Stargate Atlantis (2004-2009)

When I started watching Stargate Atlantis, I was only mildly interested. After all, space vampires as the big bad of the series were hard to take seriously. I have no trouble with space vampires in trash science fiction, but Stargate always tried to play it straight and I hoped the spin-off would be at least as serious. But while the space vampires, their origin and their abilities were always a bit wonky in terms of convincing sciency bits, what I really liked was how the series played them. Most vampire fiction never ventures into the scenario of what happens when you have more vampires than food supply.

Sure, there was Daybreakers (interesting concept, disappointing execution), but rarely do we see the outcome of a successful taking over of the world by the vampires. In Stargate Atlantis they didn’t just take over the world, they took over the galaxy. Their lifecycle was perfectly integrated with the population growth of the human worlds and the population of the entire galaxy. Once too many people had been culled from all over the galaxy, most of the vampires went into eons long sleep mode. Also most of the vampire clans in their hive ships woke up in shift, so not to overextend the burden of culling the sheep and destroying their feeding grounds.

Into that finely tuned systems the humans came like the proverbial wrench in the machine, waking up all the hives at once. While initially united against the Earth humans, soon they fell on each on other due to limited feeding resources in their galaxy. It really was something of a beauty to behold to see how the whole too much vampires to feed scenario played out.

Not to say that Stargate Atlantis was perfect. They killed of one of the best characters the show had (Elizabeth Weir, man she was the perfect leader for the Atlantis expedition), replaced here with Samantha Carter whose actress turned in a relatively bland performance (probably due to the writers of the show again not knowing what to do with a female leader) and then replaced her with IOA mainstay Richard Woolsey, who I really hated and yet who the writers wanted to portray positively (which did not work at all, he was an incompetent control freak from start to finish).

Really, the show could have been easily called the John Sheppard and Rodney McKay show, as those two were the center piece and everyone else just patchwork. Teyla was the token female who was never allowed to play much of a role (and that diminished even moreso as the series went on), Ronan never ventured far beyond being the simple warrior archetype and most of the characters were just as sketchy. And while it was nice to see McKey go from complete asshole to an asshole with a human side, it wasn’t exactly a character arc I haven’t seen on countless other shows and the same applied even more to John Sheppard.

Apart from the space vampires and their generic fantasy/heavy metal look the series provided a substitute replicator race which lacked the cool visual design of the originals and a local human culture who sometimes played the antagonist (the Genii). What was interesting, though not in positive way, was how the Atlantis expedition was the perfect metaphor for western imperialism, completely forgoing local cultures and terming their efforts to fight the space vampires as weak sauce with only Earth humans doing it the right way. The original series had similar elements, but in Atlantis it was ten times as wrong and neither the characters nor the creators of the series ever acknowledged that this was even a problem. Totally oblivious and clueless.

Plotwise the best stuff happened in the first three seasons with a few good episodes in the fourth and even the last series. Overall though, the seasons went from good (never great) for the first three to mediocre (fourth season) to disappointing and often boring (last season) with an ending that was a whimper compared to a few of the best episodes like the ending of the replicator threat. They tried for something epic with a final conflict converging on Earth, but it definitely was not the well-placed and -played climax to the long-running conflict with the space vampires (I love saying that). Very similar in approach and execution to the last episode of Star Trek Voyager, which equally went out with a whimper, where after it you felt like This is it? Really, are you fucking with me?!?.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001 is, at least for me, a movie that is hard to love. When I first saw it, I dismissed it as an artsy and pretentious piece of cinema that doesn’t do anything interesting in terms of science fiction and didn’t fit my notions of what a good movie had to be like. My recent second viewing has brought a slight change in my attitude toward 2001, thought I still don’t love it.

I think the first prerequisite to even get through the movie is an unusual amount of patience, especially when it’s easy not to go on watching. Kubrick didn’t pull any punches and did his sloooow and loooong camera shots that felt like he was trying to troll the audience and not like he was making a point. I think he did, but like I said, it’s something you need patience to even get there. To me it feels like 2001 is Kubrick’s visual expression of how he perceived science fiction or at least the source material by Clarke: cold, emotionless, disturbing, inhuman and so on. 2001 is not a movie about humanity’s ingenuity and the wonders of space exploration, but a voyage that started far in the past and stretched from those early hominids into our near future where even an AI feels more human than the humans themselves.

2001 is a critical of something, but saying it’s just dismantling science fiction is far too easy. Kubrick was excellent when it came to showcasing various elements of human nature with his movies. 2001 in that regard allowed Kubrick to show an aspect none of his other movies could have (at least not in this way), the seemingly paradox that we’ve accomplished so much in terms of technology and reach and yet that we have advanced so little in many other regards. The initial sequence with the early hominids is more than just a showcase of a plot point. It’s a reminder that despite the time gone by when humanity has reached space, we ourselves are still frightened and unenlightened little hominids, prone to do very stupid things (like
hampering an AI in a way that makes it commit murder) despite believing we are so much more.

The final, opaque sequence of the movie is IMHO both a beginning and an end. It’s like Kubrick is saying that the dawn of humanity has stretched from those early hominids up to the near future and just then the sun is coming out fully. The dawn is ending and the future has just begun. What that means is up to us.

I still don’t like the movie, but I respect it for its ambitions and how consequently Kubrick implemented his vision without pulling any punches. That’s something to admire.

Hard Rain (1998)

I love action movies with likable characters and at least a modicum of ambition to surprise me from time to time. Hard Rain perfectly satisfies that urge. The story goes like this: a money transporter gets stuck in a town where a flood is coming during a heavy rain. The money transporter gets attacked, one of the drivers is killed, the other avoids the attackers and hides the money. The water is rising, there’s a town sheriff and his deputies left in the abandoned city, a female love interest for the surviving driver, the attackers and bags full of money.

Hard Rain is a movie-long action sequence with shifting allegiances, much water and a weird side-story about an old couple thrown in for fun (thought the old man putting his dominating wife into her place was kinda shitty and a bit too self-congratulating on the part of the movie-makers, considering that most of the old couples I know have exactly the same dynamic but with reversed roles). There’s a scene where the gangster follow the driver into a flooded school building with jet skis, which is just the awesomeness you expect from this kind of movie and Hard Rain delivers exactly that.

Sure, most of the time you know the twists coming, you know how some of the people will die or what happens next. It’s not exactly the most original movie. But it’s solid movie that knows how to pace things out, when to tighten the tension and so on. For a movie that is mostly about a group of people hunting each other through a flooded city it never gets boring.

The Sound of Breaking Up (2012)

The Future is Japanese 2/13

Man was this a frustrating experience. This story started out great, even marvelous. The main character works as a proxy in basically a post-scarcity society where few people have even a job anymore. Being a proxy means breaking up people who have been married (virtually, never seen each other in real life) or in short making one of the two sign the divorce papers. There are hints that most people life in a variety of virtual worlds or layers while being in the real world and physical interactions have been pared down to the absolute minimum or become fetishized. And the main character is seen or at least sees herself as kind of a freak for even wanting to work and having to interact with other humans directly.

Really fascinating stuff and then the story drifted into a completely different, completely uninteresting direction about the future (upstream) plundering the past (downstream) and the heroine getting involved on the side of the downstreamers. If you want to see that kind of story well done, read Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory (well, only if you can handle superheroics). But man, this was an object lesson in wasted potential.

Mono No Aware (2012)

The Future is Japanese 1/13

This is the embodiment of a solid story: not all that exiting, but still showing enough skill to acknowledge that is was well written and probably worth a read. The setup isn’t all that unusual: Earth is threatened by a big, planet-destroying asteroid and various nations build spaceships for evacuation. The story flips back and forth between the time before the asteroid hits Earth and the present which takes place on the only spaceship that made it to space (launched by the US of A). The main character is one (or maybe the only one, I’m not clear on that) Japanese on board and how he relates the events of his life and his subsequent actions on board of the ship to a specific element of the Japanese mindset.

Like I say, solid story, not all that exiting, but with a well-drawn main character. I’m not sure whether the whole humbly accepting the end of the world or all things in general with quietness and dignity is really typical for Japanese or just a cliche (or both), at least is aligns with one of my favorite manga, so it might be true for some Japanese. But it’s a pretty good opener for an anthology that tries to showcase the intersection between Japanese science fiction and non-Japanese Japan-inspired/-themed science fiction.

The Apocalypse Codex (2012)

The Apocalypse Codex is much better than it has any right to be. It recycles the enemy from last book and it partly sidelines Bob for two other characters. But at the end, it’s still a pretty good read, far above the lackluster second entry and nearly as good as the last book and the first. I recently read and enjoyed another book about a secret British agency that fights supernatural threats (The Rook), but the one major difference between that book and the Laundry series is the feeling of danger and threat.

The Rook provides cookie-cutter action where you never feel like the main heroine is ever much in danger. You know deep down that she’ll survive any ordeal and comes out ahead. Stross’s Laundry series embodies quite a different philosophy. Even when the hero wins he loses and the more the series advances the more you get the feeling that it will not end well. Not at all.

And it’s not just CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the hinted at apocalyptic end of the world scenario when the walls between the universes come tumbling down and nightmarish horrors from beyond do unspeakable things to humanity. It’s easy for any writer to reference lovecraftian horrors from beyond, but it’s much harder to make the reader feel the cosmic dread and horror like Lovecraft did.

There’s a chilling scene in The Apocalypse Codex, where the North American equivalent of the Laundry saves one of their own by casually forcing him to blow his head off. And you’re not really sure if this wasn’t the right course of action. The realization that the higher power structure of each supernatural agency, be it the Laundry or the Black Chamber, is occupied by entities very much not human (or not anymore) and very much not emotional about sacrificing and killing people in various horrible ways, and yet these monstrous entities still fear CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

Stross’s Laundry series and the best parts of every book capture the slowly rising dread of a future that can’t be put into words, the feeling that even death might be preferable. It’s grimdark for sure, but one of the few examples that does it exceedingly well without kicking you over the head like Warhammer and its ilk (not that I don’t like Warhammer, but it’s not exactly known for subtleties) and still gives you the creeps.

The Matrix (1999)

I absolutely love the first Matrix movie and with the same level of intensity hate the sequels. Not so much because they were failures, but how they failed. After the announcement of the sequels there were countless theories going around what could happen next, even after the disappointing Matrix Reloaded there were ingenious theories left like the Matrix in the Matrix and stuff like that. And then they lowered the bar again with the third one.

The first one was everything the sequels were not. Ingenious, tight, slick, fresh, there’s a number of adjectives to describe just how well everything came together. The sequels, not so much. Lazy, tired, overblown, self-indulgent and so on. Not to say that the Matrix was all that deep. The whole philosophical angle was pretty much introductory level. I think the reason why the Matrix worked all so well was the inherent appealing us vs the world approach that young people buy very easily into (and I was exactly at the right age when I saw the first movie).

I’m not the first to mention how eerily Morpheus’s crew and their approach resembles the terrorist mold, the whole if you’re not with us, you’re part of the system and collateral damage, the whole black and white view of the world and the ease with which Neo and friends took lives. But they weren’t the antagonist in the movie, so instead of terrorists they got the label freedom fighters.

I’m not saying those categories are completely interchangeable, but there’s so much overlap that everyone completely comfortable with believing he is only one of the good guy should raise red flags like no tomorrow. But I think that’s exactly why the Matrix worked. It had a take no prisoner approach, never even acknowledging the inherently problematic position of its heroes. It was filled to the brim with manic energy, with clever and fast cuts and all implemented with a fabulous science fictional setting and story.

It’s like a music clip on steroids that never slows down and makes it easy to overlook any flaws. That’s why the sequels never worked, too much believing their own hype, too much banking on stuff that didn’t sold the Matrix in the first place.

In the real world, when terrorists get old they either sell out, get shot or become obsolete and laughable at the same time. Hmm, maybe that was what the Wachowski brothers were telling us with the sequels. Now that I think about it, that was clever of them.

I, Robot (2004)

It’s probably as well that I never read the original short story collection by Asimov, or I would foam out of my mouth for the movie getting it all wrong. I, Robot takes a few elements – the robot laws, the robots themselves (who look more like very agile crash test dummies) and bits and pieces from the source – and spins the usual mystery/action-yarn about an evil AI trying to take over.

The three robot laws and their implications are only explored in the most superficial manner, the main character arc from robot-hater to friend of the main crash test dummy reminded me of another character I once saw in an anime (Armitage III, where the cop with the robot prosthesis fell in love with the female bot instead of the bromance of I, Robot). All this isn’t to say that the movie is bad. It’s just lazy, substituting possible depth with action and cliches and while it’s entertaining, it’s hardly memorable.

The movies is so lazy that halfway through you’ll begin to ask yourself whether the entire world is just the city depicted in the movie and whether the robot uprising near the end would have any repercussion beyond the city limits if the robots had won.

There were countless options for adapting the source material that could have yielded interesting results. One could have been to take the three laws and challenge them on ethical grounds and the wider implications of subjugating artificial self-aware entities, another the impact of cheap, tireless labor that never resists any form of exploitation. But the way they did ensured that the movie was a fun but entirely harmless, docile and forgettable experience.

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes S2 (2012)

The second seasons of Mighty Avengers does something quite interesting in terms of comic continuity, in that it takes various plots from the comic source and then reverses their chronology (first Secret Invasion then going to the home world of the Kree). Compared to the first season this season also feels a bit like Justice League Unlimited, in that instead of concentrating on the core group of Avengers, more and more others heroes are introduced in an anthology-like manner.

My biggest beef with the first half of the series is probably that I really dislike the whole Secret Invasion era, mostly because I have a big hate for any plots that rely on some of the main cast being doppelgängers, shapechangers or similar stuff. Especially when that sub-plot is going on for what feels like forever. Another problem I had with the second season was that it felt like the animation was often subpar when compared to the first season. And the re-cut intro with the horrible voice over didn’t entice me much. And that Wasp is still portrayed as the most useless team member, despite having better powers than some of the others just feels troubling (not to mention the awful costume of Ms. Marvel).

Still, all that said, seeing classic Avengers plots streamlined for television and thus freed of all the extraneous continuity fat was fun in itself. Stupid fun, but fun nonetheless (I get the feeling I say that far too often recently, there’s definitely a lack of smart fun in my diet). Also seeing Doctor Doom done like a smart evil super-villain instead of a raving madmen was enjoyable.

Singularity’s Ring (2008)

Some ideas in science fiction have been done so often that they’ve become sub-genres of their own, others on the other hand are rare or at least rare when it comes to going beyond cliche. Group minds, gestalt beings etc. are most of the time used as evil antagonists (the most recent one I stumbled above was in the Rook, where I knew from the start that the gestalt mind would go the evil route). The most famous classic in that regard is Sturgeons More Than Human, but a more recent and pretty good example is Paul Melko’s Singularity Ring.

The group gestalts in Melko’s world have inherited the Earth after most of the singulars have (seemingly) gone away during a singularity moment and left the world to them and those few singulars who didn’t buy into the whole lets connect our brains to the Internet so that Google can index every part of our memory and waking minds. The gestalts – duos, triads up to the main character who is a quintet and if I remember right, the only one running around – try to keep the world from falling apart after the bulk of humanity left. And at the start of the book it looks like they’re doing mostly good, but it turns out later they’re just as fallible as the singulars.

Melko’s novel explores the live of a young gestalt from each of its five members (all gestalts are bonded psychologically and via
pheromones, but still remain pretty individualistic and can survive alone for some time) until it dives later in the whole question of what happened to the rest of humanity (who left a massive orbital construct, the eponymous ring of the title) and a conspiracy among their own against the quintet.

It’s a good book, well written with each of the gestalt perspectives unique enough to keep you hooked and the whole gestalt angle of the book is well thought out. It’s not a book that offers something beyond that, no big metaphor for live or human nature or stuff, but if you’re interested in the core concept to some degree then it’s good.

If anything, the book has a startling lack of ambition, considering the big concepts it throws around. The concept of gestalts is explored from the perspective of a gestalt who is more interested in itself and its story than any other considerations. The whole idea of giving up the self to be part of something bigger could yield so much more: the construction of selves, the importance we assign to identities, why we fear gestalt minds/creature, why try to create something like it at all from a practical perspective. Singularity’s Ring is smart enough to make the gestalts and their world convincing, but doesn’t follow through with asking any important questions about their very nature.