Following up on the epic 10 minute rap summary of Robocop, the same team has released Aliens:
Watching this reminds me what a great film Aliens turned out to be and how Avatar (by the same director) pales in comparison. It’s not that Avatar was terrible but nobody is going to be making 10 minute rap songs about it in 25 years.
quick update: Hey, they’ve done Terminator 2 as well!
James Cameron has always been an interesting film maker. Although on one level most of his films could be classified as pulpy genre-related fare, they usually have a more interesting subtext lurking below the explosions. Previous Cameron films have investigated such themes as mother/daughter relationships, humanity’s fear of the unknown, musings on fate and predestination, and whether it is morally acceptable (and perhaps even admirable) to slum it with a good looking lower class boy for a few weeks before you get married even though an ocean liner might not be the best place to do so. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to say Avatar is a slight disappointment.
The planet of Pandora (Who names these planets? What were they thinking?) has some stuff that humans want to mine. Unfortunately, the best place to get it is right on top of where the indigenous population (8 foot tall skinny blue people called the Navi) live in harmony with their world. The Navi are distrustful of the humans, so in order to investigate the Navi a bit more, the humans create the titular avatars – mindless Navi bodies that certain individuals can “drive around” remotely. The main character is just such an individual, and he (or his avatar) quickly becomes involved in the local tribe. Although the humans would prefer that the Navi move on without violence, it is clear that a military solution, led by a crazed marine, might be more expedient…
It is almost impossible to spoil anything about Avatar’s plot, no doubt you have already guessed the direction it which it unfolds. It is a shame that for all the risks involved in making what is apparently the most expensive movie ever made (it certainly looks like it), the story is as safe as an after-school special. The film could have made some interesting points about colonialism, or environmentalism, the military, or even feminism, but instead chooses to unspool a conventional yarn where the good guys are selfless and the bad guys are crazy and evil. It is not that is it a bad story per say, just something we have all seen many times before.
I saw Avatar in 3D, it is by far the best 3D experience so far. The lush jungles and mist-shrouded peaks of Pandora look amazing – Avatar is simply the greatest visual treat I have ever seen. The contrast between the sharp grey lines of the human base with the colourful, glowing environment outside is very well rendered. James Cameron has always been interested in portraying technology and Avatar is no exception – a nice touch is that all of the displays that the humans use during the movie are also in 3D. There are a thousand little details like that I loved about Avatar, it is just a shame that the whole thing isn’t as great as the sum of its parts. However, anyone who shares Cameron’s love for helicopters and giant robots and things being blown up by helicopters and giant robots will be thrilled.
Highly recommended if you can see it on the big screen in 3D. Otherwise only recommended if you like this sort of thing (but who doesn’t?)
I own all of the Star Wars DVDs except for one – The Phantom Menace. Even the weakest of the others have a certain charm, but TPM was stupid through and through. Even the title is stupid! I have yet to work out exactly what the titular menace actually was. Although the story includes several menaces, none of them seem particularly phantomastical. Unless the menace was supposed to be Palpatine’s amazingly convoluted plan, but that plot point doesn’t really bear fruit until the second film.
Anyway, I haven’t given The Phantom Menace much thought since it first came out but this guy certainly has:
Even if you ignore the affectations of the reviewer, he has some pretty insightful points about how TPM fails as a movie.
This guy is incredible, how does he do that?
Also worth watching, from the same guy:
Wolverine in 30 Seconds
Unemployed Hitman
Terminator Salvation in 60 Seconds
StarTrek in 47 Seconds
by Dan Simmons
After years of hearing “Hyperion is the bestest book evar!”, I finally managed to read it. And frankly, it is pretty good.
Set in the far future where humanity has created The Hegemony of Man, a culture that spans many planets thanks to portals (“farcasters”) that have openings many light-years apart. But there are some (the “Ousters”) who live in fleets of deep space vessels around the edges of the Hegemony. As the story opens, the Ousters have launched an attack on the planet Hyperion, not part of the Hegemony proper but under its control and a vital part of many hidden plans. Against this backdrop 7 pilgrims are thrown together on a religious quest to the Time Tombs, mysterious structures on a remote part of Hyperion haunted by an even more mysterious (and murderous) creature – the Shrike.
Trying to summarize all of Hyperion’s tortured plot-lines would be fruitless – there is a lot going on. But the frame story mainly concerns the difficult pilgrimage across the planet. The pilgrims initially do not know each other and the bulk of the book is made up of each pilgrim telling their own story to the others in their own words as they travel. It turns out that far from being totally random each pilgrim has a reason for wanting to go to the Time Tombs and some even wish to meet the Shrike. But are they all telling the truth?
Hyperion is basically review-bait – filled with pretentious literary allusions, most of which probably went over my head. Its structure borrows from Chaucer, but it is also clearly influenced in a big way by the poetry of Keats, but to say more would be to spoil things. If nothing else it forced me to spend an hour or two on Wikipedia trying to educate myself. The stories are all told in different styles, and information is cleverly conveyed so that by the end of the book the reader thinks they have a good understanding on the way in which the universe works.
That said, Hyperion has one massive flaw. By the last chapter we have heard all the stories and now expect to see how they all turn out. But instead the book ends right as the pilgrims start their final walk down the valley to the Time Tombs. This is rather a slap in the face to the reader – I felt cheated and resolved not to buy the sequel just to spite the author.
by Dan Simmons
Ok, obviously I failed in my resolve – but in my defense I found it at a secondhand book store so the author gets nothing from my purchase.
The Fall of Hyperion starts where the previous book so rudely left us but switches gear completely, focusing on what is happening back in the Hegemony as what they thought would be an easy defense of the far-flung planet turns into a fight for survival. The Hegemony is politically fractured, and different groups are scheming for mysterious ends. The CEO of the Hegemony has her own plan involving the pilgrims but she is not the only one.
The Fall of Hyperion sets itself a mammoth task of tying up all the loose ends of Hyperion while telling a fairly convoluted story itself. It is to Dan Simmons’ credit that it pretty much succeeds, although it does get somewhat incoherent at times. The huge audacity of the explanation for some of the strange goings on is almost worth the price of admission itself, most books that try something similar just spin out of control but The Fall of Hyperion comes as close as any to drawing everything together satisfactorily.
The writing in both books is good, and the story moves along at a good pace. The way that certain events and even assumptions about the Hegemony itself are portrayed different depending on the point of view of whichever character the book is following at the moment is particularly well done. There are a few unrealistic points – it seems that just about everyone in the far future has a working knowledge of Keats’ poetry, but they don’t mar an excellent series.
Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing but for goodness sake make sure you obtain both books and read them in order. Hyperion doesn’t have an ending, and The Fall of Hyperion makes no concessions to readers who haven’t read the first book.
Once again Hollywood dredges up the corpse of a much-loved TV show to desecrate with a pointless remake that misses the whole point of wha….Hey wait a minute! My brain just typed that automatically. Even now I have trouble gathering my wits to write the truth, so shocking and unbelievable it is! Give me a minute and I will try again…
Watchmen is a difficult movie to categorize. As an adaption of an existing work, it is excellent. The attention to detail is amazing, the cast all fit well with their characters and an impressive amount of the plot is exactly the same. A for effort.
As a stand-alone work, Watchmen is less of a success. It is very, very long and filled with talky scenes whose purpose only becomes clear later and sometimes not even then. It’s not that it is a terrible movie, just that a viewer not familiar with the source material might easily lose track of what is going on. So much of the plot hinges on the motivations of the characters – the book provides extensive back stories that the film cannot linger on, leaving the story feeling a little flat.
The production values are first rate, with excellent special effects. The actors are all look the part and for the most part are pretty good, except for guy playing Rorschach, who is excellent. Watchmen is an ensemble piece and the fact that none of the characters are played by major stars works to its advantage. The R rating is very well deserved, the film is quite gory in places and there is a lot of nudity. Watchmen may be the first mainstream film to have more male than female nudity, which I guess could be called some sort of landmark.
On the whole, I would recommend Watchman to anyone who enjoyed the book. I would still recommend it to others that enjoy the odd superhero film, but others will probably be bored.
Here endeth the review. The following section contains spoilers and crowing about how smart I am. Discerning readers may want to stop here – you have been warned.
Continue reading »
Yesterdays list of the 100 best books was judged by some to be a little unfair to the more nerdy side of the spectrum. To make up for it, here is the same thing done with this list of the 100 top SciFi novels.
Continue reading »
Sam Hughes writes short, short form science fiction, most of which I quite like. This one is particularly good. So is this one. This one is very silly.
If you are getting a bunch of guys together to play a board game, you may as well make it a nerdy one. Battlestar Gallactica (BSG) is the board game version of the recent TV show of the same name, and is the best game tie-ins that I have ever seen in terms of capturing the flavor of the original work. This has a downside; of the 5 players we had, one was unfamiliar with the show and was initially quite lost as to what was going on.
On the show, humanity has been all but destroyed by surprise attacks on the 12 colony planets by killer robots (the cylons), some of which look human. Luckily a small fraction of the population happened to be aboard various space craft at the time of the attack. Unluckily, it was the whiniest and most depressing fraction but on the plus side they managed to get away with the one remaining military vessel and a bunch of smaller craft. Now they travel the galaxy in this ragtag fleet looking for a shining planet known as Earth and arguing with their fathers. The cylon fleet (which is much cooler) is hot on their trail and if that wasn’t bad enough the humans have been infiltrated by human-looking cylons that cannot be detected. Some of the traitors don’t even know they aren’t human until they are activated!
Continue reading »
Cloverfield is really the kind of film you should see without knowing anything about it. I’ll try not to give too much away in this review, but I will write about certain aspects of the film that you may not wish to read right now. All I will say in the first paragraph is that Cloverfield concerns a group of twenty somethings in New York who are trying to survive a natural disaster, and that the film is put together in a rather unique and interesting way. Also, that it is very short but exciting. One of the better movies I have seen in quite a while, in fact.
But enough of that – if you have already seen Cloverfield, or don’t really care then read on. Otherwise, get thee to a theatre.
by Iain M. Banks
A far flung solar system has been cut of from the rest of the galaxy due to its only wormhole (allowing instantaneous travel) being destroyed. Warned that an invading fleet will be arriving at sub-light speeds in a few years, the system’s ruler conscripts a intelligent but moody loner with secrets of his own into a desperate mission to locate a probably fictional list of alternate wormholes from the capricious alien race that lives in the system’s gas giant planet. Along the way loyalties are tested, nothing is quite what it seems, and ripples from events from the distant past collide to throw the protagonist in unexpected directions.
Unlike all of the other Iain M. Banks books I have read, this one is not set in the culture universe, but an entirely new setting where culture-esque AI Minds have been wiped out (or have they…). The bulk of the book is spent inside the society of The Dwellers, a gas-giant living alien race who possibly hold the key to a hitherto unknown system of wormholes.
This was an excellent airport read, long but never dull, with plenty of finely detailed descriptions of the alien worlds visited. Whenever the main protagonist’s quest is getting bogged down, the action shifts elsewhere – usually to a massive space battle for a quick change of pace. It is my opinion that this technique should be more widely used in literature; imagine how much better Wuthering Heights (for instance) would be if an floating armada suddenly appeared in the skies above the moors. Chuck in a few ninjas and you have the makings of an absolute classic.
If you have read any other Iain M. Banks books you will know what to expect, despite the new setting it is quite like the his other books featuring a intelligent but moody loner with secrets of his own forced into a far-ranging quest in which loyalties are tested, nothing is quite what it seems, and ripples from events in the distant past collide, etc, etc. The Algebraist lives up the high standards set by its predecessors, but does not exceed them.
My one criticism is that the solution to the central mystery is fairly easy to guess if you have been paying attention, and it should have been obvious to many of the main characters right from the start. But apart from that quibble, The Algebraist was an enjoyable read.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing.
Herbert West has a problem. The world just doesn’t appreciate his genius, so much so that he has been rotting in jail after his previous experiments into reanimating dead flesh got a little out of hand. But now thanks to a new prison doctor with an agenda of his own, Dr. West may be able to finally complete his work.
Horror movies sequels almost always follow the law of diminishing returns and this is no exception. The first Re-Animator movie was a fantastically dark comedy; this film veers slightly more towards goofy satire but is still pretty watchable if not actually very creepy.
The DVD box claims that it is based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps there should be a Oscar for “least faithful adaption of a written work”. In particular, I don’t think Lovecraft ever envisioned a fight between an animated severed penis and a angry rat.
Not too bad if you like this sort of thing.
The War of the Worlds(warning, site features music and Richard Burton) stage show is is coming to Auckland at the end of the month. I am of course going, since it combines 4 of my favorite things: analogue synth-cheese, giant alien robots, large string sections and holographs. On paper, it should be an awesome show.
On a related note, I thought the recent remake of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise was fairly average. Sure it looked good, but the story was pretty unengaging. Perhaps the original book doesn’t really lend itself to an action movie, the protagonist spends the whole plot running away from invincible creatures who die off by themselves just as all hope seems lost. Anyway, while grubbing around on YouTube, I found a clip of the best part:
Maybe it’s my upbringing, but every now and then I like to sit and watch a certain old movie. The story is well worn; perhaps not as popular among todays hip youth as it once was, but still of relevance today. Not for nothing do some call it the greatest story ever told – a man rising from the dead to heal the world through his sacrifice. I think we all know who I am talking about:
Continue reading »