Vive Le Bomb! (edition 1)

It is a reality of film-making that can be painful to swallow: there are films that sink at the box-office that have genuine merit—or if they fail, fail in an interesting way— and films that make an obscene amount of money that aren’t well done or even memorable. Social appetites, and twists of capricious Fate play a role; but there is a certain amount of condescension from middlebrow critics that plays into this dynamic as well. As Susan Doll wonderfully puts it in a MovieMorlocks post dedicated to movie turkeys, “I rarely agree with movie reviewers, and truth be told, I have stopped reading a lot of reviews, especially from online sources. While reviewers like to call themselves 'critics,' true film criticism does not revolve around personal taste.I loathe reviewers who jump on a flawed film that may still be worthwhile viewing and dub it 'the worst film ever made,' which sometimes affects the box office for that title.” The curious thing that I’ve found in my own experience is that the more scholarly a critic becomes, the less myopically elitist they tend to be. In the spirit of egalitarian enjoyment, I decided to give the spotlight to  a handful of films that did not succeed commercially or critically, but which I still feel have merit.

Islands in the Sky, Questions on the Earth: Engine Summer and Castle in the Sky

Note: The following post discusses central aspects of the plots of both the novel and the film under discussion, so for those who want a SPOILER warning, this is it. I would also add that, when you get right down to it, no story with real  merit can ever truly be spoiled, whether you know the details of the plot or not.

The flying city of Laputa made its literary debut in 1726 as an episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In line with the vitriolic satire of the book, the inhabitants of the flying island are idiots, conducting pointless experiments in a quest for scientific discovery. They are literal and figurative airheads. Other artists have taken an interest in Swift’s creation and put it to use in their own works. I was recently struck by the motif of the flying island in two distinct fantasy works: John Crowley’s 1979 novel Engine Summer and Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 animated film Castle in the Sky (Tenku no Shiro Laputa). While the flying island’s function in both stories is quite different, both Crowley and Miyazaki provide a commentary on the nature of time, humanity’s place in the natural world, and the ambiguous blessings of technology. 

Illustration from original edition of "Gulliver's Travels"