Howard and I have indulged in what I’ll call “retro-sci-fi” movies over the last week. We watched Soylent Green and then Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.
As a movie Soylent Green was bad. 90% of the movie was watching actors appreciate things which we take for granted, like soap and water. The concept of the movie could have been done better in a 30 minute twilight zone episode. What I found fascinating was what the movie told me about societal values in the 70’s when the movie was made. It was obvious that the civil rights movements of the 60s had taken hold. The hero was Charleton Heston (a white man), the slimy villains were white, every other male character with a speaking part was black. The women in the movie came in two categories “destitute extra” and “furniture”. And by “furniture” the movie meant just that. You rent a furnished apartment it comes complete with a beautiful girl as part of the furniture. (Apparently women never rent their own apartments.) There were about a dozen of these women who simply were there to provide the camera with anatomy to focus on. Only two of the women had speaking parts and all of the lines were either flirting with men-in-power or screaming because the men hit them. Had the movie been made recently it would have offended everyone. It makes me wonder what modern movies are going to tell people thirty years from now about our values.
Sky Captain was beautiful. I enjoyed watching it with Howard in our own home where I was free to make fun of the ridiculous stuff in it. Some serious scenes made me laugh out loud, supposed-to-be-funny scenes fell flat. We declined to watch any deleted scenes because I decided that I didn’t want to watch anything that had been removed from the film on purpose. And the supposed love interest between the two main characters? Completely disfunctional. It’s a movie to watch with a group of friends for an MST 3K party. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I don’t think I’ll watch it again.
I remember watching Soylent Green as a kid and being deeply disturbed by it, so I told my mom and she told me that she had been pregnant with me and she was so afraid that I was never going to be able to taste fresh strawberries. I’m glad I never saw that while I was pregnant, but I remember watching the coverage of Columbine and thinking I can’t be bringing a child into this world. Strange associations I know. My brain is still trying to get over being sick. Oh well.
That’s interesting. Soylent Green did not disturb me at all because the “future” portrayed was so absurd. But the reason it is absurd is because so many technological advances have occured to make it so.
I thought the relationship between the two main characters was dreadful. By the end of the movie, I didn’t like either one of them.
As I was typing this, my boyfriend just said “The best thing in the movie was in there for entirely too short a time” — and he meant the other thing I was going to mention in this comment: Frankie. If they make a sequel in this setting, I hope they ditch both the sky captain and Polly, and star Frankie instead. Now that character came off as more interesting and competent than anyone else in the film.
i soooo miss MST3K it was never the same after joel stopped being the main charecter (replaced by..mike? whoever…)
Yeah, Frankie was definitely the best part of that film.
My wife and I both fell flat for the two main characters when they… wait for it… left the tiny elephant behind in the lab to starve, the bastiches…