Category Archives: SF

Movie Review: Tron: Ares

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The third film in the Tron franchise, Tron: Ares, flips the script and instead of spending its time with humans trapped in an alternate universe of cyberspace dealing with self-aware computer programs, computer programs come into the ‘real’ world and deal with us.

Walt Disney Studios

The principal technological advancement in this feature is the creation of digital objects and people in reality, much like Star Trek’s replicators from the later series. The creations, however, can only last 29 minutes before evaporating painfully back into nothing. The McGuffin of the film is the ‘permanence code,’ a bit of software that would allow created material to exist sans any time limit.

Fighting to possess this software is the evil Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the original film’s villain, seeking the power for military purposes and his own aggrandizement. Julian is countered by the movie’s protagonist, Eve Kim, CEO of ENCOM, the firm that was formerly headed by Kevin Flynn, Tron’s original protagonist. She, of course, is tortured by emotional trauma of the past but seeks the code for the betterment of humanity.

Pursuing Eve in the real world to seize the code from her is the military program Ares (Jared Leto), self-aware and slowly becoming more than his code defines.

Tron: Ares holds no real surprises. Every plot point is one that can be expected to take place, every character revelation is something well-trod in the annals of scriptwriting. The callbacks to the original film are delivered as expected, and this is a film that presented nothing in deeply shaded complexity.

All that said, sometimes all you need is a ‘popcorn movie.’ Something that makes little to no demands on the intellect and instead simply invites you to sit back, enjoy your popcorn, and lose yourself in a grand and well-executed spectacle. That is Tron: Ares. I watched the movie in 3-D, and this paid off handsomely—the visual effects were dazzling in 3-D, and the director, Joachim Rønning, resisted the urge to thrust too many things directly at the camera.

If you are looking for a bit of fun and can switch off any nagging issues of physics, then you could do worse on a Saturday afternoon than Tron: Ares.

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Star Wars and the Protean Honor of Old, Scared Men

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Now, Star Wars is not the finest example of world building in even cinematic fiction, much less fiction in general, the retconning that took place between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menaceamounts to vandalism of the lore but there are still elements that are intriguing to look at even with the massive alteration to the original trilogy’s history.

When the first film, Star Wars, takes place the Imperial system and the emperor himself have had their grubby little paws in power for less than 20 years. Luke Skywalker is in effect the age of the Empire itself. We could map this to real-world fascists with Italy, where the OG Fascists came to power in 1922 and were still there in 1942, albeit quite diminished in their geopolitical positioning. The German would not match that run their terrible regime, lasting only about a dozen years before imploding and taking millions of lives with it.

Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox

Let’s look at the Imperial Officers presented to us as characters in Star Wars. Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin is the old man of the group we see on the Death Star with the actor about 64 years of age, the rest of his command staff, is much younger but not young men. The other officers are in their 40s, 50s, with some matching Tarkin in their 60s, career men who dedicated themselves to military service — the military service of the Old Republic now enthusiastic and dedicated officers of the Galactic Empire willing to slaughter millions with the throw of a switch.

Undoubtedly it was the easier path when the emperor came to power to not buck the system, to not stand out from the crowd, to just ‘go along for now’ with the new government, the new administration, after all this won’t last forever. The oaths to the Old Republic conveniently forgotten in the harsh light of self-preservation.

Certainly, this observation has no relevance today.

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The Unrealistic Character of TNG’s Deanna Troi

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In the interim between the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969 and its resurrection as a television series with Star Trek: The Next Generation, creator and idolized leader Gene Roddenberry got high on his own supply of mythmaking and adoration.

After Trek vanished from the active airwaves, becoming the fare of syndication with daily reruns of episodes on local stations, the idealized version of the series and its message took hold in the growing and devoted fan base. The idea that Trek showed a future free of the human failings that so troubled our society then and continue to today, particularly bigotry, instead accepting everyone and celebrating their differences. People had been made better over the centuries, despite Kirk having to admonish officers to leave their bigotry in their quarters because there’s no room for it on the bridge, and McCoy’s continual treatment of Spock and his unending comments about the first officer’s heritage would earn him a perpetual hall pass to H.R. in any current corporation. When Roddenberry, after being booted from the film franchise, got the chance to make a TV series again, it was one that reflected what people praised about Trek while ignoring how the original series had actually been written. Every character would love and accept every other character, making drama among the crew something very difficult to write. This newfound “we love everyone” ethos was particularly strong in the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troi.

Paramont/CBS Home Video

Troi (Marina Sirtis) acted as the ship’s counselor and adviser, using her racial abilities to know the hidden emotional states of her patients and the people that the ship encountered on its adventures. She was presented as a warm character, accepting and understanding of everyone with a kind heart and word for the people around her and deeply troubled by their pains.

I find the construction quite improbable.

The truth about people is that we all wear masks nearly all the time. People rarely reveal just how much their inner thoughts, emotions, and drives are not reflected in their surface expressions and actions. Now, this would make someone like Troi a very useful agent in ferreting out the truth of a matter, a useful writing and plot device, but think about it from her point of view. She knows just how often everyone around her tells their little “white” lies, just how often men fake interest in a woman’s conversation when their minds are driven by more base desires, just how often people hold each other in contempt while presenting smiles and politeness. I can think of no better recipe for creating a hardened cynic, someone who knows that people are far nastier and crueler than they reveal. How much we are all just animals restrained by social conventions.

And that is a much more interesting character than a Pollyannaish woman wailing about joy and pain.

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Strange New Worlds Goes to Hell — In the Pacific

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Fans watching this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where pilot Erica Ortegas is

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

marooned on a planetoid with an enemy of the Federation, can be forgiven if they think that the plot was lifted from the 1985 film Enemy Mine. Of course, fans with a more extensive knowledge of televised SF programming might think that film lifted its plot from the final episode of Galactica 80: The Return of Starbuck. This ignores that the 85 film was an adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 Hugo winning novella of the same name.

If we go beyond the science-fiction genre, we get to what might be the Ur-text of the modern incarnation of this plot, the 1968 feature film, Hell in the Pacific.

Warriors from opposing sides stranded and forced to work together to survive, eventually overcoming their prejudices towards each other, is a powerful metaphor for life in general and it is not surprising that it feels like it has been adapted and readapted as many times as the plot of The Seven Samurai.

Episode 9 of this season, Terrarium, sees Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), after taking a shuttle craft into a gravitational anomaly, stranded on the moon of a gas giant only to discover that a Gorn pilot has also crashed here. Ortegas, a survivor of a brutal Gorn assault, has to grow beyond her personal terrors and emotional trauma to join forces with the alien pilot if they are both to survive until Enterprise can locate and rescue them.

Terrarium echoes the original series episode The Galileo Seven as the ship, tasked with delivering vaccines to a plague-stricken colony, faces a ticking clock that will force Pike to abandon the search for their missing officer. It is a nice bit of lore in the episode that the Enterprise is scheduled to rendezvous with the starship Constellation and its captain, Decker. Ortegas’ solution to alerting her crewmates as to the location of her crash also feels borrowed from that original series episode.

While the elements copied over from the original series are detracting from this episode, I still very much enjoyed it. Unlike Hell in the Pacific, The Return of Starbuck, or Enemy Mine, Ortegas’ history and emotional trauma makes this a more personal story and therefore one of greater growth than the other explorations of this concept. That does not diminish the other interpretations; each has their own charm and message about seeing past the surface of another and are worthy of enjoyment, even the Galactica 80 episode.

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A Little More WorldCon

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So, here is a bit of the vacation that went well.

The World Science Fiction Convention, WorldCon, had loads of good and interesting programming. Over the five days of the convention, I primarily attended panel discussions on horror (both prose and film), space science, and writing strategies.

The Con was well-run and well-organized, taking place in the Seattle Summit convention center, a massive building with five floors and loads of open-air spaces. The convention program was available on the app ‘Guidebook,’ which allowed users to browse the offerings, mark which were part of their personal schedule, and then add those panels and events to the calendars on their phones. This made it easy for my sweetie-wife and me to stay in the loop about each other’s panels.

Also, unlike some conventions, there was adequate cell coverage throughout the center, so there was never an issue with not being able to get a text to someone to arrange dinners and the like.

The con committee also deployed an interesting, if not entirely ready-for-prime-time, bit of tech to help members who suffered from hearing issues. Each room had a monitor that displayed live text of the panelists’ discussion. The AI tech employed did not always understand the words, particularly if they were from a foreign language or were unusual, and in those cases it guessed wrongly, but overall, I think it was a boon for any hearing-impaired fans.

Now, the convention is history, my vacation has ended, and in just a few minutes I will be returning to my day job and wading through an outlandish number of emails that await me.

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A Vacation of Woe and Wonder

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From August 12th through the 17th, I was on vacation from the day job and enjoying my first World Science-Fiction Convention since 2018. Sadly, while the convention itself was quite nice, with nearly every hour presenting me with multiple panels that I wanted to attend and having to sacrifice panel time just to have dinner with my sweetie-wife, the entire time was also the most stressful vacation I have taken.

We flew from San Diego to Seattle on Alaska Airlines, using miles accumulated on my credit card to reduce the cost of the flight to mere taxes. While transitioning through TSA security I screwed up royally but was unaware of the mistake until I deplaned at SeaTac in Washington. I discovered that I had left my wallet, with all of my identification, and my key ring at the security checkpoint in San Diego.

Thanks to Apple Pay, I was not without the ability to pay for things and could function at the convention, but the loss of the wallet weighed heavily on my mind for the entire duration of the convention.

Every morning I telephoned Lost and Found at the San Diego Airport and every morning their answer remained unchanged, no wallet, no keys. I researched how did TSA deal with this issue as I could not be the only person who had some terrible event cause them to lose all of their identification while traveling. TSA deals with it, I learned, by additional security screening, but it is not assured that you will pass it and be allowed to fly. So again, for the duration of my vacation my mind was bedeviled with the possibility that at SeaTac I would be turned away and have to find an alternate method of getting home. Amtrak had only sleeper remaining with costs of over a thousand dollars and Greyhound reported travel times of more than 48 hours.

I was so stressed that in the evenings instead of socializing at the open room parties, after my sweetie-wife retired for the night, I would just go to the hotel lobby and watch videos on my laptop.

The final morning of the convention, not only did Lost and Found not have my missing items, but a neighbor texted to alert us that my car had been broken into, the passenger window smashed with glass scattered everywhere.

Luckily, I made it through TSA enhanced screening and boarded the flight for home, though the flight was delayed a good twenty minutes, so we only got back into our home about 9:00 pm instead what of I had hoped for something more like 8:30pm.

My brilliant sweetie-wife produced spare keys for my car, our front door, and our mailbox. I took my Kia Soul to the dealer to have them replace the smashed window, but they wanted an astounding $1200 for that repair and that amount I was not going to pay. I found an independent service who was able to schedule an on-site fix for my car the next day, today, and do the job for under $300.

So today, I have finally, mostly, rebuilt and recovered from the disaster of losing my wallet and keys. Though a few more issues and details need to be addressed, I am ready to return to work in the morning and put this stressful ‘vacation’ behind me.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode — A Space Adventure Hour

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.

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Star Trek and Changing Social Mores

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

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I become Medicare-aged next year, and so to me Star Trek always means the original series and the original crew. Amid the adding and subtracting of cast and the morphing future history of the United Federation of Planets, one of the constants was the friendly combative relationship between Spock, the reportedly unemotional half-Vulcan, and the ship’s chief admitted sensualist and emotional heart of the crew, Medical Officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. McCoy continually needled Spock over his unemotional nature, his strangely colored green blood, and his distinctive appearance as the alien among humans. Spock usually responded in kind with a simply delivered but devastating remark that any observer could judge as victory in their mutual burn contests. Underneath the jibes and jabs was a foundation of deep respect, loyalty, and friendship, displayed most clearly in “Amok Time” when Spock invited McCoy, along with Kirk, to the very private Vulcan wedding ceremony.

What has fascinated me of late is watching younger people, usually those born in the early 90s, discover and react to the original series episodes and how they interpret Bones’ behavior toward Spock. They see it as inappropriate and borderline racist.

They aren’t entirely wrong.

The fact that Vulcans are fictional gives us some distance from the nature of Bones’ ribbing and cutting remarks, but the truth is that if he said similar things about real people and real races, we would be horrified. Denigrating comments about someone’s appearance or culture are something that is far less acceptable today than sixty years ago.

Growing up with these characters, we understood that there was and is a deep respect and love between them. We knowthat McCoy or Spock would lay down their lives to save the other, and that this surface tension is mere “play fighting.” It is not unlike comments my friends and I have made to each other over the years, but when it slides into observations based on biology, that crosses the line.

It gives me hope that the past is seen this way by the generations replacing us.

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Movie Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps

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After three previous attempts and a merger of studios to bring the film rights back to Marvel Studios, there is yet another shot at bringing the exploits of comics’ first family to the larger-than-life screen. The Fantastic Four is this time titled Fantastic Four: First Steps.

First published in 1961, The Fantastic Four is a quartet of heroes with very public identities and celebrity status in the comic book continuum. Though a popular franchise for over 60 years, the group has struggled to find a successful silver screen adaptation. The filmmakers with this reboot have elected to jettison more conventional approaches for a bold vision.

Marvel Studios

Fantastic Four: First Steps drops the audience into a parallel universe where the family of superheroes are already not only known but honored globally for their exploits and bravery. It is an alternate 1960s, and the production is drenched in retro-futurism—a future that people of the 60s envisioned but never came to pass, colorful and optimistic. The team’s ‘origin’ is quickly recounted as backstory for a television special. How scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), pilot Ben Grimm (Eben Moss-Bachrach), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), and her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) ventured into space and returned changed, imbued with amazing powers. In addition to eschewing recreating their origin, the filmmakers also steered clear of the team’s most notorious opponent, Dr. Doom. Instead, they are confronted by the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), Herald to the god-like being Galactus (Ralph Ineson), whose insatiable hunger drives him to consume planets teeming with life. Galactus is presented in the film as he was in the source material—a kaiju-sized humanoid in fantastic armor. The Silver Surfer has selected Earth as Galactus’ next victim, and the Fantastic Four attempt to negotiate with the god-like being. But when Galactus demands a price too high for the team to personally pay, Earth is set as his next target, and the world turns on its former heroes.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, in my opinion, is a mid-tier Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. Not as weak as some of the franchise films, but also nowhere near the excellence of its best. The script has four credited writers for both screenplay and story, and the final product is a bit muddled, showing what was likely a turbulent development and production. The cast is good, with Pascal and Kirby being outright terrific. Julia Garner plays enigmatic well and has one of the best ‘cheer’ moments in the feature. I think most of my issues—and why this film did not enthrall me completely—stem from the world-building of the alternate Earth failing to convince. It is not the retro-futurism that I found unconvincing (that I looked forward to), but some of the human aspects that were baked into the world that I found beyond my ability to accept. In Iron Man 2, it was stated that Stark ‘privatized world peace’—one moment of hyperbole that could be and should be ignored. Here, a similar concept is baked into this world’s canon.

Still, I did not regret venturing out to the theater for a fun, bright, and optimistic superhero film far from the dark and grounded miasma of cynicism.

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Things to Look Forward To

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After two days of dental surgery, chiropractic, and pulmonary medical appointments, Amazon drivers taking a reserved parking space, and my front passenger tire going flat due to a tiny screw, I can finally start to relax and look forward to a few weeks of hopefully nice events and activities.

First off is this weekend’s opening for Fantastic Four: First Steps. I am quite happy with the trailers and the interesting approach to produce the film in a retro-futurism style that echoes the comic book’s 60’s origins. So far, there haven’t been any decent Fantastic Four movies, but this one is the first to be produced under the Marvels Studios’ guidance following that studio’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

Next on the things that are making me happy is the next 7-8 weeks of televised science-fiction with the third seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Foundation. Full disclosure, while I have read a lot of classic SF, I never managed to get into Asimov’s Foundation series. His fiction often struck me as dry and with characters created to solve puzzles rather than experience emotional lives. So, I know that this show is deviating wildly from the source material, but it doesn’t bother me. Strange New Worlds is of course as I have previously written about is breaking ‘canon’ with Treklore, but it is doing so while giving us more realized and fleshed out characters so that’s a trade I am perfectly willing to make.

And finally, next month is the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington. It has been a number of years since I have been able to make a WorldCon and this I hope will be the restorative vacation/holiday I need just before the really busy period at the day-job commences.

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