and by King, I do not mean Kong. Saw the latest G v K movie just now – and here’s my review – (major spoilers ahead, so you have been warned).

So it was inevitable, by the end of the last movie (and if for no other reason that he has ‘king’ in his name) – it was Kong’s fate to fight Godzilla. Last time they fought (in the 60s), it was a draw. This time, it was largely the same outcome, but a lot more plot challenges along the way.

Without boring the reader too much, there are, simply stated, too many plot elements stolen from other movies, monster or otherwise, recent or old. I’ll simply name a few and you can figure out where you think they showed up in this movie: 2001 Stargate Sequence; Crazy Godzilla watchers tearing around in a van; Human-kaiju interface being used for ‘new’ mechas; little kids being used as a ‘friend’ for the kaiju; – i’m sure I saw more but simply can’t remember them all.  And you may spot some of your own?

There are other silly mistakes (the old-school Transformers problem of scale depending on scene and camera shot comes to mind in several places, just like it did in Cloverfield).  One unexpected amusing part – when the ‘evil Richard Branson‘ (effectively a Bond villain that thinks he’s saving the planet while stroking his own immense ego, immensely) gets killed by his own creation *just* as he starts “monologuing” – thereby saving us from having to hear it – but then a central character complains he ‘wanted to hear the speech’? Too funny.

I also liked that while it’s arguably partially stolen from Godzilla 2000 (specifically, the Godzilla Prediction Network in that movie) – the daughter of the GZ scientist from the previous movie (who is in this one too but only gets 2-3 token scenes this time around) is running around with a computer geek and connects up with another crazy kaiju conspiracy theorist who has a podcast they both follow. Arguably the best parts of the ‘human’ plot are with them, hands down.  The little girl who is Kong’s “muse” (akin to the tiny Japanese fairies in all the classic Mothra movies but not near as corny) is good, but her reactions are obviously meant to make you root for Kong (and that’s just wrong, of course 🙂 )

This makes for an interesting side plot/comment – in monster movies, one of the easiest traps to fall into plotwise is to have too much human interest plot and NOT ENOUGH MONSTERS! I would argue that the first of the GZ remakes balances this nicely, this movie somewhat goes slightly too much in the wrong direction (meaning more monsters, please). There have been unique takes on this angle though, e.g. Cloverfield is all about the disaster effect on the humans, and the monsters are the cause, but arguably not otherwise the center of the plot, really.

But a key point – does it deliver on the actual monster battles? Arguably the most important of any ‘monster’ movie – By and large, yes. There really weren’t enough of them, but for the most part, we get to see a lot of taxpayer-funded military hardware going to Davy Jones’ Locker, and a lot of future Hong Kong real estate developers are going to be pretty rich about 20 years from now, to be sure. I’ve never understood why in monster (or superhero) movies all the crowds seem (still) to be ‘hiding’ in skyscrapers when the all the fighting starts? I guess it makes for interesting camera work and effects? At least the crowds in Cloverfield actually seem to be trying to GET AWAY, excepting the roof rescue near the end of the movie.

So we get to see both GZ and Kong get in their hits, although the big ‘e-ax’ Kong wields is a bad version of Excalibur meets Harry Potter’s wand in the end with a little bit of Krull thrown in – although having it around pays off when the ‘real’ villain shows up in the end, courtesy of Evil Richard Branson (see villain snark above). And as per usual in these movies, apparently these megacorps have so much money as to build giant underground, magnetic tunnel transport systems and THEN be able to afford building a mecha-Gz only to know it doesn’t have enough power to actually DO anything for longer than a few minutes? Seems like bad decisionmaking to me, but hey, I’m no CEO. 🙂

In the end, as with all the non-Toho Gz movies of late (and their latest, Shin Godzilla, although it’s arguably closer to the 70s one) – the original, classic 70s ‘roar‘ of Gz is still left out of these movies, and that’s arguably the biggest plot flaw of all, besides no Ken Watanabe (and he is missed!). Of the three recent Godzilla movies, the first one (directed by Gareth Edwards) is still the best. The second one arguably has some of the best ridiculous monster battles (and still has Ken Watanabe), but is otherwise simply a set up for this movie, really.

Bash on, Titans – you make too much box office to stay out of the frame for long – I’m sure someone will make another – maybe Gz will fight a Jaeger or one of the Avengers or something – they did it several times with both Predator and Alien, after all :).

So wayyyyyy back in the C/D monthly subscription days, the Vector was always one of my two “halo cars” when it came out (the other being the b+b Cw311 which became the Isdera Imperator when it actually went to short-lived production). The Vector never really got that far though, acc. to this video, only 20 ended up getting made. And like so many of these era cars, while I’d love to try and drive one (with of course the $1M insurance policy in place before I started it up and broke a window switch or something stupid), a lot of it hasn’t aged well.

in the example seen in this video, it has more air dams and that stupid back spoiler that the original W2 car didn’t have at debut time (link below to that C/D article) and to me, (like when comparing the Lotus Esprit Turbo vs. the S1, S2 or S3 that don’t have them) all that extra crap detracts from the appearance – I doubt it makes much difference functionally in the end, though.

And given my far-overly-analog approach to cars these days, that instrument panel would drive me nuts after one drive (if not before the first drive was over – nope, I’m NEVER owning a Tesla or anything like that, NOPE) but it wasn’t the interior I was crazy about with this car anyway, it was the looks and the whole ‘concept’ of the car as the original 1980 C/D article had (that was the Vector W2, slightly earlier than the version seen in this video) and in the actual C/D road test a bit later.

in the end, I suspect the Cw311 would be a far easier car to live with (the Cw311 was virtually a production car even at the prototype stage, whereas the Vector could be argued was *always* a prototype in many ways…) but still, I agree with Doug DeMuro – this is still arguably the craziest car ever built – Somewhere, 75+ year old Jerry Wiegert is smiling…

So, I recently watched Devs – not sure what I think about this mini-series, quite honestly (partial spoilers coming, be forewarned):

On the one hand, it’s **very** well made, both the tech angle as well as simply production values and cinematography. They didn’t skimp on the budget, even though there’s really only two well known actors in it, Nick Offerman and Alison Pill, the latter of whom I wouldn’t even have known about but for her similarly-excellent work in Star Trek: Picard of late.

All the actors are very good too, especially the main overt villain, security guy Kenton (most of the characters in this movie have at least some aspect of villainy in their actions and dialogue, though). You really want Kenton to meet a bad end by the end of the series, to be sure.

It’s a really dark show, like much of TV sci-fi of late (Dark, Westworld, etc.) – not sure if that’s a reflection of our times, or just of recent screenwriting/market trends, but there it is.

Another comment i’ll make is the blatantly obvious (to the viewer only at first, but later you can tell other characters know too) endgame of Forest (Nick Offerman’s central character). While by the end he kind of ends up getting a “version” of what he wants, the end (to me) leaves too many plotlines untied. They all but ignore the rationale for all the money, time and effort spent in building the system in the first place to simply rationalize it (to the Senator visiting) about why it has to ‘survive’ – for Forest’s original reason…?  And ok, they have a small dev team but there’s no way they could spend the kind of money they claim (directly or indirectly) they did to build the facility and computer and still keep it all under wraps like that?  Come on.

Second, Stewart’s role in the end two episodes is simply inconsistent with the previous plot and un-believable. If he really felt that way, he could have told the police instead of acting on his own (and strictly speaking, making himself a bad actor in the end too). Not consistent.

Third, the way Katie (to me it was pretty clear, no matter what the plot wants you to believe) tricks Lyndon in the end was pretty much BS. And that he bought into it – despite being a brilliant late-teen computer geek and young, he still should have seen through it – If Lily could have seen through everything (and ultimately does by the end), he should have too.

Finally, the overlying ‘determinism is the nature of the world’ commentary going on as of the 2-3rd episode onward by Forest, Katie and others is also BS. No matter how great their computer, software or otherwise might become, there’s simply NO WAY to model the entire universe to do what they claim it can do. And yes, the counterargument to that is ‘well, it’s never been done – yet’ – yeah right, and “this plot has never been used – yet” by many other previous stories and thinkers – give me a break. The show even doesn’t take itself completely seriously given a character’s passing comment about techies ‘thinking they are messiahs’ – and then proceeds to ignore it’s own self-awareness? Nope, doesn’t work.

In short – this *is* entertaining, well-made fare but not for everyone and you may find it doesn’t work for you for the above (or even different) reasons, of course.

Candybowl

Didn’t even know about this until a friend mentioned it, so naturally had to bing-watch the first season (only 12 episodes avail. at the moment).

So here’s my take on it so far (some spoilers, so be forewarned):

1) Same characters as Stand Alone Complex – they spend the first couple episodes ‘getting the gang back together’ as it were. As seen near the end of the previous series (because ARISE was a prequel to SAC if memory serves, will have to go watch that again now too I guess 🙂 ) the world has been divvied up into four major ’empires’, and Japan is kind of an also-ran country now as primarily allied within the American Empire.

2) The animation is much more like a videogame this time around, no longer 2D cartoon-drawn-style. I have to say I prefer the earlier style, but this isn’t bad. I think they start to hit their stride a few episodes in – the first few to me looked way too ‘Playstation’ like but it improves over time.

3) The Tachikomas are back, albeit there are a bit fewer of them. Otherwise largely the same, very capable but more comic relief in some ways – there’s also a new character, a PhD math wizard chick (Purin) who in some ways is similar, other ways much smarter. While she has a cyberbrain like the others, she is more akin to Chief Aramaki and Togusa – not a cyborg.

Some additional comments:

a) like the reviewer comment from the IMDB page, the plot takes a bit to really get going, so looking forward to next season given it’s nowhere near resolved by the end.

b) while they are minor characters in the other series too, both Borma and Paz show up only later and I don’t think Paz even has one line of dialog that I can remember – yet.

c) like all GITS shows – barring the lamely-executed American movie with Scarlet J, which was about as effective a ‘translation’ to live action as the Aeon Flux movie was (in other words, fairly major disappointment) – it’s far better to watch these in Japanese with subtitles, IMHO. Same as with Initial D and other anime i’ve watched – you just get a much better sense of the characters and the way that here too – the ‘posturing’ goes on between them, here mostly for Batou but the Major does a bit of it from time to time too.

d) another nit: I’m not sure on timelines here, but I’d have thought that Solid State Society was the last Stand Alone Complex series/movie/etc. (again, ARISE is a prequel so it predates Section 9 being created, kind of a Major Motoko ‘origin story’?) – but acc to IMDB that’s set in 2034, whereas this is supposedly 2045? I realize most of Section 9 are cyborgs so no issue, but Togusa and Aramaki? Hmm…..

So, all in all i’m eager to see more, the premise here (which I didn’t spoil for you) is actually pretty great, lots more to explore here.

candybowl

what we need right now…

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we miss ya, Cozy!

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one of the great ones…..RIP.

Legendary sci-fi artist Syd Mead dead at 86

Iconic Concept Artist Syd Mead Passes Away

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interesting side issue, following up on yesterday’s DS9 post – I didn’t really watch B5 in its original run, then watched it on my buddy’s DVDs several years ago, then a couple years ago rewatched it all. On DVD it holds up fairly well – it’s obviously lower budget than DS9 was, and while the overall plot holds up, there are definitely lame moments from time to time (DS9 wasn’t completely immune to this problem either, but barring the Vic Fontaine aspect near the end, at least they didn’t resort to the holodeck every time they ran out of ideas – TNG, I’m looking at YOU).

Anyway, interesting read to be sure…and F people who don’t realize the impact of the Amiga computer – Ask Spielberg and Jurassic Park on that one among many, many others 🙂

‘Babylon 5’ is great, so why does it look so bad?

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Actor René Auberjonois, known for ‘Benson’ and ‘Star Trek,’ has died at 79

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RIP, science fiction pioneer Dorothy “DC” Fontana

Great tribute here: RIP: Dorothy (”D. C.”) Fontana

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