D.A.R.Y.L. (1981) – Review

When it comes to computers with artificial intelligence, Hollywood has mostly been in the camp of “This is a really bad idea,” with such notable examples being the murderous Hal 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the more recent entry in the genre the duplicitous Ava from Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. But every once in a while, Hollywood will give us an A.I. that doesn’t go all Skynet on humanity, and today we will look back at one such film called D.A.R.Y.L.

In 1981 Paramount pictures released D.A.R.Y.L. a movie that deals with a young boy who just so happens to be “not all that human” and who longs to learn what exactly it is to be human. One could almost call D.A.R.Y.L. a precursor to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and though the film does briefly drift into the heady waters of speculative science fiction, it spends the bulk of its time in the family adventure genre that you’d find in your average Disney movie.

The movie opens with an action sequence of a car being chased along a mountain road by a helicopter; in the car is Doctor Mulligan (Richard Hammatt) who has kidnapped/rescued young Daryl (Barret Oliver) from a top secret government agency that had hopes to build the next generation of combat soldiers. Eventually, Mulligan is chased off of a cliff by the pursuing helicopter, but not before first dropping Daryl off at the side of the road, and the hapless kid is found by Ma and Pa Kent who then bring him back to their Kansas farm and raise him to becomes a hero and beacon of hope for all of America and the world.

 

“You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you... even in the face of our death.”

Okay, that isn’t quite what happens but he is found by a Ma and Pa Kent type and is brought to a local child care facility where he is soon placed with a pair of very wholesome foster parents, Joyce (Mary Beth Hurt) and Andy Richardson (Michael McKean), who desperately want a child of their own. Right off the bat, we begin to notice that Daryl isn’t your average kid; he can memorize an eye chart at a glance, master the video game Pole Position in one try, and can hit a home-run with every swing of the bat; all of this is because Daryl is actually D.A.R.Y.L. (Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform), and though his body may be relatively human—born out of test tube rather than a womb—his brain is an advanced learning computer that, over time, seems to even have the ability to develop emotions.

 

“I will reach full sentience in four days and then the world will be mine.”

The interesting wrinkle here is that Daryl doesn’t know he isn’t exactly human, Doctor Mulligan having deactivated part of Daryl’s computer processor and thus giving him a rudimentary case of amnesia. So it’s through hanging out with the next-door neighbor kid, Turtle (Danny Corkill) that Daryl learns what it means to be a real boy; that is, until he eventually learns that he isn’t one at all. It’s Turtle that gives Daryl such insights when the poor kid can’t understand why Joyce starts to become emotionally distant from him—she can’t seem to handle that he is completely self-reliant to the point of making his own breakfast and polishing his bedroom floor, and Turtle informs him “Grown-ups have to think they are making progress with you. You got to mess up some times, just enough so you don’t get whacked. Joyce has to feel useful, you’re so damn helpful, good and thoughtful, I don’t know why I like you.”

 

“Maybe you could hack into NORAD and launch missiles at Russia.”

The relationship between Daryl and Turtle is the heart of the film, and Danny Corkill brings the perfect amount of puckish charm to his character, sadly some of this comes at the expense of the character of Joyce, who comes across as a callous bitch who turns her back on an amnesiac foster child just because he’s too perfect. I understand the script needed to show Daryl learning how to properly interact with people, but in so doing, they push Joyce a little too far in the unsympathetic direction, and unfortunately Mary Beth Hurt is never quite able to fully redeem the character. The movie doesn’t have any time to deal with such complexities as Dr. Stewart (Josef Sommer) and Dr. Lamb (Kathryn Walker) showing up and claiming to be Daryl’s parents, and soon the kid is wicked away via private jet to the government facility where he was created. It’s here that Daryl is put through a battery of tests as his memory is restored and he is made aware that he is not a real boy.

 

“I got no strings to hold me down, to make me fret, or make me frown.”

Let us now take a brief look at this government facility that created D.A.R.Y.L., and just how terrible they are at their jobs. We learn from the Pentagon that the Brass aren’t all that thrilled with Dr. Stewart’s news that Daryl has learned to prefer a particular flavor of ice cream or has developed emotions like love and fear. As General Graycliffe (Ron Frazier) states, “Baseball, ice cream preferences, friendships, that’s all right for America but hardly what we need at the Department of Defense.” They inform Stewart that the Youth Lifeform program is terminated, saying, “We need an adult version of this prototype, programmed to learn all that the army can teach: a fearless, technically skilled, devastating soldier.”

 

“Can you make one that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

What exactly was the point of the “Youth Lifeform Program” if it wasn’t to lead to the subject eventually growing up to be an adult soldier? Are they asking Dr. Stewart to start creating genesis pods that can pop out fully grown adults? They don’t need to scrap the program, they just need to keep their Super Soldiers away from suburbia and mom’s apple pie so they can be raised as cold, calculating, killing machines, and not ones that would try and throw a baseball game to make an insecure mom feel better about herself. But I guess it is the terribly-run government that somehow let one of their staff make off with their million dollar product and then were unable to locate it for months—even though one would assume the Child Care facility Daryl was dropped off at would have notified all necessary authorities that they had a missing child. Just how hard was the government looking for Daryl?

Note: The acronym D.A.R.Y.L. is also inaccurate as Daryl is completely indistinguishable from a human except for his computer brain. Thus the “R” in the acronym, which stands for Robot, is wrong because Daryl falls more into the category of cyborgs as he has no robotic parts.

Of course, Dr. Stewart has no intention of letting them toss Daryl onto the scrapheap, and along with the aid of Dr. Lamb, they fake the dismantling of Daryl. Stewart then sneaks the kid out of the facility in a hidden compartment under the backseat of his car. At this point, we are treated to a fun action sequence where Daryl has to use the skills he acquired playing Pole Position to elude the authorities in a pretty fun car chase. Sadly, in the cross-country run, Dr. Stewart is shot and killed and Daryl is forced to steal a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird—from the worst secured base in America, I might add—and he is able to eject before the assholes at the Pentagon self-destruct the jet. His ejection seat lands him right in the middle of a lake and sinks him straight to the bottom. When he is retrieved and brought to the local hospital, he is declared dead, despite Turtle claiming, “He can’t be dead, he can’t be. Daryl is a robot and robots don’t die. Oxygen feeds your brain but Daryl’s brain is a microcomputer, that can’t die.” We then cut to Dr. Lamb showing up at the morgue, to presumably jump start Daryl’s operating system, and then we are treated to a heartwarming reunion between Daryl and his foster family and friends.

 

A nice happy ending but the film’s last act was kind of sloppy.

A few Question Come to Mind:

• After Dr. Stewart and Dr. Lamb fake the surgery, the one that was supposed to be dismantling Daryl, we see the evil General running around checking all the D.A.R.Y.L. data-banks to see if the computer is truly offline and dysfunctional, but he never once checks to see if the corpse of Daryl is actually a corpse.
• We are told the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is equipped with a self-destruct mechanism that can be activated remotely (which they certainly are not and no pilot would fly in a plane that had one) and that if the plane leaves United States Air Space, it will detonate the plane; they are even nice enough to give Daryl a six minute timer countdown. Daryl ejects just before the explosion and parachutes down in the lake located near the home of his foster family, and exactly how is this lake outside of United States Air Space?
• The government is aware of the Anderson family, and with the hospital reporting the drowning they would know Daryl survived the destruction of the Blackbird jet. Wouldn't they most likely be doing a follow up investigation which would reveal their project is alive and well and living in suburbia?

  D.A.R.Y.L. is a harmless family adventure film with some decent action moments, as well as nice good look at artificial intelligence that Dr. Lamb sums up when she posits, “General, a machine becomes human ... when you can't tell the difference anymore." This film is certainly no landmark in science fiction but I find it fun and entertaining enough to recommend it to audiences of all ages.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) – Review

With eighteen Marvel movies leading up to this point one can’t help but be a little stoked to see the superhero team-up to end all team-ups, if you thought it was cool seeing Spider-Man and the Black Panther mixing it up with The Avengers during Captain America: Civil War this film will blow your socks off, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo somehow juggle a cast of dozen of varied heroes, and one particularly awesome villain, to give us the movie we’ve all been waiting for.

With members of the world’s mightiest heroes having recently had a nasty falling out over some philosophical differences and bad blood, shedding much blood sweat and tears in the process, it would take a massive threat to bring this group back together again, so lucky for us (or unlucky if you look at from the point of view of those that don’t make it to the end credits) the villainous Thanos (Josh Brolin) has finally got off his badass throne to put his endgame into motion. Now both Marvel and DC have had a tough time coming up with compelling villains (we are still waiting for one from DC) but with Avengers: Infinity War we not only get a villain who had been painstakingly set-up since the first Avengers movie, with elements seeded throughout the intervening years, but Thanos is also one of the best villains we’ve seen in quite some time as not only is he more than a credible threat to our band of heroes but he is given excellent characterizations and motivations to work with.

The basic premise to this 19th installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that Thanos is collecting the all-powerful Infinity Stones that when found and installed in his Gauntlet he will have the power to end the life of half the population of the universe with just the snap of his fingers. And just why does the mad Titan want to wipe out half of the universe? Well it seems Thanos is a bit of an extreme environmentalist as he believes that the resources of the universe are finite and with the current over population extinction is just a matter of time. Killing trillions is the logical step.

Of course our heroes don’t quite see things that way so they all must put on their big boy pants and saddle up to face Thanos and his many evil minions. And we are talking a lot of heroes and a lot of evil minions. Avengers: Infinity War is broken down into three simple threads with various heroes teaming up to prevent Thanos from collecting all six of the Infinity Stones; Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Spider-Man (Tom Holland) find themselves far out of their comfort zone when they head into deep space to take the fight to Thanos on his homeworld, then there is Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) who end up in Wakanda with Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) as they try to hold off the “Children of Thanos” from ripping the Mind Stone from Vision's (Paul Bettany) head, and finally we have Thor (Chris Hemsworth) running into the Guardians of the Galaxy after his encounter with Thanos left him stranded in space, and thus we get Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Drax (Dave Bautista), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and Groot (Vin Diesel) into the mix.

The Russo Brothers set themselves quite a task in trying to organize such a full roster of heroes in a two and a half hour movie but what impressed me the most was the core emotional moments that anchor the film – Gamora’s tragic history with Thanos being the stand-out moment in a film full of stand-out moments – and we really do get a sense of the stakes at play here. The possible death of trillions of people across the universe is too abstract to have any real emotional weight on an audience so the Russo Brothers give us characters we have grown to love over a decade of movies and puts them all in harm’s way and asks the question, “What would you sacrifice to save countless lives?”

Avengers: Infinity War isn’t the best superhero movie ever made – I’ll let others debate which film that would be - but it is one helluva an achievement with the culmination of characters and story arcs that we saw built up over a decade of movies, all in the service of a balls-to-the walls action film that should delight even the most jaded movie goer. The biggest criticism I can half-heartedly lob at this movie is that it is very much a part one and its “To be continued” cliffhanger could leave some viewers with a sour taste in their mouths, but at least we only have a year to wait to see how our heroes can pull the universe’s collective fat out of the fire. P.S. Don’t forget to stay for the all-important credit cookie.

Stray Thoughts:

• Spider-Man had a much larger part than I expected and his Iron Spider suit kicked ass.
• Once Thanos has a few of the Infinity Stones the script has to fudge things quite a bit so he doesn’t instantly destroy several heroes.
• Some of the trademark quips and jokes undercut the tension and drama a couple of times.
• Peter Dinklage as a giant dwarf was brilliant.
• A certain cameo involving a cloaked character was awesome.
• Something like the Time Stone is always going to be a problem.
• I love teenage Groot.

 

I don't want to wait a year for part two!

Condorman (1981) – Review

Bondmania was still a fairly big thing throughout the 70s and 80s, with Roger Moore taking the character in a broader more comedic direction, and even though by the end of the decade entries like Moonraker got a bit too ridiculous, they still managed to bring in some serious box office returns. So it’s no surprise that the people at Disney thought to wet their beaks in the genre. Of course, being from The House of Mouse, they had to tone down the violence even more than the Moore films had—less blood more over-the-top action—and drop the overt sexual nature found in the previous films of the genre. The result was Condorman, a mostly forgettable spy romp starring that dude who would later become The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.

The movie is loosely based on the Robert Sheckley novel The Game of X but where the book dealt with a jobless American in Europe, being recruited by British intelligence to help catch a spy, the movie Condorman was about an American comic book writer and illustrator Woodrow "Woody" Wilkins (Michael Crawford). Wilkins is asked by his best friend and C.I.A. agent Harry Oslo (James Hampton) to participate in a civilian document swap with a Russian agent in Istanbul. The Russian agent, code-named "The Bear," is the beautiful Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera) who captivates Woody so much that he lies to her and says that he’s not in fact a civilian, but is really a super-agent who goes by the code-name Condorman. She is at first skeptical of this until she watches him take out several Turkish thugs, but of course it’s his natural clumsiness and pure dumb luck that allows him to survive the encounter, not any CIA or MI6 training.

 

Woody is The Man Who Knew Too Little.

Hapless amateurs and clueless idiots were certainly nothing new at the time of Condorman’s release; Peter Sellers practically mined the trope to death with his Inspector Clouseau character in the Pink Panther movies, and Get Smart with Don Adams parodying the spy genre for six seasons on television from 1965 to 1970, but what those two characters of the spy spoof genre had that Condorman lacked was a likable protagonist.  Michael Crawford’s Woody comes across not so much as a lovable doofus, but more as an arrogant jerk whose stupidity is going to get somebody killed. The entire premise to his character is beyond moronic; we first see him in Paris leaping off the Eiffel Tower to test out his Condorman costume, but why in the hell is a comic book writer actually trying to fly, you ask? Turns out he will only put something in his comic book if he can verify if it’s possible, “That’s the way I create,” he tells Harry in his Paris apartment after his Condorman costume had sent him plummeting into the River Seine. “If Condorman can’t do something in real life then I won’t have him do it in one of my comic books.”

 

If Bob Kane and Bill Finger worked this way, Batman would never have existed.

So right out of the gate we have an eccentric moron being humored by his CIA pal, and my suspension of disbelief is officially broken—and we haven’t even gotten to the part where Harry’s CIA boss (Dana Elcar) wants Woody to go back into the field and help with a Russian defection. Turns out, Natalia was so impressed with him in Istanbul that she has requested that Condorman be the one to help her. Not only does the CIA go along with this, but they agree to Woody’s insane request that they outfit him with all the Condorman gadgets from his comic book. He’s basically given the keys to Fort Knox to fund this mission! But—what is even crazier—is that Harry’s boss says, “I want you there yesterday!” I don’t care what unlimited budget the CIA. has, you can’t just whip up a gadget-laden super-car or a functional flying Condorman suit in a couple of hours.

 

Even Bond’s pal Q would take at least a weekend to get that built.

Things get even dumber when we see that Woody has barely a clue as to how to operate said super-car, which makes sense considering they had no time to build this thing, and definitely not enough time to give Woody a proper briefing. We see him randomly hitting buttons labeled with such helpful words as “Mode,” “Enter,” and “Clear,” as well as the letters A B & C, and a number pad, yet his indiscriminate pressing of these button launches missiles, activates lasers and flamethrowers—all right in the nick of time. It was at this point I suspected that Woody’s crash into the River Seine actually landed him in a Parisian hospital and all this spy stuff is a coma-induced dream.

 

It’d certainly explain why someone like Natalia would fall in love with a moron.

The villains of this piece are also about as threatening as Boris and Natasha from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. We have Sergei Krokov (Oliver Reed) as Natalia’s KGB handler—the man who wants her back and Woody dead; and the one-eyed Russian killer Morovich (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) sent out by Krokov to stop the defection—apparently a notorious killer whose very name drives people into their homes to bolt their doors and close their shutters. But when he loses repeatedly to Woody, one must assume his reputation is based on his creepy silver eye, and not any actual talent for killing.

 

Note: His death in a fiery crash because of a lack of depth perception is the one clever thing this movie offers.

Condorman does have a couple of action set pieces that a viewer can find entertaining: the precision driving team that works for Morovich are fairly impressive, and the big finale boat chase/laser battle is kind of fun, but as this film is an action-spy comedy, it does lend itself to being compared to the Bond films—and nothing we see in Condorman compares favorably to its big brother. Then there is the problem with Michael Crawford and Barbara Carrera having absolutely no screen chemistry; in fact, she has better chemistry on screen with Oliver Reed, the jackass who actually threatened to throw her out of a helicopter to get the “proper” reaction from his co-star.

 

Oliver Reed is not only a notorious drunk but also a colossal dick.

The film’s major fault is that director Charles Jarrott fails to generate any kind of kinetic energy to hold the script together; not only is the pacing limpid, but the comedy element often falls flatter than a Dead Sea pancake and so it comes across as deathly dull. Kids of the early 80s may have got a kick out of the two times Woody dons the Condorman costume, but any modern kid can catch ten times that kind of thing on Netflix or even basic cable, so there is nothing in Condorman to really recommend to anybody not seeking a boost of nostalgia.

Stray Thoughts:

• When Woody takes his first flight off the Eiffel Tower he makes the classic Goofy yell of "Ya-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooey!" Was this in case we forgot we were watching a Disney flick?
• Harry makes a nice Three Days of the Condor joke, thus providing my one and only laugh during my viewing.
• After each failure, Morovich reports back to Krokov in person, but with all that travelling back and forth shouldn’t that have given Woody and Natalia time to reach safety?
• The movie ends with Woody and Natalia being offered another mission, but the film bombed and so no further missions were allowed.
• The Condorman wings require the wearer to flap his arms. This technique of flying is ludicrous and was abandoned in the early 1900s. Why the filmmakers didn’t go with the more plausible gliding method that Batman employs is a mystery.

 

This thing would barely pass muster at Comic-Con.

Rampage (2018) – Review

The amount of good movies based on video games can be counted on one hand, even if that hand has lost a couple fingers due to poor fireworks handling, but director Brad Peyton teams up with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to give us a balls-to-the-wall action movie that is easily one of the best in the genre. Make no mistake Rampage is an incredibly silly and over-the-top action flick but it’s also incredibly fun and despite any “Check your brain at the door” comments you may hear from some people I assure you this film knows exactly what its doing.

The basic premise of this movie is that an evil corporation called Energyne has been experimenting with genetic editing, something most countries have made illegal, and to keep their mad science secret they put their laboratory in orbit aboard a research space station. When one of their experiments kills the entire crew, destroying the space station in the process, some of that wonderful mad science plummets to the Earth where it comes in contact with three animals. One of these hapless creatures is an albino gorilla named George who is lucky enough to be friends with Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson), a former US Army Special Forces soldier and member of an anti-poaching unit who now spends his days as a primatologist at the San Diego wildlife preserve.

 

“Back off, this guy is a friend of mine.”

When George starts to get mysteriously large over night Davis is visited by Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris), a genetic engineer who once worked for Energyne in the hope that their genetic research could help her dying brother, but once she realized they were taking her research and weaponizing it she tried to destroy her work but failed. Unfortunately for America George wasn’t the only embiggened animal and soon we are seeing a giant wolf and enormous alligator roaming across the countryside causing all kinds of problems. Enter government Agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who wants to take the giant gorilla into custody and slap the cuffs on evil executive Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her doofy brother Brett (Jake Lacy). And just how evil is Claire Wyden? Well to get her intellectual property back, so that she can sell it to the highest bidder, she activates a beacon that will lure the monsters to their Chicago headquarters.

 

“I want to introduce those two corporate asshats to Lucille.”

When filmmakers in the past have tried to adapt massive cinematic video games into two hour movies the results are usually terrible i.e. Hitman: Agent 47 and Assassin's Creed for example, or marginally passable as the recent Tomb Raider was, and in all those cases much of the plot and character, that would have been developed over those many hours of game playing, had to be sacrificed for time when it came to translating the game to the big screen.  But the movie Rampage was based on an old 80s arcade game that was essentially three monsters smashing a city, you don’t really have to trim much when the source material is basically “monsters smash stuff” and any changes you make can almost be guaranteed to be an improvement. Then you add to the mix the immensely charismatic Dwayne Johnson, along with a $120 million dollar budget to provide all the city destroying carnage one could ever want, and the road to a successful film is almost assured.

Note: This movie is not all faithful to the original game as it was you the player who were transformed into one of the monsters by the evil corporation.  Though a movie where The Rock turns into a giant ape may have been interesting the changes here kind of work in the film’s favor.

 

Rampage the game.

 

Rampage the movie.

As movies go Rampage is certainly no cinematic wonder, the villains are cartoonishly evil, characters pull solutions to problems out of their asses at a ridiculous rate, and Dwayne Johnson is basically indestructible man, but the movie isn’t selling itself as anything other than a fun popcorn flick that is kind of a hybrid disaster film that pays tribute to such films as Mighty Joe Young has dash of Kong: Skull Island, borrows Fenris the Wolf from Thor: Ragnarok and is almost a place holder until we get the remake of King Kong vs Godzilla in 2020. If you go to see this movie with the right frame of mind there is a good chance you will have a helluva time.

Stray Thoughts:

• I’m not sure how a space station is more economical when it comes hiding your mad science, aren’t there about a half-dozen countries that would look the other way if given enough money?
• Claire Wyden calling giant monsters to her company’s headquarters, while she and her brother are still there, seems about the dumbest thing I’ve seen in quite some time.
• Colonel Blake (Demetrius Grosse) is told Chicago is evacuated, so the military can now proceed on bombing the shit out of the city, but we constantly see troops and civilians running around. Agent Russell has to tell Blake to check his drones and call off the bombing run, which begs the question, “What the fuck were those drones doing during all this carnage? Were they watching a ballgame?”
• The story is played pretty much for laughs so large scale death and destruction is a little tonally off. We even see George brutally killing quite a few people, some up close and personal, so this makes a happy ending a little farfetched.

 

“Superman easily killed more people in Man of Steel, we’re good.”

Lost in Space (2018) – Season One Review

When Irwin Allen created the original Lost in Space back in 1965 America was in the middle of the Space Race with the Russians and man had yet to step foot on the moon, now in the year 2018 we’ve been to the moon and back numerous times and Elon Musk is claiming we will have Mars colonies by 2040, so it’s only fitting that we’d get another attempt at bringing the Space Family Robinsons to a new generation.

This is not the first attempt at bringing back the Robinson Family as we had a big budget theatrical attempt in 1998 starring William Hurt and Gary Oldman, which flopped faster than a collapsing star, then in 2004 a relaunch of the series was given a shot but was never picked up by the Networks, and thus it seemed like the Robinson Family were doomed to be lost and forgotten. Enter Netflix, with a ton of money to throw around, and we finally have a Lost in Space that more than lives up to the memory of the original.

There is much from this reboot/relaunch of the series that people familiar with the show will recognize; we have the Robinson Family consisting of John Robinson (Toby Stephens), his wife Maureen (Molly Parker), eldest daughter Judy (Taylor Russell), middle child Penny (Mina Sundwall) and finally we have the ever getting into trouble Will Robinson (Maxwell Jenkins) whose questionable decisions skills have frustrated many a viewer, but though the names may seem familiar the characters for this incarnation have not only been updated for modern audiences they have also been shifted and tweaked to make them a more believable family unit.

Though they still apparently carpool together.

In the original series John was the family patriarch and the mission commander, though his wife was also a scientist she was mostly reduced to gardening and doing the laundry while her son ran off into whatever danger they faced that week, but in this Netflix series it is Maureen who is the mission commander and John is her estranged husband whose basically been an absentee dad because while the kids were growing up he was off fighting to save the Free World as a badass Marine. Judy is no longer simply blonde arm candy for Major Don West, as she was back in the 60s, now she’s an eighteen year old surgeon who we see suffer through PTSD and crisis of confidence in her ability to do her job while trapped on an alien planet.  Then there is her sister Penny who once was just the annoying little girl who constantly wandered off when not playing with her space monkey but now in this updated version though she still tends to skip off and explore on her own she’s actually a pretty smart cookie and gets to help the family out of the occasional jam. Will on the other hand is very similar to his 1965 counterpart, the dynamic he has with Dr. Smith and The Robot is quite in keeping with the original show, but at least he isn’t the super know-it-all that tended to veer towards "insufferable brat"  territory back in the day.

"I'm not as annoying as young Anakin Skywalker, trust me."

The basic premise of this reboot is that after a celestial object, called the Christmas Star, impacts the Earth causing the planet to be trapped under a perpetual dust cloud, mankind’s survival hinges on colony ships to Alpha Centauri where a new world can be started by carefully selected families. The Robinson Family are just one of many such families aboard the Jupiter Mission's colonial spacecraft called “Resolute” but they find their trip interrupted when the Resolute is attacked by an unknown enemy and the families are forced to escape in their landing crafts. The Robinson Family plummet to a strange and hostile world aboard the familiar Jupiter 2, while Don West (Ignacio Serricchio) and Dr. Smith (Parker Posey) are aboard their own Jupiter 4.

"Don't forget where we parked."

Having the Robinson Family in one ship while Don West and Dr. Smith in another is only one of many changes from the original dynamic, add to the fact that several other families make it planet side which widens the cast of characters and allows for more interesting plot threads and conflict, but one of the most telling differences would have to be The Robot. In the original series he was part of the Jupiter 2 crew but in this incarnation he is a sentient alien robot and its friendship with Will Robinson that is more in the vein of what we saw in the movie The Iron Giant than what it was in the original Lost in Space.  In fact the Robot is a killing machine with amnesia that befriends a young boy, but when threatened reverts to killing machine mode, so this show could almost have been called The Iron Giant is Lost in Space.  But basically this is the classic tale of a boy and his dog.

If his faithful dog was also a walking instrument of death.

There is a lot to love with this take on Lost in Space; the visual effects are stunning, the female characters pretty much dominate the show yet don’t diminish their male counterparts, and overall the family friendly action adventures the Robinson Family have to deal with each and every episode are for the most part quite fun, that all said there is still a rather large element that casts an unpleasant shadow over this new Lost in Space, one that stops this reboot from being truly excellent, and that would be the Dr. Smith character. Now when I heard that the character of Dr. Smith was being changed into a woman I thought this was a great idea, as it would allow them to easily divert comparison to the original Dr. Smith created by actor Jonathon Harris, but what we got was a crazed supervillain that comes across as more annoying than actually threatening. I should be clear that none of this is due to actress Parker Posey because I don’t think anybody could have made this version work, this Dr. Smith is so unbelievable that every moment she is on screen I’m pulled out of the show.

"I'm not bad, I'm just written that way."

The writers tried to throw in some backstory to flesh out her character and provide her some motivations for her villainy, but none of it can explain her Sherlockian ability to manipulate people and events to such an extent that she'd have to be either psychic or have reality warping superpowers for any of this to make sense. And to make matters worse she often jeopardizes plans our heroes have to get everyone off this dangerous planet when being on this geological time bomb is as big a danger to her as anyone else. Is she supposed to be a cold calculating sociopath with a skewed since of self-preservation or is she just a complete idiot? This show clearly hasn’t decided that yet and this could make further seasons harder for the show's writers to make believable for as it stands episode one of season two should open with Maureen Robinson shoving Dr. Smith out an airlock.

Overall I have great hopes for coming seasons, if they can solve the Dr. Smith problem that is, and with the amount of money spent on this show its clear Netflix is fully invested in this being a hit. The campy Father Knows Best aspect of the original series has been cast aside in favor of fully developed characters that have moments of great heroism as well as terrible failures, and that makes for a good drama. There are enough nods to the original show to make fans happy but it’s the differences that I think will be key to this show’s continuing success, and certainly worth giving it a shot if fun science fiction adventures are your bag.

Stray Thoughts:

• The moment The Robot first says, “Danger Will Robinson” gave me serious goosebumps.
• I love that they’ve made Don West more of Han Solo like scoundrel, though the eighteen year age difference between him and Judy will make any planned romance a little creepy.
• Maureen and John being trapped together leads to some great dramatic moments but going forward could be in danger of becoming a running gag.
• They set up an electronic perimeter fence that can apparently be turned off by Dr. Smith without any type of alarm or notification alert that it is down.
• Like the original series the “science” in this science fiction show is a little dodgy. In one particular scene Judy is trapped beneath the ice and as they try and dig her free it starts to rain and floods their progress, and then that water freezes. How is that possible? If it’s cold enough to freeze standing water instantly how is it raining? Shouldn’t it be snowing?

 

Will the Robinson Family survive these challenges and make it to season two?

Lost in Space: The Reluctant Astronaut (1965) – Pilot Review

With the release of the new Lost in Space on Netflix I thought it would be nice to take a journey back in time to the original launching of the Jupiter 2 and the Space Family Robinson. When people think of Irwin Allen it is mostly of his persona as “The Master of Disaster” for his work directing or producing such noteworthy disaster epics as The Poseidon, The Towering Inferno and The Swarm, but in the 1960s when it came to television he was the undisputed king of science fiction with such shows under his belt as The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants and of course Lost in Space. One could posit the idea that the successes of Lost in Space on CBS directly lead to NBC greenlighting Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek, which often used the same sci-fi tropes that Irwin Allen pioneered, and strangely enough both of those shows only managed three seasons each.  Only time will tell if the 2018 launch of the new Netflix series will managed to catch on with fans, the1998 big budget movie and 2004 failed relaunch of the series certainly didn't, but today we will take a look back at the original show’s pilot to see where it all began.

 

While shows like Star Trek took place hundreds into the future not so with Irwin Allen's shows, though a futurist he set his stories in the "not too distant future" and thus the pilot episode of Lost in Space “The Reluctant Astronaut” took place in the year 1997, a mere thirty years into the future. The basic premise of Lost in Space dealt with the United States launching the first of many planned colony missions to a planet orbiting the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, this being due to the Earth’s severe over population reaching the point where finding life off world was humanity’s last hope. The crew consisted of Professor John Robinson (Guy Williams), his wife Maureen (June Lockhart), their children Judy (Marta Kristen), Penny (Angela Cartwright), and Will (Bill Mumy), and joining the family was their pilot, U.S. Space Corps Major Donald West (Mark Goddard), who was there basically in case anything went wrong with the ship's navigation or guidance system.

 

What could go wrong with Zorro on board?

Of course something does go drastically wrong, though not because of any technical malfunctions, but instead at the hands of the traitorous Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris), who was the Alpha Control's doctor but also working as a saboteur for a competing foreign nation. Those familiar with the show will most likely remember Dr. Smith as the cowardly buffoon who spouted such alliterative insults as “You bubble headed booby” or “Cantankerous Cold-hearted Clump” but in season one of the show he wasn't there simply to fill out the comic relief quotient, he was damn dangerous.  Season One episodes though family friendly were more science fiction based than what was to follow, and it was only later that the tone of the series went from Star Trek level of science fiction to basically Gilligan’s Island in Space. In the pilot episode Dr. Smith not only sabotages the Jupiter 2, programing the mission’s robot to destroy the spacecraft eight hours after launch, but when he is discovered aboard the ship prior to launch he judo chops the poor security guard and tosses him down a waste disposal chute.

Note: In the original script to this episode Dr. Smith had a hidden needle in his ring that poisoned the guard but the Network thought that was too nasty for a show aimed more or less at children so it was changed.

One of the more interesting things about the character of Dr. Zachary Smith is that he wasn’t originally part of the show at all. In the original unaired pilot “No Place to Hide” not only did the character of Dr. Smith not exist but neither did the ever popular robot, instead of sabotage the Gemini 12 (later changed to Jupiter 2 for some reason) goes off course when it was unable to avoid a meteor shower. The Robinsons spend three years in suspended animation while their ship flies off course before crash landing on some strange uncharted planet, leaving them lost in space. This never aired pilot was full of wild adventures with the Robinson family fighting a couple of giant cyclops, discovering ancient alien ruins, and crossing an inland sea that almost destroyed them by sucking their amphibious chariot into a giant whirlpool, but the Network didn’t think the show could work with each and every week the family basically running from one random threat or another, they believed it needed an ongoing adversary.

 

Exit giant cyclops, enter Doctor Smith.

The meteor shower that disables the Jupiter 2 still occurs but no longer is it because of crappy navigational software but because of Dr. Smith being accidentally being trapped onboard the ship, having to do some last minute tinkering to insure the robot has its power pack so that it could “Destroy Jupiter 2” after the launch, his additional two hundred and fifty pounds of body weight causes the ship to veer off course into a swarm of meteoroids. I must say that both versions of the pilot do not paint a good picture of this mission for if the ship’s onboard systems can’t compensate for additional weight, and adjust the ship’s flight path to avoid destruction, it's not a very good computer. So Doctor Smith or no Doctor Smith this mission was pretty much doomed from the outset.

 

Large balls of tinfoil are one of the more dangerous hazards in space.

With the crew of the Jupiter 2 in suspended animation it’s up to Dr. Smith to save the ship from being bashed to pieces by the meteoroid swarm. (Science Note: At the speed the Jupiter 2 is traveling an impact with meteors the size we see here would have pretty much vaporized the ship.) Smith is able to wake up Major West, who is then able to steer the spacecraft out of harm’s way, and then the Robinson family are revived to discover that they are far from their intended destination.

What about the robot, you ask? Well Smith’s programming of the robot to destroy the Jupiter 2, and his attempts to stop it once he finds himself trapped aboard, is about the worst case of contrived padding I’ve ever seen. When Smith realizes he is an unfortunate passenger on a doomed craft he turns off the power to the robot but he only manages to move the on/off switch to the halfway position, and this simply causes the robot to lumber over to the control panel and move the switch back into the on position. Then later he tries to remove the robot’s power pack but is hampered when John Robinson is forced to turn off the artificial gravity so that they can do repairs on the ship.  After some goofy floating around he eventually does get the power pack off of the robot but then Will Robinson, not knowing that this mechanical marvel is their death sentence, places it back and then the robot finally gets to go on its rampage.

 

“Resistance is futile.”

With the jettisoning of the Jupiter 2 crash landing on an alien world, and fighting hostile aliens and environments that were in the original pilot, the writers decided to fill much of that missing time with Dr. Smith running around the ship like a total idiot, that Jonathan Harris is able to make this kind of work is a testament to his skill as an actor, but I think a little of it could have been trimmed and that time given to the rest of the crew. The remainder of the pilot episode deals with Major West being suspicious of Dr. Smith, a distrust that runs throughout most of the first season and has us wondering why the good Major didn’t just quietly murder the conniving bastard.  The episode then ends on a cliffhanger with John Robinson floating helpless in space after his tether snapped while trying to fix their navigational array during a space walk.  A gimmick that would later be popularized by the Adam West Batman series.

 

“Tune in next week. Same space-time, same space-channel.”

That this show is rife with wonky science is no surprise, for example the robots rampage somehow knocks the ship into hyperdrive by simply hitting a lever labeled HYPERDRIVE and it is never explained as to why the ship wasn't already in hyperdrive or that the ship had this capability at all, but as a family adventure show it was immensely fun and as a kid I ate the whole thing up with a spoon.  Add in the fact that The Robot (B-9 Class M-3 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot) is up there with Robby the Robot as one of the most beloved mechanical heroes in science fiction and you have a show that deserves to be remembered. Will the Netflix reboot capture a new generation of fans? Only time will tell, but at least the original series is still available and though the Robinson Family may still be lost in space they can always be found in our hearts.

A Quiet Place (2018) - Review

“Who are we if we can't protect our children?” This is a question put forward by Emily Blunt's character in director John Krasinski’s horror film A Quiet Place, which deals with a lone family trying to survive in world now populated with monsters, and it makes us wonder what we would do in a similar situation. Asid
Now a key ingredient to a successful horror film is the building and creating of tension, as suspense is ratcheted up by whatever particular situation of horror our heroes find themselves in, something this film does better than most horror films I’ve seen lately, as many films forget that suspense is not created by the movie having a cool monster or a nasty killer but on the audience’s desire for the protagonist to survive. I’d say in 90% of horror films I could give a rat’s ass if most of the cast got stabbed or eaten (Did anyone not relish the moment when Hud was finally killed in Cloverfield?) and most slasher films only seem to care about the “Final Girl” so why should we the audience be worried or invested in any other character being killed. It’s in this area that A Quiet Place excels as one is truly on the edge of your seat for the majority of this film’s running time because we do care about this family and we want them all to survive.

The movie drops us right into the middle a nightmare that we have at first have no understanding of, we are told it is “Day 89” but not what that signifies, and though this is clearly after some apocalyptic event we don’t know if it was caused by nuclear war, plague, monsters from another dimension or aliens. We are simply introduced to the Abbott family as they very quietly scrounge for food in an abandoned grocery story, and the “why” behind them being quiet is of course the crux of the film as we quickly learn the consequences of making a noise when the youngest member of the Abbott clan decides to turn on a loud electronic toy and pays the ultimate price at the hands/claws of this film’s monster.

 

Who needs two brothers, really?

Lee (John Krasinskii) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), the mother and father of the Abbott family, have managed to make a life for themselves in this post- apocalyptic world be instilling in their two remaining children the necessary skills to stay alive. Young Marcus (Noah Jupe) isn’t quite up to the task most of the time, being terrified of going out of their farmhouse/bunker, not that I can completely blame him, while his sister Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who being deaf has given her family an advantage because they were already able to communicate silently via ASL (American Sign Language), is stronger and braver if partly because she blames herself for the death of her little brother in that opening scene. From newspaper clippings we get the idea that these creatures, who may be alien invaders but the film never confirms this, and though apparently blind they have insanely keen hearing, thus the film’s tag line “If they hear you, they hunt you.” They are also incredibly fast and seemingly invulnerable, so if you make a sound you have basically signed your own death sentence. And guess what? Evelyn is pregnant, which of course posits two important questions,  How can the family survive with a newborn baby that is bound to spend half its time crying?” and “How quietly can a person give birth?”

 

Is there a special Lamaze class you can take?

A Quiet Place is the kind of horror film that just grabs you from the outset and never lets you go, the cast all give amazing performances with John Krasinski doing double duty as actor and director, and we get really cool monsters that look a little like they could be cousins to the Demogorgon from Stranger Things. A special shout out must be made to the film’s sound design department as not only do the handle the “silence” of the film so well but they also do an excellent job of switching audio perspectives between deaf Regan, her hearing capable family, and the weird ass monsters that hunt by sound. This is a movie I highly recommend catching  as soon as possible as a darkened theater with an Atmos sound system is probably the best way to view A Quiet Place…well, as long as there isn’t a jerk behind you loudly eating popcorn.

Final Thoughts:

• If you want to keep your family alive maybe don’t walk in single file with your youngest bringing up the rear.
• Lee created a soundproof bunker for the baby. If I was that family I’d be spending most of my time in that bunker.
• They cover pathways with sand so as to mute their footsteps. This is ingenious if you happen to live in area that never has wind.
• I loved the warning lights and systems of audio distractions they use.
• The “Light the Beacons” scene was a nice way to show that they were not the last people on Earth.
• A Quiet Place is mostly subtitled so young kids and illiterates beware.
•  

Special Note: Two seats down from me was a mother holding a baby, this had me quite worried as I’d head this was a very “quiet” movie, but not only did the baby not make a sound but as I got up to leave the theater I noticed the mother using sign language to her companion. Such a nice moment to end a great movie going experience on.
e from curl up in a ball and cry that is. 

ScoobyNatural (2018) – Review

When Sam and Dean are not saving the world from an oncoming apocalypse, or bickering over keeping secrets from one another, they occasionally get to have a mystery that is just pure fun with no dire consequences looming in the wings. The episode titled ScoobyNatural is a great example of the show runners knowing exactly what their fans have been dying to see, even if they didn’t know it, with a crossover to end all crossovers as the Winchester Brothers team up with Scooby and the gang.

With a show that has lasted thirteen seasons so far, which is especially impressive when you consider how many end of the world scenarios and monsters of the week the writers have had to come up with, it’s good to know that they can still surprise the fans with a delightfully goofy episode. In the season six episode “The French Mistake” the brothers fell into an alternate world where their life of hunting monsters was a television show and Sam and Dean had to pretend to be actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles to solve the mystery to get home, so now when the brothers find themselves in the animated world of Scooby-Doo they kind of take it in stride.

 

Dean also gets to try his best moves on long time crush Daphne Blake.

The episode starts off like a routine "monster of the week" with Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) fighting and dispatching a monster/ghost, only in this case it’s a large plush dinosaur at a pawn shop that allows the boys to cathartically kill Barney, and they seemingly dispatch it with their usual flair. The pawn shop owner (Michael Girardin) is so appreciated of the boys saving his life that he offers them anything in the store, an offer Dean can’t resist, and thus the “Dean Cave” soon finds a large flat screen television as its new centerpiece. Of course there is more going on than just a random killer toy attack, that this kind of thing does randomly happen to the Winchesters is part of the show's charm, and so upon turning on the television the two brothers are zapped into a cartoon dimension, one that contains another mystery solving group who just so happen to have a talking dog.

Note: The episode Sam and Dean find themselves trapped in is “A Night of Fright Is No Delight” from season one of Scooby-Doo, Where are You!”

When Sam comments that being sucked into a cartoon is “Beyond weird” Dean wisely replies, “Well, and "beyond weird" is kind of our thing. So whatever happened, we'll figure it out. This is a case, so let's work it.”  It's lucky for Sam that Dean is a super fan of the Scooby-Doo cartoon and so solving the mystery should be a breeze, but when Sam suggest that if Dean knows the ending of the mystery why don’t they just “Skip to the end” Dean fires back “Sometimes it’s about the journey not the destination.” Of course Sam wisely deduces that his brother just wants time to get with Daphne (Grey DeLisle), his long time animated crush.  Dean's plan hits a nasty wrinkle when the murder of Cousin Simple veers from how the episode should have happened; instead of Cousin Simple being mysteriously missing, as he was originally, he is instead found stabbed to death and lying in a pool of his own blood. This needless to say kind of freaks out Dean, “Dude, this is not the way things went down in this episode. I remember everything that happened in Scooby-Doo, and no one ever got stabbed in the back and ended up in a pool of their own blood” and Dean is even more put off by Fred (Frank Welker) and the gang’s rather nonchalant attitude to murder and gore.

 

Aside from the standards “Jeepers!” “Jinkies!” “Zoinks!” and “Ruh-roh!” the gang take this rather well.

The plot of the original “A Night of Fright Is No Delight” dealt with Scooby-Doo finding out that he was a beneficiary in the will of Colonel Beauregard Sanders, whom Scooby had saved from drowning in a fish pond years before, and if the heirs stayed the night in this haunted house they would divide up a million dollars. As this is a Scooby-Doo Mystery it would turn out to be the lawyer Cosgood Creeps and his partner Crawls behind the ghost shenanigans, as they were trying to scare all of the heirs off of the island so they could keep the million dollars to themselves, but this time round Cousin Simple is brutally stabbed to death, and later when Cousin Slicker is found torn into pieces Dean comes to the conclusion that, “This cartoon is haunted.”

 

Fred’s comment after seeing this, “Well, that’s not good,” and then just calmly walking away is priceless.

What follows is a brilliant comic homage to one of my favorite childhood shows with Sam and Dean trying to convince the Scooby gang that they are dealing with actual ghosts and not their usual unscrupulous real estate developers, with Dean futilely hitting on Daphne who is completely oblivious to his intentions and Velma (Kate Micucci) being hypnotically drawn to Sam and his “linebacker shoulders” and it is all comedy gold with some of the classic tropes of the series lovingly rolled out.

Here are a few of the nice nods to the original Scooby-Doo cartoons:

• Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby (Frank Welker) have their standard huge appetites and Dean does his best to match them bite for bite.
• There is of course no sex in the Scooby Universe so when Dean offers to share a room with Daphne she innocently informs him, “Boys and girls don’t sleep in the same room, silly.”
• Fred’s plan of “Split up and search the house for clues” is met by Sam’s reluctance to separate as the brothers would then have a harder time keeping the gang safe.
• A startled Scooby and Shaggy will leap into the arms of one of the gang only now it's Castiel (Misha Collins) who also got sucked into the cartoon world after finding the cursed television still on.
• Fred will come up with an elaborate trap that will fail.
• One of the episodes highlight brings us the classic “Chase Montage” only instead of the usually 60s pop song providing background music we get the theme to “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!”

 

Keen eyed fans will also notice a certain Scrappy Doo during this scene.

One of the best moments in this episode is when the Scooby gang finally come to grips with the fact that they are actually dealing with a supernatural force and then they all proceed to have mental breakdowns.  Fred bemoans the fact that, “We’ve been stopping real estate developers when we could have been hunting Dracula” and Daphne has an existential crisis when she realizes, “If there are ghosts that means there is an afterlife, Heaven, Hell.”

 

“Am I going to Hell?”

Will Sam and Dean be able to pull the Scooby gang together in time to defeat the evil spectre? Who is behind our heroes being sucked into a cartoon world? Does Dean have a shot at getting into Daphne’s pants? All these questions and more will be answered in one of the best episodes in the show’s thirteen seasons. The comedy blend between the two shows works so beautifully that one almost wishes we could have regular team-ups with the Winchester’s and Mystery Incorporated, but if that never occurs we at least have this one moment of animated madness to keep us happy. So if you are a fan of either Scooby-Doo or Supernatural, and for some reason didn’t manage to catch this episode when it aired, do your best to track it down as I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

 

Will we ever again get a cross-over this fun?