Tag Archives: Movies

What I Miss In Science-Fiction

I’ll admit that what I am gripping about here is mostly in the areas of film and television, thought the prose area is sparse just not as bare as the visual media.

There used to be a time when SF movies and shows were about professional explorers. Perhaps the best known and best overall example of this is the classic television series Star Trek. Every episode opened with a prolog telling you in no uncertain terms that this show was about explorers and their now famous five year mission.

But before Star Trek this was a well plowed field, most movies about going to the moon were about the competent professional crew, and the dangers they face. Forbidden Planet, for all of its lifting of themes and ideas from the Bard’s The Tempest, abandoned the concept of the shipwrecked visitors for the intelligent and hyper-competitive crew of the United Planets Cruiser C-75-D. (And yes Joss I spotted that reference in your film Serenity.)

I will admit that the idea of the explorers over time and misuse got beaten into a trope. A trope that met its end when in the wake of Star Wars 20th Century Fox release Alien.

The blue-collar truck drivers of space took their big rig Nostromo and turned the profession explorers into road-kill. Yeah I get the trope had been way over used, but now we have turned too far away from what is a very useful and interesting sub-genre of science-fiction.

I think cynicism is one of the reasons why this style of story has fallen out of favor. To have a serious story, without eye rolling irony, about professional explorers you need to accept that people, human people, can be intelligent ad ethical while exploring ad that is a thing few people are willing to admit that they can believe in. It is easier and cooler to play the cynic to substitute that cynicism for wisdom and optimism.

As a culture and as a language we elevate the cynic, the very term sounds of gravitas but we have no comparable word to act as its antonym.

I really hope that the new Trek series gets back to exploration, but that universe is so mapped that my hope is a fool’s hope.

Still, I hold on to my hope and refuse to give in.

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What Do You Call this Creature?

This is a topic I have visited before and for those who have experienced the earlier ranting you can skip this post.

Alien and images are copyrights of 20th Century Fox

Alien and images are copyrights of 20th Century Fox

I saw the film Alien on its initial theatrical release. It is a movie of stunning power and with a tremendous legacy. To this day people are still copying the plot and making rip-off version more than 30 years later, Consider this, since Alien, the crew of trained and experienced explorers has been abandoned as a trope for SF films.

Of course central to the movie was the monster itself, a terrifying parasite that gestated inside its victims and possessed seemingly unstoppable agency. The story, images, and themes resonated so well that sequels and prequels continue to this very day.

But what do you call the monster at the heat of this experience?

For years the term of I heard most was simply The Alien, you could practically hear the capital letters in a person voice when the subject was discussed. Slowly though that fell out of favor for the generic sounding Xenomorph.

I have issues with that name. First, it sounds generic, and it is generic. The word itself simply means ‘other-shaped.’ The character Lt. Gorman uses the term when briefing the squad saying, “…A xenomorph may be involved.” He can’t be referring to this particular type of creature as at this point in the story no one, except Burke, believes Ripley. He’s using the word to say in a fancy way that an alien of some type is involved. However fans have latched onto this word as a proper name for the monster.

For decades I have been a gamer and gamers steal from books, TV, and movies for  monsters to throw at their players, including the terrifying creature from Alien. I have been no exception and I needed a name, between the films Alien and Aliens, I landed on what works for me.

In Alien when they crew awakens early they discover that instead of being home, at Earth, that they are in fact just short of Zeta Two Reticuli. one half of a binary pair about 39 light years from Earth. Now I saw the film in theaters, before VHS and DVDs and Blu-Rays and misheard the name. For years I called it Beta Reticuli, but eventually I learned the local stellar neighborhood and the proper name for the star. My name for the creature is the Zeta Reticulian Parasite. Yes it is long but I think it has a ring to it and it sounds like a real bit of nomenclature.

I know I will change no one’s mind on this. I am the lost voice in the wilderness screaming at the horrid tag ‘xenomorph,’ and everyone will ignore me, but hey, your mileage may vary.

For me it is The Zeta Reticulian Parasite.

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An Analysis of ‘Alien’ Using the Five Act Structure

I am the sort of writer who plots his projects out ahead of time and when I do that plotting I like to have a structure for the story. Most of the time I use a three-Act system of Establishment, Conflict, Resolution, but lately I have been experimenting with five acts. One way to digest and understand an act structure, particularly if you intend to use it for your own work, is to look at something already in existence and see how the structure fits on that. This is not to say that the screenplay writers for Alien used a 5 act system, they most likely used a 3 act method, but nearly any story can be broken down by either method.

ACT I Establishment

In the first act of a 5 act story not only are characters and conflicts established in the first act, but themes and the nature of the world is laid out for the audience/reader. In Alien I would suggest that the first act goes from the film start, naturally, and concludes with the decision to land on the planet/moon about Zeta-2 Reticuli. Quite a bit is covered in this passage. We learn our heroes are working class people, not space explorers as in other films of the genre, we learn that they don’t get along, and that they are deeply concerned with money. The ‘Company’ unnamed in the original, is a source of threat and power that exists in almost omnipotent state off screen.

ACT II Complications

Here things go wrong and the characters are tested with a series of setbacks. The setbacks are dangerous and threatening to the order of the world, but not yet irreversible.

The Landing goes badly, damaging the ship. The trip to the source of the signal that they have been forced to investigate – at this point the nature of ‘force’ appears to be solely the threat of money being withheld, is difficult and the first translation hint that the signal is not a distress call but a warning. Cain is ridden by the creature and interpersonal tensions flare. While attempts to remove the creature from Cain fail, the ship is repaired and the crew leaves the planet for home.

ACT III Crisis

In Act three, classically called the Climax though today we tend to use that for resolution, there is a fundamental change that is irreversible, MacBeth has Banquo murder for example. There is a clear turning point in the plot that takes place in Act 3 from which the character become trapped in their choices and must face the consequences that their fates hold.

Cain appears to recovery from the alien parasite but shortly dies in a horrific manner. Now the crew find themselves trapped on a ship with a deadly creature and increasingly dangerous attempts to deal with it result in further loss of life.

ACT IV Resolution

With a 3 act structure it is usual to think of resolution as the ending, how everything turned out in the end, but with a five act structure this also includes the final reveals and plot twists that lead to the Hero’s victory or failure in their plot. Act 4 for Alien is Ripley’s act, it is where she is revealed to be the actual hero of the story and takes charge to deal with the creature. Act 4 also reveals Ash to be the turncoat and company man working against their interests. With all the important elements in place and revealed the hero, Ripley, drive to the solution, here destroying the ship with the creature aboard.

ACT V Denouement

In my opinion Act V for Alien is everything on the shuttle after Ripley launches from the ship. It is the final confrontation between the hero and villain, this case a monster, but nothing new is added. All the elements, including the plan to ‘blow it out the airlock’ have already been established and are in place. The final obstacle is faced and the hero either overcomes and grows from the experience or fails due to their tragic flaw, Of course in Alien Ripley overcomes and earns her ‘happy ending.’

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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2016

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the USA who celebrates this holiday and happy Thursday to everyone else. This morning my sweetie-wife and I went to an early morning screening of the latest film set in the Harry Potter universe, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I am thankful that I did not hold high expectations for this film for it would not have met them.

1-fantastic_beasts_and_where_to_find_them_posterThis is not a bad movie, but nor it is a good one, it is at best middling and a mildly entertaining bit of spectacle. The problems with the film rest primarily with J.K. Rowling who is credited with the script and is a producer as well. The story has a fairly inconsistent tone veering from whimsical fun with silly magical beasts to dark conflicts endangering countless people. it takes a very deft hand to combine such disparate tones and Rowling fails in that task. As I said to my sweetie-wife on the drive home from the theater, ‘Whimsy and the threat of genocide do not belong together.’

This movie also takes quite a bit of time to get going. Oh, events happen right from the start, it doesn’t engage in the mistake of heavy exposition for a beginning, but the actual start of the plot is quite delayed and as such I found myself wondering just why I was watching. The twine plots, whimsical and serious, eventually meld but that unification takes place far too late and without much in the way of emotional stakes for the characters.

And that is the film greatest failing, the lack of deep emotional stakes in the climax. This is a move with lots of plot but very little story. There are hints and set-ups for possible future stories, but I really wanted more than what was delivered on the screen. All the fast paced action and dazzling special effects are hollow without a powerful emotional connection.

For me the film failed though not as badly as other major productions, but still it failed.

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Interstellar vs The Martian

In recent years we’ve had the good luck to see a number of high quality hard SF films released across the country; today I want to talk about two of them and why I like one over the other.

1-interstellarInterstellar is from Christopher Nolan the brilliant filmmaker behind movies such as Memento, The Batman Trilogy, and Inception. Billed as a hard SF story Interstellar depicts a dying Earth where blights are devastating crops around the world and humanity is struggling to grow enough food. The official stance of the U.S. government is that the moon landings were forged to force the USSR to bankrupt itself in a useless space race. Now with the world on the brink of collapse a last ditch effort to find a new home is underway thanks to a wormhole opened by friendly, off screen, aliens. Our characters are part of an expedition through the wormhole and encounter the bizarre and counter-intuitive effects of highly warped space/time. There are betrayals by people who have lost all hope but in the end, and with an expression of the twins paradox displayed for the audience, humanity is saved.

1-martian-9The Martian is from Ridley Scott and is a much more restricted in scope, dealing one man stranded on mars, alone and without the supplies required to stay alive until rescue can arrive. The story follows our hero as his brilliantly solves one problem after another and with his crew mates and people on Earth who devote tremendous resources, skill, and personal risk to save him. It is a man vs nature tale that focuses on a single man but also shows humanity as a whole fighting against an uncaring universe to save a single life.

Now both films have flaws in the science. The Martian storm that strands our astronaut simply can’t exist and that was a known fact my the novelist who penned the original book and the people who adapted it. In Interstellar the smaller craft used to go between their main ship and the surface of the various planets they explore flies by PFM, pure flippin’ magic. In neither case do I really fault the films for the scientific failures, you always have to give something and grading movies on a curve these examples are tiny error.

I do favor The Martian over Interstellar because the story is so free of unrequired cynicism. I do not object to a cynical take or tone in a story. I love noir and that genre requires a cynical worldview, but not all stories benefit from a heavy dose of the cynical. I look at Interstellar, particularly with its ‘love conquers all; subtext and find that the cynicism is at odds with the rest of the film. It is tonally uneven and discordant, where The Martian never breaks from the tone it aims for. It is always a story about fighting for survival and the common humanity in such struggles.

SF can be cynical, 1984 and the movie Blade Runner are both examples of fine SF stories that have and require a cynical heartbeat, Interstellar did not need it and its inclusion damaged the movie execution.

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Roddenberry’s Forgotten Dreams

If someone knows the name Gene Roddenberry it is almost certainly due to the 60’s television series Star Trek and it’s sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation. During the 1970s Roddenberry attempted to launch a few other series before Paramount green-lit a Star Trek film and the whole cascade that followed in the wake of the titanic success of Star Wars. At my suggestion Loscon43 this year has a panel discussion, which I will be participating in, on these failed pilots.

In order the prep for the convention panel I have tried to hunt down the pilots and re-watch all of them. I succeeded in all of them except The Questor Tapes. If you are in Los Angeles do consider coming to the convention this weekend, but if you can’t make it here are some of my brief thoughts about these pilots.

Genesis II: NASA scientist Dylan Hunt is undergoing an experimental suspended animation technique when an unexpected rock-fall collapses the cavern where the experiment takes place and Dylan isn’t revived until well into the 22 century. The Earth is fragmented with some locales in post-apocalyptic barbarism while other areas have retained advanced technologies. Dylan ends up recruited by a group called Pax who are dedicated to rebuilding humanity but this time without its warlike nature. The pilot is dreadfully dull with most of the scenes tiresome exposition as everyone explains things to the poor Dylan and the audience. The most action packed parts of the pilot, Dylan rigging a nuclear device to foil evil-minded mutants, takes place off screen.

Planet Earth: Same set up as Genesis II, again our main hero is Dylan Hunt, a scientist from the 20th century who due to a suspended animation accident is transport to a post-apocalyptic Earth and works with a group called Pax rebuilding society. This pilot skips the origin story and drops us into an adventure as Dylan and a science team are forced to infiltrate a society where women enslave men in hope of finding a missing doctor needed to save the life of a leader of Pax. This pilot worked better, a lot less exposition but the dialog is stilted and the moralizing is heavy-handed.

The Questor Tapes: An eccentric scientist that few have ever met tricks the government into building an android. When the officials try to decipher the robot’s programming they damage the files. The android, Questor, awakens and escapes. The damaged programming has left him without emotions or knowing his purpose. With the help of a human friend, he tracks down his mysterious creator and learns that humanity has been guided through the centuries by androids keeping mankind for destroying itself. His creator is an android but is damaged and was unable to create his replacement, Questor. Questor is supposed to be the last in the line and if humanity survives Questor’s lifespan it will have matured.

I have memories of this pilot but I have not seen in it decades. Of course the moment Data was introduced in 1988 during the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation I felt very strongly he was Questor 2.0.

Spectre: The only non-SF pilot Roddenberry produced after Star Trek. Will Sebastian and his physician friend Dr ‘Ham’ Hailton are the occult’s answer to Holmes and Watson. Sebastian and Ham travel to London investigating an English Lord who is either a hedonist or a Satanist. Of Roddenberry’s post Star Trek pilots I liked this one the best, but when the credits flashed I noticed that on the screenplay he shared credit with Samuel A Peeples so it is clear he worked better with a partner than writing alone.

It should be fun discussing these project on the panel at the convention.

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Movie Review: Arrival 2016

Friday night after me sweetie-wife and friends finished our evening of board and card game I took the opportunity to visit a movie theater in y area and catch the new SF film Arrival before this weekend science-fiction convention, LosCon.

The theater is one I have been to a few time but generally is on the ‘do not go’ list because it had older and uncomfortable seating, but I had been told that the auditorium were now renovated with big recliners.

I arrived and true enough the seats were large, well stuffed, and quite comfortable. However the A/C had been set too high and I was quite cold foe the first third of the movie. I hope that is not indicative of their usual settings as this chain has the best prices and could well win my patronage.

1-arrival_ver11Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, is a first contact tale with the emphasis on contact. A dozen alien vessels appear at locations around the world. No one can make out any pattern to the ‘landing’ sites and the aliens unannounced arrival is a mystery. The protagonist of the story Dr Louise Banks, played quite well by Amy Adams, a linguist the United States bring into the project with hope of forging a common means of communication with aliens.

The film is a steady, measured story about that trouble, learning to communicate with something that doesn’t think or perceive in the same manner as you. There is not ‘we learned your language from your broadcasts’ short cuts and the film covers a period of months as we struggle to understand. Jeremy Renner plays Ian Donnelly a physicist and co-equal to Dr Banks in the communications project which for the United States is being commanded by Col. Weber player by the always spot on Forrest Whitaker.

There are the usual tensions between civilian and military mindsets, but the script avoid clichés for the most part. The film is not an action movie in SF drag. This is a film about ideas and the deeper implications of contact. It is difficult to fully discuss this movie without venturing seriously into spoiler space. It is at heart a mystery and how much you like the film will depend on how well that mystery’s resolution work for you.

It worked for me and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but your mileage may vary.

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Space Zombies? Really?

So veering onto an entirely new track here s a quick post about making sure that your world-building and the your metaphors work and play together.

There’s an instance where it really falls down and that occurs in the fan favorite and short lived SF TV show Firefly.

(Yes I am taking my life in my hands by pointing a glaring flaw in the beloved series.)

The show is a hybrid SF/Western set in a terraformed solar system where dozen of worlds and hundreds of moons have shirt-sleeve environments. (never mind the science issues here – Joss and Science have never been a particularly strong match.) Inspired by the U.S. Civil war our heroes are plucky rebels who stood up to the central powers and lost. They now live on the frontier moons, scraping out a living running cargos and doing odd jobs, often of questionable legality, while trying to remain a few steps ahead of the suffocating core worlds. This is all and good. The set up allows an interesting exploration go the clash of cultures that happened with the U.S. Civil war without the overpowering evil of slavery hanging over everything. The transformed frontier moons allow a wild west feel without the native aliens so he side steps the American Native issues as well. Right from the pilot a threat is revealed in the form of ‘Reavers.’ Humans who it is said had gone mad at the vast emptiness of space and now travels from moon to moon, killing, raping, and wearing the skins of their victims, should they be so lucky as to have it occur in that order.

The show ran a few episodes before Fox killed it, but gathered enough of a fan base that Universal bankrolled a modest feature film that allowed Joss to resolve some incomplete plot lines.

On the Blu-ray bonus materials Joss explains that the Reavers, who play a central plot point, are in fact supposed to be basically ‘Space Zombies.’ (Because there is no escaping the zombie genre – anywhere.) The reavers are unbridled and uncontrolled expression of human anger and aggression, incapable of expressing anything other than violence and destruction. A metaphor for what goes wrong when you try to meddle with human nature, but within the world-building there utterly ludicrous.

Reavers when they appeared display no thought, no planning, nothing but naked savagery. They run and chase down their victims, tearing into them, tearing them appart, and then chasing after the next. Okay – that’s pretty zombish, but how the hell do they fly spaceships?

Seriously I would love to have Joss write me a scene that takes place aboard a ship piloted and controlled by reavers. How do they manage to make it go from place to place, piloting and landing safely while unable to think?

It is an aspect of the show that one has to ignore and if you are unable to ignore the issue the entire story falls apart.

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Movie Review: The Eagle Huntress 2016

Something a little different with today’s review as this film is a documentary. The Eagle Huntress is about a young girl, 13, who is following in her father’s footsteps as a Eagle Hunter in the mountains of Mongolia. Hunting with eagles is an ancient tradition that supplies the families with fur and meat during the cold, hard, Mongolian winters and it is a tradition that usually passes from Father to Son.

1-eagle-huntress_0The film, narrated by Daisy Ridley of The Force Awakes, introduces us to Aisholpan who has been fascinated by her father’s eagle hunting her entire life. Believing that girls and boys are equal, her father defies tradition and takes her under wing to teach her the ways of eagle hunting.

We watch as she learns the basic of the craft and even as she scales the side of a cliff in an attempt to get an eaglet of her own to raise. Aisholpan is a fearless girl, besting others with her courage and commitment.

The movies breaks out into three major sections, much like acts in a fiction work. The first part deals with he home life and her training to become an eagle hunter. In the next block we follow her and her father to the Eagle Festival where Eagle Hunters compete in Olympic-like games and Aisholpan is the first girl ever to compete. The final element of the film is following Aisholpan and her father as winter has hit and they voyage into the mountain to discover if she has truly become The Eagle Huntress.

Except for Ridley’s narration the film in subtitled and appears to present the people it documents fairly. (Not always the case with documentaries.) I thoroughly enjoyed the two hours I watched this film in the theaters. And as a comment you are to hear quite rarely from me – I love that jacket she is sporting the photo.

For people local to San Diego – we saw this movie at the Landmark Theaters on 5th ave and they have been seriously renovating the place. The seating is now over-stuffed recliners allowing you to watch the movies in great comfort. It creates a very limited audience, by my count the theater only seats 26.

This was a fun, moving, and heartwarming story of traditions kept and broken.

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Missed Opportunities in Marvel’s Doctor Strange

First off since I am writing about missteps in the latest MCU film clearly there will be mild spoilers about the story and how it unfolds. I will try avoid any if the major wow moments of the movie but I will be discussing the villain, his motivations, and ways that might have been handled by the writers. So, if you want to go into the film unspoiled skip this post.

 

Still here? Okay let’s get into it.

 

1-mads-jpg-crop-promo-xlarge2Mads Mikkelsen plays the film’s central villain, Kaecilius a man obsessed with avoiding death. For Kaecilius even the heat death of the universe is too soon, unlike Voldemort Kawcilius truly wants to live forever. Given the macguffins of the movie and such this is a perfectly adequate motivation, in fact the missed elements that I keep thinking about all revolve around this powerful motivation.

We are introduced to Kaecilius in a rather standard scene where he and his band of zealots murder a librarian to gain access to the spells that they believe can give them a shot of truly infinite life. The murder itself is typical bad guy behavior and right there is a missed illumination of Kaecilius’ character. They didn’t have to kill him, They overpowered him easily enough that they could have taken what they wanted without murder and Kaecilus could have left with a vague pronouncement that the librarian would die soon enough. At this point we the audience would interpret that as a villain’s threat about the coming nastiness, but later once Kaecilius’ real motivation were unveiled his words would become about character and not plot.

Second missed chance: Kawcilius’ zealots. His has a few followers, all expecting the same eternal life, and we are never given a chance to see who they are as characters. They end up being just nameless thugs for the heroes to overcome. Even a few lines of dialog would have gone a long way to revealing that these are sad desperate people propelled by their utter fear of dying. We could have that these were dangerous men and women who still were objects of pity.

Third Missed shot: Strange kills one of the Zealots and we get no reaction from Kawcilius. This was a man he was leading to eternal life. This was a man who trusted him to avoid this exact fate. This was someone who trusted him and now the up-start has killed him. I would have loved to have seen a scene where the villain of the piece lectures/berates the hero for his killing; for the villain to remind Strange of his oath to do no harm. Then we could have Mordo later try to convince Strange that he did the right thing and that would have set up a stronger conflict between Strange and Mordo and helped establish Mordo eventual fall.

I think these small changes would have opened up a deeper more character driven view of Kaecilius. But all this is more in the vein of ‘go write your own story, Bob’ than a just critique.

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