Category Archives: Sci Fi Movies

"Fantastic Four": A Quick Review

Fantastic FourLast week, I finally got around to watching Fantastic Four (not Rise of the Silver Surfer, mind you, but the original film from 2005).  I guess it wasn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen.  It wasn’t even the worst superhero film I’ve ever seen (for my money, you just can’t get worse than Superman IV, or Batman and Robin).  But man, this wasn’t a good film.  I mean, in an age when films like Batman Begins, Spiderman, and Superman Returns has shown us that superhero films can be entertaining and good, why does Hollywood insist on making superhero films that are, at best, mediocre?  And that are so very annoying in so many different ways?

Where to begin?

There was Doctor Von Doom.  Dooctor Doom’s portrayal in the film was very different from the way he’s been presented in the comic books, but I’m not going to let that bug me too much.  I’ve never been a serious reader of the comic book, so I’m not a purist by any stretch of the imagination.  But Julian McMahon’s portrayal of Doom showed us that, more than anything, McMahon desperately wants to be Kevin Spacey.  He can’t do it, though; he doesn’t have those innocent-yet-psychopathic eyes that made Spacey so great at Lex Luthor or as the villain in Se7en.

I suspect, though, that it was probably director Tim Story who was responsible for McMahon’s approach; Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards was excrutiatingly dull, while Chris Evans, as Johnny Storm, did not convince me at all.  Michael Chiklis, as the Thing (aka Ben Grimm) was appropriate to the role and to Story’s direction, since the stony makeup didn’t allow for much facial expression anyway.

Then there was Jessica Alba.

By herself, Jessica Alba doesn’t bug me.  She proved in Dark Angel that she can act tolerably well, when given the chance, but I suspect she has trouble finding roles that are challenging and interesting.  She looked bored as Susan Storm in this film, and presented her most wooden face to the screen.

However, the character of Susan Storm in this film really bothered me. Jessica Alba, geneticist Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been good at pushing the envelope of gender roles, though most films still suck at it.  Check out any of the Science Fiction Channel’s original movies if you don’t believe me; a stock character is the "hot but brilliant" female scientist.  I’m not saying that women can’t be scientists, of course, and I’m glad that science fiction films recognize this; I just find it kind of disturbing that for most of these women characters, their brilliance is secondary to their hotness.  Check out the picture to the right; Alba’s portrayal as a scientist is pretty much par for the course in this sort of film.  Women scientists accentuate their doctorates with cleavage.

But the character of Susan Storm was one of the most disturbing portrayals of a woman scientist I’ve seen in a long time.  Her intelligence is barely utilized at all.  Sure she’s a scientist, even head of genetics at Von Doom Industries, if we can believe Doctor Von Doom himself.  We never got to see any indication of this in the film, though.  It was a throwaway line, a nod to the character in the source material.  We never hear her referred to as "Doctor Storm" (I assume that the head geneticist of a large private industrial research firm will probably have a PhD after her name); we only hear her referred to as "Susie".  Sometimes Susan, but mostly Susie.

Once the Fantastic Four gain their powers, though, things get worse.  Okay, she gets to spout off pseudoscientific babble about how the gamma rays altered our DNA and gave them these great powers, but what is it that triggers Doctor Storm’s invisibility?  It’s her emotions, particularly the stereotypical female emotions of jealousy and frustration at what some man is doing.  Women don’t get to have power when they’re rational and intelligent, the film seems to be telling us; it’s only when they’re emotional and angry that they have any power.  And I’m sure a thesis or two could be written about how Doctor Storm’s power is invisibility, and that when she becomes emotional, she literally disappears (there’s a part of me that wonders whether we should look at this film not as a cheap and shoddily done superhero movie, but as a brilliant satire criticizing gender stereotypes, but there’s too much evidence suggesting that this isn’t meant to be the case).

There is a frightening amount of sexism in science these days; the other day I found this article in the Washington Post, about Ben Barres, a neurobiologist who underwent a sex change operation from female to male, and who reports on the biases that exist against women.  I think that Doctor Barres is in a unique place to report accurately on this sort of thing, and what he has to say are pretty unnerving.

I like that women can be portrayed as scientists and soldiers in these films, but there’s still a ways to go.  We need to be telling girls that they can go anywhere and do anything they want; right now the message seems to be, "You can do anything you want in this world, as long as you look hot and 18 while you’re doing it."  Until these messages change, "hot but brilliant" will still be the way women scientists are characterized in these films.

Update:  As I said, I haven’t read the comics books very regularly, so I’m not very familiar with it, but I’ve been informed that Sue Richards is not actually a scientist in the comic book.  This makes me even more puzzled about the choice to make her a scientist in the film.  Perhaps they wanted to update the character just a bit; which begs the question of why they still chose to not take her and her role as a scientist seriously.

Time, Space, the Living Dead, and My Computer

First thing’s first. I’m not entirely certain I know how I should feel about a journal entry of mine turning up for this search on Google. I suppose it takes all kinds. Ah, well.

Today’s Report:

In the job hunt, I went to a job fair in Sacramento today. If I were qualified to be a probation officer or a social worker, I would have been set! The Sacramento Office of Information Technology had a booth, but I’m afraid I’m not qualified to be a supervising technical manager; I’m not analyst material, let alone management material. A few of the booths wanted technical writers, so I dropped off my resume with them. I chatted with a few folks, but I don’t expect anything to come of it.

In the home IT front, I’ve been playing around with ports and forwarding, and discovered how to set up Apache on my personal computer to listen to a different port than port 80. Effectively, that means I can turn my computer at home into a webserver. Heck, I might decide to start hosting this journal on my computer at home. I have all the tools to do it now; however, the service at Pair is more reliable and I don’t know how effective a sysadmin I’d be, even for just one computer. Besides, I haven’t lost the 30 pounds that I agreed I’d lose before buying a webserver to live in our house. I also downloaded and installed a product called Crossover which lets me view all kinds of Windows media on my Linux box. Finally I can watch those movie trailers at Apple’s website, and listen to my favorite NPR station, KXJZ on my desktop.

Sometimes, it’s the little things.

This afternoon, my blood pressure had reached the ionosphere, and the trainers at the Healthy Weight Program were uncomfortable with me working out today. So I took myself to see The Time Machine, the latest "reimagination" of H. G. Wells’s classic 1894 novel. The word "reimagination" is an ugly word to me: especially since Evilpheemy and I took our wives to see Tim Burton’s reimagination of The Planet of the Apes (a film which, apart from its wretched script, horrid acting, predictable plot, sequences which looked like they’d been lifted straight from an old Scooby Doo cartoon, was almost a decent film — though I admit that was a an insult to Scooby Doo). That film shook my faith in Tim Burton’s directorial abilities.

I had very low expectations for The Time Machine; with few exceptions, Hollywood has demonstrated that they believe that the IQ of the average science fiction fan ranks somewhere between that of a flea and an eggplant. I was somewhat surprised, though, that The Time Machine wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard of this film is that H. G. Wells’s commentary about Victorian life doesn’t translate very well to a 21st century movie screen. That is, of course, true. But I think that what these critics fail to remember is that The Time Machine is also a good adventure story, and this film captures that fairly well. I did find myself wishing that there was more action after the main character and his co-horts had encountered the Über-Morlock (played hammily by Jeremy Irons, still on the road to recovery after Courtney Solomon had drugged him and forced him at gunpoint to play the Evil Wizard in Dungeons and Dragons — the only explanation I can come up with for how that happened). But the vision of the future presented in the film was interesting and amazingly consistent with itself. And surprisingly, I thought that the social commentary that H. G. Wells had presented in his novel managed to translate fairly well to the modern film. Of course, the major themes of the novel — that there are Forces with which Man Was Not Meant to Tamper, and that The Rich Eat the Poor — are as timeless as romantic love itself, so there probably wasn’t much need for alteration.

On the whole, not a bad little film. Definitely worth a rental.

Over the weekend, Jennifer and I also saw Resident Evil, another film for which I had very low expectations, and which surprised me. Apparently the film was originally supposed to have been directed by George Romero, the man behind the Living Dead films; and there are certainly elements of Resident Evil which could have come from Romero’s mind — the ending, in particular, and the nasty surprises that turn up just when you think things are going to be okay — are very much in line with something that could have shown up in a Living Dead movie.

The special effects were pretty neat, too, though they lack the special touch that Tom Savini might have brought to them.

And that, I suppose, was my day. There wasn’t much to it. I bought a vinyl cover for the futon. I returned a CD that I had borrowed from the library (I’d returned the case yesterday). I watched Enterprise (sometimes also referred to as Spot the Nipple) with Jennifer. And I mopped the floor.

I swear. Only the Army has me beat for the number of things that they do in a single day.

Wherein Our Hero Discovers He's Been On Earth All Along

All in all, I think that Jennifer has probably made the transition from engaged to married more smoothly than I have. While I still find myself stopping dead in my tracks from time to time (inconvenient when I’m driving at eighty miles an hour down highway 80) and thinking to myself, "Wow! I’m really married now!", Jennifer says that she doesn’t feel all that different from when we were just engaged and living with each other. Well, okay, perhaps there isn’t that much different on a physical level — we still breathe the same air, live in the same house, and our feelings for each other haven’t changed. But on an existential level, there is a difference between being engaged and being married. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I’m sure that there is. Or maybe I’m just imagining the whole thing.

The hours leading up to the ceremony were hectic and stressful for me, and nothing compared to what Jennifer and her mother had to deal with, what with the seamstress running obscenely late (the ceremony was nearly an hour late because the seamstress was still sewing the groomsmen’s shirts at the last minute and trying to fix the bridesmaids’ dresses which had somehow become far too small between the last fitting and the day of the wedding). Fortunately one of the dancers from the dance troupe that came to perform at the wedding was well versed in Renaissance garb in general and helped all of us men put our outfits on and made sure we looked at least halfway decent wearing them. The only problem for me was that I wanted to take my groomsmen out to lunch before the ceremony, but between one thing and another we wound up having to go to a different restaurant than the one I’d wanted to go to in the first place, and then my best man and I ended up at the church with about one minute to spare.

I don’t remember all that much about the ceremony itself. I remember seeing the flower girl stumble her way down the aisle, upending her basket of flowers and spilling them all out on the floor and then deciding to take a nap midway down the aisle; I remember something about some vows that we exchanged; I remember Jennifer’s father coming close to tears; I remember my best man clapping me on the shoulder just before the ceremony when I confessed, "Now I’m nervous"; and, of course, I remember Jennifer walking down the aisle, glowing in her dress, more beautiful and radiant than I had ever seen her before. I remember standing up with the minister, holding Jennifer’s hand, and falling in love with her all over again.


As her wedding gift to me, Jennifer gave me a new computer, which her brother-in-law (which, I guess, she shares with me now) had put together and built for me. It’s got Windows 2000, Linux, and just about every bell and whistle that I could ever want. And it’s ironic that while I’ve probably spent more time in front of this computer than I ever did in front of my old computer, I’ve found myself with even less time than I ever did to post to this journal. I’ve been merrily learning about Samba and Linux networking to get my new box talking to the network that Jennifer and I have set up in our house, I’ve figured out how to keep our computers with static IP addresses even though our router is set up with a DHCP server, and I’ve even figured out how to use my old laptop computer as a primitive web server in addition to its duties as a file server and a print server. I haven’t yet figured out how to use Samba to print from my Linux box through the old laptop, but I’ve learned how to use my Linux computer to read files from Jennifer’s old Windows 95 machine. That part was easy.

And in addition to that I’ve been spending a lot of time playing this really cool horror FPS game called Undying. Far too much time, I suppose. All in all, I’ve been sleeping a lot less than I should over the past couple of weeks. I only hope that Jennifer hasn’t been feeling neglected.


Not, of course, that Jennifer is any less of a nerd than I am. For our one-week anniversary, Jennifer and I used some of the gift cards we’d gotten from Best Buy and picked up a Sony Dreamcast game station and a copy of House of the Dead 2. We’ve spent many a happy hour together since then shooting zombies and laughing at the cheesy voice overs and smiling warmly at the oozing green blood of melting undead creatures.


I tell Jennifer that her left pinky toe is corrupt and is bent on world domination, which is why that is the only part of her that I don’t love. She just looks at me strangely and says, "Yes, dear," in a strangely condescending voice.


Last night we went with some friends to see Tim Burton’s "re-imagination" of The Planet of the Apes. I can only hope that Tim Burton’s hands were tightly bound while this movie was being filmed, because it’s the first Burton movie that I didn’t like. Well, okay, let me amend that. When I first heard that Tim Burton was going to remake The Planet of the Apes, I thought, "This could be cool." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I haven’t seen a single remake of a classic science fiction film that I thought was any good. I could give Tim Burton’s version two stars only because it didn’t suck as bad as I thought it was going to. I can only hope that the reason why Tim Burton made this film was because someone in Hollywood had decided that by God this film was going to be made, and Tim Burton stepped bravely forward and said he’d do it. Sort of like the guy who throws himself on a landmine so that other people can live.

The word "re-imagination" should be banned. It doesn’t mean, "A reinterpretation of the original source material." It means, "Not willing to go the extra distance to make the remake anywhere as provocative as the original." Tim Burton’s film was full of gaping holes, inconsistencies that make you question your very sanity, and unresolved plot lines that scream, "SEQUEL COMING!". And there was a twist at the end, but the twist at the end of this film carried none of the power of the twist at the end of the original. When I saw the last few minutes of this film, I wasn’t shocked or surprised or anything… Instead, I found myself laughing out loud. I couldn’t help myself. It was ludicrous.

If you’ve never seen the ending of the original Planet of the Apes and have no idea what it is (which I doubt, since it’s probably the most classic twist ending in the history of science fiction and has become a mainstay of modern American culture), go out and rent it right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. I just don’t want to spoil anything for you.

Okay, so now you know that Taylor, Charlton Heston’s character, was on Earth all along. And isn’t that always the way it is? Just when you think that you’ve landed on another planet, you discover that you’re really at home after all.

Being married is kind of like that… only without the nuclear holocaust and the enslavement of humanity (though I guess some people might differ on that second point). It’s honestly not all that different from when we were engaged, I suppose, but still… something has changed.

And I’m finding it pretty damn wonderful.