Tag: venom

Direct Beam Comms #125

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

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?

Movies

Venom trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Poster of the Week

Deadpool 2 billboard

Direct Beam Comms #114

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Black Mirror fourth season ***/****

I recently finished up the fourth season of the excellent Netflix Black Mirror series and thought it was the strongest one yet. There were a few episodes that didn’t quite work, but overall I thought from beginning to end Black Mirror is still one of the creepiest/scariest/prescient things on TV right now.

Hang the DJ

“Metalhead”: “Metalhead” isn’t the typical episode of Black Mirror. Shot in black and white, this one is a straight-up action piece that’s kind’a sort’a a British version of The Terminator, and doesn’t let up until the end. I like that series creator Charlie Brooker feels comfortable enough with the universe that is Black Mirror in that there’s no one standard episode of the show and he can stretch out with a slightly different story than usual like with “Metalhead.”

“Hang the DJ”: Honesty, half the fun for me is trying to figure out where each episode of Black Mirror is headed and I couldn’t figure out where “Hang the DJ” was going at all. Even right up to the very end of the episode I had no idea what was about to happen and that’s part of the reason I liked this episode so much so much. Four seasons in and Black Mirror can still surprise.

“Black Museum”: The “Black Museum” episode is closest to the “Black Christmas” episode of a few years ago where a few different interrelated stories are all told under the umbrella of an overall encompassing story. Here, it’s a weary traveler touring the titular Black Museum that contains all sorts of forbidden knowledge and what happens when the disgraced museum proprietor reveals one too many secrets.

USS Callister

“USS Callister”: The episode that was announced first before the series had premiered and got the most hype this season was “USS Callister.” What everyone, myself included, thought was going to be a riff on the original Star Trek series turned into something that was darker and deeper in meaning that anything I could have imagined beforehand.

“Crocodile”: Crocodile is an interesting take on what extremes people are willing to go in order to keep their lives and lifestyle intact. And, since this is all taking place in the universe of Black Mirror, there’s an interesting price to be paid for those actions.

“Arkangel”: The one episode this season of Black Mirror that I didn’t think quite worked was “Arkangel.” This episode about a mother who implants a device in her young daughter’s head so she can see out of her eyes with something akin to an iPad goes pretty much as expected as the girl gets older and doesn’t quite care for the fact that her mom can literally keep track of her wherever she goes 24/7.

Westworld second season TV spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUmfriZoMw0

Movies

Venom trailer

Avengers: Infinity War TV spot

Mission Impossible: Fallout trailer

Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer

Deadpool 2 trailer

Night of the Living Dead

One of, if not the most, influential horror movies in history gets a Blu-ray release this week. While there’s been many different editions of Night of the Living Dead released to date, everything from VHS to DVD both in original black and white and colorized, this brand new 2018 edition marks the first time since the movie was originally released that viewers can see the film in all it’s gory at home.

From The Criterion Collection:

New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director George A. Romero, coscreenwriter John A. Russo, sound engineer Gary R. Streiner, and producer Russell W. Streiner

New restoration of the monaural soundtrack, supervised by Romero and Gary Streiner and presented uncompressed on the Blu-ray

Night of Anubis, a never-before-presented work-print edit of the film

Never-before-seen 16 mm dailies reel

The Movie Chain: #6: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2012)

Last week: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

One of my favorite TV mini-series of all-time is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley from 1979. So I was kind’a predestined to like the 2011 film of the same name that starred Gary Oldman from last week’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in the Smiley role.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the 1970s within the “Circus,” or the code-name for British intelligence, where a Soviet mole has be discovered in their top echelon. Those in charge might know the mole’s there, but no one’s quite sure exactly who it is that’s feeding the Soviets all the British secrets they can handle. Enter Smiley who was booted out of the agency some time before and can be brought into investigate since he’s the one person everyone’s sure isn’t the traitor.

I like the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie a lot, if I think it moves at probably a too fast pace to tell all its story. I think this comes after having read the novel movie was based on and having watched the six hour mini-series many times too. Scenes in the mini-series that take good chunks of hour-long episodes fly past in minutes, or seconds in the movie. However, this might not bother the casual viewer if they’re unfamiliar with the source material.

One thing I think other filmmakers can learn from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that there can be a lot going on in a movie yet the material doesn’t have to be spoon fed to the audience. There’s quite a few characters and scenes in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the dialog is steeped in inside jargon and the pace of the film is fast yet since the underlying story is sound and it all works.

Next week: “You can practically see it from here.”

Rumor Control

Looking at upcoming TV series premieres it seems as if things are going to be pretty light the next few weeks which I couldn’t quite understand at first. On the one hand there’s supposed to be 500 series all premiering in 2018 which would mean that right around ten shows need to debut each week to hit this number. But I figured out why things are so light — I think everyone’s trying to keep out of the way of the Olympics since any series going up against that the next few weeks is sure to be caulked in the ratings.

Then again, if you’re like me and have no interest in the Olympics, having a few series premiere against it might be some genius counter-programming to gain a few more eyeballs to your show than might normally get since there’s not really anything much going on those two weeks of the Olympics.

I’m just sayin’.

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week