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A good review, like any piece of journalism, derives its value from its objectivity. A good review should not be the ravings of a fan; it should take a sober, impartial approach to the material being reviewed, and strive to strike a balance between even-handedness and aggressive critique.
In that spirit, then, I cannot in good conscience call this piece a “review,” much less a “critique.”
Joss Whedon has long since had my devout attention as a fan; he first grabbed me with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and he cemented my devotion with “Firefly.” And while I would like to think my enthusiasm for everything he has done since then (“Dollhouse,” The Avengers, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”) is well-founded in a developed, semi-critical aesthetic, the truth is that he never fails to please me. I am nearly guaranteed to adore anything and everything his creative vision touches.
Enter “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Whedon’s small-screen follow-up to the superhero -fest The Avengers. Set in the same universe, and featuring a couple of the same characters, the new series occupies a much smaller footprint. Yet somehow, impressively, it succeeds in magically magnifying the grandeur and awe of its big-screen predecessor.
One of the problems with superhero movies is a problem of scale. Superheroes are by definition larger-than-life characters; they inhabit a realm of ability and consequence that none of us can truly imagine, much less empathize with. When Iron Man stops an alien invasion of the Earth, he saves countless millions (or billions) of lives. When Thor defeats the rampages of his evil half-brother Loki, he saves millions more. In his off time, Tony Stark collaborates with Bruce Banner on unimaginable technology that would forever advance the realms of particle physics and bioengineering.
Whereas today, I got a half-decent start on an Android phone app and carried a few boxes up some stairs. And that left me wiped.
The gulf between these two realms is vast, and the danger with any superhero movie is getting so caught up in the grandeur of the macro world of gods and monsters and billionaire-playboy-philanthropists that the scale of their adventures gets lost. When a small town in New Mexico gets destroyed in 2011’s Thor, it’s a fun spectacle, but does anyone think of the coffee shop owner whose entire life savings just got wiped out in one fell Asgardian swoop? When the Hulk runs rampage on a college campus in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, do we really stop to consider the poor group of sophomores injured or killed by falling rubble?
I don’t. Or I didn’t. Now, having seen the first episode of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, I am hoping that will change. Unlike the Marvel Studios films that preceded it, this series promises to involve us deeply in the lives of ordinary people—and in the lives of those not-quite ordinary (but nowhere near godlike) government agents who help us see the consequences of a world in which giants walk the Earth.
Foremost among our guides in this tour is Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), the agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. introduced in the first Iron Man film (it should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen previews of the series that reports of the character’s death in The Avengers were, as Twain might have said, slightly exaggerated). Coulson is, as ever, smart, capable, cool under fire—but most importantly, uncommonly decent. “Don’t ever tell me there’s no way!” he thunders at one point, when told that saving an endangered civilian is impossible. “We need to come up with a third option, one that doesn’t involve Mike’s son losing a father.”
Best of all, Coulson is unflaggingly, disarmingly funny. Humor intermixed with high drama and tragedy is one of the signature moves in any Joss Whedon drama, and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is no exception.
The rest of the ensemble—the reliable Ming Na Wen as Agent May, along with newcomers Brett Dalton and Chloe Bennet—round out the team with a fantastic combination of strength, enthusiasm, and promises of future mysteries. As ever, Joss Whedon also gives time to a few favorite ensemble actors (Ron Glass from “Firefly,” J. August Richards from “Angel”, and Cobie Smulders from The Avengers), as well as a generous smattering of tantalizing, mysterious hints of things to come (“He doesn’t know, does he?”).
What makes all of this work, however, is what will undoubtedly set this new series apart: its focus on the ordinary. In the pilot episode, we meet Mike, an average guy, down on his luck, who has been given super-powers. He’s been offered a taste of greatness normally denied the rest of us but displayed so flamboyantly by the heroes we now know inhabit the earth. Mike’s frustration with his own limitations rings very true, even intimately familiar. It’s human nature to strive for more, and to grow angry when we see others moving far past limits that we ourselves can never transcend.
“You said it was enough to be a man,” Mike says, “but there’s better than Man. There’s gods. And the rest of us, what are we? They’re giants. We’re what they step on.”
And this is the perspective that makes “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” soar. Suddenly, we are no longer just flying high above New York City with Iron Man and Thor; we are also down on the ground, amid all the other potential casualties. We stand among the ants looking up at our heroes with a mixture of awe, admiration, and frank envy.
Not many writers could successfully bridge this gap. As he has proven time and again, though, Joss Whedon not only has the imagination to successfully inhabit both worlds, he has the rare skill of being able to move back and forth between them. Doing so, he expands our perception, helping us to grasp the scale of a world that holds both the unimaginably huge and the all-too-imaginably humble.
I can’t wait to see where he takes us next. Fortunately, I only need to wait a week.
Like many Tom Cruise vehicles of late, Oblivionseems to have come and gone with little fanfare. Indeed, I was surprised to see the DVD on a stand at the grocery store last week – I didn’t know it had already come out and been (ironically) consigned to its titular state.
Which is unfortunate, because it’s actually one of the better movies I’ve seen in the past year. I won’t describe it in detail so as not to give away the numerous Serling-level twists in the story, but suffice to say that it’s entertaining and worth watching. The special effects are impressive, as is the futuristic creative design (the “tower” sets in particular). The bulk of it appears to have been filmed in Iceland, which amused me – anyone who has done the Laugavegur hike or visited Jökulsárgljúfur National Park will recognize much of the post-war New York City. The story premise and various gimmicks were clever and believable, and the leads (Cruise, Riseborough, and Kurylenko) delivered respectably layered performances (particularly Riseborough as Victoria, with her tragic subconscious dread of discovering the truth).
There were shortcomings, including Morgan Freeman as Morgan Freeman’s Usual Character, the typically improbable Armageddon-refugee-chic costumes, the colorful but unlikely depiction of the Moon, and the oops-we-forgot-about-lightspeed moment near the end. But on the bright side, unlike Elysiumand pretty much any movie of late, Oblivion is pleasantly free from obvious political preaching and product placement. No, really…there’s no blaming humanity for the war, no contrived subplots about racism or homophobia, no moralizing about the environment or capitalism, no anti-human ruminations on just how depraved and awful and evil humanity really is, no risible rodberrification of contemporary social issues, no tendentious illustrations on the dangers of technology. Which is nice. For a change.
Overall, Oblivion has the same feel as far as production, performance, and writing quality as the similarly-ignored Looper, which I was also surprised to have enjoyed.
On August 13th, the Falcon 9 test rig (code name Grasshopper) completed a divert test, flying to a 250m altitude with a 100m lateral maneuver before returning to the center of the pad. The test demonstrated the vehicle’s ability to perform more aggressive steering maneuvers than have been attempted in previous flights.
Grasshopper is taller than a ten story building, which makes the control problem particularly challenging. Diverts like this are an important part of the trajectory in order to land the rocket precisely back at the launch site after reentering from space at hypersonic velocity.
Sharlto Copley is a South African actor who first came to prominence in 2009, in director Neil Blomkamp’s excellent District 9, a tour-de-force of relatively low-budget, indie science fiction film-making. This weekend, Copley came to American theaters in two new films: Blomkamp’s big-budget follow up, Elysium, which stars Matt Damon, and in the indie film Europa Report, in which Copley’s is arguably the most well-known name in the cast. Both films delve into science fiction to explore important themes and ideas, and each film relies on its own distinct visual style.
That, however, is where the similarity ends.
In District 9, Neil Blomkamp burst upon the scene as a visionary new director of science fiction. In it, he told the story of Wikus, played by Copley, a hapless bureaucratic dweeb who finds his conscience torn, challenged, and tested, due to his involvement with the “Prawns,” a stranded race of insect-like aliens restricted to a shanty ghetto in Johannesburg. The film is a thinly-veiled allegory for the horrors of apartheid, and with it Blomkamp proved his willingness to use the trappings of science fiction to draw stark moral challenges to the economically and politically privileged.
In his new film Elysium, Blomkamp plays on many of the same themes, though this time he has shifted targets from the apartheid government of South Africa to the modern United States, embroiled in the question of illegal immigration. Though one might think that the more topical theme would enhance the film’s impact, over-broad performances and simplistic writing sabotage the film from the start. As so many critics of America’s immigration policy do, Blomkamp unwisely conflates the “Haves vs. Have-nots” narrative of the Occupy movement with the question of Hispanic immigration, throwing in a healthy dose of “Free health care” polemics for good measure. The result, philosophically, is a mess, aiming for populism but falling far short into caricature.
In this regard, he is not helped by the performances of his actors. Matt Damon shambles through the role of Max, a semi-reformed criminal trapped in a 22nd-century Los Angeles that is now one big slum. William Fichtner plays a smaller role, providing a regrettable caricature of a spoiled, wealthy industrialist, and Jodie Foster turns in her worst performance to date, overacting her way through the role of Delacourt, the scheming Defense Minister for the wealthy denizens of Elysium. Sharlto Copley does some of the most interesting work in the film as Kruger, a soldier of fortune whose barely contained, homicidal rage propels him to his conflict with Damon.
Stylistically, Elysium carries forward the torch from District 9, relying on the same shaky camera work that lent the earlier film much of its documentary realism and intimacy. Here, the technique simply seems jittery, unfocused, and has the unfortunate effect of making some of the sequences harder to follow. The sole redeeming note from a production standpoint is provided by the spectacular special effects depicting the orbital habitat, Elysium, and the launch and low-orbit flights of the shuttles carrying passengers to and from the space station.
Thematically, though, the film is disastrous.
Rather than engaging in any meaningful exploration of the questions being considered, Blomkamp chooses to paint the issues in the most simplistic, one-sided terms you can imagine. The wealthy of Elysium, hoarders of seemingly cost-free, miraculous health care that can cure any disease or injury, exclude the impoverished Earth-bound rabble more from “Dog in the Manger” pettiness than from any practical reason. In this world, there are no material limitations to explain unequal distribution of goods; some people are just selfish and hateful, and that’s that.
As compared with Elysium‘s heavy-handed, barely disguised metaphors, Europa Report uses the tropes of science fiction—in this case, a near-future exploration of our solar system—as an opportunity for character study. The movie portrays the way that different individuals respond to fear of the unknown, and the sacrifices we are sometimes called upon to make in service to our own ideals. It’s a far subtler approach, though there is plenty of drama, and as such it does a more effective job of using a fantastic scenario to thoughtfully delve into its themes.
Directed by Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero, Europa Report tells the story of a privately-funded mission to explore Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, host to perhaps the only other liquid-water oceans in the solar system, and thus, potentially, another home for biological life.
Stylistically, this film is striking: adhering to the “found footage” sub-genre of films, its contents are derived from on-ship cameras which record the story of the mission, and the tragedies and difficulties they face both en route to, and upon their arrival on, Europa. Despite the fact that “found footage” films are nothing new (The Blair Witch Project famously launched the sub-genre in 1999), the film manages a fresh, intimate tone, presenting realistic portrayals of the stresses and high emotions that can accompany such a mission.
Despite (or perhaps because of) having almost no marquee names in the cast, this movie boasts a roster of subtle, understated performances. As in Elysium, Sharlto Copley offers a well-crafted performance, though he plays a very different character. His James Corrigan, a technical specialist and engineer, provides one of the most emotionally wrenching moments of the film. Modestly-known actress Embeth Davidtz gives a quiet performance as the earth-bound mission controller, Dr. Unger. The rest of the cast is rounded out by a set of skilled unknowns and barely-knowns, including Michael Nyqvist, Dan Fogler, Anamaria Marinca, and Christian Camargo, whom Dexter fans might recognize as Dexter’s murderous brother from the first season. Each works solidly within the ensemble, contributing to a strong story without indulging in showy or hammy performances.
In telling a story like this, the obvious temptation for a more cynical filmmaker might be to posit some conventionally selfish, narcissistic, or short-sighted flaws in one or more of the characters which bring doom upon the rest. Certainly this is a theme that has been well-explored in modern science fiction: the recent film Prometheus was pretty well done in by this temptation. To Cordero’s credit, he engages in no such ploys; though his characters are not perfect, and each struggles with his or her own frailties, each crew member exhibits heroism and dedication to his or her own highest ideals, right up to the end. In an age of cynical movies and cheap, overblown heroics, it’s a brave choice, and it rings true.
Some have expressed disappointment in the “big reveal” of the ending; to those I would say: You missed the point. Even though the format presents a conventional “What is it?” sort of mystery to be solved, that answer is not ultimately the point of the story; rather, the movie delves into the important question of how we as frail, imperfect human beings strive and achieve greatness in pursuit of our own individual ideals.
At its best, science fiction uses the plausibly fantastic as a canvas on which to paint the most timeless of human themes. At its worst, it can fail at any number of points: by extending what is imaginable so far into what is not, as to strain plausibility; by rehashing tired, too-well-explored themes; by sacrificing storytelling to technical accuracy. In the final analysis, Elysium fails because it relies on the conventions of the genre to hide its flaws, which are themselves born of a certain intellectual laziness. Europa Report stretches itself beyond the limitations of its small-budget production and indie film constraints, in order to tell a well thought out story that touches on the timeless.
This sounds to me like a next-generation version of UUCP (I think it was called) from back in the day. I wondered when the PRISM, etc. scandals broke if something like that would make a comeback.
What’s needed for this to take off (apart from Americans taking enough time away from their addiction to attention-whoring on Facebook to recognize the privacy problem) is a turnkey implementation. If it requires an arcane installation and setup procedure that serves more the desire of Linux nerds to fiddle about in the innards of their computers than practical uses of same by non-nerds, it will go nowhere. If the contributors to its development poo-pooh Windows platforms and smugly refuse to develop any implementations for same, it will suffer from self-induced limits on scale which could hinder its utility and sustainability.
On the other hand, the Kickstarter effort to build a meshnet box, one which from the sounds of it would be as simple to set up as a DSL or cable modem and similarly compatible across devices and operating systems, suggests that this is indeed being taken into account.
Back in the 1970s, a handful of artists drew up intricate renderings of said mind-bending super space stations for NASA. They make the International Space Station look like a flying tin can—which is essentially what it is. In these concepts, the space stations are big enough not only to support suburban-looking neighborhoods with houses and blonde-haired dudes in polo shirts but also entire farms with livestock and everything.
I hope that in my lifetime space colonies will become a reality. Like Carl Sagan once said to future space settlers, “Maybe we’re on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there – the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we’re on Mars because we have to be, because there’s a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we’ve been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.”
I’ve noticed a trend lately in which these words are increasingly conflated or simply used interchangeably. The former carries heavier moral and religious overtones than the latter – if you’re still pretending to be objective, “iniquities” is not the word to use given the moralizing overtone it conveys.
When Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, or the corpse of Howard Zinn rant on about the “iniquities of the corporate system”, their usage is appropriate: they believe capitalism is not merely unfair but inherently wicked to the point of actual evil. When you’re pretending to objectively discuss differences in wealth or income as a neutral party while parroting the litany of unjust consequences which you have been told and believe unavoidably pertain thereto, the proper word choice is “inequities” unless you want people to see through your phony even-handedness.
I know it’s hard when your peers start using some new word that you like the sound of to stop and look it up for yourself and learn whether it’s an appropriate word choice, or whether it really means what you and the rest of your herd think it means. But given how little respect your profession has left and how much less it actually merits, it’s something (along with proofreading and spell-checking) you really ought to consider doing so as not to needlessly cause further decline.
One of the defining characteristics of the human race is our profound alienation from one another. What if a new technology promised to blur, or even erase, the lines that divide us? Director Guillermo del Toro’s new movie Pacific Rim poses that challenging question, and it is perhaps this otherwise-magnificent popcorn movie’s greatest failure that it never really explores that question.
In the world of Pacific Rim, mankind is under attack from enormous (think Godzilla-sized) alien beasts called “kaiju,” and has responded by constructing enormous robot warriors—”Jaegers”—to combat the menace. We are told that piloting a Jaeger is too much for a single human brain, that the power would overload and kill the pilot, and so each Jaeger is piloted by two human beings whose minds are connected in a technological bridge called “the Drift.” While engaged in the Drift, Jaeger pilots share thoughts, and can experience each other’s memories directly, as if both are reliving the moment.
If we as human beings were to develop such a technology, it would have the potential to fundamentally change human existence. Humans do not communicate directly (via telepathy, for example), and must rely instead on the imperfect, error-prone medium of language. This fact determines many facets of human culture: morality, religion, social taboos, and the various artistic media we employ as alternate means of more emotional communication. The misunderstandings that result from our less-than-perfect communication are perhaps the single biggest determinant of how we interact with one another.
Imagine, then: what would change if we could communicate simply by inviting another human being into our thoughts, sharing them directly? How different would day-to-day life be if every one of those potential misunderstandings could be erased, literally at the push of a button?
The short answer, of course, is “Nearly everything.” At a bare minimum, any such contact with the mind of another would tend to instantly create the sort of emotional and psychological intimacy usually shared by couples who have spent many years together. Taken to its full extent, one can imagine that such technology could create a “hive mind” within the species that would render religious and cultural differences almost entirely moot. At that point, any meaningful definition of humans as individuals—along with the whole package of individual rights posited by philosophers from John Locke onward—would vanish, irrelevant.
It’s a terrifying prospect, and one which del Toro would have done well to at least consider, if not explore, even to a minimal extent. Doing so could have vaulted Pacific Rim from the ranks of solid, well-executed summer popcorn movies, into the realm of the most important conceptual science fiction ever produced.
Looks like some of Bezos’ sea-bottom treasure belonged to AS-506, aka Apollo 11’s Saturn V: SERIAL NUMBER 2044
Today, I’m thrilled to share some exciting news. One of the conservators who was scanning the objects with a black light and a special lens filter has made a breakthrough discovery – “2044” – stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the massive thrust chambers. 2044 is the Rocketdyne serial number that correlates to NASA number 6044, which is the serial number for F-1 Engine #5 from Apollo 11. The intrepid conservator kept digging for more evidence, and after removing more corrosion at the base of the same thrust chamber, he found it – “Unit No 2044” – stamped into the metal surface.
