Rhapsodies

This week I started to skim the bottom of my list of science fiction films I hadn’t seen yet. I ended up watching a tiny sub-genre that I will choose to refer to as naval time travel… that is to say, time travel that somehow involves the navy or a naval vessel.

The first film on my list, The Final Countdown by Don Taylor starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, James Farentino, Katharine Ross and Charles Durning, tells how the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is caught in a time vortex in the middle of a training exercise. They find themselves in 1941 just a day before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

This leads them trying to figure out what to do next. Do they save the day by preventing the attack, (for that matter use their superior technology to win World War II all by themselves.) Or do they do nothing and preserve history as they know it. This is made all the more difficult when they mistakenly rescue a senator and his secretary who according to history had disappeared.

This film was… okay. It looks really cool since it had the full cooperation of the US Navy and is filmed on the actual Nimitz. For the most part, I liked it best when it was a military procedural, with professionals reacting to really weird stuff professionally. The science fiction itself was kind of weak. It really couldn’t seem to decide whether history could be changed or not.

The next film on my list was The Philadelphia Experiment. I have to confess that I was going to get the 1982 film by that name. I found out when I started playing it, I had picked up turned out to be a 2012  remake made for television on SyFy.

It tells the story of a shady corporation with military connections. developing a cloaking field. In one of their experiments, they somehow bring a military destroyer, USS Eldridge, which according to urban legend was part of a similar experiment, into the present.

The Eldridge starts to teleport all over the world with the effect of its presence causing mass destruction. It’s last surviving crewman is trying to track it down and stop it. While being chased by the agents of the corporation who are trying to cover the whole thing up.

Regrettably, this movie was about what you’d expect from a film that showed on SyFy. It was heavy-handed with a by the numbers hubristic corporation along with lots of other stale cliches.

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I’d recently watched Takashi Miike‘s adaptation of Blade of the Immortal, a film I enjoyed very much. A friend of mine, who is an even bigger fan of Miike’s work than I am, said this was his favorite Miike film since 13 Assassins, a film I’d heard about in passing. At about the same time, I’d heard it was a remake of an earlier film… Which led to the perfect opportunity to do another Old vs New.

Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film, !3 Assassins tells the story of a high ranking lord who’s decedent behavior has become so terrible, he’s considered a threat to the status quo and the code of bushido. What’s worse is he’s the Shogun’s younger half-brother and is thus untouchable. In desperation, a group of officials assigns a team of assassins to go on a suicide mission to kill the Lord.

The film starts slowly with the first hour consisting of giving us all the reasons for why this assassination must take place and introducing us to the assassins. It is only in the second hour where the pace picks up, and oh boy does it pick up, culminating in the lord and his entourage of Samurai are led into a carefully modified village that has been turned into a death trap of a maze hampering the Lord’s superior numbers and giving the assassins a fighting chance.

And what a fight it is. It takes up nearly forty minutes of the film and has you sitting on your hands all the way through.

All in all, this is a fantastic film that makes complete deconstruction of bushido, showing the extremes of what the samurai do in the name of drama. From the assassins quest to kill the evil lord to a noble retainer sticking to his principals by serving the evil lord.

For the first few minutes, Miike’s 2010 version seems like a shot for shot remake but it quickly builds from the original scenes in the original movie and expanding on them. A few things are changed. For one thing, the Assassins’ target is changed from a corrupt but weak rapist to a completed monster, who after the raping a woman, kills her husband. Later we see him using a family for target practice. One wonders why the Shogun didn’t arrange a convenient accident way earlier.

Also, the film spends more time introducing us to the assassins, their plan, and their race to get to their destination before the Lord’s entourage does. It’s all very pretty benefiting greatly from a much far larger budget than the original film.

But at the same time, I think this is a problem. The final fight suffers badly from the rule of cool. Make no mistake, it is very cool but the original film made a big deal about the fight being a desperate game of cat and mouse where the heroes have to use every dirty trick in order to survive long enough to complete their mission. Everything is dependent on taking full advantage of getting the larger numbers stuck in alleyways. If one of the heroes get outnumbered they’re dead.

In Miike’s version, they pretty much throw away this tiny advantage after ten minutes and jump down to fight the enemies superior numbers, where they have the upper hand. Sure, it’s still badass but it’s just not the same.