Category Archives: SF

Screw Canon

Leave a reply

.

Canon, a rule, regulation, or dogma decreed by a church, is often used in fiction to declare which elements of backstory and non-depicted events are part of the fiction’s reality. These days, particularly with the Star Wars franchise I see the term lore used much more often but in the same manner, those events or concepts that are considered part of the franchise’s universe versus theories generated by fandom without any official standing.

Debates about events that are perceived as ‘canon’ can generate intense, personal, and often bitter arguments, particularly online. Personally, I care very little for when canon is violated if it is done in the service of a better story, if it is done because that institutional knowledge is lost from the creative team and the story simply stumbled into something that conflicts with earlier narrative for no real reason, that’s sloppy writing but it generates no anger in me.

Star Trek V forgetting that Jim Kirk had an actual brother, Sam, is such a case, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds exploring Spock, T’pring, and Christine while shattering ‘canon’ is such interesting character work that I am perfectly happy with it. I can still watch the episode of the original series Amok Time and the seasons of Strange New Worlds with equal enjoyment.

Canon as backstory is good and nice but it should not serve as a straitjacket and when something better comes along it should not prohibit its utilization.

Share

Andor: Final Thoughts

Leave a reply

.

I have finally finished watching the Star Wars inspired television series Andor, which follows both the character of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) introduced to audiences with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the growth of the Rebel Alliance as they struggle against the Galactic Empire.

Disney Studios

Andor is quite simply my favorite Star Wars inspired media that I have encountered, unique in that it avoids tales of mysticism and chosen bloodlines for a more complex view of people in crisis. While it repeats the phrase ‘Rebellions are built on hope’, it also depicts that rebellions, vast criminal conspiracies, are often riven with conflict, competing power centers, and a willingness to do terrible things for their ultimate objective.

I refer to it as ‘Star Wars inspired’ and not directly as Star Wars because I do think the difference is immense. Star Wars is the collection of stories centered on the Skywalker clan and their associates. Those tales focus on noble bloodlines, characters born ‘better’ than the masses, and have much more in common with fairy tales than the lives of ordinary people living through difficult times facing terrible decisions. In Star Wars the fascism of the Empire is an abstract thing, shown here and there with its casual cruelty to principal characters of the story but otherwise something that we need not actually see. In Andor, the fascism is the day-to-day experience of the people, and we live it not only in the arbitrary ‘justice’ system that dispatches people to labor prisons for minor offenses but also in the bureaucratic nightmare of its security services as talented dedicated officers are hamstrung and eventually crushed for their initiative.

I applaud Andor for its multifaceted depiction of the Alliance, from politicians deluding themselves that politics and policy can still save them, through idealists writing their manifestos while running from the law to fanatics blinded to the suffering and the evil that they do by their need to win.

Andor which began with Cassian leaving a brothel where he had hoped to find his sister and killing a pair of police officers that tried to shake him down is not ‘realistic’, but it echoes our world and its corruption.

Share

So, I Finally Started Severance

Leave a reply

.

Despite the second season having already completed its airing, (airing strikes me as grossly incorrect in the age of streaming) I only began watching the series Severance this past weekend.

Apple TV +

The series is a science-fiction program centered on the ‘severed’ workers at the mysterious Lumon corporation. ‘Severed’ is a mechanical/surgical procedure that causes memory formation and retrieval in those altered to be spatially controlled. In the case of these workers while on the ‘severed’ floor they have no memory of their lives outside of the work area and when off that designated floor they have no ability to recall anything that occurred during their working hours. Each worker lives two lives, one where work is their entire existence and one ‘normal’ outside of their shift on the ‘severed’ floor.

 

 

The show’s protagonist is Mark (Adam Scott) a man who in his regular life is dealing with crushing grief and at work who has recently been promoted to a supervisory position which now includes a new hire, Helly (Britt Lower). Things become complicated when a ‘severed’ worker, Petey, approaches Mike in his outer life with information that Lumon is hiding the truth of their work and that being ‘severed’ is actually reversable.

Severance is executive produced by Ben Stiller and his company Red Hour Productions, (Stiller is a noted Star Trek fan as his production company indicates.) and Stiller directed the first two episodes.

I have heard since the series’ release of season one that this was an interesting and challenging show with surprising twists and reveals but it has been only in the last few days, I made time to start watching. Right now, I can’t say if I am completely sold on the series.

I have watched two episodes, and the world building is interesting, the concepts are fascinating, the acting is quite good, but the show hasn’t managed to set a hook that forces me to come back for the next episode. Comparing my reaction to Severance with another show I recently started watching, The Pitt, produces a striking contrast.

The Pitt is a medical drama with no genre conventions, normally the sort of series that would provoke little interest from me and it was only doctors praising the accuracy that caused me to watch the first episode, and I was utterly hooked. From the very first show I had favorite characters and those who I disliked, and I had to watch more. I burned through the entire series in about two weeks, skipping only one night when I was still so mad because my favorite character had been physically attacked.

Severance has produced no reaction like that. It is interesting, the world building with the people who live outside of the company have valid and interesting reaction to such technology, and there are mysteries to be uncovered, puzzles to be solved, but so far nothing that is emotionally compelling. The series is prompting curiosity but not much more. That is not to say I will stop watching; I will give it a few more episodes but unless something changes it could fall into a well of disinterest where I simply watch other things and fail to return not from dislike but simply not caring.

Share

Why did John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ fail at the Box Office?

.

June 25th, 1982, witnessed the release of The Thing a remake by horror icon John Carpenter of the classic Sci-Fi film The Thing from Another World, both inspired and adapted from the short story Who Goes There by famed writer and editor John W. Campbell Jr. Despite Carpenter’s successful track record of feature films such as Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Fog this movie crashed at the box office, making less than 20 million on a 15 million estimated budget, considering prints and advertising that a movie that lost money. Reportedly Carpenter for decades felt bitter about the movie terrible run even after the film became a classic beloved by millions and considered a masterpiece of modern horror.

1982 was far from a year of depressed box office receipts. Many films scored enormous financial successes that year including such genre fare as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Poltergeist, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial but along with The Thing another movie that is now considered extraordinary died at with audiences in 1982 Blade Runner.

Blade Runner, I believe, suffered from both studio interference and audience expectations causing its failure to find the success it would eventually discover once alternate edits became widely available, but The Thing is a different story. That film has not been re-tooled, edited, or significantly altered from its original theatrical release. The version hailed as a masterpiece is the same one I watched in 1982.

The film did not change, the culture around it did. The decade prior to The Thing’s release was one of deep cynicism and anti-heroes. The 1970s brought forth films about failure, systems crushing heroes and the futility of trying. Even when heroes won victory it often came at great costs or produced pyric wins. By 1982 this cultural mood had been swept away with ‘morning in America’ and a renewed sense of manifest destinty. Following that massive success of Star Wars and its first sequel The Empire Strikes Back the cultural zeitgeist was one that demanded happy endings, clearly defined heroes and villains, and unbounded optimism. The Thing stood not only in contrast but stark opposition to all of that. It’s heroes were deeply flawed the mood darkly cynical and the ending so ambiguous as to provide no sense of closure for any audience.

We can never know for sure, but I believe if The Thing had been released in 1976 it would have found an audience on that release but for 1982 it simply marched to a beat so different that few could actually hear it.

Share

We Hope George A. Romero was Wrong

.

In March of 1972 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched a pair of space probes bound for the planet Venus. One of those probes suffered a failure of either an engine quitting too soon or not producing enough thrust. Either way was the probe failed to escape orbit about the Earth and has spent the last 53 years in an inclined and eccentric orbit that has very slowly degraded. Sometime tomorrow, May 10th, 2025, it will pass too deep in the Earth’s atmosphere, lose too much velocity, and return to its planet of origin with the very solidly built lander possibly surviving all the way down to impact.

What does this have to do with Pittsburgh filmmaker George A. Romero?

While Romero directed 17 feature films before his passing in 2017 and was involved in both film and television projects, he is best known for the creation of the modern cinematic zombie with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

In Night the recently deceased are reanimated to attack and consume the living. The film, with a budget of about the same value as a single episode of the original series of Star Trek, focused on a disparate group of fractious survivors attempting to outlive a siege of the dead there are moments here and there where the larger world of the story is revealed. One of those moments provides a usual bad scientific ‘explanation’ for the plague of ghouls. (It’s worth noting that the word ‘zombie’ is not uttered in what many consider to be the birth of the modern zombie genre.) That explanation is that a Venus probe returning to Earth with a strange and unknown radiation has ‘activated’ the brains of the dead causing them to reanimate. Later movies in the series would ignore that origins of the monsters preferring no solid answers, but the original film remains with its foreboding prediction of death from returning probes that had been bound for Venus.

Of course, there is no danger of zombie and the end of the world from the old piece of communist hardware returning to Earth, but I find the coincidences amusing.

Share

Key Star Trek (TOS) Character Episodes

.

I recently watched a YouTube Reactor react to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The amusing elements in this reaction was that the young woman had zero context for the film, being utterly unaware of the characters and their history. One of her reactions when Spock comes aboard after the wormhole event is ‘Oh, they know Spock?’ with a tone of surprise.

In her wrap up, she of course mused about watching the series and that got me thinking about the most pertinent episodes for understanding the core characters of Star Trek. Not the best episodes mind you, just the ones that give you deep insight to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and the relationship to each other.

Season One:

The Naked Time

The Menagerie Pt I & II

The Galileo Seven

Arena

Space Seed

This Side of Paradise

The City on the Edge of Forever

Season Two:

Amok Time

Journey to Babel

The Ultimate Computer

Season Three:

The Enterprise Incident

The Tholian Web

The Paradise Syndrome

The list ended up heavy on season one episodes, but I think if someone new to the series who wasn’t going to watch all of it would get a pretty good understanding of the characters and what they mean to each other for the films that followed.

Share

Quick Review: The Gorge

.

Dropped on Valentines Day this year was the action/horror/romance movie The Gorge. Two expert sniper/assassins are the latest people assigned to monitor a mysterious gorge with

Apple TV+

orders to prevent anything from leaving the site and maintaining strict no communication with each other. Since the pair stationed on opposing sides of the chasm are outstandingly attractive people (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) the no-contact rule is of course broken. By the third act of the film the pair find themselves at the bottom of the gorge, fighting for their lives and uncovering terrible secrets it has hidden for 80 years.

Directed by Scott Derrickson who gave us the first Dr. Strange film and the wonderful Black Phone I had hopes for The Gorge but while not bad the film in the end proved to be less than satisfying.

What works in the movie are the leads, Teller and Taylor-Joy works quite well together, have an excess of chemistry with each other and the camera, and are simply fun to watch. All of the movie’s troubles start at the bottom of the mysterious gash in the Earth. The secret they discover not only strains credibility but is actually lackluster. Their fight for survival is meant to the suspenseful but with a film boasting a cast this limited it can never leave your mind that both are going to survive. Additionally, once they reach the bottom of the gorge all character development grinds to a halt. They face no choices or challenges that impact on their character only on their physical survival.

I don’t regret watching The Gorge but it’s highly unlikely I will ever revisit it.

Share

Movie Review: Companion

.

Nailing the genre of Companion is a tricky endeavor. Many consider it to be a horror film, after all it’s about an A.I. that’s for the run time of the film is primarily engaged in a spree of killing. Other classify the film as science-fiction/thriller, I guess because they turn their nose up at horror. What is undeniable is that Companion is at its heart a satire taking aim at terrible men and the manner in which they treat their romantic partners.

Warner Bros Studios

Sophie Thatcher, whom I last watched in the terrific Heretic stars as Iris, an emotional support robot, that is sex bot, to craven and despicable Josh (Jack Quaid.) They have journeyed far into the countryside for a weekend with two other couples, Eli, (Harvey Guillen) & Patrick (Lucas Gage) and Kat (Megan Suri) & Sergey (Rupert Friend.) Very quickly things go badly when in an act of self-defense Iris kills one of the men and events spiral out of everyone’s control.

Some have complained that Companion’s trailers, revealing that Iris is in fact a machine, destroys the movie’s ‘twist’ but that is not the case. The script is loaded with reveals and reversals that at each turn enhance the story and further the satire.

Writer/Director Drew Hancock has crafted a find piece of cinema that is both highly entertaining, rightfully funny without ever losing it thematic core while avoiding becoming a tiresome lecture. Sophie Thatcher is excellent in her performance, often making these tiny choices that very subtly convey quite a bit about Iris and her internal monologue.

This is a film I can whole heatedly recommend.

Share

Movie Review: Star Trek: Section 31

.

Let me be upfront with the limitation of this review, I did not finish the film and abandoned it part way through its runtime of an hour and thirty-five minutes. That alone should tell you my opinion of this project.

Paramount +

Now, there are those who have been annoyed with ‘new Trek’ for political reasons; I am not counted among them. There are those that are annoyed with it for canon and continuity reasons, nor am I counted among those people. Star Trek: Discovery did not capture my attention, and I give up after a few episodes. However, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds I adore and cannot wait for the new season this year.

I went into Star Trek: Section 31 with limited knowledge, that ‘Section 31’ was effectively the ‘Black Ops’ division of Starfleet and with an open mind. Let the movie be the movie and see if I was entertained by it.

 

I despaired when it began with a ponderous and overly dramatic prolog. Prologs are tricky things, particularly when they ask the reader or viewer to accept things that are highly improbable, such as a ‘hunger games’ kind of deal to selected random persons who will become an Emperor. Despotic governments aren’t well-known for rigidly adhering to rules concerning the transfer of power.

Fine, we get through the prolog and go into another misused technique, the voice-over exposition, where Jamie Lee Curtis gives us the background for a central character. Minutes and minutes of screen time have been wasted that only served as exposition creating neither dramatic nor emotional tension. Now, with that past, the story itself can finally get going.

In a scene that was supposed to establish Phillipa’s (Michelle Yeoh) acute perceptions as she identifies the special ops team in her space bar the script comes to yet another screeching halt for more ham-handed exposition describing the team, which we get twice as the team leader goes over it again. It doesn’t not help that the team is comprised of stock, flat characters wholly devoid of any sense of any inner life.

Okay, we can get to the mission and at least start the story. Things go a little wonky and there’s a big special effects driven pseudo-martial arts fight scene that drags, is hideously edited and lacking in any dramatic or emotional weight because all we have been severed to this point is frying pan to the face exposition.

I mentioned that the film has a run time of 95 minutes, when this fight ended, we were about halfway through that. Mw sweetie-wife and I bored by the tedious affair stopped the stream and spent the rest of our evening playing the deck building game Dominion on-line.

As you can see Star Trek: Section 31 never engaged me on any level. There wasn’t enough story to be emotionally invested, the characters, what little time we had with them, were too bland and flat to care about and the plot never turned interesting. I could find nothing in this production that was worth any attention at all. We shall not finish it as life is too short to waste of such bland formless material.

Share

Series Review: Dune Prophesy

.

Set ten thousand years before the coming of the Kwisatz Haderach Paul Atreides the series Dune Prophesy concerns itself with the early Imperium following the Machine Wars when humanity freed itself from sentient computers and the founding of the Bene Gesserit.

HBO

Thirty years earlier the sisterhood, before becoming the Bene Gesserit, suffers a crisis with their found Mother Superior dies and power struggle erupts between factions, a struggle won by the fanatically dedicated and deeply emotionally scarred Vayla Harkkonnen and her sister Tula. With careful mechanizations over the following thirty years, they are now close to bring the emperor’s daughter into the sisterhood and through her placing one of their own onto the throne. Their plans are disrupted when a mysterious solider who apparently survived a sandworm attack appears in the court with a deep burning hatred of the sisterhood and strange inexplicable powers.

Dune Prophesy is the next cinematic adaptation of the novels and stories created by Frank Herbert and successfully brought to the movie screen by French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. With an ample production budget and a cast of veteran and new actors the series is a wonder of dramatic science-fiction television, a worthy follow-on to the pair of films from Villeneuve.

As has become typical of television of late the season is rather shot with just six episode none of which are bloated with any filler. Also, as it has become the practice in the industry the series doesn’t answer all the questions raised leaving some for further seasons.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dune Prophesy and anticipate further interesting and unsettling seasons.

Share