C L Walker
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Long Time No See

9/8/2016

 
Long time no see.

I haven't had much to say here lately. Life has been busy and I have been lazy. Let's see if we can fix that.

I went to see the new Star Trek recently and I really liked it. It had a very Star Trek feel to it (unlike the first two). It was big and looked like a video game most of the time, but it was fun and kept me engaged to the end.

I fell asleep during Into Darkness, so I missed the end of it. I don't think I missed much. I go back and rewatch films all the time and I still haven't bothered doing that with Into Darkness, even though I haven't seen some of it. But with Beyond I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

People talk shit about the first two new Star Trek films all the time (myself included), but they did something really important: they made Star Trek cool.

Let me tell you a story

I had settled into my seat and was watching the previews. I was cautiously optimistic that I was about to be entertained for 2 hours, and that I probably wouldn't pass out again.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a chattering, giggling group of teenage girls appeared, like a plague descending on the theater. The skipped happily toward me and took their seats directly behind me. I am an old man (and have been since birth), so I got a sinking feeling at the thought of having them talk through the movie because it wasn't what they were interested in and they shouldn't have been there.

God, I'm such an asshole.

They loved it! I wanted to join in when they spoke over the movie (I didn't, of course, because they are teenage girls and I don't want to be arrested). They spotted all the cool easter eggs and were excited at all the right moments. They were engaged to the end and even made a comment about how little lens-flare there was.

It's possible that these girls have always been into Star Trek because they were raised on it or something. But I think it's more probable that the lens flare-heavy, dumb reference making, boring action-fest first two films made them interested. They then went and became Fans, enough that they got a bunch of obscure references my wife didn't get, and she grew up watching the TV shows.

Now we're getting a Star Trek film that's a little closer to what I think of as the Trek feel, and the new fans are coming along for the ride and enjoying it. We're getting a new TV show and they'll watch the hell out of that too.

We're getting a million new Star Wars films over the next few years, but they were always going to be huge. Knowing that Star Trek still has a place on the field after fifty years makes me happy.

Of course it's looking like the movie is going to be certified as a bomb, so what do I know?


Movie Review: Transcendence

22/9/2014

 
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There are so many things in this movie that are wrong. There’s a big one that really ruined it for me (and, it seems, me alone), but we’ll go through a couple of other things first.

In this movie Johnny Depp dies after being shot with a radiation bullet by some anti-technology terrorists. His wife and his friend scan his brain and they manage to boot him up in a computer, apparently in part thanks to a quantum processor.

At this point we are clearly meant to be rooting for him, because otherwise the movie is asking us to root for the terrorists. And they wouldn’t do that.
I’m fine with the science-fiction. I think you’d need more than the scans they did to get a good image of a consciousness, but I’ve never actually done it. When someone pulls it off I’m sure it’ll be really complicated and way more tedious than this movie portrays it, and when writing my fiction I’ll just make it all look simple anyway. Because people don’t care, and neither do I. Unless your story is about the process of uploading someone, you can do some hand waving about how.

The terrorists attack and Cyber-Depp escapes onto the internet (more on that below). He then manipulates data all over the place and builds a high-tech facility out in the desert, where he is free to create the future.

The terrorists, now in league with Cyber-Depp’s former friend and the government (somehow), attack the facility and shut down all technology to get him. The movie starts and ends with the friend walking through the low-tech dystopia that follows this fight and this decision.

I’m skipping over a bunch of stuff here, because I just don’t care. At no point did I care, because the way the film is structured points me toward thinking of Cyber-Depp as the good guy. He is clearly a good guy, and the terrorists (and then the government) are the bad guys, and I know they’re going to win.

This isn’t just my bias either; the core question of the movie appears to be “Cyber-Depp, a good idea or not?” At the end of the movie, once they’ve shut down all technology (really?) Cyber-Depp chooses to die, because he was really human all along. So we’re shown the pod-people (there are pod people, and I still think they’re the good guys) and the raw power this one individual has over the whole planet, to set him up as a potential bad guy. But he was actually kind of a good guy at the end, by choosing to die. The answer to the central question seems to be: Maybe?

Either that or the answer they came up with was that Cyber-Depp was awesome and the government choosing the side of terrorists was wrong, in which case they did it badly.

None of that matters though, because the movie was ruined for me at the end of the first act. The terrorists attack shortly after Cyber-Depp is turned on. To help him escape, Mrs Cyber-Depp hooks up a satellite dish so he can get out into the world. He escapes onto the internet in a few minutes.

Cyber-Depp is a huge program, I’m sure, and a satellite uplink is pretty shitty. But I don’t mind; this is more hand waving. Nobody wants to spend the time dealing with the ridiculously slow upload you’d actually get from this sort of setup. It would be boring, and it wouldn’t add anything to the story.

Cyber-Depp appears online, now able to manipulate banks and basically do whatever he wants.

Bullshit. The internet doesn’t work like that. You can’t hack the planet. You can’t infest a bunch of servers, all sitting behind firewalls you have to crack first, and then reprogram them so they work as a single unit you can use to house your brain (or anything else).

“But, hand waving!” I hear you say.

No, random voice on the internet. No.

The climax of this movie posits a scenario where the terrorists and the government are able to outsmart Cyber-Depp. I think the idea at the very end was that Cyber-Depp could have flattened them anyway (my bias), but he was still taken by surprise when they first attacked. If he was capable of doing the “escape onto the internet” thing, then there is nothing he can’t do. Nothing. He has all the power, and having the terrorists use old cars and mortars wouldn’t matter because they live in the 21st century and Cyber-Depp owns the 21st century.

Cyber-Depp is also shown to have nanotech all over the place, so he would have seen them coming and he would have overheard them planning. There are lots of reasons he wouldn’t have been caught by surprise and none of them matter because of the main reason he should have won:

He is super smart. He can see this coming and he can outthink them a million times over. In fact, if we judge his abilities purely by the escape-to-the-internet scene, it’s ludicrous. In his facility he has a warehouse full of processing power that he designed himself, which is quite a bit more than his one processor origins. Origins in which he took control of every internet facing machine on the planet, including at least some government ones.

I saw the escape scene at the end of act one, and I knew from the trailer how the whole thing was going to end, and I couldn’t believe it. Ruined an otherwise Meh movie for me.

Do yourself a favour, go read a book.

Planet of the Apes and a harbinger of the end times

10/8/2014

 
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I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes today, and I saw a true image of the definite end of civilization. Really.

First, a quick review.

Great film, taking a well-used end-of-the-world plot and putting talking apes into it.

If I had to go further, I’d say that the film focusses where it should, on the apes. The humans are there as a maguffin, a thing to get the ape civilisation changing from the idyllic to the complex. From Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, to Adam and Eve a little later in the Garden of Eden.

Caesar has this peaceful little civilisation going, with hunting and community and a little school and, we are left to imagine, lots of picking fleas off one another. Some humans turn up, shoot one of the apes, and things go a little pear-shaped.

We pay attention to the apes more than the humans, watching as ambition and distrust change their world into something more human. This is very much a movie about the apes. The humans are stock characters, never given enough screen time to become more than they are absolutely required to be. Even Gary Oldman (who, I probably don’t need to tell you, is Gary fucking Oldman) is given perhaps one scene to grow a little. Otherwise he is post-apocalypse stock character number 4, though he plays it extremely well.

The apes are believable and, thanks to all that body hair, we are never bothered by the uncanny valley. We are able to get involved in their story and we come to care what happens to them. This is their movie and their characters are the three dimensional ones. The human we are most invested in is given as much chance to become a character as Caesar’s newborn, and it works.

Also, there are apes on horseback with guns. All by itself, that is a reason to watch this movie.

Here’s how it heralds the end of the world.

From the first moment of the movie, when the clichéd news footage was data dumping all over the screen, there were people in the back of my cinema talking. We got to see the apes on a little hunting trip, and these geniuses were talking. We saw the ape civilisation, and they were still talking. Humans turned up and I thought, surely now they’ll stop talking; nope. An employee of the cinema turned up about halfway through and had a word with them and they finally shut up.

For ten minutes. Then they were talking again. Incessantly yammering about…it doesn’t matter what they were yammering about because they were in a cinema. And some other people started talking too, I suspect because they didn’t want to feel left out.

I was watching another movie a few years ago (I don’t go to the movies much). It was an explosion movie, where every plot turn is punctuated with a ball of fire (for an example please see my series, Dead Men). It was Michael Bay perhaps. Throughout most of the movie I couldn’t have heard whether someone was speaking because the speakers were set loud enough to rupture my eardrums (seriously, it’s very loud and we get it. Shhhh). But even in an explosion based movie there are quiet moments.

The cardboard hero stares emptily at the plastic love interest and dribbles some dialogue, and the music goes quiet to let us know that this is important and we should pay close attention.

At no point during this silence did I hear someone speaking. At no point, despite the lack of explosions and/or giant robot testicles, did the audience utter so much as a peep.

I believe this is the sign.

We as a civilisation are coming to an end, and the people in the back of my cinema are among the first to know it. There are no rules to civilisation anymore, and they’re capitalising on this. Soon people will be skipping their place in the queue, or not holding doors for people when the people are clearly mere moments away from being able to grab it from them. Madness will descend on the world and we will realise we were warned. We could have stopped it and we didn’t.

Much like Caesar and Koba. We trust them to uphold civilisation and they are going to destroy it. You have been warned.

Or, I guess, some people found the bits where the CGI apes had conversations with each other a little boring, when all they wanted to see were apes, on horses, with guns.

    C.L. Walker

    Author. Nerd. Long-Haired Slacker

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