The Aquarians (1970)

Few things in the world caused me to titter with delight when I was young quite so much as the name “Lake Titicaca.”  There was a moment in time when underwater photography was a big selling point for mass media, and people such as the late, great Jacques Cousteau brought their pure sense of wonder for the deep into millions of families’ households on a regular basis.  In fact, it was through that man that I first heard this lake’s moniker, so blame him.  After all, what child wouldn’t get joy out of pronouncing two words you weren’t supposed to pronounce?  Together?  In the same word?  To my eternal shame, the name still manages to bring a smirk to my face.  Incidentally, the name “Titicaca” translates (according to some) as “Rock Puma,” and this only makes it sweeter to a pre-adolescent (and adolescent, and even adult) mind.  “Rock Puma” would be a great name for a superhero character (and, more obviously, a rock band; apologies to Dave Barry).  Nevertheless, Lake Titicaca is a large body of water, and like all large bodies of water (and some small ones) it contains mysteries both mundane and exotic.  I mean, who among us can say what truly lies at the bottom of a lake, what doesn’t want to be discovered, what will resist being dragged out into the cold light of reason?  Even with the most modern equipment overseen by the most stolid of explorers, some enigmas refuse to be unraveled.  And that’s their charm.

Don McDougall’s The Aquarians opens with plenty (and I mean plenty) of footage of the ocean depths (courtesy of Ricou Browning, director of Mr. No Legs but likely better known to cinephiles as the Gillman from The Creature From The Black Lagoon [at least in the underwater scenes; the monster was played by Ben Chapman for the scenes on land]) narrated with expository parchedness by none other than Leslie Nielsen.  In due course, we are introduced to Luis Delgado (Ricardo Montalban), the head of Deep Lab, a research station located five hundred feet beneath the waves.  After an interminable amount of nothing occurs, Delgado and his lackeys are whisked away to the African nation of Aganda (which to the best of my knowledge is fictitious, though I was never any good at geography) to investigate the sudden death of almost all sea life in the immediate vicinity.  The answer to the mystery is intriguing (and spoiled right in the film’s IMDb synopsis, not that it’s in any way shocking or all that important to the plot; it’s a straight up McGuffin), but what’s done with it isn’t.

I’m going to say right off the bat that I was let down by this film, though it posits enough compelling aspects that it’s kind of inexcusable.  A group of adventurers cruising around the bottom of the ocean is one of the most innately exciting premises ever.  There’s tension simply in the surroundings (which could kill you if you walked out the “front door”), but unlike outer space, the locales (theoretically) are easier to get to.  Add in some espionage goodness, and you bring in Disaster film elements (something Irwin Allen exploited to the hilt with his movie and subsequent television series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea).  Further, there are Science Fiction components like the creation of an artificial gill and a deepwater submersible that’s a cross between a UFO from Monster Zero and the Venus Space Probe from what we all know were the best episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (outside of those with Bionic Bigfoot, naturally).  Montalban proves hands down that he could carry a feature (with or without a neckerchief), and I found myself dreading the moments he wasn’t onscreen.

So, how could all of these things add up to a dry, dull viewing experience?  For starters, there is an overabundance of underwater photography.  I get that a large portion of the reason this was even produced was to showcase such images, but they tend to drag on aimlessly, becoming a blue-tinted visual drone.  The footage that does have action in it is glacial (more a matter of physics than anything else, I’d wager), and it’s not exploited properly to ramp up suspense, at any rate.  It’s all very matter of fact.  Outside of Delgado, the cast of characters are distinguishable as characters in name only.  They exist solely to be the jobs they perform, with little to no differentiation between them (the one standout being Katherine Woodville’s Barbara Brand, though this is more due to biological happenstance than anything written into the script).  

Further, the film is focused on procedure to the point of tedium.  Now, I am a fan of procedure.  I love Police Procedurals, and a good Heist film can thrill me to no end.  I am enthralled by the scrutinization of the details of a plan/crime and watching said minutiae be laid out to the smallest dust mote.  I tend to be myopic in my own approach to procedures.  That’s just me.  Nonetheless, there is no excitement generated in the procedures in The Aquarians.  It doesn’t hit peaks and valleys of overcoming and being overcome by obstacles culminating in ultimate success.  It is instead the stereo instructions of plot progression (and I mean that in the bad way).  Even when depth charges are being flung at our intrepid protagonists, it’s reacted to like plucking a long nose hair: Sure, it stings, but no biggie, and it has to get done regardless.  In fact, if an enterprising person were to research wasted opportunities in filmed media, one would be the casting of Walton Goggins in Django Unchained.  The other would be the sum totality of parts that is The Aquarians.  The filmmakers even managed to never have any direct physical conflict with the bad guys; astounding, since three of the film’s heroes are very able-bodied young men, and the villains include Chris Robinson, no stranger to badassery (see Revenge Is My Destiny for further proof).

The film isn’t empty-headed.  It’s simply poorly handled.  It has an eco-crusader angle that was big (and getting bigger) in the Seventies.  It does a nice job balancing its respect for the ocean with its notions about exploiting it (for the betterment of man, of course).  It deals with the perversion of science and the manipulation of good men for evil purposes.  The potential for the character of Delgado is enormous, as he’s a clinical prick of a man, but he cares about what he does and the people he does it with (again, expertly portrayed by Montalban).  And the film wastes all of this.  Perhaps as background noise (along the lines of the Yule Logs stations used to air around Christmas), The Aquarians could serve a purpose.  Unfortunately, entertainment isn’t one of them.

MVT:  Montalban gets the dubious distinction.  He really does carry himself with authority, and you believe that he believes every word he says.

Make Or Break:  The Break is no one scene.  It is the aggregate of the lack of action and lack of personality in the plot and every character engaged in it (save one; I’m sure you can guess their identity).  

Score:  5/10

Wrong Is Right (1982)

Let’s discuss the idea of shaky cam, and let’s start with a definition (or at least my definition).  Shaky cam is the technique of filming with a handheld device in such a way as to make any action (and even inaction) onscreen completely incoherent or just to induce nausea in the viewer.  This is accomplished by shaking the camera (or i-device or whatever) violently during a take, whether it is warranted in the scene or not.  Now, if we go back in time, the practice of employing handheld cameras goes back quite a ways, but it is most associated in history with documentaries or on-site news reportage.  In those situations, though, unless there is some type of sudden violence which both attracts attention and also causes the cameraman to beat a hasty retreat, you’ll notice that the shots caught on film and video were remarkably steady.  That’s because being a cameraman was something of an art form, requiring attention and discipline.  I defy you to watch something like, say, Harlan County, USA and tell me you don’t understand everything you see onscreen at all times. 

 

Since this isn’t a treatise (yet), let’s skip ahead to today.  There are still filmmakers who understand and know how to utilize handheld cinematography in their films (aided greatly by the invention of the steadicam in the mid-1970s), but there has also been a massive rise in a style of filmmaking which (from my own ignorant perspective) feels wholly concerned with expediency over purpose and a mistaken notion that the more the camera moves, the more immediate a film will feel.  To be fair, it can work to a degree and can even be artfully done, but what these folks don’t seem to realize is that the truly talented among them are lumping themselves in with those simply interested in grinding product out (and there’s a whole conversation to be had there, the answers to which I’m sure would prove most elusive) and defeating the purpose (in my eyes) of making an action film.  Compare, if you will, a film like The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter with something like A Quantum Of Solace (a film that I like, but we’re not here for that argument, either).  The latter may be flashier than the former, benefiting as it does from nearly a quarter of a century of sophistication in stuntwork techniques and special effects, but the former is simply a better depiction of cinematic action.  Don’t believe me?  Go ahead and watch the two back to back and get back to me.  I’ll be around here, somewhere.  

Patrick Hale (Sean Connery) is a globetrotting reporter who meets with fellow journalist Sally Blake (Katharine Ross) while doing a story about his friend King Awad (Ron Moody) in some Middle Eastern country.  Chancing upon terroristic arms dealer Helmut Unger (Hardy Krüger), who is delivering two suitcase nukes to Awad, Hale soon finds himself embroiled in a scenario as frightening as it is credible, with ties to everyone from loony Presidential hopeful Mallory (Leslie Nielsen) to loony Arab terrorist Rafeeq ( the chillingly humorous Henry Silva) to loony current President/health nut Lockwood (George Grizzard) .  And it’s kind of funny, too.

Wrong Is Right (aka The Man With The Deadly Lens) is Richard Brooks’ (who hails from my home state and has turned out some great films, including The Professionals and Blackboard Jungle) adaptation of the novel The Better Angels by Charles McCarry.  The film is a satire of the time in which it was made, when it felt like everything was topsy-turvy (hence the title), and it was entirely within the realm of possibility that a large portion of seemingly insanely-run factions would want to possess and/or detonate a nuclear device.  What’s really compelling about the film and its characters is that this could almost have been produced yesterday.  There are still deranged religious zealots who want to annihilate their enemies in order to gain power for themselves.  There are still self-involved morons at the very highest levels of power making decisions without thought of the people they swore to serve.  There are still violent programs inundating people in this country via the church of the cathode ray (apologies and thanks to Mr. Cronenberg).  In fact, there are probably even more now, since television is now a twenty-four-hour-a-day business festooned with hundreds of channels that still insist on running epic marathons of a single program for days on end (surely, not out of laziness?).  Its prescience notwithstanding, the film’s satire is far more subtle than it could have been, and for my money, that’s not only more difficult to achieve but also more malleable as an entertainment.  Not being saddled with hamfisted, pass-or-fail jokes a ten-year-old would likely scrawl in a lavatory stall, the quality of the humor is dependent on the viewer to get it and encourages a slightly more engaged viewing experience.  That’s not to say there aren’t more undisguised jokes going on (which also work by and large and are seemingly centered on Robert Conrad’s character of General Wombat [get it?]), but for the most part, the writing herein doesn’t “mug” for the camera, and I for one appreciate that sort of style.   

As long as we’re on the subject of writing, though, we do need to discuss the film’s biggest problem, and it is rooted in the script’s structure.  Adapting a novel is a difficult task for even the most straightforward story, I’m sure.  When you add in a lengthy cast of characters and a plot which spans multiple continents over a short time period, things can get a little muddy, and such is the case here.  One of the “commandments” of screenwriting has long been “get into a scene late and get out early,” and the screenwriter here (Brooks) obeys this tenant religiously.  Unfortunately, he also seems to be trying to follow the structure of the novel (I cannot be sure of this, not having read the source material), and consequently, the film feels like it is hopscotching (if you don’t know what hopscotch is, there’s probably an app that will play it for you) around, breaking the story up and making a complicated plot into a labyrinthine one.  It is also disconcerting, because many of the same characters appear in multiple scenes back-to-back in settings which either they shouldn’t have been able to get to so swiftly or which doesn’t account for the short time frame in which the plot takes place.  It’s no deal breaker, but it is demerit-worthy.

What most intrigues me in the film, however, is its view on violence in society.  In the opening of the film, Hale reports on a company (dubbed “The Happy Farm,” and not to be confused with the “funny” variety, surely) where people can simulate murdering the people in their lives who irritate them.  Interestingly, a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh sums up the facility with which violence has become a solution stating that she doesn’t hate her parents; “they’re just useless.”  I am by no means the sort of person who feels that media are solely to blame for the actions of mentally unbalanced folks, but I do accept that said media has sensationalized violence to nigh-pornographic levels and de-sensitized many of us to its very real impact.  But that’s entertainment, for better or worse.  At some point, we, as individuals, have to take the responsibility for how our families process that violence and draw the lines of demarcation.  It’s not a perfect answer (if it’s an answer at all), and I don’t mean to go off on a screed here (I think we can all agree I did enough of that in my introduction), but violent media are not going anywhere anytime soon.  If society is to regain that essence which allows it to be called “civilized,” let’s face it, it begins with us.  You can write my name in on the next election ballot, thanks.

MVT:  Without the level of writing at work in this film, it truly would fall apart.  Granted, it does indeed threaten to at multiple points, but it never totally does.  And the lead is never buried in the minutiae or sacrificed for the sake of a laugh, and that takes a deal of integrity rarely seen these days.

Make Or Break:  The opening with “The Happy Farm” draws you into the film handily.  It’s also effectively creepy and verisimilitudinous at the same time, and it’s this scene and its significance which remains with you after all the nuclear shenanigans have been sorted, and Connery’s toupee has flipped (yeah, a fellow bald guy went for the bald joke).

Score:  6.5/10

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