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power of the daleks

Fascistic Beasts and Why You Shouldn’t Fight Them

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SPOILERS / TRIGGERS

I’m going to generally assume you’ve seen this film and the previous one.

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It is entirely apt that the poster for The Crimes of Grindelwald features a crowd of people wandering about looking confused; it’s both an apt depiction of the film and of the audience on their way out of the cinema.

An even better encapsulation: the sinking of the Titanic features, briefly, as a throwaway and perfunctory period reference, in a flashback scene in the middle of an infodump, part of the resolution of a pointless subplot… and nobody asks why the wizards on board didn’t stop it sinking.

Bluntly, this film is a mess.  The plot flaps around, bifurcating into dead end after dead end.  Things are set up and not paid off.  When the payoffs do arrive they are sudden, arbitrary, and unsatisfying.  There are lots of events but nothing really happens.  Nothing is achieved.  Every time you think progress might be made you find yourself stuck in a new subplot surrounded by characters who are multiplying around you like those cursed goblets in the final Potter film.   

The first Fantastic Beasts movie had a more than incipient case of this, with the subplot about a plutocrat Jon Voight and his two sons, on top of the subplot about witch-hunters, and the plot about Grindelwald in disguise hunting a powerful cursed child… all on top of the stuff about Newt getting entangled with new friends and local magical authorities in 20s New York while trying to recapture the magical creatures that escaped from his case.  This last would’ve made a perfectly entertaining little movie all by itself.  

The main attraction of the first film – the likeable main characters; played by a uniformly charming cast – is squandered.  The core cast do their best but they get very little time together, and even less in which they can have fun.  The mood is dour compared to the first film.  These stories about people with magic wands who conjure bats made of bogeys at each other are getting Dark and Serious again.

The colour pallette has been drained correspondingly.  The first film allowed us a bit of sunlit sepia in 20s New York; this gives us 20s Paris almost in monochrome.  Just as everyone is starting to snap out of that trend for washed-out colours and oppressive shadows, David Yates is digging his heels in and making Wizarding World movies the same murky way he shot Half-Blood Prince.  Some of the production design is nice, especially the art nouveau interior of the French Ministry of Magic – even if it’s always a bit too evident in advance which era cliches the production designers will give a perfunctory magic twist.

But the overall grey uniformity of the film – also mirrored in the poster – is fitting for such a lifeless experience.  A lot of effort is expended seemingly just to get new characters in place ready for future installments.  They’ve tried to cram lots of set-up for the next movies into this film, almost as if they realised they came perilously close to telling a self-contained tale last time.…

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Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall’s office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems… all their problems.

“It can do many things,” agrees the Doctor, “but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them… without pity…”

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

“I – AM – YOUR – SER-VANT,” it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it’s a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it’s the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen’s orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen’s own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races… has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

“WHY – DO – HU-MAN – BE-INGS – KILL – HU-MAN – BE-INGS?”

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.

(UPDATED 21/11/13) …

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The Power of the Zargoids (Reconstructed)

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What follows is a substantially rewritten version of something I wrote AGES ago and originally posted at my old site. The original version struck me as woefully inadequate (and embarassingly gushy… which is a fault of mine) when I reread it recently.

Is ‘The Power of the Daleks’ a parable about a democracy destabilised by fascists or about an authoritarian society destabilised by liberals, or even people who think of themselves as leftists? Well… the answer is, of course, yes.

If this is about the rise of fascism, there are some problems with it. Bragen works as a sort of fascist, scheming to replace a relatively soft regime with an authoritarian one which he will rule with an iron fist. But the presence of the Daleks muddies this, separating the barbarism of fascism from fascism as a political movement. The Daleks have always been symbols of totalitarianism so, when they turn on the astonished rebels, it makes it hard to see the rebels as analogous to the Nazi party. If the rebels are Nazis, it should be they who are persecuting the ethnic minority in the colony… and that’s the Daleks! And the depiction of fascism is inadequate anyway because it is depicted as the work of one man acting on his own psychological motives. The story manages to notice that fascism emerges from social democracy, that it is a mass movement which can mobilise some popular support and appear radical… but predicates it on one man’s ambition and offers no context for it, no recognition of the fact that it is a form of class war waged at times when the capitalist system is (or perceives itself to be) under intense threat from crisis, instability and rising working class resistance and mobilisation.

But a full analysis of fascism as an actual historical phenomenon isn’t what the story is trying to do. And, in any case, the rebels are never conclusively identified as a fascist movement… and nor is the Governor’s regime ever conclusively identified as democratic. It might be an unelected oligarchy, for all we know. It has military undertones, almost like the colony’s social superstructure is built upon the ranks and hierarchies of a military expedition. Hensall seems happy for Bragen to acquire more and more police muscle as long as he thinks they’re his to call upon. Hensall’s government certainly seems to operate very much behind closed doors amongst small groups of plummy-voiced men… but then so does ours and we’d call ours a “democracy”, meaningfully enough as long as all we’re doing is distinguishing it from places like Saudi Arabia. In any case, it’s perfectly possible that the rebels are a liberal or leftist movement reacting to an authoritarian regime.

The rebels don’t seem to be an ideologically revolutionary organisation. They certainly behave like one… although they may simply be a non-revolutionary organisation forced into clandestine meetings by authoritarian repression… though, the guards who’d do the repressing are commanded by the rebel leader, so…. hmm, it’s all a bit confusing.…

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