#ridley scott I BEG you to make that directors cut

[sherryholmes]

I might go insane the way I am replaying the deleted scenes with Caracalla and Geta

[adamwatchesmovies]

Black Hawk Down (2001)

All war films walk a delicate line. You don’t want to portray war in a good light but movies are entertainment. You have to show combat without glorifying it but unless you have a good reason to, you probably shouldn’t show members of the armed forces as monsters (well, unless they're Russian). Black Hawk Down features too many characters to keep track of, the running time is way longer than is probably necessary and the character development is almost non-existent but these “weaknesses” are actually features. This powerful film immerses you in the chaos and trauma of armed combat.

In 1993, Somalia’s civil war rages. United Nations personnel are on a peacekeeping mission when the Mogadishu-based militia suddenly declares them enemies. To put an end to the conflict, United States forces make a move to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the country’s self-proclaimed president. The mission should've been done in thirty minutes. Instead, there's no end in sight, with many men now stuck behind enemy lines.

This is a long movie. The theatrical cut lasts 144 minutes (and there’s an extended edition that’s even longer). Inside it, there are A LOT of characters played by familiar faces: Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Ewen Bremner, Ioan Gruffud, Jason Isaacs, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, and more. What roles do they play? It’s almost not important. I say this because once the operation goes wrong, you’ll quickly lose track of who’s who. You know you saw one soldier take off parts of their armor because “the operation isn’t going to take long and I won’t need the extra weight”. This almost certainly means they will be shot and killed at some point. The thing is, you can’t remember who it was that did that until they are hit. Once the titular Black Hawk helicopter is shot down, chaos erupts. People die, people are left behind, people are brought back to the camp to be treated and reinforcements are sent out. All hell breaks loose. Names, ranks and personal stories don’t matter anymore. It's all about the enemies all around them, the diminishing resources and the ever-increasing number of wounded. You feel like at any point the characters on-screen could be shot and killed. There are no certainties.

What makes Black Hawk Down so effective is how it shows us the bravery of the men involved in this military catastrophe and the futility of war as a whole. The militia who hound the U.S. troops are seemingly endless. When a man gets shot, there’s another right behind them to pick up their gun and take their spot. You wonder how these people can so carelessly throw their lives away. Did they not see their predecessor die seconds ago? Why do they insist on fighting? At least two scenes beg this question so vividly that they will leave a scar. One involves a woman who reaches for a gun. The other features a boy and his father roaming Mogadishu's streets, looking for soldiers. The U.S. military personnel are in a similar position. Their vehicles are constantly pelted by bullets. Inevitably, the gunner above will get hit and fall down, dead. Less than a second later, someone is ordered to take their place. At the end of the movie, we see the names of the people killed but that feels like an incomplete list. That severed hand we saw. Did it belong to one of the dead, or is it from another soldier who survived despite an injury you can never recover from?

There is so much chaos that Black Hawk Down could’ve easily become a slurry of violence - credit to the editing, cinematography, sound design, and score for making it a well-paced, "easily to follow" story. You only feel the movie’s length at the very beginning when we get at least a couple of paragraphs’ worth of text to set up the stage, and towards the end when all the soldiers are so exhausted they feel like they can’t go on any longer. It’s yet another way in which director Ridley Scott and writer Ken Nolan make you feel the way the characters feel. Then, you're hit with a wallop of a scene that shows no one - not even the people in the country you’re fighting for - can understand the inhumanity of war. I don’t know how anyone could watch this film and think “I need to enlist so I can experience this for real”. Watching it unfold from the comfort of your couch is traumatic enough.

Black Hawk Down hits some similar beats as Saving Private Ryan in that its carnage serves a purpose. It makes you wonder how anyone could choose to make war. In one scene I’ll never forget, a soldier’s gun is shot out of their hand. Their thumb is so badly mangled you doubt it can be saved. The weapon? It’s perfectly fine and fires like nothing's happened once it's picked off the ground. That moment says a lot, but rather than condemn the people who choose to serve, it shows that sometimes, you HAVE to intervene if you want a clean conscience. It fills you with all sorts of emotions in so many ways I foresee myself revisiting Black Hawk Down again in the future. Specifically, because it’s so well made on a technical level. (April 1, 2022)

[douxreviews]

Legend (1985) Review

"You think you have won! What is light without dark? What are you without me? I am a part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal!"

Legend was Ridley Scott's direct follow up to Blade Runner. Much like the sand dancer’s seminal sci-fi classic, it was a flop on its initial release, but has since gone on to become something of a cult classic and one of my favourite fantasy movies.

Rather than being an adaptation of a famous work, Legend is like a composite piece of many different sources, from the Grimm fairy tales to the Bible (just look at that poster image, I've visited churches with more subtle religious imagery). Jean Cocteau's 1946 film Le Belle et la Bête, which Scott and writer William Hjortsberg both shared a love for, was clearly a huge influence as well. The plot is a rather conventional story about a dark lord who plans to take over the world, a young hero who sets out on a quest to stop him, and a beautiful princess who gets caught up in the middle of it all. What sets the film apart from others fantasy films of the time is the visual flair Scott brings to the film.

Like all of his films, Legend looks absolutely stunning. Scott brings the same kind of obsessive attention to detail to this film that he brought to Alien and Blade Runner, creating a living breathing world that puts other fantasy films to shame. The forest sets, created completely on sound stages at Pinewood, look truly magical, while Darkness’ lair is simply gorgeous. The costumes and prosthetics for the various magical creatures are also impressive.

As Darkness, Tim Curry just owns the film. Backed up by a fantastic make up job, Curry injects some Frank N. Furter swagger into the role, making Darkness a charismatic and oddly sexy villain. Poor Tom Cruise just can’t compete. Cruise is definitely one of the film's weakest elements. He's not terrible, but the future mega-star fails to make Jack anything more than a fairly bland hero with a nice pair of legs. Mia Sara fares better as Lilly. She might start out as a rather whinny princess, but improves when she has Darkness as a sparring partner rather than dippy Jack.

Darkness' seduction of Lilly is one of my favourite parts of the film. It helps to make Legend a far more interesting film, and offsets the tweeness that threatens to engulf the film at times. The stand-out scene of the film is the Dress Waltz. It's a mesmerising sequence where a captured Lilly dances with a living dress in Darkness’ liar until the two become one. That is when Darkness finally makes his grand entrance, stepping out of the mirror in all his satanic majesty.

Why anyone would chose Tom Cruise over this guy is a mystery to me.

Notes and Quotes

--Meg Mucklebones is played by none other than Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo.

--The face of goblin Blix was based on Keith Richards.

--During filming a fire broke out at Pinewood, burning the 007 soundstage to the ground and destroying all of the film’s sets.

--Two version of the film are available, the original theatrical release and a director's cut. As with Blade Runner, the director's cut is the superior version of the film.

--Jerry Goldsmith's sublime score was removed by the studio from the US version of the film and replaced with one by Tangerine Dream. It was restored for the director’s cut.

Lily: "I hear a throat begging to be cut!" Darkness: "Are you so eager to see blood flow?" Lily: "As eager as you are to drink it!"

Screwball: "I vote we run like hell." Brown Tom: "I second the motion."

Oona: "What care I for human hearts? Soft and spiritless as porridge! A faerie's heart beats fierce and free!"

Darkness: "The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity."

Three out of four goblins that look like guitarists for the Rolling Stones.

Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011.

[aion-rsa]

Why I Am Legend Has One of the Most Frustrating Endings in Science Fiction

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Last March, confronted with a pandemic none of us had expected or understood, many people found themselves rewatching Stephen Soderberg’s Contagion. Whether out of morbid fascination or as a guideline to what we might see in the future it quickly topped charts on streaming services. A year on and another pandemic movie has made it into Netflix’s top 10 – 2007’s I Am Legend, a horror sci-fi starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, who thinks he’s the last man on Earth after a virus has wiped out most of the population. Directed by Francis Lawrence, who would go on to make the Hunger Games sequels, a new adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel had been in the works at Warner Bros. since the mid ‘90s, with various talent attached, including Ridley Scott and Michael Bay as directors and Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star. 

At its release the movie was praised for Smith’s performance but criticised for an overuse of CGI and a weak third act, but rewatching against the backdrop of 2021 what really sticks is how much of a wasted opportunity I Am Legend was. This is an hour of an excellent film, then 30-odd minutes of rubbish.

What you might remember of I Am Legend is this: cool empty New York stuff, Batman V Superman logo on a building, Will Smith talks to mannequins, the dog dies, CGI zombies, the end. But it’s so much better than that (until it’s not).

The first hour of I Am Legend is incredibly sparse. Virtually silent except for flashbacks, Dr. Neville is alone and talks only to his dog, Sam, and to mannequins he’s placed around shops and the street to try to emulate real life. New York is deserted. Each day when the sun is at its highest point, he waits at a meeting place he’s broadcast on the radio for other survivors to find him. Each day he is disappointed. His routines are down pat. He and the dog eat well from food scavenged during the day. At night they lock down and stay silent, hidden from the initially unseen threat outside. Neville is immune to infection but not to being killed by the creatures that keep him locked away at night, and on whom he experiments during the day. Neville is trying to find a cure using his antibodies, testing first on zombie rats and then on the infected human subjects he keeps chained up in his underground lab. He keeps failing. Is he really trying to save humanity? Or does he just want someone to talk to? Perhaps the two things are the same.

Forget zombies, I Am Legend is an exploration of the pure horror of being alone – it’s resonant as all hell in the current climate where we know that hordes of other people exist but that they pose an actual threat of death. That loneliness is so acute that talking to a dog or a shop dummy – or indeed a plant, your computer, the TV – seems completely legit. Neville’s struggles with socialization once Alice Braga’s Anna is in the picture feel entirely authentic and familiar – has he gone slightly mad from the loneliness and isolation, the film posits? In 2021, have we? 

Keeping the CGI baddies in the shadows is a wise move, and even though they really haven’t aged well, in the first hour there’s still scope for a few decent scares. The best comes when Neville is caught in a trap set for him by one of the creatures – a trap which mirrors one he himself had set earlier to capture the latest of the infected he’s experimenting on. Hung up by a foot with the sun rapidly fading, when Neville wakes from his concussion he is in a serious rush to save himself with his faithful friend Sam barking in panic below him.

When it’s him and the dog, Smith is brilliant. Sam (played by two dogs – Abbey and Kona) is also excellent. And at the end of this sequence when the dog dies, bitten by zombie hounds and euthanized by Neville, it is genuinely devastating. Forget Marley and Me, this isn’t canine grief porn – instead the moment a grief stricken Neville goes to the record shop and talks to a mannequin, begging her to “please say hello to me,” is deeply upsetting. Smith does some very heavy lifting and it really holds up. Neville has hit rock bottom. Without Sam there’s nothing left to live for. Neville heads out into the night on a kamikaze mission to take as many creatures with him as he dies. The end. Except it’s not.

Instead, the film is completely ruined by the deus ex machina arrival of another survivor, Anna (Alice Braga) and her son Ethan (Charlie Tahan) who rescue Neville. Anna says she believes God sent her to find Neville and take him to a survivor colony she thinks exists in Vermont. 

Anna’s arrival is no doubt supposed to provide hope and redemption in the final act after the incredibly moving end of the previous act but ultimately it does the opposite. Her random appearance undermines the three years Neville has endured. Neville has lived with the frankly torturous concept that he was the last man alive, but instead he’s faced with the possibility of a survivor community that somehow she has managed to track down while he has not, and the thought that for three years (or however long he’s been sending his own broadcast) survivors, in all likelihood, did hear his missive but never responded. His strength and resilience, his battle to stay sane, these were nothing, there were other people who could have found him, or he them, all along. Bad luck Neville, you spent three years trying to find a cure when you could have just had a chat with God (or worked harder on your telecoms). Bleak for him but in this version he becomes a martyr of sorts.

Anna and her son arrive and trigger a mega zombie showdown in the house. In a stroke of luck, Anna’s arrival has coincided with the latest strain of antidote actually working, so when Neville, Anna, and her son barricade themselves in the lab, Neville is able to extract a vial of the cure to give to Anna and then sacrifices himself so she can escape the creatures. Neville is killed but the cure is safe and arrives at the encampment with Anna, his life’s work wasn’t futile, and Anna gives a speech essentially saying how much of a legend Robert Neville was.

Yep, the title of the film has been completely reinterpreted from the original text here to mean “I am a total legend!” rather than the much much darker meaning found in Richard Matheson’s wonderful novel.

In the novel Robert Neville’s foes are vampires and other than the traditional vampire weaknesses – garlic, sunlight, stake through the heart, etc – they are intelligent, articulate, and human-like. In Matheson’s book Neville meets and becomes involved with a woman whom he discovers is a vampire sent to spy on him; the race of infected have managed to treat and control their symptoms and are forming a new society, while he’s been hunting them down. And the woman’s husband is one of the vampires Neville has killed. 

The book ends with a dying Neville realizing that, to the vampires, he is the bogeyman, the stuff of nightmares, as vampires themselves were once to humans. He will become a legend, not because he’s a great man, but because in his extinction he will be a cautionary tale and a mythical figure to a newly formed society. 

The director’s cut alternate ending of I Am Legend gives more of a nod to Matheson’s book – it’s better but it’s still not great. In this version the alpha male zombie who set the trap for Neville is bashing his head repeatedly on the locked door of Neville’s lab where Neville, Anna, her son, and his latest test subject, a female, are barricaded. Through the glass, the alpha male makes the sign of a butterfly (a call back to a gesture Neville’s daughter makes earlier in the film) to indicate the butterfly tattoo the female has. Neville understands finally that the “darkseekers” have their own relationships and community. The woman is the alpha’s partner. To the darkseekers, Neville is the monster, who has been capturing and torturing members of their group. Behind him is a photo wall of each creature he has experimented on and eventually killed. Willing to sacrifice himself so that Anna and her son can escape, he is now at the mercy of the alpha. In fact, when he apologizes and returns the captured female, the darkseekers show Neville mercy and don’t kill him. In this version Neville, Anna, and her son travel to the survivors’ community together and Neville lives.

This ending works better and gives more resonance to certain earlier scenes – the alpha male exposing himself to sunlight after the female is captured, the trap alpha uses on Neville matching the one Neville used on the female, the scenes of Neville experimenting on the female causing her excruciating pain – the final beats still don’t land. The outdated CGI renders the creatures so far away from humanity that the emotional resonance is lost. “Sorry about torturing your missus,” doesn’t have quite the impact it should and the existence of the community in Vermont, far from feeling hopeful, gives a sense that Neville has just wasted the last three years.

Neither ending properly gets across the significance of Matheson’s title, and the inclusion of reference to Bob Marley’s album Legend only muddies things further.

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Lawrence’s I Am Legend is so nearly a brilliant, thrilling, troubling exploration of loneliness and isolation and it could have had a gut punch ending which remained faithful to the book had they gone for something other than the CGI zombies. Instead it’s a movie which builds to an electric crisis point and then throws it all in the bin with unnecessary new characters, a religious message, and a faux happy ending that no one needed.

I Am Legend is available to stream on Netflix (US) and Sky and Now TV (UK).

The post Why I Am Legend Has One of the Most Frustrating Endings in Science Fiction appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[samjbatty]

Why Does Hollywood Whitewash The Bible and Does Anyone Care?

An alarming number of ‘biblically inspired’ movies are being released with one major deviation: The lack of ethnic diversity.

It has happened again; yet another ‘biblical’ epic has been released which features an all-white main cast. This time, the movie is critically acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.  

The film, itself, has been criticized for many reasons, including its inaccuracies that do not match the Bible’s story such as CGI rock monsters and the absurd, almost insulting, omission of God’s name. These frustrations came to a head with the release of the documentary Noah and the Last Days created by Young Earth Creationist Ray Comfort, and led National Religious Broadcaster’s president, Jerry Johnson to condemn the movie’s “extremist environmental agenda.”

However, there is a glaring oversight in all of these criticisms: no one seems to realize that the story has been sacrilized further.  The story of Noah’s Ark can be found in the book of Genesis, Chapters 6-8. It is from the Old Testament and would consequently feature Middle Eastern characters. So when the whitewashed cast of Aronofsky’s movie was announced, one would expect uproar from true Christian believers who do not wish to see our beloved tales hijacked and cheapened for a quick buck.  

The movie features Russell Crowe in the titular role, with Jennifer Connelly playing his wife, Naameh, Ray Winstone as Tubal-Cain, Douglas Booth as Shem, Noah’s son, Emma Watson as Ila, Shem’s wife, Logan Lerman as Ham, Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah, Noah’s grandfather and Leo McHugh Carroll as Japeth, Noah’s youngest son. 

 This is not the first time the characters of biblical stories have been twisted by Hollywood, with our ideals and culture being tossed out in favour of white actors. The most famous, The Passion of the Christ, had Jim Caviezel playing Jesus, a role which clearly required an actor of Middle Eastern descent, The Last Temptation of Christ which suffered the same problem, having white actor Willem Dafoe playing Christ and 1956’s The Ten Commandments, which had an all white cast. This racial miscasting is perhaps most obvious in the blasphemous Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which featured the white, British comedy troupe as the main cast and DreamWorks’s Prince of Egypt, which featured no actors of Middle Eastern descent and few black actors. 

This problem is set to occur yet again this year with the release of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings: a film, which features Christian Bale as the Egyptian Jew Moses, as well as a fully white cast of Egyptian royalty and black actors cast as slaves.   

This racial erasure is rendered pointless as over the past few years actors from many different ethnic backgrounds and cultures have been chosen to play roles in successful major motion pictures, such as Will Smith in iRobot, Antonio Banderas in Puss in Boots or Morgan Freeman, who played God in the 2003 comedy Bruce Almighty. 

Journalist Ryan Herring also wrote how his excitement for Noah had been lost once he discovered “not a single one of the leading roles… was given to a person of Middle Eastern descent.” Efrem Smith, president of Los Angeles-based World Impact, a Christian nonprofit, and author of The Post-Black and Post-White Church, has said: "The Bible is the most multicultural piece of literature that most people will ever read. So a film about the Bible should reflect that diversity." Episcopal Reverend Wil Gafney described the movie as a “throwback” to the Hollywood era of all white casts, which is unacceptable in our modern, multi-cultural society. Gafney believes the movie simply erases people of color from the story in order to avoid the controversial confrontation between Ham and Noah, which has been used in the past as a means to justify slavery. This confrontation is left out from the final cut of Noah, missing a fantastic opportunity to address and dispel one of the most misinterpreted stories of The Bible, in which Noah curses Ham and his descendants.

The Co-Screenwriter of Noah, Ari Handel has been quoted saying the white cast is supposed to be representative of the whole human race, which begs the question; if the characters are symbolic of all people then wouldn't it make sense to have a cast that did actually represent all of mankind, in every color and hue. He defends himself saying artistic license has been taken, in order to craft a 138-minute long story, but can this excuse stretch to cover this very basic casting flaw?

It isn’t hard to see why many believe the whitewashing of biblical stories such as Noah is damaging. It is a type of indoctrination, suggesting to the audience that all holy beings are white; creating an idea of white superiority that goes directly against God’s teachings.

The literal meaning of the Noah’s Ark story is that God renews the human race by saving Noah and his family from the sinful world in which they live, leading them to a new, peaceful life. Surely if this story is going to be adapted, all creeds must have some representation within the story, in order to prevent implications of white supremacy over all people.

Something must be done to combat this problem, we must begin to boycott this film and all others that do not have real life representation of either the society of the country they were made in or the time and place in which the story occurs. The only way to stop the inequality, perpetuated by film producers and studio executives, is to prevent their product from making the gross margins required for a successful and profitable movie. Without a consumer led protest of such clearly misrepresentative films, I cannot see Hollywood moving away from basing the success of their films on the casting of well known, white actors and actresses.

We need to make the people in charge realize that they need to start relying on the script of their films being strong and historically accurate rather than papering over weak storylines and inconsistent characters with A-list, white actors. It has been proven that a movie can achieve a desirable amount of critical and financial success if more care is taken in crafting an engaging story, for example, 12 Years A Slave.

It is upsetting and worrisome that in a country as proud of their freedom and equality as America, boasting themselves as the land of the free and open minded enough to be run by the first black president, there is still not equal representation in media, specifically in our bible stories and religious teachings in which diversity is already abundant. The seemingly purposeful purging of any ethnicity other than white is obviously a regressive step backwards for society as a whole, highlighted as particularly disgusting after such a long period of people of colour being oppressed by white Americans. We are at a point in time where we should be celebrating our differences at every opportunity we receive, living life in Jesus’ footsteps and loving our neighbors. We, as the consumers, have the power to right the injustice present in Hollywood, which tarnishes the way in which we view the bible, replacing the racially diverse figures with white characters, damaging not only our own beliefs but the world in which we live.

Hopefully now you can see the whitewashing problem we face and will choose to join the crusade to make a change by showing that we care about proper representation in modern media.

[johnatthemovies]

John’s Top Shelf: Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982, 2007)

I’ve already talked about how much I loved Blade Runner when I reviewed the 1992 Director’s Cut a few months ago, how every single frame was a work of art washed in neon light and whatnot.  Now, as the sequel makes its way to theatres whether we like it or not, let’s talk about what is universally considered to be the superior version of the film, 2007′s The Final Cut, as well as the act of revisiting classic films as a whole.

To make a long story short, this is the version of the film I’d recommend.  The forced voiceover by an obviously uninterested Harrison Ford that marred the original Theatrical Cut is gone, as is the slapped-on “happy ending” cut together from outtakes of the opening credits to The Shining demanded by the studio because the focus groups simply didn’t get it.  The Final Cut goes even further than the Director’s Cut (which wasn’t even edited by Ridley Scott, but by someone else using Scott’s notes, a la the 1998 re-edit of Touch of Evil.  Scott was busy with Thelma and Louise, I think.) by re-shooting a pivotal scene, the retirement of Zhora, which was originally a stunt double in a wig crashing through all those panes of glass in slow motion.  I joked that it looked like Deckard missed Zhora and hit Frank N Furter instead, but now, Deckard is right on target.

These changes, as well as the 4K remastering of the original negative before anyone even paid attention to 4K, take an already stunning masterpiece of a film and make it even more of a feast for the eyes.  Yes, the pacing is still quite slow, and the replicants have a lot more personality than the humans (which, come to think of it, was that an intentional choice by Scott?  Perhaps.), but dammit, the detail that Scott and designer Syd Mead put into this grimy, dystopian world of Los Angeles two years into the future as of publication is so staggering that everyone needs to see it.

This brings to mind the ethical question of classic films like Blade Runner, which has been under the knife at least five times, Touch of Evil, with three edits under its belt, and most infamously, Star Wars, which has been edited three times since 1997.  George Lucas once said that a film is not finished, but it is abandoned.  However, when is enough enough?  Perhaps it has to do with the reasons why a film went under the knife in the first place.

Blade Runner, as mentioned above, fell victim to studio manipulation, which almost killed the film upon its original release.  Same with Touch of Evil, which was re-cut as a B-movie without Orson Welles’ knowledge.  These films were begging for a director’s cut, so they could be seen as they were meant to be seen.  With Blade Runner, they took the time to fix some editing errors, improving the quality of the film as a whole.

Star Wars, however, serves as the other side of the coin.  Sure, they went back and cleaned up the original negative so it looked presentable in 1997, but then they laid into it with bizarre CGI additions that were meant to serve as a dry run for the CGI effects in The Phantom Menace two years later.  These effects, later touched upon in 2004 and 2011, do not serve any purpose beyond that, and are often regarded as a detriment to the film proper.

Another issue that separates Blade Runner from Star Wars is the fate of previous cuts after the so-called definitive versions are released to the public.  You can easily find the Theatrical and Director’s Cuts of Blade Runner on home video, hell, if you’re watching it on TV, it’s more often than not going to be the former, which is actually on my DVR right now.  When The Final Cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2007, it came in a lavish box set in the form of a Voight-Kampff briefcase with the Workprint, the Theatrical Cut, the International/Criterion Collection Cut,  the Director’s Cut AND The Final Cut in perfect HD so you could watch and compare them for your viewing pleasure.  Not so with Star Wars, which has not been seen in its original form since 1981 at the earliest, when “A NEW HOPE” was added to the crawl.  It’s okay for a director to feel ashamed for the previous versions of his work.  However, it’s better for the audience as well as the film itself to have the original versions available so fans can compare and contrast which was the better cut.  It worked for Blade Runner, it worked for Touch of Evil, it worked for E.T., who’s to say it can’t work here?

Stay tuned for my review of Blade Runner 2049, which I’ve heard nothing but good things about.  A film with that much talent behind and in front of the camera can’t be bad, can it?

[aion-rsa]

Flash Gordon’s Original Ending Revealed

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Following our enlightening Flash Gordon 40th anniversary interview with the film’s director, Mike Hodges, we got to have an in-depth conversation with author John Walsh. Titan Books published Walsh’s exhaustive coffee table book Flash Gordon: The Official Story of the Film last November. It was a labor of love for Walsh that delves into the making of the movie and celebrates its enduring appeal.

Walsh is a Trustee of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, and was also behind the BBC’s critically acclaimed documentary series Sofa Surfers, which explored childhood homelessness, and the BAFTA-nominated film My Life: Karate Kids, which tackled issues of bullying among disabled children.

Den of Geek: You’ve been involved with preserving the legacy of the late Ray Harryhausen, and your first book through Titan was about some of his work. You first met him at film school in the 80s?

John Walsh: That’s right. I was BBC Young Filmmaker of the Year when I was 15. I was offered a place in London Film School when I was doing my A-levels and they sort of scooped me up. At the end of your first year you do a 16mm documentary film. I found Ray Harryhausen‘s name in the London telephone directory. I asked my parents for permission to use the phone, as you did in those days. My mom said “Ring after six when it’s cheaper.” So I rang him up and said “I’m making a film about your life and work” and he was very gracious about it. 

I went to see him. I’d done some very basic animation as a youngster but was fascinated by all his creatures and everything else. We stayed in touch over the years. He asked me to become a trustee of his foundation, so I’ve been helping to look after the vast collection, which is the largest of its kind outside of the Walt Disney Company. His daughter, Vanessa Harryhausen, and I run it with one member of paid staff. Then I did the book – Harryhausen: The Lost Movies.

At what point did you decide that Flash Gordon was next for the John Walsh treatment?

The Lost Movies was stories about films that we think we know but hadn’t been told. Titan are very good at making books on our favorite films – like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth – and those films which maybe we liked on VHS but weren’t successful when they came out theatrically. I was just thinking, gosh, no one has done a Flash Gordon book yet.

It took about eight months to get Universal Pictures and King Features, who were the rights holders for the Flash Gordon character, and Studio Canal, who now own the physical asset of that 1980 film, to come together and put a deal together. 

What happened after the deal was done?

I thought “they’ll give me all their photos because there’ll be a gazillion photos in the archive” – I got the shock of my life when there were no photos or any assets worth putting into a book! I was like “oh no, what have I done?” I drank from the poison chalice to some extent, because I thought that the work had finished when we got the rights, and it had really just started. 

Universal Pictures had some of the publicity photos, but not enough to put into a book like this. Nothing ‘behind the scenes’. I went begging around the world asking fans and different people, “please may I have your pictures if I credit you in the book?” A big part of the introduction of the book ended up being the story of how the assets had been dispersed or thrown away. The film cost three times what Star Wars cost. It cost somewhere in the region of $35 million. The idea that nobody kept any of the assets from it, the original artworks for the paintings, for the posters – gone. The models, gone. The costumes were mostly gone. 

A rare behind the scenes look at the making of Flash Gordon

It kept me up at night. I was genuinely quite worried about whether we’d get enough high quality images that would be good enough, but ultimately I got everything I wanted. I even managed to get a high quality unpublished image of Queen from 1980 for a publicity round they did in Japan. Virtually every page has something unseen, never before published, recently found.

It was around the clock. Sometimes it took 20 or 30 hours just to get one image. It was pretty all labor intensive. The easiest part was speaking to the people like the actors, but another problem existed there as well. If you take the Star Wars universe as a comparison, the various actors and filmmakers speak so regularly that you can pretty much find a consensus on how things happened and where they happened. But on this, [lead actor] Sam Jones – naughty, naughty Sam Jones! –  lovely Sam Jones, and Brian Blessed…

Brian tends to be quite creative, doesn’t he? Every time he tells a story there’s a new spin on it.

Mike [Hodges, director], told me “It’s not true what Brian says in your book that he directed one of the fight sequences.” He said “I love Brian dearly but there’s no way he directed one of the fight sequences. I was there every day and I never would have allowed him to do that. It’s just not what happened.” So between Brian and Sam, they’ve kind of filled in the gaps. As actors often do, they will inflate their parts! 

Some other bits are true. Sam did get stitches, and Dino [De Laurentiis, producer] was ready to kill someone. Two days before principal photography, there’s the lead actor getting stitches in his face. 

When I was researching the film for our piece, I couldn’t really establish how much of Sam’s audio had been replaced in post-production.

Some of Sam’s dialogue is in there! Some has been voiced on top of his voice, and some is a completely different actor in different places. If you were to cut together the different sounds and hear them all together, they sound higher and then lower.

There isn’t actually a record of who the actors are, not because anyone is trying to create conspiracy around it all, it’s just that’s one of the many assets of the film that were tossed aside. It’s more than one [other voice] Mike told me.

That’s new information to me. I knew that there was one other; I didn’t know there was more than one!

It’s more than one, and it’s Sam as well. There are at least three voices that make up Sam’s dialogue. There’s kind of a little Frankenstein’s Monster of dialogue in most places for Sam.

Do you remember the first time you watched Flash Gordon? 

Yes, it was a good movie at the time. I loved anything with science fiction! I’ll tell you what I was disappointed by: there were no robots. To me, if it had a robot in it I was like, “that’s it, I’m there, I want to buy the robot from that film.” So, I was kind of disappointed. There are no robots. 

I was obsessed with the Superman movie and how the flying sequences were created at the time. When this film came out, I thought “this is going to be better than Superman, it’s got hundreds of people flying.” But the flying sequences aren’t as sophisticated in this as they are in Superman, so my first time seeing Flash Gordon was tinged with a kind of geek boy technical disappointment about some of those aspects, and no robots. I haven’t told anyone that.

When researching the book, what ended up being the most surprising revelation?

There were two big moments. The first was when I discovered there had been an entirely different film planned – and we got the artwork, it’s in the book. Then, I found out that the film was supposed to have an entirely different ending. 

Where the film ends now, at the wedding crashing, that was the start of a new major sequence that was going to involve Ming turning into fabulous creatures and fighting Flash, the Hawkmen and the Arboria Tree Men. It all had to be cut. Literally, the pages were pulled. They were like “no time for that, haven’t got time for that.” They had the money for it, but no time.

At the back of my book are all of those scenes, and in some cases photos of scenes they shot that were cut because they couldn’t complete the effects for them, and then comprehensive storyboards with major characters like Lion Man, who was going to accompany Flash Gordon throughout the film like a Chewbacca character.

Wasn’t Lion Man in the cartoons as well as the serial? 

Yes. We got the original artwork from when Dino was going to make the film for Paramount Pictures. It shows Lion Man as part of this fantasy concept poster.

Flash Gordon concept art featuring Lion Man

When I talked to Mike last year, he still seemed somewhat baffled that he was the one who was chosen to take over from Nicolas Roeg as director. Do you think that Nic’s original vision would have worked on screen if Dino had just gone along with it?

No. For tax purposes it was very difficult to get a director in from America to do a picture, particularly in the late 70s. It was a big tax kerfuffle. British directors who’ve done major Hollywood films would have included Alan Parker, maybe John Boorman, Ridley Scott. Nic Roeg and Mike Hodges were the right fit, even though they hadn’t done special effects films.

Roeg’s version couldn’t have worked because the content was adult in tone, and also he came up with some concepts that were outside of the comic strip that would have made it much more adult-themed as well. For an audience to have followed it and enjoyed it and for the film to have had a chance to make back it’s $35 million, I think he was right to pull the plug on the Nic Roeg version. It needed to be a film that had a much broader base to make that money back. There were two sequels planned!

And Mike was originally brought in as an option for the second film.

Yes, that’s right. It was Roeg who suggested him, because he knew Mike and thought Mike would be a good fit. Mike had just been sacked from Omen II so he was suddenly available at the point when Dino parted company with Nic. It wasn’t a marriage of convenience, he was the right fit. 

Dino did this thing where if he liked your face, then you got the part or you got the work. It wasn’t about having a pretty face or anything, it was if he thought your face was sympathetic. It’s kind of an Italian superstition that you can kind of trust a man by his face. Dino wouldn’t get on an airplane if he looked at the pilot and didn’t like their face.

Wow.

Your natural instincts are often right. Dino’s were often right. He said to Mike, “I like-a your face Mike, and that’s why I chose you for this-a film.” Doing a very credible Italian accent there! I interviewed [Dino’s wife] Martha extensively for the book – she said Dino would have liked my face.

We’ve heard so many myths and legends about the Flash Gordon sequels. It seems like everyone you talk to has heard a rumor about what the story would have been. Has your own research revealed any new sequel information? 

Dino had great, great plans. Dino’s plan was to buy Pinewood Studios and to film three Flash Gordons back to back. That’s ambitious by any movie standard, isn’t it? 

Brian Blessed first put me on the trail of what the second film would have been about – it was going to be Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars – based on the second cinema serial. In that, Flash Gordon meets the Clay Men and other people on Mars where Ming has set up base. 

Flash Gordon storyboards

40 years on, what do you think the enduring appeal of the movie is?

Flash Gordon has survived the critique of not having state of the art special effects. It’s a much more fun film to get into than Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek: The Motion Picture – two comparable big budget films of the era – as they’re kind of heavy going. 

This film was also perceived to be a Christmas film, it premiered at Christmas and received it’s TV premiere in 1983 on the BBC at Christmas. So for most people, it has a special Christmas vibe and a happy vibe about it. It looks like a Christmas ornament. 

It’s separate from other science fiction films of the time, it went in the opposite direction: rock score, kind of camp humor, brighter lit with more colors. There isn’t another film you could compare it with, except Barbarella from the 60s.

Recently, it’s come into criticism for its racial stereotyping – Ming playing effectively as a Chinese Fu Manchu character.

Yes, the BBFC has added a warning to the film now. Has the problematic nature of Ming’s portrayal changed the way you view the film?

For me it hasn’t, because when Max von Sydow played the part he didn’t have a darkening of his skin. That’s his natural facial pallor. The accent he chose is English – he decided to speak it as an English officer or an English monarch. There’s quite a kind of clash of cultures there. The facial makeup and the costume itself is definitely Red China from 1936, as Alex Raymond had envisaged. 

But I think it’s quite right the film should have a warning. I don’t think the film should be stopped, or that he should be pixelated out. I think Dino and Mike Hodges chose the best actors from the time to play these roles. You needed people who had played hard roles in films before. If they remake Flash Gordon, then I’ll be quite happy to see someone of Southeast Asian origin in the role of Ming. I think that would be spectacular.

There are levels to which this works and doesn’t work. The more extreme argument is “you wouldn’t cast a serial killer as a killer would you?” Well no, because if you’re casting for Dennis Nielsen you cast a good actor. David Tennant happens to be Scottish. I’m sorry he’s not a serial killer in real life.

That we know of, John.

That we know of. You can never trust actors, you know? Never leave them on their own in a room. But yes, I think where it’s possible and where it’s practical, it’s respectful.

Have you made any decisions about what you would like to do next, now we’ve had your take on Harryhausen, and Flash Gordon?

I’m literally in the process of delivering a manuscript for my next book. It comes out in September!

I will definitely check it out. Thank you, you’ve been brilliant.

Flash Gordon: The Official Story of the Film is available now from Titan Books. You can check out John’s The Official Story of the Film Podcast right here.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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