Okay, I know there's a ton of spinoffs out there and there's no way the story will end here...
But this is the official Canon series, the one Lucas envisioned when he first drew up his outlines for a possible Flash Gordon reboot he wanted to film.
I started this when I was seven years old. I'm 49 now, but I don't want this part of my childhood to go away...
Who will be there with me when this happens, at long last...?
Just saying, ten years ago the xkcd comic ran a comic freaking out about how The Matrix was ten years ago...
Meaning we're now at the TWENTY YEAR MARK about freaking out over The Matrix.
Yeah, I know. I've been freaking out about getting old ever since they cast Winona Ryder to be Spock's Mom in the Star Trek reboot. Stay with me on this though...
Looking back, I remember 1999 being a big year because of something else: the long-awaited return of the Star Wars storyarc that Lucas had promised during the original trilogy. The Phantom Menace's release was such a big deal an entire webpage was created - countingdown.com (no longer valid, it's been outpaced by so many other sites especially YouTube and IMDB) - to report on the release and keep track of the building hype. Everything else that movie year paled in comparison: Austin Powers sequel? Pfft. This weird cult movie making waves on the 'Net called Blair Witch Project? Please. Bruce Willis in some psychological thriller called The Sixth Sense? Who's even directing that thing...!
So there's a level of irony here that the most anticipated movie of that year turned out to be the bigger dud. For all the advancements Lucas made in digital effects directing, Phantom Menace was just... meh, lacking any kind of reason or narrative focus fans were expecting.
Anyway, I vaguely remember the trailer for this Matrix film. Starring an actor I had grown up to - Keanu Reeves, from my high school/college years of Bill & Ted movies and then the surprisingly good Speed action flick - this Matrix thingee looked like some sort of computer heist / spy thriller that somehow involved giant spider robots. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me. I doubt the studio releasing it knew either 'cause they dumped it in the early April schedule before all the summer blockbusters were due to come out.
But as a Keanu fan, and with little else to do back then - my social life then and now was/is meager - on my day off from work I went to the Sawgrass multiplex in Broward County and caught an early screening (I was in the habit of trying to avoid the crowds).
And about two and a half hours later I stumbled back out into the bright sun of South Florida. I pulled out round sunglasses and slid them onto my face as I slow-walked to the nearest Burlington Coat Factory. I found a trenchcoat, paid for it with a credit card, alerting the computer overlords of my rebellion, and wore that thing back out to the heated parking lot where I sweated ten pounds off driving back to my apartment to play the PvP mods on Quake II until I became like Neo.
Okay. I might not have played Quake II. I was terrible at PvP. But the rest of it is real. I TOOK THE RED PILL, PEOPLE.
Even as I was watching it, I could tell the plot was a pretty straightforward "Hero Becomes Messiah" story. But the details of the thing were astounding. The filmmakers - at the time the Wachowski brothers - employed a mashup of cultural archetypes, ranging from Asian anime and kung-fu elements to Western shootouts and explosive overkill. The story blurred the line between Christian (Gnostic, which was probably the first time most people even heard of it) and Buddhist philosophies: "The Matrix is run by a set of rules." "Stop trying to hit me and hit me." "There is no spoon." There had been earlier movies that questioned the very nature of reality itself - Dark City had a similar vein and even shared the same sets - but The Matrix was the one that did so with a deep understanding of what had to be real and what wasn't. It's been called the best cyberpunk movie ever made, considering earlier attempts like Johnny Mnemotic (hi, Keanu again!) never tried to go as in-depth to cyber-reality as the Matrix did.
The movie was unafraid to create a universe that for all intents was a graphics-intensive computer game. The Matrix established in film how a Massive Multiplayer Online universe could actually work. (Ironically, a Matrix MMO game that came out after the third movie ended up too buggy and shut down in 2009) Using a revolutionary filming technique that became known as "Bullet Time," the camera itself did not remain static in a scene, it could move and rotate during a fight in-progress to make the fight more intense. Much in the way a gamer's POV moved during the FPS, or how it would float above a fight during a PvP death-match, the camera was now closer to the action than ever before.
Just the opening sequence of Agents attempting to capture Trinity, with unknowing human cops trying to arrest her only to face a computer expert who "cracked" the cheat codes to the Matrix, was a mind-blowing moment. A woman (Carrie Anne Moss) in an all-leather cat-thief outfit suddenly turned into a lethal gravity-defying assassin, pulling stunts that looked done real-world. Except for the moment where she jumps up, pauses while the camera repositions itself, and finishes off her flying kick move that sends the unlucky cop into the far wall. There had never been anything like that on film before.
From that point on, the Matrix was the defining film in a year - 1999 - crammed with them. It didn't do more than just revolutionize visual effects and cinematography, it changed storytelling. It challenged the Hero narrative (while, yes, sticking to the Campbellian template). It added a diverse cast of supporting characters (Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus leading a multicultural crew fighting the machines) and mixed in Eastern themes that most Western audiences rarely saw. The movie not only questioned the defined role of the hero - the machine Agents constantly call the hero "Mr. Anderson" as an insult, leading him to declare "My name... is NEO." - it questioned self-identity (are you an office drone or a superhero?), it questioned gender roles and gender itself (a funny but overlooked moment is when Neo meets Trinity - with a men's haircut and lack of feminine markers - for the first time: "I thought Trinity was a guy." "Most guys do.")
Just some other thoughts to throw out there: As noted earlier, I had a pretty good idea how the movie would play out once the plot got going (when Morpheus' crew unplugs Neo from the Matrix). While the filmmakers seem to make a big deal about the Oracle "not what we were expecting," I actually knew enough by 1999 about such archetypes - we call them tropes now - to expect the Oracle (Gloria Foster) to be a wise elder woman baking cookies in her kitchen. Still, I loved Foster's performance for the human grace it added to the story.
Watching today, Neo seems like the poster boy for a disaffected Generation X, a non-conformist who escapes his dull life as a cubicle drone to become a god. (In fact, one of The Matrix’s closest thematic companions from the fertile cinema du 1999 is probably Mike Judge’s Office Space—another sad ballad about humans being swallowed whole by faceless corporations, though Judge’s film has a few more jokes...)
There's some things to be said about the sequel films, which felt inevitable when the original Matrix became such a huge hit - it was arguably the best reason to start buying into the newly-introduced DVD discs (the tech came out in 1995), improving its revenue pull for the studio - but now is not the time to get into those arguments.
In terms of anniversaries, it may be time to look back at a lot of other movies that came out in 1999 - yes, I'm sure I'll talk about Phantom Menace when the time is right - and marvel at how we were poised in that moment to break free of the standard blockbuster formats of film watching (and film making). But for now...
I'm serious. Jodie Whittaker starred in a cult classic SciFi movie called Attack the Block, which is now required viewing.
Oh yeah. That's Finn from Star Wars teaming up with the Doctor to fight off aliens. This is gonna go off the geek-o-meter, mates. Allow it.
In the meantime, this is great. The show is opening up the gender roles in science fiction more than it's been in ages. We've had strong female roles - Scully, Buffy, Xena - and we've had strong female leads in established franchises - Janeway on Star Trek, Starbuck and Athena on the reboot of Battlestar Galactica - but this is a major step: This will be a strong female lead in an ICONIC role.
Icons exist beyond the stories that birthed them - Sherlock, Bond, Kirk, Spock, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, just to name a few - and icons have a great impact on the cultural trends of the past, present AND future.
As much as a successful Wonder Woman movie is groundbreaking, as much as having movies like Mad Max Fury Road promote positive imagery of women, to open up an existing role and character as important to SciFi geekery as the Doctor will pave the way to equalizing roles between genders for the next generation of shows and characters.
So to all the haters out there, grow up. Women have been into science fiction as long as the men, and they've been writing their fanfic and making their cosplay and pining their dreams of heroic escapes same as you.
Book: This should do.
Zoe: Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?
Book: Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.
We can't blame this on the hair.
2016 has just basically been an incredibly shitty year for celebrities and important people.
I've been geeking out lately to something NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab just did.
As a means of promoting their endeavors to explore space, they created a series of Travelogue posters that one would find in a travel agency back in the 1950s-1960s. With an excellent eye to Art Deco style.
...Fox just issued a press release confirming the long-whispered return of The X-Files — and also confirming the return of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
It's been 13 years since the finale (and a couple of so-so films in between) and now Fox has re-ordered a six-episode X-Files run, with original showrunner Chris Carter.
In the PR release, there's lots of nice talk, like this bit from Carter saying he thinks of the hiatus as a, "...13-year commercial break." And as for what's in store, lots more weirdness as Carter seems pretty giddy about the state of scifi television today, "The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories."
Hell. Yes.
In a previous life before the political blogging here, I did fanfiction and alt.tv.x-files postings as I followed this show I got hooked on back in the early 1990s. I've mentioned before I was into the conspiracy stuff, UFOs and Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot and ghosts and here was this show that delved into all of that and I pretty much geeked out.
This was around the time that Star Trek was getting into a rut, where Babylon 5 was an acquired taste, and Dr. Who had faded away (with only a badly written but well-acted TV movie with Paul McGann as The Eighth Doctor as a hoped-for reboot), and there wasn't much else good science fiction on television. There wasn't much more in the way of mind-bending fun/scary sci-fi, and The X-Files covered the need.
It helped that the show was anchored by two fun actors - Duchovny and Anderson - and had heaping helpfuls of a recently realized trope called Relationshipping (or 'Shipping for short). The concept had been around for ages, as a literary trope (SEE Ivanhoe, Little Women, Jane Austen), but rarely seen on television the way they did it on this show. They didn't create UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension), they merely demonstrated how brilliant a story-telling device it could be in the right hands.
Fans tuned in less for the scary monsters and tuned in to watch Moose and Squirrel shamelessly flirt with each other over an autopsy. It got to where nearly every other show aims for it, intentionally or not (West Wing was a good example: the show started off with the open intent of having Josh flirt with Mandy, but when it proved Josh interacted better with Donna the dynamic of the show - Will They Or Won't They? - revolved around that).
From that, my massive output of writing during the 1990s revolved around what I called Senseless 'Shipper Surveys, an episode recap done in a humorous vein around how much that episode involved the 'Shipping and how silly Mulder got while St. Scully lorded over all. I had a major section of a personal website (ye olde wittylibrarian.com site) devoted to it (the other half was to following the Tampa Bay Bucs).
The website is gone - I got to the point I couldn't afford to pay the domain rights - but I've got those old surveys on file somewhere. I am sorely tempted to waste a lot of my time re-posting them online.
Just how many blogs should I be running at one time? I may need to grab another Blogger address... UPDATE: new blog address for the Surveys, folks! http://xfilesshipper.blogspot.com/
As the lead-up to the 50th anniversary to the start of the long-running science-fiction show, the producers have seen fit to give us some closure regarding the dreaded backstory of the Last Great Time War. A war between the Time Lords and Daleks at the height of their respective empires that reportedly shattered much of space-time.
This mini-episode is about seven minutes long but packs a season's worth of details into it (The following CONTAINS SPOILERS STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE EPISODE YET):
The Time War itself has become so massive that nearly every race has been dragged into it whether they wanted to or not.
The War began during the lifespan of the Eighth Doctor, but he himself refused to participate in it and tries to help people flee from it.
Other races are so horrified or disgusted by what was/is/will be happening that the ship's captain Cass flat out refuses the Doctor's help.
The other elder races of the universe - the Sisterhood of Carn for example - are well aware of what's happening. From earlier tellings we already know most of those races had fled the known universe altogether.
EDIT: Has been noted elsewhere that The Eighth Doctor mentions all of his companions from the Big Finish audio series - the thing that kept Doctor Who popular between the 1989 cancellation, 1996 movie, and 2005 rebirth. The Big Finish series is in fact still ongoing and very popular with the fans, and there's been a question if those stories would be accepted as canon. YES THEY ARE...
The Eighth Doctor himself is offered a handful of choices as he faces his own death in four minutes' time: accept his death and let the Time War destroy everything; regenerate and use his skill as The Doctor to save whatever he can before the Time War destroys everything... or become a Warrior and end the war by any means possible. As he considers the rejection he endured by Cass' rage towards him, The Eighth Doctor makes his choice...
Oh, and one more thing: McGann would have F-CKING ROCKED AS THE EIGHTH DOCTOR.
Damn you, Fox Channel. You really screwed the pooch with that 1996 movie.
There was this article I read a few years back - I think TBogg over on Firedoglake website highlighted it or something, or maybe on Balloon Juice - about the three primary types of political ideology in the United States. Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian. And how the blog writer despised all three.
It was hilarious. It oversimplified the political traits of all three, true, but sarcasm or satire work best when it's correct on the details. I could copy/paste some of the article quotes from there to here, but that wouldn't be fair to you. You HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING. Click that link above. Read it. Learn it. Live it. You'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll become a part of you. Then come back here because I crave your attention and still have a few more things to say.
Okay, you back? ...oh okay... quick bathroom break, see you in three minutes...
(awkward wait)
Anyway, so here I was about a month ago reading up on the Hugo Award winners - as both a librarian and a sci-fi / comic book geek, I have an interest - and I see the winning novel this year was Redshirts, a meta-fictional delving into the lives of the ill-fated crew members who tend to die on science fiction space opera shows. And the author's name is John Scalzi.
And I think to myself Wait, I know this guy.
I admit I don't read as much science fiction lit as I should in order to keep my geek cred fresh - partly because my collection management duties focus more on non-fiction - so I hadn't really noticed that Scalzi has been penning a few good novels here and there (I'd been reading more Iain M. Banks and Terry Pratchett lately, so that's my excuse). I merely recognized the name as someone who'd written a blog entry about politics that I recalled was twisted and funny.
So, yeah, I go diving back in and find that I've got the Whatever article still saved as a bookmark on my browser. And yeah, it's him.
And so now, a lot of things about what Scalzi wrote about libertarians makes a whole shitload of sense.
Here, I will copy and paste this part:
Never got over the fact they weren't the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board... Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn't actually involve real live humans... Libertarians blog with a frequency that makes one wonder if they’re actually employed somewhere or if they have loved ones who miss them... Socially slow — will assume other people actually want to talk about legalizing hemp and the benefits of a polyamorous ethos when all these other folks really want is to drink beer and play Grand Theft Auto 3. Libertarianism the official political system of science fiction authors, which explains why science fiction is in such a rut these days...
Back when I first read it (about 2007, maybe earlier), I wasn't entirely sure why Scalzi was chewing out libertarians for screwing up modern sci-fi literature (unless he was tuned out by John Ringo's stuff). I hadn't noticed Scalzi was getting his works being published when I first read this (he's updated / upgraded the blog site since last I visited, back then I didn't see the About The Writer or a link to his books). But now I'm looking at his career and I see why he's pissed.
Scalzi's been involved in publishing and editing for more than a decade, some of it in traditional markets and a few years working with science fiction pubs. As such, he's probably been exposed to more horrifically bad science fiction story submissions than the average Human,Vulcan, Klingon, Minbari, Silurian, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.
This is part of the Sturgeon's Law: that 90 percent of everything is shit. Since Sturgeon was an acclaimed sci-fi writer, he came up with what he called the revelation when he got tired of defending science fiction as a genre when the critics kept using the worst of sci-fi - the bad aliens, the bland ideologies, the squicky sex - to belittle it. And in a way, Sturgeon is right about 90 percent of the stuff out there is bad, regardless of genre or format: 90 percent movies, 90 percent music, 90 percent art, 90 percent fashion, some of that shit is bad shit. It's just that the worst of that 90 percent, well it rankles on you if you're a fervent lover of that music/fashion/art/film/literature genre. You live for the 10 percent that wows and enjoys and delights, but if you get nothing but shit most of the time it's gonna make you jaded at best.
So in a way I see where Scalzi's coming from when he dumped on libertarianism like that in his article. He's probably seen one too many sci-fi fantasy stories of a Randian-inspired utopia filled with bland archetypes and bad sex. And he's pretty much right about it dominating and ruining a lot of current sci-fi: a lot of libertarians love to write speculative fiction / alternate world stories where their ideology can flourish (since, as I've noted meself, utopias don't flourish in the real world), which gets it shoved into the science fiction shelves at your local ebook retailer.
I hope this means I grok Scalzi's political stance. Probably not, there may be nuances to his ideology that drives his world-view. But I'm damn certain I know why he hates libertarians: it's all that self-indulgent terrible writing (and it's getting worse now that there's cheap self-publishing and no editorial control). Damn you, libertarians: why can't you write more Harlequin romance novels and leave us geeks alone...
It helped that the show was anchored by two fun actors - Duchovny and Anderson - and had heaping helpfuls of a recently realized trope called Relationshipping (or 'Shipping for short). The concept had been around for ages, as a literary trope (SEE Ivanhoe, Little Women, Jane Austen), but rarely seen on television the way they did it on this show. They didn't create UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension), they merely demonstrated how brilliant a story-telling device it could be in the right hands.
