Order off the Menu.

Nothing’s pulling the carriage, Harry. It’s pulling itself, like always…
— Hermione, ORDER OF THE PHOENIX.

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX reminds us of how Jor-El’s warnings to Krypton’s elders went unheeded, and how Krypton paid the price. In PHOENIX, the demon wizard Voldemort is back – but no one believes the people claiming this – Harry Potter and Dumbledore. Even using scientific evidence, Jor-El could not convince Krypton their planet was going to explode; how then do Harry and Dumbledore prove Voldemort’s return with only the amorphous, pointless, rule-less faculty of magic to aid them? I don’t blame the council of old farts for not believing.

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX exhibits the same problems of disjointedness as its predecessors, not because it omits material from J.K. Rowling‘s book of the same name – but because the filmmakers (new screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, and new director David Yates) do not structure their movie as a stand-alone tale. They rely too much on audiences having a priori knowledge of the Harry Potter universe, so the movie just barges along with no thought to setups, exposition, foreshadowing or payoffs.

The two major plot threads in PHOENIX are the return of Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) to battle Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), and a totalitarian witch (Imelda Staunton) ousting Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) as headmaster and taking over Hogwarts school. When these two plotlines are followed, the story chugs along swimmingly. As soon as movie deviates from these threads for the sake of inserting book material for diehards, it’s like Hermione says, “It’s pulling itself, like always”…

Movie opens very grimly indeed, as Harry and his bullying step-brother Dudley (Harry Melling, replete with goombah gold necklace) are attacked by Dementors. Harry uses magic to deter the beasts and is put on trial for using magic openly. These scenes are dark visually and metaphysically, not least because:

Sky turns from sunny to overcast in mere seconds to reflect the encounter;
A strange woman tells Harry she was sent by Dumbledore to watch over him;
The court of wizards ignores all sanity and reason;
Dumbledore ignores Harry in a disturbing manner, even whilst defending him in court;
Richard Griffiths (Harry’s stepdad) is now so morbidly obese in real life, he looks like he’s gonna die any second – and that’s truly disturbing.

The tone remains pretty dark like this, to the movie’s credit, but it just… meanders sometimes.

At Hogwarts, a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is hired, Dolores Umbridge (Staunton), a Republican absolutist in a vomit pink dress who is institutionally insane. Forget the black-robed special effects, the most terrifying horror of all is the old white woman with the closed mind in the position of power.

With waves of her wand Umbridge battens down on the dress code, on students kissing in public, on the desired distance between them, on a hundred other codes that she posts outside her office. When she punishes Harry by making him write lines, each line he writes is simultaneously inscribed painfully on his hand!

When she tries to arrest Dumbledore to banish him to Azkaban prison, he claps his hands above his head and in a blast of dramatic phoenix-fire, disappears. Which raises the question: How do they apprehend ANYONE to take to Azkaban prison?

Students rebel against Umbridge’s totalitarian regime and gather in a secret room, electing Harry their new magic tutor. Harry (now a true teen, short-cropped hair, voice broken, balls dropped) seems to be the only person at Hogwarts to have achieved anything remotely cinematic – killing the Basilisk, defeating 100 Dementors, etc. – and we gain a perspective on his accomplishments; without him, this motley collection of witches and wizards would be called St. Crispin’s School for the Terminally Mundane. He teaches them that the hardest part of casting spells like “Expeliamus” and “Expecto Patronum” is admitting you’re gay.

With his newfound masculinity, Harry stupidly makes a move on the Asian-American chick (Katie Leung); “stupidly” because Hermione is still in the wings, being ultra-hot, but mitigating that hotness with her lack of understanding on how to grow into her role as a young adult; I’m saying she’s a terrible actor. Harry’s and Katie’s lips actually touch, but the camera makes it a point to pan up their bodies to ensure Republican parents that their bodies do not.

Evanna Lynch is Luna, a bottle-blond creepy chick who sees dead horses. David Thewlis is back, as is Gary Oldman, both in a secret Order of the Phoenix (mentioned once then forgotten), amassing to do battle with Voldemort. Helena Bonham Carter is a bad witch; in and out of the story for no reason. Emma Thompson has a small cameo as the useless soothsayer. Brendan Gleeson brings his mad eye. And Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy struts around with his hair set on Charlie’s Angel.

It’s lucky that all the stars and B-characters retained their looks and shapes as they aged. None of them turned into fat, ugly people or had limbs replaced or joined a cult and got face tattoos. What are the odds that such a large production could retain so much of its main onscreen cast like this?

Apparently, you can only see those emaciated horse specters “only if you’ve seen death” like Harry and the creepy chick. That’s why Hermione couldn’t see the specter pulling the carriage and thought the carriage was “pulling itself.” Later, all the kids – including Hermione – are fly-riding those horse specters to London. You lost me at Making It Up As You Go Along.

Climax sees massive posedowns between Voldemort and Gary Oldman, Voldemort and Dumbledore, Voldemort and Hansel (he’s so hot right now!) – in the best lightshow a computer can regurgitate, Volde cheesing it up and Dumble matching him pound for pound in Limburger and Swiss. In the end, everything peters out because – magic.

It’s pulling itself, like always…

END

Buried within The Message from Vega – The Message from Sagan.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND needed updating. CONTACT is that update. Though it may never attain the lofty heights of commercialism that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS enjoyed, CONTACT is, in fact, a more intelligent vision of extra-terrestrial communication with our outer-spiral-arm planet.

Poffy Sagan

Jodie Foster is SETI maverick, Ellie Arroway, who discovers extraterrestrial alien signals that instruct mankind to build a machine to take us to the stars. Woven into this storyline are all the adversities that not only affect the world and its myriad misapprehensions and fears, but also factors that affect Dr. Arroway as a female in a man’s world (with Jodie Foster’s perfect features and sensual, leonine mane not helping any), or an atheist in a theist’s world (Arroway butts heads – and butts – with not only a preacher but the whole inculcated space committee on religion and gods).

From science maven Carl Sagan‘s optimistic novel of the same name, the movie is based on the ideology of the Drake Equation (the speculative theory postulating multitudes of Life-harboring planets in this galaxy, given the sheer quantity of possibly habitable worlds), defined in the movie by the almost-too-cute syllogism: “If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.”

The Drake Equation is weighed against the Fermi Paradox, which argues that if there are alien civilizations, why haven’t we detected them yet? This movie’s plot – obviously – negates that paradox.

Whereas CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ method of alien contact played on the age-worn industrial-era concept of aliens physically visiting Earth, an infinitely more efficient manner is effected in CONTACT by means of radio waves. SETI astronomers, headed by Ellie Arroway, stumble upon distinctly intelligent radio signals originating near the star Vega. In decoding The Message, they are astonished to find it is not merely a rudimentary greeting, but rather a technologically-superior detailed schematic for a Machine, to transport US to THEM.

Considering the economics of space travel – not referring to money, but expending energy – The Message defines the most judicious method for establishing contact, whilst discerning whether a recipient civilization is ready and/or worthy to step up to an interstellar level of commerce. The concept of “aliens” has matured in this film, from simple benign or malignant humanoids (treating Earth as the retarded child of the galaxy), to ambiguous “intelligences,” regarding us as near-equals, in placing the ball in our court.

This maturity is due in great part to the inexhaustible efforts of the late Dr. Sagan, whose quest to bestow a sense of cerebral wonder in a generation jaded by laser-wielding aliens and detestably non-scientific science fiction found a culminating point in this movie.

With aliens being so apparently existent, there comes the inevitable contention of Religion vs. Science, and though Sagan clarifies his position in the novel, the movie must necessarily leave the issue ambiguous to appeal to its demographic of (real or imagined) “christians” – the bulk of Earth’s popcorn-plucking populace. The film ultimately preaches to the converted on BOTH sides. No Atheist or Christian will be jumping their razor-wire fences on the grounds of this movie.

The Machine. The journey to the future begins with the logo on the Atom’s head.

As with all major-studio releases, the screen story tampers with the novel’s finer details, slotting it squarely within motion picture dramatic parameters – most notably modifying the overweight evangelist of the book, Palmer Joss, to that of Hollywood man-toy, Matthew McConaughey, to give Ellie that seemingly necessary love-interest. Thankfully, the broad strokes retain enough of Sagan’s driving pursuit of knowledge, elevating it above mere alien-invasion fare. And/or butting butts fare.

Yet we do not lack for effects – stunning, thought-provoking effects, rather than whizbang jaw-droppers. The challenging opening sequence sees a camera panning backwards through space away from Earth, beyond the edge of the Milky Way, outracing a jumble of radio static, which gets progressively “older,” the farther out we go (as indicated by familiar tunes, news snippets and cultural signpost sounds – i.e. the farther out in space you get, the farther back in time you hear; in essence, time-traveling backwards – faster than light, no less, if you are outpacing radio waves!).

The visualization of The Machine (that The Message instructed to build) is a marvel of utility and “alien” design, seamlessly integrated into the landscape of Cape Canaveral. Most impressive was the tragic sequence which destroyed the first Machine – so artfully contrived, with views from the scores of “media” cameras covering the event – that the viewer never thinks to question where the reality ends and the green-screen babble begins.

An astounding camera trick with a running girl in a mirror (Jena Malone as young Ellie) will leave directorial aficionados in mortal brain pain trying to decipher its ingenuity.

One can only hope that viewers can delve through the flummery (which must necessarily blossom during the latter stages of the movie, as The Machine traverses worm-holes) to the REAL message from Sagan: that the questioning and scientific mind is infinitely more precious to our species and creates more impetus for launching Mankind to the stars than the stagnating minds of the pseudo-science shamsters, which includes fanatical christian contingents.

One of the best arguments against religionistas – played out in the movie by the ever-psycho Jake Busey – is that no scientist has yet strapped himself with explosives and taken innocent lives in his quest to force an opinionated Physics viewpoint on other people, whom he believes he will “save” by blowing them up…

The incomparable David Morse is Ellie’s encouraging father, while William Fichtner poignantly plays a blind astronomer colleague. A stoic Tom Skerritt is simultaneously Ellie’s supervisor and adversary, although thankfully is not painted as villainous, even though cast as the obvious antagonist; an intelligent rendering, keeping his interests “scientific” rather than petty. Although he does prevaricate to score his Machine seat, he is noble enough to admit to Ellie, “I wish we lived in a world which rewarded honesty like yours,” to which Ellie replies, “I thought the world is what we make of it.”

Carl Sagan died before production was completed on CONTACT, making it one of his last gifts to a blinkered world. The film’s dedication read simply: “For Carl.” I wept.

Without him, the Universe seems like an awful waste of space.

END