The Andromeda Strain (1971)

From the Crichton book of the same name, which was published in 1969 and which was his first Big Break. I'm not sure I should even be patronizing anything attached to Crichton, given his weirdo ostrich stance on global warming, but I cannot resist his crush on science. This movie would never have been made the way it was now (and particularly not post-Outbreak - there is simply not enough vomiting of organs in this film, and nobody's suit gets cut with a scalpel, at least not unintentionally). The pace is incredibly slow, dwelling lovingly on each scientific procedure, and especially on the equipment.

The film starts with soldiers observing a slumbering town named Piedmont, in New Mexico (the look of which I swear was copied from Ansel Adams' "Moonrise in Hernandez, New Mexico" - see pic). Turns out Piedmont is not actually asleep - everybody has died because they were exposed to bacteria which came down on a super-secret satellite sent up by army guys trying to explore the possibilities of alternative types of life extant in outer space. (Maybe they were also trying to find biological weapons, but that's not really clear till later.) A crack team of scientists is assembled, including the mastermind who has been involved in the government project to collect these extraterrestrial organisms. (Can I just say that I love the scene in movies when a crack team of scientists is assembled? I hope one day to be part of either the assembling or the assemblage of a crack team of somebodies. I'm pretty sure at this point it won't be of scientists, but hey.)

After a couple of these scientists explore Piedmont and find two survivors, the action moves underground, to "Wildfire" - a top-secret facility constructed to investigate extraterrestrial lifeforms under ultimately sanitary conditions. The movie spends about twenty minutes, it seems, on showing how the scientists de-bacterize, including a gross scene when the outer epidermis is basically burned off.

The rest of the film follows the crack team through every minute of their scientific discovery process, showing the microscopes, the animal testing, the titrating, the hypothesizing. Finally, the crack MD figures out what the two survivors (an old Sterno drinker and a constantly crying baby) have in common - blood that's out of kilter, Ph-wise - and discerns the way to kill Andromeda. By that time, though, the disease has mutated to a different, plastic-eating format, and isn't a threat to humans anymore. The scientists thwart Wildfire's attempt at self-destruction by nuclear bomb, and then everything's all right - except, that is, a floating mass of Andromeda off of the coast of Mexico, which the powers that be propose to kill by seeding clouds with alkali rain. Always a solution!

There's a weird, not-too-explored sixties subtext to this film - the crack team is always cracking wise about protestors and radicals, to little effect. I kind of couldn't believe that there was never an outbreak - maybe I'm too conditioned to expect really bad things to happen to the protagonists of my movies. But hey, this was rated G.

Rollerball (1975)

No, not the lame Chris Klein version, the awesome James Caan version (dir. Norman Jewison, from a short story by William Harrison). This film has the hairy-chested Caan competing in a game created by the corporations which also rule the entire world—ROLLERBALL! The sport is intended to channel spectatorial aggression, so that the people of the world don't rise up against the autocrats with big bushy eyebrows who pull all the strings of their lives. Caan's character, Jonathan E., is a rollerball *star*, and that worries the corprocrats, because if there can be stars, then the concept of individual achievement is still dangerously alive.

The thing that I thought this movie does well is the non-sports stuff - the seventies futuristic world of luxury that Jonathan E. inhabits, where gorgeous women with major cheekbones and long, flowing dresses appear at his ranch house to service him and spy on him for the Energy corporation; where the pretty people who surround Jonathan get together at night-long debauched parties to take unnamed pills and incinerate pine trees with flamethrowing pistols; where living room decor features giant leather couch-beds and crystal globes, etc. etc. I'll leave it to Nick to hopefully elaborate on the radicalism of the plot, which really is pretty anti-business. I can't imagine that the Klein version is the same, though I haven't seen it. Yet.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Dir. Byron Haskin, recently released by Criterion: This film follows a stranded US astronaut ("Christopher Draper", played by Paul Mantee) who finds himself on Mars after an accident, with only the monkey Mona for a companion. (Mona looked like a doll at some junctures, but the credits say that she was played by a real simian, "Barney, the Woolly Monkey".)

After a funny scene in which he watches a useless instructional video provided by the Navy on the subject of survival in a foreign land, Draper solves the problems of shelter (cave); air (a yellow Martian rock, when burned, releases oxygen); water (Mona finds an underground pool); and food (Mona's pool grows funny seaweed with summer sausage-looking pods in it). Then he starts feeling isolated and having funny dreams with the captain of his spacecraft in them (who is played by Adam West, of TV Batman fame, though Nick had to tell me that).

Just about this time, conveniently, Draper discovers a skeleton buried in the desert with metal bracelets on it, and shortly thereafter sees alien spacecraft in the sky. (I thought these looked like the ones in the 1950s "War of the Worlds", and Wikipedia actually backs me up - though these have grids which emit lasers, instead of menacing stalks on top.) The American investigates, and the ships seem to follow him, blasting holes in the rocks around him. Eventually he stumbles upon his human Friday, a slave of the alien mining corporation, which sent the ships and can track Friday by his bracelets. This human-slave-of-aliens plot is much like the Stargate movie, except there's no interesting ambisexual Ra behind the scenes manipulating things with a cat in his lap. Or is it an allegory about Communism? Crusoe comes on the scene to rescue those in oppression and tell them about the possibility of another life? Regardless, the deus ex machina/American spaceship comes to rescue them before they ever see the alien overlords, which is kind of disappointing.

The film was made in Death Valley, our own baby Mars. Daniel Defoe gets a writing credit, leading me to imagine what would have happened if Defoe had lived in the 30s or 40s and had, Faulkner-like, ended up in H'wood, pounding out scripts in the winter of his discontent. Ha!

Rocky Balboa (2006)

In this movie, Sylvester Stallone, who also directed, is a shambling, endearing weirdo with extensive plastic surgery on his face. His character wears a maroon blazer and entertains visitors to his restaurant (named "Adrian" after his erstwhile wife, who died of what he calls the "woman cancer") with old fight stories. Rocky is a local hero, and intimately connected with South Philadelphia, where all of the houses seem to remind him of Adrian, and there's something truly pathetic and moving about his quest to recover a sort of meaningful life after Adrian's passing.

I didn't really buy the idea that this quest would lead Rocky back into the ring to fight the current champ, Mason "The Line" Dixon (AWESOME), a young black hotshot who has never really gotten to fight somebody of his own caliber and is trying to prove himself. There's a lot of talk on the part of The Rock about fire in the belly and feeling like you haven't finished what you started, but in real life, wouldn't one fight just lead to "just one more"? It would for me, and that's the pathos of human nature: you always think "just one more" will satisfy you. Not Rocky - he really does want only one more, and when he's done, and has taught Dixon the meaning of tenacity, he can go back to his restaurant and his stories and maybe a romance with "Little Marie", the local girl who's platonically present throughout the film.

There's also a lot of weird race stuff in here - from the black champ's posturing and obnoxious posse; to the group of white kids in a bar who harass Rocky and who speak in affected hip-hop slang, who are supposed to signify the downfall of the neighborhood; to "Little Marie"'s son Steps, a biracial kid who serves as sort of a scarlet A signifying Marie's fallen status as single mom and ex-mate of a Jamaican. Rocky's fight is sort of a resurgence of white masculinity in the face of all of this degeneration, a la James Jeffries, the Great White Hope, who came out of retirement to fight Jack Johnson in 1910 in order to prove, quote, "that a white man is better than a Negro." (Jeffries, by the way, lost; this film lets Dixon win, but only in a split decision.)

Whatever. I still love Rocky's weird verbal tics and "yo"s and awkward posture and kindness to run-down old dogs. And I found out during this movie's training montage that Nick could once lift 615 pounds, which is valuable information and worth the watch.