Of all the possible works by SF Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein to adapt into a film this would have been near the bottom of my list. Not due to the quality of the story, it is a classic in time travel and it’s inherent paradoxes, but the mind-blowing inside-out nature of the plot is not something that lends itself to a film…
I had an amount of curiosity concerning this film when it was released. As a child I had watched the American-ized version of the television show and been entertained by the impossible antics of Speed and his racing family. My interest and fond memories people were not enough lure back into the theater for this baby-boomer bit of nostalgia. I had 
seen far too many properties from the baby-boom picked up and turned into utter dreck by producers, writers, and directors who had absolutely no respect for the original source material. So Speed Racer waited until I got around to it on Netflix, because that is one thing the service is great for, taking risky experimental leaps in your cinema viewing.
The Wachowskis; the sibling duo responsible for The Matrix franchise and the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, directed the film. Speed Racer displays all the visual style and experimentation one should expect from the Wachowskis. The story is simple, Speed and his family are a small independent racing team and motor car company. (Pops, play by John Goodman, builds the race cars in his home garage.) Speed’s older brother has been disgraced and killed in an earlier off road race. Speeds own inherent talent has brought him to the attention of a major motor-company mogul Royalton, played with villainous flair that seemed to strike a resonate cord reminiscent of the acerbic Christopher Hitchens by Roger Allam. Royalton tries to seduce Speed into signing on a corporate racer, and when rebuffed turns his energies to destroyed Speed and the Racer family.
If you have watched the 60’s animated show you know that the program constantly dealt in absurd impossibilities, cars that leap great distanced thanks to powered jacks, fantastic weaponry, amazing capable pet chimps, and so on. Adapting this sort of material into a film usually calls for eliminating as much as possible these cue that are acceptable in animation, but shattering to suspension of disbelief in photography; this was not the approach the Wochowskis employed. Rather they embraced the animated style, integrating into it the live-action performers, mixing CGI that had been rendered to reflect the style of animation and not photo-realism, while layering in the actors as real people. (Even Chim-Chim the chimp is real not a CGI character.) The final product is both mad-cap over the top, and layered with character moments and performances.
The film disappointed at the box officer and I think the stylistic approach is the final culprit. The animation elements, I believe in form the viewer the accept one level of reality and the live-action performances ask the viewer to accept quite a different level of reality. The dichotomy of these two very different expectations creates a jarring effect that is quite deleterious to suspension of disbelief.
That said, if you can find a way to let your mind work on the two levels simultaneously, the film has surprisingly entertaining moments. It was clearly crafted with an eye towards the source material. From my memory the Wochowskis nailed every major plot and character element of the show, while adding a level of story that the television program never explored. It was a bold, brash experiment that failed, but I salute them as artists for their vision and the risk taking. They could have made a bland cookie-cutter film, but instead that took real risks and that should be rewarded.
There has been a rather lengthy hiatus in this series as I dove into edits of my novel and composing a new short story, but I have returned to the topic, coming around to perhaps the most important decade in SF cinema except for the 1950’s.
First up I’ll discuss the moon-sized shadow eclipsing all SF films of the 70’s and later;
Star Wars (1977)
I think it is difficult for people who came of age later to appreciate just how monumental Star Wars was in the history of cinema. It is part of the triumvirate that created the block-buster phenomena that Hollywood continues to chase to this very day. (The other two films being JAWS and THE GODFATHER.) Science-Fiction simply had never been as big as Star Wars before and that sort of success casts a might long shadow.
Looking at SF films of the 70’s everything before Star Wars gets lost in the uproar of that space fantasy and everything after it is compared to it. While Hollywood had been moving in fits and starts towards adult science-fiction in the 1970’s with film such as The Omega Man, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan’s Run, the arrival of Lucas’ baby shunted all that aside for a generation as the studios chased after the next massive box-officer adventure.
However the influence of this movie reaches far beyond the pale imitations hurried into production and the senseless pursuit of massive runs, how we watch , hear, and make films changes because of George Lucas.
Today’s theaters packed with digital projectors, multi-channel sounds systems, and comfortable seating owe a great deal of their evolution to Lucas’ and his foresight and insistence on exhibition as well as film production. Behind the scenes, Lucas’ advanced the technology of film making more in the twenty years post Star Wars that in all the years following the introduction of synch-sound, Digital effects, digital processing, non-linear editing, these are tools that make todays production look vastly different to films short and edited traditionally. When you shoot a home video on your camera phone and edit it on your home computer you are participating Lucas’ revolution, it’s that massive.
Selecting a second film for the 1970’s is a very tough thing. Any film produced and released before Star Wars pretty much had any lasting impact erased by the tidal wave that is Star Wars, any film made after Star Wars nearly always is following and in some case just bolding stealing, from Lucas’ massive hit. Personally I came down to two post Star Wars films for my second choice; Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. Alien has been copied endlessly since it’s stellar release in 1979, but I think the broader impact it had was that in theatrical films it pretty much, singlehandedly, destroyed the professional explorer set-up. Before Alien interstellar travel was the domain of military and para-military experts, after Alien’s ‘truckers in space’ approach the professional explorer for all practical purposes vanished from feature films.
However I am going to go with
Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979)
After the success of Star Wars Paramount decided that the pilot that they had been planning for a new Star trek television series needed to be a feature film. The script wasn’t in great shape, and Roddenberry wasn’t an experience hand at feature film production. The $20 million dollar budget quickly vanished as the studio spent $40 million, the script was re-written as they filmed, and the production was troubled from the set to the special effects, but still the film was a hit, spawning a franchise of feature films that continue to this day, but I would argue that is not the lasting effect of Star trek: The Motion Picture.
The lasting effect came from the firing of Gene Roddenberry. Now out of the loop in the feature film department, he returned to his true love, television but this time with a Radical concept, a television show that would be sold directly to the stations, instead of a network, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The success of the show paved the way for a flood of directly syndicated programming, most of it genre, laying the ground work for the fertile and rich television landscape we have to day in SF and fantasy. I don’t think we would have any of this with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The mid-term elections are only a few weeks away and it looks as thought life might get interesting. Nate Silver, last I looked, was giving the Republicans about a 65% chance of taking control of the Senate. Given the sweep of governorships the Republican won during 2010, a critical redistricting election cycle, the baked in advantage from rural districts outnumbering urban ones, and the Democratic party’s base for not showing up on off-year elections, it looks all but certain that the Republicans will retain control of the House. I see no signs of a wave election, for either party, and if forced to guess I would hold that in November the Republicans will have control of the Legislative branch of the United States Government. I am not sold that this is going to work out all that well for the Republican Party in the long term. If they want to move legislation from bill into law they will have to pass bills that the President can sign. Right now, with the Democrats controlling the Senate, the Republicans have been having a responsibility free ride in their legislative actions. They can pass repeals of the ACA all they like, knowing perfectly well that the bills will die in the Senate, with the majority of American unaware of their existence. Once they control the Senate the landscape changes, but the internal dynamics of the Republican Party does not. The Tea Party base will brook no concessions, no compromises with President Obama, but to pass bills into law they will have to compromise. The Hassert rule, which is really more of a guideline but they adhere to it like it was the 11th Commandment, means nothing gets out of the House unless the Tea Party faction is happy with it. You cannot make them happy with compromises and you can’t violate the rule, leaving the Republicans in a position where their options are to pass nothing, or pick fights with the President, fights that they will lose. Why will they lose those public relations fights? Because it is easier for the White House to stay on message then it is far the vast number of Representative and Senators to do that same. Because the President will offer compromises, just as he already has on Social Security (offending his base) and the Republicans will be forced to publicly reject them. Because it it the Republican’s philosophy that government is the problem and when government is locked up in a partisan fight people tend to assume that the Republicans like it that way. If this goes on for two years, the Republican nominee will have a headwind he or she will not need. They may very become the Dog that caught the car and asked, now what?
[Update: apparently Silver’s latest projections have the Republican Take-over down to 53%. Interesting]
So John Scalzi, SF author, had a book event at Mysterious Galaxy last night, and even though I was suffering a sore throat my wife and I attended. It was funny, and fun, and well worth the time, however that’s not the point of my post.
Mysterious Galaxy is also the locale where my writers group meets, thank to the lovely hosting from the store. at the meets we take turns reading about 1500 words from out works and listening to feedback from the other members.
John read out about 1500 words of a new piece and i could not for the love of god shut down the critique parts of my brain. I did not say anything, I do have self-control no matter what some people may think, but my minds raced along making notes just as it would for anyone in my writing group.
‘hmm too many dialog tags’
‘it’s a little info dumpy in the middle that can probably be crunched down’
‘overall a good scene that clearly advances the plot, just needs a bit of tightening.’
I am sure the last thing he needs to hear is my opinion.
I am quite tardy in posting this essay, but I did finish the original franchise out as I had intended.
So after the racie war implications driving the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox, fearful that they had driven the kiddie away, took the next, and final, installment of franchise in a lighter and more optimistic direction. The screenwriter for the previous two sequel relinquished his duties, in part due to the dark nature of his proposed script and in part to ill health, while the husband wife team that penned the screenplay for The Omega Man came onto the scene.
In many ways this film is the most direct sequel of the entire franchise. Where Beneath the Planet of the Apes introduced a new astronaut the Ape Planet, nothing in the first film set up the silly concept of a rescue mission. Escape from the Planet of the Apes heavily violates continuity by introducing an unknown Ape genius “Milo” who is able to repair and launch Taylor’s crashed spacecraft. Conquest played buffet with elements put forth in Escape, picking and choosing what they wanted to tell a story with some of the same characters, and throwing away anything that didn’t fit. (retconning long before the term became standard in fandom.) That is not the approach with Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
Battle takes the situation and characters established Conquest and continues the story, playing mostly fair and extrapolating from the scenario already in motion. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, Battle for the planet of the Apes is the least ambitious, least transgressive, and least daring of the franchise. The budget was again cut, and the situation reduced to the most simplistic elements. A colony of apes, lead my Caesar from Conquest, is building an ape community with humans as second-class citizens, but not slaves or property, amid the ruins of a nuclear war. Racial animosity against the human divides the apes, while a colony of surviving humans, scarred by the constant exposure to radiation in the bombed out city, led by a brutal security man from Conquest, plots a war of ape extermination.
The too small budget hampered the production, reducing the screenplay to one rather lackluster battle and a few set locales. The film ends on a note of optimism, putting it in direction conflict with the tone of the series while implying that the events of the first film were no longer possible.
While the franchise limped on with a short lived and poorly conceived television series, this film represented the end of the series until the terrible attempt at a reboot with Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That failed and the franchise again went dead until the next film Rise of The Planet of the Apes, a success which in many ways was a rebooting of Conquest in that it told the story of how the planet got started on the path toward humanity’s fall and the rise of the apes.
This year saw the next film in the new franchise, Dawn of the Planet of The Apes, and in reality it is a rebooting of Battle, but done with real style, a real budget, and far better written. I will be interesting to see where this new franchise series goes.