Category Archives: SF

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

The first post-Avengers: Endgame  Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Spider-Man: Far From Home  opened this weekend and reviewing it will requires spoilers for Endgame,  though I will refrain from spoilers for Far From Home  as much as possible.

Set five years after the events in Infinity War  and shortly after the return of the ‘snapped’ and after Iron Man’s sacrifice ending Thanos’ threat Far From Home opens with Peter Parker trying to resume his abnormal life as a high school student, he and all his emotionally relevant friends lost five years due to the Snapture (thanks to NPR’s Glen Weldon), while trying to cope with the loss of Tony Stark.

A new threat appears on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s radar when monstrous forces called elementals begin appearing around the world and the sole survivor from a parallel universe Quentin beck where these forces destroyed the Earth is recruited to save this version of Earth. With the major former Avengers either dead, aged out, crippled, or unavailable, Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. conscripts Peter Parker to help Beck save the world.

Peter wants nothing more than to leave the world saving to others, enjoy his high school class’ European Vacation, and possibly get closer to his crush Mary Jane Watson, but the continuing and escalating threat upset Peter’s plans and being the heir apparent to Stark’s mantle carries with it a level of guilt and responsibility that test’s Peter’s character.

Spider-Man: Far From Home  has exciting action set pieces, fine acting, deft, quirky, and often funny dialog but it lacks a strong story leaving it in the midlist of MCU movies. Unlike the last outing for Spider-Man where a padded plot dragged down the pacing this time the flaw is the central conceit of Peter’s motivation as character. As a protagonist Peter is simply far too passive.

In the Western tradition stories are constructed around a protagonist who desires a goal, something the protagonist much work to achieve, and the obstacles that the character most circumvent, defeat, or overcome to achieve their objectives. What your character wants and why they cannot simply have it is the core of a story’s plot. In this movie Peter wants to be left alone. He wants to go his vacation, not be ‘Spider-Man,’ and explore his relationship with M.J. Peter’s objective is not to do the thing the audience is here to see him do and as such the plot must repeatedly intervene and force Peter back onto the track that leads to dashing heroics and exciting action. In short he is pushed and pulled by the plot rather than driving the plot himself with his actins, choices, and needs for an objective. When the script makes the turn from Act 2 to Act 3 it finally creates enough pressure that Peter can no longer hide from his responsibilities and his objectives changes and for the final act he is driving the story, but this transformation comes too late to prevent the majority of the movie from being subjected to rudderless piloting.

How much this passive protagonist bothers someone will be a matter of individual taste. As I have mentioned this time the film’s running time doesn’t feel padded and each action set piece has a strong narrative purpose. There are plenty of humor and character moments to carry a viewer along but for me the lack of a plot driven by Peter’s needs drags the final product down into the mid-tier range of MCU movies.

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Movie Review: Dark Phoenix

One of the many signs that a movie is in trouble is when I am saying the lines of dialog before the character utter them. That usually indicates that the writers have taken the first and blatantly obvious choices in constructing their scenes. Throughout Dark PhoenixI predicted the characters’ dialog many times word for word.

The fourth installment in the re-booted X-Menfranchise Dark Phoenix  is the second attempt to adapt an iconic storyline from the source material onto the silver screen and while it is not the garbage fire that the most recent entry in the series was this movie managed to provoke big action boredom. Set in 1995 with an utter disregard to all of the characters’ ages, remember that the re-boot of this series started in 1962 by mixing mutants into the Cuban Missile Crisis and now thirty-three years have passed and none of the characters have appropriately aged, the X-men are now beloved by the world as heroes and saviors. Jean Grey, seen briefly in the previous installment, participates in rescue of a NASA shuttle crew and become empowered with a strange cosmic force.  Wielding her newly enhanced abilities Jean, for *reasons* (I’m sarcastic there nothing in the film is properly motivated.) engages in destructive behavior, assaults local police that responded to an unauthorized jet landing, and is then on the run from her friends and the law, all while being pursued by malevolent aliens who want her cosmic powers but are also somehow unable to possess them.

Of this film’s many great failings is the lack of a central story or even consistent theme. There are the bones and threads of an emotional and impactful story here about hubris, lies, and what happens when we start to believe our own press releases, but none of that is developed with any skill or tact. Characters speak in the plainest fashion, always revealing inner thoughts that most people obscure or in an overly expository explaining to each other what they already know. Things that might have been emotional reveals if held back as secrets as revealed in a straightforward linear fashion, draining later scenes of stakes and meaning. Characters are forced into the plot because the actors are under contract not because they belong in this story, yes I am looking at you Magneto, and set-piece battles happen because they are expected to happen at this act break.

Over all this film was dull, plodding, and wasted the talents of many fine actors, not worth your time at any price.

 

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Movie Review: Guardians (2017-Russian)

Not to be left out in the gold rush of Superhero film franchises Russian entered the fray with 2017s Guardians, an answer to Marvel’s The Avengersthough with even less set-up than DC’s Justice League.

In the film’s backstory, during the Cold War, for you youngsters out there a period from 1947 through 1989 when the world’s superpowers the USA and USSR stood ready with nuclear annihilation in their bitter rivalry, the USSR experimented on people, creating the Guardians, super-powered individuals. After the Soviet’s collapse these people dispersed to the four winds, losing themselves in the vast terrain of the Russian Federation. Simultaneously a competing Cold War project to protect the motherland, which focused on mechanical powers created by the mad scientist August Kuratov, succeed in giving Kuratov the ability to control any machine. Now Kuratov is back and bent on world domination. With the military’s vast forces neutralized by his ability to usurp control of all their weapon systems it is up to Major Elena Larina to locate and reunite the Guardians in the hopes that thy can defeat Kuratov.

As a set up that doesn’t exactly suck, but the movie Guardians,  suffers from both a lack and over abundance of character issues to create a compelling plot. The film seems to have no central character to act as a point of view and with a brief running time of a mere 88 minutes it simply can’t explore all the set-ups that it attempts to utilize. There’s the question, where have the Guardians gone? Well, that’s knocked out in a fast montage of computer searches and rapid-fire location changes as Major Larina seeks and recruits the four members. Instead of any tension the sequence becomes route exposition and introduction. Each of the Guardians presented in the film have deep character issues, but without the focus on any particular character all of the issues are given short shrift and thus come as flat and uninteresting.

The movie picks up in the third act with a climatic battle against a villain atop a tower in a metropolitan center surrounded by a force-field with the Guardians having to learn to fight and work together to save the world from domination.

Overall this was slightly less than passable with much missed promise.

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More Thoughts on Noir

Recently I have been re-reading my SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge  in anticipation of editor’s notes as we proceed towards our early 2020 publication date and, along with watching classic noirson streaming while reading some of the classic works in their original forms, I have been thinking about the nature of the genre and what really makes up this beloved form.

In previous posts I have discussed how one of the principal driving factor of noiris to me is how characters are consumed by their appetites and I still hold that this is an essential elements in noir  fiction, be it film or literature, but I am now thinking there is an additional element, beyond the stylized ones, that feels central to the genre and that is the conflict between the character and their culture.

In noir  fiction characters are often immoral and that immorality is judged against the larger culture that character comes from.  Murder, theft, and unsanctioned sexual activity are the hallmarks of noir  movies and from the classic period running through the 1940s and 1950s acting on these desires places a person firmly beyond the boundaries of ‘polite society.’ Even when the heroes of noir fiction aren’t murderous insurance salesmen but rather the hard-bitten border-line alcoholic private detective they still transgress far beyond anything accept my society at large. Sam Spade before being entangled in a hunt for the ‘black bird’ and temptation of great wealth it represents is betraying both his partner and societies morals by his affair with Archer’s wife. Time and time again the main characters in noir  reject society’s conformity, sometimes they do so with an internal code such as Spade or Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past  or in other instances they simply violate society’s rules out of greed and lust such as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity.

All of this prompts the idea, that I am sure is far from original with myself, that a close reading of noir, either in a film or prose piece, can also been seen as a commentary on the society surrounding those characters. This is doubly so when the noiris combine with another genre such as fantasy or science fiction where the society is likely to be as fictional as the protagonists leveling an additional responsibility on the creator to be detailed and thoughtful about their narrative and what it says about human nature both at the individual and societal levels.

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A Really Good Book: Delta V by Daniel Suarez

As I have stated before this blog is not a book review site. When I read a novel that doesn’t work for me, is flawed, or just fails to achieve takeoff speed I am not going to mention it here. However if I get my hands on a book that really works, which really sings you’ll hear about it and Delta-V by Daniel Suarez is just such a novel.

Set in the very close year of 2033 Delta-Vis the story of humanity’s first attempt to mine precious resources from a near Earth asteroid. Most people think of asteroid mining as something that would take place between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where the main asteroid belt resides but a number asteroids also orbit much closer, even occasionally cross the Earth’s orbit with potentially catastrophic consequences. The protagonist of the story is James Tighe, a cave diving adventurer who, after surviving a terrifying disaster while on a deep under ground cave dive, is recruited by mysterious billionaire Nathan Joyce as a potential member of the first asteroid mining crew. Joyce, an entirely fictional character, is part of the New Space contingent of billionaire including ones who made fortunes in robotics/Artificial Intelligences, reusable rockets, and Internet based commerce. (You can decide for yourself who these characters are possibly analogs of in our real world.) As the training and mission unfold it becomes clear that Joyce hasn’t told anyone the full scope and audacity of his plan and his lies, short cuts, and mania turn out to endanger the lives of everyone involved.

Delta-V  is a novel heavy on the technical aspects and for some that will prove to be too dry of a narrative to endure but for devotes of ‘hard sf’ this novel will be catnip. Suarez has worked out the launch windows, the delta-v for his transfers and journeys, and the climax of the novel is an amazing meld of engineering and trying emotional decisions for the characters. Though hardly a massive tome, the story if packed with a number of fascinating and believable characters and could easily be adapted into a limited run series if someone wanted to pony up the funds for a production that would be as challenging as this one promises.

Over all I really loved this book and I can’t recommend it enough.

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The Day has Come

Sorry for the couple of days missed at this blog but things have been a little hectic. Good hectic as I am about to tell you but hectic all the same.

So after sitting on the news while I wait for all the details to be finalized and all the signatures collected I can now announce that I sold my SF/Noir novel ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to Flame Tree Press and it is currently slotted for publication May 2020.

This has been quite a road and there have been a number of lessons learned as I traveled it. I won’t go into too many details as I think some of them will be better served in dedicated posting but here are a couple of highlights of lessons learned.

One: write what you love. I did not write ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ with any sort of an eye to the market, rather it was my own desire to see a blending of science-fiction with noir that spoke to my sensibilities. There are plenty of fine SF stories that blend with the noir traditions but the vast majority of them do so through the lens of the private detective and I wanted something that came at it from more a James M. Caine perspective where ordinary people get in over their heads in the sordid criminal life. When I outlined and wrote the novel my plans were to self publish it because it was more for myself than anyone else.

Two: Never self reject. I mentioned my plans were for self-publication but I still examined the publishing market and Flame Tree who publishes both crime and SF novels seemed to be the kind of house that might publish my cynical noir. If I had not submitted the book and self published it I would have never discovered that there are others who share this taste that I explored.  Always submit the material.

I am thrilled to be working with Flame Tree Press and I am over the moon excited about bringing ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to market next year.

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Double Movie Review: No Blade of Grass & Bird Box

This was a pretty good weekend for the number of movies I have watched but sadly not for the number of good movies I have seen.

Bird Box   based on a novel. is about a woman, Mallory, played by Sandra Bullock, and two children, Boy and Girl, taking a dangerous river trip while blindfolded in order to avoid seeing a supernatural force that drives people mad, usually into suicidal behavior or depending on plot requirements religious mania to spread the truth of what they have seen coupled with homicidal behavior. Bird Box  operates on the level of plot and really nothing more and even there is fails as it requires suspension of disbelief that I was unable to provide. A person unskilled and blindfolded cannot row a boat for days down a river without ending up on the bank, not to mention running fully blindfolded through heavy growth forest, or accurately wielding shotguns while opposed by multiple attackers. Each of the several characters that begin their siege as the apocalyptic disaster unfolds has a specific plot purpose and once they fill that purpose they die making for route and unimagined writing. Too patly constructed, lacking any characters of depth, and demanding far too much suspension of disbelief Bird Box  fails every test of effective horror.

No Blade of Grass,  also adapted from a novel, is another apocalyptic tale, this one focused on environmental destruction and the attending collapse of society. In the film a virus or blight is spreading around the world that destroys all member of the grass family, that includes, wheat, rice, corn, and other cereal grains, leading to mass starvation and anarchy as the governments of the world prove incapable of meeting the existential threat. The story focuses on the trails of the Custance family who, with advance warning of the government’s plan to seal off London, flee with a friend to the safety of a large potato farm owned by the father’s brother in the north of England. Along the way they surrender civilized norms in their fight for survival becoming hard brutal people until reaching their sanctuary and discovering that their plans are upended forcing them into even more immoral choices.

Released in 1970 No Blade of Grass,  which I first heard about from a fellow panelist as we discussed environmental disaster SF stories, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed production. Partly the film suffers from too much compression in both screen time and the passage of time for the characters. With a scant 136  96 minute, and wasting quite a few of those with set up and exposition, and with a fair number of characters, the movies doesn’t have the running time to build, explore, and transform these character in an meaningful method, leaving the viewer to watch a series of scenes that only nominally follow a sequence but lacking in emotional impact. Further more the character appear to travel for only a few days and in that short time they become murderous and hard, transformations that lack any clear baseline, we hardly get a chance to see who they were before the crisis, and as such reinforce the impression that these were evil people all along. No Blade of Grass  required a more epic format and without it the film falls far short of its intended goals.

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