The first episode of Fox’s Gotham tells the well worn story of Batman’s origin. A young Bruce Wayne is traumatized by watching his parents murdered in front of him. But Gotham isn’t content with merely telling us about Batman, they manage to shoehorn in the Penguin, Joker(maybe), Riddler, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy. On the surface, it wants to be a police procedural that follows around James Gordon, future Police Commissioner and friend of Batman. For the most part, I liked Gotham, but I found it impossible to pay attention to the story of Police corruption. When we flew over Stately…
Category: sci fi
Lock In by John Scalzi
John Scalzi has written a few very fun books, including Red Shirts and Old Man’s War. Lock In covers a lot of familiar Sci-fi territory, but it’s still fun. One of the major gimmicks in Old Man’s War was that old people could trade their used up old bodies in for shiny new bodies that were very tough. This is kind of a foundantion story about how this tech might have come into being. We have a lot of people who got sick with a disease that left them paralyzed, but conscious-thus locked in. So naturally our hero is a…
Guardians of the Galaxy
Spoilers and such We start off with a moody kid in 1988 listening to a Walkman as his mother dies in a room nearby. He goes outside for a cry and is taken up by a very large spaceship. 26 years go by and we meet our hero on a deserted planet where he is doing a bit of looting and dancing to some classic rock. We can assume that he’s been doing this sort of thing for a while. He steals a shiny metal orb and kills a number of people who try to stop him. He calls himself…
Cryptonomicon
A few Spoilers All writers love doing research. There’s nothing quite as fun as, say, deciding to write a book about Nazi submarines and then going about the business of becoming the world’s leading authority on Nazi Submaries. The reason to do this is that when you mention, in passing, in one or two paragraphs, that funny looking little shinny bit of metal sticking out of the wall just so is called (Insert Proper and Correct Nomeclacure Here) and not a thingamajig or whatsit. The danger, of course, is that the writer will not just drop a few random Nazi…
Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise is a smiling happy PR man in the opening scenes of Edge of Tomorrow. He’s in the army, but he’s not a soldier. His job is to get people to sign up for the Big Push to beat back the alien invaders. This is one of the weakest aspects of the story. Europe has fallen to an alien invasion and the rest of the world won’t be far behind, do you really need some smiling recruiting officer to get people to join the fight? Tom is smiling and happy as he meets up with the Commander of the…
Godzilla
Spoilers– The new [easyazon_link identifier=”B00KG2SXII” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Godzilla[/easyazon_link] starts with the opening credits being redacted. This was a cute bit of business where lines were blocked out as we watched. Then we see a mine where Something has hatched and hightailed it out of there. We soon find Bryan Cranston, a man who works at a nuclear power plant, trying to figure out what is going on. Soon disaster strikes and Bryan’s wife dies because she didn’t run fast enough to escape the fallout from the reactor breach. Bryan is bummed out. Flash forward fifteen years. So, a lot of nothing…
Lies, Inc by Philip K Dick
Published in 1966 as The Unteleported Man, Lies, Inc takes the short story and makes it longer and less focused. Lies, Inc has a number of odd futurisms. We have trans-galactic travel and time travel of a sort, but we also have everyone using magnet tape to record and send messages. It’s also very much a Man’s World in Lies, Inc. We have a couple of women characters, but they are mainly sex toys for the heroes, even when they are smarter than the heroes. Most amazing of all, the villains in the piece are left over Nazis. Wasn’t this…
Robocop
The new Robocop is a kinder gentler Robocop. Oh, he’s still a bloodthirsty killing machine, but he doesn’t make near the mess that his 1987 counterpart made. The orginal Robocop was so hyperviolent and the characters so vile and evil it left me shaken for weeks. Well, maybe I was just much more of a wuss back in those days. I liked the new Robocop, even if it makes Detroit look better in the future than it looks today. I liked the logo for Omnicorp, which looked a lot like the logo for the Umbrella Corporation and the Dharma Initiative.…
Showtime’s Penny Dreadful
If you liked the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you should like Penny Dreadful. Another show that steals some of the great characters of speculative fiction and tosses them into one big bowl. Penny Dreadful is a good looking show with great sets and costumes. Among the cast are such familiar names as Billie Piper and Timothy Dalton. The rest of the cast is a little less familiar, but they are good looking in a Steampunk and a horror kind of way. . After one episode, I kind of like Penny Dreadful. Yes, it is a bit predictable and it’s lack…
HER
Spoilers and such. In a world much like our own, where everyone walks around in a daze talking to themselves like morons, we find our hero Joaquin Phoenix. He has a job as a Letter Writer, where he sends heartfelt handwritten letters to and from people who can’t be bothered to write themselves. He lost a better job about a year ago when he also separated from his wife. He’s kind of a sad sack who mopes around thinking about the good old days with his wife. He has odd phone sex and fantasizes about having sex with a pregnant…