Why Dune is Unique: Three Reasons, and Some Questions

(Contains novel spoilers, Lynch movie spoilers, but not Villeneuve movie spoilers.)

Dune has a lot of very loyal readers who rightly understand its specialness. Both its contents and its place in science fiction as a tradition are unique. I somehow had gone my entire life without reading the novel, or even seeing the David Lynch movie all the way through, and committed to correcting this prior to the release of the Villeneuve version (which as I write I have not seen.) Coming to it late - much like I did as a metal fan with Led Zeppelin - provided me a unique perspective that might escape those encountering it in late adolescence or early adulthood, though you can see the warts a bit more clearly as well.

In short, there are three core features that make Dune stand apart, in order of increasing uniqueness.

• The setting echoes early modern Europe or the age of discovery, unlike standard "star empire" stories.
• In Dune, religion is real. It's not just that religion is central to the identify of many of its characters; in many ways, its worldview is not a rationalist one.
• Above all, Dune is a projection and exploration of human potential, in extension into the far future. It is therefore a hard SF of social sciences.

The Setting

Interstellar empires abound in science fiction, but they typically evoke either strong associations with a re-born Roman empire, or a not-so-subtle thirst for the hegemony of a modern-day state (almost invariably the U.S.) expanded out into the wild black yonder. Dune doesn't fall into either category. The setting is politically reminiscent of Europe with a Holy Roman Empire balancing power against multiple other states.[1] Many of the other elements have obvious parallels, e.g. the Sardaukar as Ottoman Janissaries. Note this was also the age of discovery, which at first was for spices and gold, though melange is a lot more like oil. The Fremen are often compared to Bedouins or Tuaregs, and Paul Atreides to a Lawrence of Arabia figure. The mixture of elements from different periods is a strength of Dune, since Herbert is not merely retelling history but on another planet with lasers - rather, it opens up discussion of how these forces interacted to produce history, like the best alternate histories. (Even Asimov wrote a humorous song about himself referring to "cribbin' from Gibbon" for Foundation.)


Religion Is Real

It's not just Herbert's focus on concepts from psychology and religion - it's that these things are taken as real and literal in the world that he is showing us. As in most science fiction until thew New Wave (and probably most since then), Fondation's future is depicted as secular, and though Hari Seldon is revered, people have the good sense not to turn it into a religion. But most telling is that both Foundation and Dune have "distractor" religions – the Dark Things spread by the Bene Geserit, and the superstitions spread by the Foundation to keep surrounding worlds in check. But in Foundation, the people on Terminus understand that these beliefs, and indeed superstitions in general, can only be nonsense used to keep the rubes in check - and more important, Asimov assumes that you the reader understand this as well. As he conquers the Imperium Muad'dib speaks of God in what seems a very literal and unironic sense, and his destiny and powers seem to confirm this. Herbert's approach to religion in Dune is not merely to recognize in the manner of a detached anthropologist the importance of religious belief (in the abstract) to humans, but rather to suggest its literal reality, and in so doing paint a picture of a dualist, human-shaped, not fully rational universe where our nature can reach its fullest projection. This is true of very few works of science fiction. Attanasio's Radix has many echoes of Dune but, again tellingly, ultimately the language is that of a comprehensible monism.


A Hard SF of Social Sciences

Comparisons with Foundation and Star Wars are obvious and appropriate, but a superficial examination risks missing what is unique about Dune. All three have heroes that struggle against empires which are in some way fraudulent, deceptively unstable, or unjust. The argument has been made that Dune is Foundation, told from the standpoint of the Mule, but to me this isn't so clear; certainly Paul has aspects of both Hari Seldon as prophet, and the Mule as out-of-context conqueror. Both Dune and Star Wars have a hero who is "the one", imbued by his ancestry with special powers that are developed through training.

The comparison with Star Wars is ultimately not fruitful, because Star Wars is actually a fantasy work that happens to occur in space, and Dune is science fiction - interested as it is with concepts from ecology, politics, religion, and psychology. Hard sf classically speculates about physical sciences - what if you could manipulate the internal structure of a proton to make it an AI? What if you could build a habitable ring-shaped megastructure? - and in its best moments, gets us to put down the book and think about the speculative ideas presented, or argue about their plausibility with other readers. In Dune, Herbert takes the same approach, making concepts from these fields central to his world-building. George R.R. Martin borrows heavily from history, but he drops these episodes in for dramatic benefit (wedding massacre, the battle of Cannae, barbarian hordes from interior grasslands) but for Martin these are all stand-alone set pieces, they aren't meshing gears in a machine as in Dune.[2]

While the proximate trigger for a novel about a desert planet was research Herbert did for an article on sand dunes in coastal Oregon, he spent time as a journalist at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California where he kept company with two psychoanalysts[3] whose influence can certainly be felt in the world he built here. Until Dune, there was really nothing like this in science fiction.

The Fremen in particular were unique in science fiction up to that point (Martin's wildlings are a later example of the same type.) If science fiction taking place after an expansion away from Earth includes stateless people at all, they tend to be small groups of bandits or criminals - rather than an entire civilization that is not also a state. The Fremen are very much like James Scott’s Zomians: a people who are never absorbed into a state because their terrain is not "legible" (note how the Imperial census on their numbers was unreliable.)

The following observation deserves its own paragraph: I'm writing this a few weeks after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. If ever life imitated art, it's now. I don't like comparing my country to the Imperium or Harkonnens, but if a Taliban fighter watches Dune, you can be certain he will enthusiastically see himself as a Fremen. I think this is a major scotoma on both the part of Herbert and readers in the West. The Fremen are explicitly called jihadis. They are religious fanatics. They do not have a rationalist, monist view of the universe - fitting with the themes of Dune, but nonetheless, not people who I imagine would think about equality, between the sexes or anything else, the way you or I do.

I think the absence of both intelligent aliens and thinking machines was a deliberate choice on Herbert's part, to be able to create a universe that was "humanized", where only human consciousness is projected onto and shaping the cosmos. The Buterlian Jihad and consequent absence of AIs is the more important of the two, and serves twin purposes. First, Herbert might have thought that a world where humans co-existed with thinking machines for thousands of years would be either too hard to build, and/or too disorienting for readers to be interested. Second, a world without thinking machines forces us to develop human potential - and we see how physical and mental disciplines have grown over the centuries. This gives us the mentats, and Bene Geserit, and navigators, and the weight of practices and aphorisms that are probably the most specific identifying feature of the book. It should also be noted that as technology is retarded by the absence of computers, the human race recedes to its base-state of feudalism,[4] predictably in a world of stagnant economic growth. You could even argue that the entire Imperium suffers from the resource curse. The Holtzmann Shield is the final trick to build this stage, removing large scale missile weapons from the picture, returning us to an age where physical, martial prowess means something.

You might correctly point out the Foundation series was about an empire's collapse and the natural laws that govern civilizations - an idea that has influenced readers for decades - and object that Herbert's hard social sf was new or unique. But Asimov did spend a fair bit of text on positronic brains, hyperspace, and logic puzzles. The world he built was a tidy, rational and comprehensible one, and the fundamental approach of Hari Seldon was that of a physicist, studying humans as particles - an analogy his characters make frequently.[5]

The linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter wrote Doing Our Own Thing about the transition in American culture from formality (in music, in film, in speaking and fashion in culture in general) to informality. He provides countless examples, even pointing to specific performers whose output changed during this period - and points to a specific year when the transition occurred in earnest: 1965.[6] He gives examples of performances which were stylistically "mid-transition", referring to these as cultural archaeopteryxes. Before I looked up the year of Dune's publication I guessed it would be 1965. It is. My argument is not that Dune's tone is somehow more informal, but rather that it's the archaeopteryx for science fiction. The tone change in science fiction in the U.S. was in some cases a stylistic move toward less formality, but moreso a migration in topics toward social science. In the U.S. the changes were clear enough that it was being discussed by 1967. Dune still uses science, but has transitioned partway to a post-rationalist, post-scientific worldview - that, more than the concern with social science concepts, is what makes it an archaeopteryx.


Problems with the Novel

There are difficulties with science fiction that are not unique to Dune. When you create a world from scratch, you have to choose between "info dumps", or confusing (or boring) the reader. To me, novels with entries from a Galactic Dictionary, or "italics sections" at the start of chapters, are actually enjoyable. But it's the geopolitics of the Landsraad as revealed through grinding dialogue that lose me. My own bias is that if I'm going to invest time reading about complicated politics, I'd rather read about the real world. The level of detail in these discussions frustrated me in the extreme, even more than the infamous long-winded tree descriptions in Lord of the Rings. My reasoning is partly that an economy or a civilization are such complex entities that, when you make one up, you will always leave holes or commit contradictions no matter how great your effort. So just give us a sketch and fill us in as need be. Related to this, the random and inconsistent insertions of various characters' internal thoughts was really irritating, and did not add anything that could not have been done in a different way (just state it - it doesn't have to be dialogue.) It is here that I will confess that I did not actually finish the novel - but I did read lots of secondary sources, and the Appendix. (If one of my points here is actually answered in the novel or in a later book, please comment.) The two main reasons I couldn't continue were the dialogues about politics, and the internal monologues in italics (see below.)

That said, the Dune universe is overly simplistic and monothematic. There's too much reliance on the spice's miraculous powers; and if the spice really is that important, it seems that something as critical as the transfer of control over spice production would be a bit better attended to by other Houses, and in fact there would be a lot more presence on or around Arrakis by other Houses. It makes the Dune universe, for its otherwise rich canvas of invented social structures, in this respect feel a little one-dimensional. Though it's briefly addressed, characters seem remarkably incurious about the inability to manufacture spice, or its connection to Dune’s ecosystem i.e. the worms. It's also hard to understand how certain things like the stillsuits can be manufactured by Fremen who are essentially hunter-gatherers.

Maguffins like spice are not uncommon in fiction, but it's worth pointing out that Herbert wrote multiple other stories with a maguffin with these characteristics:

• It can only be obtained in one place
• You can't make it, you have to harvest or extract it
• It is involved in mental activity - the substance results from it, or stimulates it (often but not always)

While I haven't surveyed his entire output, here are some examples:

• The psychoactive compound Jaspers in The Santaroga Barrier
• The glandular secretions mined by aliens (important enough to have to hypnotize the human race) in his first published short story "Looking for Something"
• Oil in The Dragon in the Sea, his first published novel.[7]

For a novel that supposedly emphasizes ecology, there's very little actual discussion of the native flora and fauna of Arrakis besides sandworms and sandtrout. Only later do we even learn why Arrakis has an oxygen atmosphere (worm metabolism produces oxygen.) (Compare to the richness of LeGuin's The Dispossessed.) I do like the observation that Earth's desert plants from all deserts became naturalized there, but this is not discussed as a tragedy of invasives displacing natives; rather the description takes the tone of Arrakis as a (good) desert preserve for Earth's desert organisms.[8] Related to this, worms attack rhythmic motion because they're defending their territory – from what? Other worms?

Herbert is not alone in having his characters speak in the stiff and unnatural manner that can be called "mythic-speak", the first rule of which is that contractions are not allowed. Fantasy novels often adhere to this convention as well. We know they're not speaking English; therefore, you might consider just having the characters talk like your audience. Even Hemingway made this mistake in For Whom the Bell Tolls with his whole thou and thee convention to reflect use of tú instead of the formal second person, and it is similarly jarring.

If faster-than-light travel is possible without spice (if a bit slower than space-folding), and there are working non-spice-dependent FTL ships, why the stranglehold by the Spice Guild? Why don't the Houses build their own? If the Guild does control space travel so tightly, how have the Fremen migrated? If non-spice-based FTL travel is possible, what stopped renegade houses from expanding on their own to a new habitable planet?

I'm quite confident that in a hundred centuries, no names now familiar to us will still be in existence. There will be no Duncans or Pauls or Jessicas. I see what Herbert may have been trying for with the surname Idaho - many people in the New World carry a surname of a faraway land that they may not even know is a real place - but no one has a surname of a place from a hundred centuries ago.

Why don't the other types of spice users also have blue eyes like the Fremen (ie the navigators?)

Why do people have to go into space to get folded by a navigator? Why not just sit in a warehouse on one planet, then get folded to another?


Criticisms of the Lynch Movie

Most people don't care for the Lynch movie, so I'm hardly taking a risk panning it. The choice of Lynch as director is actually the first mystery: he wasn't a science fiction director, and didn't particularly like science fiction, and it showed. (In the same vein, I'm a fan of much of John Updike's work but his attempt at science fiction Toward the End of Time fell quite flat.) Amazingly, Lynch was apparently considered to direct Return of the Jedi, and even as someone who doesn't love the original episodes as much as most, I think that would have been a mistake. He also wasn't able to make the movie he wanted to. Even so, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not much of a Lynch fan to begin with, and even his fans mostly concede that Dune wasn't strong work.

A positive: given the limitations on travel between planets, I would expect massive genetic drift. I actually liked the physical differences between the imperial family, the Harkonnens and the Atreides and hope the Villeneuve movie expands this.

I also liked the costumes, at least for the emperor and nobles and higher ups in House Atreides, who have a definite 1800s European imperialist flair.[9]

I did not recognize Sean Young until late in the movie, despite Blade Runner being one of my favorite movies.

I am somehow always surprised by Patrick Stewart being in this movie. Since Max von Sydow was in Episode VII of Star Wars, that makes actors in both franchises. In the Villeneuve movie there is a DC franchise actor (Jason Momoa) along with no less than five MCU actors (Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgård, Oscar Isaac,[10] David Dastmalchian, and Dave Bautista, the latter two having also been in Blade Runner 2049.)

The most inexplicable decision to me was keeping one of the worst features of the novel - the voice over - which are just the movie version of the italicized internal monologue we're occasionally forced to read in the novel. Princess Irulan's narrations were okay if a bit jarring in places, but the random whispered "paroxysmal third person omniscient" moments are just horrendous. (South Park's treatment was just about right.) And they thought the added voiceover in the U.S. theatrical release of the original Blade Runner was irritating?

The special effects are one of the few aspects of the movie that are regarded positively, but I don't understand why. Even comparing to contemporaries - they mostly seem inferior to Return of the Jedi, which came out the prior year.

A lot of the Lynch movie feels very claustrophobic, which is the opposite of "epic". It seems like Lynch built big sets, and barely used them, and we're up close to the characters in small corners half the time.

The battle scenes were disorganized messes and the fighting itself often seemed like people flailing randomly.

The directorial decision on how to portray Vladimir Harkonnen was unfortunate. He's not scary, so much as gross. I would be afraid to be in a room with Darth Vader, but with the Baron, I just don't want him to touch me. Being charitable, his homosexuality as a sign of decadence is an unfortunate hallmark of 80s big studio movies trying to be edgy (see also, Bright Lights, Big City.)

All that said, Dune is a long and difficult novel to film. Then again, Ted Chiang stories are tough to film, and Blade Runner fans (like me) were ready to hate 2049 - and both were outstanding. If there's anyone who can make a good Dune movie, it's Denis Villeneuve.


FOOTNOTES

[1] A major difference from the Dune universe and 17th-19th century Europe is the existence of a religious authority separate from political ones - the Holy Roman Empire was not the Vatican, and though the two were closely connected, one was a moral authority and the other a secular authority. This may have been one of the major differences in the history of Europe in the second millennium as compared to the Middle East, and while Herbert is clearly interested in the relationship of politics and religion, he does not seem to have been considering this problem specifically. It is also worth noting that religion in Dune is syncretic - there are Bene Geserit both living among the Zensunni Fremen and marrying into the Orange Catholic noble families.

[2] Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is science fiction, and does take place in early modern Europe. In this case, the stories are like gears in a machine, not standalone single-act plays, and not surprisingly, Stephenson strongly agrees that despite the era of its setting the Baroque Cycle is science fiction, not fantasy. These two characteristics are related.

[3] No doubt his virtue was corrupted by the ordeal of keeping company with such unsavory characters.

[4] A standby plot fix for any movie with a "historically familiar, but unlikely to occur in the future" scenario, is that it is taking place in a simulation or curated theme park run by AIs, unknown to the human characters. In other words, the Butlerian Jihad was actually theater produced by the machines for the benefit of humans, and they have kept a section of the galaxy for humans to play their little political games in the ways most comfortable and familiar to them, while the machines colonize the rest of the outside universe. I don't think this is what Herbert intended but it does seem a good match here, given that the computers magically gave up and said, "Okay humans, you win! Now go impose a strikingly antiquated social system on an alien universe with remarkable ease!" In-universe cryptohistory I guess.

[5] I would also argue that when Asimov wrote the first three Foundation novels it was also too early to be talking about subgenres, and it had not fragmented yet. Similarly - was Elvis country or rock and roll?

[6] I would argue that this transition will happen in any post-scarcity consumer society as farmer norms revert back to hunter-gatherer norms (see Robin Hanson), and in fact even further, as beyond a nuclear family we can pick and choose who we associate with without impact on our survival, and therefore we have little need to be even momentarily uncomfortable for the sake of observing common norms.

[7] In Dragon in the Sea he described an idea which actually inspired a type of real-world carrier called a Draconis.

[8] This is an interesting question - over time on Earth, most likely even widely separated areas with the same climate e.g. Mediterranean will end up with the same flora and fauna - California has ice plant from South Africa, eucalyptus from Australia, and grasses and other plants from Eurasia and North Africa, which have badly displaced native organisms.

[9] Another interesting design decision in the Lynch movie is the almost steam-punk look of the technology. The translation device used by the Spice Guild "stewards" looked like a 1930s radio microphone. It raises the question of an alternate history (and present) without our thinking machines. Consider freezing "computing" technology at World War I levels – what would history look like without the Enigma machine, or vacuum tubes, or microchips?

[10] Oscar Isaac was in an X-Men movie and will now be in Moon Knight; this may be the crossover Disney uses to save Star Wars with the MCU.

Star Wars Episode IX Review (CONTAINS SPOILERS BUT MAY NOT MATTER SINCE I'M THE LAST ONE TO SEE IT)

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these things would be easy to look up but I didn't. In no particular order:

• Overall, a fitting end to the saga. Much better than Episode VIII. Glad JJ Abrams is back; he's the master of playing well in others' universes. You walk out feeling that you saw a good Star Wars movie, much like Episode VII.
  
  
• As a Star Wars movie, at some point there will be: a desert planet, a cantina, a scummy trading city with a motley assortment of criminals, and people rescuing their friends and admitting how zany they are because they’re making it up as they go.
  
  . But it's not dwelt upon, and there were so many types of planets in this one that the desert planet doesn't stick out. Also, I hope I'm not turning into a social justice warrior, but the colorful festival on the planet with "third world" aliens did bug me a little bit, just because it seems so obvious.
  
  
• In that spirit: Star Wars movies are fantasy movies in space: knights, sword-fighting, wizards. A horseback attack on a starcruiser is therefore not only cool and original, it completely fits. Also, it stuck out in Episodes I through III that a) there was no improvement in technology across 30 years and b) that late 90s cell phones were about as good as Obi Wan's communicator. Some of the tech in this one looks positively 1980s - wired headsets, colored wires in C3PO's head that look like a Commodore 64 console - and that's great. It fits Star Wars perfectly. It's a fantasy movie, and these are set pieces to maintain the tone - it's not about technology at all.
  
  
• I noticed in the end credits for animation, there was a group of 8-10 names together that looked Thai or Lao. I tried to look up whether a studio in one of those places was used but couldn't find any mention. Always good to see more talent in the game, it benefits film-goers.
  
  
• I couldn't remember if Carrie Fisher died before they made this (she did), and couldn't tell if she was live, computer-generated, etc., and wasn't particularly worried about it either way. It's that last part that says the most I think.
  
  
• The introduction of matter transmission through force connections (and its continuing use) is quite a good cinematic trick. It's creepy as hell when Ren grabs Rey's necklace, and then this trick is used in the final battle with the Emperor (unlike some inventions in Episode VIII like hyperspace missiles.)
  
  
  
• The action starts immediately at the beginning and doesn't let up for quite a while. It's also full of plot twists. Nothing like the (pointless, non-plot-advancing) dead space in Episode VIII.
  
  
• Plot holes, discontinuities, and other jarring moments must be taken in context with the franchise. I'm a fan of hard science fiction (i.e., real physics) to the core but if I ever directly overhear someone complaining that "it's unrealistic because there's hyperspace" I will punch them. That said, no one came to help in the second one, but Chewie and Lando can magically raise a rebellion in a few hours by flying around in person? Doesn't seem required to advance the plot, though it does feel good and advance a nice moral ("they win by making you feel alone") so it didn't bother me so much. Also, where has Lando been?
  
  
• I'm going to come out and say it. Grown-up Daisy Ridley is much, much more attractive than at the start of this trilogy (and she wasn't bad then either.) She's also come into her own as an actor.
  
  
• Good performances also from Adam Driver (duh) and Oscar Isaac. I always wonder how hard it is for Boyega to stay in-accent when he's working with other English actors. As time goes on, he gets by more on his innate charisma, which is fine because he's just likable anyway (honestly, it's the very rare actor who actually masters another character and doesn't just enhance his innate personality. I like watching Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins, but come on, how different are they on-screen from their actual personalities? Gary Oldman and Christian Bale actually get outside their personalities for their characters, which carries a penalty of not being as "follow-able" as they might otherwise be.)
  
  
• Lots of nice parallelisms in this and tying up of themes. The Empreror as master manipulator tries to rise above the paradox of the Sith by having his death be the key to the rise of the Sith (and if Rey doesn't do it, her friends die and the fleet takes over anyway.) The balance brought back to the Force requires the dyad, with Ren and Rey. Ren, again Ben with the same words he said when he killed his father. Leia's death as she kills her son by distracting him (Ren killed Solo where Vader couldn't bring himself to kill Luke, twice.)
  
  
• Kylo Ren has to announce that Han Solo is a memory so we don't get confused. Luke has sparkly blue outlines so we know the difference between a memory and a Force ghost.
  
  
• There's a little bit of babbling of the sort that annoyed Alec Guinness, which annoys me mostly because you don't know where things are going and you can talk your way (in an unsatisfyingly unpredictable way) out of any plot knot. Then again, the Force is if nothing else a script writer's dream to resolve what would otherwise be massive plot holes by appealing effectively to magic.
  
  
• Much better psychology in this one, thinking about the characters' motivations (e.g., Hux being a spy because he hates Ren.)
  
  
• At the end where there's a crowd watching Palpatine and Rey: where did all these mystery Sith come from? And why have we never seen other Knights of Ren before? What is their connection to the Sith?
  
  
• The creator of Darth Maul said that Lucas came to him and said "I want you to use your worst childhood nightmare as inspiration." He described to Lucas a pale face slowly revealed by flashes of lightning. Sound familiar? I was happy that they used this.
  
  
• I didn't notice any lens flare, but there is a shot of Kylo Ren standing in front of the heaving ocean after Rey leaves, a bit fuzzy and shaky as if shot from far away, that gives it more immediacy. Adam Driver also looked genuinely cold, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he insisted on being cold and wet in reality for these shots.
  
  
• Rey being a Palpatine is somewhat of an obvious plot twist, just because if she IS the daughter of someone significant, the only decent move left is for it to be Palpatine (with intervening parents; why did they turn out so lame?)
  
  
• I was annoyed that a non-Jedi (Leia) could magically continue Rey's training. ("Hey, I'm a surgery resident. My attending just died. His sister is going to come continue to teach me surgery.") But they closed that loophole.
  
  
• Once Rey explained she gave a little bit of the force away to heal the giant snake critter, you could see a self-sacrifice (from someone) coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab. Same with the accidental force lightning, which immediately gave away what I suspected about Rey being a Palpatine. Good on the writers, I actually thought Chewie was dead. I'm sure that there are religious fundies somewhere all bent out of shape that Jedi can heal people.
  
  
  
  Above: Jedi Christ, who can heal the sick; only Sith can raise the dead. I bet Golgotha would have been a whole lot different with a light saber.
  
  
• Good coordination with trailers and writers. They know going in that everyone knows Palpatine is in it. I'm always amazed when trailers give away things in the movie and the film-makers expect you to be surprised (often this is no doubt marketing that's not in their control.)
  
  
• I thought C3PO was added to the list of main character deaths - a robot is its memory in a way that humans are not - but he was saved too.
  
  

Things That Might Bother You About Avengers Movies

I noted before that the "20 Things Wrong With [Amazingly Successful Franchise Film]" articles are sad, then wrote just such an article. This is a very short one for a very few of the things about MCU movies that are most bothersome. To me.

Complete inconsistency in relative strength: the battles are what's actually important here, and even so, there's no rhyme or reason. Yes that keeps the audience interested and serve to advance the plot but come on, most powerful guy in the universe hits a mortal with no special armor or anything and they just get the wind knocked out of them - but he can knock down Thor or the Hulk? And he constantly doesn't take obvious shots?

Zero sum thinking: I get that Thanos is a bad guy, so his message - that there are only so many resources, and more and more mouths to feed - is not the one the good guys agree with. Yet the franchise appears to endorse it. The disappearance of half the life on Earth would be first, economically catastrophic. Guess what? Smartphones and corn don't just grow themselves out of the ground. Plus, the specialized knowledge required means that the disruption in productivity would actually be more than a 50% drop. Imagine your company's level of functioning if 50% of people called in sick tomorrow - it would be much less than 50%. And of course, the disappearance of the Earth's oxygen-producing organisms, plankton, etc. would be much worse.

Profound scientific incuriosity, including by career scientists: "Hey, I'm on Asgard! Should I maybe try to pocket a few pens or take a few pictures, ask people how things work? Nah, I'll just hang out and get all wrapped up in my personal issues." Incontrovertible proof of aliens on Earth by their repeated attacks, but no mention of a second Copernican revolution in decentralizing mankind's image of itself, or trying to get the alien tech for more than for the Avengers to make better guns. No attempts to start trading or at least communicating with aliens. Also, Thanos's snap would answer a bunch of questions - for example, which things are alive or not (did half of prions disappear? Viroids? Kind of weird that no wombats disintegrated, I was always suspicious of those things. However, Galaxy S5 phones disintegrated but not S4's, so that must be the sentience boundary.)


If these things start to bother you, though you can never really return to your previous innocence once you've noticed them, you can over-intellectualize and get partway back. Rather than criticize these gross inconsistencies, you can think of these movies as modern action-expressionism. The original expressionist film movement is often described as portraying the (actually more important to the viewer) inner emotional reality of the narrative, rather than the superficial matter of the characters' physical world. This coincides with the hyper-reality discussed by Umberto Eco (i.e., where for example artificial lemonade is more lemonadish than any real lemonade ever was; the California Adventure section at Disneyland is more like the Sierras because it purifies and concentrates all the salient aspects of the Sierras, etc.) Alternatively, you could think of the MCU movies as magical realism, where the magic is focused on violence rather than relationships. Or, that MCU is modern-world fantasy in the same way that Star Wars is fantasy; though it takes place in space, exploration of the science is absent, and there are wizards and sword-fighting.

Finally: THERE WILL BE A STAR WARS-MCU CROSSOVER BY 31 DECEMBER 2028. Anyone willing to bet? And the way things are going, it will be Disney trying to use MCU to salvage Star Wars rather than the other way around.

Get Out Review - With Spoilers

A great movie, even if taken only as a horror movie. If you catch all the other commentary, much better. I will add a fifth to my other four favorites: Event Horizon, Martyrs, Jacob's Ladder, and the Hellraiser series (only the first and second ones of that franchise count.) Granted, it's the least scary of those five, but the most - interesting, I would say.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of Being John Malkovich when I saw Catherine Keener condemning people to be in the Sunken Place, from where you're mostly a passenger in your own body. (Coming up with your own narrative for how the same actor is actually the same character in different movies can give you a lot of fun subtext. I wonder if Peele's fears of what happens to split brain patients influenced this, or he just watched the video for Metallica's One too many times.)

I can't help but wonder if the single Japanese party-goer was a reference to the single Japanese attendee at the birth of Rosemary's Baby.

I also notice that both Hellraiser II and this movie feature a malevolent psychiatrist and neurosurgeon doing their tricks on victims, although in Hellraiser it was the same person (Chennard appeared to be double-boarded.)

There were a few bits that were clearly intended to make theater-going audiences laugh ("T S fucking A, we get shit done" and all the sex slave discussion) but it wasn't done to the point where it damaged the movie's overall tone.

Then there's the racial commentary. First of all, at the ending, you're absolutely in the protagonist's shoes, thinking "Great, I almost escape, and here I am, a young black male at a murdered rich white family's estate, with police lights approaching. What chance do I have?" (Or, maybe the police are in on it.) Even forgetting that all the partygoers are sinister, their seemingly well-intentioned commentary on the protagonist's race are nonetheless douche-chill-inducing. And when the protagonist is talking by intercom to the blind guy whose brain he'll be hosting, he asks the blind guy "Why us?" (black people) to which the blind guy responds "I don't care what color you are." Yes, but the very real fact is that it is us, and here I sit - not some hypothetical demographically average person - strapped to a chair about to have my brain sliced up. Finally, the protagonist's buddy goes to the police and says "My friend from Brooklyn" (who the protagonist ran into by sheer chance) "must have been abducted. He's from Brooklyn, he didn't dress like that" to which the black police woman says "I'm from Brooklyn, and I never used to dress like this." And this is different...why?

I like that the protagonist doesn't hesitate (much) when it comes time to kill the bad guys, and does it in somewhat nasty ways. Antlers? TOTALLAY NOICE! But he does wait too long to try to escape. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered to his fate, but I would have been swimming across that lake as soon as that guy had his "seizure".

Betty Gabriel is a unique combination of very attractive, and very creepy. One of the most disturbing scenes in the movie is the tight shot on her face in the discussion about disconnecting the phone, and without her acting ability this would have fallen very flat. She actually turns into a grandmother in the scene at the end. I can't wait to see her in Westworld, which I also love, but hope she doesn't get typecast as a Stepford Wife.

The Hidden, 1987

I always thought The Hidden was an unjustifiably forgotten scifi action movie from the 80s, and this is reinforced by the positive reviews it got and still gets. Basically, imagine the Terminator meets Fallen - except instead of a time-traveling unstoppable cold-blooded robot pursuing/being pursued by a good human from the future and shooting up Los Angeles in the process, and a demon possessing suspects and detectives, they're space-traveling unstoppable aliens (one cold-blooded and one nice) chasing each other and shooting up Los Angeles, and taking over suspects' and detectives' bodies. It's more smartly written and filmed than you might expect from that description (I still think the intro is quite clever.) And, the good alien is played by Kyle MacLachlan, and one of the evil-alien-possessed-people by Claudia Christian, before she was in Babylon 5. You may also recognize Ed O'Ross, who showed up in a number of action/scifi movies in the 80s and 90s. A good number of one-liners are had by all, with a possible explanation toward the end of the movie of what's happened to our political system recently.

As a side note, that narration on trailers from 80s can sound so dated makes me realize how very old I truly am.

The Hidden Car Chase (1987) from Sergei Nazarov on Vimeo.

Review, Blade Runner 2049 (Containing Many Spoilers)

tl;dr It's good, worthy of the original, with a much cleaner script, and what shortcomings it does have it shares with the original. Go see it now, on the big screen.


POSITIVE:

The cinematography (given other reviews to this effect I need not belabor this point) and the sound, which was fantastic in the first one and is a hallmark of Villeneuve's other work. It's not surprising that a director who clearly focuses on being a good story-teller - to the narrative flow - also pays so much attention to the sound in his movies. In several interviews the actors described him as tending toward verbal sound effects in his direction. Roger Deakins should get the Oscar, [added later: he did] and you should watch this on the big screen.

In his movies, Villeneuve always goes for the emotional jugular, usually with the death of loved ones and harm being done to children, both happening here. From a distance it seems like manipulation but it feels wonderful while you're watching.

I really liked the shot looking down onto the city during the initial approach to Los Angeles. You see the detailed metal surface of the city, reminiscent of Latin American shanty-towns on the mountains surrounding the city centers - and then, best of all, you realize that's just the roof of packed high-rises, and you catch glimpses of neon down to the streets. And then there are the police and corporate towers above it all, implying the class stratification as in the first one - i.e., if you're not cops (or corporate) you're little people. This movies continues the trend of moving away from CGI to building real sets and doing real stunts (used to excellent effect in Mad Max: Fury Road.)

I liked the transition from slave to working skinjob, and the attendant shift in social status, represented as out of the frying pan and into the fire in a sense. In the first one after the term skinjob is introduced, in the narrated version we hear "O'Brien is the kind of man in history books used to call black men n-----s." In this one, the replicants are walking around free but clearly despised by police and civilians alike. This closely parallels the status change of African-Americans from slave to free but living under Jim Crow and segregation; or of gay people being out, but still having to watch their step.

Also a clear parallel - the police chief ("Madame") has more than a hint of plantation owner or county sheriff to her, and treats K as her boy. In the scene where she gets a little drunk there is clearly sexual tension and she talks to K teasingly in a way I doubt she would talk to her human employees. (She also at one point asks "How long have you been under me?")

The introductory scene continues the moral ambiguity of Blade Runner vs replicant. In the first one, it's "Did you ever take that test yourself Mr. Deckard?" that starts many viewers wondering. In the very beginning, a hard-working farmer (producing food for an overpopulated world and otherwise minding his own business) enters his kitchen, there's a thug sitting in the shadows who coldly dispatches him.

I like that we get out of LA in this one. If the cities are so miserable, now we understand why people aren't just moving elsewhere. If you've made the LA-Vegas drive on the 15, you've seen the single solar tower surrounded by mirrors, and in this movie we see a whole plain covered with them (I imagine Villeneuve doing his research by driving or flying around the desert and saying, "What is that? That's real, right now in 2017?") I like that LAX is now separated from the rest of LA by a fair stretch of Pacific and that there's a massive tide wall protecting LA. In general I appreciate movies that really use the places as they are instead of a made-up generic American city. In this one we see maps and landmarks - except during the visit to San Diego, which is seldom featured in movies. (Incidentally, that's exactly how I pictured the Dog Solitudes from Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.)

They eliminate the question of whether K is a replicant very early on, which I like. Even though he's a replicant, when "there's a wasp crawling on [his] arm" he chooses not to kill it. The movie then plays with the "are the memories real or not?" quite a bit. Favorite scene in this regard: K gets angry when he sees memory woman, and she assumes it's because he is finding out his memories are false, but the truth is much more complicated. And I'm still not clear that K really isn't the male twin who survived.

We still don't know if Deckard is a replicant or not. Villeneuve says in so many words that they were quite careful to avoid answering this.

We see a big Atari logo, but there's no explanation at all as to the resurrection of this company from 2017 to a corporate giant. In general the movie stays away from explaining how we get from 2017 of today to 2019 of the movies, and that's not what's important, so I'm glad they don't get bogged down in it. There continues to be an 80s flair to the styling, especially the cars (K's car looks like an old Toyota with flimsy plastic over it) although it's clearly shown to be a Peugot. (I wonder if companies actively fought to keep their logos out of this movie, given the fortunes of those prominently featured in the first.)

The Blackout is a way to keep the movie from being over in five minutes ("ah, I'll just go on Google 2049, and voila, there's Deckard!") but to the movie's credit, they don't belabor it. I had previously worried that this movie would suffer from the same problem that all paradigm-shift-reliant science fiction does, but I think I was correct that they aren't bogged down by it. the last one?)

Sylvia Hoeks said in one interview that the out-of-place crying was her idea and that Villeneuve trusted her to go with it. (Evan Rachel Wood has to do something like this in Westworld for her character Dolores and likens it to the "acting Olympics.") This is her first American movie, so I'm sure part of it is her showing off her acting skills to future directors. Even if this is confusing or even showboating, I don't mind, because we in the audience get to benefit from her performance.

The parallelism between Deckard's rejection of neo-Rachel and K's rejection of the not-true-Joi hologram is nice.

The fight scene and choking of Luv is genuinely disturbing.

The use of monumental architecture gives the movie a bit of an interesting 70s scifi feel (think of the concrete bunker where memory woman lives.) I wonder if they built this or just used some building on UC Irvine's campus, like everyone does.

There is rare use of humor, just enough to keep the movie from being too heavy or pretentious ("You must have been adorable" to the Wallace clerk.)


NEGATIVE or NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD - the more I think about them, the less important they are.

There's maybe just a little too much correspondence between characters in the first and second movies, although many are hybrids. Memory girl is J.F. Sebastian (a replicant subcontractor who keeps to herself and has a genetic defect that keeps her from going off-world.) Wallace is Tyrell. Robin Wright is O'Brien. Blonde replicant girl is Pris. The man running the salvage-orphange is half Chu (the eye guy) and half Taffy Lewis (incidentally, I didn't like his performance - too over the top crazy.) K is a combination of Roy Baty and Deckard, Luv is a combination of Roy Baty and Rachel - but much more Roy. (Sylvia Hoeks didn't make up lines for Luv like Hauer did for Roy, but she did take liberties with emotional expression, i.e. the random flat crying.) She also auditioned by recording herself delivering Roy Baty lines. And she certainly perfected the facial-expression-of-naughty-child-while-doing-horrible-murderous-things look that Hauer used for Roy. You could say Joi is this movie's Rachel, but not really - she's the one that most does not fit.

One of the things that made Blade Runner unique was its depiction of 2019 Los Angeles as a multiethnic mess. When I first watched it I was an easily scared 80s kid on the East Coast, and I signed on to the sentiment at that time (driven by fear of an ascendant Japan) that if there are that many Asians in an American city and white people are eating with chopsticks, it must be a dystopia! Now I watch the first one and think, I wonder if that noodle stand is any good? Today, implying a dystopian tone is much better done with climate change and much less with ethnic mixing. Therefore, oddly, in this one, there are remarkably few Asians (or non-white people for that matter - far fewer than in the real LA of 2017 - did they all go off-world?) and furthermore, the use of certain languages doesn't make sense from a world-building perspective (Cyrillic on the farm modules; Devanagari in the police station; Korean on the casino.)

David Bowie was originally supposed to play Niander Wallace. That would've been perfect. I kind of wonder at Jared Leto as a choice. His dedication to the role can't be questioned, but I found his slow, staggered delivery a bit contrived and self-conscious.

I really liked some Robin Wright scenes, like the drunk one I mentioned. But some of her dialogue was clunkily written. "You've bought yourself a war." Sticks out to me; no good way to deliver it.

In the first one I wondered what the point was of using emotion to distinguish human and replicant. Because then the replicants become dangerous? For crying out loud, Pris was part of a kick-murder squad! In this movie, the unclear point is why being "born" makes such a distinction. But you can only explore the dimensions of the human condition so much in one movie.

Everyone who has seen Her will think of that movie during the sex scene, and I think the scene in Her was more poignant and better done - although technically I did really like the video effect here. That said, it still felt very crowbarred-in. The function this scene serves in the plot is to increase the emotional resonance of K's relationship with Joi, as well as to get a tracer into K's pocket, but this could have been accomplished in other ways.

I could've used less of the screen investigations (looking at bone fragments, looking at DNA.)

Where did Gaff's accent and use of cityspeak go?


There has already been discussion of another movie. Alien: Covenant has extra features that strongly suggest continuity between Blade Runner and Alien (i.e. Weyland's mentor was Tyrell) but this has several continuity problems: a) by 2049 there are at least 9 off-world colonies. In Prometheus, fifty years after BR2049, there are none. b) The late 21st century citizens of Prometheus seemed much happier than the people in Blade Runner. c) This would also mean continuity between Blade Runner and Predator. d) There has even been implied continuity between two PKD-inspired movies, Blade Runner and Total Recall. What a mess! I hope that Villeneuve or his descendants don't think about this at all, but if these movies are commercially successful, I can easily see pressure being applied to make this into a parallel to the Marvel Universe. Which will not likely benefit the quality of these movies.

The Paradigm Shift Problem in Science Fiction Movies: How Will Blade Runner 2049 Solve It?

A paradigm shift is a plot twist that changes the setting and therefore the whole meaning of what the characters are doing. Science fiction suffers uniquely from this because it's unique in having paradigm shifts (the rare action movie notwithstanding.) In Alien, we find that the crew is not dealing just with a face-crab, but with a predator that bursts from people's stomachs. In V, it's that the friendly human-like aliens are literal cold-blooded reptiles. In the Matrix, it's that we're all in a simulation. In Star Wars it's that Darth Vader is Luke's father - a bit more like a traditional plot twist, but still profound.

When a movie depends on the paradigm shifts for its money shot, what do you do to keep the fires burning? You could either make an entirely different reveal in the next movie - and that's hard. You can just keep having things bursting out of people's stomachs (boring!) or just have, I don't know, the personification of the Matrix reveal you know, a little bit more (so lame!) Or, you could add a whole NEW paradigm shift. That's difficult and dangerous. Not only are good paradigm shifts are hard to come by, but introduce a new one, and suddenly you've changed the whole tone, and it no longer seems like a movie from that franchise. This is hardly ever done, although Highlander 2 does come to mind, and it was so bad that Highlander 3 ignored it as essentially un-canonical.

Of course audiences are getting smarter, and harder to please, as we see the man behind the curtain, because we're saturated in media and we've become a bit too savvy and aware of how plot structures work and we roll our eyes at call-backs (Sarah Connor telling Kyle Reese "come with me if you want to live", WOW! I can't believe that it's reversed now!) The innovation here is the J.J. Abrams trick of making the characters aware of their past and having them consciously do the call-backs - Kylo Ren looking at Vader's helmet - and possibly even having the reversed Vader-Luke interaction, and having the bad son succeed in killing the good father.

I'm nervous about Blade Runner 2049 running into the same problem, but there's a difference, and here I'm afraid the title of the post is a little misleading. Blade Runner kind of doesn't have to solve the paradigm shift problem. Blade Runner doesn't rely on "Is Deckard a replicant?!?" for its punch to the same degree that the franchises above do. Its success is in the overall tone set by the first movie, so Villeneuve isn't as trapped into focusing on the paradigm shift as the core of the story. The Fifth Element was probably the movie that was at its debut most compared to Blade Runner, and the film-making is such that, if it has a sequel, it also won't be forced to make such difficult no-win writing decisions. The new short that takes place in 2048 is obviousy a Blade Runner film, by the sound just as much as the famous vision. My main complaint is that it seems that nothing much in that world seems to have changed in 30 years. But we will see!

Anticipation: Blade Runner 2049 - and Kubrick?

At least one person has the theory - and enough confidence in it to post a Youtube video about it - that Blade Runner is deliberately full of references to Kubrick's 2001. Of course, the ending credits are actual Kubrick footage from the Shining, but there are a couple other things. And of course, these are my own two favorite movies in the world, so I would love for this to be true. Consequently I'm immediately skeptical.

In Blade Runner there are clear references to other movies - for instance, the lighting in the Tyrell Corp. office where Deckard interviews Rachel is unambiguously straight out of an early scene from Orwell's Citizen Kane (another great one.) But I have in fact noticed two odd connections recently, not between these two movies, but between Kubrick and the (now we must use the word) franchise. To wit: Tyrell is played by Joe Turkel - who also played the bartender in The Shining. Perhaps more significantly, Denis Villeneuve, the director of Blade Runner 2049, is a certified Kubrick freak.

Review: Alien Covenant

tl;dr Not terrible, and definitely not as bad as Prometheus, with good acting and better-developed and organized themes but still with some ridiculous plot holes.

I had said I was not going to worsen my experience of the Blade Runner sequel by over-anticipating it, and I am failing spectacularly. I'm beginning an effort to see the recent Ridley Scott movies (he executive produced Blade Runner 2049) and will also be seeing all Villeneuve's movies before I see the new Blade Runner. This is my excuse for having seen Alien: Covenant.

I reviewed Prometheus quite negatively several years back and while Covenant is not as bad, nothing will ever live up to the original, through no fault of Scott's. Science fiction relies on paradigm shifts more than other genres. Paradigm shifts are a subspecies of plot twists. Plot twists are an event unexpected to plot and characters (the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones), or the revelation of information about characters or events in the past that changes the motivaitons of characters and the meaning to audience of events. A paradigm shift is a revelation about the very nature of the world that the characters are living in; e.g., we actually live inside a simulation! (the Matrix); the V aliens are not really humanoid but actually reptiles!

And therein is the problem. Soap operas and action movies can and do have multiple plot twists. But since the paradigm shift is about the whole world on the screen, it necessarily becomes the central aspect of the story. And you're trapped: either you just rely on the same shift (and wear it out) or you shift to a new one. Rely on it, and you bore your audience (the second and third Matrix movies; the utter lack of surprise that the V aliens are reptiles; the eye-rolling boredom of "Wow, aliens are bursting out of people's bodies? Who knew!") Shift to a new one and you're making a different movie. Studios and directors really don't want to change the underlying formula of a successful franchise, so more xenomorphs bursting out of chests it is! J.J. Abrams developed a neat trick for coming into mature franchises and simultaneously appealing to fans and casual viewers, but even this trick has worn out a bit. Without further ado then, the good bad and ugly of Covenant.


Positive:

- Great location and cinematography. For that matter I even liked that in Prometheus. Then again, you could film anything in South Island, New Zealand and I would probably like it.

- Scott did a better job of developing the theme that we live in a pitiless and mechanistic Darwinian universe, and that maybe the machines really are seeing accurately (in the original Alien, "Survival - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.") The cruelest can, and probably usually do, win, despite our strivings and the trappings of our comforting values. I also like the animalistic nature of the aliens throughout the franchise, again on display. Nature doesn't produce culture, it produces survival, and culture is a by-product that helped survival (for a while.) David's creations have a predatory cleverness but there won't be any exchanging art or technology with them any time soon. I really liked the very biological touch of the dead facehugger curling up like a dying spider. There's also the theme of Weyland creates android; android creates xenomorph. Weyland wasn't very nice to begin with. They also explained why the later version of the android didn't just run over the earlier version (Walter explains that David disturbed people and so there were limitations placed on later models.)

- Fassbender is an outstanding actor and I might even have enjoyed the movie more if it was just David and Walter talking and fighting. The flute-teaching scene was very suspenseful, erotic, and in general made me uncomfortable, which I very much appreciated; by far the scene in the movie that bothered me most (yes, even including creatures bursting out of organs.) There was a criticism of Prometheus that the only character that didn't act like a robot (Fassbender's David) was, in fact, playing a robot, especially against Charlize Theron's woodenness. (Did you see her in Mad Max? She stole the show. If somehow you made Charlize Theron boring, you really screwed up.) I wonder if Scott was creating this contrast intentionally, but it's hard to defend this as intentional direction when the rest of that movie seemed like a disorganized pastiche of half-developed ideas. Here, the contrast is clearly a central feature of the themes of a much better developed story.

- In some of the lines and themes, there was more a sense of the film-maker's call back to previous movies (and his own outside the franchise)

• While Daniels is resisting David's attack, David says, "That's the spirit." I'd argue that's an intentional Roy Baty reference.
• David refers to the xenomorph as the "perfect organism", which Ash calls it in Alien. This one is particularly interesting because you wonder if somehow David influenced Ash, or if androids have a tendency to be psychopaths that arrive at the same admiration for the Darwinian killing machine.
• At first I thought Scott was plagiarizing himself in the flush-the-alien-out-the-airlock scene, but he's actually plagiarizing Cameron, who had taken over the franchise.
• It has nothing to do with Scott, but when David and Walter fight, you can't help but think of scenes from a certain other Cameron series with two terminators going mano a mano. Their relationship very much invites Data and Lore comparisons as well.

- David is a character study of a psychopath. His narcissism, manipulativeness and lack of empathy are clearly on display (an android admiring himself in a mirror?) Walter points out his flaw in misattributing a poem. David's crying is clearly sometimes for show, but he does seem to have been genuinely moved, at least abstractly, by the slaughter of the Engineers. On the other hand, Walter's innocent Kantian adherence to "duty" in contrast makes him seem safe, boring and even child-like.

- More interesting to think about in terms of where Scott could take the franchise - if David's point in creating the xenomorphs was to wipe out organic life, or at least both humans and engineers, then it makes sense that in Aliens 4, Ripley and her new android friend finally make it back to an obviously ruined Earth. If Scott continues to make movies, he's either going to have to declare other directors' work on the franchise not cannon, or do a lot of maneuvering. (Until this decade Scott had made only one of the four Alien movies. Each one had a different director; and of course this is even more complicated since xenomorphs have also been kidnapped into another franchise entirely, i.e. Predator.)

Interesting, so I guess positive: James Franco's role in the movie was near zero, other than two lines of dialogue on a video the protagonist was watching, as well as being a Pittsburgh-rare corpse. There was really a lot that was released online that was not in the movie.

Neutral, but I expected it to be bad, so I guess that means good: I was expecting to hate Danny McBride in this (boy, what a casting decision) and I had no feelings one way or the other.

Puzzling: Mr. Foreign-Accent McBurny-Face had a facehugger on him for all of 30 seconds and still managed to get a xenomorph implanted. Why do the things hang on to faces (in later-in-the-timeline-movies) for hours to days? The chest bursters popped out in a matter of minutes too. It could be that the later ones had deteriorated somewhat from David's original design. Or, it could be that Ridley Scott cares more about rapid action than continuity, because audiences tend to ignore plot problems when there's higher action density.


The Negative

- So stupid I can't even believe it: trained interstellar professionals go gallivanting off the ship into the brush on an alien planet, one they weren't even planning on landing on, and no concern for pathogens? (You could get rid of some of this with a single line in the plot without changing the visual story much at all, e.g. "remember when we got our universal vaccine shots", etc.) And very little comment about "Wow, we're setting foot in an alien ecosystem!" And very little comment about "Wait, there's wheat here, humans must have been here before us!" Fine, maybe Scott thought audiences are a little tired of every movie showing the wonder that the first settlers felt...but worst of all, when the crew goes out with THE BIOLOGIST to collect samples, a crewmember smokes and just casually tosses the cigarette butt. Seriously!?!? And then when the crew is returning with THE BIOLOGIST, two of them are obviously, suddenly, severely sick with a local pathogen, and THE BIOLOGIST is in full contact with them and doesn't think to put them in quarantine outside the ship. I mean come on. This is worse even than a bad horror movie where they say, "Hey, inhuman howling in the basement of this abandoned house, we should go down and see what it is!"

- Also really stupid: Yes Scott went out of the way to show us that Billy Crudup was a bad captain. But still, he doesn't appear to be a complete moron or an emotionally vacant nitwit. "Hey, a creature just killed one of my crewmembers and not only were you communing with it, but you were mad at me when I killed it!...okay, I'll follow you into your horror chamber and lean my face into this weird pod when you tell me to."

If Scott had made the characters behave a little more circumspectly - maybe even have viruses that could get through air filters on space suits, have David do his explication to Walter and have a facehugger drop on bad-captain from above as he was about to shoot David - this would have been a much, much better movie.

- Confession, I knew how it ended, but come on - how was it possible not to realize that it was David and not Walter when he was proudly watching the xenomorph run up and down the deck? Waiting for the reveal at the very end was quite annoying for that reason.

- Also, once they're in the dead colonial city - I guess there's barely a word uttered about the massive carved monoliths around them because they've already heard of the Engineers from the earlier mission? (Although again, a little more awe might still be on order when you walk into an alien city.)

- A neutrino burst? Come on, you can do better than that. There are only enough neutrinos to do serious damage if you're right next to a supernova, and then you have other things to worry about. If David can trigger neutrinos and supernovas, why doesn't he just go back to Earth and do that? The plot would've lost nothing if a stray shower of comet fragments damaged the ship and woke them up.

- A colony ship with a specific destination goes off-route to land on a planet emitting a strange (but ultimately human) signal. Alright; that's fair enough. But how did they miss a planet that was habitable? Yes it's a trap that David set, but the planet was habitable prior to any interference by David. Note that the ship has hyperdrive and it's the early twenty-second century, and it's interesting that we feel we can say that won't happen. (This is a reality criticism, not film criticism.)

- The bad android has an English accent and the good one has an American accent. I want to see an evil robot from Alabama or Queensland. (Gary Oldman as the villain in Fifth Element did have a Southern American accent, to that movie's credit.)

Why Only Exotic Gods Coming to Life in Movies?

Here's an idea for a movie: a Lakota boy is adopted and raised by Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. He is thus mostly ignorant of Christianity; and given his genetic ancestry, he is fascinated with Old World culture. He becomes an archaeologist and travels to Israel. While there, he discovers an ancient tomb...a tomb that locals fear, and one old man tries to warn him about. Though their "New Testament" describes the power of the demigod who was killed and put in the cave, this archaeologist knows better than to believe in primitive fairy tales. Until, of course, strange things start happening. The bread and fish he bought for lunch one day keeps replenishing itself, and one of the other professors who had been laid up with leprosy magically heals. Was he about to discover that this "Christ" was real, and had awoken? And even more, that the locals' god had a dark side as well?

Of course I'm deliberately being uncomfortably irreverent, even offensive. If instead of the tomb I'd used Mohammed's angel-cave, people would really be upset with me. And yet when you see a movie with a white archaeologist being chased around by an awakened Native American god, that's somehow okay...and that's exactly the point. There is a strange disconnect here. Movies are "allowed" to concretely depict the powers of pagan gods that we remember mostly as myths; that is, they can do so without being considered offensive. But movies are not allowed to depict the powers of gods that people still actually believe in.



Above: in The Mask Jim Carrey was supposed to be wearing the Mask of Loki, the Norse God of mischief, which gave him powers. Below: a major studio is unlikely to make a movie about Christ rising from the dead like this. But wait - people actually believe that he did! Shouldn't there be more support for doing such a movie then?


For the purposes of supernatural horror, people who identify as Christian are quite willing to suspend disbelief about the reality of an exotic god for the duration of a movie or book. So Christians should love a movie about a literal avenging Christ, or Jews about the modern Angel of Death, right? Imagine it: U.S. fighter planes scramble over the Red Sea, firing missiles pointlessly into the Angel's swirling mass. Lamb's blood for door-painting is at a premium on Amazon. (I can't wait for 2-day shipping, we're already up to the seventh deadly plague! ZING, HEY-O!) But guess what? They don't love it. Even talking about it in this way may seem provocative. (An experiment: would trying to explain Buddha's supposed cobra-calming ability be offensive? Shiva's appearance from a flaming lingham? How about a movie about the search for the Mormon gold tablets or the Scientologists' alien-spirit volcano? If some are okay and some are not, why? I think the answer is fairly obvious.)

Of course there are exceptions to this strange ban on movies depicting the gods or forces people say they believe in. The American film industry made a number of such pictures in the 1950s and 60s, and more recently, Passion of the Christ - although these took pains to identify themselves as narratives created by the in-group, and all carefully kept themselves within the scriptural understandings of their likely audience. The only action movies per se made about these themes were Raiders of the Lost Ark and especially the Holy Grail. But there, it's not about Indy getting a gleam in his eye and going on a quest to use the power of the Holy Grail - no, in both cases with Biblical artifact maguffins, it's really, really bad guys who in their hubris have gone looking for them. It's also likely that setting the adventure a few decades in the past insulates it from moral discomfort. It would make people very itchy if Raiders were re-made to take place in the Middle East today, with ISIS fighters digging for the ark and grail.

The likely reason that we're allowed to put mostly-abandoned gods, but not ones worshipped contemporarily, in works of fiction - even if we don't personally believe in them, and just know that many other people do - is the same reason people get uncomfortable about the direct, concrete discussion of religious stories, even if not from a critical standpoint. Angry Christ fighting off the Navy Seals by walking out on the water where they can't get him would move the whole thing out of ritual-land and into concrete visualization, which is very uncomfortable for modern people who believe in things like laws of nature. And we have a frankly misguided sense that it's offensive to do this with anyone's continuing beliefs. But the second the last Scientologist dies - then I guess it's okay to make the L. Ron Hubbard zombie movie.

In this case, giving power to indigenous gods is not a compliment, or an endorsement of their reality. It's exactly because we clearly understand that they're silly that they can serve as entertainment. But we don't want to get led into thinking or explicitly saying that about contemporary gods.

Star Wars Episode VII Observations (Spoilers)

Quite enjoyable, and as many people have said, on par with episodes III and IV. But most important: Abrams has developed a trick that avoids a difficult problem of rebooting a franchise, or continuing someone else's. If all you do is remake the movie, people accuse you of making a boring recycled risk-averse sequel. If you actually do something original, people come out of the theater saying "I paid to see a Star Wars movie, and that didn't seem like a Star Wars movie."

Star Wars actually doesn't have it quite as bad as other franchises. If a franchise leans on a paradigm shift driven by a big reveal, there's really no way around it. Ridley Scott had difficulty with this in Prometheus because if you have chest-bursters, people will say "Boring!" but if you don't have body-horror critters any kind, people ask how it can be an Alien prequel. I imagine the people making the V reboot had an even worse time. The Visitors are reptiles? Yeah we already know, it's V, do something original" versus "Wait, the aliens aren't reptiles? What is this bullshit?"

Consequently there's an insoluble knife edge of make something new (and too different) or make something familiar (and boring). The trick is to acknowledge the influence inside the narrative, by having characters recognize how they're influenced. This occurs when BB-8 (obviously this movie's R2) meets R2 and has obvious affinity (by the way, nice cat-like head-bump). Abrams uses this trick the most when he builds a character who obviously is copying Darth Vader to a fault, and has collected his mask. Can we imagine Anakin deliberately styling himself after another Sith this way? This youth and even naivete also gives a nice depth to Ren's character. Yes, there is sort of an "I am your father" moment with Solo and Kylo Ren, but it's out of the way relatively early; and there's a nice contrast when he takes off the mask and betrays our expectation of a "creature" underneath. It should also be added that the fallen star cruiser and AT-AT (and the reverent screen-time they get) are in keeping with the practice of the characters themselves consciously referring back to the earlier films.

As an aside, Abrams did something similarly clever in the Star Trek reboot when Vulcan is destroyed. You're watching that movie and you're relaxed because you think, well obviously Vulcan wasn't destroyed...and then it is. You can hear Abrams at the writers' meetings saying "Hey, we're making a science fiction movie. If we're too hemmed in by franchise canon, well science fiction has time travel and we can do what we want."

All that said, the beginning of the new movie seems unnecessarily derivative. Early in the film the plot is established when stormtroopers attack and, as the smoke clears from the carnage, a masked agent of the Dark Side appears with terrifying powers; against all odds the maguffin (a hologram with critical information) is carried by a hapless droid across a desert planet, ultimately found by a mundane wretch who seems to yearn for something beyond the horizon, and ends up in a dirty trading post. Wait, am I talking about episode IV or VII? No way to tell! The main difference is that the attack happened on the planet rather than on a ship in orbit. Somehow it's the fact that it's another desert planet that annoys me the most. I mean come on, would it have killed you for it to be any other climate? Unless Jakku turns out to be the sneakily re-named Tattooine, that's weak. Second on the list of annoyances is another cantina scene, inexplicably in a cathedral in the middle of a forest. On the other hand, in Abrams's defense, better to err on the side of conservatism than make something that breaks with franchise tradition so early.

As a comment on Star Wars generally: it's hard to call these science fiction films. There are swords. There's magic. There are demi-humans that aren't elves or orcs but might as well be. There is not one lick of interest in how hyperdrive works, or the light sabers, or the economics or politics or history of the First Order and Republic. Which is fine, because it's consistent with the franchise, and that's not what Star Wars is about. And speaking of politics, isn't it a little troubling that basically the fate of the whole galactic civilization comes down to one family with special powers? Much like the Superman franchise, which makes Krypton seem like a third world dictatorship where their whole government really just boils down to a struggle between interstellar Hatfields and McCoys (or the -El family and the Zod faction) who bring their provincial little struggle with them wherever they go. (Yes, obviously it's more interesting when everyone is related and then you sell more tickets or comic books, but people invariably complain when one points out how beholden to the narrative is to the true function of the medium that conveys it.)

I didn't notice any lens-flair, although during the Millennium Falcon chase into the engine of the crashed star cruiser, there's a power-zoom that is distinctly un-Lucas-like.

And a final acknowledgement must be made, of Kylo Ren: forensic psychiatrist extraordinaire. I'm going to start wearing black gloves during intake examinations with my patients.

Greatest American Hero Ep. 22, "The Shock Will Kill You"

This was a great show. First of all it had Bill Katt (who should've been Luke Skywalker instead of Mark Hammill, because Bill Katt can, you know, ACT), it had Connie Sellecca, who was an early crush (of course before I found my true love Jane Badler). I remember that the alien eel thing scared the crap out of me, despite that they were obviously filming in such a way as to protect their budget. (Re-watching the nuclear attack scene in the 1980s made-for-TV The Day After similarly reactivated an old fight-or-flight response.)

Watching it again as an adult in comparison with modern "rules" for television genres, I found it interesting that the astronauts on the space shuttle unambiguously died. Today, that would be allowed in a serious prime-time show, but not a show with tongue-in-cheek overtones like this one had. I also liked that a random FBI agent comes into a California dam facility and demands an immediate water release so that a reservoir can be filled, and the guy listens to him! Of course we were much more loosey goosey in this state back before California turned into Arrakis; today the alien eel would have overrun the state!

Spike Jonze's Her Is Not About the Future

There are a few comments online about Her that are fully on the mark about the content of the movie, yet miss the main goals I think Jonze was striving for. That people think enough about any work of fiction to be annoyed by it is usually a compliment. What Robin Hanson said was

The main character of Her pays a small amount to acquire an AI that is far more powerful than most human minds. And then he uses this AI mainly to chat with. He doesn’t have it do his job for him. He and all his friends continue to be well paid to do their jobs, which aren’t taken over by AIs...Soon after they all leave together for a place that ”it would be too hard to explain” where it is. This is somewhat like a story of a world where kids can buy nukes for $1 each at drug stores, and then a few kids use nukes to dig a fun cave to explore, after which all the world’s nukes are accidentally misplaced, end of story.

Yes, when you think about AI for a living, you can't help but notice these kinds of incongruities. For that matter I'm a casual fan of Roman history, and I still get annoyed when I see tailored clothing in Roman-period movies. Along these lines, for me the silliest thing in Her in terms of predicting the future might be the China-India merger news near the beginning of the movie. But if you can get past the window-dressing to remind you it's the future so the creator has some license to alter the setting to make his point, then you can also realize Her isn't about geopolitics and economics. The technology Jonze creates is only a means for him to focus on his main themes. First, even though Her is set in a science fiction near-future LA, it's a better depiction of LA than in most movies. For example: LA is on the coast, and it often has really nice clouds. (If you live or travel there, pay attention. It's not the vanilla neutral people-terrarium portrayed on our screens.) A simple touch like this, letting LA speak for itself, warms the heart and makes the city in the movie feel more similar to the world outside the theater. In fact, the movie almost made me homesick for Southern California, while I was living in Southern California! And another thing about LA: there is a natural world that the city hasn't obliterated. There are mountains. There are islands. There are things to do outside. There are restaurants very much like the ones the people in the movie go to. And speaking of restaurants, the differing ratio of white:non-white you can see among the characters' friends, as opposed to waitstaff, felt accurate too. (People in California don't like to talk about this discrepancy.)

But more importantly, Her is about how the nature of intimacy has changed in the modern age, with the gain turned up a little on the role of technology to help focus on this. There is the obvious point being made that the protagonist's job is to write heartfelt cards for others' intimates, and in so doing, interpose himself (by invitation, for commercial reasons) in the most tender moments between lovers and family members. Yet he himself spends most of his life alone in a dark apartment, his only close friends from back in college. There's always clearly a connection missing - made all the more obvious by the people around him during his commute - always physically alone - constantly talking to friends on their earpieces. His material comforts (which are many - witness the great view and the cool video game system) don't make up for his lack of connection. In all the material and surface aspects, this guy has a great life - even with that dumb mustache he manages to get a date with Olivia Wilde, which seems to go well, and then he whiffs. And finally, the most aggressive and uncomfortable experiment in intimacy is the "real" woman standing in for the virtual Samantha, yet another intimacy intermediary. I found this scene not at all salacious and indeed only slightly less uncomfortable than the threesome in the film version of The Handmaid's Tale. (Seriously, don't look it up.)

The Film Martyrs and Horror of the Irrational

"Martyrs" is the first horror movie I've seen that I would put within hailing distance of Hellraiser. Here's a review; I'm not linking to a trailer, but you can find them on Youtube quickly. To put it mildly, "Martyrs" is postdoctoral-level horror, and don't watch it unless you would characterize the Hellraiser films as "intriguing". (Spoiler alert.)

Why does it deserve such high regard? Because "Martyrs" has a concept which intrudes into the real world and scares us that way, rather than just splashing blood on walls. Without a concept, a horror movie is just shock - and most fall into this category - and whether you're laughing or gasping, shock quickly becomes boring.

Hellraiser doesn't just present you with monsters and torture, it presents a whole new cosmology. It argues that there's a world underneath ours and that the rules we think govern reality are not the rules at all. ("Event Horizon" does something along these lines as well.) Turn of the century strange fiction does something similar. There's a horror of the irrational, a terror at the revelation that the comforting predictability of the rules we think govern the universe is an illusion; that either we only know the rules on this one world or in this one spiritual plane and these rules are so provincial that they might as well be an illusion.

The concept in "Martyrs" examines a similar idea, one that many humans in the real world take seriously - an afterlife - and posits a question. If we take this part of religion seriously, and many (most?) of the world's great religions have at their core a recognition that through suffering we attain transcendence, then shouldn't we explore this further? The protagonist in "Martyrs" encounters a cult that captures and tortures people precisely to get them to the point where they can see this next world. When this main character is tortured beyond all imagination to this stage of "transfiguration" where she can see into the next world, the cult leader gathers the rest of the group's higher-ups. The leader asks the dying protagonist what she sees, and of course it's kept secret from the audience - and then very soon after, the leader kills herself. "Keep doubting," she says to her second-in-command just before she puts the bullet in her own brain. The ambivalent ending is fantastic. Did the leader kill herself because she realized she had just been torturing people for no reason? Or, did she finally have a direct report of how wonderful the afterlife is - and acted rationally, given that information?

Skynet's Ancestors: Are Groups of Humans Also Conscious?

I just re-watched Terminator 2, which is aging pretty well, not least because it used CGI as opposed to live action latex-and-juice effects in the first one that today look fairly bad. A refresher: Skynet sends a new, scarier shape-shifting terminator back in time, this time to kill John Connor as a 12 year-old instead of killing his mother as in the first one. To counter Skynet, the grown-up John Connor sends back a re-programmed terminator to protect him. It turns out that there were parts recovered from the first terminator from 1984, and a tech company has been reverse-engineering them - creating a loop where Skynet essentially catalyzes its own creation. A big part of the movie is the side-mission taken by the Connor family and their pet Austrian to destroy the lab working with the old terminator's parts, thus stopping the creation of Skynet.

Of course this plot was an excuse to get Schwarzenegger in another movie even though the terminator (well, the first terminator) was killed in the first one, and to make him a much more central character. But the most interesting thing to me isn't that, or even the paradox of a self-causing AI. Certainly the idea of fate figures prominently in the second and third movies, and many who think the Singularity concept is a coherent one also think that such an event is inevitable, given a technological civilization with enough time.

And that's why the most interesting thing to me about T2 is the police. (How many? "All of 'em, I think," says the young John Connor.) First of all, the parallelism is interesting: fine Skynet, you try to kill John Connor's mother? Well then we'll kill your mother, what do you think of that? (As a side note, because the shapeshifting Terminator made no attempt to defend Cyberdyne, either Skynet didn't think of this, or had already seen Terminator 3 and knew it didn't matter.)

1970's Colossus, which deserves to be more clearly remembered as introducing us to the idea of defense computers using the nuclear weapons under its command to sinister ends. (Although if you were Skynet, you could do better than something so obvious as a nuclear war.)



But much more fascinating than that: even though there is no fully functioning, self-perpetuating AI inside Cyberdyne systems, a more dilute but still discrete pattern has begun forming around the primitive Skynet's birthplace, a wealthy society's resources marshalled to protect the womb. And much like in our own tissues, Cyberdyne's individual T-cells (investors, police) cannot possibly appreciate the ultimate result of the developmental process they're taking part in. It's hard not to see the invisible hand of Skynet's intelligence, already embedded in the logic of the human scientific enterprise and capital accumulation and the institutions we've created to advance those processes.

To be clear, I don't get the impression that Skynet was somehow magically reaching back through time and hypnotizing LA's finest (and Cyberdyne's investors) to protect its primordial ancestors, or that this is what James Cameron was suggesting. But it's interesting to contemplate not just in light of the concept of the Singularity, but of the serious philosophical debate about the basis of consciousness, and to what kinds of entities it can apply. If you think consciousness comes from a pile of neurons being connected, then does it matter whether some of the neurons are inside separate skulls, connected by speech rather than synapses? That is to say, if you believe that one person is a conscious entity, doesn't that mean two people must form an additional conscious entity, as would any combination of humans? So things like Wyoming, and Honda Motors, and investors in the stock market, are conscious entities! As would be Cyberdyne Systems (and its associated financial and security apparatus) - and Skynet is the eventual expression of the converging currents of that particular self-organizing system.

"Happy Halloween Ladies!"