More meandering literary observations

I'm re-reading Julian May's 'Saga of the Pliocene Exiles' for the first time in a decade or two. I love the fecundity of the world-building, the audacity and inventiveness of the premise, the vast submerged mass of information about the Galactic Milieu that is out there hidden from our sight; I like the outre characters. As a long-time RPGer, I like the gamified classification of psionic powers. I don't mind the lack of character development many reviewers complain about. After all, the main characters are either denizens of the Land of Faerie - whose characters cannot develop as a literary convention - or profoundly messed-up people subjected either to compulsory happification or brutalisation that is only likely to mess them up further. Even the way the two most unlikeable male characters are unconvincingly transformed by 'True Love' is reasonable if you assume they are wartime romances that are not going to last: the female Exile population would be rich in the sort of sad cases who fall for men like that, and that kind of desperate clutching at affection is common under that sort of stress.

But as a story... coming back to it... it is not my kind of story. It is not the way I would have done it. All the glorious world-building is frittered away. For me, at any rate.

My many years of GMing have conditioned me to prefer the 'slow unfolding of a mystery' to 'whirlwind of action' and I would have written this story as more of the former.

Even though the society of the Galactic Milieu is less pathologically risk-averse than our lame-arse one, it still seems unlikely that they would let Madame Guderian send people willy-nilly back through time for sixty years without regulating her in any way, and stranger that they would just take over her enterprise and keep it running without doing any investigations of their own. It doesn't make sense that Madame Guderian would just have kept going, after the third or fourth time she sent a time-traveller off with amber tablets and instructions on how to attempt to get a message back to her, and heard zip. Or, that she wouldn't have communicated her suspicions to someone else. So, in a more realistic, plot rather than action-driven scenario, the third or fourth time she would have gotten a message back saying things were initially bad in this area, but now it is secure, and we're all fine here thanks, how are you? And over time a whole plausible story could have been built up mirroring the 22nd century expectations about what the Pliocene is like, feeding information to improve the chances of future Exiles and coincidentally milking the future for particular items and materials wanted in the past. On the basis of this plausible story, it makes sense that the Milieu would keep the business rolling after Madame Guderian steps through the portal herself. The first novel will end as the characters step through and discover this story is a complete fabrication.

Actually, no, thinking about it that will drag the pre-story out too long. Instead, Group Green will arrive in the Pliocene halfway through the first novel, and find that superficially it appears much as reported - the Tanu will stay well in the background at Castle Gateway and it will all be carefully managed to stop information from leaking back into the future. Only as they travel on to the next stage, in the second half of the volume, will the fabrication emerge.

As written, the procedure for handling the time-travellers at the Pliocene end is incredibly messed-up. There would be a procedure for stripping incomers of blood-metal artefacts: it is not hard to drag them off for a delousing and have some human who can recognise iron go through their loot. And so much of the future plot hinges on the ridiculous accident of Felice's latent superpowers not being picked up: it is silly, and it wouldn't have happened. In my version they will be smoothly processed and carted off in appropriate directions without unseemly violence, and Felice will have to escape later.

Now, in this second half of the first bit, while the fabrication is revealed, the full malignity of Tanu intentions will be hidden from the characters, and from us. That can wait until book two. The enemy in book one can be the Firvulag: they don't control Castle Gateway, but are obviously keen to deny the Tanu the use of the humans, and make use of the more valuable ones: they can attack the northern party and capture them, and it can be they, rather than the Tanu, who subject their captives to a brutal sorting process. I know this makes the human characters more dried leaves tossed by the winds of fate than the Omnipotent Captains of Their Destinies, but damn it, at this stage they should be victims of fate, and that whole John-Campbellesque 'aren't we humans just so damn precious and special?' shtick is soooo 20th century.

I would like a whole second novel of Group Green's largely peaceful integration/failure to integrate into the world all that world-building went into: let us care about them, and the people who are already there, as people rather than hyperkinetic action figures. Through the course of this book, it will become apparent that the Tanu, as well as being liars, are considerably blacker than we thought at the end of book one; and the Firvulag considerably greyer. Layered over this, I would introduce a second group of 'special' time travellers, Group Aquamarine, say, whose back story will move more quickly than Group Green's. This group will contain as one of its members a retired member of the Portal Administration who has been reviewing all the correspondence going back through Madame Guderian's time - it has not been that long that the Milieu has been operating the Portal, after all - and has isolated all sorts of puzzling inconsistencies in the data. So he/she/it (why have no mentally-unbalanced Simbiari taken the plunge into the Pliocene, anyhow?) has volunteered for a one-way fact-finding mission to ascertain the facts on the ground and send a report back.

And then, well, in books three and four we can let loose with all the action scenes and wholesale slaughter.

That's how I would have done it.

Movie Review Haiku

Hannah

Eric Bana dies.

Pointlessly. Cate Blanchett too.

It just missed my heart.

Night Watch

In nightmare Russia

It is still the seventies.

But look, there's Buffy!

(Ezra Pound would have

worked in Purgatorio

Canto XXVI)

Take Shelter

I anticipate

A zombie apocalypse.

No such luck. Bummer.

Trollhunter

As the boss giant

Caught up with the Landrover:

There was an earthquake.


***

Probably neither of you have seen any of these movies, so there's no point me adding more spoilery comments, but I have these thoughts going through my head and I can't sleep, so just to expand a wee bit...


Hannah started with amazing promise. But it just sort of ... faded away. Not at any particular point, it just gradually dulled from something extraordinary to something ordinary. Maybe that was intentional; but if that was the idea it was a pretty lame idea, filmmaking peeps.


I am used to seeing movies set in big cities with faces from every corner of the globe. But Moscow is white, white, white. It was a culture shock. I thought the plot of Night Watch was marvellous and the special effects were spot on: no CGI for the sake of CGI or impossible action sequences, just solid realistic phantasmagoria where realistic phantasmagoria were called for.


If Take Shelter is in any way an accurate picture of employment security, medical care, and the general mood in working-class Great Recession America, it is really chilling. It made me want to hug all the living Cabinet and ex-Cabinet Members of our country. Thank you! (By the way, the other night I dreamed I somehow accidentally got through an air-conditioning duct into Kevin Rudd's office and he was really nice to me. I told him I thought he had been a great Foreign Minister (which I do) and he was very humble and gracious in reply and didn't seem to mind me coming into his office through the air-conditioning duct). One thing that didn't ring true in the movie was the fight between the main protagonist and his ex-best-friend at the Lions' Club dinner: in an equivalent situation here, I know at least a dozen blokes would be instantly out of their seats to get them to calm down or take it outside in a spontaneous collective blokey way. I'm sure it would be the same in small-town America. Surely. But in the movie they all stay sitting down like stuffed aardvarks and only the wives of the combatants interfere.

BTW, It was great to watch not knowing anything about it and expecting it to turn into a zombie apocalypse movie at any moment. But I've ruined that experience for you. :(


The interesting philosophical thing in Trollhunter is how the trolls can smell Christian blood. This would not be a problem if you were a hardboiled no-nonsense atheist, or someone who doesn't think at all, or a serious Muslim or Jew to whom it would make perfect sense for God to curse Christians for blasphemously associating Him with a son; but I think if you were an average semi-thoughtful agnostic the effect of any evidence that trolls are, in fact, attracted to Christian blood would be to make you think 'hmm, there must be something to this Christianity after all'. So Kalle the cameraman is in a terrible bind. Probably, quite honestly, at the beginning he is so weak and watery a Christian that he can say without lying that he isn't: but as they go along he can't help but believe more, and then when they are trapped in the mine he gets into a terrible positive feedback loop where the more trolls notice him, the more he believes, so the more they notice him, so the more he believes...

Fifty First Dates is an allegory in which Adam Sandler is God. Discuss.

The last time I was sick I saw two movies - Legends of the Fall and Fifty First Dates. I've sort of meant to write about them for years since, and re-reading Chesterton's "Ethics of Elfland" has set the contrast between the two of them clashing and gyring in my mind again.

I don't mind fiction in which the characters do stupid things, or evil things. I don't mind it if bad things happen to them. But I like to think that there is a person inside the character doing those things for reasons that make sense to them at the time, and I like to think they react to the bad things as that person would react. I didn't get that sense in Legends of the Fall at all. The characters were just ciphers carried along by events. None of them seemed real. A loyal, good-hearted fellow becomes a sociopathic libertine; a vivacious, competent woman becomes a suicide: well, these things can happen to people, but in Legends of the Fall they just seemed like automata following a script, not real people who had undergone terrible transformations. I thought perhaps the characterisation might have been botched by trying to compress a really long story into a short time, and that the film had been adapted from a sprawling vast novel where these transformations made sense: but wikipedia told me it was based on a novella. A novella!

It was a meaningless, deterministic, pagan, fatalistic dance of chaos. The characters were remote unknowable inhuman things, like the fairies of W. B. Yeats.

Fifty First Dates is the opposite. Instead of a series of events that tumble the characters along, the characters make the same essential event happen over and over again. There was a continuity in the character of the woman whose memory is wiped clean every night; I had the feeling there was a real person there. The same with the man who is in love with her. Things happen: but the story is about the audacious and vital way the characters respond to those things. They seem to illustrate perfectly the exultation in repetition, the joy in the ordinary amazing wonderfulness of everything, that Chesterton talks about.

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say 'do it again'; and the grown-up does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon."

Even the crudities of Fifty First Dates were of a piece with Chesterton. He would probably have liked them if he had been born into our time. They breathed the democratic spirit and the love of life. They were not more crass than Shakespeare's. It is the elitist anti-democrat and dry intellectual in me that shudders at them.

It was a thoughtful, profound story. And a fairy-tale, yes. The characters were humans, reacted like real humans, and did the whole range of things real humans do.

There are little people moving inside the box

Having been sick for a few days, I have spent a lot more time watching movies than I usually do – via the movie-streaming option that the Xbox suddenly acquired for no reason.

I thought the Tintin movie was true to the spirit of the original. When I try to remember scenes from it, I can easily remember them as frames from a Tintin comic. So it must have been doing something right. A loss on pedant points: from the cars and the newspapers and the general style it is obviously set in the 30s or 40s. Or possibly early 50s; I am bad with placing cars in their proper time period. Anyhow, before the decolonialisation of Africa. But there were at least two brief glimpses of globes showing Africa with post-colonial political boundaries. This bugged me. Parenthetically, the post-Versailles political map of Africa with the northwest mostly one big green splodge looks more natural to me than the ones I have lived with all my life – Africa is too artificially chunked into unaesthetic bits about the same size, ugly like a political map of the United States or Australia is ugly. The old one was better. The contiguous parts of Francophone Africa missed a chance by not opting to be one big country, I think. That country would have been a player. The world would care what the position of an 'Etats Unis d'Afrique' was, much more than they do for the combined positions of all the little countries it is broken into instead.

I watched the newest X-Men movie, about the early days of Professor X and Magneto. It had a nice clear-cut narrative that I thought better than that of the other X-Men movies I've seen and a five-second scene with Wolverine that was worth the price of the download. While in Argentina Magneto orders 'una cerveza' in an outrageous Cathtellano lithp, rather than using the Hispano-American pronunciation. I am not sure whether this is a loss on pedant points or a cunning win on pedant points hinting at his European background and why the other men in the bar then start talking to him in German. I didn't like the bit where the token black character dies, ostensibly heroically, just another hapless man of colour ending up as cannon fodder in whitey's schemes. I hate being ineffectual myself and for some reason I especially hate seeing black men being ineffectual in fiction. Maybe I am too touchy. This sort of thing just seems to happens in movies a lot. I should see if there is a TV tropes page for it.

In 'Kingdom of Heaven' there was also a token black character who was killed early on. But, at least there were no battle scenes where Orlando Bloom 'snowboarded' down a hill on a shield. This is a lesson to Peter Jackson: it is possible to resist the urge to do this. I was impressed with how historically accurate the film was. Not in absolute terms: if it had been a movie set in the Napoleonic Wars that was as historically dodgy, I would have felt the urge as a pedant to tear it to shreds. But that far back, the bar is so low, it was really pleasing.

I was checking on Guy de Lusignan in Wikipedia to find out if he was as really as much of a witless blackguard as he is made out in the movie (hint: no) when the dearth of female characters in the movie hit me. There is Princess Sibylla the love interest, another love interest who is only seen in flashback and has no speaking lines, and Saladin's sister, who has one line in Arabic. That's all. But, in real life, there were plenty of other female characters that could have been written in: Sibylla's half sister Isabella, who would later be Queen of Jerusalem herself; Sibylla's mother, Agnes of Courtenay, who seems to have played a very active role politically (though it is possible she died shortly before the events of the movie); Maria Comnena (mother of Isabella and later wife of the real Balian of Ibelin). They all have interesting life stories on Wikipedia - which also tells me they have been portrayed in various interesting ways in previous historical fiction. It would have been easy to construct a feminine indoors Levantine world of intrigue to contrast with the masculine outdoor French world of whacking each other with swords. Would have been interesting. But I guess the movies was long enough as it is. Oh, and Sibylla didn't just have the son who ruled as Baldwin V: she had two daughters by Guy de Lusignan, Alice and Maria, who don't appear in the film.

Hmm. So it seems one effect of being sick may be to make me more sensitive to the treatment of women and minorities in fiction. Interesting.

One more thing I have watched is my DVD of the first season of 'Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot'. I am used to every DVD I own having a dozen subtitles in all sorts of languages- if I ever want to watch Winnie-ther-Pooh with Icelandic subtitles, or Hebrew, then I can – so I just assumed that this TV series I got on ebay from Germany would have English subtitles. Nope. No subtitles at all- not even German ones, which would help my really lame language skills along. Most of it just washes over me. Once in a while I get a complete sentence. Sometimes it is even funny, and then I laugh. Hurrah! It may be just as well since maybe if I understood it better I would chew my own wrists at the liberties the adaptation has taken with the original. For example, they have given Tichy a holographic companion. But she is a really cute chicky-babe, so that is alright.

The style is interesting. As the original stories make no attempt to be real science fiction, the sets make no attempt to be real science fiction sets. The spaceship is transparently a tiny flat, with most of the action taking place in the kitchen. The aliens are transparently people with wigs and foam-rubber snouts. The planets are obviously made of aluminium foil. But, the holographic companion is fit into this obviously faux world with picture perfect CGI artistry. It is a style I did not take to at once, but it is growing on me.

La Muerte y la Brujula, Part Two

This originally appeared as a comment some years ago on Rob's blog, which alas I have forgotten the name of since Lexifab removed his link:
 

The thing that bothered me about Se7en- besides it being really gross and disturbing, of course- was that there was not enough internal consistency in the choice of victims or their punishments. This was explained by taking the traditional Hollywood path of least resistance and making the perpetrator a psycho-looney. But I think even a psycho-looney ought to have a self-consistent lunatic philosophy. I advise the following principles to guide a looney- or better, a lunatic organisation like the Opus Dei of fiction:

(1) The victims should not necessarily be those who have been corrupted by a particular sin, but those who corrupt others with it.

(2) The punishment should be, as far as possible, simply the consequences of the sin they encourage, taken to its logical conclusion.

Hence, rather than some poor recluse, the proper exemplar for Gluttony should be a celebrity chef- a Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson type. Who better to exemplify the exploitation of Lust than a presenter on one of those sleazy reality programs? Or Wrath, the host of a nasty Jerry Springeresque talk-show? Avarice, someone connected with televised real-estate porn, or a ‘Weakest Link’ style game show? In fact, it seems to me that the pernicious corrupters who embody these sins cluster thickly around Big Media.

In my never-to-be-made remake of Se7en, each of the victims will work for a (unnamed) television network.  I thought for a while about the best way to kill each one off, but decided this was too icky a pastime. The Seven Deadly Sins pattern will not be made explicit by the killer(s), but will be explained on the website of a kooky religious organisation that the investigator googles early on. I envision Mel Gibson in a cameo as head of this kooky religious organisation. In fact, the killer(s) will never be seen: there will be no action sequences, because this never-to-be-made remake is the work of someone who dislikes action sequences. The investigator will not be able to pin the murders convincingly on the kooky religious organisation, not quite, not yet. The developing pattern of events- following the order seen in Dante’s descent into Hell- will point to the head of the network as the final victim, sentenced to die for the sin of Pride.

But of course, it is the investigator himself who has to die. In the course of the film we will have seen the investigator gain a cult following being interviewed on this same network’s news and current affairs programs during his investigation, oozing the arrogant hyperintellectuality of a Holmes or a Lonnrot. He has rejected his place as an interdependent member of society, relying only on himself and scorning the help of God or Man. We now can see clearly that he embodies the solipsistic vision of Timothy McVeigh’s last words, which is also the boast of Lucifer: ‘I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.’  Is the network head’s smile just a little too fixed? Are the investigator’s fingers feeling ever so slightly numb as he grips the glass the kindly network head offered him? He finds he cannot move his arm, and struggles to ask the network head for an explanation. And as he slips into a black coma where there will, indeed, be no-one else but him, the network head will explain.

‘It was all about ratings, of course...’

I had a pretentious title for the blog post on the price of gold I was going to write, but not for this one. Oh well.

On the weekend I saw this half-decade’s answer to ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’.  The children did not like it much. Sample dialogue:

Daughter of Clam: Isn’t he wearing a sentient creature?

Son of Clam: I don’t want to think about it.

Son-of-Clam-who-is-admittedly-rather-critical-in-general gave it an interim rating of 7/20, downgraded to 2/10 by the conclusion. He said it had instilled a strong fear of food which he expected to persist for some time. Though it appeared to be gone by dinner.

‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ is straight science fiction in the classical mould in a way that ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ was not. It follows the standard recipe of postulating a scientific or technological advance and exploring the logical dramatic consequences of that advance. In this case the advance is in carbon capture technology, in the form a machine that can convert water (and carbon dioxide) into food. (I added carbon dioxide there, when I mentally converted the lead character’s explanation of how the machine worked into real science. It was MUCH easier to do than mentally editing out Jar-Jar Binks from ‘Carry On Up the Naboo’, or whatever that film was called). The machine escapes, as they do, ending up floating high in the atmosphere and drawing energy from lightning and stuff to create food.  It then wreaks havoc when it is exploited by a greedy government, creating planet-wide destructive weather patterns that are almost as unbelievable as the ones in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’.  The Hero Scientist saves the day. I should say that the film also featured a sensible Heroine Scientist, as a steadying force on the rather ditsy Hero Scientist, who starts out pretending to be dumber than she is to conceal her inner nerdiness. In a neat twist on an ancient trope, she is first seen to be beautiful when she puts on glasses and ties her hair back.

I thought it was interesting – and very encouraging, for us wannabe Hero Scientists who *may* be working on giant robots with laser eyes as we speak – that the Hero Scientist was lauded as a Hero at the end, despite being the one whose actions, er, destroyed the city. I had recently noticed this unbelievable outcome appear in an even more extreme form, in ‘Megamind’.  I am humbly thankful for this ‘get out of jail free’ card for Hero Scientists in popular culture, so many years after the invention of the atom bomb. 

What really struck me was the picture of government in the film. ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was a sympathetic portrait of the Bush/Cheney administration, whose faintly disguised analogues were shown as heroic, if clueless, but government in ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ has no redeeming features. The film is set in a town where the collapse of the sardine fishing industry has left the economy in ruins. The Mayor, in a picture perfect illustration of how unimaginative government is when it tries to think outside the box, spends the annual budget of the town on a sardine-themed amusement park. This initial demonstration of fiscal profligacy is then reinforced many times over on a metaphorical level. The Mayor enthusiastically scoffs the food that comes from the sky, snatching cheeseburgers from old ladies in the aftermath of the original rain of food, and is seen to get fatter and fatter and fatter as the movie progresses. He makes more and more extreme demands on the machine that are the proximate cause of it breaking down and wreaking havoc. All the NPC inhabitants of the town happily go along with Mayor’s excesses, and he effortlessly resists all attempts by the Hero Scientist to get him to moderate his behaviour.  

The Mayor explicitly sets himself up as a father figure for the Hero Scientist when he is trying to get him to do what he wants, in an obvious reference to the usurpation by the welfare state of functions traditionally performed by the family. An even clearer reference to the infantilisation of society at the hands of an ever-expanding paternalistic government is the Mayor’s golden boy, a former child actor featured on the tins of sardines once produced in the town, who still goes around in a nappy. In the end the Mayor leaves the town in the lurch as it is about to be destroyed, escaping on a raft made of a giant toasted cheese sandwich. He is unable to stop himself from eating it as well, and in the very last scene we see him going under. 

Productivity increases are made possible by science; the response of government to these productivity increases is to bloat uncontrollably. This is the core message of the film, made with no subtlety whatsoever. 

So I kind of liked ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ despite the fact that it made me afraid of food too.

Today is the 7^th anniversary of this blog.

Because I too am infected with the self-referential spirit of the age, I intend to revisit my posts exactly seven years on, if they are at all interesting, and comment on them. The first one was not (at all interesting), so I shan’t bother today.

Old men staring out to sea

There is a Film Forensics about The Island; but I just saw it the other day and had to write something. Or, I saw it the other day and just had to write something.

I can’t remember the last movie I saw that started out with so much promise and then collapsed so completely. It was like The Matrix and the first of those crummy Matrix sequels had been combined into one movie. It was like Highlander and Highlander 2 had been combined into one movie. It was like the screenwriter had disappeared halfway through, and been replaced by his 15-year-old clone who liked to blow things up.

So my first suggestion for improving the movie would involve the following two steps:

(a) Cut it in half
(b) Throw the second half away

Two things bothered me, besides the long and tedious action sequences. The first was the economics of the cloning operation, and the second was the behaviour of the people involved in it.

Economics first: $5 million is just too much to pay if all you get is replacement organs, and them not on demand: who wants to wait in a coma for months or years while your replacement parts are grown? Androo hit the nail on the head: “If the technology is there for building adult bodies, it’s not so much of a leap to go further and have brain transplants. Why bother repairing the old host body, when you can just move your brain into a new body? Ickier, more memorable, and we have a chance at some interesting plot points to go with it. The clones have to be physically trained to match (or exceed) the capabilities of the originals, which is a better explanation of why they have to be conscious...”

Then the people: Of course, groups of people can easily be persuaded to do evil things to other people. You usually need to do two things: isolate your group of evildoers from outside norms of behaviour, and convince them that their target group is subhuman. In The Island, there are too many humans working with the clones, and they interact with them all the time and see them behaving like regular humans. They are allowed to treat them occasionally in dehumanising and cruel ways, but not as a matter of course, since that would spoil the product. And they do not live on an isolated company compound, but commute to normal homes in the outside world. I think, if under these circumstances none of them have had pangs of conscience, if none of them have squealed about what is going on, it can only mean the rest of the country shares their morality. It only makes sense that they would behave that way if everyone considers clones to be inhuman, whether they are conscious or not, and that the uplifting scene of clones wandering across the desert at the end will soon be followed by scenes of helicopters rounding them up and taking them back to the pens.

In my version, most of the black-shirted people wandering around managing the clones will be clones themselves, who believe the same backstory, but have been conditioned to believe they have an important role in managing the facility and will automatically be sent on to the Island after a given length of time. Among these will be a few humans, some of the very few who know the whole story. Upstairs, where the clones are processed, things will be as automated as possible, and most humans working there will be unaware that the products were ever conscious.

The first part of the film will therefore unfold almost exactly the same as before, except that, of course, there is no need for white-suited clones to know how to read. I expect black-suited clones will be able to read. Also, the sleazy mechanic will be played by Jet Li.

When Lincoln escapes into the upper part of the facility, he will not find bustling corridors full of medicos, but- after a bit of atmospheric wandering around looking at cool special effects- an operating theatre where remotely operated robodocs are operating on the football-player replacement clone. Everything is under control: there is no racing about trying to escape. Lincoln just sees the guy lying there, obviously the man who won the lottery. An unspeakable machine comes up and puts some tubes in. Another one puts in some more tubes. Some lights flash. Maybe something beeps. Another machine comes up and shaves a small spot on his head. Splot, a machine sticks a thick steel tube through his skull. Schlurp, we see his brain being pumped, grayish-pink and icky, through a transparent tube. He is shrinkwrapped, a few more tubes are attached, and then a door whooshes open and a couple of gowned figures come in to check dials and wheel him away.

Consumers don’t come to the facility. That would be bad. So there is no scene with a baby being handed to grateful parents.

Then, there is no stupid action scene when Lincoln and Jordon get away. The clones are smart. Androo, again, has it perfectly right: “Have them both with some notion that they’re escaping to somewhere incredibly dangerous: that the world is not only radioactive, but filled with hideous beasts, as they see on the videos. They dress in radiation suits, take fresh water, weapons, and other supplies, and are cunning about hiding.”

Now, if you were running a facility like this, where would you put it? A disused military base in an open democracy where there are things like a free press and an activist judiciary? Only if you are a Michael Moore-style fantasist and the government is in on the deal. No, when they get out of the facility, the clones are not in the Nevada desert. They are on a bleak street in a Chinese industrial city, tarted up to look a bit more like Blade Runner because it is after all 2042. As they wander down the street, totally lost and looking like dills in their radiation suits, we see that the ‘Medical Supply House’ they have escaped from is not the only one. No, this street is lined with them. They can’t tell, because they can’t read.

Since, for a brand new body, $5 million is not so much. Millions of people can pay that. There are hundreds of these places here in Chengdu, where labour is cheaper and regulations less strict than they are in Nevada.

We flash back to the excitingly CGI-rendered video conference (clients aren’t going to travel out to the middle of nowhere to listen to a sales talk, after all) where the evil scientist fills in the back story for the folks at home. Its not good for old geezers to be transported into a body that is bed-ridden and weak from just sitting there in a vegetative state, of course: so it has to be exercised, by the latest top of the range equipment which keeps it in tip-top condition. Our automatic equipment for exercising our vegetative clones is the best in the world, which is why our bodies command premium prices, etc., etc. Because, and this is why the guys who own this place are really evil, they don’t have to keep the clones conscious in order to make their product. It’s just cheaper that way. It’s all about the bottom line.

The clones are wandering down the street when Lincoln sees his old friend Jet Li. Jet Li drops his dinner, which he is carrying home, in surprise. Jet Li can fill the clones in on his version of the backstory back at his place.

Now, I have slightly reconsidered my first suggestion, which was to throw the second half of the movie away. Perhaps some essential part of The Island is the dichotomy between a cerebral, intelligent world that is a total fraud and a stupid world of ultrakinetic action that is reality. Instead, we will make sure that the hyperkinetic action sequences are justified by the only justification for hyperkinetic action sequences, that they be part of the Hong Kong action movie tradition.

So, there is some artificial plot device to stop the clones from contacting their owners right away. They are pursued by the police and by the mercenaries. Far fewer things are totally destroyed, since we have spent more of the special effects budget on booze. The police will actually collect the clones, bring them into the station- not to charge them with the murder of Jet Li, because he is alive in this version, and they’ve brought him into the station too, but because it is an authoritarian state where they can do what they like to simple-minded foreigners in weird costumes who run away and break things- and then they will be grabbed by the mercenaries, who have more impressive special effects than the police.

The clones will be tied up and spirited away, but we always thought the mercenary leader was going to turn out to be a good guy, and our suspicions are about to be confirmed: he has gotten a better offer and is being nice to the clones and taking them somewhere else. Meanwhile it will be revealed to the viewers at home that, going through proper channels, what the police were going to do is hush things up and disappear the clones quietly. The mercenary leader is taking the clone to Matt Damon of Team America: World Police, who is investigating dumping of cheap Chinese clones on the market. We are just starting to like the mercenary leader when he turns evil again and is shot by Matt Damon. Lincoln borrows Matt Damon’s mobile phone and calls his owner. His owner is mortified and nice, and immediately arranges for the two clones to be repatriated.

Lincoln and Jordon go to live with Ur-Lincoln, who lives on- dramatic music- an island! Yep, it’s a real nice private artificial island, either in Tampa Bay (like in that Alan Dean Foster book based on Navajo mythology), or part of The World in Dubai. (There will be nothing in this film to offend any geography pedants.)

We see the same police who were going to hush things up barging into the upper floors of the clone factory, now that it is no longer possible to hush things up.

We see the other clones owned by Americans being happily repatriated to a real swell holding facility in Nevada, until Team America:World Police can figure out what to do with them.

We see Lincoln and Jordon sitting on the beach happily drinking pina coladas.

We see the inert bodies of the evil scientist and the rest of his evil non-clone collaborators, and yes, that’s Jet Li there too, he was caught by the authorities as well- being processed on a conveyor belt. A robodoc much like the one we saw in use in their facility is dissecting them for organs. Splot. Schlurp. Buzz, whir.

Then we pan along that street in Chengdu again, past ‘Medical Supply House’ after ‘Medical Supply House’.

Everyone happy. Cue credits. Await diplomatic incident.

Is this a possum I see before me?

Saw Bridge to Terebithia today. Never read the book: remember picking it up when I was ten or so and flicking it open to a sad bit, so I put it back down again.

There is this scene where the young lad Jesse gets up early to fetch the trap from the greenhouse before his father can get there, to save the beast that is making a mess of the greenhouse from its well deserved fate as a serial pest. He takes the cage out into the woods and lets the beast go. I was expecting the beast to be a raccoon. It isn't, though. It looked like a possum. Not a rat-faced Virginia opposum, such as might realistically be found rummaging through greenhouses in Virginia, but the cuddly sort of dinky-di possum that you would find rummaging through greenhouses in New Zealand, where they filmed the movie. Admittedly it was only on the screen for a few instants, but I can't think of any North American animal that would look like that. If you see the movie, please look carefully, gentle readers, and let me know what you think. Possum, or not? I haven't been able to find any references to possums (as opposed to oppossums) being introduced pests anywhere in North America, so my working hypothesis is that the movie is actually set in a parallel universe where New Zealand is part of the United States. Take that, David Lange!

Unification Day, w/ Brownshirts

The main problem with Serenity can be stated very simply, though its solution is far from obvious, and most of my suggestions towards improving the film will doubtless amount to no more than minor tinkering. Before I move on the main problem, however, I must declare my prejudices. There are a few things that are not at all Serenity’s fault that caused me dissatisfaction. These are equally features of Firefly, but were harder to overlook in the larger, more concentrated dose of a film.

(1) The first prejudice is entirely my bad, not Serenity’s. I do not like ‘Action’. When there is so much plot to get through, why waste time running around like headless chickens? I find action scenes tedious at the best of times, and while watching Serenity I found myself several times reaching for the free local paper and reading the Under-16 netball results and letter from Mrs. G_____ complaining that the council had not yet surfaced C____ road while waiting for an action scene to finish. I don’t think this stems from anything as noble as an aversion to violence. I think it is a preference for chance over determinism, stemming in large part from a quarter-century of role playing. An action scene can be interesting in an RPG, since there is a real connection between the mayhem and the final result: but in scripted violence, it is all predestined. I just want to get to the end and see what the result is. If it was possible to play the DVD again and get a different outcome, that would be alright. This is not really any criticism of Serenity, just a good reason to recuse myself from commenting on Action films. So everything else I have to say will address the ‘Non-Action’ elements of Serenity.

(2) The second prejudice is shared with the entire ‘Hard Science Fiction’ community. Serenity is not science fiction in any real sense of the word. Space has certain characteristics that make it an inherently interesting place to tell a story: the terror of the vast emptinesses, the phenomenal plenitude of stars and planets in their possible quadrillions, the deep Otherness of an Other that is utterly indifferent to us. In science fiction this amazing backdrop is preserved. Maybe we can whisk from star to star in the blinking of an eye, but some sense must remain of the terrible distance, the incredible audacity of doing such a thing. Cordwainer Smith has a dozen different ways of doing this in different stories. In Space Opera, the characteristic qualities of space that make it space are removed. We move from world to world as trivially as we move from town to town in our global village. Once space is made just like anywhere else, we need to introduce new terrors to create drama, terrors that are usually transparently and tediously terrestrial. This is what I call ‘The Shatterzone Effect’ after a mid-1990s RPG that did it particularly badly. [It also mentioned logarithms in the first paragraph of the rule book, a sure sign that a game is not destined for a second edition]. The Reavers are basically a crummy device of this kind. Take the Firefly’s approach to Miranda. Randomly running into a Reaver in space is about as likely as jumping into the ocean and landing on a giant aquatic serpent creature previously unknown to science. If you see one, it is because it is chasing you. Okay, so the Reavers are present in a belt of ships around Miranda, because they started there. We are told there were about 300,000 Reavers, once upon a time- if we make the conservative assumption that pretty much all of them are ranged around Miranda, that will give more than a thousand square kilometres of room for each Reaver in a sphere surrounding a typical Earth-size planet. We could say that, perhaps, you can only jump from world to world at specific nodes, and the Reaver ships are clustered around the Miranda node. But then, why doesn’t the alliance have all these nodes staked out, so that people like Mal can’t function? Maybe not all planets have these nodes, just some, and Miranda happens to be one? I could go on. But making up excuses for what is really only a crummy device to make cheap drama- like having the Enterprise crew fall out of their chairs- makes my brain hurt.
The tacky space-opera aspects of the Firefly ‘verse are of course present in the TV series, but were less noticeable.

There is a third thing that is again not really Serenity’s fault but is not simply a prejudice of mine, which leads naturally to the main problem. In a film, there is not room for the kind of luxurious, leisurely character development that was one of the great joys of Firefly (and also Buffy). In a movie I don’t think there is room enough to develop more than about three well-rounded characters (e.g., Han, Chewie, and R2 in Star Wars). If you try to do many more, none of them will work, and they will all end up as flimsy cutouts. Mal is a much more unlikeable bastard in the movie than in the series. Jayne is much less an unlikeable bastard. Kaylee is much less cute and endearing. Enara might as well not be there at all. There are too many characters cluttering the landscape, and they are flattened and lifeless. And this brings me to the glaring flaw in the film: It is not really a film. Serenity is a highly compressed second season of Firefly. It does not hold together well as a film and (on my limited observation) commands very little interest to people who watch it without having seen the series. That is why it is cluttered with undeveloped characters. I expected to see a resolution of the River storyline in the film, but I also expected that plot to be presented as a whole, a thing in itself. This was probably naïve of me, because the main audience was obviously going to be fans of the TV series. Essentially, the whole point of the film is to answer the questions left hanging about River at the end of the TV series.

Now I shall make my prescriptions for improvement, in the classic tradition of Film Forensics. As you probably know if you have bothered to read this far, the Alliance is after River not because she is a genius, or a super soldier, or even that she has weird psychic powers per se: they are after her because of what she has learned with her weird psychic powers. The film needs to set up the mystery properly, for the uninitiated, and then get to the point where it is solved without too many unnecessary discursions, because time is needed to resolve what the characters are going to do with this information.

(1) Stuff needs to be cut out. I would have excised Enara and the Shepherd, for a start. Mr Universe, certainly. Even worse than making travel between worlds trivial is to make communication between worlds as trivial as communication in the global village, and introduce preposterous anachronisms like Mr Universe. Firefly could not exist in a global village. Mr Universe could not exist anywhere else.
There are a number of little things that damage the consistency of the ‘verse. I am sure Jayne swore once in English, rather than Chinese- that should go. The sense of the culture of the Firefly ‘verse as a Chinese-American fusion is too muted in Serenity.
Kaylee should not say that she had heard of Miranda. Space Opera is large, it contains multitudes, and even if there is no terror in the dark spaces between the planets they should still be there in their thousands and tens of thousands.

(2) The missing pieces of the River-Simon storyline need to be fitted in. This would involve abandoning the attempt to provide one canonical text for the whole story. We do not need a shot-by-shot abridgement of the first episode, but a different version with fewer characters and sub-plots that can fit into the time available. If the fans demand a single canonical version, tough. Christianity has survived for millennia with four different overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts of the life of its central figure. The point is to make a film that can stand up as a film.

(3) There should be a more plausible excuse for the name Miranda to come out. The whole scene where River goes berko and beats up the barful of people, and its explanation, makes very little sense. Begone! That is of course partly my prejudice against action speaking. We have a long way to go and a lot of plot to fit in. Something else can be put in to bring out the name Miranda, as soon as possible after the beginning of the story has been told. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

(4) They should be chased by a Reaver- just one- on their way to Miranda. This could be made as exciting as any number of exciting things by good writing. There is no need to show more than one.

(5) In Serenity as it stands, Wash is killed in a stupid and senseless way. That is okay, after a fashion: life is like that. A hero is someone who gets other people killed. But I have a different plan.
Why are all these Reavers in spaceships? Why are they happy to cooperate together in flying spaceships, and only give way to rape and pillage and cannibalism when they find non-Reavers? The answer might be that for some pseudo-scientific doubletalk reasons people who have spent a lot of time in space are more likely to become Reavers than to lay down and die, when exposed to the Pax agent. And for similar reasons, whatever happens to them, it doesn’t alter their sense of shipboard camaraderie, it just renders everyone else prey.
Okay, so maybe it’s a pretty hot summer’s day on Miranda. We might see Wash splashing some water on his face from a convenient fountain. Sometime later, we learn from the holographic captain that the planet has been exposed to the Pax agent. How do we know its not still there? In Serenity as it stands, the crew doesn’t seem to worry about this possibility. They should. Maybe the Pax agent is still there- in the water, say. Wash starts to get mood swings. He becomes a bit inarticulate. Maybe he gets some Ukrainian-style chloracne, But he still seems to be to same old Wash. Then they land on Convent School World^TM and he goes on a sadistic rampage. Mal has to kill him- not indirectly, as in the old Serenity, but directly- just like he killed the guy when the Reavers disrupted the bank robbery at the beginning.

(6) The fanatical bounty hunter guy just gives up at the end? ‘No use crying over spilt milk, what’s done is ended, have a nice life?’ I don’t think so. Not going to happen. While Mal’s goal after the discovery of Miranda is to tell everyone about it and change the ‘verse for the better, this is a hero’s goal. Its primary result is to get a lot of other people killed. Politically, realisation of this goal is a victory for Neoconservatism. Hollywood should not stand for such a thing. Mal should be forced by events to abandon this goal for the more limited goal of getting out with his life to someplace far, far away where he won’t be chased any more. Maybe pursuing this goal should get other people killed. Maybe his single-mindedness in pursuing this goal could lead the crew to suspect that he, too, is turning into a Reaver. Maybe the crew’s passivity and lack of enthusiasm in pursuing this goal could lead Mal into thinking they are becoming apathetic Pax-affected drones. The whole idea of peace as a drug could be used as the basis for a subtle and topical allegory of the processes of mutual demonisation we see in the real world.
Of course, even escaping with their lives seems like a big ask for the Firefly. I envision the Firefly escaping from some big exploding thing that is nigh-impossible to escape from (they are the PC’s, after all), so all the chasy people think River is dead. Maybe she can reinforce this with her weird psychic powers. Anyway, off they go to Backofbeyondworld^TM to wait for the sequel. Roll credits. Not a big win, but a hell of a lot more satisfying than the ending of the X-Files movie. Pretty much on a par with Star Wars, methinks.

Almost, but not quite, another 'Film Forensics'

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. But it is a perfect illustration of the nightmare postmodernist universe where there is no absolute truth or absolute morality.

I came late to this particular bit of popular culture, since I never saw it when it was on TV, and have been watching the episodes straight through from the beginning on DVD with minimal preconceptions since the beginning of the year. We are now halfway through season six. One consequence of this is that whenever I see the name ‘Joss Whedon’ in the end credits, I immediately think of ‘Palmer Joss’ from Carl Sagan’s ‘Contact’. Again, because of the order in which I was exposed, I don’t immediately think of the Palmer Joss in the movie version, played by Matthew McMuahaha, but of Palmer Joss in the novel. While the movie version is vaguely religious in a New Agey way, the original Palmer Joss is overtly Christian, though in a relatively vague and undogmatic way. He is the rational religious character, as opposed to the irrational religious character whose name I forget, and while he is not particularly believable (he started out as a tattooed man in a circus and turned to the ministry after a near-death religious experience, for instance), he is a serious attempt by a non-religious author to create a sympathetic religious character, and he makes serious contributions to philosophical debates within the novel.

So, when I reach the end of an episode of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, I often find myself thinking, ‘what would this have been like, if it had been created by Palmer Joss, instead of Joss Whedon?’ This non-Film Forensics blog entry will discuss the interesting philosophical questions that are raised by aspects of the Buffy universe and then ignored (at least as far as the middle of season six), but probably wouldn’t be ignored if Palmer Joss were in charge. I should state that don’t know anything about Joss Whedon’s Weltanschauung, and I don’t particularly care; I will treat the Buffy universe as a ‘thing in itself’, which can be discussed without reference the qualities of its creator.

* The Buffy universe is as mutable as the virtual worlds of Greg Egan’s novels- no, more so. Entire people can be created by magic, and retroactively inserted into reality. Sunnydale can be converted into a Broadway musical by one demon or a chaotic mish-mash by the dreams of an eleven year old boy. The memories and personalities of the characters- and even the whole world- are trivially manipulated by magic. The postmodern guff about reality being a social construct is made flesh. Characters in a Greg Egan novel would be disturbed by this; they always work hard to maintain their personalities in a mutable universe. Characters in Buffy never talk about it at all. They worry about their trivial personal problems, but not about this nightmarish quality in their universe. Do they not notice it? They have no science and no religion. Perhaps they thought their reality was a social construct, even when it was like our reality? They ought to be self-aware enough to talk about this. Is the Buffy universe the collective dream of everyone? Is it a solipsistic universe, the dream of one person? Is it something like the dream of Brahman, with some underlying unimaginable reality? Or is it not really as mutable as it seems, but governed by yet undiscovered laws? I would certainly talk about these things if I was a character in the Buffy universe, and so would at least some of the characters if Palmer Joss had created it. This postmodern mutability is so much a part of the Buffiverse that I will not consider discarding it in this hypothetical. Although Palmer Joss does not believe in such a universe, it would be within his powers to postulate such a universe for the purposes of entertainment.

* At the very beginning of the series, the traditional religious weapons against vampires are used- crosses, holy water. It even looks like there is a container of consecrated hosts in Buffy’s war chest in the first episode. The camera keeps drawing our attention to the silver cross that Sad Puppy Vampire gives Buffy. These religious symbols are gradually forgotten and fade away as the series progresses. Later on- when Adam’s vampire minions attack the church- it is implied that their effects are purely psychological. The only overtly Christian character ever presented, the old lady who kept the orphanage that later became Finn’s residential college, is presented as thoroughly unpleasant, and her world view is denigrated. If Palmer Joss had created the Buffiverse, this efficacy of Christian symbols would not have faded away, and it would have had some internal consistency, even if it was never explained to us. And the characters ought to wonder what it is in holy water that makes it work.

* The afterlife in the Buffiverse is utterly terrifying. There is no salvation, through works, faith, or ritual. Everyone is apparently at the mercy of a variety of strange powers, whatever they do, to an even greater extent than they are in the pre-death universe. This is the animistic universe of some of the nastier primitive cultures, like the Bataks of Sumatra. Nobody ever sits down and talks about what happens after death. In Palmer Joss’ Buffiverse, they would.

* What are Vampires? Early on, Buffy says they are demons inhabiting human forms, sharing the memories of the original human, but not being human. Do they have demonic memories of a previous existence? They don’t seem to. Do they return to their own dimensions when their human shell dies? They don’t seem to, and when Adam is talking to his vampire minions their fear of death is mentioned. If human memories are the only memories vampires have, and they cannot return to their demon dimension, how are they not human? What makes them intrinsically evil and deserving of death? Their slayage is never questioned, even after Buffy gets to know the neutered vampire Spike quite well. He doesn’t have a ‘soul’- whatever that is- and yet is something other than intrinsically evil. Only his external behaviour is controlled by emasculating technology; he should remain a beast. But he is- imperfectly, fitfully- redeemed. At least up until the middle of season six. The implications of this for vampire slaying in general ought to bother Buffy. But they don’t.

The characters in the Buffiverse are flawed because none of them ever ponder the big philosophical, religious, and moral problems thrown up by their universe. In this they are much like characters in our universe, I suppose. In the long run, like a very very old character in a Greg Egan novel of the far future, their personalities are too mutable, too dependent on the whims of a chaotic universe, to hold my interest. If they talked about the big questions of their universe, they would remain interesting regardless. And they would, if Palmer Joss had created them.

Me too!

I couldn't resist doing a Film Forensics as well...

The Day After Tomorrow

State of body: Perfectly preserved, as though flash frozen in an instant. Stomach contents still intact.

Detail of inspection: I had to drive home so I only had two glasses of wine and examined the body in a state of near-complete sobriety..

Forensic Investigator: Dr. Clam

Comments: This unfortunate corpse provides a wealth of scientific information about its historical epoch.

Although some of the fun has gone out of movies in which New York is reduced to ruins, there was such a lot of fun in those movies to start with that I found this one thoroughly enjoyable. I would love to see one of the classic ‘World Meets Well Deserved Fate’ novels done with the special effects we have today- the ‘Black Cloud’ or ‘Inferno’ by Fred Hoyle, Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Wanderer’, Frank Herbert’s ‘The White Plague’- to list some examples by people whose names begin with ‘F’.

Yes, I enjoyed this film. While the science was pretty silly, the heavily pushed message: ‘Listen to the wise scientists! They know better than the politicians!’ is one I could only applaud. It is good to see a film portraying us scientists as we really are- tough action hero types, stoic and self-sacrificing under pressure, the only ones who keep our heads when the world around us descends into madness, the ones who get the girl and save the world- or at least explain convincingly why it can’t be saved.

I loved the square-jawed, cardboard-cut out, completely ineffectual President. I could vote for somebody like that. Maybe I have, oops. And even Vice President Cheney- or whatever his name was, I forget- came across as clueless and avuncular rather than as some devious right-wing conspirator covered with oil company pocket lint. I don’t remember the last time I saw such a basically nice administration portrayed in fiction or non-fiction, notwithstanding the fact that they were supposed to be the bad guys. If this film was supposed to be satire, it was about as pointed and malicious as a sponge bath.

I also found the heavy-handed preaching completely inoffensive. Because the results of global warming were portrayed in such a ludicrously over-the-top fashion, the preaching came across about as convincing as the preaching of some bucktoothed hillbilly preacher. [very badly done example of bucktoothed hillbilly preaching deleted here]

I loved the way the core of the film was a pastiche of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ and Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ – a manly journey to somewhere for no particularly good reason; once you get there, you turn around and come back. I would not change that. I would keep that, that is archetypal and timeless.

These are things I would change:

• H.G. Wells said that the key to good science fiction set in the modern world (his modern world, of course, not ours) was to change just one thing and keep the rest as much like it is as possible. Hence, he did the invisible man thing; he did the Martians invade Earth thing; but he points out to us that he didn’t have invisible Martians invade Earth, that would be too much. The core premise of this movie was not as dumb as I was led to believe before I saw it- though it is still pretty dumb- and you could build a pretty decent film around it. The core assumption that is being made for the sake of science fictiony disaster movieness is that the failure of the North Atlantic Current could generate some wacky weather features of a kind never seen before in recorded history, with wacky cores of super-cold. So: cut all the references to weird weather in places like India and Australia. Ditto the tornadoes destroying Los Angeles, hard as I find it to condemn anything that destroys Los Angeles. The giant ice-age causing storms should take the world by surprise.

• A nastier set of bad guys. The administration could be oily and smooth and happy to say the right things and support Hero Scientist’s research, and all the time be taking trailer-loads of cash from the oil companies.

• The debate about what to do could be made much more exciting if it was more accurate. ‘But implementing the Kyoto Protocol will cost the world economy hundreds of trillions of dollars!’ ‘I’m sorry, Mr Vice President, the Kyoto Protocol isn’t enough. You must immediately begin genetically engineering super-soldier penguins to stop the flow of fresh water from the Antarctic ice shelves.’ Okay, so that isn’t more accurate, technically. Feel free to replace everything after ‘You must…’ with your own pipe-dream from your reading of New Scientist or Green Left Weekly.

• The Wolves. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Puke. Only people who have utterly forgotten what drama is could have considered putting them in.

• More panic-stricken nastiness among the citizens of New York. They were all too nice.

• A more convincing reason for Yoda and his friends to be left behind in a small group at the library. Maybe some grim-faced Men in Black types with helicopters could show up and organize things, rather than just one cop having a bright idea. This could reinforce the ‘scientist wise, politician clueless’ core message of the film.

• More sensible survival behaviour for Yoda and his friends- I get the feeling none of the writers grew up playing role playing games, so it is not surprising they didn’t think of these things immediately. For example: (1) Books make good insulation. Line the walls of the room with books. (2) There are lots of other building close by with food and stuff in them. It didn’t look hard at all to make furtive sallies to other buildings.

• If the air is below freezing already, it has hardly any moisture in it. Dropping the temperature suddenly by 10 degrees a second is not going to make frost dramatically grow all over everything. This was just more special-effects madness from people who have forgotten what drama is.

• I kept waiting for the homeless guy’s dog to be flash-frozen. I guess I just have very little self-control, but I would have flash-frozen his dog at some point.

These last two points might imperil the rating the producers were aiming for, but I would do them anyway:

• Fetching antibiotics- even if chased by wolves- does not compare with an emergency amputation under primitive conditions. Bite down on this, Laura.

• Of course, if Laura had gotten properly naked in order to effectively warm the hypothermic Yoda with her body heat, one of them could have noticed how nasty her wound was and they could start worrying about it. This could conveniently make them stop whatever else they were doing, avoiding any danger of the rating getting too out of control. The Laura’s wound subplot could then be milked all the way up to the emergency amputation, like the toe of that guy in ‘Scott of the Antarctic’.

This is one of those films that is dated almost before it appears in the cinemas, providing a flash-frozen picture of the Zeitgeist for future generations. The particular mixture of earnest preachiness about global warming, coy avoidance of its cause and cure, and timid deference to an administration that cries out for spirited mockery, could only have been created at this particular point in history.