Jonathan Romney
HERE’S the bad news: 1997 promises to be pretty much like 1996 all over again. Wall- to-wall space aliens and natural disasters. If you can’t face the prospect, you could always hibernate all year with a stout volume of Henry James. But that won’t help you forget the movies – he’s this year’s favoured classic author, with Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, and The Wings of the Dove to follow.
Even if you managed to opt out of Independence Day, you won’t escape intergalactic duty in 1997. I’ve just seen the trailer for a forthcoming three-part astral epic, and it’ll be hard work to top this one – Star Wars, 20 years old and still the flashiest zap-gun opera since stardate whenever. The next batch of galactic hopefuls include: the new Robert Zemeckis epic Contact, with Jodie Foster; Tommy Lee Jones chasing aliens in Men in Black; Tim Burton’s extravagant Mars Attacks; and Alien IV, which promises to be the darkest, strangest yet, directed by Jeunet of the Delicatessen team.
Also looming: giant space insects in Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s mega- budget follow-up to Showgirls (lap-dancing cockroaches?)
Insects are altogether on the march this year, with rival animations in the works from Toy Story director John Lasseter (Bugs) and Spielberg’s new DreamWorks (Ants). Or to avoid confusion, you could try the real-life wriggles of French documentary Microcosmos.
No one’s yet planning a locust-plague film, but it can’t be far off, as the natural catastrophe cycle continues in the wake of Twister – two bubbling-lava movies, Volcano and Dante’s Peak, not to mention The Flood. Then there’s James Cameron’s Titanic, which may be his Waterworld, with a budget creeping up to an unthinkable $130-million. With JG Ballard currently a hot ticket after Crash, who’ll be first to take on his disaster books The Drowned World and The Drought? Likely to trample all over the 50th anniversary of Cannes are more dinosaurs, in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World.
For more adult pursuits, there’s The Game, a paranoid thriller by David Fincher (Seven); Milos Forman returns with the tale of an all-American pornographer, The People Vs Larry Flynt; and Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient will cause mass outbreaks of swooning (it’s either the passion or the desert heat).
For culture, there’s the long haul with Kenneth Branagh’s uncut Hamlet (just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind the arras), but the hipster vote goes to Baz Luhrmann’s drugs-guns-and- fashion Romeo and Juliet. Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You will, at the very least, have better tunes than Evita. Britain’s entries into the fray will include Mike Leigh’s latest, and the first American foray by the Trainspotting team. Comeback of the year, let’s hope, will be David Lynch, whose Lost Highway is said to be wild at heart and weird all the way through.