During my lifelong quest to see every sci-fi flick ever made, I somehow completely skipped over the French New Wave sci-fi. A little while ago I watched Godard’s Weekend, a rambling and vague collection of violence and surrealism. On the strength of that, I rented a sci-fi film that Godard made a couple years before called Alphaville. Alphaville was much the same as Weekend, but without much violence or surrealism. Here’s the most futuristic image from the whole movie:
Mostly, Alphaville is just the hero wandering around a city that looks exactly like a city from the 1960s, while people make apparently nonsensical pronouncements about the fate of man in an increasingly mechanized and technological society.
I have the feeling that Godard loved the spectacle and drama of sci-fi movies, but he always had too little budget and too much Frenchness to make one that was really fun.
A movie that Godard would have made if he had very little education and was a borderline pedophile is Yo-Yo Girl Cop.
While at the video store once I suggested to my girlfriend that we rent this. She responded with "why would you want to watch that?" in the tone of voice that one usually reserves for people who like to collect their urine in jars.
So I waited for her to leave town and then put it on my Netflix queue.
Now, honestly, having watched Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, I was not particularly impressed with Yo-Yo Girl Cop. Those other movies were action movies the same way that grizzly bears with rabies and cybernetic arms are apex predators. Yo-Yo Girl Cop was just a movie about a schoolgirl with a yo-yo. The yo-yo wasn’t even particularly useful, even though everyone had one.
So I’m sad to say that this is just a fighting schoolgirl movie that’s just going through the motions.
A little while ago I reported on the vikings versus space dragon movie Outlander. So I thought I would complete the set and watch another Hollywood viking movie, Pathfinder, where the vikings fought skraelings (this is the only correct general term for aboriginal Americans as a whole).
In theory, a movie about the clashes and misunderstandings between these two cultures would be thrilling. As it turns out, the movie makes about as much sense as the movie poster:
I mean, seriously, the viking longship has spikes coming out of it?!?!? In the movie itself, the longship is about the size of a Navy missile cruiser, with four different levels. The people who made this movie spent about five minutes researching the historical background.
And to add insult to injury, they had a convoluted plot device to make the skraeling hero white. I think that we’ve all matured enough that we can watch a movie with a skraeling man saving the day. If nothing else the new Twilight movie will prove that.
