The S. Darko of Moon movies

Donnie Darko is my favorite film of 2001, though I didn't actually see it until 2003. Moon is my favorite film of 2009, one I got to crown at the actual time of its release.

Neither film needs or is capable of supporting an expanded universe, though I can see why people would try. "People" in this case being a studio with the rights to Darko director Richard Kelly's intellectual property, and Moon's director himself, Duncan Jones. (Though Kelly did try to expand the Darko universe in other ways in his other films, with poor results -- a friend and I even referred to it as the "Kellyverse.")

S. Darko -- released in 2009 straight to video -- was terrible. Mute -- the "spiritual sequel" to Moon released in 2018 to the modern-day equivalent of straight-to-video, Netflix -- may be even worse.

Jones was smart not to overburden his new film with references to Moon. In fact, I could detect only one scene that overtly references it, and it's really just a background shot of Moon main character Sam Bell in a courtroom on the news. (I guess that's sort of a spoiler for Moon, but you've already seen Moon, haven't you?)

But that's a level of restraint Jones does not show in any other aspect of this production. The damn thing runs for 126 meandering minutes, introducing us to awful characters in an underworld that's uninteresting. Having to watch awful characters in itself is not an issue, but when the film confuses them as kind of co-protagonists rather than the antagonists they really should be, and then even gives them morally relativistic beefs with each other, then this thing has gone way off the rails.

For all its many, many failings, S. Darko at least had the sense to exist in the same type of world with the same type of unexplained stimuli as in Donnie Darko -- wormholes, etc. It just doesn't do it interestingly, and is of poor quality in almost every aspect of its execution, most notably the acting.

The acting is okay in Mute, for the most part, but Mute's failures feel worse overall, as they are emblematic of a new type of franchising/universe-building to which Netflix is particularly susceptible. We are just coming off the cataclysmic failure of another Netflix original release, The Cloverfield Paradox, which I thought was a contender for my worst film of 2018, even at this early date. That movie was retrofitted to have elements that linked it to an existing cinematic universe, the Cloverfield universe, which itself is already a bit poorly defined, as the second film in the series was meant to exist more as a new chapter in an anthology than one that connects directly to the original Cloverfield. Needless to say, the attempt in Paradox did not work.

Mute is guilty of a similar thing, though it was premeditated and not retrofitted. The actual text of Mute has nothing to do with Moon, as the films are different stylistically and look at entirely different planets (Moon never sets foot on Earth). So the only reason it needs to be part of a Moon universe is to give the film some additional buzz for fans, to give them a reason to see what is otherwise a turd. "Spiritual sequel?" Why, Duncan? Because you decided to stick in one scene with Sam Rockwell in it? With newly minted Oscar winner Sam Rockwell in it?

Moon is full of heart and brimming with a certain type of optimism, despite being underpinned by a certain cynicism related to human beings and their tendencies. How can a movie in which the robot decides to do the right thing not be optimistic?

Nothing but the cynicism survives in Mute, a movie made even worse by the fact that it is dedicated to his father, David Bowie. This is a wretched movie that looks terrible, and its one truly sympathetic character, the character Leo (Alexander Skarsgard) who can't speak, is poorly defined and missing for weirdly large sections of the movie.

It's a waste of my time to continue picking apart Mute, but let's just say The Cloverfield Paradox cannot be my worst movie of 2018 with Mute around.

For Jones' sake, I hope he doesn't go the route of Darko director Richard Kelly, who made one brilliant film and then two awful ones, and now cannot get another movie made. Though Jones' career is on a similar downward trajectory, as his follow-up to Moon, Source Code, was liked by most people but not me, then his next movie, Warcraft, was liked by almost nobody. With two hits rather than one, Jones will probably get a few more lives than Kelly did, but if he keeps making movies like Mute, they will dry up quickly.

Darko-centric

In honor of my friend Don (and his lovely wife and 10-month-old son) visiting this week, I thought I'd write a post about Don's and my bonding over a particular movie.

See, we have a Darko-centric relationship.

To describe our friendship in these simple terms is intentionally misleading on my part. We've known each other for over 30 years, so we obviously have tons of shared history, and then a boatload of common interests as well.

But for about the last six years, ever since he first introduced me to Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, we seem to keep coming back to it in uncanny ways. And that makes tonight's planned viewing of S. Darko -- the sort-of-unauthorized, straight-to-video sequel -- all the more appropriate.

Don first showed me Donnie Darko on a February 2003 visit. I knew nothing about it at the time, other than that I'd seen the billboards, and I thought it looked vaguely pretentious. I was aware that Jake Gyllenhaal was the star, and I think I also knew that Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle were in it. Other than that, it was just another movie.

All it took was one viewing for me to rank Donnie Darko among my favorite films of all time. I won't go into an extended praise session now. I will ask what the hell you're waiting for, if you haven't seen it yet.

Since then, I've watched it about five more times. And it's continued to pop up in my relationship with Don over the years. (In case you were wondering, it doesn't have anything to do with his name being Don -- that's only his blogger identity anyway. Nor does his choice of blogger identity have anything to do with the movie).

Within that first year, I made Don a de facto Donnie Darko soundtrack. We both loved Kelly's choice of music -- which he changed at his peril in the director's cut -- and lamented the fact that no soundtrack was ever pressed. So I downloaded the songs that work so well in that movie -- Echo & the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon," Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," Gary Jules' "Mad World," even "Notorious" by Duran Duran -- and burned a CD. Then I adorned it with images from the movie, many of them involving the mysterious giant rabbit named Frank. I believe it was somewhere around this time that he sent me my own DVD copy of the movie.

It was the next year, 2004, when I was visiting Don in Chicago, that Kelly's director's cut happened to be in the theaters. Naturally, Don and I went. As I hinted above, we were disappointed with this cut, particularly the substitution of INXS' "Never Tears Us Apart" for "The Killing Moon" in the dynamite opening bike-riding sequence. And though some of Kelly's other additions were mild to modest failures as well, it was a bit like watching the deleted scenes from DVDs you love. You have to see the extra footage just because it exists and is worth examining.

I believe it was a November 2005 visit to Los Angeles when Don and I attended an art walk, and he picked up a lapel pin that bore an artist's rendition of Frank. Or maybe I picked it up. Or maybe we both did. Anyway, the Darko theme continued.

I can't remember if anything particularly Darko-centric occurred in 2006, but in November of 2007, it was my turn to visit Chicago again. Lo and behold, Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko, the incomprehensible Southland Tales, was in theaters. Don and I were all excited to go see this monstrosity together. The early feedback, especially from an incredulous crowd at Cannes, told us that this would be no worthy successor to Darko, but we were determined to expose ourselves to it anyway. Unfortunately, our best intentions were defeated by our better halves, as his wife and my fiancee conspired to poo-poo the plan, leaving Don and I to eventually endure it separately.

Sometime since last fall, Don picked up his first BluRay player, so what was the logical gift for him for his birthday this February? That's right, the newly-released BluRay version of Donnie Darko. My timing was perfect -- Don had actually been monitoring its potential release on BluRay, but I managed to jump right into that window of time between the last time he checked on it and its actual release. So he didn't even know it was out yet, and was pleased as punch to get it.

So it couldn't have been too big of a surprise to him when, a few weeks back, I told him to hold off on watching S. Darko until he got out here. Released straight to video in May, it was third on his Netflix queue at the time, but he bumped it down in anticipation of watching it together.

So what exactly is S. Darko, and why is it "unauthorized"? Well, without giving too much away, Donnie Darko is not exactly the kind of movie you make a sequel to. Richard Kelly surely knew as much, which is why he had nothing to do with this. But I can see how the world created in Donnie Darko would be something its fans would want to visit again, myself included. So even though I doubted the adventures of Samantha Darko, Donnie's sister -- the S. of the title -- would be much to write home about, I knew I'd have to see it. Lending some sense of credibility: At least they got the same actress, Daveigh Chase, to play Samantha, even if none of the rest of the cast returned.

S. Darko graduated to the top of my own queue, and arrived on Tuesday, one day ahead of Don and his family. The plan, as I said, is to watch it tonight.

Where will Don's and my Darko-centric relationship go from here? It's hard to say. It does seem like we're unlikely to be in the same place when Richard Kelly's next movie, The Box, comes out on November 9th. But if the above examples tell us anything, you never know.

And if not ... well, I guess we'll just have to fall back on our 30 years of other experiences.