But there were real sets and real fire effects. How much of that would have been CGIed today?

Michael Moorcock, Hideaki Anno and George R. R. Martin all managed to do that while still writing interesting stories with compelling characters. Quentin being whiny, I could tolerate (Harry Potter's not particularly interesting until the third book). The rest of the cast being uninteresting? Not so much.

My only real regret was how rushed everything was. The X-Men needed more development and I didn't see why the great bromance had to fall apart at the end. I wanted those guys to do more movies together. Otherwise, a great homage to silly 60s spy thrillers. I never would have thought of the Hellfire Club as SPECTRE,…

I agree the book gets much better after they leave Brakebills. Unlike you, I'm not sure it's worth slogging through the first 2/3 of the book. It's not because it pales in comparison to Harry Potter, it's that none of the characters appealed to me until after they left the school. I neither liked them, nor sympathized…

The police procedural lends itself extremely well to speculative fiction settings. Detectives by definition have to be nosy, poke around in all kinds of places and talk to people from all walks of life. It's a great way to deliver details and exposition about the setting without coming across as forced, clunky or…

To turn it around, science fiction writers, being a cohort of intelligent and imaginative people, have so thoroughly explored these concepts in the last several decades that real-world terrorists, bureaucrats, generals, politicians and intelligence analysts couldn't come up with anything original. I read about a…

Most big-budget movies featuring large-scale devastation are going to pick cities with international recognition. NYC has lots of easily recognizable landmarks. San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Moscow and Sydney often get targeted for similar reasons.

Actually, Battle LA worked better than all the recent alien invasion movies because it didn't offer any real explanation for the alien invasion, as it was focused on ground-pounders vs. ground-pounders. And more importantly, the aliens seemed to have some understanding of tactics. My friend and I speculated it would…

Yes, and because of that, in numerous past versions of this quiz, people regularly think lines from Shakespeare come from the Bible. This is hardly the first time this "problem" has been brought up.

This was hands-down the best boast from B5 and strong contender for best ever. Pretty much every badass boast Sheridan or Ivanova made after "Severed Dreams" was an attempt to duplicate the pure awesome of Delenn's.

"There is no best sword" is a good article on the topic. Arms races existed well before firearms did, and most swords represent an attempt to deal with a new defensive tactic or armour.

Ezekiel 23:20 is usually my go-to passage for these arguments. :-)

Yeah, what's the source for the "rising violence we're seeing in people"? Every time I see crime statistics, they suggest violent crime in the US and Canada has dropped dramatically over the last 30 years (with maybe a slight spike in the early or mid 2000s), though admittedly I don't know about the rest of the world.…

Lately I've noticed a lot of movies today have the main character doing a voiceover narration. Usually explaining exactly what's happening on screen, or explaining their emotional state when that should come out through acting. It's starting to drive me mental!

I appreciated that for once, the obstructionist civilian bureaucrat arguing for sensible precautions turned out to be right. That's about all I appreciated about this.

Frankly, I'd put Xena on the top of this list. She spent the first season and a half of her show just trying to live down her old rep.

People consider A View to a Kill the worst in the franchise? Have they seen Moonraker or The Man With the Golden Gun?