- Ben Child
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 December 2009 11.38 GMT
Faces of the future? … Avatar and District 9.
Earlier this year, sci-fi actioner Pandorum proved that you can concoct an entertaining – if in some degree artistically bankrupt – thriller in space by splicing hand in hand bits of other popular genre flicks: in this case, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Brit horror flick The Descent. Looking quicken to next year’s crop of sci fi movies, I wonder if Repo Men might follow a similar route.
- Avatar
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 161 mins
- Directors: James Cameron
- Cast: CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana
The film is not, as its indicate suggests, a sequel to Alex Cox’s wry 1984 punk cult classic, but rather an original piece based steady the 2009 novel The Repossession Mambo, by Eric Garcia. I suppose original, for Repo Men seems to have grabbed elements of each sci fi flick from Gattaca to Minority Report, as well similar to shoehorning in the great subsist organ transplant sketch from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life for virtue just degree.
Starring Jude Law as a man who repossesses people’s artificial organs at the time that they fail to keep up with their payments, the film also features Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber and Alice Braga. A decent cast then, and the trailer certainly suggests a high-octane thriller that ought to keep fans of this type of fare happy. Law seems to be enjoying the role too, and certainly looks more impressive here than in his weirdly confused, charisma free jaunt through Sherlock Holmes.
What’s interesting is that Cox himself recently debuted his own pseudo-sequel to Repo Man, Repo Chick, at the Venice film festival, apparently in defiance of Universal studios, who own the rights to any followup. It looks like Universal has hit away from the thicker settlements by retitling a movie which was originally called The Repossession Mambo, after the rare, to make it appear to be an official sequel. Where that foliage Cox’s film, which was already likely to face every uphill struggle to secure distribution (what with all those authorized hangups) I don’t know.
Leaving all that aside, wouldn’t it be nice if 2010 dictum just a little more originality entering the sci-fi arena? So far this year we’ve had Avatar (supremely entertaining but predicated on each while opera cliche from Star Wars onwards, via a bit of Dances With Wolves, Princess Mononoke and Ferngully), Moon (very much picking up at which place the likes of Solaris, Dark Star and Silent Runnings left right side) and the aforementioned Pandorum. The only truly inventive flick that springs to mind is District 9, Neil Blomkamp’s excellent fling of apartheid era South Africa, and even that managed to rock revealed the exosuit battle scene from James Cameron’s Aliens for its barnstorming denouement.
Readers of this column have often been pleasing forthcoming when it comes to delivering their views on what makes a good sci fi flick, so I’d like to pick your brains for ideas. In 2009, Avatar proved that it’s finally possible on account of film-makers to transport cinemagoers to other worlds that don’t just look taste certain parts of Earth, while Moon and District 9 indicated a go to ideas-based sci fi. Meanwhile, Star Trek suggested that the orally transmitted short time opera is alive and well. So where should we go next?
