Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Days of Future Past, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal, X-Men
Every once and a while a movie comes along that I really, really, REALLLY want to like, but I just can’t. Such a movie is X-Men: Days of Future Past.
This movie had a lot going for it coming in; most importantly a strong lead in from X-Men: First Class, a movie I enjoyed enough to almost forget the travesty that was X3. Sure, it changed cannon, but what superhero movie doesn’t? And more so to this history teacher, it messed with history quite a bit, but… so what? Clearly the mutant stories are set in an alternate universe, so… it’s all good. And hey, it’s the X-Men. They’ve always been my favorite super hero franchise.
In other words, I went into an 8:30 showing of the X-Men Saturday night with a great deal of excitement. More than any of the movies coming out this year, this was the one I was looking forward too. Yet my hopes were quickly dashed
**Please note: there will be some spoilers ahead. You have been warned!**
The movie starts off with one of the staple premises of the “X-verse:” A future war between humans and mutants that the humans, aided by the power of the robotic Sentinels, win. Handily. In this version, our heroes – the X-Men of X3 – are some of the last survivors. Apparently they keep ahead of the Sentinels by harnessing Kitty Pryde’s time travel powers to project Bishop back in time a few days. He warns the X-Men that the sentinels are about to attack, and they move to a new base before the Sentinels arrive. In effect, they are never there when the attack occurs. Safety by temporal paradox.
Already here I cried foul. To the best of my knowledge (and I may be wrong) Kitty never has temporal powers – she’s a phase shifter. Her powers have nothing to do with time travel. (And I won’t do more than mention how annoyed my friend was that Kitty and the other X-man, despite this movie clearly being set in the future, appear not to have aged. At all.)
There are bigger problems, though. The first of these, if this movie is in the same continuity as X:1 through X:3, as it seems to be, is that Charles Xavier DIED in the end of X3. You know, ripped apart by the powers of the Dark Phoenix? Minor little detail, that. Now, I did assume that that would be explained later on, so I let it slide for the moment.
Of bigger concern is Kitty’s time travel powers. It seems that she doesn’t actually send people back through time; rather, she sends their consciousness back into their past body. I suppose this means that the writers avoided the paradox of having the time traveler meet themselves, but… I digress. That’s not the issue. The issue is that it is painful for the time traveler, so the farthest back she can send someone is a couple weeks – a month at most. As she says “There is only so much a mind can stand.”
Enter Wolverine.
Here is where the movie begins to fall apart, IMO. Wolverine has epic healing powers, true. He can even survive a gunshot to the face from an adamantine bullet. Yet this is a pain of the mind. In cannon, this was the one way to screw with – even break – Wolverine. Mess with his head. More to the point, why would his healing power save him from mental trauma in ANY way? But Wolverine is the main character of the franchise, so…. OK.
But, really? They introduced Bishop into the movie, and he’s pretty bad @ss. As window dressing. Sure, he shoots his energy cannon a few times, infused by Storm’s power, but… other than that, he has no role in the film. Wolverine has to be the main character.
Why? Hasn’t he already had two movies under his own name? And wasn’t he already the star character of the first three X movies? Yet the producers felt the need to use him again, despite having teased us with Bishop. Why bring Bishop in at all if he’s just going to be nameless mutant gunner #3? Maybe it’s just my nerd rage, but it would have been far more daring to have Bishop (an African-American character to boot – addressing that glaring lack in the super hero movie cannon) as the main character of the story as he is in the comics.
But, no. Instead we have Wolverine Three, now with shiny ’70’s clothes! Throw out the cool time travel story of cannon, throw out the Bishop / Forge arc… for throwing a mental projection back in time by a mutant whose power had nothing to do with time travel. Sigh. At least we have Jennifer Lawrence in the blue skin body suit.
Yeah, as attractive as she is, she can’t save this hot mess.
I could go farther, but… Suffice it to say that this is a movie that should have been moved forward in the time lime (Sentinels make much more sense today than in 1973), and the actor they hired to portray Richard Nixon has to be the worst Nixon impersonator I have ever seen. In other words, we have a movie long on flash, short on cannon continuity, and filled with errors that if easily fixed, for various reasons, could have made this movie into a worthy sequel to X-Men: First Class.
As it is…. Meh. One and a half out of four stars.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Robocop, Sci-Fi, Spec-Fic
The first Robocop came out when I was a kid, and being a Paul Verhoven film, it was not one I saw in the theater at age 12 (It was, after all, pretty violent). I did see it later on – well, the first one, at least – and I enjoyed it immensely. It was a good SF action picture at a time when I enjoyed action pictures as much as the next red blooded American teenager. I will say that I don’t remember if I ever saw either of the two movie sequels, but I did enjoy the much maligned early ’90’s television version. Sure, it wasn’t as good, and it had campy elements, but hey – it was SF on TV.
In other words, when I heard they were re-booting the movie a few months back, I was less than impressed. Re-boots, in my experience, generally don’t work. Sure, some may be ok and watchable (the Trek re-boot and the A-team movie come to mind), but most of the time, I agree with the advice a friend of mine gave me a while back: “just stick to the original.” If something is good the first time, why try again? Usually the imitation comes off worse.
Yet to every rule, their are exceptions. I hadn’t originally intended to see the movie, but when one of my gaming friends said “It has it’s moments” in a rather cryptic way, and when I read more positive than negative reviews online, I decided it was worth a trip to the second run theater – and I was glad I did.
To be clear, the re-boot is a very different movie from the ’87 original. That movie is a straight up body count action flick. The bodies pile up constantly, and the one liners come fast and furious (Tell me, those of you who have seen the original: You still say “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” I know I do.) Verhoven may be many things as a director, but even when dealing with source material like Starship Troopers or Total Recall (both based on excellent spec fic stories), well…. lets just say subtlety is lost on him. He may not be Michal “Baysplosions”, but… boom. Boom today. And then a boom tomorrow for effect.
The re-boot, OTOH, while not lacking in action, makes you think. (Be warned: there will be some spoilers ahead). It begins with a talk show – yes, a talk show – hosted by Samuel L. Jackson. Sure, Mr. Jackson’s character is spoofing conservative talk shows, but his point is very good: If we can use drones and robotic warriors overseas (as the near-future America of the movie does), why can’t we do the same thing at home? After all, we are protecting American lives from vicious criminals. And you WANT to protect Americans from VICIOUS CRIMINALS, RIGHT?!?!?! How can you not? That would be…. un-American. AND EVIL!
In other words, from the start, I knew this would be a different kind of movie. I don’t recall the original dealing with such issues at all; I don’t think Verhoven has the ability to think that deeply. Heck, it still saddens me that he was the one to produce Starship Troopers when he admitted he’d never read the book because it was “fascist.”
No, this Robocop is a thinking man’s action movie. It talks about drones and killing from afar at the push of a button – without a trial. It delves into what makes us humans, and why, for example, I am against drones in this country – at least for surveillance. Do you really want the government to have the power to fly drones around our cities, watching (spying) on us in the name of “keeping us safe?”
This Robocop, in addition to the social commentary, focuses much more on Murphey’s family. I remember them being minor characters in the original, but here they are the focus. His wife and son drive Murphey to not only keep what little of his humanity he has left, but also to move beyond his shattered body and to matter to his wife and son.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, captain america, Heroes, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Pathfinder, Personal, Winter Soldier
It is not often these days that I unabashedly and without any reservations recommended a movie. Yet this is the case with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. For the first time in a long time, I was on the edge of my seat, not able (not even desiring too!) try and predict the ending, simply losing myself in the story and – honestly – wanting it to not be over.
I say this in dead honesty. Most with movies these days – even ones I enjoyed, such as Enders Game – I find myself checking my watch half way through, wondering how much time is left. Or, with movies that I dislike… I’m counting the minutes, wondering whether I should simply get up and walk out.
Not so with the new Cap movie, though. Nope; this time, I was looking at my watch to see how much time was left.
I could do more of a review, and talk about specific points, but that would involve lots of time, and necessitate starting a discussion of how the Mouse worked the plot lines from the movie and from Agents of Shield together into a seamless whole. It would also require me to get into a discussion about the political commentary within the movie, but to do that would require me to talk politics far more than I want to do here.
Nope. A review would take lots of time, and between what I’ve said here, and the commercials and trailers we’ve all seen by now, I’ll just say this: If you haven’t seen the movie yet, see it. It is the best of the super hero movies I’ve ever seen (better than Cap One, my former favorite, and far better than The Avengers), and is arguably the best movie I have seen in years.
What I will talk about, though, is why I like Captain America as a character – as a hero – so much, and the answer, as I said in my first review is simple: He’s a paladin. He fights not for fame or glory, or even to right great wrongs and defend the innocent. Nope – he fights for one simple reason: He hates bullies.
I’ve been thinking about this over the weekend as I again consider the nature of heroes in RPG quests. One of my players looked at me across the table last night and said, “I’ve been thinking about this: I’ve been wondering why my character is here.”
I looked back at him and said “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”
Now, a large part of the issue is tied up in the nature of the Paizo Adventure Path I’ve been running. In short, the players are traveling around the world, collecting pieces of an artifact that it would be very bad for the Forces Of Evil (TM) to get first. Or, put another way, it is a series of dungeon crawls linked only by the imposed requirement that the players are all members of an adventuring society called “The Pathfinders.”
In other words, as this player’s first character died a grizzly death some time back, and his new one is “finishing his brother’s quest,” he has little reason to keep adventuring. I mean, several parts of the artifact are in the hands of their superiors, so putting them all together actually makes it EASIER for the bad guys to acquire them all. Throw in that after finding the last piece (and some tough tomb raiding), they are all pretty wealthy, and it honestly make more sense for him to retire, open an inn, and stop risking his life. He’s not trying to save the world; it’s not even in danger. As I said, it can be argued that they are actually ENDANGERING the world by their actions.
So why keep going? He’s not a hero, but rather an adventurer. And realistically, he’d stop.
To me, this is a flaw in the adventure path. As I have lamented in this journal many times, it is my experience that most people don’t like to play heroes – aka selfless good guys like Captain America – but rather adventurers or mercenaries whose characters are only in it for the money. Now, as it has in the past, this still baffles me. As Thak said long ago in his video commentary on ADWD, heroes are STUPID. They die. But they die doing heroic things because they ARE heroes.
OTOH, as I said, an adventurer has little reason to keep adventuring after his first big tomb raid. In a world where the average person makes a couple gold peices a week, why would you keep adventuring when a good crawl can net a character hundreds or thousands of (or tens of thousands, depending on the size of the dungeon) gold peices? Heroes will. Adventurers may – to show their worth, or test their skills. But long term? Nope. It makes no sense.
As always, I will never understand this. I know that I can’t perform great feats of daring do in my everyday life; that is one huge reason why I role play. But to simply money grub, as so many people do? No thanks.
This is why I think the story is flawed. As I said, there is no reason for the PC’s to adventure together. This is the first flaw; I don’t like railroading PC’s like this. More so, there is no reason for them to keep together and stay adventuring.
What surprises me, though, is that the adventure writers don’t seem to realize this!?! Or am I wrong, my own personal experiences with too small a sample – and most people really DO like to play heroes?
I hope that that’s true. Yet… that saddens me even more, for what does that say of the small sample of people who I play with?
Sad Panda. 😦
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Desolation of Smaug, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Spec-Fic, The Hobbit
Well Aromathians, I had originally intended to write up a Christmas list for this post – i.e. things that I hope to see in the realms of speculative fiction, both in print and on television in the coming year; I honestly still plan on doing that before Christmas. However, then something happened, something I hinted at in my last post: Strangely to me, a great many people I know are ripping on the new Hobbit movie.
Now, I have to say up front that I haven’t seen the movie yet. I hope to go with my nephew this week now that he’s done with exams, but between his job and my Pathfinder campaign, we haven’t had time yet. In other words, I can’t fully prove or disprove some of the comments I’ve read.
Saying that, though, I move onto my topic. It started when a friend of my posted on Facebook that she and her husband were waiting in line for the midnight showing of Hobbit Two. One of her friends, whom I have never met, made the comment that he would never see the second movie after “the travesty that was the first one.”
Really? Now, as I said in my response, I have my issues with the first movie, but… the first movie was anything but a travesty. It added some stuff in, sure, and it was a little too long, IMHO, but it was a good movie.
Yet when I pushed for this person to explain what they had wanted, and more importantly, what he’d expected the movie to have been, her prevaricated. After several attempts (and verbose responses), the best I could get him to say was that the movie was “action porn.” Lots of stuff going on, you know – making it “action porn, and porn makes everything better.”
At this point, (and four posts going each way) I gave up. As far as I could tell, what he seemed to want was a literal, word for word translation of the book into a movie. All the things he objected too were in the book – stone giants, trees burning brightly, battles with goblins, etc. Yet they all occur “off camera.”
Could you make a movie without these things – without the “action porn?” Sure you could. But face it – it would be, well…. pretty boring. Especially to the average fan. Or, as I put in a response to another post by another disgruntled fan, the person who doesn’t eat, breathe, sleep, and poop Tolkien.
Most of their responses, it seems to me, seem to be objecting to the fact that the richness and depth of Tolkien’s writings and world don’t come through in the movie; his philosophies, his morality tales and allegory, etc. The problem with this argument, IMO, is that most people watching these movies neither know nor care about these.
Think about it: Peter Jackson’s movies take a written story, one written for a very different time than out fast paced one of today, and convert them to a visual medium, where the entire story has to be told on screen. There is no background, no narration or inner monologue. Just what we see. All that stuff that makes Tolkien great? It’s not there. It can’t be. Is this action porn? Sure, I suppose it is. But the alternative? You could do a literal, line-by-line copy of the book. Again, that would be a very dull and slow and movie.
What makes Tolkien great? It’s not his story telling; it’s his world-building. The depth of Middle Earth and its culture and history and so much more. In short, all the stuff that the purists and lore junkies love that the casual Tolkien fan (your truly) is only peripherally aware, and that the non-fan neither knows or cares about. I know this is hard for the “Tolkien is a god” crowd to accept, but it’s true. Moreover, Peter Jackson isn’t making his movies for the purist. The purists are going to see the movie, or they aren’t, regardless if how true the adaptation is to the book. No; Jackson is making his movie for the 99% of the world that has never read Tolkien, and doesn’t care too.
We spec fic fans need to realize this, yet many of us seem not to. This is best exemplified by another comment I read on facebook: “Why wouldn’t you want to eat, breathe, sleep, and poop Tolkien?” Why? Because, as I’ve said many times before, Tolkien is a wonderful world builder, but a pretty average author. Jackson’s changes, IMHO, make the story better. The STORY, not the world.
Feel free to disagree with me on this, I know many people do. In closing, though, I will make one more point, and that is another example my GM gave me when we were talking about this. He is a HUGE comic book fan, and he agreed with me that many people expect too much of Tolkien. He went on to say that “Tolkien purists have nothing to bitch about. After all, I’ve been sitting through comic book movies for YEARS that butcher and destroy character after character in movie after movie – and with less reason for the changes than the changes to Tolkien. Yet we all still go watch them.”
Are the Hobbit movies action porn? Sure. Is that bad? Not really. After all, what do you purists expect? Oh, right – a Tolkien musical with all the songs and very little action, Or, put another way, a boring movie that would never get made because the average fan would NEVER see it.
I’ll take action porn any day over that. 🙂
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Ender's Game, Gravity, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal
Well, after a very busy couple of weeks at work, helping a friend move, and dealing with the general business of life in the fall (one of my busiest times of year), I’ve finally found some time to ruminate on a couple movies that I found time to see. So, without further ado….
The first of these two movies, Gravity, I didn’t plan on seeing; the commercial alone looked, well, cheesy. I mean, a free floating robotic arm from the shuttle and an astronaut whipping around it like a kid swinging a jump rope by one end? I mean, if nothing else, didn’t anyone tell the producers that we don’t HAVE a shuttle anymore?
Then a strange thing occurred: A good friend of mine who NEVER likes new movies, told me it was good – really good – and that I should see it. Well; suffice it to say that stranger things have happened to me, but not many, and so with that in mind, I took in a matinee.
So…. first, I will say the movie is visually stunning. It’s not often I wish I had decided to shell out the extra money for IMAX and / or 3-D, but with Gravity, I think it would have been worth it for the shots of the Earth alone. I don’t know how else to say it; this is one of the prettiest movies I have seen – perhaps ever. It’s simply that pretty.
Yet… that’s all the movie has going for it, IMO, and it’s not enough. Maybe I’ve grown to cynical, but the bad science and contrived plot devices – and that doesn’t even get to the equally hokey not-so-contrived plot devices – ruin the movie for me.
I won’t get into them for space and time reasons, so I’ll just say this: When I posted a detailed list of but some of my objections to the movie on a forum I frequent (a site where the consensus was “THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME!!!!) I was told that a real life astronaut was interviewed and asked about the bad science of the movie. His response: “Shut up and pass the popcorn.”
Huh. So Hollywood’s tendency toward making bad – but pretty – movies continues when, in reality, with a little bit of talking to some real scientists, and a little better writing, this movie could easily have been a GOOD movie as well as a PRETTY one. As it is…. I have to say skip it.
OTOH, every once and a while, Hollywood does do something right, and this time, it is Ender’s Game. Now, I must preface my comments here with the point that I haven’t read Mr. Card’s book, despite repeated entreaties from multiple people to do so, I simply haven’t made the time to yet. OTOH, two of my best friends who have read the book said that the movie does a good job of adapting the book to the big screen. Sure, it has some omissions for time and pacing, but it gets the point across.
Imagine that – a movie (not named Lord of the Rings) that is, for the most part, faithful to the source material! (It does help that Card wrote the screen play…) Sure, I understand that a lot of people are upset that the movie uses the more recent name for Card’s aliens – the Formics – instead of the original “The Buggers,” and that a good deal of the cold war era political commentary is left out, either for space reasons, or that of relevance in this post cold-war era, yet…
This was a really, really good movie. It is visually stunning, and the acting performances, from veterans Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsly, down to the youngest of the kids, are spot on. And yes, while it does leave out what I’m told is significant social commentary, the rest of the story – Card’s core commentary on understanding the other and on the power and effects of command – is still there.
Are changes made, even to that? Sure. I’m told there is an entire commentary on how Ender’s brother Peter becomes a blogger and begins to affect the politics of Earth in the book – and that isn’t present. The movie does hint at it, though – to the point that despite the fact I’ve never seen the movie, I picked up on it enough to discuss it with a friend who has.
In short, the parts of the book that are done in the movie are done very, very well, and the part’s that aren’t are either not truly necessary to the core plot line, or hinted at so much that you walk away – as I did – going “This isn’t just an SF shoot-em-up. This is a deep – very deep – story.”
Go out and see the movie – four out of four stars – and then, like me, somehow find time to read the book. Somehow. So many books, so little time….. :)
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Kick Ass 2, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Personal, summer
Well, I return again after yet another long pause. I’ve been busy, and not all by choice. First, the Father of an old and dear friend passed away after a long battle with MS, and I took time to be with him and his family. At the same time, that same friend’s two year old daughter had major surgery. Third, one of my oldest and dearest friends has retired after a long career in the military, and he finds himself bored and with nothing to do (and no immediate need to do anything, thanks to his pension), so he has been around often, looking to game or just hang out. But finally, I have been laid up with a foot injury, making it hard to get around, and removing my desire to much but sit and watch TV or read.
Or, put another way, I have lots to do and little desire to do it. Better to procrastinate on anything that doesn’t need to be done immediately and heal up.
That being said, I have increased the bank of topics in my head that I mentioned recently, so while I have lots to talk about, the topics might be a little behind for a while. So, saying that, I will talk about the two movies I saw most recently – the two that I have enjoyed the most. Hopefully these reviews – if they influence you at all – are not coming too late for you to see these movies on the big screen.
The first of these was a movie that I am honestly surprised got made: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. I really enjoyed the first Percy movie when it came out several years ago, and I am in fact now very much a fan of Rick Riordan’s books as a result. Yet the first movie didn’t do very well financially (much to my surprise), and so it took three years to make the sequel.
This has had some… interesting… effects, shall we say. First, remember that these movies are based on kid’s books. In the novel of the same title, our heroes are seventh graders. The first movie made the decision to age the characters to high school age. No problem. Yet the actors – primarily the heroine, Annabeth, are played by actors SIGNIFICANTLY older than their characters. Miss Daddario is 27, and looks it. Yes, she is very attractive and is more than credible in the role. Yet… if they make movies out of the other three books, they need to pick up the pace, or we’ll have a women in her mid-30’s trying to play a high school kid.
Or, as I put it, the “90210 effect.” Gabrielle Carteris may have been a good actress, but casting a women in her late 30’s to play a high school kid was silly. One of the greatest strengths, IMO, of the Potter movies was that they shot them quick, and when they were done, the actors were only a few years older than their characters. Here, not so much.
Beyond that concern, though, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It generally follows the plot of the book, (other than removing everything related to the characters’ age) probably more closely than the first one. The effects are adequate, the action good. And the fun of the books is evident. Sure, this is a movie aimed at tweens, but… as I said in my review of these books, the story is GOOD. This is a movie that you can take your kids too, and both you and they will enjoy it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
The second movie is the long awaited “Kick-Ass 2.” Like Sea of Monsters, this is another movie that I wasn’t sure would ever get made; I’m glad it did. While not as innovative or original as the first one, it is still a great movie, if for totally different reasons.
The first Kick Ass movie was both a darkly brilliant comedy and intensely thought provoking. As I said about it several years ago, it deals with the basic question of “Why doesn’t anyone ever put on a mask and become a super hero?”, and over the course of a darkly funny romp, that question is dealt with.
The follow up is very different in many ways, yet also similar: after Kick Ass, lots of people become heroes, yet most of them do community service or neighborhood watch type stuff.
Not our two main characters. Kick Ass, and his far-better-at-the-job sidekick, Hit Girl (played by the supremely talented Chloe Moretz) actually do take on villians. Well, OK; Hit Girl does. Kick Ass mainly takes punches well.
Now, I don’t want to give away plot, so I’ll say this: This is movie about two things: It is a coming of age movie for our two main characters (the part of the movie I didn’t see coming), and it also flips around the premise of the first movie: Super Heroes need Super Villains. This means that the son of the Big Bad from KA1 decides to use all of his father’s ill-gotten money to get revenge on Kick Ass for killing his Father in KA1, despite the fact that he has no powers. (Like Bruce Wayne, he quips, his power is money. Lots of it)
I will say that despite not being quite as good as the first one, I really enjoyed it. It’s a very different movie in tone, so direct comparisons are hard to make, but it was still very entertaining, and probably the best movie I have seen this year. OTOH, please remember: this movie got a hard “R” for a reason, and despite not being remotely as violent as Jim Carey tried to claim, it is violent, and more importantly, filled with very profane language from the young main characters. So…. Yeah. Four out of five stars. Just leave the kids at home for this one. You will enjoy it.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Pacific Rim, Personal, summer, The Wolverine
Well, it’s been a while since my last post. I could give lots of explanation, but I’ll sum it up: Vacation. In short, I’ve been stockpiling ideas, and should have a heavy dose of posts in the near future.
Now, saying that: I have had time to see a couple movies, and it looks like the second half of the summer will be far better for cinematic entertainment than the first half was. First up is movie that I only saw on the repeated recommendation of my friends, and in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t. In fact, the two hours or so I spent seeing Pacific RIm are hours that I will never get back. Ever.
This makes me sad. I should have trusted my own judgment; that a movie about giant robots punching out giant monsters wouldn’t / couldn’t be good. Yet I listened to the hype – mainly people saying that “Oh! It’s giant robots fighting through a city! It’s Battletech!”
Not really. Not really at all. Battletech does have its own conceits, primarily that walking robots are practical as war machines. There are others as well – I am well aware of that – but at its heart, they are still war machines. ‘Mechs are still military vehicles that destroy things by blowing them up. With weapons.
Not true in Pacific Rim. Nope. The best was to defeat giant extra-dimensional monsters is to run up to them and punch them. Really Hard.
Now, I could accept that conceit if that was the best way to kill the critters – heck, if it even worked. But… No. You still need to blow the monster up with a plasma cannon.
Which begs the question: Why is punching the monster necessary? Why not, oh, I don’t know, get a bunch of plasma guns, mount them on something smaller than a city smashing robot and blast them when, say, they’re coming out of the ocean and before they smash the city? Nah, that’d make sense.
Normally at this point I’d say “Maybe I’m being too hard on this movie. It’s got some redeeming factors.” Not this time. Pacific Rim is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Save your money. This weekend, though, I took in the one movie other than next month’s “Kick Ass 2” that I really wanted to see this summer: “The Wolverine.”
This was a movie that I really wanted to like. After all, unlike just about everyone I have talked to about it, I liked the first Wolverine movie. Yes I know it plays fast and loose with the timeline, that it introduces Gambit for no reason, and that it horribly mangles the character of Deadpool (who I am still not familiar with and so will pass on commenting on).
Yet if one looks beyond comic book original source purity, it was a pretty good movie. It explains his origins, and is hardly a movie about a “mono-syllabic grunter,” as a reviewer I cited in that first post called him.
Wolverine is a very different kind of hero than what I normally enjoy. He’s not a knight in shining armor, nor is he prone to standing in gaps. Yet in his own way, he is still a bit of a paladin. He still has an honor code, and if you’ve earned his trust, or if he pledge to protect you… He is the guy you want at your back. He is the guy who will do what needs to be done. Or, in RPG terms, he is the classic chaotic good hero.
So I had high hopes when this movie started. It does get into his back story, yet this time, it bothered me. It takes place after X-3’s timeline bending (and universe altering) plot. Yep. Jean’s dead, and keeps appearing to Logan in his dreams.
OK, no problem. The problem comes in when you consider the story which, AFAIK, takes place in the comic book time line between his “Weapon X” days and his days at Xaviers’s school for gifted youngsters, takes place after the… events, shall we say… of X3. Or, put another way, it’s all about Muriko and the Silver Samurai, but is set today, not in the past.
OK, minor criticism, to be true. So I’ll come at this from another point of view: Why did everyone hate the first Wolverine movie? Messing with the timeline / changing characters. So tell me why, when this movie does the same thing, people were cheering and clapping after a 7:00 PM Friday showing? I don’t get it.
It’s not that this is bad movie; it is what it is. I was discussing it with a friend yesterday (the only one I’ve ever talked to who liked Wolverine One), and he summed it up succinctly: Wolverine movies are about action and Wolverine slicing his way through a mess of bad guys, and in this, the movie succeeds admirably.
OTOH, though, it just seems like more of the same. Wolverine fights bad guys – oh, but this time they are Yakuza ninjas on top of a moving bullet train. Yeah, that was pretty cool. But…. So? Despite a visually pleasing movie, and despite the fact that lots of it was set in Japan with ninjas and corporate take over’s and…. Meh. Yep. Just meh. More of the same.
So, if I had to chose one of these movies to see, it would definitely be The Wolverine. It’s not a waste of money, and I don’t regret seeing it. But I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it either. Give it two and a half out of five stars. But if you would rather see a good movie, I think I’d wait a couple weeks and see Kick Ass 2.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Into Darkness, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Review, Star Trek
Well, Aromathians, this has been a not so fun period of time for me these last few weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say that a cranky car deciding it felt the need to break down, and the long hours spent working to pay for fixing said cranky car equals a not-so-fun period of time. :(. Saying that, my few free hours of late have been devoted to gaming, and not writing. At least until this weekend, when my gaming group went to see the newest Star Trek movie after our session yesterday.
So, saying that, I will say that my thoughts on Star Trek: Into Darkness will, by necessity, violate my “No spoilers rule,” for it is pretty much impossible to talk about the movie without doing so. I will, as always, keep my thoughts general, but you have been warned.
OK, first up, let me say I went in not expecting much of the new movie. I saw the first one, and liked it at first, but as time went along – and I watched the movie again and again on FX – it’s various science errors and plot holes came to irritate me more and more. I mean, Red Matter? Really? Yeah, ’nuff said. Add in a disturbing interview I read with JJ Abrams where Abrams said he couldn’t get into Trek as a kid because it was “too philosophical,” and I truly expected very little from the new movie.
Yet it is Star Trek: there was never any question that I’d see it. So when I mentioned that my gaming group should go see it together, and when one of my players took it on himself to organize it (thanks Dave!), it became just the event to set off what had been a pretty crummy week for me – a bit of mindless fun to enjoy on a Saturday night.
I will say the movie was good – much better than thought it would be. Like the first one, it is filled with little homage’s to the classic TV show – tribbles, first of all. And when they mentioned a commercial freighter out captured in “the recent Mudd incident,” my Trekker friend Dave and I laughed out loud.
It was more than that, though. As with the first movie, it is visually stunning; in fact, the scene of Scottie’s shuttle rising over Jupiter in the background is one of the breathtaking FX shots I have ever seen, and the scene of the Enterprise ascending out of an alien ocean (despite making no sense tech wise, other than for being in the movie to look cool) was pretty awesome, too.
Yet Ill say this: I find I have a love – hate relationship with this movie, and while I find myself leaning more to the love side, certain things drive me go AHHHHH! as well. (This is your spoiler alert!) Why? Simple: Khan.
OK, yes. Khan Noonian Singh is the main villain of the movie. Open secret, I know. Yet it’s not what I’d expected. It’s not done cheesil y, which I’d worried about. It turns out that the CNO of Star Fleet, one Admiral Marcus (Yes, Carol’s Dad, and therefore the grandfather of Kirk’s son David in what I’ve taken to calling the “Trek Prime” timeline.) has a brain in his head. It seems that he doesn’t like the fact that Starfleet got it’s arse kicked by a Romulan mining ship three years ago, and starts scouring the galaxy for things that will help him get any tech edge he can to help them fight “Whatever comes next.” Then – you guessed it – he finds Khan’s ship and followers, and blackmails Khan into helping him. This starts the plot for the movie.
At this point, I found myself nodding my head and whispering “Clever, clever!” to my buddy sitting next to me, and him nodding in agreement. “This,” I thought, “makes the fact that were in an alternate reality drive the story forward!” The timeline is messed up; the Botany Bay will be discovered, just not by Kirk and crew, and Admiral Marcus’s actions make sense – we got our butts kicked, lets deal with it.
So far, so good. OTOH, while the borrowing is the movies strength at this point, it moves to nearly become it’s undoing, for it starts to become a bad alternate history novel and borrow too much.
Consider this: I have said before that Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, is not just a brilliant Star Trek movie, but a brilliant movie. It discusses the human condition – life and death, friendship and aging, finding a purpose for one’s life – in such a way that it is one of those rare movies I love more and more as I get older. Yeah, I loved the space battles as a kid. As I get older, though, I see that the movie is like an ogre. It has layers (Sorry, saw Shrek last week 🙂 ).
To my point. Wrath of Khan is a culmination movie. It tells us something about Kirk and Spock as individuals. Spock’s devotion to duty, and to his friends. Kirk’s accepting that there is more to life than hopping galaxies, and his acceptance that getting older makes you older, not old. Life and death, and all those things in between, so to speak. Or, put another way, it is a movie that defines the relationship of two old friends, and Spock’s death scene in that movie has so much emotional punch in that movie simply because that are old friends – not just to each other, but to you, the viewer.
Into Darkness, OTOH, flips all that around. To try and explain what I mean, I’ll quote a comment one of my friends put up on Facebook this morning – “It’s like the movie is a parody of all old Trek plotlines.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I will say this: When you have an AU (Alternate Universe), you need to embrace it. Abrams and company, OTOH, appear to believe that continuing to mine old stories – and scenes, and even dialogue – for ideas means that people will instinctively like the new version.
This is the problem with ST:ID. It takes that classic death scene, and flips it around. The Enterprise is crippled, and one of the crew has to go on a suicide mission into the reactor core to save the ship. This time, though, it’s Kirk and not Spock who goes down to the engine room, punches out Scotty, and goes in without a rad suit. He then kicks (yes, I said kick) the main power coupling back into place, and we have then have the death scene from ST:TWOK – complete with a good chunk of the dialogue from that scene done in reverse. Ending, both best and worst of all, with Spock screaming “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!!” after Kirk dies.
Sigh.
OK, I can understand going to the well to use Khan as a villain. As one comment I saw online said, “he’s the Joker to Kirk’s Batman.” OTOH, that scene does come across as a bit of a parody. It’s a a highly emotional moment, both in this movie and more so in the original, and yet I found myself laughing at that dramatic moment.
Or, I loved and hated it at the same time. See?
Well, this is going long, so I’ll just say that yes, you should see the movie. It’s a good movie. Just be prepared to, it you grew up on Classic Trek as I did, to feel a little… wierd… when you walk out. You will find yourself cheering one moment, the next going… Really? On the whole, though, I approve.
Yet for me, it will never be the same. This is not the Trek I grew up on, full of deep philosophy and social commentary, but a whiz-bang action shoot-’em-up that appears as if it will continue in a new tradition of being both incredibly invigorating and annoying at the same time.
Huh. On second thought, guess it isn’t so much different from Trek Prime after all. 🙂
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Oblivion, Offringa, Personal, summer
Summer movie season is upon us; a summer that unlike last summer, doesn’t appear to be jam packed with genre movies. Yet there are as always a few; more in fact than I first thought, but certainly not as many as last summer with its spate of super hero movies. I’ve seen a couple of them over the last few weeks, and while one of them was sadly so forgettable that despite the presence of one of my favorite actors – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – being in it, I won’t even mention GI Joe: Retaliation other than to say “save your money,” OTOH, the second new movie, the Tom Cruise vehicle “Oblivion,” was surprisingly good.
I must say first up that I have become much less of a Tom Cruise fan since his couch escapade on Oprah a few years back, but I also can’t deny that when he isn’t hopping up and down on a couch professing his love for a woman young enough to be his daughter, he is a pretty good actor. At times. And his newest movie is one of those.
I will also say that between the above, and the reviews I’ve heard scatterings of – that the movie is pretty forgettable, being derivative of, oh, just about everything, I went in not expecting much. OTOH, It is a new big budget SF movie, it does co-star Morgan Freeman, and it looked cool. Add it that I surprisingly found my missing wallet over the weekend (Yeah!) and so I felt a little more like splurging for a matinee, and there you go.
Thirdly, please keep in mind while most of us have seen the trailers by now, this is a movie that will be hard to talk about without giving a few spoilers. I will as always try to keep them to an absolute minimum, but I make no promises.
OK. having said all that, my first thought about the movie is that, like the movie Prometheus I re-watched on vacation, the movie has lots of cool visuals. A bombed out Pentagon, for example, along with many, many other shots of a post-apocalyptic Earth (It seems like that is a them for both genre TV and movies this year). Cool new tech, from the ubiquitous drones, to floating bases and cloud hopping transport craft, to giant floating resource extraction factories. Add in lots of sweeping background shots and scenery, and the movie doesn’t disappoint in this area.
Cruise’s acting is also good. He keeps you guessing at what’s going on long enough that you don’t think about the obvious in hind-sight plot twists until after they happen. Or, put another way, all of the little clues that are dropped as to what is really going on and why are apparent until after the fact.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Sure, there are lots of little things going on that make you wonder – why are we extracting all the water from Earth? Why do we only ever see two humans – Jack and his partner, Vica – if we won the war, and why does their boss keep asking Vica “Are you still an effective team?” And then there is that nagging little question – If we won the war, why are we leaving Earth? Sure, as Jack says in the beginning, “We did what we had to do; we used the nukes,” even so; we’re totally pulling off Earth?
Yep. These things make you wonder. But the strength of this movie is that while you do wonder these things, it never gets to the point where you stop and go, “Wait, wait, wait! That ain’t right!” Rather, it keeps giving you just enough – one little reveal after another – such that when the payoff comes about half way through, you go, “Oooooohh! NOW it all makes sense!” And instead of feeling annoyed at what could have been a series of major plot holes, I instead walked away going, “That was pretty clever! Nicely done!”
*END SPOILER ALERT*
Now, saying that, I could go more, but then I’d go beyond slight spoilers into a plot discussion, but this is a movie I LIKED and am recommending. Go see it. It’s pretty darn good. Yes, it does borrow a lot, but it does well. There are elements of the old TV show V in it, and I’m sure I could think up more examples if I sat here and thought about it for a while, but this time, I really don’t see the need. And while I did notice in the end of the movie that the story was borrowed form a graphic novel, I will say that it was new to me – it’s not a remake of other stories or an ’80’s TV show. So…. we’ll leave it at that. This is a good movie, and I recommended it. Just Ignore the nagging feeling of “But why are they doing this?” that I, at least, had for the first half, and just wait for the pay off. It’s worth it.
Four out of five stars.
Jeff Offringa's Journal 