Race to Witch Mountain

In the previous post, I mentioned that I had slowed down a bit in movie watching. I forgot to mention that another reason is that I was sort of in a holding pattern, waiting until I had a chance to see Race to Witch Mountain, which came out in mid-March.

The reason was that I had promised my sister that I would see it with her. This was more than a passing pledge, as it harkened past to our childhood, when, in 1975, we went to see Escape to Witch Mountain together. We later had the story LP (this one, I think), and I remember my sister playing it in her room, and the sound of the story narration. It seemed impossible to imagine seeing the new movie, which is billed as a variation and a sequel on the original story, without her.

But for the first couple weeks after the movie's release, the timing was not right for us to see it. There was always something else going on. Mostly we were waiting for things to settle down while my sister made the transition to pulling her 10-year-old son out of public school and starting his homeschooling.

It was a step I completely endorsed and supported. Last Monday was to be "D-Day." My sister was understandably nervous about the whole thing.

She had prepared herself by reading a great deal of material about how to approach this step, and the best advice seemed to be to take things in a relaxed manner at first, and not to try to make a hard transition to a new fixed regime of instruction.

She thought that taking her son to the movies might be a fun first step, to celebrate the new era. On Sunday, partly in preparation, she bought the DVD to the original 1975 Disney release, and on Monday evening she played it, forcing her children to watch it.

They were so riled up after dinner, that they had trouble sitting through it, but I find myself completely absorbed in it, and enjoying seeing it for the first time in over three decades. There were many familiar scenes and lines that came back from my childhood. I was particularly happy to see Ray Miland, one of my all-time favorite actors, in the role of Aristotle Bolt, the millionaire villain. In case you're wondering, Escape to Witch Mountain happens to be the answer to the trivia question: "In which film does one find Miland in a helicopter looking through a pair of binoculars at a black bear in the passenger seat of a car?"

The next day, with the other kids all in school, the three of us were in Lowell at the beautiful Showcase multiplex (Leominster is too shabby for this kind of outing), in a nearly empty parking lot to catch the 11:30 matinee, which was only six bucks a person.

We were the only ones in the theater, a fact that my nephew found to be quite amusing. With this mother's permission, he went to the very top row of the stadium seating, but continued to run back down to us at regular intervals to ask questions about the movie.

As I watched it, I inevitably found myself comparing it to the original I had seen the night before. I was pre-inclined to approve of it, based on several criteria: (1) I'm a fan of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, (2) the original child actors appear in this version, and (most importantly) (3) Race was not a remake, but rather a "new story" that could be seen as a sequel (although it doesn't really function as a sequel).

This last point is worth discussing, because it could have been so easy to call this movie Escape to Witch Mountain, like the original. That would have plundered the title and would have really pissed off anyone who enjoyed the 1975 version. It's amazing how little it takes to defer to this kind of sentiment---a change of one single word in the title. Compare this to the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which earned the scorn of many thousands of possible fans even before its release. It could easily have been called The Night the Earth Stood Still (probably more appropriate, given the actual story), and have earned just as much money, while being viewed more appropriately as an homage that was not trying to plunder the title of the 1951 classic.

But I digress. Race to Witch Mountain turned out to be worth the wait, and solidified my growing opinion of Disney as currently the most reliable source of well-told cinematic tales. The movie was very well-written, and did everything it should have done to tell a contemporary version of the original while paying homage to it for middle-aged folk like me.

Certain Johnson is limited as an actor, and he delivered a few horribly clunky lines and facial expressions, but he seems well aware of his own limitations, as anyone knows who has watched him in his hilarious appearances hosting Saturday Night Live.

Afterward, the three of us drove back toward home and lunched at McDonalds. While my nephew climbed on the indoor playground equipment, my sister and I discussed the movie, specifically its differences with the original.

We both agreed that it had a lot more action: it dove right into the action sequences almost immediately. The original had a slow revelation of the nature of the children as aliens (they have to discover it themselves), whereas in this version, the children (who are older teenagers) are fully conscious of their natures from the beginning.

There is more at stake in the version. In the original, the dramatic tension centers on the fate of the children alone. In this version, the entire future of the earth is at stake. I was pleased to see, however, the movie did not descend into the trite and trendy themes torn from the latest headlines about global warming. Instead it seemed to use fear over climate change in a way that could satisfy anyone of any political persuasion, and the way I read it, it seemed to warn as much about the danger of societal overreaction to climate threats as much as anything else.

I told my sister that what really stuck out to me, in comparison with the original, was the raising of the level of the villainous human pursuers. In the 1975 original, Aristotle Bolt is a private multimillionaire who pursues the children through his control of the California State Police (who are somewhat innocent in the manipulation), as well as through a bumbling and corrupt county-level sheriff and hick townsfolk (who are downright nasty and evil).

In the 2009, version, it is now a corrupt and out-of-control federal government (nowhere to be seen in the original) that now serves the role of villain. The county-level officials and mountain townsfolk are now on the side of the alien children, helping them escape the evil Feds who are after them. More than anything else I have seen recently in movies, this shift in the villainy to the high level of government illustrates the magnitude of the cultural change we have witnessed since the 1970s.

Moreover, the sheriff who sticks up for the fleeing alien kids is played by none other than the same child actor who played Tony, the boy alien in the original (Ike Eisenmann). Likewise the helpful local waitress in the restaurant is played by the woman who was Tia in the original (Kim Richards). If I hadn't just seen the original the night before, I might have missed all this, as well as the fact that the town is called "Stony Creek," taken directly from the 1975 version. In fact, it's not impossible to think that the sheriff and the waitress actually are the alien kids from the original, now living comfortably in a mountain community with a healthy suspicion of the federal government.

We sat there at McDonalds for nearly an hour discussing the movie in detail. We both agreed that the movie had used the Winnebago cleverly. We also agreed that it had failed to wrap-up one its sub-plots (involving the relationship between Johnson's character and a group of Las Vegas mobsters), and that it had also surprised us by not having one of the Fed agents (Chris Marquette) rebel against his tyrranical boss and help the alien kids at a critical moment at the climax.

But I never delve this far into thinking about a movie unless it has really made an impact on me, and this one was a pleasure to watch. There was nothing about it that really disappointed me.

I could write a lot about Escape to Witch Mountain, which I consider to be an important landmark in the use of aliens in storytelling, including its relation to later Spielberg movies in setting the parameters for Postmodern cinematic poetics. But that would deserve a whole treatise on its own. Sometime I'll have to delve into it.

On the ride home my nephew peppered me with questions about moviemaking, specifically in how stunt drivers were used during the action sequences. I described to him the process by which the actor is temporarily replaced, so that he doesn't get injured, something that would be a disaster to the production. It felt like a fitting ending to the whole experience, which was, after an official homeschool outing.