I hope this comes to the states soon!

Technorati Tags: Gamera

I’ve always had a certain fondness for insane web developers with fixations on Star Trek, so it’s no wonder that I’ve always like the Heaven’s Gate story. So, in honor of their transportation to the stars, here’s a list of things to do this weekend to mark the anniversary.

• Wear some Nike shoes and keep a roll of quarters with you.
• Watch Dude, Where’s My Car.
• Find some Star Trek to watch.
• Redesign a web site or two, just as some of the cult members did.

Things you should probably avoid doing:

• Castrating yourself. That’s good advice for every day, too
• Slamming down shots of phenobarbital and vodka
• Talking to old men with crazy eyes who want you to do any of the above.

Technorati Tags: Heaven’s Gate, Star Trek, castration, cults, ufo, nike

Technorati Tags: Godzilla

Last night, I saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. And, truly, it should be called “Spielberg’s” because no one else could take an apocalyptic event and make it all about a guy reconciling with his kids. Unfortunately, it’s that famous Spielberg schmaltz that once again torpedoes the movie.

Firstly, the good. The special effects in this movie are top-notch: the alien tripods are equally menacing and fascinating and they seamlessly inhabit the environment. They look believable. Paired with the visuals and equally excellent is the sound of the film. I rarely take notice of sound in a movie, but this one really gave my ears a workout: there’s some great directional sounds that caught my attention. There are some sweeping vistas of the destruction that look marvelous: glowing red fields of vines, bodies floating downriver, etc.

Unfortunately, that’s the end of the good.

I understand Spielberg’s thinking when choosing to focus on a random family: in the 50s version, the movie focused on a scientist on the front lines of the war: we were involved in decisions that were made and the thinking behind them (and, ultimately, how futile their efforts ended up being). Spielberg wants to show the other 99.9% of the people affected: those people who have no idea what’s happening or why. Unfortunately, he chooses a fairly pedestrian story of a man, Ray, (Tom Cruise) who has no idea how to deal with his children. We know this, because he doesn’t know his daughter is allergic to peanuts or that his son, uh, truthfully, the son just seems like a jerk for most of the movie.

The first time the little girl started her high-pitched whining, I knew I really wanted the aliens to win. The second time, I was ready to join them myself. If you want us to care about the characters, you really have to do a little more building up of them first. We get about 15 minutes of Hollywood shorthand telling us that Ray is a rotten father and that his kids have issues. Whee. And since it is a Spielberg movie, we all know where it’ll end.

Yes, Spielberg does toss in some dark bits, but they really don’t affect the characters at all. While holed up in a barn, Ray makes the decision to kill the character played by Tim Robbins in order to save his daughter. So he blindfolds the daughter and tells her to sing a lullaby while he does the dirty business. Then he sits on the stairs for a while and hugs his daughter and all is well. Why even bother with something like that if it makes no difference at all for the character? I guess one could argue that that’s the point where Ray decides he should engage the enemy, rather than run, but that’s really dictated by the abduction of his daughter by one of the tripods than by anything else.

And why bother having Ray meet one of his previously unseen neighbors, only to leave them behind scant seconds later? I suspect something was left on the cutting room floor.

And the explanation that the aliens buried their war machines on Earth millions of years ago just makes no sense without more context: is Earth some sort of “farm” for them? Did they bury machines on Mars, too, and millions of other planets? Talk about preparing: it’s like burying ammo underneath every tree, just in case! And while the visuals are cool, they also make little sense: is our blood fertilizer for their food supply? If so, why vaporize so many at the start of the invasion: is that some sort of pre-fertilizer?

The aliens also appear to be as stupid as the ones in Signs: they walk around without any protection from the environment, drinking water and breathing our air. It would be as if Neil Armstrong went to the moon and decided he didn’t need his helmet or spacesuit and made moon-dust Tang to drink. I’m a little tired of super-advanced alien species who mount amazing invasions only to be brought down by their own stupidity.

And, finally, the nail in the coffin for the movie. Spielberg had a chance to pull this off: as his family travels from New York to Boston to reunite with his ex-wife and her grandparents, he loses his son (who, out of the blue, decides he wants to join the army or something). As Ray and his daughter reach their goal, everyone is there and alive: his ex-wife, the grandparents, the ex-wife’s husband, and, yes, his son (who apparently survives a firebombing that destroys well-armored Army soldiers, but leaves him unharmed).

Now, had Ray gotten to Boston and seen a smoking crater, it would have been more believable and would have made the movie much, much better. But Spielberg can’t seem to give us an ending like that. For him, everything ends up happily, despite a plot and situation that cry out for something darker. The same problem plagues A.I. and Minority Report: movies that cry out for more ambiguous endings than we get.

Still, despite the plot and the characters, the movie was enjoyable, mostly because of the technical things: the special effects, the sound design, etc. I was able to suppress my need to strangle Dakota Fanning for screaming every 10 minutes, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Now, a quick review of my theater experience for this movie. We got there early and got nice seats: the theater had about 20 or so people in it (I guess everyone was seeing Fantastic Four), with no kids or babies. The trailers were forgettable (I think there was one for a new Cameron Crowe movie, and one for Peter Jackson’s Jurassic Pa…, I mean, King Kong, but neither made me want to see the movie.

For most of the movie, the experience was good, but about a third of the way through the movie, an older couple came in and sat near us. And didn’t stop talking until the end credits rolled. They didn’t talk all the time, but enough to be annoying. It certainly wasn’t as bad as my Spider-Man 2 experience (imagine two busloads of 12-16 year olds), but you’d think older folks would be better about not talking.

Problem 1: The Script

Everything seems so rushed in this movie that you hardly ever get a chance to think about what’s going on (which may be for the best, since the movie hardly makes any sense). Firstly, they’ve turned the story into a heist movie crossed with the typical “fugitive-on-the-run” plot. The problem is that the chasers, the Vogons, are supposed to be this totally ineffective bureaucracy (paperwork for everything), but they still manage to catch up to the main characters at every juncture.

Some of the more annoying problems, though, are how the funnier parts of the story are dumbed down for the audience. The Babel Fish, for example, isn’t funny because you stick it in your ear and it translates other languages, which is what the movie seems to consider funny. No, the Babel Fish is funny because of the story around it, with a philosopher using it to prove the existence of God, thus disproving the existence of God. Very funny stuff in all the previous incarnations of the story, but ignored here. The fish is simply a means to an end. Get used to it.

The whole beginning of the books/radio/TV show is compressed into about 10 minutes: Arthur’s house is going to be bulldozed, Ford shows up (inexplicably with a shopping cart full of beer that just acts as another way to compress the narrative), they go to the pub to drink up and grab some peanuts (none of which makes any sense, because they apparently cut the explanations), the Vogons show up, Arthur and Ford hitch a ride…. It happens so fast that you get no explanations about hyperspace, the towel, or the Guide itself.

The Infinite Improbability Drive is another of those great concepts that just falls flat: it’s just an reason to turn things into other things and to give us a barf joke (which was pretty funny, I must admit). There’s none of the sly explanation of its creation (like the Babel Fish entry, it ends up just not being funny without the whole explanation).

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that at some point in the movie, the Guide just doesn’t matter anymore. There are the occasional voice overs, but it’s as if they really had no way to integrate the material, so they just stopped trying. And as much as I enjoyed the dolphin musical number, I can’t help thinking that the time could have been better spent on the Guide itself. And what’s with the weird credits at the beginning of the movie, then, essentially, another title card after Ford and Arthur are adrift in space (though, again, I love that the theme from the radio series was used). It’s as if they played film editing bingo when working on the final cut.

Now, the good. I didn’t mind the Trillian/Arthur romance all that much. The Humma Kavula stuff was just fine, as was the whole Point of View gun subplot. Deep Thought watching cartoons was perfect. And powering Zaphod’s remaining brain-half with lemon zest hit the right note of zaniness.

Problem 2: The Casting

Without a decent script, it really doesn’t matter what the actors do, really, but just to comment a little on the major players. There was really only one standout among the major cast (luckily, it was the main character). The others were just fine.

• Martin Freeman as Arthur: great choice for Arthur, I’ve got no complaints here.
• Mos Def as Ford: not bad, but not actually given enough to do. There was a glimmer of oddness, but no real sense that he and Arthur were friends.
• Sam Rockwell as Zaphod: I know that most people seemed to like him in this role, but I wasn’t too enamored. He was adequate.
• Zooey Deschanel as Trillian: Eh. Okay, I guess.
• Stephen Fry as the Guide: great, as always, just wish there was more of the Guide in the movie.
• Warwick Davis/Alan Rickman as Marvin: there’s something about the way that Warwick Davis walks that makes it very easy to tell that he’s playing Marvin. Unfortunately, it just made me realize that it was a guy in a suit. Rickman’s voice as Marvin was, again, adequate.

I loved Anna Chancellor as Questular Rontok, though, despite the lack of screen time. She did a great job of getting that “in love with Zaphod” vibe going. Always great to hear Hellen Mirren’s voice, too: she played a quite nice Deep Thought. For the most part, I thought the supporting players really did a better job than the mains.

Summing It All Up

I just realized that the movie never gives the Guide entry on Earth. Bah.

Anyhow, the movie is, like Earth, harmless. The script is pretty scatter-shot and not very good. The acting is adequate. But I’d rather watch the BBC mini-series, or listen to the radio show.

Other Hitchhiker Links

• The Hitchhiker’s Game: this is a Flash version of the old Infocom game, infamous for driving gamers insane with its method of obtaining a Babel Fish.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show: They are currently in the Quandary phase. The Tertiary Phase is available on CD.
• An old guide to using the IBM Parallel Environment for AIX: Lots of Hitchhiker Guide references. Just sorta weird.

Seems that in Toronto, nearly all the pedophiles arrested by the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit in the last four years have been hard-core Star Trek fans. I tend to take these things with a grain of salt, though: what constitutes “hard-core?” I suspect the truth might be something more along the lines of “had a few Star Trek books around.” Or maybe not…

In other very odd Star Trek news, the latest episode of Enterprise (caution: there be spoilers here) was actually pretty good. If they had been doing these kinds of episodes a few seasons back, I suspect the show wouldn’t have been cancelled. There’s also a podcast for the episode available (there was a time when Star Trek would have been the leader in such things, rather than a follower).

Some other Star Trek news (and non-news):

• Generosity: Nimoy and wife share their wealth, learn a lot
• End of Star Wars and Star Trek Causes Nerd Population Explosion
• ‘Star Trek’ Bit Players Cling On: Ha ha. Cling On. Get it? GET IT?
• Morality beliefs formed by Star Trek: Cloning, Stem Cell Research bad
• Google in Klingon: Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam!

And, while not Star Trek news, the trailer for Joss Whedon’s Firefly movie spinoff, Serenity, is available over at Apple. I can’t say enough good things about Firefly. Like Wonderfalls, it was cut down before it had a chance (thanks, Fox!). It galls me when crap like Enterprise pretty much gets a four-year run based on the franchise, while other great shows get cancelled after a few episodes.

• More about Serenity
• More about Firefly

I tend to visit a few news sites and blogs about science fiction:

• Gene Expression
• Sci Fi Wire
• Locus Online
• Solar Flare
• SyFy Portal