Category: Reviews

Hugo Novelette Review: “Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner

written by David Steffen

“Championship B’tok”, written by Edward M. Lerner, published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is nominated for this year’s Hugo Award in the Novelette category.  Analog has posted this story for free online as part of this Hugo season.

I generally start these stories with a synopsis, to give a sense of what the story was about.  For me to be able to write a meaningful synopsis I need to be able to get some cohesive sense of what the story was about.  I had trouble discerning that for this particular story, so this is not so much a synopsis as a list of story elements.  The story starts with pilot Lyle Logan playing chess against his ship AI, and then the scene ends very abruptly in a way that’s never adequately explained and these characters never appear again in the story, nor have any other appreciable effect.  We’re introduced to an alien race known as Snakes, among other things.  There are also a mysterious race of beings (Interveners) that can apparently mimic the appearance of either humans or Snakes–these beings are not at all well-understood but they believe that the beings sparked the explosion of life in the Cambrian Era and that they steered the social/technological development of the human race.  The story mostly circles around two characters: a snake named Glithwa and a human named Corinne, and a human Carl.  Glithwah represents the ruling Snakes, digging for information about what might be human sabotage.  The titular game, b’tok, is played during the story, which is supposedly as much more complicated than chess as chess is more complicated than rock-paper-scissors.

As you might’ve gathered from the scattered, rather long and directionless synopsis, I apparently did not really get the point of this story.  What was that first scene there for?  What do the Snakes have to do with the Interveners?  Who am I supposed to root for?  Why do I care about any of this?  I found some references on the Internet that this might be part of a series of stories involving the InterstellarNet. If so, maybe I’m just missing some important information, but there was no information attached with the story that suggested it wasn’t a standalone, so I’ve got to judge it on its own merits.

One of the issues with the story was that it claimed that B’tok was so incredibly complicated, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward battle simulator, something we have many variations on even now.  Not only that, but some of the reals were just nonsensical, that rather than making it incredibly impressively complicated like it was apparently meant to be, it just came across as a poorly designed war sim.  That’s the trouble with trying to write a story about a game that was so complicated humans wouldn’t grasp it well, I guess.

I thought this story was all over the place.  I was not interested in any of the characters, or what happened to them, and the point of major reveals was often not particularly clear–the throwaway initial scene certainly did not help any of this.

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn

written by David Steffen

“The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn, published in Analog, is nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novelette.  Analog has posted this story as a free read as part of the Hugo season.

This is part two of the Journeyman series of stories.  I have not read the first part of the story, so I am extrapolating a bit.  Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand and Sammi o’ th’ Eagles are in the midst of  a journey that began in the previous story, where they were sent on a quest by a ghost that resided in a crashed vessel from the sky (presumably an AI residing in a starship) to find particular settlements for the star-men to salvage from the remains.  As well as the quest, they are also trying to stay ahead of Kalakaran Vikaram who is looking to avenge his brother that Teodorq killed.  As they are trying to cross a territory toward their destination, they stop to examine a stone building and they wonder how it was constructed (the technology level of the setting is mostly like a Medieval level, but with the remains of higher tech scattered about it’s clear that this occurs in the future after a technological collapse of some kind).  They, as well as their pursuer, are captured.  To continue their quest they must somehow escape their imprisonment.

The most interesting thing about this story was the use of language.  The two protagonists are from different cultures that speak different languages.  This means that to communicate directly with each other they have to speak in a broken pidgin dialect.  Each has vastly different views of life and death and everything that surrounds it, and this comes out in various conversations throughout the story.  At the same time I found some of the dialect rather distracting because, well, I just wasn’t all that interested in the outcome of the story, and the dialect was more absorbing than the events.

Maybe I would feel more absorbed if I had read the first story in the series.  Maybe if I had seen the conversation with the AI I would have a clear idea of the stakes at hand here, and I’d be more emotionally invested.  As it was, I was never confused by what was happening, I didn’t feel like it left out too much detail at least to explain events, but I didn’t really care what happened either and the story dragged as a result.  The characters could succeed, they could give up and go home, they could die in the attempt, and it wouldn’t make much difference to me–not that I really had any doubt that they’d make it through this alive.  When I read a story I want to feel connected to it, either an emotional connection with the characters, or at least some kind of thematic or intellectual connection.  I want to understand the stakes, what will happen if they fail in their mission, and I didn’t really feel like I got any of that.

And then the story just kind of ends at a pretty much arbitrary point, clearly just leading on into the next one, but without any kind of satisfying tying off.  Maybe these stories as a whole make a compelling story when combined together, but when a story is up for a Hugo as a standalone I’ve got to judge it based on what I see, and to me this is a not-very-compelling story fragment with some interesting dialect.  Maybe I would’ve liked it better if the Journeyman series as a whole were nominated for a novella or novel award, rather than this segment being nominated for the novelette award (that’s no longer possible with this nomination, a part of a whole cannot be nominated and then the whole also be nominated).  So this one was a miss for me.

 

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

written by David Steffen

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelte (translated by Lia Belt) was published in Lightspeed Magazine.  It appeared both in text and on the Lightspeed podcast.

Toby’s world turned upside down, figuratively speaking, when his girlfriend Sophie left him, with only a promise to pick up her goldfish the next day.  But, before she can fetch the fish, the world turns upside down, literally.  No one knows why or how, but gravity suddenly reversed.  Many people don’t survive, many from head injuries, many others from falling down into the endless sky.  Toby survives.  The goldfish survives.  Did Sophie?  He has to find out.  And also give her the fish back.  And maybe, just maybe, they can reconnect in this world gone wrong.  As Toby makes his way across the dangling undersurface of the Earth, he meets other people trying to survive.

I enjoyed this story.  It was on my nomination ballot because I thought it was fun (admittedly, I don’t read nearly as many novelettes as I do short stories so the pool of my potential nominees is quite a bit smaller).  When I was a kid I played games like that, imagining how I would get around if the world turned upside down, so probably part of my like is that it tapped into that childhood sense of wonder about reimagining everyday scenarios.  Some of the dialog felt a little bit odd, but I’m assuming that’s an artifact of the translation, and only lent to the dreamlike quality of the story.  I can’t say that I entirely related to the quest in the story to return the goldfish and try to rekindle the relationship, because she had made it pretty clear she wanted it to be over, it didn’t seem likely that was going to change, but I found the overall scenario and the interactions with other characters along the way to be plenty to keep me interested.  I gave this my second-rank vote for the Hugo novelette category.

Hugo Novelette Review: “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart

written by David Steffen

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart was published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.  The story is posted here for free to read.

Alluvium is the name of a human settlement and the planet its on, a place close enough to Earth in habitat that colonists can live with just nano-infusions to balance out the few chemicals that are toxic to humans.  Life is as good as it can be, until the Peshari (a lizard–like alien race) landed and conquered the human settlements.  Cerna is one of the settlers still living under their oppressive rule.  His friend, Keller, has become sick, since the Peshari took away their all-important nano-fabbers.  Keller has taken an interest in the death rituals of the Peshari and how it differs from human death rituals.

This story was slow to start.  The beginning scenes didn’t grab my attention very strongly, but I wanted to give the story a chance, to see if it picked up.  I’m glad I did, because a scene or two later it did grab my interest, when the death rituals start to take more of a focus.  I’ve said before that I would like to see more science fiction that features religion but neither preaches nor demonizes it, and so admittedly this story hit a sweet spot for my personal tastes with its focus on human and alien death rituals and how the effect of ritual and symbol can have on the world.  After the slow beginning, the rest of the story held my interest to the satisfying end.  Usually I go for stories that connect to me more on a personal level than this one perhaps did, this had more of a golden SF feel to it, but I thought the social and religious ritual aspects of it more than made up for that.  This story has my top vote in the novelette category.

Hugo Short Story Review: “On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli

written by David Steffen

“On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli, published in Sci Phi Journal, is nominated for this years Hugo Award in the Short Story Category.  Sci Phi Journal has posted the story for free for the voting period, which you can find here.

The story takes place on the alien planet Ymila, devoid of any useful resources apart from being close to a wormhole.  Ymila has a single sentience species who practice a single religion based around the journey of the soul.  The biggest thing that’s different about Ymila is that it has a much stronger electromagnetic field which keeps dead souls from dissipating quickly as they apparently do on Earth.  Another major thing is that the Ymilans have developed specialized sensory organs that allow them to see and communicate with dead souls.  A human dies for the first time on the planet, and his soul visits the human chaplain–visible only under certain conditions but unable to communicate clearly.  The chaplain sets out on a pilgrimage to the pole of the planet where the magnetic field is weaker to allow the soul to dissipate.

I thought the core idea here was interesting, the concept of a intelligent-life-supporting planet which has different properties that will keep a soul in place, and the intelligent lifeforms there evolving with sensory equipment to communicate with them.  I can see how that sensory equipment would give an evolutionary advantage–allowing a multigenerational learning/mentoring culture.  I would love to see more stories that include religion as an important element without either preaching nor demonizing them.

But I never really felt any tension as I was reading.  At the beginning of the story they set out on a journey, they take the journey with no significant obstacles, and then the journey is over.  A lack of tension might be made up for by some interesting philosophy, something deep to mentally chew on, and that would certainly make sense in a publication that styles itself a journal of philosophical science fiction.  The chaplain had the opportunity to speak to Joe (the dead soul) through native translators, yet for most of the journey Joe is not aware of what the purpose of the trip is.  Why is the chaplain undertaking this journey without even speaking to Joe about it?  Does he think that he knows what’s best for Joe better than Joe himself–why not just ask Joe what he wants to do?  It seems to me that a chaplain’s role in such a situation would be to be a counselor for the dead, to help Joe come to terms with what has happened and to help Joe come to his own decision about what Joe wants to happen next.  The impression I got, which is probably not what the author intended, is that the chaplain wanted Joe’s ghost to go away because it would raise awkward questions among the congregation to have a ghost hanging around.  If he simply wanted Joe to go on to the afterlife, why rush it?  The pilgrimage could be taken at any time whenever Joe felt that he was ready–the native souls usually moved on after six generations, as a natural progression of their relationship to the living populace, so I would expect Joe to eventually decide to do the same if he weren’t rushed into it.  If the answer to these questions wasn’t the rather negative conclusion I jumped to, then I felt the story could’ve supported whatever was intended more strongly.

 

Hugo Short Story Review: “Totaled” by Kary English

written by David Steffen

“Totaled” by Kary English was first published in Galaxy’s Edge magazine, edited by Mike Resnick.  Galaxy’s Edge posted the story for free after the announcement of the Hugo ballot so you can read it for yourself if you like.

The story is told from the point of view of a disembodied brain extracted from a woman’s body after her body is “totaled” in a car accident.  Before the accident she had been a member of the research team that made this possible.  A rider on her insurance dictated that if she died or got totaled her tissues would be donated to her research lab–including her brain.  At first she can only sense from the outside nerve by feeling vibrations in the vascular tissue, but as the experiment advances she is connected to more peripherals, including sensory apparatus, and she can find ways to communicate outward as well because they are scanning her brain.  She tries to communicate with her research partner Randy, who doesn’t know that the brain he’s using was his partner’s.

I enjoyed this story.  The character is thrown directly into a difficult situation where she literally has only her brains as an asset and has to figure how to get through this situation with nothing on her side.  To me it felt kind of like a golden age science fiction story where it’s all about a scientist pitted against a brain problem, but with the un-golden-age characteristic that the protagonist is an intelligent woman scientist, so that’s a bonus.

There were high stakes and a difficult problem to solve, but although the stakes have plenty to keep the tension up, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to it the way that I really want to connect to a story.  I don’t know exactly why that was–perhaps the focus on the intellectual problem over other factors, or I just wasn’t feeling the personal stakes for personal reasons, I’m not entirely sure.  So, in the end I enjoyed the story but it didn’t blow me away the way I really want from an award story.

 

Hugo Short Story Review: “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond

written by David Steffen

baenbookmonsters_“A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond was first published in The Baen Big Book of Monsters published by Baen Books.

In this story a mountain-sized kaiju has arisen in Japan, rising from beneath the land itself where the landscape had built up around it.  The monster is moving across the countryside, crushing everything in its path.  A samurai has survived its uprising where so many others haven’t by riding the kaiju as it rose up and climbing up its back even as the soil and trees and rocks shift off the kaiju as it walks.  To save Japan he has to finish his climb and find some way to kill the monster.

This was my favorite of the category, and earned my vote.  I am not well-versed in Japanese culture, so I couldn’t say how authentic the viewpoint was, but from my layman’s eye it worked well enough for me.  The story is very short, and doesn’t overstay its welcome–it kept me interested from beginning to end.  The resolution made sense in retrospect but I didn’t see it coming.  The story is so short and the premise is relatively simple, so that there’s not a lot else I can say about the story without spoiling it.

The Hugo packet included the entire collection, but this is the only story in the collection I read, so I can’t comment on what I think of the volume as a whole–if you didn’t register for WorldCon and get the Hugo packet, I think that the collection is the way to get the story.

Hugo Graphic Story Review 2015

written by David Steffen

The Hugo Graphic Story category is the one that I look forward to the most, because I enjoy the medium, but I don’t really keep up with them on a regular basis, so the Hugo packet catches me up on some of the popular comics of the previous year.

I only read the stories that were included in the Hugo packet, so did not read Zombie Nation #2, which was not included.


msmarvel1.  Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)

Kamala Khan is a sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Muslim living in Jersey City with her family, trying to figure out how she fits into the world, at least when she’s not reading comics or gaming.  She doesn’t feel that she fits in with her peers who she has trouble relating to, but she also doesn’t feel in place at the mosque and she doesn’t feel comfortable in some of her family’s strict traditions.  One night she sneaks out of the house to go to a friend’s party and begins to exhibit strange abilities after she passes through a strange fog.  That first night she takes on the appearance of Carol Danvers in her old Ms. Marvel costume (Carol Danvers is now Captain Marvel), and she saves someone’s life.  She experiments with her newfound abilities and finds that she can alter her body’s size and shape in a variety of ways.  Taking on the name Ms. Marvel, and with a new costume built from a burkina (a traditional swim garb her mother bought for her which she has been too embarrassed to use)  In this first volume, she tries to decide what to with her abilities as she hones her skills.

Kamala Khan is one of Marvel’s most memorable characters in their recent push to diversify the stars of their comic lines.  Most of the original lines were made in the 1960’s and mostly star white men as the stars, so it’s a refreshing change to see more women, more varied ethnic backgrounds, and (for me at least) particularly interesting is to see a character with not only a religion, but a non-Christian religion–even in fiction in general it’s too rare to find religion as an element which is neither preached nor villified.  To see religion (and, again, a non-Christian religion especially) as an element in a comic book in that fashion is wonderful.

But I don’t like it merely for its diversity.  I found Kamala to be a very interesting and compelling character.  She’s a gamer and a comic fan, just like me, and I had my share of social difficulties at that age.  In some ways her situation remains me a young Peter Parker–with the split between high school social things and the superheroing, the reason that I think Spider-Man proved as popular as he has.

There are lots of fun little in-jokes for long-time science fiction fans to reward careful reading and examination of background art, as well as just some other jokes such as the cereal brand “G-M-Oh’s!”

I highly recommend reading this, whether you’re a long-time comics fan or new to the medium.  This is a rare comic that has made me want to get my first comic book subscription.

 

sex-criminals-vol-01-releases2.  Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)

Suzie is a librarian who discovered at a young age that she is different than other people in one important and secret way–whenever she experiences an orgasm, for a while afterward the world around her freezes and she is the only moving thing in this shimmering and immobile place she calls “the quiet”.  As an adult she finds another like her, a man name Jon, only realizing after they have sex and he is not frozen like the rest of the world.  This first volume covers both of their sexual histories, their meeting, their experimentation with the connection they’ve found over this strange shared ability, and their choice to rob a bank–the bank that is foreclosing on her library, the bank that he works for.

I enjoyed this quite a bit.  Because of the lewd subject material, it’s a hard book to make a blanket recommendation for.  It’s not a book that I’d bring up at a family reunion, for instance.   But I found the frank discussion of sex from both a woman and man’s point of view to be refreshing, including the discovery of sex when they were younger–a topic that is often near-taboo even though it’s a natural thing for children to discover masturbation long before they reach sexual maturity.  Some elements of it are pretty corny, but I thought they were corny in a good way–they hung a lantern on it and used it for laughs instead of trying to take everything too seriously.  I thought the volume was funny, refreshingly honest, and entertaining to read.  I found the choice to rob the bank a bit of stretch, but maybe not considering the powers that they have.  I’m curious to see where the series goes after this volume.

I really wish they’d chosen a different title, though.  I see what they were going for, since their bank-robbing relies on their sex-triggered ability, but usually “sex criminal” means a rapist or a child molester, not exactly what you’d consider the hero of a comic book.

 

rat-queens-vol-01-releases3.  Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch (Image Comics)

The Rat Queens are a quartet of women adventurers hailing from the town of Palisade.  The group is made up of the elven mage Hannah, the dwarven warrior Violet (who has shaved her beard), atheist human cleric Dee, and the halfling thief Betty.  When they’re not out adventuring, they spend their time carousing, doing drugs (and candy in the case of Betty) and having large-scale destructive bar fights.  The town of Palisade has a bunch of mercenary/adventurer teams that are assigned tasks from time to time by the city government–after a particularly damaging barfight, the Rat Queens and other merc groups are all sent out on simultaneous missions but the missions turn unusually deadly–somebody has set ambushes to take out the mercs.

This comic was inspired by D&D games, and it shows–there’s a lot of fun, a lot of humor.  An all female fighting cast is refreshing, and it’s good to see a variety of body types of both men and women characters.  The characters were interesting and I liked to see the mix of men and women characters who treated each other as equals without sex having to be an element between them (but of course sometimes it is).  I liked some of the humor, other of it was a miss–I guess I’m not much of a carouser myself so that angle didn’t really interest me as much as the comic seemed to be aiming for.  The fight scenes were pretty cool to a degree but they often dialed up the violence to the point that it got to be a bit much for me at times, it felt a little bit like a Tarantino film here and there.

 

Saga_vol3-14.  Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics))

Volume three, as with the earlier volumes, mostly focuses on Alana and Marko, a husband and wife of warring extraterrestrial races, and their newborn daughter.  They are fugitives from both bounty hunters and from the Android known as Prince IV of the ruling android royalty.  In this volume Alana and Marko and their ragtag crew take refuge at the home of revolutionary novelist D. Oswald Heist.

I read Volume 1 in the Hugo packet a couple years ago.  Volume 2 wasn’t in last year’s Hugo packet and I didn’t seek it out, so I’m sure I’m missing some important background for this story.  I was a little lukewarm on the first volume, but this one I warmed up to a little bit more.  There’s certainly some real personal stories told here, with Alana and Marko trying to figure out practical things like caring for a baby and trying to find an income stream when they are traveling fugitives, as well as having some more action-packed elements when different hostile groups cross paths.  I liked the art design of most of the characters, incorporating people we would recognize as varying races, but giving them further inhuman embellishments like horns, wings, single cyclopean eyes, etc.  The androids I still found rather hard to take seriously with their cathode-ray-tube TV heads, a design which is already outdated in our present, let alone in any future.

 

 

Review of Hugo Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form 2015

written by David Steffen

All of the nominees for this Hugo category this year were also nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award that goes with the Nebulas, which I reviewed over here.  At the time, Interstellar wasn’t available to rent yet, so I didn’t review that.  So, these are all repeats of that previous set of reviews, except Interstellar which I’ve watched since then.

1.  Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Earth is under attack from an alien force known only as mimics, viciously deadly enemies that humans have only one battle against.  Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) works in PR for the US military and has been ordered to the frontier of the war in France.  The general in charge of the war effort orders Cage to go to the front lines to cover the war.  When Cage attempts to blackmail his way out of the mission, he is taken under arrest and dropped at the front with the claim that he had tried to go AWOL and so is quickly forced into service, given only the most passing training in the mechsuits that are standard issue, and dropped into battle with everyone else.  This area was supposed to be fairly quiet, but the battle here is intense.  Cage manages to kill one of the mimics, but dies in the act, only to wake up earlier in the day when he’d woken on the base in handcuffs after the general had him arrested. He dies again, and again, and again.  No one else has any memory of reliving the day except for Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the super-soldier nicknamed “Full Metal Bitch” after she wreaked havoc against the mimics in the only battle against the mimics that the humans have won.  She confides that she had won that battle because she had gone through the same thing he had–as long as he dies he will always restart at the same time and place.

I avoided this movie in theaters, because I haven’t really gone to any Tom Cruise movies since he kindof went publicly nuts.  But I rented this one since it was nominated.  I thought Tom Cruise was back to old form in it, and even if you don’t like it, well you get to see him die literally dozens of times.  I thought Emily Blunt was especially good in her role as Rita, powerful but still affected by the PTSD of dying over and over and seeing so many die around her over.  The looping-after-death element makes for a cool dynamic when well-plotted and when placed against large enough obstacles, which was well done here.  Good spec FX, good casting all around, solidly entertaining.

2.  Interstellar, screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Lynda Obst Productions, Syncopy)

Widespread crop blight has put the world’s food supply in jeopardy, and the sustainability of life on earth is in serious question.  Much of the population is focused on farming efforts, pushing back against the inevitable as the Midwest turns back into a dust bowl.  Cooper (Matthew McConaghey) is a widowed farmer living with his father-in-law, son, and daughter.  His daughter Murphy believes she has a poltergeist in her room that knocks her books from her shelf, and though Cooper doesn’t believe in ghosts, he encourages her to measure and record the things she sees.  They find that there are binary coordinates coded into waves of gravity–they follow those coordinates and find a top secret research facility led by Dr. John Brand (Michael Caine).  A wormhole has opened up near Saturn that opens to an unknown location in another galaxy, and they have been working in secret to colonize any inhabitable planets they may find on the other end of the wormhole.  Some people have already been sent through to scout, and some information has been relayed which suggests some of the planets might be inhabitable.  They recruit Cooper to pilot the mission.  He reluctantly agrees, for the sake of saving his family, even though he will miss his children growing up while he is gone.  He goes on the mission with two others, Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and two other scientists, as well as two repurposed military robots, TARS and CASE.  While Cooper and the others continue on their mission, Dr. Brand and the other scientists on Earth try to solve the remaining problems necessary for the colonization effort to be successful if Cooper and the others can find a habitable planet.

I was skeptical of Matthew McConaghey, because I haven’t seen him in a lot of things that I thought he was particularly good in, but this was probably the best acting I’ve seen from him–I thought he was very convincing.  The casting all around was very good, no complaints there.  I thought as the movie progressed that the convenient reveal of the wormhole was kind of a deus ex machina in terms of this universe, not in terms of the movie, since it appears early in the movie.  It’s clear that the people in the movie in general are of no better preparation for the end of humanity than we are in our world, but in their world a convenient solution shows up right when it’s needed.  This ends up making some sense later on, but it kind of had me skeptical as well.

The robots were kind of weird.  I like robots, don’t get me wrong, but they were rectangular prisms that usually seemed to be too awkward to be threatening military units, though they did show their mobility and abilities better later in the movie.  I was often distracted by the weird design, though, when I was supposed to be paying attention to other things.

There are a lot of good, convincing special effects, tense moments, a lot of good emotional tension with family’s split by the tension and especially with Cooper fighting so hard to succeed at his mission–even if he can never see his family again he is fighting for their survival.  This is a major theme in the movie, used to good effect, the discussion of of how family love like that, while we generally think of it as positive, can make you consider only your personal relationships over the fate of humanity, choosing personal connections over the survival of the species.

3.  The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller  (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Emmett Brickowski is just a regular guy, pretty much the poster child for averageness in a world of Legos.  He does everything exactly the way he’s supposed to do, but no one pays much attention to him.  He meets a strange woman name WyldStyle who tells him he is the subject of a prophecy, the most interesting person in the world and the one who will save everyone from President Business who rules over all of Brickburg.  WyldStyle is a master builder, a rare class of lego person who can take random Lego parts and turn them into a variety of imaginative things.  She is part of an organized rebellion of master builders, and Emmett joins them in their fight.

I enjoyed this story thoroughly from beginning to end.  The voice acting is great all around (particularly that of Chris Pratt as Emmett, Nick Offerson as Metal Beard, Will Arnett as Batman, and Liam Neeson as Good Cop/Bad Cop).  Lots of fun, weird imagination, and as they see out of the worlds they travel and into the real world there’s actually a relatable real life story tied into it.  Great stuff all around.

 4.  Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

I hadn’t heard of this Marvel franchise until this movie came out, one of the more obscure ones.  In 1988 a young Peter Quill is abducted by aliens by a band of space pirates and is raised as one of them.  In the present day he has his own ship and has grown up to be a bounty hunter (Starlord by name), taking whatever odd jobs he can find for money.  After taking what seems to be a pretty straightforward job to find and deliver an orb, he’s suddenly the focus of attention from the assassin Gamora as well as the bounty hunters Groot (a tree person) and Rocket (a one-of-a-kind genetically modified raccoon) who are all after the orb.  In the scuffle for the orb, they are all arrested and locked in a prison. Gamora tells them of her adoptive father Thanos who wants the orb for nefarious plans. They decide their only chance of escape is to work together, with help from another prisoner Drax the Destroyer, and stop Thanos.

Solidly fun, another Chris Pratt work, probably my favorite role that I have seen him in.  Great casting all around, with Bradley Cooper memorably voicing Rocket.  Action-packed, solidly fun popcorn movie.  Lots of memorable lines, memorable fights, really no complaints all around. 

5.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

Two years after the Battle of New York (depicted in The Avengers), Captain Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans) is working for Nick Fury at SHIELD, and trying to adjust to modern society.  SHIELD is on the brink of completing one of its most ambitious projects, a set of three helicarriers that fly in low orbit and link to a network of spy satellites that are meant to find and kill threats to society all over the globe.  Not long before the project comes to fruition, Nick Fury is hit with a large scale and no-holds-barred attack led by a mysterious assassin known only as the Winter Soldier.  Despite all of Fury’s security measures, he barely escapes with his life to warn Rogers that SHIELD is compromised.  Rogers works together with Natalia Romanoff aka the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to get to the bottom of it.

This was one of my least favorite Marvel movies in the recent years of the franchise, which almost always produces movies I enjoy.  There was certainly a lot going on, but the movie was quite long and it seemed like the fight scenes were drawn out way way too long, as if the director thought the movie needed to be padded.  Neither the fight scenes nor the non-fight scenes did a lot to hold my attention.  It might just be because I’m more interested in the superheroes with more fun powers instead of just the shield.  For me the highlight of the movie was the platonic friendship between Rogers and Romanoff–a fun dynamic there.