Movie: South Korea’s Hope

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Forged Films.

If you are still hoping for one more summer movie about space aliens (it was released on September 9th even if it is officially fall now), South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin has another one to add to your list. The movie, Hope, is a thriller set in a small South Korean town on the border with North Korea. While the residents look north for a fearsome foe, little do they know the foe is from above. That’s right – extraterrestrials.

This preview indicates there will be plenty of action, though in the movie itself the aliens do not show themselves until late in the film. Hope may satisfy your need for alien battles after Disclosure Day portrayed the visitors as ICE captives and The Mandalorian and Grogu proved to be a kiddie film. How American films went from Alien terror to teddy bears this past summer is anyone’s guess.

The film reviews are mixed at best, but still somewhat encouraging.

A Deep Focus Review noted:

To work, Na’s film needed either more or less screen time for his aliens, and given their appearance, less would have been preferable. Still, action junkies and South Korean cinema fans will probably be able to look beyond the poor CGI better than I can, making it worth seeing, even admiring Hope, with caveats abounding.

The Roger Ebert site had this to say:

It’s bold, provocative, and assured filmmaking that oscillates between moments of breathtaking cinematic prowess and satirical characterizations, whose coy rendering turns a mirror toward those who unconsciously lap up hollow action heroes when the far more intriguing story exists in plain sight.

To finish up the summer stretch, you should see it for yourself and decide.

60 Years of Star Trek and Counting

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Adam Evertsson from Pixabay.

This week we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, a simple science fiction story from 1966 that was first broadcast in Canada and barely lasted for three seasons. But from that tepid beginning arose an idea that led to multiple spin-off television series, movies, books, and more.

And it has been a hopeful show that took the dark edge off of science fiction. As creator Gene Roddenberry said back in 1985:

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!

Today we still have plenty of people attacking Star Trek for being too liberal or “woke” as they say using the word of the week, but the show was always that way.

Discussing battles with TV executives about women on the USS Enterprise, Mr. Roddenberry noted:

I had insisted on half women on board [the Enterprise]. The network came to me and said, ‘You can’t have half women. Our people say it will make it look like a ship with all sorts of mad sexual things going on — half men and half women.’ So we argued about it like a poker game and they finally said, ‘Okay. We’ll settle for one-third women.’ I figured one-third women could take care of the males anyway.

Star Trek moved forward before the rest of the country, but it saw a future that was slowly realized over time. And even if it seems we are going backwards at times, he understood that as well when he said:

I have nothing but admiration for this silly race of ours. Even with the Hitlers in it and so on. Sometimes it goes into ugliness, but, in all though, it is a beauty. It’s like a rose, which also has thorns. We’re something.

So let’s not get too depressed just because we seem to have a Ferengi in the White House. Think long term like Mr. Roddenberry, and move past the thorns.

Movies: The End of the Mandalorian

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Anzellans and Grogu in The Mandalorian and Grogu. (Lucasfilm)

If you were awaiting last week’s streaming roll out The Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney+, you may have come away both happy and disappointed. I was happy that I did not pay $18 for a movie ticket to see the Mandalorian mess, but I was disappointed about every other part of the experience.

This film is more evidence, if you needed it, that multi-billion companies are capable of producing lousy products. I am now glad that Star Wars: Andor came to a respectable end and did not go through this big screen process.

Basically, the Mandalorian television series started as an adult show with some extras for the kids, while the movie was basically a kids show with little adult supervision. We started with a sole Mandalorian defeating three ATATs with his bare hands, and ended with a multi-day montage of Grogu feeding a comatose Mandaloria in the woods. How did we get here?

It reminded me of the earlier movie disaster Star Trek: Section 31, where all of the pieces were there, but they were put into a blender with nothing but gray goo coming out of the other end.

If the Star Wars franchise needed a kids show, they should have stuck with the one season and done series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. That was an okay series. But The Mandalorian started as something else – more of a western like the initial Star Wars (IV, not the I crap) – that also spoke to re-establishing earlier traditions and fighting for something in common. I saw none of that in the film. We only had a metallic superman with a stuffed animal fighting large slugs for some nebulous Republic that never seemed worth fighting for. It was like the Ewoks on steroids by the end of the movie.

So is the Mandalorian series dead? It would seem so, and those who saw this movie were given no reason to go back to the original material. Maybe without the movie some people would have stumbled onto the Disney+ series and given it a try, but now they have been scared away by a silly story set in a galaxy far, far away.

It that’s what the universe has in store for all of us, let’s dismantle the rockets now.

Television: Blade Runner 2099

Posted on by onespaceman2000

If you are not in the mood this weekend to see The Dog Stars, the latest Ridley Scott film, remember we still have another Ridley Scott show coming later this year.

Blade Runner 2099, a new 8-episode series, premieres on Amazon Prime this November 25th. While Mr. Scott was not involved with this production, his view of the future continues to amaze and haunt us.

Set in Los Angeles 50 years after the last film, the new series includes plenty of humans and Replicants, but this time it is the Replicants who are on top. It is quite a twist in the story at a time when AI is everywhere and AI-related unemployment is a continual worry.

This trailer on Youtube shows you what to expect from the new series.

Unfortunately, Harrison Ford will not be returning for this new series, but it still boasts a good number of well known talent, including Michelle Yeoh (Star Trek: Discovery), Hunter Schafer (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Dimitri Abold (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Lewis Gribben (Somewhere Boy), Matthew Needham (House of the Dragon), Maurizio Lombardi (Ripley), and others.

I want to walk into the future with my eyes wide open, so I am eager to watch the new series.

Update: As far as the role of AI in books, movies and television, I recommend a YouTube video by The Art of Storytelling titled “Sci-Fi Was Right About AI.” It touches on Blade Runner and Dune, as well as Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, and many earlier works as well.

Survey Results: Americans and UFOs

Posted on by onespaceman2000

Americans are skeptical about their government for many reasons beyond the Epstein Files. In the case of UFOs, they continue to believe that Uncle Sam is withholding the truth. As shown in the figure above, this skepticism has grown over the years.

The results from a recent Gallup poll, outlined in Americans Still Skeptical That UFOs Are Aliens, have even more to say about how American feel, including:

  • 37% believe at least some UFOs have been alien spacecraft;
  • Individuals between age 30 to 49 are more likely to believe UFOs have been alien spacecraft; and
  • 17% of Americans say they have personally seen something they thought was a UFO.

Steven Spielberg, creator of this summer’s blockbuster movie Disclosure Day, is probably not all that surprised by these results. He has been telling this same story about encounters with aliens since 1977 with his movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I think it is also reasonable to be skeptical about the existence of UFOs at this point. As Carl Sagan stated in his book Other Worlds:

UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.

Hence, it might be reasonable to be skeptical on both fronts – we cannot trust our government to properly share what it knows about UFOs, yet what it knows about UFOs is of no real value.