New Scientist - 15.02.2020

32 | New Scientist | 15 February 2020

Views Culture

NICOLAS CAGE’S career-warping

efforts to clear his tax debts after

problems with the IRS continue

with yet another relatively low-

budget movie, Color Out of Space,

a film no one expects much of. It is

in US cinemas now; by the time it

hits UK screens on 28 February, it

will already be available on Blu-ray.

But have you ever watched a bad

film and found yourself dreaming

about it long afterwards? Color

Out of Space is one of those.

Its origins date to March 1927,

when author H. P. Lovecraft wrote

what would become his favourite

short story. In “The Colour Out

of Space”, a meteor crashes into a

farmer’s field in the Massachusetts

hills. His crops grow huge, but

prove inedible. His livestock go

mad. So, in the end, does the

farmer, haunted by a colour given

off by a visiting presence in the

land: a glow that belongs on no

ordinary spectrum.

This is Lovecraft’s riff on a

theme beloved of science fiction

at the turn of the 2oth century:

the existence of new rays, and

with them, new ways of seeing.

The 1890s and 1900s were, after

all, radiant years. Victor Schumann

discovered ultraviolet radiation in

1893. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered
      X-rays in 1895. Henri Becquerel
      discovered radioactivity in 1896.
      J. J. Thomson discovered that
      cathode rays were streams of

electrons in 1897. Prosper-René

Blondlot discovered N-rays in

1903 – only they turned out not to

exist, an artefact of observational

error and wishful thinking.

The last of those is pretty much

what the local media assume has

happened when Cage’s character,

Nathan Gardner, the not-very-

effective head of a household that

is relocating to the country after

unspecified health problems

and financial setbacks, describes

the malevolent light he catches

spilling at odd moments from

his well. The man is a drunk.

Radiant days Color Out of Space takes us on a Gothic sci-fi trip in rural New

England as strange colours start spilling from a farmer’s well. It all harks back

to an earlier era when newly discovered rays dazzled science, says Simon Ings

Film

Color Out of Space

Written and directed

by Richard Stanley

Simon also

recommends...

Film

Annihilation (2018)

Written and directed

by Alex Garland

Body-plan genes are

strangely refracted and

species barriers crumble

in this intelligent, ravishing

take on Jeff VanderMeer’s

cult novel. On Netflix.

TV

The Martian Chronicles

(1980) miniseries

Written and directed

by Michael Anderson

A weird, wise Mars gets

under the skin of Rock

Hudson and other hapless

settlers in this intermittently

brilliant adaptation of Ray

Bradbury’s stories. On DVD.

A fantasist. An eccentric.

The film is yet another

attempt to fuse gothic horror

with a contemporary setting.

Director Richard Stanley (who

brought us 1990’s Hardware,

another valuable bad movie)

has written a script that, far from

smoothing out the discrepancies

between modern and pre-modern

proprieties, manners and ways

of speaking, leaves them jangling

in a way that makes you wonder

what on Earth is going on.

And what is going on, most of

the time, is Cage. Has anyone ever

conveyed so raucously, and yet so

well, the misery, the frustration,

the rage, the self-hatred of weak

men? Every time he gets into

a fist fight with a car interior

I think: Ah, Nicolas, c’est moi.

Even better for the film, Cage’s

on-screen wife here is played by

Joely Richardson, an actor who

packs a lifetime’s disappointment

into a request to pass the sugar.

Alien life isn’t like Earth life

and to confront it is to invite

madness. That’s the general idea.

But with tremendous support

from on-screen children played

by Madeleine Arthur and Brendan

Meyer, Cage and Richardson turn

what might have been a series of

uninteresting personal descents

into a family tragedy of Jacobean

proportions. If ever hell were

other people, then at its deepest

point you would find the

Gardner family, sniping at each

other across the dinner table.

Color Out of Space mashes up

psychological drama, horror and

alien invasion. It isn’t a film you

admire – it’s one you get into

internal arguments over, trying to

sort all the bits out. In short, it does

what it sets out to do. It sticks. ❚

COURTESY OF TIFF

Few rival Nicolas Cage's

ability to capture the

self-hatred of weak men

The film column

Simon Ings is a novelist and

science writer and a culture

editor at New Scientist. Follow

him on Instagram at

@simon_ings

“ Color Out of Space

mashes up horror,

psychological drama,

and alien invasion”