Covers of the Future

September 26, 2016

I was recently looking at various sites like Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, io9 and others that basically take a set of images and say some fairly obvious things about them to create a piece of content that will attract some views.

I’ve been in a bit of a creative blackhole for the last few months, so I thought I'd try my hand at it to see how hard it is.

I recently came across a bunch of science fiction story magazines and decided to take photos of their covers, which provided me with a great source of images to try and create some content from.

I unfortunately didn't take photos of the inner covers which would have provided me more details than I currently have. Publish date, publisher, the other stories in the magazine, the artist. Had I known this is what I was going to do with them I think I would have taken down more information.

Astounding Science Fiction October 1957 - “Ribbon in the Sky” by Murray Leinster

It’s basically FaceTime or any sort of video chat. Albeit more bulky. Although temperature today remains the killer with most electronic devices won’t function below 0º Celsius, although they will survive down to around -20º.

Analog Science Fact & Fiction June - “The Weakling” by Everette B. Cole

Fantastically science fictiony and just a bit of the creationist faff. Humans and dinosaurs living and working together. Or alternatively and better more so, dinosaurs on an alien planet that humans come across and use them as pack animals? Perhaps not.

Astounding Science Fiction November - “Cat and Mouse” by Ralph Williams

This is one of the somewhat more staid covers; not containing anything that’s amazingly science fiction-like. A hipster in a flannel coat off to put out a fire. The gap in the trees is a bit odd, almost like they’re a fire barrier or something to the hilly countryside beyond.

Analog April - “Blind Man’s Lantern”

When I saw it this cover made me think of a piece of art I saw online a few years ago. “White Castle” by Yuri Shwedoff. Looking at them now the similarities aren’t that close, just the presence of a spacecraft and horses.

Now a few covers with similar themes, though more likely stories with similar themes, I didn’t have time to read everything contained within the magazines unfortunately.

I’d broadly call these the ‘savage’ vs the learned man. First a literal savage vs the intelligent men with guns in their city, the second the elite vs the workers and finally the 'explorer' vs the savage indigenous.

Future Science Fiction No.2 & No.10

These two covers, which are two of three that were in the pile that I took photos of share a similar theme of a blonde woman on the cover.
The blonde woman on an alien planet and presumedly Earth, in both she’s the ‘outsider’, preyed upon by the space butterflies in No.10 and oggled by the soldiers in No.2.

Astounding Science Fiction, stencil tagged covers.

The stencils are something I didn't notice until I started to compile and arrange the images into galleries and format them for this page. Not every Astounding has a stencil of some kind in the upper left corner, but enough that it seems like it was some sort of indicator to the reader.

Finally some a few more images that wouldn't fit into a specific grouping or analysis, but nonetheless are interesting and noteworthy.

Favourite movie of 2012 - Battleship

December 22, 2012

Battleship is flawed, relatively flawed, but still a great movie.

It’s a great action movie with a great huge scoop of science fiction, and it’s fairly shamelessly just that.

That’s what makes it great and a re-watchable movie.

There is not a lot of drama or anything other than action in this movie, there’s a little bit of humour here and there.

It should be noted that this movie includes in its credits “Based on the Hasbro board game Battleship”.
If you go into this movie knowing this and expecting not too much from the movie it’s actually really enjoyable.

It looks amazing, on Blu-ray especially it looks wonderful, the colours are rich and intense, the setting of Hawaii and the sea around it make for some really intense visuals.
Inside the ships everything is still intense, yet muted.

Sound wise this is a great film to watch in a surround sound setup, it gives all 5 speakers a good work out and the sub-woofer also is given a good rumble throughout the action sequences.
But even with a set of stereo speakers, or even just a pair of headphones it’s full of intense sound that really helps to make this movie great.

But it’s not just action and explosions, there’s some good tactical scenes of naval warfare knowledge at work. It is quite fortunate that the aliens are not a “shoot first ask questions later” sort of species but follow a fairly easy to understand war laws or something that means you basically have to be aggressive towards them before they attack you.

Which means for a action science fiction film the civilian deaths in this movie are actually quite low. The only people who I think would die is a result of aliens taking out infrastructure.

Characters wise they’re all good though there’s no real character development outside of the first 20 minutes or so.

On that 20 minutes, it basically sets up Taylor Kitsch as one of the main characters Alex Hopper as a risk taker and youthful, they make sure he’s seen almost naked and shirtless within the first 10 minutes. His brother is Stone Hopper played by Alexander Skarsgård which is an interesting choice. Skarsgård is perhaps best known for playing Eric Northman in True Blood, or if you’re only into war-based drama then he played Brad Colbert in the excellent Generation Kill.
Within that 20 minutes is a soccer game, which seems present to bulk out the film and to cement the character of Alex Hopper as someone who despite joining the Navy is still a risk taker and hot head.
The other interesting casting choice of note is Rihanna, she plays Cora Raikes, whose name I didn’t really notice in the film, so that info comes from Wikipedia. She’s a Gunner's Mate Second Class (GM2), crew mate and a weapons specialist. Battleship appears to be her only acting role so far. I found her pretty convincing her character gets to shoot at aliens, get beaten up by aliens and fire weapons on Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and also on an actual battleship, an Iowa-class battleship.

Yes, on that, only one genuine battleship appears in the film, though this is explained quickly and briefly at the start as to why the navy doesn’t have battleships much anymore.

Now, back to the flaws. It is those that make the movie, once you can acknowledge these flaws and move on or fast forward through them it becomes a great movie. Perfect movies are fairly hard to find, but it’s the imperfections that make you truly enjoy a movie because you know there’s some parts that aren’t any good that are a bit ropey. But you’ll still sit down and watch it because the rest is great and those ropey parts aren’t really that bad in perspective.

Iron Sky

May 23, 2012

Went to see Iron Sky the other day. It’s a movie I’ve been waiting some time to see, and it didn’t disappoint. Though I can see why it wouldn’t work for some people.

It’s advertised on their website as a “dark science fiction comedy”, and it is, though the dark part comes in at some very odd points.

Basically the ideas is Nazis went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and now they’re back!

Iron Sky is a Finland - German - Australian co-production. In the history of cinema that combination of countries is not historically one that you see paired together.
At the start of the movie it’s evident that they went around to a lot of different funding bodies to get funding for this movie. Screen Queensland being one of them, but there were at least 6 different bodies/companies/people with logos at the start of the movie.
The movie was made on a budget of €7,500,000. 7.5 million Euros that’s $9.68 AUD, $9.56 USD and £5.05 GBP. In comparison a Michael Bay big explosions with lots of CGI film like Transformers cost $150 million USD. The movie based on a boardgame Battleship cost $209 million USD. A lower budget science fiction film like Serenity was $39 million USD, and finally a movie which shares similar production techniques (use of virtual sets and CGI) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow cost $70 million USD.

It wasn’t just various funding bodies putting in money, this movie was also crowd funded to the tune of approximately €900,000, which makes this movie one of a handful of “crowdsourced” feature films.

Spoilers ahead now as I’m going to talk about the movie’s guts a bit.

I’ve read some reviews that say they don’t think this is a comedy / don’t think it’s funny.
I thought it was humorous and funny in places. I’m not really a big comedy movie sort of person, but I do like comedy and if the comedy’s really funny I’ll laugh out loud and occasionally snort because I’m laughing so hard (one comedian I think Adam Hills...or maybe Wil Anderson said that if you’re laughing that hard it means they’re really doing their job to make you laugh so much you have no dignity and snort...or something, I don’t really care, everyone laughs differently).

Maybe a crowd dynamic would have made me laugh more, you get cues from a crowd when to laugh. Did I forget to mention I saw it in a cinema with no one else in there with me, I had a whole cinema to myself. And yet Hoyts still gave me an allocated seat.

I have seen Star Wreck: In the Pirkining the previous work that many of the guys (the Finnish contingent) worked on prior to this film. The humour that is in that film is present in Iron Sky. The thing is it’s not American humour, it’s not British humour and it’s not Australian humour, nor is it German humour (probably) It’s Finnish humour. Not that I claim to be any expert on Finnish humour (nor German humour). I guess I recognise the similarities between Star Wreck and Iron Sky in how the comedy is working.

It’s quite odd, the humour is sometimes not really there. But sometimes is. It’s a biting, mocking humour against the United States, but there’s something else to it.

Broadly Iron Sky is set in the United States, on the moon and in space.

The President of the United States is played by Stephanie Paul playing a Sarah Palin-esque sort of President.
If this were a US-produced and written movie this aspect might exist, but it would have been played a lot more for its comedic and mocking style. But instead Paul drifts between playing it straight and playing it for comedy. It’s an odd mix of styles in a movie which is sort of comedy and sort of something else and sort of drifts between the two.

It’s comedy, but almost played straight most of the time but then occasionally it’s actual comedy.

The CGI in Star Wreck was amazing (Star Wreck pitted Star Trek-esque ships against Babylon 5-esque ships or actual Star Trek and Babylon 5 ships against one another depending on whether you’re watching the Imperial Edition or the original edition) and on this it’s no less amazing. There’s an excellent textual quality to all the CGI models used, all of the Nazis ships have a gritty iron sort of texture to them, they look rough and wrought.

There are also, as there was in Star Wreck a large amount of virtual sets or chroma-keyed sets, also known as blue/green screen sets. This is what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow also used to create all of their world in the move. But in Iron Sky there’s also a fair amount of physical sets as well, with everything coming together seamlessly.

The actual use of virtual sets are only really noticeable on occasion and it’s usually because it’s taking up so much of the screen and moving that you notice it’s not real because of all the movement...meaning it has to be not real. Also some scenes where there is a real set that the actors are standing on and then the scenery around them is all CGI then it becomes somewhat noticeable. But it doesn’t detract from the movie, it just means that on occasion some of the backgrounds and other sets have a different textual quality to others.

Language is something I have to mention, it was glorious to have the Nazis all speak German. There were no people speaking English with faux-German accents, everyone who spoke German spoke German and then there were subtitles on screen. It just added that extra reality to this film. I think if they were speaking English with German accents it might have pushed the comedy in this over into farce or silly comedy.

Julia Dietze who plays Renate Richter in the film has said in an interview this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Germans. I also think this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Americans. For the quirky humour and for the fact that one of the main characters James Washington, who’s a black guy, he spends around 3/4 of the film in white face. Yep. The Nazis make a black guy white, it’s extremely weird. It’s made quite weird in the way the Nazis even the sympathetic one Renate Richter who just say; ‘yep okay that’s good we made you white, you should be happy’. And all of this is played straight, it’s comedic but in a dark comedy sort of way.

There are a lot of epic space battles in this movie. There is even an Australian space ship! Which I’m happy about.
Big epic space ship battles are not something that’s turned up in movies a lot of late, mostly because there haven’t been a lot of big science fiction films Star Trek the 2009 reboot movie had a few. But not too many have had small ships against big ships and little ships against medium sized ships.
It’s more been the realms of TV shows; like Battlestar Galactica and various Stargate series; SG1, Atlantis and Universe.

Costumes wise hats off to Peta Sergeant for being able to wear confidently the different costumes of her character Vivian Wagner, and also to the costume designer Jake Collier for creating them. These costumes veer occasionally into camp, but she’s got the sort of style that would make Servalan (from Blake’s 7) envious. It’s even lampshaded more than once.

Speaking of lampshading and troping, there are several throughout the film and you can go to the TV Tropes page to browse through them. But the reference that particularly caught my eye in the movie was there was a Downfall reference in the movie, for a few moments I couldn’t work out where I’d seen the scene before, and it was only as it played out, the editing matches the Downfall parody videos exactly.

Now to the dark part of the film which ends on a pretty dark end. There’s explosions and everything like that. But at the end, with the Nazis (on the moon) having been bombed into oblivion, the Earth’s greatest powers (in Earth and in space) turn on one another to try and grab the Helium-3 resources on the moon. This doesn’t end in a humorous way, it’s a very sombre and again odd way to end the film, yet it’s weirdly fitting.