Category Archives: SF

Voice Actors are not Interchangeable

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I had intended to write this yesterday but when you wake in the morning in the midst of a migraine your day is pretty much trash.

Monday, we learned that the talented performer James Earl Jones passed away at 93. With a career and noted performances well before his ascendency to fan stardom as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, Jones was a unique talent.

Jones was also not the person Lucas had in mind when he wanted someone to vocally perform for his space fantasy adventure, his first choice was Orson Welles. Jones proved to be the right choice. His voice was lesser known but nothing in the man’s multidecade history indicates that he was ever difficult to work with. Would Star Wars have reached the same heights with Welles providing the voice? Probably. The nation culturally was ready to turn the page on the cynicism of the 70s and Star Wars provided that new direction and escape, but I do think that Vader would have been lessened with another voice actor.

Vader wasn’t the only character transformed by their vocal performer.

C3PO is famously vocally performed by the character’s suit performer Anthony Daniels but that was not the intention.  Daniels had been hired to be the body on set, much as David Prowse had been Darth Vader on set.

Instead of a prissy English butler, C3PO’s conception of a character was closer akin to an untrustworthy used car salesman. Go back and listen to his dialog in the original film and note just how mean and cutting it is. 3PO is not a nice and likeable character as written, but only becoming endearing due to Daniels’ performance. It is my understanding that when they tried to record the lines as originally envisioned, everyone heard the disaster it was, and the role was then given to Daniels.

We often think of voice actors as lesser. That is unfair and probably due to the preponderance of terrible dubbing of foreign language films. In those case the artists are rarely given the time or direction to craft a real performance, a gross disservice.

Voice actors deserve the respect and admiration of the audience, and they are never interchangeable.

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Alien Covenant and the Mainline Franchise

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I saw Prometheus in the theater, found it terribly disappointing and therefore skipped its direct sequel Alien: Covenant when it was released. Following the modestly entertaining Alien: Romulus I decided to watch Covenant since it was one of my streaming services.

20th Century Studios

The first hour of Alien: Covenant was pretty damn good. The science, while far from being ‘hard sf’ was insulting and the neither the script nor the characters mind numbingly stupid as they had been in the previous film.

Then they reached the point where it had to bring in Prometheus and the film died. The action was lackluster with a dropped frame style that made everything too much like a video game and the plot progressed predictably with every ‘reveal’ blindingly obvious.

So, how do I feel about this most inconsistent franchise?

The two best films in the series are easily Alien and Aliens.

Next would be Alien” Romulus, derivative but entertaining.

Next Alien: Resurrection, more action than anything else and populated with what feels like the ‘alpha’ version of the Firefly crew.

Everything else, Alien 3, the Predator crossovers, and the two prequels are the trash dump of the franchise.

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Movie Review: Alien Romulus

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The seventh film in the Alien franchise Alien Romulus is set between the events of Alien and Aliens. The film is directed and co-written by Fede Alvarez and produced by Ridley Scott’s production company ‘Scott Free’ and Walter Hill’s ‘Brandywine.’

20th Century Studios

Romulus returns to the theme of ‘blue-collar’ workers in dire trouble established by the original 1979 feature film. In this story a collection of miners and other assorted low-value labor board a derelict station in hopes of obtained hyper-sleep pods that will allow them to escape their indentured servitude by making the 9-year voyage to the nearest planet not controlled by the corporation. the station however harbors secrets and dangers the characters are wholly unaware of and what started as a quest to escape rapidly become one of survival.

 

 

In my opinion Romulus ranks third in the franchise, directly after the original and Cameron’s direct sequel. Fede Alvarez and production designer Naaman Marshal have done a quite admirable job is creating a film that feels as though it is part of the world established by the original film and its sequel. Graphics recreated from those movies do not draw attention to themselves but create the familiar environment of those production. For the most part story beats and scenes that do call back to earlier movies do not feel as though they were forced into the film as some sort of obligatory ‘fan service.’

For the most part.

There are sadly several bits that do feel forced and contrived. I think in general it is preferrable to reference earlier films in a franchise with production design and props but not dialog. The dialog spoken by previous characters is theirs and it is unquestionably better to find the right words for you characters rather than take them from another.

The weakest section of the film for me is the final ten or fifteen minutes. Not only does it not feel earned and rather forced it extends a film that had reached a natural and satisfying conclusion with references to substandard entries in the franchise and caused the movie to end with more stolen dialog.

I find it ironic that the most enduring thematic element in the franchise is the one that screenwriter Dan O’Bannon objected to the most when it was inserted into his original script for Alien. The entire corporate conspiracy sub-plot, that the ship had been diverted deliberately and that the crew was considered expendable O’Bannon never liked but has become the defining theme of the films. It lives strong and proud in Romulus.

The next element of my review contains a spoiler so here’s a few thoughts before I continue.

Alien Romulus is a decent if somewhat flawed film that earns at least one viewing.

***SPOILER WARNING***

Through extensive and fairly well deployed CGI the filmmakers recreated on the screen Ian Holm, portraying another android in the same series that ‘Ash’ belonged to. There were some minor ‘uncanny valley’ issues, but they were well managed and actually fit the style of the film for an ‘artificial person.’

The fact that the plot revolves around a soulless corporation pushing workers to their death and seeking a way to extract value even beyond their death while the film literally extracts value from a deceased laborer is deeply ironic.

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Quick Thoughts on The Acolyte

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I am late to the party because I have not been overly enamored with the expanded Star Warsproducts of late. I adore Andor and thoroughly enjoyed season 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian but season 3 was aimless, The Book of Bobba Fett felt as though it had no point and Ashoka failed to entrance me and I dropped the show after two episodes.

Disney Studios/Lucas Film

The Acolyte falls squarely in the upper half of these offerings. It was decent enough and I was interested enough to watch the entire season. Set considerably earlier in the cannon’s history the series’ focus is twin girls, Mae and Osha, powerfully force sensitive and at the center of possible Jedi maleficence.

The cast is uniformly good with the most surprisingly performance in my opinion belonging top Mannie Jacinto. He manages a performance so distant to his previously best-known character, Jason Mendoza on The Good Place as to reside in an entirely different galaxy. (Yes, that analogy was intentional.) Lee Jung-jae as a troubled Jedi master was also exceptional.

Amanda Stenberg as the twin women held my attention and played the two characters quite well.

The Acolyte received some serious scorn from elements of fandom. I will not address if the root cause of that scorn is out of misogyny or from a desperate need to preserve an image of the Jedi as pure and wholly good. I must admit that I side with the fiction galactic senator that questions unchecked political power held by a religious order.

Overall, The Acolyte entertained and remained a pleasurable way to past a few evening hours but it is unlikely to stay with me in the manner that Andor has proven. It is not quite Star Wars for adult, but neither is it explicitly for children

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How Many Legs Should a Dragon Have?

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In a recently and utterly low stakes online conversation the topic has been raised how many legs should a dragon have? This discussion has principally been initiated because G.R.R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones novels, disputed the image used for the newest series which shows the beast with four legs and two wings.

Martin’s argument is based on evolution and that flying creatures evolved wings from their forelimbs leaving only the rear two to serve as legs. He’s right about that. On Earth all land animal life descended from a common ancestor which set the pentadactyl limb structure. Everything animal we know has the basic limb design, One Bone, Two Bones, Many Bones. IF dragons were evolved creatures from an ecology that mirrors Earth’s, then you would expect the same body form rules to apply.

In fact, the common ancestor is the reason why I have an issue with Cameron’s Avatar. Every land animal in that ecology has six limbs except for the big-eyed human analog. They are as out of place as a four-legged dragon.

But if they were evolved creatures they would not exist.

There is simply no way that a beast that large, that massive will evolve flight. Yes, there were some flying dinosaurs with absolutely enormous wingspans, but they remained light, fragile creatures not massive lizards with weights measures in tons. It is furthermore an impossibility for the ‘fire breathing’ to evolve as depicted. The energy consumption required to power such abilities is too staggering to contemplate.

With all that said, dragons exist in a setting where the laws of physics are upended by sorcery and magic. In a world where non-nuclear transmutation is possible, and the laws of thermodynamics are abandoned. In such a setting a genesis for a creature outside of biological evolution exits and along that path the arguments of two or four legs are reduced to the author’s preference.

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Chosen One Stories

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I have never been overly fond of ‘chosen one’ narratives. There is something in the core concept that some people are just ‘special’ and deserving of praise and riches because fate or the gods or something has selected them above all others that just rubs my skin wrong.

There is a vague memory lurking in my brain of some production of a Camelot myth that struck at just the right time to inspire a foundation element of my ethos and personality. Arthur proclaiming that Laws must bind high and low alike or they are not laws at all. To me this extends to narratives.

The chosen one myth is at its heart, to me, a perpetuation of the lie of nobility. That person is better than you by virtue of birth. You own that person you loyalty for no other reason that chance has deemed it so. Granted, in stories the heroes nearly always are virtuous and good people. Luke refuses to turn to the dark side even though it will cost him his life. Aragorn is a kind, just, and benevolent king. Harry Potter despite a childhood of horrid abuse is compassionate and only interested in what is right, immune to the seduction of sudden riches, fame, or sports induced glory. These characters are ‘good’ because the author has made them so, not for any other reason.

While I have never been a dedicated fan of the Dune novels, I deeply appreciate that in that series not only is the ‘chosen one’ the source of billions upon billions of deaths and the imposition of a tyrannical galactic theocratic dictatorship but that from the start the ‘chosen one’ myth is a lie fabricated to manipulate populations for the goals of an uncaring elite.

One reason I adore The Last Jedi is that the chosen one is flawed and scared and subject to human frailty, but most all because it ends with a nameless slave wielding the power that had been reserved to the ‘noble.’

I doubt I would ever write a ‘chosen one’ story but if I did you can be assured that it would be to subvert it.

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Time and Familiarity Distorts Art

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By chance I am reexperiencing a couple of television series. To follow along with the podcast The Detective and The Log Lady my sweetie-wife and I are rewatching the surrealist mystery horror series Twin Peaks with an episode each Sunday evening. On YouTube I am enjoying watching millennial reactors experience the original series of Star Trek for the very first time.

Season one of Twin Peaks speeds along much faster than my faulty memory recalled. I had forgotten that the entire first series, as the Brit would say, totaled just 8 episodes. Not even half of a tradition American television season. My emotional memory of a slow, languid story that unfolded at a leisurely pace is entirely a construction that the mood of the series and the decay determine by the decades since its debut.

Star Trek has had a different course in my recent re-exposure to the program. I grew up watching reruns of the series in the 70s. (With very hazy memories as a child of the original broadcast.) I have seen every episode countless time, own the program on Blu-ray dice and have player the Roulette Episode game with myself where dice determine which story to watch.

This saturation of the series, with a judgment set by decades of rewatching that fixes the good and bad episodes into their hierarchy is quite shaken when a new viewer comes along.

Let That be Your Last Battlefield has long been on my list of some of Trek’s worst episodes. Aliens with superpowers that exist solely to put the plot of a deterministic course and a ‘message’ presented with all the subtly of a frying pan to the face made this episode painful to watch.

And yet people new to the series, without their opinions set my decades of judgment, can find the story engaging and relevant. My familiarity with the episode exaggerated it faults until I could no longer see its charms.

Oh, it remains a poor episode and the faults I have mentioned are glaring with my experience as a writer, but the bod doesn’t always overpower the good. It is important to try and keep that fresh new viewer experience alive.

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Where the Alien Franchise Went Astray

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As I write this people across the internets are celebrating the 45th anniversary of the release of Alien, a science-fiction horror film that spawned sequel after sequel and nearly countless knockoffs and imitations.

20th century films

In my appraisal there are only two Alien films of quality, Alien and Aliens. James Cameron wisely decided when he wrote and directed the sequel to the original film that his was not to be horror but action/adventure with only tone of horror. With the conclusion of Aliens Ripley’s story came to an organic and satisfying end. Healed from her traumatic encounter with the Zeta Reticulian parasite and with a new composite family there should have been no more to tell for this woman.

Naturally the studios screwed that up and insulted the audience along the way.

With the next film, Alien3, a production that had a hard release date before it has even a story treatment much less a script, after abandoning such vaunted SF concepts such as wooden space stations crew by technophobic monks, the producers opened the story by killing Ripley’s new family.

The producers considered the audience suckers for investing any emotional energy or commitment to these characters. The lesson is quite clear. Nothing you care about matters. No victory is lasting, all happiness is fleeting, we bring you only despair. Is it really surprising that this production is the one that introduced sexual assault to the franchise?

The proper course after Aliens would have been to craft new stories about new characters. The bold and correct choice would have been to even abandon the parasite as the central threat. Horror repeated becomes adventure and further repeated become dull. This is of course not what the studio did, instead, reviving poor Ripley from her demise and adding scores of parasites in a futile attempt to create a sense of danger and dread where only lame action now existed.

Two ‘prequel’ movies have been produced, a pair of Alien vs Predator movies have squeezed a little more cash from the concept and this year, yet another movie will be released but everything after Aliens has been crap.

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Consider the Transporter in Star Trek

CBS Home Video

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Developed as a means of sidestepping the impossible production challenge of landing a ship every time the characters went ashore in Star Trek the transporter is a marvel of impossible science and utterly fantastic energies.

The show’s lore the transport converts the target’s, usually a person, matter into energy, beams it to a distant location, then reconverts that energy back into matter precisely recreating the person at the new location.

Let’s sidestep the ‘Ship of Theseus’ question if the reconstituted person is actually the same person or not for another essay and focus on the physics of this process.

Einstein revolutionized the world with his understanding that energy and matter were equivalents as set forth in the world’s most famous equation E=MC^2. The energy value of a mass is equal to that mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Let’s put a 50-kilogram (110 lbs.) person on the transporter and set them down.

50 kg converted entirely to energy becomes 4,500,000,000,000 megajoules. Such a number is simply beyond human comprehension. It is the equivalent 71 thousand Hiroshima bombs delivered instantaneously as a beam to a distant location. If the transporter chief held a grudge against the person on the planet that had sold him a crummy watch, he could deliver 71 thousand Hiroshimas.

There is a reason why in my Space Opera role playing games when I have introduced a transporter like device it has never ever been of the variety that directly converted matter to energy and back again. Star Trek would have been far better served if someone had decided early on that the transport simply created a gate between places and saved us from both bad technobabble solutions to problems (we’ll just put the doctor in and reconstitute her from an early pattern) and not introduce a weapon of such scale and destruction.

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Re-Reading Dune Messiah

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More than 30 years ago I read Dune Messiah, the first sequel to Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.The continuing storyline did not quite capture my attention and I did not proceed down the course of the following novels. Now with the release of Dune part 2 completing Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the novel and its box office and critical success I decided to re-read Dune Messiah and see if I had a different reaction to it this time around.

The first thing I noticed was that in the passing decades I had forgotten nearly everything about the sequel novel. Vague aspects of the story’s final ending floated in my memory but of the actual plot and events, nothing.

Dune Messiah picks up a dozen or so years after the ending of Dune. Paul Atreides’ Jihad has swept the galaxy and the fanatical legions of Fremen have slaughter billions and destroyed hundreds of worlds for their Messiah. The vast powerful forces of the galaxy spanning human imperium, economic, political, and religious have crafted a plot to eliminate Paul and reclaim control of the empire. Paul, plagued by prescience, knows some aspects of the plotters plans but also sees that any misstep and error will lead to even more slaughtering and death than he has already unleashed on the galaxy.

With even more mind-bending concepts, Face-Dancers, people with such utter control over their muscles that they can assume the appearance of any person, and people reanimated after death and imposed with brain washing conditioning, Herbert’s sequel is challenging to read and even more challenging to adapt to a visual medium that the first novel in this classic series. The book makes more explicit Herbert’s premise that charismatic leaders are a danger to everyone, their enemies and their followers. While the reader may sympathize with Paul who never intended to do evil it remains clear that evil is the product of his actions no matter his intent.

With the most recent adaptation fresh in my mind, it was easy to ‘hear’ the voices of the actors playing in my head as I read the book and adding a few new member’s to the cast. I expect that should Villeneuve adapt this to the screen that Peter Dinklage will once again become part of a fan favorite franchise.

I can say that this time around I enjoyed the novel more than I had in the late 80’s when I first read it. Partly because of Villeneuve’s adaptation and partly because I have become more aware of the social and cultural antecedents that Herbert drew upon for his inspiration. I do not feel that this go around I wasted my time.

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