Hoth Ice Monsters Blitz Rebel Base!

Luke wasn’t the only one to get mugged.  It all started when a lone Ice Creature discovered what he thought was a Snack-Warmer.  It sure was hot inside the base, but the Taun Tauns were quite a delicacy:

 

He evidently went back to his buddies and let slip the news.  Soon, other Ice Creatures began to drop in:

 

When the Imperial fleet jumped in, a whole party of Monsters were trapped.  The Rebel leaders simply looked the other way when R2-D2 mercillessly taunted them:

 

These scenes were obviously cut from the film because they so clearly establish a moral equivalency between the Empire and the Rebellion.  It’s sad, really…. 

Well… okay… maybe it had more to do with the fact that these scenes do absolutely nothing to propel Luke, Han, and Leia further into the action.  Even worse, the ice monster sequence that did make it into the film was probably the worst special effect in the entire series.  All you see is this big arm at first.  (Woah!)  Then when he’s coming to eat Luke in the cave, he looks like this stupid unmoving maniquin that’s just being rolled along the passageway.  Barf.

No, but Luke, Han, and Leia are really what its about.  But just sitting back and watching the films again, I have to say that the plot is really lacking something there.  You know… the films really need an epic prelude that undermines the centrality of those three… and that establishes R2-D2 and Chewbacca as being the chief spys and the key movers and shakers of the entire Rebel movement.

No… no….  Nevermind.  That’s a really dumb idea.  Forget I mentioned it.

Comic Adaption Reveals Inner Workings of George Lucas’s Mind

The movie originally opened up with Luke observing the space battle above Tatooine, but the scene was cut because the hat he was wearing was just too embarrassing– even for the man who would later create Jar-Jar Binks!

 

We also would have gotten to see the “Toshi station” where Luke oh so wanted to go pick up power converters… but that scene was cut because Luke’s nickname was so irritating and also because Lucas later decided that a crystal ball did not fit so well with his vision of the Star Wars ethos: 

I had the Star Wars storybook as a kid and it also contained images of the following scene that hit the cutting room floor.  Man, I thought Biggs was cool.  I could not figure out why they cut him, but then in the nineties Lucas reinserted some of his scenes when he released the altered version of the film.  Oh!  The pain!  If only we lived in a world where Lucas had someone near him to tell him he was out of his mind….

You remember that scene with the shiny black miniature Death Star looking floating droid thing with a syringe?  I never could figure it out as a kid….  I mean here we are in this high tech supernatural universe and Vader can’t pull a Jedi Mind Trick while using some kind of high tech brain imaging.  No… we’ve got a floating death star with a syringe!  It just doesn’t fit.  Well, you should have seen what Lucas originally had in mind: a black droid with a mohawk and an earring!  “I pity the fool that don’t tell me the location of the hidden rebel base!”

He’s another lousy scene that should of stayed on the cutting room floor but that Lucas had to dig back up for his re-envisioning of the film.  At least you get to check out the frightening pre-slug Jabba:

And check out this rendition of the famous Remote and Blast Shield.  This image upset me even as a kinder-gardener with only a dim memory of the movie.  I guess the Marvel Comics artist lacked the necessary stills to pull this one off and had to make it up based mostly on the script?

And here’s the scene where Frodo is entering the Mines of Moria… oh wait… wrong movie.  You remember the scene where Chewbacca gets frightened and Han just randomly shoots his blaster down an empty hall?  It never did make any sense to me.  Apparently, Lucas originally had something different in mind there as we see below.  Hmm… maybe he was running out of special effects $$?

But if I was slightly confused by Han shooting down an empty hallway, I was quite perturbed by Obiwan Kenobi’s light-saber duel.  He just gives up!  He holds his light-saber straight up and lets Vader kill him.  Right.  (Luke, did Ben forget to tell you that not only do Jedi Knights venerate lying, but they are also heavy into ritual suicide.)  The comic book adaption of that fight is much better; Kenobi talks a little more smack and appears to go down fighting.  Here’s line that got cut from the film that puts one of Ben’s more cryptic remarks in context:

Here’s a particular juicy bit… in the earliest cuts of the film, Luke’s father was well known and well thought of.  Personally, I’d like to live in a universe where Ben’s not a liar, Luke didn’t kiss his sister, and where Vader was not Luke’s daddy.  This scene provides some evidence for those that think that things really were intended to be that way as the first film came together:

Here’s a scene that demonstrates how Lucas’s revisionism truly knows no bounds.  You can tell this is the revised adaption from 2006 because Lucas had Dark Horse comics remove the part where Luke screams “Carrie!!!”  instead he makes them put in some lame line about ‘Technicos.’  Right.  You’re not fooling anyone, George.  It’s bad enough that you’ve altered the movies, but could you at least stay out of the comic adaption and leave things be?

Things Man Was Not Meant To Know

I recently picked up the 20th anniversary edition of TRON on DVD.  Excellent stuff.  I learned a lot of stuff about my favorite movie via the healthy dose of extras. 

The guys that made TRON were cartoonists.  They made some of the weirder sequences that appeared on Sesame Street and The Electric Company.  Their big score came when they were signed on to make a whole slew of cartoons for the 1980 Olympics– an entire “Animal Olympics” to run concurrently with the real thing.  Of course, the US ended up boycotting the Olympics that year, so the cartoons never ran…. 

TRON’s the first movie to use computer animation.  There were no software tools to do this stuff back then… and everything had to be done from scratch.  It took four different companies to do all the graphics– each company had a jury-rigged software/hardware system that could do a slightly different thing.  In spite of their groundbreaking and cutting edge achievements, TRON did not receive any awards for animation: the judges felt that the fact that they used a computer was cheating! 

TRON was inspired by… PONG.  Yeah….  PONG.  Somehow the director had seen the game… and immediately he thought of gladiator games in the coliseum.  He must have been a really creative guy.  I played one of those in the late seventies and it mostly made me think of hockey….

Probably my favorite part of TRON was the music, but alas there was not much on the DVD about that part beyond just a couple of tunes from the lightcycle sequence and closing credits that failed to make the final cut.  I’d hoped to see an interview with the composer– a certain Wendy Carlos– who had his/her gender surgically altered.  Ah well, perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

There was one scene in the movie that the creators labored over excessively.  It was beautifully crafted and each frame took about twice as long to construct.  They got it just the way they wanted it and then… at the very end… it all hit the cutting room floor.

It was an electronic sex scene.

I couldn’t believe this.  I’d always thought of the program entities as being asexual automatons… and that maybe Flynn had shaken things up a bit by introducing the whole concept of kissing to them.  But no… the programs were… uh… well….  I guess you just have to see it to believe it.  Yes, I know this was a Disney movie!  But they even included an equally bizarre “morning after scene.”

Okay, okay.  It is “G rated,” but it will still blow your mind.

Dune

We rented Dune last week.  Twice.

(Sigh.)

I’ve got fond memories of the 1984 David Lynch version.  1984 was just such a good year in so many ways.  Role playing games were probably at their height of popularity and there were still interesting things to discover and perfect.  Eight-bit computers were still the best thing going.  You could still go to the mall and buy text adventures.

It was late one night when we rented the Dune VHS tape.  We’d been playing Ogre and we were all sure that the cybertank was unbeatable.  We’d heard that an all-G.E.V. force could win every time, but I don’t think we had stooped that low.  We put in the tape half in frustration at the seemingly impossible little game and were soon barraged with all that is David Lynch.  We didn’t have any idea who he was at the time, and we were slightly bored by the complexity of the plot… but we were convinced that Dune was somehow supposed to be really cool.

A year or so later I’d end up reading the book during Geometry class.  I’d keep waiting for passages about the Barons weird facial disease and the sound weapon… but they never showed up.  (I’d end up reading the next three books in the series, but could never quite get all the way through Heretics.)

So back to last week: I’m at the video store and I see that there’s two versions of Dune now.  The second one is a four hour version that aired on the sci-fi channel.  The overweight/bearded geek-clerk said it had lower production values (matte paintings and stuff), but it was more faithful to the book.  I elected to take a chance and took it home.

Argh!  The horror!

The cast was so… poorly chosen.  Gurney was overweight.  Keynes looked like a ghoul.  The duke looked like he belonged on a different TV show.  (Quantum leap, maybe?)  The costumes were just plain silly– everyone had geometric sheets of fabric hovering over their heads.  The acting was so flat.  And the director had to alter scenes in annoying ways– lines from one character were moved to another– and new scenes were scrubbed together when leaving things as they were in the book would have done just as well. 

Yuk.  I couldn’t sit through more than an hour of it.  It was terribly painful.  Fancy computer graphics make cheap costumes look even cheaper than they really are.  So I went back to the store and picked up the Lynch version.  They wouldn’t give me my money back, unfortuneately.  We put in the DVD and immersed ourselves into all that is… DUNE!

Lynch’s version starts off with Princess Irulan attempting to sum up the axioms of the socio-political of background of Herbert’s universe.  Ha!  Like anyone can do that in three minutes….  She begins to fade out more than once and then pops back and says, “oh, I almost forgot to mention.”  She could keep popping back with her tidbits for half an hour and we’d all still be lost.  (What’s an Orange Catholic Bible… one more time?)

Lynch is completely off the wall– he opens up with the bizarre guildmen confronting the emperor.  Wow.  It’s just completely weird.  A bald guy with tubes sticking in his head speaking through an old fashioned microphone with a creepy voice… and somehow it translates.  And its all contrasted with the emperor’s 19th century style.  Then we’re off to witness a visit to the Baron’s session with his dermatologist.  Wagh!

Watching this movie it is completely clear that it was done by the same guy that did Twin Peaks.  It’s kind of appropriate, though.  The 1965 novel is full of hallucinations of all sorts– and everything in that universe is powered by freaks on the strangest sorts of drugs.  There was scene after scene that the director managed to slip in that just had me shouting, “that’s SO Lynch!”  Where did he get some of this stuff, though?  It doesn’t matter… the pace of the film keeps hammering along.  It seems he throws out a lot of this stuff just to freak you out. (But Herbert’s future better freak you out….)

He takes a lot of liberties with the material… but he stays close to the text and the characterizations even when it hurts the cinematic elements.  Characters dish out 100% Herbert dialogue… while strange dubbed over hushed wispers enlighten us to what they’re really thinking.  A little unconventional, but this is Lynch we’re taking about after all.

Lynch’s bad guys are gruesomely despicably irredeemably evil.  They’re on screen for just a short time, but we get the point– with loads of maniacal laughter.  Anyone that makes their slaves wear reversed mohawks is bad enough, but check it out: a cackling floating fat man, an insatiable bug eating binge eater, and Sting playing Feyd Rautha… stepping out of a weird industrial sauna in a metal thong…?  Rrruh?!  But… they’re so evil!  You may not understand anything that’s going on, but you know these guys are… evil!

Sting rocks, by the way.  He has maybe two lines in the whole film, but his smirking and glaring are perfect.  Compare him to the sci-fi channel’s version… sitting around in a dainty happy colored future-suit… grinning… with a geometric figure floating over his head… and a crowd of bored admirers.  Bah!  I’ll take metal thongs and weird saunas over that garbage any day!  Metal thongs are obviously 10 times as evil as floating geometric figures. 

Whatever might be wrong with Lynch’s film, it is in any case populated with a fine group of actors.  They fit their parts perfectly and carry themselves well.  (Except for when it’s an actress with 80’s rock star hair flowing around them as they artfully skip through the desert.)  And the costumes change dramatically depending on the character types and their homeworlds.  It’s a visual feast that doesn’t quit.  Sure, he compresses two thirds of the book into about twenty minutes– making the Fremen sietch into practically bit parts– but it’s still an awesome film.  Any film that has such powerful guitar riffs filling in during every pivotal scene can’t be all that bad.  I mean really, there’s no incomprehensible moment in film that cannot be improved by triumpant Toto guitar chords thrashing out in an unrelenting march in the background.

1984.  Dune.  David Lynch.

Put your hand in the box.  Pull out the DVD.  Watch.

I will not fear bizarre Lynchisms.  Fear is the mindkiller.  I will face my fear of the sci-fi channel… and let it pass over me.  And when it is gone, only Dune will remain.

Best “Car Wars” Movie of 2005

Without a doubt, “The Island” is the best Car Wars movie of 2005.  It’s got it all: futuristic 18-wheelers, jet-bikes, killer dropped-weapons, and clones….  Lots and lots of clones.

If you ever wondered how Gold Cross would really work, this movie shows us.  There are a couple of key differences between Car Wars continuity and the movie, but there’s no reason that the movie couldn’t describe how things really work in the Autoduel America’s 2040s.

The movie combines themes from Bladerunner and The Matrix, and hits hard on the ethical issues in a much more moving and effective way than movies like Alien: Resurection did.  The action is relentless and the suspense never lets up– this makes the movie emotionally exhausting the way that The Matrix:Reloaded’s endless chase scene was.  It probably would have been a better movie if it had given us a break to assimilate everything that had happened.

The sets and visuals are incredible.  There’s just so much space and scope to everything.  (We’ve come a long way from Star Trek’s matte paintings and styrofoam….)

I hadn’t heard a lot of good about this movie, so I wasn’t expecting much.  I didn’t think “Obiwan Kenobi” could pull off the leading man bit.  (The wart on his forehead is distracting and he’s nowhere near as cool as Sean Connery or Harrison Ford.)  But he did pull it off….  Ewan McGregor was a very believable actor and drew me into the character.  I guess now we won’t have to fault him too much for working with Lucas on the prequels….

It’s really not a bad movie, on the whole.  It’s little derivative, but “Matrix Runner: The Resurection” turns out to be entertaining anyway.  The first thirty minutes alone are worth the price of admission.  No other movie has illustrated so graphically the ethical difficulties that would result if the technology of cloning became possible.  John Nowak addressed some of it in his short stories for Autoduel Quarterly, but this movie goes even further than I imagined it could go.  That to me is the mark of great science fiction: when authors give us a glimpse of the future beyond what we already think we know.