Spread of Activation VII: The Earth Day Edition

It's Earth Day and let's celebrate by bragging on how much aliens love our planet. They do! They can't get enough of it, from War of the Worlds to Independence Day they want the whole thing. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind they love us so much they're willing to travel light years, lots of 'em, just to say "Hi." Awww. In This Island Earth, despite being much more advanced than us scientifically, they want our help with their own planet Metaluna, and a couple of our best and brightest oblige. Sometimes we're naughty, and since they love us so much they feel the need to show us the error of our ways, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still where they gently but firmly tell us to stop our warring ways or they'll kill us. Gee thanks Dad! And in 2001: A Space Odyssey those aliens... well, okay who knows what in the hell they're up to but whatever it is, we're the centerpiece of their master plan. Yes, Science Fiction, beloved here at Cinema Styles, has always operated under the conceit that you just can't find a better planet than good old Mother Earth.

The great thing about most science fiction is that outside the gobbledygook of the basic plot they don't try to explain too much. It's usually kept to a couple of sentences revolving around our natural resources or danger to the rest of the galaxy or something stupid like that. And it's a good thing too because when you think about Earth centered sci-fi plots they never actually make much sense. For instance, take the "destroy and conquer" plots.

War of the Worlds and Independence Day are all about alien races envying what we've got here and wanting to take it for themselves. In War of the Worlds, they apparently buried tripods a million years ago with the intent of taking over the planet. Why they didn't just do it then when they would have encountered NO technological resistance I have no idea. Why they didn't research the environment to realize that bacteria present here would kill them is another mystery for the ages. They have the technology to form an invasion plan from millions of miles away over a thousand centuries but didn't bother to research the environment and how it interacts with their own biology. Wow, that's monumentally bad planning!

And how about the Independence Day dullards? They too can construct fleets of ships and massive mother ships to invade a world for it's resources when the gathering of resources from planets and asteroids is something even we already understand but lack the technology and money to get enough ships to the asteroids and planets to collect the resources. The aliens of ID4 do realize don't they, with their advanced technology, that they can strip mine the galaxy for all the resources they need without once having to actually mount an invasion? They realize that right? Oh no wait, of course they don't because Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are the guys that provided them with their motivation in the first place.

Or how about the "Earth is a danger to the rest of us" plot of The Day the Earth Stood Still? Ha! That's a laugh. People seemed to think in 1951 that nuclear weapons could destroy the universe. Your average humdrum star, going through the process of nuclear fusion constantly, produces more heat and radiation in a second than every nuclear weapon on Earth combined could ever hope to do. Which makes me think of The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire has nothing to do with aliens, I know, but this ain't called Spread of Activation for nothing. See, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which is a great and underrated movie by the way, the Earth is thrown off of her axis by two hydrogen bomb tests by the United States and the Soviet Union done at the exact same time at the North and South Poles. Okay, first of all, even if a nuclear bomb could somehow move an object with a mass of 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (6E+24 kilograms / 1.3E+25 pounds), and brother would that need to be one HUGE-ASS nuclear bomb, the fact that you have two at opposite ends would simply result in the two offsetting each other, further resulting in, well, nothing. For the plot to work it should just be one bomb, not two. Oh well, at least with a destroyed Earth no aliens are going to want to take it.

But what about destroying the Earth? Does Sci-Fi have anything to say about that? But of course it does! Everyone loves apocalyptic Sci-Fi. From asteroids to global warming to nuclear warfare Sci-Fi loves destroying the planet Earth. There's a new one coming out soon, 2012, and like the other ones it looks pretty stupid. My favorite in the field is probably the aforementioned The Day the Earth Caught Fire but for instant destruction I'll go with Deep Impact.

Deep Impact was released in 1998 in competition with another asteroid destruction movie, Armageddon. Deep Impact gets 5.9 on IMDB and Armageddon gets 6.0. This is important because it reminds me that most people who rate movies on IMDB are idiots and it's always good to remember that. Who knows, one day it may save your life. I don't know how, but I'm not ruling it out. Anyway, Deep Impact is a pretty good disaster flick as these things go. They do have their cake and eat it too of course by having the smaller non-planet killing asteroid hit so we can all enjoy the special effects and having the bigger planet killing one destroyed so we can all enjoy the happy ending. That was kind of chickenshit in my book but hey I understand the need for it. Besides in the instant destruction sub-genre you've got to show something to the audience. I mean, we paid money to see the planet killed, or at least injured. Which takes me to my final category, the slow death of the planet as exemplified by films such as Silent Running and Wall-E.

These don't work as well for me. Wall-E has an interesting nugget of a sci-fi idea but focuses on the robots instead of the people, which makes sense since it's mainly for kids. But for me it's like watching Star Wars where R2-D2 and C3PO are the main characters and everyone else is a bit player. Silent Running on the other hand has a very interesting main character played by Bruce Dern but a hard to swallow plot device: The Earth is now devoid of all plant life. Uh huh. As Carl Sagan said in Cosmos, "We need the trees much more than they need us." Without us the plants would be fine. Without the plants, and all apologies to Coruscant, we wouldn't be here. The idea of a functioning planet without plants is ludicrous but it's still a good movie with an interesting central character and a trio of droids (Huey, Dewey and Louie) that predate those previously mentioned Star Wars droids by five years. And it's one of the first major Sci-Fi movies with an environmental theme which makes it a good one to wrap up with on this Earth Day.

So Happy Earth Day everyone! Watch an Earth destruction Sci-Fi movie today. Sometimes the best way to appreciate what you've got is to see what it would be like if it were taken away.

Your Favorite President Sucks

Or maybe he just doesn't feel right. I'm not talking about real presidents, I'm talking about the President of the United States as portrayed in the movies. And I'm not talking about Henry Fonda or Raymond Massey playing Abe Lincoln at any age or in any state. I'm talking about that wonderful Hollywood tradition, the Genero-President! As in, we need a President because the script calls for it so find some guy with white hair and a strong chin and we'll call him the President for a day. That's what I'm talking about: The Great Generic Presidents of the movies.

It's a noble tradition that really got jump-started by the science fiction genre. Before Sci-Fi got on-board movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy actually had someone play real Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and actors like the aforementioned Fonda and Massey played the Great Emancipator onscreen. But eventually Hollywood needed some guy to order an A-Bomb attack on the invading force from the planet Kulltar, and when that happened they got the guy with the white hair. For years it was a pretty standard model but eventually even Genero-President grew into something much grander and deeper.

By the sixties Stanley Kubrick gave us perhaps the greatest Genero-President in history, President Merkin Muffley, played by Peter Sellers in the now classic Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was an eye-opener. Genero-Presidents could be actual characters, not just talking marble statues with three lines, usually ending with, "My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I surrender our nation to our new rulers, the Tashderians of Mokdar." In fact, 1964 produced a triumvirate of character driven Genero-Presidents, or GP's: President Muffley of Strangelove, President Jordan Lymen (Frederic March) of Seven Days in May and simply The President (Henry Fonda) from Fail Safe. Hell, in that very same year Henry Fonda even played a fake candidate for the nomination of the presidency in The Best Man, written by Gore Vidal. It was a banner year for the GP and brought him into the limelight as never before. To hell with portrayals of Washington and Lincoln, with a GP you could do and say things with the character that you could never do or say with a real president, except maybe Nixon. And it provided the "starved for portrayals of fake politicians" masses with endless hours of entertainment. And damn, I love me some good fake politicians.

But then something disturbing happened. By the late eighties and into the nineties, the Genero-Presidents became "real" people. Actors like Michael Douglas gave us warm, nurturing portrayals of the Commander in Chief in The American President and television got all deep and thought-provoking on us with West Wing. What the hell? I don't want my Genero-President dealing with his motherless daughter and dating a lobbyist. I don't want him having a crisis of faith on the eve of his decision to run again. I want him fending off a military coup staged by Burt Lancaster. I want him talking to a drunk Soviet Premier on the phone in the War Room (where you can't fight). I want him calming the nerves of J.R. Ewing so J.R. can tell the Russians that we're gonna bomb New York, just to make things square and all.

Hollywood made some half-hearted attempts to revive the great tradition of kick-ass GP's with vehicles like Air Force One, where the President is a Harrison Ford type, amazingly enough played by Harrison Ford, fighting off terrorists on his plane, but I don't know. Unless a military coup or A-Bomb attack is imminent the new Hollywood model just doesn't do it for me. Even when Sci-Fi got back into the act with Deep Impact and Independence Day the GP's left me underwhelmed. Sure they were fighting for survival with impending asteroid destruction or invading alien forces but once again they were too soft, too touchy feely for me. I'm not saying GP's can't be great anymore, just that it's been a long time since I really connected with one of them.

And that's why I've saved my two favorites for last. They're the last two GP's that I really liked. They're not fully fleshed out characters like the 1964 Banner Year GP's. They're Standard Model Sci-Fi GP's and among the last of their kind. I'm talking about E.G. Marshall in Superman II and Donald Pleasence in Escape from New York. There be some damn fine Genero-Presidents.

First, let's understand and spread the love for E.G. Marshall as President Bad Wig in Superman II. Three years before, Marshall had played fake Senator Joseph Paine in Billy Jack Goes to Washington, a clear reference to Claude Rains' fake Senator of the same name in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But now it was 1980 and Marshall had graduated from fake Senator (yawn - who cares) to GP (woohoo - G-P! G-P! G-P!). Why is his GP so good? Because it is the model of GP simplicity given gravity by actually casting a respected actor in the role. And the wig? I'm thinking the producers accurately predicted that Ronald Reagan would take the presidency at the time they were making the movie and decided to put a Reagan wig on poor old E.G. Marshall. And man did he look ridiculous! But let me just say this: Thank God they did it! That wig completes the character in a way a bald, graying E.G. Marshall never could have done on his own, despite all of his talents. That wig, I mean really, I don't know what to say: it's the end-all be-all. And Marshall plays President Bad Wig as if he were playing O'Neil on the Great White Way, full of solemnity and stoicism, which makes it just that much better. And - AND - he gets to do the classic all-time GP Sci-Fi shtick: Surrender the United States to a bunch of aliens. You can kiss that re-election bid goodbye:

President Bad Wig: "My opponent, Senator AbScam, has ruined his state's economy, been caught red-handed in at least three bribery stings and eliminated all public works from his state in a bid to line his pockets."

Senator AbScam: "President Bad Wig surrendered our nation to two guys and a chick from outer space in two seconds flat."

Winner: Senator AbScam.

But as good as Marshall is, to quote Yoda (and I don't do that often so mark this day on your calendar) "there is another." So now let us praise famous men, or at least one: Donald Pleasence as the President in Escape From New York. Now this is a GP! He's got the whole range going on here. He's conniving and crafty (like a real politician), self-concerned, a little on the cowardly side when he needs to be and finally, when he's all safe and secure, goes Tony Montana on the Duke of New York mocking him as he shoots him to ribbons: "You're the Duke of New York. You're A-Number One. A-NUMBER ONE!!!!!!!"

My only beef here is at the end. He's got to deliver this speech that's going to save the world or something (it's not made very clear) and Snake Plissken's busting his balls and getting all whiny about his treatment after saving him. Look Snake, I understand, I really do, but he's the President and now that he's safe and secure he needs to concentrate on saving the world with that mix-tape he got from the United Nations discount bin so can you take your whiny, "woe is me" shit and shut the hell up please? The attempt to make President Montana look ungrateful here is transparent and doesn't fly in my house. Donald Pleasence is the President of the United States in my book. He cowers when he has to to stay alive because he knows the country needs him. And once his survival is assured he can tear a man to shreds with an M-16 and five minutes later deliver a calm and composed speech complete with a Maxell-60-Gold prepped to save the world. That's a guy who understands responsibility to the greater good. That's a guy who wouldn't switch out tapes on somebody cause he felt all dejected and sad. And when I see Plissken walking away tearing up that tape I think, "Screw you cry-baby, you couldn't wipe this President's ass if you were white and linty and wrapped around a cardboard cylinder."

Donald Pleasence is the Genero-President of the United States! He's A-Number One! A-NUMBER ONE!!! Hail to the Chief!