Retro-review: Revisiting Flash - a-ah - Saviour of the universe!

Klytus, I'm bored. What play thing can you offer me today?

For pure, ridiculous fun, nothing beats Flash Gordon. It's sugar saturated sci-fi cheese. You couldn't, survive on a diet of such fare, but it makes for a great treat after a season of, say, The Wire (which is so grim it's like beating your hopes with a two by four for an hour), or a grueling day in the corporate trenches fighting rival fiefdoms. I mean departments. But enough of reality.

Every now and then you want leave all your concerns behind, slip the surly bonds of earth and flit about in the stratosphere of juvenile silliness.

If such is your desire, I humbly recommend the critically savaged 1980 Flash Gordon.

It's right up there with delights like Army of Darkness and Galaxy Quest.

Based on the comic strip by Alex Raymond (which was King Features Syndicate's answer to Buck Rogers), this movie doesn't just indulge in tropes, it revels in them. It's like someone sent the writer's internal sophistication censor packing and let his inner ten year old run riot: there are Hawkmen, an entire people of Robin Hood look-a-likes in tights (honestly, is there only one clothes manufacturer in Arborea?), floating cities, ray guns, sword fights, rocket cycles, hideous monsters, beautiful maidens and seductive femme fatales.

What's not to like?

According to the director, Mike Hodges (who also directed Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man), it's "the only improvised $27 million dollar movie ever made."

In one early scene, our eponymous hero actually identifies himself to the alien Emperor Ming as 'Quarterback, New York Jets' as this would have meaning to an alien overlord. Then he plays 'irresistible force' linebacker to Ming's flat footed Imperial Goon Squad lineup, and starts tossing about a metal egg like it's a football, all while Dale Arden cheers him on from the sidelines.

Flash shows aliens how it's done football style.
All astronauts in future should be NFL quarterbacks.

It's gob smacking, high octane kitsch and it's totally awesome.

That's the miracle of Flash Gordon.

You know immediately it wasn't made in the USA: European DNA suffuses the flick and there are few Americans in the cast. In particular, the over-the-top art direction (What isn't over-the-top about Flash Gordon?) is more reminiscent of Barbarella rather than Star Wars.

And then there's the sociopolitical subtext. It's most obvious in the hero and the villains, who embody stereotypes from the mid-Twentieth Century.

Ming's control panel of Dooooooom:
complete with hail, earthquake, and volcano options!
Does Walmart carry these?

Flash Gordon (Sam Jones), the all American football quarterback hero, simply put, is America: bright eyed, naive, idealistic, and brimming with hope and positivity. He's eager to stand up for what's right while being utterly oblivious to larger political ramifications. His exhortations to team up and fight Ming ("Ming is the enemy of every creature of Mongo! Let's all team up and fight him.") are so simple minded as to seem childish to the jaded barons of Mongo. These lords cannot even conceive of playing a positive sum game, so broken is their sense of altruism and justice.

Nor do they even know how to cry or feel empathy. So sad.

Outer Space Eurotrash Sophisticates. 'Pitiful earthlings, who can save you now?'

Flash's idealism stands in sharp contrast to these inhabitants of Mongo, who are all played by Europeans: Max von Sydow (Ming), Timothy Dalton (Barin), Brian Blessed (Vultan), Peter Wyngarde (General Klytus), Mariangela Melato (Kala), and Ornella Muti (Aura). They're sophisticated, cynical, duplicitous, Machiavellian, and engaged in endless, internecine struggle. They'd stab their own mother in the back. Dominated by their tyrannical Emperor Ming, they believe one can only win if others lose. Their hearts have been hardened by despotism and oppression, and they exist without hope or belief that things can be different.

It's a planet of narcissistic manipulators who lack all empathy. But they have sex appeal to make up for it.

Idealize, devalue, discard, baby.
The Mongons (?) lecture with sophisticated British or Italian accents, while Flash sounds like he just left a farm in Kansas. Ming is verbally dexterous, spinning webs with seductive words, while Flash uses them with the finesse of a Big Bud 747 tractor. Naive, honest, direct vs. seductive, beguiling, deceitful. Which would you prefer? Think of it as a self-revelation test.

Casting the urbane Max Von Sydow as Ming was a stroke of genius. The veteran actor contrasts beautifully with Sam Jones' Flash. Sydow's Ming is a brilliant, charistmatic megalomaniacal, narcissistic psychopath.

Flash identifies Ming's true nature within the first few minutes of encountering the dictator. It isn't hard: Ming is busy demanding a subject fall on his own sword to demonstrate his loyalty when our heroic trio of daring earthlings arrive. Flash rather unwisely identifies Ming, out loud, as a psycho (Speak truth to power!), which is overheard by a security robot. This inevitably leads to Flash being sentenced to death.

Rulers of the Universe don't like hearing the truth from alien country bumpkins.

Physcially, the pair are opposites: Flash has youthful good looks and great hair, while Ming is old and chrome dome bald. You know who the good guy is with a glance. Cinema short hand in action.

Flash himself goes through the film actually labelled, "Flash". In the font of the movie's logo. So Meta.

It's no surprise that the 25 year old Sam Jones, who did most of his own stunts, is outclassed by his European counterparts, most of whom were experienced stage actors. But it works: he's meant to be simple, all the better for sophisticates to look down upon. Flash is the American interloper, the earnest G.I., the bourgeois American, blundering about with a surfeit of good will and helpfulness while the shocked Mongo elites stand agog at his lack of manners and insight. Doesn't he know it's a dog eats dog world? That you cannot trust anyone? Cooperation and compromise is for rubes.

Wake up! Remember Munich!

Which brings us to Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol). Zarkov represents The Jewish Other, for, despite his European accent, he's not from Mongo. It's no coincidence Flash is accompanied by a Jewish scientist: hundreds fled Europe to escape persecution by the Nazis. Ming's minion Klytus, head of Mongo's secret police, even praises Hitler.

Yet Zarkov doesn't fit in on earth, either, where his theories got him expelled from NASA, America's science Mecca. He's a one man diaspora, who doesn't fit in anywhere, not quite. But he does work well with Flash, the living embodiment of the American Superego. Jim Crow and the uglier aspects of America couldn't fit on Zarkov's rocket, and didn't make it over to (European) Mongo. Resourceful, intelligent, and moral, Zarkov's a slice of Einstein mixed with secret agent. He's the brains of the trio.

Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) is the perfect female compliment to Flash, all earnest and well meaning American pie. She's also proves resourceful and spunky, as a New York gal should.

The film could be said to work on another level still, with Flash representing American entertainment, Hollywood, penetrating into Europe's higher brow but fractured cultural milieu. Hollywood was overwhelming European studios and establishing huge sci-fi blockbuster beachheads with hits like Star Wars in 1977.

Now it was time for The Europeans Strike Back. Many attempts have been made to mimic Hollywood's sci-fi success, such as the batsh*t insane LifeForce, but Flash Gordon is the one that successfully fused European and American DNA.

The capital looks like a great big red wedding cake.

Thoroughly tongue in cheek, and all the better for it, Flash Gordon knows it is silly and preposterous, like the fevered dream of a ten year old boy, a spiritual ancestor of Axe Cop, yet also manages to also be relentlessly fun and enjoyable.

The screenwriter,  Lorenzo Semple, Jr., also wrote for the Sixties Batman TV show, and it shows. Batman and Flash share a similar, campy sensibility, although Flash is buoyed by a far bigger budget and has better action sequences with real tension. That so much money was thrown at such an eccentric script can be disconcerting for some audience members who are more fiscally responsible.

In fact, Semple himself didn't want to make it a comedy:

"Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved... I never thought the character of Flash in the script was particularly good. But there was no pressure to make it any better. Dino had a vision of a comic-strip character treated in a comic style. That was silly, because Flash Gordon was never intended to be funny. The entire film got way out of control." 

And Dino only read Semple's scripts after they were translated into Italian:

"He reads English better than many people realize, but translates all of his scripts into Italian. We were living in Nantucket at the time, and his translator was a woman whose name I forget. She could barely translate the scripts; if it said, 'The tall, beautiful woman walked into the room,' she'd say, 'Oh, what a beautiful cat.'"

It just gets more absurd: on set, not only could many people not communicate on essential matters due to language barriers, not everyone was even on the same page regarding the tone of the film, at least according to Melody Anderson (Dale Arden):

"The director said, 'I want you and Sam to try to go for a relationship, make this as human as possible. Don't camp it up or go for laughs.' That's why the movie's so funny, because we didn't try to make it campy. In fact, I'm surprised that (people) are laughing, because we weren't out to make a funny film. In fact, De Laurentiis was very upset when he showed the film and people started to laugh, because he thought they were laughing at it and not with it. In fact, he re-did the cheerleading scene. He wanted it to be serious...with macho man out there. Play it very straight, the more you play it straight, the funnier it is. I think that's why Flash and Dale work, because of the way we played it."  

"I'm supposed to serious here, right, guys?… I'll just play it straight."

Sometimes when you skirt the edge of The Abyss of Total and Utter Catastrophe you wind up escaping with something unexpectedly, accidentally wonderful.

Personally, I love the film's humour and unrestrained, campy joie de vivre style, and wouldn't have it any other way.

The sets and costumes look like they were designed by a madman, something Dali might dream up, and the film has aged better for it. The art director, Danilo Donati, outdid himself with his grandiose, operatic sets and sexy-silly costumes of gold trim and spandex and guaze. There's just nothing out there to really compare it to, other than, perhaps, Barbarella or Fellini's pictures. Sadly, those are virtually unwatchable today. Frighteningly, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis actually wanted Fellini to direct originally.

Brrr.

Bullet dodged, there.

Lava lamp skies of pink, white, and purple swirl over the jagged gold and red capital of Mongo City, while ginormous trees stretch up to infinite heights in Arborea. Everything is warped and exaggerated, like in a fun house mirror. Mongo City is machined oppression, the fantasy of a control freak, while Arborea is nature run amok. It's a spiritually empty but scientifically advanced urban state vs. rural tree hugging druids who dress like Robin Hood. There is even a court jester of sorts in Arborea, a wise counsel for the stiff, Prince Barin. Barin doesn't like what his spirit guide says, but knows he needs to hear it. Techno-Emperor Ming would have such an insolent figure executed before breakfast. The Hawkman's floating sky city is airy and dream like, detached from the concerns of the rest of the world, their isolationist 'I stick my neck out for no man' position delivering them inevitably into subservience to Ming.

For divided the kingdoms of Mongo are easily dominated by the Machiavellian despot. As Princess Aura observes, "Every moon of Mongo is a kingdom. My father keeps them fighting each other constantly. It's a really brilliant strategy."

Sound familiar?

It should.

Flash and Barin face off on a spinning disk with extendable steel spikes.
Because… everything is better on a wobbly, spinning disk
covered in sharp spikes over a bottomless abyss.
Try it with your next company meeting!

There are great action sequences, and yet the goofiness is never allowed to undermine them or rob the film of (admittedly lighthearted) dramatic tension. It's a cartoon struggle for an alien world, but still a struggle, and not quite so wink-wink that you're thrown out of the adventure aspect entirely.

Most of the characters get at least a few instantly classic lines:

Princess Aura: But my father has never kept a vow in his life!
Dale Arden: I can't help that, Aura. Keeping our word is one of the things that make us better than you.

Ming: It's what they call tears. It's a sign of their weakness.

And then there's the kick-ass theme song. It was the first time a rock band scored a major picture (they'd follow it up with Highlander's score), and Queen threw themselves into the task with gusto. Dino had never heard of them before, but he was nothing if not willing to experiment. They came back with a soundtrack that makes you want to stand up and cheer, it's that feel good.

The lyrics bear repeating:

Flash - a-ah - saviour of the universe
Flash - a-ah - he'll save everyone of us
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Flash - a-ah - he's a miracle
Flash - a-ah - king of the impossible
He's for everyone of us
Stand for everyone of us
He'll save with a mighty hand
Every man every woman
Every child - with a mighty flash
Flash - a-ah
Flash - a-ah - he'll save everyone of us
Just a man
With a man's courage
He knows nothing but a man
But he can never fail
No one but the pure in heart
May find the golden grail
Oh oh - oh oh
Flash

Yeah. Go, Flash, go!

Flash is sentenced to death for defying Ming, while Dale is sentenced to… marry the lecherous despot. Hard to say which would be worse. Zarkov is shuttled off to be brainwashed and turned into an agent of the secret police.

Saved by a lustful and slinkily seductive Princess Aura, Flash must then endure the machinations of a jealous rival, the Prince Barin. Oh, those silly blue bloods. She's a little bit wanton, he's a little wooden woodie.

"You mean you two… and he… and I'm… Oooh, that's not good. Can you say, 'Triangulation'?"

Flash even has a nice, quiet one-on-one chat with Ming the Merciless along the way. Ming weaves verbal rings around him, and tempts Luke – I mean Flash – to The Dark Side by offering the young man a kingdom of his very own: the earth. After, that is, Ming's finally finished 'toying' with it. Which is a polite way of saying 'kicking the planet about and killing billions'. Ever noble, our man Flash turns the offer down and flies a battlecruiser into Ming's wedding.


It's a move right out of G.R.R. Martin's playbook.

Ming's minions are so decadent, so used to being on top and facing little to no real resistance, that when the revolution arrives they are poorly prepared for it and start to fold like cheap chairs.

Of course, Flash saves the universe in the end, as your inner 10 year old would expect. The naive young do-gooder and all American boy unites cynical, decadent alien aristocrats in opposition to real evil and triumphs in spectacular fashion. A new, better day dawns.

Boo-yah, baby!

The film's tone is supercharged feel good, and this is reinforced by the rocking sound track and zany dialogue.

The climax reunites the characters from earth (who, oddly, are rarely in each others' physical presence after the first third of the film) and Flash delivers all Mongo from Ming's oppressive grasp. Mortally wounded, the weakening emperor vanishes into his power ring, which clatters to the floor. Flash is informed the earth has been saved and jumps for joy into a freeze frame.

As the credits roll, Ming's ring is picked up by a mysterious, black gloved hand. We hear Ming's laughter, and the words, 'The End' appear on the screen, followed by… a question mark.

Is it really the end, after all?

Yeah, pretty much.

At least for this iteration of the franchise. Which may be just as well. Given the haphazard way it came together, recapturing the original's unintentionally madcap magicwould have been a very difficult task indeed. This was a freakish, one-of-a-kind happy accident.

But what we have is pretty awesome.

"Give me the sugar, baby!"

Flash delivers.

The nature of story: why sequels suck but we want them anyway.

I'm as guilty as the next person of wanting great stories and characters to, well, keep going. And going and going, like the Energizer Bunny. After all, it's so good, why stop? I wanted a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Arc. I wanted a Star Wars sequel, and a Matrix sequel, and a sequel to Batman.

And, God help me, I've wanted sequels to the sequels.

Be careful what you wish for, because you may just get it. Sequels infest the theaters: Ted II, Avengers II, Spiderman v2 II, Mad Max IV, Terminator V, and Jurassic Park IV to name a few. Heck, sequels are reviving Roman numerals.

And if isn't a sequel, it's a reboot. It's less about story and more about the franchise, and this is changing the nature of film.

Blockbusters are expensive and such risky undertakings, after all. Film execs are reluctant to stick out their neck and back an unknown property when they can green light a sequel instead. Batman worked before, it can work again. It's got an established track record, which is very reassuring when you're about to spend $120 million bucks. Hits in other mediums are also grist for the movie mill: Harry Potter, comic books, TV shows, games, anything with name recognition that can cut through the noise. Studios go big now or stay home, so we get micro budget indie projects for the Oscars and megabudget sequels for the bank account, and not much in between.

The film industry is becoming 'franchisified', and more like episodic television. Meanwhile, cable is becoming… more like the movies used to be.

With film, you start with the ending and work your way backward to the beginning. You push your characters as far away from the climax as you need to so they have a decent dramatic arc. They need space for their emotional, physical and spiritual journey. 

If a character must learn to be responsible, you start them out on their best buddies' couch playing video games all day. That establishes distance between who the character is and who they have to become. They need a flaw, like video game addiction, that must be overcome. And the flaw is  determined by the ending of the story and the challenge they must face in the film's climax.

Everything is tied in together. It's holistic.

The ending dictates the beginning, and the nature of the challenge dictates the problems the protagonist has, which are inextricably linked to the climax. Supporting characters are inversions and/or reflections of the main character, and exist to flesh out the protagonist and throw the hero's personality and values into sharper relief.

Take Star Wars. Luke is the naive farm boy who needs schooling in the ways of the world, so up pops Obi Wan Kenobi as the wise old man. Luke's earnestness and youthful enthusiasm is thrown into sharp relief by Han Solo, the cynical rogue. Princess Leia's pragmatism contrasts with Luke's idealism.

Characters bounce off of each other. They reflect. In Game of Thrones (which does this sort of thing extremely well) Varys is Order and is opposed by Littlefinger, who represents Chaos. Edard Stark is honor and principle, and he's played off against Robert, debauchery and indulgence, and Cersei, who's Machiavellian corruption.

G.R.R. Martin, an excellent writer with a background in television (Beauty and the Beast) constructs his characters not in isolation, but specifically in relation to the people they are in proximity to. The Onion Knight and Melissandra, for example, are externalizations of the struggle going on inside Stannis. We better understand them because the person next to them is an opposite in at least one personality trait or value.

Stories are delicately balanced webs of characters, events, and meanings. Nothing exists in isolation, and all the elements must relate to each other and make sense in all the ways real life doesn't. Even the environment is a reflection of internal struggle.

And there must be an emotional payoff at the end: we want to see characters who change profoundly after enduring terrible ordeals, emerging on the other side all the better for it. Why? Because this is dramatically satisfying. We all want to know that if we go through hell, there's a point to it.

Even if it's anti-story and the point is to know, and accept, that there is no point.

The bigger the change in the character, the greater the obstacles they overcome. The farther they fall, the higher they can rise, the more satisfied we are when the curtain goes up. Each story is, in a sense, a step towards enlightenment and meaning.

Everything in the film is a balanced part of a whole, and it works because it is part of a whole.

And this is why so many sequels suck: if the first film did its job right, everything has been resolved and the story is over. The main character has solved their crippling issue(s) and grown as a person. Which means there's nothing for them to fix in the sequel.

As movies are incredibly lean story telling machines, a good screenwriter is not going to waste time putting in extraneous problems that have no bearing on the plot, as they need that precious time for issues that are actually relevant.

In addition, when you plot backward from the sequel's ending, you can't just push the character anywhere you want. You need to take into account the ending of the first film, or the audience will be confused.

Which leaves you with characters who have no compelling issues, living happily ever after in peaceful places. So writers must shoe horn the character into a new conflict. This can feel unnatural and forced. Because it is.

A film is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end.

Or it did.

Our franchise saturated age has changed all this, which is why films are becoming more like television.

Writers and marketers now plan ahead and include extraneous material in movies specifically to set up sequels. Loads of sequels.

I'm looking at you, Marvel Universe.

They're embedding trailers inside the movie itself rather than running them beforehand. That's not all bad, as I rather like trailers. It's an art form in and of itself. But it should never be at the expense of the primary story. Sequel seed planting can slow down and hampers the main narrative. In addition, these hoped for spinoffs (unless they're Marvel) often don't happen because the film didn't do as well as expected.

So a film that's been made as a stand alone, such as the original Star Wars (George Lucas made it self contained because he never expected to be able to make the sequels, but still left threads untied to exploit in case he could… which just made it better), is inevitably a more satisfying emotional experience by its very nature. It has a self-contained, complete story, with meaningful arcs for the characters, and a satisfying conclusion. Sure, Vader gets away, which was a serial trope. But it doesn't take away from the fullness of the film's resolution. It's a real, solid ending, which can be a tough trick to pull off: create something self-contained and fulfilling which is also a stepping stone to a new narrative.

Any film with a cliffhanger is not a full story. It can't be, by its very nature. The journey is not completed, and so it is dependent, in part, on the other films in the series. If one of them fails, it diminishes the whole.

This is why so many 'grand arc' television series fall apart. They start out strong, filled with intriguing ideas and mysteries and twists. But they lead nowhere. Shows are all premise and no conclusion. Why? Because the writers do not start at the ending and they don't work their way back to the beginning.

They don't come up with an ending at all.

Why not? Studio executives don't want one. They want TV series to go on and on and on, forever, because they have yachts and summer homes and bills to pay (so do the actors and the crew), and they want to, understandably, keep their jobs. Who wouldn't?

The perverse thing is that the more satisfying a movie is, the more we want a sequel. Yet what makes a movie satisfying is that it tells a full, complete story. With resolution and character transformation.

So what do you do? The answer is to go for one of the two.

The focus is now on either high concept stories, where the characters are secondary, or they're built around characters who are themselves high concept. Self-contradicting archetypes who don't evolve but are so interesting, we don't care that they don't. Nihilists with hearts of gold, moral serial killers, cruel doctors, OCD detectives, sentimental assassins, and cannibal gourmands are the order of the day. Character flaws remain. Any flaw the protagonist has that's related to the climax is minor, so small and piddly that if it is resolved, it really changes nothing and can be forgotten in the next installment.

Welcome to The Franchise Era!

It started way back when Victorians demanded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle produce more Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle tried to kill the deductive detective off by throwing him over a waterfall, but it wasn't enough. Later the public clamored for John Carter and Tarzan and Solomon Kane to return, and then Buck Rogers and Philip Marlowe and Batman and Superman. High concept characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and more flooded into Penny Dreadfuls and later comic books and public consciousness.

They don't change, they don't evolve, they don't learn, and they've never gone away, God bless 'em.

Franchise characters, like most TV characters, remain static, frozen in time at the height of their entertainment value, frozen in cinematic amber, with at most only minor changes from season to season. Why? Because if they changed in any meaningful way, the adventures would naturally change along with them, because character and climax are inextricably linked. Change one, and you have to change the other to fit.

And if you fundamentally change the character, then they no longer fit with their supporting cast (who reflect old traits), or with the established challenges and villains (who opposed who the protagonist was, not who they are now).

Everything has to be revamped as a unit, or it becomes unbalanced, senseless, and unstructured.

And if you change the nature of the conflict, you change the premise of the show, the franchise itself, which changes the appeal of the show, which changes the audience, which changes the advertisers, which changes the budget, which changes the cast and the writers and the viewing time and so on.

Sure, our lovable archetypes are refreshed from time to time, but never fundamentally altered. At most, they are just changed into a new, updated form that will remain frozen until the next refresh. There will be no organic growth. Periodic updates are hyped like crazy but are more like someone applying a coat of contemporary paint than anything else. 

As a writer once told me, people watch movies for plot and arcs, and they watch TV for reassuring archetypes.

Episodic TV leads cannot have meaningful character arcs, as that would ultimately evolve the character out of the franchise, destroying it. Instead, we get static but compelling high concept characters going through the same sort of challenges, over and over again.

Which is much more like episodic television than what we once knew as cinema.

Meanwhile, cable shows are making limited length series that allow for complex character development precisely because they are not locked into the perpetual motion narration machine of the franchise model.

Cable is now producing more interesting, nuanced material than what we typically see on the silver screen.

Along with all the sex and violence, that is.

The franchises have their place, but so does film that illuminates the human condition.

Franchises provide magnificent thrill rides at the cost of deeper meaning and emotional impact. Those threads in the story web have been cut for the sake of…