Robinson Crusoe meets Titanic, as Passengers intrigues

Part Robinson Crusoe meets Titanic in space (and yes, I know that Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a thing), director Mortden Tyldum’s Passengers is an intriguing film, even if it never hits any heights of supersonic excitement.

Written by Jon Spaihts, the luxurious starship Avalon is carrying 5,000 people to a new colony planet where they will begin a new life. They and the crew are in hibernation pods, as the trip takes 120 years.

But when one of these pods malfunctions, 90 years from journey’s end, mechanical engineer Jim (Chris Pratt) finds himself awake, with just a droid bartender for company.

And that doesn’t seem to be the only technical glitch. A year on, with the ship’s systems experience more and more problems, Jim is joined by Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), with neither of them able to return to hibernation.

Here we get a touch of Titanic, with Aurora travelling first class and Jim in a subsidised – his skills are in demand – starship version of steerage.

But when a third person wakes as the malfunctions increase, that’s when the trouble really begins.

Lawrence and Pratt make a good and enjoyably watchable team here and the film carefully eschews any clunky stereotypes, allowing plenty of time to develop character and situation.

That’s almost as much a downfall as it is a benefit: this is a picture that can, on occasion, seem to drag, yet at the end, the viewer is left with themes that have been worked hard enough to intrigue, from the nature and affect of loneliness to the limits of AI-human interaction (and therefore the nature of humanity) and a sort of Dorothy-in-Oz question of what you really want from life.

Sumptuous to look at, the glossy, hi-tech, sleekly-designed appearance of the ship itself, together with its sheer size, adds to the sense of human isolation, along with a beautifully-realised idea of the vastness of space.

Michael Sheen as Arthur the android bartender and Laurence Fishburne as Gus, the third to wake, add nice cameos that help develop plot and the relationship between our central protagonists.

Some critics have complained about the ethics of a key element of the plot (I’m not giving that plot device away here), but the complaints seem a tad forced, since the question concerned is hardly played for over-simplicity and certainly far from ignored.

One hopes we’re not going to see sociological analyses of all forthcoming releases, from Assassin’s Creed (spoiler alert: likely to include some killings that are Not Very Nice) to Despicable Me 3 (is Gru really an appropriate parent for three small girls, once of whom is clearly from a different ethnic background to him?).

Tedious it may seem, but it seems boringly necessary to remember that Passengers is, after all, a piece of entertainment and certainly no more morally dubious than most other entertainments around if one starts playing such a game.

So, while it’s certainly no masterpiece, it is a pleasant and interesting enough way to spend a couple of hours.

Just an old romantic

How do you cope with the trip to work in the morning? Particularly on dark winter days and particularly on Mondays?

I seem to have spent the greater part of my winter travelling with headphones firmly attached to my ears and creating a bubble of warmth around me with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (first and third movements in particular).

My corporeal self might be on the 394, but whatever else it is that constitutes the rest of me is elsewhere: standing, à la Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic; only not on a liner at sea, but speeding over the snowswept Russian landscape in a horse-drawn sleigh.

Yes, I know that Scheherazade is supposed to be about Arabia, but Rimsky-Korsakov was also one of Russia’s great nationalistic composers, who used folk songs and lore in their own work. Such incorporation might have been known as orientalism, but what I hear – well, what I see – when I listen to Scheherazade is a Russia, blistered white by snow; a cold that burns your eyes and rasps the skin, and leaves you feeling more alive than ever and even vaguely heroic.

This morning, for a change, it was Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – the second movement is like floating in honey. If it’s not the apotheosis of Romantic music (and convention certainly says that that has to be Wagner) then it’s not far off.

But this is all really quite new in terms of my musical tastes. I’ve loved classical music since I was a teenager, but until recent years, the likes of Wagner and Strauss were far too rich a diet for me.

Then something happened to change that.

It was a few years ago. I was heading west with m’friend and culinary guru George, to visit Garcias & Sons, a rather fabulous Spanish deli and cafe on Portobello Road.

It was a long journey by bus – neither of us like the Tube, which, apart from anything else, is always too noisy to enable conversation.

So there we were, upstairs on an old Routemaster, plodding down The Strand, chatting away. And since George is German, I happened to mention, as a snippet that might be of passing interest, that where I had been doing a bit of work in the preceding weeks there was a German colleague called Brunhilda.

This – unexpectedly on my part – proved to be a cue. Specifically, for the story of the Nibelungenlied – the German legend that is the basis for Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle, and an influence on many other artists – not least, JRR Tolkien (and more of him later).

But on the basis that one of the central characters is called Brunhilda, I was told the story – of Siegfried, the dragon, Kriemhild, Brunhilda, Gunther, Hagen … all the way to the climax, where the Burgundians are burned alive in the hall, loyal unto death.

I don’t know whether, in reality, my jaw really did hit the floor of the bus, but that’s what it felt like.

Metaphorical or actual, my gobsmackedness was real.

First, there was the shock of being told a story. I have no other memories of anyone, at any time in my life, telling me a story in such a manner. And this was storytelling – as an art; an ancient art of communication. I don’t remember anything like it from my childhood. And certainly nothing since, but this was not childlike storytelling, but something completely grown-up.

And then there was the dawning realisation that this was what romanticism meant. Not daffodils and bland insipidity. Not soppy stories of lovelorn couples, but something with teeth and guts and passion.

From there is was hardly a major step to start ‘getting’ Wagner. And it was like finding part of my soul.

Coincidentally, I have a slight Tolkien connection. Around 22 years ago, just after I’d moved south, my parents decided that I hadn’t had a holiday in years. This much was true.

So they decided that I should holiday with them. In Torquay on the so-called ‘English Riviera’. This, by and large, was a mistake: a single woman of such tender years and an un-rebellious nature is not likely to have much fun when holidaying with parents who believe that she should dine with them in the hotel every night and go to bed at the same time they do (for some reason or other, I also remember trout with almonds and dry white wine from that holiday – which tells you something if that was a central memory from a whole fortnight away).

Anyway, the hotel that we stayed at was run by a nephew of JRR. It had, if memory serves, nine rooms. And the owner and his wife had long been thinking of having each room designated not by a number, but by a place from Middle Earth. So Rivendell and Bag End etc. The idea was to have illustrations from the books done and then mounted on the doors beneath acrylic plates.

The problem was that of all the people they’d met down the years, the Tolkien enthusiasts couldn’t draw and the artists didn’t like the books.

My father leapt in to offer my services as someone who could tick both boxes. Thus, in the face of the understandable skepticism of JRR’s nephew, I meekly went and bought myself a drawing pad and some pencils, and proceeded to sketch some ideas.

I got the commission. Eventually, I even got a bit of money for it. And I can still legitimately claim to have done artwork for the Tolkien family, based on JRR’s books.

So there you go – that’s my little Tolkien connection. More salient in terms of this story is the point that, until just over 10 years ago, if you’d have asked me to name what I considered the best book in the whole wide world, I’d have said: Lord of the Rings.

Now before I upset anyone, let’s make it clear that Lord of the Rings is a very fine work of literature.

But to quote Terry Pratchett – who was commenting in 1999, during the frenzy of polls and lists marking the end of the millennium: “If you don’t think Lord of the Rings is the greatest book in the world in your teens, there’s something wrong with you.

“If you think Lord of the Rings is the greatest book in the world in your forties – there’s something wrong with you.”

I was saved from that embarrassment by the onset of my own late (but better late than never) surge into something resembling adulthood, and the suggestion by George (after a request for recommendations) that I might appreciate Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

I did. And being aware of the title of Mann’s seminal novella (but not of the first thing about its actual subject matter), I read that next. And was thus thoroughly gobsmacked all the way into the middle of the following week. Or to put it more precisely, I found myself incapable of writing anything for several months – and then finally, when standing on a remote beach in Ireland, watching the wind blow a layer of sand across the beach like a magic carpet, I struggled to find the words to describe the scene to myself. And when they came, it was a dam break, with words pouring out: a vocabulary that seemed to grow almost exponentially in the coming weeks.

You see? It’s that romantic thing – and that’s before you get to Visconti’s film version, with the lush sounds of Mahler’s third and fifth symphonies making up the score.

Not that I realised the romantic nature of the story at the time – that only emerged later, after that telling of the Nibelungenlied.

The sense of fate, of the tragic but somehow honourable – all that: a feeling of something outside – beyond – convention; raw and edgy, violent and noble at the same time.

So there you go. Yesterday might have been Valentine’s Day, but give me the power and the passion of the Nibelungen any day.

Give me the thorns and not the roses – or at least, if you’re going to give me the roses, gives me the thorns too.

Please.

Life and death in Venice

When Jane Hudson disembarks from her train in Venice, she’s full of excitement at the prospect of spending time in the beautiful city. But her awe at the beauty of the sights takes a blow when the sights that she sees include Italian men eyeing up women in a rather obvious manner.

As her dream holiday unfolds, Jane is torn: desperate to be her independent self on the one hand, but lonely on the other; shocked by the sexual openness that she sees around her, yet desperate for an experience that has eluded her.

And when she meets handsome antique dealer Renato de Rossi, he challenges a whole host of her beliefs about relationships.

Written originally for the theatre by gay US playwright and stage director Arthur Laurents, before being scripted for film in 1955 by the quintessentially English talents of HE Bates and David Lean (more famous for Dickens and deserts than romance) Summertime, Lean's own favourite film, is as astonishingly open work for the time.

It’s quite clear that there can be no hope of anything but a holiday romance, and Renato, separated but married, challenges Jane to question her illusions: that all romances could be out of the storybook of her dreams, with a complete set of idea criteria. Indeed, he even tells her that Americans are mixed up about sex.

So when Jane makes her decision, she is under no illusions, but chooses to embrace life. Extraordinarily, in terms of the 1950s, there is no price that must be paid by this unmarried woman who has an adulterous relationship, and the film closes with no moral judgment.

The judgment of the viewer, though, will surely be that she was right to grasp the opportunity: that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. It is better to have reached out and grasped the opportunity to taste the life-affirming power of love and lust, passion and sensuality, than to have fled in the belief that somehow those things are wrong unless governed by strict rules.

And it brings to mind another work set in the same city – Death in Venice. Thomas Mann’s novella, filmed in 1971 by Luchino Visconti and starring Dirk Bogarde in the central role, tells the story of acclaimed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who is utterly dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity.

Tired and disturbed by a strange encounter with a rough-looking man he sees on a walk, the writer resolves to take a trip to Venice. Once there, he is appalled by the appearance of an elderly man who has tried desperately to use make-up and a wig to make himself look young.

Once installed in his hotel, Aschenbach finds himself fascinated by the young son of an aristocratic Polish family who are fellow guests. Over the weeks, it becomes an obsession and, even when he realises that cholera is ravaging the city, he stays put, refusing to warn the family and convincing himself that, if the boy Tadzio dies now, he will never age and lose his beauty.

But even as Aschenbach tries to regain his youth, his own trips to the barber for hair dye and make-up a pathetic mirror of the man at the beginning of his visit, he realises what he’s doing and warns Tadzio’s mother.

A day later, as the family prepare to leave, the sickening author sits in his deckchair, watching the boy bathe one last time. Delirious, he sees Tadzio as an almost classic vision beckoning him. Aschenbach attempts to rise, only to fall back, dead from the cholera.

Mann, who spent a lifetime struggling with his own sexuality, partly intended the piece to show passion and sensuality as a disease. But it is far more than that.

For Aschenbach, at the end, has an epiphany: finally, he is full of joy – full even of life. He pays for it with his life, but his existence before that lacked anything but dedication to his work. Work as disease, denying the human being the chance to blossom fully, to become.

Mann, like Aschenbach, was disciplined and ascetic, his writing almost a duty. This was the Protestant work ethic applied to art. Perhaps he believed that, if he gave full rein to his own passions, it would kill him – or at least his work. Perhaps that, by submerging himself in his work, he could kill the passions. But perhaps he envied Aschenbach too, for that final epiphany: a salvation, if you will, that is earned at the last by his warning to the family to flee.

Unlike Jane Hudson, Aschenbach pays a price that we know of. But as with her, Venice opens him up to sensuality and pleasure: as with her, it breaks down the barriers of Anglo-Saxon repression and fear and even guilt, and offers him, however fleetingly, a moment of pure beauty.

Life and death intertwined in Venice. Two works created by two very different northern European artists, but both reaching a strikingly similar conclusion. To live fully, means to live sensually and passionately.

Girlies doing it for themselves

On the off chance that you’ve been off world for the last week or so, yesterday was Valentine’s Day.

Now in the dim and distant past, The Other Half announced to me that he isn’t “romantic”, so over the years I have become accustomed to 14 February being just like any other day. At least when it’s at the weekend, one doesn’t have to put up with hearing colleagues announcing their own plans for the evening debauch.

It does all, of course, beg a few questions. We’ve been together for almost 20 years and, for the first 10 or so, I’d send him a card but was quite used to the lack of any reciprocation. Yet in the second half of that sentence, I have begun to feel differently. There is even, occasionally, a little sense of annoyance. Why? Have I perhaps decided that I actually deserve a bit of that “romance” – however soppy it may sound? Or, worse still, have I started to succumb to the dread god of commercialism, and am merely now hankering after what Hallmark tells me I should have?

Whatever the answer, instead of pondering too long, I have the chance for a little girlie indulgence today – and fully intend to make the most of it.

Super League – the pinnacle of European club rugby league – has recommenced. So, packed lunch in his rucksack, The Other Half set off at 8.50 this morning for the twilight zone. Or Yorkshire, as it’s sometimes known.

Girlie plans can now be put into place.

Actually, most of those “plans” flew right out of the window at the first hint of reality – I can do (or not) what the hell I want: there is nobody else to answer to. In a fit of indulgence, I took a stroll to the nearest shop that I know of that sells crumpets, salving my conscience by buying an Innocent smoothie (two of my five a day) as well as the crumpets, which later dripped with good, unsalted French butter.

I took the time to sit in a café-bar near Colombia Road flower market and browsed the music section of the Observer, feeling so at one with the world that I even enjoyed a lengthy piece about Saint Bono of the U2 without feeling the need to snarl cynically.

Later, I messed around with the camera at home, producing nothing of value except a few lessons in lighting.

Then I chilled in front of the TV and watched some cricket.

Those plans had included serious amounts of this and serious amounts of that. And all of it worthy. But here I am now, a risotto on the hob (yesterday’s stock smells glorious as the Arborio absorbs it), tapping away on my laptop in the kitchen, feeling relaxed and at ease. Usually, this is the point at which I start guilt-tripping, as that old time Protestant work ethic invades my leisure, leaving me with a sense of having wasted hours simply by relaxing, but rest has a great deal of value all of its own. And for today at least, I have successfully banished such guilt.

The risotto is a simple one – more Jamie Oliver. Take ye basic rice dish, add lashings of wonderfully fragrant thyme, fresh stripped from the twigs, stir in rich Marscarpone at the end and serve with a topping of toasted breadcrumbs and slivered almonds. I promise you, I’m not depriving myself.

I have a single-portion almond and pear tart for dessert, which will be perfect as I will pour myself into my armchair and watch a film. Since this is still my post-Valentine girlie day, I’ve selected Summertime, David Lean’s beautifully shot tale of a repressed Anglo-Saxon spinster (Katherine Hepburn) on the holiday of a lifetime to Venice, being swept off her feet by a touch of Latin passion (Rossano Brazzi).

I can’t claim that there are any great artistic reasons behind this choice – although one could perhaps suggest that Brazzi was a piece of Italian art in his own right (and oh, he had taste – his beloved wife Lydia was more my shape than that of an Ava Gardner). I shall lech in quiet pleasure. I first remember seeing him as Emile de Becque in South Pacific … “Some enchanted evening” … oh ye Roman gods (even though he was a Bologna boy).

In those days I didn’t know what lust was, imagining naively that what was going on was love. Ah well, we all grow up – and I am unapologetic. I like the story too: all we girls, brought up with that Protestant work ethic and repressed senses, could do with a little of the Latin in our lives.

The Protestant work ethic has been shut in the cupboard in the hall, where it's thumping the door and squeaking in protest. But it can bang all it likes – it’s not coming out tonight.