THE PUPPET MASTERS
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1994 Jon A. Webb
THE PUPPET MASTERS is a throw-back to 50s science-fiction films, which were really more horror or suspense movies, and which rarely got the science anywhere near right ("the blonde exobiologist straightened up from the electron microscope.") This is kind of refreshing, in this age when so many of us are wondering about what technical innovation allowed the refitted Enterprise to not only exceed the Warp 5 galactic speed limit, but actually achieve Warp 14 in the future scenes of "All Good Things...." Even more so because this film is based on Heinlein's novel of the same name, which, like all of Heinlein's writings, seem exactly suited for this kind of shlocky presentation.
In the story alien brains invade the earth, and immediately start turning everyone in the Midwest into mindless zombies, something like Rush Limbaugh. The whole thing is sped up quite a bit in the movie, because of the need to compress the story so it can fit in a feature film; the result is the addition of tension due to the very rapid advance of the invasion, but this is almost completely undone by the swift conclusion of the story. The addition of the predictable final fight absolutely does not help.
What the movie unfortunately misses is Heinlein's study of the experience of being a mindless zombie, which is the best part of the book. It would be hard to portray this in a film; it would be hard to market a film built around this psychological conflict rather than fights, sex, etc. But it would've been nice if they had tried.
It also misses effective direction. The blonde exobiologist peering down into the spaceship should have been a scene fraught with tension and danger; it had almost no impact. The father-son relationship was never properly developed prior to the torture scene. More could have been made of the brief romantic moment. Etc.
Still, it is nice to see the army out once again to fight against the aliens; they go at it with the same gusto, but none of the technical innovations (undoubtedly due to limited budget), that they brought to our recent successful invasions of Kuwait and Haiti. (I wish that the film-makers had been able to work in some stock footage of the B2 Stealth bomber taking off to fly against the aliens -- it would have been such a nice reference to the scene in, I believe, a version of War of the Worlds, where a Fifties "flying wing" does just that, to no dramatic point.) In fact, the whole movie seems stuck in a kind of time warp -- when the aliens are shipped to somebody's apartment, they show up in a wooden crate, packed in excelsior. No overnight delivery and styrofoam peanuts for these guys! One almost expects to see cars with huge fenders and men in fedoras.
Pointing out the technical flaws in a film like this seems silly, though, because the film does not take itself so seriously. There were plenty of nice bits (but not enough to make a nice film.) I particularly liked the encysted aliens, hidden like snakes in mailboxes, or later like Easter eggs; the arrival of the aliens was neat, quickly making the point without wasting lots of time and money on special effects; some of Donald Sutherland's dialogue is pretty funny.
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