BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Season 4 Episode 10
“Revelations”
Written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle
Directed by Michael Rymer
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Twelve Cylon models
Seven are known
Four live in secret
One will be revealed

So, not only was the mid-season finale a tense little motherfraker, but it also reduced me to a blubbering idiot, before pole-axing me with that punch-in-the-stomach coda.
Man, if this is what it feels like halfway through the last hurrah, the series finale will be brutal…


So D’Anna takes the lead and announces that she’ll be holding the humans hostage, till she gets the Cylons from the Fleet. Adama and Helo aren’t thrilled by that and there’s a Mexican standoff, till Roslin asks Bill to trust her.
D’Anna then says that Adama will accompany her to the Galactica, but when he says he won’t leave, Laura whispers in his ear that D’Anna cannot be allowed to take the Five, so if things should go sour, that the base ship be destroyed, regardless of who’s on board.


The base ship and Raptor jump back to the Fleet, and when D’Anna and Adama get to the Galactica, D’Anna says she’ll wait for the four Cylons in the Fleet to join them, and only then will she release the hostages.
Toaster Tory, canny little minx, says she should return with D’Anna to the base ship, purportedly so she can bring President Roslin her meds.
Which she does, but when Laura asks her to speak with D’Anna to stand down (after Tory is revealed to indeed be a Cylon), Tory says, I don’t take orders from you anymore. (B!tch.)

Suddenly changing the game plan, D’Anna jettisons a hostage out the airlock, and she threatens to execute a hostage every 15 minutes till the still Secret Cylons turn themselves over.
There’s a hurried idea to draft a rescue plan, during which the four Fleet Cylons again have a “Watchtower” moment, that leads Tigh, Sam, and the Chief, to that apparently brand new Viper Starbuck flew back to Galactica in.
Sam and the Chief are convinced there’s something different about the Viper, something important, so when Sam says Starbuck knows this ship inside and out, Tigh tells him to get her down there, then goes off to do what he knows he has to do (something he admits he should have done from the moment it happened, if only he’d been braver).
What follows is a really great scene where Tigh admits to Adama that he’s a Cylon, and that the only way to get D’Anna to stand down, is to threaten to blow him out the airlock.

But the revelation first leads to one of those scary, volcanic moments when Adama loses his cool and rages. It’s like witnessing some volatile force that makes you terrified to even breathe, lest you trigger any more outbursts that could be directed at you.
Adama then drinks himself blind and is himself a blubbering mess, as Lee lovingly tries to get him to pull himself together.
It’s an emotionally devastating scene, where we see just how important Tigh’s friendship is to Adama. The scene is then made all the more powerful by the genuine caring that Lee shows for his father.
Brokenly, Adama admits that—should it come down to it—he just can’t kill Tigh, so Lee says he’ll take care of it.


What follows is a fraktastic stand-off sequence as D’Anna threatens to execute more hostages, while Baltar tries to talk sense to her.
On board Galactica, Tigh is placed in an airlock, with Lee ready at the button that will suck the poor one-eyed skinjob into outer space.
Lee then asks Tigh who the others are.

Meanwhile, Starbuck can’t understand why Sam and the Chief think there’s something about the Viper, but Sam says, When you had a feeling you knew how to get to Earth, I trusted you, so trust our feeling on this.
The grunts then arrive to arrest Sam and the Chief, who are brought to the airlock to keep Tigh company.
Despite Baltar trying to talk sense to D’Anna, things escalate to the point where the base ship’s weaponry is targeted at the Fleet, and Tigh is alone in the airlock, Lee ready to consign his Toaster a$ into space. Even as we see Starbuck find some reading on a gauge of the Viper (probably one that points to Earth) and start running all the way to the airlock, Tigh demands of Lee, “Well, what are you waiting for?! Do it!”


Starbuck of course arrives before first blood on either side is drawn.
She shows the readings to Lee, who takes a little convincing, before he accepts that Starbuck’s probably right.
And, in a pivotal moment, Lee decides to share the information with the Cylons. There’s another great moment in the episode, as Lee and D’Anna shake on this truce, as they both agree that human and Cylon will journey to Earth, together.

Lee than has a quiet moment with Adama, who we see is clearly broken by the Tigh-is-a-Toaster revelation. When Lee asks if he’s ready to take command again, Adama says, I don’t know.
Laura arrives, asking, What don’t you know?
Laura and Adama then have a nice, tender moment, during which Laura says, I want to see you with that first fistful of Earth.
Rockface then stands to face his immense responsibilities, leaving Laura and Lee to have that Moment I’ve been waiting for.
Lee says, Well, this is the end of the shortest Presidential term in Colonial history.
And Laura responds, You made the right choices in a very difficult situation, and this Fleet will still need that sort of strong leadership in the days to come.
So the rift between the two is on its way to healing (yahoo!), and Adama emerges in his uniform, ready to roll the hard six.


What follows is a tremendously moving sequence as the Fleet and the damaged base ship make that final jump to the coordinates they believe are going to take them to Earth.
The sequence is brilliant, capturing all the hope and bittersweet emotions of this jump to what they have held out will be their salvation.
After poor Felix confirms the stellar coordinates, Adama makes a moving speech over the wireless, and we see faces across Galactica and the Fleet, even the faces of some of the Not-So-Secret-Anymore Cylons, particularly Tigh (who’s alone, getting sloshed) and the Chief, who’s with Nicky, and of course, Cally’s absence is overwhelming.
It’s a sequence both joyous and melancholy, bringing home the point that this is what the Fleet has been striving for since that horrible day the Cylons attacked, while reminding us of what this apparent victory has cost.

Then, as some ships make that Earth entry, and they’re flying through the clouds, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, thinking, Okay, we’re here. But when?
Will it be pre-history, and will the Fleet end up being the first humans to populate the planet?
Will it be 2008, and will we suddenly attack the ships, thinking it’s some kind of alien invasion, thus opening up hostilities between Earth and the Fleet, and a new, perhaps even more tragic war, begins?

But when we see Adama pick up that first fistful of earth, and we hear that Geiger counter making that terrible noise, and we see the devastated reactions of all these people we’ve come to love and hate over the course of five years, and we see what at first looks like ancient ruins around them, before it becomes apparent that what we’re looking at are the remains of a bridge, and a city in the distance, we know that the other shoe has most definitely dropped, and we are so not yet at the end of this particular road.

Gods, Moore and Eick (and Thompson and Weddle) are evil.


So, has the Fleet arrived after the planet has already been ruined by humanity’s own raging stupidity?
Or did some other Cylons somehow get to Earth before the Fleet and a war broke out?
Ooooh, where’s that second half?

Getting back to the here and now though, aside from that “jump to Earth” sequence, I think the most potent bits of this episode were those moments when we see the reactions people have to the Secret Cylon reveals.
There’s Adama, of course, but Starbuck’s reaction to Sam’s being a Cylon was also a great Moment that worked without the sturm und drang of the Tigh-is-a-Toaster plot development.
As is sometimes too often the case with BSG, it killed me that we didn’t have enough time in this episode to get a better sense of how characters were reacting to events, particularly the Cylon revelations.
Well, just some more bits to look forward to in the next half of the season. (I’m particularly looking forward to seeing how Adama and Tigh work through this curveball in their friendship.)

Onward to January 16, 2009, eh?


Parting shot: It seems, at the moment, that the series’ final episode has grown to a 2-hour finale, so I’m hereby re-calibrating the countdown.

COUNTDOWN: 11.

(Images courtesy of twitchfilm.net and ew.com.)

SOUTHLAND TALES
(Review)

“I wanna shine on in the hearts of men,
I want a meaning from the back of my broken hand…”
-- The Killers
“All These Things That I’ve Done”

When I first laid eyes on Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko just as were entering this brave new millennium, the damned thing simply blew me away; it was a fantastic movie that had brains and a heart, it sported the most excellent Mary McDonnell, featured Jena Malone and October Sky’s Jake Gyllenhaal, and introduced me to his sister, Maggie.
As the dust settled around me, the facts sunk in: not only did Kelly apparently have a keen eye for casting, he was also clearly a vital, imaginative force to be reckoned with and a name to watch out for.
So it was with some excitement that I greeted the news of his follow-up, Southland Tales. Yes, I was a tad dubious; among the cast were names like Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock), Sarah Michelle Gellar (a.k.a. Buffy), and Justin Timberlake (a.k.a. That Dude From That Boy Band).
But this was Richard Kelly, so I took a deep mental breath, and trusted him.
As it turned out, I had quite the wait before Southland Tales finally saw the light of day.
Though the 163-minute cut that screened at Cannes in 2006 was met with some derision, it was subsequently picked up by Sony, on the condition that Kelly return to the editing room for some celluloid surgery.
Now, two years later—and twenty or so minutes less—and Southland Tales is finally with us.

Southland Tales is a sprawling apocalyptic epic set in 2008, on the eve of the Presidential elections, in a totalitarian, post-nuclear attack United States exploring alternative energy sources in light of the Middle Eastern conflict. The ambitious, tentacular narrative follows a diverse band of characters—which include an apparently amnesiac movie star (Johnson), a porn star poised for a complete career make-over (Gellar), and a host of Venice Beach-based Neo-Marxist revolutionaries (played by everyone from Christopher Lambert to SNL alumnae Nora Dunn and Amy Poehler)—all struggling to either topple the government, or maintain the status quo.
And while all that socio-political jockeying is going on, the fate of the cosmos lies in the balance…

If you’ve seen Donnie Darko (and if you haven’t, you really ought to), you’ll know that Kelly loves the heady stuff.
Well, Southland Tales certainly delivers on that score. One could, in fact, argue that there is perhaps, too much of the heady stuff. From time travel to T.S. Eliot to the fourth dimension to a perpetual motion drug called Fluid Karma, there is a blazing surplus of cerebral concepts that are certainly not the staple of your average Hollywood movie. Throw in a healthy dose of New Testament Revelations, as delivered to us courtesy of Timberlake (as movie star/disfigured Iraq war vet, Pilot Abilene), who supplies the film’s narration, and a dance number involving Johnson, Gellar, and co-star Mandy Moore, and this one gets truly, truly wild. This is the drugged-out master's thesis to Donnie Darko’s high school explorations of wormholes and time travel.
Little wonder then, the long delay Southland Tales experienced.

What surprised me though was, no matter how bizarre and convoluted things get in Southland Tales (and they do get noodly, believe me), Kelly always manages to smack me with some amazingly moving bits, sometimes when I least expect it, other times when the emotion is enough to help me get past a bit where my brain isn’t sharp and quick enough to process the narrative tics as they’re unfolding.
Among those amazingly moving bits: Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done,” and Rebekah Del Rio (who also appeared in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Again, if you’ve seen Donnie Darko, you’ll know that Kelly has a flair for the Musical Moment, and though the song choices here are arguably not as strong as those in Darko, Kelly more than makes up for it by roping in Moby for the film score. I honestly think Moby’s music had a lot to do with grounding the loopy on-screen action in a potent emotional context.

But what could very well be the best hook Southland Tales has is its truly insane cast, which also includes Seann William Scott, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith, Zelda Rubinstein, Bai Ling, Wallace Shawn, Curtis Armstrong, Donnie Darko alums Holmes Osborne and Beth Grant, and Jon Lovitz. Sadly, Janeane Garofalo’s General Teena MacArthur is virtually cut from the proceedings, though you will see her once or twice as the film winds down.
And if you don’t blink, you’ll see Eli Roth die on the crapper…
It’s also a noteworthy thing that though the ultimate effectiveness of the performances of both Johnson and Gellar are up for debate, they do gamely toy with—and in some instances, skewer—their very own celebrity. (And I’d like to think that’s precisely the reason Kelly cast them in the film.)

In the end, I can safely say, I love Southland Tales. Not as much as I love Donnie Darko, mind you, but I love Kelly’s sophomore effort just the same.
It’s messy and strange and moving, and I may not be able to explain to you exactly what’s going on (particularly in the film’s climax), but it’s a fun, revelatory ride that makes the end of the world look like a party you wouldn’t want to miss.
Yeah, I had a nice apocalypse.
I hope you have one too.

“Over and in, last call for sin,
While everyone’s lost, the battle is won,
With all these things that I’ve done,
All these things that I’ve done…”
-- The Killers
“All These Things That I’ve Done”

Parting shot: Kelly has indicated that he has intentions of releasing a longer cut of Southland Tales (as he did with Donnie Darko) on DVD. Hopefully it’ll be the original 163-minute Cannes cut.
A prequel saga to Southland Tales is also available in comic book form. (And it appears that what’s contained in them could shed some light on the more bizarre—and apparently inexplicable—bits in the film.)
Meanwhile, Kelly’s working on his third movie, The Box. Based on the Richard Matheson short story, “Button, Button,” this one features Cameron Diaz, and Superman Returns co-stars James Marsden and Frank Langella.
Of The Box, Kelly had this to say: “[It] is still in my crazy wheel house, but I’m deliberately trying to see if I can make a film that is very easy for a studio to release on 3,000 screens at once, as opposed to platforming it and waiting to see how the public digests it.”
Looking forward to that one…

(Southland Tales OS courtesy of impawards.com; UK quad courtesy of empireonline.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (14)
“The Attack of the Living Dead Afterthought”
(A Companion Piece to “Revelations”)

If you haven’t read “Revelations” (Archive: July 2007), please do so, so as to give this installment of Afterthoughts a proper context.

If you look carefully at “Revelations (Getting at the Truths of Apocalypse Cinema),” the article is more a focus on then-current zombie cinema than of apocalypse cinema in general. I took that tack (and chose that title) though, since I thought it would be an easier sell to my editor, as the mainstream movie-going audience at that time (2004) would most likely have known the doomsday scenarios of Armageddon and Deep Impact more readily than they would George Romero’s Dead films.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised though, if an out-and-out article on zombie cinema would get the greenlight today without much trouble.
And that’s because a lot’s happened since 2004, events that have brought the rotting, flesh-hungry hordes into the bright spotlight of media attention. Zombies are one of the hot trends of horror du jour, and our recently-returned dearly departed are making the most of their Moment in the sun.

With the box-office success of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, studios big and small hopped on the zombie bandwagon and brought us such excellent entries in zombie cinema as Edgar Wright‘s hilarious Shaun of the Dead and Andrew Currie‘s interesting boy-and-his-zombie tale, Fido. On the downside, we’ve also been saddled with the dead on arrival attempts at zomcoms, Dead and Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl, and Plane Dead.
Undisputed Zombie King George Romero returned to the apocalyptic world that made his career with Land of the Dead, Robert Rodriguez brought us to Planet Terror as his half of Grindhouse, and the French gave us Robin Campillo‘s Les Revenants (They Came Back), the only arthouse zombie film I’ve ever come across. Boyle also made his own return trip by producing the lacerating and explosive follow-up, 28 Weeks Later.

Meanwhile, trudging towards us from the horizon are Steve Miner’s remake of Romero’s Day of the Dead (with Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames as Capt. Rhodes, the brother that Rhames’ Kenneth from the Dawn of the Dead remake refers to; I’m going to have to assume they’re supposed to be twins), as well as Romero’s Diary of the Dead, where some college students shooting a horror movie encounter some real zombies and decide to go cinema verite.
There’s also Zack Snyder’s zombie epic, Army of the Dead (though this may not come at us for quite a while, as Snyder’s currently knee-deep in his Watchmen adaptation). In it, a father struggles to save his daughter’s life from the ravenous zombie hordes in a quarantined Las Vegas.

But what was perhaps the most intriguing zombie development didn’t quite get out the gate: CBS got a pilot together for something called Babylon Fields, a “sardonic, apocalyptic American comedy-drama where the dead are rising and, as a result, lives are regained, families restored and old wounds reopened.” Michael Cuesta (of Six Feet Under and Dexter) was set as executive producer, and directed the pilot.
Sounding like a blackly comic spin on Les Revenants, I was pretty stoked about this, but sadly, CBS chose not to pick Babylon Fields up as a series.*
I mean, am I the only one who wanted to see zombies represent themselves on the small screen? There are vampires aplenty: on the lamentable Blood Ties, and the upcoming Moonlight (yet another vampire PI) and from Alan Ball, True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire books, so why not zombies?

But I guess the networks aren’t ready to release them onto the TV screen on a weekly basis just yet. Oh well…
I suppose we’ll just have to content ourselves with seeing them mill about the multiplexes. Don’t forget to buy extra buckets of popcorn. You never know. They could be persuaded to eat something else other than your brain…

* Then again, who knows? Maybe Cuesta can pull a Mulholland Drive and turn Babylon Fields into a feature film. Here’s hoping…

Parting shot: There are also “vampire zombies” (whatever those are exactly) on the way in John Moore’s upcoming Virulents, based on the Virgin Comics title.

Parting shot 2: Reviews of Boy Eats Girl, Plane Dead, 28 Weeks Later, Dexter, and Blood Ties can be found in the Archive.

(Shaun of the Dead, Fido, Land of the Dead, and Day of the Dead OS’s courtesy of impawards.com; Les Revenants DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)