The Kaleidoscope of the Noughties – OWW! – Film #1

A Christmas season for me nowadays always seems like it lacks something, and that something happens to be a Tolkien film.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I feel the need to skip the airy, demeaning preamble that usually smears the first half of my posts, but I also want to say that often with these lists there’s a need to juggle the concerns of the demographic, eschuing all manner of qualifiable films for foreign masterpieces or eschuing all of those masterpieces for crowd pleasing extravaganza’s. Many more try to dialetically merge these two modes of film appreciation with varying levels of success, often leading to compulsory choices that tick demographic boxes, from Funny Games to Mission Impossible III, resulting in a strange, tensile list that tries to please everybody and enthrals no one. The upside to this is that we often get to see the tensions of our society played out in the lists. The downside is that the lists just become a farce.

So this is the beginning of my film “list,” which will trundle on until I am satisfied.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)

The problem publications seem to have with adding The Lord of the Rings to their lists is that they are so rife with pedantry, cynicism and cross-examination by their very nature (a nature brought to the forefront of their sensibilities now that the internet allows, even champions the feedback of idiots) that a typically po-faced genre like fantasy tends to fall out of favour because they aren’t in constant self-justification of itself. While The Lord of the Rings is by no means po-faced (as its many derivatives are) it bears a sincerity that this post-modern nastiness finds hard to swallow.

I remember the first time I saw the teaser trailer for The Lord of the Rings. I had had no interaction with any of Tolkien’s books until then – although I firmly remember my cousin, who will forever be five years my senior, mentioning it as a literary classic. After seeing the trailer, I read The Lord of the Rings, then The Hobbit, then The Lord of the Rings again, all within a matter of months – which was incredibly tough for a child of my stupidity. I read it religiously, effecting a kind of pseudo-cool position within the realms of geekdom at my school; the acceptable face of geekdom if you will, for being gifted as I was at running like a bellend and naturally skillful with the football, the rugby ball, the basketball and the tennis racket, I served as a kind of emissary to the other schoolchildren, for I could deal on their level and then retreat back into a cabal of couplet speaking outcasts and bask in their favour for a time.

But if I thought I did a good job of representing a long maligned (and long po-faced) genre, then The Fellowship of the Ring was the 9/11 of fantasy movies; it was a complete game changer (probably a more appropriate reference somewhere). People – more specifically men – more specifically men born in the late 60s/early 70s – - often go on about the first time they saw Star Wars, seeing the Blockade Runner shoot past the screen followed by a dagger shapped ship that just got bigger and bigger and bigger. After this experience, they saw, everything changed: the possibilities of cinema opened up for them. They knew then, they just knew, that they were destined to regional sales manager for Enviromow Lawnmower Delivery LTD for the rest of their lives. Well, firstly screw them for helping ensure the infantilisation of the sci-fi genre, and secondly, allow this to happen, but third and most significant, I’m going to borrow their anecdote and apply it to Fellowship: I feel The Fellowship of the Ring performed a similar ritual to the young minds of the early 00s. From the first few seconds of the first film, you just had to be impressed with what had been achieved.*

Out of the three films, the first remains my favourite. This is not a detriment to the latter two films, for they continue the journey in unrivalled quality, but the first retains a charm for me, whether it be the whistful Hobbits, the stirring formation of the Fellowship, the riotous last ditch efforts of a heroic Sean Bean as Boromir (long my favourite character) or the ethereal disquiet of Lothlorien or even the cerebral beauty of Rivendell. But most of all, what guarantees its appeal to me is probably that it’s a magnificent statement of intent from Peter Jackson. It is truly a wonderful, life-affirming achievement to have adapted a book so unwieldy and troublesome into such a deserving and worthy film, evoking the spirit of the book at the same time. I mean the prose of Tolkien is a literal nightmare; it makes mine look like that of a poet bloody laureate.

But what’s also fascinating and magnificent about the trilogy as a whole, is its construction of Middle Earth in our world (for which New Zealand will always be a place on my “to visit” list); the visualisation of all these spectacular, serene or terrifying locations; the designs of the Uruk-Hai, brutish and jagged; the men of Rohan in their rich Saxon get-up; the Elves in their brilliantly rendered, gorgeously executed armours and costumes. And all this was clear from The Fellowship of the Ring. Middle Earth was brought to life with such confidence and aplomb that any conceptions of Tolkien’s Middle Earth I gain while reading the book are articulated through what I know to be Weta’s aesthetic.

* To me this began with the prologue, a wonderfully economic but exciting look into the masses of armies clashing on the slopes of Mount Doom. In particular, the Blockade Runner moment occurs when the Elves of the Last Alliance unsheathe their massive swords and play synchronised ninja with orc.

Reflecting back on the decade, it is feasible to see how we all became bigger wankers.

There’s a nauseating outpouring of retrospectives on the decade that was, but still really IS, entering the public sphere at the moment, reflecting on these past 9 years with various insights, some of which are interesting, others vaguely hollow and glib but most simply leading you to a state of realisation: 10 years have past and I have achieved nothing. Literally nothing. You’ve only just started taking global warming seriously, because Leonardo DiCaprio told you to, let alone rescued the planet from it. You’ve not found a cure for AIDS yet, because lets face it, cancer was in vogue this decade, but you didn’t manage to find a cure for that either. You haven’t brought a stop to oppression, you’ve not stopped global conflict and you certainly haven’t managed to find any level of contentment. And 10 years have passed you by.

Many may have watched Big Brother, but in the end, Big Brother was watching us.

What you could do to better form some kind of contentment and happiness would be to draft a list, a countdown, a ten commandments of music, films and books that have infiltrated and successfully manipulated your decade into a kind of roller coaster ride of different emotions, all secured via financial means, that give meaning to your sad, pathetic life. This is precisely what I’ve done. I form my world view and then reinforce it with corresponding materials which give credence to my observations, from the politik of xenophobia and combating terrorism to paranoia and coincidence to the grotty halls our nocturnal selves inhabit at the weekends, gulping at malty beer and playing urban poetry in our heads as we resist and allure those of the opposite sex.

But even though I subscribe to this notion of representation and image governed by my tastes, likes and choices, I still do not like lists. Especially numbered, countdown lists, competitive lists that lift a piece of music, an album for example, out of its context and its specific time and place and supplant it in a sort of chronology of the decade, full of contrivances which all incite pedantry and naysaying because of the very nature of having lifted these albums from their belonging and putting them where they don’t. I’m struck by Paul Morley’s article. I’ve been following his series Showing Off… for a while now on the Guardian website for the Observer. I’ll readily admit that not all is to my taste, but I reserve enough humility and self-ridicule not to scoff at some of the people appearing in its many interviews in much the same way as Morley does not himself.

I’m going to write my own retrospective soon, on the music, films, games and books which have shaped my particular decade, whether they were made of this decade or not. My criteria is wide, but that’s because lists, especially competitive lists are so bloody reductive. There is no such thing as an objective list and as Morley says, even should there be great care taken with the choosing of such a list, the results will always reflect the readership and status of the publication it’s being written for, thus the Guardian’s will differ vehemently from that of Ok! magazine or the Daily Mail. So I’m going to make a consciously subjective list. No, hopefully my “list” – I would prefer to think of it as a kaleidoscope to be frank, documenting my tastes, triumphs and failings – will simply be reflective of me and my own, no one else.

I feel relatively blessed, having been born on at the fall of one decade and the eve of another. It affords me an easy way of judging such decades as they correlate with my own transitions to 30, to 40 and so on. The two decades I have spent in waking life have informed me a great deal and will, I suspect in more autumnal years, be full of nostalgia and golden meadows buried with gold and drizzled in Liefman’s Goudenband. No doubt this last decade shall appear integral to what later comes, and thus I, in the present, feel a great desire to reflect on the wanky “Noughties” – OW – while I can to learn what I can.

And if you’re wondering why we’re all become wankers, then remember to hit yourself in the face the next time you see, hear or write – OW – the “noughties.” The “noughties”…what an infuriatingly pathetic monicker for our infuriatingly pathetic days. Now I’m going to run off and grab a tissue to stop my nosebleed. It’s the step up from The Game. No only have you lost The Game, but you also live in the Noughties.

Just a little review on Stargate: Universe “Water.”

Ah. Another week, another elementally themed SGU episode. As expected – and mentioned, in the review of Light – the premise of these episodse are becoming a little draining for the discerning viewer, despite them delivering the goods in the end.

This week saw the crew search for water as they gather up the ingredients for the extragalactic picnic basket that is the good ship Destiny. Turns out that the water is running out at a frantic rate on the ship, sowing malcontent among the military personnel and the civilians as they search for the cause. Again, the fact that these disagreements seem petty rather than reasonable are indicative of the writers being unable to match the intensity of the rather more rationally motivated disagreements of BSG. Yes, I’m mentioning BSG again. But it’s really very good. The cause of the water evaporating (see what I did there) happens to be the sentient like ‘Dust’ from a previous episode, that seems to have stowed away on the ship.

This unexplained entity, presenting Scott with a mirage that ultimately saved him on the planet, should always have been more than a device to give us Scott’s backstory, and definitely more than the cause of water leakage on Destiny. It presented us with that rarest of things: a harmonious alien. It was peculiar because its interaction with a dying human, mimicking the devils of Scott’s past (ironically a priest: HAHAHAHA) was part of its very nature and for that, much, much more than our idea of the alien as a man in costume and prosphetics. Should the ‘Dust’ have remained a permanent feature of Destiny’s interior, it would have become a fruitful device for both exploring the stories of our characters pasts, but also for encouraging the larger narrative arc of the season to rear its head.

Which, of course, brings us to that unknown beast. We know our characters aren’t going to make it home for a long time yet – if they ever do – so give us something, please, anything to cling on to. Marauding Aliens will do, contact with ’something else’ will do, mysterious happenings within the ship will do or things awakening inside the ship will do. The world is your oyster writers. The use of such a potentially fruitful sentient in this way was entirely redundant. A chance missed.

Meanwhile, some other stuff happened. Scott and Young went ice fishing; a red jersey got a facelift courtesy of the ‘Dust’; Eli got a little ratty at Rush; Rush was being difficult as per the norm; Dead Senator’s daughter got to cry a bit more. It was all a bit wishy-washy really. Not much to see, not much to ponder and our thirst for more is a little weaker than the week previous, hence why I was so lazy in typing up a review. Hopefully SGU can shrug off its slight dopiness and throw us up in the air a bit next week – with something other than a malfunctioning shower curtain and a look at a periodic table.

First impressions of V

I’ve not seen the original series of V, and when I heard it was being remade by ABC, I thought they were remaking the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name. But that would be bloody treacherous to adapt in the first place. And foolish to remake it even then. But whatever the character of the original V show, the first episode of this remake is brimming with confidence and polish. That said, it’s conventional to the bone, and nothing is particularly spectacular. Oh, and the dialogue is, at times, dreadful.

The plot is that aliens reveal themselves to Earth peacefully but the slickness of the Visitors (Hence the V – tadah!) belies a more heinous intention and manner. We see, as ensemble shows love to do, all the characters we will follow through the course of the show, in their daily lives – the single mother badass cop, her bratty teenage son, the enfranchised black-american businessman, the priest with a strong jaw and the Journalistic lovechild of Tom Cruise and Michael J Fox playing an amalgam of Tom Cruise and Michael J Fox characters – before the events which send everybody into turmoil.

Everybody is, as US drama would have us believe, a normal working human in V, with the compulsory cautionary past, familial issues and wanderings of faith that typify us as a species, in comparison to, say, Goats, which are just stupid animals. There’s nothing really wrong with this – you can’t expect ABC to pull out anything resembling realistic characterisation like a BBC, HBO or AMC program would – but again, it feels same old, same old. Most are likeable, conventional types, even if the writers lack the spirit to push the Priest (name unimportant) to the level of Jesse Custer or the balls to make him anything other than a Mddle-of-the-Road beefcake with a lot of scepticism. The bratty son of the cop is annoying however; too sappy, too wet, and too full of himself to like. Of course, he’s want for frolicking with an attractive female Visitor and generally expatriating to the Other side, so there’s no loss for humanity there then.

As said however, ABC shouldn’t be expected to overcome the hurdle of dramatising realistic familial relationships in a way that doesn’t wreak of cringeworthy sentimentality. Things do get more interesting though, with Morena Baccarin as Anna, the seeming head honcho behind the media-frenzied visitation of the aliens, whose beauty often so distracts from her solid performances. Here, she is framed in such a way that her angelic features become stretched beyond normal human possibilities to reveal something entirely alien and frightening. The compulsary monstrous feminine she may be, but it’s a wonderful performance, and slightly unexpected for those used to seeing her doll about as a foil to Captain Hammer.

Alan Tudyk is always great to watch, and although he isn’t given much to do here, his presence is always reassuring in a sense – although this is in the sense that he looks like he feels just as marooned as us, and not in the sense of ‘everything is going to be alright for I, Alan Tudyk, am here’. Suffice to say, playing around with our affections for Tudyk worked brilliantly in that one decent episode of Dollhouse – swooping from jabbering pot-head architect to sinister mastermind in one of the biggest Ohhhhh! moments of recent memory – and the same device works great here too, if less masterful.

There are interesting places to go with V. The first episode sets up threads we not only anticipate, but actually want to follow; we aren’t teased in sick ways and told to endure horrific bouts of boredom before we are given answers (that’s for you David Goyer: Flashforward could take lessons from V on the subject of developing characters alright), but instead are fondled with in ways quite appetizing for a viewer. I’ll end the metaphor there, as it could go a tad blue. There’s also what appears to be a swipe at Obama’s healthcare plans in the show – although I hesitate to condemn it because the first episode seems to suggest that there’s more to the Visitors than a palatable lust for genocide – as the Visitors suggest a worldwide health service. This was nearly lost on me to be honest. Good idea, I said. Extend the NHS and that. And then I realised that the US is way behind on healthcare to those who need it. Silly me. I’m rooting for the Visitors now.

There’s a lot of asides and parallels to a staple of sci-fi themes in V, from the manipulation of the masses to the purpose of the media, and it could be rich territory for the show to mine in the future. I’ll be watching probably. Tuesday nights are pretty drab on the whole.

A Good Year For Sci-Fi?

Science fiction films of late have been somewhat lacking in the science fiction department.  In fact, due to the success of Independence Day, The Matrix and of course, Star Wars, the whole notion of science fiction has become somewhat blurred.  Of course, The Matrix is rife with quasi-religious cyberpunk stylings and spiritualism, but more memorable are its mammoth action set pieces and fight scenes.  So if anything, 2009 has been a year where we learned to appreciate that a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, science fiction was more than explosions in space.

Three films spring to mind this year that have recieved general acclaim and all of these films are the works of talented filmmakers making their feature length debuts, or in JJ Abrams’ case, merely their second.  Indeed, Abrams’ formula for success with Star Trek borrows heavily from the aforementioned action films, and yet the reinvention of Star Trek    captured the imagination of cinema goers all around, with its extravagant set pieces and wonderful characterisation reigniting the failing star. An excellent step for a series that never really qualified as an acceptable subject in public discussion.  Star Trek, always a cerebral entity, feels fresh, young and hip again, and as a flagship icon it can now evolve as a platform for allegorical science fiction where no well liked men have gone before.  And I didn’t even like Star Trek before I saw it.

Moon, the debut of Duncan Jones (I’m reminded by compulsion to mention he is David Bowie’s son, although he’s since proved that such trivia is unnecessary), was a highlight of the summer blockbuster season, offering a perfectly engineered alternative to the brash, throwaway bonanza’s that infiltrate the summer evenings – and became a savour for cinema against the corrupting nightmare of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  It featured the delight of Sam Rockwell giving two masterful, nuanced performances with pathos and quiet grief that equal or better his finest work.  Of course, Sam Rockwell wouldn’t be Sam Rockwell if, even when playing a serial killer, made you want to become his best friend, even if you were sure he was privy to an excellent joke in the room that you weren’t.

The film, set on a lunar mining installation, hangs on his performance to succeed, yet it is much more than a film of performances: Moon is atmospheric and haunting, its ethereal score permeating the sterile white labs and corridors and the grayscale deserts outside – and with its commentary on themes of identity, corporate control and cloning, Moon works on the mind and the eye.  And it was made for only five million dollars – five million fucking dollars (not even five million pounds)!  It’s a fine work of fiction, a fine homage to the great works of science fiction like A Space Odyssey and Soylent Green, and a fine debut for someone clearly in control of such fine artistic talents.  I only hope the funding arrives for his next film, Mute.

Moon was not the only film to provide a visual and mental feast.  District 9, the thinly veiled allegory of apartheid – although it would be fair to add that its sentiments stretch outside of South Africa – was a knock out effort.  Neill Blomkamp, swindled alongside Peter Jackson on their prospective Halo movie, was given a budget and freedom to create a science fiction film with $30 million, and by god did he do well.  Despite certain shortcomings, District 9 was a film that delivered on its hype, providing us with thrills, scares and awe inspiring events that allowed an audience to enjoy an action romp and still be worked upon by the films more weighty themes of intolerance and xenophobia.  With its critical and commercial success, D9 proved that audiences were able to handle allegory and even take it to heart – many times I was asked whether I had seen that “film about apartheid,” before being assured it was very good.

Discussions about Star Trek’s sequel have begun appearing on media sites all around, and the writers seem to have reached the consensus that the follow up  - while of course living up to the spectacle and adventure that the first film delivered so well – should and will incorporate the franchises hallmarks of analogy and allegory,to some capacity.  That capacity better be wide enough to prove the point of this flippin post.  I hope they realise that their sequel bears a heavy burden now.  But more to the point, they hopefully realise that the franchise they are dealing with is not just important to the purile, insolent fans – who should be forgotten, by the way* – but to the science fiction genre itself.

Audiences have shown that they will respond to science fiction that talk to the mind as well as the eyes, D9 was one of the years most successful films, and Moon, despite a horrendous absence from all but a minority of theatres, was able to recoup its budget with ease.  Both were received well by critics and both were made for extremely tight and restrictive budgets.  Will Star Trek take up their mantle? Will it be a champion of a new age of science fiction? Or will Star Trek decline? Will it become simply another action blockbuster set in space?

I feel as though I’ve been spoiled already this year.  My hunger and thirst haven’t quite been clenched, but I won’t be greedy.  Greed would only stipulate the production of lesser films and expecting Avatar to be more than a humdrum retelling of Braveheart and a more respectable, yet ultimately arbitary work, the name of which escapes me right now, would border on gluttony.

*This should include fans of ANY to-be-adapted work. Nothing they say matters.  Nothing.

Star Wars Sequel?

According the MarketSaw blog, there may be the possibility that the Galaxy Far, Far Away that we’ve all come to greet with apathy may be returning to cinemas.  A strong source suggests that the success (or quality) of Star Trek’s reinvention has whet George’s appetite for more Star Wars movies.  This time however, we’ll be treated to a trilogy in 3D – this all depends however on the success of James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems to be drawing on Star Wars’ legacy of infantilising the public’s perception of science fiction.

Noah Berger/AP

Good news for what would otherwise be a heinous and vile suggestion would be that Lucas is willing – or planning – to relinquish his autocratic control on the reins of the franchise.  With little production input, and no director’s chair, the iconic franchise could be in the hands of someone with a fresh angle and perspective, and someone who can write snappy dialogue.  The other side of this coin is that Lucas may only be willing to let his old chums from film school take a crack at it.  And while Spielberg taking a shot would probably lead to predictable but worthy results, the idea of the fading powers of Francis Ford Coppola controlling Star Wars is a bit of a stomach churner.

Lucas before has stated that his initial intention was for three trilogies chronologing the fall of the Empire.  This is probably a bad idea; the franchise is almost bursting from the seams with the amount of film, TV shows, comics and crap books documenting the Galactic Civil War already, with little room for a whole trilogy.  Only the pairing of the planned live-action TV show (that’s presumably still going ahead) with the word “Battlestar Galactica” piques any interest at all, for its about time Star Wars matured a little and grew a philosophical limb – and by that I mean returning to more than just Zeitgeist Jedi bollocks.

So what other period in the Star Wars timeline could possibly give enough fruit to be worthy of a 3D trilogy?  The future, envisioned with increasingly ludicrous novels, ranging in quality from shockingly bad to forgettably readable, is problematic. There will undoubtedly be question concerning the fate of Luke, Han and Leia that cinema goers will want to know, and the amount of times we see the resurgence of the Empire, the resurgence of the Sith, the resurgence of another Empire, the invasion of Star Trek villains the Vong is endemic of Star Wars playing by the same old tricks again.

The past of Star Wars – way before the fetid prequels – has been plundered before to reasonable success.  The Knights of the Old Republic era, from the first comics documenting the ancient Jedi to Bioware’s fantastic roleplaying games (including the in-development MMO, The Old Republic), are set far enough before the events of the Galactic Civil War to overcome any notion of knowing what’s going to happen before the characters do – a large problem of the prequels.

The best of these additions to the franchise borrow the fun, humour and types from the original trilogy and plant them in a mythically framed universe slightly different from the one that burst onto the screens in 1977.  But because there has been a great deal of success with the Knights of the Old Republic era – and thus many different iterations of it – one wonders whether there is enough room for more galaxy spanning wars or confrontations between robed monks at all.

Why not simply a story about a Smuggler? Everybody loves a Smuggler.

Dollhouse and Flashforward fail to ignite, The Office (US) misses its chance and Stargate: Universe impresses

These last few weeks, a host of shows have returned.  First off, let’s consider Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon’s offering that takes a lump of  Baudrillardian ponderings, digests it along with his usual cast of hip, All American actors (with a glossy edition of OK! magazine on the side) and shits it out.  The resulting dump is a thing of two sides.  On one hand, the concept of reprogrammable avatars (the dolls) living inside a brothel and used by its clientèle for things as varied as romantic engagements to bank heists to rewaking the dead to solve their own murders is rich with potential.  On the other hand, each episode feels plucked from the air with little interest in maintaining a strong narrative arc and impetus in being watchable.

Instead, episodes usually revolve around Echo – a doll who, as her name suggests, finds echoes of her past and the echoes of the personalities which inhabit her over the course of the series – on a mission, with Eliza Dushku playing a variety of characters to various levels of success.  The thing is, every single week there seems to be a hiccup during the process of acting out these missions, so we follow the same procedure of the Dollhouse’s “handlers” – those who look after the dolls while on these missions – as they try and sort out the mess caused.  One wonders how the Dollhouse can be a successful business enterprise and what its customer approval rating is.  Ultimately, the shows first season felt like a very long, extended pilot, whereby only the final reels indicate that the show is going anywhere.

Season Two, starting again after the mysterious 13th episode “Epitaph One” was placed on the first seasons DVD, dawdles about in the same manner as half the first seasons episodes, which is again a shame, because “Epitaph One,” set in an apocalyptic future where the technology programming dolls has run out of control, should have galvanised the shows creative energies.  One can despair already that Dollhouse has been a bit of a spoil sport for ideas, rendering the chance of a similar premised show, executed better in the near future unlikely.

Flashforward unlike Dollhouse has a very clear premise, and one in which the whole show is built around.  The thing is, as I have noted before, everyone is so bloody boring in it.  There may well be genial orchestration in the construction of its overall narrative and mythology – although that has yet to be seen; I’m just saying – but the show insists on only dripping tidbits of information regarding the mysterious flashforwards, and in the mean time documents the ongoing crisis these many characters are dealing with.  That, in itself, is not a bad thing and is a proven formula for success, and indeed that loathed beast Lost does it well with its compulsory flashbacks, but it requires the characters to be more than cardboard cut outs.  Characterisation requires more than everyone having their own dark secret – as contrived as Fienne’s Mark Benford having a drink problem – their one fatal flaw which apparently gives them a depth and  humanity lacking in the perfectly ordinary, average human beings such as ourselves.  Domestic American life has been proved a tale of status, depression and discontentment so many times before that its starting to become incredibly dull, especially when you have to sit there and wait it out to catch a glimpse of the greater narrative arc.  However, Jack Davenport is nice to see onscreen as always, and here brings a standard (for him) knowing performance to the table of absurdity that is Flashforward, a table that no one else seems to cotton on exists.

Jim and Pam finally got married in The Office (US).  Their romance has gone on for a while now and the writers have built upon expectation after expectation that this would be something like the icing on the cake for a very good show.   They seem to forget that the icing on the cake needs a chef to expertly lattice that fluffy pink drizzle over the rest of the cake.  The episode had a feeling of self-gratuitous contentment which just came across lazy; let’s put all these characters which have slowly developed to varying levels of success over five seasons and put them in a hotel near Niagara falls.  Let’s see what happens then.

And it happens pretty much as you would expect it to, in a way one could probably suggest it would after seeing merely the first season.  Michael will embarrass everyone with a speech.  Dwight will have to interact with other people.  Pam and Jim will through off convention with a secret wedding.  There seemed to be little effort or interest in writing a comedic show to it, and as Krasinski and  Fischer’s onscreen chemistry arguably rivals or even betters that of Tim and Dawn’s (which is definitely one of the most underplayed yet wonderful romances of recent memory) to have such a predictable effort for what should be a landmark moment in the shows chronology is a waste.

It’s not all doom and gloom, disappointment and disinterest though.  The Sci-Fi Channel (now regressed to the oh so postmodern moniker of Sy-Fy) has reinvigorated the Stargate franchise, a franchise which I must admit to have never cared for much to the extent of never watching more than a handful of episodes of SG-1 and completely avoiding Stargate Atlantis.  Why I began watching Stargate Universe is not something I can really answer considering my record with its precedents, but the casting of Robert Carlyle probably had something to do with it.   That’s right, taking up the mantle of the game-changing Battlestar Galactica, respected thespians are flocking to Science Fiction television regardless of the baggage of their original hammy incarnations.

Time seems to have moved on in the Stargate mythos – although only a few years to be fair – and us humans have spaceships and shit, with offworld military installations, and all this still unknown to the world at large, and yet we still have no solution to the increasing gut of Richard Dean Anderson.  Carlyle plays a Scientist figuring out what some 9th chevron on the Stargates does, which is something they obviously haven’t achieved yet.  What follows is that some kind of alien force attacks Icarus, the base that Carlyle works on this mysterious Stargate at, and events are pulled into motion that elicit the survivors of the attack to jump into the Stargate and thus into the unknown.  They end up on an old, old ship drifting through space with no way home.  Indeed, we soon learn through a modestly awe-inspiring slideshow that the ship is no longer even in the Milky Way, the zoom of the images drifting outwards until dozens of galaxies fill the screen.  I’m a sucker for stuff like that.

Carlyle, as a source of knowledge among a rag tag bunch of bureaucrats and grunts, occupies a situation similar to Gaius Baltar in BSG, although instead of James Callis’ effete manner, Carlyle rockets around the ship with the kind of fury a bookworm Begby might radiate.  It’s quite hard to stop with the BSG comparisons, and the look of Ron Moore’s remake is obviously a starting point for Stargate Universe, with the Destiny (the name of the ship they are stranded on) replicating not only the interior look of the Nostromo but that of the good old Galactica too, and any comparisons are only likely to do Universe favours considering the acclaim BSG commanded.  The situation too, gives a similar potential for collisons of morality and politik among the crew.

Where it falls short of Battlestar Galactica for this viewer is that while Robert Carlyle is a great actor to watch week in week out, none of those around him carry the same kind of gravitas as Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos or Michael Hogan.  Perhaps an arbitrary or ungrateful criticism, but it means that those opposing Carlyle and his brusque manner are unknowable and somewhat tame actors, without the bite of Edward James Olmos glaring and snarling at you, or Michael Hogan giving his excellent pirate impression.  They are certainly capable actors, but they don’t have the extra edge that the aforementioned BSG aluminaries give, and you get the feeling you could pick up remarkably similar performances from any line of queuing Hollywood actors, and a line that will not include revelatory talents like Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer and Jamie Bamber.

What it does provide however, and very well, is the sense of wonder and awe that Battlestar Galactica, in its metaphysical, philosophical mutterings, ignored.  Not having been a fan of Star Trek in any sense until the new film (which borrows heavily from Star Wars, so criticise me for that) I’m loathe to reference a major part of that franchise, but the wonder of visiting these new, strange worlds and being alone in a very alien universe is a major part of what made me connect with Stargate Universe.  It’s a very strong start, and one that I will be following.

The Mist

One of the best horror films I have seen in years. But then I don’t watch or even like alot of horror films.  In fact, with the exception of the odd Carpenter film, or Alien, I wouldn’t say I own any “horror” films on Dvvduh or VHS.

Yet the film (an adaptation of a King novella by Frank Darabont) succeeded, in my opinion, at drawing on a great number of archetypes and investing them with enough plausability, gravitas and humanity so as to really kick off an enjoyable film.  I continuallly see Thomas Jane in sub-par films performing sub-par material yet he is always, always top notch.  Someone should really give the man some higher profile roles.

The direction was taught, yet interesting and ever engaging, providing us with both our “hate” figures (a local evangelacist at the forefront of them) and the redeeming small-town stock characticures.  I remember reading an interview with Darabont a while back, and he mentioned his fear of being branded the industries premier King adaptor.  Well, he is.  But I see nothing derogatry about that when considering The Mist; for certain this is different from Shawshank or the Green Mile, but it is a well crafted adaptation.  It also has a spectacular ending.

Revised Impressions of Heroes: Villains

It has been a while since I last had the time to post something on here, but now I have the time, I thought it would be apt to articulate my impressions of Heroes‘ third volume – Villains – thus far.  As this is being written, the last episode of this “arc” has yet to air, and if it were not for my willingless to experience a sub-par stream with bad sound synchronisation, I would have to wait another week.  However, I think, as we stand on the precipice of the volumes finale, we can garner some interesting observations on the series so far.

First off, I would like to congratulate myself for noting the haphazard pacing of the season opener, which in retrospect really was the taste of things to come.  Of course, of course, that has since become evident to everyone, but I feel due respect should be given in my case.  Forgetting vanity for a minute, I think it must be said, again, that the leverage of the “fans” really is noticeable on the show; the producers, writers and network seem to cave in to the speculation and wishes of die-hard fans without a fight.  I am not saying that those vocal fans are not accurate or inaccurate in their criticisms and suggestions, but the writers are writers for a reason, the production team working on Heroes for a reason and the network financing it for a reason.

I find following a show so susceptible to fan reactions to be a bit of a pain, especially when it results in often irrevocably dire plot lines and character arcs.  Consider the character of Sylar; a hit, memorable character who is the darling of superlatives the world over – yet because of his popularity with the fanbase, this dodgy fellow has been allowed both survive a sword through the heart (which ultimately undermines the entire first season) and recieve a humanising redemption from the pit of Hell in seasons 2 and 3.  It isn’t that Gabriel Gray (Zachary  Quinto) isn’t a bad villain – in fact, he’s generally played to great effect by the strange looking Quinto – but that Heroes is unable to tell the stories it wants because of the fans incessant whining.

The pace of the season has drfited between flat action sequences, rarely filmed with the kind of visceral verve invested in those of season one or two, and flat discourses between characters with some cringeworthy dialogue.  All in all, if  you had to pick and chose a list of shows in your weekly schedule of “self-time,” on paper, Heroes would not be up there.  However, I continually find an idea, or an enigma to look forward to in Heroes.  It does not matter whether Heroes provides or not – especially when some of the notions you pick up on are so unfounded – because neither do other big, ensemble dramas like Lost, which is driven by ideas, but ideas without explanation.

Heroes is often at its unwittingly strongest when it plays around with the ideas of lineage and misue of power; the whole mythology is more concrete than Lost and all the more fascinating for it.  Again, on paper, season 3 should have this in spades, but instead of the unravelling misdeeds of previous Generations in season 2, we instead find a rather flat character in Arthur Petrelli, the presumed dead patriarch of the Petrelli dynasty, played by Robert Foster.  Foster is a strange proposition; the potentially complex and memorable character of Arthur Petrelli is played with the kind of aplomb that should result in one, yet something feels off about his appearance, his delivery of dialogue and the fact that you can’t help but feel Foster is miscast in a role that would be much more effective if the the budget allowed for a bigger actor.

Foster is no bad actor however; his mincing of dialogue is great stuff, but the notion of respected lawyer and philanphropist does not suit an actor who would be more at home playing the local mob boss.  He just doesn’t have the gravitas to make the role convincing or even threatening enough for the series arch villain, especially one who has the powerful Austin Linderman (a superb Malcom McDowell) in his pocket.  Back to the events of the season itself and great news for those who thought Arthur was an odd fish; the penultimate episode Our Father (and one that got increasingly better as it went on) had Sylar telekinetically launch a bullet into the mans head, killing him instantly and destroying the cells that generate his abilities.  Arthur’s legacy is there, and it seems the wonderful Nathan Petrelli (a chisel-jawed politician with a paradox for a moral center) has taken up his fathers villainous mantle, which hopefully means the cluttered ensemble drama can keep with one clear goal for the next volume, entitled Fugitives.  Or mabye they’ll scrap that plottime when the fans vote in.

Perhaps it is the demographic that a show about normal people who gain superpowers inadvertently attracts that mean a standard ensemble drama is treated in ways not dissimilar from the realms of superhero conventions, pulp fiction and the comic book indstury.  In converse, one could say that Heroes is a superhero story that borrows from the realms of televised ensemble drama.  All in all, following a show in which characters, plot lines and even production staff can be voted off is not a show I want to follow.  I like Heroes, I like its ideas and I like the majority of its characters (and it has a great soundtrack atypical for your standard ensemble) and I hope that Duel, the last episode of Villains goes out on a high.  As a show, it isn’t immensely important as some will have you believe, and if it does go the way of Old Labour, Princess Di and Don La Fontaine, something will undoubtedly arrive in its place, but for what its worth, Heroes is good entertainment.

Heroes Returns! The first 2 episodes of Season 3 reviewed.

Its been a fair old while since I last made a post on here.  Caution to the winds though; the golden afternoons of late Summer are fading and I’ve been driven back inside.  Now, to the point.  Heroes, that big hit of a US TV Show that even made an impression on the British viewing public, is back for its third season.  Following a longer than expected hiatus for the shows creative powers, it returns in the hopes of recovering its dwindling audience, one that followed the first season avidly, yet tapered out with the shows troubled second.  Admittedly, the pacing of the second season left a lot to be desired after the octane fuelled conclusion to the first, but after a while the season began to shape up.

Sadly, the Writers Strike ended an ambitious storyline before it had a chance to come to fruition.  Tim Kring, creator of the show, acknowledged complaints both from critics and fans about the second season, assuring that when Heroes returned, it would come back with a bang.  But here I think is where a potential problem lies.  The second season was evidence of their intent to explore the cast of characters deeper, a slowly ticking character drama with excerpts of adrenaline.  As a result of the poor reception this noble idea evoked in the audience (and viewing figures!), the patriarch of the series went in the completely opposite direction, citing that if the audience wanted Heroes to be a non-stop adrenaline ride, he would see it so.  And so here we have Season 3: Villains.

I think it is here that my problem manifests.  The first episode of two, Heroes: Second Coming, is a over-reaching, sometimes disenchanting affair.  The Present Day (Time seems to shift nightly when, as enjoyable as some are, plot devices require it to in Heroes) seems to have shifted slightly from the last annals of Powerless, the last episode of Season Two.  We are treated to the answer to Powerless’ cliffhanger; the identity of Congressman Nathan Petrelli’s killer almost instantly, rushed through an explaination that really deserves more growth, thrown into an encounter between a demonic serial killer and a cheerleader with again, less of a dynamic than deserved and baffled by the disappearance of the ever-sympathetic policeman Matt Parkman, all in a matter of minutes.  Even fans of the show will have to be on the ball to follow the drama as it shifts, more often than not incessantly, between locales and characters.

The first episode moves at the breakneck pace as promised, but the tension, mystery and drama that made the First Season such a compelling watch seems to have evaporated.  One however, suspects that the baggage acquired during the First and Second Seasons tenure simply had to be shed in order for the writing staff to open on a clean slate.  Mysteries that have eluded us since the First Season are answered without the revelatory direction that the effort made to keep them awarded in the first place.  For fans insistent on answers, the tidbits of information revealed of long suspected truths will be rewarding, if not a little sour in delivery.  For a series that delivered its mysterious cliffhangers so well in the first, and almost in the second, seasons, it certainly does feel that a greater sacrifice has been made to please impatient fans.

The second episode, entitled Butterfly Effect, is a lot more of a grounded affair, if not still a tad shaky at the hinges.  You get the feeling that the rushed execution of the first episode was the wiping of the slate for the writing staff, because that is at least what Butterfly Effect indicates; important moments are handled delicately in contrast to the previous entry, characters are given their dues and we begin to gather a greater sense of the volume, especially considering the omnious titled Villains.  A mass breakout of imprisoned “Villains,” including a rather amusingly named Master of Magnestism, “The German,” seems to spark a rounding up of the troops for the Heroes cast, and we seem to have been provided with an obvious goal for our Heroes to unite against.  Those who have watched Season Two will have noted that unless provided with a conspicuous impediment to the safety of the world (or the USA it seems), the focus of Heroes seems to waver indefinitely.  Like the First Season, obvious antagonism has alerted the Heroes to their respective destinys, and all that boring character-driven nonsense that fans rejected can just be a product of the journey rather than for its own sake.  Just like the First Season.

Characters in Heroes have always proven to have an elasticity to them, a moral ambiguity, and thankfully I feel that this second offering hints that many different paths will open for certain characters.  As for the treating of individual characters, I caution myself to withhold judgement.  For example, those characters in the show without their own CGI-Power budget gaining a  CGI-Power budget will be a big turn off for many.  Its an obvious path, but if you’ve seen the two episodes you’ll know I’m talking about the Peter Parker lookalike.  My revised opnion on the matter, especially concerning the drain the power seems to exert on the character in Butterfly Effect, could lead to an intriguing character arc when he manages to “get rid” of his new perks.