Captain Avengers: Age of Civil Wartron

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Directed by: Joss Whedon
Written by: Joss Whedon

Captain America: Civil War
Directed by: Anthony & Joe Russo
Written by: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Finally got around to seeing these two entries into Marvel’s sprawling cinematic universe, long after Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 convinced me that these safe but comfy cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers movies had nothing going for them but photogenic leads, CGI and the occasional quip.

I still think that’s the case, but it feels like the formula’s been improved and refined, so what you end up getting is a kind of junkie hit of pure, uncut, photogenic leads quipping in the middle of CGI action sequences. And let’s admit, that can be a lot of fun, because these photogenic leads are very photogenic, and they do have some very good quips indeed.

You can talk about plot, but really, these movies have kind of ceased to contain anything but the bantering, and are now about the characters we know and like just kind of bouncing off one another and their environment.

I think that’s one reason Marvel movies often get criticized for having weak or uninteresting villains—the bad guys are secondary, useful only as a prop to get our heroes back on their one-linering. Civil War goes a step further and makes the ostensible ‘bad guy’ almost a no-show in his own movie: his only role is to get the superheroes punching each other. (I think maybe this is also why, say, Marvel can get away with 3-4 movies a year while something like Star Wars feels odd having two movies 5 months apart--A Marvel movie is like meeting old friends, while Star Wars is listening to them tell you about their summer vacation). 

None of the paper-thin plots stands up to even the lightest and airiest of dramatic analyses.

In “Ultron,” Iron Man/Tony Stark/Robert Downey Junior creates an AI that goes berserk and tries to kill humanity, so the team’s solution is to hang out at a farm for a bit and then create an AI (Vision/Paul Bettany) that they just kind of hope won’t go berserk and kill humanity.

In “Civil War” (an Avengers movie in all but name), the whole plot revolves around whether or not the superhero team will submit to international oversight, though each character’s opinions on this seem entirely artificial and geared to making an even 50/50 split between the cast. Captain let’s-punch-the-Nazis America says no, because, um, reasons. Tony loose-cannon-I-spent-a-previous-movie-telling-the-government-to-back-off Stark says yes, because he’s the other big name and the two leads need to fight.

In terms of characters, they’re both incredibly overstuffed, but because characters are ALL they have, and they’re all as charming as a Tom Hiddleston wink, you don’t mind. Black Panther, Spider Man and Ant Man are in Civil War, because, well, these movies are just 12-year-old me mashing my G I Joes against the Star Wars action figures for the hell of it.

Marvel absolutely trades on their pop-culture familiarity: we get maybe five minutes of introducing Spider Man, because hey it’s Spider Man, maybe 30 seconds tops with Ant Man because eh, why not, and then we’re on to the next scene.

But for all that, they’re fun. Really, marshmallowy, rot-your-brain fun.

Civil War moreso than Ultron, but even that finds its feet when it isn’t trying to set everyone up on the right trajectories for the next 10 years of Marvel movies—an early party scene where everyone tries to lift Thor’s hammer is delightful, because it’s the distilled essence of Marvel: these dudes just hanging out and shooting the shit with each other (contrast that to when they try to do anything other than quip, like the utterly uncarbonated ‘romance’ between Black Widow and the Hulk).

For sheer Marvel-ness, Marvelosity, Marvelousness, Civil War probably outdoes Ultron, as the latter is so clunky that even the quipping often seems forced. It tries to shoehorn too much plot into movies that, like I say, really aren’t about plot at all. My only other criticism of Civil War (aside from the patently artificial setup) would be the false-gravity somberness of the ending, the movie’s insistence that the heroic infighting we saw was a serious matter which has torn this team apartbecausehahaha,  no of course it hasn’t, don’t be silly, you’ve got 3-4 more movies with these actors, come off it.

So, they’re very fun movies, no denying it, but I don’t really like them, if only when I spend a second or two thinking about them (which, as mentioned, is clearly optional).

Two reasons.

One problem I have is with the whole ‘superhero’ genre (both comics and movies). It’s a moral abdication, it’s giving up in the face of challenges or difficulties and hoping someone else is going to swoop in and solve everything for you. It’s not giving a fuck about the environment or poverty because Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are going to solve everything for everyone and take us all to Mars or whatever—No, they aren’t. They’re lining their pockets and that’s the end of it. It’s up to regular people to fix what’s wrong in our world.

The cops or army you see in every superhero movie screwing things up or running around ineffectually? The civilians screaming and crying and waiting for someone to save them? That’s us. That’s you and me. And if there are no superheroes (and there aren’t, I checked), then those people are all in deep, deep shit.

Particularly in our age of media overload where the world can seem so overwhelming it’s tempting to just shrug and turn your back on the world’s problems, the idea of being saved by heroes seems a dangerous fantasy to indulge in. It’s the cheapest, easiest, most childish form of wish-fulfillment (I’d show them, if only I was magically gifted with laser eyes, instead of making an effort to improve myself…).

Give me Samwise Gamgee, the gardener willing to go into literal hell, give me John McClane the regular cop trying to stop the terrorists, give me the whole cast of Saving Private Ryan, people who actually had to work to become heroes.

That’s point one.

Point two is the gotta-catch-em-all structure in which Marvel tries to get you to watch every movie just so you can keep up with what’s happening in the other movies. None of these movies really have anything interesting to say about our world, the people living in it, or even about the characters that inhabit the fictional universe, they’re empty calories, and Marvel just wants you to keep coming back for more so that you can keep coming back for more. You have to watch the movies so that you can watch the movies.

It’s a bit like modern online-only video games, which generally require you to repetitively play (or ‘grind’) the same content over and over again so that you can be rewarded with some game item which allows you to … play the same content over and over again, but this time with a slightly larger number on the screen.

So I’m entertained by these movies, I enjoyed them, I admire the craft that went into their structure and production. But I do not love them.

Horus Hears a Who

Title: Horus Rising (Horus Heresy Book 1)

Author: Dan Abnett

Publisher: Black Library

When you’re writing about a premise as silly as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (W40K for short), or something equally silly like superheroes or giant robots, I think you’ve got two options: either revel in the silliness, play it with a wink and a smile and dial it up to 40,000, or else commit to it entirely, and really try to work out the realistic implications of the crazy premise so that you can wring some meaning from it.

If I can go on a quick tangent to illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some movies as examples: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Pacific Rim (2013) are very wink-wink we know this is ludicrous but ain’t it fun?, while Watchmen (2009) and Logan (2017) are committed to getting under the skin of either the whole idea of superheroes in the former case, or one superhero in particular in the latter case.

Point is, you can make it work either way, but this novel doesn’t.

THE SILLINESS AT THE CORE

The gonzo, over-the-top conceit of the W40K universe—a tabletop/miniatures wargame first published in 1987—is that in the year 40,000 giant, roided space marines in a pseudo-Roman intergalactic Empire will fight on distant planets against fantasy beasts, like Orks and Eldar (Elves), Ridley Scott Alien-esque Tyranids and other assorted weird creatures.

It’s supposed to be ‘grim’ in the sense that the default human protagonists belong to a bloodthirsty, evangelical crusade, and also in the sense that they have no hope of ever winning against the opposition ranged against them. That grimness, however, doesn’t quite hide the silliness at the core—it’s an over-the-top grimness, yet it’s never squalid or gratuitously shocking, so that grimness can be played for laughs.

So when it came time to build on W40K’s long-running popularity and expand the brand into the field of fiction, I think those two paths were open—go hard or go full ridiculous.

In 2006’s “Horus Rising,” the first of 48 (and counting) volumes in the “Horus Heresy” series, Games Workshop’s fiction imprint, Black Library, opted for serious, but it’s kind of a dull seriousness that never tries to scratch beneath the tropes it presents.

If the intent had been to produce a fun page-turner, then I think they’d have done far better to go the nudge-nudge, wink-wink route. Instead, the whole thing is a bit dour and downbeat, without any insight or innovation that might make such dreariness worth slogging through.

COMMITTED TO THE WRONG THINGS

Dan Abnett—whose career seems more focused on comics such as X-Men, the Punisher or Judge Dredd than novels—brings to the novel the Judge Dredd tone with none of the social commentary. It’s a competent and serviceable book, but really doesn’t have anything going for it beyond the mechanics of plot.

The story of this first book focuses on Space Marine Captain slash post-human superman Garviel Loken, and details how he and his avowedly atheist comrades deal with an encounter with supernatural, seemingly godlike creatures that live in W40K’s equivalent of hyperspace, called the Warp.

During a battle on an alien planet, one of Loken’s men is possessed by something that lives in the Warp, mutating him into a monster. Loken is shaken but reassured there is a scientific explanation, while one of the civilians who witnesses the horror is shocked into joining a secret cult that worships the Emperor (despite the latter’s insistence he is mortal). Meanwhile, Loken’s commander, Horus, is slowly corrupter by agents of the infernal/otherworldly power.

The question of “What happens to religion when humanity gets into space?” is maybe not an obvious choice for a wargame to tackle, and frankly one the book doesn’t spend too much time addressing despite it being the only thing of real interest happening—Abnett is much more focused on the machinations surrounding Horus and foreshadowing his eventual fall from grace. Presumably explored in more detail in the other 47 books in the series.

There’s potential in the idea, for sure. Will the triumph of reason represented by space exploration and colonization lead to the downfall of religions, when we do not find God or Allah or Zeus or whoever out there? Is religion truly just the retreat before the inexplicable, and will new mysteries in the galaxy drive us back into its arms? Interesting questions to ask, but not ones you can really deal with in a series—and oh what a series it is—of books about bloodshed and blowing things up across the galaxy.

MAXIMUM SILLINESS

So, for me at least, it feels committed to the wrong things: it’s committed to its premise, but only the surface details, the who is doing what to who, when and where, rather than the underlying concepts or ideas. I think Abnett could and should have jettisoned all the faux-introspection and just gone for maximum silliness—perhaps had the buffoonish Orks (who’ve always been presented as a kind of parody of the British working class in W40K) as foils to the serious space marines—and had more fun with this. 

Or is that ... HERESY?

Titan

Title: The Titan
Directed by: Lennart Ruff
Network: Netflix

Do modern trailers give away too much? The Titan, a direct-to-Netflix sci fi movie by some guy (seriously, this is the only recognizable thing on Lennart Ruff's IMDB page--though he seems to have been more active in German cinema), poses an interesting problem on this score.

Here is the trailer for The Titan: On an environmentally-devastated Earth, a soldier (either Sam Worthington or Channing Tatum) is subjected to genetic modifications intended to make him able to survive on Saturn's moon of Titan. His wife (Taylor Schilling) worries that the unscrupulous scientist leading the program (Tom Wilkinson) is going too far.

Here is the actual plot of The Titan: On an environmentally-devastated Earth, a soldier (either Sam Worthington or Taylor Kitsch ... possibly Jai Courtney?) is subjected to genetic modifications intended to make him able to survive on Saturn's moon of Titan. His wife (Taylor Schilling) worries that the unscrupulous scientist leading the program (Tom Wilkinson) is going too far.

It is, in other words, a movie impossible for the trailer (or this review) not to spoil, a movie that does literally nothing surprising, interesting or original with its premise. This is easily one of the dumbest "cerebral" movies I've watched in ages.

Not only is the plot completely linear and utterly obvious, is it also direly lacking in any kind of meaningful conflict. The Earth is dying. Requisite mad scientist dreams of genetically engineering people to live on Titan. So, right away, his up-front stated intention is to genetically modify people. His secret, dastardly plan is ... to genetically modify people. But, like, more.

The movie starts off with the expected beats--the set up, initial happy scenes as Sam (Rick) and the other 'pioneers' revel in their new abilities, followed by a descent into madness and despair as the real cost of the transformation becomes apparent and then ... um, short chase, easily captured, short chase, easily captured, but then not, for some reason. Our hero Rick (Sam) escapes the clutches of the evil scientists who wanted to send him to Titan, and instead aligns with the good scientists, who send him to Titan! Score one for the little guy. Roll credits.

Characterization is pretty bare-bones. Sam (Rick) loves his wife and kid. Wife loves him. Evil scientist is evil. Within such stick-figure roles it seems a shame to complain about acting, so all I can say is they're fine, Tom Wilkinson's BBC tones are a joy to listen to but also a reminder that "bad guy speaks with a British accent" is exactly how stupid this movie is.

There's potential here, I think, some different ways you could have gone with this idea. Body horror as Rick (Sam) slowly realizes the changes that are turning him into something alien, or is driven mad by the process. Or maybe a morality play, asking: Is it ethical to save the human race if it means turning us into something inhuman? Would you be willing to make that choice? But nope, instead they go the dumbest, most obvious evil-science take on the concept. The genetic treatment is painted as outright evil, because the big scientist lied, and lying is wrong. Thank you, elementary school ethics class.

Star lab rat Rick (Sam) -- or quite possibly Sam (Rick) -- undergoes agony as he is slowly transformed into a human-alien hybrid, but he does not lie, or do violence, or actually do anything other than suffer, which makes him good and the savior of the human race. Not the mad scientist who actually made his transformation possible, mind you, but the guinea pig, the guy who just sat there and was injected with shit--him, he's the hero.

So, consider yourself spoiled. And warned: this Titan is an intellectual midget.

Woken Furies

Title: Woken Furies
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

Maybe there's something both sad and inevitable in the way the idealism of youth gives way to the practicality and compromise of middle age, and so on down that slippery moral slope to the conservatism of our golden years. When the hippy generation rose to power we got not peace and love but two Gulf wars and a housing bubble. 

Woken Furies, the third in Richard Morgan's cyberpunk series featuring taciturn badass anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs, is Kovacs in middle age, the burning fervor of Altered Carbon tempered through the fires of Broken Angels, now reduced to nostalgic bitterness and disillusionment.

It's a far more meandering book than the first two in the series, a blurry, unfocused plot in dire need of bifocals, as former government super-soldier Kovacs returns to his birthplace of Harlan's World on the path of revenge, then becomes a fugitive among robot-hunting mercenaries, then rounds up a group of ageing revolutionaries in order to stage a rescue, then has to do it all over again. Spoilers!

The writing in the sense of painting-pretty-pictures-with-words is still top class though, and Kovacs' return to the Japanese-influenced Harlan's World allows Morgan to slip in some dry jokes among the place names: Tekitomura ("Random town"), Tadaimako ("Welcome back") Harbour, Muko ("Over there") Prospect.

It's the tone and theme, however, that have come the furthest since Altered Carbon.

While Kovacs remains his monosyllabic, irresistible-to-women self (tangent: did Morgan have it in his contract that Kovacs would have full-on triple-X sex with two separate women in each novel? Because it works out exactly--two technicolor sex scenes with two individuals. Every. Damn. Book.) but instead of the eat-the-rich anger of Altered Carbon, he's now cynical about political causes, noting that revolutionaries care as little about the individual as the repressive governments they plan to overthrow.

During his time among the mercenaries, Kovacs meets Oshima, a woman who may have downloaded into her own brain a copy of the consciousness of Quellcrist Falconer, a near-legendary rebel leader and kind of moral lodestone for Kovacs throughout the series. Only now, faced with the possibility of meeting his idol, Kovacs is disinterested, wanting only to restore Oshima's personality and individuality. The other ex-revolutionaries, on the other hand, have very different priorities.

It's not just politics that's grown up, though. Kovacs' return to his homeworld brings him into contact with many of his old associates from his youth, and from his time as an "Envoy" (a sort of intergalactic space commando), and he learns the hard way that the way he remembers things are not the way others do, that our happy peaks are sometimes our friends' lowest troughs, that our friends grow apart from us and we discover there really wasn't that much keeping us together in the first place, save for the convenience of proximity and time.

He even--bigger spoilers--comes face to face with a younger version of himself, and hates what he sees.

To the extent that living on this funny old world of ours has imparted me with any wisdom whatsoever, these realizations ring true, though I'm not sure what anyone could do with this knowledge--if you're young, you probably don't believe it, and if you're not (like me) well, then it's already too late, innit?

Those themes can be a little hard to see as you're wading through yet another rat-at-at action sequence or a squishy sex scene, but once you put the book down for a bit and let it sit, these things come into focus and leave you with an appropriately somber, reflective mood for the end of the trilogy.
  

The Lemmiest of Movies: Annihilation

Title: Annihilation
Directed by: Alex Garland
Screenplay by: Alex Garland

This is another one of those times when I'm oddly relieved I don't live in America, as this tremendously simplifies the streaming service landscape: everything's on Netflix. Star Trek? Netflix. The Expanse? Netflix. Quirky movies that the studio apparently has no faith in? Netflix.

Annihilation is extremely loosely based on the very Lemmy book I reviewed earlier, and according to my extensive, in-depth, exhaustive research on the film's Wikipedia page, one of the financiers felt it was too nerdy and a deal was struck with Netflix for international distribution. And there was much rejoicing. Their loss is my gain.

Although it shares the same title as the book, this is very much its own thing. Director Alex Garland (Director/Screenwriter of Ex Machina and Screenwriter on Dredd, Never Let Me Go and Sunshine) takes the basic premise--five women scientists go into a weirdo paranormal zone of alien origin called Area X, located on the Florida coast and centered about a lighthouse--and uses it to tell what is essentially a completely different story.

Instead of existential dread and man's disconnect from nature, we get body horror and fear of mortality. Largely, these changes are all to the good, turning the aimless navel-gazing of the book into something as honed and pointed as an alligator's tooth or bear's claw. It's only let down at the end, when the last 15-20 minutes or so go full on 2001-ish psychedelic lights and  exploding jellyfish that it kind of loses its footing and goes from OMG to WTF.

The actresses almost all underact their asses off here, angling for existential disassociation that honestly, makes them a bit bland to watch, especially leads Natalie Portman (Luke and Leia's mom) and Jennifer Jason Leigh. There are some zippy scenes between Portman and her husband, played by Oscar Isaacs (Poe Dameron), but once we get in to Area X everyone goes into stunned fish look. About the only one who leaves much of an impression is Goina Rodriguez, as unhinged paramedic Anya.

It's not a movie to watch for the performances, really, but for the atmosphere. Taken together, the movie is not so much scary as unsettling. There's a lot of strangeness going on as the alien zone warps and twists the life of everything inside it, including our five intrepid heroines, as deer grow flowers on their antlers, flowers grow in human shapes, sand is transformed into crystal trees and people's intestines get up and go walkies.

In the limited field of direct-to-Netflix movies, it beats the pants off of Mute, at any rate. It's unique, it's got its own style, a couple of things it wants to show you, and isn't too hung up on action and spectacle. If this is the future of moviegoing, I for one am fully on board.

Dubble Deighton

In keeping with my recent fad for aerial adventure, here's two more that have been on my reading list:

Title: Bomber
Author: Len Deighton
Publisher: HarperCollins

Absolutely blown away by this book, ranks right up there with some of the great military fiction, like James Jones's Thin Red Line, Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five or Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn.

Bomber follows a single RAF night bombing raid over Germany from a number of perspectives: Lancaster bomber pilot Sam Lambert, German night fighter pilot Victor Lowenherz, radar station commander August Bach, and the inhabitants of the fictitious town of Altgarten.

The build-up to the raid is excruciatingly tense and slow-paced, as the participants go through their little pre-flight rituals, squabble or brown-nose with comrades and commanders, or make unrealistic plans for their futures. I'll admit the first third of the book can be a bit frustrating, as you're introduced to yet another set of characters who stumble into the story, wishing they'd DAMN WELL GET ON WITH IT. Which is the beauty of this section I suppose: that's precisely what all the bomber crews would be thinking.

The only part that still doesn't work for me in this part is the constant reminders and descriptions of the weather patterns and cloud formations. If this is intended to be ominous, it doesn't quite work, leaving me a little bit lost amid all the stratocumulous and cirrus nimbus.

The bombing raid itself, by contrast, is absolutely riveting.

Once the bombers take off, pretty much everything goes straight to hell more or less immediately. Planes ram into flocks of birds and crash. Pathfinders are shot down or mark the wrong targets. Fire hoses run out of water. Rescuers are killed by unexploded bombs.

The two contrasting themes are the mechanization of war and the extent to which soldiers and airmen become mere tools on the one hand, and the all-too-human jealousy, infighting and office politics that plagues everything that happens outside of the combat zone.

There's a wealth of technical detail here, but it's to Deighton's credit that this never (apart from the cloud formations) overwhelms the story. The sometimes arch observations on the nature of war, particularly from Lancaster pilot Lambert--the eagerness of the young to destroy, the speed with which war reduces them to automata, the ultimate futility of bravery in a war where individual contribution counts for nothing--really hit home hard by the end of the book.

Title: Fighter
Author: Len Deighton
Publisher: William Collins

Despite the parallel titles and identical author, Fighter is nothing like Bomber in the least.

Instead of a fictional account of a single action, this is a historical overview of the complete Battle of Britain in 1940, when Hitler and Goering's Luftwaffe tried to smash the RAF. Or did they? One of Deighton's major points throughout the book is that the Germans were extremely vague on what they were trying to accomplish--destroy the RAF, provide cover for a seaborne invasion or destroy Britain's capacity to resist one?

As with Bomber though, Deighton seems to take real pleasure in describing the technical aspects of war, the operation of radar and the Luftwaffe's guidance systems, the aerodynamic properties and characteristics of the Bf109 and Spitfire, pilot training schedules and aircraft production statistics. Some of this is fascinating--such as the fighter plane design and how it impacted both armament and flight performance (and therefore tactics). The Luftwaffe guidance systems, on the other hand, I just found a bit of a chore to read through, and still don't really understand.

As you might expect, there's a corresponding paucity of first-hand accounts. A couple of British pilots describe encounters, but that's about it. So frustratingly, there isn't much of a sense of what it was actually like for the people actually fighting this battle.

In the end, I'm a little perplexed by this book. It goes into such detail on the fighters and the tactics employed (especially on the German side--e.g. have fighters fly high above the bombers or down with them?) but even at the end of the book, I'm still not quite sure why they didn't wipe the floor with the RAF, other than due to lack of interest. The weather turned bad and Hitler, never especially interested in conquering Britain, turned towards Russia.

A bit depressing to realize that after all those deaths, one side just couldn't be bothered any more, but that does rather dovetail nicely with the message of Bomber.

Flying off the pages

Recently I've been interested in books about combat flying, including the two reviewed below. Very different books, but each enjoyable in their own way.

Title: Lords of the Sky
Author: Dan Hampton
Publisher: William Morrow

This first one tries to be comprehensive, covering the whole history of air combat from World War 1 right up to the author's own experiences as an F-16 pilot in the First Gulf War.

Chapter layout is pretty standardized: First you get a fictionalized 'account' of some encounter during the period. Then Dan explains the situation on the ground--who invaded who, and why the former was usually the Germans--followed by a very detailed account of pilot training programs, perhaps a few details of one or two notable pilots or aircraft, then more explanation of what was going on a few thousand meters below their feet.

The fictionalized accounts are the best parts of the book, excitingly written if of dubious historicity, while the rest of the chapters tend to explain a lot more about the wars in general than about the actual specifics of air combat in each era. As a result each chapter feels as padded as a flight suit, an impression reinforced by the extensive appendices, glossary of terms and excerpt from another of Dan's works, as if there was a page count to meet and he couldn't fill it. Dan also frequently falls victim to the desire to editorialize and spout fairly cookie-cutter hoohah opinions on all things military.

Could have been about a quarter of the length without losing any detail on actual air combat.

Title: Carrier Pilot
Author: Norman Hanson
Publisher: Silvertail Books

In contrast to the above book, this is one man's memoir rather than an attempt at a historical overview. The man in question, Norman Hanson, signed up with the RAF, was sent to the USA for training, then posted to Egypt and finally to HMS Illustrious, operating in the Pacific Ocean against the Imperial Japanese.

If none of those engagements strikes you as terribly central to the course of World War 2, it should come as no surprise that Mr Hanson didn't actually see all that much action, and the bulk of the book is instead occupied by tales of drinking and singing in various bits of the USA and the Empire, punctuated by about three instances where he actually fired his guns in anger.

These rear-area shenanigans quickly get repetitive, whose boredom is only broken by the author's Boy's Own magazine writing style, about things going "like the clappers" and things being a jolly good show eh what? It's perhaps not the author's fault, but he does rather sound like he just stepped out of a Monty Python "Upper Class Twit" sketch.

The most impressive part of the account of actual battle is the absolute, terrible and utter slaughter the Allies were able to inflict upon their own pilots. Primarily, this seems to have been because the fighter Hanson flew, the F4U Corsair, was a bit of a death trap for new pilots or when attempting to land on a carrier.

At one point, for example, Hanson states the carrier air wing lost 41 aircraft, only 16 of them in combat. The other 25 were from ditchings or crash landings. Indeed, the only two times the author's life seem in genuine danger are when he's forced to ditch to avoid hitting another plane, and when a friendly destroyer accidentally fires on them in an attempt to get at the "Japs."

Ordinarily, this might be a cause for sober reflection, but Hanson is far too psychotically British stiff upper lip for that, and any sadness over the repeated and grisly demise of his closest companions is done away with by a stiff drink and a sentimental tune on the piano.

Jolly good show.

A Break from Cyberpunk: Broken Angels

Title: Broken Angels
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

In this semi-sequel to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's body hopping anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs returns, this time to take two-fisted aim at corporate greed and the commercialization of war.  

Sixty years after the events of Carbon (which is referenced briefly once then promptly forgotten), Kovacs is now a mercenary fighting on the revolution-wracked world of Sanction IV, where rebels are liberally dispensing nukes to anyone they don't like, while the corporate-backed cartel government is using even worse weapons.

In the midst of all this, Kovacs is approached by a deserter from the rebel side with a proposition: help uncover a 'Martian' artifact found on the planet, and help everyone involved become filthy rich. (Martians being the colloquial name for a race of presumably-extinct highly advanced aliens whose ruins mankind has discovered).

To that end, Kovacs assembles a team consisting of such Dirty Dozen tropes as the Demolitions Expert, the Ninja Assassin, the Hotshot Pilot and you get the idea. They all go traipsing off to a highly irradiated beach that will inevitably kill them all as they dig for said artifact.

Oh that's right, this is the universe where people's consciousness is digitally backed up in a 'cortical stack' implanted inside their spines, allowing them to be ported from one body to another or even squirted across space to another star. 

Now, being backed up strikes me as being pretty cold comfort if you're dead (Morgan establishes in graphic detail that getting shot in the head still kills you--the stack is a backup, not the real you). I could see it being a kind of life insurance deal (at least my family will be provided for, etc.) in the event of accidental death, but in Broken Angels a whole platoon of guys go into a hot zone knowing they are 100% positively absotively going to die, and comfort themselves with the knowledge that their digital selves will enjoy a reward afterwards. That seems a trifle ... psychotic. No?

Removed from Altered Carbon's urban setting this feels much more military scifi than cyberpunk, though to be honest the secret elite crack super-soldier crack elite super squad do very little but die of radiation exposure and have graphic sex with Kovacs.

And can I point out how creepy it is to have vivid sex scenes in a book that's written in first person? Who exactly are we supposed to imagine Kovacs is telling all these slippery, gushy, wet and wild stories to? I wish I could say this was an indication Kovacs is an unreliable narrator who is far too into himself, but the rest of the book is presented as fact. I just picture the interviewer or amanuensis's horrified face as Kovacs wades into excruciating details about glands and secretions and thrusting and moaning. Hope they were paid well.

The message is presented with a little more nuance here than in Altered Carbon, even if the message itself is still not terribly subtle. In Altered Carbon, it was 'rich=bad, so rise up and murder the bastards.' Here, corporations that profit from war are in the target sights, but so are fanatics who use their revolutionary fervor to justify their revolting actions. It's balanced, but it does rather mean it reaches conclusions as trite as 'war is bad,' 'ruthless companies are bad' and 'fanaticism is bad.'

All that said, this is my favorite of the three Kovacs books. A sense of impending doom builds throughout the book, with the soldiers working to unravel the mystery before radiation unravels their DNA, culminating in an apocalyptic burst of action that is much more original and satisfying than, say, Altered Carbon's endless techno-ninja shenanigans. On the other hand, that does mean it's more slow-moving, which may test the patience of people expecting more of the same from the last book.

Altered Johansson: Ghost in the Shell

Title: Ghost in the Shell
Director: Ruper Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman)
Screenplay: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger

Let's get one thing out of the way right from the start: This isn't very good. What's interesting to me is the similarities to Netflix's recent cyberpunky titstravaganza, Altered Carbon, and the way they both fail for much the same reasons.

The main problems are the cast--the wrong people in the wrong roles--and the movie's attempts to "humanize" the heroes when the dehumanizing, alienating impact of body-invasive technology is the whole bleeding point.

Not because of the whitewashing thing--as I mentioned in the Altered Carbon review, living in Japan puts a different perspective on the issue for me: Lack of Japanese representation is not really a problem in Japan. On account of it being chock full of Japanese, I suppose. The other point being the silliness of insisting on the 'correct' ethnicity of a character that is, let's be clear about this, a purple-haired cyborg. I'm not saying Hollywood shouldn't make more effort to cast Asians in roles other than kung fu masters and wise old karate sensei. Just saying this is a pretty damn stupid hill to die on.

So Scarlett Johansson as the Major doesn't bug me because of whitewashing. It bugs me because this is absolutely the wrong role for her, wrong, wrong, pouring the milk before adding the cereal wrong. She can do silent and weird or creepy (as in Under the Skin), but the script wants her to alternate between kickass cyberninja and little girl lost/confused about who she is, and it does not work. At all. She looks like she's trying to remember her lines, not her past.

The reason they have her moping around looking like her hamster just died is the writers have decided, just as they did in Altered Carbon, that the hero wasn't sympathetic enough, so they've stuffed her backstory full of cyberpunk tropes 101 and shrunken their world so that absolutely everything revolves around her and this little voyage of discovery she goes on.

Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones) is better than I expected given how over-the-top his scenes in GoT are, but he's barely in the movie. Pretty much the only non-Johansson to get some decent screen time is "Beat" Takeshi Kitano who--again this is a living in Japan thing--strikes me as having all the gravitas of a whoopee cushion with none of the sophistication. Doesn't help that he doesn't speak English, so he's literally the only one in the whole movie delivering his lines in Japanese.

Sure there's one or two cool set pieces (like the clip above), but they're lifted directly from the original anime, so I'm reluctant to even give points there--there are entire scenes that are shot-for-shot remakes, just to rub your face in how unnecessary this movie is. What else? The cars look like unfinished video game models, the cityscape is Blade Runner done cheap, and the climax is a total cop-out on the whole message of the movie.

If you must scratch the cyberpunk itch, watch Altered Carbon (for punches and boobs) or Blade Runner (for moody introspection) instead.

The Sky Crawlers

Title: The Sky Crawlers
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Chihiro Ito

Recently got the urge to watch something about aerial combat, and remembered this little 2008 Japanese animated movie. I mention it for two reasons: One, the dogfighting scenes are amazing. Watch the video. Second, it strikes me as a shining example of the dangers of applying Western critical thought to foreign movies.

The Sky Crawlers presents a world without war, in which companies are hired to wage air battles for show, with airplanes piloted by zombie-faced teenagers. The hero's squadron is in turn terrorized by an enemy ace known only as the "Teacher," while the hero himself struggles to understand what happened to the pilot he replaced.

A lot of reviews--like this one or this one zero in on an apparent anti-war message. In one scene, one of the main characters even appears to lay down this message like a butcher setting out slabs of meat: War is part of human nature, she says, and if there were ever no war we would have to invent it.

Now there's nothing the Internet likes more than to say "Actually..." so let me break in here to say "Actually..." Westerners are missing the subtext. The fact that the enemy ace is called the Teacher--such as a HIGH SCHOOL teacher--is not random. The fact that all the pilots are HIGH SCHOOL AGED teenagers is not random. The fact that pilots speak Japanese on the ground but English (which is taught in Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS) in the air is not random.

I'm even suspicious of the above-mentioned scene where the character appears to state the theme. She does so in a very droning, glass-eyed way, suggesting someone who has been taught what to say by rote: Rote learning is one of the most criticized aspects of teaching at Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS.

This movie is a very strong strong criticism of the Japanese educational system, claiming that it mass-produces cannon fodder who are mercilessly torn apart by their Teacher, and by a world that applauds rather than cries over their suffering.

Anway, great dogfighting scenes, a bit slow, but an interesting glimpse into the Japanese psyche.