Jupiter Ascending: written and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski; starring Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum (Caine Wise), Sean Bean (Stinger Apini), and Eddie Redmayne (Balem Abrasax) (2015): The Wachowski Brothers serve up a frenetic, boring science-fiction movie that plays out as if Dune had been adapted for Heavy Metal magazine in the 1970's by someone who had been repeatedly dropped on his head as a child.
The fight scenes whiz by at such a pace that they're mostly unfathomable, as are a couple of the ship-to-ship battles. The Wachowskis lift concepts from a long list of better movies, novels, and comic books. They might still be able to produce and direct if they stopped drinking so much espresso, but no one should let them write their own scripts ever again. Ever. Again.
The borrowings often become so odd and mismatched as to become hilarious. A concept lifted from Men in Black bleeds into an entire sequence meant as an homage to Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And in case you miss the fact that this is an homage to Gilliam, here's Terry Gilliam playing a bureaucrat! Now back to the super-serious space opera, in which it turns out that the Death Star is a factory producing Soylent Green! Hey, is that Hawkman? Are those weapons named after the game Warhammer?
The absurdities mount. Does a movie with a character named Jupiter have several scenes set inside the clouds of Jupiter? Did you know that bees are genetically engineered to recognize space royalty? Did you want to know where crop circles come from? Hey, did you know that human life on Earth came from somewhere else? Do you want to see Mila Kunis in a hospital gown and gynecological stirrups while a pitched laser battle goes on all around her? Of course you do! The true reality of life on Earth has been hidden from you: you're the power source for strange, hidden overlords. Why does that seem so familiar?
Channing Tatum is hilariously miscast as a gruff warrior who seems like the result of the Wachowskis' fannish desire to see Wolverine ride the Silver Surfer's flying surfboard. Sean Bean plays the Sean Bean role. Mila Kunis plays Neo, The Chosen One... I mean Jupiter Jones, The Chosen One. Eddie Redmayne plays the evil space nobleman in a way that should probably get his Best Acting Oscar revoked. There are moments of beauty and splendour amongst all the junk, but they're few and far between. Not recommended.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011): This YA, nominally science-fictional novel by Ernest Cline screamed 'Adapt me, Hollywood!' as soon as it came out. And indeed Hollywood came, and Spielberg directs for a 2017 release. It's a shame, I think, that Spielberg choice -- Edgar Wright could probably make a movie better than the book by putting a noticeable spin of satire on things. He could certainly match or exceed its manic, mindless metafictionality.
We start in Oklahoma City in the 2040's, in an America gone to ground in the ruins of its apathy and decayed infrastructure. Pretty much everyone, rich and poor, spends a lot of time inside the OASIS, a Massively Multiplayer Online Everything created by a reclusive and now deceased billionaire genius. Upon his death, that genius created a contest. Whoever wins the contest wins his company and his fortune, the latter somewhere in the mid-100 billions. Years go by, the contest unsolved. And then, one day, our orphaned, poor, plucky protagonist figures out the first stage of the contest. And we're off.
Because the billionaire obsessed over the pop culture of his childhood, everyone who's anyone is now an expert on pop culture from the 1960's to the 1980's, from video games to types of sugary breakfast cereal, from Japan and the United States and Great Britain, from Family Ties to Ultraman. They have to be experts. A detailed knowledge of the band Rush may be vital to winning the contest.*
Ready Player One has its charms. It's relentlessly entertaining and tightly plotted within its extraordinarily familiar plot outlines. The pop-culture references are sometimes fun. Some of the near-future, dystopian world-building is inspired. The world has burned itself out, and no one even bothers trying any more. When one can escape into a candy-coloured Matrix of near-infinite entertainment, the world outside can go to hell. A gifted science-fiction writer could do a lot with a world in which the Real has disintegrated while the Unreal has flourished. Cline isn't that gifted a writer. And besides, he wants you to have FUN.
Oh, FUN. This is indeed a novel of endless entertainment. Its own plot beats and characterization are almost doubly Meta: everyone in the novel knows about Star Wars and Dungeon and Dragons and Harry Potter and The Matrix. That our orphaned protagonist is a cross between Luke Skywalker and Neo and Harry Potter can't really be complained about in a novel that acknowledges all those influences throughout. Or can it?
Well, entertainment! Our protagonist Wade (or his online avatar Parsival, if you prefer) exists in a flattened-out world of popular though often geek-centric entertainment. You're not going to get any high-culture references here. Well, you get one Shakespeare quote, but that's because the play and the game share the same name of [The] Tempest. There are a lot of giant robots, and giant robots are cool. There's a lengthy section devoted to Rush's 2112 with nary a mention of Ayn Rand. There's a lengthy section devoted to Blade Runner which pays lip service to the idea that the genius recluse's favourite novelist was Philip K. Dick, but there's no trace of Dick's novels or short stories, much less his sensibilities, in the novel.
This is a Fun Machine. Welcome to it. There's a brief moment towards the end when what had begun to seem to me to be the best possible climax for the novel seems to manifest itself. But then it doesn't. This is exactly the sort of genre work driven by David Langford's Plot Coupons and the search for them that we've seen a million times before. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But there's nothing here of meaning. There's nothing aesthetically challenging. There's nothing Sublime. Ready Player One is all Cracker and no Jack.
The real-world sections are William-Gibson-lite; the OASIS sections are so saturated with pop culture that by the end, you may feel a need to read or watch something difficult, whether that's a Bergman movie or a stretch of writing by James Joyce, just to reconnect with the idea that there's more to art than entertainment. The novel even makes Monty Python unsubversive. Ready Player One could be one of the disturbingly simplistic, perfectly immersive melodramas that humanity drowns the best part of itself within, in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's exhaustive. It's exhausting. But by God, you will bloody well be entertained. Recommended.
*Spoiler Alert: It is.
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984): Science fiction can age badly in the specifics without losing its zing -- or its relevance to one's present-day situation. It isn't about prediction, after all. It's about imagining the social changes attendant on changed circumstances.
And Neuromancer, gifted with one of the most famous first lines in science-fiction history, actually drops the predictive ball right there, at least for now: the sky over Chiba City, meant to look like a static-filled TV set to a dead channel in publication-year 1984, would now almost certainly connote the colour blue to a reader. And the sky over one of Gibson's technocruddy megalopolises certainly isn't deep blue.
Two things really set Gibson apart in the early 1980's -- his interest in something other than the plain style favoured by so many science-fiction writers over the decades, and his concern with the Inner Space of computers. Neuromancer, set some time in the late 21st century in a world with a massive, networked computer landscape known as The Matrix, offers us lots of locations to describe: the mercurial, neon world of the Matrix; the orbital habitats of the rich and infamous (or the stoned and immaculate) ; the technogrunge cityscapes of Chiba City and The Sprawl.
Gibson's descriptions, often dense and poetic, make it clear that the protagonist of his novel is really the world of the future itself. There's a plot here, and characters. But you don't really know that much more about cyber-jockey Case and techno-ninja Molly at Neuromancer's end than you did at the beginning. Really, the Artificial Intelligences who drive the plot are the most interesting characters, and certainly the characters with the most agency. Everyone else is being acted upon to secure a particular outcome that will Change The World Forever. And boy, will it ever, if Case and Molly survive to complete their mission.
One can see why both genre and mainstream critics went gaga over Gibson when Neuromancer broke. His style had few genre antecedents; the subject matter of the world inside The Matrix, really none. Overall, his obvious influences were Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, and perhaps the Fritz Leiber of "Coming Attraction." All of them presented variations on a run-down, high-tech, over-crowded future in which corporations had supplanted governments. Gibson's film noirish plot and characters, combined with his almost baroque attention to telling detail, helped introduce us to the future we all live in, more and more every day: the cyberpunk present, born in the 1980's. Highly recommended.
Count Zero by William Gibson (1986): In this, the originally unintended second act of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, we return to everyone's favourite late-21st-century Earth to see how things are going several years after the conclusion of Neuromancer. We get a mostly new cast of characters. We get Gibson stretching his muscles with a multiple-thread narrative. We get... a lot of fax and print-out paper?
Yes, fax and print-out paper, so ubiquitous in Gibson's future that endless scrolls of them blow down the city streets. Oh, well.
By the end, this really feels like a second act -- nothing really major is resolved, though we learn a lot about the world of the Sprawl just a few short years after the Matrix-altering events of Neuromancer.
For instance, an awful lot of artificial intelligences released upon the Matrix in the aftermath of Neuromancer have decided to play at being the quasi-pantheon of Vodoun (that's Voodoo to you!). There's a certain logic to it, though some of that logic won't be revealed for another novel. Of course, there's also a certain type of playfulness to it. One imagines that artificial intelligences with minds that work at the speed of light might start goofing around with role-playing just to pass the time.
In any case, Count Zero moves quickly and tensely from beginning to end, even if that end ultimately feels like a set-up for the next novel. Gibson's main characters have a lot more room to move this time when it comes to personality: his growth as a writer encompasses characterization as well as multiple-plot-line coordination. Recommended.
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (1988): In his third solo novel, and third part of The Sprawl Trilogy, Gibson really flexes narrative muscle by giving the reader several narratives converging neatly at the conclusion. And this concludes not only the novel itself, but the trilogy as a whole, as questions left unanswered in the previous two novels are answered.
This novel gives us the broadest view of Gibson's quasi-dystopian, late 21st-century Earth we've had. We tour another incredibly grungy wasteland of the North American, East Coast Sprawl of urban, suburban, and exurban grunginess. We visit England, where there's still a semi-functional national government in place. We briefly see Japan.
Most importantly, we visit more areas of the Matrix, the cyberspace megalopolis that dominates Gibson's future world. Still the location of vast constructs of data, the Matrix is now also inhabited by artificial intelligences and the occasional electronic ghost of a dead person who's been uploaded into what we would now call the World Wide Web. That web didn't exist when Gibson created the Matrix. Indeed, a lot of people think his Sprawl novels influenced how people created and imagined and shaped the World Wide Web.
Gibson's work with characters here is first-rate -- he's a much better and more assured writer a mere four years after the publication of first-novel Neuromancer. There are flaws and mistakes in his imagination of the future, but such can be said of anyone who tries to think ahead in his or her fiction. His social theorizing seems awfully prescient -- his imagining of the relationship between our (then) future selves and the giant world of data and corporations and people connected electronically on Earth, and beyond the Earth.
Complaints? The ultimate 'villain' of Mona Lisa Overdrive almost seems like a tying off of loose-ends that didn't necessarily need tying off. I almost wonder if Gibson realized this while writing the novel -- the threat posed by the antagonist orchestrating the early crises of the novel just sort of drifts away in a puff of cyber-smoke at the end.
So, too, a concluding scene that could use a few more pages. It's as if Gibson realized that advances in technology and geopolitical events had already started to make his Sprawl an obsolete science-fictional concept less than a decade after he first devoted a story to it. Like several of his characters in that conclusion, he's already in the car driving away. Still, a grand achievement in literature, genre or otherwise, studded with scintillating bits of extrapolation and hard-edged imagery. Highly recommended.
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.
