The Running Man (1982)

The Running Man (1982) by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman: Almost unrecognizable as the novel that spawned the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Running Man is a gritty, grimy, raw slice of action-dystopia. Poor people compete in a variety of televised game shows (my favourite is Swim With Crocodiles, actually). Our protagonist is a skinny malcontent. Definitely not Schwarzenegger material. He's way more interesting and heroic than that, hoping against hope that he can strike a heroic blow against the System. 

And thanks to one of the greatest coincidences in the history of Stephen King, maybe our Ben Richards, contestant on The Running Man, may get to be that heroic spanner in the works! A reality show in which contestants are hunted to death for the amusement of the masses seems more relevant today than in 1982. The ending is probably unfilmable. I'll leave you to discover why. Recommended.

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race

SUPER BEST FRIENDS AGAIN !!!

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (2016-2017/ Collected 2017): written by Brian Azzarello and Frank Miller; illustrated by Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson, Frank Miller, Eduardo Risso, John Romita Jr., Brad Anderson, and Alex Sinclair: Rumours are that Frank Miller had very little to do with the writing of this follow-up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986-87) and The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002). His art duties involve the inking of a few covers and drawing inter-chapter 'mini-comics' that contextualize portions of the main story. 

The main story is credited as 'Story by Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello.' Penciller Andy Kubert and inker Klaus Janson (inker of The Dark Knight Returns) do a fair job of maintaining their own styles while also paying homage to Miller's art style circa 1986. Miller's art in the mini-comics is sort of awful at points, reaching a nadir when he hinges the Atom's legs backwards, having apparently forgotten how knees work.

Taking up three years after The Dark Knight Strikes Again and six years after The Dark Knight Returns, DKIII again features aging versions of DC's major superheroes in a near-dystopic future. Events conspire to team up Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many others to oppose a new global threat. One of the signs that Miller may not be writing much of the book is that Superman comes across pretty well for once, even saving Batman's life at one point. It's a shocker. 

Azzarello, if he scripted most of this, supplies lots of tough-guy and tough-girl introspection alongside all the fist fights and explodey-ness. Kubert and Janson give us suitably over-sized heroes and villains, innocents and grotesques and all that jazz. The whole thing goes down smoothly and way, way faster than the original The Dark Knight Returns and its intermittently densely packed pages of dialogue and exposition set off by full-page spreads. There's still satire here, particularly of both Obama and Trump, but it's pretty boilerplate stuff. 

Azzarello, not really known for writing superhero punch-ups, has written a giant superhero punch-up. It's enjoyable, certainly far more enjoyable than the clumsy and misanthropic Dark Knight Strikes Again, though no touch on the original. Miller's far-right politics seems to manifest in the idea of Kryptonian cultists who look and act a lot like stereotypical Muslim fundamentalists, but the comparison is never pushed too far (and these fundamentalists appear to believe in gender equality). In all, lightly recommended.

Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One (2018): adapted from the Ernest Cline novel by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tye Sheridan (Wade/ Parzival), Olivia Cooke (Samantha/ Atr3mis), Ben Mendelsohn (Forgettable Corporate Villain), Lena Waithe (Helen/ Aech), T.J. Miller (I-R0k), Mark Rylance (Halliday), and Simon Pegg (Ogden Morrow): 

Steven Spielberg's latest is also the latest in a now never-ending stream of movies to Break the Internet, Ready Player One is an enjoyable, slight adventure that improves upon the novel by virtue of being able to show some of the adventures inside virtual reality. 

Our boilerplate young hero, aged-up to 18 from high-school age and made slim because God forbid some goddamned fat kid should be the hero of a $175 million movie, wanders the virtual reality Oasis in a dystopic, corporate-controlled future. 

He's on a quest to find three Easter Eggs left in the Oasis by its late creator (Mark Rylance, game as ever but woefully too old for the role). He teams up with four other freedom-fighting young whippersnappers online and then in the real world to find the Eggs and gain control of the Oasis before nightmarish corporation IOI wins the hunt and puts ads everywhere. I guess. Net neutrality forever!

A sequence set 'inside' Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is the showstopper, after which things seem to go on forever to rapidly decreasing effect. That Spielberg and company added a gratuitous, lengthy, real-world car chase intercut with the virtual climax of the movie isn't so much gilding the lily as it is covering it in lead. 

Ben Mendlesohn is about as forgettable a corporate villain as one can imagine, which seems to be the point. That his online avatar appears to be the Berni Wrightson-designed Captain Sternn from the Heavy Metal movie just seems baffling. Due to rights issues, the entire film takes place in an alternate future in which Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars never existed. Lightly recommended.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K. Dick

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K. Dick: Winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 1974, beating out Ursula Le Guin's revered The Dispossessed. Set in a Dystopian America of 1988, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said presents a world in which America is a terrible, terrible place to live. 

The powers that be have isolated the universities, where college dissidents have been literally forced underground by the government as a result of the Second Civil War between Nixon's presidency and all forms of civil disobedience. America is now a police state with a Police Marshal at the top and five regional Police Generals below that position. A person can't function for long in society without a host of official IDs, and as the students and protesters don't have such ID's, they're easily discovered by the seemingly endless series of official checkpoints throughout America. 

But the masses -- especially those living away from the depressed inner cities -- still need entertainment. And Jason Taverner, popular talk-show host and singer, is one of America's most popular and well-paid entertainers. 

However, one morning, Jason Taverner wakes up in a fleabag hotel room with no ID. He at least has 5000 dollars in his pocket. But as he soon discovers, he no longer exists either on record or in anyone's memories. What has happened? Well, it's a Philip K. Dick novel, so the answer turns out to be typically reality-bending.

Taverner's odyssey to find out what has happened takes him through various levels of the new American society, from ID forgers to police bureaucrats to middle-class potters. The novel soon provides him with a co-protagonist, Police General Felix Buckman. Buckman isn't actually a bad guy -- he's spent his career at the top trying to save the lives of the enemies of the State, though he's still a dystopian bureaucrat with more than one skeleton in his closet.

This is one of Dick's sharpest, most focused later novels. Nonetheless, it still abounds and swirls with those brilliant, disturbing flashes of Dickian imagination. Most prominently in terms of the novel's critique of certain beliefs both real-world and science-fictional, in this world, there are highly intelligent people genetically engineered to be supermen (indeed, Taverner is one).  They're called 'Sixes,' after their batch number (a nod to Dick's own Nexus-6 androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner?). But the sixes couldn't conquer the world because they can't stand being around one another: the superman abhors the superman, and thus fails to conquer.

There is a bizarre form of phone sex that can cause permanent brain damage and ultimately death. There are flying cars and pin-sized nukes and... conventional 33 1/3 LPs and 45s in juke boxes? Cigarettes are heavily regulated by the State, while pot and mescaline are readily and legally available to all. African-Americans are now seen as a rare, exotic group that's close to extinction thanks to decades of genocidal eugenics. And behind it all, there's a dystopia based on fear and paperwork. 

There's also hope, though, especially as the novel ends. The dystopian police state will not endure as long as people are capable of small acts of empathy and compassion, and of creating beauty. And entropy affects everything, good and evil, the same: the dystopia will succumb to entropy just like everything else. It's a fine novel that sends back echoes of the world we live in, refracted by Dick's prismatic and unique imagination. The title is derived from a song (an ayre, actually) by 16th-century composer John Dowland ("Flow, my tears, fall from your springs"). You'll have to read the novel to discover the significance. Highly recommended.

The Widening Gyre

Grendel: Black, White, and Red/ Red, White, and Black (Mostly 1998-2002) (Collected in Grendel Omnibus Volume 2 (2013): written by Matt Wagner; illustrated by Matt Wagner, Duncan Fegredo, Kelley Jones, Ashley Wood, Michael Zulli, Mike Allred, David Mack, and many others: Writer-artist Matt Wagner would return several times to the first incarnation of his villain-hero Grendel over the decades, early 1980's crime boss and novelist Hunter Rose. This made a lot of sense, as the initial story devoted to Rose was only about 60 pages long.

And yes, these stories are black, white, and red: those are the only 'colours' used, and the effect is mostly smashing. 

Black, White, and Red and Red, White, and Black saw Wagner writing short tales of the early Grendelverse for an astonishing list of artists. Even if one doesn't like the writing, one can find a lot to love here in these often wildly disparate artistic takes on the world of Hunter Rose.

Me, I like the writing fine for the most part, though a couple of Wagner's forays into poetry and doggerel fall pretty flat. Helping things is Wagner's decision to focus most of the individual tales on the supporting cast. A little of Hunter Rose's glib, smug nihilism goes an awfully long way. But Grendel as instead a terrifying secondary character in most of these stories works very well indeed.

I wouldn't recommend reading the two collections in one sitting. Grendel's world is a grim one, albeit often laced through with gallows humour. With the sharp writing and art here, the whole thing is highly recommended. Look for it in-print in the first Grendel omnibus from Dark Horse. 

Grendel: God and the Devil (1988-89/ Collected 2013 in Grendel Omnibus 3): written by Matt Wagner; illustrated by John K. Snyder III, Jay Geldhof, Joe Matt, and Bernie Mireault: Matt Wagner re-situates the epic Grendel narrative in early 26th-century America in this ambitious work of dystopian science-fantasy. I think it's swell.

Climate change and a limited nuclear exchange have left large stretches of North America uninhabitable, with most of the continent's population now living in the Western states. That's also where the newish North American Vatican, Vatican Ouest, is located -- in New Mexico. The various levels of government in North America have been replaced by corporations which battle for dominance with the Vatican and the Confederacy of Police (C.O.P.).

Wagner and artists John K. Snyder III and Jay Geldhof make this installment of Grendel a dense work of science fiction and political satire. But they also manage to stage fine, sometimes harrowing sequences of action and horror. 

What's changed in the Grendelverse is that now the body-hopping demonic entity finds itself fighting on the side of life itself. The Pope -- who will quickly be revealed to be an old nemesis of Grendel -- has a plan that's not going to do humanity any good. And so the new Grendel and Orion Assante, an ambitious but principled corporate type, find themselves extremely unlikely allies, with the full power of Vatican Ouest against them.

There's action and horror and world-building galore in what was originally published in ten issues of defunct Comico's Grendel back in the late 1980's. It's an interesting case study in how Wagner saw the future back then, or at least the future as a metaphor for the present. His world pits the mercenary  private police of C.O.P. against anyone they're paid to deal with. And the 'commmisioner' of C.O.P., the brutal and pragmatic Pellon Cross, becomes the fourth side of the triangle of Grendel, Orion, and the Pope. 

Oh, and there are animal metaphors galore, including a running joke about an extremely hard-to-kill rat. You'll be reminded of Wagner's Canadian-ness when 1980's Canadian band Jerry Jerry and the Sons of the Rhythm Orchestra make a guest appearance. And you'll laugh at some of Wagner's inspiration for names (his new Grendel is named for Margaret Thatcher, for one). 

This is dense storytelling -- perhaps a bit too dense on some pages for the reduced page size of the Grendel Omnibus series. So dig out your magnifying glass. This is one of the great comic-book narratives of the 1980's and 1990's. It can stand beside Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns without suffering by comparison. Highly recommended.

Orbital Revolutions

Elysium: written and directed by Neill Blomkamp; starring Matt Damon (Max), Jodie Foster (Delacourt), Sharlto Copley (Kruger) and Alice Braga (Frey) (2013): Elysium's somewhat more enjoyable a second time on a smaller screen. The implausibilities can now safely be ignored, for the most part -- you already know they're coming, and they're still ridiculous. The telegraphing and over-explaining still grate at points. Do we really need to be reminded twice about things we saw at the beginning of a 100-minute-long movie? And does every hero have to turn into Jesus Christ?

On the other hand, Neill Blomkamp possesses a rare eye: the movie looks great even when it depicts an over-crowded dystopia. And the action sequences make sense: you can follow them, and they have moments of horror and beauty within them.

Blomkamp even gets real pathos out of Matt Damon and leering menace out of Sharlto Copley, the meek hero of his first movie. Jodie Foster seems pitch-perfect as the refined defense minister of the orbital habitat that gives the movie its title: she's impeccably mannered and viciously inhuman.

With his left-wing attitudes now enshrined in two science-fiction movies (this and the superior District 13), Blomkamp needs someone in Hollywood to figure out the obvious and put him in charge of a Star Trek movie. His science-fiction-as-action-allegory approach could give us a Trek adventure more in line with the original series without sacrificing fist-fights and space-battles. Recommended.

Rise of the Super-Communist

Superman: Red Son: written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett, Andrew Robinson and Walden Wong (2003): What if Superman's rocket landed in Stalin's USSR in the 1930's? That's the initial changed premise in this Elseworlds 'What if?' story of a Communist Superman and his crusade to keep everyone on the planet safe, all the time, whether they want him to or not.

It's a much-praised story that riffs an awful lot on a classic Silver-Age Superman 'Imaginary Story' in which Superman, concerned by his failures, exposes himself to a barrage of various types of Kryptonite radiation and ends up splitting into two mono-coloured versions of himself, Superman-Red and Superman-Blue. They're both about 100 times smarter than the original, and thus proceed to eliminate all crime, disease, poverty, and want from Earth in about a week. That was presented as a utopia. What's presented here is also a utopia unless one wants a certain level of freedom.

Superman's powers here are actually greater than pretty much any other version of the character in comic books: he actually can protect everyone on the planet from even relatively small-scale dangers such as car accidents. This causes people to start driving recklessly in great numbers (!!!). Once the Soviet Man of Steel takes over from Stalin, the countries of the world join the Communist Bloc with the exception of the United States. Lex Luthor helps keep the U.S. free while trying to figure out how to stop Superman. Some heroes join Superman (Wonder Woman being the prime example) while others are deployed against him (Green Lantern and Batman).

It's all fairly enjoyable, though I'm not entirely sure why this is praised as much as it is: besides Superman-Red/Superman-Blue, there's a Marvel graphic novel from the 1980's, Emperor Doom, which covers pretty much the same territory in about 1/3 the space, while Alan Moore's Marvelman (aka Miracleman) epic also ends in similar territory, only with much better writing.

Time constraints also forced an art change with the last third of the collected book (the third issue of the three issue miniseries in its original printing). Dave Johnson's work is cleaner and more suited to the narrative, making the change a bit jarring when the art switches to Kilian Plunkett. The twist ending is nice, if a bit gimmicky and telegraphed a bit too much in the closing pages. Lightly recommended.

I without a Face

'V' for Vendetta: written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd (1981-89; collected 1990): Now that V's Guy Fawkes mask has been appropriated by both the Occupy movement and Anonymous, it's getting hard to remember what a violent, anarchic fellow Alan Moore and David Lloyd's original character was. The dystopia of the graphic novel is about ten times worse than that seen in the movie adaptation, and V himself (herself? itself?) ten times more violent and ten times more problematically justified in that violence.

The story started life in the pages of England's Warrior comic magazine in the early 1980's, alongside Moore's other early opus Marvelman (aka Miracleman). If Miracleman was Moore's push-the-limits take on Superman, then V was his Batman: a Batman fighting a dystopic future Britain that strongly resembled the world of George Orwell's 1984. A Batman whose true face and true identity remain forever hidden from the characters in the story and from readers as well. When you put on a mask, you become a symbol.

Moore was initially reacting to the heightening nuclear tensions of the early Reagan/Thatcher era, and to the ruthless economic and social policies of those two genial abominations. The dystopia of the graphic novel is a Great Britain that avoided direct nuclear conflict thanks to its Labour Government severing all nuclear ties with the United States in the 1980's.

The U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. are presumably smoking, irradiated ruins. Great Britain fell into chaos and was soon under the control of a far-right party which now rules with an iron fist and a hatred of civil liberties and anyone different. There are no non-white ethnic groups left in this Great Britain; gays and lesbians have also been exterminated or forced underground.

And so rises V, a mysterious, anarchic freedom fighter who possesses the improbable fighting and planning skills of Batman and the homicidal justice-seeking of the Shadow. Also, he loves Motown music and Thomas Pynchon. He's Anarchy personified, set against Fascism. And he knows he's a monster, which makes him oddly sympathetic, and the ending quite moving. Moore has given him some of the qualities of Mary Shelley's hyper-educated Creature in Frankenstein.

The reactions to the book have been quite telling over the years -- this is, ultimately, a book with a terrorist as its protagonist. But he's a terrorist fighting a terrorist government, a monster set against monsters. And Moore is fairly clear throughout that V's violence isn't to be romanticized, and that there must a price, a price V knows. Having lost his essential humanity at some point, V fights now to allow people the Free Will to choose their own humanity. But Moses cannot enter the Promised Land.

In any case, this book remains thrilling and bracing today, and perhaps even more relevant in a world of perpetual war with shadowy terrorist groups. David Lloyd's moody art hits the right notes, though the book would be better if the entire thing was done in the Black and White of its early Warrior episodes: colour really does nothing to improve Lloyd's art, and indeed somewhat mutes it at points. Highly recommended.

Emotional Rescue

The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993): This solid little Young-Adult-targeted dystopia has sold a gajillion copies and spawned three more novels set in the same fictional universe. Lowry's dystopic model is far more Brave New World than 1984, though not entirely either.

Neil Postman suggested that dystopias tend to fall between the two poles of pain-based (1984) and pleasure-based (Brave New World) control of the citizenry. Lowry's citizens are taking something a lot like Huxley's Soma, only moreso: they feel nothing strongly, and some things they feel not at all. It's a dystopia of emotional and physical subtraction: no pain, no pleasure, no problem.

The trade-off for the full range of human feelings is a peaceful, well-ordered existence in which even physical pain and accidental death are almost non-existent. But our young protagonist Jonas will soon learn both the secrets of his community and the secrets of himself.

The Giver is a dystopia, not dystopic science fiction: many of the qualities of Jonas's world fall apart when examined too closely. The same can be said of a number of classics of dystopian literature that include Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Orwell's 1984. A dystopia may be an allegory about a condition that already exists and/or of a condition that could exist if things keep on going the way they're going (The Handmaid's Tale satisfies those criteria). It doesn't necessarily hold together as a plausible imagination of a workable society (again, The Handmaid's Tale satisfies that criteria: it really isn't science fiction).

Figuring out what the conditions are that Lowry sees in the here-and-now as deeply disturbing enough to imagine a dystopia around them is part of the enjoyment of reading the novel. It's concise and moving and possessed of appealing characters. Its only real problem is that it ends in a rush. It doesn't overstay its welcome. Recommended.

Vampire Weakened

Priest, written by Cory Goodman, based on the graphic novel series by Min-Woo Hyung, directed by Scott Charles Stewart; starring Paul Bettany (Priest), Karl Urban (Black Hat), Cam Gigandet (Hicks), Maggie Q (Priestess), Brad Dourif (Salesman) and Christopher Plummer (Monsignor Orelas) (2011): If the writing on this movie were a lot better or a lot worse, it could be pretty interesting. However, all dialogue was written by the Dialogamatic 3000, which means that you won't actually hear a line of dialogue you haven't heard a hundred times before in other movies. That's an impressive feat of dialogue writing for a movie set in an alternate, steam-punky universe in which super-powered Catholic priests fight a species of eyeless vampires that look like the reimagined Pig-monster from the rebooted Doom video-game franchise.

I'm assuming Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, and Christopher Plummer all had bills to pay. They all do what they can with this amazingly derivative piece of junk, which is not much. Movies this movie rips off for plot, characterization, visuals, set design, and monsters include (but are not limited to!) The Searchers, The Matrix series, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, the Alien movies, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and pretty much the entire steampunk genre.

In what must be an alternate universe, thousands of years of war between humanity and vampires (which are not, I repeat, not human, and not derived from humans, a fact the movie doesn't really establish fully until there are only ten minutes left) are seemingly over. The remaining vampires are on reservations, which must have been a hell of a relocation effort given that at no time are the vampires shown as being able to reason, much less talk.

They are afraid of the sun, however, which is a good thing given that they don't have eyes, meaning that they know the sun's there when their skin starts burning. These vampires really are nature's cruelest mistake. Move over, Bottomless Pete!

The super-powered ninja Catholic Priests who won the Great Vampire War have been decommissioned and given menial jobs, because when you have superpowered people around, it's always a good idea to piss them off by having them clean toilets and shovel coal. The church hierarchy now denies there's any vampire problem. Pretty much everybody lives in walled, smoke-filled cities, though there are settlements out on the endless desert that surrounds these cities. The citizens in the cities all dress like urchins from a road company production of Oliver. They have invented the elevator, the television, and the computer, but not soap or fashion.

Oh ho! Vampires kidnap the Paul Bettany Priest character's niece (the only name he gets is Priest, which is really a title, isn't it?) and kill his brother and sister-in-law. Like John Wayne in The Searchers, off he goes. The Church doesn't want him to go, but he goes anyway. Because that's what a man does when vampires kidnap his niece.

He knows it's a trap because otherwise the vampires would have just eaten his niece, but he goes anyway. The Church recommissions four other priests to follow him and stop him. He teams up with a young sheriff to hunt the vampires. The vampires, meanwhile, are all riding around on a train headed straight for one of the cities. Or maybe The City.

Yes, the villains are all riding around on a train. This makes for a pretty linear chase narrative, as there appears to be only one train line in the whole world. If this civilization had radios, cellphones or even telegraphs, the movie could end around the 45-minute mark. However, this does not appear to be the case.

While the city (or The City) is a smoky Blade Runner industrial dystopia, the country appears to be the 1850 Old West with motorbikes instead of horses, but otherwise invested in oldey timey clothes and phonographs and 19th-century cotton dresses. I would love to know how history ended up here, but I'm not sure the writers of either the movie or the comic book know the answer to that any more than I do.

Priest instead really seems more like an intentional mash-up of visual styles without any attendant brainpower devoted to figuring out how such visuals could ever have occurred. One shot shows the keen intellect at work here. After Priest intones portentously that there's no sun in the city any more, we see a shot of the city as seen on the horizon. It's no wonder that the city has a smog and smoke problem because its designers didn't invent an industrial district -- instead, there appears to be a gigantic smokestack looming over ever city block. And you thought your city was badly planned!

Much chasing of the train ensues on the solar-powered motorbikes everyone seems to ride when they're not riding the train, cars also apparently not having been invented. Also, I can't think of a better vehicle to ride across a rock-strewn wasteland than a motorbike travelling at 300 miles per hour. Can you? Karl Urban shows up, looking pretty much exactly like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Much CGI ensues.

I didn't NOT enjoy Priest. Like Terminator Salvation but at one-tenth the budget, it offers a rich array of swipes, steals and homages to mull over. Okay, laugh over. Paul Bettany struggles manfully to invest his ill-written role with something remotely actorly -- with this and his role in the equally bad and derivative Legion, Bettany is threatening to become the Peter Weller of the 21st century. We know that, like Weller, Bettany can act. But we don't want to see him acting in movies like Priest or Legion (or in Weller's case, Screamers and Shakedown. Note how all these movies have one-word titles?).

Christopher Plummer does his old hambone in a bad movie routine, and Karl Urban does about what he can with a character who doesn't even have a proper name or in lieu of that, a title. He's Black Hat. Brad Dourif is Salesman! Maggie Q is Priestess! And Priest is Movie! Paradoxically recommended.

Time Bandits

In Time, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, starring Justin Timberlake (Will Salas), Amanda Seyfried (Sylvia Weis) and Cillian Murphy (Raymond Leon) (2011): Enjoyable throwback to the at least semi-socially aware science-fiction films of the pre-Star Wars era. Niccols (writer-director of Gattaca and S1m0ne and writer of The Truman Show) pitches his films somewhere between the future and an alternate timeline, and this one, somewhat subtly, appears to take place not so much in the near-future as in an alternate universe where the secrets of human aging were decoded decades or possibly centuries ago.

Those at the top can live forever; those at the bottom scrabble for every minute and second. Time is money, and while no one ages past a certain age any more -- everyone's stuck permanently at 25 once they reach it the old-fashioned way -- death comes for anyone whose clock runs out due to lack of funds after the age of 25. And the elite keep raising the price of everything, forcing the working class (there doesn't seem to be a middle class anymore) to work more and more just to literally survive.

Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, young, rebellious working-class hero who gets more than a century of extra time (all of it encoded into the green-glowy numeric display everyone has grafted somehow onto his or her right arm) from a member of the elite who's grown tired of life and of the perpetual oppression of the lower classes.

Soon Salas and a daughter of the elite are on the run from Timekeeper Leon. Can they overthrow the way things are and hand out millions of extra years to the downtrodden and the oppressed? What do you think? Enjoyable and clever in the background details (you may actually have fun trying to figure out when time 'stopped' based on the technologym and lack thereof, you see in the movie), but also somewhat rote in its connect-the-dots final half-hour. The movie's heart is pretty obviously on the side of the people and against the banks and corporations. Recommended.

Narcosis

Narcopolis, written by Jamie Delano, illustrated by Jeremy Rock (2008): Jamie Delano's one of those fine comic-book writers who never seems to be on anybody's radar to the extent that he should be despite terrific runs on titles that include John Constantine Hellblazer and Animal Man. Here he goes the dystopia route with a future world that mixes elements of 1984, Brave New World, and, um, tentacles.

In the future world of Narcopolis, every good citizen spends much of the day medicated in some way. The city of Narcopolis periodically launches devastating military attacks on any human settlements that exist outside itself, branding these humans as 'BadEvil' (the Orwellian homages reside mostly in the language of Narcopolis).

Citizen Gray Neighbour, one of the few people left who questions how things work and why, finds himself in a relationship with one of Narcopolis's security agents. Soon, he's been inducted into the security agency itself. But he's also on a quest to break the hold that Narcopolis's various drugs have on human consciousness in order to literally see what's really going on behind the scenes but really out in the open.

Delano does a nice job of writing future dialogue, with a host of new or mutated terms the meaning of which must be gained by paying attention to their context. Jeremy Rock's hard-eged, representational art falls into what I'd call the Avatar Press 'house style' -- cleanly depicted and seemingly mimetic, it wouldn't be out of place in a Vertigo title of the early 1990's. The miniseries ends on something of a cliffhanger, which is a bummer, so hopefully more will be on the way. Recommended.