Andrew Niccol
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Logan's Run (1976)
Directed by Michael Anderson
influenced In Time (2011), Gattaca (1997)
Themes Plot
Like other films of its ilk such as "The Stepford Wives" (gender discrimination), and "Logan's Run" (age bigotry), it makes incisive, edgy commentary on our own contemporary world, by showing us the ugly face of prejudice--as experienced by the natural-born Vincent.
Although it could be accused of being stitched together from parts of lots of movies – “Logan’s Run,” “Timer,” “The 39 Steps” and even this year’s “The Adjustment Bureau” – its concept feels like a fresh attempt to combine pulpy storytelling with a socially conscious theme.
Set in an unspecified future where people are genetically programmed to time out at the age of 25, the film echoes Michael Anderson's 1976 hoot Logan's Run, whose characters were catapulted into the sky at 30 unless they did a runner.
Borrowing a dash from Logan's Run and a dollop from Bonnie and Clyde, the concept is that in the near future, time has become the most precious commodity.
The movie, which initially sounded like a rip-off of Logan’s Run, turns out to be a diatribe against the widely loathed 1 percent, who, even in this pop fantasy, still control the large majority of the world’s wealth.
Nothing remarkable about this futuristic adventure that reminds me a bit of “Logan’s Run.” Grade: D+…
It reminded me of All of Me, that movie where Steve Martin's body is possessed by Lily Tomlin.
From the moment we hear the inner voice from Melanie, the film derails from its attempt to be a combo rip-off of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" mixed with "All of Me," and heads down the path of unintentional laughs.
Ronan is one of our most promising young actresses, but listening to her wrestle for command of her own brain made me yearn for Steve Martin's antic duels with Lily Tomlin in "All of Me." Martin's bisexual split personality spilled out into the way he held himself, the way he walked, and ate, and urinated.
Director Andrew Niccol (who also adapted Meyer’s novel) dramatizes this by having Melanie speak telepathically to Wanderer, who in turn responds with spoken dialogue — which, for a while, gives “The Host” the strange tenor of a 1950s women’s psychodrama crossed with a 1980s body-switching comedy: “The Snake Pit” meets “All of Me.”
Equals (2015)
Directed by Drake Doremus
influenced by Gattaca (1997), In Time (2011)
Plot Themes Visuals
In everything from B-movie fodder like Logan’s Run to artsy fare like Gattaca (which this strongly resembles), filmmakers lavish art-department resources on wholly invented worlds—the better for initially docile antiheroes to rebel against.
The futuristic dystopia of the arty sci-fi romance Equals will be familiar to anyone who's seen the likes of Gattaca, The Island, or THX 1138.
It’s a bleak blue world reminiscent of Gattaca, where the chic sheep invest all their desires in the possibilities of space travel, and people are reduced to glass cases of emotion ready to shatter at a moment’s notice—in the form of plummeting to their own death.
While Andrew Niccol’s latter-day imagined futures in Gattaca and In Time are specifically attuned to contemporary anxieties about social control and exclusion, Equals merely reworks scenarios that arose out of specific 20th-century political anxieties.
Such pining gazes are a staple of film romances — and, though dressed in packaging purposefully reminiscent of the sparse, futuristic sci-fi ilk of THX 1138 and Gattaca, which also trifled with matters of the heart, Equals is a romance through and through.
Actually, the comparison “Equals” more immediately conjures is with Andrew Niccol’s “Gattaca,” that sleekly styled Ethan Hawke starrer in which members of a carefully monitored workforce contend with their own genetic limitations (certainly, the turnstile scanners, medical checks and killer cheekbones all check out).
One obvious inspiration is Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (like that 1990 classic, Niccol’s movie depends on long passages of narration by the protagonist), but Niccol can’t match the headlong pace or resist a preachy, hectoring air (Scorsese never berated his audience for tolerating gangsters).
Niccol has clearly been inspired by films such as Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, and initially infuses Lord of War with a similar sensibility - complete with period-appropriate rock songs on the soundtrack (ie Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" plays during a drug-heavy sequence).
Writer-director Andrew Niccol, however, has already decided how he feels about it, and he isn't the kind of filmmaker to give you a down-and-dirty rise-and-fall story, like Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas or Ted Demme's Blow.
Typically, this type of device is a sign the screenplay needs revision, but it tends to work here in much the same way Ray Liotta's voice-over helps unify "Goodfellas."
But it's not the jolly Goodfellas' marina and Dino tinged streets of mobster lore.
Writer/director Andrew Niccol ("S1m0ne") takes on a huge issue and gives it the "Goodfellas" treatment, making his morally suspect lead a wisecracking narrator and entertaining guide into the glamorously evil world of gunrunning.
The aim, evidently, was to combine the brash racket of American Hustle with the cynicism of Lord of War .
Adapted from a “Rolling Stone” article called “Arms and the Dudes,” “War Dogs” is a familiarly giddy rise and fall saga that unfolds like a watered-down cross between “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Lord of War” that’s been sprinkled with some of “The Social Network” for good measure.
Thanks to some great performances, “War Dogs” rises above similar themed films (for some reason, I kept thinking back to 1983’s “Deal of the Century” as well as 2005’s “Lord of War”).
It’s a far cry from “Lord of War,” Andrew Niccol’s scathing 2005 satire about an arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage.
There's definitely a joke to be made about the idea of Frank the Tank brokering an arms deal but, though there is no Will Ferrell cameo, War Dogs is caught somewhere between Nicolas Cage's Lord of War and the filmmaker's KY jelly wrestling brand of comedy; therein lies the problem.
Before long, Niccol morphs In Time into a yarn that borrows liberally from Robin Hood and Bonnie and Clyde as Will and Sylvia race around determined to steal from the rich and give to the poor.
Borrowing a dash from Logan's Run and a dollop from Bonnie and Clyde, the concept is that in the near future, time has become the most precious commodity.
Drawing on movies like Gun Crazy, Thieves Like Us and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, Niccol gives us a combination crime spree/love story.
Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s plodding Logan’s Run-meets-Bonnie and Clyde pastiche takes its vacuous emoting and C-grade plotting very seriously, but the whole thing ultimately becomes nothing more than a dumbed down, tarted-up riff on his earlier film Gattaca (1997).
As previously mentioned, from this moment on the film officially becomes a game of cat and mouse with a bit of Bonnie and Clyde subtext thrown in for good measure.
Set in an unspecified future, In Time owes as much to The Marx-Engels Reader as Bonnie and Clyde.
The Island (2005)
Directed by Michael Bay
influenced by Gattaca (1997), In Time (2011)
Plot Visuals Themes
Another car chase, surely, or another grisly scene of medical malfeasance, whether in the form of implanting tiny crawling robotic critters under someone's eyelid or some unsavory business involving a bone saw, or yet one more reference to (or rip-off from) "Blade Runner" or "Logan's Run" or "Gattaca" or "Minority Report" or "The Island of Dr. Moreau" or "Austin Powers" (unintentional, but there are scenes featuring McGregor's character and his nemesis, played by Sean Bean, that can't help but conjure Dr. Evil).
Fans of cult sci-fi may notice overt echoes of Logan’s Run, Gattaca, or THX-1138.
But here, before the Bayisms start in earnest, it's moving and spooky and kind of real, both due to McGregor's slow and convincing awakening and to the familiarity of his surroundings, a cross between Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and Andrew Niccol's "Gattaca," a surreal world that by now feels sincere.
The movie feels as if it were once much smarter -- something on the order of Andrew Niccol's Gattaca -- and, sure enough, it probably was.
Thematically it’s just too familiar: “Gattaca,” “The Truman Show,” “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Wow: Logan's Run! Cool, look, GATTACA !
Its central themes are nothing new - the haves-vs-have-nots concept has long gone hand-in-hand with sci-fi and in recent times has been wheeled out with varying success by In Time (good) and Upside Down (not-so-good).
And while Blomkamp's message is morally stalwart, his delivery system sure is a bummer: Andrew Niccol's similarly themed 2011 In Time was both more stylish and more effective, a serious movie that hit its mark without taking itself too seriously.
Simmering or open class warfare has been a rich trope for sci-fi futurecasting as far back as Fritz Lang ’s 1927 “Metropolis” and as recently as “In Time,” “ Total Recall ” and Michael Winterbottom’s fine, underseen “Code 46.” Lang’s influence is particularly evident in “Elysium’s” army of industrious worker bees slaving away on the factory floor of the Armadyne corporation, whose slithery CEO, Carlyle ( William Fichtner ), developed Elysium and all the technology that makes it run.
(Check out on Andrew Niccol's underrated " In Time ," in which the haves and have-nots use the minutes they have to live as currency.)
Blomkamp stitches patches from a bunch of other sci-fi films — the rich-poor futureworld of Gattaca , In Time and Upside Down , plus the mind-melding caper from Inception — that devolve into a numbingly familiar series of chases and fights.
Blomkamp filters a lot of other people’s sci-fi ideas into this, from “Johnny Mnemomic” and “Mad Max” to “Blade Runner”, “In Time” and “Iron Man.”
Daybreakers (2010)
Directed by Michael Spierig
influenced by Gattaca (1997), Lord of War (2005)
Visuals Themes Plot
"Daybreakers" is not for the squeamish, but it's certainly for people who appreciate the futuristic looks of "Gattaca" and "Blade Runner," the post-apocalyptic content of "Children of Men" and "28 Days Later," the blood splatter of "Evil Dead" and "Drag Me To Hell," and the vampire focus of every single piece of pop culture in the past two decades from "Blade" to "Underworld."
I’m talking about the “movie X meets movie Y” style of cinematic analysis, and it’s how I plan to open my review of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers: “It’s Gattaca meets Near Dark … sorta.”
Though "Daybreakers" is more akin to "Gattaca" than "The Matrix" - and not just because it stars Ethan Hawke.
While much of the film feels (and not just due to the presence of Ethan Hawke, who oddly spends the last half an hour of the film looking exactly like Han Solo) like vampire Gattaca as the machinations of the rebel-underground-vs-evil-corporate-overlords-and-there's-also-a-family-betrayal-subplot revolve, there are a handful of truly scary, truly sublime scenes of the best kind of vampire carnage, gory and stylish and terrifying.
It�s more of a science-fiction dystopia borrowing heavily from Richard Matheson�s I Am Legend, with a side order of Gattaca.
Cars are chased, bodies explode or burn to a crisp, and all the while a personable Ethan Hawke (2005's " Lord of War "), an off-the-wall Willem Dafoe (2009's " Antichrist "), and the rest of their co-stars do what they can as they increasingly blend in with the swarm of chaos around them.
Yet, on another occasion, she relates how some men spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a painful surgery to increase their height by up to six inches, a procedure I had only previously heard of in Andrew Niccol’s 1997 dystopian sci-fi movie Gattaca (a quick trip to Mar-A-Lago suggests that the compulsion for such dysmorphic butchery is more symptomatic of female rather than male pathology).
Hint: if you saw “Gattaca” (1997), you can guess, and Song is brilliant for coming up with a rare, not commonly known, factoid.
The story borrows from Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which has been filmed several times -- by Don Siegel in 1956, Philip Kaufman in 1978 and Abel Ferrara in 1993, and more recently, but less successfully, by the Wachowskis as "The Invasion" in 2007.
Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced In Time (2011), Gattaca (1997)
Themes Visuals
The prescience of Blade Runner and The Terminator become clearer, too, as the Eisenhower-era nostalgia fostered by Reagan's time in the White House reaps its harvest in the barely subsumed sex of Pleasantville (1995) and the god in the machine of The Truman Show (1998).
While Cronenberg's films are always risky, injected with a sense of danger or experimentalism, Nicol's movie comes across as softened sci-fi, a boring "Blade Runner".
Look at " Dark City ," "Total Recall," " Brazil ," " 12 Monkeys " or " Gattaca " and you will see its progeny.
Yet the movie is at least as stunning as Blade Runner or Brazil.
It’s a cool-looking, medium-budget futuristic nightmare in the post-Orwell, post-”Blade Runner,” post-”Matrix” vein, neither the best nor worst example you’ve ever seen.
Even with its thoughtful nods to “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Les Miserables,” “In time” never delivers that transcendent “Blade Runner” moment, and never rises above cult classic to simple classic.
Framing (and accentuating) her bulging eyes and Angelina Jolie lips with long bangs and flippy pageboy, he's clearly trying to evoke Anna Karina , Godard 's luminous muse in New Wave classics like " Band of Outsiders " and " Pierrot Le Fou ."
Framing (and accentuating) her bulging eyes and Angelina Jolie lips with long bangs and flippy pageboy, he's clearly trying to evoke Anna Karina , Godard 's luminous muse in New Wave classics like " Band of Outsiders " and " Pierrot Le Fou ."
But Lord of War, which seems like a depressed remake of William Friedkin's 1983 flop Deal of the Century, has only the slightest connection to his previous concerns as an artist.
At times the film that Paul Brickman's brilliant screenplay for Deal of the Century promised, Aussie futurist Andrew Niccol crafts with Lord of War a sometimes transcendent, sometimes finger-wagging fable about a ridiculously successful gunrunner, Yuri (Nicolas Cage), prowling the hot spots of the Third World like a vampire in trenchcoat and shades.
Self-consciously at a remove from the trashy B-movie sensibilities which have dominated science-fantasy movies in recent times, this harks back to the vacuum-packed, classically alienated dystopia of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451.
When I read he was from New Zealand, I was reminded of a 1985 New Zealand science fiction film that is similarly low-key, called "The Quiet Earth."
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Directed by Michael Radford
influenced In Time (2011), Gattaca (1997)
Themes
Any omen-of-the-future movie inevitably owes much of its mood and theme to "1984" and "Brave New World."
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
Director Favreau wisely chooses not to dwell on the Lord of War vibe and pulls theme park action into the foreground.
For a more realistic view, check out Lord of War starring Nicolas Cage.
It’s a little like the old Jeff Bridges movie “Starman’’ with the genders reversed, then serialized for Seventeen magazine.
However, if the deja vu don’t get you (it feels like elements of Falling Skies, Starman, The Island and This is Not My Life have been put in a blender and mulched into a schmaltzy, sappy pulp) then the portentous and pretentious dialogue, the worst use of voice-over since Jason Statham in Revolver and the repeated slapping of Ronan will.