Movie Review: Prometheus

I watched Prometheus twice this weekend. I bought both tickets ahead of time, which is the first time I can remember gambling on a film like that. In this case, it did not pay off.

Long story short: I did not like this movie. Even if you view it completely separate from Alien, its story-linked predecessor, I feel that it did not succeed. Of course, if you try to link the two movies and compare them together you won't get very far because although they may be set in the same universe, they are not same genre nor scope. I read another review (by Faith Erin Hicks) that worded this difference quite well:

Alien is a taut, miniature movie focusing on a tiny fragment of working life in the future. In contrast, Prometheus is high-minded message SciFi, ruminating about life, the universe, everything.

Don't go into this movie expecting a horror film, or even an action film. It tries to be a mysterious drama, but it ends up answering all the wrong questions and left me as a viewer unsatisfied.

Another big problem I had with the story-line is that the characters consisted of supposed experienced scientists, who acted like they knew nothing of the scientific method. Several lines in the movie refer to quarantine procedure, but very little of what I would consider proper procedures were ever followed. And I don't even want to get started on the actual science behind DNA. The leaps that this tale were making were so absurd as to make me laugh out loud.

In the end, there were a couple of redeeming factors. One, Michael Fassbender continues to impress me with a performance was that truly entralling. Despite the questionable nature of the character he portrayed, he was the one of the few in the movie that I wanted to keep watching. The only other characters of note in my mind were Charlize Theron's company woman and Idris Elba's captain of the ship. All other actors, although some of them very qualified and respectable in their own rights, seemed to be delivering very flat or strained performances. The relationships between the characters didn't feel realistic and their reactions to the situation as presented were fairly ridiculous.

The second redeeming factor was the visuals. Not just the special effects, which were fantastic. But the composition and structure of many scenes was captivating.

Final rating: 4 out of 10.

Review: Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the end, this is just more of the same as "Hunger Games". Not a lot of surprises, but an enjoyable and easy read.

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Review: Catching Fire

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the end, this is just more of the same as "Hunger Games". Not a lot of surprises, but an enjoyable and easy read.

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Review: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book after watching the movie. Although both were enjoyable, I felt they were "shallow". The label of young-adult applies aptly to this book.

I think if I had read this when I was in grade school, I would be one of the many avid fans who consider Katniss a personal heroine. I know back then I really enjoyed stories of young people who had to go above and beyond the average person to help support themselves and their family, especially if that meant hunting and/or living in a forest. And my glee was even greater when the main character was a female -- a seemingly plain girl who was loved secretly or from afar. This books hits on all those notes.

However, I am older now and I appreciate stories with characters that make surprising choices and struggle on a more internal level to be a better person. Katniss felt pretty formulaic; never really surprising me. Furthermore, I predicted much of the story as a whole, even guessing where the twists and turns might come in.

Still, because it brought back some childhood memories of old favorites, I would recommend this highly to other young readers.

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Review: Coyote

Coyote by Allen Steele
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think as long as an author has good grammar, decent sentence structure, and basic storytelling skills, I will give them the benefit of the doubt. I believe I will try hard to like a book but sometimes, it just doesn't work. At the end of Coyote, I found I just couldn't like it despite the fact that I held on until the end.

The most annoying problem was what I refer to ask "carrot dangling". Sometimes in a narrative there will be vague references and allusions to the past or the future so that the reader is curious enough to keep reading. For example, a character might briefly remember bits and pieces of some bad accident from their youth and the reader hangs on until the details and complete story are revealed over time. I often felt this technique come up in Coyote unnaturally, and it brought my focus out of the story instead to critique the writer explicitly. There are a couple of examples I will provide to demonstrate why this was so annoying.

The first example is a case where the story was following a young girl and her relationships to two different boys. The next chapter was an excerpt from the same person's diary, written in her old age, describing events like a flashback. For no apparent reason, the woman refers to her husband as "my current partner". So when does someone writing in their diary not use first names, especially of those people close to them? Furthermore, no where else in the book was the term "partner" used like that – is she married or not? Why would she bring it up like that? It felt like a direct poke at the reader – "you're not supposed to know which boy she picked yet, so you have to keep reading."

Another example in same vein – we are still reading a woman's journal as she describes events from her youth that haven't happened yet in the primary narrative. She makes a reference to an adventure she went on that "cost a person's life." Really? When you're writing in your diary, you wouldn't just say how you miss so-and-so because they died on your adventure?

These details were really jarring to me and made it hard to empathize with any of the characters. Another reason that it was hard to empathize is that the story never really focused on one character. I think that as the reader I was supposed to care about the group as a whole – their survival and ability to start a new colony – but the motivations of everyone where so disjointed that instead I just felt tossed from one individual struggle to the next. If there was an underlying thread that was supposed to tie all the independent actions together, I never found it.

This is one book I can't see myself ever reading again, and probably won't even try any of the author's other works.

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Pictures from Aruba

Finally processed most of the pictures I took from our trip a couple weeks ago. This is about one tenth of all of them. (I went a little camera crazy) Enjoy!

Aruba 2012

Review: Judas Unchained

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Overall, I liked the series because it had the hard scifi feel I've been craving, however, certain themes fell a little short for me. Final score is 3 out of 5.

I finished the book awhile ago, so this review may be a little fuzzy on details from bad memory. (I was busy preparing and then experiencing a vacation in the Caribbean -- a good excuse!) The general take away I have from this story is a pleasant one. One of my primary drivers to read this in the first place was to find some serious hard science fiction and this definitely fit the bill. It was well-written and didn't fall into any tropes that I am familiar with. In other words, I was engaged and on my toes most of the time. However, there are a few areas that didn't work so well for me.

First, I felt overwhelmed with the number of protagonists and never really sympathized with any of them. The large cast and wide scope of the story felt a lot like the Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin) to me. However, with George, I perceived the world as being small at first and then growing bigger and bigger gradually. Peter, on the other hand, just plunged me in to this huge Commonwealth so quickly I had a hard time getting my bearings. (I will admit that some of this could be biased because I’ve read Ice and Fire more than once.) And this is my fuzzy memory talking here –- but the viewpoints from the Commonwealth didn’t seem truly first-person. Like I never really got the sense that I was getting inside anyone’s head. Thus, being an outsider, the events didn’t impact me that much.

(Minor spoilers here)
Second, several aspects of the technology were not explored to my personal satisfaction. The fact that humanity is basically immortal at this point should have changed our culture more drastically in my mind. Similarly, if humanity can create memory-storage chips that are built into our brains, wouldn’t we have a ton of other cybertech? Too many aspects of everyday life remained the same as what we experience today that at times, I almost forgot how far-future the story was supposed to be.

Those complaints aside, I did enjoy the series. I like it when alien species are presented as truly alien and not just a different human culture in costume. I like exploring the universe in space ships and using computers and technology to do amazing things. Once my ‘to read’ list empties out, I would even consider revisiting this story again.

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