Ultimate Secret

Ultimate Secret continues the Ultimate Galactus trilogy in much the same fashion as the opening volume. That is, it tells a reasonably good story whose main flaw is feeling entirely too short. I mean, most of the Ultimate books have felt like discrete storylines in the lives of our heroes. The Galactus books, on the other hand, have felt very much like part of an (extremely incomplete) ongoing story. It is not particularly a flaw, except that it makes it hard to feel much excitement for the review; it’s as though I’m reviewing thirds of a book, instead of three books.

Another way it matches the first volume is that it uses the Galactus story to talk about other characters entirely that had not yet been drafted into the Ultimate universe.[1] In this case, the fight is against the alien Kree who are sabotaging mankind’s space program, in the hopes that when Gah Lak Tus arrives, the planet will have no survivors. The story was decent, it just wasn’t what I was looking for. Again. I’m really relieved this is only a trilogy, as I’m not sure I could take much more pushing back the payoff.

Except for the lack of character continuity, what this has most reminded me of is the old G.I. Joe event weeks when they’d present a five-part series in which Cobra and G.I. Joe were crossing the world in search of parts for a doomsday machine, and inevitably Cobra would manage to get all the parts, fire up the machine, and then lose anyway. The continuity meant that each episode had a series payoff feel, unlike these books, but there’s still definitely a race across the world in search of clues feel. (Does anyone but me remember those episodes fondly? I mean, clearly there’s a movie studio that hopes so.)

[1] Captain Marvel? Really?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I’m genuinely unsure what to make of the 6th Harry Potter movie. It took its time and worked hard to include what was necessary, unlike some of the previous films. Lots of backstory was ditched, but it kept the important bits. And they did a great job with the character interactions. Every cylinder fired really well[1], honestly, except for the parts that dealt with the central storyline and mystery. The Half-Blood Prince’s identity scarcely registered as a mystery in the first place, despite so many revealed reasons as to why it might be troubling. Voldemort’s secret was mostly an afterthought, though I suppose it being the main focus of two more movies will make up for that. And the climatic scene felt, well, rushed.

But what I can’t decide is how it would have looked to a newcomer. Were the scenes unsatisfying because the script and the direction weren’t quite up to it? Or because I was able to choose the pacing in the book, and the movie simply didn’t live up to my preferences? You’ll have to ask someone who came at these from a different direction, I guess, because I’ve got nothing to go by here, except what I’ve already said. On the bright side, it was pretty good in itself, just not as satisfying as I had hoped. Alan Rickman, as usual, is the tops. Oh, and speaking of bright sides, I think I recommend an afternoon or evening viewing. It’s a very dark film, visually, and emerging into the bright of summer would be… disorienting, at best.

[1] Okay, Daniel Radcliffe is simply not keeping up with the emerging talent of his co-stars. Pity.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor

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You would think, given a decisive lack of job, that I would have plenty of time to read, right? And I can’t in any real honesty say I haven’t had, but I somehow haven’t been reading much nevertheless. Less than usual, even, which is a bit puzzling. I guess all those lunches at work added up? Anyhow, what I have been reading is a perfectly serviceable Star Wars book. I wish I could say more for it, but it really very much reminds me of the early books chronicling the chaotic period after the fall of the Empire, before the people in charge had started taking firm plot-based reins on the progression of the extended universe. So, some of the books would be top notch, some would be godawful bad, and the majority would be like this: perfectly okay, good Star Wars feel, but ultimately forgettable.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor suffers the most, I think, for being so plot-based. After a 20 book series with an epic plot and a 9 book series with reasonably epic character progression to follow it, it’s just hard to go back 30 years and read a standalone book that has yet another take on the dark side of the Force and how different people perceive it, yet another wholly alien species that must be understood if the day is to be saved, yet another stack of TIE Fighters and stormtroopers. The characters were all on, and that means a lot. And there’s a reasonably good running gag behind the awkward title. But on the whole, it was entirely too missable for my tastes. I hope the next one I read, which delves the farthest yet into the future of that universe, is a substantial sight better.

Resistance: Fall of Man

After long delays[1], I have finally gotten a PlayStation 3, what with the Blu-Ray playing capabilities and all. Resultantly, I also snagged one of the handful of PS3 exclusives that also looked in any way entertaining. And even more surprising than all of this combined, I finished the damn thing. It’s ever so slightly possible I may play through again, because there are lots of pieces of paper with more storyline that I missed and new weapons to kill the alien/zombie hybrid things with. In realism land, I won’t. But I might, and that’s a piece of shock in itself.

Resistance: Fall of Man chronicles a non-specific divergent history without an apparent World War II in which some kind of weird bio-experiment (that seems a lot more plausibly like alien technology to me) goes awry in Russia over the course of the 1930s and ’40s, and then suddenly breaks free and conquers all of Asia and Europe in a matter of months. The especial deadliness comes from the fact that the majority of humans caught up in the conflict are converted into new waves of killer alien/zombie hybrids themselves. So, never-ending supply of new soldiers. And now it’s late 1951, England has all but fallen, and it’s time for some random American dude to have a weird immunity to the alien takeover thing that makes him even more hybridized than the others, insofar as he gains powers and yellow eyes but retains his essential humanity, and then, y’know…. payback time.

I probably should be tired of games whose main point is to be mankind’s alien-killing service? But not yet!

[1] I mean, it launched, what, 2.5 years ago? I are slow!

The Real Cancun

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Going into it, I considered that this may be my most embarrassing review ever. And if you’ve been reading this for any amount of time, you know that’s saying kind of a lot. It’s like, The Real World, right? Sort of the first big reality TV show, took over MTV and removed all hope of music videos ever gracing those airwaves again? Yeah, that. Some years later, they decided, hey, what if we made a movie about these kinds of people going to Cancun for Spring Break and getting nakeder than MTV generally approves of since the early ’80s? And then they did so.

And, y’know, The Real Cancun really is about what you’d expect. It’s like, let’s take a whole bunch of college age students, give them way more than they can afford, and let them do random stuff. In the Real World, that turns into weeks of annoying drama interspersed by fake community service work, or maybe that stuff like happens on Donald Trump’s show? The point here, is that I don’t really watch much reality TV and have no clear idea what happens except what I’ve tried to ignore while others were watching. But it turns out that if you reduce the time they spend together to just a week or so, put them into lots of wet t-shirt contests (and beefcake contests, to be fair), and (especially this one) change the show’s duration from weeks of 23 minutes down to about 90 total, it’s a lot more palatable. I, ever so slightly, cared about what happened to these characters.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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Remember what happened in Transformers? Me neither, so I’ll join you in reading that review before I proceed. Yeah, right, okay, no new giant robots, missing Allspark, etc. Anyway, I know they had a happy ending in which the bad guy was vanquished and I guess the Allspark bit it, so no more giant robots? Except: now there’s a new bad guy that’s even badder and more important than Megatron, except we’ve never heard of him before. Which, okay, fine. And the giant robots have been on Earth for 17,000 years instead of showing up when their Allspark crash-landed by random chance. Which seems maybe less plausible?[1] And they have a new plan for making giant robots, although it technically involves the death of every living thing on the planet. Lucky it’s the giant robots having this debate; if it was humans who needed to destroy Cybertron to perpetuate our species, the giant robots would all be toast before you could finish Clapping Off.

Still, Transformers 2 was a pretty good movie. Megan Fox remains hot and occasionally runs in slow motion. There were a lot more tiny robots, the same amount of giant robots[2], a few distressingly racistly-typed robots[3] to detract from that, and at least two ancient robots. The military dudes were acceptably military, the conspiracy dude was John Turturro, and he’s generally good, right? And Shia LeBeouf was that young guy that gets lots of big roles for teenagers in movies these days; whether that is deserved, I choose not to speculate.[4] Plus, another cosmic-scale plot. So, yeah. Michael Bay has done quite well, here, putting together a solid, entertaining, explosions-filled movie filled with only a few missteps. Ninety minutes’ worth of adrenaline, entertainment and such, and through the art of movie magic, skillful casting, and blindingly-talented script oversight, he was able to cram that ninety minutes of entertaining film, with I’m sure no small amount of effort, down into a mere two and half hours of screen time.

Oops. Still, the good movie is in there, if you want to dig for it and can let your lizard brain be entertained by explosions, overt racism, and Megan Fox in the meantime.

[1] I grant the possibility that I missed some explanation for this during the first reel. But I’m pretty sure not.
[2] Though they look distressingly similar in robot form
[3] I could have gotten past the accents and attitudes with little more than an eye roll, but buckteeth, and one of them gold? You’ve got to be shitting me. I mean, seriously.
[4] Clearly, starring opposite Megan Fox is not deserved, though. I mean, it’s possible she’s going to be the better actor of the two of them in another year or so, which just indicates what I’m trying to say here.

Hack/Slash: Return of the Revenge Part 4

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I don’t know if I’ve said lately how much I appreciate that there’s a generic horror-movie comic around that simultaneously makes fun of and embraces all the relevant tropes. (I mean, last time they had by God Chucky, right?) So: Hack/Slash, thank you muchly for existing! I keep seeing indications of a movie version on the horizon, but I kind of don’t want one, as once it’s a movie, the tongue-in-cheekness of it all flies right out the window. Still, it’s pleasing that the comic’s doing well enough for people to consider that.

One consequence of this appreciation is that I have bought (well, a year ago) and read Return of the Revenge Part 4, in which, as you might possibly expect, old nemeses crawl out of the woodwork to trouble Cassie Hack and her monstrous companion Vlad once more. I know I already said it in the previous review, but I am very much in enjoyment of the month-to-month storylines version of the comic that has only recently (for me) started to occur. Every single issue has just a ton of stuff going on. In this book alone, we have an ongoing quest to discover the whereabouts of Cassie’s long-missing father, an Archie comics parody, and secret society hot tub lesbians. Plus the revengencing enemies I already mentioned, some brand new enemies, the progressing personal lives of the five-ish regular characters in the series, and some pretty brutal moral dilemmas that are only now starting to be planted for eventual dire fruit. Good times!

Ultimate Spider-Man: Superstars

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I have to admit this, right up front. Superstars tricked me. Despite the disclaimer around the initial two-issue arc that the writer knew full well it was over the top and not to be taken seriously, when I saw Peter Parker and Wolverine in the middle of a Freaky Friday knockoff, I rolled my eyes hard and internally kvetched about how this kind of thing is exactly why the Ultimate Marvel Team-Up series was mostly flawed, despite its quality moments.

But, okay, there were the disclaimers. But after that, the additional two arcs featuring first the Human Torch and then Doctor Strange meant more bad times, yeah? In fact, no! Instead, the first story introduces the canonical Ultimate Fantastic Four into crossover territory and gives Peter a chance to recover from the emotional wounds inflicted in Carnage. And the second story, well… I don’t like to say more because of spoilers, but it is a Spider-Man book, so you can probably guess.

The shorter version of all this is, you can still trust Brian Michael Bendis to write some of the best comic on the market. Even his fluff-piece breaks are still entertaining and verging on excellent in their own rights.

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.

Elantris

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So, this is an old story by now, but I picked up Elantris to read after Brandon Sanderson was named as the author of the Wheel of Time’s concluding volumes. Well, and also after being told that people like his books pretty well. And hey, good news, this is a pretty damn good book. A strong female protagonist, a holy war, a symbol-based magic system, a pretty horrific curse, and a thoughtfully drawn adversary are only some of the upsides. Plus, rumor has it that his Mistborn trilogy is even better.

The book is pretty hard to describe, though. There’s this city, Elantris, and it used to be the envy of the world. People would randomly ascend to a higher state of being, move to Elantris, do their cool magic, and everyone in the country had a pretty great life because of the free foods being distributed from the ascended magic people, and yeah. Pretty much utopian communism at its finest. Sure, there are religious differences out in the rest of the world, with a holy warrior / proselytizing empire ranged against a fairly low-key, love-based religion that most of the world’s other countries embrace. This would probably spell a recipe for disaster, except for Elantris. And then, ten years ago, its ascended, magical residents are all inexplicably struck down: their bodies waste away, their magic has failed, their city is a rotten, crumbling ruin. And worst of all, people continue to randomly ascend, just as they always had, only now they “ascend” into pain, misery, and forced exile in that once proud city.

These facts combine to form the setting for a story about three characters: Prince Raoden of Arelon (Elantris’ country), brought down by the Elantrian curse in the book’s opening sentence; Princess Sarene of Teod, who would have married Raoden a week later under better circumstances as part of a politically-motivated alliance, and Hrathen of Fjondell, the priest who has most recently converted the country to the south of Arelon by fire and is determined to not make the same mistakes with Arelon and Teod, the last countries not to have fallen under his empire’s sway. Add several interesting supporting characters, many of whom have backstories too large for this one book, stir, and watch the results, about which I can say no more. That issue, a few elements of the plot or the characters lacking enough explanation to really make sense, was my only problem with it. But these didn’t get in the way of an excellent story, and, like I said, people say his current books are better. That’s a decent achievement already, as much as I did like this one.