The Gone-Away World

Post-apocalyptic adventures across the globe populated by literally every imaginable nasty, kick ass ninjas, some gung-ho super fighters and a wee dose of humour every other word or so doesn't get any better than this, Nick Harkaway's debut novel, The Gone-Away World. 

For a start, The Gone-Away World struggles to be put into a genre-specific box. Sure, it's adventure, and there's a large dose of hard sci-fi in the form of the weapons that bring about the destruction of civilisation as we knew it. But the description on the back of the book suggests bleak action (or once one sees the protagonist's name - Gonzo Lubitsch - bleak, over-the-top, hyperbolic, if not comedic, action) and the opening chapters have their fair share of macho posturing and rushing off on missions in a balls-to-walls kind of way. But more than that, we are launched into an autobiography. Well, it's a biography too. Gonzo's closest friend, his childhood playmate and nearly-brother, begins to tell us all about himself, and all about Gonzo too. So we receive far more than standard adventure narrative or harrowing war ganderings; Gonzo and his buddy instead treat us to school days and a first introduction to gong-fu and girls; to university and first jobs (how I giggled at the Spanish archer, of which I'm a proud fellow recipient); and finally to a war in almost precisely the middle of nowhere in which our brilliant, witty and introspective narrator bemoans the hell of not being shot as civilians and sheep duck for cover and wish everyone would just leave their once pleasant land alone. 

Finally, finally the bombs begin to drop. The droppings hit the metaphorical fan and everything goes batshit crazy. If you've been smiling and marvelling up to this point at Harkaway's imagination, his skilful storytelling clearly underpinned by a strong sense of timing and poise, his ability to pull the rug out from under you repeatedly takes off on a rather more epic scale and mundane tasks like shopping or cooking get narrated with wit and energy. It's as though simply being in the presence of the narrator means things are a) funny and b) likely to get blown up, knocked down, atomised or otherwise in the turn of a page. 

So it's funny. But it's also moving. One can't help but smile that a martial arts fight to the death starts to involve tupperware, but suddenly becomes serious and painful. Or the grin is wiped off one's face with the  romance of the story, of which there is a fair dose, which starts off boyish and playful and gets seriously in the blink of a eye and becomes another way in which the humorous is transformed into the emotionally weighty. To try to create a novel and fill it with a whole gamut of emotional bathos and pathos, while also bouncing around merrily with all kinds of irony, understatement and linguistic creativity, is a very bold undertaking indeed. 

Is there a weakness to The Gone-Away World? Is it too clever for its own good? No, except in one tiny, dangerous way. It'll be an awfully tough act to follow. 

Buy it, read it, read it again, and hope Nick Harkaway has some more gems up his sleeve.

~~~

2009

Nick Harkaway

Windmill Books

Speed Racer

Bit of a guilty pleasure here for me. As a proud owner of a Speed Racer red t and a quiet fan of the 60s series, I have to put hand to my heart and declare this is a well put together film. I think I might be the only one.

The film has many of the hallmarks of a Wachowski production. Emphasis is placed heavily on effects and on the power of emotions to overcome any obstacle (Neo's love-gamble anyone?). But it's also marvellously fun.

Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) has always dreamt of following in his brother Rex's footsteps and being a racer, from his earliest schoolboy daydreams. Ably assisted by the family-run crew of Racer Motors, he becomes a racing car driver, only to discover operating independently is not only dangerous but also extremely difficult when the major corporations want to dominate, and rig (ooh, ahh!), the sport.

It's a bright, vibrant film. Apart from ill-judged comic episodes from the youngest of the Racer progeny, the film sparkles. The Racer parents (Sarandon and Goodman) are both excellent presences, while Hirsch and girlfriend Trixie (Ricci) are both entirely laudable. The tension ratchets up rapidly, and the racing scenes are gloriously over the top and colourful. But beyond any individual performance or the suspense or colours or score, it's essentially a film about going it alone and fighting for something you believe in. And I approve of that.

~~~
2008
Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman
dir. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

Inception

Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thrill-ride offers in equal measure suspense, drama, mind-bending plot- and physical twists and a healthy dose of good cinematic fun. It cements his position as a potent blockbuster creator, and reminds viewers of his ability to tell a cracking, complex story.

The basic premise is far from complicated. In a world much like our own, people are able to share dreams together. First developed by the US military for training soldiers (In a dream, while one can feel pain, one normally cannot die: dying simply awakens the dreamer), the compact technology is now exploited for corporate espionage by thieves who kidnap or hijack people's dreams to extract information, trade secrets or gain blackmail leverage.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is one such thief, and an excellent one at that, despite his troubled past. But when Seito (Ken Watanabe), a previous target, approaches Cobb with the chance to get charges waiting for him in America dropped, Cobb is forced to embark on a job far more difficult than any before: inception, the planting of an idea inside a mind. Cobb's closest friends try to dissuade him; inception cannot be done.

So Mr Cobb assembles a team about him to undertake the mission. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Ellen Page), Yusuf (Dileep Rao - pictured left) and Eames (Tom Hardy) all have very particular, very cool roles to play in the coming job. The first act is very much an explosive exposition of some of the film's key principles. But the second act, where Cobb plans and plots, is when Inception really starts to sparkle. The dialogue is crisp and to the point; the characters are witty and engaging. After any given scene with a character, particularly Arthur or Eames, I was left wanting more, gently in awe of highly competent performances.

A lot has already been written about some of the special effects in this film. But more than that, Hans Zimmer needs to be praised for the major role his score plays in establishing more than just pure effect but a fully formed mood, an all-encompassing ambience. This is what makes Inception stand out from other standard weak sci-fi fare. It is more than any one detail but the chilling mood of the entire piece that leaves one both thrilled and mentally wearied, in the best possible way.

Special note has to made once more of the performances. DiCaprio is on top form, even if this is not a far cry from his emotionally raw characterisation for Shutter Island. But Gordon-Levitt is super slick, while Cillian Murphy, playing Robert Fischer, is sensational. Murphy is no stranger to emotionally charged performances, but this one crackles. There appears to be so much bubbling beneath the surface in his portrayal that I'm tempted to suggest he's a show stealer here. Meanwhile, Cotillard and Watanabe have depth and detail to their performances that made them thoroughly enjoyable to watch.

Conspiracy theorists and pedants will love the many questions and holes this film throws up, but I believe that only adds to the film's validity as a great blockbuster. I don't know how watertight the concept really is, but I think there's an easy answer: it doesn't need to be. We're dealing with dreams. We're dealing with uncertainty and the kind of material, as Cobb himself notes, that only seems strange once it's ended. One's mind may ache by the final act, but that is surely better than mindless fun. Great re-watching potential, and a great step for Nolan.

~~~

2010

Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy

Written and dir. Christopher Nolan

Moon

Duncan Jones's Moon, which rightly earned him a Brit for best newcomer this year, sees Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) as astronaut working for Lunar Industries on the dark side of the moon. He is reaching the end of a three year contract mining for energy deposits in the moon rock, and longs to return home to his wife and young child. But an unfortunate accident causes Bell's situation to take a turn for the worse, and suddenly the comfort of his moon-base is transformed into a hall of riddles.


I don't want to spoil a plot that unfolds fairly linearly but is a delight nonetheless with a couple of great revelations. Instead, it has to be noted that Rockwell's performance is nothing short of consummate. He shows off a diversity and depth that is demanded by what is practically a one man film, and rises to the challenges of isolation impressively. Jones also captures that mood of isolation very effectively, with scenes of silence as Bell wanders the station, filling his time as best he can as he counts down the final two weeks.


As for the style of the film, it was something reminiscent of Danny Boyle's 2007 Sunshine, a modern sci-fi thriller that re-explores what our future beyond Earth might be like. But while Sunshine went out of its way to invert expectations as to what space travel or space-suits might be like (remember these?), Moon sits more closely to traditional expectations. Food is boil-in-the-bag; Bell plays ping-pong and does woodcarving. There's a simplicity and a lack of sci-fi shockers that heightens the sense of tension and isolation that Jones has strived for, and attained. 


And all this complemented by a lovely, repetitive score, which, of course, mirrors something of Bell's own situation, and gives that sense of loneliness, and is only broken by three moments in the film: twice his alarm clock blares out a garish song, and once when he insists on dancing rather maniacally for thirty seconds or so. All told, the elements of this film pull together towards a mood, a sensation, an intensity, that is rarely seen. It was a shame it didn't receive a broader release.


~~~
2009
Sam Rockwell
dir. Duncan Jones

Franklyn

Can one trade in substance for style? Franklyn certainly makes a fair enough bid to achieve it. Unfortunately, despite moments of excellence, it doesn't quite make it. At least not to my satisfaction.

McMorrow's Franklyn, his only outing after Thespian X, a sci-fi short, is not short of interesting ideas. Jonathan Priest (Phillippe) lives in a world in which while everyone has religion, he does not. He is hunted mercilessly by religious fanatics as he himself tries to piece together something of a murder mystery. Emilia (Green) is a troubled artist who films herself attempting suicide as her latest art project, to her mother's disgust. Milo (Riley) has been dumped, yet again, and goes on the trail of a childhood friend to try to work out what left him jilted once more. The latter two inhabit what seems to be real-world London. Then there's Esser (Bernard Hill - sorry, I couldn't find a good Franklyn image) who's looking for his missing son. 

Individually the storylines are interesting enough, and McMorrow's ideas are all there. However, as bedfellows, they seem uncomfortable. The denouement as worlds collide didn't quite work in my mind, and while it was entertaining enough to try to piece together how characters overlapped between worlds, how much we were being guided to see things through certain viewpoints, it failed to live up to the emotional weight that the script tried to demand. Sadly that was the greatest weakness here: a script that verged on melodrama left the actors delivering fairly empty performances and not quite managing to lift the drama beyond the mediocre. But that remained a shame to me, a disappointment that could have been avoided with a closer edit of the material. Some of Priest's film noir style observations where in themselves amusing and a fitting homage to that genre, but why did McMorrow then choose to situate his hero in this futuristic dystopia rather than in black and white New York or Chicago? It is almost as though there are too many elements at play jarring with each other.

The dystopia is pretty enough, but maddeningly so, overladen with an intensity of detail that offers little to the plot or characters. On the one hand, reason is given as to what we are really seeing (and I'm avoiding spoilers here). But on the other, it does not inform the story to any level that is meaningful. Again, a judicious edit or rethink might have helped here. So it was a shame to watch as competent enough actors struggled through a tepid script and failed to give wings to potentially emotionally moving drama that really never got off its feet.

Am I glad I watched it? Not really. I can't go using the name Franklin much now. Boo.

~~~

2008

Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley

Written and directed by Gerald McMorrow

Yellow Blue Tibia

Adam Robert's Yellow Blue Tibia is the record of the attempted alien invasion of the Soviet Union in 1986, told by science fiction writer Konstantin Skvorecky as he pieces together the disparate elements that make up the story. It's a good enough device, to write as a writer who is prone to flights of imagination and prides himself on his command of language. It's also a good plan to set the novel in the USSR and play some games with language and translation. Fortuitously enough, our hero can speak English so communication with American scientologists provides no problems.


But unfortunately, despite the obvious attention paid to narrative devices and structure, the novel falls flat for two main reasons:

1. It struck me as rather pat, rather trite, how elements combined to bring about the hero's death, the failed invasion. What felt as though it was building to a massive climax ended instead in a feeling of disappointment. If that was the intention of the author, as I hope it might have been, sadly he failed to pull it off in any meaningful or rewarding way. Instead, I was left deflated, and not because I felt that was the intended response of a reader, but because the finale had missed the point.
2. The setting and characters are by and large Russian. But Robert's experience of Russia, if he has any, is not in evidence in the writing. That in itself is not essential; what is, however, is that we aren't provided with mere caricatures of what a Soviet man might be like in the 80s. Yet there is something horribly garish about the jesting with 'yellow blue tibia', an attempt at rendering in English ya lublyu tibya, the Russian for 'I love you'. There's something garish about the pastiche of omnipresent KGB officers, about how everyone is an alcoholic bar Skvorecky. There's even something a little disappointing that the book's jacket has to include that silly attempt at mock-Russian styling in using letters from Cyrillic as though they made sense in English. They don't. It just looks ill-considered.

The premise is good enough, and Roberts' clearly knows how to manipulate elements of a novel to great effect. But there needs to be some kind of passion behind such a manipulation. Otherwise, we are reading an exercise in novel writing, not a novel itself.

~~~

2009

Adam Roberts

Orion Books

District Nine

What happens when you're really into science fiction, you've just got out of film school, you're South African and thus involved with complex questions surrounding racism and then Peter Jackson offers to bankroll your project? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you end up making a film a bit like District 9.

District 9 takes the premise that aliens do exist and in fact have made it to Earth. But, through interviews with journalists, sociologists and collected scientists, we discover that they didn't land over New York or Hollywood, but over Johannesburg. Rather than rush out, invading army style, they were found to be malnourished, disorganised and suffering severely. An aid camp is immediately set up to support them. Twenty years pass, and the camp becomes a slum; anti-alien sentiment rises in Jo'burg, and MNU (Multi-National United) is contracted to evict the aliens to a new camp, District 10, outside of the city.

Stylistically director Neill Blomkamp has plumped for quasi-documentary filmmaking. Snippets of interviews fill us in with information about the alien arrival very swiftly, and are interspersed with news broadcasts and what appears to be a film crew following the hapless MNU employee, Wikus Van De Merwe, who has been chosen nepotistically to organise the serving of eviction notices to the aliens. It is through Wikus' eyes, or at least, with our eyes on him, that we gain the greatest insight into alien-human relations. Wikus is blase and crass in dealing with the aliens, or 'prawns' as they are dubbed, and even though one knows something is going to go wrong, it is hard not to laugh at how incompetent Wikus proves himself to be.

When things do in fact go wrong, and Wikus finds himself without friends or support, and indeed being pursued by his own company, the film shifts a gear from edgy mockumentary, where the challenge of dealing with race sits side by side with Wikus' ongoing commentary, to nearly-action flick. I say nearly, because I felt that it never quite became full-blown. Or at least, it never leapt the gap into blockbuster territory, as the South African accents and range of camera styles kept that distance from the standard Hollywood action flick. I appreciated that.

What really struck me was just the range of emotions it elicited in me. Yes, there were some difficult questions being posed about racism, and since the film's release the director's handling of the Nigerians in the film, who are portrayed as soulless bandits out only for profit from the hapless aliens, so debased they even eat alien flesh in the hope of magically gaining alien strength, has come into question. But I was also laughing at the natural comedy of the goonish Van De Merwe, and touched as the twist in his life left him at times vomiting and at times in tears. As he squats on a rubbish dump and starts to push cat food into his mouth, only to cry, his face was wracked with the pain of knowing what he was becoming, and what he had lost. That, to me, was a touching moment. Although there was the suggestion of a happy ending, it was not spelt out for us. Perhaps to allow for a sequel, but perhaps because where the strength of the film lay was in the fact it may have had a Hollywood budget, but it wasn't governed by some of the 'laws of filmmaking' that govern many American films in recent years.

***

2009

Sharlto Copley

Dir. Neill Blomkamp

Eve: The Empyrean Age

World of Warcraft fan fiction; Matrix comic books; Warhammer novels; Transformers movies. It's fairly standard for a toy to become a film, or a game gets a book, or a book spawns a film trilogy which then spawns a game and a computer game. Anything can happen in this day and age.

For fan fiction though, the big hitters (Halo, Warhammer, Dungeons&Dragons, Star Wars) all seemed to offer the same thing: fairly standard, low-quality, mass produced paperback books, with spin-off characters and repetitive plots. The world itself was more engaging than the characters or plotlines. World of Warcraft books seem to be doing ok and that must be in part due to those obsessive fans (and we know warcraft collects them) who immerse themselves in the world so that even when no longer gaming they still want to read WoW.

Eve is a book of a game. This time, the game is Eve Online and the book took as its mission to write something of comparable depth and complexity as the game. The game, set in New Eden, an alternatively galaxy separated from Earth, allows the complete growth of a character within a space-age society that is both ruthless and demanding. The author, Tony Gonzales, has taken this futuristic universe, complete with pirates, warring factions, governments and mega-corporations, and woven a thread of three different stories into it. In some sense it is following the standard package for fan-fiction, by using the universe of the game as a starting point, and then adding characters, but it differentiates itself in terms of both character and plot.

As the book progressed, I was concerned that this triple-weave plot might wind up with a cliched ending, some kind of easy resolution, as Amarrian lord meets Minmatar fleet meets Caldarian revolution in some kind of 'closure' device. Instead, it became apparent that tragedy was the order of the day, and in fact the plots of Eve were leading to a fateful future (perhaps even the future in which the game is set, one in which Amarr and Minmater, Caldari and Gallente, battle endlessly). To try to pitch his book as some sort of pre-history to Eve Online rather than as a selected episode from the game gave a purpose to his tale and a freedom to narrate events in a manner of his own choosing. In fact, it almost appears as if Eve Online was merely used as a starting point for Gonzales, rich as the game is in history and immersive detail, and in fact once in that universe he made it his own, building upon already gleaned information to provide a level of authenticity and attraction to his tale.

Eve is not remarkable in using a computer game as its main influence; however, it goes further and achieves more from that standpoint than others I have encountered. Furthermore, it seems to glean the best elements from the sub-genre, while discarding the worst. Plot and characters are involving and well-drawn, and the prose is not bogged down with a undue amount of game references. In fact, the game heritage to the book is most noted in the meticulous attention Gonzales shows to naming each class of spaceship, displaying an impressive attention to in-game detail.

*****
by Tony Gonzales