Audio By Carbonatix
No matter the time or place, even in deep space or the far future, war is hell, and the little guy always gets the worst of it. But when that little guy is the hero of director Alex Cox’s adaptation of Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero, at least you get a few laughs along the way, plus the hope of a happy(ish) ending.
“It’s definitely funny, in the sense that Catch-22 is funny,” Cox says of the story. “It embraces a lot of really terrible situations, and yet the hero is able to survive. That was Harry Harrison’s theme, I think — survival. The hero is always a survivor, always manages some-how to pull through, even if he accomplishes not very much at all.”
Given the state of endless war in which the United States finds itself mired, Cox’s take on Harrison’s anti-war cult classic — a project he’s wanted to tackle since just after he finished Repo Man in 1984 — couldn’t be more timely. And its lo-fi sci-fi action, brought to the screen thanks to Kickstarter and a cast and crew made up largely of students from the University of Colorado at Boulder, should provide the perfect realization of both Cox’s style and Harrison’s message.
See the world premiere of Bill, the Galactic Hero, with an introduction by Cox, tonight at 7:30 or 9:30 p.m. in Muenzinger Auditorium on the CU-Boulder campus, as part of the International Film Series. Tickets are $8, or $7 for CU students and seniors. For more information, visit internationalfilmseries.com.
Fri., Dec. 12, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., 2014
