video – Page 28 – Wis[s]e Words

John Carter – Borelord of Mars

Published on December 28, 2014Leave a comment

Had the movie been more like the the trailer it would’ve been more successful. But having just watched it on the BBC tonight I understand why it was such a box office failure. Boy did this drag, mainly out of the misguided desire to put a framing story around it. It also doesn’t help that John Carter himself is a huge dick during most of the film and an incompentent dick at that. Or that the story itself, that of the reluctant hero unwillingly learns to fight for a greater cause than his own greed, is so predictable.

All of that is fixable though. Cut out everything in the first fifteen-twentyfive minutes until Carter is chased by Apaches into the cave with the portal to Mars/Barsoom, tighten up some of the running to and fro once he’s on Barsoom and with the Tharg, cut at least some of the “Carter gets angry, gets in a fight and gets his arse kicked” scenes, then end the movie with him calling himself John Carter of Mars. That should cut out at least half an hour of tedium and puts the focus back on the fighting and the great setting. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom is a great place for a spectacle film, but not if you load it up with tedious extras.

I’m not sure why Disney felt it necessary to make the film the way it did, why it didn’t just film A Princess of Mars, but it’s such a shame because it could’ve been a great sci-fi romp. When it does gets going it’s a great movie to watch. The CGIed Tharg look great, the Martian technology looks cool and the low gravity jumping looks fun. A missed opportunity.

A wreck on the highway

Published on December 16, 2014Leave a comment

So well done.

25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male

Published on December 4, 2014Leave a comment

Number 25 is especially on the nose.

“The sister is in space”

Published on November 26, 2014Leave a comment

Black to the future: science fiction writer Tananarive Due talks about afrofuturism and why it’s important.

Doctor Who cares

Published on November 4, 20141 Comment

So I’ve not been too impressed with the latest Doctor Who series. None of the episodes have been great and a great many have been actively bad with shoddy characterisation and nonsensical plots. Throughout the series there have been the usual hints at thr big mystery waiting in the season final, with the irritating Missy popping up at the end of various episodes to vex recently killed extras. I wasn’t that confident that it would all add in the end and the trailer, which already gave away that the Cybermen would be involved, didn’t help. Giving away the big reveal like that took away much of the tension in the episode.

Now my pet theory had been that Missy somehow was the spirit of the TARDIS, revealed to a) exist and b) be female a few series ago, but this fortunately turned out to be wrong. Instead she’s a gender changed master, not even another Time Lord like the Rani, for a revival of that camp flirting between the Doctor and the Master that we saw in his previous appearance as well. There really are no new ideas in NuWho.

And then there was the plot catalyst that set the whole story in motion, as Clara’s boyfriend Danny Pink gets killed off screen in a car accident, she turns eevil and threatens the Doctor with losing the TARDIS if he doesn’t find a way to bring him back. Danny meanwhile finds himself in the Afterlife being interviewed by Chris Addison in which a Mysterious and Awful Secret from his Soldiering Past is revealed. So that’s a fridging, a Danger Room scenario and a troubled past in one sequence, which is impressive with its cliche denseness.

Things did get better as details of this afterlife and its implications became known, reminding me somewhat of Iain M. Bank’s Surface Detail, but this seems to get lost once Missy starts chewing the scenery, the Cybermen are revealed and all this afterlife business turns out to be a way to get recruits for their army: the dead outnumber the living.

It does feel as if two different stories have been smashed together, to the detriment of both. Why go through this whole charade if the whole intention is just to reprogram dead people as Cybermen? Why go for a tedious Cybermen invasion (again) if you have the whole idea of an artificial afterlife to play with?

As for the revelation that Missy is the Master, this both seems about the least interesting thing to be done with her and a deliberate snub of those who had been wanting a female Doctor for this series. I can’t even find it halfway progressive, as some seem to find it.

So yeah, of course I’ll be watching the second part to see if there’s any improvement, but I’m not hopeful.