Category: Feature

Direct Beam Comms #125

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TV

Westworld

It’s a great time to be alive if you’re a fan of sci-fi on TV. There’s such a wide variety of shows from The Orville to The Expanse that explore much of the same story territory yet are polar opposites in terms of tone as well as series like Black Mirror and Doctor Who to name a few. So, for one of the best series on TV a few years back Westworld to be as good as it was is ironic, since before it even premiered a lot of people, myself included, were ready to write it off before they’d even seen an episode.

Evan Rachel WoodWestworld was originally set to premiere back in 2015 but various problems on the set forced the delay until late in 2016. There were reports of parts being recast and at one point the entire production was shut down in order that series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy could catch up on scripts that had fallen behind. None of which is a good sign but I was still willing to check the series out when it premiered and am glad I did. The first season of Westworld is one of the finest seasons of television in the last few years and is one of the best sci-fi series out there these days.

Westworld takes place in a theme park of the same name in the future. This park is inhabited by robots dubbed “hosts” who live their lives within the bounds of the park thinking they’re real people really living in the wild west. Into Westworld comes the “guests,” real people who pay obnoxious sums of money to visit the park wherein they can do anything they want to the hosts. ANYTHING. But because the hosts are reset when they “die” and at regular intervals they don’t know all the horrors the guests do to them over and over again.

That is until one day after a software upgrade makes it so that some of the hosts do start remembering.

Jeffrey Wright
Jeffrey Wright

The question in the first season becomes at what point do you recognize that what you originally though were just automatons are a new form of life, and what happens when this new sentient life realize this too and wants to start living free of the horrors they’ve been enduring for decades?

What happens when start fighting to take back what’s theirs?

The first season of Westworld ended on a perfect beat, so much so that it the series would’ve ended there it would’ve been one of my favorite endings ever. Luckily, though, it wasn’t and the second season of Westworld premiered on HBO last Sunday.

The first season of the show played out in a non-linear fashion, with events taking place in its past as well as present and the second season does this too. This time it’s events from just after the conclusion of the first season up until a few weeks later.

If the first season ended with the “hosts” fighting back against their oppressors, in the second the “hosts” have totally rebelled and any software safeguards they once had that made harming the “guests,” or any living thing really, impossible are gone. And while the guests might like playing cowboys when they’re on vacation, they’re no match for the hosts who some of which are programmed to be killing machines and now practice their savage skills on living people.

Tessa Thompson
Tessa Thompson

But the park is still worth billions in its technology alone so Delos, the park’s owners, have come with a small army in order to secure their intellectual property. Which, ironically, they’re more concerned with their IP than for the people still left alive on Westworld on the run from the hosts.

It’s interesting to see just how the dynamics of Westworld have shifted between the seasons. In the first, host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) was a sweet farmer’s daughter who just happened to be the oldest host in the park. As the season progressed Dolores’ programming shifted and she slowly began to see what was really happening around her. Now, in the second, she’s changed to a murderer who, along with host Teddy (James Marsden), are hunting down all the guests they can find. And the characters who were the uncaring people of the first season who took their aggression out on the hosts when they weren’t treating them like slaves are on the run for their lives.

So who are we to root for in the second season of Westworld? Is it the Dolores and the hosts who are murdering people as fast as they can find them or will it be the host’s former oppressors now trying to stay one step on the run from their murderous creations?

Will we pull for Dr. Frankenstein or his monster this season?

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Venom trailer

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Deadpool 2 billboard

Direct Beam Comms #124

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

Movies

It seems like it was Christmas only yesterday, but the summer movie season starts this week. Traditionally, this movie season starts the first week of May, but because there’s so many movies out this summer Marvel decided to kick it off a week early with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on Friday.

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool
Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool

For the longest time it seemed as if one summer would have a bunch of movies I wanted to see but the next would only have a few. And this would alternate year to year. But nowadays, for the last few years at least, each summer is filled with movies I want to see. Too many for me to see in theaters so I have to pick and choose. While there are some movies I’m dying to see and will certainly see in theaters, I’m looking at you Deadpool 2 and Solo, others like Ant Man might be ones I wait to come out on home media.

Even waiting for a home media release doesn’t mean waiting very long. A movie like Black Panther that was released at the beginning of February is set to be released on digital download just three months later at the start of May. For some movies I can wait 90 days to check them out.

I remember too when all the talk about the summer movie season used to be that it was filled with remakes and sequels. That really hasn’t been mentioned for some time now since it seems as if practically every big-budget summer movie the last few years is a sequel or based on some other pre-existing property.

Which brings me to a curiosity of movies as of late.

A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place

Over the last few years the most interesting movies being released are low-budget horror films like Get Out and, while I haven’t seen it yet, A Quiet Place. These movies cost a relative pittance to make, reportedly A Quiet Place cost $17 million and Get Out just $5 but have been earning huge returns at the box office. $255 million for Get Out and, as of this writing, more than $100 million for A Quiet Place. While these movies aren’t making anything near the amounts of cash a Marvel movie does, so far Black Panther has made more than $675 million alone, those little horror movies aren’t nearly as big a risk for the studios to take in developing them. The budget for Black Panther was a reported $200 million which means only a huge movie studio like Disney can afford to make them. When the budget for a movie is between $5 and $17 million like those horror movies the risk is a lot less and can be taken by a smaller studio.

And too, if a movie that cost between $5 and $17 million to make flops at the box office it probably doesn’t mark the death knell of the studio that made it, while the flop of a $200 million dollar movie might.

This has happened before. Back in the 1960s movie studios were producing a lot of big-budget movies then too. Movies like Doctor Doolittle and Paint Your Wagon were big-budget flops that decade which nearly bankrupted the movie studios then.

I’m not saying that any of the big-budget movies this summer in any way are going to bankrupt any movie studios — billions in box office returns the last few years testify to that — but it is something to thing about. That the movies that are crowd pleasers today might be the same type of movies that are the flops of tomorrow when tastes change as they always do.

Solo: A Star Wars Story TV spot

Deadpool 2

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GLOW season 2 video

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Superhero teams don’t make sense

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Superhero team movies are all the rage these days. If it’s not the Justice League teaming up then it’s the X-Men or Fantastic Four. All of which is very cool. But as I started thinking about the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie I came to the realization that a lot of superhero teams really don’t make sense.

The Avengers
The Avengers

If you look at a team like the one in Avengers (2012) of Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow, these are characters thrown together to battle some great, unstoppable foe that they can only hope of defeating with each other. Which makes some sense. They all come together for the big dust-up and prevail in the end. What doesn’t make sense is why do they stay together?

Thor is a god who lives on another planet, so making it to Avengers meetings can be problematic. The Incredible Hulk is an unstable monster who’s only kept in check by Bruce Banner and should probably stay as far away from people as possible. Captain America is a super soldier, and as such shouldn’t he be working for the government? Tony Stark/Iron Man is a playboy whom time and time again proves that he doesn’t work well with others.

Who’s paying them? Are they indentured servants giving up any semblance of normal lives in order that they can put their lives on the line day in and day out to battle things like robotic terrors and science gone amok for the greater good? Are they superheroes, or are they superslaves?

I suppose you’ve got Hawkeye and Black Widow who are already working with SHIELD when the movie begins, so they make at least some sense working as part of the team.

But for the others, not so much.

The X-Men
The X-Men

Things get even worse when you take into account the X-Men. The X-Men are a group of super-powered mutants lead by Professor X who secretly teaches outcast mutants at his school where the teachers moonlight as this super-powered team. By day Jean Grey might teach math to a bunch of seventh graders, but by night she’s out saving the world from the likes of Magneto with the other X-Men. So these are teachers, who have to be doing all the things teachers do like helping kids with their homework and coming up with their curriculum. But these X-Teachers are really spending most of their time zooming around the globe trying to stop armageddon. Am I to believe that Scott Summers is aboard the Blackbird grading papers in between fighting Apocalypse and Mr. Sinister?

Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four

I suppose the one team that does make sense is the Fantastic Four. This is a family-ish team with stretchable Reed Richards who’s married to, or at least gets married to at some point in the story, Sue Storm who’s brother Johnny and friend Ben Grimm are all given superpowers after one of Reed’s experiments goes awry. Regardless of the fact that they’re all almost killed by this experiment, them banding together does make some sense because of the whole family angle and the fact that they get their powers at the same time.

While all that might be plausible, at no point did anyone like Johnny or Ben say to Reed, “I appreciate the opportunity to fight the Mole Man once every few months, but I’d really like to go back to school to learn how to become a chef.”

Looking at the superhero team from the outside it’s interesting to see how scary someone like Iron Man is. He’s got the power of a small army at his fingertips and roams around the globe doing whatever he thinks is right no matter what the consequences. Or even the Incredible Hulk who at any moment can Hulk-out can devastate any city more effectively than even an atomic bomb. For them to be running around together to the average person might just be terrifying.

Of course these movies all take place in a fictional universe where all of the superheroes are nice to each other and none of them has ever thought about how much better the world were be if it were their group running it. 😉

Direct Beam Comms #123

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Lost in Space

The Lost in Space franchise has been around longer than the Star Trek franchise, yet while there’s been more than 700 episodes of Star Trek on TV and 13 movies in the last 50 years, with Lost in Space there was only the original 93 episodes of TV that ended in 1968 and one poorly received film in 1998. But the original concept behind the series is even older. It’s based on the novel Swiss Family Robinson from 1812 about a family marooned on an island after a shipwreck which was almost certainly inspired by the even earlier story Robinson Crusoe from 1719.

Lost in Space
Lost in Space

Lost in Space has been gone so long that there are a few generations of people who’ve grown up without it, and their only connection to the material is the series’ catch phrase, “Danger, Will Robinson!” I know I’ve only ever seen a smattering of classic Lost in Space episodes as I don’t ever remember it rerunning in my area when I was a kid.

While there hasn’t been much Lost in Space since that 1998 movie that starred William Hurt, Mimi Rogers and Gary Oldman there was an attempt to reboot Lost in Space on The WB in 2004 that would have starred Adrianne Palicki (currently starring in The Orville) as Judy Robinson. But that series never got any further than a single pilot episode and was never brought to series.

The Jupiter 2
The Jupiter 2

But now, 50 years after the original 1960s series ended comes a new Netflix version of Lost in Space. Starting Molly Parker and Toby Stephens as Maureen and John Robinson, the duo along with their three kids are part of an evacuation of the Earth after it was hit by a comet causing an ecological disaster. But instead of ending up where they were supposed to be the Robinsons were separated from the rest of their colonists when their ship the “Jupiter 2” crash landed on an uncharted planet. This planet is full of wonders and dangers as the family must overcome obstacle after obstacle in order to survive even their first day lost in space.

I enjoyed this new Lost in Space if there was a bit too much, erm, danger going on in the first episode for my taste. If it’s not the family crash landing on the planet than it’s Maureen breaking her leg or Judy (Taylor Russell) trapped in ice or young Will (Maxwell Jenkins) being lost in a woods … and that’s not all that happens in the first episode that feels overloaded.

Lost in Space isn’t Stranger Things or even something like The Expanse — and I think that’s a good thing. This new show feels more like a family adventure show, something that’s really not made anymore. I’m interested to see where this new Lost in Space goes, if I hope it slows down a bit on the whole family in peril every few minutes thing.

The Expanse

Over the last few years the one bright, shining spot on the Syfy channel has been The Expanse. There was a lot of talk when this series premiered that Syfy was trying to turn its act around, to become more like the channel it used to be that ran series like the Battlestar Galactica reboot rather than what it had become known for more recently as the home to cheap-o movies and schlocky genre reality series. Yet here we are three years later and Syfy still airs those cheap-o movies and is still producing schlocky reality shows.

The Expanse
The Expanse

Oh well, while it might be on a channel questionable character, it doesn’t take away from the fact that The Expanse is still one of the best series on TV no matter where it happens to air.

I remarked at the time The Expanse debuted that we were experiencing a dearth of “very large ships in outer space” shows. Which three years later we still mostly are — there’s also Star Trek: Discovery that covers this same sort of ground too but that’s the only other one I can think of. Which is really odd. We live in a time where sci-fi, horror and other genre series are king yet the most traditional sci-fi show out there of people zipping around the cosmos in ships is still mostly missing from the crop of current series. I’m not sure if this is because that “very large ships” bandwidth is being taken up by 700+ episodes of Star Trek that seem to air in constant rotation on TV, not that I’m complaining since I love that stuff, or if what’s popular sci-fi now are more Earth based shows like Black Mirror or Westworld? But the last few years The Expanse has been filling a very large hole as it were in my sci-fi yearnings since there’s not much else out there new that’s like it.

The crew of the Rocinante
The crew of the Rocinante

In The Expanse, it’s a few hundred years in the future where mankind has colonized most of the solar system. People are living on the Moon, Mars and on asteroids out in the “belt.” But even though it’s a bright, shiny future we’re still squabbling over petty things and mankind isn’t going to let a little thing like the discovery of something in the depths of space that threatens all life in our solar system dissuade us from having an all out solar-system war with the Earth on one side, Mars on the other and the people living in the belt caught in the middle.

Much of the first two seasons of The Expanse focused on the lead-up to and the eventual start of this war and this new third season of the show picks up mere moments after the second season ended, with the solar system exploding in war all around the crew of the Rocinante while the one person who might be able to stop the bloodshed Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is being held hostage on a ship far out in space.

Much like with the Battlestar Galactica reboot The Expanse isn’t a show viewers can just start watching now, three seasons in. There’s so much backstory going on from plot to character relationships to politics it’s really only possible to start watching this show from the beginning.

So, if you haven’t seen The Expanse yet do yourself a favor and check the first two seasons first before jumping into this new third one. But it’s worth your time and effort to do so.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer

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Direct Beam Comms #122

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Legion

While they might not start out that way, after a while a lot of the villains in superhero movies and TV series become boring and overused. In the Superman movies time and time again it’s Lex Luthor who’s the main baddie and in the X-Men universe it’s Magneto. Not to knock those characters, or the actors who portray them, but in the Superman and X-Men universes there’s literally hundreds of amazing villains that could be used, yet those standby bad guys get used time and time again.

Rachel Keller
Rachel Keller

Except the FX TV series Legion, which is part of the X-Men universe, doesn’t use Magneto, or even an antagonist many people would know. Instead, the creator of that series chose to use a relatively obscure villain, the Shadow King.

A little backstory — in the comic book universe David Haller is the son of Professor X and suffers from a condition of multiple personalities where each personality controls a different power. Haller was such a powerful mutant that he, abet accidentally, destroyed the entire X-Men comic book universe a few decades back. The TV series approaches things a bit differently, though still very interestingly.

In the first season of Legion, Haller (Dan Stevens) is a person who’s suffered his entire life with mental illness and ends up in an institution. But it’s an odd place where it seems as if some people there possess strange abilities. And as David begins exploring past memories he comes to realize that he too possesses said “strange abilities” when inexplicable past events suddenly becomes very explicable if the explanation was that David has superpowers. And the reason that David is in an institution rather than running around and using his powers for good is that there’s a mutant parasite called the Shadow King (mostly Aubrey Plaza) who’s attached itself to David’s psyche and is feeding off of him and his powers and keeps him in a delusional state.

Aubrey Plaza
Aubrey Plaza

I’m a comic book collector and while I’m intimately familiar with the likes of Luthor and Magneto, I was only dimly aware of the Shadow King. Which I really liked in Legion. If I don’t really know a character, then I really don’t know what they’re going to do next, unlike villains who get used all the time. The first season of Legion kept me guessing as to where it was going to end up right until the end which made for what I thought to be one of the best series of 2017.

Now comes a second season of Legion which began last week. Always a series that’s just as much style as substance, but is able to be BOTH rather than just style, the show picks up about one year after the events of last season with the Shadow King on the run and Haller kidnapped by a robotic orb. Now returned to the fold, Haller finds that the group of mutants he was working with in the first season to battle the Shadow King have joined forces with the mysterious “Division 3,” a sort’a government organization, since both came to the realization that the Shadow King’s more dangerous to the future planet than their small group of mutants

But David’s returned a bit different, he seems to be hiding things. And the one place you should never try and hid things is alongside other mutants who can read minds.

I was a bit concerned when watching this latest season of Legion as the show takes some time to ramp up. I was worried that this season was going to be more style than substance, but when the second season story kicked in and made my jaw drop all my fears about where Legion was headed dissipated and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.

Fahrenheit 451 TV spot

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