Asimov, Lovecraft, & promiscuous continuities

HERE’S A piece of news for you: Ridley Scott’s Prometheus 2, formerly known as Paradise Lost, Prometheus: Paradise Lost, & Alien: Paradise Lost, is now called Alien: Covenant, until a new title for it rolls around. Pfft, who cares? Prometheus was rubbish, & the whole world is much more excited for the same-franchise, rival-movie, Neill Blomkamp’s maybe-one-day-to-see-release Alien 5. And if we have to see Ridley Scott revisiting a gritty early sci-fi classic, aren’t we all way more excited for the Blade Runner sidequel? Yeah? Kind of? Yeah.

You know, in another world, both movies would be the same thing. Scott stopped just short of including explicit reference to Blade Runner‘s Tyrell Corporation in Prometheus. Given the visual & thematic similarities of Alien & Blade Runner, it only makes sense to bind them together as sisters in continuity. But, it could be argued, it doesn’t even require a Prometheus to do that. The recent videogame Aliens: Colonial Marines had absolutely no qualms about including a cheeky nod to Blade Runner. OK, given it also includes nods to Prometheus & Spaceballs, it may not be that significant, especially since Colonial Marines has trouble even fitting itself into the franchise. But the more authentic Alien: Isolation also enjoys a good Blade Runner nod.

& then, of course, there’s the matter of Soldier. Released in 1998 & forgotten shortly thereafter, the film was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson & written by David Webb Peoples, also credited for Blade Runner. Sharing many elements of continuity with Blade Runner, & incorporating several references to other Philip K. Dick works (Blade Runner was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Peoples admitted to seeing it as something of a sidequel to Blade Runner. But freeze-frame enthusiasts would also have determined that it shares a continuity with Aliens, thanks to a reference to Kurt Russell’s character Sgt. Todd 3465 having received training with the M41A Pulse Rifle & the USCM Smartgun. Those even fonder of freeze-framing may also have discerned the wreckage of Event Horizon‘s Lewis & Clark alongside a wrecked Blade Runner spinner. It seems appropriate, given that Event Horizon, also directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, so effectively aped the look & the mood of the Alien series that it was more satisfying than the same year’s Alien: Resurrection. About the only property it seemed to resemble even more closely than Alien was the videogame franchise Doom: in Doom, an experimental teleporter on Mars accidentally opens a portal to Hell; in Event Horizon, an experimental FTL engine in space accidentally opens a portal to Hell. Doom, the most influential first-person shooter game in history, had begun life as an Aliens licensee, before legal issues required a quick reskin & change in backstory. & what other weapon should Todd have been trained in the use of? The DOOM MKIV BFG! Perhaps we shouldn’t take all of this too seriously: the really really freeze-frame-savvy would also have spotted references in Soldier to Executive Decision (in which Kurt Russell starred as Dr. David Grant), Escape From New York & Escape From L.A. (in which Kurt Russell starred as Snake Plissken), Stargate (in which Kurt Russell starred as Colonel Jonathan O’Neil, & which also deals with aliens contacted via experimental portal technology), Tango & Cash (in which Kurt Russell starred as Lieutenant Gabriel Cash), The Thing (in which Kurt Russell starred as R. J. MacReady, & which owes its structure, mood, & nightmarishly-designed alien villain to Alien), Captain Ron (in which Kurt Russell starred as Captain Ron), Backdraft (in which Kurt Russell starred as both Captain Dennis McCaffrey & his son, Lieutenant Stephen “Bull” McCaffrey), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (& thus indirectly every other iteration of Star Trek, too), & the Dexter Riley trilogy: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, & The Strongest Man in the World (which starred Kurt Russell as Dexter Riley, & whose use of Medfield College, a fictional university setting shared with The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, & Flubber, recalled the use of fictional Miskatonic University in the works of Lovecraft). Soldier was clearly having its fun, & “Tannhauser Gate” has become almost an obligatory reference for science-fiction works.

But, at the same time, there might be something to this. Science-fiction giants of the late-twentieth century, Alien & Blade Runner both established handy ready-made references that later films could easily piggyback on, aiming perhaps to gain a bit of easy credibility or, less cynically, just to make audiences smile. Both were accepted into a wider canon of what we might call “promiscuous continuities”: fictional shared continuities which were a) open to new entries, b) proved to be attractive continuities for other writers, & c) could have continuity easily established with a throwaway line or references. Most of these pre-established promiscuous continuities came from pulp literature, in which originality is uncommon, but so is litigation. Prominent promiscuous continuities include: the Cthulhu Mythos, a cosmic horror continuity established by H.P. Lovecraft & others; the robot stories of Isaac Asimov, whose Three Laws of Robotics are sufficiently simple & sensible to be adopted whole by numerous other writers; & the world of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, in which mech armour is deployed against alien “bugs” (probably shares DNA with the aforementioned Doom: just as Aliens FPS games look like Doom ripoffs; just as the Doom movie, when it finally appeared, looked like a ripoff of Aliens, Event Horizon, or even Resident Evil, itself a videogame-to-film adaptation by Paul W. S. Anderson; just so, the eventual Starship Troopers movie owed a fair debt to the superior Aliens).

Academics would call this wealth of pre-established suggestive connections intertextuality, though the key difference is that, where intertextuality requires only that another work is being referenced, these are cases of it being invoked, i.e. the use of elements from that work are to establish that both take place within the same wider narrative universe. Connections to these promiscuous continuities are often so casually established that it’s easy to miss &, like invoking magic with spells, there are usually certain preferred phrases with which to do it. For Blade Runner, you just have to say “Tannhauser Gate”. For Asimov, it’s “Three Laws”, while for Lovecraft it might be Miskatonic University, the Necromonicon, or Cthulhu. Alien is often referenced via the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, while the Terminator films, sharing much cast & crew with the Alien series, are invoked in Aliens with Cyberdyne Systems.

Aliens just couldn’t stop namedropping, so it only made sense when a Freeze-Frame Bonus gag in Predator 2 led to a full-fledged crossover film directed by Paul W. “him again!” S. Anderson. In the comics world, things were taken even further with an Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator comic. Aliens came out in a more innocent time, & writer-director James Cameron was probably only aiming for window-dressing in hitting the big promiscuous continuities: the android Bishop, we are told, is Three Laws Compliant, while Starship Troopers, required reading for the actors, was invoked in one throwaway “bug hunt” line. Meanwhile the first Alien film, without ever directly referencing Lovecraft, has also been suggested to do a better job recreating the mood & themes of his works than most official adaptations, & between it & Prometheus, Lovecraft’s celebrated At the Mountains of Madness has pretty much been covered.

If one has to go to Alien for their Lovecraft fix rather than to other, more official sources, this is likely because most official Lovecraft film adaptations were by either Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna or both, whose successful Re-Animator set a comedic tone influenced by The Evil Dead & Ghostbusters, both of which suggested themselves as unofficial Lovecraft films. Lovecraft’s sphere of influence, however, extended beyond the cinema; it was a sufficiently promiscuous continuity for Doctor Who, who found himself battling Lovecraftian Old Ones several times in the novels; more officially, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos & Robert E. Howard’s Hyperboria (home of Conan the Barbarian & other, less successful, creations) were mutually dependent. Conan the Barbarian even became a part of Marvel Comics continuity, which also included G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Trek, & another promiscuous continuity of the cinema: Godzilla.

James Bond, Mission: Impossible, & the nonsense of spycraft

FIRSTLY, sorry for being away for so long. I’ve been busy moving city & also I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about film over on mrrumsey.com.

Secondly, in case no-one’s noticed, Spectre, the 24th – or fourth, in-continuity – Bond film, comes out in just over a month, & it’s incredibly exciting. Since rebooting the franchise with 2006’s Casino Royale, the producers have crafted an intricate & continuity-heavy universe that manages to be just credible enough to work without going full Man of Steel & sucking all the vitality from its source material.

This is in stark contrast to Bond‘s rival, Mission: Impossible. Their latest, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, released earlier this year, delivers all the spy action thrills (& leans heavily on the rebooted Bonds for inspiration; see “Recycled Script” here) in a big, preposterous package. Among its other borrowings, it takes from the new Bonds a slight inclination towards the political thriller, a sense that, rather than being a series of cool standalones like the television programme on which it is based, the film series now takes place in a real world, an organic world in which actions have consequences & overweight CIA men get stuffy at you when, despite saving the world, you can’t prevent a deactivated missile clipping a building slightly. Since Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was probably the coolest action film ever made, I’m sure fans were very happy to see it granted a continuing influence on the plot of this new, slightly more action-oriented movie. But in copping a move from Bond once again, the M:I series sink further into their own nonsensicality.

The five movies in the series each have a different director &, consequently, a totally different feel: Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was a techno-thriller not too far removed from the TV version; John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was an action film showcasing its director’s obsessions (slow-motion wirework, flocks of doves, dual handguns with infinite ammo, villains as near-identical Shadow Archetypes); JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III benefitted from his fannish penchant for ditching a series’ silliness while retaining its cool; the best, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol won much praise for its visual “pop” & fast-paced humour, both elements found in the director’s previous animated work. Rogue Nation, by The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, is the first without an agenda of its own. Rather, it tries to be a continuation of Ghost Protocol while also rehabilitating past entries in the series. But continuity isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a big issue here. The series, like the Alien films (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & apparently Neill Blomkamp), has benefitted rather than suffered from its tendency to be remodelled by auteurs. If you can ignore your hang-ups, you’re better off seeing each film as a new artist’s interpretation of the material, rather than a continuation of what’s gone before. It’s certainly easier than believing the bombastic M:I II is something that actually happened in the past of the characters in the later films. They probably just try not to talk about it too much.

And, of course, so few film series bother going all the way with continuity. The way science-fiction miracle tech habitually shows up in superspy movies, by your third or so installment you’d be living in an alternate timeline. Take the facemasks of Mission: Impossible; the first scene of the first film screws everything with the first time one of the highly realistic gadgets is removed. While being worn, their wearers are indistinguishable from the real deal (the third film gets hilarious, with fit Tom Cruise becoming portly Philip Seymour Hoffman simply by wearing a mask). Fine, that makes no sense but it’s part of the series’ trademark superscience. The silliness comes in during later films. In every scene – & each movie has at least one – in which a character is exposed as an impersonator, someone will grab the lower left corner of their face & pull, easily removing the mask to reveal Tom Cruise or someone else underneath it. Since the masks are so easily removeable once the characters are aware of them in-universe, why isn’t giving someone’s cheeks a good old pinching part of every standard security procedure in the world? Partly it’s to make the plots work, partly it’s to avoid looking silly, & partly it’s the fact that sequels, in general, tend not to be set in the world prior movies have established; rather, they’re generally about those established fictional characters living in our world, not their own. Example: going by GoldenEye, the Cold War apparently ended the same way in Bond’s world as our Cold War did. But in an alternate universe in which the UK is the most hypercompetent power in the world, the Soviet Union should have been militarily & economically outclassed much, much ealier.

Bond gets even sillier than M:I does with facemasks, too: in You Only Live Twice, Bond undergoes a surgical procedure to appear (unconvincingly) Japanese; in Die Another Day, a Korean villain goes through a more painful reverse version of that treatment, having his DNA replaced (???) in order to impersonate a Caucasian businessman; in Thunderball, a SPECTRE-affiliated villain has apparently spent two years’ worth of plastic surgery & acting lessons in order to become the double of a UN pilot; in Diamonds Are Forever, Ernst Stavro Blofeld undergoes plastic surgery in order to hide out in disguise as reclusive millionaire Willard White (his earlier change from Donald Pleasence into the equally bald but much taller Telly Savalas goes unremarked on). What idiots all those people were! From Russia with Love, an earlier film, opens with “James Bond” dying. Except…it’s a training exercise for villain Red Grant, & the deceased was wearing a facemask! If 100% convincing facemasks exist in this universe – & are commonplace enough to be thrown away on a training exercise in which, verisimilitude aside, they really don’t add much – why aren’t they put to use on all those later occasions? The only reason is that the old Bonds really weren’t a series, just a series of impressions, with certain archetypical features (disfigured villains, shark pits, ski sequences, fake-out deaths for Bond) repeated in slightly different order with little continuity. Mission: Impossible was even worse for this, repeating not only its own tropes (infiltration via aerial descent in four of its entries; the IMF discredited in four of its entries; the aforementioned facemask reveal in all five of them) but also square-pegging Bond tropes such as the constantly shifting love interests – Bond’s a bastard who we expect to continually ditch women, but Ethan is a thoroughly decent sort it’s hard to imagine abandoning so many loves of his life so abruptly*.

But continuity isn’t a bad thing. You can get too much of it, certainly – see the mess Doctor Who periodically becomes before a nice soft-reboot (1970, 2005, 2010) – but if you can manage to stay on top of it, your fun little movies become all the more meaningful & worth returning to. Mind you, it took Bond a complete reboot before the producers could keep their continuity straight, & even now it continually threatens to spin out of control. When it was never there in the first place, it might not be best to force it.

*Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher’s thoroughly decent Batman has the same problem, with a new love interest in each; as does, funnily enough, thoroughly decent Daniel-San in his three Karate Kid movies. His lowest moment is convincing the lovely Kumiko to leave her tiny Okinawa fishing village for America, then dropping her, broke & alone in a strange country before the third film begins.