Orphans in Space: A Fearless Trek into Bad Sci-Fi Movies

Orphans in Space: A Fearless Trek into Bad Sci-Fi Movies

By Christina Harlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Christina Harlin

Visit the author at http://www.christinaharlin.com

and http://www.themovieorphan.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Spoiler Alert: There are more movie spoilers in this book than you can shake a stick at. I discuss all of the movies in detail, from each film’s beginning to its stupid, stupid end. You have been warned.

Table of Contents

Intro Schmintro: Information that Might Help

Who is Fearless Young Orphan?

Picking on Science Fiction

Some Orphanic Terms to Know

Chapter One: Exploration is a Terrible Idea

Sphere (1998)

Event Horizon (1997)

Mission to Mars (2000)

Chapter Two: Get in Line for Your Alien Probing

Dreamcatcher (2003)

Skyline (2010)

Species (1995)

Chapter Three: Getting DNA All Over the Place

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Lost in Space (1998)

Intermission Part One: What the Orphan Considers Good

Chapter Four: Love is a Battlefield Earth

City of Angels (1998)

Meet Joe Black (1998)

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

What Dreams May Come (1998)

Chapter Five: Incredible Powers of the Mind

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Minority Report (2002)

Next (2007)

Chapter Six: Mad Scientist or Sociopathic Jerk?

Hulk (2003)

Hollow Man (2000)

The Astronaut Farmer (2006)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

Intermission Part Two: The Orphan’s Guilty Pleasures

Chapter Seven: Reality is Not What it Used to Be

The Forgotten (2004)

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Chapter Eight: Solving All Your Problems with Time Travel

Déjà vu (2006)

The Time Machine (2002)

A Sound of Thunder (2004)

Chapter Nine: Attack of the Whatever

Apollo 18 (2011)

Godzilla (1998)

Altitude (2010)

Virus (1999)

Intermission, Part Three: Science Fiction Too Bad to Chunk

Chapter Ten: The Heartbreak of the Remake

The Invasion (2007)

Planet of the Apes (2001)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

This is the End

About the Author

Filmography

Intro Schmintro: Information that Might Help

No, you don’t have to read the intro. I usually skip them, too. But if you’re nice enough to read any part this book and have questions such as, What the hell is she talking about? then you might just have missed some detail provided in this vastly informative and yet mercifully brief introduction.

Who is Fearless Young Orphan?

That name is 0 for 3, unfortunately. I am not fearless, young, or orphaned. The Movie Orphan is a website devoted to the discussion of films by me, my junior writer who works under the pseudonym Interfering Antelope (it’s a play on the word interloper, in case you’re interested), and the occasional guest writer.

The site was launched in April of 2010, at my best friend Max Doomsday’s suggestion. I had been a guest writer and editor for his awesome blog Atomic Gadfly for almost three years. That’s where I picked up the pseudonym Fearless Young Orphan – of course that’s not my real name. My name is Christina Harlin. Max Doomsday – uh, yeah, that’s not his real name, either – said to come up with a screen name and Fearless Young Orphan was the result. It’s a phrase from the introduction to a cartoon I loved when I was ten years old: Battle of the Planets, which was a weirdly Americanized version of the anime show Gatchaman. Now you know! Stop inundating me with millions of emails!

One day Max said to me: You should have your own blog and write about movies. That sounded like a good idea and it was also a really nice thing for him to say. On The Movie Orphan we have a little catchphrase which is, We have a website and the spare time, and that’s not just sarcasm, people. That’s the truth. I already had a website for my novels but my package website deal included two domains, so I thought, Heck, I’m not using it for anything else, might as well use it for movie talk. The thing is, I’m such a big nerd that I was writing about movies anyway, so posting the essays was just a little bit further down the road. My thanks to you, Max for getting me off my ass, and I miss you, man.

Picking on Science Fiction

In my favorite genre of film, science fiction, one can find ridiculous badness that is exceeded only by the horror genre. Much of the charm of the sci-fi genre comes from the fact that it is inherently outlandish – that’s sort of the point – and can bear up under a lot more silliness than could a melodrama or a war picture. In Alien (1979), which is one of my five favorite films, the titular creature makes an appearance via John Hurt’s exploding esophagus at the breakfast table. While that is one of the famous scenes in motion picture history, let’s admit that it is only one double-take away from being comical.

Science fiction also lends itself heartily to criticism because there is so much about it that can be torn down, seeing as the plots usually involve speculative technology or resources and the writers seldom seem eager to bow to research or facts. Trashing science fiction films is so easy that even a child or an inexperienced movie essayist can do it.

My favorite science fiction plot device is time travel, and damned if my hero Stephen Hawking didn’t tell me (via his TV show, not like in an email or anything) that time travel to the past is impossible and time travel to the future is nearly impossible and also sucks (he did not use the word sucks). (NOTE: This is my severe paraphrasing of the brilliantly entertaining Episode 2 of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, run on the Discovery Channel from April 9-May 9 of 2009. This made a serious impression on me, as it was the first time I had ever heard the concept of time travel explained in a way that made honest-to-God sense. I’m going to reference it repeatedly in this book. If you’re interested at all in time travel, you owe it to yourself to see that show.) That does not stop me from loving a time travel story. I believe it to be a fictional construct that makes a great story, just like hot sex in elevators, or lovable codgers.

I have restricted the science fiction films under discussion to those made from 1990 to the present simply for the sake of keeping the book a manageable length. Dissembling silly science fiction from, for example, the 1950s, would require another eight volumes of work. And do not get me started on the 1980s.

I am so forgiving of science fiction as a film genre that even these films that I am about to tear apart are rather beloved to me, almost always entertaining in their own idiotic ways, good for a laugh and really quite fun to watch . . . well, in most cases. To this particular orphan, bad films have almost as much value as good ones, if only because they show the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong. With science fiction, as bad as a film might be, there is always the hint of a brilliant idea somewhere among the wreckage.

We’re mostly going to talk about the wreckage.

Some Orphanic Terms to Know

As I tend to speak in a dialect of my own invention, like a solitary backwoods twin or a schizophrenic, here are some clues:

Chunks of Awfulness, a Chunk, or chunking a movie: this is my pet term for a bad film and the trashing thereof. Chunks of Awfulness are picked by yours truly, for a variety of reasons, but typically have this is common: they are films that could have, should have, would have been great, save for some irresponsible or downright baffling mistakes.

Hunks of Happiness, a Hunk or hunking a movie: I discuss a film that is generally considered bad, using its score at the wonderful website rottentomatoes.com as criteria, meaning that it must rate a 30% or lower score with a total of fifty or more reviews. My goal with Hunks is to find five things to like about the film. I do this sometimes because trashing films is too easy; the real trick is mining gold out of these things. What I have discovered in the process is that sometimes, in looking for five things to like about a film, one can be even more insulting than if one just went ahead with the chunking.

Meg Ryan: My arch nemesis. If you asked her about me, she’d claim not to know who I was. If you have to ask me why Meg Ryan is my arch nemesis, it means you’re on her side, and I don’t want to talk about it.

Movie Orphan: A person who was raised by movies. Similar to a latchkey kid except probably heavier.

Nicolas Cage: Used to be in cahoots with Meg Ryan. But he and I are friends again, since he made Knowing. I think he has managed to turn away from the darkness. If you asked him about me, he’d claim not to know who I was either, just as Meg Ryan would, but I like to think of this as discretion.

Stephen Hawking: My hero, because he’s brainy and because he likes to talk about science. He might claim not to know me, but the truth is, he knows everything.

Chapter One: Exploration is a Terrible Idea

Should we ever get our butts off Earth to have a look around outer space, the movies predict the results will be a comedy of gruesome errors. Movies usually figure that exploration will involve:

Encountering a malevolent life form that wants to kill and/or eat us all;

Encountering a benign higher power that we’re too stupid to understand, because we are all killing and/or eating each other; or

Encountering a malevolent life form that wants to kill and/or eat us all, so that we panic and kill and/or eat each other.

As you can see, the predictions all seem to involve us being killed and/or eaten. Damn it!

Here are some crappy movies about exploration that warn us against such destructive adventuring.

Sphere (1998), Directed by Barry Levinson

Just look at the pedigree on this movie. Directed by Barry Levinson, based on the book by Michael Crichton (Knopf, 1987), starring the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson. Folks, I don’t even know how to credit it, when you can have this much talent involved and still wind up with something this irritating. I don’t know who to blame, either, so I’m just going to blame everyone. They took a science fiction tale full of fun metaphysical questions and made it into a shouting contest held in between gigantic plot holes.

Here’s the setup: A team of experts has been specifically chosen for first-contact with alien life. They are chosen for bogus reasons, but that’s not our problem. As the film opens, the team is brought to a deep-sea research station, because the U.S. Navy has found evidence of a spacecraft buried in the coral at the bottom of the ocean.

The team consists of psychologist Norman (Dustin Hoffman), mathematician Harry (Samuel L. Jackson), biologist Beth (Sharon Stone) and physicist Ted (Liev Schreiber). Also down there is the Navy commander, Barnes (Peter Coyote) and his subordinate crewperson nicknamed Teeny (Queen Latifah, utterly likable and therefore doomed to die early). There are other people on the research station but they don’t matter to us; they either head for the surface before things get nasty, or they die when things get nasty.

After exploring the enormous, buried ship, which must have been down there for 300 years, our team discovers that this is actually an American spacecraft from the future! They guesstimate that while exploring the universe, this spacecraft experienced an unknown event, which our crew assumes was a black hole. After being sucked into the black hole, the craft arrived on Earth 300 years in the past, then was hidden at the bottom of the ocean by its crew, so as not to interfere with the pilgrims and such.

In the ship’s cargo hold is a big golden sphere, about the size of a good carnival ride. Nobody has a clue what the damn thing is. Supposedly, here it has been sitting all this time.

A storm on the ocean’s surface (because there is always a storm) isolates the team just as wonky stuff starts to happen. They are attacked by a swarm of jellyfish, then by a giant squid, all manner of hell breaks loose all over the vessel, they get paranoid as their numbers dwindle, they fight and bicker and nearly die, and Peter Coyote gets cut in half.

Turns out that the sphere imbues anyone who looks too hard into it with the ability to manifest their own thoughts as reality, meaning that all the crazy shit that has been going on has been caused by our team and their nightmares. This plot twist is sort of a cheat, one of those recent movie constructs where it’s all in your head becomes the playground for the film. A film can make its own rules when the danger is all in your head. However, this doesn’t mean that the rules don’t have to make some kind of sense.

Anyway, as far as the movie goes, a scant few members of the team narrowly escape their own paranoid delusions to return to safety on the ocean surface.

I have actually seen Sphere three times now because, Lord help me, I wanted to like it. You know I’m sci-fi’s bitch. After I saw this the first time oh so many years ago, in my disappointment I sensed there was some missing information, so I read Crichton’s book. And yes, reading the book does fill in a lot of details that the movie inexplicably leaves out.

I’ll give you an example of this. Teeny is killed by a swarm of jellyfish when she’s out in the water. Biologist Beth dissects one of the offending jellyfish. In the book, she explains the jellyfish’s strangeness to Norman, telling him that it is like a layman’s version of a jellyfish. It only has the body and the tentacles; it has no internal organs, or any of the special jellyfish parts that really only a biologist would know about in detail.

However, in the movie, all Beth tells Norman is that it’s a weird jellyfish, and the depth of her explanation is, God didn’t make this jellyfish. Well, what in the flying hell does that mean? Does the jellyfish have a Made in Korea stamp on it? Is it an EVIL jellyfish? Does it have googly eyes? Is it not actually a jellyfish but a wad of tissue paper with a voodoo curse?

There are many instances of this problem in Sphere, when information should be provided in order to intrigue or inform us, and it simply is not. So what results is a movie where a lot of odd things happen and you, the poor audience, aren’t given all the information you need to process it, so what it looks like is a bunch of people acting like assholes in a poorly-constructed vessel with poorly-specified mission goals. If the movie is going to skip over the book’s relevant information, they need to put a little disclaimer in the movie credits that suggests the source as additional reading material. "You have just seen Sphere. If you would like to understand what the monkey-fighting-snake just happened, we recommend you read the novel."

But me, I love the sci-fi, so I watched Sphere again after I read the book, hoping it would make the movie better. Hey, it worked for David Lynch’s atrocious 1984 film of Dune (seriously!). Here’s an unfortunate thing: once that I understood exactly what was supposedly going on, the movie got worse, because Crichton’s book was fairly intelligent and this movie has a bunch of people acting like assholes in a poorly-constructed vessel with poorly-specified mission goals.

A third viewing, for the purpose of this Chunk review, did nothing but increase my dislike. Our team, and by this I mean the characters and the actors portraying them, are given a real mess of a script, and they cope by turning into the most dislikable jerks you have ever seen in a movie, so that by about the fourth time they have one of their rambling, accusatory, uninformative, idiotic arguments, you want to slap them all until you break their teeth.

So here comes a list of troubles:

Professional Ignorance. To be fair, things don’t go badly wrong in the movie Sphere until the team actually finds the sphere in the American ship from-the-future. Up until now, you’ve just had to deal with Dustin Hoffman’s steady stream of mumbly chatter, which is annoying but not fatal, and a whole slew of characters that make you sigh and think, Oh dear, I’m not going to like any of these people. Once they get to the shiny, pretty sphere, they start to say stupid things.

Liev Schreiber’s character of Ted is a respected and published physicist. He takes one look at the sphere and announces something like this: I bet if you took a measurement of this thing, you’d find that it was a perfect sphere down to the millimeter. This is meant to convey a high technological prowess, as creating a perfect sphere is very difficult. The thing that irritated me was that, once he said it, everyone assumed it was true. Nobody actually took a measurement. Real scientists don’t assume anything.

The assumptions continue and become more generalized. They assume the unknown event that stranded the ship was a black hole, but there’s no proof of that. They assume that the sphere is alien; there’s no definitive proof of that either (it could be a futuristic construct). They assume to understand how the crew of the ship eventually died. This just goes on and on.

Commander Barnes is another professional idiot. The whole team has been down on the ocean floor for a good long while before he finally reads Beth’s file and finds out she once attempted suicide. Then he yells at Norman about it. Hey, Mr. OSSA, if this mission was so important to you, you might have read Beth’s frigging file before you submerged with her.

Norman is a terrible psychologist too; his job seems to be Be Dustin Hoffman. He slept with Beth, who was his patient at the time, years before. Bad form, Doctor. He does nothing useful psychologically for the entire trip, particularly since they eventually discover that the entire mess they are in is psychological, and he is just as panicky, paranoid and disoriented as everybody else.

It’s all in your head. Uh-huh. This is a big fat narrative cheat. When creating new rules, the rules still have to make sense for your audience to accept them. Here we have a few people capable of manifesting their thoughts, yet the only thoughts that seem to manifest are the weird, scary ones that result in explosions and monster attacks. At no point does anybody manifest a girl-on-girl naked wrestling match, or even a viable form of rescue, or even, at least, a viable method of attacking each other when they’re really pissed off. You’d think an angry Beth could just manifest Norman into a smear on the wall.

When these people are afraid for their lives and manifesting problems willy-nilly, I’d suppose that at least one of them might think, Damn, I wish I was back on the surface where it’s safe, and then suddenly be there. The rules of manifestation don’t make sense. Even after these morons figure out that they’re making their own problems, they just continue in their course of destruction like hysterical little girls, and don’t even pause for a moment to say, You know, if we all calmed down a bit, we could think our way out of this trouble.

All they have to do is entertain a microsecond of unpleasant thought and it comes true; but the sphere is apparently discriminating and ignoring all the happy thoughts.

Oh no! What if the compound catches on fire? Boom, the compound is on fire. However . . .

"Oh dear, how I wish that Ted weren’t burning alive!" But, um, Ted still burns alive.

In the terrible cheating finale, Beth, Norman and Harry even discuss how they can make anything come true with their nifty new superpower, and it is assumed that the sphere is a gift from another world for which we are not ready.

Well, you guys aren’t, I said. But give it to me. I’ll conjure up Kit Kats for everyone in the world.

At the end the sphere goes flying away, deciding that humans are too frustrating to cope with. Well, these are, Mr. Sphere, I agree. Do you think Mr. Sphere knows that he’s still at least 70 years in the past from his own point of origin? Maybe he can think his way back home.

Harry and Jerry are the same? This is an inexcusably stupid mistake. For a while, before they figure out what’s really going on, the crew thinks they are speaking with an alien being from inside the sphere. They begin by typing in code to it, using numbers corresponding to a keyboard. The alien sends this message: Hello. How are you? I am fine. My name is Jerry. An alien named Jerry, how cute.

Then (cue stinger music) Norman later discovers that the keyboard code was wrong and what the message actually said was, My name is Harry!!! which means that, even then, it was mathematician Harry who was mentally cuing the conversation.

Anybody who has ever done a code-breaking puzzle, or written a secret note in the third grade, or has a functional I.Q., can spot the error here. If the H is mistakenly coding as J, and the A is mistakenly coding as E, (even ignoring what the J and the E would then be coding as) then the message would have said, at best, Jello. Jow ere you? I em fine. My neme is Jerry.

Later the messages are no longer being sent by the keyboard code, so by then it’s a moot point. I can’t figure out why they even brought up the keyboard code or had the alien entity give himself a name. Why open the window to such an elementary error? Especially since an alien named Jerry is only quaint for two hot seconds, then starts sounding like exactly what it is: somebody’s stupid joke.

The alleged black hole and the sphere. This is a niggling point, and if the movie had been just a wee bit better, I wouldn’t be worried about it. But just because I’m so pissed off, I’m going to bitch about this. The sphere and the alleged black hole incident are only assumed to have anything to do with each other, and I think this is a ploy to generate suspense and dread. So the ship from-the-future stumbles into-the-past and just happens to have this alien sphere on board. Our team of experts act like it’s all related somehow, which presumably should cause us to fear the sphere (hey, that rhymes!) but I never heard a causal relationship explained either way.

We don’t even know for certain if there was a black hole, but okay, let’s pretend. Did the sphere cause the black hole, or did it come out of the black hole, or did the sphere make the crew manifest themselves into Earth’s past, and if so, why, and also if so, couldn’t they figure out how to think themselves back to their own time? I guess that the crew went insane just like our team of experts only they all died, and then the sphere thought, Well shit, I guess I’ll just wait here until some more of these losers show up.

I don’t know why we have to have a time-traveling American ship and also an alien sphere. It merely complicates things and requires a lot of confusing, often slyly contradictory expository dialog. The sphere could just be on the ocean floor, looking for human friends. Or the time-traveling American ship could be imbued with mind-projection technology that screws with the present-day humans. Or the ship could have been an alien ship with the sphere as part of its engine.

This kind of plot-layering makes you think there is more happening