Trying too hard to be something different

It's been a few weeks. There hasn't been much playing at the Michigan Theater that's been particularly interesting, so we've mostly just been watching TV on Tuesdays. But there hasn't really been much of that that's particularly compelling, either. We've had the misfortune to see a film that we were hemming and hawing about seeing at the Michigan and also another Apple+ TV series that is ending up like all of the rest of them, other than Severance.

The film was Bottoms; another Emma Seligman feature that is the follow-up to her fairly-entertaining Shiva Baby, which we did see and did enjoy, but wasn't compelling enough for me to sit down and type out a couple thousand words about. It was originally a short film and then was popular enough to become a long film and didn't really benefit from the necessary padding of the script. Meanwhile, Bottoms, which stars and was co-written by Rachel Sennott (also the lead in Shiva Baby) is one part bog-standard teen sex comedy and one part parody of same. The characters are all hyper-realized stereotypes of those idiots you detested in high school, except for the main group, which is the poor nerds that somehow end up with all of the girls. At any moment, I was waiting to hear Robert Carradine's bellowing laugh erupt from one of the women that mostly occupied our time. But the problem, of course, was just that: We've seen all of this before. Many times. None of it is new. None of it is original. None of it is really that funny. The only difference here is that both leads (the other being Ayo Edebiri, best known as Sydney from the spectacular The Bear) are gay. That's a nice acknowledgement of modern viewpoints and the identities that many people had even back when you and I were in high school, but it doesn't make the tired plot or screenplay any better. It just makes it an even more obvious retread with some modern window dressing to try to sell it to new audiences (much like Bros.)

Seriously, the summary offered by Rotten Tomatoes (where the film has a 93% approval rating...) is "Propulsive and over-the-top, Bottoms is an instant high school comedy classic that feels both current and nostalgic." I can assure you that there's nothing inherently "propulsive" (whatever that actually means) about it, especially when it comes to the leaden predictable plot. That, of course, is probably what makes people feel "nostalgic" about seeing the same thing they've seen since the 1980s introduced us to Porky's. I'm sorry to say that nostalgia was not the overarching feeling I was getting. It was more like boredom. And, of course, the "current" part was, again, likely down to the fact that many reviewers seem smitten with the idea of gay people being something original in storytelling when they should just be regular people in a decent story, if one were being told. If they wanted to make a film about being LGBTQ+ in high school, then they could have written a script that fully engaged that topic, rather than simply using it as a note of "modern" difference from the almost 40-year-old Revenge of the Nerds. There really was nothing that made this film stand out- script, direction, performances -from any of the dozens of lookalikes over those past four decades, which is really disappointing after the solid films that we've seen both Sennott and Edebiri (Shiva Baby, Theater Camp(!)) in this past summer. And, yes, I should get around to writing something about The Bear.

Until then, I'll have to content myself (and you) with writing about Apple+'s attempt to be different in a similar failing fashion to Bottoms. As noted, other than Severance, the offerings on Apple+ have been pretty subpar for any number of reasons. The problem with our latest attempt to find something interesting, Invasion, is also one of trying too hard to stand out from the crowd and missing the target in the process. Just from the title, you're automatically aware that the series is about an attempt by little green men to conquer/eradicate/make aggressive contact with/something-as-long-as-it's-violent our little green world. Again, this is a plot that goes back to H.G. Wells at the end of the 19th century (War of the Worlds is 125 years old this year, in fact.) However, in this case, rather than show the snake-necked saucers of the Martians laying waste to the countryside, through the three episodes we've watched, we've seen the presumed aliens once, for about 15 seconds. In their place, we've gotten four stories about emotional and personal loss that just happened to occur during this supposed crisis.

We have the estranged former doctor who gave up her career to be the perfect housewife; the career soldier wrestling with the effects of distance from his own marriage; the fragile schoolboy dealing with bullies and absent parents; and the brilliant engineer who is enduring her first long separation from the love of her life, driven by their mutual careers. Again, all of these are themes of emotional and personal loss and all of which are completely ancillary to the ostensibly overarching theme of an alien invasion. Any of them could have happened in the midst of any other kind of disaster (pandemic, terrorist attack, worldwide forest fire) and any of them could simply have been happening on their own, no crisis required, such that the focus of the show called "Invasion" isn't any SF element at all, but simply the angst of these people going through their personal problems. But all that does is make a footnote of what is supposedly the central thrust of your story. Said invasion is a background element, at best. I think the idea was that they'd tell the story of a "war of the worlds" at the ground level, by showing what happens to these normal people facing normal problems who are suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances, akin to the classic Alien. But all they've done is provide a veneer of SF to a pretty standard melodrama; to the point where you wonder why it's considered speculative fiction at all.

Now, I was just complaining about seeing the same, old thing and, certainly, we've seen a few hundred alien invasion-type films and TV series that put our (human) heroes in trying times over the years, from ongoing wars like Battlestar Galactica to plain, old Earth-gets-firebombed stuff like The Tomorrow War. None of that is particularly exciting or original anymore. But none of them try to pretend they're something they're not in the hopes of approaching it from a nominally original angle, either. All of the stories and characters (and performances) in this show are interesting enough. It's not been boring. But it could have just been titled "Four Stories of Loss" with any of the premises mentioned above (jokes or not) and we would have had the same result. But we came into this with the idea that this is about an ALIEN INVASION and instead it's about a lot of longing (and appropriately plaintive looks) for when things can be "normal" again; presumably post-divorce, post-mourning, and post-getting back to primary school before someone kills you and takes the conch. Clearly, they've tried to slow play this as a different way of approaching the stereotypical assumption that many would make and that's all well and good. But it also sets up the viewer to be disappointed as we wade through the emotional debris and wonder what visitors from other worlds have to do with any of this or why they'd bother. We're probably not going to anymore, either.

The sky doesn't need framing

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. (If you're really desperate for my overly wordy writing, you can always look at Extratime.blog, but probably only if you're a Liverpool and/or Euro football fan.) Part of the reason that I haven't been present is, well, kind of obvious. Since I spent most of my time doing movie criticism here and we really haven't been to see any movies since March, 2020, there hasn't been a ton of material to work with. Like most other people, we've been watching a lot of TV, some of which has been really interesting (Boardwalk Empire!) and some of which really didn't measure up (Lovecraft Country.) But tonight I decided to sit down in front of an actual newly-released film in the form of The Midnight Sky on Netflix. It's a George Clooney effort, as he both starred in and directed it, and that's always a draw for me. I'm a Clooney fan both for most of the work he's done and his philosophy on life that he mentioned to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio many years ago. I recorded that episode and watched it several times (before the DVR crashed.) I often wished I had the drive and ambition that Clooney talked about in that interview but, at the very least, it made me respect his work even more than I did when I simply enjoyed it. That said, I can't say I'm entirely sure about this one.

The Midnight Sky is based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and I can see the novel structure in the film and its underlying screenplay. Like much modern science fiction since the advent of the New Wave in the 70s, the central focus isn't on the technology but the people caught up in the vortex that it may (or may not) be a part of. In short, it's a humanist perspective that makes most stories more interesting if you're not just interested in laser beams, global catastrophes, and spaceflight. Of course, this is a story about a global catastrophe and spaceflight... (But no lasers!) But what it's really about is one man's struggle with his humanity or lack thereof. The initial lead character is Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse, an astro-something (-physicist? -nomer? It's never mentioned but the crew of the space flight seems super indebted to him for their mission without ever having met him, which is odd in itself.) I say "initial lead" because despite our story beginning at an Arctic observatory and Augustine waving away his colleagues as the global catastrophe ensues, there's a whole other primary locale for our story, which is said spaceflight: the returning mission Æther, on the back leg from its voyage to K-23, a heretofore undiscovered moon of Jupiter which is habitable (Shades of 2010, although this takes place in 2049.)

So, the story is nominally about Augustine and his obsession with looking outwardly, to outer space and new worlds, and inability to focus on the inward: himself, his relationships, and his commitment issues. Delivered in so few words, the story sounds incredibly trite and very overused: Cold scientist (literally and figuratively) discovers human contact is right in front of him if only he'd try. It's also staged against a very grand tableau (the collapse of the old world, the discovery of a new one) that can serve as a metaphor for the need for more empathy in our society as a whole before it leads to our own destruction. I can see how this story would work in novel form, especially if the author was willing to immerse the reader in the emotions and inner thoughts of her characters. But as a film, it really doesn't or at least it doesn't in the manner in which this one is presented.

We have a story that's about the inner struggles of one man, writ large against the disasters happening around him. But we spend a lot of time on those disasters to no significant end. First off, we're skipping between the Arctic and outer space. We have two radically different settings and two completely disparate sets of characters that are nominally telling the same story but really aren't. The struggle for survival contrasted with the casual return home of the Æther is kind of jarring as we switch back and forth. Here's a man struggling with some form of lethal disease and surviving in one of the deadliest zones of a ravaged world... and then there's the spaceship crew eating cereal with holograms of their families. It changes tune a bit when the Æther suddenly veers off course and has to approach Earth through uncharted space(?), whereupon various physical disasters begin occurring off the planet, as well as on.

But if the main struggle is supposed to be one man searching for empathy in trying circumstances, why do we spend so much time with this ship's crew as they battle meteor storms on the way home? There's a ton of action involving smashed spaceships, blood, and Star Trek-style RED ALERT sirens (that are pointedly turned off in an acknowledgment of pragmatism) that really departs from what otherwise seems to be a fairly inward-looking and cerebral story. As jarring as the shift from survival to the boredom of spaceflight is, it's even more jarring to have a story about humanity dropped into bog-standard Hollywood sci-fi action. I mean, I guess the leverage of trying circumstances can explain the transformation of Augustine, but isn't survival in the Arctic enough? Couldn't we have simply had the global catastrophe teaching him how to care about other people? Being alone in the Arctic and delirious from chemo and blood transfusions should be sufficient stress to drive most people to examine their lives. We also need the (exaggerated) dangers of space travel and a new moon around Jupiter to make this happen? Because what ends up happening is that a potentially intelligent and personal story is being hoisted on the massive framing devices of global catastrophe and humanity-saving spaceflight and making both of them seem like they were half told. Did we need both frames to create the window on our story? One already seems like it may have been enough, if not too much. (Global catastrophe!)

This, of course, leads one to question how much the film departs from the book and/or how much is lost in the usual translation between the two media. There's always going to be something lost from the author's vision when you take a 400-page novel and turn it into a two-hour film. Always. Something will be lost. But the danger is also that a studio decided that a movie audience wouldn't appreciate a very cerebral tale about one man's inner self, spaceflight or not, and decided to toss in the usual rock'em, sock'em action in order to keep people watching. And that's where we usually end up in the technical issues.

Most sci-fi stories have technical issues. That's why they're science fiction. But some plot holes are bigger than others and they're only more obvious when they're as large as these two stories are (because this really is two stories that kind of touch each other in various places.) Augustine keeps talking to his young companion, Iris, about not breathing the air or when and where the air is safe. Meanwhile, the catastrophe is referenced several times as being rooted in radiation. The only way radiation would spread through the air is via dust, most of which wouldn't reach the Arctic in the manner displayed and certainly wouldn't be released in ever-growing, perfectly circular shapes as shown on his instruments. Dust travels on wind patterns which go around the globe because... you know... our world is a globe, Trump followers. When I saw the scene of Augustine examining what appeared to be mutated birds who'd suffered the effects of the catastrophe, I thought they were some kind of alien organisms and wondered just how far out (space joke!) we were going to go. Did someone bring back an alien from an earlier voyage to K23? Other than vague "radiation" and "don't breathe the air" descriptions, "The Event" isn't detailed at all; other than it apparently being an accident of some kind.

Also, Æther has to approach Earth from "the dark side" or some such thing, so it's stated that they're "flying in the dark". Other than that being another obvious space joke, there is no "dark side" to Earth. Because it rotates. Like a globe. And there are observatories and satellites on every "side" of that globe that have explored the local environment extensively. There are no clusters of ice or rocks in the vicinity that would create a threat to spacecraft that I'm aware of. It's just a plot device so that some kind of action other than the holographic kind actually happens in one half of our movie setting. Action which is, of course, kind of unnecessary to tell the story, since confronting death in space (just like on Earth!) is superfluous to the plot. This is, of course, compounded when members of the crew make the decision to confront certain death upon reaching home, for reasons that aren't especially clear other than overwhelming depression at the state of affairs (arrived at in a couple minutes of screen time) and a desire to join everyone else on the planet in the depths of that despair. This doesn't even touch on the idea of a perfectly temperate moon around Jupiter (almost five times as far from the Sun as Earth) and the awesome radiation and magnetic fields around that planet (witness Io) that would make the likelihood of said inhabitable orb extremely small.

Again, all of these strange, very human emotions and their consequential actions may be perfectly explained at a reasonable pace in a written novel, but they don't come across at all well in a two hour film. Once again, the problem of moving a story from one medium to another. Aside from all that, there aren't really any performances to speak of other than Clooney's, since he has the most range and material to work with (It's good to be the king (director)) which brings us back around to why all of this narrative was included for a story that is, in the end, comparatively small, despite a broad and well-felt message. Overall, it's not a bad film, but it simply tries too hard (and in too many large ways) to be a good one and mostly fails.