December 23, 2009
"Independence Day" in Japanese
Speaking of Independence Day, over at AJATT, Khatzumoto ripped an MP3 of the Japanese dub of the "St. Independence Day Speech."
The translation and dub are a good fit for Pullman's performance. Just about any Japanese actor who's played the lead or villain in one of NHK's year-long historical dramas has delivered a speech like this (albeit dressed as a samurai warrior). You don't need to understand Japanese to follow the dramatic beats.
Khatzumoto has a transcription (in Japanese) of the whole speech.
The translation and dub are a good fit for Pullman's performance. Just about any Japanese actor who's played the lead or villain in one of NHK's year-long historical dramas has delivered a speech like this (albeit dressed as a samurai warrior). You don't need to understand Japanese to follow the dramatic beats.
我々は決して音無しく死の闇に消えたりはしない！
Wareware wa kesshite otonashiku shi no yami ni kietari wa shinai!
We [definitely] will not [disappear] quietly into the [darkness of death]!
我々は決して戦わずして死にはしない！
Wareware wa kesshite tatakawazu shite shi niwa shinai!
We [definitely] will not [die] without a fight!
皆で生きるのだ！
Minna de ikiru no da!
We're [all] going to [live]! [These two lines are reversed from the English.]
生き殘るのだ！
Ikinokoru no da!
We're going to live on!
今日、我々の独立記念日を祝おう！
Kyou, wareware no dokuritsu kinenbi wo iwaou!
Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!
Khatzumoto has a transcription (in Japanese) of the whole speech.
Labels: id4, japanese, movies, personal favs
December 18, 2009
Stupid on "Star Trek" stilts (1)
The latest iteration of Star Trek isn't so much SF as DF: "dumb fun." Along with movies like Independence Day and Live Free or Die Hard, the science isn't merely fictionized, it's a magic wand. A prop to be chewed on. And yet done in a way that the rest of the rational mind goes along for the ride and enjoys itself.
I'm not talking about the MacGuffins. In Star Trek, the whole "red matter" silliness belongs alongside other impossibilities like warp drives and transporters, far enough removed from reality to not disturb the integrity of any actual science. The problem here isn't the physics, but the logical implications of the physics as stipulated.
As in Star Wars, if you make blowing up stars and planets that easy (lining up a contractor and the budget), the arms race implications become horrifying. And if a Death Star can pulverize an entire planet, then the Mini-Me version should be able to vaporize a continent or two, which would obviate the whole first act of The Empire Strikes Back.
Which brings us to the favorite kamikaze tactic in Star Trek: ramming the bad guys with a starship. Because starship engines run on antimatter, rupturing the magnetic containment vessels would trigger an explosion more powerful than a hydrogen bomb. This actually qualifies as valid science.
One reason I give the dumber-than-dirt Independence Day a big pass (besides Bill Pullman's rah-rah Americanized version of the St. Crispian speech) is that even if you've got yourself a super-armored spaceship the size of Rhode Island, setting off a thermonuclear device inside it will indeed turn it into so much Jiffy Pop.
At the end of Star Trek, Scotty dumps the engine cores, which go kaboom, and they ride the shock wave away from the black hole created by rupturing the containment vessel holding the "red matter." All fine and dandy, but why didn't it work for Spock or Kirk Senior? Their ships were smaller, but either should have blown Nero's to kingdom come.
This is one of those MacGuffins whose implications were never thought through from the start. Let's say that, at the end of the day, starships can only run on Chernobyl-grade power sources. A calculated risk taken by daredevil risk-takers. But in that case, you wouldn't populate the ship with families and the occasional pregnant woman.
In science fiction, the demands of objective science can take you only so far. Keeping a narrative's internally-created realities--however non-scientific--consistent with each other will create many more interesting story possibilities than if they are lazily glossed over.
I'm not talking about the MacGuffins. In Star Trek, the whole "red matter" silliness belongs alongside other impossibilities like warp drives and transporters, far enough removed from reality to not disturb the integrity of any actual science. The problem here isn't the physics, but the logical implications of the physics as stipulated.
As in Star Wars, if you make blowing up stars and planets that easy (lining up a contractor and the budget), the arms race implications become horrifying. And if a Death Star can pulverize an entire planet, then the Mini-Me version should be able to vaporize a continent or two, which would obviate the whole first act of The Empire Strikes Back.
Which brings us to the favorite kamikaze tactic in Star Trek: ramming the bad guys with a starship. Because starship engines run on antimatter, rupturing the magnetic containment vessels would trigger an explosion more powerful than a hydrogen bomb. This actually qualifies as valid science.
One reason I give the dumber-than-dirt Independence Day a big pass (besides Bill Pullman's rah-rah Americanized version of the St. Crispian speech) is that even if you've got yourself a super-armored spaceship the size of Rhode Island, setting off a thermonuclear device inside it will indeed turn it into so much Jiffy Pop.
At the end of Star Trek, Scotty dumps the engine cores, which go kaboom, and they ride the shock wave away from the black hole created by rupturing the containment vessel holding the "red matter." All fine and dandy, but why didn't it work for Spock or Kirk Senior? Their ships were smaller, but either should have blown Nero's to kingdom come.
This is one of those MacGuffins whose implications were never thought through from the start. Let's say that, at the end of the day, starships can only run on Chernobyl-grade power sources. A calculated risk taken by daredevil risk-takers. But in that case, you wouldn't populate the ship with families and the occasional pregnant woman.
In science fiction, the demands of objective science can take you only so far. Keeping a narrative's internally-created realities--however non-scientific--consistent with each other will create many more interesting story possibilities than if they are lazily glossed over.
Related posts
Stupid on Star Trek stilts (2)
Stupid on Star Trek" stilts (3)
The brave old world of Star Trek
Labels: annoying stuff, id4, movies, science, science fiction, star trek
May 27, 2009
SF/F cliches
A list of overused fantasy tropes and cliches here and science fiction tropes and cliches here. Amusing and telling. At the end of the day, telling stories is all about "the same only different."
Here are a few more of my own:
It is impossible to "crack" a true one-time pad except through brute force. There was an old Mission Impossible episode where the mission was to crack a one-time pad. The only way to do it was to socially engineer a situation that would force the villain to reveal its source: a page from a randomly-chosen phone book. Clever.
A Vulcan Phalanx is used in Under Siege. Mount a couple on the Death Star and Luke Skywalker would have lasted about five seconds. You do see guided missiles a lot in anime--but they are never proximity devices, so the good guys can always outrun them.
A nice thing about the Stargate series: conventional automatic weapons remain quite useful at killing things.
Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle have used this idea. And despite how dumb the rest of the movie is, Independence Day deserves credit for illustrating the proper use of a nuclear warhead against an enemy.
A few more from Kate
A few more from Joe
Here are a few more of my own:
In the future, not only have we run out of oil, but everybody's forgotten that internal combustion engines run equally well on ethanol, butanol (better than ethanol), hydrogen and natural gas, not to mention all the diesel/turbine substitutes.
Any bright kid can crack 128-bit encryption with a laptop (Mac, of course).
Supercomputers are all mainframes based on the Cray-2, circa 1985, just bigger. Despite faster-than-light communication, nobody uses distributed networks, making single-point-of-failure catastrophes inevitable.
Nobody uses off-site backups either.
Passwords and one-time pads, no matter how complex, are always crackable thanks to some super-duper mathematics genius or wizbang gizmo.
It is impossible to "crack" a true one-time pad except through brute force. There was an old Mission Impossible episode where the mission was to crack a one-time pad. The only way to do it was to socially engineer a situation that would force the villain to reveal its source: a page from a randomly-chosen phone book. Clever.
Shooting the ten-pad causes a digitally-locked door to unlock (great security, that!).
Similarly, the hero can hotwire any vehicle or spring any prison lock with rudimentary tools.
Super-advanced militaries of the future lack the equivalent of the guided missile, JDAM, HARM, Vulcan Phalanx, drones, or even effective firearms (or lack them in sufficient quantities).
A Vulcan Phalanx is used in Under Siege. Mount a couple on the Death Star and Luke Skywalker would have lasted about five seconds. You do see guided missiles a lot in anime--but they are never proximity devices, so the good guys can always outrun them.
A nice thing about the Stargate series: conventional automatic weapons remain quite useful at killing things.
Alien races bent on destroying civilization will descend into the atmosphere and engage Earth air defenses rather than staying safely in orbit and pummeling the planet with really big rocks.
Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle have used this idea. And despite how dumb the rest of the movie is, Independence Day deserves credit for illustrating the proper use of a nuclear warhead against an enemy.
No matter how technologically developed the society, all communications systems are analog (even faster-than-light) and AM radio is ubiquitous.
Robots insist on occupying the same ecological niches as humans, despite robots ostensibly having no need for what those ecological niches provide humans.
Since Alec Guinness is dead, if you have a wise sage that instructs the youthful hero in his life's work, the wise sage must either be Liam Neeson or Roy Dotrice. That is, he must have a beard, a deep voice, and talk in something that could be a British accent. Even Ewan McGregor had to grow a beard before he could give sage advice.
Super-advanced society with massive technological advances will nevertheless be completely lacking in one area that the heroes just so happen to be skilled at.
When a movie is turned into a TV show, the villain's powerful abilities are diminished and continue to diminish as the TV show progresses. And other, often extremely useful ones magically pop up, often to only disappear the next episode without explanation.
In order to see with helmets on, lights are placed pointed at the eyes.
Complex societies exist in the future despite a) the lack of technology, b) the lack of resource, c) completely dysfunctional organizations, or d) the obvious lack of physical ability.
Aliens that aren't humanoid must build ships, machines and cities that easily accommodate humans.
When aliens or robots want to get rid of those pesky humans, they do it piecemeal instead of whacking everyone at once with poisonous gas or neutron bombs.
Labels: criticism, fantasy, id4, mainframe, movies, robots, science fiction, television reviews, thinking about writing
October 13, 2008
Gall Force: Eternal Story
This is one of my favorite "old school" (pre-digital) anime feature films. Gall Force: Eternal Story is classic SF/F "high concept." That is, it takes a profound question about life, the universe, and everything, formulates a far-out theory, and then makes the explanation so entertaining you can ignore the galloping illogic.That order is important. Crowd-pleasers like The Matrix and Independence Day enthrall their audiences (well, me) sufficiently that they (I) can ignore the deeply idiotic premises. As long as they don't push it. Unfortunately, as with The Matrix, a dumb premise dooms the sequels.
Gall Force keeps your superego from spoiling the fun for your id with plenty of gratuitous nudity (though of the Barbie Doll variety), a J-Pop power ballad at regular intervals, and a "Ten Little Indians" plot that has you wondering who will get bumped off next.
The profound, existential question it asks is where the human race came from (assuming that evolution isn't your cup of tea). And it devises an explanation that Mormons who know their Brigham Young arcana (and where Glen Larson got the idea for Battlestar Galactica) should be familiar with:
Mankind are here because they are the offspring of [Adam and Eve,] who were first brought here from another planet, and power was given them to propagate their species . . . . [Adam] was the person who brought the animals and the seeds from other planets to this world. (Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, p. 285; vol. 3, p. 319.)
In the Gall Force universe, the all-female race of the "Solnoids" and the reptilian (male) "Paranoids" have been engaged in centuries of ruinous warfare. In fact, the "gall" in the original is actually garu, a cognate of "girl," meaning "young woman." The American distributor must have thought a literal translation sounded silly.
In any case, faced with the prospect of mutual annihilation, the powers that be conspire to invent--wait for it--heterosexual mammalian reproduction! It's sort of like Lysistrata in reverse.
Actually, the original intent was to produce a race of Mr. Spock superegos to mediate between the squabbling ids and egos. But they messed up and created men instead.
The unwitting victims of this experimentation are the crew of the Star Leaf battle cruiser. The last woman standing is rewarded just as Brigham Young would have scripted it. There's a reality game show for you: the winner gets to populate a new planet!
Okay, if you want to nitpick, you could ask why the "females" have secondary sexual characteristics in the first place. But like I said, don't think about stuff like that and you'll enjoy it a lot more. There are also a bunch of Gall Force sequels and prequels, but they don't measure up to the original.
This theme pops up in other anime series. Vandread posits a future where men and women have separated into separate societies. In Tweeny Witches, this separation triggers the apocalypse. While the former rarely rises above the dumb but fun, the latter comes to some insightful conclusions.
Or as my brother Henry puts it, "In short, fish really do need bicycles."
Related posts
Simoun
The birds, bees, and the trees
Labels: anime, deep thoughts, id4, lds, personal favs, sex
December 31, 2007
Transformers
It's been a long time since I've approached a film with such low expectations and have yet been so delightfully rewarded as I was watching Transformers. This 140-minute, blow-em-up, special-effects Michael Bay extravaganza didn't lose my attention from beginning to end. And even more surprising, made sense from beginning to end.
This is rare in the bubblegum science-fiction genre. Independence Day and The Matrix, to cite two examples, are based on mind-numbingly stupid premises. In the one-off blockbuster format, you can usually turn your brain off long enough to get past it. In the case of Star Wars and The Matrix, though, the persistence of the original premise through subsequent sequels only painfully pounded the stupidity into your skull with a heavy mallet.
Transformers uses the reliable capture-the-flag plot: the good guy team and the bad guy team after The Prize. (Or one team already has it and the other team is trying to get it back.) If handled competently, it's hard to get wrong. Star Wars starts out this way, which is why it works so well in the first installment (ignoring the dumb Freudian subtext injected after the fact, and the criminal incompetence of the Empire's Death Star Engineering Division).
In Transformers, the bad guys--the obviously-named Decepticons led by Megatron--and the good guys led by wonderfully-named Optimus Prime--are after the All Spark, a sort of robotic Philosopher's Stone in the shape of a Cube (looking very Borg-ish in the intro). The bad guys want the Cube so they can rule the universe (why else?). And the good guys want the Cube so the bad guys won't end up ruling the universe (stop me if you've heard this plot before).
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf ) ends up at the crux of the conflict when it turns out that his great grandfather discovered--very X-Files-like--a frozen Megatron and the Cube during an expedition to the Arctic. Megatron's buds have finally deduced he's on Earth, and are alternatively hot after government databases and Sam for clues. This is when Sam finds out that the used Camaro he just bought is a sentient robot in disguise--one of the good guy robots called Bumblebee.
After a detour through Hoover Dam (yet another secret government installation, didn't you know), the always-entertaining destruction of a major American city follows.
Like I said, once the premise has been established, this story works like the well-oiled machines these Transformers are (the mecha CGI is worth the price of admission). The bad guys pretty much do what bad guys ought to do, and the good guys pretty much do what they ought to do. Keeping Sam at the center of the action during the big climax strains common sense, but no more than farm kid Luke Skywalker suddenly being able fly the equivalent of an F-22.
The action is so well-paced that you don't have time to think about the logical failings too deeply.
The movie plays out with the same sense of seriousness as The Tick or George of the Jungle, yet without embarrassing itself. More kudos to Bay on that account. But perhaps most remarkable of all is how fairly the Bay treats the U.S. Military. (Sad that this should be so remarkable.) Granted, there's always some bureaucrat in these movies whose monumental cluelessness becomes an excuse to drag out of the resolution of obvious plot points.
That job is handled here by John Turturro. Thankfully, he proves a minor distraction. The rest of the Armed Forces, led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) as a Special Forces officer, and a competent Jon Voight as the Secretary of Defense (he's good with a shotgun too), execute their jobs with the skill and expertise we all hope the Pentagon will muster if the country is ever invaded by a bunch of giant, power-mad, marauding robots.
Even the de rigueur FBI-guys-busting-in-on-the-genius-teenager-hackers scene made me think: Yep, they deserved it. I also like the fact that the military figures out a way on its own to cause serious damage to the bad guys. None of this nonsense with Jeff Goldblum uploading a virus from his Mac to an alien operating system he's never seen before (as my brother said of that conceit: "You might as well try to upload a ham sandwich").
A single cheap shot aimed at the current occupant of the White House is so glancing that nobody will get it in a few years.
The icing on the cake are two truly funny and clever sequences that keep the story going before things start blowing up. In the first, Bumblebee does his best to help Sam get to first base with his new girlfriend (Megan Fox). This before Sam concludes that his Camaro really does have a mind of its own. The second has Sam rooting around his room trying to find The Important Clue while a bunch of gigantic (good guy) robots right outside the house are trying their best Not To Be Seen by his parents.
And not step on the Chihuahua (rest assured, they don't step on the Chihuahua--they're the good guys--but the rest of the lawn ornamentation isn't so lucky).
These two scenes are out-and-out funnier than anything in The Simpsons Movie, or any other recent comedy I can think of. Turning Michael Bay's name into a hiss and a byword has become a popular sport among intellectuals (Pearl Harbor certainly was a stinker). Yet Transformers is not only the best thing Bay's done since the first Bad Boys, but there's more to admire about this film than most of the year's Oscar and art-house circuit competition.
Starting with the fact that it's actually fun to watch.
This is rare in the bubblegum science-fiction genre. Independence Day and The Matrix, to cite two examples, are based on mind-numbingly stupid premises. In the one-off blockbuster format, you can usually turn your brain off long enough to get past it. In the case of Star Wars and The Matrix, though, the persistence of the original premise through subsequent sequels only painfully pounded the stupidity into your skull with a heavy mallet.
Transformers uses the reliable capture-the-flag plot: the good guy team and the bad guy team after The Prize. (Or one team already has it and the other team is trying to get it back.) If handled competently, it's hard to get wrong. Star Wars starts out this way, which is why it works so well in the first installment (ignoring the dumb Freudian subtext injected after the fact, and the criminal incompetence of the Empire's Death Star Engineering Division).
In Transformers, the bad guys--the obviously-named Decepticons led by Megatron--and the good guys led by wonderfully-named Optimus Prime--are after the All Spark, a sort of robotic Philosopher's Stone in the shape of a Cube (looking very Borg-ish in the intro). The bad guys want the Cube so they can rule the universe (why else?). And the good guys want the Cube so the bad guys won't end up ruling the universe (stop me if you've heard this plot before).
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf ) ends up at the crux of the conflict when it turns out that his great grandfather discovered--very X-Files-like--a frozen Megatron and the Cube during an expedition to the Arctic. Megatron's buds have finally deduced he's on Earth, and are alternatively hot after government databases and Sam for clues. This is when Sam finds out that the used Camaro he just bought is a sentient robot in disguise--one of the good guy robots called Bumblebee.
After a detour through Hoover Dam (yet another secret government installation, didn't you know), the always-entertaining destruction of a major American city follows.
Like I said, once the premise has been established, this story works like the well-oiled machines these Transformers are (the mecha CGI is worth the price of admission). The bad guys pretty much do what bad guys ought to do, and the good guys pretty much do what they ought to do. Keeping Sam at the center of the action during the big climax strains common sense, but no more than farm kid Luke Skywalker suddenly being able fly the equivalent of an F-22.
The action is so well-paced that you don't have time to think about the logical failings too deeply.
The movie plays out with the same sense of seriousness as The Tick or George of the Jungle, yet without embarrassing itself. More kudos to Bay on that account. But perhaps most remarkable of all is how fairly the Bay treats the U.S. Military. (Sad that this should be so remarkable.) Granted, there's always some bureaucrat in these movies whose monumental cluelessness becomes an excuse to drag out of the resolution of obvious plot points.
That job is handled here by John Turturro. Thankfully, he proves a minor distraction. The rest of the Armed Forces, led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) as a Special Forces officer, and a competent Jon Voight as the Secretary of Defense (he's good with a shotgun too), execute their jobs with the skill and expertise we all hope the Pentagon will muster if the country is ever invaded by a bunch of giant, power-mad, marauding robots.
Even the de rigueur FBI-guys-busting-in-on-the-genius-teenager-hackers scene made me think: Yep, they deserved it. I also like the fact that the military figures out a way on its own to cause serious damage to the bad guys. None of this nonsense with Jeff Goldblum uploading a virus from his Mac to an alien operating system he's never seen before (as my brother said of that conceit: "You might as well try to upload a ham sandwich").
A single cheap shot aimed at the current occupant of the White House is so glancing that nobody will get it in a few years.
The icing on the cake are two truly funny and clever sequences that keep the story going before things start blowing up. In the first, Bumblebee does his best to help Sam get to first base with his new girlfriend (Megan Fox). This before Sam concludes that his Camaro really does have a mind of its own. The second has Sam rooting around his room trying to find The Important Clue while a bunch of gigantic (good guy) robots right outside the house are trying their best Not To Be Seen by his parents.
And not step on the Chihuahua (rest assured, they don't step on the Chihuahua--they're the good guys--but the rest of the lawn ornamentation isn't so lucky).
These two scenes are out-and-out funnier than anything in The Simpsons Movie, or any other recent comedy I can think of. Turning Michael Bay's name into a hiss and a byword has become a popular sport among intellectuals (Pearl Harbor certainly was a stinker). Yet Transformers is not only the best thing Bay's done since the first Bad Boys, but there's more to admire about this film than most of the year's Oscar and art-house circuit competition.
Starting with the fact that it's actually fun to watch.
Labels: id4, movie reviews, personal favs, robots, science fiction