Author: photog

Arrival (2016) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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What is it with YouTube lists of science fiction movies.  Every other choice is some incredibly unwatchable movie!

Already you can tell I didn’t like this movie.  And that is an understatement.  I despised it.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The movie starts out with us meeting the protagonist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams).  We see her with her daughter Hannah starting with her as a newborn and progressing with her as an adolescent dying of what appears to be cancer.

Switch scenes and Amy is teaching a class in Portuguese language at a university but just then the world finds out that twelve alien spacecraft have landed in different areas of the Earth and Amy is needed by the US government to figure out the aliens’ language and find out what they want.  Her contact is Colonel Weber (played by Forest Whitaker).  Louise is teamed with a scientist, Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) to solve the mystery of why the aliens are on Earth.

There’s a lot of hand-waving (literally) but eventually Louise takes off her quarantine suit so they can see her pretty hair and slowly but surely, she translates the language of the aliens; heptapods which are represented as some kind of hyperintelligent cephalopods that spell out words with their ink (seriously!).

Through misunderstanding the difference between the words for tool and weapon, all of the major military powers come to believe that the aliens are attempting to start a war by providing some kind of advanced weapons to all of them separately.  Rogue American soldiers even try to blow up the heptapods and Louise is almost killed.

But just as the world is about to attack the heptapods and cause an interstellar incident Louise reenters the ship and has a magical epiphany and can understand everything the heptapods are saying.  She finds out the tool they are giving humanity is their language which if studied allows the user to see the future and experience time as “non-linear.”

Louise then is able to see into the future and know something that will convince the Chinese leader not to attack the heptapods and save the day.  Then we find out that Louise’s daughter Hannah didn’t die in the past but is going to be born to Louise and Ian in the future.  And apparently Louise is accepting of this future tragedy including the fact that Ian will leave her when he finds out she conceived Hannah regardless of knowing she will be doomed to an early death.  The End.

How do I hate this movie?  Let me count the ways.  This movie epitomizes the “girl boss” stereotype.  Louise is the omnicompetent protagonist who can do seemingly anything needed without any rational explanation for her abilities.  Everyone else is always stumped but she always finds a way.  And it’s always ridiculous.  The military are always arrogant, murderously enraged and completely incompetent.  And the action of the movie is non-existent.  The highlight of the film is Louise writing the word “LOUISE” on a white board and holding it up for the heptapods to see.  I’m not kidding.  And then in the last five minutes of the movie Louise figures out all of that stuff and we live happily ever after (except for her daughter dying of cancer).  This movie sucks.

A Big Crazy Idea

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I have this crazy idea.  I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.  I heard of a guy whose book was given out to a hundred thousand people by some corporation for some reason unknown to me.  And after that it became very popular and sold millions of copies.  Now obviously that’s a crazy thing.  I think this was a hundred thousand physical copies not e-books.  Why a corporation would pay for a hundred thousand copies of a book to then give them away doesn’t make any sense unless it’s the Gideons giving away the Bible at hotels.

But for whatever reason it intrigues me.  Now theoretically I can give away a hundred thousand copies of my e-book by emailing them.  Of course, an e-mail provider will charge some fee for that much bandwidth.  But in terms of the files they’re free.  The trick would be to interest a hundred thousand people to request the book and actually read it.  There are book sale sites (e.g., Smashwords) that allow you to lower the sale price to zero.  But the trick would be to attract the right audience for the book.

I admit it’s kind of a goofy idea.  The whole reason for writing a book is to get people to pay you money for the privilege of reading it.  This stands that concept on its head.  But I think it’d get more satisfaction from knowing that a huge number of people had read my story than having a few hundred pay me for buying it.

I have a lot more research to do to figure out all the details of how doing something like this would work.  I want to target a right-leaning audience and so I’m looking at advertising on one of the right-leaning sites like Red State or something like it.  But one of the things is making sure it doesn’t cost me too much money.  After all I’m not a trillionaire.  I’m just a regular old multi-billionaire you know.

My book sales on Amazon reached one hundred tonight.  Maybe that was what triggered this megalomania.  After all it’s only a few orders of magnitude between a hundred and a hundred thousand.  What’s that between friends after all?  But I have learned a little bit about how difficult it is to reach across the “digital barrier” and communicate with the mass of humanity out there.  It requires you to master the secrets of the “algorithm” and “search engine optimization.”  Either that or you have to shell out a lot of dough.

But I’ll have to say it must have been more fun in the old days when a writer could sell a short story to Analog for a few hundred bucks and have a hundred thousand people read that story and give their feedback in just days or weeks.  I know there are now digital equivalents.  There’s a site called Royal Road where free content is uploaded and people vote with their eyeballs.  And maybe I’ll go that route.  Of course, I understand that most of the content is sort of video game fan fiction which is completely impenetrable to me.  And maybe an audience for my stuff would never show up there.  But I should look into it.  Well anyway, enough about this.  I’ll figure it out and see if it can be done and if it’s worth it to me or not.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of a great literary artist.  Oh, the pain, the pain.

03MAR2026 – Sales Update and Begathon

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

Update:

Yesterday’s total was 18 books and my book ranking has also improved markedly.  Overall rank now close to 20,000 and categories in the top 100s!  Look out Tom Clancy (or whoever the new alive guy is).

Well, things are looking up.  So far today, I’ve sold ten copies and pretty soon I’ll reach a hundred sales.  Cool!

And I broke through the 40,000 overall rank in Kindle Store and the 200’s in some major categories (see below)

And so now that some momentum is building up I’d like to make one last plea (on bended knee mind you) for anyone who liked the book to put a good review up on Amazon.  You can use any name you like and you don’t even need to have bought the book.  Just tell the world why you liked it and help me become independently wealthy ( or at least cheer up a poor hard-working author.

Thank you for your attention.

Jake Barter

Dune – Part 2 (2024) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Just as with my review of the first installment of Dune, this will not be one of my usual reviews where I describe the plot.  Once again, I’ll give my impressions of the movie as someone hitting the story for the first time, since, as I mentioned before I’ve never read the books and only have a vague sense of the story and the author’s message, if there is one.

First off, the cinematography is top notch.  If the movie is blending actual desert landscapes with CGI it’s seamless and extremely realistic.  Or maybe the whole thing is CGI in which case it’s even more remarkable.  The acting is very good although casting Christopher Walken as the galactic emperor is jarring for me.  It’s almost impossible for me to see him in a film and not expect some kind of joke.  But he has very little screen time and the rest of the cast is very, very good.

The plot seems to be a combination of Lawrence of Arabia with a science fiction galactic political intrigue story.  And that may sound sort of flippant but actually I think the storyline is handled very skillfully by the director.  The pacing and the building to the climax is done with great skill and the final battle and its outcome are great.

What the filmmaker went for here was a combination of a personal story about Paul and his friends and family against the backdrop of a spectacle which is the revolt of the Fremen against the off-worlders who have dominated their world for centuries.  The reason I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia is because Paul is an outsider who is accepted by the Fremen just as Lawrence was accepted by the Arabs in their struggle to liberate themselves from the Turks.  And the Fremen are obviously modeled after the Arabs with “spice” as a stand-in for oil in the real world.

I don’t know if the movie is very faithful to every detail in the novels but in my opinion both this installment and the previous movie provide top-notch science fiction cinematic entertainment.  The protagonist and his friends are extremely likable and their adversaries are almost literally cartoon villains that in some cases seem hardly human.  And watching their defeat is almost as much fun as seeing Paul victorious.  One thing though, Paul’s mother belongs to some kind of female religious magical cabal that has a lot to do with control over the nobility of the empire.  I find myself repelled by all of them including Paul’s mother.  I’d like to see all of them burned at the stake as witches.

So, my take on all this is simple.  The plot is consistent enough to pass the suspension of disbelief hurdle and the action of the plot is lively enough and entertaining enough to keep you watching right through to the end.  I can’t see how I don’t rate it as highly recommended.  And the movie ends in the middle of a giant war so obviously we all have to save up our pennies to see the third and possibly further installments when they arrive.  So, three cheers for Dune: Part 2.