Love and Monsters

I just watched the Netflix adventure movie Love and Monsters.  It was great, in no small part because of the superb job done by the lead actor.  There are two things it did well though, and I wanted to comment on them because so few movies get them right.  The two things it did best were monsters... and love.

There will be a spoiler warning halfway through.

First, Monsters.  Love and Monsters is set in the near future in a world where monsters arose from a freak weapons accident and smashed human civilization.  Scattered remnants of humans live in hiding but monsters walk the world freely.  The reasoning given for the monsters was kind of silly from a scientific perspective, but I am totally willing to forgive that.  The important thing is that There Are Monsters, and I just ask that the movie tell me a story from that.

Mostly movies fail at this sort of thing.  They write themselves into corners and then get out with ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings or insert senseless MacGuffins into the plot to cover for their shortcomings in writing and planning.  You have to strike the right middle ground where you continue to reveal things about the world you have created without making the things you have said previously seem silly.  Each new reveal in a science fiction story should follow from the previous one such that the viewer says "Oh, okay, I see how that would be.  Makes sense."  even if they wouldn't have *predicted* that reveal.

That is the key there.  You want to surprise people a bit, keep them guessing, but you want everything to fit together in the end in a logical manner.  After all the reveals are done, the characters need to have made reasonable choices given the world in which they live.  Love and Monsters does a great job of this.  Throughout the movie you learn more about the monsters and how the world works, and each time it all fits together with what you learned previously.  I couldn't have told you what the final act would look like, but it fits cleanly into the rest of the story so far.

I can accept all kinds of nutty stuff (space wizards with laser swords come to mind) as long as the rest of the story follows sensibly from there.

Now we get into spoilers as we talk about Love.

Twu Wuv appears way too much in movies.  I particularly object to it because of the built in assumptions of exclusivity and eternal duration, but also I think it doesn't well reflect how actual people work.  Relationships are messy, and that messiness does not have to detract from their beauty.

The hero of the story, Joel, is a guy with a crush.  Before the monsters he was dating Aimee and they were in love.  Then monsters came and they were separated by a huge tract of monster infested world.  Seven years pass, and Joel is still desperately in love with Aimee even though he has only spoken to her over a radio a couple of times since.  He has put her up on a pedestal so high that he has convinced himself that he can never be happy without her.

So he suits up and marches across more than one hundred kilometers of monster filled territory to find her.  Without a decent map, a compass, or any sense of how to survive.  This is idiotic, obviously, but it is exactly how lovesick, desperate people behave.  Grand romantic gesture!  Find my Twu Wuv or die in the attempt!

Naturally since Joel is the hero he makes it.  Many trials and much learning occur on the way, of course, because it is an adventure movie, but finally Joel arrives at Aimee's doorstep.

This is the point in a bad movie where they would kiss and reunite and Twu Wuv would make all the problems go away.

But not here!  Joel arrives and finds out that Aimee has moved on.  She still thinks of him fondly, you know, as that guy who she dated in high school who was a real sweetie.  But this whole "I would walk 500 miles" schtick is WAY too much for her.  She has her own life now, and while she is duly impressed by his feat, that isn't changing her mind.

Love and Monsters doesn't try to paint one of them as bad and wrong.  They realize the mixup, both feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and try to muddle along.  I love the idea that love doesn't have to 'work out' or be about betrayal and villainy.  It can just be a thing that is there, and we can empathize with the struggles of the heroes without a canned, predictable conclusion.

More adventure happens, and finally Joel goes back home.  His choice to risk his life mattered, both for his own group and Aimee's.  He learned things and got better, and more importantly he learned to value the things he already had like friendship, instead of pinning his hopes on Twu Wuv with someone he barely even knew.

Maybe someday those two do end up in a relationship.  The ending doesn't prevent that, it just has them in different places, on different courses.  It leaves them like real people, in a spot where even if you love someone or lust after someone you don't have to choose between Twu Wuv or Only Friends or Bitter Enemies.  You can have a thing where there is some love, and fondness, and maybe some lust, and who knows where you end up over the years.

This has immense appeal to me.

Relationships are complicated, and they can be good and fulfilling even if they look nothing like a fairy tale.  I enjoy when movies acknowledge that, and give us some stories that reflect the complexity of real life.

Joel is a character I can believe.  Aimee is a great complement to him, especially because she isn't some damsel in distress that he 'wins' - she is doing her own thing, has her own agenda, and gets her moments of bravery and heroism too.

I want more science fiction like this, where a logically coherent world evolves out of a simple twist.  I want more love stories like this, where people struggle with love in a complicated situation and find paths to happiness that aren't Twu Wuv.  

This was a great movie, and you should watch it.

Hail to the King

I watched Aquaman recently and it got me riled up about the way we tell superhero stories.  The thing that gets to me in so many of these stories is the constant reliance on royal entitlement as a moral imperative.  We are asked to believe that the most important thing in the world is people of high birth being in command.  Aquaman ends up being the king of Atlantis.  He isn't the king because he knows what he is doing - he only visited the place for an hour before being declared king.  He knows absolutely nothing about the job, and will certainly be an incompetent ruler.

Aquaman gets to rule because of being born entitled.  Nothing more.

I would prefer a world where rulership by birthright isn't a feature, but I can totally deal with stories that include such structures.  The thing that gets me isn't the existence of dynastic rule, but rather that it is framed as a good thing.  We are asked to believe that all is right in the world so long as the people who had powerful parents get to exercise absolute power over others.  

What I want, in short, is that when someone born to power ends up in charge the movie doesn't try to tell me that it is right and necessary that they do so.

This, I think, is part of why I liked Black Panther so much less than most people.  I am glad that superhero movies got a little bit more diverse in terms of race.  What I can't stand is the pitch that Wakanda is a enlightened society, one which has evolved far beyond the rest of the world, and yet they have a herediary monarchy with a 'battle to the death' element tacked on as their system of government.

In Aquaman at the end we watch the main villain be carted away to a cell.  He is spared because he is royal, someone important.  The tens of thousands of deaths that just happened a moment ago are an afterthought - those people were just peasants, after all.  The important thing is that the rightful king is on the throne, and that all the royal people are alive and well.  Death and suffering among the commoners is just a thing that happens.

It all wouldn't matter much if it was just a movie.  Movies ask me to believe in all kinds of idiocy all the time, that isn't new.  It isn't just a movie though.  Our society is currently a battleground of ideas, and one of those ideas is the idea that rich and powerful people ought to be able to guarantee their children a place in the halls of power.

There are times when this becomes a real problem, like in the case of Justin Trudeau or George W Bush, neither of whom would have been anyone of note if they hadn't been born into powerful families.  It isn't limited to just those most visible cases though.  I have often heard people talk about how taxes ought to be low so that people can give huge amounts of money to their children.  They often pitch it as a moral good to be able to give their kids a hand up, while I see it is the opposite.

Helping kids by teaching them, by supporting them emotionally, by loaning them a vehicle for a move or a place to stay when life gets them down, these are things that we should absolutely give our children.  Millions of dollars?  Hell no.  It is bad enough that people can accumulate enormous wealth themselves, much less pass it down the line.

Political battles between left and right are often about rich vs. poor, dynastic wealth vs. redistribution, iron fisted rule vs. egalitarianism.  This is a real fight we are having right now, and it bothers me to see movies so clearly pitch the idea that the only people who matter are the rich and powerful.

I am okay with movies about the monarchs and gods.  I just don't want the movie to tell me that their position is *right* and *deserved* and that it is my job to die to maintain the status quo.

Failing to stick the landing

 Wendy, Pinkie Pie, and I have been watching Avatar:  The Last Airbender for months now.  We have a pizza and Avatar night every week, and tonight we finally finished the series.  Wendy and Pinkie Pie are way more into the show than I am, but I am definitely still enjoying it so far.  

Unfortunately, like many shows, this one failed to wrap up the series in a way that satisfies me.  It actually stumbled into what I consider one of the most common and unfortunate issues in entertainment - failing to resolve a difficult, tense choice properly.

One of the key things the show highlights about Aang is his conflicted feelings about killing.  He wants to defend the world, and it is made clear that his destiny is to fight and kill the Fire Lord.  He wants to fight, and to win, but not to kill.  In many places in the story this is a major source of issues and angst for our hero, and in fact there is a whole short arc devoted to him trying to resolve it.

Aang's decision to kill or not could be a powerful climax to the series.  He could kill the Fire Lord and regret it, saving the world but costing him personally.  He could refuse to kill and watch the world burn, which would be devastating in a different way.

Instead they decide at the pivotal moment that he doesn't have to make this choice.  He can just win without killing because magic.  Yay!  What a relief!

The problem is that all the tension in the scene falls completely flat.  What did training matter?  What did Aang's struggle over killing affect?  He just went straight to an answer he could have used in the first season, removing the need for much of the story so far, making many of the struggles of the protagonists entirely moot.

It seems as though the writers were desperate to have Aang not kill people, so desperate that they were willing to throw away half of their story.  It isn't as though a refusal to kill makes a story bad, far from it, but making that moral choice a cornerstone of your story and then just abandoning it is sad.  Thing is though, if Aang isn't willing to kill, why was there so much killing in the series?  Smashing ships, crushing tanks, exploding aircraft, there is no end of mass killing of bad guys by the heroes, Aang in particular.  Aang and his gang, without any sign of moral quandary, murder huge numbers of people throughout the series.

The people they murder without worry are the unnamed randoms, the soldiers without stories, the poor, the low.  But murder a lord?  We can't do that!  Killing the highborn *matters*, in a way that killing the lowborn does not.

Let me be clear - the murders of soldiers aren't shown on screen.  Avatar doesn't explicitly show the grisly deaths, but tossing people in the middle of the ocean, or crushing a vehicle they are in to nothing, is definitely lethal.  You can't ignore the fact though that the gang will kill without worry so long as the victim isn't someone important.  As soon as the victim is important, powerful, known, suddenly they will risk anything and everything to keep that person alive.

It manages to be both classist and cruddy storytelling at the same time.

Ending it all, done right

Usually when I click on obvious clickbait on the internet I feel bad about my choices.  It never brings fulfillment, only endless marching hordes of exclamation points, hoping to divert my attention from something that actually matters.

But sometimes I find a gem.

I just wandered across the alternate ending to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and it fixed so many things.  One of the things about Scott Pilgrim was that while most of the movie was an absolute joy to watch I found Scott's obsession with Ramona unpalatable at times.  At points their dynamic was good, but there was simply too much of entitled dude chasing a woman he has imbued with all his dreams and fantasies without much thinking about who she really is.

I wanted the film to end with Scott not being involved with Ramona.  I wanted him to realize that his desperate pursuit of an unknown was not true love, but simply infatuation.  I wanted him to grow, dammit.

And in this alternate ending, Ramona just walks away, and Scott ends up happily gaming with Knives, finally seeming to appreciate what she brings to him.


And Ramona should walk away.  Sure, there was a crazy thing between her and Scott, but this is the right ending to the story.  I like it both because I feel like this is the right story to tell, but also because I want to put the right lesson out into the world.  "Chase the woman you become infatuated with until she is yours." is not the thing I want the world to see.  I would have been happy with Scott alone at the end, Ramona having left because they didn't actually have anything, and Knives having left because Scott was an asshole to her.  That would have been good too.

But Ramona leaving and Scott and Knives finding a good place for the two of them to be - that is an ending I am so much happier with.

(Here is where I insert my usual snark, noting that polyamory as an option blows up the scripts of at least half of the movies ever.  Why not date both of them?  At least consider it!)

If only The Breakfast Club could put out a new ending to replace the final 5% of the movie... then I could die in peace.

On blood, the giving of

In movies and TV shows you often see people cutting themselves to extract blood.  The power of blood for rituals, for spells, for magic, is a common thread in our stories.  Somtimes you test to see if people will go berserk, or if they are a vampire, or perhaps you just want to gather their blood because they are special and it has power. 

The really foolish part about all this bloodletting is that people always seem to want to slash their palms.  They grab knives, slide their hands down swords, and slice n dice their palms to bits.

This is a terrible idea.

Look, if you want to cut yourself in an obvious way you should *clearly* make a slash on the back of your arm just above the wrist.  Easy to bandage, easy to keep an eye on.  When you slash your palm though you have a bandage around your hand.  This is a disaster from a utility standpoint.  You are clumsy, you risk opening the wound if you use your hand for anything, the bandage will be hard to apply properly and will easily come off.  The back of the forearm doesn't have any of these penalties!

Plus the back of the forearm has little in the way of nerves so it won't hurt nearly as much.

So the next time a wizened old warlock tells you that your blood has the power to do some big exciting ritual blah blah blah do yourself a favour and don't cut your palm.  When the big powerful leader demands a show of loyalty and for some reason they want that to include blood, keep in mind that you need your hands for things and the big power leader wants you to be effective.  Back of the forearm, that is the ticket.

You are welcome.

We have air

The premise that humanity needs to go to another planet because Earth is too polluted is a common one in science fiction movies and it drives me bonkers.  Somehow writers don't seem to get that even if Earth gets nuked, climate change runs amok, and resources get used up, it is still about a billion times better than anywhere else.

You know what Earth, even a wrecked up Earth, has that Mars and Titan and Ganymede don't have?  AIR.  We have AIR here, air a human can safely breathe.  That alone makes Earth, even a sad, down on its luck Earth, better than anyplace else.

But you know what else Earth has?  Livable temperature ranges.  Even with climate change Earth has temperatures in the -50 to +50 range.  We can survive those.  Mars is -60C.  Titan is -179C.

Our water here is polluted.  Our resources are being used.  But you know what Mars and Titan and everywhere else doesn't have?  Pure water!  Fossil fuels!  Strong sunlight for growing things and generating power!  They don't have that stuff.

I mean, unless you go to Venus or Mercury.  They have lots of solar power available.  Also instant death, either by burning or disintegration, depending on which surface you land on.

It irks me even more when this sort of thing is used as a justification for colonization of other planets.  Other planets are useful for research, certainly, but we haven't colonized Antarctica, and it is about a billion times more hospitable than anywhere off planet, so until we bother with that, then we have no business whatever thinking that colonizing other planets is a useful endeavour.

Maybe we will try to colonize other planets because GET EM, THAT'S WHY but let us not pretend it is useful for anything.

I just watched the movie The Titan and it set me off.  The whole premise was standard nonsense - the Earth is in rough shape, so we will genetically engineer people to live on the surface of Titan, not requiring oxygen, and capable of hanging out in -179C temperatures.  If we can do that why the hell aren't we genetically engineering people to live on the parts of Earth that are wrecked?  It has be about a billion times easier and cheaper.  The Titan was also a complete piece of garbage from about fifteen other angles too, but the idiotic premise was the cherry on top of a poop cake.

I know, I know, I shouldn't get all worked up about sci fi movies having idiotic premises.  But the thing is, they don't have to be stupid.  You could have a premise like Seven Eves, which requires humanity to find a new home in a way that absolutely makes sense.  I don't mind people making up worlds with new cosmic phenomena or lightsabers or whatever but I do mind when the worlds they make up don't hold together at all and the characters' decisions make no sense.

A crime against Batman

I watched Batman vs. Superman this weekend because I knew it was going to be bad and it finally appeared on Netflix so I didn't have to pay real money for it.  I had heard about why people thought it was bad and I was curious to see if I would agree with the haters.

I did agree with them, but not for the reasons they cited.

The problem with the movie was that Batman was the worst.  Superman is a garbage superhero, we all know that.  He is boring, in only the way an invulnerable demigod on a planet full of normal people can be.  Batman can be great.  Just not in this movie.

The thing about the Justice League is that it is full of invulnerable demigods with outrageous powers.  Also Batman, who is a guy who is good at martial arts.  Batman can outfight a half dozen assailants at once.  Superman can throw an aircraft carrier at an army.  These people should not be on a team together.  So why have Batman?

Because he is smart.  Batman is a master tactician, always outmaneuvering his enemy.  Batman plans, and thinks, and gets in people's heads.  That is the only thing he brings to the table that is remotely useful.

But in this movie Batman is an idiot.  He gets outthought by Wonder Woman, Superman, and Lex Luthor.  He is irrational and makes hasty, foolish choices.  His main contribution to the film is to be Luthor's dupe.  So much for The Detective.

Batman also generally has an aversion to guns and refuses to kill.  In Batman vs. Superman he uses guns regularly but foolishly.  He is happy to kill people but insists on giving them lots of chances to stab him.  I can live with Batman who won't use guns and won't kill.  I can also live with Batman who uses guns and kills people.  What is garbage is Batman who wades into combat with heavily armed opponents just using his fists and occasionally uses guns to kill people.  If you are willing to murder with guns, why the hell aren't you using guns all the time?  Be SMART.  The guy who is totally willing to use guns but insists on punching people for no reason is the opposite of a master tactician - he is a fool.  Either be a deadly sniper or be a brawler, but pick one.

Also Batman is supposed to be human.  Tough, smart, well trained, but human.  The demigods on the Justice League can all get punched through a building but Batman can't.  He has to out think his opponents so that he won't get punched through buildings.  Instead the movie decides to have Batman put on a suit of armour and get punched through buildings without any damage done.  No problem!  But he doesn't use the super armour suit all the time, which would make sense - no, he just puts it on when it is time for someone to punch him through a building.  That way he can use a normal suit and get stabbed by random dudes with knives the rest of the time.

I was hoping for Batman vs. Superman.  Instead I got Rich Idiot vs. Cardboard Smile.  I expected the Cardboard Smile, but the Rich Idiot was a real disappointment.

Possibly the Dark Knight series of films set the bar for Batman too high.  In any case, this new Batman utterly fails.

Instructional video

I went and saw the movie Professor Marsden and the Wonder Women this week.  It made a big splash in the polyamory community because it focuses on the relationship between three people that happened roughly 80 years ago.  Polyamory isn't well accepted now, and it was far more fringe then.  I don't even know that they had words for it at the time.  The title character, Professor Marsden, was also the original author for Wonder Woman, hence the title.

After I heard about the movie I read a review of it by Franklin Veaux, who is a bit of a polyamory celebrity.  His review was brutal and he made it clear that he thought the movie was a disaster, particularly in terms of how it portrayed polyamory.  I went into the movie expecting it to be pretty bad, largely on the basis of the review.

It wasn't bad!  I wouldn't give it a stack of awards or anything but I enjoyed it perfectly well.  One of the main things that ground my gears about the show was it portraying lie detectors as being extremely effective at ferreting out the truth, which they are decidedly are not.  They are unreliable and should not be used in law enforcement.

My review of the movie largely depends on the perspective a viewer goes in with.  If you expect it to be an educational treatise on how best to conduct poly relationships it is an utter failure.  The characters do all kinds of crappy things to one another and they don't do poly right.  In particular there are a lot of instances of couple supremacy where the established married couple place their relationship as far more important and permanent than their relationship with the third person involved and she ends up being badly treated.

But seriously folks, this is a movie.  Nobody going into a movie should expect it to be an educational video on how to live properly!  Romcoms aren't good education in how to run monogamous relationships either.  Everybody has to make lots of bad decisions for the thing to feel realistic and be entertaining.  Calm discussions about boundaries and good communication do not make great entertainment.

I think Veaux's problems with the movie generally stem from him hoping that it would be positive poly activism and it doesn't do that particularly.  It does show a poly relationship that works, mostly, and bring a lot of happiness, mostly.  If you go into it with the idea of seeing how such a relationship might work you will probably be satisfied with it.

The movie won't teach you how to do poly right, but it might give you an introduction that grants some perspective and normalizes it a bit and I am perfectly happy with that.  Personally I am just happy to see models of poly behaviour in mainstream media, even if they don't show it off at its best.

Unfortunately very few people will see the film as it flopped in theatres and is now stuck in a tiny run. I wish that it had done better as it could have been an positive vehicle for poly exposure, but I won't fault the movie for that. It was fine, though never brilliant.

So if you want to see a movie about a polyamorous triad, Professor Marsden and the Wonder Women does that.  Don't go in expecting model behaviour though, and please ignore all the nonsense about lie detectors.

An unnecessarily happy ending

I saw the movie Chappie this weekend.  It was a bad movie that managed to entertain me despite its badness.  Throughout most of the movie I would have deemed it quite fun indeed, but unfortunately the ending really fell to bits.

Chappie is about a robot called Chappie in the near future who acquires self awareness and begins to rapidly learn, growing up from unable to speak or understand anything to functioning roughly like a teenager within about 5 days.  Chappie is involved with criminals and desperately violent makers of war robots so there is some action involved too.

A lot of the time when people try to write science fiction movies I end up being really disappointed by them.  I don't mind preposterous assumptions as long as the movie makes those assumptions clear and then writes a good story that makes sense afterwards.  Chappie was normal in that regard because the way that Chappie acquires consciousness is unrealistic and the rate at which Chappie learns is ridiculous.  However, the story of a robot growing up and trying to cope with the terrible conditions it finds itself in worked for me.

The problem is that the movie should have ended tragically.  Chappie and most of the humans surrounding it should have perished.  There was only one reasonably sympathetic character in the movie to my mind and it still made sense for him to die the way the story played out.  However, that doesn't happen.  The plot instead calls for Chappie to personally discover the secret of completely learning, digitizing, and transferring consciousness from body to body, including from human to robot.  This way instead of everyone dying in a savage battle most of the main characters get to have stupid and unsatisfying resurrection scenes at the end of the movie.

I can cope with resurrection scenes, but when you just randomly tack them on to the end of a movie it cheapens everything that went before it.  A character's heroic death suddenly isn't much of a thing when the writers randomly and without foreshadowing simply bring them back to life.

There is also the problem with the visuals.  A lot of the scenes in the movie involve using computers and mostly they manage to make it look reasonable.  Some hacker movies can't stop themselves from having the hackers manipulating giant 3D constructs when 'writing code' and Chappie at least avoided that... until the consciousness mapping part.

Apparently you can look at a digitized consciousness as an animated image, and it looks like a pixellated random colour map on a computer screen.

I know you want the characters and audience to see *something* when the main character suddenly acquires the ability to replicate human and robot consciousness, but having it randomly be a splatter of colours with a constant shimmy to it just makes me cringe.

The movie could have been so much better if either the foolish and unnecessary consciousness mapping was removed or if it just didn't work and all the characters died in the end.  A tragedy would have been infinitely better than the Deus Ex Machina (seriously!) mess that comprised the denouement of Chappie.

It is just sloppy.  Tell me what bullshit I have to believe for the story to work, then write a good story.  Don't get halfway through and then decide to make up a bunch of new bullshit to desperately scavenge an acceptably happy ending out of a story that shouldn't be that way.  The best science fiction explores what happens in a world with a twist, it doesn't keep adding twists until the story can be turned into pablum for the masses.

Low expectations, but not low enough.

I watched X-Men:  Apocalypse on Monday.  At midnight the construction crews outside my house were using some incredibly loud machine that was literally vibrating my condo from 12 floors away.  Since sleep was not likely to come to me I had to figure out something else to do.  The solution I came up with was to watch a bad superhero movie that I wouldn't mind quitting halfway through if the machine stopped.

I went into Apocalypse with low expectations, you see.  I knew the critics hated it.  I picked it because I knew I would be willing to stop watching it partway through.

It failed to meet my expectations, even then.

When I think about superhero movies that utterly fail I find they have many things in common.  They regularly try to shoehorn too many stories into the movie and end up with boring characters and rushed plot.  Apocalypse did this spectacularly.  It tried to have a character arc for Jean Grey, Magneto, Cyclops, Angel, Quicksilver, Storm, Professor X, and Mystique.  That doesn't even include the main villain!

Now I get that X-Men movies are ensemble hero movies, so you are going to have some amount of story spread around, but that was WAY too much to try to do in a single outing.  You need a couple characters that the plot focuses on that have good development and go through changes and the rest of the crew just does the thing you expect and fills out the background.  Trying to do too much just leaves every single interaction feeling rushed, unsupported, and deeply unsatisfying.

Directors should bloody well know this.  Studios that hand directors hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies should bloody well know this.  When there is this much money on the line, how does everyone fail so spectacularly at knowing basic things?

It wasn't just the heroes that were overdone though.  Apocalypse himself was a total bore.  Powerful villains can be fun even though the best ones are usually not particularly powerful at all, like Joker or Lex Luthor.  Unfortunately the movie portrays Apocalypse in ways that are absurd.  He can wave his hand and simply cause people's heads to fall off.  He can level a city and reform the smashed bits of it into a fantastically complicated, kilometer tall temple in a few seconds.  He can teleport, regenerate, empower others, control all technology, and turn other people's powers against them.  He can shrug off outrageously powerful physical, psychic, and magical attacks like nothing.

Worst of all though is his powers were unbounded.  Each scene the director granted him some new and completely absurd power that he would conveniently forget to use in the next scene.  Where were his instant death attacks and city smashing powers when he was in a fight?  Why didn't he simply teleport away when things got bad, or cause all of the X-Men's heads to fall off?

Apocalypse also completely lacked any personality or unique features.  He wanted to destroy the world for no particular reason.  He had no weaknesses, no individuality, nothing to make him remotely interesting or relatable.  Apocalypse wanted to destroy the world because he was a villain, and that is what they do, right?

Apocalypse didn't frighten me.  He wasn't interesting.  It was clear that his powers weren't a problem for the heroes to solve, but rather a plot device that was made up fresh every five minutes.

Speaking of powers that weren't used, the heroes were just as bad.  Quicksilver is a hero who can move so quickly he can casually walk around explosions while they are happening.  Not just that, but when a massive explosion is wrecking a gigantic mansion he is capable of rescuing 30 people who are all simultaneously a few meters from an advancing wall of flame in various parts of the building.

And yet he forgets to use his ability to save the day to stop the evil soldiers, rescue the lad in distress, or to easily beat up the villains threatening his less powerful friends.  He could have defeated the plot of the enemies and pounded them all into submission quite handily.  Apocalypse himself was apparently a bit too powerful for Quicksilver to defeat, but any other challenge the heroes found out about was utterly trivial... unless Quicksilver conveniently forgot about his powers, which he did whenever the plot called for it.

The last thing that absolutely drove me nuts about this movie was the way the characters themselves ignored the plot of the movie.  Just before the ending Magneto, empowered by Apocalypse, was busy destroying the earth.  He was simultaneously smashing every city on the planet to rubble, shattering bridges, knocking down buildings, sinking ships, and launching pieces of metal in random directions across the globe.  The mayhem he was causing would have killed millions of people.  He finally had a change of heart away from total global annihilation and decided to fight against Apocalypse instead.

Everyone ignored the genocide part.  As soon as the fight ended he was buddy buddy with the X-Men again, and everyone was completely chill with the fact that he was the biggest mass murderer in history.  MILLIONS dead at his hands, and the other characters just shrug it off without a blink.

Its cool.  He's on our team again.  Until, you know, he gets in another one of his moods and tries to wipe out humanity a second time.

How can you expect anyone to take your plot seriously when the characters themselves completely ignore it?  I get that you want to raise the stakes and use CGI to show us world landmarks being destroyed, but why pay for that CGI if the people in the world pretend that it isn't even happening?

What a travesty.

So much fire

I have been binge watching Game of Thrones this past week.  It is a hard show to watch, in that even when I know a favourite character is going to die it is difficult to watch the scenes leading up to the death, though the death itself is often easy enough.  Even when I know a high tension situation will result in the protagonist escaping I desperately worry about them dying nonetheless.

One thing I have noticed is that there is WAY too much fire in that show.

Everywhere anyone goes there are torches, candles, blazing braziers, and lanterns.  Somehow everyone has access to armies of people with nothing else to do but produce light for them.

Now I know that most of the characters are nobles who in fact do have armies of peasants producing things for them, but this is true even for those who are desperately poor and in dire circumstances.  Every library scene seems to have dozens of candles burning for no reason.  Every bedroom has lanterns going at all hours.  All kinds of nearly abandoned places have fires burning merrily at all times in every corner... who is chopping all that wood?!?

I know, I know.  It is for mood, for good shots, so we can actually see the characters.  With reasonable lighting in the scenes everything would be shadows, and we wouldn't be able to get the most out of gratuitous nudity if things weren't well lit.

But geez, do the writers have any idea how much effort it takes to get all the oil and wax and wood that the people in that world burn with no care whatever for how long it took to acquire it?  I know about chopping wood, and nobody would waste that much when they could get someone to do something else productive instead of flatten every forest in the nation.

I am fine with visions of the future, dragons, blood magic, and absurdly large ancient buildings.  But there is WAY too much fire in Game of Thrones.

Spend a few weekends chopping wood yourself and you won't be able to unsee it either, mark my words.

Feral spaceman kills people. Are you not entertained?

This weekend I watched Riddick, a futuristic action movie starring Vin Diesel.  It is the third in the series, though I didn't even realize that when I watched it and I didn't feel like I was missing out.  I really liked it until right at the end a scene went wrong and it bothered me enough to shake my happy feelings about the movie.  (Massive spoilers, in case it wasn't obvious.)

The film got pretty meh reviews, but the complaints everybody else had were largely different from mine.  Mostly people hated the dialogue and the characters, whereas I quite liked them.  People think Vin Diesel is a horrible actor, and they are completely right.  He is the worst.  But even the worst actor can be fun to watch sometimes, and Vin wasn't called up on to do anything interesting here.

In short, Riddick is violent, gory, and brutal.  It has great conflict between four different factions that shifts throughout the movie in ways that are satisfying.  Many futuristic movies totally screw up tech, but Riddick does it right.  There is tech but they don't try to explain how it works or make me cringe with pseudo scientific gobbledegook - the characters just use the tech naturally.  There are advanced cybernetics, energy weapons, FLT travel, and other toys but they fit into the movie smoothly, by and large.  It feels dirty and rusted, patched together, a lot like a western setting but with lasers - it reminds me of Firefly, and that is a good thing.

The conflict mostly takes place between a bunch of violent mercenaries on a deserted planet, so one might expect that the token woman in the film would be there mostly to get rescued.  There is only a token woman called Dahl, but she is a total beast who kicks people's asses.  When they try shitty cat calling, she beats them up.  When one of the bastards tries to rape her, she kicks his ass and acts like it was no big thing.  She also is a lesbian which is great because more queer representation in film is good, especially amongst the hardcore hetero male action movie set.

But.

Near the movie's end the shit is hitting the fan and Riddick tells people how it is going to be.  He goes on about who he is going to kill and how they are going to get away from the aliens, and finishes off with "And then I am going balls deep into Dahl, but only because she will ask me nicely."  It was a jarring because Dahl had already spent enough of the movie fighting off misogynistic crap from the evildoers, she hardly needed the hero presuming she will be available for sex too!

The plot continues, and at the end of the movie Riddick is being rescued by Dahl, pulled up a wire into a spaceship.  She grinds against him, then says "I want to act you something really nicely...." and we are left to assume that they run off to have sex as soon as they get into the safety of the ship.

This makes me grumpy.  You get points for putting lesbians into action movies as fighters, sure, but you lose ALL those points when you have them suddenly convert to being straight just because the male protagonist is so damn sexy.  It especially irked me because there was a superb way to finish that scene that the movie already set up!  Earlier in the movie Dahl says to a guy who is hitting on her "I don't fuck men."  All she had to do when rescuing Riddick was say "You know, you were right when you told us how things were going to play out.  Except for just one thing... I still don't fuck men."

Bam!  She gets to actually stay queer, the conclusion is nicely foreshadowed, and it is even a bit funny when the superman hero of the series actually gets it wrong.  It would humanize him a bit, and make him much more of a character, and less of a caricature.

I found a lot to like about Riddick, but it seems my misogyny detector is set higher these days than even before and stuff like this gets to me.

Just a little off the edges

I watched Scarface (1983) for the first time this weekend.  It is an iconic film, one that I knew I was expected to have experienced, but I have enormous gaps in my pop culture education.  Watching the movie was a mixed bag.

I enjoyed the acting and I felt like the actors brought me into the world they inhabited.  I believed them.

It is good to now know where "Say hello to my little friend" and "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women" came from.  I knew those phrases, but now I have seen their origin which helps when people reference them.

Old movies are *slow* though.  This is the thing that really got me - scenes just went on for a long time, far longer than was necessary to convey the message that the scene was there for.  I am sure people will tell me that it is about mood or something, but honestly it just felt like 40% of the movie could have been cut without losing anything.

That lack of proper trimming is the key to my dislike.  I subscribe to the theory that something is done when there is nothing left to remove.  I talked about Downton Abbey quite some time ago and one of the things I most admired about the writing there was how much they could cram into tiny amounts of time.  If an encounter was going to go predictably, they simply didn't show it.  Instead they would have a character toss away a single line to indicate how things had played out.  Scarface is like many older movies in that it didn't try to do that, or at least it wasn't done with enough vigour.

I suspect people will talk about how my generation wants everything instantly and has no patience, but mostly it is just that I want to be engaged all the time.  If I am going to put my time into a movie I want that movie to grab me from start to finish.  If it is going to drag and have overlong scenes whose point is already made then I would rather be killing monsters on the internet, thank you very much.  I don't want to just pass time, I want the story to leap out of the screen and not let me go.  I have shit to do that will entertain me actively so if I am going to try out passive entertainment it had better be a ride.

I don't regret watching Scarface.  It gives me references I would otherwise miss, and gave me some extra insight into the way film has changed over time.  But it wasn't all I was hoping it would be.  It too often was just chilling, doing nothing really interesting, letting time pass.

And that isn't so much my thing, when it comes to movies.

Free as the wind

My last post touched a nerve, it seems.  I got a lot of comments on my critique of Guardians of the Galaxy, some inquisitive, some supportive, some critical.  One in particular was interesting because it contained the phrase:

Comedies _must_ be free to offensive, or they may become less funny, which is antithetical.

Now it is true that comedies must be free to be offensive.  I would call that a pillar of free speech, not to mention comedy!

But it is important to note that I never suggested that comedies shouldn't be free to be offensive.  They should.  I should also be free to call them out on their shit.

There is a marked difference between something being free to violate the boundaries of good taste, and something being immune to criticism.  The government is not going to start policing comedies using language I don't like, notably randomly referring to women as whores.  I wouldn't want the government to do that; in fact I would fight against any such thing.  But the government also isn't going to stop me yelling on the internet about how much I dislike randomly slinging around the word whore at women in movies for no reason.  (There are reasons to use words like that in art.  There are times and places for it, no question.  But this place in this movie was not one of them.)

This smacks of someone wanting something they like to be immune to criticism.  Both by my post and by my writing history you can see that I do not support government stepping in to censor comedies' use of language like this, so it strikes me as likely that what the commenter is really getting at is that they don't like their thing being criticized.

I get that reaction.  I have felt that way before and I conflated my desire to support a thing I liked with a violation of freedom of speech.  However, it is extremely important to differentiate these things.  It is also important to remember that just because someone's criticism of a thing makes you uncomfortable does not mean that their criticism is wrong, nor that the thing must be protected from that criticism.

There are no end of things I enjoyed in the past that have real problems upon further reflection.  That doesn't mean those things have no value, nor that I can't enjoy the good bits.  It does mean though that it is worth examining the problems that are there so we can take lessons from them, and maybe improve in future.

This situation comes up all the time, enough so that it is worth repeating.  If someone criticizes a thing, and you want to respond by saying that people have to have freedom of speech, make damn sure that the criticism actually suggested curtailing free speech.  If the criticism was just saying that the thing in question is shitty though, then you are engaging in a strawman attack and completely missing the point.  Rather than making an inappropriate free speech argument, it is probably a good idea to examine why you feel so defensive about it; usually it is because deep down you realize that the criticism has some merit.

Villains of the Galaxy

I just finished watching Guardians of the Galaxy.  It isn't new by this point, so I am going to spoil it for you.  Since it took in $635 million worldwide, it is safe to say that audiences in general really loved it.  I have a much less rosy response.

The movie has some normal superhero movie flaws.  The plot is absurd.  The villains are ludicrous and hard to take seriously.  There are plenty of points that are meant to be emotional, heartwrenching, or full of tension but instead become a joke because the writing is weak.  (Seriously, dying in space from being in hard vacuum and you save yourself by phoning someone, who picks you up in five seconds?  From across the galaxy?  Why even pretend to have a plot?)

I often enjoy interesting tech ideas in science fiction books and movies, but this one is a mess.  Some people use knives to fight, some people use laser cannons, and some people use pencils that can fly through the air and kill hundreds of enemies (and ships) in a single second.  It is ridiculous.

However, it is a superhero movie about a talking tree with magic powers, a cybernetic raccoon with super intelligence, and two random guys who don't seem to be much good at anything really, but they are in the movie anyway.

Oh yeah, also there is a woman on the team.  Which is where all the trouble starts.

See, I get that when you have an intellectual property that has a five person hero team with one female on it, you don't have gender balance.  That is the breaks, when using specific source material.  But when you are making up a universe around those heroes you could at least try a little not to have everyone be male, right?

Evidently not.

And okay, fine, the movie portrays nearly all men, but at least the female lead gets to be treated reasonably, right?  Because while I don't like the male dominated universe, surely the writers and editors wouldn't just have the sole female protagonist be the target of gendered slurs for no reason, right?

Wrong again.

For some reason the raccoon, when being introduced to the female lead, refers to her as a broad.  He could have just used the word she, he could have asked about the green skinned lady, or found some other way to refer to her.  But no, lets just slip in a gendered slur for no reason.  To establish the raccoon as a tough guy, or something.  Because it is totally worth torpedoing the female character to establish a male one, right?

Even more egregious though is a scene near the movie's end where one of the male team calls her a whore.  Not because he is angry, or because she has done something that might suggest promiscuity or sex work, but just because why not.  It is just casually tossed in there without any justification or sense.  Seriously people?  Use her fucking name!

This stuff really bothers me.  I get irritable at movies that have preposterous science sometimes.  I grump at plots that are ridiculous.  But otherwise I had a reasonably good time and suspended disbelief long enough to enjoy the ridiculous scenes and pretty visuals.

But when writers toss in garbage like that it just breaks the movie for me and makes me sad.  That shit had to go past editors and public relations people and nobody did anything about it.  Nobody even realized how unnecessary and shitty this kind of writing is.  Is there really a demographic who wants silly space romps and insists that women in them need to be randomly degraded for absolutely no reason?  Are we pandering to those assholes still?

We can do so much better than this.

Our heroes

I have a problem with heroes sometimes.  Last week I watched Fast and Furious 6, and while I got the ridiculous driving and fighting scenes I expected, I also got a taste of heroism that left me troubled.  Part of the film involves the villain getting captured right after he murders 100 or so random people.  Then he reveals that his henchmen have captured the hero's sister, so the hero insists that the villain be set free, and given a terrible weapon that could kill millions.

Of course in the movie the villain drives away, is intercepted by the heroes, and eventually dies, saving the damsel in distress.  During the escape one of the heroes perishes, and so do ten or so other people.

To me this is the opposite of heroism.  The movie is fluff, but it tries to place the hero's devotion to his family as a good thing, and him as a rogue with a heart of gold.  To me heroic actions are not ones where the hero causes mass carnage to all kinds of random people to save one person the hero cares about - that is just being self centred.  Letting a mass murderer loose with a terrifying weapon so you can chase them down personally makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.  A real hero puts themselves at risk to save others, rather than putting others at risk to save themselves.

Sure, Fast and Furious movies are hardly real life.  But they do speak to how people think, and the way that they portray heroes is disturbing when I think of things like the gun control debate that rages right now, and which reignites after every mass shooting event.

People make it clear that they want guns, and they want to have them so that they personally can defend their loved ones.  They aren't concerned with the fact that having a gun makes them far more likely to die, and that their loved ones are in much more danger with a gun around.  They aren't concerned about the collateral damage and the risk.  They just want to be the hero with the gun.

We would be far better served by heroes who accept that they shouldn't be the ones pulling the trigger.  By heroes who place the lives of other faceless people above their own when the risk to those other people is much greater.

Self sacrifice is heroic.  Sacrificing others is not.  I wish the heroes we got to see on the big screen and elsewhere more clearly followed that ideal.

Not good

I went to see the Warcraft movie.  It was not good.

On the other hand, I had a lot of fun.

This should surprise no one, really.  The movie was a CGI explosion, full of people riding gryphons and orcs and magic spells.  It was chock full of all kinds of references to Warcraft that I enjoyed greatly.  Also the reviews were absolutely awful.  All that adds up to a movie that hardcore Warcraft nerds like me will enjoy, and most normal people will find ridiculous.

It couldn't have been otherwise, really.  A movie trying to tell a story with a bazillion named characters that is way too long for normal movie length isn't going to work.  They could have told the whole story and had it feel rushed and ridiculous, and that would have angered the Warcraft nerds who actually wanted to see all the stuff.  Instead they chopped it down and only told a small chunk of the story, which left the ending feeling arbitrary and unfulfilling.

So if you are considering going to see the movie, consider this:

If you will mark out for people riding through Elwynn Forest and hearing this in the background


then you should probably go see Warcraft.

If you remember fighting Moroes in Karazhan, especially if you tried it with 3 Dwarves, 2 frost mages, and 2 paladins, (which kinda trivializes Moroes) then you should go see Warcraft.

If you are a normal person and don't know what the hell those last two sentences mean, you should probably give it a pass.  It is a badly written, nonsensical movie with really good CGI and epic scenes of magic and mayhem.  There are lots of movies out there these days that have all the CGI and far less of the awful.

Also, as a side note that probably deserves it own post, can somebody tell directors of movies that not everyone in a fantasy movie needs to be a white guy?  I get that they are working from established lore, but come on.  This isn't feudal England, we are talking about a world with fireballs and murlocs and fel magic.  Add a bit more diversity to the movie, even if it does drive some of the grognards to frenzies of anger.  The future will thank you.

Thumbs up

Last week I watched two movies that had some things in common, but which ended up making me react in totally different ways.  They were Ender's Game and Terminator:  Genisys.  Both have connections to my younger self and a big claim to nostalgia.  I love Ender's Game the novel (though the author is a wretched excuse for a human) and I wanted the movie version to be good.  I wasn't optimistic on that count though because I couldn't imagine how you could do that movie properly without it being a six hour epic and I was right to think that.  It was obvious that it would have to be a cut back version of the story and to no one's surprise that version ended up being bad.

It wasn't just the limitations of the time and format though.  Unfortunately Ender's Game the movie went with a bunch of ridiculous space tropes that make no sense, particularly the chase and fight scenes in ludicrously crowded asteroid fields.  A pro tip:  A real asteroid field is a hunk of rock, and then another hunk of rock 10,000 km away.  And then one more hunk of rock 1,000,000 km away.  You don't zoom around in fighter jet style maneuvers around tightly packed, spinning pieces of space stone.

Maybe there was a decent movie that could have been made by ignoring most of the Ender's Game book and cutting it down to a totally different story.  Maybe.  But the movie failed to deliver anything resembling a good experience, and also failed to deliver on the Ender's Game story.  I could forgive it not being like Ender's Game if it was good, and I could forgive it being bad if it was Ender's Game, but instead the movie fails on all counts.

Terminator:  Genisys on the other hand was schlock but at least it delivered where it counted.  Arnie played a mostly humourless terminator killing machine who displayed more nobility than any human could muster and that carried the movie on its own.  The plot makes little sense, the ending was hackneyed, and the acting (Arnie aside) was bad.  I don't know if I should blame the writers or the actors but I wasn't impressed.

But it turns out I will forgive a movie all kinds of flaws if Arnie nails his role and he did.  Genisys could have succeeded by either having Arnie do his thing or it could have succeeded by being a good movie.  It managed one of those things.

Genisys also ended with a direct setup for more movies.  While on some level I feel silly for supporting such rubbish I can't deny that the formula of Arnie plus random hacked together nonsense is good enough for me, and I will certainly see any additional movies that go with that formula.

I am not that picky about my movies.  They just have to get one thing right, and Genisys succeeded while Ender's Game did not.

A really big sword

I saw The Edge of Tomorrow this weekend.  I loved it to pieces.  Action movie with a cataclysmic setting with cool future tech but modern enough to make it relatable; right up my alley.

It also doesn't hurt that the most badass soldier in the world is a woman wielding a gigantic sword.

See, you have to be terrified of an opponent wielding a sword in a world of guns.  Because when you see a swarm of enemies coming towards you shooting grenades and machine guns and one of them is rushing in wielding a preposterously large blade you can reach only one conclusion.

She is so dangerous and going to kill so many of her enemies that she can't even carry all the ammo she would need if she were using guns for all of her killing.  I mean, she is a badass, and obviously could carry a *lot* of ammo.  But even that large amount of ammo simply won't do to kill all the stuff she is going to kill that day.

Now that is a scary prospect.  Or a heartwarming prospect, depending on which side you are on!

The movie makes no damn sense from a science standpoint but that doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of it at all.  It doesn't try to explain physics, but happily breaks all the rules in order to tell an entertaining story.  Plus in a two hour movie having about one hour devoted to a training montage is pretty fantastic.

So ridiculous, yes.  But also fighting aliens with gigantic swords for reasons of being so awesome, for which I will forgive nearly any transgression against science.

Gravity is a harsh mistress

I watched the movie Gravity this week.  It definitely had great production values, and despite rampant criticism towards the acting, I actually really liked the job that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney did.  I mean, Clooney was just playing that guy he plays, but he does do that guy really well!  I shouldn't be too critical of a guy just doing that one job that everyone knows he is good at.

Unfortunately for the movie there was one particularly unforgivable crime against physics that made me really grumpy and tarnished one of the pivotal scenes in the movie.  The scene in question is where the two astronauts are tumbling past the space station, trying desperately to grab on, while the cord tethering them together gets caught on various things.  They fail to get a hold and are almost past the station when Bullock's foot gets caught in ropes.  So far, so good.  Her foot is entangled, the pair of them are stopped, and Clooney is still attached to Bullock so neither of them is going anywhere.  Clooney then gives a long speech about how he has to let the tether go to save her, and Bullock predictably objects.  They sit there, immobile, having this long chat... then Clooney untethers and rapidly zooms off into space.

THAT IS NOT HOW MOTION IN ZERO G WORKS.

They were stopped.  The slightest tug on the tether would pull Clooney back in, and both of them would be fine.  There was no force acting on Clooney to pull him away!  It was noted by all the people who critiqued the science of the film as a major hole, and it totally broke the scene for me.  The worst part is that most of the zero G movement in the film is done well.  They have people tumbling and hovering and moving pretty much just right.  However, somebody wrote this damn scene and had to have it just this way so they slapped science silly and made a hack job of it.

Now I don't mind science being sacrificed for plot.  If your plot needs faster than light travel, then add it in.  Don't belabour the point with stupid pseudo science, just say "FTL works, moving on".  But this was totally unnecessary.  If instead the two of them had *just* missed stopping on the station they could have drifted away with agonizing slowness, and then Clooney could have shoved Bullock back toward the station, saving her and causing him to drift off into space.  Bam!  Same scene, same emotional impact, no physics violation.  That took me 30 seconds to think up.

I don't mind breaking physics when there isn't another way.  But when you can fix the holes with a trivial solution that maintains all of the emotional impact there is no excuse.

There were other issues in the movie with science, but honestly they were far more minor and didn't break me in the same way.  In particular the debris coming in towards the characters at 50,000 km/h shouldn't have been visible - random holes and explosions should just have happened without warning or visual cues!  That might even have been cooler, honestly.  Still, it didn't trigger my sense of scientific horror in the same way.

So yeah, break science if you have to.  Just don't do it when you don't need to, that's all!