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Ultimate X-Men: Hard Lessons

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The one thing that sticks out to me about my most recent X-Men book, Hard Lessons, is that there really weren’t any. There were several bridge stories placed to catch us up on characters that haven’t been around lately and to remind us about bad guys that will probably pop up again soon, but lessons? Nothing apparent to me! This doesn’t bother me all that much, but it is a little weird.

Instead of lessons, there are these stories. What’s up with Professor Charles Xavier? He’s maybe out of money courtesy of old enemies, and he’s also held hostage at a bank. And he’s a devious son of a bitch, which is one of those things I like about the Ultimate line. Yay, layers and shades of grey![1] What’s up with Storm and Wolverine? The one is looking for (and, okay, has just found) the other, and their pasts are about to team up to bite them both in the ass. What’s up with Rogue and Gambit? They’re about to face the return of Juggernaut, who, um, I kind of forgot had been in a previous book? Anyhow, all three stories produce incremental plot shifts that indicate to me big things are on the horizon, even if I can’t get the shape of anything but their inevitability. Which in some books might be an annoying delaying tactic; but in the hands of Brian K. Vaughan the stories are every bit as good as the future glimpses are.

[1] Well, deeper layers and more shades of grey than at least Marvel in the 1960s. I could be underselling later and modern Marvel due to ignorance, and I clearly was underselling the early Marvel catalog, which itself had a lot of depth. Especially for the time.

The Amber Spyglass

All things considered, I’d rather live in the parallel universe where Philip Pullman wrote a better conclusion to his fairly nifty parallel universe trilogy, His Dark Materials.

I suppose I’m obligated to say more.

So, despite my continued enjoyment of the main characters and their struggles, most of what’s left went way, way downhill at the end. The Church badness got more cartoonish than ever. The climactic battle was barely a battle and in no way climactic (although it did have a satisfying Cost associated with it). Dangers to the characters were consistently resolved in deus ex machina ways, which is incredibly ironic in this particular plot. Several interesting things happened, but seemed to be only tenuously related to the previous two books of storyline. And even now, I have no clear idea who He is, nor what His Dark Materials are, or whether I should be concerned about them, happy, or something else entirely.

Could some of this be my problem and not the author’s? Sure, I suppose it could be. But I like my odds. I’m inclined to say that two books were squashed into one to achieve trilogy status. Which I suppose is a nice change from one book being extended to three, but ultimately, the reader suffers either way. One book in one book’s worth of pages, please.

I did like the titular amber spyglass and in fact the entire storyline associated with it. Except for the part at the end, where Lyra is supposed to be tempted like Eve was. I think I can cobble together a pretty good explanation of the temptation, the choice, the outcome, and all that, but I disapprove of the fact that it didn’t play out the way it was prophesied to earlier in the book, because it left me thinking that the point of the whole series had never actually occurred. There I was, waiting for event X, and event Y happens instead, the book ends, and I have to spend the next day or so working out that, no, that really was what he meant, he just forgot to write the part where it was in any way related to the characters I had been promised would be involved.

Looking up, I feel like I ought to include spoiler protection, except that if it never happened, how can it be a spoiler? And also except for the fact that the above is a jumbled, barely literate mish-mash of words that mean essentially nothing, and will probably even confuse people who have read the book, much less people who haven’t. If it helps any, this matches my own state of mind when I passed the climactic chapter and reached end-story land. Without the story, y’know, ending.

(Also, I was not particularly satisfied with how the story did end, but that is not the fault of the author and so falls outside the boundaries of this particular review. I can easily see how it could be satisfying to people who are not me.)

Alone in the Dark

The first good thing I can say about Alone in the Dark is that, not ever having played the games it’s rumored to be based on, I can only see the faint outlines of the travesty that has been visited on the series, rather than being forced to embrace it in all its horror.

The next good thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t have a whole lot of needless plot getting in the way of the story. In fact, whenever plot does crop up, it is handled by Exposition Lad, a spirit that roams freely throughout the movie, initially possessing a museum security guard but willing and able to leap into any warm body as needed. This leaves Christian Slater free to brood, Tara Reid free to pout and take off her sweater, and Stephen Dorff free to shoot at things which are, as you might expect, in the dark.

The final good thing I can say about the movie is that it was absolutely snarktastic. Exactly bad enough to make mocking easy for the whole family, while at the same time just engaging enough that it’s more fun to wait for the next snark than turn it off and go on about eating your popcorn in the dark.

Problems: The two lead males did fine, but the rest of the acting was terrible. Terrible. Laylah speculates that Slater only took the role for a free grope at Tara Reid, and… well, it would explain a lot. The directing was also bad. Uwe Boll, who brought you the absolute worst sequence I’ve seen on celluloid in his first video game adaptation, House of the Dead, … I need to pause and paint this picture.

The House of the Dead is the first of a series of arcade and now console games where you have a gun instead of a joystick and shoot at zombies on the screen. You know the type, with the “reload” warning sound and you shoot off the screen to get more of an endless supply of bullets? So, there they are, the characters that haven’t had sex yet, shooting at all the zombies on the cursed island. This Boll guy, he thinks that, maybe in order to emphasize the game roots to his movie, he thinks that a good idea would be to edit in multiple animated screen shots from the game to intersperse with his actors woodenly marching forward and shooting at the camera. Seriously.

So, yeah. Mr. Boll has bettered his skills only by comparison here. The fact that he’s made a trademark out of blaring techno music while characters with guns shoot at hordes of evil things in incomprehensibly edited montages would be really funny, if he wasn’t listed for three more videogame movies over the next two years.

Really, though, without that two minute sequence, the rest of the movie was about as good as any other generic horror, not good enough to convince people to see who wouldn’t have gone anyway, bad enough to be fun without being depressing. My remaining complaint may be a spoiler, but it’s the kind of spoiler that people need to know when making up their minds, so here it is.

At no point in the film (and believe me, I was watching for it) was Christian Slater alone in the dark. It was a middle finger raised to the genre. Like setting Deep Blue Sea in the pool at the YMCA or Halloween in mid-April. Uwe Boll is fired.

P.S. If anyone actually sees it after reading this, a couple of things to watch for: The broken generator scene that was clearly put in as an example to film students of when a sequence serves absolutely no purpose, and the big scary payoff scene where the much-scarier-than-what-we’ve-been-fighting-all-along monster is revealed to be… well, I shouldn’t ruin it completely.