Terminator Salvation not the definitive film it was intended or touted to be.

I was not very impressed with Terminator Salvation. It was a realistic and action-packed action/war film, and quite entertaining, but it was not the film I was expecting. Especially after the fiasco of the original ending leaked on the internet, and the subsequent re-working of the film ending, I was expecting the end-all-be-all of Terminator films. Not so much. There are really only two reasons I do not appreciate the film much: Christian Bale is not a good John Connor, and the film abandons the sci-fi themes critical to the Terminator ethos.

I like Christian Bale a lot. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both the shit, in no small part due to Bale’s excellent serious portrayal of Wayne/Batman. In Salvation he cranks up the gravitas to the point of overacting, and to the point that his character is not very compelling or charismatic. He’s disquietingly fanatic , more jihadist than savior of humanity. Sure, terrorist or prophet is a matter of perspective, but I thought we were supposed to sympathize and identify with Connor. I didn’t.

 

There was no heroism in the character to inspire me like John Connor is supposed to do. In fact, every character that surrounded Bale outshined him as a heroic and sympathetic character. Anton Yelchin was great as Kyle Reese (though he’s a bit young I would have much preferred him as Connor), and Worthington’s Marcus was awesome. Even Moon Bloodgood’s Blair, though extraneous and peripheral, was a more interesting character than Bale’s Connor.

The character was dour and driven by a deep hatred of the machines, exceeding that of the people around him, casting him as the point-man in a grueling was of attrition against the machines. Yet much of what we know about John Connor from the other films and The Sarah Connor Chronicles portrays him as a much more pragmatic warrior. He understands that the machines are not people, or a culture ideologically pitted against humanity. They are programmed tools, and unlike humans they can simply be reprogrammed for alternate purposes. John Connor did this when he used and sent back T-800s in T2 and T3, as well as the unknown Cameron model in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and obviously trusts the reprogrammed machines as much or more than humans to give them such critical missions and put them in close proximity to sensitive assets such as his younger self. Yet Bale’s Connor is not this pragmatic strategist we’ve come to know as John Connor, he’s just a machine-hating ideologue. One cannot even argue this is a portrayal of the young Connor before he really comes into his own as the leader of the resistance, because lore from T2, T3, and Chronicles suggests Connor already understands the machines better than anyone else long before Judgment Day even occurs, so the hate-filled warrior played by Bale just doesn’t make sense. John Connor is a cooler and more intricate character than what McG and Bale make him.

The other reason I have problems with Salvation is because it veered off on a sci-fi tangent that is not really what Terminator mythology is about. I’ll keep it vague so I won’t give away any spoilers. The thrust of Salvation’s sci-fi theme is the identity crisis of Marcus Wright, the machine that thinks he’s a human. (This should have been a spoiler, but inexplicably the producers decided to use this as the trailer hook to bring audiences in rather than as the shocking reveal it could have been.) Is he a person? Is he a machine? Can he fight his programming? Are any of his decision really his own? Hello, Battlestar Galactica anyone? This has already been done exquisitely, in exacting detail, and much, much better in the BG saga. Salvation’s attempt was a very poor (and even wrong) gloss over the concept.

The entire attempt, poor as it was, was completely misguided anyway. Terminator is about the psychological schism between humans and machines. Machines are not, in any way, human, but their effectiveness in masquerading as humans makes them very creepy. The greatest scenes from the franchise hinge on this disparity between the machines’ human appearance and their non-human actions. Like when the “good” Shwartzeneggar T-800 in T2 tries to murder the guys that jump him before John Connor stops him, and Connor can’t explain why the Terminator shouldn’t kill (“You just can’t, okay?”). Like when the same Terminator realizes it must be destroyed and explains to Connor that it’s ok because it’s not human (“I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do”). Like how Cameron constantly seeks explanations for human actions that don’t make machine-sense, and then eerily mimics the actions even though she clearly still doesn’t understand the reasoning. The Marcus Wright character gives us none of this. He behaves just like a human, he thinks just like a human, he actually believes he is human. He has a Terminator body, but there is nothing Terminator about him. What’s interesting about the Marcus character is his humanity, not his Terminator-ity. He would have been equally entertaining as a mere human character with super strength and resilience, and that makes him an uninteresting Terminator and a useless addition to the Terminator mythos.

Terminator Salvation was a decent film with great action, horror, and effects, but I was dissatisfied because it never delivered the Terminator goodness I was craving and expecting, and it did nothing to advance the Terminator mythology.

And the Award for Best PC Media Remote Goes to… the iPod Touch

(Sorry, just finished a fast-forwarding through 5 hours of DVR’d Oscar extravaganza, and I’ve got pompous self-importance on the brain.)

I recently settled upon connecting my PC directly to my HDTV as the best solution for watching AVI and WMV computer video files on the tv. Everything was great, except I had no convenient way to control the 20’ distant PC from my couch. So now that I had settled upon the most efficient media setup, I needed to research the most effective remote.

The standard and most easily found PC remotes come in two flavors, infrared (IR) like your basic tv and DVD payer remotes that need to be aimed at the machine, and radio (RF) like cordless phones that can communicate in any direction and through walls up to a certain distance. IR was not an option because my PC is not located where a connected IR receiver device is visible from the couch, so I wouldn’t be able to aim the remote where it needed to be aimed (without jury-rigging some USB extension cable thing and wiring the receiver to the tv as well, but I already have enough cabling running around the house). RF remotes would have been the answer, but the cheapest decent one I found was the Firefly at $50. Remotes such as the Firefly bill themselves as “universal” remotes, but for a lot of specialized hardware (like my Motorola DVR from Comcast) these remotes simply don’t have the functionality. My Comcast remote won’t easily control the PC, and the PC remote won’t easily control the DVR, so the PC remote would end up being relegated to the simple duty of running videos. $50 is more than I wanted to spend on a single function device that would only control the media center, and at that price I thought I might be better served by a wireless keyboard and mouse combo so I could have complete control and also use the tv for convenient websurfing if I so chose.

That turned me off the simple remote solutions and got me searching for the coolest wireless mouse. My favorite solutions for that were Kensington’s Slimblade Media Mouse and Media Presenter Mouse. Both are Bluetooth laser mice on one side, and flip them over for a media remote on the underside. The presenter also has the additional cool feature that the middle button rollerball is a full trackball as well, allowing complete mouse control in without a mousing surface. Neither is cheap, at $50 and $80, but they are cool wireless mice that allow the full control I desired.

The Kensington mice seemed a great solution, however in my search for the best wireless mouse I learned that you can control your PC with your iPod Touch or iPhone. Intrigued, I found a handful of apps that will do this, ranging from too simplistic to overly complex. The simple free apps like Apple’s Remote and VLC Remote are geared just toward iTunes or other media applications and won’t do more extensive video and desktop control. More complex apps, like Mochasoft’s Remote Desktop, are actually complete VNC or Windows Remote Desktop clients which tie into the PC and give you complete remote access to all the computer’s functions, so far as to have a virtual representation of the computer desktop on the iPod screen. The simple media apps just didn’t give me the flexibility I needed, and the full remotes were too cumbersome – who wants to navigate a huge PC monitor display and make menu selections on a tiny hand-held screen? Not I.

Luckily I came across two great apps that bridge the gap between simple and complex and make the near-perfect media remote solution. Neither are free, but they are cheap and absolutely worth it. So much so I bought and use both.

The first is Zemote ($3.99). This brilliant app is designed for exactly what I want: a simple interface that commands all Media Center’s functions, and alternative sophisticated mouse control for when I need to deal with other PC applications. The apps three main screens are the media remote, trackpad, and keyboard.

The trackpad allows full cursor control just like a notebook pad, with right and left mouse buttons and scroll bar. In addition, using the iPod’s built-in accelerometer one can hold the dual-arrow button in the lower left corner and move the iPod in the air and control the cursor movement. Mouse control is frustrating, especially via the accelerometer, but it works.

The keyboard is straightforward, but is a full virtual PC keyboard including Windows, Function, and Control keys, as opposed to the mere text entry keyboard native to the iPod. It’s also conveniently landscape oriented, a blessing for the fat-fingered such as myself.

The real coolness of Zemote is the media screen, which by default controls the majority of Media Center’s functions. The Home button launches MC, volume, fast-forward, and skip all do as expected, and the Back button, navigation pad, and scroll bar are perfection. Really everything I want to do in Media Center is contained on that one screen. Occasionally I swap to the keyboard or trackpad to reposition windows of do other activities outside Media Center, such as web browsing, but really the vast majority of my media PC experience is handled by Zemotes’ simple and smart media controller.

My only issues with Zemote are mouse control and configurability. The trackpad is very slow, typically requiring two to three thumb repositionings to move the cursor across the screen. The accelerometer movement is equally pokey. You have to hold the button and tilt the iPod and hold while the cursor jerks lazily across the monitor. Luckily those flaws don’t kill the app, since most of the time one probably won’t be using the mouse control, but rather the much better thought out media screen.

Some time ago, while it was still beta software, I tried the Mobile Air Mouse ($5.99) app. It was one of the first apps to tap into the iPod’s accelerometer and touchscreen as a PC mouse control surrogate. At the time it was a quirky and novel concept, fun to toy around with, but ultimately just too ahead of it’s time to get much use. However, the app has been in aggressive development, and now in it’s 1.5+ iteration is massively improved.

Basic functions and interface are the same as Zemote, though immediately the commercial polish of Air Mouse is apparent (and to be fair, the app had this going for it from the get-go. It always looked super slick). Air Mouse’s trackpad screen is conveniently coupled with other controls, so one can pause and skip tracks, web browse, and keyboard input without abandoning the trackpad. A cool underrepresented feature is that by simply shaking the iPod downwards, or rotating it to landscape view, the keyboard or control buttons slide out of sight leaving the whole touchscreen available for trackpad control. Shake the iPod upwards, or rotate it back to portrait view, to bring back the hidden controls.

 

Air Mouse includes a web browsing screen with dedicated controls for typical browser activities. I don’t find this a huge advantage as I try to do as little browsing as possible on the awkward tv screen, but others could find a lot of convenience in this feature. The keyboard is also present, though it lacks the comfortable landscape view.

The function screen stands out as the most different. This screen activates function keys which typically correspond to many media controls, and also grants four customizable hotkey for application launching or keyboard shortcut replication. Also here are arrows keys which compare to the directional pad on Zemote’s media screen.

What’s unfortunate about Air Mouse is that it doesn’t come out-of-the-box ready for PC control. It’s hotkeys must be manually configured for each application is is to control. It comes with hotkeys pre-programmed for iTunes and Windows Media Player, but I had to program Media Center myself, which was only a chore because not all the default controls correspond to MC controls, so it took some trial and error. Also no single Air Mouse screen combines all the features I need in one place. I need the arrows keys for file selection and menus navigation, but the play, skip, and pause control are on another screen, so within Media Center I need to swap screens depending upon what I’m doing. Zemote puts it all on one screen. A minor inconvenience, but it does force me to interact with the remote rather than just being able to memorize buttons and control my media without thinking, as one should be able to do with a good remote.

As is the nature of iPod network apps, they communicate via wi-fi, not IR, RF, or Bluetooth. So of course one needs a home wi-fi network set up to make use of these apps, but that’s no big deal these days (a good wireless broadband router, useful even if one has only a single computer, can be had very cheap like my $40 Netgear). Another excellent uncelebrated feature of both these apps is that they leverage Apple’s Bonjour network service for zero-configuration networking. Install the app on your iPod, install it on your PC (already installed automatically with iTunes), and when both are running the automatically find each other on your network with no effort from you. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but spend some time toying around with your router and firewall port forwarding and pinning down dynamic local IP addresses and you’ll come to value the simplicity as I have.

Now given my criticisms one might think I lean toward Zemote, but in fact the opposite is true; I completely embrace Air Mouse as the best iPod remote app. It certainly looks better, but the real reason is the touchscreen and accelerometer control. They are fantastic. I can zip the cursor across my 42” screen with a simple thumb slide, yet have perfect fine control to move pixel by pixel. And the accelerometer control, which is Zemote’s biggest weakness, is Air Mouse’s forte. The cursor moves realtime with your movements of the iPod. A quick flick spend the cursor flying, and subtle twist moves it smoothly and slowly, but always in exact lockstep with the speed of your own movements. With Zemote a twist to the right set the cursor moving toward the right at a fixed pace, no matter how fervent the iPod motion. You simply have to hold the iPod at it’s angle to maintain the cursor motion until it reaches it’s destination. Air Mouse is tenfold more natural and accurate and come s close to true synergistic perfection in motion control. Additionally, if you don’t like the default sensitivity, you can increase or decrease it for both accelerometer and touchscreen control, which  you can’t with Zemote.

If you have a Nintendo Wii you know something about cool motion-to-cursor control via hand-held accelerometers, and have certainly marveled at the Wii’s fine control. Air Mouse is even better. Whether the credit is due Air Mouse’s software engineers or Apple’s accelerometer engineers I don’t know, but Mobile Air Mouse is the PC and media remote app of choice for me.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Could this be the definitive medium?

Clone Wars Sneak Peak at Starwars.com

EDIT: the full theatrical trailer is available now.

Holy crap. I think Star Wars may finally have found it's ultimate medium to really deliver the universe Lucas envisions.

The original live action films have great character, but when Lucas expanded the epic into mind-blowing pageantry in the latter films the live-action medium fell short. There is just too much disconnect between the awesome special effects and the very lame mundane live acting. When they try to mix it more by digitizing the actors to let them do super feats it's very obvious and becomes even cornier.

That's certainly not most of the problem with the new films, but even if the acting and dialogue had been stellar this hitch would have nagged at me. There are even several scenes in the Lord of the Rings films that irk me because they just look so fake when juxtaposed with the otherwise excellent effects (like when Legolas scales and does acrobatics all over the cave troll in Fellowship and the oliphants in Return).

The Achilles Heel of CGI effects is still the human body. We are all naturally extremely familiar with human movement, and it must be reproduced to perfection to convince us it is real. Despite what one might think, current technology can do that. Actually, 8-year-old technology can do that. Seen Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within? That's from 2001 and is still the greatest testament to CGI animation I've seen. Anyway, I'm sure it just takes a helluva lot of work, and apparently modern movie makers just aren't willing to input the effort. When they skimp, I notice, and it is crappy. If they are not going to make it perfect, then just avoid scenes that require animating live action characters. Work to your strengths, not your weaknesses.

The original Clone Wars animated shorts were awesome. They told great stories, had lots of action and less drama, and portrayed amazing Jedi badassness. One of the greatest strengths of the series was the animated format. The fact that it is animated shifts our expectations so we are not looking for real-world verisimilitude. We are able to suspend our disbelief more than we are in live-action and much more incredible (and unrealistic) events can be portrayed without breaching the medium's credibility. They could literally portray anything and it would be believable in context, because there is no standard for realism or plausibility in an animated world. The Star Wars saga portrays extraordinarily incredible events, and it does so much more effectively in a medium that allows for that.

The only weakness of the original Clone Wars animated series was it's simplicity. The episodes were only about 10 minutes long, and even when strung all together they make for a very choppy and non linear movie. Plus, the very feature of animation that makes is perfect for amazing stunts is also a weakness. No matter it's strengths, animation lacks credibility as a genuine storytelling medium, and with very few rare exceptions anything penned by animators instantly gains children as it's primary demographic, and therefore must cater to them. The original Clone Wars was devoid of the mature-themed action and drama that helped make the Star wars films enjoyable for all ages. I loved Clone Wars, but in the end it was trivial.

I hope the new Clone Wars, which will be computer animated rather drawn, will be the perfect marriage of mature live-action drama and storytelling and amazing animated effects. The preview already is a lot darker than the original Clone Wars, but still showcased a couple scenes of superhuman feats that I would expect from animated Jedi. Also, the lengthier standard tv show time slot will allow more fully developed stories, rather than the action-packed but limited snippets we got from the original Clone Wars.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Dark Knight, and the final season of Battlestar Galactica are the only media I'm looking forward to this year.

On Zombies

Zombie maestro lays down the lore, BBC News (via thinkpol)

I was excited about the new Romero film Diary of the Dead and saw it recently. Not very impressive. Not the worst of the five-film mythos, though, that goes to the previous Land of the Dead. That was bad.

Diary wasn't zombie enough. It was too preoccupied with Blair-Witch-Projecty collegiate angst and social commentary on modern media. The gore was disappointingly minimal. Maybe Romero learned too much of a lesson from the Land fiasco, because that film was just a lame B-plot zombie flick with no script quality, and Diary seems too be a failed effort to make a great quality script + zombies. Unfortunately it's too heavy on (poor) script and too light on (mediocre) zombie action, leaving both independent film dorks and zombie horror geeks wanting.

 

Horror vs. Slasher

"That's where the applause comes from in my films - good zombie kills!" -Romero

Sorry George, but in my experience the greatest applause comes from good human kills. With few exceptions, we don't empathize with zombies so there is no horror in their destruction. There is certainly fascination with the mechanism of death, but it's really just good fun when zombies are destroyed. The great kills, for cheering or for horror, are when the humans fall prey to zombie depredation. There's always the bastard human everyone hates, and the highlight of the films are when these guys become zombie-jerky. Then there's the inevitable sympathetic character kill, when we mourn (a little bit) for the loss of a good character.

That, in my mind, is part of the distinction between horror films and merely scary or slasher movies. Real horror exploits emotion to create truly gut-wrenching and horrendous scenes, often difficult to watch (and I can only imagine how difficult to film), and their value lies in the psychic trauma they inflict. Slasher films focus on merely on body counts with spectacular death scenes that are often as comedic as they are scary.

I've always though Romero's films danced at the border of horror and slasher, and the best films like Dawn of the Dead did it very well and delivered the goods to both horror and slasher fans, and even squeezed in some respectable social commentary to boot. That was a big part of the problem with Diary: really lame human (and zombie) death scenes, and none of the characters were interesting enough to inspire sympathy or even hatred. I cared no at all when they died off, and the film probably would have ended better had everyone died. It didn't deliver the horror, because you couldn't develop enough connection with the characters to care if they lived or died, and it didn't deliver the hallmark Romero outrageous deaths. Too bad.

 

Zombies Reinvented

I understand the complaint about running zombies was directed specifically at the Dawn of the Dead remake that trampled his shambling corpse paradigm with fleet-footed dead, but I can't help feeling this is a swipe at all depictions that depart from mobility-challenged undead. George, don't even rip on 28 Days/Weeks. 28 Days Later didn't invent the speedy zombie (I believe that credit goes to the hilariously awesome 1985 Return of the Living Dead), but it put it squarely into the popular conscious. The film reinvigorated the zombie genre, which had gone underground through the 90s, and it's success finally got Romero the funding he needed to do Land and Diary. I believe Day of the Dead would still be the last Romero zombie film were it not for 28 Days.

 

What Romero owes to 28 Days aside, it and the sequel 28 Weeks Later are excellent films, and true horror films. There are no ludicrously convoluted deaths, and no hilarity when people or 'zombies' die. The films inspire a fantastic moral sickness in me like few other films ever have, and that's what horror is about.

 

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Run, Zombie, Run.

Star Wars: more One Ring, less The One.

I read a hubpage called 10-Science-Fiction-Movies-Every-Sci-Fi-Fan-Should-Watch and one commenter said Star Wars is fantasy, to which another asked why, to which I felt compelled to reply. It's an ongoing discussion I've had with many people, and surprisingly to me one that has made a lot of converts (I'm not used to scoring converts with my arguments, no matter how right I may be). Here's my comment:

Star Wars isn't sci-fi in the same way Mazlow01 expressed Pitch Black isn't sci-fi: neither of them relies upon science, technology, or future society to tell their story. The settings, gadgets, costumes, etc. of both films are mere pageantry that make them look "techy" and sci-fi, but that's not what they are about. Sci-fi is fiction about science or technology and it's impact on people, and deals with scientific and technological concepts such that they cannot be extracted from the story without telling a different story. E.g. you can't have "I, Robot" without robots, but you can have killer creatures that only come out in the dark without going to other planets, and you can have stories about good vs. evil, rebellion against tyranny, and traditional morality vs. draconian law without spaceships, lightsabers, and Jabba the Hut. (In fact Lucas admits Star Wars is homage to the morality epics of 50s Japanese samurai films and American westerns, and to that end Star Wars has been called space western as much as space opera; it's about the moral drama, not the setting.)

Now, why Star Wars is *fantasy* is because it relies heavily upon unexplainable (or at least unexplained) mystical happenings as a storytelling device. The Star Wars universe is no more plausible than Middle Earth, and Lucas makes no effort to make it plausible to our scientific worldview. The Force just is, and we accept it and what it can do without criticism, just like we accept balrogs and the power of the One Ring, because these features appeal to nothing but imagination to make them work. Science fiction, with the very intonation of "science", appeals to our understanding of the natural world to support itself. Science fiction portrays worlds that, given our understanding of the natural world, we have reason to believe could possibly be, while fantasy portrays worlds which we have no reason to believe could exist.

Lucas didn't try to make serious sci-fi with Star Wars. What he did was remake classic Akira Kurosawa films, which were themselves inspired by American western and detective stories, and dress them in the visual pageantry of a space setting. One of Kurosawa's best films, The Seven Samurai, was adapted into a great western The Magnificent Seven. Despite the radically different settings, neither The Magnificent Seven nor The Seven Samurai relies upon it's setting to tell it's story because the story can be extracted intact from each and injected into a new setting. Star Wars is the same kind of storytelling about epic themes that transcend the setting, and borrows heavily from Kurosawa's films, particularly the awesome Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress. Lucas extracted great thematic elements from those films and injected them into a fresh and entertaining space setting, but just as Kurosawa's films were not about feudal Japan and Sturges' was not about the American west, Star Wars is not about the space, aliens, or technology displayed in it.

The hallmark of fantasy is that is uses a mystical setting or worldview to explain events, or rather that it invokes mystical features of the setting to avoid having to explain events. No one knows how Gandalf works his magic, how the One Ring corrupts, or why elves are immortal. These are just facts of Middle Earth about which readers/watchers are expected to suspend disbelief (and we do so happily). In our modern paradigm logical explanations about events in the world are derived from science, and these facts do not stand up to logical scrutiny because there is no science that supports them. This is of course perfectly acceptable storytelling as good fantasy doesn't claim there to be any logic or reason behind it's mystical events, so there is no reason we should seek logical or scientific explanations. Fantasy worlds are no our world, and they provide no reason to believe they even in principle could be our world.

The Force is 100% fantasy. Notwithstanding Lucas' pathetic midi-chlorian postulate, which was just a lame and misguided attempt to shore up the franchise with some sci-fi legitimacy, there is no explanation for the mechanics of the Force, and no scientific basis to believe it even in theory could work. The Force = magic, and magic is inextricably fantasy.

The hallmark of science fiction is portrayal of worlds not just like our own, but which could be our own, not just in principle but even plausibly given our current understanding of the natural world. Sci-fi takes the world as we known it and stretches it's principles to extremes, portraying worlds and settings that may be possible under extraordinary conditions or in the future. Fantasy doesn't bother starting with our natural world but rather reinvents the fundamental features of the world to suit the storytelling devices it wants to use.

Good sci-fi requires little suspension of disbelief because it portrays settings we believe are possible. Will there be spaceships and colonization of other planets? Yes, and portrayal of this does not require us to suspend our belief in the natural world. Will those spaceships fly around with the same physics as airplanes in atmosphere, and will they make cool engine noises? No, to accept that we must suspend beliefs we already have about the nature of space vacuum and microgravity, meaning to accept it in the film we must tacitly accept fundamentally different natural rules of the film world. Some literary license is of course acceptable and even most good sci-fi doesn't let natural verisimilitude hinder the storytelling, but look at 2001, the great tv series Space: Above and Beyond, and the new Battlestar Galactica series to see that consistency with the natural world doesn't have to hinder great fiction. Except for 2001 they still take a little license with sound effects (much less than Star Wars), but they portray zero-g inertia faithfully.

And finally sci-fi isn't a transcendent story just set in space or the future or an alternate reality, it is a story about space, the future, or an alternate reality, and how the science and technology in those settings affects protagonists. 2001 is not a story + aliens and AI, it is a story about aliens and AI and that story cannot be told without those elements. The Matrix isn't a love story or slave rebellion tale merely set in a virtual world, it's a story about virtualization and human-machine interface. The story of Star Wars can be retold without corruption in an American west or feudal Japan setting, does not rely upon the science and technology elements of it's setting, and therefore does not qualify as science fiction.

 

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George Lucas tells Marc Lee why he loves Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954)

Turning Japanese? The Influences of Japanese Culture on "Star Wars"

How did George Lucas create Star Wars?