ASTRO BOY (1963-65)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                                                                                                         Some specifications first: Japan produced 193 episodes of TETSUWAN ATOM, the first animated TV show the country marketed abroad, from the Osamu Tezuka work of the same name. However, only 104 episodes were translated into English, which ran from 1963 to 1965 under the name "Astro Boy." To my knowledge few if any of the other 89 episodes have been translated into English or into any other non-Japanese language, so my review of the series is necessarily truncated. Because I can only reference the English episodes, in this review I'll also use the American names for the episodes and for all of the characters, though I'm aware that one can find the alternate cognomens on the web if one so desires. I should also mention that I've little knowledge as to which episodes adapt specific Tezuka stories and which ones are original productions, so I won't make mention of the adaptation factors.                      

  Although ASTRO was produced with child-viewers in mind, it's a much better science-fiction television series than most of those that preceded it and many of those that came after. True, there's a lot of silly kid-humor in most of the episodes, and frequently the animators would throw in the sort of gags only feasible in cartoons, like having characters' faces morph into weird shapes after said faces get punched. Nevertheless, most episodes possess a strong grounding in the tropes of "sense of wonder" science fiction, and a good sampling possess high mythicity in terms of their cosmological, psychological or sociological patterns. Since so many episodes were made for ASTRO's two seasons, I'll only review the high-mythicity episodes below, though I might argue that all of them at least touch on Tezuka's master trope: "Robots are people too." By that I don't mean that the "God of Manga" erased all distinctions between mechanical people and organic human beings. But Tezuka's robots possess the same affective range as, say, the star of Disney's PINOCCHIO, and this capacity makes both Disney's puppet and Tezuka's robots *essentially* human. Because of this commonality, Tezuka does not really imagine his robots as mere mechanisms that emulate human behavior, as sci-fi author Isaac Asimov would. And because these robots possess essential humanity, many episodes of the TV show, like the 1952 manga, assert that robots should have civil rights like human beings. Tezuka's robots are the ultimate marginalized group: they really aren't humans, in the way that members of marginalized races or religions are still humans. But it becomes essential that in a forward-looking society as that of Astro Boy's 2013 era, robots should be treated as humans.                                                                 

    

"The Birth of Astro Boy"-- in many ways, Astro's origin remains the standout story even among other resonant stories. The narrative feels much like an inverted version of PINOCCHIO. In place of Geppetto, a father who ceaselessly sacrifices himself for an often thoughtless son, Astro Boy is created by the thoughtless narcissism of Professor Boynton, who makes a robot duplicate of the small son Boynton lost in an accident. When Boynton belatedly realizes that the little robot cannot take his son's place, he callously sells Astro to a circus, and, in the English episodes at least, is never seen again. A second "bad father" takes Boynton's place: an unscrupulous ringmaster whom the translators named "Cacciatore" (possibly a callback to the evil Italian Stromboli in Disney's PINOCCHIO). Cacciatore forces Astro to battle other robots in arena-fights, much to the innocent automaton's displeasure. But a good father, the huge-nosed Doctor Elefun, seeks to free Astro from the ringmaster, and he ultimately succeeds in doing so when the government passes a "robot emancipation act" (almost certainly based upon the Emancipation Proclamation of the 1800s). Astro then joins Elefun in a variety of adventures, and Elefun even creates a robot family for Astro: father, mother and little sister Astro Girl. (There's also a "brother" who's introduced in later episodes, but he doesn't assume much importance.)                           

   "Expedition to Mars"-- as if to test Astro's status as a free being, he's assigned to captain a vessel going to Mars. Not surprisingly, a number of human crewmen don't like being bossed around by a robot.                                                                                                       

"The Sphinx"-- Is the huge creature Astro encounters in the desert the real Sphinx of legend? Of course not, it's another robot, but the real story of the riddling monster is related during the episode, which conveys a certain level of mythicity.                                                           

  "Hullabaloo Land"-- In a foreign country given the semblance of a fairy-tale land, a huge tyrant, Baron Von Hoodwink, seeks to bend an innocent robot named Princess Lollipop to his will. No sexual overtones appear, though Lollipop's ability to morph into a swan suggests that there was some influence from European swan-maiden tales.                                                                                                           

 "Ditto"-- for the first time, a young robot named Ditto is elected to the presidency of a foreign country. Ditto's own creator Deadcross seeks to overthrow the new ruler, and Astro comes to Ditto's rescue.   

   "Astro Boy Goes to School"-- Astro realizes that he doesn't share some human capacities, like the ability to appreciate beauty. He thus enrolls in a human middle school. Amid various hijinks, Astro does make a little progress toward his goal of greater humanity.                     

"Dream Machine"-- Astro. who like other robots has no ability to dream, participates in an experiment to see if a device can give him this human experience.                                                                           

  "Mighty Microbe Army"-- In a fascinating anticipation of FANTASTIC VOYAGE, Astro and Doctor Elefun must diagnose a space traveler's malady by shrinking themselves to microbe-size and entering the man's body for a closeup look.                                                   

 "Contest in Space"-- was this a riff on Frederic Brown's "Arena" before STAR TREK did its sanctioned adaptation? No way to know, but it's the same setup. Aliens select two representatives of Earth to fight other ETs with the survival of one team's homeworld at stake. The Earth-reps are Astro and a criminal fugitive, and initially the crook doesn't care if his world perishes. But a virtuous little robot shall lead him...                                                                                     

   "Mystery of the Amless Dam"-- Robot-human tensions heighten in the city of Amless, due in large part to the influence of reactionaries like "Boss Barker." When a human child disappears, the locals blame robots, claiming that the automatons should never have been liberated. The persecuted machines barricade themselves at the local dam, claiming innocence, and Astro Boy jets over to help. But it seems Barker reached out to a kindred spirit, Astro's former master Cacciatore, who brings two big robots and a bunch of small manta-like creatures to subdue the hero. The missing boy shows up to help Astro and to vindicate the local robots, and everyone makes nice.        

"Jungle Mystery"-- In a story that's both wacky and sentimental, Astro Girl gets hired to play a movie-role, that of a Tarzan-like boy. While the movie shoots in a real jungle, Riva, the immortal queen of a remote valley, spies what she mistakes for a young man, and abducts Astro Girl to be Riva's new husband. Astro follows to rescue his sister and learns that there's an alien force that has made Riva and her valley immune from death. (By the way, though Astro Girl is not as powerful as her brother, she often plays the role of "fighting female" in various episodes.)                                                      

  "The Mighty Mite from Ursa Minor"-- Though this episode aired after "Amless Dam," both in Japan and in the US, it feels like the script for this one was written earlier, because of the way it portrays Cacciatore and one of his minions. The scheming ringmaster comes across a young boy with super-strength, and though the boy only wants to find his way home, Cacciatore hoaxes the boy into fighting a huge man named Saturno in an arena for the entertainment of patrons. Then Cacciatore realizes that the boy is an alien, so the ringmaster may be in legal trouble because he's only supposed to have humans fight humans in his circus. Astro Boy must intervene to make sure the mighty mite gets back to Ursa Minor. The continuity problem arises because in "Amless Dam" the villain not only says that Saturno is a robot, the assertion is proven when a young boy drains Saturno of his power to re-energize Astro.                                      

And the last high-mythicity episode of the English-language episodes in my view is "Mystery of the Metal Men," which chronicles Astro's only voyage to an alternate universe. An explosion hurls the little robot into a world where Astro Boy never existed, because Doctor Boynton never lost his son Astor and so never invented his robot replacement. Once Boynton and Elefun accept that Astro really does come from an alternate timeline, they help him get back, though first Astro has to use his powers to help them out of their "metal men" difficulties. And just to show Astro's unceasing virtue, he even renders advice to Astor to help the youth relate to his father better-- even though to Astro, Boynton was nothing but the father who cast him aside like trash.    

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological*                                                                                                                                                                                                    I don't remember what year I saw this landmark SF film. It might have been a year or two after its initial 1968 release, since I would have been thirteen that year and I might have seen ODYSSEY in an ancillary release to a "neighborhood" movie theater. But I'm sure that I was in high school at the time, because in one class I was given information about how ODYSSEY had been inspired by the "superman" philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I didn't know enough about Nietzsche then-- or probably for the next forty years-- to say much of anything about how the German philosopher influenced director/co-writer Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of stories by Arthur C. Clarke. (Clarke is billed as the co-writer of the screenplay with Kubrick, but without even checking histories of the collaboration, I think it axiomatic that Kubrick called the shots.)       

     

So, from my current standpoint of having read lots of Nietzsche, I can now ask, "what about the ODYSSEY screenplay resembles Nietzsche, or at least whatever Kubrick took from Nietzsche?" In the film as we have it, there are no direct references to the philosopher or his works, and only one indirect reference, in that the music that bookends the film's principal events is from Richard Strauss's 1896 ALSO SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, whose title is itself a callback to Nietzsche's 1883 work THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA. This was one of the books in which the philosopher argued for the potential of his "overmen" to succeed ordinary human beings, represented at one point in the book by "the conscientious man." I don't think my high-school class managed to expatiate on how Nietzsche said that the overmen would bring this about, but my own reading of ZARATHUSTRA and other Nietzsche works indicated that the overmen would practice "self-overcoming." What this means in the corpus of Nietzsche is not important here; it's what Kubrick made of it in ODYSSEY. And in the prelude to the main story, "The Dawn of Man," we see primitive ape-men overcoming their animal natures in order to advance to more-than-animals. The mysterious monolith encourages one of the ape-men to make the evolutionary leap to the use of tools, which the Ancestor of Man uses to kill both an unlucky tapir and one of his fellows. Then, in ODYSSEY's most famous (and most parodied) metaphor, the ape casts his murder weapon in the air, and the instrument, used to conquer an enemy, transitions into an instrument used to conquer space.                                                                                  

So, with the accompaniment of symphonic music, the audience is propelled into a world where humankind has made space travel almost routine, and one particular mission is scheduled to make its first foray to Jupiter. But in contrast to dozens of other films about the future of space travel-- to say nothing of hundreds of prose narratives-- Kubrick may not think that this is the end of man's story-- or, if it is, that it may be the dawn of something else. Not the first time, I noticed that all of the characters speak in a very emotionless, blandly descriptive manner. In some ways, this makes perfect sense. People dwelling in the hostile terrain of outer space would know that everything they do from moment to moment depends on following the rules for existence in that terrain. Here there are no cranky Doctor McCoys who are out of sync with the demands of interplanetary flight, and the nature of their spoken dialogue falls under the verbal strategy Philip Wheelwright called "stheno-language." I explained this category in my post A PAGE RIGHT OUT OF PREHISTORY:                                                                                                                                                                        'Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."'                                                         

 In space no one can hear you being expressive. Every dwelling-space, every corridor, every vehicle, must be used for the purpose of staying alive in space, and in part Kubrick expresses this through his use of man-made geometrical shapes that have no real counterpart in the nature in which humans were born. And the most consequential of those geometrical shapes is Hal-9000, the computer programmed to help shepherd astronauts Bowman and Poole to Jupiter. Hal is represented by three concentric circles, more geometrically perfect than any human eye, and in theory capable of acting without human error.                                                                                                                     

But of course it's a contradiction in terms to imagine fallible humans making an infallible instrument, and so Hal-9000 proves just as dangerous as the tool with which the ape-man slays his prey. The computer, told since its creation that it must be infallible, makes a mistake and then fears that the mistake threatens the machine's very existence-- which indeed it does, since the astronauts cannot risk their lives on a flawed guide. So Hal, the Cain of computers, kills one of the men it was meant to serve, and almost kills Bowman as well. Ironically, only as Hal is deactivated does Bowman learn that his superiors entrusted the computer with information to which neither astronaut was privy: that they are expected to investigate evidence of alien contact in the vicinity of Jupiter.                             

 Thanks to a monolith waiting for the advent of humanity to this alien sphere, Bowman does make contact, though it's a form of contact that he wouldn't be able to report to his fellow Earthmen even if given the chance. After a dazzling transition through what some sources call a "stargate"-- one in which, BTW, the logic of pure geometry is thrown to the winds-- Bowman ends up spending the rest of his life in an "alien zoo," fed and maintained by masters who never interact him in any way. At the end of Bowman's life as an old man, a monolith appears to him once more. He morphs into a fetus-like "Star Child," and apparently teleports himself across the void of space to what was formerly his homeworld-- and there Kubrick ends the film.                                                                             

  Since Kubrick eschews almost all exposition in ODYSSEY, one can only guess as to why Bowman transforms, since he doesn't do anything but "go with the flow." In Nietzsche's writings, the overman only exceeds commonplace humanity thanks to what the philosopher called a "delight in the uncertain." Does Bowman, whose mental processes remain inscrutable, find some such delight at the end of his mortal existence, and thus win the transformation from his perceptors? There's no evidence of such a transformation, though. The unknown ETs seem to have no particular reason for bringing about the metamorphosis, since they have scrutinized Earth's inhabitants for centuries with only the most minimal interference, and their intent doesn't seem to be outwardly destructive. At the end of Clarke's novelization of the screenplay, Clarke simply asserts that though the Star Child's powers dwarf those of his former kindred, he isn't sure what he will do next-- "but he would think of something." Perhaps that's all Kubrick wanted to convey in the puzzling conclusion of ODYSSEY: the embrace of all things uncertain.                                     

MADAME WEB (2024)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              "It's like, a woman's natural instinct is to protect, to give-- and it's like [Cassandra's] instincts to do both mix with her powers"-- actress Isabelle Merced's take on her movie MADAME WEB.                                                                                                                                    This is a really weird one. It's not weird in a psycho-obsession way, for it's too middle-of-the-road in its appeal to represent anything truly personal. And yet it's not oddball in terms of any artificial intellectual obsessions, like a lot of the MCU movies. It's a movie selling itself as a superhero movie, which goes out its way to elide a major source of the genre's appeal, and it's also a "girlboss" film in which the main heroine isn't really an aggressive know-it-all, as is the case in so many other girlboss movies. The above comment from one of WEB's actresses is the closest thing to a "theme statement" I could find in the dvd's extras, and even director/co-writer S.J. Clarkson didn't really say anything in her few comments beyond platitudes about feminine representation. Most of all, WEB is a puzzle because it was based on a minor side-character within the corpus of Marvel's SPIDER-MAN comic-book stories-- hardly the sort of property most major film-studios would attempt to monetize, even given the fact that Sony couldn't work with anything except the corpus of SPIDER-MAN stories. (I mean, if Sony could do Madame Web, surely they could have adapted the earlier character of Spider-Man's premiere female foe, The Black Cat, who would have been much more marketable IMO.)                                                                     

 So, here's the origin of Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson). She's just a gleam in the womb of her mother Constance when Constance goes exploring in Peru's Amazon forest, seeking a rare spider whose venom may stave off her unborn child's genetic illness (though the audience doesn't find out the motivations until later on). Constance finds the rare spider, but her guide Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) kills her to steal the spider, which he believes will make him into a super-spider-man. A legendary tribe of spider-like natives come across Constance, who was also bitten by the spider before Ezekiel took it. The natives can't save Constance, they save the infant Cassandra. Somehow Baby Cass is transported to America, where she's entered into a fosterage program, though the viewers never know anything about what happens to the young Cassie in that system, any more than they-- or Cassie-- ever knows who her father may have been. Though the character doesn't make explicit comments about having lacked a mother, the film's diegesis makes clear that such is THE defining issue in Cassandra's life.                                                                   

                                                                                                      Since Cassandra can't change the past events that deprived her of a mother, the script's solution is that the protagonist should become a mother-- albeit only in a figurative sense, to avoid getting boy-cooties, I guess. She works as a New York paramedic and has no love-life and may never have had one. But a near-death incident causes the awakening of precognitive talents resulting from her mother being bitten by the super-spider. Cassandra (by now, the use of the Classical prophetess' name should be evident) has visions of a man she's never seen-- the twenty-years-older Ezekiel-- being attacked and killed by three costumed spider-women (all based upon characters from Marvel, of course).                                                             

To race past a lot of boring exposition, it turns out that the future spider-women are just teenagers in present-time, and since Ezekiel has also gained vision-powers from the spider-venom, he decides he's going to use his vast wealth to track down the teens and kill them before they kill him. (How did Ezekiel get rich with his powers of prophecy and Spider-Man-like abilities? Who knows?) Cassandra manages to find the girls and shepherd them away from Ezekiel, who assumes an all-black latex outfit as he crawls from wall to wall on his hit-mission. For the rest of the movie, Cassandra runs from pillar to post with her young charges, just barely managing to out-predict Ezekiel. I'm not sure why Ezekiel, who's been using his powers longer, can't use his powers to outguess the heroine. Possibly it's because it's only important that Cassandra should be able to realize her ability to change the future, since this is the essence of her feminine ability to protect and to give. Eventually, Cassandra's defensive strategies bear fruit, so that Ezekiel's superior male might succumbs to Cassandra's feminine ability to think outside the box. The film ends with the assumption that Cassandra will also play a big role in guiding her three figurative daughters to their destinies as full-fledged superheroines-- though we never know what factors are going to make them become heroes. (Maybe none of the girls want to become costumed crusaders-- and if not, isn't that a future that they can change if they please? That possibility is never suggested.)                                              

Clarkson's peculiar approach only makes sense to me in terms of Hollywood's attempt to seek equity for the female of the species. Since big, expensive action-thrillers generate a lot of money and fame for successful raconteurs, advocates of social justice reasoned that the action-genre would become more equitable if more action-movies starred actresses. The problem with this logic is that the audience that was theoretically going to support all of these female-led films, comprised of American Liberated Women, did not significantly support such films, regardless of the films' good or bad qualities. Women viewers simply did not turn out for big expensive action-thrillers as often as male viewers did, because in general women don't like such thrillers the way male viewers do. So I theorize that Clarkson and her collaborators tried to rewrite the social justice narrative to make it work for women's dominant tastes. If women don't support action-thrillers in which all-female groups like the Birds of Prey and the Marvels get into fights with lots of flashy powers-- maybe that same audience will buy a female-led superhero flick that's structured like a super-expensive Lifetime movie. I'll conclude by stating that although the script for WEB is clunky and undercharacterized, I do not, unlike the podcaster The Critical Drinker, explain this by a snide reference to WEB being Clarkson's first theatrical feature. The woman had been working professionally as a television director for roughly twenty years before this film. She may well be a mediocre director, even in her TV works-- but the failings of WEB can't possibly stem from lack of experience.                                                                        

MIL MASCARAS: AZTEC REVENGE (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                  AZTEC REVENGE, though plagued by the same low budget and amateur actors as ACADEMY OF DOOM, is an improvement over the entry from seven years previous. Though the fights are nothing special, at least they look to have been professionally blocked out. Yet REVENGE seems to have been the last moviemaking hurrah for writer-producer Jeffrey Uhlmann, not to mention his last acting credit. Amusingly, Uhlmann played all the nasty nemeses in this series: the evil mummy in the 2007 movie, the evil mastermind of the 2008 follow-up, and the evil decapitated head of an Aztec chieftain here. According to IMDB, REVENGE is almost the last credit for Mil Mascaras, though I can't tell whether he decisively retired from wrestling or from filmmaking.                                                                

Perhaps scripter Uhlmann intuited that REVENGE might be his last shot at capturing the cheese-appeal of the luchador-movies. Not only does the main menace of the film suggest the Aztec menace of the 1963 Mex-horror film THE LIVING HEAD, the Aztec Chief (never called anything else) possesses, like his 1963 kinsman, the power to manipulate others mentally. After the decapitated do-badder is unearthed in an archeological dig, he takes control of a couple of college students to serve him. Then he branches out, forcing athletes to dress up like ninjas and to attack wrestlers-- reason being, the Chief wants to transplant his head onto the healthy body of a champion fighter. This academic angle is of course the way Uhlmann once more worked things out so that the majority of the movie's scenes take place on a campus, whether it's the same one utilized in ACADEMY or not. Further, throughout the movie Mil Mascaras' confidantes on campus are a security guard (the worst actor, btw), a professor known only as The Professor, and a doctor known as Ruth. No, not that one, although this middle-aged, somewhat frumpy woman supplies Mil with his only romantic interest in the film, as she comes on to him in one scene.  Mil doesn't take her up on her offer, but maybe he thinks about it. And maybe that's why the Chief, with a college full of hot girls, chooses Ruth to be his Aztec queen-- just to twist his enemy's tail, as it were.                   

   Speaking of pulchritude, ACADEMY barely rated in that category, since almost all the female characters there went around clad in heavy masks and wrestling-gear. Hardly in line with Mexican movies of the era being emulated, since the babe-factor usually dominated, sometimes pairing aging wrestlers with very young heroines. But Uhlmann throws in a pleasingly gratuitous scene in which the Chief takes control of a whole sorority, boosts their strength somewhat (says the script), and has these nightgowned beauties try to overpower Mil, who's too gallant to hit back. At the very end, when the Chief can't take possession of Mil's body, he fits his head atop a ramshackle robot form that MUST be a callback to THE ROBOT VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY. Yet the greatest suspense in the movie takes place not when Mil Mascaras is in physical danger, but when he's accused of participating in a kidnapping, and the suspicious cops inform the hero that he's under arrest and will have to take off his mask for their records. The goodguy wrestler escapes this fate, just as the real performer was never unmasked in the ring. But it's the sort of suspense I've rarely seen even in the "real" luchador movies.   

MILS MASCARAS: ACADEMY OF DOOM (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              One online review asserts that this item was shot on an American college campus by some of the same crew that worked on the more professional MIL MASCARAS VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY. This choice of locations affected the plot of this amateurish production and its seven-years-later sequel. The "academy" of the title is "Mil Mascaras Wrestling Women's Academy," which means a lot more females in the narrative than in the average luchador film. Said wrestling-school is menaced on two fronts: Luctor, a criminal mastermind (complete with luchador-mask) who wants to buy the school by hook or by crook, and a mysterious killer who attacks people and eats their brains.  (Contrary to the copy on the movie poster above, the monster has nothing to do with the 1960s "Brainiac" creature.)                                                                                                                                                                                 Some online reviews esteem the movie for trying to capture the cheesy appeal of the famous luchador-movies from the sixties and seventies, albeit on a very restricted budget and with a lot of amateur actors. I could get behind that, even given that all aspects of the script, including the revelation of the monster's ID, are exceedingly moldy. But it's not worth doing a luchador-homage if you can't set up even half-decent fights, particularly when one has the services of a famous cinematic wrestling-figure. About the only item of interest here is that the female wrestler La Torcha (Sabrina Braden) made a non-speaking appearance in MUMMY, but here she's upgraded into something like a quasi-partner to Mil. Oh, and as in MUMMY, there's an attempt to sell Mil as more than a wrestler, but a bon vivant with extensive knowledge of physics and philosophy-- a depiction that actually plays into the plot of the following installment.  

LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION (2003)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               If there's one thing more depressing than the humorless abyss that was SPACE JAM, it's the fact that this seven-years-later sequel flopped, proving that JAM's success was entirely reliant on the presence of Michael Jordan (who even makes a "cameo" here courtesy of archive footage). ACTION by contrast depended totally on the charms of stars Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, a horde of animated walk-ons, and human support-players Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser. Not every joke in the quiver of director Joe Dante and writer Larry Doyle lands. But since SPACE JAM demonstrated the total lack of funny bones in its producers, ACTION's failure just shows that the Warner Brothers cartoon characters weren't capable of carrying a theatrical film for modern audiences.                                   

To be sure, the project had gone through a lot of false starts, including an idea wherein the toons shared billing with Jackie Chan in a spy-comedy, while Dante testified as to a lot of studio interference as to what sort of jokes he was allowed to do. The idea they went with suggests some inspiration from the 1990s TINY TOONS show, in that Bugs, Daffy and many if not all their toon brethren work as actors under contract to Warner Brothers Studio-- though in this world a number of the toons also work in other human-dominated venues, like Yosemite Sam running a casino.  Though Bugs and Daffy are both making movies together, studio executive Kate (Elfman) deems Daffy unnecessary and fires him. She orders security guard DJ (Fraser) to kick the duck off the lot, and when he goofs up the assignment, she fires him too.                                                   

  However, once Daffy's gone, Bugs wants him back, and the studio executives reverse their agreement with Kate, threatening to fire her if she doesn't bring back the duck. Meanwhile, Daffy's made himself the house guest of DJ. Then DJ gets an urgent message from his father, actor Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton), who is famous for playing a superspy in the movies-- but who suddenly reveals that for years he Damian has really been an operative of some spy-agency or other. DJ, seeking to save his dad's life from the evil Acme Corporation, headed by Mister Chairman (a hideously unfunny Steve Martin). Daffy tags along on DJ's mission, and Bugs tags along with Kate as she goes looking for Daffy, so that all four of them get pulled into assorted spyjinks.                                                 

           

As I said, there are a lot of jokes that aren't especially good, but some of this may be due to the long shadow that the best work of Termite Terrace casts over all subsequent animation. I like the fact that many of the "villains" of the shorts-- Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Wile E Coyote-- work for Acme, and this conceit leads to the fllm's best idea: having Bugs and Daffy visit a museum, where shotgun-wielding Elmer promptly chases them into famous paintings, allowing the toons to experience surrealism and pointillism. In a separate scene, the toons and their "humes" find their way to "Area 52," where the government keeps such alien boogeymen of eras past as the Metalunan Mutant, the Robot Monster, and the Man from Planet X. Dante even works in DOCTOR WHO's Daleks, which probably makes this the first crossover between the Warners' toons and the Who-niverse.                                       

Dante also made sure to work in a lot of guest cameos, some of which last mere moments, like Mister Chairman's board-members, including such familiar faces as Ron Perlman, Mary Woronow, and Vernon Wells. The most impactful short-shot guest-bit is also the movie's only claim to the "fighting femmes" category, in that Heather Locklear shows up as a lady spy who beats up toon-villains Cottontail Smith and Nasty Canasta.  

HUMANOID DEFENDER (1985)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                        This flop pilot for a TV show may be better known by the title JOE AND THE COLONEL, but I've chosen the VHS title of HUMANOID DEFENDER. The well-trained clone soldier Joe (played by Gary Kasper, and whose technical name is J.O.E., though I forget the acronym's meaning) is definitely the star of the show. But the support-character of "The Colonel," played by William Lucking, definitely does not deserve co-billing.                                      

I concur with this review that the TV-movie feels as if writer Nicholas Corea-- who worked exclusively on TV shows and TV movies-- tossed almost every idea he had for an ongoing series into the mix for this hour-and-a-half pilot. This does give DEFENDER a minor distinction for sheer incoherence, though there's nothing especially amusing about the chaos. First, we see the full-grown clone being trained in a government facility by his "three parents," whom I *think* may also have contributed genetic material to his creation-- which if true would make him more like a DNA version of Frankenstein than a clone. Then the "mother" of the trio, Lena (Gail Edwards) is said to have died suddenly. The military's liaison, The Colonel, blows it off, but the third "parent," Doctor Rourke (Terence Knox) thinks Kai's death is part of a conspiracy to shut down the JOE project. There's also been an incident in which Joe, despite being massively trained as a super-soldier, refuses to kill an animal when ordered to do so. So Rourke spirits Joe away.                           

 So far, so average for a derivative spy-story. But DEFENDER goes completely off the rails because Corea sought to set up a rationale for Joe as an action-hero. Joe and Rourke hide themselves in some suburban dwelling, where one assumes they're going to keep their heads down and live a mundane life. But no, somehow Rourke works things out so that Joe can still take on missions to help people, like liberating a kidnap victim from terrorists. Not a word is said about how such activities could call the military's attention to their existence and location. Then there's a plot about an unthinking Joe-clone that gets loose and creates very minor chaos before Joe takes the creature out with very minor action. Then, surprise, Lena is alive again. And then Rourke's out of the picture and the Colonel's a good guy after all, since he becomes Joe's new handler for whatever adventures are down the road. None of the actors, good or bad, can do anything with this sloppy tripe. I think Gary Kaspar tried hard to make his sketchy character charming, but I have a theory that even if had DEFENDER become a regular show, it would probably have flopped, and thus Kaspar probably would not have had any more lasting success as an actor than he did in real-time.        

ALIEN RISING (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                                Once again I find myself launching a mild defense of a low-budget film that's been bagged on, way out of proportion to its faults. Director Dana Schroeder and his two writers (one of whom was Michael Todd, star of ROBOT NINJA) didn't produce any sort of sci-fi sleeper. But there's a smooth progression of incidents and some half-decent fight-scenes, even if the plot doesn't always make perfect sense.                                                                                             

  So I'll unfold the plot as it's supposed to occur in the actual story, not the protagonist's fragmented discovery of it. At some past era, an alien craft with two ETs-- one small, one big--crashlands on Earth. The military prompted hides the first contact in a secret facility. Apparently the boffins' research shows that the small alien wields some sort of mental control over the big, powerful one, and the theory is advanced that the small one created the big one as a proxy with which to explore other planets. The head of the operation, Colonel Cencula (Lance Henriksen) separates the two ETs to test their level of contact, sending the big one to another laboratory. For some reason the head scientist gets the idea that they might better communicate with the alien and its "twin" with the use of a human twin that demonstrated psychic connection with her human twin. The military finds a female twin named Amy in prison, remands her, and uses her in a communication experiment. Amy dies somehow, and maybe it's the fault of Cencula-- because hey, how often does Lance Henriksen play a good guy?                                                           

   So Cencula sends his agents out to collect the other twin, whether she likes it or not. Lisa Morgan (Amy Hathaway), long estranged from her prison-bait sister, became a kick-ass homeland security agent. In a botched operation, Lisa's partner Manning (played by the sixty-something John Savage) gets killed, and because Lisa had enjoyed an affair with Manning, she quits her job. But Cencula's men abduct Lisa to their isolated facility and induct her into the government's alien-inquiry program. There, Cencula doles out just enough info to keep Lisa intrigued-- her sister's involvement, the possibility that Lisa possesses the same psychic powers as the late sister. Oh, would you believe that Cencula was far-sighted enough that he also spirited away Manning before he died, faked his death, and inducted him into the project because the colonel thought Manning would prove useful? Nah, and I didn't believe it either.                           

In fact, if anything Manning just further indicates to Lisa that Cencula's dealing from the bottom of the deck. Manning wants to get with Lisa again, but she finds love with Plummer (Brian Krause), an agent closer to her own age. (Both Krause and Hathaway were in their forties at the time RISING was made, though appearance-wise both were able to skew younger in 2013.)  Lisa also participates in the head scientist's experiments with the small alien, and I guess she provides the research guys with some extra data, though no one actually says so. But Cencula has some involved plans to make money off the ETs, and soon Lisa has to play one-woman army against the colonel, her former lover, and the troops-- though she gets some last-minute help from the Big CGI Alien.                                                                     

Director Shroeder is no Orson Welles, but he tells the formula story passably well in terms of visuals. I saw a number of critiques of Hathaway both as an actress and as a performer of movie-fights. There's not that much in the Lisa character that proves Hathaway's thespian abilities either way, but I thought she looked okay punching and kicking in the fight-scenes. I agree that sometimes the heroine would hit a full-grown man and that he'd fold too easily, and that her male opponents rarely managed to hit Lisa with a really strong blow. But those could be the fault of hasty, low-budget fight-coordination, and I've certainly seen a lot of actresses who were much less convincing as tough-girl heroines.                                                     

MORBIUS (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                          Maybe I would have hated MORBIUS as much as many "morbin' meme-sters" did had I seen the movie in a theater, where I had to pay for it. It is, I must admit, a pretty ordinary take on the Marvel character, who was never much more than your average "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Vamp" type of figure, full of existential agony every time he exsanguinated a hapless victim. But having seen the film for free, I can think of a lot of movies that deserve a lot more antipathy.                                                                                                     

The year before Sony Pictures released MORBIUS in April 2022, they'd had success both in collaborating with Marvel Films on two profitable SPIDER-MAN films, and had also done reasonably well with its October 2021 sequel to the new franchise Sony had built around former Spider-Man villain Venom. There was no good reason to think the company couldn't build a solid franchise around Michael Morbius, a scientist who accidentally infected himself with "scientific vampirism." All the producers had to do was repeat the Venom formula: eliding the movie-version's connections to the comic-book source-material-- Morbius's costume and his relationship to Spider-Man. It's possible, though, that MORBIUS got hurt by some of the public's disenchantment with superheroes when the MCU launched "Phase Four" in 2021. In contrast to 2019, which finished up with AVENGERS ENDGAME and the second Sony-MCU collab on Spider-Man, post-pandemic MCU released four 2021's films prior to MORBIUS's April release. These were BLACK WIDOW, SHANG-CHI, ETERNALS, and the third Sony-MCU SPIDER-MAN movie. The SPIDER-MAN film was the only major box-office success, while the "mainstream" MCU movies at best made some money beyond their principal budgets, but didn't prove all that exciting to the public. I think it probable that MORBIUS got caught up in the public's disappointment with uninspired flicks like SHANG-CHI in particular-- though even SHANG-CHI and MORBIUS look good next to a couple of the eyesores of the last half of 2022.                                                                                                    

So, back to MORBIUS's plot, which, as I specified, is pretty ordinary, but in an inoffensive way. Since childhood Michael Morbius suffers from a genetic blood disorder that forces him to walk with crutches, and while at a rehab center he meets another kid similarly afflicted, Lucien, whom for unknown reasons Michael nicknames "Milo." Michael saves Milo from a crisis, and the two bond into adulthood, where they're respectively played by Jared Leto and Matt Smith. Milo's character remains sketchy, though he's apparently both rich and crooked in some mysterious way. Michael, however, distinguishes himself with his innovative research into the disease from which he and Milo suffer-- the broad implication being that friendship with Milo has caused Michael to become altruistic, wanting to cure Milo as much as himself. Michael's research is funded by Milo and aided by fellow doctor Martine (Adria Arjona), who inevitably serves as Michael's romantic interest. Michael decides that a cure for the disease can be found by combining human DNA with that of vampire bats, and naturally the desperate scientist tests his formula on himself. Like dozens upon dozens of scientific overreachers, Michael becomes a monster: a vampiric powerhouse, but only as the result of feeding on human blood. But though Michael does contend with law-enforcement agents investigating his transgressions, his major foe turns out to be his best friend, who wants to possess the power of a vampire, no matter who gets hurt.                       

It's a shame the writers didn't provide Michael and Milo with more than these very schematic characterizations, because Leto and Smith are very talented performers and could have handled much more complex emotions, and Leto in particular looks good in vamp-face. There are some big action-scenes that emphasize some "morphing" effects akin to those in the VENOM franchise. While the fight-scenes aren't as bad as the ones in those late-2021 releases I mentioned-- i.e., the second BLACK PANTHER and the fourth THOR-- I imagine the familiar look of the action didn't do MORBIUS any favors. A mid-credits sequence tosses in another villain from the SPIDER-MAN movie universe, Michael Keaton's "Vulture," but whatever future plot-action this would have set up was doomed by the film's perceived failure. Again, I'm not saying that MORBIUS was anything special. But it also didn't deserve the "special" level of animosity it inspired.