The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence

Scott Lynch's The Lies of Lamora Locke and Red Seas Under Red Skies are a really good pair of books, which is surprising considering how much they do wrong.

The basic plot is that you have a Thief Priesthood preying on a fantasy city with a whole lot of alchemy and such cramed in. The main characters Locke and his gang, who are a group of con-artists that prey on the rich with elaborate confidence schemes who then get caught up in underworld politics and tangled in all manner of complications.

The characters are well-realized and human. The plot twists and turns in surprising ways and the books are most certainly page turners. I read the second one cover to cover in one sitting. But unfortunately, Lynch suffers from an affliction that many Fantasy authors suffer from. Mainly: the guy loves his fucking world building and refuses to put that shit down.



World building is an exercise that every bit of speculative fiction needs to go through. Readers need some context if they aren't going to be in some form of Earth that they're roughly familiar with. If Earth has been enslaved by alien crabs you need to establish that much before starting the rebellion against the crabs. But the problem of the last decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that world building was been placed at the forefront when it's supposed to be in the background.

In my opinion, nothing illustrates this trend better than Lynch. Every three chapters or so, the man would call a halt to his actual story and do some world building. He'll literally leave the real plot on a coathanger somewhere and go on for twenty pages about a random world building detail that he apparently feels is more important than his actual fucking story. It's almost always unnecessary and breaks the immersion like a crying baby in the middle of the Dark Knight.

Some examples of the shit Lynch foists on the reader in the middle of his narrative:

- The cruel aristocratic Chess-with-peasants-as-pieces game of some obscure palace
- How a bunch of hookers rebelled against their pimps
- The rituals of the freaky death goddess cult

There was one part of the second book where Locke and his friend Jean are getting trained to be seamen. The first worldbuilding detail Lynch put into that sequence was something that I liked... a seaman superstition that it was deathly bad luck to go out to sea without a cat aboard the ship, lest you offend the Iono the Lord of the Grasping Waters who apparently is very fond of cats. That was a cool detail that I thought was hilarious at the same time. I mean it's not often you see a Fantasy author taking inspiration from lolcats



But nevertheless, that one good moment was soured somewhat by the fifty fucking pages of fantasy sailor jargon ("Hard to Larsboard!") that followed it. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, the world that Lynch has put together is pretty cool. It's got a really interesting set of political institutions, a nuanced criminal underworld, a well-realized religious angle, alchemy, clockwork machines, elaborate poisons and even a bit of diplomatic intrigue. Lynch even knows when to hold things back and keep them mysterious, as he does with a certain society of sorcerers for instance.

And fuck, he has cats in pirate ships:



But world building should be context. World building should be background. World building should be subordinate to everything else that's in the fucking story. World building should never be the story itself.

That said, the book has many virtues to make make up for this flaw. Let me go through them quickly so that I'm not just writing a negative review for a pair of books that I actually liked.

#1: Strong characters.

I'm a big fan of trickster protagonists and as the title of the first book suggests, Locke sort of embodies that. Trying to guess when he's lying and when he's not is what keeps the pages turning for me. As you read along and get a feel for his value system and personality it becomes easier to tell (which takes a bit of the joy out of it) but well-told and surprising lies are still in great abundance.

Unfortunately his world building mania does cloud into some of the more minor characters in the story. Like the Pirates (Plural! More than one!) who love Poetry and have long discussions about it. But fortunately that shit is minimized

[Note to Lynch: I get it, by the way. Lucarno is Seneca/Roman poets. The other guys were Sophocles/Greek poets. Thank you for inserting the discussion you had in a first year Classic seminar into your book. That was a very necessary thing for you to do.]

#2: Good planning.

The first two books have all manner of references to a girl that broke Locke's heart and left him, with no details or explanation. One thing that kept me reading so quickly was my curiosity about who the hell she is and why/how she did that and where she is now. In two books, Lynch avoids giving any tangible details. That tells me that he has the next five books in the series tightly planned and I strongly approve of that.

#3: Excellent fight scenes.

This one speaks for itself. Dirty thief fighting is full of quick movements, with dodges and distractions and feints. Often a fight in fantasy will rely on a character's gimmick or feel DnDish. Lynch's fights on the other hand seemed very real, with good accounts of pain, fear, hesitation and rage. I always like an author who pays attention to the physical nature of combat.

#4: Pirate cats.



Seriously. There's more ...

Star Trek Online - "You betrayed your uniform!"

Star Trek Online is the best MMO ever made. But that doesn't mean it's good.

The game has two portions... a Starfleet Command style ship combat system that's fairly sophisticated and pretty fun, along with a ground combat system that is awful. Most of the game takes place in space however so it's good on average. Like Guild Wars, the game uses an instance system and thus I went through the majority of the beta playing by myself and eschewing any and all contact with my fellow human being.

The gameplay of the average MMO is not fun. WoW fights boil down to finding an enemy, attacking them, pressing your hotkeys for special skills and hoping to kill them before they killed you. Party play took that central concept and made it somewhat grander but did not change the fundamentals. Star Trek Online is thus unique in the sense that basic space combat is actually a fairly fun game in its own right.

But unfortunately, that in turn begs a simple question: Who the fuck got all this MMO into my single player game?

So the first thing you do in the game is create a character.


At first I was trying to make a girl that looks like Jadzia Dax, but while playing around with the sliders I noticed that it's perfectly possible for me to make a Starfleet officer that looks like she's maybe 12 or 13 years old. After thinking "I would totally watch that anime" I created the first lolita Starship Captain in order to see how long it took some Star Trek douche to hit on me.

Thus was Atera Kell born and the answer to the hit-on question was five minutes after completing the tutorial. Oh Star Trek fans, you guys are just so predictable.

In any case, the character of Atera Kell in my head was a Wesley-ish Child Prodigy that was given her own ship because really Starfleet's standards are THAT low nowadays. Anyhow, this was funny for a while but by the time I became a Commander I was a bit tired of looking like a 14 year old girl and thus broke out the char creator again and aged her...


I actually really like the way you can change your look at a moment's notice. You can also hide things like body armour and such so that you can make a nice customized Federation uniform as I did above. It lets you really feel like you're progressing as you go along and makes your character feel a bit more consistent. You don a different uniform as you rank up, rather than simply put on whatever you find on Klingon corpses. I actually thought it was pretty cool when I became a Captain and changed my look to this:



Neat.


You can also customize the look of your crewmembers. From left to right there you have Ensign Kayla, Lieut Commander Olox (my Security Chief), me, Chief Engineer Takara and my medical officer Sha'kar. I spent a fair bit of time tweaking their appearances.



I especially like how Olox came out. Imposing Bolians are cool.

Anyhow, so this is pretty solid so far, I'd say. You have a ship... you have a crew... you fly around the galaxy shooting other ships and beaming down to planets to shoot dudes. Why's it so bad?

Reason #1: It's an MMO.



A random crewmate will be selected to read some quest dialogue ("Sir there are some Klingons here, let's kill them). I suppose the reason for this is that you aren't supposed to be chatting with NPCs, you're supposed to be chatting with other players. But that isn't how Star Trek is. In Star Trek social development is directed inside the ship, with only occasional appearances by Admirals and other Captains. In this you're in a fleet battle against 10 Borg Cubes every few moments.

That's not what Star Trek is like! Voyager sucked! Stop ruining the Borg!

I rarely grouped up in the game because that's how Star Trek should be: a single ship going around the galaxy, having its own little adventures. But at no point will you get any genuine personality from your officers. They're literally just upgrades for your ship that you take down on away teams.

I would really prefer a single player game with that sort of interaction. I'd like to be able to hear about how Olox lost his barber father during a Borg attack on the Enterprise or whatnot. I don't really have much interest in having five ship Captains beam down to a shitty planet to scan for microbes.

Which brings me to...

Reason #2: Scanning for Microbes.


Or rocks. Or lava. Or archeological artifacts. Or... whatever. Exploration is the essence of Star Trek and they tried to put it into this. This turned out to be just beaming down to a planet, finding a couple of rocks (usually 5), hitting 'scan' and then leaving. It's really boring and really pointless. Sometimes they'll be some random enemies loitering around the microbes which you have to kill before you scan, which isn't really how Picard did it in my memory.

What would be better is if they did what is done in the shows and used these silly missions to develop some of those bridge characters. When you do the missions with other people it's just a bit of the other dudes like 'this sucks' as everyone runs in every direction to find the shit. I would kill to have them use it as a platform for character development, but that sort of thing is possible only in a single player game.

Reason #3: The story is bad.

It's set thirty years after Nemesis. In true nerdish overcomplexity tradition, let me explain reason #3 in three parts.

#1: Bending over backwards to make references and connections to the original series. Stuff like this:

Ich.

#2: Complete unoriginality.

Almost all the missions are rehashes of old Star Trek episodes. There was a Section 31 mission that involved a long 'test' exercise on the Holodeck, like that Bashir episode of DS9. There was a mission about the Hirogen doing some bullshit that was not far removed from the shit they did to Voyager. There's a mission that's like that episode of DS9 where some Jem'Hadr have a Gateway. It's like they think that if something can't be directly connected with an episode, the fans will revolt. I guess this must be what Star Trek novels are like.

#3: It's stupid.

The game is based around combat. You can't hail a Romulan vessel and do a bit of cowboy diplomacy to get them to cut out their shit. You have to open fire immediately and the way they try to justify your doing that is often just retarded. Without going into the painful details, let's just say that there is no fucking 'neutral' zone anymore if I'm going into Romulan territory and destroying their ships.

And honestly:


Holographic ships? Fuck if you can have those why bother doing anything else ever.

#4: Ground Combat


It's really bad.

It has two issues that I would think any developer would be able to catch. The first issue is that the enemy does not deal enough damage. I didn't put much thought into my away teams. Two Tactical Officers, an Engineer, and a Doctor (I'm also a Doctor). The enemy could never even put a dent in me.


The second issue the worst possible thing you could combined with the first. They have WAY too many hitpoints. It takes FOREVER to kill ANYTHING. So you have a situation where fights last a good 5-10 minutes where you're struggling to whittle an enemy armed with frickin' dart guns down. Awful awful awful.

Your away team is also retarded. They can get stuck on anything. Open doors... chairs... a bit of debris... a knee high rock... you name it, they get stuck. It's fucking terrible and it seemed like I spent almost as much time trying to get my away team from room to room as I did fighting. A simple solution would be to have the idiots teleport to you if they got too far, but simple solutions don't belong in MMOs.

#5: PvP


Someone working at this studio needs to play Team Fortress 2. If they did, they would see that there are certain things that team-based PvP needs in order to succeed.

They are:
- Spawn points/safe rooms that cannot be camped
- Objectives to discourage turtling strategies.
- A setup phase to let people load the map so that you don't have 5 Klingon ships loading while there's only one Federation vessel.
- Autoteaming. There's no point in playing a medic without easy access to the team's health bars.
- Voice commands (i.e. "BEHIND US!") that can be broadcast with a press of a button.

The game has none of these. Space PvP missions thus boil down to Federation ships drifting around in a circle waiting for the Klingons to decloak and attack. If the Klingon ambush is good enough they win and get spawn camped. If the Feddies hold them off, Feddies win. Terrible.

In conclusion:


I had a fair bit of fun with this over the last week or so. It's certainly better than WoW. But it just suffers from the fact that it's an MMO in a universe that really just isn't an MMO universe. I thus will not be giving it any of my coin. There's more ...

2009 - A Year of Unity

So it's a new year and in two weeks it'll be one year of Unity Plaza. One of those two things is probably worth making a post about, but probably not both. So let's just say this is the joint 'one year' post.

Unity Plaza has turned out pretty much the way I intended. It doesn't get updated every couple of weeks infrequently, has attracted not so much in the way of readership but has given me a venue to talk about some of my more obscure tastes without cluttering my writing blog. Some might call these are rather modest goals, but I never have liked the idea of having a popular blog. Blogs are meant to just let a person sound off as an individual without having to worry about people yapping at them. If there were 20 comments on every post, I'd probably turn comments off.

So yes, Unity Plaza is a success and will hopefully continue to be a success in 2010. But since this is a year thing, let's do a review of 2009.

I have no idea why this fucking Haruhi pic is showing up on the front page. It's not supposed to be there. Fuck Blogger.

So it says at the top of the website that this is a place to sound off about books, anime, gaming and whatever else comes to mind. So let's take those things in order.

Books:

I'd say that the best book I read this year was probably...



With powerful writing and a gripping storyline, the Kite Runner was the one book that I didn't just sort of slog through during the year, but rather actually enjoyed and went through with great interest. The post about it is here, so no need to say so much about it, but in terms of Books-I-Read in 2009, this was probably at the top.

The runner up...



Not technically a book, but certainly a story that I shall remember forever more. Reverie is still my desktop wallpaper and I have no intention of removing her.

The worst book I read this year...


I didn't make a post about this. It's about communists in space. I read most of the book thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek parody of communist propaganda and that the author was laughing with me. In the last few chapters it became clear that he actually believed what he wrote. This just made me sad. God damn commies.

Anime:

The best anime I saw this year...

Assuming that I do this next year, Gintama will win next year too. And, so long as it continues, the year after that and the year after that. I tried to make a post about Gintama once upon a time, but I found that words could not adequately express my feelings for this series. It's basically a sci-fi comedy series about a freelancer samurai and his two wacky sidekicks. But those words do not do it justice. What Gintama truly is is the pinnacle of anime and perhaps of human endeavour itself. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it does everything that a work of art is supposed to do without ever taking itself seriously.

Thus do I salute Gintama and sing its praises.

The second best...



Of course. Awesome storytelling + wacky characters + unique setting = one damn good series.

The worst...

Ignoring the series that I watched one episode of and shut off in disgust...


I don't know who thought it was a good idea to do 8 different versions of 1 episode, but that guy needs to be shot in the fucking face. And then following that travesty up with fucking Sighs, which is the biggest load of bullshit in Haruhi's damn universe? Fuck. There are no words to adequately describe how angry I am. Not even that Disappearance movie can placate my anger.

Games:

The best game I played this year...


The game has many virtues, too many to list here. What makes Arkham Asylum the best though is that it brings the player the experience of actually being Batman. One feels everything from Bruce Wayne's silly morality to the confidence of being able to beat the crap out of everyone that looks at you the wrong way as you stride about Arkham in this Metroidvania-style opus. Long story short, I cannot wait for the sequel.

The second best...



Persona 4 is just one of those rocking and unique experiences that leaves you wanting more. Mystery, romance, drama, fantasy and a dash of horror... it's just got everything. With the undub version providing a stellar Japanese cast, it's just an experience that you carry with you after it's done. Hell, I should play the thing again sometime.

The worst...

Puzzles are stupid, especially time puzzles based on rather arbitrary and illogical game mechanics. And just because a story is hard to understand and keep track of doesn't make it smart or deep. Fuck this game, it should go to hell. At least it only cost 2.50, but frankly a bag of chips would've been a worthier investment.

And everything else:

Favourite movie:
District 9

Second favourite:
Sherlock Holmes

Favourite song:
Warsaw Philharmonic Choir - Lapis Philosophorum

Favourite song that people who aren't like me are likely to know:
The Decemberists - the Rake's Song

Favourite Comic:
Bad Machinery by John Allison

Second Favourite:
Penny Arcade

Preliminary Unity Plaza-related goals for the year:

Read:
American Gods
Stardust
1984 (I was reading about it on wikipedia the other day and it's been so long)
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Dracula (I started it but never got through)
The Sandman Graphic Novels
Sherlock Holmes
Look for more good Visual Novels like Planetarian
A good adult fantasy series would be nice

Watch:
Gintama
Monster
Akagi (as soon as I learn Mahjong's rules)

Play:
Team Fortress 2
Jade Empire
Edgeworth's game

Swear at:
Patrick Rothfuss
Hideo Kojima
Andres Franco
Stephen Harper

Stop:
Reading bad webcomics
Watching animes recommended by Fradener

There, done.

Happy twenty ten! There's more ...

A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

This book is a memoir written by a young man not much older than myself who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I actually don't know what to say about it. It took me about three months to get through it fully, because I kept having to put it down. That isn't really a criticism... at no point did I want to stop reading the book altogether or anything of that nature. Rather instead, the book is just so intensely sad and filled with such horrifying stories that it's just hard to read continuously. Beah exacts an emotional toll that is designed to obliterate everything before it.

This book might be too much for most people to read, but those that can withstand the intense and soul shattering grief that is presented will probably find the thing to be somehow rewarding. It's not a political book at all and at no time does it attempt to pass judgment on the political conflict. The story is rather told from the perspective of a boy who saw his family die in front of him before being given a gun, drugged up with cocaine mixed with gunpowder and sent to kill. The author tries to write as he feels and is extremely good at doing that.

It's not an easy story to read. But if you can get through that sort of thing, this is worth picking up. Just be prepared.

Few comments:

1) This is a memoir, so one is presumes that Mr. Beah's experiences are true here and I don't doubt them. A cursory glance at his wiki page reveals a discussion of some 'investigation' of a journalist from Sierra Leone that nitpicks details and tries to make the government look a bit better ('we didn't CONSCRIPT child soldiers, they were volunteers!'), but I'm willing to dismiss all of that as politically motivated hogwash.

That said, I did sense a certain amount of drama that felt a bit artificial. At one point, he's told that his parents and siblings are waiting for him in the next village and arrives in the village to find it burned to the ground just hours before. I would never have the guts to go up to this author and say 'Did it really happen like that?' but it still didn't quite ring true.

But quite frankly, I think it's his right to take some dramatic license with his story if he so chooses. It's his story to tell, after all, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.

2) The most powerful bit of the story for me was when he was standing in prayer in a village when the rebels attacked, scattering the prayer save for the Imam who stood before his Lord reciting a long sura until they came to butcher him. Beah isn't explicitly religious, but that image has power. That is the spirit that one hopes to hold onto as a believer, I do feel.

3) I don't cry for things that often and this is no exception. That isn't an assertion of some kind of machismo or anything, but rather it's just not what I do. Rather instead, when something makes me sad it gets me in my dreams. This book has haunted over me for the last little while and I think it will for a some time to come.

I should read something more cheerful next. There's more ...

Baccano! - "My, my. This is quite a racket."

I feel that this is a nice contrast to the last post.

Baccano is about two things. The first thing is 1930s New York gangster families that wear awesome hats and hire hitmen to shoot each other. The second thing is magic. Needless to say, it was really fucking good.

More than that though, it's a story that seeks to be innovative. It's not really a single story either, but rather something like three or four really cool stories (each with subplots inside) melded into each other. There are gang wars involving magical artifacts. There's a train that a terrorist group, a bunch of gang enforcers and some bandits try to hijack at the same time. There's an ancient feud between rival magicians. There's a Robber Couple that likes to dress up in weird costumes during their heists. It's a bloody wild ride. The only downside is if you aren't quick-minded you can easily get lost.

The cast is enormous (something like 15-20 characters in a 16 episode series) but everyone's such a character that they all get a lot of development in a short period of time. One of my favourite characters was this guy called Luck who didn't get much face time but made up for it by being so ridiculously laid back about the work he does that he just radiated cool. There is no dead weight on this cast list, which is very very rare.

It's a real breath of fresh air, I think. It's unique, arty (arty is not to be confused with artsy) and smart but never pretentious. It's just about having a lot of fun. Check it out.

Bit more talk after the jump.

Three spoilery things to touch upon:

First: The antagonists were great.


I really thought it was amazing how the villains were all these over-the-top cackling fiends and still managed to be somehow humanized. Ladd, Vino and even Dallas. They all were comically evil on one hand and yet filled with all these believable redeeming features. I think my favourite of the bunch was Vino, who's blood drenched affections will be difficult to forget.

Second: I liked how the magic worked.


There was a coherent and straightforward system for it. No magical surprise bullshit in this. The way that Maiza's character was sort of minimized so that he was really just a side character that was never in the thick of things I thought was an especially good touch. It leaves a lot to be inferred about him, which I think is a positive thing.

Third: Those hats really are pretty cool.


Seriously, why did gangsters stop wearing those things? They're awesome. They should bring them back.

Oh and I should also mention: Isaac and Miria.


Fuck yes. Normally pure gag characters wear thin after a while, but holy fuck I loved those two.

And nothing else needs to be said. There's more ...

Ef - A Tale of Memories

(Before we begin: Note that comments on the site are currently broken)

This was... hm... It's a 12 episode series about uh... artists.

The first storyline is about a one eyed writer girl with a bizarre form of Plot Amnesia that makes her forget all her memories for the day on the thirteenth hour of every day. She meets a dude who tries to give her confidence in her writing abilities so that she can write a post-modern novel about being a one eyed writer girl that loses her memories every thirteen hours.

The second storyline is about a genius manga artist that's trying to balance his publishing schedule and schoolwork. He has two co-dependent girls interested him (a cheerful though somewhat emotional gal and an overly possessive childhood friend) and he has to deal with that stuff somehow.

So... um... I am avoiding the use of the word 'bad' in reference to this, because really that's a bit too harsh. Still, I'm fairly certain that no one I know that I'm on good terms with would like this. But at the same time I'm sure there are a lot of people that swear by this thing and think it's the most deeply beautiful and meaningful thing they've ever seen. It's certainly very popular (multiple recommendations is why I ended up going through it, in case you were wondering). But still... let's talk about this, if you wish.

Let's start with the manga artist. Hiro Hirono.



When artists create fictionalized versions of themselves it usually is an excuse to pat themselves on the back. This is a tradition that goes straight back to that part of the Odyssey where that Bard sings about the Trojan War and has Odysseus in tears because of how awesome his storytelling skills are. That's basically what this guy is. He draws Shoujo Manga which he apparently started publishing when he was like 14 or 15 and while the show never mentions anything about what the stuff was about it is generally understood that it is awesome and that Hiro is amazing.

That in itself is a problem. I've never been a fan of the whole 'look at how awesome my artist character is, you can't see even a hint of what he might create' thing. It's a cheap device. But fine, whatever, that isn't the big issue here. The issue is that Hiro's utter awesomeness transfers to pretty much everything else in his life.

The guy spends his entire story being cool. He spends his time making deadlines and being pursued by gorgeous women. The women themselves are both kind of crazy and vicious, with each seeming to look to destroy the other's self esteem in order to win the artist. But the manga artist is pretty much detached during most of that giant emotional war, as he's just too busy being awesome. His only 'flaw' is that he didn't choose which girl he liked earlier, but that seemed to be pretty much thrown in as it was fairly clear who he would choose from the get go.


It's funny to me that this show plays at being post-modern and artsy so much and yet lapses into the 'stable, responsible and logical male'/'emotional, fickle and irrational women' molds. I don't know anything about who made this or why, but the way this thing was written struck me as base artistic wish fulfillment. And that just doesn't yield a satisfying story.

The second story is about Chihiro Shindou.



The amnesia I described earlier was caused by a car accident (which also took her eye). I know I don't really need to mention how stupid her condition is, but I will anyway. Thirteen hours of memories a day (her memories from before she was 12 are intact) and then she forgets it all. That is not simply not plausible. People might say 'well, it's fiction' but fiction needs to be internally consistent. I could not feel any sympathy for her condition throughout the show because it was just such a silly idea.

And that's a big problem. As I mentioned Chihiro's goal is to write a novel with the help of her boyfriend Renji, who she'll tell what's going on so she can keep on track and keep writing in spite of her memory loss cycle. But honestly, no matter how much she struggled and suffered, the inescapable fact was that it's a stupid premise that I couldn't suspend my disbelief for. Amnesia is an overused trope in any case. It's in everything from Firefly to Gundam. But this is stupid amnesia.


I doubt whoever wrote this doesn't even cared about that, being concerned more for the overall effect. It's 'a tale of memories' after all and so the author has to deconstruct the role of memory in human experience and obviously turning to something crazy like say science fiction to explain reoccurring short term memory loss would have just been so vulgar. So just stamp on 'amnesia' and keep going!

For some people that's probably enough... but me? I think it's lazy and irritating.

Finally, let's talk about the most egregious thing about this piece of work, mainly the art style.



Pretentious.

I get the feeling that whoever was art director for this thing thought that no one could understand him/her in high school. Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others) the scenes would randomly cut to a shot of one of the characters as a shadow or as a purple outline or the background would suddenly change or text would flash by. I'm not sure whether this style is called Impressionist or Expressionist or what... that isn't my area of expertise. But I do know that it was really annoying.


You can say art is subjective, of course, and I acknowledge that. But I think often people mistake novelty value for actual value. Great art would be something like Jin Roh rather than something that slaps a shadow on someone's face. I would even say Kaiji's big noses and weird looks outstrip this thing. All the silliness with photoshop filters and random scene cuts struck me as the product of someone who's really insecure and terrified that no one would 'get it' (though what 'it' is is rather nebulous). There was one scene that I really disliked which consisted of one of the girls leaving messages on the manga artist's cellphone.

That's how it looked like. As she left messages, what she said would write in text across the screen and she kept leaving messages which made more and more messages appear until the screen was covered. It went on for like ten minutes. After a minute or two I just said 'okay, I get it' and skipped the rest of the scene. But that's the junk I'm talking about.

Overall, I can say I got through it which is more than I can say about a lot of things. But generally speaking, I think this is not the way things should go. There's more ...

District 9

District 9... hmmm. Not too shabby.

Gotta give a film credit first and foremost for innovation. An alien refugee crisis in Africa filmed in pseudo-documentary style complete with occasional cuts to random experts/acquaintances of the main character. I've never seen anything like that before and it's a neat idea. The documentary aspect sort of breaks down after a while and it becomes what I think is fairly straight-forward science fiction. But still, I tip my hat towards risk-taking.

The movie was fairly politically charged, perhaps even a bit too politically charged. The politics of District 9 are pretty heavy handed, but also kind of vague. Refugee camps have extremely poor living conditions. Racism is bad. Okay sure. But these are bloody aliens.

Personally if alien refugees came to earth I would be in favour of a massive quarantine. You can't just let a bunch of people from another damn planet set up camp without knowing anything about them. Who knows what damn biological weirdness can come out of that? I don't care how damn malnourished the damn aliens are, you don't just let in a bunch of unknown organisms onto our planet. That's just stupid.

But in any case, details aside it was good. So let's talk about some specifics here...

Documentary-style:

I liked this. Documentaries have sort of become an art form these days, what with the spooky music and the interviews with loved ones/generic experts with European accents. It's all pretty standard and so seeing science fiction using the documentary style like this was rather nice. I would go so far as to say that I think that the first chunk of the movie before the infection part took off was actually the best part.

I especially liked the use of past tense. "Wikus was this" "Wikus was that"... made the movie more tense as you watched to see what was going to happen to the guy.

Main Character:


I liked the actor, I have to say. He really played the part of the semi-charismatic pseudo-liberal nerd pretty well. You could tell right from the get-go that this is the kind of guy that was picked on in high school and probably got his degree without doing anything that remotely resembled field work. He talks a lot about things being illegal, doesn't seem to like violence but is still kind of prejudiced. I don't think the audience is supposed to really like him, but he really works as a believable character.

That is until he gets some alien guns and becomes frackin' Rambo. Up until that point I was really liking the whole documentary aspect of it, but when Wikus blew up that whole military base and then escaped... well, he also blew up the documentary part too. Which is a shame really, as they could have still kept it going and put up some interviews with some people that survived his onslaught. That would have been awesome.

"He came through the door and shot the guard, yelling 'FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!'. We hid under a table and then he..." *breaks down weeping* "He told us to run... to run or else he would... he would..." etc. etc.

I don't know why they just abandoned that in favour of just a standard action scene.

That said, that mech he had was pretty cool.

Politics:



My main objection:

Why is it a stupid private contractor managing the aliens rather than some sort of government or UN agency? I mean, sure, I understand. Blackwater (or whatever the fuck those fuckers renamed themselves... Xe or something, isn't it?) is one of the most evil organizations on the globe. But for crying out loud, Blackwater are a group of mercenaries who are given contracts. You can't just put them in charge of the aliens. The whole shadowy 'MNU' thing running the show just felt silly.

Good Detail:



I think the movie does a fair enough job with explaining why the aliens don't just attack. They might have cool guns but when they get shot they die just the same and there aren't so many of them that they can just take over the Earth. If you chuck missiles at their spaceships, they will explode and if you shoot their crazy mech enough it will be destroyed. Nice way of justifying the refugee thing.

Bad Detail:

I don't understand how a trigger pulling mechanism is supposed to be linked to DNA. That's nitpicking though. But while we're on the subject, why exactly did alien fuel stuff make him turn into an alien?

Worst part of the movie:

Cannibalism. Or well, maybe not 'cannibalism', but the whole alien eating thing. I know that there are some weird cults with inhuman practices in Africa. But that was still really stupid. "I'm going to eat this thing to see if I can use this gun" is an idea with practical intentions. When that shit doesn't work then you can maybe see it not gaining too much traction.

The whole 'scary African gun guy' thing just felt out of place and unconvincing.
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