Old Transformers Music and Sound Effects

I guess there's a video too but that's secondary.

Aliens Was Full of Strange Character Decisions

In advance of Prometheus no doubt, they're showing Aliens on Syfy right now.  I was obsessed with this thing when I was in junior high (as you can guess by my current obsession with Prometheus).  Re-watching it, I notice two things:

1) I can still recite most of the dialogue along with it (I'm almost doing it unconsciously)
2) It has problems.  Such as:

- Why didn't they give the marines any information about what they're facing ahead of time?  Yes, the little presentation Ripley gave on the ship before the drop is for our benefit, but there may be more plot-sensible ways to do it.

- Why such a small detachment of marines for a colony that's so valuable?  Or, to bring back specimens if that is (again) the company's real motivation?

- The whole drop preparation seems pretty nonchalant for walking into a whole colony on a planet with a known hostile species that's completely lost contact.

- Humans and xenomorphs are both facing an alien environment on this planet, yet not much is made of this.  What advantages do we have against them, especially once the terraforming began?

- Possible inconsistency:  LV426 always seemed cold, although one of the shots in the trailer shows "165 F".  Will be interesting to learn a little more about the planet.  (I'm looking forward to Iceland as a backdrop.)

- Why was the information about these mean critters lost after Ripley's initial landing? (Why for that matter after Prometheus?) Any responsible writer will identify these holes and have some explanation.

- In Aliens we find out that they didn't go look for the space jockey's ship until Burke's order sent them.  How long were they there before that without finding it themselves?  Not very good space colonists.  And if the whole idea of sending another small crew is so they get infected and bring some back, why would Burke be so stupid as to go along?

- Could it possibly have made sense for the whole crew to drop down the gravity well in these kinds of operations, even if a couple of them are in the drop ship.  (Which, yes, was one of the HK models from Cameron's Terminator, which also used Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton.)


Okay, I'll stop now.  And I don't care about the rest of the Alien movies.  One a scale of one to five stars I rate them somewhere between ass and ass prime.

The first Alien scared the hell out of me because I saw it on HBO when I was five years old.  This one kind of scared me too.  I've noticed a pattern where I repetitively watch and internalize things that horrify me.  This is similar to my experience with metal, which in my early teens also scared me, and believe it or not with power chords - because for some reason, the Peanuts theme (and several other childhood songs) also terrified me.  I've talked to other metalheads who have similar patterns of behavior, i.e. gravitating to things that initially terrified them when they were younger.

Seeing Prometheus in San Diego

In San Diego?  Planning to see Prometheus?  A group of folks from varying walks of life including med students, San Diego New Atheists, beer enthusiasts and other miscreants are going to head to one of the theaters in La Jolla either the evening of June 8 or 9, most likely to be followed by a beverage, details to be decided and posted here later.  Email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com if you're interested in joining the horde. 

Stephen King's Dreamcatcher is Pretty Good

This Stephen King novelization was widely panned but I submit it isn't so bad.  Note that I did not read the novel.

1) It features actually alien aliens, with a life cycle more suggestion of actual animals (complete with weaknesses, e.g. sensitivity to cold).  This is much much better than the humanoid aliens which low-budget TV shows can at least blame on their budgets, but which bigger-budget films can only blame on lack of imagination, or a desire to insult their audience.  Also for some reason those humanoid aliens always seem to want to offer us brotherhood in the great galactic civilization where we can sit around in deep intellectual exchange all day long.  Just like Europeans did with Native Americans.  And that was within the same species. (For some mealtime deliciousness see below.)



2) The plot is actually well thought-out and contains (largely through Morgan Freeman's grizzled war stories) tantalizing hints of back-stories, placing humans as one species in a whole ecosystem.

3) There is no black and white morality, no heroic portryal of humans, just a struggle for survival.  This includes less-than-rational self-interested elements in the human defense force, Morgan Freeman's character prominent among them.

4) There is local New England color invoked in the poetry the alien chooses to recite.


Legitimate complaints:

1) The mind-reading/occupying metaphor is taken a little too far.  You could cut out all the mental warehouse scenes and the movie wouldn't suffer.

2) From a science fiction concept standpoint, the idea of a universal parasite is a little too easily believed (see Alien or the sure-to-be-awesome upcoming Prometheus).  Think about it:  yes, we have an alarming amount of effective parasites here on this planet, but even after a billion years of practice to evolve ways to invade and assemble copies of themselves within organisms with whom they share basic building blocks, there still isn't a universal parasite.  There still isn't a worm or virus or bacterium equally at home in any vertebrate or even any mammal.  Yet here come these guys from across the galaxy, using D-amino acids or a carbohydrate genome for all we know, and they find the human colon completely hospitable the first time they visit one.  (I think there's an argument to be made from first principles that if we do encounter parasites that have spread outside their ecosystem of origin, they are likely to be both simpler and more universal than other alien parasites we might encounter.  But this is just silly.)

Intellectual Property on the Planet of the Apes

Franco's discussion with Jimmy Kimmel about a "non-visible art" museum - or rather, one which only contains plans and concepts for works of art - seems silly at first glance. But it becomes a lot more interesting in an age of 3D printing, where the templates are what really matter. Either way Franco is an interesting guy.

Blade Runner Remake and the Elements of Literature

Blade Runner is the best movie of all time. If you want to argue that point, you are fundamentally flawed, cognitively and morally. I'm interested to see what they're going to try to create in the Blade Runner mold but I don't envy them their responsibility and I'm not getting my hopes up.

Reflections on film and prose in the setting of science fiction:

1) Film is much more capital-intensive. It costs more money to make a movie than write a book, which is fundamental to the nature of the work that gets produced. Film-makers are naturally going to be more risk-averse. This is why there's a longer tail on BOTH sides for books in terms of innovation and quality, and more interesting/ experimental/weird books than movies. The barrier to entry and risk to investment is just lower (and books can be written solo). Hence, movies like Blade Runner get accidentally made and are considered failures by most people responsible for their creation and distribution, because it was a box office disaster, even though it continues to make people happy, a mere 8 years from 2019. (Speaking of which, I'm calling dibs on Blade-Runner themed parties New Years Eve 2018-2019.)

2) In movies where a paradigm shift is key (spoiler alert, Deckard is a replicant), it's very difficult to pull off a second one. In fact this puts the producers of sequels in a very bad position. If you use the same paradigm shift, it won't be cool because everyone already knows; to their credit, in the new V, at least they didn't drag it out, like a vampire movie where you have to wait around for the police to figure out what the audience, and everyone with a brain, figured out the first time they find a corpse drained of blood by two bite marks in the neck. In Planet of the Apes the spin Burton tried to put on it was absolutely pointless. And the Matrix sequels were largely done in by the unexpectedness of the shift in the first movie. But on the other hand, if they don't do something with the who's-a-replicant question, they're not making a Blade Runner sequel, and why did you go see it? It's really a rock and a hard place, and why from an artistic standpoint these kinds of movies should be left alone after the first one. If they were Box Office flops like Blade Runner, they might be; if they made money like the Matrix, they won't be. This isn't a problem just in science fiction - action thrillers often use paradigm shifts as well. As the most intense possible plot element, paradigm shifts will be useful in any plot-driven genre, which both science fiction and action thrillers are.

3) Because of the capital-intensiveness and therefore the risk aversion of the film-making endeavor, the use of cinematic properties that are guaranteed an audience, or at least close simulacra of them, is one approach to minimize risk. E.g., Transmorphers, or Starcrash. These film makers didn't seem to have delusions of art like Ed Wood did - these are businesspeople, and they're very good at what they do, and they seem to get a good ROI. Even if you rent it just as a goof, unless you pirated the thing, you still paid to see it. Ironic dollars raise bottom lines just as well as earnest ones do. (Note: if you watch Starcrash, watch the documentary Marjoe too. I stumbled across Starcrash being shown in a bar on my 35th birthday, oddly immediately after I had seen the Marjoe documentary and not known that Marjoe was ever in a "real" movie.)


Science Fiction and the Elements of Literature

There's more to be said about the importance of literary elements in science fiction, versus other genres. Literature is first and foremost built on plot (I'm just paraphrasing Aristotle here - the focus on character is a modern development.) The evolution of literature is about bringing more of its basic elements into play over time. The first stories were just lies: plot elements that didn't happen, even if the people were all real. (Imagine a caveman telling his tribe that he fought a huge bear.) Gradually, people got smart enough to know when they were getting lied to but to enjoy it anyway, and to let the story-teller know that they knew they were being lied to, but keep going. Chimps can deceive each other but not on the level that we can. Eventually, some smartass decided to make up people who never existed, or even whole classes of people that never existed (like ghoststhe kind that live on Mt. Olympus.)

More recently, setting has been brought consciously into play, and we make up places and times that never existed. Thinking about it this way gives us an idea about how to resolve the perennial question of whether Shelley or Plato were writing science fiction: they were certainly using the setting element creatively, to make a point or tell a story that they couldn't tell without playing with setting, but (to their credit) there was no continuous convention of using the setting as one of the variable elements.

More recently than setting, structure and genre rules are in play. Again, we can look back to previous examples: some sections of Shakespeare's Tempest, or Don Quixote, or certainly Tristram Shandy play this game - but there was no continuous convention until the last century. In part, developing an awareness of these elements and structures is a malady of the postmodern age that we can't escape because this wealthy era so saturates us in media that we can't help but notice the patterns. Consequently, to stand out in the marketplace, writers have no choice but to tweak our nerves by violating these now-obvious expectations slightly. This is no surprise, since what drives pattern recognition in all organisms from worms on up is what has driven art since day 1: novelty with some preservation of patterns that can still be recognized.