Given yesterday’s post, I can’t help believing this is true – although SOME people weren’t laughing (me! 🙂 )

candybowl

As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.

In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.

While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.

The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…

As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.

Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB

candybowl

Finally saw the new Godzilla movie last night – great stuff! Nerdy review:

Likes – Godzilla (big surprise); the comparative size of the monsters (huge) and that they don’t mind stomping the crap out of everything they see or that bothers them. Also kudos to newbie-ish director Gareth Edwards, who after cutting his teeth on the earlier Monsters from 2010 – which you can actually watch online here – was selected to write and direct this movie – well done, sir! I also liked the fact that you are intended to feel sympathy for the Motu even when her babies are getting the ‘Ripley treatment‘ – well I did, anyway 🙂

Puzzled – Ken Watanabe‘s constant ‘thousand yard stare’ even when people are asking him questions (and he’s supposed to be the decades-long chief scientist who knows everything?!?) Maybe he lost his Godzilla Prediction Network card…? 🙂

Major nit – *no classic Godzilla roar*? I realize this is a ‘re-imagining’ (aren’t they all these days) but people, Come ON! And the roar provided is adequate but nowhere near loud or powerful enough? At least they didn’t forget the firebreath (oops, spolier alert!)

Minor nit – not enough monster battle scenes. I realize they did this in part to build tension and not just have a big battle at the start and then nowhere to go with the plot, but at least 5-10 min. more of battle would have been fine, guys. Maybe with the kaiju crushing Oracle’s HQ in downtown SF, or possibly John Woo’s office at Berkeley? now THAT would have rocked!

all in all, a very good film, however, and definitely up there with Cloverfield and other recent monster fare….see it – or be stomped!

candybowl

here’s where I’ll be, hoping Thu night!

Cinerama – Coming Soon

in the meantime, 3 comics from another person who can’t wait for the new movie…. (keep scrolling)…..

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Privateers race to capture forgotten NASA space probe using crowdsourced cash

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I’m not sure when this one came out, but dare I get excited all over again? Oh yeah….. 🙂

although I just realized in getting a better link that this is a fan trailer – but still pretty good…….!

candybowl

Saw Europa Report this evening – interesting movie. While the plot itself isn’t original – if you have read the book version of a certain sequel to a certain other VERY famous sci fi movie, you essentially know what happens here – but I will leave the clues to the reader.

The acting is good, the effects are well done and straightforward. The movie isn’t Gravity – and isn’t trying to be. Rather, I would put this on the level of Cloverfield or approaching District 9 (even sharing one of the main actors from District 9 as I discovered after reviewing the cast) – the effects serve the story, not the other way around (yeah michael bay and joseph kosinzki – I’m talking to YOU). I like the attention to detail and realism here too – you get the sense of how a real spaceship might look for a mission like this.

Like Gravity, there are some obvious visual influences too, but i’ll leave that to the reader/viewer to discover. And like all the movies I see, I’ve got some nits to pick – meaning spoilers, if you care about such things 🙂

1) No doctor on the ship? I realize Dr. McCoy was quite often just along for the ride until Kirk and Spock got themselves into trouble or hurt, but he served a purpose and barring a two-man spacecraft, I can’t see a mission of this size and ambition not having at least ONE person on the ship trained in medical stuff? They don’t mention it at all. Yet I think they spent a year in space minimum?

2) ‘decisions by committee’ – at one key plot point, the commander doesn’t get to make the final call, they in effect override him and vote. Maybe it’s 18th century of me to expect otherwise, but I think this aspect of movie plots is increasingly tiresome. I can’t remember an actual ship (military or otherwise, in space or on water) that allows ‘democratice decisionmaking’ when there’s a real crisis – that’s actually WHY they have a captain in the first place? That person is expected to make the decisions, and the others obey them?! Here, all of the crew are pretty young excepting the chief engineer, and the captain seems youngest of all but still, why have a ‘commander’ if you aren’t going to have him/her ‘command’? This is simply a mistake in the movie.

3) Spacewalk backup/contingency planning. In at least two situations, there are major problems (to me, anyway) with how they treat risk(s) inherent in spacewalks/EVA and then endure the consequences of same – there seems to be too much ‘cowboy’ and not enough ‘astronaut’ in how they do things. At least in 2001, you had a computer trying to kill people, and you had much more careful planning/control over the EVA than you see here – I think it was handled a bit slipshod. It’s not even clear that the rest of the crew CAN handle an EVA, although I guess it’s assumed.

4) The Prometheus problem. Nowhere near to the stupid degree seen in Prometheus, but the characters here display a somewhat disconcerting detachment when confronted with an apparent obvious danger, and allow themselves to keep moving forward instead of being conservative and SAFE by choosing a move obvious and safer route (like NASA would?).

All in all, I liked the movie, despite the nearly identical plot mentioned above (I really wonder whether the writers had read it or not?) and that it doesn’t overreach, despite the nits just mentioned. Well done!

candybowl

NEVER time travel! 🙂

So finally got a chance to see Ender’s Game at The Crest last night. I haven’t read the book in some time, but reread it last year (I think?) in anticipation of this movie coming out.

Likes:

All the actors are well cast. Many are not given very much to do save a few lines or scenes, but even with big-name actors such as Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley in the movie, it balances out well.

The special effects are also well done and convincing – it’s always a bit of a crapshoot with zero-grav stuff in movies (to me, anyway), even with the CGI you now see (as opposed to hidden wires used in the past). It can look too fake (e.g. all the stupid CGI guys running around in Attack of the Clones) or a bit too forced – but here it looks good and doesn’t overpower the plot trying to be ‘amazing’ or anything. By contrast with the recent Gravity, in which nearly the whole movie is in a zero-G environment (and done very, very well) – this movie still holds its own.

I was also glad they didn’t go out of their way to overdo the Formics (‘Buggers’) like was done in Starship Troopers several years ago. While I have quite a number of gripes (unrelated to CGI) about that movie, they really went overboard with bugs, bugs everywhere and making them as horrific and never-ending as possible. Here, they show them only briefly, mostly in spaceships and then the Hive Queen in a few scenes, and she/it is portrayed as a sympathetic figure, just like in the book.

Nitpicks and critical (incl. some spoilers, be forewarned)

OK, on with the usual complaining 🙂

1) They really took out too much of the book, despite Orson Scott Card being heavily involved in the movie’s production, writing, etc. You miss out on most of the alienation and isolation that leads to Ender acting out – you just see a few scenes or dialog that sets it up and then boom, he’s acting out. I also missed the extensive Battle School zero-G drills and wars that the book details at length, and his brother Peter only has one scene here (in the book, he’s not a major character so much as he’s a major influence throughout Ender’s experience, but you surely see a lot more of him there). And even his sister Valentine only has a few scenes herself, and she is arguably a bigger influence on Ender than Peter? And the “mind game” Ender plays on the tablet is much more detailed and longer in the book, and serves as an important backdrop for how the Hive Queen makes mental contact with him and gains his trust. They pay lip service to it here but treat it much more like a dream that he sees several times and then follows in the real world, and that doesn’t quite cut it.

2) They don’t discuss the whole issue of Ender being a Third (in the future, people must obtain permission to have kids, and almost nobody ever goes beyond a second kid, so Ender being a Third makes him stand out – not in a positive way – from the beginning of his life). It is mentioned once at dinner and that’s about it, and never really explained

3) The whole side plot of Valentine and Peter using their skill at debate over the world networks to influence society at large (and ultimately build Peter up into becoming The Hegemon, the world’s ruler) isn’t in this movie at all. Yet it plays a notable role in the book – I think at least a few minutes here and there could have helped add it?

It’s true that were you to include much of what I mention above as missing, you’d likely add at least an hour to the movie at minimum. But I think the story suffers here because of these omissions, and I’m hoping the moviemakers pulled a Peter Jackson and filmed extra footage that can be included on the DVD when released soon. The comparison I’m thinking of here was the second Lord of the Rings movie – The Two Towers. I didn’t like that movie near as much in the theater, because most of it was spent watching people run over mountains, run across meadows, run run run! When the DVD came out, the extended version included almost 40 min. more of plot and scenes that broke all that up much better and rounded out the story much nicer. I could see a similar result with Ender’s Game, provided they made that extra footage while filming the movie.

All in all, I liked the movie and think they did a good job, but it could have been great instead of just good had they included more. Maybe the DVD….?

candybowl

Check out The Space Needle’s new website – very cool, and IMHO – innovative! Shout out to Monica Guzman for telling us about it!

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