The rest of the movie aside, the first six minutes of The Great War of Archimedes (a literal translation) is worth watching for its recreation of the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato on April 7, 1945.

The most memorable scene in this segment has an anti-aircraft battery on the Yamato shooting down an American fighter, only to watch in stunned amazement as a PBY Catalina swoops in and scoops the fallen pilot out of the water.

It's like, "That is so not fair!"

The dark irony of the scene is surely intended, as the Yamato was dispatched to Okinawa on a suicide mission. Without air cover, it was destroyed along with its destroyer escorts soon after leaving the coastal waters of Kyushu.

The story then flashes back a decade to an Imperial Navy conference proposing the construction of the Yamato and turns into a movie about—accounting (do not trust movie posters to tell you what a movie is actually about).

The conference pits the Kantai Kessen faction led by Admiral Shigetaro Shimada against the carrier faction led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Convinced that Shimada has grossly underbid the project, Yamamoto recruits mathematics prodigy Tadashi Kai to come up with a more accurate cost estimate.

The middle third of the movie thus consists of Kai (promoted on the spot to lieutenant commander) and his aide, Ensign Shojiro Tanaka, desperately searching for some way to obtain the necessary data, while being obstructed at every turn by Shimada's henchmen and denied access even to the blueprints.

Along the way, Kai essentially figures out how to solve a Fermi problem, a method devised by the physicist Enrico Fermi for making accurate estimates about really big things using really small amounts of data. In this case, the really big thing is the largest battleship deployed by any navy in history.

Thus the title of the movie refers to Archimedes' principle, which describes the design of a vessel in terms of its displacement.

Actors Masaki Suda (Kai) and Tasuku Emoto (Tanaka) have reasonably good chemistry in what becomes a two-man play. It is based on the manga by Norifusa Mita. (That's the thing about manga. There is nothing unusual about a manga that is primarily a paeon to accounting and calculus in particular.)

Along the way, we also get lessons about how to cook the books and get your ridiculously low-ball contract approved by the government and still turn a profit.

But despite director Takashi Yamazaki's best efforts (he helmed the wonderful Always: Sunset on Third Street and the well-received war film Eternal Zero), there's not much in the way of dramatic tension. After all, if the Yamato didn't get built, it couldn't get sunk in the first scene.

Three Yamato-class battleships were ultimately constructed, the Yamato, Musashi, and the converted carrier Shinano. None of them survived the war, with the Shinano lasting a mere ten days after being commissioned.

Kai and Tanaka present their results to the conference in the nick of time (again, the dramatic tension is unconvincingly manufactured), proving that Shimada's proposed budget is utterly at odds with reality.

Of course, it proves a Pyrrhic victory. Shimada immediately switches gears and claims the official bid was purposely underestimated (by an order of magnitude) in order to mislead Japan's enemies. But then Kai points out a fatal flaw in the Yamato's design and again appears to have won the day.

This leads to the penultimate scene, the most interesting in the movie, in which Shimada (Isao Hashizume), recognizing Kai's genius, entices him to the dark side by offering an opportunity for existential atonement.

Shimada explains that he actually agrees with the carrier faction and fully expects the Yamato to become a sitting duck in any upcoming conflict. In the wake of an inevitable defeat, the sacrificial lamb bearing the historical name of Japan will show the way for Japan to leave its military past behind.

Frankly, it's a rhetorical reach, and even Hayao Miyazaki criticized Yamazaki for likewise imbuing the characters in Eternal Zero with sentimental but contemporary sensibilities. Though to play the devil's advocate, I think there is a constructive role for historical fiction as social commentary.

This fanciful historical revisionism does accurately capture what the Yamato became in the popular imagination of postwar Japan. Rather like the Titanic, its mention in any period piece now foreshadows both a heroic end and the inevitable doom that surely awaits such enormous displays of human folly.

The Yamato itself lives on most notably in Leiji Matsumoto's enormously influential Space Battleship Yamato franchise, in which the battleship is resurrected to save the human race from alien marauders. The first anime series debuted in 1974. Takashi Yamazaki directed the 2010 live-action movie.

The opening theme song for the 1974 series by Isao Sasaki has since become an instantly recognizable classic.


The Great War of Archimedes is currently streaming on Tubi.

Related links

Kantai Kessen
The Showa drama
The Great War of Archimedes
Star Blazers (2013 anime series)
Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action movie)

Labels: history, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, streaming, tubi, ww2

The eponymous character, originally named Lieutenant Mary Sue, was created by Paula Smith in her short 1973 parody of Star Trek fan fiction. Editing a Star Trek fanzine, Smith had noticed the predominance of stories that featured

the adventures of the youngest and smartest person ever to graduate from Star Fleet Academy and ever get a commission. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm wrestling, this character can be found burrowing her way into the good graces of Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.

The Mary Sue can be simply summed up as a character who is too good to be true, having acquired more skills and talents and positive personality traits than our most generous expectations suggest is realistically possible.

Put the Mary Sue shortcut down to the rush of wish fulfillment or to impatient writers who want to fast forward to the "interesting" scenes. Or who think they are giving the audience what it wants to see. You know, because practicing to get good at something is for chumps.

Meeting all these criteria, a recent Mary Sue par excellence is Rey in The Force Awakens.

Yoda himself can't keep Luke Skywalker from getting badly beaten by Darth Vader in the second movie. Forget about crossing swords with anybody in the first. But Rey is an expert the first time she touches a lightsaber. She's as good a pilot as Han Solo the first time she sits in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon.

Now, Luke does have a Mary Sue moment at the end of A New Hope, when he pilots an X-wing starfighter to victory. No, logging a couple hundred hours in a Cessna 172 does not mean you can hop into an F-35 Lightning and out-fly the Top Guns who've been at it for years.

We give Luke a pass here thanks to the narrative trick of making the audience a participant in the trials, travails, and eventual triumphs of the protagonist. As the help wanted ads put it, having proved his mettle, we'll let the good guy skate by on "equivalent experience" in lieu of a resume.

The problem with Rey is that's she's perfect from the moment she appears on the screen. We never see her resume. We never see her burning the midnight oil. Making it all the more annoying, as I outlined in my review, is that it would not have been difficult to give her one.

The big irony of the Mary Sue and its Star Trek origins is that The Next Generation wrote one right into the cast. Pandering to the fan base, I suppose. But perhaps any trope worth being singled out and savagely critiqued is one that connects at a deep level with a significant portion of the audience.

In that light, it deserves a defense. And so now I rise not to bury Mary Sue but to praise her.

To be sure, I cannot bring myself to defend Wesley Crusher. He is exactly the kind of annoying Mary Sue that Paula Smith snarked about back in 1973. Any reasonable appeal to verisimilitude could not tolerate his presence on the bridge of the Enterprise.

But a Mary Sue story can be done right. Komichi Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform is a more recent and perfectly adorable example. But Snow White with the Red Hair really sets the standard.


Based on the manga by Sorata Akizuki, the anime ran two cours (the manga is still being serialized). As befitting the title, the story takes place in a spick and span medieval Disneyland (the setting itself qualifies as a Mary Sue).

When we first meet her, Shirayuki (白雪), whose name translates as "Snow White," is a conscientious herbalist who owns a small pharmacy. That is, until the lecherous Prince Raj, entranced by her brilliant red hair, decides to make Shirayuki his mistress. And won't take no for an answer.

Figuring that caution is the better part of valor, Shirayuki's answer is to pack up and scamper across the border, where she promptly runs into Prince Zen of Clarines and his retainers. It's "like" at first sight.

No mooning around. No one gets serenaded beneath a window. Shirayuki and Zen are preternaturally practical and competent people. Shirayuki has principles and no hesitation in standing up for them. And one of those principles is to own only what she's earned.

Although ostensibly a "European" kingdom, Clarines appears to be run by a ranked bureaucracy of mandarins appointed through an imperial examination system. Determined to stay close to Zen but refusing any handouts, Shirayuki applies for a job as an assistant court herbalist. And passes the tests.

But, again, the backstory has established that she works hard and is good at it, and shows us (doesn't just tell us) that she is deserving of the position. Zen as well works for a living. Being a prince in Clarines comes with a portfolio. Besides going on inspection tours, he has to sit at a desk and push paper around.

These jobs not only make them more interesting but also generate compelling plot material.

(Seriously, what do Disney's Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty actually do? Well, Cinderella is good at housekeeping. What does Elsa do? Anna at least has the important job of keeping Elsa from going nuts and destroying the kingdom.)

There's no need to pretend Shirayuki and Zen aren't Mary Sues. They are too good to be true. Here we have a pair of protagonists who couldn't be any nicer without getting saccharin. Even Prince Raj can't resist becoming a better person when he's around them (a character arc that pays off well in the second cour).

Yet they both possess a depth of character that makes their stories compelling. Yes, nice people can be interesting and do interesting things. I would describe the resulting genre as a "cozy" romance, the equivalent of the "cozy" mystery.

Dispensed with are the angst, the sturm und drang, the love triangles, the miscommunication, all the melodramatic conventions of the genre. Another way of describing this romance sub-genre might be "You and me (and our friends) against the world."

In fact, the only real hint of romantic tension arises among their friends, principally Mitsuhide, Kiki, and Obi, who are Zen's retainers, though Zen assigns Obi to Shirayuki. Later in the series, Mitsuhide seems to have a thing for Kiki, and Obi definitely has unrequited affection for Shirayuki.

But being loyal to Zen and having earned his trust, Obi never does anything stupid or inappropriate. Aside from Mitsuhide getting goofy in one episode in which he goes looking for Shirayuki in the pharmacy and accidentally ingests an elixir, nobody embarrasses, betrays, or compromises anybody.

Even for the day or so that Mitsuhide is under the effect of the elixir, he acts like a stereotypical gallant knight and drives everybody batty. It's a clever way of stating what the show is not about.

In the second cour, more high adventure comes their way, what with pirates and outlaws and damsels in distress and long lost family members showing up in unexpected places. But Shirayuki keeps her head on her shoulders (literally and figuratively) and the relationship never falters. Neither does her career.

In the end, nobody rides off into the sunset. There are no impending nuptials. We don't need to be told that Shirayuki and Zen will live "happily ever after." They only need to live their lives as best they can. From what we have learned about them, that will suffice. Real life is tough enough already.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, movie reviews, romance, star trek, star wars, streaming, thinking about writing

One of the biggest films of 2017 was a movie you might not have heard about. Unless you live in China. To be sure, as far as cinematic works of art go, Wolf Warrior II isn't one. Then again, neither was The Force Awakens, the only movie to earn more in a single market ($937 million in North America in 2015).

Wolf Warrior II raked in $854 million in China alone.

It certainly held my attention better than any Star Wars installment since 1980. Though, to tell the truth, my reaction to the whole bloody (literally) shoot-em-up verged on a ho-hum shrug—until the penultimate scene.

As I said, it's no cinematic work of art. But it is a decidedly important political statement delivered in the decidedly non-political package of a by-the-numbers actioner.

As with every action movie of this stripe, Jing Wu (acting and directing) plays Leng Feng, an ex-special forces guy who got himself court-martialed for Standing Up For The Little Guy and now is a Lone Wolf doing missions Nobody Else Can Do. He's Rambo with better martial arts skills, more charisma, and a less somber mien.

This really is the saving grace of the movie. Bruce Willis takes himself seriously in Tears of the Sun (2003) a movie that takes itself more seriously than it should. Sylvester Stallone takes himself seriously in Rambo 3, a movie that is impossible to take seriously, despite being about a serious subject.

Jing Wu doesn't take himself too seriously in Wolf Warrior 2, a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously either, despite having a way higher on-screen body count than Stallone's war movie about an actual war. The intricately choreographed gun fu and kung fu at times turn the non-stop violence into a bizarre ballet.

Though it does get numbing after a while. Jing Wu needed somebody on the set to wave his arms now and then and shout, "Enough already!" They must have ordered squibs by the container ship. I got to wondering who was responsible for cleaning up all the fake blood and doing the laundry.

Anyway, Wolf Warrior II borrows plot points from Tears of the Sun, in which Bruce Willis leads his SEAL team into war-torn Nigeria to evacuate a pretty doctor (Monica Bellucci) from a besieged hospital.

Having exiled himself to a fictional African country that soon plunges into a brutal civil war, Leng Feng steps up to rescue a pretty doctor (Celina Jade) from a besieged hospital. He was supposed to rescue her boss but the boss got killed first. (This happens an awful lot when you're getting rescued by Leng Feng.)

Although he starts out as a one-man army, Leng Feng gains a couple of allies along the way, including PLA veteran He Jianguo (Wu Gang). The unqualified respect shown for this character (who thankfully manages not to get killed) is a good indicator of where the movie is thematically headed.


Meanwhile, the entire (shiny and modern) Chinese Navy is camped out in the Gulf of Aden, all ready to pitch in and help as soon as they get permission from the United Nations. Here is where we depart from the Hollywood formula. No American Man of Action needs permission from the United Nations to do anything.

For good reasons, as the movie amply illustrates.

In Japanese military actioners too, the United Nations makes a convenient moral cover for whatever means are justified by the ends. And if you're Jing Wu, it probably is more politic to point at third parties obstructing the hero's journey and not your own national government (local government is a whole different matter).

Which may also explain a puzzling hole in the plot, namely what exactly is motivating "Big Daddy" (Frank Grillo) and his merry band of sociopathic mercenaries. What they're after can be easily inferred, but this isn't a genre known for subtlety. A stereotypical appearance from Big Pharma would have fit the bill here.

But vilifying Big Business isn't in the cards either (though like local government, little business catches a few sharp elbows). Instead, the bad guys are bad guys because they're, well, really really bad.

Well, in any case, the whole purpose of this foot-dragging is to raise the dramatic stakes. When permission comes, it's a regular fireworks show. Guided missile destroyers sure are neat! (And uncannily accurate.)

As Leng Feng races his convoy of survivors to safety, there's one last battlefield to cross. In a scene that could have been inspired by Eugène Delacroix, he ties a Chinese flag to his arm and perches atop the cab of a truck. The warring parties part like Moses at the Red Sea. Because Nobody Messes With China!


To be honest, I found the scene rather stirring. Unabashed, unironic patriotism is an endangered species these days, and it casts the movie in its own unique light.

A brief coda at the end sledgehammers that message home. Across the image of a Chinese passport, the text tells the citizens of China that "no matter what corner of the world you may find yourself in, your country will always have your back."

This "reminder" ties into a scene early in the movie, in which a Chinese businessman tells Leng Feng he's ditching his citizenship in the name of profit—and then backtracks when all hell breaks loose and a Chinese-flagged ship is the only available refuge. He gets to stay alive because he made the right choice.

Welcome to the century of Chinese exceptionalism.

Labels: china, movie reviews, politics, social studies

Guardians of the Galaxy is pure space operetta, though with some substance lurking beneath the razzle-dazzle veneer. And it does bother to get one bit of science right. As Kyle Hill explains on Because Science, exposed to the vacuum of space, you would simultaneously asphyxiate and freeze to death. Messy by undramatic. No exploding heads.

That's pretty much the end of the science. The laws of thermodynamics? Orbital mechanics? Fuhgeddaboudit. But we are served up some tried and true science fiction memes. And while I'm all for the-same-only-different, the conflict at the core of Guardians of the Galaxy II struck me as entirely recycled, too much the same and not at all different.

The good stuff (and there is some good stuff) gets short shrift, though it is worth sticking around for.

But first, let's venture back in time to 1965 and the second Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," a dang good piece of cinematic science fiction for the era (notable for its lack of both monsters and miniskirts).

Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood) is the same sort of supercharged human "god" as Kurt Russell's "Ego" (though Gary gets there much quicker). His rule-the-universe end game is the same too. Star Trek returned to this plot device over and again. You'd think that in the process of amassing all the knowledge of creation, these "gods" would learn a thing or two.

Or get more interesting hobbies. A subject of the current season of Lucifer is how immortals entertain themselves for eternity. And the one refreshing idea is that the main character has no desire to rule or reign over anything.

Lucifer is about a dysfunctional (very Greco-Roman) family that functions, also true of Guardians of the Galaxy II. Despite being such a weird bunch, the way they connect to each other says a lot about the human condition.

But I don't include Ego in that group, despite the familial connection. He adds nothing to the mix, and finally turns into a by-the-numbers supervillain.

In the end, Captain Kirk buries Gary Mitchell's divine ambitions under a big rock. Ego meets a similar fate. The screwed up sibling rivalry between Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) pays off better than the screwed up father-son relationship between Ego and Chris Pratt's Peter Quill.

Indeed, Nebula's relentless pursuit of Gamora is a sideshow that could have been the main attraction.

The movie begins with an act of pure MacGuffinry, Rocket stealing some "batteries" from a bunch of hilariously condescending and (literally) gilded aliens (who apparently all descended from Niles Crane) with no concept of the sunk cost fallacy.

As the leader of this race of Inspector Javerts, Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) is prepared to pursue Rocket to the ends of the galaxy over a couple of Duracells, draining the coffers of the planet in the process. (As in Star Wars, the economics of building—and destroying—these enormous space fleets is never questioned.)

It would have been nice to tie these pair of obsessive quests together into a deeper message. Instead, Ayesha is reduced to playing the relentless paperboy from Better Off Dead, hounding John Cusack with cries of "I want my two dollars!"

The even better story lurking in wings of this movie focuses on the father-son relationship between Peter and Yondu (Michael Rooker), the space pirate who "kidnapped" him and then thought better of turning him over to his real father (Ego).

But like every other laudable element of the movie, it is swamped by volume of digitized material hitting the screen in every frame.

In the end, what's good about Guardians of the Galaxy II manages to surmount the overly busy script and the tidal waves of CGI. Please, Hollywood, just because you can fill every square inch of the screen with 3D SFX doesn't mean you should. Give the audience some moments of calm, a respite now and then to let the story to sink in

But now with all the big backstories dealt with, I can only hope that the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise turns into a goofier version of Firefly. Joss Whedon should be available.

Labels: movie reviews, movies, science, science fiction

Ever since the March 2011 Tôhoku earthquake, NHK has run an ongoing series of short documentaries featuring survivors of the disaster. With surprising objectivity, they deliver first-person accounts of the moment, recounting the tragedy then and the small triumphs since.

The subjects of these vignettes are often shown standing on the concrete slab that remained of their home or business. Such scenes are becoming less common as the Japanese government pours billions into the recovery efforts, in some cases raising entire communities hundreds of feet above sea level.

Last year, the NHK documentary series 72 Hours (in which a film crew camps out in a particular place for three days straight and interviews anybody willing to appear on camera) visited Yonomori Park in Tomioka, Fukushima, renown for its wide boulevards of lush cherry trees.

Because of its proximity to Fukushima, only registered residents are allowed to visit the northeastern part of the town. The result is a kind of open-air Pompeii. Past the barricades, human civilization stopped in 2011, slowly being reclaimed by nature and repopulated by mildly radioactive boars.


Makoto Shinkai wrote Your Name with this context in mind. In the alternate reality of Your Name, a disaster visits Japan on a smaller scale and in non-linear time. A rural town in Gifu Prefecture instead of rural fishing villages north of Sendai. But the parallels are clear.

Still, Shinkai begins with a feint, a body-switching Freaky Friday physical comedy (though elevated to near transcendental levels by his gorgeous cinematography). Even there, his direction is laden with symbolism deeper and darker than the subject matter initially suggests.

The first time we see Mitsuha in school, the teacher is explaining the etymology of tasogare ("twilight"). It was originally pronounced tasokare, literally, "Who are you?" In a world without artificial lighting, identifying a person at twilight could be tricky.


A moment later, Mitsuha turns a page and that question stares back at her from her notebook, written by Taki the last time he switched bodies with her.

A word from classical poetry with Chinese roots, tasogare also suggests an otherworldly time when "gods and ghosts walk unnoticed upon the earth" (as I have Gendô explain in Serpent of Time). Only during the twilight can Mitsuha and Taki meet before their timelines realign.

Given this aura of magical realism, of course Mitsuha and her sister are Shinto shrine maidens. (As cinematic reference points, see Inuyasha, Ginkitsune, and Kamichu! just to start with.)


But the unifying metaphor that ties the film together is the red thread. Originating in ancient China, the red thread of fate "connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break."

Mitsuha ties up her hair with a red ribbon and Taki wraps a red strap around his wrist every morning. Thanks to a Heisenbergian trick of time and place, it is the same red thread.

More subtly, I believe that Shinkai is symbolically referencing his own work, namely Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011). This retelling of the myth of Izanagi and Izanami (Orpheus and Eurydice) takes a young girl to the Gate of Life and Death in the center of the Underworld.


To get to the Gate, where Asuna hopes to find her father, she descends into a giant crater. In Your Name, The town of Itomori surrounds an impact crater. When Mitsuha, her sister and grandmother visit the family shrine within a metaphorical underworld, the site is in the center of an impact crater.


In the wake of the 2011 disaster, hundreds of "tsunami stones" in the hills of coastal Japan attracted renewed attention. The stones marked the high-water mark of previous disasters. Geological data and historical records point to a "Sanriku earthquake" in the year 869 in the same Tôhoku region.

And thus in Your Name, Shinkai's "Itomori Crater" was formed 1200 years ago and the comet, like the earthquake, has returned again.

The past is prelude. Forgetting the past, Santayana warned, we are doomed to repeat it. There's no telling when Godzilla will come stomping in from the sea. Hence the curse of samsara, the "cyclicality of all life, matter, existence."

All things pass away. All things come around again. And once more pass away. The pathos of life.

Mono no a'wa're is Shinkai's specialty, referring to the Japanese aesthetic concept of the beauty that can be found in the transitory nature of things, "a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life."

And yet. Reinterpretations and extrapolations of Buddhist and Shinto metaphysics are part and parcel of Japanese fantasy. Reincarnation need not be a curse. While Children Who Chase Lost Voices is about accepting loss and moving on, Your Name circles around and rekindles hope anew.

As does Ocean Waves, giving its characters a second metaphorical chance at a life that still-could-be. Angel Beats offers them rebirth and a second life (and a similar ending). Your Name splits the difference, suggesting that we can step outside of time and not become prisoners of fate.

It is a message that Japan, particularly since 11 March 2011, very much wanted to hear.

Related posts

Makoto Shinkai
Your Name (not a review)
Hollywood made in Japan
Walk on water

Labels: anime, anime reviews, fantasy, movie reviews, nhk, religion, shinkai, tohoku earthquake, your name

In the process of ostensibly saving the world, the contemporary superhero leaves so much wreckage in his wake that the world would have been better off if he never showed up. What makes Wonder Woman such an outstanding superhero movie is that Diana does hardly any wrecking at all.

And what wrecking she does turns out not to be the solution to the problem.

Call it the fiduciary responsibility of the superhero. The infrastructure balance sheets can't keep running into the red. To be sure, the Marvel franchise has turned the whole thing into a running joke. Except there's nothing funny about the damage all this wanton destruction would inflict upon society.

This realization inevitably reduces the bubblegum in bubblegum entertainment to a sour gob of tar.

Stalin famously said (he wasn't the first) that "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Perhaps the more appropriate version of the quote is attributed to the 18th century scholar Beilby Porteus, who wrote that "One Murder made a Villain, Millions a Hero." Or a comic book supervillain.

But as Dirty Harry would say, a supervillain has got to know his limits. This business in science fiction blockbusters of blowing up planets has worn quite thin (besides being totally impossible according to even the most fanciful laws of fantasy physics).

Every action film confronts this dilemma: how many innocent bystanders the bad guys can kill to prove how deserving they are of being killed. Unlike the first and later installments, Die Hard 2 illustrated the limits by killing a plane full of bystanders to make a dramatic point. That killed the entertainment value for me.

Spider-Man: Homecoming seems to have digested this lesson, and mostly follows the George of the Jungle rule: "In this film nobody dies, but they will get big boo-boos."

Well, one henchman gets zapped with a ray gun and a few others are going to end up with some serious medical bills. Still, it was a nice change compared to a movie like Logan, where it'd be easier to count who doesn't end up dead.

Unfortunately, Spider-Man still wrecks a whole lot of property, including a national landmark. Okay, maybe he didn't do it on purpose, but his actions certainly led directly to it. Here's a lesson for all you kids: Don't carry glowing alien technology around in your backpack.

One ironic problem with super-realistic CGI is that, on a human level (as opposed to blowing up Death Stars), it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that a ferry splitting (realistically) in two or a C-17 sized transport plane disintegrating (realistically) over New York City would not have deadly consequences.

A problem anime largely overcomes by sticking to abstract versions of reality. And Godzilla largely overcomes by being silly make-believe.

In this respect, Tom Holland plays the teenage Peter Parker perhaps a bit too well. A typical teenager, he doesn't understand the repercussions of what he does on the spur of the moment, even after Tony Stark dresses him down (literally) and tells him he's causing more problems than he's solving.

Of course, Spider-Man sort of saves the day in the end (the world wasn't at any risk). But he never actually pays for anything. I don't mean with money (Tony Stark can cover that). I mean with some moral acknowledgement of personal responsibility that goes beyond getting either dopey or mopey.


This is what annoys me about "family-friendly" movies like Brave. Merida "bravely" confronts problems she caused in the first place. The same applies to Frozen, though I'm more forgiving in the latter case because Elsa is a deeply flawed character whom Anna (the real hero) has to save from herself.

The problem is, Elsa becomes not-a-basketcase far too easily. At the end, she's wrecked her kingdom and (nearly) killed her sister too. Spending even a minute or two more at the big climax getting a grip would have helped enormously with my empathy for her travails.

Strangely enough, as Adrian Toomes (the "Vulture"), the finely-cast Michael Keaton comes across as the most empathetic character in the movie. He has no actual superpowers. He does have an understandable beef with the government, which explains his turn to the black market arms trade.

Spider-Man: Homecoming would have done better channeling his desire for revenge in a righteous direction, uncovering government secrets far darker than his arms peddling. The Department of Damage Control sure seems like a seedy outfit, and maybe they're running their own con right under Tony Stark's nose.


That'd present Peter Parker with a morally complex problem that would require him to make morally complex choices that couldn't be solved (as Wonder Woman discovered) by bashing stuff.

Or at the very least, Toomes could have been fashioned into a second father figure for Peter Parker (contrasted to Tony Stark), without revealing his criminal activities to Spider-Man. That would have made the moment when they both realize they know the secret identity of the other so much more dramatic.

Labels: movie reviews, superhero, thinking about writing

I'm sure that somewhere along the line, the final cut of Logan was heavily influenced by Deadpool, which proved that a decidedly not family-friendly superhero flick could find a niche and deliver healthy box offices receipts.


And, as with Deadpool, it mostly works. Which isn't to say that being dark and gritty for its own sake (for ART!!!) is necessarily a good thing. I imagine Disney will keep things in check. I actually found the cussing less objectionable than the non-stop killing of "redshirts."

Nothing is more morally weird than the way the MPAA rates movies.

I'm not a devotee of superhero movies, so I don't have a long list to compare and contrast. But Logan is better than most. Though on an absolute scale it's still not very good, especially compared to Deadpool and Wonder Woman.

Logan is redeemed by Wolverine being so broken down he's almost "normal." Unfortunately, the plot of Logan was old when The X-Files did it to death—some evil corporation or government guy making and/or chasing "gifted" children around. The Ghost in the Shell remake has the same problem.

(Logan perhaps works best as a clever way to reboot the franchise, though I don't get why they clumsily set it in the "near future." By the time those kids grow up it will be the near future and time to start rolling sequels off the assembly line.)

In the process, Logan makes clear how more interesting the whole series might have been had Jackman's Wolverine that vulnerable all along. And had Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier been that unstable from the start (the same way Stewart's manic Picard in Star Trek: First Contact is so refreshing).


And how much Wolverine not having to share the stage with a crowd of other heroes-in-tights improves the drama. Alas, comic book franchises these days are all about the "universe" of characters occupying them, which can't help but get unbelievably stupid in very short order.

Okay, so the R-rated superhero flick is now a thing (although anime has been doing it for ages). But here's another variation on a theme for the superhero franchises to test out (at the end of their run).

As with Logan, invent some alternate universe where all the rest of the boring superheros have been killed off except for the actually interesting (and vaguely plausible) one. Then let him deal with a world where all of the supervillains have been killed off too.

Labels: ghost in the shell, manga, movie reviews, superhero, thinking about writing

To start with, the casting of Scarlett Johansson (naming her "Killian" instead of "Kusanagi") wasn't an issue for Japanese audiences. Or for me, though I would have preferred an "unknown" (to western audiences) actor like Ko Shibasaki in a much "smaller" (budget-wise) production. The Deadpool approach.

Both 47 Ronin and Ghost in the Shell (2017) were ruined by absurdly generous budgets. Some tightening of the purse strings, some discipline in the art direction, might have reined in the compulsion to plaster every square inch of the screen with CG effects that make no sense in the context provided.

Hollywood needs a new movie-making rule: if you want that Blade Runner "look," pretend you have to do it the old-fashioned way, on a sound stage using in-camera effects. Otherwise, don't do it.

Not only is it wasteful, but the obsession with "big" CG overlooks better "small" CG possibilities. As Aramaki, Beat Takeshi speaks only Japanese. What about other languages? Definitely Mandarin and Cantonese. Simulating simultaneous machine translation capability would open the door to a lot of linguistic fun.

Cinematographic excesses aside, the biggest problem with the latest incarnation of Ghost in the Shell (and with most adaptations of this ilk) is a needlessly muddled and hackneyed script. It didn't stick closely enough to the source material (same problem with 47 Ronin).

Though I'm afraid that still wouldn't have turned it into a blockbuster worth its $110 million budget.


The original film had no problem making back its six (that's six) million dollar budget. But like Blade Runner (1982), which failed to break even during its theatrical run, Ghost in the Shell (1995) has since garnered a reputation that outstripped its initial box office appeal abroad.

Director Mamoru Oshii sifted through Masamune Shirow's manga and extracted the two classic questions at the nexus of philosophy and computer science: 1) At what point does an complex machine gain sentience? 2) How much of a human brain can be replaced with inorganic components before sentience is lost?

Here was cyberpunk done right, that took itself (a bit too) seriously. But it was prescient. The Netscape browser (version 0.9) had only been out a year. The Matrix came along four years later, drastically dumbed down the subject matter, tossed in a big bad mainframe antagonist and tons of gun fu, and made beaucoup bucks.

Hollywood learned exactly the wrong lesson.

Okay, so it was asking too much to expect American audiences to sit through a hundred-minute treatise on cyborg existentialism. But at least director Rupert Sanders could have made a movie that didn't immediately decompose into a mess of cliches, like spending the first five minutes serving up a bucket of unnecessary backstory.

Just start with the classic rooftop opener!

Oh, and about that opener. What Mamoru Oshii gave us in 1995 was not the Major going all cowboy in a shootout at the O.K. Corral (Sanders forgot he wasn't remaking John Wick), but the carefully executed assassination of a foreign diplomat engaged in industrial espionage.


I can well imagine that the Chinese financiers of the 2017 remake weren't too keen on a story that revolved around government-sponsored hacking of foreign entities and internecine battles between competing ministries. Too relevant! Just make the bad guy a Japanese corporation. Yeah, that'll do it.

So what we got instead was Robocop. Seriously. It's Robocop meets a self-involved Bourne in Hong Kong. The use-by date on the "big evil corporation run by Dr. Evil" trope expired a couple of decades ago. Have none of these malevolent CEOs heard of fiduciary duty? Somebody fire them before they wreck another company.

(Also see Kate's comments about the uninspired practice of hiding critical information from the protagonist and the audience in order to maintain suspense.)

Major Kusanagi's past isn't an issue. Her hardware isn't unique. Ghost-less androids are commonplace (Aramaki's assistants, for example). The existential angst doesn't kick in until the cat and mouse game with the "Puppet Master" is well underway, when the possibility arises that sentience can exist in an AI without a ghost.

And that cat and mouse game is smart (though a bit talky at the halfway point). The story hangs together well after twenty years, despite the enormous technological changes. The narrative isn't pushed forward by the characters crashing through doors and shooting everything in sight and taking unnecessary risks.

Major Kusanagi is a tough, competent, by-the-book team leader. She only steps out of line at the very end, when her inner existential crisis threatens her actual existence. And once she steps out of line, all is not forgiven and she's not coming back.

It's no surprise that the best scenes in the remake are exact copies of the original. Ghost in the Shell didn't need to be redone. It's just fine as the penultimate film in the franchise. Major Kusanagi doesn't even make a corporeal appearance in Innocence, the sequel to Ghost in the Shell.

Rather, the prequels provide more suitable material as entry points for American audiences. In particular, I consider the Stand-Alone Complex television series to be better than the manga or the latter two movies (though they are different enough to defy direct comparisons).

Along with the season-long arcs, there's plenty of material in the standalone episodes, plus the feature-length Solid State Society, to fuel a franchise of remakes. Forget about evil mainframes taking over the world. This isn't Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov, but a bunch of Deep Blues and Garry Kasparovs all playing each other.

Person of Interest was headed in the right direction before it fell into the evil mainframe trap and contended that "there can be only one" (credit for that goes to Highlander). No, in the world of Stand-Alone Complex there can be millions, if not one for every person on the planet.

Sure, a supercomputer can beat a grand master at chess or go. But a pretty good computer teaming up with a pretty good human player is better than both. This is the fundamental concept The Matrix movies failed to grasp. Self-aware machines will need us as much as we need them. (An on-off switch is a powerful thing.)


Plus, the Tachikoma robots—some the most original characters in all of science fiction—would make for a marketing tie-in bonanza.

All the necessary ingredients are there. The next time Hollywood gets a hankering to serve up the latest cool Asian fusion cuisine, well, first hire a chef who bothered to read the cookbook.

Related posts

Innocence
Reframing the mainframe plot
The Medicator (they'll be back!)
What is the narrative need for secrets?

Labels: anime, anime reviews, computers, mainframe, manga, movie reviews, science fiction, shirow, tech history, technology

Speaking as I was last week of art about artists being artists, Miss Hokusai is a fine addition to the genre (click image to enlarge).


Based on the manga by the late Hinako Sugiura, the film is episodic in nature, with no real plot or even much in the way of character development. Told from the perspective of O-Ei, Hokusai's elder daughter and an accomplished painter in her own right, it is series of vignettes about Hokusai, his two daughters, and his apprentice, living and working in Edo (Tokyo) during the first half of the 19th century.

If there is a theme to the movie, it concerns the limits of technical ability alone to produce great art (here also meaning that people will pay to see it). The much fabled eccentricity of the creative type thus reflects the ongoing struggle to resolve that conflict ("good artists copy; great artists steal").

But the setting is the real story. These slices-of-life take place in the surreal Edo of the popular period drama, untroubled by politics or the impending collapse of the Tokugawa regime (mentioned in an afterword). As with the imaginations of the characters, it is infused with magical realism, the threads of folk tales and religious figures winding through the fabric of the scenes, sketches, and anecdotes.

The title of the movie in Japanese is Sarusuberi (百日紅) or "crepe myrtle." The flower symbolizes the subtle tragic arc that bridges the narrative, though the matter-of-fact tone of the presentation never threatens to overwhelm us with emotion. Rather, the movie invites us to watch and observe and examine it like a painting. Whatever sentiment you wish to bring to the subject is entirely up to you.

Miss Hokusai is like a slow stroll through a stately old museum (whose director is doing his best to make it more "accessible"). Nobody is going to clobber you over the head with ART, but if you wish to look, it's hanging on the walls all around you to see.


The soundtrack on the GKids DVD defaults to a pretty good English dub version.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, art, gkids, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan

Star Wars isn't "science fiction." It's medieval fantasy with suits of armor made from extruded ballistic plastic (painted white to make them easier targets, I suppose). Light sabers instead of swords and lasers instead of longbows. (Except the laser bolts move slower than actual arrows.)


Not that there's anything wrong with that. Repurposing old genres makes the topsoil of popular entertainment all the richer. And like McDonald's french fries, when it comes to genre entertainment, the decent low-brow stuff beats the tony high-brow stuff nine times out of ten.

The first Star Wars movie (1977) defined this revised genre. With Irvin Kershner at the helm, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) extended it (it even included a dragon in a cave). Then things went downhill and never recovered. Not even after George Lucas bowed out and laughed all the way to the bank

Granted, at that stage there was no place to go but up. But so determined was Disney to rekindle some of that now "classic" fairy tale goodness (its specialty, after all), that they made the same movie all over again, only with better CGI and a worse script.

It'd be one thing if they'd made exactly the same move. But everybody was so familiar with the archetypes that they forgot to fill in the rest. In between each predictable turn of plot, there's supposed to be, you know, a story. And the accompanying material that fashions ongoing character development.

As a result, The Force Awakens ends up a compilation of deus ex machina moments, the characters and their reasons for being there springing into existence out of empty space like subatomic particles.

The original Star Wars has a few of these problems too, though they're not nearly as glaring. For example, Luke demonstrating the skills of an experienced ball turret gunner straight off the literal farm.

In fact, everybody in the Star Wars universe is surprisingly adept at both operating (and sabotaging) complex military hardware they've never seen before. Galaxies long ago and far away must have had the same high school curriculum as Girls und Panzer (in which armored combat is an extracurricular activity).

And the last act of Star Wars is plain silly, suggesting that a couple hundred hours flying VFR in a Piper Cub qualifies a pilot to jump into an F-22 and fly circles around an MIG-29. (See also: Independent Day, but at least the Randy Quaid and Bill Pullman characters had flown military jets before.)

Otherwise, Luke is realistically shown to be the novice that he is, whose best option in a tight situation (again, until the heroic last act) is to run away or hire some muscle. Even after extensive one-on-one training, he is incapable of besting Darth Vader with a light saber in The Empire Strikes Back.

By contrast, the time to learn any activity, any skill, any knowledge-dependent process in The Force Awakens—from "I've never seen this thing before" to "I can use it as well as a professional"—is about sixty seconds.

All the more exasperating is that most of these glaring plot holes could have been easily fixed.

1. Finn goes AWOL after ten minutes of doing whatever he was programmed/trained to do since forever.

Well, they certainly don't make stormtroopers like they used to. For such a key character, a bit more substance behind the decision would go a long way to informing us about his character and personality.

Easy fix: Make Finn part of Kylo Ren's detail. Finn is sick and tired of babysitting this whiny kid with anger management issues, has been nicked one too many times during his temper tantrums. Then witnessing Ren's depravity in person punches his ticket to get out of there before he ends up as cannon fodder.

This would also explain why a narcissistic sociopath like Ren would notice who Finn was in the first place, let alone bother to call him a "traitor." Because he knew Finn personally.

2. I read the manual and now I can fly a starship better than an experienced pilot.

"Howling Mad" Murdock on the A-Team could fly anything because he learned how to fly everything. But since the original Star Wars, "The Force" somehow became shorthand for "Hard work, study, and practice is for suckers."

Easy fix: Make Ridley a mechanic when we first meet her. She works for the pawnshop proprietor who owns the ticket on the Millennium Falcon. She's trying to fix it because Han disabled it before hawking it and it won't go FTL, making it worthless. In the meantime, Ridley uses it to cart junk around.

One day she spots Finn and BB-8 out in the desert and gives them a ride. When they get back, Han Solo and Chewbacca have shown up to claim their craft. In the middle of arguing about who owns what and who owes whom, the stormtroopers charge in and all hell breaks loose.

3. I didn't even read the manual but just holding a light saber means I can beat a guy with way more experience than me.

It's easy to establish that both Finn and Ridley can handle themselves in a fight. But that's not enough. Not after the first three Star Wars movies established the deadly difficulty of light saber fighting.

Easy fix: This was sorta hinted at, but it should be pointed out (by Finn, say) that, sans the Force, Ren can't fight his way out of a brown paper bag. Lazy jerk that he is, he never had to. But now he has to. The question is whether actually applying himself will make him a better man too. Ah, a character arc!

On the other hand, some things are not fixable.

The Death Star was a cool enough concept that, first time out, I could quell the eye rolling. But this predilection to "Do the exactly same thing only bigger" movie after movie is just inane.

And here I thought that Space 1999 boasted the stupidest SF premise of all time. Supposing that the Queen in Through the Looking-Glass really could believe six impossible things before breakfast, she couldn't believe this:

Moonbase Alpha is a scientific research colony and watchdog over silos of atomic waste from Earth stored on the Moon's far side. On September 13, 1999, magnetic energy builds to cause an explosive chain-reaction of the waste, blasting the Moon out of Earth orbit and off the plane of the ecliptic, out of the Solar System.

The first Death Star (so sad there's more than one) was the spherical version of the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek. And the Doomsday Machine was huge but not-unreasonable sized. But a whole freaking planet on the run? I'd need a space elevator for my suspension of disbelief to go that high.

Also, these super-advanced societies can travel faster than light but can't make a decent circuit breaker. Or make a non-combustible space ship. (Also see Independence Day, but I do give Independence Day credit for setting off a nuke inside the mothership, which would do pretty much as depicted.)

This single-point-of-failure problem extends to the Republic, which hasn't figured out distributed networking either. They need to take lessons from Monty Python on "Not Being Seen."

Speaking of Monty Python, watching Star Wars gets me into a "What have the Romans ever done for us?" frame of mind. The entire argument against the regime du jour is that they're mean. And not very bright, taking a sledgehammer approach (repeatedly) to solving small problems.

These are the kind of people who, lacking a flyswatter, grab a hammer. Now all the windows are broken and the walls are full of holes. With Disney committed to pumping out rebooted Star Wars sequels on a regular basis, turning every conflict into an galactic existential threat will get old fast.

It's already old.

Firefly employed a not-dissimilar premise—big bad bureaucracy against the little guy—with an important difference: our motley crew has a job to do, and overthrowing the Alliance tomorrow isn't anywhere near the top of the list.

Posit instead that the Empire or First Order or whatever rules with a heavy hand but is basically competent. The Republic doesn't want to (and can't) overthrow the whole shebang. It's the Republic of Texas: it'd rather not be part of Mexico anymore (it helped that Santa Anna was not a nice guy or a smart general).

Even if the center could not hold, the result would likely resemble the Warring States period in Japan, which is still producing great story material four centuries later.

The sovereign power wielded by the warlords during the era compares to that of the Italian city-states, with conflicts taking place mostly at the peripheries of their domains, leaving commerce and agriculture largely undisturbed. This, in turn, led to significant economic, cultural and technological growth.

But the lack of central control also produced a veritable queue of claimants to the throne, and great business opportunities for the pirates and mercenaries in (or out of) their employ. The kind of universe in which Han Solo and crew would feel right at home.

Related posts

Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace
McKee meets the "Menace"

Labels: history, japan, movie reviews, science, science fiction, star wars, technology

"Hard" science fiction—science fiction that attempts to adhere to actual science—is hard. When making up stuff, the closer to reality, the higher the demands of verisimilitude. Almost nothing in a space opera like Star Wars is even scientifically plausible. Nobody cares because we accept from the start that it's closer in genre to a Disney fairy tale.

Hollywood's been on a hard science fiction binge of late, to varying degrees of success. The physics in Interstellar is more wishful thinking than science. Gravity turns the laws of orbital mechanics upside down. But The Martian, which maroons Matt Damon on Mars, is basically Apollo 13 and Cast Away (minus most of the angst) set a few years in the future.

In The Martian, man fights nature largely within the limits of current technology and without any bad guys out to purposely harm him. Oh, for a few minutes, they try to make Jeff Daniels into a villain to gin up some conflict. But two scenes later he goes back to playing a perfectly plausible NASA administrator.

The simple yet daunting goal of Damon's Astronaut Mark Watney is to survive until a rescue mission can return to rescue him. The problem is that with current technology, getting from the Earth to Mars takes six months at best. So he's got a lot of problem solving to do. A major motion picture that is about nothing but problem solving is a breath of fresh air.

Granted, in the space of two hours, the screenplay is going to have to gloss over a few aspects of the real world to keep the story moving. This is big budget motion picture, not a NOVA documentary.

Like, I'm willing to give the radiation thing a pass, because no manned mission is going to Mars in the first place without solving that vexing problem. They don't solve it in the movie either, they simply ignore it, the same way they mostly ignore the .38 Gs of gravity on Mars.

And unlike Tom Hanks shedding a real fifty pounds for Cast Away, Matt Damon didn't starve himself for the role; a scene toward the end showing us his gaunt frame (face hidden) is almost certainly a body double. He's wearing a space suit most of the time anyway.

Tacking down the Pathfinder lander, plugging it in and powering it on (interplanetary cable standardization at last!) a quarter century after it landed is an eye-roller. Still, I could roll with it just because it's such a cute idea.

And I loved the bit about digging up the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) and using it as a plutonium-powered handwarmer (accompanied by Damon's wry "Don't try this at home!" narration).

No, what first suspended my suspension of disbelief was the implication (again, in order to create more obstacles to cleverly overcome) that the astronauts had only a single point of direct communication with Earth. In fact, the Mars landers use satellite uplinks to talk to the orbiters, which relay the signals to Earth ground stations.

Likewise, it is beyond belief that an ATV the size of a small truck would be limited to line-of-sight communication. All of the later Apollo missions left working equipment and experiments on the Moon. The vehicle and the habitat would be studded with transponders and satellite dishes humming along long after the humans left.

Equally improbable is that the inner hatch door of a habitat in a near-airless environment wouldn't be sealable and built into the superstructure. To quote NASA, the purpose of such a hatch is to "isolate the airlock from the crew cabin." I bet Astronaut Mark Watney sure wishes he had one of those. They were standard equipment on the Space Shuttle, after all.

The first failure of the NASA resupply rocket was awfully predicable (more conflict creation). While I did appreciate bringing in the Chinese (China should be part of the ISS), the movie ignores that Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency have comparable launch capabilities, not to mention ULA, Orbital ATK, and SpaceX.

Given the chance to save the day, Elon Musk would be all over this.

And yet I give it a solid A for effort. The Martian isn't one of those movies where the plot holes let all the air out of the suspense. It is a rousing Rubik's Cube of an adventure movie with a bunch of cheating aces tucked up its sleeve. Like the old Star Trek, it's often more interesting for its obvious flaws than for its dramatic successes.

Labels: movie reviews, science, science fiction, space, star wars, technology

A common criticism of the recent spat of Jobs biopics is that he is unfairly depicted as a nasty piece of work. Pirates of Silicon Valley is no exception. I can understand why: screenwriters and actors alike are drawn to the operatic drama of human conflict like rats to cheese.


But it gets awfully samey (sorry, Tolstoy). And at only 100 minutes long, watching Steve Jobs rant and rave (and Bill Gates drive a bulldozer) draws time and attention away from more interesting subjects.

I would have preferred less melodrama and more documentary. Though for that, there's always Robert Cringely's definitive account, Triumph of the Nerds. And more recently, Silicon Valley (the hardware side) and Something Ventured (the finance side).

In cinematic terms, Pirates of Silicon Valley looks like the made-for-TV movie it is. Even so, Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs, Joey Slotnick as Steve Wozniak, John DiMaggio as Steve Ballmer, and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates handle the material quite well.

When playing off each other, Wyle and Hall do such a good job illustrating their wildly contrasting personalities that I wish they'd invented more scenes for them to be in together, out of whole cloth if necessary. Because the abstract moments in this movie are the best ones.

The narrative is occasionally interrupted by "interviews" with the main characters (the actors). In one scene, John DiMaggio as Steve Ballmer steps literally through the fourth wall to comment on the historical moment in which IBM allowed Microsoft to license DOS to anybody.

It was that agreement that would eventually hound IBM out of the PC business it created, not Apple.

DOS licensing begat Compaq and Dell and a thousand other makers of "beige box" IBM PC clones, which begat the Windows/Intel hardware standard, which was adopted by Linux and, ironies of ironies, even Apple. Which is why an iMac can dual-boot Windows.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn't follow the tone set by that scene. This docudrama about people thinking outside the box is pretty buttoned down. It needed more goofy moments illustrating creativity at play, rather than telling us how brilliantly eccentric everybody was.

Related posts

The accidental standard
The blind spot
Back to the digital future
Something Ventured

Labels: movie reviews, tech history, technology, television, television reviews

Impressive special effects on a small budget.

Worrying about existential threats from "strong A.I." is the latest fad among bored intellectuals, with Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk (among others) voicing "concerns" about a future robot uprising. Or something (it's not entirely clear, just that they're "concerned").

But before going to DEFCON 1 on the "A.I. panic of 2015," Erik Sofge would first like to see "any indication that artificial superintelligence is a tangible threat." So he posed the question to Yoshua Bengio, head of the Machine Learning Laboratory at the University of Montreal. Bengio doesn't see much of a threat either.

Most people do not realize how primitive the systems we build are, and unfortunately many journalists (and some scientists) propagate a fear of A.I. which is completely out of proportion with reality. We would be baffled if we could build machines that would have the intelligence of a mouse in the near future, but we are far even from that.

Alex Garland doesn't share these "concerns" either. If anything, the director and writer of Ex Machina seems to anticipate the day when every nerd will have a fully functioning sex robot in his closet. Not exactly a terrifying prospect (except for Japanese demographers).

So Ex Machina isn't another silly Terminator clone. But it is a very silly movie, and its silliness is largely a product of taking itself so danged seriously. And yet not seriously enough.

The role of science in science fiction is relative to the technical aspirations of the story. Other than stipulating the existence of spaceships, there doesn't need to be a whole lot of actual science in space opera. Even the "mainstream" of the genre demands little more than a nod to the current state of the art.

But make the science the primary focus--enter the realm of "hard" science fiction--and you have to color within the lines. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is no longer a suggestion, and the standard shifts from "vaguely not impossible" to one brilliant mind away from realization.

In Ex Machina, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) is supposedly that brilliant mind. The CEO of search engine giant Bluebook (i.e., Google), he's the amalgamation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison (and inexplicably, Sylvester Stallone).

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), one of his star programmers, has "won" a "weekend with the boss" contest. When he ends up at Nathan's estate in the wilds of Alaska, it seems he's really there to conduct a Turing test on the comely Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan's latest android.

A machine that passes a Turning test can carry on an unconstrained dialogue without its human interrogator realizing it's a machine. Nathan recruits Caleb because he needs an "objective" evaluator to make the assessment, but misleads Caleb at first about what truly is being assessed.

Which isn't all that difficult, as Caleb's "test" consists of vacuous conversations that could have been scripted by a machine. More likely, the writer simply isn't as smart as his characters. Caleb comes across as a dweeb on his first date; Nathan is a boorish football jock who likes to hit stuff.

Least convincing casting ever.

What if the whole thing's a Mechanical Turk? If the hardware's that good, it'd be easy to pull off. Where's a Voight-Kampff machine when you need one? Hmm, might this android be as nuts as the guy who built her? Once my suspension of disbelief began to fray, there was nothing to stop it from unraveling all the way.

Now, to start with, Ava is mechanically beyond anything anybody's invented, and her "brain" is more than a bit of a leap. Still, given the proper context, that leap could be made. No surprise that the leap not easily made depends on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, pop sci-fi's biggest stumbling block.

Caleb's first question to Nathan wouldn't have anything to do with her A.I. Rather, what kind of servos does she use? What kind of batteries does she have?

Human nature is such that we tend to judge the internal consistency of a plot, especially in fantasy and science fiction, not so differently than a criminal trial: the prosecution can't cross-examine on excluded evidence unless the defense brings it up on direct. Unmentioned, we happily exclude great swaths of the real world.

Ghost in the Shell begins by positing that non-sentient androids are already ubiquitous. So that takes the subjects of mobility and functional capability off the table.

Fine. Except that Garland introduces the subject into the script. Now it's fair game. The first mention is quite smart, when Ava reveals to Nathan that she gets her power through inductive charging. That's real technology.

But the only reason inductive charging is brought up is because Ava knows she can kill the main power feeds by triggering a "power surge." This idiotic technobabble is the same dumb plot device that has shown up in caper flicks for decades: kill the power and the security systems fail. (Die Hard did it in 1988, okay? Stop it.)

And it's paired with another one just as old and creaky: genius coder reprograms a security system (at the source code level) that he's never seen before. And super-paranoid Nathan doesn't encrypt or do check-sums on any of his super-duper top-secret software.

Oh, and inductive charging would severely limit Ava's range. Without a supply of the most advanced battery technology imaginable, Ava is permanently confined to the house. So why confine Ava to her room as well? We're at least a hundred miles from civilization. There's nowhere else for her to go.

Seriously. The androids want to be free? Set them free. That'd be a million times more interesting than this script. Tossing Caleb into a Survivorman episode with Ava would be the ultimate test of intelligence. It'd be truly hilarious if they both got all bitchy and whiny. Now that'd be human.

In any case, the equivalent of an electronic dog collar or an OnStar system would take care of things quite efficiently. Your super-intelligent robot can't have less sophisticated electronics than cars have had for years. ("Kyoko" aside, the rest of Nathan's androids are turned off, so they can be turned off.)

Hmm, so at what point did Nathan regret not implementing Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?

Both Caleb and Nathan use the same metaphor: the pretty assistant who distracts the audience while the magician palms the card. Garland deploys a harem of naked girls to distract the audience from a pretty standard femme fatale plot, that relies on the smart people catching a bad case of the stupids.

I'm reminded of Freeze Me, another exploitation thriller that got to thinking it was an art house movie and subsequently drained all the smartness out of it. Garland likewise wants us to root for a sociopath (surrounded by dunces) with an hour of life expectancy. I cared about none of them.

There are better versions of this story. Ghost in the Shell is about a self-realized A.I. that frees itself from the constraints of its makers. As the shell isn't what makes Ava "human," Caleb could simply smuggle out the A.I. in a drive array. The season five climax of Person of Interest did exactly that.

But more on theme is Let the Right One In (the 2008 Swedish version directed by Tomas Alfredson).

Eli is a vampire--permanently a young teenager--who has to periodically recruit a new Renfield to stay alive. The vampire element grounds the plot in that fundamental thermodynamic equation: the constant flow of energy in and out. She's dependent and yet must maintain the upper hand, which keeps her constantly on her toes.

This tension is what's utterly missing from Ex Machina.

Borrowing from Let the Right One In, I see Ava striding up to the helicopter, Caleb trudging behind her with a big rucksack full of battery packs slung over his shoulder. That balancing act between the machine and the human, that necessary mutual addiction, is a much better model of the real world.

Related posts

Freeze Me
Person of Interest
Robot on the Road
Appleseed: Ex Machina
They don't act that way in real life

Labels: anime, computers, movie reviews, movies, robots, science, science fiction, technology