The End of Originality

So I’m sure by now you’ve seen this trailer for the new Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco and Tom Felton. For those fans of the original series, the remake with Mark Wahlberg was a disastrous catastrophe. Apparently the studio didn’t learn from its previous mistake and is now attempting to push through with the reboot of the scifi classic (though the very fact that David Hewlett is in this movie means I must go see it, unfortunately).

Where have all the original stories gone?

I understand that it is very, very difficult to come up with something completely original these days. But it is possible to take an original spin on an old idea (how many renditions of Romeo and Juliet have we been graced with over the centuries?). What bothers me the most about the remake is the message they are sending with this new movie. From the previews, it appears that the sentient apes were genetically engineered, which, of course, means that science is Evil and Shouldn’t Play God.

At the risk of spoiling all you who don’t know that the original series exists, it is a time loop. A never-ending circle of circumstances that leads to a twisting, spiralling downfall of humanity in which no one event can stand alone. The five movie set was developed so that when you watched the fifth movie of the series, you could then watch the first and start all over again. It was ingenious and infuriating at the same time. The message of total nuclear destruction was overbearing in the second movie, but as a sign of its times you learn to deal with it.

The new film, to debut this summer, appears to be yet one more in the apocalyptic diatribe against science and its developments. Experimentation on apes leads to a sentient monkey capable of toppling governments and destroying humanity. Terrifying. Even more horrifying is that audiences will come away from this film with a very real, latent fear of what the sciences can do. This is the climate of America today. Science is the large, frightful bogey-man that we all must beware of or face the consequences.

Don’t believe me? Tell me what you think about climate change.

If you’re going to remake a series, try doing it at least a little more faithfully. One of the main themes in the original film was the distinction between science and faith, how one is very distinct from the other and cannot be reconciled without vital injury to either’s statutes. Either science exists, or faith exists. You could even take the theme one step further and infer that science trumped faith at the end, because of the existence of a sentient human culture pre-dating the ape culture. The faithful’s methods were exposed, and the truth shone through, dug up from the levels of dirt in a desert cave.

This new film is not only retracting the themes of the original movie, but circumventing them, turning them around and arguing a case in which humans need to be fearful of their own ego; never stepping on god’s toes in their quest for knowledge. And yes, humans do need to ensure their pursuit of scientific knowledge is done so in an ethical manner, but to blatantly destroy the original series’ themes and messages in what is being called a ‘remake’ of the series…

We seem to have reached the end of originality.

Instead of creating their own movie, they had to take a classic science fiction series and abuse it for their own purpose, to suit their own views of modern culture and its appetite for fear of science and the investigation of knowledge. I’m not sure which makes me angrier; that they think they can remake a movie that originally starred Charlton Heston, or that the message they portray completely appends the original series. Hollywood is really grasping at straws, it seems, and they’re not doing a very good job at it.

Not so Loserific

Warning: Massive spoilers for the Losers movie and the comic

For those of you who want to think during their movies, don’t go see the Losers. Just don’t. The mindset you want to have when entering the theatre for this flick is that you have no expectations. You want to see lots of boom, you want to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan get it on with Zoe Saldana, and you want to see Chris Evans escaping a hostile situation to the tune of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ‘. If you’re expecting a semi-decent plot, please go see another movie. Most of all, if you want to see a movie that keeps the themes and nuances of the comic, don’t, don’t, don’t go see this movie.

In fact, if you have read the comic at all, spare yourself the brain hemorrhage and just pretend the film doesn’t exist.

I got lucky. I didn’t even know a comic existed when I heard of the movie. All I knew was Jeffrey Dean Morgan played a black ops commando, there were lots of slo-mo explosions, Zoe Saldana fired a rocket launcher in a black-stretch cami top, and I had to see it.

When I found out about the comic, I read it (all 32 issues), and realised just how lucky I had gotten. Imagine when Starship Troopers, the movie, was released. Because the book had been written in 1959, many of the target audience had never even heard of the novel. They went, they enjoyed the movie, and when they realised there was a book, read it, and wondered ‘what was the director thinking!? Why aren’t there any suits in the movie!?’

That is basically the reaction I had after I finished the comic. The comic was so confusing, so twisted, so politically, emotionally, psychologically deep that I wondered how exactly the director expected to pay homage to such a brilliant bit of work. There was no possible way the director could squeeze all of the comic themes into a two hour movie. Even a four hour movie would have trouble. Even a two hour movie with a three hour sequel would have problems fitting everything into the screen time. The movie set up for a sequel, but the way they handled the plot doesn’t leave much room for the political intrigue that follows in the comic.

We’ll start with the similarities, because they are the quickest to get through. Aisha exists. Clay and his unit are called the Losers. They were screwed by the CIA and are out for revenge against a ghost handler named ‘Max’. And… that’s it. Oh, except the explosions and guns. One thing the movie did handle better was the epic take-down of the private jet. Flaming Ducati into the cockpit of a private jet followed by massive explosion makes Lor one very happy fangirl.

The comic, on the other hand, was so twisted I had a hard time keeping up with it. Seeing the movie first helped me keep things straight until the long exposition in issue #31 that laid everything out. A few things I noticed right off: Aisha was one crazy bitch. While she was lying and manipulative in the movie, the screen time did not do justice to the complete level of batshittery she displayed in the comic. I mean. Wow.

Another thing I noticed (because Cougs was my favourite. I enjoy the quiet, guilt-ridden ones) was the lack of character development on Cougar’s end. Sure, in the movie he’s the quiet one. The one everyone has to watch out for (because it’s always the quiet ones, yea?). The movie doesn’t explain how he got so quiet. They take it as an innate aspect of his character, which the comic didn’t entertain. Cougar started out as chatty as the rest of the guys. The incident in Bolivia (in the comics it takes place in Afghanistan, I believe) is the turning point in Cougar’s character. The comic sets it up so that Cougar experiences the most amount of personal angst in the unit, being intimately connected to the kids when the chopper goes down. He carries the most angst, and the trauma from the experience is what makes him lose his voice. Add ten minutes to the movie and they could have added miles of depth to Cougar’s character. I’m still scratching my head as to why this was cut from the movie.

Max is also a big sticking point for fans of the comic who saw the movie. In the movie he is a CIA agent working to maintain America’s dominance by instigating a war that will let America wipe Muslim extremists from the face of the planet. All right, this is a pretty reasonable motivation for rogue CIA agents. The comics take him one step further. For a bit he is the man who is profiting from provoking acts of terror (he owns a company that bets on stock markets in the middle east and owns a company that provokes acts of terror so he’s basically funding his own operations in one giant corporate loop of craziness), but as the comic series draws to a close he is revealed to be something much more dangerous.

Think HAL9000 from 2001: Space Odyssey.

Max is still a CIA agent, sort of, and is determined to protect America from itself by destroying the current landmass and opening up a new one free of the fallacies that had dragged the former Land of the Free into a state of timid diplomacy. Just as HAL figured that the only way to protect humans from themselves was to terminate, Max plans to resurrect a true America from the ashes of the current nation. Yes, this sort of political discussion would never fit into one movie, but the way the Losers movie!verse went, I can’t see how they are going to bring in the comics concepts of government corruption. Yes, Max is still alive, but now the movie!verse becomes more of a hunt and chase than a game of political corruption and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Especially given the cutesie soccer scene at the end of the movie, lulling the audience into a false sense of security. That everything would turn out all right. They’d get Max and things would be happy (And then Aisha would eat their ears for lunch. Yum!).

The take-away from this is, if you’ve read the comics do not go see the movie. You’ll just hurt yourself. If you want a thinking movie, don’t go see this movie. Again, you will walk away wanting to hit your head against a wall. If you would like to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Zoe Saldana get hot and heavy on the big screen, by all means, high-tail it to the theatre as fast as your little legs can carry you. I personally loved the movie. JDM and the whole cast did a great job, and the movie was tons of fun. I loved the comic series. It was twisted and ridiculous and crazy-awesome. I recommend both, but see the movie first. Then read the series. Please, for your sanity.

Blindsided by Awesome

To the non-sc-fi audience, ‘subtle’ is not a word they’d associate with the genre. Giant alien motherships hovering in the lower atmosphere, hell-bent on destroying the world, just barely falls under the category of ‘obnoxious’. A large, eternal war with massive alien bugs could be called ‘noticeable’, especially when said bugs launch a meteor at Buenos Aires and level the entire city. And let’s face it, giant bugs, which are the terror of choice in most scifi because of their hive mentalities, are usually rather intrusive in every day activities.

So when I claim sci-fi can be subtle, many of you may roll your eyes. But as in any art form (yes, writing/creating science fiction is an art), there are quiet messages that can go unnoticed to the inexperienced eye. Tunnel in the Sky is a young adult survival novel about a group of child pioneers by Robert A Heinlein. It was published in 1955, during the start of many of the civil rights legislation regarding blacks in America. Why is this important? It is important not because of what Heinlein dealt with in the book (pioneering, a sense of adventure, population crush, strong women leads), but more so what he didn’t deal with.

Rod Walker, the main character of the book, is forced to rally his classmates when a survival exercise goes terribly wrong and the group are stranded on a forsaken planet. As with most of Heinlein’s protagonists, he uses Boy Scout know-how to help keep himself and his classmates safe. He has a woman at his side, but she is not simpering or helpless, nor does she squeal in the face of danger (again, on par with most of Heinlein’s novels). He has the strength, the manliness, and the sheer force of will to survive to keep him going. He is the man every white, geeky target audience wants to be. Except he’s not.

White, that is.

Rod Walker was, in fact, a black teen. Heinlein never mentions his race directly, but there are several extremely subtle hints dropped in the text that lead to the conclusion that Rod was black. The hints are, in fact, so subtle that nearly everyone misses them. Which is precisely what Heinlein intended when he wrote the novel in 1955. His writing, for the most part, is the epitome of colour-blind (neglecting Farnham’s Freehold, of course, where Heinlein was explicitly making a point about racism). It is not surprising, perhaps, that the hints were so subtle that a white boy was placed on the cover of the book when printed. Some may cry foul, but racefail like this happens to this day by editors who are interested in marketing their novels. Heinlein could have spoken out about the mistake, but I think he was too busy chuckling to himself about his brilliance. I know I would be.

Andrew Jackson Libby. He has certainly gone through a lot during his two lifetimes. His first appearance was in Methuselah’s Children, where he met the incorrigible Lazarus Long, who’s sexual stamina was only surpassed by the years he lived, and they worked together on the Libby-Sheffield Drive, which enabled men to spread out to the stars. He was in the space navy, he was offered the command of a ship (he refused), he was phenomenal in mathematics, and he wasn’t quite a ‘he’.

He was, in fact, a hermaphrodite, which Heinlein states in a later novel in his Future History series (The Number of the Beast). Subtle this is not, but Number came out in 1988. When Libby was first introduced, the year was 1958. Libby’s gender identity is not clearly expressed. It is taken for granted that he is a man, because he is in combat and women don’t fight. However, there are one or two lines in the text which hint towards Libby’s identity, which may be missed by the lay reader, or someone just not paying attention. There are also minor hints that Libby is attracted to Lazarus, which was still rather progressive for the time it was written. Gays? In 1958? Not in my America.

In his later years, Heinlein relied more on preaching than analogy to get his points across. Stranger in a Strange Land, a treatise on how ridiculous organized religion is, reworks the Christ story in a manner that is downright blasphemous to some (and hilarious to others). Another example is Heinlein’s extensive use of line marriages. To say that Heinlein is textbook for polyamory would be an understatement. He introduces the idea of group marriages in such an unassuming way that the reader almost ignores that it’s happening at all.

Science Fiction may have aliens and universal battles and huge bombs that can crack planets open, but it also has layers under all that exploding shrapnel. Layers that can take up to six readings to understand. Or layers that may never be understood unless pointed out.

Counting the Decades through Science Fiction (Pt 2)

The What in the What-If
Important Groundwork for Science Fiction

Welcome to part two of my own little SciFi through the ages. First I’ll give you a brief run down of the major players (more specifically, writers) in the era. Verne, Wells, and (get this) Jack London are just a few writers who were wetting their pens in the new genre. Novels were starting to give way to pulp magazines, which, in the future, would be the driving force for proliferation of sci-fi. And the movie projector was starting to pick up popularity.

Because science fiction was still a forming genre at the time, there were few novels that can be recalled by history. However, a few very key scientific breakthroughs were laying the groundwork for future novels and ideas that would rock the world. Much of the key work in physics revolved around confirmations and experiments concerning the nature of the atom. Marie Curie was writing about her groundbreaking work in radioactivity. Edison invented the battery, the first way to store power for a later time.

And, of course, one of the most creatively influential scientific and mathematical breakthroughs to occur during the first decade of the 1900s was the postulation of relativity. In 1905, Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, which states that no frame of motion is unique and that all physical laws apply to any inertial frame. Which is to say gravity works if one is standing still on the earth’s surface or if one is standing on a moving train on the earth’s surface. It may just work a bit differently mathematically. This mathematical possibility derived from the works of other strong members of the physics field, including the huge name Lorentz, and Poincaré, a name which may be unfamiliar to nonmath-people (he did amazing work in differential equations).

Many of you are familiar with relativity and the extent with which it has been used and abused by scifi authors. A side theory to relativity is the idea of the contraction of space while traveling at massive speeds, which is not something Einstein came up with, but rather was Lorentz’s child. He was the one who derived the equations that prevent breaking the light speed limit, forcing quite a few scifi authors to develop interesting methods of working around it, such as implementing wormholes or dimension hopping. It is curious to note that Lorentz was actually trying to help figure out that space was composed of a pervading ether. Inadvertently he triggered relativity. Coincidentally, if you come across any tales of ships swimming through space, they most likely came from this era in time. The common scientific theory at the time was that space was filled with ether, and that was how light traveled from the stars.

Max Planck, during the early years of 1900s, developed his theory of quantized energy, which opened the door to countless other minute things being quantized (charge, for one). Believe it or not, this concept has been used in science fiction as a plot device. But we’ll get to those later.

The 1900s was a great time for the scientific community. Technology was on the rise, and scientific theory was paving the way to knowledge of the universe. And, of course, providing shiny for the fiction writers of the time.

One Writer’s Greatest Fear

Most authors are afraid of not getting published. They’re afraid their work won’t be received, won’t be recognized, and will fade into oblivion without so much as a murmur of protest. Other authors fear that their work will be eviscerated by their audience, and won’t be accepted for the literary genius that it is. Robert A Heinlein didn’t suffer from either of these fears. His fear was something much more practical and much more terrifying (mostly because he brow-beat his editors until they published his work. The first short he ever wrote was published- this never happens in the literary world. Ever).

In If This Goes On–, Heinlein paints a picture of a theocratic America run not by Presidents but by Prophets. Without specifically mentioning a denomination, Heinlein steals from evangelical Christian organizations to craft a perfectly terrifying American government that is the result of catastrophic failure of separation of Church and state. The first book in Heinlein’s Future History series, where he details what path our Earth (specifically America) could go, describes a totalitarian police state where free thought is minimized, science is lauded as magic handed down from God, and the Bible is the new constitution of the United States.

Through John Lyle, the protagonist of If This Goes On–, we learn exactly how the religious fanatics have come into power in the stronghold of democracy. It appears that the very democracy which we all love and enjoy was the eventual downfall of freedom and liberty. An uneducated public responding to the stirring rhetoric of men who claimed to have an in with god was enough to elect a man who based his political platforms on religious doctrine. With most of the country behind him, he slowly, patiently, restricted the government’s power until he was the head of the ‘new’ republic. The trend from democracy to dictatorship can be traced through many historical governments, and the theme was prevalent in the day Heinlein wrote his novella.

One thing that was different in Heinlein’s story, however, was the gradual outlining of precisely how the theocracy came to power. The detailed accumulation of power that Nehemiah Scudder (the first Prophet) accrued is frightening for two reasons. One, that America was not only able to, but willing to give a religious man that sort of power. And two, that the hand over could happen realistically, especially with the surge of the religious right after the most recent election.

Never before has politics been so vocally religiously-driven. Most of you are familiar with the new Tea Party movement (Taxed Enough Already Party), and if you’re not, have you been living under a rock? The Tea Party is under the impression that the Republican Party (despite blocking Obama’s legislature at every turn) is not conservative enough. And while their fiscal policy, if stripped down, is somewhat admirable, their other stances are slightly frightening. One of the undertones in the movement is the prominent featuring religion plays. A blogger posted about his experiences with the Tea Party convention that took place a few weeks ago. Many of the news commentators with CNN and MSNBC were surprised at the level of religion they found while covering the convention.

Along with the fears the Tea Party fuels (such as the notion that refusal to teach creationism as a science infringes on freedom of religion/speech), the magnanimous organizers of the movement trumpet blatant lies as truth to their unsuspecting audience. One of the most epic lies perpetrated by the Tea Party movement, and an affront to any educated person in existence, is the notion that America’s founding fathers were Christian. Hate to break it, but they weren’t. Sure, deism is slightly related to Christianity in regards to morals, and dos and don’ts. Minus the whole Christ person, though, which I had always thought was an important doctrine to being Christian. That’s not even starting to mention the lies spreading concerning Obama’s nationality and religion.

The Tea Party is now placing candidates in the running for Congressional seats in the upcoming general election (which will only help the Dems this time around, so hey, keep at it!). But if the Tea Party becomes a driving force in American politics, we could be facing something much like Heinlein’s progression of power towards a theocracy. Sixty years ago he saw the seeds for a religious revolution waiting in America’s soil. Let’s use a bit of caution to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Related article: http://coffeehousepoetry.net/?p=860

Better Luck Next Time

Well, at least Avatar didn’t win.

No, Avatar did not deserve best picture. No, James Cameron did not deserve best director (though I’m convinced he didn’t win was because he told the Academy that his ex-wife deserved it. The man is terrifying). In fact, Avatar won exactly what it was supposed to win, all the technological based categories like, big shock, the visual effects award. While District 9 carried the mantle of the sci-fi film much better than Avatar did, it was no match for the ground-breaking effects that took Avatar to box office champ.

District 9 had the unfortunate honour of going up against the Hurt Locker, which deserved every award it won. Perhaps if Hurt Locker had been released a bit later District 9 would have had a chance. Even as a scifi movie, it was undeniably intimate and riveting. District 9 just got unlucky this year, unlike Avatar and Star Trek, which didn’t have the makings of a truly epic science fiction story with contemporary messages and a take-away theme that the audience can learn from. Yes, Avatar told us to play nice with other cultures and not destroy the environment, but we’ve seen that message before in the same scenarios. Star Trek was just a rough and tumble action flick which stripped a lot of the original series’ messages to the bare minimum. Both amazing movies, neither really deserving of many of the awards for which they were nominated.

So the Academy upholds it’s long tradition of leaving scifi in the dust when it comes to best picture. It’s a bit of a bittersweet feeling, knowing that Avatar could have won but shouldn’t. And the fact that two science fiction pictures and an animated feature were all up for best picture says something about shifting views of the Academy. Perhaps sometime in the near future a science fiction film will make best picture.

District 9 may have just been unfortunate, but Sherlock Holmes got robbed.

Counting the Decades Through Science Fiction (Pt 1)

Welcome to Part 1 of my SciFi through the Ages series. It is surprising how easy it is to pick out the decade when a scifi book was published. Just take a look at the science. Sure, the language is helpful, but when you gets up into the 50s, language hasn’t had enough time to evolve since then. It’s all in the science.

The Industrial Age

1800s – 1899

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1863)
From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne (1865)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1889)

The dawning of the technological age saw the creation of what is known today as science fiction, though at the time it wasn’t considered as such. There was no category for a genre which discussed reanimating dead tissue. Nobody had really thought about what would happen in the future of humanity, if you went far enough. It was impossible to shoot a ship out of a giant canon (slingshot, what have you) and reach the moon. The public just wasn’t thinking about these things until technology started to become a massive part of people’s everyday lives. Only then did writers start to question where such technology could lead us as humans.

One of the first scifi novels was written by (surprisingly) a woman. Frankenstein, the terrifying tale of a man reanimated with electricity, shows the crude understanding of the human body that prevailed at the time. Dr Frankenstein rummaged through cemeteries for limbs and then sewed them together. Now, this all happens in the background of the novel, so it is very possible that the physician spent the time to determine compatible blood types and antibody matches, but in the early 1800s it is highly doubtful he had the technology to do so. Aside from that obvious conundrum that we can now see from our perch in 2010, it is impossible to reanimate dead tissue. Within days of physical death, the body starts to break down beyond hope of repair.

Though the idea of bringing people back to life after death has fascinated humans throughout the years, zinging a collection of decomposing bits stitched together is not going to work any time soon.

Already the gender divide was fairly evident. In perusings of various science fiction novels which I will most likely delve into during a later post, I’ve had pointed out to me that women tend to write science fiction that is more biologically based. Men tend to be impressed with very shiny things like guns and ships and sentient computers. Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon is an amazing step in the science fiction world regarding goals and the insertion of science into novels. This is not to say that Mary Shelley did not have any science in her novel. Verne’s characters calculated escape velocity needed to reach the moon, and, in 1865, a full hundred years before humans went into space, determined a fairly plausible idea on how to get there.

“Suffer me to finish,” he calmly continued. “I have looked at the question in all its bearings, I have resolutely attacked it, and by incontrovertible calculations I find that a projectile endowed with an initial velocity of 12,000 yards per second, and aimed at the moon, must necessarily reach it. I have the honor, my brave colleagues, to propose a trial of this little experiment.” –Verne, Chap 2, From the Earth to the Moon

Seems reasonable enough. Shoot something hard enough, fast enough, it will eventually get there, right? Neglecting slowing down once they get to the Moon, or their lack of knowledge about orbits, or various other minute details that make up rocket science, it was a good idea. However, in Verne’s time, there was no gun that could shoot the 11.2 km/s needed to escape Earth’s pull. There isn’t a gun in our time that can shoot that fast. He had the basic idea down correct, though. Put enough combustion behind something, and it will go as fast as you need it. That’s basically all the Shuttles are. Giant rockets. Giant, prettily coloured rockets with a bit more aim. The first ships they tested were, in fact, quite literally rockets. The astronauts were strapped to giant explosive devices and hurtled through the atmosphere. And to think people volunteered for such missions.

Where Verne was traveling along the right path with Moon, he was amazingly off with his Journey to the Center of the Earth. The large, rotating ball of condensed gas which served as the sun to the underground world was about the only thing he got correct. While his underground world is fanciful, it is rather implausible.

So, for novels written in the 1800s, you want to look for old science. Not necessarily incorrect science, but old knowledge that has been debunked.

True Separation of Church and State

Most people hear science fiction and immediately think spaceships or aliens or global devastation. What most people don’t realize is that science fiction also tackles social conventions, as demonstrated in District 9 (which, of course, also had aliens but that’s beside the point) by its intimate look into abuse and segregation by race in South Africa. Science fiction is credited with driving technology, but it isn’t usually associated with social change. True, much of the old, good scifi breaks cultural and social convention, but those messages are often lost by the misconception that science fiction is about aliens and huge, busty women.

Perhaps it is time to start looking into the pulp novels for advice on how to construct our present and future. The pulps were cheap scifi novels printed in the 50s, usually for young adults, but many of the authors then went on to publish huge cult classics, and become known as Grand Masters of science fiction. Heinlein, the Grand Master, broke the brain of the average American with his concepts of human relationships and the future of marriage. If you are socially conservative, this article is probably going to make you cry.

The first interracial kiss is usually credited to Kirk and Uhura, from Star Trek, the Original Series, in the episode Plato’s Stepchildren. In it’s golden years, Star Trek was pivotal in demonstrating what made science fiction so great. It was culturally shaking. Something that flew under the radar was Heinlein’s Future History series. It took years for the series to develop a cult following, though the ‘first’ in the series helped launch the sexual revolution of the sixties. Stranger in a Strange Land certainly wasn’t the first novel he wrote with open relationships in it, but it was the first that extensively explored the idea of free love. Because the novel was more of a treatise on the dangers of organized religion, the legal ramifications of free love were never discussed.

In the rest of his Future History novels, however, he gives us glimpses of how open relationships and marriages are handled when it’s not an issue to be an ethical slut. The issue of marriage is briefly mentioned over the course of six books, but it is purposefully weaved into the narrative to give the audience a pretty fair idea of an ideal marriage ‘ceremony’. If one could even call it that.

Heinlein’s marriage contracts were exactly that. Contracts. Two, three, four, however many people drew up a legally binding document which lay out the terms of agreement between the parties. The contracts were then sent to a judge to be confirmed. No religion. No pomp and circumstance. The contracts state length of relationship, babies to be created, monetary value, and various other quibbles that a couple, triad, quad, what have you, would discuss when starting a relationship.

There seemed to be no distinctive tax clemencies for those who were in relationships. In a free loving future, when people are moving between families easily and smoothly, it would be too hard to keep track of benefits for couples, etc. Tax breaks for married couples are in place currently to encourage people to wed and have children. Contracts regarding child support are a bit lax in Heinlein’s married worlds, because he relies on the good will of the people in his future, and the quaint notion that people actually take responsibility for their actions, which we all know nobody does anymore.

Heinlein’s marriage contracts are the ideal standard for what a marriage contract is supposed to be. Anyone consenting should be allowed to enter into a government contract with each other, to share benefits and lay out their lives together. There is no distinction between who is allowed to enter into a contract, and who is unable to enter. The only disqualifying instances occur when one or more of the participants is under duress, or underage.

The reason that there is such a huge debate over the definition of marriage is because religion is still so invested in America’s legal system that it cannot be shaken out without a fight. The government has zero right to define marriage between a man and a woman, much less any right to put the rights of a minority at the vote of the majority. It’s sole purpose is to mediate contracts between two people, three people, whatever.

Perhaps we can start taking cues from a book that was published in the 50s. It is 2010, after all.

Why Avatar Should Not Win Best Picture

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?

District 9

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.