holabendez (Level 12)

Aside from Iron Man 2, it would seem that movie studios have eased up quite significantly on their comic book movie titles in 2010, and aside from “Inception” the year has suffered for it in terms of the quality of its “blockbusters”. That looks to be remedied in the next couple of years with the impending releases of “Thor”, “Captain America”, “The Green Lantern” and “The Avengers”. Perhaps the break was a good thing to help people catch their breath.

As an avid comic book super hero fan, I am looking forward to these movies with great anticipation, however, lets face it, these titles are B-grade heroes at best. Sure, Iron Man has shown that if a film is well made it doesn’t matter what the status of the hero was in his comic book form, but I do wonder about the broad appeal of these upcoming titles.

So it was a pleasant surprise for me to see the extended Comic-Con trailer for “Thor” which is due out early next year. This particular property seemed challenging to make in any kind of grounded form – remembering that in conjunction with “The Avengers”, it is supposed to be set in the same world/universe as the “Iron Man” films which are somewhat grounded. This trailer made me feel better about the potential of this movie, but didn’t leave me all that convinced that it would have mass market appeal. What do you think?

See the bootleg trailer on YouTube

So I recently finished watching the first season of the new Stargate Universe. I'm glad to say I liked it. My immediate impression was that it was trying to be more like Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek this time around. On a similar theme I thought it was very interesting the parallels between Stargate and it's spin-offs following similar themes to Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs. After the "original" Next Generation with its alien of the week story, you had a series that was set on a space station with access to a wormhole to a distant part of space, followed by a series with a ship stranded very far away where the main objective is to get home. Sure the DS9/Atlantis similarity is a little thin, I still kind of see the space station/city setting relatively similar. The one similarity that is unquestionably similar thematically is the Voyager/Universe one. 
 
Of course the similarity ends very much there, and falls back to what I was saying before about how this show is trying to be more like BSG. It is clearly "grittier", the sets and the colours seems darker, more dreary and the subject matter is more raw, and less fantasy. The film skillfully maintains all the sci-fi mythology of the previous shows, but doesn't push those elements particularly hard, not even the "Ancients" stuff.  
 
Any departures that a spin-off show makes from the original elements that I loved so much were always going to be closely scrutinied, but I really feel like the differences from the other Stargate shows have been done well, and are all strengths to the new show. I particularly like the flawed, less than squeaky clean characters that make up the show. They are without a doubt what makes the show so engaging. Whereas previously the edgiest, most flawed character you could find in a Stargate was Ronin, he is Mr Rogers compared to some of the crew of Destiny. 
 
Colonel Young is actually not a very good commander. He lacks motivation, and has a troubled personal life that is a major distraction to him. He makes lots of mistakes and struggles to remain cool under pressure. He is not such a great hero - and I love that about him. Quite frankly it gets more than a little boring to see hero leader, even reluctant hero leader save the day. It is far more interesting to see flawed leader make a mistake and watch the story unfold that way. The fact that he should be so recklessly irresponsible as to beat up Dr Rush and leave him stranded on the planet in "Justice" was jaw dropping., and it was great. He appears cool and emotionally unaffected most times, but he regularly cracks when under pressure, and more often than not vents his anger and frustration on Rush, or anyone of his team. Even more interesting was the point where he receives a stern dressing down from O'Neill in "Incursion, Part 1" the guy makes mistakes, big ones, and it's made pretty clear that if it weren't for the fact that it is physically impossible for them to do so given the circumstances, Young would have been relieved of command a long time ago. 
 
Other characters that are interesting include Eli, who is a fresh type of character; kind of the everyman with a clear understanding of the commonality between the situations that come up and the sci-fi references that are associated with it. By virtue of essentially being the fan who is in the show he puts an interesting twist on the events. He is kind of the easy pick for favourite character simply because he is easily relatable for most viewers, but I'm not going to go there. Scott is an interesting character too because he is clearly conflicted between being a good person and being well, flawed. He seems really clean cut, but on the other hand he sleeps around a bit, and the way he has cold shouldered James seems to conflict with his other wise squeaky clean behaviour on the ship. That also in contrast with his questionable moral behaviour back home fathering a child out of wedlock when he was raised by a priest all seems to set the scene for a character clearly in conflict with himself.  
 
However, as interesting as these characters are, and without even looking at the potential that the female characters like TJ, Chloe and Camille Ray, or arguably the lead character of Nicholas Rush have, my favourite character without a doubt is  Master Sgt. Ronald Greer. This guy is clearly messed up. He has had an abusive upbringing, and he is kind of a good example of the sort of trouble people that find their way into military service. He has developed a very interesting sense of "blind faith" in his leader, made all the more interesting by the inherent flaws of that leader. That unwavering sense of loyalty to the orders given to him, without question, without exploration into the morality of the order and what he thinks is best, makes his character almost ironically unique, and refreshing. You can see that with Scott he is the one that is going to question those questionable orders, to try and do what he thinks is best and be the "good guy", but with Greer you can see that if he is told to do something that just doesn't seem right, he's going to do it because that's what he was told to do, and I like that about him, a lot. He is going to be a very very interesting character and I can't wait to see how things develop with him. What's particularly interesting about him and the fact that he is clearly messed up is that, rather than being an excellent well disciplined soldier as his unwavering loyalty seems to suggest, when the show begins we found him looked in the brig, so he clearly has some kind of disciplinary issues. I think we can see where that might come from, but it will be interesting to find out more about these sorts of things as the series develops. 
 
The show is dripping with potential, and the real strength of the show is its characters. In a similar fashion to how Lost uses flashbacks to flesh out the characters and develop a narrative that way, I can see the same sort of thing happening with SGU. 
 
Stargate Universe is refreshing, it shows a mature team of creative people who have managed to take some well loved and old property and keep it fresh and modern with the times. I often wonder what amazing things could have been done with a team like this working on a Star Trek series because right now Stargate is clearly walking all over what Star Trek has achieved in television. 
 
Looking forward to much much more Stargate.

Welcome to my blog. I intend to use this blog to overanalyse movies.