Four Quick Scifi Reviews

Thanks to the magic of cable TV and the internet, I recently got the chance to see some on-screen works of science fiction I missed the first time around. So here's some quick reviews of stuff most of you probably already saw years ago. Warning, some spoilers ahead.

First up is Mission To Mars. The very first thing I thought of when I finished watching it was: they made the wrong movie.

For those unfamiliar with the plot, Future Don Cheadle (well, okay, his character, but I can only think of him as Don Cheadle) heads the first manned landing on Mars. They discover a mysterious mountain-sized artifact of apparent alien origin. When they investigate, the artifact reacts with lethal results.

Back on Earth, another Mars mission is launched, and after a lot of hokey melodrama, the follow-up mission arrives on Mars a year later. They find Future Don Cheadle still alive, having somehow survived a year in the first mission's makeshift base. Then they all traipse back to the artifact, figure out how to get in, and discover a recording meant for mankind by a dopey looking extraterrestrial.

The movie was okay up until the first team died, then it segued into dumbness and horrible cliches. But you see, hidden in that mess, was the movie they should have made. I'll spell it out: Future Don Cheadle was marooned alone on Mars for a year with a mysterious, murderous alien artifact just over the horizon. Why didn't they make that movie instead?

Can you imagine how awesome that story could have been in the hands of a better director (sorry, De Palma) and much better writers? Can you imagine his struggle for survival on an alien, hostile world, more isolated than any human being has ever been in all of history? Or the dark terrors that man must have suffered through in his crushing loneliness, with the deaths of his friends and teammates weighing on him, and the alien horror that caused it all just an hour's walk away? In the hideous silence of the Martian night, was there really something moving out there, or was it all in his mind? Was any of it ever real, he wonders, as he skirts the edges of madness for months at a time?

It could have been one of those awesomely dark, complex mindf*ck movies, where both the hero and the audience wouldn't quite know what was going on for sure. And Don Cheadle could easily have been up to the acting task. Instead we got some horribly-staged bad-science melodramic crap with Gary Sinise. Argh. Guess we can just chalk this up to one of those great missed opportunities.

And on we move to Bicentennial Man starrig Robin Williams, and based on an original short story by the great Isaac Asimov. Of the works reviewed here, it was the least annoying, but that was mostly because it was so bland.

Robin Williams plays Andrew, an android employed by a wealthy family in the far-flung future year of 2005. When Andrew begins showing signs of sentience, his family helps him become more independent, and Andrew begins a 200-year struggle to be accepted as human.

This film was actually a lot more true to Asimov's original vision than the movie adaption of the all-but-raped I, Robot that came out some years later. There's even some very Asimovian intellectual dialog toward the end, when Andrew pleads his case before the World Council of Smart Guys, or whatever they were supposed to be. But sadly, the film also lacked a lot of Asimov's playful inventiveness, and there was never any real tension or excitement to interest the audience. A for effort, but C for execution.

Okay, I'll admit it, I never saw the blockbuster Transformers movie until it was shown on broadcast TV a few weeks ago.

The robots were damn cool. I've got to give the film creators that. Visually they rocked, and their characters were actually fairly engaging as well. Or maybe it just seemed that way because almost every single human character in the film was so vastly annoying that the robots just seemed much more likable in comparison.

For those of you still more behind the times than me, or perhaps just never watched any cartoons in the last quarter century, in Transformers, two factions of a race of living robots are engaged in a millennia-old war, and that war spills over to an alternate version of Earth populated by good-looking but vapid idiots.

Okay, I'll admit the soldier characters were mostly tolerable. But every time our hero Teenage Goofball was on screen I wanted someone to smash his mouth shut with a sledgehammer. Megan Fox was indeed nice to look at, but that was about it. Goofball's clueless family apparently was created by an algorithm that averaged every sitcom cliche from the past twenty years, and the government types were so incompetent I expected Inspectors Gadget and Clouseau to show up at any minute to take charge.

But did I mention the robots were cool? Megatron especially, I thought this was the single best version of him. He honestly came across as menacing and dangerous. Optimus Prime was also at his best, as noble and heroic--and surprisingly badass-- as one could hope for. If only the film had more of them and less of Goofball and the sitcom brigade...

The anime series Stellvia ran on Japanese TV in 2003, and is available on DVD and for viewing online.

The series starts with a crackerjack premise: For unknown reasons, the star Beta Hydrus, 20 light years away, suddenly goes supernova. Its radiation pulse hits Earth in the year 2167, devastating the planet. Humanity slowly rebuilds, and even expands into the solar system. But in the year 2356, mankind faces its most grim challenge yet: the physical shockwave from the supernova is about to wash over the solar system, and threatens to annihilate everything. To protect the inhabited worlds, a number of immense foundation space stations are created to coordinate defenses; Stellvia is the one above Earth.

The series focuses on a 16-year-old Peruvian girl named Shima, who is recruited to undergo pilot training on Stellvia. Despite a rocky start (she earns the nickname "Shipon," japanese for 'ping pong', after her disastrous first flight) her genius ability with computers and math quickly allow her to become a prodigy as a pilot.

The series started off so well, it was sad to see it slowly but surely degenerate into a batch of banal anime cliches. The series is definitely shojo in flavor (the anime equivalent of a 'chick flick') but was still smart and original enough at first to keep my attention. But despite being 350 years in the future and set in space with the potential extinction of humankind threatening, we're set up with a lot of japanese high school drama cliches spread out among video-game-like space sequences. All of the secondary characters are forgettable; not necessarily badly done, just nothing about them stood out or made me care about what happened to them.

Then, half way through the series, the supernova shockwave arrives. The apocalyptic event they'd been building up since the first moments of the series, the Doom of Man, the Great Mission, etc, etc. I had to admit I was expecting an epic struggle and confrontation. But it was over in two episodes, and the big danger was resolved by the most horrible anime cliche of all: a big robot with an even bigger gun.

I stopped watching after that, with 13 episodes still to go. It was just too disappointing. Like Mission to Mars, there was a much better story buried in that material, if only someone had bothered to try and dig it out. Oh well. Maybe someday I'll go back and watch the rest, but after the way they handled their biggest and most important storyline, I'm afraid it would be just more disappointment.

But Stellvia did also have a cool opening theme, though.

Review: Avatar

I've finally seen Avatar, after getting it on DVD. Thought I'd do a quick review.

I've watched it twice so far and, surprisingly, it was actually better the second time around. I think that it was because I was able to take in a lot of the little details that passed me by the first time. The story IS cliched, as much a retread of a classic story arc as Star Wars was (the 'Stranger in a Strange Land' motif, ie, hero travels to far off land, befriends the natives, has adventures and becomes a great hero--see also Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, Ferngully, etc, etc), but just like with Star Wars, the cliched plot path didn't prevent the story from transcending its expectations.

I did not see the movie on a movie screen in 3D, I saw it on a standard TV screen, so I was able to enjoy the story without being overwhelmed by the special effects. Not that I still couldn't appreciate them, but they weren't the main attraction for me in watching the story.

All that being said, Avatar is an important scifi milestone. Pandora easily is the most fully-realized alien world in on-screen science fiction. Kudos to Cameron and his crew for such amazing attention to detail in creating the alien biosphere of Pandora.

The technology of the Earthers was also created with an eye toward realism. The mecha looked less anime-streamlined and much more like what such a system would look like if made in the real world. I especially like the shots of the starship, complete with glowing-hot radiators on the twin nuclear engines and the translucent icy impact shield on its bow. Gave me goosebumps.

For those of you who frequent the Orbital Vector main site, you might be interested that I'd classify the Humans' technology in the movie at about Tech Level 15, maybe edging toward 16. Some anomalies, though--firearms should have been much more advanced, for example.

An interesting thing I was contemplating the second time through is that I don't think the Pandoran biosphere naturally evolved. There seems to be tantalizing hints (particularly the big floating mountains, the huge apparently invulnerable arches around the Tree of Souls, the presence of super-conducting Unobtanium, plus some other stuff) that the world may actually be built on the ruins of a much older more advanced civilization, maybe even post-Singularity. For whatever reason the inhabitants may have decided to abandon technology and bio-engineer a nature-centric utopia for themselves.

I did think Cameron was a bit too hard on humanity, but then its apparent he was trying to drive home certain points. Despite what some conservative critics may have said about the film, I don't see it as anti-American or anti-military, as some have said. Rather, like most films of its type, its meant as a cautionary tale, showing us the dangers of a what could happen if we let certain forces in our society run out of control. (Ie, no 'green' left on Earth, and humanity apparently run by out-of-control, amoral corporations.)

There are some exceptions, of course. Cameron apparently could not resist taking a few digs at past US administration, but they are few and fleeting.

I don't think every human soldier and worker on Pandora would have gone along with the destruction of Na'vi except for a few scientists and the Hot Aircraft Pilot. I think a lot more would have protested and tried to block Colonel Bad Guy and Corporate Douchebag. But I also realize the film could only get so complicated and long, so the creators had to simplify things a bit with this.

The Na'vi in a way also had to be streamlined in a certain way for the same reason. In order to work, the movie needed to portray the aliens as actual sympathetic characters. However, making them too inhuman, as realistic aliens would be, would take too much time and work that it would distract too much from the story, which was making for a long movie to begin with. Most other scifi films and TV series run into this problem. Because of limited time to tell stories, creators have to choose: should the aliens be human-like, and be characters the audience can relate to, or should they be realistically inhuman, and result in them being puzzling enigmas? Here, Cameron obviously chose the former path, and though it is kind of stretching believability that the Na'vi would look and act so human having evolved on a completely alien world, for the purpose of a two+ hour movie it works well enough.

As I said, the plot as a whole was pretty familiar. Since I myself kind of came up with something similar with part 1 of The Shattered Sky (see the sidebar for links), I can attest Cameron did NOT 'rip off' the story as some people say. Its just seems that when you have certain story elements, certain plots and characters follow naturally for drama's sake. But even if events were in the broad term predictable to anyone who's seen this type of story before, it was in the details that the story become very enjoyable, and at times even surprising.

All in all, it was well worth seeing, and definitely a science fiction movie milestone, mostly for its stunning world-building and satisfying if unsurprising story. Looking forward to the eventual sequel and seeing if I'm right about Pandora being a post-technological society.