The Amazing Movie Show
Reviews, history, and background on Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy Films, and related media.

2000 Overview: Part 3. Theatrical Sci-Fi Movies



In one of those occasional coincidences/clashes of ego that crop up in Hollywood from time to time, the year 2000 saw two big-budget Mars movies, which together set the cause of serious cinema space exploration back a decade. First out was Brian de Palma's Mission to Mars, which aims for 2001/Abyss-style awe, but falters with some dodgy set-pieces and terminally dull chat between otherwise excellent actors Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Connie Nielson and Don Cheadle (Armin Mueller-Stahl also appears, uncredited). The script by Jim and John Thomas (Predator) and Graham Yost (Speed) contains a nice concept involving the human genome as a key to the Martian's secret, but this is one of the weaker entries in De Palma's canon and followed the equally dire Snake Eyes (1998).
Despite its short-comings and perhaps propelled by interest in the Mars Rover, Sojourner, which briefly transmitted pictures back to Earth in 1997, Mission to Mars raked in $110M at the Spring box office (not a huge sum compared to its $100M budget) and was followed by the November release of Red Planet, which proceeded to flop miserably, its worldwide take of $33.46M falling way short of the $80M budget. Which is a shame, as it's a more enjoyable film, replacing lofty ambitions with the straightforward tale of a team investigating the failure of a terraforming project and dealing with a malfunctioning killer robot and a newly indigenous lifeform. South African commercials director Anthony Hoffman (who made his name with ads for Nike and Budweiser, winning Cannes Golden Lion awards in 1997 and '98), has yet to make another feature and while his work does lack flair, it's bolstered by cinematography from regular Cronenburg collaborator Peter Suschitzky (who also lensed The Empire Strikes Back and Mars Attacks!), and Production Design by Owen Paterson (The Matrix, V for Vendetta), which together transform the desert outside Coober Pedy, South Australia into a thoroughly believable Martian landscape.
Also filmed around Coober Pedy, and beating both Mars projects to the punch was David Twohy's Pitch Black. Twohy had previously had a patchy career as screenwriter (Critters 2, Warlock, Waterworld) and director (Timescape, The Arrival), but here took a story by Ken and Jim Wheat (Nightmare on Elm Street 4, The Fly II), and delivered a taught horror/sci-fi hybrid that launched Vin Diesel on an unsuspecting world and introduced the under-rated Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill). Sadly, the sequel was an overblown let-down (another is in development) and Twohy would't regain this kind of form until 2009's A Perfect Getaway.
Sandwiched between disappointing cop thrillers True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002), Space Cowboys is an amiable romp in which Eastwood's astronaut Frank Corvin gets his long-delayed chance at a space shot when a Russian satellite, running bootlegged code he created, needs to be rescued. Naturally he wants his old team with him and James Garner, Donald Sutherland and a somewhat too-young Tommy Lee Jones go along for the ride. The film breezes along nicely in that making-it-all-look-so-easy way unique to Eastwood's directorial style.
The rest of the year saw a collection of weird and wonderful, bizarre and disappointing science fiction movies, including Tarsem's The Cell, which is either a visionary masterpiece or pretentious crap, depending on who you talk to, but uses a good cast (Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio) well and lacks nothing in ambition and scope. It would be good to see Tarsem re-attach his last name (Singh), overcome the hatred people have for the single name director (McG anyone?) and harness his love of surreal art to make a really great film - his follow up The Fall (2006) was even more ambitious and left most viewers cold. The Cell 2 from TV producer/director Tim Iacofano ("24"), starring Frank Whaley (Vacancy) went straight to DVD in 2009 and bears little relation to the original.
Supernova was originally marked as the US directorial debut of Australian Geoffrey Wright (he helmed Cherry Falls instead and then returned home), until the reigns were handed to Alien producer Walter Hill (Southern Comfort), who presumably had no more success with the powers-that-be, given that he took the pseudonym "Thomas Lee" after Jack Sholder (The Hidden) was hired for reshoots and Francis Ford Coppola re-cut the film. Starring James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Lou Diamond Phillips, Peter Facinelli, and Robin Tunney, it's doubtful that anything coherent could have been made of this, but the production looks handsome, the effects are good and it's mercifully short.
Hollow Man felt pretty mainstream for a Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop) project, but still had plenty of the leering stupidity that made Showgirls such a hoot. The first thing Kevin Bacon's character does once invisible is to attempt to spy on his naked neighbor (Rhona Mhitra), an understandable impulse and probably forgivable if the rest of the film didn't descend into standard slasher fare. Verhoeven's heart doesn't seem to be in it - unusually for him the film didn't run into problems with the MPAA – and he took a break from directing after this and has yet to return to genre film-making having completed only one film, the World War II-set Black Book, in the last 10 years. Hollow Man 2 with Christian Slater, Peter Facinelli and Laura Regan followed in 2006, with a script by Joel Soisson (Dracula 2000, Mimic 2),directed by Claudio Fäh (producer of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder and Joe Dante's The Hole).
In 1999, Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed that, while interested in politics, he had no plans to run for governor of California. All that would change in 2003, but in the meantime he still had three lead roles left in him and The 6th Day is a competent but forgettable $82 million cloning thriller, directed by Roger Spottiswoode (Terror Train, Tomorrow Never Dies), from a screenplay by The Wibberleys (Bad Boys II, National Treasure), which gives us two Arnies for the price of one and not a lot else.
Frequency was Gregory Hoblit's third film as director, following Primal Fear (1996) and the silly Fallen (1998) and the first as writer and producer for former music executive Toby Emmerich (The Butterfly Effect, Snakes on a Plane). It's premise, set against the 1969 World Series is given legs by good performances from Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel as a father and son, separated by time and premature death, who reconnect via ham radio and some handy solar flares. Unfortunately it descends into fairly standard serial killer nonsense and has an extremely sentimental ending. Early appearances by Michael Cera and Elizabeth Mitchell ("Lost") enliven proceedings.
Left Behind followed the limited success of The Omega Code (1999) with more End Times rumblings, aimed at scaring poor sinners into the arms of fundamentalist Christianity. However where Omega Code had Caspar van Dien, Michael York and Michael Ironside, Left Behind can only manage Kirk Cameron ("Growing Pains"), Brad Johnson (The Birds II: Land's End) and Gordon Currie (Puppet Master 4 and 5) in the tale of events following the raising of 142 million souls to heaven. The film was initially released on video, selling 2.8 million copies (the highest from an independent that year) and then to 900 theaters in February 2001 where it pulled in a further $4.22M (budget was an estimated $17.4M), enough to ensure two sequels: Left Behind: Tribulation Force (2002) and Left Behind: World at War (2005). Producer Peter Lalonde's Cloud Ten Pictures also gave us Tribulation (aka Apocalypse III: Tribulation) the same year in which Gary Busey sees the light, along with Howie Mandel and Margot Kidder, neither of whom apparently realized they were in a Christian flick.
All of the above are classic of their kind, compared to the monumental folly of Roger Christian's JG Ballard adaptation, Battlefield Earth, which Franchise Pictures claimed cost $75 Million, but was discovered in court to have cost a mere $44M. The court case bankrupted the company (which also produced duds The Boondock Saints, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, and FeardotCom) and left John Travolta, and Scientology as a whole, looking very silly indeed, killing Barry Pepper's career in the process. Universally panned, the film opened against Gladiator in its second week and died a quick and painful death with eventual worldwide earnings of just $29.72M.
If "straight" science fiction hit a black hole in 2000, then things were even worse in the benighted sci-fi comedy arena, with Garry Shandling's leading man status still-born in Mike Nichol's painful What Planet Are You From? from a screenplay by Shandling, Michael Leeson (The War of the Roses), Ed Soloman (Men in Black), and Peter Tolan (Analyze This), in which the former "Larry Sanders" plays an alien with a whirring phallus looking for a mate. Quite how this nonsense attracted Annette Bening, Greg Kinnear, John Goodman, and Linda Fiorentino we may never know.
Much better was Happy Accidents, the follow-up to Sundance hit Next Stop Wonderland from writer/director Brad Anderson, whose career would take a darker turn with Session 9 (2001) and The Machinist (2005). Pre-figuring the following year's K-PAX. Vincent D'Onofrio plays Sam, the current boyfriend of unlucky-in-love directory assistance operator, Ruby (Marisa Tomei). Sam claims to be from the 25th Century and the film hinges on whether or not Ruby should believe him.
From the arthouse came Possible Worlds, the only English language film to date from French-Canadian director Robert Lepage, more famous for his stage work with Peter Gabriel (Secret World and Growing Up tours) and Cirque du Soleil (). The film stars Tom McManus as a man found dead with his brain missing and follows his relationships in parallel worlds with versions of the same woman (Tilda Swinton). Beautiful to behold but cold to the touch (mainly thanks to Swinton's performance), it's difficult to see in the US these days, but is available on Region 2 DVD.

Check out Part One and Part Two for a review of the horror movies of the year 2000, Part Four will concentrate on direct to video Science Fiction, and Part Five will look at Super Hero and Fantasy films, Foreign Language releases and list those actors and crew we lost that year.
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San Francisco, CA, United States
Born in the UK, a graphic designer and long-time film fanatic, Gareth has been working on his book: the Amazing Movie Show, for over 10 years.

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