Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review Part 1
The main problem with The Force Awakens is that it’s the most strategic—and by that, I mean cynical—films I’ve ever seen.
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2001: A Space Odyssey: It Comes Down at Last to Bowman vs. HAL
In Part 5, we see that both Clarke and Kubrick treat AI as a potential threat to humanity but for different reasonsA critical question for assessing the future of AI is, why did the space agency give HAL almost total control of the ship.
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2001: A Space Odyssey: The Brief Story of Heywood Floyd
In Part 4, we look at what the middle story — meeting the Monolith on the moon — is doingWe don’t really get to see enough of HAL 9000 when he is actually a help to the space travelers, which reduces the impact of his turn.
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Space Odyssey 2001: Were Clarke and Kubrick at Odds?
Part 3: The ambiguity in 2001 is not the result of artistic muddiness but the middle ground for an unspoken conflict between the two writersOne thing is for certain. In the iconic Dawn of Man sequence, the Monolith is conveying information. The question is how.
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Space Odyssey 2001: Decisions To Make About That Monolith
In Part 2 of my series on the sci-fi great, I want to consider where the Monolith fits in the hard vs. soft magic systems that make for sci-fi storiesLetting the question of who sent the monolith remain a mystery was probably a wise dramatic choice on the part of the writers.
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2001: A Space Odyssey Was a New Type of Science Fiction
The film is perhaps best understood as three completely different stories whose only connection is the monolithThe greatest measure of a film’s success is the test of time. Something about this film works even though it breaks conventions.
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How To Write a Time Travel Story That Keeps Making Sense: Part 2
In this sixth and final installment, I show how narrowing a rather than escalating it, avoids unwanted paradoxesEscalation is where the Terminator franchise went wrong. The writers kept enlarging their world until it became contradictory.
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How To Write a Time Travel Story That Keeps Making Sense, Part 1
Here in Part 5, I offer an approach that allows for time travel without obvious giant plot holesTo keep the story under control, the time machine itself should be a hard system even if the concept of time is soft and pliable.
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Time Travel in Science Fiction: Now For Some Examples That Work…
Here in Part 4, we look at how to make time travel work as either soft or hard magicTime travel into the future is not as tricky as travel into the past because altering the future does not create so many complex story problems.
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Time Travel: The Threat of Escalation in the Terminator Series
Part 3: The Terminator series writers never new whether there would be a sequel, and that had implications for how they plotted time travelShrouding the story rules in mystery only works with soft magic systems where the story focus is on something other than the system.
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Time Travel: How and Why the Terminator Series Worked—Then Didn’t
Part 2: Time travel works well enough as a soft magic system but time-travel stories run into problems when it is treated as a hard magic systemTerminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel, which means that specific rules began to matter.
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The Pluses and the Perils of Time Travel in Science Fiction
Time travel can be treated as a form or hard or soft “magic” but it is important not to confuse the twoSoft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.
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Time Machine 2002: When the Good Guy Somehow Becomes the Bad Guy
In this final part of my six-part review, I look at a basic problem: The movie is pretentious without ultimately having anything to sayThe writers of Time Travel 2002 merely use Wells’s story’s name and reputation to tell a less satisfying tale of their own making.
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Time Machine (2002): When the Bad Guy is Nicer Than the Good Guy…
In Part 5 of my extended review, we get an answer to the story question: Can the traveler save Emma?The answer to the traveler’s dilemma is provided by an Uber-Morlock, unique to this version of the story and perhaps the most interesting character in the film.
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Review: Time Machine 2002 — Hold On Again. That Snarky AI Returns
In Part 4 of my review, we look at plot devices and holes. How DID that AI survive the destruction of New York?The time traveler, good-natured gentleman that he is, ignores the hologram’s snootiness and continues asking urgent questions.
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Time Machine (2002) — A Gordian Knot of Freshman Philosophy
In Part 3 of my extended review, I look at the film’s effort to tease apart the philosophy of fighting vs, accepting one’s fateGood and bad writing are on a spectrum. Underlying this spectrum is the suspension of disbelief. That is, viewers should forget where they are while watching.
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Review: Time Machine 2002 — Hold On. Someone’s Destroyed the Moon
Part 2: The Eloi we meet in this film are radically different from H.G. Wells’s Eloi and that of the 1960 film versionBy making the Eloi more hearty and capable of surviving on their own, the writers destroy the seriousness of the threat the Morlocks represent.
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Review: Time Machine 2002 – Wells’ Tale Gets an Unneeded Makeover
Part 1: This doesn’t seem like the same story as H.G. Wells’s 19th-century tale! But there's still a time machine, Eloi and Morlocks here, so let’s look at it anywayIn this film, the time traveler has a girlfriend whom he is trying to save from death. But can time travel really alter the course of events?
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The Time Machine (1960): The History of the Eloi and the Morlocks
In Part 3 of my four-part review, we look at the difference the Cold War made to how the Eloi and the Morlocks are portrayedIn the 1895 novel, Wells was working out a Communist-inspired theory of evolution but the 1960 film’s screenwriters chose an anti-war narrative instead.
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The Time Machine (1960): The Evolution of the Future
Part 2: The movie portrays the Eloi — future humans — much differently from the film, probably because the script writers had different aims from those of H. G. WellsThe time traveler is alarmed to discover that all the knowledge and achievements of man have been lost and he almost despairs.
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