Tag Archives: science fiction

Jumper (2008)

First I was lazy, then I was busy, then I was distracted, then I was sick. Like, a lot sick. Stupid flu. I bet if they’d had the right shot available this year, I wouldn’t have gotten it, is all I’m saying, and then I’d only have three excuses instead of four. (Plus more money, but that’s a separate issue.) Anyway, these problems have conspired to prevent me from finishing a book in practically ages, so I’m alright on that front, but I have seen a couple of movies, one of them weeks ago. So that part is embarrassing, but I shall rectify the issue via a quick review now!

Jumper tells the story of a guy who used to be Anakin Skywalker, but instead of having a lightsaber and a pregnant girlfriend, he can teleport around and also his girlfriend isn’t pregnant. So really, life would be fantastic, since he can steal whatever he needs with no hope of being caught[1] and there’s no child support to worry about. Except his girlfriend notices little inconsistencies in his story like how she last saw him trapped under a frozen river like ten years ago and how he has an awful lot of money for not spending much time at a job and how people want to kill her because she knows him. Which is a pity, life being so great otherwise.

Well, and there’s one other fly in the ointment, I suppose, in that Samuel L. Jackson runs (or at least runs the operational end of) an organization of Paladins who have been hunting down Jumpers for centuries. They claim that this is because only God should have the power to be everywhere, but even a first-year Jesuit could easily point out that the Jumpers are only one place at a time, and anyway God made them that way, right, so what’s the big deal? Clearly the truth of the matter is that Sam is still angry about the time when the kid cut his arm off and pushed him off a building, and he invented this centuries-old underground war out of whole cloth to cover the revenge angle so it would play better to the audience. Which I can understand all of except the part where he actually thought anyone would buy the conspiracy in the first place, because, come on! What did those Jumper dudes ever do to y’all, seriously? If you were Bankers instead of Paladins, yeah, that would be one thing.

I approved of all the nifty teleportastic special effects, and of the awesome location shots, and that they dunked Rachel Bilson in a lake[2], and even in a Little Engine That Could kind of way I approved of them setting themselves up for a sequel. I cannot bring myself to approve of the plot, or really even of using the word ‘plot’ in conjunction with the shooting script that ended up on film. That would be going a little too far. But it had eye candy and humor; even the intentional kind, from time to time. I hope it turns into a cult classic, now that I’m thinking about it, because that would be a pretty fair outcome.

[1] and he doesn’t really need to spend any money on gas or airplane tickets in the first place, such that he could probably go legit as a one-man shipping company, but at least that never actually happens, because holy wow, it would have been boring.
[2] Seriously, prune skin aside, if I had my way that girl would never be dry.

My Own Kind of Freedom

My-Own-Kind-of-Freedom-coverDespite a relative lack of reviews of his books due to the timing of my having read most of them before I started here, I like to think it’s no secret that Steven Brust is one of my favorite authors. And I’m positive that it’s no secret that Firefly is one of my favorite TV shows. So, you know what would be cool? If Brust were to write a Firefly tie-in novel and get it sold and start off a chain reaction of new book farm awesomeness. I mean, probably most of the authors would not work out that well, so there’s that, but I love the characters enough to put up with almost anything out of said hypothetical book farm other than bad character depictions. And believe it or not, that dream may have been closer than you think! However, not all dreams can come true, and nobody ultimately published the novel that he wrote a couple of years ago. Which would be where the story ends, in tears and bloody recriminations, except that he’s self-published it under the Creative Commons license, and you can read it whenever you want, for free. That’s cool except for the lack of future novels and his not getting paid, which he really should be.

My Own Kind of Freedom is tidily short novel set in the nebulous months between the end of the series and the movie, Serenity, and informed by both. Except for being slightly too long for that, it feels very much like an episode of the show, and in all the good ways. A standard shipping run turns quickly dangerous when Jayne and Mal have a parting of ways and Jayne is left free to make another attempt at collecting the reward on the head of the Tams. And, one problem never really being enough to stymie the crew of Serenity for long, unfriendly faces from Mal and Zoë’s past are popping up in the single unfriendliest place the Unification War had to offer the both of them. (And if this summary isn’t enough to get you going, it’s because you haven’t watched Firefly yet. And you really should! So go ahead. I’ll wait.)

Brust’s plotting and typically spare prose are a known quantity by now. His characterizations shine as brightly as if the entire story had been written in Firefly’s script room and then performed by the cast, voices and often images being piped directly into my brain. The story is dense, also a known quantity of Brust’s; the man loves to write just enough to let you figure out everything that’s going on, instead of providing it all to you, piece by piece. All of these are positive things, from my perspective. The only flaw, if you can call it that, is that I’ve been once again reminded of just how little access I have to a universe that could have been mined for years of entertainment. There’s time yet, though. Look how Star Trek turned out.

Y: The Last Man – Paper Dolls

So, I notice that my Y reviews are getting shorter over time. I figure this is in part because it grows harder to avoid spoilers as a series grows in length, and in part because Brian K. Vaughan is doing his level best to delay a conclusion to the series. (Well, in point of fact, it already has concluded or will have within just a few weeks. But I mean as of the time of the current collection, Paper Dolls.) I should hasten to point out that this doesn’t bother me. As long as the main sequence story as well as the flashbacks and digressions remain interesting, as they certainly did here in Volume 7, he’s welcome to take all the time he could possibly want.

And anyway, the plot has certainly thickened. Yorick’s quest to find his girlfriend continues to falter in interesting ways, although the quest he shares with Dr. Allison Mann and Agent 355 to bring males back to the world in time to prevent extinction may be coming to a head soon. Along the way, visits with the modern Catholic Church, 355’s past, Ampersand’s history and current whereabouts, and a drop-in by an old enemy serve to keep things popping. And there’s still plenty of time to bring all the outstanding elements to a boil. As has been the case ever since I finished the first collection, I really can’t wait to see where this is headed.

Cloverfield

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Then, earlier this week I saw Cloverfield, which will mean that I’m finally caught up. So that’s awesome. As for the awesomeness of the movie… well, it turns out it wasn’t really that kind of movie, and I think that’s what made it work so well. When you see Independence Day or Godzilla, to name a couple of other times New York has been destroyed, the focus of the film is on the people who are out there saving the day, and they’re big and heroic (or occasionally dorky and heroic) and the movie is about them saving the day. Cloverfield, contrariwise, is about us. Any of the regular people who, when New York starts falling apart around them, are basically fucked. And they know they are, but the thing about being human is you still do everything in your power to survive, even when there’s no hope. And sometimes there are still amazing feats and there are still small moments of heroism, and that’s okay because another thing about being human is that every so often you surpass your limits.

I’m going to leave plot out of it, I think, because except for that something is attacking New York and there’s a dude who has a video camera[1], you don’t really need to know anything else and it might take away from the impact. And, okay, there’s the Blair Witch comparison: sure enough, if you have motion-sickness problems, this will probably not be the movie for you. People have to run a lot, which makes for shaky camerawork. But if you can get past that, the rest of the film is equal parts cool / scary things happening amid explosions and gripping human drama, or occasionally melodrama. But let’s be honest, that’s just as real a part of the human experience as the rest of it. Plus it subscribes to the first rule of drive-in cinema: anyone can die, at any moment.[2]

[1] And pretty much everyone who has seen a movie preview somewhere in the past six months knows this much already.
[2] There are just so very many reasons I liked this movie.

I Am Legend

Far back in the mists of Delirium’s history (er, the site, not the girl), I read I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. He fills in one of the final gaps between the old school horror of Poe and Lovecraft and today’s modern horror renaissance birthed by Stephen King, and yet until just a few years ago I’d never heard of him. He is certainly to my liking so far, and it was with a fair amount of excitement that I heard I Am Legend was being made into a movie this Christmas. Plus, I like Will Smith a lot better than Tom Hanks, so it’s nice to see him in the role of last man standing. But I suppose that’s getting ahead of myself?

The premise of the movie is as follows: in late 2008, a viral cancer cure has just completed successful human testing and is poised to flood the market. Cut forward three years later, to where Dr. Robert Neville is a man alone in Manhattan with only his dog and department store mannequins for company. His days are spent hunting for food, watching DVDs, presumedly siphoning gasoline and maintaining his cars and generators off-screen, trying to develop a cure in his underground laboratory, and broadcasting to any person alive who can listen that he can meet them at the harbor at noon, that they are not alone. His nights are spent huddled in darkness behind metal shutters, praying that tonight isn’t the night the things that roam the darkness will find him.

The first two thirds follow Matheson’s book thematically if perhaps not event-for-event. Neville is driven to find some way out of his exile, whether via the message he broadcasts on all frequencies to convince himself that someday a non-infected person will appear, that he isn’t truly alone, or via his attempts to find some kind of cure, to bring back humanity from its rapid decline, huddled in caves by day and ravening through the streets in search of food (or explicitly in search of Neville?) by night. And Smith does a great job of conveying the drive, the despair, and yes, the subtle edge of insanity that is only barely being held off, one day at a time. The final third’s variance from the story would of course be a spoiler to explain from either direction, but suffice it to say that as interesting as Matheson’s conclusion was, the movie provided a much more reasonable ending for a screen. I mean, that sounds obvious, right? My point is, Matheson’s ending works well in a book but would fail horribly in a movie. The media are too different, in this case.

Also: someone involved in the writing of this script appears to have a vendetta against me, as with but a minor change one sequence of events would have been not just as horrible as it was but instead have actively ruined the movie for me. So, that was mean, mysterious writer guys and lady!

Mass Effect

One sign of an extremely good video game is that it would be almost easier to describe it as a movie and leave out the game elements entirely. Well, okay, that may not be true. But if the reason you want to leave out the game elements is that they were so seamless and non-intrusive that you only very occasionally even felt like you were playing something instead of watching it and influencing the outcome, that would be good. It would also be a good sign if your father, no stranger to games even if he’s not the gamer type, were to ask you after watching the last 15 or 20 minutes of the game to clarify that it was in fact a game, and not a movie.

And looking at it like that, Mass Effect is an exceptional game. Short centuries from today, humanity has spread out into the solar system only to discover relics of an extinct race that had observed our solar system 50,000 years ago and left behind technology we were quickly able to make use of. Now the mass effect drives have unlocked the galaxy for rapid exploration. And of course, we are not alone in the discovery, nor are we the first. And so, at a moment when humans are accepted as an important member of the galactic community but are clamoring for a chance to be more involved in the governing and policy-making of that community, opportunity arises in the form of Saren, a Council agent gone rogue who has just unleashed a rain of death upon a human colony and garden world in the form of his AI allies, the Geth. Now, the principle character of the game, Commander Shepard, must marshal diverse resources to hunt down Saren while unraveling the mystery behind his motivations and goals. At the very least, humanity’s position in galactic affairs is at stake for years to come. And it’s always possible that the stakes could be higher still.

Mass Effect is an RPG, in the style of Baldur’s Gate or Knights of the Old Republic, not Final Fantasy. That is, created with conscious effort to be reminiscent of tabletop RPGs, if they were played by one player instead of several. In the general course of events, I can only get so much enjoyment out of those games, because the micromanagement gets in the way of the pure joy of playing. And sure enough, the inventory system is an exercise in frustration, both because of the limit on how many things can be kept and because of the horrible ordering system. This kind of thing results in the games taking ages to complete if I ever do, and any justified sense of accomplishment comes tainted by the lack of consistent gameplay over a short period of time. That is, these games take me months or years to complete because I get bored of all the between-time work I have to do, so I play something else for a while instead.

Except, contrary to expectations, I’m about to proclaim joy instead of hardship. The majority of the game was put together explicitly to minimize these kinds of micromanagements, even if the inventory part failed. Instead of pausing and selecting enemies for combat, everything is played out in real time with a third person movement and cover system reminiscent of Gears of War that simultaneously allows growing character skills to matter while providing direct control over the flow of combat. The dialog system was primarily about setting the tone of your character; not what does she say, which is for the most part scripted (though there certainly are important choices scattered throughout the game), but how does she say it: with an eye toward politics and goodwill? Strictly official to get the job done, irrespective of the opinions in his head? Or with a giant chip on her shoulder, trying to cut through the pointless bureaucracy? And there are more tones, of course. So, my point is this: RPGs in general are only so entertaining to me, but Mass Effect was spectacular. Even the simple brilliance of Portal has such a different focus as to make them non-comparable. If it wasn’t for BioShock, Mass Effect would unquestionably have been my favorite game this year. (I really need to finish BioShock. Like, a lot.)

Portal

35979-portalI’m about halfway through Bioshock, and probably within an hour’s play of finishing Mass Effect. But I at least finished one of the three or five big awesome games that have come out this quarter, and I’ll take what I can get. Mind you, I’ll be playing most of the rest of the stuff in the Orange Box before too much longer, but many of those games have been previously reviewed, so I doubt I will again unless some kind of mood really strikes me. (On the other hand, at least there will be no stupid sparkles flaring all over my screen to distract me. Thanks, PC gaming!) The important part for now is that I have finished Portal.

At the risk of over-selling it, Portal is what a video-game would be if someone took pure awesome, distilled it into its Platonic form, and then burned it onto a game disc. Yeah, okay, that’s probably an oversell after all. Anyway, Portal is a game set in the Half-Life universe. You play as a volunteer at a Black Mesa rival company called Aperture Science, testing their Portal Device. The function of the so-called portal gun is to open transdimensional portals between two points in space, effectively joining them into a single point. Aside from this possible violation of the laws of physics, the portals otherwise adhere to natural laws, conserving momentum and gravity in ways that would make Escher smile like the Cheshire Cat. Utilizing the portal gun and the assistance of the Artificial Intelligence in charge of the testing chambers, you make your way through a series of tests designed to confront you with diverse challenges that can only be solved through ingenious use of these portals.

The game has three essential strengths: 1) The puzzle-solving aspect, although sometimes frustrating, is mostly a true delight. In a way that no FPS has ever done before, it lets you come up with novel solutions to otherwise insoluble problems. Every victory, however small, leaves you feeling like a giant among men. 2) As of Half-Life 2, Valve has really captured the urban decay chic, and despite that almost all of the game takes place in sterile white test chambers, there’s a real sense of the same kind of minimal but undeniable wrongness about things that marks their other recent efforts. 3) The dialogue is outstanding, even though there are only two characters with lines in the entire game. It swings between hilarious and chillingly disturbing with, at the risk of repetition, disturbing ease. (Also, the end credits contain a wonderful song to which I wish I had the mp3.) Oh, and 4), the three things I just listed combine to form a very tight and affecting plot.

I like Mass Effect quite a bit. I like Bioshock better than I’ve liked any game since Half-Life 2 came out. That said: if you find time to invest yourself in a game before the year ends, it should be Portal. You’ll thank me later. (Except you mostly won’t, because who hasn’t already played it? Nobody, that’s who! (Dear people who haven’t played it: no offense!))

Unearthed (2007)

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MV5BMTczODI3NjQzNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTE5OTc0MQ@@._V1__SX1217_SY911_Have you ever wondered what would happen if Alien had never been filmed, and the concept sat on a shelf for 30 years, only to be released today as a Sci-Fi Channel original motion picture, set in an isolated corner of New Mexico rather than in space? And instead of being a bit-player warrant officer, Ripley is a sheriff with a dark secret, hovering on the verge of alcoholism? And instead of being trapped on a ship together, they’re trapped by a closed road and insufficient gas to get to the next town in the other direction? And instead of… well, no, that’s pretty much all of the actual differences. The characters aren’t all identical, I mean, but the four main ones are, which is plenty enough.

My point is, if you’ve ever wondered that, you should really see Unearthed. In the style of Alien, it chronicles the discovery of an alien life form that probably killed all of the Anasazi, has been rediscovered on an archaeological dig, and will now kill all of everyone else if possible. Unless Sheriff Ripley and her doomed companions can find a way to stop it, I mean. …okay, “doomed” sounds like kind of a spoiler there, I guess? I was using literary license; in reality, basically anybody might survive. (Well, not the black guy. You’ve seen a horror movie ever, right?)

Y: The Last Man – Girl on Girl

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51DmVpA+bwLThings I have noticed about Y: The Last Man today, while noting that some of the things may be specific to the volume I’ve read, Girl on Girl, and not necessarily to the entire series:

1) The stars are aligning in an always entertaining but still highly improbable manner to get Yorick all the way to Australia, half way around the world and despite a variety of more logical destinations. Perchance to be reunited with his long-missing fiancée, Beth?
2) Men are not a necessary ingredient to make pirates entertaining. Yar!
3) In a world without men, lesbians really do show up a lot more often. Mmmm, lesbian pirates.
4) You know all those action movies where the bodyguard dude is keeping some material witness or annoying-voiced diva singer safe, and they start to fall in love? I guess it’s reasonable for that to happen in reverse too.
5) I suppose that’s all? It was a surprisingly short book.
6) Oh, and dream sequences are still always awesome. See also the Sopranos and that one episode of Buffy at the end of the fourth season.

Captain’s Glory

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296484I got around to the end of the most recent Shatner trilogy finally. I guess I read the last one two and a half years ago? Long enough that another one has already come out, but as usual, I can wait for used with no stress. Anyway, I was pretty high on it and the last several before it. Unfortunately, Captain’s Glory is not so good. I mean, it has good dramatic Trekky scenes in which ships face off, Starfleet personnel gamble with fate at high stakes, and so forth. And the prose has no problems[1]. But the ex machina not only had too much nonsensical deus, there wasn’t even a boring epilogue in which the author clarifies what we would have been able to piece together ourselves in a better book. Now I have to downgrade it self-indulgent tripe all over again.

The plot was alright, though, prior to that bit at the end. Due to an invasion that’s been hinted at for books now, the Federation (and most other Alpha Quadrant denizens, if not further afield) is losing warp capability. What with sublight being a little slow on the galactic scale, this would be bad. So now there’s a race against both time and gradually failing technology to forestall invaders that, as of page one, only a handful of people even believe exist. See? Except for the last thirty or so pages, that would have been pretty cool. Instead (spoiler alert), James T. Kirk’s history-making semen is once again called upon to save humanity. Yay?

[1] I know that sounds like backhanded praise, but come on. The prose was never going to amaze anyone; it’s a Star Trek book.