May 28, 2004

• More movie action, although this time it's a miniseries from Britain.

  'Quatermass:' Yet another (and more than likely the final) installment in the Quatermass science fiction franchise.

  Over the course of four hours, we learn that the Earth of the near future is a desperate place, full of poverty and crime, especially in urban centers. There are normal people trying to get along in desperate times, there are bands of thugs, and there are hippies. The hippies call themselves the Planet People, and they are searching for the ancient sacred sites where they will be transported by some kind of alien intelligence to a new planet, free from the troubles of Earth.

  But... when the hippies (and subsequently much of the rest of the population, as well) get to the stone circles and mountaintop temples they're drawn towards, a death ray from an unknown source incinerates them. This happens more and more frequently, and it's up to professor Quatermass to solve the problem through the scientific method, and prevent more destruction, thereby saving what's left of the human race. Gee, you think he'll succeed?

  There's some thick acting and a few silly plot points, but there are a few things I really like about this story. For instance: Annihilation come from an undefined source. No one knows what they're fighting, really. This allows the script to suggest that maybe the planet people are right, or that maybe there's no rhyme or reason to it at all. There are also bickering scientists. They all disagree about how to proceed. It's a very chaotic movie. And most of all, I enjoyed the way the script values the elderly, and maintains that they still have much to offer.

  Here come the spoilers, if you care...

  Watching it, I kept being reminded of 'Britannia Hospital,' which came out within a few years of 'Quatermass.' Britain was in pretty bad shape at the time, so the science fiction and social satire reflects this. Both movies propose a solution that is worse than the problem in order to whip people back into some kind of perspective, so they're both pretty bleak, but that's par for the course in SF. 'Britannia Hospital' announces that humanity can't be pieced back together once it's torn itself apart, and so humanity will be replaced by machine intelligence. 'Quatermass' suggests that the solution is for most of the young people of the world (and German Shepherds named 'Puppy') to simply disappear in a conflagration of their own self-centeredness and idiocy. I'm not sure where to go with either solution... They don't help me understand a real solution, and they also don't really help me understand the problem, either.

  But darn if they aren't entertaining mind-candy.

  • 10:43 am
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