Tank Girl (film)

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Tank Girl

Film poster for Tank Girl
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Produced by Tom Astor
Written by Tedi Sarafian
Alan Martin (comic)
Jamie Hewlett (comic)
Starring Lori Petty
Ice-T
Naomi Watts
Malcolm McDowell
Music by Graeme Revell
Cinematography Gale Tattersall
Editing by James R. Symons
Distributed by United Artists
Release date(s) March 31, 1995 (U.S.)
Running time 104 min.
Country U.S.
Language English
Budget $25,000,000 (estimated)

Tank Girl is a 1995 film loosely based on the Tank Girl comic book created by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. It was directed by Rachel Talalay and stars Lori Petty as Rebecca Buck, aka the eponymous Tank Girl, who had originally appeared in the UK comic magazine Deadline.

Contents

[edit] Plot

 This plot summary may be too long or overly detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (May 2009)

The movie takes place in a dystopian 2033 A.D., after a comet hit Earth, turning it into a wasteland and altering the atmosphere, making it so that there has been no rain for the last 11 years. Water is extremely scarce, and what little is available is controlled by the monopolistic Water & Power (W&P), led by Kesslee. Water & Power are opposed by the almost mythical "Rippers," whose precise nature is unknown as the film opens.

Tank Girl, a.k.a. Rebecca, is a member of a small outlaw group that has set up their own water well in the basement of a house. Learning of the well, W&P attacks, killing most of the people in the house and taking Rebecca and a young girl named Sam (Rebecca's boyfriend's daughter, as it's revealed in The Making of... book). Imprisoned, Rebecca is repeatedly brutalized by Kesslee, who wants to break her spirit. Between intellectual jousts with Kesslee, Rebecca befriends her next-door-cellmate, a mechanic who works on W&P's vehicles.

W&P take Rebecca to the desert, where they have found a Ripper "subgate," an entrance to their underground lairs. Kesslee has his right-hand-man, Sgt. Small, inject Rebecca with a tracking device and then forces her walk onto the subgate; if the Rippers kill her, he will be perfectly happy and if they don't, they will be able to track their location. However, in the midst of having her walk onto the subgate, the Rippers attack, massacring the W&P soldiers and mortally wounding Kesslee (in various scenes from this point until the climax of the movie, we see Keslee being reconstructed by a renowned cybernetics expert, and regaining control of W&P).

The two steal a tank and a jet, thereby becoming Tank Girl and Jet Girl in the process. They start out to rescue Sam, who they learn has been sent to a brothel. On the way, they come across another "outlaw"who, after being disarmed, allows them to disguise their vehicles so W&P will not recognize them as their own.

Tank Girl and Jet Girl reach the city Liquid Silver where Sam is being held against her will in a brothel. They arrive just in time to rescue Sam, but are discovered trying to sneak her out. Then the owner of the club known as 'The Madam' attempts to catch the two, but TG and JG end up holding her hostage and forcing her to sing 'Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love' for the club. The song becomes a club sing along and a musical scene, but is cut short by W&P. They take Sam, leaving TG and JG left to rescue her once more.

Tank Girl and Jet Girl are determined to gain the help of the Rippers on their next attempt to rescue Sam. After wandering the desert, they find themselves in the Ripper hideout, a buried bowling alley. The Rippers turn out to be genetically enhanced super-soldiers who were infused with kangaroo DNA who were created by a scientist named Johnny Prophet during the war. Once the war was over, Prophet was given an order to destroy the Rippers, but he spared their lives (Prophet at this time is somewhere in New Zealand, working on a way of making sea water drinkable). The Rippers' main objective is to take down W&P because they believe everybody should have water. Tank Girl befriends, and develops a romantic relationship with, Booga (Kober), and the two girls are promised acceptance into the Ripper society after they complete a task for them.

Tank Girl and Jet Girl leave to a W&P loading dock where they trick W&P employees into thinking they are photographers putting together a 'Men of Water and Power' calendar, and want to photograph them near crates. They photograph the crates and the pictures are immediately sent back to the Rippers in their hideout. Eventually discovering that guns make up the cargo, Tank Girl and Jet Girl's mission now is to get the cargo back to the Rippers.

Once the cargo is successfully retrieved and back at the Ripper hideout, the Rippers open the crates with the intention to destroying any guns inside. However, they discover most of the crates are filled with dirt, and one of the crates holds the corpse of their beloved creator, Johnny Prophet.

Enraged, the Rippers agree to assist Tank Girl and Jet Girl on their mission to rescue Sam and bring down W&P. Breaking into separate groups, Tank Girl assaults by land with her tank while the Rippers and JG try to infiltrate the hangar bay by air. They reunite briefly and during a shootout, one of the Rippers is killed, enraging the others and sending them on a killing spree of W&P personnel. Jet Girl goes after Sgt. Small, who tries to escape in a plane. A victim of his sexual advances previously, she finishes him off while Tank Girl confronts Kesslee who has put Sam in 'The Pipe' a torture chamber of tubes that get narrow as one approaches the bottom, trapping the tortured person inside, further endangering her by letting a hose drain into the pipe with an intent to drown her slowly.

Tank Girl and Kesslee battle, and his newly cybernetically enhanced body is discovered. A few rounds of beer in her tank slow him down, and a dumping of water from above disables his gears; she finishes him off with a device introduced earlier to stab into someone and withdraw water from the victim's very body. After rescuing Sam, the group reunites in an animated epilogue which seems to have met the resolution to the drought. As Tank Girl drives a water-skiing Booga to the edge of a waterfall, she tells Jet Girl to shut up when attempting to warn her of the danger and both plummet happily off the edge as the film freezes and the credits roll.

[edit] Production

Rachel Talalay, longtime producer of John Waters, had fallen in love with the comic after receiving an issue for Christmas one year from her stepdaughter, and set out to make "the ultimate grrrrl movie."[citation needed] Although the resulting film has a considerable cult following along with the far more widely acclaimed comics, Talalay has complained that the studio interfered significantly in the story, screenplay and feel of the movie.[1][2][3]

The Rippers were also changed in the movie from a group of ordinary (albeit talking and a bit mutated) kangaroos to a new race of genetically-modified supersoldiers with spliced kangaroo DNA. The makeup effects were created by Stan Winston's studio, who reportedly loved the project so much that they cut their prices in half.[4]

[edit] Reaction

The film received mixed reviews from critics and had disappointing sales at the box office, only grossing one fifth ($4 million) of its $25 million budget. The film currently holds a 43% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert, while praising the film's ambition, said the film's manic energy wore him down: "Whatever the faults of "Tank Girl," lack of ambition is not one of them. Here is a movie that dives into the bag of filmmaking tricks and chooses all of them. Trying to re-create the multimedia effect of the comic books it's based on, the film employs live action, animation, montages of still graphics, animatronic makeup, prosthetics, song-and-dance routines, scale models, fake backdrops, holography, title cards, matte drawings, and computerized special effects. All I really missed were 3-D and Smell-O-Vision."[5]

In the wake of poor box office gross, Deadline collapsed, having apparently taken huge gambles on Tank Girl merchandising, and the character and the strip have only recently reappeared.[citation needed] Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett have since spoken poorly of their experiences in creating the film, calling it "a bit of a sore point" for them. [6] Hewlett said, "The script was lousy; me and Alan kept rewriting it and putting Grange Hill jokes and Benny Hill jokes in, and they obviously weren't getting it. They forgot to film about ten major scenes so we had to animate them ... it was a horrible experience."[7]

[edit] Cast

Bongwater member Ann Magnuson and Iggy Pop also had cameos as The Madame and Ratface, respectively.

[edit] Soundtrack

Tank Girl Original Soundtrack
Soundtrack by various arists
Released March 28, 1995
Genre Alternative rock
Label Warner Bros./Elektra
Professional reviews

The music consultant who assembled the soundtrack for the film was Courtney Love.[citation needed] Talalay originally wanted Elvis Costello to do the cover version of "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love", but he declined, and the song was instead performed as a duet by Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg of The Replacements.

The soundtrack album was released on March 28, 1995 on Warner Bros./Elektra Records.

[edit] Track listing

  1. "Ripper Soul" by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, performed by STOMP! – 1:42
  2. "Army of Me" by Björk – 3:56
  3. "Girl U Want" by Devo – 3:51
  4. "Mockingbird Girl" by The Magnificent Bastards featuring Scott Weiland – 3:30
  5. "Shove" by L7 – 3:11
  6. "Drown Soda" by Hole – 3:50
  7. "Bomb" by Bush – 3:23
  8. "Roads" by Portishead – 5:04
  9. "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love" by Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg (of The Replacements) – 2:23
  10. "Thief" by Belly – 3:12
  11. "Aurora" by Veruca Salt – 4:03
  12. "Big Gun" by Ice-T – 3:54
  13. "Supernaut" by Black Sabbath

[edit] Other songs in the film

The comics themselves, in keeping with their experimental and often metafictional nature, commonly featured "soundtrack suggestions", like The Vaselines, The Senseless Things, and The Pastels.[citation needed]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fan site reprints Talalay's list of studio changes
  2. ^ Talalay mentions studio interference
  3. ^ Wired 2.12: Tank Girl Stomps Hollywood
  4. ^ Meet the Rippers - from storyboard to silver screen
  5. ^ :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews :: Tank Girl (xhtml)
  6. ^ Alan Martin interview
  7. ^ http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/036/hewlett.htm

[edit] External links

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