2012:

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From Truth vs Fiction on Brain Pickings

I saw Timo Vuorensola in November on a panel at Futures of Entertainment and he spoke at length about how the film has been financed and put together. This was the first time I’ve seen anybody put crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing in a credible business context, and the first time I’ve contemplated the prospect of blockbuster movies being produced in this way. With all the fallout from SOPA/PIPA, I can’t think of a better time to be invading multiplexes with a film pitched as INGLORIOUS BASTARDS meets SIN CITY meets ‘old French movies’. Expect the space hun to be big in 2012.

And, if that’s not enough Alan for you…

Read all about it on Brain Pickings.

I have nothing to add.

Bleeding Cool have already exhaustedly dissected it in relation to ALIEN, of which it is clearly antecedent.

What the trailer confirms is that the connection goes further than the fact of the two films being situated in the same sprawling storyverse. Even with the poster released a couple of weeks ago (see below) it seemed evident that what’s being sold here is a reboot, albeit one with a poise and finesse that’s only possible when your director has been talking ‘transmedia’ since you were in facehuggies (note to self: might sell).

It brings to mind a talk I gave at EAVE just over a year ago in which I framed film production in terms of a new paradigm for popular entertainment: Content, Community and Application.

Content is story, but also universe, the universe through which the story arc passes. Community is audience, but also inhabitants, from stakeholder to smallholder across the spectrum of participation. Applications are anything that realise and extend the relationship between the two. That means anything.

The ALIEN franchise is a perfect example of this. Four principle films over twenty years, each helmed by a director with his own distinctive style and creative vision. As it expands, the universe fragments. Certain truths remain intact, while others lie out of sight, on the dark sides of as yet undiscovered moons.

Franchises are interwoven, and universes collide. Do your homework and you’ll find that the Giger-designed xenomorph has crossed paths at one time or another with Predator, The Terminator, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and the WildC.A.T.S., in myriad spun-off movies, comics, novels and video games.

Then there’s the fan fiction, with the Alien vs. Predator crossover pulling the biggest crowd. One fan movie, by CrippleHawk, comes in twenty-nine parts and has a four hour running time. And there’s an audience for this stuff: the opening instalment has notched up over a quarter of a million views.

Another, baseballguy11avp’s Aliens vs. Predator: Dark World is closing in on three hundred thousand plays, despite being stop-motion animated with action figures and subtitled throughout. Sure, a few people probably leave before the end, but I bet plenty, like me, watch on a little longer than they’d expect to, if only to enjoy the sheer resourcefulness and ingenuity (shot for shot) of the ultimate in micro-budget film-making:

All of these are ‘Applications’ as I understand them, each as legitimate as the last. Questions of authority are secondary: story belongs to those who write it. CrippleHawk and baseballguy11avp have painstakingly created their own little corners of this infinite universe precisely for the purpose of autonomously owning and exploring them.

So what if exploration sometimes leads to exploitation? Do I see Ridley Scott chasing take-downs when some YouTuber runs some ads over the top of Alien vs. Bladerunner? (note to self: make this).

No, I see him too busy terraforming, taking talents as immense as the resources he can bring to bear on them and carving out new worlds and new dogma, a modern day Prometheus, stealing fire from the heavens of the imagination and making it a plaything for mortal hands.

And this is what S.O.P.A. means to me, this is the price it asks us to pay. A world in which Content, Community and Application remain in corporate hands, regulated and restricted, whole civilisations neutered in the name of outright ownership, and ‘quality control’.

How long do we expect the master story-tellers to accept these terms, how long will the universe-builders choose to labour under the badge of Weyland-Yutani? Sure, they might be career control freaks, but will they always want a sandbox only they can play in?

Especially when they wake up in the not-so-distant future and discover that, for all the industry’s best efforts, all the take-downs and law-suits, all the lobbying and land-grabs, it’s a broken business model.

“You think this can last. There’s a storm coming Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

So speaks Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, in this week’s trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, with a prescience promising a resolution of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy uncannily zeroed in on the Zeitgeist.

Ever since comics legend Frank Miller dispatched a missive of purest vitriol in the direction of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, speculation has been being speculated by the usual suspeculators as to exactly where the caped crusader stands on the issue.

Here, for those who missed it, (care of Bleeding Cool) are Miller’s very words, through the prism of a page from The Dark Knight Returns, his irrefutably epic (and, in places, exquisitely poetic) riff on Gotham’s grandee:

[UPDATE: Hideously, this is a lie. It's actually from BATMAN: YEAR ONE. Also Miller. Also epic.]

For my money, it would be an exercise of particular pointlessness and narcissistic nerdery to scribe some sprawling diatribe pondering precisely where Batman’s feelings lie. He’s a comic book character, y’know, he kind of goes where we please in that respect, morally confused, the ace of spades in a house of cards, and I’ve not yet had breakfast.

He presents an interesting paradox though, of benevolent billionaire donning a disguise from behind which to bat for the little guy. Going toe-to-toe with the status quo, all the while reaffirming it: that you need money to buy toys, and toys to play hero.

Bottom line is he’s as schizophrenic as the rest of us, wants to have his cake AND give it to some homeless guy. Inconsistent as hell, a true sell-out, just doing it with style. A kid with a few natural talents who got pushed to his limit, and decided to push back.

Maybe that’s Miller’s story. He went to his special place, a place filled with empty bourbon bottles and scrunched-up monkey porn, and got angry. Saw that his best years are behind him, his best comics too, and figured he’d take it out on the softest target Google had to offer.

Maybe the ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ are actually you and I, and Miller the embittered voice of a power elite telling us we had it too good, that the party’s over, that the imminent implosion of their regime spells hell-fire for us all. Telling us to get a job, get busy, die stupid. Telling us to await Mitt Romney’s ‘American century’, or no century at all.

(‘Batman vs Occupy Wall Street’ illustration up the top there pilfered from Boulet.)

Odder.