While George Lucas shouldn’t really be blamed for every cut price, dollar store, sci-fi rip-off he inflicted on history after birthing Star Wars onto a numerous generation, you can’t help but imagine grabbing him by his plaid lapels and shaking him for all he’s worth after sitting though the excruciating experience that is The Shape Of Things To Come. I mean, it’s not like you could hold H.G. Wells accountable because even though this Canadian production is apparently based on his book, it follows it about a closely as I follow the happenings of reality television – e.g. hardly at all.
As you sit there, trying to work out what the hell is going on and – more importantly – why the hell you should even care, The Shape Of Things To Come just carries on regardless, like a busted, winded robot, content to be one of the cheapest, blandest, most watchable sci-fi epics I’ve ever seen. Still, at least a viewing helped me scratch a childhood itch.
It is the tomorrow after tomorrow – aka. the future – and earth is a barren wasteland after the much hyped Robot Wars caused untold devastation. As a result, mankind has retreated to the moon and lives under a dome dubbed New Washington while being dependant on an anti-radiation drug called Raddic-Q2, but despite all of that, humans seem relatively happy.
However, this is cut short when a cargo ship that was supposed to supplying Raddic-Q2 from Delta 3 suddenly ploughs into the dome which signifies a worrying shift in power. It seems that Omus, Delta 3s “Robot Master” (which is an actually job in the future, apparently), has overthrown Nikki, the planet’s previous leader and declared himself absolute emperor – which is a fairly gutsy move for a man in a purple cape.
While the Moon’s Senator, Smedley, wrings his hands at the news, science advisor Dr. John Caball decides to take action and commandeer the Starstreak, an experimental starship in order to combat his former student. En route to Delta 3 with his son, Jason, Smedley’s daughter, Kim and Sparks, a former member of Omus’ mechanical horde who has been reprogrammed from being an evil kamikaze drone into becoming a perky robot sidekick.
While the majority of Starstreak’s mission literally just seems to be “get to Delta 3”, meanwhile, on the planet’s surface, Nikki leads a meager rebellion against an utterly loopy Omus and his robot battalions armed only with poles and shields – but even if Caball can get his motley crew there in time and foil the depot’s evil schemes, can he survive the near lethal blast of radiation poisoning he absorbed long enough to get himself a dose of Raddic-Q2?
To start by breaking the fourth wall somewhat, I confess that this review of The Shape Of Things To Come is going to be something of a painful affair, because not only is the movie just bad on every conceivable level, but it’s just so unbelievably impossible to give the slightest toss about anything that’s going on, I honestly feel like I didn’t even watch it despite being grimly fixated on the screen like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. While there are many other issues going on with George McCowan’s wonky space opera, the most pressing one is that thanks to its punishing waves of bland, its literally impossible to focus on the plot for anything longer that fifteen seconds at a time before all the bleeping, techno-babble and atrocious acting literally pushes your consciousness out of your body like a dodgy hypnotist.
Aiding this perfect storm of interstellar crap is the fact that the film looks so cheap and features such uninspired design and effects work, it makes the average episode of Blake’s 7 look like it has the production values of one of the Avatar movies and it seems that the actor are split into two camps: ones who blatantly overact such as Barry Morse (who, as a veteran of uber-funky Space: 1999, should probably know better) and Jack Palance who once again proudly proves he would agree to act in anything as long as they let him chew the scenery like a ranting, leathery, middled-aged Unicron. However, the younger members of the cast are seemingly trying to address the balance with the rather risky notion of choosing to not act at all as the effort of keeping their Canadian accents in line presumably meant it was too hard to do both.
And then there are the robots. I’m not entirely sure why Jack Palance’s army of clanking cacophony of cogs and crankshafts has such the fearsome reputation that they do, but the top heavy, waddling, vending machines that are supposed to invoke fear look more like they desperately need help from us fleshy humans to navigate the sparse sets before the performers encased within break their damn necks. Vaguely looking like the Gonk droid from Star Wars has an illegitimate baby with the robot from Lost In Space, they only seem so adept at unalive-ing their victims because they’re considerate to run right into their grasp.
Now, if it feels like I’m taking easy potshots at a low budget production, I’d like to add that while similarly cash-strapped productions such as Battle Beyond The Stars or even the hysterics-inducing Starcrash are actually fun in some way shape or form, whereas this slice of space junk proves to be as irritating and offputting as sharing an escape pod with Jar Jar Binks, CHAPPiE and Ruby Rhod.
Still, when you’re not sniggering at the fact that Starstreak sounds like something you’d find in the back of a Stormtrooper’s underwear, I have to admit there are one or two sparse reasons that I’m glad I watched this space turkey with one of them being the sight of a giant, holographic Jack Palance leering at our heroes as he slowly rotates like a rotisserie chicken, and another being the actor wearing what looks like the jug bit from a water cooler over his head in order to drown out a sonic assault. However, what proved to be beneficial to me is that it turns out that I had seen this film at a very young age and the only bit I could remember is when one of Omus’ robots choose to dispatch a human in possibly the most un-technological method imaginable. Yes, I was traumatised when burly robots held their screaming victim in place while one of their number bashed his head in with a rock like a fucking caveman, but now I finally know what movie it was from, I can rest easy from my OCD musings.
I can live with cheap, and I can work with stupid – especially when there’s inadvertent chuckles to be had – but what I cannot abide when it comes to pulpy sci-fi is boredom and this movie has it in spades.
The Shart Of Things To Come.
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