Scifi

Last night the wife and I watched Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Yes, I know - we’re 3 years behind, it having came out in 2005. I’m pretty lax about watching movies when they first come out, largely because 1) I’m not crazy about going to the movies, and 2) they all come out on DVD, which is either far cheaper than going to the movies, or even free, if I can borrow the DVD from a friend or family member - which is exactly what I did with Revenge of the Sith. Anyway, moving along…

I quite enjoyed it, which was truthfully quite a surprise. After the first couple of prequels, I was not expecting Revenge of the Sith to amount to much. I was severely let down by The Phantom Menace - I thought it was just bad, all around. Jar Jar was awful, the kid playing Anakin couldn’t act, his mother giving him up, just like that, to go help the Jedi, the build-up of Darth Maul just for him to have one line of dialogue and then get lopped in half never to be seen again… I could go on like this for quite a while. I thought Lucas really dropped the ball with Episode 1. A few weeks ago I watched Attack of the Clones (also borrowed!), and thought that while it was better than The Phantom Menace, it still didn’t live up to the first three movies. Lots of cool effects, yes, but it still didn’t really grab me.

Revenge of the Sith did grab me, however. While some of the acting was still a little questionable - Hayden Christensen, I look to you, good sir - the movie was all around quite enjoyable. One aspect of it that I really liked were the hints at what was to come in the later movies in regards to ships^[1] I loved seeing the Republic attack cruisers, which would later become the Imperial Star Destroyers; the ARC-170 starfighters which looked quite similar to the X-Wing. Seeing that stuff really made the whole thing feel more like the older films. I actually shouted with glee a few times when I caught such hints (I know, I’m a geek). One in particular that I remember? The TIE-fighter sound. It got a pretty big smile out of me.

I also thought the politics of the movie were pretty interesting. In particular, Chancellor Palpatine’s continued use of the emergency powers granted to him by the Senate (in Attack of the Clones) caught my eye. There’s been another Chancellor who gained similar power through legal means, except his name was Adolf; Hitler became more or less dictator of Germany via the Enabling Act of 1933. Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the similarity; it’s mentioned on the Attack of the Clones Wikipedia page.

Definitely glad I got around to watching it; for a while, I had pretty much abanonded Star Wars due to The Phantom Menace. One outstanding gripe with Revenge of the Sith, though: Yoda could have looked better. Revenge of the Sith came out three years after The Two Towers, and Gollum still looks more realistic. In most shots, I thought Yoda looked blatantly CGI-ish. Oh well - still a great movie.

(One last thing: if you’ve not seen the Star Wars Databank, do check it out. A Star Wars geek’s heaven.)

1. There’s a good chance there were such hints in the other two prequels, but I don’t remember them. That’s not saying much, though - the only ship-type I remember from The Phantom Menace is that sleek, banana-yellow thing from Naboo. [↩]

The forthcoming re-arrival of Battlestar Galactica got me craving science fiction, and so I’ve returned to playing (major) catch-up with Stargate SG-1. If you remember my posts about it before, you’ll know that I was just getting started with the series, having never watched it at all on television. On that first “run”, I got through all of season 1 and watched the first, and maybe the second, episode of season 2.

On returning to the series this time, I went ahead and started over with season 2, as I couldn’t remember much about the first episode, and the second episode was even hazier in my memory, despite the fact that I recognized the opening scene. Maybe I had started watching it and never finished it; who knows. I’ve now watched the first 7 episodes of season 2, and something peculiar has struck me: on the planets that have inhabitants… well, where is everyone? Whenever SG-1 goes to a planet that has humanoid inhabitants, generally, those inhabitants seem to number in the dozens or perhaps hundreds. The Nox had a huge ship hovering over their planet, which could have held thousands of inhabitants, but overall, it seems that most of the planets that SG-1 finds are relatively sparsely populated. In talking to my friend Joshua about it, I remarked, don’t these people ever reproduce? Shouldn’t their population increase, especially if they’ve been on the planet for a thousand years, which one would assume about, say, the Viking population on Cimmeria?

He said that perhaps the Goa’uld preferred to keep the people spread out on a planet in small village units to make controlling them easier. I suppose that could make sense with some of planets, but what about the Viking descendants in particular? Until SG-1 broke the protection device, the planet of Cimmeria was protected from Goa’uld by Thor’s Hammer. The Asgard seemed to obviously care about the people on the planet, and so I can’t see them controlling the population growth in any way. So, why is the population level still so low?

When you get down to it, I’d guess it’s simply a matter of money: they can only hire so many actors and actresses, and so the population depicted in each episode is rather small. However, what’s stopping them from using CGI to throw in some cities or large towns here and there? People are expensive, CGI is (relatively) cheap. Even just having a single panning shot of a CGI town or city would gift some realism to the episodes.

Somewhat related to the population issue: do the civilizations that SG-1 finds ever do any of the things that civilizations have to do to keep going? I don’t think I’ve seen any farms on any of the planets, for example. What are these people eating^[1]? I’ve seen setups where there was essentially a king or similar figure with his royal helpers, and then the slave population, but the slaves have, as far as I can recall, never been producing food. The planet P3R-636 and associated civilization, from the “Need” episode, is an example of what I’m talking about. Shyla the princess and her father control a slave population that seems to be largely used for mining naquadah, while Shyla, her father, and the other high class folks live “in the lap of luxury.” Okay, but who’s making all of that stuff? Who’s growing the food, raising the cows, sewing all of the flashy clothing, etc.?

Yes, yes, I know. I’m picky! I do wish the civilizations seemed a bit more realistic. Despite all of my nitpicks, however, it’s still a great show. I don’t think it’s as good as Battlestar Galactica, story-wise, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch. It also gives me geeky things to write about, as this post bears witness to.

1. If you recall my posts about Battlestar Galactica, you might think I’ve got some weird obsession about food in television shows. Not really. Food is just one of those essential things (duh), and so if, in a show, seemingly no one in a civilization is producing it, the civilization just seems flat and fake. [↩]

I’ve not written anything about Battlestar Galactica since November, due to there not being much to write about. We were given Battlestar Galactica: Razor, which was good, but it was also almost 5 months ago.

I remarked in that post that Battlestar Galactica was going to be gone until April of 2008, and luckily, we now found ourselves nearing April. Season 4 will start up on April 4th, a mere 25 days away. (When you’ve waited nearly a year, 25 days is nothing.) Truth be told, I’ve been looking forward to it coming back, but I haven’t been excited per se. What I needed, apparently, was to actually watch some Battlestar Galactica, even if it was an 8 minute recap of seasons 1 through 3.

The recap is currently here, but in case Scifi.com pulls it from the main BSG page or hides it in a nest of links, you can also watch it here. If you’ve not seen seasons 1 through 3, I really do recommend you watch them - they’re excellent - but if you’re strapped for time, the recap will at least get you ready for season 4. If you’ve watched all of the seasons thus far, the recap is a good refresher. It’s also got some pretty funny narration - “There’s a bun in the toaster.” Heh.

25 days… I think I can hold out that long.

I’m nearly a month behind on this, but I suppose if I could go a month with not knowing, plenty of other Battlestar Galactica fans could do the same. In a nutshell: we’ll be getting Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a 2 hour special, on November the 24th. After that, the Battlestar Galactica signal will go dead again until April. This is truly foul news. When I learned earlier this year that Battlestar Galactica would be mostly gone until 2008, I assumed that by “2008″, they meant “January of 2008.” Wishful thinking, I suppose. As it is now, besides the Razor special, Battlestar Galactica will have been off almost a year when Season 4 starts up. I think I may end up going back and rewatching Seasons 1 through 3.

In checking out the Razor website, I saw this at the bottom:

From October 5 through November 16, SCI FI whets Battlestar fans’ appetites every Friday night with “Razor” Flashbacks during all-new episodes of Flash Gordon. All the flashback clips will be available on SCIFI.COM immediately after broadcast.

Written by Michael Taylor and directed by Wayne Rose and Felix Alcala, these intense, roughly two-minute segments tell the story of young William “Husker” Adama’s rookie Viper mission during the first Cylon war. In addition to fighting for his very survival against relentless Cylon centurions, Adama makes a terrifying discovery that will come back 40 years later to threaten him, the crew of the Pegasus and the survival of the human race.

Well, that would have been nice to know back at the beginning of October. Then again, maybe it’s for the better; now I can watch all of the Flashback things back-to-back. Why, that’ll give me nearly 15 minutes of Battlestar Galactica! (I feel like a junkie saying that.)

If you’ve not seen the Flashbacks, check ‘em out; part 1 is here. A warning, however: don’t watch it at work! I just started to watch it at work, and was greeted with a sex scene. I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home this afternoon for my BSG fix. Figures.

I can’t do it. I can’t finish the book. The Mote in God’s Eye has defeated me.

The Mote in God’s Eye was written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the pair that wrote Lucifer’s Hammer. When I read Lucifer’s Hammer previously, I loved it. Later, I read Ringworld by Niven alone, and found it to be alright, but nothing spectacular. I tried following it up with Ringworld Engineers, but I ended up abandoning that one altogether. It just didn’t do much for me. I figured that I wouldn’t care much for further works by Niven alone, but might find collaborations enjoyable.

So, when I saw The Mote in God’s Eye at the library, written by both authors, I had my hopes up. I imagined a book written in the style of Lucifer’s Hammer, but set far in the future. And, to an extent, that’s what the book is. Plot-wise, the book is about humans in the distant future (3016) making first contact with an alien species. The species they encounter, which they call Moties, are quite different from humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The goal of the human expedition is to figure out as much as possible about the aliens. You can read the rest of the plot summary here if you’d like.

I ended up reading 400 of the 460 pages of the book before I gave up on it. Why? I’m not really sure, truth be told. I can’t pinpoint what it was about the book that turned me off. The writing was alright; the plot was an interesting one. Similar to Ringworld, there were too many instances of “science chatter” for my tastes (usually regarding how many Gs they were travelling at, spin in the ship, etc.), but they weren’t earth shattering. Whatever was wrong, I just couldn’t really stay interested in the book. It felt like it was going to take me the next 5 years to finish up the last 60 pages. The closer I got to the ending, the slower it dragged.

I read the plot summary at Wikipedia in full to know how the book ended, and I don’t think I missed much. Too bad I didn’t give up on it sooner and just read the plot summary, heh.

Next on my to read list: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell.

Oh, by the way: even though I didn’t quite finish the book, considering I read 400 out of 460 pages, I am counting it towards my 52 books in 52 weeks thing. I spent too much time on it to not count it.