May the Fourth Be With You: Star Wars (1977)

Okay, it may not be the best movie ever made.  It may not even be the best movie I have ever seen.  However, I can safely assert that Star Wars (1977) is the movie that most changed my young life. 

I first saw director George Lucas’s blockbuster space opera when I was seven years-old.  Up to that point, I had never witnessed a fantasy/sci-fi/monster movie crafted on such a grand scale, or one presented with such an incredible, unshakable sense of reality.

Unlike many genre films of the epoch (for example, Damnation Alley [1977]) there was never even a single moment during Star Wars when the “spell” was broken, or the fantasy facade broke down to accommodate a bad special effect, a lousy performance, a cheap set/costume, or some other weak production component. 

Rather, that atmosphere of reality – of a different and fantastic reality, no less – was rigorously and impeccably sustained for two hours.

And because of that fact, Star Wars was the most exhilarating movie I’d seen up to that point.  I remember coming out of the movie for the first time and feeling like I had been holding my breath for two hours.  Then, over a period of several weeks, I saw the film in the theater at least three more times...and felt precisely the same way.

The great joy of Star Wars, even today, all comes down to George Lucas’s incredible ability to ground his otherworldly “space opera” world in a reality that is immediately recognizable to all of us.  For instance, underneath the flashy lasers and colored light sabers, or the strange aliens and robots, the film boasts this driving, human feeling of yearning, of almost anticipatory anxiety.

Star Wars’ lead character, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gazes up at the night sky of Tatooine, and he wonders what awaits him.  Where will he go next?  When does his life really begin? When does he finally get to grow up and chart his own destiny?  What is he supposed to believe in?

Lucas grounds the viewer in Luke’s personal “coming of age” story, yet that’s far from the only grounding the director accomplishes here.  Without explaining in significant terms a back-story, Lucas crafts in Star Wars a lived-in world which nonetheless points to previous adventures, and to a larger universe beyond the main narrative. 

It’s such a big (and yet consistent…) place, in fact, that it almost can’t all fit within the boundaries of the movie frame.  Thu,s at times, it almost seems as if Lucas didn’t make it up his universe at all, or build it all from scratch.  Rather, it’s as though he took a camera in-hand and actually traveled to a galaxy far, far away, filmed what he saw there, and brought that footage back for us to enjoy.

The film’s dialogue, filled with descriptors like “this time,” or “no more,” captures obliquely the notion that this adventure is set on just another day in this faraway galaxy, and that there are many, many other adventures to witness, and personalities to meet there.  The film boasts many half-explored implications, from intimations about unseen characters like The Emperor, Captain Antilles and Jabba the Hutt, to tantalizing hints about the previous adventures of Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, R2-D2 and C-3P0. The scenery or set design itself possesses a kind of unexplored depth and breadth. There's a staircase leading up -- where precisely? -- beyond Docking Bay 94 on Tattooine. There's the packed-to-the-gills interior of a bustling, junk-filled Sandcrawler.  There are even alligators in the sewers, so-to-speak, or rather a Dia Noga in the trash compactor.

The visual form of Star Wars reflects this narrative content in a most unusual and resonant fashion.  Specifically, Lucas utilizes visual homage or visual tributes to previous and well-established cinematic productions to help us -- the audience -- process quickly and thoroughly the essential nature of life in the world of the Galactic Empire. 

So even if we don’t consciously recognize or identify all the visual touches in terms of the original source material (such as The Hidden Fortress [1958], Metropolis [1927] or 633 Squadron [1964]), our eyes nonetheless understand the touches as belonging to some common “language” we all share.  Star Wars is an accomplished blend of the familiar with the unfamiliar, the past with the present, and with the (imaginative) future.  And Lucas’s choice to re-purpose imagery from film history is one key to help us understand his universe.  Underneath this technique of tribute or homage is a simple yet elegant message about man's nature, and not least of all, his spirituality.  In short, Star Wars offers a renewal of movie spirituality in an era of anti-heroes, cynicism, and the personal, idiosyncratic cinema.

“If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.”

While being pursued by the Emperor’s minion, Lord Darth Vader (David Prowse), Princess Leia of Alderaan (Carrie Fisher) hides the tactical plans for an Imperial battle station called the Death Star with a small droid called R2-D2 (Kenny Baker). 

With his counterpart, protocol droid C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) in tow, R2-D2 escapes to the desert world of Tatooine with the goal of finding former Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and soliciting his aid.

On Tatooine, however, the droids are captured by scavengers called Jawas and sold to the Skywalker farm. There, a young man, Luke (Hamill), hopes to leave his dreary life working at the moisture farm, and tender his application to the Academy.  But his uncle resists.  He doesn't want Luke to go.  He doesn't want Luke to grow up.

Soon, Luke and the droids meet up with Kenobi,  an old man who urges the young man to help him  reach Alderaan with R2 and the technical schematics.  After his aunt and uncle are murdered by Imperial Stormtroopers, Luke agrees to join Obi-Wan's quest.  They book passage to Alderaan aboard the Millennium Falcon, captained by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and co-piloted by a Wookie named Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew).

Unfortunately, the commanding officer on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) plans to make Princess Leia reveal the location of the secret rebel base, and destroys her home planet of Alderaan to coerce her cooperation.  

When the Millennium Falcon arrives in the Alderaan system from Tatooine, it finds not a beautiful planet, but the Death Star.

Now, Luke and his friends must rescue Leia, Ben must confront his old student, Vader, and they all must get the plans to the rebels, before the Empire and the Death Star carry the day…

For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the 

Old Republic. Before the dark times... before the Empire.

When you stand back and gaze at Star Wars from a good distance, you can detect that the film tells a very old story: the hero's journey.  But it tells that tale in a new way, and in a new (final?) frontier: outer space.  

Rather, it is the explicit details of the narrative that are new to audiences, from the history of the Jedi Knights and The Force to the explanations of such things as snub-nosed fighters, T.I.E. fighters, tractor beams, hyper-drive, Wookies, land-speeders and droids.  The way to make all these people, concepts, and ideas immediately understandable, Lucas understands, is to mine much of film history for visual antecedents, ones that make the story graspable for audiences, even though they don't know the precise details of the Old Republic, the Galactic Empire, or the Clone Wars.

From the film’s opening crawl, this is the very technique Lucas regularly deploys.  In particular, the crawl that appears immediately after the film's title harks back to Flash Gordon (1936), and the title cards used in each serial opener. In Flash Gordon, such screens conveyed important information about previous episodes in the thirteen installment production.  This crawl is actually our first visual indication that Star Wars is a pastiche, or a work of art imitating and honoring the work of previous artists.   It also sets the jaunty, almost retro tone of the picture. By recruiting this technique from the Flash Gordon films, Star Wars announces, specifically, its intention to be pulpy, lighthearted, swashbuckling fantasy and fun.

This was not a small detail in the 1970s.  The disco decade was an era when such swashbuckling adventure films were not in vogue.  In terms of the sci-fi genre, Dystopian-styled films dominated the landscape (The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and Damnation Alley, for example.).  Not coincidentally, the same decade was the age of growling, violent anti-heroes like Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (of the Death Wish films).  

By commencing Star Wars with a 1930s-era, serial-like crawl, George Lucas effectively renounced contemporary cinema, and reached back to an older tradition, a “golden age” of more innocent fantasy fare. Not incidentally, the screenplay seems to share his point of view, describing the light saber of the old Republic as an "elegant" weapon for a more "civilized time."  In other words, the past inside the Star Wars universe, and the past of Hollywood history outside Star Wars were both more elegant and civilized than the present of the Galactic Empire/anti-hero cinema.

Our invitation to adventure in a more elegant and civilized time: Flash Gordon (1936).

Our invitation to innocence in a cynical time: Star Wars (1977).

After the opening crawl, Star Wars very much begins to deliberately ape elements and details from Akira Kurosawa’s film, The Hidden Fortress.  That film also used “wipes” as visual transitions between scenes, but more importantly, involved two pseudo-comic individuals, Tahei and Mataschici, who escaped a pitched battle, wandered for a time in a wasteland, and were then captured and enslaved.  They then became involved with the rescue of a Princess and the exploits of a General.  

This familiar sequence of events is repeated with the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars.  Two likable (and funny) robots escape from the rebel blockade runner battle, become lost in the Tatooine desert, and unwittingly become involved with the rescue of a princess and the exploits of a Jedi-Knight.  The point in both films is to highlight two unassuming, even “common” individuals who become caught up in huge, important events beyond their control, and even their understanding.  It's a ground's eye view of world-shaking incidents, of history unfolding.

In terms of Star Wars, the first twenty minutes of the film or so mostly revolve around the droids and their exploits, and this kind of “macro” focus is one way to introduce the Star Wars universe without inundating audiences with tech-talk and difficult-to-pronounce names or sci-fi concepts.  Matters of galactic import (like the Death Star), can wait, and Lucas introduces his core concepts one at a time without risk of sensory overkill or confusion.

Two common men get caught up in world-changing events, in The Hidden Fortress (1958).

Two lowly droids get caught up in galaxy-changing events, in Star Wars (1977).

A trek through the wilderness, their future uncertain.

A trek through the desert, their future uncertain.

The first hour of the Lucas film is, on retrospect, my favorite portion of the film. After things settle down a bit, there's a quiet yet vital scene set in Ben Kenobi’s desert home. What Star Wars accomplishes here, again, is revolutionary, if in an unassuming kind of way.  Kenobi quietly and steadfastly introduces us to his faith.  He describes the Force as the thing that “gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”  

Again dismissing the tenets of the contemporary and cynical 1970s Hollywood, Star Wars thus reintroduces “spirituality” to a cinema that had asked, explicitly, “Is God Dead” in films such as 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, and also, to some degree, Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973).  Certainly  Lucas's film is not a strict re-assertion of Christianity, necessarily, but rather a non-denominational acknowledgment of man’s inherent spirituality and interconnection.  The Force, like belief and faith in Jesus Christ, is a promise of immortality in  the Star Wars universe.  We see this quality of belief depicted in Ben Kenobi’s heroic death – or disappearance – after his duel with Vader.

This famous Time cover set the tone for the late 1960s and early 1970s American cinema.

But Star Wars re-introduces spirituality in the form of "The Force..."

And the film even promises "eternal life" for those who believe in its precepts.

As Star Wars continues, the film spends more time in space, and indeed, in space combat.  Again, George Lucas chooses to make his “space opera” one that visually resonates in terms of film history.  When Luke and Han take to the guns of The Millennium Falcon to destroy several pursuing TIE fighters, Lucas explicitly references combat visuals from Twelve O’Clock High (1949), a film about American flying fortresses in aerial combat during World War II.  

Once more, viewers may not exactly recognize the specific reference, but they absolutely "get" the allusion to a previous  global conflict, and a previous form of warfare.  We may not understand how lasers work, or what powers TIE Fighters, but we do understand the settings and dynamics of aerial combat, even translated to space.

The underside gun of a flying fortress in Twelve O'Clock High.

A view on the inside looking out (from the same film) as a gunner targets evading fighters.

From Star Wars: Targeting evading fighters.

And again, an underside gun mount.

The battle to destroy the Death Star follows the same film making approach. Only this time, Lucas re-casts a critical set-piece from the 1964 British film 633 Squadron as his point of origin and point of audience recognition.  In that film, several Allied Bombers make a run against a Nazi base lodged between two mountains (essentially in a trench...).  As the bombers make their attack run, they  attempt to avoid blistering anti-aircraft guns.  There is also an initial false start, and a false detonation at the target site.  Additionally, enemy fighters swoop in to challenge the bombers and pick them off as they focus on their quarry on the ground.   If you’re at all familiar with Star Wars, you will recognize the setting, sequence, and outcome of the Death Star trench scene as being very similar indeed to 633 Squadron.

The point isn’t that Lucas stole anything.  The point is that when “you’ve taken your first step into a larger world,” to quote Obi Wan Kenobi, elements of that world need to be understandable immediately, so that other important concepts can be grasped.  In other words, if you’re focusing on something like how a tractor beam works, or what is hyper-drive is, you’re not paying attention to the details of Luke’s quest, and Lucas’s story.  

By updating old cinematic imagery, Lucas conveys his story -- and his message about spirituality -- in a way that we visually accept and understand, almost at once.

From 633 Squadron: the Nazi's strike back at attacking Allied aircraft.

From Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back at attacking rebel spaceships.

On the horizon, enemy fighters swoop in for the kill (in 633 Squadron).

TIE Fighters swoop in for the kill (in Star Wars).

In the trench, planes avoid blistering gunfire. (633 Squadron).

In the trench, rebel X-fighters avoid blistering gunfire (Star Wars).

I’ve long argued that Star Wars may not be a perfect film, but that the film offers a perfect presentation of a galaxy “far, far, away,” and I think that’s the point of all the tributes and re-framing of scenes from The Hidden Fortress or 633 Squadron.  But the deeper point is the one I mentioned in connection with the Force and Flash Gordon.  George Lucas’s epic space fantasy serves as an explicit indictment of the 1970s self-involved “personal cinema,” and harks back to a time of greater innocence and greater adventure in terms of movie narratives. 

I suspect this is the reason why, seriously, that George Lucas altered the dynamic of the Han Solo/Greedo sequence. In that scene as it was originally crafted, Han fires his blaster, and Greedo doesn’t shoot at all.  It’s an almost anti-hero, Dirty Harry-esque moment for the Solo character.  I believe that’s precisely the kind of aesthetic Lucas wanted to eschew and avoid, and so on retrospect, did just that by making Greedo shoot first.  Han’s act was thus transformed from one of preemptive murder to self-defense.  I’m not arguing that his selection was the right one, or that Lucas should have tampered with the scene, only that some of the changes Lucas has forged in terms of Star Wars tend to play into this very notion of Star Wars as pastiche, of a call-back to an earlier, more innocent generation of film productions.  

Even the idea to title his Star Wars films numerically and with melodramatic sub-title fits in with this tradition of the crawl concept of Flash Gordon which boasted titles such as “The Unseen Peril.”  That sounds a lot like The Phantom Menace, doesn’t it?

If Han Solo shoots first, is he Dirty Harry?

The two concepts I have discussed most frequently in this review are: 1.) how Lucas grounds the reality of Star Wars by creating a lived-in, recognizable universe and 2.) how Lucas attempts to hark back to a more innocent, swashbuckling, spiritual age of movies.  If you link those two concepts, you will arrive at my unified theory of Star Wars, and at the very essence of the film itself.  Star Wars presents a universe so authentically-rendered and well-thought out that you can truly believe in it. The careful forging of the world discourages cynicism or disbelief.  

The idea of “May the Force be With You,” not unlike the exclamation “Go with God,” is inherently about belief; about believing in yourself and your capacity to tap the spiritual center of existence itself.  Yet no one would possibly believe in Lucas's world or in that inspirational message if the special effects in Star Wars were unconvincing, if the aliens looked hokey, or if the space battles were confusing. 

I believe that by referencing these older films and older visuals, Lucas was making certain that we could relate to Star Wars. It’s a unique and intriguing technique, and I submit it actually works very well.  The later films in the franchise depend on vast, special effects set-pieces with digital backdrops and drooling creatures, and yet the greatest emotional thrill I felt during the saga occurred here, in the original Star Wars, as Luke and Leia swung boldly across a chasm together, and John Williams’ scored blared heroically underneath their leap. 

A boy, a girl and a universe.  The thrill and appeal of Star Wars are almost literally that simple. Despite making a high-tech film filled with laser blasts, spaceships, robots, and a complex internal history Lucas directs us through this complexity and gets right to the mythic, spiritual heart of his film.

As of today -- how many years after I first saw the film?? -- that pure-hearted (but intellectually-conceived) approach still works for me.  

Guest Post: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026)

Imagine If LOST Took Place at a Norms

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could have been a piercing satire. Instead, the current apocalyptic comedy settles for scattered brilliance. The film is packed with provocative ideas and anchored by a game cast, but director Gore Verbinski’s tone veers wildly off, and the climax falls flat like a plate of frozen nachos.

A zany, manic stranger (Sam Rockwell) storms into a Norms diner with a bomb strapped to his body, claiming the world is ending. He insists he has time traveled to this exact moment, and this same group of customers, countless times before. Each time, his mission fails, forcing him to blow himself up and start over. This round, he’s altering the variables, recruiting different diners to join his mission to stop AI from destroying the planet. Is he insane, prescient, or both? With no proof beyond his frantic conviction, those dragged along must risk their lives on the word of a man who may be either a time cowboy or a complete lunatic.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson, who co-authored the charmingly intimate yet epic horror comedy Love and Monsters, brings a similar sense of whimsy amidst the gore. His characters have real bite, and the script doesn’t shy away from provocative territory - America’s frighteningly blasé response to school shootings, youth’s obsession with social media, and an exhausted humanity that would rather be swallowed by the Matrix than confront the real world. Unfortunately, these ideas never coalesce into a satisfying or meaningful conclusion.

The talented cast does its best to keep the humor dry and grounded. Rockwell, reliable as ever, channels his frenetic energy into something genuinely funny. Juno Temple is both pained and hopeful as a mother fiercely protective of her clone child, while Haley Lu Richardson, drifting through the chaos in a grimy princess dress, seems intentionally checked out yet remains oddly compelling.

I’ve always been a Verbinski fan. Pirates of the Caribbean redefined what audiences expected from a theme-park adaptation, The Ring was a model of tight construction, and even his much-maligned The Mexican was brilliantly subversive. Here, though, he loses control of the wheel - and the whole thing careens off a cliff. It is possible to satirize flippancy without being flippant, but that’s exactly the trap Verbinski falls into, and it grows tiresome fast.

With a surer directorial hand, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could have been a classic end-of-the-world comedy. Instead, it’s as lost as its characters. Early in the film, Zazie Beetz asks, “Are you high?” It’s a fair question - one that could just as easily be directed at the filmmakers.

 

Guest Post: Project Hail Mary (2026)

The Heartwarming Tale of a Boy and His Rock

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Project Hail Mary should not work. Since Steven Spielberg introduced the world to a squishy, childlike alien in 1982, we’ve endured decades of imitators trying to cash in on the man-and-alien friendship. So, on paper, Ryan Gosling cozying up to a rock-shaped extraterrestrial sounds brain-numbing. Then again, a comedy about sentient toy blocks didn’t exactly sound like a humdinger either. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie), however, have made a career out of bringing impossible stories to dazzling life, and Project Hail Mary - like the implications of its title - is a winning touchdown.

Set in the near future, the entire solar system is in danger of extinction - well, even more so than we are at this precise moment. Gosling plays a scientist who awakens on a spaceship as the lone survivor of a suicide mission to discover what is dimming our sun. Along the way, he teams up with an alien, and the two form a bond as they slowly learn each other’s languages and customs. Together, they attempt to uncover why one specific planet in a damaged region of space has remained immune to the organism attacking our sun and other celestial bodies.

Part of what makes Project Hail Mary so compelling is Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel. Goddard and Weir previously partnered on 2015’s The Martian, and like that Oscar-nominated film, the screenplay translates heady scientific concepts into something relatable for those of us who aren’t exactly science-minded (my hand’s raised). Even more than The Martian, though, Project Hail Mary leans into the comedy of watching an unprepared, untrained, non-astronaut attempt to operate a massive space vessel. That clumsiness becomes part of the charm, endearing Gosling’s character to the audience.

The script also earns its flashbacks - not as a cheap storytelling trick, but as memories slowly returning to Gosling’s character after awakening from a coma. These trips into the past feel organic, motivated by character rather than convenience.

Gosling himself is a key component of the film’s success. He plays everything with complete sincerity, never winking at the audience or undercutting the absurdity of his situation. Most importantly, he treats the alien as a living being, which gives the audience permission to invest emotionally in their relationship.

Instead of leaning entirely on CGI, Lord and Miller smartly cast puppeteer James Ortiz to portray Rocky, an alien who looks like several boulders fused together. Backed by a team of puppeteers - the “Rockyteers” - Ortiz’s vocal performance grounds the character in surprising warmth. The directors also have fun with perspective, occasionally rotating the camera, even on Earth, to remind us that what we perceive as “upright” is merely the magic of gravity doing its job.

Most of the supporting cast only gets a line or two, but Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) makes the most of her time as a determined scientist - cold, exacting, and quietly devastated by the implications of the choices she’s forced to make. Karaoke scenes have become a tired cinematic trope but watching a tightly wound Hüller wail Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” as a desperate plea to save humanity is unexpectedly - and deeply - moving.

Somehow, Project Hail Mary makes molecular biology, the end of the world, and a rock puppet feel intimate. It’s a film grounded not in bravado, but in problem-solving, awkward communication, and the slow realization that survival isn’t a solo mission. That a story this strange ends up feeling this sincere is its greatest strength - and like its implausible friendship, it’s one that remains after you’ve left the theater.

50 Year Ago: Who Can Kill A Child (1976)

There's an old saying in Hollywood warning actors not to work with animals or children.

If you happen to find yourself in a vintage 1970s-era horror film, however, you should amend that proverb a bit. May I suggest: don't piss off animals or children?

Because they will have vengeance, and there will be blood....

Case in point, the rather remarkable, half-century old Who Can Kill A Child? (1976), a tense, Spanish-made genre gem. Like all great films (and great horror films) Who Can Kill A Child? reveals something important about the times in which it was crafted, a context which also gave rise to other child-centric horrors such as It's Alive (1973), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976).

As David Frum, the notable conservative scholar wrote in How We Got Here, The 70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better of Worse): " It's hard to remember an era when American popular culture was as nervous of children as in the 1970s." (page 106).

Frum further points out that the number of births dropped to its lowest level since the Great Depression in the year 1974. This was despite the fact that the baby boomer generation -- a huge generation -- was now of child-bearing age.

So what the hell was occurring in America during the 1970s to turn innocent children into icons of fear, anxiety and terror? Well, a recession and gas/energy shortage made children an expensive proposition, to start with. Plus, there was the contentious war for sexual equality (characterized by the controversy around the Equal Rights Amendment...). One front in that war concerned reproductive rights. The latest salvo was the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court.

Also -- especially where horror movies are concerned -- it is virtually impossible to separate the idea of "children" from the idea of "tomorrow." Kids are an explicit and recognizable representation of the future...our shared legacy. If something terrible happens to the children, the future becomes grim. If the children turn evil, again our outlook is desperate. If the children happen to turn against adults for a valid reason, then we have failed totally, and our civilization is doomed.

These notions are at play in the unsettling Who Can Kill A Child?, which depicts a British married couple, biologist Tom (Lewis Fiander) and pregnant Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), as they countenance true horror. The couple decides to take a vacation on the remote island of Almanzora, a place where "very few tourists ever go." It's a four hour boat ride from the mainland to Almanzora, and though the island "certainly looks peaceful," nothing could be further from the truth.

At first the island appears deserted, but before long, Tom and Evelyn learn from a shattered, lone survivor that all the adults are dead. Worse, the islanders were killed by their maniacal children; tykes who suddenly and inexplicably turned homicidal a night earlier. Before long, Tom and Evelyn are fighting for their lives as roving bands of murderous children block their escape route at every turn.

"Its as though they thought we - the adults - were their enemies," Tom realizes (a bit too late...).

On Almanzora, Tom witnesses a multitude of horrors, all while protecting his expectant wife. He sees a violent pinata game involving an elderly man strung up by his feet, a circle of giggling children, and a sharp sickle. He also sees the grisly aftermath of several massacres, including a beating death, and a vaguely sexual attack inside the island church. Finally, Tom and Evelyn -- now going into labor -- take their final refuge in a police station. The children arm themselves, and Tom finds a machine gun....

He's left with an unenviable choice. For...who can kill a child? Another important question: if our children rebel against us, could we, would we and should we fight back? As the film's climax reminds the viewer, making the terror identifiable, "There are lots of children in the world..."

Who Can Kill A Child? is the sort of horror film that gets under your skin through stealthy but effective means. It opens like a routine travelogue, as we follow Tom and Evelyn through the apparently mundane experience of their foreign vacation. The hotel at Benavis is booked, so they're sent to a house in the "old part of the city." They settle in, get directions to the beach, and then purchase rolls of film. That night, Tom and Evelyn enjoy fireworks and share an intimate (and well-written) discussion about Fellini, death, and the future in their rented bedroom. Nothing earth shattering at all...just ominously normal and "human." These moments establish the characters as real, but not in heavy-handed or soap opera fashion. It simply feels like we've gone abroad with them for a few days. Tom and Evelyn are likable and easy to relate to, a fact which serves the movie well.

Once we reach the island with Tom and Evelyn, the horror mounts. In little, clever bursts at first. For instance, there's a portentous moment early on (before the nature of the children is revealed...) in which Tom sees a little boy fishing on a pier. Tom tries to peek under the lid of the boy's fishing basket to see what he's caught, but the boy won't permit it. He shoots Tom a murderous, aggressive look. We never actually find out what's under that lid, but the moment is disturbing, and your imagination takes flight.

Other moments are crafted with more than a modicum of skill. There's an absolutely brilliant shot featured deep in the third act, an awe-inspiring reveal over one character's shoulder and head...to a background mountaintop populated by "watching," unnoticed children. The move in question is a simple camera pivot, but one perfectly executed.

Or notice the manner in which the camera doesn't move at all during a critical juncture, as a central character slips slowly and inexorably out of lower right-hand corner frame for the last time, making the death all the more significant and powerful. And the director appropriately moves to hand-held, immediate camera-work during the siege in the police station, which ramps up the anxiety.

When Who Can Kill a Child's narrative calls for bluntness, we get that too, with shocking and egregious results. Late in the film, Tom is confronted with a barricade of children, three or four rows deep. They won't budge and just stand there, smiling at him. After a moment's hesitation, Tom opens fire with a machine gun, bloodying and murdering his youthful opponents. The gun fire is like a slap in the face...we're not used to such screen violence leveraged against children.

Even that spiky moment is superseded by a final, high-speed, nail-biting confrontation on a pier, with an attempted escape in a row boat. Children launch an ambush from the pier, jumping off and attacking Tom in the boat with ferocity and velocity. He frigging beats them back with a wood board, a knife, and any other weapon he can find, and the movie doesn't shy away from revealing the bloody results of the massacre.

Of course, I don't encourage violence or even the depiction of violence against children, but horror should be about the shattering of societal taboos and movie decorum. And horror is also - indeed - about nightmare scenarios rendered real, and asking the viewer to identify with "what it would be like" to face them. Who Can Kill a Child is both taboo-shattering, and identification-provoking, and by my reckoning that makes it a great bit of genre cinema. You'll be shocked at what you witness, yet at the same time, you may want to slap Evelyn silly when she refuses to reckon with the "reality" of the situation that the children on the island are homicidal.

The film's ending is comparable to Night of the Living Dead, with a slow-to-adjust society failing to understand the nature of the enemy and making a bad mistake. In a strange way, the movie is also a kind of "revenge of nature flick," like Day of the Animals or Hitchcock's The Birds...only with kids instead of animals. And of course, it's harder to shoot down a giggling child than a grizzly bear or pecking bird, right?

Who Can Kill a Child? is not perfect. The film mis-steps badly by opening with a nine minute, documentary "atrocity reel" about real crimes committed against children across the globe. We see starving children in Africa, murdered children in Pakistan, and young victims of the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts. These scenes are true and appalling and powerful, but I question their necessity in a horror film. They start the movie off with a gruesome, unnecessary heaviness, which, in some senses, undercut the very ordinariness of the travelogue and the slow-escalation of horror that follows. Essentially, they make the movie less effective because they telegraph the point of the narrative before the very narrative has begun.

The images in the mini-doc are powerful, but unnecessary. The director makes his point (about the world's cruelty to children) without them all-together. In the body of the film proper, Evelyn sees footage on a camera shop TV of children dying in the Philippines. A shop owner says "the world is crazy. In the end, the ones who always suffer are the children." Message transmitted and received. The graphic imagery at the beginning is therefore just heavy-handed overkill.

Also, non-horror fans might rightly complain that Tom and Evelyn have apparently been born without the gene that allows them to sense the warning signs of incipient danger. This is something horror aficionados (like myself), willingly accept...because what fun would it be if Tom and Evelyn did recognize the danger and abandoned the island in their boat before the horror escalated? Horror fans will willingly (and happily) suspend disbelief, but non-genre fans may be screaming at the film's characters to get off the island NOW!!!.

Who Can Kill A Child? also shares much in common with the Children of the Corn franchises of the 1980s and 1990s, yet I should be absolutely clear: it's also a better-made scary movie than any one of them (even the '84 original). After watching this film, you may even want to amend a second proverb.

Forget "never trust anyone over 30." How about, "never trust anyone under 12?"

Library Journal Recommends Horror Films of the 2010s

To my delight and gratitude, Library Journal has reviewed my new book (and final contribution to this series), Horror Films of the 2010s. 

 Here is an excerpt of their review:

"Horror reflects the anxieties of an age, and Muir connects the films from 2010-2019 to economic unease, political polarization, and institutional mistrust in the post-Great Recession era... Muir goes out on a high note, documenting 275 movies with his trademark insight and wit." — Library Journal. 

Watch Abnormal Fixation: The Complete Season 1

 

30 Years Ago: Space: Above and Beyond: "R & R" (April 12, 1996)

Imagine a "gritty, gutsy" (per TV Guide...) futuristic war drama colored in hues of mood battleship gray. It takes place in deep space following a devastating sneak attack on humanity by an unfathomable and merciless enemy.

Our protagonists in the war effort (which we are "losing badly") are young, attractive (but headstrong and angsty) pilots. Much of the action occurs inside the cockpits of cramped space fighters and in military briefing rooms. The universe depicted by the series is one of murky morality and hard truths which shift in the troublesome and ambiguous sands of wartime. For instance, the specter of torture (here termed "re-education") is brought up in one installment.

You don't think I'm talking about the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, do you?

Instead, the first paragraph of this review describes the Glen Morgan/James Wong sci-fi war drama, Space: Above and Beyond, a mid-nineties-era TV endeavor that aired on the Fox Network for one season (and twenty-three hour-long episodes), and which concerned a squadron of rookie - but committed - soldiers serving in the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry aboard a mobile space headquarters; not the Galactica, but the Saratoga.

Set in the year 2063, Space: Above and Beyond sets its stories in the immediate aftermath of a devastating ambush on an Earth Colony ship bound for distant Tellus, ("the furthest any human has ever ventured,") and thus this nearly-forgotten series imagined a futuristic 9/11 scenario...six years before 9/11 (and eight years before the Ron Moore remake of BSG). The enemy in this case was not the Cylon race, but the menacing and mysterious "Chigs," a derogatory slang name which refers to chiggers... fleas which burrow into the skin.

What remains so interesting about Space: Above and Beyond is not merely that the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica co-opted so much from its look, feel and narrative without so much as a "by your command," but rather that the creators' of this cult series seemed to understand - far earlier than most of us - how truly divided Americans were becoming as a people; and how - as bad as it might be - a war effort could conceivably bring us together.

Some context: Space: Above and Beyond premiered just a year after the 1994 "Contract with America" Republican Congress swept the elections, a stinging rebuke to President Clinton and a victory for Nute Gunray...I mean Newt Gingrich. This was post-Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas America, when the buzz word "sexual harassment" was all the rage. On a personal note, it was around this time that I first heard the name Rush Limbaugh, and began to meet otherwise seemingly-normal people who followed his every rant like he was some kind of cult leader.

Space: Above and Beyond reflects this reality in nineties America by featuring a diverse group of pilots, the men and women who will fight the Chig attackers. In particular, one of the pilots is Lt. Cooper Hawkes (Rodney Rowland), who is part of a new minority in America called a "Tank," a term which is more derogatory slang, this time for "in vitros," citizens who were conceived and born in artificial gestation tanks.

America is still land of the free and home of the brave in 2063, but that doesn't mean that the "in vitro" class can expect total equality. As one character states bluntly in the pilot, "we believe in civil rights for in vitros, but not at the expense of our rights." This is EXACTLY what the debate was in the country at the time: women and African-Americans should have equal rights, as long as we didn't establish any laws that gave them privileges over the white man, some believed. 

Meanwhile - on the show - racism towards the in vitros still flourishes in the ranks of the space marines, mostly out of ignorance. "Tanks are lazy and don't care about anyone," reports one soldier, relying on an old stereotype. Later, a character registers surprise that "Tanks" actually dream. It's always easier to demonize the enemy (even a domestic one...), when you can somehow render them sub-human. Even the military equipment on hand in the Corps. doesn't fit the "Tanks," and Hawkes has to cut off part of his space helmet to accommodate a common "Tank" birth mark. "They don't make nothing with In Vitros in mind," he laments.

So this is the cultural context that Wong and Morgan were working on with Space: Above and Beyond. And the episode "R & R," directed by Thomas J. Wright, takes the characters of the 58th to yet another new horizon: furlough.

Specifically, the squadron is exhausted after multiple tours-of-duty, and the In-Vitro pilot Hawkes (Rodney Rowlands) is injured during a Chig attack on his patrol. Colonel T.C. McQueen (James Morrison) is relieved when the group is assigned 48 hours of vacation on a pleasure ship called "The Bacchus." 

This vessel is described as "Vegas, New York City and Oz all rolled into one." I immediately thought of Sinoloa in the Buck Rogers episode "Vegas in Space" and "Space City," the so-called "Satellite of Sin" in Blake's 7.

In Space: Above and Beyond, this viper's den looks like a Trump Casino in space, and the futuristic Cabaret's master-of-ceremonies is none other than Coolio (!). He promptly informs the visiting soldiers that Bacchus is the place "where what you can only imagine, we make happen."

He also notes that this is not a world of virtual reality or "phony Holodecks," a pointed line which clearly differentiates Space: Above and Beyond's gritty, hard-bitten universe from that of another 1990s outer space franchise, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Remember, Star Trek off-spring dominated the 1990s, and Space: Above and Beyond was a first dramatic step away from that Utopian world of plenty. Again -- today, we might not appreciate the pioneering aspects of Morgan and Wong's space combat series as much as we should. Not entirely unlike Space:1999, this program ventured to present a realistic look at man in space; rather than going for an idealistic approach.

Back to "R & R." In short order, the pilots of the 58th start to let their hair down. On Bacchus ,Lt. Shane Vansen (Kristen Cloke) sets about winning some dough in the ship's pool hall, only to be verbally upbraided and relentlessly "played" by a psychologically-adroit android pool-shark, Alvin...an uncredited David Duchovny. This characters snarls like Clint Eastood and even asks Vansen "do you feel lucky?" I loved this subplot because it played on expectations (the audience's and the character's): Vansen arrives in the pool hall in a slinky black dress, manhandles her pool cue seductively (!) and vamps it up...expecting to get one by the other players on sex appeal.

Didn't count on a robot, I guess...

Meanwhile, Hawkes has to deal with the specter of drug addiction because of the pain medication he's been prescribed, for his injury. On The Bacchus,  gegoes in search of sexual comfort. A virgin, Hawkes soon meets up with a beautiful in-vitro hooker who is far less glamorous than she appears. She's addicted to drugs too (so she doesn't have to think about how she earns her cash), and she's the mother of an infant.

And yes, this distinctly un-romantic subplot indeed sounds familiar if you've seen the re-imagined, second season Battlestar Galactica episode "Black Market."

As "R & R" continues, another sub-plot: West (Morgan Weisser) learns that the seemingly-humorless colonel, McQueen, has a fondness for old, black-and-white, W.C. Fields movies. Before long, however, the brief respite from war is called off, and the pilots are back to combat. Hawkes, for his part, has trouble leaving the events on The Bacchus behind. The Colonel, who has also faced drug addiction, tells him "There is there. And here is here."

What we get in "R & R," which aired originally on April 12, 1996, is a dissection of virtually all the program's dramatis personae. Sometimes that dissection is explicit: Alvin (Duchovny) finds the right words about Shane's family life to shake her; to make her lose at pool. Sometimes the character dissection is more subtle: the episode tackles everything from loneliness and virginity to the way "closeness" in combat sometimes creates a false sense of intimacy. James Morrison's character, McQueen doesn't have a tremendous amount of screen time, and yet we learn a lot about him here.

It isn't often in Space: Above and Beyond that audiences got see the characters relate to one another and their universe outside of the battle situation, and their time on the Bacchus (except for the W.C. Fields movies...) doesn't seem relaxing at all. But perhaps that's part of human nature too: our need to pursue love, money and yes, danger, even when we're off the job, supposedly taking it easy. Of course, there's even more danger in pursuing these things when outside the confines of "responsibility. It's hard, as Vansen might say (especially after her encounter with Alvin), to "keep your head screwed on straight" in an environment like the pleasure ship.

Space: Above & Beyond is a remarkably prophetic show. I write often about the sense of anticipatory anxiety evident in the works of Chris Carter, and I think you might detect that quality here too, in the efforts of Wong and Morgan. It's the belief that the apparent good times don't last forever, and bad times are imminent. The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica of the 21st century also highlighted artificial people, sneak attacks, hookers, R & R, psychological mind-fucks, and gritty space combat, yet it's hard to ignore that Space: Above and Beyond hit the same notes (and without some of the more questionable soap opera plotting) almost ten years earlier. Also, Space: Above and Beyond always remained humanistic, rather than telling us that we are all the fools of the Gods, the victims of a fate we can't control.

So much of success in Hollywood is based on timing. Space: Above and Beyond in the Roaring Nineties, apparently didn't resonate with a wide audience (though its ratings were higher than many genre shows airing on television today). If the program aired after 9/11, maybe we would have gotten to know Morgan and Wong's intriguing characters and solid writing for four seasons, or more...