Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden combines a strange and powerful ambience with intriguing character development. Being spoiled and willful and stubborn were bad traits for Victorian children, yet that defines her heroes here, and it gives them spine to subvert the world of grown-ups and effect real change (beginning in themselves). The most famous film adaptation is the 1993 version, though I recall a good 1970s BBC serial that aired in the U.S. on Once Upon a Classic. Other outings include a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version and a Broadway musical. Fans of the story, or of classic children’s movies, should seek out this excellent MGM version from 1949 now available on demand from Warner Archive.

Let’s examine the premise for a moment - it is America, 2020. A mere seven years from now. In the interim, crime, poverty, and disenfranchisement have gotten so bad that, when a future election is held, a group known as “The Founder Fathers” (or, perhaps, “The New Founding Fathers”) are put into power and have created something they believe will cure the ills of an ailing nation. In conjunction with specious scientific studies which suggest many social problems have their roots in the horrific realities of everyday living, and that by letting people act out on their aggressions, the country would be a better place, they come up with a concept. If possible, creating an outlet for such “violent tendencies” would lead to a kind of communal rebirth.

How do you see the future? If you were someone living in the salad days of the ‘50s and ‘60s, there were promises of interstellar exploration, flying cars, high tech lifestyles, and meaningful medical breakthroughs. We’d cure all diseases, live like royalty within our own slick scientific reality, and never once worry about modern maladies like hunger, war, or death. This is Utopia, the perfect portrait of a supposed shape of things to come. Yet for every optimist there’s an opposite, a pessimistic perspective that’s part luddite, part ludicrous. It’s not a fear of technology that inspires these people, but where said advances will take us. Eventually, they believe our “U” will turns into a Dystopia, a horrible place where the End Times dictate our destiny.

Alternative title: Mars Needs Japanese Women

POSITIVES:
Gigantic robot armadillo thing from space!.
Gigantic robot armadillo thing from space shoots pulsar destructo-beams!
Twists and turns and double- (and triple-) crosses.
Nifty, “Now what?” ending.

There are certain taboo subjects that polite social society hates to address. Politics is one, especially in light of our modern desire to divide completely along ideological and electoral lines. Enter a party spouting the latest liberal nonsense or equally offensive Tea Party talking points and you’re bound to face a fierce rebuff. Religion is another hesitant topic, though the reasons are slightly less unilateral. Everyone assumes a belief in God (or a one way trip ‘down below’ for those that don’t), it’s just how they choose to believe, and what they do in said Higher Power’s name, that causes commotion. For some, all Muslims are violent fundamentalists. For others, Christians have just as many insane skeletons in their closed confessionals.