Gargarin: First in Space, but Not Drama

Netflix has a Russian language biopic called “Gargarin: First In Space,” which I found terribly disappointing. It should have been the Russian “The Right Stuff,” but totally wasn’t. And that’s a real shame.

Yaroslav Zhalnin plays Gargarin, and is a dead ringer, close enough that in some places, the production cuts back and forth between historical footage and recreation, and you’d never know. All of the cast is wonderful, and the emotions–such as there are–come through believably, even with subtitles.https://alchetron.com/cdn/Gagarin-First-in-Space-images-86d60f3f-e4c1-4f92-9c87-d0dce23d487.jpg

I was pleased that they included (and named) all twenty of the original soviet cosmonaut candidates. Sadly, through, this story was all Gagarin, and either the filmmakers didn’t know much more about him than you might learn from a blurb on a trading card, or they chose not to dramatize it.

Instead, the story is pretty much just Gargarin preparing for, then taking his historic flight, with a few flashbacks to his early life. There is a nice scene of him stealing from a German soldier during the war and almost getting his little brother killed, and…that’s about it.  The only sources of drama are the (probably fabricated) conflict between Gagarin and Titov, resolved with a last minute hug at the foot of the rocket, and the long suffering silence of his wife, Valentina, “the pilot’s wife” played by the lovely Olga Ivanova.

Watching this film, you get the distinct impression that Gagarin only married her because she was pretty, and only was selected to be first in space because he was pretty; senior officers in one scene explain, not very dramatically, how he should be first because some of the other cosmonauts are more fit, and should be saved for the harder, longer flights to come. Really? His staunch party support and photogenic youth had nothing to do with it?

It’s sad, because the film should have been so much more. We don’t get to see Gargarin plant a ceremonial tree the day before the launch or have the bus to the launchpad pull over so he can take a piss–both on which happened and led to traditions carried on right up to the present day.

There is a brief mention of the passcode Gagarin was meant to be given so he could unlock the controls in the event manual operation was needed, but we don’t see the ground technician slip him the code–which we know from history is what happened; the ground crew knew that if he needed it, there would be no time for party officials to approve it. This conflict between party officials and common sense is portrayed, but is watered down to the extent one wonders who they are trying not to offend. At least Gargarin’s summary promotion from lieutenant to major (skipping a rank for political reasons) is portrayed.

Another thing they get right is that Gagarin had essentially nothing to do except sit in the capsule until it was done with the flight–then pull the eject rings. As he makes his one orbit, reflecting over his life, we are treated to several shots of his feet, dangling over the tiny porthole like a little boy’s from a treehouse.

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Which is not to take anything away from him or the flight, but we get no sense of why he had to be the titular “first in space.” Instead, we see an attractive kid, an unexceptional but competent pilot, and his winning smile. We get no sense of anything that made him exceptional, either as a pilot, a cosmonaut, or a political envoy, we don’t see his post-flight drinking or infidelity (we don’t get to see him climb out the window) and we don’t see his fight to be allowed to return to the air, or subsequent crash and death (which would be where the real drama and tragedy lay).

We also don’t see cosmonaut candidate Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko carried out in a body bag after his training accident, the drunken encounter that got Grigory Nelyubov booted from the program (later to commit suicide) or the state political revisionism that saw the famous photo of the Sochi Six–after the other fourteen cosmonaut candidates were airbrushed out of the photo–and history.

So…the effects are excellent and the performances are good for what they have to work with, but all in all, “Gagarin: First in Space” comes across as a fluffy bit of post-Soviet nostalgia that does a profound disservice to the genius and sacrifice behind Gagarin’s historic flight.

The OA: A Near Story Experience

Spoiler alert. If you haven’t yet watched Netflix’s series, The OA, to the end yet, go away and come back after you have. It’s okay. We’ll wait.

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Okay.

The OA is the story of Prairie Johnson, adopted daughter of two small town Samaritans who has just turned up in the hospital and on YouTube after having been abducted seven years previous, just as she reached her maturity. As she tries to readjust to normality, she acts weird and assembles her own little quasi cult of followers who meet every night in a half-finished house to hear the spooky tale of her childhood, her abductor’s maniacal research into near death experiences, and the trans-dimentional Tai-Chi she brought back from the wichy woman at the bottom of the lake, the veracity of which is apparently demonstrated by the odd nocturnal nosebleed.

Got that? Doesn’t matter. No really,

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Disney Rethinks Sleeping Beauty — Again

imagesYesterday, I took the family to see Maleficent, and the following contains SPOILERS – sort of.

In this reimagining of Disney’s classic “Sleeping Beauty,” a pure-hearted fairy protector turns vindictive after she’s betrayed by a human who uses their acquaintance to gain the throne. To get her revenge, she shackles his child and kingdom with the unbreakable curse familiar from the classic tale, but later grows to regret this petty act and to love the child she has cursed and to seek to undo what she herself has made undoable.

Which is all very well. It’s nice to see the female characters recast as something akin to actual people. It’s nice to see both the king and Maleficent retold not as one-dimensional archetypes but as people with imperfections, vices, and redeeming virtues. However, for me, there is far more wrong with this story than these virtues can heal.

First, the ending is transparently clear from early on–from the first scene after the child goes into exile with her “aunts”. Once this ending approaches, it become clear that a pointless battle must occur to fill up the remaining time in the film. The battle occurs, but there is only moderate peril and a somewhat unlikely resolution. To be fair, I have found that since I started writing, I’m surprised by very little in any film, so it might just be me.

Second, if Maleficent has depth, the entire rest of the world is reduced to puppetry. The king’s youthful actions are capricious. As an adult, we feel for him only at the moment of the curse, and next see him as a virtual lunatic who we can neither sympathize with nor despise. The prince is now the throw-away archetype that the princess was in the original telling–and I don’t see how that’s any better than the original sexism. The other characters act and appear at the whim of one king or another or at the flick of Malifecent’s hand. The kings wife just conveniently goes away, as apparently has Maleficent’s parents and support system, to the detriment of all.

Third, the story is conveniently inconsistent. There is a point in the final battle when, consistent with the story so far, Maleficent could easily arrange her servant’s escape but doesn’t–because the story requires that someone else intervene. Multiple scenes set up the premise that when fairies contact iron, they are instantly and painfully burned, yet when a heavy iron net is dropped on Maleficent, she seems only mildly inconvenienced and then instantly recovers. At the start of the film, Maleficent is respected as the future protector of the fairyland “moors”, but after her betrayal, all the other fairies vanish even though she clearly still has more than enough power to protect them. This gives the entire world the feeling of a convenient plot element.

At the end, Maleficent restores the fairy moors and bestows a fairy crown on the girl, declaring the two kingdoms to be finally united. Which is what you WOULD say, I guess, having vanquished the army of the neighbouring kingdom and thrown it’s ruler from a tall tower. Okay, he was trying to kill her for no clear reason, I get it.

Finally, the pacing—-oh the pacing. On the one hand, I didn’t feel than key relationships were developed sufficiently. On the other hand, there are whole swaths of film that needed to be tighter–like when Maleficent’s crow, acting in the role of aerial recon drone, makes several forays into the kingdom tell us things that were obviously going to happen. Then in a pivotal scene of redemption, I found myself thinking less about the poignancy of the moment than about how the filmmakers had wasted a gaping opportunity to draw out the tension and amplify the power of the moment.

My youngest daughter gives the film 9 out of 10 sprinkles. I give it about five. It isn’t that it was bad, I just thought it could have been far more emotionally powerful and that Disney fumbled away the drama at nearly every step. But then, I am not the target demographic, and I’m a writer, so my brain is kind of warped. Oh yeah, and Angelina Jolie did pretty well with the role, such as it was. There was one scene of genuine poignancy in which ladies throughout the theory could be heard squeeing into tears. If only there could have been a few more such moments.

Star Trek Continues

I’ve always been a bit befuddled by fan-produced TV shows–particularly Star Trek. I grew up loving the show, but i’ve never considered myself a “trekker” per se. I just love good sci fi, and for many years, Trek was as good as it got on the small screen.Happy Birthday, Scotty

But fan produced shows? Guys, the show is over. Usually, these fan things amounted to amateurish CGI and corpulent “officers” who spent an inordinate amount of screen time dialoging about, well, nothing.

Then I hear that Grant Imahara of Mythbusters fame is playing Sulu in a fan remake called “Star Trek Continues.” I respect Grant enough to check it out, and it turns out that as fan fiction goes, this show is through the roof. Scotty is played by James Doohan’s son. Kirk is an actual professional actor. The set is both authentic and complete, the effects and cinematography are too.

But it ain’t Star Trek…except…it sorta is. I keep waiting for the story to bog down into dialoging–it doesn’t. The first episode is a sequel to a TOS episode, and a rather good one, I must admit. The attention to detail is impressive. Oh, I’ve seen nice looking set pieces before, but these guys have the cadence,  the mannerisms, the timing and the pacing–all down right to the level of tension at each “commercial break”.

So, okay. “Continues” isn’t going to put J.J. Abrams or Chris Pine out of work, but I have to say, If you liked Star Trek the original series, you should check these guys out. It won’t be entirely just for nostalgia’s sake. http://www.startrekcontinues.com

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I finally got around to watching the latest incarnation of this venerable franchise, and my take is “good in a way”.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I have long worshiped at the literary altar of Rod Serling, and that I see in his contributions to the original Planet of the Apes screenplay the keys to its longevity. His was a cold war theme, of course, and while religious extremism was the main evil confronting Taylor, it was cold war ideology that had wrought his hell on earth, and that led him to damn his fellow men “all to hell”.

This latest movie does one thing I like very much–it makes every major character act with virtue and character within his own little slice of the world–even the apes on rampage. No evil Dr. No here. No mad Dr Moreau. The trouble though, is that they pull it off too well.

Sure, the guys running the primate house are a tad petty, and the next door neighbor a bit of a jerk, and the head honcho at the lab a little too obsessed with making money and the researcher a little too worried about saving his dear old dad. In short, everyone is guilty of being human–appropriately enough given that they are about to be exterminated and replaced by apes who will have a little more of exactly the same defect.

So who’s the protagonist here? You watch this and find yourself rooting for the flight computer on the irrelevantly mentioned Mars shot. Perhaps it will come back, kill EVERYONE and make the world safe for visiting aliens—or perhaps the microbes who, duplicitous in the mayhem though they might be, are at least incapable of suffering over their own weaknesses.

So, it’s a good movie, well made and well written. And yet…
There is no one and nothing to root for. There is no real villain and no real protagonist. And sorry, that is not “highly evolved modern literature”, it’s cheap and shallow. Take a stand. Make the characters noble in their own eyes, but make someone right and someone wrong in MINE (even if it’s up to me to choose up sides), or their is no point in my attending the party.