Movies of 2013, Science Fiction, pt1

Science Fiction

            I like Dystopias.  I have talked about this in the past and keep coming back to it.  I find it hilarious that in the 40's 1984 was considered the height of controversy because it depicted a future that was not bright and shiny because Orwell had the audacity to say Communism was bad (even though that book could just as easily be about Capitalism, not a lot of detail is put into the economy of a world in which the main focus seems to be a media retarding people through telling them what to think).  In modern society dystopias are all over the place and have been since "Bladerunner" became the most overrated movie in nerd culture.

Elysium, or "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE INCREDIBLY SUBTLE MESSAGE I AM TRYING TO CONVEY TO YOU?"

Overall: 6/10

Also, boring, boring posters.

            I would not call director Neill Blomkamp's first movie, "District 9" subtle, but compared to this it was cloaked in shadow and obscurity.

            The bad guys are cartoonish in their evil... Actually that is a disservice to Ursalla and Cruella de Vil.  The bad guys are so evil that it kills your ability to buy into the movie.

            In Greek mythology the Fields of Elysium was a sort of heaven that existed beyond the horizon where great heroes went to live forever in legend.  And I guess this movie does sort of acknowledge that Greek mythology exalted "virtues" that were at best questionable, with greed, glory, and self aggrandizing being seen as noble... This movie gets that right.

            The science fiction element doesn't really make much sense because the metaphor is stretched past the breaking point.  They have humanoid robots with super strength that can comprehend complex tasks... Why is there any menial labor left on Earth?  Just have the robots do it.  Instead they have the robots doing the LAST THING YOU EVER WANT ROBOTS DOING, oppressing humans with violence.

            Moving past that the reason people on Earth want to go to Elysium isn't for work, or luxury, it is instead to get one use out of magical super beds that sure all disease and cure all injuries... Okay, I get it.  Universal health care.  Here is the thing, if such a device existed they would just set them up on street corners like phone booths, have you swipe your credit card, and charge you a fee for their use.  They have hospitals and a pharmaceutical industry on Earth, but why not just have a bunch of these magical super beds in the hospitals?

            Monetizing the magic beds is easy to figure out.  Take the cost of the machine, divide that by the number of typical uses you get out of the machine, then figure how much it would cost to pay a technician to maintain and operate the machine (which are household items that operate automatically on Elysium), add on a small mark up for profit purposes (10-15 percent) and then just have people use them.  No pill deliveries, or sorting, doctors and nurses would exist in far fewer numbers, no other medical devices of any type.  This movie presents a potentially post scarcity society and then pretends scarcity still exists.

            Then there is a radiation scene.  At one point Matt Damon accidently gets trapped in a chamber that irradiates him... What that chamber exists to do is unclear because all it seems to do is fill with radiation.  (Is it a giant microwave?)  Anyway, one of the villains of the movie is sees that the factory Damon is working in has stopped operations because of the accident, and the villain complains that things shouldn't stop and orders them to start cranking out more material.  This is sort of reminiscent of "The Jungle" in that on the job injuries happening during the Gilded Age would be met with a "back to work" by management (there is a reason Anarchism was a mainstream movement at one point), but this movie takes place in the future, in which lawsuits presumably still exist, shouldn't he be pissed that he is about to get sued out of his suit?  If anything Damon should be happy, getting irradiated would mean a lawsuit big enough to go to Elysium, get a cure, and live happily ever after.  But apparently Morgan and Morgan up and vanished at some point.

            The need of metaphor... Science breaks down as you approach the needs of the story.

            This is a mostly cool, and mostly miscast film.  Matt Damon seemed out of place and they probably stuck him and Jodie Foster in for name recognition, but neither seem right for the part, and since Foster is so evil and there is no complexity to the issue it just comes off as really dumb.

Catching Fire, or "We Are the 99%."

Overall: 9/10

Actually, there are dozens of posters for this movie, many are awesome, others are like a set of trading cards for characters fighting each other in the movie.

            The fact that this movie was good shocked me.  I thought the first film was at best passing with camera work that was so frantic that I found myself looking away from the screen (though I consider the book, "The Hunger Games" to be one of my all time favorites).  This movie totally fixes the problem of the screen shaking like Michael J Fox is the cameraman.

            Beyond that this movie has more scope, higher stakes, lots of cool characters with a great deal of visual personality.  There is a scene in which a guy is tied to a post and whipped by some military police, and guy with the scourge has flecks of blood on his face from the flipping the whip around.  Not to say all the violence is so poignant, the hero of the film shoots people with arrows, but there isn't a lot of blood.

            There is another instance in which a character curses out the audience for having to compete in the titular Hunger Games, and her swearing is censored... a world in which "vulgarity" is censored but in which teenagers are murdered by one another on live television and it is state policy that people must watch?  Wouldn't you hate to be in a world in which violence was okay, but speaking your mind is impolite?  I know such a world is one I wouldn't want to be in.

            Also, the main character of Katniss is great.  She is kind of a stand off bitch because she grew up in poverty, her Dad died tragically working a job that is miserable, and her Mom couldn't handle that shit; Katniss grew up too fast and in a world with too little love, which makes her emotionally retarded.  It is wonderful.  You never see women in this sort of role and they got probably the best actress of her generation, Jennifer "I'm kind of a weirdo and dingbat" Lawrence to play the character.

            There is one bigger break down in reality though that comes with all science fiction.  District 12 is a poor area that mines coal, no one else mines coal, and the coal goes somewhere and is used for something (presumably power).  This means that the economy has use or even need for coal.  So how can the Capital threaten District 12 (or any district) with annihilation?  Each district produces something that the other districts do not produce, so they are needed.  I guess they could just use something other than coal for power... Which makes me ask why they mine coal at all.  It is in a way the same issue that "Elysium" has, that there is technology with higher utility that isn't being used... for no reason.  But since that is not the thrust of the movie (violence and politics as entertainment is) the technical issues of the fictional economy is easier to ignore.

Movies of 2012, Honorable Mentions

            I did not watch a hell of a lot of movies in 2012.  I was busy, worried about money, and was not drawn in the way I have been in years where my brother and I motivated each other to go see more movies.  But in the later half of the year I got a little bit more of a drive to see more and I think that (overall) this was a really good year for movies.  There is also a lot of crap too, but I think I mostly dodged those, aside from my "Worst Movie of the Year" which I will talk about later.  So there are some holes in my analysis, this is just my own limited perspective on what movies I liked and hated this year.  For the next couple days I'll go over them, but before that I want to give out some tiny awards that I think need to be given out.

Most Overrated Movie of 2012: "The Dark Knight Rises" (Trailer)

            While good (here is a longer blog about it), this thing is a mess and doesn't measure up to its predecessors.  There are issues with character development, scene placement, timing, and just real world logic on how things work.  For instance, "Who would have known, Bane's one weakness was getting hit in the face really fucking hard; who would have guessed that mask was his weak point like a video game boss".  Or, "Well, of course all of those financial transactions that happened during that terrorist attack went through and cost Bruce Wayne his money."  Or most egregiously, "Why is Batman keeping that power source from public consumption?  We already have atomic bombs and mustard gas, what makes this thing so uniquely powerful as a weapon?  Iron Man uses the power generator in his chest as both a life saving device, cheap power source for his company facilities, and as a weapon... Wouldn't Batman get real use and have better security for the device if it were up and running?  This doesn't make any sense."

            To be fair though, while I do not think that it deserves all of the love it is getting, it also does not deserve all of the hate.  People have too strong a reaction to this film over the entire emotional spectrum, and it really just deserves to be the mediocre final chapter to an overall very potent film franchise.  If I were to offer a suggestion on how best to fix it, make it two two-hour movies instead of one movie that runs for not quite three hours.

7/10

Most Disappointing Movie of 2012: "Prometheus" (Trailer)

            I like science fiction.  I like the idea of Ancient Astronauts, lost knowledge, and the drive to discover god.  I also believe that people who are supposed to be scientists should act like scientists.  I believe that movies advertised as prequels to other movies should resemble the other movie thematically.  I think that this movie made numerous stupid mistakes to the point in which it just stopped working.
4/10

Best Performance in a Bad Movie: Michael Fassbender in "Prometheus" (link is to a longer previous blog)

            For all its faults, Fassbender was not one.  The android character, David was hard to pin down, but his motivations, his plans, his ultimate goals are all very mysterious and intriguing.  Fassbender made this character come alive with his rigid movements, his not quite human reactions and voice, the subtle wrongness of how he behaved that belied a character who acted human, but was not human.  If "Prometheus" had not been such a mess, I think this performance would have landed a Best Supporting Actor nomination by the Oscars.

This movie fell so short of what it could have been, it makes me kind of mad.

Missing the Point because of Marketing: "The Hunger Games" (Trailer)

            This might be the first movie I have ever had to look away from because the constant shaky camera made my stomach turn.  There is no moment in which this movie is not shifting and twitching and otherwise making me ill, the reason for that is so they can destroy the whole point of the movie.

            This movie is about the mass ritual killing of children for the political oppression of the weak, and the entertainment of the powerful.  More than 20 teens are murdered by other teens.  And I will say this unequivocally: if you can't show children being murdered by other children then you can't make this movie.  "The Hunger Games" uses shaky camera to hide the blood and death that is the whole message and point of the story.  Without that visceral punch the movie is just weak and flaccid bullshit.  It is at best bland and unfocused.  It totally missed the point.

6/10

The Deserved More Respect Award: "The Amazing Spiderman" (Trailer)

            This movie has gotten shit on so much, and really isn't that bad.  What leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths is that the movie was made in a rush by Sony or they would lose the rights to Spiderman back to Marvel, who would then be able to put Spiderman on future installments of "The Avengers".  The movie has a very simple story, doesn't do enough to distance itself from comparisons to the Sam Rami trilogy (they could have easily replaced Oscorp with another fictional Marvel company like Roxxon), but overall I really liked how funny Spiderman was, how they show visually how he evolves from a vigilante out for revenge, and then step by step into a hero; all of which is done by having his costume evolve from Pete, to Pete in a mask, to full on Spiderman.  Martin Sheen does a great job as Uncle Ben, playing a father rather than just a too nice to be real old guy, when he yells at Peter I felt as if he was behaving like a real dad would instead of just being "disappointed" in a soft spoken and condescending way.

7/10

The Really Not all that Bad Award: "Snow White and the Huntsman" (Trailer)

            For whatever reason, I actually have no idea why, people have decided that Kristin Stewart is a bad actress.  I don't know how they reached that conclusion as she so rarely acts.  In this movie, she did fine, so did everyone else.  This movie has an interesting world filled with cool set pieces, mostly in the form of a very toned down fairy garden, and a rather Tim Burton-esc haunted wood, nothing in it really fails or offends, it is just sort of okay.  A little slow in sections I suppose, but it overall works, it deserves less hate and a few more viewers.

6/10

Making History for the Worst Reason: "John Carter" (Trailer)

            This movie wanted to be "Avatar" so much.  It might have the worst marketing so far this century and is the single biggest financial disaster in the history of film costing hundreds of millions of dollars utilizing state of the art movie making technology, and making roughly enough money to cover catering and maybe gas enough for a beer run.

            And what is really sad, this movie could have totally worked.  The source material is very rich and kind of messy, written in an era in which modern science fiction tropes and conventions did not exist.  The source materials predates "Star Wars", "Star Trek", "Flash Gordon", "Conan", and the entirety of the Superhero genre, it has an odd perspective on space travel and science in general, it could be great if it did not take itself so damn seriously and cut down on the weird stuff.  Pull a "Lord of the Rings" and film a trilogy, cut out the unnecessary stuff, and explain in elegant fashion the more esoteric.  As is it is messy and over stuffed, but really, it just did not meet its potential.  And it paid the price by being a legendary money loss for Disney, which is sad.
6/10

My 5 Favorite Books

            As a random little thought I figured I would do a top 5 list because lists are mentally very easy to digest and a recent movie release, along with anticipation for a movie coming out later this year has me thinking.  What are my top 5 favorite books?

            Number 5, and the spurring to write this, "The Hunger Games".  Since the movie is a very accurate and faithful adaptation, and it has made half a billion dollars already I feel redundant explaining the premise of young woman chosen to participate in a gladiatorial combat with other children.  The book is violent, and does an excellent job satirizing modern television, the disparities that exist between the rich and poor, all while framing through a single character that is ostensibly unlikable, having grown very bitter because of the absolute boiling crock-pot of shit her life has been.  It also has some good lines in it, strangely, my favorite line did not make it into the movie, even though the scene it is in did.  Whatever.

Have not read the other two... And I don't know if I ever will.

             Number 4, the movie adaptation of this, or at least part 1, will be out later this year, "The Hobbit".  As a kid the animated adaptation of this book was frequently, if not constantly checked out from the library, and while I read huge numbers of books (mostly Goosebumps, Animorphs, Spooksville, and other kids series) I actually didn't know that "The Hobbit" was a book for a long time, and only got around to reading it in high school, and I have since re-read it.  It is a lot of fun and the definitive classic in its genre, it is tightly written, and that works to its advantage, something its sequel does not have working for it.  This may make me a freak by nerd standards, but I find "The Lord of the Rings" over written and poorly paced.  Currently my epic fantasy thirst is being quenched by the "Game of Thrones" series (which I did a blog of) and I refuse to call it the "Song of... Whatever" because that is a stupid title for series of books, again something that might make me a freak among nerds.

This was a big part of me starting into fantasy.

             Number 3, this is actually my favorite part of a series of books that are all pretty good, though I think the last 2 are the weakest ending on downer notes rather than the jokes and good fun of the other 3, this is "Life, the Universe,and Everything".  It is the third book in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy in five parts.  It takes place as a group of renegade killer robots dressed as Cricket players set out to find and activate a weapon that will destroy all of creation.  The origins, the machinations, and the way all of the heroes of the series are drawn together to help solve the problem are bizarre and fun.  Sadly, since they tried to turn this book series into a movie franchise, and got someone infinitely unqualified to write and direct it doubtless this movie will have to wait another decade or two before it gets its turn at bat, hopefully with Edgar Wright or Steven Moffat at the helm.  Or both if there really is a Santa Claus in the hearts of children everywhere.

This really doesn't come up in this installment.

             Number 2, this one makes me think back to how my brother told me, "you (Josh) always identify with assholes in control of things," a fact I can't deny, this book is "Ender's Game".  Written by an author who has in recent times gone Christ-crazy and rages against the liberals of the world, the book explores how the smartest boy in the world is shaped by a militant world alliance to save humanity from the Alien bug menace which has twice invaded our space to horrifying result.  Ender, so nicknamed by his sister who could not pronounce Andrew, is a misanthropic child murderer who grows more and more distant as he figures out how to outsmart everyone.  Actually this book is considered the holy script of nerds everywhere because it isn't about a meat-head who gets handed power by a wise old wizard, but instead gets put through hell by his mentor figure, you know, like every father who has ever told their child, "You can be anything you want to be... So long as you are some kind of Doctor."

The timeline of this series gets a bit complex.

             My favorite book, much like the others follows a rather misanthropic person... Huh, just realized that... Huh, that probably means I am less than stellar person... Moving on, it is about the nature of religion in American society, it's "American Gods".  The man called Shadow is released from prison and encounters a con man called Wednesday who takes him down numerous rabbit holes to meet the living ideas of various traditions and superstitions that came over from the old world, and they are dying off in favor of modern ideas made of silicon and celebrity.  The author, Neil Gaiman, said he started off writing it in the first person but found he had to switch off because the main character was so listless and detached, rather a fish out of water story in which the fish was happy to suffocate without flopping.  It also does the original Heroes Journey to great impact.

I'm 70% sure this man is not a wizard.