parable so persuasive was its patina of brand-name realism, with a wealth of sharply etched material details that account for its tidal emotional potency. More than any of the film’s other achievements - its precise, poetic evocation of a peaceably tree-lined suburbia its seamless integration of a mechanical character into a live-action ensemble the soaring euphoria of John Williams’s score - what made Spielberg’s alien B.F.F. In lieu of Kubrick’s anxious allegory about humans outsmarted and destroyed by their own technology, George Lucas put escapism on the table - “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” - and staged a reassuringly Manichaean battle between good and evil, with very fine aliens on both sides. Almost a decade later, “Star Wars” used a similar array of special effects to cultivate more weightless sensations. The film’s grandeur was undeniable, and so was its gravitas: It was an epic punctuated with a question mark. Following the pulp fictions of the ’50s, if there was one movie that represented a great leap forward for cinematic science fiction, it was Stanley Kubrick’s epically scaled, narratively opaque 1968 film “ 2001: A Space Odyssey,” which not only featured a massive, mysterious monolith but also came to resemble one in the eyes of critics and audiences alike. Whether the summer of ’82 represented the gentrification of cinematic sci-fi or its artistic apex, the genre’s synthesis of spectacle and sociology had been underway for some time. How could five such indelible movies arrive at the same time? Whether giving a dated prime-time space opera new panache or recasting 1940s noir in postmodernist monochrome, the filmmakers (and special-effects technicians) of the summer of ’82 created a sublime season of sci-fi that looks, 40 years later, like the primal scene for many Hollywood blockbusters being made - or remade and remodeled - today. The range of tones and styles on display was remarkable, from family-friendly fantasy to gory horror. Not all of these movies were created equal artistically, but taken together, they made a compelling case for the increasing thematic flexibility of their genre.
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