Friday, March 30, 2018
NaPoWriMo is approaching
Just creating a tag to stick (hopefully) daily poems on for NaPoWriMo. I can do this. Yup. Done it before.
Once.
Well, I did literally just write sixteen poems in two hours (wrote the instructions for 16 kinds of short forms in verse), but that was at work, so it doesn't really count.
I haven't made a real habit of poetry for about four years. Let's see how it goes...
Heh, I'm starting a little early. Just wrote a virelai to fill out a chapbook, and I kind of love it.
Once.
Well, I did literally just write sixteen poems in two hours (wrote the instructions for 16 kinds of short forms in verse), but that was at work, so it doesn't really count.
I haven't made a real habit of poetry for about four years. Let's see how it goes...
Heh, I'm starting a little early. Just wrote a virelai to fill out a chapbook, and I kind of love it.
Ooh, Shiny!
What was I thinking, just moments ago?
I lost the thread as it sped to and fro!
How was I trav'ling and where would I go?
And people around me are staring...
Other folks keep to their topics, I know
They can stay steady and manage the flow
But me? I'm constantly erring!
I grab shiny things like a raven or crow
No, that's a magpie, they're all corvids, though...
Oh, blast, now I'm off again, raring!
Thoughts won't stay in order, above or below
I hope I can cover it, so it won't show
But inside, I'm kind of despairing.
What was I thinking, just moments ago?
I lost the thread as it sped to and fro!
How was I trav'ling and where would I go?
And people around me are staring!
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Wonder Woman review
I guess in the great war between DC and Marvel, I come down pretty hard on the Marvel side... not that I read the comics, we're talking strictly cinematic universes here. I find that I've never had the patience to try and catch up on fifty years of comic history for... well, anything. That said, I have nothing special against DC properties. I liked Superman and Wonder Woman in the 70s, and I like them still. I'm vaguely fond of Batman.
So, while I wasn't exactly waiting on the edge of my seat for the Wonder Woman movie, I certainly meant to go see it, and I finally did. Since I was late in the game for blockbuster, I doubt I really need a spoiler warning -- everyone who meant to see it probably saw it before me -- but for form's sake, I review with spoilers all of which are unmarked.
It was... pretty good. I'm not sure about all the hype about how utterly amazing I'm supposed to find it, but yeah. Good flick. I liked the people (which isn't always a given for me in recent DC films), and I liked the overaching theme that the way you behave toward people isn't about what they deserve, but about what you believe.
And yes, it's cool to have a female-led major summer blockbuster. Dear Marvel, aren't you kicking yourself now about not bothering with a Black Widow movie just because you thought female superheroes wouldn't bring in the box office? Want a plot? She has to infiltrate Hydra and retrieve a Macguffin, forcing her to don several undercover identities along the way. Or she is using her common tactic of pretending to be captured when outside events trap her among the enemy, and she has to escape and rescue whoever she was sent for. Or she discovers that the red room is still active, and goes in to rescue girls who have been so brainwashed that most of them don't even think they need rescuing. Or... you know, pretty much any well-written story would work. If you can come up with stuff for Tony to do, you can come up with stuff for Nat to do. It is not an alien concept.
It's true that female-led superhero movies in the past have flopped -- Catwoman, Supergirl, Elektra. That wasn't because they were female-led. That was because they were awful movies. Get a good movie with a female action lead, and people come to it like any other awesome popcorn flick.
Which brings us neatly back to Wonder Woman.
It's much better than it has any right to be, following, as it does, one of the worst superhero movies I've seen, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. I hadn't bothered to watch it before, and only watched it now to find out how they set up WW, and, spoiler, it's as bad as the reviews say. Just a big, dark gray, muddled mess. But Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was the best thing in it, and by some miracle, they gave her over to people who could capitalize on that instead of killing it.
So, elements:
Plot
Diana, princess of the Amazons, spends her childhood on the hidden island of Themyscira, home of the Amazons. After a bloody battle Zeus hid it from sight with his last breath. Diana is the only child. She has been raised to believe that it's the Amazons job to defeat Ares eventually and stop human wars. When WWI pilot Steve Trevor crashes through the barrier, chased by German troops (defeated by the Amazons because they're just that good), she learns about the Great War and decides that Ares is abroad in the world. Taking the sword she believes to be the god-killer and the magic lasso that compels people to tell the truth (along with her iconic gauntlet bracelets, of course), she follows Steve back out into the world of the 1910s. They stop first in London, where she gets her first taste of modernity ("It's hideous!"), and then they go to the Belgian front, where she suits up as a superhero and goes through a brilliantly shot bit of trench warfare to save a village. She believes the German commander is Ares and determines to find him and go mano-a-mano, especially after he destroys a village with a poison gas attack -- the very village that she, backed up by Steve and the Howling Commandos -- er, I mean, Steve and his band of misfits -- had saved. She kills him, but he isn't Ares, and it makes no difference. The real Ares shows up, and gosh, it turns out that killing him won't really work either, since humans pretty much make war without a lot of help from divine or demonic forces. She's tempted to simply give up, but Steve makes a huge sacrifice to save a lot of lives, and she understands that Ares' view is too simplistic. Yes, humans do stupid and cruel and violent things, but they also do great and brave things. So she continues fighting (though, judging by BvS, she gets pretty jaded afterward.)
Again, not bad. There is a lot of seriously mangled Greek mythology, which bugs my Grecophile self, but I'm guessing they're stuck with it from the comic source material. Just as a taste, Ares has killed all of the other gods. Yes, in this verse, the Greek gods had Ragnarok. Also, more irritatingly, THE AMAZONS WORSHIPPED ARES, mythically speaking. They were daughters of war, not pacifists sworn to fight their own patron god. And Zeus wasn't exactly a pacifist, and he didn't create humans (that was Prometheus) and Ares... sigh. Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of classical mythology, just kind of... remember that it's most likely not the movie's fault, and what they came up with makes a kind of internal sense. Ah, well. Someday, a movie will do justice to Greek mythology, but that movie is not this movie, and that's okay. They're constrained by a lot of comic canon.
Character
Much improved for DC. Diana is good protagonist. She goes through a very believable innocence-to-experience arc, and she works even the sillier elements of the WW mythos -- the Lasso of Truth, for instance -- work in context.
Steve Trevor is good as the love interest. Like most superhero love interests, he's strictly support, but he does it well. He and his band of brothers follow WW through the trenches. He teaches her to dance. She rescues him several times. But he's a believable enough sort of guy, and Chris Pine does well with him.
Ares is... well, let me put it this way. If you can't figure out exactly who Ares is really pretending to be within one scene, you haven't been watching a lot of hero movies. The telegraphing was breathtakingly clumsy, one of the few plot missteps, unless it was actually almost brilliant: It was so obvious that I thought for at least part of the movie that it might be a red herring, and that they were playing all of the cliches to try and misdirect my attention from someone else. But... they weren't. Still, David Thewlis seems to be having a good time with it.
Setting
The first setting is Themyscira, and it's a lovely Mediterranean island with glowing water and an ancient Greek society. For that part of the movie, they actually used saturated color, almost. After that, we're in Great War Europe, which is understandably bleak, though not as understandably mostly gray.
I like the historical setting. We don't have a lot set in WWI, and it's a striking choice because of it. I wish there were more period pieces, though most of Diana's frame story is in the present, so we most likely won't get any more.
Style
Have I mentioned how much I hate the "gritty" look, and how fervently I wish the fad to end? Because I hate the gritty look and fervently wish for the day this fad will leave.
That said, while it's certainly of an aesthetic piece, it is brightened up somewhat, and Themyscira uses almost lifelike color. Maybe they're slowing digging their way out of they gray, but feel they can't do it too suddenly?
Theme
"It's not about what they deserve. It's about what you believe."
The theme is actually relatively complex. Wonder Woman learns that mankind is troubled and deeply flawed, and she can't save the world with a single grand gesture like killing Ares. And people may not deserve the help she gives. But it's important to be a good person anyway, important to be a hero, because the more people choose to be heroes, the more likely we are to defeat our flaws. Therefore, believe in love and goodness and heroism (all names for the same thing in this 'verse), and act accordingly toward your fellow creatures, and in that way, you contribute to saving the world. It's a pretty healthy message.
I guess there's some complaint that Ares' presence as a real figure undermines this somehow, but I don't think so. He whispers to people about how to do more efficiently what they want to do anyway, but he doesn't cause them to want to do it. My own interpretation is that the nature of the humans is what created the god of war in the first place, and they therefore sustain him, rather than vice versa.
That's about it. I enjoyed the movie. It has a lot of details that I liked and didn't mention because they're just... details. But yes -- I may even make an effort to see Justice League in a more timely fashion, since this movie shows that DC can make movies. (And also because Joss Whedon touched it up, of course.)
So, while I wasn't exactly waiting on the edge of my seat for the Wonder Woman movie, I certainly meant to go see it, and I finally did. Since I was late in the game for blockbuster, I doubt I really need a spoiler warning -- everyone who meant to see it probably saw it before me -- but for form's sake, I review with spoilers all of which are unmarked.
It was... pretty good. I'm not sure about all the hype about how utterly amazing I'm supposed to find it, but yeah. Good flick. I liked the people (which isn't always a given for me in recent DC films), and I liked the overaching theme that the way you behave toward people isn't about what they deserve, but about what you believe.
And yes, it's cool to have a female-led major summer blockbuster. Dear Marvel, aren't you kicking yourself now about not bothering with a Black Widow movie just because you thought female superheroes wouldn't bring in the box office? Want a plot? She has to infiltrate Hydra and retrieve a Macguffin, forcing her to don several undercover identities along the way. Or she is using her common tactic of pretending to be captured when outside events trap her among the enemy, and she has to escape and rescue whoever she was sent for. Or she discovers that the red room is still active, and goes in to rescue girls who have been so brainwashed that most of them don't even think they need rescuing. Or... you know, pretty much any well-written story would work. If you can come up with stuff for Tony to do, you can come up with stuff for Nat to do. It is not an alien concept.
It's true that female-led superhero movies in the past have flopped -- Catwoman, Supergirl, Elektra. That wasn't because they were female-led. That was because they were awful movies. Get a good movie with a female action lead, and people come to it like any other awesome popcorn flick.
Which brings us neatly back to Wonder Woman.
It's much better than it has any right to be, following, as it does, one of the worst superhero movies I've seen, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. I hadn't bothered to watch it before, and only watched it now to find out how they set up WW, and, spoiler, it's as bad as the reviews say. Just a big, dark gray, muddled mess. But Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was the best thing in it, and by some miracle, they gave her over to people who could capitalize on that instead of killing it.
So, elements:
Plot
Diana, princess of the Amazons, spends her childhood on the hidden island of Themyscira, home of the Amazons. After a bloody battle Zeus hid it from sight with his last breath. Diana is the only child. She has been raised to believe that it's the Amazons job to defeat Ares eventually and stop human wars. When WWI pilot Steve Trevor crashes through the barrier, chased by German troops (defeated by the Amazons because they're just that good), she learns about the Great War and decides that Ares is abroad in the world. Taking the sword she believes to be the god-killer and the magic lasso that compels people to tell the truth (along with her iconic gauntlet bracelets, of course), she follows Steve back out into the world of the 1910s. They stop first in London, where she gets her first taste of modernity ("It's hideous!"), and then they go to the Belgian front, where she suits up as a superhero and goes through a brilliantly shot bit of trench warfare to save a village. She believes the German commander is Ares and determines to find him and go mano-a-mano, especially after he destroys a village with a poison gas attack -- the very village that she, backed up by Steve and the Howling Commandos -- er, I mean, Steve and his band of misfits -- had saved. She kills him, but he isn't Ares, and it makes no difference. The real Ares shows up, and gosh, it turns out that killing him won't really work either, since humans pretty much make war without a lot of help from divine or demonic forces. She's tempted to simply give up, but Steve makes a huge sacrifice to save a lot of lives, and she understands that Ares' view is too simplistic. Yes, humans do stupid and cruel and violent things, but they also do great and brave things. So she continues fighting (though, judging by BvS, she gets pretty jaded afterward.)
Again, not bad. There is a lot of seriously mangled Greek mythology, which bugs my Grecophile self, but I'm guessing they're stuck with it from the comic source material. Just as a taste, Ares has killed all of the other gods. Yes, in this verse, the Greek gods had Ragnarok. Also, more irritatingly, THE AMAZONS WORSHIPPED ARES, mythically speaking. They were daughters of war, not pacifists sworn to fight their own patron god. And Zeus wasn't exactly a pacifist, and he didn't create humans (that was Prometheus) and Ares... sigh. Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of classical mythology, just kind of... remember that it's most likely not the movie's fault, and what they came up with makes a kind of internal sense. Ah, well. Someday, a movie will do justice to Greek mythology, but that movie is not this movie, and that's okay. They're constrained by a lot of comic canon.
Character
Much improved for DC. Diana is good protagonist. She goes through a very believable innocence-to-experience arc, and she works even the sillier elements of the WW mythos -- the Lasso of Truth, for instance -- work in context.
Steve Trevor is good as the love interest. Like most superhero love interests, he's strictly support, but he does it well. He and his band of brothers follow WW through the trenches. He teaches her to dance. She rescues him several times. But he's a believable enough sort of guy, and Chris Pine does well with him.
Ares is... well, let me put it this way. If you can't figure out exactly who Ares is really pretending to be within one scene, you haven't been watching a lot of hero movies. The telegraphing was breathtakingly clumsy, one of the few plot missteps, unless it was actually almost brilliant: It was so obvious that I thought for at least part of the movie that it might be a red herring, and that they were playing all of the cliches to try and misdirect my attention from someone else. But... they weren't. Still, David Thewlis seems to be having a good time with it.
Setting
The first setting is Themyscira, and it's a lovely Mediterranean island with glowing water and an ancient Greek society. For that part of the movie, they actually used saturated color, almost. After that, we're in Great War Europe, which is understandably bleak, though not as understandably mostly gray.
I like the historical setting. We don't have a lot set in WWI, and it's a striking choice because of it. I wish there were more period pieces, though most of Diana's frame story is in the present, so we most likely won't get any more.
Style
Have I mentioned how much I hate the "gritty" look, and how fervently I wish the fad to end? Because I hate the gritty look and fervently wish for the day this fad will leave.
That said, while it's certainly of an aesthetic piece, it is brightened up somewhat, and Themyscira uses almost lifelike color. Maybe they're slowing digging their way out of they gray, but feel they can't do it too suddenly?
Theme
"It's not about what they deserve. It's about what you believe."
The theme is actually relatively complex. Wonder Woman learns that mankind is troubled and deeply flawed, and she can't save the world with a single grand gesture like killing Ares. And people may not deserve the help she gives. But it's important to be a good person anyway, important to be a hero, because the more people choose to be heroes, the more likely we are to defeat our flaws. Therefore, believe in love and goodness and heroism (all names for the same thing in this 'verse), and act accordingly toward your fellow creatures, and in that way, you contribute to saving the world. It's a pretty healthy message.
I guess there's some complaint that Ares' presence as a real figure undermines this somehow, but I don't think so. He whispers to people about how to do more efficiently what they want to do anyway, but he doesn't cause them to want to do it. My own interpretation is that the nature of the humans is what created the god of war in the first place, and they therefore sustain him, rather than vice versa.
That's about it. I enjoyed the movie. It has a lot of details that I liked and didn't mention because they're just... details. But yes -- I may even make an effort to see Justice League in a more timely fashion, since this movie shows that DC can make movies. (And also because Joss Whedon touched it up, of course.)
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Lord of the Flies (1990 movie) review
Ah, another day, another adaptation. And really, it's right on point. Who doesn't need a review of a 27 year old movie that's never exactly been considered a classic?
It's a classic novel from 1954 -- that would be 63 years ago -- so I don't think we exactly need the traditional spoiler warning anymore. I'm going to talk about the book first to get to the movie.
But I'm going to be doing a book-and-movie group on the subject, so I re-watched, and my re-watch=review.
For starters, I consider the book one of the best to come out of the post-war cynicism. It came out in the 1950s, when Europe was still reeling from WWII, and William Golding's text rooted the evil that had just occurred not in some specific failure of the German state, but in the evil of human hearts. ALL human hearts (or at least most of them), which can manifest itself in any society. Golding stated, "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." He explores this by crashing a planeload of English boys onto a deserted island, with no adults in the vicinity. (He left girls out because he -- wrongly, I think -- thought that girls wouldn't form this kind of microcosm of society -- and because he didn't want to mix any of it up with the question of sex, which he seems to have considered a distraction from the question.)
In the book, this largely plays out through the main character of Ralph, who starts out as a fairly normal boy, but as he gains responsibility over the others, he sees the society they initially formed begin to fall apart as they realize that they're not answering to anyone or anything, and descend into violence, anarchy, and, ultimately, murder. It ends with Ralph, once the acclaimed and beloved leader, running through the burning jungle as he is hunted. The implication (the stake sharpened at both ends, which they use to sacrifice pigs before they eat them) is that they're about to cross over into cannibalism when the smoke from their out-of-control fire finally draws a rescue.
The descent is largely shown through Jack. He starts the novel fairly normal, but authoritarian and boastful. He insists that they will have a perfect society, for instance, because they are English, and "the English are the best at everything." He first becomes obsessed with getting meat, but that quickly morphs into an obsession with blood and with causing pain to the animals he's hunting. After his hunting causes the signal fire to go out just when a ship is passing, he and Ralph come to a parting of the ways, and Jack goes to the other end of the island, where he sets up a violent dictatorship, drawing the boys off one by one, either by the lure of living outside of society's "normal" rules or because they are scared. Toward the end of the book, the sympathetic characters of the twins Sam and Eric are actually tortured into remaining in Jack's band, peeling off the last of Ralph's friends.
A younger boy named Simon is the only one of the boys who is presented as fully good. Rivers of ink have identified him as the Christ-like figure, and story-wise, it's true. Certainly that would be Golding's frame of reference. What is it, though, that makes Simon good? Interestingly, in the novel, it's that he's able to see the truth from the start: That the Beast the children are afraid of is something inside of them. When the rest mistake a dead parachutist for a beast watching them -- which ultimately shifts the balance of power to Jack, who promises to hunt it -- Simon climbs the mountain to look the beast in the eye and understand what it really is. He frees the dead man from his riggings and lets the wind carry him out to a sea burial, then goes to tell the others the truth... only to be murdered in their first act of frenzied violence against one of the human characters. Simon is also the one who has a vision of the pig's head on a stick, which is the scene the title come from. It becomes "The Lord of the Flies" (ba'al zevuv, from Hebrew, surviving in English as Beelzebub), and it taunts him with his own inability to articulate the horror that's happening, and the fact that the other boys will think him crazy. (Filmwise: This crucial scene has got to be almost impossible to film, and I don't envy anyone doing this adaptation at this point. It's the crux of the whole book, and it's NOT VISUAL AT ALL.)
The last of the four main characters is Piggy, a physically weak, overweight boy whose real name is never revealed. He's the voice of "baffled common sense" -- a technocrat of sorts, who is generally right about many things, and who is Ralph's most loyal supporter up until his death, when he, along with the conch which represents a sane, Apollonian society, is crushed by a rock deliberately dropped on him by his equivalent on Jack's side -- a sadist named Roger who, it is strongly implied, is very happy to drop all of the trappings of society so that he's free to indulge his whims. Piggy is increasingly debilitated through the book, as his severe myopia eventually leaves him blind when Jack steals his already broken glasses to make fire. (And yes, making fire with myopia lenses isn't possible, but we'll suspend that disbelief for symbolism. Piggy's specs are the rational world, and they are used to create the signal fire that stands for hope in the world.) Piggy has one major moral failure: When Simon is murdered, Ralph -- picking up Simon's clear-seeing mantle -- identifies the action for what it was, while Piggy denies it vigorously.
(If you want a more recent story, take Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption -- King is a major LotF fan, so this isn't surprising. Shawshank Prison is more or less the Flies island. Most of the men deny whatever crimes they've committed, as the boys deny responsibility for Simon's death. But Andy, like Simon, is genuinely innocent, if unable to articulate/prove it, and Red, like Ralph, accepts, understands, and regrets his crime, thereby making penitence and the titular redemption possible.)
Okay, yes, all of that was set-up to review the 1990 movie.
Which had some excellent elements, but also dropped the ball in some MAJOR ways.
The first and most obvious change is that English schoolboys have been changed to American military school boys. Of all of the changes, the nationality change bothers me least in terms of the themes of the book. Is anyone going to seriously argue that a random group of American boys wouldn't contain a good number saying, "We can't screw this up -- we're Americans, and Americans are great at everything"? Which is, of course, the root of what goes wrong, because pride is never a good start, and association with any group pride is not a good start. It depends on the individual and his ability to do what's right ("the choice between what is easy and what is right," as Dumbledore would later put it, and what are the Death Eaters but Jack's followers, all grown up?). You could tell this story about a group of people from literally anywhere in the world, and it would play out the same way, because it's not a truth about Englishmen or Americans. It's a truth about human nature, and humans, God bless us (please), are humans. You have your Ralphs, Simons, Piggys, and Jacks pretty much anywhere. Was it necessary? No (except in as much as everyone occasionally needs that slap upside the head saying, "Yeah, that could happen to you, too, if you're not careful"). Was it destructive to the theme? Also, no.
The most baffling change was leaving one of the teachers alive but delirious, ultimately becoming what they perceived as the Beast. I understand the thinking: Ultimately, it served the same purpose as the dead parachutist, pointing out that the adult world was the macrocosm of the island. But it didn't work well in practice, and since the boys all knew about him, it seemed much more unlikely that NO ONE other than Simon would figure it out. The parachutist drifted down at night, from a battle that the boys didn't even know about, and was therefore utterly terrifying to them. The beast was death and war and all of the endpoints of where their dark sides were leading them.
There's also not much establishing of why they were in a plane over the island in the first place. In the book, they're being evacuated because of the war. It's not specified, but given the choir's stated stops -- Gib and Addis -- it's a reasonable guess that they were being flown down to Australia or New Zealand from Great Britain, and the plane was shot down on the way. Wherever their latest stop was, the airport was blown up out from under them as they took off. That's why the ending isn't the cheat that some people think. Wow, they're rescued by a naval officer.... who is taking a break from hunting his quarry to rescue them. To paraphrase Golding, sure, the cruiser rescued the boys, but who's rescuing the cruiser? In this movie, there's not much indication that there's anything going on other than a routine patrol, and there's no talk of any war going on. So the ending loses some of its horror.
But the worst failure was in the characters.
I don't mean the child actors. Some were bad, most were competent, and Balthazar Getty as Ralph was quite good. Chris Furrh, who played Jack, seems to have left acting, which is too bad for the profession (though probably good for him), since he actually was very good.
The problem with the characters was the script. Granted, the story is a fable and therefore a lot of them are sort of one-trick ponies in the first place (by design), but script decided everything needed dumbing down. Therefore, Jack is written not just as kind of an ass to Piggy, but as every bad thing that the screenwriter could think of. Instead of a choir boy whose absurd (but kind of amusing) notion is that he should be chief because he could sing a C sharp, he's a juvenile delinquent sent to military school as a disciplinary measure. From the start, he's a snake in the grass. And Ralph, who is the ego character and therefore the only one who changes in the course of the story, begins and ends the movie at the same place: A deeply serious boy who is obviously right about things. Basically, he's Simon, but with power, which renders Simon kind of pointless as a character. And since Ralph is already right about everything, it also leaves Piggy basically to supply the glasses and to whine. Now, at the end of the story, this characterization works, but it's because Ralph has come by his wisdom the hard way. He's lost his innocence. In the movie, he begins this way, so there's no growth at all. (This is especially galling, as Golding told the story of the two images that became the book: A happy boy doing a headstand in delight as he finds himself on an idyllic tropical island, followed by the same boy weeping and filthy, having discovered how humans would really act.) ETA: Interestingly, in neither film version do we see the final moment of Ralph and Jack's feud. The naval officer who arrives asks them what they are doing and asks who is in charge of this obvious disaster. Jack, who authored the misery, shrinks back to just be one little boy among the group, while Ralph answers that he is, indeed, responsible, in charge. It seems like a strange thing to skip, now that I think about it.
Simon, while filmed in a kind of beatific way, is left with very little to do. He loses his central scene (except for a puzzling shot of him staring at the pig's head -- see above for my sympathy with the screenwriters on doing this scene), and he doesn't get the establishing scenes where he shows kindness and responsibility toward the littluns, fetching them fruit before going about his own business. You can't see his struggle to tell the others what he understands. He's just basically a good egg who has the unfortunate luck to choose the wrong time to run into a Dionysian revel.
I don't want to say that this movie is all bad. It's not. There a lot of elements I like. Philippe Sarde's score (here's the main title) is very good, and, while they skip the choir in the story, the choral backing toward the end brings it in surreptitiously (I wonder if the composer was annoyed that the choir was cut). It's not as chilling as boy sopranos singing Kyrie Eleison, as they did in the 1960s version, but it's dramatic and effective. Like I said, Chris Furrh's Jack is very well realized, and Balthazar Getty, when not hampered by bad writing, seems to understand what's going on. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the dance scene where Simon is killed is genuinely frightening. And truth is, it's hard to do this story badly, per se, because it is a very simple story that works well on film even when individual elements don't play out properly. Like most very basic stories, it can be told and retold in a lot of different iterations, and an updating isn't a bad idea. You could also put it in space or... I don't know. In an arena on deadly reality television show? In a prison? Lots of places.
So, my feelings about this movie are mixed. The technical work is excellent, and parts of the story come out very well. I don't hate it. But given their resources, it could have been so much better!
Ah, well.
It's a classic novel from 1954 -- that would be 63 years ago -- so I don't think we exactly need the traditional spoiler warning anymore. I'm going to talk about the book first to get to the movie.
But I'm going to be doing a book-and-movie group on the subject, so I re-watched, and my re-watch=review.
For starters, I consider the book one of the best to come out of the post-war cynicism. It came out in the 1950s, when Europe was still reeling from WWII, and William Golding's text rooted the evil that had just occurred not in some specific failure of the German state, but in the evil of human hearts. ALL human hearts (or at least most of them), which can manifest itself in any society. Golding stated, "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." He explores this by crashing a planeload of English boys onto a deserted island, with no adults in the vicinity. (He left girls out because he -- wrongly, I think -- thought that girls wouldn't form this kind of microcosm of society -- and because he didn't want to mix any of it up with the question of sex, which he seems to have considered a distraction from the question.)
In the book, this largely plays out through the main character of Ralph, who starts out as a fairly normal boy, but as he gains responsibility over the others, he sees the society they initially formed begin to fall apart as they realize that they're not answering to anyone or anything, and descend into violence, anarchy, and, ultimately, murder. It ends with Ralph, once the acclaimed and beloved leader, running through the burning jungle as he is hunted. The implication (the stake sharpened at both ends, which they use to sacrifice pigs before they eat them) is that they're about to cross over into cannibalism when the smoke from their out-of-control fire finally draws a rescue.
The descent is largely shown through Jack. He starts the novel fairly normal, but authoritarian and boastful. He insists that they will have a perfect society, for instance, because they are English, and "the English are the best at everything." He first becomes obsessed with getting meat, but that quickly morphs into an obsession with blood and with causing pain to the animals he's hunting. After his hunting causes the signal fire to go out just when a ship is passing, he and Ralph come to a parting of the ways, and Jack goes to the other end of the island, where he sets up a violent dictatorship, drawing the boys off one by one, either by the lure of living outside of society's "normal" rules or because they are scared. Toward the end of the book, the sympathetic characters of the twins Sam and Eric are actually tortured into remaining in Jack's band, peeling off the last of Ralph's friends.
A younger boy named Simon is the only one of the boys who is presented as fully good. Rivers of ink have identified him as the Christ-like figure, and story-wise, it's true. Certainly that would be Golding's frame of reference. What is it, though, that makes Simon good? Interestingly, in the novel, it's that he's able to see the truth from the start: That the Beast the children are afraid of is something inside of them. When the rest mistake a dead parachutist for a beast watching them -- which ultimately shifts the balance of power to Jack, who promises to hunt it -- Simon climbs the mountain to look the beast in the eye and understand what it really is. He frees the dead man from his riggings and lets the wind carry him out to a sea burial, then goes to tell the others the truth... only to be murdered in their first act of frenzied violence against one of the human characters. Simon is also the one who has a vision of the pig's head on a stick, which is the scene the title come from. It becomes "The Lord of the Flies" (ba'al zevuv, from Hebrew, surviving in English as Beelzebub), and it taunts him with his own inability to articulate the horror that's happening, and the fact that the other boys will think him crazy. (Filmwise: This crucial scene has got to be almost impossible to film, and I don't envy anyone doing this adaptation at this point. It's the crux of the whole book, and it's NOT VISUAL AT ALL.)
The last of the four main characters is Piggy, a physically weak, overweight boy whose real name is never revealed. He's the voice of "baffled common sense" -- a technocrat of sorts, who is generally right about many things, and who is Ralph's most loyal supporter up until his death, when he, along with the conch which represents a sane, Apollonian society, is crushed by a rock deliberately dropped on him by his equivalent on Jack's side -- a sadist named Roger who, it is strongly implied, is very happy to drop all of the trappings of society so that he's free to indulge his whims. Piggy is increasingly debilitated through the book, as his severe myopia eventually leaves him blind when Jack steals his already broken glasses to make fire. (And yes, making fire with myopia lenses isn't possible, but we'll suspend that disbelief for symbolism. Piggy's specs are the rational world, and they are used to create the signal fire that stands for hope in the world.) Piggy has one major moral failure: When Simon is murdered, Ralph -- picking up Simon's clear-seeing mantle -- identifies the action for what it was, while Piggy denies it vigorously.
(If you want a more recent story, take Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption -- King is a major LotF fan, so this isn't surprising. Shawshank Prison is more or less the Flies island. Most of the men deny whatever crimes they've committed, as the boys deny responsibility for Simon's death. But Andy, like Simon, is genuinely innocent, if unable to articulate/prove it, and Red, like Ralph, accepts, understands, and regrets his crime, thereby making penitence and the titular redemption possible.)
Okay, yes, all of that was set-up to review the 1990 movie.
Which had some excellent elements, but also dropped the ball in some MAJOR ways.
The first and most obvious change is that English schoolboys have been changed to American military school boys. Of all of the changes, the nationality change bothers me least in terms of the themes of the book. Is anyone going to seriously argue that a random group of American boys wouldn't contain a good number saying, "We can't screw this up -- we're Americans, and Americans are great at everything"? Which is, of course, the root of what goes wrong, because pride is never a good start, and association with any group pride is not a good start. It depends on the individual and his ability to do what's right ("the choice between what is easy and what is right," as Dumbledore would later put it, and what are the Death Eaters but Jack's followers, all grown up?). You could tell this story about a group of people from literally anywhere in the world, and it would play out the same way, because it's not a truth about Englishmen or Americans. It's a truth about human nature, and humans, God bless us (please), are humans. You have your Ralphs, Simons, Piggys, and Jacks pretty much anywhere. Was it necessary? No (except in as much as everyone occasionally needs that slap upside the head saying, "Yeah, that could happen to you, too, if you're not careful"). Was it destructive to the theme? Also, no.
The most baffling change was leaving one of the teachers alive but delirious, ultimately becoming what they perceived as the Beast. I understand the thinking: Ultimately, it served the same purpose as the dead parachutist, pointing out that the adult world was the macrocosm of the island. But it didn't work well in practice, and since the boys all knew about him, it seemed much more unlikely that NO ONE other than Simon would figure it out. The parachutist drifted down at night, from a battle that the boys didn't even know about, and was therefore utterly terrifying to them. The beast was death and war and all of the endpoints of where their dark sides were leading them.
There's also not much establishing of why they were in a plane over the island in the first place. In the book, they're being evacuated because of the war. It's not specified, but given the choir's stated stops -- Gib and Addis -- it's a reasonable guess that they were being flown down to Australia or New Zealand from Great Britain, and the plane was shot down on the way. Wherever their latest stop was, the airport was blown up out from under them as they took off. That's why the ending isn't the cheat that some people think. Wow, they're rescued by a naval officer.... who is taking a break from hunting his quarry to rescue them. To paraphrase Golding, sure, the cruiser rescued the boys, but who's rescuing the cruiser? In this movie, there's not much indication that there's anything going on other than a routine patrol, and there's no talk of any war going on. So the ending loses some of its horror.
But the worst failure was in the characters.
I don't mean the child actors. Some were bad, most were competent, and Balthazar Getty as Ralph was quite good. Chris Furrh, who played Jack, seems to have left acting, which is too bad for the profession (though probably good for him), since he actually was very good.
The problem with the characters was the script. Granted, the story is a fable and therefore a lot of them are sort of one-trick ponies in the first place (by design), but script decided everything needed dumbing down. Therefore, Jack is written not just as kind of an ass to Piggy, but as every bad thing that the screenwriter could think of. Instead of a choir boy whose absurd (but kind of amusing) notion is that he should be chief because he could sing a C sharp, he's a juvenile delinquent sent to military school as a disciplinary measure. From the start, he's a snake in the grass. And Ralph, who is the ego character and therefore the only one who changes in the course of the story, begins and ends the movie at the same place: A deeply serious boy who is obviously right about things. Basically, he's Simon, but with power, which renders Simon kind of pointless as a character. And since Ralph is already right about everything, it also leaves Piggy basically to supply the glasses and to whine. Now, at the end of the story, this characterization works, but it's because Ralph has come by his wisdom the hard way. He's lost his innocence. In the movie, he begins this way, so there's no growth at all. (This is especially galling, as Golding told the story of the two images that became the book: A happy boy doing a headstand in delight as he finds himself on an idyllic tropical island, followed by the same boy weeping and filthy, having discovered how humans would really act.) ETA: Interestingly, in neither film version do we see the final moment of Ralph and Jack's feud. The naval officer who arrives asks them what they are doing and asks who is in charge of this obvious disaster. Jack, who authored the misery, shrinks back to just be one little boy among the group, while Ralph answers that he is, indeed, responsible, in charge. It seems like a strange thing to skip, now that I think about it.
Simon, while filmed in a kind of beatific way, is left with very little to do. He loses his central scene (except for a puzzling shot of him staring at the pig's head -- see above for my sympathy with the screenwriters on doing this scene), and he doesn't get the establishing scenes where he shows kindness and responsibility toward the littluns, fetching them fruit before going about his own business. You can't see his struggle to tell the others what he understands. He's just basically a good egg who has the unfortunate luck to choose the wrong time to run into a Dionysian revel.
I don't want to say that this movie is all bad. It's not. There a lot of elements I like. Philippe Sarde's score (here's the main title) is very good, and, while they skip the choir in the story, the choral backing toward the end brings it in surreptitiously (I wonder if the composer was annoyed that the choir was cut). It's not as chilling as boy sopranos singing Kyrie Eleison, as they did in the 1960s version, but it's dramatic and effective. Like I said, Chris Furrh's Jack is very well realized, and Balthazar Getty, when not hampered by bad writing, seems to understand what's going on. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the dance scene where Simon is killed is genuinely frightening. And truth is, it's hard to do this story badly, per se, because it is a very simple story that works well on film even when individual elements don't play out properly. Like most very basic stories, it can be told and retold in a lot of different iterations, and an updating isn't a bad idea. You could also put it in space or... I don't know. In an arena on deadly reality television show? In a prison? Lots of places.
So, my feelings about this movie are mixed. The technical work is excellent, and parts of the story come out very well. I don't hate it. But given their resources, it could have been so much better!
Ah, well.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Rogue One
Remember: Review contains spoilers. No attempt to hide them will be made.
The climatic scene of Rogue One, the battle on Scarif, was shot in sunlight with fully saturated colors. I just want to take a moment to appreciate that. Fully. Saturated. Colors. It was a horrifying sequence, in terms of plot, and still amazing to look at. Even the inside of the Imperial base, where you'd almost expect gray, they did almost in jewel tones, and Vader's pad on Mustafar was vividly red. What a change from the dreary gray tones of so much of contemporary film. It was refreshing.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled review.
First things first, I liked it. Quite a lot, actually. I warmed up to The Force Awakens after a while, but this one, I liked right away and continue to like. My reasons are outside of the "elements" format, so I'll get to them more in depth at the end of this essay.
Let's just go straight into the elements.
Plot: More on this later, but essentially, I see this as a very well executed bit of fan fiction (and no, that is NOT AN INSULT). It's a very plausible answer to several questions raised in the canonical films, and it explores something that has to have happened: The battle mentioned in the very first opening crawl of the series, where the rebels stole the Death Star plans. The story follows Jyn Erso, daughter of the engineer who was coerced into designing it, as she first finds him and learns about the flaw he built into the station (nice gap-filling on a major fan question), then, with the team she's built along the way, leads a suicide mission against the Imperial archives to obtain the plans and transmit them up to the fleet, where Leia will retrieve them and set us off on the saga. The movie ends perhaps a day, perhaps only minutes, from Leia's capture at the beginning of A New Hope. (And makes her lie about being on a diplomatic mission all the more audacious, since she's literally been chased from the battle.)
Character: Probably one of the weaker elements. I wasn't really drawn into the conflicts of any of the OCs (original characters) who populated this tale. I mean, there was nothing wrong with them, but with the exception of the reprogrammed imperial droid, K2SO, I didn't think, "Wow, I can't wait to find out what that one is doing next." Jyn's got some good moments, but I feel like they tried to force a character arc on her by making her cynical without any particular explanation, so that she could later find belief. I didn't really understand Cassian at first; I thought after he killed the informant that he was an Imperial spy, and waited the whole movie for something to come of it (either that he'd betray the rebellion at a crucial moment or he'd reform). I realize that was a wrong assumption, but the first act we see him take is murdering a rebel after getting information, so... Kind of a curveball, and not in an interesting way. Krennec isn't a very credible villain (and it's not helped by the costume... most of the costuming is good, this poor guy was saddled with what looked like the kind of bedsheet cape kids will trick-or-treat in this year). Vader is great, but doesn't get much screentime. Tarkin... more later. I like Chirrut and Bazea and (especially) Bodhi, but I guess I'm just as glad I didn't get attached. Was that the plan? To have characters not be especially attachable so that people wouldn't be particularly phased by all of them dying at the end?
Setting: There are several settings, from the city of Jehda to the rebel base to the Imperial base at Eadu, to the amazing Scarif base. I've already mentioned how refreshing Scarif is. Eadu is more standard, but they chose to set the battle during a raging rainstorm, and it looks fabulous. Jehda is more or less the standard desert planet trope of Star Wars. Looks good, but it should... they've had enough practice! To be fair, I'd think the desert-planet type is likely to be a common occurrence, so that one's fair to have several examples of.
Theme: Rebellions are built on hope. Conveniently stated outright. (Though of course, the Empire was originally built on hope of correcting the corrupted republic, too. Hmm.)
Style: This is a gorgeous looking film. Saturated is the best word for it, I think. The look is detailed, there is great care given to lighting and sound, and the creators clearly love the fact that they are working in this universe. They savor the details.
Beyond the elements:
There is, of course, more to the movie than the regular elements because it is an entry in a long-running, well-beloved series.
I referred earlier to the movie as well-executed fanfic, which is what I believe it to be. Good fanfic interacts with the canonical text, asks questions, offers ideas, and plays around with what is plausible and even probable within the world. Rogue One does this wonderfully. It takes that open question -- that shiny bauble: "How did the rebels get the plans to Leia?" It's an obvious question, and it leads to other questions. Who were the people who got it? Why did they take that risk? What happened to them, and why did we never hear of them again? It even looks at minor questions like why the call sign Red Five was available for Luke to take over. The script is a well-thought out and highly plausible answer to the questions. It feels like the real answer, or at least like it could be the real answer. (And no, I guess I don't ultimately feel the Disney era stuff is canonical. I mean, it's not anti-canonical and there's nothing wrong with it, but I just don't subjectively feel like it's part of the saga.) Full marks for fan imagination here.
My main fannish quibble is that they brought in a lot of Expanded Universe stuff, like Kyber Crystals, that are part of a whole overly-complicated structure that I wish they'd stayed away from. They didn't need to reject it outright, but I'm not a big fan of bringing things in from outside the main line. If people are just watching the movies, they should be able to just watch the movies -- the rest of it is like tinsel on the Christmas tree. People should be able to take the tinsel off if they want to, and I feel like a lot of it got tangled up in the branches here. That's probably just me, though. I did a little jig when I found out Disney was jettisoning the EU, and I don't like seeing it back, largely because I detest the Star Wars EU. Which, you know... is probably just me.
I hadn't read up on the movie a lot before seeing it, so I actually didn't know that they'd used CGI to bring back Peter Cushing's face for the role of Tarkin, or a 1977-vintage Carrie Fisher (the real CF did the voice of course) for Leia. As a concept, I don't mind it, though I think they're going to have to start making deals with actors in their contracts to use their likenesses in other films, potentially far in the future. If you're dealing with a series that may well jump around in time, it's the best solution. My problem wasn't moral or ideological. It's just that, while the Leia appearance was all right (not perfect, but pretty good), Tarkin kind of screamed "Hi, I'm a CGI character." It was just not... quite... there. A little bit of Uncanny Valley going on there. The tech will get better, though.
God bless James Earl Jones for voicing Vader again. The character would just not be right otherwise.
And now, the big fan war: Force Awakens or Rogue One? God knows why SW fandom is so given to these fights, but it is, and I come down on the side of Rogue One. I didn't dislike TFA. It's okay. But for me, the main saga was satisfactorily closed with Return of the Jedi. (Well, chronologically with Revenge of the Sith, I guess.) The saga was the story of Anakin Skywalker -- how he rose, how he fell, and how he was redeemed. Because of that, TFA felt a little... unnecessary? Disconnected? And any connection seems forced (no pun intended) because the story is over. The final shot at the celebration was the eucatastrophic moment (ref, Tolkien) that put a button on the tale. It began with the equivalent of "Once upon a time..." and ended with "And they all lived happily ever after." It was done. Reintroducing it and grafting on problems that didn't need to be there just... I don't know. Of course it's the beginning of a new story, so you need a problem, but... I guess I just didn't need the new story.
The fill in stories, though, the back stories and one-offs and midquels and so on? Those, I feel like there's an unending need for. What about the life of the Imperials? I wrote a story once about kids trapped in an Imperial boarding school when the Death Star went up, who needed to escape from enraged mobs. The normal, everyday people of the Empire would seem to be endless fodder for this kind of story. What about the handmaidens? What happened to them? Did Obi-Wan do anything during his exile? Did Vader have moments before RotJ when his loyalty to Palpatine may have wavered? How did Leia end up in the Senate at the age of 16? It's fertile ground, and I hope Disney continues to explore it.
The climatic scene of Rogue One, the battle on Scarif, was shot in sunlight with fully saturated colors. I just want to take a moment to appreciate that. Fully. Saturated. Colors. It was a horrifying sequence, in terms of plot, and still amazing to look at. Even the inside of the Imperial base, where you'd almost expect gray, they did almost in jewel tones, and Vader's pad on Mustafar was vividly red. What a change from the dreary gray tones of so much of contemporary film. It was refreshing.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled review.
First things first, I liked it. Quite a lot, actually. I warmed up to The Force Awakens after a while, but this one, I liked right away and continue to like. My reasons are outside of the "elements" format, so I'll get to them more in depth at the end of this essay.
Let's just go straight into the elements.
Plot: More on this later, but essentially, I see this as a very well executed bit of fan fiction (and no, that is NOT AN INSULT). It's a very plausible answer to several questions raised in the canonical films, and it explores something that has to have happened: The battle mentioned in the very first opening crawl of the series, where the rebels stole the Death Star plans. The story follows Jyn Erso, daughter of the engineer who was coerced into designing it, as she first finds him and learns about the flaw he built into the station (nice gap-filling on a major fan question), then, with the team she's built along the way, leads a suicide mission against the Imperial archives to obtain the plans and transmit them up to the fleet, where Leia will retrieve them and set us off on the saga. The movie ends perhaps a day, perhaps only minutes, from Leia's capture at the beginning of A New Hope. (And makes her lie about being on a diplomatic mission all the more audacious, since she's literally been chased from the battle.)
Character: Probably one of the weaker elements. I wasn't really drawn into the conflicts of any of the OCs (original characters) who populated this tale. I mean, there was nothing wrong with them, but with the exception of the reprogrammed imperial droid, K2SO, I didn't think, "Wow, I can't wait to find out what that one is doing next." Jyn's got some good moments, but I feel like they tried to force a character arc on her by making her cynical without any particular explanation, so that she could later find belief. I didn't really understand Cassian at first; I thought after he killed the informant that he was an Imperial spy, and waited the whole movie for something to come of it (either that he'd betray the rebellion at a crucial moment or he'd reform). I realize that was a wrong assumption, but the first act we see him take is murdering a rebel after getting information, so... Kind of a curveball, and not in an interesting way. Krennec isn't a very credible villain (and it's not helped by the costume... most of the costuming is good, this poor guy was saddled with what looked like the kind of bedsheet cape kids will trick-or-treat in this year). Vader is great, but doesn't get much screentime. Tarkin... more later. I like Chirrut and Bazea and (especially) Bodhi, but I guess I'm just as glad I didn't get attached. Was that the plan? To have characters not be especially attachable so that people wouldn't be particularly phased by all of them dying at the end?
Setting: There are several settings, from the city of Jehda to the rebel base to the Imperial base at Eadu, to the amazing Scarif base. I've already mentioned how refreshing Scarif is. Eadu is more standard, but they chose to set the battle during a raging rainstorm, and it looks fabulous. Jehda is more or less the standard desert planet trope of Star Wars. Looks good, but it should... they've had enough practice! To be fair, I'd think the desert-planet type is likely to be a common occurrence, so that one's fair to have several examples of.
Theme: Rebellions are built on hope. Conveniently stated outright. (Though of course, the Empire was originally built on hope of correcting the corrupted republic, too. Hmm.)
Style: This is a gorgeous looking film. Saturated is the best word for it, I think. The look is detailed, there is great care given to lighting and sound, and the creators clearly love the fact that they are working in this universe. They savor the details.
Beyond the elements:
There is, of course, more to the movie than the regular elements because it is an entry in a long-running, well-beloved series.
I referred earlier to the movie as well-executed fanfic, which is what I believe it to be. Good fanfic interacts with the canonical text, asks questions, offers ideas, and plays around with what is plausible and even probable within the world. Rogue One does this wonderfully. It takes that open question -- that shiny bauble: "How did the rebels get the plans to Leia?" It's an obvious question, and it leads to other questions. Who were the people who got it? Why did they take that risk? What happened to them, and why did we never hear of them again? It even looks at minor questions like why the call sign Red Five was available for Luke to take over. The script is a well-thought out and highly plausible answer to the questions. It feels like the real answer, or at least like it could be the real answer. (And no, I guess I don't ultimately feel the Disney era stuff is canonical. I mean, it's not anti-canonical and there's nothing wrong with it, but I just don't subjectively feel like it's part of the saga.) Full marks for fan imagination here.
My main fannish quibble is that they brought in a lot of Expanded Universe stuff, like Kyber Crystals, that are part of a whole overly-complicated structure that I wish they'd stayed away from. They didn't need to reject it outright, but I'm not a big fan of bringing things in from outside the main line. If people are just watching the movies, they should be able to just watch the movies -- the rest of it is like tinsel on the Christmas tree. People should be able to take the tinsel off if they want to, and I feel like a lot of it got tangled up in the branches here. That's probably just me, though. I did a little jig when I found out Disney was jettisoning the EU, and I don't like seeing it back, largely because I detest the Star Wars EU. Which, you know... is probably just me.
I hadn't read up on the movie a lot before seeing it, so I actually didn't know that they'd used CGI to bring back Peter Cushing's face for the role of Tarkin, or a 1977-vintage Carrie Fisher (the real CF did the voice of course) for Leia. As a concept, I don't mind it, though I think they're going to have to start making deals with actors in their contracts to use their likenesses in other films, potentially far in the future. If you're dealing with a series that may well jump around in time, it's the best solution. My problem wasn't moral or ideological. It's just that, while the Leia appearance was all right (not perfect, but pretty good), Tarkin kind of screamed "Hi, I'm a CGI character." It was just not... quite... there. A little bit of Uncanny Valley going on there. The tech will get better, though.
God bless James Earl Jones for voicing Vader again. The character would just not be right otherwise.
And now, the big fan war: Force Awakens or Rogue One? God knows why SW fandom is so given to these fights, but it is, and I come down on the side of Rogue One. I didn't dislike TFA. It's okay. But for me, the main saga was satisfactorily closed with Return of the Jedi. (Well, chronologically with Revenge of the Sith, I guess.) The saga was the story of Anakin Skywalker -- how he rose, how he fell, and how he was redeemed. Because of that, TFA felt a little... unnecessary? Disconnected? And any connection seems forced (no pun intended) because the story is over. The final shot at the celebration was the eucatastrophic moment (ref, Tolkien) that put a button on the tale. It began with the equivalent of "Once upon a time..." and ended with "And they all lived happily ever after." It was done. Reintroducing it and grafting on problems that didn't need to be there just... I don't know. Of course it's the beginning of a new story, so you need a problem, but... I guess I just didn't need the new story.
The fill in stories, though, the back stories and one-offs and midquels and so on? Those, I feel like there's an unending need for. What about the life of the Imperials? I wrote a story once about kids trapped in an Imperial boarding school when the Death Star went up, who needed to escape from enraged mobs. The normal, everyday people of the Empire would seem to be endless fodder for this kind of story. What about the handmaidens? What happened to them? Did Obi-Wan do anything during his exile? Did Vader have moments before RotJ when his loyalty to Palpatine may have wavered? How did Leia end up in the Senate at the age of 16? It's fertile ground, and I hope Disney continues to explore it.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
I caught up on my movies today. I've been meaning to see this one and needed to see Rogue One (review later), so I said, "You know? Let's just hang out at the multiplex."
So, Fantastic Beasts. As always, please recall that I review WITH SPOILERS. There will not be immediate pre-warnings or blanking out.
The verdict? Eh.... not bad.
Enjoyable, actually. It's a story about grown-ups in Potterworld, which is neat. It's in a new setting, which is also neat. Eddie Redmayne is a blast, and the critters are cool.
But...
I don't know. Something didn't entirely click.
So, the elements of the story are all not bad.
Plot: Newt Scamander, author of future!Harry's textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, arrives in New York in 1926, carrying a suitcase full of magical creatures. The dark wizard Grindelwald is on the loose, but Scamander doesn't have much to say about it. Meanwhile, in New York, a very explosive magical force is destroying a lot of things, and it's being blamed on gas leaks. A former Auror named Tina Goldstein (related to Anthony Goldstein, later of Hogwarts?) is investigating a muggle (non-maj... was there any reason for Americans to use a different term for this? That one's pretty clunky, so I'll just use Muggle) group called Second Salem, which is calling for the destruction of the wizarding world (though of course, no one else believes they exist). One of Newt's critters -- a Niffler -- gets free in a bank and causes havoc, which sends Tina after Newt. Meanwhile, Newt bumps into a Muggle named Jacob Kowalski, and they accidentally switch suitcases. Jacob doesn't know what's happening, and several creatures escape. Tina brings Newt in, but is ignored by the upper echelons of MACUSA (the American wizarding government), and they go to find Jacob, though it's too late to stop the escape. Tina brings both men back to the apartment she shares with her sister Queenie, who immediately falls for the kindly Jacob. Then there's another attack by the violent force, this time killing a young politician, and for a time, suspicion falls on Newt's creatures. He explains that the force is an obscurus, a violent expression of suppressed magic, but they don't believe him and sentence both him and Tina to death for breaking the statute of secrecy and possibly causing a war with Muggles. They're rescued by Queenie and Jacob, and it all comes to a fight with the obscurus, which is the magical energy of an abused teenage boy who was raised by the head of Second Salem. The MACUSA wizard who's been in charge of the case -- who's been blocking the heroes at every step -- turns out to be Grindelwald in disguise, and he wanted to start a war because he wants to dominate Muggles, as we know from the books. His position is not made especially clear in the screenplay, though. After the battle is over, Newt's creatures help with a mass obliviation spell, which ultimately has to include Jacob (don't worry, Queenie re-introduces herself later), and Newt returns to Britain to write his book, promising Tina that he'll come back.
Yeah... there's a lot of plot. The magical creatures plot is pretty good. The Second Salem plot doesn't quite work, and the obscurus plot is melodramatic to the point of being unintentional self-parody. It reads like about a million poor-ickle-Draco fanfics. But the rest of the movie is quite charming.
Character: Newt is just awesome. Awkward, a little annoying. He's Sherlock Holmes-ian in his inability to fit in. Smart and kind-hearted as well. His real purpose in America is to release a thunderbird named Frank back into the wilds (it's Frank who saves the day in the end), and he is willing to die to protect his creatures. He's also friends with an adorable bowtruckle. He's not so good with Tina and Queenie (possible romantic heartbreak in his past), but he's delightful with Jacob. Jacob himself is a great addition to the universe. I thought for a while that he might be excused from obliviation, but he isn't. He's gobsmacked by the magical world, but he keeps up and works with Newt all along. Tina -- a bit insecure after her sacking, but determined and well-meaning, and able to change her ideas about Newt as she sees the truth of the situation. Legilmens Queenie is a little pushy, but funny and appealing.
Most of the American wizarding government has pretty short shrift. Graves, the persona Grindelwald is using, is more than a little over-the-top, but I'm guessing, with Johnny Depp taking over the Grindelwald role, that the man is supposed to be over-the-top. The less said about the Second Salem group, the better. I don't mean, "Wow, they're unpleasant." They're villains, that would be allowed. I mean, they're soap opera villains, with motives so paper-thin that I couldn't suspend my disbelief over them.
Theme: Don't suppress your talents and gifts, or require others to do so. Not a bad theme. I imagine anyone who's been told to give up an aspiration to be in the arts feels it, or really anyone who has a particular talent that's being hidden. All of the smart kids who feel they have to play dumb to get along, all of the creative ones whose ideas are shot down as absurd, all of the hopefuls ones told to get real.
Setting: New York City is a super odd setting for that theme, though. I mean, the essence of New York is not letting anyone hold you down. You have a city of... what was it in the 20s, three million? Every one of them chasing down one dream or another. The only city less likely for the "don't suppress your gifts" theme would be L.A. (Unless you're talking about a gift as a nuclear scientist, I guess, but in terms of municipal mythos... not so much.) We didn't see a lot of the American wizarding world, which I'm glad of because I prefer to imagine it for myself, but it seemed relatively interesting.
The other setting is the inside of Newt's suitcase, which is full of magical environments for the beasts. It has the wonder of Hogwarts in the earlier episodes, and I'd dig an entire movie set in the suitcase.
Style: This movie is in the same style as all of the later Potter movies, with the same effects and design, and, outside of the suitcase, the same bleak, gray undertones so common in pop movies today. I have no idea why this is a thing, but there you have it. I guess there's no getting around it. (Except that Rogue One kind of does... but that's for later.)
So, Fantastic Beasts. As always, please recall that I review WITH SPOILERS. There will not be immediate pre-warnings or blanking out.
The verdict? Eh.... not bad.
Enjoyable, actually. It's a story about grown-ups in Potterworld, which is neat. It's in a new setting, which is also neat. Eddie Redmayne is a blast, and the critters are cool.
But...
I don't know. Something didn't entirely click.
So, the elements of the story are all not bad.
Plot: Newt Scamander, author of future!Harry's textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, arrives in New York in 1926, carrying a suitcase full of magical creatures. The dark wizard Grindelwald is on the loose, but Scamander doesn't have much to say about it. Meanwhile, in New York, a very explosive magical force is destroying a lot of things, and it's being blamed on gas leaks. A former Auror named Tina Goldstein (related to Anthony Goldstein, later of Hogwarts?) is investigating a muggle (non-maj... was there any reason for Americans to use a different term for this? That one's pretty clunky, so I'll just use Muggle) group called Second Salem, which is calling for the destruction of the wizarding world (though of course, no one else believes they exist). One of Newt's critters -- a Niffler -- gets free in a bank and causes havoc, which sends Tina after Newt. Meanwhile, Newt bumps into a Muggle named Jacob Kowalski, and they accidentally switch suitcases. Jacob doesn't know what's happening, and several creatures escape. Tina brings Newt in, but is ignored by the upper echelons of MACUSA (the American wizarding government), and they go to find Jacob, though it's too late to stop the escape. Tina brings both men back to the apartment she shares with her sister Queenie, who immediately falls for the kindly Jacob. Then there's another attack by the violent force, this time killing a young politician, and for a time, suspicion falls on Newt's creatures. He explains that the force is an obscurus, a violent expression of suppressed magic, but they don't believe him and sentence both him and Tina to death for breaking the statute of secrecy and possibly causing a war with Muggles. They're rescued by Queenie and Jacob, and it all comes to a fight with the obscurus, which is the magical energy of an abused teenage boy who was raised by the head of Second Salem. The MACUSA wizard who's been in charge of the case -- who's been blocking the heroes at every step -- turns out to be Grindelwald in disguise, and he wanted to start a war because he wants to dominate Muggles, as we know from the books. His position is not made especially clear in the screenplay, though. After the battle is over, Newt's creatures help with a mass obliviation spell, which ultimately has to include Jacob (don't worry, Queenie re-introduces herself later), and Newt returns to Britain to write his book, promising Tina that he'll come back.
Yeah... there's a lot of plot. The magical creatures plot is pretty good. The Second Salem plot doesn't quite work, and the obscurus plot is melodramatic to the point of being unintentional self-parody. It reads like about a million poor-ickle-Draco fanfics. But the rest of the movie is quite charming.
Character: Newt is just awesome. Awkward, a little annoying. He's Sherlock Holmes-ian in his inability to fit in. Smart and kind-hearted as well. His real purpose in America is to release a thunderbird named Frank back into the wilds (it's Frank who saves the day in the end), and he is willing to die to protect his creatures. He's also friends with an adorable bowtruckle. He's not so good with Tina and Queenie (possible romantic heartbreak in his past), but he's delightful with Jacob. Jacob himself is a great addition to the universe. I thought for a while that he might be excused from obliviation, but he isn't. He's gobsmacked by the magical world, but he keeps up and works with Newt all along. Tina -- a bit insecure after her sacking, but determined and well-meaning, and able to change her ideas about Newt as she sees the truth of the situation. Legilmens Queenie is a little pushy, but funny and appealing.
Most of the American wizarding government has pretty short shrift. Graves, the persona Grindelwald is using, is more than a little over-the-top, but I'm guessing, with Johnny Depp taking over the Grindelwald role, that the man is supposed to be over-the-top. The less said about the Second Salem group, the better. I don't mean, "Wow, they're unpleasant." They're villains, that would be allowed. I mean, they're soap opera villains, with motives so paper-thin that I couldn't suspend my disbelief over them.
Theme: Don't suppress your talents and gifts, or require others to do so. Not a bad theme. I imagine anyone who's been told to give up an aspiration to be in the arts feels it, or really anyone who has a particular talent that's being hidden. All of the smart kids who feel they have to play dumb to get along, all of the creative ones whose ideas are shot down as absurd, all of the hopefuls ones told to get real.
Setting: New York City is a super odd setting for that theme, though. I mean, the essence of New York is not letting anyone hold you down. You have a city of... what was it in the 20s, three million? Every one of them chasing down one dream or another. The only city less likely for the "don't suppress your gifts" theme would be L.A. (Unless you're talking about a gift as a nuclear scientist, I guess, but in terms of municipal mythos... not so much.) We didn't see a lot of the American wizarding world, which I'm glad of because I prefer to imagine it for myself, but it seemed relatively interesting.
The other setting is the inside of Newt's suitcase, which is full of magical environments for the beasts. It has the wonder of Hogwarts in the earlier episodes, and I'd dig an entire movie set in the suitcase.
Style: This movie is in the same style as all of the later Potter movies, with the same effects and design, and, outside of the suitcase, the same bleak, gray undertones so common in pop movies today. I have no idea why this is a thing, but there you have it. I guess there's no getting around it. (Except that Rogue One kind of does... but that's for later.)
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle, by Rick Riordan
Spoilers, lots of them, as always.
Spoiler space...
Spoiler space...
Spoiler space...
Okay, if you're still reading, you're going to get spoiled.
I adore Rick Riordan's Greek mythverse, in case you haven't noticed by the number of reviews. The man has an excellent grasp of the mythology, and he loves to throw in even more great tidbits as he learns them. The books have a great sense of humor, and a lot of genuine heart, too.
The Trials of Apollo is the third and final quintology of the series, which began with Percy Jackson and the Olympians and continued the Heroes of Olympus. Here, Riordan takes a fairly obscure pair of myths about Apollo being turned mortal as punishment from Zeus, and updates them into the contemporary world. Apollo, in trouble for letting his oracle set a prophecy in motion, comes crashing down into a garbagey alley in New York, as a sixteen year old mortal boy with acne. He has no idea how to regain his godhood, so he asks for Percy's help to get to Camp Half-Blood, and there, quests for the Grove of Dodona (the titular Hidden Oracle), because it's the only place where a good prophecy might be found a the moment (Apollo is the god of prophecy, among many other things, and neglectfully let his oracles be taken by a hostile force).
I'm going to be blunt: The beginning is rough here. The first several chapters had me doubting Riordan, as Apollo's voice is almost parodic, and the new character, Meg (a street urchin who protects him from bullies and then claims his service), is... well, irritating. And not just in Apollo's point of view. I was irritated at even being asked to care about this one.
But I stuck with it, because the first book of PJO started a little rough, too, and the series ultimately became quite good. In this book, things take a turn for the better when Apollo reaches Camp Half-Blood and begins to deal with his somewhat complicated relationship with his own half-blood children, now his own age or even older. This is when he begins to develop his own voice, and it's actually quite winning.
If you're hoping for a lot of check-in with older characters, keep hoping. Percy appears at a couple of key points, and Nico is a small presence throughout (he's dating Apollo's son). Another member of the crew of the Argo II shows up at the end, with an implicit promise of more in the next book. Everyone else is just name-checked. Apollo lampshades it by wondering where the A-listers are, but it still feels a little bit of a cheat.
Elements.
Style:
It has the usual Riordan touches, acknowledging the absurdity of the situation and using sarcasm and wry humor to make it feel like, yes, this is how modern people would react to these elements of Greek myth. The chapter titles are done in deliberately bad haiku (god of poetry, of course). The most dangerous of all prophecies are delivered as limericks, which we learn by the horrified reactions of Apollo and his oracle, Rachel Dare, to a limerick delivered by the Grove. There's a talking arrow that gives Apollo instructions in Shakespeare-esque dialogue, and Rhea appears as a first wave feminist hippie who thinks the young goddesses coming up don't really understand the struggle, since they weren't asked to stand by their men while he ate their children. Basically, Riordan gives good Riordan on the tropes of the 'verse.
Like I said, the beginning is off-kilter. Apollo as a character in the earlier books had a certain grandiose way of talking, which is amusing in itself as dialogue, but as interior monologue, it's grating very quickly. It's understandable that he'd still think of himself as a god who ought to be worshiped instead of tossed in garbage, but there's a kind of self-consciousness to the prose that makes me feel more like Riordan is making fun of his protag than that he's dealing with the protag as a character. This starts to self-correct as Apollo becomes more human.
The interesting thing about it is that Apollo turns out to actually be a very decent guy, and the less he brags, the more apparent that becomes. At first, he's talking about how awesome he is, but later, he decides that he's a terrible person, that he's not as worthy as his children, that he's nothing but a blowhard... but throughout the whole thing, we've seen him quite consistently doing the right thing, worrying about his children when they're taken, befriending his son Will (who he is happy to play second fiddle to as a healer), being deeply proud of his daughter Kayla and his son Austin (an archer and a musician, respectively), staying loyal to Meg even when her behavior is open to question, and generally being a good egg. Like his inability to be a perfect archer or play music perfectly, he is focused on his failings while the text makes clear that he's succeeding wildly. It's a very good example of unreliable narration.
Setting:
A garbagey alley, Percy's apartment, an orchard on Long Island, and Camp Half-Blood. This isn't a very setting-heavy book. The labyrinth is back, and will likely be more of a plot point later on.
Theme:
I'm not sure I can say, thematically, what it's all about, Alfie. There's a lot of focus on destiny and on innate talents. Maybe some notion of finding out what you're really good for, getting to that middle ground between "I'm the greatest god that ever was" and "I'm an unworthy worm." But if I were to put a circle around weakness in this particular story, it's that I feel like this first book doesn't know what it wants to be about. The same was true of The Lightning Thief, except that the plot there had more urgency. I could almost feel Riordan groping for a theme. I think it will come together more in subsequent books, because there were a few places where it was touching on something. I just can't quite put my finger on it.
Plot:
Eh. There's a lot of exposition here, and the plot skips around a little bit. Meg rescues Apollo, then they're with Percy, then there's a problem at camp (kids disappearing into the woods), and there's a problem with prophecy and...
I'll get this over with. The new bad guys are semi-deified Roman emperors, led by Nero, who are trying to be a Triumvirate (Apollo reminds Nero that this never ends well). They are the financiers behind the events of the other books, and I have to admit, I'm getting bad season six Buffy vibes from them. Meg's connection to them is painfully obvious from the start, and Riordan still treated it like a big reveal. Not loving this development.
Other than that, there's the search for the Grove, an encounter with giant ants, and a fight with a giant bronze statue of Apollo, which annoys him because it's got a neck beard. Also, he finds himself irritated that it's not wearing underwear, even though he knows they almost never do. Because it's weird having a battle with a 50 foot tall naked bronze version of yourself, I guess.
Finally, Apollo gets a prophecy to set him on the path to his next adventure, which is going to at least be started in the company of a crewman on the Argo, his girlfriend, and another bronze automaton.
Characters:
Since this largely exists to introduce the character situation, that's where the book spends most of its time.
Unfortunately, the old characters don't appear much, and the new characters are kind of duds.
Not good:
Meg McCaffrey is a twelve-year-old half-blood (daughter of Demeter, which for some reason was treated as a big deal to Apollo), who has been living on the streets with a protector. (Three guesses.) She's not actively unpleasant, but she's also just... not there. We're asked to care about her immediately, and the character gives us no compelling reason for it.
Nero... I can't with this villain. There is no point at which I care about what he's doing. Maybe that will change; I don't know.
Percy and Chiron: Are there. So is a pregnant Sally Jackson. None of them do anything particularly impressive. Rachel is a smidge better (she's jealous when she finds out that Apollo has other oracles), but she doesn't do much. She's largely been sublimated to Meg. (What I would have done: Rachel's father or his business partner turns out to be one of the Triumvirate. She's the one who rescues Apollo and gets him to camp, with Percy's help, and goes on the adventure with him.)
Much better:
Will Solace, Apollo's healer son, started to come into focus at the end of The Blood of Olympus, when he starts flirting with Nico, and, more importantly, actually standing up to his Prince of Darkness routine and making him interact with the world. Here, Nico is a satellite while Will comes into his own. He's head counselor to the Apollo cabin, which means he has to keep his head when things go wrong (which they always do), and he feels very responsible for the well being of his siblings and the camp as a whole. He's a naturally good doctor, and he's the first one Apollo makes a real connection with. His siblings, Kayla and Austin, are less prominent (they are mostly missing for the book, as pieces for Apollo to rescue), but all three of them turn out to be caring and generous kids, who are sympathetic to Apollo and immediately behave as real family to him, which isn't always a given. (Riordan is pretty frank about how badly the Greek gods treated their kids.)
It's in Apollo's interactions with his kids that he becomes a very interesting character. He absolutely adores them. He chastises himself for being a terrible father (I have a feeling that sometime in the series, we're going to get some information about this that will change perceptions), but he loves it when Will, like his other son Asclepius, surpasses his skill as a medic, and he is absolutely delighted by the others as well, calling Austin his beautiful son, and praising Kayla's archery skills. He has to go on a quest, but he wants to stay with them, to be part of his cabin and part of life at camp. It wasn't what I expected in the first book. I figured that would be part of the process of character development. But it's there at the start, and I'm very interested in where it goes.
In general, it's a shaky but promising start. I trust Riordan to deliver on the rest of the series.
Spoiler space...
Spoiler space...
Spoiler space...
Okay, if you're still reading, you're going to get spoiled.
I adore Rick Riordan's Greek mythverse, in case you haven't noticed by the number of reviews. The man has an excellent grasp of the mythology, and he loves to throw in even more great tidbits as he learns them. The books have a great sense of humor, and a lot of genuine heart, too.
The Trials of Apollo is the third and final quintology of the series, which began with Percy Jackson and the Olympians and continued the Heroes of Olympus. Here, Riordan takes a fairly obscure pair of myths about Apollo being turned mortal as punishment from Zeus, and updates them into the contemporary world. Apollo, in trouble for letting his oracle set a prophecy in motion, comes crashing down into a garbagey alley in New York, as a sixteen year old mortal boy with acne. He has no idea how to regain his godhood, so he asks for Percy's help to get to Camp Half-Blood, and there, quests for the Grove of Dodona (the titular Hidden Oracle), because it's the only place where a good prophecy might be found a the moment (Apollo is the god of prophecy, among many other things, and neglectfully let his oracles be taken by a hostile force).
I'm going to be blunt: The beginning is rough here. The first several chapters had me doubting Riordan, as Apollo's voice is almost parodic, and the new character, Meg (a street urchin who protects him from bullies and then claims his service), is... well, irritating. And not just in Apollo's point of view. I was irritated at even being asked to care about this one.
But I stuck with it, because the first book of PJO started a little rough, too, and the series ultimately became quite good. In this book, things take a turn for the better when Apollo reaches Camp Half-Blood and begins to deal with his somewhat complicated relationship with his own half-blood children, now his own age or even older. This is when he begins to develop his own voice, and it's actually quite winning.
If you're hoping for a lot of check-in with older characters, keep hoping. Percy appears at a couple of key points, and Nico is a small presence throughout (he's dating Apollo's son). Another member of the crew of the Argo II shows up at the end, with an implicit promise of more in the next book. Everyone else is just name-checked. Apollo lampshades it by wondering where the A-listers are, but it still feels a little bit of a cheat.
Elements.
Style:
It has the usual Riordan touches, acknowledging the absurdity of the situation and using sarcasm and wry humor to make it feel like, yes, this is how modern people would react to these elements of Greek myth. The chapter titles are done in deliberately bad haiku (god of poetry, of course). The most dangerous of all prophecies are delivered as limericks, which we learn by the horrified reactions of Apollo and his oracle, Rachel Dare, to a limerick delivered by the Grove. There's a talking arrow that gives Apollo instructions in Shakespeare-esque dialogue, and Rhea appears as a first wave feminist hippie who thinks the young goddesses coming up don't really understand the struggle, since they weren't asked to stand by their men while he ate their children. Basically, Riordan gives good Riordan on the tropes of the 'verse.
Like I said, the beginning is off-kilter. Apollo as a character in the earlier books had a certain grandiose way of talking, which is amusing in itself as dialogue, but as interior monologue, it's grating very quickly. It's understandable that he'd still think of himself as a god who ought to be worshiped instead of tossed in garbage, but there's a kind of self-consciousness to the prose that makes me feel more like Riordan is making fun of his protag than that he's dealing with the protag as a character. This starts to self-correct as Apollo becomes more human.
The interesting thing about it is that Apollo turns out to actually be a very decent guy, and the less he brags, the more apparent that becomes. At first, he's talking about how awesome he is, but later, he decides that he's a terrible person, that he's not as worthy as his children, that he's nothing but a blowhard... but throughout the whole thing, we've seen him quite consistently doing the right thing, worrying about his children when they're taken, befriending his son Will (who he is happy to play second fiddle to as a healer), being deeply proud of his daughter Kayla and his son Austin (an archer and a musician, respectively), staying loyal to Meg even when her behavior is open to question, and generally being a good egg. Like his inability to be a perfect archer or play music perfectly, he is focused on his failings while the text makes clear that he's succeeding wildly. It's a very good example of unreliable narration.
Setting:
A garbagey alley, Percy's apartment, an orchard on Long Island, and Camp Half-Blood. This isn't a very setting-heavy book. The labyrinth is back, and will likely be more of a plot point later on.
Theme:
I'm not sure I can say, thematically, what it's all about, Alfie. There's a lot of focus on destiny and on innate talents. Maybe some notion of finding out what you're really good for, getting to that middle ground between "I'm the greatest god that ever was" and "I'm an unworthy worm." But if I were to put a circle around weakness in this particular story, it's that I feel like this first book doesn't know what it wants to be about. The same was true of The Lightning Thief, except that the plot there had more urgency. I could almost feel Riordan groping for a theme. I think it will come together more in subsequent books, because there were a few places where it was touching on something. I just can't quite put my finger on it.
Plot:
Eh. There's a lot of exposition here, and the plot skips around a little bit. Meg rescues Apollo, then they're with Percy, then there's a problem at camp (kids disappearing into the woods), and there's a problem with prophecy and...
I'll get this over with. The new bad guys are semi-deified Roman emperors, led by Nero, who are trying to be a Triumvirate (Apollo reminds Nero that this never ends well). They are the financiers behind the events of the other books, and I have to admit, I'm getting bad season six Buffy vibes from them. Meg's connection to them is painfully obvious from the start, and Riordan still treated it like a big reveal. Not loving this development.
Other than that, there's the search for the Grove, an encounter with giant ants, and a fight with a giant bronze statue of Apollo, which annoys him because it's got a neck beard. Also, he finds himself irritated that it's not wearing underwear, even though he knows they almost never do. Because it's weird having a battle with a 50 foot tall naked bronze version of yourself, I guess.
Finally, Apollo gets a prophecy to set him on the path to his next adventure, which is going to at least be started in the company of a crewman on the Argo, his girlfriend, and another bronze automaton.
Characters:
Since this largely exists to introduce the character situation, that's where the book spends most of its time.
Unfortunately, the old characters don't appear much, and the new characters are kind of duds.
Not good:
Meg McCaffrey is a twelve-year-old half-blood (daughter of Demeter, which for some reason was treated as a big deal to Apollo), who has been living on the streets with a protector. (Three guesses.) She's not actively unpleasant, but she's also just... not there. We're asked to care about her immediately, and the character gives us no compelling reason for it.
Nero... I can't with this villain. There is no point at which I care about what he's doing. Maybe that will change; I don't know.
Percy and Chiron: Are there. So is a pregnant Sally Jackson. None of them do anything particularly impressive. Rachel is a smidge better (she's jealous when she finds out that Apollo has other oracles), but she doesn't do much. She's largely been sublimated to Meg. (What I would have done: Rachel's father or his business partner turns out to be one of the Triumvirate. She's the one who rescues Apollo and gets him to camp, with Percy's help, and goes on the adventure with him.)
Much better:
Will Solace, Apollo's healer son, started to come into focus at the end of The Blood of Olympus, when he starts flirting with Nico, and, more importantly, actually standing up to his Prince of Darkness routine and making him interact with the world. Here, Nico is a satellite while Will comes into his own. He's head counselor to the Apollo cabin, which means he has to keep his head when things go wrong (which they always do), and he feels very responsible for the well being of his siblings and the camp as a whole. He's a naturally good doctor, and he's the first one Apollo makes a real connection with. His siblings, Kayla and Austin, are less prominent (they are mostly missing for the book, as pieces for Apollo to rescue), but all three of them turn out to be caring and generous kids, who are sympathetic to Apollo and immediately behave as real family to him, which isn't always a given. (Riordan is pretty frank about how badly the Greek gods treated their kids.)
It's in Apollo's interactions with his kids that he becomes a very interesting character. He absolutely adores them. He chastises himself for being a terrible father (I have a feeling that sometime in the series, we're going to get some information about this that will change perceptions), but he loves it when Will, like his other son Asclepius, surpasses his skill as a medic, and he is absolutely delighted by the others as well, calling Austin his beautiful son, and praising Kayla's archery skills. He has to go on a quest, but he wants to stay with them, to be part of his cabin and part of life at camp. It wasn't what I expected in the first book. I figured that would be part of the process of character development. But it's there at the start, and I'm very interested in where it goes.
In general, it's a shaky but promising start. I trust Riordan to deliver on the rest of the series.
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