Hell is the Absence of Other People

Batman Returns (1992)

Superhero movies are Not My Thing. And it is probably fair to say that the superhero I have the least patience with is Batman. Nor am I a particular fan of the work of Tim Burton. Why is it, then, that not only can I say I have a favourite superhero movie, but that it’s the second Tim Burton Bat-Feature, Batman Returns (1992)? That? The one that is so very Tim Burton, and a Superhero Christmas Movie to boot?

Y'know, I guess one person can't make a difference

So this year I wound up seeing Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) twice in the cinema, without needing to pay. I don’t go out of my way to see Marvel movies, but I was curious about this one, because I wanted to see what a veteran director of genre movies with a distinctive visual sensibility would do with the most policed and marketed cinematic property of our generation. The second time, I was interested to see if I was wrong.

It made me sad. And even sadder the second time. 

Your Move, Darwin #11: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

(Spoilers. Always, spoilers.)

Cultural historians of the future will probably have no hesitation in recognising that cinema in the second decade of the 21st century was the high point of the Franchise Genre Blockbuster. A flood of Marvel and DC superhero movies; five new Star Wars movies; four Hunger Games movies; five Fast and Furious movies; a couple more Terminator movies; four more Transformers movies. And of course, there were more Bond movies (there have always been more Bond movies). Failed, super-expensive attempts to kick off franchises abounded, with Luc Besson’s good-hearted but chemistry-free attempt to bring French comicbook legends Valerian and Laureline to the screen flopping catastrophically, and ready-planned sure-thing multimillion-dollar franchises based around King Arthur and the Universal Monsters getting themselves cancelled on the spot thanks to movies that were frankly crappy enough that audiences noticed. Every studio was looking for a property to resurrect: indeed, the Rocky, Rambo, Alien(s), Mad Max, Predator and Jurassic Park series all came back, and the long-running Toho Kaiju series – home to Godzilla, Rodan and Kong – got a monster American relaunch. Why wouldn’t they have another pop at rebooting one of the most successful sci-fi movie franchises of the past? They did it with pretty much all the others.

I’m not the first to observe that the titles of the Planet of the Apes reboots are a bit wonky. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a film about the dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes had a war for the Planet of the Apes in it, explicitly flagged in dialogue. And it’s fair to say that War for the Planet of the Apes is really about the ultimate rise of the Planet of the Apes. Even the final film itself seems implicitly to admit this, explaining how each of the films supplies a Rise, a Dawn and a War in an opening crawl. I do not know if this is true, but I have this guess that they came up with the titles, pitched the movies and announced the return of the franchise before having a script. In the same way that Paul Dehn was long ago sent off to write another one with the terse words “apes exist” (and by the way knocked it out of the proverbial park), I would guess that the writers of these new movies got sent off to produce a bible and create scripts after the titles were settled. The initial thought behind these films was plainly “Hey, I guess we should make some more Planet of the Apes movies.”

Your Move, Darwin #10: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

(Before I start this one, I'd like to take a moment to dedicate this one to Planet of the Apes superfan Mark Talbot-Butler, who passed away recently. I did not know Mark well, but he was a hugely positive presence in the fan community, and was an invaluable help in the writing of several of the earlier posts in this series, which I'm only really returning to because Mark has passed, and I feel I owe it to the guy to finish the work I began. Mark is and will continue to be missed.)  

In any movie franchise, especially a genre franchise, you inevitably wind up doing a retread or two. You have to. You’ll always have to return to some ideas, because that's what makes it a sequel. In the era of the reboot, this is more acute still, as essentially you sometimes wind up making the same film, only with some parts updated, or even some messages flipped, so you get a Godzilla movie where they save the world with a nuclear bomb, or a Robocop movie where only some of the corporate executives are baddies, or a Superman movie where he's an objectivist who doesn't care about the consequences of collateral damage. Or a Spider-Man movie reboot where everything is pretty much exactly the same apart from Aunt May being sorta hot.

Room 207 Press Webinars #8: Sex On-Demand – sex with robots in film and TV

Ever since Fritz Lang made Metropolis in 1927, science fiction cinema has been the home of the fembot, the sexualised woman-machine who fulfils heterosexual desires in ways both threatening and unthreatening. As the technology advances, the idea of the sex robot weirdly becomes a possibility – RealDolls are a thing – and in this week's Zoom lecture, I'm going to look at the idea of how the sexy robot has developed in film and TV, and the meaning of them for what it is to be human.

Expect difficult conversations on issues of consent and sexual politics.

(And also some discussion of why I found this so funny)

The talk is as ever going to be held twice, on Monday 3rd August, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). It's Pay What You Want, meaning that although the suggested donation is £5-10 you can if you want come for free, and you are very welcome to do so. If you back my Patreon, you not only get automatic invites to all my lectures, but access to the videos after the fact, early access to my writing and some exclusive content from time to time.

I Blame Society #8: Enter the Dragon (1973)

(I'd warn you about spoilers, but hey, you've probably seen this already. You may already know that there's a lot in this film that's, eh, the sort of stuff you see in 70s exploitation films. Make of that what you will.)

I Blame Society #7: Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

When I was a kid, there was a certain sort of movie that would be shown in the mornings during school holidays, and often these movies would be oddly affecting, and would haunt me for years. one of the morning screenings of the 80s dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Tenkū no Shiro Laputa, 1986) would haunt me for a decade or more until I realised what I had seen; likewise, René Laloux's existentially bleak Moebius-designed and Moebius-strip-plot space opera Time Masters (Les Maîtres du Temps, 1982) absolutely traumatised me, as well it might. And then there's Watership Down (1979). I don't need to tell you about Watership Down.

Some movies seemed to be on every holiday. I don't know if this is really the case. In the words of 80s Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner, “The memory cheats.” I mean, all it probably took for me to recall a movie being on “all the time” was two screenings, the one being burned on my memory and the second reinforcing that. I know for sure, for example, that I saw Jim Dale-starring “science makes a cuddly mutt colossal” comedy Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World (1973) at least twice. But it feels like more. The same goes for insanely harrowing and inexplicably U-rated kid-against-the-wilderness thriller Lost in the Desert (actually Dirkie, 1969), and it most definitely goes for Battle Beyond the Stars.

Guest Post – The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, episode 1 (2019)

The Dark Crystal is one of my favourite childhood movies, one that had a powerful formative effect on me. So the news that there was going to be a Netflix prequel series was not a thing that I had simple feelings about. My friend, frequent collaborator and BERGCAST co-presenter, Jon Dear felt the same way, and when he offered to write about the first episode, which he got to see previewed, I leapt at the opportunity. And unlike most of the posts here, this is more or less spoiler-free.

The Action Movie Pulled Over Your Eyes

The Matrix (1999); The Matrix Reloaded (2003); The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

You've seen The Matrix, I expect. Even if you haven't, what if I told you that you've still got a half decent chance of being able to quote lines from the film?

(Also, what if I told you that Morpheus never says "What if I told you"? But I digress.)

So, Spoiler warnings are irrelevant, but here's one anyway. All the spoilers are here. All of them.

Like you care.

Capitulate to All Monsters!

Gojira (AKA Godzilla) (1954);
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019);
Shin Godzilla (2016)

If anything demonstrates how much I hate the pathological insistence on not spoiling the plot of a film, it's how little has been said of any substance about Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and about why it's so bad, why it's so toxic, so radioactive if you like. No, since you asked, no, I did not like it. It enraged me in fact, made me losing-sleep-over-this angry more than any film in the last couple years

But here we are. I'm going to write about Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It will give away plot twists. It is full of spoilers, but nothing here will ruin things for you as much as actually watching the film. Because, as my pal Eve Moriarty recently observed, it is on brand for me to respond to getting upset about a film by watching two more films* in the series and writing 5000 words, I have also made this about that original 1954 Godzilla, and about Shin Godzilla, both of which are films I rate and liked a lot, but I give away the endings and plot twists of them too, but then I have to.

(*OK, actually five, but the three Netflix movies are another thing entirely)

So. Let's go back and start with first principles.