Monday May 4, 2009
Stretching it on the silver screen
SILVER SCREAM By DAVIN ARUL
As part of Global Bullcrap Appreciation Week*, we look back at some of the crazy suspensions of disbelief that the movies have asked of us.
IN an earlier column, we said that Beneath the Planet of the Apes stood as part of a really small group of movies that dared to advance the idea of extinguishing all life on our little green mudball.
It also effectively ended the series, or so most people thought. Actually it didn’t; which brings us to the following pieces of movie b.s.
B.S. Idea #1:Space Chimps – the prequel
Just a year after Beneath came Escape from the Planet of the Apes in 1971. It asked viewers to suspend their disbelief long enough to accept its premise: that a trio of intelligent chimpanzees with no access to salvage gear or knowledge of space travel could pull Astronaut Taylor’s (Charlton Heston) ship out of a lake, learn how to fly it and travel back along the same bend in space that sent the humans forward to the future.
Two of these apes would then have a child who would set in motion the events leading to the creation of a “planet of the apes”. Like Kyle Reese being John Connor’s father.
Right. Even if the third chimp scientist (ironically, strangled by a caged gorilla early in the movie) was hailed as a genius ahead of his time, this idea is on the level of a doctor expecting a patient to swallow a basketball-size tablet.
Battlefield Earth, which stars John Travolta (pic), is a title that frequently pops up when turkeys are mentioned. And yes, I know that some fans and nit-pickers have put forward the argument that it wasn’t Taylor’s ship but the unseen one flown by Brent (James Franciscus) in Beneath, even though various characters in Escape refer to it as Taylor’s ship.
But at least we knew what was being asked of us – a far cry from the inexplicable, incomprehensible ending of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake, complete with its Ape-raham Lincoln Memorial.
So when it comes to far-fetched b.s., Escape is pretty high on my list, but the thing is ... I really like the movie nonetheless. B.S. Idea #2: Who Wants to Stink Forever?
Liking Escape is a lot more than I can say for the second film on this list – Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), with its “Big Revelation” that the Immortals of the first movie were really aliens from the planet Zeist, banished by the tyrannical General Katana (Michael Ironside) for going against him.
More a stab in the gut to all the first movie’s fans than just another hard-to-swallow concept, this really killed off any interest in future Highlander projects for me.
Not even director Russell Mulcahy’s “Renegade Version” or all the ultimate cuts and special editions that followed could make me want to re-visit this blighted ground.
B.S. Idea #3: Macintosh, the universal standard
Independence Day (1996) was a corny, fun romp but it went a bit too far by expecting us to believe that Jeff Goldblum’s super-nerd character could not only hook up his Macintosh to an alien computer network, but also upload a virus to knock it out.
Dude, I couldn’t even get my iBook hooked up to the office network back in 1999, three years later.
As things go, not so much a fatal flaw in my book, but an example of how lazy writing can burst the bubble of even the most crowd-pleasing mass entertainment. Or maybe it was just Devlin & Emmerich’s dig at the pro-Windows world. Yeah, I’ll bet they were presented with prototype iPhones for that.
B.S. Idea #4:Aqua-averse aliens
We never get tired of slipping M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs on a list, whether it’s about dumb ideas or dumb aliens. Imagine travelling all the way to our little planet to attack and consume beings who are nearly 70% water, living in a world that’s 70% covered with the stuff, when ... you’re allergic to water. Not just allergic, but fatally allergic, it would seem.
That’s as bad an idea as making a dull movie about an apocalyptic near-extinction event and then blaming it all on plants.
B.S. Idea #5: George Lucas’ Twins effect
“Leia ... Leia’s my sister.” With those words, the Bollywoodness of the Star Wars saga was firmly sealed. It was one thing for Darth Vader to be revealed as Luke Skywalker’s father, to toss a extra tension into their conflict.
But it seemed so arbitrary the way Luke was just written out of the way so the Han-Leia romance could move ahead.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is convinced that this brother-sister thing was there all along.
It smacks of taking the easy way out, and “convenience” is just another word for “toilet” – a place where, if this was the Planet of the Bulls, you might find much of their you-know-what.
B.S. Idea #6:If cavemen had wings
Battlefield Earth is a title that frequently pops up when turkeys are mentioned. The movie, based on a book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, is set in 3000 when Earth has been subjugated for a thousand years by giant aliens called the Psychlos.
Humanity has, for all intents and purposes, been bombed back to the Stone Age, and forced to do terrible things by the cruel Psychlos, such as mine gold for them in radioactive areas.
One of these glorified cavemen, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, finds an underground military base containing 1,000-year-old jet fighters and firearms which, amazingly, still work!
To live up to some aircraft makers’ promise that “even a monkey could fly these things”, Jonnie and his crew teach themselves how to fly the jets using flight simulators (that also, gasp, still work) and then launch an assault against their captors.
In the course of the battle to liberate Earth, Jonnie manages to teleport to the Psychlo homeworld and detonate an atomic bomb there, which incinerates the planet’s atmosphere. He then returns home to rub Psychlo warlord John Travolta’s face in his defeat and take his rightful place as Liberator of Humanity.
That brings us full circle. Like Escape from the Planet of the Apes, this one also required us to believe that a bunch of “relative primitives” could grasp technology beyond their understanding and learn to fly.
Unlike Escape, these guys had flight simulators at their disposal. Unlike Escape, this one totally sucked donkey buttocks. So it just goes to show that movie bullsh*t isn’t always bad. We can love it when it’s fragrant, and abhor it when it’s flagrant.
- The suggestion that Global Bullcrap Appreciation Week exists is, of course, pure bullcrap.
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