Just The Caffeine Talking

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 3)

In my previous posts about Corsair, I mentioned that I have to expand my first draft to make it a proper book-sized book. Doing that revealed a structural problem. The original short story "The Barbary Shore" had extensive flashback sections, since it was simultaneously about Captain Santiago of Orbital Command battling Captain Black the Space Pirate and about the failed romance years earlier between Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz at M.I.T.

The structural problem was that while the short story divided neatly into the main action and the flashbacks, the novel didn't. There's a lot more stuff going on in the "present time" of the novel, while the amount of "back then" flashback material remains about the same. As a result, I had a story with a handful of flashback scenes scattered through the first few chapters, then no more. That felt clumsy.

So I decided on major surgery. I bundled all the flashback sections into a single chapter. So now the book's first chapter takes place "last year" when Elizabeth and David slug it out in space, then there's a chapter taking place "long ago" when they had their failed romance, and then the rest of the book is a straightforward chronological narrative.

I think the new organization will let me get away with using narrative scene-setting to tell when things are happening, until the actual launch of the pirate spaceship -- at which point I can put a little "mission clock" header at the start of each scene to make it clear that things are happening very fast for the rest of the book. 

Battleship (Part 3): Aliens

I write science fiction. A lot of my stories have alien beings in them. I like to think I'm pretty good at creating aliens and alien civilizations.

Which is why I am developing an irresistible urge to drive out to California and shout at every screenwriter who has used aliens in a film during the past couple of decades. For some reason, aliens in cinema have become the all-purpose excuse for lazy writing and slapdash plots. 

The failings of movie aliens fall into two main categories: motives and methods. Nearly every cinematic alien in recent years has completely nonsensical motives for doing what they do.

Battleship is actually one of the least bad offenders in this particular respect. The bad guys at least have a comprehensible motive: they apparently want to conquer the Earth. And they seem to be at least moderately suited for living on our planet -- they're nocturnal, but the Sun is down as often as it's up, and they appear to be amphibious.

Contrast the aliens in Signs, who turn out to be harmed by contact with water, which sucks for them because Earth is covered with water and its living things are basically made of the stuff. Why the hell would they want to come here?

Or the aliens in the otherwise enjoyable Cowboys and Aliens, who are on Earth to mine gold. Even the characters in the movie find this motive ridiculous when it's explained to them. When fictional characters start critiquing your writing, you should go back and revise what you've done.  

Or, stupidest of all, the bad guys in Battle: Los Angeles, who are here to steal our water. This is a howler which would have been barely excusable in 1961, but in 2011 we know that water is common in the Universe, and it would take about five minutes with Google for a screenwriter to find out that fact.

I'm not saying movie aliens should act just like humans. In fact, I'd love to see a movie alien with genuinely alien motivations. But alien motivations aren't the same as stupid motivations. The extraterrestrial big-game hunter in the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger action picture Predator was a fine example: it was here to hunt humans. It's weird, but it's not stupid.

And when they're not invading Earth for stupid reasons, the aliens seem to do it in stupid ways. I know why this happens: screenwriters have to build up the aliens as a big, powerful, scary threat, but they also have to build in an Achilles Heel to enable the humans to ultimately defeat them. Unfortunately, they tend to do this by making the aliens do blatantly stupid things, and then justify it by saying "Hey, they're aliens!" 

In the case of methods, the bad guys from Battleship are among the worst I've seen. They're totally inconsistent and, frankly, stupid. In personal combat they insist on attacking people with knives, like a pack of Assyrian soldiers from Sennacherib's army. A company of longbowmen could handle them pretty roughly. In naval enagements they are completely innocent of air power or gunnery, but insist on attacking by lobbing some kind of giant robot buzz-saws at things. (Said buzz-saws can chew through warship hulls at the speed of a running sailor, but can apparently be blasted into harmless puffs of vapor by a few rounds from an airplane's cannon.)

Most startling, they are capable of surrounding the entire state of Hawaii in an impenetrable forcefield dome, but don't bother using any similar protection on their spaceship gunboat things. At one point the heroes shoot out a window on the spaceship with rifles!

Everything they do is determined by what the moviemakers thought would look cool and scary, rather than what would actually be effective. The audience is apparently supposed to be so dumb we think a giant buzzsaw is a more deadly weapon than a dinky little cruise missile.

There's one other complaint I have about cinematic aliens: their appearance. For sixty years now, visitors from other worlds in movies have been humanoids. Two legs, two arms, a head on top, proably two eyes with a mouth underneath them.

People, in other words. People who wear funny clothes and may have funny rubber prosthetic appliances on their foreheads. 

Why? In written fiction, H.G. Wells had blobby tentacled Martians driving big tripods invading south England in 1898! We've had freaky weird-shaped aliens for more than a century in science fiction novels and stories, but cinema clings to the human form with limpet-like tenacity.

This was excusable in 1953, or even 1987, when your aliens ultimately had to be built around an actor or stuntman. But in the age of computer animation (when every spaceship in a sci-fi movie is an eye-straining mass of shifting pieces and fiddly bits) it's practically a crime. Where are the giant bugs? Where are the squids? Heck, just give me some centauroid aliens or some guys with three legs. I can't quite blame the writers for this, because of course production designers and costumers bear a lot of the responsibility.

I think it comes back to my perennial problem with moviemakers. They think we're stupid. They think audiences can't recognize a non-humanoid creature as intelligent. They think audiences won't think about why the alien villains are doing the things they do. I don't know how to fix this problem. But I do wish some moviemaker would take a chance and make a movie with believable aliens -- he might be surprised by how well it works out. It just so happens I've got some stories with aliens . . .  

Battleship (Part 2): What Could Have Been

I'm going to continue posting my reactions to watching the movie Battleship. Today I want to talk about a startling thought I had when it ended:

It could have been a good movie.

In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it began as a much better movie than it ultimately became. I don't have any way to see a copy of the original screenplay, but there are some odd bits which survived into the final version which hint at better things.

What's the focus of the movie? What's it about? Specifically: what's the title? It's called Battleship, and yet mysteriously the actual battleship Missouri gets much less screen time than the AEGIS destroyer John Paul Jones. How come? Pirates of the Caribbean has pirates doing stuff in the Caribbean. Citizen Kane has Charles Foster Kane in almost every scene. But Battleship doesn't have much battleship in it. 

There's also the curious presence of a Japanese warship, which gets sunk by the aliens, and her captain, who teams up with the boring young hero of the film. I owe my daughter a dollar because I bet her that the Japanese guy was in the movie so that at some point he could fight one of the blade-wielding aliens with a katana. I believed that because the movie was so blatantly dumb I couldn't think of any other reason they'd include a Japanese character. And yet, against all odds, he never once picked up a sword. Don't all Japanese guys in action movies use swords? What's the world coming to?

I'm going to advance the thesis that the Missouri and the Japanese guy are the last traces of a much better original screenplay. In this hypothetical Battleship, the focus isn't on Taylor Kitsch's irresponsible jerk of a junior officer. He's either a minor character or doesn't appear at all. Instead, the focus is on an elderly Navy veteran who serves as one of the volunteers aboard the museum ship Missouri. He's starting to feel as though he's lived too long -- most of his friends are gone, his family are off somewhere else, and the tourists who come to visit the Missouri don't seem to know or care anything about the ship and its history. The world apparently has no use for either the man or the ship.

Cue the aliens. They surround Hawaii with their forcefield and annihilate the remaining navy and National Guard forces inside the bubble. Our Japanese commander and his ship go down fighting but are rescued. A rag-tag bunch of surviving sailors from half a dozen countries converge on the Missouri as the only chance to stop the aliens. The Japanese officer must work with the elderly veteran to get the Missouri seaworthy in time. Instead of a two-minute montage set to AC/DC this would be the entire middle act of the film. We would see the desperate improvisations and know that the Missouri is underarmed, undermanned, and barely seaworthy. When the ship sets sail the audience and the characters know it's probably a one-way trip. 

That story has actual conflict among the characters. We can have some characters trying to preserve the historic Missouri while others are eager to see the last battleship do what she was built for. We can have our elderly protagonist take the chance to do something meaningful again, even if the physical strain may be too much for him. We can have the historical irony of a Japanese commander on the flag bridge of the Missouri as humans put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. 

This idea even dovetails nicely with the film's existing subplot about the legless soldier who's the only one near the radiotelescope when the aliens take it over. It's all so tidy I can't escape from the suspicion that this was the original idea for Battleship, but at some point someone said "We can't have a summer blockbuster about a guy in his eighties! Make the hero a young guy -- kind of reckless and irresponsible so the morons in the audience will be able to identify with him."

Writing fiction has given me a bad habit: I can't resist going "under the hood" of just about every story I read or film I watch. It's particularly depressing when the story I write in my head is better than the one I'm reading or watching. I think that's one reason why I found Battleship so annoying in its badness: the sheer waste involved. With just a little originality it could have been a good movie.

So the second lesson from Battleship is this: don't be wasteful. Don't scrap a decent idea just to stay within the safe template of your genre.   

 

Battleship (Part 1): Not Stupid Enough

My family recently rented the awful big-budget action movie Battleship, which of course was based on the board game. I learned a great deal from watching Battleship, mostly about things that I don't like. Today I'll talk about the first thing that bugged me: stupidity.

Battleship was stupid -- in a Facebook comment I said it was "fractally stupid" because the stupid parts were made up of smaller stupid parts. But stupidity isn't enough to make a movie irritate me as much as Battleship did. I tend to like dumb action movies, because I realized a long time ago that all movies are stupid. Seriously: movies are good at manipulating the audience's emotions through visuals and swelling music, but are universally awful at actually discussing ideas.

When movies try to tackle ideas more complicated than "Nazis are bad" or "It's funny when a pompous person gets hit with a pie" they seldom succeed. The things movies do well -- images, movement, and music -- are simply not suitable for presenting complex ideas. So a movie which wants to tackle ideas winds up either just filming people talking to each other, which seldom works well, or it has to caricature one side to make a point. When people say they like a movie's presentation of ideas, they generally mean they agree with the ideas presented, and consequently don't mind the caricaturing.

This isn't a problem. Ballet is also a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Architecture is a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Pretty much all art forms that don't involve text or lectures are poor media for presenting ideas. That's okay. You don't have to present ideas all the time. As Samuel Goldwyn said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."

Anyway. Battleship. My problem with the movie wasn't the stupid parts -- the parts where Navy ships are fighting aliens, astronomers are fighting aliens, a legless veteran is fighting aliens, or the USS Missouri is fighting aliens. Those were the fun parts.

The problems came up in the parts where the movie tried to not be stupid. Because nothing reveals fundamental stupidity like attempts at sophistication. There's an interminable sequence at the beginning of the movie intended to show that the main character is an irresponsible, impulsive jerk. This undoubtedly comes from some story meeting at which a writer put down his much-loved copy of Robert McKee's Story and said "What's his character arc?"

At which point nobody else did the sensible thing and said "What character arc? It's a movie about battleships shooting at aliens! Shut up!" Instead they gave us twenty minutes of Taylor Kitsch being an impulsive jerk. It might matter if this had any connection to the rest of the movie, but it doesn't. 

Once the aliens show up and the computer-animated warships start shooting at them, none of this matters in the least. Kitsch's character is thrust into a position of command when his ship's captain is killed, and he does a decent job of shooting at aliens. Some other characters may doubt his fitness to command, but nobody acts on this. Sensibly enough, they're all focused on saving the world from alien invaders.

Which means Kitsch's character's background as an impulsive jerk is irrelevant. He could be a grizzled veteran who drinks to forget, or a rigid martinet who needs to loosen up, or a virulent racist who needs to respect others, or an incorrigible joker who needs to get serious, or a womanizer who needs to settle down, or a chronic nailbiter who needs a manicure. It simply doesn't matter. We spend a tedious twenty minutes watching him be a jerk for no reason.

So the first lesson I learned from Battleship is this: know when to be stupid. If you're making a stupid movie, have the courage to be really stupid. If you're stupid enough, you might do something clever. But if you try to do something smart, you pop the fragile bubble of entertaining stupidity. 

 

Getting Rid of Books

This week my wife and I tackled the hardest task for any family of readers: getting rid of books.

Our house has about 200 feet of shelves, some of them packed two layers deep with books. We also have stacks of books in the office and the bedroom waiting to be read. They pile up faster than we can finish them.

So Diane and I made a first pass at culling the herd, going through our nonfiction (we'll get to fiction later). I began to notice a pattern in the books we agreed to get rid of.

The biggest group consisted of topics we aren't interested in any more. These are books that we bought in order to find out about something, and now that we've learned it, they aren't really worth re-reading. One example is a biography of "Wild Bill" Donovan I got while researching a novel about World War II spies.

I expect that in the future, my family won't buy many of these books -- at least, not in physical form. It makes much more sense to buy references for a particular project as ebooks, especially since that way I can keep the text right in my laptop so I don't have to lug a bagful of books around.

The second-biggest group were things that weren't as interesting as we thought they might be. In other words, disappointing books. A good example of this is a book called Globish, about the rise of English as the lingua franca of our time. It's not a bad book, really, but I got bored with it about halfway through and never felt like finishing. I've noticed that companion books to television series often fit into this category: they look cool and they cover interesting subjects, but they usually wind up being superficial.

I don't think that category will ever disappear completely. We will always buy books which aren't what we thought they would be, or works which simply disappoint. 

Finally there were the books that are simply obsolete. My copy of Charles Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things is a perfect example. It was a useful reference in the pre-Internet era, but now if I want to read up on the history of, say, Silly Putty, there are 290,000 results for a search of the words "Silly Putty History." Reference books which are out of date but not sufficiently old to be useful as historical sources also fit into this category. Note that these books are not just obsolete, they're increasingly obsolete as a class. I don't need to accumulate reference books on odd topics any more, and Project Gutenberg means a lot of older or obscure works are also available online.

 Now we've got a box of books to get rid of, and more will follow. I always let my friends go through them before disposing of them permanently. This way my friends can fill up their own shelves, so that when they eventually decide to get rid of books, I'll be right there to see if there's anything good.  

 

Movie Review (sort of): Forbidden Planet

Last Sunday the Crack Team went to see a showing of the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet at Popcorn Noir in Easthampton. I had never seen it on a big screen, and it's definitely better than watching it on television.

I'm not actually going to write a review. It's a great movie, even after half a century. There are a couple of things I want to talk about, though.

Let me tackle an issue which is starting to irritate me. One frequently sees Forbidden Planet described as an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. That's simply false. There are similarities -- a wise old man on a remote island/planet, his innocent daughter, their supernaturally powerful servant. But those similarities are swamped by the differences.

In Tempest, Prospero (if you don't know who he is, go read the damned play) is the master of events. His magical workings bring about the entire action of the play. The visitors to his island are tested, learn a lesson about mercy and humility, and everyone goes off home content.

In Planet, by contrast, Morbius (if you don't know who he is, go watch the damned movie) only thinks he is in command of events. He ultimately learns, to his cost, that he isn't in control of anything, not even his own mind. It isn't the visitors but the wise old man who needs to learn humility, and Morbius's lesson comes at the cost of his life.

This isn't just a minor difference. It shows a change in mindset from Shakespeare's day to the postwar 1950s. Shakespeare was a contemporary of Francis Bacon (no, Bacon didn't write Shakespeare's plays -- he was too busy to bother), and one can see The Tempest as a reflection of Bacon's new idea that "knowledge is power." Prospero isn't Faust, bargaining with Hell for power which destroys him. He's a noble, wise magician whose power is entirely used for good. Knowledge gives Prospero power on an entirely different scale than what he enjoyed as a Duke before being deposed.

Contrast Forbidden Planet. Morbius is a Faustian figure. He has delved into the advanced science of a dead civilization in order to gain knowledge -- but that knowledge literally releases monsters. In the end he destroys the priceless scientific legacy of the lost Krell, as it is simply too dangerous for humans to meddle with, and the movie implicitly endorses this choice. Knowledge is power, but some power is too dangerous.

The two stories neatly bookend the scientific/technological revolution which transformed Western civilization. Shakespeare, in the confident, expansive Renaissance, looks to what may be accomplished by human ingenuity unleashed. Irving Block and Allen Adler, writing just a decade after World War II, were more concerned with the consequences.

And yet . . . despite its alarmist message the film is also a great example of Space Age optimism. The humans in the film are explorers, voyaging outward and taming the universe just like Shakespeare's seafaring contemporaries. The flying saucer C-57D in the movie isn't a mysterious alien craft but a ship built and manned by humans, no more remarkable in its future world than a Sherman-class destroyer in 1956.

One can easily see Forbidden Planet as the spiritual ancestor of Star Trek -- indeed, the entire plot of the movie could be an episode of the original 1960s series. Despite a few "darker and edgier" forays, Star Trek is still the template for optimistic science fiction on film or television. I'm not the first person to notice this, of course. David Gerrold devoted quite a bit of space in his book The Making of Star Trek to the influence of Forbidden Planet.

It's noteworthy that even the plot structure of Planet mirrors an old-school Trek episode: the heroes visit a planet inhabited by a well-known character actor, and it's his character who learns an important lesson before the crew fly away again. The C-57D could stop off at another planet for more adventures a week later. It almost feels like a series pilot episode.

The movie isn't flawless, of course. The entire subplot involving Earl Holliman as the alcoholic comedy relief cook is more tedious than funny, and the dialog handed out to Leslie Nielsen as the starship captain veers wildly between engagingly Heinleinesque "living in the future" naturalism and extremely stilted "as you know, Bob" exposition.

Still, Forbidden Planet's place as one of the great science fiction movies is unassailable. Half a century after it was made, it still works. Moviemakers with twenty times the budget manage to produce works with less than a twentieth of its impact. Watch it if you get the chance.