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Anderson's Mirth was Mesmerizing
don't think Gillian Anderson need worry about her having to audition for roles outside the "Scully" genre. I saw her in The House of Mirth and was mesmerized by her stunning performance in that film. We don't see too many real actors on screen these days; mostly "personalities" who never leave themselves too far behind when playing a role. Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts no matter what character she plays.
But Ms. Anderson was amazing as the doomed heroine of the movie. She appeared in just about all of the scenes and her emotional depth never ran shallow. It's great to see real actors now again on the big screen. I hope she will return from England to do more work here on films like this one.
Vicki Harrison
veharrison@mindspring.com
Final Fantasy Outspirits Raider
just saw Final Fantasy and I think that the review of the movie done on your, and other sites, are a bit off target. First, I'll admit that the story could have been a little bit better, but overly complicated? Within
the context of the movie, everything was explained, and made sense. The concept of "Mother Earth" or Gaia isn't new or New Age. And what is it that reviewers look for anyway? Tomb Raider was given an A-, even though it left a lot to be desired as far as plot and character development. I got more emotional nuances from Aki Ross than from Angelina Jolie. I agree that the methods used to have the characters speak may have made the syncing be off but the quality of the voices more than made up for it. I've read General Hein described as evil, but he wasn't evil, he was vengeful and willing to do what he thought would eradicate the creatures that destroyed his family.
A soldier willing to sacrifice him or herself for the protection of others may be cliche but it's something that those of us who served are familiar with. Some reviewers seemed to have a revelation that the characters weren't real. Well, duh. This movie may not have been perfect, but I found it to be much better than Tomb Raider.
Robert Palomino
TriggeR58@aol.com
Trek Writers Should Take B5 Lessons
ll right, I notice these days everyone is complaining about the various storylines of SF shows. Now, I don't think they're all great, but if nothing else they could use to take some lessons from Babylon 5 writers. While Star Trek rocks, they don't really have much of a sense of continuity. The only storyline that ever continued for a long time was the Dominion war, which was decent but wasn't great compared to the B5 stuff. So, I'm wondering if these writers can catch on and maybe work on this continuity thing. I think it would make for much better SF shows. ...
CoughcoughStarTrekEnterprisecoughcough.
David Holness
portal@cgocable.net
The Rules of Fiction Are Fantasy
n the rebuttal letter "Time Travel Must Follow the Rules", Mr. Huxter has missed one extremely important fact: This is just a piece of fiction!
Time travel has not been accomplished and no matter what various people believe the rules are since we cannot do it who knows how it would truly work. It may not work at all. Who cares! Geez, you spent so much time on your soap box defending your knowledge and reasoning all to no apparent reason except to come off fairly self righteous.
You can believe whatever you wish, Mr. Huxter, but I enjoyed the episode and since I know it is merely a piece of fiction, I could care less what fictional lives were changed. If people all felt the way you do I think it would be unlikely that many excellent books, movies and TV shows would ever have been written. So I suggest you get off your soap box and not act as if this were real life, because it is not.
Cybele A. Baker
cybelebaker@dwt.com
Old Enterprise Surprises Fan
am writing in response to Brian Paxson's letter entitled "Trek Film Shows New Enterprise." In his letter, he states that the ship named Enterprise between the space shuttle and the Constitution-class ship "is a concept drawing of a ship design for the Phase II ship."
Several years ago, a book was released that was titled Ships of the Federation or something similar to that. Within that book, a ship configured just like the one pictured in the arboretum in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is indicated as existing around the mid-22nd century. It was a Declaration-class ship called Enterprise. This particular ship class stuck in my mind, because it surprised me that another ship with that name existed before the Constitution-class ship that I so dearly loved.
Patrick Stutzman
starspeed@hotmail.com
History's Inertia Acquits Janeway
aving read Sean Huxter's recent follow-up ("Time Travel Must Follow the Rules") to his "Admiral Janeway Murdered Millions" letter, I feel I must raise one small point that he has obviously missed. Unless everyone in the new timeline is sterile, Janeway can also be considered to have created millions. The millions who were born in the previous timeline have simply been replaced by the millions who were born in the new timeline, added to by the children who will grow from the family lines of the returned crew. Not a bad trade.
Whether deleting someone from history is murder or not is an interesting question. In the new timeline, there's no evidence of their existence. They were never born, so how can they have been killed? Sure the future Janeway saw them, but the question of their reality depends on your perspective. From the position of the younger Janeway and her crew, those millions were phantoms, potential people as yet unformed from the myriad possibilities of the future. Millions of people would be born in either reality, and with the information about the Borg and Species 8472 that Voyager brought to the Federation, those millions stand a chance of living to produce millions more.
Sean talks a lot about ground rules, so let's take a look at what we know about time in the Star Trek reality. In one of the earliest episodes to deal with time travel, McCoy alters history by saving the life of Edith Keeler. When she is killed, history returns to its previous pattern. There is no magic reset button here. The previous history has not been restored. It has been forever altered, because even in the history where Edith dies, Kirk, Spock and McCoy exist in the 20th Century where once they did not. So, how likely is it that every tiny decision between the time of Edith Keelers death and the point where McCoy leapt into the Guardian of Forever would be exactly the same? Unless there is no free will in the Star Trek reality the chances of those decisions--the cumulative weight of which become history--all being identical is astronomically high. The fact that history can be altered demonstrates that free will exists. So there must be another force at work. We'll call it "historical inertia," the tendency of history to return to its original pattern.
What other evidence is there for historical inertia? Well, there's plenty. In "Yesterday's Enterprise," the reality that we see at the end of the show is almost identical to the one we see at the start of the show, despite numerous minor changes to the past. Without historical inertia, one would expect those tiny changes to snowball until the resulting history was very different from the one at the episodes beginning. As it was, the only change appeared to be the existence of Sela. In "Trials and Tribbilations," reality is again left undisturbed despite a large number of minor historical changes. The two-part episode "Past Tense" demonstrates the reluctance of history to change from an established pattern once more, as Ben Sisko takes the place of the historical Gabriel Bell. This time the only change appears to be an alteration in historical records of Bell's appearance. And then there are the events of the movie First Contact. There are many other examples of historical inertia throughout the Star Trek series, certainly enough for it to be considered a ground rule.
The point of this is that there is considerable evidence that, barring a drastic alteration to a critical event, history tends to turn out basically the same. Sean claims that millions of children were "unborn" by Admiral Janeway's actions, but if there is such a force as historical inertia active in the Star Trek universe, then that claim is distinctly dubious. If history tends to follow the same basic pattern, then the majority of those children will be born in the new timeline as well as the old one. There's no doubt that some children would be unborn, but millions? I don't think so.
Admiral Janeway may have destroyed a future, but she replaced what she destroyed, hopefully with something better. The wisdom of her actions will be seen in how that new future plays out.
Chris Halliday
otherchris@erols.com
Lexx Should Be Left Alone
'mon everybody, leave Lexx alone. Lexx is to sci-fi what Ally McBeal is to
lawyer shows. It was intended to be a ribald, campy series and it has succeeded. While I prefer the original Zev, Eva Haberman from the four precursor movies, the rest of the cast is pleasantly weird with absolutely no pretensions of grandeur.
Now if they will only rerun the episode of Eva Zev taking a shower again.
T. Hannibal Gay
Hannibal@Hotmail.com
HarperCollins Demonstrates Chutzpah
egarding Sandy Ball's comment ("Publisher Pummels Lewis' Narnia"), "I'm angry that HarperCollins would have the guts to even think about changing the Narnia Chronicle." I believe a better word to describe what HarperCollins proposes is "chutzpah."
Michael Walsh
mjw@mail.press.jhu.edu
A.I. Is A Poor 2001 Knockoff
saw A.I.: Artificial Intelligence last night with my wife (who hates SF) and my 13-year old (who's been raised with my love of it).
If Pearl Harbor was an inferior From Here to Eternity stitched together with a superior Tora! Tora! Tora!, then A.I. played like 2001 mated with a 30-minutes ending of Spielbergian sugarcoating.
My wife called it "a story gone astray" while my son and I both likened it, structure-wise, to 2001 in that HAL, the most interesting character by far in that film, was not who the story was about.
"Gigolo Joe is HAL," said my son. How right he is; when Joe leaves the scene, the film is on thin, rather than thick ice. (Had the film begun with Joe discovering his murdered customer and gone on from there, without David and his Mom, that might have been cool even if kept PG-13.)
The whole Blue Fairy and Dr. Know-It-All premise ... please! Need I go on? Why I have yet to read a negative review of this $100 million conceit in search of a cohesive story? It's as if the emperor has no clothes, but the critics watching his parade lack the guts to write that Steven Spielberg is stark naked.
Speaking of fables, the material upon which A.I. was based and its developmental history are like Icarus and Daedalus attaching feathers to themselves with wax to make wings to escape from a prison tower. Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he perished, leaving his father
to fly to freedom alone.
Well, Stanley has gone leaving Steven to flap away on his own. Now if only somewhere along the line somebody told them that this wax-feather screenplay was never going to take wing. As for those who want to see A.I. again before making a definitive judgment ... Are they afraid to believe or simply refuse to accept it was that bad the first time they saw it?
Yo, folks. It was.
Kevin Ahearn
KEVTOMA@aol.com
Hard Science Absent from A.I.
wouldn't call A.I.: Artificial Intelligence "hard science fiction" at all. For one thing, how long do you think it would take for the polar ice caps to melt? The sun would have to get hotter or expand, or we'd have to put so many green-house gasses in the atmosphere that we'd probably suffocate before we'd see the affects.
In addition, everything freezes over just 2,000 years later. Only 2,000 years? I originally assumed the ice caps came back in a sort of second ice age, but the entire planet looked covered in ice, even to the equator. Remember, this is only 2,000 years after he's stuck begging the "blue fairy" to make him a "real boy." The Earth is not going to just up and freeze after it's been warming up.
Finally, it is not entirely clear whether the creatures at the end were robots or aliens. They have some robotic feel to them, but they also have a feel like every psychic alien I've ever seen or read of in these fictions. So much for "hard science fiction." I don't know if anyone writes hard science fiction anymore, though a few people come pretty close.
Christopher Schneider
chrisjs@rica.net
A.I. Millennium Coincidence Stuns
omment on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence-- I just want to point out the amazing coincidence that in the year 2001, the child star of Kubrick's film about artificial intelligence is named "Hal."
Larry Aronberg
drmac@flite.net
Davids and Darlenes Answer A.I.
hought I'd put my two cents in about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. (SPOILERS AHEAD)
Although I had an entertaining and thought-provoking time at the film, I did feel that the Coda failed. If I were the director (how many times has a reviewer started with that idea?) I would have ended the story with David in the submersible looking at the Blue Fairy.
But, even if I wanted to go for a "happier," more poignant ending, I would have skipped the aliens. It would have made more sense to have all those Davids and Darlenes still functioning. As the only "living" creatures left, they could rescue the original David and create a robot mom for him out of respect for his being number one. Introducing aliens who create this fantasy for David seems pretty far-fetched and doesn't gel with the mood of the movie.
Dennis E. Henley
dennishenley@hotmail.com
A.I. Misplaces Science and Story
K, I just saw A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and I had to make a few comments. (I'll be brief to save the Spielbergites brain cells as they devise their rebuttal.)
Firstly, it's very obvious what elements are Kubrick's and where Spielberg watered down the perspective. There are minor inconsistencies throughout the story that are due to the "softening" influence of Spielberg. Secondly, it is also very obvious where Kubrick stopped writing and where
Spielberg picked up after his death.
(SPOILER ALERT!)
Let's face it, aliens? Lovely, friendly, benevolent aliens who wish nothing but to peacefully and wonderfully re-ignite the flame of humanity--for they are beautiful and wonderful beings who ... cough, hack, choke This is Kubrick?!
Thirdly, David is a supercomputer--but he can't seem to understand fairy-tales? David has incredible learning talent and the ability to process information at a phenomenal rate--but he can't see the ludicrous nature of his quest? David runs from the orgas who hunt him--but can't conceive that those who created him would be powerful enough to fool him with an all-too-obvious trap at Dr. Know? C'mon! Who's the child here? (I'd say the writer.)
Fourthly, aliens who have the technology to read a mind at a whim--gaining an entire lifetime of memories in a few moments--can't do the same when they re-ignite the memories of a human? And aliens with such incredible technology to "revive the memories stored in the space-time continuum" and have the ability to edit them so that a thinking mind does not scream at the sheer inconsistency of not remembering husband or child--yet they can't build a human from the ground up and install the recorded and duplicated memories into that mind? heavy sigh (Can't we just have killed David
with the ferris wheel like Kubrick envisioned?)
Let's face it. If Kubrick wrote the movie, it would have ended at David's plunge from the building top. Or it would have ended with his destruction at the end of his quest for the fairy. These are very Kubrick concepts--destroy the character's very life through a realization that everything he sought was an illusion--then kill him.
OK, so, I've decided the movie needs to be re-written. There are two possible conclusions:
1) Happy ending: David becomes human. David finds mommy. David lives happily to a point wherein he chooses his own demise while holding the hand of his beloved mommy. (Oh, yeah, this has already been done ... Bicentennial Man.)
2) Sad ending: Discovering the angst of unrequited love--a mother who abandons her child, rejection, the harsh realities of a vicious criminal life on the run, David becomes what every child who experiences these things becomes--a sociopathic rebel who must strike out at the world around him. Armed with his incredible thinking capabilities (he is a supercomputer, after all) and driven by his horrible angst, he rounds up the mechas, wages war against the orgas and exterminates mankind. The final scene, Monica is broken and bloody on the ground in front of David--he bends down to her, says, "You never did love me. But I will always love you..." Then he kills her, stuffs her and mounts her in his command bunker. (And now we actually have a reason to make Terminator 3--besides the almighty dollar.)
On a final note, must every movie from Hollywood these days proclaim the poppycock of global warming? Until it came in vogue to use this political tool to emotionally drive uneducated people into a frenzy over the environment, it was commonly known in every major Earth science that preceding an ice-age (which don't, by the way, freeze oceans solid) is a warming trend generated by increased geological activity. Coupled with the fact that we have measured over 900% increase in geological activity in the past two decades--it's fairly safe to conclude we're in that "heat up" period that produces a more humid atmosphere so that it can precipitate onto the colder regions of the world and cause an ice-age.
And, finally, please, someone, do the math--how many BTUs of energy does it take to increase the temperature of gallon of water by 1 degree. Now, calculate how quickly does this energy dissipates in volume. And, finally, figure that into a global ocean ecosystem wherein the human race--in its entire history--has not produced enough energy (nor trapped enough heat) to cause the ocean temps to rise by even a fraction of a degree.
Let's use science in our "science fiction," shall we?
Evan Moore
EvanMoore@aol.com
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