The Return of Time Commanders!

In the Beginning...

Some years ago, to their mutual advantage, the folk who designed Rome: Total War managed to persuade the people at BBC2 to put on a series of episodes based on their game. You can't advertise on the Beeb, so the game engine was not mentioned, but you didn't need to be Hannibal Barca to work out what it was.

There Was A Lot of Shouting

The format involved a team of four people running an army against an AI force. Two of the players were theoretically generals, in charge of the overall strategy, and two were captains, in charge of the tactical disposition of different wings or troop types. In practice, sometimes one general seized the reins, and the second sat around like an inept Roman consul. On other occasions the generals both flailed about, and their adept captains won the day in spite of them. Each pair would bellow at the other across the studio.

Enter the Experts

Dr Nusbacher of Sandhurst and weapons and tactics expert Mike Loades were on hand to set the scene in terms of the wide sweep of history, the reason this battle was fought when it was, and they also kept us supplied with educational snippets about the correct employment of the Roman pilum or Dacian falx or what have you. As the battle unfolded, they would offer a running commentary, complimenting or criticising the players for the benefit of the viewers at home. At the end of the battle, they told us how things actually turned out.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King!

After a long absence from our screens, the show has returned. There have been some changes. In addition to our experts in the studio, some re-enactors in an indoor riding arena (I think) gave us some delightful demonstrations of bashing people with wooden swords, and how effectively a pilum penetrates a shield, and how useless it is for throwing back after it's been thrown once.

More signally, the teams have been cut to three (a general and two captains), and no longer play against an AI. This excellent change to the situation sees the teams playing against one another, each on opposite sides of a huge screen (or rather pair of screens) dividing them. As before, they get to fight a skirmish prior to the main battle, and this is still against an AI.

The Battle of Zama

In the first episode, a team of nerdy Southern board gamers took the field as Scipio's Roman army against three Scottish wrestlers. The production team deserve congratulations for this delightful match-up of two very different teams. It isn't often one gets to watch a chap shouting "By Jupiter!" as he throws in his triarii! Both played a skirmish beforehand in which the Romans had to seize a small town from the Carthaginians, and I don't want to spoil that for you, because even that introductory bit was very amusing. After that they moved on to the main event.

It was truly fascinating to see how both sides reacted to the introductory skirmish. On the one side, ideas were reinforced, and on the other certainties were abandoned. Somewhat frustratingly, both sides responded to the situation with a surfeit of caution. I recalled a passage from Featherstone's Complete Wargaming, in which he remarks on the unreality of the wargame in which both sides "go gaily forth to meet one another", whereas in history one tends to have an attacker and a defender. The experts in the background remarked on the reasons why both sides should be rather more aggressive.

After the initial hesitation, things got a move on. I won't spoil it with any details, but it was just like the old days of this great show. A team would make a move that made sense to them. The experts would criticise their failure to notice this. I would expostulate to myself that they needed to do this or that. All too soon it was over. There are another two episodes, I understand, in this series, and - by Jupiter! - let's hope the viewing figures are as good as they need to be to justify to Auntie the recording of some more shows.

In conclusion, I want to say how wonderful it was to see Dr Lynette Nusbacher and Mike Loades back again. It just would not be the show it is without those two! If you want a rating out of 5, it's 5! If you have access to it, do watch it.

January Retrospective, February Prospective

Things are looking pretty good here, so I'll focus on the positives. Although all I have posted this month is teasers for forthcoming projects, behind the scenes they are proceeding apace. On the personal front, I attended a meeting for folks with Asperger's/autism at Crewe Library. It was rather interesting, and the attendees ran the gamut of ages from teenage to twice my age, covering both genders, though with a preponderance of blokes. Silberman mentions that one of the things that made Asperger decide the condition was predominantly masculine is that women in 1930s Austria were expected to sit quietly, doing things like sewing, so there was a societal predisposition toward ignoring woman who displayed such traits. It was also striking that everybody was white. This area is pretty boringly monochrome, but the absolute absence of anybody did strike me as indicative of under-diagnosis. Again, Silberman mentions difficulties for immigrants in accessing good health care in America. While I'd hope that is less the case here, it's bound to have an effect. Anyway, I enjoyed it, and will return next month.

In further personal news, my defunct book-club is carrying on outside the library, and on a Thursday night, which is good news. So after a year-long hiatus, I should be able to get back to it. I don't do a tremendous amount of socialising, and that was a fair percentage of it until I couldn't go!

On the gaming front, nothing has happened, but the terrain work is coming along pretty nicely. I have a couple of buildings, a teaser for one of which will appear tomorrow, and the large ravine project all on the go. The different scales and styles allow me to shift focus and retain interest when one wears me out or, indeed, can't be worked on. There's always drying time to consider in this hobby! With luck, February will see me posting some finished pieces and tutorials. I am now starting to gather ideas for my next round of projects, as well as dusting off (in some cases literally) unfinished old projects for another look. More on that next month. Meanwhile, thanks for reading.

Book Review - Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire: A Short Story Collection

Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire: A Short Story Collection

First, a disclaimer: several years ago I met the author on the alternate history website he mentions in some of his introductory pieces, and later in person. He's a nice chap.

The book comprises ten short stories, each around 20-40 pages in length. They cover a wide range of topics: alternative history (or alternate history), horror, science fiction and fantasy, often in combination. Two of the stories (Coil Gun and Picking up Plans in Palma) are set in an alternative world in which a racist Boer empire takes the place of our history's Soviet Union in opposition to the United States. They are quite different in tone, as one is adventure-filled and surprisingly romantic, with a clear villain, while in the other the prevailing feeling is that both sets of protagonists are real people faced with terrifying choices.

Lord Giovanni's Daughter is a rip-roaring yarn in the mould of Robert E. Howard's Conan adventures, featuring a barbarian hero who comically subverts expectation by planning to buy a library with the money he aims to get for rescuing the beautiful princess from the villainous snake-men. Two of the stories (Nicor and I am the Wendigo) deal with the two different perspectives of monsters feasting on men - the men it hunts in Nicor and the beast itself. The protagonist in Nicor has a disturbingly close-to-the-bone epiphany, which echoes in one's head as one finishes the latter story. I recommend reading the two in sequence to get the full force of it. Melon Heads takes urban legends and runs with the idea for a story that is truly disturbing on several levels, while making you wonder whether the humans are as bad as or worse than the monsters.

Illegal Alien and Westernmost Throne deal in different ways with protagonists in circumstances beyond their control, who are still trying to master their bleak situations. Both have to make hard choices to survive. Lord of the Dolorous Tower is a delightful story about two young adventurers exploring an ancient warlord's ruined tomb, and getting rather out of their depth. The Beast of the Bosporus is a fun and creepy homage to the Lovecraftian canon in an oft-ignored historical setting. There are some very telling depictions of human character in these tales, particularly in Coil Gun, but Matthew's main strength is in zippy, entertaining - and often rather alarming - tales. I heartily recommend this work. It's available here on Amazon, in both paperback and in electronic format for the Kindle.

The Mystery of Father Brown

The BBC is currently showing a series of nine adaptations of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and the series as a whole is something of puzzle. Chesterton's Father Brown is a diminutive man, whereas Mark Williams is a shade over six feet tall. The French detective Valentin has been transformed into the English Valentine, and the strong and towering Frenchman Flambeau has been used as inspiration for a diminutive scamp-cum-chauffeur called Sid. A gossip of an Irish parish secretary and a Polish immigrant cleaner have been added to the mix, because this is a series, and audiences need to be reassured by seeing the same characters every time. An aristocrat has been added purely to provide Father Brown with an excuse to be in some odd places, which is a striking claim, given that he turns up in the original stories without needing a protectrix. There is a short dialogue between the two writers of the series at this link, in which they explain that and other choices.

It has been a long time since I read the Father Brown stories. Indeed, I think it must be about a decade and a half if not two decades, so the memories are not fresh. Consequently, this new show led me to revisit Chesterton's work. Doing so led me to wonder what the heck was going on in this new TV show. Let me say, first, that this is daytime TV, so anyone approaching it with high expectations is over-generous or inexperienced. Having said that, the show is quite reasonable. Mark Williams is an enjoyable Father Brown, albeit one who seems less of a Catholic Priest of the 1950s and more a time-traveller from today, such are his sensibilities toward homosexuality, adultery and foreign religions. Nobody reasonable would expect a modern adaptation of The Wrong Shape to contain such sentiments as the loveable Father Brown expresses in the original. Hinduism, Indian art and India as a whole are damned as sinister and cruel. One would find it hard to sympathise with Father Brown if he had just deliberately insulted a mass of innocent people for no reason other than a dagger being made in "The Wrong Shape", which is what inspires his diatribe in the original.

Changes, I agree wholeheartedly, had to be made. Although the extent of the alterations are such that I am left thinking that this is not Chesterton's Father Brown, nor his stories. The date of the stories has been changed. Chesterton's first story was published in 1910, and at the beginning of The Wrong Shape he sets the scene in the year 18--. The characters have been altered, sometimes radically, or plucked from thin air, as I remarked in my initial paragraph. The geography is different, which is rather sad, as the original Father Brown would turn up all over the place, but is here confined to a little village. Last of all, the stories have been signally altered or, again, cut from whole cloth. If the characters are different, the date is different, the stories are different, and in some instances the solutions are different, is this really Father Brown? No, no, it isn't. The name seems to have been taken purely so that some storylines can be pillaged for elements the writers happen to like.

As to the characters, Mark Williams plays a cheerful, almost boisterous Catholic priest. Poor Hugo Speer plays Inspector Valentine, who has had one opportunity in the first six episodes to be nice, when he allowed Mark Williams illegal access to a confidential file. The whole rest of the time he is stuck playing a very surly Jones from Midsomer Murders. For those who have missed that show, there is an older detective, Barnaby, who is wise because he is old, and a young detective Jones, who is foolish because he is young. I am slightly oversimplifying. The character Sid seems to be something of a wheeler-dealer, which was mainly established by having people declare that "he may have gone too far this time" in one episode, in which he was wrongly suspected of beating up a man on a train and flinging him out the window. I can't imagine anyone would regard that as a spoiler, as the fact that he is a main character in the series establishes that he is not guilty. Well, maybe not in the last episode of the series, which is titled (and perhaps even based on) The Blue Cross, but who knows?

Sorcha Cusack seems to be having a whale of a time playing a frightful old woman. Nancy Carroll is convincingly posh enough for this middle-class man to accept that she is (although someone on IMDB has cuttingly remarked that no respectable lady should be carrying a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1950s!). Kasia Koleczek has a somewhat perplexing role as an intermittently tragic Polish immigrant. I say perplexing because she ended up thrust into a main role in the adaptation of The Eye of Apollo, which was (again) nothing like the original, reusing only the elements of a mad cult and a rich lady "falling to her death".

In short, when my mother decided not to watch it on the ground that Mark Williams is too tall, I think she had it right. If you have a great affection for the original stories, and want to see them accurately rendered, you would be a fool to expect it of this show. I shall keep watching them for two reasons. First, a sense of curiosity impels me to find out what is going to be changed next, and more specifically, whether the seventh episode, The Devil's Dust, has got anything to do with anything Chesterton wrote. I suspect it of being a bizarre concatenation of fears about radiation resulting from Fukashima and the handy fact that the show is set in the fifties, when nuclear power is becoming a real prospect, and all the world knows the danger of the atomic bomb. Second, I would like to see if The Blue Cross, the last episode of this run of nine, is anything like the original, from which Father Brown is almost wholly absent, or if they have just nabbed the title and done something weird. I would really like to see Flambeau make an appearance, but who knows what the future may bring? Not I.

In conclusion, for daytime TV this would be perfectly adequate were it not for the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of a series of books, and is actually a wholesale reimagining. For it bears about about as much resemblance to the originals as do those Robert Downey Jr. films to anything Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. Sadly, because it is daytime TV, there are fewer explosions and fistfights to provide a cinematic distraction from the eccentricities of the show. If you do fancy something good with Mark Williams in, having enjoyed him as Mr Weasley in the Harry Potter films, let me recommend the first seasons of Red Dwarf, in which he has a small recurring role as a friend to Lister. Until next time, folks!

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.

Millennium: a review

This is one confusing show. That would be a generous summary of Millennium. A more accurate appreciation is that this show was strikingly mishandled, rather like The X-Files, and for a similar reason. In the case of the one with aliens, the network threw money at it to keep it on the air, necessitating a wholesale reimagining of the show's mythos. The same sort of thing happened with Millennium, which received an unexpected reprieve after it ended the world at the end of Season 2. This necessitated dropping the end of the world, and led to a poorly handled recasting of the Millennium Group as villainous, and Peter Watts as malign. When the show began, Watts was a good guy and the Millennium Group, although sinister in its secrecy, was on the side of the angels. There is a clear intention in the show to reveal that they are not all that they are cracked up to be, and every bit as much sinners as sinned against.

The problem with this is that they are too evidently on the side of good at the start of the first season, and that in the second season there is too rapid a descent into unconscionable practices. I am currently halfway through the last season, and they have become wilfully obstructive of justice and public safety, acting behind a mask which ironically brings to my mind the French Revolution's Committee of Public Safety, a real body avowedly opposed to evil which perpetrated a great deal of it. Had there been a few more seasons, this could have been done well. It is clear from the introduction of the two factions, Owls and Roosters, in the Millennium Group, in Season 2, that there was a long-term plan to introduce faction, and set one side against the other. The lack of time demanded a swift change of direction, and made the whole business too confused and self-contradictory.

The worst casualty is Peter Watts, who introduced Frank to the Group, and mentored him. By the end of Season 2 his character arc has snapped, and his character barely blinks at having to sacrifice his whole family because the Group refuses to take perfectly reasonable measures. The actor does his best, but no actor who has ever lived could rescue such a situation from descending into farce. Nobody can hold this sort of nonsense together for long, though Lance Henriksen merely has to react to the Group's sudden and inexplicable villainy rather than alter his character to justify it.

This is not to say that Millennium is a bad show. There are some amusing comic episodes, including a crossover with one of my favourite episode of The X-Files, featuring the quirky fictional writer Jose Chung. The dark episodes are nearly ubiquitous, but the striking human (and other) monsters unveiled do make for memorable and compelling figures and stories. The real problem is that one is left wanting more, not in the sense that one is rubbing one's hands for a sequel, but in that one is watching a car crash with a certain knowledge that there is no way out for the victims. I am going to finish this show off in the next day or two, and might add a codicil to this post covering the final episodes, but like so many shows - The X-Files, the new and old Battlestar Galactica - this show could have benefited from the maxim of Augustus: festina lente (more haste, less speed). It was good, but disappointing.

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!

Back with chocolate ice-cream!

I have just had one of the nicest ice-creams I can recall ever eating. I intend to sing its praises to you. I popped into my local healthfood shop. Tomorrow night I'm off to Scotland for a wedding, so I wanted some supplies. The lady in there drew my attention to this new range they had, and then praised it to high heaven, remarking on its creaminess, its excellent texture and its gorgeous taste. Naturally, I was intrigued, and bought a little tub of Bessant and Drury's chocolate ice-cream (website: http://www.bessantanddrury.com/main ). It's in a prettily designed little tub for individual consumption, but you can get larger ones! There's even a nifty little spoon hidden under the card top that sits in the lip of the plastic lid. I cannot recall the last time I got to eat an ice-cream with a tiny plastic spoonlet; I can't have been more than fifteen!

Anyway, the ice-cream is coconut-based, and that does make it simply gorgeously creamy. If you like coconut, even just a little, get this delicious manna from Heaven! Because it's made from coconut milk, the manufacturers have dodged the use of soya. The lady in the shop was saying how useful it is for parents of children with lots of allergies, since the most widely available vegan ice-cream in the UK is Swedish Glace ( http://www.swedishglace.com/ ), which uses soya - no good for folks who are allergic to it! So they've had three or four children in with their parents buying them the little tubs this week. Lucky kids, I say! I enjoyed it so much I even ended up dipping my finger into the tub to get all the melted stuff I'd missed! In short, go and get this ice-cream if you're vegan, allergic to soya or, quite frankly, you have working taste-buds. You will love it.

Klingons on the starboard bow!

Courtesy of a kind friend over in South Korea (that's the Korea that isn't the one where the mad tyrant died a few days ago, if you were wondering) I have received some of the delightful new Mongoose Star Trek models (specifically, the Federation and Klingon squadron sets - he also bought me the rules - huzzah!). They tend to come in several parts (Fig.01), for which reason my favourite is the tiny wee one part Klingon ship! They tend to have a bit of flash, but not so much as to worry me. The metal round things you can see (Fig.01) are the deflector dishes. Needless to say, I had to get out Enterprise first, and assemble her. She's a fair sized model, as you can see (Fig.02). After I'd trimmed the flash back I assembled her with some superglue gel, as I find I get longer for my fingers to escape being fused to things. I'm not painting my hand green and pretending to be Apollo!

The model goes together easily (Fig.03), as did all but one of the other Federation ships, the three-nacelled Dreadnought, which had some crazy three-pronged system for gluing the hull and third nacelle to opposite sides of the saucer section. After I gave up trying to make that work and just cut off the third prong, mind you, all was well. There was a little damage to the rear of the light cruiser (top right of Fig.04), which I plan to model as battle damage. At the foot of that pic (Fig.04) you can see the frigate model, which is adorable, and reminiscent of the Reliant (the ship Kahn nabs in film #2). You can see her assembled to the right in the next picture (Fig.05). On the left is the battlecruiser, which is visually a slightly larger Enterprise style model. You can see her in the top left of Fig.06, and may note that her warp nacelles are horizontal rather than angled. The Dreadnought is in the bottom left, and you can already see that none of these ships looks exactly the same.

Figs.08 and 08 show the squadron together, and make clear that there is no way you are going to get these ships confused. They all share a similar aesthetic, although if you're raising your hand to say, "Uh, Pete, there's one without a saucer, dude." then I agree. It's an earlier style of design, I deduce from the rulebook. The only real work I had to do was on the Klingon dreadnought. I will have a full pictoral rundown of the undercoated/painted Klingon ships next time, but for now it's just the flagship. There were minor problems with every model, but I am not so mad as to expect perfection of resin! Everything fit together, and the problems are all small and easy to repair or ignore. It's a sign of how slight the other problems were that this is the only model I had to do any real repair work on.

The dreadnought's warp nacelles (as with all Klingon models) attach separately to the edges of the wings, and there was a slight but obvious gap. I probably would not have worried too much about this (it's probably going to be obvious on my other Klingon ships in the coming photos), but for the fact that the hull-neck connection was all kinds of gone to heck. Well, I couldn't just trim and glue, as I'd done in every previous instance. The connection point on the hull had got a bit crushed or had come out of the mould a bit funny. I only have a basic knowledge of this sort of thing, and it is - let me reassure you - all you need. I used my pin-vice to drill a hole in the opposing parts of hull and neck, then superglued a piece of staple to mate the parts together. Then I got a bit of Greenstuff modelling putty, mixed it up and used it to cover over the holes. Since I had the GS out, I covered up the gaps on the wings, and fixed the air-bubbled bit of detail aft of the bridge. I smoothed stuff down with a modelling tool until everything was nice and flush and that was it. Bob's your uncle!

In all, a lovely set of kits, and some gorgeous models. Klingons next, and then I shall try to get in a game with my brother. The rulebook is very nice, too. The first half is regular nice paper, and includes the rules and background material, and the latter half is glossy paper, and includes ship details and so on. But I am getting ahead of myself. Enjoy the pictures!

An eccentric departure: US 6" gun review (good for a Medusa/Basilisk)

When I went to pick up some balsa the other day, I found a kit I'd not seen before. It interested me, so here's a review.

First the basics: the manufacturer is 21st Century Toys, so don't expect that a Golden Demon winner painted this bunny. It is pre-painted, but that amounts to an overall sprayed-on coat, some sloppy dry-brushing and a few other bits. "So what's in the kit, Pete?" Well, you get a 1/32 scale M59 155mm Long Tom US artillery piece, which the box tells me served from WWII to Vietnam. You guys accustomed to GW/FW stuff will be surprised at the size of this thing once assembled. It's about the same footprint as a superheavy tank.

The casting is nothing to write home about. In some ways it exceeds the standards we expect of GW (small parts lack flash), but in other ways it falls down badly. The actual barrel of the gun has a weird shape. It slides down like a whale's back. Either it's really obvious that the moulding has gone wonky or my eyes are totally screwy. My eyes, while screwy, aren't that bad. Yeah, the moulding's bad. Now, you might think that was bad news, GW-fans, but remember what I said: the gun has the footprint of a superheavy. So if you lop off the barrel after the N of BERLIN, then you'd have a hefty Medusa, let alone a Bassie. The kit has some nice details. You can even pull out the breach and get yourself a prettily detailed screw feature running round it.

"Shut up, Pete, you rambling fool. Should I bother buying this?" Sheesh, you're rude. Yes, buy it. It cost me £5.99 for this kit. All you need to deal with it is a set of small screwdrivers to secure the screws that lock the wheels and bits of the framework in place. The only problem I had was that I didn't have the right size of screwdriver. Yes, there are mould-lines. Yes, there are casting problems. Indeed, the casting problem with the length of the gun is basically insurmountable, if you want to use the kit as sold. But you've got a £5,99 kit that yields 10 rubber (yup, rubber) wheel, so if you fancy "wheeling-up"a couple of Chimeras, it's a cheaper option that resin. You've got a huge, long gun, so you can slap that on a Baneblade chassis and get yourself a Shadowsword, or you can cut it down, giving you a Medusa and a spare bit of barrel. You get a pre-painted kit. Frankly, I would re-paint it. Respray and then re-do the whole thing . . . if I intended to keep it. But it's inarguably well-painted enough for tabletop gaming. Six quid for something I can use to make a Medusa, a Shadowsword/Laser Destroyer, 2 Chimeras and still have parts left over? Yep, that's a good buy, kids. Until next time, dear readers.