Zenon's the coolest. She's a tweenage dream. The smart,
pretty 13-year-old girl is clever enough to outsmart every adult, lucky enough
to get everything she wants, and sharp enough to figure out every situation
well before anyone else. The entire narrative arc of Zenon: Girl of the 21st
Century comes down to no one believing Zenon about plot developments major,
things subsequently going badly for many, and finally the eventual discovery
that Zenon was right all along, an admission that then saves the day. Not bad
for a girl who is also young and innocent enough to completely and totally flip
out over the hot boy band Microbe and the dreamy (I guess) lead singer Proto Zoa.
That may sound like denigration, but it is in fact praise.
The reason why Zenon the movie works
so well is because Zenon the girl is just so cool. She's the Ferris Bueller of
the space station. She's the cutest, most popular kid in space. Young actress
Kirsten Storms (nowadays, 14 years later, appearing on General Hospital) plays it up well as a younger, more self-aware version of Alicia
Silverstone in Clueless. She's the
charismatic blonde around which her friends and family rotate. The film's
namesake, the center of attention, and the one character in nearly every shot
of the movie, Storms proves to be a confident and charismatic young performer.
Living in orbit with her scientist parents (Greg Thirloway and Gwynyth Walsh),
the movie follows Zenon through the day to day operations of being a tween in
2049, that is until the plot comes crashing in, sidelining Zenon unfairly.
She's the only one on the space station to catch on to an
evil scheme, which the would-be perpetrators of course deny. The villain is the
slimy moneybags who bankrolls the privatized research station, a man (Frederick
Coffin) intent on cashing out his investment by any means necessary. If Coffin
had a mustache, he'd twirl it. It's his benefactor status that gets him out of
suspicion and Zenon's accusations branded as lies. This gets her sent to Earth
as punishment, where she will stay with her non-space-going aunt (Holly Fulger).
Will she get word of the dastardly billionaire back to space in time to prevent
the station's destruction? What do you think? The main problem for Zenon seems
to be that all the adults think the only reason she wants to be back in orbit
is to attend the first ever rock show in space that will find her beloved Proto
Zoa and crew performing their hit song "Supernova Girl" right from
her home "spay stay."
First aired in January 1999, Zenon is to these eyes the best DCOM up to that point. With a
bigger budget, the movie could've easily been a theatrical release. (It's
certainly better than Disney's live action My
Favorite Martian remake, which hit theaters the next month.) It's corny and
aimed at children, but what of it? It's also fast-paced and has a decent mix of
silly and serious. The stakes are high, but the outcome is hardly in doubt. The
movie's always good-natured (I mean, it ends with a dance party, people!) and
filled with the kind of genre cheese that ages well. Instantly dated in mostly
charming ways, Zenon is a time
capsule of the time it was made much more than the speculative time in which it's
set. An early scene is structured as a fake-out in which a holographic teacher
drones on about President Clinton, who at one point he eventually and
forcefully refers to as Chelsea. Ha ha.
It's in the sci-fi film tradition of 1976's groovy Logan’s Run by positing that people in
the future will live in a spiffy shopping mall. The station, CG establishing
shots of which look roughly as convincing as a high-end Windows 95 screensaver,
is filled with rooms that like a food court with submarine-style corridors
connecting them. The palate is all pastel purples, blues, and pinks with some
Day-Glo accents in the fashion. As for technology, there are chunky iPad
approximating devices, holographic teachers, and the vaguely Skype-like
"datazapping." Not terrible for a 14-year-old attempt at imagining 50
years ahead, super (and endearingly) strained future slang ("Zetus
lapetus!") aside.
Director Kenneth Johnson, the man behind Short Circuit 2 and the terrible
Shaq-starring action movie Steel,
films Stu Krieger’s script with some nice moments of modest style with the
budgetary and format restrictions that make the whole thing cramped at times. I
was particularly taken with a nice spinning shot that circles a climactic
confrontation that finds a great way to add visual interest to what would have
otherwise been a flat moment in a stuffy set. There's a sweetness and a sense
of fun through the movie that breaks out in winning ways. There's a charming
and relaxed subplot about a crush Zenon develops on an Earth boy (Gregory Smith)
and a convincing chemistry between her and her best friend (Raven-Symoné post-Cosby Show, pre-starring in her own
Disney Channel series). The very-90s boy band has funny swagger and Phillip
Rhys is having a lot of fun playing the lead singer who struts around waggling
limbs and hamming it up. But it all comes back to Zenon, who holds the whole
thing together with her charm. She's everyone's best friend, after all.
Up next: Can of Worms
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