Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume IV: Battlestar Galactica... There's a Starbuck Waiting in the Sky

Forgiveness, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. At least, that's what mom always told me. Learning to move on from any kind of sustained animosity or after being wronged is no easy feat for either the forgiver or the forgivee (unless either one of those parties is a complete sociopath, which in that case, problem solved, I guess), and in my own experience, forgiveness is almost always driven by some utilitarian purpose. This isn't a knock against any variety of situational pragmatism: in fact quite the opposite. Most important decisions in life tend to be made only when our hand is forced. (Or maybe I'm just an indecisive bastard.) Real life has a way of throwing curve balls; it's these changes in our personal situations that tend to act as catalysts for our really big decisions. And rightfully so. In life, as in film, we're often far better served by what we need rather than by what we want. And the contingency that serves as an impetus for driving decisions should also necessarily bleed over into the content of those decisions:

Like trust, respect, love, and making on offer on a house, forgiveness should always be conditional.
 
This may seem counter-intuitive, but essentially what I'm arguing for is forgiveness in the sense of accountability rather than forgiveness in the mystic sense of the Christian (or Cylon) tradition, which is tainted by this concept of absolution. People absolutely should be given second chances, but it's important to make this distinction between accountability and absolution. Accountability is a process of accepting responsibility for one's actions, and involves an effort on the part of the individual who wronged someone to better themselves and atone for what they've done; it's also a process that involves that individual's society (either on a macro or micro level) to work with and support them, and reintegrate them back into the group. Absolution, on the other hand, is an abdication of all responsibility by all parties to have to change or strive to do better; it's a surrender, in the worst sense of the word, of any kind of moral obligation for everyone involved, sacrificing the need to process uncomfortable emotions like hate, anger, guilt, or resentment in favour of a self-indulgent and immediate gratification.

Like much of the series, Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica doesn't shy away from difficult ethical questions like this. Season 4 was, in many respects, centred around this core theme of the pragmatism of forgiveness, and that divide between accountability and absolution. Well, that, and, of course, hot robot sex.

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume III: Battlestar Galactica... The Occupy New Caprica Movement

In the wake of 9/11, the Terrorist became the bogeyman de jour. One of the most defining characteristics of this new threat was their propensity for using suicide bombers. It's a difficult mindset to understand and one typically associated with the evil hordes threatening to kick down our front doors. So it was all the more striking for a sci-fi show made by Western Devils just a few years after the single most iconic terrorist act in modern history to empathize--quite effectively--with what amounts to a terrorist movement employing suicide bombers against the enemy.

Granted, Battlestar Galactica does give us more meat to sink our teeth into in terms of contextualizing the extreme measures the survivors of humanity are willing to resort to in order to fight back against their cybernetic oppressors than, say, nobodies favourite real-life assholes in al-Qaeda. At the outset of Season 3, we're presented with a scenario and point of view that makes such methods more easy to swallow, but that in itself is a pretty incredible feat considering the political landscape both then and now. Ask anybody in the Western world--especially residents of the good 'ol US of A--in the wake of the 9/11 attacks whether they could ever fathom what it would take for somebody to consider going to such extremes, and what few answers you would have been able to remember after waking up in the hospital three days later probably wouldn't have offered much insight into that sort of mindset. For most people living in modern times, it's a nearly unfathomable thought experiment. So to have it tackled in a mature and nuanced way in a sci-fi show about humanity's struggle against annihilation at the hands of usually pretty sexy murder-bots is a feat unto itself.

Of Mercs and Men... Riddick Rides Again

In another world, Pitch Black and the iconic character Riddick might have been relegated to the realm of the one-hit wonder, and the truly frightening thing is that world isn't that different from this one. Only through the sheer willpower of director David Twohy, Vin "Riddick" Diesel, and a ragtag group of dedicated fans and social miscreants were further exploits of the infamous "escaped convict and murderer" committed to film (as well as a few video games to boot). If anybody had told me when it first came out that Pitch Black would spawn three sequels (Next one is in development. Can I get a "Fuck yeah!?") I probably would have stabbed you to death with a teacup.

In a move that came as a surprise to exactly no one, Twohy doubled down on the insanity for Chronicles of Riddick, thrusting Riddick into an intergalactic space adventure dealing not only with mercenaries but also alien elementals, a technologically advanced death cult, and Karl Urban's bizarre yet completely entrancing haircut. It's like if Star Wars had been written and directed by an escaped lunatic high on acid and Luke had been written as a homicidal, shiny-eyed rogue with a heart of gold and also violence.

Just like Pitch Black, Chronicles of Riddick begins with an opening voice over (by Dame Judy fucking Dench no less) so ludicrous and over the top that it can't help but grab your brain by the balls a pull you along for the ride. And with an introduction like this, you're all but guaranteed that the ride is going to be a wild one:

"They are an army unlike any other... crusading across the stars toward a place called UnderVerse, their promised land--a constellation of dark new worlds. Necromongers, they're called. And if they cannot convert you, they will kill you. Leading them, the Lord Marshal. He alone has made a pilgrimage to the gates of the UnderVerse... and returned a different being. Stronger. Stranger. Half alive and half... something else. If we are to survive, a new balance must be found. In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil."

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume II: Battlestar Galactica... Cross-Species Pollination and Burdens Laid Down

I like my television shows how I like my women: coherent, engaging, relatively free from plot holes, and benefiting from a strong narrative arc. Also, a healthy budget doesn't hurt either. Also, after diving into Battlestar Galactica, a love of cigars and fine liquors is also a plus. Also, strong doses of Katee Sackhoff are also basically a must. Being Katee Sackhoff is even better. Or maybe just a show about Katee Sackhoff taking names and kicking ass, or just kicking ass, or just doing whatever the fuck she wants to do because Starbuck is a fucking god.

After a strong start, I think it's safe to say that I did not find it too hard difficult to become completely immersed in Katee Sackhoff the world of the reborn Battlestar Galactica television series. As far as television sci-fi goes, it's hard to think of a real contender in recent years. It's as exciting as it is insightful, effectively dealing with moral, social, and political issues in a fairly nuanced way without any really definitive black or white answers, but more of a murky grey maybe flecked with, I don't know, whatever colour explosions are. Red and orange maybe. (I don't know, I've been watching a lot of Archer recently, and I totally can't help but read that last sentence in Archer's voice. I know, right?)

Intergalactic Planetary: Interstellar and the Duality of Everything. Philosophical Bifurcation at Its Finest

Excellence, or the perception thereof, is the kind of knife that can cut both ways.  On the one hand, it drives forward, inspires the same in others, and garners accolades from the layman and master alike.  It also elicits a higher degree of scrutiny and larger scale of criticism because the statues of heroes lining our Hallowed Halls must not be commissioned without due cause lest the bar be lowered and standards be plundered.  Either way, blood will be drawn.  To be held up as a paragon in any field requires a significant blood sacrifice: first willingly on the part of the potential candidate and second painfully at the hands of the gauntlet.

In the world of film, Christopher Nolan is no stranger to these grotesquely beguiling cultural rituals and is perhaps one of the best examples of the costs required for entry into the fellowship.  It is, perhaps, small comfort that these sadomasochistic cultural tendencies mirror elements of life for which there is no safety word.  Nolan's films have been subjected to increasingly rigorous critical analysis, and his latest opus, INTERSTELLAR, is no exception.  While it's sometimes frustrating--even infuriating--listening to never-ending criticisms of the most minute details of Nolan's work, a level of scrutiny usually reserved for lawyers, smarmy British food critics, and war crimes tribunals, it's also a sort of validation.  Movies made by Michael Bay, par example, don't receive the same amount or quality of criticism because it's generally accepted through historical precedent that there's nothing really substantial there to critique.

Surrogates for Intelligence... Missing Links, Hated Avatars

I'm pretty sick of this shit, Bruce Willis.  We live in strange times.  On the one hand, we're constantly being sold on the idea of progress and the achievement of human potential, while on the other hand, we're being bombarded with conflicting ludidtic, anti-technology propaganda.  And it's a total crock of shit.  I was watching the Bruce Willis vehicle SURROGATES the other night in an effort to use up my stockpile of nearly expired, military-grade popcorn that I had accumulated in my lead-lined underground shelter that I had constructed so I could watch movies in peace during whatever apocalyptic view of the future that Roland Emmerich has envisioned came to awful fruition.

SURROGATES started out with an intriguing premise; the advent of advanced robotic and AI technology provides people with the opportunity to experience the world through cybernetic avatars that allow them to experience all of the pleasure and none of the pain through some kind of neural interface.  The vast majority of the human population embraces "surrogacy" while a few hold-outs led by The Prophet (Ving Rhames) prefer to live on reserves, embracing a low-tech agrarian lifestyle devoid of most forms of technology except for an ass-ton of fire-arms and accompanying unlimited supplies of ammo, because apparently the only technology worth embracing is the kind that you need when you absolutely, positively got to kill every last motherfucker in the room.  (Accept no substitutes.)

Growing Old But Not Up With King Arthur: Hanging out at The World's End

There are very few things that most people can agree upon, but one of those things is that growing older generally sucks big old deep-fried grizzly balls.  The inevitable ebb and flow of time causes us to drift towards that final unimaginable expanse of ocean until we are finally swept out into the unknown by the tide or, if we're really lucky, a tsunami that lets us take a lot of innocent people with us.  One of the most commonly occurring and overarching themes in human culture is the tension between youth and old age.  That dichotomy between childhood and maturity is pretty readily accessible by almost everyone because, unless you're Cher, aging is a pretty universal human experience.  It's an easy way to mark our progress through life, and that sort of temporal delineation has become a common trope to draw upon when constructing one's identity.

In Stephen King's introduction to the latest edition of his seminal Dark Tower series (which I've recently delved into with the gusto of a fiend desperate for his next fix of devil grass), he taps into what I think is a pretty fundamental cultural sentiment regarding the temporal forces at play in the very bowels of our collective souls:

"Another thing about being nineteen, do it please ya: it is the age, I think, where  a lot of us somehow get stuck (mentally and emotionally, if not physically).  The years slide by and on day you find yourself looking into the mirror with real puzzlement.  Why are those lines on my face? you wonder.  Where did that stupid potbelly come from?  Hell, I'm only nineteen!  This is hardly an original concept, but that in no way subtracts from one's amazement"

What King's insight illustrates is that Cusp between childhood and maturity, a sort of balance that we struggle to attain between the shit-kicking, conquer-the-world mentality of youth and the world-weary pragmatism of experience that alludes so many of us. I think that sometimes we tend to fall into the derogatory with the denunciation of middle-aged men or women "acting like they were teenagers," but I think what's at issue in that case is an imbalance, with youthful exuberance and its accompanying stupidity winning out completely over the tempered wisdom that comes only with age. Of course, this may be small comfort when the subject in question ends up fucking a coworker or spending Junior's college fund on some shitty American sports car, but the point remains that the goal is neither the eradication of youth nor the total denial of one's ever-accumulating chronology but a balance between the two.

Superman Unbound: A Tale of Two Fathers (And a Bonus Messiah Complex)

Suck it, Brandon Routh

There are some things that work great on paper but seem to have some internal mechanism that prevents them from bridging the gap with implementation.  For most of us, this might manifest as everyday, mundane activities like orchestrating a simple kidnapping or arson, or a three-way with your girlfriend's hot cousin, or the impregnation of your impotent friend's wife at the couple's behest.  Then, of course, there's Superman.

I have a Superman shirt.  And it is fucking awesome.  And when I wear it, my awesome quotient invariably increases.  I always loved the idea of Superman, but I hated the character of Superman.  As a cultural icon, Superman is pretty powerful (even more so than a locomotive or a massive load shot out at Mach 3 from Ron Jeremy's massive cock).  He represents strength: not only physical, but also moral.  Invoking the tropes specific to the mythology of Superman is to draw inspiration to be our best selves.  We can look towards him as an archetype of incredible physical feats and endurance or the epitome of "good guy" morality in situations that have (comparatively) more clear ethical boundaries and we might be tempted to falter.  Superman as a symbol works great.  He's an ideal; something to strive towards but never to be attained.  Superman tracks down the owner of the lost wallet full of cash and returns it personally.  Wolverine drops the wallet off at the cop shop with all of the ID and credit cards in tact but keeps the cash as a finder's fee.  Lobo keeps the wallet, then tracks down its owner and beats the shit out of him for being a dumbass. 

It's the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel... Bored

We are a culture obsessed with its own destruction.  This is quite funny because we are also a culture that believes in its own inherent superiority and immortality.  We are also a culture that believes in breast implants, keeping up with the Kardashians (whoever the fuck they are), penis piercing, Bill O'Reilly, novels about vampires that sparkle in the sunlight and fuck teenage girls, (supposedly) comedic movies about people with the last name Focker, oganized religion, female singers shooting something out of their breasts be it fireworks or whipped cream, invading countries looking for weapons of mass destruction that don't exist, and texting.  Perhaps we feel some kind of inate cultural guilt and deep down inside we know that our disappearance from the earth wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. 

Or perhaps it's egotistical.  One of the reasons apocalyptic fantasies are so engaging is because of the way we have constructed them.  The scenario is always (basically) the same: some force, be it natural, human, or extraterrestrial, ends up destroying 99% of the human population leaving a small group or groups to either A) Fight back against this destructive force,  B) Wander the barren wastelands trying to eke out a living, C) Fight other people in the aftermath of the catastrophe, D) Quest for an item or place to help rebuild society to its (supposed) former glory, E) Having sex with beautiful post-apocalyptic women who seemto be unaffected by disease or poor hygiene or damading radiation which have hadsuch a detrimental effect on everybody else around her, or F) Any combination of the above.  The key to post-apocalyptic movies (moreso than other genres) is the question: What would you do?  The conceit of the audience of any post-apocalyptic story is that they will be the ones who somehow survive the Ultimate Catastrophe.  In this type of fantasy one aways imagines oneself as one of the lucky (?) few who survive and not one of the millions who perished and so, whether consciously or unconsciously, we, as the audience, put ourselves in that position in the context of the narrative.  What if the polar ice caps melted and the whole world was flooded?  What if a virus broke out that either killed most of the population or turned them into walking corpses with nothing better to do than eat you alive?  What if somebody dropped "the bomb" and wiped out most of human exitence?

This kind of fantasy narrative plays to the ego because in order for us to engage with the fantasy we put ourselves in the position of the survivors, which by necessity means we think of ourselves as exceptional.  Either by design or through our own ingenuity we will have survived.  The idea of surviving the apocalyse, should it indeed occur, is, in essence, the idea of celebrity.   You're one in a million.  One in a billion.  You are the sperm that made it.

But probably not.

Just by simple averages you are most likely dead.  If 99% of the human population was wiped out tomorrow, your chances are simply not that good.  You are not some lone gunman wandering the wastes like Mel Gibson in THE ROAD WARRIOR.  You are most likely one of the skulls crushed by a T-800 in the opening sequence of TERMINATOR 2.  But you don't believe that.  And that's OK.  The effectiveness of a post-apocalyptic movie -and indeed our society itself- is predicated on the fact that you are just as unique as everybody else.  And we all understand this at least on some amorphous, subconscious level.  We are all the heroes of our own personal narratives and so it is only natural that in a hypathetical narrative (in this case the future) each of us s still the centre of the universe. This is imortant because it keeps us from killing ourselves in record numbers.  Besides, there'll probably be a meteorite or an infected monkey or a freak storm to kill most of us off anyway.  It's only a matter of time really.  I mean, it could be as soon 2012.  One can only hope.

The most egocentric of post-apocalyptic movies are not actually post-apocalyptic movies, but fall into that category by default.  These are the movies that deal with the apocalypse itself.  I suppose these might simply be called apocalyptic movies, but that sounds kind of crazy and depressing like one of those nut jobs running through the streets carrying a sign that says "Repent, For The End is Nigh" or "Vote For John McCain" or "Buy Soy Milk."  Fucking crazies.  No, post-apocalyptic has a nice ring to it, like you've accomplished somethng: you've survived the apocalypse.  Congratulations.  It's like winning the lottery only instead of winning money you win the chance to try to survive in a cold, harsh world where the only way to survive is to scrounge for food and clothing and try to avoid the zombies or aliens or cyborgs or Cyborg Alien Nazi Zombie Vampire Clones (I totally call that fucking movie title, Copyright from now until infinity years) and suicide is actually starting to look like a pretty good alternative.  But that hasn't happened yet.  The apocalypse has just begun.  So now we need an enemy.  For a movie that centres around the apocalypse you need some kind of active agent to fight against: a virus or plague is just plain boring.  It could take years to watch billions of people die.  The classic Man vs. Nature doesn't really work here either.  You can't actually fight back against the weather, and this makes for a shitty movie like THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.  Zombies are a good choice, and my personal favourite, but for the ultimate unite-the-human-race-against-a-common-enemy-which-we-can-heroically-fight-back-against-with-sometimes-sexy-results bad guy we tend to look for otherworldy invaders: namely aliens.  No, not that dude from Mexico who spoke very little English and who you hired to fix your toilet even though you were pretty sure he wasn't really a plumber, but he was cheap and his wife was hot and up or anything (and I mean ANYthing).  I'm talking extraterrestrials.

In narratives there's basically two types of extraterrestrials: the passive explorers or the ass-kicking annihilators.  They either travel a billion light years in ships that can make the Kessel run in less han twelve parsecs to drop in and say "Hi" or to enslave and kill us for some evil purpose (but most likely harvestingour natural resources and to sleep with our women in multiple, increasingly erotic positions).  Aliens are great because they provid a tangibe enemy who, although always technologically superior, is still perceived as beatable, though sometimes just barely.  Whenever I think "alien apocalyptic summer blockbuster movie" the first thing that obviously comes to mind is INDEPENDENCE DAY, which for some reason tried to tie in an American nationalistic message with a narrative about psychic space reptiles trying to wipe out human civilization.  I recently went to see SKYLINE and I couldn't help but draw comparisans between these two movies because they are so similar in subject matter: basically aliens come down in giant ships to major cities and start fucking shit up and we are powerless to stop it.  However, where INDEPENDENCE DAY mildly succeeded SKYLINE depressingly failed even though these two movies are practically sisters.

The plot of SKYLINE follows a group of friends, well really two friends and a bunch of acquaintances, who wake up after a party to find that Los Angeles is besieged by aliens who are abducting citizens en masse for what is obviously a sinister purpose (we later find out that these particular aliens love human brains, maybe for use as aphrodesiacs, we don't know, it's unclear, but I'm pretty sure that was the reason).  The rest of the movie basically illustrates how totally fucked we all are by showing how impervious the aliens are to our "conventional" weapons.  (At one point the army comes in and drops a nuke on the mothership.  This seems to destroy the vessel, but then the move promptly shows that the alien technology includes regenerative powers, which means even if you do manage to destroy some of their technology it will simply repair itself, Borg-style.  There's always something with these fucking aliens...)  I hesitate to use the word "movie" because what SKYLINE really was was a collection of scenes kind of cobbled together.  There was no real plot per se, rather a bunch of scenes where characters argued about what to do and then usually did nothing except maybe die.

So while SKYLINE failed from a narrative point of view, and in many ways from a filmmaking point of view, I was really intrigued by the thematic elements especially in relation to INDEPENDENCE DAY.  Whereas INDEPENDENCE DAY was about a bunch of scientists and government officials who had the inside scoop (so to speak) on the whole alien invasion thing, SKYLINE was about a bunch of random dudes who had absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on.  They didn't have access to fighter jets and they had no idea about any secret signal the aliens were using to coordinate their attack an they didn't have access to Area 51 or an eccentric Brent Spiner to fill them in on what was going on.  This is something that really struck me about SKYLINE: how aware it was of itself and its genre.  The makers of INDEPENDENCE DAY went out of their way to make give it this bloated epic scale, SKYLINE seemed to be trying to do the opposite.  The makers of SKYLINE seemed to be purposely making it as un-epic as possible.  And I think part of the reason for this was because they (wrongly) thought that if they made the characters less grandiose (ie. instead of a President of the United States we get a struggling artist) and showed an alien invasion from the point of view of oblivious citizens that this would appeal more to the audience who would probably be in the same position (metaphorically) if this ever happened and allow them to more easily engage with the movie.  Actually all it did was limit them narratively and creatively.  The characters were always helpless at all times and I simply could not empathize with them at all.  Instead of thinking "What would I do?" the only question that came to my mind was "Why don't they do something?"  Instead of drawing me deeper into the narrative this attempt to show the alien invasion from the point of John Q Everyman had the opposite effect because the answer to my question was always blatantly obvious: because they can't.  The filmmakers not only disempowered their characters but in so doing disempowered their audiences as well. 

Initially, I liked the concept of watching the invasion from the point of view of ordinary citizens. (Just like I liked the concept of three new STAR WARS movies back in 1999.  We all know how that turned out.)  Or maybe more accurately I wanted to like the concept.  Because I am an ordinary citizen.  But then as I watched SKYLINE I realized that ordinary citizens sucked goat balls.  I had been stripped of the egotistical idea of my own specialness.  I wasn't the misunderstood mutant warrior in WATERWORLD.  I was one of the corpses at the bottom of the ocean who happened to look out the window in time to see the tidal wave then turned back to the lesbian porn I was watching on my laptop and pumped a little faster hoping to squeeze one last one out before I drowned.

The thing is SKYLINE could have been a decent popcorn flick that I might have picked up eventually in the cheap bin at Wal-Mart, but only after seriously weighing the pros and cons of buying PINEAPPLE EXPRESS instead.  Now it will go down in history as worse than THE POSTMAN and I AM LEGEND combined.  It's movies like this that make the common person make cynical comments about Hollywood like the one that will follow this sentence.  SKYLINE was a clearcut case of style over substance.  It's like the big (and sometimes slightly less big) studios think that it's audiences are a bunch of fat kids and if they put enough icing on pile of dog shit we will gladly eat it and hopefully be fooled into thinking it is actually chocolate cake and then thank them for it.  Even the icing wasn't all that sweet.  The special effects were outstanding, there's no doubt, but even the actors had no real star power to blind us and distract us from the mess of a movie.  The most recognizable faces were Eric Balfour (SIX FEET UNDER, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake) and David Zayas (Batista from DEXTER.  Got to love that fucking hat, dude.)  Not to mention the fact that the filmmakers couldn't decide what to do with he most interesting thread of the whole movie which was Balfour's character seemingly getting some kind of super powers after being twice exposed to some kind of alien hypno-ray.  I suppose the tacked on ending (which was so obviously setting up a sequel that they might as well have just shown the trailer for the goddamn thing at the end of the credits) kind of covered it, but not really.

If you want to immerse yourself in post-apocalyptia then go check out THE ROAD WARRIOR, or PLANET OF THE APES, ZOMBIELAND, DAWN OF THE DEAD, or do yourself a real favour and check out THE ROAD.  Overall SKYLINE was about as satisfying as an orgy with a bunch of department store mannequins.  My rating is 4/10 = One Alien Invader's Head Sucking the Brain Out of A Living Human Being Simply Because He Can