Movie Muser

The BFI has been busy once more restoring a piece of cult cinema from Britain’s past, this time 1961’s slice of sci-fi, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, from Quatermass director Val Guest. Like the best of science fiction from that era, it’s a movie that’s not just about made-up nonsense, but takes on things such as the changes in sexual politics and most particularly fear of the nuclear bomb.

Like everyone else, Daily Express journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) can’t help but notice that strange things are happening with the weather, such as an unexpected solar eclipse and weird, dense fog blanketing London. After getting off to a rocky start with civil servant Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), they embark on a affair, and thanks to her Stenning gets a tip that the weather isn’t just an anomaly. The US and Russia simultaneously exploding nuclear bombs has knocked the planet off its axis and may also have sent it out of orbit and getting ever closer to the sun.

For those raised on a diet of big, flashy CGI spectacles, The Day The Earth Caught Fire will seem a very strange film. After all, it doesn’t even follow the people on the ground trying to stop the Earth from falling into the Sun, it’s a movie about the journalists who find out it’s happening, and who spend much of the film listening to radio and TV addresses from the people who are directly involved.

Nowadays it seems an odd strategy but it’s a surprisingly effective one, with the journalists being a great storytelling device who are presented as essentially normal people able to hold the authorities to account. Indeed it’s interesting that back then journalism could be presented as the paragon of virtue while the government is intrinsically untrustworthy and hideously paternalistic. It’s perhaps not surprising that Val Guest would present journalism this way as that was his background, but it’s certainly true that the public’s trust in newsmen has dropped massively in the past 50 years.

Instead of the race to save the world, the movie is more interested in things such as the danger of atomic weaponry and the government’s disdain for the public, who in the film’s world view the populous as an annoyance who are there to be patronised and who should just shut up and have nothing to say about whatever the self-proclaimed masters of the universe wish to do.

It’s also interestingly on the cusp of a change in sexual dynamics. Stenning is a rather old-fashioned misogynist pig, who’s divorced and having difficulty seeing his son (which is presented as intrinsically being the mother’s fault). However there’s also Jeannie, a woman with her own opinions and ideas, and has no wish to be subservient to men. While she works in the steno pool, it’s clear that’s solely because back then she wouldn’t have been allowed to rise higher up the ranks. She’s also sexually liberated in a way which, unlike many other films of the era, isn’t presented as her being a harlot or temptress. It’s an odd mix of being very forward thinking and oddly backwards, but it’s very thought provoking.

The Day The Earth Caught Fire is also quite unusual for directly tackling nuclear weapons in sci-fi and not hiding the theme as a 50ft spider, or a mysterious glowing suitcase. Much 50s sci-fi was infused with fear of the atom bomb, but it rarely came out and said it, or directly criticised the use of them. However The Day The Earth Caught Fire looks it in the face (even if the idea the bombs would knock the Earth out of orbit is preposterous), particularly the arrogance of governments possessing and testing them despite the danger they know they represent, as well as the normal man of street who has to live with a threat that has nothing directly to do with them.

It’s a surprisingly entertaining film and thanks to the restoration it looks great on Blu-ray, including the famed yellow-tinted sections at the beginning and end. There are also some truly excellent special features, including a great new retrospective making of documentary full of fascinating insights. There are also some really good vintage documentaries, such as one about an atom bomb test, as well as a civil defence film about what to do in the event of a nuclear blast. The latter is brilliantly British and stiff upper lip about the whole thing, being more interested in the science and treating the whole thing as a terrible nuisance than the potential end of civilisation as we know that it could have been.

One thing I would take a slight issue with is the fact the BFI has included a quote from the Daily Express on the cover. As the movie is about a Daily Express journalist and largely set in the newspaper’s offices, any quote they give may be a little bit biased.

Overall Verdict: A great new release for this cult classic slice of British sci-fi, which still resonates over 50 years on, especially in the light of climate change.

Special Features:
‘Hot Off the Press: Revisiting the Day the Earth Caught Fire’ Documentary
Audio commentary with Val Guest and Ted Newsom
An Interview with Leo McKern
The Day the Earth Caught Fire: An Audio Appreciation by Graeme Hobbs
Original trailer, TV spots and radio spots
Stills and Collections Gallery
Three nuclear films from the BFI National Archive: Operation Hurricane (Ronald Stark, 1952, 33 mins); The H-bomb (David Villiers, 1956, 22 mins); The Hole in the Ground (David Cobham, 1962, 30 mins)
Think Bike road safety film with actor Edward Judd
Illustrated booklet
The Guardian Lecture: Val Guest and his wife, actress Yolande Dolan are interviewed by David Meeker

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

The makers of Earth To Echo certainly seem to like 80s family films, as the movie mixes bits of the likes of ET, Stand By Me and The Goonies with the more modern found footage genre.

Alex, Tuck and Munch are best friends living in a community that’s being forced to move due to a new construction project. It’s their last week together, which takes an unexpected turn after they realise strange electromagnetic anomalies are happening. When they decide to investigate they come across a small, damaged, semi-robotic alien, who needs help to rebuild his spaceship so that he can get home.

Found footage films are dime a dozen nowadays, but there have been relatively few designed for a younger audience. As a result Earth To Echo could have been a bit of a treat, but unfortunately it works better in theory than in practice.

Even if you can look past the usual found footage flaws of it being illogical that absolutely everything is filmed, not enough care has been taken with the story with the result that it’s unevenly paced and while there is some charm and magic, it comes in fits and starts. Indeed it’s all a bit of a shame, as there’s masses of potential here and there are sections that do a great job of capturing the spirit and inspirational tone that family films in the 80s were so good at.

However they’re mixed with bits that are either dull or which don’t really fit with the rest of the film. Likewise the decision to allow the kids room to improvise may help sell the found footage angle but it also tends to slow things down and sometimes seem a bit amateurish. Likewise while there’s definitely effort been put in trying to find an emotional core to the story of the three friends and the alien, it’s not sold all that well.

Overall Verdict: There are some great moments, including a truck that disintegrating and reintegrating and the end is pretty cool too, but while it’s nice to have a homage to 80s family flicks, even in found footage form, this one could have been a lot better.

Special Features:
FRIENDS NO MATTER HOW FAR
CREATING THE TRUCK SCENE
CASTING THE CHARACTERS
WE MADE THAT!: THE MAKING OF EARTH TO ECHO
DELETED SCENES

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Reviewing Transformers: Age Of Extinction seems slightly pointless. It has an abysmal 18% rating on RottenTomatoes, with only 32 out of 178 that collated reviews saying it’s a decent movie. Despite that it’s currently the highest grossing movie of 2014 worldwide with over $1 billion in the bank (largely thanks to a gargantuan gross in China). So whether anyone says it’s good or bad seems a little irrelevant.

But just for the record, it’s not a good movie.

It’s all change on the human front this time around, with quite a few new bots too. It’s several years after Dark of The Moon’s battle in Chicago, and the world is aware of the presence of the Transformers. While everyone is told to report anything they think may be alien activity, the US government is still working with the Autobots. At least most of it is, as parts of the CIA, led by Kelsey Grammer’s Joshua Joyce, want to rid the entire planet of all alien activity, seeing even Optimus Prime as a threat.

To do that they’ve teamed up with another extra-terrestrial entity – which is neither Autobot nor Decepticon – a Transformer bounty hunter called Lockdown, who’s more than happy to kill any Autobots he can find, as long as he can take Optimus Prime alive. As well killing Transformers, Joyce also has another plan to hopefully ensure the human race can take on any alien threat.

Mark Wahlberg plays amateur inventor Cade Yeager, who buys a beat up old truck to use for parts. It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to discover the truck is actually Optimus Prime, who’s severely injured after an attack by the CIA. Optimus teams up with Cade, his daughter Tess (Nicola Peltz) and her boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor), along with several of the Autobots, to find out what is going on and to stop it – a journey that takes them back to Chicago to a company looking to exploit Transformer technology, and then onto China for a big, climactic showdown.

It’s easy to knock director Michael Bay for his love of everything loud and noisy, as well as the fact his movies often seem more about explosions and flinging cars around than telling a story. However as long as you give him a decent script to work from, he’s not too bad at working that around the 30,000 explosions nearly all his movies have to have. Unfortunately, as with Revenge Of The Fallen, he doesn’t have that here.

That’s not totally screenwriter Ehren Kruger’s fault, as it’s difficult to escape the feeling that he was hamstrung by a checklist of things the movie had to contain – dinobots, new Autobots, the presence of Megatron, and most especially taking the movie to China so they could suck up the money from that growing market – and then it was his job to find some way to turn it into a coherent script.

Unfortunately he wasn’t able to do that, resulting in a movie that has some good action scenes and explosions – and some absolutely amazing special effects – but nearly everything inbetween feels pretty random and as if it’s very slowly connecting the dots that will ensure Hasbro has plenty of new toys to bring out, Michael Bay can blow a lot of stuff up, and the studio can make a lot of money in China (even if they can’t find a proper, logical reason why the film suddenly needs to jump halfway around the world).

And boy does it slowly connect those dots. The film has about 90 minutes of story stretched out over 165 minutes, and a lot of the story it does have feels slightly unnecessary and irrelevant. That’s particular noticeable with the dinobots, who could have been removed from the movie without changing anything, but then there wouldn’t be the opportunity for tie-in toys. It’s also a major issue in the early stages, as the film takes an awful long time to get going, largely because while its attempts to introduce us to the new human characters are admirable, it doesn’t realise that these are rather tedious people and no matter how much time we spend getting to know them they’re still pretty annoying.

I had initially thought Michael Bay’s hideous sexism might have taken a break, but it soon kicks into high gear, including a rather creepily distasteful scene all about why 20-year-old Shane is allowed to have sex with the underage Tess due to a specific Texas law. It’s utterly unnecessary and seems to be there solely so that men can have an excuse why they can perve with impunity over a character who’s supposed to only be 17-years-old.

With the Star Trek movies they used to say only the even ones were any good. Perhaps with Transformers it’ll be the odd ones, as while the first and third were okay, the second and this one are pretty dire. Well, if you really don’t care about story, characters or the vaguest sense of logic, and just like action, effects and explosions, you’ll think it’s brilliant, but if you want anything else you’re out of luck.

The film does undoubtedly look good on Blu-ray, although there is more artefacting that you might expect at certain moment. The two-disc Blu-ray also comes with a large array of special features (around three hours worth), which really give you an appreciation for just how good the special effects and stunt work is. It’s just a shame about the rest of the film.

Overall Verdict: The action and effects are undoubtedly top notch, but the story and script are mainly about checking commercially minded boxes, even if they make the film seem dumber and more random than it needed to be.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac