DYSTOPIAS PAST AND PRESENT

::| Retro Future and the Dystopia We Were Warned About |::

I was watching Johnny Mnemonic, the 1995 Cyberpunk movie, currently on Netflix. Set in 2021, it’s the usual sort of anachronistic view of [wave hands] The Future that we get from fiction of the time. But it has some redeeming qualities that prompted me to think about this in context.

Large corporations run every aspect of life across the globe. They control information, travel, technology, communication, and manufacturing. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a data courier. He is smuggling out pharmaceutical data from China about a worldwide plague which is killing people. The smuggled data is a straight-forward cure for the plague. But the big corporations do not want this information to get out because it is far more profitable to treat the plague rather than cure it.

What a far-out plot that doesn’t sound relatable at all to the real 2021, huh?

There is a style to CyberPunk that is 80s fashion forever into the future. People wear goggles, not merely glasses. Glitter-encrusted big hair. 80s style wide suits lapels and parachute pants. The look of the world of this future is both somehow more neon of the 80s, yet dark and dingy, like a cheap hotel room from the 1940s. Every bar in the Cyber-future will be lit like the Mos Eisley Cantina. There are no cell phones nor digital cameras nor laptops. But people do get on the internet and are able to walk through virtual, real-time 3d environments that look like computer graphics from, uh, the 1990s.

Johnny Mnemonic is set in a typical high-tech dystopia we’ve seen before from Brave New World to Soylent Green to Bladerunner. The style of the latter became at some point the template of our fictional Cyberpunk future, and I’m sure there is fan fiction out there in which they all exist in the same shared universe. Or at least there should be.

The problem is that the movie is also bad. So bad that it comes around to being entertainingly bad. It’s a sci-fi noir is the style of the author, William Gibson. And in this rehashed noir B-movie, Johnny is a data courier who smuggles data physically within his body. Not sent encrypted over the internet, no, but literally wetwired into his brain. Which has 160GB of storage. He’s smuggling double that on this mission. This threatens to overwhelm his brain and kill him if he doesn’t get the data out. (However that works. One just has to go with it.)

Or the bad guys don’t cut off his head to freeze his brain. Whichever comes first.

The line delivery of the actors feels very community theater level for most of them, and attempts at serious monologues are stupidly glorious.
The actual anachronistic things technologically are the least interesting critique. Roger Ebert, in his review, noted

That's why it's puzzling that this movie is so dumb about computers. Where did it get the notion that the best way to get information from Beijing to Newark would be to hand it to a courier and have him travel the distance? Hey, a lot of people went to a lot of trouble to invent computers and modems and satellites just to make trips like that unnecessary.

That review, like the movie, came out in 1995. So even at the time, the story had a plothole at the center of narrative.

But, given some artistic license, it’s not so cut and dry if you consider this an alternate, but parallel, history of our world. We also have a future where tech is ever more tightly delineated by corporate and government power. Perhaps in this alternate world, the free-market expansion of bandwidth never took off. No data can be smuggled on the internet due to the nature of constant surveillance. Maybe it seems silly that Johnny doesn’t just put the data on a thumb drive and hide it in his sock. But if we also presume that complete body scans for airports and trains in this world makes that impossible, finding a way to store data in nerve tissue works as a not entirely fantastical scenario.

::| Welcome To the Dystopia |::

The fictional 2021 in the movie has the villains wearing black and announcing their villainy in full-throated, exposition-heavy monologues The real 2021 is a lot more interesting, sinister, gaslit, and dystopic.

The corporations in the movie use the Yakuza as their muscle. It’s a lot more cinematic to have Japanese gangsters in suits with shurikens and katanas chasing down the good guy. In our reality, the muscle is just the militarized authorities of state power. As well as, of course, the secret agents loyal to and/or paid off by the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe the movie didn’t imagine the Chinese Communist Party would still be exercising totalitarian control by 2021. Quaint.

Gibson’s story being so focused on the idea of corporations wielding “unchecked” power is exactly how so many of us missed the coming totalitarianism in the real world. Libertarian free-marketeers were so often the bad guys of dystopic stories of the past, that we missed the obvious. Of course governments would just co-opt the power amassed by large corporations, as they exactly have done. The corporations were not, in fact, run by militaristic, cold-blooded alpha males who watched their toiling workers from upper-floor windows while they chuckled, swirling brandy in a glass.

Corporations in 2021 may still be run by dreamers filled with megalomania. But they do so with a smile and a “like” on social media. As corporations became larger, more bureaucratic, more technocratic, more dependent on capricious capital flow, they didn’t become militarized, masculine entities with unbending spines. They dissolved into coagulated blobs of invested money. The largest became providers of sinecures for a technocratic, cognitive elite.

What Johnny Mnemonic missed was the Huxley twist on Dystopia. People wouldn’t be dominated by truncheons and barbed wire. Not at first. First, they come to love the instruments of their oppression. They are sold slavery and told that it is freedom, delivered by smiling, winsome faces. Then they are told what they see with their own eyes is not true. They are told to resist as they are punished for slight resistance, and rewarded for compliance. Words are invented, changed, meanings inverted, to make the pusillanimous and compliant feel brave and virtuous. While the brave and righteous are immediately targeted, highlighted, and given over to mobs of the weak who feel strong in numbers.

We are a people now kneeling in obeisance to the totalitarianism of passive-aggressive HR departments. One in which the government manipulates the money in the system to accommodate the corporations to do their bidding, eroding political opposition to the system by silencing, bankrupting, or otherwise disempowering dissent. Unlike the Cyberpunk dystopia, the recipients of the control mechanisms are not given leeway to be martyrs. They are instead treated as agents of evil for opposing the technocracy, deserving of the cancellation of freedom, dehumanized and denounced in the ubiquitous screens which form a totalitarian phalanx against the individual voice.

The would be masters of the world are still in fact in their upper-floor windows. They rule with confusion and cognitive dissonance, however. They support performative egalitarianism and equity, but chaos, complexity, and spiraling costs keep them from being challenged.
If you want to see a vision of the future, imagine a mob of boots stamping on a human face, but chanting “why are you such a fascist?” Forever.

::| 2021 The Movie |::

I have an idea for a movie. Call it just 2021, and make it to look as if it were a cheesy sci-fi film made in 1991 and set 30 years in the future. The set and design would have to look exactly like it was an early 1990s vision of what life and tech would be like today. Dingy,low-lit underground settings. Walls of (cathode-ray) televisions everywhere. Needless neon projections everywhere, advertising brands like IBM, TWA, and Atari. People wearing clothing that incredibly outdated by today’s standards, such as paratrooper pants, and speculative “future” looks like foil and neon accents on jackets. Massive goggles instead of glasses on people. Oh, and the hair for men and women remains stubbornly 1991 styles.

Except that the paranoid conspiracy at the center of the movie would be factually exactly what has happened in the real 2021.

Movie begins. Credits roll.

2021
Slow scroll. “Cyberpunk” looking font. Video tape squiggles to show the tracking is off.

A mysterious virus from China has unleashed a pandemic. People are seen dropping dead in the streets. The Chinese government begins locking people in their homes. The world panics and all governments ban people from leaving their homes and going to work. On the verge of total societal and economic collapse, riots break out in major American cities. Cops walk off the job, and anarcho punks carve out sections of cities under their rule. The government, corporations, and academic community have unleashed a plan to "Build Back the World" as their best, last hope.

SCENE 1

SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS
We see an Airstream trailer in the middle of some scrubland in the night. We cut to the interior of the trailer. The INFOWARRIOR, A man played by a Denis Leary type is shouting into a television camera. We see his face reflected in multiple television screens, including a view of face in a fisheyed lens. The backdrop is typical 1980s view of the future. Lots of errant wires and blinking lights. He is wearing a jacket with several buttons on it in 1980s style. There is a plastic gorilla mounted on the microphone stand. He is wearing neon-outlined bug-eyed goggles.

“This is it, folks! The InfoWarrior is on the air, and we’re bringing you Guerilla news! Uncensored! Unsponsored! Telling you what the big corporations will not! They run the banks, the supermarkets, the gas station, the ATM! That’s right, ATMs are part of the banks. I said banks TWICE! And all of them want YOU to be scared! Living inside and afraid to leave your house! Sealed up in gas masks. Confused like mice in a maze. Connect to the vidnet, working in your home pods, and sliding your credit cards through the door to get your groceries and your pizzas. They want you kneeling! Gagged! Begging them for help. Because they want you scared of this virus!

“Well, I got news for you folks out there! This virus ain’t what they’re telling you it is! It came from a lab, made by the same people telling you to cover up and hide in your homes. Because this was all about getting you to comply! Getting you to be scared! Getting you to give up hope! Getting you to reach up and cry to the heavens, ‘somebody help me!’ Why, look who’s here to help — it’s the people who made the virus! And they offer to help, oh yeah, to send you money, to keep you safe from the roaming anarcho-punks. Who is looking down on you? Dr. Smiley, that’s who! And he’s no longer smiling!”

SCENE 2

The audio of the InfoWarrior continues as we cut to the next scene.

CRANE SHOT: We see empty streets in future LosAngeles. Large billboard ads glowing everywhere. DR SMILEY is on the billboards, an elderly, smiling man with small, round glasses. He is smiling broadly. Caption of the billboard says OBEY YOUR HEALTH MANDATES. REPORT FOR YOUR VACCINE SHOTS.

A lone motorcycle driven by our protagonist, JOHNNY. The bike is neon colored like something out of Akira, is tearing down the street, followed by two police cruisers with blazing lights. Johnny is wearing a full face helmet and black jacket with neon accents. We don’t see the face of the motorcycle rider in his helmet. But we see he has a TV screen on the motorcycle.

The face on the screen is AMANDA, a 1990s version of a woman in the future. Massive, teased hair in basically 1990s style, but with goggle glasses. Bridget Fonda type.

“They’re on to you, Johnny! There’s a safe garage three blocks up! You’ll have to make a sharp turn.”

There follows a brief car chase where we see more of the 2021 Cyberpunk world. The “future” motorcycle that is obviously a 1990 Kawasaki jumps over rows of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks and in tents. He turns up an alley and into a garage. Finally, he is safe and the police are past.

We are looking down on him. He puts a large wristwatch with a multi-color Apple logo up to his face as he lifts the helmet. He speaks to his Apple Watch which is his communicator.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got the tape!”

We see the motorcycle pull up a dark alley of abandoned factories. We see the requisite shot of homeless people standing around fires lit in 50-gallon barrels. The motorcycle pulls up to a garage door that closes behind him.

There, we see a multi-cultural group of his gang, WRENCH. Older mechanic, think DANNY GLOVER type greets him and is looking at the motorcycle with a flashlight as Johnny steps off.

“Looking for bugs, Johnny. You know they can trace you whereever you go when you use the vid network.”

Johnny removes his helmet and shakes down his 1990-era hockey hair. Think ERIC STOLTZ type.

“Yeah, well that’s why we have those Russian scramblers on there isn’t it? You’re not losing your touch are you, Wrench”

Wrench grumbles. “Maybe I am gettin’ too old for this shit!”
Johnny steps into a bay. We see the collection of “computer hackers” stereotypes. A young Asian male, a cute girl with a punk haircut, and a 14-year-old white kid with thick glasses. Johnny holds up the video-tape.

“This is it, gang. The feed in the news networks they tried to erase permanently. But we’ve got copies.”

The Asian male pushes up his glasses.

“That’s Dr. Smiley talking off the record, right? Wow! They definitely are going to try and cancel your citizen card.”

“They’ll cancel all our cards” says Johnny as he hands it over.

Cut to Johnny entering a dark room. Amanda is sitting in front of a row of CRT screens, all showing different feeds. They are showing a press conference of the PRESIDENT. An obvious Ronald Reagan parody, The President is an old man, barely coherent. He is answering a question from the Press.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, what are your plans for alleviating the virus? When will people be let out of their houses again?”

The President talks and moves his hands, appearing obviously confused. He purses his eyebrows and he stumbles with his words.

“An enigma wants for truth, gentlemen… you see, insignificance is like a summer breeze. A small mercy sees the sun, you know. You know… like I was saying… you, you know the thing.”

He trails off, obviously confused, his hands left in the air as he seems to be trying to concentrate. The PRESS SECRETARY leads him off stage to other handlers as she takes the microphone. A middle-aged woman with red hair in a futuristic jacket with a high-collar she speaks to the press.

“Now… uh… we have been watching the vidfeed channels, but we have not been able to dismiss…uh… every single rumor we see. We will share with you the most up-to-date information daily. You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust Dr. Smiley, the Director-General of the CDC. We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can.” 

Amanda shuts off the feed. Johnny leans on the video console, crossing his arms and looking at her. He is looking directly at her.

“I think this is the big one. They admitted the virus came from a lab. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top.”

“You thought you had that before, Johnny. What’s different this time?”

“It’s my secret. I found a mole.”

“They’re not going to stand for it. They’ll cancel you for sure this time.”

“I’m counting on it.”

She stands up and puts her arms around his neck. They kiss passionately.

SCENE 3

We see a large boardroom table inside a deciduous old-growth forest. The table is clean and white. Three men in futuristic (white? puffy?) suits are standing around the table.

DR KLAUS is seated at the table. He is an older man with a thick German accent.

“Ve must discuss this, gentlemen! The virus is our chance, now! Ven the world comes back, it must never be the same. We can build it back better than it was.”

MR. LOCKS, has his back to the others. He is looking out into the forest, looking at a family of deer directly in front of him. They are grazing as he speaks. We see him only from the back. In addition to the white suit, he has a long mane of white hair.

“Yes… I spent my life building the vidnet for this moment. I have spent money on charities, purchased politicians, funded news companies… all for this moment. This is our chance. There is no way forward without my creations. All the world depends on them now. Depends on them for all their news. For their jobs. For even finding jobs. For their banks. For their healthcare. We have the possibility now to herd the unruly mob of humanity into a corral of our choosing.”

He reaches out as though to pet the deer. The environment seems to shudder. Obviously, the forest and the deer are virtual projections. They fade, and we are clearly inside a sterile conference room with beige and silver walls.

The third man at the table is the elderly man with small glasses we saw in the billboards. He chuckles.

“Now, Bill. No reason to go that far. Now after all, we think after we keep people inside for another two weeks, we’ll have stopped the spread of the virus…”

Mr. Locks turns around. He has a disheveled look like an evil computer programmer. His eyes narrow.

“No, Dr. Smiley. That was never part of the plan.”

tbc…

Review of the M1 MacBook Air and Nietzsche’s Last Man

I used to be all about the Linux. Wanted to run Linux on as many of my devices as possible. I felt smug about having old Dells that corporate entities would discard, and then reviving them with Ubuntu. But you really run up against it once you do things which really require commercial software. Like music. Ahem.

I’m typing this on a new MacBook Air. Because my employer is locking down the computer I have used for work, and my ol’ desktop PC is doing Adobe duty for the Little Wife in the basement. I have been feeling smart getting by with my 2012 Lenovo Thinkpad I bought for $100. Whopping one-hour battery life. Not-terrible keyboard. Shit trackpad. A screen that looked like it had a coating of opaque vaseline. I upgraded that with a $75 Samsung laptop screen that is bright and HD, and I felt so smart to do so.

But the Lenovo is still dying. Like an elderly relative having seizures or passing out at dinner. Not dying with dignity. But more like Mr. Orange in the back of Harvey Keitel’s car. It’s horrible, but it keeps going. And isn’t dead yet. But you’ve known for a while you needed to have The Talk about what to do when the time came.

Covid lockdown has actually improved my life. I hate to admit this. Because it’s destroying economies and wrecking the education of a generation of kids. It’s making people miserable and wrecking relationships. People desperate to work and socialize are left to go insane inside their domiciles. Overdoses, depression, ruination.

And then me. I’m already an introvert. I no longer hump up and down ladders. I can do most of my physical labor hunched over a keyboard and standing at a bench with a light on on the computer parts. I feel guilty, because as others suffer, I am so relieved to not have to go to an office and sit in a crowded space while the culture of “open-desks” makes my working life a catherine wheel of chaos. It’s a reprieve for me. But misery for others.

I’m able to run on a daily basis now. Take a long lunch. Why not? I’m not commuting. I can wear my Adidas sweats all day. Those brand names again. I have only ever been able to use Nike running shoes comfortably. I tried to be clever, trying to get away with cheaper Reebok or New Balance. But I hurt my feet with fascia blisters that made it difficult to walk for more than a year. Biting the bullet and sticking with Nike has made me one of those annoying people able to run full-bore for miles at a time on the canal trail. The dirty secret is that I feel great these days.

So there I am. Buying big-name brands. Brands run by boards which do not have my best interests at heart. I’ll give money to Nike or Apple if their products are the best for my needs. But I do it almost with a buzz in the back of my head screaming “asterisk!” Because I also know that the company’s actions also tell me that they actively hate me.

I’m an inconvenience for them. They don’t, on an investor-return level, really want the atomization of all values. They are neutral in every way. But neutrality nowadays implies adapting to the lowest common denominator of Twitter-approved social activism. Corporations want only consumption, really. Whether it’s adopting a woke stance, or raising a fist, it’s a performance. Consume and go away, is what they say to me, smiling through gritted teeth.

They just want to tame the mobs, keep the happy talk going, encourage everyone to agree to a hostile sameness of thought that ends in Nietzche’s Last Man; a naked man, owning nothing, having no agency, no purpose but to consume.

But the battery life on these Macs is fantastic. Plus they always have good screens and the best trackpads. The keyboard is better than the ones that were famously bad. But it’s still kind of meh.

Negative Nationalism

Orwell coined a term he called Negative Nationalism.

Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases …In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy.

There is something about the terrestrial United States which seems to get people into high dudgeon. Persons who consider themselves of high moral standing vibrate with intense loathing for their own countrymen over political differences. Simultaneously, they feel pleased as punch to show obsequiousness and open-mindedness towards the culture of others.

A case in point would be the recent law passed in Georgia which severely restricts abortion rights. I’m not at all supportive of this particular law. However, I also consider that this law is subject to change by politics, and I believe it should be. I also consider that it should not necessarily reflect the state as a whole. In fact, as much as it is a symptom of political avarice of one side, the solution to the problem of bad law is ultimately more politics.

However, the reaction among many to announce their desire to boycott and punish Georgia, and anathematize all Georgians for things they themselves have no control over, suggests that the wokest among us hold this state to a standard higher than they would any other political entity other than a country in a state of war. They hold this U.S. state at a level of contempt far higher than other constituencies which in turn offer their citizens even less freedom. Especially, deliciously hypocritically, when money is at stake.

Sophie Turner instantly agreed to a boycott of Georgia over the new abortion laws when it was presented to her in an interview. Even though she’s been working in Northern Ireland for a decade which, itself, has abortion nearly banned. I don’t mean to pick on Sophie Turner, as she’s not a public policy commentator. But it is instructive at the pressure put on individuals to instantly conform to the correct opinions, whether they have deeply considered them on principal or not.

Yes, there are several places in the world where abortion is illegal. How many woke Westerners will be boycotting?

::: || :::

A few years ago when Indiana passed a “Religious Freedom” bill which allowed, in so many words, persons to deny their commercial services to people based on religious convictions. It was an overbroad law drafted with the intent of, say, allowing a Christian baker the right to refuse to cater a gay wedding.

Enter then the demands for boycotts. Including by Apple, which, in its vast commercial enterprises, will not stand for discrimination against homosexuals. Or, wait, maybe it will…

Come buy Apple in Dubai, one of the wealthiest playgrounds of the world.

But of course, you may find that Dubai, a far, far, wealthier entity than Indiana, is also slightly more problematic for homosexuality than Elkhart.

Homosexuality is illegal across the entire United Arab Emirates, punishable by death! However, each Emirate has its own legal system, with Dubai the least severe, whereby homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and/or a fine instead of death. Like in many Arabic countries, homosexuality is a massive taboo and is not accepted by society.

Like abortion, homosexuality is something widely tolerated, if not celebrated, in the Western world. This is not the case all around the world.

::: || :::

Silicon Valley is not fond of working with the military. Well, okay, they’re not fond of working with the American military. Foreign military dictatorships? Just sign the check!

Furthermore, as Greg Ferenstein argues in The Age of Optimists, “the culture [of Silicon Valley] is inherently post-nationalist”

It is “based on a rather extreme idealism about human nature, society, and the future” and “reject[s] the notion that there are inherent conflicts of interests between citizens, the government, corporations or other nations.” At the same time, “They are highly, highly, collectivist. They believe that every single person has a positive obligation to society and the government can help people or coerce people or incentive into making a unique contribution.”

But the same Silicon Valley is comme ci, comme ça about working with Chinese dictatorships. From writer Roger Simon,

But where did this ability to control such a giant country come from in the first place? As Pogo would say, I have seen the enemy and he is us! Namely, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie. The technology was taken piece by piece by the Chinese from all of them to execute, with some local improvements, the social credit system. In a certain sense, these companies provided the inspiration for it—and the impetus. The Chinese copied them. That’s what they do.

Farewell To Thrones

Game of Thrones was a grounded fantasy. Sure, there were dragons, armies of the dead, a cult of death-worshiping, shape-shifting ninjas, naked redheaded witches, etc. But they were used abstemiously. Most of the show was character driven and about power politics.

Season Eight didn’t merely alienate the fanbase. It hit them hard. Fans seem to have reacted to this climactic season like watching their team lose the championship. Some of that is a little over-hyped; mere nit-picks spun by maddening epicycloid gears of social media, whipping up like-minded discontent into a tsunami of froth. But this discontent is not unearned.

The show was always enjoyable to watch. It was endless spectacle with mostly solid story telling. But there were always flaws.

:::| Nits? Watch Me Pick Away  :::

I’d agree with the general observation that the show was nearly perfect for at least the first four seasons. I’d say that the show was only consistently logical through season two. Complaints that the season went off track in terms of logic this last year or two are generous. I’ll list some longstanding nitpicks of mine with the caveat that these are minor. They bother me if I think too much, but I can regularly choose to ignore them for the sake of spectacle.

The Ironborn may be adamant about stealing things from others, but it does present a worldbuilding problem. They are a small island with a massive navy. If they “do not sow” crops, they are going to have a terrible time finding enough linen and hemp to make all the sails and rope they would need. Building ships as we saw requires not just sowing, but also significant sewing. Especially when Euron spontaneously suggests building a fleet of a thousand ships.

The armies of the Unsullied or Golden Company are either marching or standing at attention. Watching the Unsullied march off into the desert for the first time, my initial observation was that none of them had any kind of infantryman’s pack with gear. Actual pre-industrial armies and their gear are an interesting subject in themselves. I didn’t see any water or sleeping rolls, let alone any supply wagons.

Part of enjoying the show is to just roll with all these. I can pretend that there are massive baggage wagons with water skins and sleeping rolls and medical kits which are just off screen. All the intense labor required in providing these armies which regularly get slaughtered with their weapons, armor, food, clothing, burial, etc., must also be going on behind the scenes. It must also be mentioned that labor intensity was the way of life in Dark Age and Medieval Age, and wars were costly things which required generations not just to properly supply, but often to recover from in their aftermath.

The feckless way in which armies and navies all are supplied is part of the ambience of the show. The matter-of-fact ease with which this is done precisely evokes a tabletop game. Sometimes the characters stand stock still like the carved mini-figs from the incense-imbued gaming store in the mall which probably inspired their creation. That’s just how the show was.

The use of magic, intermittent though it was, always presented a lot of problems. This was a particularly sticking bit with how the dead were raised. Were the wights moved like marionettes by the Others/Walkers? Wights seemed to have some kind of agency, but not related to the living person they once were. Was it some kind of demon working within them like the myths of revenants or vampires? Even mechanically, it doesn’t make sense how corpses with decayed or absent muscle and sinew can even move. The more you think about it, the more it is just something you have to shrug at and move on.

Of course, going into Season Eight, the cumulative plotholes and nit-picks were already piled up like so many wights who’ve thrown themselves over a cliff. Trying to bring a resolution to the show meant an inevitable clash of problems previously relegated to hand waving away.

We saw realistic close-up sword-and shield fighting. But then we also saw a shirtless Ramsey standing feet from Ironborn raiding his castle and laughing maniacally. When of course a mere slip of a sword at that point could have easily ended his life. We saw cavalry charges which made no sense, and commanders on the field subjecting themselves to danger which would have meant losing instantly.

The show always gave and took away from realism in almost equal order.

:::| Plot vs Character + Acting = Spectacle |:::

I have not read George RR Martin’s books, although my interest in watching the series has prompted me to go back and explore much of the lore. There is naturally much in the volumes which is richer, deeper, and more consistent than the abbreviated version in the show.

I am personally fond of how he played with tropes in the fantasy genre. He includes actual extinct Earth species, such as direwolves, mammoths, wooly rhinos, etc., to correlate where fantasy authors use griffins or hummerhorns or other fantasy creatures. Dragons are depicted as if they were possibly real animals, with winged forearms, which give them an anatomy similar to that of bats, giving them an uncanny tangibility.

He hints at extinct species of humans, such as Australopithecus and Neanderthals, as being the near-human races in the background of the book, similar to ogres or goblins in Tolkien fantasy. Even Tyrion, the dwarf, suffers the indignity of what actual humans with such disabilities may suffer, playing against type.

Martin created an antithesis to the the typical morality within high fantasy. In real history, heroes are usually compromised by inevitable acts of butchery on their path to heroism. Nobody is entirely good, and even villains have humanity and shades of grey.

I’m most fond of the book version of Euron, who is a powerful warlock akin to a Sith lord, whereas in the show he’s a bit like a ridiculously camp lead singer of pirate-themed punk rock band.

I am not in a hurry to read the books because I am not a stickler that book versions of stories are the “purer” versions. As someone who has read nearly everything that Bernard Cornwell has written, I have to say that the Sharpe novels stick in my mind as much more engrossing sagas than the abbreviated movies made from them. However, the depiction of the main character by Sean Beane indelibly stamped that image of him in my mind. This is a credit to the art of making movies as well as acting itself. Actors can bring a character alive in a relatable way which is instantly palpable. Even those who prefer the books can enjoy in the verisimilitude of many of the great performances of the actors who bring the characters alive. And Game of Thrones has had so many great actors, I think the strongest reason it will endure, if at all, is how well the actors bring across the fullness of their characters. (Maybe not Euron, but they all can’t be winners.)

:::| So The Woman Demanding She Rule Everyone by Right of Her Birth Turned Out To Be Kind of Evil? Shock |:::

A lot of people were upset at Danaerys’ turn to the Dark Side. Writing-wise, I am more forgiving of this, seeing as I think it was foreshadowed as inevitable.

Why should we be on the side of the Targaryen(sp?) dynasty? Those who dip into the lore know that the founder of the dynasty conquered Westeros by using three dragons which burned everyone who defied them. They are rulers by right of conquest. This seemed to be unaddressed throughout the run, but I was pleased that, in the end, there was pushback against Targaryen entitlement.

On Dany’s first meeting with Jon Snow in Season Seven, she insisted that she ruled the Norf’ by right, in perpetuity, because her ancestor threatened to burn everyone and everything otherwise. After Dany burned the Tarleys in an obvious war crime, yes — even by Dark Age standards — I found myself literally thinking “huh, is she a villain? I think she’s a villain.”

This essay by Jennifer Wright pretty much sums it up, I think. Quoting:

In Season 2, she told the people of Qarth, “We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground! Turn us away, and we will burn you first.” In Season 3  she pledges to take what is hers “with fire and blood.” In Season 6, she implores the Dothraki to “kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses.” She also pledges “I will set their fleets afire. I will kill every last one of their soldiers and return their cities to the dirt. That’s my plan.”

Ramsey laughs. You thought this would end some other way? Have you been paying attention?

:::| Things Left Unsaid — When it Would Have Been Really Easy to Just Write Someone Saying Them |:::

In the end, that ad-hoc choosing of a king with a Witan was weak. What I saw did not make sense to what I intuitively felt. Going completely outside the suspension of disbelief, I start to think: oh, it could have made sense. The Bran as the Three-Eyed-Raven otherwise had no real effect on the story until that moment. The powers he had were vague, and his sense of personal agency was also unclear. Was he a powerful warlock? We saw his powers thus far amount to not much of consequence other than playing Raven Simulator. He did not behave in an otherwise human manner which showed he was capable of real empathy, which is something, I presume, we’d want from a philosopher king.

The show ended with three Starks in control of Westeros; Bran on the throne of the Six Kingdoms, Sansa as Queen of the Norf’, and Jon… well, exiled to the Free Folk, who of course don’t give two shits what the rest of Westeros thinks. They’ll probably just make him their honorary king and oath or not, he’ll have all the ginger minge he can eat. (More power to him.)

I applaud the plot point of ending the tyranny of proximity to Targaryen blood. It doesn’t track that the whole continent would then be fine with being ruled by Starks. It flatly doesn’t make sense that if the Norf’ is an independent [queen]dom, then why would the rest of the kingdoms allow a foreign Stark mage as their king?

Nothing came of Jon’s Targaryen heritage. It could be said that it nudged Dany to the Dark Side that he was a rival to the throne. But thematically, she seemed to be heading there regardless. Since they ultimately decided on the king with a Witan, and ultimately put a son of Ned Stark on the throne anyway, Jon was still a rival to the throne regardless of his heritage. Jon’s identity was the single largest mystery of the show for several seasons. And it amounted to nothing in the end.

We needed more about Bran as the Three-Eyed Raven and why that was so particularly important. The Witan scene was the last chance for this. I will suggest a piece of dialogue, maybe which should have been delivered by Bran in the first or second episode, before the showdown with the Night King. Imagine this dialogue spoken to Tyrion, Sam, and perhaps Varys in Bran’s spooky monotone:

I have seen the Night King. I have seen his past, and I know the vast, cold emptiness of what passes for his mind. He is the sum of all the divisions among men. He is the sum of all our wars. The Three Eyed Raven has always been the keeper of this knowledge and stands between him and his ultimate victory. The living have purchased this knowledge for the price of all our dead.

I’m not saying this is good dialogue. But I am suggesting this, or something like it, would have set up a reason for why Bran would have the potential to be a wise king. It needed to be literally said out loud as dialogue. And said to Tyrion so that there was a solid reason for Tyrion suggesting Bran as their king. These sentences stated before both the Battle of Winterfell and the fall of King’s Landing could have set up the ending we got. Which is also a nice segue to the main problem I have with Season Eight…

:::| Setting Up a Big Boss as a Metaphor For Death and Dispatching Him Like the Enemy of the Week is Lame |:::

I have no real gripe with the execution of Episode Three, The Long Night. As spectacle, I enjoyed the Hell out of it. Sure, some characters had plot armor. The tactics were jarring nonsense if you thought too hard. I didn’t have a problem with the plot point of Jon’s heroism being trammeled by a mob of zombies in his way, nor Arya’s sudden ninjitsu and rope-a-dope resolution.

However, I would only have liked some more threads connecting the story beats. Maybe having Jon conspire with Arya at some point in a previous episode, indicating that they had a tag-team plan of some kind, which we only get revealed at the end when Jon distracts the dragon so that Arya can sneak into the Godswood.

They also committed the cardinal sin of storytelling wherein those of us in the audience felt like we were smarter than the characters. Jon very clearly saw how the Night King raised the dead at the end of Hardhome. So there was no excuse that people could have thought hiding in the tombs would have been safe. C’mon, writers!

The metaphorical fight against death itself should have mattered more than it did to the series resolution. It was an analogy about the squabbles of the different lords of the realm, as Jon Snow literally said in Season Seven. The show has been laboring to tell us that from the start.

The best line in the episode is delivered by Sandor Clegane in a moment of despair.

“We can’t beat them! Can’t you see that…?! It’s fighting death! You can’t beat death!”

Our main characters needed to be changed utterly after going in and coming out of the experience. Fighting and triumphing over death is just too symbolically important to be as disconnected as it was from the rest of the plot.

We didn’t get any solid reason within the story for why Bran mattered as much as he did, nor what was at stake if he was killed. Nor did we get a sense of how his survival had even changed him, if it did at all. The story needed to show the thematic connections between defeating the White Walkers, the resolution of the Westerosi civil wars, and Bran’s eventual acceptance of kingship. The show just needed more dialogue to set up that our characters weren’t so dumb. That they had reason for behaving as they did. They failed to do this and left it to us to ponder the reasons why.

The show was always fantastic to watch. In the end, though, it ended on a field goal at the 20 yard line. And it wobbled.

My Regrettable ‘The Last Jedi’ Review

When the Internet is Forever … or Regrets? I’ve Had a Few.

It’s been more than a year since The Last Jedi came out, and we’re halfway to the next chapter in the Disney sequel trilogy. My original review is still up on this site. I gave it a tepid positive review. I don’t regret all of my review. I think I very pointedly complained that it was, to be kind, a mess of meandering, mediocre movie-making. I also didn’t want to pick at too many plot points for preventing spoilers at that time.

My biggest regret is that I defended, quite incorrectly, that the movie was respectful of the Force and StarWars-y things. I have no excuse. My reasons for doing this are probably a mixture of giving the movie too much credit from past good will, and perhaps a bit of a moment of shock of looking on the bright side after watching StarWars fade like so many neuminal Lukes into dual sunsets.

The Last Jedi has become a bit of a polemic by itself. Much more iconic than its status as a part of the StarWars saga, it is now really a symbol of where entertainment is going in the conglomerate age, and how far large entities can push their fans, via social media, before they break their trust.

I will get this out of the way. I gave positive reviews to the way the Force is used in the Disney sequels out of a sense of nostalgia. While The Force Awakens also suffers looking back with a critical eye, I thought JJ Abrams at least was true to much of the aesthetic which made StarWars so memorable. I will give him that. I did enjoy a lot of The Force Awakens, and I don’t regret enjoying it for what it was. But I see Disney as having duped the fans, exploiting and mocking their nostalgia and enthusiasm. Shame on them and those who enable them.

My tl;dr gripe with The Last Jedi:

1. The movie is not well plotted nor well directed. You could excise Rose and Finn’s arc from the entire film and lose nothing in particular. The Crait scene at the end makes no sense. At several points characters go unconscious in order to transition to the next scene. Characters have to get to a particular location because the plot requires it, and they are constantly able to just be in the right place regardless of guards or distance or any other obstacles.
2. So, if the goal was to introduce more women into significant roles, they had two new female characters in Holdo and Rose who were just terrible. Past characters from the Extended Universe (EU) of novels, comics, and games included Mara Jade, Satele Shan, Ahsoka, Ventress, etc. All were all female characters with real arcs, who fit in well with the space-fantasy genre of StarWars. These characters did not.
3. Maybe this is 2a, but as far as the Holdo maneuver went, it really should have been a chance to give a heroic exit to Leia, excising Holdo entirely from the story. Also, it broke my disbelief very heavily that the maneuver wasn’t done earlier once all the transports were away and they were being fired on. Also, yes, it was pointless as they could have had a droid do it.
4. Ultimately, Luke was very ill-served by this story. I could handle that this would have been Luke’s exit from StarWars. I could also accept if he were a minor character in this particular story. But they relied him as the MacGuffin for putting the whole story into motion. We spent a lot of time with him only to have him pointedly be a tragic figure, negating his previous incarnation as an optimistic cipher. They turned a classic hero story into a meditation on failure. We lost the EU, and all of Luke’s great adventures, for this?
5. Rey is the protagonist in the story, and there was little to no growth of her as a character. They introduced her as a mystery box, but she still seems to have nothing at stake, and it’s not clear who she is as she deliberately has no back story.

The Soft Reboot Used the Original Characters for Nostalgia, but Impeached their Stories

The original trilogy (OT), the story that started all this, ended in failure. Nothing the original characters did had any effect on the galaxy. The Empire returned, the Jedi did not. All their plans turned to ashes.

Han and Leia gave birth to an emo Vader cosplayer who killed his deadbeat Dad. Luke ended in complete failure, and failed to “return” the Jedi. Even poor Akbar just got unceremoniously sucked out into space.

The New Republic failed, ending with the Empire’s successor building a superweapon which created a larger genocide than the original Death Star. In the end, when the Resistance sent out the call for help from Crait, everyone in the galaxy who said “we would have been better off sticking with the Empire” turned out to be correct. No wonder nobody answered the distress call.

Return of the Jedi Turned Out to be No Such Thing?

After Return of the Jedi, the first dialogue Luke Skywalker has in a movie is a discussion where he says “it is time for the Jedi to end.”

Technically, his first line is “go away.” Then he throws his father’s lightsaber — his first lightsaber — over his shoulder.

Just let that sink in. Disney thought they’d mine nostalgia. Then they frame their story so that the original heroes ultimately ended in complete failure with no effect on the galaxy. Contrary to the triumphal ending of Return of the Jedi.

Luke would have saved more lives, and possibly kept hope that Jedi knowledge would stick around, if he had surrendered and served Palpatine and learned the ways of the Sith. Even if he had, and ended up as an evil emperor himself, that would still be a better story, as it would give a clear course of action for the next hero in the next story.

With Luke serving the Dark Side and helping the Empire triumph, there would have been far less destruction and chaos in this fictional universe. The Empire’s infrastructure would still exist, an entire system of planets presumably would not needed to have been destroyed by the campy First Order. And the whole apparent war profiteering going on with the arms dealers on Canto Bight would have been mitigated by an Empire at peace rather than endless civil war.

Instead, they impeached all impact Luke had on the galaxy when he and his friends previously triumphed over the Galactic Empire. Now, Rey, this ungrounded mystery box, is the Last Jedi, and supposedly will be the one to bring back their return. This isn’t merely a sequel. It’s essentially a reboot of the same story as Luke’s. Which belongs in a cheap copy of StarWars, not an authorized sequel.

Had Luke trained a generation of Jedi, and then the sequel trilogy dealt with their conflicts in a new era, which Luke in the background, serving as a coda to his story, allowing him to die with some meaning, even tragically, I would have taken it for what it was. I wanted to believe very much that this would have been what we got that I suspended my disbelief and shamefully made myself feel as if it is what we got. But this was not even close. So I rescind all prizes and ribbons I’ve sent to Disney since.

It’s a Shame About Rey

One of the more outlandish theories of Rey I had was of Rey being a chromosone-switched clone of Anakin. Not my favorite theory, still better than the worst EU. But also better than what we got.

Story-wise, she should have been an orphan/servant in that Force cult we saw at the beginning of The Force Awakens. She could have been the mistreated washer girl. We see her at the beginning, grounded in a society, but also being on the bottom of that society: forgotten, dismissed, etc. All part of the necessary trope of the hero’s journey.

My proposal would have been to cast Temuera Morrison as her servant/mentor in the Force Cult. Perhaps a scene where he gives her some basic advice, muses on his own history as a “warrior,” and also we also see that he’s the one who has taught her how to fight with a staff.

Then, when the cult was all slaughtered by the First Order, she goes out in the desert to be a scavenger and eventually discover her destiny. This kind of quick setup could have added a lot of worldbuilding to the story with minimal screen time.

The throne room scene was the strongest sequence in The Last Jedi, and was the last moment that this movie (and the new trilogy) could have been saved. There was a storyline possibility with her joining Kylo Ren somewhat. She was a bit of a Mary Sue in the first movie, but in this, we are only told that she is vacillating between the Light and the Dark. Told, not shown.

Yet, there is literally zero worldbuilding for Rey. She grew up on a flat, completely featureless desert. We know nothing about her hopes or fears, how she can read, fly a ship, nor know how to survive in the desert as a feral teenager. Luke originally stood on his farm and dreamed of a wider world, but felt an obligation to his aunt and uncle who raised him. When they were killed, he instantly had a reason to enter that wider world and a very personal reason to fight the Empire. Rey has no grounding whatsoever for any decision or action she takes. The story just lurches forward from The Force Awakens to The Last Jedi with her having no moral dimension to decisions she makes.

If Rey was supposed to have a whiff of darkness, we should have seen her do things like steal BB-8 rather than just ask nicely. Rey only ever faced obstacles in theory, and succeeded at everything she tried on the first try. She only has radiated goodness in the stories thus far. And having some connection to Kylo was the only thing which could presented moral depth.

I was fine with Rey not being a Kenobi or Skywalker. I do think it redeemed the meaning of the Force to me to have broom boy at the end. But none of that in the end goes anywhere with this story.

Was it Just Rian Johnson or was JJ Abrams Our Last Hope?

I would like to defend JJ, and have hope he’ll make something worth seeing in Episode IX. (Edit: title is Rise of Skywalker? There’s your nostalgia plea.) But The Force Awakens still shoulders the blame for putting this trilogy on a dive which it could never recover from. I’ll explain:

The essential problem set up in TFA is that they simplified the story by keeping it focused on a few main characters with Rey as the protagonist. This could have been fine as the template. But they put it on a trajectory where the original trilogy had no effect on the universe. Everything they did ended in failure, with the Empire’s inheritors returning with a bigger genocide than Alderaan in the originals.

I can forgive using Luke as a MacGuffin in the first movie. But they needed a deeper story. There needed to be a generation or two of Jedi which he had trained, who operated inside the story. Not just that they all died in some throwaway line. There needed to be more of a story arc to give us genuine sense of something at stake rather than just CGI genocide happening in an expository shot.

We didn’t get anything which stands alone from the original series. And that fault was present with the TFA.

Yes, But is it Art? Subverting Expectations, You Incel!

I like artsy-fartsy movies as tone poems. But I have a problem with David Lynch as a storyteller. He only enjoys making movies like the way he makes paintings; he likes to make something you experience, or that washes over you with your own internal interpretation, giving you a take-away. Plots or satisfying stories are not his thing.

Twin Peaks new “season” I thought, was mostly a waste. Because he teases out characters and storylines as though it will go somewhere. You get a sense of a plot or a resolution, but in the end, there is none. I find this frustrating because it’s “subverting expectations” just to do it.

If you are going to do this, I can handle artsy-interpretive things. I recommend watching Twin Peaks: The Return Episode 8 as a standalone movie. None of the other episodes are necessary. It’s a completely meandering, interpretive film, mindfuck. It’s horror and sci-fi all combined. None of the other episodes explain it, and it does not lead into any other resolution. It stands alone on its own as David Lynch doing his thing as he does best.

The Last Jedi defenders are doing a rearguard action, like they’re explaining some kind of David Lynch artsy-fartsy tone poem. But it’s not. It’s a plot-driven movie with characters who are supposed to serve as the guides to a story of adventure and heroism. Giving us some sort of muddled, wet-fart characterization and plots which are perplexingly incomprehensible is not art. It’s just a shitty film. And everyone in the film industry, in the creative industry, all know it. The only people who are vocally defending this movie seem to have career incentives to do so, or otherwise fans with Stockholm Syndrome.

But Wasn’t Lucas a Gadfly Auteur Who Had a Vision?

George Lucas took a major personal risk on making the first Star Wars, and then another big risk in using that to finance The Empire Strikes Back. With both of those, he couldn’t afford complete creative control, and had to compromise more than he wanted to.

Compromise was a very important part of why the original Star Wars worked, and what the prequels lacked. It was saved in the edit. I really cannot stress how important that movie about the editing of StarWars is to any fan who is interested in the process of creativity. (I know that video has some controversy. I am split. Nearly every film is saved in the edit, and saying that the editors made the original film as good as it was does not invalidate Lucas. His choices were ultimately part of the editing process, too.)

Lucas offloaded a major part of the writing work in The Empire Strikes Back to Lawrence Kasdan, and less mentioned is Leigh Brackett, who was a solid sci-fi storyteller who provided many of the solid story beats (and fantasy elements) to Empire. Sadly, she died in 1978, and didn’t help with Return of the Jedi. Yes, a female writer provided the bones for what became the primary story arc of the original trilogy. The Force may in fact be female, but it’s not the current story group who made it so.

David Lynch famously went to meet with George Lucas about possibly directing RoTJ. You can hear him speak for himself. Obviously, Lynch himself has a huge ego. But it’s pretty clear that Lucas wanted someone who would just do a journeyman job, which would be aggravating for a lot of creative people.

The Reaction to Criticism Brought Out the Worst Kind of Corporate Remoras

After The Last Jedi came and went I shrugged and realized I wasn’t interested in the rest of where this story is going. Given the shortcomings of it as a movie and story alone, I didn’t think they could really take it anywhere after all that, and closed that chapter of my mind as no longer being interested in Disney StarWars. But the fierce defense of the movie, as if it were something of object quality which was being criticized as a result of edgy philosophy — attacking the detractors as incels, MRAs, Trump supporters(?), garden-variety misogynists, and of course as racists — became part of the script used in defending this poorly-received corporate product. This has become interesting on its own, as the attempt to gaslight the public, with massive, paid media campaigns to mock former fans and customers, strikes me as a particularly terrible precedent.

My own experience online has included giving mild criticism to the current StarWars direction. In my case, a paid radio host for Lucasfilm forwarded me screenshots of a seemingly angry and mentally-defective juvenile making some kind of horrible threats in Tweets. The radio host asked me if I thought this was “OK.”

And there you have it. With Twitter, and social media in general, we have this brigading effect. Not only do people pile on, flood, dox, and anathematize contrarian opinion, but they will hold up random, bad eggs as if some barely-literate twitter person says something hateful or misogynistic, that random person’s tweet automatically counts as a press-release from your camp. This is gaslighting, and it has destroyed the integrity of genuine disagreements among fandom.

George Lucas received a lot of criticism from his fans for meddling with his own movies and doing odd things with the Prequels. It’s still a worthy discussion of who really owns something which lands so large in public consciousness. I always fall on the side that it was Lucas’ right to do what he wanted with his creations. Just as his fans have every right to point out where he isn’t honoring his own creations. I think he could never really reconcile that with himself, and for that reason I’ll bet it was a relief for him to offload all this to Disney.

But sold them he did. And Lucasfilm and the StarWars legacy is not in the hands of a visionary, but a large, multi-billion dollar corporate entity. There was a massive investment here, and then there an intention of having it all pay off. There is no hiding that Disney’s appeal is calculated to get customers. There is no other reason for it to exist.

Lucasfilm now, which is an entity which does hire public-relations employees who do issue press releases, seems indifferent to their employees who have open contempt for their fans. This is completely bizarre to me. This justifies to me every notion of refusing to purchase product from these people. They only tolerate this contemptible behavior from their employees, I assume, because they calculate that enough people won’t be driven away.

Corporate decision makers do love the idea of an entertainment product which appeals equally to boys and girls. They would love to sell movies, books, toys, comics, games, etc., equally among both sexes. As it has always been, StarWars had a primarily male fanbase, and entities like Twilight have primarily female fanbases. I don’t fault the mammoth corporation of Disney for trying its mightiest to make StarWars appeal to more female fans. But they’ve done it so ham handedly, so contemptuously, they’ve isolated their current fans, including their current female fans. (If 20% of their fans were female, still one presumes that they liked it the way it was.) I’m sure that George Lucas is having himself a mighty laugh.

What it Would Really Take to Get Humans to Mars

I vacillate between thinking of Elon Musk as a visionary and a Bond villain. (Can a man be both?) His futuristic visions arrive with suspiciously competent marketing. Electric cars are neat, but they’re only “green” in as much as they shift pollution to the electrical grid, done at a high marginal expense of putting big battery arrays into individual vehicles. As a sci-fi geek, I’m thrilled at his high-tech rockets. I also roll my eyes that we’re still relying on massive, contained explosions to get into orbit. What about massive airships which float gently to the edge of space, say more than 30 miles up, and then launch a craft from there via railrun? (Just as a sci-fi proposal to get craft into orbit without burning massive amounts of rocket fuel.)

Like a lot of people who are genuinely interested in the idea of long-term space travel and exploration, I probably have my eyes to the horizon, taking for granted that we will get to that level someday while being impatient  to see theoretical technology finally brought up into the big game. Even when I was young, I was more bored with the Space Shuttle than I was impressed. Partly this was because I didn’t want a ricketty, expensive shuttle. I wanted the Millennium Falcon. Now, obviously, the more I learned about science, the more I realized that the Millennium Falcon is a fantasy object, a totemistic item which cannot exist, but which we use a cipher for our imagination. But that reality aside, the fact remains is that we can do much, much better than what we have done. We won’t get Millennium Falcons. But we can do better than just using big rockets to get into orbit every time we need to do so.

My impatience with the large expense of fossil fuel just to get a single rocket to escape Earth only scratches the surface of my desideratum for space travel. There is, Musk marketing magic aside, no feasible plan to send humans to Mars except merely as a man-in-a-can, one-way stunt. I think that would be a tragic mistake to do.

First and foremost, there is a huge downside to getting humans to Mars just to prove we can do it. Any life-form from Earth which sets foot on another planet would bring, necessarily, billions of bacteria, viruses, and other flora and fauna, which would taint the research of looking for signs of life, or former life, on any planet. Even people desperate to get to Mars as a one-way trip would inevitably risk tainting future research by planting their bodies there.

Titan, Europa, and Mars all have the possibility of sustaining life or having once done so. It would be vitally important that sterilized mechanical arms sift through these environments before we plop our own bags of Earth-born protoplasm onto their surfaces. It would be un-ethical for any one human to bring their own personal cloud of billions of Earth-born microbes on to an alien surface. At least not without extreme scrutiny of the environment first to see if there is any native fauna. This scrutiny needs to be done by machines which we’ve only begun to develop.

The proven ability of humans to actually live and traverse in space has only barely edged beyond what we knew during the Apollo missions. The shuttle missions were two decades of spinning wheels in planetary orbit; burning through money and fossil fuel while hardly pushing the envelope for long-term space missions.

///

Mary Roach’s book Packing For Mars details the incredible difficulties humans face with even relatively local space travel. Zero-gravity is incredibly difficult for humans. Your blood doesn’t flow correctly, your digestion doesn’t work correctly, your bones leach calcium, your eyeballs swell. Even things we take for granted such as sweat evaporating, heat and exhaled carbon-dioxide moving away from our bodies, do not do so without gravity. Experiments on mice indicate that it may be impossible for mammals to get pregnant in zero-g.

Additionally, for all our faffing about during decades of building shuttles and space stations, we haven’t successfully built spaceborne habitats with any ability to sustain a living environment for long periods of time. We’ve built tiny stations which must have waste products removed, and food and air and fuel constantly replenished by rockets from Earth.

Humans have lived in space for long periods of time as games of endurance, akin to Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic or Scott at the North Pole. The persons managed to do it under extreme conditions, in extreme discomfort, and likely will have lifelong physical effects. We have not build a habitat that a normal person could live in for any amount of time other than treating it as an extreme sport and the type of thing done on a dare.

Astronauts have been highly selected, brave volunteers who chose to expose themselves to these possibly permanently debilitating conditions. They’ve had to be highly selected because we have yet to even attempt to build anything which would approximate anything like an environment suitable for humans to live with any sort of normalcy.

This isn’t even mentioning the massive doses of radiation which all astronauts have been exposed to. We have yet to perfect better shielding for any real space exploration. While it’s perfectly logical that we may yet do so, this is one of the major engineering projects which is both highly involved, and highly necessary, before we can even begin discussions of humans traveling the distance it would take to get to Mars.

The real goal for humans living in space needs to be a space-born structure, heavily shielded from radiation, which makes an effort towards sustaining a self-contained environment, artificial gravity, and the ability to move the craft (even slowly) beyond just being captured by orbital velocity. This means attempting something like a 3-kilometer wide wheel which spins at a velocity in order to create some kind of centrifugal artificial gravity, has some sort of ability to move, even slowly, and maybe has maybe the intervening wheel spokes full of algae and water in order to cycle waste products and produce fertilizer, fuel, and oxygen. This is my back-of-the-envelope suggestion for what NASA ought to be focusing on. It’s what commercial ventures will have to undertake as well if they want to beat others to colonize space.

The wheelship I reference above would be a huge undertaking, but as far as we know, it is feasible to attempt all this. We have to yet to find out how scaling up contained biospheres, solar sails, or centrifugal gravity would work, but testing all of them in functional spacecraft is preliminary to any plans for humans to land on other planets. Craft like this theoretical wheel could be a prototype for platforms to facilitate humans living in space for long periods of time.

Meanwhile, real efforts to push out into space require more advancements in robotics and material design. Highly articulated machines, abetted by better AI, could do the preliminary work of landing on planets and begin building long-term structures for human habitation. We have yet to revolutionize cheap carbon-fiber weaving, or fully develop machinery which could theoretically smelt, shape, and 3-D print construction material from, say, moon soil. But all of this is necessary to create the stepping-off point for humans being able to actually live beyond Earth. The prospect of constantly lifting off massive amounts of Earth material and supplies is incredibly expensive, and being able to repurpose the material found beyond our own planet is the key part of genuinely being able to explore space over ensuing generations.

The short-to-long term future of humans expanding through our solar system seems to ultimately rely on two main inevitabilities.

First, robotic forms, either as our inheritors our as our avatars, are going to be our foremost leading edge when exploring other worlds.

Second, biologically, we’ll either be finding better ways to replicate our own bisophere beyond our world, or genetically modify ourselves to better adapt to different gravity, radiation, temperature fluctuations, etc. All of which we’d have to endure with long term space exploration.

Almost certainly, humans will use all these different paths.

When humans expanded and colonized our own planet, we did all of these things. Humans adapted their bodies over generations as they spread out into different regions of the planet, creating slight differences which we unscientifically have categorized as races or ethnicities. Skin pigmentation changed to better adapt to the sun in different environments as humans wandered into different continents. Our layers of fat adjusted over time to temperature, as did density of bone or muscle, or the ability of our blood to carry oxygen at different elevations. All of this was genetic adaptation over the slow process of hundreds of thousands of years.

Our need to have better technology to live in new environments has always been part of the human story. There are very few environments on Earth in which naked humans could survive. All evidence points to humans wearing clothing and building tools from the earliest hints of homo-sapien cognition. We built tools to adapt to new surroundings, from the cro-magnon to the Internet age, from the atl-atl to air conditioning.

Humans didn’t simply fling themselves to Australia or Greenland and survive. They learned over time how to live with what was there. (And when environments like Greenland changed over time, they mostly became simply inhospitable to human habitation.) Humans avoided living in environments like the Sahara or Death Valley until relatively recently because the environment is so hostile to our needs for life. Even now, we only have little more than symbolic human colonization of Antarctica, which is a relative Eden compared to the cold, dead, distant, airless, radioactive, ⅓ gravity environment of Mars.

I’m as interested as anyone else at the prospect of moving beyond our home planet. It will be space stations as stepping stones, and better and badder-assed robotics to get us there. The idea of colonizing Mars is a wonderful fantasy which Elon Musk is selling to an eager public. It is just that right now — a fantasy. But the effort to actually, seriously, get us there, requires a lot less-sexy endeavors which are often quickly elided when discussing what needs to be done. Bring on the robots. Bring on the zeppelin orbital-craft launchers. Bring on the wheelships.

The Last Jedi Thoughts

Two years already since The Force Awakens. How time flies. I know I don’t update this website very much. And there has been some fascinating sci-fi released since then. Ex Machina (see it!) and Alien: Whatever (avoid it!).

I heard a lot of preliminary buzz about The Last Jedi ranging from people squealing that this was the best Star War since The Empire Strikes Back or, alternatively, that this was the worst thing ever. Nowadays, with billions of dollars at stake, and social media a kind of catnip for toxic people, anything popular is curated by some of the worst impulses of the human animal.

But here we are. The technological advancement that has made Twitter and GIF memes possible, also lets us seamlessly make our dreams into simulated reality. When Star Wars arrived in 1977, the special effects pioneered by Lucas’ creative team made a whole new world of make-believe possible. Lucas himself once said that “…a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” We went from that to a bouncing, animated Yoda sword-fighting with Emperor Palpatine in an embarrassingly short span of time.

The appeal of Star Wars wasn’t just the fantasy of cool ships and laser swords and pyu! pyu! It was a story with characters on a mythical journey. Periodically, the flow of StarWars™ product ever since has periodically been isolated from the human story, telling more and more formulaic stories that are about spectacle more than story.

I liked The Last Jedi. As a fan of the series, I probably am willing to like it too much. Similarly, I am likely to be disappointed if it were to burst some canon bubble I carry around in my head which is baggage from previous StarWars™ product. But on its own, it is a singular vision of a fantasy series, and it comes close to being a very good movie. I do think it is its own worst enemy, and there are numerous reasons why it’s not that good of an actual movie. I’ll get to that.

I’m going to separate my opinion on this. Because there really are two parts to having a reaction to this movie. There is the StarWars-y mythology thing, and then there is the way it succeeds or fails as a movie. The Last Jedi, in my opinion, succeeds very well in being StarWars-y mythological thing. But it has much to be desired as a movie. I will extol the virtues of the former, and decry the latter, anon.

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If They Should Buy Wars, Please Let These Wars Stay

The dominion of us Nerds are divided on the Star-Wars-y worthiness of The Last Jedi. I thought it was a triumph of recovering the greatness of the original trilogy, and has done so far more than any other product has done since then.

I think a major problem with the prequels and the subsequent other media from the subsequent era, is that George Lucas essentially wrote Star Wars into a corner. What The Force Awakens began, and what The Last Jedi finalized, was breaking out of these corners. I’ll list here my rundown on the painted corners from which Rian Johnson has thankfully liberated this saga.

The Rule of Two… Who Cares?

In the original era, Darth Vader was referred to as “Dark Lord of the Sith” without further explanation of what that was.¹ The original trilogy had established only that there was a Dark Side and a Light Side, and that Vader was once a Jedi, and the rest was left open. This was expanded somewhat in the subsequent Expanded Universe novels and comics, which explored the idea of “the Sith” as an order like the Jedi. The Phantom Menace introduced the Sith as the baddies directly opposing the Jedi. It established that “there are only two, a master and an apprentice.” It established that the Sith were a secret order, with a sort of self-defeating org-chart with masters pitted against their apprentices who were always plotting to usurp them. These were very specific plot devices for the prequel era.

¹I think this was the comics. I don’t believe that “Sith” was uttered in the original trilogy.

This limitation was the easiest one done away with in the The Last Jedi. Kylo Ren is not a Sith. Snoke is not a Sith. Or at least they do not say he is a Sith anything. And it doesn’t matter. The issue is thankfully dropped and not mentioned again. Hopefully not ever. Let the past go.

Midichlorians and the Force Are… Who Cares?

Once again, The Force Awakens began to get the Force right, and The Last Jedi completes the rehabilitation of the concept. Luke has more than a few scenes in which he goes into detail on what the Force is, expanding on the lessons we got from Obi-Wan and Yoda in the originals. Once and for all, this movie buries the notion that the Force runs only in a bloodline. Other Star Wars stories with multi-generational Jedi and Sith presaged that the universe is completely at the mercy of either genetically gifted wizard-monks who kidnap children, or psychopathic sorcerer-tyrants who kill children. What a depressing prospect. Maybe it is time for the Jedi to go after all.

Luke explicitly says the Force belongs to everyone and that everyone is a part of it. There is not even a hint of the dreaded “M” word.

Slight spoiler here: we learn that Rey is at least neither a Skywalker nor a Kenobi. The theme that the Force comes to anyone, and that a random person from nowhere can in fact be a hero, gets right back to Joseph Campbell’s original mythology. I wanted to stand up and cheer when it became clear that the build-up and fake-out mystery of who Rey is was resolved with a shrug. Much, much better plot point than her being part of a dynasty or someone who was conceived or created or cloned for some kind of destiny set out for her ahead of time.

Snoke is… Who Cares?

One of the corners into which the prequels had painted the story is that Emperor Palpatine, who was almost created as a one-off baddie in Return Of The Jedi after a brief cameo in Empire, becomes the main villain of the whole saga. To his credit, Iain McDiarmid took advantage of the scenery-chewing required and was always entertaining as Palpatine. But the story got pretty stale pretty quickly, with the Jedi playing Wile E. Coyote to Palpatine’s Roadrunner.

There is no background given to us going into this movie for who or what Snoke is. I liked to entertain the theories that he was an old Sith, or some kind of malevolent undead entity. He obviously is introduced as an Emperor stand-in for the soft reboot in The Force Awakens. In the The Last Jedi, the Snoke theories are all pretty much just similarly ignored and the plot drives right past him. It doesn’t matter, and he’s not the main point of the story. Thank the maker.

Everything doesn’t have to tie together. We no longer have to think about grade-school Darth Vader building C-3P0, baby Boba Fett, or Obi-Wan commanding an army of Jango Fett clones. Things are set back to being a vast universe in which our heroes only play a small, but significant, part.

Jedi are No Longer Super Heroes

This is probably one of the changes which is the most controversial. It takes away something which has been extremely popular for StarWars™ product over the last couple of decades: the Jedi as having super powers. This started with The Phantom Menace when we see Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon cut through enemies with no tension, or sense of danger, or anything at stake. We saw them effortlessly make superhuman CGI flips as though they were weightless animation. We saw them using lightsabers as acetylene gear. Thus began the era of animated, ridiculously overpowered Jedi, whether it was Starkiller in The Force Unleashed video game throwing around TIE Fighters, or Anakin and Obi-Wan effortlessly skipping over a lake of lava in the course of an insanely obviously computer-generated lightsaber fight.

Let me stick to that one, as it is commonly cited as one of the highlights of the prequels. The Anakin vs. Obi-Wan fight is to me the height of this ridiculous phenomenon in the live movies: there is no sense that either participant had actually expended physical effort, possessed an inner ear for balance, or was once in any way terrified of the molten rock and heat around them. Only when the plot demands it does Anakin get burned by the lava. Until then, there is no sense that either character is doing anything other than controlling a bloodless avatar in a computer simulation. Neither seems to suffer from the heat or caustic gasses one would be subjected to over a flowing lava stream. The animated series, sad to say, only continued this super-power trend, and made it worse over time.

For what it’s worth, I think the Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul fight in The Phantom Menace is by far the best fight scene in all the prequels. Every other attempt to create overwhelming (but perfectly coordinated) chaos in every battle scene in every subsequent movie is just CGI cacophony. Obi-Wan facing down General Grievous looks far less convincing than Luke facing down the Rancor.

In The Last Jedi, Luke actively mocks the idea that he can be some savior facing down the First Order with his “laser sword.” We knew then that we weren’t going to get a CGI Luke Skywalker floating up, cutting Imperial Walkers in half, or combining with Rey to double-team Snoke in some massively coordinated melee. I’m sure this rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way based on a lot of the backlash there has been. Luke’s place is thematically consistent with where Obi-Wan was in A New Hope. And it makes Luke’s decisions, both heroic and ill-considered, to have more consequence. Most importantly, it is consistent that Luke Skywalker knows that the legend of heroes will matter much more than what the heroes do themselves.

I agree it would have been fun to have seen a Luke in his prime, kicking some butt. Well, we’ve had years of comics and novels about the further adventures of Luke Skywalker. It’s too bad that all we get with Mark Hamill is the grumbly, bitter Luke. But those movies or TV shows would have had to have been made years ago. So as a torch-passing performance to a new cast, I thought this was an excellent use of Hamill as Luke, and, as cannot be said enough, was thematically consistent as well. That’s all I will say about Luke’s fate. See it for yourself to see the twists.

Luke also addresses another major plot hole the prequels steered us into: namely that the Jedi were failures. Luke points out that the Jedi were fooled and defeated by Darth Sidious. They inadvertently trained Darth Vader. They arguably did as much damage as they did any good in the galaxy at the end of their run. Luke is wary of any power wielded by Force users, which is of course the big lesson that should have been learned by the prequel events.

And it of course fits perfectly with a lesson on human nature. Good and evil at war within a human heart is very much a theme of classical heroes and villains. The Last Jedi wonderfully recasts this entire moral story. It’s taken a long time, but suddenly the moral metaphors in the SW universe mean something to people who may use the Force, but are still human, and neither all-powerful nor invulnerable.

What we really got in The Last Jedi more than anything was a development of the characters of Rey and Kylo Ren. Which is as it should be. The crux of their relationship, including Kylo’s entreaties that they rule the galaxy together, is thematically similar to what we’ve seen before, but it is a different form. I’ll address this more on the issues I have with the movie’s pacing itself, but the scenes with the two of them were very much the climax of the story that was being told here, and the best parts of the movie.

There are fans who would have preferred that the Jedi-as-super-hero trope continue on. If Episode IX were to include a light-saber fight between a bouncing, weightless CGI Maz Kanata, and a bouncing, weightless CGI Snoke, there are fans who would have clapped and shouted and justified it as the best thing ever.

The Universe is More than Just Remixes on What We’ve Seen

The B-story adventure in Canto Bight had some fun parts, although I know a lot of people found it over the top or silly. (I think this is definitely part of what needed fixing with editing or pacing, as I say below.) As for the premise of the expansion of the fictional universe into the territory of casinos and politics and war profiteering, I think it was necessary. After all, the series is based around stories of war. We’ve already seen developments which should be plenty depressing on their own, considering the way that endless war and genocide has been a plot device throughout the series.

I thought the expansion of the universe into some weird tangents was a great choice. It remixed some of our expectations and gave us a moral weight to the actions we saw. We can see that the war affects other people in the galaxy in other ways. And we see that there is a moral dimension to the Force, as we get a sight that even a slave child in the stables has a spark of the Force within him.

A political dimension to the Star Wars universe is also nothing new. The points made about war profiteering may rub some fans the wrong way. I can understand some of the complaints that it wasn’t a point that they would choose. I don’t entirely agree with making war profiteers out to be a villain, either. (In the real world, it’s not such an easy answer.) But then again, I respect the film for having a point of view. This makes this universe more lived-in than just a Jedi vs Sith role-playing game. And thankfully, if we’re going to get political allegories, it wasn’t horrifying Asian stereotype-creatures with names that are puns for American political leaders.

That last bit was maybe a little too cruel on ol’ George. I will give him this: Star Wars was always political. The metaphor of the Death Star was clearly a weapon of mass destruction, and the mechanized Empire was not-even-subtly a stand-in for 20th century fascist regimes, down to Nazi and Japanese-Imperial uniforms. Lucas himself also intended his films to directly point fingers at the USA and the Vietnam war for that matter, made more explicit as a metaphor with the Ewoks in Return of The Jedi. (I, like, many others out there, will fast-forward through all Ewok scenes if I am to re-watch any of ROTJ, anyway.) For that matter, when Ronald Reagan went with the metaphor and analogized the Soviet Union with the Empire, that was hardly out-of-bounds, either. In the 1970s, the Empire was a buzzingly obvious metaphor for evils in the real world.

To keep the Star Wars universe updated while also mining nostalgia, there was always going to need for an overriding political metaphor for the villains which would meet some kind of emotional impact on the audience. World War 2 was very much still in living memory during the original trilogy, although today it is less so. I personally thought that the First Order with their full-on Nazi drag act in The Force Awakens was stretching it a little bit. The world faces dangers from conflicts like Daesh nowadays, or bloody border wars in ethnic conflicts. In this, I thought Kylo Ren was a good successor to Darth Vader. He was wonky, unstable, more full of anger than competence.

I heard another take on the First Order from Mr. Sunday Movies which I do think is interesting. The original Nazis were scary evil and scary competent. The “alt-right” guys in their Nazi T-shirts and bad haircuts are scary in an unbalanced, desperate way. Hux, then, is more of a LARPer of an original Imperial Moff rather than a cool, competent ruler. In that sense, it works.

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So the Mythology is Awesome, But is it Any Good?

In the age of the internet, I’m doing what nobody regularly does. I have a split opinion — a shade of “gray,” if you will, rather than pure black or white. I am firmly on the side of approving of how Rian Johnson handled the mythology of Star Wars, preserving what is awesome about it. And I mean “awesome” in the dictionary meaning of the word.

The movie, The Last Jedi, however, is just not a great movie. I certainly may hold a more critical eye than others, but I’ll be as objective as I can without spoilers. The flaws I find may not bother others, and it may be much more fun for kids. But that doesn’t make it immune from criticizing the things which tax our patience or halt our suspension of disbelief. The original trilogy was insanely popular not because it was a “kid’s movie,” but because it was entertaining for a wide audience on different levels.

Now, this brings up all kinds of objections. People will say, sure, “b-b-but the original had plot holes! So this film has plot holes too, so it’s exactly the same in quality as the first one!” I can say The Empire Strikes Back is a classic that everyone compares every other sci-fi action movie to because it is a master class on pacing and editing. People can reply, “yeah, well, uh, that had flaws, too, and people didn’t like it at the time, either, so… no one can say The Last Jedi isn’t as good!”

There is a role for opinion and then there is a role for taste. But there are objective things that can be measured.

The first problem with the movie which I think most people will notice is simply the running length. At two-and-a-half hours, it’s a lot to sit through. And there are several scenes which don’t really pay off for the story, which I believe would make the movie much more enjoyable had they been excised.

A theme that runs through the movie is failure and redemption. “Let the past go” is something which is important to Luke, as he is trying to excise the legacy of the Jedi’s horrible mistakes.

A chase plot sets the pace and ticking clock that frames the movie’s drama. With this setting and this conflict, different efforts to find a way out of impossible odds meet with degrees of failure or success. The chase parallels Rey’s time on Ach-To with Luke, and eventually these events link up, bringing our characters more and more successes and failures.

The problem with the story here is tone. There is a sense of desperation and a need for characters to risk their lives or to even outright sacrifice them. This is played for tension. But there are also moments where characters clearly need to sacrifice themselves and we can see it coming for quite a while.

Are we supposed to be horrified at the deaths, or ignore them as ships blow up left and right? Should we feel tension when a character seems about to die, or should we feel numbed because of the rate of destruction of everything else? I found myself frustrated when characters would fret about saving a single other character while ships or people are literally being blown to pieces around them. It’s not a spoiler to say, no, of course not everybody dies — we all knew that was going to happen. As if, well, our heroes really, really messed up and got a lot of people killed for no apparent reason.

The tone would definitely be helped if a few scenes were removed or excised altogether. I would have given editors a goal of removing at least half an hour from the movie to make the story flow in a tighter way. Some scenes linger simply because there is a desire to introduce more characters for no good reason. (Or to sell the toys? Such cynical thoughts do cross one’s mind.) Since Captain Phasma is in the trailers, I believe it’s not a spoiler to note that she is in it for a couple of extended sequences. She serves utterly no point other than to have a battle which is completely distracting to the plot. It is also edited in strange ways.

Now, granted, that is my critique of the main chase story. I think that there is a truly great story within this film about the arcs of Luke, Rey, and Kylo Ren. Luke’s final scenes in the film are, I think, some of the best things ever in Star Wars. By contrast, a lot of the prelude to this with the actions with the other characters was, frankly, padding.

I can handle plot holes such as wondering why the bombs in space want to fall downward. We get it: it’s mainly a WW2 metaphor, and whether we are given an explanation or not, we can imagine that there probably is one that we don’t need to be concerned with. I can’t criticize the movie for having physics that doesn’t make sense. That’s always been Star Wars. This is fantasy, not hard sci-fi.

Other plot holes that just speak to bad editing are little more jarring. “Wait, did that person just drag his injured friend two miles? That would take a lot longer, wouldn’t it?”

The movie, as everyone can tell from previews and the trailers, starts at exactly the ending of The Force Awakens. We don’t know, say, how long exactly it took Rey to travel to Ach-To, but even if it is a number of days to pad the events, it’s still not much time. The chase sequence at the beginning of the film has an exact timeline, so we know for a fact that the whole movie seems to take place in a matter of three to four days. (I lost count.) So that does not leave a lot of time for Rey to make the, er, progression, she seems to do. By the end of the movie, it’s still at most a week after Han’s death and her fight with Kylo Ren.

I will gladly praise Daisy Ridley’s charisma in playing Rey, and I think the character is absolutely perfect for what she is. But it’s not hard to make the Mary Sue critique for some of how she was introduced. It’s a minor gripe, as I think a lot of plot holes like can easily be fixed by a simple line or two of exposition. My grip is that this exposition is never offered.

Rey turns out not only to know how to fly the Millennium Falcon, but she’s incredibly good at it? It wouldn’t have hurt to indicate that she had worked as a pilot on Jakku on the weekends. It turns out that she is incredibly competent with her sword and staff and requires no training whatsoever to use a lightsaber competently? It wouldn’t hurt to note that she received specific melee training back on Jakku, for instance. Because if a person can become a Jedi in a matter of days, it sort of takes away from how special it should be.

This is a critique that is more applicable to The Force Awakens, of course. But it’s still relevant to this movie, as we see a lot happen in a very compressed period of time. Ironic, then, that we get some important speeches about the importance of learning from failure. This is hard to do when you go from being a scavenger to hopping around the universe, training as a Jedi, and killing many people, all in less than a month.

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I am disappointed in how it seems the Disney/Marvel machine might be churning these movies out without as much careful editing and pacing as I would like. But this movie may get a lot of guff it doesn’t deserve from people more upset about the necessary re-set of the Jedi mythology. There are a lot of places they can go to from here. They can tell stories without some of the constraints from previous incarnations. Let the past go.

Sci-Fi Comes To Life

I’ll just leave this link here.

Researchers design moisture-responsive workout suit. – Ventilating flaps lined with live cells open and close in response to an athlete’s sweat.

This “live” suit is a proof of concept of something which I have written into my fiction as an “overskin.” My concept of it was based on the real-life research behind just this type of thing. I explained this in the Star Wars story as the black, lycra-like suit that Stormtroopers wear underneath their armor.

In my fiction, a version of this not only has engineered bacteria, but also theoretical engineered silicon-based nano forms and long-strand polymers. The suit not only literally eats the sweat and oil from the wearer’s skin, but expands and contracts to compensate for fluctuations in atmospheric pressure or puncture wounds on the skin.

It’s interesting to see theoretical and fictional concepts get tangible.

Rogue One Review

Mild spoiler warnings here. I won’t reveal any deaths. Other than that, I cannot think of much in this film that might be regarded as a twist in the narrative you wouldn’t expect on walking into the theater.

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Ever since Return of the Jedi, any subsequent Star Wars™ product has been judged by the fans on whether it got some element right or not. Rogue One certainly gets certain things very right about conveying the feel of the original trilogy. The “lived-in” look of the universe, wherein everything look dented, dirty, and used, was right-on. My inner nit-picking nerd was delighted. As far as sci-fi-based action goes, I would say that the battle scenes were as visually enthralling and competently directed as anyone would have hoped for. The mix of CGI and practical effects has never looked better. The ships and crafts all were seamlessly rendered beautifully. Good work has been done in the past, but this is a triumphant passing of the hat from the model-based stop-motion of the original to CGI.

So, on technical aspects, R1 is definitely a Star Wars™ movie, trademark and all. If you sense I preface the rest of this review with my praise before effecting a deep inhale before announcing my ominous “but…” then the Force is indeed strong with you.

The technical expertise on display could have been put into any space opera setting. What makes me love Star Wars more than the look of any particular special effect are the characters and the rich mythology evident in the story. Rogue One was not a movie that went that route.

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Rich Evans of Redlettermedia.com made a brilliant observation in their review of Rogue One. He noted that the Star Wars universe isn’t really all that vast. In fact, it’s actually pretty limited. Fans don’t want new things. They demand variations on the old things: light sabers, Imperial walkers, Tie Fighters, X-Wings, etc.

Let us consider Imperial Walkers.

When the Imperial Walkers first appear for the Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, they reinforce the movie’s title and overall theme. Their terrifying size visually relayed the power discrepancy between the Empire and the Rebels.** This establishes right away that the ending of the original Star Wars did not end the war. In the second chapter of the saga, we see the Rebels are back on their heels and are literally in danger of being crushed by the Empire’s wrath.

**This continues the brilliant design details from the first movie. As was similarly observed, the very opening scene of Star Wars juxtaposes the size of the Star Destroyer and the much smaller Rebel ship. The downward angle implies dominance. As Mr. Plinkett taught us, this visual detail tells you everything that you need to know at the beginning of the story: the Empire is dominant, has a long reach, and the Rebels are a precarious disadvantage.

The Rebels find that their snowspeeder aircraft can’t stop the Walkers, and they have very little ability to fight back against them with their standard projectile weapons. Luke, like the classical hero archetype, goes up against the impossible foe armed with his sword, and against all odds, comes away victorious.

The Imperial Walkers were not designed as if they would be practical war machines. To actually contemplate how they might work is besides the point. They are mythical monsters, and that is the purpose they serve in the story for which they were created. They were created as obstacles on the way for the wider journey in the story.

If we really stop to contemplate why Godzilla doesn’t act like more of an actual lizard — asking why he takes the time to punch down buildings and stomp on cars or how he could possibly breath fire — we’re missing the point. Godzilla is not supposed to be a real animal. Godzilla is a monster, and to get all Jungian here, monsters in stories convey palpable fears not literally, but on different levels.

The Walkers are an iconic design of the SW universe. They succeed so well as archetypical monsters by also invoking the mechanized cruelty of World War 2 tank warfare as well as classical motifs of mounted warriors. They accomplished their purpose by evoking something that was a tangible horror within living memory. So, just in terms of design, they’re popular as iconic mementos. The toys were coveted by my generation, and even as I’m going gray like Galen Erso, I can cast a wanting eye to the awesome Lego version.

But when we see them entering into a gritty battle against the Rebels in R1, and we also discover — who knew? — that X-Wing fighters have the firepower to cut them in half, then they become part of the practical landscape, and are no longer monsters.

In this movie, the Walkers become objects added to the background. Each ship or machine seemingly has a set amount of hit points and firepower and armor, and we get to see them set off against one another. To me, this makes the Walkers utterly pointless for being in the movie. Any nostalgic thrill I had in seeing them was quickly dissipated in a series of expected explosions and dogfights.

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In the Empire Strikes Back, the chase at the center of the narrative is the structure that frames the plot. Han Solo and company flee across the galaxy, dodging Imperial ships, space slugs, and ending up on the planet Bespin for the denouement of Luke versus Vader. The story structure is enriched by each step of the way by having the characters experience new locations and fantastic elements of the universe while expanding their relationship with one another, (Han and Leia), and with the Force (Luke). The pacing and plotting are virtually perfect, and it’s become the standard to which other sci-fi dramas are often compared.

Plot-wise, R1 suffers from the same problems as Return of the Jedi and every subsequent movie. The story progression only makes sense in that things happen in a way that they have to happen to fit the story.

In R1, the story serves the locations and elements, rather than the other way around. This is a typical progression in something like a modern game. In games, the purpose of the story structure is to get the character to navigate different environments and undergo different challenges. The overall story can be thin because it only serves to deliver the player to the different experiences. This kind of storytelling is familiar to modern viewers. I would argue that it would be better experienced through gameplay storytelling, but is not the same thing when experienced as a movie.

The hologram message from Galen to Jyn solves a plothole from the original movie: the Death Star designer only reluctantly built the station. The vulnerability was thus baked in so the Death Star will self-destruct. Galen’s hologram message with this fact starts the main story in motion, with Jyn desperate to follow up and find the secret, find the plans, and to get them to the Rebels so they can stop the Death Star.

Which left me wondering why Galen doesn’t shout in the hologram: “Exhaust port! Hit it with a torpedo! Toss a grenade down the shaft! It’s the EXHAUST PORT!” This certainly would have saved a lot of trouble for the Rebels having to steal the blueprints of the thing to find out where the vulnerability Galen talked about could be found. This would have cut down the running time of the movie by 80 minutes or so.

Also, is there a reason Krennic has to visit Vader in person? Well, we get to see Vader be intimidating, which is the only point of the scene. It seems like a waste of time and fuel there for a brief meeting that could be done by hologram.

R1 unfortunately spends a lot of time zipping from planet to planet for scenes that seemed rushed and unnecessary to the story.

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Stray observation 1:

So much effort was made for intricate details of this movie to mimic the feel of the universe from the original movie, that I am yet the squealing fanboy marveling at the work of the original creators all that much more. So many of the elements of the aliens, planets, costumes, ships, straps, guns, hair, noises, sounds, colors, and lighting, all look fantastic.

It’s still more to Rich Evans’ point that we as fans are our own worst enemies when we don’t want to see too much that is new. It started to grate on me that every familiar element Easter Egg that showed up seemed calculated to get the audience to clap with eager recognition. Luckily, my showing was mostly devoid of that response.

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Stray observation 2:

There was a lot that was a bummer about this movie. The war scenes were serious enough that I felt a bit of war fatigue. Did we need to see the Stormtroopers in a situation not unlike, say, American forces fighting insurgents in Iraq? As well as the Saving Private Ryan style bummers of seeing rows of Stormtroopers machine gunned?

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Stray observation 3:

Something that I also noticed from The Force Awakens: since when do ships in Star Wars have the ability to jump to/from light-speed from inside the atmosphere of a planet? It was a major plot device in the first few films that there was a degree of difficulty and imprecision in making the jump to and from light speed. Malfunctioning hyperdrives were a major source of tension. The imprecision of where a fleet would land even in the emptiness of space was another element. All that was gone in the new stories.

I am not a fan of seeing wheeled vehicles in Star Wars, either. I’d prefer seeing either floating vehicles or mounted creatures. The pedestrian “in between” of wheels sort of spoils the feeling of immersion in this fantasy universe. For a movie that was so intense about getting things “right,” I think this is an oversight of the world building.

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Stray observation 4:

For my taste, far too much attention was paid to make R1 close up any gap of events up until the start of the original movie.

As for the original characters that appeared in this movie, I thought they mostly seemed kind of off. The digital versions of Moff Tarkin and Leia seemed waxy and deep in the uncanny valley. I was immediately distracted. I could have understood their characters being in the shadows or reflections rather than full on, but I’m not sold on the digital puppetry.

They could have recast Moff Tarkin with someone like Charles Dance or David Bowie. (He was still alive at the time.) This would have been distracting, true, but more or less than the digital creations? I’m not sure.

Darth Vader seemed off. The costume just didn’t look quite like it did in the first movie to me. It seemed like the actor was shorter and of less stature than David Prowse, and the helmet didn’t quite look right around the neck. Also, sadly, while James Earl Jones reprises his role, his age is showing (or sounding), and Vader didn’t sound right to me.

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Stray observation 5:

One other note about Vader and his last scene of whup-ass on the Rebels: for all the care to make this movie snap seamlessly to the original, there were some things here are very different from the source.

Vader didn’t lead attacks into boarded ships himself and start kicking ass. The opening scene of Star Wars is effective as it is with Vader coming in after the slaughter brought on by the Stormtroopers, stepping so nonchalantly and intimidatingly over the bodies as he does with his hands neatly behind his back.

The first movie is very, very low-key on what exactly the Force is. Mostly, the Force users have meditative, trance-like powers to sense things in their minds’ eye, and this is the transcendental nature of the Force as it’s explained in the story. Most of the use of the Force is very constrained, with Kenobi using it to persuade stormtroopers, throw sounds, and most effectively seeming to disembody himself into it altogether. Telekinesis is only used once with Vader underlining a point by choking an Imperial Officer.

This is all amped up, as it should be, in the Empire Strikes Back, where the stakes are vastly increased, as are the abilities of Luke and Vader to toss objects around with the Force, and even deflect blaster shots.

By the time we get to Vader in Rogue One, Jedi powers in all the subsequent movies, games, cartoons, and movies are less like religion or martial arts, but are full-on super powers. Characters can be tossed around at will, shots deflected, and we already expect Jedi to be invulnerable when the plot requires it.

If I were to make the argument that the prequels damaged Star Wars mythos permanently, I would base it on how they changed the perception of the Jedi and the use of the Force as more super-power and less mystical. (I’m not even going to bring up the “m” word.)

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Last bit:

The characters in R1 are fairly flat in this heavily plot-driven story. They’re potentially interesting in their own right, but they just aren’t developed. There isn’t as much of the witty banter as in the first movie that was as important to the feel as the set design. The inherent darkness inevitable in the story of R1 doesn’t make for much uplift. There is nothing as charmingly fun as scenes of the Jawas capturing R2-D2.

The constraint of the running time is my biggest regret with the movie. I had a thought that all of this would have been much more enjoyable if it had been a 10-part series on cable/streaming. Game of Thrones gets a much better 10-hour season from a storyline than they likely would with a 2-hour movie.

As much as the CGI looked good when it was used, the practical sets were also quietly excellent. I could have watched the characters spend more time interacting in the practical environments with more dialogue and intrigue. All the same amount of special effects could easily have been padded out with more story content which would have introduced us more to the characters and their journey. An episodic structure would have given us more room to breathe and ponder the universe in between story beats. This could have given us more of the heart and mythos I felt was lacking.

We could have actually seen a proper love story, perhaps. The tragedies would have had greater weight than seeing the death of a character we only met an hour earlier. Saw Gererra’s character might have made sense. I definitely could sit through hours more scenes with K2-SO, who was the single part of the movie I enjoyed the most.

Maybe the makers of the movie might even agree with me, and would have enjoyed having more room to play in this wonderful sandbox and flesh out the stories. I’m sure the expenses involved with that approach meant that this never was a possibility. Even if it would have been a better story this way, Disney™ needed to see this movie return their multi-billion dollar investment. That meant that they aimed for a blockbuster with this over all other considerations. Too bad.

2016: Ructions All The Way Down || Arrival Review

Writing about culture is delicate thing at the end of 2016. Our society is undergoing frantic re-contextualization of what is right or wrong, conservative or liberal, taboo or normalized. Is social media is ultimately a tool for more social democratization or a boon for totalitarians? I suspect the ructions will continue, and we won’t shake this out for some time.

Maybe the received wisdom from cultural curators in the past was just reporting on general trends rather than influencing them. I’d wager that established cultural critics have never been less influential on popular perceptions than they have been in 2016. In the past, I would have thought the influence of internet bloviating twitterati as being over-hyped. This year has proved me wrong. Received wisdom is being overturned with every tick of the news cycle.

I think the pushing aside of the clerisy has been a long time coming.  As a Libertarian who is technically an atheist, I don’t exactly stand athwart social change shouting “stop.” But I’m afraid right now we are in the Stalinist stage of the social media revolution. The marketers, both of the commercial and political species, have legions of marketing and psychological methodologies at hand. The trick nowadays for the would-be power brokers is not to actually be an individual going viral with an original point of view. Clever power brokers at the top now seek to use strategically placed social media as an imitation of authenticity.

One of the insights on the state of all things digital and cultural was provided to me by Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me, I’m Lying about his work as a PR person deliberately manipulating media blogs. Internet news blogs run on advertising, and advertising runs on clicks. They must get you, the consumer, to click on something, whatever it takes. Thus, the most ridiculously arresting, arousing, or infuriating of headlines will be hyperlinked. The metrics of what works are known by cruel, unfeeling, Darwinian culling. If it harvests a click, it multiplies; if it does not, it withers. It doesn’t matter whether what is being put forward is uplifting, insightful, or important to your actual life. What matters is a boolean consideration: whether or not the user clicks that link.

Media manipulators have used the accumulated knowledge of human nature to figure out what makes us click. Turns out, things that make us angry make us apt to click more than anything else. Yes: puppy videos or celebrity nip-slips are up there, too. But it’s much more profitable, if you are running a web site, to have a headline with a declarative statement that will cause blood pressure to spike one way or the other. This earn clicks. And only clicks matter.

It could be said that advertisers, politicians, and polemical-minded journalists are trolling us. They are much like the fisherman trying out different shiny flies to find which one gets the bass to bite. The troll feeds on its catch, grows larger and smarter, and the cycle continues.

Trolling reverberated throughout the election this year. Electoral anger was made possible by a Democrat Party that sought to suppress democracy in the name of Super Delegates delivering up a candidate neither welcomed nor even widely well-liked by the would-be consumers.

Anger-induced clicks helped with the Bernie backlash against the Clinton product simply being handed to the Democrat constituency by this clerisy. And this anger against the clerisy ultimately helped Trump against everyone else.

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American politics are almost light-hearted compared to, say, the Turkish would-be “coup” this summer. This is a story almost completely uncovered in the West. In what’s become a theme this year, the government of Turkey seems to have trolled their own populace. The Islamist President blamed the coup attempt on a bookish Islamist organization his own Islamist party was once allied with. In this way, Erdoğan cemented his hold on the country as a populist Islamist, while also claiming to fight dangerous Islamism. This contradiction is not coincidence. The incoherence is confusing and demoralizing, of course, but that can only help the powers in charge maintain their hold by repressing dissent.

Not so subtly, the Erdoğan regime has claimed that groups of secularist liberal intellectuals are tied in to the “Islamist” coup through links in education. Thus, the current Islamist populist regime has cemented its hold on the country, while claiming to be fighting Islamist terrorists by arresting and removing from positions of power large numbers of non-Islamist secularists. It takes some deliberate concentration for an outsider to follow these events, but the population of Turkey is forced to take it all in stride, and stand compliant in the face of a broadly mendacious official government line. And if the individuals do not like it, they can say goodbye to their jobs, their livelihoods, and in a word repeated quite often: their “honor” in society.

True totalitarianism is not merely living in a society in which official power repeats lies endlessly; that happens often enough everywhere. Under true totalitarianism, one is forced to recite those lies with phony sincerity and a phony smile, which everyone knows is phony, but which is required nonetheless. Totalitarianism demoralizes the individual by humiliating him and emasculating him, forcing him to smile and partake in his own humiliation.

Social Media has proven to be very adept at reinforcing these totalitarian norms by leveraging every pseudo-private space as a vector through which to enforce these pageants of self-negation and submission. In the West, we’re so far only playing games with totalitarianism and hate-clicks; contrarians still have room to mock back. In Turkey, the real thing is playing out for blood and body-counts. It remains to be seen whether the Turkish experience is an anomaly or a prequel for the rest of us.

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Of far less importance than matters of Trump or Turkey, is the state of the culture of geekery.

I’m not sure whether it’s purely motivated by money, or part of some social experiment, but the social media hive minds been telling us consumers of geek media that what we really need is for women to kick ass!! in more action/sci-fi/super-hero movies.

I think, for the dollars involved, marketers are determined to fight the fundamental truth that a bunch of action films are power fantasies that boys — testosterone soaked boys — revel in. Female power fantasies — which exist — are often much subtler, personal, and less about punching or using swords. The company line that feminism means we need to see more women kick ass!! is as phony to me as claiming Cinemax soft-core lesbian sex scenes are “empowering” for the gay community. Both seem to me really driven by the consumption habits of a male audience, eager for the visual spectacle of titillating female flesh.

I think the story of 2016 as the year of the Great Gaslighting might best be exemplified in this RedLetterMedia video on the failed Ghostbusters reboot. Consider: a major corporation, worth billions, for the sake of maintaining high-income executive salaries, conducted an ad campaign for Ghostbusters that framed the existing fans of their intellectual property as basement-dwelling misogynists. This is not to defend the small number of misogynists who actually did make their foolishness known, but to point out that Sony marketed their product as a symbol of progressivism and feminism that all well-meaning, right-thinking people should embrace by principle. Whether it’s fraudulent to advertise an awful, unfunny movie as if it were otherwise, is besides my point. It’s about a multi-billion dollar corporation ginning up hatred against a group of people that Sony even explicitly recognizes as powerless and small. The massive corporation played the part of victim for being rejected by its own consumers. This is a level of cynicism really beyond parody.

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This is not to claim that there are no legitimate fans of watching women kick ass!! in movies. Geek girls exist, and they are legion, and I love them. I just won’t pretend that these are things that everyone actually wants. I’m in favor of the things that not everyone gets.

I just am aware that geek girls are numerically in a minority, and no sane person goes to, say, ComiCon because it’s a great place to meet girls. I stand for the contrarians, the geeks, the outcasts, and the lovers of insanely nerdy inside references. I fight for the users! There is something to be said for being in the minority, anyway. Who wants to always be in the “most” when the “most” is mostly wrong?

As it is, true nerds have seen their culture appropriated as super-hero, fantasy, and sci-fi movies have taken over movie grosses. As a geek, it’s interesting to watch female starlets play comic book characters. I often think to myself: has she any clue who Emma Frost or the Scarlet Witch are in comic books? And one level further: has she even dated the kind of man who has any idea who those characters are?

Fine enough. Let the nerds and neckbeards have our moment. We geeks suffered through playing right-field in our day, so I am fine with the pretty, chiseled people in movies coming to ComiCon and grovelling at the great otaku temple to win the favor of our dollars and clicks.

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Arrival is a science-fiction movie with a female protagonist, and it’s very good science-fiction that satisfies the thinking geek. Nothing felt false to me in the movie, as things so often do in the sci-fi genre these days.

I’ll compare it to the Martian, as far as smart sci-fi goes. I didn’t care much for that movie, even when I wanted to like it. It pulled me out of my suspension of disbelief a little too often with over-acting actors making too many quips and asides that fell flat to me. I liked it for the journey of the protagonist solving problems in a methodical way, providing the base for the rare hard sci-fi big budget movie. I felt I appreciated the Martian more as an idea of a story than the story itself. Which follows, as I heard the book was better.

Arrival, also based on a book I didn’t read, is not quite hard sci-fi, as obviously it involves aliens and fantastical elements. But let the geeks rejoice! This is a movie wherein the two lead characters are scientists. And they act like scientists. And there is honest-to-Xenu drama in watching them figure out the complexity of communicating with aliens. There is no fake-out with people acting like they wouldn’t act in real life, nor needless quips, nor jokes to elicit audience response, nor cheeseball moments. It all felt very true. Even the heart-wrenching sentiments, which are very powerfully evoked by Amy Adams’ character and her very personal loss, are all very pure.

Critics said they hated how the military stymies the scientists when they’re trying to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. But I found it rang true. Forrest Whittaker’s character says “I need to know exactly what you’re going to do before you go in there, because I need to defend it to a room of people trying to protect their jobs.” Sounds like a perfect recitation of the drama of life in a bureaucracy. In my experience, any actual scientist would nod knowingly at that scene. (Yes, that’s how you can recognize the real scientists in the theater: they’re the ones in the lab coats nodding.)

There still is a lot of drama that is milked from characters under danger from other characters pointing weapons at them, but it serves the story progression within context of the plot, not as a plot device to add drama unnecessarily. No jump scares. Sound is used as part of the story, but the alien noises are very deep audio tones, and it worked to hear it in a theater where the room is shaking. No audio is used in lieu of plot. (Take that, JJ Abrams and Lost.)

Yes, the message is a bit hippie-dippie: “we all need to get along!” But if you’re going to criticize human nature and the state of the world along those lines, this is the way to do it.

Arrival is science-fiction at its best. It is transcendent storytelling that bridges the world we know with fantasy, and brings us face to face with things both beautiful and terrible.