Yeah, Jason X was about what I expected. It's the slickest of all the Friday the 13th films, although for casual viewers it's not slick enough. In Roger Ebert's pan of the picture he makes it a point to go on about the shoddy special effects. For some of the more hardcore Friday the 13th fans any slickness is too slick. The charm and effectiveness of the originals was in their minimalism. I sort of agree, but the last time a Friday the 13th film was played more or less basic was with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. With Jason Lives on, the filmmakers hardly even took their jobs seriously. And so this Sci-Fi Channel coating is appropriate considering what Friday the 13th has become. I mean, it's Jason Goes to Space. Whatever you may think of the Friday the 13th franchise, this may be the best that they can make them, and as we have already reached a point where the notion of a "Jason Goes to Space" is plausible, we can't really complain too much.

At one point I actually began thinking of Jason X as a remake of the last Friday the 13th film, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Whereas Jason Goes to Hell was released in theaters in 1993 and looked like a direct-to-video release from 1988, Jason X was released in theaters in 2003 and looks like a direct-to-video release from 2003. It's a substantial improvement. Jason X was the first movie to be shot on film and transferred to high-definition television, allowing them to put in more special effects for a fairly low cost. It looks pretty good on DVD; solid arguments probably could be made that it looks better than Attack of the Clones. Of particular interest to me was the opening sequence, which takes us from inside Jason's body to some doctors checking him out: an homage to the great Dr. Giggles. All the same, the look and then the feel of Jason X is ultimately what distances the picture from those classics that were shot on film and stayed film.

The satire of Jason arcana in Jason X manages to be more affectionate and less condescending also. The filmmakers seem to regard Jason as a hyper-masculine killing machine lacking in any personality or motivation other than to destroy. That's slightly oversimplified, but it's not at all inaccurate. After Jason is cryogenically frozen, we are thrown 450 years into the future or so. A group of scientists rediscover him frozen in his "slashing position.” He's an action figure. Later in the film, Jason invades a virtual reality game and hacks up both the players and their alien antagonists. He's a video game villain. Jason X is smart in recognizing its place in the fanboy lexicon of fetishization. Jason Voorhees becomes a himbo for slasher fans. We get off just on looking at him, not from his personality, which is why he is served well as being an action figure or a video game character. Jason Goes to Hell's "hockey mask" hamburger patties pale in comparison. (I have a good idea for a re-write. Cut out the hockey mask hamburger patties. Just put an extreme close-up of a pink burger frying after a particularly grisly killing. It'll gross out the audience, and you'll come up with much more interesting correlations between Friday the 13th movies and hamburgers. Man, the problem wasn't only that Jason Goes to Hell was ideologically insulting to fans. It was a horribly made movie.)

The junk culture that has arisen from Friday the 13th is a funny thing. A Nightmare on Elm Street video game would be, pardon the pun, overkill. But Jason Voorhees doesn't really ever change. His lack of consciousness separates him from whatever nonsense going on around him. Jason is as comfortable in outer space as he is anywhere else, and he would of course be just as comfortable in a video game or in an office. As the critics have always complained about these films, wherever you put Jason, he's always going to end up doing the same thing. But that's the attraction, isn't it? There is purity and simplicity to Jason, which the other mad slashers don't have. With purity and simplicity ultimately comes resonance and subtext. Jason X fares a little worse than previous entries in that area, but it also explores a variety of new areas.

Jason X was inspired by Ridley Scott's Alien, which is arguably the best of all the slasher films (at least let’s call it a tie with Psycho. The original, okay?). Alien was about an alien creature, referred to the characters as something like the perfect predator or something along those lines, getting on a spaceship and killing almost the entire crew. The alien was brought aboard by an android and was to be brought back to earth, by orders of "The Company.” Basically these people are messing where they shouldn't have been messing, and they are punished brutally for it. The arrogance of the scientific pursuit is to make the natural accessible and thus to overpower it. Our original sin was, of course, eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge after which we realized that we were naked in the eyes of God. Then our Biblical ancestors were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Paradise is defined as being ignorant of how shameful God made you. The Garden of Eden was the last time that we were really close to God. (Later, in the book of Genesis, everybody gets together to build the Tower of Babel. Fearful that they will become even more like Him, God confuses their languages so that they'll fight with one another.)

Alien can be said to be more medieval than really Rousseauian or Romantic, as those terms seem to imply a love for man. It's a nihilistic, angry piece of work. While it argues, like some of the Trotsky films do, that we should be wary of worshipping science and technology as our faith is better served in higher powers, it's awfully cruel about it. The alien triumphs because it is of a Godly hand, and man's technology fails because it is the product of inferior beings. The Company completely hosed Ripley and the crew. That alien was never supposed to come into contact with human beings, and if they just toed the line and stayed in their place, they would have still been alive. In Jason X, Jason obviously takes the place of the alien. The shipmates are not scientists exactly; they are students on a field trip. All the same, they serve the purpose of both scientists and students on a field trip. They can dissect corpses and build androids, but they are also extremely horny. These two creatures are on in the same in Jason X. It is important to note that this is not a venture to further scientific knowledge. The students are there to complete an exercise. Their instructor calls back to earth and admits that nothing in his journey (the resurrection of Jason and a woman that he murdered) are really spectacular accomplishments. The resurrection of Jason is only of note in that it's Jason Voorhees that they have in their possession. Jason is a celebrity. The resurrection of the dead, through cryogenics and the use of "ants" or robots that work on the level of molecules has become commonplace. The future of Jason X is practically post-Christian. Medicine can both heal and resurrect. The guy who built the android has created her in part to be a sexual plaything. He provides the film's only genuine scientific pursuit as he attempts to get her nipples to stick on her breasts in an attempt to make her look more human. That's about all that's missing in this universe.

The culture of Jason X is one of a bored utopia. This is a logical extent of the Friday the 13th universe, where you have to understand that absolutely nobody has any problems or worries really except for Jason Voorhees, his mother and occasionally one or two others on the same wavelength. Yes, Jason's mother killed all the teenagers because they were all making love while her son drowned. It is, again, not just the fact that they are having sex; it's the implication that sexual pleasure is the beginning and end of their existence. Indeed, the victims of the Jason films begin as an orgasm and end with an orgasm. They haven't lives with meaning, weight or substance. Jason, however, does have an existence with meaning, weight and substance. None of these characters will ever make it back for a second helping. They'll be dead. But Jason will. Killing them is his life’s work. Living the life of a victim is more of a summer job.

At his core, Jason is spirituality incarnate. If he is not the product of a vengeful God, he is the product of a frustrated subconscious. His supernaturalism exists as a counterpoint to the hedonistic technological materialist universe of his victims. Later in the film, Jason even surrenders a slick futuristic cutting utensil for his trusty rusty machete. There is a revealing scene in the film where the characters trick Jason by creating a holographic Camp Crystal Lake, where two girls ask Jason if he would like some alcohol, pot or some premarital sex. The girls declare that they love premarital sex and punctuate the statement by removing their shirts and climbing in some sleeping bags. Jason slaps them against a tree while they are in their sleeping bags, in homage to the most cheerfully tasteless of the Friday the 13ths, Part VII: The New Blood. Watching this I realized that these people have created, and always have created, a Garden of Eden in defiance of God. They have overcome the guilt of their nakedness. Hell, they have embraced it. And they have overcome their fear of mortality. The filmmakers remark in their audio commentary for the film that these characters never figure out what is going on and that there is a madman coming after them. Yes, of course they never figure it out. They have achieved such comfort, such a sense of lazy unforced pleasure, that they can be afforded this ignorance. This holographic Camp Crystal Lake is played on the level of a joke.

In the future, these people have found pleasures beyond those contained in the (inferior) natural world. The holiness, the purity and simplicity, of Jason Voorhees cannot co-exist with this universe. These people must simply be destroyed. His failure to destroy these people who have been audacious enough to go into HIS woods and go skinny-dipping and bump uglies has led to this atrocity of a future. He has a whole lot of catching up to do. (One of the film's most regrettable decisions is the inclusion of an "uber-Jason" with a new futuristic mask. It would have been funnier and more thematically coherent were he to remain the same old Jason throughout and still butcher lots of flesh. The filmmakers said that they did this to provide more variety to the plot. First they are winning and then he is winning, and back and forth. Neither a relevant concern or a wise move.)

Further evidence establishing Jason as the true hero of the piece can be seen in the naming of the spaceship Grendel. This would make Jason, quite obviously, Beowulf. Thinking about it, I guess that I'm reluctant to say that Jason is really fighting for any value in particular. But he is the essential element in fighting against this sea of temporal pleasures and ultimate meaninglessness. Jason has meaning, even if I can't specifically identify what that meaning is. He is a being of myth, much like Beowulf, in a culture that has evolved beyond a need for myth.

Jason does not have a controller in Jason X. Perhaps all the troubled kids have been weeded out in the future. While the filmmakers have said that they wanted the film to be more character-driven, the people in the picture are much more shallow than any of the heroines in the previous entries. Similarly, the killings aren't sexual in nature. There is no penetration of the flesh. No "rapes by steel.” Jason slashes, but he doesn't stab. A lot of his victims are crushed. (In the most famous kill in the film, Jason puts a head in some liquid nitrogen or something and smashes it into a mess of pink mush. I saw this gag before, in an episode of “The X-Files” called “Roland,” which I referenced when I began my review of Friday the 13th Part VII when discussing the virtues of tasteless violence. In the “X-Files” episode we saw a chalk outline of bits of skull. Nothing like that in Jason X.) When a couple is making love in another room, the previously dead Jason suddenly jerks up, implying that he is like a now-erect phallus. The concept of Jason himself being a phallic instrument of destruction is unfortunately not explored much more by the film.

Jason X isn't one of the better films of the series. It's about on par with that deliciously tasteless Part VII which gets a mild recommendation, but pales against Part II, Part IV, Part V, and yes Part VIII which I can recommend with far fewer reservations. The satirical elements in the film are no more cornball then Jason Lives (I don't find talking decapitated heads very amusing, and I find that Harry Mandarin’s score sounds a little too much like Merlin's Magical Shop of Wonders for me) and the sexualized violence no less absent, but I think that I want to excuse this film more, as placing Jason in space still gets to some key elements and explores some new territory of the Friday the 13th experience.

It is sort of depressing that Jason will never be able to go back to the woods, and films like Jason X are the most that Friday the 13th fans can now hope for. But when you love a film series, you gotta love it warts and all. I'll be sure to see the ludicrous Freddy vs. Jason when it comes out this August and I'll be cheering for Jason all the way. I mean, how can I really get all indignant?