SUMURU (2003)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

"I think most of Earth's cultures were based on some form of mistake or other."-- Adam Wade.

Though I'm a stone Sax Rohmer fan, I missed my chance at his Sumuru books some thirty years ago, when a dealer offered to sell me the five paperbacks for ten dollars. I may have thought they would eventually be reprinted in more affordable editions, but I was wrong, and now you can't find the pb's for less than thirty dollars each. I did luck out in acquiring just the first one, and got a sense of what Rohmer's super-villainess was like, as I described in my review of the character's first two movie adaptations.

I very much doubt that the 2003 SUMURU, which will probably be the character's final cinematic outing, borrowed anything from Rohmer but the name Sumuru and her association with a civilization of women out to dominate men. But writer-producer Harry Alan Towers, who owned the rights to adapt both Sumuru and Fu Manchu since the 1960s, did come up with a stand-alone film that at least does that basic concept credit, albeit in an otherworldly science-fiction setting that Rohmer would never have attempted.

For sake of clarity I'm going to give away a "spoiler" early in the game. We're thousands of years in the future, and humankind has colonized and terraformed numerous planets. However, humanity has also suffered two wars that used germ cultures, and on many worlds human beings no longer have the capacity to bear children. 

The audience knows none of this when two astronauts, Adam Wade (Michael Shanks) and Jake Carpenter (Terence Bridget) land their space-cruiser on the planet Antares, looking for a colony that's been out of contact with other worlds for nine centuries. When the spacemen do contact the natives, they tell them, truthfully, that Antares is in danger of exploding from a severe case of the Krypton Quakes. But the guys have come looking for breeding-stock, for men and women not polluted by germ warfare.

After the landing Adam leaves Jake with the ship and goes out to reconnoiter. He meets a young boy, Will (David Lazarus), but the boy runs off and gets taken prisoner by a band of armored chicks-- not exactly the science-minded colonists Adam expected to find. Adam picks up Will's trail and follows it to the city: specifically, a temple filled with hot women in form-fitting metal armor. There the boy is going to be sacrificed to a gigantic snake, whom the main priestess Taxan (Simona Williams) calls the "serpent mother," and who is credited with the power to "return the sun to our sky." Also in attendance is the queen of Antares, Sumuru (Alexandra Kamp), who clearly doesn't buy Taxan's eschatology. However, a fight breaks out when Will's sister, a friend of Sumuru, tries to save her brother. Sumuru butts heads with Taxan, but Adam's presence is detected and his presence distracts everyone from the ritual and from Will's convenient escape.

Of course at this point I wouldn't be a good myth-critic if I didn't point out that it can't be a coincidence that a guy named Adam finds himself in conflict with the servants (called "snake heads") of a serpent-deity. The standard pulp-trope would be that the planet has declined into superstitious savagery, but that's not the whole truth. In one of various exchanges Sumuru has with Adam, she's quite aware of the scientific origins of the colony, and she uses technology to mine oil and gas from the earth. Adam also learns that there was a catastrophic event involving a nuclear reactor that eliminated much of the male populace. This led to an XX-takeover, in which men became second-class citizens, used only for heavy labor, as in the mines, and for procreation. The nuclear event was blamed on men, and the religious ritual with the giant snake-- possibly a mutation?-- came about to reassure the female citizens that all was right in an unsteady world. The subterranean snake is propitiated because he's said to be the source of the world-quakes, though Sumuru doesn't believe this herself.

Once Sumuru is introduced, the movie unquestionably becomes her story. Thanks to the presence of the religious fanatic Taxan, the queen doesn't have to play the role of the dumb backslider to whom the gallant astronaut mansplains everything. She's allowed to be intelligent despite her arrogant belief that men deserve to be enslaved, though her interest in Adam is indicated by the fact that she lets him watch her showering. She also mentions that unlike most Amazon Queens she was elected to her position, while Taxan is more in the nature of an aristocrat, Adam initially tells Sumuru that he and Jake only sought out Antares to help them move to a new world. Sumuru intuits that he's not telling the whole truth, and even if she doesn't believe in serpent-gods, she does have a strong belief that men are too dangerous to be allowed parity. 

Eventually, just as Adam's half-truth will be exposed, Sumuru will learn that the catastrophic event wasn't the fault of any human, male or female, leading to Adam's rather Nietzchean statement that cultures originate from mistakes. But since Sumuru makes it evident that she plans to make Adam her booty call, Taxan wants whatever her enemy wants, and so we get the usual "bad girl" seduction-attempt. This also leads to Taxan staging a coup d'etat, so that Sumuru, Adam, Jake and Will must escape by seeking out a long abandoned colonial transport ship. But even if Sumuru routs her rival, can the Amazons of Sumuru be saved from their dying planet and keep stellar humanity from dying out as well? Oh, and one more thing: just as the good guys seem about to get clear-- cue the return of the giant snake, right in concert with the quakes that will doom Planet Antares.

For some viewers, things like the cheapness of the South African locations, occasional lame dialogue and the basic trope of "space Amazons" will mark SUMURU as a schlock-film. And to be sure, there are slow spots that lower the film's energy at times. But given the generally mediocre reputation of most Harry Alan Towers productions, the detailed, reasonably intelligent script is a big surprise. It was almost the very last movie either written or produced by Towers,who passed in 2009. Possibly he got substantial help from his two co-writers or from South African director Darrell Roodt. Still, I'd like to believe Towers knew he just had one last hurrah left in him and so made an extra effort here. He didn't make any sort of Sumuru that Sax Rohmer would recognize. But it's a Sumuru rooted in the eternal quarrels of XX and XY, and that's a legacy worth remembering.