| State of Body | Slightly scalped. Nothing serious, really. Oh, and there’s a bit of a cut on the forehead; hopefully won’t scar too much. |
|---|---|
| Detail of Inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | Shellshear |
| Comments | Brilliant, except very slightly implausible towards the end bit of the film. |
One hour into Watchmen, I thought it was going to beat out Dark Knight as my favourite superhero film.
I didn’t expect much. The graphic novel is dense and long and literary, and although 300 (the director’s previous film) was visually lush, I wasn’t moved by it. I knew it was going to be pretty long, and would nonetheless have to do some fairly savage cutting to get it finished under three hours. I was prepared for compromises. That was the first surprise. It fit in far more than I was expecting, and patiently laid things out without the kind of mad rush that infected such films as The Golden Compass. It even made an improvement in discarding the giant squid in favour of the very logical “Doctor Manhattan goes nuts” scenario, tying things together very effectively.
Still, perilously close to greatness, the second half meandered into setpieces that were cool but left the plot hanging. The subplot about Black Canary’s patrimony *was* rushed and so was Doctor Manhatten’s ultimate conversion to save humanity.
For a change, let’s open the comments for suggestions for changing the film, even if it is just me in the end.
Astute readers may recall a 2006 Film Forensic about how Pride and Prejudice might be improved with vampires.
Recently, someone decided it would be a better Zombie story.
And now, please welcome to the stage: Pride and Predator. Yaaaaaaay!
I watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new “Dollhouse” TV series the other day. While it wasn’t particularly exciting in itself, and it doesn’t really sell the raison d’etre, I can see some good SF potential.
It posits a pretty big SF idea: that it’s possible to read and write memories and personality, and even fuse aspects of memory and personality from several people.
In the first episode, this is used purely for imprinting expertise onto people (Echo, the main character, gets to be a motorcycle-riding hottie and then a hostage negotiator). Whedon makes a strong effort at selling why people would pay for an artificial hostage negotiator rather than a real one:
“Nobody has everything they want. It’s a survival pattern. You get what you want, you want something else. If you have everything, you want something else. Something more extreme. Something more specific. Something perfect.”
…which is nice, but not quite compelling enough. However, there are plenty of reasons the Dollhouse might appeal to people with the right amount of money.
A government wants a perfect spy/infiltrator against an Enemy. A Doll is uploaded with a genuine Enemy-sympathising personality. They join the Enemies. Time passes. When the time is right, the Doll is uploaded with the Spy upgrade.
A hypothetical billionaire wishes to swap their sex for a day. They upload their own memories and personality into a Doll. The Doll-billionaire does stuff for a day. The billionaire downloads the memories from the Doll.
A hypothetical billionaire is old and wishes to not die. They pay a great deal of money, and upload their memories and personality into a Doll.
It seems unlikely that these scenarios will be played out. They highlight the society-changing aspects of the underlying technology a little too much, moving the series too far away from the initial concept. It’s very unlikely, however, that Whedon is unaware of these possibilities, and he may play around the edges of this. What’s more likely is that we discover limitations of the Dollhouse technology – perhaps the memory imprinting only works for a short time (which would gel with the stated position that Echo will get aspects of her own personality back), or that prepping to be an imprintee is time-consuming/requires surgery/only works on certain people.
Joss Whedon has opened a big world of possibilities with the first episode of Dollhouse. It’s as though somebody had invented a time machine and is using it as an alarm clock. Perhaps it has hidden limitations, and an alarm clock really is the best use for it. Time will tell.
Some thoughts on the ending.
Some thoughts on the ending…
Read the rest of this entry >>
A few thoughts on why I should definitely not be put in charge of this kind of material…
Read the rest of this entry >>
| State of body | Oooooooh, where to start. Um, dead? Yeah. Very dead. Strange puncture wounds. Mysterious. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | So much potential! Well, I thought so anyway. A classic example of a movie playing it far too safe; of failing to properly explore the premise. |
| State of body | Um, well. Where to begin? Elaborately tortured, of course, but oddly, cause of death was old age. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | People aren’t exactly looking for watertight plots in a horror film, but in this case, more attention to the scenario might have made a more interesting film. |
| State of body | Utterly pristine. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected six times. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | The body appears to have been desecrated by person or persons unknown. Well, OK, maybe not unknown. It was me. The autopsy was presumptuous & pointless. But fun. |
| State of body | A little malnourished, occasionally beaten, but mostly healthy. Killed by a couple of ticks and an infestation of nits. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Competently done, until the usual mess at the finale. Why do action movies so often fall apart at the end? |
Well, I finally knocked off the “War of the Worlds” dissection, and yup, that’s one ugly alien (though not, perhaps, as ugly as it should have been). I’m not enormously happy with my analysis, so if you disagree with me or have better ideas of why you thought the film worked or didn’t work, why not post a reply?
Coming up in the next weeks: Dr. Winston analyses “The Terminal” and “Goldeneye”, guest Forensic Analyst Dr. Keith Kelly takes the Doctor Who serial “Arc of Infinity” for a spin, and I determine whether “Unleashed” has been a bad boy. As usual, if you have any suggestions or criticisms, feel free to email me or leave a comment on this post. Thanks for coming.
| State of body | Simple, small, greyish, and conical. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | A small-scale slice-of-life family drama was an interesting and nicely daring choice for an alien invasion film, but it falls perilously close to being “a bunch of stuff that happened”. |
| State of body | Exquisitely preserved, apart from the fact that all the water in it had been instantaneously turned into steam. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | A tragic pity that the body ended up on the slab. It nearly escaped injury altogether, except for one fatal miscalculation regarding a microwave steam gun. |
| State of body | Unseen. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Never inspected. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | I didn’t dare to view the body. Instead, in a radical and unethical departure from the usual procedure, I have reconstructed it from my vague memories of the first film. |
| State of body | Multiple organ failure. Apparent efforts had been made to surgically replace organs, which were rejected by the host. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | A Hollywood film about cloning. The irony will only be exceeded when they do the remake. |
| State of body | Both bodies had multiple gunshot wounds – none to vital organs, but enough to have caused blood loss and death. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | As with many of the subjects here, wounds appeared self-inflicted. |
| State of body | Subject ripped to shreds by wild mob. Curiously, exhibited no signs of fear whatsoever. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Should have concentrated less on looking cool and more on building tension. |
| State of body | Killed by a bizarre mutation – partly normal, and partly something very, very strange. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected five times. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Seems to be a normal comic-book movie that has been partially attacked by another Film Forensics reviewer who wanted to turn it into something infinitely stranger. More power to them. |