Backs to the future

This summer, Hollywood celebrates
a darker tomorrow

by Peter Keough

Doomsday was last summer; in 1997 we learn to cope with, even profit from, past and coming disasters. We've come from Independence Day to Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day (opening this week), a remake of the French comedy Les compères, in which Robin Williams and Billy Crystal are two errant lotharios forced into domesticity when a former lover of both, played by Nastassja Kinski, convinces each that he is the father of her runaway child. Restoring the family nest might seem a pleasant escape after the Heaven's Gate tragedy, proposing a pre-millennial period when people will be too busy acting out apocalyptic fantasies in real life to go watch them on the screen. But that won't last. Ever mindful of sequels, Hollywood is looking beyond the end of the world to the special effects and high-concept opportunities available in what comes before and after.

This week, for example, Bruce Willis rebounds from the future despair of 12 Monkeys to the more upbeat dystopia of The Fifth Element. Directed by French neo-New Wave maverick Luc Besson, it's set in a 23rd-century New York City that has Willis as a futuristic Everyman again, a cab driver called on to battle single-handedly a vast field of antilife released every 5000 years from another dimension and overseen by Zorg, played by one of this summer's hardest-working villains, Gary Oldman. I think it's a good bet that after The Fifth Element we'll be safe from Zorg and his minions for another five millennia.

Another blast from the past in our future threatens in Steven Spielberg's sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (opens May 23 -- but remember that all film opening dates are subject to change), which by next year at this time should have packed in its first $500 million in grosses. That's all we know for sure about this project from the notoriously secretive demigod moneymaker, other than Jeff Goldblum's return in his hilarious role as chaos theoretician Dr. Ian Malcolm, and Richard Attenborough's as captain of industry John Hammond; the availability of Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, and Pete Postlethwaite as likely hors d'oeuvre for the resurrected antediluvian beasties; and the reassuring ad-copy line "Something has survived."

What if the Blues Brothers were undercover cops in yet another futuristic New York City and were pledged to protect the planet from unwanted alien immigration? Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, who have been through all this before in Volcano and Independence Day respectively, star as Kay and Jay in Barry Sonnenfeld's "Sci-Fi Adventure Comedy" Men in Black (July 2), which is based on the comic book by Lowell Cunningham. Dressed in cheesy dark suits, fedoras, and shades all reminiscent of Jake & Elwood's attire, they have it as their mission from God to track down an interplanetary terrorist plotting to assassinate a pair of alien ambassadors and set off a galactic conflagration. It sounds a bit like a recycled Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, but the presence of Linda Fiorentino as the cynical city medical examiner suggests some intriguing post-Roswell alien autopsies.

Reminiscent of another Star Trek episode (actually, the premise for Star Trek: The Motion Picture) is Event Horizon (August 1), in which Laurence Fishburne leads a band of 21st-century space jockeys in a mission to salvage the title spacecraft, a faster-than-light vehicle that disappeared seven years before only to return, like the monolith in 2001, in the neighborhood of the planet Jupiter. Will the visitant bode doom or a glorious new future? That's the question posed also by Robert Zemeckis's somewhat more down-to-earth Contact (July 11), an adaptation of the late cosmologist Carl Sagan's novel. Jodie Foster plays an astrophysicist who detects a signal from an alien civilization near the distant star Vega. The news electrifies the world, eliciting dread, hope, and opportunism from a cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, James Woods, and Angela Bassett. Who should be sent as the first human ambassador to the extraterrestrials? No doubt Forrest Gump's name will be kicked around.

With Richard Donner's Conspiracy Theory (July 25), paranoia passes from the cosmological to the microcosmic realm. In a 20th-century precursor to Bruce Willis's role in The Fifth Element, Mel Gibson plays a crusading New York cab driver with a bad case of ideas of reference. Everything suggests a nefarious conspiracy to him, with himself as the ultimate target. Julia Roberts as a federal district attorney is amused until Gibson's wild ideas start panning out, and before you can say Travis Bickle both are menaced by the nefarious Dr. Jonas, played by Marshall Applewhite look-alike Patrick Stewart.

These days, being driven about in a public-service vehicle commandeered by a violent nutcase is most likely to remind people not of Taxi Driver but of Jan De Bont's 1994 moneymaker Speed. De Bont gets a chance to extend the franchise with Speed 2: Cruise Control (June 13), and it appears he's got his work cut out for him. Sandra Bullock is back, her star dimmed somewhat by the woeful outing In Love and War. But replacing the vapid and serviceable Keanu Reeves as the hero is dour and phlegmatic Jason Patric, and in lieu of consummate bad guy Dennis Hopper we get the creepy but namby-pamby Willem Dafoe. And then the whole premise seems a bit leaky. A hijacked ocean liner? Leisurely compared to a bus barrel-assing through LA traffic. Not to mention the numerous production woes allegedly involved in the making of the movie.

At least Speed 2 looks to get off the starting line in time, unlike its behemoth oceanic competition, James Cameron's Titanic. This may be the most expensive movie ever made, with state-of-the-art special effects matched by flavor-of-the-month big-budget casting including Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; and its mammoth postproduction needs don't leave much hope that it can open as scheduled on July 2. Not to worry: for those who find entertaining, if not symbolic of life, the prospect of being trapped in claustrophobic vehicles at the mercy of malevolent powers, there are lots of other options.

Con Air (June 6), for one. Nicolas Cage is a newly paroled prisoner who bums a ride home on the all-convict air shuttle of the title. He should have taken a hint of what was to come after noting the presence of John Malkovich's Cyrus ("The Virus"), a "hijacking mastermind," on the passenger list. John Cusack plays a federal marshal on the ground in what looks like an obvious ripoff of Die Hard.

If you prefer your airborne hostages to be more distinguished (well, pending the Whitewater outcome), there's Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One (July 25). In an odd fusion of Petersen's In the Line of Fire and Das Boot, the film features Harrison Ford as the chief executive whose plane is hijacked by Russian nationalist fanatic Gary Oldman. Perhaps Ford might take a hint from former president Bush and bail out.

Back on the ground, folks have problems of their own. In Copland (August 1) Sylvester Stallone tries to play a human being again as the laughingstock sheriff of a quiet New Jersey town that owes its nickname to the predominance of police officers among its residents. When he uncovers corruption among said officers, he's torn between turning them in or backing up the boys in blue whom he admires but who despise him. The first-rate cast includes Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel; perhaps they gave Sly some tips on acting.

Someone who needs no such tips is Samuel L. Jackson, who in Kevin Reynolds's 187 (August 1) plays an inner-city high-school teacher who's traumatized after being attacked by a student. He returns a year later determined not to back down to the renegade student body or the ineffective system.

Copland and 187 are the exceptions this summer in that they confront such mundane issues as corruption, poverty, and the causes and consequences of crime. Most of the season's big movies aspire to something higher -- like comic books. If you took Samuel L. Jackson in 187, added half a foot or so in height, and put him in a metallic superhero costume, you might have Steel (August). Based on the DC comic-book hero, it stars Shaquille O'Neal as military researcher John Henry Irons, whose goal of discovering non-lethal weapons is subverted by bad guy Judd Nelson. When Irons learns that his nemesis is using his technology to arm Los Angeles street gangs, he goes back to the drawing board, designs an armored suit and a multi-functional hammer (John Henry, get it?), and becomes a Steel driving man.

In a sense, films like Steel are a new mythology that might well reveal more about the state of society and our culture than the more serious sociology of 187. At any rate, that's one way to feel better about the awesome box office that can be expected from Batman and Robin (June 20), which should give The Lost World a run for its money. Is there a homoerotic undertone to the dynamic duo's relationship? Is Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic? Does Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze represent the threat of global warming and a consequent new Ice Age? Is Alicia Silverstone's Batgirl an allusion to some Jane Austen novel, perhaps Mansfield Park? What will be the McDonald's tie-in, and how much will the merchandising of Robin's cool motorcycle, "The Red Bird," reap? In a world where the signs of the Apocalypse are being read everywhere, it's nice to know that in Hollywood summer movies, everything can ultimately become irrelevant.