After biological warfare produces a deadly plague that wipes out most of humanity, military scientist Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) finds himself alone in Los Angeles, waging a one-man war against the nocturnal mutant survivors. At first this looks like it might be an interesting film about the last man on Earth struggling to hold onto his sanity in a world full of monsters trying to kill him. But then very quickly every last ounce of nuance gets stripped away from Richard Matheson's original novel so the late NRA president could break out his guns and once again play the saviour figure. I literally groaned out-loud when one wide-eyed little girl sincerely asked him if he was god. If that wasn't bad enough, the main villain unfortunately looks like a zombie Jimmy Savile. *shudder*
Rating: ⭐⭐
Before he adapted half of Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi directed this daffy sci-fi/fantasy hybrid. Set following a devastating nuclear war, a time when whimsical magical creatures have reclaimed Earth, the mutant wizard Blackwolf sets out to conquer Earth using the weapons and technology of the old world, and dispatches an assassin to kill his brother, the kind hearted wizard Avatar. Imagine The Smurfs, but Papa Smurf sounds like Peter Falk, Smurfette looks like a buxom Conan heroine, and Gargamel is Sauron and commands an army of Nazi mutants. That's Wizards and I wish it had been as weird and entertaining as all that sounds. This isn't a movie, it's Bakshi chucking every idea he had into a blender and using the results to paint a Jackson Pollock. A cinematic curiosity and nothing more.
Rating: ⭐⭐
John Boorman's trippy, rambling, incoherent, philosophical version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with a nappy wearing Sean Connery as Dorothy. This is one of those movies where after you finish watching it (assuming you make it that far) you just sit there, staring silently at the screen, wondering what the hell you just watched and how much they must've paid Connery to be in it. I'm not even going to attempt to describe what the plot might actually be because I haven't the foggiest. I'm actually amazed a major studio agreed to make this because it's just complete nonsense, and not even fun or interesting nonsense. Most charitable thing I can say is that Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography looks nice.
Rating: ⭐
The residents of a small New Mexico town are found dead not long after a satellite crashes nearby. Fearing a viral outbreak of extraterrestrial origin, the government assembles a team of scientists at a top secret underground base to investigate. The original novel was the first Michael Crichton published under his own name and established him as a major writer. Robert Wise's adaptation eschews typical Hollywood sensationalism and movie star glamour in favour of clinical realism and character actor mundanity, but the deliberate pace and awkward framing narrative robs the film of much of its tension and urgency. An hour passes before the scientists even begin to examine the virus. Far too much time is devoted to the lengthy decontamination process they go through just to get into their high tech lab.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Following (you've guessed it) a devastating war, the survivors enjoy hedonistic lives in a domed city where everything is provided for them with one catch: everyone dies at 30. Logan 5 (Michael York) works as a Sandman, hunting down "runners", those who try to escape their fate, but when he's given an assignment that cuts short his own lifespan he decides to run himself, seeking the aid of Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter) to escape the city. This is a very much a film of its time, a quintessential 70s view of the future where it looks like everyone lives in a shopping mall, but being dated is the least of its problems. The first hour is a fairly decent chase thriller with some interesting ideas, but the second hour just blunders around aimlessly before reaching a very rushed boom boom finale. There isn't much to the main characters, requiring nothing more of York and Agutter than to look pretty and try to occasionally remember that they're supposed to have American accents.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Friends Peter and John (Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, who looks so much like Christian Bale here it's eerie) visit Westworld, a futuristic theme park where lifelike robots allow visitors to live out their every fantasy. But not long after they arrive the park's systems start to break down and the machines turn on the guests. Crichton's first crack at things going disastrously wrong at a state of the art amusement park, only instead of cloned dinosaurs we have robot cowboys, with Yul Brynner effectively reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven as the rampaging Gunslinger. Unlike the later HBO version, this film isn't too concerned with why the machines are going haywire, asking deeper question about the nature of artificial intelligence, or what sort of messed up people would pay for such a vacation in the first place. Crichton's fascination was always our arrogant over-reliance on technology and how even the most well thought out system can be undone by the smallest of flaws. While Westworld is interesting in concept, it's lacking in execution. As a director, Crichton was no Spielberg, lacking the latter's knack for taking b-movie material and turning it into something great.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
I've seen Wizards, Logan's Run, and Westworld, and like all 3 to some degree; all are fun to watch, none really struck me as great.
ReplyDeleteI've seen pictures of Connery in the outfit he has for Zardoz, and wondered WTF was going on! I've been curious about the Andromeda Strain, but missed that one so far.
I saw Logan's Run and Wizards, and one thing I will say about Logan's Run: several scenes from it have stuck with me fifty years later, which is not true of many more celebrated movies. Just recently, I was joking that the language the Canadian government uses for the ends of contract (an employee's termination date) made it sound like we were going to be put on the Carousel in Logan's Run.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I saw the movie the Andromeda strain; it may have worked better as a book. But one thing I like about pre-Star Wars 70's science fiction films: many of them were actually science fiction films about ideas rather than action films that were just set in space like most sf for 20 years after Star Wars.
Also of note: I haven't seen the Omega Man but Charlton Heston also starred in one of my favorite sf films of the era: Soylent Green.
I've seen every single one of these films multiple times, except Wizards, which I have never seen,, and I love all of them — okay, maybe not Zardoz. Although that film did introduce me to Beethoven's Symphony no. 7, which is fabulous, so there's that.
ReplyDeleteThe Omega Man is decidely 1970s stuff, and could have been a TV movie, and yet it's unforgettable. Charlton Heston chats with his bust of Douglas MacArthur and plays chess against himself, and has a whole house wired with sound, lights, and booby-traps; how cool is that? The Anthony Zerbe cult is clearly evangelical Republicans. And if you don't feel gutted when he dies at the end, I don't understand you.
The Andromeda Strain as a novel was brilliant. As a film, it was very good, except for the ending, with the silly lasers. I thought it did botch the bit about the organism eating the synthetic rubber bits; the novel handled that much better. But overall it was well-paced, technologically up-to-date, and just fine.
Logan's Run I liked, maybe only because Jennie Agutter was so amazingly hot. I do recall reading the comic book based on the film, and thinking it was very good indeed, and probably better than the film. There is someone out on the Internet who has collected the edited bits and so it's possible to construct a version that's much better than the original cut; that's a project I plan to work on over the summer.
And Westworld tells you everything you need to know about why not to trust computers, artificial intelligence, corporations, robots, and the Walt Disney Company. It was brilliant. That look on James Brolin's face when things don't go right is priceless. Good stuff.
Love it all.