A Beautiful Naked Woman Only Gets You So Far: Lifeforce

I never think much about what goes in to casting a movie. Usually one only notices the stars and the bit players all fade to the background (by design, I guess). It's easy to forget that there are rounds and rounds of auditions that people have to go through just to get considered seriously for a role and even then they might not get it (Samm Levine comes to mind simply due to his stories from Sad Sad Conversation). I bring this up now because a beautiful woman walks around nearly all of her scenes stark naked. All I could think about was how many women had to go into the casting office and get naked (and subsequently get rejected because their bodies weren't quite right. And it was their bodies because there is very little acting involved in the role). IMDB tells us that over 1000 actresses were considered for the role. That's a whole lot of naked ladies for one movie. I'd imagine the only other person who looks at that many naked people for one movie is Tinto Brass.

There's a lot going for Lifeforce. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist). Written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Return of the Living Dead), though apparently Hooper made changes that O'Bannon didn't approve. An awesome score by Henry Mancini. But after a stellar first act (pun slightly intended), Lifeforce falls apart.

The film opens in space with a crew investigating Halley's Comet and the come across desiccated bat corpses and three humanoid bodies in clear coffins made of an unknown substance. They bring the space coffins on board and we flash to thirty days later and contact is lost with the space ship. Another is sent up to find out what happens. The whole scene plays out much like the similar scene in Sunshine where the crew enters the other ship only to find everyone dead and burnt to death except without the crazy burned man fucking things up. I can't help but think Danny Boyle was a little inspired by Lifeforce. While the space scenes (and those soon after) are the best in Lifeforce, the special effects in space are pretty shoddy, though I do like the matte paintings. 

The coffined bodies are brought back to earth and we get some fun nakedness, soul sucking, and pretty cool animatronics. For a while, Lifeforce feels like it's going to be a perfect melding of O'Bannon's Alien and Return of the Living Dead. But once Space Girl (Mathilda May) gets loose from the compound, the movie becomes weird, confusing, and complicated.

Apparently, not everyone on the first space ship died. Colonel Carlsen (Steve Railsback, who I'm not really familiar with but is horrible in this) found his way to an escape pod and was recovered on earth. Now he's connected to Space Girl and she can get in his thoughts and he can see hers. It's a cheap gimmick gets even worse when hypnotism is also thrown in their. Now they can know where Space Girl is at all times even though she can change bodies. I'm not going to go much further into detail because it would be a garbled mess of words. Even though the space humanoids are referred to as vampires, somehow everyone gets turned into zombies. Patrick Stewart pops up and disappears without having done much. I don't even know what to make of the climax.

There are several key issues that prevent Lifeforce from being anything more than a mildly entertaining movie. First, we spend a lot of time with the first crew without getting to know any of them, then they are all killed. We enter act two by getting introduced to new characters. This approach leaves the viewer with no stake in what happens because we don't give a rat's ass what happens to these people and don't even know what it is they want (except maybe to get the naked woman back). Then there's the fact that the first act features a lot of nudity and cool special effects that disappear for a large part of the rest of Lifeforce. Just like the head explosions, you don't want to shoot your wad early. Additionally, the movie needed a better lead. I couldn't help but picture Jeffrey Combs owning as the lead in Lifeforce. He can play slightly insane better than anyone I've ever seen (and we'll throw insane in there, too).

Lifeforce crumbles when it introduces hypnotism and mind-connections as major plot points and never recovers. I'd like to read O'Bannon's original script just to see how much was his story. I like his work so much I struggle believing he crafted something so absurd. One thing I'll say for Lifeforce, though, is that I didn't see the ending coming at all.