Spoilers, lots of them, as always.
Spoiler space...
Spoiler space...
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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.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Ender's Game Prequels, by Card and Johnston
I was in either my junior or senior year of high school, if I recall correctly. It was, at any rate, the first science fiction convention I was going to go to, with a friend of mine and her mother. One of the guests of honor was Orson Scott Card, who I'd never heard of. My friend shoved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead into my hands and said, "YOU HAVE TO READ THESE."
I more or less missed the convention, curled up in bed, reading the story of Ender Wiggin as it existed at the time. Like many an academically gifted kid before and since, I gulped it down. Yes. This was a true story. It's a nutty story about alien invasions and a convoluted plot about having to believe a real war was a game because only a brilliant child who didn't know he was doing it could win it, but it was also a real story about a kid who was isolated and lonely, whose ambiguous relationship with the power structures left him with no one who understood him, with the exception of one kid, possibly even smarter, but younger and less socially adept. It was the story of the equally bright brother and sister, who weren't chosen for the program for other reasons, but who felt frustrated, bored, and out-of-place in an everyday school. And proceeded to take the world over by interesting uses of "the nets," a fairly prescient notion of an internet as it would become in a few years (and may become again, if it gets stepped on and reined in a lot).
Someone knew how all of that felt. It was repeated in Speaker for the Dead, with young Novinha, though that novel was less interested in the visceral character creation and more interested in the speculative part of speculative fiction.
The following sequel novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, had strong points to them, but never reached the intensity of EG and SftD. I liked a lot of the introduced characters, but the speculation got more than a little odd. (Beating lightspeed travel by wishing was probably the worst, though the philosophical wrangling over a lethal but possibly sentient virus also got a little tiresome.) Then there was the parallel series, beginning with Ender's Shadow, telling the story of Bean, the aforementioned younger child who became Ender's friend. I liked many things in the Shadow series, and disliked many things in it, about in equal measure. Bean's story was too much of a trauma conga line, basically, and I would have liked more of Peter's plot and less of the ridiculous villain Achilles de Flandres. Seriously, I kept expecting him to grow a mustache just so he could twirl it absurdly; the problem wasn't that he was scary. It was that I never believed in him for a second past his initial moment of threat in Bean's early story. He was a believable threat in that context. Everything after it was just eye-roll-worthy.
So basically, I didn't jump straight into the Formic Wars series, which are the prequel to the main series, telling the story of the First Formic Invasion, co-written by Aaron Johnston (I neither know nor care who wrote what in the story). I finally decided to give it a go.
The first book (Earth Unaware), largely concerned with miners out in the Kuiper Belt, left me vaguely intrigued, but I wouldn't have been in a rush for the second, except that I had nothing else pressing on my list. It wasn't bad, per se, just kind of a pedestrian story. We get to meet the main players, including rich mining magnate Lem Jukes, working class "free miner" Victor Delgado, and Wit O'Toole, the head of the international strike force which would obviously become the international fleet. Lem and his dramas aren't thrilling, though there's some interesting work with perspective and unreliable narration. Victor is a good character, though his story arc seems little herky jerky for the first half of the novel. Wit's the most interesting, and in the most interesting setting (Earth... unaware!), plus he gets us to the only known character, Mazer Rackham, who is rejected from the strike force... but he also gets the least screen time.
The second and third books, which are really a single story, from the actual invasion through the destruction of the scout ship, are much better.
Or maybe I just really like the action scenes, and they are super action heavy. I learned for myself how difficult action scenes are to write, and I have a great deal of respect for people who can write them well, and use them to advance the story and the characters. It's much harder to have a character grow while you're also maneuvering him through battles than have him gaze at his naval for a few chapters and tell you all about himself. They also introduce a Cardian character on the level of Ender or Bean in young Bingwen, a boy trapped in the devastation when the Formics begin their attack in southeast China. Through the course of the books, he attaches himself to Mazer and later to the strike team, but is most striking in the third book, when, with the help of a medical device designed for soldiers on the battlefield, becomes a de facto medic. All of the characters make their way into the same sphere for the final attack... and then we're left with a young woman discovering, after the devastation, that the second invasion is on the way.
I will be joining the series in progress this May, when The Swarm comes out.
I more or less missed the convention, curled up in bed, reading the story of Ender Wiggin as it existed at the time. Like many an academically gifted kid before and since, I gulped it down. Yes. This was a true story. It's a nutty story about alien invasions and a convoluted plot about having to believe a real war was a game because only a brilliant child who didn't know he was doing it could win it, but it was also a real story about a kid who was isolated and lonely, whose ambiguous relationship with the power structures left him with no one who understood him, with the exception of one kid, possibly even smarter, but younger and less socially adept. It was the story of the equally bright brother and sister, who weren't chosen for the program for other reasons, but who felt frustrated, bored, and out-of-place in an everyday school. And proceeded to take the world over by interesting uses of "the nets," a fairly prescient notion of an internet as it would become in a few years (and may become again, if it gets stepped on and reined in a lot).
Someone knew how all of that felt. It was repeated in Speaker for the Dead, with young Novinha, though that novel was less interested in the visceral character creation and more interested in the speculative part of speculative fiction.
The following sequel novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, had strong points to them, but never reached the intensity of EG and SftD. I liked a lot of the introduced characters, but the speculation got more than a little odd. (Beating lightspeed travel by wishing was probably the worst, though the philosophical wrangling over a lethal but possibly sentient virus also got a little tiresome.) Then there was the parallel series, beginning with Ender's Shadow, telling the story of Bean, the aforementioned younger child who became Ender's friend. I liked many things in the Shadow series, and disliked many things in it, about in equal measure. Bean's story was too much of a trauma conga line, basically, and I would have liked more of Peter's plot and less of the ridiculous villain Achilles de Flandres. Seriously, I kept expecting him to grow a mustache just so he could twirl it absurdly; the problem wasn't that he was scary. It was that I never believed in him for a second past his initial moment of threat in Bean's early story. He was a believable threat in that context. Everything after it was just eye-roll-worthy.
So basically, I didn't jump straight into the Formic Wars series, which are the prequel to the main series, telling the story of the First Formic Invasion, co-written by Aaron Johnston (I neither know nor care who wrote what in the story). I finally decided to give it a go.
The first book (Earth Unaware), largely concerned with miners out in the Kuiper Belt, left me vaguely intrigued, but I wouldn't have been in a rush for the second, except that I had nothing else pressing on my list. It wasn't bad, per se, just kind of a pedestrian story. We get to meet the main players, including rich mining magnate Lem Jukes, working class "free miner" Victor Delgado, and Wit O'Toole, the head of the international strike force which would obviously become the international fleet. Lem and his dramas aren't thrilling, though there's some interesting work with perspective and unreliable narration. Victor is a good character, though his story arc seems little herky jerky for the first half of the novel. Wit's the most interesting, and in the most interesting setting (Earth... unaware!), plus he gets us to the only known character, Mazer Rackham, who is rejected from the strike force... but he also gets the least screen time.
The second and third books, which are really a single story, from the actual invasion through the destruction of the scout ship, are much better.
Or maybe I just really like the action scenes, and they are super action heavy. I learned for myself how difficult action scenes are to write, and I have a great deal of respect for people who can write them well, and use them to advance the story and the characters. It's much harder to have a character grow while you're also maneuvering him through battles than have him gaze at his naval for a few chapters and tell you all about himself. They also introduce a Cardian character on the level of Ender or Bean in young Bingwen, a boy trapped in the devastation when the Formics begin their attack in southeast China. Through the course of the books, he attaches himself to Mazer and later to the strike team, but is most striking in the third book, when, with the help of a medical device designed for soldiers on the battlefield, becomes a de facto medic. All of the characters make their way into the same sphere for the final attack... and then we're left with a young woman discovering, after the devastation, that the second invasion is on the way.
I will be joining the series in progress this May, when The Swarm comes out.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review
Star Wars was my first fandom.
I was six (almost seven) when it came out, and Mom and I went to see it with our neighbors, a boy my age (who was my best buddy at the time) and his mom. It was showing in the next town over, and by the time we got there, the line was stretched around the block twice. Apparently, fire regulations weren't quite as stringent in 1977, because we all got into the single theater, though we little kids had to sit up front on the theater floor. When it started up, the screen took up even beyond what my peripheral vision could catch. It was the entire world, and it was beautiful. My buddy and I spent the ride back quoting lines to each other ("Someone get this big walking carpet out of my way!"), and it became a major, major event right up until RotJ in 1983. My later best friends and I formed a club, and wrote our very own Mary Sue fanfics for it. (Yes, they predated the internet, and it was astoundingly horrible, and I loved it and still do.)
I don't know if it's possible now to explain it, in a time when blockbusters come and go "like busboys in a restaurant" (as another of our cult movies put it). By the time part three of a series comes around, people are barely talking about it anymore, and there's only a year between them. The attention span was considerably longer in 1977. Star Wars, well... it was what gave us our first generational identity. It bound us, penetrated us, and bound the generation together, so to speak. We were still buying toys from the first movie when the second one came out three years later. When my college ran the trilogy -- all of us within a couple of years of one another in age -- the lecture hall they showed it in was packed to the rafters, with people sitting on the stairs and standing up against the walls. For hours. Quoting along with favorite lines, cheering at the good guys, hissing at the bad guys, and, possibly the only time in my undergraduate experience, with no rancor between factions at all. (Yes, yes, there was the Rancor in RotJ, but that's a different thing.) (ETA: I have been corrected. Apparently, a left/right fistfight almost broke out over the "Wars not make one great" line. I must have missed that in my own bliss-out.) I'm sure people later went on and on about how that awful blockbuster thing was reactive or some such nonsense, because that's what people do, but in the room, it was all love.
Then, in 1999, the prequels came out. There were people who didn't like them, but I wasn't one of them. I adored TPM and AotC. (I thought RotS dropped the ball on the thematic and narrative arc in a major way, for no discernible purpose, but this review isn't that review.)
And now, the third trilogy is here. I wasn't excited. I'm maybe still not excited, but largely because I was satisfied with the ending of Return of the Jedi. It was a fisher king thing, and I was happy that when Anakin was restored to himself, the galaxy was restored, because in a mythical sense, he was the galaxy. (And yes, I did understand that at twelve, not later on, though I didn't have the frame of reference for it.)
I saw The Force Awakens today. I wasn't so unexcited that I didn't make sure to get tickets the first week, after all. I review with spoilers, so, um... here's a picture and some graphics to take up space if you want to stop reading now.
Here I am dancing with one of my SW buddies, dressed up as our Mary Sues.
Still on the same screen? More space-filler? Here are our rebel note-passing codes, decrypted after all these years, so I hope our vitally important messages have been destroyed in the interim. This should be enough to take up a full screen, so proceed beyond with caution...
Okay, still here?
I will assume that (a) you have seen The Force Awakens or, (b) like me, you rather enjoy spoilers, and think that any movie worth seeing is worth seeing even if you know what happens in it. They will be thick from this point out, so this is the last chance to hit the back button.
First the verdict: Eh. Not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, I had fun. I just wasn't all that engaged in the experience.
Plot
The Empire wasn't utterly destroyed at the end of RotJ, and now survives in the smaller, resurgent First Order, which seeks to crush the Resistance, supported by the Republic. Luke lost an apprentice, who killed everyone, so he went into hiding, and now people are trying to find him. The apprentice in question was Han and Leia's son, and, as might be imagined, that didn't do great things for their relationship, and they now operating mostly as separate entities. A map to Luke's location surfaces, and is hidden in a droid, and a new power trio assembles to protect it, get it to the resistance, and, ultimately, use it. The fallen apprentice, Ben Solo (aka, Kylo Ren) also wants it, so he can track Luke down and destroy the Jedi once and for all. Also, they've turned an entire planet into a Death Star that can destroy entire planetary systems, because one planet at a time is just passe now, apparently. I'm a going to go ahead and put an extra level of spoiler here, just in case you don't want to know about a character death:
When Han confronts Ben, Ben -- who is genuinely conflicted -- uses his inner conflict to get close to Han, and promptly kills him with a lightsaber, then throws him down one of the 'verse's trademark bottomless chasms.
I still think the story was over with the restoration of Anakin's soul at the end of RotJ -- that was kind of the whole point of Luke's choices there, and I am and have always been a Luke girl. I was fond of Leia as a tough girl and okay with Han, but I always felt that time away from Luke was just time wasted. ;p So I have always been fine with his moral choice to heal his father bringing about the redemption of the galaxy by, essentially, magical means.
That wouldn't have left a story for them to tell, my old Mary Sue aside. She was fun, but didn't have a good enough story to carry a franchise. (We were fourteen; the Sues barely had enough story to carry a good cosplay.) So they went in the more realistic direction that the Empire was dealt a serious blow, but didn't just fold up. I can't fault them for that, and they did a better job than the EU novels I've read. For what they chose to go with as a premise, they did a good job with the plotting. I don't think they developed the relationships between old and new characters particularly well, and didn't buy the new character's exaggerated mourning for an old character they'd only just met, but that's a quibble.
I do wish that, instead of being "the resistance," they'd positioned the Republic as the power at this point, with the First Order (the new Sith, basically) and the Imperial remnants as a nasty underground force, if for no other reason than turning the tables. But they didn't. I'll make judgments based on how well they did what they decided to do, rather than carping about what I wish they'd decided to do. That's a kind of pointless critique.
Characters
Han Solo is the main old trilogy character seen here. Harrison Ford slips him on like a comfy pair of bedroom slippers, and I can believe this is a Han who's gone through thirty-two years and a couple of major losses, though the script doesn't establish them too well. (I think in its fear of telegraphing anything, it sacrificed emotional urgency.)
Chewie is, as always, at Han's side, and has a good sense of humor. Han uses his crossbow a couple of times, and it's a running gag that he's just figuring out that it's a powerful weapon.
Leia also appears as the leader of the resistance, and doesn't have much else to do, even though her son is the bad guy. Again, they lose some urgency on this front.
Luke appears at the end, and we don't know much at all, except that he's apparently spent an inordinate amount of time building stone stairs.
New characters, in order of appearance:
Po Dameron is a hotshot pilot who will undoubtedly have more of a role in the future, but who really isn't in this one all that much. He sets things in motion playing Leia's role of hiding information in a droid, in this case, a ball droid called BB-8. (Not sure how that's going to shorten. The Beeb is a thing, and so is the Biebs. I guess he'll just be Beebee?) The place he gets it from, on the planet of Jakku, is destroyed by stormtroopers, at which point we meet...
Finn, a boy taken from his family and raised under mental conditioning to be a stormtrooper, who nevertheless fights that conditioning and doesn't participate in the massacre. He is particularly noticed by Kylo Ren, who presumably senses the Force in him. He helps Po escape from captivity in stole TIE fighter, and they crash together on the planet, but get separated. Finn is one of the more interesting characters. He lies easily and humorously, but knows how to take responsibility. He's a tough fighter, and unlike Han in the first trilogy, doesn't dither about whether or not he wants to be good. He makes the call and acts according to his call for the remainder of the story, showing that he has the kind of strong will that the series values.
Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is a little bit over-the-top, and I'm not at all sure what his deal is. He's been seduced by the Dark Side, yes, and admits throughout that he feels the pull of the Light Side. He just doesn't have the emotional or symbolic weight to pull off the Anakin role, though. If he's rescued, even I couldn't find a way for it to symbolically repair the galaxy, though of course, it would make Leia happy, and that's good in itself. (Well, every soul saved from the Dark Side is a good thing, if only because it's one less source of power for the Dark Side.) Because we never knew him, it's a little hard to care about his conflict. You can't just say, "This is Han and Leia's son" and expect the audience to go, "Awwww." I want to know why he idolizes his grandfather's evil alter-ego, despite the fact that he should have had the whole story told to him all along. What the heck's wrong with Luke and Leia that they let it get that far? (And why in the GFFA would they keep the melted mask?)
The last major new character introduce is Rey, a scavenger girl on the planet of Jakku who, in Skywalker tradition, finds the droid and helps it get to the resistance. She was abandoned there by unnamed parents and has been counting days until their return, but accepts it very quickly when told by bartender Maz that she knows they're not really coming back. Here, Daisy Ridley is obviously going to carry the franchise, and she's good at it. I like her. I like Rey. I don't like the way they're playing the card of her identity as some kind of Sooper Sekrit thing that will be a big bombshell the way, "No, I am your father" was. You can't re-do that. It won't work. And if her father is Luke, what's the response? Yay? (Or, in my case if that turns out true, :eyeroll:). If she's Ben's twin and therefore Leia's daughter, then you get to, "And Han and Leia don't mention having lost a daughter as well... why?" If she's some descendant of Kenobi's, oh, yes. Good going, oh you paragon of faithfulness to the Order.
Look, she's obviously some connection to the family. That's how SW works. The Skywalker family is the GFFA. More to the point, they went to the trouble of scouring for an unknown actress who could easily play Natalie Portman's younger sister... or her actual double. Unless they're going to go with her being related to Sabe the decoy queen (Keira Knightley's character), then somewhere, she's connected to the Skywalkers. Maybe at some point, someone stole cells from poor Padme's body and they were sitting in a cloning vat for years, then someone decided to reactivate them. I don't know. But the virtual capering around going, "I've got a secret and you do-on't know it!" is deeply annoying. All it will do is cause fan wars so that large segments of the fandom will stalk off in a huff if their pet theories are wrong.
Kind of a quibble, though. It goes with my general theory of spoilers -- if knowing them actually spoils your enjoyment of a movie, then there's not much to the movie other than cheap surprise -- but it's not relevant to her as a character. As a character, I really like Rey a lot, and I loved that she got a seriously kick-ass lightsaber duel scene. I like that her interactions with Finn didn't try to mimic the bickering dynamic of Han and Leia. Actually I kind of love that -- they're both really excited about what they can do, and they hit it off right away. We don't see that often enough. I like that she seems to be the apex of the new trio without it being in any manner a romantic competition. And I like that she forgets that she needs to turn the blaster on before she can fire it. And that she looks at a droid and treats it as an individual. I could get into a Rey-based series, for the same reason that I'm a Luke girl: She's a hero whose choices I can buy as making all the difference.
Last and least, the new Big Bad, Snokes. Yes, the Big Bad is basically Darth Snookums. He appears as a giant hologram, and I kept thinking that Toto was going to show up and pull a curtain, revealing a funny little man in a green suit. This aspect needs serious work.
Setting:
Hmm. The setting wanders a bit, and I don't get nearly the sense of Jakku that I had of Tatooine. I can't for the life of me remember the names of the other systems. On the other hand, CGI has allowed them to create much more alien architecture and more varied landscapes, so it already seems more physically complete. But it needs some world-building in the future.
They've added some land-side aerial battles -- it's not all up in space. It gives some nice image work.
Style:
Abrams has done a good job re-creating the SW used-future style. Everything looks good; everything looks like it's in the same universe, except a few decades later. Narratively, this isn't quite on the ball, because it doesn't take the time to develop the simple themes first. (It's back to that emotional urgency question. This might have been a better second story.)
Theme:
I'm not sure, yet. Oh, the usual SW theme of choosing the light, no matter how tempting the darkness might be, but specific to this one... I just don't think we have enough information to guess on.
So, I'm going with "Not bad."
But for the record, I sat as far up front as I could. So far up that I couldn't see the edges of the screen with peripheral vision. For two hours, it was the whole world.
And yes... flaws or no, it was still beautiful.
I was six (almost seven) when it came out, and Mom and I went to see it with our neighbors, a boy my age (who was my best buddy at the time) and his mom. It was showing in the next town over, and by the time we got there, the line was stretched around the block twice. Apparently, fire regulations weren't quite as stringent in 1977, because we all got into the single theater, though we little kids had to sit up front on the theater floor. When it started up, the screen took up even beyond what my peripheral vision could catch. It was the entire world, and it was beautiful. My buddy and I spent the ride back quoting lines to each other ("Someone get this big walking carpet out of my way!"), and it became a major, major event right up until RotJ in 1983. My later best friends and I formed a club, and wrote our very own Mary Sue fanfics for it. (Yes, they predated the internet, and it was astoundingly horrible, and I loved it and still do.)
I don't know if it's possible now to explain it, in a time when blockbusters come and go "like busboys in a restaurant" (as another of our cult movies put it). By the time part three of a series comes around, people are barely talking about it anymore, and there's only a year between them. The attention span was considerably longer in 1977. Star Wars, well... it was what gave us our first generational identity. It bound us, penetrated us, and bound the generation together, so to speak. We were still buying toys from the first movie when the second one came out three years later. When my college ran the trilogy -- all of us within a couple of years of one another in age -- the lecture hall they showed it in was packed to the rafters, with people sitting on the stairs and standing up against the walls. For hours. Quoting along with favorite lines, cheering at the good guys, hissing at the bad guys, and, possibly the only time in my undergraduate experience, with no rancor between factions at all. (Yes, yes, there was the Rancor in RotJ, but that's a different thing.) (ETA: I have been corrected. Apparently, a left/right fistfight almost broke out over the "Wars not make one great" line. I must have missed that in my own bliss-out.) I'm sure people later went on and on about how that awful blockbuster thing was reactive or some such nonsense, because that's what people do, but in the room, it was all love.
Then, in 1999, the prequels came out. There were people who didn't like them, but I wasn't one of them. I adored TPM and AotC. (I thought RotS dropped the ball on the thematic and narrative arc in a major way, for no discernible purpose, but this review isn't that review.)
And now, the third trilogy is here. I wasn't excited. I'm maybe still not excited, but largely because I was satisfied with the ending of Return of the Jedi. It was a fisher king thing, and I was happy that when Anakin was restored to himself, the galaxy was restored, because in a mythical sense, he was the galaxy. (And yes, I did understand that at twelve, not later on, though I didn't have the frame of reference for it.)
I saw The Force Awakens today. I wasn't so unexcited that I didn't make sure to get tickets the first week, after all. I review with spoilers, so, um... here's a picture and some graphics to take up space if you want to stop reading now.
Here I am dancing with one of my SW buddies, dressed up as our Mary Sues.
Okay, still here?
I will assume that (a) you have seen The Force Awakens or, (b) like me, you rather enjoy spoilers, and think that any movie worth seeing is worth seeing even if you know what happens in it. They will be thick from this point out, so this is the last chance to hit the back button.
First the verdict: Eh. Not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, I had fun. I just wasn't all that engaged in the experience.
Plot
The Empire wasn't utterly destroyed at the end of RotJ, and now survives in the smaller, resurgent First Order, which seeks to crush the Resistance, supported by the Republic. Luke lost an apprentice, who killed everyone, so he went into hiding, and now people are trying to find him. The apprentice in question was Han and Leia's son, and, as might be imagined, that didn't do great things for their relationship, and they now operating mostly as separate entities. A map to Luke's location surfaces, and is hidden in a droid, and a new power trio assembles to protect it, get it to the resistance, and, ultimately, use it. The fallen apprentice, Ben Solo (aka, Kylo Ren) also wants it, so he can track Luke down and destroy the Jedi once and for all. Also, they've turned an entire planet into a Death Star that can destroy entire planetary systems, because one planet at a time is just passe now, apparently. I'm a going to go ahead and put an extra level of spoiler here, just in case you don't want to know about a character death:
When Han confronts Ben, Ben -- who is genuinely conflicted -- uses his inner conflict to get close to Han, and promptly kills him with a lightsaber, then throws him down one of the 'verse's trademark bottomless chasms.
I still think the story was over with the restoration of Anakin's soul at the end of RotJ -- that was kind of the whole point of Luke's choices there, and I am and have always been a Luke girl. I was fond of Leia as a tough girl and okay with Han, but I always felt that time away from Luke was just time wasted. ;p So I have always been fine with his moral choice to heal his father bringing about the redemption of the galaxy by, essentially, magical means.
That wouldn't have left a story for them to tell, my old Mary Sue aside. She was fun, but didn't have a good enough story to carry a franchise. (We were fourteen; the Sues barely had enough story to carry a good cosplay.) So they went in the more realistic direction that the Empire was dealt a serious blow, but didn't just fold up. I can't fault them for that, and they did a better job than the EU novels I've read. For what they chose to go with as a premise, they did a good job with the plotting. I don't think they developed the relationships between old and new characters particularly well, and didn't buy the new character's exaggerated mourning for an old character they'd only just met, but that's a quibble.
I do wish that, instead of being "the resistance," they'd positioned the Republic as the power at this point, with the First Order (the new Sith, basically) and the Imperial remnants as a nasty underground force, if for no other reason than turning the tables. But they didn't. I'll make judgments based on how well they did what they decided to do, rather than carping about what I wish they'd decided to do. That's a kind of pointless critique.
Characters
Han Solo is the main old trilogy character seen here. Harrison Ford slips him on like a comfy pair of bedroom slippers, and I can believe this is a Han who's gone through thirty-two years and a couple of major losses, though the script doesn't establish them too well. (I think in its fear of telegraphing anything, it sacrificed emotional urgency.)
Chewie is, as always, at Han's side, and has a good sense of humor. Han uses his crossbow a couple of times, and it's a running gag that he's just figuring out that it's a powerful weapon.
Leia also appears as the leader of the resistance, and doesn't have much else to do, even though her son is the bad guy. Again, they lose some urgency on this front.
Luke appears at the end, and we don't know much at all, except that he's apparently spent an inordinate amount of time building stone stairs.
New characters, in order of appearance:
Po Dameron is a hotshot pilot who will undoubtedly have more of a role in the future, but who really isn't in this one all that much. He sets things in motion playing Leia's role of hiding information in a droid, in this case, a ball droid called BB-8. (Not sure how that's going to shorten. The Beeb is a thing, and so is the Biebs. I guess he'll just be Beebee?) The place he gets it from, on the planet of Jakku, is destroyed by stormtroopers, at which point we meet...
Finn, a boy taken from his family and raised under mental conditioning to be a stormtrooper, who nevertheless fights that conditioning and doesn't participate in the massacre. He is particularly noticed by Kylo Ren, who presumably senses the Force in him. He helps Po escape from captivity in stole TIE fighter, and they crash together on the planet, but get separated. Finn is one of the more interesting characters. He lies easily and humorously, but knows how to take responsibility. He's a tough fighter, and unlike Han in the first trilogy, doesn't dither about whether or not he wants to be good. He makes the call and acts according to his call for the remainder of the story, showing that he has the kind of strong will that the series values.
Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is a little bit over-the-top, and I'm not at all sure what his deal is. He's been seduced by the Dark Side, yes, and admits throughout that he feels the pull of the Light Side. He just doesn't have the emotional or symbolic weight to pull off the Anakin role, though. If he's rescued, even I couldn't find a way for it to symbolically repair the galaxy, though of course, it would make Leia happy, and that's good in itself. (Well, every soul saved from the Dark Side is a good thing, if only because it's one less source of power for the Dark Side.) Because we never knew him, it's a little hard to care about his conflict. You can't just say, "This is Han and Leia's son" and expect the audience to go, "Awwww." I want to know why he idolizes his grandfather's evil alter-ego, despite the fact that he should have had the whole story told to him all along. What the heck's wrong with Luke and Leia that they let it get that far? (And why in the GFFA would they keep the melted mask?)
The last major new character introduce is Rey, a scavenger girl on the planet of Jakku who, in Skywalker tradition, finds the droid and helps it get to the resistance. She was abandoned there by unnamed parents and has been counting days until their return, but accepts it very quickly when told by bartender Maz that she knows they're not really coming back. Here, Daisy Ridley is obviously going to carry the franchise, and she's good at it. I like her. I like Rey. I don't like the way they're playing the card of her identity as some kind of Sooper Sekrit thing that will be a big bombshell the way, "No, I am your father" was. You can't re-do that. It won't work. And if her father is Luke, what's the response? Yay? (Or, in my case if that turns out true, :eyeroll:). If she's Ben's twin and therefore Leia's daughter, then you get to, "And Han and Leia don't mention having lost a daughter as well... why?" If she's some descendant of Kenobi's, oh, yes. Good going, oh you paragon of faithfulness to the Order.
Look, she's obviously some connection to the family. That's how SW works. The Skywalker family is the GFFA. More to the point, they went to the trouble of scouring for an unknown actress who could easily play Natalie Portman's younger sister... or her actual double. Unless they're going to go with her being related to Sabe the decoy queen (Keira Knightley's character), then somewhere, she's connected to the Skywalkers. Maybe at some point, someone stole cells from poor Padme's body and they were sitting in a cloning vat for years, then someone decided to reactivate them. I don't know. But the virtual capering around going, "I've got a secret and you do-on't know it!" is deeply annoying. All it will do is cause fan wars so that large segments of the fandom will stalk off in a huff if their pet theories are wrong.
Kind of a quibble, though. It goes with my general theory of spoilers -- if knowing them actually spoils your enjoyment of a movie, then there's not much to the movie other than cheap surprise -- but it's not relevant to her as a character. As a character, I really like Rey a lot, and I loved that she got a seriously kick-ass lightsaber duel scene. I like that her interactions with Finn didn't try to mimic the bickering dynamic of Han and Leia. Actually I kind of love that -- they're both really excited about what they can do, and they hit it off right away. We don't see that often enough. I like that she seems to be the apex of the new trio without it being in any manner a romantic competition. And I like that she forgets that she needs to turn the blaster on before she can fire it. And that she looks at a droid and treats it as an individual. I could get into a Rey-based series, for the same reason that I'm a Luke girl: She's a hero whose choices I can buy as making all the difference.
Last and least, the new Big Bad, Snokes. Yes, the Big Bad is basically Darth Snookums. He appears as a giant hologram, and I kept thinking that Toto was going to show up and pull a curtain, revealing a funny little man in a green suit. This aspect needs serious work.
Setting:
Hmm. The setting wanders a bit, and I don't get nearly the sense of Jakku that I had of Tatooine. I can't for the life of me remember the names of the other systems. On the other hand, CGI has allowed them to create much more alien architecture and more varied landscapes, so it already seems more physically complete. But it needs some world-building in the future.
They've added some land-side aerial battles -- it's not all up in space. It gives some nice image work.
Style:
Abrams has done a good job re-creating the SW used-future style. Everything looks good; everything looks like it's in the same universe, except a few decades later. Narratively, this isn't quite on the ball, because it doesn't take the time to develop the simple themes first. (It's back to that emotional urgency question. This might have been a better second story.)
Theme:
I'm not sure, yet. Oh, the usual SW theme of choosing the light, no matter how tempting the darkness might be, but specific to this one... I just don't think we have enough information to guess on.
So, I'm going with "Not bad."
But for the record, I sat as far up front as I could. So far up that I couldn't see the edges of the screen with peripheral vision. For two hours, it was the whole world.
And yes... flaws or no, it was still beautiful.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Mockingjay, Pt 2 review
SPOILERS FOR BOOKS AND MOVIE.
I don't review without them, and it is at the top of my blog, but just in case: I'm not being particularly careful to avoid them. Or, actually, even trying at all. If you don't want to know who lives or dies (and haven't already read the book, because there are no changes on that front), then this is probably where you should get off.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay, still here?
First, I want to acknowledge that Mockingjay is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to any kind of dramatic form. Most of the key elements take place in Katniss's head, and while having a fine actress like Jennifer Lawrence in the part helps matters, even Olivier couldn't have expressed a series of undiscussed decisions by a slight tip of the eyebrow. It just doesn't work that way, unless you already know what the narration is. Much of MJ is spent as Katniss begins to realize, with dawning horror, what the rebellion has become, and what it's doing to her and to her loved ones, finally culminating in the death of her sister in a false flag bombing meant to kill the last support for Snow by making it look like he bombed a plaza full of children. The cruelest part was that the trap -- while never intended specifically for Prim -- was designed by Katniss's friend, Gale, who has become more and more radicalized as the story goes on, losing any compassion he once had. (Though he understands it at the end, and I believe he can find his footing again.)
Through it, Katniss has frequent fugues and times when she simply withdraws from the world and goes inside her head. Many of her decisions happen in those head-spaces. That is very hard to script.
So how did they do?
I had my doubts, but it was actually... pretty okay. Much better than I expect out of Hollywood, which has been the case throughout the series. It's beautifully filmed, and most of the decisions made were, at the very least, not destructive. And I don't mean to be damning by faint praise here -- Mockingjay is a very good, very thematically dense book, and I had a real fear that even these producers would drop the ball in the end and not really face the book head on.
Before I start, the major changes:
For some reason I can't even guess at, they decided to have Katniss sneak into the Capitol instead of just going with the star squad in the first place. Since they promptly sent the rest of the squad in and didn't change from there, I'm not sure what the point of that was. It couldn't be, at this late date, that they thought the audience was too stupid to figure out that she was just playing along. Since the scene where she and Gale discuss the fact that she's planning on breaking away, that doesn't play. So why? I dunno. I guess it doesn't ultimately harm anything (especially since it went exactly nowhere), except for the fact that we don't get to see the scenes where she and Johanna bond, but I don't understand that call.
Katniss's injuries are much less severe. She doesn't lose her spleen. Her burns don't seem terribly bad, and neither she nor Peeta is close to death at the end, or even scarred. Her mental state never degenerates into the self-destructive shock she goes into in the book, probably because it would have been too much screen time for an element too many people really didn't like.
They chose, finally, to address the importance of the bread scene, and in what I consider one of the biggest missteps, had Peeta attack her on that scene ("I should have fed it to the pigs"). The fact that he didn't do so in the book was one of the signs, to me, that he really was still in there. And original line, a wistful, "I must have really loved you," was more poignant. Again, kind of an inexplicable narrative decision, but not awfully destructive in the long term.
There are about a million minor changes, but nothing that even a Evil Purist (tm) like me is terribly fussed about. Most of the problems were in skipped characters. I'm sorry, but sending Prim in to talk to Peeta instead of his friend Delly is just stupid. ANYONE would have made more sense than Katniss's beloved little sister. I know they wanted to give her something to do, but come on.
I'd heard that Prim's death scene was changed, but all I really spotted was that Katniss was standing on a truck instead of climbing a flagpole. Otherwise, it's as written.
They switched the ages of the kids in the epilogue so Katniss would have a baby to talk to. I'm perfectly fine with this change, though I hope it doesn't get picked up in fan art, where it's unnecessary.
I know why Tigress didn't remake them as much as she should have -- the audience is following visually, so you want your actors recognizable -- but it did make it giggle-worthy that, in essence, Katniss's only disguise as she went to kill the president was a big hood.
Elements? Elements.
Character
There's a cast of thousands, of course, which means that no one gets much in terms of development. Poor Finnick only got a handful of lines before his death, which left that scene without the emotional resonance of the book. Haymitch got most of his book lines back, so I can be glad of that. (Haymitch is my favorite and I have given him more thought than I expect filmmakers to, so I'm not going to go on and on about how I wish they'd focused obsessively on this or that. And they officially teased Hayffie. What more can a fangirl ask?) Shoved into practically one-line-land are Beetee, Johanna, Annie, and, as mentioned, Finnick. Paylor actually gets expanded a little, which is not a bad thing, since she's the one who ends up president, and seeing her in action gives a sense that maybe, just maybe, they've managed to get it right.
Snow... sigh. Look, I get that you snagged Donald Sutherland, and he is all manner of awesome, and is a fanboy to boot (he wrote a letter explaining all of Snow's motivations!), but time spent with his crew in scenes that don't really make any difference to the story is time not spent on the plot.
They worked around Hoffman's death pretty well. The only significant Plutarch scene left was one where he talked to her about the end of the war, and it was re-written as Haymitch reading her a letter from him, since he couldn't be seen with her right then.
Peeta and Gale. Okay, I've said Hutcherson was miscast, and I am actually very pleased to take it back this time. Yes, he still looks nothing whatsoever like Peeta, and his romantic chemistry with Lawrence is still nil, but here, he brings a very strong sense of the character, and, romance or no, he and Lawrence do a wonderful job with the inherent strong affection between these two characters, which isn't easy, given the material in this section of the story... but is absolutely essential to the plot. While the overt story is Peeta recovering from his hijacking with Katniss's help, the mirror story is Katniss re-learning who she is as well, as she chooses Peeta's kindness and quiet determination over Gale's increasingly frightening anger and vengeance. The years of working together really pay off here. Hemsworth's Gale also deserves a lot of credit. He manages to take the character where he needs to go without ever sacrificing sympathy, or making it seem like Katniss is in the wrong to have anything to do with him. His final scene, where he acknowledges how badly astray he went, is lovely.
Of course, it's Lawrence's Katniss that carries it all, as it should be. Like I said, she doesn't go through the psychological injuries that she does in the book, but Lawrence manages to get across her confusion and dawning horror as the movie goes through. Without Katniss all of it falls apart, and we get good Katniss here. The scene where she finally realizes that Peeta wants to recover, and tells him about his favorite color, and that he double-knots his shoes -- it's taken verbatim from the book and it's absolutely GORGEOUS as a performed scene between them. The scene where she decides to kill Coin really does manage to get across thought processes without dialogue, with just looks between her and Harrelson.
Plot
It's the second half of Mockingjay, covering Katniss's trip to District Two, the surge into the Capitol, and the aftermath of the war.
I said that I thought they were right to split it into two parts, but after the whiplash-worthy D2 sequence, I have to admit: They probably should have split it into three. I mean, dear God. It was about fifteen minutes in when she'd (a) recovered from Peeta's attack, (b) asked to be sent to Two, (c) gone to Two, (d) been shot in Two, and (e) gotten back and been told that she couldn't go to the Capitol. Until she actually got to the Capitol, I was sort of hating it for all the whipsawing, stone-skipping storytelling. I mean, I can buy brevity, but this was the equivalent of telling Cinderella, as "Cinderella had dirty clothes, then she got new ones," then lingering in loving detail on the run down the palace steps. It covers the bases, but you kind of miss something.
But once Peeta arrived in the Capitol, I was happy more or less until the end, even if they did start stutter-jumping around around the plot again for a few minutes. That was most of the movie, so no complaints. The battle scenes were horrifying, and they really did show the rebels explicitly opening fire on the fleeing civilians, including a featured child civilian. The talks among the dwindling band were great. The man playing Pollux (sorry, I don't remember his name) was really fabulous. And the mutts in the sewers. EGADS. Those things were exactly what I imagined when I read the book, and they were terrifying.
The main issue, of finding out that Coin had been every bit as manipulative and dirty as Snow, is quite well handled, though I still think it was poorly set up in the last movie.
Style
Stutter-jumping story aside, this was a very well-filmed piece. The choice to mirror Katniss's behavior in Peeta was brilliant, highlighting the real, underneath story. In the book, Peeta mutters a lot. In the movie, they chose to make it explicit. As Katniss opens by stating her name and origin, which she did in the beginning of the last movie, Peeta's mutterings are, "My name is Peeta Mellark. I'm from District Twelve..." Etc. That was an excellent choice. They chose not to have any light moments, really, except for the wedding and the epilogue.
And on a small shot notice, I have to say, in the end... there's a montage as Katniss and Peeta heal, and there's a simply beautiful shot of them sitting in the doorway and watching a rainstorm together. It's a sweet, simple moment, and I think it's really a spot where I can believe that they're going to be all right.
Setting
I question the choice to have the Capitol so very gray looking. It's supposed to be filled with candy-colored glass buildings, and I think the contrast of the war with the bright and beautiful city would have been more effective. But I guess I'm never going to convince Hollywood of 2015 that THEY DON'T HAVE TO SHOOT IN PSEUDO-BLACK-AND-WHITE to be be taken seriously. Did I shout that? Sorry, didn't mean to shout. The Capitol apartment where they take refuge is quite luxurious (and for once, there's a future TV set up that I feel like a rich person might actually spend money on), but we don't see much of it, and it's very dark. I always imagined the Capitol as light and airy... a contrast to its behavior. This just looked like an above-ground Thirteen. They could have been cold and colorful and still contrast with the final scene, which is warm and natural.
The final, epilogue scene, in the mountains outside Twelve, with Katniss and Peeta playing with their children, is beautiful. Full stop. I don't have anything else to say about it; I just wanted to say that. I kind of just wanted to be there, too.
Theme
There's a lot that gets wrapped up in the series -- love triangles, politics, commentary on the media -- but all of it boil down to the line that Peeta says in the first movie, and Katniss returns to here: "I don't want to be a piece in their Games." The whole idea, from start to finish, is that you can't let yourself be swallowed by circumstances. You can't let go of yourself, of your inherent sense of right and wrong, no matter what cause you think you're fighting for, because in the end, that will destroy both you and the cause. Choose humanity. Choose the dandelion in the spring.
So, with that, the series ends. Was it exactly perfect? No. But in terms of movie adaptations of books? This series has been a resounding success. Good job.
I don't review without them, and it is at the top of my blog, but just in case: I'm not being particularly careful to avoid them. Or, actually, even trying at all. If you don't want to know who lives or dies (and haven't already read the book, because there are no changes on that front), then this is probably where you should get off.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay, still here?
First, I want to acknowledge that Mockingjay is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to any kind of dramatic form. Most of the key elements take place in Katniss's head, and while having a fine actress like Jennifer Lawrence in the part helps matters, even Olivier couldn't have expressed a series of undiscussed decisions by a slight tip of the eyebrow. It just doesn't work that way, unless you already know what the narration is. Much of MJ is spent as Katniss begins to realize, with dawning horror, what the rebellion has become, and what it's doing to her and to her loved ones, finally culminating in the death of her sister in a false flag bombing meant to kill the last support for Snow by making it look like he bombed a plaza full of children. The cruelest part was that the trap -- while never intended specifically for Prim -- was designed by Katniss's friend, Gale, who has become more and more radicalized as the story goes on, losing any compassion he once had. (Though he understands it at the end, and I believe he can find his footing again.)
Through it, Katniss has frequent fugues and times when she simply withdraws from the world and goes inside her head. Many of her decisions happen in those head-spaces. That is very hard to script.
So how did they do?
I had my doubts, but it was actually... pretty okay. Much better than I expect out of Hollywood, which has been the case throughout the series. It's beautifully filmed, and most of the decisions made were, at the very least, not destructive. And I don't mean to be damning by faint praise here -- Mockingjay is a very good, very thematically dense book, and I had a real fear that even these producers would drop the ball in the end and not really face the book head on.
Before I start, the major changes:
For some reason I can't even guess at, they decided to have Katniss sneak into the Capitol instead of just going with the star squad in the first place. Since they promptly sent the rest of the squad in and didn't change from there, I'm not sure what the point of that was. It couldn't be, at this late date, that they thought the audience was too stupid to figure out that she was just playing along. Since the scene where she and Gale discuss the fact that she's planning on breaking away, that doesn't play. So why? I dunno. I guess it doesn't ultimately harm anything (especially since it went exactly nowhere), except for the fact that we don't get to see the scenes where she and Johanna bond, but I don't understand that call.
Katniss's injuries are much less severe. She doesn't lose her spleen. Her burns don't seem terribly bad, and neither she nor Peeta is close to death at the end, or even scarred. Her mental state never degenerates into the self-destructive shock she goes into in the book, probably because it would have been too much screen time for an element too many people really didn't like.
They chose, finally, to address the importance of the bread scene, and in what I consider one of the biggest missteps, had Peeta attack her on that scene ("I should have fed it to the pigs"). The fact that he didn't do so in the book was one of the signs, to me, that he really was still in there. And original line, a wistful, "I must have really loved you," was more poignant. Again, kind of an inexplicable narrative decision, but not awfully destructive in the long term.
There are about a million minor changes, but nothing that even a Evil Purist (tm) like me is terribly fussed about. Most of the problems were in skipped characters. I'm sorry, but sending Prim in to talk to Peeta instead of his friend Delly is just stupid. ANYONE would have made more sense than Katniss's beloved little sister. I know they wanted to give her something to do, but come on.
I'd heard that Prim's death scene was changed, but all I really spotted was that Katniss was standing on a truck instead of climbing a flagpole. Otherwise, it's as written.
They switched the ages of the kids in the epilogue so Katniss would have a baby to talk to. I'm perfectly fine with this change, though I hope it doesn't get picked up in fan art, where it's unnecessary.
I know why Tigress didn't remake them as much as she should have -- the audience is following visually, so you want your actors recognizable -- but it did make it giggle-worthy that, in essence, Katniss's only disguise as she went to kill the president was a big hood.
Elements? Elements.
Character
There's a cast of thousands, of course, which means that no one gets much in terms of development. Poor Finnick only got a handful of lines before his death, which left that scene without the emotional resonance of the book. Haymitch got most of his book lines back, so I can be glad of that. (Haymitch is my favorite and I have given him more thought than I expect filmmakers to, so I'm not going to go on and on about how I wish they'd focused obsessively on this or that. And they officially teased Hayffie. What more can a fangirl ask?) Shoved into practically one-line-land are Beetee, Johanna, Annie, and, as mentioned, Finnick. Paylor actually gets expanded a little, which is not a bad thing, since she's the one who ends up president, and seeing her in action gives a sense that maybe, just maybe, they've managed to get it right.
Snow... sigh. Look, I get that you snagged Donald Sutherland, and he is all manner of awesome, and is a fanboy to boot (he wrote a letter explaining all of Snow's motivations!), but time spent with his crew in scenes that don't really make any difference to the story is time not spent on the plot.
They worked around Hoffman's death pretty well. The only significant Plutarch scene left was one where he talked to her about the end of the war, and it was re-written as Haymitch reading her a letter from him, since he couldn't be seen with her right then.
Peeta and Gale. Okay, I've said Hutcherson was miscast, and I am actually very pleased to take it back this time. Yes, he still looks nothing whatsoever like Peeta, and his romantic chemistry with Lawrence is still nil, but here, he brings a very strong sense of the character, and, romance or no, he and Lawrence do a wonderful job with the inherent strong affection between these two characters, which isn't easy, given the material in this section of the story... but is absolutely essential to the plot. While the overt story is Peeta recovering from his hijacking with Katniss's help, the mirror story is Katniss re-learning who she is as well, as she chooses Peeta's kindness and quiet determination over Gale's increasingly frightening anger and vengeance. The years of working together really pay off here. Hemsworth's Gale also deserves a lot of credit. He manages to take the character where he needs to go without ever sacrificing sympathy, or making it seem like Katniss is in the wrong to have anything to do with him. His final scene, where he acknowledges how badly astray he went, is lovely.
Of course, it's Lawrence's Katniss that carries it all, as it should be. Like I said, she doesn't go through the psychological injuries that she does in the book, but Lawrence manages to get across her confusion and dawning horror as the movie goes through. Without Katniss all of it falls apart, and we get good Katniss here. The scene where she finally realizes that Peeta wants to recover, and tells him about his favorite color, and that he double-knots his shoes -- it's taken verbatim from the book and it's absolutely GORGEOUS as a performed scene between them. The scene where she decides to kill Coin really does manage to get across thought processes without dialogue, with just looks between her and Harrelson.
Plot
It's the second half of Mockingjay, covering Katniss's trip to District Two, the surge into the Capitol, and the aftermath of the war.
I said that I thought they were right to split it into two parts, but after the whiplash-worthy D2 sequence, I have to admit: They probably should have split it into three. I mean, dear God. It was about fifteen minutes in when she'd (a) recovered from Peeta's attack, (b) asked to be sent to Two, (c) gone to Two, (d) been shot in Two, and (e) gotten back and been told that she couldn't go to the Capitol. Until she actually got to the Capitol, I was sort of hating it for all the whipsawing, stone-skipping storytelling. I mean, I can buy brevity, but this was the equivalent of telling Cinderella, as "Cinderella had dirty clothes, then she got new ones," then lingering in loving detail on the run down the palace steps. It covers the bases, but you kind of miss something.
But once Peeta arrived in the Capitol, I was happy more or less until the end, even if they did start stutter-jumping around around the plot again for a few minutes. That was most of the movie, so no complaints. The battle scenes were horrifying, and they really did show the rebels explicitly opening fire on the fleeing civilians, including a featured child civilian. The talks among the dwindling band were great. The man playing Pollux (sorry, I don't remember his name) was really fabulous. And the mutts in the sewers. EGADS. Those things were exactly what I imagined when I read the book, and they were terrifying.
The main issue, of finding out that Coin had been every bit as manipulative and dirty as Snow, is quite well handled, though I still think it was poorly set up in the last movie.
Style
Stutter-jumping story aside, this was a very well-filmed piece. The choice to mirror Katniss's behavior in Peeta was brilliant, highlighting the real, underneath story. In the book, Peeta mutters a lot. In the movie, they chose to make it explicit. As Katniss opens by stating her name and origin, which she did in the beginning of the last movie, Peeta's mutterings are, "My name is Peeta Mellark. I'm from District Twelve..." Etc. That was an excellent choice. They chose not to have any light moments, really, except for the wedding and the epilogue.
And on a small shot notice, I have to say, in the end... there's a montage as Katniss and Peeta heal, and there's a simply beautiful shot of them sitting in the doorway and watching a rainstorm together. It's a sweet, simple moment, and I think it's really a spot where I can believe that they're going to be all right.
Setting
I question the choice to have the Capitol so very gray looking. It's supposed to be filled with candy-colored glass buildings, and I think the contrast of the war with the bright and beautiful city would have been more effective. But I guess I'm never going to convince Hollywood of 2015 that THEY DON'T HAVE TO SHOOT IN PSEUDO-BLACK-AND-WHITE to be be taken seriously. Did I shout that? Sorry, didn't mean to shout. The Capitol apartment where they take refuge is quite luxurious (and for once, there's a future TV set up that I feel like a rich person might actually spend money on), but we don't see much of it, and it's very dark. I always imagined the Capitol as light and airy... a contrast to its behavior. This just looked like an above-ground Thirteen. They could have been cold and colorful and still contrast with the final scene, which is warm and natural.
The final, epilogue scene, in the mountains outside Twelve, with Katniss and Peeta playing with their children, is beautiful. Full stop. I don't have anything else to say about it; I just wanted to say that. I kind of just wanted to be there, too.
Theme
There's a lot that gets wrapped up in the series -- love triangles, politics, commentary on the media -- but all of it boil down to the line that Peeta says in the first movie, and Katniss returns to here: "I don't want to be a piece in their Games." The whole idea, from start to finish, is that you can't let yourself be swallowed by circumstances. You can't let go of yourself, of your inherent sense of right and wrong, no matter what cause you think you're fighting for, because in the end, that will destroy both you and the cause. Choose humanity. Choose the dandelion in the spring.
So, with that, the series ends. Was it exactly perfect? No. But in terms of movie adaptations of books? This series has been a resounding success. Good job.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer Review
I've probably reviewed Riordan here more than I've reviewed anything else, but it's mostly because he puts things out on a very regular basis. Five Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, followed by five Heroes of Olympus books, one a year, like clockwork. Now, same time, same place, we move out of the classical world and into Norse mythology with his new series, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard.
First things first: I have never been particularly drawn to Norse mythology. I'm a Homer fangirl. It's kind of sad, since I'm considerably more Scandinavian than Greco-Roman, at least by blood. Culturally, I'd argue that, through the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Athens is a deeper influence than the Northland. Which is a long way of saying that, unlike the Percy books, I had to interrupt my reading to check the source material from time to time to get Riordan's riffs on it, and that I wasn't as immediately interested in the cosmology.
Style
Straight up Riordan. Take this discussion of a new rope to bind Fenris Wolf:
And, of course, the setting.
Setting
In Percy Jackson, we learned that the Greek gods had moved to New York, where Olympus is anchored above the Empire State building. In Heroes of Olympus, we discover New Rome in the Berkeley Hills. (The centers of the gods' powers move west with western civilization.) Now, we move to my old stomping grounds in Boston, and there were several moments when I actually laughed aloud.
Boston, you see, is where the World Tree is, and always has been. It's what the Vikings were really questing for. The Puritans' vision of City on a Hill was really a glimpse of another one of the nine worlds, and Valhalla currently appears as a luxury hotel near Copley Square.
And did I mention that you can access Yggdrasil by using a magic sword to cut open the air above the Make Way for Ducklings statue? Or that a giant eagle drops our hero off on the roof of the library, and later roosts on the Art statue, before turning into a giant and sitting on her lap? Or that the dwarfs live just a hop skip and cosmic jump from Southie, which their realm resembles? Okay, that was just fun, and I can't wait to find out if we visit my old neighborhood in Brighton, or if we'll see a send-up of the colleges, or... it's just fun to see Riordan's take on the place.
Other than that, we visit Jotunheim and Folkvanger, which aren't direct analogs of places in Boston (sadly), and dream-visit the ship made of discarded toenails, and ultimately the disappearing island where Fenris is imprisoned. Like most of Riordan's modern myth-settings, it's both tongue-in-cheek and deeply affectionate.
Plot
Hmm. Like the first of the Percy books, The Lightning Thief, The Sword of Summer isn't the best plot. The plot is mostly an excuse to get jerked from place to place and meet new characters. In this case, Magnus Chase (cousin of Percy's girlfriend, Annabeth, daughter of Athena) is a homeless orphan with a rich uncle, who scoops him up on his sixteenth birthday and gets him to reclaim the magical sword of summer, the weapon of his father, Frey, who bargained it away and will die at Ragnarok because he doesn't have it. (In keeping with Riordan's strict adherence to the worldview of the myths, I don't expect them to be able to change this.) He's killed and becomes a warrior of Valhalla, one of the einherjar, after being chosen by the Valkyrie Samirah al-Abbas, a mortal girl who is also trying to live her regular life with her grandparents. He discovers that his two protectors from the time he spent homeless are a fashion-conscious dwarf and an elf mage, and makes some friends among the other einherjar. There are several mini-quests on the way to the main quest, which is to delay Ragnarok a bit by re-binding Fenris Wolf.
Mostly, it's set-up for the series. I hope. I wasn't terribly engaged, but then, I wasn't overly impressed with The Lightning Thief, either, and ended up loving that series.
One note: I'm not sure why Riordan felt compelled to make Magnus Annabeth's cousin. She appears at three points in the book, and it's nice, but right now, I'm not seeing how the two mythos realms are going to interact, and it feels a little superfluous. Also, she doesn't spill any information for him, so we don't get any new tidbits about old friends. So, phooey. :D
Character
Magnus has the sarcastic edge of most of Riordan's characters -- serious WORLD OF SNARK here -- but he's much more bitter than I'm used to. He's not a secretly cheerful dude who lets things roll off his back, though by the end, he's defrosting a little. He has potential, but I'm not hooked yet.
Samirah ("Sam" throughout) is also just forming; you can almost feel her forming on the page as she goes. A young Muslim girl in a hijab (with magical concealment properties) who works as a Valkyrie and is a daughter of Loki. I'm not sure how this is going to work. The cosmology of these books is very clear that the gods presented are very powerful beings associated with various phenomena, but don't delve into the metaphysical question of whether what they refer to as "capital G God" exists, so on certain edges, you could make an argument that you could be a faithful practitioner of another religion while working for Odin, same as for any other boss -- in Heroes of Olympus, there's a minor goddess, Iris, considering becoming a Buddhist -- but it's still a dicey definition of monotheism, and I'm curious and a little concerned about how that will work out in the end (please, let it be handled well). She's in an arranged engagement, and in a surprise move, she's not only good with it, she's glad of it, likes the guy a lot, and thinks her grandparents have been working with her interests at heart. It's an interesting take, and I hope Riordan sticks with it, because I think we've seen enough ARRANGED MARRIAGES ARE EVIL plots. Sometimes, they're fine, and people are happy, and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
Blitz and Hearthstone (dwarf and elf) are sweet, but I find myself not caring about their melodramatic pasts all that much.
Other than that, we get very brief glimpses of the Norse gods, all with Riordan's wry accuracy to the myths. Probably the best moment was when Thor told them not to call him "Lord Thor," because he is a god of the common people. Fenris is a pretty frightening villain, and Magnus and Annabeth's Uncle Randolph is trying to get his family back and will do anything to accomplish it. Odin is wise and Freya is kind of silly. We barely meet Magnus's father, Frey. Loki schemes, as one would expect. There's a whole host of characters I'm not familiar with because I was never obsessive about this mythology, but they seem fun. There's the sea goddess Ran, and her husband Aegir, who's apparently become a divine hipster obsessed with microbrewing. And assorted dwarves and giants.
Theme
Not sure yet. This one was all over the map.
In short, I'm intrigued with the world, but not totally sold yet. I'll definitely pick up The Hammer of Thor next year -- same time, same place.
First things first: I have never been particularly drawn to Norse mythology. I'm a Homer fangirl. It's kind of sad, since I'm considerably more Scandinavian than Greco-Roman, at least by blood. Culturally, I'd argue that, through the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Athens is a deeper influence than the Northland. Which is a long way of saying that, unlike the Percy books, I had to interrupt my reading to check the source material from time to time to get Riordan's riffs on it, and that I wasn't as immediately interested in the cosmology.
Style
Straight up Riordan. Take this discussion of a new rope to bind Fenris Wolf:
Junior glowered at me. “Boy, your ignorance is breathtaking. Gleipnir was just as thin and light, but its paradox ingredients gave it great strength. This rope is the same, only better!”
“Paradox ingredients?”
Blitz held up the end of the rope and whistled appreciatively. “He means things that aren’t supposed to exist.”
[...]
Junior huffed. “The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds— Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!”Riordan, Rick (2015-10-06). Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 1: The Sword of Summer (Rick Riordan’s Norse Mythology) (Kindle Locations 3897-3900). Disney Book Group. Kindle Edition.We also see Thor wanting to watch television in his hammer, all dwarf-made items being named and having long histories, offhand mentions like Davey Crockett sitting as a thane of Valhalla (and Taylor Swift is a half-elf, in case you didn't already know), chapters like "I Am Trash Talked By A Squirrel," and oddball asides like, "If he was the lord of Muspellheim, High King Roasty Toasty, shouldn’t he pick on more interesting heroes, like the children of Thor? At least their dad had a movie franchise."
And, of course, the setting.
Setting
In Percy Jackson, we learned that the Greek gods had moved to New York, where Olympus is anchored above the Empire State building. In Heroes of Olympus, we discover New Rome in the Berkeley Hills. (The centers of the gods' powers move west with western civilization.) Now, we move to my old stomping grounds in Boston, and there were several moments when I actually laughed aloud.
Boston, you see, is where the World Tree is, and always has been. It's what the Vikings were really questing for. The Puritans' vision of City on a Hill was really a glimpse of another one of the nine worlds, and Valhalla currently appears as a luxury hotel near Copley Square.
And did I mention that you can access Yggdrasil by using a magic sword to cut open the air above the Make Way for Ducklings statue? Or that a giant eagle drops our hero off on the roof of the library, and later roosts on the Art statue, before turning into a giant and sitting on her lap? Or that the dwarfs live just a hop skip and cosmic jump from Southie, which their realm resembles? Okay, that was just fun, and I can't wait to find out if we visit my old neighborhood in Brighton, or if we'll see a send-up of the colleges, or... it's just fun to see Riordan's take on the place.
Other than that, we visit Jotunheim and Folkvanger, which aren't direct analogs of places in Boston (sadly), and dream-visit the ship made of discarded toenails, and ultimately the disappearing island where Fenris is imprisoned. Like most of Riordan's modern myth-settings, it's both tongue-in-cheek and deeply affectionate.
Plot
Hmm. Like the first of the Percy books, The Lightning Thief, The Sword of Summer isn't the best plot. The plot is mostly an excuse to get jerked from place to place and meet new characters. In this case, Magnus Chase (cousin of Percy's girlfriend, Annabeth, daughter of Athena) is a homeless orphan with a rich uncle, who scoops him up on his sixteenth birthday and gets him to reclaim the magical sword of summer, the weapon of his father, Frey, who bargained it away and will die at Ragnarok because he doesn't have it. (In keeping with Riordan's strict adherence to the worldview of the myths, I don't expect them to be able to change this.) He's killed and becomes a warrior of Valhalla, one of the einherjar, after being chosen by the Valkyrie Samirah al-Abbas, a mortal girl who is also trying to live her regular life with her grandparents. He discovers that his two protectors from the time he spent homeless are a fashion-conscious dwarf and an elf mage, and makes some friends among the other einherjar. There are several mini-quests on the way to the main quest, which is to delay Ragnarok a bit by re-binding Fenris Wolf.
Mostly, it's set-up for the series. I hope. I wasn't terribly engaged, but then, I wasn't overly impressed with The Lightning Thief, either, and ended up loving that series.
One note: I'm not sure why Riordan felt compelled to make Magnus Annabeth's cousin. She appears at three points in the book, and it's nice, but right now, I'm not seeing how the two mythos realms are going to interact, and it feels a little superfluous. Also, she doesn't spill any information for him, so we don't get any new tidbits about old friends. So, phooey. :D
Character
Magnus has the sarcastic edge of most of Riordan's characters -- serious WORLD OF SNARK here -- but he's much more bitter than I'm used to. He's not a secretly cheerful dude who lets things roll off his back, though by the end, he's defrosting a little. He has potential, but I'm not hooked yet.
Samirah ("Sam" throughout) is also just forming; you can almost feel her forming on the page as she goes. A young Muslim girl in a hijab (with magical concealment properties) who works as a Valkyrie and is a daughter of Loki. I'm not sure how this is going to work. The cosmology of these books is very clear that the gods presented are very powerful beings associated with various phenomena, but don't delve into the metaphysical question of whether what they refer to as "capital G God" exists, so on certain edges, you could make an argument that you could be a faithful practitioner of another religion while working for Odin, same as for any other boss -- in Heroes of Olympus, there's a minor goddess, Iris, considering becoming a Buddhist -- but it's still a dicey definition of monotheism, and I'm curious and a little concerned about how that will work out in the end (please, let it be handled well). She's in an arranged engagement, and in a surprise move, she's not only good with it, she's glad of it, likes the guy a lot, and thinks her grandparents have been working with her interests at heart. It's an interesting take, and I hope Riordan sticks with it, because I think we've seen enough ARRANGED MARRIAGES ARE EVIL plots. Sometimes, they're fine, and people are happy, and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
Blitz and Hearthstone (dwarf and elf) are sweet, but I find myself not caring about their melodramatic pasts all that much.
Other than that, we get very brief glimpses of the Norse gods, all with Riordan's wry accuracy to the myths. Probably the best moment was when Thor told them not to call him "Lord Thor," because he is a god of the common people. Fenris is a pretty frightening villain, and Magnus and Annabeth's Uncle Randolph is trying to get his family back and will do anything to accomplish it. Odin is wise and Freya is kind of silly. We barely meet Magnus's father, Frey. Loki schemes, as one would expect. There's a whole host of characters I'm not familiar with because I was never obsessive about this mythology, but they seem fun. There's the sea goddess Ran, and her husband Aegir, who's apparently become a divine hipster obsessed with microbrewing. And assorted dwarves and giants.
Theme
Not sure yet. This one was all over the map.
In short, I'm intrigued with the world, but not totally sold yet. I'll definitely pick up The Hammer of Thor next year -- same time, same place.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Insurgent/Divergent movie reviews
I'm lukewarm on the Divergent books to begin with, so I was never rushing out to the movies. I've seen them both now.
Or, well, I've seen the first one all the way through and enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the book, which is to say... I have a hard time remembering it when it's over, but don't regret the time.
The second one, I just stopped.
The book is not great literature, but it makes some kind of disjointed sense. The movie just doesn't. Full stop. Yes, there's a battle for information. But it isn't a search for SUPER-SPESHUL divergents who have the power to open a magical box. It's computer information, stolen from Abnegation during the last story. The Factionless want to destroy it. Tris teams up with Marcus (despite hating him for how he treated Tobias) to get the information before either of the other sides can. In this, she works with several good Erudite members. She also willingly goes to her execution at one point, though Tobias rescues her in the end.
In the movie, there's a weird wire situation happening, and she has to get through simulations (one of which is ???kind of??? like the security on Jeanine's office?), and they magically unlock a box that only the absolute most specialest of special people can open. People come and go with very little reason. The characters are changed, again for very little reason (and what are they going to do in Allegiant, since they took out the plot about Tori's brother and her desire for revenge, since he turns out to be a key figure in the next book?). Marcus is sidelined, and Evelyn is mischaracterized.
Okay, elements:
Setting
The setting on these movies is easily their strongest point. The set designers created a gorgeously decayed, apocalyptic Chicago, and realized their creation beautifully. I have no qualms about it. The first movie gave us the Dauntless. Now, we see the Amity greenhouse with the central tree, the tall Candor building (though I'm not sure why they didn't use the canonical Merchandise Mart, which is also pretty imposing), the broken down buildings, the crumbling infrastructure. It's all quite good. It's the only thing I have no problems with. Roth worked her settings well, and the filmmakers did an excellent job at bringing them to life. It's like a weird cyber-punk John Hughes joint.
Character
Shailene Woodley carries the franchise as well as she can. She's a good actress, and her Tris overcomes the poor scripting in several scenes. (She also looks a good deal like the character in the book is described -- one of the most accurate bits of casting I've seen, with the only disparity being that she's taller than Zoe Kravitz's Christina.) But a good performance doesn't, ultimately, save the character, who's just all over the place in her motivations. Kravitz's Christina whipsaws around as well, and Theo James's Tobias has the personality of a wet cardboard box. I suppose it's possible that a sixteen year old could look older than his young-ish mother (played by Naomi Watts, 16 years James's senior, but looking about five years his junior), but she's supposed to have been living hard fo a while. Watts's Evelyn was portrayed as soft-ish, which is contrary to her nasty book characterization, and is just not believable as the long-time leader of the city's de facto homeless population. Caleb's characterization is senseless in the book and continues to be senseless in the movie.
Theme
The first movie is about discovering selflessness, to some extent. Tris has left Abnegation because she's bored, and by engaging in Dauntless recklessness, she ultimately comes to value the simpler, service-oriented world that she left. It's not quite as clear in the movie as it was in the book. There's also the general series theme of not limiting yourself to a single way of being.
In losing the sympathetic Erudite, the second movie's theme becomes, "Smart people are bad." Seriously, it's not much more complex than that. The books aren't exactly subtle in thinking that academics are arrogant and power-hungry, but the movie makes them look like they're using obscure symbolic language. There's some mileage left in the book's "look yourself in the eye and learn self-forgiveness" theme, but not a whole lot.
Style
Aside from the setting, the style is general apocalyptic dystopia. A lot of shots of people running, some mirroring themes, with the black and white of Candor used to contrast views of self from time to time in the second. Nothing to write home about.
Plot
See the intro. The books were at best okay on plot. The first movie is relatively close. The second one pulls out the supports and lets the whole structure fall in under its own weight. Irritating.
Or, well, I've seen the first one all the way through and enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the book, which is to say... I have a hard time remembering it when it's over, but don't regret the time.
The second one, I just stopped.
The book is not great literature, but it makes some kind of disjointed sense. The movie just doesn't. Full stop. Yes, there's a battle for information. But it isn't a search for SUPER-SPESHUL divergents who have the power to open a magical box. It's computer information, stolen from Abnegation during the last story. The Factionless want to destroy it. Tris teams up with Marcus (despite hating him for how he treated Tobias) to get the information before either of the other sides can. In this, she works with several good Erudite members. She also willingly goes to her execution at one point, though Tobias rescues her in the end.
In the movie, there's a weird wire situation happening, and she has to get through simulations (one of which is ???kind of??? like the security on Jeanine's office?), and they magically unlock a box that only the absolute most specialest of special people can open. People come and go with very little reason. The characters are changed, again for very little reason (and what are they going to do in Allegiant, since they took out the plot about Tori's brother and her desire for revenge, since he turns out to be a key figure in the next book?). Marcus is sidelined, and Evelyn is mischaracterized.
Okay, elements:
Setting
The setting on these movies is easily their strongest point. The set designers created a gorgeously decayed, apocalyptic Chicago, and realized their creation beautifully. I have no qualms about it. The first movie gave us the Dauntless. Now, we see the Amity greenhouse with the central tree, the tall Candor building (though I'm not sure why they didn't use the canonical Merchandise Mart, which is also pretty imposing), the broken down buildings, the crumbling infrastructure. It's all quite good. It's the only thing I have no problems with. Roth worked her settings well, and the filmmakers did an excellent job at bringing them to life. It's like a weird cyber-punk John Hughes joint.
Character
Shailene Woodley carries the franchise as well as she can. She's a good actress, and her Tris overcomes the poor scripting in several scenes. (She also looks a good deal like the character in the book is described -- one of the most accurate bits of casting I've seen, with the only disparity being that she's taller than Zoe Kravitz's Christina.) But a good performance doesn't, ultimately, save the character, who's just all over the place in her motivations. Kravitz's Christina whipsaws around as well, and Theo James's Tobias has the personality of a wet cardboard box. I suppose it's possible that a sixteen year old could look older than his young-ish mother (played by Naomi Watts, 16 years James's senior, but looking about five years his junior), but she's supposed to have been living hard fo a while. Watts's Evelyn was portrayed as soft-ish, which is contrary to her nasty book characterization, and is just not believable as the long-time leader of the city's de facto homeless population. Caleb's characterization is senseless in the book and continues to be senseless in the movie.
Theme
The first movie is about discovering selflessness, to some extent. Tris has left Abnegation because she's bored, and by engaging in Dauntless recklessness, she ultimately comes to value the simpler, service-oriented world that she left. It's not quite as clear in the movie as it was in the book. There's also the general series theme of not limiting yourself to a single way of being.
In losing the sympathetic Erudite, the second movie's theme becomes, "Smart people are bad." Seriously, it's not much more complex than that. The books aren't exactly subtle in thinking that academics are arrogant and power-hungry, but the movie makes them look like they're using obscure symbolic language. There's some mileage left in the book's "look yourself in the eye and learn self-forgiveness" theme, but not a whole lot.
Style
Aside from the setting, the style is general apocalyptic dystopia. A lot of shots of people running, some mirroring themes, with the black and white of Candor used to contrast views of self from time to time in the second. Nothing to write home about.
Plot
See the intro. The books were at best okay on plot. The first movie is relatively close. The second one pulls out the supports and lets the whole structure fall in under its own weight. Irritating.
Saturday, September 5, 2015
My love/hate relationship with movie adaptations
It may be obvious, but when it comes to movie adaptations of books that I love, my relationship status is "complicated."
On the one hand, I love movies. Big, splashy blockbusters, especially. Things that hit cultural nerves. I love the theme songs, I love the effects, I love the actors running around publicizing things. I love costumes and sets and big action scenes. I love sitting in a crowd and munching popcorn and cheering and...
Well, you get the picture. I love movies.
And I love books. I love curling up with my nose in one. I love listening to audiobooks. If I'm not driving, I close my eyes and let the story play out on the back of my eyelids. I love stories. I love writing. I love TALKING about stories and writing. I love reading out loud. I love analyzing stories on as many levels as I can. I love theme and meaning and extrapolation. I love doing insane things like trying to figure out the geography and history of Panem from the scant clues in the books.
All of which often leads to great anticipation of movies made from books. How will this look? Will they have noticed that little thing? How will they get across the motivation for character Y to do action X, which is entirely internal in the book?
I'm not a complete novice. I've taken screenwriting. I've produced and directed a college show. I was in drama club for years. I get most of it in principle.
There are obviously places where a script needs to be different from a novel. You can't skim time in a movie the way you can in a book. You can't just have an actor frown a little bit and convey the entire mental process of a character. You can't always find an actor who looks exactly like the character who can also, you know... act. I'll take the ability to act over the ability to look like someone who only lived in an author's head.
That said, why on earth they don't even try sometimes is a mystery. I mean, really... you already put a wig on Woody Harrelson. Why not put a wig on him that's the same color as his character's hair, which, in Hunger Games terms, is actually a back story point? (Blond is coded as the merchant class, while Haymitch, like Katniss, is from the miner class. In District Twelve it's a HUGE deal, and the fact that Katniss's mother is a blonde -- like her sister -- is serious business.)
Okay, I digress. But for a good reason, and I'll digress here again.
I've been accused of being a horrible "purist," by disparaging film fans who think I somehow don't "understand" the differences that need to be addressed between the two media. I do understand it. I just don't, nine times out of ten, agree with the particular choices. Other times, I really do agree strongly.
There are two Stephen King movies in particular that surpassed the source material, in cases where the source material is actually very good. Shawshank Redemption took the novella it was based on and took the time-passing moments of the book into much more meaningful territory by the choices it made of which glossed over events to make scenes of and which to ignore. It took the freedom of leaving Red's head sometimes to expand the world very nicely, and it developed several secondary characters. In the case of Stand By Me, I think the screenwriter understood the story King had told better than King did. King genuinely thought it was a story about Chris, told from the side perspective of Gordie, sort of like Watson telling the story of Holmes, but in more tragic circumstances. It's very clear on reading it though, that it really is the story of Gordie, and the screenplay hones that and focuses on it. It happens. Sometimes, what you're really writing isn't the same story you think you're writing. Other movies, like the Hunger Games movies, are pretty all right, though rushed, and I question a few decisions -- I won't know until November whether my fears are justified on those, and if they are, I will spew much venom.
But a lot of the time -- most of the time -- the choices are awful. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I AM TALKING TO YOU, OH YOU PARAGON OF TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO-GOOD PRODUCTION DECISIONS.) There is nothing in the transition from page to screen that requires changing the entire tone of a story. There is nothing that requires one to make Mina Harker into Van Helsing's daughter. There is nothing that requires changing a small town setting to a suburb ('Salem's Lot, most recent Carrie), nothing that makes you turn a frightening battle sequence into a random misty maze (Goblet of Fire), nothing that forces you to turn a twelve year old into a twenty-year-old (Lightning Thief), nothing that absolutely compels you to ignore the theme of the book and have a character publish the wrong novel in the end (Misery -- and even someone who hadn't read the book recognizes that one in an otherwise good adaptation; it's a noticeably wrong tonal note), or have the character who stepped out and challenged a mountain troll and a black rider reduced to hiding behind the rocks in one scene and sleeping on Liv Tyler's horse in another (I stopped watching those movies at that point). If you want to do any of those things, by all means, do it -- as a new story. If those things are important, nothing is stopping you from writing an original script that has those things in it.
So, yes, I get ranty about totally unnecessary and detrimental changes, and I get back, "But that's the director's INTERPRETATION!"
And that's the thing, as far as my love/hate relationship goes. While I enjoy visual interpretation of the elements, the truth is, I don't enjoy having someone force his own textual interpretation on the material. If everyone who felt like making a movie of a book could just make one and pop it up on YouTube, then this wouldn't be a very big deal, but as it is, there don't tend to be a lot of movies out of the same book at a given time, and often, only one is ever made. Because of that, movies get a lot of privilege about the interpretation, so if a big movie of a book says, "This is what's important; the rest is irrelevant," then that tends to stand. It spoils a lot of the fun.
Also, an interpretation needs, at some point, to refer to what it's interpreting. Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, because you can't actually make the argument for or against it. How can you argue with, "Yes, but the way I saw the twelve year old, he was twenty, and I envisioned an entirely different plot"? I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, "In my view, District Thirteen was as evil as the Capitol" (me) or "In my view, District Thirteen was doing what it had to" (the movies, as far as I can tell). If you can bring in the textual support, then you can have a reasonable argument about the subject. The two might produce entirely different performances and different foci in the scripts. But if, in your interpretation, you decide to, I don't know, change the actual actions, then you're cheating in the argument.
Another thing is, it tends to abruptly fossilize every other visual interpretation. Fan art of The Hunger Games has gone almost exclusively to the movies, with Haymitch almost universally blond, even when it's not a literalistic drawing of Harrelson. It's eaten up the actual text, which describes him briefly but very clearly -- the movie is overriding the real visual. Now, I love Harrelson's performance, and wouldn't change a thing about that, but that doesn't mean he looks like the character. And Jack Torrance sure-God doesn't look like Jack Nicholson (nor does Wendy look like Shelly Duvall). But these images have absolutely frozen so much of the visual imagination! (Again, this could be solved by having as many people making movies as feel like it, but I guess they'd cut into each other's box office and cause fan wars about whose was the best, etc. But at least no one would be left with the idea that such and such is the definitive interpretation which must now be followed.)
So that's the /hate part.
On the other hand, I still love hearing the dialogue I've only heard in my head. I love seeing the characters and settings take life and begin to breathe. I love the anticipation as they build up the hype every time, and I love the cultural moments that the movies create. I still read books and think, "Wow, I can't wait to see how this scene plays out on the screen!" Heck, I'd love to write something that would look awesome on a screen. I love the whole concept of the movies, and every single time, I go in thinking, "I can't wait to see this!"
So I find myself constantly whipsawed on the subject. It's annoying.
On the one hand, I love movies. Big, splashy blockbusters, especially. Things that hit cultural nerves. I love the theme songs, I love the effects, I love the actors running around publicizing things. I love costumes and sets and big action scenes. I love sitting in a crowd and munching popcorn and cheering and...
Well, you get the picture. I love movies.
And I love books. I love curling up with my nose in one. I love listening to audiobooks. If I'm not driving, I close my eyes and let the story play out on the back of my eyelids. I love stories. I love writing. I love TALKING about stories and writing. I love reading out loud. I love analyzing stories on as many levels as I can. I love theme and meaning and extrapolation. I love doing insane things like trying to figure out the geography and history of Panem from the scant clues in the books.
All of which often leads to great anticipation of movies made from books. How will this look? Will they have noticed that little thing? How will they get across the motivation for character Y to do action X, which is entirely internal in the book?
I'm not a complete novice. I've taken screenwriting. I've produced and directed a college show. I was in drama club for years. I get most of it in principle.
There are obviously places where a script needs to be different from a novel. You can't skim time in a movie the way you can in a book. You can't just have an actor frown a little bit and convey the entire mental process of a character. You can't always find an actor who looks exactly like the character who can also, you know... act. I'll take the ability to act over the ability to look like someone who only lived in an author's head.
That said, why on earth they don't even try sometimes is a mystery. I mean, really... you already put a wig on Woody Harrelson. Why not put a wig on him that's the same color as his character's hair, which, in Hunger Games terms, is actually a back story point? (Blond is coded as the merchant class, while Haymitch, like Katniss, is from the miner class. In District Twelve it's a HUGE deal, and the fact that Katniss's mother is a blonde -- like her sister -- is serious business.)
Okay, I digress. But for a good reason, and I'll digress here again.
I've been accused of being a horrible "purist," by disparaging film fans who think I somehow don't "understand" the differences that need to be addressed between the two media. I do understand it. I just don't, nine times out of ten, agree with the particular choices. Other times, I really do agree strongly.
There are two Stephen King movies in particular that surpassed the source material, in cases where the source material is actually very good. Shawshank Redemption took the novella it was based on and took the time-passing moments of the book into much more meaningful territory by the choices it made of which glossed over events to make scenes of and which to ignore. It took the freedom of leaving Red's head sometimes to expand the world very nicely, and it developed several secondary characters. In the case of Stand By Me, I think the screenwriter understood the story King had told better than King did. King genuinely thought it was a story about Chris, told from the side perspective of Gordie, sort of like Watson telling the story of Holmes, but in more tragic circumstances. It's very clear on reading it though, that it really is the story of Gordie, and the screenplay hones that and focuses on it. It happens. Sometimes, what you're really writing isn't the same story you think you're writing. Other movies, like the Hunger Games movies, are pretty all right, though rushed, and I question a few decisions -- I won't know until November whether my fears are justified on those, and if they are, I will spew much venom.
But a lot of the time -- most of the time -- the choices are awful. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I AM TALKING TO YOU, OH YOU PARAGON OF TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO-GOOD PRODUCTION DECISIONS.) There is nothing in the transition from page to screen that requires changing the entire tone of a story. There is nothing that requires one to make Mina Harker into Van Helsing's daughter. There is nothing that requires changing a small town setting to a suburb ('Salem's Lot, most recent Carrie), nothing that makes you turn a frightening battle sequence into a random misty maze (Goblet of Fire), nothing that forces you to turn a twelve year old into a twenty-year-old (Lightning Thief), nothing that absolutely compels you to ignore the theme of the book and have a character publish the wrong novel in the end (Misery -- and even someone who hadn't read the book recognizes that one in an otherwise good adaptation; it's a noticeably wrong tonal note), or have the character who stepped out and challenged a mountain troll and a black rider reduced to hiding behind the rocks in one scene and sleeping on Liv Tyler's horse in another (I stopped watching those movies at that point). If you want to do any of those things, by all means, do it -- as a new story. If those things are important, nothing is stopping you from writing an original script that has those things in it.
So, yes, I get ranty about totally unnecessary and detrimental changes, and I get back, "But that's the director's INTERPRETATION!"
And that's the thing, as far as my love/hate relationship goes. While I enjoy visual interpretation of the elements, the truth is, I don't enjoy having someone force his own textual interpretation on the material. If everyone who felt like making a movie of a book could just make one and pop it up on YouTube, then this wouldn't be a very big deal, but as it is, there don't tend to be a lot of movies out of the same book at a given time, and often, only one is ever made. Because of that, movies get a lot of privilege about the interpretation, so if a big movie of a book says, "This is what's important; the rest is irrelevant," then that tends to stand. It spoils a lot of the fun.
Also, an interpretation needs, at some point, to refer to what it's interpreting. Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, because you can't actually make the argument for or against it. How can you argue with, "Yes, but the way I saw the twelve year old, he was twenty, and I envisioned an entirely different plot"? I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, "In my view, District Thirteen was as evil as the Capitol" (me) or "In my view, District Thirteen was doing what it had to" (the movies, as far as I can tell). If you can bring in the textual support, then you can have a reasonable argument about the subject. The two might produce entirely different performances and different foci in the scripts. But if, in your interpretation, you decide to, I don't know, change the actual actions, then you're cheating in the argument.
Another thing is, it tends to abruptly fossilize every other visual interpretation. Fan art of The Hunger Games has gone almost exclusively to the movies, with Haymitch almost universally blond, even when it's not a literalistic drawing of Harrelson. It's eaten up the actual text, which describes him briefly but very clearly -- the movie is overriding the real visual. Now, I love Harrelson's performance, and wouldn't change a thing about that, but that doesn't mean he looks like the character. And Jack Torrance sure-God doesn't look like Jack Nicholson (nor does Wendy look like Shelly Duvall). But these images have absolutely frozen so much of the visual imagination! (Again, this could be solved by having as many people making movies as feel like it, but I guess they'd cut into each other's box office and cause fan wars about whose was the best, etc. But at least no one would be left with the idea that such and such is the definitive interpretation which must now be followed.)
So that's the /hate part.
On the other hand, I still love hearing the dialogue I've only heard in my head. I love seeing the characters and settings take life and begin to breathe. I love the anticipation as they build up the hype every time, and I love the cultural moments that the movies create. I still read books and think, "Wow, I can't wait to see how this scene plays out on the screen!" Heck, I'd love to write something that would look awesome on a screen. I love the whole concept of the movies, and every single time, I go in thinking, "I can't wait to see this!"
So I find myself constantly whipsawed on the subject. It's annoying.
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