TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

There's only, like, one amusing part in the Hunger Games, and that's when the Rudy-looking fella uses his cake decoration skills (yes) to camouflage himself as a rock.  It's 110% as stupid as it sounds.

I may actually have to check that out, just to see.

(And Ashley Greene is beyond hot, particularly in that pixie cut.  Holy moly.)

Concur.  And how.

[Ideologue]

Now, as somebody who respects the concept of CANON and will call CANON VIOLATION when warranted, I have to say the Bad Guy's Big Secret truly annoyed me.  It just didn't work: not for a CANON purist, and not really for a casual fan.  It was absolutely unnecessary to develop the Big Secret into that.  And not only that, he didn't even do it well.

How so?  Explain.

That is soooo self-explanatory, and you know it.  NOW SATURN 3 MACHT SCHNELL

I was half-serious, though.  You mean Abrams, or Encumbered Batch?

Gonna watch Saturn 3 in a minute.

[CountDeMoney]

I was half-serious, though.  You mean Abrams, or Encumbered Batch?

Both, actually.

Gonna watch Saturn 3 in a minute.

Heeheehee.  Welcome to my childhood in the post-Star Wars sci-fi cultural sploogefest.

[derspiess]

Amazon prime is so great. Tinker, Taylor, etc., is already here.

Indeed it is.  A little too great.  With one-click purchase it's downright dangerous.

[Admiral Yi]

Moonrise Kingdom.  Not much to see there.

[Ideologue]

Moonrise Kingdom.  Not much to see there.

PERFECTLY FRAMED SHOTS.

[Ideologue]

Saturn 3 (1980).

Director: Stanley Donen
Written by: John Barry and about five hundred uncredited others
With Kirk Douglas (Adam), Farrah Fawcett (Alex), Harvey Keitel (Benson), and Roy Dotrice (voice of Harvey Keitel and Harvey Keitel's robot)

Synopsis:  Space Bad Lieutenant steals a suit, a rocket ship, and a pod full of secrets and ventures to the far-flung outpost of Saturn 3 which is on Titan, maybe.  There, a duo of sexy agronomists have been sent for unexplained and surely non-intuitive reasons, and who fit in bouts of research on Earth's food production problem when they're not fitting into each other.  Saturn 3 is eclipsed by the gas giant upon the enigmatic visitor's arrival, and Saturns 1 and 2 are not answering their phones, ensuring that his work there will not be interrupted by outside sources and the sexier of the sexy scientists will be unable file a harassment lawsuit for at least 22 days.  His advances spurned, and thrashed soundly by her boyfriend, an aging (but still agreeably sexy) gladiator of a scientist, Space Bad Lieutenant retreats to the lab to construct a rape robot that can handle the heavy rape lifting for him.  And then something goes wrong!

***

According to my research, Saturn 3 was a beleaguered production.  The original script, titled The Helper, which I like better in its ironic reference to the robot who rapes like a man, is said, by Martin Amis (uncredited screenwriter) and Farrah Fawcett, amongst others, to have gone through innumerable drafts.  Harvey Keitel's vocal performance was cut from the movie entirely, apparently solely because there is no Brooklyn in Space.  Elmer Bernstein's exquisitely rad score was fucked with enormously.  John Barry, whose idea this whole thing was, and famous for his work from Star Wars and Superman but a first-time feature director and easy prey for the rigors of the job and also Kirk Douglas, got fired.  Then he died.  Producer Stanley Donen stepped in and little if any footage shot by Barry was used.  Many scenes, some of which sound rather cool, were cut, either for violence (the cooler ones involve some serious gore content) or for no obvious reason, other than to cut the running time to a leanish 88 minutes.  And maybe lean's okay, because outside of the rape thing--well, scratch that, this is basically Alien.

But Alien plus.  Sure, Alien is a movie about rape, but it has no counterpoint, unless killing your rapist is a counterpoint.  I suppose that's some kind of point, but it is a little obvious.

Saturn 3, however, is a movie about the contrast between healthy and unhealthy male sexual expression.  I'm pretty sure that this is a dimension that was given little thought by bunch of 1970s men who made a movie about a robot with a psychological hard-on, but there it is: this tension is central to the character and plot dynamics of the film.

On Saturn 3, Adam (Douglas) and Alex (Fawcett) have created an idyll in which they can experience pleasure and live out their days happily.  Something of a counterculturalist, if not a downright hippie, Adam doesn't keep track of social change on Earth, though through distant memories he knows it was bad and getting worse when he left.  Alex was born in space, and has never been to Earth; she asks about it, and he evades; he doesn't like it when she investigates the current state of Earth from the Space Internet.  But Adam knows he's getting older, and that one day Alex will be making a one-way trip to the homeworld--alone.  But right now, he's a good guy, Alex is a good gal; things are okay.  Benson intervenes.

When Benson (Keitel) asks what kind of bird Alex is, he does so with the unimpeachably good pick-up line that is "You have a great body.  May I use it?"  When rebuffed, he tells her that on Earth such rudeness is "penally unsocial!"  This presumption of sexual access defines the villain, setting up the sociological conflict of the film: the struggle between the exoteric rape culture (Earth--us, I guess, but mainly you), and the sexual innocence and freedom of consent.

In a slightly earlier conversation, Benson indicates that on Earth, they also eat dogs: nothing sacred, everything objectified.

It's never made perfectly clear why Benson has stolen the secret pod--the secret is that it contains a jar containing about fifteen people's worth of brain matter--but he appears to be some sort of roboticist with a mad scientist bent, so therefore a villain for all ages, a rapist and a technological job destroyer.  His great work is to build a robot with a wetware CPU, for unknown reasons--and don't hold your breath waiting for any kind of explanation to these plot points, other than SCIENCE.  The main point is that when he arrives, he immediately wants Alex, he's willing to get rid of Adam, and he doesn't really care how he does it or how either of them actually feel about the situation.

He doesn't really build the robot for the express purpose of rape.  That's just what they call an emergent property.  He uploads a copy of his consciousnes into the robot, Hector, to train the robot in performing tasks and Hector immediately evinces the same creepy fascination with Alex and the same jealousy of Adam that Benson has been experiencing, except with the power of a robot arm behind him.

The uncanny look of Hector is the most visually memorable aspect of the film.  Fawcett reports being terrified of it, and she had good reason (not least, the eye scene).  He possesses a humanoid form in most respects, with key differences.  The metal structure that approximates musculature and the tubing that feeds and oxygenates the brain, suggest a flayed human body.  Even more strikingly, instead of a head and neck, he has a third arm emerging from his torso, replete with tiny, LED-lit eyestalks that wobble and whir most menacingly.   Imagine a fully upright (I hesitate to say erect) Johnny 5 with beadier eyes and a circulatory system.  It's really quite delightfully macabre.

Of course, as I've indicated, and in a turn which is all but obligatory, Hector goes nuts.  He turns on his creator, kills him, and briefly wears his face as a mask in the most gruesome scene of the uncut film.  Forthwith, he sets his sights on Adam and Alex.  His goal with them is never fully fleshed out--and I use the potential double entendre there meaningfully.  It does not want to kill them, but--I think--wishes to absorb their memories and personalities, Borglike, adding them to his.  To this end, he violates Adam's skull with a data port from which he can extract his brainstuff.

So how about that non-metaphorical rape?  Well, unfortunately (???), there is no actual robot rape in this movie.  I was quasi-disappointed that the seemingly inevitable and potentially quite horrifying twist ending did not occur, and Adam's consciousness was not Source Coded by Hector.  Instead the climactic scene ends with a perfunctory and patriarchal self-sacrifice suicide carried out by Adam with the help of a bomb he appears to have picked up in the pantry.  Fade to black, and coda: Alex is on her way to Earth, but understandably traumatized and depressed.

But let's consider this.  This ending is more subtly terrifying, with more profound implications.  She will experience ultimately the same end result as she would have had Hector simply won.  Recall: denial of sexual access to random, reptilian men is penally unsocial.  (Ha ha.)  Earth is Planet Rape.

I'm struggling with deciding whether or not the elaboration upon this theme was intended, that if this was an idea on John Barry and Stanley Donen's minds.  While there's no dearth of Farrah Fawcett is various states of undress, her less-than-clothed scenes are largely with Douglas, tasteful and vivaciously fun.  Of course, the irony is that she didn't want to disrobe and was cajoled into doing so, including by Douglas (double irony), who was it seems an asshole on set, and, as revealed by Martin Amis, was self-obsessed, particularly with his own naked body, and given to making rapey remarks about Fawcett himself.  Movie magic everybody!  Amis later wrote a novel loosely based on the filming of Saturn 3, named, fittingly enough for our purposes here, Money.

One of the cut scenes, that plays out the "Blue Dreamer" drug use subplot that never goes anywhere in the finished theatrical release, involves more fetishistic gear and the interplay of sexuality and violence, in the form of Adam and Alex sexily murdering Benson.  On the other hand, the Blue Dreamers (little pills) were a gift from Benson himself, the avatar of nonconsensual sex.  Stanley Donen, I've read,  in a sentence on Wikipedia with a [citation needed] at the end of it, desired to play down the exploitation angle.  Did he know what he was doing here?  Where is Task Force 34?  Anyway!

Saturn 3 is recommended.  It has some pretty neat set design; some truly great and quoteable lines (as nasty as it is, "Penally unsocial!" is, yeah, still pretty funny); the to-all-appearances fun, easy, and sexy chemistry between Douglas and Fawcett in the face of the sociopathy (on the screen and behind the scenes); Roy Dotrice's weird but ultimately effective choice to give Harvey Keitel some kind of future spaceman accent; Hector's distressing, sub-iconic appearance; about half of really interesting score; and the weird, possibly unintentional, partly bungled, but surprisingly resonant theme.

Of course, it's a bit of a bummer of a movie, if you look past the surface elements.  And I will hardly go so far as to call it feminist.  I mean, if Donen didn't want a sick Space Irreversible, he could've just gone the full Alien, and had Fawcett's character maybe be a bit more proactive (i.e., at all).  He could have had her preserving her own edenic relationship with all means at her disposal.  How?  I dunno.  Maybe with THAT GODDAMNED METAL-BURNING LASER THAT THEY SET UP IN THE FIRST FUCKING ACT.

Problematic, but good!  I'd like to see the 103-minute workprint one day, if they can ever find it.

B

Did you know that 1 in every 6 women will experience a robotic sexual assault in her lifetime?

For more on robot rape, including some cool pictures and links to Youtubes with some of the cut stuff, visit http://saturn3makingof.com/  I found it an invaluable resource when writing this review.

[CountDeMoney]

Hehehe.

[Syt]

God, I had forgotten that movie existed. I recall seeing it as a kid in some Sunday morning time slot at some point.

[Ideologue]

Sunday morning?  Well, it's Rape O'Clock somewhere.

[Ideologue]

Hehehe.

Hope you enjoy.

There's only like one Internet-readable review on RT, and not a whole ton of critical reviews I've found so far either.  I don't think the sexual politics have been seriously considered by anybody.  I did: original work.

[Kleves]

After Earth is currently sitting at 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

[The Larch]

Moonrise Kingdom.  Not much to see there.

You have no heart.

[Viking]

After Earth is currently sitting at 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

how much of that is sheer Shyamalan hate by the critics?

[lustindarkness]

After Earth is currently sitting at 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

how much of that is sheer Shyamalan hate by the critics?

86%