Alasdair Stuart's Blog

This is taken from The Heist, the largely extraordinary first full length album by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Years ago, on Band Aid, Bono was described as singing like he’d just been released from prison. Macklemore raps the same way, especially this, a tribute to legendary sports broadcaster Dave Niehaus that had such an impact when it was first played in Seattle, the station had calls from Mariners fans who pulled over to the side of the road to listen.

I’ve never played, or seen, a full game of baseball but I love this. It’s quietly, politely, one of the oddest rap numbers I’ve ever heard. Firstly, it’s about baseball. Secondly it’s about Dave Niehaus.  Thirdly, it’s about Macklemore’s childhood and fourthly? Fourthly it’s about America. Or rather, an idea which is very important to America.

Listen to that piano line under ‘We had just made history.’ There’s a lump in my throat just writing about it. It’s perfect, image, lyric and music combining to hit you not with aggression or posturing, but joy. The message is obvious;

Everyone gave up on these guys.

They made it anyway.

So can you.

‘My Oh My’ is about the passionate love America, one of the original underdogs, still has for the underdog ideal; coming from behind, winning against the odds, making something of yourself.  It’s an idea Macklemore embodies. This is a man who dragged himself through rehab not once but twice and, instead of covering it up or putting it behind him, nails his past to the table and dissects it so he, and we, can learn from it.

It’s an extraordinary song, one that wraps the romance of the underdog, and the basic, cheerful assertiveness that’s one of the best aspects of America’s national character in childhood reminiscences, Macklemore’s trademark humour (Look at how happy he looks in the video) and one of the best pieces  of production Ryan Lewis has ever done.  But where it really shines is the third verse. Listen to how it builds and builds and BUILDS, that quiet, slightly mournful horn line that’s somehow proud and tired and mischievous all at once, underscoring Macklemore throwing himself harder and harder at the words. There’s one line in particular that hits me right between the eyes;

And compete against the fear that is in me that’s my only barrier and I swear I’m going to break that

That’s the moment where the two men tie it all together; baseball, Seattle, the underdog, the possibly celestial voice of Dave Niehaus, their impossibly unlikely careers, success, failure and everything in between. It’s a mission statement and an ideal, a life line and a target all at once. It’s amazing, an extraordinary piece of music near the end of an extraordinary album and one which, despite never having been to a baseball game, means a huge amount to me. The sheer love for what he’s doing, what Dave Niehaus’ voice means to him, for the story of his life wrapped around the story of what was, for a while, a magnificently dreadful baseball team all comes belting out of him. It’s a song about heroes, written by a man who can’t quite see that his actions are themselves heroic. It’s also your Sunday moment of Zen.

Alfonso Cuaron is one of the most interesting directors working in mainstream (ish) Hollywood cinema right now. He came to prominence with the third Harry Potter adaptation, Prisoner of Azkaban, which was not only the first movie in the series to have some bite, but a chance for him to unleash exactly the sort of ragged edged nightmares that close friend Guillermo Del Toro also excels at. However, where Del Toro finds his horror, and fascination, in massive amounts of specificity and detail, Cuaron takes a different approach, one crystallized in his breakout movie, Children of Men.

Adapted from the PD James novel, the story centers on Theo Faron. Theo is a former activist turned bureaucrat approached by his wife, Julian Taylor, to acquire transit papers for a young woman. What Theo discovers in short order is that Julian is part of the Fishes, an immigrant rights group and that Kee, an immigrant, is pregnant. What makes her unique is that this is the first pregnancy for 18 years. What makes her dangerous is that the UK is one of the last stable nations left, and has only survived because of a right wing extremist government cracking down on the thousands of immigrants flocking to the country. Pursued by elements of the Fishes as well as government forces, Theo races to get Kee to the Human Project, a scientific team in the Azores working on curing the global infertility crisis.

It’s an extraordinary movie, not least for the central performances from Clive Owen as Theo, Julianne Moore as Julian, Claire-Hope Ashitey as Kee and a heartbreaking cameo from Michael Caine as Theo’s friend Jasper. Cuaron builds on those four central performances, as well as excellent supporting turns from Pam Ferris, Chiwetel Eijofor, Danny Huston and Charlie Hunnam to create a movie which stares the end of humanity square in the eye for it’s entire run time. He does this through vast takes, locking the camera off for minutes at a time to create long sweeping tracking shots that drag you into the action and deny the audience the luxury of distance. A flamboyant circling shot around a moving car becomes the agonizing record of a major character’s final moments, whilst a desperate attempt to jump start the same car later in the movie is unbearably tense. However, the technique is best used in this sequence;

A lesser director and scriptwriter would have had the religious awe the soldiers view the baby with as an emotional climax, a moment of catharsis that leads to the eventual healing of society. Cuaron and his fellow writers (Timothy J.Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby and apparently an uncredited Clive Owen too) ere  more realistic than that, with the fact hostilities break out again almost as soon as the baby is clear tells you everything you need to know about the movie’s approach to human nature. Unflinching, clear eyed, never looking away even when we’re at our absolute worst.

Or maybe, just at our most absolute. Which brings us to low-Earth orbit, and Gravity.

Reportedly the opening shot, although not actually done continuously, is designed to appear to be a single, 17-minute long take. The idea of those long takes that he excels at being used for a story about the ultimate form of isolation isn’t just fascinating, it’s honestly a little disconcerting. That last shot, of the astronaut spinning end over end, in the center of nothing but endless black is going to be chilling on a cinema screen let alone an IMAX one, and the idea of using space, negative or otherwise, and time to tell the story of what seems to be the last few hours in these people’s lives, is something that Cuaron is uniquely suited for.

What’s really got my attention though, are the hints of something deeper, such as;

-There are at least two shots in there showing Sandra Bullock’s character without a backpack. That’s where the oxygen in a spacesuit is stored and I’m curious as to whether or not that’s simply an unfinished shot, or if she has to take the pack off at one point.

-There’s what seems to be an orange and white cloth or inflatable structure on the space station. It looks like it could be a flag, but there’s also a hint of structure to it as though it were an inflatable module of some kind.

-There are two shots in there of a woman in a Russian spacesuit. It’s dark rather than white and they go by too fast to see if it’s Bullock’s character but there definitely seems to be something different about the suit. As an aside, my spaceflight geek is positively giddy about the fact the technology looks right. The space station clearly has a Soyuz lifeboat (Maybe that’s where they got the suit?), the shuttle looks right, the suits look right. Everything looks contemporary which, in manned spaceflight, means everything looks a little dated.

To say nothing of the unanswered questions; what causes the catastrophic failure not only of the shuttle, but the space station? Is there going to be an in movie explanation for the space shuttle (Which has now been mothballed) being put back into use? What sort of work are the astronauts carrying out? What consequences does the station falling have for the world below? There’s the potential for Cuaron to tell a massive story using just two people, to tell a story of humanity at its most absolute, on a massive canvas. Gravity‘s released in October meaning I should have enough of a run up to see it in IMAX without the vertigo being too bad.

This is an image by comic artist Dean Trippe. It’s called ‘You’ll Be Safe Here.’

It’s available as a wallpaper, and a print, and I would very, very strongly recommend you pick it up because, well, look at the thing. Dean has packed that so full of the greatest characters in modern pop culture and genre fiction that I actually lose count. Even better, he’s placed them in ways that suggest stories we’ve not even seen. John Constantine hanging out with Morpheus, Jack O’Neill and Pete Venkman clearly having a droll off in the bottom right hand corner and Lois Lane and Barbara Gordon, two of the driving forces of the DC universe, front and centre by the console. Then there’s Wesley Crusher hanging out with Harry Potter (And is Wesley holding Indiana Jones’ hat?), Mal and the Crow in the middle distance, Sherlock and Indy and Lion-O and He-Man standing shoulder to shoulder, the list goes on and on. Then there’s the subtle little character beats that focus on the child in the centre of the image; 11 greeting them a little formally, Superman, ever the farm boy, giving a big friendly wave and Batman, his arm quietly, definitely, around the kid’s shoulder. The message is in their actions as much as it is in the title; You’ll be Safe Here. It’s an astonishing piece of work by an astonishing artist who’s clearly as desperately fond of what happens when you combine stories as I am. After all, Dean also produced this;

I would watch the living hell out of that show.

I found this piece on tumblr, via morganoperandi. Morgan’s post about it is, well, it’s perfect. Morgan talks about geek culture, why it should be an incredibly positive force, what happens when it isn’t and what we can all try and do to change that. It’s short, simple, inspiring and, frankly, essential reading. This amazing infinite toybox we all have access to is, far too often, a pretty depressing place to be. One day it’s the pain of something you love being cancelled, the next you’re being shouted down because you haven’t been a fan as long as someone else has and, for some frankly bizarre reason, that means you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Then there’s the causal marginalization of your gender, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your body type or the growing fear that if you say anything it’ll either be ignored or, worse still, noticed. Let’s face it, there are open brushfire wars in a lot of areas of fandom, pretty much all the time, and the offhand bullying that can go hand in hand with them drives people away even as others run towards it yelling ‘FIGHT!FIGHT!’. We can, and should, be better than this. We can, and should, all be safe here. Thanks to Dean and Morgan for providing such a powerful reminder of that.

There’s an image I’ve had on my desktop for a while now. It’s a piece of concept art from Dead Space 2 and it shows Isaac Clarke, surely the most unlucky hero in modern science fiction games, boosting out into hard vacuum. Behind him, a nightmare of bony swords and skinned bodies is erupting from the ship Isaac’s making his escape from. The Necromorphs, the warped, stretched creatures that take a human body and turn it into something designed to kill as horrifically as possible. Isaac is flying backwards, aiming down his body at them and firing as he goes.

What he’s firing is, of course, an arc welder.

That image, for me, sums up everything I love about the Dead Space games. Science, and specifically, engineering, versus a particularly twisted kind of faith, the sort that rewards belief in it with a prolonged death. It’s a perfect, almost binary image, the two competing schools of thought in the game wrapped up in one piece of art.  But the real kicker, for me, is the arc welder. The fact that Isaac constantly has to use his ingenuity to defend himself far more than the traditional parade of firepower you get in games like this. Isaac Clarke isn’t just an astronaut, he’s an engineer, a man used to solving problems with the best tool he has, his brain. Like I said in a previous post, Isaac Clarke, is Dave Lister in hell.

Which brings us to Dead Space 3, the most recent and, in some ways, least loved of the franchise. The game opens with you walking through the snow, centuries in the past, on a world called Tau Volantis. You take the role of Tim Kaufman,a soldier, sent to retrieve something from a downed spacecraft for Doctor Earl Serrano. It’s slow going, you have no ammo, no real idea of where you are without triggering the direction marker and when you do, it leads you to the shattered, broken-backed wreck of a just-crashed shuttle.

And there’s ammo outside.

That’s enough to key you in on the upcoming attack but it’s not enough to prepare you for what follows. After retrieving the item you were sent for, the ship crashes down a mountainside around you, as you frantically try and avoid the larger pieces. Finally, you make it to the bottom, hand the item back to your commanding officer and he thanks you, kills you, then himself.

It’s an immersive, grim opening chapter that subtly keys you into two things; firstly, that this isn’t just about Isaac’s experiences on the Ishimura and the Sprawl, and secondly that the tone here is slightly different. Dead Space 3 is the Aliens to the previous two games Alien, something which becomes apparent very quickly. The chapter immediately following brings you to Isaac. hiding out in one of the cities on the Moon, when, as is always the case, his hand is forced. The Unitologists rise up and, as Earth and the Moon burn, Isaac is rescued by the last surviving members of an EarthGov military unit, Captain Robert Norton and Sergeant John Carver. and taken by them to Tau Volantis. Ellie Langford, introduced in the previous game and Isaac’s former love interest (Presumably his tendency to look blankly into space was a turn off), took a team there to follow up on rumours that it was the Marker homeworld. Barely escaping before Jacob Danik, the head of the Unitologists, triggers a Necromorph outbreak on the Moon, the men travel to Tau Volantis to rescue Ellie and shut the markers down once and for all.

Except, this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple.

Dead Space 3 has the most fluid, varied plot and mechanics, all of which change depending on which of the game’s three primary locations you’re in. The first, and arguably, most memorable is the shattered, centuries-old fleet that you jump into above Tau Volantis. This is the point where game mechanics and plot combine perfectly, as in short order the ship you’re on is destroyed, you have to run protection on the only capsule to make it out, dock it with one of the ships, clear it of Necromorphs and work out how to get to the surface. It’s classic Dead Space gameplay but with the volume, and budget, turned all the way up. There’s still plenty of dark corridors and Necromorph stomping, but the sheer, cold, beauty of the graveyard, and the array of things you can do in there is amazing. I had a nasty tendency, once the game opens out and gives you a skiff to zoom around the place in, of just walking out onto the airlock hatch and looking around. A dozen broken ships, countless hundreds of pieces of debris and a cold, dead, beautiful world hanging in the sky, in a view which is so extraordinary it’s been used in a lot of the game’s publicity material. For me though, that view says a lot about Isaac’s character. He’s an engineer, and one who works in space, because the puzzles there may kill you if you get them wrong, but there’s nothing more beautiful in the universe. Each objective here makes sense, from clearing the escape capsule to locating and repairing the centuries-old shuttle that may hold together long enough for you to get to the surface. They’re all engineering problems, and all play out against the backdrop of the last human fleet that came here and the countless fragments of tragedy they left behind.

Arriving on Tau Volantis changes the entire tone of the game. The frozen, barren world of the prologue, it’s crammed full of Necromorphs buried in the snow, the temperature is constantly sub-zero and the design aesthetic changes completely. Whereas the first act of the game is very much broken Starfleet, this is the game’s take on John Carpenter’s The Thing. You can rarely see more than about fifteen feet ahead of you to begin with, the danger is constant and, crucially, your suit, damaged in the crash-landing, isn’t insulating you. Stumbling from burning wreckage to burning wreckage, constantly monitoring your temperature is a really smart piece of instant jeopardy to drop you into, reminiscent of the sea floor/no oxygen level in Tomb Raider 2. You’re wounded, off your game, constantly under attack and when you find the outpost from the prologue it gets worse. Necromorphs, something colossal that you only see the passing of at first and the constant need to stay warm mean you’re always running, always juggling one priority with one another. There’s a huge feeling of imminent crisis, of doom just around the corner, and the fact that the outpost is still intact, and infested, only emphasizes that.

It’s also here that you start getting some genuinely nice twists on established Dead Space tropes. The traditional ‘turn the switch using your TK module’ puzzles are now frequently crank handles for generators for example and the skiff that you used in orbit makes a welcome return, enabling you to travel between outlying buildings for optional missions. That in itself is a change, and one for the better, with several areas either an optional single or double player mission. This idea is introduced in the first act and the first one is also one of the most memorable. Aboard the Terra Nova, one of the orbiting ships, you find evidence that there’s a massive stock of ammunition that had been hoarded by one crewmember. When you go to retrieve it, the crewmember’s automated defences, including taunting messages from him and wave after wave of Necromorphs, swarm you. Fighting for your life, whilst listening to country and western music being piped in, you finally battle your way to the ammo dump and find, of course, that he’s dead and has been for centuries. His last message is a confession and apology and you retrieve the ammo and head out.

Which is when his actual last message plays, explaining that for you to have got this far, you have to be infected and he can’t let you leave…It’s a great sequence, the fight just this side of doable and the set up for it giving a personal insight into the horrifying events in orbit. The side missions on Tau Volantis pick up on this, but never quite have the same personal impact as the haunting image of the abandoned control room in the Terra Nova main tower, and the dead body sitting there.

The side missions onworld never quite reach this level of emotional impact. Instead, they’re largely concerned with the crafting mechanic built into this game. In addition to upgrading your weapons yu can build new ones, but that costs resources and the nice juicy treasure chests at the end of the side missions tend to be chock full of them. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that you need those new weapons. This is Aliens at least as much as it’s The Thing, and the increased amount of high power weapons and gunplay hasn’t sat well with a lot of fans. Danik and the Unitologists, naturally, follow you to Tau Volantis and that means you have frequent running gun battles with them. This in itself isn’t too bad, making a welcome change from yet another shrieking Necromorph and adding a human face to the opposition. Where the crafting mechanic hit trouble, for me, was with a specific bottleneck and what I had to do to work past it. There’s a sequence, relatively early onworld, where you’re trapped with the vast creature you’ve only briefly seen prior to this. You have to constantly hack pieces off it in order to drive it away and, without one of the high end weapons you need resources to craft, it’s basically impossible, even on Easy. I ended up replaying the only optional mission unlocked at that point 10 or 11 times in order to get the resources needed.

When I finally did, and got the gun, the fight with the creature lasted under a minute.

The problem with that is, I still had the gun and almost nothing else in the game is as tough as the creature I’d just seen enough. This meant the tone of the game changed drastically for the second half, the horror replaced by full-on action movie gunplay as Isaac marched methodically through location after location, dealing out high explosive destruction along the way. The stealth element vanishes, a good chunk of the horror element vanishes and I can see why a lot of people jumped ship at this point.

The reason I didn’t was because the plot rises up at the exact moment the game’s balance shifts. Once again, you’re assailed by multiple problems; Norton’s romance with Ellie begins to collapse and he blames you, Danik returns, a colossal biological transmitter must be not only thawed out but modified from the inside and, finally, you have to lead the survivors up a mountain to retrieve the Codex glimpsed in the prologue. This section is, like the Fleet, just a perfect combination of plot, mechanic and action. Isaac travels up the mountain on asecender wires, walking up the slopes whilst fending off attacks, dodging rockslides and guiding the others along in a cable car. You’re constantly moving, constantly fighting and when you’re wounded, and you will be, Isaac’s desperate, exhausted stumble has never looked so fitting. Isaac is one of the quintessential put upon heroes and this section you can see him working for a living. Finally, you reach the top, bring the cable car up, relax and…

The creature you saw off when you first got to the compound grabs the cable car, kills someone you’ve spent most of the game trying to keep alive and drags you halfway back down the mountain.

And something extraordinary happens; Isaac gets mad. And so do you. This stupid, brutal creature has been the bane of your life, it’s killed people you needed saving, wasted ammo you needed elsewhere and this ends and it ends NOW. The mechanics of the fight are massively convenient but the emotion behind it is totally real as you use two harpoon guns and your TK module to literally tear the thing in half.

Then, for good measure, walk over to the corpse and empty a magazine into it. Just to be sure.

It’s a turning point in the plot, not just because you finally get to kill the damn thing but because after this it’s just Isaac, Ellie and Carver. These are the plot, and mechanic, centric characters and if they’re the only ones left, then this is the endgame.

Except this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple.

What follows is arguably the best section of the game, as Isaac (And Carver if you’re working as a team), search for the Codex from the prologue, which holds the key to beating the Necromorphs and Rosetta, the creature that built it. What you find is one of the original inhabitants of Tau Volantis, cross-sectioned, preserved and scattered throughout the lab complex. Once you’ve found, and reassembled, ‘her’, the truth emerges; Tau Volantis isn’t the Marker homeworld, it’s the homeworld of a race that sacrificed everything to stop the Markers, building a city-sized machine to freeze the world before its’ inhabitants could undergo Convergence. Convergence, the holy grail of Unitology, is revealed to be the combination of every living thing into a colossal Necromorph which will then reach out psychically and connect with the others of its kind.

Tau Volantis’ moon is a partially completed Convergence Necromorph.

You’re going to have to kill a small world to finish the game.

And then Danik shows up again.

And Ellie is apparently killed.

And off you go at a gallop once more.

Whilst it’s certain that Dead Space 3 is more a science fiction action game than a horror one by this stage, the plotting is so note perfect you just get swept along with it. The tempo is raised and kept there and then raised even further and by the time you get to the final location in the game, the stakes couldn’t be higher or simpler. Isaac and Carver have had everything taken away from them, will lose everything else if they fail and know they won’t be coming back. They go anyway.

The machine, which is the size of a city, is where the game’s final act plays out. More importantly, it’s where Isaac, the engineer, finally comes back to the fore. The vast majority of this level, aside from the inevitable combat, is about working out what the Machine can do and how to control it. Isaac is, after a full act where he’s an action hero, a scientist again and the result is equal parts tranquil and terrifying. The design work in the city is extraordinary, the Aliens and The Thing references falling away and Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness sloping into view. It’s an engineering triumph, a graceful monstrosity that helped a race euthanize itself and the crystallization of the conflict I talked about at the start; religion vs science, knowledge vs belief.

It makes perfect sense then that this should be the final battleground. It’s just a shame that it isn’t. Instead, after the dangling plot threads of Ellie and Danik are resolved (One well, the other…also well, given that Danik’s a bad guy), you and Carver find yourselves alone on a planet that’s tearing itself apart to complete Convergence. Running back through old locations, fighting off even more Necromorphs, you finally  face the Moon and, in a moment which is equal parts action movie dementia and brutal thematic symmetry, stab it to death by throwing Markers at it. The Moon crashes into Tau Volantis, Ellie tearfully heads for home in an escape shuttle and Isaac Clarke and John Carver are consigned to history as Tau Volantis dies around them.

It’s an odd, slightly lopsided ending, if nothing else because despite the Moon being, well, a Moon, the fight feels weirdly anti-climactic. It makes sense thematically for the plan with the Codex to go wrong but you spend so much time working for it that ‘oh just shoot it until it dies’ feels weirdly flat. What’s even odder is that this is how every previous game has ended yet somehow here it’s a bum note. That being said, the ending itself is nicely horrible, not only though Isaac and Carver’s sacrifice but the fact that, in the end credits, you find out they’re alive. After all he’s been through, everything he’s fought for, Isaac still can’t catch a break. That being said, this feels like the perfect final chapter for the series; Isaac has made his peace with Ellie, Convergence has been prevented, the Moon has been killed and Isaac and Carver lay down their lives for everyone else’s.

Except this being a Dead Space game, it’s never that simple…

At time of writing, there’s a single piece of DLC for the game which changes the ending completely, and sets up a fourth game. There are also rumours that this game has already been cancelled, which have been denied. It seems weirdly appropriate that Isaac’s fate should be uncertain like this, especially given the ending of Dead Space 3.

However, the fact that this uncertainty is based on the negative response to the game strikes me as a little unfair. This is every inch a continuation of the previous two games and, to return to that image one last time, the central conflict there is the central conflict here. Even the crafting mechanic, much criticised for both the lack of balance it causes and the optional micro-payments (Which are optional by the way. Why do you think I re-did that optional mission so much?) grounds the game, giving you full access to Isaac’s skill-set. He’s an engineer first and a soldier second and for all the action movie beats, Dead Space 3 resolutely keep that to the fore. It’s not perfect by any means, the horrendous bottleneck and balance shift I talked about earlier take some real adjusting to, but it’s ambitious and fun and does something new with the franchise. Not everything works well, but everything works well enough and as any engineer knows, that’s the best you can ever hope for.

Earlier this month, at CinemaCon, Alan Horn of House Disney announced the plan for the Star Wars sequels. Starting in 2015, there will be one released every year, for a minimum of five years.

And lo, much weeping, rejoicing and arguing over how this will impact on continuity did echo throughout the land.

This announcement has been met in most circles I read with a modicum of enthusiasm but more caution and reticence. There’s a sense, expressed frequently, that this is milking the cash cow until it squeals, a conveyor belt of movies that will tarnish the already slightly less than sparkling image of Star Wars movies beyond repair over an endless, five year, march towards whatever he has planned next. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except this time he wants five new movies instead of three.

What no one seems to be focusing on is that, without making a big deal of it, Disney have just ushered in the second wave of massive narrative evolution the Summer tentpole movie has seen this decade

The Marvel movies, starting all the way back at Iron Man, have operated off a narrative plan. Each movie has seeded the next, or featured a cameo from a previous character or plot element, culminating in The Avengers. Which is, in turn, the black swan of summer blockbusters; it absolutely has no right to work. At all. Think about it, this is a film which takes the leads from three other movies, some of the supporting cast, a recast (For the third time) lead from a fourth failed movie series and throws another couple of characters in for good measure. It should be an unholy mess, the sort of endless parade of spectacle, slow motion and heavy metal falling off a cliff that Michael Bay’s absolute worst movies are.

Instead, it completely changes the rules of the game. Each character has a moment to shine, each character is intrinsically connected to the plot and the whole narrative flow of the movie is built, not around any single one of them, but all of them. It’s the same level of narrative fairness that Kurtzman and Orci showed in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, where each character has a moment that, without their actions, brings the movie to a grinding halt. The Avengers takes this and expands it to a massive scale, express through the bravura (I love that word) rolling action sequence towards the end of the movie which follows all of them through the battle for New York in a single, blocks wide, shot. This is the sort of visual vocabulary blockbusters have half-assed for years and here it springs fully formed onto the screen and throws a gigantic space worm at you and has Mark Ruffalo punch it to death for good measure.

It’s not a universally popular movie, but nothing is, and, for me, it’s a game changing example of how to do something different, and all but impossible, with one of the most universal narrative templates on the planet; the blockbuster. The fact that it’s both the culmination of Marvel’s ‘Phase I’ movies and the instigator for the ‘Phase II’ block only fascinates me more. This is a film that may well look very different in a couple of years when the sequel comes out.

That phased approach, building larger stories out of each block of films, is something that hasn’t been done, to the best of my knowledge, ever before. Ideally (And I know a lot of Iron Man 2 viewers would dispute this. I’m not one of them), each movie tells a standalone story that contributes something to the larger block and those blocks in turn combine to create a coherent, nuanced fictional universe. The fact that Agents of SHIELD, a TV show, is set to be introduced to this narrative framework is particularly interesting and will, I suspect, see them experiment still further. It’s a chance to be bold, and there’s clearly something in the air that’s pushing more people to do the same.

The SyFy channel, who are so reviled amongst many of their apparent target audience that simply mentioning their name triggers genuine anger, have just rolled out Defiance. Set 33 years after a disastrous first contact with the Votan, a coalition of alien races fleeing their dying solar system, it follows former soldier Nolan and his adopted, alien, daughter Irisa as they try and make a living salvaging technology from the ships continually falling from orbit. They end up in Defiance, formerly St Louis, renamed for the actions of the ‘defiant few’, a group of alien and human soldiers who stopped fighting to help evacuate civilians from a fire. It’s an interesting show, and its companion MMO computer game has been designed so the two narratives complement one another. Nolan’s non-committal response about being one of the defiant few bother you? Go and play the game, where the truth is part of the central plot. Doesn’t bother you? The show’s perfectly coherent without any satellite media, at least so far.

(Image taken from ScreenCrush)

Narrative bravery, the one thing that Hollywood is continually and justifiably most of the time, pilloried for is in increasing supply these days and that brings us back to Horn and the Star Wars movies. The detail that, for some reason, hasn’t been announced everywhere, is that this isn’t a contiguous set of movies. The plan is to alternate episode VII, spin off movie, episode VIII, spin off movie, episode IX.

This is really clever for three reasons. Firstly, it’s the best possible on ramp for old and new fans alike. Think about it the spin-offs, set to feature characters from various time periods most likely starting with Boba Fett or Han Solo, will be a rolling catch all designed to attract fans of the original and prequel trilogy alike. Want to know what Boba Fett did after his dad was killed by Mace Windu? Here’s your movie. Want to know how Han’s childhood intersected with the prequels? Here’s your movie. It keeps the door open to everyone, honouring the previous movies without trying to over-write them.

Secondly, it builds in checks and balances that the prequels didn’t have. The two year process, coupled with the widespread criticism of the prequel trilogy, speaks to a welcome level of caution from the studio here. They want, and need, to get these films absolutely right, and if one or the other isn’t ready, then there’s the option of switching the order around to give the team involved time to get ready.

Which brings us to the last thing that impresses me about this; whilst it looks like a conveyor belt it’s an off ramp designed to take as much pressure as possible off the creative teams. A new Star Wars movie, let alone a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, is a military-level undertaking in terms of people and logistics and if it gets away from you then the fans have long memories and no problem holding grudges. This way, there’s a chance to keep momentum going without sacrificing quality and that’s already paid off. JJ Abrams has made it clear he won’t be rushed into that 2015 release date and I strongly suspect that this one on/one off approach has been developed to allow for directorial choices like that. It’s the old planning rule that you can pick two of these factors; quality, speed and cost but never all three, writ large and scrolling away from you as the John Williams fanfare plays.

So I understand, and sympathize with, the caution. This is a period of massive change for a fictional universe that’s been part of people’s personal maps of fandom for decades, and so many people were burnt by the prequels it makes sense to be a little cautious about touching the hand that’s feeding you the new movies, let alone biting it. But this isn’t just Disney laying out the future of Star Wars, this is Disney future-proofing Star Wars and doing so in a way which, again, innovates what can be done with the blockbuster. It’s entirely commercially driven, that’s a given, but it’s also breaking new ground and doing so in one of the most universal, populist mediums on the planet. Regardless of how the movies are, that can only be a good thing.

Dana Fredsti is the only horror author I know who’s also a Deadite. Dana was a sword-wielding embodiment of evil in Army of Darkness and her talent for mayhem has clearly served her well with her latest novel. You’ve already seen her my review of Plague Nation and her guest post so to round off Plague Nation Day, here’s my interview with her.

Zombies are massively popular right now. Why do you think that is?

Dana: Well, after the popularity of World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and now Walking Dead, they’re in the public eye, they’re making money, and filmmakers and writers are taking advantage of it.  We’re getting a glut of zombie related material, some of it good, some of it great, some of it the stuff that Bad Movie Nights are made of… but really for the first time that I can remember, zombies are the popular kids in school.

Also, you have fear of the “other” (whatever that means to each individual) as a popular theory as to their scariness.  I also think that considering all the real apocalypse or even long term disaster aftermath scenarios we face, zombies are a “safe” scare.  You can run and hide from zombies, or shoot ‘em in the head.  You can’t run from a nuclear bomb or even an earthquake or tsunami. For me, there’s just something incredibly creepy about something that looks like your loved ones or neighbors, but there’s nothing human behind the eyes… and they only see you as a meal.

How did you differentiate your zombies from the pack, or perhaps, horde?

Dana: Well, I do have the your basic slow Romero zombies in there, and am content to let them be the Classic Zombie Model… but I also have a few variations, including people who are “half-dead” and can keep their humanity… as long as they eat human flesh. I figure that’s a conundrum right there as eating human flesh does not exactly fit into anyone’s idea of “humanity.”  I also have a new one coming out in Plague World, but I don’t want to give any spoilers.

What sort of spine is there for the series? What’s the overall theme?

Dana: Erm… not sure what you mean by “spine” so I will move onto overall theme. I have no idea.  I didn’t set out to write a series with an overall theme.  I set out to write a series that was entertaining and (hopefully) with characters the readers care about and invest in enough to keep reading.  There are good guys, bad guys, dead guys, and wise guys in my books.  I’ll leave it to the readers to decide what the overall theme might be because I suspect it’s as subjective as poetry for the most part. Everyone will have their own opinion and interpretation. For me personally, I think it’s about keeping one’s humanity (and sense of humor) in the midst of extreme circumstances.

Do you write to series or plan individual books?

Dana: Depends on the genre and the book.  I’ve written a few books planned as stand-alones, mostly the erotic romances, but my murder mystery Murder for Hire, and the Ashley Parker books were always planned with sequels in mind.  There will be at least one more Ashley Parker book after Plague Nation.

How has the series changed as it’s been written?

Dana: Well, the original version had Ashley as a nineteen year old, and was also definitely geared slightly more to the paranormal romance readership. Then the series was bought by Titan Books and I had more leeway to for zombie gore and to decide when/if sex worked in context of the story. Unlike some folks, i do think there’s room for romance/sex during a zombocalypse, but it’s important to pick the right time/place. Not in a cemetery while on the run from zombies.  Yeah, I’m looking at you, Fulci….  It’s also faster paced as my Titan DEO (Dark Editorial Overlord) is one for cutting the fat.  Other than that, it’s what I envisioned.

What led you to set the books in the Bay area?

Dana: Familiarity. I like setting books in places I live or have lived or have visited because I like to have that authenticity for the descriptions.  It makes the writing process much easier.  And even then, I spend a lot of time looking at Google Street View or going to the places I want to use as settings.  Plague Town was set in a fictional Northern California town, but I used descriptions from places I’d been and it was fun having readers decided with absolute certainty that I’d set it in Arcata or Stanford.   Plague World is going to have a large portion of the action in San Diego, btw, which is where I grew up.  I spent a few days visiting to research settings.  A lot of time at the Cabrillo Monument.  The global spread of the plague will be shown via interludes.

Has anything been cut that you regret?

Dana:I get very attached to lines and scenes, but I have to say that even if I bitched and moaned about cuts at the time, none of them stick in my memory.  So I guess

my words weren’t as deathless and important as I thought at the time.

How has your own experience influenced the action scenes?

Dana: It’s easier to write what one knows firsthand, so my theatrical combat and martial arts training came in really handy when writing the action sequences.  And what I couldn’t visualize, I tried out on my very patient boyfriend.

Deadite or zombie? Which wins?

Dana:Well, it depends on what the contest is, I guess!  Deadites can talk (although only in Sam or Ted Raimi’s voices…) whereas zombies can only moan.  Unless they’re in the remake of Dawn of the Dead and then they can suddenly snarl like pissed off pumas.  Deadites can also swordfight.  So… if you’re asking which I’d rather be, definitely a Deadite.  But if you’re asking which I think is a scarier monster, definitely zombies!

Thanks, Dana. Her novels, Plague Town and Plague Nation are available from Titan now and are huge fun.

—

This article was posted as part of the Plague Nation blog tour, celebrating the release of Dana Fredsti’s new novel. For the opportunity to win a copy of the book, simply tweet:

“I would like a copy of Plague Nation @TitanBooks @danafredsti #plaguenation”.

Find out more about the book and the tour at: www.titanbooks.com/plaguenation

I’ve asked myself this question several times while working on my Ashley Parker series.  Not so much in the first one, Plague Town, because I kept my destruction limited to a hundred mile radius quarantine zone surrounding the college town of Redwood Grove, which, while modeled after certain Northern California communities I’ve been to, was still fictional.

Plague Nation, on the other hand, required a broader based swath of destruction.  Since Ashley and her fellow wild cards are still in California, I used third person interludes to show the spread of the plague, for the most part using places I’ve actually visited.

I love Grand Ledge, Michigan. Cider donuts during the winter there?  The stuff memories are made of.  Calico County in Amarillo, Texas, is one of my favorite restaurants of all time.  And the crab shack in Humboldt?  Oh, how I love thee… and yet I took an unholy pleasure in doing bad things to fictional characters in places that hold lovely memories for me (Salt Lake City, you hosted World Horror Con and were just an obvious target.  I really don’t have anything against all of your blond, blue-eyed residents.  Really!).

I also bring zombie devastation (and total traffic gridlock) to my hometown of San Francisco in Plague Nation.  When out and about, I was always considering every street, building, and neighborhood as a possible location in the book. I feel like I should offer apologies to the folks in Presidio Heights about now.  Seriously, folks, I love your neighborhood!  I’m so sorry about the zombie infestation…

Plague World, as the title implies, will spread the devastation even further.  I’ve done some traveling out of the United States, but not enough to give me first-hand experience, so I reached out to friends and family who provided me with a list of places worldwide they’d like to see overrun by zombies.  Some also provided me with photos and first-person descriptions.  I am going to have some kick-ass interludes in Plague World. 

At any rate, yes, destroying the world one restaurant/town/city/country at a time is … well … lots of fun.  I don’t think this makes me a bad person as long as I confine it to the pages of my novels.  But I don’t think I’ll bring it up in therapy any time soon.  Just in case.

—

This article was posted as part of the Plague Nation blog tour, celebrating the release of Dana Fredsti’s new novel. For the opportunity to win a copy of the book, simply tweet:

“I would like a copy of Plague Nation @TitanBooks @danafredsti #plaguenation”.

Find out more about the book and the tour at: www.titanbooks.com/plaguenation

The world is ending. The world is always ending but these days it’s getting faster. The deadly combination of a new strain of flu and the ‘cure’ for it are starting to tear at the outer edges of society. Redwood Grove, a small University town, was one of the first battlegrounds and where Ashley Parker discovered that she was a ‘wild card’, immune to the virus and gifted with enhanced strength and senses as a result. Now, after the Battle of Redwood Grove, Ashley and her team are leading the clearance operations in the area. Everything’s calming down, except, out in the world, more and more flu cases are being reported…

Plague Nation is the sequel to Dana Fredsti’s Plague Town. It’s also one of those novels that accomplishes the near impossible and does something new with the zombie sub-genre. Ashley, Gabriel, Lil, Nathan and the others aren’t survivors of a full blown apocalypse, or innocent victims as one sweeps across their world. Instead, they’re hardened soldiers, people who’ve had to do too many hard things in a short space of time and are trying to work out if they’re numb or simply accepting of what they do. This is a story set in a world on the brink, one which could be saved or damned and Ashley and her team are on the absolute sharp end. It’s a fictional space very few other books I’ve encountered exist in and it gives Plague Nation an energy and urgency that not many books manage.

It’s helped immensely by how light on its feet Fredsti’s dialogue is. Ash is a relentlessly likeable heroine, a woman who is doing her best to hold together in an impossible situation and, to her rank amazement, succeeding. She’s also massively irreverent, and in a truly endearing way, completely unabashed about that. Ash may like her swords, but what makes her truly dangerous is her brain, and Fredsti does a great job of balancing the basic luck an action character requires with moments of real thought. Crucially, she also pulls precisely no punches with any of the characters. Not all the people you meet coming into the book are still there going out and none of their exits are easy or clean.

This refusal to take the easy way out really comes into its own in the second half. After an attack on Redwood Grove, Gabriel, Ash and the team are sent into San Francisco to clear and set up at a new location. Things go wrong and they end up having to make their way through the city as the evacuation begins. The nightmarish slog up to the new laboratory sees them flash by, and brieflky encounter, other, smaller stories. Most of them they can’t help but the hard fought victories that do come are all the sweeter because of how hard they’ve had to work. Fredsti also delights in torturing her characters, especially Lil. The polite, softly spoken young Wild Card is put through the wringer over and over this book and by the time she almost rebels to help rescue the animals at a local shelter, you’re all set to go with her. Any victory, no matter what it costs, seems acceptable, any price worth paying and that’s the point Fredsti’s making; it isn’t. In order to save everyone they must sacrifice someone. It’s brutal mathematics and it drives everything Ash and the others are forced to do. They lose friends for stupid, completely realistic reasons, they try their utmost and they’re still outnumbered and pressed to the limit. Even the on/off romance between Ash and Gabriel is complicated by the fact that Gabriel isn’t a Wild Card. Instead, he’s one of the miniscule percentage of the population that the virus changes a different way. Gabriel is alive, but the virus is active in his system meaning that, without constant doses of a tailored serum, he’ll become a living flesh-eater. Jake, a character from the previous novel who shares the condition also pops up here and the horrific fate that’s always waiting for Gabriel gives much of the second half of the book real urgency. Likewise, anyone who’s lived in San Francisco is going to get a vicarious thrill out of the awful things Fredsti does to the city, especially the frantic evacuation scenes set in Golden Gate Park.

However, the second half of the book is also a little problematic. The mission to the new lab is motivated partly by the outbreak in San Francisco and partly by an attack on Redwood Grove which leaves Gabriel with a limited amount of serum. The ticking clock this gives the book isn’t fully resolved in a way which is both extremely realistic and frustrating.  The team’s plan is carried out and, like all plans it doesn’t quite survive contact with the enemy. As the book closes, you get definitive answers for a lot of questions, but a couple of primary plots are not only not resolved but have extra seeds added to them for a third book. It’s a gutsy choice, especially the material dealing with a conspiracy that may be behind it all and the introduction of not one but two major new characters, Griff and TJ. TJ, a parkour specialist, is especially good fun but some readers may still be frustrated by the dangling threads.

That aside, this is one of the best zombie novels I’ve read in a long time. Fredsti has a wickedly dark sense of humour, an eye for a particularly nasty action sequence and in Ash, Lil and Nathan especially, a knack for creating characters you care about and then doing unspeakable things to them.  The end of the world has rarely been this nasty, fast-talking, so well versed in zombie pop culture or fun to read about.

—

This article was posted as part of the Plague Nation blog tour, celebrating the release of Dana Fredsti’s new novel. For the opportunity to win a copy of the book, simply tweet:

“I would like a copy of Plague Nation @TitanBooks @danafredsti #plaguenation”.

Find out more about the book and the tour at: www.titanbooks.com/plaguenation

Oblivion is a very odd film. Not so much in format as in what it represents, and the really unusual, lop sided way that it represents it. There’s some moments of real genius in here but they’re mixed with plot elements and choices that honestly look like they’ve stepped out of the 1950s and are vaguely irritated at how pornographically everyone’s dressed.

Oblivion is set 70 years in the future, following a catastrophic alien invasion by a race called the Scavs. Their opening shot was blowing the moon apart and the resulting environmental horror all but ripped the planet apart. The survivors rallied, nuked the remainder to drive the Scavs off and began the near impossible process of rebuilding. Now, the Earth is deserted aside from two-person clean-up crews whose job it is to monitor and maintain the immense Hydro-Rigs cracking the oceans down into fuel for humanity’s relocation to Titan. The Tet, a vast obelisk-shaped space station orbits instead of the Moon, humanity’s greatest creation and the stepping stone to Titan. In two weeks, Victoria Olsen and Jack Harper, one of the only crews left on Earth, will finish their shift and rotate out to the Tet and then, Titan. They’re a couple as well as a team, Victoria handling communications with the Tet and general signals intelligence and Jack getting his hands dirty, fixing the rigs and repairing the security drones that surround them. He’s a soldier as well as a mechanic, continually forced to defend himself against the Scavs still left on Earth. There’s only problem; Jack’s dreaming of the world before. A world he seems to remember.

The first thing that becomes clear about Oblivion is how beautiful it is. Joseph Kosinski’s an astonishing visual director with a real eye for both detail and scope and this is his best work to date. Kosinski swaps the precise, geometric brutality of Tron:Legacy’s Grid for a world which is equal parts ruin and paradise, the shattered remnants of the old world attaining a new kind of beauty. One of the best scenes takes place at the site of the last superbowl, a broken-backed stadium with one goal post intact. It’s beautiful, desolate and abandoned and Jack finds a moment’s piece there, reliving a game he never quite got to see. A later scene, at the cabin he’s been painstakingly building does the same thing, as the last man on Earth carefully, almost apologetically, builds his first house. This is a Quiet Earth, and that’s a sort of post apocalypse that we don’t get enough of. The film’s at its best when it remembers this. The scale of the desolation gives the film an undertone of real sadness and fragility in places, and there are moments when Jack is nothing but a tiny white speck, a single living thing in a world filled with the ruins of its past. Kosinski cleverly uses this to show the scale of the conflict too, with pivotal scenes taking place at the Empire State Building, only its top few floors protruding from the ground. Jack may feel like he’s home but this isn’t a welcoming Earth and it lets Kosinski fold some clever character beats into the plot. Victoria is always clean, precise, dressed for the office she works in whilst Jack is constantly dirty from the work he does.  He’s also charmingly down on his luck and one of the film’s few laughs comes from the moment where, having abseiled down into the ruins of the New York library and been ambushed, he climbs back to the surface only to find his bike’s gone and a long walk awaits him.

That sense of grounded, pragmatic, blue collar work is neatly contrasted with the literal castle in the sky that Jack and Victoria live and work out of. Tower 49 is a beautiful piece of cold, graceful design, little more than a pool, a machine shop, a kitchen, a comm tower and a launch pad perched thousands of feet above the ground. It’s a literal ivory tower, and Victoria’s presence there tips you off to the rift between them long before the movie does. There’s also some really smart stuff woven into the design work there, both in how ergonomic it is and also how cold. This is an idealised environment, the sort designed by committee, or machine, rather than an individual. As a result it’s precise, and graceful, and cold.  It makes Victoria and Jack seem small and fragile and that gives several of the movie’s events real menace. The destruction of one of the Hydro-Rigs fills the sky outside the Tower and Jack’s search for a Scav transmitter in the Empire State is cold with tension.  Even better are the moments where it becomes clear the ‘effective team’ are anything but; Victoria is pathologically afraid of anything from the surface whilst Jack hordes items he’s found and conceals them from her. It’s an ivory tower, but its foundations are starting to wobble.

This is where the film breaks new ground, as the exact nature of what’s threatening Jack and Victoria becomes unclear. There’s the increasingly pointed conversations with their Tet control officer, Sally, a downed spaceship whose crew are almost all murdered by drones before Jack can save them, the one survivor, Julia Korsova, whose simple presence disrupts their aesthetic little world and, of course, the Scavs. It would be very easy to pick one and run with it, but, instead, Oblivion chooses all of them and adds one more for good measure.

The cascade of reveals that form the spine of the last hour are genuinely great. We discover that Julia, and Jack were married, they and Victoria were all astronauts dispatched to Titan and rerouted to investigate an alien artifact. That artifact is the Tet, a machine intelligence that’s communicating with them through video of their old NASA CapCom, won the war and has been strip mining the planet for the last 70 years. Oh and just for good measure, it fought and won the war with a clone army built entirely of Jack and Victoria, who have had their original memories wiped. A second batch of clones are being used to run the Towers, each unaware of their origin or the other clones. The only reason Julia didn’t join them was that, as their ship was being taken, Jack ejected the crew module containing Julia and the others, still in hibernation. Finally, the Scavs are the last survivors who have been following Jack because they realize that, even though this is his latest in countless millions of clone bodies, he wants to remember. They’ve been gently prodding him along and trigger the distress signal that brings Julia’s ship back into orbit because they finally have a way of destroying the Tet but need Jack’s mechanical expertise.

That’s a pretty breathless list and even then it isn’t fully complete. We get a nice look at a very Portal-influenced Tet central core at the end of the movie and some really smart design work on the Tet’s drones and the Scavs ways of dealing with them. There’s some smart pacing too, the clone reveal comes very late and changes the timbre of the movie drastically. However, what really shines here is Andrea Riseborough as Victoria. Initially set up as the prissier of the two, the more we see of her the more we realize is going on beneath the surface. Even better, the film leads you to place some of her actions in context after the fact, which is a mark of some really solid, nuanced plotting. Her refusal to go to the surface at all could be read either as simple reluctance or genetic tweaking by the Tet, but there’s one line she has which is shattering in its implications. When Jack is preparing to take Julia back to her crash site, Victoria tries to reason with him until she finally snaps and yells

‘It was always her! She always had a thing for you!’

The line flashes by so fast it’s almost impossible to register straight away. Once you do, the implications are staggering;

Victoria knows. She, like Jack, has dreams about the life they used to have. In fact, Victoria knows more than Jack does, she knows what they are, who they work for and she’s made her peace with it.

That’s a really brave character beat and it informs everything we’ve seen Victoria do up to that point, especially her slightly out of character willingness to run interference for Jack. Suddenly, she becomes an unsung heroine rather than an antagonist, a woman faced with the definition of a nightmarish existence and doing the only thing she can about it; looking after her partner. The final payoff to this is Victoria’s final scene (Chronologically her first). Seventy years in the past, as their ship is drawn into the Tet, Jack orders her to evacuate with the sleep module and she refuses. She backs her partner up, and it costs her everything and she just keeps doing it. It’s a character beat I keep coming back to because superficially, Victoria’s a shallow role but thanks to this scripting, and Riseborough, we see just how deep she is.

It’s just a shame that, by and large she’s the only one who is. Kosinski has been criticized before for his lack of comfort with actors and that’s certainly on display here. Cruise is good but the role doesn’t, and should have, stretched him far more. Jack is perfect Cruisebait; a blue collar repairman who’s also the most important human left alive to say nothing of a fiercely effective soldier who gets to run a lot. He should be equal parts Charlton Heston and Ethan Hunt and, whilst Cruise is good he certainly isn’t that memorable.

The Scavs fare even worse. Morgan Freeman as Malcolm Beech, their leader, is given little more than three scenes, the vast majority of which is either exposition or ambiguity. Freeman’s character is almost completely passive beyond his initial meeting with Jack and seems to exist as a function of the plot rather than a person in his own right, culminating in a death scene lifted, beat for beat, from an unseen moment in Serenity. Which is then ignored for the sake of dramatic impact and closure.

His lieutenants fare even worse, with Zoe Bell, who excelled as the lead in Deathproof being given no lines whatsoever and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, one of the lynchpins of the Game of Thrones case, faring little better. The Scavs are supposed to be the last scrappy remnants of humanity, bloodied and bowed but not quite defeated. Just like Jack, they’re supposed to be an example of humanity’s tenacity in the face of impossible odds, and, just like Jack, they fall more than a little flat.

The worst example of this is Julia. Olga Kurylenko is an actress with range and, crucially, authority and here she’s required to simper and, on occasion, yell for Jack. The role that should be the emotional centre of the movie is non-existent, and she’s even more of a placeholder for emotional response than Freeman. There’s nothing to the character whatsoever and, decades after the creation of Ellen Ripley, seeing a female lead in a science fiction movie fleeing in terror from the monsters whilst the male lead fights them off is unforgivable especially as the script takes such huge pains to make Victoria complex. The end result is the movie’s gender portrayal is vastly lopsided, with Riseborough’s complex Victoria and the cold machine menace Melissa Leo brings to Sally counterbalanced by Julia’s total lack of authority and agency. Like Freeman’s character this culminates in a moment which involves her being shot, for literally no reason other than to create a little fake agency. She barely even qualifies as a character, to the extent that her scenes feel like elements of a 1950s gender dynamic have wandered into a 21^st century movie. And yes, the irony of old behavioural patterns defining the script in a movie like this is difficult to miss.

It’s also difficult to get past. Oblivion throws so many ideas and nods onto the screen (The Tet and the Drones look like GladOS from Portal, the clone reveal riffs on Moon a little) that a much higher than normal proportion hit. Likewise, the movie has to be praised for being an original script, and not an adaptation, a remake or a sequel. There’s real worth to it, real weight of execution and story and it’s a genuine delight to see an original SF movie do so well. But for every good idea, there’s a needless beat, for every piece of remarkable, subtle characterisation there’s a stick figure with Morgan Freeman’s head stuck on it.  There’s a lot to enjoy here, but Kosinski remains a big picture director, unfortunately, in all the worst as well as the best ways.

Let’s talk about Frittata. Specifically, let’s talk about what it all too quickly has turned into in my past, something my mother likes to call ‘egg rag’. Egg rag is sometimes not quite an omelet, sometimes not quite scrambled eggs and very, very occasionally, not quite pancakes. I have perpetrated egg rag on the world many times, as have most of us I suspect. I have, like you, spent time poking ineffectually at egg that has somehow bonded on a molecular level with the pan before giving up, scraping the thimbleful I can actually get to move out, dumping a chopped up sausage on top, serving it in a cupcake case and calling it Tapas.

(Somewhere in the UK, a Tapas restaurant chef is on the phone, this article on his screen. A voice picks up at the other end and the chef hisses ‘HE KNOWS.’)

Anyway! Frittata’s crap because it always turns into egg rag for me and I’m, by and large, done with subjecting my face to that sort of disappointment. We deserve freedom, my friends! Freedom from the oppression of failed egg dishes! Freedom from the polite lies we tell ourselves that sometimes raw yolk will make us feel a bit like Rocky! Freedom from the cupcake case of oppression and the chopped sausage of failure! I give you!

Jamie’s Summer Vegetable Frittata

(With stuff)

We lug in his name.

Victor! The usual suspects!

So what we have here is;

Eggs. 8 of them. These are important.

Courgettes. 2 of them. Also important.

Left over Roast Chicken. Which I’m not sure I should capitalize.

Left over Mushrooms. Which I definitely shouldn’t capitalize.

Some Caynenne pepper.

A gem lettuce

2 tomatoes

These are not in the Frittata but rather, next to it. Think of them like the two chaps in the boat in The Great Escape. The salad they became was dull and unnecessary, but competent for all that and we should be glad they got past the Germans unnoticed. Or something.

Anyway, the first thing we need for this is TOOLS. Or rather a tool. Or rather, a spinning wheel of death. Observe!

This is the Grateotron 5000. That is its name now.

This is the Grateotron 5000 in its native habitat, at the top of the lovely food processor my parents very kindly bought us to enable my cooking habit.

This is what it does.

Seriously, I just had to pop the courgette in the Grateotron 5000’s grating chute and it ate It and turned it into this! Now, St Jamie recommends squeezing the courgette to get the excess moisture but I didn’t do this because;

A)It didn’t seem entirely damp

and

B)I’m still giggling about having to pound the chicken last time.

So instead, I added this, the mushrooms and the chicken to a hot iron skillet misted with olive oil and shoved them around it whilst they heated. So fast, as you can see, that motion blur occurred.

At the same time…well, not at the same time that would be weird. I stopped doing this then I cracked the eggs into a bowl, whisked the Cayenne in so they looked like this;

And then added them to the pan. I stirred them around until they’d covered everything else and then…I discovered the secret to Frittata.

The Iron skillet.

All I did was put the skillet in a pre-heated oven (200 degrees) after shredding some goat’s cheese on top and left it for fifteen minutes. When it came out, it looked like this;

THAT is not egg rag, my friends, that is egg couture! Only you can eat it and…it just looks…it looks better than any I’ve previously attempted and it tasted utterly amazing. Plus, because the pan was misted all we had to do was slide the spatula around the edge and it lifted out like a large enthusiastic pancake. Egg rag no more! The age of the Frittata has dawned!

What I learned:

-I shouldn’t capitalize most ingredients.

-The Iron Skillet doesn’t just sound like an obscure fighting style, it’s also the secret to a great Frittata.

-I need to make more creative salads.