Godzilla 1985

 

It's hard to believe it's been 40 years since this one came out - especially considering I saw it at the theater as a teenager. It's special to me for a few reasons: It was the first one I got to see in a theater, the first one I saw at the time of release, and it actually got attention in the press as a big new movie coming out. Prior to this we pretty much had to catch them as Saturday afternoon special features on local independent stations as even getting them on VHS tapes was not easy early on. 

This however, was a big new Godzilla. Prior to this one the last new G-movie was released in 1975 and barring the occasional re-release - which my parents would not take me to - it was a TV-only thing. Now it was big-screen time and it quickly became apparent that there were some differences:

• Most of the action scenes take place at night and this gives a very different feel to things. It's a different look and this version of Godzilla emerges from the ocean in the dark and lays waste to your city in an apocalyptic-looking scene of ruins and smoke lit by fires  as he stomps his way through. It gives them a chance to use the lighting as something other than bright happy daylight like most of the prior movies.
• In the city many of the buildings are bigger than Godzilla. That's not something we really saw before and it adds to the massive scale of what's going on. The city sets themselves are just ridiculously detailed and the amount of moving parts and the lighting is just incredible.
• More attention is paid to the human story, really to the story overall, as a definite effort is made to have a coherent narrative of problem arises, devastation continues as solutions are pursued, a major battle is fought and lost, but then one solution comes together and science saves the day - for now. The main group of human characters is kept small so when they end up in danger it actually matters - we have a reporter, a sailor, his sister, and a scientist ... and possibly Raymond Burr depending on which version you end up watching. It's a solid approach that will be used again in some of the future movies. No aliens, secret aliens, government conspiracies, or time travelers here. Just humans threatened by a force of nature.
• The cold war does make a guest appearance via the U.S. and the Russians and some questionable stances here end up prolonging the problem but it's nice to see a nod to the time in which it was made without going to an outside solution and it directly address the "why don't they just nuke it" question in a satisfactory way.

One of my favorite elements of the movie deserves a separate callout: the Super-X:

Now we had all seen Japan's obsession with giant robots before in various incarnations, most notably Mechagodzilla and Jet Jaguar in the earlier movies, but this was a different take. This little over-armored-flying-Volkswagen-bug-tank-thing was both awesome and hilarious as Japan's secret super-weapon takes on Godzilla and goes toe-to-toe with him in a running fight through a burning city at night in one of the best battles in the entire series. In fact it pretty much wins!

But after knocking him out with some special missiles the Soviet screw-up takes effect and brings him back to life and you can feel the desperation in the crew and in the observers as the tiny defender vehicle fights a losing battle that can only go one way now that it's one special trick has failed. The second part of the fight is great but leads to the end of the valiant Super-X.

(Someone else must have loved it too because we do eventually get a Super-X2 and a Super-X3!)

We do get a nicely done resolution though as the other scientific solution is implemented and leads Godzilla to a  nearby volcano and drops him in - Japan is saved but ... it is Godzilla you know.

It's just a well-done movie. If you have any interest in Kaiju films it's definitely worth watching as it (eventually) kicked off a whole new wave of Godzilla films that ran into the 90's and are pretty decent as a group. It was a ton of fun to know it was back after a ten-year gap - even if it took another 4 years to get the next one and as far as I know most of us could only see it on HBO when it did arrive, not the theater.

My only caveat for this is right up there: you do need to have some love for Kaiju films. It is still a man in a rubber suit stomping around a (awesome) model city even if it does have a decent story and better effects than prior entries. It's not Minus-One: if someone doesn't like this genre this one will probably not change their mind. 

That said I love it - it's one of my favorites and it has me fired up enough that I will probably work my way back through the series and I'm sure I will end up talking more about it here. 

Matrix Resurrections

 

Yeah, there will be spoilers ...

I mentioned in an earlier post that I liked this one. I should probably clarify further to "I didn't hate it as much as some people seem to online" but I do agree with much of the criticism. Then single most applicable word I can apply here is "unnecessary" as in no one was really asking for this movie to be made. 

The original 1999 Matrix movie is great, was incredibly impactful in its time, still holds up today, and is a great, self-contained story. If someone was only going to watch one this would be the one.

The first two sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, are good movies in a lot of ways and they do expand the universe and we do see much more of the story of freeing humanity from the machines but most opinions feel I have read feel like they do not quite achieve the same level of greatness as the original. I'm in this camp as there are a ton of cool moments in them but I sometimes feel like we see too much ... by telling the rest of the story it limits what one might envision as "the rest of the story". I don't think they're bad but I think you can stop with the original and not be missing a lot of crucial information. 

The original is the story of Neo becoming The One - that's the trip we are taking. When you talk about a sequel you have to figure out what story we are telling. Is it a big picture on the war against the machines? Is it still about Neo using his new powers? Is it about Neo and Trinity? Is it about the scrappy band of rebel characters led by Neo and they're actions in the war? Is it really about the awakening and transformation of Agent Smith? There are elements of all of these in the sequels and that may be one of the things that weakens them.

For Resurrections it's still a good question. Time has passed, some kind of reset button has been pressed and Neo is roughly 20 years older and looks about like he would if he had kept on going on his original pre-red pill character's career. Trinity shows up on the fringes of his life and there is clearly some kind of connection but their lives have been configured to keep them apart - and yes, it is quickly evident that they are in the Matrix. 

One weird part is that scenes from the original Matrix are playing in the background regularly and at one point the entire opening sequence is re-done with different actors and even some different characters showing up. We end up going through the journey of "awakening" Neo all over again as well which to me is truly pointless. Then he decides to go get Trinity too so we go through the process one more time in the film. 

A mistake that is made during all of this is that the backstory that is presented as far as what has gone on since Revolutions, a civil war between machines, some of which allied with the humans, sounds like a more interesting story than what we are watching. You could have made that a sequel with resurrecting these particular characters and continued the story of the world without needing to continue those characters - but that's not the direction they went. 

And no, it doesn't retcon the events of the sequels so yes, Neo and Trinity did die. The new Architect type character decided to bring them back to life and talks about how it was difficult ... but he did it to fix some of the disruptions to the world and created a new Matrix. This is all pretty loosely defined so don't ask too many questions. 

There is a lot of self-referential, meta, inside baseball type stuff, especially early on but I thought it was fine, if not quite as clever as the writers maybe thought they were. I didn't think it damaged the movie.

My best effort at finding the point of this movie is as a take on aging. Those movies are hitting the 20+ year mark now and if you look at it through this lens some of it makes more sense. There is one line that drove this home for me:

I took it as a parallel for life in some ways: Something you thought was fixed or resolved years ago turns out not to be and ends up turning your current OK-ish life upside down. Can you measure up to those glory years or will you fail trying? What if getting your old team back together isn't enough? Then there's all the "ex" stuff and moving on, then not moving on, "who you're really supposed to be with" ... the whole Neo/Trinity thing is probably worth more examination. 

That's my best take on it.

As far as why we needed to see again the red pill sequence, the unplugging, the rescue, the training sequence complete with Morpheus and a dojo ... I don't know. I don't think we did but that's where they went. 

Overall there's no awesome moment in the film like the lobby fight or the helicopter escape, or "dodge this" or any of that. Nothing like the car chase in Reloaded, or the mech defense in Revolutions. The fights themselves are ... slow. They do not approach the fast, crisp, amazing fight choreography of the earlier movies and that was a shame. 

So I come back to "unnecessary" as my ultimate feeling on this one. Sure, it's fun to step back into the Matrix. It's cool to see some of those characters again - even if many of them have changed actors. It's just that a lot of it feels like a loop back through the first movie. It's revisited but not really enhanced or improved. There is more story for Neo and Trinity but I never felt like it was a better story and so I'm not sure why we did all that work to get ... nowhere really. 

The Tomorrow War

 

It's a new movie on Amazon Prime that you may have heard of ... Chris Pratt, time travel, aliens, fate of the human race ... it checks a lot of typical sci-fi boxes.

NOTHING BUT SPOILERS BELOW!

I kind of want a prequel to tell us about this guy now.

Longtime 40k player take: It's Imperial Guard vs. Tyranids

But I have to admit ... I liked it better than I expected to ... a lot better.

The premise: Current day Chris Pratt is an ex-special forces sergeant who is now married, has a daughter, and teaches high school biology while trying to get a more scientific research type gig.  He's happy but frustrated. Then a terminator bubble/gateway pops open in the middle of a soccer match and humans from 30 years in the future walk through and announce that humanity is being eaten by aliens in their time and they need help. That help involves sending humans from "now" forward to "then" to help shoot aliens for a week, after which they return home ... if they live. Somehow the entire world agrees that this is legit in fairly short order so a worldwide draft is set up and people get notified at random that it's their turn to go. They get a brief training period - a week or less - and then they get sent forward 30 years to shoot aliens. 

As you might guess, this does not typically go well. Humans are still losing and the survival rate is something like 20% for the draftees. 

This is where I have some questions:

• They do go out of their way to cover the potential paradoxes in that only people who are dead prior to the current future time are drafted - no running into yourself.
• They also explain that they can only travel a fixed distance so it's only 30 years forward or back - to the day. This avoids some other questions and considering time travel was developed during an apocalyptic war it makes sense that  there might be some limitations.
• I'm still not sure how it works from our end - apparently you just need the one transmitter in the future and you can jump back and forth. Seems pretty loose but ok. 
• Location is never defined - apparently you can drop a shipment wherever you want and pick up form wherever you want. So it's kind of a teleporter too. This isn't discussed at all in the movie but it's hardly a dealbreaker. 

My biggest problem with the film is the aliens. A completely non-technological species the size of a horse ... there's just no way. There's no way they are going to take over almost the entire planet facing modern military technology. 

• They have tentacles that can shoot a spike to maybe pistol range. Wheeee! It is not particularly lethal because we see multiple characters get hit by one and survive so they aren't poisoned or anything. They are also not terribly accurate as we see many, many spikes embedded in walls or cars or other objects and they are not always surrounded by bloodstains. Plus we see a lot of missed shots during the action scenes. 
• Typical assault rifles can shoot 600 rounds per minute or more. Even with a 30 round magazine that's a lot more lead in the air than the aliens can toss and Planet Earth does not lack for bullets. They also have a much greater range, hundreds of meters, than anything we see from the aliens.
• A lot of time the movie acts as though assault rifles and pistols are the only weapons humanity has against these things. Sure, in a room maybe - but how did they get into the room? I don't think we see a single grenade used in the entire thing. We do see an M2HB in action so that was nice. 
• If the aliens had some superior technology or were spewing out some contagion I could see the problem but they don't - no heat rays, no black smoke, no force fields or super-tough alien metal ... they are basically animals. Mean animals that eat people sure, but still just animals to all appearances. They don't even have acid blood as an up-close hazard! We don't see them reproducing by laying bunches of eggs or anything like in some other movies so we don't know how any of that works. 
• If they have overrun so much of the world then presumably they have exhausted the food supplies on those other continents in the course of this 3-year war, right? Once the Russians are gone, what do the monsters in Russia eat? Given their size and activity level they would need to eat a lot.
• Back to how do these things overrun the world - They are roughly horse-sized. They are bright white in color. They are not particularly stealthy - no predator camouflage here. So again, how do they overrun any reasonably defended position? Helicopter gunships don't have to be  50 feet off the ground and in jumping distance to do what they do. We have infrared, night vision, thermal sights ... they're not going to sneak up on anyone really.

 

Now despite all this I still liked the movie. I just had to let go and take it as a given that somehow some way a series of colossal screw-ups meant that humanity was losing and losing badly to these things. I kept waiting for the big conspiracy-expectations-subversion-twist that the aliens were really from an experiment gone wrong on earth or some government or corporate bad guy was responsible for them but there was none of that - thank goodness. The movie stuck to its' original premise and that made me quite happy. There are some interesting twists along the way but nothing that is flat-out stupid beyond the core premise of the aliens over-analyzed above.

Well other than the final defense of the last human holdout. Seriously - it's in the middle of the ocean and they are totally surprised when a huge wave of creatures swarms up out of the ocean. They apparently had no early warning system set up, no picket ships, no mines in the water ... it's laughable and whoever was responsible for that should have been fired - if they weren't eaten.  

This movie does steal/homage from a LOT of other films. Alien, Aliens, Apocalypse Now, Terminator (it's sort of a reverse terminator in concept anyway), The Thing, Independence Day, Starship Troopers, ... even Stranger Things feels like an inspiration for some of the scenes here. 

Chris Pratt's family figures in significant ways, not just a motivation to "get back". The supporting characters are given just enough personality and capability to cover why they are there and to make it enjoyable while they are. The special effects look pretty good. 

It's not Star Wars. It's not super-deep. It is one of the better sci-fi action movies to come out in quite a while though and that surprised me. If you like this kind of thing it's definitely worth a couple of hours of your time. 

Terminator RPG

 

So there's a kickstarter running right now for a Terminator RPG. It is past its goal so it should happen but it got me thinking about the whole concept. I was playing RPGs for years before the first movie and I don't remember a Terminator RPG before now  - how has it taken this long for someone to make a game out of this concept and universe?

First up, I have loved the movies since the beginning - the concept, the look, the hows and the what-if's ... it's a great idea. Loved the first and the second, really liked the third (and it took them around 20 years just to make 3), was not as big a fan of the 4th, was OK with the 5th though it had some problems, and I'm roughly ok with the 6th though it has some problems as well. There was a TV series too and it was interesting.

Now it appears they only have the rights to the first movie and the ... comic books? In the comments they mention that each of the movies is a separate license which probably explains why no one has tried this before. Sure the first movie sets it all up but for an ongoing RPG not being able to use the other 5 movies seems pretty limiting. I've never read the comic books so I have no idea where they take the story and I bet most of the people interested in the game haven't either. That said I like the approach:

In ‘The Terminator RPG’, you play resistance fighters struggling against the machine onslaught of Skynet in an alternative and post-apocalyptic version of today—the once "far future" of the 2020s. You can take the role of rebel time travellers sent back to various points in time to stop Skynet from altering history. You can even play natives of any historical time period, targeted by Terminators and trying to stay alive as a future hell is unleashed around you. 

The book is designed as a toolbox to allow the Director to create their own campaigns or one-shots, including detailed multipage campaign arcs, campaign seeds, mini-missions, NPCs, weapons, detailed locations, and enemy characters.

You have the option to play either pre-generated characters or to create your own—tailored to your preferences, weapon choices, and role within your team. If your character is killed, a new one can be brought in from the future, past, or present. That new character can be many things—including even an alternate you from a divergent timeline.

They are using their own in-house system which I have not read or played but I'd bet it will be perfectly fine if they're betting on it for a very visible game like this. 

Thinking about what I would actually run with this, well, I think it would be tough to run a long term campaign here. Between the one-way time travel, the lethality of the terminators, and the high-stakes nature of the source material - I mean, they either kill Sarah Conner or they don't - I would be aiming for a limited run, finite goals type of campaign. Something like a plot-point campaign in many of the Savage Worlds books and even there I'd be aiming for 6-12 "chapters" that would not take all that long to play through. 

Think about the basic scenario: Skynet sends a terminator (or three) back to Time Period X to eliminate someone important to the future. Are the players playing resistance fighters who are also making that one-way trip back? Are they playing "natives" to the destination time period? Does a mix of the two make sense?  

At this point it effectively becomes a Superhero scenario: The villain has a plan, the heroes must become aware of this plan, figure out the specific goals or targets, then they must undertake various actions to stop it. Unlike a superhero campaign though, once you stop it, that's pretty much the game. I suppose you could come up with some kind of Torchwood-style organization to deal with future time-traveling threats but that seems out of step with the source material where it's left to the crazy people and their therapists to watch for a return.

This is why I think it's best as a limited campaign and while you could play through a few different incursions - as happens with the movies -  I don't know how many times your players are going to want to play Man vs. Machine. You could certainly change up the time periods and the scenarios to keep it interesting ...

• A Terminator drops into Germany in 1945. How does the basic scenario change in an active warzone? Plus, maybe this time he needs to keep a particular scientist -alive- to ensure the future goes a certain way. Could give your party a nice moral dilemma.
• Maybe Skynet decides someone's grandfather is a better target and drops a cybernetic Austrian into the 1960's ... in Vegas ... and the target is a celebrity ... or a mob boss ...
• Change up the location and make it more of a fish in a barrel scenario by having a T-whatever target someone on a cruise ship. Maybe it comes on board at one of the stops, or maybe your players think they are playing an entirely different kind of game until they find a spherical section of the ship is missing and things start to get dangerous ...
  

Those are just a few ideas for running something like the traditional Terminator movie scenario. 

I think a more practical use in a lot of ways is dropping a T-scenario into another game. 

• One night the Super-base sensors pick up a temporal disturbance downtown and investigating heroes find a naked human fleeing the scene ...
• Hanging out at a club in Night City gets a lot more interesting when a big guy walks in and triggers all of the security scanners then tosses the bouncers aside with ease ...
• A group of people who normally wear primary-colored uniforms are doing some field research on the life of an important scientist via the Guardian of Forever when BLAM! A new mission to preserve the timeline ensues. 

I'm mostly ignoring the ridiculous 80s-centric crossovers you could have here too with Robocop, Predator, Transformers, GI Joe, and all of that ... then throw in a Stargate for good measure. I mean, once you make time travel a thing you open up a lot of possibilities.

The final main way I could see to running a Terminator campaign is the one where you might be able to do a long-term game: Human Resistance Wars. It's pretty much Twilight 2000 with robots ... shiny killer robots ... with lasers ...

Anyway I felt a need to ponder and ramble on this topic - more to come. 

Super Stuff - Umbrella Academy

Feels like I should catch up on some things after so many gaps this year so I'll be doing that this month. One big thing - lots of super-activity this summer!

Several independent super-shows came along earlier this year and I feel very differently about each of them so let's start with Umbrella Academy. I have not read the comic books or any other version of the story so I was coming in cold. It seems like it was fairly popular on Netflix but I have to say I was ... underwhelmed.

What happens at a reunion years after a kid superhero team splits up? Well ... they all hate each other so they spend a lot of time bickering and not a lot of time doing super stuff. I mean, I get the "dark", the "modern take" - or is it "postmodern" now? I forget. I kept feeling like the stuff they were doing in the flashbacks would have been more interesting than what they were doing in the "now" of the show.

First up - the Attitude:

• They mostly seem to hate each other
• They all hate their father
• They almost all hate that they used to be superheroes
• There's a fair amount of self-hate on the team too

I don't mind having one or two "dark" characters on a team show but when the whole team is that way ... it's a lot. 

Second - the Bounty Hunters:

Was this originally a completely different story? Was it just grafted on to this one? Because there's nothing terribly original or interesting about it and it really doesn't add that much to the main plot. maybe it was supposed to be the lighter or funny element of the show but it's just not that much. 

Third - the Padding:

Even with only ten episodes it feels like there was not that much story here. Trim out the 90% of the Hunters story line that was unneeded and you could have cut this down to 8 episodes, maybe less. I mean you have a team of 7 super characters, a stern father figure running them, a chimpanzee major domo, a robot mother, and time-travelling assassins and yet it somehow feels like you didn't have enough to fill out ten hour-long episodes of a TV show.

I did stick with it through the end though I considered dropping it multiple times as I was watching. I was curious how they would resolve the big plot ... and even that was a disappointment! Get to the last episode, things are unfolding, and  - welp - see you next season??!! It's cheap and artificial. I'm still debating whether I will even watch the next season after that.

The thing I liked most:

 Mr. I-see-dead-people #4 triggers a device and finds himself in the Vietnam War. We don't see much of it in real-time, mostly it happens in flashbacks throughout the following episodes but he spends a year there, develops a significant relationship, and lives through some pretty rough stuff before he finds his way back. In one episode he goes into a VFW post and starts crying over some old pictures -which he is in- and then gets into a fight with the older members who are inside and think he's being disrespectful. It's funny, touching, and wrong on some level and to me it was by far the best scene in the whole show.

Bringing it Back Online

Well, it's been a few months but it's time to get things back online, spin up the FTL, climb out of the hole, re-ignite the forge,  and get the blog going again.

Catching Up:

• Westworld! It's back and so far is looking good. I was concerned that they might not be able to match the first season and the total lack of knowledge we had - I mean, surprises are tougher once we know what's going on - but so far they seem intent on revealing even more about the park's place in the world and I am liking it all so far.
• Ready Player One! Saw it, liked it, still haven't read the book. As pretty much the exact target demo for this movie I appreciate it quite a bit but it's not a Star Wars/Raiders/Iron Man level event. That said, there's a fight near the end that if you're a fan of various Japanese pop culture things - like say, Godzilla - that you will never see anywhere else and that alone pretty much made the movie for me. 
• Pacific Rim 2 - Again I liked it, and again it just didn't quite hit the highest notes for me. The first one felt revolutionary. this one feels like we're just doing some business. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it felt like they could have done more.
• Infinity War - YEAH! Started off strong, didn't waste time with a bunch of exposition, kept Iron Man awesome, put Thor back up to awesome - maybe even moreso than before - and stayed true to what they've been doing for the last ten years. 

Game-wise it was pretty rare thing for a few months but we're firing that up again too. It's pretty much cut down to two games for now:

• Savage Rifts is going again with our first session since January in the books and another one on the way. No pre-planned campaign here, this one is all stuff from my head.
• D&D is rolling again with the Storm King's Thunder game restarted for the first run since December. I had another sessions scheduled but we ran late and ended up playing Smash-Up instead and everyone still had a good time. 
• I'm still playing in Steve's Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign. All is well there.

So I'm running Savage Worlds and D&D 5E which makes me a happy DM as I really like both systems. I expect we will get at least one more option in play for the summer. Reading Freedom City has me itching for a Supers game again, but a second 5E campaign has some attraction as does a second Savage Worlds game - resurrecting our Deadlands campaign probably tops that list. 

Anyway there's the restart update - more to come!

Thor: Ragnarok

There are some spoilers here so skip this one if you haven't seen it yet

I saw this over the weekend and it was awesome. The Thor movies have been more fantastic than the other Marvel films in that they typically do not deal with car chases, skyscrapers, bank robbers, hacking into some computer system, or corporate intrigue. They are much more about what's right and what's not set against a backdrop of fantastic vistas, monstrous creatures, and tremendous fights. This third Thor movie amps up all of that and outdoes the rest in sheer spectacle.

Bonus: We also get a side view and what is presumably the cinematic universe's take on Planet Hulk. I'd love to see a full Planet Hulk movie but I assume this is about all that we're going to get on that.

There's not a ton to discuss - if you like the Marvel movies you've either already seen it or plan to see it and you should!

Cate Blanshett does a great job as Hella - an interesting, competent villain who's plans largely succeed despite what the heroes attempt. She's billed as a tremendously formidable opponent and she lives up to that, opening with shattering Thor's hammer and punting him and Loki out of the world. even when they do find their way back she pretty much handles them again! The only way you stop her is to unleash something at least as bad if not worse - Surtur! "A titan to fight a titan" to quote a completely different movie.

This gets to one of the more interesting aspects of the movie - there's no reset button! Thor loses Mjolnir early in the movie and he doesn't get it back! Thor is injured significantly later in the film and it does not magically heal up before the movie is over. The Warriors Three are dispatched early on and they stay dead!  Perhaps most significantly Asgard is threatened, taken over, and in the final battle, destroyed! It truly is Ragnarok! The remaining Asgardians are a group of refugees, looking for a shining planet ... well, you know the rest.

I have to say that on the list of "things I never expected to see in a live action movie" Surtur destroying Asgard would be a significant one. I used to own some Thor comics where he made it into Asgard and seeing that up on the screen was wild.

So yes, I liked it and I am looking forward to the next Marvel thing!

This Looks a Bit Familiar: Bright

I don't pay a ton of attention to San Diego Comic Con anymore because it's turned into such a huge thing it's just a torrent of information - it's overload. I did see one thing over the weekend that caught my eye though:




I know "urban fantasy" is a wider genre these days but that looks a ton like a Shadowrun movie. Plus, Will Smith actually looks entertaining in this one, unlike some of his other recent appearances.

So color me interested in this one ...

Campaign Concept: Rogue Trader as Guardians of the Galaxy. Also: Starfinder

A few weeks back I described my inspiration for a Rogue Trader campaign driven by Black Sails, Starz amazing pirate series. Over the weekend we watched Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time in a long time and I think I have found the inspiration for the opposite of that other campaign concept.

Black Sails is serious, gritty, full of scheming, betrayals, and violence.

Guardians is far less serious, not nearly as gritty, does have some betrayals, and does have violence. The movie does involve dealing with powerful artifacts and overly powerful opponents so it's a better fit than I thought at first glance.

Rogue traders do have less chance of being put in jail ...

So there are some common elements, enough to make a good game for sure, but the tone would be completely different. I think "grim and serious pirate" Rogue Trader would be significantly different from "comic book movie" Rogue Trader, to the point they might not even feel like the same game.

It's OK Captain Flint, let's talk through this.

Key elements of a GotG Rogue Trader campaign in my mind:

• Characters are in slightly over their heads, despite being basically competent. Maybe they just recently fell into their positions and the campaign starts on "Day 1" of this new life.
• Less concern about details, technology, and "realism", looser style
• Action over plotting and scheming
• Focus on organizations
• name
• goal
• leader as recognizable NPC
• one or two lower level members as recognizable NPC's to put a face on things
  (example of what this means: Guardians RT would probably be more "that's Zolo's ship!" than "that's the Red Fury!" when identifying a new arrival)
• More emphasis on "doing the right thing", even reluctantly and less on "personal gain", comparatively
• Humor - this would be accepted and encouraged as part of the feel of the game. The closes "other thing" to this kind of feel is probably Firefly - there are serious consequences to actions of the PC's but that's no reason we can't be funny in getting to them.

Organization + recognizable member NPC

There are some differences in the scenarios. A Rogue Trader has a massive crew - they would probably have to stay mostly in the background. It's a massive ship but it's still smaller than serious warships so there are still things you will need to run from. Just think if the Black Sails crew was put in charge of the Enterprise or a Battlestar vs. the Guardians crew - how would those two stories be different? 

Also as I started to think through this I wonder if GotG might be better 'adapted" to a Starfinder campaign. We don't know much about the game yet but a lot of Pathfinder and D&D games start with "out for gold" and end up "doing the right thing" not far into the campaign. 

Yep, that looks about right for a "First Contact" for a lot of my games ...

So I may have talked myself into thinking through a Rogue Trader-like campaign that may end up using Starfinder instead of RT rules to help keep the right tone. I suppose we will just have to see how they fit together when the rules come out.

The best thing about the new Guardians of the Galaxy Trailer is ...

...this:

Starlord's dad is clearly Jack Burton! It explains so much!

I know , I know, - he's supposed to be Ego the Living Planet. Let's just see how that turns out/

The Obligatory Rogue One Post

Background
I'm a first generation Star Wars fan - I saw it when I was 8. Loved the original trilogy as a whole. Mostly OK with the prequels although they could have been so much more. Pretty good with Clone Wars, huge fan of Rebels. Read a lot of the books, some are good, many are not. Been playing the RPG since the late 80's (on and off) so fairly informed on the "extended semi-canon" parts as well. Had a lot of fun with the older computer games from X-Wing on up through Old Republic today. Getting into the miniatures games lately with (another) X-Wing and Armada.

Mixed feelings on Force Awakens: Liked it the first time, disliked it the second time, watched it again recently at home for the third time and I like it again.

Rogue One
I loved it. I actually walked out of a Star Wars movie for the first time since the original with no complaints. What higher praise can I give? Despite the lack of a crawl and the different music it felt very much like a Star Wars movie - a very good Star Wars movie. I don;t feel the need to go into too many details because I liked the whole damn thing from start to finish. It stayed true to itself with the way things end with the heroes, it gave us a bunch of new things and characters, it gave us some old familiar when it was called for (AT-AT's on the beach!), it gave us an awesome space battle, and it gave us the payoff on Vader that a lot of us have been looking for since the 80's - Why are people so afraid of this guy? It ain't just stories!

One standout: Pacing. This is a great example of how to build a story from slow, to medium, to slamming it home with action in multiple locations and environments. There was a lot at the end I was not really expecting to see, starting with the arrival of the rebel fleet and continuing from there. It was great.

Revisiting a Classic - Star Trek II on the Big Screen

Cinemark has been running their "Classics" series for a few years now and we've caught a few of them before. Recently they were previewing the latest round which included American Graffiti and Godfather I & II but the standout star to me was ... Star Trek II!

Of course we had to go so I checked with the rest of the family and Apprentices Blaster and Who ended up going with me Wednesday night.

My report: It was awesome!

Keep in mind this is the movie that rivals Star Wars for "most seen film of all time" for me. I saw it in the theater in 1982. It was one of the few movies I bought on VHS when I still lived with my parents. A friend of mine had it on laser disc and we watched it roughly weekly for a couple of years so I have seen it at least 100 times (which is ridiculous, I admit) and it got to where we knew the lines so well that in my group of friends one of us could just drop a line from anywhere in the movie and the rest could take it up instantaneously and run with the scene. It was the first Trek movie DVD I bought and I've probably watched it once a year since then. I just really like it and never seem to get tired of it.

Now even with watching it all of those times most of them were done on a small (by current standards) tube TV with mediocre sound. I saw it on the big screen in 1982 and now I've finally seen it on a big screen again in 2016 and let me tell you - it does make a difference.

• First, the space scenes are much stronger on the big screen as the slow movement, the the camera work, and the lighting, say in the spacedock scene, all have much more impact at that size than on even a 60" TV. When the Reliant and the Enterprise start exchanging fire in their initial encounter it just hits that much harder as you can see and feel the impact. It feels like big ships trading body blows. Then the nebula battle, which I was worried would not hold up after 30+ years, looks great and those colors and sounds as the energy waves move across the screen really stand out.  

• Second there is a ton of detail in those sets that is much easier to spot on that size screen. Signs! So many signs and labels and warnings on walls and doors and pieces of equipment that I realized how amazingly real it looks. It's exactly the kind of thing I would expect in a working military space ship. It made me think of Battlestar Galactica in terms of realistic treatment of a military ship and that's not something I had really noticed before.  There was a lot of thought put into "how this would work" and it really shows.

• Third - the sound! Even with a decent surround sound setup at home it's difficult to compete with a full-blown modern theater sound system. The effects still sound great today, no question. The music ... the music to this movie is part of a "trilogy + 1"  of movie music that set the standard for me: Star Wars, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Trek II. Over a span of 5 years which coincided with my formal introduction to music with various school bands this movie is one of the ones that defined "timeless classics" for me. It takes the theme from the series and blows it up to hurricane force, adding in the unforgettable Khan theme (reminiscent of Jaws in a way, communicating a lurking menace in a tremendous way), and adding in quieter sets here and there when called for. I've owned the soundtrack CD for at least 20 years and it's music I never tire of listening to. This movie is my most perfect example when it comes to syncing up the music to what is going on screen. It's just amazing, and to hear it in a big time theater again was a peak moment for me. 

It's just a great movie and great movies are worth seeing on a big screen with big sound. The Enterprise crew seems to actually like each other in this one. Saavick is a nice addition to the old crew (if only Kirstie Alley had stayed with them for the rest!) Khan is a great villain with understandable motivations and understandable flaws. The literary references (Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick) are on point and not over done by beating you over the head with them. The parallels between Spock and Saavik, Kirk and his son, and Khan and his first mate are nicely and subtly done. It has a great mix of action and character development.

If you're wondering the "Director's Cut" is the one with Scotty's nephew scenes included. There's nothing new included here and no other remastering or updating that I could see.

It was fun to see an old friend in a "new" way. Again. For the first time. It was fun to take the apprentices too as while they've seen it on the TV they'e never seen it "at the movie" and they both admitted it made a difference. Also, with both of them being band kids, the music made a strong impression on them as well. I was really happy that a theater chain is doing something like this and giving us a chance to both relive these kinds of moments and to share them with our kids.

Mid-Week Media: Suicide Squad

I went in with low expectations as a) I don't really like the concept that much of trying to turn supervillains into sort-of heroes as a pop-culture thing and b) I haven't seen anything terribly interesting in the trailers yet. Oh it's colorful! Oh it's got Harley Quinn! - yeah yeah. I wasn't pushing to see it in the theater but the kids wanted to so we went.

The opening hour or so is decent. I won't say great but I had some interest in seeing what they would do. The second half is something you've probably seen in a bunch of other movies. Parts of it looked a lot like Escape From New York, and most every post-apocalyptic city/zombie/scruffy team-up movie out there. There's a heavy focus on Will Smith and on Harley and the rest of the team is pretty thin. Why is Captain Boomerang there? He has about 5 lines in the whole movie and does very little - could have been an easy cut.

The team concept is pretty flawed here too. "What if the next Superman flies down and tears the roof off of the White House?' is the question that's asked. The answer is that Waller is building a team to handle that scenario - except they couldn't! Harley? Please. Croc? No. Boomerang? Lol. Diablo? Lasts about 3 seconds. Deadshot? Maybe if he is given a glowy green bullet - otherwise no. This is your anti-superman plan?  

These guys just don't come across as "evil". They're supposed to be bad guys, the "worst of the worst" - but we don't see much of that. It mostly happened offscreen, prior to this movie, and we're just supposed to assume they're awful.

• Deadshot actually kills someone - for money! On screen! Did we mention the target is a mob informant so he's a badguy too? They talk about him killing a bunch of people but that's the only one we see. Then we get beaten over the head with the existence of his daughter and how he wants to change. Not exactly hardcore. Plus it's Will Smith! How bad a guy can you make him? It would take a lot of extra story work and it just doesn't happen here. 
• Harley isn't shown doing anything particularly bad before- the Joker does a little but not her! Screwed up, sure, but where's the evil?
• Croc - well he's ugly so he's clearly evil right? 
• Captain Boomerang - he robs banks - execute him! He may kill people while doing it but they don't really emphasize that in the film. The thing that gets mentioned is how many banks he has robbed. You know, we don't hand out death sentences for that - did these people read any comic books?
• Diablo - he did do something bad and he regrets it to the point of shutting down. He does deserve to be on the team and he accepts it. He's also the only one with actual superpowers (depending on how you want to count croc) and he is the badass of the team at key points of the story and with more angst than Will Smith. He feels more like he should be in an X-Men movie. I liked his part of the story.
• Katana?! Why is she in this movie? She joins late and does little. Another unneeded character. 

There's just not enough "anti" in these anti-heroes. There's no unrepentant evil here. It's a shattering weakness: you want to make a super-movie about the bad guys, but you haven't established as all that bad before you're trying to turn them into heroes! When Anakin ignites his saber in a room full of Jedi kindergartners that tells you something about his character. Only Diablo has anything close to that here. Heck Amanda Waller comes out of the movie as more of a "villain" than any of the people on the team and while that may be a somewhat intended outcome this dirty half-dozen needed to be dirtier to drive that home. 

The tone jumps around too - there are some funny moments, then things get all serious but not in a way that makes any sense. Inevitable Marvel comparison: this is something Marvel consistently gets right, using humor to relieve dramatic tension, then jumping into an action scene. The DC movies are still struggling with this. The music jumps around too, like a DJ that can't make up his mind what to do next.

Extra Points

The Joker: He seems more menacing than anyone actually on the team, in a gang leader kind of way, ala The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. He doesn't seem like a world-threatening supervillain. And no, he's not in it enough to push Ledger into obscurity. The actor seems fine but considering this is the 5th Joker we've seen that's given a memorable performance (Romero-Nicholson-Hamil-Ledger-Leto) I'm wondering if maybe the crazy un-Batman is truly that difficult to portray. 

Enchantress: She's sort of on the team and I suppose she would be the anti-superman measure if it came to that, but she gets very little development beyond a 2-minute origin story. There was nothing particularly memorable about her or her alter-ego. She's as generic as it gets. 

Harley Quinn: A lot of the energy of the movie revolves around Harley. I only know the character from Batman The Animated Series and she was pretty memorable there. I am happy to say that she comes across really well here. I'm not sure that "crazy, criminal. hot girl" is all that tough to play either but Margot Robbie does it well. If you're mainly interested in seeing more of her let me direct your attention to Wolf of Wall Street.

The Finale
It's a little bit of a letdown, for two reasons:

First, The "brother" that shows up seems pretty powerful. I'd say he's the most powerful thing in the movie. he destroys tanks, soldiers, aircraft - pretty much everything he runs into. the he gets taken out by a demo charge. Not a nuke. Not a mystically-enhanced-mumbo-jumbo-powered magic bomb. Just a bomb someone brought along to blow holes in buildings and streets. It's a big moment in the movie but once I thought about it the whole thing seemed very anti-climactic.

Second, The "sister" that is the main enemy of the film is close to someone on the team and I really thought would play into the finish. it doesn't, really. I thought it would force some kind of difficult choice on one of the characters but that wasn't really the focus. Instead, like a bad RPG session, one of the other characters picks up a different character's signature weapon and uses that to finish off the opposition. It's not quite to the same level, but if Iron Man picked up Thor's hammer and Cap's shield to take out a villain it just wouldn't be right.

I mean honestly, who would do such a thing?

Suggestions

I hate to offer criticism without some advice on how it could be better, even on a movie, so here are a few thoughts of mine:

• Let Diablo kill the "brother" - seriously! Let the effort burn him out and kill him but let him do it instead of a bomb. 
• If you want a certain character to kill the main enemy then give them a reasonable means to do so before the final scene. It's not like the enemy was a secret or a surprise! You'd think they would have come up with some specific means to handle them.
• Make your bad guys bad! Show us! Don't print out a police record on the screen! Don't make them perpetrators of crimes something that wouldn't get a life sentence! Make them bad!
• Let's see we want the Joker in the movie but we don't actually want him to be part of the team ... why? Why not make him the leader? I think there's a much better movie lurking out there where the Joker leads a team of super-criminals against something worse, instead of generic elite-military guy.
• Quit short-circuiting your own storytelling! How much better would this movie be if the villains had all appeared in a small role in a prior movie? Maybe a Batman movie? Maybe even as part of a montage where Batman goes to war on the lesser villains before taking on bigger fish like the Joker or Ras Al Ghul? 

Anyway that's how I felt about the movie and what I thought about ti afterwards. I went in with low expectations, I didn't hate it, I was just disappointed and thought it could have been a lot better.

Yeah, that too...

Star Trek Beyond

I saw it over the weekend and the short version is that if this had been the second movie instead of the third the series would be in better shape.  It's just a better movie in pretty much every way. I'm keeping the spoilers light so if you've seen the trailers I don't think anything new is revealed here.

Some High Points:

• It's very respectful of Trek history. Canon matters if you want to call it that.
• Kirk is less of an impulsive maker of bad decisions here. This Kirk has a little maturity and seems more like TOS Kirk than he has before.
• There are lots of nice little character moments in the film that feel true to the characters
• The new character is decent. If she shows up in the next movie then she adds a lot more interesting. If she's a one-off, well, OK.
• The villain was more interesting than I expected. He's not original Khan, but he's not bad.

Some Nitpicks:

• That space station is just ridiculously huge. Why would you build a station of that size in the middle of nowhere? Is it a deliberate effort to show how tiny the Enterprise is? If it takes a year or more to build an Enterprise type ship how long did it take to build that thing? It bothered me every time they showed it. 
• A lot of the movie takes place on one previously unknown planet - a LOT of the movie. You only get so many shots at a movie and I'd like to see a little more of the universe than we did in this one. The station almost made up for it and this isn't a huge deal, more of a wish list kind of thing. 
• The results of the attack used late in the movie seems like a stretch, even for Trek. I get jamming frequencies to stop enemy coordination - that part I can accept - but the resulting explosions seem difficult to explain. Not critical to the plot but kind of a "how did that work?" moment after the movie ended.

One overarching thing for me: A lot of the impact of the movie depends on us caring about these characters and the ship and the universe. If they had done this as the second movie as I suggested above it wouldn't have worked as well because we would only have had the one prior movie with them. This is the third movie and much like the thrid original cast movie the Enterprise gets blown up and the crew is in trouble. The reason that mattered so much then though is that we had years of TV series to build those characters up. We don't have that with this cast and it does still feel a little "light". It's certainly possible to establish characters and relationships in a movie or three (see Iron Man and the Marvel Cinematic universe) but I'm not feeling it as much here. This is probably where being "Star Trek" hurts it for me because I am constantly comparing it on some level with all of the Trek leading up to this and it's never going to reach the depth, the level of experience, that those previous casts had. Comparing 3 movies to roughly 100 hours of movies and TV shows for those other teams is not fair but I can't help it because it's "Star Trek 9th Edition*" not "Space Cruiser Enterprise 1.0".   

So I liked it, a lot more than the last one. It feels like they are finally off and running and doing their own thing. They are moving in the right direction and I'm glad they are making a 4th installment as there is still a lot of interesting and entertaining stuff they could do in this version of Star Trek.

* Rationale:

1. Original Series
2. Animated series
3. Original Cast Movies
4. Next Generation
5. Next Gen Movies
6. Deep Space 9
7. Voyager
8. Enterprise
9. New Trek
10. (New CBS Series ST Discovery)