Four Movies, 9000 Characters

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016): written by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle; directed by Dan Trachtenberg; starring Jhn Goodman (Howard), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Michelle), and John Gallegher Jr. (Emmett): Delightful psychological thriller with several fine twists. The writing is sharp, the direction from first-time helmer Dan Trachtenberg precise, and the acting superb. And that's all I"m telling you so that you can go spoiler-free. Highly recommended.

San Andreas (2015): written by Carlton Cuse, Andre Fabrizio, and Jeremy Passmore; directed by Brad Peyton; starring Dwayne Johnson (Gaines), Carla Gugino (Carla), Alexandra Daddario (Blake), and Paul Giamatti (Dr. Hayes): Goofy, implausible, impossible shenanigans involving a massive, San Francisco-centered earthquake. Dwayne Johnson, playing a Los Angeles fire-department rescue pilot, is having major marital issues with estranged wife Carla Gugino because Of Course He Is. But when earthquakes come a-knocking, Johnson pilots helicopters, cars, SUVs, boats, and airplanes to save his wife and 20-year-old daughter, who's in San Francisco. 

This is the sort of movie in which visual effects carry pretty much everything. They're OK, and the direction by Brad Peyton is mostly brisk. Among other things, San Andreas gives us an impossibly large tsunami that couldn't actually happen in the San Francisco area. And it's going the wrong way. Maybe this is a remake of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Certainly no worse than the disaster movies of the 1970s. Lightly recommended.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016): written by David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio; directed by Zack Snyder; starring Ben Affleck (Batman), Henry Cavill (Superman), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), and Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor): A lighter touch on both the writing and directorial ends could have made the 2 1/2 hours of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice pass a lot more smoothly. However, for all the darkness of his colour palette, director Snyder at least aims for something epic and movie-like, which is more than I can say about 90% of all Marvel films, most of which are filmed as if they were the most expensive, stylistically inert TV movies ever made.

Ben Affleck is perfectly fine as Batman, Henry Cavill is solid as Superman, and Gal Gadot is a hoot as Wonder Woman. There's a plot explanation for Jesse Eisenberg's loopy Lex Luthor, but it's in the deleted scenes. Amy Adams plays Lois Lane as the film's one real ray of light. The bombastic sturm-und-drang of the battle sequences may actually play better on a small screen, where they'll be less sonically and visually overwhelming. And hey, a Mother Box! Parademons! Batman with goggles! A Boom Tube! An early Excalibur (1981) reference that pays off visually in the climax! Recommended.

The Princess Bride (1987): adapted by William Goldman from his own novel; directed by Rob Reiner; starring Cary Elwes (Westley), Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya), Chris Sarandon (Prince Humperdinck), Christopher Guest (Count Rugen), Wallace Shawn (Vizzini), Andre the Giant (Fezzik), Robin Wright (Buttercup), Peter Falk (Grandfather), and Fred Savage (Grandson): Still a gold standard for light-hearted meta-fantasy after all these years. William Goldman's screenplay is slightly sweeter than his even more meta novel. The cast is great, though Billy Crystal remains somewhat jarring -- he's a little too tonally off to be funny enough to justify. Andre the Giant steals the show, though, as the amiable, reflexively violent Fezzik. A movie from the time when giants walked the Earth, and the giants were funny! 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.

War Stars

The Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear (1993): In this sequel to Bear's excellent late-1980's science-fiction disaster novel The Forge of God, Earth has been murdered by self-replicating machines created by a race known to the rest of galactic civilization only as the Killers, who have seeded the Milky Way with machines that seek out and destroy intelligent life wherever they find it.

The Benefactors, benevolent machines created by an alliance of interstellar civilizations, arrived in our solar system too late to fully defeat the machines of the Killers, though they did rescue tens of thousands of people from the dying Earth (along with a laundry list of species) and begin the process of renovating Mars and Venus into two new homes for humanity's survivors.

Part of humanity's bargain with the Benefactors involves the selection of a crew for a 'Ship of the Law' sent forth to find and destroy the home of the Killers if they still exist. Every race saved by the Benefactors sends such a ship forth, partially built from the materials of that species' dead homeworld if the homeworld has been destroyed.

The sentient, benevolent machines of the Benefactors are cagey -- in order to protect themselves, the races of the alliance don't tell the races they've rescued who they are or where they live, at least not immediately. Any intelligent, space-faring race may become a Wolf species like the Killers. In space, the best defense is silence and misdirection. The Killers targetted Earth because of the radio and television signals that have been flooding into space for the last 100 years. Highly developed species maintain a low electromagnetic footprint as a matter of self defense.

Five years into their mission, the 80+ human teenagers of the Ship of the Law Dawn Treader come across a solar system that seems to be the home of the Killers. Hundreds of years have passed outside the ship as it moved at speeds close to light in its search (welcome to relativity -- the universe of the novel doesn't seem to allow for faster-than-light travel). Technologies that can wipe solar systems off the map are about to compete -- and one will be found wanting.

Martin, the main narrator, is the son of one of The Forge of God's protagonists, and we see much of the search and the battles with the Killers through his eyes. This is hard, extrapolational science fiction, Bear's specialty. Those laws of physics which aren't yet known are extrapolated logically from some fairly arcane ideas of Bear's about how things really work at the quantum level. The result is a mix of the probable (relativistic effects being the most 'normative' thing here from a scientific point-of-view) and the meticulously extrapolated (everything from quark matter to the instantaneous communications devices the crew calls 'noaches' for 'no channel').

And along with an examination of group dynamics comes one fascinating alien race -- the Brothers, from another Ship of the Law that joins the Dawn Treader in its final assault, who are cooperative life-forms made up of smaller, potentially independent creatures that look like giant centipedes. Some time and attention is lavished on the culture of the peaceful Brothers, whose biological need for cooperation makes them less war-like and more thoughtful than the humans. They're terrifically imagined aliens -- their group-form nature has even affected their mathematics, which deals only in probabilities and not in integers.

In the end, though, it's the space battles that form the twin nuclei of the novel's narrative. Going back to E.E. "Doc" Smith's space operas of the 1920's and 1930's, print science fiction has given us star wars that make Star Wars look like a fart in an elevator, and Anvil of Stars is no exception. But Bear takes care to evaluate the ethics of war -- and indeed of genocide -- through the contrasting viewpoints of his human and alien characters.

The narrative also works as a group bildungsroman for the various human characters, as all must wrestle with why and how to achieve justice against a race that may no longer remember why it did what it did -- or, alternately, to survive the psychic trauma knowingly exacted by the still-thriving, still-malevolent Killers as they play hide-and-seek behind artificial worlds, alien races and entire civilizations. Thoughtful, insightful and thrilling. Highly recommended.