WILD WILD WEST (film 1999)

WILD WILD WEST (film 1999). Barry Sonnenfeld, dir. Brent Maddock, Jeffrey Price, script. USA: Peters Entertainment (prod.), Warner (prod., dist.), 1999. Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, stars. Bo Welch, designer.

Based on the 1965-70 CBS-TV series The Wild, Wild West (q.v. . Arguably a work of "steampunk"—cyberpunk in the 19th-c., Jules Verne form—but in the much lighter vein of the original TV series and James Bond movies, and with a good deal of po-mo allusiveness. See for superweapons and gadgets (good and/or comic when invented by Artemus Ward), a cyborg-ized or prostheticized villain with at least one Terminator-like employee, mechanized environments, and arachnoid variations on insect/mechanism association. Note especially mechanisms associated with the crippled and emasculated villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless: his Tarantula war machine, a steam-driven wheel chair that converts into a spider-leg chair, and "fiendishly inventive restraining system" where prisoners are "fitted with a giant magnetic collar" which attracts a blade launched in their direction "from a steam-driven catapult" if they try to escape (Kutzera 27). For the restraining collars, cf. F. Pohl and J. Williamson's Reefs of Space (cited under Fiction), and the films DEADLOCK and THE RUNNING MAN (see above, this section); for their visual design, and function, note the ruff warn by the King of the Moon (Robin Williams) in Terry Gilliam's film THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988/89). Donald Gilzinger notes also the exploding wrist cuffs among the "Great Game" cell in B. Sterling's Heavy Weather, ch. 9 (q.v. under Fiction); and Mike Conaway adds "pain-inducing collars" in the original Star Trek episode, "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (not cited). The tarantula war-machine is an obvious and possibly significant variation on the Imperial Walkers in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI, and it is sufficiently terrible that a flying machine following the designs of Leonardo can be positive technology, even when explicitly compared to ichneumon wasp (and the treatment of spiders by ichneumon wasps briefly described). In an interview in Cinefantastique, Sonnenfeld noted that Welch used "spider web themes" in Loveless's mansion and repeated use of "little rods with balls hanging down that are" literally system governors but which Sonnenfeld identifies as "testicles. And in every single thing that Loveless has, whether it's the tank, the machine gun, the back of his own wheelchair, you see these rotating balls. [. . .] Perhaps it's because he [Welch] feels that since Loveless doesn't have a penis or testicles, he would put them everywhere." See Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 32-43 f. for articles and interviews by Frederick C. Szebin, primarily, and Dale Kutzera; they also print useful stills and drawings.