Rocketing beyond the horizon of our time to join the greatest human adventure of all time

Despite blizzard conditions, transit shutdown, snow delay, and Verna's changing their hours of operation, derspatchel and I have successfully completed our fourth 'Thon, all twenty-whatever hours of it. My notes this year may be more abbreviated than usual. As of starting this post, I have been awake for thirty-one hours.

This year was the fortieth anniversary of the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and Marathon, so there were various commemorative mentions throughout, from an onstage conversation with the founder of the festival to a recorded greeting from Harlan Ellison to kick off the 'Thon, even before the traditional countdown to Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953). He talked a lot about his latest books. That's all right. He had a stroke in October; he mentions early in the message that he shaved for the camera for the first time in months. He was an incredibly important writer for me in high school and college and I'm glad to hear him wish the 'Thon well, even on either side of an advertisement. I didn't know about the new collection, anyway.

Having seen Snowpiercer (2013) when it was in theaters last July, I am not sure that I needed to see it again on a big screen so soon, but I will not deny that it was meteorologically appropriate and that everybody had fun shouting "Look! It's the Red Line!" as the world-train caromed past snow-drowned railyards and frozen, toppled cars. It's still a flawed film for me, but its early scenes especially have the gripping resonance of myth as well as dystopia—fighting through darkness, cold, betrayal, carrying fire forward, the girl with the dove's name who can see beyond doors and will see the living earth when the snows recede—and Chris Evans really can act. I like that its happy ending is equivocal as to humanity, but firmly on the planet's side.

I had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in theaters before; I had not seen it in 70mm. Douglas Trumbull spoke before and after, advocating a greater sense of immersion in science fiction film and clarifying stories about the production. Because the 'Thon had started so late, unfortunately, it was our only real chance at dinner, so we stayed through the first act on the space station, ran across the street to the Boston Burger Company (which was open this year, because we had learned from experience and gone well in advance of eight o'clock), and got back just in time for the dismantling of HAL and the transformation of David Bowman, which was very beautiful in its rightful aspect ratio and resolution. Did I mention Douglas Trumbull in person? Someone like Criterion should please give him money for a restoration of the lost footage he's found from 2001; isn't that what film foundations are for?

The version of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) that played last night after the Alien-Deflecting Helmet Device neé Tinfoil Hat Contest was the recent Kino restoration from the original camera negative composited with the highest-quality available international prints and it was so breathtaking that I did not care that it was a digital projection rather than ninety-five-year-old film stock. You can see the lines in the actors' faces beneath their makeup, the texture of the cloth beneath the paint of the backdrops, and it does not destroy the theatricality of Wiene's expressionism; it heightens the intensity. Conrad Veidt as Cesare is more beautiful every time I see him, dragging open his sleepwalker's eyes in their heavy diamonds of shadow like he's trying to lift the lid of his own coffin.

I don't want to damn Quiet Zone (2014) with faint praise: it is a perfectly pleasant five-minute animated zinger where the real point is the sound work and the music, both of which are inventive and catchy. It was unfortunately positioned, because Prelude to Axanar (2014)—The Four Years War, Part III: Prelude to Axanar to give it its full title—is a knockout and I have my fingers crossed its creators get their funding for a full-length feature; it's one of the most impressive fanworks I've seen in its medium. As it stands, Prelude is a twenty-minute episode of a Federation documentary on the Four Years War with the Klingon Empire, cross-cutting interviews with the surviving major players—on both sides—with archival footage of the battles they fought. The universe is original Star Trek, non-reboot. The starship combat is three-dimensional and thrilling. Apparently I would have recognized the actors if I'd watched more non-Babylon 5 science fiction on TV. It breaks off on a cliffhanger, of course.

I don't know if Fantasticherie di un Passeggiatore Solitario (Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 2014) was the find of the festival for me, but it's one of the films I keep thinking over, partly because I've seen its relatives far more often in print than on screen. It is not entirely linear; it braids three layers of narrative, partly nested within one another and all centering around the fictitious book of the title, an antique and incomplete volume of stories and "recipes" whose last pages purport to show the way to Vacuitas, a Lavondyss-like place at the heart of the wood where all decisions can be undone and all lives can start anew—or a pernicious trap for the gullible, cautions the seen-it-all proprietor of a curio shop whose father came into possession of the same book thirty years ago and died of his obsession with it. In a brick-walled garret in the nineteenth century, the poet Jean-Jacques Renou drinks too much absinthe and works on his Fantasticherie, kept company by a daguerreotype of his lost love (and occasionally her ghost) and a reality-twisting demon he keeps locked in a crate on his bed, fighting it every day for the right to write another page. In present-day Italy, when distracted grad student Theo finds the published Fantasticherie among a stack of overdue library books, first he and then his girlfriend Chloe, each of them carrying their own damage and loose ends, fall into its perhaps fatal, perhaps redeeming orbit. In the last story of the book, the unfinished "Reverie No. 23," a small boy whose aged guardian has unexpectedly died takes the body and the old man's book of recipes and journeys into a timeless wood, to find a demon who can bring back the dead. (In claymation, by the way. Most of the special effects in the film are practical ones—puppets, shadows, stop-motion—and they're great.) The poet is perhaps a pseudonym of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote the real-life Rêveries du promeneur solitaire; Theo doubts it and the film doesn't seem interested in clarifying the connection. It ends where it needs to. It is about the power of unfinished stories.

I can think of few better ways to inaugurate the after-midnight portion of a sci-fi marathon than by watching Them! (1954) on 35mm with a crowd that cheered for every appearance of the ants. It's a surprisingly tight B-movie, considering its action-to-talk ratio; I am always delighted to see Edmund Gwenn in roles that are not Kris Kringle and Leonard Nimoy's uncredited walk-on got a round of applause for answering the teletype. Now I just have to convince whoever programs this thing to screen Hans Conried vs. the Giant Radioactive Sea Monkeys The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) one of these years.

Right around three in the morning when the audience wouldn't know what hit it, we got a miscellany of glorious ephemera, including trailers for Republic Pictures' The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), Radar Men from the Moon (1952), and George Pal's Conquest of Space (1955), whence this subject header; a beautiful excerpt from Ward Kimball's "Mars and Beyond" (1957) speculating on Martian evolution in richly colored, predatorily inventive, and increasingly, genuinely alien forms; and Florence Marly's "Spaceboy" (1973), a music video that becomes difficult to describe without incoherent waving of hands and statements like "The jeweled pudenda are legitimately racy," "Barbarella this ain't," and "Whatever did happen to Baby Jane?" The backing music is by Bebe and Louis Barron, who scored Forbidden Planet (1956), and it's awesome. The lyrics are . . . the narrative equivalent of a nudity-colored bodysuit studded with rhinestones and very, very big hair? Her name is Velana. It gets repeated a lot. I think his name was just Spaceboy. I felt bad about both their haircuts, really.

And then we got Moonraker (1979). I was vaguely aware of its existence; mostly I stick to Connery and Craig Bonds, with some time off for Pierce Brosnan being a great choice who needed better scripts. In hindsight, I think "Spaceboy" must have been intended to soften us up, so that we didn't protest quite so loudly at the undercranked gondola chase scene, the comedic pigeon double-take, the one-liners, the more one-liners, the laser-gun fights in space, I'm really not sure where this film was going, all right? Except Venice. And Rio de Janeiro. And the headwaters of the Amazon. And space. I developed a great deal of empathy for Richard Kiels' Jaws and the bespectacled, blond-pigtailed, half-his-size love of his life with whom he survives crashing into the sea in a piece of exploded space station, because why not? Made more sense to me than the orchid-derived toxin that is only lethal to humans and no other mammals.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a great movie, but we have both seen it multiple times in theaters and we very badly needed donuts after Moonraker; it was either that or booze. It was below zero as we walked to Verna's. The sky was blue-black, the brightest light in it the new moon in the old moon's arms. The wind chill was freezing my eyelids shut. There was a horrible few minutes when we realized that the bakery had changed its hours to open at six on weekdays, but fortunately after a brisk walk up the block and back—wondering where we could possibly wait the extra fifteen minutes without losing any fingers by the time they let us in—Verna's was open, was shocked to hear we had walked even from Davis to North Cambridge, sold us half a dozen donuts and coffee and hot chocolate; we tipped like crazy, because otherwise we would have frozen. We even caught the finale of the film, from Klaatu barada nikto on.

"I Sing the Body Electric" (1962) is not one of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone, but it's by Ray Bradbury and at least it wasn't "Time Enough at Last" again.

I have nothing against Kurt Russell. He is counterintuitively charming, endlessly quotable, and just the right degree of totally out of his depth as Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China (1986). I just really like Dennis Dun's Wang Chi, quick-spoken, flip-kicking, slightly geeky romantic hero that he is. He has a beautiful face and a great hat. This time around it struck me that the pace and zing and ricochet of the dialogue is right out of screwball comedy and so are several of the character types. Fine by me. A good film to watch around eight in the morning, as it is dawning on your body that it's really been up for twenty-two hours and watching movies for sixteen of those and the light-headedness is beginning to set in.

The Iron Giant (1999) is still one of the high-water marks of hand-drawn animation in the late twentieth century; it is a perfect '50's period piece and a perfect deconstruction of '50's period conventions and I second-guessed Vin Diesel as the voice of the eponymous Giant because of Groot, but no, it's him. He's very good with expressive monosyllables. I'd seen the film in high school, but retained only snapshot fragments of imagery and a vague sense of the plot tending toward military confrontation; I'd forgotten a lot of the smaller details and the crossing character arcs—some rising, some crashing in flames—and the hilariously merciless send-up of the civil defense film "Duck and Cover" (1951). Of all the movies in this year's lineup I was glad to have seen on a big screen, The Iron Giant and Caligari head the list.

I would love to have something pithy to say about This Island Earth (1955), but I passed out cold on Rob's shoulder during the second act and dreamed I was watching an entirely different Technicolor '50's sci-fi film (a researcher with a war record and a stammer, in communication with aliens who offer him a lifespan far beyond the human norm if he will come to their planet and study them; I don't even think there was a catch) and woke up just in time for the bombing of Metaluna. Mostly I feel qualified to comment on the explosion effects, which were many and various. I'd probably have liked the turncoat Metalunan if I'd been awake for more of his plotline.

And here we come to the film that may deserve an entry of its own, because I did not expect to walk away from Edge of Tomorrow (2014) flat-out liking it as much as I did. It was an ideal closing movie, as bracing a jolt of adrenaline at the end of a long haul as caffeine to people who can drink that stuff: two hit-the-ground-running hours of polytropic, propulsive, smart military science fiction where for the first time in decades I wasn't thinking about (and gritting my teeth against) Tom Cruise as the star, I was tracking the comic-horrific Kafka-and-Vonnegut-wrote-an-IF-game-together misadventures of ex-Major William Cage, a middle-aged PR flack who unwisely tries to blackmail a four-star general in a moment of panic—trying to get out of a front-line assignment—and finds himself promptly stripped of his rank and dumped on a troopship, cannon fodder for the latest push against the Mimics, the virally fast alien invaders of this near future who seem to know Earth's every move before we make it. Cage has no military training. He's never been in combat. He's terrified. The Mimics are thrashing tangles of steel-whip tentacles and cinder-spiked teeth and it is fool's luck, nothing more, that he manages to kill one—dying messily in the process, half-melted by its silvery blood. And the next thing Cage knows, he's unstuck in time. Every death resets him to the moment he wakes in handcuffs at Heathrow, a marked coward and deserter, with less than twenty-four hours before his squad hits the beaches of France. If he wants to change anything about his future or the war's, he's going to have to learn fast. Well, all right, he's not going to have to learn that fast, because he can just keep trying and dying and coming back and trying again ad infinitum if he has to. One of the things I respect about the movie is that he pretty much does. I am indebted to Rob for the comparison to interactive fiction, because I don't play any; my points of reference for fictional time loops were all literary like Fritz Leiber's Changewar stories or cinematic like La Jetée (1962), Primer (2004), and inevitably Groundhog Day (1993). As far as I'm concerned, Edge of Tomorrow compares favorably to all of them, especially in its willingness to think through all possible scenarios and then play them out—if the audience can think of it, the protagonist should be able to—and its turnabout reliance on the audience being as fast on the uptake as the protagonist, so that time is not wasted in spelling out for us what he already picked up three deaths ago. I wish I'd seen it before Arisia; it would have fit nicely in the discussion of World War II precipitating itself out into genre fiction, with continental Europe occupied by the Mimics and new landings at Normandy and echoes even of an earlier war with Emily Blunt's Sergeant Rita Vrataski, the "Full Metal Bitch" who is also the "Angel of Verdun," the only human ever to win a victory against the Mimics. I feel I really should not have been surprised by the presence of Bill Paxton, given Marines and aliens. I was surprised by Cruise. It was very pleasant. The film goes much further than its conceit.

And now it is dark out again and I have to shower and sleep; the cats have already acclimated to our presence after a day away and are curled up happily in the green basket chair and beside my radiator, small soft rounds of purring black fur. I am very tired. I've been awake for thirty-six hours now. I shall change that.