To the main body of today’s post, I watched a movie called “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.” It was actually a rather new production that was made to resemble the old b-movie low-budget horror films of fifty years ago. It was amazingNow, this surprises me. Usually, I don’t like movies that try to be bad-funny. In example, I don’t really care for Evil Dead 2, although I loved Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. The difference is Evil Dead was truly bad-funny, Army of Darkness was honestly just funny, but Evil Dead 2 was a “well, I accidentally made a comedy when I meant to make a horror, let’s do it again!”.

Yet, Lost Skeleton actually worked for me. It had so many of the old tropes that are still in use today, even if in much more mature forms. In fact, the movie felt like a bit of an homage to where Sci-Fi and Horror have come from. It had a re-animated skeleton, aliens, and evil scientist, a good scientist, and a mutant. It had the grim farmer on the side of the road that gives directions to ominous locations, laced with likewise dark warnings. It had the hapless local authority that didn’t believe in the legends.

It also had the mark of good acting and good writing, which is to say the ability to write badly while not actually writing badly. A similar example I would point to was John Sclazi’s April Fools joke: The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. He spent a long paragraph saying “it was a dark and stormy night”, and did it in one sentence! And yet, it wasn’t totally painful to read, like actual bad writing that is often found in fan fiction or under author’s bed where they keep their first manuscript in an airtight sarcophagus.

So, to be short for once, “Lost Skeleton of Cadavra” his hilarious. You should watch it, preferably with friends and booze. You won’t be disappointed.

Well, I’ll start with the good things. The movie actually had pretty decent acting, from the two brothers who were betrayed and react differently, to the prince who was framed, to the Priestess-Princess that has her own motives and designs and isn’t just there to be a love interest.

There is also, honestly, a pretty strong plot. Granted, I pretty well every twist as it was foreshadowed, from who the real villain was to what the Prince would have to do to save the day. I even called the heart-wrenching extremes he was pushed to. I also do not feel that the time-travel thing at the end cheapened the story at all. So yeah, plot was perhaps a hair generic, but it delivered one at least being structured and whole.

The first thing that hurt the movie, I think, was the thinly veiled modern commentary, from the invasion of a country looking for weapons that aren’t there to an amoral businessman who is just dodging taxes and takes up a fairly large part of the screen time for his character’s actual worth.

Some of the dialogue betrayed the modern call-forwards much like watching an old episode of Hercules or Xena, and much of the dialogue was extremely contemporary. Which, honestly, was very jarring since the characters were not tongue-in-cheek contemporary themselves. Imagine King Leonidas complaining about work unions or a Fair Tax. Yeah.

But, I think the number one thing that hurts this movie is how pretty it is. Now, I love pretty things. I’m attracted to them like a moth to flame, which is probably why I watched The Golden Compass, Avatar, Clash of the Titans, and Prince of Persia. Yet, all of these have a similar failing, and that is far too strong of a desire to show of what they can do on the big screen with special effects and computer graphics, and not enough of a feeling for telling a story. Several times in this movie, I felt like I was watching someone playing a videogame, either for in-game play or watching cinematics for the game. And that, my friends, is what I feel hurt this movie the most because it was the most jarring.

But, what to do? I mean, this movie is, much like any SpecFic movie, about the world as much as it is about the characters.  We need to feel the epic nature and grand vistas, but is it really worth the amount of screen time that is given to sweeping panoramics of cities or deserts or ruins? After all, aren’t we supposed to be marveling at the beauty of what they can do on the big screen?

Well, here’s an idea for you. If you want to see those kinds of video-game style graphics, play a video game. The movie screen shouldn’t be about showing off the budget they had for special effects. It should be about producing the highest of quality story in two to three hours that a TV show just couldn’t handle on the scope. You want amazing special effects, make them invisible. The audience should not be aware that they are there. I’m not saying you aren’t allowed to have giant sandstorms, towering cities, or over-large scorpions, but don’t dedicate 10 minutes to a fight that features these things.

I want story. I want to see how the characters of this world are reacting to it, not how the world simply is. Show, don’t tell, they say, and that doesn’t mean let me see it on the screen. That isn’t showing. Figure it out, Hollywood. Please. And leave the vapid eyecandy where it belongs, as the backgrounds for fancy video-games (which I will gladly play).

So, I’ll start high.  In many fairly popular sci-fi stories, it takes an alien invasion for the world to set aside its bickering and unify as a single force.  Granted, there are still cultures and other issues within, but a single government entity emerges to confront the new alien terror.  Which, as I will say many times in this post, is a Them for our Us.  And honestly, I think that is about the short of it.  Sentient life seems to have such a hard time getting along that it comes down needing something bigger and scarier to pull us together.  Heck, John Locke noticed this, although he believed that it would take a Behemoth, a massive military force that was able to hold the world at gunpoint, to actually make it behave most of the time.  Which, funny enough, has been the case in some Sci-Fi too.

But, let’s even look back at the beginnings of government.  Nomad tribes learned to farm and settle, then when other nomads came to take the crops, the settlers banded together for protection.  Of course, the biggest, meanest settler became the king, and bingo, government, us, and them.  Pack behavior from the get-go has probably been survival based, with Nature being the Them, but don’t quote me on that.  I’m hardly an anthropologist; I just play one on TV (I wish).

So, cliques.  And an aside, I hate that word, cause I use it quite often in speech, but it took me a full five minutes of going DUR to remember how to spell it and have it mean what I wanted it to mean.  Anyway, cliques, and in particular, kids on a playground.  I don’t know how well anyone here remembers elementary school, but there were two givens. Thursday was spaghetti day, and there was a group of kids who hated with your group of friends with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns.  They might not have been able to do anything about it, especially if your group was way larger or more popular, but they still did.  And more than likely your group had an animosity with some other group (or, sadly, occasionally just a single outcast type kid).  Why? Well, it isn’t just that kids are mean, which they are.

No, it is because an enemy draws us closer.  Hatred is, sadly, a very strong and universal emotion, perhaps moreso than love.  A mutual love of something can create some bonds, but a mutual hatred is like the duct tape and super glue of young friendships.  Perhaps the nature of hate is a good reason.  After all, to quote (shudder) Billy Shakespear, “In time, we come to hate what we often fear.”  And, to quote many people (although Carmine Falcone from Batman Begins is stuck in my head saying it) “You always fear what you don’t understand.”  And what is more universally true of any human than a lack of understanding?

Oh, and an aside of historical proof, both the unification of modern Italy and the unification of the German State required a vilification of an outsider to make it stick.

So, hatred bonds people together, even when they have great differences.  Get enough people together, and there will be great differences.  So, perhaps, there will always have to a “Them.”  To my psychology-savvy friends, please, give me proof otherwise (or anyone for that matter). Cause, honestly, that is a kind of depressing thought.

Oh, and writing.  All I really take from this is that you need to think long and hard if a single-government without external threat really makes sense at all, whether in a future-earth or a fantasy universe.  I, personally, find them odd (which is funny since I do want to write about one in a novel.  Least I have more to think about.)

I’ll focus on Avatar, which is funny ‘cause I haven’t seen it.  I almost want to just to look for all the messages within, but it can be boiled down to a quick summary.  Hero’s world wants to invade Native’s world.  Hero becomes a native as a spy, ends up turning completely native, fights off uncompassionate home world.  This story has been done so much that it’s even a Disney movie.  Now, what was the creator of this particular story trying to say?  I’ve heard no less than three explanations.

1) It is a direct re-creation of the Last of the Mohicans/Dances with Wolves story, where the aliens are native Americans and the humans are the “The White Man.”
2) It is an anti-technology piece about the price of expansionist industrialism and the loss simpler, more holistic morality.  Of course nature wins of the industrialists because is more pure.
3) It is a war between Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and Fantasy wins because it is more appealing and hopeful where Sci-Fi is typically grim and pessimistic.

So, what did James Cameron want?  Honestly, I think he just wanted an awesome looking movie.  So how did all these other levels and messages get in?  Because he didn’t even think about them.  It is kind of like my earlier comments on racist stereotypes.  To make an Asian use a katana just because they are Asian is imbedding meanings you never meant to put there.  And just because you didn’t “mean it” doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Now, I’m going to go right and say that this irks me on two levels.  The first is that people can’t just accept that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, the second is that apparently I can’t either.  Why do authors (until recently because of super-awareness of the issue) typically write heroes of the same race, religion (or level of conviction), and gender as themselves?  Are we trying to say that white agnostic men (in my case) are the superior hero and neener-neener to anyone else?  No, not really.  We are just following the pre-coded paths in our thought process where we don’t even think about “what would the effect be if the protagonist was a woman, or a minority, or a different religion, etc.”  Again, this is changing, even in myself.  I have written a minority hero (at least in his world), and I have written religious heroes and heroines.  But I always have to think about it.  The default settings are what they are, just like in a video game, and if I’m lazy, I will use them.  And that, unfortunately, can be an endorsement of them.

A friend of mine commented that race is a myth, an imaginary thing made up for various reasons.  He may be right, but racism is hardly a myth, even if what it focuses on is, and it extends into everything.  I’m not going to say writing a “minority” piece is going to make something instantly good fiction, or something that is riddled with “lazy stereotypes” is instantly bad, but I do think in general at least a little thought needs to be put into realizing exactly what trope you are using, and if you really want (or care) if that message is carried through along with anything else.  A neglect to can make your entire story completely off base.  As a closing example, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which created a public outcry over the quality of meat and food in processing plants, was supposed to make people angry over the treatment of immigrants.  It caused the FDA to be made, but immigrants were still treated like mud.  Funny, ne?

This is a rewrite of something I did a while ago.  It is a revisit to the world of Adervyn and steam-powered cyborgs, and the tale of one man upholds the job and his first encounter with the half-man, half-machine.

Also, small administrivia: Short stories will now be posted whenever I can manage to get one written.  I’ll still put give them blog posts so they will show up in the RSS, so no worries, but no promises on schedule either.  Holidays are hectic, and even 1 month can be a bit much if trying for something of decent quality while not getting paid for it

Just to get into the habit, blog post for new short fiction. This is a bit of a steampunky piece based in the world of one of my books. And, while yes it does have some of the minor characters from the book in it, it’s meant to stand completely on its own. Also available via the short fiction page via the nav-bar. Comments on the story can go here since I’m using pages and not posts for the stories.