Your moon asplodes!

A quiet moment of intense drama...

In the grand tradition of Exploding Sun and Ring of Fire and CAT. 8, the other night Wonder Wife and I dipped into the well of truly awful disaster movies, this time a big-budget version from a master of big, dumb movies, Roland Emmerich: Moonfall. And I gotta tell ya, it was big, and it was dumb. Mind-numbingly stupid. So bad I have returned to bad-movie reviewing, which I generally try to avoid.

So, the premise is that the moon is actually a mega-structure, a fact which the government has at least suspected, if not known, since 1969. It is also the site of an ongoing battle between an evil AI entity (that looks like a swarm of metal shavings) and and a good AI that is a the last remaining artifact of the alien race that actually created Earth and seeded it with what became human life. (It's a long story and not very interesting.) And for some reason it's falling out of orbit, too.

Anyhow, an intrepid disgraced ex-astronaut (who had a close encounter with the metal shavings on a mission years before), a plucky NASA ex-astronaut administrator (who was on the same mission but missed the encounter), and a wacky conspiracy theorist who seems to know more than all government scientists combined must team up to intervene in the AI battle and keep the moon from crashing into the earth as its orbit decays, although it causes a lot of trouble on the way down anyway.

There all are sorts of hijinks, including gravity doing things it doesn't do, the atmosphere doing things it doesn't do, NASA getting a space shuttle out of a museum and somehow making it spaceworthy in hours, and panicky people running and hiding and shooting at each other as things explode and crash and burn. Apparently the real astronaut serving as technical advisor would occasionally tell them "that's not really possible" but they would roll with it anyway because Movies. It's a total mess.

There was only one bright spot: Halle Berry actually tries her best to breathe life into a cardboard character speaking insipid dialog, She is working so hard I actually felt sorry for her, but she's really the only in the whole film who is acting.

Actually talking about D&D...

So,I am not going to repeat my recent lament about blogging, but I will note that although Epicurus and Talent have been pretty healthy of late, this little geeky blog has been pretty neglected. I don't know if that's because my comics/cartooning pursuits have become a bigger part of my normie life (I have an Instagram, for cryin' out loud), or because D&D and similar geeky pursuits have become more mainstream (viz: this), or what, but let's correct it with something that made my little nerdy heart sing:

So maybe you have to have had more exposure to D&D than just watching Stranger Things, but seeing an owlbear, a  treasure-chest mimic, and a gelatinous cube in a big-budget production (it's even got a Chris!) - well, I am not sure if have been this nerdily excited since the Michael Keaton Batman movie.

Unfortunately, we won't see it for another 14 months, so let's stave off creeping fascism and environmental doom at least until then, okay?

In the green (streaming serendipity part two)

So, as I mentioned last time, Wonder Wife and I had a short run of streaming some good movies lately. As I was napping watching The Monster That Challenged the World ( a quintessential 1950s monster movie, about which perhaps more later) I recalled that I needed to post about the second great find.

Prospect is a great hard science fiction story, one that could have come from Clarke or Asimov. It is both big and small in perfect proportion. It is big, because it gives us a constant and full sense of a much wider world than we seen in the film itself, without having to show us any of it. It is small because it is totally focused on the characters and their struggles, not special effects or spectacle. There is conflict and danger in abundance, because these particular people are in this particular place facing this particular problem. They are not trying to save the world, but rather just trying to survive.

They are Cee, a young girl stranded by circumstance on a hostile moon during a treasure-hunting expedition, and Ezra, a freebooter of dubious ethics, who is an enemy-turned-ally. Together, these two must face natural and human threats in order to secure passage back home - or at least off the planetoid full of threats.
 

The actors are wonderful. Young Sophie Thatcher gives a compelling, tightly-controlled performance as Cee - it's all in the eyes - while Pablo Pascal's turn as the expansive Ezra is captivating, seemingly an admixture of equal parts True Grit, Firefly, and Shakespeare.

As equally compelling as the leads is the art design. The vehicles and suits and equipment - excuse me, the sets and costumes and props - are all totally realistic and plausible in a retro-futuristic dieselpunk sort of way. Everything looks and feels utilitarian and grimy and used; I haven't had so strong a sense of realness to a science fiction setting since the first Alien.

If you want edge-of-your seat tension in a completely engaging sci-fi world,  Prospect will not let you down.

All shook up

So, Wonder Wife and I have been favored with some streaming serendipity lately in the form of two movies that we just happened to come across while browsing, each of which was a total blast. here's the first.

The Quake is the Norwegian disaster film that is the sequel to The Wave, which won all kinds of awards and broke all kinds of records in Norway and around the world. Like the original film, this follow-up features Hollywood-style special effects and spectacle while maintaining focus on the individual characters, who we can really care about. It helps that all of them, even (or especially) the main protagonist, Kristian, are cut from decidedly unheroic cloth, and the image of these everyday people coping with an unbelievable natural disaster has a lot more power than watching The Rock stunting his way through the same sort of scenes.

Kristian, the ever-suffering geologist, having played Cassandra once before when a tsunami wiped out his fjordside hometown, finds himself once again sounding the alarm before the earth moves in Oslo and once again being unheeded  by the official bureaucracy - all while contending with PTSD, depression, a failed marriage, and estrangement from his kids. He's a total Nordic Job, and we feel for him every step of the way.

And the action scenes are terrific: tense, suspenseful, edge of your seat stuff. This is no slow-moving character study; the producers have earned their action-film moves well, and once things start shaking, you're in for thrill ride.

Walaka's predication: there will be a third film in the franchise (there's a literal handoff to a new character that I expect to see more of) and it will be.... The Storm.

See this movie.

 

12 Step Movie Review: Aquaman

A little bit spoilerey, I guess?

1. It starts even with the opening credits: The Warner Brothers and DC Entertainment logo sequences happen underwater. It sounds hokey, but it totally worked for me.

2. The origin story is given as much time as it needs and no more, and is woven into the A-plot and character motivations well.

3. Aquaman's fish communication powers are presented effectively, and no time is wasted explaining them.

4. Similarly, all the Atlantean stuff that could strain credulity - people talking underwater and so on - is hand-waved and/or lampshaded so we can get on with enjoying the fantastic underwater scenes.

5. The underwater scenes bear further mention - James Wan and his crew pulled it off. From the architecture, to the hair, to the voices, to the slight wavery nature of the scenes - everything maintains the illusion. The art direction and design of Atlantis is spectacular - even the giant seahorse mounts look cool.

6. The movie also does a great job of showing how Aquaman can function just fine on land, thank you.

7. Notwithstanding the change to significant detail of her origin, Mera is portrayed faithfully and respectfully, functioning as a partner, not a sidekick or damsel in distress. Amber Heard does a great job.

8. Patrick Wilson does a creditable heel turn as Orm, the Ocean Master, and I am seeing a Thor-Loki vibe rising up in the future.

9. The movie's version of Black Manta works, although Yahya Abdul-Mateen II doesn;t get to do much but be angry.

10. Jason Momoa does what he was called upon to do in this movie - a lot of badass, a little humor, and just a touch of heroic drama. The story successfully justifies Arthur Curry's dudebro personality as reasonable and credible, given the point in the character arc when we meet him, and this movie allows him to grow a little bit. Momoa doesn't have the sustained presence of Gal Gadot and this movie doesn't have the gravitas of Wonder Woman, but it certainly sits on the same shelf.

11. The plot is serviceable, setting up the stakes and the conflicts and the quests appropriately. More importantly, Aquaman makes a decision early in the movie that he comes to question and regret later in the story, and this was key for me, as it shows the DC is remembering what superhero movies are supposed to be about. It bodes well for the future, and I am looking forward to the upcoming DC movies more than I have been.

12. One quibble: although Willem DeFoe does his usual fine work, Vulko is supposed to be slightly stocky or even chubby, not a whipcord-lean sensei. If he weren't working for Team Marvel, Jon Favreau would have been a better choice.

My man Vulko - and my next cosplay.

So, all in all,  a heckuva fun night at the movies. I don't think I have flat-out enjoyed a superhero movie this much since the first Ant-Man.

5 x 5 Move Review: Avengers | Infinity War

 
1. So, right off the bat I am going to say that I didn’t like this as much as I had expected to. I had heard from lots of friends and acquaintances, including folks who are not necessarily comics fans, that this was a great movie, totally engaging, didn’t feel like three hours long, etc. I guess it was good, but I didn’t feel it was great. Maybe that was just Inflated Expectation Syndrome^TM kicking in.

2. About halfway through the film, I identified a familiar feeling in a new context: as the movie jumped from group to group in various places (physical and plot-related), I felt like I was reading a Big Event story that is told across different comics series. The tonal shifts and odd juxtapositions of characters in the film felt like seeing the same character illustrated by different artists and having characters that really don’t mesh too well together on the same team. The MCU may be tighter than old Eclipse was, but it still felt a little off.

3. So, explain to me again why, went the fate of the whole universe is at stake (and I’m not even going go into my stakes-too-high rant), that it is morally wiser to try to save the life of one person you know, even if it means putting the whole universe at risk. Not to mention that there didn’t seem to be a problem with putting a whole lot of other lives at risk to protect that one life. I had a real hard time accepting this from Cap, who is, after all, a soldier, and knows the necessity of sacrifice. (<cough> Crash into the Arctic much? <cough>) On a related note, the Battle of Wakanda seemed to be set up specifically to allow the more ground-level fighters to have something to do in this more cosmic conflict. (Cf. Batman and parademons).

4. One thing that I really appreciated was the treatment of Spider-man: it is good to have him in the mainstream MCU and this movie treats him with the respect he deserves. He may be a high-school kid, but he is one of the smartest and most powerful heroes in the continuity, and can hold his own with the big shots. Except maybe with Scarlet Witch – she seemed really OP in this movie, but in a good way.

5. Regarding the ending: I don’t know how Marvel is going to get themselves out of this without cheapening the entire narrative.


PS: Of course, Wonder Wife was most excited to see T'Challa and Shuri.

5 x 5 Movie review: Mythica

1. So, if I summarized a story something like a cleric and a magic-user meet in adventurer's tavern in a vaguely medieval setting; joined by a fighter and a thief, they go on a quest to rescue a kidnapped priestess and retrieve a sacred object from a band of orcs and an ogre, you'd probably guess that I was talking about a archetypal Dungeons and Dragons adventure. Well, that's actually a summary of the movie Mythica: A Quest for Heroes, but you'd still be correct, because the movie is really just one session in a five-movie-long D&D campaign.

Fighter, magic-user, thief, cleric... duh

2. As Wonder Wife commented while we were watching, you could almost call the dice rolls as the action in this film progressed, it was such a parallel to gameplay. A little backstory, get the party together, the thief has a stealth encounter, the fighter draws the aggro in combat and the cleric heals him - I mean, seriously, the big guy kept putting himself in harm's way to save the party and going down, and I kept thinking, yeah, he's got the HP. The climactic battle has the party caught in a cave between giant spiders and the ogre - pretty good DMing there.

3. Which is not to say the movie doesn't stand on its own merits. I don't want to sell it short: for an  indie fantasy film, it's pretty engaging. That the leader of the group is a young woman is a nice change, and the movie hints at a darkness within her (related to the nature of magic in the world) that I am sure will be explored later on. The characters have a little bit of wiggle room within their stereotypes as well; this is the set-up film for the franchise, so I will expect some growth and change there as well. There is a bad guy that I am sure will return, and an enigmatic elder wizard (a cameo by Kevin Sorbo, the film's "star power") who is sure to have a bigger role in the future. And if the  CGI is a little cheesy, well, that just adds to the charm - and you try doing high fantasy on tight budget!

4. Perhaps that tight budget actually added to the appeal of the movie for me: without huge CGI effects, there's no world-threatening, mind-boggling, set piece with a cast of thousands. There's just four adventurers fighting one monster. But they are four adventurers that are kinda fun to watch, and who you're staring to care a little about, and that beats the heck out of any planet-smashing for me.

5. I did a little research on the creators and they have the expected cred - not just in RPGs, but with other fantasy and mythology as well. Anne Black, the writer/director, includes in her credits The Crown and the Dragon, Dawn of the Dragonslayer, Orcs!, and Age of the Dragons - that last a retelling of Moby Dick with steampunk dragon hunters and which I most def want to see now. I think I may have discovered a new well from which to draw.

25 words or less: A Wrinkle in Time

Totally disappointing. Great actors wasted in a superficial, charmless, confusing, and tension-less story about people I didn’t care about. Two hours wrinkled away pointlessly.

5 x 5 movie review: Justice League

1. So, right off the bat (heh) I am going to say that I liked this a lot more than I had expected to. Based on a lot of stuff I had heard, and my general disappointment with the way DC has been handling its movie properties,  I didn't rush out to see this in theaters, but watching it at home on our new fancy-schmancy HD TV, I had a ball. Of course, I would have liked to have seen the Original Seven, but one thing I realize is that the comic book version of a thing and the movie version of a thing are not the same thing, and that's okay. It's not hard, really; just think of it as an Elseworlds. And on that level, this was a fine superhero movie.

2. Even if I am okay with Cyborg in the Justice League (which honestly still feels a little weird given his connections in my mind with the Teen Titans), I was not down with his angular, multi-faceted chrome appearance: it just seemed way too fussy. I had a similar response to Flash's segmented and wired outfit; I got the in-story explanation but it still had an overall clunky effect. On the other hand, I thought "The Aqua-man" look was a great interpretation.

3. I often go on about how this type of movie often gets too big for my tastes, how the stakes and the action are unnecessarily high; I didn't have that problem with this movie for two reasons. The first is that the Justice League, both in the comics and in this movie, was formed specifically to deal with world-threatening events; it is pretty much their brief. The second reason may seem like a technicality, but I think it is important: the League's mission was not to fight off an entire invasion, but to eliminate a device that would have made the success of that invasion a guarantee. The target, the goal, the macguffin if you will, was graspable and manageable.

4. The movie was also appealing to me for how much it captured the feel of the animated series - for example, the use of parademons to give Batman something to fight  while the heavier hitters fight the big bad.

5. Am I the only one who didn't notice Henry Cavill's CGI-ed out mustache?

Closing with this image just because I liked it so much.

12 Step Movie Response: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

So, Wonder Wife lobbied hard enough that we went to see the new Star Wars movie last night; as I have mentioned before, I am not a hardcore fan. But here goes.

1. It seems pretty clear that the last film tried to hit some sort of emotional reset button. I have to agree with some reviewers that The Last Jedi seems to be aiming to clear away much of the clutter of the past and move the franchise forward. As I don't have as much of an investment in the canon as a lot of fans do, that part doesn't matter much to me. Just judging the movie on its own, as an adventure flick, I just found it so-so.

2. Will Shetterly wrote a comprehensive (warning: and totally spoilery!) analysis of some of the writing problems with the film; I saw many of the same issues and can add a few of my own regarding portrayals of strategy, military discipline,  and so on. The biggest flaw for me is that while much of the film takes place in three different locales simultaneously, and the passage of time is critical, the events seem out of synch even more egregiously than usual.

3. Visually, the movie is pretty stunning; besides the usual blowy-uppy stuff and recreation of WW2 style combat logistics, there are great landscapes and wonderful critters to look at, as well as a diversity of alien and artificial life forms.

4. And speaking of diversity, it is great to see more visible diversity in the human cast as well, not just in race and gender but also in age and body type. Heroic figures don't all need to be popped out of the same action figure mold.

5. And speaking of critters, there seemed to be a real mindfulness regarding animals embedded in the film: some not-totally-subtle messages about animal cruelty and such. Wonder Wife was of course thrilled by this sensibility.

6. As for the major characters: I still love Rey, but she seemed a little more petulant than she needed to be and doesn't get a big enough set piece to really shine.

7. Finn is still developing as a character and hasn't quite found firm footing in this film. I like the idea of his being like a Spirit-esque hero: getting the crap knocked out of him a lot and being dragged out of wreckage by women, but fighting on nonetheless.

8. Kylo Ren moved the dial a little bit from emo to menacing in this episode... but still not enough.

9. Nice final appearances of Luke and Leia, considering the series had already all but left their characters behind. (When is Chewbacca gonna get some real love?)

10. I know Poe is supposed to be a headstrong hotshot, and he obviously has both skills and physical courage, but he was really quite the jerk otherwise, if you ask ask me. I really want to like Rose, and in many ways I do, but the next movie is going to have cash that check.

11. The movie included a couple of star turns in minor roles: I expect this from Marvel superhero movies, but not Star Wars. I think these parts could have been exploited a lot more.

12. We got a nice dig at the 1% in the middle of the flick.

That's it. Not really a review, since you're going to see it or not anyway. Wonder Wife loved it.

5 x 5 Movie Review: Thor: Ragnarok

1. So, why can Marvel Studios churn out competent, entertaining superhero movies seemingly at will, while DC Entertainment gets caught in so much Sturm und Drang every time it puts out one of its overwrought productions? With the exception of the excellent Wonder Woman, which I think shows the best potential of being a tent-pole of any film that DC has produced,  all their movies seem just terribly... fraught. Thor: Ragnarok, on the other hand, is everything one would want from a film in this genre: fun characters, fantastical action, visual thrills, a little humor, and some heroism at its core.

2. Like many films these days, the CGI stuff got a little too big for my taste: my favorite Marvel movie is still Ant-Man, in part because the stake were so relatively small. But given that this movie focuses on a epic chapter in the history of Asgard, I guess it can be forgiven for being huge. And truth be told, for all that it was an apocalyptic tale, there were a lot of small bits as well - Thor with Dr. Strange, with Odin, with Hulk, with Valkyrie, and of course, with Loki.

3. I gotta give credit for diversity. We're starting to see worlds on screen inhabited by people who more resemble those in the world we live in, and that's great.

4. I'm going to say it: Stan Lee's cameos are getting tiresome.

5. Many years ago, I read an article in a fan magazine - Amazing Heroes or A Comics Reader or something like that - in which a writer asserted that many of Jack Kirby's visuals would never work anywhere but on the comics page. He said that certainly in live action, and even in animation, some of the King's costume designs were just too much for reality, as wonderful and beautiful as the looked on the page. He gave Hela's headdress as an example of this notion.

He was wrong.

5 x 5 Movie review: Ghostbusters

1. So, I came of age with the classic 1973 Richard Lester film version of The Three Musketeers, which I thought was a close to perfect as a movie adaptation could get to Dumas's vision. When the Brat Pack made their version twenty years later, my first response was "Why? The Lester version is close to perfect!" The I realized that my love for my version ignored many prior films that other people no doubt had a soft spot for and that every generation can have its own version of whatever story the public cares about and wants to see again. This new film is Ghostbusters for 2016; the earlier versions just don't matter when we look at it, and they're still there if you want to watch them.

2. That said, I think I liked this movie better than I liked the original. Memory dims with time, of course, but the resonance from the first film that sticks with me the most was that Peter Venkman was kind of a dick. On the other hand, this movie positively echoes with teamwork and relationships throughout, along with all the ass-kicking action (and there's plenty of that, with all sorts of cool ghost-getting gear). I liked all the characters, I laughed out loud several times, I had fun: what else is a summer blockbuster movie for?

3. Not that it is a close-to-perfect movie: there are some real problems with pacing and editing, and the plot doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. But, hey, the performances by four very funny women - Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones - and a tour de force turn by a surprising hilarious Chris Hemsworth more than make up for any flaws.

4. The movie does make a few nods to the original film - some of them clever, some of them forced and awkward - and takes a few cool in-story swipes at the anti-woman, you-destroyed-my-childhood hysteria that rose from the asshat brigade during the making and marketing of the film. The cameos by the original cast seemed wasted; only Ernie Hudson seemed to have any ethos and Bill Murray in particular seemed to be having flashbacks to his early days a sketch comedian.

5. Of course, like the rest of the planet, I am totally crushing on Jillian Holtzmann.

Not to scale

So, I just watched a mini-documentary on movie trailers, and it put me in mind of a frequent complaint I have voiced: that the stakes or conflict or set-pieces in most movies have too often gotten too big and too much. It seems that we can't have a movie motivate its characters - or interest us - by anything less that the the end of the world, or something close, anyway. Any conflict is waged with doomsday devices and/or clashing hordes. Deathstars, worldwide plagues, global annihilation, armies of darkness: nobody reaches for small goals anymore, certainly not in science-fiction type movies. Everything is Armageddon.

This trend is even evident in theoretically smaller movies like action thrillers. I can recall watching stuff like The Guns of Navarone, in which the WW2 commando team must destroy one strategic gun emplacement - just one! Not save the world, or even win the war - just accomplish the mission. There was still enough drama to keep me on the edge of my seat. But now, it seems that the macguffin that the spy is after is more likely than not software that will destroy the entire internet, or the strike team has to recover a virus that could wipe out all of humanity. Do we really need a threat that big before we care about the outcome?

The bigness is present not only in the overarching plot, but in the execution of the action as well. I have talked often about how overused some CGI effects are - just because you can create huge armies doesn't mean you must create huge armies. Skirmishes can be just as exciting as battles and a fistfight as tense as clash of ninjas - more so, if we connect with the human element better.

I once saw a bit of one of those Jason Statham movies in which he drives cars real fast (I don't know which one). Some bad guy had put a bomb on his car and somehow forced him to drive away with it attached even though he knew it was there. He drives real fast, finds a construction site with conveniently stacked material, drives the car up a makeshift ramp and into a barrel roll, positioning it precisely so that a nearby crane scrapes the bomb off the undercarriage of the car, then lands the car and drives away while the bomb explodes in the air as it dangles from the crane. I felt like I was watching a Road Runner cartoon - just too much.

Just recently, I saw a bit of Meet Boston Blackie, the first in a string of 40s action films about a reformed criminal who gets caught up solving crimes (usually because people think he did whatever it was). Blackie and a woman were in a car chase, being pursued by cops or crooks, I couldn't tell which. In order to elude them, Blackie unscrews the knob from his gearshift lever, throws it back at the other car, causing a spiderweb of cracks in their windshield that impedes the driver's vision and causes him to crash into a fire hydrant. Brilliant.

That's a flick I'll have to catch the rest of. It seems more my size.

5 x 5 Movie Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

So, I guess this blog wouldn't be earning its keep if I didn't say something about Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

1. I saw the original movie on the second day was released - I guess that would have been May 26, 1977 - and I can still remember the frisson of excitement I felt as a movie-loving college student and SF fan at the opening scene: man, those effects blew 2001 right out the water. I liked the movie a lot, but I never became a fan in the popular sense of the word. I saw the sequels as they came out, I saw the execrable Phantom Menace later, and skipped the rest, and have never more than dipped a toe in the Extended Universe.  I understand that there are apparently people who are wee bit more invested in the franchise than I am.

2. If the intent behind of this film was for Disney to let all the aging die-hard fans see that the original look and feel of the movies is back, that they can ignore those nasty prequels, wrap themselves in the familiar, and know that everything is going to be okay, then I imagine that they have succeeded. Almost the entire movie is a callback and/or a shout out: plot elements, comic relief, set pieces, all of it.

3. I might be too harsh a critic on that front, as I had similar issues with the second Star Trek reboot movie. But I think it a fair assessment to say that even accepting that context and approach, the film does not fully exploit what should have been the emotional climax of the film involving two main characters.

4. I also wonder how this nostalgia-based strategy plays with the fans of the extended universe, who are familiar from comics, books, cartoons, and web content with a vast array of characters and settings and circumstances far removed from the original trilogy. I guess it's working out, since the movie has already made a jillion space-dollars, but it seems counter-intuitive to me.

5. All that said, I will watch any movie that has Rey daringly doing some derring-do. Finn was cool and I liked him, but Rey is awesome.

 

A little bit of my soul asplodes...

So, I have chronicled how Wonder Wife and I have been dipping from the well of disaster mivies on Netflix with Exploding Sun and Ring of Fire, and we tried again last night with CAT. 8 starring the often very good Matthew Modine. The quality curve dipped downward sharply.

A secret government project to harness solar energy and use it to alter the Earth's magnetosphere to combat global warming gets weaponized in an even secreter government project. The initial test of the weapon goes awry and spits some solar energy back into the sun. For some reason, this causes solar flares, falling satellites, and eventually a coronal mass ejection so colossal that it will strike Earth, cause a Category 8 event - the destruction of planet.

The film's title conceit encapsulates how bad it is. It is announced in the White House situation room as the threat rises from a Category 5 (major loss of life disaster) to 6 (breakdown of fabric of society and technological infrastructure) to 7 (loss of all human life) and so on, but we never feel it. The global catastrophe is presented by people reading reading emails and a few wide matte shots of cities. That's it. Even the local disaster (the film is centered in Boston) takes place off-screen and only the aftermath is shown. This is the most boring disaster film since The Swarm in 1978, which had South American killer bees destroy a nuclear power plant and the audience didn't get to see it explode.

Modine sleepwalks through his role as a disgraced solar physicist who can somehow deduce a solar flare from a small earthquake and spotty cell phone coverage and who is the only one with the know-how to Put Things Right (because he developed the program before it was weaponized and he left it because he is a bit of a peacenik). He seems to convey only one attitude, whether dealing with his ex-wife's new husband, his daughter's boyfriend, or the end of life on earth: mild annoyance, with a bit of peevishness thrown in. The rest of the cast might have been recruited from a high school drama society, for all the emotion and authenticity that they invest their roles with.

After an exciting stint sitting in a cell for a good third of the movie and some pulse-pounding cable-attaching (really, that's the climactic set piece), the scientist and the boyfriend save the world. But is it over? The daughter's heirloom compass is going crazy and the Secretary of Defense, angry that the scientist has saved the world and made him look bad, has the scientist kidnaped by special ops guys. Looks like we'll have to watch the second half of this mini-series to find out how the story ends!

I am trying to convince Wonder Wife that that's not going happen. This movie was beyond enjoyably bad and well into life is too short to watch bad Matthew Modine pictures territory.

I think I'm done.

5 x 5 Movie Review: Ant-Man

1. So, I gotta say: I thought this was going to be the one where Marvel tripped, but it's not. My movie-going buddy said he liked it better than the latest Avengers movie, and truth to tell, I probably did too, and I didn't expect to like it very much at all. I liked that it was a smaller movie (no pun intended) in the sense that the scope of the conflict was much more contained and focused. It's not a great film, but Rudd is engaging and funny, the effects are fun, and like all Marvel movies it gets the job done.

2. One strong criticism: the mentor/protege - Ant-Man/Yellowjacket dynamic was a little too similar to the protege/mentor - Iron Man/Iron Monger relationship from the first Iron Man movie. Has Marvel made so many movies we're recycling plots already?

3. The shared-universe integration of these movies is really picking up steam. The common knowledge of the Avengers as a force in the world, the "guest appearance" by Falcon, the flashbacks to the early days of SHIELD - all this stuff reinforces the sense of connection. I appreciate that as part of this shared universe, the intelligence community has always been shown as a mixed blessing. From its beginnings as the Strategic Science Reserve, SHIELD is shown to be as much a danger as it is a force for good. This approach has added a layer of complexity to a lot of formulaic stories.

4. Science: the movie hand-waves in much the same way as the comics did why an atomic physicist would also be an expert in telepathic communication with insects. Fake science: I do quibble with Ant-Man being able to shrink to atomic levels; that shtick was always The Atom's territory.

5. As much as I liked Rudd's Scott Lang Ant-Man, I would really liked to have seen the Hank Pym/Janet Van Dyne Ant-Man/Wasp team in action. Marvel could have made it a period piece set in the early sixties and had Wasp is a different outfit (civilian or heroic) in every scene : Mad Men meets superheroes.

Bonus: Go read Will Shetterly's takes on the movie: the spoiler-free one and the spoilery one.

Your Earth Asplodes!

So, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Okay, I'm ashamed.

Once again, Wonder Wife and I were seduced by the SE1: EP1 designation on the Netflix offering Ring of Fire. In our defense, I have talked before about our penchant for cancelled one-season sci-fi series, and this apparent volcano story did star Terry O'Quinn (whom I like) from Lost and Michael Vartan from Alias (which Wonder Wife loved). But about 40 minutes in and with no resolution imminent, I checked Netflix on my phone and saw that it was another mini-series shown in two parts, each 88 minutes. What is up with this stuff, anyway?

 At least this one was (a) not quite as bad as Exploding Sun  - but close! - and (b) a bit shorter.

Ring of Fire hits all the right beats for a disaster movie. First, the characters are typically "complex": the plucky eco-activist heroine is the bad-guy oil executive's estranged daughter; the savvy geologist hero has a lurking brain aneurism; the morally-torn drilling engineer lost a child in a mine accident that was the result of his brother's negligence; the drill-site guard and the loud protester went to high school together; and so on. And, in a typical disaster movie plot, all of these characters and threads cross as we advance towards volcanic doom.

That doom is one of the biggest flaws of the film. It's not enough anymore to riff on the Mt. St. Helen's eruption and threaten an entire city or region with annihilation: this movie says that disturbing the pool of magma that the oil company sneakily and mistakenly drills into (hoping to put Saudi Arabia out of business) somehow ignites eruptions in previously dormant volcanoes all across the Pacific Rim, enough to bring about the End of the World (or as the geologist likes to say, an ELE - Extinction Level Event). Do the filmmakers think we wouldn't care enough if it was just a town that was threatened?

Of course, the science is still laughable. If we buy the ELE threat, we also have to buy that it is prevented by releasing a bit of the pressure in the first magma pool through exploding a "sonic bomb" delivered by a re-purposed manned Venus probe vehicle piloted by a geologist instead of, say, a test pilot or astronaut. Okay.

Still and all, it's not that bad. Unlike Exploding Sun, some of the players turn in creditable performances that come close to redeeming the material, although Vartan seems to be phoning it in. I have to single out Agam Darshi for her performance as Audrey, the hero's sidekick: she imbues what could have been a cardboard character with real humanity at every turn. But really, if volcanic hijinks are your thing, check out Dante's Peak, starring James Bond and Sarah Conner.

Spoiler alert: the Earth doesn't explode.

Your sun asplodes!

So,  I imagine it went something like this:

"Guys, we just finished this movie. A spaceship with an experimental drive crashes into the sun and sets off a chain reaction that threatens all life on Earth. We need a killer science-fiction disaster movie title. What do you have for us?"

"The space ship makes the sun explode? How is that even possible?"

"Well, it's an experimental quantum scalar mumble mumble, polarity atomic mumble mumble."

"Cool. Okay - let's call it Exploding Sun!"

"Well, the sun doesn't actually explode -- it kinda gets all stirred up and emits cosmic rays and microwaves and EMPs and mumble mumble."

"So it's more like Cosmic-Ray-Emitting Sun? How about Energetically-Active Sun? Or Sub-Atomically-Excited Sun?"

"Okay then, Exploding Sun it is!

***

I'm still not quite sure why Wonder Wife and I sat through all of this disaster of a disaster movie. We thought it was a television series, since it was listed on Netflix as SE1:EP1 when we were browsing, but it turns out the film has just been packaged to be shown as either one two-hour movie (on DVD) or a two-part three-hour version (what Netflix has). On any case, after sitting through the first half, we thought we'd watch the second half to see if it got any better (as it couldn't get any worse).

Starring Not-Greg Kinnear, Not-Summer Glau, and Not-Patrick Warburton.

Forget Star Trek technobabble; this movie operates on Flash Gordon levels of scientific accuracy to send its small crew of civilian astronauts (including the First Lady) on the inaugural trip of a space clipper: a nine-hour trip the moon and back. (It's a really fast ship.) While we thought we were going to watch the exploits of this small group of survivors when disaster (naturally) strikes, they are summarily killed to get the plot moving. What we thought was too little time spent on them turns out to be too much time, since their identities never factor into the plot or character development of those left behind in any meaningful way, but only as links to the various scenarios that comprise the film.

The movie seems to have been shot by several units who never worked together or even corresponded via email. Besides the main scientists-vs-sun action featuring our heroic trio above, we have White House situation room shenanigans, a small town coping with disaster, the callous arbitrager stuck in his high-rise, and the plucky medicos of the refugee camp in Afghanistan fighting warlorlds as well as solar flares.

 

And this really is Julia Ormand stuck in this turkey. 

(I think she filmed all her scenes in two or three days while on vacation in Morocco 

and nobody told her the plot of the actual movie.)

The disaster movie recipe isn't a difficult one to follow, and somehow this movie managed to hit all the beats without creating emotional resonance with any of the characters or any narrative coherence in the plot. It almost seems like a first draft, with seeds of some interesting character development or conflict (an over-zealous White House Chief-of-Staff, a potential polygamous relationship among the three leads, an It Can't Happen Here vibe in the small town) but without more than the slightest realization of those notions. The guy in the high rise seems to have no narrative purpose whatsoever.

But Wonder Wife and I stuck it out to the end, I guess optimistic that something would rise from the morass. It didn't, but at least we saved you the mistake of watching Exploding Sun.

Spoiler alert: the sun doesn't explode.

5 x 5 Movie review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

1. Wonder Wife and I made sure to watch this latest Avengers movie between episode 2.19 and episode 2.20 of the television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  The integration was seamless. Seam. Less. Is this the future? To get the whole story, I will need to participate in several simultaneous narrative streams?

2. Why does Marvel Studios get that the Avengers, and Captain American especially, would care about civilians becoming collateral damage, while DC Entertainment has Superman engaging in battle in the middle of a town or city with hardly a concern for the locals? Has anyone at DCE ever even read a comic?


3. Nice to see lots of faces from the supporting casts of all the different movies; the two missing Women were lampshaded amusingly.

4.  I know that I have said this in other review, but why does every battle have to be so big and so loud and so chaotic ALL THE TIME?! The rise of CGI has taken the constraints off some aspects of filmmaking, and constraints generate creativity. Now, all the action is quick cuts and confusing perspectives, incomprehensible and unengaging, particularly when held in contrast to the quieter, character-directed bits, which were actually quite good.

5. I do not 'ship Natasha and Bruce, not one little bit.

Hitting the nail

So, I recently tripped over a couple of articles on a movie blog, one called 5 Comic Book Adaptations That Got It Just So Wrong and one called 5 Comic Book Adaptations That Got It Just So Right. You can find these articles on your own if you like, but I wouldn't waste a lot of time looking for the, since they should have just been combined into a single essay titled Some Superhero Movies I Liked and Didn't Like for a Variety of Reasons that you could then skip at your convenience.

In neither article does the author ever give us a clear sense of what just so right and just so wrong actually mean. Some of the so wrong movies deviate from what he considers the core concepts of the character; but so do some of the so right ones. His responses to the various movies and television shows are so idiosyncratic that the essays become even less useful than a typical review and are all the more disappointing because of the promise they held out for some greater meaning than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down.  There's no core thesis to be found. (Is my English composition teacher showing?)

To balance the ecosystem of the comixweblogosphere, I am going to offer my Superhero Comic Book Adaptation That Got It Right, and back it up.

First of all, to define terms: got it right means a movie closely matched the spirit and sensibility of the source material, visually, narratively, and thematically. It does not mean a slavish devotion to continuity or canon, but rather the evocation of the same sort of emotional response in the viewer of the movie that a reader of the comic would have.

In my mind, the movie that has succeeded best at this specific objective is...

Now, I know this 1984 Salkind spin-off doesn't get a lot of love (even though it gave us the wonderful Helen Slater), and I'm not arguing that it is the best superhero movie ever or even that it is a good movie. What I am saying is that this is the most faithful translation of a comic's style and mood from page to screen.

You see, in the early eighties, The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl was being written by Paul Kupperberg and illustrated by Carmine Infantino. Kupperberg was a former fanzine publisher who became a DC stalwart in the Julie Schwartz days; his stories were typical of Bronze Age DC: not as goofy as Silver stories, overly earnest in their "relevance," and about as hip as Happy Days. Infantino, after being removed as Publisher of DC, was back to work as an artist, replacing his earlier delicate style with lines that embodied the ideas of brio and gusto and elan. Here's an example of their collaboration, from a DC promotional comic:

"Halston I'm not, Kara..." Oh, Kupperberg, you wag!

Here are some more samples from  the comic:

I got news for you, babydoll - this ain't Watchmen. These comics are big, they're bright, they're bold - they're comic book-y. 

And they comprised the model for the movie that came out a year or so later. Here's the trailer from the movie, which matches my memory pretty closely (except I am sure there was a much higher ratio of Peter O'Toole). I think you can see where the filmmakers took their cues:

As my cinematic namesake would say, am I wrong? Sure, they changed a lot of stuff - that giant robot became a piece of construction equipment -  but the female antagonists, the forced humor, the awkward romantic element, and the whole tone and timbre are spot on. I mean, Faye Dunaway even looks like she was drawn by Carmine Infantino.

I will stand by this assertion:  over 30 years ago, Supergirl was the movie that got it right.

Of course, the greatest single performance to get it right occurred 18 years later, but that's another post.