It’s great to finally see a new fantasy or science fiction movie that is hopeful as opposed to the glut of movies that are set in apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic worlds.

With NBC I have zero faith in this. Their stuff skews too soapy, and this will probably get cancelled after a season, maybe two if they’re lucky.

Yep. The Invisible Man getting sodomized by Hyde in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen always felt like it was thrown in there just because he could.

Fake Christians: Consider White Supremacy A Religion

I am losing my goddamned mind.
I thought I wanted this 23 years ago in high school when I read the Infinity Gauntlet for the first time.
I thought I knew what this would feel like.
I was so very, very, VERY wrong.
I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what it would feel like, what it would cost, and how excited I would feel at 42…

idk if the film goes into it, but the book does. It’s appropriately grim and dystopian.

The book really improves as it goes along, and moves beyond the wacky, episodic adventures of its first half. Then the later books in the series really pick up, and do some fascinating things with the setting. It also has very atypical characters for a novel of this story, and its rejection of the chosen one and…

Always has been

In my childhood, there were four book series that were the height of stoking my imagination.

-Harry Potter
-A Series of Unfortunate Events
-Pendragon
-Artemis Fowl

While I still feel like this movie is a couple years too late to be coming out now, I’m still cautiously optimistic to see the little bastard of an evil…

It seams like they’ve done away with the mechanical strap on wings for the fairies. If they don’t have the conspiracy nut centaur in this movie who wears tinfoil hats to keep the humans from reading his mind, I’m going to burn the theater down!

I enjoyed reading your well-educated and insightful comentary. The WWII vets had seen the horrors of good people complacently allowing the worst of humanity to ascend to power.

Per the io9 aarticle “Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever,” sci-fi author Redfern Jon Barrett — now there’s a memorable name! — came up with the attractive and useful term “ambitopia,” for something that’s neither a utopia nor a dystopia but somewhat in between, and typically leaning more toward utopia.…

Beyond simple nausea at the thought of Starfleet sinking so low, there’s also the rather more pragmatic and substantial point that cowboy stunts like the ones Section 31 indulges in just don’t work. At worst they make the agency and the government sponsoring it look like a bunch of damned fools, like the Bay of Pigs…

I don’t mind Section 31 in the context it was originally introduced. We’d had three years of TOS, seven of TNG, five of DS9, and three of Voyager. All sorts of stories had been told with the Federation as the unimpeachable moral centre of the universe. The later seasons of DS9 had the opportunity of showing that…

I think Section 31's also a highlight of the difference between post-WWII optimism (Roddenberry) and post-Vietnam cynicism (the younger writers who have since taken over the show). It’s not just that S31 is a bit of a lazy kludge (though it is), but also that it was wholly unnecessary in the kind of universe…

I get where they’re coming from both in wanting to critique the idea of an idealistic utopia and from a writer’s perspective wanting to create challenges and conflict, but I still kinda don’t like it. I have pages worth of thoughts and strong opinions about the “Hard men making hard choices” trope, but in the end I jus…

Not surprisingly, Rick’s concerns turned out to be all the reasons I disliked the movie. I have read and enjoyed the books, but I am seldom ever against film revisions (the movies Jurassic Park and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory deviated from their source material to no or very little ill effect). But what we…

The one thing that makes the Riordan books stand out is their quirky sense of humor. The plots are pretty paint-by-numbers changeling YA fantasy, but they’re funny.  Making a movie that tried way to hard to be deadly serious was mistake one, and they just made things worse from there.

Which means they barely broke even if that; general rule of thumb is that a movie needs to make about 2.5x its budget to break even once theater distribution, marketing, and actor/producer cuts get handed out, and the studios get less of the international % (where Percy 2 in particular made its money) because of the…

Wow.