Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 21

Coming back to the first Captain America movie after seeing the full Infinity War saga, two seasons of Agent Carter and several of Agents of SHIELD, I like the film even better than I did the first time. It deepens the story to know what the Tesseract actually is, where the Red Skull ends up (it makes more sense now than when I dimly remembered what happened to him), the future of Hydra, how Steve and Peggy and Howard and Bucky’s lives intertwine over the next few decades.

And it’s not quite what’s become the standard superhero movie. The Marvel movie formula hadn’t been established yet, and it’s more of a war movie even than Wonder Woman (which I now see as kind of a companion piece to this one…which is appropriate because she was DC’s star-spangled hero invented to fight the Axis, just like Cap was Marvel’s). The final battle is high-stakes and high-action, but it’s not the overblown special effects extravaganza that they’ve become since.

This was still back when they felt the had to justify the comic-booky visuals like Cap’s costume, or Red Skull’s appearance – or Cap’s name, for that matter! – but they made it work in an otherwise realistic war film. And I really liked the design work in the settings they invented: Stark’s facilities looked very much like a 1940s view of near-future tech, but Hydra’s looked a bit more modern – more like what you’d find in a 1960s James Bond movie, just darker.

You can see all the ways it’s setting up for the present-day MCU. But it’s also a very strong story of what makes Steve Rogers a hero: It’s not the super-soldier serum. It’s his heart. His determination to do the right thing, his integrity, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for others. That’s what defeats Hydra Mark I, that’s what keeps Cap going when he’s unfrozen, that’s what brings him into conflict with Tony Stark in Civil War…and it’s what Tony ultimately learns from him by the conclusion of Endgame.

The first Thor movie isn’t bad, but it’s not especially good either. It does its job in introducing the Marvel version of Asgard and the nine realms as an advanced alien civilization that the old Norse saw as gods. And it does its job at introducing Thor, Loki and Odin, and their family dynamic – which is where its heart is, far more than the action sequences. But it’s not quite as compelling as I remember it being. Though my memory could be mixing in the later movies and other, non-Marvel sources. At least Loki gets to debut as a complex character here, rather than the flat version seen in The Avengers.

I do really like the Asgardian designs, the mix of futuristic technology, high fantasy, and old Norse art and architecture. That aesthetic is established here, and the sets and effects and costumes really bring it to life. It’s fantastic in several senses of the word.

But I kind of feel like the Thor series didn’t hit its stride until Ragnarok, just in time for everything to be trashed in Infinity War.

It feels weird to rate this higher than the original it’s based on, H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. I’m not sure it’s actually a better book, but it is more enjoyable, largely because it’s written in a more modern style and to today’s sensibilities. The characters are more distinct, the personal stakes are higher, the corporate malfeasance and environmental exploitation are amped up, and the twists are carefully set up instead of dropping in out of nowhere.

Fuzzy Nation tells largely the same story as Little Fuzzy: a prospector on a company-owned planet encounters a cute animal species that may or may not be sapient, in which case the company loses its license to exploit the world, finishing with a courtroom drama over murder charges and whether the fuzzies are people or animals, with a major breakthrough in communication settling the question. But it takes a different enough path that you can read it without knowing what’s coming next.

I’d recommend reading both if you have time, but space them out to let the first one you read settle.

Notes

An engaging read for the general audience about what we currently know about the history and structure of the universe and what that knowledge – and the pieces we don’t know – might mean for its future and eventual end. Katie Mack writes in a casual, entertaining style. It’s clear she finds all of this absolutely fascinating. And she sprinkles the writing with funny stories and quotes and side notes to get across the basics of quantum mechanics, Higgs fields, high-energy physics and the like without delving too much into the math. But the math, and the measurements, are important, because as it turns out, very small changes in how things work at the quantum level can have major implications on the universe’s ultimate fate.

The last time I read about this topic in anything resembling depth was about a decade ago. Since then there’ve been major discoveries in both quantum physics (chiefly confirming the existence of the Higgs boson) and astronomy, where we’ve found ways to look at ever more distant galaxies, and effectively farther and farther back in time.

Dr. Mack goes through the easier to grasp possibilities first, the ones based on what we do know about the universe. Big crunch, heat death, big rip - these are almost tangible, and which is more likely depends on things we can measure right now. Then she gets into the more esoteric possibilities, the ones based on the uncertainties. Like, if this quantum field we’ve measured is a little bit off one way or the other, reality might be unstable, so it would be really helpful to get better measurements. Or some of the multidimensional theories that have been proposed to unify relativistic gravity with quantum mechanics. If our 3D universe is just one of many in a larger-dimensional space, colliding with another one would probably be bad news for both!

She finishes up with a quick round-up of upcoming lines of research and some new theories in development that could fill in the gaps, or could shift to a new paradigm. (One theorist she spoke to suggested that even space and time might not be fundamental aspects of the universe, but built on something else)

Random thoughts:

I’ve known about the cosmic microwave background radiation for a long time. But I’d always thought of it as “leftover radiation,” like a lightbulb fading as it cools down. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of looking so far back in time that we’re effectively seeing the big bang itself (or at least the point when the universe was still on fire)!

Dark energy as a cosmological constant, something Einstein put in his equations because they wouldn’t balance otherwise, then someone else figured out how to get the math to work without it… and then later observations found this weird discrepancy that could be best explained by adding this constant to the equations. Einstein was right even when he was wrong!

I still can’t wrap my head around the concept of vacuum decay. It’s like an ICE-9 scenario for the laws of physics.

We know more about dark matter than we used to. We can map it. We know roughly how much there is and roughly where. We know what it does. We just don’t know what it is yet.

And yet calculations indicate that dark matter and dark energy – whatever they turn out to be – make up vastly more of the universe than our own kind of matter!

I couldn’t begin to count how many hours I played this back when it was new. Heroes IV was fun too, but this is the one that I always remember from the series. Good for both solo play and two-player campaigns, the key is really logistics: what resources do you go after first, which troops do you build up, where do you send them, and so on. There’s strategy to the actual battles too, but it mainly depends on your choices building and exploring.