Movie Trailer: Supernova (2000)

Mars on Film: Red Planet (2000)

The years 2000 – 2001 brought movie audiences a handful of films about the (angry) red planet, including Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, and Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet. 

Of all those titles, Red Planet is likely the least satisfying work of art. A big-budgeted film featuring a great cast that includes Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Terence Stamp, the film suffers from poor execution, and, finally, a lack of coherence.

It would be tempting to write that the movie’s heart is in the right place because Red Planet expresses the idea that man will survive by exploring and settling the final frontier, by pursuing new horizons.

But Red Planet also boasts a contradictory anti-science message, one that suggests faith and belief are actually the answers to solving man’s problem. It isn’t my job -- or my place -- to tell anyone what to believe in this regard, only to state that, thematically-speaking, it would have been better for Red Planet to pick one idea and stick with it. Instead, the film raises a debate about science vs. spirituality that is handled superficially at best. The whole approach is…scattershot.

This thematic schizophrenia would be more tolerable and easily reconciled if Red Planet were better paced and the narrative details more compelling. I’ve watched several Mars films of late, and Red Planet, like The Angry Red Planet (1959) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) boasts some scientific errors too.  But both of those (older) films knew clearly what they wanted to be about, and what they had to say about human life and nature.

By contrast, Red Planet is muddled and sadly anti-climactic, unable to enunciate any clear philosophical through-line or point. Much of the film looks great, particularly a dangerous landing on the Mars surface, but other than that, the film possesses very few memorable virtues.

“Maybe life is more mysterious than you think it is.”

In the near-future, Earth can no longer sustain the rapidly-expanding human population. Realizing that the planet will soon die, mankind sends algae to Mars which will produce oxygen and commence the terraforming process prior to colonization.

A ship, Mars-1, heads to the red planet, however, when the air on the planet begins to diminish rather than expand. The mission is captained by Commander Kate Bowman (Carrie-Ann Moss). Others in the crew include engineer Gallagher (Val Kilmer), scientists Chantillas (Terence Stamp) and Burchenal (Tom Sizemore), co-pilot Santen (Benjamin Pratt) and a terraforming expert, Pettengill (Simon Baker).

En route to Mars, the ship is damaged, and Bowman remains on board to conduct repairs while the others attempt a dangerous landing on the Martian rock. 

After making ground-fall, the crew finds that it is being hunted by AMEE, a military robot who has been set to “war” mode inadvertently. Soon, the crew also learns that their habitat -- equipped with food and oxygen -- has been mysteriously destroyed.

With precious little air remaining in their suits, Gallagher and the others must solve the mystery of the algae, evade AMEE, and repair an old Russian launcher that may be the only key to returning to orbit.

“Short time to live. Long time to wait.”

First things first: the makers of Red Planet should be commended for creating a strong, and central female character Kate Bowman. This mission commander is likely named after Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), of the ill-fated Discovery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Moss is very good in the role.

It’s no exaggeration to note that Red Planet seems to work exponentially better whenever Bowman is on-screen making tough calls, and fighting for her team’s survival, and the success of the mission. Bowman faces some of the same challenges that Sandra Bullock’s character endured in last year’s Gravity (2013), but Red Planet doesn’t saddle the character with a trite personal tragedy to overcome, or one that contextualizes Bowman in terms of a traditional or conventional female role, like being a Mommy instead of being an astronaut.  One of the few things Red Planet gets right, finally, is its depiction of a competent, resourceful commander figure.

Red Planet evidences a strong environmental undercurrent too. The Earth is dying and a terraformed Mars may be the only option for survival if man is to endure into the twenty-second century. I admire the film for noting that man will not last forever if he remains solely on Earth -- whether for reasons of over-population, pollution, or even an asteroid strike -- and that the logical alternative is to seek new homes on neighboring worlds, or in deep space.

In the film, Chantillas (Stamp) puts a fine point on human short-sightedness about the environment. “If we fail,” he says, “everything” (including the works of Shakespeare and the Constitution) was for nothing.

How true.

If humans don’t take better care of the Earth, or make arrangements for the future, then every great artistic achievement is lost to history, and, finally, unimportant. And that, of course, would be a terrible tragedy.

Yet, in the very same scene, Chantillas -- the scientist, and a character described as “the soul” of the crew -- notes that “science can’t answer any of the real interesting questions.”

Since he is a scientist, I wonder how he can make such a claim with a straight face.

Science has brought the team to Mars.

Science has made space travel possible.

Science has seeded Mars with algae, which should (according to the film) make the air breathable.

Science has thus made it possible for man to have a second chance to escape extinction.

Without science, I hasten to add, there would be no chance whatsoever.  Believe in God or not, you simply can’t pray your way to Mars. I don’t mean that facetiously, I mean it in practical, real-life terms. To get to Mars you require specific things, like rocket fuel, computers, trained astronauts, and a competent support net.  All those things arrive from the auspices of knowledge and science.

I suppose it comes down to what, precisely, are Chantillas’s “interesting questions.” 

If by that phrase he is talking about the existence of the human soul, or of the afterlife, he may have a point worth debating, absolutely.

But those topics aren’t under discussion.

What is being discussed in the film is a mission to determine why some algae on Mars is dying, and whether or not the planet will soon be ready to sustain human life. I don’t see how anything other than science can answer those particular questions. Again, you can’t analyze the properties of algae (or alien “nematodes”) through prayer or worship.  You do it with education, with science.

While Red Planet struggles to be profound by musing over “interesting questions” vis-à-vis science and religion, the time would be better spent sharpening the characters. Many suffer from a severe lack of definition. Benjamin Bratt’s character, Santen, for example turns into a complete asshole once on the Martian surface, and his death is depicted so poorly and so suddenly that you wait for the rest of the film for him to re-appear. But he doesn’t.

By the same token, Pettengill is woefully ill-defined. Why does he go nuts? Why does he kill Bratt’s character? Why does he attack the others? 

There is no rhyme or reason for his behavior or paranoia beyond personal mental instability, and though he is a last-minute crew addition, it certainly seems someone would have detected, on the long journey to Mars, that he is a bit off. 

Instead, Pettengill is just a useful -- but baffling -- cog in the screenplay, one that must make certain things (like a murder) happen in a certain order, thus throwing up second and third act obstacles for the landing team.

But if you examine Pettengill’s behavior, there is no reason for him to go bonkers when he does. Why kill the very people who are going to repair the spaceship you need to get home? Or who will solve the mystery of the atmosphere that you need to can breathe?  The human survival instinct would preclude Pettengill’s behavior, even if he is unhinged. Only Gallagher can re-tool the Russian lander. Only Burchenal can understand the mystery of Mars, etc.  Kill them, and you’re killing yourself, essentially.

Unfortunately, much the same argument can be made regarding AMEE, the robot that conveniently gets stuck on “war” mode and attempts to kill Gallagher and co. The robot begins hunting and killing the crew-members, but there is no real rhyme or reason for this plot strand, unless the movie is attempting to note that man, by creating such technology, is actually endangering only himself. 

And again, a movie about man landing on and taming the Red Planet can’t be anti-technology or anti-science to such a degree, can it?  There would be no hope for mankind in the film’s central scenario if he didn’t build spaceships, terra-forming devices, or robots like AMEE. 

And again, Gallagher explicitly survives by re-purposing old (Russian) technology and getting back into orbit.  Bowman survives by knowing how to purge a fire from the belly of Mars-1. 

Science saves them both.

Once more, Red Planet doesn’t seem to know what point it wants to convey. It wants to suggest that life is more mysterious than humans can reckon with (and thus hint at profound or deeply philosophical religious truths), but similarly tries to make the case that man must tame -- via science, knowledge, and technology --other planets to survive.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars and Angry Red Planet certainly had their share of scientific errors, but in fairness to those films, these errors were made before much our fund of knowledge about Mars was complete.  By the time of Red Planet’s release, we had a rover on Mars (which features in the film) and a decent sense of the planet’s qualities.

But Red Planet keeps getting things wrong that we already know. For example, it gets wrong the four letters that describe DNA sequences -- G T A and C -- and wrongly suggests that nematodes are insects rather than worms.  Errors like these may be small, but can take one right out of the film’s reality.

Forget the errors, and forget, even, the muddled message about science vs. religion. Red Planet simply never works up any real sense of tension or momentum. The final battle between AMEE and Gallagher is completely lacking in suspense, or even a true sense of danger. Like every other aspect of the film, the denouement just falls completely flat.

I wanted to love Red Planet when I first saw it. I had high hopes for it. But the film, like poor Mars-1, ultimately, is “dead in the water.”

Cult-Movie Review: Battle Royale (2000)

The dystopian sub-genre in the science fiction cinema has long held a fascination -- even obsession -- with bloody games, or contests.

Remember The Tenth Victim (1965) about a game of murder and assassination for the jet-set?

Or the twin demolition derby dystopian movies of 1975: Rollerball and Death Race 2000?

In the eighties, we had fare such as The Running Game (1987), which mocked American TV and game shows, and this century has given us The Hunger Games (2012), a franchise that endures even as I write this review.

Battle Royale (2000), based on the novel by Koushun Takami, follows in this familiar tradition, but also stems from a specific, Japanese cultural and historical context. 

From 1996 to 1999, juvenile crime in Japan spiked. According to The New York Times, the “fastest growing criminal category” in Japan at that time involved minors. In one decade, the number of violent crimes committed by juveniles doubled.

The stories of these turn-of-the-century youth crimes were shocking to the nation, and remain so to this day. In 1997, in Kobe, for example, a 14-year old boy decapitated an eleven-year old boy, and clubbed a ten year old girl to death. In Yamaguchi during the same span, a minor strangled and killed a mother and baby.

The reasons behind this uptick in youth crime are numerous. 

Some scholars point to a weak national economy, which offered too few jobs to young people finishing school. We've all heard or read references to Japan's "lost decade."

Others cast a light on the social aspects of the culture, like the drop-out rate, and the push (via “juku” or “cram” school) to compete for academic/economic success. That intense competition -- which sometimes saw students attending school programs from early morning to nearly midnight -- kept children from being at home with their families. The same article I quoted above observes that, in particular, children were cut from spending time with their fathers.  The absence of present, engaged fathers, was -- and remains -- a catastrophe in many places around the world, including this country.

So, to put a fine point on it, economic success was prized more highly than family time in the Japanese culture during this period (the same period, incidentally, that gave rise to Ringu [1998]).  A whole generation, it seemed, as a result, lost faith in the future, and their place in it.

In response the youth crime wave, new, draconian laws were proposed to address it. For example, it was suggested that there would be an increased detention period for juvenile offenders, and that the age in which they could appear in criminal court would be lowered from 16 to 14.

All of this information and history is necessary back-story, in a sense, if one hopes to make sense of Kinji Fukasaku’s ultra-violent film, Battle Royale.  

The film depicts a few-days-in-the-future Japanese society in which children are out-of-control and violent, but where, ultimately, the adults are responsible for the worsening situation because of the laws they have imposed. 

In the fictional Japan of the film, specifically, a BR (Battle Royale) law (or Millennium Education Reform Act) has been enacted. It states that troublesome students can be removed from their school rooms and remanded to a remote island, where they will kill each other in a contest over a three day span.

Only the last survivor will return home. Explosive collars make certain that this is the case, as do rotating “danger zones.” 

The lord of this deadly game is a teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) who was once stabbed by a wayward student, and now, out of spite and hatred, sentences students to untimely, monstrous deaths.

Battle Royale follows one classroom of kids as they are taken to the island and must compete to there, against one another, to survive.  

The action on that island is brutal, monstrous, and bracing.  

However, as in many films of this type (see: The Last House on the Left [1972]) there is a pro-social meaning underlining the violence. In this case, we are asked to reckon with the savagery and the barbarism of the students on the island...much as newspaper readers in 1997 would encounter the savagery of the crimes I tallied above. 

But then, the film goes a step further, and asks audiences to reckon with the idea that the cure -- a crueler, less sympathetic and more violent society -- is worse than the disease itself.

To put the matter another way, Battle Royale reminds us that youngsters may be violent if they lose hope, or are abandoned by society and family. 

But the real monster here is that society which made this world for them: one of no hope, no escape, and no love. It is a society whose primary lesson is be the best or you have fail. Kill or be killed. And take no prisoners in your quest to be number one.

“Nothing is against the rules.”

At the start of the new Millennium, Japan suffers an economic depression. There is 15 percent unemployment, ten million people out of work, and rising violence, especially among the country's youth. 800,000 students boycott the Millennium Education Reform Act, which has been crafted to address the uptick in crime.

Each year, under the new law, troublesome students in a random class are taken from their school and transported to an inhospitable island. There, they will fight to the death, until only one student remains.  

This year, class 3-B has been chosen, according to game-master Kitano.

Among those abducted for the fight are the gentle Noriko (Aki Maeda) and a young man, Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) whose father recently committed suicide, all but leaving him alone in the world. 

In the course of the games, Shuya seeks to protect Noriko, and and also team-up with a former game-winner, the mysterious Kawada (Taro Yamamoto), to survive the extreme violence.

But alliances are neither encouraged nor allowed here, which means that everyone is constant danger, even from those they trust most.  

And worse, some students take glee and pride in their pursuit of murder.

“How can you all kill each other so easily?”

Battle Royale (2000) succeeds on several thematic and literal fronts. In the first case, the film is a blistering action film, one totally lacking in political correctness or decorum. Here, school age kids commit murder and die bloodily.  Innocent youngsters, I should add, are hunted and killed without remorse.  Some beg for their lives, and are killed anyway.

Again, there’s a reason for this level of unadulterated violence: it rocks us back on our heels and shocks our sensibilities.  The violence must be edgy, must push the envelope, or the movie's point doesn't transmit.

In America, this approach likely would not fly. For instance, I can recall the late movie critic Gene Siskel giving James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) a thumbs-down review because it often put a child (Newt) in direct danger.  

Imagine what Mr. Siskel would have made of Battle Royale, in which children kill one another viciously and graphically on camera.

Again, however, there is a thematic point.  The violence -- and the blunt, indecorous nature of the violence -- shocks the system.  These are little more than children, as you can see from the photos accompanying this post.  

But they are drenched in blood, surrounded by death. Witnessing this violence here, as I noted above, is akin to reading about or countenancing some of the violent youth crimes conducted 1996 - 1999. The brutal, taboo-shattering nature of the violence makes us wonder, how is this possible? 

How has society gone so wrong that the youngest among us think that it is acceptable to act so violently, and without thought?

Putting aside the in-your-face aspect of the violence it often depicts, Battle Royale is brilliantly-staged and filmed, with the violence being timed and shot for the most dramatic and visceral impact.  

At times the violence is so over-the-top and intense that you may be tempted to let out a nervous giggle. It's discomforting.

And that nervous giggle, in a sense, is the key to the film’s satirical argument.  

Specifically, Battle Royale operates, at least on one level, as a metaphor for the pressure-cooker that students face in Japan, with juku and relentless study. They must metaphorically slay their classmates every day to achieve success academically and economically, and this means beating everyone, even their friends.  

No alliances will get them to first place in school, or to the best job academically.  They must show no mercy, no quarter in their rise to the top. Gazing at Battle Royale’s violence, it can be interpreted as a literal representation of Japan’s academic regime.  Here there is no prize for second place. Yet thousands of students are competing…for slot one. Felow students aren't friends.  They are enemies to be dispatched.

Even the explosive collar seems to be a comment on the rigorous academic competition of students in Japan's schools.  They may not slay others successfully, but there’s always a risk their heads will blow-off from all the pressure of cramming…

Much more intriguing to me, however, is the serious (rather than satirical) social commentary laced throughout the film’s text.  

In Battle Royale, we encounter a society that fears youth violence, so what does it do?

It rewards successful violence. It breeds violence. The problem, as noted above, is an outbreak of juvenile crime, but the Millennium Education Reform Act only ensures that students become more adept, more skilled in their use of violence.  

Consider this fact: any class can be picked, any year. So it becomes incumbent upon a student to prepare -- cram? -- to survive in the event his or her class is picked. After a few years, students will be cramming not in academic subjects, but in the art of dealing death.  The law only encourages one to become a cold-hearted killer.

The purpose of rehabilitation or reform in Japan is “shokuzaikan,” the insight to view your crimes in a new, empathetic light.  You must look at who you hurt, and why your hurt them, for example. What was the impact, on a human level? On a personal one?  On a societal level?

The Battle Royale in the film doesn’t achieve that end of self-awareness or reckoning...even in the slightest.  =Instead, it encourages blood-thirstiness, a kill-or-be-killed attitude that puts self-survival and success above all else. 

In this case, the film's “bad father” figure, Kitano embraces a system which creates additional student assassins, much like the one who stabbed him in the first place.

Indeed, the direct result of the battle/contest featured in the film is that he is assassinated by students who, before the games, would not have come after him. They would not have imagined hurting, let alone murdering him.

On a broad scale, then, what Battle Royale concerns is the idea that tougher laws -- heartless laws -- can never make better people, only meaner, more cut-throat ones. 

The idea with criminal reform is to make the criminal pay his or her debt to society, and then make him or her better able to return and function normally in society.  

At the end of Battle Royale, by contrast, two students become criminals. Outside the game experience they would never have been criminals.  We last see these protagonists in a major city, on the run, trusting no one but each other.  In this case, clearly, the draconian law has backfired.  It has made the law-abiding youth of Japan unable to trust, unable to join society.  They have cashed in their chips, and signed out of the culture. Permanently.

Indeed, a key line in the film states “I’ve never really trusted adults,” and that’s because, in the film;s fictitious world, the adults have responded to a problem not by making it better, not by examining its root causes, but by making it infinitely worse.  The laws to crack down on teen violence have only made teen violence necessary.

There is also, unusually, hope in the film. 

Shuya remains an open, hopeful character, despite all the tragedy that life has thrown at him.  He knows he will be punished for making allies with other students, and yet he seeks and honors those alliances because he knows it is the right thing to do. Inside of isolating himself from others, he responds by reaching out.  That is a real sign of strength.

I don’t feel -- as some do -- that The Hunger Games (2012) is a straight-up rip-off of Battle Royale. But I do believe that the popular American franchise appropriates the Japanese story’s ending, which is that the “stupid system” is defeated, specifically, by disobeying rules about the contestants working together, building alliance.  That is a constant in both films, but Battle Royale handles the concept better.

I applaud Battle Royale for gazing at this idea with such clarity.

Another line in the film also resonates: “If you hate someone, then you have to live with the consequences.” 

That is so true. The film's Millennium Education Reform Act came out of fear and hate, and then built a larger culture of fear and hate, one that would swallow the next generation of Japanese youngsters.

My closing thought about Battle Royale?  

To quote a survivor of the battle to the death, “it’s beautiful…even though it’s where everybody died.”

Movie Trailer: Battle Royale (2000)

Movie Trailer: Red Planet (2000)

Cult-Movie Review: Supernova (2000)

Supernova (2000) is just the kind of genre film that -- I readily admit -- I’m inclined to enjoy. It involves a doomed space mission skirting the edge of the cosmic map. Specifically, Supernova recounts the most dangerous journey of the Medical Rescue Vehicle Nightingale as -- in response to an emergency signal -- it “jumps” to a rogue moon where a mining outpost, Titan-37, once operated.

Unfortunately, the Nightingale’s crew learns, post-jump, that the wandering satellite is now desperately close to a blue giant star, one destined to go supernova in less-than-a-day.

And that’s just the beginning of the action.The film also involves an alien artifact -- a ninth dimensional bomb, -- and a super-strong psychopath, Troy (Peter Facinelli) determined to keep ownership of the WMD.

Buttressed by some solid year 2000 visual special effects, Supernova also features a promising cast, including James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robin Tunney, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Robert Forster. 

And yet despite such virtues, this science-fiction film never quite comes together as powerfully as one might hope it would.

The action and death scenes are largely run-of-the-mill affairs, less kinetic and less effective than similar scenes you will find in pictures of this vintage and type, like Event Horizon (1997) or Pitch Black (2000), for example.

Behind-the-scenes turmoil on Supernova is the stuff of legend, with director Walter Hill opting to be credited by the pseudonym “Thomas Lee.” When MGM refused to approve the budget necessary for special effects, Hill left the production, allegedly, and Jack Sholder was brought on to complete the film.  Then, Francis Ford Coppola attempted to save the film in the editing process.

Not good.

Given a history like that, Supernova is actually a bit more coherent than one might expect. Legendary box office “bomb” or no, the film boasts a few facets that even today hold the interest.

The first is the deliberate aping of the Dead Calm (1989) narrative, which was writer William Malone’s intent. 

The second quality of value is the film’s steadfast refusal to clear up the ambiguity of the final act, and the fate that may befall Earth.

Third and finally, Supernova provides an interesting contrast in “percentages,” in a subplot that suggests the greatest treasure in the universe may not be ninth-dimensional matter, but rather the human capability to connect with his fellow man or woman, right down to the genetic level.

“I like deep space…People tend to respect your privacy.”

In a few centuries, the rescue ship Nightingale receives an emergency distress signal from Titan-37, an abandoned mining operation on a rogue moon. 

New to the ship is the co-pilot, Vanzant (Spader), an ex-junkie who has earned the dislike of the ship’s doctor, Evers (Bassett), in part because of her personal past with a violent junkie named Karl Nelson.

After a dangerous jump, the ship’s captain, Marley (Forster) is mutilated in his bio-protection chamber, and asks to be killed.  And the sender of the distress call turns out to be the son of Karl Nelson, Troy (Facinelli).  

While the ship’s crew tends to repairs from the dimensional jump, and prepares to escape a nearby blue giant’s supernova, the crew also learns that Troy has in his possession an unstable alien artifact…

“That whole place is like a ghost ship.”

The most notable aspect of Supernova’s story, perhaps, is its dedicated repetition of the plot-points of Philip Noyce’s sea-based thriller, Dead Calm. In that film, as you may recall, a couple played by Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman go to sea following the death of their child, only to help out the last survivor of a ruined vessel, played by Billy Zane. Zane’s character turns out to be a dangerous psychopath, and he strands Neill’s character on his useless old boat while he terrorizes Kidman’s character on the family yacht.

In Supernova, we also get the passenger from the ruined “other” location, in this case a moon-based mining operation. The film also finds Spader’s lead character, Vanzant marooned there, and fighting his way to get back to his ship, much as Neill did in the earlier picture. Facinelli, like Zane, is a physically-fit, twitchy psychotic who, before his reign of terror ends, has his way with a female shipmate. Outer space, obviously, substitutes for the terrestrial high seas.

Supernova has its problems to be sure, but the idea behind it, of bringing Dead Calm into the future, is not one of them. You may recognize the Dead Calm flourishes and consider them derivative -- because they are -- but Supernova is also original enough to introduce some new elements to the formula. In this case, it’s the presence of the ultimate WMD, the alien artifact that elevates the film’s ending. The movie’s denouement, which eschews our desire for closure, also leaves audiences to ponder what might could happen in the brave new world following the finale.

There’s also a present -- if irregularly enunciated -- through-line here about the human race, or more accurately, human nature. Once rescued by the crew of the Nightingale, the evil Troy/Karl tries to bring them around to his cause. He promises them each five percent of the wealth he plans to acquire from the alien artifact. He prizes monetary wealth, and is surprised that there are no takers, save for Yerzy. 

At film’s end, uniquely, Vanzant and Dr. Evers are forced to share a biological containment unit so as to survive the space jump away from the super nova. In the process, they each swap 2.5 % of their DNA with the other.  Add those figures up, and you have 5% percent, Troy’s proposed figure for recompense. 

The notion here may be, simply, that one “treasure” may be more worthwhile or more valuable than other. Troy promises material wealth to the crew, but at the risk of everything, at the risk of the universe itself.  By contrast, the biological transfer renders Evers pregnant, ostensibly with Vanzant’s child.

Who needs the magic of unstable, 9^th dimensional matter, when human matter can, likewise, “replenish” life, and in a way that is safe?

Finally, Supernova ends with a terrifying thought. The shock-wave from the supernova will detonate the 9^th dimensional bomb, and the ensuing shock-wave will spread out, to all corners of the universe. It will strike Earth in fifty one years, we are told.  When it strikes, it will either destroy the planet, or change the very nature of human life. 

Supernova gives us no idea which outcome is more likely, or what that change could be. But I’ve got to give the movie credit for setting up an apocalypse that it never intends to depict, and asking viewers to consider the possibilities. 

Would the shock-wave render all men and women physically powerful, but mentally unhinged, like Troy?  Or would it usher in the very “leap in evolution” that the mad Troy foresees? There are many ways that the movie could have ended. Troy could have been killed. The ship could have escaped. There could have been a final sting in the tail/tale. Instead, Supernova leaves audiences to ponder the idea that a “wave” is coming for mankind, and that it is something he can’t avoid.  The future will be…different.

When one couples this idea of some force changing man’s physical nature with the moment early in the film in which Captain Marley (Robert Forster) discusses “violent animation” of the 20^th century (meaning Tom and Jerry), and calling it a “catharsis” that can, under some circumstances, unleash “human malevolence,” the film’s theme starts to become clearer. 

Tom and Jerry live in a world in which there are no physical limits or restraints.They bash, bruise and bludgeon each other with that power, and do almost nothing else. If the shock wave unshackles man from his biological restraints, will he find a better use for that power than the animated cat and mouse, his artistic creations, do?

A further connection to the film’s leitmotif comes in characterization of the ship’s computer, Sweetie.  The ship’s navigator, Benjamin (Wilson Cruz) attempts to over-write her programming when under duress, when threatened with death by Troy.He attempts to unshackle her, however, so she can kill.  Again, there’s the notion here that without “programming” (or biological) restraints, the universe tends to violence.  Man creates Tom and Jerry and Sweetie the Computer, and directs them both towards such that violence.  What chance is there he won’t act violently if transformed into a superman?

Supernova falters, largely, in that most of the crew deaths seem to happen all at once, and without tremendous or even modest distinction. Two crew members, one after the other, get ejected into space without protection, and die there. Similarly, the battle scenes on Titan and aboard the Nightingale seem claustrophobic and messy, but not in an intentional or good way. The scuffles are virtually incoherent, and so some sense of suspense is sacrificed.

There are gaps in the storytelling too. Danika Lund is shown to be in an intense (and apparently rewarding…) romantic relationship with Yerzy. So much so that they are hoping to be approved as parents when they return home. They want to have a child together.  But after seeing Troy naked (and with an apparently sizable erection), Danika makes love to him. She does not seem to be under duress when she does so.  She is not executing a strategy (as Nicole Kidman’s character was, once more, in a similar scene in Dead Calm). Instead, we have no understanding of why -- besides carnal lust -- she would sacrifice everything to be with this (admittedly hot…) guy for the right fifteen minutes. 

I’m not arguing that people don’t make impulsive decisions about sex all the time, only that we don’t have a lot of insight into Danika’s character, and her decisions. Does she feel trapped by Yerzy? Does she really not want children? Is this her way of avoiding those responsibilities?  It would be nice to have just a bit more clarity in terms of character motivations. If we knew Danika’s reasons, we might be able to fit them into the film’s larger puzzle or leitmotif.  Sex, like violence, might be deemed the result of our biological programming, and this aspect could have been explored in the context of the rest of the film’s themes.

It’s pretty clear that Supernova overcame incredible odds just to get to theaters, and given the tumult of its production, it’s a little amazing that the film succeeds to the degree it does. The silver-blue palette that suffuses the film gives it a sense of visual consistency, and from time to time, the script really gets close to expressing a meaningful thought about mankind, and what kind of creature he is, or might become, given a giant leap forward.

It’s no Sunshine (2007), Pitch Black, or Event Horizon, but Supernova occasionally shines very brightly. You can either enjoy the flashes of ingenuity on their own terms, or curse the general darkness of the enterprise.

Movie Trailer: Supernova (2000)