There's nothing in The Wild Blue Yonder that you'd want to include with a Happy Meal. Werner Herzog's film cobbles together old footage of a space shuttle voyage, mathematicians talking about super-fast space travel and a bitter, wild-eyed alien, played by Brad Dourif, with failed dreams of luring earthlings to his intergalactic shopping mall.
Wild Blue Yonder is part of a new wave of independently produced, idea-driven science-fiction films. These lo-fi sci-fi movies aren't, in Hollywood parlance, "toyetic," and they won't be playing at a theater near you.
But, unlike many of the mindless, gutless science-y blockbusters that dominate the studio system, these sci-fi flicks will lodge in your brain. Here's four you probably missed in 2006:
The Wild Blue Yonder
Herzog's film, which made brief appearances at a few urban theaters and is now available on DVD, starts with the premise that aliens are among us. Pretty standard stuff, except these aliens are devoid of special powers – or anything special at all.
"We suck," Dourif's character says about his ET brethren, who spent hundreds of thousands of years making the journey from Andromeda to Earth, only to find themselves every bit as mediocre as the two-legged beings on this planet.
Adding insult to injury, NASA has found a shortcut ("gravitational tunnels") to Andromeda. So now a round-trip journey feels to the astronauts like it takes just 15 years (instead of 800 to those on Earth).
Herzog's film isn't poetic in the way he intends. The extended footage of zero-G astronauts and of Andromeda's watery surface (Herzog used film shot during a deep-sea dive under the ice of Antarctica) is clever, not moving. And Dourif is more a cartoon than a character.
Still, Herzog, who takes movies more seriously than anyone in the universe, is genuinely interested in how our notions of the cosmos frame our notions of time and life. We can't understand ourselves, Wild Blue tells us, without trying to comprehend the vast emptiness out there.
And the film's central irony – Andromedans want to move to Earth; earthlings hope to colonize Andromeda – suggests this quest is galactic in scope.
Interkosmos
Less deep but more far out, Interkosmos also uses faux documentary techniques to tell its space-exploration story.
The style is thrift-store vintage, with a sprinkling of communist good cheer in a tale about a Soviet-era program. Writer-director-star Jim Finn wrote the script after he finished filming, less interested in building a narrative arc than in creating the proper tone.
Interkosmos includes newsreel footage of cosmonauts in training, cheap and charming animation and several musical interludes, including one of a field hockey team smacking balls for Marx and Lenin.
The film's central story thread features Falcon and Seagull, cosmonaut lovers flying separate spacecraft in parallel orbits. Their conversations, spiked with pregnant pauses, are far more banal than anything you'd overhear in a high-school cafeteria. Falcon sings to Seagull ("Clang clang clang went the trolley/Ding ding ding went the bell"). She tells him it sounds like capitalist trash.
At times, Interkosmos' hip, deadpan style threatens to grow tiresome, but then Finn injects something unexpected to liven it up. By the end, Interkosmos has coalesced into a colorful portrait of an imagined time where movies and space travel were happy, bubbly things.
Automatons
Another film steeped in nostalgia, low-rent effects and a deadpan sense of humor, Automatons offers a flashback to '60s monster movies.
Director James Felix McKenney imagines a final battle between humanity's last surviving groups: a teenage girl and her troop of battle bots, and a group of rebel twenty-somethings, hidden away in their own lair. The Earth's surface is contaminated beyond habitation, and control of the bots becomes the key to victory.
Can the girl and her machines conquer the humans, or will the humans convert enough bots to win the war? Just to make sure we get the contemporary relevance, McKenney uses ham-handed dialogue straight out of the war on terror, with references to suicide bombers and phrases like "freedom is not free."
More effective is Automatons' grainy, jittery style. Shot largely on 8 mm, it features wondrously clunky stop-motion animation and a small army of guys in cardboard robot suits. McKenney's film evokes the days when special effects were crafted by hand, not programmed on a Mac. The film has been playing at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in New York, where it's gained a cult following.
Puzzlehead
Considerably more mundane, but more gratifying and ambitious, is James Bai's Frankenstein tale, Puzzlehead, set in the near future in an unnamed, color-drained and vaguely apocalyptic city.
The narrator, an android created in his maker's likeness, first wonders what it would be like to dream and then begins to compete with his master for a woman who lives down the block.
At first, Puzzlehead runs like your standard machine-wants-to-be-human movie. But once it begins weaving family dynamics into its technological fabric, it becomes more: a classic psychodrama amped up by circuitry.
Bai's effects budget was probably a few hundred bucks. But like Wild Blue Yonder, Automatons and Interkosmos, Puzzlehead gets what it needs out of its FX: support for an ingenious, relevant story.
Now if we could just get some studio execs to watch.
