Change Your Image
jay-1007
Reviews
Outlander (2014)
i only made it through episode 3
The basic premise of this series is that a 20th-century woman is magically transported back in time several hundred years by a pagan ritual at a set of standing stones (like Stonehenge). So okay, I presume we accept the premise for the purpose of the story.
Then in the third episode, a boy becomes sick. She becomes the voice of science and reason against the primitive villagers. The villagers, and especially the bafoonish priest, believe that his illness must be caused by demons or something, and she fights to be allowed to give him scientific medical treatment and ridicules their primitive superstition.
Except, umm, look back to the premise of the series. She is here because of an inexplicable magical rite. If anyone should believe in the supernatural, it would be her. She herself is living proof of it. If I was transported hundreds of years through time by literal magic, I think I'd be re-examining my doubts about ghosts and psychics and astrology and every other claim to the supernatural. The whole episode made no sense.
I quit watching at that point. Maybe subsequent episodes made more sense.
Foundation (2021)
many disconnects from original novel
I've only watched the first couple of episodes so far. And so far, I'm disappointed.
Right off the bat they changed two of the major male characters, Gaal Dornik and Salvor Hardin, into women. I think there's some law in Hollywood that every TV series today has to have women in the roles of the primary movers and shakers. This seems rather unnecessary in this case as the original novels already had a female character as the major mover for one of the three books, Arkady Darell. Well, maybe one wasn't enough. This political correctness isn't revolutionary and profound any more. It's predictable and tedious.
Some have complained that they also changed the race of many characters. Actually I don't recall the novels mentioning anyone's skin color. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's been years since I read the books. So whatever.
The first episode begins with a dumb monologue by Gaal Dornik in which he/she attempts profound comments about how "this story became my story ... our story". And along the way she mentions "the Mule". Which makes no sense, as in the books anyway, Dornik died centuries before the Mule was born and the whole point of the second book was that no one anticipated the mule.
They changed the Time Vault from a simple setup where people heard pre-recorded messages from the founder of Terminus explaining his plan into some strange mystical something.
Minor spoiler here, I'll be deliberately vague: A key plot point of the first few chapters of the book is that Salvor Hardin discovers that Hari Seldon's plan was nothing like what everyone thought it was. But in the TV show, everyone seems to understand the real plan completely from go.
And, well, et cetera. This isn't one of those movies that is supposedly based on a book but in fact has nothing to do with the book. They did sort of follow the book. It's close enough to be recognizable, but different enough to be annoying.
On a different subject, I don't like the special effects. They are overly complicated-looking and very dark, so it is difficult to see what the objects are supposed to be or what is happening.
Vice (2015)
supposedly intelligent people commit violent crimes for no apparent reason
I'm checking the "spoiler" box, but nothing I say here is a surprise if you've ever seen an action movie before in your life.
This movie had some potential. It brought up some serious issues: If people could act out their most evil fantasies -- rape and murder and so on -- in a way that no real person is harmed, would they then "get it out of their system" and be less likely to harm anyone in real life, or would they want bigger and bigger thrills and be more likely to harm someone in real life? The analogy to violent video games is obvious. If people created artificially intelligent robots, at what point should these robots be considered "people" with human rights? That one's been done before but they could have brought new thoughts to the table.
But instead the movie very quickly devolves into one of those action movies where the violence doesn't even make sense. I can believe a story where poor and oppressed people with nothing to lose engage in desperate violence. I can believe a story where an intelligent person with wealth and status hatches a carefully-planned criminal plot. But I have a hard time believing a story where a supposedly intelligent person with wealth and status commits violent crimes with some lip service about protecting his wealth and status but where anyone with an IQ of 20 would realize that he has far more to lose by committing these crimes than any of his other problems. I'm sure a skilled writer could make the story believable by showing the rich person getting more and more desperate as things go against him, let us see his growing paranoia or whatever until he snaps. But there was zero attempt to explain the villain's totally irrational behavior here.
In "Vice", there's a resort where, presumably for a large fee, people can act out their worst fantasies on robots, "killing" them, "raping" them, etc. Then one of the robots breaks out of its programming and escapes. At that point, absolutely zero harm has been done. As far as anyone in the world of this movie is concerned, it's the moral equivalent of an auto mechanic having a car roll out of the shop and into the street. In the case of the car or the robot, you'd have someone run out to get it back. If it did some damage or harmed someone, your insurance company pays up, and that would be the end of it. But in the movie, the owner of the resort sends armed men out to kill anyone who has seen the robot. They have a shoot-out with the police. How could he possibly expect to get away with this? Is his company such a bunch of yes-men that absolutely no one says, "Umm, before we become involved in a conspiracy to murder police officers, why don't we just call the authorities and tell them that one of our robots is malfunctioning and could they please help us track it down?" Then the hero, a police officer, decides he's going to destroy the resort. He gets a computer hacker friend to sabotage the robots so they start killing the guests of the resort. He then breaks in with a machine gun and starts shooting all the employees. Now I'm no legal expert, but no matter what crimes the owner of a company commits, I'm pretty sure the police are not allowed to go to his office and start killing all his employees and customers.
The other illogic is barely worth mentioning. Like they have a tracking device on the robot. At one point someone disables the tracking device for her. Then they stay in the building where he disabled the tracking device for what appears to be hours. Despite the fact that she is in the exact same place where the tracking device last registered her, the villain doesn't have the vaguest idea where she is or where to start looking, until he gets a clue from a totally unrelated source. Because the tracking device is disabled.
Supergirl (2015)
a feminine superhero, amusing social/political messages
I liked this series mostly because the heroine is not one of those modern Hollywood heroines who we are supposed to admire for being more masculine than any man in sight, but rather, she is totally feminine. Yes, she's Supergirl, so she's strong and powerful. But her primary attributes are that she's caring and compassionate and loyal and loving. She's constantly trying to reform the villains rather than destroy them -- her signature line in the series seems to be "you don't want to do this".
Some reviewers have pointed out that the men in this series are all simplistic cardboard cut-outs. True. While a man can enjoy the series (I did), I think it's intended for women. The male characters are all background and stereotypes: the good guys are just love interests and father figures, the bad guys are all overbearing and arrogant. The real story is about the heroine's personal struggles, and her relationships to her sister and her (female) boss-mentor and her mother. I'm sure you've seen movies where the female characters are just there to be eye candy or sex toys for the hero; this is a role reversal on that, except instead of eye candy, the men are emotional support.
I haven't read a comic book in 40+ years so I can't say much about how true this is to the source material. It is weird that they changed Jimmy Olsen from a young, nerdy white guy to a mature, confidant black guy. Why? If they wanted to introduce such a character, why not just invent a new character and give him a different name? The political/social views behind this series make for an interesting study. On the one hand, the heroes all talk liberal, I mean right down to blatant politics like saying they support Hillary Clinton. One episode has the evil politician talking about the dangers of these aliens invading the Earth, and maybe we need to "build a dome" to protect the country, surely a sneering reference to conservative calls for a border wall. (Except the sneer doesn't make sense in context, because 90% of the aliens in the series ARE dangerous invaders.) Big government is presented as a positive good -- there's even a scene where one of the main characters, Alex, gives a speech about how the government helps people and people should trust the government. Except the military, who are villains, irrational and violent and oppressive and out of control. The lamest villain in the series is General Lane, an absurd liberal stereotype of a military leader. (Have the writers ever met an actual American military leader? I have. They are NOTHING like General Lane.) Except ... in a curious twist for Hollywood, the main villains of the first season are environmental extremists, who will kill and enslave people to "save the planet".
Which by the way brings up: Unlike many Hollywood villains, who seem to be evil just for the sake of being evil, the villains in this series have plausible motivations. The boring ones are motivated by personal revenge. But the better ones think they are saving the planet, saving humanity from itself, or defending the country from alien infiltrators. I only found the environmentalists done well enough to be believable, but hey, they tried.