No doubt about it — this will be the summer of The Clones. The zealously hyped and awaited Star Wars: Episode II (May 16) and about a dozen other major releases will sport numerals in the titles — and then there are the numberless other remakes and adaptations. No one looks to summer movies for originality, and as for escape, these films venture more into the realm of the familiar and the compulsively repetitive than into anything new or imaginative. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it still makes a killing at the box office.
For this state of affairs we can thank clone master George Lucas, whose original Star Wars, which seemed so fresh and invigorating 25 years ago, has spawned the evil empire of high-concept, market-driven genetic duplication that passes for summer filmmaking. The attack of the movie clones looks to be irresistible: The Sum of All Fears (May 31; Clones aside, all these release dates are subject to change), Men in Black II (July 3), Stuart Little 2 (July 19), Halloween: Resurrection (July 19), Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26). The assault isn’t limited to mainstream films — Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (August 2) follows up his breakthrough sex, lies and videotape — and it won’t end with the summer, since we’ll still have Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (November 15) and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (December 18) to look forward to.
Still, there’s more than simple duplication and repetition at work here. Almost all these films involve a secret of some kind, a concealed identity, past, weapon, code, or desire, or else they revolve around a cabal or conspiracy or alternate reality. The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Memento, and even A Beautiful Mind touched on paranoid suspicions, but not to the extent of this summer’s movies. Even the "original" efforts — Sam Raimi’s big-screen version of the Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man (it opened last week), Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (June 21), and M. Night Shyamalan’s new paranormal blockbuster, Signs (August 2) — seem obsessed with the enigma of appearance and reality.
Has this all arisen from the national mood of dread and suspicion following September 11 and been nurtured by the Enron and Catholic-priest pedophilia scandals? Most of the summer’s films were conceived a year or more ago, of course, but Hollywood, despite its own superficiality, has a knack for going beyond the obvious issues bruited in other media. It’s in the business of selling dreams — or nightmares — and sometimes it can probe the cultural subconscious, turn our darkest and dirtiest little secrets into marketable fantasies, and so provide a prophetic look at future shocks.
Secret agents
Not since the heyday of the Iron Curtain have there been so many films about secret agents — I guess a worldwide war against terrorism can do that. The current atmosphere suits bestselling writers Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, whose brand of potboiling espionage thriller looked in danger of being left out in the cold with the fall of the Evil Empire.
In Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of Clancy’s 1991 opus The Sum of All Fears (May 31), Ben Affleck takes over the role of Jack Ryan from Harrison Ford as the grumpy CIA spook. Here he combats a nuclear threat from an Austrian neo-Nazi (now that’s a demographic we don’t need to worry about offending; the original novel’s villains were Arabs). Morgan Freeman co-stars. Meanwhile, Ben’s pal Matt Damon does a variation on his Tom Ripley in former indie director Doug Liman’s adaptation of Ludlum’s 1980 The Bourne Identity (June 14). He’s a bullet-riddled amnesiac who needs to find out who he is before terrorists and various bad guys do him in. Sounds like a metaphor for the US, and in fact seems the film itself has undergone its own identity crisis in the form of rewrites and reshoots that have delayed its release. The eclectic cast includes Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, and Brian Cox.
If we can’t laugh at the things that threaten our very existence, what are movies good for? Hence the proliferation of spy-thriller parodies. Joel Schumacher’s Bad Company (June 7), like the woeful Big Trouble, got sidetracked by September 11, since its plot also involved a suitcase nuke, this one wielded by terrorists in NYC. Chris Rock is the raffish twin brother of a murdered CIA agent who must take his place on the case. Whether the affair requires more than 48 hours is unclear; Anthony Hopkins has the Nick Nolte role as Chris’s grizzled superior.
Joking about terrorism is one thing; taking the name of a movie franchise in vain another. Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26) almost had the offending member in the title cut when the James Bond people threatened litigation because of the similarity to a famous 007 film. Goldmember is the name of another baddy played by Mike Myers, whose multiple identities in this sequel include familiar faces Fat Bastard, Dr. Evil, and, of course, the title international man of mystery. Throw in time travel to the ’50s and the ’70s, a cameo by Michael Caine as Austin’s dad, and Destiny’s Child’s BeyoncŽ Knowles as kick-ass blaxploitation agent Foxxy Cleopatra and the result is bound to be a distraction from whatever awful things are happening in the real world at the time. Jay Roach helms again.
Amnesia, shape shifting, and alien terrorists return in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II (July 5). In a reversal of the original film, Will Smith plays the veteran agent who must enlist his now retired and memory-erased former partner (Tommy Lee Jones) back into the extraterrestrial INS agency of the title. Together they combat the sultry Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle), an evil E.T. who can morph into a Victoria’s Secret model. Expect a cameo from the ultimate morphing alien, Michael Jackson.
Secret lives
Secret agents working for the government might arouse more suspicion than sympathy in a world where they know everything about us and we know nothing about them, Case in point: Minority Report (June 24), the long-awaited adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story by Steven Spielberg about a future dystopia in which crimefighters employ precognition to incarcerate felons before they break the law. Why hasn’t John Ashcroft thought of this? Tom Cruise as a police agent gets hoisted by his own petard when he’s pegged as a future murderer and becomes a fugitive seeking vindication.
Given this kind of social oppression, who wouldn’t invent a secret identity in order to have a good time? Oscar Wilde had the idea a century ago in the arch farce The Importance of Being Earnest (May 24), and it’s being adapted by Oliver Parker (who did a fair job on An Ideal Husband), with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth as the pair of hedonistic fops who go Bunberrying. Reese Witherspoon as Cecily and Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell also get to swap bons mots.
This need for an alter ego to act out one’s taboo desires provides the premise for several more films. A selfish, unmarried and childless slacker (Hugh Grant at his best) gets in touch with his inner single parent (all right, it’s partly a ploy to get into the pants of Rachel Weisz) in About a Boy (May 17), an adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel from Chris and Paul Weitz (American Pie). A Yeshiva student played by rising star Ryan Gosling gets in touch with his inner Jew-bashing skinhead in Henry Bean’s provocative The Believer (May 31). And a Rodmanesque basketball player (Miguel A. Nœ–ez Jr.) gets in touch with his feminine side when he takes on the WNBA in Jesse Vaughan’s Juwanna Mann (June 21).
Sometimes a secret identity is just a matter of survival or making a living, as is the case in The Road to Perdition (July 12). Sam Mendes’s follow-up to American Beauty adapts the Max Allan Collins & Richard Piers Rayner graphic novel about a Depression-era family man, played by Tom Hanks, who makes ends meet by making hits for the mob. Paul Newman, Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony LaPaglia fill out the outstanding cast. In the postmodern Simone (August 16), Al Pacino (who should know better about twisting the truth — see Insomnia, below) plays a washed-up director who revives his career when he invents a computer-generated Galatea — the digitalized star of the title. Catherine Keener and Jay Mohr co-star; Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) directs.
Secrets and lies
We all know what happens when we first practice to deceive — just look at the latest intergalactic mess of betrayal, lies, and mistaken identity in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (May 16). Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) enlists an army of clones (talk about duplicity!) to protect Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman); meanwhile young Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is getting the hots for her, and that distracts him from his Jedi Knight training with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor). Almost makes you long for the simple-minded inanity of Jar Jar Binks!
Or maybe something more down to earth, like Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (May 24), a remake of the 1997 Norwegian psychological thriller. Al Pacino plays a veteran LA police detective who accidentally — or is it? — shoots his partner while pursuing a killer in Alaska. He ends up collaborating with the suspect he was pursuing, a detective-story writer played by Robin Williams, to cover up the deed. If that’s not enough to keep you awake, there’s the 24-hour summer Arctic days and Nolan’s knack for re-creating subjective mental derangement ˆ la Memento.
As for Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (August 2), his alleged sequel to sex, lies and videotape, it apparently confronts the deception of cinema itself, with a film within a film and lots of raw improv from a cast including Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, and Catherine Keener. Then there’s Shyamalan’s Signs (August 2). Mel Gibson joins the director in this tale of a farmer who’s lost his wife and his faith and then wakes up one morning to find crop circles in the cornfields. Is it a prank? An alien marking? A warning of the Apocalypse? Kevin Costner from Field of Dreams messing with his head? Like many of this summer’s movies, this one may well offer us signs of things to come.
