The Wandering Earth (2019)

The Wandering Earth (2019): written by Gong Ge-Er, Frant Gwo, Liu Cixin, Junce Ye, and Yan Dongxu; directed by Frant Go; starring Wu Jing, Li Guangjie, Chuxiao Qu, Ng Man Tat, Jin Mai Jaho, Qu Jingjing, Mike Sui, Arkady Sharogradsky, and Lei Jiayin:

A somewhat lunatic Chinese blockbuster mashes together the apocalyptic world-saving shenanigans of films that include Armageddon and Deep Impact with many micro-lessons in being a good Communist.

The sun has gone crazy, so the people of Earth team up to build 11,000 11-km-high rockets to push the Earth out of the Solar System to safe haven in the nearby Centauri system. OK! 70 years into this escape attempt, the Earth starts getting pulled into Jupiter's gravity well because Jupiter's gravity has "spiked." What is the deal with gravity in this movie?

Much heroic action on the part of Chinese soldiers, scientists, and Common People must be taken in order for Earth to escape Jupiter and get out of the Solar System. The CGI is pretty good, especially in depicting the space scenes.

You really can't subject The Wandering Earth to even a cursory scientific analysis. It's ridiculous. Oddly, in the midst of all the astronomical and physical impossibilities, the film uses the term 'Roche Limit' correctly. Hurray for science! Recommended.

Three Strikes

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016): based on characters and stories by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, and many others; written by Simon Kinberg, Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris; directed by Bryan Singer; starring James McAvoy (Professor Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/ Mystique), and Oscar Isaac (Apocalypse): Once you've got more than five X-Men in a movie, maybe you should make a miniseries instead. The bloat of X-Men: Apocalypse didn't affect me because I watched it over three nights on TV, thus making it into a CW superhero four-parter with a really high production budget. But it is bloated. And while Oscar Isaac's decision to underplay Apocalypse makes for an interesting arch-villain, it doesn't make for a very exciting arch-villain.

The acting from everyone who didn't date Aaron Rodgers is fine, and some of the visual effects are really lovely and sublime, though there are so many of them by the end that all effect is lost. Certainly not the 'bomb' that some critics suggested it was, however. Lightly recommended.

Light's Out (2016): adapted by Eric Heisserer from a short film by David F. Sanberg; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Teresa Palmer (Rebecca), Gabriel Bateman (Martin), Alexander DiPersia (Bret), Billy Burke (Paul), and Maria Bello (Sophie): Short, taut, and to-the-point supernatural thriller pits a family against a ghost-thing that only comes out at night. Or at at least when the lights are out. I'd have liked a scene in which the main characters hit a hardware store to buy every portable light source imaginable from flashlights to glow sticks. They do have enough sense to pick up a crank-flashlight, given that the ghost-thing can affect utilities and batteries, so Kudos! Recommended.

Patrick Dennehy

Disgraced (2017): directed by Pat Kondelis: Marvelously assembled Showtime documentary on the 2003 Baylor University basketball scandal that started with the murder of Patrick Dennehy, the team's best player, and then became a horrifying story of American university athletics spun entirely out of control, aided and abetted by a local legal system stacked with Baylor grads. Then-Baylor coach Dave Bliss, secure in some false sense of untouchability, is actually stupid enough to be interviewed by the film-makers in the present day. It's gratifying to learn that once the documentary aired, he was fired from his then-current job as coach at another 'Christian' university. Highly recommended.

Claustrophobia

Wind Chill (2007): written by Joseph Gangemi and Steven Katz; directed by Gregory Jacobs; starring Emily Blunt (Girl), Ashton Holmes (Guy), and Martin Donovan (Highway Patrolman): A car-sharing ride from Pennsylvania to Delaware for Christmas Break goes horribly awry thanks primarily to the fact that the driver is a stalkery loner who has a crush on passenger Emily Blunt. 

However, the movie's more interested in the supernatural than in stalkery, slashy real-world goings-on, and that makes Wind Chill worth watching. The generic title doesn't help matters, especially as wind chill isn't much of a factor -- it's really just cold and snow and a crashed car, within which about 50% of the movie's scenes take place.

The writers go a couple of times too many to the Well of Dreams That Seem To Be Real, but things are otherwise quite, um, chilling. Portions of the story play effectively with various Urban Legend tropes concerning stopped cars and sinister cops, with a nod to the movie's Urban Legend qualities coming in the unnamed status of our two principals, who remain simply 'Guy' and 'Girl' for the movie. Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes do decent work as the 'couple,' and the outdoor scenes manage to be sufficiently chilly and forlorn. Recommended.

JeruZalem  (2015): written and directed by Doron and Yoav Paz; starring Danielle Jadelyn (Sarah Pullman), Yael Grobglas (Rachel Klein), Yon Tumarkin (Kevin Reed), and Tom Graziani (Omar): Loopy found-footage film with an anomalous 'Z' in the title. Yes, the 'Z' is there to cater to World War Z fans. But the monsters in this Israeli production aren't zombies. Jerusalem itself is really the on-location star of this film. 

The two Jewish-American 20-something women who visit Jerusalem on holidays have a good time at first before all Hell breaks loose, though not before the protagonist has taken off her footage-filming iGlasses so that we can get a look at her nekkid. Hoo ha! 

The whole thing ends up being a plea for people of different faiths to get along set against a background of apocalyptic destruction. I enjoyed it, especially its non-zombie components. More nudity might have been nice. Recommended.

Quarantine (2008): adapted by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle from the movie Rec, written by Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo, and Paco Plaza; directed by John Erick Dowdle; starring Jennifer Carpenter (Angela), Steve Harris (Scott), Jay Hernandez (Jay), and Johnathon Schaech (George): Effective Americanization of the Spanish horror movie Rec throws out Roman Catholicism in favour of a more bioterroristic explanation for the horrors that await the cops, paramedics, film crew, and residents in an L.A. apartment building within which they're trapped under quarantine. 

It's another found-footage movie, and as such it plays better on a small screen (or at least less vertiginously). Jennifer Carpenter's character gets annoyingly reduced to screaming, Fay-Wray stand-in for the last third of the film. Admittedly, who wouldn't scream while being assailed by blood-thirsty, super-strong plague victims at every moment? The original was superior, though not by as much as horror cognoscenti like to pretend. Recommended.

Deep Time

Mythago Wood (1984) by Robert Holdstock: Transcendent fantasy novel about fantasy, legend, and myth. Englishman Stephen Huxley returns to his ancestral home of Oak Lodge after a year recuperating from wounds suffered in World War Two to discover his father dead and his brother, well, a bit bonkers. 

Huxley's brother Christian soon disappears into the encroaching Ryhope Wood, a relatively small stand of old-growth English forest, but only after explaining to Stephen that the woods are haunted by mythagos: avatars of English myths and legends given physical form by the woods and by the occasional interaction of the woods with a human mind.

Got that? The word 'mythago' is a portmanteau derived from 'myth' and 'imago.' Holdstock's concept, expanded upon at great and fascinating length throughout the novel, is intensely Jungian. The mythagos manifest and, in most cases, die after a time, to be reborn again and again. They vary sometimes depending on what version of a myth a human knows: Robin Hood, for instance, can change depending on what myth about him is relevant to the human. 

And the woods themselves are a pocket universe, much larger inside than out and well-defended against too much human incursion: most people are simply guided back out of the woods by labyrinthine, shifting pathways should they attempt to walk too far back into the Deep Time held within Ryhope Wood.

Holdstock soon gives Stephen a personal element to fuel his attempts to explore Ryhope Wood and discover the whereabouts of his brother. He'll also gain an ally, disfigured former RAF pilot Harry Keeton, whose plane crashed into a haunted woods in France similar to Ryhope. Together, they'll face the ancient myths and legends of England, and some more modern ones too, as they enter the maze. The deeper one goes, the longer the myths persist -- and the mythagos can be almost anything, from castles to walking corpses.

Mythago Wood is a marvelous meditation on the power and sources of myth, told as an entertaining and engaging work of fiction. Holdstock's greatest prose accomplishment lies in keeping everything clear while still poetically describing the events, creatures, and stories Stephen encounters. It all has the ring of real myth, whether it is or not. It's also a fantasy world that makes clear and reasoned sense. It's a triumph of fantasy. Highly recommended.

The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. Ballard: Deeply modernistic with its ideas of race memory and archetypal Edens hidden within human consciousness; deeply post-modern in its refusal to assert these systems as having any power to unite humanity in some universal whole.

J.G. Ballard's first novel is a John Wyndham global-disaster novel reimagined as a combination of Heart of Darkness and an extraordinarily odd journey into the disintegrating self. Dr. Kerans, a biologist attached to a biological survey team of the world government, is our protagonist. He first appears looking out onto the changed landscape of some European city whose name he's forgotten. 

No matter: the city has been drowned by the world-wide flood unleashed by terrible changes to the sun. The tiny remnant of organized humanity now lives at the poles, perhaps 5 million in number.

Kerans and the survey team catalogue the rapidly changing flora and fauna of the drowned metropolis. Species dead for millions of years seem to be returning, per the theory of Kerans and fellow biologist Bodkin that Earth is moving into a second Triassic Age. Giant alligators and iguanas and monitor lizards are everywhere, along with increasingly gigantic and exotic species of bats and insects and fish. All this in the 100 years or so since the seas started rising.

The book stays in the survey team's location, for the most part, bringing new characters and situations into a world in which a half-submerged Ritz hotel looms over the lagoon that drowns the cityscape. Kerans and several other characters suffer from lassitudinous dreams and visions -- of  a desire to head south into the super-heated tropics, and of an identity-destabilizing descent into some strange, returning group un-mind.

It's a hothouse book of mythic and psychological speculation, The Drowned World. Ballard's mastery of mood and mythically, psychological complex landscape description aren't much like anything he'd done in his short stories prior to this, which were more generally along the lines of Philip K. Dick as translated by a proper Englishman who's swallowed a thesaurus. Stunning, depressing, weirdly hopeful -- its images and questions stay with one after the novel's over. Highly recommended.

Terminal

Terminator: Genisys: written by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, based on characters and situations created by James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd, some of which were inspired by Outer Limits episodes written by Harlan Ellison; directed by Alan Taylor; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Guardian), Jason Clarke (John Connor), Emilia Clarke (Sarah Connor), Jai Courtney (Kyle Reese) and J.K. Simmons (O'Brien) (2015): Oh, what a terrible movie. About all one can charitably say about Terminator: Genisys is that it's competently directed and that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a few good moments as the old good-guy Terminator.

Otherwise, the movie makes a terrible hash out of the first two movies with a time-travel plot designed to negate all the significant events of the previous Terminator films and replace them with new, shoddier versions. It also gives us a strange, far-flung future of, um, 2017 in which everyone from the U.S. military to adolescent boys are ga-ga about a Cloud-based app that, umm, integrates all your computer-based systems. This is Genisys. Hoo ha.

There are mental workarounds to make the plot work, though they involve positing things the film doesn't seem to have thought of yet. And it's not an enjoyable enough film to give the benefit of fannish thought to. It's also perhaps the worst-cast big-budget movie I've seen in, perhaps, ever. Jason Clarke is vaguely serviceable as John Connor, who's now been played by almost as many different people on screen as Sherlock Holmes, but there's nothing in him to suggest the charismatic leader of the human resistance to Skynet and its machine army. Emilia Clarke (no relation, so far as I know), Daenerys in Game of Thrones, seems to have invested so much effort into creating an American accent that she can't reliably furnish adequate line readings.  And Jai Courtney is utterly without charisma or interest as Kyle Reese. 

The script compounds the problem by giving them almost nothing to work with. The movie spits out the famous lines from earlier Terminator movies in different forms and coming from different characters. This is what passes for wit. 

What also passes for wit is that Arnold's old Terminator (the 'Guardian' of the credits) now repeatedly plays Mr. Spock to Courtney's Dr. McCoy. Well, Star Trek and The Terminator ARE both Paramount properties. The action sequences are competent except in situations that give us cartoon physics. Oh, cartoon physics. How many human characters would die in action movies without you?

This being what looks to be a failed attempt to generate more Terminator movies, I feel obligated to warn you that the ending is conditional. Well, if you watch until about halfway through the credits, anyway. It's just one more bad taste in a movie full of them. The film-makers even seem to crib an explanation of how time works from a Star Trek episode penned by Harlan Ellison, who once got an out-of-court settlement based on the original film's similarities to two Outer Limits episodes he penned in the 1960's. Is another Terminator lawsuit in the works? Not recommended.

Extinction is Extinction

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (1965): It's 1980. Earth has been under siege for nearly eight years by giant, fast-growing plants. The cities have fallen. The environment is collapsing as the plants destroy all other plant species and the animals that rely upon them as a result. Basically, humanity has become a rat hiding in fields of 600-foot-tall corn. And now whoever or whatever sent the plants has sent out the exterminators.

To say that Thomas Disch's first novel is an astonishingly bleak end-of-the-world novel is an understatement. We begin in terrible shape. Things don't get better. The plot focuses on a small Minnesota farming community on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, not so much shores. The plants have been relentlessly draining the Great Lakes for years.

So the town of Tassel, much of its original location overrun, has moved to the newly draining bottom of Lake Superior. There, Anderson, the Christian fundamentalist patriarch of the town, attempts to push back the plants and feed his town by growing corn. Just keeping the corn going requires a maximum effort by the village. Anderson believes they are being tested by God. But if they are, then God has gone silent. Or his answer is simply 'No.'

Disch invests this short, terse novel with effectively chosen moments of Biblical imagery and language and the occasional quote. But The Genocides is about the failure of all of humanity's institutions in the face of a sublime and indifferent menace, not a world in which a Christian God actually exists. Or any other gods. 

The occasional scene of terror gives way to scenes of fumbling, racing panic. Our protagonists can only flee or die. Or flee and die. It's a rich, full life. Their numbers dwindle. Winter comes. Internal tensions begin to destroy Tassel almost as effectively as the invasion. Will whatever is behind all this ever show its face? Good question. 

Even at this young age, Disch was a skilled stylist and an occasionally sardonic chronicler of human frailties. Some of Anderson's choices as a leader are understandable yet almost unspeakably grotesque, none moreso than a sort of Uber-Calvinist imitation of communion. We may become invested in whether or not some of the other characters survive, but it's an investment kept at a remove: it's doom alone that ultimately counts.

Disch was never known as a technically inclined science fiction writer, but the science of The Genocides still seems ruthlessly pragmatic and sound. The plants, devoid of personality and agency, nonetheless become an extraordinarily effective foil for humanity's own inhumanity, and for humanity's world-reshaping mistakes. The Earth is at the mercy of the ultimate invasive species. The crops must grow. The weeds and the vermin must go. Highly recommended.

Eyes of God

The Reaping: written by Brian Russo, Carey Hayes, and Chad Hayes; directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Hilary Swank (Katherine), David Morrissey (Doug) and Idris Elba (Ben) (2007): Dumb but good-looking horror film in that venerable sub-genre of the Christian apocalypse. Plagues start descending on a small, isolated Louisiana town. Plagues like the ten plagues of Egypt! Well, not quite, but the movie says they are.

So a female priest who's lost her faith after the death of her daughter and husband in the Sudan turns that loss of faith into the world's only university job as a debunker of miracles. That's Hilary Swank. And I'm not kidding.

She's even got Idris Elba as her scientist sidekick. And apparently they travel the world disproving miracles. And then she lectures about it at her Louisiana university. Does she have tenure? What department is she in? Did they pay a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner a lot for appearing in this movie? I hope so. They stick her in a peculiarly unfetching tank top for much of the film. Aren't there a lot of bugs in the bayou? Surely sleeves would be a good idea.

As this is a Hollywood production, debunking miracles proves to be an entirely bad thing, even though Hilary Swank saves a group of Chileans from an on-going toxic waste problem at the beginning of the film. But screw that, right?

Various shenanigans cause a bunch of residents of the Louisiana bayou town of Haven to call for Swank's help in solving the mystery of what appears to be a possessed girl and a mysterious murder. Pretty soon, dogs and cats are living together and there's mass hysteria. Also boils, blood for water, a rain of frogs, lice...

Stephen Rea periodically appears as a mostly useless Roman Catholic priest who knew Swank's character in Africa. He delivers some exposition that, as is de rigeur in dumb Christian horror movies, refers to absolutely nothing in terms of actual Christian mythology, and does so with great portentousness and absolutely no sense. Truly, he is Father Basil Exposition. Truly, God works in completely confusing ways so that the movie can go on for 100 minutes.

Stephen Hopkins directs in his usual competent way. There are a couple of nice moments involving locusts. Oh, and some fireballs. Lots of fireballs. Out of nowhere also comes the theft of a scene from the first Terminator movie. Don't worry. You'll know it when you see it. Not recommended.

Cube: written by Andre Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, and Graeme Manson; directed by Vincenzo Natali; starring Maurice Dean Wint (Quentin), David Hewlett (Worth), Nicole de Boer (Leaven), Nicky Guadagni (Holloway), Andrew Miller (Kazan), Julian Richings (Alderson) and Wayne Robson (Rennes) (1997): Fun, occasionally thought-provoking bit of horror in which several people wake up in a trap-filled building that consists of cubes they need to move through to find a (hypothetical) exit. It's certainly better than most subsequent horror efforts in this bizarre sub-genre, riffing on "The Lady or the Tiger?" in a technological world. The writers and director have real talent.

Performances are the key, and Nicole de Boer (Star Trek: DS9) and David Hewlett (Stargate: Atlantis) do much of the heavy lifting, along with Maurice Dean Wint as a cop with anger-control issues. The sets (or should I say set, as only one cube-room was built to stand in for all of them) are clever, as are elements of the script. Mathematics is important, kids! And be nice to autistic people -- you'll never know when you might need one's help.

That the whole movie functions as an occasionally heavy-handed metaphor for life itself pretty much goes without saying. While there are a few gory moments, the whole thing is much more in the vein of classic Twilight Zone than it is the torture-porn horror movies that would follow it into the 'escape from horror prison' sub-genre. Recommended.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: written and directed by Lorene Scarfaria; starring Steve Carell (Dodge), Keira Knightley (Penny), Rob Corddry (Warren), Martin Sheen (Frank), Connie Britton (Diane) and William Petersen (Trucker) (2012): A small independent film with an A-list cast, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World got an unfairly limited release last summer. It's a small gem of a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of impending global apocalypse.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is the sort of science-fiction film that most people don't realize is a science-fiction film because it's concerned with character and not plot. But it is science fiction of the adult sort that almost never make it into a film, one in which the social implications of the impact of one changed premise upon a society are explored with wit, humour, and a certain amount of poignance.

A giant (actually, a really, really giant, as in ridiculously giant) asteroid will soon destroy life as we know it. On the bright side, the asteroid is named Matilda. Steve Carell's Dodge, whose wife runs out on him with three weeks to go until doomsday, is a slightly repressed and deeply unhappy insurance salesman. Keira Knightley is his free-spirit upstairs neighbour. Some of what happens between them can be predicted, but not all of it.

Forced together into a road trip, she to find a plane to get her back home to England to be with her family and he to desperately reconnect with the love of his life, they have a series of wacky but thankfully realistically muted adventures that net them a truck with a bullet hole in the windshield, a cute dog, and a lot of unpacking of emotional baggage.

Developments with the asteroid mostly go on in the background; in the foreground, people run the gamut of emotions and actions one would expect in such a situation. The power-company people are the real heroes here, as the electricity stays on pretty much right to the end. Kudos!

A nitpicker with even a bit of astronomical knowledge will probably decide by the end of this film that one way or the other, aliens are involved with this asteroid. With personal theories resulting from these asteroidal shenanigans (though the science here is at least as realistic as what happens with the comet and the asteroid in Deep Impact and Armageddon, respectively), one can decide what happens after the final scene in a way that I don't think writer-director Lorene Scarfaria intended.

As it stands, this is a worthy addition to that small but sturdy sub-genre of films with the apocalypse in the background and not the foreground (see also Last Night, Melancholia, and apparently five or six comedies coming out in the next six months). Knightley is really good, as is Carell, and the supporting characters are also all clearly defined and believeable. Recommended.

Cry for Love

The Boys Volume 7: The Innocents: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson, Russ Braun, and John McCrea (2010): Revelations follow revelations, as Bill Butcher comes to believe Hughie is secretly working for the evil Vought-American corporation because his girlfriend turns out to be a member of premiere superhero group The Seven.

Hughie being Hughie, this is all a coincidence aggravated by Hughie's blithe ignorance of current events and, for that matter, who exactly it is that he and the rest of The Boys are fighting. Hughie's also going to finally find out a different terrible truth about his girlfriend, but only after spending time keeping tabs on Superduper, the only superhero group composed of neither bastards nor poseurs.

That's because, no joke, they're all suffering from major mental health issues which render them benign, loveable, and pretty much harmless. Hughie's relationship with the members of Superduper (a parody of DC's teen supergroup of the 31st century, the Legion of Superheroes) will pay dividends much later in the series. Recommended.

The Boys Volume 10: Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson (2011): Collection of the six-issue miniseries that finally laid out Boys leader Bill Butcher's tortured personal history. The violence is often overwhelming, as is the tragedy: Butcher is cut from the same mould as Ennis's Saint of Killers in the earlier Preacher series, a violent hardcase redeemed by love and then further damned with the loss of that love. Recommended.


The Boys Volume 11: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Russ Braun, John McCrea, Keith Burns, and Darick Robertson (2011-2012): The corporate controlled superheroes have decided to take over the world. Well, 65% of them, anyway, while the other 35% lay low and wait to see who wins.

Have Bill Butcher's plans prepared the world to successfully stand against several thousand nigh-invulnerable wankers, or will the vile and vainglorious Homelander soon rule over everything? And which side will corporation Vought-American, which didn't authorize a hostile takeover of the United States by the superheroes it created, come down on as all Hell breaks loose? And will Bill Butcher finally get vengeance upon the Homelander for the rape and subsequent death in (super-powered) childbirth of his wife? And if everything ends here, why is there one more volume to go? Highly recommended.

The Boys Volume 12: The Bloody Doors Off: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Garth Ennis, Russ Braun, and Darick Robertson (2012): The six-year, 90-issue, 2000-page odyssey of The Boys ends here, a few months after the blood-soaked superheroic attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Loveable Scottish Boys member Hughie is still having relationship problems with former superheroine Starlight, more normally referred to as Annie. Vought-American is still up to lots of things, most of them profitable and dreadful. But with armageddon averted, Boys leader Bill Butcher suggests that the Boys take a vacation.

But when a Russian superhero ally of the Boys shows up dead along with a black marketeer, the vacation is cut short. And then the deaths of both supporting and main characters start to mount. Who is tidying up? Was the superhero coup the real threat? Is Hughie capable, mentally and physically, of engaging this newly revealed conspiracy and saving millions or perhaps even billions of lives? Is this Garth Ennis' last superhero comic book? All will be revealed. Highly recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.

When Animals Evolve



Canada, now proud home to the Insect Revolution!

Jack Kirby's Kamandi Omnibus Volume 1: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and D. Bruce Berry (1972-74; collected 2011): In 1972, DC Comics' then-Editor-in-Chief Carmine Infantino gave up on getting the rights to do a Planet of the Apes comic book and turned to writer-artist Jack Kirby to create something similar. Kirby had never seen Planet of the Apes and wasn't initially supposed to do anything other than create the book. But with the demise of most of Kirby's Fourth World books for DC, Kirby got tagged to write and illustrate his Apes knock-off, which he called Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth.

　
Kamandi quickly became Kirby's most popular book for DC in the 1970's, one that would only get cancelled six years after its debut because of the infamous line-wide DC Implosion. But by that time, others were writing and drawing it -- Kirby returned to Marvel in 1976 for four years.
　

A double-paged splash in the first issue suggests that Kirby had been told about an iconic scene in the first Planet of the Apes movie -- the splash features the Statue of Liberty half-sunk underwater. And we soon meet talking apes. But Kirby quickly moved into a wilder, woolier universe than anything Charlton Heston ever encountered. This was the future after a nebulous Great Disaster redrew the maps and rewrote genetics. This was the world of Kamandi!
　

Kamandi, a scrappy blond teenager, gets forced out of the bunker he's been living in his entire life, a bunker called Command D (get it?), when the bunker is overrun by raiders and Kamandi's grandfather killed. No other humans survive in the bunker.
　

But the raiders are intelligent, bipedal wolves. In the world after disaster, a wide variety of animals are now intelligent and bipedal, while others (killer whales, snakes) are intelligent but not bipedal. Some will turn out to be Kamandi's allies and friends -- the Lions are civilized environmentalists; a giant grasshopper becomes a valued companion; and Tiger Prince Tuftan becomes one of Kamandi's few animal friends, along with helpful Doctor Canis. Some will be pains in the neck -- the thieving wolves and rats, the pirate leopards...
　

Conversely, much of humanity has reverted to a pre-civilized state and, furthermore, has become something of an endangered species in most parts of the world. Some humans are enslaved, some kept as pets and guards, others put in zoos. A few radically altered humans persist as tiny but courageous Mole People (!) who keep ancient machines running simply because the noise drives off a giant, voracious earthworm (!!).
　

Kirby shuffles and reshuffles the thematic and conceptual deck repeatedly. The book moves rapidly from story to story, from animal kingdom to animal kingdom, and from one devastated but familiar locale to another. Kirby soon indulges his ability to synthesize myth and popular culture into odd and rewarding combinations. I mean, pirate leopards working for a greedy but cultured talking snake who runs a piracy operations called Sacks? A 100-foot-tall talking ape dubbed Tiny who is caged by Hoover Dam? It's weird stuff. Improbable and enjoyable.

　

My favourite creations here (other than the Eater, that radiation-charged, Moleman-hating, gigantic earthworm) are the Fission people -- genetically altered humans whom Kamandi teams up with on several occasions -- and their floating, super-scientific city Tracking Site. Therein dwells Morticoccus, a giant germ that eats everything and anything biological or metallic, indestructible but caged forever. Or is it? Whee!
　

DC would severely misuse Kamandi's world during its Countdown to Final Crisis/Final Crisis event a few years back. One measure of that failure would be that they made Morticoccus a normal-sized super-germ, which is way less awesome and creepy than a germ that can engulf an entire city and which is apparently highly intelligent AND EVEN APPEARS TO HAVE EYES. But DC has also finally made Kirby's entire run on Kamandi available in the Omnibus format, so kudos for that. It's Kirby's last lengthy run on a title, and one of the most enjoyable from his entire career. Also, it would make an awesome movie. Highly recommended.

End of Dazed and Confused

Promethea Book 5, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia (2003-2005; collected 2006): Promethea, the 1600-year-old demi-goddess whose current host/personality is young college student Sophie Bangs, will end the world if Bangs allows her to manifest again. So Bangs hides from the government and from herself in New York under an assumed name.

But the paranoid, increasingly militaristic U.S. government has recruited science-hero Tom Strong to track Promethea down because Strong knew one of Promethea's previous avatars back in the 1950's. Strong reluctantly agrees, but he doesn't believe that Promethea really means to end the world.

But she does. She has to. That's her job.

And so the end comes to the Earth of Moore's America's Best Comics imprint, ushered in by the unstoppable Promethea despite the best efforts of Tom Strong and the rest of that world's heroes. From the realms of fiction and poetry and magic and gods descends judgment on everything. But what does the end of the world actually look like?

Well, it doesn't look like the end of the world in Moore's Watchmen. Promethea is a much different bringer of catastrophe than Ozymandias. And violence is not a solution or a means to a solution.

Moore's 32-issue exegesis on magic and the nature of reality comes to a stunning end here, beautifully imagined by both Moore and his artistic collaborators J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia. This may be one of the most visually beautiful comic books ever created, and one of the most visually complex. It's not for everybody -- this is a didactic essay about Moore's actual beliefs ever since he decided to become a practicing magician (!) in the 1990's.

Images and iterations of the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, various occultists and pretty much every religion under the sun get combined and recombined within Moore's apocalyptic vision -- with the caveat that 'apocalypse' derives from the Greek word for "revelation" or "lifting of the veil."

Never has Aleister Crowley made so many appearances in a comic-book series not named Aleister Crowley. Hurry down doomsday! Highly recommended.

Too Many Vampires

The Passage by Justin Cronin (2010): The Passage caused a bidding war among publishers that topped out at $3.75 million for the publishing rights and an unknown (and probably greater) amount for Ridley Scott's purchase of the film rights. Pretty good for a third novel from a writer whose first two novels were acclaimed and awarded for their literary merit but, insofar as I know, lacked vampire apocalypses.

There are a lot of good things in The Passage, especially in the first 500 pages or so (it checks in at about 760 pages in trade paperback, with two more volumes of the trilogy on the way). Cronin has a flair for description and characterization that elevates this above the run-of-the-mill thriller, with passages of occasional lyric beauty and some keenly drawn sympathetic characters. The plot is suspenseful, the apocalypse nicely imagined. He's not so good at imagining the inside of unsympathetic characters, but that seems to be part of the ethos of the novel -- there's really only one truly despicable person in The Passage, and he isn't a vampire. Everyone else has his or her reasons.

We begin in 2016. A U.S. military-funded expedition to South America yields what appears to be the source of all vampire legends: a bat-carried virus that turns people into, well, vampires. They're super-strong, nearly invulnerable, extremely photo-sensitive, tear people to pieces and eat them an awful lot, and can transmit their affliction to others. They also lose all body hair and run around naked -- essentially, they're a cross between the vampire in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Will Ferrell's character in Old School.

The military sees this a golden opportunity to "weaponize the human body", and begins experimenting with the virus in a secret Colorado laboratory. Things go well. And then they don't. They really, really don't. Boy, do they not go well at all.

We leave the major characters of the 2016-2018 portion of the novel behind at about the 250-page mark with the complete collapse of civilization well underway. A couple of vignettes take us through the next 93 years until we arrive at a small California mountain-top settlement that's survived the ongoing apocalypse, and we are introduced to our next cast of characters. Here, the novel shifts into a post-apocalyptic mode that recalls novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, only with vampires and a lot of late teen-aged angst. Lots of stuff happens. And 500 pages later, we end on a cliffhanger.

There's a major logical flaw very early in the novel that may derail some of your appreciation for the work if you figure it out. I'm not telling you. Like Ontario, it's yours to discover. The first 500 pages really do zip by, with solid world- and character-building yoked to a rollercoaster of a plot. And what a rollercoaster!

No, seriously, what a rollercoaster! After 500 pages of reversals, apparent deaths, shocking developments, shocking returns from the dead, more shocking deaths, and a casino that explodes because of a 93-year-long build-up of sewer gases, I started to feel less like I was on a rollercoaster and more like I was being punched in the head repeatedly.

Cronin never runs out of ideas (though they're often other people's ideas synthesized into new combinations), but after awhile you may wish he would. Or save some for the sequel. As The Passage has often been compared to the first volume in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'll illustrate the problem with the climax using The Fellowship of the Ring: imagine if Gandalf and company fought a Balrog, then fought two Balrogs, then fought an army of Balrogs, and then found out that there were 500 more Balrogs between them and Mordor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, both Boromir and Gandalf die and then come back to life, only to die again. Or maybe not. Now imagine that scenario on speed. That's what the novel accelerates into, out of the blue and into the black.

By the end, there's too much of everything. So too much of everything. Two loveable animals killed for no discernible plot reason except to jerk some tears; two 'good' characters with what amount to superpowers; two Magical Negros (seriously -- it's as if Stephen King decided to have both Mother Abigail and John Coffey dispensing magical blackness in The Stand); two action set-pieces involving a train pursued by a horde of vampires; 12 vampire lords (actually, 13. Or maybe 14. Maybe it's an homage to the replicant-number problem in the original version of Blade Runner); so many teary farewells and subsequent teary hellos that I lost track; bioluminiscent vampires (which are I assume a satiric commentary on the sparkly vampires of Twilight); multiple nicknames for vampires, none of them being the obvious 'vampire' or 'vamps' (instead we get 'smokes' or 'jumps' or 'flyers'); one super-magical little girl; two dead characters who return from the dead and really, really shouldn't have; one fairly major character we know is doomed because he alone never gets an internal monologue; a seemingly haunted house; and repeated references to an academic conference more than a millennium after the outbreak of the vampire plague that recall Margaret Atwood's frame narrative for A Handmaid's Tale but which don't help at all with generating suspense.

This last one is quite interesting, as it's similar to what Max Brooks did in World War Z -- that is, contain the apocalypse within a shell narrative demonstrating that the end of the world did not, in fact, entirely arrive. It defangs the menace of the apocalypse (and the vampires), and I can't say as I think it's a good idea. Essentially, it puts a guardrail up for the weak of heart. Someone will survive! But one of the points of an apocalyptic narrative in the contemporary world is that someone may NOT survive, and you're supposed to read to the end to find out.

The dual trains-outracing-vampires sequences illustrate one of the problems with Narrative Overkill. The first sequence is startling, in part because the character describing the events can't actually see what's happening -- she can hear what's happening, she can respond to the reactions of the people around her who actually know what's happening, and she can describe what she learned later about what she was hearing. It's quite unnerving and evocative, and leaves a lot to the imagination, which is where a lot of great horror ultimately resides.

The second train sequence plays like a storyboard for a Mummy movie, with rivers of fast-moving vampires pursuing a train in what really reads like a description of a CGI scene from a big-budget film. It isn't evocative at all, or particularly scary, and the conclusion of this sequence also operates as a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card that immediately solves what might have actually been something of a messy plot problem. It's dull, it's manipulative, and it's completely inorganic. Remember when Spielberg couldn't restrain himself and had to give us a second 'bike flying through the air' sequence in E.T., only with more kids and far less impact? That's Cronin's problem here. He's too schematic in his attempts to top himself.

Overall, though, I enjoyed The Passage more than I was annoyed by it. The first 500 pages really are solid and sometimes spectacular; the last 260 pages are increasingly wearying and manipulative. I will be interested to read the middle book of the trilogy. Right now, Cronin could go either way as a thriller writer, and I'm interested to see which way that will be. Recommended.

Dead boys, Demons, Darkness

Comics:

The Sandman Presents The Dead Boy Detectives by Ed Brubaker, Bryan Talbot and Steve Leialoha: A slight delight almost entirely populated by characters created by Neil Gaiman during his Sandman days (hence 'The Sandman Presents'), including the two boarding-school ghost-friends from A Season of Mists and immortal Morpheus-pal Hob Gadling. The boys, who elected not to go with Death back in A Season of Mists, have been goofing off around London ever since, and have now opened a detective agency with its office in a treehouse in the yard of a haunted house. Street kids are disappearing and the turning up dead and extremely desiccated. So the dead boys take the case -- luckily, while most adults can't see them, kids and teenagers can. Various hijinks ensue. Recommended.


Books:

Darkness Demands by Simon Clark (2001): There's a sub-genre of horror in which a town is imperilled repeatedly by a horror which returns cyclically. In Stephen King's It, the creature has been terrorizing the town of Derry, Maine every 28 years or so since before there was even a town there; in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show travelling carnival returns to the twons on its schedule at about the same frequency. In Darkness Demands, something that 'lives' beneath the massive English cemetery known locally as the Necropolis returns every 70 years or so to request things from randomly selected townspeople. The requests are minor -- bars of chocolate and pints of porter are to be left in the cemetery prior to a certain date. Failure to do so results in extremely bad luck for the person who refuses to do so, and for the entire town if enough people refuse to honour the request. What's doing it and why? Well, you'll have to read the novel. This is a very tightly plotted, suspenseful novel with a climax you may not see coming. Recommended.


A Lower Deep by Tom Piccirilli (2004): The narrator (referred to only as The Necromancer or The Master Summoner) and his demonic familiar Self find themselves pulled back into the machinations of the Necromancer's old coven leader, whose previous major feat of magic destroyed his previous coven with the exception of the narrator and a couple of others. Piccirilli draws on Christian, gnostic and kabbalist sources to portray the magic used by his characters, with a bit of Marvel's Dr. Strange thrown in for good measure (spells crackle and arc before being released). What seems like a pissing match between two former friends turns out to be something much larger, as a version of the Christian apocalypse begins to seem pretty much certain. Piccirilli plays fair with the implications of an apocalypse right out of the Book of Revelation -- would it be such a bad thing if one was on the side of the saved? -- while sketching in enough of the rules of magic so that the novel remains 'fair', even in its surprising final pages. Recommended.