Slow sci-fi, magic swords

This month’s home entertainment offers artfully shot, slow-paced, retrofuturism based on a cult Scandi art book and a high definition release for one of the seminal classics of Hong Kong cinema

Tales from the Loop Created by Nathaniel Halpern, US 2020 Streaming on Amazon Prime

Tales from the Loop is a perfect example of slow sci-fi. You might already be familiar with the inspiration for the series. Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish artist whose work has received a lot of attention over the past few years. Capturing a child’s view of the 1980s, infused with abandoned robots, anti-grav ships and strange government installations, his artwork is beautiful, contemplative and haunting: there have been art books, a role-playing game, and now a TV series. Is it possible to capture the beauty of Stålenhag’s art and translate it into an eight-episode series? The short answer is yes.

Written by Nathaniel Halpern and Stålenhag, the series is transplanted from the latter’s native Sweden to the US. It follows the experiences of residents of the town of Mercer, Ohio, situated above the loop, a machine built to unlock the mysteries of the Universe. While the switch across the Atlantic caused some concern among fans, the tone is perfectly preserved.

Over eight hour-long episodes

Tales from the Loop tells eight stories centred on encounters with the technology that litters the landscape. There are body swaps, time-slips and AI, but at its heart the series is about people, and how these experiences change them.

A TV show based on a series of static, albeit evocative, paintings would be easy to get wrong, but not here. The cinematography is stunning, and the succession of beautiful, images will make your heart soar. Each episode has a different director – including Jodie Foster, So Yung Kim and Andrew Stanton – but the series emerges as a coherent whole in which main characters from one episode become background characters in others, and events in one story have consequences further down the line.

This is not Stranger Things, probably the most obvious comparison because of the Eighties setting and focus on childhood stories. Tales from the Loop has a much slower pace, having more in common with Ray Bradbury, Arrival ,and Roadside Picnic. The soundtrack reflects this, offering an amazing series of compositions by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard Morgan. Whether it’s the sparse piano of ‘Walk to School’ or the thrumming strings of ‘The Fight’, the music perfectly captures the tone of the series.

As I said, Tales from the Loop is all about the people, and while the series doesn’t have the demonic monsters or alien invaders of other sci-fi shows, the threats are just as menacing: cruelty and thoughtlessness have long-lasting consequences, and people make choices that have devastating results. Characters are shattered by the unintended outcomes of their interactions with the abandoned technology waiting to be discovered in the woods and fields of Mercer. These are incredibly human stories that integrate the technological without pivoting away from the emotional. If you’re anything like me, you will find the room getting very dusty during episodes such as ‘The Echo-Sphere’, ‘Transpose’, or ‘Home’. There are no easy answers here, but there is humanity. Tales from the Loop will break your heart several times over, while showing the silence of loss and the grief and beauty of change that cannot be reversed. Steve Toase

★★★★★

Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain Dir Tsui Hark, Hong Kong 1983 Eureka Entertainment, £14.99 (Blu-ray)

This is one of those movies that seemed to come out of nowhere, leaving us awed with delight by an amazing glimpse of a rich Chinese fantasy word. In his commentary on Zu: Warriors ,the American film historian James Oliver called it “prophetic”.

Originally released in Chinese cinemas in 1983, it certainly seemed to herald some important developments. It fed into what was called the Hong Kong ‘New Wave’ of the 1980s, which spawned a whole generation of Chinese and Taiwanese auteurs, and it was Tsui Hark, to some extent, who led the charge, with a series of films that seemed to dramatise his personal frustration with the old colonial censorship while confronting new but conflicting political loyalties.

The film grips from the start, when deserters from two opposing armies flee into mistshrouded hills to escape the relentless strife of this world. Our hero takes refuge in a haunted cave on Mount Zu and is attacked by vampiric spirits. He is rescued by a Daoist master and his flying swords, and they clash with a firehurling Buddhist monk in pursuit of a terrifying Blood Demon. When the monk is possessed by the demon, they seek refuge in a mysterious enclave of female sorcerers headed by the Ice Fairy. Despite her anger at the intrusion into her magical solitude, the ethereal Ice Fairy attempts an exorcism, but becomes possessed herself. The Daoist master fails to cure her and we learn that the Demon can only be overcome by the ‘Twin Swords’. Our hero and the monk’s disciple set off to find them, meeting an immortal with prehensile eyebrows called White Brows. Together they convince the female immortal who guards the mystical swords to part with them… and, as the swords are united, the Demon is vanquished.

Before the story launches into this frenetic tale of magic and supernatural beings, it begins with an epic battle between first two (then several other) armies. The reason our hero deserts is that he is spiritually tired of being trapped in this world of endless misery. The point is underlined when the attentive viewer notices

Characters are shattered by the unintended consequences

that the fighters of all the armies are dressed almost identically, the factions distinguished only by a brightly coloured scarf. The men escape because they work together. The Buddhist monk and the Daoist master overcome their traditional opposition to jointly tackle the Blood Demon. And in the finale, to avoid their looming fate, the two magic swords and their owners are necessarily merged into a single weapon. This is a powerful subtext for the ordinary Chinese at any level of their uneasy history … and, ironically, it works as well for uniting the Communists as it does the downtrodden against the warlords and other oppressors.

The cultural influence of Tsui Hark’s genre-spanning films cannot be overestimated: many of them inspired such popular series as Once Upon a Time in China, Chinese Ghost Story, Swordsman ,and Detective Dee (to name a few); also, many of his disciples and actors went on to distinguished careers of their own.

It is said that Tsui Hark began work on Zu: Warriors having been inspired by Star Wars; but he told interviewers later that he was simply aiming for the same level of success. Yet his mark on Hollywood has been more artistic than financial; he was cited by John Carpenter as an influence on his Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

Much discussion of the film praises Tsui Hark for combining Hong Kong’s long tradition of action cinema (wuxia) with special effects provided by a team of Western technicians (some from George Lucas’s ILM). Tsui Hark had a reputation for experimenting with new cinematic technology. He once told an interviewer that he had to recruit and train his own technical team, and that while he used CGI technicians from Hollywood to train them, it was his team that did the actual work. The results were not always successful, Hark later confessed, as his students got colours wrong or failed to remove the wires used by ‘flying’ actors. This edition of the film actually preserves such production mistakes. It was good to view it again, knowing that its ‘prophetic’ subtext still shines through the occasional clumsiness. Bob Rickard

★★★★★

Fast forward to 1982 for Blood Tide. Here, a laid-back James Earl Jones hunts for treasure on a Greek Island, but instead wakes a legendary sea creature from centuries of sleep. To be honest, I felt like I needed waking from centuries of sleep after this. Sure, the locations are lovely, but I can barely remember what happened in this tedious film. That’s not a good sign, really.

Next up is Dream Demon from 1987, where bride-to-be Jemma Redgrave is plagued by surreal nightmares: giant beetles, public underwear moments, maggoty china dolls… you know the drill. Is she just stressed about marrying a caddish Falklands war hero? Or is there something more spectral at work? Two tabloid journalists feature heavily and are played by… wait for it… Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail. To think that when looking for Britain’s answer to Freddy Krueger the producers saw Auf Wiedersehen Pet on ITV and shouted “Stop the clock… we have our monsters!” Brilliantly inspired or dangerously insane? You choose. It starts well enough, with Redgrave slapping her fiancé’s head clean off in the opening sequence. Yet this spurting start is something of a tease really. The rest of the film plods, but amuses too; as when Nail and Spall pull on their latex appliances and start calling Redgrave ‘dog meat’.

Finally, we whizz to present day, for 2019’s After Midnight. Here a man mopes around his farmhouse after his girlfriend ups and leaves. Why did she go? Will she return? And what the hell is that bizarre cryptid lurking in the woods near the house? Reviews of this indie ‘romance horror’ include phrases like ‘dreadfully boring’, ‘useless’ or ‘terribad’. True, the film is pretentious at times, and it’s so slow you’ll feel your clothes going out of fashion. Yet there’s still an earnest attempt at depth here, which I kinda liked.