Favourite movie of 2012 - Battleship

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.

Distance and Travel

Living as we do, in communities that are separated into suburbs and towns and whatever we totally and completely fail to understand the size of the places we live.

When we go long distances, like very long distances, we fly between them, be it interstate or overseas. It is an extremely deceptive process, flight is deceiving on the senses.

You enter one large building, go through innumerable security checks and then enter onto a large composite craft, fly for 1-6 hours within your country or 9+ hours outside of your country and suddenly you're within another country.

Yet the sense of travel passing, the sense of movement and things changing is totally removed, you fail to travel you've just moved from a space to another space, there is no sense of scale when you travel like this.

Air travel is about destinations, it's about trying as hard as you possibly can to cut out the middle man, the travelling medium, the thing you use to compress the distances between. The 'jumbo jet'.

Travelling interstate is like travelling on a bus in the sky, you get onto the aeroplane, find your seat, sit down and then you don't even have the joy of watching the landscape slide past, it is just rumble down a runway, see the land disappear and be replaced by clouds and then 1 hour or so later touch down on a similarly sized runway and you pull up to a similarly sized building.

It's all a very clinical, albeit not totally simple, certainly a far cleaner sterile experience of travel.
Very deceptive also when moving between these spaces.

It also deceives us when we're doing this on how big our country and indeed how big (or small) the world is.

To fly to Sydney it takes about an hour, factor in security, arrival times and all those sorts of things and you're looking at around 2 hours or so to travel from Melbourne to Sydney.
Yet, if you take a land based solution; train or road this travel time rockets to around 10 hours.

But that is the amazing part of travel, not the downside.

Travel by air and you are not worrying, not concerned about what lies in between your location and your destination, that is merely the space between, the nothingness that exists in the constructed landscape of your travel, it's the none-event space that is present.

But you need to travel closer to the ground, which makes some sense, to (without sounding too styled) get in touch with the landscape, to understand its foibles and to understand its size and scope.

Travelling the distances lets you understand them, instead of bypassing them. Cities exist in isolation, only relative to one another by size, population and scope. It is the distances, the space that makes them, makes them of their own environment. It gives them context so you can frame them.

Doctor Who and the passing of time.

Caroline John passed away earlier this month. She played Dr Elizabeth Shaw for four stories in the early 1970s opposite Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney. These were also Jon Pertwee’s first four stories.

Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen (who played the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith) passed away last year.

I read a comment somewhere that said ‘I like to think that Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney and Caroline John are somewhere doing a Season 7b’.
It made me smile that comment, just before my cynicism about the afterlife kicked in.

Imagination and the continuation of stories is a lovely thing.

I think if we continue to read and write stories about these people, about the characters they played then they’ll continue to live on in our imaginations.

Stories continue to be written about the First, Second and Third Doctor’s adventures, evoking the characters played by William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. Stories continue to feature Barbra Wright, Ben Jackson, Liz Shaw, Nicholas Courntey, Sarah Jane Smith, bringing to mind the actors who played them.

Doctor Who began in 1963, but the story that started then is still going, and the characters that started there, and the characters who were created, built upon throughout its history continue to be written about. Continue to be recreated in audio, in comic, in prose and in our imaginations.

That’s a brilliant, wonderful thing, that these characters and the people who portrayed them, brought them to life for us will continue to live on. Recreated and remembered, brought to excited life in our imaginations as we read, listen and interact with them.

Iron Sky

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.

Easily distracted

There is something to be said for the single focus of an iPad, that running a single program and focusing on the task gives you focus on that task.

On a modern computer, whatever standard by which you measure modern you can be doing several things, running several programs at once.

There is something that the iPad gives you in only allowing you do do one thing and do that one thing quite easily, but if you want to switch between programs (fine Apps) you have to double click the home button to allow you to switch.

But on a computer, on a desktop or laptop that is, it’s much easier to switch between programs, or have several running in the background of your main task.

Sometimes that’s good, in researching stuff you’ll need to have a browser open in the background with likely several tabs worth of information open to refer back to. Plus PDFs open as well with additional material.

But then there’s all the other minor distractions, at the moment I have two word processors open. Bean a small, low complexity word processor which I use to write most of my blogs, because it opens quickly, doesn’t have very many extra bells and whistles and lets me compose things quickly.
Behind that I’ve got Word open, which is what I should be working on. I likely could be working on the file that’s in Word in Bean, but Word is what I originally composed it in and will continue with it in Word.
Behind those there’s iTunes downloading podcasts, and somewhere at the back is Firefox, which is only a distraction which I should close, but haven’t.

It is an active concern, the internet lies in wait to distract me from the work I should be doing. It shouldn’t take self control like this to avoid the internet, but it does.
It was easier when the internet was dial-up, then you couldn’t just use it on impulse, you had to make a decision to use the internet, it would tie up the phone lines as well (unless you had a separate one for the internet, or fax or something). Then you used it, and while it was a decision based sort of activity you could actually do other things because load times were long.

Now it seems I’ve distracted myself from what was the main subject of this.
While an iPad does give you focus, Apple’s decision to tie down the operating system on the iPad makes it somewhat irritating from a text construction point of view. The dictionary is one of the most annoying parts, the other is the lack of keyboard shortcuts.
I don’t use the keyboard shortcuts for bold or italic often, but when I do it’s part of my regular typing process, I don’t pause to use them, I use them and then move on. But with the iPad it forces a break in the flow because you have to take your hands off the keyboard (I use a wireless one when I’m composing at length) and touch the screen. It’s not a gigantic issue, but it’s one of several annoyances which prevent me from using the iPad as anything other than an occasional text construction device.

Turning to philosophy or science

“I realised that science couldn’t answer any of the really interesting questions, so I turned to philosophy. Been searching for god ever since.” Chantilas. Red Planet.

I really love this quote, it might possibly be one of my favourite quotes from a movie. It is I admit from my favourite science fiction film, a Mars movie. But the quote delivered from a character who is a philosopher (as well as a surgeon or something) during a quiet moment in the story is just, it’s great.

I feel like it should clash with my atheistic thoughts and notions.
But I like the idea of god, not in a belief structure sort of way, but in a fictional idea sort of way.

I don’t believe in god, I think it’s frankly a silly proposition that there’s some deity that influences our actions or that we must atone to.

But in fiction I think it’s a great concept, it’s a great concept to play against other things.

Maybe not god as such, belief might be a better term for how I like it to work in fiction.

Having god or gods for that matter in fiction is a little bit of a dead end.
The Greeks and Romans had it right with their gods in their plays, poems and other fictions that they created. Those gods, the polytheistic religions from those civilisations had flawed gods that aside from being immortal had the flaws and problems of humans, they drank, they had sex, they fought and they weren’t all powerful.

Which is the problem in any fiction that’s written, you need to balance the powers of your characters and the world that they inhabit. Having people, places, things with too much power upsets that narrative. It means you can’t write a plot with super-powered elements in it because whenever there’s a problem then the all powerful thing would just come along and BANG, that’s it problem solved. There’s no problem solving process that goes along with trying to sort out a problem, it’s just fixed and then that’s it.

Then there’s free will. With god around you don’t have any.
You already start with “original sin”, whatever that is, and then spend your whole life trying to atone for this sin that’s built into you. Which suggests the lack of any free will. If you had free will then you’d have the choice not to start with the sin, or to make choices to avoid the sin implantation in the first place.
Or, alternatively if god has a plan, then why should we bother striving, why should we try and control our lives if god has planned it all?

Returning to the quote, I could simply cut out the god bit and quote it as “I realised that science couldn’t answer any of the really interesting questions, so I turned to philosophy.” But that still doesn’t make how I think any clearer. I do think that science has all the answers.
I certainly think science has the answers to the really interesting questions, or at least will have a stab at the interesting questions until someone comes along with an even better go at it. Scientists want to be challenged, with proof, not god. Though if god showed up that’d be an interesting conversation (or not).