Pacific Rim

IMDB 7.9/10
My Rating: 7/10

When giant monsters start appearing in the Pacific ocean and destroying cities, humanity must band together and fight back with giant piloted robots. 

I love giant monster movies.  Ever since the days of Godzilla and Ultraman, the kaiju genre has been my thing, so the idea of a big budget, all-original robots vs monsters movie has always been high on my wish list.  And Pacific Rim is clearly a labor of love by a fellow fan of Toho's creations... which is why it pains me to not *quite* be able to give it the glowing review I'd like to.  Nonetheless, it's a marvelous film and thus far is the only summer movie that's actually been able to motivate me to the theater - Man of Steel and Star Trek and Iron Man 3 are more, "Wait for it on DVD" for me, whereas Lone Ranger is strictly, "I'll watch this when I'm forced to on a long plane flight."

In Pacific Rim, giant monsters are attacking the world.  One after another, they are popping out of a dimensional gate under the Pacific and laying waste to civilization.  Humans build giant robos called Jaegers to fight them off, and our hero is a former hotshot Jaeger pilot who inevitably had his fall from grace and now seeks redemption.  That's about all of the plot I can reveal without spoilers, but that's also about all the plot there is - Don't be expecting a complex storyline because, like the classic kaiju pics of old, it's basically, "Giant Robot, Giant Monster, FIGHT!"

Overall, I'd probably give this one a B+  -  It's an A+ for big screen spectacle, a B for cool robots and beasties, a C for characters, an A for homages and wink-wink moments, and a C for action scenes. The action scenes were my biggest complaint. As advertised, they were better than Transformers, yes, but where Transformers got an F for utter failure, Pacific Rim just gets a C because at least 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, it was impossible to tell what the hell was going on. Wall-to-wall CGI, everything is moving, everything has a million moving parts, the camera is flying all over the place, and it's all happening in raging seas at night in the rain. When you could see what was happening, it was totally awesome, and some of the fights kicked ass all over because of how great they looked when there was actual lighting and visual coherence, but others (specifically the opening fight and the big battle in the bay later, AND the climax) were just gibberish overload to me - a screen full of moving pixels that I tuned out of and just ended up waiting until the scene settled down enough to see who had won. In this respect, Pacific Rim was a big step down from last year's Avengers, which also had a metric fuckton of CGI at the end but it was all lit and staged so well that I never once had any problem telling what was happening or visually understanding what I was seeing. When it's completely impossible to follow what's happening on screen, something has been done wrong.

Example - Here is a Godzilla fight at night:

 

You can clearly see what is happening and clearly see what each monster looks like, and have no problem following the action.

By contrast, this is what half the fight scenes in Pacific Rim looked like:

The above is much harder to follow in motion, too. The experience is like - Lots of rain, Lightning. A flash of claw. Something blows up. Splashing everywhere. Brief glimpses of monster parts. That gets me to my other big complaint, which is that you never get to see the monsters for shit. Some of the designs looked cool, but as is the modern way, they're usually way too overdone with too many opening mouth parts and arms and you never, ever are allowed a good look at any of them.

Typical Godzilla movie monster view:

Typical Pacific Rim monster view:

It's all the more frustrating because when they do the action scenes good, they're REALLY good. Some in-city fight scenes are way cool, and when they let you see what's actually happening, there are some great moments and many big fist-pumping, "HOO-RAH!" cheers for the giant robots. It ticks me off because this could have been an A-level movie if they had resisted giving in to "Too much moving CGI shit" overload.

Other negative points are smaller. The ending is the next biggest one, as it's basically a scene-for-scene reshoot of the ending of one of LAST summer's big blockbuster flicks. The two leads are not very interesting. Virtually everyone is a stereotype cliche.

That's all the bad stuff.

NOW, the good stuff is that it's a freaking overwhelming cinematic experience. Despite the visual overload, when it rocks, it ROCKS. It's a big budget giant monster movie and that alone is cause for celebration. The Jaegers are cool and at least somewhat different - Again, the designs are overcomplicated such that we never get a good look at any of them, but at least they are visually distinctive unlike the Transformers. My favorite was the battered, heavy-metal low tech Cherno, a Russian robot piloted by Ivan Drago and Brigitte Nielson.

While the star dude is a charisma-free plank whose job in the movie is to fill screen space while standing around with his shirt off in every possible scene, pretty much everyone around him manages to be likable and interesting. There's Maverick, of course, and Grizzled Veteran. Idris Elba does a terrific job of showing what a great James Bond he would make. Ron Perlman is hilarious in a cameo part. Even normally hideously unlikable Burn Gorman (of Torchwood, otherwise known as Rat-Face) seems to be having fun playing Blimey Codswallop, the most overdone foreign scientist ever. In fact, the two geek scientists were the best part of the movie, IMO - Whenever we went back to them bickering in their lab filled with equation-covered chalkboards, they were always a hoot. They also checkmarked many geek references, including a nod to Buckaroo Banzai. There was a lot of this stuff in the movie and it was always cool - Moves from a Toho kaiju film, a line from War of the Worlds, a name reference here and there, etc. In general, the whole thing showed a huge love of the genre and I commend them for it.

Verdict - I really wish I could give this an unqualified cheer because when it works, it works REALLY WELL. Also, my demerits probably would not make any difference to the videogame generation who are already used to having two million things moving around on the screen, and see that as normal. For myself, the problem was driven home when I later that same evening watched an episode of Wild Wild West about a mad scientist who was creating explosive robot duplicates of the heroes to kill the president. It had a Frankenstein lab, killer robots, a huge fencing scene, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, various fights, etc, and I never once found myself in the situation of tuning out because I couldn't follow what was happening, or just having to twiddle my thumbs and wait until the scene was over so I could see who won. It's the main drag on an otherwise fucking awesome movie.

7/10

Worth seeing in the theater? Yes.
Worth buying on Blu-Ray? Yes.
Worth buying the toys? Definitely yes, if only to see what the monsters actually looked like.

I want a Cherno on my desk to face off with my Baragon.

14 (A Book Review)

My Rating: 7/10

Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches.

There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.

At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment.  And Tim’s.  And Veek’s.

Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.

Or the end of everything...

I just finished this in audiobook form (I listen to tons of audiobooks during my long days in my woodworking shop). It was loads of fun. It is by Peter Clines, an author whose work I've previously read in "Ex-Heroes", a very straightforward genre mashup of superheroes and zombies (After the zombie apocalypse, the world's masked avenger types round up the survivors in LA and attempt to defend them inside a fortified compound. This was every bit as entertaining and as dumb as it sounds).

14 was a whole different kettle of fish, and it's as hard to review as Triangle was, because I don't want to give away what made it so cool. It's like a combination of Lost and Lovecraft, with a mystery/horror/SF bent.   The hero is a young slacker type who works as a data entry temp and is stuck in that "Waiting for his life to start" phase (Weren't we all, once?  Let's just call it "Age 21-26", eh?), when he finds a new apartment that is too good to be true - Incredibly cheap rent, included utilities, and a nice building. After moving in, however, he begins to notice oddities - The elevator is always in the basement, the building has no power lines going to it, his kitchen light fixture turns any bulb put into it into a black light, and his neighbors are a collection of oddities. Tim is a former book publisher with a skill range from James Bond, there's a young actress who spends her time topless on the roof, and computer nerd Veek is a cranky geekette with an apartment so crammed with high powered PC gear that she could run 4Chan in her spare time.

The book is about the deepening mystery as these disparate characters begin to cooperate, Scooby Doo fashion, to delve into the mysteries and secrets of their strange building.   I went into it expecting either a haunted apartment story or an evil landlord story, and instead got the Phantasm effect - That feeling I had way back when first watching Phantasm, that I was completely expecting the story about a funeral home to be a ghost or vampire movie and instead got weird yellow-blooded aliens and fingers turning into crazy bugs and evil jawas from another dimension. 14 is an ongoing succesion of unexpected twists and discoveries and weirdness that goes from Mystery Gang fun to sanity-shattering, universe-threatening horror. The characters are simple but it's well written and has a lot of clever, natural-sounding dialog. Worth reading.

Another opinion!

Battle beyond the Stars (1980)

NetFlix 2.9/5
IMDB 5.1/10
My Rating: 5/10

A young hero must voyage into the galaxy with his talking organic space ship to recruit mercenaries who can save his peaceful planet from the war-mongering armadas of Sador.

Back in 1980, we were still basking in the warm afterglow of the Millenium Falcon, in the heady days when Star Wars was THE coolest space franchise in existence and George Lucas was a trusted god to young lads all over America as the distiller of our dreams.  Star Wars ripoffs were being rushed to the drive-ins as fast as they got back from the Fotomat, and it seemed like every weekend had some new Space/Star/Blasters/Quest film running at the dollar matinee.  Into this mix came Battle beyond the Stars, from none other than B movie legend Roger Corman.  I'll probably be lynched by nostalgia-soaked fans of Shad and Nell, but I have to be honest - I thought it was a pretty incredibly goofy movie at age 14 and time has not been kind to it.  That said, it is still a hoot to watch for its pure insanity and I guarantee you won't go away unhappy, at least.

The basic plot is thus - Intergalactic bad man Sador (Hammed to the hammiest by a gloating John Saxon) comes to innocent, hippy-esque planet Akir to demand that they surrender or die.  The natives of Akir have no weapons and live by some sort of nonviolent code so it's a wonder they aren't invaded every week, but there you go...  We don't spend a lot of time on Akir, which is a shame because every panorama of the planet looks like a 70's album cover and I kept wanting to flip the TV screen open so I could read the cosmic lyrics and wonder at all the mystical new harmonies and coded meanings in the songs, man.

Alas, right off the bat we're visited by the floating Blue Head of Death, otherwise known as John Saxon, and there's some random killing and chaos just to ensure no one laughs at the giant head in the sky.  Sador gives everyone time to surrender before he destroys the planet, and an emergency council convenes to send idealistic young Frodo, err, Shad, off on an adventure to save the world!

Shad's quest will take him all over the universe in search of skilled mercenaries to defend his planet, but let's pause for a moment and bump right up on the movie's weirdest casting, hero Shad, otherwise (and inescapably) known as John-Boy Walton.  Like William Shatner and Captain Kirk, Richard Thomas was John-Boy, the naive but well-meaning writer/countryboy from Waltons' Mountain.  Modern generations have likely never even seen the Waltons so it won't be a problem for them, but for those of us in the theaters in 1980, it was like casting Ernest T. Bass as Ben Kenobi...  Just one long, open-jawed, "What were they thinking?"  The unknown Mark Hamill could embody every young lad's aspirations, but Shad was...  John-Boy.

Stepping past that, Shad ventures forth in a talking spaceship named Nell to have his adventure.  Nell is a female ship.  Nell is a very female ship.  I'd love to have been present in the design stages of this to hear whose idea it was to, hey, "Try sticking some breasts on that space ship, and maybe make the rest of it look like a skinned rabbit".  Nell may possibly be the most unusual looking spaceship in film history.

Shad explores the galaxy in his skinless talking space organ and this is the meat of the movie, pardon the pun...  It's Magnificent Seven in space, as he recruits badass after badass to come save Akir.  Robert Vaughn, Sybil Danning, George Peppard, and various actors in rubber alien masks all sign up for the cause.  Robert Vaughn gets special credit for his portrayal of world-weary mercenary Gelt, who has the wealth of planets but no safe place he can relax over a meal.  Sybil Danning, by contrast, gets notice for managing to keep her marginal clothes attached for the entire movie, and how she accomplishes this magnificent feat is anyone's guess (IMDB says lots of hidden sticky tape was involved).  Her character is loads of fun - A fearsome space Valkyrie out to prove herself, and I suspect a lot of young lads had their first case of lust/crush when she appeared back in 1980.

Once the crew is assembled it's non-stop action to the end as all and sundry take on the imperial fleet of Sador.  Star Wars, it is not, but for a $2 million dollar budget, it's an amazing accomplishment.  The space battles are fun, the alien makeup is wonderfully cheesy, and the whole thing is infused with that sense of, "Well, why not throw in a talking alligator?" that made so many of the 70's drive-in films so deliriously enjoyable.  Battle beyond the Stars might not have been the next Star Wars (It had the dire misfortune of coming out in the same year as Empire Strikes Back), but as late night TV entertainment, it's definitely worth seeing.

Gog (1954)

NetFlix 2.8/5
IMDB 5.3/10
My Rating: 6/10 *Qualified

At a secret US underground military/space/research base, a series of bizarre deaths occur which may have been caused by the supercomputer that runs the installation.   Or a pair of killer robots.

Gog is a forgotten gem, if you love 50's sci fi.  Heaven help me, I can't imagine getting most modern people to sit through this, but while I acknowledge that it's a fairly tedious film, I also really enjoyed it and especially loved its retro-future look at "Tomorrow's world" as envisioned by the folks of 1954.   It's a great mix of the prescient (Everything is controlled by the central computer, from nuclear reactor to door locks), the "We're still not there yet" (Robotic lab assistants), and the outright wacky (Building orbital space station heat beams...err, wait, I think that was tried already...). 

Gog gets a cracking start when some scientists performing one of those typical "Let's freeze this monkey and then re-animate it" experiments all end up dead in mysterious ways, if you can call being locked in the freezing chamber mysterious.  A square-jawed, non-nonsense hero-type is packed off from Washington to the underground base to set things in order, punch bad guys and woo the women.  Although in this case, our heroine Joanna is...Well, slightly more terrifying than sexy:

Fortunately she's a proper 50's woman, and ends up delicately fainting in lace by the film's end.  The first half of the movie will either fascinate or drill through your skull with boredom, depending on your level of interest in what the 50's thought the future would be like.  It's a 30+ minute crawl through the base, introducing our hero to the various scientists and eggheads and potential baddies that work there.

Probably my favorite bit here is where we are introduced to the concept of the near-future orbital space station, which will run on solar power capable of directing a giant solar heat beam from space down to incinerate any godless communist city we want, thus finally making "the world safe for the USA".  I have no doubt that the engineering wonks who worked on the Death Star were equally enthused about the positive uses of their discoveries.

The main chunk of the film is a Whodunnit.  The base is being sabotaged in ways small and large, and those who look into events too closely have a tendency to meet extra-sticky ends.  I think I am safe in non-spoilering this for any modern viewer when I remark on how the characters repeatedly puzzle over how someone could be killed by radiation in a sealed room, or how someone else could be electrocuted with no one else in the lab, while we're simultaneously told that the entire installation is completely controlled by NOVAC, a computer that runs everything from the AC to the sound system to the pair of killer robots.  Oh yeah, and speaking of them...

These guys, Gog and Magog, are great in that 50's robot way, which means that they wobble like plywood, they're pretty useless at everything, and yet despite this they are somehow unstoppable ninja monsters that are probably behind your chair RIGHT NOW.  Gog and Magog are controlled by NOVAC and are completely above suspicion because NOVAC is good and he's only a computer, anyway... A charming bit of 50's computer trust that will induce twitches in anyone who's spent days trying to install a printer driver.  So the movie crawls along at its slow pace and we're treated to a medley of random murders and artificial gravity experiments until things inevitably go tits-up and Buck Squarejaw has his big chance to defeat evil by punching it in the face with an all-American baseball bat.

While I may be making light of it (And frankly, it's hard not to get some chuckles out of people randomly walking into a room beside the guy in the radiation suit, or someone being told they got a bad case of radiation and need to go lie down for a couple of days), I still enjoyed it a lot.  It's not in the class of 50's masterpieces like Forbidden Planet, but it's an enjoyable romp with a prototypical SkyNet+Terminators, and I give the filmmakers big credit for how original this was...  I mean, Trekkies go all "iPAD, iPHONE!" over Star Trek's tech, but in 1954 Gog gave us an entire base with centralized computer control, computer hacking, wireless access, wireless robot control, and women in jumpsuits.  This was the future, baby.    It's probably a solid 5 as a movie, but for me it was more of a 7, so I'm splitting the difference.  Your mileage may vary. 

Children of the Stones (1977)

NetFlix 2.8/5
IMDB 7.2/10
My Rating: 7.5/10

An astrophysicist and his son investigate the standing stones of secluded village Milbury and find the people eerily happy and under the control of the creepy Hendrick.


I had NEVER heard of this before, and for some bizarre reason it has only been rebroadcast once since its original airing in '77, but it's now out on DVD and Netflix has it for rental. If you can pick up the single DVD (all 7 eps are on 1 disc), I recommend it highly, providing you are a patient viewer and well-attuned to the sort of no-budget ambiance of 60's-70's British TV.  Fortunately, it eschews FX for the most part and depends instead on a smart screenplay and a slow-building atmosphere of tension that makes it seem much more than just "kid's telly", as it was originally marketed.

It's the story of a professor and his son moving to a small village that's completely surrounded by a circle of standing stones, and populated by strangely cheerful villagers under the thrall of the Tall Man... excuse me, Hendrick, the town's Big Hat. He's the guy in the poster above and geez, what a performance. His resemblance to the Tall Man from Phantasm is unnerving, but Hendrick is a happy fellow, no Scrimmian growls of "BOYYYY".  In fact, he's positively delighted that we've come to visit him in his weird little village with its weird little customs.   This is the first clue that our intrepid leads should run away screaming, but then we wouldn't have this disturbing tale to revel in.

It's a lot like 70's Doctor Who in style - plot-heavy, talky, lots of running back and forth to the same few sets, few FX, mood-heavy - but it's still enjoyably creepy and really well done. I have to give special bonus points to the soundtrack, which is composed entirely of human voices - it's a chorus doing moaning and wailing and multi-level harmony, rather than the usual instrumental music, and it works great to give the whole thing a really disturbing feel. Here's the music from the intro and the first few moments of the series opener, which nicely sums up the feel of the whole show:

Much is made of the old Doctor Who shows sending kiddies hiding behind the couch, but I never found them scary.  This, on the other hand, is a little unsettling even to me as an adult, and despite being marketed as a YA show, in many ways it's perfectly enjoyable for adults also...  In fact, probably more so, because I doubt you could get modern kids to even sit still for this, given how slowly it moves.  ADD teens will nod off during the long scenes of characters standing in the library and talking - Static cameras, puzzle-solving, debate, etc.  Imagine, if you will, The Wicker Man recreated as a miniseries for children...  with perhaps a bit of Stepford Wives stirred in.  The village's "Happy Ones" are Prisoner-eerie, and the mix of science and folk magic and space/time distortions give it a prototype-Lost ambiance.  I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who's a fan of off-kilter television such as old Who, Twin Peaks, and the like. 

And as a tidbit of personal info, I was much inspired by the show's logo shot when I designed the title graphic for our workshop's Ligne Bretagne pipes - Spot the similarities!

Altered (2006) - A Guest Blog review

Trying something new here - I've invited a friend to do a guest review for me.  This review was brought to you by Nathan of Lost on Monster Island.  Enjoy!

NetFlix 3/5
IMDB 5.8/10
My Rating: 6/10


Five high school buddies are abducted by aliens from a farm in Florida -- but only four of them survive. Fifteen years later, the friends -- whose lives have been altered ever since -- return to the farm to face their enemy and seek revenge.


"From the co-director of The Blair Witch Project" is not traditionally considered a good method of advertising a film. Unlike your regularly scheduled reviewer, however, I have only been around for two-and-almost-a-half decades and am still naive and optimistic to say "At least they tried" when watching a bad movie. I also actually enjoyed Blair Witch Project, inconsistent as it was - because I think sometimes you have to watch the movie that defined a cinematic style to appreciate the movies that came after it. Without Blair Witch Project, vastly superior movies like Cloverfield, [REC], and Paranormal Activity wouldn't exist. I'm also glad that Altered was made, because for viewers with more refined tastes, it has a lot going for it.

The movie focuses on four men who, at the start of the movie, have successfully kidnapped an alien in revenge for their own alien abductions as children. How they catch the alien is never explained, which is probably for the best. I can't imagine anything convincing the writers could have come up with - first they'd have to lure the alien out of its ship, then I guess they would try to tackle it, and these aliens are psychic so you would immediately blow your cover as soon as you thought "Okay, we're close to the alien ship. How do we kidnap one of the aliens?" This movie works a lot better if you don't think about it too much, and it's silly fun.

The big draw of this movie in my opinion isn't the acting (which is decent) or the writing (which is...subpar) but the special effects. The aliens are actually handled entirely using a man in a suit, a concept that works much better for films which involve a lot of physical contact between the protagonists and the monster. The characters have to continually restrain the alien, which eventually escapes, and the fighting and wrestling that take place in the film are much more convincing because the alien has a physical presence. It's heavy, it's actually doing the punching and biting, and when it picks things up, things are being lifted by an actual onscreen hand. This works in the movie's favor, because the movie has a very low budget to begin with and shoehorning in cheap CGI would have made it completely laughable.

A lot of big-name movies are full of missed opportunities: jokes or characters that could have been removed, scenes that play too long, or even story lines that start half an hour too soon (Skyline would have been a great film if it had been half an hour shorter at the beginning and half an hour longer at the end - or it least it wouldn't have been quite as terrible.), but Altered actually has the opposite going for it. It is a very small-scale film, with a low budget, no big-name actors, and a relatively localized plot. The aliens would theoretically retaliate if their kidnapped member was killed, but at no point do we see a fleet of ships surrounding Earth or hints at a global conflict between mankind and the angry green aliens who are evidently very easily kidnapped.

This movie is fun. It doesn't take itself too seriously, the actors are clearly doing their best and enjoying their roles, the special effects are almost all practical and therefore much more convincing than the ones in films like Transformers: Indistinguishable Shapes & Unbearable Noise, and there is an especially gory and amusing scene near the end of the film that I will always remember Altered for. This movie hits the right combination of gross, silly, dark, and cheesy, and though it's no Aliens (it's not even The Creeping Terror) it's an enjoyable one. Definitely an average movie with some great moments where it becomes good, and that's really all I ask of my films. 

Space Battleship Yamato

NetFlix Not Available
IMDB 6.3/10
My Rating: 8/10

Earth has been attacked by the alien Gamilus race and bombarded with radiation bombs, rendering the surface of the planet uninhabitable.  The surviving humans are clustered in underground cities awaiting extinction when hope comes in the form of a message from another alien world, the planet Iscandar.  Iscandar sends advanced plans for building a warp-capable ship that humans can use to travel to obtain a radiation removal device, to restore life to the ruined earth while humanity still exists.  With no space fleet remaining, the engineers secretly build their starship beneath the rotting ruin of the WW2 battleship Yamato, which must be resurrected TO SAAAAVE THE HUMAN RAAAACE! 

OK, first things first - If you're going to say, "This is just like the new Star Trek" or, "They ripped off the look of the new BSG", you need to get out of here now before I start slapping you.  NO, SB Yamato does not rip off the look and style of new BSG... BSG took much of its tone, realism, theme, and style from this original anime, which ran some 30+ years earlier.  Pardon my hostility, but I've read so many comments on sites like io9, from snarky teens and 20-somethings convinced that nothing happened in this world before the last 5-10 years, that it's left me ready to throttle the next person who says, "This whole thing is a total ripoff of Battlestar Galactica."

For "Who done what first", let's make a list:

• Yamato was the first SF series to depict space battles as WW2 dogfights, later copied in Star Wars.
• Long before BSG, Yamato gave us a world where the battle against the aliens was already lost and humanity was reduced to a handful of desperate survivors looking for hope in unknown space while fighting off constant attacks by their relentless enemy.
• Yamato was first with the low tech, military battleship interiors later used by shows like BSG.
• Yamato gave us a gigantic, round, planet-destroying battle station controlled by an evil empire, years before Star Wars.
• Yamato gave us a battered, used hulk of a spaceship star, before BSG.
• Yamato gave us a ship that could fire a weapon so powerful it could wipe out asteroids, enemy fleets, and even moons, long before Crusade.
• Yamato gave us a climactic dogfight that consisted of fighters having to exploit a secret weakness in the giant alien battlestation in order to deliver a killing blow to its internal workings, before Star Wars.
• Yamato even gave us a "cute" (Arguable, that) robot sidekick shaped like a trashcan.

Well, I could go on, but I'll leave it at that.  Suffice to say, if the look or events in the new live-action Yamato film feel familiar, or look like something you've already seen in recent popular SF media, it isn't because Yamato is copying, it's because Yamato was late to the party in getting its story made into live action cinema due to decades of rights disputes.  But now it is back, riding on the current wave of "gritty" space SF that it fits into so well.

For the rest of this review, please understand that I am a huge fan of the original anime and my view of the Yamato live action movie is not so much through rose-tinted glasses as through glasses made out of the radiant smiles of Lynda Carter and Wilma Deering.  That said, I did have a number of problems with the film, mostly relating to the uncomfortable neccessity of squashing a 26 episode anime series story down to fit into one 2:15 movie.

The Kickoff!

The old girl has never looked better, for starters:

The studio did a stunning job of creating some excellent space FX on a mere 13 million dollar budget.  Think about that again - 13 million.  That's not enough to cover the typical Hollywood star's coke and hooker fees, yet Japan got a whole 2 hour and 15 minute movie out of it.  The story starts off with the battle against the invading aliens already lost - We see the earth fleet hopelessly outclassed and forced to withdraw, and the radiation bombing that reduces the planet to a barren wasteland.  It's a hard place to start a movie... Hell, it was an astonishing place to start a cartoon, back in 1977.

Let's rewind for a moment.  It's the late 70's, and your popcorn-addict writer was still living in the land of the Saturday morning cartoon gala.  The stuff that the US networks fed us was caca - Sure, there were some fun shows tucked in here and there, but for every 1st season Scooby Doo there were 10 shows like the Superfriends and Wonderbug.  US animation was crap and American kid's cartoons were dumbed down to the IQ level of a Tea Party Xtreme Wrestling expo.  Suddenly, into this maelstrom of mediocrity, my friends and I started noticing these funky Japanese cartoons - Or as my mother liked to call them, "The ones full of people with big eyes".  Starblazers didn't treat us like infants, oh no...  It grabbed us by the neck right off and showed us an earth that was dying of poison, with one year until the human race would be extinct, and all we had going for us was an ancient battleship and a crew willing to take an insane gamble against an invincible enemy - Fly across the galaxy further than any human has ever gone to get a radiation removal device from a mysterious alien woman, and get back before the last humans are dead.

OK, the ship was crazy... This was the big stumbling block for many, and at the same time it was symbolic of the sort of, "Holy crap, I've never seen anything like that before!" chutzpah that these new Japanese cartoons were introducing to us (Nobody called them anime, that didn't come till 15 years later).  A WW2 battleship flying around in space looked insane...  but awesome.  To this day I maintain that the Yamato is the best looking spaceship ever, far cooler than any version of the Enterprise or the Galactica.  And there was a reason for it, too - With no fleet and no space bases, the last ship had to be built in secret, in a way that the watching Gamilons would not suspect, so the entire thing was constructed under the rotting hulk of the original Battleship Yamato, now exposed by the dried-up ocean.  The launch of the Yamato remains one of the coolest scenes ever, and the new movie did it right (Skip to 1minute 40 if you're impatient):

It took 3 episodes of the anime to get to the launch.  Can you imagine?  Three episodes of build-up.  Modern kids can't sit still for fifteen minutes without squirming, if they don't have something being thrown in their faces constantly.  The ongoing plot and the gradual development of the characters was a wholly new thing to us, at a time when the Superfriends were lecturing the 34th set of stupid teens about the Darwinian hazards of choosing to play in the bear cave.  The full story ran a year and it had everything that American animation of the time did not have - Depth, pain, insight, character growth, and violence...  Holy shit, a lot of violence.  Superman was too noble to punch Lex Luthor for threatening a city, but the Yamato crew had no compunctions about blowing away an entire enemy fleet because they knew it was them or us.  But beyond that, it was the sneaky subplot that grabbed me as a growing boy - The ongoing schism between young hotshot hero Kodai/Wildstar and the father figure captain that he resents.  As much as anything, Yamato was the story about every young man learning to understand his father and what it takes to really become an adult.

So!  The original series was an epic, with each episode covering a different challenge for the Yamato crew as they traveled to Iscandar, fighting the Gamilons every step of the way.  The new movie does its best, but even at over two hours, it doesn't have a prayer of delivering the depth and gradual development of the original, and this brings me to its first problem, it's too fast.  The filmmakers wisely choose to jettison most of the original storylines in favor of telling four complete stories from the best individual episodes, and this is a plus and a minus - I'm happy with the four stories they picked and I'm glad that they took the time to tell each properly, but this meant leaving out a LOT of build-up and connecting tissue, and it makes the film strangely paced.  It's a bit rollercoasterey, with event-action-climax happening in repeating sequences throughout the runtime.  This stitched-together assembly makes for an unwieldy movie experience.

The casting and the look was spot-on:

Yuki/Nova is changed, however - Instead of the demure nurse and love interest of the series, we get a sullen Yuki who is a hotshot pilot, and this "Starbucking" of her character is probably the one element that really is ripped off from current SF fare.

It moves fast, and you have to jump on and try your best to hang on.  I will admit I followed far more of it on a second viewing, particularly the strategy of the final divebombing assault on the Gamilus cavern base.  It's weird to say, but in this the live action movie actually feels a bit *less* mature than the cartoon - Everything is rushed up and before you know it the Yamato is launching and then WHOAH, where did that Kodai & Yuki relationship come from?  And then, crap, Kodai in charge and suddenly we're at Iscandar and there's a climax happening.  In this, it totally lacks the feeling of an epic voyage from the original... There's no "Homer in Space" about it, it's a 2 hour SF action movie.  I suppose this is not a bad thing, as I doubt anyone today would be willing to sit through a 13 hour long Yamato movie.  Except me.  I can't help but wish they'd gone the LOTR route at least, and split the story into two or three different films.

My other complaint is the change in the Gamilons, from blue-skinned human types to generic modern CGI aliens.  I've read various message board posts from people saying that the blue-skins would have looked stupid, that that dreaded "today's audience" wouldn't have accepted them, etc.  However, with the switch to an inhuman aesthetic goes one of the best arcs of the series - The continual taunting and plotting and politics of Gamilus leader Dessler as he rode his Yamato obsession into apocalyptic madness that cost him everything.  Instead, we get waves of these Playstation-looking things:

Mostly what they do is show up the limits of the budget in some of the few scenes that are less than impressive.  They also remove the element of personal antipathy  It's no longer Dessler and the Yamato crew getting more and more pissed at each other, it's now just an endless wave of generic computer bugs.  I'd have loved to see this smug bastard on the big screen:

However, I can't dock them too hard for this because the presence of an active enemy character would have done even more extreme things to the pacing and length of the film.  Essentially, they do the best with what they have and make it work in two hours, trimming as needed, and in this case the blue-skinned Gamilons are our Tom Bombadil.

Also, I have to mention the one utterly glaringly god-awful decision of the movie - To employ a Steven Tyler faux Aerosmith song on the trailers and over the closing credits.  WHAT WERE THEY THINKING???

So with all this said, did I like it?  Hell yes!  I loved it.  My wife even loved it, and she never saw the original and had no connection to the anime, nor any nostalgia effect.  This should make the filmmakers happier than anything else, because they successfully pulled off the terrifying task of creating a story that would appease fans of the original AND be accessible and enjoyable to someone who had no clue what this flying space boat was all about.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a ride nonetheless, and I can give this one a definite thumbs up.  May the Yamato keep on rising from the dead for generations to come!

Star Trek Remastered

NetFlix 3.9/5
IMDB 8.6/10
My Rating: 9/10


The best Star Trek TV series.  Watch the original Trek and you'll see the basic plotlines for nearly every episode of TV Trek since.

Here is another TV blast from the past - The original 1960's Star Trek TV series in newly-remastered and digitally-massaged form.  Star Trek: Remastered is available on DVD and is also on Netflix streaming now. And it looks GREAT. Those of us old enough to remember watching this growing up will recall well the hazy FX and background matte paintings that rendered this space adventure for us.  Back then, it didn't matter - We were watching on 14" screens in wooden cabinets with local reception that came and went with the weather.  With this series set, the original Trek has been cleaned up and enhanced throughout using modern computer effects and digital matte replacements.  And...  While ordinarily this would be the sort of thing that would leave me frothing at the mouth, it works.  The colors and sharpness are excellent and you get to see Kirk and Spock and crew adventuring again while looking as if they filmed this yesterday.  The real kicker is the redone FX. Space scenes and backgrounds have been redone in CGI and look gorgeous, if I do say so, and I do.

We've watched a few eps of this now and enjoyed them a lot. What has impressed me the most is that the redone FX do not in any way detract from the stories (*Cough*, Star Wars, *cough*). You are not constantly being distracted by some stupid added CGI thing in the background. The Enterprise bridge is not full of screens showing different CG displays and flying, buzzing robots, and the hallway scenes aren't suddenly filled with slapstick Jawas. Nor do we suffer with scenes altered to reflect "modern sensibilities" - No phasers replaced with flashlights, and Kirk shoots first every freaking time.  It's the original Star Trek just like you remembered it, but with better background FX.

Also, they integrated the new stuff REALLY well. It does not stand out and look pasted in. And it matches the 60's look of the show, too - They haven't redone the Enterprise with an impossibly complicated model, for instance. So many times in these remasters, the modern bits stick out crazily... If they'd put the 2009 movie Enterprise in this, for instance, it would have jangled like hell and kicked you straight out of the story every time it appeared.  This version looks just like the original Enterprise model, it's just shot more gracefully and clearly:

It's an interesting approach because the Enterprise still looks like a toy, but a very pretty toy. It matches perfectly with the rest of the show in colors and general 60's ambiance, so it doesn't feel like you're switching from a 40 year old show to a jarring modern FX scene, suddenly. They look like 60's effects, but sharper and with a better budget.  If I were going to be maudlin for a moment, I'd say that the finished effect is the Star Trek that I remember from age 6-9, back when the entire concept was fresh and new, and just seeing a space ship traveling the galaxies during dinnertime reruns was an amazing thing.

They take a similar approach with the planet FX. City backdrops are still matte paintings, they just have more depth. They do not suddenly look "real", with a million background details and stuff whizzing around, they just look like nicer matte paintings.  I am thankful once again that no one in the computer department was allowed to cram 200 moving objects into every background scene - Trek was always about story when it was at its best, not overwhelming visual noise, and it's great to see that the people who worked on this new version respected that central truth of the original series.

I know there are fans out there who are apoplectic over this remastering.  Maybe I'm just not religious enough about Star Trek, or maybe they just did an extraordinary job of integrating the new with the old. Whatever, I like it. It looks good and lends a nice, odd beauty to the show that helps it look less like the alien planet was filmed on a 20x20 soundstage with a couple of tumbleweeds thrown around. For me, what makes it work in ways that other remasterings/restorations like this have not, is that you can watch a whole episode and never really notice the new FX. They don't jump out and shout, "LOOK AT ME!" Instead, you just think, "Wow, Star Trek hasn't looked this good since my memories of it from age 8."

Outcasts, the BBC Miniseries

IMDB 6.3
My Rating: 4/10

The adventures of the first human colony on a distant planet as they attempt to rebuild civilization on an alien world amid interpersonal struggles and political infighting.

This is about to start broadcasting on BBC America, so I thought it was worth a short mention for those who might be interested by the premise.  BBC seems to be pushing it a bit as "BSG without the space ships", all the way to the casting of former "Apollo" Jamie Bamber for the opening episode.  Unfortunately, what could and should have been some riveting sci-fi about a subject not tackled in a very long time, becomes yet another dull character drama, at least in my opinion.  I have not yet watched the entire first season - Take that as you will, because it is both a condemnation of myself for writing a review of a show that I haven't fully finished watching yet, and also a rather damning commentary on the show itself, that it just hasn't engaged me enough to keep me hungry for the next episode (I'm right up on Game of Thrones, though!)

I was just reading an interview article about this series in Sci Fi Now magazine, and head writer Ben Richards perfectly summed up the problems of the series when he stated, "I don't come from a sci-fi background, so it was a huge challenge and almost a bit of a surprise to me to realize that I was doing a science fiction project".  Richards ".. never experimented with genre" and goes on to say, "The problem I encountered was writing things that I thought were devastatingly original , and the story editor going, 'Yeah, they kind of did that in Blade Runner'".  While I applaud their editorial decision not to have CGI aliens crawling around everywhere, the unfortunate result of all this apologizing for the "SF" label (The overall impression I got from the production team was that they wanted to make an SF series to be different, yet were almost embarrassed to be doing SF and kept focusing on the character relationships) is that it's a science fiction series that doesn't have any of the appeal of good science fiction.

There are virtually no intriguing "What If?"s. Our group is trying to run a small outpost settlement on an alien world, but no episode I've seen so far even touches on anything genuinely alien.  There's Earth-air, Earth-water, Earth day/night cycles, Earth plant life...  Indeed, the only SF-ish part of the concept is the fact that our group has previously genetically created some artificial humans better adapted to this new world, and then tried to kill them.  The bulk of each episode so far has been focused on inter-character politics - "Will she sleep with that guy?", "Will this guy's faction gain more power?", "Why is this guy so weird?", and so forth.  The original concept was the story of British pioneers in Australia, of all things, and it shows, with the SF aspect being more tacked-on than central, as one would expect it to be in a saga about adapting to an alien world.

I don't know... Perhaps it's me, and I'm in the minority for preferring to see stories about our characters experiencing bouts of madness from a slightly different air composition, or unexpected behavioral problems from an altered day/night cycle, or startling encounters with the fauna of an extra-solar world.  I can say that if you're more into the politics of such things - more interested, say, in whether the ultra religious people will seize power and shape the new society, or whether it will be founded on liberal values (And given that this is BBC, we pretty much know already which side will be the good guys in this little turf war) - then you might enjoy it more than I did.  It is well acted, and Hermione Norris is always fun to behold.  The stories are logical and relatable.  There is nothing bad about it, per se, it's just that I ultimately question the purpose of making this a SF series when so much of the tale is bending itself into contortions trying NOT to be a SF story.  And lastly, it's just dull...  Not one character really stands out so far, there's no one to be sympathetic with, and there's no one in this brave young world whose fate I'm really invested in.  I want a colonization show that I want to follow every week, because I want them to succeed, because successfully transplanting ourselves onto another world would be the most amazing and breathtaking accomplishment the human race could aspire to.  I want something that will wind me up and hold me tightly involved in the sheer grandness of that undertaking, and the terrifying fragility of it and the skin-tingling magnificence of genuinely being the first human colony on another world.

Outcasts needs more jazz.

Moon

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 7/10

An astronaut living alone on a lunar base is coming to the end of his three year work contract.  His years of isolation have left him craving human interaction, but as his final day approaches, he starts to discover disturbing things about his base and himself.

Here is a 2009 indie film that I think nearly all our KFP visitors would love.   It's the director's first feature, made on a measly budget of $5 million by a devoted fan of serious SF of the pre-Star Wars years.   I'm speaking of that non-flashy school of SF films that at least made some pretense of trying to be science fiction, from 2001 to Silent Running to Blade Runner to Outland.  That sort of SF seems to have pretty much died out in cinemas, despite brief exceptions like Gattaca.  It's the stuff that Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke grognards would call "real science fiction" instead of "space opera", dominated by ruminating on the possible impact of scientific advancement on our lives.

Moon, like Triangle, is really hard to write a review about because I don't want to give away anything about the story. I would also REALLY avoid reading the IMDB page for this one if you might want to see it, because it is spoiler central with no regard whatsoever for the dramatic impact of the film's central thesis. Here's what is safe to say - The movie is about one astronaut responsible for solo operation of a lunar mineral harvesting station, who is coming to the end of his three year tour of duty and suffering from prolonged isolation. His only companion is the station's AI and helper robot, GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey. I will say nothing about the plot other than that it is good, gripping, and if you liked the general themes and ambiance of movies like "Silent Running" and "Outland", you will like this.   Lots of good ideas here about future tech, and not a laser pistol battle or space dogfight in sight.  Not that these things are bad, mind, it's just that a little brain protein in the diet helps make Johnny healthier than just consuming Twinkies all day.

In lieu of talking about the plot, I should mention some cool sidebar bits about the film. It is the first SF film made since forever that uses all miniature SPFX instead of CGI. The director has said there is CGI in the film but it's only in places where you can't notice it, instead of being the main show. The funny part is that the director had to find all these 70 year old dinosaur SPFX guys and haul them out of retirement to help with this, because all the effects houses currently running were too expensive and didn't know a thing about building models and using camera tracking and such. So, it gives the movie a unique look in this day and age, and it really looks quite good. It's the opposite of CGI in a way, because my eye would look at a rover and think, "That's a model", instead of looking at an entire scene and thinking, "None of this exists at all". For example:

Personally, I thought the effects work was terrific, though it is not an effects-dominated movie by any means. They also went to a lot of trouble to give everything a look of realistic tech, and "very used tech". 70's kids will be instantly comfortable with the design motif:

They really did a terrific job on a drink-cart budget.

I also have to give major kudos to GERTY, for general design and personality. GERTY is something like the station's housekeeper, responsible for keeping our hero alive and functional, and looking after the mining operations. GERTY is a great robot, one of the better ones, and combines the eerie AI of HAL with the sort of clumsy charm of the Silent Running droids. He also looks like a real robot, which gets extra points from me, in the sense that he looks absolutely nothing like anything but an extremely dexterous arm hanging from the ceiling and a box with a smiley screen on it. All the corridors have tracks in the ceiling so GERTY is constantly wired directly to the station and just glides around the halls like some giant robotic bat. His video screen, intended to facilitate emotional relations with humans, is both touching and creepy in equal parts, given that his emotional expression is done via smileys:

Going off on a tangent here... Just recently I saw a news article on the shiny new "home robots" from RoboDynamics (Article here).  They are beautiful things, lovely to be sure:

Yet despite all the press hoopla and "synergistic monetizing of cloud-based open sourcing" corporate-speak of the news stories, I find myself looking at this iRobot thing and wondering what the heck it can do.  It has no useful arms, it can't manipulate anything, it's too tall to work as an under-chair vacuum cleaner like the excellent Roomba...  I dunno.  GERTY, to my mind, is perhaps the best example of a useful household robot that I've yet seen in films, or at least the most realistic.  I've always tended to favor the practical robot designs, though - The droids in Silent Running and R2D2 both exemplified the look of a robot designed for a purpose, rather than to look pretty.  One of these days I will satisfy my deep robot craving and get myself a Roomba, if only for the fun of watching it chase the cats.

Back to the movie!  And yet... that's about all I can say about the film without going spoilerish. Neat old-style SPFX and a great robot. The movie was supposedly shown in advance screenings to NASA employees for their seal of approval, which isn't something you'd hear about the latest Star Wars prequel. Moon is out on DVD now. Here is the trailer from YouTube, which gives an excellent idea of what the film is like, but be warned that it is a *bit* spoilerific - It doesn't give away any major scenes or storyline, but it does show a couple of things that become the focus of the story, though you may not recognize them as they pass. Watch at your own risk, depending on how much of the premise you want to know before renting/buying:

I highly approve of this movie!


Suggested Accompaniment:  Ecigs.  Seriously, what else could you smoke during a near-future SF film but a near-future alternative to tobacco?