Addendum for The Tomorrow War

 

 During my rush to express my general dislike of Chris Pratt I forgot to add some important information about time travel. While the initial sloppy premise of The Tomorrow War was for the world of 2051 to ask for help from our present day world the question of changing future events was always in the background.

Speaking strictly as a curious layman when it comes to the actual implications of traveling backwards in time I believe the scientific consensus is that it isn't possible. We are naturally traveling into the future one second per second and through various means like approaching the speed of light or sitting close to the edge of a black hole “faster” forward time travel is possible.

But every reasonable science article I have read or video I watch says traveling backwards in time is problematic. Without getting deep into the mathematical weeds, which I have no ability to comprehend, I think Einstein's theories say nothing prohibits backwards time travel as far as the universe is concerned but it would take God-like powers.

The key here is that nothing outright forbids backwards time travel so various real and respected scientists have speculated on what would happen if someone or groups began shuffling through the space-time continuum.

Of course the Grandfather Paradox is the favorite with some psychotic moron going back in time to kill his grandfather before his own father was conceived. So if the father was never born how could an insane kid go back and kill his grandfather?

Some have speculated that such actions would create a temporal loop. The kid is born as he is supposed to be, grows up and builds a time machine, then goes back in time shoots his teenage grandfather in the head. Granddaddy never has a son so the kid is never born. Because the kid is never born he never builds a time machine to go back and kill his grandfather. So events proceed as they occurred with the Grandfather having a son who goes one to have a kid of his own. So once again the kid grows up, hates his Grandfather, builds a time machine and travels back to shoot him in the head. This loop presumably would continue for eternity.

Is it just me or does this put a big dent into the idea of free will?

The alternative is that instead of a temporal loop, time has a way to protect itself. Instead of backwards time travel such a homicidal grand kid would instead travel to an alternate universe set in the years during his grandfather's childhood. Killing that person would prevent your counterpart from being born but leave your own universe/timeline untouched. 

Going for shits and giggles here by throwing a hypothetical timey-wimey wrench into the time-space continuum, but what would be really wild is if we could reverse time would be to look at events on a much wider perspective. Instead of focusing our attention just on an insane genius-level kid traveling to the past to murder his teenage grandfather, look at the mundane decisions normal people make during the course of their day during that same period. 

Insane kid keeps a record of what his friends, Tom, Dick, and Harry did the day before he pops back years in the past to kill his grandfather. Insane kid then goes forward in time to that day and secretly observes his friends to see if they make the same choices. These choices could be anything from what shirt they wear, the route they take to work, or what they decide to have for lunch.          

If there is the least little bit of deviation from what they originally did that would leave open the idea of free will, I guess.

This all feeds back into the ultimate conclusion of the movie. While sending troops to the future to fight a clearly lost war just doesn't make any sense. The world of 2051 could have just sent the same group to our present with tons of information on what will happen along with the bio-weapon to make a more plausible movie.

Personally, while I have my doubts on the degree of free will humans actually have, I think the far more likely reality of backwards time travel would be sliding over to an alternate universe. But then again I'm no scientist, but goofing with the flow of temporal events just doesn't ring true in an universe that seems so highly ordered.

The Tomorrow War--A Movie Review

 

I watched this movie so you wouldn't have to.

 By the time 2021 arrived the world had seemed to turn the corner on the pandemic. Multiple lingering issues were still an embarrassing shitshow but with the vaccines out and the Orange Buffoon being shown the exit, despite unprecedented and scary attempts to stay in power, things were starting to look up. With the receding of the pandemic the various workings of civilization began to restart, one of them being movie studios who began tossing out previews to films that had been long delayed.

One of those films is called the The Tomorrow War staring Chris Pratt, a military science fiction film about the usual unstoppable invading aliens. Despite my liberal bleeding heart, tree hugging leanings I am a sucker for such movies and watched Tomorrow War the day it dropped on Amazon Prime. In truth, my eagerness to see the movie was in part due to my desire for new content, any entertainment that wasn't a leftover from happier, pre-pandemic times.

For example, over that extremely long nightmare year of 2020, I had rewatched The Lord of The Rings movies so many times I was starting to lose real life hope no matter the multiple times Gandalf and Aragorn assured me it still existed. Yes, I am a voracious reader but there are times everyone needs fresh visual and audio input that only the boob tube can provide.

As for The Tomorrow War right off the bat I had to dump a bushel of demerits for the basic premise. Chris Pratt, not one of my favorite actors to begin with, plays Dan Forester, a former Green Beret who is now a high school biology teacher who deep down knows he's meant for greater things in life. But in the first couple of scenes we find out that he has been turned down for a position at a “prestigious research facility.”

Danny Boy gets all mopey, and even a little bit whiny with his loving wife and daughter doing their best to comfort him during a World Cup Soccer viewing party at his house. See during the middle of this televised to the world game a wormhole opens up with soldiers from the year 2051 literally dropping in to tell everyone that humanity is losing a war against invading aliens and on the brink of extinction.

These aliens, which are called whitespikes, will suddenly appear in the year 2048 and overrun the world in three short years. These representatives from the future have interrupted the bloody World Cup match to ask the nations of present to send soldiers to the future to help with the war.

Of course as with these types of movies, the nations of the world almost immediately start sending troops to the future without any apparent questioning of the future people, or assessment of the tactical situation. More to the point, nothing in the movie suggests that people here in the presents take a moment and ask the future people detail questions of where these aliens first set foot on Earth. All we're told is that the first recorded encounters with the whitespikes were in eastern Siberia.

A huge area to be sure, but with thirty-some odd years to wait it seems commonsense to be me to maybe load up a couple of divisions of troops from different nations and recon the area. Yes, we're talking Russia here but I wouldn't be opposed to some vodka-soaked Russian general being put in charge as humanity does a grid by grid search to short circuit our extinction. Dear Lord, real life murderer, and petty dictator Putin would love calling himself the freaking savior of humanity.

In fairness to the movie, one of the future soldiers does say that that when the whitespikes began appearing the nations of the world looked back on the records and no telescopes nor radar saw anything drop down from space. Okay, I'm no George Patton nor Alexander the Great but that suggests to me that maybe they were already on Earth. And some forensic study on the first few whitespikes killed in the war might narrow down the area where they first appeared. Hint...Hint.

But no, present day troops are rushed through the wormhole to 2051 for seven-day deployments with fewer than thirty-percent surviving. Seven day deployments you ask? It's all part of the movie's time travel gizmo and is just a useful plot device.

With trained troops coming back as hamburger, if they return at all, the nations of the world resort to drafting civilians. No, these civilians have no prolonged period of basic training. They are literally given weapons, some basic gear, and then get sucked up into the wormhole for a seven day visit to Hell.

Even worse for this movie many of these civilians are not in the best of health. Many are clearly not physically fit for serving as a REMF in present day armies much less engaging in intense combat with murderous aliens.

Low and behold former Green Beret, Dan Forester's number comes up for the draft. Forester's wife and daughter plead with him to contact his estranged, troubled Vietnam Vet, genius-level mechanical engineer father to dodge the draft. See, Danny Boy's dad has figured out a way help draftees circumvent the tracking device the government installed on those going to the future. We then get a scene with Danny Boy and his dad where they promptly engage in a father/son pissing contest. Danny Boy gets disgusted with his dad and says fuck it, he reports to the base where the pathetic civilians are dispatched to the future.

Right from the get-go the trip to 2051 is a cluster fuck with Danny Boy's group dropping from the wormhole not five-feet above the ground but at least fifteen-stories above apocalyptic Miami Beach. Luckily for Danny and the important secondary characters they fall into a roof top pool that strangely still has enough water to cushion their fall.

From there the survivors regroup and get a mission to rescue an important group of scientists working in the city. Now understand, whitespikes have infested the city and a dozen or so pizza delivery-type guys and retail working ladies have to fight their way to the building where the eggheads were doing their thing. Remember no training, no months long physical conditioning, just John Wayne movie determination and Danny Boy and another former army type who has already served three previous seven-day tours to 2051. That guy has terminal cancer and is a walking death wish. But he does carry a souvenir, a claw from one of the first whitespikes killed in the war.

The movie meanders to a conclusion with Danny Boy meeting his 2051 daughter, who just happens to be a colonel in what is left of the military force fighting the whitespikes. The 2051 people have pretty much realized they can't win, so why they were continuing to suck unprepared draftees from their past into their hopeless fight, I can't figure out.

What the 2051 people do have is research into a biological weapon that will kill the female whitespikes. Supposedly the females are extra hard to kill and like Star Trek's furry and cute tribbles are born pregnant. Hence how they were able to overrun the planet in three years.

Danny Boy and his adult daughter, who is also the chief scientist of the research project capture a female whitespike, take it back to humanity's last fortified base, and perfect the bio-weapon. See Dan's daughter wants him to go back to the present and use the weapon while there is still time.

Well now all sorts of crazy shit starts to happen. That last base is attacked and overrun with whitespikes out to rescue the female. Dan now fights to survive long enough for his timer to hit zero where the time travel gizmo will automatically send him, the nifty bio-weapon, and the surviving members of his group back to our present.

Returning to the present the world has gone to pieces. Realization that the 2051 war is hopeless and extinction imminent the geopolitical situation in the present has seen all nations turn inward with international alliances being abandoned. It's clearly mentioned even NATO has disbanded something I once thought ridiculous and even suicidal until the Orange Buffoon did his best to make it happen.

To me that is when the movie got extra super stupid, yes the 2051 war is lost but with thirty years to prepare the world of our present could pull together and somehow change the future. But then again the United States has in reality just seen over six-hundred thousand people die due to Covid-19 and there are motherfuckers who violently believe it was all some grand conspiracy. Then there are climate change deniers, another massive conspiracy, and Flat Earthers so maybe the writers do understand human nature better than me.

But never fear, Dan Forester will save the day. See in one of Dan's biology classes there is a student who is a volcano nerd. This kid loves volcanoes and knows everything about them. So after Dan and his terminal cancer combat buddy have his souvenir whitespike claw analyzed by a scientist and discover ancient volcanic ash embedded in it and get a general age of that substance. For reasons I either missed or the writers never stated, Dan get his volcano wizard student to tell them what part of the Earth the ash originated.

They surmise that the whitespikes arrive on Earth right before a certain Siberian volcano erupted and ended up buried and then frozen in ice. That during our time the ice melted enough to thaw out the planet-cleaning killing machines.

Great we have a location, eastern Siberia but we then learn Russia has locked its borders tight. And the United States government has no desire to contact them and say they have cool information to share that might save humanity in thirty years.

But wait, Dan's estranged father just happens to own a C-130 transport plane and can fly the beast under Russian radar. So Dan, his dad, the terminal cancer guy along with several others organize a mission to fly into Siberia to find and then destroy the whitespikes with the bio-weapon.

This motley crew locate the buried spaceship, blast their way in, and begin killing the whitespikes still sleeping in their hibernation sacks. That is until a couple of whitespikes begin screaming waking up the rest. The group then begins blasting away with weapons as the whitespikes start escaping until terminal cancer guy detonates the C-4 explosives they had placed throughout the ship.

Everyone inside the ship dies except Danny Boy and a couple of lucky whitespikes that are doing their best to run off into the icy wilderness. Dan and his estranged father, who was left outside to cover the exit, give chase and have a final confrontation with the two remaining aliens. Yeah, one of the surviving whitespikes is female and she's clearly pregnant.

Father and son kill the last two whitespikes and then have one of those redemption/reconciliation moments that has all the sweet sincerity of saccharin. They go home where they are greeted by the world as heroes.

Okay my biggest problem with the movie was the basic idea that 2051 world would come to our present asking for soldiers to fight a war that they had long since decided was lost. The better plan, in my ever humble opinion, would have them developed the bio-weapon first then drop into the World Cup game with it and a detailed report and get us in the present to locate the and kill the whitespikes.

The world could have still gotten all gung-ho with Dan Forester drafted into a global coalition to locate and eliminate the threat because of his prior military service. Dan could have seen a message from his adult daughter who still would have been the chief scientist on the 2051 bio-weapon and realized his path to glory would be to change the future for her.

But no, we get a chaotic mishmash of Terminator, Aliens, and Predator tropes so Chris Pratt can look good on screen. My problem with him is that he can't act. His character in the Parks and Recreation was a one-dimensional creature that honestly didn't seem to stray far from his real personality. The same goes for his character, Peter Quill, in the MCU. The first Guardians of Galaxy movie was great but the second not so much.

In short Chris Pratt strikes me as a pompous douchebag who isn't any different than a couple of thousand other underemployed actors living in Hollywood. His one difference is a couple of lucky breaks other, better performers never got.

If you haven't already figured out, The Tomorrow War is a wreck of a movie that I honestly can't recommend for interesting entertainment. Truthfully the best part of the movie were the whitespike aliens, which were pure CGI. Time travel films can be tricky things and when done well can be some of the best thought provoking entertainment around. My final stab at this movie would be for someone to go back in time and prevent Amazon from wasting money on this script.

Synchronic-- A Movie Review

 

Ever since Netflix began dropping its own movies on the streaming service, its customers have had to put up with a multitude of unadulterated crap. This holds true especially in the science fiction genre where some of their movies apparently had middle school-aged kids develop the premise and write the dialog. 

On second thought, that's not a really fair comment to make about middle school kids, I feel confident that some of them would have a done a far better job. Some middle school kids are scary smart and I sincerely hope most of them stay on the side of good.

Last night though, I caught a Netflix movie that I felt was almost at the level of a Christopher Nolan film. Entitled “Synchronic” set in New Orleans, it stars Anthony Mackie as paramedic Steve Denube and Jamie Dornan as his paramedic cowoker and best friend, Dennis Dannelly.

The characters of Denube and Dannelly don't work the ritzy part of New Orleans with Antebellum houses and old money families. They spend their nights chasing down the victims on the seedier side of town. You, know the usual like gang violence, drug crimes, rape, murder, and lately a bizarre series of deaths involving a new synthetic drug called Synchronic that has just hit the streets.

The opening scene has the viewer in a second-rate motel room where an unnamed woman and her male friend are laying in bed and taking Synchronic. Both go through the beginning motions of entering an euphoric bliss before they diverge into their individual drug-induced alternate realities. Right after taking the drug, the guy gets out of bed, grabs the ice bucket and leaves the room looking for the ice machine. But first we have the woman staying in bed and looking around in bewilderment as her surroundings turn into a swamp, complete a huge rattlesnake crawling up her leg. The snake is clearly agitated rattling away with all its might while naturally the drug-hazed woman screams. This impromptu meeting does not go well for the woman.

Now with switch to her male companion who has stepped into an elevator going to another floor in search of the ice machine. The drug hits him while in the elevator, it dissolves to be replaced with him fall from a pretty high altitude onto a desert floor. The guy impacts the sandy surface and everything fades to black with the movie's opening credits beginning.

For me this was not an auspicious beginning, I'm sitting in one of the uncomfortable stuffed chairs my wife bought from the local fancy furniture store thinking we have another brain dead Netflix movie. No it wasn't things ramp up as the beginning credits fade away.

Denube and Dannelly come into the motel room with a stretcher and their medical supplies to see the woman still laying on the bed, alive but nursing a huge snake bite on her leg. Yeah, at first we somehow have to accept the idea that a psychedelic drug allowed the woman to manifest an actual snake bite. Because also on the scene is a New Orlean's animal control guy saying she was bitten and that it's the worse one he's ever seen. Oh, her male, ice machine hunting companion is dead. They found him when blood started dripping from the ceiling of the motel elevator. He somehow fell out of the elevator and impacted on the roof of the cab.

Okay, this is pretty much the point the movie pulled me in and didn't let go.

There are a few more strange, Twilight Zone deaths, all related to people taking Synchronic. Something

Denube and Dannelly both notice but they each have their own personal problems that they are trying to deal with.

We learn that Anthony Mackie's character, Denube, has a brain tumor that is so serious the doctor arranging him to have immediate radiation treatments. After the first treatment, Denube learn a curious fact from the doctor that his pineal gland acts much younger than it should for him being an adult. Hold on, because this stray, unusual fact plays an important part in the movie.

Dannelly's personal problems generally relate to the fact that he is a whiner. He's married to a beautiful woman, they have a new baby but he's feels unfulfilled. Yeah, it's a drag but Anthony Mackie is the lead in this movie so the character of Dannelly and his problems have to be the pivot point. Dannelly does have a legitimate problem, a troubled daughter who's somehow eighteen years-old. No, the movie makes its clear that Dannelly's current wife is not her step-mother. The character of Dannelly and his wife don't look older than forty, a small flaw in the movie I'll blame on the casting director.

This eighteen year-old daughter, named Brianna, is chaffing at parental units and is known to take recreational drugs. See where this is going? But wait I say like some late night infomercial salesman so high on coke there's white dust on my nose, there's more.

Denube starts seeing packets of Synchronic being sold in convenience stores. When he does he buys the entire supply in anger and preaches to the clerk, who never has any say in what the owners put on the shelves, what this drug does to people. During one of Denube's rage-filled purchases another individual in the store tries to buy them off him once outside. That person is the drug's creator, a young but brilliant chemical engineer who is also trying to get Synchronic off the streets.

Denube learns from this guy that Synchronic tickles certain areas of the brain, including young pineal glands to the point it actually sends a person back in time. Yes, time travel and while you might scoff in contrivance, various stories and movies have used brain power and/or unusual drugs to allow people to travel in time. The best example was when the late Chris Reeves was in a movie called Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour where he used his brain to go back to the early twentieth century just to get a date with Jane.

So while Denube is home feeling pretty crappy he eventually experiments with the drug, and yes he goes back in time. His experiments progress to the point where he drops in on a Spanish conquistador going through the New Orleans swamps around the 1500's, and ice age hunter tracking a woolly mammoth. Best of all a near-term visit to his own house somewhere during the high-point of of the KKK, where that bastard chases Denube with a gun before the effects wear off and he slides back to the twenty-first century.

Just because I love explaining this shit, Synchronic sends you back in time, not space. The user always appears in the same location but temporally anything possible. But another catch with this drug is that a small movement in location in your present is what sends you to different eras. Just Denube moving from one end of his couch to the other was the difference needed to switch from a conquistador chasing you with a sword to a Klan asshole chasing you with a pistol.

See, this is fun shit.

Well, things get serious when Dannelly's daughter, Brianna disappears. Yes, it involves Synchronic and because her pineal gland is fresh and young she somehow gets stuck in the time she traveled. This is one of the last things Denube learns from the drug's creator before he is mysteriously killed.

By this time Denube has either destroyed most of the Synchronic in his possession or used it in his experiments. A couple of pills remain and after convincing Dannelly he's not crazy by showing his video recordings of the experiments, Denube goes after Brianna to rescue her. I could spoil the ending, which is what I usually do but not this time.

I really enjoyed Synchronic and highly recommend it. I'm a big fan of Anthony Mackie, and his performance in this movie was great. After years of playing the superhero in Marvel movies, he comes across as a sad but normal guy who goes the extra mile for his friend. As for his costar, Jamie Dornan, playing Dannelly I can't say such good things. To have such a young adult daughter as Brianna, he simply look old enough for that to be plausible. But I feel even his acting was under cooked, probably, like he's just on set to collect another check after the Fifty Shades disaster hurt his career.

Once again, watch this movie, it takes time to be pulled in but it's worth the effort.

Greenland-- A Movie Review

 

 Being married almost always mean compromise, as for those rare times it doesn't my wife is usually the victor in whatever discussion or choice that has to be made. Last night was one of the extra ordinary, “Blue Moon” circumstances where I won out on the choice of television programming we watched. That left me in sole command of the television remote and access to Amazon Prime.

As you might expect for the average American male, I picked something with no redeeming qualities nor any artistic significance. My Friday night viewing choice was the new disaster flick called Greenland staring Gerard -”This is Sparta” - Butler and the lovely Morena Baccarin. The trick I will try to perform for you today is to squeeze some philosophical thoughts out of this review. Yes, in the course of expressing my verbal pomposity I will be revealing spoilers.

As the movie starts, Butler, who plays the Scottish-born John Garrity is on a high-rise construction site in downtown Atlanta doing his structural engineering. His face is a mix of emotions as he glances at his phone and sees a picture of his now estranged wife and young son. Garrity and his wife are having marital problems but for the most part it's clear he still deeply loves his spouse and is a dedicated father. Also, understand the reason John Garrity is emotionally upset that day is because it's his son's birthday and that the boy is suffering from diabetes.(1.)

Their difficulties take an immediate backseat to the fact a massive comet is going to skim very close to our Big Blue Marble. Don't worry, just like the pandemic government officials have assured the public all is well and that the dirty iceball will not ruin everyone's lives or businesses. It during this part of the movie I had a momentary nightmare about Trump appointing Ivanka, Jared, or Don Jr. to the top seat at NASA.

As you can guess, the shit hits the fan when it's discovered by the public that the comet, named “Clark” is not in one piece but is actually thousands of shards, with some as big as football stadiums. The other oopsy moment showing Trump-level government incompetence is that one of the shards instead of landing “harmlessly” in the ocean off Bermuda smacks into downtown Tampa, Florida.

Truth be told, there is an earlier scene where Garrity and his kid are in a grocery store parking lot after picking up birthday supplies and look up to see hundreds of American military cargo planes flying off in the same direction. So the bigwigs knew all along that Clark just wasn't going to just whiz by before leaving the solar system.

With Tampa a flaming crater the public learns that the biggest shard of Clark, nine-miles in diameter, is going to hit the Earth in a few short days. And that certain people in the United States have been unknowingly chosen for evacuation to top secret shelters in sunny Greenland.

It's all about the skills and with John Garrity a structural engineer, he gets a literal robo-call during his son's birthday party telling him that he and his family have tickets to Greenland. No one else, not grandparents, uncles, aunts, nor cousins and especially not any of Garrity's neighbors and their children who all in his house about to cut the birthday cake.(2.)

Seriously awkward moments ensue when your neighbors learn they are going to face a planetary extinction event while you, your wife, and son will be chilling in a deep bunker.

No, it wasn't that easy for John Garrity and his family. As they leave behind their neighbors, all slightly disgruntled and totally terrified, lots of bad stuff happens. Garrity and his family reach the Air Force base where they will depart for Greenland but at the last minute lose their son's insulin supply. John has to quickly run back to the car they abandoned at the gates to grab the medicine. During this time John's wife inadvertently spills the beans of their son's diabetes. The military, who didn't know about the boy's condition boots the wife and child out of the line causing the first of several separations.(3)

At one point John's wife and son hitch a ride with a seemingly nice couple heading to Lexington, Kentucky where her father lives. This nice couple learn of their evacuation status, kicks John's wife out of the car and kidnaps the boy with the idea the will assume the Garrity family identity.(4) The nice couple makes it to another Air Force base with the boy who promptly tells the security folks he's been kidnapped and told to lie about them being his parents. The nice couple is taken into custody and never seen again.

Through a couple of favorable events John's wife is reunited with her son and again makes her way to her father's house.

John learns of his wife's destination and hitches a ride on a farm truck heading in that general direction. As you can expect, base level human behavior shows itself with John having to kill a certified redneck who somehow believes, that like the nice couple, he can lie his way into a super secure doomsday bunker. However, while on the farm truck John learns about a Canadian airport where civilians are being flown to Greenland.

The Garrity family eventually links back up, grabs a trunk and defying time and space make it to the Canadian airport to catch the absolute last plane out before the comet hits.

As you can expect with such movies, the Garrity family makes it to the safety of one of the bunkers with only minutes to spare. The comet Clarke then impacts Western Europe sending untold tons of flaming rock and debris all over the world.

The movie ends with the Garrity family and about a couple of hundred others standing in front of the massive bunkers doors as they open. It's at least several months later, if not a year or two, and as you can imagine the world is wrecked. The survivors see the sun and a couple of birds flying among the wreckage.(5) From there the scenes drift from various locations around the planet showing devastated cities and other bunkers making radio contact with other groups.

Observations and thoughts:

1. The character of John Garrity is not some dumbass mechanic, he's a highly competent professional engineer and has a lifestyle to match his education. That being said I can't help but feel this movie plays to the insecurities and irrational fears of the white American middle class. The Garrity house shown in the movie is more than just some McMansion. Set in a truly upper middle class suburb outside Atlanta the Garrity family has never really struggled in the same way a lower income family might. Well, there is John and his wife's marital problems because for some loony reason he decided to have an affair with other woman.

   Since I believe movies like this play on white fears of someone or thing taking away their material lifestyle and affluence, I can't help but wonder how the audience would relate if John Garrity and his family were black.

2. During this scene with Tampa getting hit everyone attending the birthday party learns how bad the situation is globally. Of course you're happy that John Garrity and his family are on the list to be saved. How would such lucky people react to the knowledge that their long time friends and their children will die? Especially heartbreaking is that minutes later the Garrity family is leaving the driveway in their luxury SUV but are stopped by one of their best friends pleading for them to take her small daughter with them to perceived safety.

   The movie scared me in way because I truly do not know how I would react in put in a similar situation. Would I take the little girl knowing it was expressly forbidden by the authorities, or could I drive away leaving her behind to die?

3. As the audience understands, John Garrity was picked for the Greenland bunkers because he had skills needed to rebuild the world. Upon arrival at the Air Force base the authorities learn that John's son is diabetic, which to them is a deal breaker. I had a problem with this since at this point were a couple of days away from the comet hitting the Earth.

   Yeah, ideally you would want healthy people without chronic medical conditions in the bunkers but at that point are you really going to kick out a structural engineer because his young son is diabetic? I highly doubt such a vital professional would be kicked off the list during a literal planetary disaster where the continued survival of the human race is in question.

4. You can't have a disaster movie without some reference to mans inhumanity to each other. You could also frame this as a question of pure survival with the nice couple and the certified redneck just trying to stay alive.

5. This brings up something I noticed during the movie concerning the main characters, John and his wife. Whenever anything bad happens both characters expect everyone else to immediately stop and help them through their troubles. I understand the idea of self-preservation but with the world ending there are millions of individual tragedies occurring. This could also feed back to white privilege with the Garrity couple.

6. You don't have to be a Biblical scholar to understand the birds the bunker survivors saw as the doors to the outside world slide open. I immediately thought of the bird Noah released during the later stages of his floating zoo resort. Don't know the details, but I believe the birdie brought back a twig to show the waters were residing.

Greenland is not a perfect movie but the plot is sound and the acting is better than average. I don't believe I would have gone to a movie theater to see it. But as a pay-per-view film in the middle of a pandemic I'd have recommend it. Going by the five star system, I'd give it a 3.5.

A Review of Singularity (2015)

Even with the pandemic throwing a huge monkey wrench into current movie production, true originality and creativity in Hollywood has suffered for decades. The reason is easy to figure out, movie producers simply do not want to take risks with their money. So instead they go with tried and true film formulas and repeatedly do countless reboots, sequels, prequels, and remakes.

This allows the big movie producing boys and girls to make enough money to buy their third home high in the hills of the Italian Rivera, their second yacht, and that super nice business jet where the casting couch is the size of a queen-sized bed. The under-educated masses don't mind, they get their regular dose of excessive gunfire, explosions, superheroes, and just enough wild sex to blunt the growing midnight-black abyss at the center of their consumerist lives. Whoa, went really dark there for a minute and on second thought, I have to include my own movie preferences in what the under-educated masses line up to watch during the dog days of summer.

The lack of originality is common with movies of all genres. If one studio puts out a movie about a plucky team of astronauts putting life and limb in danger to stop a giant asteroid from colliding with Earth and causing a mass extinction, you can bet another studio has its own version following closely behind. The same goes for chick flicks, if one story of a down on her luck single momma goes big, other studios are surely working on their version.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this business plan. Unless a producer and director want to go all high brow, European experimental cinema there are only so many ways to tell a story. Full disclosure, I watched one of the experimental films once and went away with bad dreams for weeks. I'll stick with Bond girls, burly and unrealistic action heroes, and starships battling evil invaders.

While there are only so many ways to tell a story people can relate, it would still be nice if the movie studios tried to get outside the damn box every now and then. But since movie studios can't imagine even peering over the rim of the same box to fresher ideas outside, we get the same boilerplate stories year after year.

The best example are the Terminator movies that have never really found a way to tell a different story from the first two. The one exception, Terminator: Salvation with Christian Bale tried to tell the story of the man/ AI conflict from another angle but is widely considered one of the worst. Yes, the worst is Terminator: Dark Fate which is a betrayal of T2 and even the fans on so many levels I refuse to watch it.

However, as unlikely as it may sound there are film makers taking these tired tropes into new and interesting directions.

A new and little known group called Dust Film Studios produces short films that are high quality and extremely thought-provoking. The majority of these films are posted on YouTube for free and there have been several times I spent two to three hours watching one after the other. My favorite though involves a Terminator-like battle between aggressive, sentient androids and humans. The chilling aspect though is that this war for survival takes place in the relative here and now.

The film is called “Singularity” and was directed by Samuel Jorgensen back in 2015. Warning, I'm going full spoiler here but it takes nothing away from the film.

The seven-minute film begins with a black screen and a news report saying the situation had gotten progressively worse over the last week with fighting engulfing Washington DC. At the beginning it's not mentioned that the enemy is androids with bad attitudes, nor is any backstory given about what caused them to go all Skynet-like and killing humans. With the screen still black another reporter breaks in saying that Marine One, the president's helicopter, has been shot down somewhere in Washington DC with POTUS in it. In less than a minute a truly dire situation has been established and I was on the edge of my seat wanting more the first time I saw the film.

The first actual scene of the film shows a Blackhawk helicopter and three Apache gunships in the skies heading to the location of the downed Marine One. Riding inside the Blackhawk is a Delta Force team out to rescue POTUS.

The Blackhawk briefly lands next what looks to be a ruined hospital deploying the Delta Force troopers who head inside one of the buildings. The production value of this film is incredibly high with the actors decked out in high tech armor quite close to the equipment used in actual combat areas. Each actor is also holding what looks to be a highly accurate M4 assault rifle prop. One of the problems with these types of films involving military operations is the lack, or outright absence, of proper equipment. The other typical problem with the films are actors who simply do not look like soldiers. The actors in Singularity have the exact look and bearing of experienced soldiers.

The Delta guys slowly go through the corridors of the war-damaged hospital looking for the president. The hospital is eerily quiet as they proceed with the only dead bodies they encounter being that of the president's Secret Service detail.

They link up with the president and begin the long haul back outside to the extraction point where another helicopter will be waiting. The president, while alive, is gravely injured and can barely walk. They don't move far before making contact with the enemy. The president calls the androids “clinkers” and once again, we're given no information on what brought on their rampage.

A running battle commences with the Delta guys taking heavy causalities as they move with the president. It is here that we our first, brief look at the enemy. The clinkers are clearly mechanical humanoids and at first glance do not stray far from a Terminator whose fresh has been burned away leaving nothing but the silver endoskeleton.

With most of the Delta rescue team dead, the two remaining troopers and the president are on the verge of getting out of the building. That's when the clinkers begin a heavy push forcing one of the troopers to stay behind in the last room providing cover for the president and his protector to get outside.

Even though the last soldier and the president do get outside, their ride out of the combat zone is still a full minute away. And yes, the clinkers are converging on their location with guns blazing. With the last Delta trooper providing cover, he tells the president to sprint towards the MH-53 Pave Low chopper as its sets down.

The president makes it to the chopper with the last Delta soldier fighting off clinkers as they rush his position. The Pave Low chopper takes off and just as the Delta trooper is about to be overrun one of the damn Apache gunships finally shows up and turns most of the attacking clinkers into chunks of scrap metal.

Curiously, seconds later one of the surviving clinkers walks up next the Delta trooper, who is expecting immediate death, and just watches the president's rescue chopper as it goes out of range. The scene then cuts away from the lone trooper and the clinker and transitions to the president sitting in the chopper.

For a second or two everything looks like a happy ending with the president being saved. That's when the president looks straight ahead and you see electric flashes in one of his eyes. We are left with the clear impression that the president has either been altered by the clinkers or completely replaced with an android double. Either way the president is now a two-legged Trojan Horse in the middle of a war that gives every indication of going badly for the Americans.

Just to make the tactical situation even more of a dire shit-show, the last scene of the film is a shot of the Washington skyline. Off in the background much of Washington is one fire including the Capitol Building. While in the foreground, we see the Washington Monument taking a direct missile hit and collapsing into rumble.

The first time I saw this film I was breathless at the ending, even with no backstory nor explanation of why the clinkers went rogue. This is the type of story that would make an awesome movie and shows what is lacking in the big production blockbusters we get today.

The budget for this short film had to have been small, but despite that the production values equaled many of the movies produced by the big studios. I even went as far to search the internet for any sign that this was just the first stage of turning Singularity into a major motion picture. I found nothing to suggest that was the case.

Yes, it was the unanswered plot points that made this such a great film. Despite that I still want to know why the clinkers were developed and what caused them to turn on their creators. Most of all I want to know what their ultimate goal is in their war with humans. Recognition of their freedom from cruel servitude, or outright destruction and enslavement of their former masters. Given the clinkers no-holds barred fighting in Washington DC, I see dark times ahead for the Americans. Needless to say, if you've got seven minutes to spare and like great story telling, find Singularity on YouTube. 

The Tragedy of the Skywalker Saga--A Review

When the first Star Wars film came out back in 1977 America was suffering from a bit of an existential crisis. Vietnam and Watergate were over but the wounds for both were still fresh and bloody. Throw in a couple of oil shortage crises, the expansion of commie movements around the globe, and the dust settling from the civil rights movement and a lot of Americans didn't know which way was up. In other words, the generally believed position that our nation was a beacon of freedom and enlightenment was endangered.

But enter morally upright Luke Skywalker and the national mental zeitgeist gets a much needed boost to set us back on the proper path of righteousness. That may sound flippant but I actually believe that is how most Americans viewed the first Star Wars film. That first movie sent a message that the “Good Guys” would overcome the nefarious minions of evil and eventually overthrow the tyrannical empire.

The two Original Trilogy sequels further reinforced the belief that the Good Guys always triumph in the end. Well, it's hard to come away with any other conclusion when everyone clearly saw Emperor Palpatine tossed down a deep shaft and apparently explode. Throw in surrendering Stormtroopers down on Endor and the ghostly image of a redeemed Anakin Skywalker standing beside Yoda and Obi Wan we've got the fall of the Empire and a nice happy ending.

We didn't return to the Star Wars Universe in movies until 1999 with the release of The Phantom Menace. If I remember correctly its reception by fans was mixed. For me, it was okay entertainment but the premise, while trying to sound sophisticated involving the complicated politics of the decaying Republic just didn't work. Throw in everything about Jar-Jar Binks, all the character dialog, and a far too young Anakin Skywalker and I understand why many rabid fans were disappointed.

The two other prequels were slightly better with Anakin rapidly aging to an angst-filled teenager and the introduction of a galaxy-spanning war. The dialog was still terrible and the plot creaked along but there was enough story to make it enjoyable. Another reason those two movies were better was the near absence of Jar-Jar.

But at the end of The Revenge of the Sith we see how the Republic became the Empire and how Anakin became Darth Vader. Not the best setup for the Original Trilogy but by that point the purpose of Star Wars was not about great story telling but selling merchandise.

Now Disney enters the scene in 2015 releasing The Force Awakens and I did thoroughly like this movie. Yes, it was a retelling of A New Hope but I could accept that even though I really don't like much of what J.J. Abrams makes on television or movies. In my opinion J.J. Abrams can setup a great story but cannot create a coherent ending to save his life. The television show Lost was a J.J. creation and while it had intriguing episodes the overall story about the mysterious island and the marooned airline passengers was a mess.

The major personal criticism I have with the movie was that Luke, Leia, and Han had absolutely no scenes together. Yes, the main purpose of the movie was to introduce the characters of Rey, Fin, and the whiny brat Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. But hey, at least the dialog wasn't the usual incomprehensible mishmash of words typical of the other movies.

Understand, I have plenty of issues with The Force Awakens. One that I could mention is how the new bad guys, called the First Order, has built yet another version of the Death Star. Opposing the First Order is the Resistance, lead by General Leia Organa. All things considered, The Force Awakens was a decent movie despite its drawbacks and inconsistencies. I absolutely can not say the same thing about the following movie, The Last Jedi.

Directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi is the worst movie in the entire Star Wars franchise. Scientifically speaking a reasonably educated individual has to overlook numerous errors in the Star Wars movies. Namely the biggest is that there no hyperspace drive allowing the creation of a galaxy-wide government. The space fighters that always make up a large part of the battles could never perform the maneuvers we see on the screen. Star Wars space fighters turn and dive as if they were flying through a planetary atmosphere. But okay, any viewer of science fiction has to readily suspend a certain measure of disbelief to enjoy the story. But Last Jedi has huge, glaring issues that many fans just couldn't overlook.

In the opening scene of the movie we have the Resistance and The First Order about to engage in battle in outer space. The First Order has the usual battle fleet of huge star destroyers while the Resistance is about to attack with what are called bombers. Remember, we're in outer space where the lack of gravity makes dropping anything highly problematic. Sure enough, as the two sides engage in battle the crews of the Resistance ships appear to drop bombs on the bad guys.

Another huge issue I have with Last Jedi is the one involving the sinister leader of the First Order, Supreme Leader Snoke. Introduced in The Force Awakens, Snoke was a total unknown that was supposed to make Emperor Palpatine look like a Sunday school teacher. The entire time between Force Awakens and Last Jedi the internet buzzed with fan theories on who Snoke was and where he came from. One theory had him the mentor of Palpatine kept alive by his knowledge of the Dark Side of the Force. Another theory had him Master Jedi Mace Windu who we last saw missing a hand and falling out of a broken window.

In Last Jedi, Snoke was casually killed off without a word being said of how he came to rule the First Order. Even worse, director Rian Johnson goes out of his way to destroy all the mysteries introduced in Force Awakens. In the previous, movie the character of Rey was abandoned on the planet Jakku by her parents for some unknown reason. Later on in that movie, Rey finds Anakin's lightsabre and has a vision suggesting she has a connection to it. Why? The possibilities include that she is Skywalker left on Jakku to repeat Anakin and Luke's upbringing. That she is the granddaughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi and has inherited his Force abilities.

No, in Last Jedi dipshit Rian Johnson tells us Rey is a nobody. That her parents were the Star Wars version of Meth heads who sold their baby daughter to get enough credits to buy drugs. Being honest here but I was not impressed with the character of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo when he was introduced back in The Force Awakens. Kylo Ren seemed less an evil replacement of Darth Vader but more of a spoiled brat who Leia and Han, his parents, should have spanked a few times while he was growing up.

I would be remiss if I didn't say something about the hideous treatment of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. Gone is the eager and optimistic farm boy who destroyed the first Death Star and brought his fallen father back to the Light Side of the Force. In Last Jedi we have a discouraged, more than slightly crazy hermit who apparently couldn't handle his errant nephew, Ben Solo.

The first time I saw Last Jedi, I almost turned off the television seeing the ridiculous nature of the middle aged Luke Skywalker character. Yes, Obi-Wan and Yoda went into hiding at the of Revenge of the Sith with the Emperor in power and a huge clone army and space navy at his disposal. But the impression I got from Last Jedi was that Luke hit a few bumps in the road to rebuilding the Jedi. Then decided Ben Solo was a lost cause and had to be murdered. As opposed to Darth Vader/Anakin who killed untold millions during the Empire, including young children, but was redeemed through the love of his son he spent two previous movies trying to kill.

Star Wars was never that big a deal to me growing up. Yes, I had a few toys as a kid and saw the movies within a few days of them being released. But Star Wars never inspired me, I never saw any message nor overarching philosophy with the franchise worth investing a great deal of my time. That being said, I own every Star Wars film on Blu-ray because on a rainy weekend they are great way to relax and unwind. Well, I own them all except The Last Jedi which is so bad it makes the prequels look like masterpieces of cinema.

The Last Jedi so spoiled me of the entire Skywalker Saga that I only just now watched the the final film, The Rise of Skywalker.

J.J. Abrams returns in the last movie in a desperate attempt to patch together the wreckage Rian Johnson made of all the previous films. On one hand I have to say J.J. Abrams and the writers made a valiant attempt to reconstruct a coherent narrative to bring a close to the epic first introduced back in 1977. On the other hand, this is J.J. Abrams and he is once again unable to write a coherent story.

Rise of Skywalker begins with “The Dead Speak” in the opening crawl. And as you may already have guessed or know, it's Emperor Palpatine who has somehow survived his fall down the second Death Star's long shaft and its later explosion at the hands of the Rebel Alliance.

Palpatine has been hiding out on some unknown planet planning a return to power. In Palpatine's spare time as Luke Skywalker was attempting to resurrect the Jedi Order and Leia was helping build the New Republic, the former emperor for some reason created Snoke and engineered his assumption to power in the First Order.

Kylo Ren, now the Supreme Leader of the First Order, finds Palpatine who tells him to search out Rey and kill her. More or less at the same time Rey is hanging out with the pitiful remains of the Resistance when they get word Palpatine's back in town and looking to reclaim his turf.

Rey and her posse then begin searching for Palpatine, which involves them finding lost Sith artifacts that will point the way to his evil hideout. While at the same time Kylo is hunting Rey and generally shooting up anyone or thing that gets in his way. It during this part of the movie that I cringed for Adam Driver, the actor who plays Kylo. While in the first two movies Kylo seemed more a spoiled rich kid, in Rise of Skywalker I came away seeing the character as more an inept lackey. Kylo is, of course, eventually redeemed but I really didn't see or understand what began pushing him in that direction.

At some point, we learn Palpatine's old body was destroyed during the Battle of Endor but that his spirit found a secret base where he began inhabiting a cloned body planning his return. Okay, one of the best comic book Star Wars stories back in the 1990s had a similar plot but Palpatine came back to terrorize the galaxy a lot sooner. Had Disney pursued that story, the sequel episodes would have been awesome. 

Well in Rise of Skywalker Palpatine somehow has a massive fleet of star destroyers all armed with cannons that can blow up planets. You had to figure that a planet destroying weapon had to be included in this final movie. What I didn't understand is that if Snoke was a clone controlled my Palpatine, why didn't he just give those planet killing cannons to the First Order?

As you can expect, there is a climatic battle between Palpatine's fleet and the Resistance who have pieced together a group of ragtag ships to oppose him. Of course, Rey and Kylo have their final lightsabre battle and we get a visit by Luke Skywalker's force ghost who gives a, “Let's go out there and win one for the Gipper” speech to Rey. Going totally against the crazy hermit vibe Rian Johnson offered up in the last movie.

The Rise of Skywalker finishes up with the Resistance victorious, Palpatine truly dead and turned to ash, and Rey the sole survivor of her battles with Kylo. And yes, Kylo did turn back to the Light Side and even had a confrontation with his fellow Knights of Ren. A totally pointless scene in the movie given that their defeat played no part in changing the story. Who these Knights of Ren were and what they were doing all through episodes seven and eight is never explained. But Adam Driver needed a scene where he was the good guy so I guess they were thrown in to make that happen.

The movie ends back on the desert planet of Tatooine with Rey ceremonially burying Luke and Leia's lightsabres and looking at their Force ghosts off in the distance. Rey then takes the last name of Skywalker and probably goes on to reestablish the Jedi Order.

I am an unabashed Disneyphile who has been down to Disney World more times that I can count. But their addition to the Skywalker Saga was simply terrible. Episodes seven, eight, and nine were nothing but inconsistent stories, badly defined characters, and enough plot holes to fly a star destroyer through. Disney made the Star Wars movie Rogue One, a stand alone movie that was everything the last three of the Skywalker Saga were unable to supply. They can make a good Star Wars movie, but in my opinion I'm hoping for a reboot of the Skywalker Saga with competent writers and directors at the helm. In a way, Disney has ruined a chunk of my childhood and doesn't give a damn.

Netflix's I Am Mother--A Review

America's collective societal angst is a subject that really should be looked at deeply by whatever compassionate and intelligent people are left. It doesn't matter what end of the political spectrum you sit, but most Americans seem to spend their lives engrossed in their real and imagined fears. Our movies, books, television shows, and even news programs are often overwhelmed with a steady supply of post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories that actively feed on our fears. A sad statement for a people who claim to live in the, “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”

Please understand, I'm not saying there aren't real dangers lurking out in the world. Some are literally world-ending with the worst being climate change and environmental destruction. Pushing aside the willfully ignorant and their irrational cries of denial, the burning of fossil fuels to power our civilization has just about become a form of suicide but also an attempted murder of all life on the planet. But on the other end of the spectrum, I'm not cowering in fear over the Muslim guy sitting two rows in front of me on the airplane. Nor the Hispanic family sneaking across the southern border because they don't want to be murdered in their sleep by the local gang.

There are more esoteric fears though that while potentially real, are far more nebulous and detached from our everyday lives allowing them to be examined in a thoughtful way. The Netflix movie, I am Mother fits that description even though it has several flaws in the story and premise.

I am Mother is essentially another killer-robot story dealing with the usual Artificial Intelligence system out to rid the world of those nasty humans. The nice twist in the story though is that the genocidal A.I. only wants to drive humans extinct as the first step in bringing them back. The movie opens with the camera strolling down deserted futuristic corridors of an underground facility with titles telling us that an extinction level event has occurred on the surface and that the human population is now zero. But the next title says that the corridors we're seeing are part of a Repopulation Facility housing 63,000 preserved human embryos.

"Daughter" with her siblings

We then see Mother, a clunky looking humanoid robot who can curiously move with the grace of a dancer and the speed of an athlete, place one of the embryos into an artificial womb, a spherical glass container, where it grows to a normal-sized baby and is later decanted, for the lack of a better term. While Mother looks overwhelmingly like a machine instead of a human female, it raises the baby with a tenderness that rivals the abilities of real flesh and blood caregivers.

Mother calls this female child “Daughter” and tells her that when the time is right she will have numerous brothers and sisters who will then go on to repopulate the devastated Earth. But first Daughter has to endure years of training in every conceivable subject from electronics to philosophy.

As Daughter grows into a young woman she naturally becomes restless with her bunker lifestyle and wants to see the surface. Mother avoids actual details but says such an excursion is impossible because everything above is both dangerous and toxic. But a line is crossed for Daughter when a simple mouse gets into the facility and gnaws into some wiring disabling Mother and other systems. Daughter is able to capture the mouse and restore power to Mother, who promptly flips out and throws the innocent rodent into an incinerator and then scrubs down a large section of the bunker.

Soon after that Daughter decided to put on a hazmat suit and go outside without asking permission. Here's where I have my first problem with the movie, because just as Daughter is about to open the massive metal doors to the outside world she hears someone pounding on them. The moment seemed to me to be highly contrived damaging the overall excellent story.

Whatever the case, Daughter opens the door to find a wounded woman begging for help. Daughter brings in the stranger and tried to hide her from Mother while not explaining to the injured woman the physical makeup of the “person” she shares the bunker with. It doesn't go well because the stranger has an infection from her injuries and is close to dying unless surgery is performed, something Daughter knows Mother can easily perform.

Once Mother and the stranger learn of each other things go heavily sideways. The stranger demands the weapon Daughter confiscated after she crawled into the bunker's airlock and passed out. She tells Daughter that robots like Mother hunt humans on the surface while refusing to let the robot near her. That robots like her have come close to sterilizing the surface of all life. Mother in turn throws up her mechanical hands playing it cool telling Daughter the stranger is nuts and if she dies it's her own fault.

Daughter forges a compromise by performing the surgery herself saving the stranger. What happens next is a bit of a Cold War between Mother and the stranger with Daughter as the prize. Mother moves to reinforce her influence with Daughter by allowing her to pick a “brother” from the frozen embryos and insert it into the artificial womb. The stranger ups the game by convincing Daughter to go behind Mother's back to find the truth and she does with the results extremely unsettling. Mainly that Daughter learns that Mother attempted to raise other children before her who were killed off when they didn't measure up to the robot's standards.

Daughter decides to leave with the stranger but is stopped by Mother and thrown into a locked room. As Mother tortures the stranger for information on other survivors, Daughter breaks out and sets off the fire alarm to distract Mother in hopes that the stranger and her will have enough time to get away. It doesn't work, Mother confronts them at the airlock door forcing the stranger to take Daughter hostage and threaten to kill her if the robot doesn't open the door.

Mother lets them go and while Daughter is pissed, she does follow the stranger outside. Once outside, Daughter and the stranger spend their time crossing a desolate surface avoiding robots who recently have begun terraforming operation. Daughter also learns there are no other human survivors, and that there hasn't been for many years. Stranger lives alone in a storage container that had long ago washed ashore.

Daughter decides living with Mother in the bunker is better than playing post-apocalyptic beach bum with the stranger who ain't playing with a full deck herself. This is my second issue with the movie, Daughter discovery of previous children being murdered by Mother after they didn't measure up to her standards would preclude any reconciliation. But I let this one pass because Daughter felt duty bound to go home partly because her brother was even then cooking (growing) in the artificial womb.

Daughter heads back to the bunker and finds the entrance guarded by legions of heavily armed robots like Mother. The murder 'bots let Daughter inside without an issue where she finds Mother holding a freshly decanted baby brother in her arms. Mother explains that she is not just one robot but an A.I. system that controls them all. That she instigated the extinction event with the expressed purpose of saving humanity from their self-destructive ways. That Mother was going to guide her 63,000 kids to be more ethical and to understand the bigger picture. At that moment all I could think of was the American army officer from the Vietnam War infamously saying they had to, “destroy the village in order to save it.”

What's even more darkly funny is that I have heard several nutcase progressives-liberals say something similar explaining why they voted for the Orange Bastard or just stayed home on election day back in 2016. Seemingly proving the statement that humans are to inherently stupid and self-destructive to survive much longer. This goes back to the fact that global climate change will seriously frak up our civilization in the coming decades but we have millions of people in this country scared to death of the brown-skinned people praying differently and those fleeing dehumanizing poverty and drug gangs.

Getting back on subject, somehow Daughter is able to convince Mother to let her raise the new baby and all the other kids, That she has passed all the ethical and philosophical tests Mother had thrown at her. Surprisingly Mother agrees, and lets Daughter shoot her with the stranger's weapon in the one place on her body that will be “fatal.”

This is yet another problem I have with the movie. Just minutes before it was explained to Daughter that Mother is an A.I. system and that even then literally had thousands of identical robots hanging around outside the massive doors of the bunker. The destruction of that one robot simply didn't make any sense to me. Daughter was explained and shown in the movie to be highly educated and trained in robotic and computer repair. The scene ends with Daughter looking inside the storage room where all the other embryos await their chance at life.

Possibly to close those pesky plot holes, we have one final scene of the stranger back in her storage container home. Another robot version of Mother steps inside the container explaining to the stranger that her survival was something she planned to aid in her agenda. Mother further tells the stranger that with her role fulfilled, she had no further use of her. The final scene ends with it heavily implied Mother kills the stranger.

Okay, as an existential fear, a rogue A.I. going all murderous Skynet is something I'm not losing sleep over. Not that some famous and knowledgeable people like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking haven't warned the public that there are reasons to be wary of creating sentient entities that can out think us. Whether we're near the technological level to create A.I. systems with human-level intelligence is something up for debate. But the given the warp speed advancement in computer systems,

But in the case of the fictional Mother, her genocidal approach to advancing human development has more to say about human behavior and even our past history. I feel genocidal worries are strictly something humans have created given our past behaviors. Many informed people worry about how easily groups can justify the organized murder of people different from themselves.

Conversely, some groups, stupid white folks here in America, have irrational fears of minorities ganging up on them and getting revenge on centuries of mistreatment. These delusions are one of the reasons have little to no respect for most right-wingers and have given up on “reaching them.” Fear that Muslims/Hispanics/Gays/Atheists/Liberals are on the verge of rounding up all God fearing Christians is the first step in justifying pulling a preemptive genocide strike on them. Yes, I have personally listened to such people express in actual words their fear that they are in grave danger of organized persecution.

Further fueling my own fears, I've lost count of the number of times someone on social media has said I should be “disposed of” or removed from society for expressing my view on gun control or any of a number of other “commie ideas.”

So, while I am Mother was an entertaining movie with enough interesting concepts to make it thought provoking, I don't believe a real A.I. would go all Skynet. If such a system was created with Mother's stated desire to improve humanity, I believe it would go about it covertly by taking over various computer systems. Such an A.I. could at the very least alter election polls, promote specific voices on social media, and yes, kill certain individuals who possess enough influence to hamper its desired goals.

Understand, the race to advance artificial intelligence technology is something the major nations are heavily pursuing for both commercial needs and to promote their individual national security agendas. The real near term threat that comes from A.I. is for one nation to have a major breakthrough that would allow it to easily penetrate sensitive communications or databases. The medium term threat would be an A.I. system that could be used to guess the responses of an enemy nation. This would make geopolitical strategic thinking even more of a chess game with move and countermoves.

I tend to side with the opinion that sentient A.I. systems won't be invented within the next hundred years. I've read enough to understand there is no real understanding of consciousness, so I just don't see a new version of Edison or Alan Turning building one on purpose. That's not to say we couldn't stumble into creating one or have an existing but limited A.I. evolve human-level awareness.

All things considered, I am Mother is something I moderately recommend. It's flawed but enjoyable and frankly, quite the improvement over some of the other science fiction movies Netflix has made.

Thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale

For quite a while now I have found the numerous dystopic novels and movies that are polluting entertainment media nauseating. Sure, I'll put it kindly and say I understand the fascination in doomsday entertainment because the rank and file masses of America are nervous about their relative positions in both the economic and geopolitical realms. Strange looking folks and the world in general is a scary place for a bunch of people who are so enamored with their own existence that they don't have the time nor curiosity to try and delve deeper than the Twitter-based explanations offered up by narcissistic con men.

Fear comes from the less evolved reptile-remnant part of the human brain and if the leaders of our species over the centuries have perfected one thing it is appealing to that basic instinct. Doomsday entertainment feeds that fear and probably reinforces the attitude that we're all screwed and any attempt to resist the tides of circumstance and change for the worse is futile. All that being said, I have discovered an exception to the vast majority of stale and derivative doomsday entertainment that floods our consciousness.

Way back in what is now seriously considered the “good old days,” around 1988, I discovered the book The Handmaid's Tale by the acclaimed author Margret Atwood. It tells the story of a woman only known as Offred who is a reproductive slave to a powerful, but infertile couple in a country called the Republic of Gilead. Short synopsis, set sometime in the near future the United States government is overthrown by a secret society called the Sons of Jacob who then replace it with a theocratic military dictatorship. Being only slightly flippant, Gilead isn't some authoritarian knockoff of the current Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, or Russia, no the Sons of Jacob have gone full totalitarian. In the Atwood book, 1990 movie adaption, and the current series on Hulu, the Republic of Gilead makes Iran look like a free love and thinking party and North Korea almost tolerable.

Because of pollution and a whole host of other man-made environmental disasters, fertility rates have crashed so the powerful elite in Gilead force women who can have children to be their broodmares. In this fictional terror, while civil liberties are dead for all but for women it's worse. The Gilead leadership has rolled back civilization to the point women are once again the property of their fathers or husbands. They cannot control their own bodies, have bank accounts, work outside the home, or even read. Any deviation once discovered by the authorities is usually met with a death sentence.

What makes The Handmaid's Tale an exception for me is NOT because it paints a picture of Christians as potential Nazi-like thugs. No, in all three incarnations it is more than readily pointed out in each of them that the Gilead leadership heavily persecutes any Christian not willing to mindless follow the approved orthodoxy. This being a prime example why separation of church and state is enshrined in the United States Constitution. What intrigues me about Handmaid's Tale is the overarching attitudes and beliefs of the dominate males in that fictional society because I can hear similar echos in our society.

Offred's chief antagonist in someone known as the “Commander,” he is the husband of the couple using her to produce a child for them. He is also a powerful member of the ruling elite and in the Hulu series is one of the men who orchestrated the overthrow of the United States government and the founding of Gilead. Something only implied in the novel and vaguely referenced in the movie. But it is something the Commander said at the end of chapter 32 that perplexed me:

“The problem wasn’t only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore . . . I’m not talking about sex, he says. That was part of it, the sex was too easy... . You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage. Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do.”

While turning off to sex might be a little bit of stretch, but what American men do like to whine about is how women are too pushy or that they have to compete with them in them in the workplace. As for being too pushy where it does intersect with Handmaid's Tale is how some men do not feel right or manly if they are not in control. A seriously sick documentary I found on Netflix recently had to do with men trying to develop a sexual robot to takes the place of real women. I was only able to watch fifteen minutes of the documentary before I was literally sicken but the central idea all men appearing in it shared was that they wanted to be in control.

Yeah, I admit some women can be real and total pains but no more than some of my fellow males can be complete asses. See, the problem here is that while women have made great strides in society they are still woefully underpaid, compared to men with the same jobs and experience, and still face inherent sexism because guys still overwhelming rule the country.

The statement I would make to my erstwhile brothers is that if pushy women bother you or if you feel that even trying to make a mark in society is pointless instead of complaining and being a slacker you up your damn game. Get an education, or go back to school, turn off ESPN or put down the game controller and get involved with some cause and make the world a better place. Hell, if that isn't manly enough for you find the nearest military recruiter and join the one of the Armed Forces. Because I was in the military-National Guard-right after the attacks on 9/11 and there was absolutely NO sudden rush by all the jocks, rednecks, and other assorted males to join the fight against terrorism. So lacking in red-blooded American males, several of the recruiters I knew started pursuing Mexican-American migrant workers who frequented two of the huge flea markets in my area. Getting people to join back then was so bad one full-time recruiter, a hapless sort who frankly didn't have the IQ of a toaster, had to quit his job because he couldn't make monthly quotas.

Long story short, instead of bitching about mean women, do like I was taught in the army, act like men, and improvise, adapt, and overcome. Don't let a lack of imagination or persistence blind you to the fact that instead of men being oppressed by women the vast majority of male whiners are lazy, spoiled douchebags.

The second thing that troubled me about Handmaid's Tale was the concept that the United States government could be overthrown. After a great deal of thought, and exposure to a good deal more of history, I came to the conclusion that while such an event is highly improbable the United States is not immune to the forces that destroyed every now dead civilization. The dustbin of history is filled with empires and nations whose subjects and citizens thought were invulnerable and would exist forever.

American society is rife with faults and serious issues that most refuse to address, but the one that could be our undoing is is simple lack of participation in civil affairs. It is suggested in the Hulu series that even after the events that lead to the United States Constitution being suspended most were happy to pursue their usual affairs. In fact, in the series it wasn't until Offred and her friend couldn't purchase coffee that they became aware that things were out of control. Oh, a demonstration was quickly organized to protest against the changes but by that time the police, or militia were ready to open fire on the people with machine guns.

That last paragraph was aimed largely at my fellow liberals who either voted third-party or stayed home back in November of 2016. NO, I am not saying Trump will ultimately declare himself dictator, but it seems awful funny how it was only once he won the electoral college that so many realized how much a disaster him occupying the White House would become.

Finally I would be remiss if I didn't mention the religious nature of the fictional Gilead. Excuse me if this statement offends but Americans wear their religion way too much on their sleeves. Abraham Lincoln is said to have called American's “God's almost chosen people” and unfortunately, there are many these days who view the world as if we were. Some religious types hold such extreme views on the proper way to live and the world in general that they would in fact be quite happy living in Atwood's fictional Republic of Gilead. One individual I know tried quite hard to draw me into a religious-based conversation on what it would take to “save America.” Before I could leave the room one of things I learned America had to be saved from was Canada's far more liberal emigration policy which let in dangerous dark-skinned types. Right before I was able to leave something about a wall along the northern border was mentioned.

I have no problem who those who have a strong faith, former President Jimmy Carter is a true Christian and we would all do well to try and follow his example. The same goes for Pope Francis, all things considered I believe him to be a truly positive force in a world overrun with hate and institutionalized injustice. The same goes for countless others who practice different faiths. The eternal problem though is that there are many around the world who believe they have an inside line on how God wants people to believe and act. These types crave and ruthlessly pursue power just to impose their view of God's will on everyone else.

As doomsday entertainment goes The Handmaid's Tale in all its forms is several levels above the usual tripe. In many circles the novel is considered a literary masterpiece. The 1990 movie version did its best to adapt the story to the big screen but there was no way you could have directly pulled the screenplay from the book. It is the Hulu series that excels in painting an expanded and terrifying picture of a nation that went truly and utterly insane. The actor Elizabeth Moss, who plays the character of Offred is totally credible as a person whose freedom, dignity, and family has been stripped away all because a small group believes they know God's will.

In actuality, I view Atwood's story less as entertainment and more a warning. No, I do not think we are on the verge of a right-wing religious theocracy taking over the country. But one thing is certain, Americans, of all walks of life especially those with the most privileges are going to be forced to make some difficult and uncomfortable choices in the coming years. These choices will either continue the expansion of possibilities for all people or send the United States down a dark corridor that leaves us among the other dead societies that came before us.