Movie Review: Color out of Space (Just see it!)

A mix of Picasso, Geiger, and Lovecraft

I was awed by a great horror movie on Monday, and I've been wondering since if it's not the greatest horror movie I've ever seen. The film is an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's 1922 1927 novella The Colour out of Space that greatly improves the story in every way. It keeps the genius of the basic plot: a strange meteor crashes on a farm and has a horrific influence on the unlucky family nearest to it. It warps their minds and disfigures them. (A warning for animal lovers: it also affects all living things in the vicinity.

Crucial to this movie's success is the way director Richard Stanley and screenwriter Scarlett Amaris concentrate the action. In Lovecraft's pages, the story unfolds like cancer over two years. In this movie, it spans maybe four days. After a brief narration lifted from Lovecraft to set the mood, the film takes fifteen minutes to establish the characters. After that, buckle in, because the plot careens through crises with the speed and force of an avalanche. The mood is fevered, and the horror is nonstop. The characters are so well-established and acted their ordeal always seems real and urgent, even in moments of humor.

How else does the script and director Richard Stanley improve this story? Anyone who has read Lovecraft is familiar with the weaknesses of his writing: i.e. his two-dimensional characters; the shortage of dialog, with only brief passages of speech so badly depicted they make you wish Lovecraft didn't try at all.

Stanley has upgraded the story in every way. Where the characters in Lovecraft feel remote, Stanley retrofitted the tale with revised characters, armed it with great dialog, and put the best actors in the roles. The setting is completely modern-day. The visual effects combined with the cinematography are first-rate and rise to meet a spectacular ending, exactly the one Lovecraft described.

Also, they fix Lovecraft's complicated, convoluted archaic, story-telling structure, in which a narrator tells a third-hand story of an inexplicable disaster that happened forty years prior. The inciting incident is the presence of a dead-zone called "the blasted heath" in the middle of a New England forest. That approach seems to squeeze all tension and suspense from the tale.

Although Lovecraft wrote his story a century ago, it has influenced many films since. You might recognize it as being very similar to 2017's Annihilation. Instead of "The Shimmer," this meteor has "The Color," a quality that Lovecraft describes as "like no earthly colour." This makes it a psychic tint instead of a visual one, suggesting the presence of an entity that's both powerful and malevolent. The Color ends up being absorbed in everything. The water, the plants, the animals, and the people. The movie has to fudge on Lovecraft's "like no earthly color" concept, choosing a pink-purple, and showing it in mist whenever possible. Nicolas Cage gives a line that it wasn't like any color he'd ever seen. Also like Annihilation, the nature of the entity never gets any clearer by the end. As similar as the plot concepts are, the stories diverge so much that nothing in Annihilation spoils anything in this film. They are both worth seeing.

Nicolas Cage plays Nathan Gardner, the father and husband, and a hopelessly impractical romantic. He's transferred his family from city living to the remote country. His wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson) is a day-trader, a cancer survivor, and is the practical influence. They've moved from the city to the country with their three children. Nathan is comical at first, then gets serious as he goes insane. Nicolas Cage seems to be channeling every famous actor who ever played a psycho. The fate of two family members is indescribable. Here, the practical effects have none of the campiness of previous Lovecraft adaptations, such as From Beyond. The pity and helplessness the actors perform comes off as almost too authentic.

Yet, the parents are not the protagonists. Instead, the story begins and ends with their oldest child, Lavinia a late teen, played by Madeleine Arthur. Her character, a Wiccan, tries to protect herself with magic. In my opinion, it works. She seems least affected at first by the madness that seizes everyone else, but at a painful cost. She's also most aware of the danger and knows her parents can't be reasoned with about it. As the events overtake the characters, you can miss her character arc, but it's explicit.

Madeiline Arthur as Lavinia: suffering a fate worse than prom

With all the flaws in his writings, Lovecraft was a savant who wrote poetry starting at 3-years-old, a visionary whose work opened up whole new avenues for the horror genre. He freed it from dependence on traditional religions and myths. Also, he originated the subgenre of cosmic horror. In tales such as The Colour out of Space, the spiritual and material overlap or are one, and the universe is fundamentally incomprehensible, dashing all human assumptions and hopes. It's also inhabited by monstrous impersonal gods and creatures of immense power, as unaware of humankind as they are impossible to influence or reason with. Lovecraftian gods are worshipped, not because they'll help or save their believers, but because the believers have no will about it. Horror writers continue to develop these tropes today.

While watching, I never asked why the characters don't flee when things got weird, a common complaint of horror movies. In Color, it all happens so fast, with the characters' sanity undermined first. In their lucid moments when they try to leave, all of their plans are dashed. Oh, and the Color also jams cell phone reception, a touch necessary in every horror story today.

I'm pretty jaded but I was actually as scared during this film as I was during Alien forty years ago. For anyone whose eye's glaze over reading a dense paragraph of a Lovecraft story, who then asks me what could possibly be so worthwhile beneath the granite, I can now just point them to this movie. I couldn't do that before because no movie prior ever truly captured a Lovecraft story and played it without any camp or irony. 

The epilogue, like the beginning, ends with a narration that's mostly lifted from Lovecraft; a deserved tribute to a writer who originated this captivating story a century ago. 

EDIT 10:35 2/2/30 The story was actually published in 1927, not 1922.

Philosophical atheism

The real philosophical difference between atheism monotheism isn't really over God but over the spiritual world and spiritual processes. The atheist says those are empirically and logically unsupportable. By consequence, this means no God, i.e. no supreme being of any kind exists, and no means to "hear" prayers if He did exist. Also, no ghosts, no demons, no devils and no angels.  It implies all revelatory scriptures are works of fiction and/or philosophy. Psychic phenomenon are also negated. If superior beings are discovered to exist, an atheist expects their powers to be strictly contained within the universe and following its laws, known and unknown. There is no survival of the soul after death, no afterlife of any sort.

The atheist sees faith i.e. "belief in" as only a mental process that has no bearing on a person's destiny, eternal or otherwise, unless acted upon in some material way.    

The monotheist will argue that the universe could have never come into being without a creator because something can't come from nothing. But then, where would God have come from? Is it more likely nothing created God & God created the universe vs nothing creating the universe direct? It would seem the second one skips a step, but that's only a wild guess. We know there's a universe. No believing in it is necessary. No such self-apparent evidence exists for God. 

We can't know what happened 13.79 billion years ago when the known universe began. We only guess. Before that time, nobody has a guess. Guesses aren't faith. Guessing there's a God is of no benefit when there's no spiritual process that rewards the right belief. A guess about the origins of the universe is fixated too far in the past to have any benefit now. Whatever benefit the monotheist receives from correct belief are either psychological or material and are provided by the people around him.

And that's what's been on my mind.  

Obstructions to writing

I got up with an idea for writing blogs. Unfortunately, my political blog (An Arch Liberal) required an article I read last night on Daily Kos. It's gone from my browser history. I was going to write a different post here from you're seeing now but while l searched for what should have been easy to find, I forgot what I was going to write here.

If I can't get writing done, it's usually due to one of two or both things: a technical problem, or housework. For the former, I don't think I'm quite old enough or sleep-deprived enough that my technical judgment has slipped. Like just now. I need to turn on my backup program, but as soon as I do it, it's going to prompt me for permission to backup, and since it's been off for 12 hours, these are going to come one after the other, (Yes, I have to adjust that.) So, to remind myself to turn it on when I'm done here, I set alarm for fifteen minutes in the future. When I did it, though, I noticed the PC alarm didn't have labels. So, I canceled that out and used my phone.

Meanwhile, my cat bothers me for affection, and usually, I have no problem unless I'm already distracted and I'm facing some kind of frustration. Then I snap at her. A bad habit I want to quit. It stresses her out and that's the last thing I want to do to my constant companion.

Now, I might avoid this aggravation if I only demanded less from technology. But for efficiencies sake now that I'm committed to writing, I feel like I have to find ways to get more done, even if it requires time to put things in place.

And then there's insomnia. I can't get to sleep before 4, sometimes as late as 6. This almost guarantees I can't get 8 hours of sleep. After struggling with this for years, I'm convinced the problems is intractable, at least in isolation. Probably I'd sleep better if I got more exercise. I'd like to commit an hour a day to it. But I don't want to go to a gym. If I only have an hour, the time dressing out, getting to the gym, exercising, showering, dressing back in, getting back home, is too much. Besides, gyms count on the fact that you won't use them but will still pay for it. That's a key to their business model. Any exercise has to be done in my place, and in a way that won't disturb the neighbors: no jumping jacks or jumping rope. Or around my place, like brisk walking, jogging being out of the question.

I am now sixty. I am losing physical strength and ability. This is shown with the fact that when I take out the trash, do laundry, and vacuum the floor, my day is over, physically and because I'm just slower. That's unsatisfactory.

Now, I have to go and apologize . . . to my cat.

As I write, she studies me from above.

 You might not be able to tell by her face, but she's actually looking pretty sad.

I'm a poet?

It looks like a have some talent as a poet. So, I'm planning on going to an open mic this week.

And that's all I can write. I'm so damn tired now.

The mailman ate my rent

I mailed out January's rent on December 27. Last week, my landlady told me she hadn't received it. I wrote another check. As I did, I knew that the original would probably come back undeliverable for some reason. Today, it arrived back (Redactions mine, not the Post Offices):

Apparently, USPS was hungry. That note enclosed is an apology.

This is my first effort at altering a picture. Very good if I'd say so myself.