Alice Mined My Eye Holes

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2004)

***Spoilers***
Hellaciously abstract. Horror offers many opportunities for such explorations.
A film about what a film does to the audience's eye. A film about Alice, about eye-holes, especially wormy ones. Unfortunately the director doesn't have a camera to match (what if Baz or Brian had been possessed by Tark? ahh, sweet worm hole).
A film about folding, the most important of which is folding space. And the space the film is trying to fold is the space between the film, (and hence also its creator's mind) and us.
And with a couple of better actors and a better director this would have been an absolute masterpiece. As it is, I think it is still one of the most successful attempts at bending the space between audience and film.
Alice is perhaps the richest, most multi-layered archetype to base a story on.
But how many Alice stories are all about the hole like this one is? What an intelligent focus for a story! So we see the story conflated to outer space, and self-referentially is most concerned about space, folding space.
And like most Alice stories, this is about a "dream" that contains 3 Alices.
The red-headed dead wife who haunts from real life, the auburn-haired Mama bear who mirrors her death, and Goldilocks who survives with newly rouged tresses.
The film begins with us/the camera entering a wormhole; then we follow the rabbit's dream until we come out the other side by exiting through Alice's dream (as she is released from the other side of the Looking Glass). Pefect framing by the writer.
Being an Alice story, and focused on holes, one would think there would be some sex in the story. It's hard to find, but there is. In the background of the story's "reality", and rightfully at the greatest abstract distance from the main story, sex is placed within the dreams about the mad doctor's real wife (a dream within the dream, or a play within the play). Dreams about a wife who committed suicide over the death of the creation of that hole-entering sex---the hole-exiting child. The wife falls through the hole of death, mirrored by the death of Mama Bear in the ship.
What a wonderful ship, what wonderful set design. The cross-section of the ship is designed in the shape of an eye, the gateway as its pupil, and the umbilical passage as the optic nerve that travels back to the bridge/brain.
The eye is referenced everywhere, reflecting the eye of the writer, the eye of the director, the eye of the camera and the eye of the audience. The writer is able to conflate all these levels by using a worm(hole) that is eating its own tale. I.e., the film is about a story that happens in the mind's eye. On one side of the gateway this is happening in the creator's mind's eye and on the other side the audience's, folding us right into the film, and/or it's creator into us. These two worlds are separated by a couple of dams, the director & our own eyes, which the writer needs us to remove to merge our worlds.
The only survivors are us, the creator---neither unscathed---and the black sheep child of this enterprise, the film, its folded self represented by an actor who has a lot to learn about folded acting, but at least achieves some folding by doing himself doing Denzel doing the character Cooper.
Notes: The ghosts of many other horror films haunt this movie and the ship as it would also haunt the minds of its writer and its audience. Quotes by annotating not plagiarizing. For eg., Weir references Hell-raiser at the end as that is what he is in the literal mode of the story.
The sets mirror the film's notions, especially the gateway room and the stasis room. The production designer was well aware of the script's layers.
The score was well-suited and relatively minimalist.
Muted symbols like the planet Neptune (echoes of Odysseus), the hints of dualism in the opening typed narrative (and those graphics inherent reference to the writer as the faithful narrator), the floating tools, etc... all used well.
Some nice layering in the shots, and the framing is decent, but overall the direction was unimaginative and could have used a more mobile camera, one that finds its inner worm.
But with such frightfully marvelous writing...
Three out of three