Sci-Fi

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The World’s End

The-Worlds-End-poster

Directed by Edgar Wright

Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost

Grade: A

Shaun of the Dead was a surprisingly tender movie. A genre parody that had real affection for its characters was just ambitious enough to be something special. Likewise, Hot Fuzz did the same thing for the buddy cop movie. Now again, director Edgar Wright, and actors/writers Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are back with The World’s End, and they’re just as interested in creating characters that the audience will grow to care about and go to battle with as creating a hilarious alien apocalypse.

The plot is this: Five friends reunite, all except one unwillingly, to have another crack at a pub crawl they tried, and failed, when they were teenagers. Now in their late thirties, they all have baggage of pretty normal fare, wives and kids and jobs they hate and the like. Gary (Pegg), however, seemingly has larger problems, alcoholism being one of the primary issues. He assembles his friends and they all go with him mostly out of some misguided loyalty, though Andy (Frost) has deeper issues with Gary than the rest. They attempt this pub crawl, half-heartedly except for Gary, until things start to get weird. You’ll find no spoilers here, but you probably have an idea where it’s going if you’ve seen the trailers or ever seen one of these guys’ movies before. Vulgar, Apatow-style humor is combined with old-school Sci-fi movies with once again fantastic results.

Pegg and Frost switch their roles, so to speak, in this film. Frost plays the straight man while Pegg is the crazy one. Or if you like, Frost is Abbott and Pegg is Costello. Both actors are able to find the right humor and vulnerability in their roles to carry the movie. Pegg has made a nice career out of playing the reliable guy, the cautious and nice character that always seems to find himself in over his head, but here he is dangerous and unstable and brings an edge to the character that plays nicely. In Andy, Frost brings a quiet anger that’s bubbling just beneath the surface that is ready to erupt any time Gary challenges his patience. The supporting roles are all played with near perfect touches and a small role by Pierce Brosnan is pretty damn fun. And for those of you keeping score, yes, Cornetto does make it’s cameo.

The World’s End is funny and endearing. This is their third movie in the Cornetto trilogy and Wright, Pegg, and Frost understand these types of parodies. Too often nowadays, the spoof movies just go for heartless laughs, dick jokes and celebrity cameos while attempting to skewer the source material. These guys, though, understand what Mel Brooks always understood: that parody is a form of love. They love the movies they’re making fun of and remember that there has to be a story in there as well. Oh there’s plenty of dick jokes in there too, but at least we like the people making them. That’s all we ask as an audience, to like the people telling dick jokes.

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Prometheus

prometheus

Directed by Ridley Scott

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron

Grade: C-

Prometheus is an underwhelming, conventional, two hour sci-fi film that exists solely for a thirty second scene at the end to make fan boys say “Oh, so that’s where Alien comes from! Cool!” This of course speaks to the problem of any film franchise, and that is being overly self-referential. Remember how in the Star Wars prequels they couldn’t stop reminding you, as heavy handed as possible, about the old movies? Aside from the shitty story, hollow dialogue, empty characters, awful directing, and wooden acting, it was the single worst part of those films. I don’t go to see new Terminator movies because I hope Schwarzenegger will pop up and say “I’ll be back,” I go because I want to see robots killing people, and people blowing up robots. Likewise, I don’t care if Prometheus is a prequel to Alien or not, I just want it to be a good movie where people I’ve grown to care about in some capacity die in really horrible and interesting ways. Is that so much to ask?

The story is this: Some scientists find a bunch of cave paintings in various parts of the world that are all kind of the same. They seem to hint that there is this cluster of planets and there are beings there that probably created us. How the scientists determine this is not really explained. Also, this is in the future so they can travel there and check it out for themselves. The android David (Michael Fassbender) watches over the badly assembled team as they sleep over the course of a two year long flight. I say badly assembled because it doesn’t really make much sense to embark on a mission of this magnitude that takes this much knowledge and skill, and not make sure in advance that the people involved like each other and can work together. Anyway, they get there and the place is a tomb. It turns out the aliens were building some weapons of mass destruction (ooh, political!) and killed themselves. This team of scientists and geologists and a security guy that nobody listens to, don’t get along at all and make really poor choices that leads to many unnecessary deaths. The corporation that funded the trip is represented on the journey by Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), who’s a real bitch for some reason, and at one point has sex with the pilot just to prove that she’s not an android like David.

Bubbling beneath the surface, Prometheus seems to want to wrestle with large questions, as any good sci-fi story should, questions about the nature of humanity, our capacity for destruction and our equal capacity for love, and whether we’ve squandered this gift of life or are just beginning to harness it. But ultimately, none of those questions add up to anything. We just get a monster movie where the monster isn’t even cool. Then at the end there’s some big, body-builder alien that wants to kill everybody, and never explains why. This isn’t being awesomely deceptive and ambiguous, it’s just a copout.

Ridley Scott has made far more bad and mediocre movies than great ones at this point in his career and is quickly losing his status as a “must see” director. I’m not saying Prometheus had to be some jaw-dropping, shake my entire worldview kind of movie, but it could’ve at least been fun and entertaining and maybe even a little bit terrifying. The worst thing a movie like this can ever do is be boring. A great deal of the running time, I was just hoping somebody else would hurry up and die. That’s probably not a sign of a great movie.

Buy this movie!

http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=8745615&style=movie&frm=lk_Somedamnfool

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Ex-Heroes

Ex-Heroes

Written by Peter Clines

Grade: C+

The nerds have won, people. Gone are the days when the acne-riddled, asthma-infused, coke-bottle-glasses-wearing, obese kid in a Land of the Giants T-shirt was regulated to the collective corner of our society. Mainstream audiences are now well versed in subjects such as Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek and all kinds of other estrogen-repulsing things. This isn’t a bad thing. We now get high-budget stories from quality writers and directors and actors and a guy that writes a blog nobody really reads is allowed to have a relationship with a real-live girl. Of course there is a problem, otherwise I wouldn’t have written the last few sentences. That problem is oversaturation. We’ve finally gotten to a point where we can simply reference pop-culture and that is enough to appease the crowds. To be fair, Peter Clines Ex-Heroes isn’t completely guilty of this, he just falls a little short of something better.

This premise of this novel is simple: Superheroes vs. zombies. It’s an awesome enough set-up, and well-written too, though some of the dialogue is a little forced. It’s set in a Los Angeles where super powered beings have risen up and started doing super hero like things, protecting the populace and forming alliances and rivalries that are amazingly destructive. There’s St. George, or The Mighty Dragon, Stealth, Gorgon, Cairax, Cerberus, Zzzapp, and a few others that are of varying degrees of importance. Then the zombie apocalypse comes and the heroes, at least the ones that survive the onslaught, are forced to carve out a slice of the city and protect their new civilization, naturally in the safety of a movie studio lot, they call The Mount. Things go about as well as you can hope, the citizens are mostly safe other than a few minor incidents, until a gang builds up power in another end of the city. They want the resources of The Mount, and they might have a few tricks up their sleeves, including some super-powered beings of their own.

Clines offers up some new additions to the two respective mythologies. The origin of the zombies intertwines with the rise of the superheroes and is a pretty compelling angle. The survivors of the apocalypse, since they’re in Los Angeles, have a running game of who can kill the most famous celebrity zombie. These feel fresh and bring something new to well-worn concepts. This is where the novel shines, but unfortunately it just doesn’t do enough of this kind of thing. For one thing, anybody who knows a decent amount of superhero lore, will be able to spot variations on both DC and Marvel characters in these original heroes. With a few tweaks St. George is Superman, Stealth is Batman, and their relationship is nearly identical to the classic heroes though admittedly with a nice twist of sexual tension. Among others, The Hulk and Iron Man are both essentially there and Captain America is even teased at in the preview for the second book in the series. There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, except for the fact that I don’t think I would’ve picked up on these similarities if I wasn’t such a nerdlinger myself, which feels a little dishonest to me.

Zombies have had a rough go in pop-culture of late. They’ve never enjoyed more popularity than they do now, but they’ve lost something in the process. Gone are the mindless, soulless nightmares that are terrifying metaphors of ourselves and what we could all become, and in their place are mindless monsters who want to eat humans. They’re more gory, but less scary. Superheroes fighting zombies has the potential to be an amazing allegory for this contemporary world. Gods have come down to protect us from the monsters threatening to turn us completely into a mindless consumer society. Our very souls are at stake. What is too often missed is that it’s not our lives that are on the line in a zombie apocalypse, but our humanity. And to be fair, Clines does address this, and at times he does it well, but it feels like an afterthought for the most part, and just an excuse to lend a story some weight that’s really just fixated on how hard a super strong guy can punch a zombie.

Overall this is an enjoyable, if kind forgettable, read. It’s apparently the first book in a series, and I liked it enough where I will probably read the next book when it comes out.


Buy this book!