Stupornova

I tried to watch the movie Supernova today. Really. I tried. I didn't have any illusions going in, in part because I've never been particularly enamored of James Spader. He just seems creepy to me, in the same way Christopher Walken always seems creepy. But James Spader seems creepy in a different and less interesting way.

But I'm not an ideologue, and I thought "Oh, who knows, he might be good. After all, he was pretty good in Stargate, creepiness aside."

I'll never know, because I had to stop watching the movie long before I could decide if I liked James Spader. The movie itself seemed like a combination of Event Horizon, Alien and Firefly, which is all good. Unfortunately, it's also like Battlestar Galactica. Maybe even worse.

My main beef with Battlestar Galactica was the Unsteady Cam. Whatever the director may or may not be trying to tell me by wobbling the camera around like that, my reaction was to see it as someone's badly-done home movie and I lost interest in it very quickly. But Supernova takes the Unsteady Cam to new and altogether infuriating lengths. I found the Unsteady Cam in Battlestar merely annoying. But in Supernova, it was actually frustrating. It made me angry. I'm sure director and cinematographer and all sat around the screening room high-fiving one another over the artistry of the wobbling, but me, the consumer, got angry and turned the TV off because I couldn't bear any more.

The Unsteady Cam in Supernova has an all-new mode of unsteadiness. It rolls back and forth, incessantly, obnoxiously, to the point that most of the time I felt like I was watching the movie from a rowboat in the open ocean. Why? What possible idea does this rolling camera convey? That we're in space? That we're in a rowboat? That the Unsteady Cam has become such a trope in science fiction that one has to have an Uber-Unsteady Cam to be noticed? That we've drunk half a dozen bottles of cough syrup and can't hold our heads steady?

The movie also had the annoying habit of having wildly out-of-focus things in the foreground. I guess it's supposed to make us think we're actually on the ship, but most of the time it made me feel like a Peeping Tom, like I wasn't just on the ship, but hiding on the ship and viewing people in a furtive and somehow shameful way.

I turned it off. I have no idea if the story is worth anything, because the camera work alienated and frustrated me to the point that I turned it off and did other things instead.

I think what really gets to me is that someone had to design and build a special camera mount to produce that sickening rolling. It's probably some amazing construction of motors, joints, feedback devices, computers, and thousands of lines of code. It probably cost a pretty penny to develop. It's probably an amazing technical achievement. And all so I could feel like I was in a rowboat in the open ocean.

Come on, people. This is getting ridiculous. When your audience starts to shout "Hold still, for crying out loud," you may have taken artistic pretension just a little too far.