Ralph McQuarrie Splinter of the Mind’s Eye cover painting
Tag: star wars
Star Wars is officially cool again
I couldn’t imagine myself saying this a few years ago, but we are living in the age of Star Wars. Sure, the early 2000s were a big time for Star Wars too with the completion of episodes I to III but somehow what we’re experiencing right now feels different. Not only are there new Star Wars movies being released every year but, if last years’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens is any indication, these new movies have the chance of being pretty good too.
And it’s not like there’s been any time since the first movie was released that Star Wars was totally hidden from pop-culture. In the 1980s Return of the Jedi was released, a few TV movies and a slew of animated series were all out too. And in the 1990s the original trilogy was re-released in theaters to great fanfare plus in both decades were loads of Star Wars novels and comics too. And I think what kept Star Wars creative in those nearly 20 years between films were those comics and novels.
Before the age of digital special effects there were limits as to what was possible to show on screen since everything had to be practically done — models had to be built, sets constructed and matte paintings created. But with the comics and books there was no FX budget so anything was possible. The quote I’ve always heard is that those medium has a “billion dollar” special effects budget for each story. And so some amazing things happened in the pages of the comics and books that couldn’t have happened on movie screens then.
I especially remember the Star Wars paintings of artist Dave Dorman. Dorman created these wonderful pieces of art that graced a multitude of comic and book covers from the early–1990s to present And he didn’t just paint established Star Wars “things,” his paintings also helped to expand stories that had already been told in the movies and introduced new characters and situations as well.
Dorman illustrated things I’d always wanted to see like Darth Vader leading a mass of Storm Troopers in a charge, Han Solo facing off against Boba Fett and, more importantly, brand new characters as well. These new characters looked liked they’d spent a lifetime existing in the galaxy of Star Wars with all the grit and grime and wear to show for it.
In fact, when I first saw the trailer to the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story I thought it looked exactly like one of those 1990s Dave Dorman paintings come to life.
This new movie, due out December 16, is a prequel to the original trilogy and tells the story of how the Rebellion got a hold of the plans to the massive planet-destroying Death Star. Said plans were used in the first Star Wars to destroy said Death Star. All of which is great, and is a story I’ve been dying to see since I was five. But it’s the character designs and locations of Rogue One that really piqued my interest in the film, especially that of character Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). Gerrera’s encased in a suit of armor that looks like it was left outside for a decade before being tossed down a flight of steps then set alight.
And Gerrera doesn’t look like he’s in the best of health, he doesn’t look much better than the armor he wears.
In fact, there are loads of characters and settings in Rogue One that looks like all those diverse and different things from the comics and book covers that are different from the previous movies come to life and I couldn’t be more happy.
All those things I have closed up in bookshelves around my house that I pull down and open and fawn over once or twice every few years when the mood strikes will finally be alive and breathing on the big screen. With the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story it’s like I’m a kid again and am counting down the days until Christmas until I can open up my presents and see what I got. Or, in this case, pony up a few dollars and go to the movie theater and see all this on the big screen.
Direct Beam Comms #45
TV
Falling Water – Grade: D+
The new series Falling Water on USA has a nugget of a great idea — that dreams might be interconnected and through these connections greater truths can be gleaned. Alas, other than that kernel Falling Water is a mess.
In the first episode these interconnected dreams don’t actually lead to much of anything. We see a few characters within other’s dreams, but for the most part these dreams are just, well, dreams. One character dreams of his mother, another of a son and the third a love. But otherwise not much happens in them. In fact, story-wise not much happens in the first episode at all.
The four main characters of the Falling Water don’t seem that unique or even all that believable either. There’s Tess (Lizzie Brocheré) who’s a bit like a toned-down version of the character Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but instead of being a computer hacker is a sort of style prognosticator who can tell what’s going to be hot in a few months. There’s Take (Will Yun Lee) who’s a stock police detective as seen on many other TV series. There’s Burton (David Ajala) a corporate security director who feels like he’s a clone of the character of Michael Clayton. And there’s Bill (Zak Orth) who seems to be the rich, eccentric character from loads of series who’s the one person who suspects that dreams might be interconnected.
I’ve got no problem with series taking character types and putting them into different shows, but the characters of Falling Water seemed to be almost copies from other sources. Still, this could be interesting if the overall story had some intriguing aspect(s) to it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much story in Falling Water and what story there was I wasn’t totally sure what’s going on.
Take’s investigating the death of a woman that leads to him finding a mass suicide that ends with someone’s house blowing up while Burton is trying to figure out if the girl of his dreams is real or is literally from his dreams. And Tess and Bill meet and begin to delve the depths of the interconnected dreams. But there just wasn’t any main story to hang things off of yet.
And that’s a big problem I had with Falling Water. It’s the show that’s built around this big central mystery of what’s going on in the dreams and how this relates to reality where the plot will be dribbled out throughout the season. There’s also hints that something else weird is going on from certain characters having monstrous shadows to the word “Topeka” turning up in different characters’ stories. Which is fine, except I’ve been burned too many times on series that do this, that rely on a season-long “mystery” rather than telling a story within each episode, to have any patience whatsoever with Falling Water. Maybe Falling Water will have a brilliant story and maybe not, but the only way to find out is to watch the whole season which I’m not willing to do.
It doesn’t help matters that the series is shot in a way where it seems to be aesthetically close to that of a pretentious perfume commercial with hands intermingling and characters gazing at each other across rooms both inside and outside the dreams. Plus at times the dialog came across as fake and phony that it seemed like the writers of Falling Water were more concerned that people recognize them for the craft than having the characters come across as believable human beings.
Maybe I’m wrong and Falling Water will be one of those shows that people look back on at the end of the season and think how great it was. If so, someone will have to tell me since I’m done with this one.
Channel Zero – Grade: C-
Much like Falling Water, the first episode of the SyFy series Channel Zero isn’t so much a story unto itself, it’s a portal into the six episode limited series. But when the first episode of this horror series feels long and drawn out as this one did it can’t bode well for the rest of the series.
Here, Paul Schneider (Parks and Recreation) stars as Mike Painter, a very Stephen King-like character who’s a writer returning to his hometown years after he first left. Back in 1988 disturbing things happened around town, some of which we glimpse as flashbacks in the episode, but the major event for Mike was the murder of his twin brother. And once Mike returns to town weird things start happening again with creepy creatures stalking the countryside and the return of a children’s TV series called Candle Cove that only kids seem able of seeing and hasn’t been on the air since 1988.
Honestly, the first episode of Channel Zero felt like a cross between some lost King story and the movie The Mothman Prophecies, which sounds great. But somehow Channel Zero came off feeling long and drawn-out and I was quite bored with it by the halfway point of the show. Plus, I was never quite sure what the main plot was for the show. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but I felt more confused than intrigued. Mike has flashbacks to when he and his bother were growing up which seemed to show that the more they watched Candle Cove the more Mike’s brother started developing weird powers. And there’s also a thing that seems to be covered in teeth running around as well as someone in a skeleton looking costume.
The more that I think about the show it seems like it’s got a lot of good ideas going on all taken from other sources as base material for the show, but none of these differing things ever gelled into a one coherent story. Unfortunately, Channel Zero is a mess I don’t think I’ll be sticking around for any more visits to.
Movies
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story trailer #2
“Save the rebellion!”
The Reading & Watch List
- Cycle of the Werewolf- Bernie Wrightson Art Portfolio
- Collins’ Crypt: Report From The 2016 New Beverly All Nighter
- Project Blue aims to snap the first picture of an exoplanet in Alpha Centauri
- These ocean worlds reveal just how little water we have on Earth
This week in pop-culture history
- 1948: Margot Kidder, Lois Lane of Superman is born
- 2004: The TV series Battlestar Galactica premiers
Sci-Fi Heaven
I’m amazed at the amount of great sci-fi movies and TV series that are being released each year. It wasn’t too long ago that sci-fi was relegated to late night TV syndication or movies of the week, but these days the most popular films are all sci-fi in nature and there are a plethora of quality sci-fi TV series too.
What sci-fi movies am I talking about that are so popular? To me, just about each and every superhero movie is sci-fi in disguise. Don’t believe me? Superman is an alien, both Spider-Man and Captain America were created by experiments gone awry and The Guardians of the Galaxy takes place on far off planets in the depths of space.
Even ones that don’t directly contain sci-fi tropes none-the-less have sci-fi elements from Iron Man’s robot-like armor to Batman’s crazy gadgets.
And those are just superhero movies. There’s also loads of great obvious sci-fi movies too.
One of my favorites of the last few years was the underrated Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt movie Edge of Tomorrow about a soldier who’s trapped in a time loop and is forced to live the worst day of his life over and over again during an alien invasion. There’s also the new Planet of the Apes franchise that’s taken a story that’s been around nearly 50 years and put a fresh spin on it and even the latest Mad Max: Fury Road that’s based on a nearly 40 year old film series and recently won the most Oscars at the 2016 ceremony.
And it’s ostensibly a movie that’s a big car chase that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future!
And let’s not forget the two grand sci-fi franchises of the 20th and 21st century; Star Wars and Star Trek. The current Star Trek film franchise has been around since 2009 and has produced three movies, the latest of which was the number one movie in the country for a few weeks running. And Star Wars returned last year with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and earned more than $2 billion at the box office. Now there are new Star Wars movie due out every year forever — or until the movies stop making money.
Because TV series costs less to make than a movie things are even better for the sci-fi genera on the small screen. There, series like The Expanse on SyFy is a classic “people in very large ships in outer space” series updated for the modern day while The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime brings movie adaptation stalwart Philip K Dick to a TV series and even the oh-so-good Stephen King/Steven Spielberg/1980s mashup Stranger Things on Netflix.
In fact there’s so much good TV on these days I could go on and on and on. I didn’t mention the awesome Black Mirror on Netflix or even Doctor Who on BBC America with seemingly more sci-fi series announced each month.
Next year brings the return of Star Trek to TV screens for the first time in 12 years with Star Trek: Discovery. Discovery is co-produced with Bryan Fuller who created the amazing Hannibal series and was also a Star Trek writer in the 1990s. Which means there’ll be two totally separate Trek properties, one in movie theaters and the other streaming to TVs.
And because sci-fi is so popular and makes so much money these days the immediate future looks nothing but bright. The superhero genera is so popular there are SEVEN big-budget movies due out in 2017 and the next Star Wars movie Rogue One premiers this winter. What has me most excited are upcoming movies like Annihilation based on a book series of the same name, another Alien prequel and a new King Kong movie all due out next year.
Surly all this gold can’t last — one day sci-fi will return to the geeky depths that it emerged from earlier this century. Nothing this good can last forever, but until the bubble collapses I’ll be spending my time with my favorite stories and characters at the movies and on TV every week.
Direct Beam Comms #42
TV
The Exorcist – Grade: A-
To be honest, I’ve never seen the original 1973 film of The Exorcist. It was never one of those movies that turned up all that often “edited for TV” on the networks and for whatever reason I don’t ever remember seeing it on any of our pay cable channels we got either. Now I’m certain that I’ve seen parts and pieces of the movie over the years when I happened to catch it here and there. But I’m also very certain that I’ve never seen the movie from start to finish.
And that may be why the new FOX The Exorcist TV series caught with me — I really don’t have anything else to compare it to.
This version of The Exorcist story takes place modern day in the same universe as the film — one of the priests of the show (Alfonso Herrera) sees a newspaper article mentioning the events of the film. In the TV version it’s Chicago and one of Angela Rance’s (Geena Davis) daughters has been behaving differently ever since the death of a friend. And ever since her daughter began behaving this way weird things have started happening around the house like voices inside the walls and weird shadows moving behind doors. Enter young Father Tomas Ortega (Herrera) who goes in and realizes he’s in over his head and isn’t even quite sure what’s happening and gets Father Marcus Keane (Ben Daniels) who has experience in exorcisms to help.
And that’s pretty much where the first episode ends, well after a pretty big/interesting twist to the TV version. So it seems like the story of the TV The Exorcist will be of these two fathers fighting for the soul of Rance’s daughter while at the same time finding out that there’s more than one demon involved.
I really got a kick out of The Exorcist — even if it does fall into the trap of having the demons only affecting people who are already religious which doesn’t quite make sense. Isn’t evil equal opportunity?
I went into it not expecting much — it doesn’t pay to expect much out of new TV series. But I left The Exorcist liking it a lot with the show giving off a strong The Sixth Sense and The Mothman Prophecies vibe in a good way. The show is creepy enough with a few genuine scenes of horror — even if there’s a few scenes where things happen that don’t quite make sense logically other than they happened that way in order to make the scene scarier.
I’m genuinely excited to see where this one goes — with one caveat. I think what worked so well here is that it seems like the story of The Exorcist is going to play out over the course of a season which is great. But only if that season is something like 10 or 13 episode. I think if FOX tries to turn the story of The Exorcist into something more/longer it’s not going to work.
But for right now The Exorcist looks to be the best new show of the season so far.
Also, I realized watching The Exorcist that this is Davis second foray in starring in a remake of a horror classic. She also starred in the 1986 movie remake of The Fly.
Star Wars Rebels – Grade: B+
This third, and reportedly final season of Star Wars Rebels on DisneyXD jumps ahead a few years in time from the first two seasons. Here, Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray) has matured from a young boy to a young man, and where he once had burgeoning Jedi powers now wields these same powers as an almost master.
The only problem is that without the guiding hand of Jedi Kanan Jarrus (Freddie Prinze Jr.) Ezra is being lured by evil forces to serve the dark side.
The story complexity of Star Wars Rebels is surprisingly deep. This is much more than a simple action series where the good guys go and fight the bad guys. Instead, this is a show about what can happen to people fighting the good fight if they even take one step in the wrong direction. Like is Kanan’s decision to train Ezra as a Jedi which could possibly help bring down the Empire a good one, if it also means there’s a chance Ezra might instead be turned to bring down the Rebellion?
Now the rumor is that this is the final season of Star Wars Rebels since there’s a desire to rather than having a bridge show between the two film trilogies to instead have a new series focused on events around the new movies. Which is fine — it’s just a shame that Disney can’t find a few extra dollars in the billions that Star Wars is bringing in to support, I dunno, two Star Wars cartoons instead of just the one?
Just an idea. 😉
The Good Place – Grade: B
The premiere of the new show The Good Place debuted last week on NBC. It was billed as a comedy but after having watched the first three episodes that all ran last week I don’t think that The Good Place had many laughs — I think I chuckled a few times during the episodes. But what the show really is, is one of the darkest and most disturbing things on TV in the guise of a comedy which is actually kind’a interesting.
In The Good Place, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) is a newly deceased person who ends up in “the good place” where the good people go and not the “bad place” where everyone else ends up. Except it turns out that there was a mixup where Eleanor should’ve ended up in the bad place but instead wound up in the good place. And after Eleanor hears what it’s like in the bad place, which involves lots of screaming and loud noises, she wants to stay in the good place and enlists the help of her soul-mate Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) to stay. Which means he’s got to try and make her a better person.
Except that every time Eleanor has a bad thought or does something not good it makes bad things happen in the good place — like trash being strewn everywhere or giant ladybugs attacking the city. So it’s a question of can Chidi reform Eleanor before the good place is destroyed by her, or should he turn her into the good place overseer Michael (Ted Danson) and save everyone else?
Much of the comedy of The Good Place is supposed to come from Eleanor doing bad things like getting drunk, being selfish and envying others. And there are flashbacks to Eleanor when she was alive doing those same sort of things. However, what she did when she was alive wasn’t all that bad — she litters in front of an environmentalist and sneaks off to have sex with a bartender when she’s supposed to be her group’s designated driver. She’s not bad, she’s just a self-centered jerk.
And I think that’s where the darkness of The Good Place comes from. In the mythology of The Good Place only the best of the best get in. New arrivals watch an orientation film of why they made it to the good place and it’s obvious that the vast majority of people on the Earth aren’t good enough to make it to the good place and go to the bad place instead.
I think what interested me the most about The Good Place was thinking about just how people get picked to go into the good or bad place? It seems like there’s some algorithmic based decision going on there — doing good things adds up in your favor and bad takes away, but doing really good things adds up more than just slightly good and vice versa — but who made the algorithm and who made the good place? Is it god who’s pulling the strings?
In certain ways The Good Place reminds me of the 1980s The Twilight Zone episode “Dead Run”. In so much as in that episode it turns out that god isn’t the one deciding who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, that’s the devil’s job. And he’ll take anyone who’s even sinned in the slightest taking nice old grandmas who had impure thoughts and murders alike.
And The Good Place feels very much like the mirror of “Dead Run,” except here it’s the story of the lucky very few who avoid going to the bad place.
Honestly, if The Good Place were more of a drama I’d think it’s the next Lost wondering just what’s going on with the behind the scenes mechanics of the good place and the mystery of how and why everyone got there and what the bad place is like. Is the good place some lie? Are the people living in the good place not actually in the good place?
But since The Good Place is a comedy and not a drama I highly doubt this is the case. I’d be pleasantly surprised if there were something more hiding in the depths of the story of The Good Place, but I won’t be surprised whatsoever if there isn’t.
Lethal Weapon – Grade: C+
This new FOX series based on the 1987 Lethal Weapon film is basically Lethal Weapon-lite by way of the movie Last Action Hero where every police chase is a HIGH-OCTANE chase and every police shootout is a HIGH-OCTANE shootout. And, if a good character is going to be shot it’s going to be in their shoulder so they’ll be able to be up and around that same day. The bright shining spot of the mostly “we’ve seen this all before” Lethal Weapon is Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh who plays the role with just enough cheese to make the first episode at least watchable. Clayne Crawford as Martin Riggs, on the other hand, starts off the episode with a thick southern accent which he somehow looses after the first ten minutes. His version of the Riggs character seems to prowl the depths of depression one minute, pining over a dead wife and child while drinking shots and almost playing Russian Roulette, and almost joyous the next.
I get that the Riggs character is supposed to be a loose cannon and suicidal, but in tone I’m not sure that the TV version of Riggs is there yet.
MacGyver – Grade: F
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Movies
Passengers movie trailer
The rom-com-space-con?
Cool Sites
Pilot Callsigns: The web’s largest collection of callsign stories
This week in pop-culture history
- 1951: Linda Hamilton of Terminator, Terminator 2 and the TV series Beauty and the Beast is born
- 1952: Christopher Reeve, Superman, is born
- 1968: Night of the Living Dead opens in theaters
- 1985: The TV series Amazing Stories debuts
- 1987: Star Trek: The Next Generation premiers
- 2001: Star Trek: Enterprise premiers
- 2005: Serenity opens in theaters