1970s SF film
Warlords of Atlantis, 1978, UK DIRECTED BY KEVIN CONNOR
From the depths of space they came to vanish beneath the sea… and all from the decade when Doug McClure was a fading sex symbol and Britain's occasional stab at cinematic science fiction was producing mixed results. Warlords of Atlantis looks dated now and, it has to be said, had a pretty nonsensical premise even for its time, despite unashamedly using as its template Conan Doyle's The Lost World. I remember seeing it in 1978 and coming away from the cinema naively impressed but also a bit baffled: first, did this quaint British effort really deserve to be up there on the big screen in the wake of Star Wars? Well, why not? Much-hyped and heavily-invested British SF/F movies were a relatively rare thing, and proved handsomely that it was several cuts above the current Space: 1999/Doctor Who standard of visualisation and special effects. What hasn't endured so well, of course, is the plot. In fact it's pretty laughable and one could pick holes in it endlessly: why were the Atlanteans not called Martians if they came from Mars? Ah, that's because Atlantis was the name of Mars's third moon on which they made their escape from their dying planet, being captured by Earth's gravity and crash-landing in the Bermuda Triangle, etc. etc., from where, ever since, humans have been abducted and used as slave labour. And so on. It all feels a bit ridiculous now, and watching it today I wonder just how many C-grade skiffy ideas were they trying to squeeze into an hour and a half.
But I still like how it looks and I enjoy my memory of how I appreciated it even more in 1978 instead of facing up to the failings I see in it today. It's not all bad, of course, for example the giant octopus attacks are well done and the assorted godzillas are all good value for money. This was not the most enduring creation of screenwriter Brian Hayles - that would probably be Doctor Who's Ice Warriors - and it's a pleasure to watch Shane Rimmer prove he can act in the flesh a decade after introducing British kids to his uber-cool voice as Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds. The film's tie-in novelisation was also the first such work I ever read in my late teens and which I can still remember filling in a few gaps left by the film; it also added an extra character to the adventure and was written by Paul Victor, very likely pseudonymous and as far as I know still a work of unknown attribution. To watch this again was a great trip down memory lane; far from unpleasant and not nearly as cringe-inducing as I'd feared.