There. I said it. Avatar shouldn’t win Best Picture.

It most likely will. James Cameron is known and feared in Hollywood (he made Ed Harris cry while filming Abyss), and his technologically brain-breaking movie is posting records in the box office. The Academy would be insane not to give the coveted award to Avatar. But it shouldn’t.

Avatar’s plot is nothing short of trivial. It is the typical story of an odd man out who finds solace in an extremely alien culture. He then fights alongside them when his own are causing destruction, and in the end becomes one of them after orchestrating a sweeping victory that could not have been accomplished without him. It reminded me strongly of Ferngully, minus the riveting musical numbers and Robin Williams. Quite a few other comments I’ve seen around have compared it to Dances with Wolves, most likely because both the white men stay with the culture they were initially in conflict with. While Avatar and Dances both have impressive messages, Avatar has hardly broken new ground. The same plot has been rehashed again and again, the only difference with Avatar is the audience can see CG dust floating on a CG world.

Also up for Best Picture this year is District 9, a dark, gritty tale of pretty much the same venue. White men oppress refugee aliens who landed over Johannesburg, South Africa. D9 focuses on the one individual and how he related to the prawn he encountered, and the involuntary transformation he was going through. Avatar was Dances with Wolves painted in stunning 3-dimensions, District 9 took a different spin on the innate fear and oppression of ‘the other’. With a more unique story line, and more realistic, average main character, D9 puts the audience right in the situation, in a way that surround video 3D can’t.

D9 makes you appalled at the humans, for reasons less epic than destroying an entire ecosystem. For the tiny things that make a human a human. For knocking out the alien who just helped save your skin and then trying to steal his ship with his kid inside. Because really, if any of us were in that situation, what would we have done? D9 portrays humanity at its best and its worst, in true form to the human condition. There is something admirable and something devastating in all of us, and D9 brings that out with startling, and at times irritating, exposition.

If a science fiction film is to win this year at the Oscars, Avatar does not deserve it. While the film skewered all the other movies in the box office with its effects and stunning new filming technique, what it lacked in plot originality should be enough to give the Academy pause. Rather than lauding the hugest film to reap in cash at the box office this year, they should take another look at the genre that they have ignored for so long. D9 deals intimately with the humans being humans, where Avatar merely brushes the surface of cruelties humans can do to ‘the other’. Sure, destruction of sacred holy ground is terrible, but it is not nearly as intimate as the mind-blowing agony Wikus goes through while he sits in the dirt, starving, trying to cut off his own arm.

Who am I even kidding? Scifi has been ignored and sneered at by the Academy since the award ceremony’s inception. No science fiction film has ever won best picture, and the only fantasy film to have broken the genre barrier was Return of the King, given most likely because it was based on a piece of credible, classic literature. Avatar won’t win, District 9 won’t win, and the science fiction record will be maintained. Right?

Intense spoilers for District 9. Read at your own risk.

Best scifi movie of the year? Possibly. Most thought-provoking, definitely. The last half hour or so had a decent amount of action. Would District 9 ever survive in the box office next to the brainless, action-packed, instant gratification that Transformers 2 offers? Most likely not. If my brother, a typical American audience member, is anything to go by, District 9 will suffer the fate of all great science fiction. In a culture of immediate satisfaction, thinking science fiction movies are not welcome. The audience wants explosions, limbs flying, and space ships. The only thing better than these are bug-like aliens to direct fear and revulsion towards. Starship Troopers delivers this in spades. District 9 does not.

The movie starts out with your everyday man, the man who will face incredible odds that hopefully we will want him to overcome. We will be sympathetic to this main character because he will be like us, the normal and average. Indeed, he is exceedingly average aside from the fact that he is evicting aliens from a slum. He is awkward, a white collar worker for the government with a family life and a father-in-law who he doesn’t get along with. Yet despite how familiar we are with him, with his character, and with his actions, we are a bit repulsed by him. During the evictions he is unkind to the aliens. He shows no compassion for those he is displacing. He feels them inferior to humans, and speaks to them as if he were talking to an unaware child. We would like to think we’d never do that in a real situation, but deep down we know that if everyone else were doing it, we would too. One can’t help but be a bit disgusted by the grittier details of humanity. Mob mentality is a terrible thing.

The director does a great job of keeping his audience in the dark as to whether or not the critters are sentient, or ‘intelligent’ to our standards. The aliens go about rustling through garbage and digging for scraps as is witnessed in many slums. They don’t seem to coherently answer the government workers in the beginning of the movie, and even if they do the humans treat the aliens as if they were a dog that had learned a trick.

Things take a turn when the main character, played by the director’s childhood friend, gets dosed with biotech that starts to change him into a prawn (the term for the aliens denoting shrimp or bottom feeders). It is here we learn about government experiments on live and dead prawns. Because their technology is completely biology based humans have never been able to use their confiscated weapons. Naturally, humanity being, well, humanity, when they see a shiny new toy they were desperate to start playing with them. Bigger and better, I always say.

The main character escapes to the slums. After all, what is a good movie without bonding time between the two species? He is taken in by the very prawn who accidentally started to change him and this is where the main character starts to realise that the prawns maybe aren’t as dumb as he first thought. Of course, he wants to use the technology to his advantage. The prawn has the technology to change him back and return his body to its previous, human state. However, after a disastrous journey back into the basement of the government building, the prawn learns exactly what humans are doing to his (her?) kind.

If it were a human, we’d be horrified. Saw and Freddy and all those horror movies are popular for just that reason. We love to be shocked and appalled at creative ways people can come up with to off each other. As long as it’s not us being massacred. But as a prawn, it is less mortifying and more run of the mill. We’re used to monster movies. We’re used to government experiments on creatures who aren’t us. Starship Troopers is again, a perfect example. The buggers are brainless monsters that we don’t care about. They’re just awesome things to shoot because when they go ‘boom’ it’s hilarious and gratifying. We love to fear the other. The ‘other’ isn’t us, therefore cannot be nearly as awesome, as sacred, or as intelligent.

District 9 forces watchers to reevaluate that sentiment. By making the human character act the way the audience would act in the given situation, we are driven away from the character and consequently from our own inherent responses to the situation. We start to feel sympathy for the prawn, who is acting more human than we’d like the human to act. The prawn is outraged at the treatment of his fellows, where the human views the massacre as commonplace. It doesn’t matter if it’s the ‘other’, as long as humans aren’t being defiled.

The scene in the basement of the government building is a turning point for the audience. It’s where we start realising that being human isn’t always being noble, isn’t always being caring, and isn’t always being self-sacrificing. It’s where we start to realise that the aliens are acting more human than ‘we’, as the main character, are. The human takes the cowardly route, the route we all know we would take in that situation. He steals the space ship after knocking the alien out and tries to fly it to save his own skin. And the audience, though understanding where the character is coming from, does not like him. In fact, we start to sympathise more with the ‘other’, in this case, the prawn.

Stuff blows up, obnoxious army officers get their due, and the main character does a 180 just in time to save the prawn and get him/her up on the ship at risk of his life (Note that it is the humans who gave the prawns their names, thus enforcing the male dominance in preexisting culture by giving them masculine identifications, but that is something for another time). Huzzah! The human finally starts acting the way we want him to! Despite it being the way we know we wouldn’t act. We’d like to think we’d all act heroic given the chance, but anyone who is honest will tell you they’d turn to complete chickenshit faced with what the main character went through. I would.

One of the most interesting, intriguing, and annoying things about the movie is the idea that one must experience the life of the ‘other’ in order to fully understand and become sympathetic to their plight. Or to one up that, actually become the ‘other’. By the end of the movie, the human realises he is now a prawn. The other prawns recognise him as one of their own and defend him from several of the cops that are after him. He is now one of them, because he is physically turning into one of them. Humans see him differently now. Even though he is human at heart, he is physically a prawn and that is what seperates him.

Now, I’m a bit of an optimist but it is my experience that one cannot shake prejudices until experiencing the life of the other or having someone close to you actually become the ‘other’. I’d like to think that we can get past black, white, gay, straight without having to spend a few weeks in the other’s shoes. It isn’t in humanity to go quietly like that, however. Until spending a good amount of time in the other’s shoes, a great majority of people, Americans not withstanding, will retain their prejudices despite how silly they are. Hence why it is annoying.

That’s all for the movie itself. I’m sure I’ll get around to the prawns themselves in a later post. The last thirty seconds of the movie got me thinking about another dastardly notion which is intriguing, interesting, and super annoying.

Very large spoilers for the recent Torchwood release. Read at your own risk.

I chatted with my friend about Torchwood: Children of Earth before I even downloaded it. After last season’s epic ending, I wasn’t sure I was emotionally ready for another battering via Russell T Davies. He succeeded in so thoroughly destroying me that it’s difficult for me to watch the first season because Tosh and Owen are in it. I didn’t even like Owen. So when I found out what happens in the new series, suffice to say I’ve already gone through a box of tissues.

Day One starts off interesting enough. Jack and Ianto are out recruiting for a doctor, and Gwen is doing her usual thing, whatever that is. The children are acting strange, and the voices/noises they make is definitely bone-chilling to say the least. Davies outdid himself with that one. I don’t know what it is about kids but they are always so creepy when they’re half-possessed by demons, monsters, and/or aliens. We find out Jack has a grandchild who is being effected by the strange happening, as Ianto has a niece and nephew. Therefore we automatically care about what happens to the children, as if the fact that they are children wasn’t enough. In the subsequent visit, Ianto also ‘comes out’ to his sister, though he insists that he is what fandom has long termed Jack!sexual. It’s different with Jack, obviously. Jack is special.

Jack is so special, in fact, that Davies dedicated a good fifteen minutes of torture for our perpetually horny hero, thus driving a wooden stake into the hearts of all his fans and twisting viciously. This series is not going to be light-hearted, and it is not going to end prettily. At least he lets us know early on that we’re in for a great heaping of angst and terrible character deaths, though the less perceptive of us probably wouldn’t have caught on until the last five minutes of the episode in which it is discovered Jack has mysteriously swallowed a bomb. As if being shot, reviving, and being shot again wasn’t enough to cue us into the dark nature of this season. Despite what some guys may feel, there was no gratuitous fanservice in this episode a la the infamous hothouse scene from season 2. Rather, there is the absolute best kind of mankissing that exists: the desperate last kiss as Jack shoves Ianto onto the lift before lock-down. This is not why the show is spectacular, but it is one of the best reasons.

I should probably have a ‘fangirls are not shallow’ tag.

Despite my innate dislike for Gwen and her weirdly inconstant character, she grew on me in season 2. It’s nice to see her and Rhys getting on, and to see her and Jack working through their kinky relationship. It’s also nice to see that Jack and Ianto aren’t exactly what one would call traditional. Though it is hard to tell what Ianto feels on the subject. He doesn’t like the word couple, he says, but he gets that lonesome puppy-dog face when he says it, and when Jack walks away he has that look in his eyes.

Ianto’s been severely changed since we first met him. There’s even a massive difference from him in the second season. He’s more reserved, quieter, not as snippy or quirky as he was on season 2. I don’t know if this is on purpose or if the writers just let this one slide like they did in season 1 and 2. His character seems to have shifted from quiet and reserved to whimsy and sharp, and now he takes on a more solemn face. It could be a result of anything, from Owen and Tosh’s deaths to contemplating his thing with Jack. We shall have to see how it develops.

Jack of course seems to have not changed a bit despite his eons of torture being buried in the ground in the last episode of season 2. He seems no worse for the wear as they careen around town trying to gather intel on the children and the strange occurrences surrounding them. Though the tension seems to have gone out of his thing with Gwen, he obviously isn’t going to perform a 180 and become monogamous for Ianto. Not that it is terribly unexpected, and fans wouldn’t want Jack any other way. That just doesn’t make for good fanfiction, obviously. And because Jack is our beloved Captain, he seems on track to take the brunt of the agony in this series.

All aboard the angst train! Woot woot!

This article is brought to you spoiler free (negating the tv spots and movie previews).

When I went to see Transformers, I was expecting to get blown out of my theatre chair with massive explosions, epic mecha fights, and the all around corny dialogue that is so typical of Michael Bay. He certainly delivered on the massive explosions and quite epic battle sequences, complete with red-tinted robot oily blood being splayed all over the landscape as robotic jaws are unhinged by mechanized upper cuts.

The corny dialogue was abused to the T, and Bay tried to fit every sex joke he could possibly squeeze in to a PG-13 rating. There are only so many balls jokes one can handle before wondering when the more important dialogue is going to occur. And by more important, I mean the screaming and Shia’s character whimpering about going crazy. Or having a robot for a car. Mostly going crazy.

Our favourite characters are back with a vengeance, including Sam’s wonderfully suburban mother and his sexy, sexy girlfriend. Who is very handy with a blowtorch. Remove your mind from the gutter, if you please. Sam returns in this movie as our lovable if clumsy, and slightly awkward, boy hero under the careful eye of his yellow Camero. His yellow Camero enjoys things like walks in the park, voyuering under his charge, and bursting out of the garage in a spray of lethal splinters and metal, much to the distress of Sam’s mother. Sam’s sexy girlfriend, whose name everyone forgot from the first movie (it’s Mikaela, for you fanboys who were too busy drooling), is still going strong with our boy hero and even flies across the nation to save him from certain doom (failing miserably yet hilariously). Bay introduces us to more quirky, stereotypical characters along the path of the movie, and by the end we have new friends to stand side by side with the old, but you know how the saying goes.

Lennox, who first name is too spectacular to mention, seems to have taken a fondness to Ironhide but that might just be the inner slasher in me screaming out for attention. The movie on a whole seemed more attuned to the humans’ relationships with the Autobots, and how they work together and depend on each other in particular situations. Bumblebee’s voice box is still broken, which while amusingly adorable also leads to wonder exactly what the medic Autobot has been doing over the last few year(s). Mikaela, despite the rumours floating around on the net, is not a complete damsel in distress, and is more than willing to stand on her own against a few rolling Decepticons. She struts her stuff on the big screen, looking slightly indecent while working on motorbikes for her father and chatting with Sam via phone and webcam. I would say go to the movie just for her, if you want. You’ll also catch some great sound and effects while you’re there.

Lots of action shots and sixty million deaths later, the movie ends with a spectacular crash, bang, boom. If you’re looking for a mindless, fun summer movie with tons of action, a great soundtrack, and really amazing special effects, then Michael Bay supremely outdid himself on this sequel. If you’re looking for character development and witty, stirring dialogue, I suggest renting Stargate, the 1994 version (yes, the one with Kurt Russell. That one). If you’re looking for plot, or to have your mind stimulated by some really intense scifi awesomeness, go find your copy of Bladerunner, or even the new the Day the Earth Stood Still. Transformers 2 is a great action flicka, but is more a sort of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am movie than a deeply evocative masterpiece of theatre.

When people think of teen books they think Twilight more often than not these days. The recent craze of vampire teenie books has exploded onto the market thanks to the poorly written, badly constructed Twilight series, and now bookshelves across the nation (and the world) are inundated with copycats and other teen girl authors who are cashing in on the revival of the ‘vampire’ novel. But before there were vampires who sparkled in the sunlight and couldn’t be killed by a stake through the heart, or werewolves who didn’t bother to wait for a full moon to fursplode into their hairy alter-egos, there was pulp fiction. In an age when most girls weren’t encouraged to read, writers for young boys dominated the market with thrilling tales of aliens and guns, high powered rockets and dangerous enemies. One of the most prolific writers for young men in the 40s and 50s was Robert A Heinlein, also known as the Grand Master of Science Fiction.

His stirring novel, Rocketship Galileo, tells the story of three young men, Ross, Morrie, and Art, just graduated from high school, who are conscripted by a Nobel Prize winning atomic scientist to help him build a rocketship that will get to the moon. Keep in mind this is a book geared towards young boys, hence mere 18-year olds getting the chance to rocket to the moon. First published in 1947, the novel is one of Heinlein’s most famous, and with good reason. His exquisite insertion of actual science into an action/adventure space story is ingenious. Before NASA even considered sending men into space, Heinlein had postulated the use of atomic space flight, something that is plausible but stymied by public fear of putting a nuclear power plant on a few thousand tons of high explosives. He meticulously explains the mechanics behind an atomic drive, which not only enhanced his credibility with his readers, but also planted the seeds of interest in young readers who would then go on, inspired by his writing, to work in aerospace engineering or planetary science.

Aside from his science, Heinlein subtly inserts some social standards that he lauds as admirable. The scientific method tops the list, with express emphasis placed on taking good engineering notes for everything, and questioning anything passed down ‘on authority’ with a sound mind and a good head on one’s shoulders. Heinlein also puts a great amount of care into writing about responsibility. When the offer to go to the moon is placed on the table, it is completely up to the boys’ to make the decision and then inform their parents. When they plead with the doctor to state their case, he refuses. The boys are legally men, and should start taking responsibility for their actions. Heinlein also puts nearly inconspicuous emphasis on the fact that Ross’ father expects his boy to have responsibility for what he does, including his notes and experiments. However, when the proposition to go to the moon is announced, Ross’ father rejects the thought of his son reneging on college. Responsibility and free will overrule his father, however, as Ross asks to be treated like the man he is and receives his parent’s permission to travel to the moon.

From there, Heinlein paints an interesting picture in which (spoilers ahead) Nazis secretly make it to the moon first, obliterating the original moon people and planning the next rise of the Third Reich. The doctor and his boys swing around the moon before landing, observing the dark side and confirming that it does actually exist (which is debated right before landing, helping to expand the minds of Heinlein’s readers through philosophy and how we don’t actually know anything for certain because everything is based on mathematics).

In true adventure fashion, Heinlein’s protagonists handedly show the white supremacist who is the better nation, killing nearly all of the men on the moon base and taking the leader prisoner to stand trial before the United Nations after a return trip to earth in the stolen Nazi vehicle. Considerably lighter in conclusion than Heinlein’s future works, Rocketship Galileo is a satisfying, if slightly shallow (comparatively) young adult novel that is guaranteed to instill a sense of national pride and the urge to go build something.

While the book is obviously a boy’s adventure novel, and women are noticeably lacking (aside from Ross’ weeping mother who finally convinces his father to let him go), the book is a great adventure story, and evidence of Heinlein’s philosophies and ideals leak through even in this young adult. Anyone who is a fan of Heinlein’s later works will enjoy this rough and tumble story of young dreams and accomplishments.

I will admit right off that I am not a hard core gamer, and that I am a bit of a wuss when it comes to scary games. I can’t play Left4Dead without squealing like a 5-year old girl and ducking into a corner hugging my shotgun. My best buddy owns an Xbox, and he’s been reading up on the Microsoft coverage that I missed Monday.

Nintendo, where to start? They came off the weakest of the Big 3, with no new technologies except a crazy stabilizer doohickey that one adds on the bottom of the existing Wiimote to allow for better control. Yay. More control for a system that is already heavily dependant on slightly flawed motion sensing technology. This is great for people who already own the system, and for setting up more realistic situations in which you can lob your Wiimote through the television screen. Nintendo didn’t come out with any exception new game titles, though they tugged deliciously at the fanboy’s hearts with the surprise announcement of a new Metroid game for the Wii in the very near future. I may not be a fanboy, but I know my heart was aflutter when I heard that Squeenix was releasing a FF open-world specifically for the Wii. A beautifully crafted RPG literally in the palm of my hand where I can swing my sword around and watch my pretty boy avatar onscreen follow my motion… Well, let’s just say fangasm was a bit of an understatement.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 perked my interest as well. I don’t own a DS, but the animation almost looks to be on par with the PS2. If the game isn’t that stupid card-based fighting techniques they released with CoM, I may consider purchasing the system and game. The new game appears to handle what happens to Roxas and Ansem!Riku before the events of KH:2. If we get more screen time of Riku in that blindfold, then I’m sold. Let it not be said that fangirls are shallow.

Other than my pets with Squeenix, Nintendo gave us pretty spiffy previews of their line up of sequels and ‘plus’ games, including another installment of WiiFit (aptly titled, WiiFit Plus), and another Super Mario Galaxy (named, also aptly, Super Mario Galaxy 2). I personally am not spectacularly thrilled about these new titles, because I don’t have a Wii and I don’t really care for RPGs that don’t feature insanely hot boys and crazily beautiful women. However, I’m sure there are some fanboys who are thrilled with the new announcements.

Sony, on the other hand, blew me away with their showings. They premiered (sorta) a new handheld, which has less body mass than the PSP. It’s called the PSP Go, and I’m unsure about the features it’s going to offer. I’m not going to buy it unless it rolls over and plays FF for me. What got me excited was the surprise of the online MMORPG that will follow up FFXI, FF XIV. Sony and Squeenix shocked everyone with the world preview of the MMO, and the online community of FFXI is buzzing. Players can’t bring their characters into the new world, which is several categories of Not Awesome. FFXI has been out for almost 7 years, and those characters have been built from the ground up. Having to start over is going to be a real downer. From what I can tell, there is great excitement for the new MMO out of Squeenix. I can tell you that from what I saw, it is going to be very pretty. I doubt my poor Cap’n Jack can handle the processing capabilities needed for the game, though.

The one announcement that I was looking for from Sony was the one they didn’t deliver. The price of the PS3 is still so inordinately high that I can’t even think about buying one to play any of the awesome games that are being released (like that Super Awesome 200+ MMORTS? Can someone say ’suh-weet’?). And while they didn’t announce the long awaited price drop, they did let us in on a prototype motion sensor wand they’re working on. It’s like a hybrid of Microsoft’s Project Natal (which uses a webcam to capture motion and has voice recognition capabilities. You may fangasm now) and the Wiimote. It uses a wand and a webcam to bring a 3D depth that will let users do some awesome stuff. Like ‘hold’ a sword and a shield and slash at zombie skeletons. I want one.

All in all, if I had to put a top ranking on the Big 3, I’d say Microsoft came out on top in this one, with its Project Natal and all of their games coming out this year. Sony comes close on their heels in second, mostly because their consoles are still so expensive and their games are all projected for next year at the earliest (look for delays, people). Nintendo was unimpressive, unless you’re a casual gamer or you enjoy launching solid objects at your tv screen in an attempt to whack a virtual tennis ball. The gamers all win out for this year, though, with the slew of new games being produced for almost all the consoles simultaneously it’s going to be hard to let the masses down.

ETA: The preview for L4D2 looks quite awesome. While I doubt I can get the guts up to play it, hello melee weapons and chainsaws. Good-bye zombies.