Just look at the One Sheets. The Matrix has actual humans photographed. Reloaded has Neo and Trinity Photoshopped within an inch of their lives. Revolutions has photos turned into a digital illustration. This parallels the path of the films, The Matrix is a very good film. Reloaded is a not so good film. Revolutions sucks. Part of my feeling has to do with time. If you come to Matrix as a Trilogy, then you probably don’t see much of anything wrong with the sequels. A small aside. Easily the best ever episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation is Best of…
Category: sci fi
Defiance Season 3
The Syfy Channel’s post alien invasion/post apocalyptic tale of a city that used to be known as St. Louis. The first season was basically a Western, with the town getting a new Marshall and fighting off the Indians, only the Indians were a rag tag group of aliens. They are long gone now. Season 2 saw the Marshall’s daughter turn into a killing machine bent on the destruction of Earth. We abandoned any idea that Defiance might be the last free city in the world and spent a lot of time with massive CGI destruction. A few characters from the…
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
A Trigger Warning is something designed to keep people from being upset by what they read or see. I agree with Neil when he says if you’re warned about something, you pretty much take the fun out it. I’m not sure this collection of stories and poems is seriously disturbing, but they are fun. Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers and I think he’s a great reader of his own audio books. A few of the stories are very short and the last story is closer to a novella than a short story. They were all very good,…
Mr Robot
The story of an insane man who happens to be a world class computer genius. He hacks in his spare time and works as a cubicle drone during the day. One day a mysterious man approaches him and talks to him. I know how you feel. You think something is wrong with the world. You are The One…oh, wait, that was The Matrix. I have to wonder if the producers thought, just for a moment or two, about getting Laurence Fishburne to play the part that Christian Slater plays. The cast could certainly use a little color and it would…
Age of Adaline
A few spoilers and such. Adaline was in a car wreck and then struck by lightening. It’s the kind of thing that gives people in comic books their powers and it’s how Adaline gets to stay young. Age of Adaline has a lot of quirks. The story makes it necessary to hop around in time, but then, there is not nearly enough time spent in the past. The bulk of the story takes place now and deals with her meeting a rich young man who can make her happy. More Cinderella, anyone? Easily the most annoying thing in Age of…
Ex Machina
A company that bears a striking resemblance to Google is run by a man who bears a striking resemblance to Steve Jobs who creates a woman that bears a striking resemblance to Rachel from Blade Runner. The bulk of the film is two men talking about esoteric subjects and occasionally getting drunk. They are at a house somewhere near a glacier where the uber rich man whiles away the hours by making robotic women in the basement. He brings in one of his employees to give his latest robotic invention The Turing Test. Because, well, why not? The effects for…
Person of Interest:Samaritan, Good?
I wasn’t too impressed with this show when it first started. The story of a minor league Skynet and the man who created it/her/him/whatever. But over the past few episdoes it has changed into something a bit more interesting. The Machine has a rival known as Samaritan. The idea being that this new Artificial Intelligence is a good guy. But Samaratian is a good guy in the same sense that Nazi Germany and Eugenics are good guys. We can all agree that there are some people the world would be better off without, among them would be Nazi Germany and…
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
I’ve always been a fan of time loop stories. The first such tale I remember reading was a brilliant little short story called 12:01. Then came [easyazon_link identifier=”B00170I7GG” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Groundhog Day[/easyazon_link] and a number of very good episodes of [easyazon_link identifier=”B002PQ7JQK” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Star Trek[/easyazon_link]. All of these time loop stories worked on a fairly short interval, from an hour to a few days. [easyazon_link identifier=”0316399620″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August[/easyazon_link] takes the time loop to a new length, the length of a man’s life. At first Harry is shocked to find himself in an infant body again.…
All You Need Is Kill Script
a few spoilers and such I like reading scripts. The original stories almost always differ from the final films. There was a scene with Mr Potter and Clarence cut out of It’s A Wonderful Life and there’s a sequel to The Matrix floating around that actually makes sense. All You Need Is Kill by D W Harper is the original script for Live Die Repeat or Edge of Tomorrow. There’s a lot of stuff in the Tom Cruise time loop story that makes no damned sense at all. Like Tom being a recruiting officer and how he makes that…
iZombie on the CW
Episode one of iZombie jumps right into the action. We get a brief scene of our hero as a normal woman going about the business of being a doctor, then she goes to a party and is scratched by a zombie, thus becoming one herself. We then flash forward a few months, and no one has noticed that she’s now a zombie. She quits her residency as a surgeon in favor of a job in the morgue, where she can help herself to brains when the need arises. A side effect of her braining eating is that she gets flashes…