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Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Project Hail Mary Box Office Update: $616,588,738

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Well, it’s official, Project Hail Mary is a moneymaker for Amazon.  The info says it cost $200 million to produce.  Even if they spent another $100 million to advertise (which they wouldn’t have to because, of course, they’re Amazon!) that still puts them in the black.  And this is all in advance of what they’ll make streaming the movie on their own platform after the end of the theatrical run.

Box Office Data

Well, well, well.  So people will go to the movies if you give them something that isn’t woke slop.  If you give them entertaining story telling they’ll pay you money to watch it.  Shocking.  Wake up Disney.  Amazon is eating your lunch, you fools.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – Some Observations on the Book

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So, I had so much fun comparing the book and movie for “The Thin Man” that I to read Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” so that I could compare it to its movie too.  And once again I’m reading it from the Library of America edition that I already have.  The book came out in 1939 and the movie in 1946.  The pre-war and post war difference probably is significant.  But we’ll just leave that alone.

And let me state for the record that this review is full of spoilers.

First off, I’ll state for the record that although I’ve always enjoyed the movie immensely, I found the book much more interesting and satisfying as a story.  The biggest difference between the book and movie is the characterization of the Sternwood daughters Vivian and Carmen.  In the movie the role of Vivian is a mostly sympathetic character who becomes the love interest for the Marlowe character.  But in the book, she is almost as reckless as her unbalanced sister Carmen.  And whereas in the movie Carmen is an exhibitionistic spoiled woman-child in the book she is truly psychotic.

And allowing the Sternwood daughters to be pathological individuals they are, simplifies the details of the story that in the movie have to be sanitized in order to fit the Hays Code.  So, we can be told that Geiger’s “book store” lent out pornography to its customers and Carmen was being photographed naked by Geiger at the time when the Sternwood chauffer came in and killed Geiger and stole the exposed film of Carmen.  And so on with other parts of the story that don’t make sense in the movie because the seediness of the plot elements prevented their being openly stated instead of subtly implied.  So, we don’t have an explicit statement that Eddie Mars is not only aware of Geiger’s racket but also uses it to blackmail customers.

But the biggest difference between the two versions of the story is the disappearance of Rusty Regan (called Sean Regan in the film).  At the end of the movie Eddie Mars claims he saw Carmen kill Regan.  But because Mars didn’t even know what Carmen looked like Marlowe seems to reject this version of the facts.  This leads the audience to believe that Mars had Regan killed by Canino out of jealousy over Mars’ wife’s relationship with Regan.  But in the movie Marlowe suspects Carmen of the murder and he tests the theory.  After he had rejected Carmen’s sexual advances one night, the next day he tests her sanity.  He returns her pistol and tells her it’s loaded and she asks for him to teach her how to shoot.  After leading Marlowe to a secluded location, she uses the opportunity and angrily fires all six shots at him.  Of course, he had the gun loaded with blanks and after disarming her she goes into an epileptic fit.  And after bringing Carmen back to the house to receive medical attention Marlowe tells Vivian that he knows that Carmen must have murdered her husband after a similar refusal by Regan to sleep with her.  And Vivian admits to the truth of the killing.

I find this a much more satisfactory ending.  We’ve been shown the Sternwoods as a very sinister and dysfunctional clan and the idea that Vivian is somehow a sympathetic or admirable individual despite all the evidence to the contrary just rings false.  Chandler’s story is a grim tale that lacks the happy ending of the Hollywood movie that pairs Bogart and Bacall as a romantic couple.  But it’s a better ending and in my opinion much more satisfying.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett – Some Observations on the Book

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Someone my age or older if he is familiar with Hammett’s story, “The Thin Man” probably has only seen the 1934 film with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.  And as I’ve reviewed elsewhere, it is a fantastically entertaining movie made up of equal parts comedy and murder mystery.

I have a copy of the Library of America volumes for Dashiell Hammett and for whatever reason this past week I decided to read the short novel that the movie is based on.  And to start with I’ll say I wasn’t disappointed.  It’s a good story and well written to entertain the reader with vivid characterizations and plenty to keep your interest piqued.  But one thing it isn’t is a blueprint for the movie.  So, I thought it would be interesting to just give my impressions on how the book and movie differ and then to say which version was more satisfying.

The first piece of bookkeeping is the suitability for general audiences.  Now the film was pre-code meaning that strict censorship of risqué images, language and themes was not yet being enforced in Hollywood.  But even saying that, the film version of the story would today be rated (at worst) PG-13 due to violent circumstances in the plot.  But in reality, a G rating would not be a terrible stretch.  Several of the characters were criminals and murder and other crimes are the focus of the story but everything was handled in a sanitized portrayal.  The book however leans heavily into the seedier aspects of several of the characters’ lifestyles.  There is allusion to sexual activity and the violence that is portrayed is much more graphic than in the movie version.  And as an example of an unusual bit of reality one character is compared to a lesbian in her “hatred of men.”

And as far as the characterization of some of the more important people in the story, the two grown children of the eponymous “Thin Man,” Dorothy and Gilbert Wynant are described as at the very least highly neurotic and very possibly dangerously disturbed due to the terrible parenting of their mother Mimi.  And this differs significantly from Dorothy’s character in the movie where she is portrayed very sympathetically.  And as one of the main characters Mimi is definitely portrayed as a much worse person in the book than in the film.  In the movie she’s a greedy, manipulative woman but in the book she’s close to a psychopath.  She brutalizes her daughter for almost no reason and she lies pathologically at every turn.  At one point she becomes so angry at Dorothy that she goes into a sort of blind fury as she tries to get at her while Nick restrains her by main force.  She is easily the ugliest character in the book.

As far as the characterization of Nick and Nora Charles, one thing that agreed in both versions is that they both drank hard liquor almost continuously both day and night.  Now in the movie it almost seemed to be a joke.  But in the book, it was just their routine.  I guess allowances would have to be made for the prohibition era mores and customs but to a modern reader it is very noticeable.  As far as their personalities they come off slightly harder edged than Powell and Loy’s remarkably affable screen personae.  Nick especially is quite willing to get tough with both men and women who get in his face.  At one point he has to stop Mimi from assaulting her daughter by lifting her off the ground and pinning her arms while holding her down on a couch while someone throws water in her face to calm her down.  In the final scene he becomes angry at the police Lieutenant Guild for not seeing that Wynant was the murdered man and knocks out MacCaulay as much out of anger as to stop him.  And in general, both Nick and Nora are not as “nice” as their screen versions.

The book characterizes most of Nick’s friends in upper crust New York City as morally compromised while his underworld acquaintances come off as “good fellas” if a little on the rough side.

Evaluating overall the contrast between the book and movie, what we have is a gritty detective story versus a film that is basically a light-hearted comedy as much as it is a murder mystery.  And considering the audiences that each of these stories were aimed at both are highly successful in their entertainment value.  The book was aimed at adults, probably particularly men.  The movie was a family entertainment with some double entendres thrown in for the adults.  But I think the short novel is well worth reading and I only wish he had written more stories for Nick and Nora.  The screen sequels never measured up to the original film but I’m sure Hammett could have provided more gritty adventures for his Nick and Nora.

Keeping My Options Open

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One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.”  What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman.  Yikes!

But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment.  And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing.  There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.

And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.

Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting.  It’s basically my book.  And that’s exciting.  I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to.  But we’ll see.

Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies.  They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product.  So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story.  But it’s always fun to dream about these things.

And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story.  He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own.  And now he has two hit movies made from his books.  Think about that.  Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender.  They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble.  It just brings tears to my eyes.

Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience.  My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor.  Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction.  I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right.  So, no.  I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal.  Ever!

But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood.  The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy.  They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon.  And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).”  That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already.  And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change?  Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”

Or something like that!

Cleaning Up the Wreckage

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For years people have said in my presence that despite the leftist leanings of Hollywood, the people running it were there to make money.  But despite that I watched as Hollywood produced bomb after bomb that preached the leftist creed above all other ingredients in the film.  They sacrificed entertainment, artistry and certainly profitability on the altar of woke propaganda.  Probably the most egregious of these studios was Disney that sacrificed the virtually unlimited money-making machines of such franchises as Star Wars, Marvel Comics and even the classic Disney princess movies to bang away at woke agenda elements like LGBTQ identity, anti-white racism and feminist dogma.

Well, maybe, just maybe, the tide has turned.  I think this week we received two data points that signal a definite reversal.  The first is the news today that Sky Dance has cancelled the third season of “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  This was a two-season installment that has been estimated to have cost somewhere between two hundred and four hundred million dollars.  Now that is an enormous amount of money but what makes it astonishing is that when this show ran it wasn’t one of the top ten shows on Paramount Plus.  It was regularly beaten out by reruns of “Everyone Loves Raymond” and “Sponge Bob Square Pants.”  In fact, it was even worse than this.  In order to build up buzz for the first episode, it was put on YouTube for free and less than a thousand people watched it the first day.  Think about that.

Paramount was bought by Skydance last year so they didn’t order this show.  And the production company (Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout) is finishing its contract with Paramount in April and it’s looking like they won’t be doing anymore Star Trek for Skydance.  And Skydance is probably going to purchase Warner Brothers this year and that may have a very great impact on how the DC Universe movies look going forward.  So, there is an example of changing sensibilities going forward in Hollywood.  Enormous costs for productions that no one wants to watch are ending.  So that’s the negative case, what won’t be happening anymore.

As for what is happening on the positive side let’s look at what Amazon/MGM have released this week.  Andy Weir (the author of the book turned movie “The Martian”) wrote the book “Project Hail Mary” in 2021.  It cost two hundred million to make.  It made $141 million on its first weekend.  This is one of the biggest openings in the last four years.  And it is predicted to be a big hit.  It’s a movie whose only human character is a white male.  The only diversity casting is an alien creature that looks like a pile of small rocks.  There’s no woke elements at all.  Just an adventure story about a man light years from Earth cooperating with an unearthly creature to save both of their planets.  From all of the reviews I’ve read it’s a solid movie that the whole family can and probably will enjoy and it doesn’t say anything about the LGBTQ or how white people stole America from the Indians or enslaved black people.  And the fact that the astronaut is not a girl boss but a young white man I take to be aspirational for every white American boy who has been told for the last couple of decades that they shouldn’t get a turn at being the good guy.  So that’s the positive side.  Hollywood can make good movies and people will come to the theaters to see them.  And they can make money doing it.

Maybe the tide has turned.

Champion (1949) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he can only find.  He and his brother Connie arrive on a freight train from the east and believe they have an ownership stake in a small restaurant.  But discover they’ve been conned.  Taking jobs as waiters there, Midge becomes romantically involved with the owner’s daughter Emma but this leads to the couple being forced at gunpoint by her father into a marriage.

This prompts Midge to abandon Emma and he and Connie end up at a boxing gym where a trainer named Tommy Haley agrees to manage Midge.  Midge proves to have considerable skill in the ring but more importantly he has a killer instinct that leads him to brutalize his opponents with maniacal force whenever he gets in the ring.  Eventually Haley arranges for Midge to fight the number one contender for the middle weight crown, Johnny Dunne in New York.  But the gambling interests have only allowed Midge the fight with the understanding that he’ll take a dive to allow Dunne to capture the middle-weight crown from an aging champ.

Midge double crosses Haley and the gamblers and knocks Dunne out in the first round.  The mobsters beat Midge, Haley and Connie badly but now the reality is Midge is the leading contender for the crown.  Dunne’s platinum blonde girlfriend Grace tells Midge that the only way he’ll ever get a shot at the crown is by appeasing the gamblers.  And the only way that will happen is if he dumps Haley and signs up with Grace’s friend Jerome Harris.  And Midge does it without blinking an eye.  Seeing how Midge stabbed Haley in the back and what company he was now keeping, Connie decided to leave New York and go back to his mother’s apartment in Chicago.

Meanwhile Midge is flying high with a victory in the ring against the champ.  He’s dating Grace but sleeping with Jerome Harris’s wife Palmer.  Neither of these women know that he is still married to Emma.  But now all of Midge’s double-crossing comes due.  He has to defend his title against Johnny Dunne and he’s out of shape from living the high life.  So, he hires Haley to train him but has to agree to split 30% with him.  But Haley doesn’t really care whether Midge is up to the fight and after missing his mother’s death bed Connie and Emma despise him.  On the day before the boxing match, she tells Midge she’s divorcing him and marrying Connie.  He answers her statement by dragging her to bed to claim his conjugal rights as husband.

At the boxing arena Connie attacks Midge for what he did to Emma.  But Midge beats him down and heads for the ring.  The match is very even at the start.  Midge manages to knock Dunne to the canvas in the first round but after that the match slowly but surely shifts in Dunne’s favor.  By the twelfth round Midge has one eye closed and looks almost punch drunk.  But when he sees Grace and his other “friends” in the audience smiling at his defeat he becomes enraged and with a manic flurry of punches he beats Dunne to the canvas and wins the fight.  But he is basically dragged back to his dressing room by Haley and his trainers and after a brief ranting speech that seems to come from his angry tortured soul, he drops dead.  The movie ends with reporters asking Connie about his brother and him replying sardonically that Midge was a perfect reflection of the spirit of his sport.

This movie has some good points.  The early scenes of Midge and Connie travelling across country to make a new life for themselves and their loyalty to each other is affecting.  However, the unfolding of Midge’s personality and his general hatred of humanity is a very unpleasant experience.  As he goes from one betrayal to the next, I found him despicable.  And because of this, by the end of the movie, I wasn’t enjoying the story at all.  I was very relieved when he dropped dead and I could turn off the tv.  I can’t recommend this movie to anyone.

The Tomorrow War (2021) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This movie is an alien invasion/time travel movie.  Wow, that’s complicated.

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

This movie is a highly confusing science fiction story.  Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester a retired special forces soldier from Iraq who now works as a high school science teacher.  He has a wife Emmy and a young daughter Muri.  So far so good.  One day while watching soccer’s world cup game on tv they witness the beginning of the future war.  In the middle of the field a “wormhole” opens up and a bunch of humans dressed in military attire carrying weapons appear.

They explain that they are from the year 2051 and their world is fighting a war against aliens called the “whitespikes.”  They are about 8-10 feet long, have four running legs two grasping legs and two tentacles that can grab but also shoot “spikes.”  And they are always ravenously hungry for human flesh.  The aliens appeared in arctic Russia and quickly spread across the world and now the human population has been decimated (total world population down to 500,000) and they are begging people from 2021 to come through a portal and help fight the aliens.

Earth agrees to send its armies into the future but barely twenty percent return alive.  After that a draft is employed and all adults (men and women) are eligible.  Eventually Dan is drafted and is sent.  Enlistment involves surviving one week of combat after which the soldier is automatically returned to the present wherever he is.

Dan goes to the future and is immediately swept up in the “run for your life” action of fighting the whitespikes.  Eventually he meets his commanding officer Colonel Muri Forester (played by Yvonne Strahovski), in other words, his daughter now grown up and become a biologist working on a toxin to kill the whitespikes before they finish off what is left of humanity.  And with Dan’s help she captures a female whitespike and they synthesize a toxin that will kill all whitepikes injected with it.

But it’s too late.  The last human outpost where Muri and Dan are located is overwhelmed by a horde of whitespikes and Dan time jumps with the toxin just as Muri falls to her death in the grips of a whitespike.  Dan reaches home and is overwhelmed with grief and anger.  Grown-up Muri had told him that back in the “present” when Dan had returned from his seven-day assignment he abandoned his wife and daughter and eventually was killed a few years later in an auto accident.

Determined to get the toxin mass produced and sent back to the future Dan reaches out to the government but finds out that the portal is gone.  The whitespikes have finished off humanity in the future.  There is no place to send the toxin.

But Emmy reasons that it makes more sense to find the whitespikes before they conquered the world and destroy them at the beginning.  With a clue from volcanic ash present on a whitespike artifact they figure out that the whitespikes must have been frozen under the ice cap in northern Russia and thawed because of “global warming” in 2051 or shortly before.  Because of global instability caused by the knowledge that the world would be coming to an end, the US refuses to help Dan go to Russia to find the whitespikes.  So, Dan goes to his Vietnam War vet estranged father (played by J. K. Simmons) who happens to have access to a large cargo plane and they mount a small expedition.

They find the alien ship by its magnetic field and use thermite to reach it through the ice.  Then they find out that the whitespikes are not the astronauts but rather a bioweapon cargo on a ship that crashed into earth long ago.  They use the toxin to kill about half the whitespikes on the ship but another five or six escape.  Two of the humans use a C4 explosive to kill the whitespikes in a suicide maneuver.  But one female escapes and after an extended chase and fight scene Dan and his father kill the monster.  The movie ends with Dan reuniting with Emmy and introducing young Muir to her grandfather.  Wow, what a mess!

Okay, what the hell do I say about this crazy mixed up movie?  From a science fiction plot perspective, this thing is a turkey.  There is no indication of how the 2051 humans in the middle of their existential alien crisis were able to create time travel.  And the workings of this time travel also seem goofy.  The 2051 people can only go back and forth thirty years.  So, they can’t go back five years and search for the whitespikes before they became overwhelmingly numerous and unstoppable.  Also, grown-up Muri tells Dan about what he was like after he came back from the future but then Dan followed a completely different course of action when he returned.  How?  Alright the plot is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  But is the movie any good?  Well, yeah.  Chris Pratt portrays a likeable character and so does Yvonne Strahovski.  There is a good family chemistry there and the action sequences although quite a mess aren’t boring.  And it isn’t woke.  Chris Pratt is allowed to be a white man and the hero of the movie.  That’s something to be amazed at in a movie made in 2021.  It’s a silly sci-fi action movie.  But I kind of liked it.  You have to decide if it’s something you want to waste a couple of hours on.

A Firefly Animated Series

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The sci-fi television series “Firefly” and its subsequent big screen continuation “Serenity” came out in 2002 and 2005 respectively.  That’s a very long time ago.  So, for that whole 20 plus years there have been rumors that circulated on-line that a sequel tv show or a movie would be greenlit.  And the fanbase of Firefly has been dying for such a sequel all these years.

And now their dreams are coming true.  Well, almost.  There won’t be a live-action tv show or movie.  There will be an animated movie with the original cast providing the voices of their characters.  And other than Ron Glass (who died a number of years ago) the whole cast is coming back.  But will it be any good?

Firefly and Serenity were the creation of Joss Whedon.  He invented them and breathed life into them.  Joss Whedon will not be writing or producing or directing this new movie.  He has been canceled in Hollywood for bad behavior.  Apparently, he hurt the feelings of some actresses before or during the #metoo witch hunts and has been consigned to a lower level of hell where powerful Hollywood men are sent to burn forever.  And without Whedon what are the chances that a new Firefly would be anything like the original?

Well, we’re about to find out.  That’s a slight exaggeration.  It’ll probably take a year or longer to produce this movie.  And whether it’s a tv miniseries or a motion picture you probably have to add a few months to fit it into the schedules for these kinds of things.  So, let’s say eighteen months.

Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that the best thing that could have happened to Firefly was exactly what did happen.  It only lasted a part of a season on tv and then had a motion picture to provide a satisfying climax to the characters and the story.  And the reason I felt that way was because Firefly appealed to me exactly because it went against the kind of female-centric left-leaning stuff that Joss Whedon typically produces.  Things like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” and “Dollhouse” are what he makes.  And those shows are garbage from my perspective.  Firefly was from the opposite perspective.  It was the battle between the oligarchic Alliance which is a stand-in for today’s globalists and the Independents who are the freedom-loving commoners much like today’s Right.  But the danger as I see it is that eventually Whedon would have tweaked the characters and stories until they became “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

And I still think that.  The two showrunners they’ve put in charge of this animated series are as thoroughly left-leaning and devoted to woke culture as anyone else around.  If anything, they’re worse than Whedon because at least he was talented.  They’re not.  So, I fully expect this new show will be pretty awful.

That being said I will watch it when it comes out.  Firefly was enormously entertaining while it lasted.  And it will be nostalgic to see the animated characters and hear the voices of the old crew.  But I would be shocked if it turned out to be good.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This is a time loop movie.  It’s Groundhog Day crossed with Starship Troopers.

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

Tom Cruise is Major William Cage.  He’s the US Army’s public relations man during a war against aliens called the mimics who have conquered mainland Europe and are about to be counter-attacked by humanity’s attempt at D-Day from a London staging area.  But instead of staying behind in an office to edit commercials his superiors have loaned him out to the Brits as a warrior.  He tries to desert but is handcuffed and handed over to Master Sargeant Farell (played by Bill Paxton) and put into powered body armor and dropped into battle in France.  And of course, since he’s not a real soldier, he’s killed in the first few minutes of the horrific battle.  But right before he dies, he manages to kill a special mimic called an “alpha.”  And because some of the alpha’s blood gets on him, he ends up in a time loop that always brings him back to the same day of the battle.  And as long as he’s always killed he’ll come back again.

And from starting out as a hopelessly incompetent soldier, by virtue of getting to endlessly re-live and re-die on that day, he becomes adept at fighting mimics.  During one of these replays, he meets Sergeant Rita Vrataski (played by Emily Blunt) and just before she dies, she tells him to find her the next time he wakes up.  In other words, she has had the same time loop ability.  Through endless additional replays, Cage and Vrataski figure out that the mimics are aware of all the humans’ plans and fighting them is futile.  But if Cage is exposed to a device that was made to read the mind of alphas he will discover where the head mimic (the omega) is hiding.  But in the effort Cage loses his ability to reset time and come back to life.

And so, there is a kamikaze mission with Cage, Vrataski and some comrades to storm the Louvre where the monster hides.  As it works out everyone but Cage is killed and he is mortally wounded just as he blows up the omega.  But somehow killing the omega (I think) resets his looping ability and he wakes up with all of them alive but the omega destroyed and the mimics basically defeated.

Alright, so what about all this.  This is a pretty good sci-fi war movie.  The special effects are good.  The acting is good and the plot is pretty well worked out.  And even Emily Blunt’s Rita Vrataski character isn’t a complete girl-boss super hero.  She is annoying from time to time but not hopelessly.  Cruise carries the movie with a decent amount of character acting from his “comrades” and with even a little humor thrown in to lighten the mood.  The endless live/die repetition is handled very well for most of the movie with only a couple of spots where they seemed to over do it.  I will say that in the final assault the image on the screen is sort of too dark and hard to really understand.  It’s at night in an underground vault and under water so maybe that’s realistic but it feels confusing and unhelpful to the viewer.  All in all, I recommend this movie to fans of sci-fi action movies.  It’s pretty good.