Aussiewood: The Power of One (1992), Super Mario Bros. (1993)

 

I’m taking an elastic approach this week, focusing not on an Australian film or international work by an Australian filmmaker, but two films showcasing cinematography by an Australian DP, the great Dean Semler. My admiration for Semler is well-documented on this site (see, for example, my recent review of Razorback and older review of Firestorm). I love the challenges Semler has embraced as a DP, ranging from shooting epic vehicular chases through the outback (The Road Warrior) to epic buffalo hunts on the frontier (Dances with Wolves) to thrillers and sci-fi adventure set largely on water and floating sets (Dead Calm, Waterworld) to Mayan action adventure on digital (Apocalypto) to a thriller centred on a paraplegic lead (The Bone Collector) to equestrian action (The Lighthorsemen, Secretariat) to multiple Eddie Murphies (Nutty Professor II: The Klumps). I love that over his career Semler’s helped defined the aesthetic behind several genres, including the contemporary Western (Young Guns I and II, Dances with Wolves, City Slickers, The Alamo, Appaloosa), grungy dystopian science-fiction (The Road Warrior, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Super Mario Bros, Waterworld), modern studio and Netflix comedy via repeated collaborations with Peter Segal and Adam Sandler, and even the Disney live-action remake boom with Maleficent. Finally, I love that he’s clearly a mensch, indicated by his repeated collaborations with actors, directors, and actor-directors including Sandler, Segal, George Miller, Phillip Noyce, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Angelina Jolie, Kiefer Sutherland, Vin Diesel, Rob Cohen, and Tom Shadyac among others.    

Semler is not the only Antipodean connection in The Power of One (1992). The film is based on the first novel by bestselling Australian author Bryce Courtenay, was produced and distributed in part by Village, and stars several friends of Australian cinema in Shine players John Gielgud and Armin Mueller-Stahl, plus Bruce Beresford regular Morgan Freeman. The film takes place in Courtenay’s birth country of South Africa and unfolds over three time periods in the early twentieth century, charting one character’s rite of passage against local and global events. In the first, coinciding with the outbreak of World War II, British boy PK is sent to an Afrikaner boarding school where he's bullied by other students, particularly the zealous Botha. In the second, nearing the end of World War II, PK learns to box from a coloured convict (Freeman) and helps stage a concert where black prisoners can denigrate their white incarcerators through song. In the third, on the very cusp of apartheid, PK (now played by Stephen Dorff) is a student at an elite British school who falls for the daughter of an Afrikaner politician and attracts the ire of the authorities, including the adult Botha (Daniel Craig), for teaching black South Africans to read.

I’m a regular listener to the podcast This Had Oscar Buzz, in which Joe Reid and Chris Feil talk about “movies that once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another it all went wrong”. The hosts have not covered The Power of One, and I don’t know if the film ever generated Oscar buzz to qualify for discussion, but it strikes me as of a piece with ill-fated prestige films like Charlotte Gray, The Shipping News, The Life of David Gale, Pay it Forward, Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, All the Pretty Horses, and so on. The Power of One has all the component parts and prestige aesthetics of an Oscar-buzzy film: an awards-friendly director (Rocky’s John G. Avildsen) and cast (Freeman, Gielgud), historical setting, big important themes (race, class), and so on. It also followed other films grappling with Apartheid that had secured Oscar nominations in earlier years: Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom, released five years earlier, received three nominations, including for Denzel Washington as freedom fighter Steve Biko, while 1989’s A Dry White Season scored a nomination for Marlon Brando. However, in The Power of One’s case, its prestige aesthetics did not conceal into an awards-worthy whole.

Of course, filmmakers don’t make films to win awards: they make films for myriad reasons, such as affinity for the material and subject matter, emotional resonance, opportunity to work in a genre, a country, or with particular actors or filmmaking tools, to stage specific set pieces, and, pragmatically speaking, for income (studios, on the other hand, will greenlight, finance, and strategically time film releases for their awards potential). No doubt Avildsen was attracted to the story, as well as the competitive sport aspect that had served him well over two Rocky films and three Karate Kid films. His Karate Kid screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen adapted Courtenay’s novel and imposes some of that series’ formula in his adaptation, notably fleshing out boarding school villain Botha—who makes only a small but pivotal reappearance at the end of Courtenay’s novel—into the Act III antagonist. Other “movies gotta be movies” logic is evident from the outset, when a sermon is delivered in English at PK’s Afrikaner school. Avildsen is a wonderful and well-intentioned filmmaker, but was not adept at all genres (see Neighbors) and I’d argue lacks a sensitivity to the nuances of other periods and places that would have served the material well.

In the nuts and bolts sense, though, Avildsen’s direction is mostly solid, as are performances. Dorff, who would go on to become a likeable B-grader, is milquetoast but serviceable. Freeman’s character is a greatest hits composite of his past and future work—convict (The Shawshank Redemption), subservient (Driving Miss Daisy), teacher (Lean on Me), boxing coach (Million Dollar Baby), and Mandela-esque (Ivictus)—but delivered with quiet gravitas. Daniel Craig, unknown at the time, stands out most given his subsequent fame, but not on the strengths of his performance, which leans into the caricatured Afrikaner villain tropes entertained in the likes of Lethal Weapon 2. Meanwhile, the film paints a largely uncomplicated portrait of British South Africans as uncomplicit allies, and PK is very much a white saviour audience avatar: a chosen one hailed as a ‘rain maker’ bridging cultures and tribes, born of British parents, reared by a black nanny, bestowed with courage by a Zulu witch doctor, taught to fight by Freeman’s coloured convict, and so on.

For Semler, The Power of One is the sort of logical follow-up assignment befitting a just-crowned (for Dances with Wolves) Oscar-winning DP, and his work is strong throughout. Shot partly in Zimbabwe (substituting for South Africa, as it did on Cry Freedom), the cinematography is lovely, with the DP’s time shooting the outback on The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, Razorback et al. serving him well for shooting African landscapes. Also effective is Hans Zimmer’s score, preceding his similarly-African-themed scoring for The Lion King two years later. Ultimately, all these component parts amount to a watchable, but not special or entirely satisfying, whole. 

I have some history with Super Mario Bros (1993), watching it at least twice—in cinemas and on video—in my pre-teens. As a Sega native with no skin in the Nintendo game and no attachment to the video game aesthetic and lore it happily abandons, I enjoyed the film just fine as a piece of demographic programming. Watching it a few years ago, I thought it was ghastly. This fourth viewing—for the record, three more times than I’ve watched 12 Angry Men, All About Eve, or The Bicycle Thieves—was spurred by fascination, not of the so-bad-it’s-good variety but more the Richard Dreyfuss staring at a mountain of mashed potato and knowing it means something but unable to crack it variety. My reaction was more measured; I didn’t find it ghastly, but I also didn’t crack the code. The only revelation I took away is one I’m already very familiar with: sometimes, good people make terrible movies.

There are a lot of good—that is to say, talented and capable—people who toiled on Super Mario Bros: Semler, Bill & Ted writer Ed Solomon, co-producer Roland Joffe (director of The Killing Fields and The Mission!), editor Mark Goldblatt (who cut James Cameron’s Terminator films and True Lies), composer Alan Silvestri (Robert Zemeckis’ regular scorer, also Ricochet), actors Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo (friend of Australian cinema: Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge), Samantha Mathis (friend of Australian cinema: Little Women, How to Make an American Quilt), Dennis Hooper (chaotic good, also friend of Australian cinema: Mad Dog Morgan), and Fiona Shaw. I don’t know if husband and wife co-directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (best known for creating Max Headroom) are good people, but they made a pretty good noir thriller D.O.A. a few years earlier.

Very loosely adapted from the hit Nintendo game series, the film transports the game’s titular sibling plumbers Mario (Hoskins) and Luigi (Leguizamo) to an alternate dimension created 65 million years ago when a meteor hit the Earth. In this dimension, dinosaurs evolved into human-like beings and dictator Koopa (Hopper) lords over a megacity surrounded by scorched earth. Mario and Luigi must defeat Koopa, square off against his reptilian Goomba army, and rescue the kidnapped archaeologist and princess Daisy (Mathis).

Like The Power of One, this is a film of watchable component parts that don’t work as a satisfying whole. Hoskins was uniquely positioned, following his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook (both shot by another Dean, Cundey), to sell this type of fantastical fare, and to his credit, despite loathing the production, he does, fully commanding that particular skill set a decade before acting against tennis balls would become the blockbuster star norm. There’s some good sibling chemistry between Hoskins and Leguizamoa Briton and Hispanic playing New York Italians—and Leguizamo has a nice chaste romantic chemistry with Mathis. Semler, ever the professional, shoots the film’s sparse action beats well—frequently chases, by foot or vehicle, from A to B, akin to a side-scroller—and delivers on the aesthetic he’s tasked with executing: a weird, scuzzy, fungus-coated variation on THX-1138, Blade Runner, and Total Recall. It’s ugly and unappealing at times, and like Total Recall its sets always look like sets, but that all jives with the film’s goofy colourful-8-bit-game-turned-cyberpunk-dystopia design.

Super Mario Bros was a notoriously troubled production, indeed one of three troubled productions turned gigantic commercial & critical misfires shot by Semler and released within a three-year period: the others were Last Action Hero and Waterworld [1]. It’s testament to Semler’s talents and mensch-ness that he weathered those professional stormy waters (literal set-destroying ones in Waterworld’s case). Of the three, Last Action Hero and Waterworld were more costly ventures, but also more successful and better-looking—on the former, Semler effectively apes the glossy action aesthetic the film parodies; on the latter, he translates his Road Warrior aesthetic to the high seas—and have probably had healthier afterlives, albeit never shaking their damaged goods label. 

Ben 

[1] Both Super Mario Bros and Last Action Hero were actually released a few weeks apart—May 28 and June 18 1993 respectively—and thoroughly stomped on commercially by the June 11 release of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, another film featuring dinosaurs shot by a Dean (Cundey again). Spielberg would cash in on his own dinosaur fad as producer with animated We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story later in 1993, live-action The Flinstones the next year, and five Jurassic Park sequels/offshoots over the next three decades (the first of which he directed), plus insert Mario references into his film Ready Player One, which like Last Action Hero cannibalizes and renders incoherent the popular culture of preceding decade/s. This year, the balance tipped back in the plumber's favour (albeit not Semler, Morton, Jankel & co.'s) with the animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossing over a billion dollars and poaching voice talent (Chris Pratt) from the Jurassic World films. Who wins in all this? Not necessarily audiences ...