The Mysterious Island: Jules Verne’s Little World

The recent films Jonah Hex and Knight and Day were forgettable wasted efforts and I have nothing to say about them, so I thought I’d bemoan the absence of imagination in most of this year’s films and pay tribute to that master of the imagination, Jules Verne, whose novel The Mysterious Island (1874) I am currently re-reading.

As my blog title might suggest, I yearn for imaginative films that transport me to other worlds – those little worlds of imagination that films have the power to create. James Cameron’s Avatar features a richly detailed little world. On the moon Pandora, jungle vegetation lights up with bioluminescence; thanator, viperwolves, and hammerhead titanothere, oh, my!, roam the dense jungles; winged banshee swarm over the floating mountains; and the blue Na'vi people live in harmony with all around them. (How nice!) Despite its corny dialogue and borrowed storyline, the film's imagined world has consistently engaged me throughout nine viewings at the movies and on DVD.

Similarly, when I was ten years old, I was totally transported to another little world of the imagination by the film Mysterious Island (1961), directed by Cy Enfield, based on Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel. Enfield also directed Zulu (1964) and wrote the screenplay for Zulu Dawn (1979).


Even today, this movie captures my imagination and engrosses me completely. I love the use of matte paintings to establish an otherworldly atmosphere, but a masterstroke is the use of islands off Spain that provide the real beaches, jungle, and rocky slopes of the island. Unfortunately, the film strays dramatically from the plot of Verne’s novel. There are no giant creatures in the novel, but one of the main attractions of the film is Ray Harryhausen’s magical stop-motion animation that renders a thrilling giant crab (a real crab), an oversized dodo bird (funny but sinister), huge bees (realistically menacing as they seal two islanders into a honeycomb), and a multi-tentcled nautilus (frightening as it is revealed but ultimately a dud). The film is especially memorable for its rich, brooding, deep-toned musical score by Bernard Herrmann.

"Everything is Kung Fu" - The Karate Kid (2010)

As Jackie Chan, playing reclusive maintenance man, Mr. Han, says in Harald Zwart's passionate remake of The Karate Kid, "Everything is Kung Fu." Cool. I guess that means there's a magic to kung fu. Indeed, there's a magic to this story, first made in 1984, the decade of many many sequels, because the up-from-obscurity-to-kung-fu-victory formula here works once again, gives Jackie Chan a chance to play a troubled character, presents the very promising debut of Jaden Smith, and takes us to China as well.

Now I've only seen parts of the 1984 original on television, though I've seen Hilary Swank tap her inner Million Dollar Baby in ubiquitous training montages in The Next Karate Kid (1994), so I'm not a devotee of the franchise, and I'm not missing the whimsical and witty Pat Morita here. Nevertheless, I was taken for a wonderful ride in this rendition, starting with an absorbing opening chapter in which director Swart is not afraid to take time to develop the alienation felt by twelve-year-old Dre Parker (Smith) when he ends up moving to Beijing with his mother (Taraji P. Henson).

A nice attention to detail makes you feel the jet-lag, the dense air, the alien sights and sounds. You feel the dampness with its suggestion of alien smells. Of course, we know little Dre will end up victimized by bullies. We know he will try to fight back on a number of occasions. And we know that Mr. Han will intervene to teach Dre the way to fulfillment: learn kung fu and kick butt at the big tournament. But it's believable fantasy.

It's also very atmospheric fantasy. The opening scenes, as I have said, realistically portray the feel of an alien land. In addition, the requiste training montages play out in beautiful settings. Yes, they do some training on the Great Wall. At the beginning of Dre's training program, Mr. Han makes the boy climb the many steps to a mountaintop monastery, where devotees of Chinese spiritualism do their thing in picuresque courtyards. "This is like Mulan," my daughter, Jane, said next to me. On the top of the mountain, Dre watches a kung fu guru hypnotize a cobra and control its movements on the edge of a high precipice. This skill will serve Dre well in the climactic tournament, an ending that is gripping despite its predictability.

Jackie Chan gets to do a little more acting than usual. He is a tormented individual who feels responsible for the death of wife and son in an automobile accident. Every year he rennovates the culprit car to vintage condition and then bashes it with a sledgehammer on the anniversary of the fatal accident. For Mr. Han, Dre helps fill some of the loss of his son, but training him is also a chance to teach a lesson to the cruel teacher of the kung fu boys who have victimized Dre. As Dre, Jaden Smith is suitably engaging; his father can be proud. The Karate Kid is a rousing, touching adventure, a film worthy of your time in a summer of lackluster offerings.

Teaching Watching, Part II

School's out! Summer vacation! Last month, I shared the term-long film history unit I teach to 8th graders. In this brief follow up, I present passages from spontaneous, uncoached student responses to the ambiguous endings in The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Graduate


This is not a completely happy ending. Elaine will no longer be able to associate with her parents or friends. She has also just run off with a man she barely knows and who has had an affair with her mother. They awkwardly look forward, which implies that it will not work out between them.

Tampering With Nature: The Human Centipede and Splice

A big fan of the novels of the H.G. Wells, I love The Island of Dr. Moreau for its jungle island setting, its way-out weirdness, and its exploration of the theme of scientific tampering with nature. In this mordant tale, a wayward vivisectionist cuts and pastes animal parts so that his creations have human traits and are smart enough to acknowledge the pain Dr. Moreau is causing them and to wonder about their place in the world of humans.

Two recent films explore the theme of tampering with nature with varying degrees of success. In Tom Six’s The Human Centipede: First Sequence, a brilliant but psychotic surgeon, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), kidnaps three tourists and knits them into a human centipede. (How he achieves this I leave to your imagination.) In Vincenzo Natali’s Splice two brilliant American geneticists, Clive (Adrien Brody), and Elsa (Sarah Polley), combine a potpourri of animal DNA with good ol’ double-helix human DNA to hatch a creature that looks human from the waist up but is all kangaroo rat below. But while the low-budget The Human Centipede succeeds as a disturbing, gripping tale of the macabre, the CGI-enhanced Splice stumbles between haunting commentary on scientists playing God and standard horror-movie schlock and splatter.

Both films tinker with horror-movie tropes, but The Human Centipede uses them to tweak the suspense while Splice blunders into them, sometimes unintentionally as it seems, thus marring the film’s initial tone of thoughtful seriousness. In the former, two lost female tourists, played by Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie, their nightclub dresses soaked with rain, come upon a house - very isolated, of course. But if a scowling recluse, who looks like Jim Jones but is all Dr. Mengele, opens the door on a dark and rainy night, you just don’t go in! Forget the rain! But we go along with the inside jokes, knowing what we know about Doc Heiter from the beginning, and the clichés tease our tension as the clueless women blunder into their own doom, to be joined by a third victim, a Japanese tourist named Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura). In Splice some of the early images of the rapidly growing creature in its more animalistic stage at once evoke a gut-wrenching sense of awe and horror at the creation of a life that should not be, but when a scene of hyperbolic gore that you assume must be Clive or Elsa’s nightmare turns out to be a real event, the film’s seriousness is blown away in an instant. Later, too, as the creature called Dren evolves into a winged demon, the similarity to recent winged-demon schlock is regrettable.

Game Mode: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Impossibly acrobatic Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal), the former street urchin who is adopted by the king. Luscious-lipped Tamina (Gemma Arterton), guardian of the magic time-warping dagger. The magic time-warping dagger – the worst prop since the crystal skull in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) – with its cheesy glass handle, magic sand, and jeweled button you press to reverse time. The evil Jafar, I mean the so-bald-you-know-he’s-bad Nazim (Ben Kingsley), who wants to turn back time so he can be king. These are some of the characters involved in a conflict over said magic dagger in Mike Newell’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Now, I’m good for any mindless adventure that transports me to another place and time, but this adaptation of the popular video game never goes beyond video game mode. It’s an endless blur of superhero leaps and bounds and a constant flash of swordplay that never constitute any distinctively memorable action scene. One scene with potential involves the duel between the knife-throwing expert, Seso (Steve Toussaint) and a spike-shooting Hassansin, but even that scene, with all its flying projectiles, feels like merely a higher level in a game.

The lackluster acting and minimal characterization also keep Prince of Persia in game mode. Gyllenhaal as Dastan reveals a glimmer of Errol Flynn dash, but for the most part he just smirks wryly at the next impossible predicament and makes big goo-goo eyes at Tasmina, whose tanned skin, huge eyes, and voluptuous upper lip are the most interesting details in the movie. Frustratingly, the movie never explains why Dastan can leap so high! Meanwhile, Toby Kebbell and Richard Coyle blandly play Dastan’s bland brothers, and Ronald Pickup is whiny as King Sharaman. Alfred Molina injects character and elicits some laughs as the garrulous Sheik Amar, a conniving, opportunistic entrepreneur who runs an ostrich-racing racket. But at the point at which Dastan remarks that Amar talks too much, I was feeling the same way.

CGI renders vast Persian cities, but there’s neither majesty nor whimsy to them, and the Moroccan locations employed are mostly bleak terrain with lots of sand – it’s a very sandy movie. In a few scenes, Moroccan ksars provide real atmosphere, but the mise-en-scéne comes off as half-hearted and unimaginative, as routinely superficial as some Disneyland ride settings. CGI also depicts what the credits bill as “sand time” – kind of cool, but the scene involving the effectively chilling sand vipers happens too fast to enjoy. In the end, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how the sandy thing works. I thought it was supposed to cause an apocalypse. How is that supposed to make Nazim king?

Prince of Persia borrows heavily from Disney’s own Alladin, as well as from just about every Errol Flynn adventure, but it never achieves the joy, exuberance, and memorable action of one of those classics. I just felt like the time I made the rare purchase of a PC game: The Fellowship of the Ring, and I could never get out of the first level. I wandered around Hobbiton for hours and hours. (I much later read that the game was defective.) And that’s the defect here. We get the repetitious action, the CGI, the leaping heroes, but we never get liberated to a cinematic level of escapist adventure that takes you away to another place and time where delightfully memorable things can happen.

I vant to suck your blood substitute!: Daybreakers (2010)

The other day I Netflixed Daybreakers, directed by the Spierig brothers. I had toyed with the idea of seeing it at the movies when it came out, but I rented it mostly because I wanted to compare notes with my 10th grade girls at school – who love anything about vampires. They thought it was a fun movie (though they acknowledged its ridiculous aspects) and they have crushes on Ethan Hawke, who plays Edward Dalton, a vampire hematologist who is working to find a cure for a vampire plague that threatens to deplete sources of blood and cause global starvation.

I’m not a fan of vampire movies, but I love science fiction, so I was entertained by a number of elements in the film. I liked the totalitarian society allusive of Fahrenheit 451 and THX1138 - with black-clad policemen wielding rods with electrified collars used to subdue vamps rioting for blood or to capture members of the starving poor class of vamps turning into quite scary bat-monsters. When Dalton is taken in by human resistance fighters and encouraged to develop his cure, I enjoyed the gothic Frankenstein elements of his experimentation. I enjoyed the film’s gloomy, film noir look, with vampire businessmen in trilbies and overcoats ordering shots of blood with their Joe at the local coffee bar. In addition, there’s an outrageous moment with an exploding head that fills an operating room with blood that was a hoot.

The film entertained, I always enjoy Ethan Hawke, and the plot moved along expeditiously, but what I found frustrating was aspects of this sci-fi world that seemed illogical or, at least, caused confusion because they were not explained clearly enough. If a writer has enough imagination to dream up an alternate world, he should have sufficient imagination to iron out the inconsistencies in logic. Maybe I’m not well versed enough in vampire lore, but it seems that each new movie about vampires reinvents the way vampires work. Afraid of garlic or not afraid of garlic. Sparkles in sunlight or bursts into flames in sunlight.

Thus, I have a few questions I’m going to ask my vampire experts at school on Monday, but I thought I’d note them here for everyone else. (I have one 11th grade girl in my Drama Club who is truly an expert on Greek mythology as well as the lore of vampires, angels, devils, witches, zombies, and werewolves, and she has read widely about these topics. She recently encouraged me to watch The Craft (1996), and she admitted that I was right when I surmised, “I bet you’ve tried witch spells, haven’t you?” She said, “With all I’ve read about this stuff, do you think I haven't?” I didn’t ask her if her spells had worked.)

Anyway, here are some of the unclear aspects of this vampire world that bothered me. I also include a question or two for any expert who can help me.

1. In the first shootout between the vamps and the resistance fighters, the humans are shooting bolts from crossbows and long bows. Cool. Can’t kill a vampire with a bullet. But in an extreme long shot we see vampire cops exploding. I was thinking that some of the bolts carried bombs. Can you blow up a vampire? That’s what I thought until much later in the film when it is clearly shown that a bolt to the heart causes the vamp’s heart to explode. Okay. Nice. But make this clear in the beginning, not towards the end. Also, the vamp cops have body armor, but I guess it's not impervious to bolts to the heart. What use is the body armor if it doesn't protect the heart?

2. This concerns the above-mentioned exploding head. Said exploding head comes from a vampire who’s being tested with the cure. Do vampires have blood? Do vampires bleed? These vampires bleed - and yet when Dalton gets a bolt in the arm, he doesn't bleed!

3. SPOILER ABOUT OPENING SCENE: I liked how this movie rebels against Twilight skin-sparkling-in-sunlight absurdity. In the striking open scene, a little girl writes a suicide note, says she can’t cope with immortality, and goes out to sit in front of the house to wait for the sunrise. Sunrise comes and whoosh! She bursts into flames. As it should be! But the fine line between bursting into flames and not seemed ridiculous. A vampire can avoid burning up by standing in the thin shade of a tree? I thought not.

4. SPOILER ABOUT FATE OF SAM NEILL AS THE EVIL CHARLES BROMLEY: Sam Neill plays the villainous blood tycoon. With his normally dark features, he looks sinister with vampire contact lenses and fangs. Of course, he wants to prevent the discovery of a cure because that will kill his profits from dealing in the farming of human blood. When he gets his comeuppance, he is tied to a chair and ripped apart by vamp cops who seem to be sucking his blood? If, in this world, vamps have blood, then why isn’t the starving populace cannibalizing each other in a mad frenzy?

5. Dalton is also trying to develop a blood substitute to stave off starvation. Well, what about animal blood? As shown in the poster above (The Matrix!), humans are tapped for their blood. What about deer or dogs or cows? There is no mention in this film that animals have died out.

6. I thought vampires had to hang upside down like a bat or lie in a coffin during the day. Although most activity in this vampire society happens at night - and it's cool how the streets a vacant during the day and then everybody comes out at night - they seem to be quite active during the day, driving around in sunlight-shielded cars driven by means of video screens, or executing vampire criminals by dragging them out into the sunlight.

7. Do vampires have fun? Do they read? Go to movies? Keep a movie blog? Bromley loves his immortality, and he enjoys a brandy snifter of pure human blood, but where does the fun come in?