I watched about five episodes of Alias before I gave up. The reason was that they would always end on what seemed like a cliffhanger, but was really the climax that was meant to lead into the final act. It was a very artificial way of creating cliffhangers that was, in fact, just a rip in the middle of the plot. I'd argue that an effective cliffhanger is more the Inciting Incident of the next story - not the climax of the previous one.
The Expanse actually does something similar, but for whatever reason, it works a lot better. The story of Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the series, is divided between seasons one and two, and there's a transition to the second book, Caliban's War, in the middle of the season. We just saw the resolution of Caliban's War in the previous episode, and now we're getting into Abaddon's Gate. I haven't read the books, but there is a pretty clear divide here, in this case with a rather big time jump, not to mention a little isolated short story that ends in what is honestly maybe the most gruesome death I've ever seen on screen.
With Errinwright and Mao both arrested, and even SG Sorrento-Gillis resigned (we don't really see his fall from grace, as he came out of Errinwright's arrest as kind of an opportunistic victor,) the war with Mars seems like it's died down - presumably to previous Cold War positions. The biggest deal is the giant ring that the protomolecule has been constructing out beyond Saturn after the massive jellyfish/Lovecraftian god rose out of Venus and traveled there.
So what is going on with our people?
One thing that's surprising is that the Roci crew is now famous and kind of legitimized thanks to their many heroic feats. They have a documentary crew on board and there's new reports that portray them in a flattering light (though I've got a pet theory developing about the docu-crew that might be total BS.) Holden, Alex, and Amos have been invited to check out the ring along with a huge and totally-not-at-all-going-to-die-horribly group of UN representatives (including potential survivor of whatever horrible thing happens Anna Volovodov.)
Amos is, as always, reluctant to share anything about his past, and clearly misses Prax, even though he's glad that Prax is back home on Ganymede with his daughter. We actually don't get a ton in this episode for the Roci crew, though I'll come back to Holden.
Naomi has left the crew and is now working for Drummer, who has become captain of the Behemoth - the renamed Nauvoo, now the most powerful ship in the OPA. Indeed, we're seeing the OPA starting to adopt a more legitimate aesthetic, with some sort of hierarchy and a new logo that looks more precisely designed than the old Anarchy A.
Drummer is awesome as always, but while she and Naomi see eye-to-eye, the OPA leadership (which is apparently a thing now) sends a man named Ashford to be Drummer's XO. Ashford is an old space pirate, and seems to be very much your standard OPA tough guy when he has a violent confrontation with some old rival on the bridge of the Behemoth. But despite his snarky attitude, Ashford presents an enigmatic face: when Drummer wants to space a drug-supplier who provided the stuff that got one of her crew killed, Ashford argues in front of the rest of the crew that he ought to be taken to the brig and court-martialed like one does in a real navy. It's certainly good advice if the OPA wants to be seen as legitimate, but at the same time, Ashford's ambition and willingness to undermine his captain is on full display here.
Ashford could really go either way - a status-climbing future mutineer or a really useful, tell-it-straight-to-the-captain first officer. And it's David Straithairn, so that's good.
We're also introduced to a new character (I can't recall if she's named.) There's a group of what appear to be salvage workers working on some station (I couldn't tell if it was near the ring or not.) One of the workers, however, is clearly there for other reasons, as she plants explosives on the station they find, killing a friendly co-worker who finds the bomb after taking some kind of strength-increasing drug hidden in a false tooth.
That suggests to me that this is someone backed up by powerful resources, but we really don't know what the motivation is here just yet.
Second-to-last, let's talk about our poor one-shot Belter. We were introduced to the idea of sling-shotters in season one, where the super XTREME Belters get in tiny ships and attempt to fling themselves between various planets and moons at the fastest speeds attainable to beat previously established records, using the slingshot effect to accelerate as much as they can. Clearly a lot of people die this way, like we saw in season one.
But generally not like this.
Our Belter, a dweeb who is just trying to impress his super-hot and not very faithful girlfriend back on Ceres, blasts Belter covers of old Deep Purple Songs (seriously, "Highway Star" in Belter Patois is the kind of thing that could be cheesy but is actually awesome,) is breaking records, but it turns out all of the coverage of his shot are being pre-empted by all the news about the ring and the fact that the famous James Holden is heading out there to investigate (which, to be fair, has a very tabletop RPG feeling to it - like, why are these guys being sent other than "they're the System's greatest heroes?" Considering that the Expanse was originally conceived of as an MMORPG, if you think of the Roci crew as a group of RPG PCs, it actually works out shockingly well.)
So our dumb, horny, but ultimately innocent belter dude decides that if he's going to get his girl back, he's got to do something really unprecedented. So he changes course, getting ready to send his ship through the massive ring. Once he tells his girlfriend, she sends him a video where she shows him her boobs, which was what this was all about in the first place, and so he enthusiastically goes forward. Telling the UN ships warning him from proceeding the old "oops, sorry, technical difficulties. I'm totally going to stop once I can!" he proceeds to travel through the gate.
And then... uh... um... ew.
See, a field pops up within the gate that stops his ship cold. Everything in the ship goes from thousands of miles and hour to zero velocity in an instant. Well, everything that's a part of the ship. The belter guy, who is strapped into his chair but honestly this'd be ugly any way, keeps moving forward. And he's torn apart... like, depth-wise. It is super, super, super nasty.
What this means for the gate is a big question mark I'm sure we'll spend the rest of the season (and the first half of the next! Thanks, Amazon!) exploring. But for this one dude... that's a nasty way to go. At least it was very quick.
Ok, but I said I was getting back to Holden.
Holden is getting ready for some bunk time when he hears a familiar voice. He looks down and it's Miller, wearing his old stupid hat. And then Miller disappears.
Now, I have had a bit of this spoiled, but I've got to say it's nice to see Thomas Jane back, even if for now he's kind of a dream-like apparition. Given the nature of the protomolecule and Juliet's quasi-resurrection, it always seemed like a possibility that it could bring Miller back in one way or another, but we've got a few questions to ask - is this Miller really the same guy? Does he want to protect humanity from the dangers of the protomolecule? And how big of a presence is he going to be?
The fact that there's a bit of protomolecule on the Roci has been a dangling plot thread for a while now, so if this is the payoff, I'm pretty happy about it.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Solo: A Star Wars Story
As an aside, before I even begin: Does "A Star Wars Story" work for you? I feel like it sounds awkward. Something about the indefinite article and the utterly generic "story." It's like whenever you have a biopic that's "Otherwise Interesting Title: The Famous Person Story" always makes it sound like it's some really crappy made-for-TV-movie-back-when-such-things-were-often-terrible.
Anyway.
I'm still often surprised to see people who react so negatively to the Last Jedi. As a lifelong (if starting at age 9 counts) Star Wars fan, the Last Jedi was the exact sort of decon/recon I wanted to see of the new movies. The Force Awakens, while its characters redeemed it, rehashed a lot from the original movies, and the Last Jedi delved into the philosophy and mysticism in ways that I found fascinating. I felt it challenged the audience in a way that the Force Awakens had been too gunshy to do - examining just what would happen to someone who was simultaneously a human being but also a godlike figure of legend.
Solo doesn't do that. In many ways, it is the quintessential fan service film. It ticks a hell of a lot of boxes, explaining things like why Han described the Kessel Run in units of distance rather than time (which has been a subject of nerdy debates for like forty years - I'd always just assumed it was a research error) or why his last name was Solo (turns out the heavy-handed character labeling is in-universe.)
True to Star Wars tradition, Solo is a mixture of genres. It's part Western, part Noir, part Heist movie. I don't want to do a full plot recap, but basically the film starts with Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra (I had just assumed she was Keira until I saw the IMDB page) trapped living in some rat hole on Corellia run by a local crime boss. Han gets his hands on some valuable fuel and attempts to use it to escape the planet with Qi'ra, but just as they are about to get out, Qi'ra is seized by the mob lackeys and they're separated.
Hoping to be a pilot, Han joins the Imperial Academy, but we rush through those three years to find that he washed out and wound up in the infantry, fighting in some WWI-style trench warfare on some planet that is probably totally innocent and just being put under the Imperial boot heel.
But the movie isn't about the Empire or the not-quite-there-yet Rebellion. We actually don't see a lot in the way of Stormtroopers or the Empire in general. Indeed, as the brief blue-texted captions at the start (echoing the initial "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") describe, it's a time of lawlessness. The Empire, like so many autocratic regimes that claim to be there to restore law and order, are actually not in the least interested in doing so.
As befits a Han-centric story, we're dealing with criminals and outlaws, and only in the sense that the more powerful mobsters have friends or minions within the Imperial hierarchy does the government really come into play.
So what we have is a plot in which Han screws up a job, only to realize that this puts him in debt with a very powerful person you wouldn't want as an enemy, and so he and his team have to pull a more dangerous job, all while dealing with double-crosses and unclear loyalties.
Of the three genres that the movie apes, the least effective is the heist movie - there's very little of the fun, Ocean's Eleven-style planning, complications, and reveals. Instead we see criminals doing what I might term "opportunistic heroism," as they stage a slave revolt within the spice mines of Kessel so they can sneak their loot out in the chaos.
In terms of Noir, Han's relationship with Qi'ra is pulled pretty directly out of that genre - the lost love who resurfaces with a potentially darker past than the hero's and whose loyalties thus cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the only real payoff for this is what seems like a sequel hook for a movie that's already an interquel spin-off featuring a character long thought dead unless you've been watching the animated TV shows or, like me, reading AV Club reviews when they catch your attention. It's really not clear to me that such a sequel will happen unless by shear force of Disney filmmaking will. Unfortunately, this forces Emilia Clarke to play the whole movie as an enigma we might never be able to explore and unravel.
One of the oddities of the movie is that Alden Eirenreich is not all that much younger than Harrison Ford was when he first played Han. Now, I wouldn't want to see Han as a little kid (just as, in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to introduce Anakin in the prequels before he was, like, twenty - among other issues.) But it does sort of shrink the time scale here. Lando is supposed to be one of Han's best friends by the time of Empire, and so having him just meet him here suggests the bond is a somewhat weaker one than we might have assumed (one could have imagined them being childhood friends from the way they act in Empire.)
Now, for the record, I did think it was a pretty fun movie. It just didn't blow me away with anything. It was pretty much the movie I expected it to be. And some people might really like that - especially after the risks that Last Jedi took. If you're looking for space adventures with Han and Chewbacca, this is definitely that. And if you want to explore the underbelly of the Star Wars universe in a way that Rogue One didn't even really do, this gets at that as well. Star Wars popularized the "used future" aesthetic, and this really gets that look - we even see that Lando's ship - you might have heard of it - the Millennium Falcon, was once a pretty snazzy vessel before Han got it all jacked up.
I would say that all eight existing main Star Wars films are essential in their own way - the prequels for showing how ambition without restraint can create cinematic abominations, and the sequels for handing off a film franchise to a generation of filmmakers who grew up on it and seeing their own takes on the world and its mythos (I don't really need to explain why for the originals, right?) Rogue One was a bold and bleak leap out of the series comfort zone, which made up for its flaws with "holy shit did they really do that?" chutzpah.
Solo... is inoffensive. I'm a sap so I'll always be curious about the fate of long-lost love interests, but in ways that Rogue One avoided by centering entirely on new characters, Solo suffers a bit of the inherent problem with prequels, which is the foregone conclusion. We know that he won't get back with Qi'ra because he has to get with Leia. And we know that Lando, Chewbacca, and Han are all going to be fine, which then makes the deaths of other characters less shocking.
If there's one thematically interesting thing the movie reinforces, though doesn't really introduce, it's the idea that Han gets betrayed. The depths of that betrayal do have a range - Lando at one point abandons him in the middle of a standoff, but one does not get the impression that either of them considers it personal. But given what we know of how Han ends up in the end of The Force Awakens (does that still need a spoiler tag? Would you be reading a review of a Star Wars movie if you hadn't seen it?) the fact that Han's life is filled with betrayals makes his death at the hands of his own son really freaking tragic.
Still, this isn't a movie to make you think too hard about the consequences of Han's lifestyle choices. It's fun. Don't expect epic and you'll have a good time.
Anyway.
I'm still often surprised to see people who react so negatively to the Last Jedi. As a lifelong (if starting at age 9 counts) Star Wars fan, the Last Jedi was the exact sort of decon/recon I wanted to see of the new movies. The Force Awakens, while its characters redeemed it, rehashed a lot from the original movies, and the Last Jedi delved into the philosophy and mysticism in ways that I found fascinating. I felt it challenged the audience in a way that the Force Awakens had been too gunshy to do - examining just what would happen to someone who was simultaneously a human being but also a godlike figure of legend.
Solo doesn't do that. In many ways, it is the quintessential fan service film. It ticks a hell of a lot of boxes, explaining things like why Han described the Kessel Run in units of distance rather than time (which has been a subject of nerdy debates for like forty years - I'd always just assumed it was a research error) or why his last name was Solo (turns out the heavy-handed character labeling is in-universe.)
True to Star Wars tradition, Solo is a mixture of genres. It's part Western, part Noir, part Heist movie. I don't want to do a full plot recap, but basically the film starts with Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra (I had just assumed she was Keira until I saw the IMDB page) trapped living in some rat hole on Corellia run by a local crime boss. Han gets his hands on some valuable fuel and attempts to use it to escape the planet with Qi'ra, but just as they are about to get out, Qi'ra is seized by the mob lackeys and they're separated.
Hoping to be a pilot, Han joins the Imperial Academy, but we rush through those three years to find that he washed out and wound up in the infantry, fighting in some WWI-style trench warfare on some planet that is probably totally innocent and just being put under the Imperial boot heel.
But the movie isn't about the Empire or the not-quite-there-yet Rebellion. We actually don't see a lot in the way of Stormtroopers or the Empire in general. Indeed, as the brief blue-texted captions at the start (echoing the initial "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") describe, it's a time of lawlessness. The Empire, like so many autocratic regimes that claim to be there to restore law and order, are actually not in the least interested in doing so.
As befits a Han-centric story, we're dealing with criminals and outlaws, and only in the sense that the more powerful mobsters have friends or minions within the Imperial hierarchy does the government really come into play.
So what we have is a plot in which Han screws up a job, only to realize that this puts him in debt with a very powerful person you wouldn't want as an enemy, and so he and his team have to pull a more dangerous job, all while dealing with double-crosses and unclear loyalties.
Of the three genres that the movie apes, the least effective is the heist movie - there's very little of the fun, Ocean's Eleven-style planning, complications, and reveals. Instead we see criminals doing what I might term "opportunistic heroism," as they stage a slave revolt within the spice mines of Kessel so they can sneak their loot out in the chaos.
In terms of Noir, Han's relationship with Qi'ra is pulled pretty directly out of that genre - the lost love who resurfaces with a potentially darker past than the hero's and whose loyalties thus cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the only real payoff for this is what seems like a sequel hook for a movie that's already an interquel spin-off featuring a character long thought dead unless you've been watching the animated TV shows or, like me, reading AV Club reviews when they catch your attention. It's really not clear to me that such a sequel will happen unless by shear force of Disney filmmaking will. Unfortunately, this forces Emilia Clarke to play the whole movie as an enigma we might never be able to explore and unravel.
One of the oddities of the movie is that Alden Eirenreich is not all that much younger than Harrison Ford was when he first played Han. Now, I wouldn't want to see Han as a little kid (just as, in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to introduce Anakin in the prequels before he was, like, twenty - among other issues.) But it does sort of shrink the time scale here. Lando is supposed to be one of Han's best friends by the time of Empire, and so having him just meet him here suggests the bond is a somewhat weaker one than we might have assumed (one could have imagined them being childhood friends from the way they act in Empire.)
Now, for the record, I did think it was a pretty fun movie. It just didn't blow me away with anything. It was pretty much the movie I expected it to be. And some people might really like that - especially after the risks that Last Jedi took. If you're looking for space adventures with Han and Chewbacca, this is definitely that. And if you want to explore the underbelly of the Star Wars universe in a way that Rogue One didn't even really do, this gets at that as well. Star Wars popularized the "used future" aesthetic, and this really gets that look - we even see that Lando's ship - you might have heard of it - the Millennium Falcon, was once a pretty snazzy vessel before Han got it all jacked up.
I would say that all eight existing main Star Wars films are essential in their own way - the prequels for showing how ambition without restraint can create cinematic abominations, and the sequels for handing off a film franchise to a generation of filmmakers who grew up on it and seeing their own takes on the world and its mythos (I don't really need to explain why for the originals, right?) Rogue One was a bold and bleak leap out of the series comfort zone, which made up for its flaws with "holy shit did they really do that?" chutzpah.
Solo... is inoffensive. I'm a sap so I'll always be curious about the fate of long-lost love interests, but in ways that Rogue One avoided by centering entirely on new characters, Solo suffers a bit of the inherent problem with prequels, which is the foregone conclusion. We know that he won't get back with Qi'ra because he has to get with Leia. And we know that Lando, Chewbacca, and Han are all going to be fine, which then makes the deaths of other characters less shocking.
If there's one thematically interesting thing the movie reinforces, though doesn't really introduce, it's the idea that Han gets betrayed. The depths of that betrayal do have a range - Lando at one point abandons him in the middle of a standoff, but one does not get the impression that either of them considers it personal. But given what we know of how Han ends up in the end of The Force Awakens (does that still need a spoiler tag? Would you be reading a review of a Star Wars movie if you hadn't seen it?) the fact that Han's life is filled with betrayals makes his death at the hands of his own son really freaking tragic.
Still, this isn't a movie to make you think too hard about the consequences of Han's lifestyle choices. It's fun. Don't expect epic and you'll have a good time.
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