Directed by: Robi Michael. Written by: Winston Engle (based on a short story by A.E. van Vogt). Produced by: Thomas Sammon. Visual effects supervision by: Thomas Marinello. 25 min
“Unhappy paint is dead paint.”
The ’40s and ’50s were an unimpressive time for cinematic science fiction. Space opera serials, mad doctors, and a few red-scare-induced alien invasions were pretty much it, and few of those were intended for thinking adults. But in the literary world, this was the golden age (or so it has been labeled). Magazines were filled with the stories of genre masters: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.
Add one more to that list: A.E. van Vogt, a masterful author who made a career of stories where a character would run into something alien (a device, life-form, ruin) and then have to determine how it functioned in order to survive. The character didn’t have to understand everything, which is good as the situation would be beyond understanding human understanding; he just needed to figure out that one important thing. A Can of Paint is van Vogt’s best story of this type.
Kilgour (Aaron Robson), an interstellar junk dealer, stumbles upon an abandoned ship. A bit of raiding and he ends up with some odds and ends, including an unlabeled can. A forceful scan causes it to open explosively, splattering just the smallest dab of its contents, paint, on his hand. Unfortunately, the aliens who made it had a different vision of paint than Kilgour has, and this stuff begins to grow, covering his body. If he doesn’t find a way to get it off in a few hours, he’ll be dead. And when his first idea causes his engines to fail, things start to look grim.
With a story so filled with inner monologues, it isn’t obvious that this is the stuff of a great film, but Winston Engle improves on a good thing, remaining faithful to the concept of the short story while adding witty dialog. The new character of the ship’s computer (voice: Jean Franzblau) gives Kilgour a target for his ideas and sarcasm. Remarkably, Engle’s smooth and easy skill with language allows a single onscreen actor to convey a huge amount of information to an off-screen voice without it ever feeling like an exposition dump. Everything seems natural, at least for a guy in space slowly being enveloped by smart paint.
The production values match the script. Two spaceship exteriors, expanding paint, a spacewalk where Kilgour removes a solar panel as the sun rises, and various futuristic-junk-ship interiors all look great, and never distract from the central story. Nothing gives away that this isn’t a big-budget Hollywood flick.
Robson brings charm to a difficult part. He cares the film on his shoulders, and he’s got plenty of personality to make it work. His unusual dialect of English (which I took as Australian, but is actually from somewhere around London) added the proper touch to make Kilgour seem like a man from another place and time; it also occasionally made it difficult for those of us who are accent-impaired to understand every word.
A Can of Paint presents a great mystery, told with a sense of humor and astoundingly high production values. No film brings the feeling of the golden age of science fiction literature to the screen better.