Alas, May the 4th falls on a Sunday, when my library is closed. Good thing is, the first Saturday of May is also Free Comic Book Day, so my library still celebrated them both!
We had members of the Tampa Bay squad of the 501st show up during the morning to help promote the comic book giveaways!
There was a Lightsaber Training for families up in the meeting room on the second floor, but I don't have any pics of that to share.
So today, make sure to do your full-day binge-watch of the Skywalker Saga! Either that or pretend you did and prep for Cinco De Mayo tomorrow (owstophittingme).
Also, I need to get around to posting my long-overdue thoughts on Episodes VIII and IX of those movies. Perhaps during Memorial Day weekend when I've got time.
It spoke of the future: At a time humanity was threatened with nuclear war, environmental disaster, or worse, Trek suggested we would outgrow our worst demons and answer to the better angels of our nature, that we would achieve space flight and do so in ways that would let us explore the cosmos. That we would meet races like Vulcans and Klingons and myriad others, and that despite the differences we could blend, co-exist, share our wonder of the universe.
Star Trek is a reflection of the whole Earth: that we are a diverse species as humans, clinging to this small blue/green rock covered with air and water, facing daily challenges to survive but still looking upward and outward, dreaming up warp drives and seeking out exoplanets that might share other lifeforms. The drive to improve ourselves and improve our futures...
So that being said, another thing that science fiction geeks like to do with beloved franchises is to pull the thing apart, nitpick the errors and inaccuracies, what the literary academics like to call Deconstruction of an entire 'Verse of beliefs...
...and then put it all back together again with a sly awareness that we still enjoy the damn thing.
In the past five years or so, our entertainment media empires have exploded with content - movies, television shows, crossover materials - to fill the expansive and still-growing streaming capabilities that the Internet and high-quality video have reached this 21st Century (It's 2021, people!). Among them is/was/not sure of their current status Paramount Studios and/or the CBS network competing against the likes of Disney-Plus, which currently sits on so many franchises - Marvel, LucasFilm (Star Wars), Pixar, Disney's own empire - that Paramount/CBS had to hit back with one of the biggest franchises they own with Trek.
As a result, in the past three years they've come out with a new series ST: Discovery, followed up by a sequel/rebirth of Next Generation with the series Picard, and soon to include a reboot/prequel of the Original Series involving Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock called Strange New Worlds.
Into THAT mix of new content came an animated series fitting into the Original Timeline (yes, this is a problem with multiverses now) just after the Dominion War (ST:DS9 and ST:Voyager, also the movie ST: Nemesis) but before Picard's series. Thing is, this animated show was getting put together by people who worked Rick and Morty, a show that went out of its way to Deconstruct other shows and genres in a sometimes vicious (almost sadistic) fashion.
Star Trek: Lower Decks does indeed Deconstruct a lot of the known tropes for both science fiction and Star Trek itself... and yet for all of the gore, body horror, high-pitched screaming, and psychological trauma (not the audience, I'm talking about the in-show characters) the show is actually doing a good job of showing WHY the Trek Universe works the way it does... and why it's not a bad thing for humanity in the long run.
And it's actually a good show. Lemme get into that a little more.
The thing about space is that it's big, really big, and in that vastness of space there's millions of stars and hundreds of thousands of planets. A space that big requires a big Starfleet to explore and patrol it, meaning hundreds if not thousands of starships to trek it.
While the major shows of the Trek 'Verse either involved the crews that oversaw epic adventures (the Enterprise) or dealt with galactic crises (Deep Space Nine) or survived insane journeys (USS Voyager), there are still a lot of minor, almost common tasks that the rest of the Fleet works on. As the opening quote to Lower Decks notes:
First Contact is a delicate, high-stakes operation of diplomacy. One must be ready for anything when humanity is interacting with an alien race for the first time...
That is where the Enterprise gets involved. Alas...
But we don't do that. Our specialty is Second Contact. Still pretty important. We get all the paperwork signed, make sure we're spelling the name of the planet right, get to know all the good places to eat...
And the "we" in that opening narration is the crew of the USS Cerritos, a California-class starship that's not as glamorous as the Enterprise (the flagship of the entire Federation) or battle-tested as the Defiant, or even as quirky and durable as Voyager. Cerritos is part of one big happy Starfleet Bureaucracy, keeping up with the aftermaths of major battles and contacts and scientific findings that the major league starships resolve on a weekly basis.
The ship itself is part of a class that's easily interchangeable, one of a hundred named after small towns and cities in the state of California (a nod to the human-centric (actually American-centric) nature of Starfleet in spite of the hundreds of humanoids that make up the crews). The Cerritos is also not exactly in the best of shape, more like a 3-star hotel where the Enterprise would be a 5-star luxury resort.
And as the show highlights with most episodes, the Cerritos doesn't get any of the glamour gigs, dealing with supply runs, taxi services, minor planetary disputes, and finding out how bad the drinks are at the local Klingon coffee shop on Rigel VII. This ship is kind of like the lower deck of the Federation fleet itself.
What we get then is a show about the mundane, day-to-day activities of a large-scale employer that just happens to be a quasi-military exploration fleet that basically involves cleaning out holodecks of bio-refuse (oh yeah, the Internet of the Future is still for porn), daily maintenance checks of those sliding doors that don't magically open when they're supposed to open when you're ready to leave a room, and signing off on timesheets for the midnight shift in the astronavigation lab who really all goofed off in the bowling alley on Deck 10 instead.
You know, all the stuff that the important cast members don't have time to do because they're fighting the Borg or engaging in espionage against the Romulans or dating plasma ghosts from 19th Century Ireland. (Yes, that reference gets made in this show)
So we're stuck with the "lower deck" ensigns of Starfleet, such as Brad Boimler, an energetic newcomer out of Starfleet Academy who's a little too eager for promotion and too naïve to realize how dangerous the galaxy out there can get. Desperate for promotion, he's one of those extras you see on the bridge handing PADDs (the Tablets of the 24th Century) to another extra to make it seem like people are working.
He's been teamed up with Beckett Mariner, older and more experienced, who ought to be an officer by now except for her reckless disregard for regulations and diplomacy. Where Boimler wants to step up, Mariner wants to step out, and seems only to be in Starfleet because there's nothing else out there that gives her the opportunities to "explore new worlds" and "kick ass."
Filling in the Engineering side of things is Rutherford, a human who suffered an injury before all this and received cybernetic implants to help him function. He's the tech nerd of the group, more interested in making sure those sliding doors open properly rather than worry about a zombie infection or a bridge officer turning into a god.
Making this a four-team ensemble is Tendi, the token alien crewmember that provides the diversity of Trek philosophy (IDIC). She's actually from the "sexy alien" category: The green-skinned Orion women who add that allure of seduction and intrigue to the Trek 'Verse... Except Tendi is the sweetest, shyest, and least sex-obsessed crew member on the Cerritos (she was a little shocked to see Mariner's naked Olympic holodeck program).
It's through their viewpoint we witness the goings-on of a regular Starfleet cruise: The weekly crises resolved with the right application of technobabble; the quick fights over Prime Directive/Non-Interference quandaries that are resolved through insane troll logic; and the reality that Starfleet operates on a kind of repetitive ennui that requires a healthy balance of holodeck fantasizing and a lack of micromanaging in the workplace.
What makes Lower Decks work as a series is that its efforts at Deconstruction are not meant as dark or dispirited mocking, but a kind of deliberate examination of "what would it really be like for the day-to-day operations of Starfleet, away from the dashing heroics of the original show and its spiritual successors?"
One episode for example focused on "Scotty Time," a Trope about how Trek engineers would inflate their deadlines for repair jobs that would get finished earlier and make them look like miracle workers. In the Lower Decks, it's become a dirty little secret to have your projects use "Buffer Time" on the calendars so that you'd have time to juggle that project with other hobbies beneficial to the ship - or better still fix any emergencies that crop up while you're working on the main task. When the Cerritos' Captain Freeman finds out what "Buffer Time" means, she's enraged because she thinks the crew is deliberately slacking off work (and hurting her chances at promotion), and then sets immediate deadlines for projects to make her crew work faster. Instead, because the deadlines are too swift, too arbitrary, and too inflexible to allow responses to emergencies, the Cerritos turns into a chaotic mess. "Buffer Time" had been happening for so long, no one could remember how much time was needed to calibrate a sensor array.
By the show's own logic, Buffer Time was a necessity: it allowed the crew (employees) to work at a pace they inherently knew could let them function while allowing enough time to handle the crazy space stuff along with it.
Another episode delved into those nightmarish episodes that would happen where a crewmember or guest-star would suffer an accident that would cripple them... or infect them with an exotic incurable disease... or turn them into salamanders (oh, yeah, THAT was when I quit watching Voyager, ye Gods. Why can't we go to Warp 10?! It'll turn us into newts!!! (We got better. SHH!!))
When Boimler gets phased improperly during a transporter upgrade test, he's assigned to a transport ship under Division 14 to take him to a "retirement" spa called The Farm for treatment. These "accidents" to crew members have been so common that Starfleet did develop a protocol for handling it. While the episode careens into a crisis when the other passengers are convinced - because they've been en route for months - that there is no Farm, the matter is resolved when the transport finally arrives to an exotic, Risa-like planet that does take care of the injured personnel as they were promised.
Mixed into all of this is a critique of the serial storytelling of the early Trek series, how weekly escapades and epic movies would ignore the ramifications of those events down the line. As television narratives evolved in the past 20 years to allow for continuity - for novel-styled story arcs that ensured a coherent, developed history would emerge from what we watched - what were stand-alone episodes for TOS and TNG now seem antiquated, and leaving behind issues that the "lower deck" crews like the Cerritos would have to clean up after.
In this, the animated series' Deconstruction is more deliberate, and raises legitimate issues regarding the idealism of Star Trek's philosophy. The contradictions of "exploration and discovery" behind Starfleet curtailed by a Prime Directive that insists on non-interference with "lesser" yet sentient races. The sporadic threats of one-off villains like Pakleds coming back years later as serious threats. And the abuse of flare lighting in holodeck movies, okay, the emotional conflicts of allowing family members (Mariner is secretly Freeman's rebellious daughter for much of Season One) serve on the same ship.
But I come to praise Lower Decks, not to bury it. Underneath the snarky witticisms, gag replays of Trek's less-noble plot points, and obvious physical humor, there is some legitimate character development AND 'Verse development for a complex, overwhelming universe as Star Trek's entire franchise. For all the craziness the ensigns go through, you see how the excitement and challenges of space travel keep them going, even in the vastness of bureaucratic inertia where they work. That for all the eldritch horror (and repetitive cleaning chores), there is still Hope that humanity (that may seem a bit speciest, but it's the only way we can define the nature of Starfleet itself) will prevail.
It gives me hope that somewhere down the line they can plot out a decent crossover moment with Dr. Who and Star Wars and DC Comics and Marvel Comics and... and... YES, I KEEP HOPING FOR A MASSIVE CROSSOVER, DAMMIT. IT'S IN MY BLOOD!
In the meantime, Season Two is streaming... somewhere. CBS Access or some such. BINGE IT while you're buried alive. BIIIINNNNNGGGGEEEEE IIITTTT!!!!!!!
From 42 years ago when I was seven years old sitting in the Clearwater Carib (thanks for the reminder, brother Phil) watching this mind-blowing movie Star Wars...
Photograph taken somewhere around that time period
...to watching the Official Final Episode IX Rise of Skywalker at the AMC Brandon multiplex...
Photograph taken somewhere around that time period
to considering whether or not to sign up for the Disney Plus streaming service for the hell of it because The Mandalorian has been must-see TV...
I WILL DIE FOR BABY YODA YOU NERF HERDERS
So in the meantime I'll wait a bit on posting my thoughts on the Rise of Skywalker movie and how I have to live with my guilt from here on out...
Wait. I never did a review of The Last Jedi did I? Slipped my schedule. I'll go back and review it ASAP.
Actually, this should be a moment of incredible geek-out, but also a signal of DAMN WE'RE GETTING OLD:
This is the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek (aka The Original Series).
TO BOLDLY SPLIT INFINITIVES THAT NO MAN HAS SPLIT BEFORE!
...no, no, that's sexist.
TO BOLDLY SPLIT INFINITIVES THAT NO ONE HAS SPLIT BEFORE!
Damn, that's discriminatory towards hive-mind races.
Anyway.
I think I've explained before how Trek has been not only a major force within the genre of Science Fiction - not just film and television but also literature, and some of the best writers have been part of it - but the series is one of the great American cultural milestones.
When most Americans think Sci-Fi they will think of Star Trek (or Star Wars, or hell mix up the two). Everyone knows who Vulcans are (SPACE ELVES). We just shifted from our phones looking like the Original Series comm units (flip phones) to our phones looking like Next Generation PADD tablets (there are apps to make your smartphones look at act like TNG screens!). When we joke about breaking speed limits on the highway, we measure it by Warp Speed ("Musta been doing Warp 90 back there on the goat road, Junior.")
Looking back 50 years ago, it seems quaint how a TV show that struggled in the ratings could turn into such a massive influence (WKRP, outside of references to turkey genocide, never did). But Trek was ground-breaking: It shook off the more hoary SciFi cliches and tried stories that delved into social and political debates.
It cast African-Americans in prominent starring and guest roles: Just having Uhura - despite the seeming meaningless task of "hailing" calls - on the bridge of a starship alongside White men (mostly) in a genuine attempt at ethnic and gender sharing was shocking for the 1960s television market. Would it stun you to find out that Southern television stations back in the day would insist on cutting out any black characters on shows as much as possible? Having Uhura in nearly every bridge shot made that impossible. No less a figure than Martin Luther King spoke to actress Nichelle Nichols to convince her to stay on after she wanted to move on: She was that important a role model.
The show routinely called into question the human condition: What is racism? Can Logic as a belief structure control the emotional impulses that divided our lives with conflict, passion, and despair? Are we superior beings, our bipedal humanoid selves, or can sentient rocks like the Horta be our equals (and share the universe with us)? The best episodes questioned the duality of human nature, that things did not divide "equally" between good and evil, that sometimes we humans (or sometimes we Americans/Starfleet) were in the wrong... but that we had chances to do better.
The Horta was the first non-humanoid creature on Trek that showed intelligence
and ability to adapt/learn/communicate with us. The fans still love them
as one of the best aliens the show ever created.
Religion and faith were part of the debate. What is spiritual purity? Gods would appear on the show only to be revealed as petulant children or uncaring beasts or soulless computers (and yet the show retained a vague Judeo-Christian value system that a benign distant Providence kept things ticking).
Trek would argue the virtues of Socialism one episode (the United Federation of Planets had replicators, advanced agricultural tech, a "wantless society" that couldn't comprehend gold or trinkets of value) and push the Libertarian virtues of self-reliance and need for deregulation the next, but somehow pulled off the trick of making BOTH -isms co-existing and balanced (it did so by arguing that in a socialist-wantless society the human drive to achieve will still seek challenges and life purpose).
The show also dropped a ton of Tribbles on William Shatner's head.
It downplayed the then Cold War between the Soviets and Americans, by providing alternate Earth scenarios of bad ends for those Earths that couldn't resolve the East-West conflicts. By Season Two they included a Russian character - partly for comic relief and mostly to answer the legitimate complaint from the Soviets that they too were space explorers. Thus Chekov (who spoke with a Polish accent than Russian, go figure)
Why did Star Trek influence us, influence not just American culture but the global community?
It spoke of the future: At a time humanity was threatened with nuclear war, environmental disaster, or worse, Trek suggested we would outgrow our worst demons and answer to the better angels of our nature, that we would achieve space flight and do so in ways that would let us explore the cosmos. That we would meet races like Vulcans and Klingons and myriad others, and that despite the differences we could blend, co-exist, share our wonder of the universe.
Star Trek is a reflection of the whole Earth: that we are a diverse species us humans, clinging to this small blue/green rock covered with air and water, facing daily challenges to survive but still looking upward and outward, dreaming up warp drives and seeking out exoplanets that might share other lifeforms. The drive to improve ourselves and improve our futures.
The Trek universe itself allowed for a range of literary themes to play out, and gave us heroic characters - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, Chekov as our original cast - that defined themselves as Archetype. Spock in particular would become a character that reached the level of legend, akin to Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes or Superman (RIP Leonard Nimoy).
Granted there's a ton of comic book heroes here, and the setting is Doctor Who's TARDIS, but Trek is there with Picard and other characters standing just behind the Doctor. Someday, there'll be a story that encompasses all our modern heroes, a tale of epic scale where all the heroes are summoned, and you can be certain that the USS Enterprise - all of them - will answer that call.
Let's make sure history never forgets the name Enterprise.
I am wary of the budget woes I currently have, but I need to enjoy life once in awhile, dammit.
Also, the Tampa Bay Comic Con has a couple of presentations on writing that Saturday August 6th I wanna follow up on.
Also also, with the release of Pokemon GO, I'm sorely tempted to see if the convention hall will have working WiFi and a ton of PokeStops. Here's hoping there's a Lure drop of EPIC proportions that weekend.
Alas, I WILL NOT Cosplay this year. It gets too hot and sweaty and carrying the lightsaber everywhere gets complicated etc. etc.
This WILL HAVE SPOILERS. Although it's been two weekends now, let it go people, let it go... If you don't wanna read this, you don't have to.
Once you get past the thrill and enjoyment of there being another Star Wars movie, you can examine your feels and consider the actual merits and value of the movie.
In the good news category: The Force Awakens is a fun, well-crafted, well-acted piece of entertainment. In the bad news category: It's not a GREAT movie, mind you, nothing along the lines of MAD MAX FURY ROAD. Then again, few will be.
If I had to rank the movies this year by level of SHEER AWESOMENESS, it'd be Fury Road at the WITNESS IT level of YOU WILL ARRIVE IN VALHALLA SHINY AND CHROME, Force Awakens right behind it at the YES OMG IT'S GOOD, Age of Ultron about five or six levels below around Thank GOD Marvel Knows What It's Doing, Ant-Man in the middle of the pack at Exceeds Expectations, Jurassic World about twenty levels down around At Least There's a Dinosaur Battle, and Fantastic Four reboot in the trash-heap at Please Put 20th Century Fox Out of Our Misery.
Don't ask me how I feel about the Jem and the Holograms disaster. /cries
If you want me to go into greater details about what I liked and didn't like, here goes. (If you want someone else's view, I found this one, and John Scalzi's, and Flick Filosopher's view here, and maybe more)
Likes:
They did an incredible job casting the new lead actors/actresses. Daisy Ridley as Rey is a goddamn find: with only a handful of television and independent short film performances to her credit, she's tasked with being one of the primary characters in one of the largest film franchises of all time, and she hits a home run in her first big movie lead. She plays Rey with the right balance of pluck, wistfulness, smarts, emotional heft, and glee.
John Boyega I knew from the criminally undervalued Attack the Block movie (a cult classic that deserves more love and should get more play now that Boyega is a superstar), so when they cast him as the co-lead Finn I already knew they hired a quality actor and what to expect. He didn't disappoint, and even displayed some comic timing I wasn't expecting, which added to the movie's appeal.
Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, the hotshot pilot of this new trilogy, impressed early on as a charismatic figure. Playing Poe as a confident veteran of an ongoing war, he interacts well with Finn during the first third of the film and provides a great way to re-introduce the audience to how the good guys - the Resistance - think and act. It's actually a problem the movie has when he disappears for most of the first and second acts of the story...
Adam Driver did excellent work as the saga's newest prominent villain Kylo Ren. Saddled with playing behind a mask for much of the movie, he does what he can with voice acting, and conveys the anger and arrogance of a Dark Force acolyte with exacting purpose. Once he does remove the mask, his angular yet oval face makes his villain appear boyish, almost innocent: except when the petulance kicks in, and when his fear gets the better of him...
BB-8. You keep forgetting that this machine is literally a film prop, just a remote-controlled droid, and yet it is so imbued with personality and care that you think the metal soccer ball is alive. It takes all the cuteness of R2-D2 and multiplies it by 100.
Just the way all three leads - Poe, Finn, Rey - play with BB-8 like kids believing the puppet is real and having fun doing so. The bit where Finn gets BB-8 to cover for him - and sharing a thumbs-up 'cause yeah dude - is both heartwarming and funny.
I liked the in-universe references to the previous movies. Building on its own history, this movie is filled with nods, homages, and nostalgic reminders. The opening world Jakku is littered with the debris of such history - Star Destroyers collapsed upon the sands like broken pyramids - signalling the passage of time and how events from the original trilogy are passing already into rust, dust, and legend.
Every re-introduction of a familiar face just makes the old veteran of the Star Wars - hooked since 1977 - like me break out with hoots and applause. Like the reuniting with old friends.
The characters are running from a wave of TIE fighters strafing the Jakku trading post. Finn (points to an off-camera spaceship): What about that ship? Rey: That one's garbage! (keeps running towards a shiny ship further away) Shiny ship gets blasted by the TIE fighters. Rey (shrugs): The garbage will do... Both characters start running towards the Millennium Falcon half-shrouded like an abandoned hunk of junk. (audiences start cheering when we see it)
Han: Chewie, we're home... Chewie: Rawwrrrr.
Chewie getting laughs every time he shrugs as Han digs himself into deeper holes dealing with space gangs.
Harrison Ford shifting the way Han Solo is played: no longer the cocky smuggler anti-hero, but now a Mentor figure to both Finn and Rey, becoming the Obi-Wan figure that Alec Guinness played in the first movie (there is some irony there). Playing father figure to the new leads in a way that humanizes Han even further and adds to the emotional nostalgia the film is already giving the audience.
The way Carrie Fisher - no, Leia - shakes her head seeing Han as they reunite when the Resistance shows up to fight the First Order on Maz Kanata's world.
Everyone knowing how a Sith / Dark Lord of the Force handles bad news. When Kylo throws a temper tantrum, he means it...
Two Stormtroopers patrolling a hallway come across Kylo throwing an epic conniption in a nearby room, and quietly turn around and walk away.
An overall upgrade to Stormtroopers, period. Jokingly considered bad shots the way they never hit our heroes, always used for cannon fodder, and eventually beaten by teddy bears, in this movie they're more formidable and thus memorable. In particular, the baton-wielding Trooper has become the One Scene Wonder of the movie, standing up to a lightsaber and winning that fight (until Han shows up with Chewie's bowcaster).
Rey confronting Kylo. First, in the woods as Kylo uses his experience with the Force to hunt, taunt, and capture Rey. Second, when Kylo tries to use his Force powers to mind-probe Rey, only to have Rey discover SHE has the Force and can use it to block his effort and read HIS mind. And Third...
...Rey uses her new-found link to the Force to summon Anakin/Luke's lightsaber to HER rather than let Kylo take it. This is a huge moment in the movie, arguably in modern cinema. The moment she grips that lightsaber and turns it on (with John Williams' epic score blaring a combination of Anakin and Luke's leitmotifs), it confirms that a woman CAN be the Hero of the Monomyth on her own terms.
Speaking of Rey using the Force, how she uses that new talent to Force Persuade a Stormtrooper - Ident JB-007 - to unlock her from the torture chair and leave the cell door open. Here's the thing: it takes three tries for her, it's not like she's just a brand-new person just mind-tricking everybody off the bat, she has to get a FEEL for how the Force works. Rey (thinking quickly): And you will drop your weapon. JB-007 (zoned out): AAaaaaannnnddd I will drop my weapon (does so).
And speaking about how the Force works, Finn gets it in his head during the rescue mission for Rey - as well as going off to blow up the Death Star 3.0 - that they can just rely on the Force to provide them with all the luck they need.
Han (remember, he started off not even believing in this stuff): THAT'S NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS!
...and yet, all the plot points fall into place, so yeah, that IS how the Force works...
The final battle sequences, with all the fighting and the blowing up of things and good guys getting the shot in that takes out the Evil Empire First Order's superweapon, because that's what you do in a Star Wars movie, only this time there's no explosion it's just the planet-sized weapon turning into the star it just tried to consume, which is about five different kinds of symbolism there.
And the final scene. The poignant, painful expression on Rey's face as she holds up Anakin's lightsaber, offering it to the one person who can teach her the ways of the Force so Rey can become a Jedi... like her father... (yes, I believe that theory)
No Jar-Jar. Sorry, Ahmed Best, it's not you, it's how George wrote the guy.
Not-Likes:
The massive gap in the narrative when Poe drops off the screen. He'd been set up as a major character, desperate to rescue his droid and recover the map that leads to Luke Skywalker... and then he's seemingly killed off and disappeared, only to come back for the big rescue battle ending Part Two and opening Part Three of the movie. We find out from other sources that there's a reason he disappears, but we never see a good explanation in the movie and it's just this huge plot hole that needed filling.
All this build-up for Captain Phasma being a badass and... nothing. Even Riot Stormtrooper Guy does more and does more AWESOME stuff. All that happens to Phasma is getting dumped into a garbage compactor for Han's amusement.
It feels as though Maz was criminally underused.
Snoke is being set up as a Major Big Villain but comes across as a poorly rendered CGI cartoon version of the Emperor Darth Sidious. I don't really care what the big secret about him is going to be.
Not enough Rey.
Things I Can Live With, Because Yeah:
Biggest complaint I've heard from other people is how the plot recycles the Death Star as a MacGuffin-like target for the good guys to destroy. Thing is, as a student of history and with an awareness of tropes, I know this was unavoidable as a plot point. Remember: the Empire was a fantasy version of the Nazis (the uniforms alone are a huge freaking hint), and its offspring the First Order emulates that role. The whole "overwhelm, occupy, impose order" theme requires them to deploy massive weapons as a means of generating fear and cooperation, as well as let them wipe out massive opposition with a single blow. As a result, OF COURSE the First Order is going to build a planet-sized superweapon, it's what the Nazis would have done (and did, post-war discoveries showed how they kept building larger and more improbable weapons like super-tanks as though they were going to intimidate armies and nations into sh-ting their pants and surrendering).
Having Kylo Ren turn out to be a whiny, emo Darth. That's kind of the whole point about those who fall to the Dark Side of the Force. They are, when you take away their threatening names and metal masks, scarred children decimated by overhyped expectations and abandonment issues. Driven by personal fears of inadequacy and failure, they turn to anger to express themselves, letting that hate dominate their view and turn them into power-hungry control freaks bullying everybody else and yet who secretly write really bad poetry into a diary book while listening to British punk music. Having Kylo smash up every other chamber in fits of rage, make poorly thought-out temptations to Rey to turn her Dark Side to no avail, and turn on his own father makes perfect sense.
The confrontation between Han and his son Ben Solo, now Kylo Ren. I've seen criticisms online that the scene is dull, emotionally flat, boring. I didn't see that. The whole character arc for Han in this movie is the despair and regret he has of losing his son to the bad guys, and for Kylo the fear that he can never be as evil (and what he views as powerful) as Darth Vader. The scene on the chasm walkway where Han tries to talk sense to his son, where Kylo describes the emotional conflict he's feeling, and where Kylo proves to himself his final acceptance of the Dark Side by killing his own father, is actually pretty powerful, emotional stuff.
The way the movie ends, with Rey hiking up the island mountain into a sparse, open-air temple of Jedi solitude, finding Luke standing there overlooking the ocean view, and the wordless conclusion between them. It seems frustrating that the whole movie leads up to discovering where Luke fled, and then when found leaves us hanging without any kind of confirmation or confrontation between Luke and Rey (considering the theories floating out there). But upon further thought, the whole point of this movie is the emotional impact of everything: dialog and interaction are nice, but the mood and the awareness of the characters convey more weight. Leaving us with a vision of Rey and Luke standing there, still waiting for a decision to be made between them, hooking us for Episode VIII, was perhaps the best way to end this movie after all.
There. Got my feels said. Still in the mood to go see this movie again. I may go a total of five times, so I can equal my enthusiasm for Fury Road. That's another story...
Somewhere in my mind there is a seven year old boy sitting in a large rocking chair in a movie theater called a Bijou in downtown Clearwater Florida. Update 12/21/2019: Damn me for a fool, my brother Phil reminded me the place was called Carib Theater, closed down ages ago, WHY did I think it was called Bijou...?
It's late summer, just before school. Having taken care of a big event in our family's lives - moving into a new home - the parents relent and take their three youthful boys to see this movie everyone's been gabbing about called Star Wars. The lads are familiar with some elements of science fiction - we've seen this thing called Star Trek on the teevee once or twice - but all we knew about the movie was from an ad campaign that showed spaceships blowing up and robots running around.
And the previews for other movies wrap up, and the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up with its fanfare, and then this comes up on the screen...
Okay... (now you know where I get the habit of writing ellipses at the end of sentences)
AND THEN BAM
AND THEN WHAM
And then this whole movie plays out an epic heroic journey of two droids struggling to deliver vital battle plans to a struggling resistance battling an evil galactic empire, drawing in a young farmboy, an aging mystic warrior with dark secrets, two space pirates piloting the coolest spaceship ever ("What a piece of junk!"), an action princess caught in the clutches of the evil empire, and about a billion human beings across the planet getting hooked on the whole damn thing.
It's archetypal, it's nostalgic, it's futuristic, it's action, it's space opera, it's primal emotional satisfaction. When Luke finishes that trench run and the Death Star blows up (oh shush I'm not spoiling a damn thing), the need among everyone in the audience to stand and cheer in victory is universal.
I never really grew up from that moment. My mom is probably thinking of suing George Lucas at some point for stunting my adult development.
So here I am, this week, it's a big week. It's one of those "I wanna stay alive to see this happen" moments. The next movie in the Star Wars space opera saga is coming to movie theaters.
The Force Awakens is the continuation of the proposed third trilogy of George Lucas' once-planned nine-movie saga covering the entire Star Wars history. There's a lot more that can be said about that, and you may have noticed on this blog a few entries about the movie coming out, but all that I can discuss later, after I see the movie this Friday.
The early, SPOILER-protected reviews are saying good things, enjoyable things. It's not like we should be expecting the next great Oscar-winning film - that's Fury Road, dammit - but for all intents it's going to be like what it was when I was seven and sitting in that big rocking chair geeking out to the Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperspace.
Been a bit of a fan since the movie Labyrinth. Went with my friend Sherry to see it back in the day: she went for David Bowie, I went for the Muppets. This was how the movie opened for me:
(there's no YouTube of this?)
But yeah, I crushed.
So anyway, been a fan. She hasn't always starred in great or enjoyable films but she's done well, been in a bunch that I like (Rocketeer, Dark City) and a couple that were artistically challenging with great acting (Requiem for a Dream although seriously you can only watch that once, that damn thing is soul-rending...)
I don't blame her for the 2003 Hulk, that could have been huge if the director hadn't gone avant garde on the damn thing... and mutant poodles, Ang really?! REALLY?!
There's a real-working desk-sized BB-8 toy that can be remote-controlled by your tablet/smartphone.
There's a chance to buy your very own Harlan Ellison uh Lawrence Kasdan no no your very own Simon Pegg! Whadda you mean, he's not for sale...?
(takes his 50 p) (gets out, crying)
These are kind of the things I missed asking for Christmas back when I was eight years old (did get the action figures and the fluffy Chewie doll SHUT UP). It'll be a little embarrassing asking Santa for them at the age of 45 (okay so I haven't grown up THAT much...). And I hate to admit it, but the Saturnalia holidays is not up on toy-gifting (damn the harvest festive bacchanal nature of the Romans!).
So I would very much like... ahem, NEED... to buy these toys for meself. Thing is, I'm a little strapped for cash at the moment. And the Falcon set alone is around $140.
That's where you, the faithful seven readers of this blog, come in.
Can you all ask about 50,000 of your closest friends and co-workers and deep-pocket rich people around you to, you know, buy my ebooks?!?!?! The extra cash-flow from the sales should cover the purchase price of a life-size Jabba the Hutt sofa...
I don't think I can boot up a Kickstarter crowd-funding thing for this sort of project.
Sigh.
Update: Actually I *can* add a Donate button to a blog, but it would be a little too tacky. ...Except I'm begging for book sales in the first place! Well, as I argue to myself, selling the books is a fair form of exchange, me providing a service (book) and the buyer getting something of value. So that seems morally acceptable. ;)
That said, the Lego Millennium Falcon is now MINE. Yes, I indulged for myself this Saturnalia season. Getting it now means I won't miss out getting it when we get closer to the movie release in December, when all the stores are bound to run low on supplies of the cool toys.
I won't open it now. 1) I need to find a place to shelve it when finished and 2) It's 1300+ pieces! This thing is gonna take a WEEK to put together...
Sharing over to the entry I wrote at the other blog I run. Link here.
Here's a photo or two I didn't post on the other article, just to entice...
The food lines got packed after noon time, partly because it started raining heavy, like a wall of rain, around the same time. It kept raining well into 4 pm, and there were reports of flooding on certain streets in the downtown area.
Much like last year, the line to get in on Saturday morning - always the busiest day for what I know - went way out along Channelside. It went under the Harbor Island bridge. And I got there about 7:30 in the morning. One of Tampa Convention Center's glaring weaknesses: lack of covered entranceway space, and a not-large-enough foyer area...
Seriously. Even if the movie looks to be bad in the trailers, if it's a franchise movie of a beloved geek-focused literary or televised series, YOU WILL GO SEE IT.
Ant-Man is a perfect example.
I didn't want to see it. I didn't NEED to see it. The trailer looked... weak... foolish somehow. I figured beforehand that I could simply skip it coming out in the theaters and waiting for the DVD/Blu-Ray.
...I ended up going last Sunday during its first weekend.
Problem was, the early reviews for it were not that bad... the excuse of "oh no it'll suck" wasn't sticking... I had to... I HAD TO...
This is all just lead-in to one of the funniest YouTube animated series I've just come across called FanGirls done by OnlyLeigh.
Too many Marvel movies indeed...
...I loved how the lead insurgent was from House Stark. And the eyebrow twitch she develops as Leigh speaks to truth.
Anyway. Next Saturday is Tampa Bay Comic-Con. See you there!
And this is a good year to be a Star Wars geek as this is happening:
Chewie, we're home...
And yes, with The Force Awakens movie coming out December, we are indeed home...
I want that toy. I really wanted a Falcon since I was kid, but the models were too big for the bookshelves in my room so I held back. NO MORE. I may be turning 45 this month, but with this series I am STILL that seven-year-old sitting in the Clearwater Bijou (sadly so long gone) watching the first movie A New Hope again and again...
From that, my massive output of writing during the 1990s revolved around what I called Senseless 'Shipper Surveys, an episode recap done in a humorous vein around how much that episode involved the 'Shipping and how silly Mulder got while St. Scully lorded over all. I had a major section of a personal website (ye olde wittylibrarian.com site) devoted to it (the other half was to following the Tampa Bay Bucs). The website is gone - I got to the point I couldn't afford to pay the domain rights - but I've got those old surveys on file somewhere. I am sorely tempted to waste a lot of my time re-posting them online. Just how many blogs should I be running at one time? I may need to grab another Blogger address...
Well, should I re-post the Senseless 'Shipper Surveys? Yay or Nay? UPDATE: I went Yay. Created a new blog at http://xfilesshipper.blogspot.com/ So here goes with the re-edits of pre-HTML5 code...
...and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human...
Science fiction is at its best not about space rockets firing lasers at each other or furry creatures threatening to invade planets, but about the human condition, of who we are and where we are going.
Star Trek at its best was about the possibilities of life, of life on other worlds, of other perspectives and philosophies. The show's producers came up with a Vulcan concept of "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," of which Spock - its truest representative - was a perfect example.
Spock, half-Vulcan and half-Human, trapped between the philosophies and yet the most ardent defender of the Vulcan way, even when by the time his character aged into a wisdom that realized his Human traits had value as well, meshing them into an iconic figure that outgrew science fiction into one of legend. There are few fictional characters who grow to such a stature - Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Robin Hood, Hamlet, perhaps today Doctor Who - but Spock stands there as more Human than Human, more Vulcan than Vulcan...
The actor Leonard Nimoy was basically appearing in this thing Star Trek back in the 1960s as a paying gig, but it was one that quickly grew into a phenomenon with his character one of the major draws. For a time there he railed against the expectations that he had to play Spock as a person, but later on he settled down, and came to terms with him. Spock was, after a fashion, himself: Nimoy threw in a few things from his own life - the Vulcan salute is from his Orthodox Hebrew upbringing, and he put into play character quirks he felt were appropriate to what a logical Vulcan would do - to where he could never really leave the character. Not every actor gets to play a character for the first time, and have that character become as important, as iconic as to how that actor fit into that role.
Nimoy passed away today. He lived long enough to see other actors take on the role of Spock. There will be others long past us who will play the role, add to the legend perhaps. But they will be building on the archetype that Nimoy forged. A great legacy...
They're a species able to shapeshift in their natural forms, and so when they mass-bred human forms they merely adjusted their skin pigmentation to look blue.
If anybody asks about the unhealthy levels of hemoglobin or silver in their bloodstreams, I'll just whistle a jaunty tune and keep writing...
(muttering under breath) damn geeks, we never stop nitpicking do we....
I return to you with tidings of great geekery which shall be to all people.
Namely, that Tampa's Comic Con has gotten a little bit bigger and lot more fun.
Also, per my previous post about the fan squee for Batgirl's new outfit, I found one cosplayer yesterday who already (within two weeks!) made an excellent version of it!
SNAP-ON CAPE! squeeeee
That said, my full review is unfortunately going to be on my other blog - I have made too many other comic-con postings over there, so gotta go with where I've got the traffic going - so I will provide a link to that as soon as I've finished writing it.
P.S. gonna go see Guardians of the Galaxy this morning as well. There's been too much good buzz about it to hold off longer.
UPDATE: the link to the Comic-Con review is up! Also, I saw Guardians this afternoon. Good movie, has some obvious jumps in narrative that looks like a lot of deleted stuff waiting for DVD/Blu-Ray, funny as all out which is what we need in summer action movies more often... But Dear God... they wanna bring back (SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!)?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO gasp wheeze OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO cough cough wheeze gag insert additional choking noises here
...somewhere in this galaxy, George Lucas is laughing at his revenge on us all...
