Movie Review: RoboCop 2014

Warning: Spoilers!  Not spoilers as in too many plot details, but spoilers about how this is yet another Hollywood Liberal Tomato.

When this movie came out in theatres I didn't go to see it because I thought it would just be another completely lame attempt to cash in on a popular movie.  The original 1987 RoboCop was a fantastic movie- any re-make would necessarily be much less.

I watched the new RoboCop by myself first to make sure it wasn't inappropriate for my kids and was pleasantly surprised. This really is a completely different story than the '87 RoboCop. And as entertainment it's not bad.  It's much more serious than the original, but honestly it's better written.  The dialog is better.

Unfortunately, RoboCop 2014 suffers from the rot of the liberal mindset much much worse than the original.

The basic premise of RoboCop 2014 is that the evil Corporation (backed by FoxNews) wants to replace policemen with Terminator-like robots, but Senate Democrats won't allow it. This is laid out in an early scene between the evil CEO of The Corporation and the heroic senatorial homage to Harry Reid and Barney Frank:

Senator Dreyfuss: I don't care how sophisticated these machines are, Mr. Sellars. A machine does not know what it feels like to be human. It can't understand the value of human life. Why should it be allowed to take one? To legislate over life and death, we need people who understand right from wrong. What do your machines feel?
CEO Sellars: Well, they feel no anger. They feel no prejudice. They feel no fatigue, which makes them ideal for law enforcement. Putting these machines on the streets will save countless American lives.
Senator Dreyfuss: You're evading the question.
CEO Sellars: No, I'm not.
Senator Dreyfuss: Yes, you're evading the question. I asked what do these machines feel? If one of them killed a child, what would it feel?
CEO Sellars: Nothing.
Senator Dreyfuss: And that's the problem. That's why 72% of Americans won't stand for a robot pulling the trigger. 

Somewhere

Thanks to Dog in Space for posting this...  Too true.

What Movie Is 'Avatar' Really Based On? [review]

The following contains plot spoilers for Avatar and for various movies to which it will be compared.  If I mention a movie here, chances are the plot will be discussed.  None are new movies.  Proceed at your risk.

Avatar has been said to be based on so many movies that one wonders whether it is actually based on any one particular story, and instead belongs to a family of related stories.  Avatar is an imaginative recombination of existing themes and story elements, and a visually interesting realization of its story, but I do think it owes more to some movies than others.

So much so, in fact, that I think that certain movies had a noticeable impact on the minds of the story's developer(s).

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I started thinking about this when I first heard Avatar characterized as "Dances With Wolves on another planet."  The more I thought of this idea, the more apparent it was to me that it had much more close parallels with another film.  As I finally started to assemble my thoughts on the matter, I came across the meme above.   If you look at the picture, you can see some apparent similarities between Avatar and some other films.  Some are more superficial than others. 

Premise Problem With District 9

In retrospect, the most basic premise of District 9 falls flat with an audible thud.

Quasi-governmental corporate thugs will do anything for the big bucks.  They want extraterrestrial weapon technology to sell to the highest bidder.  Billions and billions of dollars. They want it so bad that the Big Boss will sacrifice his son-in-law to get it, breaking his daughter's heart, even to the point of having him vivisected to death.

That's pretty greedy, if you ask me.

So how do they try to get these extraterrestrials to cooperate?  They put them in shacks in a concentration camp.  The aliens are reduced to the criminal mindset that we are told must inevitably come to those who live in shacks.  They become greedy opportunists themselves, who will do almost anything for .. cat food.  It seems that a local native crime lord (and why did the evil corporation let him into the District 9 camp?) has a larger collection of alien technology than the evil corporate thugs, because he knows a secret that hasn't occurred to the corporate thugs: bribe them with the thing everybody knows they like: cat food!!!! 

These aliens may be refugees, but they are not sheepherders (or zeepherders or whatever) from planet X.  Many of them are engineers with knowledge of the very technology the baddies want.  Christopher Johnson (the alien who is a quasi-protagonist in the film) never is conflicted about turning over his alien technology, because he is never offered anything for it.

What corporation wouldn't wine and dine our extraterrestrial guests (even if keeping them prisoner, prisoners can still be treated like guests) for such a huge pay off?  What government wouldn't do that, for that matter?

Comparing Elysium to District 9

Spoilers abound here for Blomkamp's two sci-fi action flicks.

I'm not planning here to compare the quality of the two movies, just highlight their plot similarities.

Both movies feature a disadvantaged group living in slums, a state that seems to be attributed to the avarice of corporations. Both feature a protagonist that has some health emergency that they have only days to resolve.  In both movies, the ailing protagonist is attempting to get to a space station in the sky that contains healing machines that can cure his ailment.  He must in the mean time hide from evil mercenaries because he has something in his body that the bad guys desperately want to exploit.  He must at some point escape from a torture table/chair because of this.  He will hide from the bad guys' surveillance in the slums for a while.  He will at some point be battling the bad guys using a powerful exo-suit, a reluctant hero turned Rambo.  He will have acquired the exo-suit from some crime lord in the slums.  He will at first be very selfishly motivated to only care about his ailment, but in time he will come around to deny himself access to that healing machine in the sky in a selfless act which will right some social injustice, since "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

A lot of similarities, I think.

Leela's Dateability

For some reason my children dearly love the TV show Futurama. They love Bender's exhortation to "bite my shiny metal ass" and Zoidberg's scuttling.  Even the Professor's senile "wha-?"

And so, as a parent, what they watch on TV, I watch on TV.  Believe me when I tell you I can recite the entire script to How To Train Your Dragon as well as Cars.

One thing I've noticed about Futurama is Philip J. Fry's frequent professions of his love for Turanga Leela. As an adult male I must say, Leela definitely has what it takes from the neck down. But it suddenly occurred to me that Futurama is a cartoon. What would Leela look like in real life? The Internet to the rescue once again!

Aaahhhh!  Homer Simpson's anguished scream of horror echoes through my head as I look at this picture.  No, I could not get used to that. Maybe if the eye were a little more human.

Aaahhhh!  Nope, still completely freaks me out. Let's try a little more cartoonish:

Okay, I might be able to get used to that... from about the nose down. Nope, I still can't quite stomach the cyclopian look.

I guess that's it- I'm hopelessly shallow.  I demand a (possibly unrealistic) standard of binocular beauty from women. I could not be Fry- if I worked at Planet Express I'd be trying to date Amy.

Yep, she's rich.

Unintentional Hilarity

My kids and I have been going through all 700+ episodes in five different series of Star Trek. Before embarking on this adventure I dithered about watching the series in broadcast order or chronological order. A co-worker pointed out that people now have the same problem with Star Wars. I think I would go for chronological order with Star Wars- the movies start off really lame with Little Orphan Ani, get steadily worse, then by the fourth installment start getting better, peak with Empire Strikes Back, and then end with the bittersweetness of the Ewoks combined with Princess Leia in that bikini.

But we were talking about Star Trek.  I ultimately decided on a loose broadcast order:  TOS then TNG then DS9 then VOY then ENT.

So, first they got to see Kirk.  Almost immediately I had to pause it and inform the children that "back in the 1960s that was what they called comedy."  Eventually we reached "The Trouble With Tribbles" which I told them "was an attempt at an all comedy episode."

As a good father I told the kids (aged seven and nine) about Redshirts, complete with the phrase "what are the odds he's going to die?" whenever a Redshirt appeared. We got over halfway through the series before I had to tell them "not all Redshirts die. Some lived."

I also introduced them to the phrase "oh, what are the odds Kirk is going to kiss her?" And the obvious answer "one hundred percent." There was the occasional episode in which I had to say "nah, Chekov/Spock/McCoy is going to kiss her. But Kirk really wants to!" But we made it all the way to the third season's "Requiem for Methuselah" before I realized the awful truth about Kirk. In that episode the Enterprise has a raging epidemic.  All hands will soon die if they can't get the right medicine. And despite this, the instant Kirk lays eyes on a pretty blonde all he can think about is getting into her pants. Even after he finds out she's a robot.

"What?!" My wife asked as the children described this to her. "He wanted to kiss a robot?"
"Yes," they replied. "He's kissed robots before."
And that's when I finally realized that Kirk isn't just some starfaring horn-dog. He's pathological. He's got a problem worse than Democrats Anthony "Seymour" Weiner and Filthy Bob Filner combined. What the heck was Starfleet thinking of giving this guy command of a starship?!

The Original Series has even better examples of unintentional hilarity, though. In the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get captured by a group of aliens with telekinesis.  It finally occurs to McCoy to run a tricorder scan of the aliens and discovers that a substance in their blood called Kirinite gives them their powers.

Kirk: McCoy, there must be a quick way of building up a concentration of Kirinite in our blood.
McCoy: It'll take some doing, but it's possible!
<pulls ampule out of medical kit and inserts it into hypospray>
McCoy: I'm ready.

Wow, that did take some doing, Bones!  And wait a second, you mean McCoy has had an ampule in his medkit this whole time that can give people telekinesis?!  Earlier in the episode we saw the alien's TK was powerful enough to damage the Enterprise.  A little later was an amusing scene in which they forced Kirk to slap the shit out of himself.  So… If Bones has this wonderful TK shot, why don’t they all take it every day? Why do they even bother with phasers?  Next time they encounter the Klingons just force them to slap themselves silly and then wedgie themselves to death before setting the auto-destruct on their ships.

But the long nineteen year hiatus between The Original Series and The Next Generation apparently allowed Rodenberry to really hone his comedic WTF? powers. In the NextGen
ep "Where No One Has gone Before" there's a scene in which Picard is making a shipwide address, somberly informing the crew of the plan to return home. There's various shots
of the crew bustling about preparations for the ship. And then there's this shot:

Uhhh, Captain, why is there some random Asian dude wearing a dress on deck eight? I showed this to a co-worker and after we discussed "what the heck were they thinking when they filmed this?!" I asked the question "...and why does he look so confused to boot?" To which my co-worker replied "well, because. He's obviously... confused."

Another co-worker was more matter-of-fact: "Why wouldn't they have transvestites in the future?"

This whole question came right back just a few eps later with this scene:

Sure enough, my nine year-old asked "Why is Picard wearing a dress?"
"Uh, because it's a formal occasion and he wants to look his best," I replied lamely.
"Then why isn't he wearing a suit or a tux?" My son asked practically.

Because Star Trek is essentially just "Libs in Space" (which explains what Jim Henson was really trying to say with "Pigs In Space" as well as why all the Treknobabble is so nonsensical) and this was probably some ham-handed comment about what liberals euphemistically refer to as "gender stereotypes."  But that's kind of a lot to lay on a nine year-old. Fortunately, my knowledge of history bailed me out.

"It's not a dress, it's a Greatcoat, like the ones worn by the British Navy long ago."

Thankfully, the Internet backed me up on this:

Picard's accent certainly helped.