Category: Movie

When the credits started rolling on Tomorrowland, the theater audience erupted in applause. I can’t remember that last time that happened. The critics said it was tripe, but us stupid commoners seemed to buy into it anyway. Must have annoyed all those sourpusses.

Sure, it was a bit syrupy, and the plot had a few holes, but it did make a good point. What happened to that unbridled optimism we used to feel? I think it has been crushed by the reality of our civilization. Our choices are not focused on building a good world for everyone. We could change that, though, and part of the change is to imagine something better.

My favorite character was Athena. What a wonderful gynoid! She was quirky and clever and charming, and she had such a great simmering romance with Frank. (As a writer of robot romance, this would of course appeal to me.) Too bad they killed her off at the end. It seemed rather unnecessary, especially in a movie about optimism. It made me think about alternate endings.

With a very small change, Frank could have kept her. Before I go too far on this topic, we should notice the obvious. This is a Disney film rated PG, so of course we can’t have something icky like a 60-year-old man romantically involved with a 12-year-old girl, even if she is actually a robot even older than him. It’s the appearance that matters. Simple, change her into a woman at the very end. Just before he drops her into the time thingy, she pops open some slot, pulls out her memory and tucks it in his pocket. In the final scenes, she shows up loaded into a rather well-built adult model. Yeah!

Is there any point to Casey? Almost everything that happens with Athena and Casey could be replaced by Athena and Frank. I wonder if that was how it was originally written. In Utopian literature there is usually a character who visits the other world, as a vehicle for the rest of us to go there. At the beginning of the movie Frank is the visitor. Then Casey takes over that role. Imagine an alternate script …

The movie starts the same, with Frank and (adult) Athena briefing us. They tell about their childhood encounter at the World Fair, and their growing relationship up to the point he is thrown out of paradise. Then we see him as an older man waiting for the end in his techno-hideout. Athena staggers to the door and begs for help. The other robots are after her. At first her refuses to let her in, but his bitter old soul can’t resist the cries of his childhood sweetheart. They battle the robots and escape in the bathtub.

They grab a vehicle and go on the run. Along the way they fight about the past. She explains the situation in Tomorrowland, and they agree to go back and try to fix it. They battle it out with Nix, and as a last resort use her self-destruct. Just before she explodes she ejects her memory core. Later, Frank finds it and has it loaded in another, more age-appropriate robot. They live happily ever after.

I heard rave reviews from friends and family about the new Star Wars, for example, “The best Star Wars ever.” SW7 had quite a legacy to live up to, so it required the very best writing. (We can safely assume it had the very best special effects budget, so little worry about there.) I came away feeling “meh” about it.

SPOILER ALERT

I’m interested in digging into the literary aspects of movies, so I like to write about them as if having a conversation with someone else who just watched it.

SPOILER ALERT

Seriously, I’m about to spoil the movie. You have been warned.

The biggest single issue with SW7 was the Death Star story. SW4 told this story. Then Lucas got more money and created a full trilogy. SW6 gave us the Death Star story again. Now SW7 tells us the very same story yet again. Three times in seven movies! Lucas at least tried to tell us a different story in SW1-3. More precisely, they were additional chapters of the (more or less) same story. SW7 did not give us a new chapter, merely the old chapter with the characters reshuffled. This illustrates the problem of doing art as a business.

That covers plot. Little to say about setting. The dessert world (Tatooine in SW1-6) showed up again, though it was named something else. Most of what I have to say is about characters …

Darth Vader 2, aka Kylo Ren, aka Ben, the son of Han and Leia — This guy hasn’t finished his Dark Side training yet. Most significantly, no one has bothered to teach him how to use a light saber. He is so bad that Finn, a guy from the ranks of cannon fodder, a guy who has never seen a light sabe before like a day ago, is able to hold his own for almost a minute. Real sword fights between well-matched opponents only last a few seconds. The most interesting thing DV2 does is kill his own father, turning the Luke-Vader pattern on its head.

Finn — This guy must have the Force or something. He awakens from his clone conditioning and spontaneously turns to good. Then he is able to pick up a light sabre and do something reasonable with it. I liked him and his arc with Rey.

Rey — Potential for super-awesome heroine. Second case of someone mastering the Jedi arts in less than 24 hours. I kept expecting them to reveal that she is a Skywalker, like maybe the long-lost daughter of Han and Leia. There is some kind of back story about being separated from her true family, but they were vague and went by rather fast. I thought the Millennium Falcon parked in her back yard was a hint as well.

During the fight with DV2, when they zoomed in on her face while she was connecting with the Force, I sort of hoped the zoom back would show us something like the shadow world in Lord of the Rings. She would be glowing white like one of the elves, and Ben would be surrounded by a dark cloud.

Leia — Mom should have been the one to go confront DV2. She should be every bit as strong in the Force as Luke. In fact, she should be powerful enough to go confront Supreme Leader himself. Maybe something is coming in the sequels.

What would really be good is if Leia and Rey had a similar arc to Luke and Obiwan. It could even have included a scene where DV2 cuts down his mother, and then her ghost guides Rey. Equally interesting, Leia (not Luke!) teaches Rey the ways of the Force. In particular, it would be a more feminine version. Light sabers are boy toys. A woman might tap more into the mind powers, like sensing events at a distance and influencing the thoughts of others. If Leia fights, she should simply use telekinesis and Force lighting rather than a saber.

Regarding feminine use of the Force, I kept hoping that Rey would give DV2 a telepathic black eye. She does get him a little in the interrogation room. Later, when they are fighting with light sabers, she should simply not bother. Go straight to telepathy.

Maz Kanata — If Leia is Rey’s Obiwan, then Maz is her Yoda.

Supreme Leader Snoke — Looks like an Orc escaped the Lord of the Rings set and came over to work on Star Wars. There’s a rule-of-thumb in writing: if you want to turn a bad guy into a good guy, introduce a bigger bad guy. That’s what Lucas did in SW5 with the Emperor, beginning Darth Vader’s arc back to the Light Side.

This bad guy is really big, like 50 feet tall. He seemed to be there to turn DV2 back to the Light, but sadly DV2 kills his own father. Either the writers did it deliberately to trick us into hoping for DV2’s soul, or they don’t really know how to use the trope. (Third possibility: DV2 turns to the Light Side in a sequel. In that case, they introduce Snoke too soon.)

Luke Skywalker — Had the best lines in the whole movie.

Seriously, though, what are they doing to these characters? What’s this business about giving up in despair and letting the galactic empire go to hell, just because one padawan went bad? Seems like a rather strained premise.

This movie had a reasonably good start, a slow middle, and a disappointing ending. Don’t get me wrong. I thought it was good, almost worth the time and money I spent on it, but it wasn’t the thriller the previews suggested. It was simply the coming of age story of three young men. The real problem is that the central romance did not work out. Sure, two of the guys got their girl, but the one we’re all rooting for, the one that keeps us watching the long drawn out middle of the story, does not pay off. (Margo is a McGuffin.) Instead we get a lesson in relationships. See people as people, rather than some romantic scenario we build around them that includes ourselves in their world.

Ugh! I don’t want a lesson in relationships. This might be fine for people under the age of 22, but I’ve already had my teeth kicked in, secretly pining for someone then revealing it to her only to have her run from me. I go to movies for wish fulfillment, not reality. What good is a romance without the payoff? Let Quentin get the girl, and let Margo actually be worth having. They wouldn’t even need to change the tedious drawn out middle, just make a better ending.

Quentin is better off walking away from Margo. To redeem her, she either needs to repent and make amends (Love Redeems), or there needs to be some deeper purpose to her actions. I was rather hoping for the latter. Maybe she turns out to be something uber cool, like a government agent. Or perhaps she was trying to shake people out of their complacency and get them to embrace a fuller life, so it was really for their own good.

I imagine an alternate ending: A few years later, Margo opens the window to Quentin’s bedroom and slips back into his life, now that she has herself figured out.

Apparently, the novel ends with them vowing to keep in touch, which is better than the movie.

The movie “Age of Adaline” has gotten some tepid marks from sites like Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was a very well-constructed drama, with no wasted footage. For example, it shows Adaline’s dog growing old and dying. Then she goes and puts his picture in her photo album, and we discover he was like the 100th dog that she’s owned. Her grief over the dog helps us understand why she’s standoffish about relationships.

The pseudo-documentary narrator was a bit heavy-handed. They probably could have afforded an extra 5 minutes of play time to “show, not tell”. The pseudo-scientific basis of her immortality was also a bit hard to swallow. It may have been better to leave it unexplained (which would eliminate most of the narration).

To really scratch my science fiction itch, Adaline could have taken us into the future. Perhaps a mere 20 years forward, to 2035, when scientists discover the mechanism by which she became immortal. The she and her beau could be immortal together.

SPOILER ALERT

I have a philosophical bone to pick with the movie. In the happy ending she gets her mortality back. Basically, the movie says, “Immortality was not such a great idea, after all.” To be fair, it’s mainly because only one person, Adaline, is immortal. If everyone could be immortal, we might have a different kind of story. (I plan to write on that in the sequel to “Time of the Stones”.)

It seems like a literary trope that the lone immortal would rather not be. The Prince of India suffers a drudgery until the Christ returns. Bicentennial Man’s girlfriend tells him there is a time to move on. OTOH, Dr. Who seems fairly well adjusted to constant reincarnation, as long as he has a few friends around (mostly girls).

I once asked my mother-in-law if she would like to live for 200 years, like people in the Bible. She said no way! This response stunned me. It took a while to realize that in her imagination, the last 150 of those years would be spent in absolute decrepitude. Nonsense! If you live for several centuries, your decrepitude need not be any longer than someone who dies at 70, ie: only the last 10 years or so. Very long life also implies ongoing good health. Adaline got that part right.

So why this deep-seated cultural aversion to immortality? Is it that we in fact cannot live forever, so we comfort ourselves that death is actually better? We have stories about an afterlife where everything will be perfect. Death is the door to that life, something to be desired. Immortality is not for the present world. God put an angel to guard the way to the Tree of Life, lest man stretch out his hand and live forever.

Is it perhaps that we are mindless drones of our genes? They program us to start dying as soon as our grandchildren are born. When our great-grandchildren are born, our genes get serious and actively try to kill us off. There’s a good adaptive (evolutionary) argument for this. There is a tension between helping our offspring and competing with them. Clearly our usefulness to our children drops exponentially with each subsequent generation.

We don’t value human life equally. We view the aged as disposable, but enshrine our children. Those of reproductive age get a special spot in the middle. We accept this arrangement so passively that we create stories to justify the status quo.

For the first time in human history, we can conceivably create technology to live forever. We can specify the outlines of that technology and a practical program of research to get there. This is not like the pharaohs building large piles of rocks, or some witch chanting over a pot of bad oatmeal. Our science can describe (albeit imperfectly) the mechanisms of our body and intervene in them.

So why don’t we do it? Why isn’t everyone rushing to pour all our societal resources into avoiding death? Why do we keep making stories like Age of Adaline, where it is better to grow old and die?

We would have to defy our genes. Not only by blocking the aging process, but by resisting the urge to reproduce (which is an entirely different thing than the urge to have sex). We would have to shift our philosophy to value individual existence. A world where people live (nearly) forever is also a world where very few new people are made.

I read “Hunger Games” and also watched the movie. Given the lock-step similarity between the book and the first movie, I decided movies were sufficient to get the rest of the story. I also watched “Divergent”, but haven’t read that book.

I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but there is something irritatingly out of kilter about Hunger Games which does not seem to be true of Divergent. They both have a really weird caricature of society. Panem tries to be like the real world, divided up into “districts” where real people live. Chicago is divided into these weird metaphysical groups based on positive personality traits. I kind of like Chicago. It is so out there that I can suspend disbelief and enjoy the fairy tale.

Panem, unfortunately, falls into the “uncanny valley”. It’s close enough to reality that I have higher expectations of it. It does not rise to those expectations. Why is there so much open country, filled with untamed wildlife to be eaten, yet everyone is hungry? Why does a Capitol with such incredibly advanced technology feel the need to oppress other people for resources?

Coal power? Really? First of all, I don’t believe there will be coal left in any kind of post-apocalyptic future. But that aside, there are other ways to get energy that would be much more reliable, and therefore a better investment of the Capitol’s efforts. (Hydro, which shows up in the third movie, is a good example.)

The first book implied that the Capitol has the technology to construct artificial organisms. With such technology, you don’t need other people–for anything. At worst they would be a nuisance that you ignore.

I suppose Collin’s thought she was making a statement about the United State’s relationship with oil-producing nations, while setting it in a Roman Empire-esque world. Neither comparison holds well. In the Roman Empire (and for most of human history) there has been no appreciable difference in technology between the very elite and the very bottom of the oppressed. In fact, that was why there was oppression. Without technology, they had to take it out of fellow human beings.

Basically, we’re left with a very mean and oppressive Capital with no real motivation. President Snow is paper thin. His job is to be bad. Full stop. If there is a way to be mean and bad, Snow will do it, but why? Even Hitler had a reason to expand his country. (BTW, “lebensraum” had a lot to do with resources. Hmm… )

This points to an interesting characteristic of young adult (YA) fiction in general. Written from the point of view of a young person, society does not make sense. There is a feeling that the System is sinister, trying to ruin your life, but has little motivation beyond that. And of course there’s the journey of self-discovery, that you’re an extraordinary person with special gifts who will make a huge difference in the world. Which is of course why the System singles you out for particular oppression.

It’s all absurd, but the story resonates very well. Reality is that we’re all pretty much ordinary, and the System is something that emerges from collective human nature. Perhaps the real fear of the young adult is that she will be absorbed into this thing and lose her individuality. That’s a good fear to have.

In SuSAn, I play with the concept of the Fourth Order. It is precisely collective human nature, and it always leads civilization to self-destruct. Sadly, I can’t turn that into the overarching terror of President Snow. Every character has normal human motivations, both good and bad. The world ends with a whimper, not a bang. The story of Susan is how our unraveling civilization affects her personal life as the world’s first sentient machine.

The movie “Imitation Game” amazed me! It was exceptionally well-written. It had war, spy intrigue, friendship, romance, computer science, and addressed Alan Turing’s homosexuality. It is an enormous achievement for a script to pull together so many diverse threads in a way that makes sense, with just the right amount of each one.

So why isn’t this a blockbuster mega-hit? Because this is America, where we prefer shallow techno action thrillers. Sure, there was some eye-candy. A few of the war shots (particularly a flying fortress, well, flying) screamed computer graphics. But most of the movie showed people interacting in fairly normal environments.

It was clever to approach the subject of Turing’s homosexuality via a heterosexual relationship. He forms a strong platonic friendship with the woman on the team, and proposes marriage so they could keep working together. Later he confesses his homosexuality as a way of driving her away, specifically to protect her from the growing intrigue around them. She says she knew, and that she still wants to be with him for their intellectual connection. In a heart-wrenching twist, he succeeds in breaking the relationship anyway.

Can’t speak to the historical accuracy, which is apparently quite bad. As a computer scientist, I think more about Turing’s theories and philosophical questions rather than his personal life.

One of the most clever twists of the movie was to turn the classic “Turing test” into another kind of question: was Turing a criminal or a hero? Otherwise, the movie did very little to address the “Imitation game” or its meaning. Since that is lacking, let me tell you about it…

The fundamental question (also mentioned in the movie) is whether machines can think. Turing wrote a paper in 1950 called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. It is popular-level writing, so you don’t need to be a computer scientist to read it. I recommend it to everyone.

The Imitation Game was a party game in which a judge exchanges messages (think texting here) with two people, a man and a woman. The judge must determine their genders. The man’s goal is to trick the judge into the wrong choice, and the woman’s goal is to get the correct choice. This turns into a Turing test when the man is replaced by a machine.

This test is poorly constructed for several reasons. One is that gender is an unnecessary variable. In the modern version the judge texts two entities, a machine and a human, and must decide which one is which. Both the human and machine want to convince the judge they are human. This is still poorly constructed, because the judge doesn’t really take each entity on their own merits. Instead, the judge knows that one entity is lying.

A post-modern version appears in my novel SuSAn. There, the judge interacts with a humanoid robot (only one), which may be operated either by a human or by an artificial agent. There is a large pool of humans and agents, in equal number. There are also a large number of judges, including people who watch the interaction. I would argue this setup has far more validity than the recent highly-touted test run by the University of Reading (see my blog post on this).

Crystal and I recently started watching through Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG) with our 9-year-old son Justin. This series play during the late 80s and early 90s, and ironically it is now several generations back in the Star Trek universe.

One of the central characters is an android named “Data”. I continue to be impressed with how well the writers did with him. This will be a running post, where I comment on various episodes as we get to them. To avoid being tedious, I will only comment on episodes that bring up an interesting point or go in a new direction.

General

Data repeatedly asserts that he feels no emotions, yet he acts in ways that must be driven by emotion. The characters around him doubt his assertion. The writers obviously did not know how to make an emotionless android, because they only had humans as reference.

It is impossible to act rationally without emotion. You may know what the right action is, but simply not care enough to do it. Emotion is our internal measure of the value of actions. Unfortunately, our emotions can also lead to irrational and hurtful behavior. The goal should not be to eliminate them (like Spock) but to channel them in a positive direction.

Data has a “positronic brain” a la Asimov. OTOH, he does not appear to be a 3-laws robot.

He asserts he is an “android” not a “robot”. This is an artificial distinction. “Android” simply means in the form of a man. “Robot” means worker. In the strictest sense, Data could claim not to be anyone’s slave, and therefore not a robot. However, most of us would call any sophisticated mechanical device a robot. As such, android is a subcategory of robot. Note that “gynoid” is the feminine form. It is sexist language to call a female robot “android” (especially if she is capable of sex, which of course they all are …)

The Naked Now

The writers are still introducing characters, and they haven’t yet figured out Data. The key mistake here, never repeated, is to make him nearly biological, such that he can get drunk like everyone else. OTOH he gets his girlfriend Tasha.

Datalore

A little backstory on how Data was made. We learn that his is an old-fashioned machine that can be separated into clunky mannequin-like parts. The oddest thing was the notion that Data is invisible as a life-form when he is turned off. The writers seem to conflate the notion of alive (and a tasty morsel for the Crystalline Entity) with conscious or sentient.

Elementary, Dear Data

It is only worth mentioning that in Season 2, Dr. Pulaski is constantly questioning Data’s nature. She makes a good foil to develop his character. Usually he proves her wrong in some subtle way.

The Measure of a Man

Challenges our notions about human attributes and whether machines can have them. This is a wonderfully structured episode. The courtroom setting, with Data’s very life and freedom at risk, is a great way to keep us interested while they work through some of the most difficult arguments in AI and the philosophy of mind. In the end we learn that Data is a new life-form, worthy of full protection under the law.

The Offspring

My absolute favorite so far! There are a number of parallels between Data’s “child” Lal and Susan. Specifically:

• Black hair in a stark mushroom cut. Quorra from TRON is the same way. This must be the universal hairstyle for gynoids!
• She is created by copying the structures of one “brain” to another. Lal gets a download of Data’s structures. Susan is built by replicating human brain structures from our genetic code.
• She goes through a series of updates before she is complete.
• She has a parent-child relationship with her creator.
• She struggles with the disconnect between her body and her mental age.
• Others want to take and use her.
• She experiences the full power of emotion.
• She dies of a system crash in the arms of someone who loves her dearly.

The notion that Data downloads Lal’s memories into himself is kind of creepy. Does he merely provide storage space for her, or does he become Lal in part? This may be similar to the chapter “Susan Too”, where she branches into two beings that have separate experiences for a while, then gets rejoined into a single person.

Unlike Data or Lal, Susan is not on a quest to become human. Being human is where her journey begins.

The Most Toys

It seems pretty clear that Data decides to kill the bad guy at the last moment. The surprising thing is he denies it. Then he denies gloating when the bad guy finally gets caught and loses everything, which invites us to think that maybe Data does feel something.

Brothers

We meet Dr. Soong, and learn that Data can finally have the one thing he lacks: emotions. All he needs to do is shove a little chip in his head. The Pinocchio cycle is complete. Sort of.

Soong has a few conversations with Data about the relationship of the creator to his creature. These are not as compelling as the tension between Soong and Lore. It is like the tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, except Soong shows a much greater sense of responsibility and guilt, wishing he had time to make things better.

Why does Data do dastardly bad things to divert the ship? He clearly exercises his unique knowledge to do it, so his ethics should also remain intact. This is merely a writing device to drag out the story. The original series episode Amok Time handles this somewhat better.