I once wrote an extremely popular/useful comics gossip and speculation column for over a decade. I was also the news editor of the same magazine the gossip column was in. I prided myself on my, sometimes, uncanny ability to forecast the future. In reality, what I was doing was not a lot different than people who gamble on the stock market; experience is usually better than intuition, but the more experience you have makes it feel like intuition, especially if you read the tea leaves in the right way. It's a bit like insider trading without actually making any money.
The only reason I'm telling you this is because what follows is essentially a form of the thinking that went behind my Movers & Shakers column, that mixed with something I'd call 'logical wishful thinking' - not on my part, but, logically, on the part of the people this bit of whimsical fantasy is about.
Logical wishful thinking is one of the routes to experience and intuition, grasshopper.
I sat and watched Avengers: Endgame again, a few weeks back, and while I enjoyed it more this time around, I still picked more holes in it than I can remember, but this isn't about that, at least not entirely. It did make me think about how I used to foresee events in the comics' universes and how that 'insider knowledge' once allowed me to be more than accurate about the future...
Spoiler warning if you still haven't seen this film and know nothing about it then this will ruin it for you.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe was held together with a glue called The Avengers; the three main players are no longer in the game. The other half of the original sextet that remain are - in the MCU version of things - not really suitable to lead the Avengers (or a box-office charge), even if they appear in them.
With Iron Man, Captain America and the Black Widow now all gone, what remains doesn't feel as 'box office' as you would expect from the franchise - like a top football team without three of their star players. Naturally there's the scheduled anachronistic flashback movie - Black Widow but that almost seems like an afterthought (a thank you, perhaps), unless something happens in it that has a bearing on what's to come
Looking at who's left of the major players in Earth's Mightiest Heroes; Captain Marvel is okay but far too new, wooden and arguably dis-likeable (and powerful) to become leader of a new Avengers and of the remaining 'original' team of Avengers, we're set to have a new Thor (Jane Foster) while the old one swans off across the galaxy with those pesky Guardians; there is no actual Hulk film planned and Hawkeye is going to be a TV series rather than a film - pretty much cementing his place as a non-box-office draw. Outside of the remaining Avengers 'mainstays' there's Spider-Man (after a fashion), Doctor Strange (both had never actually been Avengers in my day), Ant-Man and the Black Panther - otherwise, Marvel's Cinematic Universe'd future is all down to new (to film) characters...
What I'm trying to say is while there are no definite Avengers movies even planned at the moment, the franchise is far from dead - it makes too much money for starters - and more importantly Marvel now has just about all its own toys back in the same pram. We now have a Fantastic Four and an entire X-continuity to put (back) in to the MCU.
However, the problem is the MCU probably needs replacements for Steve Rogers, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov (who, as we all know, should be Romanova); maybe there's new characters, like the Thing, Human Torch and Wolverine who can captivate the audiences or lead the Avengers like their predecessors?
Nah. The new additions will just add to (and complicate) the already rich tapestry of the MCU; they won't replace.
Looking at the proposed MCU schedule - after Black Widow there's The Eternals - which seems to be shrouded in mystery at present. It also, in my humble opinion, risks a lot with what has pretty much always been a marginal bunch of poorly thought-out characters (essentially a poor imitation of The Inhumans, which itself is already a failed MCU project) - that said, the Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't exactly iconic and look how that did. There's a Shang-Chi film (possibly set outside what we currently think of as 'our' MCU, but also might supply a hint of what's to come), another Spider-Man with Sony (which will concentrate mainly on the Marvel/Sony continuity), the fourth Thor film (with a female Thor) and then the film I believe could be pivotal to the future of a franchise - Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Then there's Black Panther II and Captain Marvel II both, I expect will steer the new major story arc along further.
Disney now has at least 10 more years planned of milking this cash cow, if they do it right - post coronavirus, maybe more. I believe 'doing it right' pretty much requires including (or re-introducing) the three most prominent and important characters to the franchise so far. The main problem here is Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr and Ms Johansson are all getting on a bit, even with the aid of stunt doubles. The thing is, Evans said he's open to do cameos, Downey Jr has not written off coming back (and may well be in a future movie if his cryptic comments are anything to go by) and Scarlett probably wants out, because I haven't heard anything to the contrary. They all now have limited shelf-lives regardless of what they do; as do many of the other, more middle-aged, actors like Paul Rudd, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo. The coronavirus, other jobs, scheduling and life means we might not see another big 'Avengers' finale for 15 years, by which time Tom Holland will be a 40-year-old Spidey, Scarlett will be 50 and RDJr will be 70. Superhero films with geriatrics or incredibly old teenagers doesn't sound to me like a great ongoing idea for the MCU.
Now, entering into pure speculation (the above was based on common sense): the reason I believe the next Dr Strange film will be so pivotal is because I believe the title possibly gives away a lot of clues, the main one being the admittance of a multiverse - different universes that look similar to our own but are not. I believe The Eternals will sow a seed that will grow into the main plot for the second Strange film (which I've heard also has Scarlet Witch in it and possibly Bruce Banner, which would make sense given what I think they should do). That seed, I believe will be either what part the Celestials - godlike creatures and adversaries of the Eternals (who have been seen/mentioned in the Guardians film) - will play in it and what will we learn about what they can do or where they come from.
As things stand, mutants don't exist in the MCU, neither do the Fantastic Four or supporting characters. The films made by Fox might as well be tales from any number of multiverse realities or simply something to be forgotten about. If Marvel and Disney are able to wait at least another two years before even dropping hints on us about 'newcomers', I expect in the next Doc Strange film we'll be introduced to several new faces and maybe some old ones or probably some old ones with new faces...
Imagine a MCU with the myriad characters introduced in the FF? New heroes and a host of villains. Equally, imagine the MCU with Wolverine - because he's the kind of character who actually does (and has) transfer(ed) well to the screen. Personally, I don't think The X-Men will work as well, not because they're not great characters, but because visually they lack the visual 'brilliance' many of the heroes of the MCU have already got. They'd need to be done either as they were in the comics or re-imagined completely and we all know what happens when re-imaginings take place?
The most logical wishful thinking of Kevin Feige, the man behind the MCU, would be to be able to have Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow back, either in their own films or as co-stars in others. It makes sense, Iron Man kickstarted the MCU; Cap was the lynchpin and Natasha was the most present without her own film; she became as heroic as her two more elderly team mates and died helping save the universe. The future wouldn't be the same without them.
The thing is the MCU hasn't really been complete without the Fantastic Four; readers of the comics for many years would tell you the FF are pretty much one of the most important cogs in the Marvel universe wheel. I like to think Feige knows this and without three of his big hitters, he can replace them with four, except, he can do much better than that...
Imagine (in his next film) Doc Strange with Wanda (and the Hulk) manage to discover a way to jump between different multiverses, perhaps attempting to track something. On their way they bump into many familiar characters (and some not so). In world's where Wanda is believed to be a mutant; the Hulk is a menace in most places and Stephen Strange sometimes doesn't even exist or is completely different to how he actually is? Maybe their multi-universal adventures have them meet an FF, a bunch of mutants and maybe new threats that don't exist in the current MCU continuity?
Obviously, 'Our' heroes will win out and the day will be saved, except maybe in one of the credits sequences, we'll return to the world of the FF and something is wrong there. Then in the second credits sequence we'll return to one of the other worlds and they also have a problem - the multiverses are crumbling or maybe even merging...
Maybe something will happen in the 2nd Black Panther film; he could be leading the Avengers by then, so his next solo effort might be like Cap's 'solo' efforts, or maybe they might skip a film and the next Captain Marvel film will pick of the gauntlet - so to speak - of discovering why the multiverse is merging together?
Eventually, all the heroes unite to defeat whatever the new bad guy is - maybe the Beyonder, a god from another dimension (created in the crossover Marvel comic series Secret Wars) released by the same accident that started merging the universes. Yes, it's a bit Crisis on Infinite Earths (a DC reunification project and the first of its kind), but Avengers: Endgame was essentially Lord of the Rings, so why not?
Eventually, in what could be the next big 'Endgame' finale, the remaining universes merge together and all the heroes, whether played by the same or new actors, are in one reality again, allowing, if they want, for new Captain America, Black Widow, Iron Man films as well as all the others to keep them going until 2035. Even if it sounds like fan fiction, it makes perfect (financial) sense; what better marketing tool than introducing the new/old new/same but different Captain America! Played by whichever one of the de rigueur mid-20s actors currently floating around who can safely take the mantle on for another 15 years; ditto Iron Man and Black Widow, maybe the Hulk, Hawkeye, possibly they're already starting with Thor - Marvel/Disney can do whatever they want to reflect whatever era they want to pilfer from Marvel's comicbook history?
Maybe the next big culmination will see the 'original' Avengers together (again), but with different actors playing the parts. You see, in the Marvel Comics Universe - nobody dies forever. It's not like we don't already have at least 3 different Spider-Mans existing in films from the last 20 years; obviously not in the same way, but that was before they could play with all their own toys. It's not like Marvel/Disney and Feige are just going to forget about these iconic characters; that would make any accountant baulk at the idea of discarding cash cows in the hope other characters will take their mantle.
In conclusion; the powers that be will want to milk as much from this franchise as they can until superhero movies no longer command the returns they currently enjoy. With the face of cinema changing because of the pandemic, the time scale might be even longer and the longer it goes on the ravages of time will affect the actors currently inhabiting the roles. If I was a betting man, I'd expect the clock to be reset, allowing a kickstart within an already successful franchise; they never have to just re-start it, because they can tinker, change and fiddle as much as they like while keeping everything on an apparent linear track.
It could be, for some, that Avengers: Endgame might be a great jumping off point, especially for people who really don't think they'll be alive (or compos mentis) by the time the next great conclusion is arrived at. One thing is for certain - while Marvel/Disney rule the cinematic box office, they're not going to lose their main characters for the sake of common sense, especially not in a 'universe' where anything is possible.
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Sunday, August 02, 2020
A Book Review
I actually put down another book I was a third of the way through to read this and yet it left me feeling even more negative about an industry that I'd grown up with and worked in for many years...
As a (former) fan and 'blessed' with having earned a reasonable living from comics - some of it from Marvel - I approached this book pretty much knowing the bulk of it. What I wasn't aware of was some of the anecdotal stories passing back and forth about creators, nor the specifics of Marvel Comics as a publishing entity.
Generally though, despite its brevity it is something of an interminably boring study. Once the main protagonists had been reduced to bit part players (Lee, Kirby & Ditko), it was simply a cycle of wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. One thing overrides everything else in this account, there were very few periods in the company's history where it was anything like the pictures vividly described by Stan Lee in his soapboxes or in letter columns.
The book also sits squarely on the fence about copyright and ownership rights issues - returning to it regularly but treating it like magnolia paint. Yet Howe had two of the three chief protagonists still alive when he wrote this; maybe he asked them, maybe he didn't bother? Now, if someone wanted to approach this subject again, they'd probably end up with the same largely dull story with no one really able to add any insight - with Lee's death last year, there are only a few people left - all from the periphery - to consult and, of course, those consultations would be only anecdotal and difficult to verify.
What the book does do is show Marvel as an Arsehole Magnet and not just any common or garden arseholes, but extremely rich, powerful arseholes, who are painted in such a way as to confuse the reader into wondering how these massive vile human sphincters ever managed to make fortunes in the first place. Marvel has been owned, since Martin Goodman sold it off, by a list of people you wouldn't piss on if they were on fire and rarely was it run by the right people.
It also brings into clarity periods of Marvel's history that were often rumoured about, especially when I was writing my comics gossip column throughout the 1990s, and confirmed some stories that my former employer cut because he didn't want to upset an already precarious apple cart. In fact, Howe's exploration of the 1990s left me wondering why Comics International (the magazine I had been news editor of for nearly a decade) never did anything more than product promotion, especially given the ignorant treatment we got from Marvel (after Lou Bank left). I know the magazine's 'brief' was for brevity, lack of controversy and to act as a promotional tool for the comics industry (which, incidentally never afforded the magazine much more than a cursory nod, let alone buying adverts or offering anything to repay us for essentially doing their respective PR department's job for 10 years+), but it was ignoring real comics news to promote spandex.
Probably the most interesting section of the book was during Jim Shooter's reign, because it was essentially one of the few times when the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel was more of an arsehole than the executives holding the purse strings. That's not to say the owners of Marvel at the time weren't cut from the same cloth as those who preceded or succeeded them, but Shooter went from child prodigy who everyone looked up to into some horrible monster with scant regard for those who were under him. Perhaps he felt he needed to be as much of a cunt as his bosses, or perhaps with great power comes greater capacity to be a twat? Who can say? I met Shooter in 1993; he was offensive, aloof and very much a pompous arsehole - history taught him nothing.
The biggest problem with the book is that it's simply just a tad repetitive, a little like the medium it's covering. However, while Howe doesn't exactly write with any dynamism, it might be because his subject material followed similar cycles throughout its existence. He could possibly have avoided falling into this trap with some more interesting asides, maybe some editorialising in the margins, or perhaps covering the entire story rather than just the bits he relished in repeating. This book has the briefest of brief mentions to Marvel UK (or any of the other countries that took Marvel Comics on for their own markets). Marvel UK from Stan Lee's infamous appearance on Pebble Mill @ One through its Pet Shop Boys connection, my former employer's period there, how it spawned a number of big stars and then how it boomed in the wake of the comics boom of the 1990s - all completely overlooked and I kind of find that unforgivable...
Or its failure to mention the many dodgy business practices employed by (both) Marvel (and DC) throughout the '80s and '90s, nor how Marvel essentially spent their time, once the Direct Market was established, treating retailers like they were there to exploit, with scant regard to anyone's future. There was a brief mention from my old pal Lou Bank about Marvel's lack of support for the people paying their wages and then it was back to who's stabbing who in the back stories.
90% of the book covers up to the late 1990s; presumably it was written between 2010 and 2012 (for the cursory mentions of the Iron Man and Hulk films); the period after 1998 is almost breezed over - almost a decade and a half condensed into the last few fleeting chapters. It was like Howe avoided that period because he might write about people who still worked there or had aspirations to work there; the only people he concentrated on were former-employees many with grudges. No one with any - at the time - current connections (or gripes) were spoken to or made the final cut.
I always thought biographers, good ones, at least, were not frightened to burn some bridges to get the best story and I felt there were some good stories Howe simply didn't pursue. It might be because he's a biographer rather than someone who lived and worked in comics during that period; maybe it's because he's not a journalist and that was what was needed.
The whole thing needed to have a feel that the author was an expert about the subject he was writing about and that simply didn't come through at all. It was simply perfunctory. Comics is a weird and nuanced genre and doesn't conform to the real world of business in the same way as any other 'entertainment' industry, this probably needed to be reflected in the book, it wasn't.
While it has interesting moments and was an enjoyable read, it does feel like it was marketed as some wild and sexy expose of the company and yet reads like all the wild and sexy has been omitted.
Ultimately, it will leave comics historians, fans and those interested slightly empty and doesn't really offer enough to tempt non-comics fans from delving into its pages. There's too much Machiavellian shit in it and not enough informal general interest shit - it manages to take four colour brilliance and transform it into dull and boring monochrome.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Book Review
The Institute by Stephen King
At some point in about 2013, I simply stopped reading books. Shortly after reading Dr Sleep, the then latest Stephen King novel and sequel to his book, The Shining, I didn't read anything for four years.
Really. No books or novels, just newspapers and magazine articles.
I was busy writing my own novel - The Imagination Station - and that took all of my mental capacity at the time. About to face employment oblivion, I concentrated my efforts on writing and took a fledgling idea to its current final draft stage (a stage that has hovered uncontrollably after a frantic return to rewrite duties, last year). I also didn't want to read anything. We continued to buy books, the wife is an avid devourer of books and many times I'd pick one of her books up and think, 'maybe.' Yet, maybe never really came.
About six months before we moved, I reread the His Dark Materials books. The time was right and I wanted something I could enjoy that wouldn't challenge me too much. I had my book too deeply ingrained (I know what I mean by that, I can't be arsed to explain to those who don't). And that was it. We moved. I continued to not read books. The new Philip Pullman book came out - the new adventure of Lyra - and it took me almost fourteen months to start reading it after having it bought for me the previous Christmas. Even when I did read it, it didn't reignite my once bottomless thirst for fiction, but I did start reading again - selective stuff and mainly re-reading.
The second of Pullman's new Lyra trilogy came out last Christmas and it only took me four months to start to read it. Partly due to my interest being piqued by the recent BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials. I finished it and felt unfulfilled; don't get me wrong, it's a good book and an intriguing new story, but I felt the itch hadn't been scratched - both in this new Lyra adventure and my return to reading. The desire for something else that was new was growing and that was what brought me to The Institute...
Before we go there, we need to address the last King book I read. I saw Dr Sleep as a stepping off point, not just for reading in general, but to escape my decades old obsession with Stephen King (and his hardbacks). Unfortunately, the wife wasn't prepared to do that, so we've continued to buy them as they come out - with only one missing. That is why we have The Institute, that and because it was one of the Christmas presents I got her.
I can say that I'm already casting my eye across the bookshelves for the next book to consume, now that is finished. I don't know for sure if the old sparkle is back, but it certainly seems that way and the latest Stephen King novel has helped redevelop that...
First off. I feel King has been reusing old ideas in new ways for two decades. Cell is a cut price shorthand version of The Stand and much of what followed could be identified in earlier novels. If it ain't broke why fix it? If you want to revisit old ideas then make them better, not inferior. Pale imitations. Occasionally, there was something that excited; that felt different, but generally King felt like an aged rock and roller trying to recapture his glorious past.
The Institute is Firestarter, but with less pyrotechnics and more 21st century nous. The names change but the faces remain the same. It almost briefly wanders in Dead Zone territory and skirts around earlier King novels which featured The Shop or had characters with vastly superior brains. Yet, unlike those earlier books, this seems to follow a different timeline; is set in a slightly different part of King's multiverse. The Institute isn't The Shop and the two never met in these pages; the earlier incarnation of 'government' sanctioned human experimentation was not even given a recognising nod, even if there was a backhanded reference to the likes of good old Johnny Smith.
The story begins with Tim Jamieson, essentially drifting north after losing his job as a cop, quickly switches to Luke Ellis, bonafide child prodigy/genius and then after a typical King intro plunges straight into shock and awe. It really doesn't hang about. King has never had a problem shocking his Constant Reader with an unexpected death or a peculiar turn; it's almost like he enjoys it - it's one of the way he unsettles his readers - to borrow the advertising line from the first Peter Gabriel album - "Expect the Unexpected" and this is no exception and it's done with such power and almost incredulity that you're hooked from that point.
The Institute is an example of the evil that men (and women) can do if they believe what they're doing is for the benefit of mankind and that belief turns the staff at the Institute into modern day Mengeles and his Nazi scientists... Or does it? It's certainly tinged with a sadistic streak and as you read it you wonder how King could allow himself to go to these places (although he 'went there' far worse in It!); it touches areas that parents of any child would view as barbaric.
It's certainly a rollercoaster ride; many of his books in recent years have swapped exposition for pace; where the minor supporting cast of Dupre would have had almost a book in itself; however it is a fleeting glimpse of the township and its more colourful residents and then, like some hand is guiding the coincidences to reach a certain point, for best part of the rest of the story it is ignored; forgotten about. It never leaves you, the sensation, that at some point the world we're introduced to in the opening pages will collide with the faraway world that is meticulously described as 'hell'.
It does and the pieces placed, in this intricate chess game of a thriller, play their part.
The place in the title of the book is a top secret installation (above top secret) that experiments on children with slight powers of telekinesis or telepathy to enhance their abilities in ways that would have made Nazi scientists green with envy. The 'conscripts' into this program are treated no better than lab rats and the staff are all borderline psychopaths, sadists and outcasts who have found their true calling in the torture and abuse of children. The Institute exists above governmental control; the people there and the work they do is sponsored by a secret government, one that believes it is safeguarding the world by doing heinous things. The bombing of Coventry in WW2 resonates in the reasoning behind its existence, even if it never mentioned; to save the many, a few must be sacrificed. But in a such a cold, pernicious and nasty way?
Despite Luke being extremely clever, it isn't his functioning brain that interests the Institute, it's his latent and mild telekinetic powers and that is the first mistake this decades old 'thinktank' makes. Add to this mix Avery Dixon, an underdeveloped 10 year old who can read minds easier than anyone the Institute had seen for decades, who through his complicity with Luke to aid the latter's escape, is subjected to tests not designed for his level of ability. You give a low level telekinetic - can move an empty pizza box - a near death experience and it boosts their overall psychic abilities, especially when they join with the hive mind in the less attractive part of the Institute.
Luke's escape hinges not just on his unique brain and his ability to cut round corners, but also helps him befriend one of the people who should never have needed a friend. Luke helps this person and she enables him to escape, providing him with information that could bring the entire facility down on their heads. It obviously isn't as simple as that, but it is one of the more feasible of the long shots that King attempts to pull off. Coincidences and all that.
While Luke is engaged in his own carnage in South Carolina, meeting Tim in the process, back at the Institute Avery is setting in motion a chain of events that will leave another trail of dead people. He is also aware of Luke's idea - a gamble put in place designed to fail, because of a strategy underneath that only Luke and his now psychically linked friends know about. The tell tale line is when Tim, finally understanding what he's involved in, suggests to Luke that they're not returning to the Institute to save people and Luke replies, 'No, we're going to pick up the pieces.' The first time in years I got that crackle down my spine reading King's words.
Everything about the book is scarily possible, even in today's world and then just as you read and hope that the denouement will be as good as you hoped there is the one real cop-out. As well as channeling Firestarter, it also borrows themes from Philip K Dick's The Minority Report; the consequences of that idea wouldn't become clear until the epilogue.
Parts of the climax work exceptionally well, other parts feel like they've been ramped up to make a feature film sale more viable. To say the end of the Institute is far fetched is like suggesting the rest of the book isn't, but the plausibility of the book disappears in a conclusion that feels like it's going right back to Carrie but with the volume turned to 11 and that didn't work for me. I would have preferred less bangs and more buck - which might be why there's a long but ultimately unfulfilling epilogue. Everything could have been logical, even the set-up to cause the conclusion, but I feel it could have been handled in a way that cut out the disaster movie and still achieved a desirable conclusion.
It is, however, a cracking read. It has some excellent set-up lines, brilliant exchanges and King writes like he's remembered how to write likeable characters you give a fig about even if you've just seen a flash of their lives. He also channels his inner-villain to perfection with an array of baddies with cameos that make you realise almost always all hope is lost for anyone who enters this Godforsaken place. I can forgive some of the decisions made by the main cast for being caught up in the craziness, but others felt like they were done to reach a point where they may not have happened if it had played out in a real world setting. But that is what writing fiction is sometimes about; cliches exist because if they didn't there wouldn't be cliches.
I almost felt like it could have been a wee bit longer. Both Stackhouse and Sigsby - excellent villains, both instinctively evil in different, but effective, ways were almost superficial; ciphers for their general kind of person. Yet there was a sense that if King had told a little about their lives - more than a couple of almost afterthought lines - they might have been less unbelievable. The impression Ka was at work here was obvious, but carefully hidden; like King wanted us to know, for sure, this was not a story in a universe of dim follies.
I get the impression he's not done with this particular corner of his mind. I do feel we might see these characters again. It is incredibly good at using emotion as an excellent narrative.
It won't make any of my King top tens but it feels like he's actually revisited an old idea and probably done a better job. I'm giving this book a 7 out of 10
At some point in about 2013, I simply stopped reading books. Shortly after reading Dr Sleep, the then latest Stephen King novel and sequel to his book, The Shining, I didn't read anything for four years.
Really. No books or novels, just newspapers and magazine articles.
I was busy writing my own novel - The Imagination Station - and that took all of my mental capacity at the time. About to face employment oblivion, I concentrated my efforts on writing and took a fledgling idea to its current final draft stage (a stage that has hovered uncontrollably after a frantic return to rewrite duties, last year). I also didn't want to read anything. We continued to buy books, the wife is an avid devourer of books and many times I'd pick one of her books up and think, 'maybe.' Yet, maybe never really came.
About six months before we moved, I reread the His Dark Materials books. The time was right and I wanted something I could enjoy that wouldn't challenge me too much. I had my book too deeply ingrained (I know what I mean by that, I can't be arsed to explain to those who don't). And that was it. We moved. I continued to not read books. The new Philip Pullman book came out - the new adventure of Lyra - and it took me almost fourteen months to start reading it after having it bought for me the previous Christmas. Even when I did read it, it didn't reignite my once bottomless thirst for fiction, but I did start reading again - selective stuff and mainly re-reading.
The second of Pullman's new Lyra trilogy came out last Christmas and it only took me four months to start to read it. Partly due to my interest being piqued by the recent BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials. I finished it and felt unfulfilled; don't get me wrong, it's a good book and an intriguing new story, but I felt the itch hadn't been scratched - both in this new Lyra adventure and my return to reading. The desire for something else that was new was growing and that was what brought me to The Institute...
Before we go there, we need to address the last King book I read. I saw Dr Sleep as a stepping off point, not just for reading in general, but to escape my decades old obsession with Stephen King (and his hardbacks). Unfortunately, the wife wasn't prepared to do that, so we've continued to buy them as they come out - with only one missing. That is why we have The Institute, that and because it was one of the Christmas presents I got her.
I can say that I'm already casting my eye across the bookshelves for the next book to consume, now that is finished. I don't know for sure if the old sparkle is back, but it certainly seems that way and the latest Stephen King novel has helped redevelop that...
First off. I feel King has been reusing old ideas in new ways for two decades. Cell is a cut price shorthand version of The Stand and much of what followed could be identified in earlier novels. If it ain't broke why fix it? If you want to revisit old ideas then make them better, not inferior. Pale imitations. Occasionally, there was something that excited; that felt different, but generally King felt like an aged rock and roller trying to recapture his glorious past.
The Institute is Firestarter, but with less pyrotechnics and more 21st century nous. The names change but the faces remain the same. It almost briefly wanders in Dead Zone territory and skirts around earlier King novels which featured The Shop or had characters with vastly superior brains. Yet, unlike those earlier books, this seems to follow a different timeline; is set in a slightly different part of King's multiverse. The Institute isn't The Shop and the two never met in these pages; the earlier incarnation of 'government' sanctioned human experimentation was not even given a recognising nod, even if there was a backhanded reference to the likes of good old Johnny Smith.
The story begins with Tim Jamieson, essentially drifting north after losing his job as a cop, quickly switches to Luke Ellis, bonafide child prodigy/genius and then after a typical King intro plunges straight into shock and awe. It really doesn't hang about. King has never had a problem shocking his Constant Reader with an unexpected death or a peculiar turn; it's almost like he enjoys it - it's one of the way he unsettles his readers - to borrow the advertising line from the first Peter Gabriel album - "Expect the Unexpected" and this is no exception and it's done with such power and almost incredulity that you're hooked from that point.
The Institute is an example of the evil that men (and women) can do if they believe what they're doing is for the benefit of mankind and that belief turns the staff at the Institute into modern day Mengeles and his Nazi scientists... Or does it? It's certainly tinged with a sadistic streak and as you read it you wonder how King could allow himself to go to these places (although he 'went there' far worse in It!); it touches areas that parents of any child would view as barbaric.
It's certainly a rollercoaster ride; many of his books in recent years have swapped exposition for pace; where the minor supporting cast of Dupre would have had almost a book in itself; however it is a fleeting glimpse of the township and its more colourful residents and then, like some hand is guiding the coincidences to reach a certain point, for best part of the rest of the story it is ignored; forgotten about. It never leaves you, the sensation, that at some point the world we're introduced to in the opening pages will collide with the faraway world that is meticulously described as 'hell'.
It does and the pieces placed, in this intricate chess game of a thriller, play their part.
The place in the title of the book is a top secret installation (above top secret) that experiments on children with slight powers of telekinesis or telepathy to enhance their abilities in ways that would have made Nazi scientists green with envy. The 'conscripts' into this program are treated no better than lab rats and the staff are all borderline psychopaths, sadists and outcasts who have found their true calling in the torture and abuse of children. The Institute exists above governmental control; the people there and the work they do is sponsored by a secret government, one that believes it is safeguarding the world by doing heinous things. The bombing of Coventry in WW2 resonates in the reasoning behind its existence, even if it never mentioned; to save the many, a few must be sacrificed. But in a such a cold, pernicious and nasty way?
Despite Luke being extremely clever, it isn't his functioning brain that interests the Institute, it's his latent and mild telekinetic powers and that is the first mistake this decades old 'thinktank' makes. Add to this mix Avery Dixon, an underdeveloped 10 year old who can read minds easier than anyone the Institute had seen for decades, who through his complicity with Luke to aid the latter's escape, is subjected to tests not designed for his level of ability. You give a low level telekinetic - can move an empty pizza box - a near death experience and it boosts their overall psychic abilities, especially when they join with the hive mind in the less attractive part of the Institute.
Luke's escape hinges not just on his unique brain and his ability to cut round corners, but also helps him befriend one of the people who should never have needed a friend. Luke helps this person and she enables him to escape, providing him with information that could bring the entire facility down on their heads. It obviously isn't as simple as that, but it is one of the more feasible of the long shots that King attempts to pull off. Coincidences and all that.
While Luke is engaged in his own carnage in South Carolina, meeting Tim in the process, back at the Institute Avery is setting in motion a chain of events that will leave another trail of dead people. He is also aware of Luke's idea - a gamble put in place designed to fail, because of a strategy underneath that only Luke and his now psychically linked friends know about. The tell tale line is when Tim, finally understanding what he's involved in, suggests to Luke that they're not returning to the Institute to save people and Luke replies, 'No, we're going to pick up the pieces.' The first time in years I got that crackle down my spine reading King's words.
Everything about the book is scarily possible, even in today's world and then just as you read and hope that the denouement will be as good as you hoped there is the one real cop-out. As well as channeling Firestarter, it also borrows themes from Philip K Dick's The Minority Report; the consequences of that idea wouldn't become clear until the epilogue.
Parts of the climax work exceptionally well, other parts feel like they've been ramped up to make a feature film sale more viable. To say the end of the Institute is far fetched is like suggesting the rest of the book isn't, but the plausibility of the book disappears in a conclusion that feels like it's going right back to Carrie but with the volume turned to 11 and that didn't work for me. I would have preferred less bangs and more buck - which might be why there's a long but ultimately unfulfilling epilogue. Everything could have been logical, even the set-up to cause the conclusion, but I feel it could have been handled in a way that cut out the disaster movie and still achieved a desirable conclusion.
It is, however, a cracking read. It has some excellent set-up lines, brilliant exchanges and King writes like he's remembered how to write likeable characters you give a fig about even if you've just seen a flash of their lives. He also channels his inner-villain to perfection with an array of baddies with cameos that make you realise almost always all hope is lost for anyone who enters this Godforsaken place. I can forgive some of the decisions made by the main cast for being caught up in the craziness, but others felt like they were done to reach a point where they may not have happened if it had played out in a real world setting. But that is what writing fiction is sometimes about; cliches exist because if they didn't there wouldn't be cliches.
I almost felt like it could have been a wee bit longer. Both Stackhouse and Sigsby - excellent villains, both instinctively evil in different, but effective, ways were almost superficial; ciphers for their general kind of person. Yet there was a sense that if King had told a little about their lives - more than a couple of almost afterthought lines - they might have been less unbelievable. The impression Ka was at work here was obvious, but carefully hidden; like King wanted us to know, for sure, this was not a story in a universe of dim follies.
I get the impression he's not done with this particular corner of his mind. I do feel we might see these characters again. It is incredibly good at using emotion as an excellent narrative.
It won't make any of my King top tens but it feels like he's actually revisited an old idea and probably done a better job. I'm giving this book a 7 out of 10
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Harry in Lockdown
Sometimes people fall through the cracks. It isn't done on purpose, even if it can seem like it at times. Harry found this out, or didn't as the case was, when he told the woman - a local nurse - to get out of his house and never come back. He knew she had, several times, but he'd been out, or hiding in his garage. He didn't like being told what to do. He was 80 years old, for God's sake, old enough to know better than some kid in a uniform telling him what's best for him.
Harry's year had been the worst he could remember, except this was the root of all of his 'problems', his memory was not what it was and he was beginning to get yesterday mixed up with who knows when? The truth was by the time COVID-19 had shut down the British Isles, Harry had already been blighted by a run of bad luck he couldn't quite comprehend, when he was in a comprehending kind of mood.
Shortly after Christmas, his wife, Margaret? Was it Margaret? He wasn't as sure as he once was. Might it have been Mary? Anyhow, his wife had taken a nasty fall and what seemed likely to be a couple of days in the local hospital, turned into a nursing home. Quite why Harry couldn't look after her, he didn't quite understand. Something about 'his diagnosis', which made little or no sense to him. Whose diagnosis, he'd ask? That seemed to be one of the problems, apparently.
In truth, Harry had been suspected of having the early stages of senile dementia, but had managed to make the doctor think he wasn't at the stage where he needed to slow down or stop doing things. Harry was a fit man; he'd never smoked and while he liked a drink, he was never an alcoholic or even a heavy drinker. The problem - a word he seemed to hear far too often - was that shortly after Margaret had her fall - her name was indeed Margaret, but Harry had called her Maggie for the 54 years they had been married - and subsequent failing health, he was deemed unsuitable to care for his own wife and she, of complete sound mind, had forbidden her husband to drive to see her. In fact, Harry's driving licence had been taken away after a minor accident in January he had caused, so the only way he could go the 35 miles to see his wife was if someone took him.
There was also the dog. Harry loved his dog, but during the week he spent almost entirely at the hospital because of his wife's fall, he completely forgot about his 13-year-old dog. It was removed from his residence by the RSPCA and a letter was left explaining why. Harry picked up the letter placed it on the side table and promptly forgot it was there. The positive thing, you could say, was that within a few days, the dog became as distant a memory as his long-departed parents and when he did think of the dog, he invariably thought of ones they had had many years ago. Within a few weeks, his car, his dog and his wife had been taken away from him and he believed they now wanted to take away his freedom; but it might have been so much easier or better had it not been for the virus that Harry seemed determined to ignore.
Of course, by the time the coronavirus found its way into the mainstream of planetary life and the country was shut down, there was no one to drive Harry to see his wife and no one to care for him when he decided that he wasn't going to be told to stay indoors for 12 weeks. "There is no way I'm doing that," he shouted at the girl in the nurse's uniform and he told her to get out of his house and never come back. He knew he didn't feel bad about it, but as March turned into April and the sun came out, the last thing the old man wanted to do was be cooped up inside his bungalow, whatever advice the girl had given him, which he had ignored, and now no longer resided in his memory at all. He'd spent all of his life working outside, he was sure of it, so he was going to wander around the village and chat to all the people he hadn't been able to while his wife had been keeping him at home.
Harry began to interpret his inability to get to see his wife with the belief she didn't want to see him, which wasn't true, she just realised he was a danger to everyone if he drove. Harry now remembered it as her telling him she never wanted to see him again and the way his mind was now working, that meant he was going to go and do what he wanted; see the people he had spent all of his life with in the village and get to know the ones who were new.
Buried at the front of his now scattershot memory was that people were trying to make him stay in. It seemed to him there were a lot of people telling him, from a distance, that he needed to go home unless he was going to the shop. He did go to the shop, not always. It seemed to some of the locals that when they explained the risk to Harry, he simply seemed to drift away from the conversation or wandered off, like a child bored with something. The fact he was told repeatedly by different people made no difference to him; he simply avoided those people - the enemy - and went in search of new people to talk to. He loved talking to people, he didn't understand why they didn't want to talk to him.
Did Harry understand what a pandemic was? Probably not and even if he once understood the danger one posed, it was no longer something that inhabited his brain. It was something affecting the rest of the world and even cases of coronavirus in the village failed to make him comprehend the risk to himself and indirectly to others. If he caught it - and he was almost trying despite not knowing - he could prove to be fatal to those who he came into contact with. Except, that wouldn't happen, because he wouldn't get it.
Do you see the problem? He was in a place of denial but only because his brain no longer understood exactly what it was denying. This was no longer about others, apart from their intent to stop him from going about his business, which now as April slipped into May, was shuffling the streets, in the same clothes, looking more dishevelled and unhappier because the more he tried the more people consciously began avoiding him, crossing the road, locking their doors, closing their gates. There had been instances where he'd simply wandered onto people's property, because he thought someone who hadn't lived there for 40 years still did.
While the world twitched at their curtains and became like honorary members of the Stasi, reporting rule breakers, the kind who, if they were social isolating the way they were supposed to, would never enter their personal spheres, Harry was ignored. People felt sorry for him, but didn't want to help him. Except, they did, they just couldn't because the advice he received, the conversations he had, the shouted abuse from people he didn't know, just compounded his belief - his paranoia - that they were all out to get him. The rest of the world's problems were something he was not even aware of. So the neighbours and locals accepted the wandering old man, the way you might an unwanted tramp sleeping on your local park bench, but without acknowledging, condoning or condemning - it was as it was.
Harry's fate was now down to chance. Maybe he'd be lucky; maybe he wouldn't. The problems arise if he wasn't, but there was no obvious path; no way of knowing who or what he might come in contact with and short of having him committed or sent to a care home - Harry and Margaret had no children - he had fallen through those cracks in the system. Whatever outcome suited the rest of the village was going to be bad for Harry. Do you inform the police and even if you did, what chances of impressing on him the importance, to everyone else, that he stays inside and lets the local resilience group do his shopping, collect his medicine or simply drop by - at an appropriate distance - to talk and see if he's able to cope?
Locals have watched the old man deteriorate over the last few months and the underlying feeling rises in all of them; they are watching the last act of a defiant, but mentally-challenged old man, heading towards an inevitable death, either from the virus or his own diminished abilities. Harry had become a Dead Man Shuffling and people were afraid of him. This was something that would end badly, through no real fault of a system or a person. In the time of an unprecedented plague, responsibilities and duty of care are lost in the unrelenting face of a creeping death, picking off victims even if they never catch the disease...
Harry's year had been the worst he could remember, except this was the root of all of his 'problems', his memory was not what it was and he was beginning to get yesterday mixed up with who knows when? The truth was by the time COVID-19 had shut down the British Isles, Harry had already been blighted by a run of bad luck he couldn't quite comprehend, when he was in a comprehending kind of mood.
Shortly after Christmas, his wife, Margaret? Was it Margaret? He wasn't as sure as he once was. Might it have been Mary? Anyhow, his wife had taken a nasty fall and what seemed likely to be a couple of days in the local hospital, turned into a nursing home. Quite why Harry couldn't look after her, he didn't quite understand. Something about 'his diagnosis', which made little or no sense to him. Whose diagnosis, he'd ask? That seemed to be one of the problems, apparently.
In truth, Harry had been suspected of having the early stages of senile dementia, but had managed to make the doctor think he wasn't at the stage where he needed to slow down or stop doing things. Harry was a fit man; he'd never smoked and while he liked a drink, he was never an alcoholic or even a heavy drinker. The problem - a word he seemed to hear far too often - was that shortly after Margaret had her fall - her name was indeed Margaret, but Harry had called her Maggie for the 54 years they had been married - and subsequent failing health, he was deemed unsuitable to care for his own wife and she, of complete sound mind, had forbidden her husband to drive to see her. In fact, Harry's driving licence had been taken away after a minor accident in January he had caused, so the only way he could go the 35 miles to see his wife was if someone took him.
There was also the dog. Harry loved his dog, but during the week he spent almost entirely at the hospital because of his wife's fall, he completely forgot about his 13-year-old dog. It was removed from his residence by the RSPCA and a letter was left explaining why. Harry picked up the letter placed it on the side table and promptly forgot it was there. The positive thing, you could say, was that within a few days, the dog became as distant a memory as his long-departed parents and when he did think of the dog, he invariably thought of ones they had had many years ago. Within a few weeks, his car, his dog and his wife had been taken away from him and he believed they now wanted to take away his freedom; but it might have been so much easier or better had it not been for the virus that Harry seemed determined to ignore.
Of course, by the time the coronavirus found its way into the mainstream of planetary life and the country was shut down, there was no one to drive Harry to see his wife and no one to care for him when he decided that he wasn't going to be told to stay indoors for 12 weeks. "There is no way I'm doing that," he shouted at the girl in the nurse's uniform and he told her to get out of his house and never come back. He knew he didn't feel bad about it, but as March turned into April and the sun came out, the last thing the old man wanted to do was be cooped up inside his bungalow, whatever advice the girl had given him, which he had ignored, and now no longer resided in his memory at all. He'd spent all of his life working outside, he was sure of it, so he was going to wander around the village and chat to all the people he hadn't been able to while his wife had been keeping him at home.
Harry began to interpret his inability to get to see his wife with the belief she didn't want to see him, which wasn't true, she just realised he was a danger to everyone if he drove. Harry now remembered it as her telling him she never wanted to see him again and the way his mind was now working, that meant he was going to go and do what he wanted; see the people he had spent all of his life with in the village and get to know the ones who were new.
Buried at the front of his now scattershot memory was that people were trying to make him stay in. It seemed to him there were a lot of people telling him, from a distance, that he needed to go home unless he was going to the shop. He did go to the shop, not always. It seemed to some of the locals that when they explained the risk to Harry, he simply seemed to drift away from the conversation or wandered off, like a child bored with something. The fact he was told repeatedly by different people made no difference to him; he simply avoided those people - the enemy - and went in search of new people to talk to. He loved talking to people, he didn't understand why they didn't want to talk to him.
Did Harry understand what a pandemic was? Probably not and even if he once understood the danger one posed, it was no longer something that inhabited his brain. It was something affecting the rest of the world and even cases of coronavirus in the village failed to make him comprehend the risk to himself and indirectly to others. If he caught it - and he was almost trying despite not knowing - he could prove to be fatal to those who he came into contact with. Except, that wouldn't happen, because he wouldn't get it.
Do you see the problem? He was in a place of denial but only because his brain no longer understood exactly what it was denying. This was no longer about others, apart from their intent to stop him from going about his business, which now as April slipped into May, was shuffling the streets, in the same clothes, looking more dishevelled and unhappier because the more he tried the more people consciously began avoiding him, crossing the road, locking their doors, closing their gates. There had been instances where he'd simply wandered onto people's property, because he thought someone who hadn't lived there for 40 years still did.
While the world twitched at their curtains and became like honorary members of the Stasi, reporting rule breakers, the kind who, if they were social isolating the way they were supposed to, would never enter their personal spheres, Harry was ignored. People felt sorry for him, but didn't want to help him. Except, they did, they just couldn't because the advice he received, the conversations he had, the shouted abuse from people he didn't know, just compounded his belief - his paranoia - that they were all out to get him. The rest of the world's problems were something he was not even aware of. So the neighbours and locals accepted the wandering old man, the way you might an unwanted tramp sleeping on your local park bench, but without acknowledging, condoning or condemning - it was as it was.
Harry's fate was now down to chance. Maybe he'd be lucky; maybe he wouldn't. The problems arise if he wasn't, but there was no obvious path; no way of knowing who or what he might come in contact with and short of having him committed or sent to a care home - Harry and Margaret had no children - he had fallen through those cracks in the system. Whatever outcome suited the rest of the village was going to be bad for Harry. Do you inform the police and even if you did, what chances of impressing on him the importance, to everyone else, that he stays inside and lets the local resilience group do his shopping, collect his medicine or simply drop by - at an appropriate distance - to talk and see if he's able to cope?
Locals have watched the old man deteriorate over the last few months and the underlying feeling rises in all of them; they are watching the last act of a defiant, but mentally-challenged old man, heading towards an inevitable death, either from the virus or his own diminished abilities. Harry had become a Dead Man Shuffling and people were afraid of him. This was something that would end badly, through no real fault of a system or a person. In the time of an unprecedented plague, responsibilities and duty of care are lost in the unrelenting face of a creeping death, picking off victims even if they never catch the disease...
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
Pop Culture is Dead to Me: Part 237
It's been a while. Eight months since I last did a proper TV thing.
I did a final (unrelated to this) blog on the old PC. It's still in draft stage. I procrastinate a lot. I wish I could get over it, but I procrastinate about getting over it as well.
We've been watching a lot of TV, but not a lot in the grand scheme of things. A lot, for us. We have a lot to catch up on. We gave up on some things and were pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised by some other things. This is life.
Let's get started; we have a lot to get through and it will be in no specific order...
The Witcher - what a load of shite. Sorry, but it is. We gave it two episodes and frankly neither of us wanted to go any further. I know that Henry Cavill wanted this part, but you'd have thought he would have done more than phone in a disinterested looking scowl. It might have got better, but frankly I don't care. I'm sure there will be more and people will be happy. Good for you.
Servant - Apparently all but a few outside scenes were shot in London. 90% of the cast are British. Rupert Grint was brilliantly horrendous as a vile wine drinking, pot smoking twat and it was the weirdest and probably creepiest thing I've seen on TV in years. I really hope they don't make a second series because while there are so many holes in it, it still worked for me. In a nutshell: a family of utter shits, a dead baby and all held together by the 'nanny'. Really tough watching but worth it in a nasty skin crawling way...
Lost in Space 2 - we said we wouldn't bother with season two and so far we haven't. we have it waiting for us, but it's about convincing the wife that it's worth giving it another go.
Shameless US - in the last proper one of these I did, I said it was time to call it a day. No more Fiona means no more glue. We've watched the opening episode of Season 10 and I don't know if I have the will to persevere with it. It should have stopped with season 9 because that was an excellent jumping off point.
Doctor Who - Now... where to start. If you look back to the last time I talked about DW you won't find anything remotely positive and that's almost how I feel about this series. It is pretty much a load of old wank and Chibnall did nothing at all to make me think he was anything other than a fraud with a pseudo-educational brief. The current series has been preachy, whiny (even with the return of the Master) and I don't really like any of the cast; not even Jodie Whittaker any more. It's just shit. However, just as I was about to actually call it a day and stop subjecting myself to an hour of grief and anger up popped 'Fugitive of the Judoon' and arguably the most excellent episode for a decade. It was one of those episodes where absolutely nothing happened, but everything happened. On the surface it just seemed as one-dimensional as every other Chibnall episode and then BAM and BAM and oh yeah BAM BAM BAM. Jack Harkness, an unknown black lady Doctor, lone Cyberman teasers, Galifreyans and the actual feeling you'd stumbled into an episode of Doctor Who. It was quite brilliant. And then we returned to shit the following week...
The Outsider - I've not read the book. After Dr Sleep I've struggled to be tempted by any Stephen King book, especially ones that are crime novels with a supernatural twist. I struggled with Mr Mercedes and didn't get past the opening chapter; never even bothered buying the sequels and was really tempted to read The Outsider until I discovered it had more links to the crime books than it does to any of King's 'proper' books. We're halfway through the HBO adaptation. Ben Mendelsohn is superb. Jason Bateman blew my mind. It is playing on a theme that Joe Hill's NOS4A2 touched on - what happens when weird meets the real world and specifically law enforcement and there's a sense of bewilderment running through it that reflects what the world would actually do if the bogeyman existed. I might read the book now.
Picard - two episodes in and it is how you would want to see the real Star Fleet; how it really is and how the earth isn't really a Utopia, it just pretends to be. It is glorious to look at; moves at a snail's pace and can carry on until Patrick Stewart is 200 for all I care.
The Expanse - I haven't watched Season 4 yet. It's on the 'to do' list.
Preacher - horrid. Just awful. After such an auspicious start it just descended into utter shite. I was glad when it was all over and you got the impression the cast felt the same way.
Nos4R2 - I touched on this when I last did one of these on TV. We'd just started to watch it and I said it felt abridged. It's been fucked about to the extent that I don't know if I'll watch the second (and hopefully concluding) season. Has as much menace as the One Show. I also don't think Zachary Quinto can act. Went on far too long and could have done the entire book in 13 episodes. Hopefully Joe Hill's Locke & Key will be much better, but after reading his book The Fireman, I think he's a one trick pony and hasn't got a tenth of his father's ability. If you get the chance to read The Fireman don't. Killing yourself would be more preferable - dreadful rubbish.
The Boys - is nothing like the comic (apparently). It was extremely enjoyable and in the worst possible taste. One of the few things I watched last year that I'm genuinely looking forward to a second series. Karl Urban didn't need to be English (is he English or an Aussie, it's hard to tell?) and his accent is the worst since Dick Van Dyke. Other than that foible, it made some other superhero series look very poor indeed.
Watchmen - Almost the best superhero series. Utterly compelling; hated the ending, felt that Damon Lindelof simply didn't understand Doc Manhattan. He almost got him, but failed. Other than that it twisted and turned all over the place; felt weird and otherworldly and I hope there's a second series, if only to piss off comic fans.
Undone - watch it. It's a strange mix of animation and Bob Odenkirk. It's a time travel story but it might be about madness. It was strangely fulfilling and there's likely to be a second series.
Russian Doll - there's also going to be a second series of this and that confounds me. If you like Groundhog Day (I did) then you should like this; but unless they use other characters I can't see how this is ever going to work. It was an enjoyable romp but ultimately you didn't really care about the characters you just wanted to find out why everything was rotting away.
Fleabag 2 - We finally watched this, like a film, the other night. Nothing beats the first episode which has more laughs in it than all the following five put together. I liked the juxtaposition where all of Fleabag's awful people just get more awful and she seems to find some kind of redemptive peace (oh and she shags a priest). Olivia Coleman's stepmother has to be the most vile and horrendous human being ever portrayed in a TV series; the weird thing is we know people like her...
Haunting of Hill House - I liked what they did. I didn't think it was scary. It was clever but also stupid. It felt a little like The Umbrella Academy while being nothing like it at all. The problem with ghost stories is that when you boil it down, ghosts are not real, even if they exist. They have no form, they can't hurt you; the entire thing about them is to scare you and if you know its a ghost and it can't really hurt you it stops scaring you. Apparently this is also going to be an American Horror Story anthology series... shame.
Stranger Things 3 - hated and loved it in equal measure. I've never really understood the hype around the series and I discovered 11 is English (and essentially plays herself in most things - such as the woeful Godzilla: King of Monsters). It just feels like it never wants to give you a proper money shot because once it does it won't be able to replicate or beat it. Prick tease television.
Castle Rock 2 - was in many ways a bit of a revelation. The first series was a struggle, while this one was more of a rollicking adventure featuring the 'origin' of Annie Wilkes. I can't say I ever liked the character but tying her in with the Marston House from Salem's Lot and suggesting that the old place had much more history than just a mad bastard and a vampire's residence was a master stroke. Tying it into the first series wasn't such a good idea.
Love, Death & Robots - something of a revelation in that almost every single short SF film was excellent. It was full of sex, robots and death, but also stories that were excellently done in such a short space of time. This was science fiction anthology at its most excellent. I hope season 2 lives up to the first.
Mindhunter - the second series of this semi-fictionalised account of the FBI's psychological profiling department focused on another true crime and managed to wrap a disturbing and alienating story around it. It's superb TV and feels like it should be twice as long. A real pleasure, even if we're dealing with serial killers, horrid deaths and serious mental health issues.
His Dark Materials - frankly, they could have made this with glove puppets and it would have been better than the abomination that was The Golden Compass. It was, however, slightly cold and calculated and doesn't have the soul the books had. It was still quite brilliant in places and the only real heartbreaking thing is The Northern Lights is by far the lightest and shortest of the trilogy, but they're wrapping the entire thing up in a second series. How they will deal with the entire Mulefa storyline, the death of God and the battle between everything and travelling to hell and back, I really don't know?
For All Mankind - let's save the best till last. If I had to stick my neck out and declare something as my favourite TV show of the last 12 months, this would win. This alternative history of the space race is quite superb. It starts with the Soviet Union beating the USA to the moon and then upping the ante by putting a woman on the moon next. Everything the Yanks want to do, the Russkies beat them to it, so as a result the space race never ended. It's essentially a kind of science fiction soap opera focusing on the astronauts (some real, some fictitious) and how the world changed - but didn't too much - as a result of the events in 1969. It was the first big show on Apple's streaming service and was probably worth the entry fee alone. It's full of edge of the seat action, tragedy, love and with a fantastic late 60s/early 70s feel; all done extremely well. If I had to recommend one TV show from this entire list it would be this one.
***
I mentioned Dr Sleep earlier. We watched the film the other night and it was 3 hours long. The first 2½ hours follows the book extremely well, but then becomes a sequel to Kubrick's The Shining, which the book really avoided. The great ending in the book was replaced by a sorry homage to a film I've never liked and ended up being truly disappointing as a result.
We have watched so few films this last 12 months, it's either an indictment to the lack of interesting films or we're just not seeing anything we like. My mate Andy always manages to list 50 films a year - minimum - he's seen; I think I can count on one hand the number of films I've seen that I want to remember. I don't think the medium is dead, but it's very much in a coma for me at the moment and I fail to understand why some films get so hyped up, especially when they leave me disappointed and feeling like I've just wasted valuable life time watching them.
***
Spider-Man: Far From Home... I might be done with Marvel films. Endgame was a really poor film but also a good jumping off point. I can't see what the point of Black Widow is, unless it's a gift to Scarlett Johansson for time served and the Spider-Man film simply left me with far too many questions that I get the feeling are going to be breezed over. Mysterio was a lame villain and I'm fed up to the back teeth with Spider-Man. I feel about as much of an interest in him as I do Batman and anyone who knows me will know I can't stand Batman and haven't really watched any since the first Bale film.
Which brings me nicely to Joker. Joachim was okay; better than the dead Aussie channeling Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle or that singist twat in Suicide Squad, but apart from a few oblique references to Batman it was just a film about mental health and right wing America. Not a nice film; maybe a necessary one. I wouldn't have minded not seeing it at all. At least it wasn't a multiplex cinematic blockbuster with more special effects than you can shake a stick at.
That's me done. If I missed anything it couldn't have made much of a mark on me.
I did a final (unrelated to this) blog on the old PC. It's still in draft stage. I procrastinate a lot. I wish I could get over it, but I procrastinate about getting over it as well.
We've been watching a lot of TV, but not a lot in the grand scheme of things. A lot, for us. We have a lot to catch up on. We gave up on some things and were pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised by some other things. This is life.
Let's get started; we have a lot to get through and it will be in no specific order...
The Witcher - what a load of shite. Sorry, but it is. We gave it two episodes and frankly neither of us wanted to go any further. I know that Henry Cavill wanted this part, but you'd have thought he would have done more than phone in a disinterested looking scowl. It might have got better, but frankly I don't care. I'm sure there will be more and people will be happy. Good for you.
Servant - Apparently all but a few outside scenes were shot in London. 90% of the cast are British. Rupert Grint was brilliantly horrendous as a vile wine drinking, pot smoking twat and it was the weirdest and probably creepiest thing I've seen on TV in years. I really hope they don't make a second series because while there are so many holes in it, it still worked for me. In a nutshell: a family of utter shits, a dead baby and all held together by the 'nanny'. Really tough watching but worth it in a nasty skin crawling way...
Lost in Space 2 - we said we wouldn't bother with season two and so far we haven't. we have it waiting for us, but it's about convincing the wife that it's worth giving it another go.
Shameless US - in the last proper one of these I did, I said it was time to call it a day. No more Fiona means no more glue. We've watched the opening episode of Season 10 and I don't know if I have the will to persevere with it. It should have stopped with season 9 because that was an excellent jumping off point.
Doctor Who - Now... where to start. If you look back to the last time I talked about DW you won't find anything remotely positive and that's almost how I feel about this series. It is pretty much a load of old wank and Chibnall did nothing at all to make me think he was anything other than a fraud with a pseudo-educational brief. The current series has been preachy, whiny (even with the return of the Master) and I don't really like any of the cast; not even Jodie Whittaker any more. It's just shit. However, just as I was about to actually call it a day and stop subjecting myself to an hour of grief and anger up popped 'Fugitive of the Judoon' and arguably the most excellent episode for a decade. It was one of those episodes where absolutely nothing happened, but everything happened. On the surface it just seemed as one-dimensional as every other Chibnall episode and then BAM and BAM and oh yeah BAM BAM BAM. Jack Harkness, an unknown black lady Doctor, lone Cyberman teasers, Galifreyans and the actual feeling you'd stumbled into an episode of Doctor Who. It was quite brilliant. And then we returned to shit the following week...
The Outsider - I've not read the book. After Dr Sleep I've struggled to be tempted by any Stephen King book, especially ones that are crime novels with a supernatural twist. I struggled with Mr Mercedes and didn't get past the opening chapter; never even bothered buying the sequels and was really tempted to read The Outsider until I discovered it had more links to the crime books than it does to any of King's 'proper' books. We're halfway through the HBO adaptation. Ben Mendelsohn is superb. Jason Bateman blew my mind. It is playing on a theme that Joe Hill's NOS4A2 touched on - what happens when weird meets the real world and specifically law enforcement and there's a sense of bewilderment running through it that reflects what the world would actually do if the bogeyman existed. I might read the book now.
Picard - two episodes in and it is how you would want to see the real Star Fleet; how it really is and how the earth isn't really a Utopia, it just pretends to be. It is glorious to look at; moves at a snail's pace and can carry on until Patrick Stewart is 200 for all I care.
The Expanse - I haven't watched Season 4 yet. It's on the 'to do' list.
Preacher - horrid. Just awful. After such an auspicious start it just descended into utter shite. I was glad when it was all over and you got the impression the cast felt the same way.
Nos4R2 - I touched on this when I last did one of these on TV. We'd just started to watch it and I said it felt abridged. It's been fucked about to the extent that I don't know if I'll watch the second (and hopefully concluding) season. Has as much menace as the One Show. I also don't think Zachary Quinto can act. Went on far too long and could have done the entire book in 13 episodes. Hopefully Joe Hill's Locke & Key will be much better, but after reading his book The Fireman, I think he's a one trick pony and hasn't got a tenth of his father's ability. If you get the chance to read The Fireman don't. Killing yourself would be more preferable - dreadful rubbish.
The Boys - is nothing like the comic (apparently). It was extremely enjoyable and in the worst possible taste. One of the few things I watched last year that I'm genuinely looking forward to a second series. Karl Urban didn't need to be English (is he English or an Aussie, it's hard to tell?) and his accent is the worst since Dick Van Dyke. Other than that foible, it made some other superhero series look very poor indeed.
Watchmen - Almost the best superhero series. Utterly compelling; hated the ending, felt that Damon Lindelof simply didn't understand Doc Manhattan. He almost got him, but failed. Other than that it twisted and turned all over the place; felt weird and otherworldly and I hope there's a second series, if only to piss off comic fans.
Undone - watch it. It's a strange mix of animation and Bob Odenkirk. It's a time travel story but it might be about madness. It was strangely fulfilling and there's likely to be a second series.
Russian Doll - there's also going to be a second series of this and that confounds me. If you like Groundhog Day (I did) then you should like this; but unless they use other characters I can't see how this is ever going to work. It was an enjoyable romp but ultimately you didn't really care about the characters you just wanted to find out why everything was rotting away.
Fleabag 2 - We finally watched this, like a film, the other night. Nothing beats the first episode which has more laughs in it than all the following five put together. I liked the juxtaposition where all of Fleabag's awful people just get more awful and she seems to find some kind of redemptive peace (oh and she shags a priest). Olivia Coleman's stepmother has to be the most vile and horrendous human being ever portrayed in a TV series; the weird thing is we know people like her...
Haunting of Hill House - I liked what they did. I didn't think it was scary. It was clever but also stupid. It felt a little like The Umbrella Academy while being nothing like it at all. The problem with ghost stories is that when you boil it down, ghosts are not real, even if they exist. They have no form, they can't hurt you; the entire thing about them is to scare you and if you know its a ghost and it can't really hurt you it stops scaring you. Apparently this is also going to be an American Horror Story anthology series... shame.
Stranger Things 3 - hated and loved it in equal measure. I've never really understood the hype around the series and I discovered 11 is English (and essentially plays herself in most things - such as the woeful Godzilla: King of Monsters). It just feels like it never wants to give you a proper money shot because once it does it won't be able to replicate or beat it. Prick tease television.
Castle Rock 2 - was in many ways a bit of a revelation. The first series was a struggle, while this one was more of a rollicking adventure featuring the 'origin' of Annie Wilkes. I can't say I ever liked the character but tying her in with the Marston House from Salem's Lot and suggesting that the old place had much more history than just a mad bastard and a vampire's residence was a master stroke. Tying it into the first series wasn't such a good idea.
Love, Death & Robots - something of a revelation in that almost every single short SF film was excellent. It was full of sex, robots and death, but also stories that were excellently done in such a short space of time. This was science fiction anthology at its most excellent. I hope season 2 lives up to the first.
Mindhunter - the second series of this semi-fictionalised account of the FBI's psychological profiling department focused on another true crime and managed to wrap a disturbing and alienating story around it. It's superb TV and feels like it should be twice as long. A real pleasure, even if we're dealing with serial killers, horrid deaths and serious mental health issues.
His Dark Materials - frankly, they could have made this with glove puppets and it would have been better than the abomination that was The Golden Compass. It was, however, slightly cold and calculated and doesn't have the soul the books had. It was still quite brilliant in places and the only real heartbreaking thing is The Northern Lights is by far the lightest and shortest of the trilogy, but they're wrapping the entire thing up in a second series. How they will deal with the entire Mulefa storyline, the death of God and the battle between everything and travelling to hell and back, I really don't know?
For All Mankind - let's save the best till last. If I had to stick my neck out and declare something as my favourite TV show of the last 12 months, this would win. This alternative history of the space race is quite superb. It starts with the Soviet Union beating the USA to the moon and then upping the ante by putting a woman on the moon next. Everything the Yanks want to do, the Russkies beat them to it, so as a result the space race never ended. It's essentially a kind of science fiction soap opera focusing on the astronauts (some real, some fictitious) and how the world changed - but didn't too much - as a result of the events in 1969. It was the first big show on Apple's streaming service and was probably worth the entry fee alone. It's full of edge of the seat action, tragedy, love and with a fantastic late 60s/early 70s feel; all done extremely well. If I had to recommend one TV show from this entire list it would be this one.
***
I mentioned Dr Sleep earlier. We watched the film the other night and it was 3 hours long. The first 2½ hours follows the book extremely well, but then becomes a sequel to Kubrick's The Shining, which the book really avoided. The great ending in the book was replaced by a sorry homage to a film I've never liked and ended up being truly disappointing as a result.
We have watched so few films this last 12 months, it's either an indictment to the lack of interesting films or we're just not seeing anything we like. My mate Andy always manages to list 50 films a year - minimum - he's seen; I think I can count on one hand the number of films I've seen that I want to remember. I don't think the medium is dead, but it's very much in a coma for me at the moment and I fail to understand why some films get so hyped up, especially when they leave me disappointed and feeling like I've just wasted valuable life time watching them.
***
Spider-Man: Far From Home... I might be done with Marvel films. Endgame was a really poor film but also a good jumping off point. I can't see what the point of Black Widow is, unless it's a gift to Scarlett Johansson for time served and the Spider-Man film simply left me with far too many questions that I get the feeling are going to be breezed over. Mysterio was a lame villain and I'm fed up to the back teeth with Spider-Man. I feel about as much of an interest in him as I do Batman and anyone who knows me will know I can't stand Batman and haven't really watched any since the first Bale film.
Which brings me nicely to Joker. Joachim was okay; better than the dead Aussie channeling Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle or that singist twat in Suicide Squad, but apart from a few oblique references to Batman it was just a film about mental health and right wing America. Not a nice film; maybe a necessary one. I wouldn't have minded not seeing it at all. At least it wasn't a multiplex cinematic blockbuster with more special effects than you can shake a stick at.
That's me done. If I missed anything it couldn't have made much of a mark on me.
Monday, September 16, 2019
Ancient Pop Culture is Dead to Me
The Guardian - home of the spoiler and the holier-than-thou BTL smart arses who think they're more intelligent than people who comment on the Daily Mail on-line - caused something of a minor cult controversy last weekend when it suggested that Babylon 5 had 'jumped the shark' (this was in a column about good TV gone bad and one that now seems to have to mine the deepest darkest past to be able to fill a page) at some point either during series four or with five (the final, often unknown whether it would happen, season).
Almost 95% of the comments posted lambasted the Guardian for suggesting B5 should even be considered a contender for the Jump the Shark column's ire; most everyone who is familiar with this now 25 year old series agreed that it should never have been granted a fifth season, especially as its complex stories had to be, hurriedly, tied up by the end of season four, but most praised it like it was a precursor to The Sopranos or The Handmaid's Tale.
Babylon 5 is remembered by a many people for differing reasons. Many compare it to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (a source of controversy and argument among both sets of fans for reasons I really can't be arsed to go into); others like to point out the wooden acting, the PS1-styled special effects or the fact that sometimes it was excruciatingly poor TV. The thing is, for all of its criticisms, B5 was a groundbreaking and prophetic SF series and in many ways is perfect for a re-imagining (the way Battlestar Galactica was brought into the 21st century).
But is it?
Most B5 fans you talk to will extol the virtues and brilliance of the Shadow War and tell you that if you thought Game of Thrones was a twisty and turny political drama with a fantasy backdrop then you missed the original. If you think Lord Varys was the arch-schemer then you need to meet Mr Morden. If you thought Jaime Lannister was the epitome of redemption, then you're not aware of G'Kar; or if you felt there were far too many tortured souls floating around Westeros then you need to introduce yourself to Londo Mollari - Babylon 5 was, at the time, the most sophisticatedly-plotted television series ever made but it was then enveloped in Pound Shop wrapping paper.
The truth is B5 was more than just a massive story arc about a space war between ancient races and the new kids on the block. For five series there was an underlying subplot about how Earth was actually not a very nice place; riven with corruption, hate and discrimination and despite being set in the same century as Star Trek, it was anything but a glorious utopia. B5 was not just about the United Nations in space, it focused on inequality while showing that equality was achievable.
The future isn't idyllic, the future is full of homeless disenfranchised people with no future, no hope, nowhere to live or call their own. B5 was about themes that current SF fan favourite series The Expanse focuses on such as xenophobia, the hate generated between Earthlings and those people born on colonies such as Mars or the Asteroid belts. B5 was rife with hatred, racism and other distinctly human traits. Whether the other alien races depicted in it picked up humans bad habits through osmosis or whether it was simply a universal thing wasn't really discussed; but the Narn, the Centauri, and the Minbari - the principal alien races other than humans, all had traits similar to their mammalian brethren. It sounds like it should be great...
The Shadow War, considered by many as one of the most original story arcs ever to appear in a TV series, is the thing many remember about B5, but as I said, all the way through the series it was really all about Earth and its inhabitants. It was about how Earth was not like Star Trek and the universe wasn't a nice homely Federation of Planets; how it was always extremely close to being a fascistic organisation and how it found going down that path extremely easy. It was about Psi Corps or the Ministry of Peace or the Night Watch. It was about assassinating the President of Earth so malevolent forces could dictate the agenda; it was about the hatred between Earth and Mars, especially after the latter ceded from Earth's control. It was about how massive inequality still existed below the surface and it was about corruption, massive fraud and genocide. The stories of 2258 to 2263 are the 21st century in microcosm and series creator J.M Straczynski either had a crystal ball or he knew that the drift towards right wing politics is something other generations of human beings are going to have to suffer...
I've recently re-watched chunks of the series and it amplifies the fact it was woefully made. The actors were poor; the sets were wobbly, the special effects were garish and infantile, but there was something about it; something under the surface that was allowed out every so often to remind us just how BIG 'the big picture' was.
The problem B5 had was those moments were few and far between and had it been produced in 2019 it would have dispensed with a lot of the superfluous filler; those dreadful Star Trek-lite episodes; or the ones made when all the budgets had been exhausted. It wouldn't be 22 episodes a series, it would be 13 and it would meld character building and the actual plot in a far more sophisticated way than was done in 1994. It would have state of the art special effects and actors who didn't seem like they were reading off of prompt cards behind the cameras. It would be wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am from episode one. But...
I'm not sure it would work in 2020. At first I put this down to logistics; in the 25 years since B5 first appeared thinking has changed. A space station is a stupid idea; it is essentially a sitting target. To believe humans would be the facilitators of a universal peace is also stretching it a bit. In fact, if you strip away some of the interesting things that make the series tick, you'd be hard-pressed to find any redeeming qualities.
The truth is it was made for a buck fifty; it was written by a man whose biggest claim to fame at that point was Murder She Wrote and however much you try and talk up the complexities of the series, if you watch it in the cold light of 2019 there are holes you could steer a star ship through. In fact, it's probably a damned sight worse than people who slagged it off in 1994 realised. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, the thing that actually hasn't aged is the struggle for the soul of Earth; probably because we're seeing a lot of the themes from B5 play out in real life - not quite with the melodrama or action, but some themes explored in seasons two and three of B5 would not seem too out of place in 2019, even if they're just updated versions of things that happened in Germany in the 1930s.
I approached the series the same way I approached it 10 years ago when I last watched it, with an open mind and devoid of criticism and I saw beyond the shitty production values for about 20 episodes. I was focusing on the episodes that focused on the Shadow War and for a while I saw a symmetry I'd not really seen before; that the Earth subplots were all loosely tied into the Shadows story. This was probably the only positive revelation I garnered, because for most of the time I was gobsmacked by how awful it was.
Any sympathy, empathy or association I might once have felt towards lead characters evaporated - the way TV has become more sophisticated over the last 20 years saw to that. Instead of laughing at the jokes or smiling at the interactions between central characters, I started to cringe a little - would people really be like that in 300 years? Obviously, for something made in the 1990s it's going to have certain anachronistic problems; I managed to see past that; what I didn't expect was to find myself tearing plots apart, with consummate ease, no less.
Looking back, I now believe the Shadow War was a brilliant idea that sometimes was executed perfectly, but at other times was contrived and simply makes me think that my once mad devotion to the series blinded me from glaring holes in the plot and story?
The thing is the Shadow War was actually at its best as a preamble - a subplot. It kind of lost all of its cohesion when it became the main story. But even in the episodes before it became the main crux, it seems that common sense was ignored in favour of tension, suspense and action. In 2019, looking at how fascistic some things are now, the naivety of the 1990s appeared to forget about bureaucracy, unless it was a necessary device. The word 'contrived' keeps springing up in my head, as well as the phrase 'a means to an end' and it seems that both of these things were prominent in B5. I appreciate in some ways, fantasy TV depends on these kind of things, especially when you're dealing with so-called prophecy, but the lack of genuine continuity - even when most episodes were written by the same guy - made it feel 'manufactured'; there is little or nothing 'organic' about it.
I got to the stage where I didn't actually want to carry on watching it. How I'd missed such glaringly obvious plotting mistakes three times previously really annoyed me. I used to explain the sometimes uneven feel it had to the production and budgetary constraints but words are rarely affected by budgets. I struggled to understand why - comic book style - it liked to give a precis of the general story whenever it could; having characters tell other characters who were as versed in everything what was going on and for every genuine bit of dialogue, there was a ham hock of wince-inducing bollocks.
The worst thing was the realisation that the Shadow War actually didn't make a lot of sense and its conclusion kind of contradicted itself... The Shadows believed in evolution through chaos; the Vorlons (the other ancient race still hanging around with the little kids) believed in a more peaceful way, through genetic manipulation and covert means and while the Shadows went around getting all the races to have wars with each other, the Vorlons stood around being cryptic and frankly not doing much at all (which you kind of understand at first). The problem was, when push came to shove, the war was all about the Shadows and Vorlons resurrecting an ancient war and getting someone else to take all the losses. The rest of the universe became collateral damage as they fought each other, forgetting their reason for being there. That might have been the plan, but for races billions of years older than us, it all seemed a little like the meeting of two bullies in the same school yard and the sensible teacher having them both expelled for the future safety of everyone else...
That aside, B5 has always been called a series that has equality at its very heart, but it doesn't. Women are still stereotyped in a 1970s fashion; aliens are often used as a substitute for race or culture and religion appears to supersede everything else - suggesting the discovery of aliens reinforces mankind's belief in God, not destroys it. In fact, in many ways, it was simply business as usual - human dramas played out with prosthetics.
Babylon 5 was every criticism levelled at it. It was like the US version of late 1970s Dr Whos. You felt the sets would eventually collapse in on themselves. The overblown dialogue would eventually spur someone into saying 'this is bollocks, no one would ever talk like this'. It pains me to say this, but B5 was a graveyard for has-beens, D-list actors and basket cases and with the aid of time were allowed to con us into believing we were witnessing something great. It might have been once or maybe it could have been, but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. We don't need to know how it might be re-imagined. What we need is for people who remember it fondly to never watch it again (for fear of realisation) and to defend its corner, the way I once did. I feel it deserves that, if nothing else.
I want to be able to say with the confidence I had in the late 1990s that B5 was something special; the problem is the only thing that elevated it above awful was the ideas it played with. It executed those ideas piss poorly, but it doesn't detract from the fact that JMS (and others) had them in the first place. To attempt to do something like B5 is far more worthy of praise than to actually critique the show. The fact they were allowed to tell such a strange story from start to finish, with so much interference, is something to be held in high esteem... 'In the face of adversity' should have been the series' subtitle.
The problem is, it is the memory of it that has grown in our minds. If you love B5 for all the reasons I thought I did then I urge you to never go there again. Lock your DVDs or illegal files away - burn them, if necessary; just don't be tempted to re-view something important from a period in your past that can't be changed, because under (not a lot of) scrutiny it falls apart and becomes something you wish you could unsee; it makes you want to remember it how you did, not how it is.
Almost 95% of the comments posted lambasted the Guardian for suggesting B5 should even be considered a contender for the Jump the Shark column's ire; most everyone who is familiar with this now 25 year old series agreed that it should never have been granted a fifth season, especially as its complex stories had to be, hurriedly, tied up by the end of season four, but most praised it like it was a precursor to The Sopranos or The Handmaid's Tale.
Babylon 5 is remembered by a many people for differing reasons. Many compare it to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (a source of controversy and argument among both sets of fans for reasons I really can't be arsed to go into); others like to point out the wooden acting, the PS1-styled special effects or the fact that sometimes it was excruciatingly poor TV. The thing is, for all of its criticisms, B5 was a groundbreaking and prophetic SF series and in many ways is perfect for a re-imagining (the way Battlestar Galactica was brought into the 21st century).
But is it?
Most B5 fans you talk to will extol the virtues and brilliance of the Shadow War and tell you that if you thought Game of Thrones was a twisty and turny political drama with a fantasy backdrop then you missed the original. If you think Lord Varys was the arch-schemer then you need to meet Mr Morden. If you thought Jaime Lannister was the epitome of redemption, then you're not aware of G'Kar; or if you felt there were far too many tortured souls floating around Westeros then you need to introduce yourself to Londo Mollari - Babylon 5 was, at the time, the most sophisticatedly-plotted television series ever made but it was then enveloped in Pound Shop wrapping paper.
The truth is B5 was more than just a massive story arc about a space war between ancient races and the new kids on the block. For five series there was an underlying subplot about how Earth was actually not a very nice place; riven with corruption, hate and discrimination and despite being set in the same century as Star Trek, it was anything but a glorious utopia. B5 was not just about the United Nations in space, it focused on inequality while showing that equality was achievable.
The future isn't idyllic, the future is full of homeless disenfranchised people with no future, no hope, nowhere to live or call their own. B5 was about themes that current SF fan favourite series The Expanse focuses on such as xenophobia, the hate generated between Earthlings and those people born on colonies such as Mars or the Asteroid belts. B5 was rife with hatred, racism and other distinctly human traits. Whether the other alien races depicted in it picked up humans bad habits through osmosis or whether it was simply a universal thing wasn't really discussed; but the Narn, the Centauri, and the Minbari - the principal alien races other than humans, all had traits similar to their mammalian brethren. It sounds like it should be great...
The Shadow War, considered by many as one of the most original story arcs ever to appear in a TV series, is the thing many remember about B5, but as I said, all the way through the series it was really all about Earth and its inhabitants. It was about how Earth was not like Star Trek and the universe wasn't a nice homely Federation of Planets; how it was always extremely close to being a fascistic organisation and how it found going down that path extremely easy. It was about Psi Corps or the Ministry of Peace or the Night Watch. It was about assassinating the President of Earth so malevolent forces could dictate the agenda; it was about the hatred between Earth and Mars, especially after the latter ceded from Earth's control. It was about how massive inequality still existed below the surface and it was about corruption, massive fraud and genocide. The stories of 2258 to 2263 are the 21st century in microcosm and series creator J.M Straczynski either had a crystal ball or he knew that the drift towards right wing politics is something other generations of human beings are going to have to suffer...
I've recently re-watched chunks of the series and it amplifies the fact it was woefully made. The actors were poor; the sets were wobbly, the special effects were garish and infantile, but there was something about it; something under the surface that was allowed out every so often to remind us just how BIG 'the big picture' was.
The problem B5 had was those moments were few and far between and had it been produced in 2019 it would have dispensed with a lot of the superfluous filler; those dreadful Star Trek-lite episodes; or the ones made when all the budgets had been exhausted. It wouldn't be 22 episodes a series, it would be 13 and it would meld character building and the actual plot in a far more sophisticated way than was done in 1994. It would have state of the art special effects and actors who didn't seem like they were reading off of prompt cards behind the cameras. It would be wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am from episode one. But...
I'm not sure it would work in 2020. At first I put this down to logistics; in the 25 years since B5 first appeared thinking has changed. A space station is a stupid idea; it is essentially a sitting target. To believe humans would be the facilitators of a universal peace is also stretching it a bit. In fact, if you strip away some of the interesting things that make the series tick, you'd be hard-pressed to find any redeeming qualities.
The truth is it was made for a buck fifty; it was written by a man whose biggest claim to fame at that point was Murder She Wrote and however much you try and talk up the complexities of the series, if you watch it in the cold light of 2019 there are holes you could steer a star ship through. In fact, it's probably a damned sight worse than people who slagged it off in 1994 realised. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, the thing that actually hasn't aged is the struggle for the soul of Earth; probably because we're seeing a lot of the themes from B5 play out in real life - not quite with the melodrama or action, but some themes explored in seasons two and three of B5 would not seem too out of place in 2019, even if they're just updated versions of things that happened in Germany in the 1930s.
I approached the series the same way I approached it 10 years ago when I last watched it, with an open mind and devoid of criticism and I saw beyond the shitty production values for about 20 episodes. I was focusing on the episodes that focused on the Shadow War and for a while I saw a symmetry I'd not really seen before; that the Earth subplots were all loosely tied into the Shadows story. This was probably the only positive revelation I garnered, because for most of the time I was gobsmacked by how awful it was.
Any sympathy, empathy or association I might once have felt towards lead characters evaporated - the way TV has become more sophisticated over the last 20 years saw to that. Instead of laughing at the jokes or smiling at the interactions between central characters, I started to cringe a little - would people really be like that in 300 years? Obviously, for something made in the 1990s it's going to have certain anachronistic problems; I managed to see past that; what I didn't expect was to find myself tearing plots apart, with consummate ease, no less.
Looking back, I now believe the Shadow War was a brilliant idea that sometimes was executed perfectly, but at other times was contrived and simply makes me think that my once mad devotion to the series blinded me from glaring holes in the plot and story?
The thing is the Shadow War was actually at its best as a preamble - a subplot. It kind of lost all of its cohesion when it became the main story. But even in the episodes before it became the main crux, it seems that common sense was ignored in favour of tension, suspense and action. In 2019, looking at how fascistic some things are now, the naivety of the 1990s appeared to forget about bureaucracy, unless it was a necessary device. The word 'contrived' keeps springing up in my head, as well as the phrase 'a means to an end' and it seems that both of these things were prominent in B5. I appreciate in some ways, fantasy TV depends on these kind of things, especially when you're dealing with so-called prophecy, but the lack of genuine continuity - even when most episodes were written by the same guy - made it feel 'manufactured'; there is little or nothing 'organic' about it.
I got to the stage where I didn't actually want to carry on watching it. How I'd missed such glaringly obvious plotting mistakes three times previously really annoyed me. I used to explain the sometimes uneven feel it had to the production and budgetary constraints but words are rarely affected by budgets. I struggled to understand why - comic book style - it liked to give a precis of the general story whenever it could; having characters tell other characters who were as versed in everything what was going on and for every genuine bit of dialogue, there was a ham hock of wince-inducing bollocks.
The worst thing was the realisation that the Shadow War actually didn't make a lot of sense and its conclusion kind of contradicted itself... The Shadows believed in evolution through chaos; the Vorlons (the other ancient race still hanging around with the little kids) believed in a more peaceful way, through genetic manipulation and covert means and while the Shadows went around getting all the races to have wars with each other, the Vorlons stood around being cryptic and frankly not doing much at all (which you kind of understand at first). The problem was, when push came to shove, the war was all about the Shadows and Vorlons resurrecting an ancient war and getting someone else to take all the losses. The rest of the universe became collateral damage as they fought each other, forgetting their reason for being there. That might have been the plan, but for races billions of years older than us, it all seemed a little like the meeting of two bullies in the same school yard and the sensible teacher having them both expelled for the future safety of everyone else...
That aside, B5 has always been called a series that has equality at its very heart, but it doesn't. Women are still stereotyped in a 1970s fashion; aliens are often used as a substitute for race or culture and religion appears to supersede everything else - suggesting the discovery of aliens reinforces mankind's belief in God, not destroys it. In fact, in many ways, it was simply business as usual - human dramas played out with prosthetics.
Babylon 5 was every criticism levelled at it. It was like the US version of late 1970s Dr Whos. You felt the sets would eventually collapse in on themselves. The overblown dialogue would eventually spur someone into saying 'this is bollocks, no one would ever talk like this'. It pains me to say this, but B5 was a graveyard for has-beens, D-list actors and basket cases and with the aid of time were allowed to con us into believing we were witnessing something great. It might have been once or maybe it could have been, but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. We don't need to know how it might be re-imagined. What we need is for people who remember it fondly to never watch it again (for fear of realisation) and to defend its corner, the way I once did. I feel it deserves that, if nothing else.
I want to be able to say with the confidence I had in the late 1990s that B5 was something special; the problem is the only thing that elevated it above awful was the ideas it played with. It executed those ideas piss poorly, but it doesn't detract from the fact that JMS (and others) had them in the first place. To attempt to do something like B5 is far more worthy of praise than to actually critique the show. The fact they were allowed to tell such a strange story from start to finish, with so much interference, is something to be held in high esteem... 'In the face of adversity' should have been the series' subtitle.
The problem is, it is the memory of it that has grown in our minds. If you love B5 for all the reasons I thought I did then I urge you to never go there again. Lock your DVDs or illegal files away - burn them, if necessary; just don't be tempted to re-view something important from a period in your past that can't be changed, because under (not a lot of) scrutiny it falls apart and becomes something you wish you could unsee; it makes you want to remember it how you did, not how it is.
Sunday, September 01, 2019
Pop Culture is Dead to me: The all-new, all-different X-Men?
Once upon a time, if you wanted to talk about mutants, explore the X-Men or find someone to champion something that was already big, I was your man. When I say I had a direct line to the man in charge of the X-Men in the 1990s, I wasn't lying. I even wrote a 'Beginners' Guide to the X-Men' for Marvel UK (which is a vignette for another time). I produced popular fanzines about them; I interviewed creators; my reviews were used as editorial tools. I even had an article in Time Out about... me and my mutant fixation.
There was a point in my comic collecting life where I possessed, not only every single X-Men comic, spin-off, one-shot and cross-over, I possessed every single comicbook that was in some tenuous way linked to Marvel's X-Men universe (which was part of their entire Marvel Comics Universe and not just restricted to what we see on the big screen). Every single comic - even comics which featured no mutants at all, but had characters in or stories that crossed-over into known Marvel Mutant History. I was that sad. The thing is, this was an attainable target in a world where collecting comics was extremely expensive and circumstances had pushed me into a collecting corner, so sticking with the X-Men seemed to be something I still connected with. The point is, by the year 2000 I had pretty much every single comic that I could shoehorn into my carefully researched (and various other peoples) Mutant timeline.
If truth be told, I started to fall out of love with the X-Men in the mid-1990s, when an arguably already bloated franchise of comics exploded into almost double the amount with a fraction of the quality. Because X was a family of comics, you almost felt obligated to keep up with what your third cousin twice removed was doing, even if it was as dull as dishwater and had cost you a couple of quid. The thing was, none of the spin-offs really addressed the reason I was an X-Men fan; they didn't do what this fanboy wanted, tie-up the loose ends of the last 30 years, instead they just added to something that didn't need adding to. They were prepared to change almost everything (yet again) for the of sake massive sales and the promise of a gold reprinted issue #1.
There was a time when I'd have to explain to people who the X-Men were; despite their comics being the best sellers in the USA and UK, this was pre-internet, CGI, video games and still sneered at as something losers were into. It's difficult in this day and age to explain the appeal for a comic with such a (behind-the-scenes) chequered past. The X-Men were created in the early 1960s by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the concept of the mutant was introduced to Marvel. Marvel had their superheroes, who became that way through cosmic rays, gamma radiation, radioactive spiders, super soldiers enhanced by serums and playboys in iron suits; mutants were born with a gene that made them 'better' than normal humans, therefore made them different. In 1963, the world knew profoundly of prejudice and the first appearance of the X-Men reflected this and as the comic limped along during its first few years, there were very few reasons to imagine it would one day become such a phenomenal success. The analogies to civil rights in the USA were an ad hominem at best.
By the time I got into the X-Men it had just been cancelled by Marvel, it had never exceeded a million sales, like many of the other books and it spent best part of its 66 issues as a bi-monthly (6 times a year). The X-Men wasn't the first Marvel Comic to be cancelled, but in an era where Marvel comics were like Marvel heroes - ever-present - it felt odd it had been. This is also where it gets complicated but only if I want to give you the ins and outs of a duck's arse - which I don't; the important thing was after March 1970 and for five years nothing new was published in the X-Men comics.
During the preceding years, with cancellation imminent, the X-Men started doing some unusual things. Initially, an innovative comics creator called Jim Steranko was given a couple of issues to have a play and the results were, for their time, quite staggering. For some people it gave a glimpse into how the X-Men look - somehow otherworldy. And then it was back to the same old average comicbooks which ultimately saw it get the axe. To cut a long story short, by the time Stan Lee's number two, Roy Thomas, took back over writing the book, it needed a miracle to save it from extinction. Arguably that miracle was delivered, even if sales at the time did nothing to reflect it. Thomas returned to the main theme - a bunch of teenagers with special powers in a hostile world fighting evil mutants and the rest of the world while staying decent people. This was the premise for the X-Men.
Thomas recruited hot new artist Neal Adams, and for the rest of the title's original run, we were treated to 9 comics of superior quality (albeit one of them wasn't drawn by Adams, his replacement was more than adequate). The way Adams (and Steranko before him) designed their pages was nothing like Marvel had ever done before and Stan Lee really didn't like it, but Thomas, who had been given more power after Lee withdrew from editorial duties, got it through and not only did the X-Men really begin to tell its story, comics changed as well; they began to grow up and reflect what their long-standing audience was thinking. The irony of those defining Adams X-Men was they looked fantastic but because Roy Thomas wasn't particularly 'adventurous' with a lot of his stuff, they were lightweight in the literary department. I think the Adams issues set a precedent with the X-Men; if they were ever to return they would need to be done differently.
For five long years (I was only young), the X-Men were off the menu - Marvel wouldn't even reprint the decent stuff as they produced issues #67 to #93 as reprints from the mid-1960s. Then something happened and as this isn't what this blog is about, I'll get back on track, otherwise I'll get bogged down.
In 1975, Marvel brought back the X-Men. And they did it in what was at the time a very risque move - they introduced us to a bunch of never-before-seen heroes and a couple of familiar ones and called them the X-Men. The familiar faces were Cyclops, Marvel Girl, now simply called Jean Grey and others popped in briefly before disappearing off to their own comic adventures (Iceman, Beast, Angel were all in other teams) and Professor X was there leading this new team of international X-Men against new and interesting villains, oh and there was a Canadian who had appeared in the Hulk once. It was a hit. In a pond that felt it had been stagnating throughout the 70s, the X-Men really was a breath of fresh air and because of accidentally shrewd promotion and a stroke of storytelling genius, it became a hit almost instantly.
There was a real buzz about the book on both sides of the Atlantic and by the time a writer called Chris Claremont and and artist called John Byrne were in the middle of their award-winning run, the X-Men was Marvel's runaway success; rivalling Spider-Man and the Hulk, but it required a path to get there and that sequence of stories needed to be special.
You know the story, you've seen the films. The background bollocks is something I've always found fascinating about the X-Men and why it took on an almost mythical status - this was the most successful English language comic book of all time. In a time when comics were at a real low, the X-Men almost single-handedly jump-started the entire comics industry. No shit. In business terms, the X-Men was what all comics aspired to be.
There is no coincidence that I pretty much stopped reading the X-Men around the year 2000. Trust me when I say I find it difficult to actually put a finger on it, but I must have made a conscious decision to stop buying the few remaining comics I collected. That whole period was ... difficult.
Also in 2000, the X-Men film came out. A big-budget superhero film. All-star cast. Patrick Stewart in the role he was born to play. What's not to like? Oh and in the intervening years Wolverine had became one of the top 5 superheroes in terms of $$$$. X-Men was going to be huge and with state-of-the-art CGI this was going to be the start of something big... I had the misfortune of catching a chunk of the first X-Men film recently on one of the outer ITV channels. It's dreadful. I mean, it's not, but it is. In terms of comparing the first three X-Men films to the last 6 or however many there have been, they're all fucking Citizen Kane, but compared to the battle sequences in say the Avengers films, the ones in X-Men are more akin to Batman 1966. The thing is it was 2000 and a lot was to happen in the ten years or so when the MCU got into its stride. Fox stayed as close to the real thing as we could have hoped, and while they buggered around with X-Men comic continuity to suit their film's narrative, in terms of authenticity it at least had a tide mark. By the time they basically ate themselves Ouroboros fashion, everything X-Men made little sense if you analysed it.
The other night, I knew full well what I was letting myself in for. The wife did. We both did. We watched X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
We'd suffered all the ones before this, we had to go for the full house. And watching it is the reason for this blog. The preamble was designed to show you that while the X-Men's adversity was from both sides of the fourth wall, it won through with good stories, soap opera-like plots and excellent art, plus it gave you a feeling of belonging to - as schmaltzy as this sounds - an extended-family drama. The thing is, that era ended in 1991, when X-Men ruled the world.
Without sounding like an X-Men elitist because whoever reads this and has read the X-Men will cite examples outside of this generalisation; let me explain. The X-Men started, in earnest in the late 1960s when imminent cancellation meant caution was thrown to the wind. That emergence continued through its mid-70s relaunch, when the writer - Chris Claremont - introduced a sense of family and soap opera.
Claremont introduced and then wove a network of subplots into things of labyrinthine beauty, many of which may never have been concluded, that made other comics seem terribly stuck in a formula. The writer realised the audience wanted something more than just the illusion of change. Many of these subplots led directly into remarkable stories; the seeds of future stories were introduced; forewarning became common and the X-Men became a serial comic. I also mentioned good marketing and luck earlier, well, it was more likely editorial bravery and going against the accepted norm. What made the X-Men 'different' is in its first relaunched issue, made people sit up and go, 'Oh, hello?' was that one of the new team - Thunderbird, a native American - was killed, only 3 issues into his hero career. He was (and remains) properly dead, not Marvel 'dead'.
So it was always a case of expect the unexpected with the X-Men and this duly played out with the Dark Phoenix Saga. For a few years, this was the most cataclysmic comic event since the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man. Jean Grey, very early on in the relaunch had saved the lives of the rest of the team in the space shuttle and as this was #100 and we'd already had a death, when it appeared that Jean dies at the end, us comic fans were like - would they do it again and with, you know, one of the originals? What followed was a maze-like journey that saw Jean Grey become Phoenix - reborn from the shuttle crash - essentially a mutant bestowed with a shitload of cosmic energy. Just how powerful she was got hinted at, but we're talking the power to see off Thanos with his Infinity Gauntlet in the time it takes you to tie your laces. Planet destroyer strong.
With great power comes great megalomania and Jean's human psyche couldn't handle it. In a massive great galactic court room she's found guilty of genocide - she took her powers to the other side of the galaxy and destroyed an entire planet to see how powerful she really was. It all goes tits up when the X-Men decide to prevent the galactic court from executing her and after a big emotional fight scene, Jean sacrifices herself to save Scott and is blasted into atoms by the Ultimate Nullifier. End of. And for a number of years, Jean Grey stayed dead dead, not Marvel dead.
It was, at the time, the comicbook equivalent of The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter saga; the paper version of what we've just had with Avengers: Endgame, played out over and across 27 issues of a comic and taking over four years to complete, it was proper soap/space/opera and had The X-Men films followed that route from the off then I might not be sitting here writing this...
In many ways, this is when the X-Men stopped being a brilliant comic and simply became very good. I see little said about the following issues, which were equally as devastating for different reasons and as the team came to terms with life without Jean, the family grew and greater intrigue and stranger intergalactic hijinks ensued. It stayed top for nearly a decade.
But in terms of how the X-Men stories relate to the cinema, Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl) is always pretty much going to be the lamest looking superhero in the entire comic publishers oeuvre. Visually she's a red head who stares at things; she might move her hands - or stand in a pose that is slightly odd. Oh and she reads minds... All great things to visualise in a visual medium. She wore a lot of short skirts and spent much of the '60s looking like a bemused Texan housewife forced to wear a silly costume.
And this is why I think the new and improved Marvel Cinematic Universe might have bitten off more than it can chew with the X-Men franchise. By all means play with the Fantastic Four toys; that's a given, but maybe leave the mutants to disappear into history or until it can be done properly.
Forgive me if this precis is incorrect, but we had three X-Men films, we then had a rebooted X-Men franchise utilising some existing characters but messing around with roles, characters, etc. Then we had a weird Wolverine sideline before we returned to three more utterly contemptible examples of how not to make a superhero film, that finished up at Dingy Phoenix with Sophie Turner proving once and for all she's Sansa Stark and only Sansa Stark. She can't act, she makes Rupert Grint look like Olivier. Building a film around a reasonably attractive red head with zero charisma, nil charm and no acting ability whatsoever is a tall order, which is why Dark Phoenix feels like an ongoing epilogue with periods of threatened, but unmaterialised, menace.
It felt like events happened so the next events can happen, so the next event... can you see where I'm going with this? It's held together with a flimsy nod to the comics and a race of aliens who SHIELD would dispatch between crap episodes. To call the film flimsy would be an insult to flims.
There's also this 'Dark' thing. In the comic, the Dark Phoenix destroyed an entire world; she manipulated reality, people and things for her desire; she placed the entire universe at peril and only her humanity saved us all. She was fucking Joan of Arc, in the end! Sophie Turner's Phoenix accidentally kills Mystique in a hissy fit; goes round being (not) menacing and blowing things up without actually hurting anyone and stuff happens and she sacrifices herself for the greater good. Yadda yadda yadda. It was such a colossal bunch of pants you could lose the Hulk in them.
It's like a long drawn out version - the X-Men films this is - of my single most horrendous visit to the cinema in the 21st century. Having read all of the Philip Pullman 'His Dark Materials' books, I went to the cinema to see the Golden Compass with such anticipation that the way it was mercilessly driven from my body has actually scarred me for life. It has almost entirely obliterated my expectation gland.
In fact, while I'm here, allow me to digress a little. I saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters the other day. Two days later, my wife says, "What did you think of Godzilla then?" My reply was, 'It was a big monster movie.' The thing is, it's a big monster movie with far too many humans standing around in awe like they're not part of an elite monster-chasing task force.
I wasn't expecting anything more than big monsters knocking seven bells out of each other and that's exactly what it gives you; the fact it levers a very post-modern husband, estranged wife and daughter situation into the film in a way that loses all of its post modernism is almost a joy to behold. This is Godzilla from the Bruckheimer school of film; it has people dying with smiles on their faces because they've helped the big nuclear lizard save the day is a throwback to a bygone age that never existed. We have a meeting with King Kong on the cards (these movies make money regardless of how blindly thrown together the human bits are) in what will obviously be the two of them teaming up to battle some really old gnarly titan who used to kick Godzilla's dad round the yard. Just using their strength, guile and atomic energy coupled with an oddly-paralleling-the-original-King-Kong subplot about the girl they both have to save while her beefcake boyfriend stands around gawping like a kid at the big monsters. It'll end with the entire world being consumed by sentient jelly. Red jelly.
But, the X-Men. How does Marvel introduce them to er... Marvel? One thing about the MCU at the moment is - as a viewer - it's as transparent as anything similar; Captain Marvel aside, most of the films didn't have anything a good 23-part TV series shouldn't have. However, the X-Men, as Dark Phoenix shows, in its glory, is that characters such as the Beast (original or furry blue-counterpart), Jean Grey, the original Angel, Magneto, Professor X - are all visually dull in the Marvel Age of cinema blockbusters. Much of the reason why the X-Men worked when it did was because comic books made you use your imagination more; they prove with Dark Phoenix that they can't really do much visual that really works on screen in the way an Iron Man, Hulk or Thor can dominate a scene. The thing that made the X-Men comic work was that feeling of family which I don't think can be replicated on the big screen, in a believable way. In the X-Men, it wasn't always the physical battles between good and bad. It had a history to allow itself to suddenly become grey, doing that in an extant MCU is likely to be as believable as The Inhumans and their less than lukewarm reception in Agents of SHIELD.
The other dilemma you have with the X-Men is with the Phoenix you have the perfect foil to create an event which maybe unifies a number of divulgent multiverses. We know the next Doctor Strange film is going to touch on the idea of a multiverse; different earths all slightly different. If I had to stick my neck out, I'd say that this is your gateway film into the next Real Deal. There will be people saying that Spider-Man: Far From Home is the beginning of the next story arc, but remember, there were several loose story arcs throughout the films and what ended with Thanos - plot and non-plot films, tied together with end credit scenes to keep us hooked and that is what all these new films and series are doing; they're filling the schedules with what they used to do in the comics; the sandwich filler (Oh and Spider-Man is no longer part of the MCU at time of writing).
Marvel/Disney's policy seems to be: introduce new characters, gauge the waters for three years and then begin the Thanos process again. If we haven't seen the Fantastic Four by 2022, I expect we'll at least be introduced to them via end credits or some device. I can see it; visualise it in my head... It will be done in a familiar way; this introduction will be through the streets of our New York. It will be full on introduction straight away - classic FF battling a villain above the streets of NYC. The crowds - typical New Yorkers - will be cheering them on; our current President will be adorned on some posters and everything will be the same as the MCU except the heroes will be different. I expect that after a totally-out-there opening 15 minutes, the plot device will appear - possibly a rip in the space time continuum - that's always a good one to play with, it gives you scope.
Switch back to the Marvel Universe and whoever is in charge of the Avengers now that all their regular Joes have pegged it, probably Professor Hulk aided by the girl from Wakanda and Captain Marvel, looking at the same thing from the other side, Cue fight between worlds, cue common ground: Reed Richards is this world's genius, he makes Tony Stark look like a dustman and there's also Reed's nemesis who's literally just as clever but also unfathomably evil. They all team up to fix the rift, but it's only temporary, at some point in the future it's going to tear again. Dun dun dun!
The you'll get another filler film probably featuring a geriatric Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, before...
The next bit. And that's where I draw a blank. You could easily have the two worlds of the FF and Avengers merge with little or no consequences. You could reintroduce the Iron Man and Captain America from their universes and bingo, you can reboot the franchise without ever having to end it. But the mutants. Hmm...
With their best story having been done one and a half times already and neither occasion with much justice, you're kind of stuck for a starting point with the X-Men. The problem with straightforward integration is how has it been kept a secret for so long and how come the Avengers weren't aware of it? That means reintroducing them possibly in a similar way to the FF (in my above scenario), this would require two things; a starting point and a cast that can believably be seen as part of the MCU. As far as I know Marvel wants to distance itself as far away from the Fox X films as possible and this is the best possible start. Don't even acknowledge their existence and start with Wolverine, but one from the past. Forget the origin nonsense, just reintroduce the plucky little Canadian, maybe in the way he was in the comics, by bumping into a Hulk (his universe's Hulk not ours). Make his adventure somehow linked to the existing MCU but really all about his universe and end it, maybe with the introduction of Professor X.
The next X outing could be further down the line; an older Prof X is assembling a new task force to try and find out the origins of a strange rift in the space time continuum (see what I did there?) and he assembles a new team of X-Men, with flashback references to an older team that went to investigate and several were lost through it. Cut to several members of the X-Men in a world almost identical to theirs, but with an entirely different set of 'heroes'. It's up to the other two universes to try and come up with a solution to save all of them and the only thing they can do is merge the three together to prevent, say Galactus from devouring it, so we can can shoehorn the Silver Surfer in there.
The three earths merge into one, heroes and villains who didn't exist in some now exist in the only and only the superheroes involved know it has happened. Fully integrated universe and a blank slate to boot. And I'll be happy with just one million dollars (at current exchange rate) for solving the dilemma for them.
You have to make a decision about whether the X-Men are heroes or outcasts in their own universe and I think they have to be the good guys fighting the bad mutants, which, in itself, breeds an unhealthy relationship. You have your built-in prejudices almost immediately, you don't need to use a sledgehammer on it. If you make them outcasts from the word go then you miss the opportunity of an entire subplot of who is and who isn't a mutant...
Once you have an integrated Marvel Universe, albeit ridiculously huge and cumbersome you can move your toys whatever way you choose. If Marvel/Disney treats this like an ongoing experiment it will live on longer than most of us. As the first story arc in the MCU showed; using actual comicbook stories as a template is the way forward. The best comicbook stories took place in the comic books, so mine them for their rich veins of history; just so long as whenever Marvel chooses to bring the mutants back, they consider looking at Alans Davis and Moore's Captain Britain run for inspiration on how to produce bizarre, massive yet insignificant and terrifying all in one story. It would open a world of opportunity if they did and give them a couple of really brilliant villains.
As an exercise is humiliation, X-Men: Dark Phoenix was something of a nadir. Rumour has it that a lot of it was reshot, which suggests it was either considerably worse than it turned out or Marvel/Disney wanted to ensure that nothing they do in the future could possibly be confused with this mess. The fact that Fox made (was it 9?) X-Men films suggests that there's money to be made from it even now and with the full force of Disney's marketing machine behind any reboot, I expect they can treble that amount of money by simply having Nick Fury meeting Charles Xavier, covertly. The problem is down to what they do, how they do it and what story they can come up with that will be original and worthy of introducing the X-Men to a cinematic universe that isn't broken and doesn't need fixing.
There was a point in my comic collecting life where I possessed, not only every single X-Men comic, spin-off, one-shot and cross-over, I possessed every single comicbook that was in some tenuous way linked to Marvel's X-Men universe (which was part of their entire Marvel Comics Universe and not just restricted to what we see on the big screen). Every single comic - even comics which featured no mutants at all, but had characters in or stories that crossed-over into known Marvel Mutant History. I was that sad. The thing is, this was an attainable target in a world where collecting comics was extremely expensive and circumstances had pushed me into a collecting corner, so sticking with the X-Men seemed to be something I still connected with. The point is, by the year 2000 I had pretty much every single comic that I could shoehorn into my carefully researched (and various other peoples) Mutant timeline.
If truth be told, I started to fall out of love with the X-Men in the mid-1990s, when an arguably already bloated franchise of comics exploded into almost double the amount with a fraction of the quality. Because X was a family of comics, you almost felt obligated to keep up with what your third cousin twice removed was doing, even if it was as dull as dishwater and had cost you a couple of quid. The thing was, none of the spin-offs really addressed the reason I was an X-Men fan; they didn't do what this fanboy wanted, tie-up the loose ends of the last 30 years, instead they just added to something that didn't need adding to. They were prepared to change almost everything (yet again) for the of sake massive sales and the promise of a gold reprinted issue #1.
By the time I got into the X-Men it had just been cancelled by Marvel, it had never exceeded a million sales, like many of the other books and it spent best part of its 66 issues as a bi-monthly (6 times a year). The X-Men wasn't the first Marvel Comic to be cancelled, but in an era where Marvel comics were like Marvel heroes - ever-present - it felt odd it had been. This is also where it gets complicated but only if I want to give you the ins and outs of a duck's arse - which I don't; the important thing was after March 1970 and for five years nothing new was published in the X-Men comics.
During the preceding years, with cancellation imminent, the X-Men started doing some unusual things. Initially, an innovative comics creator called Jim Steranko was given a couple of issues to have a play and the results were, for their time, quite staggering. For some people it gave a glimpse into how the X-Men look - somehow otherworldy. And then it was back to the same old average comicbooks which ultimately saw it get the axe. To cut a long story short, by the time Stan Lee's number two, Roy Thomas, took back over writing the book, it needed a miracle to save it from extinction. Arguably that miracle was delivered, even if sales at the time did nothing to reflect it. Thomas returned to the main theme - a bunch of teenagers with special powers in a hostile world fighting evil mutants and the rest of the world while staying decent people. This was the premise for the X-Men.
For five long years (I was only young), the X-Men were off the menu - Marvel wouldn't even reprint the decent stuff as they produced issues #67 to #93 as reprints from the mid-1960s. Then something happened and as this isn't what this blog is about, I'll get back on track, otherwise I'll get bogged down.
In 1975, Marvel brought back the X-Men. And they did it in what was at the time a very risque move - they introduced us to a bunch of never-before-seen heroes and a couple of familiar ones and called them the X-Men. The familiar faces were Cyclops, Marvel Girl, now simply called Jean Grey and others popped in briefly before disappearing off to their own comic adventures (Iceman, Beast, Angel were all in other teams) and Professor X was there leading this new team of international X-Men against new and interesting villains, oh and there was a Canadian who had appeared in the Hulk once. It was a hit. In a pond that felt it had been stagnating throughout the 70s, the X-Men really was a breath of fresh air and because of accidentally shrewd promotion and a stroke of storytelling genius, it became a hit almost instantly.
There was a real buzz about the book on both sides of the Atlantic and by the time a writer called Chris Claremont and and artist called John Byrne were in the middle of their award-winning run, the X-Men was Marvel's runaway success; rivalling Spider-Man and the Hulk, but it required a path to get there and that sequence of stories needed to be special.
You know the story, you've seen the films. The background bollocks is something I've always found fascinating about the X-Men and why it took on an almost mythical status - this was the most successful English language comic book of all time. In a time when comics were at a real low, the X-Men almost single-handedly jump-started the entire comics industry. No shit. In business terms, the X-Men was what all comics aspired to be.
There is no coincidence that I pretty much stopped reading the X-Men around the year 2000. Trust me when I say I find it difficult to actually put a finger on it, but I must have made a conscious decision to stop buying the few remaining comics I collected. That whole period was ... difficult.
The other night, I knew full well what I was letting myself in for. The wife did. We both did. We watched X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
We'd suffered all the ones before this, we had to go for the full house. And watching it is the reason for this blog. The preamble was designed to show you that while the X-Men's adversity was from both sides of the fourth wall, it won through with good stories, soap opera-like plots and excellent art, plus it gave you a feeling of belonging to - as schmaltzy as this sounds - an extended-family drama. The thing is, that era ended in 1991, when X-Men ruled the world.
Without sounding like an X-Men elitist because whoever reads this and has read the X-Men will cite examples outside of this generalisation; let me explain. The X-Men started, in earnest in the late 1960s when imminent cancellation meant caution was thrown to the wind. That emergence continued through its mid-70s relaunch, when the writer - Chris Claremont - introduced a sense of family and soap opera.
Claremont introduced and then wove a network of subplots into things of labyrinthine beauty, many of which may never have been concluded, that made other comics seem terribly stuck in a formula. The writer realised the audience wanted something more than just the illusion of change. Many of these subplots led directly into remarkable stories; the seeds of future stories were introduced; forewarning became common and the X-Men became a serial comic. I also mentioned good marketing and luck earlier, well, it was more likely editorial bravery and going against the accepted norm. What made the X-Men 'different' is in its first relaunched issue, made people sit up and go, 'Oh, hello?' was that one of the new team - Thunderbird, a native American - was killed, only 3 issues into his hero career. He was (and remains) properly dead, not Marvel 'dead'.
So it was always a case of expect the unexpected with the X-Men and this duly played out with the Dark Phoenix Saga. For a few years, this was the most cataclysmic comic event since the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man. Jean Grey, very early on in the relaunch had saved the lives of the rest of the team in the space shuttle and as this was #100 and we'd already had a death, when it appeared that Jean dies at the end, us comic fans were like - would they do it again and with, you know, one of the originals? What followed was a maze-like journey that saw Jean Grey become Phoenix - reborn from the shuttle crash - essentially a mutant bestowed with a shitload of cosmic energy. Just how powerful she was got hinted at, but we're talking the power to see off Thanos with his Infinity Gauntlet in the time it takes you to tie your laces. Planet destroyer strong.With great power comes great megalomania and Jean's human psyche couldn't handle it. In a massive great galactic court room she's found guilty of genocide - she took her powers to the other side of the galaxy and destroyed an entire planet to see how powerful she really was. It all goes tits up when the X-Men decide to prevent the galactic court from executing her and after a big emotional fight scene, Jean sacrifices herself to save Scott and is blasted into atoms by the Ultimate Nullifier. End of. And for a number of years, Jean Grey stayed dead dead, not Marvel dead.
It was, at the time, the comicbook equivalent of The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter saga; the paper version of what we've just had with Avengers: Endgame, played out over and across 27 issues of a comic and taking over four years to complete, it was proper soap/space/opera and had The X-Men films followed that route from the off then I might not be sitting here writing this...
In many ways, this is when the X-Men stopped being a brilliant comic and simply became very good. I see little said about the following issues, which were equally as devastating for different reasons and as the team came to terms with life without Jean, the family grew and greater intrigue and stranger intergalactic hijinks ensued. It stayed top for nearly a decade.
But in terms of how the X-Men stories relate to the cinema, Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl) is always pretty much going to be the lamest looking superhero in the entire comic publishers oeuvre. Visually she's a red head who stares at things; she might move her hands - or stand in a pose that is slightly odd. Oh and she reads minds... All great things to visualise in a visual medium. She wore a lot of short skirts and spent much of the '60s looking like a bemused Texan housewife forced to wear a silly costume.
And this is why I think the new and improved Marvel Cinematic Universe might have bitten off more than it can chew with the X-Men franchise. By all means play with the Fantastic Four toys; that's a given, but maybe leave the mutants to disappear into history or until it can be done properly.
Forgive me if this precis is incorrect, but we had three X-Men films, we then had a rebooted X-Men franchise utilising some existing characters but messing around with roles, characters, etc. Then we had a weird Wolverine sideline before we returned to three more utterly contemptible examples of how not to make a superhero film, that finished up at Dingy Phoenix with Sophie Turner proving once and for all she's Sansa Stark and only Sansa Stark. She can't act, she makes Rupert Grint look like Olivier. Building a film around a reasonably attractive red head with zero charisma, nil charm and no acting ability whatsoever is a tall order, which is why Dark Phoenix feels like an ongoing epilogue with periods of threatened, but unmaterialised, menace.
It felt like events happened so the next events can happen, so the next event... can you see where I'm going with this? It's held together with a flimsy nod to the comics and a race of aliens who SHIELD would dispatch between crap episodes. To call the film flimsy would be an insult to flims.
There's also this 'Dark' thing. In the comic, the Dark Phoenix destroyed an entire world; she manipulated reality, people and things for her desire; she placed the entire universe at peril and only her humanity saved us all. She was fucking Joan of Arc, in the end! Sophie Turner's Phoenix accidentally kills Mystique in a hissy fit; goes round being (not) menacing and blowing things up without actually hurting anyone and stuff happens and she sacrifices herself for the greater good. Yadda yadda yadda. It was such a colossal bunch of pants you could lose the Hulk in them.
It's like a long drawn out version - the X-Men films this is - of my single most horrendous visit to the cinema in the 21st century. Having read all of the Philip Pullman 'His Dark Materials' books, I went to the cinema to see the Golden Compass with such anticipation that the way it was mercilessly driven from my body has actually scarred me for life. It has almost entirely obliterated my expectation gland.
In fact, while I'm here, allow me to digress a little. I saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters the other day. Two days later, my wife says, "What did you think of Godzilla then?" My reply was, 'It was a big monster movie.' The thing is, it's a big monster movie with far too many humans standing around in awe like they're not part of an elite monster-chasing task force.
But, the X-Men. How does Marvel introduce them to er... Marvel? One thing about the MCU at the moment is - as a viewer - it's as transparent as anything similar; Captain Marvel aside, most of the films didn't have anything a good 23-part TV series shouldn't have. However, the X-Men, as Dark Phoenix shows, in its glory, is that characters such as the Beast (original or furry blue-counterpart), Jean Grey, the original Angel, Magneto, Professor X - are all visually dull in the Marvel Age of cinema blockbusters. Much of the reason why the X-Men worked when it did was because comic books made you use your imagination more; they prove with Dark Phoenix that they can't really do much visual that really works on screen in the way an Iron Man, Hulk or Thor can dominate a scene. The thing that made the X-Men comic work was that feeling of family which I don't think can be replicated on the big screen, in a believable way. In the X-Men, it wasn't always the physical battles between good and bad. It had a history to allow itself to suddenly become grey, doing that in an extant MCU is likely to be as believable as The Inhumans and their less than lukewarm reception in Agents of SHIELD.
Marvel/Disney's policy seems to be: introduce new characters, gauge the waters for three years and then begin the Thanos process again. If we haven't seen the Fantastic Four by 2022, I expect we'll at least be introduced to them via end credits or some device. I can see it; visualise it in my head... It will be done in a familiar way; this introduction will be through the streets of our New York. It will be full on introduction straight away - classic FF battling a villain above the streets of NYC. The crowds - typical New Yorkers - will be cheering them on; our current President will be adorned on some posters and everything will be the same as the MCU except the heroes will be different. I expect that after a totally-out-there opening 15 minutes, the plot device will appear - possibly a rip in the space time continuum - that's always a good one to play with, it gives you scope.
The you'll get another filler film probably featuring a geriatric Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, before...
The next bit. And that's where I draw a blank. You could easily have the two worlds of the FF and Avengers merge with little or no consequences. You could reintroduce the Iron Man and Captain America from their universes and bingo, you can reboot the franchise without ever having to end it. But the mutants. Hmm...
With their best story having been done one and a half times already and neither occasion with much justice, you're kind of stuck for a starting point with the X-Men. The problem with straightforward integration is how has it been kept a secret for so long and how come the Avengers weren't aware of it? That means reintroducing them possibly in a similar way to the FF (in my above scenario), this would require two things; a starting point and a cast that can believably be seen as part of the MCU. As far as I know Marvel wants to distance itself as far away from the Fox X films as possible and this is the best possible start. Don't even acknowledge their existence and start with Wolverine, but one from the past. Forget the origin nonsense, just reintroduce the plucky little Canadian, maybe in the way he was in the comics, by bumping into a Hulk (his universe's Hulk not ours). Make his adventure somehow linked to the existing MCU but really all about his universe and end it, maybe with the introduction of Professor X.
The next X outing could be further down the line; an older Prof X is assembling a new task force to try and find out the origins of a strange rift in the space time continuum (see what I did there?) and he assembles a new team of X-Men, with flashback references to an older team that went to investigate and several were lost through it. Cut to several members of the X-Men in a world almost identical to theirs, but with an entirely different set of 'heroes'. It's up to the other two universes to try and come up with a solution to save all of them and the only thing they can do is merge the three together to prevent, say Galactus from devouring it, so we can can shoehorn the Silver Surfer in there.The three earths merge into one, heroes and villains who didn't exist in some now exist in the only and only the superheroes involved know it has happened. Fully integrated universe and a blank slate to boot. And I'll be happy with just one million dollars (at current exchange rate) for solving the dilemma for them.
You have to make a decision about whether the X-Men are heroes or outcasts in their own universe and I think they have to be the good guys fighting the bad mutants, which, in itself, breeds an unhealthy relationship. You have your built-in prejudices almost immediately, you don't need to use a sledgehammer on it. If you make them outcasts from the word go then you miss the opportunity of an entire subplot of who is and who isn't a mutant...
Once you have an integrated Marvel Universe, albeit ridiculously huge and cumbersome you can move your toys whatever way you choose. If Marvel/Disney treats this like an ongoing experiment it will live on longer than most of us. As the first story arc in the MCU showed; using actual comicbook stories as a template is the way forward. The best comicbook stories took place in the comic books, so mine them for their rich veins of history; just so long as whenever Marvel chooses to bring the mutants back, they consider looking at Alans Davis and Moore's Captain Britain run for inspiration on how to produce bizarre, massive yet insignificant and terrifying all in one story. It would open a world of opportunity if they did and give them a couple of really brilliant villains.
As an exercise is humiliation, X-Men: Dark Phoenix was something of a nadir. Rumour has it that a lot of it was reshot, which suggests it was either considerably worse than it turned out or Marvel/Disney wanted to ensure that nothing they do in the future could possibly be confused with this mess. The fact that Fox made (was it 9?) X-Men films suggests that there's money to be made from it even now and with the full force of Disney's marketing machine behind any reboot, I expect they can treble that amount of money by simply having Nick Fury meeting Charles Xavier, covertly. The problem is down to what they do, how they do it and what story they can come up with that will be original and worthy of introducing the X-Men to a cinematic universe that isn't broken and doesn't need fixing.
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