21: Knights of Cydonia - Muse

The problem is that they have subsequently shat in buckets.

Hello and welcome to We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far,

a podcast where a Scotsman, an Irishman and a Bulgarian discuss the worst,

the silliest and the weirdest, the spock music videos.

Say hello.

Hello.

Hi, I'm Neil.

Hi.

Are you guys sounding like robots?

Dave or Nelly, say bacon.

Yeah, bacon.

Neil.

Say bacon.

Bacon.

Neil.

Oh, well.

Oh, fuck.

Let's carry on.

Oh, well, yeah.

He's lost.

We are taking a break from our socially distant international travels to bring you yet another

video showing the eternal fighting between good and bad cowboys and blonde ladies in peril.

However, this time we are taking a very hard turn into the future past to present to you

the actual masterpiece that is Knights of Sidonia.

Yeah.

Yep, it's fucking Muse time, and we have the best guest host to help us.

Say hello to my oldest friend and fellow reformed Muse cultist, Robbie.

Hello, thanks for having me.

Welcome to the podcast.

Long time listener, first time caller.

The day the podcast speaks back.

Exactly, yeah.

We lived across the street from each other when we were younger, and in our teenage years,

we pretty firmly believed that Muse were the best band in the world.

Yeah, I often used the analogy that if they were to shit in a bucket, I would have bought the album.

Oh, you're one of those people.

The problem is that they have subsequently shat in buckets, and I haven't bought those albums.

Bit of a heartbreaking experience when Muse embraced the cheese and just became cheesy as fuck.

And we were very disappointed because we were edgy teenagers, I guess.

There will be no cheese in our favourite band.

I get mocked mercilessly at school for a lot of years.

You told me a story about this recently, but we were drunk, so I can't really remember what it was.

A name that someone called you online or something like that?

Matt Bellamy-

Oh, no, a muse-loving perma-virgin-pollating-matt-bellamy or something.

Chris, I didn't even know I told you.

Yeah, you were steaming. It was on my birthday. Virtual birthday.

I will write this down and I will present it to my partner as, because it's basically the description of him in high school, I guess.

Like a muse-loving perma-virgin sounds about right.

Perma-virgin is actually pretty witty for a teenager.

I know.

Whoever it was that called you that, that's pretty good.

I was angry but impressed, yeah.

Was that like the original term for incel?

We invented incel.

Oh God.

Oh God.

We didn't invent N-Sales.

We didn't invent N-Sales.

I'll take that back.

Mews proceeded to get cheesy

and in our opinion at the time,

I've actually gone back

and listened to some of it since

and I've got a significantly higher tolerance

for cheese these days.

Hence why I'm on a podcast

talking about bad music videos.

And yeah, it's all right.

It's still not the same.

I would absolutely call this video cheesy as fuck.

It's a fantastic video, don't get me wrong,

but there's nothing, like, you know,

masterpiece about it.

This was the album where

they started transitioning into the cheese and i think we all liked this album at the time it is a

good album it is but this was the point where we were all starting to get a bit worried and then it

was the next album where we just we just went god damn it i think you went i personally went for

another couple of albums that personally own the i forget the name the one that has the pricing and

united states of your age resistance i think yeah that one pretty decent i like it i listened to it

recently again, I was like, actually, it's pretty good. My younger self is shouting in

through time at me. You bastard. But anyway, okay, enough flating Matt Bellamy.

He's had plenty of that himself. What else have we got? Oh yeah, history.

History.

The third single from Blackhawks and Revelations, the song was an immediate success internationally

and cemented Muse as one of the main forces in rock music to be reckoned with.

The song when they debuted at number 10 in the UK charts never actually went past this,

but it's Muse and we know where all they went.

Sidonia refers to... or terraformed Mars.

Album cover is two guys sitting in a chair on what looks like Mars playing chess,

so yep, that checks out.

I'm just gonna quickly close my window because some kind of grass.

How dare he terraform his land?

The video was directed by Joseph Kahn, the director of virtually every single music video you can think of.

The current count is 182 music videos, 4 films and 3 TV shows.

It shows a futuristic depiction of what I would make a guess to be as a New Yorkish area.

It is, as Wikipedia describes it quite accurately, a thematic smorgasbord.

It has cowboys, laser guns, motorcycles, unicorns, CDs, holograms, jukeboxes, Asian style, martial arts and many many more things.

all of this removed. It is a basic story of an archetypal western character, the man with no name,

going to a new village where he fights the evil corrupt sheriff and saves his main love interest

from certain death. They then ride away into the literal sunset on a motorbike, cause why not?

In my head, I described it as it looks like someone's taken their DVD collection of B-movies

and smushed them all together into one glorious hole of a video.

One glory hole, someone might say.

This video is a glory hole.

W-H-O-L, you dirty-minded bastards.

No, no, no, it's H-O-L. It's H-O-L. It's fine.

Overruled.

We know our listeners. It's fine. We can make sex jokes. It's understandable.

Especially with a video like this.

I mean, it's not as horny as Bonnie Tyler, but it's close.

Well, is it not?

It literally has a sex scene.

I think the whole of the Bonnie Tyler video was about sex,

so this just happens to have a sex scene, isn't it?

I don't understand why it was cut off.

Which, by the way, if someone doesn't know,

it was cut off from the original MTV release.

Because, you know, people having sex.

Oh, no.

And it's not even...

It's kind of humorously shown.

Humorously shown?

Humoristically shown?

What's the fucking word?

I don't know.

I can't talk anymore.

They did it funny.

Yes.

Thank you.

I remember a DVD came with a single.

Yes, I bought the single of this.

I had the director's cut on it.

I think from what I can tell,

the only difference is one shot in the sex scene,

which is like mildly runnyer and that's it.

There's a couple of different versions.

There's one that is shown on Joseph Kahn's website.

I mean, there's numerous differences in with,

you know, cutting the sex scene out and putting the sex scene in.

But there's even details down to,

You know, at the very beginning where they have a Gustav von Musterhausen production and all that stuff.

They have, you know, the little copyright Roman numerals that shows the year.

One of them is completely incorrect.

And that's the version that's on YouTube at the moment.

Ah, okay, that's one I'm watching.

But the one that's on his website is the correct Roman numerals.

So I don't know how many versions have been cut and how many have been released.

I do actually remember the version on the DVD being more sort of veering towards pornographic than the one that I just,

Because I just found a Vimeo of the supposed director's cut.

I'm just going to throw it out on the limb

and probably say that you're, what, like 17, 18,

and you just found, oh, it's a Titi.

Oh, my God.

It probably was not quite as raunchy as you remember it.

This is entirely possible.

So the video is still on his website, J-Zero.

Yeah.

I don't remember seeing anything like that.

So I don't know if there is a version I haven't seen.

But if you want to provide, you know, a link or anything like that,

it's in the show notes, right?

I'll leave it behind the bike shed.

But yeah, I think, Rob, you were saying before Nelly came on

that you went into alarming detail.

58 seconds when it comes in with the title card,

you know, Gustav von Musterhausen Production.

Gustav, the way that it's spelt in the video,

G-U-S-T-O-F isn't actually, you know, a name.

I think it's kind of a deliberate bastardisation of the real name,

which would be Gustav.

So I think they've gone to some detail or some effort

to deliberately make things ridiculous.

Mr. Housen wouldn't have...

You don't say it.

Yeah, I know.

The circumflex, the little, like, the hat on top of the U

and the name Mr. Housen, it wouldn't be used in that kind of name.

So I think, yeah, they've gone into a ridiculous amount of detail.

So they couldn't also get called out on doing things deliberately or accidentally.

Definitely the spelling was the most ridiculous thing in this video.

No, that was my opinion, yeah, definitely.

If you start this video and you think,

oh yes, that would be a very serious production,

there's something very genuinely wrong with you.

I'm saying this with the point of view of a person

who actually shot the video for the first time last night

because I'd never seen it before.

Up until I saw the unicorn, maybe four fifths into the video,

I was on the fence.

I didn't know if this was serious.

I don't know.

It immediately gets confusing what genre it is

because obviously it opens up kind of looking like a cowboy film

and then there's a robot walking along

and then he's doing martial art moves in his bedroom

and it's popping up like snake style, flying eagle style.

Tiger style.

Flaming energy boil.

Circle of death.

Shell in bear strike.

It's a great training montage slash tooling up scene.

I thought immediately of Rocky IV, where Rocky's training to fight Ivan Drago, kind of Russian Soviet boxer.

And while Ivan Drago's, you know, in labs with oxygen masks and scientists and clipboards all around him,

Rocky's doing these, you know, he's lifting up hay bales and punching wooden walls in his cabin in the woods.

So it reminded me a lot of Rocky IV.

It's Quentin Tarantino. He's like super Tarantino-esque in the good point because he's a disgusting human being, but he's aesthetic, like his style. I actually wanted to double check when Kill Bill was and it's 2003. So there you go.

Quentin Tarantino was kind of half copying the greenhouse films and stuff like that a lot of the time.

I think there's also, they're borrowing a lot from, you know, the old spaghetti westerns.

And you can see that right at the end where there's the kind of PowerPoint presentation

of scenes while the credits roll.

And it's, you know, just all these Italian names.

So this kind of European impression of what the Wild West would have been like.

Directed by an American Korean.

I've just spotted another shot on location, the People's Republic of Socialist,

Romanistan.

Yes.

You haven't noticed that one before?

This is something that me and Scott

when we were watching it last night

when he was showing me the video

because he got very excited

when he heard this possible recording today.

He stopped it specifically

because that's obviously something

that he noticed before.

He couldn't stop laughing.

It was quite funny.

It's a fact of the world.

The more words you have in your country's name,

the more free it is.

Free People's Independent Republic of blah, blah, blah.

Especially any direct reference to people or democracy.

Obviously democratic.

Obviously.

I also loved at the very end,

while they go through the imaginary cast and the crew,

it shows a production finance services

by Euroballistic Rockets and Aerospace Film Company.

Raytheon, basically.

Oh, that's a reference to another podcast.

I'm not sure if anyone will get Behind the Bastards.

It's fine.

They make Raytheon jokes all the time.

Behind the Bastards is a really good podcast.

It is actually fantastic.

I think they're an American weapons company,

And the joke is that they produce rockets with knives at the end of them.

It's better when Robert Evans makes the joke.

The mental image is pretty good.

It is, but he's actually really good at making the joke.

He makes it literally in every single episode.

So if you just play a random episode from behind the bus,

they will make that joke.

Okay, I'm going to add that to my never-ending queue podcast.

Top of the queue podcast.

I wonder if this reference to the Euroballistic Rockets and Aerospace Film Company,

I don't know if it's like an urban legend or if it's true,

but movies like Top Gun were all funded by the Pentagon

and were used essentially as American military propaganda.

But that's not an urban legend.

Is that true?

That's terrifying.

The American military provides money for pretty much any movie

in the last more or less 30 years.

That's absolutely true.

They're not hiding this, including all the Marvel and DC movies.

At the end, they always say thanks to support from American military or devil's victim.

Who would have thought Ant-Man was part of the military-industrial complex?

Well, basically, any single movie that you see where they have any resemblance of the military showing up,

they always have the support of the American military,

mostly because they need access to, as you say, like tanks and shit.

Reminds me of the Frankie Boyle joke that only Americans will invade your country

and then come back two years later

and make a movie about how invading your country made them sad.

Pretty much.

Going back to the music video,

it was partially shot in Romania,

which maybe contributes to the last joke at the end.

Right, okay.

Romanian style.

Who knew that Muse were secretly comrades?

Comrade Belmay.

Yeah, there's a ring to it.

He won't be the first one on the guillotine list.

Okay, make a decent album where we're cutting your head off.

I thought you were things about the latest-ish albums

or later-ish albums.

I decided to make an effort to go through and listen to them

and try and forgive them.

I haven't yet made that commitment.

I don't know if I can bring myself to it.

If you were to make a genre combining sort of B-movie,

what genres would you combine?

I would like to make a

like a heist movie

and maybe it's just the time

for living in

but a kind of pandemic

or you know

like contagion or something

where a heist movie

has to be socially distanced

that movie exists

it was shot last year

in Harrods

while it was in lockdown

it'd probably be pretty easy

to do a heist during the pandemic

because everyone's working from home

yeah that's true

you'd have security guards

shouting at you over Zoom

it's not a movie

but I've always wanted to make a

post-rock elevator music band

oh yeah

that'd be good

you walk into the lift

and there's just this

ambient soundscape

going on

I've just seen that movie

Lockdown

it's called

yeah I just saw it

it looks as bad

as I thought it would

look

coronavirus

heist

yeah

can I take my answer

back

no

no

yes

no

take two boxes

I'll own it

there was another movie

taking advantage of

I remember in the trailer

it was like

COVID-22

and I was like

oh for fuck's sake

it literally came out

towards the end

of the first lockdown

a little bit too soon

not going to lie here

I know

Connie fuck off

can I feel like

anything has been done

I don't think there's

anything original

that exists

ever in the universe

wow

nothing new under the sun

yeah

imagine the amount

of bad movies

we have seen

combined

a lot

a very big

very very big number

I genuinely cannot think

of a combination

that has not happened

before that they want to watch

has there ever been

a film

which combines

yodeling

and

I'm going to say the sound of music exists.

So very possibly.

Well, that's a combination of yodeling and Nazis.

So yeah, that's actually pretty good.

Yeah, but yodeling and Nazis is like one step removed only

because they're all contained in the same part of the world, more or less.

An apocalyptic musical.

Oh, that 100% exists.

We're not going to be able to do this, I don't think.

It's not possible.

Okay, you may be right.

I'm going to say a reality TV show,

but actually it turns out to be real life.

The Tribune Show?

this seems coming to life

there was a movie last year

it was about cities that had been turned

into tanks and they were

fighting each other

Peter Jackson film, yeah, it's literally about

cities that can move and they fight

each other

I swear to God, look it up

oh it's called Mortal Engines

well, I think I'm watching that tonight

anachronistic movie where

trying to think of two bands from completely different times

oh no, that would be basically

Back to the Future though

it doesn't exist

it's not possible

anything we come off

with someone has

made it better

okay we've proved

that everything is a

remix

because we're doing

the only thing they

had left to do

smoosh everything

together

guys I've got it

a kung fu courtroom

drama

oh

literally all in the

courtroom they never

leave the courtroom

but all the judgments

take place in some

sort of martial art

form

like 12 angry

ninjas

yes

I like this

it's the court case

after a kung fu

movie where they're

all getting charged

the grievous bodily iron.

I think my favourite part, I'm just running through the kind of plot of the video,

it's when the unnamed man, he first arrives at the town.

The lady looks out of the window, sees him arriving.

Good man gets jumped by a thug and then there's just a guy playing trumpet.

And obviously it matches with the music, but just this sudden trumpet playing bandit with a toy gun.

But during the fight, there's a scene where there's like a crash zoom on these two women

watching on and they look thoroughly unimpressed.

You stole my favourite moment, yeah.

It's like, aye.

Because it just zooms into both of them and one of them looks like she's laughing

and the other one just kind of looks bemused.

And I love the transition from the kind of future saloon to the sex scene

where it's those three slaps.

It was really good.

I was quite impressed with it when I was first watching it.

I'm just, I'm a sucker for something that's like perfectly, like replicated.

it and like centered and i was like oof that's nice i didn't even care about the 16 itself it was

like whoa that's a good shot i appreciate what they did there and there must have been a moment

in the writer's room where they're thinking right how does this go from saloon to bedroom how can we

do that you know between the verse and the chorus how can we do that to be fair joseph khan is

incredibly prolific it's a very prolific video director he just genuinely always felt like an

absolute creative force.

The majority of his videos

are so fresh and just good.

There's just a lot of references

to like to pulp movies

and like Western,

like spaghetti Westerns

from the 70s.

I think my favourite point of that

is I think it's during the sex scene

when you just get a brief glimpse

of the film crew in the mirror.

That is my best part.

Sort of shit movie 101.

You just told my favourite part

of the movie, thanks.

Music video.

So we all don't have any favourite parts anymore.

No.

An interesting thing about his kind of video-making career,

Gustav von Musterhausen's kind of alter ego,

it appears again in another video.

Oh, is it?

Taylor Swift's song, Wildest Dreams.

I think the video is kind of set in the 1950s,

and he's kind of like...

In the Savannah, kind of, yeah.

At one point, there's a clapperboard,

you can see that the producer of the movie is G. Mr. Housen.

So it must be just like a character that he falls back on

for these kind of shots.

I like to think he is the guy in the mirror.

He's not, but...

Well, interestingly enough,

there's social media profiles for Gustav von Mr. Housen

and he uses that shot from the mirror as the profile picture.

MySpace one and a Facebook one.

MySpace, well, have they posted anything of late?

I don't know, because MySpace, the format of MySpace has changed like a million times.

So I think what would have been posted before is no longer there.

Does MySpace even still exist?

It does.

I have no idea how to navigate it, but it's definitely there.

Why are we just not on MySpace to Facebook?

Go to MySpace and you'll immediately find out why.

I will.

Oh, fuck, what's going on here?

Did it not turn into like some sort of music site?

Yeah, it's basically...

I think it tried to become like a SoundCloud rival

and then it just didn't know what it was.

Does anyone remember Last.fm?

Yes.

I think that's still good.

As far as I know.

Or the one that you downloaded the plugin

and you connected to whatever player you're listening to

and then you showed to your friends

all the music you're listening to, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You could link MSN Messenger with Last.fm

so people could see what you're listening to.

I definitely listened to a lot of Muse

and it showed on my Last.fm all the time.

Another scene that I loved.

Bad guy turns up in town in his car.

There's a bar fight kind of coming to an end.

And our hero, he's fighting at the top of a set of stairs.

And he throws a guy down these stairs.

And then he just points like, you know, finger gun.

He finger guns at the camera.

I think there's another crash zoom there.

I think we have to just appreciate that crash zooms are always funny without fail.

Yes.

I don't know why.

That's a very Tarantino thing, isn't it?

He loves a crash zoom.

I feel like you could stretch this out into an actual TV show

or at least a short movie and I'd watch it.

I'll say a short movie, I don't think there's much...

Well, I mean, depends how they make it.

I feel like eventually, depending how they make it,

it might just feel repetitive.

Yeah, if you pad the shit out of it, I suppose it would work.

There were no lingering kind of foot shots.

That's the second time Tarantino's foot fetish

has turned up in this podcast.

Do you remember Anna's story about the guy who sniffed feet in Brazil?

Of course I remember that story.

I'm a sucker for intentional anachronisms, which this music video is literally what it

is.

And also, funnily enough, I had never seen the video before, before last night.

And it just kind of reminded me of how I used to like Muse as a teen.

So it was kind of very nice, warm feels.

Anyway, it's a great movie.

10 out of 10 would watch again and you should go and watch it as well.

It's pretty much every terrible B movie you've ever watched and loved smashed into one music

video comes at you at such an incredible pace that you can't quite take it all in one go.

So I recommend watching it and then watching it again.

My favorite part was the shot of the crew, quote unquote, in the mirror, recording the

sex scene.

Because honestly, who hasn't been there when making any production?

Just accidentally filming the whole crew in a mirror somewhere.

I fucking hate mirrors.

They always catch me like the bastards.

Yeah.

Shiny doorknobs as well.

Oh, that's very, very specific.

Like, who will be actually staring at the shiny doorknob to look at your face?

Sound guys all around the world just staring at the door knob.

The worst part for me is...

And that's a funny one, but it just somehow felt both too long and not long enough.

And it might be partially something to do with the rapid editing, I guess.

It's nothing that made me recall we wanted to turn off the video immediately.

Just something that kind of made me go,

that didn't entirely work for me.

But again, going off the video is actually great.

My favourite part was just crash rooms in general.

Just a bit of appreciation for that.

Specifically the bit we mentioned earlier,

which was the two uninterested women at two minutes in

when the main guy is just away kicking ass.

And the runner up for me is two minutes five when he walks into the sloon.

Not because it's funny.

They just nailed that shot in terms of a homage to cowboy films.

They did.

Yeah, they nailed it.

And the worst part is the fact that one day I'll have to explain to people younger than me what a CD is.

Well, clearly it's a reflection for all the laser guns.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's a self-defense mechanism here.

It's a hologram projector in this.

You should make a suit out of it.

Yeah, a suit of CDs.

Out of a few favourite parts, I think it would have to come down to our hero throwing down a thug from the stairs and doing the finger guns at the camera.

But there was also a scene that I think if it was to stand on its own, would be really problematic.

Would be, you know, when the pseudo KKK turn up with their torches to capture the hero and then the hero then shouts to them, you and I must fight for our rights.

I just think the image of somebody shouting to a group of pseudo-KKK,

we must fight for our rights, I think that wouldn't stand up well in history.

You're like, which rights are you talking about?

Specify which rights, please.

Nothing specific.

Don't know what you guys want.

All of three seconds.

It's better than a lot of the videos we've watched.

Yes.

It could have been deliberate, who knows.

I don't think there's a portion of this video that it's not entirely deliberate,

Every single ridiculous

strange choice was thought through

by some fucking psychopath.

Well, I'm going to give this

a resounding eye because I'm a

Matt Bellamy flating

I'm not a

permaversion, but

definitely would flate Matt Bellamy.

I'm going to read it. I'm going to cut that out.

Leave it in.

You cut it.

Leave it in.

You'll see, I always say that and I never do, so we'll see.

Aye.

Aye.

Yes, aye.

Sorry.

I forgot what you were doing.

Yeah, it's aye.

It's a fun six-minute video for you to watch.

I give it a guest aye.

A standing aye.

I love it.

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to help us not have to do Squarespace adverts

because we will fucking do it if we need to.

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And just because it's that time of the year,

We're taking a very short break of maybe four to six-ish weeks, maybe.

Anyway, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and Newgate updates

when we're actually on our way back to your ears.

I just want to go and have fun in the sun.

And you should do as well, and also distance and wear a mask.

Are we technically in the post-apocalypse now?

Because it's potentially after the apocalypse.

We're doing the apocalypse still, no?

We're still mid-apocalypse.

at the moment. It would make a lot of sense

if the post-apocalypse was also

incredibly disappointing.

No laser guns! On that note

say goodbye, everyone.

Bye. Thanks for having me, guys.

Bye.