You're on mute! [Review: Sleep Dealer]

Sleep Dealer is an indie science fiction movie made in 2008 and set mostly in Mexico. I first came across it when reading an interview with the director, Alex Rivera. I recently watched it online and I think it's a beautiful film, deserving a second lease of life in this era of Zoom remote working.

 Memo (Luis Fernando Pena) is a tech geek growing up in a farming village but dreaming of escape. When catastrophe strikes his family in the form of an aerial drone attack, Memo is forced to leave. He travels to Tijuana, along the way meeting city girl and aspiring writer Luz (Leonor Varela), gets mini-jack ports inserted painfully in his arms and back, and he's ready to get work in a "sleep dealer factory" where he can plug into the VR network and control a construction robot that could be working in another country.

This movie uses near-future sci-fi concepts to tell a very personal story about oppression, exploitation and the value of life. Remote working is not safe - thanks to dodgy electronics Memo runs the risk of blindness or injury every day he clocks in. His employers don't seem to be interested in health and safety and there's little he can do. But while labour is cheap, water is expensive - following the construction of a dam, the rivers around Memo's home village have dried up Jean de Florette style and the inhabitants pay to collect water from a commercially owned and heavily guarded reservoir.

The remote working theme is interesting as it becomes a metaphor for indirect oppression - while the privileged seem to be running the world, the means of oppression are remote controlled checkpoints with machine guns, and their operators are likely to be other low-paid workers. The drone pilot is revealed to be a young American with a Mexican immigrant background and perhaps it is this connection that leads him to seek information about Memo, leading in turn to a surprising finale with elements of Star Wars or Dambusters.

There's also a Scanner Darkly-esque theme about the many aspects of surveillance: Memo and his brother watch the drone attack unfold on a live TV programme, recognizing their own village as the drone approaches its target. Luz pays her bills by literally selling her memories online, including her memories of meeting Memo - a career choice that does not bode well for their relationship.

Sleep Dealer is accidentally prophetic. In addition to the themes of remote working and social media, it's the second indie film I've seen that predicts a US-Mexico border wall. The other is Gareth Edwards debut Monsters. In this case the wall has prevented migrants coming to work in the US, and as a result the low-paid migrant workforce has become an equally low paid remote working workforce, migrating to work digitally all over the world while remaining plugged in to their factories.

As other reviewers at the time of release noted, a weaker aspect of this movie is the CGI for the aerial drones and the construction robots. While it's good enough to tell the story it's not quite convincing as real. In contrast, the practical special effects are excellent. I squirmed in empathic pain when Memo had his nodes inserted - that's one memory I won't be downloading. And the acting from all the lead characters is superb, with total commitment to role.

Overall this is a likeable and thoughtful indie sci-fi and well worth the three stars out of five I'm giving it.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars.

Follow That Town [Review: Mortal Engines]

Score: 3 out of 5 stars
All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

A small Bavarian mining village is minding its' own business when suddenly a predator city appears on the horizon. The town packs up its' houses, shops and streets and makes a dash for it but it's too small to outrun the caterpillar tracks of London, and its' fate is sealed. However as the village is pillaged and torn apart to feed the furnaces of London, amongst the villagers being "welcomed" into London's immigration system, there is a certain young lady with a desperate agenda.

Mortal Engines is a Peter Jackson-directed movie based on the Philip Reeve novel for children, young adults and old adults, set in a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years into the future, where cities have been uprooted and mobilized on wheels, legs or tracks, and where "municipal Darwinism" rules - the bigger cities prey on the smaller ones, and it seems London has become the biggest of all. The challenge for this film is to bring to life this very eccentric vision of city-sized vehicles driving furiously across a desolate landscape, without losing the humanity and the stories of the characters brought together by the clash of cities.

Does it succeed? Mostly. The traction city of London is an awesome creation, topped with St. Pauls Cathedral and its' gardens, its' overpopulated levels packed with houses and office blocks and connected by a transit system that combines the Tube, the red double-decker buses and the London Eye, and the entire structure driven on massive engines topped with Trafalgar Square lions. London kicks ass, and its' colourful citizens cheering in bloodthirsty fashion from their terraces as the City gives chase to its' next victim are just the icing on the cake. Meanwhile I can't describe in detail the other cities visited without the cast as that would be major spoilerage, but they are imaginative and full of character.

The central characters of Mortal Engines are mostly played by unknowns - at least in the Western Sphere. The singer Jihae, playing the rebel leader Anna Fang, is of course well known and loved in South Korea but hasn't broken the West yet - hopefully we will see or hear more of her. The unfamiliarity means that the cast are in competition with the cities to steal the limelight, and the cities put up a good fight. However I felt the lead players, Robert Sheehan and Hera Hilmarsdottir, gave super performances, and the most familiar face amongst the cast, Hugo Weaving, is a good choice for a villain who actually gets to do some genuinely villainous things *innocent face*.

Genuinely villainous. This is an extremely violent movie for a 12-certificate release. It is a war film of sorts. There is a lot of death, destruction and injury, whether in human-on-human firefights or in the collateral damage when cities clash or fall. Blood guts and gore are sparing - most deaths are clean, off-screen or implied, Doctor Who style, and sometimes this can be confusing.

For a movie based on such an original concept, it has to be said that Mortal Engines is derivative in some ways, and this comes down more to the way the movie has been styled than the original novel. London and particularly the Londoners are highly reminiscent of the Hunger Games' Capitol, and many aspects of the movie echo Star Wars, from paternity revelations to the assault by small flying machines on the Doomsday device. The novel itself, while original in many ways, also has its' precedents, such as the Christopher Priest novel Inverted World which also features a travelling city.

Overall I felt despite the derivative elements, Mortal Engines was a decent, enjoyable movie that well deserves its' highly accurate and meaningful rating of 3 stars out of 5.

Snoke And Mirrors [Review: The Last Jedi]

Picking up where The Force Awakens ends, Rey (Daisy Ridley) has found Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) but must persuade him to return to help the rebellion. The First Order, under the command of the mysterious Snoke and his subordinates Kylo Ren and General Hux are closing in on the rebel fleet. Providing any more synopsis would be a spoiler - and nobody wants that.

The Last Jedi is directed by Rian Johnson but J.J. Abrams is still the executive director and there is still evidence of his influence - not least the in-jokes that reference the original trilogy and the legends that surround it. To give one example that is only a minor spoiler, it's quite well known that R2-D2's electronic sound is based on actual dialogue, and that much of that original dialogue was filthy. In this film R2-D2 is reprimanded for using inappropriate language in a holy location.

However the film feels a little more gentle than The Force Awakens, despite the intense battles at the start and end, and more spiritual. Midichlorians are not mentioned and the mystical side of the Force is emphasised, not unlike Hope and Empire. We also get to see some completely new sides of the Force, even if one of these is taken wholesale from Harry Potter. And there are one or two scenes that carry surprising emotional weight, on a par with the most memorable scenes from the original trilogy. The writing is good, and questions are answered - but not the ones I was expecting. Performances from the newcomers (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Adam Driver) are matched by the awesome return of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. There are some things called Porgs, and BB-8 still steals scenes left right and centre.

The Last Jedi is enjoyable for many reasons, but particularly for the comedy aspects. Visually all of the Star Wars films are strong and The Last Jedi is no exception. It's not another Empire Strikes Back but definitely one of the better present-day films.

[Review: Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets]

When a valuable stolen treasure is sighted in the multi-dimensional Big Market, Valerian and Laureline, two intergalactic special agents are dispatched to recover it - but this turns out to be just the first step in solving a greater mystery connecting the stolen item, the destroyed planet of Mul and the mysterious entity that has taken over part of the multicultural space city Alpha.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a Luc Besson film based on the Valerian and Laureline French graphic novels. The heroes are played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delavigne. As in the comics, Valerian is straight-laced and does it by the book while Laureline is more of an out-of-the-box thinker; traditional gender personality traits are exaggerated for effect. Somehow they appear younger in the film than in the comics - more or less hormonal, bickering teenagers despite their elite skills, military rank and galaxy-saving duties. Theirs is not the greatest on-screen partnership Hollywood has ever seen. When the chemistry does work the flirting and bickering is fun to watch, but it's hit and miss throughout the film. The plot also veers between child-friendly action, adult innuendo and the aftermath of a serious war crime making me wonder just who it is aimed at.

Valerian also takes inspiration from other sci-fi movies - visually there's a lot in common with The Fifth Element including colourful, entertaining aliens, sharp fashions particularly when it comes to uniform, and eye-popping over-the-top environments. The space megacity of Alpha, born from a series of space handshakes starting with the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz link-up, is a mixture of The Fifth Element's New York and Star Wars' Coruscant. There are plenty of other Star Wars parallels but on the other hand, for some reason none of the Star Wars movies feature a shape-changing alien exotic dancer performing any famous scenes from Cabaret. Why not, George?

I bought my ticket for Valerian with high expectations for the visuals but fairly low for everything else. I came out ahead in that the visuals are indeed pretty good, and much of the film (if not quite all) is entertaining.

Rey A Drop Of Golden Sun [Review: The Force Awakens]

You may be aware of the recent release of this obscure micro-budget arthouse flick - in fact you may have noticed there are already one or two reviews elsewhere on the Internet. A few observations:

History does seem to repeat itself through the Star Wars movies. Certain themes and plot elements, particularly the obsession with genocidal planet-busting weapons, recur quite often. I'd like to think this is deliberate. After all, no-one complains if the recap at the end of a symphony movement sounds a bit like the first part of the movement, do they? It's called structure.

There seems to be a different approach to character-building. Finn, Rey and Kylo all have believable internal conflicts and grey areas, whereas the cast of all six previous films* are easily classifiable into "good" or "bad" (with the possible exception of Lando). It's particularly interesting to see "bad" characters that are so conflicted - in plot terms this might also indicate that the First Order is different from the monolithic Empire. However these characters are only complex for Star Wars - they still seem simplistic compared to many other films.

There's a definite improvement in the quality of the filmmaking. I won't say it was bad but there was always something eccentric about Lucas's approach to direction, perhaps befitting the most successful indie filmmaker of all time, whereas under J.J. Abrams and his team the new film looks - how do I say this? more professional. It's hard to pinpoint all the technical changes but there's better composition, more interesting shots and angles, and it all makes for a more engaging film.

Overall The Force Awakens worked for me - it was a lot of fun, I thought the new cast were excellent and brought something fresh to the series, and there were a lot of new ideas even if there were also a lot of familiar ones. I look forward to Episode VIII.

*The six previous films are, of course:
A New Hope
Empire Strikes Back
Revenge of the Sith
Return of the Jedi
Attack of the Clones
Ewoks: Caravan of Courage

Answers to Star Wars quiz.

I'm sure you got them all:

1: A New Hope
2: Empire Strikes Back
3: Revenge of the Sith
4: Attack of the Clones
5: Return of the Jedi
6: The Ewok Adventure

Sorted.

Quiz - Star Wars films

There may be some disruption this week as I replace my desktop. I'll post anyway if I can get to a cybercafe or some alternative, and I hope to be back on the sub-ether band in a few days.

Meanwhile here's a quick quiz. I'm not too obsessive about lists, but let's see if you think the way I do: place the six Star Wars films in order of quality, starting with the best. I'll post my choices in a few days.