Considering humanity probably started both of those wars unprovoked, they probably had it coming. Let's hope the chigs are merciful, at least. I'm pretty sure the bugs won't be.

Wights and Others/White Walkers are two different things, the former being slain humans and animals animated by White Walker magic and the latter an actual race of ice beings. I don't recall dragonglass or dragonsteel having any special effect on wights, nor fire having any special effect on Walkers, though I might…

I don't care for Card's work and even less for his politics, but he's not a hack writer. And he's won some of the highest literary awards in science fiction, whatever you may think of that. Coulter can't even string together paragraphs to make some kind of point. Every sentence in her books could be replaced with…

It's possible to to be entertained by something and recognize it has little or no cultural or intellectual value. Most people would call this a "guilty pleasure", "trash reading", a "beach book", "mindless fun", etc. I thought the heli-carrier was dumb too, the only reason it was there was because a) it's from the…

Maybe that helps explain the rise of near-future sci-fi and decline of far-future sci-fi in the 1990s? Well into the late 1980s, science fiction still had the Soviet Union existing centuries into the future. After its breakup in the early 1990s, and the breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, who wanted to speculate…

Plus I'm not really sure how reality style TV shooting really fits into a medieval society that doesn't have television.

Why can't they both be on the soundtrack?

Neil Postman talked about this in one of his books. The End of Education, maybe? Something about mass culture indoctrinating us into elevating trivia to the level of knowledge. Like when reporters ask a politician or official a question with a complex answer, there's pressure to give a soundbite instead of a detailed…

Ramirez (Sean Connery's character) was originally from ancient Egypt, to further confuse the issue.

That's the problem with the Highlander franchise. You can have awesome Immortals from any place and culture in Earth's history, like the TV series showed us, but the brand is called "Highlander", not "Immortals". So if you don't have an actual Highlander in your cast, you confuse the audience. At least that's what the…

"Ooo, baby, how did you know stabbing yourself and not dying was one of my turn-ons?" To be fair the love interest in the first film was a scholar of antique swords so maybe she had some kind of cutting fetish?

I think, much like with Battle: Los Angeles, I enjoyed it more than I should have because I thought about it. Both Battleship and Battle: LA have dull plots and even duller character development, and generic action scenes, but the aliens showed just enough intelligence in their tactics—unlike say, those moronic…

I was pretty much hoping against hope that Snape would turn out to be the real hero around the time of Order of the Phoenix, and was pleasantly surprised when I turned out to be right (though not for the reasons I thought).

I shouldn't like Battle: LA. The saving grace for me is that unlike a lot of recent alien invasion flicks (*cough, cough* Cowboys vs. Aliens), the aliens actually have some kind of tactics. Yeah, they're basically the same a modern professional army would use, which makes me think they wanted to make a modern war…

This kind of thing is the reason I could never get into Big Two superhero comics as a teenager (right around the late 80s/early 90s Image/grim and gritty/endless crossovers/variant covers/pre-comics crash era). With a few exceptions, most individual storylines were pretty dumb, without the whole zany collage of past…

"Wernher von Braun, one of the head developers, never wanted to make a missile...The Americans grabbed all the V-2s and V-2 parts that they could, and carted them back to the United States to do exactly what von Braun had originally wanted to do with the rocket: go to space."

Well, my Dublin-raised coworker, when asked what he was doing on St. Patrick's Day, responded "hiding in my bedroom with the sheets pulled over my head, waiting for it to be over."

Rotten Tomatoes is (thankfully) not Metacritic; it doesn't average "scores". RT slots every review into one of two binary categories: "fresh" or "rotten". A review that says the film "has its moments but is forgettable" will be treated the same as a review that considers the film a cultural blight that should be…

Well, if they're splitting Storm of Swords into two seasons like the rumours say, he might survive to Season 4 Episode 6?

This is another step towards the SQUID technology featured in the under-appreciated James Cameron/Kathryn Bigelow joint, Strange Days.