Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth (review)

Curiously, this low-budget movie has all the hallmarks of many a major sf blockbuster. Based on a pre-sold property, it is greenscreen- and CGI-heavy. It assumes that individual shots are more important than narrative or character arcs, and that the incoherence of its plot not only does not matter but is actually something to boast about. Its trades in nostalgia for a lost patriarchal and imperialist order misrepresented as an age of certainty and fairness, while gently chiding, with no real conviction, neoliberal globalisation. It is dull-witted and charmless, and it thinks it is funny.

Square-jawed space hero Captain Eager (James Vaughan) is summoned out of retirement by middle management at Macrospace, the interstellar corporation that has taken over everything (they provide ‘infrastructure and marketing’ and thus have turned every conceivable location into a ‘sterile retail opportunity’). Eager’s mission – whatever it actually is; the film is deliberately obscure – almost fails to get off the ground because Shiobhan in Personnel (Laura Clarke) casts doubt on the suitability of the balding, greying, paunchy protagonist and his old-fashioned rocketship-shaped rocketship, the Victory. Further complicating matters is the vengeful Colonel Regamun (Richard Leaf), who has concocted an absurdly elaborate scheme to (1) drain the life-force from the minds of the alien Panvolkians so as to make himself immortal; (2) turn the now-mindless Panvolkians into slave labour; and (3) kill Eager, whom he blames for the deaths of his family in a long-ago war. Various poorly paced shenanigans ensue. Limply. For a seemingly endless 95 minutes. Which may, or may not, be deliberate.

Captain Eager is conceived as a parody or pastiche of – or perhaps even a satire on – 1950s and 1960s sf film, television and comics, particularly Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, created for the Eagle comic in 1950 and set in the late 1990s. However, the film falters because it is either not familiar enough with this source or fears that its potential audience would not be (for example, The Victory looks nothing like the Anastasia or any of Dan Dare’s other spacecraft, more closely resembling a cross between Thunderbird 3 from Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds (UK1965–66) and the rocket that took Hergé’s Tintin to the moon a decade earlier in Objectif Lune (1953) and On a marché sur la Lune (1954)). Consequently, Captain Eager flounders around rather indiscriminately, looking for other things to parody/pastiche/satirise: sliding spaceship doors, clearly made of wood and painted to look like metal, do not open properly; sets made out of painted flats get knocked over; and so on. The film even boasts that it is shot in ‘Card-o-Scope’ and that CGI stands for ‘Cardboard and Gum Imagery’. This not-exactly-nostalgia does lead to the film’s few quite good jokes: Regamun’s Ming the Merciless-inspired collar gets in the way every time he turns his head; when Eager and Jenny enter the darkened Victory, Eager turns on the light to the sound of a pull-cord switch echoing in a bathroom. There is also a wry pleasure to be derived from the design of certain vehicles: Eager’s eventual triumph depends upon him flying a battered old Mark 1 spacecraft, which resembles an Avro Vulcan bomber, a triumph of 1950s British aeronautical engineering, and then a glider that recalls the Colditz Cock, a home-made glider constructed by British POWs and featured in Colditz (UK 1972–74). Such amusing moments, however, are also indicative of the film’s conceptual and tonal uncertainty, caught between recalling a 1950s vision of the future and a folk memory of the actual 1950s (and 1960s and 1970s, and 1940s).

Other revisions of Dan Dare have likewise struggled with how to update its upright protagonist. For his intermittent, downbeat and punkish appearance in 2000 AD in the late 1970s, he was thrown, via suspended animation, 200 years further into the future, where he bore no real...