Star Trek: The Original Series (Season 1)

Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Grace Lee Whitney, Majel Barrett, James Doohan

Creator: Gene Roddenberry

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: C+

This is going to be a bit sacrelige, but I didn't really enjoy the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series (initially known  as simply Star Trek).  There was a plethora of reasons, but the biggest were simply the overall writing, the horrible special effects, the overall plot (or lack thereof), and the acting.

For those who don't know Star Trek (are in the dark so to speak, probably owing to the rock on the far side of Pluto that they've been living on for the past forty or so years), the original series follows the crew of the starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) as they "boldly go where no man has gone before."  The crew is headed by Captain James T. Kirk (Shatner), first officer Spock (Nimoy), and chief medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Kelley), and rounded out by crew members chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (Doohan), communications officer Uhura (Nichols), helmsman Sulu (Takei), yoeman Janice Rand (Whitney), and nurse Christine Chapel (Barett).  In the first series, the crew encounter aliens, defy death (except for when they don't), deal with mutants, and watch as Kirk loses his shirt and sleeps his way through the galaxy.

I don't actually mind the general plot of the story, as it's really rather typical of science fiction (especially of science fiction of this time), and I can appreciate the ways in which it helped the genre.  I'm not a big fan of the writing though, simply because I found myself having to buy into a bit too much.  This probably could have been avoided had the show been less episodic and more serial; each episode essentially carried itself and was unaffected by the episodes that came before it - and thus had no effect on the episodes that came after it.  I'm not a fan of TV tabula rasa, which in my opinion is essentially what happens here.  Every episode the Enterprise crew come up against some new adventure, Kirk sleeps with some new woman, and people (often in red shirts) die.  Every episode the crew learns something - only to conveniently forget it by the next episode.  It is because of this that the show is able to be aired in a non-chronological order, which goes contrary to the order in which they were produced in.

The problem of the special effects is one that can be dismissed by the fact that Star Trek was created in the mid-1960s, until you realize that Planet of the Apes was created around the same time.  Some of the effects are actually pretty cool and I have to admit that I love the backgrounds that fill the show.  What I hate, however, are the aliens.  They're really kind of lame, and often really cheesy.  The worst, in my opinion, is the neural parasites in the season finale, which were literally created by covering novelty vomit in a plastic bladder.  Seriously: the special effects involved dollar store fake vomit.

The worst thing, though, is the acting.  While there are some good, possibly even great actors, here - I really have to say that I love Leonard Nimoy's Spock - most of them are a bit more on the mediocre side of things, and William Shatner... William Shatner is not a good actor.  He's entertaining, yes, but he's not exactly good.  The fact that he's the lead here just makes things worse, as does his manner of enunciating every word and thus making them into their own individual sentence. While I suspect that this is done so as to add emphasis and create dramatic tension, what it actually does is makes him sound as though he's constantly struggling to remember his lines.

Drums of Autumn

Author: Diana Gabaldon

Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi

Rating: A-

The fourth instalment in the Outlander series, Drums of Autumn takes our heroes Claire and Jamie Fraser to the American colonies just before the American Revolution.  While Claire knows what is going to happen she's not certain an all the details and knows that she and her family must walk a thin line so as to survive the Revolution with their lives intact.  Newcomers to the land, the Frasers must establish themselves and Jamie dreams of gathering up the men that he was in prison with.  Meanwhile, in the mid-20th century their daughter Brianna is coming to terms with now essentially being an orphan, having lost her mother and the father that she has only just learned of.  In order to come to terms with this, Brianna and the historian Roger Wakefield seek out information about Claire and Jamie, with the hope of discovering what happens to them.

The question that I always have here is just why Claire and Jamie decide to settle in America, at least knowing what they know.  Regardless of their allegiance to the British crown (which does exist for Claire if not her husband), being somewhere largely unaffected by the war just seems kind of safer and in the long run smarter.  Once they commit to making life work in America I get why they chose to stay, but I always wonder why they decided to make that commitment in the first place.  I don't even buy that Jamie wouldn't have had friends or family in Canada to help him establish himself - Jamie seems to have friends or family just about everywhere he goes.

That being said, I did like the general story of Drums.  Things get a lot more complicated in this part of the series than they ever seemed to be in the first two (or three) books, but it's an enjoyable complicated.  I am never too sure about Brianna and Roger as characters, and even less so as time travellers.  Claire seems to have fit in both the 18th and the 20th century, while Brianna and Roger seem to only fit in the 20th, despite their travelling to the 18th (and Jamie, who is stationary in time, doesn't seem as though he would fit in the 20th, although if given the opportunity and need I have no doubt that he would make it work if it meant being with Claire).  I do like the overarching villain of Stephen Bonnett, though, and find the threat that he adds to things to be really interesting.  I grew to kind of hate Geillis in the earlier books, and not in a good way, so I was glad to see that they were really done with her and had moved on to a new threat - or to at least be given that feeling.

Zardoz (1974)

Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman

Director: John Boorman

Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Rating: D

"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth ... and kill!"

Thus begins the classic cult film Zardoz.  In the year 2293 the Earth is inhabited primarily by a people called the Brutals, who are ruled without realizing it by the Eternals.  As the names might suggest, the Brutals live a life of brutality while the Eternals lived a life of ease - a life that lasted forever.  The Brutals, however, don't actually know about the Eternals.  Instead, they are more directly ruled over by a class known as the Exterminators, who worship the god Zardoz.  Zardoz appears to them in the form of a giant flying, hollow stone head, where the Exterminators deposit grain in exchange for guns.Enter the Exterminator Zed (Connery) hides in the head of Zardoz, where he's brought to the Vortex - the community of the Eternals that is protected from the Brutals by an invisible force-field.  Here Zed meets two Eternals, Consuella (Rampling) and May (Kestelman), and begins to figure out this new world around him.

And the entire time, Sean Connery looks like this.  Except for when he's wearing a wedding dress.  I kid you not.  That bit is possibly the best moment of the entire film, Sean Connery running around the Vortex in a wedding dress.  The other costumes are rather quesitonable too... and when it comes down to it, all I can do is hope that I'm not alive to see the future inspired by 70s fashion.

The plot for this movie is laughable at best.   I spent most of it wondering just what the hell was going on, and even when I had it figured out I still wasn't sure.  The plot overall was a lot like the costume; it's weird, it's confusing, it's disturbing and distressing, and yet for some reason you can't seem to look away.  It's not really good... but I'm not too sure if it's really bad either.  Disturbing.  That's the word I'm going to go with.

Voyager

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: B-

The third novel in Diana Gabaldon's critically acclaimed Outlander series, I have to say that I think that Voyager is probably the weakest, at least in so far as her novels go.  While there is a story here a lot of it seems to be more about a justification of her desire to reunite protagonists Jamie and Claire and move them, once again, towards the action.  While I appreciate the sentiment and I do largely agree with the desire to reunite our time traveller with her soul mate, there is still a big part of me that can't help but feel as though more so than most of Gabaldon's books, Voyager really fails to stand out on its own and really serves instead as a bridge covering the cap between two separate parts of the series.

Voyager picks up where its predecessor, Dragonfly in Amber, left off, with Claire facing the revelation that Jamie is not dead, as she had long believed, but rather very much alive - or at least, would be, 200 years in the past.  Time travel inherently makes understanding things like that more complicated.  Claire sets out on a journey to reunited with her man, while the daughter that she is leaving behind, Brianna, comes to terms with the knowledge that the man she thought was her father wasn't, and that she's now about to lose the only parent that she has left.  Meanwhile, Roger Wakefield is faced with the very pressing desire to be a big part of Brianna's life.

I already said this, but I think it bares repeating.  This book is a bridge between two connected but rather separate stories; Outlander and Dragonfly are about Scotland and the Rising, while the later novels are about America and the revolution.  This book serves to connect the two and to establish the younger generation.  While Jamie and Claire continue to play important roles in these books, in a manner of speaking they also become more and more about Brianna, Roger, Young Ian, and other characters more their age.  I understand that, and I really respect that, although I do think that in later books the series becomes a bit bogged down by both the characters and the number of different plots going on.  Gabaldon is a great writer, but sometimes it becomes a bit much and at points it begins to lose the charm of Outlander.

The other problem with Voyager is that in being a bridge book the plot is somewhat lacking.  There's a lot of set up here for a major future plot device, and likewise there's a lot of conclusion here for some of the hanging threads of previous devices.  In as much as the characters might at times bog down later books, one of the things that I love about Gabaldon in general is the plethora of really deep and unique characters.  Voyager doesn't lack in them at all, but for much of the time it almost seems like they're there not so much to introduce or partake in any plot, but to simply exist.  In a way this works, but in a way it doesn't.  The way that it really doesn't work, at least for me, is the fact that there is almost no continuity in these characters - the bulk of them were never introduced before Voyager and do not appear again afterwards.  This is really hugely disappointing, just because I like to see the ways in which these characters appear to have developed off screen.  This idea continues as well; a lot of the characters introduced in Outlander and Dragonfly no longer appear to exist in Voyager.  While it's understandable that Claire has been gone (and presumed dead) for some twenty years, there's still a part of me that wants to see her seek out some of her old companions.  She might not wonder what happened to them, but I do.

A Dragonfly in Amber

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: B+

The sequel to Outlander, A Dragonfly in Amber is a bit more jumpy than its predecessor – particularly in the start and finish.  Rather than being a straight continuation of the story where it left off, Dragonfly jumps to the future – thus establishing that Claire both survives the rising and returns to the future, while leaving the how, why, and (most importantly) what happens to Jamie left hanging.  I think a big part of the reason why Dragonfly isn’t as strong as Outlander is because of this immediate jump to the ‘future’; it’s a bit disjaring (which is okay, given the nature of the series), but more significantly it kind of interrupts the story.  Outlander is one concise story, about a woman out of time, with the reader experiencing things as she’s experiencing them (despite the novel being written in the past tense).  By starting Dragonfly twenty (and 203) years after the events of Outlander Gabaldon is establishing Claire as this older, wiser woman now telling a story to her daughter – and, frankly, some of the story that she tells the readers is stuff that I would hope she isn’t also telling Brianna.  The story that Claire tells Brianna and Roger is one that picks up very roughly where Outlander ends and brings our English woman and Scotsman into France on the eve of the 1745 Rising. Knowing what they know about the future, Claire and Jamie are faced with a problem: can they use what they know to change the future and if so, should they be trying to prevent the Rising or work to make it successful?

I really like the way this book ends, even if I wasn’t a big fan of the way in which it was started.  Honestly, I love the idea of a narrator telling us a story from a much older perspective, as they look back on their life.  It’s actually a big part of why I enjoy Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles and The Saxon Stories.  As I said, the problem that I had with the way Dragonfly did this was that it interrupted the overall narration of the story.  I think I would have rather seen the jump forward twenty years to a Claire telling the story to Brianna and Roger at the end; have her in the present with her daughter be the big reveal at the end instead of the shock at the start.  But that’s all coulda, woulda, shoulda, and while I’m not a big fan of how Gabaldon did this overall I do have to admit it works.

That being said, what I don’t think worked as well was the period of the novel where our heroes are in France.  While I loved the characters that are introduced here – especially Master Raymond – and would love to see some of them remerge in later books, the overall story here in itself was a bit on the dull side.  The charm of Outlander was its setting, but the bulk of Dragonfly is really removed from this setting.  Claire was a fish out of water to begin with, but while in France it’s more like she’s… I donno… a whale out of water.  She’s able to survive, but not for long – likewise with my attention span.

One of the things that I do love, however, is the introduction of Roger as a narrator, even if it is in the third person. I really like the way Roger sees things. Like myself he’s a historian who’s intrigued by a good tale, and it’s made very clear very quickly that the only way Claire is able to move forward and Brianna is able to accept the truth is through Roger. The part of me that enjoys a good mind fuck in literature almost thinks that it’d be fun if Claire was revealed to have been a complete nutjob who dreamed her time in the eighteenth century, but I realize that’s not going to happen – there’s too much pseudo-science to these books to make them just a mind fuck.

Looper (2012)

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt

Director: Rian Johnson

Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Rating: A+

Lately I've been watching a lot of movies that I've either found to be outright bad or else simply not good.  A lot of them have failed to meet my expectations - a lot have made me question my expectations.  Looper is not one of these movies.  In fact, Looper is one of those movies that just absolutely blew my mind.  It is everything that a time travel movie should be.  Everything that a science fiction movie should be.  Everything that a movie should be.

In the not too distant future time travel will have been invented.  Immediately outlawed it is only used by the mob when they wish to get rid of someone; they send the person back in time, thirty years, where a looper executes them.  Sometimes the mob wishes to close loops; they seek out former loopers and send them back to be executed by themselves.  The looper is then given a sum of gold and the next thirty years to live out their life. One day Joe (Gordon-Levitt) discovers that his loop is being closed and makes the unforgivable mistake of letting his elder self (Willis) escape. Joe must find himself and kill him before it's too late - and all he has to go on is a piece of a map with a farm belonging to a woman named Sara (Blunt) and her son Cid (Pierce Gagnon).

This movie did not meet my expectations.  I went into it thinking that it was going to be about one thing and go in one direction and be good at what it did, maybe even great.  It didn't take me long to realize that it wasn't going in that direction at all and after a bit of discomfort I went with it - and I'm glad I did.  What Looper did was so much better than what I was expecting it to be.  It's so intricate and complicated and yet so amazing.

I love the world that they created here.  It's the future and has a lot of the typical futuristic elements that you expect - time travel, telekinesis, hovercars - but it also has a lot of really old world elements.  There's a lot to it that makes it feel like it's set in the 30s or 40s instead of the future, which I felt was just a really nice touch.  The movie doesn't over do the sci-fi or the futuristic elements, making things feel a lot more real than they do in most sci-fi movies.  Sure, time travel hasn't been invented yet an people can't make coins float, but a lot of what happens in Looper feels like it could be real.  A lot of the characters feel like real people.  The issues maybe not so much, but definitely the people.

The thing that really wowed me about Looper, though, was the ending.  It was something that I didn't see coming at all - aided heavily by the fact that I spent at least half the movie not exactly sure who I wanted to win or how I thought things were going to play out.  I had some elements of things figured out before hand, but not most of it so the ending was just this amazing surprise.  Looper distracts you, making you think about possibilities for some things and thus leaves you rather blindsided by other things.  Oh! And another thing that's awesome about this movie is Joseph Gordon-Levitt himself, and all the detail that they put into making him look like Bruce Willis.  I've watched Bruce Willis films for a long time now and Gordon-Levitt really reminded me of the other actor when he was younger.  The fact that they even had similar mannerisms and spoke in a similar way just made it all that much better.  You often see movies that have a young and an old version of the same character (although, rarely do they share scenes), but never before have I seen a film go to such lengths in order to ensure that they were so easily identifiable as being the same person.  It was that detail that really sold this movie for me in the trailers, and it was that detail that really helped sell the movie itself.

Outlander

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: A

The first in Diana Gabaldon’s series of the same name, Outlander tells the story of accidental time traveller Claire Randall and her journey through the eighteenth century Scottish Highlands on the eve of the 1745 Jacobite Rising.  I’ve read this book a number of times now, along with its successors, and I think this is easily the best in the series – although the sequels aren’t shabby either.

At the start of the novel former army nurse Claire Randall and her husband, Frank, are in Inverness, Scotland on a vacation to rekindle their marriage – no, not rekindle.  More renew; while there’s no doubt of the love between the two, they’ve been separated for a long time now as the result of the War, it being 1945 at the start of the book.  Then life drastically changes for Claire; during an excursion around the standing stones at Craigh na Dun Claire finds herself transported back 203 years in time, to 1742.  Claire quickly becomes captured by Clan MacKenzie and taken to Castle Leoch, and somewhat enchanted by the mysterious Jamie McTavish.  Overhanging all of this is Claire’s desire to return to her own time, and her husband, as well as the looming threat of war – which Claire, graced with the knowledge of the future, knows will be disastrous for Scotland.

I think this might be one of the few novels written in first person that I’ve ever really loved.  There’s something about Claire that makes it clear that even though she’s telling the story – and as such it’s biased by her perception of things – it’s clear that she’s still a flawed person.  A good number of the things that befall her and Jamie are caused by Claire’s own shortcomings and her failure to really fit into the world around her.  I love that Gabaldon took a woman who isn’t entirely modern and sent her back; I think it does a lot to help her fit into the eighteenth century while also making her accessibly to a contemporary reader.  She doesn’t spend her time fussing over things like central heating or running water – although she does lament the standard of personal hygiene common at the time – but she does have ideals that don’t exactly coincide with the way that the typical eighteenth century woman was expected to behave.  This becomes more prominent by Drums of Autumn, by which point it’s really clear that Claire’s place isn’t necessarily eighteenth or twentieth century, it’s at Jamie’s side.

As I believe I’ve said of other works of Gabaldon’s, Outlander is very anecdotal.  However, where it doesn’t seem to work as well in some of her short stories, it works really well in Outlander.  The overall issue of the plot is clear very early on – the woman from the twentieth century transported back to the eighteenth, on the eve of what is to be (for Scotland) a devastating war – and the incidents that happen following it do a lot to firmly establish the characters, the setting, and the time.  There is a bit of repetition to the story, particularly when it comes to Black Jack Randall, but it’s easy to forgive, especially at this early point in the series.  There’s also so much detail that it’s easy to get lost a bit at times, but for the most part it’s just enough to really emmurse yourself in the story.

My favourite part, though, is the dialects and accents. Gabaldon really has a nack for writing accents and dialects in a manner that’s easy to read. Her characters talk like people really talk, using words that firmly establish who they are and where they’re from. This is seen even more later on in the series, as more ethnicities are introduced, but for now it’s really easy to see that Claire Randall talks like an Englishwoman – not an American – and a good chunk of the rest of the characters talk like Scots.

Armageddon (1998)

Starring: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Keith David, Steve Buscemi

Director: Michael Bay

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Rating: C+

This is not a good movie - few Michael Bay films really are.  It's lame and cheesy and ridiculous and I absolutely love it.  Unlike the similarly themed Deep Impact, Armageddon is pretty much entirely about the attempt to save the planet and not really at all about the people left behind, facing the end of the Earth.  Sure there are some brief moments showing the latter half, but they're not what's important.  That's typical of a Michael Bay film though; they're not about the little people, they're about the great men doing great things and the women who love them.

Armageddon opens with the discovery of an asteroid the size of Texas that is going to hit the planet and wipe out all life on it - even bacteria - in less than a month.  NASA scientists, lead by Dan Truman (Thorton) try to devise a way to save the planet, the best plan of which involves sending a group of astronauts up to it, drill a big hole into the asteroid (named Dottie), drop a nuke into it, resulting in an explosion that will divide the asteroid into two halves - if done before passing the magic line, Dottie will fly past Earth, but if done too late then both halves will still collide.  In order to do this, NASA needs drillers, specifically Harry Stamper (Willis) and his crew, considered to be the best deep-sea drillers on the planet.  This group of ragtag drillers are sent into space with NASA's best, all hoping to blow up the asteroid before its too late.  Oh, and there's a love story - Harry's daughter, Grace (Tyler), is in love with reckless driller A.J. Frost (Affleck), a fact that Harry is not happy about.

Where to start... So, it being a Michael Bay film, the science isn't exactly... well, science-y.  Bay depends on one-liners, flashiness, and things going boom, not intelligence.  There are no real good moments of solitude and reflection, something is happening every moment of the film.  When the people on the earth are reflecting about the impending doom it's always in this moment of passion and anger, there's no calms or moments of sorrow.  When things go wrong its huge and disastrous - such as the explosion of the Russian space station.  A lot of this creates confusion, it's hard to tell just what it is that's going on at points in the movie.  It's also rather messed up that Armageddon doesn't do anything to show any contingency plans and what not - in Deep Impact there's the Noah's Ark style backup plan, but there's nothing of the sort mentioned in Armageddon.

Actually, I do want to take back part of an earlier statement.  This film does take little people and makes them into great people.  In the end it's really the same result, but it's not entirely the same intent.  There are some great moments of Liv Tyler's that are really moving, as well as a few with the crew themselves.  For the most part though, it's all just silliness.  Armageddon doesn't really address the issue of the impending doom so much as the issue of how to stop it.  No one's caring about what happens after the team fails, just about ensuring that the team doesn't fail.  As such there's this huge gap to the film, this thing that's missing.  Despite that, though, I still love it.  Its an old favourite and I suspect it always will be for me.  Definitely not the best action film out there, or the best Armageddon movie, but still a good one.

Star Wars: Clone Wars

Starring: Mat Lucas, James Arnold Taylor, Tom Kane, Grey DeLisle, Anthony Daniels, Corey Burton, André Sogliuzzo, Daran Norris, Nick Jameson

Creator: Genndy Tartakovsky and George Lucas

Genre: Serial, Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure

Rating: C

This is not the way that Star Wars should be depicted.  While a serialized animated TV series is possible for the story that is Star Wars, the way that this rendition of Clone Wars was done was just wrong.  And bad.  And wrong.  Really, really, really wrong.  Star Wars: Clone Wars is a series of 20 three-minute and 5 twelve to fifteen minute instalments, aired over a course of three seasons; the entire thing can be viewed in about two hours.  At the end of the two hours you’ll not quite feel as though you’ve wasted your time in watching this movie, but you won’t exactly feel good about it.

The first two seasons focus on Obi-Wan Kenobi (Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Lucas) in the assault against the planet Muunilist, with Obi-Wan on the planet and Anakin in the space battle above it.  Count Doku (Burton) has taken in a new apprentice, Asajji Ventress (DeLisle), who he assigns to assassinate Anakin.  In the third season, following his promotion to Jedi Knight, Anakin and Obi-Wan are assigned to find General Grievous (DiMaggio) on Nelvaan, while Grievous assaults Coruscant and tries to kidnap Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Jameson).

There are several problems that I have with this rendition of Star Wars.  First, let's start with the characters.  I'm not going to say that they're poorly drawn or anything, but I will put it out there that a good number of the characters don't exactly look like their motion picture counterpart.  Call it nitpicking if you want, but when I see Anakin Skywalker, I expect to be able to identify him as Anakin Skywalker.  The same goes for Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé, General Grievous, and so on.  There was actually a moment when I was watching Grevious and thought "it's weird that they would introduce another droid Sith" before realizing that he wasn't just another droid Sith but the droid Sith.  When watching something like this, especially as short as this is, I don't want to have to spend my time re-figuring out who all the characters are.  Oh, also, the voice work sucked.  Seriously.  Mat Lucas succeeded in making Anakin Fucking Skywalker more annoying.  That's not an easy feat.

Beyond the characters, whoever, there's the plot.  Or rather, the lack of plot.  While I will agree that there were a few really nice action sequences, the fact that the entire thing is pretty much one action sequence after another gets old, and fast.  Star Wars is awesome not because of the action but because of the story.  Sure, we've all made lightsaber noises in our lives, but I doubt as often as we've said "Luke, I am your father," or quoted Yoda.  Yoda quotes is what makes Star Wars Star Wars.  There aren't any memorable Yoda quotes in this rendition, because there aren't any memorable really anything in it.  It's just "here's this action sequence, and oh, here's this action sequence, and plot? what plot?"  The one thing I will give Clone Wars - along with its much more successful counterpart, Star Wars: The Clone Wars - is that it does shine more of a light on characters we don't know as well.  It isn't just the Obi-Wan and Anakin Chronicles, there are a lot of other lesser character swho gain prominince here.  This trend is continued in The Clone Wars, especially as the Clones themselves become major characters.

Total Recall (1990)

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Rating: B+

This is what a classic science fiction, action movie looks like.  The special effects and the futuristic world are totally ridiculous and the acting isn't the best (hey, it's stars Arnold), but the script is great, the movie is smart, and the characters envoke emotion.

For some time, Earth construction worker Douglas Quaid (Shwarzenegger) has been having a reoccurring dream about Mars and a mysterious woman there (Ticotin).  He expresses a desire to go there despite it's political problems, which his wife Lori (Stone) and everyone around him discourages.  Finally he decides to visit Rekall, a place where memories are implanted into your brain - he selects the spy mission to Mars.  Except, while he's under something begins to go wrong and suddenly it appears that Quaid is in fact a spy from Mars whose memory was wiped and everyone, from the governor of the colony of Mars, Vilos Cohaagn (Cox), and his chief lieutenant, Richter (Ironside), to Quaid's wife are trying to kill him.  Quaid must fight to survive and figure out just who he is, and maybe get back the woman of his dreams, before being killed himself - or, is it all a dream, implanted into his mind by Rekall?

Total Recall was all about screwing with our minds and making us doubt the entire premise of a movie years before Christopher Nolan had even thought about Inception.  Even at the end of the film you're not really sure whether or not Quaid's adventure was real and if he is in fact just having some paranoid delusion while strapped into a chair in Rekall.  It's the ultimate spinning top.  But paranoid delusion or not, the film has you on the edge of your seat hoping that Quaid's going to survive and get the girl and the whole shebang.  You hope that this is really happening and isn't just the delusions of some Average Joe - because, really, Arnold Schwarzenegger could totally pass as an Average Joe.

Really, actually I think that's the biggest flaw in this movie, the idea of Arnold being some construction worker nobody.  It's the one improvement that the remake made - sure, Colin Farrell's hot and that'll make him stand out in a crowd, but in the land of a Hollywood movie where everyone's beautiful, at least he isn't built like Schwarzenegger.  I mean, the guy doesn't really blend into a crowd, which is kind of essential to the plot of Total Recall.  But if that's my biggest complaint, that Schwarzenegger doesn't blend into a crowd and look like he could pass as Average Joe, then it just goes to show how good this movie is.  It's not my only complaint - I do hate how lame all the technology is - but it's the only one that's really founded.  The technology may be big and bulky and look like it belongs on the set of Star Trek: The Original Series instead of a movie from the early nineties, but at the same time technology then really did look like that.  Total Recall's technology in itself isn't really trying to look like what future technology should look like, but rather be 'futuristic' in style - Mars Rover or not, Man has not colonized another planet, nor can they stick electronic tracking devices up people's noses, or implant memories in their brains.  It might not look futuristic to us, but it still is futuristic.

Total Recall (2012)

Starring: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Jon Cho, Bill Nighy

Director: Len Wiseman

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Rating: B-

I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I actually really enjoyed this movie.  The acting isn't superb, the plot is weak at points, it's not really moving on an emotional level or funny or anything.  At its core, Total Recall is a mindless action flick set in a dystopian future.  It isn't meant to have a great plot or great acting or connect on an emotional level (the lack of funny, however, is a bit of a disappointment).  It's supposed to have awesome chase scenes, mind blowing special effects, and cool gun fights.  Total Recall has all of this and more - in addition to it all, it also has this awesome futuristic world.  Sure the science is sketchy, but damnit, it's science fiction.  The science doesn't have to be right, it's fiction.

Total Recall follows factory worker Douglas Quaid (Farrell) as he begins to realize that his life is not exactly what it seems.  After a series of nightmares in which he is a spy of some sorts running from the police, Quaid decides to visit Rekall, a company that implants memories into its clients.  You can go anywhere, do anything, be anything.  While he's at Rekall, however, things go horribly wrong and before he's even put under it's revealed that Quaid is in fact a spy, who worked for a resistance movement.  From here his life goes to shit as his wife, Lori (Beckinsale), reveals that she isn't really his wife but rather a cop who's been assigned to watch him.  Quaid must flee from her, and by extension the entire paramilitary police force of both the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and the Colony (otherwise known as Australia), the only two habitual land masses on the planet.  Oh, and in it all, the girl from his dreams, Melina (Biel), appears.

The plot and characters in Total Recall are somewhat weak.  There isn't really the emotional connection between them and the viewer that the original film had.  I will give the film a lot of credit, however, in that it doesn't just totally rip off the original movie; while it follows the same basic plot and much of the general storyline, it also goes on a number of different directions.  This Total Recall is a lot more political than its predecessor, although never in a really original way.  It's very much anti-militaristic totalitarian and rather pro-workers, which is pretty much what you expect of a movie like this.  There's a lot of development towards this aspect of the plot, just not the characters themselves - I actually don't think I would have known the name of Biel's character if not for Wikipedia (and the fact that it's the same name as used in the 1990 version).

That being said, though, the movie's fun.  The special effects are cool, the chase scenes are hot. Every action movie is pretty much required to have a chase scene at one point or another, and in Total Recall it does so with hover cars.  Hover car chase scenes are the best.  The science is a bit wonky, but who cares - they go through the center of the earth.  Going through the center of the earth is always awesome.  The thing with the original Total Recall is that, while it's got a good plot and is emotionally charged the futuristic elements are rather lame and dated.  It's something that's a bit characteristic of older science fiction movies, which makes them a bit annoying to watch in the present day.  In this Total Recall, however, everything is slick and smooth and very much along the lines of what the future would look like if current trends continue.  I'm sure in another twenty years I'll be saying that the futuristic technology used in this Total Recall is rather old, dated, and lame when they remake the movie again, but for now it looked damn awesome.

I think, though, that my favourite part of this movie was the way that it differed from the original film while also paying tribute to it.  There's no Mars, but they mention it.  There's no huge brothel, but there's still a three breasted prostitute (no midget prostitute, however, sorry).  There's a fat woman who's travelling to the UFB for two weeks.  There are more moments like this, and to be honest every time they happened I smiled.  I enjoyed them.  Total Recall knew it was a remake of an older classic and assumes that you've seen the original.  It doesn't try to be some grand, fantastic movie.  It's a mindless action flick, and it does mindless action damn well.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley
Director: Gary Ross
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Rating: A-

The film adaptation of the bestselling book, The Hunger Games brings us to a dystopian world where every year two tributes, one male and one female, are selected from each of the twelve districts of Panem to participate in the Hunger Games, essentially a televised fight to the death.  Think “The Lottery” meets Gladiator, with an element of Big Brother.  The film is set around the 74^th Hunger Games and follows District 12’s female tribute, Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) as she struggles to overcome the odds and survive.  In order to be able to return home, she must be the only surviving tribute at the end of the games, including District 12’s male tribute, Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson).

The film does lose some of the novel’s story and doesn’t go into as much detail in regards to the political background of Panem.  I don’t actually feel that further detail is needed, though.  There was a war, it ended badly, and as a consequence the winners imposed a hugely cruel consequence – the Hunger Games.  What further background information is really needed?  The actual games aren’t as action packed as one might have expected – but the book itself isn’t that action filled either.  I really liked the way that they handled the action that they did show.  I also really like the way that they show the backstory and what’s going on outside of the Games; the book is very cerebral and only follows Katniss. The movie, however, avoids utilizing narration and instead shows you the things that book-Katniss only thinks about.  My one problem with the film is that I felt it cut too much of the relationship between Katniss and Peeta.  Some of my favourite parts of the book were the moments between the two of them, so I was disappointed to have that aspect of the film marginalized.  I did really like the film’s ending.  I really felt that it ended things on a happier note than in the book.