Review – Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

This wasn’t the best Star Wars film, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. (That would be The Phantom Menace, largely because it was so close to being a good film, but failed abysmally at almost every stage.)

The film’s biggest weakness was its poor pacing. This film was 2.5 hours long, but with the rejigging of a couple of plot points, could have been dropped to 2 hours; a film-length chase scene isn’t exciting unless it’s got the intensity of Mad Max: Fury Road. The entire final battle scene (which was, in itself, very good, and contained some lovely call-backs to the Battle of Hoth) should have been brought forward thirty minutes.

Finn and Rose’s mission to Space Monaco was a bit of a missed opportunity. While it served to expand on the First Order/Resistance era of the Star Wars setting, some parts of it just felt a bit… well… prequel trilogy. I guess that that’s what Rian Johnson was going for at times, with the child slaves and the racing and all that, but there’s no reason to bring the bad bits along. But at least slavery was actually portrayed as a bad thing in The Last Jedi, rather than just an obstacle in Qui-Gon Jin’s discovery of Jesus Skywalker.

The other big let-down with The Last Jedi is that it was saddled with the same characters as The Force Awakens. Don’t get me wrong – they were great characters, but they were created for Episode 7, not Episode 8. The main plot of the film explored Rey’s personal journey, and Kylo Ren’s parallel degeneration. However, the subplots felt like the writers were scrabbling around for something for Finn and Poe to do (other than each other, which didn’t actually happen – sorry, Tumblr).

There were loads of opportunities to mention midi-chlorians, but they never did. I wonder if this was because Luke wasn’t taught properly and so understanding of midi-chlorians never really made it through into the modern setting’s understanding of the Force, after the Emperor killed off virtually every other Force-user during the age of the Empire. Or maybe Johnson just tacitly acknowledged that midi-chlorians are bantha-balls.

The characterisation of Rey, Kylo Ren and General Hux were high points, along with the 30-year check-in on how Luke’s character has been developing. Kylo Ren and Hux were both particularly good, with both of them being deeply flawed individuals, neither of whom are actually well-suited for their roles. I look forward to seeing how they cope with working together in the next film; the First Order military have demonstrated they don’t respect Ren and Hux has shown that he’s willing but incapable of breaking away from domination by Ren.

Visually, the film was marvellous. The ‘bloody’ footprints on the salt flat made for some extremely stark colour contrasts when the red under-layer was exposed as the white crust was disturbed. (This phenomenon also provides a clue to a major plot event towards the climax of the film, as well as looking rather gruesome a few seconds later when a character gets targeted by heavy blaster fire.) Vice-Admiral Holdo’s crowning moment of awesome was beautiful, its visuals enhanced by the complete lack of sound at the key moment. The final shot with the kid with the broom, although possibly a bit cheesy, was also very nicely done.

Overall, despite not being the best Star Wars film, it’s still better than anything in the prequel trilogy, and does contain some incredible moments that more than make up for its weaker elements.

Review – Fire and Fury

It’s been a while since I posted anything up here, and I finished reading Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury earlier tonight, so here are my thoughts.

 

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Michael Wolff)

I try not to get too political on this blog, for the simple reason that it’s (hopefully) eventually going to become my public-facing web presence in the event I make it as a published author. However, like most of the rest of the world over the past year, I’ve been watching, aghast, as a whole mob of badly-written movie villains have taken over the United States of America.

I pre-ordered Fire and Fury and, thanks to the White House’s futile attempt to cease and desist, got it several days earlier than expected when the publishers decided to tell Trump what it thought of his attack lawyers.

While I’ve been reading the book, I’ve also been reading/watching the parallel news articles and criticism of it and its author. A lot of the criticism makes very valid points. Although the story feels too in-sync with the news and gossip that’s been coming out of the White House over the past year for it to be, as the administration has claimed, a work of fiction, even the author admits that some of the events described are composites of reports from different sources, i.e. they’re probably not exactly what happened, but an interpretation of several versions of events.

Most of my issues with the book’s reliability are challenged in this video from Stephen Colbert, who, frankly, doesn’t seem overly convinced by Wolff’s claims of authenticity – note that he signs off the interview with a comment about looking forward to listening to the tapes of Wolff’s interviews, despite the author earlier saying he had no intention of releasing those:

The problem with Fire and Fury is also its biggest strength: it feels exactly right. Even if you were to assume it was a complete work of fiction, the characterisation of the real people in it feels so spot on that it’s hard to tell the difference. Events described tally up really neatly with actual historical events that have occurred. If this book’s fiction, it’s one of the best alt-history books out there. If this book’s 100% true, it’s terrifying.

My thoughts are that it’s somewhere in the middle. I’m not suggesting that Wolff deliberately made up events, but his sources (which he generally fails to cite) are, by his telling, generally unreliable narrators anyway, in competition with one another and either delusional or with a strong interest in portraying themselves as righteous and their rivals as imbecilic or ideologically flawed.

(Oh, and if even 10% of the events in the book are accurate, then the US is in deep, deep trouble…)

It’s been suggested that Wolff has delved into some pretty unethical journalistic practices to get his material – at least one of the various dinner parties mentioned in the book actually took place at Wolff’s house, and I’ve seen some suggestion that he ‘burned his sources’ by quoting them on the record when they didn’t wish to be identified.

Even if that wasn’t the case, it’s pretty clear who his main sources in the book were. Steve Bannon, for example, is almost a protagonist in this story, with extensive direct quotations that appear to have been spoken to the author rather than another character. Some critics have accused Wolff of describing him overly favourably – I don’t see that. Bannon’s characterisation is as a self-delusional egomaniac who’s downfall comes because he believed he could control an even greater self-delusional egomaniac. Jared Kushner, or someone close to him, appears to have been a major contributor as well, which makes sense, considering most of the book’s action revolves around the infighting between the Bannonite and Javanka factions.

Wolff says, in the Colbert interview above, that the book’s accuracy can be measured by how much it ties in with what we already know. Yeah, that’s called confirmation bias and is typically something best avoided. Just because the characterisation is so spot on to what we think we already know about the Trump administration doesn’t mean that it’s true.

That said, events since the book’s publication appear to be something of a continuation of its own narrative. Bannon’s career as an alt-right prophet has continued its dramatic decline, with him even losing Breitbart, and Trump’s vengeful attacks on him match the very style of casual cruelty and denial of history that the book ascribes to the president. But then, you only need to read @RealDonaldTrump to recognise how consistent both his recent tweets and his portrayal in Fire and Fury are to his previous recorded actions and statements.

I suspect there’s a lot more fact in Fire and Fury than (even inadvertent) fiction, but sadly its very writing process makes it difficult to identify which is which. All we can do is, as with Bannon’s dramatic fall, watch the ongoing events Wolff describes gradually come to their natural conclusions (or not, as the case may be). It will be very interesting to see, in decades to come, how much of this book reappears in actual scholarly texts about Trump’s term of office.

Ultimately though, the most damning revelation Fire and Fury brings is its very existence. I can’t imagine Obama, Clinton or either Bush allowing a single journalist such unrestricted access that he could even write such a book and have it appear plausible; nor would the vast majority of staffers and aides in those administrations be stupid enough to say the things that they allegedly said to Wolff.

 

 

The header image is a promo image from ‘Olympus Has Fallen’, a film which has the alternate title ‘Gerard Butler Shoots Lots Of Koreans, And His Best Friend, In The Head’.

Review – Pandorax

I recently read two Warhammer 40,000 novels, Pandorax by C.Z. Dunn, and The Horusian Wars: Resurrection, by John French. The Black Library is often a gamble in terms of quality, particularly when you’re trying something by an author you’ve not read before. Both of these authors were new to me (aside from a John French short story I’ve read, but can’t quite remember, from an anthology).

Today, I’m going to do Pandorax. I’ll have a go at Resurrection on another day because I got carried away writing this and ran out of time.

One of these books is a great example of how to do a tie-in novel. The other is a great example of how not to do a tie-in novel.

This is a review of the latter.

 

Pandorax (C. Z. Dunn, 2013)

Pandorax is one of the Space Marine Battles series of books, which is a series I’ve dodged because it sounds as if someone at the Black Library said, “You know how everyone criticises our Space Marine novels as being bolter-porn? Well, what if we do a series that’s entirely bolter-porn?” That might be unfair. Like I say, I’ve avoided the Space Marine Battles series.

As well as being part of a series of books that doesn’t inspire confidence in those seeking good plot and characterisation, Pandorax is also a tie-in to the Apocalypse War Zone: Pandorax setting book for the 40k wargame’s ‘buy as many cool models as possible, line them all up in their deployment zones, and then remove most of them in turn one’ Apocalypse variant. (Back in my day, if you really wanted Titans and aircraft and tank companies on the battlefield, you played in 6mm epic-scale and actually had space on the tabletop to manoeuvre your troops.) In other words, Pandorax is one of those Black Library novels that, rather than just trying to sell the wargame setting in general, is specifically milking a recent release.

Those were my two main concerns going into the book: Battle Bro bolter-fests and ‘If you enjoyed this novel, maybe remortgage your house for this other book and loads of plastic soldiers and tanks.’ The former wasn’t so much of a hindrance to the story. The latter… was.

Pandorax starts out from the points of view of some Catachan Jungle Fighters and a reasonably nicely-drawn Inquisitorial retinue. (One of them is a traitor. Slight spoiler: it’s the one who’s a horrible person… Really? That’s the one the author picked? In the Inquisition, you shouldn’t beware the nice ones?) I really liked this segment of the story. There was a nice exploration of Catachan culture that I personally haven’t seen before, as well as a characterful depiction of the deathworld of Pythos. (Confusingly, and in contradiction to most systems portrayed in Warhammer 40,000, the Pandorax system and its primary inhabited world have completely different names.)

Things happen, Chaos turns up, someone turns traitor, and Rambo-style Catachan badassery ensues. This section of the story went well, although the abilities of the Catachans seems overstated. When Gaunt’s Ghosts go up against traitor Marines in Dan Abnett’s work, it’s always an effort to take down a single one of the superhumans. Here, Plague Marines fall like Star Wars stormtroopers, having apparently forgotten that they have enhanced hearing and centuries of combat experience. Catachans are badass guerilla warriors, but they’re still only human. They shouldn’t be slaughtering Astartes quite so easily, or silently.

Anyway, once Chaos arrives, the plot becomes a race to get the Inquisitorial team’s astropath to the capital so that they can send a request for reinforcements off-world, all of Pythos’ astropaths having been killed by sorcery early in the invasion. (I would remark on how contrived it was that they had an astropath on their team, but it’s a pretty common trope of the setting that Inquisitors like to have their own private psychic emailer.)

During this section, we spend a lot of time with Inquisitorial agent Tzula Digriiz (a black female protagonist – how often do you see those in science fiction, let alone Games Workshop science fiction?) and Colonel ‘Death’ Strike of the 183rd Catachan Regiment and various of their comrades and companions.

Tzula is a nice character. And by nice, I mean she’s actually a good guy. She’s a professional thief recruited to the Inquisition, but as much as I like her, she doesn’t feel like a member of an organisation that has the legal right and ability to commit genocide against its own side if it’s in the best interests of the Imperium. She possesses the McGuffin upon which the entire story hinges. She also gets a pretty good payoff at the end of the story, and (without spoilering) I think she’s the best Inquisition agent for that job. Certainly, she’d never make a good Inquisitor anyway.

Colonel ‘Death’ Strike’s main defining characteristic is that he has a goddamn stupid nickname, which he got early in his career, because the only thing those who fight against him have to hope for is… death. Really? Seriously? Who wrote this, a 12-year-old who thought he was being cool? Of the millions of soldiers that Catachan has given to the Imperium, he’s the one who gets the nickname of ‘Death’? Or is there a guy called ‘Death’ in every other squad, who fights alongside ‘Killer’ and ‘Knifeman’ and ‘Shadow Stalker’ and ‘Two Guns’ (who fights with two guns akimbo because it’s cool)? He doesn’t have much else in the way of personality, beyond being a kind commander who looks after his men. Unfortunately, this is an Apocalypse tie-in, so even when he’s leading a guerilla war against the invaders, he’s doing it with the most un-Catachanny of fighting methods, a super-heavy tank. A goddamn tank the size of a building, that can be heard from a mile away, is armed with ordnance that can be heard from even further, and is available as a plastic kit from Games Workshop. There is a nice touch that the Inquisitorial team included a Jokaero alien, who falls in love with the tank and starts tinkering with it. Unfortunately, the author gets carried away and decides that Jokaero abilities are so awesome (to be fair, they are, but not this awesome) that a tank that normally moves at 20-30 miles per hour is suddenly capable of 200 miles per hour. This is on a jungle deathworld not noted for its road network.

I’ve just realised… ‘Death’ Strike isn’t a character in the grimdark of Warhammer 40,000. He’s a supporting character from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

The good guy Space Marines, around whom the entire Battles series is based, don’t actually show up until reasonably late in the story, but when they do, it’s in the form of the entire Dark Angels Chapter, all one thousand of them, and a bunch of Grey Knights. Because all the Dark Angels are there, that means all the named characters from the tabletop game are there, along with Dark Angels characters from other novels. Also, Supreme Grand Master Azrael is an arse. He’s a complete and utter arse. Some reviews I’ve seen of this book don’t like that revelation. I don’t know if it marries up with other portrayals of the character in other books, but I like that one of our shining heroes of the Imperium, available from Games Workshop Mail Order, complete with Watcher in the Dark Helmet Bearer(tm), is a git. The supreme boss guy of the Grey Knights turns up as well, and there’s a bit of friction because the Grey Knights don’t trust the Dark Angels and the Dark Angels are scared that the Grey Knights will find out their secrets. (Spoiler: they already know.)

It’s around the time of the Space Marines arriving that the story on Pythos ceases to be interesting. Oh look, Abaddon and Huron Blackheart are sort-of allies. That’s nice, but has no real bearing on events. As much as I like the Red Corsairs, Huron could have been left out of the story. Everything he provides to Abaddon is something that Abaddon could plausibly have already had in his arsenal.

This being an Apocalypse and Space Marine Battles tie-in, everything degenerates into massive battles. Even the finale of the story takes place in the middle of a pitched battle of hundreds of thousands of combatants. There are two problems with this.

Firstly, the author can’t really write large battles (even if the smaller guerilla actions of the early book were pretty decent). They all seem to be Hollywood-style, in which two armies line up and attack each other until one side is wiped out. And yet, despite the vast amount of ordnance and the tightly packed bodies of the troops, named characters are still running around and not being blown to pieces. It turns out that even the sneak thief Tzula is such a badass that she can run around alongside Space Marines and not get hacked to bits by the kinds of things they face.

Secondly, and most egregiously, the large battles scream, “WE ARE GAMES WORKSHOP AND YOU MUST BUY OUR MODELS!!!!” Every hideous daemon that materialises from the Warp, despite the infinite variety of Chaos, is one of those found in the Codex: Chaos Daemons army list. Every Imperial vehicle is named by its model name, rather than by its general type (e.g. ‘Leman Russ Demolisher’ rather than ‘siege tank’). Every single Space Marine squad is available as a boxed set. Every single regiment of Imperial Guardsmen present on Pythos has a model range behind it. How boring. Characters do reference other regiments that aren’t in the order of battle, but they also have model ranges. In the million worlds of the Imperium, our characters only know the ones whose tithed troops are for sale in your local Games Workshop store? All of the large battles seem to have been written with the primary aim of being scenarios for apocalypse-scale games of Warhammer 40,000.

Aside from the plot and merchandising, the actual writing style of the novel was pretty poor. It wasn’t as bad as, say, Twilight or anything by Dan Brown, but I was still halting after reading sentences and thinking about how I could have written that sentence so much better. There were cool things that happened that were utterly ridiculous, even within the heroic grimdark of 40k.

Here’s an example: one of the defining character moments of Shira, a viewpoint character who’s a hotshot space fighter pilot, is when she deliberately sets of a sonic boom in a hangar bay because she’s annoyed at the officer who reprimanded her for not wearing regulation uniform and then sentenced her to a fortnight in the brig when she comes back from the mission she’s about to go on. She’s a maverick, see, who plays by her own rules and won’t let anyone tell her… wait, what? This is the Imperial Navy. She just caused severe damage to a launch bay on one of the God-Emperor’s own voidships, as well as to the hearing of every person in the immediate vicinity. While they’re engaged in battle. That fortnight in the brig should have been escalated to immediate summary execution and no one in-setting would have batted an eyelid.

(Disclaimer: I’m an unpublished author, bitterly so at times, and it bugs me to read prose that is inferior to my own.)

Fortunately, everyone who knew that Shira is a saboteur and traitor dies shortly afterwards, so the author gets to keep her in the story.

I mentioned diversity earlier. She’s part of the gender diversity of the characters. There are a few others, including passing references to female soldiers among the Catachans. I have a big issue with the racial and gender issues in Games Workshop’s settings (I’ve ranted about it before – though apparently not on this blog). The Black Library is getting a lot better at gender balancing its casts, so long as you ignore Space Marines, who are canonically all male, but every time they do a good job, it throws the actual miniature ranges into stark relief. There have probably been less than a dozen female Imperial Guard models released by Games Workshop in the past thirty years, and yet the Black Library regularly includes women amongst the Imperial Guard’s ranks. And as for the new Primaris range of Space Marines missing the opportunity for female Astartes…

Anyway, I’ll grant Pandorax the credit that my initial recommender gave it for diversity, but overall, it’s still an example of how not to write a tie-in novel. The Black Library has released several series of novels that are amazing. The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition tie-ins were great, as were The Ambassador Chronicles. The Eisenhorn trilogy is still one of my favourites, such that I recently bought the 15th anniversary special editions. The Gaunt’s Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain series are rightly renowned amongst Black Library fans, and the epic Horus Heresy series has thrown us some amazing tales of tragedy from Dan Abnett, Aaron Dembski-Bowden and others (although with a few stinkers from other authors, to be fair). Sadly, this isn’t one of the Black Library’s high points. Although it has its moments, it feels like it was written to order with the instruction to include a checklist of canon characters, events and products. There’s nothing wrong with writing to order, but the finished product shouldn’t feel like it was written to order.

It’s a good job that I’ve given up on ever being published by Games Workshop because C.Z. Dunn, author of Pandorax, is actually one of the Black Library’s senior editors…

 

Film Review: Wonder Woman

My partner and I went to see Wonder Woman last night. Short review: I thought it was great and I look forward to seeing more of Diana.

As with my previous ‘review’ of Rogue One, this’ll be presented more as a bullet-pointed list of thoughts than a coherent essay or article about the film.

This list will contain spoilers, but I’ve tried to keep them mild.

 

The Setting

• A superhero popcorn movie in something as emotive as World War One is always going to be a tough sell. World War Two has been simplified into straightforward good versus evil of Allies & Axis, which had to be fought and was a resounding victory for the good guys. (And our favourite Uncle Joe Stalin, but we’ll gloss over that…) This bowdlerisation is such that Captain America and the Red Skull can exchange punches without it feeling… off. The First World War though is characterised in the popular consciousness as being a morally-neutral disaster – see the concerns over the video game Battlefield 1 being set in 1914-18, when dozens of first-person shooters, including Battlefield, but also the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor (remember them?) have done 1939-45 without more than a mumble of discontent. However, Wonder Woman pulls it off; it gets close, because she spends the entire film blaming Ares for corrupting the Germans into starting the war (the ‘Hitler Was A Vampire’ trope), but the reveal that actually, humans are just fond of killing each other keeps the blame for the war pinned firmly on real world politics. That the film is set during the dying days of the war, when both sides are trying to negotiate the Armistice, probably helps. Wonder Woman’s not going to be leading the Americans into Berlin here
• Misogyny. Lots of casual misogyny, particularly in the London sequence. However, Diana being Diana, she just looks confused and carries on doing whatever it was she was doing. Also, no one gets protective or dismissive of Diana by the end of the film. Being an actual demi-goddess helps, I suppose. The horrendously sexist attitudes of, for example, the British commanders and politicians, although appearing ridiculously overdone, weren’t that implausible for the era. A female police constable appears in a crowd scene in the film, stood beside her male colleague/bodyguard. Thousands of women served as volunteer constables during the war, to allow male officers to fight at the front, but a Metropolitan Police official was asked in 1916 if he ever saw women being taken on permanently. His reply was: “No, not even if the war lasts fifty years.”
• There was a recent episode of Doctor Who in which Bill (who is black) was cautious about leaving the TARDIS in 1814 London (“Slavery is totally still a thing,”) and is pleasantly surprised when she does look around the streets: “Regency England, a bit more black than they show in the movies.” The Doctor’s reply is, “So was Jesus. History is a whitewash.” Aside from several non-white civilians, the London crowd scenes in Wonder Woman make a point of showing the ethnic diversity of the war effort. We see non-white troops from multiple nations. I’m not hot enough on the uniforms to identify the nations, but I presume one of the groups of Asian soldiers were the Indian Army, some others appeared to be from a Sikh regiment, and there was a black soldier at the docks that looked to be wearing British Army uniform (black British soldiers served alongside white comrades in the First World War, although non-whites were barred from becoming officers – there were several exceptions though). Of course, he may have been from the Caribbean or African colonies, but he appeared to be on his own rather than a part of a group.
• The ethnic diversity continues into Steve’s team, who are all (or mostly anyway) existing characters from the Wonder Woman comic canon. Sameer is Moroccan (and makes a point of highlighting his skin colour as a reason why his acting career has never taken off), Chief is a native American (who mentions to Diana that it was Steve’s people who took everything from his during their last war), and, well, okay, you don’t get much whiter than the Scottish Ewen Bremner.
• Visually, the film portrays its era very well. A historian might pick holes in some bits and pieces, but it feels right.
• The action scenes don’t fetishise automatic weapons in a way that some First World War portrayals I’ve seen have done. Even World War Two films and games fall prey to that urge, when rifles were still the most common armament for infantry soldiers. Dakka might look and sound good on screen, but it detracts from the feel of the era.
• Interestingly, the two German tanks seen towards the end of the film are not historically inaccurate. Yes, they’re clearly British tanks painted up in German colours (possibly the same props seen in British colours in earlier scenes), but the Germans actually fielded more captured British tanks than they built of their own. (For comparison, the Germans fielded fifty tanks during the war, only twenty of which were of German design, while Britain and France fielded literally thousands of tanks between them.)
• Finally, how often do you get a superhero film set in Belgium?

 

Diana / Wonder Woman

• Wonder Woman doesn’t get referred to as such during this film. I haven’t seen Batman v Superman: Dawn of Unnecessary Subtitles, but apparently it was the media in that film that gave Diana that name.
• Gal Gadot is excellently cast. She looks the part and plays it well too. I’m not sure what more I can say about her than that I definitely want to see more Wonder Woman.
• Born Sexy Yesterday is a trope (explained in more detail behind the link) in which a science fiction character, almost always female, is portrayed in a sexualised way, despite being either naive to the ways of the world (a mermaid come ashore, for example) or literally being born yesterday (Leeloo in The Fifth Element comes to mind, but it’s also the central conceit of Weird Science and its sub-genre of nerdy wish-fulfilment movies). Diana brushes against that trope, in that she’s an outsider to the world beyond Themyscira, but her naivety is emphasised as idealism, rather than foolish cluelessness. There are also a few moments where that same naivety is used to highlight the hypocrisy or prudishness of the mortal world, such as her continuous criticisms of women’s dress in 1918. It helps that the scene in Selfridges was also very funny.
• However, my partner was rubbed up the wrong way by an early conversation between Steve and Diana, prompted by Steve’s awkwardness over their sleeping arrangements on the small boat they take from Themyscira. Diana appears ignorant of the idea of marriage and relationships, yet in the comics she’s mentioned having relationships on Themyscira. (A quote from the comics: ‘So, let me get this straight, you’re from a paradise island of science fiction lesbians, with a side of bondage?’) The conversation is explicitly about marriage before sleeping with someone in the literal, as well as euphemistic, sense, and that marriage was part of the natural sequence of then having children, growing old together and being happy with one other person forever. As Steve readily admits, it doesn’t always work out like that. At the time, I read the conversation as saying that Themyscira simply didn’t have the same rigid family structures as the mortal world; they were more communal, egalitarian or whatever, but there’s also the reading that the film was saying same-sex couplings can’t have proper relationships or families. It was explicitly stated earlier in the film that Diana was the only child on the island, moulded from clay by her mother and given life by Zeus, so that’d suggest family and relationships are treated very differently there than in our world (or at least, our world in 1918). I think I’d have to watch this scene again, but since I’ll probably pick up Wonder Woman on Blu-Ray when it comes out, no problem with that.
• Oh yeah, the bondage comment above? The creator of Wonder Woman was bigly into that sort of thing. Why do you think Diana’s lasso makes people tell the truth? It was also a common feature of the early comics that Diana would end up getting tied up and taunted by villains. The film avoids all that, but I do think that a moment in the climactic fight scene was a nod towards the character’s history: Ares pins Diana to the ground with a length of telekinetically-hurled tank track and villain-monologues at her. However, the scene is not played for eroticism, but as an obstacle for Diana to overcome.
• Speaking of the lasso, and of the Wonder Woman get-up itself, the bright colours worked marvellously in the otherwise muted and muddy scenes in Belgium, particularly during the incredible moment where she climbs that ladder into No Man’s Land. (As a side note, they weren’t explicit with it, but when characters described it as ‘No Man’s Land’, the audience knew full well what was going to happen next.)
• The No Man’s Land scene is what happened next. You know those bits in superhero films where the film manages to sell precisely who or what the hero is? When Spiderman loses his mask during the train sequence and the New Yorkers just give it him back, promise not to tell anyone what they saw, and then try and protect him from Doc Ock? Or when Superman lands a crashing plane safely onto a baseball pitch and the crowd go wild, and then he mentions to the passengers that flying is still statistically the safest way to travel? No Man’s Land was that scene for Wonder Woman (and Patti Jenkins had to fight to keep it in the film!). It’s the scene where she ceases to just be a naive idealist with a few nifty superpowers, and becomes a goddess who inspires all who witness her. From the moment she sets foot on that ladder, the air in the cinema got very dusty. The aftermath sequence in the liberated village was a wonderful respite from the war and showed the human side of the conflict.
• And what happens later is just cruel, but a necessary part of Diana’s journey to discovering that not everything evil in the world is the fault of Ares.

 

Steve Trevor

• Chris Pine put in a solid performance of what, in any other film, would have been a two-fisted pulp hero. Wonder Woman manages to still give him time in the spotlight to do his dashing spy stuff, without detracting from Diana’s own plot and character arc. In fact, strip out the superhero stuff on both the good guys’ and the bad guys’ sides, and you’re left with a perfectly serviceable pulp spy/action movie about Steve Trevor and his buddies shooting and punching their way across Belgium.
• He even manages to be the love interest who inspires the protagonist. Holy gender-flip, Batman!
• Hell, since this film is set in 1918, if it weren’t for the fact that this film forms an end-point for his character arc, you could probably get some mileage out of a Steve Trevor spin-off. Think of it as Biggles for an American audience.
• Oh, wait, that godawful idea already exists, thanks to the 1980’s.

 

Erich Ludendorff

• Using a real-world historical figure as the main villain was another bit that could have turned out badly. For a start, Danny Huston looks absolutely nothing like Ludendorff. Furthermore, the historical Ludendorff (alongside Hindenberg) pushed the Kaiser to seek peace, unlike the version presented in the film, who was convinced that Germany could still win in late 1918. Again though, the film made it work.
• It helps that Ludendorff is one of history’s bad guys anyway – he was a leading proponent of the ‘stabbed in the back’ myth about Germany’s 1918 defeat and took part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Film-Ludendorff believed that war was the foundation of human civilisation (thus placing him firmly into worship of Ares, even if he didn’t realise it). Interestingly, this aligns fairly closely with real-Ludendorff’s beliefs. He was a social Darwinist who venerated war as a driver of societal advancement. Ironically, he did allegedly convert to the worship a pagan god, specifically the Norse Odin/Wotan, after the war. He also believed that Jews had conspired to undermine the German war effort by seeking profit ahead of patriotism, and condemned Christians as weak. So, yeah, he was pretty much a perfect fit for the Nazi party.
• When I see Danny Huston though, I will always see him as the jazz musician/axe murderer from American Horror Story: Coven. Maybe the film-makers tried giving him real-Ludendorff’s little kaiser-moustache, but decided it didn’t suit him.
• Ludendorff turns on his own government, to the extent of murdering the rest of High Command when they try to negotiate the German surrender on behalf of the Kaiser. Sure, it’s a way of making clear that the film isn’t trying to tar the entire other side with the crimes of its supervillain, but the Red Skull also turned on the Third Reich in Captain America: The First Avenger. At least there it set up Hydra as being a separate organisation that could succeed the Third Reich, but it just didn’t feel necessary in Wonder Woman.
• The jovial way in which he and Dr Poison laughed as they killed his colleagues also felt a bit out of character – at no other point during the film did Ludendorff express any positive emotions.
• Hang on, fridge logic kicking in… It can’t possibly have escaped anyone’s notice that a dozen senior German officers had died in a horrible poison gas attack, and yet dozens of equally senior German officers bring their wives along to Ludendorff’s gala later in the film. Really? Even if Ludendorff had covered up his murders as a freak accident, surely they’d have been a bit more circumspect in accepting his invitation.
• Ludendorff shoots one of his junior officers dead fairly early in the film as punishment for not preventing Steve Trevor from stealing Dr Poison’s notebook and blowing up her lab. As noted, Ludendorff is a rogue element within the Imperial German Army, but at this stage he was still overtly loyal to the government. The German Army executed very few soldiers during the First World War (150 death sentences, of which only 48 were carried out) and although summary executions on the battlefield probably occurred and aren’t properly counted, this was in Turkey, at the heart of friendly territory. Sure, executing underlings for failure has a long tradition in arch-villainy, but it felt unnecessary here. Sure, it could be said to set up his willingness to murder more senior German officers later in the film, but his motives were very different: here it was anger and stock villainy, but there it was patriotism and lust for war.
• It’s not really a spoiler to reveal that Ludendorff wasn’t Ares, despite Diana believing he had to be. It’s obvious from the outset that Diana’s simplistic view of The War To End All Wars is a mistake. Still, he made for a very good decoy antagonist, particularly with his ahistorical(!) use of weird blue gas ampoules to give himself super powers.
• Okay, I did not realise that. Danny Huston also played Theo’s cousin Nigel, the government art collector, in Children of Men. That’s two things I’ve seen him in before Wonder Woman.

 

Dr Isabel Maru / Dr Poison

• A somewhat underused character, to be honest, but also an example of the ‘Scarred Villain’ trope. Come on… in such an otherwise wonderfully progressive film, the disabled character is a villain.
• That said, it was nice to see the period-accurate mask she wore over the hole in her face. Trench warfare led to a lot of facial wounds, and survivors often wore masks like that to get by in daily life. (Also, in the UK, there were special park benches, painted blue if I recall, reserved for disfigured war veterans, partly to give them privacy from people staring, but partly perhaps to avoid the social awkwardness of realising you’ve just sat down next to a gentleman with only half a face.)
• During her first appearance, Steve describes her as a ‘psychopath’. He must be really into his study of psychology to be using a word like that in 1918. I guess Diana just understood the Greek translation of ‘suffering mind’ and figured, ‘Yeah, evil weapons designer, makes sense’.

 

Etta Candy

• Good grief, that’s what her surname was? Comic books have a lot to answer for.
• I’ve managed to go through all the trailers and articles about Wonder Woman without ever once placing Lucy Davis. Derp. She’s Dawn, the receptionist from The Office. Also, it’s 16 years next month since the first episode of that particular show was broadcast. I feel old.
• Etta was awesome, and (like Dr Poison) felt slightly underused. Of course, this being 1918, and with most of the rest of the film being set in or beyond No Man’s Land, there’s not much scope for her to be directly involved. She certainly made the most of the London scenes though.

 

Ares SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING

• As effective as it was for Ludendorff to turn out not to be Ares, I think the film would have worked better if Ares had been played by Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Movie. I suppose killing Ares in the origin film gives her the breathing space to do sod all for the next hundred years before she turns up in Batman Versus Superman. I do hope though that we get to see Diana in other eras in her standalone films, possibly still tying in Ares’ influence after his death, rather than how the Captain America films started in World War Two and then became modern day Avengers films.
• I liked the bit earlier on where Ludendorff dismisses the idea of armistice with the (allegedly) Thucydides quote, “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.” Diana takes that as proof positive that he is Ares, but it also fits in with Ludendorff’s socially Darwinist warrior mindset and, on a meta-level, is a clue for the audience.
• Also, the presence of Ares in the film also slightly dilutes the film’s message that war is a human failing, not one by the gods. That said, there is something to be said for Ares’ argument that all he was doing was guiding humans towards an extinction that they’re determined to inflict on themselves anyway (complete with a meta-comment about how the Treaty of Versailles was a major cause of the even-more devastating Second World War).
• That flashback sequence definitely included some Rogue One-style CG face-transplants. (CG faceplants?) There’s no way [censored] is that buff.

 

Other Thoughts

• So… Steve flies a plane from the Ottoman Empire to crash it on Themyscira. This is presumably somewhere in the Mediterranean, assuming it works by normal geography. A light bomber plane of that era couldn’t get much further than that. He and Diana sail away from Themyscira, apparently spend one night asleep on the boat, and by the time Diana wakes up they’re being pulled up the Thames by a tugboat? Themiscyra can’t operate using normal physics, clearly.
• After all, the fastest route from the eastern Mediterranean to London is to land on the south coast of friendly Italy, take the train through Italy and France, up to the English Channel at Calais, get a boat across to Dover and then another train up to London. You don’t sail all the way around the Iberian peninsula.
• What happened to the Germans who landed in Themyscira? The Amazons only took one prisoner from the battle, and that was Steve, and then only because Diana protected him. There were several dozen of them in the landing party pursuing Steve, as well as a fairly hefty warship. Now, we saw the warship run aground when it unexpectedly found itself on an island where previously there’d been only sea, but is it seriously plausible that not a single man aboard survived that? Also, as badass as the Amazons are, a lot of the casualties they caused on the Germans during the beach battle were from arrows. Did not one of those soldiers survive those single puncture wounds? Maybe the Amazons are old-fashioned and they all developed sepsis and died.
• Or maybe the Amazons murdered every last wounded or half-drowned man who wasn’t directly protected by Diana. Well, I guess they do model their society around the classical era, where that sort of thing was allowed. (Or am I overthinking this?)
• The German mooks (and other soldiers, actually) were cast well as extras. They looked like just ordinary blokes conscripted to fight a war that was far bigger than they were. (This makes the apparent off-screen mass executions on Themyscira feel a bit more off.) Their innocence and youth are explicitly emphasised after Ares dies and his influence fades.
• Frankly, I think that scene needed a bit of explanation, since everyone stopping fighting because Ares was dead shifted the film back towards the ‘Hitler is a Vampire’ trope, rather than the war being a thing started by humans. Sure, the classic ‘Britisher, the war is over, we are now friends,’ as seen in everything from Biggles: Pioneer Air Fighter and Sebastian Faulkes’ Birdsong, is a World War One trope, but they didn’t even do that. I dunno, maybe Ares’ death led to brief feelings of pacifism, rather than a universal rejection of conflict, and that was reflected by the Armistice being signed shortly afterwards.
• As great as the No Man’s Land scene was, were there really that many Belgian villages left near the front line that still had people living in them in 1918? I guess this was post-Spring Offensive, so possibly these guys had been living behind German lines for four years after being largely ignored by the German occupiers.
• I don’t know if the modern-day book-ends to the film were really necessary. It was nice to see that photo (the one they’re posing for in the header image) on a glass plate, but the Wayne Industries logo plastered everywhere, plus the final ‘somewhere a crime is happening’ moment just screamed of DC waving its arms and shouting, “Hey, remember that we’ve got a shared superhero universe franchise as well!”
• You have Themyscira, and then you have the world of men. Not humans, or humanity, but men. The terminology was specific throughout the film. Partly, I guess that’s because ‘humans’ is a very science fiction term, and this is a fantasy film, but it also emphasises the contrast between the island and the rest of the world.
• Speaking of Themyscira, it was lovely. The architecture, the landscapes, the sea, the Amazons themselves, all perfectly designed.
• The Amazons had an interesting mix of ages as well, despite being a whole bunch of immortals.
• As has been noted elsewhere, Robin Wright has gone the Leia route and grown up from being Princess Buttercup to becoming General Antiope. Meta.
• David Thewlis is always worth watching.

Board Game Review – Gorechosen

In early January, I broke my New Year’s Resolution to refrain from buying any new models for the first six months of 2017. I picked up Games Workshop’s Gorechosen board game on a whim.

Gorechosen is an arena combat game, where each player controls a single Chaos Champion of Khorne (think psychopathic killer with more muscles than self-control) in a last man standing melee.

The box contains everything you need for the game, chiefly four gorgeous plastic Chaos Champion models from GW’s Age of Sigmar wargame range. These things normally retail for a terrifying £18 each, or £72 in total. It says something about GW’s profit margins that they can put four of them, plus numerous high-quality bits of card, in a box and sell the lot for £35. (Also, it says something about me that I bought the game solely for the models.) Each champion gets their own character card containing all the rules unique to that fighter, and a Wrath Track to monitor exactly how angry each of the mad bastards is. In a nice touch, the board is double-sided, with a slightly different arena on each side. One arena has four pillars blocking movement, while the other has a pillar and three lava pits (if a fighter gets pushed into one of the latter hexes, there’s a 50% chance of falling in to instant death). And then there are lots of counters and cards.

This game uses a lot of counters and cards.

The rulebook is a floppy 14 page pamphlet. The first two pages set the scene – in short, the most powerful warriors in a tribe that worships the Blood God, Khorne, climb into a pit and kill each other for their patron’s favour. Pretty straightforward. The next couple of pages give biographies of the four champions included in the box, and the page afterwards describing each champion’s unique attacks from the point of view of the poor sucker on the receiving end. There is a lot of purple prose here, as well as some medically dubious and extremely graphic descriptions of murder. Six pages of rules follow, and then, as a bonus and to add replay value, reference cards for four more champions not included in the box. I’d scan these in and print them out, rather than either cutting up your rules or trying to run them from the book (reference cards get covered in counters during the game).

The rules are simple, with certain key concepts being described in box-out diagrams in the margins. I found them a little unclear when reading the rulebook in isolation. Gorechosen‘s strength is in the interplay between different rules, most of which are presented on action cards or the individual fighters’ reference cards. Because of this, you don’t get a full view of the game simply by reading it; you need to play it to ‘get’ the rules.

The Wrath Track consists of four columns of eight squares, upon which each player places a token bearing their character’s sigil. (These sigils aren’t particularly linked to the champions presented in the box, allowing for use of other characters, but is reflected on their reference card and Initiative cards.) Actions and events in the game will reduce or increase a fighter’s position on the Wrath Track. This matters because how enraged your fighter is will determine how many actions he gets during a turn.

(As a sidenote, all the fighters in the box are male. I’ve been critical in the past about GW’s failure to incorporate a more gender-balanced society in with its modern Age of Sigmar game. It’s not like they’re adhering to a loosely historical setting since the Old World went pop. A female champion or two would have been more than welcome – although Valkia the Bloody did get a reference card in an issue of White Dwarf, along with other tabletop characters.)

At the start of each turn, each player adds a number of cards, based on their fighter’s current Wrath, to the Initiative deck. The order of play is determined by drawing an Initiative card; the fighter whose sigil has been drawn takes an action before the next Initiative card is drawn.

In a turn, fighters plays one of a hand of Action cards, each of which contains a Move, Attack or Special action. Some actions increase or lower your Wrath; cautious movement or particularly tiring or, er, cathartic attacks reduce it, while the frustration of a Desperate Swing or the piety of praising Khorne increases it.

Move is straightforward, with fighters moving between one and three hexes on the board, although many cards will place restrictions on your fighter’s facing at the end of the move. For example, a Disengage move allows you to withdraw two hexes, but you must face the last hex you left. (In other words, you’re backing away from the enemy – incidentally, you lose Wrath for that act of cowardice.)

Attack options mostly dictate the number of dice you roll to attack, along with a special effect, where appropriate. (Backstab, for example, normally grants you two dice, but this increases to four if you’re in your opponent’s rear arc when the card is played.)

Special actions vary from allowing your fighter to activate their unique action, through combat manoeuvres like ducking past an opponent, to various forms of block or parry. The Most of these are activated like any other action, but the latter category are a reaction to being hit, with various forms of effectiveness, either reducing or negating damage entirely.

Getting hit by your opponent’s axe, mace or whatever is rather neat in implementation. Each dice that hits causes a number of points of damage (and the chance of hitting and amount of damage are both affected by certain Critical Injury effects). You begin with eight boxes on your fighter’s reference card, down which you move a counter as you take damage. When you hit the bottom of a track, an Injury marker is placed over the topmost space, preventing it from being used again. Each time an Injury marker is placed, you draw a Critical Injury card and apply that result. (Incidentally, many of those Critical Injuries make you, and possibly your opponent, angrier, increasing Wrath. Very characterful.) Barring the misfortune of a decapitating Head Shot Critical Injury or being punted into a lava pit, death occurs when you finally run out of damage boxes. In effect, this gives each fighter 36 hit points, but the placement of Injury markers creates a vicious death spiral, where you draw a Critical Injury card after seven points of damage, then six, then five, and so on.

At the end of a turn (i.e. when no Initiative cards are left to be drawn), the Initiative deck is rebuilt and a new turn begins.

Last man standing wins, although the rulebook does provide some variants.

 

Playtest

I ran through a solo four-fighter game of Gorechosen to see if the rules actually work. It turns out that each fighter has a distinct fighting style, strengths and weaknesses.

Vexnar the Reaper: Armed with an axe and hammer, he’s got a small kill zone, limited to the three hexes in front of him, and each of his hits cause very little damage, but he hits on dice rolls of 2+ and gets bonus dice if his opponent’s in the hex directly ahead. In other words, he attacks with flurries of hits from each of his dual-wielded weapons.

Redarg Bloodfane (yes, the names are all that Khorney and cliched): Redarg has a large axe that only hits on 4+ and has an even more restricted kill zone than Vexnar, but causes lots of damage. He also has a hooked buckler-type thing strapped to one arm, allowing him to retaliate when hit.

Heldrax Goretouched: He has a massive two-handed axe, not quite as vicious as Redarg’s, but which allows him to attack opponents two hexes in front of him in a nasty overarm strike and has the chance of causing an automatic Injury marker (and associated Critical Injury) on a particularly good roll of the dice.

Kore Hammerskull: Apparently, this guy’s a blacksmith, but since his primary attack is to swing his anvil around his head on a long piece of chain, his actual unique selling point is that he’s better at attacking people two hexes away than he is those adjacent to him. This, for Khornate champions, is what passes for subtlety.

The playtest went pretty swiftly, with several standout moments.

Firstly, poor positioning by Heldrax led to him being mobbed by all three of his opponents and hacked and bludgeoned to death by early in turn two. Fortunately, death isn’t quite the end in Gorechosen; a dead fighter still puts Initiative cards in, but instead of taking an action on their go, they roll a dice on a Fate of the Slain chart on the reverse of their reference card. This has various effects, most of which cause harm to the surviving fighters. Sadly, each fighter has an identical Fate of the Slain chart; personalised charts would have been a great opportunity to emphasise the different styles of the characters.

It was Vexnar that got the killing flurry of blows in on Heldrax. Vexnar was then softened up and distracted by his surviving two opponents, only for Heldrax’s post-death chart resulted in him staggering back to his feet for a single angry attack before collapsing again. Still bearing a grudge, the mortally wounded axeman smacked Vexnar for a Head Shot Critical Injury and decapitated him.

Kore and Redarg duelled for a while, with Kore backing away to optimise the distance of his swinging anvil, while Kore closed in to make the most of his shorter-ranged attack. Then Heldrax again rolled to stand up for another last swing of his axe and killed Redarg.

The winner of the match was Kore Hammerskull, but only because he was the last man standing. Kore was probably more annoyed that Heldrax had stolen two kills from him, despite being the first of the three dead combatants to fall.

Overall, Gorechosen‘s a fun little game that I’ll be taking along to my weekly wargaming sessions for when there’s time after my usual Dragon Rampant game concludes. Quite how much replay value a game as simple as this has is perhaps questionable, but ultimately, once the game’s gathering dust on the shelf, you’ve got four lovely champions to paint and use in other games…

Twilight – a live-ish-sort-of blogging (part 2/2)

One of my earliest posts on this blog was a repost of a 2014 live-ish-blogging I put up on Facebook as I attempted to read Twilight at work. This was three months ago. Facebook Memories has just reminded me that, three months after the original live-ish-blogging, I finished it off.

Suffer.

———-

The other night, I finally remembered to recharge my Kindle. I had thought I’d finished Twilight and just forgotten the ending, but it turned out that that was just wishful thinking.

I recall now that I got so fed up with its stupidity that, at 60% complete, I went and read the Moomins instead.

However, I was feeling masochistic, so I thought I’d be a sadist as well and share the rest of the awful with you. Does not contain spoilers, because it’s not possible to spoil a turd:

(Sadly, because of Kindle’s inability to understand the centuries-old concept of pages, and it appears I forgot to divide it up by chapters, this might be even more stream-of-consciousness than it actually was.)

• “It is partially your fault.” [Edward’s] voice was wry. “If you didn’t smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered.” If you get eaten by a vampire, it’s your own fault for being delicious. Ladies, remember this lesson in life.
• Bella hurls abuse at her dad, Charlie, deliberately picking the same phrasing that her mother used when she walked out on him, and when she suggests that it may have been a little below the belt, everyone says, “No, it’s fine, he’ll forgive you.” How about slapping her around the head and saying, “You awful, terrible, horrible person, Bella Swann. How could you be so cruel, so callous and such a Mary Sue?”
• They’re racing down a freeway at double the speed limit and the car’s almost silent? Vampires are so awesome, even their cars are awesome. However, and yes, I checked this via Google, the freeway speed limit in Washington State is 70mph. Vampiremobiles are so awesome that they can travel at 140mph in near silence.
• None of these vampires have personalities. They don’t even have one-note hooks, and even Dan Brown manages that. (Author’s Note: When I wrote this, I hadn’t attempted to read The Lost Symbol, so I was blind to the true depths of awfulness of which Brown was capable.)
• James the evil vampire speaks to Bella on the phone, telling her what to say so that the McAwesome family assume it’s her mum on the other end of the line. Considering that Bella has spent the last two chapters going into pointless hysterics every time she’s become worried someone she loves it at risk, it’s somewhat inconsistent that now she’s capable of maintaining a perfect poker face. Also, not one of these vampires has good enough super-hearing to listen in on the conversation enough to realise that it’s a bloke talking to her, not a woman. And even if they’re not listening to the voice on the other end of the line, they’re ignoring the fact that Bella’s conversation consists of repeatedly saying ‘yes’, over and over again, in response to James’s evil questions. We’ve already established that they can hear her speaking in a different room; she left to avoid her body language giving her away. “Tell them that you talked your mother out of coming home for the time being.” What, by saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, like a monotonic Meg Ryan?
• “I have your mother, come alone.” Teenage girl who, it has been established, is rubbish at everything physical, is going to essentially let herself be eaten by a three hundred year old vampire with absolutely no guarantee that her mother is going to be released. Why would she be? After all, blood-crazy vampire. It’s a shame she didn’t have any alternative plans like, you know, telling the entire family of vampires that are already trying to hunt down and kill said villain. Stupid Bella.
• Oh, right, Bella failed to notice that her mother’s voice was actually on a video tape. Because any five-year-old home video ever has sounded similar to how the same person sounds in real life.
• The villain is giving the most boring, least revelatory villainous gloat ever. “Ah, you see how I did it? I did all these obvious things that a reader with an IQ higher than 85 has already worked out. Oh no, wait, there is a revelation: “You’re simply a human, who unfortunately was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Finally, a character for whom Bella isn’t the centre of creation! What’s his name again? *checks further up the page* Oh yeah, James-something. I can’t remember if he even has a surname. All I know about him is that he’s EVUL. Bad vampire, naughty vampire. Why can’t you be like Edward?
• “His pleasant smile slowly widened, grew, till it wasn’t a smile at all but a contortion of teeth, exposed and glistening.” How do teeth contort? Lips can, but teeth are immobile aside from the hinge at the back. The jaw opens and shuts. That’s the full range of movement for teeth. I’m going to ignore the use of ‘till’ rather than ‘until’, as it’s possibly US dialect and is a pretty common usage in English anyway (although even there, it’s only got one ‘l’, and ideally an apostrophe at the start).
• ‘His toe nudged my broken leg and I heard a piercing scream. With a shock, I realised it was mine.’ That was the shock: that it was you screaming after he nudges your broken leg?
• Barely two chapters after we’ve had it explained to us that being bitten by a vampire is exceptionally painful due to their venom, Bella gets bitten by a vampire and Edward has to suck the venom out. Convenient foreshadowing. (For us. Not so much for Bella.)
• Edward on his venom-sucking: “It was impossible… to stop. Impossible. But I did. I must love you.” After sucking out Bella’s venom, he immediately starts blowing his own trumpet.
• Bella apologises for tasting so good and Edward rolls his eyes (yet again). “What should I apologise for?” she asks. “For nearly taking yourself away from me forever,” he replies. Oh, right. Yeah, that. He’s right, of course, that she’s an idiot, but framing it like that? Possessive, much?
• “They love you, too, you know.” Does anyone else actually put a comma between ‘you’ and ‘too’?
• In the epilogue, Bella spends an entire day being dressed up, having her hair done, and Edward turns up in a tuxedo. She has completely failed to notice that it’s prom night and it comes as a surprise to her to discover what the date Edward has set up for her this evening is. I… I don’t… words fail me as to how cataclysmically stupid this character is.

That’s how incredibly stupid this book is.

The entire thing reads like Twilight fan-fic, it’s that bad.

So… I was wondering about doing something similar to this with 50 Shades of Grey, but then I skimmed half a page of 50 Shades Darker that was very briefly on the ‘recycled free stuff’ table at work. No, no. No, definitely not. It’s worse. Somehow, it’s actually worse.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – some thoughts

I went to see Rogue One last night. It rocked

This isn’t so much a review as a bullet-pointed series of thoughts that I had during and after the film.

This list will contain spoilers.

• Rogue One manages to successfully do a Star Wars film in a mostly different genre to the others. The other seven films have all been adventure films set during a war, but this was definitely a war film that had tropes of adventure films in places. It was darker, more cynical and even grimier than the ‘lived-in future’ (or long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) of the previous films.

• Related to the above, it was easily the most violent Star Wars film yet, and that’s including the various lightsaber-severed limbs of the other films. We had good guys murdering people (and not in the Han shooting first sense, but an actual murder of an innocent ally), some intense shoot-outs that were closer to Saving Private Ryan than A New Hope, the execution of a wounded stormtrooper with a head-shot (one of several explicit head-shots in the film), and a pretty nasty bit where a character uses a stormtrooper as a human shield. That human shield gets riddled with quite a few scorch marks.

• Storm trooper armour proves yet again to be utterly incapable of stopping a blaster bolt or even a baton strike. You can see how those Ewoks took them down so easily.

• The political machinations behind the Rebellion were expanded upon, without becoming as heavily ladled on as in the prequel trilogy. Bail Organa and Mon Mothma, both serving Imperial senators, are amongst the leadership of the Rebel Alliance. The Rebellion’s goal isn’t to wage war against the Empire, but to bring it down legally, by exposing its crimes to the Imperial Senate, who would then act against Emperor Palpatine. This feels more plausible than the good-versus-evil war implied by the original trilogy. It also feels plausible that there would be factions within the Rebellion that disagreed with the Mothma/Organa strategy, from Saw Gerrera’s terrorist splinter cell to General Draven’s hardline militarist attitude.

• The involvement of the Senate in plotting against Palpatine also explains why the Senate is dissolved during the events of A New Hope.

• The Guardians of the Whills (which is a reference to Lucas’s working title for the entire saga) are an interesting addition to canon, being a religious order that worship the Force, despite not being Force-users themselves. I can only imagine that their continued existence at the start of Rogue One is due to them being culturally irrelevant in a post-Jedi era. It also supports the idea that certain citizens of the Empire regard the Jedi and a belief in the Force as being parts of a ‘hokey religion’.

• The film ends mere hours, or even minutes, before the start of Episode IV: A New Hope, and the finale is that first victory that Episode IV‘s opening crawl tells us about.

• Speaking of opening crawls, this film doesn’t have one, removing it from the main saga, at least until the plot starts tying back in with the events of Episode IV.

• Speaking of hope, which is explicitly referred to multiple times during the film, including by Princess Leia in her cameo, it’s already been pointed out by several websites and journalists that, thanks to Rogue One, the title ‘A New Hope’ no longer refers to Luke Skywalker. The new hope for the Rebellion and the galaxy now refers to Jyn Erso and her team’s success at finding the Death Star plans. That shifts the emphasis of Star Wars slightly, from being about badass Jedi solving or causing everyone’s problems, to the little people getting to make a difference as well. This universe is bigger than Luke Skywalker.

• You know how The Phantom Menace was goddamn awful because it loved its computer-generated characters way too much? Well, Rogue One benefits from its love of CG characters. While Director Krennic has had all the publicity, he wasn’t the villain of the film. He was certainly protagonist Jyn Erso’s personal nemesis, and was integral to the development of the Death Star, but the real bad guy was Governor Tarkin, played by Guy Henry (Brutus’ sidekick Cassius in HBO’s Rome, and the Minister of Magic in Harry Potter) with Peter Cushing’s face superimposed over the top. It wasn’t a perfect effect – in a few scenes, we paid a definite visit to Uncanny Valley – but it was definitely very effective.

• The presence of Tarkin enhanced Krennic’s character significantly. The feuding between rival officers, and Krennic’s pique over Tarkin’s political manouevrings, lent a certain degree of authenticity to the Empire.

• As a side note, I’m pretty sure Tarkin was only ever addressed as ‘Governor’ Tarkin, the same title that Leia gave him in A New Hope. If I’m right, that means that the silly ‘Grand Moff’ title has now never been used in the film series. Tarkin’s still credited with that rank on IMDB’s entry for Rogue One, but I can still head-canon it out of existence.

• The CG characters didn’t stop with Tarkin, or even with the brief appearance by Princess Leia, who was likewise superimposed onto Ingvild Deila, an actor with a very similarly-shaped face to 20-year-old Carrie Fisher. (We only saw Leia’s face for a brief moment, and I don’t think the effect worked as well as it did with Tarkin.) The faces of the X-Wing squadron leaders who don’t manage to penetrate the planetary shield at Scarif have received the same treatment, so that they look like their later appearances alongside Luke Skywalker in the attack on the Death Star.

• Mon Mothma and Bail Organa are exceptions, being played by the same actors who played them in the prequel trilogy, which makes sense. However, I’m wondering about all the other faces around the table at the Rebel briefings. Pretty much every officer who’s appeared in the original trilogy is there, but are they lookalikes or CG masks?

• I hope people keep working on virtual actor technology, although it’s a technology that could get creepy if misused. Imagine if the porn industry could afford it (and get around facial licensing laws – maybe claiming parody and the First Amendment)? And what happens when you’re able to put together reasonable virtual actors at home on your PC?

• Orson Krennic is, insofar as I can recall, the first named Imperial character in any of the films to fire a blaster. Boba Fett is a freelance mercenary, and I don’t think Captain Phasma ever uses that lovely chrome blaster in The Force Awakens, though I’ve not watched that film since I saw it in the cinema. All other named Imperial characters have either been Sith or naval officers. Krennic nearly became the only named Imperial character to be killed with a blaster as well (all others having either been killed by Force powers or exploding spaceships or Death Stars).

• Speaking of named Imperial characters, we finally get to see how goddamn terrifying it is for mundane combatants to go up against a Force-wielding opponent. Sure, we’ve seen it loads of times, particularly in the prequel trilogy, but only ever from the point of view of the force-users themselves (even dark-Anakin’s rampage was from his perspective). Pro tip: never let yourself be locked in a confined space with a Dark Lord of the Sith.

• Alan Tudyk seemed to be doing his best Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) impression as K-2SO, which could have been a bad thing, but the very different personalities of those two droids meant that it didn’t feel derivative, but merely consistent, particularly since Goldenrod turns up in person for all of five seconds towards the end of the film.

• Speaking of cameos, Bum-Chin and Melty-Face from the Mos Eisley cantina appeared in a brief, unnecessary, but not harmful cameo early in the film. I assume they left the planet shortly thereafter. They were every bit as obnoxious as they were in A New Hope.

• Despite being a two hour film, I don’t think we really got to know any of the ‘Rogue One’ team that well, with the exception of Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso. Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera was underused, and I can’t even remember the names of the blind monk and his heavy blaster-wielding sidekick (although both were entertaining one-note characters). Cassian Andor and Bodhi Rook were pretty good though.

• Jyn, as is traditional in Star Wars, had a strained family relationship that involves daddy siding with the Empire and building a Death Star. Apparently it’s a thing that happens. Unlike Luke or Leia, who both had good role models as they grew up and so turned out okay, Jyn’s adoptive parent was a terrorist who abandoned her without warning when she was sixteen. This left her a bit cynical (rather like the film, really), and very much in the neutral part of the Light-Dark spectrum. There’s still a bit of heroism in there though, and it comes right to the fore when circumstances require it.

• Andor’s hardened assassin/spy was a refreshingly gritty character for a Star Wars series, particularly for a Rebel, to the extent that if he was a character in a Knights of the Old Republic video game, he’d have a red background when you looked up his stats. The manner in which he came back towards the Light Side of the Force felt natural as well. After his character-defining moment in the alleyway with the informant, his was a gradual slide back towards redemption as he developed doubts as to the orders he was receiving from General Draven. This culminates in himself leading the Rebel soldiers who decide to follow Jyn to Scarif, and issuing a brief but meaningful monologue about the terrible things that all of them have done in the name of the Rebellion. That’s him casting off of the taint on his soul, right there. Of course, this was motivated by close contact with the film’s protagonist, who was herself undergoing an awakening of heroism, and he sort of went along in her wake. That they avoided an explicit romance between them in exchange for something more comradely helped a lot.

• Bodhi Rook was an interesting role for a Star Wars film: he was a normal, everyday guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances due to his own inherent goodness. (In KoToR, to continue the analogy I used for Andor, his background colour would be bright blue.) He was continually out of his depth throughout the film, and spent most of the final battle hiding, but when it came down to it, he answered the call (as he did prior to the film’s events, by defecting to the Rebellion) and died a hero.

• Remember the spoiler warning?

• Yeah, there’s a good reason why we don’t see most of these characters again in the later films. Alan ‘Wash from Serenity‘ Tudyk managed to set up the ‘anyone can die’ vibe again with K-2SO’s tragic end. Possibly because it was the first, and possibly because K was the comic relief, its ‘death’ had the most emotional impact. It also braced us for further deaths as well.

• Jyn and Andor’s final scene on the beach worked for me, although I’ve seen others say it was pointless and they should have just done what they did the last time they were shot at by a fully operational battle station, and looked for a ship to steal. Practically, yes, they could have done that, but narratively, no. An escape into the sky would have been meaningless. Andor had completed his character arc by coming away from the Dark Side, while Jyn’s was completed when she finished off her father’s work (hmm, there’s a feminist critique in that…) by getting the Death Star plans to the Rebellion.

• Still on the subject of character deaths, the minor characters in Rogue One were excellent. Most had no names, a few had a name shouted over gunfire and explosions, others had callsigns. However, lots of them had just enough personality, even if it was just in their faces, to make you care. The casting and acting of the Rebel armsmen in the Darth Vader lightsaber rampage was particularly good – they really conveyed the terror of facing a fallen Jedi in combat, while also being big damn heroes with that data-disk they were transporting. A superb scene.

• So where did the film go wrong? Not many places, in my opinion. The biggest bit that I noticed was the triple-battle on Jedha. The initial attack by insurgents on an Imperial convoy was brilliant. Confusing, intense and more than a little bit Black Hawk Down or Children of Men. Then, as everyone sits down to get their breath back, more Imperials arrive and another battle starts. Then, as everyone sits down to get their breath back, even  more Imperials arrive and another battle starts. Do none of them ever think about leaving the scene of that loud, explodey terrorist attack?

• There were also a few moments where the stage directions appeared to say, ‘Enter half a dozen storm troopers, who are cut down by a volley of blaster fire.’ It felt a bit repetitive and forgot that the men (and possibly women, although that may just be a First Order thing) inside those suits were humans. War films are at their best when they portray the German soldiers as being just like the Allies, and too many moments where they’re just cannon fodder for the heroes detracts from that.

With that as the strongest criticism I can give at the moment, I’m awarding Rogue One: A Star Wars Story four Ewoks out of five.

American Horror Story: Hotel (2 of 2)

A bit back, I wrote my initial thoughts on the first episode of American Horror Story: Hotel, after it appeared on Netflix. After not watching for a month, due to concentrating on NaNoWriMo, I finally got around to seeing the last four or five episodes over the past few nights.

I figured I’d follow up on those initial thoughts with how they panned out.

Beware, there are most likely SPOILERS ahead… but, you know, most fans have already seen this series.

Overall thoughts at the end of the season were that it was a good ensemble piece, probably more-so than Freak Show, although this season’s characters murdered people a lot more readily than any series before. Sure, the Hotel Cortez was built by James Patrick March as a more terrifying murder house than the Murder House and that generally corrupts people, but generally there was some form of motivation or (often tenuous) justification to the killings in previous seasons. In this, aside from the vampires and the actual serial killers, multiple murder is just something to do when you’re dead and bored.

Throat-slashing: an excellently done make-up effect, but it was so overused that it became boring to see. The one time it had any impact was the Countess’s final kill, although maybe that was the point: take the signature murder move of the series and make it meaningful.

The Sarah Paulson Game was pretty much all done by the second episode, but it was a hell of a revelation to realise that Eileen Wuornos was actually played by the gorgeous Lily Rabe. Angela Bassett turns up as well, although never quite materialises as a noteworthy antagonist, since she’s outmanoeuvred at every turn and eventually becomes just ‘one of the guys’ at the hotel. Sadly, no Jessica Lange or Frances Conroy, although there was a nice, if bloody, guest appearance by Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie from Coven, which revealed the big flaw in her witchy superpower. The winner of the Sarah Paulson Game has to be Finn Wittrock (Dandy from Freak Show), who plays not one but two characters in Hotel, one of whom apparently reminds the Countess of the other. That’s not to say that Sarah Paulson herself doesn’t have a good stab at the crown, reprising her minor role from Murder House in the final episode.

This is a good season for crossovers as well, reaffirming that AHS exists in one shared universe, rather than as unrelated parts of an anthology. The only previous crossover I can remember was when Pepper turned up in Freak Show, some years chronologically before her more plot-important appearance in Asylum. This one not only features Queenie, but also confirms that the events of Coven did actually make witchcraft a thing, although possibly only amongst supernatural nerds like the hotel residents. Several characters turn up from Murder House, and it turns out the Countess gave birth there way back in the 1920’s, when it was a backstreet abortion clinic.

What the hell happened to Bartholomew the hideous, unkillable, half-vampire, monster baby anyway?

I wasn’t sure about Liz Taylor to begin with and wondered if the transgender aspect of the character was intended to be just another bit of creepy weirdness for the Hotel Cortez. Thankfully, it turned into a remarkably sensitive portrayal of a transgender character (from this cisgender male’s perspective anyway), while also being a well-developed character in her own right. It probably helps that American Horror Story rarely portrays any but the most callous and sadistic murderers as being bad people; yes, like the rest of the cast, Liz was a cold-blooded murderer.

Denis O’Hare played the role excellently, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Jeffrey Tambor’s comment during his Emmy acceptance speech for Transparent: “I would not be unhappy if I were the last cisgender man to play a transgender character.”

And I can’t mention Liz Taylor without her incredibly touching friendship with Iris, and the amazing performance in that role by Kathy Bates. They like casting Bates as mother figures that are lacking in confidence, don’t they? Even Coven‘s Madame LaLaurie had wobbly moments when she appeared close to renouncing her horribly racist ways after hanging around with Queenie.

The scenery porn may have calmed down as the audience settled into the hotel, but the sex didn’t. Yet still, besides a pair of buttocks or four, no nudity. It was as if the Countess was actually meant to be wearing black electrical tape during her scenes. As I mentioned last time, despite the liberal attitude towards showing characters having sex on screen, the prudishness about actual nudity feels incredibly at odds with the exceptionally graphic violence in this show, but at least that keeps it focused on being horror.

Oh yeah, the Addiction Demon, to give Sally’s strap-on-wearing stalker its proper name (I’d been referring to it in my head as ‘the rape goblin’, for reasons I can’t quite remember). Rather than being something that Sally has called up and is in hiding from, as seemed to be implied earlier on in the series, it actually turns out to be a manifestation of the evil of the hotel itself (the major theme of the series being addiction, whether to heroin, alcohol, murder, sex or whatever). Not sure if this is the result of an aborted story arc that they didn’t have time to expand on later in the series, but the Addiction Demon just felt unnecessary, particularly in light of its sole reason to appear on camera being to rape people, usually to death. I know that it was a creation under March’s control, and that March himself is shown to sometimes include rape in his killings, but he wasn’t primarily a sex killer. In fact, refreshingly for a TV serial killer, most of the murders we see him performing are both non-sexualised and of men. Yeah, the Addiction Demon felt wrong.

The vaccination storyline went a little haywire, and seemed to exist largely to give Alex Lowe something to do when she wasn’t arguing with John. That said, it was a nice little subplot and a welcome diversion from the vampire’s castle politicking of the Hotel Cortez. I get the feeling that the showrunners wanted to comment on the insane way that school shootings have become normalised in American culture, particularly after their horrifying portrayal of one in Murder House. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook and all those other tragedies, the lockdown scene was chilling, even when the audience knew what was actually killing people.

Oh yes, and vaccinate your children, or they’ll turn into vampires with measles!

I’m looking forward to the next series, Roanoke, appearing on Netflix…

 

 

(Oh cool, WordPress allows you to pick out previous posts when you insert a link! Nice touch.)

Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace: The Reboot: We’re Running Out of Colons

Okay, while rewatching The Phantom Menace this evening (actually, it was a year ago, in the run-up to the release of The Force Awakens, and Facebook Memories just found this for me), I’ve come with a fix to my problems with it. Yeah, okay, this film is sixteen (EDIT: seventeen now) years old, so this has probably already been done, but this is the one I wish Lucas had made.

(This post also has a two hour run time.)

I guess there are spoilers to follow:

While attending the negotiations between the Trade Federation and Naboo, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jin bring along their protocol droid and interpreter, C3P0 (because the Trade Federation guys don’t speak English at all, and very definitely not with a racist stand-up comedian’s idea of what a Chinese accent is). When the Trade Federation try and kill them, they flee down to the planet’s surface, where they meet Jar-Jar Binks, a well-spoken, highly-competent Gungan scout who is either a muppet or a human wearing really good prosthetics, because the director’s aware that fully-CG characters using 1999 technology won’t age well.

Jar-Jar is observing the droid army’s landing. Realising that Naboo is in danger, he agrees to take them to the Gungan king, Boss Nass.

Boss Nass isn’t as convinced, thinking he can stay underwater and wait for everything on the surface to calm down, but he lets the Jedi go on their way. They say goodbye to Jar-Jar Binks and go to Naboo City to rescue Queen Amidala and her bodyguards.

As in the original version, they flee Naboo for Coruscant, to tell the Senate what’s happened. During the flight, Threepio meets R2D2, the last remaining astromech droid on the queen’s flagship. Being the only two droids on board, they bond somewhat. Unfortunately, the damage suffered during the escape means they need to make repairs before they can get to Coruscant.

They land on Tatooine to sort that out, where Qui-Gon takes both droids into town to get spare parts, and one of the queen’s handmaidens tags along to experience life on Her Majesty’s behalf. There they meet a twelve-year-old boy, Anakin Skywalker (who is played by someone who won’t hate having been a movie star when he’s older, and who is old enough to convincingly play the older Anakin in Episodes 2 and 3), and his mother, who are both slaves owned by Watto, who most definitely is not a stereotypical Space Jew.

Qui-Gon immediately notices that Anakin is strong in the Force, something that just radiates from him because it’s GODDAMN MAGIC. The kid’s also managed to build his own fully-functional racing pod, which is an incredible feat of engineering for a child with very limited financial resources, even if he is owned by a guy who runs a spaceship spare parts shop. Even more incredible is that, unlike most humans, Anakin can actually drive the damn thing without smashing into the sides of the canyon walls.

Okay, Qui-Gon thinks, we need to get this kid back to Coruscant, because he could become a powerful Jedi Knight. (He’s definitely not The Chosen One though, because that’s just tacky and cliched, even in 1999. Anakin’s just really, really Forcey.) Qui-Gon makes a deal for the hyperdrive they need, but tries to buy Anakin as well. Watto says no, but Qui-Gon, having picked up over the conversation that Watto is something of a compulsive gambler, bets that Anakin will win the pod race. Watto says there’s no chance. Qui-Gon has a good feeling about Anakin’s Force abilities and stakes both C3P0 and R2D2, in exchange for Watto staking Anakin. (Watto draws the line at Anakin’s mother, even for two droids.)

In the meantime, Anakin and the handmaiden (okay, it’s secretly Queen Amidala because Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley are interchangeable) are bonding. This time around, Padme’s flirting with someone almost the same age as her, so it doesn’t count as grooming.

The pod race arrives, Qui-Gon gives Anakin a few tips on using the Force, and it’s all wrapped up in about five minutes of tense, tightly-scripted, racing, which Anakin wins. Watto is an honourable person and doesn’t try and weasel out of his debts like he would if he was a horrible racist stereotype that we somehow managed to not have during the Star Wars films made two decades earlier.

Anakin says goodbye to his mother and promises he’ll come back and free her and all the other slaves when he’s a Jedi Knight.

As they leave, Darth Maul arrives. Badass lightsaber fight occurs, in which Maul actually says a few things using the actual actor’s mouth, rather than poorly dubbing in Peter Serafinowicz later on. (Sorry, Mr Serafinowicz, you’ve got an awesome voice, so we’ll have the battle droids say more stuff to make up for it.) The Jedi get away.

Events proceed on Coruscant much as they do in the original version of the film. Senator Palpatine continues to be awesome.

The Jedi refuse to let Qui-Gon Jin train Anakin, because he’s actually old enough to be believably too old to start training. Qui-Gon decides he’s going to do it anyway, but doesn’t bother telling anyone except for Obi-Wan, whose training he declares complete.

On the way back to Naboo, after Amidala decides she needs to end the oppression of her people, Qui-Gon gives Anakin the basics in a nice little flashback/forward to how Obi-Wan teaches Luke in Episode 4, complete with the helmet with the poorly-designed visor.

On Naboo, they meet up again with Jar-Jar Binks. Turns out that Jar-Jar has been aiding the Naboo resistance in their campaign against the Trade Federation, against Boss Nass’s orders to remain neutral. When the Trade Federation turned on the Gungans, Jar-Jar was promoted to general, partly because of his foresight and skill at warfare, and partly because that’s how easy it is to advance up the military hierarchy in the galaxy far, far away (paging generals Solo and Calrissian…). The Gungans launch a diversionary assault against droid forces, leading to a battle in which all the close-up shots of droids or Gungans are stop-motion or actors respectively, because CG is still too primitive to do close-ups (Spielberg knew that in Jurassic Park, for god’s sake).

Anakin is deemed a decent enough pilot (what with his pod-racing experience) to accompany the orbital segment of the battle, which he does with extreme competence, eventually destroying the droid control ship in a way that isn’t even the slightest bit accidental. As in the original, he has R2D2 in his ship, but in general the parallels with his son’s first space combat are a bit more pronounced.

Meanwhile, Amidala and the Jedi infiltrate the palace to do their big damn hero stuff, and all this goes according to the original script. Qui-Gon dies, closely followed by Darth Maul, and Obi-Wan promises to continue Anakin’s training.

We get to the ending, there’s a bit of smiley chemistry between Amidala and Anakin during the ceremony at the end, and Jar-Jar is rewarded for his heroism in the Battle of Naboo by being made senator now that Palpatine is chancellor. The newly-knighted Obi-Wan reveals to the Jedi Council that Anakin is already partly-trained, so somebody better finish the job, and he did kind of promise Qui-Gon, and Yoda wouldn’t want him to break a promise, would he? Yoda reluctantly agrees to let Obi-Wan take on Anakin as an apprentice.

What could go wrong?

Cut to the Star Wars end theme.

American Horror Story: Hotel (1 of 2)

The fifth season of American Horror Story turned up Neflix UK the other day, so I watched the first episode last night and am watching the second episode now. (Well, I clicked pause.)

This might be a bit late for people who actually watch TV, but here are my somewhat disjointed thoughts:

I’m not yet hooked by it in the way that I was about, say Asylum or Coven (aka Evil Hogwarts for Girls), but it’s appropriately different from the previous seasons, which is one of the strengths of the show. Even when it misfires, it keeps things fresh.

And then there’s the Sarah Paulson Game, where you wait for each recurring actor from previous seasons to show up. Interesting that they’ve chosen to use Freak Show‘s Edward Mordrake as the apparently sympathetic protagonist, considering how small a role he played in Freak Show (although I understand he’s also in season six, Roanoke, so I guess he counts as a regular now).

Not sure what they’re trying to do with Denis O’Hare’s character, Elizabeth Taylor, this time. Let’s see what happens with that.

The director clearly loves the set/location they’re using for the Hotel Cortez, with long, lingering shots of the art deco. I can see why. It’s lovely.

Lady Gaga seems to think she’s in one of her own music videos, which is appropriate, since the entire thing seems to be a particularly bloody Lady Gaga video, but without her music.

 

For a show that has frequently dabbled with sex, usually of the really sinister or sordid kind, and just as often represented it on screen, it’s somehow managed to completely avoid any nudity beyond the occasional pair of (usually male) buttocks. That trend continues with lots of careful hair placement and, I think at one point, some digital nipple erasure. American network TV, huh? You can show caved in heads and disembowelled torsos, severed limbs and flayed muscles, but a lady-nipple is a no-no. Still, it helps resist the temptation of turning the show into an HBO-style boobfest which would probably detract from the show’s splatter-horror heart.

That said, how graphic was that rape scene? The reflection in the mirror showed a lot more than you could if the attacker was male. (Was the attacker male? Hard to tell. Not sure it was even human.)

If the show could be said to have any message, it’s ‘VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN, YOU IDIOT!’ I’m just a few minutes into the second episode, and it’s been repeated again, thanks to a stupid mother who read some stuff on the internet. I guess the need to protect children is an important part of the Lowes as characters, but coming at a time when completely preventable, yet extremely serious, childhood diseases are coming back in the US, thanks to the fraudulent work of a stricken-off British doctor, it needs saying.

As mentioned, the show hasn’t quite hooked me yet, but it’s not the first season of American Horror Story that hasn’t. Murder House, the very first season, didn’t grab me with its first episode, but I went back to it nearly a year after and ended up mainlining the first three seasons via Netflix. Even seasons that never quite seem to work out what they are, like Freak Show, are still worth watching. Let’s hope that principle still stands for Hotel.

 

EDIT, HAVING SEEN THE REST OF EPISODE TWO: Oh look, Dandy’s back, playing another psychopathic man-child! He does it so well though. And yes, it’s Evan Peters, probably the most varied of the regular team, this time chewing scenery as psychopathic Clark Gable.

(As an aside, I really need to work out a Featured Image to use for my posts aboutCold Iron/Streloc.)