In the green (streaming serendipity part two)

So, as I mentioned last time, Wonder Wife and I had a short run of streaming some good movies lately. As I was napping watching The Monster That Challenged the World ( a quintessential 1950s monster movie, about which perhaps more later) I recalled that I needed to post about the second great find.

Prospect is a great hard science fiction story, one that could have come from Clarke or Asimov. It is both big and small in perfect proportion. It is big, because it gives us a constant and full sense of a much wider world than we seen in the film itself, without having to show us any of it. It is small because it is totally focused on the characters and their struggles, not special effects or spectacle. There is conflict and danger in abundance, because these particular people are in this particular place facing this particular problem. They are not trying to save the world, but rather just trying to survive.

They are Cee, a young girl stranded by circumstance on a hostile moon during a treasure-hunting expedition, and Ezra, a freebooter of dubious ethics, who is an enemy-turned-ally. Together, these two must face natural and human threats in order to secure passage back home - or at least off the planetoid full of threats.
 

The actors are wonderful. Young Sophie Thatcher gives a compelling, tightly-controlled performance as Cee - it's all in the eyes - while Pablo Pascal's turn as the expansive Ezra is captivating, seemingly an admixture of equal parts True Grit, Firefly, and Shakespeare.

As equally compelling as the leads is the art design. The vehicles and suits and equipment - excuse me, the sets and costumes and props - are all totally realistic and plausible in a retro-futuristic dieselpunk sort of way. Everything looks and feels utilitarian and grimy and used; I haven't had so strong a sense of realness to a science fiction setting since the first Alien.

If you want edge-of-your seat tension in a completely engaging sci-fi world,  Prospect will not let you down.

All shook up

So, Wonder Wife and I have been favored with some streaming serendipity lately in the form of two movies that we just happened to come across while browsing, each of which was a total blast. here's the first.

The Quake is the Norwegian disaster film that is the sequel to The Wave, which won all kinds of awards and broke all kinds of records in Norway and around the world. Like the original film, this follow-up features Hollywood-style special effects and spectacle while maintaining focus on the individual characters, who we can really care about. It helps that all of them, even (or especially) the main protagonist, Kristian, are cut from decidedly unheroic cloth, and the image of these everyday people coping with an unbelievable natural disaster has a lot more power than watching The Rock stunting his way through the same sort of scenes.

Kristian, the ever-suffering geologist, having played Cassandra once before when a tsunami wiped out his fjordside hometown, finds himself once again sounding the alarm before the earth moves in Oslo and once again being unheeded  by the official bureaucracy - all while contending with PTSD, depression, a failed marriage, and estrangement from his kids. He's a total Nordic Job, and we feel for him every step of the way.

And the action scenes are terrific: tense, suspenseful, edge of your seat stuff. This is no slow-moving character study; the producers have earned their action-film moves well, and once things start shaking, you're in for thrill ride.

Walaka's predication: there will be a third film in the franchise (there's a literal handoff to a new character that I expect to see more of) and it will be.... The Storm.

See this movie.

 

The sensibilities that time forgot

So, I made a shopping blitz through Henderson Books the other week and grabbed a whole slug of stuff, including a copy of The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The paperback I bought was not graced with the old style cover art picture above; it was released to coincide with the film version of the story ("A major new motion picture!") in 1974. I have always had a soft spot for that cheesy, breezy Doug McClure flick, and thought I would check out the original, as it was a Burroughs I had never read in my glory days of cutting a reading swath through all things pulpish.

A bit of a shock it was.

The novel was originally published in 1918 and man, does it show. The typical ERB-ian adventure is there, all right; lots of excitement and derring-do to go around from a stalwart protagonist. But the casual racism and sexism, the unapologetic imperialist and colonialist attitudes, and a surprisingly robust anti-socialist/communist stance were real stumbling blocks to my enjoyment. There's lots of discussion about not judging something out of its own context, and I get that, sort of. But as many people have noted about Golden Age comics, sometimes it is just hard to read them. In point of fact, I didn't finish the book.

This response I had made me wonder about all the other ERB I had read as young man - Tarzan, of course, and the Barsoom novels, Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus. Are they as dated and problematic as this is? It was 45 years ago or more that I was reading them. Were the times so different then - was I so different then - that they were, and I just didn't notice?

I'm not sure I really want to find out; perhaps imperfect memory is a gift in this case.

But I do wonder about the "product of its time" argument. I am currently reading some of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries (two books from the same Henderson haul - one upstairs in living room and one downstairs on my nightstand). These were written in the early 1920s, and while some of the language and terminology may be a bit awkward, to say the least, there's a lot less stereotyping and bit more humanism present. Maybe that can straightforwardly be chalked up to a difference between Burroughs and Chesterton, but it takes some of the responsibility for the, ah, challenging characteristics of art away from "its time" and lays it at the feet of its author.

In any case, I am a little trepidatious about dipping back into another fave from my youth, Ernest Gann, but I'll give it a go. Twilight for the Gods was written in '56, so how bad can it be?