Taking a Dim View of Bright

Title: Bright
Director: David Ayer
Screenplay: Max Landis

I was drawn to this for its Lord of the Rings meets modernity Shadowrun-esque mashup and mildly curious as to what yet another critic versus internet commenter controversy was all about. Perhaps the best way to put it is that the controversy is more interesting than the thing itself: it's Not That Bad, but then again it's Not Very Good.

The backdrop of modern LA with elves and orcs and magic is used as a heavy-handed allegory to modern American race relations, but frankly beyond the elves=white orcs=black setup, the movie has absolutely nothing to say about the subject, aside from one or two half-hearted 'can't we all get along' platitudes thrown in between explosions (No we fucking well can't, seems to be the message).

I've seen a number of people praising the world-building here, and those people must have damn good eyesight because I'm buggered if I can see what they're talking about. Dark Lord, magic scary, elves rich, orcs poor. That's it. It's not a well-realized world, it's a writing prompt, begging to be fleshed out in some detail, any detail. Instead, we get the world of 2017, only with orcs and elves and magic: literally nothing else about the setting is different.

Into this setting the plot throws Will Smith, here rather charmless and inconsistently characterized from scene to scene, and Joel Prosthetics, an orc cop whose personality is that he is an orc who is also a cop.

They find a McGuffin and other people also want the McGuffin, cue series of gunfights as the two stagger from scene to scene as though they were progressing through levels in a video game: there's a weird disconnect from any physical sense of space. Baddies appear at random. Scenes change as the two walk away briskly, oddly unpursued by anyone from their most recent bloodbath.

Oh, and there's tits too, because who is going to say no to tits.

It all culminates in an anticlimactic confrontation with evil elf ninjas that the plot says can murder an entire squad of swat police and a Chicano gang but will lose to a beat-up middle aged cop and his orc buddy. 

For all that though, it's not quite the festering pile of cinematic Hogwarts some critics have made it out to be. The dialogue between Will and Joel has its moments, mainly at the start before everything explodes, and Joel is sympathetic despite the layers of latex. Treating magic as something rare and special is a nice touch, even if it's only rather unimaginatively used to set fire to a couple of people throughout the movie.

Much of the critics' ire seems to be directed at the tone-deaf handling of race relations. As a white man living in an Asian country for the last 20 years, I must admit it didn't phase me that much, save as mentioned above, that it was completely extraneous to the story they were trying to tell.

More than that though, it seems to me that both critic and audience reviews are being driven to extremes, perhaps in order to be heard above the noise. If Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic have 50 reviews, you'll read maybe 3 or 4, and you'll likely pick those either at 5/5 or 1/5. Ditto for user reviews: I'll bet people skip by most reviews, reading a select few. In this environment then, I think both critic and audience scores are being pushed to the extremes, creating this kind of apparent divide.

In any event, it doesn't matter what we think. The sequel has already been greenlit, I hear. Here's hoping they spend a bit more time than 'bugger all' on the script next time.

Star Wars: The Last Review

Title: Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Director: Rian Johnson
Screenplay: Rian Johnson

Well, the movie's been out for almost a week, a period in which everyone who was going to see it has doubtless seen it multiple times and everyone who WASN'T going to see it has already explained how they're not really into Star Wars presumably because they hate fun, adventure and excitement, the bastards. Which of course means that, thanks to my impeccable, nay immaculate, sense of timing, it is time for me to provide the review that everybody, literally everybody, hasn't been waiting for. 

I feel a bit sorry for movies these days, swimming in an amniotic fluid of rumour, conjecture and leaks even before they've been pushed grunting into theatres, but then all the major names involved make multimillion dollar salaries, so fuck 'em. That's the movie business now, suckers.

So, a little bit divisive, hey? On Rotten Tomatoes, 93% positive from the critics but only 55% from site users. On Metacritic, 86 metascore, but only a 4.8 user score. Are reviews being carpet-bombed by irate fans and trolls? Are critics too scared of the Mouse to risk giving a negative review?

In a word: Yes.

I mean, it's good fun. It looks absolutely stunning, most of the time. The opening bombing run should be risible, with bombs falling down despite the zero-g and crewmembers surviving nicely without spacesuits, but is so expertly cut and framed it has you on the edge of your seat right from the get-go. There's a crimson throne-room fight that is all about fucking cool lightsaber moves, easily the best fight choreography since Darth Maul did his thing. There's a sudden cut to silence, in a monochromatic hyperspace kamikaze attack that is just jaw-droppingly phenomenal. A planet that bleeds red as the two sides battle across it. Imperial--sorry First Order, whatever--walkers hulking like Egyptian statuary against the skyline.

Oh, but the plot. Alas, the plot. Caught between the original trilogy and a new generation of movies, overstuffed with characters with too little to do even in the bloated 150 minute running time. Overburdened with expectations, too, all the mysteries JJ Abrams presented in The Force Awakens, apparently without bothering to have the slightest fucking clue how he was going to resolve any of them. And it shows, good lord, it shows.

There's a lot of talk of taking the Star Wars universe in a bold new direction, but let's acknowledge that it does so by almost immediately throwing over its shoulder every plot line left dangling from Episode 8. Who is Snoke? Who cares. Who are Rey's parents? Eh, just some guys. What's Luke doing at the Jedi Temple? Um, not much. Drinking space giraffe milk straight from the tit, mainly.

As a stand-alone movie, a lot of this would work fine. As the second movie in a trilogy, it just exposes the fiction of the emperor's new clothes. There is no trilogy, there's just a bunch of movies created so Disney can make back the money it spent on Lucasfilm. (Yes, yes, all movies are made to make money, but usually they also have the tiniest morsel of artistic merit to them, some message they wish to impart upon the world. Here? No.)

Some of the ideas are good, great even. There's a moment of tension when Kylo and Rey finally meet, and he urges her to forget the past. Jedi, Sith, it doesn't matter. That's a great direction to go--maybe the only direction, if the series doesn't want to mire itself in a hamster wheel of successive dark lords getting their laser-sword comeuppance from feisty youngsters, forever and ever, like infinite reflections repeating in facing mirrors--but then the movie immediately backs off by having the two revert to good/bad stereotypes.

The idea that anyone can be a hero, that it's who you are, not where you came from, is one I really, really like. It's the anti-Marvel effect: Evil is not defeated by the Chosen One or superheroes, but by ordinary people finally saying "enough is enough." That's a powerful and important message. That's weary cop John McClane saying "Yippe kai-yay, motherfucker." That's Ripley telling the Alien Queen to get away from her, bitch. That's fat gardener Sam Gamgee stabbing a 12-foot spider that tried to hurt his friend. But, oh but, it's a message that gets largely lost in a barrage of time-wasting silliness and too-close-to-home political posturing.

Which brings us to the parts of the movie that are just indefensible. A ropey CGI chase scene, punctuated by a stuttering bit-part character in service of a subplot that goes nowhere and achieves nothing. A plot device straight from the age of sailing ships, overseen by characters whose only role is not to tell each other things and then die heroically. A walk-on by returning character Captain Phasma that only serves to highlight how manipulative and pointless her return was. A finale that seems to go on and on before abruptly ending, leaving no clear way forward for the next Episode.

Like I said, it's really a stand-alone movie, not part of a trilogy.

But you know, despite all that, I still quite enjoyed it. I mean, it is AMAZING to look at. Whether I'll still think so if I try to watch it again is a question for another day.

Short is Sweet

Title: Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015: A Tor.Com Original
Editors: Ellen Datlow et. al (eight editors total)
Publisher: Tor.com

Not terribly timely here (2015 collection...at the end of 2017), but this was sitting on my Kindle for a while and I only just got round to reading it, so I figured I'd write a review.

This collection includes around 20 science fiction stories of varying length, sub-genres and quality. In reviewing anthologies it's easier to comment on each story, rather than the collection as a whole, but in general the overall quality here isn't that great. I picked up the digital version for less than $3, so no complaints there, but even then you'd probably do better seeking out individual good stories than buying the whole pack.

Another minor quibble with the Kindle edition: There's no index, so no way to jump straight to the story you want to read. Terrible oversight for an anthology. Also, there's an error where they second half of one story is printed again at the end of another story.

As for the stories themselves, there's a tendency for the shorter stories to be better, with the longer ones dragging on far too long and stretching whatever neato concept they had past the breaking point of my patience.

The So Good

"Please Undo this Hurt" by Seth Dickinson: Very subtle, slightly surreal story about two friends coping with depression, who are offered what appears to be a painless way out. I like that the SF element might or might not even exist--is the "out" real or not? Really made me think.

“Some Gods of El Paso” by Maria Dahvana Headley: Takes the idea of emotion as a drug and runs with it, featuring a Bonnie and Clyde duo trading in black-market feelings. The analogy gets stretched a little too much here, but the writing carries it along with a great sense of fun.

"The Shape of My Name" by Nino Cipri: The plot here is pretty basic, and those of you who don't like modern social commentary will likely hate this, but I thought it was elevated by the writing, the cadence and the use of verbal imagery. Beautiful words in service of a so-so plot.

The Not So Good 

"Thyme Fiend" by Jeffrey Ford, “Islands off the Coast of Capitola, 1978” by David Herter and “Waters of Versailles” by Kelly Robson: Novella length, each starts of interesting but drags interminably.

“Variations on an Apple” by Yoon Ha Lee: Is there a term yet for writers who deliberately fill their prose with the most obscure terms possible? Anamorphically, integument, tessellations, reifying... I'm not against the writer stretching my vocabulary here and there, but doing it every other sentence is simply wearying and smacks of deliberate obfuscation (hah, two can play this game) and intellectual showing-off. To paraphrase Hemingway, big ideas don't have to come from big words.

The Forgettable

All the rest, really. None were terribly memorable, I'm afraid.

Military SciFi Without Much of Either

Title: War Stories: New Military Science Fiction
Editors: Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak
Publisher: Apex Publications LLC

I haven't written a review in a while--Jesus, since 2011--okay, in a long while, so bear with me. The literary landscape has changed in a lot of ways, I feel, and this short story collection is a fair example of a few of them.

The biggest change is that my favoritest author in the whole wide world was still alive in 2011, may Iain M Banks rest in the Sublime and/or the land of infinite fun forever.

Other changes abound. I read this book on Kindle, which isn't exactly new, but what is new is that it's become pretty much my only means of consuming literature these days. Another change: It's published by Apex Publications, which near as I can make out, ran a Kickstarter to get financial backing before publishing it. Another one: It seems to have been inspired by a discussion on SF site io9.com. Tired yet? One more: It's focus is military SF from the perspective of female and LGBTQ characters.

Might be hard to imagine now, but six years ago any one of those factors would have been unusual (published via Kickstarter, inspired by a website, focused on alternative perspectives). All in one book would have been well nigh unimaginable.

Yes, yes, but Giles you waffling twerp, do those changes result in anything good?

Well. It's a short story anthology, so let me be the first reviewer ever in the history of reviewing to ever say that, ahem, Some Stories Are Good But Others Are Not.

Which perhaps in itself represents a small triumph for alternative modes of publication, in that the quality of output isn't much different from what you'd get from more traditional publishers.

On the other hand, it's not a breakthrough, and there are some absolute duds here. Mike Barretta's "War Dogs" is the worst of the bunch, just cringe-inducingly badly written with its cast including a sexy telepathic wolf-woman and the cast of Deliverance. Every author featured in the collection is a previously-published author, near as I can tell, so it's not like we're even getting any new voices in the bargain.

So, we're not getting better quality, nor are we getting new names.

Well, what is new then? The content, as mentioned above, is self-consciously different. I'm not the gender, race, sexual orientation or age that seems to be the target market, but you know, there's plenty here to appreciate for any reader.

There are 23 short stories in the anthology, divided into four parts: Wartime Systems, Combat, Armored Force and Aftermath, which sound pretty forced as far as categorizations go. Joe Haldeman's contribution, "Graves," a slightly surreal tale set in Vietnam, feels oddly tacked on to the front of the collection, as though the editors wanted Haldeman for name recognition and little else.

The standout is "Enemy States" by Karin Lowachee, a positively lyrical love story about the longing and loneliness of those left behind when soldiers go to war. That it's a gay couple at  the center is completely irrelevant--if the intent was to show there is no difference between the feelings of hetero- and homosexual couples, then mission accomplished.

At the same time though, this lovely, wonderfully-written, poetic story also highlights my biggest gripe with the collection: In many of the stories, the sci-fi elements are beside the point. You could set a lot of them in the modern world with little or no change. These tales of long-suffering lovers or oppressed Arabs would work just as well set in modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan.

So there's a new social conscience, expressed in the desire to have stories about women or gay couples that aren't just or only about women or gay couples, where the heroes just happen to be women or gay facing challenges and issues that any hero in other sci-fi stories face. Which is great, but the sci-fi often seems to get left by the wayside, and we're left with stories that describe modern issues without adding anything new to the dialogue.

I'm left with the feeling of an opportunity missed, as though a lot of effort was spent normalizing alternative heroes, and not enough spent giving them something interesting to do.

Spiral Tower, Mars

Beacon

Broken Falls

Composite photo

Cold canal.

"Dance" is Dragging

Title: A Dance with Dragons
Author: George R.R. Martin

Rating: 2/5

Reality can be harsh to happy endings. Evil is not always defeated, the hero does not always get the girl, and nobody ever really lives happily ever after. That’s fantasy.

Take, for example, the tale of a plucky fantasy author, battling to finish his life’s work, who overcomes a six-year-long bout of writer’s block to at last complete the fifth installment in his epic. It would be nice to think that the book thus produced was worth the wait. That would be the happy ending. But reality can be harsh to happy endings. “A Dance with Dragons” is not the book I waited six years to read, and to wish otherwise would be fantasy.

George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series was never mere fantasy, but with each new volume, it is becoming more and more a daytime soap opera.

Mr Martin famously spent the second half of the 80s working in television, and if I may jump to unwarranted conclusions, this experience seems to have helped him break new ground by infusing fantasy with some of the best aspects of TV—sharply-drawn, sympathetic characters, crisp, witty dialogue, and intricate plotting.

He’s also made clever use of catchphrases and personal mottoes to provide a kind of leitmotif to each character’s story and give a sense of continuity and cohesion to the tale: “A Lannister always pays his debts”, “If I look back, I am lost”, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” More famously, he’s gotten good mileage from his willingness to kill off seemingly key characters at surprising moments.

Maintaining such a high standard of writing for even one book would have been an impressive feat. Mr Martin managed it for three, stumbled on the fourth, and after 20-odd years working on the series, the fatigue is beginning to show.

The personal catchphrases continue to get good airtime, with “a Lannister always pays his debts” featuring five times, “If I look back, I am lost (or doomed)” six times, and “You know nothing, Jon Snow” an impressive 13. However, much of the other writing has become simply repetitive and lazy. The phrase “words are wind” also pops up 13 times in various character’s mouths, “much and more” (meaning “a lot”) gets used as hefty 30 times, but this is pipped for the number one spot by “(s)he was not wrong”, at a teeth-gritting 33 times. These phrases have become less a leitmotif, more a pianist banging the same three chords over and over again.

As part of the series’ gritty image, Mr Martin has never been shy about including sex in his stories, but now he appears to be shoehorning it in, simply for its own sake. One character spends the night before a siege having graphic sex. Another pays a surprise visit to one of his generals—and interrupts the latter mid-coitus. A description of a man being burned at the stake takes time out to tell us what happens when the fire reaches his genitals.

The habit of killing off characters has likewise devolved into self-parody. Having already killed off most of the expendables, Mr Martin spends most of “A Dance with Dragons” only appearing to kill off characters, but not really. One is apparently executed, but isn’t. Another appears to drown, but doesn’t. Yet another seems to be beheaded, but—well, you get the idea. The effect is a bit like the boy who cried wolf, and cheapens the book’s finale, in which two key characters appear to die, since by then the reader doesn’t believe for minute Mr Martin will actually follow through.

The other major drawback to the wholesale slaughter among named characters is that Mr Martin spends much time introducing a slate of new characters in much the same way that the old Star Trek series used to introduce new red-shirts.

What is left? Plot, but not much of it. Most of the characters spend their time somnolently staggering from A to B. There are sporadic bouts of frenetic action, to be sure, but the story itself continues to plod along, fairly aimlessly as far as I can see. With no resolution to any of the major plot lines anywhere in sight, it’s increasingly hard to care about any of the latest crop of characters, knowing they probably won’t live much longer than halfway through the next book (when and if it is ever published). It’s only in the handful of chapters that “Dance with Dragons” shakes off its lethargy and wraps up in a number of cliffhanger endings.

I would like to believe the series will get better, that all questions will be answered, all the plot lines will come together, but if there’s one thing Mr Martin has taught me, it’s not to believe in happy endings.

Hearts of Darkness

Title: Matterhorn, A Novel of the Vietnam War
Author: Karl Marlantes
Publisher: Grove Press

Rating: 4/5

The real horror of war is not that it is horrible, but that it is horribly banal, taking rage, murder, filth and despair and making them commonplace. That it is neither more nor less stupid and senseless than everything else the human race does. That it repeats itself ad nauseam, like tinnitus after an explosion, or a single act of homicide on an endlessly repeating loop.

In "Matterhorn", a semi-autobiographical story of the Vietnam war, first-time author and ex-Marine Karl Marlantes brings this message to vivid, messy life, focusing on a futile battle in a futile war.

Marching along death's mobius strip come 2nd Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the Marines of Bravo Company, as they spend several exhausting weeks building an artillery base on a hilltop code-named "Matterhorn", only to be told to abandon it and march through the jungle—beset by hunger, disease, wildlife—to another hill to set up another base. This, too, they soon quit, before being ordered back to attack Matterhorn, which has in the interim predictably been occupied by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

"It was all absurd, without reason or meaning," thinks Mellas just before the attack, a sentiment that could serve as a coda for the entire book. "People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about."

For most of the book though, the NVA prove enemies more in theory than fact. Far more deadly are the hatreds between black and white soldiers, the petty office politics between the commander of the battalion and the leader of Bravo Company, the callousness and greed of rear-area personnel. "'No matter where you go, it's still high school'" says Mellas. After being wounded, Mellas suffers more at the hands of kleptomaniac orderlies than he ever does at the hands of the NVA. It is almost a relief to return to the front lines and his unit.

The book ends shortly after, but you already know what will happen next—another march, another hill, another battle. There is no catharsis or epiphany, only resignation. "It was another cycle, another wearying convulsive rhythm, and if it wasn't Mellas it was (his friend) McCarthy, and if not McCarthy someone like McCarthy, forever and forever, like an image in facing mirrors in a barbershop."

The writing feels raw rather than polished, despite the novel's reported 30-year gestation period. Tension builds, then suddenly evaporates. The team scales a mountain, deadly vulnerable to enemy fire, when... they reach the top, unscathed. The characters too are prone to sudden shifts in personality, here nervous newcomer, here swearing old-timer.

In a way though, these rough edges work to the novel's benefit. War is not a story arc, but a staccato series of incidents, and so the plot feels like a true reflection of the experiences of Mellas and his men. Characters do not develop so much as dissolve, individual tics erased under a barrage of four-letter words, but this too feels believable, and you can easily imagine after months of combat those around you blurring into an undifferentiated, swearing, sullen mass.

In the tradition of James Jones's "Thin Red Line" or Wofgang Petersen's "Das Boot", this is a work that leaves you emotionally numbed but intellectually charged. The pointlessness of it is the point. "He knew all of them were shadows," thinks Mellas. "The dead, the living. All shadows ... changing the pattern of things as the moved but leaving nothing changed when they left."

And that, above all else, is the true horror of war.