Tag Archives: science fiction

The X Files: I Want to Believe

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To be perfectly clear, the new X-Files movie didn’t have very much to offer a newcomer to the series. It avoided the pitfall of delving into the series’ long-winded mythology that, on TV, ultimately failed to deliver on any significant portion of its promise, instead opting for the much stronger “Monster of the Week” oeuvre that popularized the show in the first place. This episode (or movie, if you will) pits Mulder and Scully against a possibly psychic priest and gay Russian organ traffickers in the wilds of West Virginia. And in all honesty, it’s a pretty good episode, at that.

Where it fails for the new viewer, and therefore as a movie in general, is that it cannot escape nine years of collected backstory between the principle characters. And with as many old viewers as were dissatisfied by the conclusion of the series, it had to be open to some new viewers to have even a chance of success as a movie. Which is not to say that I think it was in any way a failure as an episode. As easy as it might be to make a joke[1] that the title is a quote from Chris Carter, “I Want to Believe that I can make some quick money off this and remind people that I am alive,” the truth is that, buried underneath all of the accumulated continuity, there is a deep and thoughtful exploration of two people who have lost or are on the verge of losing their belief: in God, in the presence of the truth, out there somewhere, in themselves, in each other. And it’s not like the theme of belief is limited just to our heroes.[2]

In short, the crew came back together to make a good movie that you will probably never watch, and that you’ll, for the most part, be right to avoid. It’s unfortunate, but these things happen every day, I guess. On the bright side, I think it makes for a pretty good (albeit unintentional) coda on the series. As a fan, I can live with that.

[1] I am willing to bet that someone already has, and probably weeks or months ago.
[2] Billy Connolly in particular as the fallen (in an all too modern way) priest: wow, the depth of a) theme and b) acting.

Y: The Last Man – Whys and Wherefores

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As promised, I’ve finished Y. Whys and Wherefores felt very much like the last volume that it was, from start to finish. Although there are certainly plot elements left to resolve (not least among them Yorick’s years-long quest to reunite with his girlfriend, Beth), the primary purpose of the book was clearly the tying up of loose ends and general denouement, which is appropriate after a series this long. It worked just as you’d expect, structurally.

What I’ve been trying to decide since I read it (and in the handful of hours I spent staring at the mostly blank screen after I wrote the first sentence this morning) is how I felt about the ending from a purely story-driven perspective. And of course, spoilers mean not being allowed to really go into details, nor even wanting to. Whatever else it was, it was a powerful finish. Which I guess answers my question pretty well all by itself. It’s also a very thoughtful finish. I’m not sure if introspective is the right word to apply to static history imprinted onto dead trees, but even if I cannot apply it to the book, it certainly applies to my mood after the fact.

Shakespeare has been on my mind all along, of course, and well on purpose. I’ll have to reread these someday as a single unit while watching for Shakespeare in general, all English-majory and analytical, but my point right now is that it has occurred to me, with surprising belatedness, that Yorick certainly qualifies for the descriptor of a fellow of infinite jest, which is good: played differently, The Last Man‘s potential for unrelenting grimness would have overwhelmed any other possible message. In retrospect, I’m starting to think that the Walking Dead series might suffer from a terminal case of the same disease.

Y: The Last Man – Motherland

If memory serves, the most recent volume of Y: The Last Man ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, in which… well, okay, I guess I can assume you may not have read Kimono Dragons and therefore not spoil you. But you really, really should. (I mean, and the others ones first, right?) This is noteworthy because of how Motherland starts out offset by about an hour earlier in time, or possibly with a little bit of a ret-con. I spent the first dozen pages wondering if I had misremembered things entirely, but they eventually got back on track.

And then… answers. Answers about the ninja.[1] Answers about humanity’s future. Possibly answers about the ultimate cause behind the now four year old mass male die-off , though I’m not sure whether I trust them, nor whether I like them if they’re true. But don’t worry, because all those answers are revealed with the series’ standard mix of action, drama, and panache. This is by no means an infodump devoid of any plot or character development. Plus, there are a couple more framing stories about how characters in the series’ past are getting along now.[2]

You really can tell that the series is drawing to a close, because at least one storyline has ended here. (Two, if the answers behind the extinction were factual.) The only thing left now is for Yorick to resolve his long-running emotional turmoil for a girl who, notably, he has never been on the same continent with since the series began. Well, okay, and there are a few other odds and ends as well, but the thing with Beth is the heart of the primary dangling plot, and anyway, the other stuff probably all falls under the spoilers heading again. In any event, I’ll be reading it quite soon, so that’s good news.

[1] Have I mentioned how much I love that there’s a ninja?
[2] Well, they were both at the end, but since their release order would put the very final issue at the beginning of the book, I’m calling them framing stories regardless. I’m torn, because putting that story first would have worked a lot better literarily: both because of the framing thing and because the last couple pages of the previous issue / closing frame would work so well as the end of the book, if they’d been there. But on the other hand, there’s a spoiler in the “opening” framing story (due to it being out of the chronological sequence they ultimately decided upon instead) that would have removed some tension from the primary arc of the book.

WALL-E

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So there I am, sitting at the bar, nursing the water between my third and fourth beers, occasionally snaking a fry from Ryan, sure because they taste good but mostly for the thrill of the hunt, when suddenly the girl next to me says, “Hey, babe. Is this guy boring you? Why not come with me, I’m going to see a movie about robots who could conceivably go to another planet!” Which is why I never had my fourth beer.

But that’s okay, because I got to see an impressive movie instead, in which a tiny robot has decided to clean up this town. And, okay, this town is Earth, and he was probably programmed rather than deciding. But he sounded like R2-D2 (by virtue of being voiced by the same sound editor), so that earns him a lot of credit. WALL-E is the last of his product line still running, so he has the planet to himself. And over the course of probably hundreds of years, he’s picked up personality from unlikely sources. I have to say, as last beings on the planet go, he probably gave Will Smith a run for his money, melancholy pathos and all.[1]

So, after a period in which we get to absorb the tragedy of the ruined planet and its last inhabitant or two, everything changes with the arrival of a bitchy feminine robot on a mission designed by some humans that are still wandering the galaxy. And, you guessed it, WALL-E’s life will never be the same again. A lot of people claim that Pixar makes movies that are equally enjoyable by kids and adults. I’ve skipped a lot of them recently; I think the last one I saw was The Incredibles, and I was quick to acknowledge I was watching a kid movie, contrary to that same claim I’m saying people sometimes make. I point this out as a preface.

Because, I’m not going to claim that with WALL-E, Pixar finally made a movie that can be enjoyed by adults and kids alike. It’s more like… honestly, I felt like Pixar made an adult movie and then added a bunch of kid-laughs after they remembered they were Pixar and are only allowed to make kid movies. So now the kids are able to sit in the theater and not be bored by what their parents are watching. Which is a trend that I hope continues, because damn, but the effects are consistently spectacular, and it’s nice not to be even a little bored between them. Yes, it was a child-like, innocent movie. But if it was specifically kid-oriented, then I’d think the other Pixar movies would have sucked me in better than they did.

P.S. If you happen to watch it, there’s a thing that bothered me a little bit. I get why a Disney movie isn’t going to delve into the mechanics of reproduction, but did it seem to anyone else that the humans should have become extinct a generation or two prior to the events depicted, or at the very least should have been on their way in this generation?

[1] I should pause here to point out the possibility that my identification with our robotic main character here may have colored my favorable impression of the movie. But I’m pretty sure that’s it’s also as good as I think it was.

Y: The Last Man – Kimono Dragons

For the first time in a really long span, I’ve broken the rotation of my graphic novels reading. It’s very much not my fault, though. See, the current Walking Dead book was supposed to have been out in January, and then April, and now in a few days. But “in a few days” pushes well beyond the time I was supposed to read another one, you see. So I had to skip ahead to the nearly concluded Y series. Well, okay, not very near, since I’ve got two books to go after this one, and one of those doesn’t release until June. But it feels pretty near, right now.

Kimono Dragons, by title, is about a bunch of Yakuza chicks in Japan. (I mean, they would be chicks, right, since every warm-blooded male on the planet died years ago. Aside from Yorick and his monkey, obviously. I mean, are you even reading these things? Come on!) But by plot or theme, I’m not really seeing much in the title to interpret. In short, Yorick and company continue their hot pursuit of Ampersand the capuchin monkey who holds the key to humanity’s survival, Israeli super-soldier Alter continues her hot and frequently deadly pursuit of Yorick, cold though the trail has grown, and Doctor Allison Mann continues her hot pursuit of the truth behind mankind’s extinction. (Well, and of some choice Australian tail. A woman has needs.)

Along the way, all of the usual cultural and gender explorations take place, the plot is shifted one step closer to what still feels like a solid resolution, and a few remaining characters have their backgrounds explored. The series has reached a point where (as most long-running series do) the individual pieces no longer feel quite as profound as they did early on; like I said, if there’s a central theme to book 8 here, I missed it. But the quality remains consistently high, the story engrossing, and the artwork by turns exotic, sexy, and visceral. I can’t ask for more that that out of anything that isn’t Sandman.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Most of my video game time[1] lately has been spent perusing the Orange Box for A) a Half-Life 2 experience that doesn’t involve sparkles flying across my screen[2] and B) an improved gamer score. It has been quite good to me on both counts, and hooray for that. The task has been spread out over so many months, though, that when I finally finished the other new content on the disc, I forgot that completed games get reviews! That is a little bit embarrassing, and the moreso because this is coming a few days out of order. But so be it, I have no other choice at this late date!

So, right, in the summer of 2006 I downloaded the first incremental sequel to Half-Life 2 from Steam and played it, and other than whatever bizarre video driver conflict I was having, it was extremely fun! Episode Two took rather longer to come out than I had originally heard, and by the time it finally appeared, I needed a refresher. (And a higher gamer score.) So that explains the delay since I got access to this newest sequel. (Well, and Portal, which is its own kind of awesome excuse.) Anyway, I got refreshed and voila, time to play! Which I did.

Directly following the climactic destruction of City 17 at the end of the previous game, Gordon and Alyx are forced to continue their journey to deliver the stolen Combine data on foot. The trouble with this plan is that the bad guys have some pretty brutal new assets for making our heroes dead, and since they’re on the ropes right now, they seem willing to throw almost all of their effort into preventing the success of the resistance. Along the way, there’s a friendly garden gnome, ever more antlions, gut-wrenching drama, and a promise that Aperture Science[3] will feature heavily in Episode Three. These really are the best first-person shooters on the market for storyline; they blow Halo clean out of the water.

[1] Not all; there’s Halo on Thursdays, for example.
[2] Thanks, PC gaming!
[3] Also, whenever Episode 3 is released, I bet Portal will have a sequel at the same time. Which would be fantastic.

Jumper (2008)

First I was lazy, then I was busy, then I was distracted, then I was sick. Like, a lot sick. Stupid flu. I bet if they’d had the right shot available this year, I wouldn’t have gotten it, is all I’m saying, and then I’d only have three excuses instead of four. (Plus more money, but that’s a separate issue.) Anyway, these problems have conspired to prevent me from finishing a book in practically ages, so I’m alright on that front, but I have seen a couple of movies, one of them weeks ago. So that part is embarrassing, but I shall rectify the issue via a quick review now!

Jumper tells the story of a guy who used to be Anakin Skywalker, but instead of having a lightsaber and a pregnant girlfriend, he can teleport around and also his girlfriend isn’t pregnant. So really, life would be fantastic, since he can steal whatever he needs with no hope of being caught[1] and there’s no child support to worry about. Except his girlfriend notices little inconsistencies in his story like how she last saw him trapped under a frozen river like ten years ago and how he has an awful lot of money for not spending much time at a job and how people want to kill her because she knows him. Which is a pity, life being so great otherwise.

Well, and there’s one other fly in the ointment, I suppose, in that Samuel L. Jackson runs (or at least runs the operational end of) an organization of Paladins who have been hunting down Jumpers for centuries. They claim that this is because only God should have the power to be everywhere, but even a first-year Jesuit could easily point out that the Jumpers are only one place at a time, and anyway God made them that way, right, so what’s the big deal? Clearly the truth of the matter is that Sam is still angry about the time when the kid cut his arm off and pushed him off a building, and he invented this centuries-old underground war out of whole cloth to cover the revenge angle so it would play better to the audience. Which I can understand all of except the part where he actually thought anyone would buy the conspiracy in the first place, because, come on! What did those Jumper dudes ever do to y’all, seriously? If you were Bankers instead of Paladins, yeah, that would be one thing.

I approved of all the nifty teleportastic special effects, and of the awesome location shots, and that they dunked Rachel Bilson in a lake[2], and even in a Little Engine That Could kind of way I approved of them setting themselves up for a sequel. I cannot bring myself to approve of the plot, or really even of using the word ‘plot’ in conjunction with the shooting script that ended up on film. That would be going a little too far. But it had eye candy and humor; even the intentional kind, from time to time. I hope it turns into a cult classic, now that I’m thinking about it, because that would be a pretty fair outcome.

[1] and he doesn’t really need to spend any money on gas or airplane tickets in the first place, such that he could probably go legit as a one-man shipping company, but at least that never actually happens, because holy wow, it would have been boring.
[2] Seriously, prune skin aside, if I had my way that girl would never be dry.

My Own Kind of Freedom

My-Own-Kind-of-Freedom-coverDespite a relative lack of reviews of his books due to the timing of my having read most of them before I started here, I like to think it’s no secret that Steven Brust is one of my favorite authors. And I’m positive that it’s no secret that Firefly is one of my favorite TV shows. So, you know what would be cool? If Brust were to write a Firefly tie-in novel and get it sold and start off a chain reaction of new book farm awesomeness. I mean, probably most of the authors would not work out that well, so there’s that, but I love the characters enough to put up with almost anything out of said hypothetical book farm other than bad character depictions. And believe it or not, that dream may have been closer than you think! However, not all dreams can come true, and nobody ultimately published the novel that he wrote a couple of years ago. Which would be where the story ends, in tears and bloody recriminations, except that he’s self-published it under the Creative Commons license, and you can read it whenever you want, for free. That’s cool except for the lack of future novels and his not getting paid, which he really should be.

My Own Kind of Freedom is tidily short novel set in the nebulous months between the end of the series and the movie, Serenity, and informed by both. Except for being slightly too long for that, it feels very much like an episode of the show, and in all the good ways. A standard shipping run turns quickly dangerous when Jayne and Mal have a parting of ways and Jayne is left free to make another attempt at collecting the reward on the head of the Tams. And, one problem never really being enough to stymie the crew of Serenity for long, unfriendly faces from Mal and Zoë’s past are popping up in the single unfriendliest place the Unification War had to offer the both of them. (And if this summary isn’t enough to get you going, it’s because you haven’t watched Firefly yet. And you really should! So go ahead. I’ll wait.)

Brust’s plotting and typically spare prose are a known quantity by now. His characterizations shine as brightly as if the entire story had been written in Firefly’s script room and then performed by the cast, voices and often images being piped directly into my brain. The story is dense, also a known quantity of Brust’s; the man loves to write just enough to let you figure out everything that’s going on, instead of providing it all to you, piece by piece. All of these are positive things, from my perspective. The only flaw, if you can call it that, is that I’ve been once again reminded of just how little access I have to a universe that could have been mined for years of entertainment. There’s time yet, though. Look how Star Trek turned out.

Y: The Last Man – Paper Dolls

So, I notice that my Y reviews are getting shorter over time. I figure this is in part because it grows harder to avoid spoilers as a series grows in length, and in part because Brian K. Vaughan is doing his level best to delay a conclusion to the series. (Well, in point of fact, it already has concluded or will have within just a few weeks. But I mean as of the time of the current collection, Paper Dolls.) I should hasten to point out that this doesn’t bother me. As long as the main sequence story as well as the flashbacks and digressions remain interesting, as they certainly did here in Volume 7, he’s welcome to take all the time he could possibly want.

And anyway, the plot has certainly thickened. Yorick’s quest to find his girlfriend continues to falter in interesting ways, although the quest he shares with Dr. Allison Mann and Agent 355 to bring males back to the world in time to prevent extinction may be coming to a head soon. Along the way, visits with the modern Catholic Church, 355’s past, Ampersand’s history and current whereabouts, and a drop-in by an old enemy serve to keep things popping. And there’s still plenty of time to bring all the outstanding elements to a boil. As has been the case ever since I finished the first collection, I really can’t wait to see where this is headed.

Cloverfield

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Then, earlier this week I saw Cloverfield, which will mean that I’m finally caught up. So that’s awesome. As for the awesomeness of the movie… well, it turns out it wasn’t really that kind of movie, and I think that’s what made it work so well. When you see Independence Day or Godzilla, to name a couple of other times New York has been destroyed, the focus of the film is on the people who are out there saving the day, and they’re big and heroic (or occasionally dorky and heroic) and the movie is about them saving the day. Cloverfield, contrariwise, is about us. Any of the regular people who, when New York starts falling apart around them, are basically fucked. And they know they are, but the thing about being human is you still do everything in your power to survive, even when there’s no hope. And sometimes there are still amazing feats and there are still small moments of heroism, and that’s okay because another thing about being human is that every so often you surpass your limits.

I’m going to leave plot out of it, I think, because except for that something is attacking New York and there’s a dude who has a video camera[1], you don’t really need to know anything else and it might take away from the impact. And, okay, there’s the Blair Witch comparison: sure enough, if you have motion-sickness problems, this will probably not be the movie for you. People have to run a lot, which makes for shaky camerawork. But if you can get past that, the rest of the film is equal parts cool / scary things happening amid explosions and gripping human drama, or occasionally melodrama. But let’s be honest, that’s just as real a part of the human experience as the rest of it. Plus it subscribes to the first rule of drive-in cinema: anyone can die, at any moment.[2]

[1] And pretty much everyone who has seen a movie preview somewhere in the past six months knows this much already.
[2] There are just so very many reasons I liked this movie.