Super short review: Jurassic World

Super short review: A profound shrug.

Slightly longer review: Some fun dinosaur set-pieces, but bad human dialogue never sets up characters to care about.

Accurate tag line: Come see your favorite TV actors fight dinosaurs!

Most surprising cross-casting connection: Lauren Lapkus, formerly locking up humans in Orange is the New Black, is here locking up dinosaurs. In both, she has a boyfriend, thus stymying office romance.

Most retrograde gender politics: Oh my fucking god, women don't have to be mothers, jesus fucking christ. Seriously, most of the movie seems to be about punishing Bryce Dallas Howard until she gives up her job to take care of some kids who have very few redeeming qualities. Did you ever think you would miss Dr. Ian Malcolm hitting on Dr. Ellie Sattler?

Most baffling speech: B.D. Wong by a clear mile: in two successive lines he claims that this whole lab is only there because he's doing this work AND then he says that if he's not there, someone else will do this work instead. But that incoherence and muddiness of his character--that's not unique to him. All the characters are like that.

Most interesting coincidence (or not): a seven-year old came up with most of the best ideas in this movie many years ago! (Read this--and then subtract the Nazis part.)

Tomorrowland vs. The Gernsback Continuum vs. BioShock

It's hard to dislike Tomorrowland and its central message that imagination is a positive good--that thinking that some task is possible is better than thinking that all tasks are impossible.

It's hard to dislike that message and yet...

(Spoilers ahead.)

Getting out of the Gernsback Continuum

William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" is a story that shadows Tomorrowland as a nightmare to a daydream: both focus on an alternate dimension where the 1950s dream of jetpacks and age-defying shakes is real. They're both rocket- or space-age dreams.

Gibson's genius in "The Gernsback Continuum" is to connect those rocket-dreams of what our future could've been both to the failures of that imagination (just about everyone is white and hetero in 1950s sf) and to the failures of our actual post-rocket time (where our rockets were pointed more at each other than at the moon).

Tomorrowland addresses this a bit, at least in the commercial for it, by presenting a multi-ethnic future; and by presenting our dreams of that Tomorrowland as an antidote to our obsession with our trending slide to dystopia and apocalypse.

But it doesn't all iron out, in the end. (Actually, the ethnic variations of the final recruiting scenes is pretty nicely done to remind us that Tomorrowland needs all kinds of people (even if all the lead actors that make it possible are white).)

The villain is appropriately named Nix, since nixing is the ultimate sin here, whether that's saying no to NASA funding or saying no to trying to change the world. He has one great monologue at the end where he points out that we enjoy apocalypse because it doesn't ask anything of us. (The fake movie billboard for "ToxiCosmos" bears the tagline "Nowhere to go," which lets us off the hook; it's almost like someone read Susan Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster.") If nothing you do can help, than you can go on enjoying your rain forest-destroying burger and your conflict-mineral-related iPads.

(I would argue that the other great benefit of apocalypse is imagining a return to the Real: to that time when we're reduced to pure survival. I mean, in the apocalypse, I wouldn't be blogging and we can all get behind that.)

The heroes respond to this by saying, hey, let's try imagining progress rather than disaster. Which raises all sorts of questions that the movie can't ask: Whose progress? What sort of trade-offs are we willing to go through for this progress?

Let's have a utopia and invite everyone some people!

I also think BioShock might be instructive here (at least if you're interested in why I got some less-than-great vibes from this movie): BioShock is the great video game that showcased the art deco city of Rapture, a place where the elite could withdraw from the world to live out their Ayn Randian fantasy of self-fulfillment.

Which is kind of the end of Tomorrowland: they reopen the future and send out recruiters to find "dreamers." Among the dreamers are engineers, mathematicians, scientists, ballet dancers, street-artists--just a wide variety of people from the arts and sciences. (Notably missing: movie producers. Fuck those guys, am I right?)

And I'll admit, I got a little chill when I saw the last image of everyone, all together, standing up in the corn field and looking out at the city of tomorrow. All those people, all coming from their own particular places, all coming together to make something.

Except... there's like maybe a hundred people there. And that's the remit of Tomorrowland: it's not a place for everyone, but only for a small group who can work unencumbered by laws and social mores. (Hey, isn't Jurassic World about to come out? That's another story about people moving to a place to do something scientific.) Sure, maybe--maybe--the Tomorrowlanders will come back to Earth and share their great scientific advancements. Yeah, that's imaginable.

(What if they came back not as saviors but as technocratic rulers, with disintegration rays and robot armies and--but no, that's the bad imagination speaking.)

This is another aspect of the movie that leaves me wanting more answers; and it connects to the original question: if you limit your society to just the people who pass the test (not the Voight-Kampff, because that would prove empathy and that's not what Tomorrowland is about), then you can maybe all agree on what sort of progress you want.

Or put in question form: is progress compatible with democracy?

(You know who would say no to that? The 1930s Technocracy movement that seems to cast a long shadow over a lot of 1950s sf, where slide-rule-bearing engineers are clearly the right men for the job of making the rules.)

One way of looking at common titles

Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld magazine put together a list of the most common story titles in their submissions. It's an interesting list for that reason alone: even the most popular title ("Dust") shows up only 18 times out of 50k. The tenth most popular titles--of which there are several--show up 8 times each.

But we could also break down the list into other groups, according to structural or semiotic lines. For instance, "The " + noun titles account for 139 of the top stories. Then there's also concrete noun titles, like "Dust" and "Hero"; more abstract nouns, like "Voices" and "Memories." There are clumps of home-related titles ("Going Home", "Home") and clumps of boundary-related titles ("The Wall," "The End"). There are adjectives and nouns and verbs.

Probably these titles are so simple because only a simple title could be so frequently reused. I mean, "Dust" is a title I could probably use for some of my stories. (And as some commenters noted, some great stories have been written with that name.) You're not going to find a lot of stories titled, '"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman.'

But I'm especially interested in that "The " + noun form:

The Gift

The Box

The Hunt

The End

The Visit

The Collector

The Wall

The Prisoner

The Machine 

The Tower

The Dark

The Door

The Choice

The Fall

There's that "The" that makes a definite moment out of something wide open. This isn't the story of just any old visit--this is "The Visit." We're not just talking about "A" machine, but "The" machine--the machine that we've heard so much about or that plays such a bit role in our life.

It reminds me of something Ray Bradbury wrote about his own process, which involved lists just like this of nouns that somehow captured his attention. These weren't special, strange nouns, but everyday nouns, like "baby." (That story became "The Small Assassin.")

So what is it about nouns that seems to inspire some writers?

Death rattles can still be annoying when you're trying to concentrate

This weekend saw the convergence of three totally unrelated events that I will relate through the magic of words. Also known as "lying."

In the first episode of Wolf Hall, Lord Norfolk (I think) yells at Cromwell about how France belongs to England; and he's willing to go to war to get what rightfully belongs to them.

In the Passover story, we remember how we were slaves, but now we're free to get drunk--and also how we can never be truly happy when remembering the death of our enemies.

In the science fiction community, the nominee slate for the Hugo Awards was announced; this year, the nominees largely--almost wholly--belong to a slate that was put forward for political purposes by some right-wing Americans.

What ties them all together? Well, in this scenario, the organizers of the right-wing voting block clearly see their position much like Norfolk sees his in Wolf Hall: science fiction belongs to us and we'll go to war to make sure that people recognize our right.

I believe more in the Passover story. (And also in history: Norfolk never conquered France, though he made a good show of it.) That is, we have a long way to go; and the rise of equality isn't a straight-line; but I really do believe that the arc of history is towards something like justice. Maybe we weren't anything as dramatic as slaves in our lifetimes; maybe we were just exploited labor; maybe we had our loving relationships overlooked and violated by state power; maybe we were considered the objects and minor characters in other people's stories; maybe we were told we couldn't do or be something because of who we were. But however bad things were (and are), it seems like things are getting better for justice and tolerance and fairness.

So when I see something like a right-wing movement attempting to "take back" the Hugo Awards, it doesn't seem like the spear's tip of a coming wave of bigotry and idiocy. (And, sorry not sorry, folks, but the argument that runs "this art is too political, let's read stories where there are no politics" is a pre-Copernican level of idiocy: it's idiocy all the way down.) This sweep seems like the death rattle of a movement that has really lost both the war and any understanding of what they were fighting for. (Uh, the Hugo Awards? That's your big goal this year?)

But still, a death rattle can still be annoying. For instance, right now, I'm sure there are good works that would've been nominated, but that got pushed off because of this political bloc voting. I'm so looking forward to the day after the awards ceremony, when that information becomes available.

Here again, Passover comes to my rescue: at the end of the seder, we recall we are free, but that we have more work to do when we say, "Next year in Jerusalem." So:

Next year, may we have good works on the awards lists, good works that have won by merit.

Robocop, How I Would Write It

The Brilliant Very Good Original

Robocop is not my favorite Verhoeven film, but it's a film I like a lot: you can watch it naively as a simple tale of man vs. machine, of the corrupting influence of capitalism, of--Wait, did I say that was the naive way to watch it? Let's start over.

Here's a classic, simple tale: a man falls into some pit, but then crawls his way back up. We cheer. That pit takes many forms, whether it's an internal character flaw (like greed or anger) or an external situation (like... a pit).

At its most basic, Verhoeven's Robocop is a pit story: a man falls into a pit--cop Murphy gets shot up and then re-made as a cyborg without a name, a cog in a corporate machine who can't even do his job (arrest criminals) because of corporate corruption; but by the end, that cyborg cop (OK, fine: robocop) crawls his way out of the pit, reclaiming his name and his humanity.

(Also, getting his vengeance, the classic American story of regeneration through revenge.)

(Also also: his revenge is entirely mediated by the corporate structure since he only takes revenge on the corporate criminal when that guy gets fired by someone even higher up on the corporate food-chain. But for a moment, pretend this paragraph doesn't exist.)

So, it's a fine story at the man-vs-pit level.

On top of that, screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner build a story about unrestrained capitalism, which reaches its apotheosis in the owning of people, either in the form of addiction (the drug trade is the highest form of consumerism here) or in the literal owning of people's bodies (as with Murphy being property).

And then, on top of that, Verhoeven adds (or embraces) a certain tone of louche skepticism. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "louche skepticism," but I like it as a phrase. No, I do know what I mean: as friend Jason points out in his blog post, Verhoeven makes everything so gloriously over-the-top that it's hard to miss the satire here.

(Then again, when Starship Troopers came out, I said the same thing--and lots of people missed it.)

But really, when a drug-dealer comments on how drug-dealing is the highest form of capitalism, there's not a lot of subtext going on there. At that point, it's just text.

The Rather Hollow Remake

I just finished the remake and... I'm not really sure I could tell you what it's about. There's Alex Murphy, who, again, is a good cop turned into a product. There's the big corporation that makes robots/drones for war overseas and wants to start using them here. There's the blow-hard TV personality with a definite bias. There's the doctor with the heart of gold. There's the widow/wife and the partner of Alex-cum-RoboCop. There's some of the same goddamn lines, like "Dead or alive, you're coming with me."

And about that particular line: goddamn it, people, in the original that line was a way to show that RoboCop retained some of Murphy's personality, which was a little cowboyish (That line and the gun-twirling are both used as proof that RoboCop was Murphy; and as proof that Murphy is an old-style American, a no-nonsense frontier-tamer. That description comes with a big old wink by Verhoeven.) In the 2014 version, that line is repurposed--Murphy is now describing himself as "Dead or alive" as opposed to describing the criminal--which is cute, but has no real purpose other than to remind the audience that this is a reboot. It doesn't add up to anything.

That's the big problem with the remake: it's flashier than the original, but there's a certain sense of hollowness here.

Fix It, Felix Ben!

RoboCop in 1987 was science fiction satire, with deadly robots and private cops and corporate crime. In 2014, we call that reality.
















So why remake RoboCop? How can the general frame of this story--man vs. corporate machine that he's become--help tell a good story, illuminate our moment, and, oh yeah, make a killing at the box office?

(RoboCop 2014 was made for 100-130$ and made 240$, which is respectable, around 200% return. RoboCop 1987 was made for 13$ and made 54$--a 400% return. Which would you rather have?)

First, screw all that ridiculousness about the political opponents of the robots having power. It generates some motivation for the corporation to use RoboCop as a mascot, but it waters down the real conflict. Ditto the media issue with Samuel L. Jackson's TV blowhard: it's not that interesting because it doesn't tell us anything we don't know about the world or take the story anywhere new.

Second, corrupt cops are boring; a broken policing system is interesting. (Did we learn nothing from The Wire?)

Third, what's interesting about this story to you (screenwriter, director, producer)? Verhoeven's RobcCop is clearly Verhoeven's work: the story may be pretty ordinary man-and-his-pit core, but there's all of Verhoeven's usual issues on top of it.

RoboCop 2014 could almost be the work of anyone because there's nothing that really distinguishes it; it's a little bloodless. If you're going to remake a movie, make it something you're interested in.

(Hollow, bloodless--thanks, filmmakers, for making a movie where the central metaphor maps perfectly onto the critique of the film.)

My RoboCop

I'm not going to write a reboot of RoboCop 1987 (and this post is already way too long), but here's some things I would want to think about going in to write or pitch on this project:

1. corporations and patent-trolling; 
2. intellectual property; 
3. race-class inequality in policing; 
4. drones and the psychological cost of distant war; 
5. augmented reality and tech popularity; 
6. corporate-political cooperation; 
7. neverending war.

There's a couple different ways to go with this constellation of issues. (And you might disagree that these are, in fact, the useful issues to be discussing; in which case, please tell me about your version of RoboCop.) But at its heart, RoboCop is a man-vs-pit story, where that pit tends to be marked as corporate capitalist organizations, like drug cartels and corporations. It's about a man regaining a sense of self through fighting a conspiracy. It's an underdog story (with a massively armed and armored underdog).

So here's one version: I call it, A Boy and his RoboCop.

The military-industrial complex keeps pumping out drones for war overseas; and then needing to dump the older models so they can keep pumping out newer versions. As in our world, this ex-military gear finds its way into the hands of the police forces--and maybe the criminals. (Though as we've seen, arming the police is pretty terrifying all by itself.) A damaged police drone starts acting erratically, going AWOL to discover its original home, now occupied by a small homeless child who might or might not be the child of the drone's original brain. Ah, because (dun dun dun) these drones are built around dead veterans. Something something apathetic cop, good cop, damaged cop.

(Note: this wouldn't work as a RoboCop pitch since, going into RoboCop, the audience knows that he's man and machine. So we couldn't have that "human brain in a jar" as a revelation. Still, I'd rather watch this movie than the one I did watch.)

Falling behind and Interstellar

Hello, blog! It's been a little while since I've been able to attend to you in the manner that you deserve. Perhaps you've noticed that I've skipped the last few weeks of Library of America Story of the Week Read-Alongs; or the last few weeks of Shower Awkward Comics.

Rest assured that I have tabs open with all the missed Stories of the Week; and I have several Shower Awkward photos I just need to comickify. (They come pre-awkwardified.)

But since I've neglected you for so long--and why? Because of this blog and this portfolio site and all the github repos--I wanted to add a little substance here, in the form of a super short review of Interstellar, the new Christopher Nolan film about black holes and family.

("Black holes and family--aren't you being redundant there?" Oh, you wag.)

The main thing I want to say about Interstellar is that it's very long; and very blunt with its symbolism ("love and gravity are the only things that can travel through time"); and chock-a-block full of people explaining the science behind things--but it's also pretty entertaining throughout. So there were times when I sort of sighed over how much time we take to set up a scene, or chuckled at how blunt the movie was, or wondered if anyone around me cared about what a wormhole would look like in three-dimensional space.

Sidebar: "A circle in three dimensions is a sphere," explains one scientist, completely forgetting cylinders and cones. You know what else a sphere might look like in two dimensions? A point, if that sphere touches the plane at only one point. See Flatland.

And yet, for all those issues that would seem to sink it, the film remained engaging and interesting and often humane and frequently beautiful.

I also want to hold Christopher Nolan up as a director whose primary relationship focus tends to be non-romantic. Sure, there's some romance in Inception and the Batman trilogy and here; but the real focus tends to be on parent-child relation.

Elysium (the actual review)

Spoilers here--but it's not really a movie that will be spoiled by hearing some of the plot.

Though I'll start with a confession: I did not love District 9. I respected it a lot for some of the choices it made; I think there's a lot in it to enjoy and discuss. Particularly the way in which it took the Dances With Wolves / Last Samurai / Avatar conceit that a white guy is always better at being the natives than the natives are and twisted it: so Wikus ends up being in an alien body, but he's kind of a terrible mess for most of the movie; and most importantly, he doesn't want to be in that body. Sure, he's got some cool new powers, but it comes with a pretty serious cost. That said, the second half of the movie seemed to devolve into pure shoot-em-up video game cliches that left me bored. And I like video games!

Elysium follows the same basic formula, in some ways: there's a guy who just wants to get on with his life, which is being an ex-con who is still in love with his childhood sweetheart, and who works a shitty factory job. It's a pretty simple character--and I mean that in a good way. He is not a guy who is interested in fighting the system, he just wants love. Nice and simple--and not at all necessary to show all the flashbacks to his childhood, which don't add much. It also doesn't help that his childhood love has left him and, when they meet again, shows no particular interest in him. I don't mind a protagonist who is selfish, in some ways, but it's a little hard to get on the side of a guy who seems mostly interested in a woman who's not interested in him.

And just as Wikus in District 9 gets catapulted into action through an accident, our protagonist here is pushed into action by an industrial accident, which nicely fits with the theme of economic exploitation, but doesn't give him a lot of agency. And then when he's given some super-powers through an exoskeleton, that sort of seals his fate as the Wikus of this film: a guy who likes the status quo (though here, on the bottom of things), who gets pushed into action through an accident, and who gets special powers that help him.

So I've hinted at some reasons that character doesn't really carry the film: not a lot of agency; some wish-fulfillment for powers (that doesn't really actually fit the movie's theme or plot and could easily be done away with); and a goal that is a little off-putting (to make this woman love him).

Sometimes a movie can skate by with a flawed protagonist if the secondary characters are interesting. Unfortunately, that's not really the case here. The hacker who helps the protagonist starts out as a greedy black-market figure, but--for no reason that I can see--morphs into a crusader for justice. The evil bureaucrat and the evil corporate figure and the evil soldier are all so patently evil that it's uninteresting to watch them as characters; they become mere features of the landscape, obstacles for the protagonist to overcome. As in District 9's devolution to shoot-em-up, there's very little here beyond the pleasure of watching the good guy shoot up the bad guys.

To be clear, none of these problems sinks the film utterly; each just saps a little bit of vitality from it.

And there is one, final, big problem to the film, thematically: it's all about the haves vs. the have-nots, where the thing that people need most is medical attention. I can dig that as a set-up. But as others have pointed out, there's no issue of scarcity or medically-related oppression. The rich keep the medicine for themselves because they just do. And (spoiler) once all of the medicine gets distributed, everyone is healthy, with no issues of scarcity or cost coming up. In another type of movie, this would be fine; this would be part of the admission price: "If you want to watch this film, you have to accept that the space condo people are hoarding the medicine for themselves." It's the sort of "buy-in" or "gimme" that lots of films and tv shows start with: you have to believe in X--a doctor with an amazing diagnostic mind (for House), that New York City is incredibly crime ridden (for all those Law & Orders), or whatever it is.

But Elysium is about that situation. So for us to take it seriously, it needs to show us more of the whys and wherefores. Otherwise, it's not about us or people like us, but about cartoon villains who for no reason are killing the poor inhabitants of Earth. And then it becomes just a film where a good guy who just wanted to live a normal, poor life, goes out and righteously kills rich people.

Elysium and political science fiction, part 2

Which brings us to Elysium, which takes it's place with In Time as very political science fiction.

Wait, wait! Let me rephrase that: Elysium and In Time seem very political because they comment directly on and criticize our current systems. Compare that with something like... well, how about Demolition Man, a very entertaining action science fiction film--if I remember correctly. (Mostly I just remember the thing about the three shells replacing toilet paper.) Demolition Man involves a risk-taking cop and a psycho terrorist, with the further s.f. idea that society in the future is very clean and the psycho terrorist has been revived by someone to kill off some rebellious people. So we end up rooting for the underdogs, the individuals, the risk-taking cop--which, frankly, doesn't seem so overtly political because that's one of our founding stories. Underdog George Washington, individualistic cowboys taming the West, risk-taking cops who buck the system for moral reasons--how many stories of ours fit into that basic form?

So when I say that Elysium is very political, I should be clear: it is more obviously political because (a) it is critical and (b) it is not very subtle. By comparison, Demolition Man isn't all that subtle, with Stallone personifying the heroic aspect of a dirty, individualistic America; and something like Alien--where a corporation is willing to kill off its workers for profit--may be critical, but is a little more subtle. (I mean, Alien is a great haunted house story, with a monster picking off people who can't leave. The whole political aspect is small details that you don't really need to understand to enjoy the film. Hence: subtle.)

Which brings us back to the difference between Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting and my own sketch comedy--which honestly, wasn't as funny. And it's not because I'm more critical in my sketch comedy, but because I'm not subtle.

Which brings us--again!--back to Elysium, which got a lot of flack for being political when it should more properly have gotten flack for being a little unsubtle. Rich people have access to medical technology and poor people live terrible lives that are seriously constrained by material considerations. Well, duh! To put it another way: did we need to make this into science fiction to get some of the same questions and themes? Heck, you could've made this a Roaring 20s noir about a guy trying to get access to some doctor who was dedicated to healing rich gangsters in some resort.

Oh boy, this is going to be a three-parter, isn't it? I haven't even gotten into what Elysium did right and what it did wrong.

Elysium and political science fiction, part 1: All about sketch comedy and political points!

In Austin a few weeks ago, I saw this hilarious New York-based sketch comedy duo named Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting. Their first sketch involved these two men teaching bird-watching and bird-calls, before their teaching was derailed by their personal issues, mostly around women.

When I was at Second City, my first sketch comedy teacher emphasized the idea of "point" or "point of view"--you don't just throw random things into a sketch; you organize the sketch around some central premise or idea. Coming from grad school, where I taught expository and argumentative writing (where every paper wasn't just "here's some ideas I had" but organized around some central point), I immediately latched on to that idea--and twisted it, so that each sketch had to have some argument.

So I wrote a sketch where two rich people try to convince a poor person that it's okay to eat endangered species, which ended with the idea that they were really stuffing him up to eat him later. Point: the rich want to eat you. I also wrote a hi-larious sketch where some lipstick executives wondered how to make more money, including some tasteless projects (marketing to older women for their funeral lipstick needs), and devolving into violence--lipstick specially marketed to stalkers to write on bathroom mirrors (as happens in all the stalker movies). The last line of the sketch was one executive turning to the other and literally saying "I'd kill you all for a buck."

Don't get me wrong: I still love those sketches and there are still parts of those sketches that make me laugh. And don't get me wrong (again): I don't mind really political comedy.

But let's not fool ourselves about the difference: when Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting makes a sketch about men who are obsessed with women and sex, they start out with bird calls (for mating?), and they never really have someone state the point of the sketch. (For some of their sketches, I'm not sure I could even articulate the point. When they sing Little Shop of Horrors's "Suddenly Seymour" as "Suddenly Lemur," with one of them wearing a ridiculous lemur costume and shoving food into her face, there's not a lot to analyze--but they had so much electricity and chemistry that I nearly cried laughing.) By contrast, when I was writing my sketches, I would start with the point and have someone say it. Maybe in another draft I'd cool that down a little, make that point only hinted at rather than said baldly.

Which brings us to Elysium--which I'll talk about next time!

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 230: Algis Budrys, Who? (#230)

Algis Budrys, "Who?" (1955), related to American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s:

To explain the weird attribution above, the short story "Who?" was later expanded by Budrys into the novel Who?, which is included in the LoA collection of 1950s American sf.

Though, as the headnote says, Budrys's background isn't American: he came over because his father was in the Lithuanian government, and while they were in the US, Lithuania got taken apart by the Soviets and the Nazis (and then the Soviets again). So it's not a surprise (says whoever writes these LoA page) that Budrys's fiction often revolves around themes of identity. The LoA page also includes the excellent fact that Budrys came over when he was 5 and became an American citizen when he was 65; what they don't say is that he was an officer in the Free Lithuanian Army for most of his adult life, which was probably a less-than- (or other-than-)actual organization.

The excellent Tim Powers compares the story to the novel as a sketch to a masterpiece, and since I haven't read that novel, I will have to take his word for it.

The basic story here is summed up in a few sentences by the LoA headnote, but takes a few pages to become clear in the story itself: an American scientist (on the moon) was blown up in an accident, rescued and rebuilt and returned by the Russians--or was he? Because the largely mechanical man (with the nuclear pile in his chest powering his cyborg body, like Iron Man) might just be a Soviet agent. And the Americans have no physical way to check.

The story pings some "but what..." questions, but Budrys largely takes care of these: Why would the Russians rebuild him? To interrogate him. Why would they return him? Because of diplomatic pressure and perhaps as part of a larger diplomatic gambit. Why can't the Americans figure this out? Because their cyborg technology is not as advanced as the Russians. Etc.

So it's a well-crafted set-up, but Budrys himself said the ending was weak. Here's the ending: the guy assigned to figure out whether Dr. Martini is really a kid from New Jersey walks into the holding cell and calls him a "wop." And without thinking about it (we're told), Martini jumps up to attack, just as he would've done growing up in ethnically diverse but segregated New Jersey.

Budrys wants to make it clear that ethnic slurs are not restricted to America, as the main guy also thinks that, if "Martini" was really a Russian plant, he'd probably spent his youth fighting with other ethnics in the Soviet Union. Which is funny, in a strange, sad way: no matter your economic situation, there's going to be kids beating each other up because the other kid is a wop or an Asiatic.

It reminds me of Murray Leinster's "First Contact," which is a similar puzzle story: humans and aliens meet, they want to exchange peaceful data, but neither can trust the other. The result, both of them put into play the exact same plan about killing the other--which means that we really can trust each other, since we're so alike. Then at the end, two communication officers from the different species end up telling dirty jokes. It's a fun message of universalism: every (male) army tells dirty jokes about women, every community has some ethnic strife.

Comedy and the fantastic and the unexpected

I just reread Connie Willis's essay "Learning to Write Comedy or Why It's Impossible and How to Do It" from Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy, and while I love all her examples--Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, Twain--her overall point is that comedy is about turning things on their head, setting up and knocking over assumptions, ending up someplace different than expected.

So we have a camel eating Twain's overcoat, described as a several course meal; we have Jerome's Three Men in a Boat trying to open a tin can that ends up nearly breaking all of the them, as well as a tea cup; and we have a salesman in Heinlein describing soap as made of finer ingredients, improving your chance of Heaven, and refusing to take the Fifth Amendment.

Which is all very well and good, since you can describe things in a silly manner when the reader knows what you're talking about. You can leave things out (such as any joke that ends with "that's not my leg" never tells us what it is); or add things in (Wooster talking about his aunt's chef as the most important person in the world is only funny because we know how narrow Wooster's worldview is)--as long as you have a shared frame of reference.

But what if you're on a spaceship dealing with aliens that are sentient clouds? (As is inevitable.) How do you get a shared frame of reference so that you can make something unexpected into something funny?

It seems that a lot of science fiction/fantasy humor relies on the frame of reference provided by other sf/fantasy stories. Example: Howard Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters" is a version of Wells's War of the Worlds if some Martians landed in Texas, playing on the shared references we have for alien invasion stories and for Texans.

There's also, I would argue, a larger shared frame of reference for the logical and the absurd. For instance, Douglas Adams's discussion of the Babel Fish in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe largely relies on piling absurdity on absurdity: fish don't go in the ear; a telepathic fish used as a communication device is a little odd; and the inset story of how Man uses the Babel Fish to disprove God's existence by proving God's existence caps the absurd proposition of the Babel Fish with a discussion of logical absurdities. But still, we have to share some frame of "common sense" and "logic" for that to be funny.

I sort of hate to discuss humor in so serious a manner (oh, who am I kidding, I love it), but it seems that every comic story has to set up its assumption in order to frustrate them by going somewhere unexpected. Still, it seems the writer of sf/f comedy faces the double whammy of explaining the situation (alien worlds, aliens, quests!) and adding the punchline, without the punchline accidentally being taken for a serious statement.

The good bits from World's End

The Pegg/Wright/Frost Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy all marry some big genre with some smaller personal story and comedy: zombies and growing up in Shaun of the Dead, buddy cop and odd couple in Hot Fuzz, and now, alien invasion and growing up in The World's End.

And maybe that's why the film doesn't seem to work all that much for me, despite it getting good reviews and having some fun moments: didn't they already do this film before? I mean, the alien/robot angle is just that--an angle, a trope, a premise. Thematically speaking, the idea of a crisis forcing a character to grow up isn't all that new to this crew.

There's some interesting and good bits to this movie, including the recognizable and almost anti-heroic protagonist in Gary King, an addict and nostalgia junkie who feels his best days are behind him and is willing to lie and trick his friends to get back to his self-centered vision of the ideal world.

There's also the opening section, where Gary's voice-over about the best drunken day is revealed as a support group; and his assembly of the team scenes, which all cut out right before the person agrees to go with his crazy plan because (a) they really have no reason to say "yes" and (b) it's unimaginable that they'd say "no" given the premise of the film. And each person asks about Andy, which builds up anticipation for Andy's recruitment--which is the only one we see the end of and the only reasonable end: this person has no reason to want to go back in time, since he's built an adult life for himself, so of course he says no.

The film also nicely balances--at the beginning--the weirdness of the situation and the discomfort of these ex-friends. So, right before Andy confronts Gary about a terrible lie Gary told, Gary discovers the alien/robot invasion; which distracts us from the interpersonal tension, but only for a moment, so now these guys have two problems to deal with.

And there is something thematically appropriate about these alien/robots--the "blanks"--being preserved forms of younger selves, since that's Gary's problem: he needs to let go of his younger self.

Yet, the film also has a very shaggy elements, not helped by the ensemble cast where we clearly aren't meant to care too much about anyone but Gary and Andy. By the time we get to the aliens who are part of a network, part of Starbucking (buying up places with local color and turning them into chains), it feels less like a coherent movie about the dangers of holding on to the past. After all, Gary's problem is that he hasn't changed, but the town of Newton Haven's problem is a mix of "not changed, still terrible" and "changed to become ordinary."

And while it's fun to see a large man like Nick Frost turned into an action hero, tearing through alien/robots, his hatred of the town isn't really explored or explained. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I understand the character of Andy, which is really a shame, as he's the one whose anger really drives much of the film.

Almost Human: Too far, too close

He's a curmudgeonly cop with a tragic backstory; his partner is a young gun from a despised minority, itching to make the world--and his partner--better; the chief has her eye out on the curmudgeon, helping to nudge him along towards health; the cute tech has an eye on the curmudgeon--but will they or won't they?; the weird tech is good comic relief; and the other cop at the precinct is kind of a jerk; and every week, some strange new murder or crime comes up that they have to solve--and some of these crimes are ripped from the headlines.

Does that sound like every cop/procedural show in existence? Probably. But I'm talking about Almost Human, the science fiction cop show where the curmudgeon goes to a "recollectionist" to recover his lost memories about an ambush that nearly killed him; and the young cop is actually a recently re-activated robot of a model that was de-activated for mental health reasons.

And the crimes they deal with every week (with spoilers):

1. evil Syndicate that ambushed the old cop tries to break into police headquarters
2. people are being skinned to use their skin on super-real sexbots
3. the cops face a hostage situation that is really a cover for a heist
4. the cops have to clear the good name of an undercover cop by tracing a new drug to its source--within the police department!
5. witness needs protection from brilliant philanthropist-killer--whose associates are all his clones! (Bonus: the witness underwent some brain-enhancing surgery which has turned her into a psychic who can talk with the dead. No, that doesn't really work)
6. black-market synthetic organs are leading to deaths
7. to get the equivalent of YouTube hits, a bomb specialist straps bombs and cameras to people and makes them do things
8. the cops track down "smart bullets" that can hit people anywhere (and that use the surveillance network)
9. a killer robot is on the loose!
10. genetically-engineered perfect kids ("chromes") die of drug overdose, connected to a normal who died of the same (because she felt too much pressure to keep up with the perfects)
11. after a smart house kills a kid (shades of Trayvon Martin), some hacker takes revenge by turning the smart houses against the people
12. an ugly man is murdering people to steal parts of their faces with nano-technology
13. --haven't seen this one yet--

So let's break it down:

• doesn't need to be science fiction at all (5): 1 (break-in), 3 (hostages), 4 (drugs and corrupt cops), 6 (botched black market surgery), 7 (thrill kill camera version of Speed), 
• doesn't really need to be science fiction (1): 9 (super-trained soldier works instead of combat robot), 
• too stupid to take seriously (3): ~5 (psychics?), 11 (tries to rip from the headlines, but ends in this ridiculous hacker-vs.-hacker story), 12 (why not just get regular plastic surgery? why do the nanobots really have to kill the people?)
• interesting use of future technology used to discuss contemporary issues (4): 2 (exploitation of women?), ~5 (cloning), 8 (surveillance), 10 (genetic alteration, haves vs. have-nots).

So out of 13 episodes (12 that I saw), roughly half don't really take advantage of the science fiction world; and only about a third do so in an interesting way.

And that's one of my big problems with this show so far. I like all the characters fine--I like all the actors more actually--but the whole show just feels too close to an ordinary buddy-cop show. It's Castle without the sexual tension or witty banter or fun secondary character tensions. I can definitely see this as a purposeful idea: rather than scare away people with weird s.f. trappings (says the producer, in my fantasy), let's keep things grounded in what they know.

But the result isn't a show that's relatable, but a show that's a little bland. Despite my newfound love for Karl Urban and Michael Ealy.

What do you think?

(For an alternative take, I think Lauren Davis makes some excellent points in this io9 post, especially about the strangely consequence-free world they seem to be living in.)

Alien Raiders and A Film With Me In It: Good scripts and cheap sets

What are these movies?

Alien Raiders is a terribly-named movie, though I can kind of see what they're going for: a bunch of criminals takes over a supermarket and holds the people there hostage--because (twist!) they are trying to protect all of us from alien invasion. So the raiders are both the aliens doing the invading and the humans trying to raid the aliens. Cue waa-waa horn.

A Film With Me In It is a super-dark Irish comedy about two affable schlubs--a failed actor whose brother is locked-in, whose girlfriend is growing apart, whose landlord is mean, whose apartment is falling apart; and a drunk screenwriter who never writes--who then have to deal with an escalating farce of death. The deaths are ridiculous, but the real comedy here is in how these two guys try to deal with everything, which is so god-damn hard for them. (At every single moment: so when Dylan Moran--the drunk screenwriter--introduces himself at an AA meeting, he does so in the most awkward way possible.)

The good, the bad, the replicable
Alien Raiders has many characters--the raiders, the hostages, the cops--which kind of splits the attention and drains our identification with most of the characters. So, say, when something terrible happens to character X, it's easy to say, "oh well, what's character Y up to?" At the same time, many of those characters are given some interesting thing to work with.

It's also so perfectly self-contained--just in and around this one supermarket. Not only does that heighten some of the danger and suspense, it also probably does wonders in cutting down cost. Which they could then spend on bloody special effects and squibs, since the film sort of boils down to regular joes vs. aliens.

A Film With Me In It has a similarly constricted location/scope, mostly taking place in and around this one house. And, similarly, most of the special effects budget probably went into fake blood. But the characters are so well-defined through just one or two scenes--the actor failing to make an impression at an audition, the drunk writer making the wrong impression at an AA meeting--that we don't need to see much of their lives outside of this house to understand who they are. And once we have their characters outlined, almost every thing they do is hilarious since they keep being put into tense situations.

The only negative thing I have to say about A Film With Me In It is a warning about the dog in the film, who does die. For some reason, people dying in Looney Toons fashion is amusing, but when it happens to a dog, it seems less so.

Writing Against... Bradbury

In many cases, I lean towards the anti-censor-ship view that bad speech shouldn't be silenced, but combatted with good speech. That's not a universal principle and most self-satisfied anti-censor-ship people tend to be rather dense on the dangers of speech: do you let people in crowded theaters yell "fire" and just hope that someone else in the theater makes a compelling case that there is not, in fact, a fire?

But I'm especially think that we need good speech to combat bad speech when the bad speech isn't totally bad. When Edgar Rice Burroughs writes Tarzan, with all of its ante-diluvian attitudes towards Africans and women, we can't just drop it down a well and hope no one reads it. It's an entertaining book and the Wild Man is one of the most important/common archetypes to come out of the 20th-century pulp tradition.

Or take Bradbury: "The Veldt" is an interesting view of a holo-deck style entertainment room and generational conflict--that relegates the wife/mother to shrill alarmist. (She happens to be right, but the story never really validates her and she's not good enough to actually profit from her alarm.) Or in "Usher II," where we get an impassioned defense of imagination and fantasy--along with a murderous hatred of science.

So there's a lot to like about Bradbury and a lot to dislike. (Depending on the ratio, you'll either like him or, like me, wish he wasn't as deft with a sentence considering how reactionary his attitudes are towards the world.) So how do we write against Bradbury?

For a comparable case, we could look at Pullman writing against Lewis: God is the central fact of life for Lewis's cross-planar fantasies, but in Pullman's cross-planar fantasies, God is dead and only present as a figurehead for an oppressive institution. In that way, Pullman is writing in dialogue with--and against--Lewis.

So let's say you want to write against Bradbury's sexism, his vision of the 1950s suburbs as a natural order in "The Veldt" (and elsewhere).

We could make that subtext into text: a man uses his virtual reality room to recreate his dream of the 1950s. (Sure, while the kids aren't using that room for Africa, dad could be using it for his recreation--and knock before entering, gosh-darn-it!) Here the man is totally in charge, just as he wishes he was out in the real world.

We could write the parallel and hidden reality to the original story: all the work mom has to do to prop up dad in the 1950s.

We could write the reversal: mom is in charge here.

Or the update: instead of being happy with her 1950s-style role, the mom here reads feminist material and takes up the call of liberation. (Like the parallel/hidden reality version, this is basically about adding history back to the story.)

Any other ways to write back against something you don't like in an author?

Despicable Me 2 and jokes just for adults

I'm not even sure I finished Despicable Me when it was on HBO, but when the sequel made its way into the apartment, eh why not. Now, I have very little desire to write animated movies for kids/families, so I watch this with a different sort of attention--and also a shallower pool of knowledge/referent. So if a person in a horror movie approaches a door and then jumps when a cat surprises him, I know what's going on and can judge whether it's a good example or not of that trope.

But when a kid's animated movie breaks out into a music video, I'm not sure what to compare it to: Anchorman's "Afternoon Delight," The 40-Year Old Virgin's "Age of Aquarius," This is the End's song in heaven? Or is this something that has invaded animated films? Somehow, I doubt it.

So when the minions break out in song--and that song is "I Swear" from 1993/4--I wonder who in the audience this is for. Perhaps the kids will laugh because it's silly, even if they don't get the referent. And just a few moments later, I had the same thought when the minions break into "YMCA" dressed as the Village People. Will kids know this from somewhere? Or is it just for the adults? That this seems like it would bewilder half the audience mostly seems problematic because it's the focus of the movie, with nothing for the kids to enjoy.

But other than those moments that seem like misfires to me, the film is colorful and fun and light. There are some fun visual gags, like the toupee-shop owner acting the supervillain and petting a toupee. It's so colorful and light that the nonsensical parts and the dropped threads are probably not going to bother anyone. Why did the villain fake his own death all those years ago? When did he get a son? Why does the daughter's romance plot end so abruptly.

Dredd (2012)

So Judge Dredd...

::scratches head::

I guess, the fascism of Dredd...

::takes off glasses, rubs eyes::

I don't know. According to Wikipedia, a fair number of reviewers gave this positive marks, and I can definitely see some positive aspects to it: the contrast between the gray reality and the multicolored splendor of the hot new drug; the unrepentant view of Dredd as a hard man who has no real character beyond his perseverance of his job; the morally questionable nature of the Judge program itself.

But while some of that is true to the character, I can't really understand why people like this character enough to return to him. I mean, when he was created in Thatcher's England, part of the enjoyment is in watching a hard man kick ass; but there's also a real parodic edge to this guy who is, in essence, an incarnation of anarchy in the cloak of law. He's a vigilante hero for people who always fantasize about being on the right side of a gun. (In fact, with Dredd's super-tech gun, he's always on the right side: any one else who tries to use a Judge's gun will find their hand blown off.)

OK, let's put all that Dredd history stuff to the side. How does this film fare as a story? How does it paint characters?

Not so well, I think. Lena Headley's kingpin Ma is ruthless and violence prone, but there's not much under that. Thrilby's rookie/psychic Anderson looks sadly at a picture of her dead parents and seems to want to make a difference in the lives of ordinary people--but beyond that, there's not much to her. And Dredd himself is a cipher, a man who is indistinguishable from his job--and since the job doesn't change, neither does he. Even when he discovers (spoiler) that Ma has hired some Judges to kill him, he never has any questions or doubts. And he never takes off his helmet, which is a bold choice because it's so alienating. But that boldness doesn't erase the alienation. Who could ever identify, connect--or even care about these Judges?

Which is the main problem with this film. The plot has a videogame/roleplaying game structure that, frankly, I think works: the Judges are trapped in the above-ground dungeon of this locked-down super-apartment complex, and they have to survive the attacks of the monsters while searching for a way out--or take the fight to the mastermind. No points for guessing which they do.

That would work fine, with the Judges facing more danger and greater stakes, if we cared about any of the stakes. Does it matter if these Judges survive? Eh, there are plenty more. Will the Judges help save the innocent people caught in the crossfire? No, and that's not even really their job. Are the judges so unambiguously good? Well, no, as I said before: part of the character's core concept is that he's a semi-fascist killing machine.

I wonder if this sort of empty and ambiguous character works better in comic book form, where his adventures gain a veneer of unreality. So we can enjoy his tremendous violence because he's just hurting other drawings, not real people.

No matter what media you put him in, I think the key issues in writing a successful Dredd work are to make the characters around him interesting, so that his quest to protect them has some emotional weight; while their reactions to him should show that they think of him in a positive but realistic way (to help lead the readers to that position). Also: make his enemies unambiguously evil if you want to make his unrelenting quest for justice seem good. Or maybe not--maybe some ambiguity to the villains would help throw into relief the bad aspects of the judging system that threatens killers and victims alike.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 198: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment (#78)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment" (1837) from Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches:

I first read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" in ... high school? Middle school? Elementary school?! In any case, I can't remember a time when I thought "bad people get a chance to be young again--this will go well." Maybe it's just baked in to our collective unconscious that wishes go awry--especially wishes of mad scientists, like Hawthorne's Rappaccini and Aylmer ("Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Birth-mark"), to name his most popular two. Not that those are his only two: even The Scarlet Letter has a sinister, learned man, while his notebooks are full of science-y things as the kernels for stories. Another technology Hawthorne is fascinated by: photography, as in the House of the Seven Gables.

The LoA page notes the recurrence of the sinister scientist in Hawthorne and his repeated motif of youth's return--which I would actually widen out a little to something like "the return of history, however ghostly": the parade of ancestors in Seven Gables, the play-acting of history in Blithedale Romance, the sentimental replay of history in his sketches, etc. (But can you tell: I read the heck out of Seven Gables, am not so up-to-date on my other Hawthorniana.)

OK, fine, this story is very much in Hawthorne's motif-wheelhouse. What about the story itself?

Hawthorne doesn't mince words about how old the people are here: the first two sentences say "old, venerable, white-bearded, withered," and "Widow." He also launches in directly to the story of their unhappy and sinful pasts--so we're not exactly on their side. "Venerable" doesn't equal "respectable." And after we hear about that, the next entire page is taken up with how sinister Dr. Heidegger is, with his book of magic and mirror that shows his dead patients. Which also clearly shows that we're in Hawthorne's liminal fantasy/science space.

(My favorite example of this is actually in "The Birth-mark": when sinister Aylmer in the 1700s (I think) shows his wife these "magical" things that, for his 1800s audience, are all nameable technologies. Magical light show--well, that's just a zoetrope. And so on.)

I also have to shout-out the trope of the pre-experiment experiment that Hawthorne uses: before the people take the Fountain of Youth water, Heidegger uses it on a rose that springs back to life. So of course, right before the people get old again, the rose shows the limited power of this rejuvenation. This is a trope that still gets used today, with the scientist noticing--oh no!--that the rat they used before human testing has become sick/reverted to being dumb/etc.

But what really stands out here isn't just that the people grow young, but that they revert immediately to the sins of their past: the old drunken soldier starts singing drinking songs, even though he isn't in a bar or drinking; the old merchant starts mumbling about deals, even though there are no deals to make. This is why I think we shouldn't just classify this as "becoming young again" but as "history repeating." It's a phantasmagoric, fantasy situation.

And ruling over this dream is Dr. Heidegger, who may be mysterious, but occupies a less sinister position than many of Hawthorne's other doctors. He's not trying to ruin anyone's life, or even necessarily putting his own research above other people's health--he's not the one who ruins the rest of the Fountain of Youth water. He may be as stern as Time but he's also as unmalicious as Time. Science is not mad here--just inexorable.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 175: Fritz Leiber, Knight to Move (#153)

Fritz Leiber, "Knight to Move" (1965):

Here's a slice-of-life-during-wartime story that you could only really tell in the context of an on-going serial project. "Knight to Move" is a Change War story, which Fritz Leiber introduced in 1958, with The Big Time and several other stories (about 10 or 11) that introduced us to the time-traveling war between the Snakes and the Spiders. So by 1965, Leiber could be free to skip the epic war set-up and jump into a small story about a war that's almost more of an excuse for him to lay out some theory about games.

Here's the short version of this small story: a Spider agent and a Snake agent meet on a neutral planet, which is holding several game tournaments: a chess tournament, a backgammon-like game tournament, and a bridge tournament. The Snake agent survives an assassination attempt and then realizes the Spiders plan to take over this neutral planet--and so she warns the Spider agent that the Snakes have a similar plan. And we're back to perfect stalemate again.

As I said, it's a small story, with very little action--someone steps out of the way of a homing assassination missile--and a lot of explanatory dialogue. Except this dialogue isn't just clumsy world-building. Most of it is focused on the way that games can be divided into three categories: track games where there's no branching (backgammon, Monopoly, etc.); two dimensional games where the whole board is open (chess, checkers, etc.); and counter games like card games.

That dialogue leads us to the Snake agent's revelation that there's something very spider-like about chess and other board games: the board is set up like a web; and the most interesting figure--the knight--has a very spider-like set of eight possible moves... which means that chess is so widely known in the universe because it's part of the Spiders' plan. Which means that this big chess tournament on this neutral planet is actually prelude to an attack by the Spiders. Like I said, not a lot happens externally, and this internal revelation is probably the biggest moment of the story.

And it also sets up the Snake agent's counter-warning to the Spider agent: board games may be Spider's, but track games are Snake-like. So the backgammon tournament here is actually made up of Snake soldiers ready to take over the neutral planet or fight off a Spider take-over attempt. And so that perfect stalemate relies on the clever idea that there are only a few categories of games that mimic snakes and spiders.

If you know Leiber's bio, you know he was a big fan of chess, so this story can seem like an excuse for him to play with the idea of chess. (Though it does raise the question of what faction is represented by that third category of game.) But there's the usual Leiber wit and fun to make this light story go down easily, everything from the idea of the truce and game-state between two warring factions (whose real goals beyond war remain mysterious) to the fun Leiber has with names and language (the Snake agent's last name is Spider-like Weaver, while the German Spider agent slips into German occasionally).

Movie Analysis: Gravity

Having only seen Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity in 3D, I'm not sure I can recommend that version as a must-see--but I think the movie itself is. So you should go see it before I spoil the heck out of it for you.

First, the cinematography and all the special effects are pretty amazing. I had no problem believing that this was taking place in zero gravity; in fact, there was a significant portion of the film where I could only think, "The only way to make this would be to film it in space."

Second, the acting: since this film takes place between two people (at most), where we can almost only see their faces (in their space suits), there's a huge amount of weight placed on their dialogues--and monologues. And it's to the credit of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock that those interactions never feel strained or unbelievable. Bullock in particular has the thankless task of selling us on the character of a depressed woman who still has the will to fight for life.

Third, and most especially, the writing: the story here is pretty simple in plot terms, presenting a golden-age-style problem story: After their spaceship is hit by some dangerous debris, how can an astronaut and a doctor get to the space station that will help them survive? There's some typical "do we have enough fuel, what about our inertia" questions that come up in golden-age stories. I mean, it's pretty easy to imagine Isaac Asimov writing this story, with the astronauts figuring out some clever way to slingshot themselves around or otherwise save themselves... with Science!

But as the story goes on, this simple story of physics adds a character and emotional layer, in a pretty artless manner: just having one character tell the other about her secret and ever-living sadness over the death of her daughter. There's no real mystery or drawn-out period where Clooney gets Bullock to trust her. All we get is him coming to rescue her from the deep darkness of space and towing her towards the Russian space station.

But we buy all this because of the weird and intense situation: given that these people can't act physically in the same space, given that they are in imminent fear for their lives, given that all they can do is talk, given that they are relatively new colleagues, we accept learning this backstory in this way. No flashbacks take us out of the moment. No other actors get in our way of imagining Sandra Bullock's dead child. It's really a brilliant way to film something claustrophobic and make that claustrophobia work for our engagement.

I also think the action set-pieces are brilliant little moments of set-up and pay-off. We know the space debris will come back in approximately 90 minutes; we see the little bubbles of fire on the Russian space station; we see the parachute tangled up with the Russian station; etc. Because we feel connected with Sandra Bullock's character in the most basic ways--her voice, her face, seeing from her POV, her newness to space--we jump even further than we might otherwise.