Coping with life after "After Earth"

a) I went to see After Earth There were some intolerably boring moments indeed but otherwise it was just about okay and the background story seemed disinteresting. The most boring of moments was when the boy took shelter beneath a tree fallen trunk and his father spoke to him from his room in a scene for a few minutes that didn't have any movement and one wanted to close one's eyes to cope with the boredom of it all.
 
b) The only things that appeared to be dangerous on the planet were the leeches, the monster the Ursa that they brought with them and indeed the leeches. The large cats attacking the giants birds nest didn't seem that dangerous when the boy was armed with a hand weapon, nothing more dangerous than the giant cats that we have today. The baboons appeared to be only dangerous after they have had rocks thrown at them which is not surprising, even a humans would be enraged having rocks chucked at them.

c) It seemed rather odd that the interior of the spacecraft seemed to be made from fabric, and really the technology seemed rather backwards. It might even have helped if they had created some technology to perform futuristic surgery on people and indeed a robot to pick up items from across the landscape that it took more than a day to retrieve by foot. There was something almost completely pointless about why they should be stuck in the situation that they are. It was like a nightmare coping with the idea of such a story world being taken as a serious reality.  One wonders how the boy in the movie survived the space ship crash after seeing how the interior of the craft was ripped apart. The shredded material spread around the outside of the crash site of the tale of the ship reminded me of the afterbirth of some animal or endless reams of toilet paper. This might be the sort of game that Shyamalan might be playing with the mind, is it wise to be caught in such mind games, stay out of these things.

d) Why it is that the giant bird decided to give up its life to protect the boy is another thing entirely. Birds have been known to lose their young but not suddenly become suicidal over it, surely? Did the thing mistake the boy during flight for one of its own young, is that the idea? Well I will try not to think too long about it. Things seem to be present or happen for the sake of it with no known reason required, it's there for the sake of imagery. perhaps like a dream.

Jim Cameron's Terminator fever dream

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Key image from Terminator inspired by dream

1. James Cameron: I was sick and dead broke in Rome, Italy, with a fever of 102, doing the final cut of Piranha II. Thats when I thought of Terminator. I guess it was a fever dream. (From: James Cameron - How to direct a 'Terminator',Starlog #89, Date: December, 1984)
2. Omni magazine: Piranha II: The Spawning marked Cameron's full-dress directorial debut. When the Italian producer fired him off the picture after principal photography was completed, Cameron flew to Rome, broke into the editing room after hours and re-cut the movie the way he wanted it. It was in his Rome hotel that Cameron awoke from a fever dream of a robot killer from the future, unable to walk, dragging itself by a knife along the floor as it chased its wounded female prey.  (Omni magazine 1998) 
3. NEW YORKER: In 1981, Cameron had the idea that became his first autonomous movie. It came to him, as he tells it, in the post-Freudian form of divine intercession: a dream. He was in Rome, trying to see a cut of “Piranha 2,” a bikinis-and-blood exploitation flick that he had been hired to direct. (He had been fired by the Italian executive producer, and wanted to get his name taken off the film.) He was sick and broke, and staying in a tiny pensione. One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.”  (New Yorker, 26th October 2009)
   
4.  George Noory: And tell us a little bit about the dream that led to Terminator, what happened?
   
   James Cameron: Yuh, that wasn't a precognitive dream, that was just a, and I don't get them that I'm aware of, but that was just a nightmare, seriously I was sick, I had the flu and a high fever, and so in that feverish dream state I had a dream about a, you know, a chrome skeleton and fire, emerging from the fire, you know and there was an image in of itself, and have a very strong feeling of dread associated with it in a dream almost unexplained by the image, and you know, we've all felt that, something freighted with a strong sense of dread so, I woke up from that and I felt it was a compelling image, and er I started to draw, started to write the story, to draw variations on that theme and it turned into this chrome skeletal figure, kind of death figure, er, pursuing a girl and I thought, okay, let's build a story around that and then it became a science fiction story and then this chrome death figure came from the future and was trying to kill her for some reason, what's the reason, well, her life will have some meaning that, that er is very significant in years hence and then the story kind of spun from that (Coast To Coast AM, Monday August 23, 2010)
5. Ian Nathan: The future came to him in a fever dream. He awoke with a jolt like a jump cut, the image still framed in his mind's eye "Something really horrific" he would repeat to his friends. It was March 1982, and the night before, as he collapsed into bed, he had been running a temperature of 102, slack and swampy with flu, "sick as a dog". The sweat that prickled his body brought to mind forks of electricity dancing and jabbing him around; he was momentarily disorientated shivering like a man pulled from icy water. This, he later conceived, is what it would be like for a human being to travel through time. He was so short of cash that he had taken to roaming the corridors of his seedy pensione somewhere in Rome's less salubrious backstreets, pilfering bread rolls from the breakfast trays in order to feed himself. He was virtually a skeleton, exhausted, unkempt - off the grid. The perfect recipient for a nuclear-powere epiphany. When he awoke the following morning, the afterimage of his dream was still stretched in his mind. He had been unfairly fired from his directing job, his big break, and had come to Rome to confront the Italian production company. He didn't have a friend for over 6000 miles and nine time zones. His airfare had been one way. "I was pissed off an alienated, my per diem," he recalls " and I wasn't feeling very much part of the flow of humanity." From the table he grabbed paper and pencils. and began to sketch that terrifying snapshot of the creature from his dream. He wanted to have a good look at it. "It was a chrome skeleton emerging phoenix like out of the fire,"  he says. As the drawing revealed, the machine figure wasn't striding - it had been torn in half somehow and was crawling from the flames. "He had a kitchen knife and pulled himself along the floor with it, dragging his broken arm. I also sketched the girl trying to get away from it." As he sat back to examine his newborn, the young director smiled for the first time in what seemed like forever, "I thought 'That was cool. I had never seen that in a movie before.' "
   James Cameron genuinely feared he might be dying that night. When he came to write the initial treatment, at first simply known as The Terminator, he described the implacable, silver coloured dream demon as "death rendered in steel." Whether it was prophecy, damnation , or half crazed product of a delirious mind was hard to tell as Rome awake  to its indifferent bustle. But this fiery template , this endoskeleton idea, would eventually transform Cameron into the biggest director of all time and change cinema in ways that he could never have envisaged in 1982. As dreams go, it was significant.
6. Hale Anne Hurd:He called from Rome, telling me about his dream, about a robot that previous to that had been a cyborg with human flesh, emerging from the flames "(Empire, October 2013, p98)

ghosts of Giger's biomechanics in Superman: Man of Steel

General Zod'S collar and Giger's ELP II work 218

Skull like faces with breathing masks. A creature from Giger's Li II and General Zod's helmet

loose comparison to groin of Giger's Alien suit and wall of a Kryptonian environment

Superman: Man of Steel

1. General Viewpoint: I very much enjoyed the new Superman movie, but realises that it could give a 4 year old child bad nightmares and it was quite a violent action packed movie indeed and indeed there was an immense amount of destruction taking place that might almost be post 9/11-ish. It might all be a bad dream in the end that someone had after eating a pizza. Perhaps also it was fairly low on the type of humour that made the first three Superman movies quite fun. The truth is that I am not really sure why this film is going in one direction after another and it just seemed that all assumptions that I could make about the story seemed like a cloud. Perhaps the film's story had been clouded by the new additions to it in terms of the mythos relating to the Kryptonians and Superman's role in the story, one might start to ask where it was all coming from, as if it were an odd injection of DNA from other movies that we've seen that made it seem very post-Prometheus and post-Matrix. It appears as if we have to keep running around in circles looking for a way into the nucleus of this movie that the production crew are not talking about. Whose idea was it and why? Or was it all just strange assumptions from David Goyer that came out of a cloud. The 3D in this film was sometimes good and then at other times almost non existent at some points.
2. Choice of actor: Henry Cavill, the actor who played Superman in this movie seemed to be an ideal choice for this time especially after his appearance in Immortals where he played the hero Theseus , Immortals had been produced by the same producer as 300 which was directed by Zach Snyder the director of this film. Henry Cavill is certainly not Christopher Reeve, but stood well in his own boots within this new film in a world where we might give up hoping for anything too interesting and innovative to get onto the screen. I probably thought he was the best man for the job.
3. Making the humans feel comfortable: I started to wonder why the armored outfits for the villains seem to be almost like the Engineers from Prometheus and these invaders were using terraforming technology as well. However the villain was a great one and his reason to be a villain worked well with the story.  The villain's armor seems to be loosely inspired by Giger's artwork. Also the reason that Superman keeps his handcuffs on for a while during the story is revealed to be more or less the reason David the Android reveals for why he is wearing his suit and helmet for their adventure aboard the planet's surface in Prometheus.
4. Kevin Costner's Performance: Kevin Costner gives a sensitive performance as the adopted father of Superman who obviously has been forced to develop a wider perspective of life with a great sense of foresight about his adopted son and it appears to be quite an important part of Superman's character development in the story about realising where it is important for him to conceal himself and in the process let people die including his own father.
   
5. Superman's DNA: One might ask if it was in Superman's DNA to have the urge to wear a red cape as he is as a child seen wearing one during play and well the superhero suit is one presented to him in a space craft.  Are we to assume that he wore a different coloured cape for every day of the week and it just so happened that they are selecting the day that he wore a red cape and this just so happens to be the colour of the cape of his cape from the suit he was given as a 33 year old adult.
6. The Derelict Ship: In the film we arrived at a point where a derelict space ship is discovered buried deep in the ice, and when Superman manages to tunnel into the ice to get to the spacecraft and soon it is revealed to be an ancient space craft from Krypton, with one mummified dead body in a sleeping capsule and the sign that someone had got out. Yet, this space craft is still in working order, and uses the same technology that Krypton had been using when Superman/ Kal-el as a baby left Krypton. Due to the compatability in technology so he is able to inset a key into the computer and upload a virtual copy of his father into the computer system so that Jor-El can be seen walking around and talking as a seeming living human being. This craft also just so happens to contain a growing area for the Kryptonian babies who appear to be being grown in the manner that babies were being grown en-masse in Matrix to act as batteries for the computer main frame. I'm not actually sure why it had this artificial womb feature but after all the confusion about why in Alien the derelict ship had a cargo vault that might have been a cave beneath the ship instead, the confusions that one can have about alien ships and their contents is to be tolerated. So what was the derelict ship doing there for 20000 years? Are the many of them to be found all still in fine working order? Do they all look as if they were based on slugs?
7. The terraforming ship: The villains' space craft indeed seemed to look a bit like a Philippe Starck orange squeezer, there's no getting away from that and indeed they also resembled oversized lobster crackers as well
8. General cloud of assumptions: There are many questions to ask about the story, I don't bother to read the comic books so I didn't mind the possible ways that this film might differ from the comic book world and maybe I might be in a position where I really can't comment about the story because I don't really know where its foundations are and to some degree the whole thing seems like a cloud, but it certainly seemed to be a huge disaster movie with a vast death toll, endless collateral damage and buildings destroyed by the dozen. Towards the end there was the point where we have General Zod making his boast about how he spent his whole life training as a warrior and well it doesn't stop Superman  who wasn't from beating him up. Perhaps the violence and death toll might be expected after what we've seen in 300. Perhaps the script remains a little unfirm with characters making claims with little foundation. However General Zod's character only seems to be after Superman because Superman contains the genetic blueprint of the whole civilisation of Krypton in his DNA. General Zod believed that his civilisation that he was fighting for was now dead once the ship with birthing capabilities had been destroyed and the terraforming machines had been destroyed, and it was his job afterwards to kill Superman for stealing his soul. One wonders what the point of it all violence from Zod was all about, and if all Kryptonian warriors had these ideas. And maybe everything that General Zod represented was just a general cloud of assumptions. However beyond all the clouds of confusion I do look forwards to a sequel and look forwards to the release of the blu-ray DVD.
9. See also: ghosts of Giger's biomechanics in Superman: Man of Steel

Fast & Furious 6

I went to see Fast & Furious 6 today. It was enjoyable, fairly solid, stylish superfluous action movie with great fights, car chases and other vehicle chases. I didn't find the film funny in the slightest but every other person in the audience was giggling away at all the comments that were intended to be humorous. I thought that the big action sequences had an abstract impossible dream like appeal to them that was very enjoyable. 

The last act of the main story movie seemed easily tacked on rather flimsily but seemed like a great sequence. It seemed to be the sort of movie where they could easily have just added another big sequence just as easily as that though. just when you thought it has ended after it seemed to have come to an end earlier on. 

This movie will be a great one to watch on TV in future in the early hours of the morning without any clue required as to what is going on and who is really what and , indeed it seems to share two film performers with this years G I Joe but one only makes a cameo appearance. 

I thought that I remembered that Bruce Willis was in it somewhere in the trailer but there were numerous bald heads so to be mistaken like that might be pretty easy. I might have the urge to take a look at number 5 maybe the next one when it comes in the cinema. The 2.5 hour journey through the film goes quickly. 

All the thrills and excitement from seeing it quickly dissipate after the movie. This must be the ultimate reason to see it.

Dead Man Down

A) I saw the movie Dead Man Down today, and I enjoyed the film very much. Colin Farrel was very good in it and I felt that he and Noomi Rapace managed to strike up a good chemistry all the way through the sombre world of this story. One thing to point out about this movie, despite the fact that it was made in America possibly for an American audience, it has every reason to fail there because this Danish director of the film managed to create a film with a distinctly European feel to it. The pacing of the piece may also have been disturbingly foreign foreign such as the way we were introduced to the depths of the character's worlds in such a fast way. I felt it was fabulous film with a great sense of atmosphere and maybe if people had a bit of a problem trying to work out which side of the Atlantic it was filmed in, I wouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised. It highlighted maybe the feeling that America was made up of people from distinctively different foreign cultures. Sometimes however the words uttered by characters in various parts of the film were inaudible, Armand Assante briefly turned up in a scene and it certainly wasn't easy to work out what he was saying at all, but he calmly spoke through the scene in this thick strange accent never the less, and the very last words said by Colin Farrel's character to Dominic Cooper's character didn't actually come through in an audible way. Was this due to the sound system at the Odeon Leicester Square. The film left me with a wonderful mild sense of a poetic bleakness.

B)  The next thought about this film, since I am a scifi buff, it reminded me about the fact that Ridley Scott loved his film Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and from what I saw in Dead Man Down, the director Niels Arden Oplev ought to be given the job of directing the Blade Runner sequel if Ridley finds himself too busy to direct it personally and wants it done and is happy to produce it.

C) One curiosity in the movie for me were the tiny lights that seem to zip across the grass in the graveyard. Were they leaping grasshoppers that reflected the lights of the set or were they fireflies or something like that instead of the weird hallucination that almost seemed to be. Maybe I was indeed seeing something that wasn't actually there.

The new Star Trek movie

I went to see the new Star Trek movie today, I remembers that it's called Star Trek and really can't be bothered to look up the other bit of the title since it seems completely irrelevant. However I thought this movie had a plot that was just about as grossly irritating as the previous one, I didn't like the way the plot unfolded, it was all too obvious.

I was irritated by most of the cheesy dialogue scenes and once I found out who the villain actually was in terms of who he was in the old universe of Star Trek, I felt compelled to cringe as the name was spoken and this villain in this movie looked nothing like the one that we might remember from old. If I were drinking something at the time I might have choked over it my drink as well because of the complete and utter dissimilarity between the two.

Every time I saw Benedict Cumberbatch shooting his gun blowing up various aliens and their space crafts, I cringed at the way this person could be seen to be so powerful and when he was soon under the light of the Enterprise, he looked so lean and pale almost as if he were made from plastic. The moment that Benedict Cumberbatch's charcter's true name was revealed, I thought, "oh no, there's no way they can change this now, they couldn't just leave it as someone who was in a situation like Khan Noonien Singh from the original series what the hell can this actor have to do with the likes of someone played by Ricardo Montalban. What the hell! I expect the next thing that will happen is that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be approached in a future series of Fantasy Island"

Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonian Singh almost resembling the android character 
Data from Star Trek: The Next Generations who was created by Professor Noonian Sung.

However Cumberbatch gave a great performance in Star Trek irrespective of what he was supposed to be.  Maybe one might just pretend that when he declared his name, what we heard was a misheard mumbling about Professor Noonian Sung the inventor of the android Data from Star Trek The Next Generation and maybe this Cumberbatch character was another one of his androids and just explore further forms of confusing thoughts from there

The new Klingons didn't look very good, the makeup for the main Klingon really looked ridiculous in my point of view and I was glad when the Klingons had gone.

There were many good action scenes. Some of the acting was fine, but the comedy in it was tedious. And quite honestly the interior of the Enterprise seemed now very ill designed when it came to people needing the support of handle bars along a bridge in the ships engine room and large parts of the ships interior tended to get loose and fly around almost killing people when the ship lost it's power and found itself caught within the gravity of another large body. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feels maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D. Otherwise the camera work and colour design were great, I saw it in 2D and feel maybe it might have been better to see the film in 3D.

One misses the old cast, William Shatner as Kirk with his familiar voice and indeed while there is an appearance from Leonard Nimoy as Spock, it is never enough and Zachary Quinto as the new Spock as much as a good actor he is in his role doesn't quite have the voice one associates with Leonard Nimoy. The less I say about the voice of Anton Yeltzin as Chekov and Simon Pegg as Scotty the better.

Well despite the typical way that J J Abrams pisses all over the Star Trek universe with the aid of the likes of Damon Lindel-something-or-other , I will watch it again in 3D and will of course see the next one when it comes out.

What have I got myself involved with here, I might perhaps wake up in the middle of the night screaming because I have to digest the conflicts and oddities of this new Star Trek movie and the ones to follow. It is a situation likely to be a cause of post traumatic stress having to agree that this is the way that cinema is going where we are endlessly experience of tolerating all the rubbish thrown at the audience from the movie to extract something that might be a small but worthwhile vision somewhere within the film