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Reviews
The Prisoner (2009)
Surreal Subjugation
1967's Cold War and its counter culture are gone; they've been replaced by 2009's global village and its consumer culture. So 2009's Prisoner is no longer an angry young man fighting for his identity against secret government policies and flagrant brainwashing, he's an angst-ridden 30-something trying to hang on to his identity in the face of overwhelming marketing and soothing pharmaceuticals.
2009's The Prisoner takes all the familiar elements of 1967's cult classic and re-interprets them in a relevant way, just like good remakes are supposed to. The psychedelic, lava-lamp surrealism of the sixties may be gone, but, don't worry, they've been replaced by the post-modern, dream-like surrealism of the oughts.
Yes, the Village still needs to assimilate No. 6, but it no longer cares why he would wish to resign from its society, it only wants him to understand that he can't. Instead of foiling No. 6's repeated escape attempts from the superficially charming, but inherently oppressive, Village, this new Village, still just as pleasant-looking, and oppressive, just makes it clear that there is no place else to escape to. The consumer culture and its global village are everywhere now. There is no escape.
So, instead of a government desperately trying Pavlovian conditioning, hypnotic suggestion, and hallucinogens in the water, a corporation tries matching people with their perfect mates, giving them mind-numbing jobs to take their minds off their melancholy, distracting them with melodramatic soap operas, and, maybe, making them feel a little better with some gene-therapy.
Sure, everyone's still under surveillance in this Village, but this time, its not the Village government trying to identify revolutionaries so it can silence them, its the Summakor corporation trying to identify dreamers so it can subject them to a concentrated dose of consumer culture. And if that doesn't work, maybe a few pharmaceuticals and a promotion will co-opt the more troublesome ones.
The Outer Limits: Dead Man's Switch (1997)
Plot Holes as Deep as the Bunkers
The interplay between the people sealed in the bunkers along with the suspense about what might be happening above ground kept my interest, but ...
Why would the aliens want to kill the people manning the dead-man's switches if they were the only people keeping everyone alive? And if they had managed to locate and bypass some of the switches, then why bother to burrow all the way down into the bunkers and then kill off the operators? Wouldn't just jamming communication between the operators be far more likely to prevent the operators in the active stations from allowing the doomsday device to run?
If, instead, they burrowed into the stations so they could defeat the biometrics and man the switches themselves, then why try to convince the protagonist to keep pressing the button, when they could do so themselves? And, come to think of it, what was the point in welding the doors shut, when we might open them in a year anyhow? Didn't we have any locks that worked?
I might be missing something, but I think this one needed a revision or two before they put it in production.
The Outer Limits: Manifest Destiny (2000)
Flawed but Effective
"Info-dumps" are a hazard of sci-fi and horror storytelling. They're those parts of the story where a character stops to tell another character what's going on because, presumably, the audience hasn't caught on yet because, presumably, it's all to weird for us to decipher.
The problem is, if the authors have done their job well, the audience can already see what's happening, so the info-dump is redundant and brings the story to a halt for no reason.
Yes, this episode has several info-dumps, but most of them are short and, mostly, no one has to break character to deliver them. Since sci-fi fans have learned to tolerate these things, this doesn't really hurt the show until the end, when one of the characters actually points the camera at himself so he can explain the theme of the show to the audience. Ugh.
But, up until then, this episode was pretty effective. The characters are investigating the abandonment of another spacecraft. There's a mystery to be solved, and it's a pretty creepy one, with cryptic messages and several things jumping out of nowhere and then disappearing into the darkness of the crippled ship.
One of characters is documenting the investigation with a video-camera, so the audience literally sees the story through the eyes of someone who is involved in the situation, and learns about the mystery along with that character, in "real time," and is right there with the character as his comrades succumb to the madness that created the mystery.
It's too bad the filmmakers didn't trust that they had shown the audience everything they needed to understand the show, because the final info-dump crippled everything that went before it.
The Outer Limits: The Light Brigade (1996)
Clichéd
This episode was all about its twist ending, which the writers didn't even bother to set up until the last act of the show.
Up until the final "revelations" the audience saw nothing more than improbably tough, brave crewmen desperately trying to sacrifice themselves for a war the audience knows nothing about, other than that the unseen lizard monsters are winning and the four characters seem to really hate that.
So, after a half hour of pushing levers and control rods and crawling through a radiation-filled spaceship, the writers spring their two surprises on the audience. First, one of the characters isn't who he said he was, and, second, the other characters weren't where they thought they were. Oops!
I would have felt cheated, but, frankly, the characters weren't very believable in the first place, and their situation never seemed overly compelling because no one bothered to set it up for the audience. There were several interesting tid-bits thrown in the mix, but the filmmakers just treated them as window dressing and concentrated, instead, on the least interesting, and most clichéd, aspects of the story. Oh, well.
The Outer Limits: Decompression (2000)
An Interesting Take on the "Character Issue"
American political campaigns are all about "character issues," like, did the candidate serve in the military? does he have marital problems? or, did he get stoned in college? For potential voters who'd like to hear about civic issues instead of personality traits, nothing is more frustrating, and this episode of the Outer Limits plays around with notions of character and civics in a suspense-filled and insightful way.
First, the writers throw us a red herring, just like political campaigns do. The slick "populist" presidential candidate is having an affair, and there's a reporter on board the plane with them who just might notice! But, just like real campaigns, much more significant things are at stake, and, just like in real elections, no one seems overly interested in them. The reporter drops the real issue, about technology and privacy, which he uncovers in an aborted interview, as soon as the candidate starts behaving oddly.
The show maintains its suspense effectively. The audience knows something no one else but the candidate knows, and has to watch and see how he will handle the information, while trying to guess whether everyone else on board the plane is actually misreading the situation or not. The action is confined to a small, claustrophobic setting. The time traveler who unhinges the candidate is effectively unsettling, and the story she has to tell strikes the right balance between credibility and BS. The candidate, his staff, and the reporter all behave believably, if a little stereotypically, and the audience has plenty of foreshadowing to set up the "twist" ending.
This is one of the better Outer Limits episodes.
The Outer Limits: I, Robot (1995)
Unfocused Sci-Fi Courtroom Drama
While this is an improvement over the Outer Limits' first try at dramatizing this story, it still doesn't work well because, this time around, it's just an odd melange of ideas that don't reinforce each other.
Presumably, the issue at hand is whether artificial intelligence will deserve human rights, but the show, instead, plays around with whether the robot's lawyer is just a cocky cynic who wants to mock the justice system or a crafty advocate who uses misdirection and mockery to defend his client. Yes, that's all kinda interesting, but the authors never bothered to tie it into the show's theme, so, why did they spend our time on it?
And instead of finding ways to dramatize the robot's "humanity," it shows us how humane the robot's best friend and surrogate sister is. Okay, she's cool, but what about the subject of the show?
And instead of asking the audience to see the injustice in creating an artificial intelligence, and then denying it any rights, the show pulls a bogeyman out of its hat by blaming the robot's actions on its secret military sponsors. But why even go there? It's just a cliché that doesn't address the point of the show.
This episode never really went anywhere because it forgot where it was going right after it started.
Pandora's Box (1992)
Engineers and Mathematicians Spawn Hapless Technocrats
Adam Curtis' first documentary series explores the tragicomic consequences of engineers', mathematicians', scientists', and bureaucrats' attempts to apply their specialized theories to a wide range of phenomenon, creating, each time, more problems than they solve.
The Soviet Union, for instance, wanted its socialist economy to provide a better life for its people, and in "The Engineer's Plot," bureaucrats, engineers, and workers describe how their leaders believed that massive industrialization would allow them to do this. But their increasing dependence on engineering and computer-derived targets only hamstrung politicians and bewildered citizens.
Meanwhile, their foe, the United States, turned to mathematicians to help them derive a strategy for waging the Cold War. In "To the Brink of Eternity," researchers, mathematicians, politicians, and soldiers relate how game theory and mathematical modeling seemed like useful tools, but only created a world of paranoia and brutality when applied to the arms race and the war in Vietnam.
Across the Atlantic, Britain, struggling to keep its head up in a world that seemed to be passing it by, turned to economists to help it become prosperous and powerful again. In "The League of Gentlemen," economists, politicians, and businessmen reveal that their attempts to use Keynesian economics, monetarism, and, finally, laissez-faire capitalism to create wealth failed and that they, actually, have no idea how, or whether, market systems work.
Back in the U.S., chemists, entomologists, farmers, and ecologists describe, in "Goodbye, Mrs. Ant," how the chemical industry tried to change agriculture though the use of pesticides and then attempted to justify or hide the unsettling consequences of these poisons on human and environmental health.
In Africa, the Gold Coast's reliance on a new hydro-electric power plant to transform it into an industrialized nation backfired. In "Black Power," politicians and businessmen discuss how international markets and Cold-War politics transformed the project from an unlikely panacea into a corrupt poverty trap.
And across the industrialized world, physicists who felt guilty for unleashing nuclear fission on the world discussed the feasibility of nuclear power. In "A Is for Atom," they, engineers, politicians, and businessmen recall how dreams of an atomic-powered utopia blinded them to the practical, safety, and economic problems of fission-derived energy, resulting in several major radiation leaks, two core meltdowns, and tons of unstorable waste products.
Curtis' juxtaposition of archival footage with historical PR films emphasizes the futile, and frequently absurd, plight of technocrats who attempt to bludgeon the world into a shape that fits technical procedures which read more like science-fiction than science.
The Living Dead (1995)
Suppressed Memories
Weaving together archival film footage, clips from classic movies, and on-location interviews, documentarian Adam Curtis tells three stories about the consequences of suppressing both national and individual memories.
"On the Desperate Edge of Now," lacks the focus and thematic unity the last two episodes display, but manages to create an eerie, unsettling mood as it switches between interviews of American soldiers recalling the carnage they witnessed and took part in, citizens of the Third Reich downplaying the mixture of pride and shame they feel about the Nazi party, their children's' sense of suspicion and outrage when they try to uncover their country's recent past, and the Nuremberg trials participants' recollection of a kangaroo court in a bombed-out city that was nearly hijacked by an indignant Herman Goering, who tried to tell everyone why fascism arose, even while the lawyers and judges tried to shut him up.
"You Have Used Me As a Fish," the series most fascinating episode, lets the audience in on the absurd, and chilling, experiments the CIA funded in mind control. Interview subjects try to explain how sensible it seemed at the time to believe that China and the Soviet Union had perfected methods of programming people like computers. Associates, and victims, of Dr. Ewen Cameron describe his government-funded method of electrocuting people until they lost their memories, and then trying to reprogram them while they slept, and CIA agents recall bizarre, ghoulish schemes to create assassins, sleeper agents, and recover the supposedly suppressed memories of defectors.
"The Attic" focuses on how British Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher spearheaded the "conservative revolution" by re-interpreting Winston Churchill's appeals to the memory of an imperial Great Britain. Interviews with her colleagues reveal how she seemed unaware that Churchill's version of history had been carefully edited for his own plans, and how her doubly-distorted view of history not only rallied the populace, but also revived domestic terrorism and replayed an economic meltdown.
Adam Curtis' trademark narration, filled with subtle irony and underplayed astonishment, is, as usual, complemented by a hodge-podge of historical film clips, frequently creating playful, chilling, and absurd associations. In The Living Dead, his usual obscure fragments from the BBC's film archives are bolstered by clips from German vampire movies, American Cold-War thrillers, and British ghost stories. The past, he tells us through this weird montage, is best not forgotten, lest it reassert itself on an amnesiac population.
The Century of the Self (2002)
Freud's Family Creates the Consumer Culture
The Century of the Self contrasts whimsical film footage with an ominous narrative. It describes the way our ideas about human nature have changed and how the development of psychology has allowed social institutions to use these ideas to exert more and more control over people. This documentary focuses its attention on Sigmund Freud's family, especially his daughter and nephew, who exerted a surprising amount of influence on the way corporations and governments throughout the 20th century have thought about, and dealt with, people.
At the end of the 19th century, Freud had a remarkable insight into human behavior. He believed that people were, often, unaware of what motivated them and didn't really know how they felt about things. He called this part of the mind, the part that people couldn't recognize, the subconscious. Being the cynic he was, Freud decided that the unconscious was filled with irrational, destructive, emotions which posed a danger to society. This was, unsurprisingly, a very unpopular point of view when Freud first wrote about it. At the time, people knew that they were, actually, divinely rational beings who were in complete control of themselves.
But Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew, was a little more receptive to his uncle's ideas, not because he was concerned with whether or not people were naturally destructive, but because Freud's ideas about people having strong emotions might help him convince people to buy things they didn't really need, and make a lot of money for him and his clients in the process. As long as his uncle wasn't completely wrong, then all Bernays had to do was associate emotional ideas with pointless products, and then consumers just wouldn't be able to help themselves. He was right, and his remarkable successes created a new industry, called public relations, which relied, almost entirely, on playing emotional games with people's heads.
Worse, the terrifying events, fueled by Freudian propaganda, that began to occur in Germany during the depression convinced politicians that Freud had been even more right than they suspected. People's emotions were clearly dangerous and had to be controlled. Government agencies began using Bernays' PR techniques, and Himmler's propaganda methods, to convince people to suppress their emotions and conform to social norms. Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter, and one of his most influential evangelists, even decided that she would see to it that her British nephew and niece were raised this way, as an example.
However, one of Freud's students, Wilhelm Reich, eventually decided that Freud had been a little paranoid. Emotions weren't bad, people weren't evil, and the solution wasn't control and repression, but expression. Freud's daughter didn't like the sound of this, especially since her nephew and niece had since grown up to be severely troubled adults, providing an unnervingly good proof of his thesis. This Reich guy had struck a nerve, and so she ostracized him from the psychology movement. But Reich's ideas still caught on.
And this didn't make either industry or government any happier than Anna. Neither of them knew what to do with the individuals that self-expression created. They had mass-produced products and policies that they sold through massive public-relations campaigns. Then, they noticed that self-expression gurus were organizing "focus groups" where people met to work out how they felt about things. All these institutions had to do was ask these focus groups the right questions, and they'd tell them how to sell people more products and policies than they had ever imagined possible.
It turned out that all business and government really had to do was categorize people according to their emotional development and social attitudes and then play each category off of one other. Corporations could sell slight variations of the same mass-produced products to people, as long as they associated one variation with one group of people, and then convince them that this variation allowed them to express their true nature. And politicians no longer had to worry about sweeping social changes, they could just play off one segment of voters against another and then sit back and watch all the consumers obsessively buy things, oblivious to social problems.
Documentarian Adam Curtis' bewildering collage of film clips, pop-music snippets, and interviews helps portray the slightly absurd and surreal cynicism and manipulation practiced by the 20th-century's supposedly enlightened business and political leaders.