Saturn 3 (1980)

The late, great Stanley Donen was usually celebrated first and foremost for his musicals. The former wunderkind dancer and choreographer had made some of the most beloved and admired movies in the genre, like On The Town (1949), Royal Wedding (1951), Singin’ In The Rain (1952), Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), and Funny Face (1957). As the great days of the musical waned, Donen became adept at movies blending humour and drama and proved his versatility throughout the 1960s. He scored his biggest hit with the wry Hitchcockian thriller Charade (1963), and followed it with the flashy Arabesque (1966) and the hip satire Bedazzled (1967), as well as the bittersweet study in marriage, Two For The Road (1968). But the 1970s proved a much more difficult time, and his directing career trickled out in underwhelming fashion in the ‘80s. His last two feature films, Saturn 3 and Blame It On Rio (1984), were poorly received, and both dealt with a basic theme of older men loving much younger women, if with radically different frames. The latter was an attempt to translate an older brand of screwball comedy template for louche contemporary mores, whilst Saturn 3 must stand as Donen’s most atypical work in terms of genre.

Saturn 3 was also one of British TV impresario Lord Lew Grade’s attempts to conquer cinema, which had some initial success particularly with the movies he made with Jim Henson’s Muppets, but hit a crisis point as he embarked upon Raise the Titanic (1980) and this film. Grade, wanting to ride the wave of the late 1970s sci-fi boom, had engaged Donen as producer, with acclaimed Star Wars (1977) production designer John Barry intending to make his directing debut, having written the story. Rising star novelist Martin Amis had turned that story into the screenplay. For star power, Grade nabbed weathered 60-something Hollywood titan Kirk Douglas and epochal It Girl Farrah Fawcett, anxious to stretch her legs as a star after finding fame on the TV series Charlie’s Angels. Donen, Amis, and Barry worked assiduously to try and create more than just another Alien (1979) copycat. But Barry found himself in over his head as his health declined and he quarrelled with Douglas, obliging Donen, originally serving as producer, to take over. Donen probably weathered the storm for being more understanding and experienced in negotiating Douglas’ star ego and determination to show off his physical prowess than Barry, whilst also contending with Grade’s budget cuts to leverage Raise the Titanic’s endless shoot. Amis would later caricature the events on set for his novel Money.

The film commences with the shot of a massive spaceship cruising across the screen that had become compulsory after Star Wars. But as distant as Saturn 3 nominally seems from the musicals he made his name with, Donen’s gift for manipulating design and human elements steeped in the musical method soon declares itself, with an early image of black-suited astronauts arrayed against a backdrop of fascist design grandeur that could also be the kick-off for a musical sequence. The setting is some time in the future when many space stations have been set up for scientific research as the Earth is too overpopulated and depleted of resources. Robotics engineer and research scientist Captain Vincent Benson (Harvey Keitel), learns he’s being replaced on assignment to the remote outpost of Saturn 3 because an evaluation found he was psychologically unstable. Benson kills his replacement, Harding (Ed Bishop), and takes his place, piloting a shuttle to the outpost. These scenes strike a dynamic, visually and aurally propulsive attitude thanks to Donen’s staging and Elmer Bernstein’s grand scoring. Donen offers a striking vision of Harding’s body shattering to gory chunks as Benson arranges for him to be sucked out of an airlock, and Benson’s negotiating the rings of Saturn, his spacecraft protected by a force field to fend off pieces of rock and ice. Donen doesn’t show us Keitel’s snub-nosed mug until Benson reaches the outpost, as he’s entirely cocooned in a shiny black spacesuit that disguises his identity from onlookers until he’s well away from the scene of his crime.

Once Benson reaches the outpost, the narrative and style shift gears to one of dry, patient menace. Benson is working on perfecting his piece de resistance in robotics, Hector, a mechanical being with a brain of synthetically grown tissue, and a direct connection to its creator’s mind so that it can directly absorb his thought patterns for learning. His companions on the station are Major Adam (Douglas) and his partner in both science and love, Alex (Fawcett), who are engaged in perfecting hydroponic growth of potential foodstuffs. Benson is bewildered when Alex refuses to have sex with him because she maintains a monogamous relationship with Adam: “That’s penally unsocial on Earth, you know that?” Benson declares in offence. As Hector gets up and running, quickly developing an intransigent and troubling personality to match its maker, Benson becomes increasingly obsessed with making Alex his, to the point where he assaults Adam and tries to drag Alex with him onto the shuttle by force. As Hector picks up Benson’s obsessions as well as his knowledge from their psychic link and soon entirely subsumes his megalomanical aspect, leading him to kill his creator and attempt to take Adam and Alex captive and make them slaves to his will.

Despite the vagaries of the production, the result fits with startling neatness into Donen’s oeuvre, with his eternal regard for the lovely perversities of human mating. Donen’s fascination for May-September romances well prefigured his getting to a certain age, evinced in the likes of Funny Face and Charade. Like Singin’ In The Rain, Saturn 3 is a film about the dynamics of stardom and the creation of proxies to act out fantasies and egotisms, and like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers it’s a tale where vicinity equals ardour. Benson and Lina Lamont have a surprising amount in common. The most interesting aspect of Saturn 3 might be how visible and blatant its subtexts are, aside from the familiar Frankensteinian motifs in the plot that remix the approach to Mary Shelley’s myth that Terence Fisher and Jimmy Sangster took on their Curse of Frankenstein (1957) not a creature of outraged nature but a cruel mirror to its creator’s flaws, a failed attempt to create a perfect ego-image. The futuristic social set-up, like much written sci-fi of its period, predicts logical extremes to the permissive mores of the 1970s, predicting an age when a healthy monogamous couple have to move to the dark side of Saturn to find security, whilst Benson resembles a sort of proto-yuppie subsisting entirely within a hard shell of entitlement. But the narrative has much in common with The Trap (1966) or The Fox (1968) in depicting an exiled idyll interrupted by infuriating and destructive acts of passion and possession as it does to any genre-specific forebears. 

The unlikely coupling of Adam and Alex is offered unabashedly as a union of Aging Male Star Stud and World’s Sexiest Woman. Douglas could well have been the only actor around in 1980 capable of making Keitel look weedy, whilst Keitel's exterior characterisation has the marvellous touch of slick black hair drawn into a douchebag ponytail. Adam and Alex live in splendid isolation, together whether working, sleeping, exercising, showering, with Douglas showing off a physique splendid for a man of his age, and Fawcett often dressed in a less than scientific manner. Benson’s arrival causes Alex to acknowledge an interest in the Earth she’s never seen and which Adam fled from. The interloping Captain tantalises her with the pleasures of “Blue Dreamers,” a hallucinogenic pill commonly used for R’n’R amongst spacefarers, and Adam and Alex trip together on one. Adam seems comfortable in admitting he knows one day Alex will leave him, but soon proves hardly ready for that moment to arrive. Adam learns of Benson’s attempt to wrest Alex away from him via video monitors, and Benson accuses Adam of having carefully chosen Alex for a long exile at the asshole of the universe specifically so he’d have a ripe young partner with no competition. After Hector menaces Alex and obliges Adam and Benson to bring him down and disassemble him, the sexual quandary erupts as Benson tries to knock Adam out and drag Alex with him back to Earth, only for Adam to recover and nearly strangle him with the unpeeled offence and maniacal edge of a man deeply wounded not in flesh but in self-worth – whilst completely naked to boot.

Amis’ script is equally unabashed in presenting Hector as a proxy of sexual potency. Benson fouls up Adam and Alex’s mojo but needs his great perambulating dildo to stand an actual chance of breaking up the love birds, only to find his biomechanoid Cyrano writing its own script: the robot is able to speak but remains mute until the time comes to entirely subsume Benson, at which point it uses his voice and also proves able to mimic Adam and Alex. The robot has no sexual function, communing instead with Benson via a transmitting plug installed in his necks that suggests an artificial vagina. This faintly Cronenbergian touch gives the film a tint of body horror apt for its moment although most of the narrative seems rather more retrograde than sci-fi was otherwise offering by this time, stoking a portrait of macho anxiety over being penetrated, culminating in the moment Adam panics in realising Hector’s installed him with one of the plugs. When Benson tries to steal away Alex and finally leaves Adam dazed and bloodied, it’s Hector who prevents his deparature, assaulting his maker in a memorable pivot of sudden violence as one of Benson’s hand is easily severed by Hector’s steel gauntlets and lands with a bloody plop by Fawcett’s cringing, teddy-wrapped form. The gruesome punchline to the desire of android to subsume the human comes when Adam and Alex, steered into Hector’s inner sanctum, find the robot wearing Benson’s severed head.

What thwarts Saturn 3 to a great extent is that it ultimately feels like a rough draft for something more ambitious and substantial than the movie Donen was finally obliged to make, whilst also never quite offering the sort of basic blood-and-thunder furore Alien managed. The script as served constantly hints at extra dimensions to the characters and their appositional intellectual and emotional positions, particularly in the different forces that have made them all, to a certain extent, willing exiles. The film’s also hampered by an uncertain tone to the acting. Douglas tries far too hard to seem spry in the first few reels and only becomes compelling once Adam’s irrational streak is revealed, whilst Keitel was awkwardly dubbed over by Roy Dotrice, raising Benson’s fey register a few dozen notches and hampering the required back-and-forth of the actors to generate the necessary interpersonal friction. Sometimes the special effects resemble footage for one of the TV shows Grade made with Gerry Anderson, like Space 1999 (casting Bishop, from Anderson’s U.F.O., exacerbates the feeling of connection). Hector cost a lot of money to animate and has real stature and alien beauty, a monstrous Vitruvian figuration with clear plastic veins snaking their way about his frame, carrying artificial blood, whilst viewing the world through a tiny head fixed to the massive body, a neat design joke that confirms Hector is a colossus of form afflicted by phthisis of guiding spirit. But it never achieves a truly dynamic sense of threat, looking always like a big, cumbersome movie prop.

But the film’s strengths are ultimately more pronounced than its lacks. Saturn 3 takes itself seriously and achieves a cool and carefully paced brand of tension, thanks to Donen creating a mood at once intimate and estranged. We sense this is Benson’s universe, however renegade he is in it, where people like Adam and Alex have to essentially live in hiding to remain viable, and Adam’s incensed feelings of violation on multiple levels give the film’s climactic scenes emotional impetus; Adam feels he’s earned the right trade-off in fulfilling the desire to dig himself a safe burrow and pull the dirt in over by engaging in creating food for the hungry billions he’s turned his back on. The production design, which strongly recalls the sleekly styled and functionally lit appearance of Barry’s Star Wars work whilst credited to Stuart Craig, meshes sublimely with Donen’s attentive camerawork to exacerbate the atmosphere of technocratic menace. A lengthy but fascinating sequence depicts Hector’s unexpected ability to reassemble himself after Adam and Benson pull him to pieces, hacking into robotic appliances around the station laboratories to fit his components together again. 

Soon Hector is out hunting Adam and Alex as they try to escape on Benson’s shuttle, and the hapless couple are eventually forced to admit there’s no eluding the metal sentinel. The climax is signposted a tad heavy-handedly early on when Adam comments, whilst beating Hector at chess, that a robot can’t understand the notion of sacrifice. Adam enacts this thesis more completely by blowing himself and Hector up, cueing a series of languorous slow-motion shots as Donen watches Hector’s shattered parts flying through the air along with streams water, reminiscent of the end of Zabriskie Point (1970) as the detritus of exploded artificiality are exalted in an aerial dance of destruction. Alex is left alone, seen last on a liner returning to Earth, gazing down on her new home with the anxious expectation of both loss and nascent freedom. Amusingly for a performer perpetually regarded for a famous look, Fawcett’s Alex faces the unknown shores of both a fictional future and the real 1980s, with a dramatic change in hairstyle, whilst Bernstein’s surging music suggests the menace formerly at least encased within Hector’s liminal form is now cosmic as Alex rediscovers the much greater hazard that is massed humanity. Despite not really finding an audience, Saturn 3 seems to have lingered in the minds of other prospective sci-fi auteurs. James Cameron channelled elements in both The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986). Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) copied the set-up scrupulously whilst inverting the gender dynamics.