Film Review: Prometheus 2012

Theatrical release poster Image (C) Wikipedia 

Finally just got round to watching Prometheus with Charlize Theron et al and I find myself asking myself IS IT ME?

Is it me, and are my expectations of a good movie these days too high? Is It Me, as someone once said, who is the lone voice in the wilderness, and I am so different to everyone else that it is me that is the lone non conformist among the millions and millions of cinema goers around the world - ok I didn't actually go to the cinema to watch it- so at least I saved a few bob there ....

I had seen the trailers months ago and couldn't wait for it's release, but then missed it. I read the rave reviews by the masses telling me that this was a great cinematic experience and a wonderful piece of entertainment.

It was made by Ridley Scott who terrified the life out of us with Alien (the sequels not so much)

I even saw Michael Fassbender who plays David being interviewed by Graham Norton OK, you got me there, interviewed and Graham Norton in the same sentence is a bit of a leap , but he is funny and so is the red chair. Apologies to US and other readers if you have no idea to whom or what I refer, but he raved on about what a great movie it was too, I like Graham Norton, but he lied to me on this....

It had Charlize Theron in it who appeared to be a clone, a beautiful one albeit but they forgot to give her personality, charm or wit and I suspect she must have forgotten her script as she was as laconic as a moody gunfighter hitching his spurs over the bar rail in a smoky saloon.

It had Idris Elba, dark brooding erudite John Luther from a TV show here in the UK who was a caricature of a heroic ships captain but who at least did the right thing in the end.

And talking of doing the right thing..... Lazy, lazy lazy writing in the extreme to come up with two characters right out of the stereotype handbook who are cowards through and through without one ounce of redeeming character between them, and who you just know are going to die horribly, and so too should the scriptwriters for that sheer piece of unadulterated dribble along with the director, producers and the studio for allowing them to remain in the script. We have seen it time and time again but one need look no further than David Hewlets portrayal of Dr. Rodney Mackay in Stargate to see the same traits as these two, BUT Rodney, while a coward, learned to step up to the plate, he didn't want to, but he did or he died and when he did it was great, AND he survived and we all thought better of him for it.

Guy Pierce was the only one who came out of it unscathed, only because he was made up to be an 100 year old dying nut job and therefore unrecognisable.

If you have yet to see this movie, well done; watch the trailer all the best and most interesting bits are in it and it only lasts for about 2 mins 40 seconds you won't wast another 119 minutes watching the rest of a forgettable movie which came from thoroughbred stock but bred with a nag producing an ass....

Foot note: Fassbender is the only one for me who came out of this with any credibility and that's only because he played an AI being but maybe his acting is that wooden as I can't recall seeing him in anything else.

Tom's rating: Prometheus was a Greek God from Mythology, a bit of a trickster and we believed and were tricked so,  A miss .

Film Review: Star Trek Into of Darkness

photo from IMDB 

Went and saw this on Wednesady with Ishbel who I should add has a fancy smart phone and an Orange account.  Needless to say all you with Orange accounts know about 'Orange Wednesday two for one cinema tickets', but it can only be used if you have your phone with you ......  Ishbel, you know what I'm saying .......

So the second outing for Messrs Pine, Quinto, Urban, Saldan and Pegg in the genuis of JJ Abrahams Star Trek franchise.

Was it as good as the first, where he cleverly re-wrote history and changed the time line? Yes

Are the cast and crew putting everything into these movies to give us the viewer a great cinema experience?  Yes


Some Spoilers here 



As usual it was action from the beginning with Kirk and McCoy on a planet that was still in the stone age and the inhabitants worshipping a volcano that is just about to explode and destroy the planet.  The Enterprise has been sent to study the planet only but Kirk decides to break the Prime Directive and save it instead.  His first and not his last disobedience of orders and if anything he is even better at that than the original James T Kirk..... A sub text in the opening sequence is Spock being lowered into the just about to explode volcano with a device to stop that from happening and as usual in these circumstances, everything goes to cock and he is about to die - can he be saved or not.....

Moving along to Starfleet headquarters Kirk is demoted to first officer and Admiral Pike is given back command of the Enterprise.

Then we meet Mr Cumberbatch -latterly of the BBC's Modern Sherlock and a fine job he makes of that - in London, as the villain of the piece.  Abrahams uses a character from the original series reprised in the original movies and it works well.  Cumberbatch, for the most part is very laconic, but then, his on screen presence in this part really calls for brooding malevolence and he does it particularly well.  We then get a few moments and mention of an other original series beastie that probably falls into the category of 'everyone loves them and the episode' which if memory served also had an episode of Deep space nine 'dedicated' to them too, but not sure if they ever popped up in TNG, it was a nice touch and acknowledges the greatness of the original series and writers..

Ishbel particularly likes Mr Quinto and thinks he is so like Mr Nimoy, high praise indeed..... and I agree with her, Simon Pegg is hilarious as Scotty.

Overall a great 2nd outing for Mr Abrahams and the cast of this reboot and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.  In fact I am getting worried about my Ishbel there was a time not so long ago where most 'action movies' would leave her as cold as a flash frozen fish newly placed in the hold of a trawler, but she is getting right into them and I sometimes wonder if she is garnering new ways to beat the s**t out of me as I keep annoying her or is it the 'hunks' that are attracting her? I'm still trying to find out who Christian and Sean are that she keeps saying she would like to be the ....... well best not go there.....

My rating: 5 out of 5
Ishbel:      5 out of 5

Book Review: In Her Name: The First Empress Trilogy - 'Forged in Flame'

Look inside Amazon UK here
Look inside Amazon US here 

What can I say about Michael R Hicks and his 'In Her Name' books that I haven't said before.  The guy knows how to weave a story creating whole new worlds and people who live and die by a code of honour that is so savage that it takes your breath away, yet, at the same time they are a species endowed  with as much passion for love and life as they have for killing......

Hicks has clearly spent many hours in deep thought thinking about the characters of these books so that he can pass on a clear and descriptive narrative to us, the readers; introducing us to a new species on a new planet and he just isn't giving as a story he is giving us a living history of a species in meltdown over hundred's of thousands of years and then going back and telling us how it came to be.

This is the eight book in the In Her Name series by Hicks and his writing get's better with each book, that's not to say that the writing was in any way bad or poor in the previous books as all seven that came before, drew you in from the first page and you, at least I, didn't want to put the books down until I had devoured each story, and neither, I believe will you. When they ended I do believe that I suffered withdrawal symptoms and being an avid reader with lots of other books by other authors in my TBR pile, after reading a Hicks book you find it a wee while before you are ready to go elsewhere.

I am not going to spend any time on characters or back story in this review, as part of a series it will be meaningless to you and if you have read any of his books you will already be familiar with them.  What I can say is, if you haven't read any of these books and you are a fan of science fiction, war, and love with an anthropological study of a alien race from the beginnings of time when the Earth was still in a primordial pool and then bypassing us by before finding and killing us (and even when they are, you still can't help but like them!!!) then these books are for you.

Book 1 - EMPIRE
Book 2 - CONFEDERATION
Book 3 - FINAL BATTLE
Book 4 - FIRST CONTACT
Book 5 - LEGEND OF THE SWORD
Book 6 - DEAD SOUL
Book 7 - FROM CHAOS BORN

Book 8 - FORGED IN FLAME

and if you head over to Mr Hicks web page here you will be able to nab a free copy of Empire to get you started 

The pages for Hicks Books on

Amazon US is here  and

Amazon UK is here 

Ratings:

Editing for Kindle: 5 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

Book Review: The Eldridge Conspiracy by Stephen Ames Berry

Look Inside US
Look Inside UK

Ames Berry clearly wanted to catch his reader by the throat and shake them about a bit from the outset in this novel, as the villain of the piece looked at

" a freckled teenage girl in soft repose, was now a wailing, writhing horror of ochre scales and suppurating sores, it's tentacles battering the lid." 

It worked, the opening sequence introduced us to Doctor Schmidla another 'recovered' Nazi from the 2nd World War by the American government.  Unlike other Nazi's though, where they were, it seems, integrated into a life for good and betterment, Schmidla's purpose, on behalf of the United States Government was to actively seek out (with the aid of the CIA and FBI), experiment on and ultimately murder a select group of US Citizens!

It is difficult to review this book to much without giving away the plot line but if you are old enough, and if you're not check out the Wikipedia page here , you will remember the movie The Philadelphia Experiment, where the US Government attempted to make a US Battleship invisible, during WW2.  The attempt failed!

This book takes us to the present (or at least to the 80's when this book is set and doesn't suffer any for that) and to the fact that while the attempt to make the ship invisible failed, it did do something to the crew.  Whatever it did wasn't manifest in the survivors but in their children and even more so in their grandchildren.... Think X Men II


There are twists and turns everywhere in this book with a plausibility borne from the recent hash of super hero movies, but the real hero is a father who lost a baby daughter only to find that the mad Doctor arranged for her kidnapping (presumed death) over twenty years before..... and he finds a friend in the closing paragraphs wasn't the friend you'd want to have

There are some graphic horror scenes described, particularly when one bad-ass gets his comeuppance at the hands, or rather the mind, of one of the pursued 'Potentials' and I liked what she did with him, even if she herself didn't.

The book is well written and the characters feel real.  All of us by now, have seen far too many shows telling us that Governments are not always the protectors that we would want or believe them to be and  Ames Berry plays on this and turns it into a horrific story suggesting that the people in power for years have been killing citizens for a perceived threat, whether it was real or not and as with his futuristic space borne books he has left the door open in another reality for a come back and I for one , hope there is a sequel....

Editing for Kindle /iPad: 4 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 4 out of 5 based on a couple of formatting errors and no page numbers
Page length on kindle /iPad: 279 estimated although the page numbers are not shown on either iPad or Kindle - Come on Mr Ames Berry show the Bl**dy numbers
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

Book Review: Convergent Space by John Paul Cleary

The Galaxy was living in peace and harmony benevolently controlled, protected, and guided by The Guild.

200 years ago The Aveche threatened the peace and tranquillity of the planets within The Guild.  Earth as the founders and most technologically advanced Planet develop a Shield that will encompass all of the Galaxy's and systems within The Guild, and after millions of relay stations are set up it is time to put the Shield in place.

The Earth fleet sets out with the final part but before it can be put in place  a Great (shock) Wave spreads through known space destroying millions of planets and trillions of lives.

Earth is blamed for the catastrophe and ostracised and a new ruling class is born in the The Renaissance.

Earth spends the next 200 years sending out Archeosoldiers to track what actually happened in the belief that their technology and the Shield could not have caused the disaster, no one believed them.......

Convergent Space then, turns out to be a futuristic inter galaxy archaeological detective story, with one person Archeosoldiers sent out in their ships with nothing more than a micro companion, which is connected to them wirelessly from birth, and dies when its human companion dies.

As large parts of the remaining galaxy are still in turmoil and planetary wars and civil wars are ongoing, the attrition rate of the Archeosoldiers is high.  Rone, a female Archeosoldier was badly injured during her quest and had managed to get assigned to a Renaissance station and was living with the leader of that part of space until a badly wounded soldier turns up in her front room.

She likes the life she is living and feels that Earth needs to forget its past and move on as no one really cares any more, but the Quest has become a religion on the home planet and all resources are geared to that and that alone.  The injured soldier dies but not before giving Rone information that could lead her to the truth of what happened two centuries ago.

She reluctantly takes up her old life and sets off in pursuit of the quest only to stumble upon a new threat to what's left of the Galaxy.  Humans, Phlegars, Hernesses are just some of the seemingly humanoid like species living in this mixed up star system.

The truth is finally revealed and the climax to the story is horrific, can history be repeated?

Over all I found it a little bit slow in places but, that was made up for in the overall story which has a bit of a twist to it that many people may find intriguing.

Putting it into today's setting (and whether the author intended to or not, I have no idea) The Renaissance, are probably the bankers who now control the system, francising out chunks of space to individuals and corporations but their actual power is proved to be a myth.  The Phlegars are the itinerants of the system, who have a dark secret that even they don't know about and the Hernesses are the Occupy Movement who will stop, only just short of genocide (except against one race) to rebalance the system for the betterment of everyone.  And humans, well we have just turned out to be blamed for all the ills that makes the system what it is and are ignored and hated by everyone in power... much like we peasants are today by both Governments and Businesses!

There were a couple of errors* in the book not story line but grammatical and spelling, but not as many as some I have recently read and if the author sorts these out

Editing for Kindle: 4 out of 5*
Reading Enjoyment: 4 out of 5
Page length on kindle: 348

Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

John Paul Cleary can be found here 


Convergent Space can be purchased at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here