Tag Archives: science fiction

Star Trek

MV5BMjE5NDQ5OTE4Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTE3NDIzMw@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Obviously, you are aware of this movie, and you’ve probably already formed your own opinion. And anyway, I’d be leery of spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen it. In theory, this constrains my review by quite a lot, but I figure it leaves me free to talk about what I really wanted to anyway. But, first things first. Did I like it? Enough to see it three times on opening weekend. Did it have flaws? I can think of a couple offhand, one extremely nitpicky and one that, absent, would have failed to feel like a Star Trek movie anyway. Plus, I think I’m willing to claim that at one point, there was actually an insufficient amount of technobabble. Was it accessible to non-fans? I feel as though it really was, and the reviews I’ve heard from non-fans (and in one case, an actively anti-fan) have borne this impression out. So you should really go see it, if this has not already occurred.

Because what J.J. Abrams made here was a philosophical, character-driven action movie, and really, how many of those do you think exist? Of the ones that exist, how many do you think aren’t insufferably smug about it? This right here is a narrow field to occupy! Action: ’cause, you know, space battles and laser gun fights. Character-driven: the driving forces of the story are all based in interactions. Kirk and McCoy’s friendship. Kirk and Spock’s rivalry. Spock’s relationship with his human mother. Nero’s irrational impulse for personal rather than systemic revenge. (He’s the bad guy.) Philosophical: take a group of people that shook the foundations of the Federation (and, projecting outward less than you’d think, the galaxy) and drastically change their history. Okay, many of the changes were not drastic, but one was, and there are clear, subtle ripples from there even before the main plot of the movie takes over. And then explore the question of random chance versus unalterable destiny.

I liked that by the end of the movie, the history of the Federation is vastly divergent from the one that fans of five TV series and ten movies know. And I like that it’s not going to be “fixed.” It was a bold move that I think is going to pay off in spades for the future of the franchise. But as much as I approve of that, I absolutely adored watching as, moment by moment, destiny pushed beloved characters into roles that they had fallen into by seeming happenstance in the original timeline. This new Trek may have surprisingly non-causal time travel that never really existed in “my father’s” Star Trek, but it also has some modicum of fate. And that’s kind of cool.

Push (2009)

You know what’s cool? There are just so many movies right now that have science fiction and/or superhero themes going. And it’s much like the present horror renaissance, in that so many genre films coming down the pipe means a lot of them will be not so good. But the whole point of that is that you inevitably end up with the real gems now and again. Which brings us to Push, which in all honesty looked from the previews like someone had watched Jumper and said to themselves, hey, I can make that movie too!

And, okay, instead of teleporters and evil paladins, they have telekinetics and future-drawers and mind controllers and a whole host of additional powered people, plus the U.S. government and the Triads. And they all run around Hong Kong, trying to find a drug that the consistently-talented Dakota Fanning’s mom says will bring down the feds. Who are kind of evil, maybe? But not as bad as the Triads.

Here’s the thing. It has plot holes you could drive a truck through, and it is at core a little bit silly. But it was damn fun! And it had drunk Dakota Fanning! I’m pretty sure that in the next five to ten years, she is going to be an incredible actress, and good for her. And ultimately, I kind of figure that whoever made Push was basically making Jumper again. What I forgot to consider until the movie made me realize it is that it’s possible to make Jumper again, but to make a good version. And that is pretty much what this was. Yay, that.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

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Michael Rennie had no reason to be ill on Friday, The Day the Earth Stood Still. After all, the remake of his most famous role[1] had a lot of cool to it. Nice effects budget, Keanu Reeves in a role tailor-made for him, thoughtful science fiction examinations of humanity. It was, on the whole, a good movie.

Which, in an odd kind of way, is exactly what was wrong with it. I’m not sure if it’s peculiar to me, or if I’m objectively right about this: but it needed to be a great movie, to be successful. And it never reached that level. The acting was all eminently competent without being inspiring. The effects would have looked outstanding five years ago, but they only look pretty cool today. The central questions of the film, does homo sapiens deserve to thrive? and what about at the expense of other species?, are important ones that perfectly fits the sci-fi mold. And if there had been any doubt about what answers the film would provide, then the examination of the question might not have felt quite so shallow as it did.

I don’t know, maybe it is my fault, holding expectations a little too high. All I know is, I wanted to think it was great, the way I thought last year’s sci-fi hit was great. And I only thought it was good. Oh, well.

[1] I mean, as far as I know.

Pilgrimage to Hell

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Over the past year or more, I have become more and more intrigued by a pair of series by a mythical author, James Axler, that I keep seeing on the shelves at Half-Price Books. The problem is, they run back several years, and of course the first one is never available. Right? Right? Wrong, as it happens! Not only did I find the first one, I found the first one of the older series. Unlikely, and yet I am standing here before you today to swear it is all true. The odds of finding the other first book, or this second book… but still, one takes what one can get.

Pilgrimage to Hell was written in 1986, and except for failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, it handled the next dozen years fairly well. And then, of course, nuclear apocalypse provides the stage for our story, a century later. The face of North America is drastically changed via biological and chemical weaponry in the South, dramatically altered weather patterns in the Southwest, nuclear bombs along faultlines having effectively removed the West Coast, and so on. Pretty much every aspect of life is ruled by what guns you’ve been able to maintain, find, or buy. Which is why the Trader and his army are so well-regarded and so feared; he has made a career out of finding hidden caches of weapons, munitions, vehicles, and gasoline that predate the Nuke, and then taking them around and selling them to help people protect themselves from the environment, the mutants (both human and otherwise) and each other.

Of course, despite the sci-fi underpinnings and overtones, at heart it’s one of those men’s adventure type things that spends entirely too much time describing the make and model of a gun being used, the quality and quantity of brains being expelled from an exploded skull, the heft, curvature, and coloring of a pair of breasts. But surprisingly, there’s a pretty well-told tale underneath all that, with Jungian archetypes all over the place. I’m serious: this guy Ryan finds a girl who knows how to get to a utopian promised land beyond the Deathlands, has the Trader as a father figure who (spoiler alert) is not long for this world, and goes through a giant metal door in order to take his first real step along the path to this utopia, but only after defeating a guardian beast who is (and I’m still serious) named Cerberus. So, okay, it’s a hamhanded usage of Campbell’s resonance road-map, but that still leaves a lot of room for being fun and interesting in the parts of the map that aren’t as detailed.

I don’t know if I exactly recommend it, because you probably already know exactly what intersection of enough apocalypse porn and sufficient lack of gun porn is right for you[1]. But for my part, it was a pleasant surprise that leaves me forced to keep on searching for the later volumes.

[1] Please note: as far as the porn porn, except for the lead chick being described in lusting detail, the women are each and all as capable as the men at every turn, so it probably isn’t nearly as bad along the feminist axis as you were expecting, and pretty much unique among books in this category that I’ve read for being so evenly written.

The X Files: I Want to Believe

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To be perfectly clear, the new X-Files movie didn’t have very much to offer a newcomer to the series. It avoided the pitfall of delving into the series’ long-winded mythology that, on TV, ultimately failed to deliver on any significant portion of its promise, instead opting for the much stronger “Monster of the Week” oeuvre that popularized the show in the first place. This episode (or movie, if you will) pits Mulder and Scully against a possibly psychic priest and gay Russian organ traffickers in the wilds of West Virginia. And in all honesty, it’s a pretty good episode, at that.

Where it fails for the new viewer, and therefore as a movie in general, is that it cannot escape nine years of collected backstory between the principle characters. And with as many old viewers as were dissatisfied by the conclusion of the series, it had to be open to some new viewers to have even a chance of success as a movie. Which is not to say that I think it was in any way a failure as an episode. As easy as it might be to make a joke[1] that the title is a quote from Chris Carter, “I Want to Believe that I can make some quick money off this and remind people that I am alive,” the truth is that, buried underneath all of the accumulated continuity, there is a deep and thoughtful exploration of two people who have lost or are on the verge of losing their belief: in God, in the presence of the truth, out there somewhere, in themselves, in each other. And it’s not like the theme of belief is limited just to our heroes.[2]

In short, the crew came back together to make a good movie that you will probably never watch, and that you’ll, for the most part, be right to avoid. It’s unfortunate, but these things happen every day, I guess. On the bright side, I think it makes for a pretty good (albeit unintentional) coda on the series. As a fan, I can live with that.

[1] I am willing to bet that someone already has, and probably weeks or months ago.
[2] Billy Connolly in particular as the fallen (in an all too modern way) priest: wow, the depth of a) theme and b) acting.

Y: The Last Man – Whys and Wherefores

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As promised, I’ve finished Y. Whys and Wherefores felt very much like the last volume that it was, from start to finish. Although there are certainly plot elements left to resolve (not least among them Yorick’s years-long quest to reunite with his girlfriend, Beth), the primary purpose of the book was clearly the tying up of loose ends and general denouement, which is appropriate after a series this long. It worked just as you’d expect, structurally.

What I’ve been trying to decide since I read it (and in the handful of hours I spent staring at the mostly blank screen after I wrote the first sentence this morning) is how I felt about the ending from a purely story-driven perspective. And of course, spoilers mean not being allowed to really go into details, nor even wanting to. Whatever else it was, it was a powerful finish. Which I guess answers my question pretty well all by itself. It’s also a very thoughtful finish. I’m not sure if introspective is the right word to apply to static history imprinted onto dead trees, but even if I cannot apply it to the book, it certainly applies to my mood after the fact.

Shakespeare has been on my mind all along, of course, and well on purpose. I’ll have to reread these someday as a single unit while watching for Shakespeare in general, all English-majory and analytical, but my point right now is that it has occurred to me, with surprising belatedness, that Yorick certainly qualifies for the descriptor of a fellow of infinite jest, which is good: played differently, The Last Man‘s potential for unrelenting grimness would have overwhelmed any other possible message. In retrospect, I’m starting to think that the Walking Dead series might suffer from a terminal case of the same disease.

Y: The Last Man – Motherland

If memory serves, the most recent volume of Y: The Last Man ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, in which… well, okay, I guess I can assume you may not have read Kimono Dragons and therefore not spoil you. But you really, really should. (I mean, and the others ones first, right?) This is noteworthy because of how Motherland starts out offset by about an hour earlier in time, or possibly with a little bit of a ret-con. I spent the first dozen pages wondering if I had misremembered things entirely, but they eventually got back on track.

And then… answers. Answers about the ninja.[1] Answers about humanity’s future. Possibly answers about the ultimate cause behind the now four year old mass male die-off , though I’m not sure whether I trust them, nor whether I like them if they’re true. But don’t worry, because all those answers are revealed with the series’ standard mix of action, drama, and panache. This is by no means an infodump devoid of any plot or character development. Plus, there are a couple more framing stories about how characters in the series’ past are getting along now.[2]

You really can tell that the series is drawing to a close, because at least one storyline has ended here. (Two, if the answers behind the extinction were factual.) The only thing left now is for Yorick to resolve his long-running emotional turmoil for a girl who, notably, he has never been on the same continent with since the series began. Well, okay, and there are a few other odds and ends as well, but the thing with Beth is the heart of the primary dangling plot, and anyway, the other stuff probably all falls under the spoilers heading again. In any event, I’ll be reading it quite soon, so that’s good news.

[1] Have I mentioned how much I love that there’s a ninja?
[2] Well, they were both at the end, but since their release order would put the very final issue at the beginning of the book, I’m calling them framing stories regardless. I’m torn, because putting that story first would have worked a lot better literarily: both because of the framing thing and because the last couple pages of the previous issue / closing frame would work so well as the end of the book, if they’d been there. But on the other hand, there’s a spoiler in the “opening” framing story (due to it being out of the chronological sequence they ultimately decided upon instead) that would have removed some tension from the primary arc of the book.

WALL-E

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So there I am, sitting at the bar, nursing the water between my third and fourth beers, occasionally snaking a fry from Ryan, sure because they taste good but mostly for the thrill of the hunt, when suddenly the girl next to me says, “Hey, babe. Is this guy boring you? Why not come with me, I’m going to see a movie about robots who could conceivably go to another planet!” Which is why I never had my fourth beer.

But that’s okay, because I got to see an impressive movie instead, in which a tiny robot has decided to clean up this town. And, okay, this town is Earth, and he was probably programmed rather than deciding. But he sounded like R2-D2 (by virtue of being voiced by the same sound editor), so that earns him a lot of credit. WALL-E is the last of his product line still running, so he has the planet to himself. And over the course of probably hundreds of years, he’s picked up personality from unlikely sources. I have to say, as last beings on the planet go, he probably gave Will Smith a run for his money, melancholy pathos and all.[1]

So, after a period in which we get to absorb the tragedy of the ruined planet and its last inhabitant or two, everything changes with the arrival of a bitchy feminine robot on a mission designed by some humans that are still wandering the galaxy. And, you guessed it, WALL-E’s life will never be the same again. A lot of people claim that Pixar makes movies that are equally enjoyable by kids and adults. I’ve skipped a lot of them recently; I think the last one I saw was The Incredibles, and I was quick to acknowledge I was watching a kid movie, contrary to that same claim I’m saying people sometimes make. I point this out as a preface.

Because, I’m not going to claim that with WALL-E, Pixar finally made a movie that can be enjoyed by adults and kids alike. It’s more like… honestly, I felt like Pixar made an adult movie and then added a bunch of kid-laughs after they remembered they were Pixar and are only allowed to make kid movies. So now the kids are able to sit in the theater and not be bored by what their parents are watching. Which is a trend that I hope continues, because damn, but the effects are consistently spectacular, and it’s nice not to be even a little bored between them. Yes, it was a child-like, innocent movie. But if it was specifically kid-oriented, then I’d think the other Pixar movies would have sucked me in better than they did.

P.S. If you happen to watch it, there’s a thing that bothered me a little bit. I get why a Disney movie isn’t going to delve into the mechanics of reproduction, but did it seem to anyone else that the humans should have become extinct a generation or two prior to the events depicted, or at the very least should have been on their way in this generation?

[1] I should pause here to point out the possibility that my identification with our robotic main character here may have colored my favorable impression of the movie. But I’m pretty sure that’s it’s also as good as I think it was.

Y: The Last Man – Kimono Dragons

For the first time in a really long span, I’ve broken the rotation of my graphic novels reading. It’s very much not my fault, though. See, the current Walking Dead book was supposed to have been out in January, and then April, and now in a few days. But “in a few days” pushes well beyond the time I was supposed to read another one, you see. So I had to skip ahead to the nearly concluded Y series. Well, okay, not very near, since I’ve got two books to go after this one, and one of those doesn’t release until June. But it feels pretty near, right now.

Kimono Dragons, by title, is about a bunch of Yakuza chicks in Japan. (I mean, they would be chicks, right, since every warm-blooded male on the planet died years ago. Aside from Yorick and his monkey, obviously. I mean, are you even reading these things? Come on!) But by plot or theme, I’m not really seeing much in the title to interpret. In short, Yorick and company continue their hot pursuit of Ampersand the capuchin monkey who holds the key to humanity’s survival, Israeli super-soldier Alter continues her hot and frequently deadly pursuit of Yorick, cold though the trail has grown, and Doctor Allison Mann continues her hot pursuit of the truth behind mankind’s extinction. (Well, and of some choice Australian tail. A woman has needs.)

Along the way, all of the usual cultural and gender explorations take place, the plot is shifted one step closer to what still feels like a solid resolution, and a few remaining characters have their backgrounds explored. The series has reached a point where (as most long-running series do) the individual pieces no longer feel quite as profound as they did early on; like I said, if there’s a central theme to book 8 here, I missed it. But the quality remains consistently high, the story engrossing, and the artwork by turns exotic, sexy, and visceral. I can’t ask for more that that out of anything that isn’t Sandman.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Most of my video game time[1] lately has been spent perusing the Orange Box for A) a Half-Life 2 experience that doesn’t involve sparkles flying across my screen[2] and B) an improved gamer score. It has been quite good to me on both counts, and hooray for that. The task has been spread out over so many months, though, that when I finally finished the other new content on the disc, I forgot that completed games get reviews! That is a little bit embarrassing, and the moreso because this is coming a few days out of order. But so be it, I have no other choice at this late date!

So, right, in the summer of 2006 I downloaded the first incremental sequel to Half-Life 2 from Steam and played it, and other than whatever bizarre video driver conflict I was having, it was extremely fun! Episode Two took rather longer to come out than I had originally heard, and by the time it finally appeared, I needed a refresher. (And a higher gamer score.) So that explains the delay since I got access to this newest sequel. (Well, and Portal, which is its own kind of awesome excuse.) Anyway, I got refreshed and voila, time to play! Which I did.

Directly following the climactic destruction of City 17 at the end of the previous game, Gordon and Alyx are forced to continue their journey to deliver the stolen Combine data on foot. The trouble with this plan is that the bad guys have some pretty brutal new assets for making our heroes dead, and since they’re on the ropes right now, they seem willing to throw almost all of their effort into preventing the success of the resistance. Along the way, there’s a friendly garden gnome, ever more antlions, gut-wrenching drama, and a promise that Aperture Science[3] will feature heavily in Episode Three. These really are the best first-person shooters on the market for storyline; they blow Halo clean out of the water.

[1] Not all; there’s Halo on Thursdays, for example.
[2] Thanks, PC gaming!
[3] Also, whenever Episode 3 is released, I bet Portal will have a sequel at the same time. Which would be fantastic.