Tag Archives: science fiction

Splice

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Here is the main thing you need to know about Splice: it is being mismarketed in the previews as a horror movie. It is occasionally scary, it’s intensely psychological, and it has a moral component big enough for any three normal movies. But except for an unfortunate five minute interlude near the climax of the film, it is decidedly not horror. The real problem is that I’m not exactly sure what else to say; my options seem to veer between massive spoilers and convincing people that they shouldn’t watch it, neither of which would be my intention and both of which seem likely if I really tried to explain it. I’m pretty sure I can manage to dodge the spoilers, but the other part will be trickier.

So, what happens is, there’s this genetic engineering lab being funded by a pharmaceutical company, and the two lead scientists are rock stars in their field, even on the cover of Wired, for their work in splicing various genes together to create new organisms with solid pharmaceutical applications. Also, they are a couple because of how a man and a woman cannot simply be professional colleagues in a movie. (Or, it occurs to me, in comic books. But as this would be a messy digression, I’ll stop now.) Then, like you would probably expect to happen in a sci-fi morality play, they decide that it’s time to up the stakes by including human DNA into their splicing experiments. This is successful via the power of montage, and from there forward what you have is a movie. The thing is, it’s a very disturbing movie, and although I’m glad I saw it and would even say I liked it, I don’t think I want to see it again anytime soon.

Which is exactly the concern I had, because I feel like this was a very successful film in several ways: emotionally affecting, structurally sound, and technically excellent all three. Although I’m not convinced the masses will really understand[1] the distinction, I feel like they did an especially good job by portraying the moral component strictly via the  characters and their actions, never really focusing that hard on the idea that the creation of Dren (the putative star of our drama) had a positive or negative moral component at all. Which, to bring it full circle, is another way I think the previews / marketing have failed the actual movie, though again, I doubt the viewing public will realize that particular “moral” dimension was disregarded so thoroughly.

[1] Then again, the masses won’t go see this movie anyway, so I may not have a point here after all.

Collision Course

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As you may already be well aware, William Shatner wrote several entertaining-despite-their-self-indulgence novels about the future of James Kirk, who thanks to various authorial tricks is functionally immortal. You couldn’t take them as high drama, but except for the last one you could mostly like them. Anyway, another two and a half years have passed, which made me due for reading his Kirk prequel novel, Collision Course. The series it was evidently meant to be spawning is not in evidence anywhere, so I suppose that means the book didn’t do too well. I theorize that this is a result of the previous book’s badness rather than any particular flaw of the current one, because honestly it was exactly what you would expect it to be. Which is not to say it was without flaws: far from it. But there are enough of them out to have a pretty good idea of whether you like Shatner’s vision enough to make up for his excess, so nobody could really buy it not knowing exactly what they’d be getting, is my point.

As for said prequel, here’s what it does. It takes teenaged Jimmy Kirk and slightly less teenaged Spock and chronicles their first meeting and the start of their friendship. See, there’s a plot involving stolen dilithium, stolen Vulcan cultural artifacts, and an army of killer children, and they end up in the middle of it due to possible complicity from Spock’s father and Jimmy’s Academy girlfriend, non-respectively. Also, there is a link to Kodos the Executioner, so that’s nice for longtime fans. And as usual, he gets a lot of things right through his many years of time spent in Kirk’s head. The only thing he particularly gets wrong, in fact, is that it’s a little too perfect. All of the important protagonist and antagonist players are involved in the plot from start to finish. There’s no tightening web of intrigue, no choice to get involved. As a result, everything is too pat. Which didn’t make the storytelling less good, but it did constantly take me out of the story. Pity, as it was a quick, engaging read except for that.

On Basilisk Station

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I’m having a hard time writing a cold review of On Basilisk Station, because I myself did not come to it cold; instead, a string of reviews by Mike Kozlowski has colored my perceptions of the entire series for the whole time I’ve been aware of its existence. It is like being in your twenties and finally watching this Star Wars movie you’ve heard so much about from the thirty-somethings you hang out with. And so I’ve got the simultaneous experience of the book itself intertwined with various snickerings as I note the exact kinds of things about the books that he had previously said that are just so ridiculous, and I have to wonder if they’d have struck me as forcibly, at least in this first book, if I hadn’t already known what was coming.

In any event, a rundown for you: a couple of thousand years from now, give or take a century, mankind has spread throughout the stars, only with none of that Earth-That-Was nostalgia for a vanished planet. In fact, the Solarian League (or something like that) is one of the biggest players in galactic politics, though they play no particular role in this first book of the series. And the aliens, such as they are, all appear to be way behind mankind. But that’s because this is a very 18th-19th Century setting, only with spaceships instead of boats, and of course all the European countries were the most advanced, with the native tribes there only to be enlightened or used as catspaws, depending on whether you (like our plucky heroine, Honor Harrington) are a member of the Royal Manticoran system of planets or are one of the socialist and expansionistic bad guys, such as the Republic of Haven are mostly peopled by. Because this isn’t actually 19th C. European politics and warfare, you understand. It’s the future, and we’re in space!

All you really need to know about Honor Harrington is that she’s very very smart, both as a manager of people and as a military tactician. Possibly as a strategist too, but for now she is only the captain of one fast-response warship, the HMS Fearless, so we don’t get to see her conducting a full-scale war like Luke Skywalker does sometimes. At least, not yet, and it’s good we’re in the future, because the Force would not do Luke much good against Honor. Anyway, I may be drifting a bit afield here. The point is, Honor has lots to overcome. For example, she did a bad job in a military exercise because her old reliable weapons were traded in for new technology that only works at close range if the enemy doesn’t expect you to have it, and for some reason everyone expected her to have it in the second through twentieth runs of the exercise. Thanks to this embarrassment of the weaponry and strategic thinking behind it, she and her ship get sent out to the middle of nowhere (on Basilisk Station, you are no doubt shocked to learn) for a pointless picket duty, inspecting merchant cargo for contraband. Also, her crew is angry at her, her executive officer doesn’t respect her (even though he constantly berates himself for it, since he knows she deserves his full support, for being as awesome as she is), and her doctor is a slacker. And this career failure in the making doesn’t even take into account the Republic of Haven and their expansionism that I mentioned earlier.

I think I have never read more escapist fiction, is my point here. I will not speed through them, but I am looking forward to the next one despite myself. Because no matter how bad things get, she’ll be an impressive genius. If you dropped her naked into the middle of the Australian Outback, she would not walk out alive three weeks later. She and her Aboriginal Air Force would have already conquered Sydney by then and be making plans for how to take on China. (I mean, she wouldn’t do those things for the hell of it; we can take it as read that Sydney and China are bad guys, because otherwise they would already be plying her with fresh accolades instead of resisting.)

Also, for some reason, she has an empathic six-legged cat. The book is… well, “good” is not the correct word here. The book is entertaining despite said cat. My understanding is that it is exactly the same as reading Horatio Hornblower stories, but I have never done this thing. So if you like those, or like over-the-top awesomeness that cannot be prevented by any government-built levee, or probably if you like empathic six-legged cats for some reason, then this right here is the book (and probably the series) for you. I know I’ll read more, because even if she is too awesome for me on paper[1], it is impossible to deny the holy-shit face-splitting grins that occurred several times over the course of the last few chapters of the book.

[1] Yes, yes, but I mean it metaphorically.

Warbreaker

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It is hard to start a review when you are afraid of saying too much. It is harder still when you are both afraid of saying too much and also have very little idea about what to say. I can say that I’m glad I came to Warbreaker almost completely cold[1], and that this is exactly why I’m afraid of saying too much. I can say that Sanderson has created a third completely new magic system, and that it is really hard to explain even though it was not all that hard to understand. It has to do with an amalgam of color and life-force transference, anyway.

But what I can mainly say is that the story is fantastic. So many different viewpoint characters, each with wholly realized and differing viewpoints[2], failing to communicate the way that Jordan’s characters do but for completely understandable reasons and with real and immediate consequences that aren’t four books of mounting irritation from now. (To be clear, Warbreaker is standalone.) And they exist in a world rife with religious and political conflict that has no easy answers. Best of all, every important character out of at least six is in the midst of a crisis of identity whose solutions are poised to cut to the heart of generations of barely constrained turmoil. Also, there is a talking sword that I am prepared to say is the best talking sword character I’ve ever witnessed in the genre. In short: if you think Brandon Sanderson has been doing a good job with his career to date, this book is guaranteed not to suddenly make you change your mind.

[1] There is an unfortunate spoiler in one of the reviews on the back cover, all the more insidious because it’s not obviously a spoiler until you’re mostly through the book and realize that it hasn’t been revealed anywhere else.
[2] Which sounds redundant, but I dispute that it is.

Red Holocaust

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It is clear to me, in retrospect, that I waited too long between these books. (Of course, that’s true of most of my books, but it’s more true when the books are so very light as this, and also I’m facing a quarter-century backlog for the series.) But I have finally read the second book of the Deathlands series, Red Holocaust. When last we saw the one-eyed Ryan Cawdor, pleasantly mutated Krysty Wroth, gun enthusiast J.B. Dix, and the man of mystery known only as Doc, they had escaped vengeful danger of some kind or other into one of many Redoubts, hardened chambers scattered around America that are filled with guns, supplies, and most importantly for our purposes, teleportation rooms.

This new book starts what I expect to be a long-term trend, in which the Trader’s crew will teleport randomly from place to place, find something horribly wrong, and go about fixing it. In this particular instance, the main wrong thing is that the Bering Strait has frozen over again[1], allowing both marauders and an apparently somewhat cohesive Soviet pursuit to cross into Alaska. Since the first teleport destination is also in Alaska, you can imagine that some kind of militaristic event is about to ensue. And I think that is what I am expecting to be the most common path for the series as it unfolds: party teleports somewhere randomly, comes out to discover a situation in need of caretaking, does so, probably loses some members while gaining others, returns, and teleports randomly once more. The draw, therefore, will be the gradual unfolding of the geopolitical situation[2], revelations of character histories, and of course fragment by fragment of the secret of the Doctor, who can’t keep track of a stream of consciousness for more than a few moments, yet who has all manner of pre-war knowledge, both trivial and sublime. Most recently, for example, he revealed that the matter transporters have also been used in time travel experimentation! Dating back to 1930s!

I don’t know exactly why I lap this stuff up, but really, it’s not that big of an investment. A day or two to read a book that would work equally well as a single or two-part episode of a television series, and then onto something else? It’s more than fun enough to pay that price, and thusly I do.

[1] Thanks, nuclear winter!
[2] For example, who knew that Russia would manage to be visibly more together than the United States, a hundred years after World War III? I mean, besides doomsday scenario authors, who I believe were certain of this fact throughout the duration of the Cold War.

Daybreakers

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As horror movie season dawns upon us, I find myself with fewer exciting choices than I’ve recently grown accustomed to. (But definitely not none! The upcoming Crazies looks like it could be good enough to make up for some of this lack. Nothing will make up for missing Horrorfest this year, but when they don’t actually have a screen anywhere within 200 miles, I pretty much have to give up. I’ll host my own Horrorfest weekend once the DVDs appear, I suppose, and my concessions will be cheaper and have a broader variety! Also, alcohol.) One of these less exciting choices, to forcibly drag myself back on point, was the yet-another-vampire-movie Daybreakers. Luckily, it turns out that I misjudged it based on the previews, and it was a vampire movie in the same way Night of the Living Dead is a zombie movie: as window dressing for the plot.

Ten years after a fluid-transmitted vampire virus was unleashed upon humanity[1], dystopic societal collapse is the order of the day. Humans are nearly extinct and the lack of food supply means that vampires are already starting to follow, although their method is less pleasant than simply being dead. In the midst of this three-way social (and sometimes more literal) war between privileged vampires, their starving and grotesquely transformed underclass, and the final, hunted humans, Ethan Hawke is an ethical scientist in search of a blood substitute that can save his people and not incidentally the humans as well. The plot has twists and turns and is basically interesting, but it’s overshadowed by the sociology of the vampirism and its ethical implications. The disease started accidentally, and I’m sure some people were converted accidentally in the first days. But it eventually turned into the kind of thing that some people were doing by choice, and that some people were forcing on their friends and relatives rather than watch them gradually change from dominant species to sole food source of the new dominant species. And, meanwhile, as that food source grew scarcer and scarcer through the combination of death and transformation from food to hungry mouth, there was the new sociology of class warfare, as vampires watched themselves slowly being doomed to the same violent and hideous fate as the too-poor-to-buy-blood vampires they had ’til now been shunning.

It’s a rich cornucopia of discussion fodder: is it evil to choose immortality[3] knowing that it will be at the expense of people who did not so choose? How about once enough people are choosing it that you’re nearly certain to be killed as food, instead of only maybe? Would you consider saving someone against their will? Would you compare it to rape instead? How much would you help the poor if not helping them meant they turned into ravening monsters that tried to kill you a lot? Would you death penalize them despite their lack of complicity in these attacks? And all that stuff is just the background. So you can see why the actual storyline would kind of pale by comparison. Honestly, the only part of the movie I didn’t like that much was when, past the climactic revelations, it turned into a bloody horror film for the last five minutes or so. It was simply too much of a let down on what had up to that point been an incredibly rich premise.

[1] You can probably work out just exactly how it is transmitted, if you have ever been aware of any vampire lore.[2]
[2] If you have not, 1995 me is rolling his eyes at you, while 2010 me is ever-so-slightly jealous.
[3] This leaves aside the question of whether there was ever immortality to be had. The disease had only existed for ten years, and although people did not age anymore during that period, it’s not a nearly large enough sample period to extrapolate from, says me.

9

MV5BMTY2ODE1MTgxMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTM1NTM2Mg@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_I had my time-killing afternoon movie for yesterday narrowed down to three options, when suddenly someone at the end of the table said, “Hey, do you wanna go see 9?” And other than a slightly more expensive ticket price, I had no compelling reason why not; after all, it’s a flick I’ve wanted to see, even if Tim Burton is kind of getting played out by virtue of basically every single one of them being about loneliness. I can deal with that in my music, but it starts to get old on the screen, eventually.

In the dawning years of World War II, war-attuned scientists have created self-replicating machines “for the defense of the nation”. And then… well, you know what happens next, don’t you? As sure as zombies commute on trains[1], the machines rise up against their masters. And as humanity declines, one scientist, perhaps seeing the way the wind is blowing, engages in a knit-punk experiment to create nine tiny homunculi in the slim hopes of carrying on life on the planet. So, that’s where the movie begins; as for the actual plot, it can best be summed up as “adventure and interpersonal[2] conflict ensue”.

It was a decent albeit flawed movie. I look at it like this: if you want to see a movie with incredible animation, as good as any I’ve ever seen, you should check this out. If you want to see actiony dramatics, you’re good. If you want to see the best use of Over the Rainbow as score, this is the place to be. If you want to see a thoughtful movie that makes coherent sense as a whole, well, you might should ought to look somewhere else. Also, if you are at all allergic to the really crunchy granola[3], you’ll have some problems.

[1] Dude, it rhymes. You expect more depth from zombies?
[2] Grpuavpnyyl, vagencrefbany, but that would be a spoiler. P.S. http://rot13.com
[3] Hippies, yo. Hippies. You know what I’m saying.

District 9

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It occurs to me that really good science fiction movies don’t come along all that often. In this decade, there’s pretty much Children of Men and Serenity. And I mean, those are two great movies, but there’s only two of them, so. Except, I watched another one on Friday. The only problems I have with District 9 are that I have to figure out whether I liked it better than Children of Men and that I have to figure out how to talk about it without actually saying anything.

Because, see, this is a movie that I’m pretty sure is best seen cold. But that makes a weak review, so I’ll give you a little less than I got from the previews, and certainly no more than I got from the first ten minutes. Twenty years ago, a spacecraft carrying insectoid aliens in conspicuously refugee-like conditions appeared over Johannesburg, South Africa. Whether this was a true state of affairs or unfortunate human prejudice trumping the facts is neither answered nor even addressed by the often documentary-style film. All that matters is twenty years have passed during which the residents of Johannesburg have become gradually more disenchanted by the slum called District 9 to which all the “prawns” have been relegated after it became clear that their ship wasn’t going anywhere. Nobody wants to be subjected to the prawns’ presence or share any services with them, out of nothing more apparent than outright xenophobia, excepting only enterprising Nigerian[1] businessmen hoping to profit off the suffering and a multinational conglomerate who wants to unlock the secrets of their weapons tech.

So, that’s the setting. The film documents an approximate week during which the prawns are to be evicted from their slum and then moved to a new, designed camp with the bureaucratically original name of District 10, which has been set up 250 kilometers outside Johannesburg, conveniently out of sight and mind of all the disaffected human citizens. That’s about all I have to say, except that it is by turns horrible and deeply moving, has possibly my favorite child character of any movie in history, and did I mention that it is that rare gem of the cinematic experience, good science fiction?

[1] Seriously! They were identified specifically as Nigerians. I snickered.

Halo 3

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It occurs to me to state for the record that I did finally finish playing Halo 3. A few weeks ago, I guess? I forgot it was a noteworthy event, as it happens. The Halo games, as you may or may not be aware (but probably you are), chronicle a three-way war between humans (led by Master Chief, a genetically improved guy in a big metal powersuit), um… a confederation of aliens that I distinctly recall having a name that escapes me at the moment (led by religious fanatics), and the Flood (about whom the less said the better in the unlikely event that you care about spoilers for a game that is almost a decade old). The war is fought in a variety of places, but mostly on giant terraformed rings called Halos which figure prominently in the fates and histories not only of the aliens and the Flood, but of the galaxy itself.

In this game, a first-person shooter like the others, you control the Master Chief as always, and up to three other players in co-op play, which at the time was pretty new. Other games have made good roads into that space in the meantime, but, that’s how it goes. And you continue to fight against the other two sides of the war and try to save the galaxy and all. Also, there’s some pretty fantastically customizable multiplayer components to the game.

Despite the disinterested tone of the review, it really is a great game. It doesn’t have quite the strength of storyline of Halo 2, but the game play is equivalent and probably improved, so, decent tradeoff. If it weren’t for the fact that the game play in the original game was iffy, I could unreservedly recommend the whole trilogy as a pretty good sci-fi yarn wrapped around finding a bunch of guns and using them to kill things. Which, I mean, they’re aliens. That’s why they’re on the screen!

Land of the Lost

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Unemployment plus dollar movie plus having failed to catch a lot of my secondary summer movies equals a pretty good deal, right? The moreso, of course, because only paying $1.25 to see Land of the Lost feels a lot better, even in a substandard theater, than paying full price would have done. They did a pretty good job of hitting up on a couple of nostalgia-meters, and a halfway decent job at a plot, and an occasionally decent job at being funny. And then, of course, there was the rest of the job they did at being funny, which ranged from iffy to my being able to see what they were going for to solidly unfunny to scientifically offensive.[1]

The story, lifted straight from decades of Saturday morning kid television, revolves around the fate of [Dr.] Marshall, Will, and Holly, who, while on a routine expedition, accidentally go over a waterfall and through a rift in the space-time continuum, landing in a lost world populated by monkey people, lizard people, dinosaurs, and all kinds inexplicable modern detritus that has fallen through, one supposes, other rifts that were less waterfall-accessible. The chick was pretty hot if unfortunately lacking in story relevance otherwise, the Judd-Apatow-friendly actor was about as funny as you’d expect him to be[2], and Will Farrell… it’s like, when he’s playing a pompous blowhard, I appreciate his talent. But as soon as the physical comedy shows up, I just want him to stop, as quickly as possible. This movie, alas, had a healthy mix. For the record, despite me coming down mostly negatively, I did not at all feel like my childhood had been raped.

[1] I should note that that eight-year-olds in the audience did find the last part pretty damn funny, to my chagrin.
[2] This is true whether you are an anti-fan of Apatow or not, I expect. I still haven’t seen any of his movies yet, only the ancillary stuff that floats around in his wake, but I’m pretty okay with him, to date.