X-Men: Days of Future Past: A Review

"Please Charles, we need you to... hope again."

Charles Xavier to his past self in

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

This review will spoil everything in the movie.

JamesMcAvoy superimposed over Patrick Stewart.

The Wolverine notwithstanding, has it really been three years already since the last X-Men film? I was never a fan of the Brian Singer original movies and re-watching them in preparation of X-Men: Days of Future Past certainly didn't help their case. The CGI was dated and some of the dialogues in them were painful to endure (every time Halle Berry opens her mouth, I want to extend my adamantium claws and poke my ears out).

Then X-Men: First Class came along and for the first time, I feel invested in this franchise. I was especially enamoured by Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Erik Lehnsherr which was so sympathetic that I found myself more persuaded by his cause than Charles Xavier's. The Magneto of Singer's film was almost cacklingly, moustache-twirling villainous.

So, when I heard that Bryan Singer will be back to direct Days of Future Past instead of First Class helmer Matthew Vaughn, I was apprehensive. And to some measure, my fears were confirmed. Aside from a particularly tense confrontation scene between Erik and Charles on a private jet, young Magneto seems to have inherited the Cartoon Villainy Syndrome that the old Magneto displayed in the older films, and is now committed to doing evil beyond all sense and reason. His attempt to kill Raven/Mystique? His blatant show of might and attempt on Nixon and Trask's lives at the unveiling of the Sentinel prototypes at the White House? Whatever goodwill that Fassbender's Magneto won from me in First Class, they all dissipated in Days of Future Past.

But it wasn't all bad. As a matter of fact, I am finding it difficult to decide if I liked First Class or Days of Future Past more.

If First Class was Magneto's film, Days of Future Past is Professor X's. Never minding the logic of a serum that temporarily reconnects his severed spinal cord while suppressing his telepathic powers portrayed with heroin addiction imagery, we see a young Charles Xavier who have given himself up to alcoholism and despair. We see him broken, hiding away from all the ambient anguish surrounding him. Erik expressed disbelief when he found out that Charles would give up his powers just to be able to walk - but the truth is, that's not the real reason why he is taking the serum. He said he was broken. He's like a mutant Jesus who can no longer bear the weight of all of mutant-kind's suffering.

The keystone that holds the entire movie together, I feel, is this scene when McAvoy Charles reached back into the past through Logan's mind to talk to his older future Patrick Stewart self,

Young Charles: So this what becomes of us. Eric was right. Humanity does this to us.
Old Charles: Not if we show them a better past.
Young Charles: You still believe?
Old Charles: Just because someone stumbles and loses their way, it doesn’t mean they’re lost forever. Sometimes we need a little help.
Young Charles: I’m not the man I was. I open my mind and it almost overwhelms me.
Old Charles: You’re afraid, and Cerebro knows it.
Young Charles: In all those voices… so much pain.
Old Charles: It’s not their pain you’re afraid of - it’s yours. And frightening as it can be their pain will make you stronger if you allow yourself to feel it. Embrace it. It will make you more powerful than you ever imagined. It’s the greatest gift we have that can bear pain without breaking, and it’s born from the most human power: Hope. Please Charles, we need you to... hope again.

I don't know if it was because of the momentous performance from the two thesps but it is not at all cheesy or Hallmark-ey. Old Charles' allusion to stumbling and losing one's way is incredibly potent. I is one of forgiveness. It speaks to both Raven's wayward ways and to Young Charles' despair. Maybe I need some time to let my feelings settle but right now, I think that this is one of the greatest scenes I have ever seen in cinema.

And this is something that filmmakers making superhero films must understand. It is not the huge action setpieces or lavish CGI that makes the film. It's not the slavish adherence to the source material. It is not the novelty of yet another iconic supervillain brought to the largeness of life on screen - as seen in some franchises trying to cram as many supervillains in their movies as they can. The focus of antagonism in Days of Future Past was a human scientist named Bolivar Trask who conceived the Sentinel Program that will lead to the near extinction of mutants (and apparently humans) in the future. Peter Dinklage was amazing in the role but he was essentially a walking talking McGuffin. He didn't matter. What made this film work is the complex interplay between the characters we have come to know and love from First Class. I care about the relationships between Charles, Erik and Raven. I care about what's happening to them. It didn't matter that Charles' and Raven's relationship is a fabrication of the movie franchise and didn't exist in the comics. That's why Raven's and Charles' redemptive arcs worked so well.

Speaking of Peter Dinklage, I must commend on the casting choice. Bolivar Trask is not a little person in the comics and I don't think even the comic fans minded the choice. And it is amazing how no one even alluded to or joked about his stature throughout the course of the film! If Michael Bay made this, he would have milked this for all it is worth.

Of course, all of my highbrow ideas about comic book film adaptations aside, two action sequences stand out in my mind. The first was the cold open where the Sentinels attacked a cadre of La Résistance mutants in the apocalyptic future. We were shown just how formidable they are as they brutally and efficiently slaughtered all of the mutants in the sequence. We were introduced to Blink (played by Fan Bing Bing) who has the power to cast pink teleportation portals which she used synergistically with her other teammates in combat, making for incredibly kinetic fights. I'm a huge, huge fan of the Portal games, and when Fan Blink Blink used a trick commonly used in the games to make impossibly long gravity-aided jumps to turn Colossus into a mutant missile, I wanted to nerd-punch the air. That slo-mo scene where she spatially displaced a Sentinel but was killed when the killbot reached back through the portal with its pointy limb to stab her was also fantastic - I had my heart beating in my throat the whole time. I hope they would hire whoever it was who choreographed these Blink scenes to work on adapting the Portal films!

Fan Blink Blink.

We were also introduced to Shadowcat's/Kitty Pryde's ability to project a person's consciousness into the past, a nod to the fact that it was her who travelled back in time to be the agent of change in the comics. Given the fact that Wolverine was laughably impotent in the film (and in one crucial turning point in the movie, was incapacitated by his PTSD) and was practically an audience insert, I don't see why it was so important to place him front and centre. Being a massive fan of Ellen Page myself, I felt that Days of Future Past would have been better served if we followed her instead! Yes, yes, I know she wouldn't have been born in the 1970's but I'm sure that if they are willing to just randomly change mutant abilities in service of the plot, I can't see why they couldn't have made this work somehow.

The second most memorable action sequence is of course the now-internet-famous Quicksilver's prison-breaking Magneto out of a metal-less prison deep under the Pentagon where guards were equipped with plastic guns and clear-plastic batons that are reminiscent of something you can buy at a sex shop. And it was hilarious and glorious!

Evan Peters as Pietro Peter Maximoff AKA Quicksilver.

Earlier versions of the script feature Juggernaut in place of the speedster mutant and we can all agree that we have quite enough of seeing indestructible men barrelling through walls in superhero movies to last us a lifetime after Man of Steel. While it was upbeat and hilarious throughout, the centrepiece of the sequence was when Quicksilver single-handedly defeated a dozen cops who had Charles, Erik and Logan surrounded in the conveniently round kitchen by making them punch themselves and pistol-whip one another (bearing in mind that force is a product of mass and acceleration, a little nudge from Quicksilver at superspeed packs quite a wallop) before circling back to displace the trajectory of the bullets heading towards our heroes. And it was all set to the dulcet tune of Jim Croce's Time in a Bottle. There's also a nod to the fact that Magneto is actually Quicksilver's biological dad in a funny elevator exchange between the two.

A note on how the film ended: The special mode of time travel it uses where only a person's consciousness go back in time to their younger body will prevent the creation of alternate timelines, but it didn't make sense that Future Wolverine's memories would be be reinstated in the new Sentinel-free future because that Wolverine would never have existed. And when he snapped back into his future body, what to the the Past Wolverine's consciousness who lived very differently from 1973 to present? Was that extinguished? Of course, by "resetting" the timeline, Bryan Singer essentially cancelled all the events in X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Or to put it more pithily, Bryan Singer sent Wolverine back in time to make sure Brett Ratner never happened.

Actually, the real plot of #XmenDaysOfFuturePast is that they are sending Wolverine back in time to make sure Brett Ratner never happened.
— Kok Sen Wai (@KokSenWai) May 30, 2014

So yeah, I liked the film in spite of all its shortcomings because there's really a lot to love in it. The post-credits stinger at the end featured a shrimpy pale blue-lipped kid assembling a pyramid in the desert while a throng of worshippers chant "En Sabah Nur" in the background (which is Apocalypse's true name). That is a very unimpressive looking Apocalypse if you ask me, but I suppose X-Men: Apocalypse will recast him. With that, I think that is all that I can say about X-Men: Days of Future Past.



P.S. Xavier's theme (Hope) from the soundtrack was incredibly potent. I am quite addicted to it now.



Can hope again,
k0k s3n w4i

7 Reasons Why the Red Wedding is So Much Worse in the Book

"And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that lord of Castamere,

But now the rains weep o’er his hall, with no one there to hear.

Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall, and not a soul to hear."

The Rains of Castamere by George R. R. Martin

This article spoils episode nine of season 3 of Game of Thrones and the relevant parts of
A Storm of Swords from which the episode was adapted from.

The day that all book-readers of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire had been waiting for had come to pass. It is the day that the show-watchers who have not read the books experience the surprise, shock and horror that we experienced 13 years ago when we read A Storm of Swords for the first time. Some potent were the words on its pages that I heard it made some swear off the series for good. For me, it was the highest point of the series thus far and the zenith of literary mastery. It made me an undying fan to the books and a relentless proselytiser of Martin's wicked genius.

I saw the Red Wedding episode (or The Rains of Castamere, as it is officially named) with my wife and when the tragedy went down, my heavily pregnant wife was agape in alarm, her eyes unblinkingly transfixed on screen while she held a hand over her slightly open mouth. This is a woman that flinches at the most vanilla of violent scenes in movies but she simply could not tear her eyes away. I must admit I enjoyed her reaction very much and it allowed me, by way of my empathetic mirror neurons, to re-experience the Red Wedding anew. Other book readers all around the world found their jollies by video-taping their book-virgin friends' and families' hilarious responses when they watched the climax of the episode. Red Wedding Day was like a fiesta of schadenfreude for us.

Red Wedding by FatherStone.

Right after the episode fade to black and silence, show-watchers flooded Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere with their oceanic grief, and never before in the history of television had there been so massive a response to a plot development to a TV series. It elicited death threats to the books' author and inspired passionate declarations from people saying that they are rage-quitting the shows for good. The scope and scale of the reaction and backlash was beyond imagining, and the reason why people can feel so strongly about what happened to a bunch of fictional characters was because they were so well-written. It was a testament to how much life George R. R. Martin breathed into them.

Now that the wails of sorrow and the gnashing of teeth are petering off a little, I have something to say to you show-watchers: Quit moaning. What you guys went through was Red-Wedding-Lite. While it was fantastically portrayed on screen, it was positively anaemic compared to how much worse we book-readers had it.

Here are 7 reasons why the Red Wedding was far more traumatic in the novel than on the telly, in chronology and with book excerpts.



1. The Music at the Reception was Awful.

"Music is more of a hobby for us really."

The musicians at the wedding in the TV episode was good. From the generic medieval tunes of merriment to the mournful and foreboding rendition of The Rains of Castamere, they were suitably competent. It wasn't so in the book. In fact, the wedding band was mentioned repeatedly throughout the chapter as being terrible at their job,

The drums were pounding, pounding, pounding, and her head with them. Pipes wailed and flutes trilled from the musicians’ gallery at the foot of the hall; fiddles screeched, horns blew, the skins skirled a lively tune, but the drumming drove them all. The sounds echoed off the rafters, whilst the guests ate, drank, and shouted at one another below. Walder Frey must be deaf as a stone to call this music. Catelyn sipped a cup of wine and watched Jinglebell prance to the sounds of "Alysanne." At least she thought it was meant to be "Alysanne." With these players, it might as easily have been "The Bear and the Maiden Fair."

They were also referenced in Arya's chapter when she was at the Twins,

The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer castle were playing a different song than the ones in the castle on the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song. "They’re not very good," Arya observed.

The musicians being terrible is one of the earliest clues to the storm of shit that hit the fan later. They sucked because they were not musicians but were actually assassins posing as musicians.

Okay, we book-readers didn't technically suffer from the music (even if the characters in attendance did) but this is such a stellar example of Martin's writing that I couldn't resist including it. Very few authors can write something innocuous (terrible musicians seemingly written in for harmless humour) and also have it foreshadow something far more sinister. It was a masterful contrast of comedy being a prelude to tragedy.



2. More Characters We Care About Were Killed.

 Many show-watchers have griped about the huge number of characters in the show but we book readers are saddled with so much more - and we have come to know and love some of them. Robb Stark did not descend from the North with just Karstarks and Boltons behind him. He had many more named bannermen and personal guards like Robin Flint, Wendel Manderly and Dacey Mormont who had fought with him and protected him in his campaign in the South, most of which were brutally murdered along with Robb, Catelyn and Grey Wind at the Red Wedding.

House Manderly's sigil is a merman. Wendel Manderly was shot in the mouth by a crossbowman.

Greatjon Umber, the head of House Umber, is possibly one of the most fan-loved of Robb Stark's vassals. He initially challenged Robb's authority, going as far as to draw his sword during talks but Robb's direwolf disarmed him and chewed off two of his fingers. Instead of being enraged, he joked about it and became the first of the Northmen to declare Robb King of the North. He is also Robb's fiercest supporter and arguably, greatest champion. While he ultimately survived the Red Wedding, his son, the Smalljon, was beheaded in the mêlée by Roose Bolton's men.



3. Instead of a Knife to the Womb, it was an Axe to the Belly.

Talisa's stabbing was undoubtedly one of the most shocking and gruesome scene in the entire Red Wedding sequence. Right after she talked about naming Robb's heir after his unfortunate lord father, Ned Stark, the Fetus in the North was aborted almost immediately with extreme prejudice by one of the Freys.

I let my pregnant wife watch this scene.

Now, Talisa was a character made up specifically for the show, and Robb's wife in the book (the one which he broke his oath to Lord Walder Frey to marry) was Jeyne Westerling of the Crag who Robb married after he slept with her to protect her honour. It is important to note that the Westerling girl was (1) not pregnant, and (2) did not attend the Red Wedding for fear of offending the Freys. So in a way, Talisa was specifically created as a more sympathetic character whom Robb married out of love rather than honour. It is probably for the same reason that the show's writer gave her a baby and had her go to the Twins just so she could have that conversation about naming the unborn kid Ned to raise the emotional stakes right before she was given that very special Caesarean.

This was the same expression most show-watchers had on their faces when this happened.

In the book, Robb attended the Red Wedding without his wife. One of his battle companions and king's guard, Dacey Mormont (a cousin of Jorah Mormont), was with him. She shared Robb's last dance of the night before the Freys turned on the Northmen. If you think being knifed in the belly was bad, just read what happened to the Mormont girl,

“Mercy!” Catelyn cried, but horns and drums and the clash of steel smothered her plea. Ser Ryman buried the head of his axe in Dacey’s stomach.

Now, imagine that happening in the show instead. While the emotional payoff isn't as big, it would have made for a far gorier scene.



4. Catelyn's Gambit was Far More Unpalatable.

One of the most memorable and character-defining scenes for Catelyn in the show was when she held Walder Frey's wife hostage and threatened her life in exchange for Robb's. This was the last delicious morsel of hope that the show's writers dangled in front of the show-watchers. Sure, Cat's firstborn had a few arrows sticking out of him but he stood up. He might have conceivably escaped too.

"I'll find another," said Walder Frey, disgustingly evil and unconcerned, and for the first time in this series, Joffrey became the second most despised character in the show. Then Roose Bolton stepped in front of Robb and shanked him in the heart with a sword. At that very same moment, the same blade pierced the hearts of a million screaming fans.

She was Walder Frey's 8th wife. Catelyn ought to have known how disposable they are.

Catelyn's grief was a terrible thing to behold. It seemed like all life drained from her face as she cleanly slit Joyeuse Erenford's throat in one smooth motion (yes, she has a name) as she screamed in anguish. The camera lingered on her, standing there ashen and motionless, before someone gave her an identical spurting tracheostomy. By this point, the audience must have yelled "WHAT THE FUCK?!" about a dozen times.

In the book, Cat's hostage was a mentally retarded grandson of Walder Frey,

At his feet sat a somewhat younger version of himself, a stooped thin man of fifty whose costly garb of blue wool and grey satin was strangely accented by a crown and collar ornamented with tiny brass bells. The likeness between him and his lord was striking, save for their eyes; Lord Frey’s small, dim, and suspicious, the other’s large, amiable, and vacant. Catelyn recalled that one of Lord Walder’s brood had fathered a halfwit long years ago.

He was called Aegon "Jinglebells" Frey, and it was implied that Walder Frey might actually be fond of the lackwit. And when Cat executed him in the book, it was a far more grisly scene than the one in the show,

Robb had broken his word, but Catelyn kept hers. She tugged hard on Aegon’s hair and sawed at his neck until the blade grated on bone. Blood ran hot over her fingers. His little bells were ringing, ringing, ringing, and the drum went boom doom boom.

We all know that the murder of defenceless innocents or creatures that are incapable of understanding their plight is a very powerful, very deplorable act. That is why the death of a dumb animal like a dog can hurt more than the death of a human being. Reading about a grief-stricken mother "sawing at the neck" of a mentally-challenged middle-aged man "until the blade grated on bone" certainly weighed much more on our souls than what we saw in the show.



5. Catelyn Went Completely Batshit.

Instant karma.

If you think Catelyn going all Mama Bear and cutting up some bitch up for her son was crazy, you are not prepared for the insanity that began after Jinglebell Frey was killed in the book,

Finally someone took the knife away from her. The tears burned like vinegar as they ran down her cheeks. Ten fierce ravens were raking her face with sharp talons and tearing off strips of flesh, leaving deep furrows that ran red with blood. She could taste it on her lips.

It hurts so much, she thought. Our children, Ned, all our sweet babes. Rickon, Bran, Arya, Sansa, Robb... Robb... please, Ned, please, make it stop, make it stop hurting... The white tears and the red ones ran together until her face was torn and tattered, the face that Ned had loved. Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run down her long fingers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her clothes. It tickles. That made her laugh until she screamed. “Mad,” someone said, “she’s lost her wits,” and someone else said, “Make an end,” and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she’d done with Jinglebell, and she thought, No, don’t, don’t cut my hair, Ned loves my hair. Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold.

In the book, Catelyn went violently insane and started clawing and tearing her own face into a mutilated mess. The Freys initially intended to keep her alive as hostage but after witnessing her in her throes of bloody madness, they decided to just put her out of her misery instead.



6.  Arya was Killed.

"What?"

Just kidding, but not really. In the show, we saw the Hound knocking Arya out cold to take her away from the mayhem and slaughter at the Twins.

However, in the books, this was how Arya's chapter at the Twins ended,

Arya spun away from him and darted for the gate. The portcullis was coming down, but slowly. I have to run faster. The mud slowed her, though, and then the water. Run fast as a wolf. The drawbridge had begun to lift, the water running off it in a sheet, the mud falling in heavy clots. Faster. She heard loud splashing and looked back to see Stranger pounding after her, sending up gouts of water with every stride. She saw the longaxe too, still wet with blood and brains. And Arya ran. Not for her brother now, not even for her mother, but for herself. She ran faster than she had ever run before, her head down and her feet churning up the river, she ran from him as Mycah must have run.

His axe took her in the back of the head.

Then, for 12 whole freaking chapters, we were not given Arya's POV again in the book. Many readers, myself included, thought that the littlest Stark girl was killed at the Red Wedding too (the reference to Mycah, the butcher's boy that the Hound rode down in the first book/season, really sold it). More than even Robb or Catelyn, Arya is one of the best-liked characters in the series and her temporary demise was devastating. I was sure that George R. R. Martin purposely delayed slipping in another Arya chapter after the Red Wedding just to extend our mourning. That jerk.



7. They did Things to Robb Stark's Corpse I Spoke Too Soon.

This was what ultimately happened to Robb (and Catelyn) in the books,

"I am not seeing the body, no, Your Kingliness," said Salladhor Saan. "Yet in the city, the lions prance and dance. The Red Wedding, the smallfolk are calling it. They swear Lord Frey had the boy’s head hacked off, sewed the head of his direwolf in its place, and nailed a crown about his ears. His lady mother was slain as well, and thrown naked in the river."

The King in the North by Jorge Mascarenhas.

To be honest, I was actually kind of looking forward to this macabre curiousity in the show but I guess this would ruin the sombre mood on which The Rains of Castamere episode ended.

Addendum (11/06/2013): They show Frey men parade Robb Stark's headless body on a horse with his direwolf's head mounted on his neck stump in the season finale of season 3.

 ***

So there it is, all the show-watchers have caught up to the book-readers where the Red Wedding is concerned. Much like Ned Stark's suprise beheading in season one/book one, this is going to cause a bad case of plot disorientation in anyone trying to follow the story. Where do we go from here? Who can take out the Lannisters now? If Robb isn't the hero, who is?

Embrace that confusion. You have no idea where you are and that's a good thing. For the first time in many years, you are going to hear a new tale.



Drank Red Wedding tears,
k0k s3n w4i

The Art of Misdirection

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

W.B. Yeats

Earlier this month, as my wife and I were preparing to leave the house for dinner, I performed a little magic trick for her. Her back was turned momentarily as she was putting on her shoes, and when she faced me again, I had in my hands a large bouquet of lilies. I was only out of her sight for a few seconds so understandably, the sudden appearance of a bunch of plant reproductive organs came as a complete surprise to her. She was completely baffled. I had only gotten home from work a few minutes earlier and had never left her sight since. And having spent the entire day cleaning the house, she was confident that there were no flowers stashed in a hidey hole somewhere before I left for work that day. Several weeks have passed since and she still couldn't figure out how I did it.

I'll explain how I did it, but first I'll talk about what Louis Leterrier did in his latest film, a caper thriller with an ensemble cast called Now You See Me. Ha, bet you didn't know that this post is actually a film review! Also, I will spoil everything in it, so skip to the final three paragraphs if you just want to know how I conjured up a bunch of flowers out of thin air.

Jesse Eisenberg as J. Daniel Atlas, Mark Ruffalo as Dylan Rhodes, Woody Harrelson as Merritt Osbourne, Mélanie Laurent as Alma Vargas, Isla Fisher as Henley Reeves, Dave Franco as Jack Wilder, Michael Caine as Arthur Tressler, and Morgan Freeman as Thaddeus Bradley.

The philosophy of this movie is encapsulated inside the few words of its tagline: "The closer you look, the less you'll see." I feel that it is an apt summation of what show magic is all about. One character in the film told a story about a trick that was performed by a stage magician by the name of Lionel Shrike in which he had a volunteer sign his name on a playing card. He then supposedly transported that card into a tree. When they cut the tree down, they found the autographed playing card, encased in glass, nestled within the heart of the trunk. How could such a seemingly impossible feat be achieved?

It was then explained that Shrike had gotten the same guy to sign his name on a card decades ago for another much less impressive magic trick. Then, he entombed the card in glass in the middle of a young tree, allowing it to be swallowed by the wood as it grew. It seemed inconceivable that someone would go through such lengths to set up such a performance, but it is precisely that inconceivability that protects it from being seen through. All who witnessed Shrike's feat of prestidigitation could not figure out how he could hide a card in the trunk of a living tree in an instant without breaking it apart and then meticulously put the tree back together before their eyes. That is their failure. The thing is, the answer to how it can be done is clear from the beginning if they can only step back and look at it from afar. I have heard more than once that if you want to be a successful magician, you must know how people think and how inept they are at it.

That being said, the joys of this movie are far and few between.

Heist films and stage magic have a lot in common. They first wow us with the sight of something seemingly impossible and then it impress us with the revelation at the end. The first big trick of the Four Horsemen (Eisenberg, Harrelson, Fisher, and Franco) was robbing a French bank while being on stage in Vegas. It is also arguably the only satisfying revelation of how a trick is performed, its execution mirrored the card-in-tree-trick. The entire performance suggests that the bank was robbed in real time when in fact, it had been done long before the quartet announced their intention to do so. As Morgan Freeman's magic debunker character helpfully pointed out, when a magician asks you to look at something, he or she is distracting you from what you really should be looking at.

Of course, a lot of this film hinges on your acceptance that stage hypnotism really does work and work to the absurd degree that the film portrays (instantly putting people to sleep, entombing post-hypnotic suggestions in people's subconsciousness that dramatically affect their actions, et cetera). While it was employed to great comedic effect, the success of a film about heists or magic acts relies on how grounded in reality it is. Having actual magic (Harrelson's power of hypnosis in Now You See Me) or invoking Clarke's third law by introducing futuristic technology  that are indistinguishable from magic (Bowie Tesla's teleportation device in The Prestige) just make a film in these genres look like they copped out. I am sure that the writers could have replaced all the bits involving hypnotism to something more grounded, something more mundanely magnificent - but they didn't and as a result the film suffered for it.

The Four Horsemen.

The presence of actual effectual stage hypnotism in Now You See Me's universe is the least of its sins. The motivation of the Four Horsemen in publicly performing heists and causing them to be wanted criminals, leaving them on the run from the law for the rest of their lives, is... they wanted to join an ancient Egyptian order of Robin Hood magicians called The Eye. Yeap. It was that cartoonish and needlessly fantastic. Any halfway decent screenwriter would be able to come up with motivations more believable than that.

While the second heist was rather clever and hinged on a simple trick (Eisenberg's pantomimed failure at mentalism managing to draw out crucial private information from Michael Caine), it also made me wonder at how the foursome managed to gather hundreds of very specific people into their audience, learn of their bank account numbers and the amounts of money in them, and of their grievances against a certain insurance company. The scope of their backstage prep beggars belief even if you know exactly how they did it.

Movies such as Now You See Me often relies on a third act twist that is expected to be more impressive than everything that came before it but in this case, the third heist turned out to be the worst of the three. One wonders, if the Horsemen were able to install a huge mechanical contraption to lower a giant mirror into a room on command, wouldn't it be easier if they just outright steal the safe kept in that room in all the time they were tinkering in it? Here, the magic hypnotism appears again as a crucial element in their trick in getting someone to make a phone call. I wondered: why didn't the writers simply invoke Franco's character's skill at impersonating voices instead (one which was masterfully portrayed during the cool prestidigitation-fueled fight scene between him and Ruffalo's character)?

The ultimate reveal and twist of the film was Mark Ruffalo's FBI agent character turning out to be the mastermind behind The Eye and that he had recruited the Four Horsemen to perform these heists as a very coldly-served revenge against the people who antagonised his father, Lionel Shrike, which indirectly caused his demise at the bottom of a river due to a botched escape trick.

While Lionel Shrike's story was featured prominently throughout the film, the reveal of Ruffalo's real identity and the raison behind the targets of the heists felt like they were pulled right out of the writers' asses. They were cheap and substance-less. There were no indications throughout the film suggesting that Ruffalo is anyone other than who he appears to be. There were no clues linking the Four Horsemen's heist victims to Shrike either. It is also troubling that Mark Ruffalo's character thought that framing an old bloke and putting him in jail for making a career out of revealing how magicians perform their tricks (and very indirectly catalysed the events leading to his old man's death) is commensurate retribution.

If you can forgive all of these problems (and more I didn't talk about like the unbelievable romantic subplot between Rhodes and the French Interpol agent played by Laurent, and her ultimate decision to keep Rhode's secret and thus, damning an innocent man to imprisonment), this movie makes for quite an easy viewing. There is an undeniably cocky stylishness that this film exudes. Woody Harrelson's quips and Jesse Eisenberg's boast about being the smartest man in the room (evocative of his role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) were some of the highlights. A confrontation between Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman in New Orleans was also pretty memorable.

Special Agent Dylan Rhodes facing off Thaddeus Bradley, debunker of magicians.

Now, as I promised, I will now reveal how I produced the lilies, seemingly out of nowhere.

I actually brought it into the house when I came home from work. There was a short moment before Cheryl greeted me so I quickly left the bouquet on the counter-top in the kitchen for her to stumble on - which I was certain she would when I showered. She didn't. As we were leaving the house, I quietly stepped into the kitchen when her back was turned to retrieve the flowers (that only took a couple of seconds max). I then spent the entire evening telling her that she cannot explain how or when I brought the flowers into the house without her noticing and how it materialised in the short instance her back was turned, subtly suggesting that it was all meticulously planned when it is in fact a fortuitous exploitation of an unexpected opportunity.

I invited her to look closely and made sure she saw less. That, my friends, is how magic is done.



P.S. This post's title has more than one meaning.



Knows magic,
k0k s3n w4i

Epic: A Review

"Fight for you and me

Look into my eyes and believe"

Rise Up (2013) by Beyoncé

This review contains epic spoilers.

There are cartoons and then there are animated films. All cartoons are animated but not all animated features are cartoons. On this note, I want to talk about a little film with a big name which I just saw with my wife a few hours ago.

The Epic teaser poster.

Epic had been in my peripherals since it wormed into my ears and consciousness a year ago in the form of Snow Patrol's The Lightning Strike's ponderous piano keys, but like all of Blue Sky Studios' animated films (Robots, Rio and the Ice Age film series), they always ended up crashing on the worn couch at the back of my head till I see their titles turn up unexpectedly on the rosters during my daily cinema schedule survey. You see, Blue Sky Studios, unlike Pixar or Studio Ghibli, makes cartoons - and I find it impossible to take something seriously enough to mark it on my calendar when it has no intention of taking itself seriously at all.

Epic makes the promise to be better than that.

I walked into the cinema knowing only the basic premise of the film: it is about little forest people living right beneath the huge noses of us Muggles, or Stompers as the fairy-folks call us. Professor Bomba is one such Stomper who had dedicated his life's work to studying and collecting evidence of the existence of these diminutive sylvan beings. He pursued them to the point of desperate obsession. His wife left him. His daughter, Mary "MK" Katherine, thinks he is a madman chasing delusions. There is power in tragedy, but the film - to its own detriment - prefers to treat his arc as an afterthought and reduces Bomba to a largely comic role

MK (Amanda Seyfried) travelled to her obsessed father's house at the edge of a forest hoping to reconcile with him, but all her efforts were thwarted by the wall of constant distraction Bomba had carelessly build around himself brick-by-crazy-brick over the years. His eyes are unfocused and his mind wanders through the woods when he is not physically in them. Disappointed, she left a post-it note on one of her dad's surveillance monitors - one of the only places she knows he would look - before walking out of the house.

Then, the power of a three-legged plot point compelled Seyfried to run deep into the woods where she met a dying Queen Beyoncé, a Mother Nature-like avatar of the living forest, who promptly reduced the teenager down to size and charged her with the quest of carrying a McGuffin to caterpillar Aerosmith Steve Tyler's abode. Two Leaf Men and two comic relief gastropods joined her. Adventure ensues.

Collin Farrell as Ronin.

Besides Seyfried's and her dad's relationship subplot, there is also some significant backstory between the silver-haired Obi-Wan, Ronin Farrell, and the orphaned reluctant hero slash cocksure rookie, Nod Hutcherson. There is also a hint of romance between Queen Beyoncé and Ronin Farrell, but all of these were treated more like obligatory character flavouring rather than how you expect a film called Epic would treat them. As a result, the characters are all weightless paper dolls going through the motions of the story and I simply could not care less about their fates. I refuse to dignify the characters with their proper in-universe names because they aren't real characters anyway. In the case of Aziz Ansari, he is essentially playing a slug version of the same annoying character he plays on Parks and Recreation (though I must admit that he did manage to draw the most laughs for the film).

The strength of the film lies in its world-building and it is the only aspect that managed to live up to the movie's name. Within it holds the promise of discovery and I would gladly pay to see the sequels, if any is planned, just to immerse myself in this world again and learn more about the factions, the creatures and the forces that govern their livelihood. Steve Tyler's magic archive that records everything that ever happened is one of those things that fascinate me and the screenwriter cleverly used it to allow the dying Queen Beyoncé to record a message for Seyfried when she finally arrives there. There are also ingenious touches of details throughout Epic which really sold it to me like Dagda's ratskin cloak. When he moves in it, he scurries on all fours looking exactly like a real live rat. A dragonfly-borne boat made out of lily pads woven together would unfurl artfully into a flat platform as it lands on water. The foul arrows of the imp-like Boggans that raises galls on any tree they land. All great imagery.

There is also an amazing moment when Nod Hutcherson and Seyfried encountered a stag in the forest. The animators managed to get it to invoke a sense of gigantic majesty as it approached the tiny pair, making it seem more like a massive fantasy creature like a dragon rather than just a regular old deer.

The most memorable sequence by far in Epic for me was when Queen Beyoncé travels to a pond to select a flower bud for a revival ceremony for the forest. She appears to walk on water as stray duckweed would gather under her feet, keeping her and her trailing petal gown afloat. Then there was the ambush by the Leaf Men's enemies when millions and millions of imp-like Boggans camouflaged on a tree wearing tree-bark armour broke cover to attack - followed by the Queen's awesome dash through the undergrowth as she was pursued by the Boggans while she uses her ability to manipulate plant life to take out her pursuers as she flees. Subsequent action scenes would try and fail to live up it.

Speaking of Beyoncé, the song she supplied for the credits was excellent. I had it on repeat while writing this review.

Christoph Waltz as Mandrake.

 
The bottom line is: Epic is a very good film, but it isn't great - which is unacceptable for a movie with such an overt ambition for epicness. The worst thing about films such as this one is that I can clearly see how much potential for greatness it had in it. This movie should have been 30 minutes longer to flesh out the characters and their subplots - perhaps then the Queen's death, and Bomba's vindication of his life's work and reconciliation with his daughter would carry more gravity. Nod Hutcherson's character (along with Pit Bull's toad mafioso) should be pruned entirely because he is less plot-relevant to the story than Aziz Ansari's slug character (this is not hyperbole). More focus should have been placed on the motivation of Christoph Waltz's Big Bad character, Mandrake, and his desire to bring his son back to life by subverting the enchanted bud.

Perhaps then, Epic would finally live up to its boast.



Lamenter of missed opportunities,
k0k s3n w4i

Brave: A Review

"To tell a woman everything she may not do is to tell her what she can do."

Spanish Proverb

Nutrition Facts: This review contains spoilers. Some are spoilers for Disney's Brother Bear.

There are few studios with visions that I have so much trust in that I would watch anything they create. Pixar, Ghibli and Laika are three such studios, and I wonder if there's something about animation that breeds visionaries.

Brave is one of the most anticipated films of the year for me, and after the relative disappointment that was Cars 2, I hungered for something truly new from Pixar. When I found out that Brave was going to be Pixar's first foray into fantasy, and that it will feature a female hero for the first time in Pixar Animation history, I was stoked. When I realised that they also got their first ever female director to helm the project, I was overjoyed - partly because I've always been interested in seeing the female perspective of anything but mostly because they hired Brenda Chapman, director of The Prince of Egypt (one of my favourite animated films of all time) to make this happen. At the same time, I was appalled at myself for not noticing the distinct lack of feminine voice in the past dozen Pixar films.

However, a substantial bit of my excitement was undermined when I learned that Chapman left the project in October 2010 over "creative differences" and was replaced by a dude. In my mind, that did not bode well for a film which tells the story of the coming of age of a strong-willed young woman who's into breaking traditions and besting men at what they do - but Pixar had always shown a great commitment to prioritising the telling of stories in their films more than anything else so I remained cautiously hopeful that the film formerly known as The Bear and the Bow would be nothing less than a masterpiece.

Queen Elinor, King Fergus, Princess Merida and the triplet princes, Harris, Hubert and Hamish.

Like how I feel about most women, I do not know how to feel about the plot of Brave. One one hand, it subverted my expectations and told an entirely different story from the one that the trailers and the first act of the film had led me to believe. On the other hand, it re-hashed a plot element from Disney's Brother Bear where a headstrong character is magically transformed into a bear, go on a life-changing journey, and becomes wiser and more compassionate at the end of it. While recycling a trope does not break a story (and I recognise that Brave does tell a very different tale from Brother Bear's), it didn't help that I'm constantly being reminded of a film that I love which ultimately moved me more than Brave did. Maybe it's because I'm not this film's target audience. This is clearly one for mothers and their teenage daughters.

The film opens with a young Merida with a shock of red hair playing with her mother, Queen Elinor, who was pretending to be a monster which wants to gobble her up. Foreshadowing? Check. In that same scene, her father gave her a bow and after she botched her first shot, her parents let her wander into the woods on her lonesome to retrieve her errant arrow. There she met some creepy Will O' the Wisps that led her back to her parents and her mother. Her mother tells her that the Wisps are the spirits who led people to their fates, while simultaneously setting up the fact that her father does not believe in magic. I think there might be some circular logic here - because if someone chooses to follow the wisp, whatever happens to them subsequently is their fate by default, isn't it? Dur hur hur.

Anyway, a man-eating behemoth of a bear appeared right out of the forest that itty bitty Merida was just prancing about in chasing fey lights, and attacked the family. It's a bear that's famous enough to have a name, and it's called Mor'du (which echoes the Latin word for death and is French for "bitten"). Fergus leapt into action and BAM! Prologue ends.

Holy crap, that's one terrifying bear.

Flash forward a decade or so, Merida had grown into teenage girl with a mane of red hair still as shocking as ever and she was forced to undergo princess-training everyday (which she evidently loathed) under the relentless supervision of her mother, the queen. Then during a scene at a dinner table, Elinor broke the news that she would be married off to one of the firstborns of the three clans ruled by Fergus as per traditions. What Merida thought of that was best summed up by her father's hilarious impression of her: "I don't want to get married, I want to stay single and let my hair flow in the wind as I ride through the glen firing arrows into the sunset."

Her three suitors are from the clans Dingwall, McGuffin, and Macintosh (an obvious tribute to the late Steve Jobs, to whom this film was dedicated to) and they were suppose to win her hand in an archery contest - but in an awesome sequence in which Merida utterly shows them up in terms of marksmanship, she won her own hand in marriage. Her glaring into her mother's face defiantly after loosing her last arrow made me want to stand up and clap.

The film's most emotional scene came right when Merida lost it in a quarrel with her mother and slashed a tapestry depicting her family which her mother wove for her with a sword, neatly dividing her from her mother in the picture. There's just something about the act that's deeply disturbing to me. And so intense was the scene that I half expected her to wound or even run Elinor through with the blade. Meridor also called her mother a "beast", signalling more foreshadowing there.

After the kerfuffle, Merida rode off into the woods and following a trail of wisps like as if she's in a video game tutorial, she chanced upon a witch's hut where she managed to bargain for a spell in the form of a cake that would "change her fate". The characters made it a point to mention the spell's fate-changing attributes several times just to hammer the point home and I was wondering: how stupid would you have to be to get a spell from sorcerous stranger that would "change your fate" without specifying how it will change it? And you give this pastry-shaped spell to your mother?

Here is where I wondered if the wisps aren't actually more like their malevolent real life mythical counterparts that supposedly led traveller's astray. I was also baffled by Merida's decision to follow the wisps - which are specified earlier by her mother as spirits which would lead one to their fate - when what she really wants to do is escape her fate.

Anyway, at this point, I guessed the entire film, down to the fact that Mor'du is in fact the cursed form of a power-hungry prince from a legend Elinor told Merida earlier. This had the effect of making Brave felt a little paint-by-numbers to me and subsequently ruining my experience with the movie. I also expected a much more expansive adventure with Merida and her Mother Bear in this lovingly-rendered medieval Scottish landscape that the animators have brought to life but all they did were catch some fish in a brook and visited some old ruins (courtesy of those bastard wisps again) to uncover a plot point before returning to their home, where Fergus had not noticed that his wife and daughter had gone missing for an entire night and day.

Plot point acquired. Evacuate!

I saw Brave twice already and there are definitely scenes in it that are worth the price of admission. I was not as moved by it as I was by Up and Toy Story 3, but it may be because I am neither a mother or a daughter (and the predictable storyline and chunky storytelling certainly didn't help). But as with all Pixar film, this film is a very pretty thing to stare at for an hour and a half. Merida's hair must have taken up at least half of their workforce just to animate and apparently, most of the film was supposed to have taken place in winter (but doing so much snow wasn't a feasible proposition to them... yet). I also liked how subtly and chillingly they show Bear Elinor changing internally into a real bear by having the whites of her eyes receding till they are inky black. While I think the 3D in Brave is the possible the best I've seen in a Pixar film, I felt that it was undermined by the fact that most of this film took place at night.

Besides Merida, Elinor and maybe Fergus, every single character in Brave are caricatures and comic relief characters. Merida's triplet brothers are indistinguishable from one another while the lords of the three competing clans share the same personality. I did enjoy Conan's lawyer-friendly cameo though and judging from the audible "awww's" in my audience, the baby brother bears went over great too.

The best bit of the Brave experience was probably the La Luna short appended in front of the feature and it too shared thematic elements with Merida's story, of children outgrowing their parents and making their own way in life. It was whimsical, beautiful, utterly nonsensical and may induce happy tingles in the hearts of susceptible individuals. Me? I had goosebumps when the boy splits the giant star into hundreds of tinier ones with a single tap of his hammer.

Brave ended not by having Merida meet someone she truly loves or having some guy come to her rescue in traditional Disney shlock, and for that alone it deserves commendation. There are too few films that allows female characters to just do their thing without making the quest for male companionship a major motivation. In fact, I was left with the impression that Merida would never get married, and that is perfectly okay. Now, can someone remind the 21st century women of my generation about that, please?

P.S. Brave's Scottish-flavoured soundtrack certainly gave Cécile Corbel's Celtic-oriental fusion score for Studio Ghibli's Kari-gurashi no Arietti a run for its money. It's nowhere as iconic as Michael Giacchino's sore for Up but then again, what is?

P.P.S. Stay after the credits. There's a brick joke at the end.

Wants to visit Scotland now,

k0k s3n w4i

The Myths, Science and Medicine of Prometheus

"Big things have small beginnings."

David 8 in Prometheus (2012)

By now, anyone to whom this information would mean anything had already found out long ago that Ridley Scott's latest foray into science fiction after 30 years, Prometheus, is a not-so-stealthy prequel to the Alien films. I have thoughts about this film and in the interest of full disclosure, I must volunteer the fact that I had only saw Aliens (the James Cameron action movie sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror) from the series - but after watching Prometheus, I went back and saw the original 1979 film. While Prometheus is not astounding in its quality of storytelling, it is a true blue science fiction story in the questions it tried to raise.

I see what you did there.

This review/discussion is very much a child of those questions, many of which I take a pedestrian interest in. Expect unrestrained spoilers.

The Myths

The name Prometheus itself suggests the premise of the picture: one about the quest for knowledge, and the damning of consequences. It was the name of the Greek Titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind, and for that he was chained to a rock where an eagle visits him daily to lunch on his liver, only to have it regenerate overnight to be eaten again the day after. Prometheus the film tells the story of not only the xenomorph's origin but also the origin of mankind. Disparate human civilisations which were separated by thousands of miles and thousand of years all retained the motif of an arrangement of celestial bodies in their art, and only one star system fits that configuration - and only a moon dubbed LV-223 orbiting a planet within that system was deemed Earth-like enough to support life.

I understand that this looked awesomeballs in 3D.

In find it interesting that Pandora from James Cameron's Avatar is also a habitable moon and the story surrounding the first woman, Pandora, in ancient Greek mythology is closely linked to the story of Prometheus. Zeus, to counterbalance the boon of fire which mankind had received, created the first woman as a curse for mortal men (yes, misogyny was quite a thing back then) and she carried an amphora with her filled with all the suffering, diseases and strife that ever was. Coincidentally, her arc was also one about the dangers of curiousity and discovery; she would eventually release the contents of her jar and literally unleashed a world of hurt into existence. That is basically the premise of Prometheus. The movie even kept the jar motif. Considering the similarities and mythic connections, one can't help to wonder if LV-223 was in fact Pandora in the past or future.

As for how everything relates to Christian mythology, an element brought up repeatedly in the arc of Elizabeth Shaw, I direct you to this impressive article which caused me to rethink what Prometheus is really about, blowing my mind in the process. I am now ready to accept Space Jesus as my Lord and Saviour.

The Science

The distance between Earth and LV-223 was stated as 3.27 x 10¹⁴km. I calculated that that's 34.56 lightyears away i.e. it will take light more than 34 years for light to travel from here to there. The journey via in the titular spaceship, Prometheus, took 2 years. This must meant that they were travelling about 17 times faster than a speed of light which according to Einstein's special relativity, is a fundamental impossibility - but we wouldn't have much of a movie if we adhere too closely too it. Also, I was surprised that Charlize Theron's character, the hard assed ice queen Meredith Vickers, could do pushups after 24 months of being cryogenically frozen on a spacecraft. As artificial gravity is apparently a thing in Prometheus' universe, the effects of microgravity would be neutralised, but try sitting up after a two-year coma. Heck, try moving your legs after a two-week coma. While I was watching the film, I simply suspended my disbelief by assuming that there's magical future tech that prevents disuse atrophy of muscles.

Fuck you, laws of physics.

The film opened with a suspiciously humanoid alien drinking an obviously biohazardous dark liquid before quickly decomposing, falling into the water system and seeding what was presumably a young planet Earth with its DNA and cellular material. That is a reference to panspermia, the idea that life on our planet was kickstarted by an external source of organic life, accidentally or intentionally - as opposed to abiogenesis, which is the prevailing hypothesis that life arose from non-life through natural processes (as supported by the Miller and Urey's landmark experiment). The foreign genetic material from the extraterrestrial's body was implied to be the kernel from which all subsequent living thing on our planet evolved from, so it was not at all surprising that after analysing the severed head of the Engineer alien they found should possess DNA as its carrier of genetic information rather than some hitherto unknown compound.

There was an initial scene where Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) explained to the rest of the crew of Prometheus regarding the nature of their mission, about how they believed that the human species was created by extraterrestrials - a conclusion I couldn't see how they could draw from the limited archaeological evidence they had show on screen. There is shades of Erich von Däniken's crackpot ancient astronauts hypothesis here (but unlike von Däniken, the character's within the film had good reasons to believe in their version of the Chariots of the Gods).

A botanist rightly called them out on it, asking them, "You're willing to just throw out three centuries of Darwinism?" Never mind that no self-respecting biologist would refer to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" (and that may or may not have betrayed a creationist bias within the script), but supposing that humans are created the way they are and did not evolve from precursor species - that directly violates common descent which is supported by an overwhelming amount of molecular evidence. Francis Collins, American physician-geneticist, leader of the Human Genome Project, director of the NIH and a Christian famously said: "Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things."

Shaw's reply to the botanist's challenge was "It's what I choose to believe." No real scientist would let that steaming pile of words tumble out of their mouth when it comes to their field of study. That is just not how science works. Besides, the opening scene clearly proved her beliefs wrong.

Noomi Rapace as yet another Liz.

What subsequently made zero sense was that the Engineers' DNA should be a 100% match with human DNA after almost 4 billion years of evolution. How did that particular genome get preserved through that much time? My personal feeling is that the screenwriters screwed up here. Supposing the opening scene was an accurate representation of their intent (i.e. panspermia), that botanist wouldn't make that quip about "Darwinism" because the theory of evolution says nothing about how life arose on Earth - merely how it changed and diversified. Also, they shouldn't have portrayed the Engineers as having an identical genetic code as human beings but instead point out how some basic genes common to most life are present within the Engineers' DNA, even though there are other variations which can code for the same proteins. Of course, scientific accuracy isn't as dramatic as "ZOMG THE ALIENZ IS US!!!"

The Engineer's morphological similarity to us can be explained as an extreme case of convergent evolution, but I think the likeness was meant to relate to the identical DNA (which we learnt later in the film) so that wasn't it. However, they are also way taller, paler, have weird eyes and hairless, so how can their genomes be the same? This is not impossible if you factor in epigenetics, and depending on the environmental pressures in the earliest stages of an organism's development, the expression of genes may differ, producing disparate phenotypes from the same DNA. Okay, that's a bit of a hand wave of an explanation but at least it makes logical sense.

But in its totality, the scientific premises of Prometheus simply do not compute for me - the facts they presented do not add up. Either the screenwriters didn't understand evolution or they didn't understand genetics.

Another tiny nitpick I had was the character of Millburn, the resident botanist of the expedition. He simply does not act or think like any biologist I know. He's on a moon that could possibly harbour alien life but he's not in the least bit excited. He was surprisingly unconcerned about how they might be seeding LV-223 with their own personal bacteria flora on a place with a very Earth-like atmosphere and therefore corrupting (and possibly destroying) what ecosystems it harbours. He allowed his teammates to take off their helmets and following suit without knowing what contagions there might in the very Earth-like air. Spoilers for H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds but the invading aliens in that were killed by Earth bacteria and viruses.

When they found the dead body and decapitated head of an Engineer, Millburn was not at all interested in examining the first ever fucking specimen of extraterrestrial macro-life that was ever discovered but instead, was spooked and wanted to leave. Later, when he encountered a living eyeless space-cobra and have a genuine reason to be freaking out, he thought it was adorable and wanted to fondle it, displaying a complete lack of caution and - not to mention - a baffling change of personality from before. Serves him right for being killed by that proto-Facehugger.

Not pictured: a real biologist.

As for Holloway's throwaway line about how "God does not build in straight lines" - and assuming that he's using the word "God" poetically to refer to nature - he was quite wrong. Naturally formed tessellated pavements like those found at Eaglehawk Neck on the island of Tasmania showcase very straight fissures. Basalt columns like those famously found at the Giant's Causeway also feature polygonal formations with straight sides and sharp angles. I've seen similar basalt columns at St. Mary's Island off the coast Malpe a couple of kilometres away from my med school in Manipal and I can attest to the fact that they do look freakishly man-made.

Eaglehawk Neck, Tasmania.

The Medicine.

Now, the medical aspects of the film are the only things I'm actually qualified to speak about and when they showed Shaw marvelling at a Chekhov's gun Med Pod 720i (which can apparently perform open heart surgery), I knew at some point that it would be used to cut a growing alien out of someone's body. Sure enough, after Shaw and her boyfriend (who was unwittingly infected with some alien goo) got their bone on, her barren womb was impregnated with the fetus from hell. When the baby started um, kicking, Shaw headed right for Meredith Vicker's Surgeon-o-matic, which was apparently programmed for male patients only. I immediately had a quick succession of thoughts: Was Vicker's a tranny and how surprised was Janek? They can program a very lifelike android which can easily ace the Turing test with its motherboard tied behind its back but they can't program it with extra information on how to operate on a woman's body? Oh wait, does that mean that Peter Weyland is actually hiding somewhere onboard the Prometheus? Yeap.

However, I think that that was simply a plot point to show how resourceful and tenacious Shaw is when she had a freaking womb-burster quickening in her belly.

The next stage in the evolution of the iPod.

While the audience I sat through that scene with retched, screamed and covered their eyes, I was all, "That's not how it's done!" The robotic laser simply cut her open, reached in and pulled out a gross, murderous squid baby. Okay, even assuming that the single cut neatly penetrated through all the layers of the abdomen down to where the squirming cephalopod was, one simply cannot patch that up by just stapling the gash on the outside. If you don't suture the womb up, it's just going to continue bleeding inside her and she'd die from overwhelming blood loss. And that horizontal incision? That must have severed her rectus abdominis muscles clean through. Without having those muscles fixed, I was surprised she could even stand up, let alone leap across bottomless chasms or run from a humongous rolling alien spacecraft. While it did not outright break my suspension of disbelief (I maintain it by mentally chanting "Magic future medicine... magic future medicine..."), I still find it a tad distracting.

That bit where they stimulated the locus coeruleus of the severed dead Engineer's head to animate it was not without basis in neurology as it is a part of the brain that excites and stimulates pretty much the entire central nervous system - though I highly doubt that the neural connections within the Engineer's brain could still function after 2000 years of being dead. My question was how the fuck did they knew that this alien being even have a locus coeruleus prior to them finding out its genome? It's a freaking alien. Its brain could have been located in its arse for all they know.

And the locus coeruleus is a pea-sized collection of pigmented neurons located in the pontine region of the brainstem. If any of you remember episode 16 from season 5 of The Big Bang Theory, that's the piece that Sheldon had so much problem dissecting from an exposed, sliced slab of brain. I like how Shaw and her friends could just stab blindly into the side of the Engineer's head and somehow locate it without using any precision instruments.

Final words.

There is no doubt that the star of the show is Michael Fassbender, who I did not realise is in Prometheus and it took me a full minute to be sure that that's him. If that isn't a testament to his ability to vanish into a role then I don't know what is (or maybe I'm really a racist and all white people simply look the same to me). The first scenes of the film which features him having the run of the Prometheus while its crew sleeps certainly invokes the beautiful melancholy of the first third of WALL·E. The motivations behind the actions of his character, the android David 8, is baffling and his motivations are inscrutable - if he's capable of having any at all. In respond to his handler's insistence that he should "try harder", he deliberately infected Shaw's boyfriend with the dangerous-looking black goo of unknown providence. Did he do it maliciously or out of curiousity? I can't tell.

Michael Fassbender's range includes "uncanny" apparently.

One can't help think that he might be harbouring some degree of contempt for humans. When discussing the origin of mankind with Holloway, who spearheaded this expedition in the hopes of finding out why the Engineers created his species in the first place, David asked: "Why do you think your people made me?"

"We made you 'cause we could," quipped Holloway.

"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?" said David. I find this simple bit of dialogue to be the most profound and insightful element in the entire film. Of course, when they finally managed to find a live Engineer to talk to, his answer was basically, "KILL ALL HUMANS!" and immediately went postal on Weyland and his entourage's ass. I actually laughed when I was watching that scene.

I wonder what David actually said to the Engineer.

If nothing else, this is a very gorgeous film, which was to be expected coming from Ridley Scott. While the original Alien was claustrophobic, Scott went the opposite direction with Prometheus where he not only expanded the spaces but the ideas as well. What I am going to say next might be blasphemous in some circles but I far enjoyed Prometheus than I did its predecessors. Was it a poorer film compared to Alien and Aliens? Maybe, but I don't think very much about them long after the credits rolled.



Found Space Jesus,

k0k s3n w4i