On Solo, Rogue One and The Last Jedi

On the 23rd I went to see Solo: A Star Wars Story, and I think it's the most enjoyable since the original trilogy! Unfortunately it was only me and five other people on the nine o'clock at premiere day. Hopefully this will change.

But let's go back for a bit. Let's talk about what's happened since The Force Awakens - a movie I quite liked. First there was Rogue One and this one I was looking forward to more than TFA, as the first stand alone film promising very little in the ways of light sabers but a lot in terms of gritty Star Wars reality. It delivered on both of these (with a small exception at the end) and it seems many people love the movie for that reason alone. I really liked it after the first (and second) viewings in the theater, but now that it's out on Netflix I feel it's a bit of a slog. It looks great, and it's well acted but the story isn't quite there. The visuals and world building are excellent and for the most part I like the plot. But the story feels flat and there's practically no character development among the ensemble cast. Even Jyn Erso herself, who I from the previews thought would be very much of the rebellious anti-hero in the vein of ANH Han Solo, turns out to be an all around good person from the start, and there's nary any growth to her character.

However, what Rogue One did well was immerse us in the sights and sounds of the Star Wars galaxy. Everything looked the part and generally the references were where they should be and not overdone. The film got away with the slightly lacklustre story thanks to its great immersive qualities - it was easy to suspend your disbelief because everything just felt right! That feeling of being a part of the world unfolding on screen, or at least wanting to be a part of it was very strong.

Then we had The Last Jedi which to me felt like a negative copy of Rogue One. Instead of having lacklustre story with great plot we got a fantastic story with an at times silly plot. And just to define terms: simply speaking, the story is what happens in the movie (The Resistance is chased by the First Order, Rey talks to Luke about the force) while plot is how it happens (the chase is a slow mosey through space, Luke is grumpy and milks sea... creatures). I really do think the story is spectacular in TLJ - the way the tables keeps getting turned, while still following a strict internal logic, the way it has this laser sharp focus on failure and the way it tells us that being the dashing hero who's always charging into danger isn't the actual way forward. I loved all the WTF moments and revelled in how it deconstructs Star Wars.

What did leave me a bit cold though, was the more abstract and impressionistic approach to the setting of Star Wars and the visuals in general. As I mentioned above all Star Wars films so far has gone out of their way to try and portray a "realistic" or, perhaps more correctly, logically consistent universe. It's been made to feel like a real place where people live on their lives and while fantastical things happen all the time it has this grungy sense of place and heft to it.

Rian Johnson, as he's decided to do with most of the Star Wars tropes, decided to go in a different direction. The grunge is still there as a facade, but the rule of cool or perhaps rule of what's visually striking is king in TLJ and makes short work of petty things like percieved "realism" or internal consistency. I have no problem at all with this in film making in general - examples of movies where this is used to great effect are Zhang Yimou's Hero or The House of Flying Daggers, or almost any other wuxia film for that matter. When the martial artists there dance on water, or the Imperial Army fires enough arrows to completely blanket a wall, we see it as beautiful artistic expressions, not necessarily an actual portrayal of reality.

As it happens I came across this article talking about cinematic influcences on TLJ, and it mentions how Rian Johnson was inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

And yet, with all its hokum force mumbo-jumbo, Star Wars has rarely gone down that road. The closest probably being the cave on Dagobah. In TLJ we have another cave and it's muuuuch trippier! Which I loved by the way. For me the core problem (if that's what it is) with TLJ comes from these expectations of having a real feeling plot, not one that is visually beautiful but not really sensible. Had Rian done this for one of the stand alone movies I would simply have cheered as I do love how he breaks with so many conventions. However, doing it as part of a trilogy, this trilogy, makes it feel slightly weird. A bit like how Alien: Ressurrection felt so out of place with the first three movies because Jeunet simply did his own impressionistic thing, when the earlier movies had already set up our expectations for the setting in general.

Now, I still really like TLJ, but the artistic choices, in the context of the larger trilogy, did bother me. Perhaps exasperated by having a roleplayers mindset and looking at movies like rpg settings. In the end it's far from ruining my enjoyment of the story, and enjoy it I did, but it makes the movie stand out as slightly odd. It really made me look forward to Rian's own trilogy though - as I think this kind of thing would could be awesome when we're all onboard from the start. Imagine a Star Wars wuxia!

Ok, on to Solo! With all that's happened during production it was easy to imagine that it would be a trainwreck. Perhaps it's simply Ron Howards great skill of navigating the maelstrom of a chaotic production with a steady hand, or perhaps the movie actually did improve through the iterations of hands that moulded it. It doesn't really matter because what came out the other end is pure Star Wars! Like the coaxium of the movie the Star Wars feeling has been refined to its essence and liberally sprinkled over the entire movie, with some extra dashes whenever Lando is around.

We have the lived in universe we've always loved, being what it is, but also adding to it. At times substantially! There are many references to more or less well known Star Wars lore but it's done well and the connections feel genuine. The visual design is absolutely spot on and I think it captures the lawless heist+noir feel very well. The story is generally familiar for those of us with knowledge of the EU, but there are many changes and mostly for the good. The characters are all fleshed out with their own motivations and drives. There's real character development and everyone acts according to their own internal logic. Even

Alden Ehrenreich is good throughout and even manages a few uncannily Ford-like deliveries here and there. Emilia Clarke, who I haven't been very impressed by earlier, makes a great Qi'ra who is very much her own character. Woody Harrelson is excellent as Becket, but we pretty much knew that, it's the kind of character that's made for him! I was of course most excited to see Donald Glover as Lando. It seemed like an inspired casting choice when I first heard about it, and he certainly steals every scene he's in. I just kept thinking that we need Lando: A Star Wars Story like, now!

Enfys Nest quickly climbed the ladde to become one of my favourite new SW characters. 

I also want to mention the visual design as it's phenomenal throughout! I immediately went out and ordered a copy of Art of Solo since I enjoyed both the character and setting designs of the movie so much. Again it finds a nice balance between the almost too drab and gritty rebels fighting on Scarif and the über stylized Praetorian Guards.

Solo manages to combine the world building of Rogue One with the storytelling of The Last Jedi. Together with good main character chemistry and a small army of interesting side characters the movie is thoroughly enjoyable!

While I do hope Disney will use the Anthology series to push the envelope on what Star Wars is and can be (again, Wuxia Star Wars now please!), and Solo is very much in the middle of the road, with hands at ten and two, it is simply so well crafted that it's impossibe not to grin throughout it.

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The Force Awakens - a No-Spoiler Review

Rey and BB-8

Last week I went to Swedens first commercial IMAX theatre to watch Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens. I was not disappointed.

Non-spoiler Impressions and Review

There is a lot to like in The Force Awakens, but the most important thing is that it actually feels like I'm watching a 'proper' Star Wars movie again! While watching it I was awed by the production design, props and creature design as pretty much all of feels like it fits perfectly into the Star Wars universe. Just like when I watched The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, I almost got a little teary eyed watching TFA as there are so many moments that I had seen in my minds eye since I was a kid and somehow they had been translated perfectly to the silver screen!

Still, when walking out of the theatre I felt happy to have seen a new Star Wars movie but it took me a day to really process it and discover my interest in the setting being rekindled. Don't get me wrong, I've always been a Star Wars fan, but ever since the disappointements of the prequals my enthusiasm has been somewhat dampened. That might have happened anyway, naturally over time, but the prequals certainly didn't help. However, now I suddenly find myself properly excited about Star Wars and the future of Star Wars for the first time in 15 years!

Say what you want of the entire saga, but even including the prequals, I kind of felt that it has grown a little stale. Hmm... that's probably the wrong word for it, but it very much felt like everything had been done. An x-wing is an x-wing is an x-wing. Kind of. Now it's all new and dynamic and fun again and I feel like that time when I was a little kid and learned that there was more than one Star Wars movie! Just having that feeling of apprehension and wanting to see what happens next, what kind of cool spaceships and planets we'll see and just following these great characters again.

Another thing that occured to me was how nice it was to have a Star Wars movie for grownups again. The prequals always felt like the aimed squarely for the younger age bracket and even though I quite enjoy Star Wars Rebels (and to a much lesser extent the Clone Wars) the same is true there. The Force Awakens, while fun and silly in just the right places, goes back to the much grittier feel of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. It's awesome having Stormtroopers actually being scary!

Now I find myself checking out all the new Star Wars books that are being released together with the movie and while books like Ultimate Star Wars look awesome I'm actually more interested in finding out about The Force Awakens - The Visual Guide, The Incredible Cross Sections and the Art Book look really nice for that! Also, I think I might need the Rey's Speeder LEGO set...



So yeah, that's my touchy-feely thoughts on the movie. Here are some bullet points.

• Costumes, props, ships and general production design is almost flawless. There was nothing that stood out to me as 'un-starwarsy' (unlike the prequals) and it generally felt grounded in the setting.
• It's funny in a good way! Just like the original trilogy there are jokes and funny moments and they all work and are actually funny. No poop jokes or C3PO going mental.
• Rey, Finn, BB-8 and Poe are all characters that are likable and fun to watch.
• The music is... there. Only Rey's Theme really stood out to me during the actual screening, but I think I need to listen to the soundtrack a bit more to get a better feel for it. 
• Scary Stormtroopers doing the stuff that was only hinted at in the original movies.

I could keep on just typing stuff, but I'd start to repeat myself. Bottom line: the Star Wars I grew up with is back but it's new and exciting! While you can nitpick at details in the film that simply doesn't compare with the great achievement JJ Abrams and the rest of the crew has managed to pull off.

Now I need to book another screening...

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Movie Musings

During the past couple of months I've watched a few movies of the sci-fi variety and I thought it'd be worth typing up some thoughts on them.

Tragically I ended up going alone to Pacific Rim. Sure I might have been a bit impatient, but still! I think you

know what the movie is about pretty much; giant mecha fighting giant monsters. This could so easily have become too silly for its own good or it could have taken itself too seriously, again ending up making the movie silly (the Transformers movies manage to do both at the same time!). Instead Guillermo del Toro finds the perfect balance and a movie about mecha fighting monsters becomes as fun and as awesome as it should be! It's hard putting my finger on exactly what it is that makes it work so well, but I certainly enjoyed myself and look forward to the sequal.

Something I really liked was that you had about five minutes of exposition at the start of the movie and then we got straight into kaiju fights! No gradual build-up, no origin story, just pure mecha fun from the get go! Brilliant! I really don't understand why the film didn't do better in the states. It didn't do badly at all, but I thought it could easily have been the big summer blockbuster. Did the average American movie goer miss the flag waving and patriotic undertones of movies like Transformers and Independance Day? Was the international cast and the main battlefield (Hong Kong, not NY or LA) off-putting? Or am I being a bit too prejudiced? ;)

Next up was Elysium, which I did manage to see with a couple of friends. After Neil Blomkamps first movie, District 9, was such a cool piece of cinema I had quite high expectations. I'd heard that the reviews were lukewarm but I went into the movie theater undeterred! It's about the poor, filthy masses down on Earth in contrast with the super rich and beautiful who have taken refuge to a space habitat (basically a Stanford Torus) called Elysium. Although the gritty style of District 9 is still very much intact you quickly realize that this is a different kind of movie. If District 9 was Fargo, Elysium is (the original) Total Recall . If District 9 was The Wire, Elysium is The A-Team. And I really do mean this in the best way possible! I think one reason for the lukewarm reviews is that this fun 80s style action movie can be hard to see behind all the grit and realism that Blomkamp loves so much. I was a bit confused as well at first, but when Sharlto Copley's evil sleeper agent character just became more and more over the top and insane it all clicked; "he's having so much fun doing this!". Despite the grit and the realistic design you really can't take this movie all that seriously - it's an action romp with superb sci-fi design and execution! Think about the plot a few seconds too long and you'll realize it's got holes like a sieve. But that's not the point! Just lean back and enjoy it.

With a lesser director Elysium would have been some kind of direct to video release, but Blomkamps amazing eye for detail raises it to a different level. The movie is full of all kinds of cool technology and designs, but they never insist upon themselves. This is really quite rare in modern sci-fi as every neatly designed gadget or gun have to be poured over by the camera, showing it in detail and how it works. Blomkamp simply throws all the cool stuff he likes in the movie but just allows it to stay in the background, which really helps with world building and, again, realism. And there are so many things that you'd like to just pluck out of the movie and put in your little sci-fi mini game! Just look at the different ships/hovercraft to the above.

If you don't know what I'm on about, consider the original Star Wars films. They had tons of background technology and designs that just were there and most of it you as the viewer never really understood or got a good look at. This probably had a lot to do with the cobbled together practical models used that often seemed to be a compromise between the concept art and what parts the model builders had knocking around. In the new prequal trilogy on the other hand, so many of the ships, gadgets and sets are thrust in your face, screaming "look at this awesome design I came up with! Please agree with me that this is awesome!! LOOK AT IT!!!", and to me this detracts greatly from a movie. I want cool designs, but I don't want to look at a showreel. Anyway, I quite liked Elysium and while it's not as good as District 9 it should be in every sci-fi fan's collection. 

I remember hearing about Europa Report quite a long ago, but feared it had died the kind of death movies you like to see usually do. So I was pleasantly surprised when it was released and made available for streaming. It's of the found footage variety but as the cameras are mostly fixed inside the spacecraft you rarely get the shaky cam that can be tiresome if used to much. It's about the first human exploration to Jupiter's moon Europa and we get to follow the crew through the journey and as they finally set down on Europa. The creators have gone to considerable length to make the movie as an accurate portrayal of space flight and that alone makes for an interesting movie. It's so rare these days to see something like this - the latest I can remember is Apollo 13 and (of course) 2001.

Europa Report is basically a "things go wrong in space" movie so you kind of know what you're in for, but what actually happens and how these problems are handled is what sets this movie apart. I don't want to move into spoiler territory so I'll leave it at that. It's also remarkable what kind of visual effects they've managed to achieve with the budget they had. The exterior shots are simply gorgeous! Especially during the landing sequence on Europa. Really spectacular stuff!

This is a film any sci-fi enthusiast would enjoy, but if you prefer hard sci-fi and perhaps enjoy real space flight it's an absolute must watch!

Hmm... that went on a bit too long. The next two will be quick.

I had heard so much bad about World War Z but I ended up thinking it was fairly good. It has almost nothing in common with the book of the same name, which really is the films great problem. Had it been released under any other name I think the reception would have been much better, now it simply seemed like people were angry that it wasn't the "real" World War Z and discounted it because of it. Standing on its own legs the movie adds a few things to the zombie mythology and it's actually pretty cool to see a zombie movie that is more like a classic disaster movie rather than a horror movie. Wouldn't mind a sequal.

Finally, I've watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. JJ Abrams does his thing and there are some cool scenes and pretty visuals. The cast is quite good (I liked Cumberbatch) and no expenses have been spared to make the effects spectacular. However, this is not Star Trek. It really isn't. And this is coming from someone who is really not a Trekkie in any sense of the word. I watched a bit of TNG as a teenager but that's about it. Recently I've started watching TOS and I quite enjoy it from a conceptual stand point. As a teenager I remember I thought Star Trek was mostly boring and not as action packed as Star Wars, but watching it now I like it because it is something different.

These two new movies really don't have anything in common with Star Trek except names, ships and uncountable nods and winks to the original series (really, it's starting to become a bit much). They could easily have been done as just generic non-Star Trek sci-fi movies and no one would have noticed. No one would have said "you know, Into Darkness really reminded me of Star Trek".The whole overarching concept of exploration and the future of humanity has been discarded in favour of explosions and silly plot twists. It's like rebooting Star Wars and forgetting about the Force. Or rebooting The Lord of the Rings and forgetting the actual ring! Basically, I think it's a waste of an IP when it's turned into generic action like this.

Yepp, I think that's about it when it comes to recent (new) sci-fi I've watched. I could perhaps throw in Agents of SHIELD in the mix, but it's on tv so... meh. Ok! So it is pretty cool and very Joss Whedon-y. In fact, I kept thinking "this is very much like Firefly" which in this case is a good thing. It could use a few generous scoops of grit though, as it feels much too sentimental. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing more!

There are a couple of characters missing still, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a 
River and Simon (although Simon really seems to have been integrated with Fitz/Simmons) 
and perhaps even a Book joining our merry band. :)

As for upcoming movies, we have Gravity by Afonso Cuaron, which looks absolutely fantastic, Ender's Game by Gavin Hood, which could go either way and Robocop by José Padilha, which also treads a fine line. Anything else in the next three or four months to look out for?

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Dredd Trailer - Some Thoughts

As you might know I've dived back into the futuristic dystopian world of Judge Dredd that I used to spend a lot of time reading about during my teen years. I've started exploring the (free) miniatures game from Mongoose, I've bought the first three Complete Case Files albums to refresh my memories and I've eagerly awaited the trailer for the new Dredd movie starring Karl Urban and Lena Heady. We were shown a brief glimpse of it yesterday but here it is in glorious HD. Let's watch...

My initial thoughts is that I like the overall style (however derivative) but that a lot of what made Judge Dredd unique is missing. It feels like director Pete Travis wanted to go the Chris Nolan/Batman route and make it into a grittier more "realistic" take on the original comic, problem is that the original comic is way over the top silly most of the time! And I mean this in a good way! The whole eighties sci-fi aesthetic is gone, which is to be expected, but it hasn't been replaced by oughties sci-fi aesthetics it has simply been replaced with a by-the-numbers near future trash dystopia. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that per se, but if Karl Urban would've worn a different helmet you wouldn't bee able to tell it was a Judge Dredd movie.

While the 1995 movie with Stallone as Dredd was horrible in all kinds of ways it did manage to transfer the comic book Mega City 1 onto the silver screen fairly well. While it embraced the camp of the comic a little bit too much it seems to me that the new movie doesn't embrace it enough. Could you imagine the Dredd of this trailer battling the infamous ape gang featuring Fast Eek and Joe Bananas? Or discontent fatties with bellywheels?! Nope, I don't think either exists here. Perhaps there will be yet another version in another 13 years that manage to find the right balance.

Now, I shouldn't be too negative about it since I actually like a lot of what we're seeing here. I'm a fan of near future dystopian settings so in that way I shouldn't complain. I'm hoping to see a cool sci-fi action movie featuring Judge Dredd but not really featuring the true craziness of Mega City 1. It's like a mirror image of how I view John Milius' Conan - as a movie set in Hyboria but not featuring Conan - and I love that film! Hopefully Dredd will manage something similar and actually bring its own piece of flavour to the ginormous cake that is Judge Dredd!

Finally I can't end this post without talking about how similar the movie looks to Indonesian produced (but Welsh directed!) action move The Raid - Redemption. The plot is pretty much identical only we get two judges instead of 20 SWAT troopers (seems like an even trade, right?). To save you some time, here's the trailer for that movie:

I read somewhere that Dredd actually began production before The Raid, but still... striking similarities, eh? Check it out by the way, it's pretty cool!

In other Dredd related news a package arrived the other day containting an Ape gang for me and a Sky Surfer gang for Anders. Thanks to @SnowyHoobinoo over at ThisWayLeads (excellent blog, check it out!) for letting me know of the IGUK sale! We need to put these guys together so we can start bashing it out properly. I haven't looked at the surfers yet but I really like the ape minis. Very nice sculpts! As soon as I'm done with my Yu Jing doctor and engineer (and their servant bots) I think I'll try painting a chimp. Ha!

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A (small) new project!

Just a little sneak peak on an upcoming project. Yes, I know I have my hands pretty much full... but some upcoming releases from Khurasan combined with Steve's recent post on cinematic gaming over on DH forced my hand. The above pictured beauty arrived today but the rest will probably will probably have to wait until next month.

I'm thinking I might get Spacejacker's Star Station Zero paper terrain as well to tie into this project. I'd love to get some of Creative Gamescapes starship corridor sets, but they're a bit more pricey. Looks pretty great though (see right).

By now you probably know what I'm up to (and I'm sure some of you just needed to see that first picture) but I like to pretend that I'm being sneaky and clever so I'll keep it under wraps for a while.

As my projects keep multiplying I find myself in need of a Master Plan...

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Shoggoth Design!

Some pretty cool sounding stuff about his upcoming adaption of At the Mountains of Madness from this (very long) interview with Guillermo Del Toro in The New Yorker. Just picking out some random cool stuff:

About Shoggoth design:

He told Greene that digital-effects houses needed to understand that each Shoggoth had at least “eight permutations.” He said, “Let’s say that creature A turns into creature A-B, then turns into creature B, then turns into creature B-C. And by the time it lands on a guy it’s creature E.” He discussed one grisly Shoggoth transformation: “It’s like when you grab a sock and you pull it inside out. From his mouth, he extrudes himself.”

And some more:

“Really nice,” del Toro said. “It’s sort of like a tapeworm.”
“Yeah,” Davis said. “When it’s forming, instead of just forming eyes, maybe it’s bubbling like mud, or pudding, so you have these sockets forming but no eyes yet. Then it gets one eye and has this cavernous companion. Mummies always freak me out because they have sockets but no eyes.”

About the city:

“I wanted the whole city to be like an abandoned coral reef,” he said. He showed me an image of a cavernous interior space. Everything was tubular and encrusted with skeletal remains—abandoned tools. “A coral reef is a shitload of skeletons fused together, right? All the technology those creatures have, all their technology is organic. You and I use metals, plastics. These creatures don’t have weapons or chisels. They create other creatures as tools.”

About the Old Ones themselves:

The oceanic motif was particularly evident in the design of the Old Ones. Del Toro’s enthusiasm for the lionfish had endured, and the aliens’ wings echoed their flamboyant fins. In motion, he explained, the Old Ones would appear buoyant—“unbound by gravity.” As the camera tracked them caroming around the city, the viewer would feel disoriented, like a panicked scuba diver inside a cave. “We designed the creatures in such a way that they can go forward or backward, or hang, or be vertical, and they still make sense,” he said.

Gore (or lack of it):

Having read the script, I knew that the body count would be high. (“BAMMMMM!!!!! A massive Shoggoth explodes out from the tower!!!!! It grabs and devours Gordon in mid-sentence!”) But del Toro promised that the film was “not gory.” Victims would be “absorbed” by the aliens in ways that were “eerie and scary.” He explained, “When you watch a documentary of a praying mantis eating the head of its mate, because of the complexity of the mouth mechanism, you’re fascinated. It’s a horrible act, but you’re fascinated.” Though he wouldn’t be spattering blood, he said that he needed to fight Universal for an R rating, “to have the freedom to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.”

Well, it sounds like my kind of movie!


Now, go and read the whole thing. It's long but worth it!

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Solomon Kane

Yesterday I watched the movie Solomon Kane, based on the Robert E Howard character of the same name, and although it's certainly not a great work of art I liked it!

Rain, mud, leather and that hat. Yepp, sums it up nicely!

I do own the Del Rey Solomon Kane collection but I haven't got around to actually reading it yet, so I can't really say how faithful the movie is to the source material. But I really like the bleak autumn/winter setting, the copious amounts of rain and mud and how the movie is kind of scaled back. It isn't about saving the world, it's about trying to rid some god-forsaken corner of England of an evil sorcerer. It's very predictable, we've seen all of the characters before and the ending could've been better but it still manages to retain a nice gritty feeling throughout. And even though the characters might be kind of flat there are some great actors in there, like Pete Postlethwaite, James Purefoy and, of course, Max Von Sydow.

Lately I've seen a few movies that have reminded me of the Warhammer RPG a lot, and Solomon Kane is most definitely one of them. If Sherlock Holmes is the kind of whimsical hunt-cultists-in-the-Altdorf-streets-kind of Warhammerish movie and I Sell the Dead is the (even more whimsical) weird-and-fantastical-things-keep-happening-but-just-go-with-it kind of Warhammerish movie, then Solomon Kane is the gritty trudge-through-the-mud-to-try-and-stop-the-marauders-from-killraping-your-home-village kind of Warhammerish movie. It's like a nice pallet showing the different colours of the Warhammer world!

Again, don't expect a great work of art, but I think it's a nice dark fantasy movie with good production values and quite a few beatiful vistas. It's an origin story with a lot of room for expansion, but because of the seemingly botched launch of the movie I wonder if it'll make enough money to get a sequal underway. It irks me that complete drivel like the Resident Evil or AvP movies keep getting sequal after sequal, whereas movies like Solomon Kane most likely won't. I mean, as long as you're making B-movies can't you at least not make the really bad ones?!

Anyway, check it out if you like dark sword and sorcery, ghouls, dismemberment, puritans in distress and/or mud! Now, here's a trailer:

Oh, and I really like the concept of mirrors being magical instruments that can be used as portals to other realms. More mirrors!

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Martians, mechs and mayhem!

Just came across the trailer for War of the Worlds: Goliath. It looks pretty cool!




It says that the dvd was released in February, but I can't find it anywhere so I guess it's delayed or something. More info at the website.

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Does Cthulhu like Hemoglobin?

Well, since Full Thrust is kind of on the back burner at the moment I've decided to simply use this blog as an outlet for my general nerd/hobby thoughts. So here we go...

I've been watching a couple of Lovecraft-inspired movies lately. Spoilers ahead!

First out was the dramatically named "CTHULHU" (in all CAPS!!) and even though it falters towards the end it's actually a quite interesting film. Especially since it tries to take on the cthulhu mythos from a dramatic perspective rather than the same old horror/gore (mostly gore) that we've grown so tired of, and it's refreshing! Although Stuart Gordon's many stabs at making Lovecraft adaptions can be somewhat entertaining I don't think he ever comes close to one of the original novels in terms of atmosphere and subtlety.

Anyway, "CTHULHU" is loosely based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and if a more experienced writer could have had a look at the script I think it actually would have been quite good. As it stands now the first half is intruiging but towards the end Russ Marsh, the main character, reacts very strangely (or not at all!) to what happens to him and he makes some rather bizarre decisions. The overarching plot idea is a sound one though: Russ has left his hometown and his family but when he's forced back because of the death of his mother it turns out that they want him back. His sister is sterile and the Marsh family needs him to carry on their bloodline. Problem is Russ is gay and here's where the main conflict of the story stems from.

There seems to be quite a few people being upset about the gay angle. Believing that since the director has changed the original work it sucks and that Lovecraft would be appaled! Seeing as he was more or less a racist old homophobe he probably would be, but that's like saying that jewish people shouldn't be allowed to play music by Wagner because he was antisemitic. And frankly I think that Mr Lovecraft would have been more offended by the absolute garbage that is being produced in his name rather than a film that at least tries to recreate the atmosphere from the novels, be it with a gay protagonist or not. In "CTHULHU" there's not an abundance of monsters or blood but there are a few quite eerie scenes that fits a Lovecraft story perfectly.

All in all I believe the vision that lead to this movie held potential but it lacks in execution. Mainly so when it comes to the script. However, it's well worth seeing as we're certainly not spoiled with Lovecraft movies that actually take themselves seriously and tries to do something other than be a monster/gore extravaganza.


The second film was "Hemoglobin" (aka "Bleeders") which is based on "The Lurking Fear" (although Lovecraft's name is nowhere to be seen). It's quite bad so I won't waste much space on it but simply list what I learned from watching it:

• If you're male and have grown up in Paris you'll wear 19th century clothes, wear lipstick and copious amounts of white face powder.

• When your husband eats his dead fetus brother you'll first throw up, but then get really turned on and crave sexing!

• Old ladies in wheelchairs believes that he best way to get away from a lurking horror is to tip the wheelchair over and fall to the floor.

• Hermaphrodites crave human flesh!

• When holing up in a lighthouse trying to defend it from inbred, legless freaks you'll feel like it's a good idea to go outside and stand around with your back to some cliffs.

• It's generally not advisable to have a mute as the only lookout.

• Weird mute chicks generally don't add anything to the plot.

• A group of three foot tall incest spawns with no legs and armed only with sharp twigs can pose a great threat to a barricaded and armed group of people.

• Rutger Hauer is always a pleasure to watch, even in a movie like this.

Yepp, that's all the Lovecraft goodness I have for you today but who knows what the future will bring. Oh, and to answer the question in the title of this post; of course he does! It tastes like jam!

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