Missing the puppets
Mark Steyn
Thunderbirds (PG, selected cinemas)
you have a tough choice at your local Roxy this week: you can go and see Spider-Man 2, which is a superb example of how to adapt a Sixties pop-culture favourite and get everything right; or you can sit through Thunderbirds, which is an impressively thorough example of how to adapt a Sixties pop-culture favourite and get everything wrong. You'd think the clever-clogs behind it would have learnt from Val Kihner's version of The Saint: if you don't believe in the source material, don't do it.
Thunderbirds made its debut on British TV just under 40 years ago, telling the weekly adventures of International Rescue, a 21st-century do-gooder organisation run from a secret South Pacific island by billionaire widower Jeff Tracy, aided by his five sons zipping round the planet in their five ultra-jazzy Thunderbirds. The first thing to go in this big-screen adaptation was the puppets. Like Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, Thunderbirds was filmed in Supermarionation — that's to say, it featured Gerry Anderson's distinctive school of puppetry. Maybe the producers were right: a movie audience doesn't want to sit through 90 minutes of jerky dolls with wobbly heads and campy walks. In that case, it's even more important to honour what's left of the brand once you ditch the puppets.
As the 'Filmed in Supermarionation' tag indicated, these were little TV shows with big style. Sylvia Anderson's designs gave the series a very distinctive look, and they boasted better theme-music than most grown-up shows: the Fireball XL5 title song is one of the great anthems of the space age, and the Stingray closing theme — the big love song for the mermaid Marina — is better than most of the ballads of the day.
The Thunderbirds march is part of the signature of the show, but the busy remix here dilutes its power: maybe in Dolby Digital Stereo it sounds wonderful, but in the theatre I was in it came out muddy and indistinct, and the strings of that lovely legato middle section just got lost. That's a shame, because the groovy retro animated titles sequence it accompanies is the best bit of the movie. As someone says in A Mighty Wind, 'To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very nowtro, if you will.' Nothing dates quicker than the future, and the 21st century as foreseen by Gerry Anderson was totally nowtro then, but fabulously retro now. Anderson's futuristic vision was the Sixties, only more so: Lady Penelope's pink Rolls had the licence plate 'FAB 1'. and Jeff, Scott, Virgil, Lady P and all the rest always ended their radio communications with the sign-off 'F-A-B', which didn't stand for anything but sounded 'with it', if you will. The almost fab opening suggests the adaptors understand this.
But then the movie proper starts. We're in a private school in Massachusetts, where young Alan Tracy is flunking in class because he spends his days dreaming of being a Thunderbird like his big brothers. Fortunately, Lady Penelope and her chauffeur Parker arrive to take Alan and his friend Fermat back to Tracy Island for spring break. The pink Rolls has gone. It's now a pink, er, Ford. Oh well.
Once on the island, Alan insists on doing his mopey alienated adolescent thing, and his dad (Bill Paxton) starts talking to him about how he can never be a Thunderbird until he learns to be part of the team.
Then the bad guy shows up. He's the Hood, played with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by Ben Kingsley in a cheap dressing gown with no hood. He lures Jeff and Alan's four big brothers up into outer space and then strands them there as they struggle to stay alive, even though there's not enough oxygen for five and barely enough personality for one. That's all they do for the rest of the movie: lie on the floor of a shattered Thunderbird 5 gulping for air. For all you get to see of the Tracy brothers, it might as well be the Osmonds up there. Didn't Tim Bevan (producer) or anybody else think it odd to have wound up with a Thunderbirds film in which the main characters are reduced to bitplayers in their own movie?
The Tracys get sidelined in order that young Alan, his gal pal Tin Tin and brainbox Fermat can run around Tracy Island in a transparent grab for the Spy Kids audience. Alas, unlike the Spy Kids, this is one of the dullest trios of celluloid adolescents ever assembled. And, because they hog so much screen time, we barely get to see any of the Thunderbirds machines themselves. The Supermarionation shows had two things going for them — great characters and the romance of technology — and this movie spends $45 million killing both. The only two actors having any fun are Sophia Myles as the think-pink secret agent Lady Penelope and Ron Cook as the spitting image of the puppet Parker. In a leaden screenplay with one nonfunny running joke about Brains's stutter, Lady P and Parker bring a much-needed brio to their not particularly sparkling dialogue. Parker, attempting to pick a lock, needs some wire. Lady Penelope fumbles around under her sweater and emerges with her left cup's undenviring. 'Will this suffice, Parker?"Yuss, milady.' I didn't need it anyway.' Of course, milady.' I gather Richard Curtis was brought in to punch up the script, and that sounds like him.
If they'd taken the spirit of the Penny-Parker scenes and run with it, they might have had a movie. Instead, Tim Bevan and co. took Gerry Anderson's wonderful self-contained universe and cut the strings in every sense. lady Penelope's left breast may hold up, but nothing else does.
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