Star Wars Ramblings: Tector-class Star Destroyer

I was just reminded of the Tector-class Star Destroyer, and how weird it is, by the excellent YouTube channel EckhartsLadder in this video. I shall quickly place this odd ship in context. The Tector is an Imperial II-class (or Imperator II-class, if you prefer) Star Destroyer variant seen in one shot of Return of the Jedi, and its main distinguishing feature is that it only has a very small ventral hangar bay rather than one capable of containing Princess Leia's corvette. It also seemingly lacks the typical aftward bulb-like protrusion you see on most Star Destroyers.

Star Destroyers typically fulfil a battle-carrier role akin to that of the Battlestar Galactica in the eponymous franchise; they are heavily armed and armoured, and have a considerable fighter wing. Star Destroyers have retrospectively become a very poor design choice. This is due to a number of factors.

 

First, George Lucas did not really think his universe through, and wanted more shiny toys in the Prequels. This led to the odd situation where it's perfectly clear that a single Venator-class Star Destroyer (one of the earlier and weaker ships seen in Revenge of the Sith) carries a large enough fighter wing to overwhelm the defences of a Star Destroyer in the later period. I'd like to note at this point that if you give anyone effectively unlimited funding and carte blanche in their creations, you should not be surprised if things go awry.

Second, game designers and authors followed up on part of what we see in the films, giving players and readers the opportunity to participate in the plucky little fighters attacking these "city-sized" warships. Again, this is perfectly understandable.

However, as I said above, what we end up with is a situation where the notionally more advanced later ships are very much worse than the older ones. A swarm of small fighters can take out one of these large battlewagons in a prolonged fight because the larger ship possesses neither the point defence capability of older, smaller models, nor their fighter capacity, while the swarm carries a number of missile weapons capable of knocking down the target's shields and destroying it. Neither the ship's armour, nor its shields are capable of resisting this swarm attack. The vessels' ability to carry about 10,000 troops does not justify this odd situation. Truly, Star Destroyers have retrospectively becomes jacks of all trades, and masters of none.

There is the context. Into this milieu the Tector-class Star Destroyer is introduced. The ship lacks the aftward ventral bulb that distinguishes the Imperial and Imperial II classes. It's reasonable to infer that this means that she is more heavily armoured. The ship's reactor (which is what the bulb is) is more heavily protected in the ship's innards. The vessel also lacks significant ventral hangar bays, and other sources have clarified that this is not made up for by the provision of replacement hangar bays dorsally or on either flank. I'm not even sure, from what we see, that the ship is capable of launching or receiving Lambda-class shuttles. I am happy to be corrected.

The ship lacks the fighter protection enjoyed by its close relatives, sacrificing it for armour and shileding that, we have established, are not sturdy defences in-universe. Moreover, it sacrifices another of the Star Destroyer's typical roles: planetary invasion or the ability to put boots on the ground. Without a large hangar, there is no way to launch the mammoth four-legged AT-ATs, the companion two-legged AT-STs or "chicken walkers", or even large contingents of infantry.

What is this thing for? Typical Star Destroyers of the I-line have a crew of c.37,000 and pack in another 10,000 soldiers. I'm going with the figures of my youth, so bear with me if the canon has changed. I was surprised earlier to see that Interdictor-class cruisers are now 900 metres in length. They were 600 once. Anyway, this ship certainly doesn't need that many Stormtroopers and vehicles if it can't get them out. The sources suggest that this design of vessel superseded the Venator because it was sturdier, which is a terrible argument. It is more specialised for capital ship combat, ignoring the vital fighter element, and is incapable of effecting a planetary invasion.

My best justification for this ship is that it is a taskforce or fleet flagship. Extracting ten thousand men lets you put in all sorts of communications goodies, and with the additional armour, the ship can survive longer in combat, decreasing command and control problems. Frankly, that's not a great justification. It's a Star Destroyer, so it's already very difficult to destroy, and in a ship that's a mile long, you can probably find a couple of rooms to jam in all the personnel you need to coordinate a fleet.

That's the Tector-class, folks. It's a ship that doesn't really make sense in a place where ships don't really make sense. Perhaps surprisingly, given how exactingly I've taken it to task for its deficiencies, I rather like it!

Links:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tector-class_Star_Destroyer

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tector-class_Star_Destroyer/Legends

Watership Down

There was a very odd story the other day. Channel Five had decided to take a break from showing softcore porn and CSI spin-offs, and one afternoon had broadcast the film Watership Down. A great many parents were very upset about this as it contains upsetting scenes. There are fields of blood, near death experiences, tremendous barbarism. I am just now watching it again, and intend to reread it in a week or so. I can see why parents wouldn't want their children to watch such subject matter. It's upsetting. It's sometimes horrifying. It opens your eyes to how unthinkingly cruel humans are. You assuredly don't want your children to realise that. It's the sort of thing that could even turn your children into vegetarians or - horribile dictu - vegans. It happened to me, after all.

I watched it, a long time after I read it, I suspect, and both initiations said to me that humans can be pretty horrible people. This was a long time before I understood the Holocaust or what WWII was about or what nuclear weapons were. I was just a little boy, and rabbits were being killed by humans for no reason. One of the attributes of the rabbits in Watership Down is that they are depicted with human characteristics, which helps small children understand that they are not just inanimate objects, but conscious beings. Don't worry too much, parents: when we small children get older we realise that bunnies don't compose poetry, for instance.

However, we may well realise (and retain the realisation) that rabbits do feel. They feel pain and love and hate. They quite possibly (probably) don't feel them as we do, but they experience them, nonetheless. That is an awkward time for a child. For one begins to wonder if other creatures feel some of that. The pig sliced into ribbons for our breakfast? The cow chopped into chunks for our lunch? Do they feel? Then we might go and observe, and find that they do feel. Then we look about ourselves, and we see that our fellow humans know that these creatures feel, but still don't care about killing them. We look at ourselves and ask whether we feel happy about killing them just because they taste good.

Maybe for you the taste is argument enough for murder. Perhaps you don't think of it as murder. It could well be that your parents cleverly stopped you from watching this film (or something kin to it) at such an impressionable young age, so animals never got anywhere near your conception of people. Maybe your parents used sophistry or argumentum ad populum or ad vericundiam to make you eat your sausages. Many do, I think. Maybe you cared for a little and then stopped caring. Perhaps you cared, and want to spare your child the feelings you experience.

It's so much simpler, after all, to cut down any obstacle, to blast through any blockade, to eat anything that is in your way, and to teach your children to do the same. Crush the weak. Take their possessions. They are but your playthings. Just be sure to keep your children safe until they grow strong enough to seize and snatch, rob and grab, kill and burn.

This probably will be an unpopular blog. There is no way of which I am aware to point out to people that they are supporting mass murder and cruelty on a global scale that doesn't make them angry with you. To get a whole other bunch of people angry with me for one moment, the Israeli government seems to be stuffed with awful people. You can't say that without making people angry. Then, as I expect you know, some Labour MP was recently revealed to have said some horrible things years ago, and was defended by Ken Livingstone, who was himself defended by an American chap called Finkelstein, who argued that suggesting one move the denizens of Israel to America would - in America - have been treated as a hard-nosed piece of satire. That struck me as a weird thing to say, given that when one thinks of moving a whole ethnic group from A to B, with the concomitant death toll, one tends to think of the Holocaust, where a cruel bunch of people cruelly moved another group from place to place to death. There's no humour there. There's horror, which also begins with an H.

One can't really "joke" about ethnically cleansing the Jews from Israel to America without invoking and evoking the Holocaust. Well, you can (for a given value of "joke")...but you shall annoy people. Likewise, you can't point out that the Israeli government is pretty horrifyingly evil without upsetting people, nor that mankind is egregiously despicable in how it treats other species. Heck, the only two comments I had on my blog before last, discussing a lady attacked by men, were insulting rejections of her position, which didn't deal with the substance of her argument at all.

Star Wars sold to Disney: new film in 2015

The things that happen when you go to bed early, eh? In a nutshell, George Lucas has sold Lucasfilm to Disney, who intend to continue the series. George will continue as a consultant. We can only speculate, at this point, what direction this will take. First, what does this transition mean in terms of popular appeal? Disney was a wildly varied reputation, from employees referring to it as Mauschwitz and Duckau, to it being the beloved object of adoration for sweet little children. It also controls the innovative Pixar studios and the Marvel comic franchise. It is this latter piece of ownership that may make many people swoon. The recent Marvel films have been unanimously well-received, filled with derring-do, action and likeable characters. These elements all bear comparison with Star Wars, but there is one major difference. Whereas Star Wars fans tend to be split on whether the Prequel Trilogy is incomparably glorious or diabolically disastrous, in part because of George's creative decisions, there is no such evident split in fan appreciation of the recent Marvel flicks.

There are some people who still associate Disney solely with fairy-tale princesses and talking furniture, but there is clearly a wider aspect to the corporation. I shall make some people swoon now by suggesting the first thing that I thought: the director of the Avengers flick was Joss Whedon, who has shown consistently good form on the small screen and the silver. He even has specific experience of a sci-fi show in which a small rag-tag band of rebels fight against an evil empire. Heck, the band's leader is clearly in the mould of Han Solo. Whether Joss would be interested is arguable, and the extent to which George's consultant role will enable him to poke at stuff is as yet unclear. The potential of the situation is pretty clear. For some years now, there has been talk of a live-action TV series, and George had apparently been unwilling to proceed without firm editorial control and the certainty of not being cancelled if the start was bumpy. With the backing of the Disney corporation, that coming to pass just became much more likely.

Something else that strikes me as very promising is Disney's lust for marketing and selling associated paraphernalia. Is there a major shopping centre that lacks a Disney Store? A lustful and mercenary nature is something unattractive in a human, but in a corporation, it means they desperately want you to give them money, which can have excellent consequences. Something I have wanted ever since I was a little boy is a ruleset for playing Star Wars fleet battles. Taking into account the current release of the X-Wing skirmish game, as well as Disney's mercenary nature, that just took another step closer to reality. I should say that I am aware that there are rulesets out there suitable for the setting, and that what I am really after is a large range of correctly-scaled models.

When it comes to George, I don't tend toward either of the extremes. I don't appreciate his faffing about with the details of the original films, e.g. inserting Christiansen in place of Sebastian Shaw at the end of RotJ. On the other hand, I do not regard the Prequels as the unmitigated disaster that some folk do. I even harbour a heretical thought about Jarjar that will enrage both camps: he's so bad he's good. The largest problem I have with George is that old maxim: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Too long has he had his own way about everything. This has led to some thoroughly boneheaded ideas: who was the protagonist of Episode I? What's with choosing accents that will make people think you're a racist? Why is a Black and White Minstrel with floppy ears the comic relief? If anyone had been prepared to stand up to him and point out these problems, we would probably have got a better film. If George had decided to get a better director than himself in, we would probably have seen a better film.

He himself says that he wants to see the franchise outlive him, and he wants to oversee the handover while he still has time. George has had some great ideas, but he has had some truly awful ones, too. I expect that what we will see from Disney will divide opinion. We can only wait and see whether they decide to use Thrawn for Episode VII. He is much-beloved of fans of the Expanded Universe, but who else has heard of the guy? If you haven't, then he's a blue-skinned, red-eyed alien admiral, commanding the remnants of the Imperial Fleet five years after Endor. He is Sherlock Holmes on a spaceship, and his loyal confidant is Captain Pellaeon, who is rather in the mould of Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson. The trilogy (written by Timothy Zahn) in which he appears is very enjoyable, but I am not sure we shall see it on the big screen. First, it is full of detail. Second, George has never been keen on using others' visions of his work, and he will be a consultant. Third, it means working to an established script: we do not yet know whether Disney will take a wholly new tack or decide to recycle work. All we can expect for sure are Jedi, spaceships and blasters. I am looking forward to this. Pardon me the inevitable pun, but I see this acquisition as -

A NEW HOPE

Film round-up: Dredd, Total Recall, The Possession, Anna Karenina

Let's do this in reverse order, eh? Anna Karenina is beautifully filmed, stylistically and visually gorgeous. Usually I say "But despite this, Prometheus isn't that good." Contrarily, the whole thing is very well done. It's impossible to say that it's a delight, as the central tale is tragic. Shockingly, I have not read the book, so I can only say that the screenplay (by Tom Stoppard) is well-crafted, and filled with skill. The Possession is perfectly fine, although I have to say that horror films aren't really my thing. While watching it I broke off from chuckling at moths flying down throats to remark to myself that it's unseemly and unwise to make a film extolling the virtues of exorcism when mentally ill people and epileptics are still dying from attempted exorcisms by the ignorant. I really don't think I entered fully into the, ah, spirit of things. There are some intentionally comic juxtapositions, such as the Hasidic Jew who's listening to his iPod, his earbuds' wires concealed by his dangling hair. Worth a look, if you have a spot of free time.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Total Recall remake. When I heard that they were remaking this story, I quite got the wrong end of the stick. I hoped that they would take Dick's original short-story and rework it into a quite different film from the Arnie flick. Don't get me wrong! I love Arnie's Total Recall: it's preposterous and self-aware of that very ridiculousness. I just assumed that they were going to do something different this time around. Sadly, they couldn't be bothered to rewrite the script quite that much. The most fun you can derive from this is "Spot the Actor": hey, Sulu! Woah, the dad from Malcolm in the Middle is the evil American ruler of the Federation of Britain! The Federation of Britain appears to include France and Germany. Incidentally, our Britannic thanks to our EU partners, especially the financially superior and more populated Teutonic one, for letting us be nominally in charge of this future EU, even if we have an American running us. Is that piece of casting a none-too-subtle criticism of Mr Blair in his persona as lapdog or total coincidence? God alone knows.

Back to the film, sadly. Rather than take Dick's story and do something novel with it, the chaps behind this remake decided to remake Arnie's film. We had fair warning of this in the adverts prior to the film's release, so I cannot blame anyone except my own optimism for going to see this turkey. Every scene seemed to be recreated: where Arnie had a prosthetic woman's head, Farrell has a hologram, where Arnie met a three-breasted lady of negotiable affection, so too did Farrell, where the baddie did this, the baddie did that. They've shuffled some characters and altered some minor points, but that's about it. They have stripped all the comedy out of the film, though, and that is an unspeakable mistake. A couple of tips for film-makers: if you strip all the jokes from a comedy film, then do not add in a skyscraper-cum-lift that takes people to work in London from their homes in Australia. That goes double when the lift goes through the core of Earth.

Furthermore, if you establish that the air of almost every part of Earth is toxic, it is a good idea to establish first how the poisons are kept out of London, and second . . . second, well, here we go. The Secret Rebel Base is in an abandoned church or cathedral. OK. That almost certainly isn't air-tight, but let's say Princess Leia or Han Solo covered it with sealant. If you make a big thing of sending the hero through a decontamination chamber, you have established in the viewer's mind that the air outside is dangerous. If baddies then break the windows and storm the building, the viewer realises that the bad air is now inside. So don't get people to ignore gas masks at this point. It would be fine in an Arnie film: this is the man who breaks into a gun store and steals a billion machine guns so as to rescue Alyssa Milano. He makes silly films. You have decided (foolishly) to make a serious film. Rein yourself in. Those M&M ads they run before films feature the three leads advertising the film, and poor Farrell seems to realise how piss-poor this remake is. He is reduced to saying that the vision of the future is very pretty. It is very pretty, just as Prometheus was very pretty. Unfortunately, it's rather worse than Scott's mess.

Don't despair, folks. If you want a good action flick, look no further than Dredd. It is pretty, and it combines this arresting visual quality with a tight storyline. If you have seen Watchmen, you may remember a defenestration early in the film. The assassinated character pauses in mid-air, evoking the comic source. Just so in this adaptation does the drug Slo-Mo permit the film-maker two opportunities. First, the original comic-book panel style can be copied, allowing those of us who have seen 2000 A.D. a spot of nostalgia. Second, if you use slow-motion photography to have someone thrown off the top of a 200-storey tower block, with them experiencing everything at one hundred times normal speed, you do get some use out of this current craze for 3D. As a grouchy old man of 31, I am still hoping it trundles off shortly, as it simply serves to slightly increase the price of my cinema ticket for no real gain most of the time. This time, though, I was content to pay the extra pound, Scrooge though I am.

Anyway, there is no wandering off or wondering for these characters. There is an ungodly amount of shooting, and a fair amount of blood for a modern film. Though if you compare the original Total Recall to Dredd, then you will say there is comparatively little gore and nastiness these days. The plot is simple and effective: Dredd and the rookie Anderson must vanquish some naughty drug-dealers. A friend has asked me to compare it to The Raid, an Indonesian flick about SWAT troopers fighting their way up a criminal-occupied tower-block. I will when I acquire a copy of The Raid. If you hated the tediously heartfelt and dull remake of Total Recall, you will enjoy the gravelly sincere violence and acting of Dredd.

First Blood: a few thoughts

Somehow I had never got round to watching the first Rambo film. I missed it as a little boy, forgot or postponed watching it when I got older, tried to watch our VHS copy a few months ago, and discovered that it had never existed; a case of mislabelling meant we had two copies of the first sequel. I had seen trailers and read reviews of the most recent Rambo flick, and had seen the third film, in which Rambo rescues the Colonel from Hot Shots! Part Deux and blows up a Soviet armoured brigade in Afghanistan with the aid of the Mujahideen. After seeing that, I realised that the actor playing the colonel had been chosen because of his part in the Rambo films. I do wonder how much airplay that Afghanistan-set film gets these days, now that the soldiers and vehicles being shot up and blown up are not villainous Soviets. I digress.

There are a few films such as this. I have never seen Titanic, nor Avatar. I do fancy seeing the latter, although I keep missing it when it's on the telly. Titanic, however, has nothing that strikes me as worth my time, so I expect to go to my grave ignorant of the film's details. I tend to trust my gut on these things. I once was compelled by a girlfriend to watch What Lies Beneath, and it was just excruciating. She had insisted on watching a favourite film of mine, American Psycho, and after about ten minutes had dragged her legs in front of her body, and was clutching them tightly with her arms in a classic defensive posture. I turned the film off and she was quite pleased about that. One of my housemates and friends at the time had a love of horror flicks, and he enjoined us to watch Cannibal Ferox (or perhaps Cannibal Holocaust). I kept a close eye on her, and after about five minutes we abandoned that one, too. Such films are not for everyone - especially not for people who find American Psycho too unnerving!

Clockwork Orange and Blue Velvet are a pair of films, the subject-matter of which dissuades me from viewing. Obviously, that's quite different from my reaction to Titanic, which simply fails to excite or interest me a jot or to the film of The Da Vinci Code, which was just appalling. I did watch that, mistakenly thinking that there was a good comedy to be had from such a thunderingly bad book. I tried to read it, and got no further than a chapter or two in. I expect that there is a good comedy in all that faux-sincere, turgid prose, but that film was not it. I went to see Tomb Raider with some friends, and to this day it is the only film that still makes me remember it strongly enough to wish I had just left my friends to suffer it alone. Perhaps my problem was never having played the game, but then again, my friend, Si, who was a fan of the series, thought it every bit as dreadful as I did! I caught the end of it the other day, as my young lady is a bit of a fan, and was surprised to see Daniel Craig in it.

I'm not typically a pushover when it comes to awful stuff like that. For instance, she started watching Desperate Housewives the other day, and I retreated upstairs and read some Gibbon for half an hour! I returned and we both watched Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, and laughed ourselves silly. I really recommend that film to you, if you have a funny bone!On that cheery note I wish you all a pleasant Sunday! Maybe you should pop on an old film and take it easy.

Expendables 2: Review and summary (2/2)

When we left our heroes, poor Billy had been stabbed through the heart by the villainous Jean-Claude Van Damme. Mr Stallone takes this rather amiss, declaring his response to be to "track 'em, find 'em, kill 'em", delightfully evoking an irascible John Wayne. Sly meets Bruce Willis, and you can tell he's angry and upset, because he tries to pick a fight with him, saying he never gets his hands dirty, always sending people to die for him. Brucey plays his cards right, and refuses to get suckered in. With the help of Maggie, Sly et al set about tracking down the Nasty Chaps.

Having been introduced to the baddies as pretty mean, since they killed Billy Don'tBeAHero, we now see that they are even nastier than that. It turns out that the doodah from the downed aeroplane is a map to an abandoned mine in which the Russians left 5 tons (or is it tonnes? This is an American film, so surely the former) of plutonium - dun-dun-duh! Jean-Claude and his villainous cronies want to extract the plutonium and sell it to as many wealthy terrorists as they can for as much money as possible. They are a little wary of dying of radiation poisoning, so they kidnap all the men from the villages surrounding the abandoned mine to collect it for them. J-C's 2-i-C espies a crushed villager cradling another man, clearly poisoned and weak, and speeds up the cradler's return to work by shooting the sick man. Remember that these baddies are gloriously two-dimensional in their villainy! It's wonderful! 2-i-C is ordered to collect all the remaining villagers to speed up the process of mining everything out inside three days.

Arriving some hours away in the aeroplane, Sly and his crew decide to have a bit of a recce before doing anything. They espy some sinister chaps with satanic neck tattoos, and intend to beat them up for information. Maggie kindly steps in with a bag of scalpels and offers her services. There's a tasteful cut to the next scene. I suspect if that scene ever was written, that it was one of those horrifying moments excised when Chuck Norris was attached to the production. Information "acquired" our heroes decamp to an abandoned Soviet army base, where the Russians trained to attack New York, apparently. Doubtless this is a nod to the approaching remake of Red Dawn. Mr Statham is sent back to the aeroplane to fetch a lot of guns. Our heroes encamp in a building, and there follows a little comic scene with Terry Crews having brought proper food while everyone else is eating horrible ration packs. We have a touching moment between Sly and Maggie, when he says he keeps women at a distance as people around him get hurt, and she advises him that this is no way to live.

It's next morning, and Terry's having a cup of lovely coffee in a porcelain cup, and Dolph Lundgren is snoring like a chainsaw. Suddenly the villains arrive! A gunfight ensues, with our heroes fleeing the deathtrap of a building. They are vastly outnumbered, with little hope of victory or even survival, and Sly telephones Statham to have him hurry up and bring a tank as they are badly outgunned. Then around the corner comes . . . a tank - but it isn't driven by dear Jason. Nope, the baddies have a tank. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Things look bleak for our heroes. Stallone has a single round left, and so he leans round the corner to take a final shot. BLAM! The baddy goes down. BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! BOOM! All the other nasties are cut down in a hail of gunfire, and the tank is taken out of the equation by a judiciously aimed ATGM (or something along those lines). Puzzlement abounds! I didn't do that. Did you do that? No, I don't have any bullets left! Then who?

Up pops the internet's most-popular meme, Mr Charles Horatio Xavier Norris. A spot of friendly banter ensues, and our heroes thank Chuck for helping them out. There's a reference to the memes in the form of Chuck's character saying that a King Cobra died after biting him. Boom-boom. But he works solo, and so off our heroes trot, Statham having arrived with more shooty things. They still need to find that base, after all! Through a scenic village (grey, sad people in drab clothes), when suddenly they come under fire. As it turns out, the ladies of the village had mistaken them for the villains, and decided to shoot first in an effort to save their little boys from being kidnapped to work in the mines. Villagers: "Who are you?" Sly: "We're American." Statham: "I'm English!" Maggie: "Chinese!" Terry: "Cherokee!" Randy: "You're all idiots." There's a slightly confusing moment as our heroes mistake themselves for hard-headed people solely out for revenge as opposed to a hilariously violent A-Team.

So the villains turn up in trucks to kidnap everyone else in this village. They are divided around the village and ambushed by various of our heroes. There is some rather comic gunfire from Dolph, and some lovely, balletic knife-slinging from our Jason, disguised as a priest. It seems a little odd that the villains hadn't kidnapped an old man in priest's robes beforehand, given they had stolen away every other weak old man. Maybe these are secretly devout Orthodox villains with satanic symbols on their necks. It's a delightful inconsistency. You might mistake that for a criticism, but these small scars make me love a silly film all the more. The baddies having been wiped out to a man, Sly et al decamp to spy out the enemy base. It's protected by a minefield, anti-tank weaponry (was that an old German 105mm gun?! I don't care if it wasn't, I like the idea too much!), AA weaponry - quad 0.50 cals, I think, and then one has to cross a bridge before one can get into the mine. This is going to be a challenge.

Unless you have an aeroplane with an artillery piece in the nose and a "bomb-bay door". Zoom in, shoot things, drop explosives onto the bridge's defenders . . . and then crash straight into the abandoned mine inside a disintegrating aircraft. Excellent! Ridiculously, wonderfully, gloriously over-the-top! After a little groaning from our heroes, they pop out and gun down all the villains, only to get caught in the mine by J-C, who blows the roof supports, and hightails it out of their with his convoy of trucks. Dolph, a former chemistry genius, apparently, has a way out: set fire to the phosphorus in the walls. No dice, Dolph. Too damp, apparently. But what's this? It's a large drilling machine coming through the wall of the chamber they're trapped in. Who's that driving? Why, it's only Arnie! He's both paying back the favour when Sly's chaps rescued him at this film's opening, and he's referencing Total Recall. Nice one, Arnie!

Bruce, seemingly stung by Sly's earlier chastisement about never turning up, beckons everyone into helicopters, and off they race ahead of J-C's column of nuclear trucks. Rather than any sort of planned ambush, they just stand in front of the them and blaze away very loudly! Veering off the road, J-C details a few men to hold off Bruce, Sly and Arnie - a foolish move, as they all end up dead. Then it's into the airport. If J-C can only massacre his pursuers, load five tons of plutonium onto an aeroplane, and then evade the CIA, and then sell his plutonium, he's home free. Ah. There are some very nice bits in the airport. As the baddies tear about, shooting at civilians, we see three figures, side-by-side, open fire from behind panes of opaque glass. It's Bruce! It's Sly! It's Arnie! But what's this? Sniping from a perch is the redoubtable Charles Fortescue Mornington Norris! What a lot of bullets. Huzzah!

Meanwhile, Mr Statham has a very pretty (if you find these words ineptly chosen, please feel welcome to substitute "artfully choreographed") fight with J-C's 2-i-C, culminating in shoving his head through a helicopter's rear propellor. Bruce and Arnie get into a small car, which Arnie declares is smaller than his shoe. They then drive by villains, with Bruce spraying SMG fire and Arnie blasting them with what I assume from its volume and ROF is an automatic shotgun. I could be wrong, mind - I have only a vague idea of weaponry. It looks and sounds right for Arnie, and that's the main thing. Then Sly and Maggie catch up with Jean-Claude, and there's a very good final fight scene. Needless to say, the good guy is victorious. I shan't detail it - you'll just have to watch it and enjoy it yourself. The film ends with Bruce providing the guys with a large biplane in which to fly off into the sunset. Roll the credits and closing music. In a word, do go see this film. It's fun.

Expendables 2: Review and summary (1/2)

BANG! Always open with a bang when you're making an action movie. That advice probably applies when writing about one, too. Beware spoilers below, folks. Now read on. BOOM!

If you saw the first Expendables movie, you will have guessed that this is a series that does not take itself terribly seriously. If you missed this, then my opening paragraph starting and ending with silly sound-effects should have clued you in. I have to admit, first off, that I didn't really enjoy the first Expendables flick. The main problem I had with it was that the villains were both too nuanced for a traditional action flick and yet of insufficient depth for a thoughtful piece. I like my cerebral stuff, and I like my mindless explosion-based nonsense. Separately. Also, it seemed to lack the surfeit of explosions I had hoped for. I am happy to report that neither of these is a problem I had with this film. In fact, I had no problems with this film.

We are directly thrust into the action with a daring raid in Nepal. Some villainous chaps have abducted one of our heroes, and have fastened him to a chair to beat him up. In roar Mr Stallone's Vice-Presidential Action Rangers, with lots of shooting, and some amusingly modified vehicles. You will have seen the battering ram in the trailers, but I don't recall the plough myself. Actually, this is an American film, and my spellcheck is admonishing me, so perhaps we should call it a plow. Yes, I remember that from Sherlock Holmes. Anyway, explosions ensure, lots of chaps end up as dead as a 0.50cal HMG round can make you - which is very. Dead. Very dead. Our heroes then decide to eliminate a helicopter, not with their small arms, fair enough, nor their 0.50cals - more questionably, but maybe they expended all their ammunition eliminating the Blue Meanies - but with a motorcycle.

This attack confirmed for me my enjoyment of what I had experienced thus far. Those of you who follow Bruce Willis' comedies (any good action film is a comedy in my book) will recall that the last Die Hard to hit the silver screen featured just such an anti-aircraft moment. I do like nonsense in these films. One of my favourite examples of the genre remains Commando, which all aficionados will recall as stuffed to the gills with nonsense, excessive brutality, a ridiculous death count, a villain modelled on Freddie Mercury, and the use by an air hostess of a missile launcher on an American police van to free Arnie. Speaking of Arnie, our heroes drive through a building, blast the baddies, and rescue - some Chinese chap whom we haven't noticed before, and then the man in the chair, who is everyone's favourite Californian governor.

He is rather upset at having to be rescued, and one does wonder to what extent his mild vexation mirrors his unexpected return from politics to cinema. No time to worry, however, as it is time for a ridiculous escape down some wires, preceded only by literally washing away the baddies who would chase them in a manner reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Those of you who enjoy a complete novelty in their films are probably wondering whether to watch this film now, and I can only ask what you thought you were going to get from a flick with Arnie, Stallone, Statham, &c, &c, &c! So it's down the zipline, where we meet that sniper we know from the trailers who shoots the chaps who surround Stallone and Statham. Most of our merry band board some zippy little boats, which some more baddies pursue. Messrs. Statham and Stallone, however, have collected an aeroplane (another perfectly cromulent word my American spellchecker doesn't believe exists), and Sniper Billy pops the heads of some nameless (and literally faceless once his rifle has banged up their noggins) naughty fellows in slightly different zippy boats, chasing our heroes in their other boats.

This chase scene is revealed to have been arguably superfluous, as everyone gets onto the aeroplane, Mr Statham having shot up the nasty men's boats with a machine gun. A meany boards the aircraft shortly beforehand, allowing Stallone to beat him up and throw him out the door, in the finest traditions of action cinema. So everyone gets onto the 'plane on their jet-skis, at which point I began to wonder how much money was being spent on this rescue, and then Statham loads the big gun (75mm? 105mm? Someone check out Wiki) that lives in the nosecone, and they start shooting at a raft on which some baddies are standing. This having been blown up with some HE rounds, they squeak over the top of a dam, and zoom away. They drop off the Chinese billionaire (which explains where they got the money for jet-skis) together with Jet Li (who suggests he might come back for Expendables 3 if he's free.

Homeward bound, they are, and there's an engagement party for Mr Statham, who is getting wed to Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wait, didn't she die and become a prophetic ghost? Sorry, I never saw Angel. Apparently, Carpenter's character cheated on Statham between this film and its predecessor, or Stallone's pre-wedding banter is just some odd masculine nonsense. We then get some relationship stuff which is so classic I think it came from an old black and white movie about WWII. Or a silent movie about WWI. Anyway, Billy the Sniper doesn't think this life is for him, so Stallone encourages him to go and be with his lovely French nurse girlfriend whom he met when he was in serving in Afghanistan. Stallone then drives off, moodily thinking about being alone all his life, and goes back to his surrogate woman: the aeroplane. Mr Church (Bruce Willis) is there, and with quiet viciousness excoriates Stallone for the events of film #1, and bids him take a specialist with him to collect a mysterious MacGuffin from a 'plane downed in Albania or Bulgaria. We don't meet any Bulgarians or Albanians, so I forget. Anyway, the new young lady appears on a motorised bicycle, and refuses to be ruffled by Stallone's "no wimminz" policy.

To Albgaria! Everyone, including this pretty new young lady, gets into the 'plane. On Jet Li's departure, Dolph Lundgren had demanded whom he know could bully, and Li remarked "You'll find some other minority". This new young lady being of Chinese extraction, there inevitably follow some gently humorous failures by Dolph to woo her. So they land and trundle off to the crashed 'craft. I remark privately on the inadvisability of wearing white jeans if one is supposed to be a covert mercenary - I doubt I would mention this to Mr Statham were I to meet him. Anyway, everyone trundles about slowly in a very clumped formation designed to favour cameras over sensible deployment - which is damned right for this sort of film! No fancy-schmancy sensible military tactics here, please! Needless to say, they find the downed 'plane, perform some amusing strength exercises, and send off Billy the Sniper to sit somewhere safe to keep an eye open.

Out of the fog emerges the diabolical, the evil, the deplorably French-sounding Jean-Claude Van Damme. Billy, don't be a hero! Billy has been taken prisoner, and now J-C makes Stallone's people put down their guns, threatening to shoot Billy otherwise. So they put down their guns and hand over the doodah they got out of the downed 'plane, and so J-C stabs Billy to death and nips off in a helicopter. The dastard! You know J-C is a naughty boy because he has a tattoo of a stylised goat's head on his neck, and he advises us that the goat is the Devil's pet. I'd missed that. I knew of the theory that the god Pan was conflated by early Christians with Satan, hence all the goat-stuff, but I realised at that point that I was over-thinking this film. So tune in tomorrow and find out what happens to our heroes? Will Flash Gordon save Earth? What of Professor Hans Zarkov, formerly of NASA? Wait, wrong film! More on Expendables 2 tomorrow, folks!

Prometheus: a review and summary

Avast, maties! Be warned that this review contains the dreaded Spoilers! Ye have been warned, yaar! Now read on, if ye dare!

For quite some time I have been looking forward to Prometheus, Ridley Scott's recently released film. I have heard that it would be a prequel to Alien, that it would be set in the same universe, that it would be set in a different universe and have nothing to do with Alien. Then I stopped paying attention to what I was hearing, and just waited for the film to come out. With a shocking level of inconsiderateness, it came out while I was away in Scotland at my friends' wedding in a tiny town without a cinema. Deplorable behaviour, Ridley Scott, what were you thinking? Thus stymied, I went to see it last Friday, a week later, with my brother and my friends, Berni and Nathan.

We watched it in 3D. It was the first time I have watched a 3D film, which tells you how infrequently I go to the cinema these days. I was a little wary, as Mum watched Avatar in this new "superior" format some time ago, and it confused her eyes. It took about half an hour, she said, before they returned to normal. Happily, I did not suffer from this reaction. Unhappily, I did develop a slight migraine. Happily, some cupboards in the background of a scene looked positively three-dimensional. Unhappily, a sand-storm in the film looked slightly bizarre. On the basis of that score sheet, I shall be dodging 3D in future. Don't let me put you off. I just don't consider a headache to be an acceptable result from an improvement. Call me a stick in the mud!

I had read, before seeing the film, that Fassbender's performance as the synthetic was worth the price of admission alone. This is inarguably true. The character of the android is a joy to watch. He is mature and naive, callous and filled with solicitude for the well-being of others, emotionless and yet filled with pathos, selfish and selfless. He reminded me in some scenes of Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Hannibal Lecter. In the context of the Alien series, he is a very pleasing melding of the strength and benignity of Bishop in the second film and the single-minded villainy of Ian Holm's Ash in Scott's original. He is belittled and insulted by some of the other characters, yet his humanity seems superior to theirs. There is a pointed (yet blackly comic) scene in which he asks another character, Charlie Holloway, why man created synthetics. On receiving the flat answer "Because we could, I guess." He asks how disappointed mankind would be to hear that reply from their progenitors.

The film opens with a figure in cloak committing suicide at a waterfall. We later learn this is one of the so-called Engineers, Space Jockeys, Pilots who built humanity. He swallows a toxin and dissolves in agony into the pouring water. That could sum up the film: self-destruction and self-sacrifice are the two themes that I perceived most abundantly in it. A long time later a couple of human scientists discover cave paintings all around the world which depict a specific cluster of stars, the system we know from the first two Alien flicks. They convince a dying bloke, an unrecognisable Guy Pearce, Peter Weyland (yup, Weyland and Yutani have yet to unite), to fund their speculative trip to find out what the heck is over in that star system.

Then it's a few years later. Fassbender's character, David, potters round the ship, being a real crowd-pleaser - he demonstrates his superior coordination and his desire to emulate human behaviour, and spies on Dr Shaw's dreams because he's a sinister character and because he arguably doesn't know he's transgressing a boundary. The spaceship is a bit peculiar. I have heard lamentation that it seems more advanced than the Nostromo, the mining ship of the first film. There will always be visual problems when films are created decades apart, and evolving computer technology is one. However, this ship is the privately financed state-of-the-art plaything of the head a multi-billion-dollar corporation, and the original ship was a bog-standard tug. So you can get upset or not, as you please. I didn't find it ruined my enjoyment of the film.

They reach planet LV223, and you sit in the dark cinema, wondering whether that's the same number as in the original flick. No, I had a look and in the original it was LV426. They are in the same system, and have designations apparently 203 instances apart, don't orbit the same gas giant, and this new planet is far more hospitable than the original Stygian (boom-boom!) Acheron. I had a gander at some Aliens wiki earlier, and LV426 (the planet in the original) is one of three planets orbiting a gas giant, according to a screenshot, whereas a screenshot of the new flick shows two moons (including LV223) orbiting this gas giant. So either it's a system with 2+ gas giants with big ol' moons or someone adds a third planet by the time of Alien, and renders LV223 less appetising a prospect for colonisation than LV426. The anal-retentive digression ends here.

Peter Weyland's hologram appears to give everyone a strange pep-talk, and to make us sympathise with David, the dream-invading creep: "He's the closest thing I have to a son, but he has no soul." Meredith Vickers, Charlize Theron, has a huffy moment of growling at the two academics. Shaw makes some baffling speech about how she believes the Engineers made us. It's impossible to know what to make of this. One of the other characters says she's throwing out centuries of Darwinism, and she responds "It's what I believe." It's never made clear just what the Engineers did: a) create all life on Earth (unlikely, since it would require a timescale too vast to conceive), b) interfere by patching proto-human DNA with their own (which doesn't fit with the later idea that human and Engineer DNA is exactly the same), or c) something else. I assume it's a combination of poor writing and some strange reference to the squabbling in America over whether evolution or Creationism is the One True Path. It mildly irritated me to hear the scientist dude who opposed her "crazy theory" calling it Darwinism, when Darwinism is obsolete and has been replaced by more advanced models of evolutionary theory. That said, I can see why you'd dodge a five-minute pencil-sketch of the evolution of evolutionary theory in your film.

So they fly down to the planet, which has huge mountains that make Everest look cute and tiny, and they spot a row of structures: a semi-spherical dome topped with a crested ridge, and with a wall encircling all but a small entrance. They land at one, and everyone (except David) appears to have forgotten the others exist by the film's end. I recall a line of at least three, and probably more, stretching beyond the capacity of the eye to see. There has been a lot of complaining that the ship's captain only asks whether the atmosphere is safe for the ship when they are already in it. It has been widely declared that he should have had a spectroscopic analysis run while in orbit. Frankly, I'm prepared to tolerate something that is clearly only a cinematic convenience.

Everyone's filled with the desire to explore this place and find out what's going on, so off they zoom. They get inside and discover that the atmosphere is strangely breatheable - handily allowing the actors to take off their huge bubble helmets. David has no sense of self-preservation, and doesn't care about the others, so starts poking at controls on the wall, replaying CCTV holograms of giant creatures fleeing something and opening doors to sinister chambers with big heads and worrying-looking jars that evoke Alien eggs. Shaw collects the decapitated head of one of the giants, who have been dead for a couple of millennia. Two dudes sensibly decide they are freaked out, and elect to return to the ship. Foolishly, they didn't pack their Tom-Tom, and so when everyone else flees back to the ship from the giant sandstorm a few minutes later, they are still wandering forlornly around the innards of the complex.

The sandstorm exposes a slight problem with 3D: the fragments closest to one are inevitably blurred, no matter that one looks at them carefully. Pretty minor problem, I guess. Dr Shaw drops the head, and her boyfriend, Charlie, and David have to drag her back to the ship. They poke the ol' noggin with some electricity so it thinks it's alive, and it begins to melt like the dude at the start of the film. Everyone is amazed that it looks like a giant pale human head, except Shaw, who is very pleased, as its DNA precisely matches human DNA. I began to get confused, then wrote off this impossibility as film shorthand: the DNA for a pallid, twelve-foot tall muscled, hairless race doesn't really seem likely to be exactly the same as ours. We share something like 95% of our DNA with bananas, so I presume it's this sort of closely proximate connection that the scriptwriter ineptly wished to convey. Charlie is disappointed, and so he gets drunk. David, back to being sinister, extracts some sinister black oil (very X-Files) from one of the jars, which he picked up. He has the aforementioned chat with Charlie, then asks "What would you be prepared to do to find out?" When Charlie says he'd do anything, David contaminates his booze with black oil. It's a really charmingly pointed bit, that. David really does seem to ask Charlie's permission to experiment on him. Charlie, despite insulting David for not being human, doesn't realise that human idiom is a bad idea when dealing with something inhuman, and seals his own fate.

Charlie goes to see Shaw, and upsets her by making light of the Engineers' ability to create life, which reminds her that she's infertile. Quite why he is disappointed, angry and upset is unclear to me. The only real explanation seemed to be that he'd hoped to meet the Engineers, and yet they all were dead. Given that he is an archaeologist, spending all his time studying extinct civilisations and so on, he might have got used to this by now. Perhaps he gets drunk at the start of every dig he goes on. Meanwhile, the two dudes who had wisely decided to flee back to the ship, and foolishly got lost, find that weird alien lifeforms have oozed out of the jars. The biology dude tries to charm the sinister dianoga-like thingy, and his bearded, hairy companion freaks out. They both die. Come next day and the folks on the ship head out to look for the dudes. Charlie falls ill, so they drag him back to the ship. Vickers, terrified of infection by some alien madness, flames Charlie, who deliberately forces her hand by walking onto the ship. Shaw is understandably upset. She wakes up a bit later, and David tells her that she's three-months pregnant with an alien monstrosity. She beats up some folks and abuses a silly surgical machine to have the baby removed.

Having been cut open by a laser for an emergency Caesarean, and stapled shut again, she then spends most of the rest of the film hauling heavy weights, getting into fights and running at high speed. I had heard that the Caesarean scene was unwatchable. That's untrue, unless you're particularly squeamish. If you are particularly squeamish, why are you watching a Ridley Scott film set in the Alien universe? You aren't, are you? You're watching something gentle and unworrying. So there's a nice thematic link here with the first film. In Alien the facehuggers, resembling in part the female genitalia, attacked people, and in a sense raped them, making them gestate a monster. In this film we see David practice a form of date-rape on Charlie, by taking advantage of his drunken state. Then Charlie and Shaw have consensual sex, leading to her pregnancy. The character has always dreamed of pregnancy, being infertile, and yet on realising her dream it becomes instead a nightmare.


Now it turns out that Peter Weyland was on the ship all along, wanting to find from the Engineers a cure for being old. David has discovered that one of them survives in a stasis pod, and takes everyone to meet Mr Tall, Bald, Muscled and Pallid. Shaw doesn't seem to feel like stating that she is vexed that David murdered her boyfriend, and made her womb into a laboratory to make a monster. She has a more mature attitude to the foibles of machines than I do. I shout at my car when it mucks up a gear change. I would take it very amiss if it were to impregnate me with a toothy alien squid-thing. I'm not sure why she doesn't shout at Peter Weyland. Maybe she's tired. Having your belly cut open can take it out of you, I know. It was all I could do, having lost my appendix last year, to hobble slowly to the end of the road and back, taking about three or four times as long as normal. I respect these future scientists and their awesome staples.

Vickers turns out to be Weyland's daughter, which has been hinted at throughout the film. First, when Weyland refers to David as his son, not his child. Second, in scenes when Vickers has attempted to stamp her authority on the mission and in particular on David. Third, in scenes when she clearly seeks parental approval. Her heartless, cold-blooded and yet wrathful nature makes an interesting (albeit brief) comparison with David. Peter Weyland made himself a synthetic monster of a son, and made his real daughter into a monster through neglect and so on.

So it's off to see the wizard. They wake the sleeping giant, and he cheerily tries to murder them all, then takes off, intent on using his deadly cargo of bio-weapons to annihilate all life on Earth. The human captain and his officers agree with Shaw's estimation that preventing this is a cause worth dying for, and, after ejecting a lifeboat, do a kamikaze run into the giant vessel, sending it crashing back to LV223. Vickers flees off the ship and to the lifeboat, but the Engineers' immense vessel rolls on its rounded edge and squashes her. I came home the other day in my car, and there was a rabbit in the yard. He ran directly away from me. I was driving exactly where he was hopping. Rabbits have an excuse for being silly about the way things roll: they have yet to invent the wheel. When humans do it, it's silly. Run sideways, for pity's sake!

Shaw, having sprinted, fallen, got up, sprinted and so on for several minutes, now rushes over to the lifeboat because her air is low for no readily apparent reason. I (generously) presume a deleted scene exists in which her air canister is damaged in her flight. Reaching the lifeboat, she scrambles in just in time, and is aghast to find the baby monster has turned into a giant toothy squid. It's really not clear why nobody bothered to secure this critter before popping off to see the pale stasis-pod dude. Come on, Mr Weyland, what's the point of looking for a cure for old age when you're going to get eaten by Squiddy the Pale when you come back to your ship? David helpfully tells Shaw over the intercom that the Engineer, annoyed about being knocked out of the sky, is coming to kill her. Happily for her, Squiddy and the Space Jockey have a battle reminiscent of that King Kong versus Tyrannosaurus Rex fights from the classic '30s film, and she slinks off. Folks have complained that there is no reason for David to tell her, but that ignores the fact that David is throughout solicitous for human welfare until it gets in the way of Weyland's plans or David's interest.

The Engineers are thus exposed to have been not noble progenitors of mankind with the loveliest of intentions, but sinister bio-weapon researchers who sequestered themselves on a tiny moon in case anything went wrong. Something did go wrong, but they managed to avoid it reaching their homeworld by all dying on LV223 instead. It's a nice switch to see the Space Jockeys depicted as evil, given the aura of kindness that the film crew apparently felt about the model in the original film, and given that Shaw starts the film believing them to be kindly benefactors, extending to mankind a hand of helpful friendship. It remains unclear why the Space Jockey at the end intends to cleanse Earth of mankind. Is humanity an unsatisfactory species for preparing a planet for habitation by the Space Jockeys? Is humanity perfect, but the inevitable result of our success is our extermination? Has the surviving Space Jockey just gone crazy because of malfunctioning equipment? Was he always a nutter? Does anyone particularly care? When's the sequel coming out?

David, is pleasantly stoic about having his head separated from his body by the malign Space Jockey, in a scene which reminds us that the humans were poking at the decapitated head of another Space Jockey earlier. He then reminds us of a still earlier scene, by pointing out that there are other alien ships. Shaw then lugs his body about. I know the first thing I thought of on returning from surgery was weight-lifting. Oh, wait, no. No, even sitting up was exhausting, because I had to use unfamiliar muscles so as not to wear out the stomach ones with a hole in them. I'll shut up about that now because we're at the end. So off they fly - the helpful, psychotic, naive robot and the God-loving, somewhat-crazy, PTSD-dodging, superhuman scientist. We cut back to the Engineer, and a proto-Alien chestbursts its way out of him, leaving us even more confused about the origin of the Aliens than we were before we watched this film about the backstory of Alien.

Worth watching? Yes. Worth watching in the cinema? Yes, there's some lovely grand visuals. Does it answer any questions? Er, kinda. Does it raise more questions? Arguably, but since it didn't answer the first bunch it was supposed to, you can write off any expectations about a sequel to this prequel filling in the weird gaps with any sort of conclusive answer. Self-destruction and self-sacrifice as themes? Yup: the Engineer at the start, the crazy folk who undertake a five-year trip (one-way) to look into some utterly unconvincing vague hints that aliens made us, Peter Weyland destroying himself by looking for stuff that "man was not meant to know", David getting ripped apart by the Engineer, the Engineer's own Squiddy using him to birth a new monster, Charlie's readiness to "do anything" to find out more about the Engineers, the Engineers' own bio-weapons killing them, the humans' ship crashing into the Engineers' ship so as to save Earth, the scientist who gets too close to the dianoga-thing and gets himself killed, and probably some more that aren't coming to mind.

Weird stuff about sex and rape and birth? Yup: Shaw gestating Squiddy, Squiddy impregnating the Engineer, the scientist who gets too close to the dianoga-thing having it force its way down his throat, the Engineer at the start killing itself to see Earth with its genetic material. Worth watching in 3D? Not from where I was sitting. My friend, Nathan, said they only really use 3D to have things fly at you in ads. In proper films it's more a subtle background thing. Contrarily, when Mum saw Avatar, she commented on the realism of the depths, when one's got the perspective of the characters standing over sheer drops. So I suppose I should watch that and get another headache before issuing my final verdict. Is the film good? Yes and no. Every film I have ever seen contains ridiculous elements. This is not an exception. I would say that you should go see this film, but I would temper that with the admonition that, having watched Men in Black 3 the next day, MIB3 was better than Prometheus. Make of that what you will.

Iron Sky: a review

Those of us who watched the famous Star Wreck have long been looking forward to this even crazier offering from the same folk. Yes, you're going to see Moon Nazis returning to Earth in order to have their revenge. I shall avoid detailed spoilers. They fled Earth in 1945 and built a base on the dark side of the Moon. I greatly enjoyed this flick. The CGI is very good, especially considering their meagre budget. That sentence means what it says. It doesn't mean, "They did the best they could." It means they did a great job and I'm not entirely sure how, given what Hollywood films spend on CGI! Inarguably, when you have Space Nazis with flying saucers and armour-clad space zeppelins, you need either great models or great CGI. They have the latter. The look of the film is in all respects great.

But what of the script, direction and acting? Well, let's get the bad news out of the way first. If you like or feel sympathetic toward Sarah Palin, you will be very angry with the script, as Stephanie Paul's unnamed President of the United States is a Palin parody. If you feel America is cruelly misrepresented by the media, you will get so angry with the film that you will miss the ending. If you like your films stuffed with big names, again you're in trouble. The only chap I recognise is the delightful Udo Kier, who plays a post-Hitlerian Mondfuehrer (Moon Fuehrer) with restrained glee. If you are no fan of camp humour, then why in Heaven's name are you watching a film about Moon Nazis with Flying Saucers? Get off out of it, as they say down south! The only real question mark I have in my mind is that the film's mad scientist closely resembles Albert Einstein - but he is the stereotypical German scientist, despite his thoroughly anti-Nazi politics. That sums up the problems that some viewers will have.

The benefits are multitudinous. For you visual fans, Julia Dietze, Götz Otto, Christopher Kirby and Monika Gossmann are beloved of the camera. Really, they look great. More importantly than pretty actors and actresses, the script is wide-ranging in its satirical scorn. America and Palin are far from the only targets. I got a bit of a kick out of the name of a British spaceship both because it was a stereotypical name and because the odds against us having a spaceship in 2018 (when the film begins) are so long you could put them on end and be able to see Russia from here in Cheshire. There's an off-the-cuff joke about North Korea that goes down nicely, and a very well done skewering of the fashion industry. That becomes even more pointed when you think about Hugo Boss' involvement with the Nazis.

I mentioned above those folk who feel America is too hard done by in terms of international public opinion. They will fail to see the message in the subsequent part of the film: they will perceive an unfair suggestion that Sarah Palin is a Nazi - weird as that perception might sound to those of you who have seen the film. The actual message isn't that at all. It's a satire of advertising, and the foolishness and gullibility of both politicians and the public. The messages of the film are that greed, a desire for revenge and bigotry are all potentially devastating on a personal level and in a wider sense. We all know that, and one of the ways to ensure we act appropriately is to remind ourselves. This is a very amusing film which clothes some shockingly worthwhile messages in comic clothing that we may better learn them. Plus, it has pretty people in funky clothes and machines. I don't tend to rate films on any particular basis, but I guess I have to if I write a whole blog entry about one! So let's say it's 8 stars out of 10 on a scale where Sunset Boulevard is a 10 and Plan 9 from Outer Space is a 1.5. I'm sure I've seen worse flicks than Plan 9, but none come to mind right now. So check out Iron Sky, folks, if you like your satire, dieselpunk, pretty actors and actresses!

Trips and Travails, Wales and Wassails!

This weekend just gone saw two birthdays of great import to me. My father has long celebrated his at this time of year, and more recently my friend, Kev, decided to cash in on this, and be born on the same day. It being the former's sixty-second and the latter's thirtieth, the former kindly allowed me to visit the latter. I'll stop using former and latter now. Sorry. Kev lives in Wales. Oh, that's insultingly simplistic. I don't mean to talk down to my readers. See Spot run. Actually, we have a rabbit of that n- "SHUT! UP! PETE!" Erm, yeah, ok. Right, so I set off for Wales at half twelve on Friday. En route to Kev's I was to drop in on the mysterious Grey Wolf, a chap I've known for some years. I had misapprehended a communication from him, and so was laden with all the fresh vegetables I had been able to pluck from my fridge. Top Tip: if someone jokes that they're being forced to eat dog food, explore the possibility that they are actually joking that X, who was supposed to give them nosh, carelessly directed them to a cupboard, bidding them eat its contents, only for them to discover that all therein was dog biscuits.

Anyway, having given GW (don't get confused, wargamerinos) a spot of fresh nosh, I set about securing some windows. I think a rubber seal had never been installed, so I have filled the gap with some Tetrion powder I mixed into a paste. I also inspected the wall of the shower. Some kindly workmen had been the day before and applied tiles to the wall of Grey Wolf's bathroom. The plumber had thereafter arrived, and attempted to fit a shower . . . but there wasn't a gap for the water to come through. Impressive. I hear this has already been dealt with, though. We two (GW and I, not the mysterious plumber and workmen) had a chat for a bit, and then it was on to Port Talbot, City of Light! Someone might have called it that at some point. Maybe.

At Kev's I was reunited with Martyn, whom I knew at uni, his young lady, Vickie, the eponymous owner of the dwelling, dear Peter, and Mark - whom I have not seen in a month of Sundays! - and met his affianced, the delightful Amanda. The sense of humour of our group may be gauged to a degree from the sort of gibberish I come out with on here, so her sliding easily into dealing with it all is a credit to her and the future Mr Amanda. We then proceeded to drink. Amanda and Mark had recently discovered a delightful new recipe: tear some mint leaves, add rum, ginger ale and ice, and imbibe the resultant diluted inebriant. Martyn and Vickie departed first, having drunk little, as he, poor fellow, had a shift beginning at 6am the next day. Amanda and Mark sensibly sidled upstairs around midnight, and Peter, Kev and I were up till gone 2am consuming the concoction.

The following morning I was surprised to learn that over the course of the evening we had gone through three bottles of rum (two of Mount Gay bought for the cocktail, and one of Captain Morgan, which I had brought with me). It rather explains our (or at least my!) somewhat delicate state the next morning! We trundled out for a brief walk with Kev's dear dog, Jess, then pottered back to see Ireland defeat Italy at rugby. Well, we saw about a third of the match at Kev's, then strolled into town and caught the last third. We had set out in (not quite) good (enough) time to get enough seats for the England-Wales game that followed on its heels. I have to say that team sports have never done anything for me. I dig (but do not seek out) martial arts (boxing, fencing, Judo, &c), and will equitably (see what I punned there?) watch showjumping (though horse racing does nothing for me).

Despite that, and the resultant staring at a screen of muscular chaps
running hither and thither, I rather enjoyed the end of the game. Wales and England seemed evenly matched (to my admittedly unaccustomed eye) for the greater part of the game, but toward the end Wales leapt forward and then in a separate incident, prevented England's attempt to claw back her way to victory. The pub in which we sat erupted with cheers. I recall as a teenager being thoroughly startled when a classmate erupted with a scream of joy at England beating someone (Germany?) in a football match we were watching in 1997 or 1998 or 1999. I'm older now, and I burst out laughing, which was an excellent reaction to have. Everyone was grinning from ear to ear at having defeated the villainous English, and so I fit right in. :-D There then followed a traditional Welsh song. I couldn't follow the words, so remarked to Kev that I would imitate his practice of thumping my palms on the table. He told me I'd soon know the words, and it was true that "As long as we beat the English!" are pretty easy to recall!

The villainous Saxons and Angles having been defeated, we retired to a lovely local eatery for a spot of nourishment. Mm, curry. Thus restored we returned to town, where we stood on a very sticky floor with lots of people bumping into us. We circled the wagons around Amanda, as she was more susceptible to buffeting than were we. It was an odd Wetherspoon's, resembling rather a club in Newcastle-under-Lyme than any Wetherspoon's I've ever been in before. After one drink we headed over the road. The volume of music was about the same, the floor slightly less sticky, and there were fewer people. Er, result! Then we pottered home, temporarily collecting a young couple. The feminine half of which was very happy about the rugby result, so I tactfully (and pointlessly - what would she have done? Stabbed me with a grin?) covered my Englishness by laughing in agreement rather than speaking.

Right, er, so we got back, collapsed into our beds (settee in my case), and woke up the next day. On the Saturday Jess the dog had kindly woken me at half six in the morning to see if I wanted to play. I misapprehended this, and tried to let her out into the garden and then into the kitchen. Happily, on the Sunday morning she was asleep upstairs, so I didn't wake until a little after ten, and dragged myself out of bed about twenty minutes thereafter to bid good morning and bye to Mark and Amanda. Poor Martyn, having had to get up for a shift starting at 6am the day before, was today bound to start a shift at 2pm. I'd never be a nurse. My uncle was tried to persuade me to become something in the City, which involved several years of sleeping for perhaps as much as six hours each night. That at least had the benefit of being ordered sleep, albeit insufficient. Looking after people seems to involve neither regimentation nor enough!

Peter, Kev and I thus drove into Swansea. I hoped that a small Hare Krishna restaurant would be pen, while suspecting this would not be the case. We arrived, checked, and ended up at Pizza Express. Lovely pizza, and oilier than normal.! We trundled over to Watserstone's - or whatever they're calling it these days - and I picked up a Richard Morgan book, Market Forces, on Peter's say-so. Then I decided we would treat Kev by watching this new Muppets film. He had been unable to justify it to himself, assuming it to be a kids' film. It is not. Or it is at least enjoyable by all ages. We three enjoyed it greatly!

I quickly dropped Kev and Peter off at Kev's, collected my accoutrements, and darted off to visit my friend, Mark. He's very kindly asked me to be his Best Man at his wedding in May, but owing to my erratic visits to Wales, I've never met his wife-to-be, Marie. I had intended for this to be a chance to say hi, but their wee Lily, who is only some weeks old, was poorly, and their dog, a somewhat less wee hound, was a bit shouty, so Mark and I adjourned upstairs instead. I hope to remedy that omission next time I'm in Wales! I then fixed a dead headlight, as I happily chanced to have a spare in my glove compartment, and set off home again.

On my way down I had stopped the car. It seemed that my Tom-tom was directing me a way that differed from that which the AA's internet service had suggested. This turned out to be so. But on stopping the car beeped and pinged at me, flashing that there was a problem with the oil. I checked the oil. There wasn't a problem. I continued my journey down. On the way back it pinged and beeped and flashed at me again. I checked the oil. It was fine. I very, very cautiously checked the radiator's adulterated water, not being desirous of covering myself with hot steam or boiling water. It was fine. I decided that the car was lying to me and drove back without any trouble. Bonza!

On the way back I saw a bunny sat on a verge, somewhwere on the road between here and J17 of the M6, and got home after 01:00, which meant I was a bit tired. I was driving up the M5, and kept seeing warnings that the M5/M6 interchange was shut. That is in Birmingham, but there is an alternative route! So I turned onto the M42. I pulled over to use the facilities, and the traffic monitor they have told me that the M42 was shut from the next junction. I don't know whether to curse the halfwits who decided to close both of the motorway routes around one of England's major cities simultaneously or to condemn the idiot who decided to pretend that this had happened and hack computer systems to support his amusing lie. Either way, give me an axe, somebody! So I got home around one in the morning when I would otherwise have been home around midnight. I had some stuff to do online, so was then up until gone four (my brother was up for ages).

In short, I am worn out by a wonderful weekend and by two ridiculously implausible evenings of driving! Happy late Birthday, Kev and Dad! Amanda, Vickie and Lily, it was lovely to meet you all! Peter, Martyn, Mark and everyone else I had already met, it was a delight to see you all again. I love you all! :-)

Terrain: Rocks and ruins, watertower and wire

I pulled my finger out last night, thanks to the film Aliens. I find it a joy to work to. So I popped that on in the background and got down to work. I had knocked up some asteroids from polystyrene foam ages ago, and now I finally painted them (Figs.1&5). There are three basic shades: ruddy iron ore, grey rock and brownish dust. Then I set to work on a big ruin that I found in the attic the other day (figs.2&3). I put it up there ages ago, because I had no sand, and quite forgot all about it. I've dabbed it with side and roof hatches, and sprinkled some sand on there, but I need to get some decorations to PVA onto the sides. Just a matter of looking through boxes of bits, that!

Next I made flesh an idea I had while working on my WWI/40K barbed wire the other week. I shan't link to Wikipedia to back this up, because they're down for the day, protesting some tyrannical American legislation (Come back, Colonies, all is forgiven. ;-) ). Erm, seriously, though, as I understand it barbed wire turns up in the American West, used to fence in large areas cheaply. So I fancied I'd turn my hand to replicating that kind of barbed wire, rather than the defensive structures of WWI. I had a spare piece about, into which I had long ago secured wood and foam. So I got some of the plastic mesh, and wound it round the bits of dowel at two heights, and once on either side (Figs.4&6). Whether this is strictly historically accurate or no, it gives a reasonable impression of the sort of barbed wire I see hereabouts. Having done so, I found a water tower I had delayed work on for want of PVA glue. I quickly fashioned some iron bindings for the wooden sides out of thin plasticard, glued on some rivets, and then secured some tissue paper atop the whole with diluted PVA (Fig.6). One of these days I must get back to painting a few figures rather than constantly making terrain!

Still, it's important to do what one loves. Speaking of which, I haven't been getting quite so much done of late, because I have been remedying my empty boxes of books by ticking off literary classics. Amazingly, some of these are turning out to be rather good in defiance of all the times I was ordered at school to enjoy a dull book! Then again, a thirty-one year old ain't the same as a teenager, so maybe my younger self was right at the time. No, that's unfair. I've read To Kill A Mockingbird, in which one character, Jem, is described thus, ""no tutorial system ever devised could stop him from getting at books". So let it be with Caesar, er, Pete! Delusions of grandeur. I have also begun Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which is - again - a rather good read thus far (about a hundred pages in of a total of 434).

It is a shame how certain didactic methods wreck reading for people. I've mentioned Mum's travails in school with The Wind in the Willows: having been told they would be reading it, she went home and read it, only to discover that they would spend the next term in an agony of slowly going through it. I was chatting to the lady at the Job Centre on Monday about it, and she confided in me how school had put her off Shakespeare. Hah! So it isn't just me who wanted to bash that Bard, I thought. I am no Jem, and some authors I am intensely wary of: John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Austen, the Brontes and the peerless Dan Brown.

Tolkien I am just about scared of by now. I have attempted to read the snore-fest that is Lord of the Rings about a dozen times now, the last time even soliciting a passage I was assured by a fan was intensely exciting (I think it was the escape from the Ring Wraiths at Weathertop and Frodo's instalment in that Elven City). I managed not to fall asleep, but I am now too frightened to reread The Hobbit (which I enjoyed as a little boy) lest it turns out that it is unreadably dull. I have fragmentary memories that it, too, contains Hobbits singing at least once a chapter. If ever I were to become a terrorist (rather unlikely, but bear with me), the Americans could quite easily torture me by giving me only that as a book. The films were good, though, albeit a bit long. Anyway, I have probably enraged half the readership now by attacking Tolkien's abilities and another quarter by saying how dreadful I find Shakespeare, so I shall quit while I'm behind, relying on the pics to restore my good favour in your hearts, gentle readers. Until next time!

Sherlock: gone for another aeon!

The only complaint I can fairly lay against the BBC's modernised adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories is the fact that each series is but three episodes long. Granted, they are nice and long, but one has just three weeks of enjoyment followed by an age of waiting! OK, in honesty, I wasn't too keen on the second episode of the first series, feeling the idea of Chinese gangsters was a bit passé. This series has been delightful. In the first episode we were treated to a nice in-joke. The episode names have been known for a long time (A Scandal in Belgravia, The Hounds of Baskerville and The Reichenbach Fall), all plays on the titles of the original stories. So in the opening scene of Scandal we had a series of short comic scenes in which other adulterated names came up. My favourites were The Speckled Blonde (originally Band) and The Geek (originally Greek) Interpreter. It reveals both a delight in the original and a desire to delight other fans.

Of course, the show is not for everyone. My mother does not want to see an updated Holmes, so hasn't watched them. I know another few folks who aren't keen on the alterations made to the original tales. I shall always have a love for the Granada series with the late Jeremy Brett in the lead role, but I have another friend who finds his fluctuating weight (a result of his illness) too great a detriment to the whole. Ironically, given that Holmes' schtick is his excellent observational abilities, I had never noticed this at all. Others swear by the Russian adaptations, which won the actor playing Holmes an honorary OBE. I would that my Russian consisted of more than a scant few words, because I have been unable to enjoy (some kindly fellow's Youtube upload of) their adaptation of The Speckled Band on account of the modern language used in the subtitles. "Yeah" just seems a bit odd to be coming from a period Watson.

I admit it might seem perverse for me to praise a modern adulteration one second, then backhand a faithful adaptation the next. Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall go to see the Downey film. I greatly enjoyed the first one. Lest purists be screaming, I offer this explanation: I went to see it knowing full well that it would not be Holmes. Explosions, nudity and leaping out of windows into the Thames? Hah! I expected Hollywood silliness, and I received it in abundance. I don't doubt there will be more in this sequel. To be fair, Law's Watson struck me as very faithful to the spirit of the original character: a bizarre occurrence in a film that played so amusingly fast and loose with even basic common sense!

I have, it will surprise many to learn, been hard at work on 'gaming things this week, although I have yet to provide photographic evidence of this! I can't quite explain why I haven't been posting loads this week. Perhaps, like Holmes, it is because I had a fit of activity, then fell off a bit this week. Anyway, tomorrow I shall get some pictures up and restore the balance of the universe. Another distraction this week has been books, I confess. I have begun to reread Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, a childhood favourite, toyed with having another crack at Caleb Carr's Angel of Darkness (it is a good work, but I became distracted when I was reading it, so I shall have to start again. Much the same fault befell Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Come to think of it, has she written anything since?), lunged into Stel Pavlou's Decipher (why won't my italics work?), which is a thoroughly ridiculous novel. If you imagine that funny film, The Core (now they work?), in which the Earth's core stops spinning, you will have some idea of the science in this book: the sun's a secret pulsar, for instance.

Lastly, I have begun To Kill A Mockingbird. I had found and snapped up a DVD going cheap the other day, as it is on a list of films to watch. I was then pleased to discover a copy of the book, which is on a list of books I have to read, hiding in a bedroom on a bookshelf. Cunning devils, books: you never know where they'll be! It provided a double reminder of something I have mentioned on this blog in the past: that school put me off "classics of literature" and I have only recently been giving them their fair turn at the wheel after years of Star Wars novels and Terry Pratchett. Don't take that as a dig at either of those. Anyway, it's very readable, and I have been thoroughly absorbed by the milieu. I did give Jane Austen a try the September before last, but she still does nothing for me. I could see where the jokes were in the first chapter or two, but they bounced off my thick heid.* Perhaps in another five years I'll have another go. Speaking of going, I shall be back tomorrow with some pictures of the week's physical work. Adieu!

* I don't know that switching to Scots to allow me to suggest head and hide in one word was a good idea, but I'm leaving it in.

British citizenship tests

No, not a political post, but a comic one. The government's on the cusp of releasing - or has already released - a new test for immigrants to take. Needless to say, I took it and failed! I am not sure quite why knowing when British women gained the right to divorce their husbands is an essential requirement in this country, but that's enough sour grapes from me, eh? ;-) No, the real reason I've called you all here to the Accusing Parlour (ooh, I might consider renaming this place, if I wasn't sure that some Futurama buff must have used that as a blog-name already), is for you to take the test compiled by more amusing chaps. Needless to say, I failed the gag test, too. Oy. My knowledge of pop culture is as bad as my ability to recall the date of the first census in the UK. That last being all the more embarrassing as Mum's always researching genealogical things. I should really have absorbed it by osmosis already.

I have been keeping odd hours lately to ensure I can access Dad's PC. Hotmail and other things don't work on this wee doohickey, as I've previously lamented. So last night I dozed off for a bit, which prevented me from finishing Over the Top. Then two friends came round, and we watched Casino, which two of us quite liked. B wasn't so keen, feeling the violence excessive. I have to admit that this is not the first violent Joe Pesci Mob Movie I've seen, so I might be a little accustomed to the idea. We all agreed that these films tend toward the lengthy. Then I introduced them to a mint julep recipe I hoped to make in a few weeks' time, and it received their seal of approval. So it's definitely going to make an appearance. The internet has advised me to use spearmint, but since I can't see any of that in local supermarkets, regular mint it will have to be. It seems fine thus.

After that, I was pretty exhausted, and just dropped into bed. I don't know why, but it takes me forever to get to sleep these days, so I tossed and turned for half an hour or so. Anyway, I woke up this morning and saw an email answering some questions I'd asked, and I have since been in such a cheerful mood that I have been unable to concentrate properly on the rules! I'm not counting chickens prior to hatching, but I am remarking on the quality of the eggs! I'm going to go have a poke at painting the secret project in a minute, as I can probably make myself do something physical, even if I can't concentrate with my thinky-bits. Pictures of it later, perhaps.