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- Movie directed by Mamuro Oshii
- Starring Atsuko Tanaka, Akio Otsuka, Iemasa Kayumi, and others
- Released 18 November 1995
- Runtime: 82 minutes
- Based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
‘Major’ Motoko Kusanagi, an almost completely prosthetic cyborg, is an agent in Section 9, a shady police/intelligence unit tasked with counter-terrorism and cybersecurity in a near future Japan. When she finds the trail of the ‘Puppet Master’, a cybercriminal best known for allegedly being able to hack a person’s cerebral implants and take control of them, she is pulled into a dangerous manhunt intertwined with politics and infused with questions of identity and humanness.
I am noticing a pattern in my reviews of Japanese movies (such as Howls Moving Castle or Your Name): they look amazing, but at the end I am left somewhat unsatisfied with the story. Ghost in the Shell is no different.
Again, if I were to rate Ghost in the Shell on aesthetics alone, its an easy five star (though even then I would probably have to make a remark on the movie’s awkward focus on Major’s nude body). I feel like some of Ghost in the Shell’s aesthetic choices – and even some of it’s specific shots – still resonate throughout the cyberpunk genre. Similarly, I feel like some of its themes – when does an AI become human, when does a cyborg stop being human – are central to what cyberpunk is today. In that sense, Ghost in the Shell is a pillar of the genre.
The story, though, favours emotional beats over the plot, favours scenes and moments over the story as a whole. The result is that while the immediate consequences of the scene on screen are clear, I often felt like I couldn’t place what was going on in a bigger picture. Perhaps this was also the result of rather perfunctory worldbuilding which probably served the movie’s purposes but left a lot unexplained. It is possible that some of these issues are solved in the manga – which I didn’t read – but I felt that the movie was perhaps a bit of a grab bag of scenes more than an integrated whole.
The question remains: does that matter? No, but also yes.
It does not matter in the sense that I had a fun evening watching Ghost in the Shell and would certainly recommend it to people who crave an intense injection of cyberpunk look and feel (as, you know, you sometimes do). In that area, it deserves its reputation.
It does matter, however, in that I didn’t feel like immediately diving into the franchise. I didn’t feel a connection with Major or the Puppet Master or any of the other characters, and I wasn’t curious how their lives would play out. I didn’t feel like the movie made a real attempt at answering the questions it posed, I wasn’t invested in Major’s humanness (or the lack thereof). I felt like the lacklustre story made a movie that could have been great just good.
Overall though, Ghost in the Shell’s visuals are amazing and I shouldn’t undersell the movie because it focusses only on those: it wants more than anything to look awesome and it totally does. And you should watch it because of that.
- TV show developed by Jonathan Kasdan for Disney+
- Released in 2022
- Starring Warwick Davis, Ellie Bamber, Ruby Cruz, Erin Kellyman, Tony Revolori, Amar Chadha-Patel and Dempsey Bryk
- 1 Season of 8 Episodes, as of March 2023
Over twenty years after the defeat of Queen Bavmorda in the movie Willow, six adventurers set out on a dangerous rescue mission. Accompanied by the legendary sorcerer Willow himself, they must journey to far-off places and face their inner demons in order to defeat a great evil.
This review relates to season 1
I don’t even remember how we decided to watch this show, but I do remember being on board with it way before anyone else started enjoying it.
This show isn’t good but it’s fun. You just have to give it a couple of episodes to figure out what it wants to do. The biggest struggle with Willow is that the writers don’t seem to fully know what direction they want to go in from the start. The first episodes are played relatively straight, or at least the comedy is so subtle that it’s hard to tell if the funny parts were intended to be funny, or just unintentionally bad – and thus funny. On the whole, the plot is pretty weak and the writing is mediocre. The cast do their best with what they are given, but even a good actor can’t make a bad story shine.
However, maybe three episodes in the writers seem to let loose a little. They start to lean into the humour of the show, and boy they lean hard. Surprisingly, it really works! The cast is very funny and suddenly, it’s like you’re watching a different show. I only wish they’d started the show off as more of a comedy. I can very easily imagine someone turning Willow off after an episode or two and not managing to even reach the point where the show starts to shine. It still won’t be for everyone, but if you enjoy light-hearted fantasy like, for instance, BBC Merlin, you may come to really enjoy Willow. If you make it past the first couple of episodes, that is.
This review relates to season 1
Okay, Willow the series… Where to start? I’ve only watched the Willow movie a few times in my life, twice when I was much younger, and one time a few years ago. All in all, these were not very memorable experiences, except for a rather traumatizing scene in which people were transformed into pigs. As such, I don’t really have any nostalgia for the Willow universe that I took with me when I started watching the series.
The quality of this series really depends on what you expect out of it. Of course, this is true for everything in life, but Willow takes it to another level. If you’re looking for a fantasy world full of deep and unique lore, interesting mysteries and a gripping plot, Willow is sure to disappoint. Though it tries to be this a few times, it simply isn’t. No amount of loredropping will fix this.
What then, should you watch Willow for? Well, I’d say the surrealistic shenanigans of its characters, led by Boorman, who is portrayed by Amar Chadha-Patel. Though each of Willow’s characters (in theory) has the potential to be interesting, the writing isn’t good enough to do something with it. And this is fine. The humoristic performance of the actors is the only thing that makes this series worth a watch. Bonus points for including a queer relationship, though – I know how difficult Disney can be in this regard.
Willow is an excellent series to watch with friends. However, I doubt if it also holds up when you’re watching it solo.
This review relates to season 1
Sometimes you watch something, and you just can’t wrap your head around why it was made, how it was made, how this got past quality control. Willow is like that. Mostly.
The first three episodes of this series try to take themselves seriously, and that results in some trash-tier one star material that I would not recommend to anyone. Then it seemed like the writers/directors realised that their setup for the first three episodes wasn’t going to cut the mustard, so they scratched that plan and went with a comedy satire on the fantasy genre instead – but apparently didn’t want to do reshoots of the material they already had, so they kept those terrible episodes at the start. It boggles the mind, and unsurprisingly, Willow is being eviscerated in reviews (including this one…).
In a way, it is a pity because the parody-approach works much better. The way the series is set up now, though, the shift of tone results in a jarring juxtaposition with the first episodes and as a viewer, for a while you’re utterly confused as to what Willow is trying to be. By the end, the series has (mostly) found its niche as a comedy with some heartfelt moments, but even then it is haunted by terribly inconsistent production values and the awful choices made in the first few episodes (and Warwick Davis’ complete absence of acting. I’m not saying he is acting poorly, he is just literally not acting at all. He reads his lines at the camera wearing a costume. That’s it.).
I had fun watching Willow with the other curators, but I would have never watched past the first episode, much less the entire first half of the series, to get to the decent (dare I say… good?) parts if I would have had to watch it for its own sake. I can see that there will be people who will enjoy it for the moments – and it has its moments – but if you want to watch Willow, I think it should be the kind of show that you love to hate together. Don’t take it seriously from the start, but watch it to see the train wreck itself in slow motion (and for the few moments of brilliant humour from Amar Chadha-Patel’s character Boorman).
Willow gets a begrudging two stars from me that it kind of doesn’t deserve, but then Boorman is funny and the penultimate episode is cool. I didn’t want to be too harsh. Perhaps I should’ve been.
I am so confused by this show. It started out as a generic young adult fantasy series, and not a particularly good one. The main characters are whiny teens with a level of self-obsession fitting for their age, and the overall plot will not win any originality prizes. If I had not been watching the show together with the other curators, I genuinely do not think I would have made it past the first episode.
But after a few episodes, some hilarious scenes started to appear which seemed completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the show. These scenes were not only funny but also absurdistic in a way the rest of the show is not. The contrast is so big that I kept wondering what the show-runners were intending.
Confusion aside, these few scenes were truly great. I wish the creators had leaned into this more and had chosen this tone for the whole series, because then I think it could have been a really good show.
As it stands, two stars is all I can give it.
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- Book written by Neal Stephenson
- Published 19 May 2015
- Standalone
When the moon is struck by an asteroid and disintegrates, humanity is faced with a hard deadline: evacuate the surface of planet earth and secure the means to survive elsewhere for hundreds of generations, or go extinct in the firestorm of moon debris burning up in the atmosphere that will immolate the land and evaporate the oceans. Seveneves is the story of humanity trying their best to navigate the engineering of survival in orbit and the politics of the apocalypse, with a fascinating encore offering a vista further into the future.
Listened to the audiobook with Peter Brooke – decent narrator.
Seveneves is the second book by Stephenson I listened to, and I am glad I gave him a second chance, because Seveneves turned my opinion on Stephenson around 180 degrees, and now I’m definitely interested in picking up another one of his books.
I remember when I uploaded my lacklustre review of Termination Shock to Reddit, one of the comments I got was “Bro, do you even Neal?”, which was a reference to my nitpicks about the many tangents in that book that are, as it turns out, a signature element of Stephenson’s prose. Interestingly, Seveneves is as full of tangents as Termination Shock, but unlike in the latter, the tangents in Seveneves were actually engaging and felt central to the story the book was trying to tell.
This is a good metaphor for the comparison between the two books. Despite the immediately obvious differences, there are a lot of similarities between them: the premise of humanity facing an unprecedented disaster, traditional politics throwing sand in the wheels of a solution, go-getters (or even especially, go-getter billionaires) risking everything to break the stalemate and ‘fix things’, long tangents in the writing describing technologies or science fiction ideas, the story starting off plausible and getting progressively more imaginative towards the end. The list goes on.
When people commented I seemed to be ragging on Stephenson’s style more than on Termination Shock in particular, they might have been right. Interestingly, however, all those quirks of style worked for me in Seveneves, in exactly the way they did not in Termination Shock. Perhaps I am just more fascinated with orbital mechanics than the biology of feral hogs in Texas, but every time Seveneves went on a tangent, I was more than happy to sit through it.
Perhaps the core difference between the two books is in the pacing. Seveneves posits its premise and never lets off from there, time jumping whenever necessary to get to the juiciest bits of the story and cover as much time as possible. And while there are several characters, their storylines are intertwined throughout the book (unlike is the case in Termination Shock).
One final thing that deserves mention is the final time jump. I won’t spoil too much, but it takes the story in a completely new direction and – I can hardly believe I am saying this, since I often think the opposite – I would have loved for Stephenson to have spent more time and pages there, perhaps to have split the final section off and to have developed it into a full blown sequel. I loved how the final section of the book almost changed the book’s genre and gave completely new meaning to the first half. It is something I now wish would be more common in science fiction.
In conclusion, Seveneves is a great apocalyptic near future hard sci-fi book that I would heartily recommend. Unlike Termination Shock, the imaginative ideas are executed a lot better, and the pacing kept me listening throughout the day and thinking about it all the time.
Also, I hope Seveneves gets made into a movie, no, two movies sometime soon!
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- Book written by Han Song
- Translated by Michael Berry
- Published 1 March 2023
- Part 1 of the Hospital Trilogy
Yang Wei, an everyman part-time songwriter is whisked to a hospital while away from home in an unfamiliar city when drinking a glass of water gives him a terrible stomach ache. The moment he crosses the hospital’s threshold, he starts shedding agency, as he is dragged along and washed away in a current of ever more bizarre systems, bureaucracies, ideologies, and philosophies – pulled ever deeper in the Clinical-Academic-Industrial-Complex of the Age of Medicine.
Full disclosure: We received a free advance reader copy for Hospital.
Hospital is science fiction in the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World, an idea taken to its absurd extreme to show the reader where a society could be headed if no precautions are taken. With Hospital, Song deserves to be listed among the likes of Orwell and Huxley – though as may be expected, this literary bent means that Hospital is not exactly a light read.
Hospital is definitely worth the effort it takes to read, though. Like Yang Wei, the reader is dragged ever deeper into the clutches of a bizarre vision of a hospital that starts Kafkaesque and ends in utterly deranged cosmic vistas. Song masterfully takes the reader by the hand and pulls them away from sanity one step, one chapter at a time – every chapter I felt like what I was reading had to be the weirdest Hospital was going to get, but a few chapters on I would think back to that moment and feel that the book still made sense at that point.
The chapters are nicely bite-sized, so even though the book is not exactly light, it is not difficult to get through in small steps and twenty minute sittings. This is also the sneaky way Song makes you accept the bizzarities of each chapter quickly before moving on to the next surreal idea before you have time to recover – stretching your suspense of disbelieve ever further. I expected the rubber band to snap at any moment, but Song manages to make me accept things I never though I would.
It is a pity I am not more familiar with the particularities of modern Chinese society, though the translator’s afterword is invaluable in this respect. From my perspective, it is clear Hospital criticises a system that brainwashes naïve citizens, takes away their agency, takes away their ties to anything that is not the system, mothers them, makes decisions for them, paints a picture of the world with clear enemies, tells them only trust in the system can save them, and mercilessly assails them if they attempt to break free. Corruption, ambition, incompetence and abuse of power are rife. It is not difficult to understand why the Chinese Communist Party eventually bans most of Song’s writings.
Hospital and illness are perfect metaphors for this message, since even in the West, trust in doctors and modern medicine is a given, with only conspiracy theorists (given an impulse by the recent pandemic) questioning the system. This means it took me a while too before I definitely decided that Yang Wei was being taken by the nose.
Please don’t be put off by the first chapter – it is just a taste of what is to come, and by the time Hospital ever gets that surreal again, Song will have made you feel as comfortable with it as is humanly possible.
Overall, Hospital is one of the most intriguing books I have read in years, a unique reading experience that is as much about the reader and their reactions to it as it is about Yang Wei’s descent into madness. It is also a singular window on one of China’s masters of the genre that only opened because of Michael Berry’s brilliant translation. Hospital is nothing like the escapist tales we usually review here, but a definite recommendation and a top-tier thought-provoking conversation starter.
Going into this book, I didn’t really know what to expect except that it would be “kafkaesque”. IT certainly was that. From the moment Yang Wei enters the hospital, a sequence of events unfolds that is at times intriguing, funny, horrifying and sometimes just plain confusing. I should warn you: this book does deal with a couple of topics that some may consider unpleasant or even triggering: it features body horror and sexual scenes (even some rape). If these themes are something you don’t want to read, this book probably isn’t for you.
The book also discusses a lot of philosophical and political topics. To be honest, that’s not something I usually super enjoy in literature, as I suck at reading between the lines and interpreting. I also tend to read just before bed and just after waking up, which isn’t exactly when I’m at my most astute. This is definitely the kind of book that reminded me of reading literature in high school. The only problem is that I didn’t have spark notes to explain the themes of the story to me as I read.
While reading, I also really wished I was more familiar with Chinese culture and Buddhism. These two themes played a big part in the book, and I feel like I didn’t quite have the understanding to fully appreciate the references. It’s clearly written for a Chinese audience.
One of this book’s strongest points is how short and snappy the chapters are, and how they always end with another twist that compels you to read on. It wasn’t hard to keep reading at all, though the book did lose some momentum at around the 75% mark. It managed to pick back up near the end, but be warned: this is part of a series, so you don’t get a fantastic conclusion after reading 400 pages, which is a bit of a bummer.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone, but here’s who I would recommend it to:
- People who may not take sci-fi seriously as a genre and need to see that it’s not all just laser blasters and lightsabers;
- People who want to read non-western sci-fi;
- People who like very philosophical books;
- People looking for a book for a book club. There’s definitely lots to discuss here.
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- Adults, Book, Character-Driven, Dystopian, Grand Scope, Grimdark, Horror, Literary, Male Author, Non-Western Author, Original Setting, Pandemic, Philosophy, Politics, Religious Themes, Revolution, Science Fiction, Sexual Violence, Surrealistic, Thought-Provoking, Trilogy, Unreliable Narrator, Violence & Gore
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- Movie directed by Guillermo del Toro
- Starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, and Rinko Kikuchi
- Released July 2013
- Running time: 132 minutes
For several years now, giant monsters (Kaiju) have been coming up from the ocean and attacking coastal cities. Humanity built big old robots (Jaegers) to fight the Kaiju. Each Jaeger was piloted by two pilots who used a special connection to control the giant Jaegers. Shortly after Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket loses his co-pilot, and brother, while killing a Kaiju, the Jaeger program is discontinued in favour of a wall shielding the coastal cities. That is, until the Kaiju start breaching the wall and Raleigh and his former colleagues are called back to protect humanity once more.
Pacific Rim is one of my absolute favourite movies of all time. I can mouth along the words to most of it, I’ve seen it so many times. I’d say Pacific Rim isn’t just some action movie, but the strange thing is that it is. It’s just an action movie that’s really well-made and has a great sense of humour. What is especially great about Pacific Rim is that it knows what kind of movie it is, and it doesn’t fight that. Guillermo del Toro isn’t afraid to be a little silly, which really helps to balance the drama of the story.
The cast of Pacific Rim is amazing, and what I particularly enjoy about the characters is that they all somehow seem to live in different genres. Mako and Raleigh seem to be in a completely different movie than the scientists, and it’s not even weird.
Above all, I would say this: If the idea of giant robots fighting doesn’t really appeal to you, don’t let that put you off from watching Pacific Rim. I like watching things get destroyed on a big screen, but robots don’t really do much for me.
Pacific Rim is so much more than that, though. The emotion of this movie is surprisingly real. You don’t learn that much about some characters (like Herc and Chuck Hansen or the scientists) but they’re not flat either. The characters that you do really get to know have interesting backstories that really drive the plot forward. Please watch this movie. Please please please please please.
I added Pacific Rim to the collection. To read my full thoughts on the movie, click here.
Pacific Rim is a movie that has no right to be anywhere near as good as it is. The plot is wafer-thin. The worldbuilding is mostly unoriginal. There isn’t the slightest attempt to deviate from the tropes in a meaningful way. The execution, however, is near perfect. If I had to describe Pacific Rim in a single sentence, it would be that nothing makes sense, but that everything is awesome.
In Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro takes two Japanese genre tropes, the mecha and the monster, and he mashes them together, he marinates them in a Hollywood sauce, and he lets them loose on the big screen in an unapologetic way that wakes the seven-year-old in the viewer and gives them what they secretly crave.
Pacific Rim is not for everyone. It requires you to shut off the logical part of your brain. It strains your suspense of disbelief. Every aspect of plot or logic is subservient to the rule of cool. But then, Pacific Rim is honest about it. The main title only flashes onto the screen some twenty minutes into the movie, after we’ve already witnessed the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the centre of Manila at the hands of a terrifyingly large Kaiju and seen a super-robot clash with a giant otherworldly hammer-headed monster in a storm off the coast of Alaska. By this point, the movie has telegraphed what it is going to be about, and there is no point watching on if you haven’t bought into it yet.
Those who are willing to go along will witness the apotheosis of the tropes the movie is based on. Yes, big robots will have boxing matches with big monsters. Yes, monsters will topple skyscrapers. Yes, there will be big explosions. Yes, there will be a desperate last battle. There may not be any twists, but it is all highly satisfying. In a movie like this, even the comic relief scientists that may have felt cringey in any other movie are in the right spot.
When you’re in the right mindset, if ever you want to shut off the thinking part of your brain and just watch something really, really cool, don’t hesitate, put on Pacific Rim.
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- Book written by Joe Abercrombie
- Published January 2011
- Standalone; Spin off of the First Law Trilogy
The Heroes follows a set of characters – some known to dedicated readers, and some newly introduced – on two sides of a bloody battle between the (dis)organised forces of the Union under Lord Marshal Kroy and the chaotic carls under the command of Black Dow, the Protector of the North. Switching perspectives from hour to hour, The Heroes goes into all the muddy, gruelling detail we expect from Abercrombie, and then some.
I did not listen to the audiobook by Steven Pacey, because I found a copy of The Heroes in the local thrift store. But every other line, I imagined Pacey’s narration in my head – I really missed him!
The Heroes is the best book by Abercrombie I’ve read yet. Rather than telling a single character’s story over a long span of time, he tackles a single event – a battle spanning a couple of days – and describes it from the perspectives of commanders, participants and onlookers from both sides. The multitude of characters might seem daunting at first, but there was not a single instance in this book when I was confused as to who was who – which does Abercrombie great credit.
The book’s best sequence, in fact, comes when Abercrombie lets loose all narrative convention and follows a string of about a dozen nameless characters from their introduction all the way to their death in the battle, a few seconds later. Though gruesome, there is something bizarrely funny about this passage. It is writing like this that really underlines Abercrombie’s ability to drive home the horrors of his medieval grimdark world while keeping the reading experience light with a nice dosage of dry British humour.
Abercrombie’s prose, as always, is a delight to read. The scenes are violent and gory, the story dark and desperate, and the characters cold and cunning. I realise many people would hate a book like this, and I understand that it is not for everyone. But this book was just perfect for me. The idea of following a battle, in detail, from all angles, is brilliant, and the execution is equally well done. I loved the returning characters, and I especially loved how Abercrombie chose to switch whether these characters were point-of-view characters, which means that readers get a completely new either insiders- or outsiders perspective and a completely new version of the character. Abercrombie even manages to tie the story into the bigger picture of his First Law-setting.
I just loved The Heroes – I couldn’t think of anything to criticise it. So I went with a five-star rating instead.
I think that The Heroes could be read independently of any of the other works in the First Law-world, though reading Best Served Cold first is no punishment (quite the opposite in fact), and that will give some context to a few of the characters in The Heroes. The Heroes is actually linked more closely to the First Law-trilogy itself and features more characters and events from that series than Best Served Cold did – but even without intimate knowledge of the Union’s king or the history of the Bloody Nine, The Heroes is an absolutely amazing read that should be on every fantasy lover’s radar.
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