Iron Man 2

The new Iron Man trailer. I don't know if this will be any good, but at least the writers were smart and Tony Stark is still a jerk.

Retreat, Earthmen! Horror awaits you!

The most accurate account of a First Contact scenario ever made.

The Foundation Trilogy Part 2

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 6

Puma Man

The Foundation Trilogy Part 1

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 5

Dan Dare Part 4

Coming next week

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 4

2010: The Year We Make Contact

I was re-watching the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night. Might as well while the irony is fresh, I thought. It's a fairly pedestrian film, which wouldn't be a criticism of a summer blockbuster if it weren't a sequel to one of the greatest films of all time with a script written with the help of Sir Arthur C Clarke himself.

Picking up where 2001: a Space Odyssey left off, 2010 opens with Dr Heywood Floyd learning that the abandoned spaceship Discovery with all its data about its ill-fated expedition is in a decaying orbit and will crash into Jupiter before the next American expedition can reach it. However, a Soviet ship will get there a year earlier and so Floyd, the designer of Discovery, and the man who built the homicidal Hal 9000 hitch a ride on the Soviet Leonov.

Not surprisingly, 2010 doesn't hold a candle to its predecessor, though you can't fault the director, who undertook the herculean task of re-building all the sets and props that Kubrick insisted be destroyed back in 1968 to prevent them being reused in other sci-fi films. Unfortunately, attention to that sort of detail doesn't necessarily make for a good film–especially when all the other costumes, props, and models look like they came from a completely different universe. Imagine if the makers of Star Trek kept confusing it with Star Wars and you get the idea. It also doesn't help that without Stanley Kubrick's cynicism and vision, Sir Arthur fell back on his own admirable, but overly tidy imagination that resulted in the transcendent mysticism of the first film falling sequel by sequel in this film and the novels into more and more pedestrian (and manageable) explanations about what was behind all the mysteries.

What many people might find interesting in the real 2010 AD is how far off the mark the film version is. I don't believe for one minute that Sir Arthur seriously thought the Russians would be building spaceships the size of frigates by now, but I'm sure he hoped so. What he probably didn't believe was that the Americans would start a new manned spacecraft programme and then abandon it (both being right decisions made for disastrously wrong reasons), that said spacecraft would be merely an supersized Apollo capsule while all the other versions public and private around the world would be merely updated versions of the Soyuz. Nor that the world's only space station would be built merely as an exercise in building a space station. Mind you, I'm not sure what to make of Pan Am going out of business or the notion that the Hal 9000 uses a Kaypro keyboard or that modern monitors would be the size of 30-inch CRT televisions circa 1995.

Unlike most other sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, Sir Arthur's politics aren't very easy to deduce. Or rather, they aren't until you realise that he didn't actually have any politics as such. If Sir Arthur did have any, it was that politics of any stripe is merely a temporary state of affairs until Science got a proper grip on the world and all that petty squabble would just melt away. Despite having folded like wet cardboard in 1991, the Soviet Union in 2010 is still going strong and the Cold War hasn't shifted an inch since 1984. In fact, the USA and USSR are still happily playing brinksmanship over Central America and teetering on the edge of nuclear war, so the last 26 years must have been awful "samey". That doesn't matter to the Americans and Soviets aboard the Leonov, though. That's because they're all Scientists with a capital letter. In fact, everyone in the cast is a Scientist. I even suspect that Dr Floyd's five-year old son is a Scientist, but hasn't finished his thesis yet. True, there is tension in orbit around Jupiter, but only because the Earthmen are obliged to follow the orders of their unenlightened countrymen. Left to themselves, the Soviets and Americans get along fine because Science is ever and always the objective and selfless pursuit of the truth in which politics has no place. It isn't that our heroes disagree with their governments, they can't even see the point of posing the question.

There's something charming about Sir Arthur's attitude–or would be if it didn't require him to indulge in moral equivalence to work. Even back in the 1950s in novels such as Childhood's End and Earthlight he couldn't imagine an enemy who might actually be ruthless and totalitarian or that the Cold War might have something to do with the Communists being really, really nasty. In 2010 I can't help but think that the commissar at Baikanour has fallen down on the job and is slated for a one-ounce retirement package in the back of the head. Surely the crew of a major Soviet spacecraft would have been chosen first and foremost for political reliability (fanaticism) before technical competence.

More to the point, Sir Arthur always struck me as being a bit naive when it came to science being apolitical and altruistic. You would have thought that Lysenkoism and Eugenics would have put paid to that. These days, what with the radical environmentalism of Rachel Carson et al and the tens of millions of deaths they've caused exposed to the world, the sexually self-serving fraud of Margaret Mead, and the on-going scandal of Climategate it's obvious that scientists are just as vulnerable to the corrupting temptations of money, power, status, and ideology as any politician.

That was true in 1984. It was true in 2001. And it is true in 2010.

Doctor Who: Militant Tendency

Sylvester McCoy says that during his turn as Doctor Who the production crew filled the episodes with Leftist propaganda that would have made Militant Tendency proud. Not surprising with the likes of the script editor, who at his interview said,

I’d like to overthrow the government.

Their efforts included a story that was a thinly veiled call for Margaret Thatcher to be overthrown by a worker's revolt and an anti-nuclear speech delivered by the Doctor courtesy of CND.

The amazing thing about this story is that it claimed that nobody noticed at the time. If so, it can only because they didn't see the episodes, because I did at the time and being hit over the head with a clown hammer would have been more subtle.

The only thing sadder than Doctor Who limping toward its grave in the late '80s was watching it do so while squeaking pathetic Trotskyite tirades.

Dan Dare Part 3

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 3

Hobgoblins

Dan Dare Part 2

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 2

Harrison Bergeron

Avatar in Depth

This guy almost hates Avatar as much as I do.

Almost, but not quite.

Caution: Profanity.

Dan Dare Part 1

Radar Men From The Moon: Chapter 1

Late review

H G Wells reviews Metropolis and demonstrates that one can be a literary giant and still misunderstand how another medium works (though, to be fair, he does seem to have seen one of those horribly edited versions that went into general release).

Today's phrase, Herbert, is "visual metaphor". Please provide the definition and use it in a complete sentence.

The Seeds of Destruction Part 6

Hopefully the last time this alternative feature wheeze will be necessary.

Coming next week

Coming next week

The Seeds of Destruction Part 5

And here's one I made earlier in case of file problems. These source files are a pain, but I keep getting assurances that the problem is only temporary, so here's hoping.

The Seeds of Destruction Part 4

And here's one I made earlier.

Just in case the file fails to load.

The Seeds of Destruction Part 3

And here's one I prepared earlier:

We've been having some trouble with the source files for Seeds of Destruction, so here's a bonus feature in case the link goes out.

Avatar: The Making of the Bootleg

Avatar: Born to be bad

In 1977, a film came along that remade the entire industry. It ushered in the era of the blockbuster, introduced rafts of new technologies and marriages of old, integrated symphonic music into popcorn cinema, and demonstrated that the audience had become so familiar with the vocabulary of science fiction that they no longer had to be sold on the concept in the story. It was the most successful film up to that time, influenced the popular culture of a generation, was responsible for at least half of all content on the early Internet, and resulted in some of the best jokes on Spaced.

It was also one of the worst films ever made with a plot that was stitched together with a cleaver and dialogue so bad that one of its stars conned the director into killing his character off early so he wouldn't have to say any more of those god-awful lines.

Yes, I'm talking Star Wars. It was beautiful. I well remember back then how incredibly impressive it was sitting in the Odeon with the first chord of John Williams's score, the story so far roller, and the unforgettable opening shot of the spaceship that went on forever with all ray guns blasting.

God, it stank.

I never thought I'd relive that time of youthful innocence, but I have. I have seen Avatar.

God, it stank.

I know I said I wouldn't see it until it came out on Pay Per View, but it's the Christmas hols and I was outvoted by my wife, daughter, and the five-year old neighbour boy who went with us, so it was jumbo popcorn and 3D specs all 'round.

First, let's get the praise out of the way. The CGI is very impressive. The resolution is very high, the textures are detailed to the point where you could almost touch them, the lighting effects are excellent, and the motion capture technology is state of the art. In fact, it works too well. It's the first time I've seen the subtleties of facial expressions captured properly, allowing the actor to really come through. This is great if the subject is someone who has some real acting chops like Sigourney Weaver. For others, this is not an advantage. The tag line could have been, "You will believe that a CGI character can overact". Overall, however, the effect of all the computer animation was that I kept reaching for the game controller, which is where I suspect most of the CGI techs cut their teeth.

As for the much-vaunted 3D, I merely found it distracting for the first five minutes and then I forgot about it entirely. On the upside, the Polaroid glasses are much more comfortable and don't give me a headache the way the old bichromatic jobs did.

The plot? If you've seen A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves, Soldier Blue, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, The Last Samuri, or even Dune, the Endor scenes from Return of the Jedi, or pretty much any trendy lefty film since 1972, then you've seen this film–over and over again. Civilised man meets primitives, man is accepted by primitives as one of them, man turns traitor and slaughters his civilised brethren. If you're into written science fiction, if you've read Poul Anderson's "I am Joe", Clifford D Simak's City, Alan Dean Foster's Midworld, Harry Harrison's Deathworld Trilogy, Ursula le Guin's The Word for the World is Forest, Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica", or just about anything else written since 1935, you know the fantastic side of the story. I'd include Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alex Raymond as well, but the poor men have already suffered enough and our hero isn't John Carter or Flash Gordon by a long chalk.

Short version: Paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully is sent to Pandora, the tropical moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centuri to pilot an "Avatar"; a genetically engineered duplicate of the Pandoran natives. Using a padded coffin strung with magic Christmas lights, Sully can connect his mind to his Pandoran body so he can move about freely in the moon's poisonous air and make contact with the natives to learn more about them and negotiate peaceful relations. He's a bit of a cipher and, given the plot, I'd have been happier if he'd been written as a 22nd century Harry Flashman (Flashman and the Blueskins!), but...

Unknown to Sully or the altruistic missionaries scientists who created the Avatars, the evil military commander and the evil corporation that apparently runs the evil military in 2154 not-so secretly plan to wipe out the natives because it's so gosh darn more fun than haggling over mineral rights. In a burst of incredible originality, Sully learns the ways of the natives and when he discovers the evil Earthmen's evil plans to evilly destroy the natives with great evilness, he turns traitor, leads the natives (who follow him out of curiosity) into battle, and slaughters thousands of his fellow humans without a touch of remorse. The human survivors are then frog marched aboard their spaceships back to Earth and the natives and Sully live happily ever after–or until Earth Command sends an orbital bomber force to wipe them all out a month later, but the film doesn't explore that detail.

James Cameron worked on getting Avatar to the screen for fifteen years, though from the plot it seems more like since 1968. Indeed, the frog march ending reads like a Vietnam War protester's wet dream. During the climactic battle I kept waiting for our hero to scream, "Damn you, Bush!" while Dick Cheney whizzed by in an attack helicopter with Tony Blair in the Gunner's seat.

The entire film is a beautifully imaged cliche fest. The military are mindless killers lead by a commander who is just itching for an excuse to take the safeties off for no readily apparent reason other than racist blood lust. Of course, he and his men a) have all the brains of a wet teabag b) make every mistake imaginable and c) have never seen the Endor bit in Return of the Jedi, so it's no wonder that a 22nd century force is taken down with bows and arrows. Any other director I could excuse this from, but James Cameron? The man who coined the phrase, "Nuke the site from orbit"? Doesn't he even see his own movies?

The natives, on the other hand, are without exception brave, noble, wise, in harmony with nature, have perfect teeth, vote Labour, recycle, buy only Fair Trade coffee, and drive Prisuses. Even Rousseau would feel his dinner coming back around this bunch. Mind you, for all their virtues, not a one can hold a bow string for toffee. And they have yet to discover anything resembling a sense of humour or the ability to speak in other than the most stilted of sentences. Though they live an idyllic existence, they do suffer, as do the Earthmen, from one pestilence of civilisation: The Action Girl cliche that was old when The Swordmaster's Daughter hit the stage in 1894. It never works unless the writer and director really think it through and here it's just embarrassing. When our native princess went into a knife-wielding crouch toward the end of the film, I literally burst out laughing. Dejah Thoris this Pandoran is not.

Okay, but suspension of disbelief and all that. Sorry, I'm all for it and will suspend with the best of them, but the flying mountains wrecked not only my suspension, but my shocks of tolerance and leaf springs of credulity as well. As in Titanic, Cameron imagines that imagery will cover every plot hole and excuse his dogged refusal to pick up better plot opportunities that would have improved his story immeasurably. Instead, we have a nearly three hour diatribe about Cameron's ideal Gaia-worshiping aliens who are literally connected to their world fighting off wicked Earth capitalists who deserve no better fate than to go back to face extinction on their own dying planet. It's a message that is not only offensive in its self-loathing (especially when I drop $12 for the privilege of his insult), but also because Cameron, who produced at least two excellent films back in the '80s, has prostituted his own art to share his loathing with the rest of us.

But, say other reviews I've read, don't be so negative. It's only a movie. Forget the plot and just go with what's on screen. At that point, I merely sigh and answer with two words: Star Wars.

The Seeds of Destruction Part 2

The Final Sacrifice

Avatar defined.

What I suspect will be the definitive review of Avatar.

No, I haven't seen it, because from what I've seen and heard (and having survived the horror of Titanic) I'm waiting for it to show up on Pay Per View.

Update: This one comes a pretty good second.

The Seeds of Desrtuction Part 1