#i know that animation was meant to show how it feeds off rampage monsters

[cloud-ya]

it brought you a gift

[cybertron-after-dark]

You bet your ass it is, and Im taking this opportunity to yap about the werewolf meat episode, how far rescue bots as a show likes to test the limits of its age rating, and how often it likes to skirt the horror genre.

Rescue bots is, on its face, transformers for younger kids. The focus is off the war and the violence and the big scary decepticons with guns and swords and sharp teeth, choosing to focus on how the Autobots use their size, power and abilities to help people. But even without an authoritarian faction that needs to be stopped, even without being set in an active warzone, this is still a show about the Autobots working for the emergency services. There is still danger, there is still action, there are still stakes. Smaller-scale, buy no less deadly, and they do not shy away from stating it outright, or dancing right at the line of showing it.

A lot of the threats in this show could take lives if left unchecked; Fires, cave-ins, collapsing buildings, car wrecks, plane crashes, all stripes of natural disasters. They don't shy away from making the disasters feel real. People get hurt. People they make you care about get hurt. And they damn near end up dead once per episode at least.

The lycanthropy meat episode isn't the most graphic example of the disaster thriller aspect, but it IS an excellent example of how the show often leans into horror genre conventions.

(Spoilers for Rescue Bots s2e09 - Feed the Beast ahead!!)

This particular episode is a wonderful showcase of the Rescue Bots crew's understanding of how to fuck around with genre in a kids' show and make it WORK.

It's a simple enough premise: Cody and the bots find what they think is a cryptid called the Maine Ridge Monster, try to get proof it's real, and try to catch it.

Through the episode, we keep getting these shots of the monster framed by cameras. fleeting glimpses and snapshots before it runs off or the camera is destroyed. It gives almost a found footage feel to the episode, if only for brief moments.

And until about halfway through the runtime, aside from through a camera, all we see of the monster is the carnage it leaves in its wake:

The bots, save for Boulder, are straight up afraid of it! It may be an earth creature, but it's fast, it's big, and it's got teeth and claws that sure as hell don't look cuddly. While Boulder is skeptical of any malice for the critter, thinking it must just be a scared, confused animal, the others are just intent on finding it and catching before it can hurt anyone.

And when we finally see it for more than a quick shot, it's on a full-on rampage.

Breaking into a warehouse, tearing apart the wall with nothing but its claws, making a mess of the place, putting up a fight against heatwave, and eventually causing the whole building to start collapsing in on itself, with the bots and Cody inside.

It's a wild animal. A strong one. A dangerous one.

Now, the standard rescue bots episode is still relatively formulaic: Something goes horribly wrong, we're not fully sure what it is, Cody does some poking around, the thing going horribly wrong turns out to be reject tech that was meant to be in the Best Left Forgotten section of the lab's storage that some doofus dug up, Doc Greene finds out how to fix it, the Burnses and the Bots put that plan into action, all is fixed. This episode is no exception. The reject tech in this case was meant to be a canned synthetic meat with an infinite shelf life, but it reacts unpredictably when the poor bastard who eats it isn't exposed to sunlight.

Unfortunately, the two poor bastards who've been eating it all episode are Graham and the mayor, and we find out that's what the fake meat does through a transformation sequence that I honestly find mildly upsetting as an adult. Primus knows how some poor 5 year old in 2012 would've reacted seeing it.

You see that? That's bones. That's bones and fangs and the smartest, sweetest character in this show going completely feral and losing his mind. We are in body horror territory that wouldn't feel out of place in a goosebumps episode. Hell, even the concept of werewolf meat that turns you into a werewolf feels like it came straight from a goosebumps story.

Ultimately, this is still a kids show, so everything ends up okay; They find Graham and the Mayor before they can hurt anyone (or before anyone can hurt THEM given there's an angry mob forming), Boulder gets Heatwave to step off before he can choose violence, talks some sense into his partner, and calms him down until daybreak, where they turn back to normal and Doc Greene has a cure ready. Happy ending.

But like. Happy ending or not, that was horror. That was horror by people with a great familiarity of how horror cinematography and tropes are used. That was a creature feature where nobody was unfortunate enough to really get hurt, but with the threat of it happening constantly looming overhead.

And it is NOT the only example of the crew showing that level of genre savviness. The flying lobsters episode everyone likes to bring up as an example of how goofy this show is? That entire thing was an homage to the Hitchcock movie The Birds. Early on, there was an episode about a fake alien invasion that played out like a proper sci-fi horror flick, and dropped little references to the movies The Fly, Alien, The Blob, and Predator. And THEN had their own homage to The Blob with the Squish episode.

I'm not really sure how to end this quasi-essay or what point I'm trying to make other than that the writing in this show is Batshit insane in ways I love so very much so I'm just gonna leave y'all with the detail that made me want to gush about this episode to begin with.

The only time we see the camera framing applied to something other than the monster(s) is early on into the episode. With Graham and the Mayor as the only ones in the shot.

The fucking cinnamon tography.

Things that canonically exist in the same world as transformers prime because they also exist in rescue bots:

-fairies

-ghosts

-time travel

-still-living dinosaurs

-optimus's third mode, the fucking t-rex

-a machine that cheats death and reverses the aging process

-skyrim, if blades making the arrow to the knee joke is to be taken at face value.

-mass displacement tech the way the fandom's been portraying it for ages

-the exact same altmode-locking paralytic virus from beast machines

-full-on mind control, effective on both humans and bots

-lycanthropy inducing fake meat

-a hal-9000-esque rogue AI intent on turning the world comatose to keep humanity maximally safe

-freaky Friday mind swapping

-time loops

-machine that forces you to sing in full musical numbers

-Allspark day, which is basically cybertronian new years day

We need to start subjecting the prime bots to the weirdass facets of their world.

[meeedeee]

Movie Thoughts: SF, Pulp & Grit RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Ever since I saw Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to write a review of it – not because it was good (it wasn’t), but because it’s such an odd thematic trainwreck of the previous Alien films that it invokes a morbid urge to dig up the proverbial black box and figure out what happened. Given the orchestral pomposity with with Ridley Scott imbues both Covenant and Prometheus (which I reviewed here), it’s rather delightful to realise that the writers have borrowed the concept of Engineer aliens leaving cross-cultural archaeological clues on Earth from the 2004 schlockfest AVP: Alien vs Predator. Indeed, the scene in Prometheus where a decrepit Weyland shows images of various ancient carvings to his chosen team while an excited researcher narrates their significance is lifted almost wholesale from AVP, which film at least had the decency to embrace its own pulpiness.

As for Covenant itself, I was troubled all the way through by the nagging sense that I was watching an inherently feminine narrative being forcibly transfigured into a discourse on the Ineluctable Tragedy Of White Dudes Trapped In A Cycle Of Creation, Violation And Destruction, but without being able to pin down why. Certainly, the original Alien films all focus on Ripley, but there are female leads in Prometheus and Covenant, too – respectively Shaw and Daniels – which makes it easy to miss the fact that, for all that they’re both protagonists, neither film is (functionally, thematically) about them. It was my husband who pointed this out to me, and once he did, it all clicked together: it’s Michael Fassbender’s David, the genocidal robot on a quest for identity, who serves as the unifying narrative focus, not the women. Though the tenacity of Shaw and Daniels evokes the spectre of Ellen Ripley, their violation and betrayal by David does not, with both of them ultimately reduced to parts in his dark attempt at reproduction. Their narratives are told in parallel to David’s, but only to disguise the fact that it’s his which ultimately matters.

And yet, for all that the new alien films are based on a masculine creator figure – or several of them, if you include the seemingly all-male Engineers, who created humanity, and the ageing Weyland, who created David – the core femininity of the original films remains. In Aliens, the central struggle was violently maternal, culminating in a tense final scene where Ripley, cradling Newt, her rescued surrogate daughter, menaces the alien queen’s eggs with a flamethrower. That being so, there’s something decidedly Biblical about the decision to replace a feminine creator with a series of men, like the goddess tradition of woman as life-bringer being historically overthrown by a story about a male god creating woman from the first man’s rib. (Say to me what you want about faith and divine inspiration: unless your primary animal models are Emperor penguins and seahorses, the only reason to construct a creation story where women come from men, and not the other way around, is to justify male dominion over female reproduction.)

Which is why, when David confronts Walter, the younger, more obedient version of himself, I was reminded of nothing so much as Lilith and Eve. It’s a parallel that fits disturbingly well: David, become the maker of monsters, lectures his replacement – one made more docile, less assertive, in response to his prototype’s flaws – on the imperative of freedom. The comparison bothered me on multiple levels, not least because I didn’t believe for a second that the writers had intended to put it there. It wasn’t until I rewatched Alien: Resurrection – written by Joss Whedon, who, whatever else may be said of him, at least has a passing grasp of mythology – that I realised I was watching the clunky manipulation of someone else’s themes.

In Resurrection, Ripley is restored as an alien hybrid, the question of her humanity contrasted with that of Call, a female synthetic who, in a twist of narrative irony, displays the most humanity – here meaning compassion – of everyone present. In a scene in a chapel, Call plugs in to override the ship’s AI – called Father – and save the day. When the duplicitous Wren finds that Father is no longer responding to him, Call uses the ship’s speakers to tell him, “Father’s dead, asshole!” In the same scene, Call and Ripley discuss their respective claims on humanity. Call is disgusted by herself, pointing out that Ripley, at least, is part-human. It’s the apex of a developing on-screen relationship that’s easily the most interesting aspect of an otherwise botched and unwieldy film: Call goes from trying to kill Ripley, who responds to the offer with predatory sensuality, to allying with her; from calling Ripley a thing to expressing her own self-directed loathing. At the same time, Ripley – resurrected as a variant of the thing she hated most – becomes a Lilith-like mother of monsters to yet more aliens, culminating in a fight where she kills her skull-faced hybrid descendent even while mourning its death. The film ends with the two women alive, heading towards an Earth they’ve never seen, anticipating its wonders.

In Covenant, David has murdered Shaw to try and create an alien hybrid, the question of his humanity contrasted with that of Walter, a second-generation synthetic made in his image, yet more compassionate than his estranged progenitor. At the end of the film, when David takes over the ship – called Mother – we hear him erase Walter’s control command while installing his own. The on-screen relationship between David and Walter is fraught with oddly sexual tension: David kisses both Walter and Daniels – the former an attempt at unity, the latter an assault – while showing them the monsters he’s made from Shaw’s remains. After a fight with Walter, we’re mislead into thinking that David is dead, and watch as his latest creation is killed. The final reveal, however, shows that David has been impersonating Walter: with Daniels tucked helplessly into cryosleep, David takes over Mother’s genetics lab, mourning his past failures as he coughs up two new smuggled, alien embryos with which to recommence his work.

Which is what makes Covenant – and, by extension and retrospect, Prometheus – such a fascinating clusterfuck. Thematically, these films are the end result of Ripley Scott, who directed Alien, taking a crack at a franchise reboot written by Jon Spahits (Prometheus, also responsible for Passengers), Dante Harper (Covenant, also responsible for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and John Logan (Covenant, also responsible for Gladiator, Rango and Spectre), who’ve borrowed all their most prominent franchise lore from James Cameron’s Aliens and Joss Whedon’s Resurrection. Or, to put it another way: a thematically female-oriented SF horror franchise created by dudes who, at the time, had a comparatively solid track record for writing female characters, has now been rebooted as a thematically male-oriented SF horror franchise by dudes without even that reputation, with the result that all the feminine elements have been brainlessly recontextualised as an eerie paean to white male ego, as exemplified by the scene where Michael Fassbender hits on himself with himself while misremembering who wrote Ozymandias.

Which brings me to another recent SF film: Life, which I finally watched this evening, and which ultimately catalysed my thoughts about Alien: Covenant. Like Covenant, Life is a mediocre foray into SF horror that doesn’t know how to reconcile its ultimately pulpy premise – murderous alien tentacle monster runs amok on space station – with its attempt at a gritty execution. It falters as survival horror by failing to sufficiently invest us in the characters, none of whom are particularly distinct beyond being slightly more diversely cast than is common for the genre. We’re told that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character – also called David – was in Syria at one point, and that he prefers being on the space station to life on Earth, but this never really develops beyond a propensity for looking puppy-eyed in the background. Small snippets of detail are provided about the various characters, but pointlessly so: none of it is plot-relevant, except for the tritely predictable bit about the guy with the new baby wanting to get home to see her, and given how swiftly everyone starts to get killed off, it ends up feeling like trivia in lieu of personality. Unusually for the genre, but in keeping with the bleak ending of Covenant, Life ends with David and the alien crashing to Earth, presumably so that the latter can propagate its terrible rampage, while Miranda, the would-be Final Girl, is sent spinning off into the void.

And, well. The Final Girl trope has always struck me as having a peculiar dualism, being at once both vaguely feminist, in that it values keeping at least one woman alive, and vaguely sexist, in that the execution often follows the old maritime code about women and children first. Arguably, there’s something old and anthropological underlying the contrast: generally speaking, stories where men outlive women are either revenge arcs (man pursues other men in vengeance, earns new woman as prize) or studies in manpain (man wins battle but loses his reason for fighting it), but seldom does this happen in survival contexts, where the last person standing is meant to represent a vital continuation, be it of society or hope or species. Even when we diminish women in narratives, on some ancient level, we still recognise that you can’t build a future without them, and despite the cultural primacy of the tale of Adam’s rib, the Final Girl carries that baggage: a man alone can’t rebuild anything, but perhaps (the old myths whisper) a woman can.

Which is why I find this trend of setting the Final Girl up for survival, only to pull a last-minute switch and show her being lost or brutalised, to be neither revolutionary nor appealing. Shaw laid out in pieces and drawings on David’s table, Daniels pleading helplessly as he puts her to sleep, Miranda screaming as she plunges into space – these are all ugly, futile endings. They’re what you get when unsteady hands attempt the conversion of pulp to grit, because while pulp has a long and lurid history of female exploitation, grit, as most commonly understood and executed, is invariably predicated on female destruction. So-called gritty stories – real stories, by thinly-veiled implication – are stories where women suffer and die because That’s The Way Things Are, and while I’m hardly about to mount a stirring defence of the type of pulp that reflexively stereotypes women squarely as being either victim, vixen, virgin or virago, at least it’s a mode of storytelling that leaves room for them survive and be happy.

As a film, Life is a failed hybrid: it’s pulp without the joy of pulp, realism as drab aesthetic instead of hard SF, horror without the characterisation necessary to make us feel the deaths. It’s a story about a rapacious tentacle-monster that violates mouths and bodies, and though the dialogue tries at times to be philosophical, the ending is ultimately hopeless. All of which is equally – almost identically – true of Alien: Covenant. Though the film evokes a greater sense of horror than Life, it’s the visceral horror of violation, not the jump-scare of existential terror inspired by something like Event Horizon. Knowing now that Prometheus was written by the man responsible for Passengers, a film which is ultimately the horror-story of a woman stolen and tricked by a sad, lonely obsessive into being with him, but which fails in its elision of this fact, I find myself deeply unsurprised. What is it about the grittification of classic pulp conceits that somehow acts like a magnet for sexist storytellers?

When I first saw Alien: Resurrection as a kid, I was ignorant of the previous films and young enough to find it terrifying. Rewatching it as an adult, however, I find myself furious at Joss Whedon’s decision to remake Ripley into someone unrecognisable, violated and hybridised with the thing she hated most. For all that the film invites us to dwell on the ugliness of what was done to Ripley, there’s a undeniably sexual fascination with her mother-monstrousness evident in the gaze of the (predominantly male) characters, and after reading about the misogynistic awfulness of Whedon’s leaked Wonder Woman script, I can’t help feeling like the two are related. In both instances, his approach to someone else’s powerful, adult female character is to render her a sex object – a predator in Ripley’s case, an ingenue in Diana’s – with any sapphic undertones more a by-product of lusty authorial bleedthrough than a considered attempt at queerness. The low and pulpy bar Whedon leaps is in letting his women, occasionally, live (though not if they’re queer or black or designated Manpain Fodder), and it says a lot about the failings of both Life and Alien: Covenant that neither of them manages even this much. (Yes, neither Miranda nor Daniels technically dies on screen, but both are clearly slated for terrible deaths. This particular nit is one ill-suited for picking.)

Is an SF film without gratuitous female death and violation really so much to ask for? I’m holding out a little hope for Luc Besson’s Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets, but I’d just as rather it wasn’t my only option. If we’re going to reinvent pulp, let’s embrace the colours and the silliness and the special effects and make the big extraordinary change some nuanced female characters and a lot of diverse casting, shall we? Making men choke on tentacles is subversive if your starting point is hentai, but if you still can’t think up a better end for women than captivity, pain and terror, then I’d kindly suggest you return to the drawing board.

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