So I Just Saw Another Earth

I think when this summer is over and the milieu of everyday worries come flooding back to keep me and Rachael from watching a new movie almost every day, we’re going to think of this as the Summer of Sci-Fi.  We’ve seen a lot of movies in the past month, and while some of the ones we’ve liked the best haven’t been science fiction, the ones that we’ve had the most to say about have.

We finally saw 2001: A Space Odyssey this week, and it was incredibly good–until the last twenty minutes when you go through technicolor dreamscapes (cool visuals, but what was the point?).  Maybe in a future post I’ll do a more in-depth discussion of Stanley Kubrick since we’ve ended up going through almost his entire oeuvre in the course of trying to get our hands on 2001 (which I’ll remind everyone we wanted to see originally because of Arthur C. Clarke’s involvement, not Kubrick’s).  Alternatively, I could talk about Nicolas Cage, who I regret never acted in a Kubrick film (wouldn’t it be fascinating to see Nic Cage being directed by Stan Kubrick?), but that’s neither here nor there.  Maybe on Earth 2 that all happened already.

One gem that we picked up in our weekly stack this time is called Another Earth.  It’s science fiction, but in that ever so subtle way that the sci-fi elements creep in at the edges to enhance the central story.  They’re both necessary to tell the story this film tells, and marginal enough that they don’t get in the way of the people the story’s about (unlike, say, Star Wars: Episode I).

Another Earth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The central premise of the story is that a planet that is perfectly like Earth with a parallel astronomical history is suddenly spotted in the sky, and it is gradually moving closer to our own planet.  As it approaches, SETI makes contact with the planet and everyone discovers that not only does it look identical to Earth, but it is identical, right down to individual human histories.  An enterprising billionaire decides to organize a shuttle mission to send people to the other planet.

Okay, I lied.  That’s not the central premise.  That’s all happening on the periphery of the primary story about a girl who celebrates her admission to MIT one night with her friends, and then on the way home she crashes her car into a family’s, killing the pregnant mother and young son, and leaving the father in a coma.  The girl, Rhoda, goes to jail, presumably for vehicular manslaughter, and four years later she’s released to try to return to a normal life.  Rhoda, still guilt ridden over what she did, chooses to become a janitor at a high school instead of resuming her promising education.  She hears about the shuttle mission, and learns that there’s an essay contest to win a seat.  Rhoda also looks up the man whose family she killed, and decides that she should go and apologize to him.

Rhoda finds the man, John, living in squalor.  She loses her nerve standing at the door, staring him in the face, and so she comes up with the story that she’s there to offer him a free trial for a maid service.  He believes her, and she uses this story as an excuse to come visit him regularly and clean his house as an act of penance.

Gradually Rhoda and John develop a friendship, and eventually, a romance (don’t think too hard about her being 21 and him being in his late 30s or early 40s) all while Rhoda evades explaining the real reason she first came to visit him.  Then the twist happens and Rhoda finds out that the essay she submitted to get a seat on the shuttle has won the contest, and she has a chance to go to Earth 2.  Because she’s not an awful human being, she goes to John and finally explains to him why she’s been cleaning his house.  He reacts in just about the only way you could expect someone to react to the news that their new significant other is actually the person who killed their family.

The movie ends with Rhoda giving her seat on the shuttle to John, because there’s a possibility that the two Earths are out of sync now that they’ve seen each other, which might mean that his family is still alive there.  Rhoda seems content with her decision, but then when she arrives home from work one day, she finds herself face to face with, well, herself.

What I loved about this movie was how it played with the idea of divergent paths.  Typically you get the story of a person with regrets who wishes that they could change something in their past as part of a time travel narrative, but this time it’s framed as space travel.  Rhoda wants to leave her Earth because her life’s ruined there.  Earth 2 represents a chance to truly start over for her.  Then, as the audience gets clues that Earth 2 is identical to Earth 1, you start to wonder what could possibly be different.  Even if Rhoda goes to Earth 2, doesn’t that mean that her double will be taking the duplicate shuttle to visit Earth 1?  What could possibly have changed?

The ending with Rhoda meeting herself confirms a theory that’s mentioned earlier about the possibility that the two Earths, now aware of each other’s existence, have diverged.  We can infer that Rhoda on Earth 2 probably did still cause the accident that killed John’s family (no mention in the film of what John finds when he arrives; is his double still in mourning over his family, or has his encounter with Rhoda allowed him to move on?), but we don’t know what changed that made her decide to go while the Rhoda we’ve been following chose to stay.

At the same time all these questions of causality are floating around, Rhoda continues to deal with the question of forgiveness.  She’s responsible for three deaths, and she’s served her sentence, but meeting the legal requirements for punishment don’t satisfy her need to resolve the incident.  Being responsible for someone else’s death, even accidentally, must be a heavy thing to have on your head, and the primary focus of the story seems to be Rhoda coming to grips with this fact.  She can’t truly make amends to John for what she’s done, but she can apologize to him.  Jail time and a personal apology: that’s all she can do as penance, but she understands intimately that it’s not enough.  She’ll carry the guilt for the rest of her life, and the only way she can deal with that is to come to terms with it and forgive herself.  Even if she runs away from her planet and goes to another world, that fact won’t change.

So what do you guys think?  If you were in a situation where you were responsible for someone else dying, how do you think you’d go about coping with it?

So I Just Saw A Clockwork Orange… Again

Story time!

So, when I was a sophomore in college, my friend Chris, who would later become my roommate Chris, invited me and some other folks over to watch a movie.

The movie we were going to watch was Requiem for a Dream.

If you haven’t seen it, then it can best be described as the story of a guy, his best friend, his girlfriend, and his mother all struggling to achieve their dreams of some small bit of success.  The guy and his best friend start up a small business together, and the mother enacts a plan to make herself presentable for a television appearance she’s going to make.

There’s also heroin.

Oh, yeah, in case you haven’t seen this movie, it’s not happy.  It will probably make you feel like crawling in a hole and dying after you see it.  But it’s a great film, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in seeing quality cinema.

So we watched Requiem for a Dream.

After it was over, we were sitting around, feeling rather empty and lifeless because it was also midnight and we’d just seen the story of how four peoples’ lives had just gone down the crapper.  We should have just dispersed and gone to bed at that point.

But then Chris had a brilliant idea.  He had another movie that he said would cheer us up.

Stanley Kubrick film version’s theatrical release poster by Bill Gold (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was called A Clockwork Orange.

Now, at this point in my life I had not been exposed to any of Stanley Kubrick’s work.  I had heard the names of some of his famous films, but I didn’t really know what to expect.  Chris was a good friend, so when he said this would help lighten the mood, I believed him.

Chris, you lied to me.

Flash forward about eight years.  I’ve had a few brushes with Kubrick since then, and I generally know what to expect when watching one of his films.  So when Rachael suggested at the video store the other night that we get A Clockwork Orange for our weekly roundup, I said, “Alright.  I think I can handle watching it again.”

I preferred rewatching Requiem for a Dream.

Let me say upfront that A Clockwork Orange is an excellently made movie.  It has the same high quality that I’ve come to expect from all Kubrick films.  It also has the same impersonal detachment that I noticed in The Shining and Full Metal Jacket and Dr. Strangelove.  I understand that Kubrick was famous for being a perfectionist, but I think that cost him something in the emotional resonance of his subjects.  He always seems more interested in leveling a critique at society rather than exploring the human condition.

And what a critique A Clockwork Orange is.

The protagonist, Alex, is a psychopath who enjoys only three things: violence, sex, and classical music.  He seems to enjoy them in equal parts, often mixing the three together in various ways throughout the film.  Then in the second act, Alex goes through a rehabilitative therapy called the “Ludovico treatment” which conditions him to become physically ill whenever he has an impulse to do violence or have sex.  Accidentally, he also becomes unable to listen to his favorite piece of music, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Freshly released from prison after his rehabilitation, Alex finds himself let loose in a world full of people that he’s wronged in the past who have no qualms about exacting their revenge now that he’s defenseless.  Alex’s violence, though abhorrent, can be explained by his psychopathy; everyone else just does it because they see an opportunity to act without retribution.  It’s a strange thing to draw a culture where you find yourself pitying someone who by all rights deserves every punishment he receives because he’s been reduced to a point where he can rely on nothing but other people’s mercy.

It’s just a shame that mercy is utterly lacking in this society.

Have you guys ever seen any Stanley Kubrick movies?  What were you opinions on them?

So I Just Saw A Bunch of Movies

Rachael and I go to our local video store quite regularly during the summer.  They have such an excellent deal on rentals that it’s hard not to take advantage of it and catch up on all the movies that we’ve been meaning to see but just never have.

This week, we decided after listening to an old Arthur C. Clarke story, “Rescue Party,” on Escape Pod that we wanted to finally see 2001: A Space Odyssey.  That didn’t work out, because someone else had already rented it.

So we did a modified seven degrees to Kevin Bacon and ended up at The Shining in two steps.  Going with the horror theme, we also picked up The Thing and Vertigo.  Okay, Vertigo‘s more suspense than horror, but I felt pretty horrified by the time I was done watching it.

Normally I’d choose just one of the films that we rented to discuss, but all three were so good that I couldn’t choose.  So instead of an in-depth look, I’ll give you an overview of what was cool about each one!

I’m not terribly well-versed in Stanley Kubrick films, but I’ve seen a few of his more famous ones, like Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket.  I generally liked Full Metal Jacket, though it had a detached quality to it that I also noticed in The Shining.  Kubrick’s films seem to generally be of a more analytical bent.  He looked at subjects who were a little unhinged with the attitude of a researcher running a rat through a maze.  The Shining was creepy, but it was also familiar, since it’s been so heavily parodied (it’s always weird seeing the original source of a meme).  I’d best describe it as sterile; Jack Nicholson comes off as crazy from the very first scene, Shelley Long plays a very pitiful abuse victim who, despite her hardship, I just found irritating, and the kid’s bad acting was covered up by the fact that he was supposed to be half crazy himself.  That’s not to say it’s a bad film.  I thought it was quite good, but I felt no investment in what was happening.  Of course, I usually don’t feel very invested in any characters when I’m watching a horror movie; what’s the point when you know everyone’s purpose is to be terrified or killed for the audience’s entertainment?

In contrast to The Shining, The Thing is a horror movie that wants you to feel as viscerally as possible what the characters are feeling.  The eponymous thing is a shape shifting alien that infects other organisms with its cells, converting them into aliens as well.  You see men who’ve been infected have their chest cavities cave in and turn to giant maws, their hands turned into grotesque claws, their heads pop off their bodies to escape fire.  All of the special effects are practical, and they are gloriously grotesque.  Though the film’s trying to gut check you with every surprise, it’s such wonderful fun.  I particularly loved one brief scene where the research team’s medical doctor is in his lab running tests on samples of one of the thing’s victims, and the computer concludes matter-of-factly “Chance at least one team member has been infected: 75%.”  That’s just goofy no matter how you look at it.

Vertigo (Photo credit: andy z)

Now unlike the others, Vertigo is more suspense than horror; there are no supernatural or science fiction elements to the story.  I’d also say that it’s objectively the best film of the lot from this week.  I was expecting more of a traditional murder mystery, but it was a very compelling psychological thriller.  The twist halfway through the film was entirely unexpected, and I can honestly say that what happens in the final third left me feeling thoroughly icky.  You might be able to handwave bald sexism as an artifact of when the film was made, but it still left a poor taste in my mouth.  I’m still trying to parse out how much of it was done as a way to show just how far gone John Ferguson is at that point.  Even so, it’s probably worth watching again sometime, because it was just such a tightly written film.

What do you guys think?  Have you seen any of these movies?  What’s your opinion on them?