Screenwriters in a jam can hit a new panic button. It’s the switch on the nearest 3D printer. This nifty new technology, which took its first substantial silver screen bow in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, has surfaced in three recent motion pictures. And in each case not a moment too soon. It’s enough to make you think there’s a contraption somewhere in the Hollywood hills that spits out storytelling solutions.
Think back to early February and the release (more like escape) of The Cloverfield Paradox, a movie that announced itself fully formed on Netflix the night of the Super Bowl. It’s set 10 years in the future, aboard a space station (and in a parallel universe? Or were we the parallel universe?) where things go haywire in a knockoff Alien manner. A Russian engineer loses his mind a bit when he discovers interplanetary parasites under his skin (you blame him?) and when he is “contacted” by his alternate (evil?) self, he renders up a 3D-printed gun and bullets. He dies before anyone can ask “How did you get a gun schematic programmed in there?” Oh, if only John Malkovich had access to a gizmo like this – he wouldn’t have spent so long molding a plastic pistol to get past Clint Eastwood and assassinate the president in In the Line of Fire.
The just-opened Hotel Artemis, a John Wick-meets-Marvel’s Night Nurse movie about a black market hospital for criminals, is also set 10 years in the future. Jodie Foster (whose last film, Elysium, was also a medical sci-fi actioner, so fingers crossed for that hat-trick!) runs the place, and one of the gadgets she’s got is a 3D printer for internal organs. (I imagine a hospital owning one is like motels from the 1980s proudly declaring “Yes, we have HBO!”)
In an attempt to keep this somewhat rooted in reality, the machine can only reproduce what’s fed into it. So if a heavy smoker offers up a lung, its duplicate will be just as dark and damaged. I mean, even on Star Trek a dermal regenerator could only do so much.
The biggest doozy, however, comes in this past weekend’s number one film, Ocean’s 8. Set in the here and now, the slick female-led ode to photogenic larceny is a sister film (literally! Sandra Bullock plays George Clooney’s sister) to the previous, popular Ocean’s integer movies. It has its pros, namely the look, the attitude, the costumes and Anne Hathaway playing a tweaked version of her own persona. It also has its weaknesses, specifically a master plan that isn’t all that masterly.
Bullock’s Debbie Ocean spent five years in the clink mapping out the perfect crime, and so much of it is uninspired. (The best part, visually, is Awkwafina zipping in and out of a security camera’s gaze in a swift manner. This takes five years to plan?) Part of Debbie’s scheme is just, uh, hoping a washed-up clothing designer with no criminal background will want to join the team, plus a backup plan that their mark (who is very wealthy and doesn’t need a big score) will also, you know, want to join the team. I mean, I get it: Rihanna, Mindy Kaling and Cate Blanchett are really cool. I’d want to join the team, too. We all would! But is this enough?
The crux of the plan involves swapping out the world’s largest and most heavily guarded diamond necklace. How to do that? Well, that will take some crafty diversion tactics (set to some boutique hotel-ready breakbeats) but also a fundamentally lazy one. Once Helena Bonham Carter’s magical camera-glasses can scan and upload the dimensions of the necklace to the team, all you need to do, apparently, is hit “go” on a 3D printer and you’ve got one that’ll fake everybody out.
I suppose it is possible that a 3D printer could get a job like this done. My only personal experience with this technology was at a party where a friend’s husband had one – he said he’d make me a little dragon for my desk, but by the time I was ready to leave only a third of it was completed. (It was just a head and a neck, then some plasti-mush.) What’s more depressing, though, is that it just screams shortcut. And screams it rather boringly.
We all laughed when Jeff Goldblum uploaded a virus from his Macbook to the Independence Day mothership at a time when wifi was still a dream. Back then you could barely play Hunt the Wumpus on a Mac if the floppy (that’s right I said floppy) was meant for a PC. But that didn’t stop the onslaught of bad computing protocols in adventure cinema that plagued us in the early years. Until 3D printers are inexpensive enough for everyone to have their own, we should expect a lot more of these prefab narrative tricks. There’s a new Mission: Impossible movie in just a few weeks.
