Warning: Spoilers (spoilage factor: about the same as buying a bag of mixed greens from a big-box supermarket and finding out when you get home that it’s only 2 days away from its expiry date – some leaves are perfectly good, others, well… I guess there might be some good in something slimy and discoloured teaching you to read the label a little more closely next time)
My pile of “just read” books has been getting larger and larger these days, and because there’s been no corresponding increase in the amount of blogging time I’ve got, I haven’t been able to set aside enough time to give each its due. Rather than leaving them by the roadside uncommented-on, I figured I’d just shotgun through a slew of mini-reviews. Let’s do it.
The Apparition Trail by Lisa Smedman
It’s a book with a vision as big as British North America’s northwest territories: combine steampunk, magic, First Nations folklore, mystery, political intrigue, the Northwest Mounted Police (precursors to the Mounties – a myth unto themselves) and real historical figures into a rollicking adventure across the Canadian prairies in the days of the railroad and colonial expansion into the aboriginal territories west of the Great Lakes. The book follows the adventures of Corporal Marmaduke Grayburn (the name of a real NWMP member killed in action) who’s seconded to Q Division (think of a frontier version of the X-Files department) by Superintendant Sam Steele (another real figure from the history books – a Mountie who’s deeds made him a legend) to help investigate supernatural phenomena in the territories. Aided by his second sight and by a civilian paranormal investigator, Grayburn sets off to investigate a growing number of incidents where settlers are vanishing. Grayburn uncovers a native plot to drive off encroaching whites and manages to finesse a solution that averts disaster for all concerned. I’d like to say I really enjoyed this book, it’s got a lot of SF elements that are not only cool but tend to make sense within the logic of the plot, and anytime a Canadian author can weave together a home-grown alternate history, my head is bound to turn. Unfortunately, there were a couple of significant flaws that kept my enjoyment of the story to arms-length. First among them was the story being recounted by Grayburn – not only does that remove any real suspense about his fate when he’s in life-and-death situations. The author’s commitment to making the narrative authentic in its tone to how a gentleman of the 19th Century would have recounted the tale also causes the novel to suffer in that it comes off as a little too dry and detached for a modern audience – it was too hard to care much about Grayburn, even though he seems to be presented as more-or-less a likeable fellow for his time. Some of the action towards the end seems a bit contrived too – there seemed to be too many pitfalls, secrets and sudden changes for the story to be believable. And what was most unlikely of all was the resolution where the Grayburn aids the Cree and their allies with getting carte blanche over the region. I highly doubt that a European civilization that was comfortable using magic to energize its perpetual motion machines would simply roll over and accept the threat of magical annihilation at the hands of the natives, especially with the assemblage of intelligent and driven personalities in government and behind the scenes in industry at the time, to say nothing of the general attitude of the British Empire. Especially given the zeitgeist of discovery, innovation and brave (often reckless) boundary-pushing in Europe and North America during that era, one can imagine the fledgling Dominion of Canada, it’s parent the British Empire and its neighbour the US focusing their impressive energies on finding ways to exploit their own magic and technology to go head-to-head with, and roll over the native opposition. Given the amount of research Smedman has put into this era, the fact that she could imagine that degree of political capitulation, especially on the part of the Macdonald government, shows that this is indeed a work of pure fantasy. Not a bad little yarn, but not a great one either.
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Why review an autobiography, and one of a comedian for that matter, on a blog devoted to SF? Well, Martin’s appeared in enough SF-related stuff (“The Man with Two Brains”, “All of Me” and “The Three Amigos” [remember the Invisible Swordsman, the Singing Bush and the incantations?]) that it’s fair game (guess I probably should have reviewed the impressive Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson last year when I read it too). The book chronicles Martin’s stand-up career specifically, with some introductory childhood biographical detail to give it context. A fast read and a great window into the heart behind a powerfully creative and intelligent mind who graced us by entertaining us a while with some funny bits.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
It took me a while to get around to reading this masterpiece, but certainly no-one had to twist my arm. I’m only kicking myself that I didn’t grab it when it was first released, especially since I am a fan of Wilson’s work. While the novel paints the picture of the Earth being walled-off from the rest of the universe and locked in slowtime by unimaginably alien forces wielding god-like technologies, the real story is about three friends going through life together. In many ways, with his portrayal of big ideas, post-singularity alien technologies and humanity’s use of current and near-future technologies to try to cope, and global disasters, Wilson is an author who has inherited the throne of Arthur C. Clarke. And yet, though some may charge me with blasphemy, Wilson is in many ways far superior to Clarke in his ability to delve into human relationships and emotions in painfully real details, ensuring that the human, and thus more important, stories sideline the spellbinding web of high-tech happenings (as opposed to Clarke’s characters, who, while being well-enough written to be understandable and even people we can empathize with, are features of the big goings-on – a part of the larger picture, rather than distinct and of primary importance). If you’re one of the few who hasn’t picked up “Spin” yet, go out and get yourself a copy right now.
Axis by Robert Charles Wilson
As soon as I was done “Spin” around Christmas, I picked up “Axis” from where my wife (gotta love a woman who feeds my SF addiction!) had put it for me under the tree and jumped into it right away. “Axis” picks up several decades from where “Spin” left off, this time on another world the entities behind the spin barrier have given humanity the means to colonize. Strange dust, containing what appears to be tiny, artificial constructs falls from space, blanketing everything and causing alarm in the human cities and villages. A group of people sets off into the desert to find some renegade scientists and a strange young boy who may provide the key to what’s about to happen. As much as I’d love to rave about “Axis”, I can’t. It’s got all of the big ideas that “Spin” had, but unfortunately, this time around, Wilson’s characters weren’t as engaging as those in “Spin” or some of his other works. This is not to say I was disappointed because “Axis” featured a different cast than its predecessor. Not at all. Rather, I didn’t think Wilson spent enough time on or with these people to make them truly matter to the reader. While the plot pacing was fine, the characters themselves felt rushed. I felt as though I was reading an Arthur C. Clarke story, rather than something better that I know Wilson can (and has, in “Spin” and a number of his other stories) give us. “Axis” is good enough. Sadly, it’s not great, like I’d hoped.
A Time Odyssey – Firstborn by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
In this latest installment of the “Time Odyssey” series, the Firstborn, or genocidal alien super race that doesn’t like noisy neighbours, or any neighbours for that matter who look like they’re about to develop any kind of significant technology, launches another weapon against Earth. As humanity fights among itself and tries to figure out how to deal with the latest alien menace, our hero Bisesa Dutt is yanked out of her world and yet again deposited on Mir, the copy of Earth constructed of pieces from various points in the planet’s history and stashed in a pocket universe (along with a copy of Mars with its now-deceased indigenous culture), where she must deal with Alexander the Great’s growing empire and the rising power of 19th Century Chicago, not to mention figure out how to get back home and help save the world. “Firstborn” is a worthy successor to the other “Time Odyssey” books by Clarke and Baxter. The pacing was perfect and the characters worked well. In all, it’s a solid series. My problem is that the novel is billed as the “conclusion” to the series, but the tone at the end doesn’t feel like an ending at all. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need a pat ending that wraps up everything – on the contrary, I quite enjoy some endings where story lines are left incomplete and the reader is hanging there wondering how things will eventually pan out. But to do that right, an author needs to end on the proper tone, and “Firstborn” doesn’t do that – it’s abrupt in all the wrong ways… it’s as though the book has been cut in half and we’ll be getting the next installment next year or something, even though that’s not the case. Makes me wonder if Clarke and Baxter want to add another volume or two, but don’t want to commit themselves because of Clarke’s health or something. Are they leaving the door open for Baxter to write a sequel series himself in a couple of years if Clarke dies? I guess we’ll have to wait and see – or not. At any rate, if you enjoy a typical Clarkeian tale of mankind picking up the pieces after alien meddling, the “Time Odyssey” books are certainly worth your time.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
It’s taken me long enough to get around to reading this classic, even though I’ve seen all of the various cinematic takes on the story (Vincent Price’s “Last Man on Earth” and the Simpsons’ “The Homega Man” were the best). Until the release of the recent Will Smith movie, it was pretty hard to find a copy of Matheson’s work in bookstores, but, since the newest flick has been released, the publishers have released “I Am Legend” in a convenient anthology that includes a bunch of Matheson’s other stories that’s been widely distributed. As I expected, I enjoyed the book pretty thoroughly. No need to go over the plot, given that the general idea has been splashed around the media for the past few months. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, the book certainly surpasses any of the movies. Definitely worth a read if you haven’t done so already and you’re interested in a story about a man suffering from extreme isolation and depression amidst an unending horror and his battles with alcoholism and madness… not to mention madness.
Bonus thought: non-review of Will Smith’s film resurrection of “I Am Legend”
Irrespective of all the debates about the ending of Smith’s take on the story and which movie version was best, I thought this most recent attempt was a pretty good flick. Smith does a better job of a man sinking into madness as a result of loneliness than Tom Hanks did in “Castaway”. Hands down. But what interests me about Smith’s film in retrospect is this: it seemed like Smith was creating a monster’s answer to movies like “King Kong” or “The Mummy”. It’s like we’re seeing the movie re-made to show us things from the perspective of the marauding undead Egyptian. Not to be distracted by the fact that the mutants looked a lot like the mummy, I certainly got the feeling seeing the mutant in the jacket marshal all of his buddies and his mutant dogs to brave the bullets, UV spotlights and crushing SUV’s and pursue Smith across Manhattan to rescue the female mutant Smith bags to experiment on, that this mutant was a kind of Branden Fraser and Smith was the mummy. Maybe “King Kong” is more apt, since we kinda feel sorry for the big ape and here Smith’s character is basically a likeable guy. A different kind of story than the one Matheson told. Certainly its treatment of Smith’s character was too nice and the ending was all wrong for it to be trying to be the same kind of story as the one Matheson told. That being said, I’ll give Smith full credit for telling a good reverse monster movie story, even if it was done subtly enough that the point was probably lost on most audiences.
Tesseracts 11 edited by Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips
I’m sad to say that this latest addition to the usually strong Tesseracts anthology series was a big yawn. I look forward to these fairly regular compilations of Canadian SF because for years they’ve been a hallmark of good storytelling – some of the best of what this country produces, some of it original and published for the first time as part of the anthology, some stories previously published in the various home-grown SF magazines, but generally, very high caliber stuff. This time around, not so much. I won’t say that the stories in this volume were bad, merely unengaging and not worth the $20 cover price. Really, there were only two worth-while reads in the lot: Kim Goldberg’s poem “Urban Getaway” was a tumble of moving images and Claude Lalumiere’s short story “The Object of Worship” was gripping (although, Lalumiere always writes top-notch stuff – I’ve never read a story of his that wasn’t impressive). In a generous mood I could give a bare nod to the opening tale “In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock N’ Roll” by Madeline Ashby, but the rest were completely forgettable. Not a good average for a book with 24 submissions. Especially not with Doctorow and Phillips editing.
babbling relentlessly about science fiction, fantasy, and all points in between
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Make it so... what?
We’ve become big fans of the new (or at least new in this neck of the woods) Ricky Gervais TV series “Extras”, and last night’s episode had a great anti-geek moment in it. Check out this clip where Gervais’ character, Andy Millman, a movie extra who’s always hitting up the stars for a little help in getting his big break, asks Patrick Stewart for assistance and the former Trek captain realizes his geek cred isn’t quite as significant as he’d thought. Aside from enjoying the pleasure the stars take in playing charicatures of themselves, the show’s storylines focusing on Andy and his friends are wickedly funny, frequently cruel, but often sensitive and surprisingly real too. Not a part of the SF roster, but definitely a show worth watching.
Monday, February 25, 2008
A Late Farewell to Roy Scheider
I was too busy to post anything when word came out about actor Roy Scheider’s death a little while ago, but I figured I’d throw in my two cents now, given that I did enjoy some of his speculative fiction film work.
To me, his best SF roles were Chief Brody in the first “Jaws” movie (while he held his own in “Jaws 2”, the rest of the film was limp) and Dr. Heywood Floyd in “2010”. What appealed to me most about Scheider in these roles was his ability to show us the everyman in extraordinary circumstances. Granted, some credit has to be given to the writers and directors of these films, but a lot rests on the shoulders of the actor. Who can forget Brody, a man afraid of the water to begin with, backing slowly into the cabin of The Orca, eyes wide after just getting a glimpse of the size of the monster shark hunting them, and intoning “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”? Or what about Floyd lounging around with Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) aboard Leanov, as tensions back on Earth between the US and Russia escalate and mysteries in space continue to grow… the two fall to musing about home and while Curnow says he misses “green” and goes on about the abstract beauties of nature, Floyd responds decisively “I’d love a hotdog.” What a great line! And delivered with the simple conviction of a regular guy who’s interested in concrete things that we can all identify with.
Roy Scheider was 75.
To me, his best SF roles were Chief Brody in the first “Jaws” movie (while he held his own in “Jaws 2”, the rest of the film was limp) and Dr. Heywood Floyd in “2010”. What appealed to me most about Scheider in these roles was his ability to show us the everyman in extraordinary circumstances. Granted, some credit has to be given to the writers and directors of these films, but a lot rests on the shoulders of the actor. Who can forget Brody, a man afraid of the water to begin with, backing slowly into the cabin of The Orca, eyes wide after just getting a glimpse of the size of the monster shark hunting them, and intoning “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”? Or what about Floyd lounging around with Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) aboard Leanov, as tensions back on Earth between the US and Russia escalate and mysteries in space continue to grow… the two fall to musing about home and while Curnow says he misses “green” and goes on about the abstract beauties of nature, Floyd responds decisively “I’d love a hotdog.” What a great line! And delivered with the simple conviction of a regular guy who’s interested in concrete things that we can all identify with.
Roy Scheider was 75.
Back to the Junkyard, Knight Rider!
Some childhood memories are better left in the realm of pure nostalgia. The TV show “Knight Rider” is one of them. After watching last week’s pilot TV movie, it seems pretty clear that the producers have no intent to improve on the legacy (like “Battlestar Galactica” did); rather, they’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that they’re simply slicing off another piece of cheese. To be fair, the series idea was pretty corny to begin with: a lone guy (okay, maybe not quite so lone, it seems despite the show’s intro he has a pretty sophisticated technical support team that can drop in when needed for things like fuel, repairs, sandwiches and the occasional attempt at witty banter, but still, the narrator in the old series told us he was a lone man, so let’s take him at his word) driving a car that’s tricked-out with an artificial intelligence and battling the forces of evil. In short, it was a cowboy show for a synthesizer music and neon-clothing generation. About the only part of this frontier American dream we didn’t see was the ‘Hoff periodically bursting into song like Roy Rogers would have. Then again… maybe he did at some point, and perhaps my memory of those old episodes is failing… that or my mind has walled-off the trauma of hearing him yowl away. Anyhow, you’d think if they were going to resurrect this odorous carcass (And not for the first time, might I add! Does anyone remember the “Knight Rider” TV movie[s?] back in the 90’s, or the execrable “Knight Rider 2000” [a team approach that was only lacking a merged colossus to be “Voltron”], or that transparent rip-off “Viper”?) the producers would have at least sat down and tried to figure out how to improve the thing. Apparently not. The changes here are trivial: we’re dealing with the son of Michael Knight (although the ‘Hoff did lumber onscreen in the final act to muse semi-soberly briefly); KITT is now a bulky-looking, nano-tech-enhanced, colour-changing (“Viper” rip-off, anyone?) Mustang instead of a Trans-Am; KITT’s voice is now that of Val Kilmer – sounding kinda baked – instead of the deliciously smarmy William Daniels; home base is now the belly of a cargo plane rather than the rear of a semi-trailer; and the afore-mentioned Mr. Knight Jr. is now an arms-length agent of the FBI, rather than a vigilante. Aside from that, pretty much the same show. Makes me wonder how long it’ll be before we see Goliath or KARR trundling down the lane for a confrontation. What I found curious was that while they mentioned the former KITT once or twice in passing (though they didn’t mention the “Knight Rider 2000” team – and who could blame them?), and while they cleaned-up the ‘Hoff long enough for a couple of minutes on-screen, why didn’t they bother giving the old KITT a little screen-time to bridge the generation gap? Granted, the last we saw of KITT in the 90’s TV movie was his AI module being removed from wreckage and mounted into Michael’s old 50’s jalopy, but still, woulda been nice to at least see him roll up to chauffeur the ‘Hoff outta that scene. Then again, I guess the big question is, why would I care? This flick was so bad I thought I should have carted off my TV to the scrap yard when it was over. Definitely not something I’ll be watching when it starts its regular primetime run.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Distorted Reflections in a Razor
WARNING: SPOILERS (spoilage factor: about the same as that thing you’ve got in that Tupperware container in the back of your fridge… you know the one… no, not that one, the other one, the one with the hairy blue mold starting to grow out around the edges of the seal. About that spoiled.)
Picking up from my general review of “Battlestar Galactica – Razor” a few weeks ago, I want to take a deeper look at an interesting motif that runs through the entire movie – the idea of mirrors. The razor is a thing that can cut, but we can also look at its side and see reflections, though in this case Galactica and her crew are not mirrored exactly in Pegasus: smudges of blood distort the faces staring back at them. Look deep enough and the distortions take on funhouse mirror proportions.
On the surface, the Colonial warships are twinned. Galactica and Pegasus are both battlestars. Both have been engaged in heavy combat against the Cylons. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Galactica is vintage and very much a manual model, while Pegasus is larger, more heavily armed and has a significant amount of automation. Galactica plays a shepherd’s role, defending its fleet of civilian ships. Pegasus, on the other hand, has played an offensive role (pun intended) since the Cylon annihilation of the Colonies, and moreover has been a pirate ship used to prey on Colonial civilian vessels and was thereafter alone until it encountered Galactica’s fleet.
Moving along to a meatier comparison, we can see that Galactica’s senior officers all have shadowy reflections.
Admiral William Adama is older, a veteran of the first Cylon war. He’s soft-spoken and reflective, secure in himself and commands the respect of his crew through intelligence, sound judgment and trustworthiness. While he’s had his ambitions in the past (in fact, from at least one BSG episode flashback he’d expressed a willingness to use political connections to get a command), he’s learned from experience and is mature enough to recognize when to be content with his lot. He has grown to see his duty of protecting the Colonies to be the same as ensuring humanity’s survival by protecting the civilian fleet.
Admiral Helena Cain is young (for a senior officer in the military) and was an orphaned child survivor of the first Cylon war. She also is intelligent, but makes quick decisions without looking back, is hard and cruel and commands her crew through loud forcefulness and intimidation (the frequent displays of the knife are more than just the restless Helena looking for something her hands can toy with, it’s also an overt threat and supremacy display to those around her) and ultimately lethal enforcement that would make a Roman legate proud. She’s ambitious (as we’re told in the season 2 episode “Pegasus” – with Adama noting that she’d used connections to assist her quick rise through the ranks) and determined to be in absolute charge. Her idea of protecting the Colonies is to continue to wage an aggressive campaign against the Cylons and win by any means necessary. We also see a cruel streak in Cain early on when she torments the newly arrived Kendra Shaw for her own amusement. This viciousness and insecurity explodes out of control later when she executes Colonel Belzen with his own gun when he refuses to order an attack against a vastly superior Cylon force (which, as we later learn, caused huge loses to the Pegasus fighter squadron despite Cain’s victory – as Belzen had warned).
Towards the end of “Razor”, while talking with Apollo, Adama as much as acknowledges that Cain was a kind of dark mirror of himself, explaining that it’s not wise to jump to quick judgments about her decisions and actions because it was difficult to know what he would have done had he been alone, without Apollo, President Rosalin and the others to hold him accountable and remind him of his responsibilities to protect the civilian fleet.
And yet, his attempt at fairness and balanced perspective underscores how different he and Cain really were. Cain made no attempt to see things from Adama’s point of view when she began taking apart his command. She didn’t hesitate to brand him a traitor and threaten to respond with deadly force when he insisted on the return of Tyrol and Helo and dispatched a rescue mission.
Adama and Cain also reacted completely differently to three key challenges:
Both advocated torture of Cylon prisoners to get information. But when Adama sent Starbuck to deal with Leoben in season 1, the intent was to gather information and dump him out the airlock if he wouldn’t give information or if he posed a threat. Boomer was merely put in a cell and questioned. And when the sick Cylons were taken from the infected Base Star that was found adrift, the intent was to interrogate them (until someone disabled the air filters and killed them, thereby preventing interrogation). With Adama, there is always the clear sense that there are limits to what he will permit during interrogations. While Leoben’s treatment is rough, it certainly could have been a lot worse. There is no indication that Galactica’s crew tortured Boomer at all. And the Cylon prisoners, while shackled in custody and put on a control collar in transit, were allowed to keep their clothes and did not appear to have been abused prior to their murder. And when he heard that Cain’s men had raped Boomer, Adama had the decency to go to her to express his regrets (although it did take the doctor to be blunt with the apology). Cain, on the other hand, is brutal to the extreme in her handling of prisoners. When her lover/lead civilian technician Gina is discovered to be a Cylon agent, Cain instructs Lieutenant Thorne to utterly break and “humiliate” the prisoner. (Humiliate is not a word in Adama’s vocabulary or one even implied in connection with his treatment of prisoners.) We know that among his horrific methods, Thorne employed vicious beatings and rape, deprivation of food and clothing and encouragement of other members of the crew to participate and initiate torture on their own. Some may point out that not only were the Cylons the enemy and inhuman to boot, but that Cain was acting out of revenge for Gina’s emotional betrayal of her. But encouraging Thorne to be so completely destructive in his methods was totally beyond the pale. To someone of her experience, it should also have been obvious (as Baltar pointed out in season 2) that this degree of torture was non-productive in terms of acquiring information – it was totally personal on Cain’s part. And if she didn’t expressly dictate the finer details of every action that Thorne took, there’s no way Cain was unaware of what he did. To allow Thorne to follow through with his torture was to encourage it. To allow a monster like Thorne to even be on her vessel, let alone be an officer, is inexcusable. Moreover, she unleashed him again when she heard Boomer was being kept aboard Galactica. Cain is every bit as culpable as Thorne and the other vicious crewmen who brutalized Gina and Boomer.
We then need to examine how the two leaders treat civilian fleets. After the attack on the Colonies, Adama had initially planned on leaving the refugee fleet within what he believed was the protection of the planet Ragnar while he left to continue the fight. Adama later reconsidered and decided to take the fleet away from the Colonies, agreeing with Rosalin that ensuring humanity’s survival was more important than waging an unwinnable war of revenge. Adama continued to play shepherd, defending the civilian fleet and standing by it, even during the split with Rosalin. It would have been especially easy at that point to leave the slow, unarmed civilian ships to their fate, but Adama stuck by them. Faced with her own group of civilian tag-alongs, Cain chose rather to turn on her own people (adding a pointed biblical metaphorical angle to her last name) – people she was sworn to protect. She didn’t even consider leaving them intact or in a safe harbor… Obsessed with her guerilla war against the Cylons, Cain turned pirate and preyed on a civilian fleet, plundering their “useful” crew and passengers, ordering the deaths of the family members of protestors, stripping the ships of FTL drives, fuel, weapons, supplies and any other materiel she wanted and then leaving the vessels adrift.
Cain’s monstrous treatment of prisoners and her own civilians is extreme enough to warrant charges of war crimes and indicates that while there are superficial comparisons to be made between her and Adama, they are worlds apart.
The third example of where the two differ is in their development after the end of the first Cylon war. Through flashbacks in “Razor”, as well as the previous seasons of BSG, we see that Adama has had his share of close calls during combat, but has also had challenges after the war (job dissatisfaction, divorce, the death of a child, problems relating to the surviving child, the annihilation of his people). Despite all of the difficulties, he is reflective and seems to have faced life, matured and preserved his humanity. Cain’s tendency towards viciousness almost begs the question as to what she was like before her family was killed in the war. Regardless, she was most certainly damaged by the experience of seeing her family massacred by Cylon centurions. The experience seems to have left her focused on survival at all costs, protection of herself first and becoming as hard and sharp, as much a razor, as possible. In seeking to become the ultimate weapon so that she can never be killed by the Cylons, she has, in effect killed off her own humanity and become a Cylon. Worse than a Cylon, in fact, given that we’ve seen Boomer and #6/Caprica/Gina display emotions beyond hate and show compassion towards some humans.
While Cain may be a reflection of Adama on some level, it is only in a cracked, smudged and distant mirror.
There is another Adama who has reflections aboard the Pegasus. There are three more commanders appointed to lead the ship in the wake of Cain’s murder by Gina/#6, the last of whom is Lee. Apollo begins his stint aboard Pegasus with an introductory speech where he tells the crew he’ll respect Cain’s legacy but that things will be changing. While he may hold the same position aboard the ship and like them he came by the job because of the death of his predecessors, his speech (and his later elaboration to Kendra Shaw) is about as clear a statement as you’re going to get that he’s measured himself against the others and found all of them wanting. Shaw also makes a quick, cutting comparison, noting Fisk (Cain’s second in command after she killed Belzen, later promoted by the elder Adama after Cain’s death) was corrupt and Garner (the former chief engineer promoted by Adama after Fisk’s murder) was an incompetent leader. In about as much of a contrast as she’s willing to give, Shaw acknowledges that Lee appears to be a step up from Fisk and Garner, but throws the shadow of being a daddy’s boy in the face of her new boss. Lee proves to be a worthy commander of “the Beast”, as his battlestar is nicknamed, making prudent decisions for the good of his crew and proving generally successful in tactical situations. He also differs significantly from the other commanders in that he doesn’t get killed – though he does ultimately destroy the Pegasus, thereby putting an end to the dark mirror of Galactica.
At the centre of “Razor” is Lieutenant (and later, Major) Kendra Shaw, and it is through her usually cold (though sometimes when she wouldn’t want us to see it, frightened) eyes we see most of the story. Coming aboard Pegasus as an ambitious young officer, she goes from the object of Cain’s torment to, in the wake of the Cylon attack, the Admiral’s protégé. When Lee arrives, she’s been busted to KP duty for insubordination and she’s shocked to discover that he wants to promote her to XO. Over the course of the “present” half of the movie’s plot, Shaw collides with Starbuck on a regular basis and we discover that these two women are perhaps the closest reflections of all, so similar they make each other uneasy to the point of hostility. And yet there are still differences that point to cracks in Shaw as a mirror, no matter how subtle the flaws.
The similarities between Shaw and Starbuck are fairly obvious: both are young women and career military. They are both the daughters of strong mothers. Both are (for the most part) exceptionally good at their jobs and have risen to the challenge of living under near constant battle pressures in the wake of the Cylon attack. And both have a high degree of respect for Cain’s decisiveness and fearlessness in battle.
Each has a record of insubordination. While there are subtle, yet important, differences between the nature of their insubordination, the similarities are greater. Shaw’s is new-found – she is like a teenager discovering she can be sullen. Her backlash against new authority stems from her having put Cain on a pedestal as some sort of invincible war goddess, from not seeing the Admiral for what she was (Except, perhaps, unconsciously, thus explaining the depth of her anger that fuels the insubordination?). Having become demoralized after Cain’s murder, Shaw is exposed to replacement commanders who are either corrupt or incompetent (and thus not worthy of replacing Cain on the pedestal – if that were even possible) and she lashes out, resulting in successive demotions until Apollo arrives, recognizes her talents and takes her under his wing. Starbuck, on the other hand, has a long history of insubordination predating her collisions with Colonel Tigh. Like Shaw, Starbuck’s anger takes aim at superiors she views as weak – people unworthy of occupying the pedestal. Where Kara differs from Kendra is that Starbuck seems to have never worshipped someone on a pedestal – from what we know of Starbuck’s abusive mother, who, in being violent, demonstrated she was unworthy of that position, Kara most likely grew up believing that no-one deserved to be placed in a superior position for fear they’d abuse it. In fact, her love of Bill Adama, a replacement father as well as commanding officer, seems to have grown out of a realization that some people can earn the right to a higher position with total loyalty and obedience by showing their skill and ability to rise to the challenge, rather than simply demanding respect for the mere office of authority. It is as though Shaw and Starbuck are passing each other going different directions on the highway of hero worship and insubordination.
There are other important similarities: both women are suffering from some degree of addiction – Starbuck: excessive alcohol use; Shaw: some kind of injected drug. The scene where Starbuck reveals herself to Shaw in the kitchen when both are serving their addictions is a life moment where we see two people missing an opportunity to bond – rather than acknowledging their similarity and sharing their pain, there is the standoffishness of two alley cats climbing out of separate dumpsters and stalking past each other on the way back out to the street. Both women seem to be suffering from some sort of mental illness due, in part at least, to the constant stresses of living under siege (not to mention dealing with whatever other mental baggage each drags along). Their addictions further underscore the prospect of mental illness. Shaw’s lessons at the hands of Cain have caused her to withdraw from human contact and repress her emotions. She’s also clearly trying to wall-off any kind of guilt about her role in the murders of the civilians in Pegasus’ short-lived civilian fleet. Starbuck is a risk-taker to the point of being deliberately self-harmful and suicidal.
The two share another key aspect: both play the role of partner or back-up to Apollo and neither wants to share that position, especially with the other. Shaw is the first officer of Pegasus and is extremely territorial when it comes to dealing with outsiders. While she may have to put up with Apollo as her Commander (though she has a growing respect for him), it’s her ship and she won’t have anyone else strutting around doing as they please or bucking the chain of command (especially when that bucking means going around her, directly to Apollo) or otherwise acting in a manner she disapproves of (meaning acting differently from her, and more importantly, differently from what Cain would have mandated). Shaw is definitely jealous that Starbuck has this kind of access to Apollo and disrespect for authority or conventional behavior. For her part, Starbuck is Apollo’s long-time friend, wingman, and secret true love and figures her rightful place is fighting at his side. Never one to respect the chain of command, Starbuck has no qualms about going right around Shaw (or through her if she thinks Shaw has made a bad call) and straight to Apollo. The rivalry between the two escalates to the point where the two are snarling at each other in the hanger after Shaw nearly kills Starbuck (possibly deliberately) by directing the ship’s defensive fire on an inbound Cylon raider tangling with Starbuck. Shaw even grimly warns Starbuck of harsh penalties aboard Pegasus for disobeying or disrespecting a superior officer (implying that she’s not above adopting Cain’s policy of immediate capital punishment). The tension between the two women is still there when they go on the strike mission against the renegade Cylon basestar.
There are also, obviously, many differences between the two, starting with their names – which is to say the nature of their names, not merely that their names are obviously different. Kendra Shaw’s name is straight-forward and rather plain. Aside from her changing rank, it’s the only moniker she goes by. Kara Thrace, on the other hand, is also known by her callsign “Starbuck” – a name that (aside from the Melvillian connotations) seems to imply something larger or more mystical than a regular name would. But even her last name, Thrace, harkens back to the ancient Mediterranean empire in a time of conquest and bronze-age heroes who stood out from the crowd. The fact that the fighter pilot is known by both her name and her callsign allows her to switch identities after a fashion – Starbuck tends to be her public face of hard-drinking, harder-fighting bravado, where Kara Thrace seems to be the name for her personality when she’s in her more vulnerable moments. Kendra Shaw, on the other hand, is always simply Kendra Shaw – one name with no other signature to hide behind, something that might contribute to her need to create her frosty wall to isolate herself from others and hide her pain.
Their different jobs are also in-line with their diverging personalities. Shaw is a bridge officer aboard a battlestar – a job that requires her to function as a cog in a larger machine. Though she has some decision-making powers, she is responsible for ensuring the successful operation and survival of the larger organism that is the ship. Starbuck, on the other hand, is a fighter pilot who, while she is necessarily a member of a team of pilots, can and does –also out of necessity during dogfights - also function as an individual.
The two have obvious differences in the faces they present to the world. Shaw is frosty and still while Starbuck is explosively emotional and tends to be in motion.
And they have grown in different directions as a result of the influence of their mentors. Cain tried to forge Shaw into a razor (a metaphorically violent process involving the application of heat and pressure) – has tried to make Shaw into a weapon capable of destroying the enemy without thought or emotion. Ostensibly an attempt to make Shaw clone of the Admiral. An attempt – to some degree successful – to erase the person she was before, in favour of Cain’s ideal. Aboard the Galactica, it’s clear Adama has always accepted Starbuck as-is. When he’s offered her opportunities outside of her experience or even comfort zone as a fighter pilot (such as the flight instructor assignment or the planner for the attack on the tylium mine asteroid), he done so with the knowledge that Starbuck is actually perfectly suited to those jobs once she’s learned to adapt her skills to them. What is truly significant in these radically different mentorship roles is the outcome on the personalities being guided. When Cain forges Shaw into a razor, we can’t help but think of that James Earl Jones line from “Conan the Barbarian” that weapons alone are ineffective – they must be wielded by someone and thus on her own, without someone like Cain to command her, Shaw’s use as an officer is limited and the effect on Shaw’s personality is limiting. Starbuck on the other hand, because of her independent personality and Adama’s fostering of this trait, is a person who engages in the fighting, not a thing used for fighting. Perhaps some of the mutual dislike between the two stems not only from not wanting to be around someone with similarities, but also because Shaw may be jealous of their intrinsic difference – jealous of the fact that Starbuck is more than she herself is able to be.
Lastly, we see a deep difference in the moral core of the two women (and this is something directly linked to their mentoring) – their ability to carry out orders to kill civilians. In “Razor”, Cain gives the order to kill the families of civilians aboard the Scylla and the other refugee ships who refuse to be conscripted. Naturally, the civilians refuse and protest. Shaw fires the first shots. She kills the first innocent civilians. She does not protest or even question the morality (or legality) of the order, rather, she allows herself to become Cain’s weapon to be used against their own people. In the season 1 episode “33”, Starbuck and Apollo are ordered to destroy a civilian transport that is likely being used as a weapon by the Cylons and may or may not have civilians still aboard. Starbuck balks at the prospect of destroying a ship that could be full of innocent civilians. She argues against it and appeals to morality. In the end, Starbuck does break down and obey, firing on the vessel, but, importantly, only after Apollo has initiated the attack and has put shots into the ship. The fact that Starbuck not only hesitated, but questioned the morality of the order and refused to fire first marks a fundamental difference between the moral fiber of her personality and that of Shaw, who was willing to act on orders, regardless of how immoral or unlawful.
An image we are presented with frequently in “Razor” is that of Shaw staring at the blade given to her by Cain. Certainly she is reflecting on herself during these moments, but one wonders if she sees a reflection in the razor, and if so, what does she see?
The last mirror image of note in “Razor” is one so distorted as to be funhouse mirror in proportions. In the latter half of the movie, we’re presented with a lone ship, its commander and crew, on the run from the Cylons. Sound like a familiar refrain? The renegade basestar with its prototype Hybrid and crew of intelligent and self-aware Guardian centurions is presented to us as a twisted reflection of Galactica and Pegasus. In fact, the similarities are in many ways more interesting than the obvious differences.
The Guardian ship is fleeing because its Hybrid – the first Hybrid - is considered by the Cylons to be a failed experiment (despite the fact that this Hybrid seems to be far more lucid than his younger sisters aboard the other basestars) and its crew of intelligent centurion models are an obsolete design (new centurions built to be bigger and tougher with onboard machine guns, but without any self-awareness that could risk a revolt against the humanoid models who use them like slaves). This rogue group of antique Cylons is therefore obviously in the same boat as the humans who are hunted by the modern machines that have labeled them as dangerous, inferior and unworthy of existence.
From this admittedly limited glimpse at the Guardians’ existence, it would seem that these Cylons might be following a survival strategy similar to that of Galactica - run from the Cylons and avoid direct battle whenever possible in order to preserve lives and limited resources, engage the enemy only defensively, and if offensive measures are called for it is usually to acquire vital resources. We can see that this is likely based on the Guardians’ position when discovered by the humans and by their behavior with the Raptor capture and the eventual battle with Pegasus. The fact that the basestar is on its own deep in unknown territory indicates the Hybrid and Guardians understand they have a better chance of survival by running from the other Cylons than they would lurking around their home territory or the Colonial worlds. This clearly puts them in the same boat as Galactica. In capturing the Raptor with its crew and the scientists who’d chartered it, the Guardians’ only interest seems to have been in harvesting them for biological resources to sustain the Hybrid. Had they wanted to mine the Raptor’s computers or torture the prisoners, they could (if they had the mentality of the modern Cylons) have gained enough information about the position of the fleet that they could have mounted some sort of offensive. Rather, they seem to have behaved like the Colonials at Kobol or the ice planet or the tylium asteroid (after they took it and pillaged the easily available ore, it is unlikely the fleet actually stayed around and prospected the asteroid as much as they could have if the threat of being found by the rest of the Cylon fleet was not so great) or the algae planet – intent on grabbing resources and running rather than trying to get into an extended conflict. In fact, the Guardian attack on the Pegasus seems to be more of a case of the battlestar blundering into the Guardians’ territory and the robots reacting defensively. This would seem to be born-up by the fact that the Guardians don’t appear to try to pursue Pegasus or use the Raptor’s data to locate the fleet for another attack. In fact, the next (and last battle) in the movie, comes at the end when again, the Colonials come knocking on the Guardians’ door and the machines try to fend-off the attack.
In terms of leadership, the basestar and its Guardians are more akin to the Pegasus and her crew. Adama leads Galactica through trust and mutual respect. Cain rules the Pegasus with force, demanding total, unquestioning obedience by virtue of her rank. The Hybrid is worshiped as a god by its Guardian crew. In this way, the Hybrid is the ideal that Cain aspires to. Cain still has to insist on loyalty and obedience where the Hybrid does not – he just has it. Cain presides over free-thinking human beings and tries to forge them into unfeeling weapons – into machines. The Hybrid’s crew are fighting machines, but they maintain wills of their own and yet in so doing they are still willing to do every bidding of the Hybrid (which is not even totally robotic like them). One can imagine that if Cain was still alive at the time of this encounter and had bothered to give the matter any thought, she probably would have been deeply jealous of the Hybrid. It is likely though that she would not see the sad irony that while she tried to dehumanize her crew, her enemies, the Cylons, were working to make themselves – more importantly, their leaders, more human.
The Guardian basestar is also like Pegasus in that it is a ship tragically alone and ultimately doomed. Is this because they both represent outmoded ways of thinking – that they cannot survive because they represent the drive to force things to become that which they are not, or to destroy all that is different? Galactica, on the other hand, represents a collection of many different people working together for a common goal, not merely in spite of their differences, but in respect and even celebration of them.
At the end of “Razor” the Hybrid repeats the litany we have heard previously from some Cylons: “All of this has happened before. And all of it will happen again. And again. And again. And again…” It is here where the mirror metaphor running throughout the movie is truly brought into words – the repetition of events echoes the reflection of images. But as with endless reflections in mirrors facing each other, the farther out the reflections go, the more blurry they become. The image of Galactica and those aboard her becomes distorted when reflected back as Pegasus, and even more so as the Guardian basestar. It is also a story where the mirrors get shattered. Shaw dies. We know already that ultimately Pegasus is destroyed. And the finale sees the renegade basestar nuked. In superstition it is bad luck to break a mirror. But here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here, Galactica is freed - from reflections that weren’t quite true, that were fractured. It is freed from the threat the Hybrid and its minions could have posed and it is free from the dark legacy of Admiral Helena Cain and the divisiveness it created. Because the mirrors are shattered, there are no more false reflections (both external counterparts and internal self-examinations) that could cut into the perception of the self and bleed away survival.
Picking up from my general review of “Battlestar Galactica – Razor” a few weeks ago, I want to take a deeper look at an interesting motif that runs through the entire movie – the idea of mirrors. The razor is a thing that can cut, but we can also look at its side and see reflections, though in this case Galactica and her crew are not mirrored exactly in Pegasus: smudges of blood distort the faces staring back at them. Look deep enough and the distortions take on funhouse mirror proportions.
On the surface, the Colonial warships are twinned. Galactica and Pegasus are both battlestars. Both have been engaged in heavy combat against the Cylons. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Galactica is vintage and very much a manual model, while Pegasus is larger, more heavily armed and has a significant amount of automation. Galactica plays a shepherd’s role, defending its fleet of civilian ships. Pegasus, on the other hand, has played an offensive role (pun intended) since the Cylon annihilation of the Colonies, and moreover has been a pirate ship used to prey on Colonial civilian vessels and was thereafter alone until it encountered Galactica’s fleet.
Moving along to a meatier comparison, we can see that Galactica’s senior officers all have shadowy reflections.
Admiral William Adama is older, a veteran of the first Cylon war. He’s soft-spoken and reflective, secure in himself and commands the respect of his crew through intelligence, sound judgment and trustworthiness. While he’s had his ambitions in the past (in fact, from at least one BSG episode flashback he’d expressed a willingness to use political connections to get a command), he’s learned from experience and is mature enough to recognize when to be content with his lot. He has grown to see his duty of protecting the Colonies to be the same as ensuring humanity’s survival by protecting the civilian fleet.
Admiral Helena Cain is young (for a senior officer in the military) and was an orphaned child survivor of the first Cylon war. She also is intelligent, but makes quick decisions without looking back, is hard and cruel and commands her crew through loud forcefulness and intimidation (the frequent displays of the knife are more than just the restless Helena looking for something her hands can toy with, it’s also an overt threat and supremacy display to those around her) and ultimately lethal enforcement that would make a Roman legate proud. She’s ambitious (as we’re told in the season 2 episode “Pegasus” – with Adama noting that she’d used connections to assist her quick rise through the ranks) and determined to be in absolute charge. Her idea of protecting the Colonies is to continue to wage an aggressive campaign against the Cylons and win by any means necessary. We also see a cruel streak in Cain early on when she torments the newly arrived Kendra Shaw for her own amusement. This viciousness and insecurity explodes out of control later when she executes Colonel Belzen with his own gun when he refuses to order an attack against a vastly superior Cylon force (which, as we later learn, caused huge loses to the Pegasus fighter squadron despite Cain’s victory – as Belzen had warned).
Towards the end of “Razor”, while talking with Apollo, Adama as much as acknowledges that Cain was a kind of dark mirror of himself, explaining that it’s not wise to jump to quick judgments about her decisions and actions because it was difficult to know what he would have done had he been alone, without Apollo, President Rosalin and the others to hold him accountable and remind him of his responsibilities to protect the civilian fleet.
And yet, his attempt at fairness and balanced perspective underscores how different he and Cain really were. Cain made no attempt to see things from Adama’s point of view when she began taking apart his command. She didn’t hesitate to brand him a traitor and threaten to respond with deadly force when he insisted on the return of Tyrol and Helo and dispatched a rescue mission.
Adama and Cain also reacted completely differently to three key challenges:
Both advocated torture of Cylon prisoners to get information. But when Adama sent Starbuck to deal with Leoben in season 1, the intent was to gather information and dump him out the airlock if he wouldn’t give information or if he posed a threat. Boomer was merely put in a cell and questioned. And when the sick Cylons were taken from the infected Base Star that was found adrift, the intent was to interrogate them (until someone disabled the air filters and killed them, thereby preventing interrogation). With Adama, there is always the clear sense that there are limits to what he will permit during interrogations. While Leoben’s treatment is rough, it certainly could have been a lot worse. There is no indication that Galactica’s crew tortured Boomer at all. And the Cylon prisoners, while shackled in custody and put on a control collar in transit, were allowed to keep their clothes and did not appear to have been abused prior to their murder. And when he heard that Cain’s men had raped Boomer, Adama had the decency to go to her to express his regrets (although it did take the doctor to be blunt with the apology). Cain, on the other hand, is brutal to the extreme in her handling of prisoners. When her lover/lead civilian technician Gina is discovered to be a Cylon agent, Cain instructs Lieutenant Thorne to utterly break and “humiliate” the prisoner. (Humiliate is not a word in Adama’s vocabulary or one even implied in connection with his treatment of prisoners.) We know that among his horrific methods, Thorne employed vicious beatings and rape, deprivation of food and clothing and encouragement of other members of the crew to participate and initiate torture on their own. Some may point out that not only were the Cylons the enemy and inhuman to boot, but that Cain was acting out of revenge for Gina’s emotional betrayal of her. But encouraging Thorne to be so completely destructive in his methods was totally beyond the pale. To someone of her experience, it should also have been obvious (as Baltar pointed out in season 2) that this degree of torture was non-productive in terms of acquiring information – it was totally personal on Cain’s part. And if she didn’t expressly dictate the finer details of every action that Thorne took, there’s no way Cain was unaware of what he did. To allow Thorne to follow through with his torture was to encourage it. To allow a monster like Thorne to even be on her vessel, let alone be an officer, is inexcusable. Moreover, she unleashed him again when she heard Boomer was being kept aboard Galactica. Cain is every bit as culpable as Thorne and the other vicious crewmen who brutalized Gina and Boomer.
We then need to examine how the two leaders treat civilian fleets. After the attack on the Colonies, Adama had initially planned on leaving the refugee fleet within what he believed was the protection of the planet Ragnar while he left to continue the fight. Adama later reconsidered and decided to take the fleet away from the Colonies, agreeing with Rosalin that ensuring humanity’s survival was more important than waging an unwinnable war of revenge. Adama continued to play shepherd, defending the civilian fleet and standing by it, even during the split with Rosalin. It would have been especially easy at that point to leave the slow, unarmed civilian ships to their fate, but Adama stuck by them. Faced with her own group of civilian tag-alongs, Cain chose rather to turn on her own people (adding a pointed biblical metaphorical angle to her last name) – people she was sworn to protect. She didn’t even consider leaving them intact or in a safe harbor… Obsessed with her guerilla war against the Cylons, Cain turned pirate and preyed on a civilian fleet, plundering their “useful” crew and passengers, ordering the deaths of the family members of protestors, stripping the ships of FTL drives, fuel, weapons, supplies and any other materiel she wanted and then leaving the vessels adrift.
Cain’s monstrous treatment of prisoners and her own civilians is extreme enough to warrant charges of war crimes and indicates that while there are superficial comparisons to be made between her and Adama, they are worlds apart.
The third example of where the two differ is in their development after the end of the first Cylon war. Through flashbacks in “Razor”, as well as the previous seasons of BSG, we see that Adama has had his share of close calls during combat, but has also had challenges after the war (job dissatisfaction, divorce, the death of a child, problems relating to the surviving child, the annihilation of his people). Despite all of the difficulties, he is reflective and seems to have faced life, matured and preserved his humanity. Cain’s tendency towards viciousness almost begs the question as to what she was like before her family was killed in the war. Regardless, she was most certainly damaged by the experience of seeing her family massacred by Cylon centurions. The experience seems to have left her focused on survival at all costs, protection of herself first and becoming as hard and sharp, as much a razor, as possible. In seeking to become the ultimate weapon so that she can never be killed by the Cylons, she has, in effect killed off her own humanity and become a Cylon. Worse than a Cylon, in fact, given that we’ve seen Boomer and #6/Caprica/Gina display emotions beyond hate and show compassion towards some humans.
While Cain may be a reflection of Adama on some level, it is only in a cracked, smudged and distant mirror.
There is another Adama who has reflections aboard the Pegasus. There are three more commanders appointed to lead the ship in the wake of Cain’s murder by Gina/#6, the last of whom is Lee. Apollo begins his stint aboard Pegasus with an introductory speech where he tells the crew he’ll respect Cain’s legacy but that things will be changing. While he may hold the same position aboard the ship and like them he came by the job because of the death of his predecessors, his speech (and his later elaboration to Kendra Shaw) is about as clear a statement as you’re going to get that he’s measured himself against the others and found all of them wanting. Shaw also makes a quick, cutting comparison, noting Fisk (Cain’s second in command after she killed Belzen, later promoted by the elder Adama after Cain’s death) was corrupt and Garner (the former chief engineer promoted by Adama after Fisk’s murder) was an incompetent leader. In about as much of a contrast as she’s willing to give, Shaw acknowledges that Lee appears to be a step up from Fisk and Garner, but throws the shadow of being a daddy’s boy in the face of her new boss. Lee proves to be a worthy commander of “the Beast”, as his battlestar is nicknamed, making prudent decisions for the good of his crew and proving generally successful in tactical situations. He also differs significantly from the other commanders in that he doesn’t get killed – though he does ultimately destroy the Pegasus, thereby putting an end to the dark mirror of Galactica.
At the centre of “Razor” is Lieutenant (and later, Major) Kendra Shaw, and it is through her usually cold (though sometimes when she wouldn’t want us to see it, frightened) eyes we see most of the story. Coming aboard Pegasus as an ambitious young officer, she goes from the object of Cain’s torment to, in the wake of the Cylon attack, the Admiral’s protégé. When Lee arrives, she’s been busted to KP duty for insubordination and she’s shocked to discover that he wants to promote her to XO. Over the course of the “present” half of the movie’s plot, Shaw collides with Starbuck on a regular basis and we discover that these two women are perhaps the closest reflections of all, so similar they make each other uneasy to the point of hostility. And yet there are still differences that point to cracks in Shaw as a mirror, no matter how subtle the flaws.
The similarities between Shaw and Starbuck are fairly obvious: both are young women and career military. They are both the daughters of strong mothers. Both are (for the most part) exceptionally good at their jobs and have risen to the challenge of living under near constant battle pressures in the wake of the Cylon attack. And both have a high degree of respect for Cain’s decisiveness and fearlessness in battle.
Each has a record of insubordination. While there are subtle, yet important, differences between the nature of their insubordination, the similarities are greater. Shaw’s is new-found – she is like a teenager discovering she can be sullen. Her backlash against new authority stems from her having put Cain on a pedestal as some sort of invincible war goddess, from not seeing the Admiral for what she was (Except, perhaps, unconsciously, thus explaining the depth of her anger that fuels the insubordination?). Having become demoralized after Cain’s murder, Shaw is exposed to replacement commanders who are either corrupt or incompetent (and thus not worthy of replacing Cain on the pedestal – if that were even possible) and she lashes out, resulting in successive demotions until Apollo arrives, recognizes her talents and takes her under his wing. Starbuck, on the other hand, has a long history of insubordination predating her collisions with Colonel Tigh. Like Shaw, Starbuck’s anger takes aim at superiors she views as weak – people unworthy of occupying the pedestal. Where Kara differs from Kendra is that Starbuck seems to have never worshipped someone on a pedestal – from what we know of Starbuck’s abusive mother, who, in being violent, demonstrated she was unworthy of that position, Kara most likely grew up believing that no-one deserved to be placed in a superior position for fear they’d abuse it. In fact, her love of Bill Adama, a replacement father as well as commanding officer, seems to have grown out of a realization that some people can earn the right to a higher position with total loyalty and obedience by showing their skill and ability to rise to the challenge, rather than simply demanding respect for the mere office of authority. It is as though Shaw and Starbuck are passing each other going different directions on the highway of hero worship and insubordination.
There are other important similarities: both women are suffering from some degree of addiction – Starbuck: excessive alcohol use; Shaw: some kind of injected drug. The scene where Starbuck reveals herself to Shaw in the kitchen when both are serving their addictions is a life moment where we see two people missing an opportunity to bond – rather than acknowledging their similarity and sharing their pain, there is the standoffishness of two alley cats climbing out of separate dumpsters and stalking past each other on the way back out to the street. Both women seem to be suffering from some sort of mental illness due, in part at least, to the constant stresses of living under siege (not to mention dealing with whatever other mental baggage each drags along). Their addictions further underscore the prospect of mental illness. Shaw’s lessons at the hands of Cain have caused her to withdraw from human contact and repress her emotions. She’s also clearly trying to wall-off any kind of guilt about her role in the murders of the civilians in Pegasus’ short-lived civilian fleet. Starbuck is a risk-taker to the point of being deliberately self-harmful and suicidal.
The two share another key aspect: both play the role of partner or back-up to Apollo and neither wants to share that position, especially with the other. Shaw is the first officer of Pegasus and is extremely territorial when it comes to dealing with outsiders. While she may have to put up with Apollo as her Commander (though she has a growing respect for him), it’s her ship and she won’t have anyone else strutting around doing as they please or bucking the chain of command (especially when that bucking means going around her, directly to Apollo) or otherwise acting in a manner she disapproves of (meaning acting differently from her, and more importantly, differently from what Cain would have mandated). Shaw is definitely jealous that Starbuck has this kind of access to Apollo and disrespect for authority or conventional behavior. For her part, Starbuck is Apollo’s long-time friend, wingman, and secret true love and figures her rightful place is fighting at his side. Never one to respect the chain of command, Starbuck has no qualms about going right around Shaw (or through her if she thinks Shaw has made a bad call) and straight to Apollo. The rivalry between the two escalates to the point where the two are snarling at each other in the hanger after Shaw nearly kills Starbuck (possibly deliberately) by directing the ship’s defensive fire on an inbound Cylon raider tangling with Starbuck. Shaw even grimly warns Starbuck of harsh penalties aboard Pegasus for disobeying or disrespecting a superior officer (implying that she’s not above adopting Cain’s policy of immediate capital punishment). The tension between the two women is still there when they go on the strike mission against the renegade Cylon basestar.
There are also, obviously, many differences between the two, starting with their names – which is to say the nature of their names, not merely that their names are obviously different. Kendra Shaw’s name is straight-forward and rather plain. Aside from her changing rank, it’s the only moniker she goes by. Kara Thrace, on the other hand, is also known by her callsign “Starbuck” – a name that (aside from the Melvillian connotations) seems to imply something larger or more mystical than a regular name would. But even her last name, Thrace, harkens back to the ancient Mediterranean empire in a time of conquest and bronze-age heroes who stood out from the crowd. The fact that the fighter pilot is known by both her name and her callsign allows her to switch identities after a fashion – Starbuck tends to be her public face of hard-drinking, harder-fighting bravado, where Kara Thrace seems to be the name for her personality when she’s in her more vulnerable moments. Kendra Shaw, on the other hand, is always simply Kendra Shaw – one name with no other signature to hide behind, something that might contribute to her need to create her frosty wall to isolate herself from others and hide her pain.
Their different jobs are also in-line with their diverging personalities. Shaw is a bridge officer aboard a battlestar – a job that requires her to function as a cog in a larger machine. Though she has some decision-making powers, she is responsible for ensuring the successful operation and survival of the larger organism that is the ship. Starbuck, on the other hand, is a fighter pilot who, while she is necessarily a member of a team of pilots, can and does –also out of necessity during dogfights - also function as an individual.
The two have obvious differences in the faces they present to the world. Shaw is frosty and still while Starbuck is explosively emotional and tends to be in motion.
And they have grown in different directions as a result of the influence of their mentors. Cain tried to forge Shaw into a razor (a metaphorically violent process involving the application of heat and pressure) – has tried to make Shaw into a weapon capable of destroying the enemy without thought or emotion. Ostensibly an attempt to make Shaw clone of the Admiral. An attempt – to some degree successful – to erase the person she was before, in favour of Cain’s ideal. Aboard the Galactica, it’s clear Adama has always accepted Starbuck as-is. When he’s offered her opportunities outside of her experience or even comfort zone as a fighter pilot (such as the flight instructor assignment or the planner for the attack on the tylium mine asteroid), he done so with the knowledge that Starbuck is actually perfectly suited to those jobs once she’s learned to adapt her skills to them. What is truly significant in these radically different mentorship roles is the outcome on the personalities being guided. When Cain forges Shaw into a razor, we can’t help but think of that James Earl Jones line from “Conan the Barbarian” that weapons alone are ineffective – they must be wielded by someone and thus on her own, without someone like Cain to command her, Shaw’s use as an officer is limited and the effect on Shaw’s personality is limiting. Starbuck on the other hand, because of her independent personality and Adama’s fostering of this trait, is a person who engages in the fighting, not a thing used for fighting. Perhaps some of the mutual dislike between the two stems not only from not wanting to be around someone with similarities, but also because Shaw may be jealous of their intrinsic difference – jealous of the fact that Starbuck is more than she herself is able to be.
Lastly, we see a deep difference in the moral core of the two women (and this is something directly linked to their mentoring) – their ability to carry out orders to kill civilians. In “Razor”, Cain gives the order to kill the families of civilians aboard the Scylla and the other refugee ships who refuse to be conscripted. Naturally, the civilians refuse and protest. Shaw fires the first shots. She kills the first innocent civilians. She does not protest or even question the morality (or legality) of the order, rather, she allows herself to become Cain’s weapon to be used against their own people. In the season 1 episode “33”, Starbuck and Apollo are ordered to destroy a civilian transport that is likely being used as a weapon by the Cylons and may or may not have civilians still aboard. Starbuck balks at the prospect of destroying a ship that could be full of innocent civilians. She argues against it and appeals to morality. In the end, Starbuck does break down and obey, firing on the vessel, but, importantly, only after Apollo has initiated the attack and has put shots into the ship. The fact that Starbuck not only hesitated, but questioned the morality of the order and refused to fire first marks a fundamental difference between the moral fiber of her personality and that of Shaw, who was willing to act on orders, regardless of how immoral or unlawful.
An image we are presented with frequently in “Razor” is that of Shaw staring at the blade given to her by Cain. Certainly she is reflecting on herself during these moments, but one wonders if she sees a reflection in the razor, and if so, what does she see?
The last mirror image of note in “Razor” is one so distorted as to be funhouse mirror in proportions. In the latter half of the movie, we’re presented with a lone ship, its commander and crew, on the run from the Cylons. Sound like a familiar refrain? The renegade basestar with its prototype Hybrid and crew of intelligent and self-aware Guardian centurions is presented to us as a twisted reflection of Galactica and Pegasus. In fact, the similarities are in many ways more interesting than the obvious differences.
The Guardian ship is fleeing because its Hybrid – the first Hybrid - is considered by the Cylons to be a failed experiment (despite the fact that this Hybrid seems to be far more lucid than his younger sisters aboard the other basestars) and its crew of intelligent centurion models are an obsolete design (new centurions built to be bigger and tougher with onboard machine guns, but without any self-awareness that could risk a revolt against the humanoid models who use them like slaves). This rogue group of antique Cylons is therefore obviously in the same boat as the humans who are hunted by the modern machines that have labeled them as dangerous, inferior and unworthy of existence.
From this admittedly limited glimpse at the Guardians’ existence, it would seem that these Cylons might be following a survival strategy similar to that of Galactica - run from the Cylons and avoid direct battle whenever possible in order to preserve lives and limited resources, engage the enemy only defensively, and if offensive measures are called for it is usually to acquire vital resources. We can see that this is likely based on the Guardians’ position when discovered by the humans and by their behavior with the Raptor capture and the eventual battle with Pegasus. The fact that the basestar is on its own deep in unknown territory indicates the Hybrid and Guardians understand they have a better chance of survival by running from the other Cylons than they would lurking around their home territory or the Colonial worlds. This clearly puts them in the same boat as Galactica. In capturing the Raptor with its crew and the scientists who’d chartered it, the Guardians’ only interest seems to have been in harvesting them for biological resources to sustain the Hybrid. Had they wanted to mine the Raptor’s computers or torture the prisoners, they could (if they had the mentality of the modern Cylons) have gained enough information about the position of the fleet that they could have mounted some sort of offensive. Rather, they seem to have behaved like the Colonials at Kobol or the ice planet or the tylium asteroid (after they took it and pillaged the easily available ore, it is unlikely the fleet actually stayed around and prospected the asteroid as much as they could have if the threat of being found by the rest of the Cylon fleet was not so great) or the algae planet – intent on grabbing resources and running rather than trying to get into an extended conflict. In fact, the Guardian attack on the Pegasus seems to be more of a case of the battlestar blundering into the Guardians’ territory and the robots reacting defensively. This would seem to be born-up by the fact that the Guardians don’t appear to try to pursue Pegasus or use the Raptor’s data to locate the fleet for another attack. In fact, the next (and last battle) in the movie, comes at the end when again, the Colonials come knocking on the Guardians’ door and the machines try to fend-off the attack.
In terms of leadership, the basestar and its Guardians are more akin to the Pegasus and her crew. Adama leads Galactica through trust and mutual respect. Cain rules the Pegasus with force, demanding total, unquestioning obedience by virtue of her rank. The Hybrid is worshiped as a god by its Guardian crew. In this way, the Hybrid is the ideal that Cain aspires to. Cain still has to insist on loyalty and obedience where the Hybrid does not – he just has it. Cain presides over free-thinking human beings and tries to forge them into unfeeling weapons – into machines. The Hybrid’s crew are fighting machines, but they maintain wills of their own and yet in so doing they are still willing to do every bidding of the Hybrid (which is not even totally robotic like them). One can imagine that if Cain was still alive at the time of this encounter and had bothered to give the matter any thought, she probably would have been deeply jealous of the Hybrid. It is likely though that she would not see the sad irony that while she tried to dehumanize her crew, her enemies, the Cylons, were working to make themselves – more importantly, their leaders, more human.
The Guardian basestar is also like Pegasus in that it is a ship tragically alone and ultimately doomed. Is this because they both represent outmoded ways of thinking – that they cannot survive because they represent the drive to force things to become that which they are not, or to destroy all that is different? Galactica, on the other hand, represents a collection of many different people working together for a common goal, not merely in spite of their differences, but in respect and even celebration of them.
At the end of “Razor” the Hybrid repeats the litany we have heard previously from some Cylons: “All of this has happened before. And all of it will happen again. And again. And again. And again…” It is here where the mirror metaphor running throughout the movie is truly brought into words – the repetition of events echoes the reflection of images. But as with endless reflections in mirrors facing each other, the farther out the reflections go, the more blurry they become. The image of Galactica and those aboard her becomes distorted when reflected back as Pegasus, and even more so as the Guardian basestar. It is also a story where the mirrors get shattered. Shaw dies. We know already that ultimately Pegasus is destroyed. And the finale sees the renegade basestar nuked. In superstition it is bad luck to break a mirror. But here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here, Galactica is freed - from reflections that weren’t quite true, that were fractured. It is freed from the threat the Hybrid and its minions could have posed and it is free from the dark legacy of Admiral Helena Cain and the divisiveness it created. Because the mirrors are shattered, there are no more false reflections (both external counterparts and internal self-examinations) that could cut into the perception of the self and bleed away survival.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Look what else washed up on the beach - more Battlestar photos
Since I posted “Beach Blanket Battlestar – or- Battlestar Photographica” a little while ago, featuring photos from the set of “Battlestar Galactica” on Centennial Beach in Tsawwassen just prior to the writers’ strike, there’s been some interest in more shots from that day. Joe asked for high-res versions of the pix; I wish I could oblige, but unfortunately, what you see is all that was sent to me. I do have one more nice shot of the ruins though, as you’ll see below. Chrome Toaster recently asked for some of the set and sign shots I’d alluded to, and luckily, I do have a few of those to pass along for those who are interested. (And for those who are interested in props, wardrobe, etc from Battlestar, make sure you check out Chrome Toaster’s site: www.future-past.com) So, without further ado, here are the last of the Battlestar set photos to wash up on bloginhood’s shores:
Another pretty picture of the ruins.
A really wide shot of the cast and crew doing… well… they’re too far away to actually make out what they’re doing. I’m assuming they’re feeling guilty about having no marshmallows to roast.
Really grainy shot of shooting by the water’s edge. Not sure who’s on camera.And now, just for Chrome Toaster: Signs!
Signage with Raptor-y goodness in the background.
Signage with no Raptor-y goodness in the background.
Who needs signs when you’ve got set trucks? Go, you majestic transporters of all things technical and prop-like! (How can you tell I've been watching reruns of "The Tick"?)
That’s it for the Battlestar photos, folks. I wish I had more. Let’s hope the studios will come to their senses, realize the writers just want what’s fair and ink a deal so they can all get back to doing what they do best.
Stay tuned for an in-depth reflection on “Razor”, frequently promised, but definitely coming in the next day or two.
Friday, January 25, 2008
If it's not Scottish, it's craaaaaap! A speculative fiction tribute to Robbie Burns Day
Around the world, Scots and those who want to be Scots, at least for a day, are celebrating Robbie Burns Day. (Being part Scottish, like many Canadian mutts, I once attended a Burns Day dinner and chatted with the host, who proceeded to rattle off the names of about two dozen countries where the day was honored. Locally, here in Vancouver, in addition to the more traditional Burns Day suppers, we also have events marrying the classic celebration to other cultures, such as Gung Haggis Fat Choy – uniting the Chinese with the Scots. But I digress.) On this day devoted to celebrating Scotland’s National Poet and, by extension, all things Scottish, we see plenty of scotch go down (and sometimes, if enough scotch has gone down, sometimes the kilts do too). So, while downing a glass myself earlier this evening, I thought it fitting to do a salute to the Top 5 Scots of SF film and television.
5) Robbie Coltrane – For those who haven’t followed his hilarious stand-up comedy routine and comedic acting (not to mention his solid dramatic talent and his superb “Coltrane in a Cadillac” documentary), Coltrane is popularly known these days for his role as Haggrid the half-giant in the Harry Potter movie series. He makes the top 5, edging out some on the honorable mentions list, on the basis of bonus points for having made it through the movie “Krull” (a poor flick indeed) with his self-respect intact, most especially since he was sporting one of the worst-looking buzz cuts in cinematic history throughout the film.
4) Ewan McGregor – Say what you will about the Star Wars prequel trilogy, McGregor did one hell of a job of breathing life into Obi Wan Kenobi. At times, his impression of Sir Alec Guinness was so spot on it was eerie.
3) Dennis Lawson – In playing Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy, Lawson presented the face many a fanboy could identify with – and one that was living a fanboy’s dream – the geeky lookin’ guy who became top gun and a galactic hero when he jumped into the cockpit of an X-Wing starfighter. Oh sure, Ewan McGregor’s uncle may have played a character who was a bit cautious about hitting a target as small as two metres in the Death Star’s trench, and sure he may have been made to look like a bit of a dweeb by that sword-wielding, wamprat-splattering farmboy during the mission briefing, but there was no better pilot in the Rebel Alliance than Red 2 – later Red Leader. And he didn’t let his hotshot status get in the way of handing out complements to his gunner on Hoth for a job well done. Classy guy.
2) David Tennant – The best Doctor since Tom Baker. ‘Nuff said.
1) Sean Connery – What can you say? I mean, he’s friggin Connery. The Bond films alone get him the top spot. Add to that great performances in “Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade”, “Dragonheart”, “Robin & Marian”, “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (a one minute performance by Connery makes a 90 minute performance by Kevin Costner look soooooo bad), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (say what you will about the movie, Connery represented himself well), “Time Bandits”,” Outland” and you have to admit the man has excellent SF credentials. Okay, he may lose a few points for “Zardoz”, “First Knight”, “The Avengers”, Disney’s “Darby O’Gill & The Little People” (eesh) and the truly awful “Highlander II” (okay, he may lose a lotta points for that steaming pile), but that’s the law of averages – you make a lot of movies and some are going to suck. That being said, he more than makes up for the losses with bonus points for “Highlander”, where not only did he give a good performance, he also showed great tolerance as a Scotsman playing an Egyptian-Spaniard opposite Christopher Lambert – a mumbling French actor who could hardly speak English playing a Scot. (how convoluted is that?!)
Honorable mentions:
-Billy Connolly (who only lost out to Coltrane for the number 5 slog because Coltrane kept his head high despite that buzz cut)
-Gerard Butler (a great job in “Beowulf & Grendal” and a competent enough presence in a number of other films wasn’t enough to outweigh the cheese factor of the entire production of “300” or the downright bad “Dracula 2000”)
And let’s give a hand to some honorary Scots in TV and the Movies:
-James Doohan (originally from Vancouver, BC and lived near Seattle, Washington) – Scotty. Again, ‘nuff said.
-Mike Myers (Toronto, Ontario’s own) – Shrek, Fat Bastard, and let’s not forget Stewart from the SNL “All things Scottish” sketch (not SF-related, but pretty damn funny)
-John Cleese (about as English as they come) – forget the explosions, Tim the Enchanter was enough of a bad-ass that he reduced Arthur and his cronies to nervous, self-conscious wrecks with an impatient glare in “Monty Python’s The Holy Grail”
5) Robbie Coltrane – For those who haven’t followed his hilarious stand-up comedy routine and comedic acting (not to mention his solid dramatic talent and his superb “Coltrane in a Cadillac” documentary), Coltrane is popularly known these days for his role as Haggrid the half-giant in the Harry Potter movie series. He makes the top 5, edging out some on the honorable mentions list, on the basis of bonus points for having made it through the movie “Krull” (a poor flick indeed) with his self-respect intact, most especially since he was sporting one of the worst-looking buzz cuts in cinematic history throughout the film.
4) Ewan McGregor – Say what you will about the Star Wars prequel trilogy, McGregor did one hell of a job of breathing life into Obi Wan Kenobi. At times, his impression of Sir Alec Guinness was so spot on it was eerie.
3) Dennis Lawson – In playing Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy, Lawson presented the face many a fanboy could identify with – and one that was living a fanboy’s dream – the geeky lookin’ guy who became top gun and a galactic hero when he jumped into the cockpit of an X-Wing starfighter. Oh sure, Ewan McGregor’s uncle may have played a character who was a bit cautious about hitting a target as small as two metres in the Death Star’s trench, and sure he may have been made to look like a bit of a dweeb by that sword-wielding, wamprat-splattering farmboy during the mission briefing, but there was no better pilot in the Rebel Alliance than Red 2 – later Red Leader. And he didn’t let his hotshot status get in the way of handing out complements to his gunner on Hoth for a job well done. Classy guy.
2) David Tennant – The best Doctor since Tom Baker. ‘Nuff said.
1) Sean Connery – What can you say? I mean, he’s friggin Connery. The Bond films alone get him the top spot. Add to that great performances in “Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade”, “Dragonheart”, “Robin & Marian”, “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (a one minute performance by Connery makes a 90 minute performance by Kevin Costner look soooooo bad), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (say what you will about the movie, Connery represented himself well), “Time Bandits”,” Outland” and you have to admit the man has excellent SF credentials. Okay, he may lose a few points for “Zardoz”, “First Knight”, “The Avengers”, Disney’s “Darby O’Gill & The Little People” (eesh) and the truly awful “Highlander II” (okay, he may lose a lotta points for that steaming pile), but that’s the law of averages – you make a lot of movies and some are going to suck. That being said, he more than makes up for the losses with bonus points for “Highlander”, where not only did he give a good performance, he also showed great tolerance as a Scotsman playing an Egyptian-Spaniard opposite Christopher Lambert – a mumbling French actor who could hardly speak English playing a Scot. (how convoluted is that?!)
Honorable mentions:
-Billy Connolly (who only lost out to Coltrane for the number 5 slog because Coltrane kept his head high despite that buzz cut)
-Gerard Butler (a great job in “Beowulf & Grendal” and a competent enough presence in a number of other films wasn’t enough to outweigh the cheese factor of the entire production of “300” or the downright bad “Dracula 2000”)
And let’s give a hand to some honorary Scots in TV and the Movies:
-James Doohan (originally from Vancouver, BC and lived near Seattle, Washington) – Scotty. Again, ‘nuff said.
-Mike Myers (Toronto, Ontario’s own) – Shrek, Fat Bastard, and let’s not forget Stewart from the SNL “All things Scottish” sketch (not SF-related, but pretty damn funny)
-John Cleese (about as English as they come) – forget the explosions, Tim the Enchanter was enough of a bad-ass that he reduced Arthur and his cronies to nervous, self-conscious wrecks with an impatient glare in “Monty Python’s The Holy Grail”
Monday, January 21, 2008
"Cloverfield" Review
WARNING: SPOILERS (spoilage factor: about the same as a package of sliced ham left in the back of your meat tray a few days too long until it develops a nice coating of slime)
Just got home from watching “Cloverfield”. Still waiting for my stomach to settle down.
Overall, “Cloverfield” was a good movie. Not a great film. But a good movie.
The story has us riding along second person (bordering on first person perspective) with a group of New York yuppies, who are partying it up, bidding farewell to their buddy Rob who’s about to leave for a job in Japan, when suddenly all hell breaks loose. We see things from the perspective of the video camera being held by Hud, Rob’s buddy who’s amiable, a Chatty Kathy and kind of an idiot. There are explosions, the power flickers, and the statue of Liberty’s head does a pinball impression down their street, sending our partygoers and other residents stampeding out of Manhattan. There’s something in the city, but it sure ain’t sex. After tragedy strikes the group at the Brooklyn Bridge, Rob gets a call from his sometime lover Beth, who’s trapped in her building, and against all logic, he goes back in after her, followed by faithful Hud, Lily and Marlena, as the city collapses around them and the military wage a losing battle against a giant rampaging beast.
I’ll get my bias out of the way right off the top here: I’m a fan of giant monster movies. Not an uber-fan with every episode of the Godzilla franchise on DVD, mind you, but I enjoy watching the old city-stompers once in a while (and have been greatly appreciative of CBC running the Godzilla movies late on Saturday nights for the past couple of weeks) and I’m always interested when they evolve along different lines. I’m probably one of the few people who will admit to finding the late 90’s Godzilla remake with Matthew Broderick somewhat entertaining (Jean Renaud stole the show). And the recent Korean film “The Host” was absolute genius. So, when “Cloverfield” came along, redefining the monster movie by showing us not the big picture that we’d get with wide shots of a monster running amok through a city with cutaways to scientists and military guys to explain everything (in fact, the best we get in terms of explanations are the babbled theories of Hud on the run – guessing everything from prehistoric deep sea leviathan to alien invader to government experiment gone wrong), rather, we saw it as the average citizens would live through it (or not) on the ground. Which, in many ways, made it all the more absorbing and frightening. In some ways it reminded me vaguely of a short story I read a while ago (the title and author’s name escape me, and it’s too late at night to be combing through all of the short story anthologies and issues of On Spec on my shelves) about a man in a tour group chartering a tour through a city’s ground zero during a giant monster attack.
At any rate, using the home video style of shooting the movie (like “The Blair Witch Project”) was an excellent device to really put the audience into the shoes of the characters. It did a great job (with one or two exceptions) of drawing me in as Rob , Hud, Lily, Marlena (and later, Beth) tried to survive amidst the devastation. The thunder of the tank-fire, the rampaging monster and the falling buildings weren’t something you could watch in a detached way as it was happening all around you. I normally don’t have much patience with first or immediate second person styles of shooting (that old episode of MASH where you see the entire episode through the eyes of a patient annoyed me after about 10 minutes), but this time, in “Cloverfield”, it really worked for some reason.
The down side, as many have pointed out, was that the earthquakey jerking of the camera did make me feel a little nauseous. And that’s no small feat! I’ve got a pretty strong stomach to begin with. Rollercoasters don’t tend to phase me. As a former broadcaster, I’ve had to sit through plenty of shakey amateur footage (some of which was my own, back in school) to look for details. And as a reporter on Vancouver Island, I once covered the annual SARTech (Search And Rescue Technician) games, where I rode along with a crew aboard a Hercules aircraft for a 3 hour, low-level, competition flight where the plane was constantly rising, diving and banking over the rough terrain and bucking in the air currents like a surly bronco – I made it through most of that experience before my stomach finally had enough. But, despite my gastro-intestinal hardiness, “Cloverdale” and its earthquake-prone shooting had my stomach doing flips after about 30 or 45 minutes. I kept control by looking at the seatback in front of me when the scenes were just running in the dark with not much to see, but I was glad I didn’t get my usual bucket of popcorn for this flick. Gladder still that my wife didn’t come, because she has a tendency to get really, really motion sick.
Another aspect of this movie that impressed me was its level of humanity. I knew a bit about the plot before I went in, and I wasn’t expecting to feel much sympathy for these people – I don’t have the same lifestyle they do, they’re not the sort of people I usually associate with on a personal basis or through work, and they live in a different city and country than I do. And some of the personalities are ones that I wouldn’t get along with in real life. This is an important note, because we are presented with diverse personalities, some of which are easier to like and identify with than others, and yet, as in any disaster, we have to put up with them regardless of whether we like them or not, because everyone’s in the same boat of trying to get through the experience alive. And, as the movie progressed, I did feel myself becoming concerned for these characters and fearing for their safety – even Marlena, who I found to be fairly cold and unpleasant. Marlena’s half-seen and rather gruesome end was upsetting, not merely because the other characters who I did like were upset, but because she was part of the group that I, as a member of the audience experiencing this at their level, was also a member of. There wasn’t much in the writing that made these characters as real as they were – part of the credit goes to the actors for being able to find real faces and resisting the urge to make this into a comic book, and part of the credit, again, goes to that in-your-face, street level, right-over-your-shoulder second person home camcorder style of presenting the movie.
The monster itself was different than what we’re used to. No giant lizard or insect this. This critter was pretty hard to identify (on the few occasions where we got to see the full thing) and was definitely scary. I will break from the pack of other reviewers though, and say it’s look was not unique. As a moviegoer, I’ve seen monsters similar to this one before – just not on a titanic scale. At first, coming out of the theatre, I thought it was vaguely reminiscent of Pumpkinhead. Then I thought it reminded me a bit of the hybrid alien (the Ripley clone’s sort-of grandchild) in “Alien: Resurrection”. Finally I was able to put my finger on it: this monster looks a whole lot like that weird ghost thing at the top of the stairs at the end of “Poltergeist” that tries to take a bite of the mother when she tries to free the kids who are trapped in the bedroom/hellmouth. It looked a lot like that ghost/demon. A whole lot. Except really big and grey. And of course, this beasty had friends – creepy little spidery-monkeyish lice (or were they offspring?) things that dropped off it periodically to change the tone of the film from people avoiding large-scale disaster to people fleeing from ravenous monsters. The monster worked as well as it did by the old Spielberg trick of concealing it through most of the movie, but also because the special effects were grade-A. Kudos for great sound engineering too – very important in a film with no soundtrack.
I also thought the periodic cut-aways to the bleed-through of Coney Island footage worked well. It helped to underscore the relationship between Rob and Beth, cementing their humanity and bring emotions to the forefront to an audience at risk of becoming desensitized amidst the extensive destruction. It also helped shift the movie’s gears downward too, giving us a short level to recover from the heart-pounding action before cutting back to the attack and another drop down the roller-coaster’s track. And, of course, if you pay attention to the final Coney Island bit that provides the end bracket to the film, as much as it’s out of place with “the perfect day”, there’s an oh-so-quick shot that gives you some hint at the monster’s origin.
Which brings us to the end (super spoiler territory here). Where after witnessing abrupt endings to many lives of people in the disaster, both those who we don’t know, and those we do (like Marlena and Jason), we experience the footage being cut-off as the lives of our characters get cut-off both by man and the beast. After managing to survive the hell of the night, after managing to rescue Beth from impossible odds, after surviving a helicopter crash, Rob, Hud and Beth step into a sunny morning in Central Park only to have Hud come face to face with the creature and get killed, and Rob & Beth huddle under a bridge to say their goodbyes until the military attach against the monster brings the structure down on top of them. Their deaths are sudden, shocking and sad. Their deaths were typical of the ending of lives in disaster. And thus their endings were real and all the more powerful. They didn’t get a happy ending (aside from Rob & Beth getting to say goodbye to one-another). They didn’t get any answers. And they didn’t get any tribute (at least none that we, the audience are privy to) beyond being entered into a military records archive. It’s questionable as to whether they got any dignity. In seeing their lives get cut-off abruptly in the closeness and the darkness and the noise and the fear, in failing to see the bigger picture, we too, as an audience got cut off (perhaps there’s even the possibility we’re meant to think we too got killed in the bridge collapse – somewhat like one theory about the recent end to “The Sopranos” that the sudden cut to a black screen meant the audience was whacked after a series which saw pretty much everyone else get bumped off) – at the mercy of larger and more powerful forces, like the little people we are. In doing so, this movie made a bigger impression on me than other disaster films where we see the wrap-up, where we see the monster go down in gouts of flame and blood, or the flood waters recede or the asteroid get blowed-up-real-good. This ending, for having the courage to be so abrupt, was perfect.
Despite liking “Cloverfield” as much as I did, I’m only recommending it for video purchase. The super-shakey shooting was just too much on my stomach and I think I would have enjoyed it even more watching it at home on TV where it wouldn’t be in my face quite as much. But then, maybe I’ll be missing out on what was possibly very much intended to be part of the experience – experiencing it on a more extensive, and literally gut-wrenching level than merely viewing it could give.
Check out former “Star Trek – The Next Generation” star Will Wheaton’s review (courtesy of a link through SF Signal) for some interesting thoughts on “Cloverfield”.
Just got home from watching “Cloverfield”. Still waiting for my stomach to settle down.
Overall, “Cloverfield” was a good movie. Not a great film. But a good movie.
The story has us riding along second person (bordering on first person perspective) with a group of New York yuppies, who are partying it up, bidding farewell to their buddy Rob who’s about to leave for a job in Japan, when suddenly all hell breaks loose. We see things from the perspective of the video camera being held by Hud, Rob’s buddy who’s amiable, a Chatty Kathy and kind of an idiot. There are explosions, the power flickers, and the statue of Liberty’s head does a pinball impression down their street, sending our partygoers and other residents stampeding out of Manhattan. There’s something in the city, but it sure ain’t sex. After tragedy strikes the group at the Brooklyn Bridge, Rob gets a call from his sometime lover Beth, who’s trapped in her building, and against all logic, he goes back in after her, followed by faithful Hud, Lily and Marlena, as the city collapses around them and the military wage a losing battle against a giant rampaging beast.
I’ll get my bias out of the way right off the top here: I’m a fan of giant monster movies. Not an uber-fan with every episode of the Godzilla franchise on DVD, mind you, but I enjoy watching the old city-stompers once in a while (and have been greatly appreciative of CBC running the Godzilla movies late on Saturday nights for the past couple of weeks) and I’m always interested when they evolve along different lines. I’m probably one of the few people who will admit to finding the late 90’s Godzilla remake with Matthew Broderick somewhat entertaining (Jean Renaud stole the show). And the recent Korean film “The Host” was absolute genius. So, when “Cloverfield” came along, redefining the monster movie by showing us not the big picture that we’d get with wide shots of a monster running amok through a city with cutaways to scientists and military guys to explain everything (in fact, the best we get in terms of explanations are the babbled theories of Hud on the run – guessing everything from prehistoric deep sea leviathan to alien invader to government experiment gone wrong), rather, we saw it as the average citizens would live through it (or not) on the ground. Which, in many ways, made it all the more absorbing and frightening. In some ways it reminded me vaguely of a short story I read a while ago (the title and author’s name escape me, and it’s too late at night to be combing through all of the short story anthologies and issues of On Spec on my shelves) about a man in a tour group chartering a tour through a city’s ground zero during a giant monster attack.
At any rate, using the home video style of shooting the movie (like “The Blair Witch Project”) was an excellent device to really put the audience into the shoes of the characters. It did a great job (with one or two exceptions) of drawing me in as Rob , Hud, Lily, Marlena (and later, Beth) tried to survive amidst the devastation. The thunder of the tank-fire, the rampaging monster and the falling buildings weren’t something you could watch in a detached way as it was happening all around you. I normally don’t have much patience with first or immediate second person styles of shooting (that old episode of MASH where you see the entire episode through the eyes of a patient annoyed me after about 10 minutes), but this time, in “Cloverfield”, it really worked for some reason.
The down side, as many have pointed out, was that the earthquakey jerking of the camera did make me feel a little nauseous. And that’s no small feat! I’ve got a pretty strong stomach to begin with. Rollercoasters don’t tend to phase me. As a former broadcaster, I’ve had to sit through plenty of shakey amateur footage (some of which was my own, back in school) to look for details. And as a reporter on Vancouver Island, I once covered the annual SARTech (Search And Rescue Technician) games, where I rode along with a crew aboard a Hercules aircraft for a 3 hour, low-level, competition flight where the plane was constantly rising, diving and banking over the rough terrain and bucking in the air currents like a surly bronco – I made it through most of that experience before my stomach finally had enough. But, despite my gastro-intestinal hardiness, “Cloverdale” and its earthquake-prone shooting had my stomach doing flips after about 30 or 45 minutes. I kept control by looking at the seatback in front of me when the scenes were just running in the dark with not much to see, but I was glad I didn’t get my usual bucket of popcorn for this flick. Gladder still that my wife didn’t come, because she has a tendency to get really, really motion sick.
Another aspect of this movie that impressed me was its level of humanity. I knew a bit about the plot before I went in, and I wasn’t expecting to feel much sympathy for these people – I don’t have the same lifestyle they do, they’re not the sort of people I usually associate with on a personal basis or through work, and they live in a different city and country than I do. And some of the personalities are ones that I wouldn’t get along with in real life. This is an important note, because we are presented with diverse personalities, some of which are easier to like and identify with than others, and yet, as in any disaster, we have to put up with them regardless of whether we like them or not, because everyone’s in the same boat of trying to get through the experience alive. And, as the movie progressed, I did feel myself becoming concerned for these characters and fearing for their safety – even Marlena, who I found to be fairly cold and unpleasant. Marlena’s half-seen and rather gruesome end was upsetting, not merely because the other characters who I did like were upset, but because she was part of the group that I, as a member of the audience experiencing this at their level, was also a member of. There wasn’t much in the writing that made these characters as real as they were – part of the credit goes to the actors for being able to find real faces and resisting the urge to make this into a comic book, and part of the credit, again, goes to that in-your-face, street level, right-over-your-shoulder second person home camcorder style of presenting the movie.
The monster itself was different than what we’re used to. No giant lizard or insect this. This critter was pretty hard to identify (on the few occasions where we got to see the full thing) and was definitely scary. I will break from the pack of other reviewers though, and say it’s look was not unique. As a moviegoer, I’ve seen monsters similar to this one before – just not on a titanic scale. At first, coming out of the theatre, I thought it was vaguely reminiscent of Pumpkinhead. Then I thought it reminded me a bit of the hybrid alien (the Ripley clone’s sort-of grandchild) in “Alien: Resurrection”. Finally I was able to put my finger on it: this monster looks a whole lot like that weird ghost thing at the top of the stairs at the end of “Poltergeist” that tries to take a bite of the mother when she tries to free the kids who are trapped in the bedroom/hellmouth. It looked a lot like that ghost/demon. A whole lot. Except really big and grey. And of course, this beasty had friends – creepy little spidery-monkeyish lice (or were they offspring?) things that dropped off it periodically to change the tone of the film from people avoiding large-scale disaster to people fleeing from ravenous monsters. The monster worked as well as it did by the old Spielberg trick of concealing it through most of the movie, but also because the special effects were grade-A. Kudos for great sound engineering too – very important in a film with no soundtrack.
I also thought the periodic cut-aways to the bleed-through of Coney Island footage worked well. It helped to underscore the relationship between Rob and Beth, cementing their humanity and bring emotions to the forefront to an audience at risk of becoming desensitized amidst the extensive destruction. It also helped shift the movie’s gears downward too, giving us a short level to recover from the heart-pounding action before cutting back to the attack and another drop down the roller-coaster’s track. And, of course, if you pay attention to the final Coney Island bit that provides the end bracket to the film, as much as it’s out of place with “the perfect day”, there’s an oh-so-quick shot that gives you some hint at the monster’s origin.
Which brings us to the end (super spoiler territory here). Where after witnessing abrupt endings to many lives of people in the disaster, both those who we don’t know, and those we do (like Marlena and Jason), we experience the footage being cut-off as the lives of our characters get cut-off both by man and the beast. After managing to survive the hell of the night, after managing to rescue Beth from impossible odds, after surviving a helicopter crash, Rob, Hud and Beth step into a sunny morning in Central Park only to have Hud come face to face with the creature and get killed, and Rob & Beth huddle under a bridge to say their goodbyes until the military attach against the monster brings the structure down on top of them. Their deaths are sudden, shocking and sad. Their deaths were typical of the ending of lives in disaster. And thus their endings were real and all the more powerful. They didn’t get a happy ending (aside from Rob & Beth getting to say goodbye to one-another). They didn’t get any answers. And they didn’t get any tribute (at least none that we, the audience are privy to) beyond being entered into a military records archive. It’s questionable as to whether they got any dignity. In seeing their lives get cut-off abruptly in the closeness and the darkness and the noise and the fear, in failing to see the bigger picture, we too, as an audience got cut off (perhaps there’s even the possibility we’re meant to think we too got killed in the bridge collapse – somewhat like one theory about the recent end to “The Sopranos” that the sudden cut to a black screen meant the audience was whacked after a series which saw pretty much everyone else get bumped off) – at the mercy of larger and more powerful forces, like the little people we are. In doing so, this movie made a bigger impression on me than other disaster films where we see the wrap-up, where we see the monster go down in gouts of flame and blood, or the flood waters recede or the asteroid get blowed-up-real-good. This ending, for having the courage to be so abrupt, was perfect.
Despite liking “Cloverfield” as much as I did, I’m only recommending it for video purchase. The super-shakey shooting was just too much on my stomach and I think I would have enjoyed it even more watching it at home on TV where it wouldn’t be in my face quite as much. But then, maybe I’ll be missing out on what was possibly very much intended to be part of the experience – experiencing it on a more extensive, and literally gut-wrenching level than merely viewing it could give.
Check out former “Star Trek – The Next Generation” star Will Wheaton’s review (courtesy of a link through SF Signal) for some interesting thoughts on “Cloverfield”.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
A Shallow Cut with a Razor
WARNING: SPOILERS (spoilage factor: about the same as a cow mutilated by aliens and left undiscovered in a field for a couple of weeks)
First of all, sorry for the lateness of this post. I know I’d promised something for last weekend, but things got too busy. That being said, I’m glad some of you enjoyed the post with the photos from the set on Centennial Beach. Anyway, here’s a quick review of “Battlestar Galactica – Razor”.
It’s been a few weeks since “Razor” made its appearance – a sidebar story to the main BSG plotline (though it did drop a couple of hints about what might be expected in the upcoming season) detailing the events involving the Pegasus, as seen through the eyes of one of its officers, Kendra Shaw.
Pretty much half of the story is told through Shaw’s flashbacks: her arrival, the attack on the Colonies, the murder of the ship’s first X-O, the discovery of the Cylon traitor and the slaughter of the civilian refugees, to name a few. The rest of the tale takes place in “the present” - sometime late in Season 2 after Lee Adama has been given command of the Pegasus, but before the debacle on New Caprica – a time where a sullen Kendra has been busted in rank and is spending her days on KP duty before Apollo promotes her to second-in-command.
While “Razor” is a good, solid, compelling piece of television (certainly better than most of the stuff on the boob tube prior to the writers’ strike and light years beyond the filler running now), it’s not without its flaws. In some respects, I think the story would have been much stronger had it simply been a self-contained movie focusing entirely on the tragedy of the Pegasus, up to its encounter with Galactica and the fleet.
Certainly, retooling the feature to be a continuous story line rather than jumping back and forth between the present and the past would have been a lot less jarring. A more steady rhythm to the plot would probably have given us more time to see the development ( or is it devolution?) of Shaw’s character, as well as that of Admiral Cain and the others aboard Pegasus. And in so doing, a conventional linear timeline would have allowed the writers to steadily ratchet-up the tension, perhaps giving the story’s resolution and Shaw’s death a bigger emotional payoff.
And yet… and yet… maybe that was the whole point of the constant flashbacks - to keep us, the viewers, as off-balance as Kendra was, to really put us in her boots. And in so doing, maybe it was a test to see if we too would develop a cold mask, would try to become desensitized to all the trauma we were seeing, just as Shaw did, or, if we would be able to elude that trap and retain our feelings (the fear and revulsion and helplessness) and so our humanity through the experience.
Regardless, the jerky jumps between memory and present create a more serious concern about the story: the timeline jumps gave me the feeling that the writers were flinching from probing the extent of the darkness closing in upon the crew of Pegasus. It felt as though the writes only wanted to hint at the frightening and depressing depths to which things had sunk as Cain realigned her focus along a dreadful course. Granted, sometimes it’s more effective for a story to hint at horrors rather than put them fully in the spotlight. But in this case, when it’s an emotional plummet off of a precipice, when ends-justify-the-means morality becomes a dehumanizing road to madness and destruction, it might have made a more absorbing story. Now, in saying that allowing the camera to stay in the past amidst Cain’s conversion from Colonial fleet admiral to vicious pirate queen, I am certainly not saying the story would have benefitted from seeing gore or witnessing Lieutenant Thorne’s sickening brutality towards the Cylon captive – not at all, far from it. I’m wondering if they’d given more time for dialogue between the crew, to see if they were debating among themselves, to see how Shaw managed to put up with her own company on the cold solitary nights in her bunk with nothing but her guilt and fear, to see how the Colonial conscripts/captives adapted to their new life aboard Pegasus, I’m wondering if seeing that evolution of character would have made a more powerful story. Would that have made a movie too dark for the audience to bear with? Possibly. But BSG is a dark story by nature. It is a tale of genocide and refugees and civil infighting and being hunted, of suicide and loneliness and hopelessness and the unknown and failed dreams. BSG has explored all of these kinds of darkness and more over the three seasons we’ve seen so far, and viewers have been forced to cope with all of it and reflect on what it says about our lives.
That being said, “Razor” certainly wasn’t a bad or even mediocre movie. There are many things to like about it.
On the surface, I loved the look of the old-model Cylons and their Raiders – fighting and flying the way they were meant to. They were more than a tribute to the designs of the original series; these Cylons looked and acted the part of a serious threat to the human race – they were not the gladius-waving, half-hearted extras of old staggering to their knees after just one shot. It was a treat to watch “Razor” if for no other reason than to see the Cylon centurions in action.
And you can’t help but be in awe of the sheer magnitude of the attack on the Colonial shipyard and Adama’s memories of the final engagement of the first Cylon war. Sure, as SF fans, we’ve seen plenty of big space battles before, with titanic ships lumbering across the screen slugging it out with each other as swarms of fighters dive between picking away at each other. But the special effects crew of BSG worked hard to craft a more tangible realism into these scenes than the Lucas team has – the shot of the Battlestar Columbia breaking up and tumbling into the ice planet’s atmosphere (an ice planet with an ultimate weapon no less – nice updated allusion to the old series episode “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero”) seemed more suited to something closer to home like “Memphis Belle” than a traditional SF movie like “Return of the Jedi” that felt alien in its distance (never mind because of its aliens). And best of all, these huge SFX shots didn’t take away from the humanity of the vignettes, they enhanced them – the scenes were still about the people in them. You also have to love how Bear McCreary worked the original BSG theme into the score for the Adama flashback.
I also got a kick out of some of the nice little pop culture allusions scattered throughout the story. Laughed my ass off when Starbuck, Shaw and the marines are floating in space, having just tricked their Cylon pursuers and Kara Thrace gets that smarmy grin on and says “Ain’t it grand when a plan comes together?” (for those of you who don’t remember TV of the 70’s & 80’s, the Starbuck of the original series was Dirk Benedict, who later went on to become Templeton “Faceman” Peck on “The A-Team” – the signature line of the mercenary crew’s leader Hannibal was “I love it when a plan comes together.”). And, though I didn’t catch them until my second viewing – on the extended edition – there are a couple of lines from James Cameron’s “Aliens” dropped in here and there where the sergeant gets on the case of a marine named Hudson.
All in all, “Razor” is certainly worth watching on the merits of these surface points.
But there’s definitely something deeper going on with this movie, something I’ll explore in my next post in a day or two. (Hopefully it won’t be as late as this installment!) Stay tuned.
First of all, sorry for the lateness of this post. I know I’d promised something for last weekend, but things got too busy. That being said, I’m glad some of you enjoyed the post with the photos from the set on Centennial Beach. Anyway, here’s a quick review of “Battlestar Galactica – Razor”.
It’s been a few weeks since “Razor” made its appearance – a sidebar story to the main BSG plotline (though it did drop a couple of hints about what might be expected in the upcoming season) detailing the events involving the Pegasus, as seen through the eyes of one of its officers, Kendra Shaw.
Pretty much half of the story is told through Shaw’s flashbacks: her arrival, the attack on the Colonies, the murder of the ship’s first X-O, the discovery of the Cylon traitor and the slaughter of the civilian refugees, to name a few. The rest of the tale takes place in “the present” - sometime late in Season 2 after Lee Adama has been given command of the Pegasus, but before the debacle on New Caprica – a time where a sullen Kendra has been busted in rank and is spending her days on KP duty before Apollo promotes her to second-in-command.
While “Razor” is a good, solid, compelling piece of television (certainly better than most of the stuff on the boob tube prior to the writers’ strike and light years beyond the filler running now), it’s not without its flaws. In some respects, I think the story would have been much stronger had it simply been a self-contained movie focusing entirely on the tragedy of the Pegasus, up to its encounter with Galactica and the fleet.
Certainly, retooling the feature to be a continuous story line rather than jumping back and forth between the present and the past would have been a lot less jarring. A more steady rhythm to the plot would probably have given us more time to see the development ( or is it devolution?) of Shaw’s character, as well as that of Admiral Cain and the others aboard Pegasus. And in so doing, a conventional linear timeline would have allowed the writers to steadily ratchet-up the tension, perhaps giving the story’s resolution and Shaw’s death a bigger emotional payoff.
And yet… and yet… maybe that was the whole point of the constant flashbacks - to keep us, the viewers, as off-balance as Kendra was, to really put us in her boots. And in so doing, maybe it was a test to see if we too would develop a cold mask, would try to become desensitized to all the trauma we were seeing, just as Shaw did, or, if we would be able to elude that trap and retain our feelings (the fear and revulsion and helplessness) and so our humanity through the experience.
Regardless, the jerky jumps between memory and present create a more serious concern about the story: the timeline jumps gave me the feeling that the writers were flinching from probing the extent of the darkness closing in upon the crew of Pegasus. It felt as though the writes only wanted to hint at the frightening and depressing depths to which things had sunk as Cain realigned her focus along a dreadful course. Granted, sometimes it’s more effective for a story to hint at horrors rather than put them fully in the spotlight. But in this case, when it’s an emotional plummet off of a precipice, when ends-justify-the-means morality becomes a dehumanizing road to madness and destruction, it might have made a more absorbing story. Now, in saying that allowing the camera to stay in the past amidst Cain’s conversion from Colonial fleet admiral to vicious pirate queen, I am certainly not saying the story would have benefitted from seeing gore or witnessing Lieutenant Thorne’s sickening brutality towards the Cylon captive – not at all, far from it. I’m wondering if they’d given more time for dialogue between the crew, to see if they were debating among themselves, to see how Shaw managed to put up with her own company on the cold solitary nights in her bunk with nothing but her guilt and fear, to see how the Colonial conscripts/captives adapted to their new life aboard Pegasus, I’m wondering if seeing that evolution of character would have made a more powerful story. Would that have made a movie too dark for the audience to bear with? Possibly. But BSG is a dark story by nature. It is a tale of genocide and refugees and civil infighting and being hunted, of suicide and loneliness and hopelessness and the unknown and failed dreams. BSG has explored all of these kinds of darkness and more over the three seasons we’ve seen so far, and viewers have been forced to cope with all of it and reflect on what it says about our lives.
That being said, “Razor” certainly wasn’t a bad or even mediocre movie. There are many things to like about it.
On the surface, I loved the look of the old-model Cylons and their Raiders – fighting and flying the way they were meant to. They were more than a tribute to the designs of the original series; these Cylons looked and acted the part of a serious threat to the human race – they were not the gladius-waving, half-hearted extras of old staggering to their knees after just one shot. It was a treat to watch “Razor” if for no other reason than to see the Cylon centurions in action.
And you can’t help but be in awe of the sheer magnitude of the attack on the Colonial shipyard and Adama’s memories of the final engagement of the first Cylon war. Sure, as SF fans, we’ve seen plenty of big space battles before, with titanic ships lumbering across the screen slugging it out with each other as swarms of fighters dive between picking away at each other. But the special effects crew of BSG worked hard to craft a more tangible realism into these scenes than the Lucas team has – the shot of the Battlestar Columbia breaking up and tumbling into the ice planet’s atmosphere (an ice planet with an ultimate weapon no less – nice updated allusion to the old series episode “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero”) seemed more suited to something closer to home like “Memphis Belle” than a traditional SF movie like “Return of the Jedi” that felt alien in its distance (never mind because of its aliens). And best of all, these huge SFX shots didn’t take away from the humanity of the vignettes, they enhanced them – the scenes were still about the people in them. You also have to love how Bear McCreary worked the original BSG theme into the score for the Adama flashback.
I also got a kick out of some of the nice little pop culture allusions scattered throughout the story. Laughed my ass off when Starbuck, Shaw and the marines are floating in space, having just tricked their Cylon pursuers and Kara Thrace gets that smarmy grin on and says “Ain’t it grand when a plan comes together?” (for those of you who don’t remember TV of the 70’s & 80’s, the Starbuck of the original series was Dirk Benedict, who later went on to become Templeton “Faceman” Peck on “The A-Team” – the signature line of the mercenary crew’s leader Hannibal was “I love it when a plan comes together.”). And, though I didn’t catch them until my second viewing – on the extended edition – there are a couple of lines from James Cameron’s “Aliens” dropped in here and there where the sergeant gets on the case of a marine named Hudson.
All in all, “Razor” is certainly worth watching on the merits of these surface points.
But there’s definitely something deeper going on with this movie, something I’ll explore in my next post in a day or two. (Hopefully it won’t be as late as this installment!) Stay tuned.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
And Speaking of Awards...
The nomination process is now open for this year’s Aurora Awards. And this year marks the point where this particular SF award catches up with technology: it’s the first year fans can fill out and submit a nomination form online (PDFs are available for print-out, and at various SF bookstores across Canada for those who prefer snailmail).
The Auroras are the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards. They’re presented to authors of long and short fiction in English and French. Awards are also given to editors and to SF artists and for achievements in fandom. They’ve been presented since 1980 (with the exception of 1984). This year’s awards will be presented at Keycon 25 in Winnipeg, Manitoba in May.
I haven’t made up my mind about who to nominate yet, but I should have an idea shortly. I’ll post something once I’ve submitted my nomination form online.
The Auroras are the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards. They’re presented to authors of long and short fiction in English and French. Awards are also given to editors and to SF artists and for achievements in fandom. They’ve been presented since 1980 (with the exception of 1984). This year’s awards will be presented at Keycon 25 in Winnipeg, Manitoba in May.
I haven’t made up my mind about who to nominate yet, but I should have an idea shortly. I’ll post something once I’ve submitted my nomination form online.
Award Nominee Congrats
Congratulations to Minister Faust for making the list of nominees for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. Faust earned the nomination for “From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain”.
Congrats also to Robert J. Sawyer for his nomination for the 2007 Nebula Awards for “Rollback”.
Congrats also to Robert J. Sawyer for his nomination for the 2007 Nebula Awards for “Rollback”.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Beach Blanket Battlestar - or - Battlestar Photographica
Got some set photos the other day to share with my fellow Battlestar fans out there…
My sister-in-law was taking my little nephew out for a stroll on Centennial Beach in Tsawwassen (a community in the municipality of Delta, south of Vancouver) a while back – just before the writer’s strike hit, when they came upon the cast and crew of BSG shooting an episode – one of the last episodes before things shut down.
I was proud to hear my nearly-2-year-old nephew wasted no time in charging through the set to get a close-up look at the Raptor squatting on the beach. The crew didn’t mind him touching it either. But, being a toddler, he then went on to more important things in his world – picking up rocks and carrying them here and there. One or two of the crew named him the official rock grip.
In addition to the Raptor and the ruins (the ruins had to be rebuilt after a big windstorm destroyed them – can you ruin ruins? – earlier in the fall), several of the cast were on-set, including Jamie Bamber (Apollo), James Callis (Baltar) and Tricia Helfer (#6). I’m told Bamber and Callis were nice guys.
I wonder what Season 4 has in store for us – aside from drinking coffee on the beach. Didn’t the Colonial fleet manage to save any marshmallows from the Cylon menace? What kind of advanced civilization would have a beach party without marshmallows to nicely blacken? And no bikinis? Come on, Tricia, where’s the love?
In the meantime, I can’t wait to get my hands on the Season 3 DVD collection. Granted, there are many detractors out there who thought it lost its pace and spent too much time on drama and not enough on action, but I thought the drama was warranted and well executed – even when refugees are on the run, not everything is about fighting exterior battles. The human drama within the fleet was a necessary and important part of the story and the scripts and actors were certainly up for the challenge.
Also on the Battlestar front, stay tuned for my review of “Razor” this weekend. Yeah, I know it’s been a while since it had its first airing on TV – I saw it then too, but I wanted to wait to review until I’d had a chance to see the extended version on DVD. Did that over the holidays, so I’m ready to weigh-in – for what little it’s worth.
I wonder what Season 4 has in store for us – aside from drinking coffee on the beach. Didn’t the Colonial fleet manage to save any marshmallows from the Cylon menace? What kind of advanced civilization would have a beach party without marshmallows to nicely blacken? And no bikinis? Come on, Tricia, where’s the love?
In the meantime, I can’t wait to get my hands on the Season 3 DVD collection. Granted, there are many detractors out there who thought it lost its pace and spent too much time on drama and not enough on action, but I thought the drama was warranted and well executed – even when refugees are on the run, not everything is about fighting exterior battles. The human drama within the fleet was a necessary and important part of the story and the scripts and actors were certainly up for the challenge.
Also on the Battlestar front, stay tuned for my review of “Razor” this weekend. Yeah, I know it’s been a while since it had its first airing on TV – I saw it then too, but I wanted to wait to review until I’d had a chance to see the extended version on DVD. Did that over the holidays, so I’m ready to weigh-in – for what little it’s worth.
Welcome to 2008
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope all of you enjoyed the holidays – whatever holidays you had.
Things were pretty busy around our place this year. We spent a lot of time running around seeing friends and family and doing the party circuit, we hosted the relatives for Christmas dinner, we found ourselves spending New Year’s Eve with some friends in an impromptu Wii tournament (where I found out I’m really, really not cut out to be a surgeon in a hospital ER simulation videogame – especially not after a few Heinekens), and somehow I found some time to devour a couple of books and dive into the stack o’ DVDs from Santa. Since then I’ve been getting back into the work groove and we’ve been serving up a couple of episodes of the new Doctor Who every night – we’re now most of the way through Series 3 and I’ve gotta say, it’s been a long marathon, but we still haven’t tired of being Companions of the Doctor & co.
At any rate, I’ve finally taken some time to come up for air and write a long-overdue blog post or two.
Seeing as how it’s the start of the New Year, I may as well jump on the bandwagon and do a quick highlight of the “Best of’s” of 2007. On one hand, I felt a little guilty about doing this because I haven’t read every SF book that came out in ’07, nor did I see every movie or every TV show. How can I say something is the best if the field of comparison isn’t complete? However, I did precisely that when I nominated and voted for the Auroras – acted only on what I’d encountered. Not entirely fair. But there’s nothing wrong with supporting that which you know and like, as long as you’re not opposed to trying the other stuff too. So, here are my top 3’s for 2007:
Books:
1) “The Terror” by Dan Simmons
2) “From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain” by Minister Faust
3) “Farewell Summer” by Ray Bradbury
(honourable mentions to “Overclocked” by Cory Doctorow, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman, “Bad Monkeys” by Mark Ruff, “Rollback” by Robert J. Sawyer, “The Children of Hurin” by J.R.R. Tolkien and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling)
TV:
1)”Battlestar Galactica”
2) “Reaper”
3)”Torchwood”
Movies:
1)”Stardust”
2)”Beowulf”
3)”I am Legend”
What are your SF highlights for 2007? What would you recommend the rest of us add to our “In” boxes for reading and viewing?
Things were pretty busy around our place this year. We spent a lot of time running around seeing friends and family and doing the party circuit, we hosted the relatives for Christmas dinner, we found ourselves spending New Year’s Eve with some friends in an impromptu Wii tournament (where I found out I’m really, really not cut out to be a surgeon in a hospital ER simulation videogame – especially not after a few Heinekens), and somehow I found some time to devour a couple of books and dive into the stack o’ DVDs from Santa. Since then I’ve been getting back into the work groove and we’ve been serving up a couple of episodes of the new Doctor Who every night – we’re now most of the way through Series 3 and I’ve gotta say, it’s been a long marathon, but we still haven’t tired of being Companions of the Doctor & co.
At any rate, I’ve finally taken some time to come up for air and write a long-overdue blog post or two.
Seeing as how it’s the start of the New Year, I may as well jump on the bandwagon and do a quick highlight of the “Best of’s” of 2007. On one hand, I felt a little guilty about doing this because I haven’t read every SF book that came out in ’07, nor did I see every movie or every TV show. How can I say something is the best if the field of comparison isn’t complete? However, I did precisely that when I nominated and voted for the Auroras – acted only on what I’d encountered. Not entirely fair. But there’s nothing wrong with supporting that which you know and like, as long as you’re not opposed to trying the other stuff too. So, here are my top 3’s for 2007:
Books:
1) “The Terror” by Dan Simmons
2) “From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain” by Minister Faust
3) “Farewell Summer” by Ray Bradbury
(honourable mentions to “Overclocked” by Cory Doctorow, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman, “Bad Monkeys” by Mark Ruff, “Rollback” by Robert J. Sawyer, “The Children of Hurin” by J.R.R. Tolkien and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling)
TV:
1)”Battlestar Galactica”
2) “Reaper”
3)”Torchwood”
Movies:
1)”Stardust”
2)”Beowulf”
3)”I am Legend”
What are your SF highlights for 2007? What would you recommend the rest of us add to our “In” boxes for reading and viewing?
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Review: "Blade Runner - The Final Cut"
Warning: SPOILERS (spoilage factor: about the same as a plate of nachos left on the coffee table in your living room for two days)
Does it matter that Ridley Scott has decanted another replicant of his SF classic “Blade Runner”? Is the newly-released “Blade Runner – The Final Cut” worth buying?
Having just watched it, I have to say that while it is most definitely worth buying, I’m not so sure that this latest model is different enough from the Director’s Cut, released in the early 90’s, to be significant. (Excuse me while I brace myself for the collective in-drawing of breath and cries of “Sacrilege!” from some of the other BR fanboys out there).
I think though, we have to look at the two questions separately.
Firstly, I bought the 4-disc Collector’s Edition, which includes The Final Cut, as well as the original 1982 North American theatrical release, the international theatrical release, the Director’s Cut from the 90’s and a couple of disks of special features. I’m a big enough fan of BR that I knew going into the store it would either be this collection, or the super-duper-ultra-mega-metal-briefcase-there’s-no-nerd-like-me collectible collector’s edition (including a 5th disc with another cut of the film, a paper unicorn, a toy hovercar and some slides/cells) – no single-disc cheapo version for me. I made it in time to grab the last of both of these collectors’ sets from the shelf and stood there for a minute or two, studying the extras listed on the package. Ultimately, I took the 4-disc set because after an initial opening and examination, I probably wouldn’t look at all the bonus knick-knacks again, and let’s face it, if it’s resale collector’s value you’re looking for, really, if you want to keep the value up, you’d never open the metal box in the first place, let alone remove the plastic.
Getting the collector’s edition was worth it for me because I’m one of those freakishly rare types that enjoys both the theatrical release and the DC. Each has the feeling of a different film from the other, and while I love the DC, the TR certainly has its merits. The DC is definitely more of a challenging film. That being said, in some ways the TR does a better job of creating the tone of an old-style film noir – you could almost see Bogart doing that role – the narrative has much the same tone as one of his monologues from, say “The Maltese Falcon”. A buddy of mine recently made the observation (and one that, upon further thought, I’ve come to agree with) that the TR is probably a better vehicle to introduce non-BR, non-SF fans to than the DC. If they’re interested, they’ll want to progress to the DC.
Buying the collection to watch TFC was worth-while if for no other reason than to see the footage cleaned up and listen to the crispness of the remastered sound. But the little extras that have been added here and there to the shots, such as reflections, like the elevator lights off of an exhausted Deckard’s face, enhance the look of the film nicely, rather than crowd it out. In adding extra footage – an extra reaction here, a longer hold on a character there (like the side-long looks we now see Captain Bryant giving Deckard during the debriefing in the beginning), some raised audio (like Roy calling to Sebastian after he’s just used his thumbs to egg-beater Tyrell’s eyeballs and brain – something we see more of in the new cut), or in the case of Zhora’s death, reshooting footage, Scott has shown a deft touch in making sure TFC is a fine film, rather than a caricature of itself. Taken as its own version TFC is, like its predecessors, simply great to watch.
The only digital change I’m not so sure about is the changing of the sky as the dove flies away from Roy’s body at the end. In older versions, there was the rather odd sight of the dove flying across a patch of blue daylit sky, despite the fact that Deckard and Roy were lying on a building in the perpetual darkness and rain of the lower levels of the city. Now it’s been changed so that the dove wings-off across a dark, cloudy sky with a backdrop of skyscrapers. The new footage certainly fits better with the scenery, but metaphorically, I don’t think it works as well with for the scene. Especially towards the end of the film, despite the carnage he inflicts, Roy’s character is shown more and more to be a type of savior for his people, and the dove is a crucial part of this imagery. When the replicant leader dies and the dove flies away into the blue sky, it appears to show that Roy’s finally found peace – that he’s fled the tired and dingy world he’s come to. In rising into the blue sky, the dove seems to emphasize what we’ve just seen with Roy saving Deckard’s life and accepting that his time has come, that he has transcended his violent past and gained a sort of tranquility. And this is something we can see reflected in the understanding on Deckard’s face (or, if you’re watching the TR, it’s something we’re blatantly told). The switch to the dove flying across more dark buildings negates any chance of a metaphor at best. At worst it would seem to cynically tell us that in death, Roy has not gained any freedom - that things haven’t changed, even on a spiritual level.
This leads us to the question of whether TFC is significant in being Scott’s last word on the film (allegedly – we’ll have to wait another 10 or 20 years to see if Scott changes his mind). As I said previously, I’m not sure that it is.
There’s been a lot of hype about TFC showing conclusively that Deckard is a replicant. The afore-mentioned debriefing scene at the opening with Bryant’s sidelong glances at Deckard certainly adds to the implications that Harrison Ford’s character isn’t a normal human. But (and perhaps I wasn’t being attentive enough in the first viewing of this version – or perhaps I was distracted by the cleaner video and crisper audio) I didn’t really pick up anything else in this rendition that added to the case for Deckard being a replicant. That being said, the Bryant scenes, in my opinion make this likelihood conclusive enough for this version of the film.
But so what? So this version indicates Deckard’s a replicant. That just makes it the polar opposite of the TR, which, in my opinion, seemed to fall on the side of Deckard being human. The fact that in the 2007 version Deckard is a replicant doesn’t make TFC a better film.
Some might argue that Scott has said that TFC is the version he has always truly meant for the public to see. Again, I would answer with “so what?” Scott’s entitled to his opinion, but so am I and so are you. This is a post-modernist era, where it can be argued the interpretation of the audience (both personal as an individual, and general as a collective audience) has as much validity as the intent of the author – most especially so if I’m the one paying to buy altered version after altered version every decade or so.
In fact, I would argue that the DC from the 90’s is probably the best version because it’s not as conclusive as either of the others. It leaves plenty of leeway for Deckard to be either human or a replicant. Yes, Edward James Olmos’ character leaves behind an origami unicorn, and Deckard did have the unicorn dream, but it could be coincidence – or maybe not! How much significance, and what kind of significance should we put on Deckard’s reaction to the demands of the case, the stress in his life, his new relationship or the fact that Roy chose to save him? It’s the kind of unsettling uncertainty that a classic Philip K. Dick story would leave us with. And since BR is based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, that uncertainty is fitting.
That being said, TFC is not a bad film. It’s a very good movie and a worthy addition to the collection.
I think, in the end, the way I view the 3 versions of the film is something along the lines of a favourite old story being told orally around the camp fire. Many of the themes and characters and events are the same, even if the details and the implecations of the story differ from telling to telling. As long as the storyteller spins his yarn well, all versions can be entertaining and possibly enlightening. I think in each version, Scott has done a good job of telling a tale. The newest version of “Blade Runner” definitely makes the cut.
Does it matter that Ridley Scott has decanted another replicant of his SF classic “Blade Runner”? Is the newly-released “Blade Runner – The Final Cut” worth buying?
Having just watched it, I have to say that while it is most definitely worth buying, I’m not so sure that this latest model is different enough from the Director’s Cut, released in the early 90’s, to be significant. (Excuse me while I brace myself for the collective in-drawing of breath and cries of “Sacrilege!” from some of the other BR fanboys out there).
I think though, we have to look at the two questions separately.
Firstly, I bought the 4-disc Collector’s Edition, which includes The Final Cut, as well as the original 1982 North American theatrical release, the international theatrical release, the Director’s Cut from the 90’s and a couple of disks of special features. I’m a big enough fan of BR that I knew going into the store it would either be this collection, or the super-duper-ultra-mega-metal-briefcase-there’s-no-nerd-like-me collectible collector’s edition (including a 5th disc with another cut of the film, a paper unicorn, a toy hovercar and some slides/cells) – no single-disc cheapo version for me. I made it in time to grab the last of both of these collectors’ sets from the shelf and stood there for a minute or two, studying the extras listed on the package. Ultimately, I took the 4-disc set because after an initial opening and examination, I probably wouldn’t look at all the bonus knick-knacks again, and let’s face it, if it’s resale collector’s value you’re looking for, really, if you want to keep the value up, you’d never open the metal box in the first place, let alone remove the plastic.
Getting the collector’s edition was worth it for me because I’m one of those freakishly rare types that enjoys both the theatrical release and the DC. Each has the feeling of a different film from the other, and while I love the DC, the TR certainly has its merits. The DC is definitely more of a challenging film. That being said, in some ways the TR does a better job of creating the tone of an old-style film noir – you could almost see Bogart doing that role – the narrative has much the same tone as one of his monologues from, say “The Maltese Falcon”. A buddy of mine recently made the observation (and one that, upon further thought, I’ve come to agree with) that the TR is probably a better vehicle to introduce non-BR, non-SF fans to than the DC. If they’re interested, they’ll want to progress to the DC.
Buying the collection to watch TFC was worth-while if for no other reason than to see the footage cleaned up and listen to the crispness of the remastered sound. But the little extras that have been added here and there to the shots, such as reflections, like the elevator lights off of an exhausted Deckard’s face, enhance the look of the film nicely, rather than crowd it out. In adding extra footage – an extra reaction here, a longer hold on a character there (like the side-long looks we now see Captain Bryant giving Deckard during the debriefing in the beginning), some raised audio (like Roy calling to Sebastian after he’s just used his thumbs to egg-beater Tyrell’s eyeballs and brain – something we see more of in the new cut), or in the case of Zhora’s death, reshooting footage, Scott has shown a deft touch in making sure TFC is a fine film, rather than a caricature of itself. Taken as its own version TFC is, like its predecessors, simply great to watch.
The only digital change I’m not so sure about is the changing of the sky as the dove flies away from Roy’s body at the end. In older versions, there was the rather odd sight of the dove flying across a patch of blue daylit sky, despite the fact that Deckard and Roy were lying on a building in the perpetual darkness and rain of the lower levels of the city. Now it’s been changed so that the dove wings-off across a dark, cloudy sky with a backdrop of skyscrapers. The new footage certainly fits better with the scenery, but metaphorically, I don’t think it works as well with for the scene. Especially towards the end of the film, despite the carnage he inflicts, Roy’s character is shown more and more to be a type of savior for his people, and the dove is a crucial part of this imagery. When the replicant leader dies and the dove flies away into the blue sky, it appears to show that Roy’s finally found peace – that he’s fled the tired and dingy world he’s come to. In rising into the blue sky, the dove seems to emphasize what we’ve just seen with Roy saving Deckard’s life and accepting that his time has come, that he has transcended his violent past and gained a sort of tranquility. And this is something we can see reflected in the understanding on Deckard’s face (or, if you’re watching the TR, it’s something we’re blatantly told). The switch to the dove flying across more dark buildings negates any chance of a metaphor at best. At worst it would seem to cynically tell us that in death, Roy has not gained any freedom - that things haven’t changed, even on a spiritual level.
This leads us to the question of whether TFC is significant in being Scott’s last word on the film (allegedly – we’ll have to wait another 10 or 20 years to see if Scott changes his mind). As I said previously, I’m not sure that it is.
There’s been a lot of hype about TFC showing conclusively that Deckard is a replicant. The afore-mentioned debriefing scene at the opening with Bryant’s sidelong glances at Deckard certainly adds to the implications that Harrison Ford’s character isn’t a normal human. But (and perhaps I wasn’t being attentive enough in the first viewing of this version – or perhaps I was distracted by the cleaner video and crisper audio) I didn’t really pick up anything else in this rendition that added to the case for Deckard being a replicant. That being said, the Bryant scenes, in my opinion make this likelihood conclusive enough for this version of the film.
But so what? So this version indicates Deckard’s a replicant. That just makes it the polar opposite of the TR, which, in my opinion, seemed to fall on the side of Deckard being human. The fact that in the 2007 version Deckard is a replicant doesn’t make TFC a better film.
Some might argue that Scott has said that TFC is the version he has always truly meant for the public to see. Again, I would answer with “so what?” Scott’s entitled to his opinion, but so am I and so are you. This is a post-modernist era, where it can be argued the interpretation of the audience (both personal as an individual, and general as a collective audience) has as much validity as the intent of the author – most especially so if I’m the one paying to buy altered version after altered version every decade or so.
In fact, I would argue that the DC from the 90’s is probably the best version because it’s not as conclusive as either of the others. It leaves plenty of leeway for Deckard to be either human or a replicant. Yes, Edward James Olmos’ character leaves behind an origami unicorn, and Deckard did have the unicorn dream, but it could be coincidence – or maybe not! How much significance, and what kind of significance should we put on Deckard’s reaction to the demands of the case, the stress in his life, his new relationship or the fact that Roy chose to save him? It’s the kind of unsettling uncertainty that a classic Philip K. Dick story would leave us with. And since BR is based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, that uncertainty is fitting.
That being said, TFC is not a bad film. It’s a very good movie and a worthy addition to the collection.
I think, in the end, the way I view the 3 versions of the film is something along the lines of a favourite old story being told orally around the camp fire. Many of the themes and characters and events are the same, even if the details and the implecations of the story differ from telling to telling. As long as the storyteller spins his yarn well, all versions can be entertaining and possibly enlightening. I think in each version, Scott has done a good job of telling a tale. The newest version of “Blade Runner” definitely makes the cut.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Why Sam's Girlfriend on "Reaper" really is the Devil's Daughter
Warning: spoilers (spoilage factor – about the same as piece of French bread left on the counter for a couple of days – still edible if you need stuffing for a roast hen, but otherwise…)
“Reaper” continues to be one hell of a funny show and lately a new plotline (beyond their usual hunting of escaped souls) has been added that’s kept Sam and his cohorts busy guessing: is his new girlfriend, Katie, the Devil’s daughter?
We first met the very hot Katie at the end of last week’s episode, where Sam got to know the Devil’s on-again-off-again girlfriend while doing his job (both jobs, actually). At the end of the episode, we find out she’s got a daughter who’s about the right age to have been the product of her unknowing flirtation with the forces of evil. Sock and Ben are immediately suspicious, while Sam tries to convince himself it just ain’t so. This week’s episode continues to dwell on the question, when Sam and his sidekicks aren’t up to their usual ghostbusting antics, with Sock and Ben taking their investigation to new heights – or lows. By the final act, they think they’ve found a satisfactory answer – though not satisfying in any way relating to their mystery, and it is Sam who suddenly isn’t so sure.
And so the question remains: Is Katie the Devil’s daughter?
I submit to you that yes, she is, for one very simple reason:
It is not because she’s old enough to have been conceived during the Devil’s relationship with her mother…
It is not because Sock & Ben missed a piece of crucial evidence during the hot tub incident – they didn’t…
It is not even because of all the dead flowers and animals.
No, the proof that Katie is the Devil’s daughter is that she loves the movie “Highlander II: The Quickening”.
Anyone who enjoys that cinematic abomination obviously should be held suspect – for atrociously bad taste if nothing else, but perhaps for more nefarious motives too. I met someone many years ago who summed-up the whole “Highlander” franchise very nicely: There should be only one.
“Reaper” continues to be one hell of a funny show and lately a new plotline (beyond their usual hunting of escaped souls) has been added that’s kept Sam and his cohorts busy guessing: is his new girlfriend, Katie, the Devil’s daughter?
We first met the very hot Katie at the end of last week’s episode, where Sam got to know the Devil’s on-again-off-again girlfriend while doing his job (both jobs, actually). At the end of the episode, we find out she’s got a daughter who’s about the right age to have been the product of her unknowing flirtation with the forces of evil. Sock and Ben are immediately suspicious, while Sam tries to convince himself it just ain’t so. This week’s episode continues to dwell on the question, when Sam and his sidekicks aren’t up to their usual ghostbusting antics, with Sock and Ben taking their investigation to new heights – or lows. By the final act, they think they’ve found a satisfactory answer – though not satisfying in any way relating to their mystery, and it is Sam who suddenly isn’t so sure.
And so the question remains: Is Katie the Devil’s daughter?
I submit to you that yes, she is, for one very simple reason:
It is not because she’s old enough to have been conceived during the Devil’s relationship with her mother…
It is not because Sock & Ben missed a piece of crucial evidence during the hot tub incident – they didn’t…
It is not even because of all the dead flowers and animals.
No, the proof that Katie is the Devil’s daughter is that she loves the movie “Highlander II: The Quickening”.
Anyone who enjoys that cinematic abomination obviously should be held suspect – for atrociously bad taste if nothing else, but perhaps for more nefarious motives too. I met someone many years ago who summed-up the whole “Highlander” franchise very nicely: There should be only one.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Olympics go Pokemon
The Vancouver Organizing Committee (Vanoc) for the 2010 Olympic Games unveiled the official mascots for the Winter Games today – a trio of Pokemon.
No, the mascots are not technically part of the Japanese children’s animated TV series/card game/video game/toy/etc mega-franchise. They just look that way. Much to the chagrin of many of us here in Greater Vancouver, BC, and across Canada. I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in other parts of the world are as disappointed as we local yokels. And if not now, they probably soon will be.
The three critters are representations of (inspired by? mockeries of?) figures from First Nations folklore here in BC. They are:
Miga – a sea-bear – a creature, as I understand it, that lives as an orca in the water but can come onto land where it then turns into a Spirit Bear (Kermode bear – a very rare, naturally white, non-albino black bear).
Sumi – an animal guardian spirit combining elements of the orca (represented by its hat), the thunderbird and the bear.
Quatchi – a Sasquatch (also known as Bigfoot) – who, incidentally, wants to be a goalie on a hockey team.
And if three A-line beasties aren’t enough, technically there’s four of them – they have a sidekick: Mukmuk, a marmot (a small animal, akin to a groundhog, eking out a living on the mountainsides of Vancouver Island and currently on the Endangered Species List).
I don’t have a problem with the Olympics gang borrowing their mascots from native folklore (I’d be interested to hear what our aboriginal people have to say about the matter though). What I do have a problem with is how these things were drawn. They don’t look like anything – or at least, they don’t look like anything outside of your standard after-school anime series battling monsters roster! To put it another way, one of my coworkers said she thinks they look like Hello Kitty characters. How is that unique? How does that in any way distinguish an Olympic Games mascot? How is unidentifiable artwork representative of BC or First Nations culture? How does the cheap drawing-style let us know what the hell these things are supposed to be?
Why didn’t the designers contracted by the Games actually stick to the original concepts as portrayed in native art? At least that way we’d be able to get a sense that Miga’s supposed to be a synthesis of whale and bear, rather than something that could be a penguin or a cat or Pepe La Peu’s surreal anime alter-ego!
I heard someone from the Vanoc crew try to justify the design today by claiming that the mascots had to be “cute”. Marketers will tell you the big push for the mascots is from 6 to 8-year-olds. If the kiddies want the mascot toys or want to see the things wandering around the Games venues in person, they’ll twist Mom & Dad’s arms to buy the merchandise (funding the Games) and/or to go to the actual Games (funding the event and increasing the positive optics of full stands and hopefully spreading hype). But that could be accomplished by mascots that actually look like something. Cute? There are hundreds, if not thousands of “cute” portrayals of animals, real and mythical, in art and TV and movies all over the world that actually look like recognizable animals. Bears? How about Yogi & Booboo, or Baloo? Any designer/artist actually worth their over-inflated Olympic-contractor salary could have taken a 5 second look at some original aboriginal art portraying these creatures and given us “cute” versions that would be original and worth looking at.
Thanks, Vanoc. You’ve blown my tax dollars on vaguely fuzzy-looking blobs. Hairy cat turds with smiley faces. They’re not just Pokemon, they’re lazy Pokemon-wannabe attempts.
No, the mascots are not technically part of the Japanese children’s animated TV series/card game/video game/toy/etc mega-franchise. They just look that way. Much to the chagrin of many of us here in Greater Vancouver, BC, and across Canada. I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in other parts of the world are as disappointed as we local yokels. And if not now, they probably soon will be.
The three critters are representations of (inspired by? mockeries of?) figures from First Nations folklore here in BC. They are:
Miga – a sea-bear – a creature, as I understand it, that lives as an orca in the water but can come onto land where it then turns into a Spirit Bear (Kermode bear – a very rare, naturally white, non-albino black bear).
Sumi – an animal guardian spirit combining elements of the orca (represented by its hat), the thunderbird and the bear.
Quatchi – a Sasquatch (also known as Bigfoot) – who, incidentally, wants to be a goalie on a hockey team.
And if three A-line beasties aren’t enough, technically there’s four of them – they have a sidekick: Mukmuk, a marmot (a small animal, akin to a groundhog, eking out a living on the mountainsides of Vancouver Island and currently on the Endangered Species List).
I don’t have a problem with the Olympics gang borrowing their mascots from native folklore (I’d be interested to hear what our aboriginal people have to say about the matter though). What I do have a problem with is how these things were drawn. They don’t look like anything – or at least, they don’t look like anything outside of your standard after-school anime series battling monsters roster! To put it another way, one of my coworkers said she thinks they look like Hello Kitty characters. How is that unique? How does that in any way distinguish an Olympic Games mascot? How is unidentifiable artwork representative of BC or First Nations culture? How does the cheap drawing-style let us know what the hell these things are supposed to be?
Why didn’t the designers contracted by the Games actually stick to the original concepts as portrayed in native art? At least that way we’d be able to get a sense that Miga’s supposed to be a synthesis of whale and bear, rather than something that could be a penguin or a cat or Pepe La Peu’s surreal anime alter-ego!
I heard someone from the Vanoc crew try to justify the design today by claiming that the mascots had to be “cute”. Marketers will tell you the big push for the mascots is from 6 to 8-year-olds. If the kiddies want the mascot toys or want to see the things wandering around the Games venues in person, they’ll twist Mom & Dad’s arms to buy the merchandise (funding the Games) and/or to go to the actual Games (funding the event and increasing the positive optics of full stands and hopefully spreading hype). But that could be accomplished by mascots that actually look like something. Cute? There are hundreds, if not thousands of “cute” portrayals of animals, real and mythical, in art and TV and movies all over the world that actually look like recognizable animals. Bears? How about Yogi & Booboo, or Baloo? Any designer/artist actually worth their over-inflated Olympic-contractor salary could have taken a 5 second look at some original aboriginal art portraying these creatures and given us “cute” versions that would be original and worth looking at.
Thanks, Vanoc. You’ve blown my tax dollars on vaguely fuzzy-looking blobs. Hairy cat turds with smiley faces. They’re not just Pokemon, they’re lazy Pokemon-wannabe attempts.
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