Science Fiction Interpretations

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Subject: Science Fiction Interpretations

Posted by: brm50diboll
Date: Jan 02 17

I have debated with myself starting a Virtual Blog for months. I have so little free time nowadays that I may not be able to keep it up, but I think I'll at least try. This is intended to be wide-ranging, so it wouldn't fit in the Television, Movies, or Literature boards categories and I don't want to clog up General with just my observations but here I can rant if I choose and people can choose to ignore me or engage my flawed analysis if they wish.

469 replies. On page 16 of 24 pages. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Blackdresss

And whoever has told you that the writing goes downhill gave you really bad information. As Mark said, he's very, very wordy. I got so tired of Catelyn Stark in the books, wringing her hands and blaming herself for everything (mostly rightfully so,) and wondering if anyone could or would ever forgive her, or if she had made too many mistakes raising her children, or if she got the porridge right that morning, or if her wolf fur matches her blue gown, or...

She was almost as bad in the TV series, but not quite.

Finish the series and then we'll talk about "the writing" and just how much it means to George and the lovely Parris to attend every Comic Con they can hobble into.

Reply #301. Dec 27 18, 2:44 AM

brm50diboll

ComiCons are the highlights of sci-fi nerds. The Big Bang Theory accurately reflects that point. There are hundreds of YouTube videos of various ComiCons for various shows and movies (certainly not just the Big Bang Theory.) In particular, Game of Thrones has been in ComiCons from the very start. I watched many of the YouTube videos of GoT ComiCons where George RR Martin is an active, enthusiastic participant. He obviously really loves those things. Most of the participants in ComiCons are the younger, secondary actors. GRRM seems to be the oldest guy to regularly go to these things. Occasionally, you'll see Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, or Nikolaj Coster-Waldau at these things, but they mostly feature Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, Kit Harrington and so forth.

I've never actually attended a real ComiCon, just watched the YouTube videos, so I'm definitely not in the class of a Sheldon Cooper. GoT ComiCons are OK, but I prefer Flash ComiCons. Can't get enough of Danielle Panabaker.

Reply #302. Dec 27 18, 11:04 AM

terraorca

I've never attended a Comic-con either, however, my wife and I were in Bruegger's Bagels one Sunday morning and we were visited by a fully dressed Star Wars storm trooper that purchased some kind of fancy coffee and then went out and waited for the bus. I meant to ask him if his lightsaber was a working model or just a plaything. He may have beheaded me for the flippancy of my query. He did grab the attention of the entire restaurant while there.

Reply #303. Dec 27 18, 12:44 PM

brm50diboll

So I'll take this opportunity to say that the ancestors of the ComiCon was the Star Trek Convention. In the 1970s, after Star Trek had been cancelled, the show was in reruns with a growing "cult" following. The Trekkies believed that if they lobbied hard enough, they could resurrect Star Trek, so they organized Star Trek Conventions and got cast members to show up for them. They were right, of course. NBC had actually planned to cancel Star Trek after its second season but an intense letter-writing campaign by Star Trek fans bought it a third season (but not a fourth.) The ultimate success of the Trekkies' efforts was in getting Star Trek: The Motion Picture made in 1979, and it just went on from there.

Eventually, the success of Star Trek Conventions at promoting the Star Trek franchise led to the concept being generalized, and so now we have ComiCons for all sorts of things.

Which leads me to what for me was one of the funniest skits ever on Saturday Night Live. In 1986 (around the time of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) actually, SNL got William Shatner to host the show. In one of the skits, Shatner (playing himself) is supposed to be attending a Star Trek Convention full of Trekkies in cheesy outfits looking like Spock or other characters and fawning over the appearance of the great Captain Kirk himself at the stage. But Shatner plays it annoyed.

"You look like you're 30 years old. Have you ever kissed a girl?"

And then the kicker, one of the most famous SNL lines ever:

"Get a life!"

Shatner then gets bullied by the Convention organizer to go back to the stage and apologize, claiming his outburst was just his impression of "The Evil Kirk" from the episode "The Enemy Within". Absolutely hilarious.

Reply #304. Dec 27 18, 1:04 PM

terraorca

The
SY
FY
Channel is currently airing The Twilight Zone in Marathon form.
So many stars, so many episodes, so much fun.

Reply #305. Dec 31 18, 7:15 PM

brm50diboll

The Twilight Zone marathon is an annual event for SyFy. Actually, they do TZ marathons for other holidays besides New Year's as well. But I've not only seen all 156 original black-and-white episodes (1959-1964), I have them all on DVD and have watched them all multiple times, so I'm skipping this year's festivities.

I have been watching and rewatching the new Netflix release (on December 28), Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

I'll have more to say about it, but I haven't yet cycled through all the possible options yet, despite about 6 hours of play this far. And my review of internet critique and YouTube analysis videos of it isn't complete yet. But it's very interesting: an interactive movie. I'll have my own analysis of it here in a few days.

Reply #306. Dec 31 18, 10:38 PM

brm50diboll

OK. So I'm sure that not every aspect of Bandersnatch has been analyzed publicly yet, but enough has for me to go ahead and make my review. Bandersnatch is certainly not the first interactive movie, but it is still a phenomenon new enough that it is worth analyzing.

Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, likes being "meta" and self-referential, so there is definitely a lot of that in Bandersnatch, most (but not all of it) coming from the character Colin Ritman (who acts as a sort of mentor to the central character, Stephan Butler.)

Basically, the general theme explores the limits of free will and considers that we only have the illusion of free will. Bandersnatch in a way demonstrates that to the viewer in that, despite any choices he/she may make along the way, no truly happy ending for the movie is forthcoming.

Stephan Butler is a 19-year old who is designing an interactive computer game. He lives with his widowed father and is in therapy for emotional trauma he still experiences from the death of his mother when he was five. He blames himself for his mother's death, as she was scheduled to leave to visit her parents on the 8:30 am train with him, but he refused to go with her because he was trying to find his missing pet toy rabbit (that, unbeknownst to him, his father had taken and hidden away) and delayed her, so she had to take the 8:45 train instead (without Stephan) and it derailed, crashed, and she died.

Stephan gets the opportunity to push his game idea, also called Bandersnatch, in the offices of Tuckersoft, a video game company in 1984. His idol Colin Ritman works there. The boss of Tuckersoft, Mohan Thakur, is impressed with Stephan's demo of his incomplete game that he based on the book Bandersnatch, that is an interactive novel with multiple endings possible depending on which path you follow. The author of the book was unstable and had killed his wife as he was writing Bandersnatch.

There are multiple references to Alice in Wonderland in the movie, and, of course, Bandersnatch was a character in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (if you're interested, Google it as I did.) So as the movie progresses, Stephan "goes down the rabbit hole" much as Bandersnatch's author Jerome Davies did.

Now, as the movie progresses, from time to time, you are given choices which you can select (by touch on my cellphone using my Netflix app, or other methods if you are using a computer or gaming console). In most cases, you are given two choices and you pick one. If you do not pick, a choice is picked for you. Which choice you pick changes the course of the movie, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in major ways. Sometimes the choice is an illusion, because regardless of what you pick, the same thing happens, but most of the time, there is at least *some* noticeable change.

The first choice you are given is which breakfast cereal you want to eat. This choice is minor, as the only difference it makes is which cereal commercial you end up seeing much later in the movie. The first *major* choice you get to make is whether to accept Mohan Thakur's offer to let Stephan complete his game in-house at Tuckersoft or not. I am a conservative, so I tended to always choose what I felt was the "safest" option in each case, which generally turned out to be the "wrong" option, as the movie tries to force you to choose the more radical options. I'll try to explain. If, as I said, you accept Thakur's in-house offer, the movie (seemingly) ends very, very prematurely with a scene saying Bandersnatch (the game) was too short and boring and got a 0/5 star rating. Then you are "restarted" and given the option of choosing again. You basically can't see anymore of the movie unless you "choose" to reject Thakur's offer (the more radical choice.) As the movie progresses, similar things keep happening. Choose the conservative option, and the movie "ends" prematurely (but you get go back options) with boring ending sequences and low game ratings. But (as I eventually was "forced to") choose to kill your Dad, chop up his body, take LSD, etc, then you end up getting a game with a 5/5 star rating (before being pulled off the shelves and destroyed) with Stephan in jail.

There are several possible endings, two of which are worth discussing at some length. As I'd said, Charlie Brooker loves being "meta". At one point, you get the option to choose "Netflix" on Stephan's computer. Choosing that leads to an ending where Stephan fights his psychiatrist and his dad with martial arts and, if you then choose the "jump out the window" option, the movie ends with you discovering they were all just actors playing movie roles. This ending was probably the funniest ending, though not exactly happy.

The time travel ending, where Stephan goes through the looking glass (mirror) back in time to when he was five and is given the option (which he did not have earlier in the movie) to go with his mother on the train is very sad, but appears to be the "preferred" ending, as his mother is still late, still has to take the 8:45 train, and she (and now Stephan) still die in the accident. But the movie shows 19-year old Stephan after passing out and suddenly dying in his psychiatrist's office with his Dad and psychiatrist unable to revive him, so apparently his "time travel" was just a delusion.

One of the most "meta" things about the movie is the breaking of the "fourth wall" where Stephan frequently appears to be directly addressing you the viewer, who is "controlling" him. Another is that when you choose to "redo" a timeline differently than you did it the first time, the character Colin always seems to know what had happened on the previous "erased" timeline.

There are various side options which can be unlocked, depending on your choices, including killing Colin, jumping off a skyscraper balcony, and killing Mohan Thakur. I'm sure there are other, rare options, that have not been discovered yet. The one option that has more than two possible choices is when you enter the psychiatrist's phone number. The correct option is 20541. There are rumors on the internet that certain other numbers may unlock "secret" pathways, but most of them just give you a "wrong number" scene and the story skips ahead without the call to the psychiatrist.

The fact that there is no truly happy ending bothers me. The fact that the movie seems to argue there is no such thing as free will, only the illusion of free will, also bothers me. I didn't like feeling "forced" to choose violent, detestable options (neither did Stephan, from his "fourth wall" rants).

Some people have argued on the internet that Bandersnatch violates the usual Black Mirror formula that focuses on some aspects of technology. To them I say: "What have you guys been smoking? YOU are the technology! You (in 2019 on Netflix) are controlling a character from 1984. Can't you see that?"

So, in the style of the video game reviewer in the movie, I'll give "Bandersnatch" 3/5 stars. Could've been better, but worth exploring, if you like Science Fiction and gaming. If I were to compare it to one of the old classic Twilight Zone episodes, I would say it is similar to "Back There" in which the main character (played by Russell Johnson, best known for playing the Professor on Gilligan's Island) goes back in time to Washington DC on April 14, 1865 and tries to prevent Lincoln's assassination, but fails, only to change some minor things about history. Rod Serling's closing narration in that episode is most informative.

Or the famous Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" in which Kirk discovers he must prevent McCoy from saving his girlfriend Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins) from dying in a 1930 traffic accident in order to straighten out the timeline and keep the Nazis from winning World War II, which is what would happen if Edith Keeler lives. The argument is that there are certain vitally important events in the timeline that cannot (or *must not*) be changed, but that there are other, less important events that can be changed without altering the timeline irretrievably, though still distinctly in some ways. Or the "time is a river" argument Spock makes to Kirk in that episode. We see hints of that from Colin's LSD-inspired ranting in Bandersnatch, but the Twilight Zone and Star Trek both covered this theme (better, in my opinion) many years before.

Reply #307. Jan 02 19, 5:32 PM

brm50diboll

I apologize for my misspelling. The first name of the central character in Bandersnatch is Stefan, not Stephan.

I hate misspellings. Stefan, Stefan, Stefan....

Reply #308. Jan 02 19, 6:27 PM

terraorca

Until your post, I had never heard of Bandersnatch.

Reply #309. Jan 05 19, 11:06 PM

brm50diboll

I had mentioned Black Mirror some time ago in this blog. There aren't that many episodes of it, but since it is now a Netflix property (originally it was on Channel 4 in Britain for its first two "seasons" (if you call 3 episodes a "season")), but it moved to Netflix for seasons 3 and 4 (and expanded to 6 episodes, still not that much). Black Mirror is an acquired taste, but, as I had discussed on this blog some time earlier, I have enjoyed most of the episodes, dark as they are. Anyway, Black Mirror fans have been looking for Netflix to announce the release date for Season 5 ever since they announced they were definitely going to have a Season 5 last March. Then, in December, when Netflix announced that Bandersnatch was coming on December 28, fans speculated it may be the first episode of the long-awaited Season 5. But it was not. It was a one-off special. (Black Mirror has done one-off specials before, "White Christmas" a few years back in the pre-Netflix days.) So in that respect, Bandersnatch was disappointing as fans expected a whole "season", not just one episode. To date, Netflix still hasn't said when Season 5 will begin, only repeated that it will be coming.

Everything in Black Mirror has meaning, including the choice of the name Bandersnatch for the movie.

Reply #310. Jan 05 19, 11:43 PM

terraorca

Jurassic World has some interesting and scary concepts.

Reply #311. Jan 06 19, 8:08 PM

brm50diboll

I haven't seen it, though I saw the promos. In my opinion, of the entire series, the original 1993 Jurassic Park was the best. I've read the book as well, and it is better than the film. The 7 "iterations" and their accompanying quotes from Ian Malcom are quite illuminating. I've always liked Jeff Goldblum and Ian Malcolm, the mathematician, was my favorite character in Jurassic Park.

My understanding of Jurassic World is that the dinosaurs have now been genetically engineered. There have been just too many demands on my time for me to see everything I would have liked to have seen.

Reply #312. Jan 06 19, 9:16 PM

brm50diboll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB-dB9jMFmM

Reply #313. Feb 05 19, 9:17 PM

brm50diboll

I wish it were easier to post links to YouTube. So many of the points I try to make would be so much stronger with a little musical accompaniment. The score to Creepshow is like that, so underrated. It sets the tone for the movie, so unlike today's modern horror movies. It's not about the jump scare! It's not about being over-the-top gross! It's about setting a mood. Creepshow was genuinely funny, a rare thing for a horror movie.

That's what fathers are for, babe. That's what fathers are for.
It's Father's Day, Bedelia, and I want my cake!
I can hold my breath for a loooooooong time!
Just tell it to call you Billie!
A broken meteor? I wouldn't give you $2 for a broken meteor.
Talk to me, Mr Pratt! Bug got your tongue?
Ready for another shot, Dad?

Reply #314. Feb 06 19, 11:33 AM

Skyflyerjen

Creepshow is great! I am an adult. But I am still afraid of that &$@#@% thing in The Crate. It terrifies me.
https://www.wallpaperup.com/257486/CREEPSHOW_horror_comedy_dark_movie_film_(7).html

To this day, it scares me to my core. I watched Creepshow at too young an age, perhaps that's why. But it could also be because it's simply an amazing work of art by Tom Savini.
"Tell it to call you Billie!"
I just got my sister that poster for Christmas :)

And the score is great, too, no argument from me about that!

Reply #315. Feb 06 19, 1:37 PM

brm50diboll

Thanks. The sequel was very disappointing. The original was so creative. And seeing so many famous actors in unusual roles was amazing, including the obligatory cameo by Stephen King himself as Jordy Verrill. Hard to believe it was 37 years ago.

Reply #316. Feb 06 19, 2:21 PM

UmberWunFayun

"Verrill luck - always in, always baaad....."

Reply #317. Feb 06 19, 3:44 PM

UmberWunFayun

By the way, did you also know that the little kid with the comic books is Joe King, Stephen King's real life son? I'm not jo-king, it's true.

Sorry.

Reply #318. Feb 07 19, 6:57 AM

brm50diboll

Nothing to be sorry about. No, I didn't know that. I find Leslie Nielsen's role as Richard very interesting. This was after Airplane!, so he had begun his transition to the comedic roles he is now known for, but his early career consisted of serious roles (such as Captain Harrison in the Poseidon Adventure), but to see him play a complete psychopath, especially from the point of view of how his late career roles were, is startling.

Reply #319. Feb 07 19, 8:41 AM

UmberWunFayun

I was apologising for the bad joke. He actually calls himself Joe Hill (his given name is Joseph Hillstrom King), perhaps to get away from jokers like me, or maybe to escape his father's shadow, since he's also a horror novelist. The whole family is filled with writers, it's quite unique, and definitely speaks for the nurture over nature argument, although some of it MUST be genetic.
There's an interesting article about the 'family business' here :

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stephen-kings-family-business.html

Reply #320. Feb 07 19, 10:55 AM

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