(Over at the Writing Blog, I discuss the basics of what I call space ecology.)
Or Fantastic 4, as its title is usually rendered in its graphics.
I've actually had a DVD of this movie lying around for ages (since shortly after it came out), but every time I suggested to my sister that we ought to watch it, she would mumble vaguely about how the Fantastic Four have always failed to really interest her.
She enjoyed it anyway, though she had complaints. The same is true of myself.
It always bothers me when adaptations radically depart from the original form of a character for no good reason, and on casual inspection, one could interpret some of the changes they made to the characters in this movie as unnecessary changes.
I'll never, for instance, be able to think of "Von Doom" as he appeared in this film as being Doctor Victor von Doom, mostly because he totally fails to be Victor von Doom. But that isn't to say that he's a bad character as such.
It was pretty stupid for Doom to gain his powers from the same source as the Fantastic Four, especially since, in the comic books and every other adaptation, Doctor Doom had no powers (unless you count his magical abilities, which is not considered to be a "power" as such in the comics, merely utilization of training), just sweet armor and lots of gadgets. It made for cool fight scenes and tension building, sure, but that slick, yuppie-like CEO made an utterly unconvincing crazed megalomaniac. (A megalomaniac, sure, but tame by comic book standards.)
No, what worked about Doom is that his motivations for hating the accursed Reed Richards was sensible (well, not "sensible," I suppose-logical, then), rather than merely a combination of misplaced blame for the damage to his face and fury about their college rivalry and being unable to accept that maybe Reed Richards is smarter than he is.
(Momentary aside: I tend to think that Doctor Doom is at least a bit smarter than Reed Richards. Why? Reed Richards is clearly the superior in a number of specific fields, but Doctor Doom at least rivals him in most of those fields, outclasses him in at least a few more [has Reed Richards ever invented a time machine, and if so, how long after Doctor Doom did the same was it?], and further has his skills and knowledge in magical, economic, political, and social endeavors, all areas in which Reed Richards sorely lacks. [In fact, even by comic book polymath standards, Doctor Doom is extravagantly polymathic.] So Doom ranting and raving and being insecure? Pretty stupid on his part. Which is actually kind of believable, because many very smart people are also total morons in some respect.)
A bit more intricate and interesting were the changes they made to Ben Grimm.
On the one hand, I can see why they didn't go with the comic book incarnation. In case you're not adequately familiar with that version, Ben Grimm is not in fact a middle-aged, overweight, implicitly past his prime astronaut... he's a young, handsome, athletic jet jockey turned astronaut. He played football and had nice hair.
So in the comics, his transformation into the Thing was traumatic because he had a great, wonderful life-he was attractive, skilled, and probably quite well-paid. Then, he went to massive, frightening, clumsy, and probably fairly difficult to place in a job, not to mention bald.
Hollywood being what it is, they didn't want to hide a handsome movie star behind the Thing suit. They like their actors' faces being on screen, hence many comic book adaptations trying to dispense with masked costumes. So they chose a dumpy bald guy to play him, figuring that said actor would not object to mostly being a voice actor.
(A bit of a shame, too-the dude's a pretty good actor, really. Possibly my favorite non-action/crazy comic book stuff scene in the movie was when he started to go on his spacewalk, and as the airlock opens into space, he gives one of the deepest smiles I've ever seen on a human being. His smile covered his whole face without being bizarre. That's talent, man.)
Not only that, but lots of people would be at least somewhat unsympathetic to an extremely successful, handsome man who was suddenly transformed into a bizarre-looking indestructible being. Lots of people would have seen it as whiny that he was that upset over it, taking him as rather self-centered.
Which would be why they gave him a wife who loved him, but couldn't handle him being a Thing. Being upset that your spouse left you over something you couldn't control, something that wasn't even necessarily that bad? That's something most people will have some sympathy for.
Of course, it's one of the things about the film that most stuck in my sister's craw, and one of the things that has always bothered her about the Fantastic Four: "What, only blind women can appreciate an ugly guy? WHAT? Also, the Thing wasn't Jewish enough." (In case you're wondering at that remark, it's a reasonably well-known fact that many aspects of Ben Grimm were based on his co-creator Jack Kirby, one such feature being his Jewish faith [another being his cigar-smoking].)
Johnny Storm? Eh, he was pretty much spot on, except that he was probably a little too successful at his, erm, escapades with women. (My sister was quite loudly annoyed.) Sorry, Hollywood, but that kind of character's a huge... erm, well, they're stupid.
Also, they sure loved the fact that Johnny's and Sue's powers encouraged them to take off/destroy their clothes, didn't they?
Eh, whatever. The movie was still pretty good.
-Signing off.
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Friday, June 11, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Cheesy "Sci-Fi" Movie Review: D-War
So my sister and I watched this movie last night.
Her conclusion (and mine, too, although hers was more vehement): If they hadn't tried to tell a story, they'd probably have made a better movie.
As it was, it was an incredibly stupid movie that had really, really cool monsters and explosions. The "Atrox Army," the huge mass of various reptilian creatures serving the villain, was very iconic (for me, anyway-as they say on TV Tropes, your mileage may vary)-it's really kind of sad that it's stuck in such a ridiculous movie.
Probably the best plot point in the movie was the zoo security guard who saw the evil Imoogi, Buraki, eating elephants in the zoo. (Why does a titanic serpent dragon from a celestial realm eat elephants? Because he can.) Nobody would believe him, even when Buraki was literally right behind the person who was "evaluating" his psychological fitness. Sadly, we never see if the dude lived to be vindicated.
There were a few tiny clever moments-some people remarked that the best part of the movie was the one in which a dude phases through a glass door, and an old lady tries to follow him through it, only to bump her head and then wander away confused. (Kind of a cruel sense of humor, but it was funny.) There was also a bit where a scientist was analyzing one of Buraki's scales which was kind of interesting because there was speculation as to where it came from... too bad they ruined that by having some guy show up and insist that it was a Korean legendary monster. (Though the skepticism of the guy who was being told this was amusing, if transitory.) One other thing I liked is that it was a fantasy setting that presented the ancient, powerful creatures from heck as being merely relatively evenly matched with the modern army, rather than far outclassing it-that's too rare.
But there are lots of really stupid things, like a pointlessly evil FBI agent who shoots the protagonist in the head at point blank range... and the dude gets back up, completely unharmed, less than a minute later. Granted, he was supposed to be the reincarnation of an ancient Korean celestial warrior guy or something, and he was carrying a magical amulet that was supposed to protect him, but there's no indication they actually contributed.
Conclusion: If you don't have a high tolerance for stupidity, I'd recommend fast-forwarding any time there aren't monster things or explosions on the screen. You'd still need a high tolerance even if you do (the tactics used by the military are positively abysmal, for instance), but hey, them's the breaks.
(My sister says I owe her now for making her watch it; she was all cynical and cranky for the rest of the evening. Also, she is really offended that it somehow got classified as science fiction even though it's really extreme fantasy.)
-Signing off.
Her conclusion (and mine, too, although hers was more vehement): If they hadn't tried to tell a story, they'd probably have made a better movie.
As it was, it was an incredibly stupid movie that had really, really cool monsters and explosions. The "Atrox Army," the huge mass of various reptilian creatures serving the villain, was very iconic (for me, anyway-as they say on TV Tropes, your mileage may vary)-it's really kind of sad that it's stuck in such a ridiculous movie.
Probably the best plot point in the movie was the zoo security guard who saw the evil Imoogi, Buraki, eating elephants in the zoo. (Why does a titanic serpent dragon from a celestial realm eat elephants? Because he can.) Nobody would believe him, even when Buraki was literally right behind the person who was "evaluating" his psychological fitness. Sadly, we never see if the dude lived to be vindicated.
There were a few tiny clever moments-some people remarked that the best part of the movie was the one in which a dude phases through a glass door, and an old lady tries to follow him through it, only to bump her head and then wander away confused. (Kind of a cruel sense of humor, but it was funny.) There was also a bit where a scientist was analyzing one of Buraki's scales which was kind of interesting because there was speculation as to where it came from... too bad they ruined that by having some guy show up and insist that it was a Korean legendary monster. (Though the skepticism of the guy who was being told this was amusing, if transitory.) One other thing I liked is that it was a fantasy setting that presented the ancient, powerful creatures from heck as being merely relatively evenly matched with the modern army, rather than far outclassing it-that's too rare.
But there are lots of really stupid things, like a pointlessly evil FBI agent who shoots the protagonist in the head at point blank range... and the dude gets back up, completely unharmed, less than a minute later. Granted, he was supposed to be the reincarnation of an ancient Korean celestial warrior guy or something, and he was carrying a magical amulet that was supposed to protect him, but there's no indication they actually contributed.
Conclusion: If you don't have a high tolerance for stupidity, I'd recommend fast-forwarding any time there aren't monster things or explosions on the screen. You'd still need a high tolerance even if you do (the tactics used by the military are positively abysmal, for instance), but hey, them's the breaks.
(My sister says I owe her now for making her watch it; she was all cynical and cranky for the rest of the evening. Also, she is really offended that it somehow got classified as science fiction even though it's really extreme fantasy.)
-Signing off.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Final Days of Planet Earth
Final Days of Planet Earth is a surprisingly good sci-fi/horror made for TV movie/miniseries.
What's good about it?
Well, first off, while it's a smidgen slow, it's not slow like Supernova. Supernova was terminally slow.
No, FDoPE (F'dope!) is slow in a tension-building, suspenseful way.
At the beginning, we join some astronauts on a futuristic moon mission. There's surprisingly good microgravity effects as they come home, and then, all of a sudden, one of the astronauts wakes up alone. Then, a splatter of gore tells us that he's probably the only one left.
A few years later (supposedly, anyway), we join the main plot. A cast of characters gradually get gathered together and drawn to "Room 86." (I rather had the feeling that the original title would have been "The Secret of Room 86," and they changed it to FDoPE for the sake of sounding more exciting.) There, they discover that there's a room behind Room 86 (actually the ombudsman's office) where some guys in white suits with retractable bug claws are butchering human beings. (They discover this without dying because one of their number, an archaeologist, carries a semi-automatic pistol.) It's all very disturbing and grisly-obviously, this isn't for the fainthearted. (Originally, it aired on the Hallmark channel, if what I've read around is correct. Huh?)
What are the bugs butchering humans for? To make people suits, of course! They also want to use some part of our bodies for "fertilizer." It turns out that they need to get chitin from our bodies to feed a fungus which will let them eat/drink it and harden their shells with it. (Why not use some other animal? It turns out they just really hate us, as we learn in a speech from their queen, because we're a horrible abomination to them, what with all our bug-spraying and stuff. In fact, we get the impression that one of the people was sent to Room 86 purely because she's an exterminator.)
Anyway, it was split into two parts, totaling about three hours, probably for the sake of special effects. The aliens in their true forms are giant praying mantids which can kill people with a simple blow to the gut from their big scythe arms, but they're still vulnerable, conveniently, to bullets, stun guns, and machetes. (At one point, some characters went to buy guns; the 3-day wait kept them from picking any up, so he got some machetes instead. Don't tell me it's too easy to get a gun in this country.)
The real problem isn't that they're giant, scary bugs. The real problem is that they're giant, scary bugs that have infiltrated the government, particularly the bureaucracy. I will allow you to momentarily contemplate the horrors of praying mantis bureaucrats.
...
Okay, let's continue. They turn out to have a secret weapon of sorts-for some reason, they're deathly allergic to the astronaut they didn't kill on the space mission. Why? Who knows? Anyway, they can't even touch him without protection, or they'll die horribly. Eventually, they successfully destroy the hive, blah blah whatever.
So what else is there to say about this? Well, the actress who plays the queen is apparently "hungry," because her performance is almost as hammy as the villains from the two Power Rangers movies. This is not a bad thing-I think it's pretty funny.
Then there's the astronaut, who after being held and tortured by the aliens pulling off his fingernails and stuff (yes, I already said this was a rather grisly movie, didn't I?), was loopy in a funny kind of way.
There's a thing or two that are highly dissatisfying about it, like an unresolved plot point or two (presumably, the aliens are all dead, but at least one character's fate was disturbingly ambiguous), but overall, there are worse things to eat up three hours of your time with. Not for the squeamish, but not a bad movie at all, especially compared to the stuff I got it with.
-Signing off.
What's good about it?
Well, first off, while it's a smidgen slow, it's not slow like Supernova. Supernova was terminally slow.
No, FDoPE (F'dope!) is slow in a tension-building, suspenseful way.
At the beginning, we join some astronauts on a futuristic moon mission. There's surprisingly good microgravity effects as they come home, and then, all of a sudden, one of the astronauts wakes up alone. Then, a splatter of gore tells us that he's probably the only one left.
A few years later (supposedly, anyway), we join the main plot. A cast of characters gradually get gathered together and drawn to "Room 86." (I rather had the feeling that the original title would have been "The Secret of Room 86," and they changed it to FDoPE for the sake of sounding more exciting.) There, they discover that there's a room behind Room 86 (actually the ombudsman's office) where some guys in white suits with retractable bug claws are butchering human beings. (They discover this without dying because one of their number, an archaeologist, carries a semi-automatic pistol.) It's all very disturbing and grisly-obviously, this isn't for the fainthearted. (Originally, it aired on the Hallmark channel, if what I've read around is correct. Huh?)
What are the bugs butchering humans for? To make people suits, of course! They also want to use some part of our bodies for "fertilizer." It turns out that they need to get chitin from our bodies to feed a fungus which will let them eat/drink it and harden their shells with it. (Why not use some other animal? It turns out they just really hate us, as we learn in a speech from their queen, because we're a horrible abomination to them, what with all our bug-spraying and stuff. In fact, we get the impression that one of the people was sent to Room 86 purely because she's an exterminator.)
Anyway, it was split into two parts, totaling about three hours, probably for the sake of special effects. The aliens in their true forms are giant praying mantids which can kill people with a simple blow to the gut from their big scythe arms, but they're still vulnerable, conveniently, to bullets, stun guns, and machetes. (At one point, some characters went to buy guns; the 3-day wait kept them from picking any up, so he got some machetes instead. Don't tell me it's too easy to get a gun in this country.)
The real problem isn't that they're giant, scary bugs. The real problem is that they're giant, scary bugs that have infiltrated the government, particularly the bureaucracy. I will allow you to momentarily contemplate the horrors of praying mantis bureaucrats.
...
Okay, let's continue. They turn out to have a secret weapon of sorts-for some reason, they're deathly allergic to the astronaut they didn't kill on the space mission. Why? Who knows? Anyway, they can't even touch him without protection, or they'll die horribly. Eventually, they successfully destroy the hive, blah blah whatever.
So what else is there to say about this? Well, the actress who plays the queen is apparently "hungry," because her performance is almost as hammy as the villains from the two Power Rangers movies. This is not a bad thing-I think it's pretty funny.
Then there's the astronaut, who after being held and tortured by the aliens pulling off his fingernails and stuff (yes, I already said this was a rather grisly movie, didn't I?), was loopy in a funny kind of way.
There's a thing or two that are highly dissatisfying about it, like an unresolved plot point or two (presumably, the aliens are all dead, but at least one character's fate was disturbingly ambiguous), but overall, there are worse things to eat up three hours of your time with. Not for the squeamish, but not a bad movie at all, especially compared to the stuff I got it with.
-Signing off.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Supernova
As I said with my Black Hole review, not that Supernova, this one.
I review this only for completeness; like The Black Hole, this film came in a boxed set. The fact that it came in a box that I felt compelled to mock alone was a warning sign; that I enjoyed The Black Hole and Final Days of Planet Earth (for which a review is upcoming) are good signs.
But Supernova just stinks.
First up, Supernova is three hours long.
THREE HOURS. (It originally aired as two episodes; yes, this is made-for-TV movie. I guess you get what you pay for-although those all air on cable now...)
That might not be so bad, but what you get is three hours of bull like this.
I nearly cheered when that guy got incinerated. "That guy" is somebody-or-other Sheppard, a "brilliant" scientist who believes that the Sun is much older than we thought, and that it's about to die in a supernova (hence the film's title). We know that's the premise from the beginning; there's not really any mystery to unravel at all.
Of course, as you would learn if you looked at Wikipedia's entry on it, the idea of the Sun going supernova without warning is utter nonsense.
A simple, basic knowledge of astronomy (as per even the simplest college course, or even a high school science textbook) would also tell you that this is nonsense. Why?
Well, we're reasonably confident that we can guess at the age of the Sun with some accuracy. We really don't know that much about the Sun itself, but we can see millions of stars to compare it to. We don't have any good experimental data, but we have a huge amount of observational (or to use a better term, empirical) data. Further, only big stars, and I do mean big stars, have ever been observed doing anything remotely like erupting in supernovae. (Let's not even get into the fact that the film seemed to be implying that the reason the Sun acted up was actually because a chunk of a planet that got blown up by some other supernova fell into it. That's not just bad physics, that's Space Western Comics physics.)
If the Sun were really as much older as they supposed it might be, it would be showing its age rather than looking the age that we guessed it to be. And how would it show its age? Well, over a period of thousands (upon thousands) of years, its light would get redder, and it would expand in size. Eventually it would get big enough to destroy all life on Earth, and then probably the Earth itself.
There are worse problems with the film, like the fact that the Sun shoots fireballs at Earth with uncanny precision. As noted on Wikipedia, the Earth would essentially be tiny in the Sun's sky, an itty-bitty speck, so basically, unless it shot out many many hundreds or even thousands of fireballs in random directions, it's very unlikely that even one would hit Earth. Yet fireballs hit Earth on at least three separate occasions, and they seemed to be numerous events rather than three big discrete ones. That might just be scattering, but the idea that it was randomly shooting them makes no sense at all.
Thus, we can conclude that, for whatever reason, somehow the fireballs were directly fired at the Earth itself.
And thus, one must conclude that the Sun either came to life and was annoyed at the inhabitants of Earth for some reason, or was briefly possessed by a demon. Something kind of like this, perhaps.
Which convinced my sister that behind the scenes somewhere, the Pope was busy performing a really big exorcism.
The rest of the movie is pretty trite, too. For instance, the Arch gets destroyed just like in The Black Hole. Then there's all these stupid subplots, such as one about how governments around the world secretly set up shelters so that humanity could survive, but they gonna let everybody else die without tellin' 'em.
I hate to point this out to the movie's creators, but the negative portrayal of this is pretty stupid. Sure, choosing who lives and dies is cruel and vicious, but it's better than letting everybody die, isn't it? (Not that anybody would have survived an actual supernova; it turned out the Sun didn't explode. Kind of disappointing, really; I'd have preferred that everybody died because they were all so annoying.)
There was also a stupidly predictable plotline with a serial killer on death row (in Australia, where there is not currently a death penalty) escaping and coming after the lady who fingered him as the killer. She shoots him lots of times.
That may have been the best part of the movie (after the Sheppard guy getting vaporized), but I don't know because I'd stopped watching by that point.
Yes, it's that bad. (I don't think I need to establish any further reputation for my ability to watch bad movies at this point.)
-Signing off.
I review this only for completeness; like The Black Hole, this film came in a boxed set. The fact that it came in a box that I felt compelled to mock alone was a warning sign; that I enjoyed The Black Hole and Final Days of Planet Earth (for which a review is upcoming) are good signs.
But Supernova just stinks.
First up, Supernova is three hours long.
THREE HOURS. (It originally aired as two episodes; yes, this is made-for-TV movie. I guess you get what you pay for-although those all air on cable now...)
That might not be so bad, but what you get is three hours of bull like this.
I nearly cheered when that guy got incinerated. "That guy" is somebody-or-other Sheppard, a "brilliant" scientist who believes that the Sun is much older than we thought, and that it's about to die in a supernova (hence the film's title). We know that's the premise from the beginning; there's not really any mystery to unravel at all.
Of course, as you would learn if you looked at Wikipedia's entry on it, the idea of the Sun going supernova without warning is utter nonsense.
A simple, basic knowledge of astronomy (as per even the simplest college course, or even a high school science textbook) would also tell you that this is nonsense. Why?
Well, we're reasonably confident that we can guess at the age of the Sun with some accuracy. We really don't know that much about the Sun itself, but we can see millions of stars to compare it to. We don't have any good experimental data, but we have a huge amount of observational (or to use a better term, empirical) data. Further, only big stars, and I do mean big stars, have ever been observed doing anything remotely like erupting in supernovae. (Let's not even get into the fact that the film seemed to be implying that the reason the Sun acted up was actually because a chunk of a planet that got blown up by some other supernova fell into it. That's not just bad physics, that's Space Western Comics physics.)
If the Sun were really as much older as they supposed it might be, it would be showing its age rather than looking the age that we guessed it to be. And how would it show its age? Well, over a period of thousands (upon thousands) of years, its light would get redder, and it would expand in size. Eventually it would get big enough to destroy all life on Earth, and then probably the Earth itself.
There are worse problems with the film, like the fact that the Sun shoots fireballs at Earth with uncanny precision. As noted on Wikipedia, the Earth would essentially be tiny in the Sun's sky, an itty-bitty speck, so basically, unless it shot out many many hundreds or even thousands of fireballs in random directions, it's very unlikely that even one would hit Earth. Yet fireballs hit Earth on at least three separate occasions, and they seemed to be numerous events rather than three big discrete ones. That might just be scattering, but the idea that it was randomly shooting them makes no sense at all.
Thus, we can conclude that, for whatever reason, somehow the fireballs were directly fired at the Earth itself.
And thus, one must conclude that the Sun either came to life and was annoyed at the inhabitants of Earth for some reason, or was briefly possessed by a demon. Something kind of like this, perhaps.
Which convinced my sister that behind the scenes somewhere, the Pope was busy performing a really big exorcism.
The rest of the movie is pretty trite, too. For instance, the Arch gets destroyed just like in The Black Hole. Then there's all these stupid subplots, such as one about how governments around the world secretly set up shelters so that humanity could survive, but they gonna let everybody else die without tellin' 'em.
I hate to point this out to the movie's creators, but the negative portrayal of this is pretty stupid. Sure, choosing who lives and dies is cruel and vicious, but it's better than letting everybody die, isn't it? (Not that anybody would have survived an actual supernova; it turned out the Sun didn't explode. Kind of disappointing, really; I'd have preferred that everybody died because they were all so annoying.)
There was also a stupidly predictable plotline with a serial killer on death row (in Australia, where there is not currently a death penalty) escaping and coming after the lady who fingered him as the killer. She shoots him lots of times.
That may have been the best part of the movie (after the Sheppard guy getting vaporized), but I don't know because I'd stopped watching by that point.
Yes, it's that bad. (I don't think I need to establish any further reputation for my ability to watch bad movies at this point.)
-Signing off.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: The Black Hole
No, not that Black Hole.
This one.
So what's up with this movie?
Well, remember a while back when they were getting ready to fire up the LHC and everybody was joking about whether or not the thing could accidentally make a black hole? This movie makes that into a disaster movie.
A disaster movie so full of nonsense science that it will probably make physicists turn into black holes from the density of their massive anger. (Incidentally, here's a more coherent and logical review. I'm about to retreat into crazyland.)
A safer approach probably would have been to call the object the "amazing massive space booger of death" (AMSBOD). This actually would have been less insulting to the viewer's intelligence, and would also conveniently have an alternate explanation for the black hole's behavior (it's really sticky). Since this is my review, I think I'm actually going to do that.
The movie goes something like this. A hot scientist (played by Kristy Swanson), an old geezer scientist, and some geeky kid scientist find out something bad happened inside their particle accelerator. The geezer and the geek put on radiation suits and hop into a Cushman so they can drive around in the giant maintenance tunnels. Then, when they get close to the mysterious anomaly (actually an AMSBOD), a giant semi-transparent, static-filled alien monster eats the geezer by vaporizing him, while the AMSBOD sticks to the geek and the Cushman and absorbs them into its boogermass. (Hilariously, the hot scientist says to him "Why are you going the wrong way?") Yes, you read that right. (Okay, so there were what looked like gravitational effects. My story is that it's a sticky space booger [really sticky], and I'm stickin' to it. Pun intended.)
Why is there a staticky invisible monster involved with the "black hole?" If it were actually a black hole, it would make no sense, but since this is actually an AMSBOD, we can infer that this is a common property of AMSBODs. Let's move on.
The army concludes that this is an emergency, and grabs a hung-over, frizzy-haired scientist who used to work at the lab (played by Judd Nelson-the scientist, not the lab), since he is the foremost expert on the movie's stupid version of "black hole" science. They examine the evidence, and eventually conclude rather strangely that the AMSBOD alien somehow caused the accident. You do realize, sirs, that this basically would make the alien a self-creating deity of some kind?
Anyway, the AMSBOD alien sneaks around in the facility for a while, tearing up cables and eating electricity and people. It eventually bursts out of a vent, eats a couple more guys (and makes some throw-away character throw up), and then runs away when the alarms go off. Keep in mind, the AMSBOD has been sitting there for hours. How come nothing has happened yet?
Let me take a momentary aside and explain the problem. See, a black hole is essentially an infinitely dense speck of material whose "event horizon" determines its effective "size." The event horizon is a place of gravitational cutoff-nothing on the one side stands a chance of escaping. What this means is that a black hole is smaller than an atomic nucleus. Generally also, black holes will not be significantly affected by any forces other than gravity, so far as we know. What does this mean?
It means the black hole ought to rapidly (and I do mean rapidly) fall to the center of the Earth, where we can neither do anything about it nor see what's happening. One of two things would then happen.
First possibility (let me emphasize "possibility") is that the black hole will "evaporate." According to some famous scientist guy, black holes emit radiation (I'm grossly oversimplifying) that will eventually bleed off all their mass, despite being inescapable. A small black hole actually would emit this radiation more rapidly, and thus theoretically evaporate really quickly. (Of course, it's emitting vast amounts of radiation, so that's not a good thing-in fact, a tiny black hole would for all intents and purposes be a nasty, nasty bomb.) If this happened, there might be all kinds of trouble from the energy emissions, but probably, nothing world-ending would happen.
The other possibility is that the black hole would absorb all of Earth's mass. Definitely a bad thing.
Here's the reason neither of these things will have a movie made about them: Too boring. Either the world will end fairly quickly, with little special effects except at the end, or nothing much will happen.
Anyway, back to the movie and its space booger.
The AMSBOD monster runs away, riding around on power lines somehow and seeking out power stations. (Of course, what it's actually seeking out are large transformer stations, not power generation stations, so far as I can tell, but who am I to quibble?) It's tracked at various times by news and military helicopters, and it eventually stops at a power (transmission) station, where it eats a guy and then starts eating power. Frizzy Judd concludes, since the AMSBOD only seems to grow when the monster feeds, that it is somehow sending what it eats back to the AMSBOD. While this is kinda nonsensical, it's interesting, and at least they're using the right piece of nonsensical technobabble (quantum tunneling) this time around. It's also kinda cool to see a big sparky magic thing skittering around on power lines like a gigantic spider made of lightning.
Because of the damage the monster does, an ambulance goes past nearby, and the monster reacts negatively to the sound. Frizzy Judd concludes that the monster probably doesn't like sound "because it comes from a quiet part of the universe." Well, if it is from "outer space," it probably has never heard anything in its life, I suppose. He tests the theory by using his flinker to set off the car alarm. When the alien shoots lightning at the car (an H2, by the way), he concludes that he's correct.
Then they steal the van of the guy that the monster ate. (Hot scientist stops Frizzy Judd from breaking the window, because the car wasn't locked.) In the meantime, the booger has gotten big enough that it destroys the lab. Bizarrely, its "gravitational" effects don't start until it has leveled the walls of the particle accelerator-apparently, the materials used there are opaque to the forces that the AMSBOD uses to stick to objects. It eats a few military people, including the guy who barfed earlier, but nobody important, so it wasn't that big a deal. (Although my sister was sad because it ate "the pretty lady." This is the only time I mention "the pretty lady," so you can guess how important she was to the plot.)
Except for the part where the booger starts wandering around, making a big furrow in the ground.
The film is set in St. Louis, and so, of course, it heads straight for the Arch. The general in charge of the military response wants to go "nuke-yoo-ler" on the AMSBOD, but Frizzy Judd insists that doing that would be crazy, and could cause all kinds of bad stuff, like splitting it into pieces or making it fly around. I could see the flying around because of kinetic energy being imparted, but I'm not sure where he got the idea that a nuke could possibly split apart a singularity. Perhaps he had come to the conclusion that it was a new phenomenon, and was only referring to it as a black hole for convenience.
The booger creates a giant destructive vortex and then sucks up the Gateway Arch, while the Army tries to put together a good enough plan to stop the monster, which, Frizzy Judd thinks, could be used to stop the AMSBOD by taking it back and throwing it in there. How he thinks this could possibly be a good idea, I don't know, but that's what they decide the plot is. Roll with it, it's a bad movie.
So they give some army men some "concussion grenades," which theoretically are loud enough to bother the monster, and they helicopter in a big box (probably a converted cargo canister such as are used by semi trucks, judging by appearances) with fiddly bits on it, which they hope will serve as a monster cage. The grenades don't work very well (should have given them boom boxes or hand sirens or something) and guns are totally pointless, and when they get the monster somewhat close to the box after heavy losses, it uses its lightning to telekinetically pick the box up and throw it at the remaining soldiers, apparently crushing them. (The special effects fell short a bit; it looked a lot more like it landed in front of them.) Then the monster runs away.
They give Frizzy Judd and hot scientist thanks for the advice, but it's nuke time. They ready a nuke, while the president rehearses a terrible speech in an effort to raise tension (though the effect is actually to kill it almost completely). They kind of seem to think that hitting the AMSBOD itself makes more sense than nuking the darned monster; I don't see how this makes any sense at all.
Anyway, they try to send Frizzy Judd and hot scientist away with the evacuation, but they refuse because they want to try their plan again, but with fewer resources and less backup, and Frizzy Judd steals a generator truck and takes it to where the monster is feeding. The station where it's feeding gets turned off, the generator truck is the only source of power around, and the monster decides to sit on top of the truck and quietly ride it, rather than sucking it dry in an instant, killing Frizzy Judd, and wandering off somewhere.
In the climax of the film, an F-117 is sent in to do the nuking. This is stupid for various reasons, the primary one of which is that, well, F-117s aren't intended to deliver nukes. Meanwhile, Frizzy Judd drives the generator truck at the AMSBOD at high speed and hot scientist guides him with GPS. The president, who is watching with a TV, tells the pilot to hold his fire until they can see what's happening with the truck. Frizzy Judd fools around with the truck's fire extinguisher for no clear reason (maybe he just was thinking back to the time he opened up the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and blew away a giant space devil and the fire extinguisher was looking like a good deus ex machina at that point) and then jumps out, letting the truck's momentum carry it and the monster to the AMSBOD.
Despite all the flying debris being sucked in by the AMSBOD, followed by the massive electricky explosion emitted by the booger after the monster hits it, Frizzy Judd is fine, blah blah who cares happy ending.
So what can we surmise about the weird events of the movie?
I'd guess that the AMSBOD was actually some form of evil portal to an alternate dimension, and the monster was an eldritch being from that dimension, making sacrifices in order to increase its own power. (A little bit like the Warp from Warhammer 40,000, for instance.) The particle accelerator simply gave the creature a convenient point of entrance, and was almost coincidental.
...
What? It makes at least as much sense as how they described it!
-Signing off.
This one.
So what's up with this movie?
Well, remember a while back when they were getting ready to fire up the LHC and everybody was joking about whether or not the thing could accidentally make a black hole? This movie makes that into a disaster movie.
A disaster movie so full of nonsense science that it will probably make physicists turn into black holes from the density of their massive anger. (Incidentally, here's a more coherent and logical review. I'm about to retreat into crazyland.)
A safer approach probably would have been to call the object the "amazing massive space booger of death" (AMSBOD). This actually would have been less insulting to the viewer's intelligence, and would also conveniently have an alternate explanation for the black hole's behavior (it's really sticky). Since this is my review, I think I'm actually going to do that.
The movie goes something like this. A hot scientist (played by Kristy Swanson), an old geezer scientist, and some geeky kid scientist find out something bad happened inside their particle accelerator. The geezer and the geek put on radiation suits and hop into a Cushman so they can drive around in the giant maintenance tunnels. Then, when they get close to the mysterious anomaly (actually an AMSBOD), a giant semi-transparent, static-filled alien monster eats the geezer by vaporizing him, while the AMSBOD sticks to the geek and the Cushman and absorbs them into its boogermass. (Hilariously, the hot scientist says to him "Why are you going the wrong way?") Yes, you read that right. (Okay, so there were what looked like gravitational effects. My story is that it's a sticky space booger [really sticky], and I'm stickin' to it. Pun intended.)
Why is there a staticky invisible monster involved with the "black hole?" If it were actually a black hole, it would make no sense, but since this is actually an AMSBOD, we can infer that this is a common property of AMSBODs. Let's move on.
The army concludes that this is an emergency, and grabs a hung-over, frizzy-haired scientist who used to work at the lab (played by Judd Nelson-the scientist, not the lab), since he is the foremost expert on the movie's stupid version of "black hole" science. They examine the evidence, and eventually conclude rather strangely that the AMSBOD alien somehow caused the accident. You do realize, sirs, that this basically would make the alien a self-creating deity of some kind?
Anyway, the AMSBOD alien sneaks around in the facility for a while, tearing up cables and eating electricity and people. It eventually bursts out of a vent, eats a couple more guys (and makes some throw-away character throw up), and then runs away when the alarms go off. Keep in mind, the AMSBOD has been sitting there for hours. How come nothing has happened yet?
Let me take a momentary aside and explain the problem. See, a black hole is essentially an infinitely dense speck of material whose "event horizon" determines its effective "size." The event horizon is a place of gravitational cutoff-nothing on the one side stands a chance of escaping. What this means is that a black hole is smaller than an atomic nucleus. Generally also, black holes will not be significantly affected by any forces other than gravity, so far as we know. What does this mean?
It means the black hole ought to rapidly (and I do mean rapidly) fall to the center of the Earth, where we can neither do anything about it nor see what's happening. One of two things would then happen.
First possibility (let me emphasize "possibility") is that the black hole will "evaporate." According to some famous scientist guy, black holes emit radiation (I'm grossly oversimplifying) that will eventually bleed off all their mass, despite being inescapable. A small black hole actually would emit this radiation more rapidly, and thus theoretically evaporate really quickly. (Of course, it's emitting vast amounts of radiation, so that's not a good thing-in fact, a tiny black hole would for all intents and purposes be a nasty, nasty bomb.) If this happened, there might be all kinds of trouble from the energy emissions, but probably, nothing world-ending would happen.
The other possibility is that the black hole would absorb all of Earth's mass. Definitely a bad thing.
Here's the reason neither of these things will have a movie made about them: Too boring. Either the world will end fairly quickly, with little special effects except at the end, or nothing much will happen.
Anyway, back to the movie and its space booger.
The AMSBOD monster runs away, riding around on power lines somehow and seeking out power stations. (Of course, what it's actually seeking out are large transformer stations, not power generation stations, so far as I can tell, but who am I to quibble?) It's tracked at various times by news and military helicopters, and it eventually stops at a power (transmission) station, where it eats a guy and then starts eating power. Frizzy Judd concludes, since the AMSBOD only seems to grow when the monster feeds, that it is somehow sending what it eats back to the AMSBOD. While this is kinda nonsensical, it's interesting, and at least they're using the right piece of nonsensical technobabble (quantum tunneling) this time around. It's also kinda cool to see a big sparky magic thing skittering around on power lines like a gigantic spider made of lightning.
Because of the damage the monster does, an ambulance goes past nearby, and the monster reacts negatively to the sound. Frizzy Judd concludes that the monster probably doesn't like sound "because it comes from a quiet part of the universe." Well, if it is from "outer space," it probably has never heard anything in its life, I suppose. He tests the theory by using his flinker to set off the car alarm. When the alien shoots lightning at the car (an H2, by the way), he concludes that he's correct.
Then they steal the van of the guy that the monster ate. (Hot scientist stops Frizzy Judd from breaking the window, because the car wasn't locked.) In the meantime, the booger has gotten big enough that it destroys the lab. Bizarrely, its "gravitational" effects don't start until it has leveled the walls of the particle accelerator-apparently, the materials used there are opaque to the forces that the AMSBOD uses to stick to objects. It eats a few military people, including the guy who barfed earlier, but nobody important, so it wasn't that big a deal. (Although my sister was sad because it ate "the pretty lady." This is the only time I mention "the pretty lady," so you can guess how important she was to the plot.)
Except for the part where the booger starts wandering around, making a big furrow in the ground.
The film is set in St. Louis, and so, of course, it heads straight for the Arch. The general in charge of the military response wants to go "nuke-yoo-ler" on the AMSBOD, but Frizzy Judd insists that doing that would be crazy, and could cause all kinds of bad stuff, like splitting it into pieces or making it fly around. I could see the flying around because of kinetic energy being imparted, but I'm not sure where he got the idea that a nuke could possibly split apart a singularity. Perhaps he had come to the conclusion that it was a new phenomenon, and was only referring to it as a black hole for convenience.
The booger creates a giant destructive vortex and then sucks up the Gateway Arch, while the Army tries to put together a good enough plan to stop the monster, which, Frizzy Judd thinks, could be used to stop the AMSBOD by taking it back and throwing it in there. How he thinks this could possibly be a good idea, I don't know, but that's what they decide the plot is. Roll with it, it's a bad movie.
So they give some army men some "concussion grenades," which theoretically are loud enough to bother the monster, and they helicopter in a big box (probably a converted cargo canister such as are used by semi trucks, judging by appearances) with fiddly bits on it, which they hope will serve as a monster cage. The grenades don't work very well (should have given them boom boxes or hand sirens or something) and guns are totally pointless, and when they get the monster somewhat close to the box after heavy losses, it uses its lightning to telekinetically pick the box up and throw it at the remaining soldiers, apparently crushing them. (The special effects fell short a bit; it looked a lot more like it landed in front of them.) Then the monster runs away.
They give Frizzy Judd and hot scientist thanks for the advice, but it's nuke time. They ready a nuke, while the president rehearses a terrible speech in an effort to raise tension (though the effect is actually to kill it almost completely). They kind of seem to think that hitting the AMSBOD itself makes more sense than nuking the darned monster; I don't see how this makes any sense at all.
Anyway, they try to send Frizzy Judd and hot scientist away with the evacuation, but they refuse because they want to try their plan again, but with fewer resources and less backup, and Frizzy Judd steals a generator truck and takes it to where the monster is feeding. The station where it's feeding gets turned off, the generator truck is the only source of power around, and the monster decides to sit on top of the truck and quietly ride it, rather than sucking it dry in an instant, killing Frizzy Judd, and wandering off somewhere.
In the climax of the film, an F-117 is sent in to do the nuking. This is stupid for various reasons, the primary one of which is that, well, F-117s aren't intended to deliver nukes. Meanwhile, Frizzy Judd drives the generator truck at the AMSBOD at high speed and hot scientist guides him with GPS. The president, who is watching with a TV, tells the pilot to hold his fire until they can see what's happening with the truck. Frizzy Judd fools around with the truck's fire extinguisher for no clear reason (maybe he just was thinking back to the time he opened up the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and blew away a giant space devil and the fire extinguisher was looking like a good deus ex machina at that point) and then jumps out, letting the truck's momentum carry it and the monster to the AMSBOD.
Despite all the flying debris being sucked in by the AMSBOD, followed by the massive electricky explosion emitted by the booger after the monster hits it, Frizzy Judd is fine, blah blah who cares happy ending.
So what can we surmise about the weird events of the movie?
I'd guess that the AMSBOD was actually some form of evil portal to an alternate dimension, and the monster was an eldritch being from that dimension, making sacrifices in order to increase its own power. (A little bit like the Warp from Warhammer 40,000, for instance.) The particle accelerator simply gave the creature a convenient point of entrance, and was almost coincidental.
...
What? It makes at least as much sense as how they described it!
-Signing off.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Cosmos: War of the Planets
Also occasionally called Cosmos War of the Planets or just plain War of the Planets for no apparent reasons.
There are some pretty good reviews for this movie elsewhere online, so I'll make two quick notes to preface:
There's one scene where a couple lay down on two separate beds, smile at each other, and turn on a machine. (The machine happens to resemble the Death Star by total coincidence. The movie was made at the same time Star Wars was, too, so it was coincidence.) Then we cut to the captain, the main character, making out with his lady friend, and then we cut back again to the couple using the machine, and they're gasping suggestively. Then we cut back to the captain and his lady friend, and the lady friend says "I don't think I'll ever use a machine again."
Aaaaeeeuuurrrghhh. I did not need to hear that.
And then we see that same couple use the machine again later in the movie.
This alone makes it the only movie out of the old movies I've been talking about I would never show a kid. There's also the disturbing possession stuff, which involves a guy getting increasingly horrible looking as they repeatedly shoot him with flashligh-er, disintegrators-while possessed, and he doesn't die because he's been possessed (by a super-powerful computer), and he strangles a bunch of people.
Also, the phrase "war of the planets" was a totally arbitrary description for this movie. It was really about an evil computer trying to repair itself so it could conquer the universe. And it may have been invincible.
Something the reviewer doesn't mention (though it is mentioned in Wikipedia's summary): At the end of the movie, it is possible the evil computer possessed their spaceship. So, yeah.
-Signing off.
There are some pretty good reviews for this movie elsewhere online, so I'll make two quick notes to preface:
- The movie is public domain, or so I've read, so you can find it free by searching for it (it takes pretty little effort).
- Look here for an aforementioned review which loosely summarizes the plot of the movie sorta well. (Heavy snarks ahead.)
There's one scene where a couple lay down on two separate beds, smile at each other, and turn on a machine. (The machine happens to resemble the Death Star by total coincidence. The movie was made at the same time Star Wars was, too, so it was coincidence.) Then we cut to the captain, the main character, making out with his lady friend, and then we cut back again to the couple using the machine, and they're gasping suggestively. Then we cut back to the captain and his lady friend, and the lady friend says "I don't think I'll ever use a machine again."
Aaaaeeeuuurrrghhh. I did not need to hear that.
And then we see that same couple use the machine again later in the movie.
This alone makes it the only movie out of the old movies I've been talking about I would never show a kid. There's also the disturbing possession stuff, which involves a guy getting increasingly horrible looking as they repeatedly shoot him with flashligh-er, disintegrators-while possessed, and he doesn't die because he's been possessed (by a super-powerful computer), and he strangles a bunch of people.
Also, the phrase "war of the planets" was a totally arbitrary description for this movie. It was really about an evil computer trying to repair itself so it could conquer the universe. And it may have been invincible.
Something the reviewer doesn't mention (though it is mentioned in Wikipedia's summary): At the end of the movie, it is possible the evil computer possessed their spaceship. So, yeah.
-Signing off.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Assignment Outer Space
Also known as "Space Men," "Assignment Outer Space" is an unusual old science fiction film directed by Antonio Margheriti, AKA Anthony Dawson, famous (or infamous) for films such as Battle of the Worlds. (Never seen that one, but any movie with the line "I have one advantage over all of you. Calculus!" must be pretty entertaining.)
This movie, like some others, is in the public domain, and is worth checking out (if you're tolerant of slower old movies) because it represents an achievement (if this page is to believed): "Less than 30.000 US$ [US$ 30,000], and it was completed in 20 days, including the special effects."
Watching the movie, it was fairly easy to dismiss it as simply being a rather more thoughtful science fiction flick. It featured space travel portrayed in relatively realistic fashion, the only things that appear odd now (other than the cheap effects) being things that newer ideas have rendered obsolete (e.g., use of a fueling cable-spacecraft couldn't dock in the film). The most insane and impossible thing in the film is an invisible forcefield that vaporizes things, but it's the only part of the film that feels "truly" impossible, and even that is a relatively small order of magnitude harder to believe than the rest. (There is some weird technobabble here and there, but that's forgivable.)
The character Al (spacesuit number X15) was a somewhat older black guy, and my sister positively adored him. He was certainly a striking character; probably the only one with his head screwed on straight.
Not really much to say about it, because it's not actually that crazy a movie. Either you'll be pleasantly surprised by it because it's actually a halfway decent movie, or you'll hate it because it's dull as can be.
-Signing off.
This movie, like some others, is in the public domain, and is worth checking out (if you're tolerant of slower old movies) because it represents an achievement (if this page is to believed): "Less than 30.000 US$ [US$ 30,000], and it was completed in 20 days, including the special effects."
Watching the movie, it was fairly easy to dismiss it as simply being a rather more thoughtful science fiction flick. It featured space travel portrayed in relatively realistic fashion, the only things that appear odd now (other than the cheap effects) being things that newer ideas have rendered obsolete (e.g., use of a fueling cable-spacecraft couldn't dock in the film). The most insane and impossible thing in the film is an invisible forcefield that vaporizes things, but it's the only part of the film that feels "truly" impossible, and even that is a relatively small order of magnitude harder to believe than the rest. (There is some weird technobabble here and there, but that's forgivable.)
The character Al (spacesuit number X15) was a somewhat older black guy, and my sister positively adored him. He was certainly a striking character; probably the only one with his head screwed on straight.
Not really much to say about it, because it's not actually that crazy a movie. Either you'll be pleasantly surprised by it because it's actually a halfway decent movie, or you'll hate it because it's dull as can be.
-Signing off.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Warning From Space
According to various sources, this movie is notable only for being the first Japanese science fiction film shot in color. (Wikipedia remarks that it may have inspired Starro from DC comics, but this is probably a teeny bit questionable.)
There's no way around it; this isn't a particularly good movie. Not to say that you can't be entertained by it...
It borrows heavily from The Day the Earth Stood Still (a reminder on my opinion of that film) and When Worlds Collide (sadly, I've never seen it). The plot: Peaceful aliens that look like bipedal cyclops starfish made of cloth (called Pairans, but I don't know where you would learn this from the film) come to warn Earth of "Planet R," a planet "from another galaxy" which is hurtling towards Earth and threatens to destroy it. Why do the aliens care? Because their planet is in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the Sun, and it would suffer if something bad happened to Earth. (Roll with it, it's old and Japanese.)
Comparisons with the films that probably inspired it will generally talk about how weak it is by comparison. While I'll admit that it's no masterpiece, the benevolence of these aliens is actually much less questionable than that of the aliens from TDtESS: While those aliens pretty much just said "Disarm or die," these aliens said "We'll try kinda hard to help you."
I say "kinda hard," because the film's narrative is horribly disjointed and full of wacky plotholes. For instance, there's a scientist who knows a formula that could create a substance that would allow for the creation of a bomb "many times more powerful than the A- or H-bomb." (That is exactly how they put it, every single time.) The aliens know this formula, having developed it in their ancient past, but discarded it because they had no need for it. ("We do not recognize your trait called aggression." Paraphrased significantly.) The aliens, despite being able to recognize the formula on sight, don't actually know it. What. How. Sometimes why.
Anyway, the movie couldn't have held together if they hadn't done it that way, but it still creates a big problem: When the scientist gets kidnapped by the mob because the existence of the formula was accidentally publicized, he gets tied up for interrogation purposes, and then he gets left in an apartment building alone for a month, while the Earth heats up from the presence of Planet R (roll with it, it's old and Japanese) to the point where it's killing stupid animals. (A dog shown reacting to Planet R in the sky was later shown wandering through the street and collapsing; a cat shown sitting on a rooftop also reacting was never shown again, implying it knew better than to stay where it was hot. Score one for cats.) So the aliens rescue him after the building he's in starts inexplicably falling apart. It's then that we find out they could have found him at any time, because they put a tracking device ring on him. They get the formula from him, and then throw him back out into the street to find shelter. (Holy cheese, man, they aren't very concerned with his health, are they?)
Then, they launch a missile to blow up Planet R. And because it's old and Japanese, this doesn't cause mass destruction on Earth's surface.
One of the other interesting things about the film is that the most prominently featured alien, apparently a high-ranking individual, is female. (Or, for most of the film, a human woman.) This is probably the most entertaining part of the film, actually-the alien lady (who modelled herself after some kind of Japanese pop star to explain why they picked out an attractive actress) runs around doing super insane stuff like ten-feet-straight-up jumps, phasing through solid objects, and knowing advanced scientific formulas (forgive them if that sounds sexist, it's old and Japanese). And they have to do tests on her (or rather, on her hat and tennis racket) before they decide for sure there's something strange going on, and even then there's one guy who is all "Well, I don't know, maybe..."
I watched a few other cheesy science fiction movies of dubious origin recently, so a few more of these are coming down the line. This might have been longer if I wasn't kinda sick right now.
-Signing off.
There's no way around it; this isn't a particularly good movie. Not to say that you can't be entertained by it...
It borrows heavily from The Day the Earth Stood Still (a reminder on my opinion of that film) and When Worlds Collide (sadly, I've never seen it). The plot: Peaceful aliens that look like bipedal cyclops starfish made of cloth (called Pairans, but I don't know where you would learn this from the film) come to warn Earth of "Planet R," a planet "from another galaxy" which is hurtling towards Earth and threatens to destroy it. Why do the aliens care? Because their planet is in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the Sun, and it would suffer if something bad happened to Earth. (Roll with it, it's old and Japanese.)
Comparisons with the films that probably inspired it will generally talk about how weak it is by comparison. While I'll admit that it's no masterpiece, the benevolence of these aliens is actually much less questionable than that of the aliens from TDtESS: While those aliens pretty much just said "Disarm or die," these aliens said "We'll try kinda hard to help you."
I say "kinda hard," because the film's narrative is horribly disjointed and full of wacky plotholes. For instance, there's a scientist who knows a formula that could create a substance that would allow for the creation of a bomb "many times more powerful than the A- or H-bomb." (That is exactly how they put it, every single time.) The aliens know this formula, having developed it in their ancient past, but discarded it because they had no need for it. ("We do not recognize your trait called aggression." Paraphrased significantly.) The aliens, despite being able to recognize the formula on sight, don't actually know it. What. How. Sometimes why.
Anyway, the movie couldn't have held together if they hadn't done it that way, but it still creates a big problem: When the scientist gets kidnapped by the mob because the existence of the formula was accidentally publicized, he gets tied up for interrogation purposes, and then he gets left in an apartment building alone for a month, while the Earth heats up from the presence of Planet R (roll with it, it's old and Japanese) to the point where it's killing stupid animals. (A dog shown reacting to Planet R in the sky was later shown wandering through the street and collapsing; a cat shown sitting on a rooftop also reacting was never shown again, implying it knew better than to stay where it was hot. Score one for cats.) So the aliens rescue him after the building he's in starts inexplicably falling apart. It's then that we find out they could have found him at any time, because they put a tracking device ring on him. They get the formula from him, and then throw him back out into the street to find shelter. (Holy cheese, man, they aren't very concerned with his health, are they?)
Then, they launch a missile to blow up Planet R. And because it's old and Japanese, this doesn't cause mass destruction on Earth's surface.
One of the other interesting things about the film is that the most prominently featured alien, apparently a high-ranking individual, is female. (Or, for most of the film, a human woman.) This is probably the most entertaining part of the film, actually-the alien lady (who modelled herself after some kind of Japanese pop star to explain why they picked out an attractive actress) runs around doing super insane stuff like ten-feet-straight-up jumps, phasing through solid objects, and knowing advanced scientific formulas (forgive them if that sounds sexist, it's old and Japanese). And they have to do tests on her (or rather, on her hat and tennis racket) before they decide for sure there's something strange going on, and even then there's one guy who is all "Well, I don't know, maybe..."
I watched a few other cheesy science fiction movies of dubious origin recently, so a few more of these are coming down the line. This might have been longer if I wasn't kinda sick right now.
-Signing off.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Movie Commentary: Batman: Gotham Knight
So I watched this thing last night because I got it for my sister for Christmas.
It's a rather unusual film, and must be approached from a different angle than most movies. It's more of an anthology than anything else. The film's description calls them "six mostly related segments" or some such thing, but they're really only very vaguely related. (Several of the films share supporting characters, but it's like saying that two Batman stories are consecutive because they both have Alfred. Some of the connections that are supposed to be made between the segments make no sense, such as the supposition that In Darkness Dwells is immediately followed by Working Through Pain.)
Each segment is directed and animated by entirely different teams, although the voices of the recurring characters tend to be the same. (Batman is Kevin Conroy, reprising his role from Batman: The Animated Series.)
Since each segment is so markedly different, it'd be better to divide them up into their components and look at them individually.
Have I Got a Story For You is the first segment. It was made by the same studio which made a popular but ugly movie called Tekkon Kinkreet. (Lots of people praised the movie, and it got awards, but I just can't get past how ugly the animation is.) And unfortunately, the animation is rather similar to that movie's.
However, it's a pretty good segment anyway, mostly because it's one of my favorite Batman stories: A bunch of kids tell each other warped stories of just what Batman is. As far as I'm concerned, this story borders on being the most fun Batman story.
And ugly animation aside, it's a pretty good one. The sequence where Batman is a hideous terrifying shadow monster vampire thing is probably the best, because the style suits the trippy segment.
But this film is a good place to start because it sets the tone for the wider anthology. Each part of it is depicting someone's distinct vision of Batman, and it works well for the film as a whole.
Crossfire is a Batman story of a different streak. As with the first, it is more of a "story that takes place in Gotham and features Batman very heavily" story than a "Batman" story. We don't get into Batman's head any more in this segment than in the last one, although we get more out of him than "Thanks, kid." And the animation, which is nice, serves to wash the taste of the last one's animation from the mouth.
Field Test is an odd segment, for more reasons than Bruce Wayne looking like a bishonen. Using the term "electromagnetic pulse" to describe a magical force field is just insane, thank you very much. It also feels like it doesn't belong in the same time period as the other segments. And it confuses the viewer with the gang bosses Maroni and "the Russian," both of whom were put away at the end of the previous segment, both being out on the street (well, in large yachts, actually). But it doesn't matter so much, because it actually does give us a snapshot of Batman's psychology-he won't use the forcefield again, because its ricochet effect could put others' lives in danger during firefights.
In Darkness Dwells initially promises to be a good segment, but it has too many weird things about it for me to talk about it positively. The mouths, for one, are animated in a truly... disturbing way. They're incredibly active and mobile, and super-explicitly enunciate every single letter of every word. The segment also features really bad-looking animation like Killer Croc sliding around like he's got no legs but a mass of tentacles or something hidden under the water, or Batman dynamically moving at three quarters of a mile per hour away as guys look impressed at his exit, or for that matter the hundred foot wide statue head that follows him through a sewer pipe and nearly crushes him to death (wait, what?).
Working Through Pain is a frame story that features a set of connected flashbacks to when Batman journeyed to India to learn to control pain. Why is he flashing back to this? Because he's been shot. There's a very painful (heh) moment where he takes out a little gadget and uses it to cauterize the wound. (It really sounds like it hurts. Conroy is good at those in-pain bits.) At the end, whilst wallowing around in garbage waiting for Alfred to pick him up, he finds that the garbage has a ton of guns sitting in it, and gathers them all up obsessively. When Alfred reaches him and offers his hand to pull him out, Batman looks up at him and says "I can't." (Incidentally, Batman is my mom's and my sister's woobie, and sis totally had a "poor woobie" moment in response to this. Mom wasn't watching.)
Deadshot is the last bit, and features Batman fighting Deadshot on a train. That's pretty much it, although it wraps up some of the so-called subplots from the other bits.
All in all, Gotham Knight is worth it if you like Batman and you like anime, and may be worth it if you just like Batman. Despite it having come out quite a while ago, it's still all over the place (just like this one), so if you thought about it and didn't get to it, it should still be easy to find.
-Signing off.
It's a rather unusual film, and must be approached from a different angle than most movies. It's more of an anthology than anything else. The film's description calls them "six mostly related segments" or some such thing, but they're really only very vaguely related. (Several of the films share supporting characters, but it's like saying that two Batman stories are consecutive because they both have Alfred. Some of the connections that are supposed to be made between the segments make no sense, such as the supposition that In Darkness Dwells is immediately followed by Working Through Pain.)
Each segment is directed and animated by entirely different teams, although the voices of the recurring characters tend to be the same. (Batman is Kevin Conroy, reprising his role from Batman: The Animated Series.)
Since each segment is so markedly different, it'd be better to divide them up into their components and look at them individually.
Have I Got a Story For You is the first segment. It was made by the same studio which made a popular but ugly movie called Tekkon Kinkreet. (Lots of people praised the movie, and it got awards, but I just can't get past how ugly the animation is.) And unfortunately, the animation is rather similar to that movie's.
However, it's a pretty good segment anyway, mostly because it's one of my favorite Batman stories: A bunch of kids tell each other warped stories of just what Batman is. As far as I'm concerned, this story borders on being the most fun Batman story.
And ugly animation aside, it's a pretty good one. The sequence where Batman is a hideous terrifying shadow monster vampire thing is probably the best, because the style suits the trippy segment.
But this film is a good place to start because it sets the tone for the wider anthology. Each part of it is depicting someone's distinct vision of Batman, and it works well for the film as a whole.
Crossfire is a Batman story of a different streak. As with the first, it is more of a "story that takes place in Gotham and features Batman very heavily" story than a "Batman" story. We don't get into Batman's head any more in this segment than in the last one, although we get more out of him than "Thanks, kid." And the animation, which is nice, serves to wash the taste of the last one's animation from the mouth.
Field Test is an odd segment, for more reasons than Bruce Wayne looking like a bishonen. Using the term "electromagnetic pulse" to describe a magical force field is just insane, thank you very much. It also feels like it doesn't belong in the same time period as the other segments. And it confuses the viewer with the gang bosses Maroni and "the Russian," both of whom were put away at the end of the previous segment, both being out on the street (well, in large yachts, actually). But it doesn't matter so much, because it actually does give us a snapshot of Batman's psychology-he won't use the forcefield again, because its ricochet effect could put others' lives in danger during firefights.
In Darkness Dwells initially promises to be a good segment, but it has too many weird things about it for me to talk about it positively. The mouths, for one, are animated in a truly... disturbing way. They're incredibly active and mobile, and super-explicitly enunciate every single letter of every word. The segment also features really bad-looking animation like Killer Croc sliding around like he's got no legs but a mass of tentacles or something hidden under the water, or Batman dynamically moving at three quarters of a mile per hour away as guys look impressed at his exit, or for that matter the hundred foot wide statue head that follows him through a sewer pipe and nearly crushes him to death (wait, what?).
Working Through Pain is a frame story that features a set of connected flashbacks to when Batman journeyed to India to learn to control pain. Why is he flashing back to this? Because he's been shot. There's a very painful (heh) moment where he takes out a little gadget and uses it to cauterize the wound. (It really sounds like it hurts. Conroy is good at those in-pain bits.) At the end, whilst wallowing around in garbage waiting for Alfred to pick him up, he finds that the garbage has a ton of guns sitting in it, and gathers them all up obsessively. When Alfred reaches him and offers his hand to pull him out, Batman looks up at him and says "I can't." (Incidentally, Batman is my mom's and my sister's woobie, and sis totally had a "poor woobie" moment in response to this. Mom wasn't watching.)
Deadshot is the last bit, and features Batman fighting Deadshot on a train. That's pretty much it, although it wraps up some of the so-called subplots from the other bits.
All in all, Gotham Knight is worth it if you like Batman and you like anime, and may be worth it if you just like Batman. Despite it having come out quite a while ago, it's still all over the place (just like this one), so if you thought about it and didn't get to it, it should still be easy to find.
-Signing off.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Movie Commentary: Iron Man
If you're wondering, I finally saw Iron Man last night.
As I have mentioned in the past, Iron Man is one of my all-time favorite superheroes. It has at least a little bit to do with the second season of the Iron Man cartoon from way back (intro here), and also to do with the fact that that Iron Man is sort of what Batman would be like if he actually made some kind of logical sense and wasn't simultaneously trying to be DC's version of Wolverine (i.e. the non-ultrapowerful guy who can trash all the ultrapowerful guys by flicking his pinky and his fan base in their general direction).
I also really like the armor for some reason.
So I was much more emotionally invested in this movie than, say, any of the Batman movies ever (I've pretty much decided I'll never deliberately watch any of them) or even the Spider-Man movies (the way they did Doctor Octopus just didn't work for me, something I may discuss at some point).
And I wasn't disappointed.
There are lots of little details that really worked. In ways, it seems rather like they were using the cartoon as more of a template than the comic-the iconic chest-mounted life-saving gadget thingy, for instance (though for all I know something similar was in the comic; I've just always been under the impression that he was usually wearing something much bigger in the comics till he got the old shrapnel in his heart junk removed), and also their conversion of Jarvis into a house computer (in the cartoon, the house 'puter was named Homer and had a green holographic avatar).
One thing I loved was the modification of the repulsors into this multifunction blaster/thruster combination. When Tony is testing out his arm unit when Pepper walks in, and remarks "it's completely harmless" you just know it's going to blow something up.
Lots of people, I know, don't make a big fuss about the little technical details, but I obviously love them when they're interesting, and they were in this movie.
The movie also addresses, indirectly, the question "why don't you just put that stuff in a big tank thing and get an even better weapon? Nothing says you couldn't!" Tony doesn't put his Iron Man weaponry into anything bigger than a personal suit because he doesn't want to. Stane puts the weapons into a suit the size of a small tank (he doesn't have quite as many slick weapons, but still sticks to the same technology-he's operating on different principles entirely) and gets something much stronger in a straight fight-because he wants to. Obviously, I'm simplifying considerably when I say this, but this explains so much of what happens in the movie.
The movie also has something in it which I've refered to before, which I will here call the "Spaceknight effect." Watching Iron Man blow away and physically crush the terrorists can be very unsettling. (Perhaps my empathy has improved, or perhaps I've just been seeing more things with this in them lately. I don't know.) It balanced out a bit with bits that struck me as funny-the part where the Mark I's arm gets jammed in the cave wall, so some guy walks up and tries to pop him off, but gets hit by the ricochet, the bit where he pops up out of the crater he crashed into after he was shot down by the tank (the ash on his mask made him look really mad), and the bit where he takes the guy who had been leading the purge expedition and says "he's all yours" and throws him at the villagers' feet, with a brief Robocop punch-through-wall-and-grab-that-guy bit (okay, that's not funny, but it's edifying). Moments like Iron Man's shoulder needle missile things popping up and killing fifteen guys in the span of a breath were very scary.
On the other hand, I love they way they characterized Iron Man. A lazy bum at the beginning, but only because he's confident in the world, and so he's chosen to resign from it beyond his creating technology to help it. When it comes down to it, he does care, and that's important. The way he cares doesn't strike me as heavy-handed or excessively moralizing-he realizes that he's helped kill people that he genuinely (if distantly at first) cared for, and his seeming 180 is a result of his guilt over what is essentially the shattering of his secure worldview. And he makes it clear through his actions that he cares, because he takes risks to avoid bringing others to harm-notably in his efforts to save the airman whose chute doesn't deploy, while the wingman is right there and ready to open fire on him.
Also, while writing a sense of humor into Iron Man apparently isn't what has always been done, it's pretty much necessary for the character from my perspective. Don't ask me what it is, but for some reason, if you can't at least quirk an eyebrow at him, he doesn't work as well. (I don't know that much historically about Iron Man's portrayal-I know that at times he's been funny in the comics.)
The movie as cinema? I liked it. I was a little surprised at Stane's betrayal of the Ten Rings (suppose I shouldn't have been), but I guessed early on (like, the first time I saw footage of some bald guy from the film, and read that there was an Iron Monger prop that had been spotted on the set) that he'd be the big bad of the film itself-I mean, come on, he's freaking Obadiah "Iron Monger" Stane. And yes, I picked up on who the Ten Rings sort of is. I have to admit, some of the bits where he was putting the moves on women put me off a bit (it's good they removed the Dubai house scene), but it's a part of the character-like James Bond, or for that matter like Batman if Batman took that seriously.
Making Stane Tony's "mentor" is kind of a "Spider-Man Movification" of the character, but it works really well here. And unlike Spider-Man 2's version of Doc Ock, Stane is as greedy and coldhearted an *untranscribable* as he was in the comics. (It's also interesting that they cut out Stane's being monomaniacal to the point of death aspect, as he committed suicide in the comics.)
Also, I'm very amused that Tony spontaneously threw out the bodyguard explanation for the Iron Man identity and proclaimed that he actually was Iron Man during the press conference. Obviously, they weren't worried about being slaves to the comics.
-Signing off.
As I have mentioned in the past, Iron Man is one of my all-time favorite superheroes. It has at least a little bit to do with the second season of the Iron Man cartoon from way back (intro here), and also to do with the fact that that Iron Man is sort of what Batman would be like if he actually made some kind of logical sense and wasn't simultaneously trying to be DC's version of Wolverine (i.e. the non-ultrapowerful guy who can trash all the ultrapowerful guys by flicking his pinky and his fan base in their general direction).
I also really like the armor for some reason.
So I was much more emotionally invested in this movie than, say, any of the Batman movies ever (I've pretty much decided I'll never deliberately watch any of them) or even the Spider-Man movies (the way they did Doctor Octopus just didn't work for me, something I may discuss at some point).
And I wasn't disappointed.
There are lots of little details that really worked. In ways, it seems rather like they were using the cartoon as more of a template than the comic-the iconic chest-mounted life-saving gadget thingy, for instance (though for all I know something similar was in the comic; I've just always been under the impression that he was usually wearing something much bigger in the comics till he got the old shrapnel in his heart junk removed), and also their conversion of Jarvis into a house computer (in the cartoon, the house 'puter was named Homer and had a green holographic avatar).
One thing I loved was the modification of the repulsors into this multifunction blaster/thruster combination. When Tony is testing out his arm unit when Pepper walks in, and remarks "it's completely harmless" you just know it's going to blow something up.
Lots of people, I know, don't make a big fuss about the little technical details, but I obviously love them when they're interesting, and they were in this movie.
The movie also addresses, indirectly, the question "why don't you just put that stuff in a big tank thing and get an even better weapon? Nothing says you couldn't!" Tony doesn't put his Iron Man weaponry into anything bigger than a personal suit because he doesn't want to. Stane puts the weapons into a suit the size of a small tank (he doesn't have quite as many slick weapons, but still sticks to the same technology-he's operating on different principles entirely) and gets something much stronger in a straight fight-because he wants to. Obviously, I'm simplifying considerably when I say this, but this explains so much of what happens in the movie.
The movie also has something in it which I've refered to before, which I will here call the "Spaceknight effect." Watching Iron Man blow away and physically crush the terrorists can be very unsettling. (Perhaps my empathy has improved, or perhaps I've just been seeing more things with this in them lately. I don't know.) It balanced out a bit with bits that struck me as funny-the part where the Mark I's arm gets jammed in the cave wall, so some guy walks up and tries to pop him off, but gets hit by the ricochet, the bit where he pops up out of the crater he crashed into after he was shot down by the tank (the ash on his mask made him look really mad), and the bit where he takes the guy who had been leading the purge expedition and says "he's all yours" and throws him at the villagers' feet, with a brief Robocop punch-through-wall-and-grab-that-guy bit (okay, that's not funny, but it's edifying). Moments like Iron Man's shoulder needle missile things popping up and killing fifteen guys in the span of a breath were very scary.
On the other hand, I love they way they characterized Iron Man. A lazy bum at the beginning, but only because he's confident in the world, and so he's chosen to resign from it beyond his creating technology to help it. When it comes down to it, he does care, and that's important. The way he cares doesn't strike me as heavy-handed or excessively moralizing-he realizes that he's helped kill people that he genuinely (if distantly at first) cared for, and his seeming 180 is a result of his guilt over what is essentially the shattering of his secure worldview. And he makes it clear through his actions that he cares, because he takes risks to avoid bringing others to harm-notably in his efforts to save the airman whose chute doesn't deploy, while the wingman is right there and ready to open fire on him.
Also, while writing a sense of humor into Iron Man apparently isn't what has always been done, it's pretty much necessary for the character from my perspective. Don't ask me what it is, but for some reason, if you can't at least quirk an eyebrow at him, he doesn't work as well. (I don't know that much historically about Iron Man's portrayal-I know that at times he's been funny in the comics.)
The movie as cinema? I liked it. I was a little surprised at Stane's betrayal of the Ten Rings (suppose I shouldn't have been), but I guessed early on (like, the first time I saw footage of some bald guy from the film, and read that there was an Iron Monger prop that had been spotted on the set) that he'd be the big bad of the film itself-I mean, come on, he's freaking Obadiah "Iron Monger" Stane. And yes, I picked up on who the Ten Rings sort of is. I have to admit, some of the bits where he was putting the moves on women put me off a bit (it's good they removed the Dubai house scene), but it's a part of the character-like James Bond, or for that matter like Batman if Batman took that seriously.
Making Stane Tony's "mentor" is kind of a "Spider-Man Movification" of the character, but it works really well here. And unlike Spider-Man 2's version of Doc Ock, Stane is as greedy and coldhearted an *untranscribable* as he was in the comics. (It's also interesting that they cut out Stane's being monomaniacal to the point of death aspect, as he committed suicide in the comics.)
Also, I'm very amused that Tony spontaneously threw out the bodyguard explanation for the Iron Man identity and proclaimed that he actually was Iron Man during the press conference. Obviously, they weren't worried about being slaves to the comics.
-Signing off.
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