Brother to Lions

The sun set in a blaze of fire across the hills of Kadesh, illuminating the grasslands below in patterns of light and shadow as the burning clouds drifted across the silvering sky. The light fell on the ancient city of Hatara, turning the stone walls to gold and touching the tips of the high towers with points of fiery light, like the points of spears. Eagles circled overhead in the deepening dusk, and drums pounded to drive away the breath of evil, for a king lay dying.

Arnuzana, the War-lord, the Thunder-breaker, lay in his chambers awash in the dying sun, and all knew he would not see it rise again. The wind from the far seas was cool, and it fluttered the curtains and the horsetails that hung from the pillars of the great bed. Age had sunken the flesh on his lean face, leaving behind his narrow mouth and hawk nose like monuments. His eyes were wide-set and dark, almost slitted from many years of squinting through wind and dust. He was a warrior-king, or he had been. Now time and infirmity robbed him of his strength in his last hours.

Servants and slaves clustered in the shadows of the room, but it was only to his three sons that he spoke, his voice ragged and dry as the wastelands of his desert home, far away to the east and the north. He did not speak the complicated, whispering speech of Ashem, but the jagged words of his native tongue.

The Scorpion King

I remember being excited for this movie after I saw the initial trailer, and then when I actually saw it I was disappointed – once again – by a movie that was obviously aimed at something very different than what I wanted it to be. The character of the Scorpion King was introduced in The Mummy Returns as the final end boss of the movie, and was the first movie role for the now ubiquitous Dwayne Johnson, who back then was always just called “The Rock”, as his major fanbase was from pro wrestling. Producers liked his turn as the character so much that they immediately greenlit a film all about him, which would then become Johnson’s first leading role.

The historical “King Scorpion” is a figure about which we do not know very much. He lived sometime between 3000 BCE and 3200 BCE and he may – or may not – have been the initial unifier and founder of the Egyptian First Dynasty. This actually makes him a great focus for a quasi-historical adventure, because there is nothing in the record that can prove you wrong, pretty much no matter what you decide to say about him or what he did.

In the movie, however, we immediately abandon all historical pretense by making the titular character a guy named “Mathyus” who is supposed to be an Akkadian. Now, Akkad was a real place, but as an empire it flourished about a thousand years before the time of the Scorpion King, and “Mathyus” is just a variant of “Matthew”, which is a Hebrew name, and not Akkadian at all. We also quickly notice that no effort is being made to give this any kind of fantasy feel. Everyone speaks in their bland SoCal accents and the script’s dialogue is extremely modern-sounding, with lots of words and turns of phrase that are extremely contemporary, and thus spoil any chance of us taking this world seriously.

The look of the movie is actually pretty good, as they obviously spent some money on it. ($60 million in 2002, about $90 million in today’s money.) The sets are lavish, the cinematography is solid, and the costumes in particular look fucking awesome. I like that while the ladies in the film, especially Kelly Hu, are decked out in sexy outfits worthy of Frazetta, there is also an awareness that the ladies in the audience are here to see Johnson get his shirt off, and so he does that frequently.

The CG effects look. . . well, they look bad, but it was 2002, so you can’t really blame them for that. Everybody’s CG looked bad back then. What is disappointing is the fight choreography, which is not terrible, but just kind of adequate, without any memorable moments where you stop and go “whoa”. Good lighting does a lot to make the film look more dramatic, with a lot of flame-lit oranges to give the scenes a primal look. Director Chuck Russel does a competent job, though I am thinking this maybe caused a slowdown in his career, as he wouldn’t direct anything else for 8 years, and then it was TV.

The real star – as was intended – is Johnson, who successfully transitioned his wrestling persona into a broader appeal. He doesn’t have a great script to work with, but he carries this off for the same reasons he always has: his great physicality, his undeniable, easy charm, and the fact that he is just a good-looking guy and knows what makes him look good. The movie was obviously intended for a broader audience, and is a very PG-13 film of the period, with minimal blood, no nudity, and just not much grit in the proceedings despite all the action. It wallows in cliches like goofy thief sidekicks and adorable kids who have to be rescued, and the villain, Memnon, is a disappointingly bland character, without any real flavor to him.

The real failings of this movie are not in the execution, really, but in the tone and intent. Much like Conan the Destroyer and Kull, the movie is aimed at a wide audience, so all the violence and sex are toned down, and a lot of broad, slapstick humor and modern-sounding dialogue is slapped on it to try and make for a big family blockbuster. What this actually does is make it seem like a big-budget TV movie, and The Scorpion King only barely passes the Xena test – as in, “does this look better than any random episode of Xena?” – mostly by virtue of better lighting and costume design. The bones of a good idea are here, and a more serious approach and a commitment to making it a pulp movie with a lot of blood and carnality might have produced something much more memorable and worth being proud of.

The Black Queen

Queen Arsinue’s slaves came to wake her in the dark, and she squinted into the light of the tall candles and wondered for a single moment if this were the stroke of an assassin, but death did not come and she looked up into the faces of her maids and then sat up, running her hand over her face. It was night outside, the moon coming weakly through the curtains, and she smelled the salt of the sea and the muddy tang of the river.

“Who summons me so late?” she said. She knew only her brother could give the command to wake her, and that made her angry. Menkha was a fool and often disturbed her studies with his foolish worries or silly questions, for all that he was the elder.

“Your forgiveness, my great lady of the Most Ancient Kingdom, but the lord, King Menkha, summons you to the throne hall, for there are warships offshore.” Her body slave bowed her head, looking fearful, and now Arsinue saw the guards waiting in the shadows of the entryway, and she knew this was, in truth, a serious moment. Warships. Who could it be but the Varonans? Warships from Varon could not mean anything good.

She waved the guards out and slipped naked from her bed. Her slaves converged, lighting lamps, and they drew her braided hair back and knotted it into a coil that cascaded down her back. They dressed her in silks and weighted her arms and neck and ankles with jewels. She stepped into her sandals and they laced them for her. It was not a moment to pause and paint her face, but she permitted a dusting of gold over her dark skin and a smear of it on her eyelids.

The palace was quiet in the night, with only a few lights flickering here and there as slaves moved in the hallways and through the courtyards. Arsinue saw the flicker of the moon on the waters of the Nahar, so wide and slow here beside the sea. The city of Qahir stood on a rocky jut of land that thrust out into the water like a finger. In the flood seasons it was cut off from the land altogether and could only be reached by boat. Usually that was a comfort, for the invading Hatta from Kadesh were horsemen, not sailors, but the Varonans were another matter.

Fire and Ice

Ralph Bakshi has acquired a reputation as a great producer of underground animation, despite that he was never very good at it, which says something about the state of non-kid-oriented animation in the US, I suppose. Wizards remains an almost unwatchable piece of crap, and yet it was successful enough for Bakshi to get his half-assed Lord of the Rings film semi-produced. Despite that film making enough money to justify a sequel, investors weren’t interested, and the thing remains essentially unfinished. But by the early 80s, fantasy films had become more mainstream, and so Bakshi was finally able to get a project going with longtime friend Frank Frazetta, which in 1983 became perpetual cult film Fire and Ice.

I remember people being rather excited for this, as the combination of the underground prince of adult animation with the man who was, at the time, unquestionably the greatest living fantasy artist sounded like a ticket to awesomness. Frazetta was still at the height of his powers, and an animated version of his bloody, sensual, barbaric world seemed like it could be nothing but amazing. The script was to be written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas – both veterans of Conan in the comics. Roy Thomas, in particular, was responsible for creating the long-running Savage Sword of Conan, which showcased some of the best Sword & Sorcery writing and comics art in the world.

Unfortunately, despite the strong pedigree, Fire and Ice ends up being a magnification of the creator’s various flaws, rather than a combination of their strengths. Bakshi at his best can be visually arresting and innovative, but without someone to push him he is lazy, and the animation here is full of sketchy animation, reused shots, and other such shortcuts. There are literally a few moments when you can see elements were done in pencil and just never finished or inked. The rotoscoping creates very fluid, lifelike animations, but there is too much reliance on that, and not enough detail to add richness or depth, leaving the characters looking flat.

Frazetta at his best is iconic and evocative, but he was often too rough and impressionistic for what the work needed, and to animate his style you would need someone to sharpen him up, as Ron Cobb did for the movies. Bakshi is not that guy, and the combination of Frazetta’s loose designs with Bakshi’s unfinished approach makes for a movie that is colorful but has an incomplete, unpolished look. In a lot of scenes, the best parts are Thomas Kinkade or James Gurney’s backgrounds.

The script, by Conway and Thomas, is similarly rough and unfinished-seeming. The dialogue is bland, and the plot is simplistic and rote. Evil Lord Nekron rides a glacier palace to destroy the southern lands and wipe out the peaceful, stone-aged inhabitants, seemingly just for the hell of it. He is urged on by his villainous mother, who seems to serve no purpose in the story at all. His minions are a horde of unpleasant racist stereotypes termed the “subhumans”, who are all dark-skinned and hoot and grunt, while all the heroes are white.

Our ostensible protagonist, Larn, survives an attack by Nekron and then heads off in a seemingly random direction on a quest for vengeance – despite that it would seemingly be hard to lose track of a giant glacier. Along the way he encounters Teegra, Standard Kidnapped Princess, and tries to save her from the subhumans while the camera lingers on her bikini-clad body to a degree that is almost embarrassing. There are a lot of elements here that don’t go anywhere, from an encounter with a red-haired witch who gets unceremoniously killed off, and several attacks by giant prehistoric monsters which are fun, but only serve to slow down the already slow plot.

Larn is also aided by the mysterious Dark Wolf, who is so mysterious the movie doesn’t even tell us his name, and we have to learn it from the credits. He’s like a cross between the Death Dealer and Batman, and he is so cool you can’t help but wonder why he’s not the hero. He just shows up, helps Larn out, kills a lot of dudes and then finishes off Nekron, all without his presence ever being explained or his motivations brought up. He’s cool, but he’s just there, and the movie really needed to pick a lead, rather than have this guy just kind of appear without explanation.

Even at a slight 81 minutes, Fire and Ice seems like it is stalling for time. The cuts are long, the dialogue stilted and slow-paced. Even the fight scenes – which are where this movie occasionally shines – are slow and seem to take much longer than they should. It seems like they were trying to make this iconic and epic, but they just ended up making it bland and sluggish. As with so much of his career, Bakshi made a movie that is notable for pushing the envelope and trying new things, but the end result just isn’t very good, much as I might wish it was.