Welcome Wednesday: Tim Popple: Moon, Monsters, and Money

Hey Guys,

Wednesday is the day I introduce a guest onto my blog and let them write me a post. They will be posting something about their area of knowledge and each week I will try and have a different area.

Sometimes I may post a response to what the guest has written.

The major theme running through this week seems to be Sci-Fi, and why break the running theme? This week we have Guest Star, Tim Popple who will be discussing the thrills of British and Low Budget Science Fiction. Make him welcome:

Tim lives and works in Bristol, and spends his spare time living and breathing cinema. He runs http://the24thframe.co.uk/, a website dedicated to film reviews and features (one current feature involves looking one Star Trek film a month, until the new film is released next year!). The site has a Facebook page, www.facebook.com/the24thframe, and you can follow Tim on Twitter @VoxPopple.

Low budget SciFi has often been something of a contradiction. Take an idea that seems like it ought to need a big budget, and craft something unique and wonderful with a tiny budget. Use that budget’s limitations to focus your creativity. From films like Silent Running – directed by 2001: A Space Odyssey’s effects guy, Douglas Trumbull – through James Cameron’s classic The Terminator, and on past oddities like Shane Carruth’s Primer (an altogether different take on time travel to the Schwarzenegger film) across different countries like Spain’s Timecrimes, and South Africa’s District 9, and on to recent times with the one-two Brit SciFi punch of Duncan Jones’s Moon and Gareth Edwards’s Monsters, and the US’s grunts’-eye view of an invasion with the underrated Battle: Los Angeles.

With Nir Paniry’s film Extracted getting good press at festivals, I wanted to look at these most recent British SciFi low budget films which are not only sterling examples of low budget SciFi done well, but are actually two of the best films of recent years. Indeed Moon topped my list of films of 2009. Sam Rockwell is the sole occupant of a base on the moon, mining precious fuel discovered there to help an ailing planet below. Coming to the end of his “shift”, slowly he realises things are not entirely as he thought. With nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Kevin Spacey-voiced ship’s computer, as well as the solitary life of Silent Running, it has fine SciFi as its touchstones. Yet even without that historical layer, Moon still works as an astonishing piece of SciFi. It takes a futuristic setting – a realistic futuristic setting, no less – and posits the age old question of what it means to be human, how human is human? The struggled relationship between man and machine is brought to bear most succinctly, and man’ resilience, his fight for survival, is made frightfully real. Tonally, Moon has heart, pathos, and in a lovely touch to the wake up call, humour. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest debut films since an upstart 20 something decided to make a little film mocking the most powerful newspaper magnate in America, with snowglobes, pleasure palaces, and a mystery called ‘Rosebud’.

Gareth Edwards’ Monsters is a kind of road movie. It takes the familiar set up of an alien invasion, and fast forwards to the end of that film. The aliens have arrived, we’ve become accustomed to them, and they live in a specific area. So far, so District 9. But while District 9 was a thinly-veiled nod to apartheid within South African history, Monsters looks at a more specifically American concern: border control. Trapped with no option but to travel through the area infected with the mysterious aliens, a photographer and his boss’s daughter struggle with each other as much as they do with their environment. It’s a SciFi road movie buddy movie, if you will. People turning up expecting Independence Day 2 were always going to be disappointed. Of course you see the aliens here – to not do so would have been a huge cheat on the audience, micro-budget or not – but it’s about the situation, the interactions, and the relationships. And surviving a potentially hostile environment. Monsters is a brilliantly realised vision that, like Moon paints a painfully realistic future. That is its strength. By framing the unbelievable within a believable structure, it improves the suspension of disbelief.

Throwing money at a film can often do it a disservice. Necessity begets invention, and it is necessary with a smaller budget to be inventive in one’s portrayal of the fantastical in a way that remains believable. Monsters, by its overt necessity to visualise creatures of another world had a harder job than Moon which required a Moon base, and shots in space. Both achieve, both excel, and both show how much is possible, even on the tiniest of budgets.

If you have any comments or views on what has been discussed then please place them below. If you would like to appear on my Welcome Wednesday blog then let me know.

Stay safe,

Matt

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