Another Alternate Draka Timeline for AH Enthusiasts

One of the founding texts of the modern alternate-history subgenre is S.M. Stirling's Draka series--three novels assembled into the omnibus The Domination, the distant sequel Drakon (which provides the frame story for The Domination), and the anthology Drakas! that tells stories from different points in the timeline. One of the more common criticisms of the world is how implausible the timeline is (the proto-Domination's white overlords expand rapidly in an area that was a lethal disease zone for Europeans, the British tolerate a dominion practicing slavery-in-bad-disguise after formal abolition, etc), which has led to a lot of alternate versions of the Draka timeline. Most of them feature the Draka not expanding as much or getting straight-up squashed, which they eminently deserve for combining the imperialism and murderous behavior of Nazi Germany with the cruelty of Atlantic slavery and much more brains than either.

(Here's one I created--there are some updates I didn't post on fanfiction.net and I'm not going to petition to be unbanned to copy them, so this is not likely to ever be fully finished.)

Now the premiere alternate history discussion forum online is hosting a new one, "Separated At Birth: America and Drakia." So far only a couple chapters in, but it's got some interesting features, including:

*The early death of George Washington and a different founding of the United States, which as a result is much more hostile toward slavery and also has much wider suffrage for (white) men from the beginning.

*A rebellion by free blacks and white allies against an attempt to disenfranchise black voters leads to a black-governed Georgia within the United States, which undermines much of the intellectual-cultural rationale for racism.

*A much uglier War of 1812 and surviving Republican France.

*In-universe writings that explain the rationale of the different political systems, including a very Draka take on the line of Cain in the Bible.

I'm definitely looking forward to more. The timeline's author has earned awards from the site's membership for his timelines, so hopefully this will keep going and stay interesting.

A More Radical Union During The Civil War? Japanese-Hawaiian Dynastic Union?

Although I'm still self-banned from the alternate history forum because it's a time sink, I still visit now and again to see if anything interesting has been posted. Maybe if I ever become successful enough to go full-time perhaps I'll have them un-ban me (and I'll probably drop back in to advertise Little People, Big Guns when it comes out in November), but that's a long ways off.

Here are a couple interesting scenarios for you.

Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical Civil War-In real history, the American federal government suppressed the Confederacy's attempt to secede from the Union to preserve (and possibly expand into the Caribbean and bordering areas) slavery and freed the slaves, but the war wasn't explicitly fought for abolition at first and the U.S. ultimately prematurely abandoned Reconstruction, condemning the former slaves to two to three generations of Jim Crow suppression. In this scenario, the murder of Lyman Trumbull by a pro-slavery fanatic gets Abraham Lincoln into the Senate in 1854, where his views on slavery and race become more radical much earlier than they did in real history. This has consequences--John Brown, though still ultimately a failure, is more successful than in real history, and the Confederacy still emerges under different leadership (its president is the failed presidential candidate John C. Breckenridge, with real-life Confederate President Jefferson Davis as Secretary of War). The Confederates do better early on, but from the way things are going, the South is going to get an even worse hiding than in real history.

AHC: Make Hawaii a Japanese Colony-An "AHC" is a challenge to come up with a scenario where a particular counterfactual happens--in this case, Japan rather than the United States colonizes Hawaii. In the post I linked to, a brief visit to Hawaii by lost Japanese fishermen triggers diplomacy between the kingdom (this is well before the U.S. annexation) and the Tokugawa Shogunate. You know, the regime that (mostly) cut off Japan from foreign contact. To make a long story short, the two insular powers form an alliance to deter European or American meddling. It's based on a lot of little-known real-life history (including proposed dynastic alliances, treaties of protection against various outsiders, etc) and it's pretty interesting. My main quibble is that I think the author overestimates the isolation of Tokugawa Japan from outside knowledge, although he does acknowledge the existence of Dutch Learning.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Interview with the Vampire (1994)

I vaguely remember when the film Interview with the Vampire, based on the novel by Anne Rice, came out, but I don't remember whether I wanted to see it. Although I've read the werewolf novels of Rice's sister Alice Borchardt (I strongly recommend The Silver Wolf), I never really had much interest in Rice's vampire novels or seeing the movies based on them.

Well, thanks to Myopia, I'm seeing a lot of movies I'd never otherwise watch, so here we go. Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

In the modern day, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) takes aside Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) and reveals to him that he's an immortal vampire. He begins telling his story, taking the viewer back to when he was a planter in French Louisiana in the late 18th Century. After the death of his wife and child he sought death, only to encounter Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise), a French vampire. With Louis's permission Lestat transforms him into a vampire and the two of them form a hunting pair, eventually adding transformed pre-adolescent Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) to their crew as they live through the centuries and have various adventures.

The Good

*The acting is very, very good. Brad Pitt does a great job as the tormented Louis, who has to kill others to survive but hates himself for doing it. When we first meet him, he gets his unnatural nature across very subtly and without unnecessary drama (i.e. popping out fangs and hissing). Kirsten Dunst is good as Claudia, who grows frustrated that she's stuck in the body of a child for eternity and will never become a woman and acts quite like a teenager for much of the film. She eventually manages to pull off acting like an adult woman even though she's physically around 10.

*Tom Cruise as Lestat merits his own entry. He's appropriately obnoxious as the arrogant elder vampire, who soon after transforming Louis moves into his house and discusses his home and property as though it's "ours" and not "yours." Per some of the on-screen commentary that comes with Amazon Instant Video, Cruise watched videos of lions hunting gazelles to get the predatory aspect right. He's even more overtly creepy and predatory than Louis and seeing the brunette Cruise as a blonde is even more off-putting. Although at least some of Louis's slaves care about him, they're all quite justifiably terrified of Lestat. Cruise provides both slyness and manipulation (as this article points out, it resembles an abusive heterosexual relationship with Louis as the battered wife) and manic energy that's often quite funny (his training of Claudia in how to be a vampire). Whatever you might say about Scientology and Cruise's other...eccentricities (the above link, among other things, compares Lestat's relationship with Louis to Tom Cruise's relationship with Katie Holmes)...he's probably the best actor in the film.

*There's some stuff in the film that's legitimately funny. In addition to how funny Lestat can be, Louis's "poodle massacre" is timed so well that it's hilarious.

*In the credits Anne Rice is listed as writing the screenplay. Although writing for film and writing for books are two vastly different skill-sets--with a novel you can throw in everything but in a screenplay everything must be explicitly on-screen or at least strongly implied on-screen--if a novelist can write a good script, having them at least involved in the script is a great idea. They'll know what's most important, they won't get stuff wrong about their own work, etc.

*It functions well as a period piece--in the 1990s frame story there's a lot of smoking, people are recording stuff on analog tape, etc. It also works well as a period piece for antebellum Louisiana, although there are some historical problems with the 1870 visit to Paris. Paris at that point was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War and nobody's going to be having balls, high culture, etc. there. The costumes are great and the filmmakers even gets into the subtle details of slave culture--in Catholic Louisiana, the slave religion is a lot more likely to have elements of voodoo (you see slaves sticking pins into dolls, some of the dances and ceremonies resemble stuff I've seen in documentaries about the Caribbean, etc) than in the Protestant U.S.

*The makeup crew got the vampires' unnatural nature done with great subtlety. The veins in the vampires' faces stand out and their eyes are strange--no need for elaborate special effects.

*There's also a nice bit of social commentary in making Louis a slave-owner. He's already a parasite--making him a vampire just makes it more overt. And as I noted above, Lestat is even more blatant--while Louis feeds on animals and hates himself, Lestat feeds on Louis's slaves.

*Since Louis cannot go out in daylight, there are certain colors he simply can't see anymore, like the blue of oceans. He's grateful for the advent of movies so he can see these things again. That's something I've never thought of and it's pretty clever.

The Bad

*The movie is a little slow in places. Louis is, after all, telling the story of his entire life, and it's not always going to be interesting. I'm not totally sure what the actual storyline is--Louis manages to escape from the need to have a quasi-boyfriend (Lestat, Armand), Louis figures out how to live as a vampire while maintaining his morality (okay they don't really do this, but he could feed only on criminals or work out a behind-the-scenes deal with the military or state government to serve as a soldier or executioner), etc.

*My Myopia co-hosts really liked Armand, but he felt kind of meh to me. Louis has his Catholic guilt thing and Lestat is over-the-top and often hilarious, but what makes Armand interesting?

*Even though the vampires can move so quickly people can't see them and heal wounds very quickly and Lestat seems to pay at least lip service to their need to hide their activities, one wonders how nobody notices Louis and especially Lestat are killing so many people. Louis remarks that Lestat kills two or three people per night and in one scene, they kill people at a high-class party. In another scene they wipe out a whole family coming to see Claudia play the piano, while Claudia herself kills people in public. There's also all the bloody clothes that presumably are getting laundered somehow. Louis's slaves seem to figure out something is going on pretty quickly (and at one point descend on "the big house" with torches), but Louis and Lestat never seem to need to get out of town quickly. Given how slaves in the antebellum South had a plantation-to-plantation gossip network that came in really handy for the Underground Railroad and Union forces during the Civil War, I imagine rumors would have spread of Louis and Lestat's behavior very quickly rather than being restricted to the slaves of Louis's estate. And that says nothing of their killing people in New Orleans, especially upper-class people who'll be missed.

*It's not clear whether being bitten by a vampire instantly kills or not. Lestat feeds on Louis once before transforming him and that renders him sickly but not dead, while the tavern girl Lestat kills when first teaching Louis to hunt doesn't seem to lose any blood at all. Claudia's bites seem to kill people pretty quickly, faster than Louis and Lestat's attacks, while another vampire we meet later in the film has a mortal child servant whom he seems to be nibbling on fairly often without killing him. In none of these situations do people seem to lose much blood. Dracula and the television series True Blood seem more realistic--people have quite a lot of blood and it would take multiple feedings to kill a person. That could have been an opportunity to contrast Lestat and Louis--Lestat demands blood from the slaves to the point it kills them (when he simply doesn't kill them immediately), while Louis (who is depicted as a relatively benign slave-master) tries to minimize Lestat's predations on them?

*As a brief conversation on the podcast alludes to, the film's depiction of slavery has some...problems. Louis's house slave Yvette (Thandie Newton) says the slaves are worried about newly-vampirized Louis because he's not going out into the fields (i.e. supervising them at work, which would require him to go out in the sunlight) or visiting the slave quarter? She asks him if he's still their master, which one can read as either her wondering if he's still the same person he was before (it's later revealed the slaves think he's turned into the Devil) or that she's upset that he's not supervising them and micromanaging their lives. You can see it in the script here and make your own judgments. Now, one could read visiting the slave quarter as him simply checking on them rather than something more sinister, but most slave-owners were NOT benign father-figures no matter what the Lost Cause nonsense teaches, and their visits to slave quarters might have had more sinister purposes. I initially thought the visits to the slave quarter she referenced were sexual in nature; it would be pretty screwed up if Yvette acts like him not doing that anymore is a bad thing. In Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868, which I read for graduate school, it depicts the racial environment of French Louisiana as less strict and cruel than the Anglo-American order that came with the Louisiana Purchase, but still.

I'm not going to criticize without offering suggestions for improvement, so perhaps the reactions to Louis's strange behavior among his slaves could be depicted as being more mixed? Yvette might be concerned for Louis's well-being and want Lestat gone because she was hoping to take the place of his deceased wife (in French Louisiana there was this whole legal institution in which slaves and free women of color could advance their positions by romantic relationships with white men) and is actually jealous of Lestat. That's what I meant when I commented in the podcast about how Yvette being jealous of Lestat would further emphasize the homoerotic nature of Lestat and Louis's relationship--she would view Lestat as a romantic rival. This would still allow for the dialogue between Yvette and Louis without suggesting that the slaves in general actually miss their master and would show Yvette exercising agency despite her not really having a lot of choices.

Meanwhile, other slaves are glad Louis isn't bothering them and perhaps take advantage of the fact he's drinking the blood of livestock rather than eating actual meat to improve their diets? Much African-American cuisine is based on parts of animals the slave-owners didn't want, and some accounts I've read of slavery involve slaves taking food from "the big house" to supplement their crappy rations and getting punished. Given how we see slaves mourning friends and relatives killed by Lestat, perhaps there could have been a scene where we see slaves sneaking around with dead chickens and other birds killed by Louis (and commenting on Louis's behavior as they do so), only for Lestat to ambush them? Then we see the slave voodoo rituals and the like, culminating in them marching on Louis's mansion with torches. One doesn't need to spend a whole lot of time on this issue--it would only need the tweaking of some of Yvette's and Louis's dialogue and maybe an additional scene of Lestat being a predatory scumbag.

*Later in the film, some other characters do Louis a great wrong (not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers) and he gets away from them and they know he's gotten away from them, but they take no precautions. Then he comes back for revenge. How stupid are these people?

The Verdict

A little slow in places, but overall a very well-done film. 8.0 out of 10

Movie Review: Black Panther (2018)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to roll along with Black Panther, featuring one of the first black superheroes and a character first introduced in Captain America Civil War. Although I'm not black, I've seen how much this movie has meant to African-Americans of my acquaintance and I saw some very positive reviews, so I hoped it was good. I had President's Day off, so I went to go see it.

And now the review...

The Plot

T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns to the African nation of Wakanda, which despite its rustic, backward appearance has very advanced technology based on vibranium, to be formally crowned king after his father's death. There we meet intelligence agent Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o)--who is also his ex-lover--his regal mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and his smart-alecky tech genius sister Shuri (Letitia Wright).

Unfortunately, the arms dealer and troublemaker Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), whom we last saw hobnobbing with Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, is back. He's made an alliance with Special Forces veteran Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who seeks use Wakanda's advanced technology to avenge the mistreatment of black people by Western society.

Trouble ensues...

The Good

*The worldbuilding is very well-done. I'm not familiar with African culture, music, etc. beyond television documentaries and books for the most part, but the dancing, music, etc. sound very African. This article here goes into more detail about the effort and research that went into developing Wakanda for the film. The use of Lesotho in particular as a basis for "primitive" Wakanda makes a lot of sense--Lesotho retained its independence in part due to its mountains, much like how Wakanda's mountains allow it to maintain itself in isolation from the outside world.

*There are a lot of laugh-out-loud and delightfully smart-ass comments from the characters. I particularly liked Shuri, T'Challa's sister who reminds me sometimes of my own little sister. Even the grim Killmonger gets some snarky lines, which I enjoyed as well. The Stan Lee cameo is also pretty funny.

*The cast in general is very impressive. A lot of big-time names in this movie.

*The political and cultural grievances that drive Killmonger are unfortunately quite real. I have an M.A. in world history with a U.S. History minor and I'm well aware of slavery (and its successor, convict leasing, which is not as well-known), colonialism, the assassination of people like Martin Luther King Jr., guns and drugs in the 'hood, etc. I liked how they made Killmonger, an orphaned child of the ghetto, since that makes him a foil for T'Challa, the wealthy and well-respected ruler of the one African country never to be colonized.

(Ethiopia was briefly conquered by Italy and Liberia was a fiefdom of Firestone rubber despite retaining its political independence.)

*Ulysses Klaue is a white South African and although he's not above doing business with blacks, that doesn't mean he doesn't have his cultural prejudices. He describes the Wakandans as "savages" and refers to Killmonger as "boy" at one point--not necessarily out of any personal meanness or maliciousness, but it's still disrespectful. That's a nice little bit of personality/cultural quirk there.

*The movie is only rarely dull, and those parts are typically at the beginning. Once Killmonger arrives in Wakanda it never lets up.

*Nakia's and T'Challa's breakup seems to have been caused by philosophical differences--T'Challa supports the country's historical isolationism like his father, while Nakia wants to use their technological advances to help others. When we first meet Nakia she's pretending to be the prisoner of a group of African warlord-types who are taking women in headscarves to an unknown but probably unpleasant fate--they reminded me a lot of the women captured by Boko Haram--and one of their soldiers is a child or young teen. That a spy working for an African superpower would focus on solving problems in Africa makes a lot of sense.

The Bad

*Although Wakanda's architectural styles are very African, a lot of the technology they have (monorails, hover-bikes and boards) are the same or more high-tech versions of real-world technologies from outside Africa. Another character is wearing a Western suit and tie, albeit with a rather different color scheme. Wakanda is supposed to be isolated from the rest of the world, but yet they've developed pretty much the same technology tree in isolation from outsiders? Europe got the dhow sail from Arabs and gunpowder and the compass from China; they didn't independently develop them themselves.

In the comics, Captain America's shield was made of Wakandan vibranium, much like how uranium from the Belgian Congo was used in the atomic bombs. There's also back-story of contacts between the U.S. and Wakanda during WWII. It would've been more interesting if Wakanda's wealth and technological advancement was less extreme of a secret--there's trade and intellectual exchange with the outside world, even if the Wakandans hold the best cards close to their chest so to speak. The African kingdom on which Wakanda was based dealt with Europeans from a position of strength due to its wealth and geographic defenses rather than hiding and Wakanda could be the same way. Perhaps they could have alluded to T'Challa's grandfather having met Howard Stark or something similar to build deeper connections with the wider wider of The Avengers and explain the technological and cultural overlaps. Wakanda does have agents, diplomats, etc. in the outside world who could have brought in concepts like bikes, monorails, etc., but there's nothing indicating they brought with them monorail plans, machine tools, etc.

I'd always figured Wakanda was like a petrostate, using the wealth from its vibranium to build an advanced society, but that requires trade. Even if they kept the full extent of their wealth and power secret to avoid getting conquered by greedy outsiders, I think they kind of overdid it a little bit.

*One character is kind of a loose end and we don't know what exactly happened to them. Given their relationship to T'Challa, I would think there'd be even more emotional resonance involving their actions and the film would be sure to mention their fate. Their actions were foreshadowed well, but could have been foreshadowed better and, given their actions and relationship to T'Challa, they'd have more conflict about it.

*There were a couple of look-at-my-watch moments, but not many.

The Verdict

Like a black version of Dune or Game of Thrones and a worthy member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Lots of real-world issues are explored without being preachy and annoying. 9.0 out of 10.

Two BLADE RUNNER Endings and Why They're Lame

Although I found the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner to be rather boring when I watched it the first time, the film has been growing on me. Even if the adventures of Deckard and company aren't all that entertaining, the concepts, the world, and at least some of the characters (Sebastian, Roy, Rachael) are interesting.

The version we watched for the Myopia podcast episode was the final cut, not the theatrical release. I knew the theatrical version had a more upbeat, commercial ending forced on Ridley Scott by the studio heads, so I got curious and looked it up on YouTube. Here goes...



Although Tyrell's earlier reference to Rachael being "special" could explain why she doesn't have the Replicants' typical limited lifespan, it seems like something they shoved in there to give Deckard and Rachael a happy ending.

(Of course, given Rachael's vulnerability as a shoot-on-sight fugitive and consequent dependence on Deckard, who at the very least takes advantage of her traumatized mental state after she learns her entire life is a lie and straight-up kills someone and who at worst outright rapes her, it might not be that happy for her.)

But the biggest problem for me is the world-building. The climate of this world's 2019 has changed so severely that Los Angeles is chronically rainy and nasty like Seattle, with real animals being rare and expensive. By the time of the sequel in 2049, there've been "ecosystem collapses" that results in Los Angeles being a snowy (!) barren desert with the only living things besides people wild worms and bees and bugs being raised for food and little if any plant life. Canadian science fiction author Bruno Lombardi theorized here the climate change in the original film could have been caused by an asteroid impact, which if it landed in the ocean would evaporate massive amounts of water into the atmosphere. The novel Lucifer's Hammer depicts worldwide rainstorms for weeks afterward, which much of the rain being salty from the ocean. Southern California might climatically resemble the Pacific Northwest due to lots of water being added from the post-impact rains and circulating in the area for decades, or it might be even more desolate owing to salt from evaporated seawater poisoning the land, but it looks entirely too normal in this scene.

And there's an alternate cut of the theatrical ending that managed to be even worse. Here it is:



The shot quality looks better, but the characterization is ridiculous. As one of the commenters points out, Rachael sounds "retarded" when in the film she's depicted as sensitive and clever. Even though at this point she knows she's a Replicant and the memories of her whole pre-human life are false, it's not like she's going to forget her people skills or experience a massive IQ drop. After all, she knows how to play Deckard's piano even though she knows she never actually took piano lessons and she's able to shoot and kill the warrior Replicant Leon despite not likely having in-person shooting lessons either.

(Plus this is the best day of her life? She's just found out her entire life is a lie in a crude and insensitive way, she fled the relative safety of the Tyrell Corporation to become a hunted fugitive, she killed another thinking entity to save the life of said crude and insensitive man, said man rapes her, the fact the slimy Gaff found her alone in Deckard's apartment raises all sorts of unpleasant questions, and now they're two city-dwellers having to hide out in an unfamiliar wilderness. This has been a bad day. This fan-fic here has Rachael's thoughts on why she sought out Deckard and why she comes to love him, but assuming Ridley Scott had something like this in mind for why this would be her "best day," it's not really clear. And without that clarity she seems like a moron.)

Seriously, Rachael was acting so ridiculous it's actually insulting.

Movie Review: Blade Runner (1982)

With the film Blade Runner 2049 coming out soon, it became important for the denizens of the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood to discuss the original Blade Runner. Although the film was initially not successful theatrically, it developed a devoted following and proved to be a major influence on future science fiction. Here's the podcast. And here's my review...

For the record, the version we reviewed was Blade Runner Final Cut, which lacked the Harrison Ford voice-over narration and had a much more ambiguous ending than the theatrical release. As I'd never seen the movie before, nor was this a movie from the era of my childhood like Pagemaster was, this isn't "blast from the past" for me.

The Plot

In the near future, Earth has suffered environmental devastation from some undescribed cause and people (at least healthy ones) are encouraged to emigrate to new offworld colonies. To prepare these colonies for settlement and to do the most dangerous jobs, the Tyrell Corporation has created Replicants--artificial humans--to use as forced labor. To discourage rebellions, they're only given a very limited four-year lifespan. After they rebel anyway, the Earth governments ban them from Earth, recruiting "blade runner" police to hunt them down and "retire" them.

Former blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is forced back into the business by blade runner Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and his former boss Harry Bryant (Michael Emmet Walsh) to deal with four Replicants who escaped from slavery on another world and have illegally come to Earth. They're warriors Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Leon Kowalski (Brion James), the "pleasure model" Priss Stratton (Daryl Hannah), and assassin Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy), all of whom are extremely dangerous. Along the way he encounters Replicant creator Eldron Tyrell (Joe Turkel) and his assistant Rachael (Sean Young), whom he soon learns is a more advanced Replicant herself. As the hunt continues, Deckard soon finds himself with divided loyalties...

The Good

*Rutger Hauer does a good job playing the warrior Replicant Roy Batty. When we first meet him he interrogates a scientist and comes off as really intense and creepy. However, he mourns for a fellow Replicant killed on Earth and his ultimate motivation is care/concern for another being. He even seeks out his creator, whom he seems to view as a father figure, for help. And when the object of his affection dies, he mourns and seeks revenge. For a thinking machine he's very human, which is probably the whole point. Roy is my favorite character in the film and during the podcast I found myself  defending his actions--of all the people he kills, all but one were part of his and the other Replicants' escape from slavery. Harriet Tubman carried a gun to defend herself and her charges from slave-hunters--although I'm not aware of her ever having to use it, I would not fault her if she put a few between some slavers' eyes.

(To be fair though, Roy killed a lot more people and many of them sound like non-combatants. Tubman led a Union raid in South Carolina, but she didn't burn pro-slavery towns down with the people in them.)

*Overall this was a very thoughtful film that discussed the issue of what it really means to be human, what rights a created/artificial but sapient being would have, etc. in a non-preachy and annoying way. It reminded me a lot of the issues that came up during the 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica, which incidentally also featured Edward James Olmos. The Cylons in BSG were robotic slaves who had rebelled against their human creators and ultimately evolved into beings that could successfully pass as human (one is even impregnated by a human and bears a living child) and in some cases even thought they were human.

Blade Runner brings up similar issues--the human military in Blade Runner had been keeping Priss as a prostitute, a less explicitly violent version of how the crew of the Pegasus repeatedly raped a captured Cylon spy (and tried to do the same to a Cylon defector aboard the Galactica). Given how she doesn't practice anything remotely resembling her former trade on Earth to blend in (even though another female Replicant does, see below), it may be that this job was against her own inclinations and thus rapey as hell. Yes, the Replicants (and the human Cylons) are machines, but they're clearly thinking beings who have wills and desires of their own and, unlike say a robotic arm at a car factory, can suffer. To be perfectly blunt, the Replicants are basically runaway slaves being hunted and murdered. Deckard really should know better, especially given how in the theatrical cut his narration equates Bryant's "skinjob" (for Replicants) with police of an older generation using the n-word (for black people).

(Given current issues in the USA with police and African-Americans, this is particularly timely.)

*I also liked Sebastian, the scientist suffering from premature aging (he's 25 but looks like he's in his 40s or 50s) living alone with various robotic quasi-toys. He's unable to emigrate due to his health issues, which reminded me of a story from college Spanish class called "Las Medias Rojas." He takes in the Replicant Priss when he thinks she's a homeless woman (and doesn't attempt to take advantage of her situation) and shows her the robotic companions he shares the largely-abandoned Bradbury Building with almost childlike joy. The thing that came to my mind was Jesus's story of the sheep and the goats--"I was a stranger and you took Me in, and what you have done to the least of these my brethren you have done also to Me." Upon learning of the Replicants' oncoming deaths, he attempts to help them. Of all the humans in the story, he and to a much more limited extent Deckard are the only ones who treat the Replicants with any kindness, something that Priss even remarks on.

*When Deckard administers the empathy test to Rachael as a deliberate negative, he asks her what she would do if someone gave her a calfskin wallet. She said she would not only turn it down, but report it to the police. Although I hesitate to call this "showing" instead of "telling" (since it's spoken dialogue), it does show the animals-rights legislation of this future Los Angeles. It reminded me of the novel Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton in which a hardened mercenary is horrified by the concept of eating meat made from real animals in a future where vat meat is common. Given how actual animals are expensive and most animals on-screen are artificial, this (along with her comment that if she discovered her son collecting butterflies she would take him to the doctor) could also exposit Earth's environmental problems have led to far stricter animal protections.

*Zhora at one point works as a stripper. Salome in the Bible performed a suggestive dance of some kind to persuade her stepfather Herod Antipas to have John the Baptist, who had condemned her mother's marriage to the king, executed. Making her last name Salome was pretty clever.

The Bad

*The opening with the gas fires reflected in somebody's eyes as the shot tracks over futuristic Los Angeles complete with flying cars and gigantic sci-fi buildings is kind of slow. It would have been better if the focus is on Leon being brought to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters for the "test" and just happen to see the futuristic landscape as we go along. No need for artsy shots of eyes, prolonged gas-fire scenes, etc.

*There's a significant part of the film from when Deckard first meets privately with Rachael and they discuss whether her childhood memories are real or not until he starts hunting for Zhora, that's really quite dull. In the historical context what he was doing at the time (using a computer to analyze photos in great detail) would have been high-tech and fascinating to the audience and, as one of my podcast brethren pointed out, real detective work is boring. Maybe if they'd made it a more lively montage or provided a soundtrack?

*Deckard makes some very forceful advances on Rachael (bordering if not outright crossing the line into date rape if they had sex, which they actually may not have), after she saves his life from Leon no less. Even if she was to some degree or another interested in him, she's very vulnerable psychologically (she's just learned she's really a Replicant and the whole life she remembers is a lie, and she's just killed a person too) and she is dependent on his physical protection as a hunted fugitive Replicant. She doesn't seem upset afterward and sticks with him instead of running away as soon as possible (although again, see "fugitive Replicant" part), but come on Deckard.

*Some more background information about how the world came to be would have been nice. Apparently in the original novel it takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the US and USSR in which the world is slowly dying. Although a nuclear conflict could affect the Earth's climate, I'm not sure how a general worldwide cooling could turn Los Angeles into something resembling a smoggier Seattle. This scenario here, devised by Canadian science fiction author Bruno Lombardi, posits that an oceanic comet impact some years prior was the cause. That makes more sense--in the novel Lucifer's Hammer, oceanic impacts by comet fragments cause it to rain worldwide for weeks. Depending on patterns of evaporation after the unnatural worldwide rain occurs, the overall world climate could be much more humid and rainy for years afterward. Plus if the impact was somewhere in Asia, that could explain how Asian Los Angeles looks in terms of its residents, culture, etc.--Chinatown, Japantown, Koreatown, etc. were swollen by massive numbers of refugees.

The Verdict

Very thoughtful, but don't expect a slang-bang action film. 8.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: FREE STATE OF JONES (2016)

This afternoon I rode up to the old homestead in East Cobb to see the Matthew McConaughey historical movie The Free State of Jones, based on the book Free State of Jones, with my friend Nick. It hadn't been long since I'd learned the Confederate secession was lacking in democratic legitimacy (if you combined the white Unionists with the blacks, one could make a very strong case the majority of the population opposed secession), but I'm not aware of Hollywood actually acknowledging internal opposition to the Confederacy. The only exception I can think of is Cold Mountain, and I hadn't seen the movie or read the book.

So how was it? Let's see...

The Plot

Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Confederate medic from Mississippi, deserts from the army to take home the body of his son (or a relative of some kind, it's not 100% clear), who had been drafted by Confederate soldiers who had also taken most of the family's crops and farming equipment. Already upset by the "20 slave law" that exempts the sons of large slave-owners from the draft, he protects a widow and her daughters from the thieving Confederates, who then chase him into the swamp using bloodhounds. He falls in with some runaway slaves and organizes a rebellion against the Confederacy. Along the way, he romances the slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) after his wife Serena (Keri Russell) leaves him. After the war, he and his fellow guerrillas become staunch Republicans (the white South was strongly Democratic at the time) but soon face the coming of lynching, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow.

The Good

*Great, great history that has rarely if ever been told on film before. The period where film emerged as an art form and Hollywood emerged as a cultural machine coincided with a period called "the nadir of American race relations," the age of widespread disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and lynchings. The dominant historiography of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, taught that Reconstruction governments had been run by corrupt Northern migrants and inept, foolish blacks. It's no surprise that the first film with an actual plot is the Klan-glorifying The Birth of a Nation, while mega-film Gone With The Wind romanticizes the antebellum South. There's even the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail that depicts abolitionist John Brown as a maniac who burns the Kansas countryside and so frightens the slaves that they don't want freedom if it's him bringing it.

Furthermore, when movies began depicting the Confederacy and slavery in a negative light, the story was told very simplistically. Union good and anti-racist (the film Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter depicts abolitionists holding signs declaring blacks and whites equals, a notion most opponents of slavery would have viewed with disgust), Confederacy evil and racist (Glory emphasizes the atrocities inflicted on black Union troops and their white officers by Confederates). The nuances of the conflict, such as Northerners hating blacks and refusing to fight in an "emancipation war" or poor Southern whites opposing the Confederacy as a rich man's project they're expected to die for, are generally ignored.

(And even though poor whites were generally racist themselves--the rich whites used racism or the possibility they too could become big slave-owners to manipulate them--poor whites and blacks could work together. A populist biracial movement in North Carolina functioned--and even governed--for several years before being toppled by voter fraud and outright violence by Southern Democrats. I mean, seriously, they organized an outright coup d'etat against the municipal government of Wilmington. Thanks The Dollop podcast for reminding me just in time.)

*Some people were concerned that the movie would be a "white man saves poor blacks" movie, but that's not the case. At first it's a group of runaway slaves who save Newton, providing him shelter from Confederate soldiers hunting him and medical attention for his injured leg. The runaway slave Moses (Mahershala Ali) is portrayed as a leader of the runaways and later as a Reconstruction political activist registering blacks to vote. Knight is the one who first organizes them to fight, but he's a trained soldier and blacks both during and after slavery were purposefully kept ignorant of guns. Historically Knight did lead the insurgency against the Confederacy and later as a strong supporter of blacks' rights (he served as the commander of an all-black unit tasked with fighting racist paramilitaries), so downgrading him to avoid treading on certain people's toes does him a disservice.

*There are some good character moments, like Rachel crying when Newton leads her to a feather bed. Given what we learn about how she'd been treated as a slave, feather beds might bring back some very bad memories. The racial tensions that exist within the guerrilla band do get revealed when the blacks are pointedly not participating in a cookout and a white guerrilla tries to keep one of the blacks from eating some of the leftovers.

*Knight's Christian faith is strongly emphasized. Much is often made about how the Confederates quoted the Bible to defend slavery, but his defense of the lone woman and her daughters against the thieving Confederates reminds me very much of James 1:27. Some of his economic ideas echo the Catholic notion of distributism.

The Bad

*For a war movie this was extremely, extremely non-exciting. Even the battle sequences were boring, and that's really saying something. There are gigantic time skips linked together by onscreen text and images. There have been movies covering spans of years before that handled transitions of time in a more subtle or more interesting fashion. Instead we get a disjointed mess of a movie. It's the single worst aspect of the film. Nick is wondering if there's a three-hour director's cut out there somewhere and hopefully he's right. Hopefully that cut includes some battle scenes earlier in the movie--it's not until at least an hour in that we get serious combat between the guerrillas and Confederate authorities. And the climactic battle sequence is too abbreviated.

Would it be too hard to have a montage of Confederate soldiers deserting, Home Guard stealing crops and hanging deserters, Knight organizing runaway slaves and Confederate deserters into an army, etc? Come on, this is basic film class stuff here.

*Peppered throughout the Civil War story of Newton Knight is the tale of his 20th Century descendant Davis (via Rachel) getting persecuted by the state of Mississippi. Though he is to all appearances white himself, since he has a black great-grandmother by the laws of the state he's considered black and his marriage to a white woman is illegal. If The Free State of Jones were a television miniseries--an exploration in the vein of Roots about how many white Southerners have black ancestors perhaps--using the younger Knight's story to bookend the tale of how his black foremother and his white forefather got together would make sense. Here it just adds to the film's running time. Davis Knight's story would be better as some kind of epilogue or even an on-screen graphic explaining the ultimate fate of Netwton and Rachel's descendants.

*There's not a clear antagonist. It would have been better if they combined the local Confederate colonel and cavalry lieutenant Barbour (Bill Tangradi), who extorts taxes "in kind" from the poor farmers, into one chronic enemy of Knight's. Think how Jason Isaacs' character in The Patriot was Mel Gibson's singular nemesis. The colonel at one point orders something that clearly troubles Barbour, but we don't see any disagreement (unlike the scene in The Patriot when Jason Isaacs orders the burning of a church with Patriot civilians inside, horrifying one of his subordinates) or any real character development on his part.

*Reconstruction lasted for around a decade in Mississippi, but we never see the period of large-scale black participation in the government (including two black U.S. Senators) that so riled white racists. Seeing Moses facing off against local planter James Eakins (Joe Chrest), who manages to reclaim his estate and even some of his slaves as "apprentices" after swearing an oath to the Union, as rival political leaders would have been interesting.

*The potential political power of Mississippi blacks--they were more than half the population--is never discussed, even though blacks voting plays a big part in the last section of the film. There's a reason disenfranchisement was particularly zealous and stringent in Mississippi. I remember a map from a US history book (that I can't find at the moment) depicting Virginia and Georgia as having double-digit percentage of blacks voting before the Voting Rights Act (40% and 25% if I remember right), but Mississippi and Alabama having only around 5%.

*There's a scene where some of Knight's band are hanged by Confederates and we never see them beg for mercy, claim they weren't supposed to be hanged, etc. That's a weakness, especially given the circumstances that lead to the hanging.

The Verdict

Newton, Rachel, and the others who stood against the Confederacy deserve a better movie than this. It's good history, but it's not a good movie. I was originally planning on giving it a 5.0 out of 10 (worse than what I gave Hook), but out of consideration for how little-known the history of anti-Confederate whites is, I'll give it a 6.0.

Do better next time. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III was more entertaining than this, and that movie was so mediocre I didn't have much to say during the podcast we had on the movie and didn't bother writing a review. Jeez.

YouTube For You: "I Am Australian"

Awhile back I found "I Was Only 19," a song told from the perspective of an Australian Vietnam veteran, while doing research for another project. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I soon came across another song, "I Am Australian."



It's by a band called The Seekers. iTunes, at least in the U.S., does not have the song, or else I would buy it. It's a beautiful song that does justice to the difference cultures that made Australia (the Aborigines, the convict settlers, the gold prospectors, and others) while at the same time promoting a united Australian identity. Although I'm not familiar with Australian political culture, I do know a little bit about the country's history and it's somewhat similar to our own--they're a British settler colony, but the population is not exclusively British in origin or in culture and the country has attracted immigrants from all over. Like them, "from every land on Earth we come."

I wonder if a similar song could be written about the United States? "We are one, but we are many" applies to the U.S. too. Heck, it's our motto and its on our coins--e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." You can acknowledge the contributions of different groups (and marginalized ones) without indulging in rootlessness, anti-patriotism, and cynicism.

*Instead of the Aborigines, you could start with the Native Americans. Perhaps a specific individual like Squanto, or the tribes who helped the Pilgrims in general?

*Instead of the convict laborers, perhaps poor (European) indentured servants or African slaves. It parallels the convicts who "fought the land" and "endured the lash" and acknowledges that things weren't always great for everybody without wallowing in self-flagellation.

*We had our Gold Rush too, so instead of "the daughter of a digger,"a 49er? Alternatively, since they would have come at the same time and to emphasize the "freedom from political oppression angle" that's so strong a part of our identity, we could have those fleeing the repression of the European revolutions of 1848? It was liberal Germans who played a major role in abolitionism and the defeat of the Confederacy. Perhaps they could be combined--a German political refugee who becomes a gold miner and later fights the Confederates at Glorietta Pass? I'm sure someone like that existed.

*The song references several well-known Australians, including the outlaw Ned Kelly and the Aborigine artist (and trailblazer in many ways--he was the first Aborigine to get Australian citizenship) Albert Namatjira. I'd rather not glorify the Confederate die-hard Jesse James, but perhaps one of the Founding Fathers instead? They certainly stuck it to The Man, in that case the British Empire. Not sure about an artist analogue to Namatjira (although Emanuel Leutze did paint the iconic "Washington Crossing the Delaware"), but if you want to go with the civil-rights angle, Martin Luther King?

Apparently a lot of Australians want to make the song their national anthem. I'm disinclined to change ours from "The Star-Spangled Banner," but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate other songs like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA." An American version could rise alongside it.