My Recent Reading List (December 2020)

Being that I'm a high-school teacher, I get a lot more time off than the average bear. This past week-ish, I've been using my free time to either catch up on reading or take notes from books I've read previously but had sitting around for weeks or months.

Here's a partial list of books I've read, books I'm reading, and books I've heard about and am trying to get hold of. If any of these sound interesting, please buy through Amazon because these are Associates links. :)

Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War-This is about how the South was far from united during the (American) Civil War. It makes the very strong case that if you combined the poor whites and the slaves, the majority of people in the South actually opposed secession, and many people who had supported it became disillusioned as the war went on owing to the mistreatment of the common people by the Confederate government, widespread poverty at home, draft-dodging by the rich and the plantation owners, etc. This is prime research material for the sequels to Battle for the Wastelands, since this world is roughly between the Civil War and WWI in terms of technology and social development (with the exception of slavery) and the late-war Confederacy provides a good example of how a society during this time period could collapse internally.

(The Confederacy also made some obvious mistakes that Grendel, the Wastelands series' Big Bad, can avoid. For example, the planters promised to grow food crops to feed the Confederate armies...but instead grew cotton and tobacco for the mountains of cash they could make. Although the cotton trade helped the Confederacy secure armaments and other useful materials from abroad--the book doesn't touch on that--it also contributed to starvation at home that prompted riots in the cities and desertion from the armies. Grendel, who's been a soldier since he was fifteen and is now in his mid fifties, will have the experience to know this is a bad idea and the dictatorial power and strength of will to make sure this doesn't happen.)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind-A condensed history of the human race I got as a birthday present but only now just got around to reading. Very simple and to the point, very detailed. Some interesting ideas about the nature of human thought processes versus that of our extinct kindred like the Neanderthals and how that extends to things like the establishment of communities beyond the tribe (i.e. a nation, a religion, an economic system, etc). I'd already read the author's book Homo Deus, but not this one.

Artemis-Another birthday book I've only just gotten started on. Crime and shenanigans in the first city on the Moon. :) This is by the author of The Martian, which I found in a free-book box but haven't read yet.

A People's History of the Civil War-This covers a lot of the same ground as Bitterly Divided (it is, after all, by the same author), but also includes the experiences of Native Americans out west and poor people, white and black, in the North. Basically there was a very strong anti-conscription movement in the North, which is typically only discussed in the context of the New York City draft riots. Given how I've noted the steampunk era was full of class conflict, I can mine this for information as well.

Stars In Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign-In Battle for the Wastelands and its companion novella "Son of Grendel," most of the action is centered on a platoon (30-40 men) or company (100 men). The largest combat sequences in Battle involve forces that are perhaps a brigade (3,000 to 5,000 men) in size. Things scale up in the sequels significantly. I've also requested author Shelby Foote's novel about the Battle of Shiloh from the library to similarly pillage, since a novel would go into more detail about the experiences of a man on the ground so to speak.

A Nest of Corsairs: The Fighting Karamanlis of Tripoli-This is an older book about a pirate dynasty that ruled Tripoli as the (nominal) subordinates of the Ottoman sultan, but it has some truly vivid descriptions of the environment of Ottoman Tripoli that I copied wholesale into my notes to use as inspiration for sequences in the Wastelands world involving the Iron Desert as well as a "flintlock fantasy" set in a fantasyland version of the early modern Mediterranean. Although it's old-fashioned in some of its language, it's a very interesting read.

Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World-The Cobb County library has it but the Atlanta-Fulton library doesn't, so I requested an interlibrary loan. Since those are closed down right now, who knows when I'll actually read it. This book discusses the Christianization of Rome and the resulting effects on both Roman and broader Western society. Based on the reviews, the author (although not a Christian and sometimes very critical of Christianity) makes the argument that this improvement has been broadly positive.

Sea Stories: My Life In Special Operations-This is an autobiography of Admiral William McRaven, a longtime Navy SEAL who ultimately planned the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. A lot of interesting stuff about the military in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, plus some of the Wastelands books involve dirigible raids with assassination in mind, so I can use this as a model.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic In History-I haven't read this yet, but I have put it on hold from the library. It's about the Spanish Flu, which spread like COVID-19 but killed far worse, and its effect on science, world politics, etc. There are a bunch of people ahead of me in the line for it at the library, so a lot of people are seeing the COVID-19 parallels.

Civil War Commando: William Cushing and the Daring Raid to Sink The Ironclad CSS Albemarle-I vaguely remember reading about this episode as a child in one of my grandparents' Civil War books, but I recently heard about this on the History Unplugged podcast. This sounds like a pretty cool episode in and of itself, plus it's more research material for Wastelands. The Atlanta-Fulton library doesn't have it and interlibrary loans are shut down, so I might have to bite the bullet and buy it.

Guest Post: Introducing SDI-PUNK, Or The Once And Future 1980s

It's morning in America, it's high noon in the Cold War, and America is on the HIGH-WA-AY TO . . . THE DAN-GER ZONE!

(Admit it, dear reader: you sang that last bit along with me.)

SDI-Punk is yet another form of retrofuturism, just as Steampunk reflects the Victorian vision of the future with its airships and steam-powered hardware, Dieselpunk represents a weird World War II, and Atompunk gives us the future as seen from a time when we really did vaporize entire islands as physics experiments.

SDI-Punk crosses the line of departure in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is focused on the military, intelligence gathering, and the military-industrial complex. The centerpiece of SDI-Punk is right there on the label: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and advanced aerospace technologies. The purpose of SDI was two-fold; first, to do research and development on ballistic missile defense, in order to invert the calculus that favored offense over defense; second, to help open a new "technological front" in the Cold War, outflanking the entire Soviet military industrial complex.

In our history, SDI was, arguably, the killing blow to the edifice that was the Soviet Union. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped that the USSR was "Upper Volta with missiles." Without missiles, the USSR was a ramshackle imperium where the bosses pretended to pay the workers, and in return the workers pretended to work. SDI eventually died quietly in 1993, barely a decade after it began, apparently no longer necessary because the Cold War was over.

But what if the USSR had been made of somewhat sterner stuff? SDI may have been championed by a Republican President, but it had bipartisan support in an era where "conservative Democrats" still existed. Had the Cold War still been going by the time a Democrat moved into 1600, SDI might have had a bureaucratic and legislative momentum of its own, perhaps eventually leading to deployed weapons.

SDI was just one piece of a much larger scheme of technological flanking maneuver in both the military and civilian realms. Other pieces included stealth aircraft (which would render most of the USSR's very expensive air defense network useless), smart weapons (more targets killed per sortie flown), advanced communications and intelligence systems (making the entire force more responsive and agile), Tomahawk land attack missiles (making US Navy surface ships--which had, since the end of WW2, been relegated to carrier escort missions--into lethal threats that would need to be tracked just like the carriers; this would overload the Soviet ocean surveillance system by giving it too many things to do at once), and using the KGB's penchant for technological theft to pass sabotaged equipment and unworkable designs to the Soviet Union.

The result of all that military investment played out on American television screens during Operation Desert Storm, when a U.S.-led coalition took only six weeks to turn the fourth-largest army in the world into the second-largest army in Iraq.

But enough of geopolitics and grand strategy. Like all literary punk, SDI-Punk is as much about the aesthetic and zeitgeist as it is about story and characters. So, what do we have to work with?

MORNING IN AMERICA

We were coming out of the post-Apollo, post-Vietnam, and post-1974 oil shock doldrums. NASA was returning to manned spaceflight with the Shuttle; it was easy to envision successor systems that would have a lower cost per pound to orbit. We actually started doing blue-collar stuff in space--fixing busted hardware in low orbit instead of simply writing it off.

High-end sports cars were almost universally wedge-shaped. (This is the way! I have spoken!)

Women's shoulders were padded, and women's hair was big. The mullet was popular among men, although not actually called that at the time; sometimes it was called "helmet hair," or the "Tennessee Tophat." Lee Iacocca made the white collar on a colored shirt the power fashion statement for men.

Personal computers were in their infancy (most home computers through the period had less memory than a typical CPU has for cache memory today), and networking was even more primitive (2400 baud over a dial-up modem was considered extremely quick until about 1988 or so). Nobody had any real idea what would happen, so predictions were all over the place, and almost nobody foreseeing anything like the World-Wide Web, social networking, online shopping, or Netflix. Computers and their impact on culture were trivial compared to today, and most of the impact was hype as opposed to substance. Computer networks, when they did appear and did play a role, looked like over-glorified USENET, without much in the way of graphics or video.

In Maryland, an insurance salesman named Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt For Red October, which became a sleeper best-seller, was praised by President Reagan as "the perfect yarn," and finally gave an identity to a genre known as the "technothriller," which fused real-world political and military strategy, operations, and military/law enforcement tactics into (usually) readable popular literature.

Music was . . . well, it was the 1980s. (You really did have to be there.) MTV actually played music videos. Hair metal, synthpop, rap music, punk rock, album-oriented rock, heartland rock, and many other genres coexisted happily, cross-pollinated one another, and even (in my never humble opinion) reached their peak expression in this era. 

HIGH NOON IN THE COLD WAR

Detente was dead, mostly because Ivan didn't play nice in the 1970s. The Cold War fell to a nadir in 1983, with the following events:

March: In a televised speech, President Ronald Reagan asked, rhetorically, if it would not be better to save lives, rather than to avenge them? That speech was the beginning of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Critics labeled the idea "Star Wars" and joked about "Ronnie Raygun." Most ordinary folks thought it was a good idea.

September: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down after intruding into Soviet airspace (the West maintained the intrusion was accidental; the Soviets insisted that the plane was on an espionage mission). A false alarm in Moscow occurs when an early warning satellite over North America gives false indications of an American strategic missile launch. The duty controller overrides the false alerts.

October: The US invades Grenada to prevent it from becoming a Soviet satellite. This freaked out the Soviet Union, because up to that point their understanding of the rules was "What's mine is mine, and if I can grab it, what's yours is mine, too." The Americans weren't supposed to grab stuff off of the Soviets! 

November: A NATO command post exercise, "Able Archer," is much more extensive than usual. The Soviets interpret this as a sign of a possible first strike by the United States, and go to nuclear alert in Eastern Europe.

Doctrinal revolution was underway inside the military, as the American way of war changed radically in the air, land, and sea domains (much of it coming out of the lessons of Vietnam--failure is a very good teacher), and space becoming a potential fourth domain to military operations. 

The 1980s aerospace future was stealthy (manned) combat aircraft; easy access to space with a manned space station, and eventually a moonbase; laser battle stations would patrol the cislunar void; and hypersonic airliners would fly to the other side of the world in just two hours. (Implied in that last bit: hypersonic bombers would deliver conventional or nuclear weapons to the other side of the world in just two hours, or the Pentagon would take $4,000,000,000 off the price tag. Avoid the Noid!)

POLITICAL HORIZONS: THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY

The political arguments of this era are interesting because we can see the hazy outlines of today's politics that are driven by global economics, viral videos, and the 24-hour news cycle.

CNN went on the air during this time, and began building the 24-hour news cycle.

The big SDI-related tie-in was the nuclear freeze movement, which arguably spawned SDI as a response. People were made uneasy by talk of building up US nuclear forces, and a wide swath of the political spectrum--generally left of center, but some on the right were at least sympathetic to the idea--settled on the idea of freezing nuclear weapons acquisition and research in place. Whether or not this was a good idea, it became very popular. A counterpart movement arose in Europe due to the impending deployment of improved theater-level nuclear forces by the United States. SDI came about in response to these ideas; perhaps defenses against ballistic missiles would make them less useful.

Political activism ranged from benefit concerts to fight famine in Ethiopia to calls for American schools and pension funds to divest themselves of companies based in or with significant business interests in South Africa as a means of fighting against apartheid. The rise of satellite news and modern telecommunications meant that local activism and non-governmental entities could begin to affect global issues, continuing a process that had begun in Vietnam, with the war being brought to American living rooms every night. A truly "punk" SDI-Punk would take this into account.

The flip side of this was that moral panics could be started in the same way. The 1980s saw a great deal of fear of "satanic ritual abuse" of children, arguably started by the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California. Sloppy analysis and even sloppier questioning of children (frequently involving the children being led by their questioners to the desired answers) led to convictions and plea bargains; eventually, the case petered out in a series of acquittals and hung juries years later. The sensational allegations are much better remembered than the final results.

Rural America was starting its decline; the farm foreclosure crisis began in the early 1980s as a decline in commodity prices hit heavily-leveraged farmers hardest. Further exacerbating the crisis was the rise of globalization, with maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories in Mexico) taking over production from factories located in small towns all across rural America. Losing a small factory in Chicago is bad enough for those who work there; losing that same factory in a town of 10,000 is a regional economic calamity. This made for a one-two punch that sometimes turned what had been thriving communities into near ghost towns where the only remaining industries were growing marijuana, cooking meth, and/or facilitating trafficking, whether in narcotics or people. Farm Aid was a benefit concert in 1985 to help family farms that eventually evolved into a permanent fixture as the artists and the sponsors realized the problems weren't going away.

Urban renewal and gentrification had been topics of discussion in policy and academic circles prior to the 1980s, but the rise of "Yuppies" (Young Urban Professionals) and entrepreneurship brought the conflicts inherent to these efforts from the back rooms of city managers and local community news to the big screen via the Robocop films. Homelessness, gentrification, and urban crime were all examined through these lenses.

BADDIES, BIG AND SMALL

The big scale antagonists are those devious, never-to-be-fully-trusted Commies in the Kremlin. Even in the very endgame of the Cold War, and absolutely no one expected the entire edifice of Soviet Communism and its satellite states to just collapse as they did. (I was on active duty in 1989; if you'd told me on January 1st that by the end of the year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down and German reunification would be on the negotiating table, I would've laughed in your face.)

Lesser antagonists would include various flavors of terrorist (transnational terrorism was a much different beast than today; Moscow funded terrorism in the Free World on the theory that the enemy of their enemy was, at the very least, a potentially useful idiot), drug lords, and regional powers. 

One notable omission from the rogues' gallery of the era: China. They weren't expected to ever be a major player outside of low-end manufacturing. 

(Shows you how much we knew.)

Other possible antagonists, especially for a noir/gritty story, might include devious defense contractors falsifying test results (this has always been a problem, particularly among low-end "schlocker" subcontractors supplying components to larger firms). 

Near the end of this era, Japan began to appear as a potential threat, with several novels focusing on the nature of changing technology and the fear of losing entire economic sectors to Japanese competition; a few of these posited that Japan's increasing economic power might lead to military conflict with a (relatively or actually) declining America.

The 1980s were the decade of the corporate raider, leveraged buy-outs, junk bonds, and insider trading. This could potentially affect military contractors. One could even have Soviet-financed corporate raiding . . .

The current wave of 1980s nostalgia shows no real sign of ending anytime soon; the tropes of the SDI-Punk genre and the 1980s in general are a fruitful vein just waiting to be mined by creators in all fields.

Up next...existing works of "SDI-Punk" in film and especially literature...

About the author: Ken Prescott is a Marine Corps veteran. He has worked as a management analyst, medical coder, and human resources specialist. His novel Not By Sight is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon. He lives with his wife in San Diego, California.

Blast From The Past Movie Review: VAN HELSING (2004)

I first saw Van Helsing back when I was in college. I don't remember too clearly how much I liked it then--I think I liked it broadly but didn't like the end. I did use a GIF of Richard Roxburgh's Dracula as an AOL Instant Messenger avatar, at least for awhile.

The film podcast Myopia Movies dedicated October as vampire-movie month, with Van Helsing originally planned as the Patreon special. Although I wasn't slated to participate, I'd rented the movie already and so watched it anyway. Here's a free snippet and instructions how to get whole episode FREE. And now my review..

The Plot

Amnesiac Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is a monster-hunter working for a Vatican knightly order. Owing to how many of the creatures he kills revert to human form upon death and how close-mouthed the Vatican is about supernatural threats like vampires, werewolves, etc. he's viewed by the general public as a serial killer and is the most wanted criminal in Europe. After dispatching Mr. Hyde in Paris when we first meet him, the Vatican sends him to Transylvania to assist the Valerious family in their centuries-long battle with none other than Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh).

Upon arrival he allies with Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsdale), the last living member of the family after the presumed death of her brother Velkan (Will Kemp), and does battle with Dracula and his three brides. Things get complicated...Dracula seems to have some kind of prior history with Van Helsing and the vampire king has a very dangerous and complex plan involving none other than Frankenstein's Monster (Shuler Hensley) and werewolves.

The Good

*For starters, the movie is pretty exciting and never dull. That's why, even though there's so much to criticize about it, I'm going to give it a good review. It's just plain fun. I watched about 1/3 of it on the elliptical at the gym and it made the time go by so much faster.

*The acting works. Hugh Jackman is good as Van Helsing, while David Wenham is fine as the inventor-friar Carl. Kate Beckinsdale does a decent job as Anna. Hensley, who won the Tony Award for his role as the pitiable but dangerous Jud Frye in Oklahoma!, puts a lot of pathos into his portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster. But the one who's clearly having the most fun is Richard Roxburgh, who plays Dracula himself. He chews the scenery like he's chewing on somebody's neck and it's always entertaining. In particular he plays Dracula incredibly snarky and I liked that.

*One innovation Van Helsing brings to vampire films is the characterization of Dracula's vampire brides. Rather than just being residents of the Count's house of horrors in Transylvania without individual characterization (this fanfic even depicts them as a sort of hive mind), they play a major role in driving the plot and have personalities.

*I also liked the characterization of Frankenstein's Monster. Rather than some freak with the mind of a toddler (or in the original film an executed murderer) in the body of a professional wrestler, he's very intelligent, has some very pointed things to say about monster-hunting, reveres Dr. Frankenstein as his father, and is even a devout Catholic despite being, well, the parts of seven men strung together and reanimated with electricity. I think this is more heavily tied in with the novel where the creature was more intelligent.

*There's a lot of humor in this movie. I laughed out loud several times.

*The Valerious patriarch who goes missing before the story begins is referred to as "the King of the Gypsies." Given how in the original Dracula novel and the 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula his minions are explicitly depicted as being Gypsies (or Romani as they prefer to be called), this seems like a deliberate choice to deconstruct the old story. Rarely does one put "thoughtful" and this film together in one sentence, but it looks like they put some thinking into it.

The Bad

*For all its spectacle and fun, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense. For starters, when Anna tells the villagers that Van Helsing is the first man to kill a vampire in over 100 years, that raises some questions as to what exactly the Valerious family has been doing in all the centuries they've been fighting Dracula. Have they been keeping the vampires contained as much as possible to keep them from harming others, but avoiding killing them outright because that might provoke revenge attacks? Given how they don't initially know where Castle Dracula even is, that seems unlikely. Does Dracula primarily use werewolves and human minions, with the vampires only coming out to fight occasionally? It would've been better if Anna had lectured the villagers about their ingratitude for Van Helsing saving their lives.

*The action goes back and forth from Transylvania to Rome, often by carriage. Does distance mean anything? If Dracula has a townhouse, it'd probably be in a much closer big city like Bucharest.

*Also, why does Van Helsing try to kill Dracula with methods that don't work (in this universe) like the silver stake? If the Valerious family has been fighting Dracula for centuries and tried various means of killing him (Anna talks about burning, stabbing, clubbing etc., which means they've gone hand-to-hand with him repeatedly), why aren't they sharing this with the Vatican? And why didn't the Vatican share this with Van Helsing? Someone has blundered.

*Does being a vampire mean lack of volume control? Dracula and his brides sure like to yell and scream overdramatically, especially the shrieking-prone brides. Roxburgh's hammy Dracula is fun, but the brides can get pretty annoying.

*For a world in which Catholicism is factually true, their take on Catholic theology is...dubious. For starters, Valerious the Elder making a vow to God (and apparently some kind of deal with the leadership of the Church) that nobody in his family would go to Heaven until Dracula was dead and the cardinal's worrying the entire Valerious family would end up in Purgatory if the family were killed before Dracula's death. Firstly, even if Valerious the Elder was foolish enough to make such a vow in the first place (see the Hebrew judge Jephthah), the cardinal has no reason to think God would honor it. The only way for this to make sense theologically is if the most extreme version of the apostles' authority to bind and loose (see Matthew 16:19) and that the Catholic leadership and in particular the Pope are the successors to the apostles in authority are both correct. If Catholicism is factually true the latter works, but the former is really pushing it. On a lesser note, Purgatory is temporary, even if it is unpleasant, so the Valerious family will enter Heaven eventually. When dealing with a timeframe of eternity, even a century or two matters little. Also the film implies that Van Helsing is actually the Archangel Gabriel, who has taken human form but lost his memory. Angels do not work that way.

It would have been much better if the Valerious family has been keeping Dracula contained in Romania, but they've recently suffered a series of reverses like the disappearance of Anna and Velkan's father. Van Helsing is sent in as reinforcements, since if the family is wiped out, Dracula will be free to spread his dark influence across Europe. And give Van Helsing a more conventional origin story. He's just a monster-hunter working for the Vatican and that's it.

*Also, Van Helsing's knightly order is pretty multi-faith...there are Muslim mullahs, Sikhs, and Buddhist monks present at its headquarters in the Vatican and Dracula comments that Van Helsing has been trained by "monks and mullahs from Tibet to Istanbul." That kind of ecumenism isn't something that would happen in that era. Leo XIII was Pope at the time and although he was more left-wing politically and economically, he wouldn't acknowledge salvation outside the Catholic Church (that didn't happen until Vatican II), let alone outside of Christianity. Furthermore, when faced with evidence that the Cross and other specifically Christian holy items have supernatural power against evil, I imagine non-Christian witnesses would convert relatively quickly. This is empirically factual evidence of the truth of Christianity, and Catholicism specifically. Better to have it all Catholics, but multiple ethnicities. The Japanese Christians would have just come out of hiding, there's the Eastern Rite drawn from the Greek world, the Middle Eastern Maronites (whom ignorant Westerners might assume were Muslims), etc. 

Hmm...Van Helsing trained in ninjutsu by one of the Hidden Christians? That'd be cool. Such a character could've even been a replacement for Friar Carl if they wanted to go with "martial arts" over "steampunk technology"--a man who'd secretly practiced Christianity as an instructor in the genocidally anti-Christian Shogunate's official ninja academy would do a very good job in training VH in sneaking around and assassination.

*Valerious the Elder's vow is also a missed opportunity for when Dracula attempts to seduce Anna. He can play up the idea that she'll never go to Heaven, so she might as well live forever on Earth. And owing to the people's ingratitude toward the family for protecting them from supernatural threats, might as well eat them too. Even if theologically that's all nonsense, Anna might not know that and Dracula can use it to manipulate her.

*Although the brides do more than just perv on Jonathan Harker (who isn't even in the film), they could have been better developed as characters. Per the almighty TVTropes, in interviews the actresses revealed a lot about their back-stories...one is Dracula's favorite and primary wife, another was a Gypsy in her mortal life, and one hates Anna because she thinks that Dracula will try to make her one of his vampire brides. Some of that stuff is hinted at in the film (Anna and vampire bride Aleera seem to be on a first-name basis with each other), but not enough.

*A "king of the Gypsies" with a bad-Latin name? The Gypsies/Romani originally came from India. Depending on how assimilated they are (this one even became a Romanian prince), they might have Hungarian or Slavic names. The only way this works is if Anna and Velkan's father was elected to the position, as a sort of liaison to the non-Romani. Also, Valerious was the ancestor's first name, not his family name. I don't really have an issue with the first names--being Christians a Biblical name like Anna makes sense and Velkan sounds appropriately Eastern European, but their ancestor's first name becoming their last name? How did that happen?

The Verdict

Fun, but don't think about it too much. 8.0 out of 10. If you want to listen to my colleagues--who were much less merciful--make fun of the movie, sign up for the Patreon here.

Myopia Movies: Ranking the ALIENS Film (Except for The AVPs)

For those of you not in the know, I'm a regular participant in the film podcast Myopia Movies (formerly Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, but we haven't done the "defense" part in a long time) and we have a Patreon page. We did a Patreon-only series devoted to the Alien franchise, culminating in the most recent film Alien Covenant. At the end of the episode, podcast host Nic asked us to rank the films in the order we most enjoyed. I was first to go, but I was also very tired and might not have been at my most coherent, especially compared to the other three gentlemen.

(The Alien vs. Predator films have been left out because we haven't done the second yet, and the episode on Predator 2 hasn't been released yet. These are the Patreon-only films.)

So here are mine:

1. Alien-Very well-done, very atmospheric. And since the cast is so small, we can get to know them better and care more about them.

2. Aliens-Although I was visiting friends in D.C. when this episode was recorded, I remembered a lot of well-done bits from when I did see it, like Ripley's power-loader battle with the xenomorph queen, the last stand of Vazquez and Gorman, and the overall coolness of the concept. And it elaborates a lot on the xenomorph biology too, like introducing the entire concept of the queen in the first place.

3. Alien Resurrection-I found this a lot more entertaining than Alien 3, or at least the theatrical cut we saw. I also liked a lot of the concepts, like the android Annalee Call being a devout Catholic, the implied holocaust of the sapient androids, and the hilarious and super-creepy station doctor. It's also a lot more genuinely fun despite quite a number of areas it could have done better. If you sign up for the Patreon, you can read a "how I would have done it" newsletter article I wrote. :)

4. Alien 3-A ponderous boring mess that starts out by giving the audience the middle finger and killing off Hicks and Newt, the other two survivors of the first film. It's like they wanted to return to the form of the original film (no guns, one alien, confined location) but did it in a very ham-handed way. Combine it with the first Alien vs. Predator film (which I will still insist is canon) and you get into the conundrum of just whom the Bishop android model is based on. And while the earlier films used practical effects, this is where the bad CGI gets introduced into the franchise.

5. Prometheus-I'll give this movie credit for the the seriously squick-inducing "alien c-section" scene. There's not a lot in monster movies that can rattle me, but that did it. However, it suffers from idiot-character syndrome to a degree exceeded only by the next film Covenant. It also gets into "ancient aliens" theories that I have problems with on a philosophical level. To be fair, I wasn't there for this episode and the last time I saw this it was in theaters, so I might not be remembering it properly.

6. Alien Covenant-The only way the movie can be described as "character-driven" is if you focus on how absolutely moronic the characters act. Captain Chris Oram is a particularly extreme example--they visit the new planet rather than finishing repairs and continuing on their journey to the planet they'd prepared beforehand to colonize because he doesn't have the backbone to order the crew to return to their potentially-malfunctioning stasis pods. Once there, he becomes entranced with the new planet and thinks it's a perfect alternative colony than the planet they're going to even though that seems like something that would need approval from higher up. And even after killing a xenomorph the sociopathic android David was trying to tame, he trusts David even in circumstances where the most hopeful and naive person should be screaming "NO!" And although the idea of having the crew consist of seven married couples to preserve harmony on the ship during a long journey seems like a good idea, we see the dangers of that up close--characters endanger the mission by taking stupid risks to protect their spouses and the death of crew members cause disproportionate problems for that reason. Not to mention it's my recollection David was literally dismembered in Prometheus--even if he was able to help teach Dr. Shaw how to rebuild him, he's not going to be at 100% function.

(It would have been interesting if, having spent ten years with only the talking severed head of David for company, the villain was a deranged Dr. Shaw instead. She could carry his head around like Jason carries the head of Freddy at the end of Freddy vs. Jason.)

Furthermore, the cast is too large for the film to develop significantly and the movie butchers the lore by depicting David as having created the xenormorphs within ten years of the prior film, even though there are ancient murals in Prometheus depicting xenomorphs. Furthermore, the Engineer ship Ripley and friends find in Alien is itself quite old, has thousands of new-style xenomorph eggs rather than the few David managed to create, and was captained by an Engineer. As somebody (I think it was Nic) pointed out in the podcast, if they make a third film, they're going to have to get very creative to avoid it contradicting Alien.

So those are my thoughts on which of the Alien films are the best. If you want to listen to the podcast episodes and see the "How I Would Have Done It" article for Alien Resurrection, sign up for the Myopia Patreon. The AR analysis is in the newsletter that went out on May 4, 2020.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: 10,000 BC (2008)

Once upon a time, not long after I graduated from the University of Georgia, a movie called 10,000 BC came out. The reviews were poor and I probably had more important things to do, so I didn't bother to see it even though I vaguely thought it looked kind of cool. However, I eventually got Netflix to watch The Dark Crystal show and obviously I'm not going to pay $12.99 per month for just one show, so I decided to snag this one on a whim.

The Plot

In prehistoric Europe (per the Wikipedia it's somewhere in the Ural Mountains, although I got the vibe it was just north of the Alps), a tribe of mammoth hunters adopts a orphaned girl named Evolet (played as an adult by Camilla Belle). The youth D'Leh (played as an adult by Steven Strait) soon develops a crush on her. As an adult he claims her as his woman by slaying a mammoth, only for her and many other villagers to be taken prisoner by a bunch of vaguely Semitic slave-raiders. He and some friends follow them in a rescue attempt, a journey that will ultimately take them to the Mediterranean and one of the rising civilizations of the Near East.

The Good

*No matter how ridiculous it gets, it's a fast-paced and exciting movie. It's never boring and makes good fodder for exercise--time flies when you're watching cavemen fight giant killer birds, saber-toothed cats, and maybe-Mesopotamian slave-raiders on a journey from Europe all the way to what looks like Egypt. And there are lots of exciting and awesome moments.

*There's some good imagery here, including just what it is that some of the fringe inhabitants of the evil Bronze Age empire's realm describe as birds.

*I'm glad they used prehistoric terror-birds as movie monsters. Although it's been done in the novel The Flock that was long ago optioned for film (although who knows if it'll ever be made), I don't recall it ever being done on film before.

*Although nobody is really stretching themselves, the acting is all right.

*I liked the general look of the protagonist and his tribe. Their mainstay is hunting mammoths and other large game, so their homes and clothing look to be made of animal hides and, for solid structure, bones. They're Caucasian, but they have darker skin and dreadlocks, with the lighter-skinned and blue-eyed Evolet an orphan from a different tribe. Given how the earliest humans came from Africa and genetic evidence suggests early Europeans were darker-skinned as recent as 8,000 years ago, them being in some kind of transitional state between modern notions of "white" and "black" makes sense. And the villains seem rather Mediterranean, which would make sense given how the centers of early civilization were all there and Europe (with the exception of parts of Greece and that was later) was basically a bunch of dudes in bearskins at that point. Mediterranean peoples taking European hunter-gatherers as slaves wouldn't be unrealistic--after all, scientists found a Carthaginian man with maternal-line DNA connecting him to hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in present-day Spain.

*The soundtrack is pretty good.

The Bad

*The dialogue needs a lot of improvement, especially early on in the film. It's clunky and too on-the-nose. The latter part is most blatant with the young D'Leh and Evolet--for someone who's about eight, D'Leh is remarkably poetic about his feelings for Evolet, whom he probably doesn't even really know that well at this point. The dialogue continues to be bad, leading to several moments of unintentional hilarity. Honestly I would have thought someone like Roland Emmerich could have found a better screenwriter to co-write the film with him.

*Even though they did get some of the ethnic stuff (maybe) right, as TVTropes put it, the film puts Rule of Cool ahead of anything remotely resembling historical accuracy. If you don't care about that sort of thing this isn't a problem, but if you do it's probably a low-level irritation. Seriously, an Italian or Swiss (or maybe even Russian) hunter-gatherer leads a tribe of Zulus or Kushites to war against what looks like either Egypt or Sumer that's ruled by a god-king type who may or may not be human. And one of his minions looks like a Middle Eastern John Wayne (with a mullet no less) who has the voice of a Goa'uld and talks in the Black Speech.

*It's hard to tell some of the cavemen characters apart, especially early on in the film.

*I'd have loved more on the main villain, whom we don't meet until much later. Not going into more detail for reasons of spoilers. There are some hints, but they're very blink-and-you-miss-it. I only got the clue from checking TVTropes to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The Verdict

If you're looking for a prehistoric fantasy movie in the vein of Fire and Ice or the caveman films of the late 1960s and early 1970s like When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and One Million Years BC with better special effects, go for it. A good movie to rent or stream, especially if you need something to keep you busy while you exercise. 7.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: My Science Project (1985)

Once upon a time, back when video rental stores were pretty common instead of being retro rarities, there was a video store in the Parkaire shopping center in East Cobb where I (or rather, my parents) regularly rented movies when I was in elementary school. There (I'm pretty sure it was there) I got hold of a 1980s science fiction entitled My Science Project. Before I watched the movie for Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, I remembered liking it but I didn't remember what happened in it that well. What I did remember I thought might actually be from the time-traveling section of House: The Second Story, which I saw on television.

So when Nick was looking for movies to do for Myopia, I suggested this one. We watched it as part of a whole month dedicated to "1990s precocious kids" films, although the cast seems a lot older than the denizens of a typical (as Nick would put it) "kid empowerment film" from that decade. Here's the podcast. And now for the review.

The Plot

It's two weeks before graduation and Michael Harlan (John Stockwell), who's more interested in cars than academics or his girlfriend Crystal (Pat Simmons), and his buddy Vince Latello (Fisher Stevens) don't have a science project. His old hippie science teacher Bob Roberts (Dennis Hopper) tells them that without a science project they can't graduate high school. Furthermore, to encourage him to stretch himself, he's not allowed to do a project on cars.

So Michael sneaks into an Air Force boneyard along with nerdy Ellie (Danielle von Zerneck) and salvages the engine of a fallen alien spacecraft. It sucks power from nearby sources of electricity and causes weird space-time anomalies to occur.

And then it gets plugged into the electrical grid and things really get weird...

(FYI, Jonathan R. Betuel wrote and directed this film. He's the brains behind The Last Starfighter, a previous Myopia adventure.)

The Good

*They managed to get Dennis Hopper--the Dennis Hopper--in the film. That's pretty impressive, given how the rest of the cast are no-names. I did how he portrayed his character--he's an ex-hippie who wants to encourage the kids to succeed and encourages them to not take the easy way out, even though he has to put his foot down when they're not getting their work done. Of course, he also gets waaay too into his subject matter.

*Although Michael is self-absorbed and not the most selfless and attentive boyfriend at the beginning of the film, he's more empathetic and has a much better attitude toward women than Vince. For example, when Vince says his father told him women will like him if he treats them like dirt, he asks Vince what his mother thinks about this and Vince is forced to admit his parents are divorced.

*Vince is a jerk with criminal inclinations (shaking down a student for pay-phone money, for example), but he's pretty funny. I liked how Fisher handled him.

*Vince for all his obnoxiousness is developed somewhat--even though he's just as much of a greaser as Michael, he's always got a sci-fi or monster movie reference available for whenever things get weird.

*It'd be easy to make the nerdy Sherman (Rafael Sbarge) a total put-upon victim of people with more friends and better social skills, but he's more complicated as well. He's abrasive, clearly looks down on people less intelligent than he is, and engages in some (admittedly more harmless and silly) stalking and psychological warfare toward Harlan and Ellie when they're on their kind-of date. And like Bob, he's clearly book smart but not totally up on common sense.

*At least some of the science has a basis in reality. The aliens in the film would have to be from outside our solar system (there's certainly not another technological civilization here) and in order for them to visit realistically they'd need faster-than-light travel. However, according to many Internet science types, the ability to travel faster than light implies the ability to time travel. That an alien engine presumably capable of faster-than-light travel, when fiddled with by people who don't know what they're doing, starts causing time warps as well makes sense.

*The film was clearly made in a time before angst about terrorism and school shootings and that's a good thing. I doubt the movie would be made today because plot points involving students blowing up power lines or going armed into a school to shut down a time warp wouldn't fly with the hoi polloi.

*The last part of the movie, in which all kinds of crazy time-warp stuff happens, is pretty fun.

The Bad

*When President Eisenhower is brought to see the captured flying saucer, he simply orders the Air Force to "get rid of it." That really doesn't ring true to his character. Even though he was skeptical of the military-industrial complex that began with WWII and continued into the Cold War, a captured extraterrestrial craft that "made a mockery of our interceptors" would be a treasure trove. It'd be more sensible if he ordered it taken somewhere more secure and something fell off, to be found nearly 30 years later by the protagonists of the film.

*The film jumps from Michael leaving to go on his "date" with Ellie to them sneaking into the Air Force base with no reason for it, even though he does try to explain later on. Throwing in some kind of urban legend about what went down back in the 1950s earlier in the film and have Michael decide to "impress" aspiring-journalist Ellie by investigating it would have been better. Foreshadowing and less need for after-the-fact explanations.

*A character getting sucked into an alien machine reminded me a lot of the original Ghostbusters, which came out a year before.

*The character's plan to stop the warping of reality could have been done without actually leaving the school building. Why black out the town if you can find the school's circuit breakers? They could be running around the school with all sorts of weird space-time stuff happening around them.

*One character reveals to another character their trust issues with people, trust issues that were not in evidence elsewhere in the film.

*The movie kind of drags in the middle.

*Some of the science is a bit outdated at best. For example, Neanderthals weren't Bigfoot.

*Nobody would need to be told some characters are Viet Cong. If they're 17 in 1985, they were born in 1968. The Vietnam War would have been their childhood, or something their parents or older brothers would have personally experienced.

The Verdict

It's not great, but it's not awful either. I'd say it's mediocre and only really worth seeing if you're feeling nostalgic. 6.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

The first PG-13 movie I ever saw was the original Jurassic Park back in 1993. I've been a fan of the franchise ever since--I saw the first sequel Lost World in middle school, Jurassic Park III in high school, and Jurassic World when it came out. I reviewed it and even participated in a podcast dedicated to the film. So even though the advance buzz wasn't so hot, I definitely made plans to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

The Plot

In the aftermath of the events of Jurassic World and the massive payouts the company had to make to those harmed, Isla Nublar has been abandoned again. However, it's not a paradise where once-extinct beasts can roam around freely--at least not for much longer. The island's dormant volcano has came to life and the US government, which based on Jurassic Park III seems to have been doing the lion's share of keeping the islands quarantined, has been listening to Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and is inclined to let the volcano destroy the dinosaurs.

This doesn't sit well with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is now running the Dinosaur Protection Group dedicated to protecting the dinosaurs like they're an ordinary endangered species. She allies with the late John Hammond's former partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to transport the dinosaurs to a new sanctuary, with her former boyfriend Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) along for the ride to help find his velociraptor pet/surrogate child Blue.

Unfortunately they--and the timid computer geek Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) and the take-no-shit "paleo-veterinarian" Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) from Claire's organization--find that the sinister plots to weaponize the dinosaurs (one of Jurassic World's weaker points) are still in play and drastic action might need to be taken to save them...

The Good

*I will give the film credit for taking creative risks. The island gets blown up halfway through the movie and the rest of it takes place in California, with the climax occurring at Lockwood's mansion way out in the woods. No more formulaic "how can we get people to these quarantined dangerous islands" films now. The film also gets pretty dark--there's deliberate murder (or attempted) murder of humans by other humans. Even when Malcolm and his crew sabotage InGen's attempt to capture Isla Sorna's dinosaurs in The Lost World, InGen's mercenaries rescue them from the falling trailers and include them in their attempts to get off the island rather than abandoning them to die or deliberately killing them.

*The visuals are stunning, including the dinosaur effects.

*The last quarter of the film, however ridiculous it often seems, comes off like a Gothic haunted-house horror movie, just with dinosaurs.

*Like before, Howard and Pratt are quite amusing together. And Claire has become quite the bad-ass since then. No more running around the jungle in heels for her. :)

*In general there's a lot of nice laugh-out-loud moments.

*There's a scene with a brachiosaurus that's legitimately sad, just like in the last movie. I think the last movie did it better in terms of eliciting an emotional reaction from me, but a whole lot of people found what happened poignant.

*A new type of dinosaur actually seems to have a personality and almost demonic cleverness.

The Bad

*How is the mosasaurus (really a kronosaurus due to its size) still alive if the park has been abandoned for three years? It doesn't seem like it's capable of climbing out of its pool. It would have long since starved to death trapped in its enclosure unless the pool was already stocked with fish, animals keep conveniently getting close enough for it to snag, or somebody's been feeding it.

*Apparently a tie-in in-world website of the Dinosaur Protection Group that provides a lot of the back-story, but I didn't know it existed. Consequently, I was wondering for much of the movie about Isla Sorna, which should be unaffected by the impending destruction of Isla Nublar. This is a problem--if it's that much of a plot hole, it should be explained in the movie. All they'd need is a throwaway line about how after "the spinosaurus incident" Isla Sorna's ecology collapsed and the surviving dinosaurs had to be relocated to Isla Nublar for the new park.

*There's some needless political commentary, like one of the mercenaries (a villain, unlike the awesome Roland Tembo from the second film) referring to Dr. Rodriguez as a "nasty woman." Where have I heard that before?

*There's a scene involving transfusing blood from one species of dinosaur to another. That's...not going to work. You can't transfuse from one human to another if the blood types are different and humans are all one species. The almighty TVTropes said this was like using rabbit blood in humans.

*Ian Malcolm is even more of an annoying pantheist than he was before. It's my understanding that his worries about chaos theory from the first movie had to do with the overconfidence of Hammond and his entourage that they could control these wild and dangerous animals so easily, but there was still the "nature SELECTED them for extinction" stuff. He's still on that kick in this one, even though he explicitly tells the Congressional committee that God isn't involved here. News-flash: In a purely naturalistic world (Malcolm is not a religious man, something made quite clear in the novel The Lost World), there is no "meant to be" or "wrong side of history. Things happen and people have to deal with them.

*It would have been better if the "rescue the dinosaurs" plot had taken up the entire movie--one last return to the park, rounding up the dinosaurs, some close encounters of the worst kind with big carnivores, etc. could have taken up quite a lot of time. One of the more creative features of The Lost World was the depiction of the carnotaurs as having chameleon-like camouflage, which they could have included in this one. The betrayals that take place halfway through could be a cliffhanger ending to set up the events of a third Jurassic World film, which would cover the events of the second half of the film and the consequences of those.

*Things got kind of draggy after they get off the island all the way to the dinosaur auction going badly.

*They hype up the possibilities of the dinosaurs getting loose as some kind of apocalyptic event when they're really not. Most if not all of the dinosaurs are female and there are so few dinosaurs period they wouldn't be able to create a viable breeding population even if they became established somewhere. And if the lysine contingency is still in the genes of the new batch (it's certainly still there with old-school dinosaurs like the T-Rex), many of them will die unless they can find the proper foods. The only ones I anticipate being a real problem are the kronosaurus, since it has the whole ocean to hide in, or the pterodactyls due to their ability to fly and the fact enough of them escaped Isla Nublar (and Isla Sorna earlier) that they could establish a viable breeding pool. The big carnosaurs in particular will be in zoos or trophy racks within a month or two.

*Weaponizing the dinosaurs is still a dumb idea. Unless they could teach raptors to use guns (or engineer them into creatures similar to the wolf-baboon-human chimera ghouloons from S.M. Stirling's Draka novels), it seems pretty pointless. They need too much food, the fixed costs of creating them are huge, etc. A "war raptor" might be able to do more damage on the battlefield than a "war dog" (more physically destructive, more intimidating) but it doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

The Verdict

Worth seeing once. It's not a bad movie, but it could have been done better. 7.5 out of 10.

A Grimdark Alternative Ending for the 1994 Stargate

The following discussion contains spoilers for the 1994 science-fiction film Stargate, although given how the movie is 24 years old I don't know why that's important.

In the film, Ra plans to send an American nuclear warhead back to Earth, enhanced with the type of materials his advanced technology uses (in Stargate SG-1 it's called naquadah). He states this will enhance the warhead's power 100 times and claims that he created human civilization and now he will end it.

Hold it right there. Assuming that the military sent a W78 nuclear warhead through the Stargate with O'Neill, that's 350 kilotons. A nuke enhanced with naquadah to 100x its force would be around 35 megatons. That's around a third more than the 1960s-era B41 nuclear weapon. Mount St. Helens' eruption was 25 megatons of explosive power, while Mount Pinatubo was around 70 megatons. So Ra sends the nuke back through the Stargate and it detonates in the decommissioned nuclear silo that was the base of operations for the mission. Assuming he can remotely detonate it through the gateway, he's basically just caused a volcanic eruption in the U.S. Rocky Mountains, and that assumes the mountain on top of the explosion cannot contain it. After all, underground nuclear tests generally don't disturb the surface that much.

Mount Pinatubo caused a worldwide temperature drop of one degree, and that was with smoke, gas, and other crap continuously pumping into the atmosphere from the bowels of the Earth and spreading all over the world rather than a one-time big bang and, depending on what's around it, a big radioactive forest fire. Assuming the equivalent of Mount Pinatubo, Ra has just caused--maybe--a repeat of the Year Without a Summer in 1994. That would suck if it causes drought and famine in marginal areas, but it would not destroy modern civilization.

That said, there's a more grimdark possibility here. If there's a major nuclear detonation in the US, it could potentially lead to a confrontation with Russia, although I doubt President Clinton would have ordered a nuclear strike not knowing what happened. Assuming the US panicked and launched on Russia and the Russians fired back, you could have a civilization-ending nuclear exchange depending on what missiles are fired, where they detonate, etc. Bonus points if there's a nuclear winter to cause famine and ecological collapse in otherwise unaffected areas.

Ra (or some other opportunistic Goa'uld who notices) could wait a few years or decades for civilization to collapse, show up and pull his "I'm a god" trick on the debased, uneducated descendants of the exchange survivors, and assume control over Earth. I'm now imagining the Earth's surviving libraries as the equivalents of the fresco Sha'uri showed Dr. Jackson that depicted Ra bringing Earthlings to Abydos and the rebellion that ended his rule on Earth thousands of years ago.

Of course, Ra in the movie doesn't actually seem powerful to pull that off, even if post-nuclear civilization is reduced to medieval levels. He's got a couple fighter jets, one spaceship, and a few guards with armor resembling that of Egypt's gods. The basis of his rule is deception, not raw strength. He might not be able successfully take control of Earth, although one of the TV series' Goa'uld with their planetary empires, navies, etc. would.

That said, I could easily imagine him taking control over part of it. Maybe he keeps Dr. Jackson alive using the sarcophagus long enough to see him returning to Egypt and re-establishing himself as god there once more.

How's that for a Downer Ending?

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Deep Blue Sea (1999)

As some of you may know I'm an Eagle Scout, having earned the rank in 2001. As part of my experiences with Boy Scout Troop 1011 in Marietta, GA, I visited the Scouts' major oceanic campsite Sea Base in the Florida Keys twice, once to go sailing and once to go SCUBA diving. During the first trip, several of my peers and I decided to go see the movie Deep Blue Sea after we got back. I remember really liking it at the time, but how well did it hold up? That's what Myopia: Defend Your Childhood is for.

Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

Dr. Susan McAllister (Saffron Burrows), who took care of her Alzheimers-afflicted father during his dying days, presides over a laboratory in which mako sharks with enlarged brains are being bred to harvest for a compound intended to treat degenerative brain disease. After the escape of one shark makes national news, she brings Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson), her chief investor, to her oceanic lab in a bid to prevent it from being shut down. There he meets other members of the staff, like parolee "shark wrangler" Carter (Thomas Jane) and "Preach" (L.L. Cool J), a former clergyman who's now the facility's cook.

Unfortunately having a larger brain-to-body-size ratio means that these sharks are more intelligent than the norm, and they want out. As a hurricane bears down on the facility, the sharks enact their plan to escape...

The Good

*The concept is pretty interesting. In shark attack movies, the default "bad shark" is almost always a great white simply due to the being the biggest overtly-predacious sharks (the larger basking shark and whale shark feed on plankton and krill). I think there was at least one horror movie depicting a tiger shark as the villain and the upcoming sequel depicts bull sharks (which are much more likely to be aggressive toward humans) as the villains, but other than this movie, I have never heard of mako sharks being movie monsters before.

*This being a monster movie, there are some pretty creative kill scenes. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail to avoid spoilers, but one involves a gurney and the other involves a character being torn in half.

*There's some decent acting, especially from Samuel L. Jackson. Burrows does a decent job with McAllister's intensity, although I would have expected more emotion from her when recounting her father's last days.

*The only real villains in the film are the sharks, and they're just animals acting according to their nature rather than being truly malicious. It's true that McAllister's poor judgement and excessive zeal caused the problem in the first place, but given the back-story where she had to care for her dying father, that she'd be so monomaniacal in pursuit of her goal of curing degenerative brain disease makes a lot of sense. She's not evil or malicious.

*The sharks in this film's greatest danger isn't their destructive physical power, although there's plenty of that, but their intelligence. They're dangerous smart creatures and put our heroes in jeopardy quite a bit. Seriously, given some of the things they pull off in the movie, one could make an argument that these sharks are smarter than humans.

*This is something I got some pushback on from other members of the podcast, but I liked the depiction of Preach as a Christian character. He's not a preening holier-than-thou jerk, a domineering authoritarian fundamentalist (think Escape from L.A.), or a hypocrite loudly condemning some sin that he secretly practices. Nor is he unrealistically perfect. He has a drinking problem (cooking sherry!) and admits having failed as a preacher, a husband, and a father, but when things go down, he's the one who keeps it together and even leads other characters in prayer. At one point he compares his own situation to Daniel being thrown into the lion's den.

*I liked the brief interplay between Preach and Russell. I've taken a class on portrayals of different ethnicities in movies and they riff on the "black guy dies first" trope that comes up quite a lot.

The Bad

*The CGI used to create the sharks has not aged well since 1999. Although I said on the podcast that this is something to be expected, the more I think about it the less valid an excuse that is. Jurassic Park, which came out several years earlier, had vastly superior CGI, as did Men in Black. It might've been better to use more practical effects, or Jaws-style "don't see much of the sharks until the end" to get around this, especially if the poor CGI was a consequence of its budget rather than incompetence.

*The middle part of the film kind of drags.

*There's a scene involving McAllister needing to get out of her wetsuit that is pretty ridiculous fan-service.

*Although I liked Preach, there is a little too religious anti-science for my taste. Preach at times becomes convinced the shark is a straight-up demon (i.e. a supernatural evil entity) and Carter criticizes McAllister for giving God's greatest killing machine "will and desire." Pursuant to my next point, McAllister's only straight-up sin I can think of was dishonesty about just what she was doing with the sharks. Bad judgement, even the kind that deserves legal sanction (I'm thinking there'd be a lot of charges of reckless endangerment in her future, and since several people died, not just due to the super-sharks existing, but due to her actions when one of them attacks a scientist, probably involuntary manslaughter too) doesn't equal immorality. And moralizing about "playing God" aside, I am not aware of any strong religious justification for opposing genetic engineering, cloning, etc.

(I used to be a member of an Internet forum dedicated to the Left Behind novels and I remember someone online claiming that human clones would not have souls. I cannot think of any biblical justification for that statement.)

*Per the above, there are strong anti-intellectual and Science Is Bad vibes in this movie, as TVTropes would put it. Again, although McAllister wasn't being honest about what she was doing to the sharks, it took a series of unlikely events for the sharks successfully break into the facility and start hunting the people. Even though McAllister prevented a shark that had attacked another scientist from being killed (which Nick pointed out was Not A Good Thing), it took a problem with the helicopter nobody could have foreseen for the next events to happen. Yet when things go wrong, it's the "street smart" but less-educated characters like ex-con Carter and the facility's cook Preach who are more effective than the scientists, especially Janice (Jacqueline McKenzie).

Yes, many people are book smart and lack good judgement and common sense or are prone to panicking, but still.

*To that end, one could also argue that the way "book smart" and "street smart" break down, the female characters end up portrayed worse than the men. Janice is panicky and hysterical and it was McAllister's poor judgement that caused the whole situation in the first place. Meanwhile, Carter and Preach are the ones who save the day. I am NOT accusing anybody of deliberate bigotry, sexism, etc. but that's still the vibe I got.

The Verdict

Another one of those "see it once" films. 6.5 out of 10. There is a sequel coming out this year, which seems to go even further into the "man was not meant to play God" mentality than this one and looks like a bad-CGI direct-to-video schlocker on top of that. I don't think I'll be seeing it.