BEYOND THE UNIVERSE (1981) **1/2 A monument to the reality that good will and unmitigated ambition can combine in a spiritual cocktail enabling even the least artistic people to make a meaningful artistic statement. Kind of a reverse image of punk rock. Oh sure, the sci-fi posturings are those of someone unfamiliar with even the most basic foundation of electronics, the political stuff is the formulation of one so naive as to render their servitude inevitable, the acting is abhorrent, and they couldn't have bought enough pizza to go around with the special effects budget. But still there's something...kind of like in Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel where the monks create something new from the redistribution of concepts, only the application of which is in any way original or unique. And yet the renewal is itself authentic. And isn't that blurred vision itself an antidote to the skepticism that lies itself upon the death knell of spirituality, burying that which evades such a fate in its own name? And...well, you get the idea, and my own faux clichés are in grave danger of eclipsing those from the film. And yet there's something true about it all, something repeated so often in so many ways, but just doesn't quite stick in the public perception. Perhaps it's because the evil ones have engineered blind spots in the collective subconscious. In any event none of the political implications of it all could be news to anyone who ever read George Orwell's 1984, but isn't it also true that, at a time when Orwell was typically required reading, Reagan and Thatcher got elected anyway? So there's nothing profound about postulating that politics is getting darker and controlled to the point of the impending sacrifice of the entire planet at the altar of greed and stupidity, but incredibly its the sort of stuff that still gets passed off a theoretical and visionary. Yeah, well, and some of Bob Emenegger's music is highly effective, in that Tangerine Dream genetically-modified-for-film sort of futuristic way. I'm not saying that anyone's going to learn anything from engaging the sorts of ideas that they should have regularly encountered as a ten year-old, but unless the world outside your window looks spectacularly better than the world outside mine, it's a shame if you don't.
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