Tag: Mirrored

These posts can also be found (entirely or in part) on another part of my website.

Posted on
by

Wheel of Time: The Gathering StormThis weekend I finished reading the new Wheel of Time novel, The Gathering Storm. Now that I’ve read it, I can definitely say that Brandon Sanderson was a good choice to finish the series from Robert Jordan’s notes, and that splitting the final book into three was the right approach. It may be a doorstopper, but it would be difficult to cut more than a tiny amount without diminishing the impact of what remained.

No spoilers unless you don’t want to know which characters appear in the book. In which case, stop reading now. It focuses primarily on Rand, Egwene, and their respective entourages, though most of the other major characters make appearances. If I were to guess, the next book (Towers of Midnight) will probably focus mainly on Rand and Mat, and maybe Elayne. Katie reminded me that the title is a Seanchan reference, plus there’s another mission — well, quest, really — being built up involving a tower. (Not to mention the White Tower and Black Tower, of course!)

As in Knife of Dreams (and unlike Crossroads of Twilight), things happen in this book! There’s a growing sense of urgency throughout the novel, and everyone who can is pushing hard to have everything in place for the coming apocalypse. For some characters it’s a personal journey. For others it’s political. And for some, it’s simply geographical.

As far as meshing with the rest of the series goes, the only thing that stood out for me was that points of view would switch in the middle of a chapter more often than I expected. It’s not that Robert Jordan never did it, but I remember it being rare outside of the prologues. Brandon Sanderson is more likely to take what would have been two shorter, thematically linked chapters and combine them into one. Katie also noticed one spot early on that one character from Tarabon didn’t speak with the Taraboner dialect — but only the one instance, and one in which the phrasing would have been awkward. It still reads like a Wheel of Time book.

I wish Robert Jordan had been able to finish his epic himself, but it looks like we’re getting the next best thing.

Posted on
by

The first episode of Flash Forward is one of the best-constructed pilot episodes I’ve seen in a long time, especially of an arc-driven series. (I’ve been trying to think of the last show I saw where I didn’t feel like it took the cast or story a few episodes to get up to speed, and all I can come up with is Firefly.) In one hour, it managed to introduce a slew of characters, show the major world-changing event that sets the arc in motion, pose serious questions (both story-wise and philosophically), force characters to change, set up conflicting agendas and points of view, establish a mystery or two, and find a thematic conclusion to the episode that doesn’t feel like it’s just the first hour of a two- or three-hour show.

Most shows would take two hours to do all that, or pick and choose to cram it into one. (They even found time for a car chase.)

One of the things that really impressed me was that, just using one episode’s worth of characters, they showed the beginnings of so many totally different ways of looking at humanity’s glimpse of the future, whether through hope, fear, or simply confusion. From what they said at Comic-Con, one of the ideas is to be able to expand this to theoretically anyone in the world.

The extended preview of upcoming episodes (a flash forward to Flashforward!) seemed to be making a great effort to say that yes, they’ll be answering questions, and no, you won’t have to wait 3 years to find out what the heck is going on (unlike that other show with Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, and Oceanic Airlines).

There were a couple of moments that I thought were forced, though the only one that really stands out was the immediate juxtaposition of the “we’re being punished” and “this is a gift” reactions.

Adaptation

They did a good job of taking the source material, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward (I’m getting really confused as to whether the TV series has a space in the title or not, but the book definitely doesn’t), and making something that’s recognizably the same idea, but telling a new story with it. It has the benefit of all the thought he put into it:

  • What are all the consequences of everyone blacking out for two minutes?
  • If everyone experiences his or her own future at the same instant, what about people who are asleep at that time?
  • How do you determine whether people are seeing different possible futures or the same future?
  • How do you determine whether the future can be changed? (It’s a common enough storytelling trope, but how would you scientifically prove it?)

And so on. But they can tell a larger story, with more characters…and still surprise people who read the book. I don’t know whether they plan on using a similar explanation for what caused the event, or whether the TV version will come down on the side of “The future is not set” or “You can’t fight fate” (though I expect it will be the former, for storytelling reasons). And there was a moment a few minutes before the end that just came out of nowhere and left me thinking, “Wait, what???”

The book is definitely worth reading, especially if you like science fiction of the “what would happen if…?” variety, and it looks like it probably won’t spoil much.

Posted on
by

Finally went to see the new Star Trek movie on Friday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. As a long-term fan (if a lapsed one — I only watched the first 3-4 seasons of DS9, and gave up on Voyager and Enterprise after only a few episodes each, and still haven’t seen Nemesis) I liked it a lot.

We went again Sunday afternoon to see it in IMAX, but the 4:00 showing sold out while we were in line. So we bought tickets for 7:10 and bummed around the mall for the next three hours. Not my first choice, but with Terminator: Salvation taking over the IMAX screens in a few days, it was a limited window.

So we were in the movie during the earthquake.

Quake

Not that I noticed. I’d just leaned over to Katie to whisper something about a music cue reminding me of another soundtrack, so I was moving, and didn’t notice that the chair and floor were moving. (Similarly, I managed to miss the Whittier Narrows quake despite the fact that everyone I knew felt it. As near as I could tell, I must have been standing at or walking to/from my locker at the time.) But a murmur went through the entire audience as they realized what had just happened.

The timing was perfect, too — right at the point that characters in the film open a huge, loud, grinding door to a remote outpost. People thought at first that it was the speakers rumbling. Everyone settled down immediately and went back to watching the movie, but it was the second most popular topic of conversation among people leaving afterward.

Crash

It reminded me of another real-world/movie confluence, way back when I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. That film opened with a massive explosion in space that sent a shock wave so far that it hit Captain Sulu’s ship, the Excelsior. Either at the moment of the explosion or at the moment it hit the ship, we heard an incredibly loud BOOM!, and thought at first that it was just a very impressive sound effect…until we noticed that the curtain was draped across a quarter of the screen. The curtain rod had broken during the movie. After a few minutes they stopped the movie, canceled a showing of something else, and moved us all over into another theater (it was opening night, and they had a theater full of Star Trek fans who’d waited for several hours to get in — they were not going to risk our wrath by sending us home, even with refunds).

Back to the Film

Judging by audience reaction, there were definitely lots of people seeing it for the first time today, so I’ll keep this non-spoilery as much as possible. Update: I’ve also posted this to my reviews site.

  • The film manages to recapture the Kirk, Spock and McCoy dynamic that gave the original show its heart.
  • Each character gets at least something to do, even if it does focus heavily on Kirk and Spock.
  • The actors really manage to convey the same characters, rather than new characters with the same names. Especially McCoy and Spock. Karl Urban in particular seems to be channeling DeForest Kelley the way Ewan MacGregor channeled Alec Guinness in the Star Wars prequels. (And yes, Kirk is different, but there’s a reason for it, and that reason is critical to the story and his character’s journey.)
  • The plot moves and holds together (mostly).
  • The effects of course are incredible.
  • They remembered that Trek can have humor — something that ST: TNG and later shows seemed to avoid as if it would somehow taint their artistic value (except when Q was around).
  • The nods to established elements of the series, from character quirks to design elements to music cues, that are there if you know what to look for, but don’t bog down the story if you don’t.

I had no problems with the obvious canon changes, and thought that the huge event 1/3 of the way in was probably the best way they could recapture dramatic suspense and establish the idea that anything can happen.

In fact, the things that bothered me have very little to do with other versions of Star Trek. Again, trying to be as non-spoilery as I can for the people who haven’t seen it.

  • Supernovas are not that dangerous unless you’re in the same solar system. For planet X to be destroyed, it would have to have been that planet’s sun that went supernova.
  • Another planet, to provide the view that it offered of a significant event, would have to have been a moon of the planet on which that event took place.
  • Engineering doesn’t look like a spaceship. It looks like a brewery.
  • It relies heavily on the same dead-relative-as-motivation trope that’s bothering me so much in Flash: Rebirth. But I can see what they were going for and why they did it.
  • A piece of miracle technology is invented which would revolutionize space travel to the point that it would make any further voyages irrelevant, and will most likely be ignored because of this. (Of course, the TV series did the same thing all the time.)

Music

Also, while I liked Michael Giacchino’s music in context, it’s very repetitive. The theater was playing the score while we waited for the film to start, and an awful lot of it is the same theme, over and over, in different arrangements.

My favorite Star Trek music is a toss-up between James Horner’s scores for The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, and Cliff Eidelman’s score for The Undiscovered Country. We were talking about the music before the movie, and neither of us could think of anything else Eidelman had done, so I looked him up on IMDB. It turns out that he’s written music for about 20 films since Star Trek VI, and I recognized almost all of them…I just hadn’t actually seen any of them.

Posted on
by

I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Stardust PosterWent out to see Stardust with a group of friends, and we all enjoyed it. People have been comparing it to The Princess Bride, and it’s an apt comparison: both are light-hearted fantasy adventures with a love story at the heart. Stardust takes itself a bit more seriously, though there’s plenty of humor.

The concept: Three groups of people pursue a fallen star (in this world, a woman). Tristran wants to bring the star back to impress a girl. The cruel princes of Stormhold are seeking the necklace she wears; the one who claims the gem claims the throne. The witch Lamia wants to cut out her heart to restore her own youth for another 400 years. Tristran gets there first, but has to bring her back without the more malicious seekers reaching her.

There’s swordplay, magic, betrayal, comedy, and romance. Michelle Pfeiffer throws herself gleefully into her role as the witch Lamia. Prince Septimus oozes slime as a cross between Prince Humperdink and Professor Snape. And Robert De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare is… indescribable. Charlie Cox as Tristran and Claire Danes as Yvaine (the star) manage to hold their own with the impressive cast of villains and supporting characters.

I was the only one of the four who had read the original novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, but for the most part I didn’t mind the changes. I did think the climactic battle got a bit overblown after a while, and I really missed one aspect of Una’s character which is revealed near the end of the book.

On a related note, it seems that in the last 3 weeks, the movie “adaptation” (and I use the term loosely) of The Dark Is Rising has been retitled as The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, probably reflecting how far it seems to have strayed from the source material.

Stardust does it right: change the details, or even the structure if you have to, to make it work in a different medium. But stay true to the heart and spirit of the book.