Apollo 11 – Blood and Porridge

July 23, 2026July 23, 2026

Uncle Sam (Part 2)

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Continuing my tribute to the great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who died on July 13^th…

Sam Neill got top billing alongside Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing movie of all time until James Cameron’s Titanic was released four years later. While it was gratifying that Neill’s career get a boost from his involvement in such a blockbuster, I have to say I’m not a great fan of it. That’s probably because prior to seeing the film, I read the book it’s based upon, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), wherein the story and characters are darker, more complex and more interesting than Spielberg’s interpretation of them.

As Alan Grant, a palaeontologist asked to assess the titular theme park where, it’s planned, visitors will pay good money to gawk at dinosaurs that’ve been cloned back into life using bits of ancient DNA, Neill is inevitably – and literally – dwarfed by his co-stars, the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s special-effects team, headed Stan Winston, created using then-cutting-edge animatronics and computer-generated imagery. Still, he invests Grant with enough quirks to make him memorable.

He’s sometimes curmudgeonly and not fond of children, even ones who like dinosaurs – see how he spooks one youngster with an account of how velociraptors killed their prey, or how he freaks out the grandchildren of park-owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) by pretending to get fried by an electric fence. Paradoxically, he can be child-like himself. When he first sees one of Hammond’s dinosaurs, his wonderment leaves him struggling for words and he almost faints. And he shows juvenile delight when he encounters a triceratops, which he hails as “my favourite when I was a kid… the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” (When I was a kid, the triceratops was my favourite dinosaur too.)

When Jurassic Park received a royal premiere in London, Neill found himself sitting between his 10-year-old son and Princess Diana. According to Neill, his son got so worked up at the film’s scary bits that he started farting uncontrollably, and Neill became paranoid about what his royal neighbour would think when she smelled the fumes: “Princess Di is being exposed to the horrors of a little boy’s fart, but she’s going to think it’s me. I am going to be subliminally blamed for my son’s crimes, and I don’t think she’ll talk to me afterwards.” However, gallantly, the princess did speak to him later and ‘never mentioned’ the flatulence. Jeff Goldlum commented drolly on Neill’s anecdote: “I’ve heard him tell that a couple of times and it’s just amazing the lengths that he will go to still blame the boy.”

Neill played Grant twice more, in the second sequel Jurassic Park III (2003), which I saw on TV and found pretty inconsequential; and the fifth one, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which got lousy reviews and which I’m in no rush to see.

© Miramax / Buena Vista international / Jan Chapman Productions

As well as being in 1993’s biggest blockbuster, Neill was in the same year’s biggest arthouse movie, Jane Campion’s The Piano. He plays Alisdair Stewart, a settler in 19^th century New Zealand who, via an arranged marriage, suddenly acquires a wife, the mute Ada (Holly Hunter). He also acquires a piano, the playing of which is Ada’s only opportunity to express herself. Predictably, Alister and Ada don’t enjoy a happy marriage and the piano is the catalyst for trouble. It becomes the means by which Ada, unable to tolerate Alisdair’s sexual advances, instead discovers sensuality with a neighbouring settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), under the pretext of giving him piano lessons.

While Keitel’s character first seems weird and brutish, but gradually shows himself capable of tenderness and decency, Neill’s goes the other way – we initially have some sympathy for Alisdair, but he becomes a villain who propels the plot towards its climax of mutilation and attempted suicide (though, ultimately, it ends happily). In his 2023 autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This: A Memoir, Neill wrote of the film, “I don’t think I can overestimate how important The Piano is for me in hindsight. It sits in my funny old CV like a medal on my chest. It wasn’t my film. It was Jane Campion’s. I wasn’t the star of the film. That was Holly Hunter. But there is honour to be found in the second fiddle. Or fourth. No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things. But you served. I was there in an important feminist film. I was there in the front line in an important New Zealand film.”

As many have noted, The Piano is an example of how Neill used his screen presence to generous effect. He didn’t hog the limelight but gave his co-stars space to perform to their full potential. This was especially so with his female co-stars. While Neill reined himself in a little, they got the chance to bloom in their roles – not only Holly Hunter in The Piano, but Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), and reportedly – I’ve unfortunately never seen it – Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979).

In 1995, Neill worked with cult American director John Carpenter and made the horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which critics greeted unenthusiastically at the time but which, gradually, has been re-evaluated and is seen now as a misunderstood classic. It features Neill as an insurance investigator called John Trent, who’s hired by a publishing company to track down its missing star author (Jurgen Prochnow). The author’s name is Sutter Kane and though his initials, and massive sales, suggest he was inspired by Stephen King, his tales of cosmic horror and fearsome ancient beings called the ‘Old Ones’ indicate he’s based on the legendary Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft. Trent’s investigations bring him into ever-stranger situations where he encounters characters and settings from Kane’s fiction. It’s as if the writer is controlling what happens in reality – which is worrying, since his new novel concerns the end of the world.

© New Line Cinema

While I’m glad a movie involving Sam Neill, John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft has received some retrospective love, I’m afraid I agree with those unenthusiastic critics in 1995. Like many of Carpenter’s later movies, there’s just too much going on in In the Mouth of Madness and you get the impression the director’s throwing everything at the wall in the hope some of it sticks. That said, the movie has some memorable moments, such as a scene where Trent and a client discuss business in a restaurant, not noticing a mad axeman creating mayhem in the street outside their window. Carpenter also stages a spooky sequence wherein a night-time cyclist keeps inexplicably reappearing in front of a cruising car – and keeps changing.

I prefer an earlier Neill-Carpenter collaboration, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), an adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 novel of the same name, itself inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man (1897). It’s a somewhat awkward film – the tension between the studio, Warner Bros, who wanted an out-and-out comedy, and the star, Chevy Chase, who wanted to show he could do ‘serious acting’, is palpable – but nonetheless I think it’s underrated. I certainly enjoyed Memoirs of an Invisible Man more than director Carpenter did, who once said of it: “I really wanted to quit the business after that movie… I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film. He shall not be named who needs to be killed. No, no, no, that’s terrible. He needs to be set on fire… No, no, no. Anyway, it’s all fine. I survived it.” Presumably Carpenter was referring to Chase, who has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult. Even an invisible Chevy Chase was too much for him.

Carpenter certainly didn’t mean Neill, who played the film’s slightly James Mason-like villain. “I love working with him,” the director said of Neill. “He comes prepared. He knows what he’s going to do. He reacts to other actors who are there. I mean, he’s just a dream come true.”

© Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures

Another horror movie Neill made in the 1990s, which initially got savaged by the critics but was retrospectively reassessed and lauded as a classic, is Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997). Set in 2047, it’s about an experimental spaceship that’d disappeared during its maiden voyage inexplicably reappearing years later with no sign of its crew. When a rescue mission, whose members include Neill, investigate, it becomes clear the ship’s hyperdrive system accidentally sent it into another dimension – a dimension known to religious folk as ‘hell’ – and back. And it’s returned with something nasty on board.

Well, I’m sorry to be a misery-guts again, but I also agree with the 1997 reviews of Event Horizon and don’t see it as an unappreciated masterpiece. It strikes me as a muddled mixture of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), with that old chestnut of ‘characters being tormented by their innermost fears brought to life’ thrown in. To be fair to Paul W. S. Anderson, the studio, Paramount Pictures, removed much footage from his original edit, believing it was too gory and horrific, and the finished product was not what he and scriptwriter Philip Eisner had envisioned. Incidentally, as Neill’s character is Australian, he had him wear a uniform with an Australian flag-patch – but one where the Union-Jack part of it has been replaced by the Aboriginal flag. Neill hoped that by 2047 a more tolerant, Pauline Hanson-free Australia would better honour its indigenous inhabitants.

By the start of the 21^st century, and his sixth decade, Neill had become something of an institution and seemed the personification of the word ‘avuncular’. A good example of this is in the Australian movie The Dish (2000), a gentle comedy in which he plays the boss of an Australian radio telescope that, in 1969, is landed with the job of relaying film-footage from the Apollo 11 moon-mission to the eagerly-awaiting world’s TV screens. This isn’t easy for Neill and his team as, first, they suffer a crippling power cut and then, on July 20^th, the day of the landing, a violent storm threatens to blow their dish over. Neill is reassuringly calm and reasonable throughout. Thinking about the film now, I can’t recall any moment in it where he didn’t seem to be wearing a cardigan or puffing at a pipe.

© Madman Films / Piki Films / Defender Films

He’s somewhat less avuncular, but still loveable, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). He plays Hector, a grumpy old misfit who takes to the New Zealand mountains with his chubby, juvenile-delinquent foster-kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) when the latter panics about being returned to state care. They soon have police, social services, vigilantes and the media after them. Along the way they encounter hardship, killer wild boars and a literally tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic called Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) but also form a genuine, father-son bond. Director Taiki Waititi creates an affecting and funny movie but avoids easy laughs and cloying sentimentality. Neill and Dennison’s characters take some hard knocks and their happy ending is hard won.

During the 21^st century Neill also became a fixture on television – appearing in shows like The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-9), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-14), Old School (2014), Tutankhamun (2016), The Twelve (2022-25) and Apples Never Fall (2024) – and on social media, where he regularly posted updates about Two Paddocks, his beloved farm and vineyard in New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region. Famously, Neill named the animals on his farm after celebrities he knew in showbusiness, supposedly because it made him less inclined to eat them: “Well, you can’t eat a friend… I’m not a vegetarian, but I have a ram called Jeff Goldblum. You wouldn’t want to eat Jeff, would you?”

This led to some memorable moments as, for example, Neill posted, “MICHAEL FASSBENDER ASSAULTED!” – his rooster, named after Michael Fassbender, had had his tail-feathers torn out by a rogue dog. Or a comment he made about Helena Bonham-Carter, one of his cows: “She’s had 16 calves now. She’s up for it, if nothing else.” Or a sad disclosure that Meryl Streep, a chicken, had been “…killed by a ferret recently.” During Covid-19, his gentle and good-humoured updates about his farm and its whimsically-named inhabitants was an antidote to the stress and boredom of lockdown. They certainly cheered me up more than, say , Gal Gadot and a bunch of her thespian pals crooning John Lennon’s Imagine on Instagram.

In a 2023 interview in the Guardian, Neill opined, “I’m not afraid to die but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big… But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.” A lot of people would have loved to have got another decade or two of Sam Neill, and his acting talents, and his sense of fun. But we should be grateful for what we did get.

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

April 14, 2026April 14, 2026

Nostalgic wallows 6: 1970s visions of the future

From wikipedia.org / © NASA / Josh Valcarcel

Three days ago, the crew of Artemis II returned to earth. They had taken part in a lunar flyby mission launched by the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that saw human beings leave low earth orbit and travel around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. I would have posted something on this blog about Artemis II before now, but didn’t want to tempt fate. “Let’s wait until they get back safely,” I thought. The fact that the current US government, which gives NASA its orders, seemingly doesn’t give a f*ck about matters such as health and safety or, indeed, science generally made me worry the mission had been insufficiently prepped and might end in disaster.

Happily, though, the Artemis II mission has been a resounding success. It’s also made me think back to when I was a little kid, in the early 1970s, the last time that humans went to the moon. In fact, it was in 1969, when I was three years old and NASA’s Apollo programme was underway, that the late Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on an alien world. All right, it was only the moon, which is hardly in the same league as Krypton or Tatooine, but for a wee species that evolved out of the Homo genus just 200,000 years ago, Armstrong’s ‘small step’ 57 years ago was pretty impressive.

However, it has also made me wonder. After all the excited expectations raised by the Apollo programme about space travel, how come the half-century between it and Artemis II has turned out to be so rubbish?

I’m too young to remember seeing Armstrong plant his spacesuit-encased foot on the lunar turf in 1969, but I can just about recall live TV pictures of a subsequent Apollo mission to the moon in the early 1970s. Admittedly, I wasn’t altogether sure what I was watching. At the time my family and I were huddled around a tiny black-and-white television in Northern Ireland, which only picked up one channel, the BBC. (It showed a second channel, RTE, from the Republic of Ireland, if my Dad poked a screwdriver into a hole at the set’s side and did some awkward and potentially dangerous fiddling with the wiring.) All I could make out on the screen were some fuzzy pale blobs floating against a fuzzy grey background. However, my Dad assured me these were men walking about on the moon, high above us, at that very moment, so I took his word for it.

From wikipedia.org / © NASA

It must have been in 1973 that my imagination took a leap that was almost as giant as the ‘leap for mankind’ that Armstrong spoke of when he descended from the lunar landing module. The cause of this were two sets of newly-published encyclopaedias that my parents had seen advertised somewhere and ordered – a 15-volume set with lemony-coloured covers called the Childcraft books that, accordingly, were for children; and a 24-volume set called the World Book series that were for adults and came in sombre, mossy-green covers. That was 39 encyclopaedias in all and, amazingly, they fitted perfectly into the big display shelf that ran along the top of the sideboard in our living room.

I immediately set about reading these encyclopaedias, both the juvenile and adult ones, and my horizons were swiftly widened. Not all the consequences of this were positive. My parents had neglected to read the small print in the advertisement. If they had, they would have discovered that the encyclopaedias had been printed in America, by Americans, for Americans, and their contents were duly biased towards America. As a result, I wasted a lot of time searching in the fields of our farm for evidence that woodchucks, porcupines, prairie dogs and Gila monsters had been foraging there. Also, some quaint words started to appear in my vocabulary – diaper, candy store, soda fountain, rest room – which inevitably had my classmates at primary school tearing the piss out of me.

One feature of these encyclopaedias that really rubbed off on me was that, because they were American and because they’d been published just after the moon landings, they were dripping with optimism. And this was a scientific as well as an American optimism. Yes, it’s hard to believe today, now that one of the two main American political parties is infested with far-right-wing religious fruitcakes who maintain that the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago (and vaccines are bad, and manmade climate change is a hoax), but there was a time not long ago when America took science seriously and saw it as one of the key tools in converting the rest of the world to the glories of the American way. At the age of eight or nine, I lapped all this up – even those assertions in the encyclopaedias that, with the benefit of hindsight, were a bit over-optimistic.

For example, the encyclopaedias predicted that, having reached the moon, it would only be a short time – the 1980s, at the latest – before human beings were tramping around the surface of Mars too. The ‘S’ volume of the World Book encyclopaedias had a lengthy entry about ‘space travel’ and on one page I found a multi-pictured diagram showing how astronauts were going to get to Mars. Admittedly, the Mars spaceship in that diagram, as well as having a long, sleek fuselage and a beak-like nose, had wings, which seemed a bit suspicious because by then I knew that in outer space there wasn’t any air and wings were thus superfluous. (I suspect the artist behind those pictures had been unconsciously influenced by a non-space vehicle that was making a stir at the time, Concorde.) Elsewhere, there were pictures of what a moonbase – only a few decades away in the future, I was told – would look like, although it was an unprepossessing cylindrical structure that resembled a giant tin can.

Anyway, I assumed this was what I could expect by the time I’d reached my thirties. I’d be living on a moonbase, watching Concorde-like spaceships streak past on their way to Mars.

My expectations were buoyed further when in the mid-1970s my parents finally got round to buying a new TV set that got three channels, the BBC, RTE and ITV – Independent Television. Although ITV had (and still has) a reputation for cheap and lowbrow programming in comparison with that made by the BBC, it did broadcast at the time various action / adventure series made by a subsidiary called ITC entertainment, run by the cigar-smoking impresario Lord Lew Grade. Aimed at international markets and at the American market in particular, ITC’s shows commanded higher-than-average budgets and looked quite glossy by the standards of 1960s and 1970s British TV. They included The Prisoner (1967-68), Department S (1969-70) and The Persuaders (1971) and a host of science-fiction shows made by the remarkable Gerry Anderson. I was able to watch these for the first time.

It was watching repeats of Anderson’s live-action sci-fi show, UFO, made in 1970 and starring Ed Bishop, George Sewell, Michael Billington, Peter Gordeno, Wanda Ventham (Benedict Cumberbatch’s mum) and Gabrielle Drake (Nick Drake’s sister), that convinced me that the future was going to be absolutely brilliant. For UFO, Anderson’s production team envisioned the shape of things to come through a prism of gaudy late-1960s design and fashion, with a smidgeon of then-fashionable psychedelia. It didn’t just feature spaceships and moonbases, but also sleek super-cars, talking computers with hallucinogenic panels of flashing lights, giant submarines with detachable nose-modules that turned into aircraft when they reached the ocean surface, guys in groovy-looking suits that didn’t have lapels, and ladies wearing silver miniskirts and sporting purple hairdos.

So, I thought, I’d be living on a moonbase, watching spaceships streak past towards Mars, and Gabrielle Drake would be shimmying around me looking fetching in silver and purple. The future seemed better than ever.

Needless to say, as the 1970s wore on, I began to get uneasy about the fact that very little futuristic stuff was happening any more. As far as manned spaceflight was concerned, not much occurred after the Skylab project – yes, there was the space shuttle, but that didn’t venture beyond earth’s orbit and, frankly, seemed a bit shit. Meanwhile, the Viking 1 probe landed on Mars but, alas, found nothing interesting. There were no aliens, Martian canals or H.G. Wells-style three-legged war machines shooting death-rays – just some boring geological formations that had once been river valleys. And what had happened to that you-can-do-anything-if-you-put-your-mind-to-it American optimism? It seemed to fizzle out as the 1970s became one long litany of American trauma: the Vietnam War, the 1973 oil crisis, Watergate and the Iran hostage saga.

I still had hope, though. In the mobile library that came to our village every week, I picked up a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the classic 1968 sci-fi movie he’d co-written with director Stanley Kubrick. It was reassuring to read Clarke’s sober, matter-of-fact account of a journey from the earth to the moon and then on to Saturn. (In Kubrick’s film, the final destination was changed to Jupiter because of the job of convincingly depicting Saturn’s rings was too much for his special effects team.) By then I was well-versed in astronomy and space travel and the book seemed to reinforce everything I knew already about the subjects. It also seemed to make the idea that humanity would be out exploring more of space in the early 21^st century feasible and, indeed, logical.

When I finally saw 2001 the movie, however, it was in 1982 and even I had to concede it’d become a bit of a museum piece. In some ways it possessed an admirable, almost documentary-like realism – for instance, I was impressed by the fact that, unlike the spaceships in every other science fiction movie I’d seen, Kubrick’s spaceships didn’t make any noise (because sound doesn’t travel in the vacuum of space) – but it struck me as a historical artefact nonetheless because it was clearly rooted in a past time and in past conceptions of what lay ahead. It offered a late-1960s view of the future, one that just wasn’t plausible any longer in the early 1980s.

By then, the Mad Max movies (1979, 81 & 85) had started to do the rounds and, after the oil shortages of the 1970s, they presented an unfortunately more credible vision of what the 21^st century might be like. It was also telling that a couple of years earlier, in 1978, Lord Grade’s ITC Entertainment, which had once stimulated my space-age fantasies with Gerry Anderson’s UFO, had produced the movie Capricorn One – a cynical sci-fi thriller about a NASA expedition to Mars that is actually a hoax, with the supposed landing on the Martian surface being filmed in a TV studio in the American desert.

And now in 2026 I find myself inhabiting a world far removed from the visions that Neil Armstrong, Gerry Anderson and Arthur C. Clarke inspired in me during my childhood. The Artemis programme promises that human beings will once again set foot on the moon but I’m sceptical that people will get to Mars in my lifetime and I’m beginning to wonder if they’ll ever get there at all. I know Elon Musk keeps vowing to do it but, given the logistics involved and given our current levels of technology, I think that’s bollocks. (Talking bollocks comes as naturally to Musk as breathing.)

It doesn’t help that the orange narcissist currently residing in the White House is trying to cut 23 percent of NASA’s funding – though he’ll no doubt attempt to grab the credit for Artemis II’s success and make it all about himself.

Still, thank you, Artemis II crew. You’ve kindled some fond nostalgia in me and given me a sliver of hope, at least, that humanity’s future might extend beyond the gravitational pull of its home world.