The Past = Another Planet. The plenty-reviled (but actually truly excellent) Plunkett & Maclean may have attempted such a formulation with a good dose of irony, but Gangs of New York, which I caught this afternoon, is an earnest stab at making a historical drama as if it were postapocalyptic science fiction. It doesn't always work -- as a "human story" it fell rather flat -- but what does succeed is the uncanny ambience, which makes everything feel familiar and yet simultaneously mutant, as if we were in an alternate universe. I wonder what comics creator Paul Pope, who makes New York-based science fiction as if it were a period piece, thinks of Scorsese's film. I think he'd be into the clothes. I certainly wouldn't mind a pair of Daniel Day-Lewis' drainpipes...
