The Metatemporal Detective, by Michael Moorcock

New York: Prometheus Books, 2007, pp. 370.

Michael Moorcock’s recent collection, The Metatemporal Detective, contains eleven stories centering on the adventures of Sir Seaton Begg, a crisp, clever, Sherlock Holmes-like English detective with a classic stiff upper lip who travels the moonbeam roads of the multiverse solving crimes, carrying on a long-running duel with his nemesis, the enigmatic Monsieur Zenith.

As readers familiar with Moorcock might guess, there is a lot more to these stories than this simple premise suggests. Once again Moorcock is writing in his Edwardian adventure story mode, with both Begg and his antagonist homages not to Holmes, but the stories of Sexton Blake, and his sometime opponent, the original Monsieur Zenith. (The Sexton Blake tales are relatively obscure today, the books no longer even in print, but those interested can learn more about them at "Blakiana," a web site devoted to the phenomenon which Moorcock himself recommends on his acknowledgements page and which includes, among other things, Moorcock's own thoughts on the character in his article "The Odyssey of Sexton Blake.")

Moreover, this is a story deeply rooted in Moorcock's multiverse, where the primal forces of Law and Chaos struggle against one another, and the precarious balance between the two is maintained only by the Knights of the Balance, like the various incarnations of the "Eternal Champion," the most famous of whom is very much present. The black sword-wielding Zenith, as the image of the pale, crimson-eyed gentleman on the book's cover hints, is none other than Elric of Melnibone.

As one might expect given Moorcock's rejection of simplistic notions of good and evil, and his insistence that Elric is not an anti-hero, but a hero, period, Elric does not precisely take a villainous turn here. While often on the wrong side of the Law that Begg is sworn to uphold--and certainly as capable of cold-blooded acts as ever--his adventures nonetheless have him acting not out of selfish personal gain, but his familiar role as rescuer, righteous avenger and servant of the balance. Additionally, his contest with Begg is an honorable one, played by rules they both recognize.

As a consequence, the tone in these pieces is rather lighter than in most of Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, which so often tended toward the brooding and the tragic, and they are quite effective in this mode. The individual stories in the collection are witty, intricately plotted without being confusing, and at the same time Moorcock never shies away from going over the top, the outstanding example of which is the "The Mystery of the Texas Twister," with its caricatures of well-known figures and wild climax. Additionally, even working within the Edwardian adventure mode they also manage to reflect Moorcock's trademark versatility, from the hard-boiled crime story "The Girl Who Killed Sylvia Blade" to the Western "The Ghost Warriors," the satirical spy caper in "Twister" to the Parisian-set police procedural of "The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers," which helps to keep them from being repetitive, and the worlds across which Begg pursues Zenith have an interest of their own.

As is commonly the case, particularly in the Pyat Quartet, Moorcock's settings come alive, urban ones especially, and the element of alternate history, which Moorcock earlier used to good effect in the Oswald Bastable tales, is compelling because of the uniqueness of his approach. Instead of fictionalizing plausible counterfactuals, or nightmares which make history as it turned out seem like a relief for all of its horrors, his main use of it is the visualization of alternative paths that may have had more rather than less attractive outcomes--which as he demonstrates is not a barrier to interesting and at times extravagant world-building. In most of the worlds Begg visits it is not a dwindling supply of oil but electricity which powers cars, as we can only wish was the case today; and instead of squeezing aboard crowded, paranoid passenger planes, long-distance travelers enjoy the amenities of a more gracious age on airships. The neoconservatives are not only confined to the rogue state of Texas, but find their war-making schemes thwarted and their reign cut short. (Moorcock's political sympathies are not one of the book's mysteries.) Adolf Hitler, who so often triumphs in genre stories that Gavriel D. Rosenfeld recently devoted a book-length study to them, 2005's The World Hitler Never Made, is here checked long before his regime wreaks anything like the damage it did in our world. While this sometimes has Moorcock going over ground familiar from his other works, sometimes later ones which treated the subject in greater depth (as in "The Case of the Nazi Canary," which deals with some of the same history as the Pyat novel The Vengeance of Rome), the distinctiveness of this series keeps his handling of them fresh.

The collection was also put together with an eye to making it more than the sum of its parts. As with the fifteen-volume reissue of much of Moorcock's earlier writing under the Eternal Champion heading in the 1990s, Detective retroactively puts these disparate series into a more or less linear sequence, and there is some unevenness. A few are only tenuously connected to the Begg-Zenith duel, particularly the oldest pieces, 1966’s "Sylvia Blade" and "The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius" (one reason why in some editions the stories have been revised retroactively to make them a closer fit). The same goes for "Sir Milk-and-Blood," which is basically a piece of supernatural horror in which Bad People get their comeuppance from something far scarier than themselves. Nonetheless the first story in the set, "The Affair of the Seven Virgins," is a fitting start to the saga, which develops through most of the stories that follow, particularly the last two pieces, "Les Hivers" and "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera." While "Les Hivers" vaults over quite a bit of narrative territory I would have preferred to see more thoroughly fleshed out here, it succeeds in advancing the relationship between Begg and Zenith, and in deepening the world they both inhabit. "Flaneur," which here appears for the very first time, is ambitious and grandly imagined, bringing together other threads from the Elric and Von Bek sequences, and makes for a very satisfying close to the volume.

Moorcock's polished, lucid storytelling makes these pieces accessible and enjoyable for newcomers, but as the elaborate background to them suggests, they will not get quite all of the layers and nuances to them. It is mainly longtime readers of the author's works who will appreciate the dizzying interconnections, the crossovers and the in-jokes that form a significant part of this series' full entertainment value, here even more so than in most of Moorcock's fiction. (The Von Bek family mythos Moorcock established in The War Hound and the World's Pain is not much less important than Elric's own sprawling saga to the stories in Detective, which is as good an argument as any for a comprehensive, thorough and up-to-date encyclopedia of Michael Moorcock's writing.) Old fans will likely find themselves going back to earlier works, while new readers may find their curiosity sufficiently piqued to look up his earlier books-and lose themselves on the moonbeam roads of the multiverse.

Warehouse 13: A Reaction

I've seen SyFy's Warehouse 13, and had some time to think about it.

At first I was hesitant, all the more so because of the initial description of the concept: Indiana Jones meets Moonlighting.

I was fine with the first half of that in theory, skeptical about the realization-but distinctly discouraged by the second, since while I remember that something called Moonlighting existed, I have only very fuzzy memories of it, and the distinct impression that it is a show in which the writing essentially consists of two idiots annoying each other.

Usually, I'm the one who ends up getting annoyed by character dynamics of that sort.

Fortunately, the core characters showed some signs that they won't be nearly so annoying as that, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it included Joanne Kelly, who I remembered from Jeremiah (2002-2004), back when Showtime was into this sort of thing (an underappreciated show, season 2 of which is not even available on DVD). Parts of the pilot were frankly better-written than I expected. And at this point, anything that isn't a reality show (such as those which have been cluttering up the channel's prime time schedule as of late) is something of a relief. However, as many a hardcore fan of science fiction television suspected, it is very far from being the sort of show that breaks new ground. Instead think of it as a twist on Eureka, a very lightweight cop/investigative show with one big gimmick (tending toward the generic) as the central plot point in each episode. It's the kind of SFTV that people who don't much care for SFTV can enjoy, and for those who are more deeply into this stuff, and frankly more demanding, it is still watchable, though far from being a must-see.

Personally, I don't have a problem with SyFy airing "grounded" series as such, something it has long been doing, as with The Invisible Man (2000-2002) or The Chronicle (2001-2002). The difference is that back then such shows were clearly part of a richer variety of programming, existing alongside material for a more hardcore audience, like Farscape or Lexx. Of course, there will still be Stargate: Universe, and Caprica, and Sanctuary (which showed some promise by the end of season 1), but there is no denying that the prospect of pleasant surprises is weaker than it once was in a line-up clattered with the cheap, annoying reality TV (Scare Tactics, Ghost Hunters, etc.) that the channel's marketing people push shamelessly and relentlessly. They've gone so far as to include a "complimentary" episode of Ghost Hunters on the Caprica DVD, which strikes me as only too indicative of things to come.

New in Strange Horizons (Statistical Study of the Book Market, Dinocivilization)
7/13/09

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Memoir, by Toby Young

Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003, pp. 368.

As those of you who know anything about me might guess, I am an unlikely reader of this sort of book, which I guess is why I had never heard of the book until after seeing the movie.

I don't remember ever picking up an issue of Vanity Fair, even while sitting in a doctor's office, even in that period when I read Variety religiously (thinking I would find some key to the film business in its pages, as of course I didn't); was in fact somewhat confused by Christopher Hitchens' association with the magazine given that he mostly seemed to write about political stuff (if you don't know him, you could do worse than read Alexander Cockburn's take on the man, as well as Hitchens' comeback if you'd like to see his defense, here); and had never even heard of Graydon Carter until after I found out that the movie was based on a true story.*

Indeed, I've never been much for celebrity gossip of this sort. When I saw O.J. Simpson's white Bronco on TV, the first thing that occurred to me, even at that comparatively tender age, was that we would never hear the end of it, and how sick I already was of hearing about it.

Yet, I enjoyed the book.

Granted, apart from being surprised that a few of the incidents from the film were based on things real people were alleged to have said and done (the "seven rooms" speech about which I wrote before included, this apparently having been put into the film almost word for word), the gossip that was probably the book's main selling point business-wise (and likely, for many another reader too) was ho-hum for me.

But Young makes an engaging (and highly quotable) narrator, and his relation of his adventures is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This is, in part, because he captures quite well a certain position that I think a great many of us not nearly so famous can identify with: of having a bit (or more than a bit) of education and culture and intellectual substance but being drawn to some (or more than some) lowbrow things; of being intensely attracted to that world of fame and riches and status and privilege and celebrity and all the things that go with it when you know very well that you are "supposed" to regard it sardonically as something trivial and beneath you; of feeling like you have your nose pressed up to the glass, especially in a moment of youthful frustration, and thinking that maybe, just maybe you will be able to join the party, but never getting in.

There is a great deal more of interest, not least of it the sociology, specifically the Briton-in-America stuff (and how Britain looks from over here; we too rarely get this sort of thing right in America, as I was reminded while watching my first and last episode of Bones, the execrably written "Yanks in the U.K."); his observations about the sycophantic timidity and outright cowardice of so much American journalism; and especially his thoughts on social class and wealth in these respective countries. He is not often original, but sharp nonetheless.

The distance between Toby and parents who were not merely respected intellectuals but a father whose work in the Labor Party qualifies him to be called "one of the architects of Britain's post-war consensus," also founded "dozens of organizations enriching the lives of tens of millions of people, from the East End of London to the Horn of Africa," and as if all that was not enough, happens to be a "minor immortal" in the world of sociology for his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy; and a like-minded mother prominent in her own right as editor, television producer, novelist, educator and activist; is also of interest - especially because his feelings about it are so contrary to the zeitgeist of these times, as seen from where I'm sitting now, this one a

generation of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world.

There is also an element of interest in this book's being a study of failure (not total, not irredeemable, of course, indeed partially redeemed before the last page, but failure all the same). We all too often underestimate failure's interest, which when presented honestly is really greater than the interest of your average account of success. Winners, after all, are not pressed to take a hard look at themselves, or think much about the reality of the world around them. (The worst of them wallow in their exaggerated idea of their own worth - as indeed, many of the insufferable figures in Young's story do - a luxury failures don't have.)

Besides, failures have the virtue of not being invested in the system they're talking about, or grateful to it, and free to burn the bridges they were unable to successfully cross in giving the facts and telling the truth, especially when the truths are of the sort the relevant Establishment would prefer went unspoken (as quite a few of the truths in this book are). This is a story of a man for whom America was not the land of opportunity, but the "land of the unreturned phone call," a reality not just for the newcomer, but many an American as well; of the man who failed to take Manhattan, who tried to make it in that place where if you could make it there you could presumably make it anywhere, and didn't make it.

Of course, this is probably starting to sound unfamiliar to those of you who saw the film but never read the book (there may not be many of you, to judge by the box office receipts - the global gross being $17 million, and the movie's North American take actually less than that of Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne when inflation is factored in - but then I was one until this week), and there's a reason for that: most of the best stuff is left out of the movie.

This was all too predictable, of course, given the changes one should have seen coming from a long way off, like the filmmakers' changing many of the characters' names to protect the not-so-innocent; downplaying the essential crassness of the hero's motivation by adding a touch of tragedy to his childhood (as well as sanitizing the character with regard to his alcoholism, drug use and womanizing, the last more often attempted than successful); turning his romance with Caroline Bondy into a clichéd tale of giving up on the glamorous but manipulative, self-centered starlet who captured his fantasies, in favor of the smarter, nicer office girl who for much of the film is the only one willing even to talk to him (and true to romantic comedy convention, spends much of the film giving our hero grief for simply having a male id); marginalizing the themes of politics and class, not least through the change of his parents' occupations and accomplishments (dad's "a philosopher," mom's an actress); and last but not least, having the younger Young learn What Really Matters in Life when he is in room seven, instead of after he's been kicked back out into the street from room one. The film was advertised as a "testosterone-laced The Devil Wears Prada," and while I have only seen bits of the latter film while flipping channels (so that I am in no position to make a proper comparison), it strikes me that turning Young's memoir into that entails not merely the usual compression, combination, exaggeration and sanitization, but an outright reimagining.

* Incidentally, a remark by Christopher Hitchens (in a review of Zachary Leader's bio of Kingsley Amis for The Atlantic, brought to my attention by David Langford's Ansible via the pages of Interzone) inspired this little piece of mine a couple of years ago in Tangent Online.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (A Meditation)

While not as funny as other Simon Pegg comedies like Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and certainly no stand-out for originality of concept, surprising plot twists or satirical teeth (everyone who's ever come into contact with this kind of material can probably tell from early on how it's going to end up, the targets are easy, and I imagine I'm not the only one who thinks we've got too much media about media as it is), How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was more enjoyable than I expected, and actually contained some surprisingly good bits.

One of these is the scene in which Jeff Bridges' character, magazine editor and "linchpin of the media-industrial complex" Clayton Harding, launches into an extended metaphor about "seven rooms," explaining to our protagonist Sidney Young (Pegg) that while he thinks he may have arrived, he's "only in the first room." Now,

"in about a year, maybe longer, you will discover a secret doorway in the back of the first room that leads to the second, and in time if you're lucky you'll discover another doorway in the back of the second room that leads to the third. There are seven rooms altogether."

It is, of course, part of a rather unsubtle dominance display in which Harding reminds Young of their respective places in this particular hierarchy ("You're in the first [room]. I'm in the seventh. Don't you forget it."), but it's also much more than that, a truth that we're generally inclined to avoid: that instead of a straightforward meritocracy, and ladders ascended with talent and the "hard work" that is the subject of many a sanctimonious lecture, making one's way through the world means navigating the uncharted and unchartable paths to which those hidden doors open. (That's what all the talk about "networking" comes to, for instance, upping the odds that you'll find your way to one of those doors.) The truth is that even when you are doing everything right, there's no guarantee that you'll find the door-or even that there is one of those secret doors in the particular room you've found your way into. Far from it, you can get old without getting out.

This necessarily means a much more worried life for anyone pursuing any particular ambition, and while this goes for people in any and every career path (especially in an age of economic strain, especially when one doesn't have someone already inside positioned to open some of those doors for them), it seems to me an especially troubling point for those who want to be writers in the "author of fiction" sense of the word: because there are so many jockeying for a very few slots (book deals that will let them live from their writing); because the career track is necessarily so ambiguous (it's not like becoming a lawyer or doctor, for instance); because it is so damnably difficult to correlate performance with success (there always being plenty of atrocious books on the bestseller lists, plenty of careers dragging long past their productive periods, and hype muddling everything); because every conversation writers enter into that gets beyond the face of sunny optimism complacent insiders present to anxious outsiders betrays just how much those who are not in the "seventh room" or close to it are stuck going by rumor and speculation. The how-to industry sells the idea that you just write the book (or maybe just the proposal), send out the query letter and . . . well, they don't usually say much about what happens between then and the deal (and what makes the difference between the rejection letter and the acceptance), which for most of us is probably not just a gap, but the gap.

It all comes down to those doorways, doorways you might not always be cognizant of facing or going through given how much of the decisionmaking happens out of the writer's sight and mind (and maddeningly, outside their control), and while the people in room seven can afford to be easygoing about it, those desperate to even get into room one can only worry that they never will.

Racing Down the Information Superhighway: Computers in 1990s Film

By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the THE INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, February 2009

Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.

When President Barack Obama recently pledged to "renew our Information Superhighway," it struck me that I hadn't heard that phrase in a long time. Indeed, this wording, which was supposed to evoke the futuristic, instead has acquired the exact opposite quality. It's retro, recalling 1990s-era thinking about computing and computers—and among other things, their depictions in pop culture. In particular, I think of the decade's outpouring of computer-themed films.

Of course, Hollywood had sporadically made computer-themed films before, like 1957's Desk Set or 1977's Demon Seed. Quite a few are clustered in the early 1980s, shortly after the introduction of the personal computer, like best screenplay Oscar nominee WarGames (1983), the early cyber-romance Electric Dreams (1984), and the John Hughes comedy Weird Science (1985). The related interest in household robotics in that decade (which proved to be just a flash in the pan) also turned up in the background in quite a few films and shows, like the TV series Silver Spoons (1982-1987) and Rocky IV (1985)—though these generally took a backseat to more dramatic mergers of robotics and AI, as in The Terminator (1984) and Short Circuit (1986).

Nonetheless, the theme would be far more prominent in the films of the 1990s, and this was no accident. It was the falling price of computing power, and the widened availability of Internet access, which turned the personal computer from an expensive toy, status symbol, or at best, occasionally useful luxury, into a consumer essential at that time (at least, for the industrialized world's "middle classes," though access also increased outside this group). And of course, there was the "tech boom" surrounding it, the idea that this was the one sector of the economy that really mattered, and that it was truly exploding. (1)

Put another way, this was a time when computers were both ubiquitous enough for unprecedented numbers of people to be in conscious, direct contact with them—and at the same time, new and novel enough for the fact to be topical. While only a comparative few of them were significant successes, and these outnumbered by mediocre and commercially disappointing films, even the flops make for interesting time capsules, and several of them would go on to be surprisingly influential, both via cult followings, and the inspiration they would provide other, more successful creations.

Hackers as Heroes
Just as computers became more commonplace in the popular consciousness (its cinematic component included), so did the sorts of people associated with them, and in particular, hackers. By the mid-1990s there had already been a handful of films featuring hacker heroes, like the aforementioned WarGames, but they became increasingly common as the 1990s progressed. The caper film Sneakers was slightly ahead of the curve in 1992, the deluge really hitting around the middle of the decade. (2) Sandra Bullock followed up her success in 1994's Speed with The Net the next summer, in which she played a software analyst who finds herself caught up in an elaborate computer infiltration scheme. The film was a middling performer at the box office, but spin-offs followed nonetheless, including a television series that lasted for one season (1998-1999), and more recently, a straight-to-video sequel, 2006's The Net 2.0.

That was more than could be said for Hackers, which centered on a number of young hackers who end up finding out about (and forced to combat) an oil company's cyber-security chief attempting to bilk his employers out of millions (in part, with a plot extorting a ransom in exchange for not staging multiple oil spills using a computer virus). Released the following autumn, it is remembered (by those outside its cult following) more for its cast than anything else, which included a very young Angelina Jolie in her first starring role in a major feature film (she'd already starred in the 1993 cyberpunk B-movie Cyborg 2), Jonny Lee Miller (who would be made famous by Trainspotting the next year), and the ever-obnoxious Matthew Lillard.

This turn naturally presented filmmakers with the challenge of somehow conveying the experience of hacking besides pointing the camera at a sweaty face staring into a screen, a pair of hands pounding away at a keyboard (which manages to both be uninteresting to look at, and explain almost nothing about what they're really doing). (3) Appropriate visual metaphors were hard to come by, however, as the considerable and much-argued-over efforts in Hackers demonstrated. And of course, for sheer spectacle and visceral excitement, computer battles come nowhere close to more traditional hand-to-hand combat, shootouts, car chases and explosions, so that computers were most interesting when creating big effects outside cyberspace. (4)

Not surprisingly, a more successful approach than centering a whole film on hackers and hacking was the inclusion of those elements in a broader plot. In its updating of the Bond series, 1995's Goldeneye, besides offering a host of unmistakably early post-Cold War tropes (Russian mobsters, loose Soviet nukes, leftover Cold War vendettas), prominently featured a pair of dueling computer programmers, Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) and Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco). (5) And in Independence Day the next summer Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson took out the alien mothership with a computer virus in a twist on the denouement of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Of course, this did not prove to be the last time a computer programmer had the fate of the world in their hands.

The Neon-Lit Alley Up Ahead: Cyberpunk on Screen
The future envisioned in cyberpunk was commonly viewed as a reaction to many of the economic and political developments of the 1980s: American industrial decline relative to Europe and Asia, the intensification of global economic integration, the "privatization" of economic life and the unshackling of corporate power that went with it, a greater polarization between the rich and poor. Putting it that way, of course, makes it seem rather dated, but sure enough, these far outlasted the decade. If anything, in the '90s it enjoyed greater force as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc (opening a large part of the world more completely to those same forces), and the economic stagnation of Japan (and the fad for neo-mercantilism that its rise had encouraged). "Globalization," no longer hindered by the division of the world into rival ideological blocs, or petty, predatory economic nationalisms, was now the watchword.

And of course, there was a certain inertia that carried a stereotyped '80s-style "bleak future" through the science fiction films of the early part of the decade, turning up even in some unlikely places, like 1992's Freejack (in which it proved a far less colorful backdrop than the future Robert Sheckley portrayed in the source novel, 1959's Immortality, Inc.) and 1993's adaptation of Nintendo's classic video game, Super Mario Bros. (the directors of which were, notably, the co-creators of the Max Headroom television series).

Still, it became less fashionable to depict urban decay and discuss the darker side of corporate power, and more so to anticipate cheerful consequences to neoliberalism-run-amok, as Nora Ephron did in You've Got Mail.(6) One result is that the 1990s saw no English-language cinematic expressions of that vision on a par with 1980s films like Blade Runner (1982) or Robocop (1987, sequels in 1990 and 1994). However, even as the long-anticipated Neuromancer film continued to languish in "development hell" (as it still does today), there were film versions of two of William Gibson's classic Sprawl stories, Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and New Rose Hotel (1998) (admittedly, not a computer-themed story, biotech being the source of the MacGuffin). (7)

Neither film was a notable commercial or critical success. However, Johnny Mnemonic is noteworthy for being based on a script by Gibson himself. Contrary to what one might guess, he considerably fleshed out the plot of his short story, producing a conventional chase film which we have little difficulty following, and in which we do, ultimately, get to know what is in Johnny's head, and why it matters. The movie, which suffered from, among others things, laughably bad acting from just about all the principals (Dina Meyer, perhaps, excepted), is also worth noting for giving us a visual depiction of Gibson's highly influential vision of the experience of cyberspace. (Some also view the casting of Keanu Reeves as the protagonist as a precursor to his later starring in The Matrix.)

New Rose Hotel stuck surprisingly close to the original story, which was a strength as well as a weakness. The original short story is dazzlingly crafted and quite poignant, but its particular tale of love and betrayal, depicted as a succession of remembered moments in the memory of the nameless narrator, hardly lends itself to cinematic adaptation. The result is stylish and atmospheric, but heavily dependent for its effect on the cast, which included Willem Defoe as the narrator (credited here as "X"), Christopher Walken as his buddy and partner in crime, Fox, and Asia Argento the clear stand-out as Sandii.

Realities, Real and Otherwise
The cyberpunk social vision aside, there was also the matter of the particular technologies on which those stories so often hinged, in particular the mind-machine interfaces that redefined the nature of experience—which, by this point, had far escaped cyberpunk's bounds. Indeed, by the early 1990s stories of people sucked into video games (in the manner of 1982's Tron), and computerized figures which emerge into the real world (as with Kelly LeBrock's Lisa in Weird Science), were already so cliché that I remember science fiction magazine submission guidelines including them in their lists of story topics they did not care to see in their slush piles. (8) Nonetheless, the hype surrounding virtual reality injected new life into the basic concept by making it appear that it would not be long before we could lose ourselves in virtual environments, or see virtual entities so "real" as to be indistinguishable from ourselves.

There was, of course, the Stephen King story "The Lawnmower Man," which hit the big screen in 1992 and spawned a big screen sequel in 1997. Like the Michael Crichton book on which it was based, the 1994 film Disclosure shoehorned the use of the technology into its bigger story about gender politics. So did 1995's Virtuosity which, twelve years before American Gangster, had Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe battling it out (except with the good guy and bad guy roles reversed). VR also figured prominently in Strange Days that October, and 1999 gave us David Cronenburg's Existenz, The Thirteenth Floor, and of course, The Matrix.

As the list indicates, most takes on the subject were epistemological (and other) horror stories, the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy a source of nightmare rather than dream (even in 2000's The Cell, in which a therapeutic use of the technology was explored). In Existenz, the allure of the virtual actually fostered an ideological reaction against it, and the film begins with an attempt by a fanatical anti-VR activist on the life of celebrated game designer Allegra Gellar. Most other films, however, were less ambiguous in their sympathies, their heroes clearly the ones battling the masters of illusion, most dramatically in The Matrix.

The Computer Apocalypse
With so much attention paid to networked computers, and so much anticipation regarding the speed with which the technologies involved would develop, it is hardly surprising that some were anxious; or that villains emerging from these technologies, like malignant artificial intelligences, would again become popular cinematic villains.

They were on the whole less popular during these years than catastrophes of a more natural sort (like the tornadoes, volcanoes and menacing celestial objects of so many big-budget releases), or science fiction tropes with a more "retro" quality (like the aliens of Independence Day, and 1998's Godzilla). Still, they turned up in films like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man 2, and of course, The Matrix, the last of which, as the comments in the previous sections indicate, could be seen as cap, summary and synthesis to this whole thrust in filmmaking, drawing together all these previous streams (as well as a great deal of other elements old and new, from the revival of interest in martial arts films to Cornel West, who had bit roles in the sequels) in by far the most successful cyber-film of the decade.

In the future posited by the film, the world has been conquered by artificial intelligences. In need of an energy source after the humans struck back by blotting out the sun (to cut them off from the solar energy on which they relied), they proceeded to enslave humanity as a substitute, sustaining it in a perpetual simulacrum of 1999 in order to harvest electrical current from human bodies (the titular "Matrix").(9) However, a group of humans escaped, and founded the underground fortress-city of Zion, from which they carry on their struggle against the Machines, liberating such humans as they can in the hope of one day freeing the whole species. And in the middle of it all is Keanu Reeves's "Neo," a prophesied newcomer who just may be "The One" to end the war in their favor.

The result was not just a much-quoted, oft-imitated and frequently parodied blockbuster, but a cultural moment that impacted everything from fashion and interior design to philosophy, evident in the vast academic literature to which it gave rise. (10) Its two sequels, while still commercial successes which had their fans, did not have quite the same impact as the original, but it is hard to see how they could have. The unrealistic expectations so often surrounding the later installments of a series, and the practical difficulty of delivering on the first film's promises in a cinematically satisfying way aside, by November 2003, when The Matrix Revolutions hit theaters, the '90s were clearly over.

And Afterward
At the other end of that stream of filmmaking, we have also found ourselves on the other side of a crucial transitional period in regard to information technology, just as we previously had with many of the technologies that came before it, from the airplane, to atomic energy, to the space launch rocket. As in all those other cases, ideas that once seemed radical have become simply a part of the background—while assumptions common among the True Believers were dashed. It has become a banality to say that today's crop of young adults (at least, above a certain minimum of affluence) grew up "online," taking cell phones, e-mail and Internet search engines for granted as ever-available utilities, the alternatives to which they are scarcely aware of. Yet, other, associated ideas have fallen by the wayside, like the prospect of the virtual quickly and conveniently substituting for the physical. (Consider, for instance, how little driving to work telecommuting has actually spared us, as the oil price spike of 2003-2008 painfully reminded us all. (11))

Naturally, film has reflected this. Hacking became a standard action movie trope, sometimes more central to the plot, as in 2001's Swordfish, or 2007's Live Free or Die Hard (a fun film, though to me at least, the idea seemed more dated than its makers must have intended), at other times less so. (12) And tellingly, the requisite skills increasingly became part of the repertoire of more well-rounded protagonists. In 2000's Charlie's Angels, the team hacks an air-launched missile in mid-flight, but we were never really meant to take it seriously, to instead see it as just one more preposterous testament to the titular trio's talents. By 2006's Casino Royale, though, the quiet mention of a rebooted James Bond doing his own hacking was simply a detail.

The same goes for other cinematic uses of the computer, where the novelty faded even faster. The publicity for You've Got Mail highlighted the movie's "introduction" of IT into romantic comedy (essentially, by remaking 1940's The Shop Around The Corner with AOL substituted for old-fashioned letter writing), but this did not stay "innovative" long enough for the list of distinctly computer-themed romances to get much longer. When American Pie hit theaters the following summer, the technological innovation of the sequence in which Jim's clumsy attempt to seduce Nadia ends up being web-cast to their whole school attracted little notice. In short, just as hackers became a standard part of action movies and thrillers, an online component became routine in movie romances and sexual liaisons.

Unlike personal computing and e-mail, virtual reality never became part of our everyday lives with the speed expected (in 1999 Ray Kurzweil predicted that "VR" would be standard stuff in our households by 2009), let alone the means by which we interact with cyberspace as suggested in the Sprawl stories of William Gibson. Accordingly, it retained something of its exoticism even after interest in it waned. (13) Interest in the cyberpunk conception of the future waned, too, with movies set in the near-future less prone to reflect that stream of thinking about how society will develop in the future. (14) Indeed, it is the earlier version of the machine apocalypse presented in The Terminator that continues as a franchise on the big screen, the next film in the series coming out this summer. As that fact demonstrates, computers will go on appearing in movies, prominent in them to varying degrees, but the combination of ubiquity, newness and expectation that existed in the 1990s is now behind us.

Footnotes
1. This of course proved to be nonsense, as many investors realized to their pain back in 2000, but it did affect popular attitudes profoundly.
2. "In Hollywood, where there's around one idea a year, movie concept '95 seems to be 'anything computerized,'" ran a Newsweek article covering a slew of films appearing that year which included Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, The Net, Strange Days and Hackers. "Hollywood's Big Idea: A Hard Disc's Night," Newsweek Jun. 19, 1995.
3. Through it all, however, the viewer got little sense of what hacking actually involved, and came to assume that it was a sort of black nerd magic that could support any plot convenience. Indeed, the viewer got little sense of what computer use in general was like. (Just compare the speed and dazzle of the Internet in The Net with what computer use actually was like at the time, or what it's like now for that matter.)
4. Or at least, in a version of cyberspace that looked much like that outside world. Part of the success of The Matrix, certainly, was its presentation of cyberspace in exactly that way, as a simulacra of 1999, except more exciting from an action movie perspective, because the laws of physics didn't apply there, and the principals could act as if they had superpowers.
5. Rather more low-key, 1994's Clear and Present Danger included a hacker among Jack Ryan's allies, Greg German's "Petey," and an online confrontation between Ryan and his antagonist, Robert Ritter.
6. Perhaps more noteworthy than the film's rather weak serving of romantic comedy was the film's paean to New Economy capitalism (and expression of "postmodern" New Economy conservatism), not only in its celebration of corporate superstores, Starbucks coffee and plain old consumerism-as-self-realization, but its presentation of business mogul Joe Fox as the Nice Guy Everyone Loves (Tom Hanks, just being Tom Hanks), while left-wing intellectual Frank Navasky is a pretentious jerk, played by the Nasty Guy Nobody Loves (Greg Kinnear, in the kind of role he seems to have specialized in ever since).
7. Both stories appeared in the Burning Chrome collection, which I reviewed for Tangent Online back in 2007.
8. The list of such films is lengthened considerably if one counts in stories revolving around the prospects of artificially implanting memories, as in 1983's Brainstorm or 1990's Total Recall (a theme which notably was part of Strange Days).
9. The idea of the human race confined to virtual reality simulations was not quite as novel as it seemed to many then. Olaf Stapledon posited such a scenario in his 1937 classic, Star Maker, over six decades earlier. However, there the technology was used on the "Other Earth" in an attempt by the planet's elites to control a working class that technology had made superfluous. This Marxist speculation, of course, was recast in the films as a question of the balance between human and machine, rather than an extension of social conflicts among humans themselves, though some have read the films human vs. machine conflict as a metaphor for the latter.
10. In particular, the Matrix was widely embraced as a metaphor by all who believe the reality we are conventionally presented with is not representative of how things really are, especially if the veil mistaken for the actuality is a system of control, as with many Marxists.
11. The ubiquity of work-at-home scams (they seem to outnumber real opportunities by a factor of 48 to 1) testifies powerfully not only to the desire of people to be able to work at home, but how rare it is for those who want them to actually find such jobs.
12. Live Free or Die Hard, notably, was based to John Carlin's "A Farewell to Arms," an article he published in the May 1997 issue of Wired magazine.
13. Instead of convincing sensory immersion, what we got was fuller detailing and more intricate interactivity in the worlds we see on our computer screens, as in the Sims series of games, and World of Warcraft (which have yet to be the subject of their own English-language film, despite a few memorable sitcom appearances, included a celebrated South Park episode, "Make Love, Not Warcraft"). Whether that will link up with the promise of photo-realistic video games in the next couple of generations of console remains to be seen.
14. There have been exceptions, of course, including 2002's Minority Report (based on the Philip K. Dick short story by that name), 2003's Paycheck (again, based on the Dick story), 2004's I, Robot (which actually hybridized both Eado Binder and Isaac Asimov), 2006's Children of Men, and 2008's Babylon A.D. (an adaptation of Maurice G. Dantec's novel Babylon Babies). (Stretching the meaning of "near-future," one might also include 2001's A.I..) Nonetheless, that most of these films were based on older science fiction (even when incorporating some more recent concerns and anticipations, as with rising sea levels in A.I.) is noteworthy.

On Heckler

The documentary Heckler (2007), co-produced by and starring Jamie Kennedy, is about the "heckling" of artists (in the main comedians, but creators of all sorts).

It consist mainly of interviews with celebrities running the gamut from a "Who's Who" of stand-up comedy, to filmmakers both celebrated and reviled, to journalist Christopher Hitchens.

The subject appears a valid one.

There is no denying that critics are often ignorant, narrow-minded, unfair, petty and just plain vicious in their assessments. (Indeed, it is both striking, and sad, how inspired people can get when tearing someone else apart, and especially in the case of "Internet" critics, how much time and effort they're willing to put into their attacks.)

There is no denying that certain prejudices tend to prevail among critics, and that playing the critic too much for too long can produce an undue harshness, and even an obsession with finding fault, in their reviewing.

There are also some grounds for suspicion on the part of working artists toward critics who are not coming from the same place (more commonplace, I suspect, in film than literature, where there are more practitioners, a large portion of which are active reviewers). No one should review a work in a medium or genre they do not like or understand, or without some sense of how artists actually work.

Nonetheless (and this is, admittedly, coming from a critic), to say that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, and that it can be problematic for performers and other creators, is not to say that no one has the right to express an uncomplimentary opinion (or that all such opinions are necessarily "heckling"), which is an absurdity. To suggest that any opinion about a movie, or a comedy routine, proffered by anyone not in the business is baseless and illegitimate is equally absurd.

And those on camera in the documentary seem to say exactly these things, frequently, perhaps unsurprisingly as most of it seems to consist of the interviewees venting about the raw deals they feel they got in the past in an exercise in catharsis and revenge rather than reasoned argument. The result is not only unbalanced, but backfires in making an astonishing number of the interviewees look like raving, hate-filled egomaniacs, at least as bad as the hecklers against which they are lashing out. (Kennedy appears especially clueless in his apparent inability to understand that someone out there might have a valid and honest dislike films he has made.)

Making matters worse, the line-up presented here is likely to make even a broad-minded viewer feel that some of them deserved at least some of what they got (even while they feel sympathetic to those of the interviewees they do admire)-all the more so after seeing them at their nastiest here. (Interestingly, some of those who appear in the film have publicly "heckled" each other, a point not mentioned in the course of the documentary, though the response to that would have been interesting.)

And of course, the fact remains that for all their troubles, the people doing the complaining here are the ones who've won the Dream Jobs. There are far, far worse places to be than theirs--something most of those depicted so unflatteringly in the documentary certainly realize, not that you'd guess it from this doc.

On Star Trek's Box Office Performance

The widely anticipated success of J.J. Abrams's recent reboot of Star Trek has of course impressed many observers (like the "Box Office Guru"), who have frequently noted that it has left its predecessors in the dust in terms of box office receipts. (Following its $75 million opening weekend, it has enjoyed relatively good legs for a highly publicized, wide-opening summer release to rack up $148 million in just ten days.)

After all, the thinking goes, the series has rarely been in that first rank of blockbusters, only the fourth Star Trek film even breaking the $100 million barrier at the domestic box office.

However, adjusted for inflation (pegged to yesteryear's ticket prices, courtesy of Box Office Mojo), Star Trek IV's $109 million translates to a much more impressive $212 million.

Even so, it is still a lower gross than that of the first Star Trek movie, which pulled in $82 million in 1979, so that after adjustment for inflation, it may be said to have taken in a still heftier $235 million. (Admittedly, this was regarded as a disappointment at the time, but solely because of the giant production budget, and of course, the expectations of studio executives who, displaying their typically poor grip on reality, believed that making a space-themed film automatically entitled their studio to Star Wars-like success.)

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn earned $78 million in 1982, or $193 million in today's terms, while Star Trek III: The Search for Spock brought in $76 million, equal to $163 million today, two years after that. Star Trek: First Contact fell just short of the $100 million mark with $92 million in 1996, but this is equal to $150 million now, and even the ninth Star Trek movie, Insurrection, with its comparatively underwhelming performance, is a $100 million grosser in current terms.

In fact, of the first ten movies, after adjustment for inflation, all but Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Nemesis grossed over $100 million-and V actually came close, its $52 million in 1989 equaling $94 million today.

Of course, $100 million just isn't what it used to be-theatrically or otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that each of the four early, high-grossing films made its respective year's list of top ten earners (with numbers one and four making the top five).

That being the case, the trajectory the current film seems to be tracing (toward the territory of $250 million domestic, according to the Guru) is a return to that earlier form, rather than an unprecedented event in the history of the series-another implausible case of the 1980s all over again, much like the Batman and Indiana Jones franchises (out of which came the two biggest movies of 1989) producing the two biggest movies of 2008.

In Case You Wondered What Ever Happened to the Seaquest Version of the Future . . . (Ocean Mining)

In case you've ever wondered what ever happened to the Seaquest version of the future (in which the oceans of 2018 were thoroughly colonized), The Economist has just published an article on the state and prospects of ocean mining.

The oil and gas industry, of course, is very active here, but this significant case (and De Beers's scooping up of fairly accessible diamonds off the coast of southwestern Africa) apart, such thinking largely vanished with the '70s.

The article's author isn't predicting a boom right over the horizon, despite interest from companies like Canada's Nautilus Minerals and Australia's Neptune Minerals (and from Russia and China).

Just going by the "big picture" of the world economy, this seems reasonable enough. From the standpoint of the theory of economic "long waves," the slow-growing downward trough in the wave (where we've been since the early '70s) tends to see business favoring "conservative" approaches. Debt-ridden corporations led by "short-termist" management (also the pattern since the '70s) also happen to be an unlikely source of dramatic innovation, especially in a moment like this one, with demand for everything down and the outlook precarious. And the present combination of alternative (e.g. land-based) supplies and the state of the technological art in the field presents little incentive to companies to break with that practice in a rush for the oceans.

Given the complications that might ensue, from international clashes over maritime claims to untoward ecological consequences, it might be just as well that the issue is being deferred to the future. As it is, the path to a viable economic future likely lies more in a more efficient (and sustainable) use of the natural resources already available than a grab for more.

An Exercise In Near-Instant Nostalgia

In the course of a few recent projects, I found myself wondering "What will the first decade of the twenty-first century be remembered for, pop culture-wise?" Here's an attempt at a list, detailing not what I necessarily thought most memorable about the decade (there's a lot here that I don't like, as well as a fair bit that I do like), but what I think will be part of the broad recollection of it in the coming years. It is also far from complete (and should the reader feel they have something to add, they are invited to do so in the comments section).

In any case, here it goes.

• Cell phone mania.
• Ipods.
• Google.
• MMORPGS, especially World of Warcraft.
• The explosion of blogs.
• TV, DVR and in general, the digitization of the television experience.
• Reality TV (especially American Idol).
• Forensic-themed cop shows (CSI, Crossing Jordan, Bones, etc., with even shows not specializing in this giving more time to the forensics side of things, like NCIS).
• The return of Family Guy.
• Religious-archaeological-Masonic-themed thrillers.
• Zombies, in everything.
• Harry Potter.
• Big-budget fantasy (the aforementioned Potter, the movies based on the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, etc.), and superheroes (from X-Men on), at the movies.
• "Frat Pack" and Judd Apatow comedies.
• Michael Moore documentaries.
• Borat.
• The Daily Show.
• Janet Jackson's nipple-and the idiot hysteria over it.
• The term "reboot" (and to some extent, the reboots of old media franchises, particularly James Bond and Star Trek).
• Nostalgia for the 1980s (though on the whole, the 2000s seem less obsessed with the '80s than the '90s were with the '70s, politics apart).
• A preoccupation with the idea of the apocalypse happening in 2012 (since the 2000 date had of course passed, with us still here).
• The entry of the terms "red state" and "blue state" into the cultural lexicon.
• An obsession with real estate speculation (even as the cliché of the IT billionaire continued going strong).

The End of Oil and The End

By Nader Elhefnawy

The rise in the price of oil during the past decade, and especially the last five years, sparked a great deal of talk about the world's production and consumption of energy (already on the agenda because of climate change). It has waned a bit in the last few months with the plunge of prices from $150 a barrel to less than a third of that, and our economic worries instead finding their focus in the unprecedented financial disaster sweeping the world (the immediate--but only the immediate--cause of which was the bursting of the American housing bubble), which has actually depressed consumption, even after the fall of the price.

Nonetheless, the basic problem has not gone away for good, just as it didn't go away for good after people turned their attention to other things in the past. It is rarely appreciated that the debate over the imminence of the exhaustion of oil supplies is almost as old as the oil age itself, and has long been conducted along much the same lines as seen today, with liberals and progressives calling for forward thinking and planning, while conservatives place their faith in "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and market forces to deliver the goods. (Indeed, the famously pessimistic Oswald Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West, poo-poohs such fears as they had been expressed in his own day.)

As one might expect, it is also not new to fiction. In 1914's The World Set Free, the granddaddy of all nuclear apocalypse stories, H.G. Wells expresses concern for the dwindling of the world's fossil fuel supplies.

In 1930's Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon depicts the end for modern civilization coming about as a result of exactly this problem. In his Americanized future, the descendants of his generation burn the last of the oil in mindless movement in their personal vehicles as a matter of religious duty. (And to think that so many writers have scoffed at his vision of the future!)

Such fears seem to have been less conspicuous in later decades, but they did not totally go away. In Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1953 The Space Merchants, for instance, the exhaustion of the world's oil left those of us who could afford it riding about in "pedi-cabs."

Still, it was the 1970s which would see a deluge of fiction of this type. The most famous expression was perhaps the Mad Max films. It was not simply a repetition of the earlier stories, however. Rather, it reflected a fear of imminent catastrophe, and the scenarios, naturally, were not just limited to far-future scenarios like Stapledon's. Indeed, we see the anxiety about oil's scarcity, and the preoccupation with shady oil politics, in thrillers from the period not usually classed as genre books (and which remind me how much better the period's "airport" novels were than the current run of stuff), like Paul Erdman's Crash of '79 (1976), Steve Shagan's The Formula (1979), Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) (a brilliant and grossly underappreciated mix of over-the-top parody and biting satire) and Clive Cussler's Night Probe (1981) (not as flashy as later books he would write, but a much better read than the last few Dirk Pitt novels).

As oil prices fell again in the 1980s and 1990s, and as the political tenor of the times changed (making an anti-establishment suspicion of the security state and big business less "acceptable," and militarism more so, as recounted by William James Gibson, Andrew Bacevich and others), the nightmares centered less on scarcity as such, fears of immediate exhaustion or even the ambitions of established local potentates like the Iranian Shah or the Saudi royals than their vulnerability to Soviet takeover. In the techno-thrillers that were coming to overshadow the spy novel, like Tom Clancy's 1986 Red Storm Rising, a superpower clash in the Persian Gulf was a standard scenario, and after the Soviet Union's fall, Iraq and fundamentalist Iran were the favorite bogeymen, filling its old place (though never very convincingly, given their smallness).

However, as oil prices rebounded after the turn of the century, so did the 1970s-style fears (validated to the extent that they recognized the failure of governments to act seriously in a timely fashion, as James McCausland, who cowrote the script for Mad Max with George Miller, noted in a recent article), which certainly have their place in Geoff Ryman's "mundane" science fiction movement.

I've certainly found myself paying more attention to the issue, publishing articles in Parameters and Survival on the matter, and for those wondering, here's the current big picture:

• The world's "proven" oil reserves run to about a trillion barrels. At current rates of usage, and with recently observed rates of growth, we could easily burn through a trillion barrels by the 2030s.
• Assuming those numbers, we will not actually succeed in extracting that much oil. All other things being equal, production from a given deposit rises steadily until half of it has been extracted, after which the rate of production begins to fall. This is what is called the "peaking" of oil production. Given the amount of oil already extracted, we may be near, or even at, a global peak.
• Our estimates of the world's proven oil reserves may be exaggerated (estimating supplies is a tricky thing, and the industry is known less for transparency than for dishonesty), so that the crunch may hit us sooner and harder than the numbers above suggest.
• Even assuming the global numbers to be accurate, it may be that a worldwide average makes the situation look better than it really is. The world's production is concentrated in a comparative handful of supergiant oil fields, a notable example of which is Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, which by itself produces over six percent of the world's oil. These fields are generally old ones, peaking, plateauing and declining, as seems to be the case with Ghawar, so that a field-by-field analysis produces a much more worrisome picture.
• Undiscovered oil supplies may be out there, but we are now using up oil four times as fast as we are finding it. The new deposits tend to be smaller, and increasingly in hard-to-get, expensive-to-work places, like offshore fields. (In other words, don't count on finding a new Ghawar anytime soon.) And even if we do find a really big new field that can help us through the squeeze, actually getting production going there is a decade long process. Put simply, it can be ten years before you get so much as a drop.
• There is plenty of unconventional oil, but it is very hard to exploit, and even in a relatively optimistic assessment-in which it quadruples to about 10 million barrels a day by 2030 or so-it seems unlikely to compensate for the shortfall in conventional supplies.

All of this looks pretty bad, and in ways that were not really the case back in the 1970s. It looks even worse when one sees the essential lameness of the arguments against this picture. (For instance, we are told by oil boosters that the Saudis, far from exaggerating their reserves, secretly know they have three times as much as reported.) They say that the constraints are not geological but "political" (political always referring not to the Suits over here, but the nasty foreigners over there), the Russians and the Persian Gulf countries throwing up obstacles in the way of exploration and development, or the environmentalists opposed to drilling in Alaska (this last claim in particular showing the lack of basic math skills on the part of this group, given the paltriness of even the biggest estimates of what that area might yield). And let's not forget all that abiogenic oil (allegedly) to be found deep inside the Earth's crust.

At the same time, oil boosters are quick to remind us that despite worries in the past, the apocalypse has not happened yet, making those worries "wrong." And there are those who can profit from the doom and gloom. The energy industry can certainly benefit from exaggerating the argument, using it as an excuse for high prices, government subsidies and the exertion of political pressure on oil producers to provide more generous terms, consumers to put up with their profit-mongering in times of general hardship. Fear that the end of the world is about to happen if they do not get every dollar they want can also be used to ward off demands for more socially and ecologically responsible policies.

Indeed, this is more or less what journalist Greg Palast argues in his book Armed Madhouse. Much as I respect Palast (and recommend his book), I find the evidence for a peak by the 2020s (and possibly earlier) persuasive, and said so in the journal Survival back in April 2008. In the issue released the following August, one critic disparagingly described my article as a "doomsday scenario" for that reason, but the truth is that the longer I study the issue, the worse the situation looks to me, and to a great many others. The International Energy Agency, certainly no alarmist, recently put out a worst case scenario in which world oil production falls from today's 86 million barrels a day to a mere 9 million-roughly ten percent of today's levels-circa 2030. Matthew Simmons, addressing the World Affairs Council of Houston in December, declared those numbers optimistic (in part because of the depreciation of the infrastructure for producing and transporting all that oil, which he thinks it may cost $100 trillion-equal to a year and a half of the globe's total economic output-to keep in working order, provided this can be done at all).

A ninety percent cut in planetary oil production over twenty years might well tax modern civilization's capacities for adaptation beyond the breaking point. Electricity and heating would not be the main problem; just a tenth or so of the world's electricity comes from oil burning plants down from 25 percent in 1973, and that mainly because oil-rich Middle Eastern countries have found it convenient to continue along that path. (More recently, however, they seem to be joining the rest of the world in turning to other sources.)

The production of chemicals, plastics, asphalt or fertilizer in which oil is a key component is actually a larger concern, given that in many cases no obvious substitutes are readily available.

The biggest worry, however, is transport, which uses a full two-thirds of our petroleum.

Of course, there is no shortage of ways of economizing or substituting the use of fossil fuels, far too many for me to even make a go of a proper list here. None of them looks like a quick and easy technical fix to the entire problem, but they do offer plenty of ways of chipping at it until it gets down to a manageable size. And of course, there are plenty of revolutionary concepts which can vastly reduce our use of transport in ways that may actually raise the quality of life rather than diminishing it, from treating telecommuting as more than a slogan, to "urban agriculture."

Even so, serious bottlenecks along that developmental path are nearly certain should oil production start to contract sharply in the near term, as in the direst scenarios. Still, it is very likely that early, far-sighted action on a meaningful scale can cushion the blow, at least enough to keep the modern world a going concern. The question that remains, then, is whether or not the potential solutions will actually find speedy, comprehensive, practical application to the problem. The record to date has not been promising, and while the likes of Denmark and Sweden, with their energy-efficient economies and massive exploitation of renewable energy hold out reasons to be hopeful, cases like mainland China (with its vast and growing appetite for energy, to date met mainly with fossil fuels) seem to weigh much more heavily at the opposite end of the balance.

Nonetheless, the current financial crisis is already forcing a great deal of rethinking of the policies and attitudes that led to this point. That has yet to lead to really meaningful progressive action, but an ecologically sounder developmental path may yet be a surprising consequence of our current troubles.

Whatever comes of it, I suspect some places will do better than others. I expect that the developed nations will, on the whole, do better than the developing ones due to their better access to technology and capital (though the smaller needs and innovation of some developing nations may surprise us). I would also guess that Western Europe and East Asia will do better than North America due to differences in infrastructure and politics. (Simply put, the economies of industrialized Europe and Asia are already much more energy-efficient, and in particular oil efficient, than the U.S.'s; and there seems to be less serious domestic opposition to meaningful action in their cases. Already it is Sweden which has unveiled the most ambitious plans for phasing out fossil fuel use and developing renewable energy resources.)

Yet, it is very much an open question whether even the best will do better by a large enough margin to avoid really rocky times ahead. No one is quite where they should be, or even where potentially they could have been had they made a proper start back in the previous energy crisis of the 1970s, but even if a great deal of time has been lost, enough remains in which a serious attempt to think big and think ahead can matter.

New Lexx Cast Interviews

The Lexxverse web site (a place well worth checking out if you're a fan of the show) has recently performed Internet interviews with members of the cast of-you guessed it-Lexx. The most recent, which you can read here, is with Michael McManus, who played Kai on the show.

Melrose Space to Marauder: The Starship Troopers Film Trilogy

By Nader Elhefnawy
First published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, DECEMBER 2008

Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.

In the classic Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, Juan "Johnny" Rico, the son of a wealthy Filipino businessman living in Buenos Aires, enlists in the Terran Mobile Infantry after high school, against his father's wishes. Through his training, and his service in the war that subsequently begins (when the alien arachnids attack his hometown of B.A.), Johnny goes from being a callow child of privilege to a responsible leader of men as an Infantry officer, and citizen of the Federation.

The famous 1997 film retains the basic outline of the book, as well as many of the characters and incidents, but as one might expect from a movie designed as a Hollywood summer blockbuster, there are some significant changes.1 Not the least of these is the shift in emphasis from Johnny's development in Heinlein's futuristic bildungsroman, to action-adventure and spectacle. (It has to be admitted that the novel is a bit of a disappointment for readers looking for a thrill ride. After the adrenaline rush of the opening raid against the Skinnies, the book offers very little action, and that written more with an eye to realistically providing a sense of the confusion of battle rather than visceral excitement.)

The film also has a broader scope than the novel, which is narrated by Johnny in the first person. It gives rather more time to other characters, particularly those who came with Johnny (played by Casper Van Dien) from school, like Carmen Benes (a pre-Wild Things Denise Richards), and in this case, Dizzy Flores, who in the film is a young woman (Dina Meyer) serving with Johnny in the Infantry. (In the book there were women starship pilots, like Carmen, but in the film the Infantry is fully coed.) They brought their emotional baggage from high school with them, the new circumstances facilitating the carrying over of two interconnected love triangles, one between Johnny, Carmen (now Johnny's high school girlfriend, whom he basically followed into the service) and Dizzy (who followed Johnny in her turn, even requesting and getting a transfer to his platoon); and another between Johnny, Carmen and her fellow starship pilot, Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon).

Of course, viewers had plenty to say about those changes, not all of it positive (apart from the Oscar-nominated special effects, which drew almost universal acclaim, and still hold up very well a decade later). The casting dismayed some, who felt that the principal characters were insufficiently diverse in a story where racial harmony and gender equality were supposed to have been perfectly realized (in particular displeased by the decision to cast Van Dien as Rico).

Along with the romantic entanglements, and the other trappings of American high school life (a slice of Americana, down to the high school football game and the prom), that aspect of it led some to derisively joke about the film being "Beverly Hills 90210 in space" (Van Dien and Meyer having both appeared on that show prior to this movie), or "Melrose Space." Other fans of the book were dismayed at not seeing the powered armor widely remembered as a hallmark of the story, an absence justified by producer Jon Davison on budgetary grounds (in particular the cost and time wire-work on that scale would have absorbed) and dramatic ones (as the sight of the soldiers "bouncing" about the field would easily have looked very silly).2

The big controversy, however, really centered on the portrayal of the social order in the film, which is not surprising given that it had been controversial among the novel's readers from the time of the book's first appearance. In Heinlein's future, the Federation is run solely by military veterans, who alone enjoy the full rights of citizenship--the franchise, and candidacy for high office.3 This, and other aspects of the future in the book, led some to see Heinlein's story as fascistic. Indeed, the book became so closely identified with such tendencies in the genre that Michael Moorcock titled his famous 1978 essay about the subject "Starship Stormtroopers."4

Of Starship Stormtroopers
Of course, many of Heinlein's fans have flatly rejected such a reading of the story.5They can and do legitimately point out that the Federation was not established in the name of traditional values or institutions (like the family, organized religion, the martial spirit, or anything else), and nor does it seem to take much interest in upholding their status. The military may enjoy a privileged place in the political system as the sole gateway to full political rights (the franchise, and public office), but serving soldiers are subordinate to those who have returned to civilian life, not a word is breathed about military rule per se, and criticism of the military is freely expressed by civilians, including the very physician examining Johnny when he applies.6

Additionally, Heinlein repeatedly stresses that the Federation represents a historical maximum in the personal freedom its citizens enjoy. (Indeed, even those serving in the military enjoy far more freedom in some ways than those serving in any existing military today, free to put in their resignation at any time outside of actual combat.) There is no mention of corporatist economics, which the Heinlein of the 1950s (any interest in alternatives to the free market by this point long behind him) would in any case be expected to strongly disapprove of. And of course, this society boasted perfect, matter-of-fact racial and national equality.7

Consequently, the Federation is very far from fitting the description of any fascist state in history, or any other kind of "totalitarian" state for that matter, and Heinlein's defenders are absolutely right to point this out. And yet—-it is not so simple a matter as that to dismiss the claims, especially when one distinguishes between the culture of the Federation as a whole, and the book actually depicting this world. The story's marginalization of social and economic questions in this "society that works"; the emphasis on punitive discipline, corporal punishment, and the echo of 1950s-era hysteria about "kids out of control"; the gleeful contempt for liberal sensibilities expressed by Johnny's educators--all of these at the very least identify the story with a fairly harsh brand of conservatism, while offering abundant material to those looking to identify the film with fascist ideas, to see in the vigilante vets who founded the Federation, and their political heirs, something of the post-World War I Freikorps.8

The conception of the enemy as mindless, sub-human, literally insectoid (and the not unreasonable tendency of some readers to see them as stand-ins for human opponents) also echoes the crudest sorts of nationalist and racialist propaganda, and Johnny himself embraces the rooting of morality in a harshly socio-biological view of life, reminiscent of nineteenth century Social Darwinism and rhetoric about a growing nation's need for "breathing room." While it is difficult to pin any particular political label on Heinlein, many aspects of Heinlein's politics as the author himself openly expressed them at the time (his defense of McCarthyism, his hard line in the Cold War), do not exactly discourage such perceptions.

In short, while the Federation is quite different from fascist states like Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, one can see something of fascism's spirit in it. And to the chagrin of quite a few fans of the book, it is this view of the book that the film's creators embraced, using the material furnished by Heinlein's novel as a launch pad for a satire of fascism and militarism, a decision perhaps not all that surprising given the creative team in charge: director Paul Verhoeven, working with screenwriter Ed Neumeier, the duo who gave the world the original Robocop (certainly one of the sharpest satires to come out of Hollywood in the 1980s).

Their touch is evident throughout, in the small details (like the zany commercials and news programs), and the large. In this vision of a futuristic "good society," society's less seemly aspects (and one must assume they still exist, given the lack of evidence to the contrary) are tucked out of sight, unmentioned--or normalized, like the live, televised executions that air on every channel. The same goes for the complexities of political history. (There is a quick reference to "Mormon extremists" who have intruded into Bug territory, which Verhoeven has pointed out is a reminder that, contrary to how the Federation would have it, the conflict with the Bugs did not precisely begin with the attack on B.A..9)

Instead, the sanitized, carefully controlled media speaks in a single voice reminiscent of '40s-era newsreels in its complacent authority, simplicity of outlook and uncomplicated aggressiveness, no trace of skepticism, cynicism, doubt, difference or dissent ever intruding. No one on screen dares (or at least, thinks) to utter the kind of anti-military sentiment that was unsurprising in the book, any more than these things would have turned up in the World War II films that inspired the product.10 Johnny and friends are as vacuous as they are eager, earnest and enthusiastic, a "right-wing group of beautiful, empty-headed people doing exactly what they're told to do" as science fiction historian Paul Sammon puts it.11 From beginning to end they never do a double-take at the state worship and state violence drenching their culture, and increasingly their lives--even after Johnny (barely) gets through the bloody, bungled mess that is the Battle of Klendathu (which evokes argument only over tactics, not strategy, policy or general goals in the press). Their recruiting poster looks and recruiting poster flatness makes them come across as idealized, mindless figures out of propaganda--and indeed, the film closes with a recruiting commercial featuring Johnny and Carmen.

Given this vision of the nation-in-arms at its most ridiculous, the acting and casting are actually perfect, especially when one considers that the aesthetic is not solely derived from that of Anglo-American wartime film.12 Indeed, it fits in neatly with the considerable borrowing from Nazi aesthetic expressions, ranging from the uniforms (particularly the one worn by Neil Patrick Harris in the role of Colonel Carl Jenkins) and other regalia, to the staging and cinematography of the crowd scenes, reminiscent of Nazi rallies.

The Sequels: Starship Troopers 2 and 3
Predictably, much of the audience didn't get the joke, the critical elite included. Being a satirist always means running the risk of being misunderstood, and especially being thought to promote what you are actually criticizing.13 However, the controversy did not result in a blockbuster. When all was said and done Starship Troopers took in about $55 million in the U.S., and another $66 million overseas, making for a global total of $121 million. Given that it cost $105 million to make, these earnings had to be considered a significant disappointment.14

Nonetheless, box office failure has never stopped Hollywood from trying to milk a potentially profitable franchise, and in 1999 a spin-off television series hit the airwaves (executive produced by Verhoeven himself), Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, but it proved short-lived. There were distribution problems, of course, not least of them the destruction of the story arcs when they were aired out of order, but there was a more fundamental issue; the show was clearly an uneasy cross of kid's weekday morning cartoon with the very adult vision of the film. While more successful on that level than one might expect, the result was a military procedural somewhat more mature than what one expected in that time slot, but much tamer in its depiction of the still-abundant action (and other things), the social comment toned down, the plot considerably simplified.

Instead the series continued in live-action format, specifically the straight-to-video sequel format, with the first of these appearing in 2004, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. Once again Ed Neumeier penned the script, with acclaimed special effects artist Phil Tippett (who supervised the creature effects in the original) helming.

The movie was, of course, shot on only a fraction of the first film's budget (perhaps less than ten percent of it), and it shows. Hero of the Federation is shot on video, with low light levels, to make it look like film, and perhaps also to compensate for the limited F/X resources. The recycled image of the air strike from the original film apart, in the battles we typically get a few, usually close-in shots of bugs interspersed among a lot more shots of harried humans shouting and shooting their guns at targets off screen, all in the dark and during a storm. Following that the soldiers whose story we follow are trapped by the Bug assault in an abandoned outpost on a forbidding planet, where they stumble upon a fallen war hero (Richard Burgi's Captain Dax).

Additionally, none of the characters from the original return, and only one of the cast members does so, Brenda Strong, who had a minor supporting role as Carmen and Zander's commanding officer, Captain Deladier. Deladier having died in the original, she appears as a totally new character, "Sergeant Dede Rake," a larger but less glamorous part consistent with the film's new tone.

The satirical parody that characterized the first movie is confined to brief bits at the beginning and end. In between, we get a straight war drama which after the first half hour or so starts to shade over into horror movie territory as all the characters begin to act very strangely. During it we get the darker, grimmer, more ambivalent look and feel of cinematic recollections of the Korean conflict, and to the credit of the film's makers, this is not just an excuse for the lower production values.15 The grizzled, tired quality of the Troopers we see this time around (so different in that from the fresh-faced and gung-ho Rico, Flores and Benes), and especially Dax's cynicism, are strikingly juxtaposed with the government's upbeat official line, the comic bits about them played rather more broadly than in the original film to heighten the contrast with what is really happening "over there" (and perhaps because the writer wanted to make sure the audience "got it" this time around). The unseen menace that drives our heroes to turn on each other, while admittedly cliché today, is appropriate in its evocativeness of Heinlein's work (not least, his 1951 classic The Puppet Masters), the fears in the background to this chapter of film history, and the insanity swallowing everyone up by this point.

The response to the movie was on the whole unfavorable, and I have to admit that I shared that opinion when I first saw it. However, my opinion of it improved when I recently watched it again for this review. As one might expect given Tippett's storied technical career, the filmmakers' get the most out of their resources, certainly not matching the spectacle of the first movie, but nonetheless doing better than might be expected (the action scenes have punch, and all things considered the Bugs look as good this time as in the last), and certainly well enough to tell this particular story. While presenting Rico, Benes and company seeming worn-out and war-weary might have made the film more effective, as well as giving the series greater continuity, the casting works here, not just Burgi (and more surprisingly, Strong), but also Ed Lauter as Jack Shepherd, Colleen Porch as Lei Sahara and Kelly Carlson as Charlie Soda. The result is on the whole more watchable than most straight-to-video genre film, even if lacking in many of the things (the epic battles, the humor and parody throughout) that fans liked about the original.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, which came out last September (and also marks screenwriter Neumeier's directorial debut), is something of a return to the roots of the series. Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico, who is a colonel now, and in the first few minutes of the film ends up on death row when he strikes a superior officer, his old friend General Dix Hauser (Boris Kodjoe), who had been about to shoot a farmer in a bar fight that got out of hand.

However, his neck is saved by Dix at the last second (literally) so that they can send him on a secret mission--to rescue Sky Marshal Omar Anoke (Stephen Hogan). Stranded on planet OM-1 after a visit to the front lines with only a handful of troopers and crew, he is in danger of being captured and compromising crucial military secrets, in particular the location of the planet Sanctuary, site of an important fleet base. Compounding the problem, the Sky Marshal (a flamboyant figure to begin with, with a successful second career as a singer that has increased his popularity) has been acting erratically for some time now, a fact that his second-in-command, Admiral Enolo Phid (Amanda Donohoe), has been keeping quiet.

As the premise implies, Marauder has a brighter, flashier look and feel, and a broader scope, which serve it well in its return to the propaganda movie parody approach of the original. Fans who wondered where the powered armor was during the first film will be happy to see that, as the title hints, it is featured prominently here.16 The satire also touches on some issues the previous two films did not explore, like the attitude of wartime states toward dissent (visible and growing at this point in the conflict, despite the execution of protestors); the games that go along with state secrecy, covert military and intelligence operations, and the management of the media; and the Federation's treatment of religion, which it goes from suppressing to mobilizing as a resource in the war--much of it with an eye to the conflict the U.S. is currently embroiled in.

The film suffers somewhat from its slender budget (the constraints of which are more obvious here than in the second film, on account of the bigger scale of the story), and the less polished feel of the production. However, viewers who liked the first film are likely to find it more satisfying than the 2004 sequel, and perhaps even look forward to a fourth installment.

Looking Back
The trio of Starship Troopers movies made to date certainly do not comprise the most successful trilogy in science fiction history. Nonetheless, the first film, and to a lesser extent, the whole set, are something unique in genre cinema. Despite George Lucas, big-budget space opera (indeed, even just space opera-ish material) has been a screen rarity, the few examples outside his six famous films rarely getting made, and even more rarely capturing much audience interest, even when done well. In recent years the highly praised Firefly spin-off Serenity flopped, while The Chronicles of Riddick failed to get the reception that would have warranted the big-budget trilogy originally anticipated (though apparently there is still buzz about more modestly budgeted, independently produced sequels).

In retrospect a big-budget satirical space war movie is even less likely than any of those other concepts was, but Starship Troopers delivered exactly that, and the result actually seems to have become more relevant with time. Ironically, just after the film satirized World War II-vintage militarism, the United States descended into a manic celebration of exactly that, Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan hitting theaters and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation hitting shelves the year after.17 After the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was to the memory of World War II to which pundits and politicians turned for precedents, for analogies, for inspiration.18 Verhoeven himself drew parallels between the film and the War on Terror in the interviews since that time, like this one with Ain't It Cool News:

The whole situation in Afghanistan is almost an exact copy of STARSHIP TROOPERS; the whole gung ho-mentality of bombing everything, blasting the Taliban-forces out of the caves. I put all that in STARSHIP TROOPERS! The corrupted atmosphere of propaganda, once invented by Goebbels, has now taken over the United States as well. It's extremely interesting to see how the media can besiege an entire nation with propaganda.

Verhoeven's unabashed expression of such views likely did not help his Hollywood career in that rally-round-the-flag moment, and neither did the projects he had planned. (Discussed here in another interview with the British newspaper, The Independent , they included a film about the Medieval crusades.).

The war remains a problematic subject for Hollywood, as the troubled release of Uwe Boll's Postal (about which I interviewed the director of that film for Strange Horizons earlier this year) demonstrated.19 Nonetheless, in the most recent twist to that particular story, Hollywood recently announced plans to film Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, a book often seen as a foil to Heinlein's novel. I won't hazard a guess as to what will actually come of the project, science fiction movies based on well-known books all too often ending up in production hell. Yet, assuming the film based on Haldeman's book actually gets made and proves to be a success, it's easy to picture viewers looking back at Verhoeven's movie as an important precursor.

Footnotes
1 Readers should note that this was not the first screen version of Heinlein's book, that distinction going to a short-run animated Japanese series in 1989. Incidentally, I have been unable to find it on DVD, at least in North America.
2 "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers," in Starship Troopers (Special Edition), dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, writ. Tyler Hubby, DVD, Sony, 2002. This DVD extra is far better than the usual expressions of mutual admiration and shots of actors in front of green screens that tend to accompany films like this one. The writer, director and producer discuss the film's writing, casting, theme and overall aesthetic, and it is strongly recommended to readers interested in those aspects of the film.
3 Heinlein famously responded to his attackers by saying that the word "veteran" in the book only meant something analogous to "civil servant," but the text offers little evidence for this reading. (This was in the afterword to his 1958 "Who Are The Heirs of Patrick Henry?" which readers can find reprinted in Expanded Universe (Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 2003). Those looking for a close reading of the book with attention to that question can check out James Gifford's essay on the subject, "The Nature of 'Federal Service' in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers," Site:RAH: The Robert Heinlein Homepage. Accessed at http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf.
4 Michael Moorcock, "Starship Stormtroopers," Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 4, pp. 42-4. Accessed at http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/Moorcock.htm.
5 It is worth noting that Heinlein's fans can be astonishingly combative, even against each other, as I learned the hard way after penning a small article commemorating the "Heinlein Centennial" for Tangent Online last summer.
6 These sentiments, also expressed by Johnny's father, make clear that, at least in peacetime, the culture of the Federation is not militaristic. However, as Heinlein acknowledged himself, the book was intended to glorify the "poor, bloody infantry." Such glorification of the military, especially in a story where military service is seen as proof of civic fitness, may reasonably be considered to qualify the book as militaristic.
7 Even as his economics shifted rightward, Heinlein remained a progressive on race and gender (though his image in this regard has been tarnished by changing expectations, and of course, his publication of Farnham's Freehold), a resolute atheist, an opponent of government regulation of the moral sphere, and not least of all, a writer willing to experiment with unconventional ideas--enough so that he could produce Strangers in a Strange Land, a book near and dear to many in the counterculture of the 1960s.
8 From that standpoint, it may also be relevant that the Federation originated in a revolt of disgruntled veterans whose goal is "law and order," pure and simple. Indeed, in this regard the Federation's founding (and possibly aspects of its governance) come quite close to the understanding of fascism Wilhelm Reich offered as "a mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas." See Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), p. 7. Accessed at http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf. However, I should make clear that I believe any such resemblance to be unintentional on Heinlein's part.
9 Schwarz, 2002.
10 The citizens also tolerate a great deal more control over their personal lives, as with the requirement that they get a government license before they can have children--and the favoritism the government shows to fully franchised citizens, which has the effect of compelling some would-be mothers to perform military service. (In the third film in the series, viewers also learn that the Federation has long suppressed religious freedom as well.) The film also offers a number of subtle reminders that the Federation is not an egalitarian place. While socially and economically privileged Johnny can take his place at Harvard for granted, Shujimi (Anthony Ruivivar), who earned his way in, had to enlist in the military to pay for it. Additionally, in a deleted scene included on the Special Edition of the DVD, Carmen tells Johnny's parents, unlike hers, "have money, so they don't need to be citizens," raising the relationship between economic and political power that Heinlein's book glossed over.
11 Screenwriter Ed Neumeier mentions in the documentary "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers" that the image in his head when he was developing the screenplay was "Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue go to outer space and fight giant bugs and become Nazis." Schwarz, 2002.
12 The replacement of the drop capsules with the drop ships, which look like World War II landing craft, is one example of this. Schwarz, 2002.
13 There were many accusations that the film was fascistic, the most famous of them an editorial that ran in the Washington Post shortly after the movie's release. Stephen Hunter, "Goosestepping at the Movies: Starship Troopers and the Nazi Aesthetic," Washington Post, 11 Nov. 1997.
14 One should keep in mind that of a film's total gross, usually just 40-50 percent goes to the studio, so that to make back its budget at the box office, a $100 million movie would need to earn $200 million or more. Of course, no film depends on ticket sales for its entire income, video, television rights, merchandising and the complexities of subsidies playing very large roles, but this nonetheless goes a long way to defining expectations, and the revenue from those other income streams.
15 In the "Inside the Federation" extra on the special edition DVD, screenwriter Neumeier acknowledges the influence of Sam Fuller, the director of films like The Steel Helmet.
16 The "Marauder" powered armor is not the only new reference to the book. This film also marks the first reference to the planet Sanctuary (prominently featured in the book) in the series.
17 Interestingly enough, another, major space war film appearing at this time, 1999's Wing Commander, drew heavily on the imagery and history of the Second World War, the basic plot a refight of the Battle of Midway.
18 Watching the film since then, one can be struck by how easily one can turn the film's script into the rhetoric of FOX News and company simply by scratching out the word "Bug" and replacing it with one referring to the ethno-religious bogeymen of our time.
19 It may also be telling that the third installment was a German-South African co-production, rather than one financed by an American company.