Ultimate FF: Strangest Ever

Interstellar

On Monday night, I took my father to see Interstellar. Accurate things gleanable from the previews are that it is a movie about mankind in her final hours, struggling to find an escape from a used up Earth, and that it is a movie about the tension between responsibility on small scale (family) and large scale (survival of the species), and that it is a movie about flying to Really Cool parts of space and showing Really Cool, Scientifically Factual things about those parts of space on the screen. So, y’know, it’s a science fiction movie. Cool.

Tonight, I’m sitting in his hospital room after a cancer-related surgery that to all appearances has gone well. I can’t say a whole lot about really cool parts of space here, and I can’t say a lot about the end of mankind, and I can’t really say a lot about responsibility. But I definitely couldn’t help, while watching the ten-year-old girl watch her father getting ready to leave her behind, knowing it was probably forever despite anything he had to say, feeling a twinge of existential terror. I am not, nor have I ever been, a ten-year-old girl. But I think that some parts of the human experience are universal. It may not be blood, it may not be age, it may not be gender, but correct in your mind for whatever part needs correcting and I’m still saying: nobody wants their dad to leave. No matter how good the reason might be, and not many people have as good a reason as “if I don’t, we’ll all just die anyway.”

I usually, and imdb certainly did in this case, separate out my category tags by reserving sci-fi for movies and science fiction for books. But sometimes (Children of Men springs immediately to mind, as it often does when I’m thinking about things like this), when a movie goes to such great lengths to focus on our shared experience of humanity even though we should by rights be looking at really cool things in space? Well, my point is that I try very hard to make these tags usable, in case someone were to ever want to browse by them. And this was, like I said in the first paragraph, definitely a science fiction movie.

Cool.

And, dad? Thanks for staying.

John Wick

The Equalizer

I know I saw The Equalizer before Myschievia, because I saw it the same day I bought my new canvas tent, which while not as waterproof as advertised, is far more waterproof than I have ever had a tent be in the past. Which is to say, more than a month ago.

I’m kind of sad that this has to be one of the shoddy movie reviews I had mentioned earlier (in point of fact, I may have seen it before I finished reading the Stormlight book, they were within 24 hours of each other, but who can remember?), because I had some thoughts about race and remakes while watching it that I no longer feel comfortable delving into, with the material no longer fresh in my mind. Something about the lack of black action heroes (well, since the ’70s anyway) and incorporating a comedy routine I heard sometime in that same time period but no longer remember the author of that discussed black remakes of what had been white movies, and the cultural shifts that occur and how this movie doesn’t really have that, but it’s all too vague and muddled in my head to feel particularly comfortable making a go at it.

Still and all, if you were wondering whether an action/mystery series from the mid ’80s with a British protagonist needed a modern-updated prequel starring Denzel Washington, with Hit Girl as an Eastern European prostitute who is his initiating client, the answer is: yeah, I’d keep watching that series. (In fact, there’s a sequel in development, but man, just like Star Trek: The Reboot Picture, this would be far better served by a TV season than a movie every two or three years.)

Words of Radiance

The problem with your website being down for two months is, you can’t remember what happened in between. I mean, no. I’m fully aware that I thought Words of Radiance was a good book, that it did another good job of being largely self-contained[1], that it did a great job of throwing a lot of new information and a lot of really cool new magic- and world-building, that I stayed invested in the characters.

So all in all, I still have the sense of the thing. But themes? Discussion of specific plot points I might want to put behind spoiler space? I sincerely got nothing. The good news is, I haven’t read any other books in the meantime, and I’m bound to read this again, so probably you’ll get a replacement review which will be good, someday? And more importantly, no other shoddy book reviews!

Shoddy movie review(s?), though? Probably.

[1] That’s not what I mean, but I don’t know how to pithily encapsulate what I do mean. Which is that I felt like it told a complete chapter within its larger story, and did not leave me feeling cheated out of getting more Right Now. In short, it’s doing a good job of maintaining its place in third-wave epic fantasy.

Guardians of the Galaxy

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The crazy thing about how far behind my reviews have fallen isn’t that the backlog is huge, but that it’s so very, very small. There’s the movie I saw before this, which I have finally accepted won’t be served by a useless review and which will therefore have to wait until dollar theaters pick it up so I can ~~purge~~ expiate my sins, there’s this one, and there’s one book I finished almost at the same time. Nothing else.

I haven’t exactly been avoiding the theater? I have most definitely been avoiding books though. Which is to say, boy howdy have I read a ton of comics over the past month. None of that has anything to do with anything, except oh wait, it totally does, since I just remembered that the movie I am reviewing is Guardians of the Galaxy. If you were to guess I had seen that comic in the mid ’70s, the answer would be, sort of? I did, but just the premiere issue so far, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the characters that populate this movie. I did read a handful of issues of Adam Warlock which introduce Gamora, making her, so far as I can tell, the oldest of these characters in Marveldom. This is not only pretty cool, but it definitely puts a pleasantly ironic spin on a situation I read about a few weeks ago where someone was selling kidshirts of the characters and left her off because she wouldn’t appeal to boys enough. That’s already dumb on the face of it, obviously, but man oh man is it five times as dumb with the added knowledge about their collective history in comics.

None of which has anything to do with how good the movie is, I know, but… it’s been out more than a month. I kind of missed the boat on that one already, y’know? But let’s pretend I haven’t, and someone who can see this hasn’t actually seen the movie yet. It’s like this. A misfit kid with the soundtrack of the ’70s and ’80s as his sole possession in life winds up in space because that’s how comics work sometimes, only now he’s a cool thief[1]. Then he gets caught up in a galactic civil war[2] between the Kree and some other people who are not the Skrulls and who I would probably know more about if I had read comics from the ’80s, meets up with the daughter of the baddest dude in the galaxy[3], not to mention a psychotic raccoon, his pet tree who has a lot to say but only the raccoon can translate, and an angry tattooed giant out for revenge because the second baddest dude in the galaxy killed his entire family one time.[4] Then, they… well, the point is, literally any damn thing could happen, and if you aren’t desperate to know what, we are entirely different people, you and I.

[1] Not the Danny Ocean kind of thief, the Indiana Jones kind, if Indy had ever acknowledged that he’s totally a thief but for museums, which by the way is 100% what he is. I mean, it’s not his fault, it is colonialism’s fault, but think about it.
[2] It’s more complicated than that, but at some point I’m just writing a spoiler-filled summary of the movie instead of a review; plus also, if I break it down, the movie sounds less like Star Wars.
[3] Who we last saw financing the destruction of the earth for unknown reasons.
[4] “For you, the day Bison graced your village with his presence was the single most important moment of your life. For me, it was a Tuesday.” Oh Raul Julia, we miss you still.

Powers: Cosmic

Honestly? I kinda got nothing here. This Powers collection has retroactively justified my recent acceptance of Captain Marvel into my personal Marvel comics canon, since it is about the death of Earth’s Cosmic guardian and what that means for the planet’s future. (Because, you see, that’s what Kree-born warrior Mar-Vell’s story has eventually metamorphosed into.) But otherwise, it is by and large standard Powers fare, with murders to solve[1], heroism to be performed, and major plot-points to be incrementally moved forward.

If I could talk about said plot-points without big spoilers for previous parts of the series, maybe I’d have more to say. Because there’s definitely a building theme over the course of the series, one that I could not have predicted before being an unregistered superhero got outlawed and which now seems unavoidable in retrospect. But, yeah, major character and story arc spoilers lie in that direction. Next book, when things come to what I assume is an inevitable head, I’ll just have to duck behind the spoiler cut and talk about it anyway, but since both character arcs were in set-up mode this time, I can safely wait one more time.

Meanwhile, a structural discussion. Every issue in this collection started with a coffee-house-looking open mic night, with a different random character from somewhere in The City(tm) doing a different not-quite-comedic stand-up routine. It’s not that they were bad, by and large. It’s that they felt like they were supposed to be making some kind of thematic resonance, either within the current plot or maybe even issue by issue. And, I flat out did not get it. I have no point here, I just wonder if that’s on me or on Bendis.

[1] Notably, the one I already alluded to.

Braid

And then, the first and last game of the weekend[1], Braid. The downside of which is that I am obligated to find a way to review Braid. (The upside, obviously, is that it was a fantastic game, full of challenging and rewarding puzzles and a truly incredible (and incredibly presented!) climax to its story.)

The thing is, I don’t really want to say anything about it, because it is to be played, not told. So I’ll give you what you can see and what you can begin to intuit from the first two minutes of play, and then I’ll nod to myself and consider my job done[5]. Have you ever played Super Mario Bros.? The one for the original Nintendo (also there was a somewhat different arcade version) with the walking mushroom people and the giant lizard who kidnapped Princess Peach? Along every meaningful angle from which you could consider SMB, this game is the response to that game. </wise nod>

[1] I had played a great deal of it before[2], and I also took a break in the middle before coming back to wrestle with the last few, ultra-hard levels. Ultimately, there were seven such that a walkthrough was involved in[4], and of those, I only felt like I should have figured out two of them. The rest involved knowledge I had somehow missed having or ideas that would never have crossed my mind to attempt.
[2] Annoyingly, on the XBox 360. Will I go back for my gamerscore? Probably not![3]
[3] I mean because I’m pretty lazy, but honestly, going back for gamerscore feels like missing 100% of the point of the game, too.
[4] Awesomely, my host had the walkthrough and doled out the hints gradually, so sometimes it really was just a hint.
[5] If this sounds like a candyass way to conduct my affairs, well, a) maybe it is at that, but b) it doesn’t change the fact that I would be robbing you of an experience you owe yourself. If you play video games and people don’t sidle away from you because of things you say at social gatherings, then trust me. Just play the game. The five or ten bucks that it will cost you is worth it, as is the hour or three of time you’ll spend.

Journey

I am returned, triumphant, from my long sojourn of, er, not writing the last two reviews I have owed. And if that doesn’t really sound like all that much of a Journey, it’s because I’m trying to create a parallel with my unfortunate experience playing a short indie game of the same name.

As you can see, last weekend was heavy with the light & easy games set, which… it did not convince me that small games that last a couple of hours is the way to go, but it certainly highlighted how much easier they are. I mean, yes to play, because you can’t write a particularly hard game that will only last 90 minutes, but especially I mean easy to find time for the playing of. Which is important! I can say anything I want about how much more I enjoy Dragon Age, but if I keep not turning on the XBox to play it, that claim rings pretty hollowly.

The irony is that Journey would otherwise be the perfect game to draw that comparison with. See, I finished it in about 20 minutes. You start out as a Jawa-looking dude[1] in the desert, climbing up a hill. Eventually, you see in the distance what look like places to go, and then you go to them, because you’ve ever played a videogame before. After doing some things in the desert which may or may not have any particular long-term relevance or unlock insightful cutscenes, you go through a portal to a snowy mountainscape. Or at least I did. After some additional snow-doings that may also have some kind of relevance or unlock some other set of cutscenes, a finale occurs. I can only speculate about all these things[2] because what happened to me was as follows: I collected a couple of glowing things in the desert, tried to take them back to a platform that looked like it might have been missing some glowing things but instead accidentally fell through a portal onto the mountain (was there a way back? I’m told yes, but it didn’t look like it) where I climbed for a while, turned right, dodged a (let’s say) dragon, climbed some more (briefly the climbing involved a Shaolin temple), and then after some brief spoilers[3], the game ended.

I’m pretty sure I did something wrong? You would think, in a game whose title explicitly alludes to the destination not mattering, it would not be so easy to perform a speed run, much less without intending to. Oh well. Perhaps I’ll play it again someday, when the memories have faded.

[1] Or possibly lady! If you’ve seen a Jawa before, you know I’m impressing my own opinion without any particular evidence.
[2] Well, not only speculate. I have hints from my incredulous host to go by as well.
[3] I’m taking it on faith that there were spoilers to be had. It was, from my perspective, merely an inexplicable happenstance.

Prometheus

Then I got to pick up a movie that I’ve long regretted missing out on, by virtue of it apparently being a recommended reference piece for the latest in quality surround sound.[1] I would never have been so obsessed with seeing Prometheus if I had not known about its connection into the Alien mythos, a series with which I am quite obsessed indeed. I find it ironic, therefore, that the huge failing of the movie is that Ridley Scott thought he could make a science fiction movie by drawing so strongly on the same elements that made Alien one of the best horror movies of all time.

See, there are these archaeologists, and they have found evidence in the records of a dozen ancient cultures that aliens were once among us. Better yet, they found a map. Off they go (courtesy of the Weyland Corporation, its Yutani partnership still in the murky future) to meet said aliens and see what can be learned from them or their remains. (After all, it’s been a while since anyone has heard from them.) And then… well, the problem I have here is that the only thing that compelled me to eschew my usual lack of non-theatrical reviews is how much I want to talk about What Went Wrong. And though I don’t plan to lay out the plot detail by detail, the broad strokes of conflict necessary to explain myself are major spoilers for the last third of the movie. Probably nobody is worried about being spoiled for a generally panned film that is also two years old? But just in case, you have been warned.

So, after various trials and tribulations that there’s no need to detail, half of the main characters are standing face to face with one of their Progenitors. They have woken him from presumed millennia of cryogenic slumber, they have a robot with enough linguistic knowledge and recent research to speak with him. This is a high level “Are you There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” moment in progress here. And then…

Let me come at it from another direction. Science fiction, at its core, is about the betterment of humanity. Depending upon the flavor, it may not always be successful, but we are always striving, seeking answers, reaching beyond ourselves in some way, whether technologically, physically, philosophically, morally, or some combination. And you cannot get more science fictional, I would posit, than going into deep space to learn the fundamental answers of our own genesis.

Horror, at its core, is about the inexplicable. Sometimes we try to impose a cause where no cause exists[2]. Sometimes we just shy away in existential or literal terror at the knowledge that there is no reason to be had. Ridley Scott’s Alien was exactly that movie. Some miners on their way home stumble across an old space beacon, accidentally wake up an egg filled with death, and the lone survivor walks away with no answers at all, just bloody destruction.

As you can see, these two genres are fundamentally at odds with each other, in their purest forms. The reason Prometheus is a failure, then, is because Scott pulled a bait-and-switch. Two-thirds of the way through a science fiction movie, the audience is suddenly faced with inexplicable horror and an ending that promises only the lack of answers, even as the film’s heroine launches into the uncertain future to continue her off-screen search for them.

Which forces me to wonder if the sequel (2016, IMDB says) will retroactively redeem some portion of this movie?

[1] I suspect this is entirely due to the waterfall scene the flick opens with.
[2] Pamela Voorhees launched a decade of schlock by pretending her murder spree was about teenage drug use and premarital sex instead of blind, flailing denial of her own senseless loss.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight