Carriers

This one flew completely under the radar, although I heard a lot of extremely positive word of mouth. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw it on the DVD shelf at Target and picked it up. It's short, probably a little too short, but damn if it isn't an effective little suspense flick.

The plague has wiped out much of America. No, it does not turn you into zombies. It just slowly devours you, giving you a hideous, rotten-looking rash and slowly eating you alive. It is highly contagious, and no one wants to get it. Enter our protagonists, a pair of brothers and their girlfriends. Older brother Bobby (Chris Pine) is the head of the group, a ruthless survivalist who has come up with a set of rules that keep them alive, rules like "Disinfect all surfaces" and "avoid contact with people." He is trying to reach the West Coast, and a beach that used to be a family getaway for his brother (Lou Taylor Pucci) and him. They're driving along deserted roads in their station wagon, wearing surgical masks with fangs and smiley faces drawn on them.

Of course, the trip is fraught with danger, not just from the infected, but from survivors who are ruthless in their attempts to get gasoline or food, or who have holed themselves up in makeshift bio-shelter bunkers.

This movie is wound tight. The characterizations are good, but it moves at a breakneck pace, trying to get all its plot told in under ninety minutes. As a result, it feels like a lot of it could have been fleshed out, but this also makes it something of a breathless, depressing look at what very well could be the end of the world.

In the acting department, everyone is good. Chris Pine is quite an actor, as his career indicates. From a crazy assassin in Smokin' Aces, to the heroic Captain Kirk, to this character, a grim survivalist. He's good. Lou Taylor Pucci is also good as the timid Danny, who lives in his brother's shadow, even as he fears him. Then you've got Piper Perabo who kind of fades in and out of sight in the movie scene, who also does a good job as Bobby's too-kind-for-her-own-good girlfriend, and Emily van Camp as the other female passenger who has a chillingly Machievellian streak.

If you like horror flicks, you should seriously consider giving this one a spin.

7/10

Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

I have read a lot of books about Islam and Middle Eastern history, to satisfy my curiosity as both an American Soldier and a somewhat wayward but loyal Calvinist. I've read Bernard Lewis and David Fromkin and the Koran, and I will say right now that Destiny Disrupted is the single best book I have read yet about Islam and the history of the Islamic world.

Author Tamim Ansary admits in his introduction that his history is not so much a formal account as a sort of a casual, storyteller's narrative of what Muslims see world history as being. If Westerners have a Mediterranean-centric view of history, he takes a Saudi Arabian-centric view of history, only occasionally dipping out into Greek and Medieval history. This change in perspectives is nothing short of fascinating. Take the Crusades. In Western eyes these were major events, conflicts between us and some foreign power that sought to override our religion in the deserts of the Orient. In Muslim eyes, the Crusades were minor clashes with foreigners on the outskirts of civilizations. Nothing we sought to take was of any real importance to them. What we see as a major military conflict, they see as a border skirmish with a high casualty rate.

Likewise he talks about Hijra, and how it is seen as the start of the Muslim world, a pivotal time line similar to the birth of Christ for the west. He also breaks the different schisms and sects down simply, explaining that in many ways, these schisms are just disputes about lineage or going back to religious basics.

Complementing this interesting view of history, is Mr. Ansary's narrative. He remains true to his promise of telling the story like some guy in a coffee house who is laying out a crazy theory, namely that history can be radically changed by altering the geographical center that it originates from. His book is anecdotal and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and generates far more respect for Muslims than any careful, studied, scholarly Western work has yet.

I am very interested in foreign cultures and history, but I am also very stubborn in my worldview. There are certain things I believe are wrong, not necessarily morally, but factually. I am openly a member of the Religious Right, although I believe I am substantially more reasonable and willing to talk than the majority of them. Mr. Ansary's book opened an entirely new window in my understanding and gave me a new respect for Muslims that I have never had before. Granted, I have always respected them and their freedom to practice their religion under American liberty, but Destiny Disrupted is the first account that has really given me an insight to how they think and how they perceive the world.

In addition I give a massive amount of Manly Points to Mr. Ansary for acknowledging in his Afterword that the Fundamentalist Islamic and American view of life are irreconcilable. These two views cannot coexist, and he admits it, just as he admits he has no answers for how things should be resolved. This is hands-down the most ballsy, no-fear, truthful answer I have ever read on the subject, and my respect for the author soared into the stratosphere reading it. If you have any interest in Islam, Muslim history or current events, read this book. It will change how you view current history.

9/10

Sci-fi Classic: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Yes, I have read Ender's Game before. In fact it was one of two books that started my love of science fiction over ten years ago, the other being Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? I had read a few books in both the Ender quartet and the concurrent series about micro-genius Bean, but recently at the bookstore I saw just how many in the series I had not read, and decided that this year one of my little projects would be to push through all nine books of the Ender Saga. So here we go with the first book.

Ender's Game is rightly viewed as a classic of sci-fi. Not only is it a page-turning good time, but it's also very thought-provoking as Card examines questions of War and Leadership which remain very apt today. Now, with that being said, the works of Orson Scott Card, together with the works of Lois McMaster Bujold are pretty much textbook examples of "soft" sci-fi: pulse-pounding stories set in the future, which are far more interested in social and political interactions than with exactly how this or that ship's FTL drives work. Though Card throws a shout out to the Theory of Relativity, he mostly avoids crunching numbers.

The characterization remains strong, even if the child soldiers occasionally seem too precocious. Ender Wiggin is a sympathetic protagonist who doesn't want to hurt anybody, but whose strategic genius and ruthless practicality make him more monstrous than his fellow students. His Machiavellian older brother Peter doesn't appear much in the book, but manages to be very hateful nonetheless. Conversely, his sister Valentine plays a significantly larger role in the story but I never quite got Ender's devotion to her. Of the Battle School students, they all have their own quirks (the girl, the Muslim), but of course the standout was Bean, the midget-sized tactical powerhouse who eventually got his own series.

Finally, Ender's Game is a book about humanity's stand against a vicious insectoid race called, somewhat humorously, the Buggers. Though this threat hangs over the whole book, Ender's Game manages to be a war novel that almost never straight-up addresses the war until the end. Nonetheless it's a great science fiction novel, one of the classics, and the ending is both surprising and bittersweet, an excellent lead-in to the stellar sequel Speaker for the Dead (watch for a review of that soon).

8/10

The Book of Eli

Denzel Washington is Eli, a post-apocalyptic samurai walking endlessly west, scavenging supplies and water from the wreckage of civilization as he carries the last Bible in existence to his destination. What destination is that? He doesn't know yet, but he will when he gets there, because God will tell him. Unfortunately, a desert despot he encounters on the way (Gary Oldman) has other ideas.

The Book of Eli looks great. Its vision of a sun-bleached post-apocalyptic world so bright everyone must wear sunglasses or go blind is not exactly unique, but it has a nice visual panache. There are lots of single takes, and slow motion and zippy camera moves that give the movie an energy that is a pleasant surprise compared to the bleak landscape. The action scenes are very striking, filmed in long takes that showcase just how carefully everything was choreographed, and not flinching from heavily CGI'd gore.

Actingwise, Gary Oldman is an over the top villain as always, but he manages to rein in his scenery-chewing just a bit and delivers an intelligent edge that makes his antagonist just a hair more sympathetic than you might expect. Denzel Washington also has a good turn, as his Eli is an unstoppable badass in battle, but in conversation is extraordinarily meek and unobtrusive. The odd one out is Mila Kunis as Gary Oldman's cinematic daughter who plays her character as very young and somewhere on the edge of wide-eyed and perky. It doesn't always work, but it doesn't really detract from the movie either.

The ending is not exactly a twist-ending, but more of a revelation. It adds a lot of power to the film, but at the same time it will leave the audience scratching their heads and thinking over the past ninety minutes they have just seen. Which leads into my final point.

The Book of Eli is a very Christian film. Despite the copious bloodshed and profanity, it is a movie about faith and miracles and single-minded dedication to something higher than one's self. One could argue that Eli could just as well be carrying a Koran, and indeed the final moments of the film show a sort of sissy multi-culturalism, but the fact remains that Eli is carrying a Bible, and the film draws its religious themes from Christian tradition.

But with all that said, while The Book of Eli is an enjoyable film, it remains primarily interesting and not so much great. The story is a little too familiar, and while it gleefully plays around in its post-apocalyptic setting, it doesn't really do anything to stand out. What it does, it does well, but it's not as engaging as it could have been. Still, it is a completely competent flick, and its thematic nature lifts it above the competition and makes it worth a look.

6/10

The Silver Skull by Mark Chadbourn

At first glance Mark Chadbourn's The Silver Skull seems like a can't-lose idea. Elizabethan spies secretly defend England from otherworldly beings that have recently allied with the Spanish in order to get their hands on a magical weapon that could destroy mankind as we know it.

Unfortunately, the potential outweighs the final product in the end.

Will Swyfte is master spy and swashbuckler who heads up a Dirty-dozen type band of cut-throats and brigands in their defense of the country under the guidance of John Dee, the real-life consultant to Queen Elizabeth, here re-imagined as an accomplished sorcerer. Swyfte is absolutely dedicated to defending the cause, weary of the shadowy ambiguity required of a spy, and searching for his lost love who disappeared in some unusual circumstances long ago. He is reasonably well-drawn as the main character, but alas the same cannot be said of his comrades. Though each is given a sort of character "hook" (the new guy, the angry one, the closet serial killer), it still remains difficult to keep them differentiated in the reader's mind, as they appear mostly interchangeable.

Which leads into my main complaint which is that the book moves too fast. No, you didn't read that wrong, I'm complaining about a book having too quick a pace. A lot happens in this book, and there are a lot of changes of fortune, all in about 400 pages. Chapters are only about six pages along, and something significant happens in pretty much each one. An obvious example is one where a character is placed in peril, there is a fight sequence, something major is revealed about a minor character, and then we get some brief soul-searching before continuing on with business as usual in the next chapter. There just comes a point where you want the book to slow down and actually explore some of what is coming up.

The enemy is another inadequately explored facet. I realize they are supposed to be mysterious, but there are several unique characters that are not really given the proper depth, and the nature of the foe itself is not really explored. Supposedly they are fey beings like faeries or elves, but it's not really very clear where they come from. Do they live in the same territory? Another "dimension?" What exactly do they do to the ordinary citizen of England?

On the whole the book just feels like a lot of different ideas and scenes were written down in synopsis format, fleshed out a little, and then thrown into a book without editing or expanding further. Which is not to say it is entirely without merit, because the book has several good action sequences (an early one involving Will and a Spanish agent being thrown into a pit with a bear was especially fun), and at the ending manages to provide a few of the chills it should have had at the beginning. But that's only because the revelations at the end were actually foreshadowed and actually feel like they have some hefty ramifications for the future.

Really it's a good idea that is ultimately more frustrating than not due to the sort of haphazard and hasty way it is presented. It's a fun idea to think about, but it's not that fun to read.

2/10

The Department of Mad Scientists by Michael Belfiore

There's hard and then there's DARPA hard. In The Department of Mad Scientists, Michael Belfiore takes us behind the curtain into one of the most little known parts of the Department of Defense, namely their huge, well-funded R&D department.

The book is a fast, easy read, divided up into chapters that chronicle both the history of the Agency and individual projects like robotic cars, prosthetic limbs and hypersonic flight. He does a good job of explaining in a nutshell the science behind the projects, and the difficulties that assail these scientists and engineers on all fronts.

One of the most interesting facets of this is that someone will present DARPA with a project, such as a fully functioning prosthetic limb that can replace the hooks that so many amputees wear, and then give them a development timeline of five years. The equipment brought out at the end of that time period may not be exactly what was requested, but it will be at least as good, and far beyond what you could have imagined possible.

Some of the projects described have actually already come to fruition, most notably the internet, which was actually birthed in this very agency. Some of them, such as the Scramjet engine, exist but the agency is in the process of finding new and more efficient uses for them. All of them seem like science-fiction, and indeed throughout the book, higher-ups as DARPA admit to picking the brains of sci-fi writers.

If you are interested in cutting edge technology, whether casually, as an SF fan, or for potential military application this is an excellent introduction and guide to the world of advanced R&D.

7/10

Top 10 Movies of 2009

Well here they are, my top 10 movies of 2009. Out of everything I saw this year, these are the movies that were the most fun, the most enjoyable, the most likely to prompt repeat viewings on DVD and the ones that immediately leaped to mind when I first thought of making this list. Some of these movies I may like more than when I first reviewed them, and some that I felt were fantastic at the time may not have made the list. Without further ado, number 10.

10. A Perfect Getaway
This, as stated in my review, is a twist movie. But having seen the movie two additional times, I can say that it remains a well-crafted, well-acted thriller even after you know the outcome. It's a taut little piece about tourists in Hawaii suddenly learning that one of them may be a killer. Very Hitchcock.

9. Outlander

There are many amazing things about this movie. It's a smart sci-fi film. It's also a smart, testosterone fueled dark ages action flick. And it looks amazing despite being incredibly low-budget. Despite getting very little fanfare, this tale of a lone spaceman crash-landing on sixth century earth and doing battle with an alien hitchhiker is well worth a look.

8. The Hurt Locker
This film manages to be both a very accurate depiction of combat in Iraq circa-2006, and also a completely enjoyable action flick. There's no real conclusion to the tale but rather, much like an actual tour of duty around that time period, these Explosive Ordinance Disposal soldiers are just trying to survive to the end of the movie. It's got a smart script, great visuals, and a star-worthy performance by lead Jeremy Renner.

7. Taken
Old guys are apparently the new go-to men for action, and if they keep performing in movies like Taken, it's going to keep going. I don't think anyone realized Liam Neeson had as much badassery in him as he does in this revenge tale as a former Black Ops agent trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter from a European crime ring.

6. District 9

This little movie came out of nowhere, surprising us with some eerie faux-documentary trailers. It was a bit of a fake-out though, because after about half an hour of documentary, this movie goes straight to sci-fi action tale replete with villainous mercenaries, absurdly powerful alien weapons, and a suit of powered armor. A guaranteed good time.

5. Watchmen
The more often I watch this movie, the more I realize how fantastic it is. The writing, the amazing visuals, the slow, almost picaresque pace. It is a masterpiece of a superhero movie, and it is at least as good as The Dark Knight. And I mean that.

4. Star Trek
Imagine if you took all the cool parts of the Star Trek franchise, then cut all the uncool bits and replaced them with...uh...cool bits. And that would be J.J. Abrams' reboot of this long-running sci-fi franchise. He takes it back to the glory days of a swashbuckling Captain Kirk, a coldly logical Mr. Spock, and the ever-irascible Dr. McCoy (played pitch-perfectly by Kiwi Karl Urban). The plot is a little bit too concerned with explaining the new timeline, but it is definitely solid and the villainous Nero is definitely one of the better Trek movie villains.

3. 500 Days of Summer
What's this? A quasi-romantic film on the Top 10? Nonetheless 500 Days of Summer is a truly excellent and unique take on an age old story. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Tom, a good-natured greeting card writer who becomes smitten with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), his company's secretary. She unfortunately does not fully reciprocate and the movie skips around through the 500 days of their relationship with abandon, alternately showing them in the blissfull heydey of their relationship and then as it crumbles away. Well-written and well-directed, it's one of the very best of the year.

2. Up
Pixar continues their reign as the undisputed king of the family movie with this thoughtful adventure movie about an aging wannabe adventurer and an enthusiastic boy scout who go on an incredibly journey to South America. In a flying house. Poignant, exciting, and incredibly funny, it's not just the second best movie of the year, it's the best movie this company has made yet.

1. Avatar
James Cameron is the King. Despite his aggravating habit of proclaiming that he has found Jesus' dead body, the man knows his sci-fi movies. Watching this engaging sci-fi adventure flick, you will find yourself in disbelief that none of it is real, that there are moments when everything on screen is a CGI illusion, because you will believe that it is real. Amazing.