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From Alien to The Matrix
The book seemed interesting enough from the cover, given a pleasant upsurge in the number of meaning and philosophy books on many SF films. I was expecting another take on my current joy, The Matrix universe, as well as some tidbits from other movies to get me delving for the hidden jokes and thoughts of a classic or two, like the Alien movies. Despite the title, the book is not all inclusive on film SF and does not discuss with any significance any of the latest Marvel superhero movies, and definitely skips discussion on the the Lord of the Rings trilogy--a tragic omission in light of its popular and Oscar-winning performance that brought SF/Fantasy to Hollywood legitimacy. Specifically, the writer discusses and contrasts elements from a handful of interesting SF movies of the last quarter-century, including
* The Matrix trilogy, including elements from "The Animatrix" and the "Enter the Matrix" game
* The Alien movie saga
* Galaxy Quest
* Dark City
* The Star Wars saga
* The Terminator saga
* Strange Days
* Small Soldiers
Small Soldiers? That was science-fiction? That was worthy of discussion in a book on SF film meanings? Surely there were other films of the last 25 years related to the chapter's subject on robots and AI that were more germane, such as "Bicentennial Man," "I, Robot," "Star Trek: Nemesis," and even the writer's home favorite of Marvin from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (not the 2005 release, but the 1980's TV depiction from the BBC, since this book was apparently printed in the early months of this year).
This book was written by someone that doesn't appear to read or watch much in the way of SF beyond what they see at the movies. Realizing that the writer was British, I tried (and failed) to give her allowance for her non-American point-of-view on the topic, hoping for some enlightenment over my decadent Cowboy Way of watching SF here in America. There are many areas in the book where her interpretation simply is misinformed. The writer apparently had chosen to write her book as a self-interpretation of the movies in question, failing almost completely to read other interpretations or discussions from the movie's directors or screenwriters.
The book as a whole, particularly with its monotonous small text and a complete lack of the simplest illustrations or even eye-catching chapter header graphics, feels like a dry collegiate dissertation written by someone who could give a damn about the subject matter and just needs a passing grade.
One example of the author's lack of research or understanding was confirmed by my own mother, a woman of 64 years that enjoys the Matrix movies as much as her son but has developed her understanding of the movies on her own, without my coaching. In one example in the book, the writer says that Neo, in "The Matrix," was told by the Oracle that he was not the One. In fact, the Oracle said no such thing--it was Neo who told himself that he was not the One. The Oracle, after toying with Neo to a degree by examining his hands and face, said, "...but you already know what I am going to say, don't you?" with Neo completing his own assumption, "I'm not the One." The Oracle implied that Neo was indeed in possession of the ability, but that his mind was not ready--a point confirmed by Neo's self-doubt (Neo's pod-name, "Thomas" is a Gnostic Christianity reference to that apostle's doubt of the resurrection of Christ). My mom, of all people, got this, but it was lost completely by the writer.
Other points in the book are just outright wrong and filled with error. Quoting a description about the climatic moments near the end of "The Matrix Revolutions": "Neo sets off to interview the Machines--along the way he is blinded and Trinity killed by a human who has been absorbed by Smith." In fact, Trinity was attacked, but not killed by Bane/Smith -- she would die moments after their hovercraft crash lands near the center of the Machine City.
Bad fact checking is a hallmark of this book. One glaring example was in finding the name of actress Nichelle Nichols of "Star Trek" badly warped to 'Michelle Nichols' in a discussion of the movie "Galaxy Quest." A sentence discussing the kiss between Persephone and Niobe in the cut-scenes of the game "Enter the Matrix" wrongly named Jada Pinkett-Smith's character as "Phoebe." Oh, no. What would Ross and Chandler say?
That's not to say the the whole book is totally tainted. At worse, this book is no less informed than your non-fannish significant other, a person that most of us will still take some time to listen to for wisdom or enjoyment, even if their views seem stupid initially. One quote I will leave to your enjoyment or disdain regarding a take on Darth Sidious from the Star Wars trilogy: "Palpatine is not just a machine politician, but a Dark Lord in the manner of Tolkien, and his corruption of Anakin Skywalker to the point where he becomes Darth Vader parallels the seduction of the human kings who became the Nazgul."
Her discussion on the Alien movies, particularly "Aliens," showed some insight, indicating the writer was more familiar with this material, or just more attentive. I'd guess she was most comfortable with the Alien saga--more than one-third of the book was devoted completely to the Alien movies. The book's title would be more appropriate as From Alien to Alien and More about Alien: And Some Meaningless Discussion About Some Lesser Science Fiction.
The writer name-drops Philip C. Dick, William Gibson, and Heinlein in an attempt to sound knowledgeable. "Big whoop," you might say,"as fanboys to various interests, we ALL do that kind of thing." But like the most decrepit and ill-informed of us non-mundanes, the writer seems to do this more to impress and less to inform, compare or contrast. The names just stick out like they're supposed to have meaning just because they are in the book.
Maybe this is a British thing. Maybe I'm wrong or not as enlightened while scanning this book (which is, unfortunately, the best I could do while trying to read it before I began stammering uncontrollably to myself moments later about some bad interpretation). Maybe I need a book on interpreting this book. I'd like to keep my mind open to the possibility (however unlikely) that this was really not such a bad book for most of us. Buy the book if you like Alien saga interpretations or if you like to invoke apoplexy in yourself or others. Otherwise, look for my copy of this book at your local discount used book store--and don't mind the drink stains and coffee cup rings. The book also doubles as an excellent coaster.
You can purchase From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Does the book mention that Matrix 1 was a rip-off of an old script from 1981 called "The Third Eye"? ...this also explains why 2 & 3's plot was so different and poor.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Thank you for putting the Comic Book Guy image in my head. I re-read the review and it was much more enjoyable with the Comic Book Guy voice in my head.
Sod Paycheck. Stick Robocop in as the best Dick novel Dick never wrote.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
this also explains why 2 & 3's plot was so different and poor.
That's probably only part of it. The other part of it was that the Wachowski Brothers originally wanted to make only one movie. When they couldn't fit all the material into a single movie, they decided to stretch it out into three. The results are quite obvious as the first one got the bulk of the intrigue, while the remaining movies were required to be less story dense and packed with more filler.
A similar situation can be seen with the new Star Wars Trilogy. Lucas obviously tried to plan things a bit on the fly, and ended up with 60-70% of the story packed into the last movie. Some estimate that as much as 15-20% of the material intended for the trilogy got cut from the movies. That's what left such a large gap for the "Clone Wars" animated series, and the new up-coming television show.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sci-fi is as you say. A regular story set in the future or focusing on technology (i.e.: Star Trek--although, not all episodes)
Science Fiction (SF) specifically refers to any fiction that put humans in a futuristic environment to illuminate and reflect on the human condition, culture and society. The classic example is showing tension between alien species that is derived essentially from their physical differences to demonstrate the ignorance inherent in racism found in our own society. Technology might be used to enable the story telling, but isn't the focus.
A good comparison is Star Trek vs Firefly.
Swoogan
sigs are for losers...and ppl who can think of one.
Sci-fi is a setting.
Alien wsa a horror flick, in a sci-fi setting.
Aliens was a action flick, in a sci-fi setting.
Terminator was a horror film. in a sci-fi setting.
Give Mel Gidson a flying car instead of a truck in Lethal weapon, and you would have a buddy cop movie, in a sci-fi setting.
I would like to hear of 1 sci-fi movie that tells a story that couldnt be told in a different setting?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do you have any examples that are not narratives?
I find that for narratives (either fiction or non), a lack of formatting works very well because your imagination is carried smoothly through the text. In a non-narrative, though, some formatting can aid greatly in the readability. It can help your eye flow down the page, it can break up the monotony (even if it's well-written and interesting, reading it in unbroken paragraph form can get rough on the eyes).
You're right that it can certainly be overdone, and used to mask deficiencies in the text. But in non-narrative non-fiction, a little formatting can be a very, very good thing, and I think the lack of it when it would be helpful is a valid complaint. Maybe not the author's fault, but it does affect the readability and enjoyability of the book.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Now, if you view movies as simply a collection of scenes then, sure, Alien could be set on earth and the Alien could be a vampire or just a very big guy with a knife. However, taken as a whole, Terminator doesn't work without time travel (firmly entrenching it in science fiction) and Alien doesn't work without a manned spaceship visiting another planet. Science fiction is very much its own genre of movie, just as much as action, comedy or horror. That one can make a science fiction movie with action, comedy or horror in it doesn't detract from that in the least.
Obviously, these movies should have focused on the fight within the Matrix, that is, Neo's efforts to rally the citizenry to rise up in revolt and overthrow the machine regime controlling it all.
This would run counter to the basic mythological premise of the hero. He is the object of the story, and he must redeem and save humanity, because it cannot do it on it's own.
IMHO, the sequels were bad enough because they diverged from this. They'd have been worse if they demoted Neo to "just a leader".
But of course Hollywood isn't interested in giving anybody any ideas. We're already one spark away from mass revolt as it is. So the studio said no, and the brothers, utterly dejected, just went after the paycheck with the hope of one day being able to have final cut... maybe even remaking the sequels.
I don't know how else to explain how the first movie could be so fantastic, and the 2nd & 3rd so shitty.
I think that's a lot of conspiracy theory to cover up the possibility that the brothers are basically hacks when not following a highly traditional mythological structure. (Hey, most screenwriters are hacks, so they at lest get points for trying.)
They had a good idea (traditional heroic monomyth with a modern action-flick theme), and then pushed it way too far into pretentious pseudo-intellectual garbage without backing it up. In other words: it was obvious they had read a lot of books, it wasn't obvious that they had learned anything from them.
I personally think they got too wrapped up in making the story refer outside of itself, instead of making it's internal symbology consistent. Compare Star Wars, which is another straight up hero myth, but without all of the allusory smokescreen.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
"That's probably only part of it. The other part of it was that the Wachowski Brothers originally wanted to make only one movie."
Also consider that their motivation here was to do a live-action 'anime', not a mind-bending sci-fi intrigue-a-thon. It was a loose plot intended to tie together some strange kung-fu scenes. They said almost as much in the Matrix Revisited DVD.
"Derp de derp."
You have a point.
The point is all the more interesting in light of the quite deep sci-fi content of the original stories I've read:
Alien was loosely based on one of the four short stories comprising the novel "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" by A. E. van Vogt. The main point of the novel wasn't a crew's rather helpless fight for survival against a nearly invulnerable enemy; it was the struggle for acceptance by specialists by an "holistic scientist," and it falls somewhere between the gritty-utopian and future-optimism schools of pulp-era classics. (I say "utopian" here because of the social-science aspect in the hero's profession; cf. the "encyclopedic synthesist" in Heinlein. I might add that I have always wanted to be an ES when I grew up.) The movie drops the scientists and top-of-the-line flight crew of the Beagle, and replaces them with the technically skilled, mining-competent, but not-quite-Ph.D.-toting crew of the Nostromo. Holistic science never gets a look-in.
Aliens, while keeping the acid-blooded creature from Vogt, is a frank (and honest) borrowing of Starship Troopers tech and esprit de corps. I'll skip the analysis, since I expect more Slashdotters have read the book than have bathed today, and simply note that, again, only a tiny aspect of the novel makes it to the screen. These "space marines" are troopers, but they're no citizen soldiers. (Funny, the troopers here don't bother me nearly as much as the troopers in the actual movie "Starship Troopers." Eh.)
I don't know of my own reading whether The Terminator is based on a specific prior work or not; I've seen other posts here today which attribute it to Philip K. Dick, and that seems about right.
It strikes me that the utopian aspects of the first two sources are completely stripped from the movies, while dystopian aspects (PKD influences?) are added. Does the philosophic core of hard sci-fi -always- burn up (to be replaced, if at all, with dime-store Zen) on entry to Los Angeles? *
Whoops, since I don't post much I still wasn't quite sure if html formatting was necessary to preserve line breaks...I'm resubmitting my previous post in a readable form, feel free to mod down the original one. And now, on with the post:
The abundance of posts like this indicate that a lot of the criticisms of the sequels are generated by people who didn't really bother digging into the story and really paying attention to what happened.
The explanation for Neo's real world control of the sentinels rests in the Architect's explanation of the function of the One. Basically, the One gets his power from the machines themselves, the machine "mainframe". This is the thing that also controls all the sentinels. Therefore the One has the power to act against sentinels using the machine mainframe as a conduit.
Admittedly, there are a couple of small leaps you have to make along with this, namely that Neo's control is localized (he could zap the nearby sentinels but not every sentinel in existence) and that his brain can be connected to the network of the machines without being wired directly in to a computer (a wireless connection, in other words). But I think there were certainly explanations for this as well as for just about every other question raised by the skeptics of this trilogy, found right in the film. Definitely more than "well, just because."
I wish people would really take the time to explore what this trilogy was really about (the excellent DVD boxset contains a fountain of insight), and criticize the sequels for the things which truly deserve criticism; poor acting and dialogue, and an overemphasis on CGI special effects.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."