I’ve always avoided discussions about genre deaths, but I recently begun to wonder about the position of the science-fiction genre in current cinema, and even gotten to the point of drawing comparisons to the now unpopular western genre. Not for the same reasons – quite the opposite – but because the aesthetics of it has been so saturated with space operas and technophilia entertainment, as this summer is evidence, yet to find the traditional ideological impulses of the genre one has to dig deep through the mud every year to find one or two entries. The genre might look like it is everywhere, but it isn’t. Then, the debut of Duncan Jones with his sci-fi film, MOON, is found; a movie of ideological inclinations and mediative pictures that works against the populist, superficial trends from today’s technophilia films and returns to the source.

In honor of the word “science” in science-fiction, the film introduces us (through horribly distracting credits) how Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee contracted by the company Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar soil for much-needed power, which is responsible for 70% of the energy back on Earth at the film’s time. He is stationed for three years at the Sarang lunar base with only a robot named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company. The film then follows the introduction with images of how Sam exercises, does inspection around the Moon, and general routine work, ending with him hearing about his wife and daughter, his own source of power. Jones presents to us the human energy of friendship and companionship, with Sam driven primarily by the motivation of the reward where he will be a reunited with his wife and daughter, like a person who wonders at the universe and hopes for religious companionship at the end of his life, and secondarily with the presence and conversations of GERTY to mantain sanity. It is a narrative of pictures crafted with isolation and monotony, but the reactions and interaction of the wife’s messages and the robotic conversations keep Sam (and us) alive with interest. Indeed, the idea of energy translates from the plot of Earth’s power to the very characterization of Sam’s motivation, as everything and everyone needs to run under a source of power and inspiration.

Jones further studies this human importance of archetypal inspirations with contemplations of isolation, unplugging the source of energy that is Sam’s family when the film doubts their, and Sam’s own, existance. During a routine rover excursion to extract helium from a harvesting machine, he sees a girl standing on the lunar surface. Distracted, he crashes the rover into the harvester. Sam awakens in the infirmary and GERTY tells him that he is recovering from injuries sustained in an accident. He goes to the harvester again, where he finds a crew member barely alive in the crashed rover: himself.

In a genre and a setting that usually tends to contain discoveries of the new and unseen in space, the narrative from Duncan Jones begins as an active and engaging experience of uncovering – a series of searches around the Moon and Sam’s base – but eventually makes one face the possibility that what is to be found is simply one’s own mirror. It is a poignant observation about men’s realization of his irrelevancy, like a religious person’s recognition that the universe is godless, when his sense of purpose and promised companionship is questioned as imaginative. Thus while MOON is, indeed, a film focused on solitude, the more astute analysis is that it is further driven by the emotional imperative that is the hopeful expectative that someone or something does actually exists to serve us a sense of self-importance, but then confronts us to the question if there is, in fact, nothing.

The film’s presentation of this existential question and then its answers through Sam’s reactions is the defining characteristic, as the study of Rockwell’s faces become the crux. Jones deals in simplicities to capture the stillness of time, the emptiness of space and also Rockwell’s complex act in it, as it exceeds with a focus on cerebral qualities and the responses from Sam: his different personalities clashing and joining, and finally dealing with the truths that come in his distant space and deserted base. This is a pure human study. Although it would have benefited of being more innovative, since some of its devices often seem derived from rather than invented by, it nevertheless succeeds as a psychological, science-fiction thriller that puts into attention men’s own desire to have an important place in the universe.

The script by Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker might end in a rather simplistic exit – in too much of a neat resolution. But despire its various shortcomings, Jones and Parker use the genre’s source of power – i.e. the examination of intelligence and existential scientific questionings – to create a humanistic experience that moves the viewer with the existential emotions, themes and mediative images about a man’s survival in a dead space. It is good and hopeful to see that films like MOON still are able to survive as well in an almost scarce genre. Hopefully Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION follows through next year.

The year 2008 featured two films about revolutionaries in protest, with Steven Soderbergh’s CHE and Steve McQueen’s HUNGER, based on Che Guevara and Bobby Sands respectively. Both films were ambitious in their own right, taking historical figures and using their lives, not for conventional biopic storytelling and to question their places in history, but as pretexts about the experiences and ideals of their respective times. The films weren’t so much about why, but about the how; interpretations about the images and politics left to the viewer based on emotionalism as much as the idealism; as if to live them is to further understand them. Uli Edel’s DER BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX, a 2008 German film that retells the early years of the West German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF) at the time of the German student movement to the German Autumn (Deutscher Herbst) in 1977, doesn’t attempt to do what Soderbergh and McQueen did. Edel’s choices are sometimes superior, but other times painfully inferior.

The film starts exhilaratingly with a riot in 1968, where the Berlin police enforced unfairly a brutal measure of crowd control on students that were in a protest against the Shah of Persia. I could go into the political reasons or the facts of the event, but they wouldn’t be too unique. The riot is a veracious demonstration of inhuman behavior, where Edel’s film shows each hit, its sound and its blood with detail and realness, and the camera present inside the moment (one particular shot has the viewer looking directly into the water cannon), as if we were running for our own lives. The event is atrocious enough that it works as a pill of anger for the film’s emotion, in which we initially identify with the arguments in complain from eventual Red Army Faction co-founders, Ulrike Meinhof (Martiana Gedeck) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), against German fascism, and American imperialism.

The first 30-minutes of the films are hypnotic. Their verbal dissent afterwards seems so inconsequential in TV debates and house discussions that it almost motivates the viewer to root for some of the anarchistic remonstration that follows, which do not feel immoral, but instead cathartic against such unfairness; like the image of a man screaming around a fire that is of liberation as a rebuttal to past injustices. “We believe that speech without action is wrong,” says Gudrun at one point. She says it so convincingly and of such righteousness; her looks and those of her friends are attractive and gorgeous. It fools us to follow their misguided revolution. The film captures political emotions far better than Soderbergh’s and McQueen’s films in these 30-minutes, as it timely exchanges between political debates and expressive protests. It then expands further into a montage where historical figures such as Martin Luther King, Che Guevara and Bobby Kennedy are shown assassinated, with worldwide chaos displayed. It is the death of verbal protests and the creation and creativeness of anarchism.

These first 30-minutes are the paramount of the picture, bar none, but this is the film’s disgrace. Where films like HUNGER and CHE were consistent with their promises, enganging the viewer more with visual expresiveness than verbal sections, BAADER MEINHOF consistently struggles to find the tonal frequencies of visceral articulacy and political argumentation that made the opening act masterful. The rest wavers with far more vocalization and trades the protests for an odd sense of action-movie awareness through various violent montages that lack the emotional spirit from the first 30-minutes; the fact that it is accompanied by a score oddly reminiscent to those of the National Treasure films is another critical element that adds further generic qualities. It begins as once an accessible film and an intricate one – something that Soderbergh would benefit to become – but gradually becomes more shallowly convoluted, with verbal happenings and generic montages, in which case I’d prefer my Soderbergh Complex.

There’s a particular section in the second-half where it challenges the viewer to compare it with McQueen’s mediative and visceral film, when the Red Faction Army members are in prison and enter into their Hunger Strike and claustrophobic setting. It highlights the film’s fatal injuries: Because it becomes such a hurried narrative, and eventually an unfocused multifaceted one, it isn’t able to establish much of an atmosphere to feel these events in the second-half further than their swift political descriptions. But because it then aims to build momentum rather meditative impression, to compress its historical episodes in Scorsese-esque stylization, it demands a narrative that faces an element of unification. There is none. Truth is that it gradually feels more episodic than continuous, more uneven than linear, as it breaks into more groups (characters that we don’t care for or feel for), and more anesthetized than alive.

The performances are still excellent; mainly the ones of Gedeck, Bleibtreu and Wokalek, even if attention to them is gradually compromised as the film expands. When the Red Army Faction starts to dwindle, and the focus to them is fully regained, their reaction to their downfall while they’re in prison, their faces of desperation and exasperation, becomes invaluable. They are trapped in a world of violence, where violence is the only escape.

This is a film that works out of anger, thus its genesis of unfairness and unfaithfulness, like the hate for an un-loyal husband. But it ends as one of calmness, with faces of lamentation and no celebration. It masterfully starts with death and elegantly ends with death. But the middle part of the movie is the main problem, when it doesn’t know how to deal with anything.

Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER is a rather impressive feature that re-imagines the Iraq War sub-genre as a Western genre film, with celebrated cowboys dressed as admired soldiers, the Middle East cities used as Old West towns. Bigelow tries to reinvent this modern war film by flirting with the realism of the Iraq War and the Wild West mythologies, blurring the film’s identification between them in the intent to create a picture that contains both veracity and romanticism; the shake-cam filmmaking with the adrenaline situations of a ranger in the middle of the deserted town. No interests in politics, nor a moral righteousness about war. “War is a drug” is the film’s popular quote; it isn’t written as a political argument, but as an observation of a culture that celebrates violence.

The situations of THE HURT LOCKER are cinematic entertainment at its most effective state. After all, it is all about sensations. Like the videogames that the soldiers have fun with when out of the battlefield – and indeed, as the use of the miniature bomb-disarming robots, controlled by hand-sticks – the film thrives to create a pressor that satisfies the appetitive of adrenaline to the viewer, like the citizens who stand to watch the missions from the soldiers; the events are irresistible. Bigelow seems to think of war – especially this one, announced by a President who loves cowboys and mythology, and thrived on emotionality, not in rationality – as a manifestation of a culture that defines itself by feelings, whether it is the soldiers or the viewers. This was further explored by Sam Mendes’ JARHEAD before, and that famous narration about masturbation. Neither film is pro-war or anti-war; they are meta-war movies that are extensions of a culture’s sexualization of violence, with a playfulness about explosions that is descriptive of a time where heroism and escapism is found through the mythology of battle and bloodshed.

But if the film from Mendes made the audience distant to observe such emotionalism, Bigelow makes us share it, with little plot or dialogue, all in the name of the suspense and action. She focuses on the most minutiae details by creating pictures of isolation, like western films in their deserted shootouts, where a word or move can be lethal, where the progress of time becomes painful. The audience is thus made to question movement and identify with the characters in the frame through the tension – in other words, the ever-successful Hitchcockian formulas and rules. Of course, we celebrate such sensations. In each of the sequences in which a bomb is about to be diffused, James (Jeremy Renner) becomes the center of the world, in which possibilities are endless; a show with a crowd and a stage. Like his partners, we can’t help but to live the experience right along with him, as we wonder at the surroundings and the decisions we would make, and then at the decisions he makes – a sense that is heightned by the different POVs from bystanders and then from James; different perspectives, but all in the same place and moment. Mendes’ film looks at war’s mythology; Bigelow’s film lives it.

THE HURT LOCKER is still marred by a shaky-cam that eventually becomes wearisome, and in particular that Iraq bright radiance, invaded with American uniforms, that is now tiresome. Indeed, had this sub-genre not been saturated so much in recent years (through cinema and elsewhere), Bigelow’s film may have provoked a more enthusiastic reaction from me. Even with a narrative that locates exceptional images occasionally – such as the revelation of various hidden bombs in the street, which was used for the poster – the traditional palette and the general aesthetic of American soldiers in Iraq has inundated today’s films so much that Bigelow’s distinctiveness seems trapped in a setting that has been clichéd.

Nevertheless, Bigelow’s film is an admirable Iraq War entry; one that is free of overstatements, like in Brian De Palma’s REDACTED, and of usual Hollywood tropes, like Ridley Scott’s BODY OF LIES. Instead it captures something that is primitive about our contemporary times through its situations, which is quite simply, our masturbatory need of adrenaline and feelings. As James tells his little child about his pastime by the end of the film, how war stimulates and entertains him and his past childish things don’t, we can’t help to identify in a certain degree with him. Not as soldiers, but as viewers in search of escapism. THE HURT LOCKER is, like a video-game, like a brutal sport, or like movies about cowboys in shootouts, a pastime drived from guilty pleasures.

Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT and Zack Snyder’s WATCHMEN represent the peak of the superhero genre, and for the public the most resonant superhero works to date, even if they couldn’t be more dissimilar in styles. Their aesthetics are a contradiction of the other, with Snyder’s images working through a fashion that is colorful and outrageous, with numerous superhero costumes and engaged by considerable CGI; Nolan’s contains a tactile realism that is mostly naturalistic, where real stunts are preferred and costumes aren’t popular. Snyder’s filmmaking is also occupied by cultural music and slow-mo techniques, and Nolan’s is more distant and less vivid. Yet, their stylizations aside, in terms of subtext and thematic thesis, these two couldn’t have more similarities.

At the end of THE DARK KNIGHT, reminiscent of the 1953 western, SHANE, Batman (Christian Bale) leaves into nowhere with a kid calling him to come back, ever the believer of superheroes. But Bruce Wayne finds himself preoccupied with not just a kid that needs to believe in something inspirational, but an entire society. Throughout the film, he seems to have the concern of a parent, one that wants to move on in life, to leave his children to be independent and get a normal living for them as much as for himself, but isn’t able to. That Nolan’s film concludes with Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as the hero to believe in might be something of moral ambiguousness, but in subtext, it is further an exclamation point to the film’s thesis that this is a world dependent on belief in parental figures and overly relies on them. Bruce Wayne twists them, and attempts to rebound the responsabilities to a dead Dent, and thus ironically, to the people.

WATCHMEN delves more overly into this: Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) cites Alexander The Great as an important inspiration for his life’s work, and so is the entire comic-book by Alan Moore and the film by Snyder made of idolization and influential figures as well; to politicians such as Richard Nixon; to Gods such as Dr. Manhattan (Billy Cudrup); to parents such as Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino); and to superheroes such as Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie). In particular with Dr. Manhattan, everyone envisions him as an American Superman, which is emblematic of a culture that needs to adore a lead face. Like the title suggests, humanity needs to feel watched over, made of children who are parentless, who are fanatical and who thus must follow a superior person for guidence. Like Bruce Wayne, Veidt still tries to break such nature, also ironically shifting dependability to a false Dr. Manhattan, and thus, the world.

Both films are aware of their fanaticism and exploit it within their stories, with heroic characters that revere to other heroic characters, and we, fans of heroes, watching stories about fans of heroes. They contain a meta-fiction – in particular Moore’s comic-book – in which the superhero genre’s existence is explained as a manifestation of people’s need for idols (if the last American election isn’t evidence, and the fact that both candidates had to discuss why their favorite character was Batman, I don’t know what is). These entries seem to attempt to shatter such thing, as if they were the end of their genre; to deconstruct a format that relies on archetypes being autocratic and adored (through this, the parallels between superheroes and dictatorial men and religious beings come to flourish, as celebrated idols), into a society of fans finally becoming independent.

“I leave it entirely into your hands” is the final line in Moore’s comic-book and in Snyder’s film, and it is aimed to a kid that is a stereotypical fanboy. It resonates as a supplication (in Moore’s novel, at least) for a world to grow up – “to take responsibility,” as the newspaper editor tells him. In Nolan’s film, Bruce Wayne, too, leaves citizens to be responsible for their fate as he battles his nemesis in the movie’s climax, allowing them to save themselves. They seem to implore the end of the need for their existance; not so much celebrations of individuals, but a desertion of them and a plead for their collective followers, themes that Alan Moore has covered in other books, such as V FOR VENDETTA.

Both TDK and the literate/cinematic works of Watchmen attempt to bridge closer the viewer’s reality with the genre’s fantasy, and in different styles, on a zeitgeist resonance. But not so much to fulfill fantasies about superheroes fixing the problems and conflicts of the times, but to show the limits of escapist art from these characters, and in a perverse way, their shallowness; by the end of each narrative, the superheroes end as an abstraction, hitting a wall of reality in which they must accept their falsehood. “I can change almost anything,” Dr. Manhattan replies in regard to his superpowers, “but I cannot change human nature,” also accepting his irrelevance as one individual, perhaps as a mere comic-book character. Their worlds are saved, ultimately, with the defamation of archetypes, as people are made responsble for people; the images of their endings constructed as celebrations of citizens who do good by themselves. Batman and Dr. Manhattan leave into the unknown, and into different lights, their images broken in a reality in which “schoolboy heroics” ultimately are, as their eternal comic-book continuities, redundant.

Armando Iannucci’s IN THE LOOP is an immensely comical, incredibly quotable film whose hilarious moments and characters are bound to remain in your head like the images of big, fat rabbits dressed in human clothing on a fucking David Lynch film. Following the footsteps of past satires like Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE and Rob Reiner’s SPINAL TAP, which both went to become emblematical for their respective generations, Iannucci’s film is identifiable with this period’s technocracy, Rovian politics and half-thought rhetoric, where American and British politicians are at the mercy of their staff’s cellphones and the media’s coverage of their most diminutive words. In the climate of 21st-century politics and war times, it focuses on the chaos of postmodernism, and it is as laughable as it is serious.

Based on the director’s own BBC series, THE THICK OF IT, the film begins with a radio interview from the naïve cabinet minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), and a review of it from the series’ Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi – moving one of the best performances from TV to cinema’s best performance this year), who is hearing it on his office as the political vigilante that he is. It establishes without hesitation how Tucker, a London version of Karl Rove, is the brains behind the politics (“No, you do not say that!”), an almost omniscient figure (“I’m here, I’m there, I’m fucking everywhere”) that manipulates language by deleting or changing words in documents and media outlets, and also abuses it with full-time swearing and hilarious insults, which usually include movie references. Anyone familiar with Tucker and Armando Iannucci’s BBC series should know that verbal fights are part of the menu, and so are pitiful media interviews, political debates, secretive planning and any other situation that includes talking.

Thus, indeed, so much of IN THE LOOP is about the people’s language; mainly, the exploitation of it. Characters insult each other continuously; characters express anti-intellectual reasoning and incomprehensible sentences in Bush-like demeanor (“Toby, did you just say you had sex to stop the war?”); and texts from documents that contain objective cases are manipulated in the purpose to meet an official’s desire. The result is laughter and sadness, as the last scene provokes; an emotional recreation of all the press-conferences that we had with the past American administration, where the distinction between a comedy and a tragedy couldn’t be made. And If the film’s anti-war and pro-war plot is symbolic, it might be about the time where the death of long thoughts and argumentation happened, and then the birth of wars with brutal dogmatism in a obstructionist, childish culture.

The main plot of the film, after all, originates out of a single sentence: a one-liner by Simon Foster (“War is unforeseeable”) on his not-so-great radio interview, which springs a thousand different waves from political forces that manipulate him to repeat more one-liners or to simply silent him. Indeed, Foster is a bumper sticker, instead of someone that is allowed to make arguments. He attempts to present cases that are more complicated than a one-liner (even if it is with a Bush-Palin dialogue deficit), just as Liza (Anna Chlumsky) writes a paper that acknowledges both the positives and negatives of war. But they’re denied in an obstructionistic game of 21st-century politics. It is a wonderful satire of a political climate where labels are more important than arguments, whether they are true or not; of a reductive, misologist culture that cuts any long language for the most simplistic wordings or nickname (“PWIP PIP? Oh God, it already has an acronym”), and where an image, a single statement or one fact is enough to elevate or bring down a person, as it happens to the characters throughout.

Of course, for a film that is so much about one-liners, it is only appropriate that it is so quotable, which is why it seems to have earned a cult status already. Apart from the fact that it is smart, it is also a deliciously witty script, full of references that will make cinephiles more than happy and giggle-ish. Although, for the sake of fairness, it is also elevated by the performances as well. Mainly, every line and delivery from Peter Capaldi is pure gold, as the film gains a great attractiveness when he’s present and loses some when he’s not, though it is only natural considering the powerhouse of a character that Tucker is. The rest of the supporting cast still find eventual moments of brilliance – and that Iannucci leaves them a space that is loose, and follows an editing that is swift, should earn admiration in an effort to gain a mood of unpredictable reality in a setting whose presentation always is classical and refined. As simple as the filmmaking may be, part of the praise for a director lays in his creative choices, and Iannucci makes the right ones. The film has enough memorable scenes to justify the cult status that it is receiving, though it should definitely earn more than that.

Filmmakers have been attempting to create the definitive film about the last decade’s politics, usually through Iraq War conflicts or by allegorizing with past historical events, so Armando Iannucci’s IN THE LOOP – a political British comedy – becoming emblematical of the political American culture from the last decade is quite unorthodox. But so it has successfully delivered something akin to Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE for this generation’s Rovian politics. Ironic that a film which cites popular, classic art for real-life repeatedly (“This isn’t a fucking Jane Austen novel”) ends up doing exactly the same, now nicknaming every political advisor that exists now-a-days as Malcolm Tucker. In time, this might be the classic that others will cite.