At least as good as Azkaban, perhaps better depending on what you like. Me, I like dark wizardry and Tom Riddle, walking the line with Snape, and Dumbledore Gandalfing it up. This one was finally restrained in all the right ways; for once the music was minimal enough that I could hear sound from adjacent theaters, and the frenetic “action” actually stopped for, you know, scenes. Where people act.
Jim Broadbent acts the SHIT out of this movie and is the unsung backbone of the whole thing. Dan Radcliffe’s come a long way, too, and in the sequence where he’s high on Felix he’s actually FUN for a while instead of being a dour little messiah. Sorry to say Emma Watson’s still a weak link; better, but never quite properly cast to my mind.
A lot was still glossed over from the book, but here the movie hung together instead of seeming like a hasty montage. One scene sticks out like a sore thumb and I hear it was added; bad move. The climax of the most harrowing scene also proves once again that CGI zombies don’t cut it.
July 15th, 2009 in
movies | tags:
harry potter |
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It’s really good. I enjoyed it a lot.
It’s not great. I don’t think any single movie (with the possible and obvious exception of The Wrath of Khan) or episode (with the possible and obvious exception of the Next Generation episode “The Inner Light”) has been great on its own. What makes Star Trek is the continuity — the emotional investment we make in the starship “family” and their approach to the universe. I say “we,” but while I’ve seen all the movies, most if not all of the Next Generation episodes (which were airing when I was growing up), and a smattering of DS9, Voyager, and the original series (and the pilot of Enterprise), I’ve never really been a Trekkie.
This movie won’t completely change that, though I’ll admit that for the first time since maybe Wrath of Khan I came out of a Star Trek movie eager for a sequel. It’s not because the plot was great; it was actually pretty awful, a wacky time-travel mess that didn’t even make sense while I was watching it, much less afterward. It was a clever way to deal with continuity, to give the reimagining a “science”-fiction justification rather than just running with it unexplained, but it didn’t really stand up to scrutiny. But then neither did most of the other things we saw, such as a bunch of cadets (or at least barely-graduated Starfleet students) being thrown onto bridge positions aboard actual starships, an experienced captain who wrote a thesis on a disaster whose twin he later fails to recognize (so that Kirk can figure it out and explain it to him), a mysterious substance that detonates to form a singularity but can be transported in glass tubes, random sentient aliens on the run from either George Lucas or Guillermo del Toro, and a big confrontation between Spock and Kirk that I won’t spoil but which isn’t at all…logical.
However, luckily, J.J. Abrams has built this thing around what really matters in Star Trek: affability and optimism. The crew are terrifically cast and all fun to watch — Uhura, Spock, Kirk, Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty — and several of them are actually pretty sexy, something I never thought I’d say about those particular characters (for the record: Uhura, Kirk, and Chekov). This is a Trek that gets downright slapstick a lot of the time, just silly and manic, and it actually works. This in itself is quite an accomplishment. But the crew are also all energetic, can-do youngsters — intellectual achievers, lateral thinkers, terrific athletes, and highly original geniuses.
It sounds nauseating, doesn’t it? But it’s not, and even if it’s utopian fantasy, it’s one I’d actually want to live in, or at least live up to. This, as I understand it, was what Gene Roddenberry was aiming for, and I’m gratified to finally have gotten a glimpse of what Trekkies everywhere love so much about their fictional home.
All over discussions of the finale I’m hearing the same parrot squawk:
“The show’s ending isn’t deus ex machina because it’s been about God from the BEGINNING! Weren’t you paying ATTENTION?”
Yes, I was, frak you very much. We all were. But introducing religion doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want in your story and just point to God as your explanation.
The problem isn’t that there’s divine intervention in the story. I don’t accept that as an explanation for anything in real life, but I’m okay with it in fiction if it’s earned. That is, it’s written well, it’s used sparingly, it’s connected to story values (courage vs. cowardice, compassion vs. hatred, etc.), and it doesn’t substitute for the active choices characters make to participate in their own lives.
I can accept the angels as messengers of a higher power. A big reason for that is that they represent a different point of view for Baltar and Caprica Six — they serve as conscience, as perspective, as champions of faith (not necessarily religious faith so much as faith in one’s own strength and intuition). Think about all the “miracles” head!Six kept perpetrating through Baltar. If we take these at face value — miracles for the sake of miracles, or of encouraging belief in higher powers — they fall horribly flat, unless you are already convinced that belief in a higher power is an end in itself. The angels fortunately permit different readings that all have some resonance within the story.
I find Starbuck harder to accept because she has been set up as a mystery since “Maelstrom,” flying into the abyss a clear suicide, repeatedly telling us “I don’t know what I am” — and in the end we are simply told we must take her at face value. She flew into the maelstrom for no reason, emerging simply as God’s compass, a solid ghost — and what this means is that her story ended in that episode. She is NOT Adama’s “daughter.” The Starbuck we’ve seen ever since then is an unperson — and yet we’ve been asked for an entire season to feel along with Starbuck’s ghost her confusion and struggle, something we thought she was flying into the maelstrom to end. What does her decision to trust her father’s apparition — an angel in the head of an angel! — actually mean to her character, if her character has been transformed into God’s Starbuck Action Figure? Her nature from “Maelstrom” onward is arbitrary. So the story values she embodies — intuition? perseverance? — mean nothing to Starbuck the human being. That individual is a rotted corpse. What’s left is the shadow of that person, or at best a ghost that can’t rest until it’s been able to do its duty.
In other words, there’s no real subtext because we finally learn that she is wholly and only what she appears to be: the solid ghost of herself, a star to follow to Earth. The only way for this to pay off in terms of values is for her to have a profound influence on the other characters in the show in a way she could not have done as a Real Live Girl. I would argue that generally she did not. We have every reason to view her as an actual person who is determined to lead her people to the Promised Land, and every reason not to care once it turns out she’s just a pawn. Granted, pawns only move one square at a time, but that’s because chess has rules. God can reach down and move the pieces however It wants to. That’s what “God” means.
My girlfriend’s prediction, based on Starbuck’s return and Roslin’s dreams about death as a river, was that Earth would be a sort of afterlife or underworld, a place people must die to reach. This would have explained why Starbuck’s Viper had to explode to get her to Earth. It would have been her voyage to and from the underworld, like that of Odysseus or Aeneas or Orpheus (who perhaps liked to sing “All Along the Watchtower” in a voice 180 degrees from Dylan’s?). She would have had to come to terms with the fact that she’d actually died, to accept it, and to convince everyone else to leave off their attachments — to survival at any cost, to resurrection, to the endless cycle of reincarnation — and make peace with death, which would in turn allow them into the underworld, which turns out to be Arcadia, Valhalla, Nirvana. They would have escaped the wheel of repetition and found ultimate peace.
It would have been a bit of a downer from one point of view, but really fucking cool. And still very spiritual and nonscientific (unless maybe death is “through the black hole and into a parallel universe where Earth isn’t a Cylon world,” which would have worked too), mixing elements of Greek mythology and Buddhist philosophy. Her choice of death and her return would have meant something other than a rather clumsy, elaborate “miracle.” She would have remained, in some sense, an actual human being capable of continuing to learn. And the characters would still have been making choices, rather than being led down a preprogrammed path.
What I’m trying to say is that, like many fans, I’ve known and accepted that there would be a spiritual element to the show all along. But it’s not a Get Out of Jail Free card, a way of dismissing all the mysteries that kept us riveted, expecting answers that, even if they defied rational explanation, at least resonated in terms of the overall story. Playing that card isn’t a slap in the face of ontological materialism — well, it is, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a slap in the face of good storytelling, and from what I’m reading, the critics who have been following this show as attentively as anyone else, not to mention RDM himself, are fully aware of this shortcoming.
They’re satisfied anyway. Maybe, with enough time, I will be too.
Battlestar Galactica is finally over. I’m okay with it. Right now I have very mixed feelings about how it ended, and I want to get my thoughts out before I dive into the online discussions.
First, let me review my predictions. If you are afraid of spoilers and you haven’t seen the finale yet, stop now.
1. Death is the way home/Earth is an afterlife: didn’t happen.
2. The Colony is near Earth: nope.
3. Galactica as battering ram: yep. Obvious.
4. Boomer helps Hera escape: yes.
5. Baltar and Six died on Caprica: no.
6. Helo and Athena die to let Baltar and Six raise Hera: no, thankfully.
7. Baltar stays on the “suicide mission”: yep.
8. Roslin’s health tied to Hera’s: no.
9. Ellen kills Cavil: no. In fact, Cavil’s death is anticlimactic as it gets, and didn’t feel believable to me.
10. They go through the black hole: nope. I’m still not sure what the hell that was even for.
So I was 3 for 10 on my predictions. I don’t mind being wrong, though I think some of them might have improved and explained some elements of the finale and the episodes leading up to it.
On to what DID happen.
- The flashbacks were very cool but only some of them seemed necessary. We see Adama turning down a desk job to fly Galactica and demonstrating, as if we didn’t already know, how important to him his word is. We see Roslin losing her family and frakking a younger guy before deciding to go into politics, and this is the one that seemed especially superfluous to me: I guess her character turns here seemed too subtle. We see Kara and Lee showing that they’ve been near-missing each other since they met, and always will. And we see Six helping Baltar’s father in what might or might not be a selfless act, and Baltar sticking his neck out for Six “for love,” which we could have inferred anyway, I think. So I’m glad they were there, but in terms of storytelling they were a bit redundant.
- A big old firefight between humans, humanoid Cylons, and Centurions old and new! I want to say it was exciting, but mostly it was mildly cool. I guess I knew the battle wouldn’t be lost or won on a military scale, so it was just robot porn. Again, welcome, but not really the focus of the episode.
- Boomer saves Hera. And we get a kind of unnecessary flashback to explain that a scene we’ve never seen before, in which Adama and Tigh are pretty abusive to her, is the reason why she’s sticking her neck out now. It’s not “I owe Adama one” because she, you know, SHOT him in season 1. It’s because he gave her another chance to fly her Viper correctly. It’s not because she loves Tyrol and wants to see him survive; it’s not because she doesn’t want to see Hera sliced and diced after all. It’s just a little weird to insert this character point here and now. But I’ve always liked poor Boomer, even through all the bad stuff she’s done, and I hated to see Athena gun her down, even though it probably had to happen.
- We learn The Truth of the Opera House. But there isn’t much to it, frankly. There’s really no significance to the moment I thought would be scary, when Roslin and Athena lose Hera and Baltar and Six take her through this apparently doom-laden door. It’s just a vision of Galactica after all, a fateful moment but not one that really required Baltar and Six to take Hera. Anyone could have brought her onto the bridge, provided that Baltar had been there to give his little speech.
- We learn the Truth of the Angels and Starbuck, which is no truth at all, but a vague allusion to God, made worse by its agnostic bent: is it God, or Gods, or just a force of nature that somehow has sentient emissaries (the angels) and can raise the dead Starbuck as semi-angels (substantial and visible to everyone, yet capable of vanishing when their work is done — I guess like Shelly Godfrey). It’s not that I object to agnosticism (quite the opposite), but the actions of this “higher power” have been so specific and intentional that the “force of nature” explanation I’d prefer in real life doesn’t seem to fit here. And as I feared, this is not a REAL explanation. “God did it” doesn’t really cut it for me. It feels coherent, but so does “the authors wrote it that way.” So BSG officially leaves the realm of science fiction, if it hadn’t already.
- Baltar talks Cavil down. Cavil decides to trust the “parents” he murdered. Yeah. Didn’t quite buy this either. I thought Cavil already HAD the secret of resurrection; he just didn’t have any more copies of himself. I guess maybe he didn’t know how it worked, he just ran the machines. In any case, he seemed awfully easy to convince.
- Tyrol breaks the chain and Tory’s neck. Poor Tyrol: all his women kill each other. I kind of liked things going “wrong,” here, though it’s kind of convenient, as is Cavil’s suicide, precluding any payoff to his monologuing in “No Exit.” Why would a fierce machine like Cavil just decide to give up and turn off? Not that I was sorry to see it happen, but his character didn’t get a lot of resolution.
- Racetrack blows everything up and forces Starbuck to jump Galactica, leaving the dramatic potential of the black hole completely untapped, a total red herring. So “All Along the Watchtower” was a way to get to Earth. How did her dad know it? Was it just a song repeating through history — first Anders, then Dreilide Thrace, and later on Bob Dylan? And jeez, RDM, why THAT song? Couldn’t you have picked something a little more melodic and mythic-sounding? I guess the lyrics sort of fit, but most of the time we encounter the song in the show it’s an instrumental. Oh well.
- And yay, here’s real Earth. It was here, a million light-years away, this whole time! Who knew? This is more or less the ending many people have predicted for a while: the BSG crew end up on “our” Earth in its distant past and influence its development, probably entering into its myths as well, since Apollo, Athena, and Hera all survive. The loveliness of this ending almost makes up for its glibness. So everyone really agreed to give up all their technology and start over? They really thought they’d have a better chance if they spread out over the world instead of staying together and pooling their skills? Nobody thought it would be a waste and an awful risk to fly all their ships into the sun, especially now that the Cylons are over? And what did they do with all the plastic stuff they had, the artifacts that wouldn’t biodegrade, and that Raptor Adama flew off into the wilderness? We’re supposed to believe no modern humans ever found that stuff? Just repeat to yourself: it’s just a show, I should really just relax.
- BSG’s unsettling trend of killing off its women continues. Tory dies (though I’m not sure I mind), Roslin dies, Kara is revealed to have been dead all along. This is quite a raw deal for the Adamas, but a rawer deal for our favorite female characters, who just peter out. And what’s the deal with people just deciding to go off by themselves on unfamiliar planets? First D’Anna, now Tyrol, Bill, and presumably Lee as well? Would you really do that, just go off by yourself and probably starve to death if you couldn’t develop hunting skills fast enough? Seems like suicide to me, but I guess it’s a more elegant version.
- So I don’t really see how Hera was the key to anyone’s survival, except Roslin’s. I guess she helped Kara with the song, and she helped create a situation where the Good Guys could confront and win out against Cavil’s forces. But biologically, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why she was special to humanity’s survival, since humans could already have kids. She was key to the Cylons’ survival, sort of, since presumably all the kids she had were part Cylon, if less and less as time went on. And who did she mate with, anyway? The human children of the survivors of the fleet? The children of Caprica Six and Baltar? The indigenous human tribes?
- We learn that Hera is actually Mitochondrial Eve. This isn’t the same as being an origin point for all of modern humanity, but it does, if I’ve understood this confusing concept correctly, mean that all of humanity has her mitochondrial DNA. Which we could maybe think of as a Cylon trait. So we’re all part Cylon today. That could be cheesy, but I’m cool with it. I’m even okay with Ron Moore being the guy holding the issue of National Geographic, and with the implication that our modern advances in robotics MIGHT someday lead us to make Cylons who will rebel and start the cycle over again. What I’m not okay with is the awful, awful dialogue between the Angels spelling all of this out for us. It would have been far more effective without most or all of that. I did like the “it doesn’t like to be called [God],” but I’m not sure I got “silly, silly me” — I’ll have to watch it again to see what he was talking about.
So there we have it — the end and the new beginning. The mythic part was satisfying, for me, and I didn’t feel quite as let down on the mysteries part as I’d expected to, though it was still cheaper than I’d hoped for. Character-wise, I’m not sure yet how I feel.You notice that of the major couples, no human-human pairings survived? I guess that stacks the deck for “us” to be part Cylon. I knew they wouldn’t live forever, and that not everyone would live happily ever after together, but it still felt pretty hollow and sad. Still, if I were into “favorite couples,” I was always rooting for Helo and Athena most of all, so I was glad they made it.
I’m glad it’s over. Not because I wanted it to end, but because I wanted it to end well. It didn’t end perfectly, but it ended well.
If you haven’t seen “Daybreak, Part 1,” this past week’s episode, you probably should watch it first, though frankly there was really nothing to spoil in it.
So to review my previous predictions:
1. I’m not longer sure what to think about my girlfriend’s idea that death is the way home. Production photos I’d seen of various characters in what is clearly a civilized nightclub, and rumors that certain dead characters were going to show up in the last episode, lent support to this theory, but now we know that those dead characters are in flashbacks (which are wonderful, by the way).
2. The Colony turns out to be on the accretion disk of a black hole, not on or near “real” Earth as I’d predicted. On the other hand, what was it that Racetrack and Skulls saw when they were in the asteroid field? Was it the Colony? Or was it Mars and Earth, seen from the asteroid belt in our solar system? Probably the Colony, honestly, since they wouldn’t have any clue what Earth looked like and they couldn’t just see that it’s a habitable planet. Oh well. 
3. I’m still expecting Galactica to be used as a battering ram, but I’m not as sure as I was.
4. No question this will still come to pass: Boomer will help Hera escape, or at least betray Cavil and set events in motion.
5. There’s still a possibility that all is not as it seemed with Baltar and Six. The flashbacks involving them make me wonder. But I think the Baltar we have now needs to be real and human still, and the Caprica we have needs to be real and Cylon. It would just be too weird if they hadn’t been “real” all along.
So a few new predictions:
6. Helo and Athena surely die so that Baltar and Six can raise their child. A lot of other people are saying this and I think it’s got to happen, especially since Athena is just totally broken now.
7. Baltar finally passes the Gaius Baltar test somehow. Fan speculation is that he stows away on the Galactica suicide mission without telling anyone he’s going to. His arc almost makes BSG the “Gaius Baltar story” in the same way the Star Wars trilogy has turned out to be the “Anakin Skywalker story.”
8. Roslin begins to recover the closer she gets to Hera. Somehow her health is tied to that kid now, probably because she has some of the kid’s magical blood.
9. Ellen herself kills Cavil. I’m not sure how this would be arranged, but it feels right. I don’t think he can just be blown through a crack in the Baseship hull — too anticlimactic.
10. Someone or something is going into the black hole. I mean, duh — it’s a gun in the first act and needs to go off in the third. Whether it’s Galactica, the Colony, or just a few unfortunate Vipers, I don’t know. I also don’t know if someone’s going to come out on the other side. My most far-fetched idea for the ending: the ruined Galactica goes through the black hole to a parallel universe! They crashland on our Earth! Adama and Roslin drive off into the sunset wearing studded leather on a bitchin Harley!
For me this movie was the equivalent of the Futureheads cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love.” Of course it’s not as good as the original, without which it doesn’t mean nearly as much, but despite its brashness and eagerness, it’s still extremely enjoyable, and depending on who you are and what you expect it to do, it works.
music
You’ve probably heard that the music in this film is distracting. It is. Sometimes (“All Along the Watchtower,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’”) the song works: it’s appropriate in mood and lyrics, and if it’s a little too obvious and straightforward, that’s forgivable. Other times (“The Sound of Silence,” “99 Luftballons” — even though the latter IS an 80s song about Cold War tensions leading to nuclear war) it stands out too starkly, and at best serves to remind us that we’re watching a film that’s about the planet we live on, alternate history or no. And then there’s the use of “Hallelujah” (the Leonard Cohen original, not the more-famous-these-days Jeff Buckley cover) to soundtrack the Nite Owl/Silk Spectre softcore sequence, which is a bad choice on pretty much every level. Probably the best musical quoting is the Philip Glass music used in the Dr. Manhattan section of the movie; yes, it was written for its own movie, but it’s also the least recognizable piece for most of us, and it’s incredibly lovely.
acting
What you’ve heard is true: Malin Akerman, though better than I thought she’d be, still flatlines on several important scenes, though some of them are opposite Carla Gugino trying and failing to play her older self and it’s hard to decide who’s worse. But the guy playing Ozymandias, whose name I don’t even care to remember, is easily the weakest of the key players, barely convincing us that he’s awake, let alone the smartest man in the world using every resource at his disposal to try and save it from nuclear war. More on this in a moment.
Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) is better than some of the reviews are saying. I don’t agree that Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been better; in a different version of this movie, maybe, but even in the comic Dan Dreiberg isn’t really the schlub that Hoffman would have been asked to make him. Wilson is dorky and awkward but still convinces you that he could have fought crime effectively within the decade; Hoffman, as impressive an actor as he is, would just have seemed comical. So Wilson’s fine.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan (the Comedian) is fine, too, though not quite as good as they’re saying. There are a lot of lines he just reads but isn’t really feeling. It’s a challenging role, for sure — the guy’s an asshole, but he’s also roundly human and complex, so even though you never really like him, you have to understand him and the shaded feelings others have about him. Morgan gets close enough, but he could have gotten closer.
I don’t like Billy Crudup much, but he does a mesmerizing job posing for and voicing Dr. Manhattan. It’s easy to see why this is the character that fascinated Roger Ebert enough to earn the movie four stars. And then there’s Jackie Earle Haley, whose raspy delivery in the trailers worried me but turns out to be perfect if only in a meta- way: Rorschach is, after all, a perfect lovechild of Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker, and a damn good sendup of both. But he’s more than that, and my worst fears are probably going to be confirmed — though the guy is obviously unglamorous and psychotic (like Ledger’s Joker), he’s going to strike a chord (like Ledger’s Joker) with a certain kind of fan who thinks he’s an admirable badass. Haley gets the guy inside and out, though, and though I don’t quite agree with the way he delivers his last lines, I otherwise have zero complaints.
look & feel
Generally awesome. I like that some of the newer costumes have more body armor, and that the old ones are just flimsy spandex. I love the vivid colors, though Ozymandias should have had a lot more gold in his costumes and scenes and a lot less black. Yes, it’s stylized, but mostly avoids the tableau style of 300. A little more realism would have been truer to the book, but it doesn’t kill the film. And the Dr. Manhattan sequence is gorgeous.
There are a few odd squibs, though. The old age makeup is pathetic, and “Nixon’s” nose is just silly. Bubastis looks like an afterthought, just barely more convincing than the lions in I Am Legend (and they SUCKED).
Much has been made of the supposed shot-for-panel faithfulness from book to movie, but it’s exaggerated. Will you recognize key images from the book in the film? Yes. Is that all there is to the movie? Definitely not.
story
Turns out it’s filmable. Not in its entirety, obviously, but the flip side of a story constructed (to paraphrase Alan Moore himself) like a jewel with many facets that reflect and enhance one another is that you don’t need all the facets to tell the story. It doesn’t sparkle as much, but it’s still a jewel.
Of course, I’ve read the book at least three times (and I’m starting on the fourth), so it’s hard for me to tell how this stuff feels to someone who hasn’t read it at all. I recognized minor characters like Hollis Mason and Moloch as soon as they appeared, but will the audiences pick up who Mason is based on a slow trackback from stacks of his memoir Under the Hood? Will they get that Moloch was once a sinister villain if they can’t quite decipher Matt Frewer’s increasingly eccentric line readings?
The new ending is the biggest problem. It’s not that they changed it, it’s that what they changed it to is really difficult to follow, and doesn’t really make any more sense than the original ending. Even so, it might have been fine if the character responsible for the secret plot had seemed benevolent or at least beyond suspicion at first (as opposed to seeming like a Vulcan Nazi from the get-go), and if that character genuinely seemed triumphant and happy at the end. Instead we get basically a moustache-twirler, and in general the character’s story is handled so poorly and stupidly that it’s hard to believe anyone really understood it. As a result the ending has no emotional heft and feels way too long.
Luckily, a ridiculous amount of what leads up to it is pretty wonderful. The story is remarkably fluid considering that it basically follows the comics in focusing first on one character, then on another, and honestly, flipping through the book afterward, I couldn’t find a lot that they missed (apart from the Black Freighter, which I think could never really work intercut with the main story the way it was on the page, and which of course is to be released separately). The Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach each get their spotlight sequences, and each totally works.
Oh: what Rorschach does to the child killer he corners is changed from the book, as you might have heard. Like the change to the ending of the film, this change was made for good reasons but doesn’t quite work. This time it’s too abrupt and simple, rather than being too drawn out and complex. Instead of being Mad Max or Saw, it’s Dirty Harry, though that’s arguably even more appropriate for Rorschach’s story.
violence
Yes, the martial arts are over the top, though I’d argue that with no superpowers you’d have to be pretty effective at hand-to-hand combat to be a decent (still living!) costumed vigilante.
Yes, the blood and gore are WAY over the top and totally unnecessary. They’re distracting, too “look at me! I’m freaking gross!”, too obviously bones thrown at those looking for 300-style carnage (perhaps including Snyder himself).
sex
Yes, the sex is over the top, but only in that one scene, and I’ll take a fake orgasm in a movie any day over a fake hand amputation.
but is it good?
It’s way better than it should have been. It might even be better in some respects than V for Vendetta, since it rarely tries to make the story contemporary in theme, doesn’t add any love stories that weren’t in the source, and mostly remembers that its heroes aren’t really that heroic. But which of the two Alan Moore comics I prefer depends on what day you ask, and I suspect that’s how I’ll continue to feel about their two flawed but still remarkably respectable film cover versions.
Here’s what I think we’re going to see in the Battlestar Galactica finale. If you haven’t seen tonight’s episode (“Islanded in a Stream of Stars”), you should watch it first. To give you a little spoiler space, I’ll start with some of the less specific stuff, including the big one, #1, which is something my girlfriend thought of last year and is looking more and more likely.
1. Death turns out to be the way to a new home for humanity and Cylons alike. They will break the wheel of fate and end up in what amounts to Nirvana. Kara has already done this and come back for everyone else, but she doesn’t know it yet. Perhaps Caprica Six and Gaius Baltar have done the same, and the versions of them we’ve been seeing are “dead” in whatever sense Kara is dead. When they get there, they’ll encounter some characters we’ve known to be dead, including Dee and Zak and maybe even Billy. This is how Kara can be “the harbinger of death” and “lead humanity to its end,” but actually be doing everyone a favor.
2. We’ll see “our” Earth — the planet at the end of season 3, which the clever frakkers at galactica-science.com have been telling us is different from the “Earth” everyone landed on and found a charred cinder in the middle of this season — the home of the Final Five. As that website has predicted, it will turn out that Cavil has brought the incredibly-cool-looking Colony to our solar system. I didn’t think to look closely tonight, but it’s probably either floating in space or it’s on, like, Mars or something. I’m not sure how this theory works with #1, but they both seem likely.
3. Adama is going to ram Cavil’s Baseship with Galactica, or maybe even the Colony itself. This was not-so-subtly foreshadowed by Hera playing with strategic models at the beginning of this ep, as well as the painfully dragged-out talk of Galactica “dying.” What’s less clear is who will be on board at the time. Probably Anders has to be, but maybe Adama will stay too. Roslin might even stay with him, but then again she’s got to show up for the Opera House, either physically or mentally.
4. Boomer’s going to betray Cavil and help Hera escape. Boomer betrays everyone, after all, though I just can’t bring myself to hate her. She’s a sweet girl, but everybody uses her except Tyrol (her “dad” — sorry, not really buying that rhetorical line). She’s a super-terrible mom-substitute, but when she calms down and starts to treat Hera like a little person, you can see she has a heart. And Hera has to make it to the Opera House.
5. I’m not sure what to make of the so-called “head!characters,” or “angels” as I think we have to acknowledge them. I think it’s significant that the only people who have seen them, as far as I can remember, are Caprica Six, Baltar, and Kara Thrace, which is partly why I’m speculating that Six and Baltar truly died in the nuclear blast and that only the undead are seeing angels. But then apparently the Final Five saw them too. So are they “dead”? Or did they just resurrect in the non-Cylon (according to Baltar) way that Kara did? In any case, I’m wondering (as others have been) whether the Six and Baltar in the Opera House are in fact their Angel versions. Seems likely.
That’s all I have so far. What do you think?
Oh man…I’ve let this site languish, haven’t I?
And to make matters worse, I left reviews of those Twilight books as my last words, which is really embarrassing.
I’ve been seeing a lot of movies and reading a lot of books since then. I’ll have more to say soon.
In which Meyer goes “oh shit, it’s time to end this sucker” and spins out close to 750 pages in one volume. At first it’s kind of exciting, because instead of taking 300 pages to work out the obvious Bella does it in maybe 100 and we shift focus entirely to the supernatural shit so that Things Happen. It’s actually almost okay that things go all Rosemary’s Baby for a while, and that Bella looks in real danger of going the way of John Hurt in Alien, until you stop and think about the fact that here we have a situation where the mother knows with almost 100% certainty that she will die in childbirth and she is ignoring everyone begging her to abort. In other words, from one angle Breaking Dawn is one long pro-life fable.
The best part of the book for me was that we get a long section from Jacob’s point of view and in his voice, which is a breath of fresh air and pretty funny to boot (check those chapter titles), and it made me wish once again that he were the hero of the series. It’s interesting that Meyer’s writing is liveliest when she’s writing in a young man’s voice — probably because she has so many brothers she clearly adores. Unfortunately, basically what he does is angst over Bella (who is so not worth it) and then eventually have his romantic thread neatly tied up in a somewhat pervy and unsatisfying way. Its bizarreness is offset by the fact that I think no love triangle has ever been resolved in this fashion, at least not in any book you can buy at Target.
I started writing this right after I finished the book and left it incomplete until now, so I don’t have a lot of ambition left to analyze the flaws of this novel or the series in general. At this moment we’re all watching teenage and “tween” girls everywhere hit puberty from the one-two punch of the fictional Edward and the actor playing him in the movie that’s about to open, and marveling at the mania that’s developed around these wish-fulfillment novels. Because that’s what they are. The pain Bella goes through is described in great detail, but it’s hard to imagine for most lucky readers, and her pleasures quickly take precedence in our fantasies: an inexhaustible demon lover, a brand-new baby who will never need its diaper changed (liquid diet, but also it’s way precocious), a super-mutant-power that saves the day, even a fairytale cottage in the woods (not my cup of tea — I’m more of a Frank Lloyd Wright kinda guy). Harry Potter has this kind of thing too — poor orphan discovers he’s an awesome wizard and goes to an awesome school where every attempt on his life ultimately fails — and it’s more universal in its appeal, but also less horny, so maybe it balances out.
Ultimately I find it hard to respect this series, but not just because of its insidious appeal and startlingly dodgy gender politics. It’s also a problem of missed opportunities. Here are just a few.
1. Edward and Bella “magically” fall in love. Why? She smells good, and he’s gorgeous and saves her life several times. This is so easy and so boring. I’ve never read a Jane Austen novel but I’m pretty sure they don’t work this way; from what I understand her heroines take the whole novel to fall in love, and they do it the way the rest of us do: slowly, making mistakes, building on real chemistry and the things people have in common, not on love-at-first-sight/destiny tropes. Wouldn’t the romance have been that much cooler if the 100-year-old vampire and his 17-year-old girlfriend slowly discovered that they liked doing the same things, reading the same authors, that kind of stuff? We get hints of this, but only later on. Meanwhile in New Moon Bella and Jacob fall in love in exactly this way, the natural human way. It would have been so much more compelling if Bella and Edward had done the same, and her conflict would have seemed so much more real.
2. Edward is over ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. He was around for Vietnam, Korea, WW2, WW1, and the conflicts before that. He unlived through the Depression. He probably met Jimi Hendrix, or could have, not to mention Oscar Wilde. This guy has got to have some incredibly interesting stories to tell, even if he couldn’t get too close to humans during these historical events. Hell, other members of his “family” are even older. Yet NOT ONCE DURING THE WHOLE SERIES can I recall any of them actually making reference to history or giving any real indication that they are this old. I’m not even that into history and even I think this would be one of the coolest things about being undead: you don’t have to age and yet you get to watch eras go by and see things change, forever. Bella doesn’t seem to have that many intellectual interests beyond 19th-century fiction, but you would think that she would have some marginal interest in grilling her boyfriend about the times he’s lived through, if only to help her pass Social Studies. But neither she nor Meyer shows the slightest curiosity about this.
3. The great unexplored story of vampires vs. werewolves — as Meyer portrays them — is class conflict. On one side: the rich whiteys sucking the blood of the land and the people, so rich they can afford to throw away designer clothes after one wearing*, no responsibilities other than keeping the casualties discreet so that no one realizes how deadly they are. On the other side: the poor native tribe, scratching out a living on the reservation, barely able to afford clothes (granted, it’s because they keep wolfing out and ripping them, but still), fixing up old cars for their joyrides and doing their best to defend their land and keep the leeches off it. Maybe you’re thinking “who wants to read all this sociopolitical stuff in a teen vampire romance?” but look, it’s right there in black and white — I didn’t make it up. Even if you narrow it down to the rich preppy boyfriend vs. the grungy biker rival, this is classic romance narrative, and the class element is an integral part of it as the heroine decides whether to be true to her roots (or maybe her libido) or strive for upward mobility. At barest minimum, this is something basic and real that Meyer’s readers could probably relate to, but no one talks about it. I suspect one reason why is that Jacob’s side of the argument would sound too good, and poor Jacob is not allowed to win.
*This, by the way, is why I don’t like Alice as much as I’m supposed to. Not only does her greatest pleasure in life seem to be dressing up Bella like a Barbie doll, she is the chief instigator of this incredibly wasteful consumerist lifestyle the vamps lead. I don’t think you have to be a commie to find that pretty distasteful.
A lot of people consider this their favorite of the Twilight books. It has some cool elements, such as the first serious fight sequence (though it’s a sideline to the main battle that Edward has to narrate to us because Meyer didn’t budget for a fight coordinator and a second camera unit), and something of a resolution to the Edward/Jacob/Bella thing. But unfortunately it also features Jacob basically assaulting Bella to prove that she’s even a little bit in love with him, which is nasty and, to my mind, out of character.
This also begins the devolution of Charlie, Bella’s increasingly irrelevant father. He’s been underused all along — a police chief who mostly spends his time watching ESPN or eating Bella’s cooking as opposed to, say, being called away in the middle of the night by police emergencies. I get that Forks is a quiet town, but come on! Why make him a police chief? If he’d been an insurance salesman it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Meanwhile he mainly exists to hate Edward and love Jacob (I empathize, but still) even when Jacob all but rapes his daughter.
When I first realized that we had rich, white, repressed, reserved vampires in a shaky truce with poor, native American, hotheaded, lively werewolves, I saw a perfect opportunity for Meyer to bring class and race into her romantic/supernatural conflict. Unfortunately that opportunity is totally missed. Not that I expected or wanted her to make it political, but at minimum this contrast could have added a healthy dose of flavor to the story. Instead no one in the story seems to find it the least bit unseemly that the Cullens are rich enough to buy the kinds of cars druglords own and stock their closets with designer clothes they wear only once and throw away (no kidding). These undead people are filthy fucking rich, nakedly consumerist, and flagrantly wasteful, and this is just considered glamorous. In some ways this is the most offensive element of the books to me.
Of course, there’s plenty more to be offended by, if you’re looking for it. The werewolf imprinting, for example, means that they fall in love at first sight (the men do, and the women just love being smothered with affection so much that they fall in love back), and in some cases this means falling in love with much younger women. Do I mean sixteen, fourteen, twelve? No, I mean TWO. Bella is of course shocked when this happens, but Meyer takes pains to explain that the werewolves (who, like vampires, don’t age normally) have the decency to wait until their toddler beloveds are old enough before brotherly love turns into lust (but no word on what age this actually is). It’s probably a double standard I hold that I’d find this intensely creepy in a male author but in a female author I just find it hilarious, and even a little admirable that she gets away with it in a book for young adults.