For Father’s Day, my family decided the best way to let me know what they thought of my job as a dad was to take me to see Men In Black: International.
Short review: Not great if you’ve seen the other films, and it kind of reminded me of a TV show pilot. It was softly rebooting the franchise, giving us new characters in a familiar setting, referencing the previous installments and ending with every loose end tied up, all ready for the next movie if the return-on-investment is good. There were a few plot contrivances, and there was even a phony tabloid newspaper to set up a gag that the first movie made (about all those “Aliens meet with the President” headlines being true) even though I don’t think anything like the old Weekly World News is in print anymore.
The two leads, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, play their roles well and have their own style of trying to be funny that doesn’t attempt to carbon-copy the relationship between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. There were also lines about how the MiB organization was changing in its mission, from only protecting humans from knowing about the aliens among them to being tasked with also protecting the aliens from other aliens, so it’s nice that someone has been giving the premise a little thought.
One thing I’ll say is that the franchise this reminded me the most of is Harry Potter, especially the Wizarding World movies. Take just about any scene where a person that’s never seen the hidden side of the movie’s story is escorted into a large, secret area. You get modes of transportation, architecture, directional signs, and workaday methods of dealing with large amounts of traffic that are unlike what we experience in real life. The only differences are magic vs. technology and fantasy creatures vs. aliens, really. Even the music seems to swell in the same way as the impossible is presented as an everyday happening in the hidden world. It’s a weird kind of dovetailing as special effects allow for just about anything that we’ve reached some kind of convergence that really only differs when it comes to the decor.
It wasn’t planned, exactly. My son was invited to a birthday party with a group of friends, and the birthday boy chose going to Godzilla: King of the Monsters as the main event for this get-together. My wife was tagged as a chaperone, and I was brought along for emotional support. Even though I hadn’t seen the previous film and the last Godzilla movie I’d witnessed was the one with Matthew Broderick in it, I was told that I was as prepared as I needed to be.
The spoiler-free review: It wasn’t terrible, exactly, but that’s at the standard of “It’s a Godzilla movie, so what do you expect?” The monsters and their fights were the best part of the movie, the human characters were the least interesting and often had very confusing motives and reactions, so it was a lot like the films originally made in Japan.
Getting into details is probably spoiler territory, so if you don’t want to know more, don’t click the jump below. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’d never heard of the musical rhythm combo called TWRP before today, and I’m not the biggest anime aficionado, but I do dig this synth-pop song/sci-fi spectacle that’d probably make for a decent animated series:
Okay, so who’s going to produce Starlight Brigade for Netflix? Anyone?
In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a trailer for a new Netflix series called The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and here it is:
It looks pretty good, and a lot more polished than the original film. I got a little Gerry Anderson vibe when the muppet touching the flower vibrated around when having her mind filled with “the darkening,” but that’s part of the package when using practical effects.
However, we’re probably in for some prequel-itis. While scientists haven’t completely mapped out this condition, prequel-itis has a few commonly noted symptoms:
• Everything looks far better than what’s supposed to come “after” the events of the “earlier” story. From ships predating the USS Enterprise having far more advanced equipment to lightsaber duels going (chronologically) from physics-defying ballet to two guys kind of standing around trying to hit each other with glowing sticks, most prequel media has this issue.
• We know what’s going to happen, eventually. Age of Resistance may have some interesting stories, but in the end it has to come down to two surviving Gelflings, Yoda Aughra, and ten Skeksis/Masters. This could be somewhat overcome if this prequel series lays the groundwork for something to come after the events of the movie, but that might be too much to expect. To use Star Wars as another example, the prequels had to end with all the Jedi gone, the Empire in place, and everyone who would appear in Episode IV ready to “resume” their roles that we’d already seen.
• And leading on from the previous two, one often has to ask “where is all this stuff I saw in the ‘earlier’ story?” Locations, macguffins, characters, and other signature parts of a prequel either need to predictably be setups for things in the media we’ve seen already, or their absence “later” has to make sense. This is often hand-waved if it means that characters we’ve come to like have to be killed off for the original movie to make sense, so they’re often said to be traveling, stuck somewhere off-camera, etc.
• Prequels can highlight (and create) flaws in the original movie. I’m going to pick on Star Wars again. Episode IV established how the Jedi Order had been around for a thousand generations, keeping the peace, being space wizards, etc. However, that legacy was apparently completely forgotten and relegated to fantasy by the galaxy at large in about 20 years or so. Many, many attempts to explain this have been made, but it’s still something that required that effort in the first place. True, The Dark Crystal doesn’t have such deep lore to keep in the forefront of its production, but the more complicated and rich a world a prequel makes only highlights its absence in the story that’s supposed to follow it.
All that said, I dug The Dark Crystal back in the day; If I can ever find it, I’ve got a box of trading cards somewhere that has a decent stack from the movie. I think the giant hermit-crab beasties are one of the greatest monsters of my childhood, and they had the perfect name: Garthim. The scene in the film where the Emperor dies still gives me chills. I really liked it and rented it several times on VHS (ask your parents what that was). I hope the series does the film justice.
That said, I’ve come to find a few nitpicks over the years: A review I heard many years ago that concluded The Dark Crystal would’ve been more engaging without the first five minutes where they basically gave away the plot. Now, we’ll have a series where we not only where it has to wind up, but we’ll likely have a lot of time spent telling us how it’ll turn out, which is something we already know. As it’s a prophecy, at least some time will have to be devoted to this in the Netflix show. I think that’s more to do with the problem one has when involving prophecies in the first place, and it might have had something to do with another bit of Dark Crystal trivia, making such blatant explanation of what you were about to see necessary:
A lot of the film was going to be in an alien language.
Henson wanted the Skesis to have their own tongue, so he commissioned a language for them to be created for the film. It didn’t do well with test audiences (hey, they can’t all be Klingon), so it was scrapped. The Podlings spoke Croatian, so it’ll be interesting to see if that sticks around. Anyway, with a lot of dialog requiring audiences to guess at what was being said, I figure the prophecy structure was probably a way to set up the plot so that if any details got lost in the lack-of-translation, it wouldn’t matter in the long run.
Anyway, I think I’d prefer it if this series included the story from The Dark Crystal as one of its seasons. Allow some of these new characters to play a role or even live through those events somehow, giving the fight to heal the crystal some more complexity and depth. Heck, if they wanted to really try for something ambitious, giving the crystal some kind of time-warping powers where events can be changed would work, provided the writers established the rules for it and stuck to them. Perhaps they’re considering something of this nature as Aughra says she sees “many endings,” so maybe there’s more going on under the hood than just “Skesis drain all but two Gelflings, journey of the hero(es) to follow.”
If you want to see some other trivia bits behind The Dark Crystal,Screenrant has twenty interesting facts regarding the film, what went into it, and its legacy. As for the show, all I want out of it right now is a toy of that Skeksis Batmobile we see at about 1:21 in the trailer. I’m also curious to find out if the makers of the Skydancers toys are going to be involved, seeing those creatures flying through the air at the twelve second mark.
I’d also take a plushie Garthim. Because reasons. 🙂
We start things with a little music that I stumbled across. If you don’t remember the coin-op video game Empire City 1931, then congratulations, you’re young or didn’t spend far too much time in arcades. It’s one of those light-gun games, but what stood out to me was the jazzy tune it played:
This led me to Karanba72’s channel which probably has any old arcade chiptunes you can’t find anywhere else.
What else?
• Fans of Doctor Who are being tempted by this 64oz TARDIS coffee mug. As a caffeine and beverage connoisseur, I don’t think this will be a great coffee mug. It’s porcelain, so if you fill it up, it’s not going to stay hot for long. Still, it’d make a pretty cool desk accessory for holding pencils, rulers, and sonic screwdrivers.
• Rumor has it that we’re getting a Knights of the Old Republic movie, based on video game of the same name. If you haven’t played KOTOR, I recommend that you do, since it’s still one of the best-written Star Wars games out there. That said, I’m not sure how they plan on adapting the plot to a film, since it really works best if you’re going in blind and have some investment in your character.
• Stephen King fans will get a film based on a story many thought would never be adapted to the big screen: The Long Walk. If they go the direct-from-text route, some horrific things are going to happen to the kid-aged characters, and if they come up with a way for those things to happen off screen and leave it up to your imagination… that could be worse.
• No Man’s Sky continues to be upgraded and brought closer to what the initial trailers promised, but players are leaping ahead of the developers and building cities in the game.
• I was unaware that Snoopy was lost in our solar system. That is, the test Lunar Excursion Module (named after Charlie Brown’s dog) that was used as a run-through for landing people on the moon. After orbiting the moon once, its extra fuel was used to send it off into the black, and some people are trying to find it.
At least it doesn’t look like they skimped on the special effects and fight choreography:
I have a love-hate relationship with this franchise, but it’s had some high points even after Terminator 2. I liked The Sarah Connor Chonicles, as I not only thought the story was a lot more thoughtful than what was going into the movies, but it had the potential for filling out the lore a bit and maybe filling in some of the timey-wimey plot holes. For as much as the third movie was just a giant callback to previous films, I was impressed that it ended the way it did, given Hollywood’s usual go-to of happy endings. After that, about all I liked was the occasional action sequence and machine design, and I didn’t even bother watching Genisys apart from bits and pieces on YouTube.
This film at least has Gabriel Luna in it as the black goo version of the Terminator, and he did a bang-up job as Ghost Rider in Agents of SHIELD, so he’s probably going to sell being a nano-graphine robot pretty well.
That said, I’m still not clear on how the shapeshifting Terminators can travel through time if nothing living can go through the time travel process. It’s been a tenet of the series, but it appears that all you have to do is coat something in biological material (like the T-800) and it’ll make it through just fine, so… okay, I guess?
At this point, I’m thinking the franchise will have to embrace a kind of multiverse model. From what I’ve read, Genisys went so far as to have alterable timelines of a sort, but at this point I’m wondering if that’s not enough. I could see the future being portrayed as a kind of Matrix-style nightmare world of enhanced humans and Skynet AI at war over an increasingly unstable reality due to the constant alterations to multiple universes and their histories. It’d be very much like Doctor Who and the comics that Marvel and DC publish where groups of heroes from different universes and times band together to try and “fix” history. It would allow for all the nonsensical events to be explained as fallout from this time-war, and perhaps it could let a clever writer either set up the franchise to continue with this concept or collapse into a more coherent plotline. Yes, I know which one the studios would like, but there you go.
This concept would probably be better served by a TV show, since it could get pretty complicated at times. However, we’re coming up on needing a reason why Skynet keeps going after individual people rather than sowing the past with machines that remove other key players or making events turn out in its favor in ways that don’t involve nuclear war or a showdown with someone that is somehow “destined” to destroy you.
I mean, if Skynet just became a sapient version of Amazon, it’d pretty much have half the planet in its clutches already, right? 🙂
I think this is the only recent video about Game of Thrones that contains no spoilers (or at least, none that can be easily discerned). It’s also a lot of jump-cutting, but that’s what has to be done if you want to get the cast to “sing” the lyrics to “Ice, Ice, Baby”:
I eagerly await Mr. Dinklage’s eventual concept album.
I used to play a lot of City of Heroes. It was my first and favorite massively multiplayer online RPG. While it never had the traction that World of Warcraft enjoyed, it was a fun game, even if all you did was muck about in the character creator most of the time. As you may have heard, there’s been an active CoH server running since the game’s shutdown in 2012. News of the Batcave this hidden playground came out last April, and since then, the server code (the zeroes and ones needed to set up one’s own private server for the game that had, until now, been unavailable) was released to the public.
You may have heard great things about this game. A few things to keep in mind:
• The graphics are very primitive by today’s standards, but the animations and effects are still pretty cool. There’s no voice acting, so bring your reading glasses.
• The writing set it apart from other MMOs. Yes, there are tropes for the purposes of having a game as well as some pretty standard superhero setups, but I think they hold up well.
• It’s pretty grind-y to level up, but I believe you get all the bonuses as if you’ve been a subscriber to the game, which gets you a few nifty add-ons and buffs.
And since we’re living like it’s 2004, here’s what teased the game when it was brand new:
Maybe this is a sign of things to come, where games like this are preserved by fans with the tolerance of the game’s owners. Maybe it’ll get yanked by lawyers and yet another game world will hit that big desktop recycle bin in the skybox. Maybe it’ll be an unofficial prequel game for future players of City of Titans? Stay tuned, true believers!
Yeah, that wasn’t the best title. But anyway, who remembers the 90’s first person shooter, Blood? It starred Caleb, an anti-hero that probably would’ve fit right in with most Image Comics of the day. He’s basically undead Jonah Hex with glowing eyes, out to rescue his love, Ophelia, from the dark god Tchernobog. On the way, he fights the Cabal, the cult he used to belong to, along with zombies, gargoyles, rats, and many other sprite-based mobs. Here’s the (bloody) release trailer for the remastered Blood: Fresh Supply:
I always liked Caleb, and he’s probably my favorite FPS character from his era. I still occasionally quote the line he uses when doing things that might not be seen as particularly wholesome: “Why miss heaven by inches?”
Anyway, I bring this up because if you ever bought the Blood: One Whole Unit on Steam, you should have a coupon for 50% off the remastered version, which includes a ten-level scenario called Cryptic Passage. I don’t think I ever played it back in the day, so this should be either fun or an exercise futility as I find I’m no longer skilled at games of yore. As for the remaster itself, some die-hard fans are less than thrilled, but compared to the original game, just having the ability to use mouselook made it playable for me. Setting up the keybinds is still a little strange compared to modern FPS games, as you can assign an action to multiple keys/inputs.
And in case it ever comes up, I remember liking Blood II: The Chosen when it came out, but that was a long time ago, and like a lot of FPS games with a narrative, it ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved (I think). You got to play with the metal ball from Phantasm, though, so there was that.
