We Have Always Been Here is a slow moving science fiction novel that has some mystery and intrigue but more often than not did not deliver. In the novel, a crew is sent to explore the planet Eos, where strange things were reported from two humans and an android that landed on the planet, by the ISF—an organization that could best be described as corporate overlords who control all things and people. Some of the crew experience waking nightmares where they feel as if they can’t control their bodies, and the androids start to become sentient and do things beyond their programming.
There are several things that don’t work for me. One is the characterization. None of the human characters were particularly compelling, including Park, the main character who was sent by the ISF to monitor the crew and report back to them. She has no personality and very little likeability. It’s hard to get into a novel when the main character is so dull. The other part that made it hard to get into the story was the constant switching back from the present to flashbacks of the other crew in Eos to Park’s backstory. It was hard to ever get into the flow of the story with all of the switching. Also, the writing felt plodding and tedious at times. On the good side, there was a lot of intrigue in trying to figure out the big mystery of the story, and the concept behind the planet they were inhabiting and the effects it had on both humans and androids was interesting. All in all, this was a solid but unspectacular novel.
In We Could Be Heroes, Jamie and Zoe both have superpowers and no recollection of their past life. Coincidence? Of course not. Jamie uses his memory reading and brain stunning power to rob banks that are FDIC insured, while Zoe prefers to use her superstrength, speed, and flying ability to stomp mudholes into bad guys. Both of these strategies have their merits—and problems. Naturally, behind these superpowers and lost memories is a vast conspiracy. As far as conspiracies go, this wasn’t so bad. I think the apt message here is beware of people who think they are trying to save the world because their idolatry and zeal for their cause will wind up steamrolling anyone who stands in their path.
I thought what made this story work is that the two main characters were very relatable, very much like ordinary people who just happened to be thrust into this situation. Both are very flawed. While Jamie is a little more refined, Zoe is more rough around the edges. But they worked well together. It was good to see them fail and overcome and fail and overcome. I felt the author was keeping it real with how two people like this would act given these extraordinary powers.
The story’s villains were just okay. There was a lot of predictability in terms of how things would turn out with the villains. I would much rather have had them take a darker turn than how the author handled it. I also felt that the ending had a bit of a deus ex machina feel to it. It didn’t kill the novel, but it could have been better. All in all, this was a fun read that I would recommend.
John Wick 4 is much like the other John Wick movies, so if you didn’t appreciate them, you probably wouldn’t like this movie, and if you were a fan of the other John Wick movies, this one will be to your liking. This movie is very much like its predecessors except that it happens at a gander scale and seems to have a bigger budget than those movies. Everything about this movie is just a little more than the other ones.
Certainly a big draw of these movies is the action and the fighting. I get a kick out of all of the creative ways that they have come up with the main characters killing the nondescript characters. This was a very long movie, so the body count was probably the biggest of all the John Wick movies. But I think the real draw to these movies in the world building that exists with this crazy underworld and all of its rules and regulations. The writers intricately crafted this underworld, and without it the movie would be action for action’s sake, and fighting for fighting’s sake. But this world building creates a whole web of intricate fabric that composes the John Wick movies.
This movie definitely delivers. I’m not sure if this is my favorite of the four movies. It’s probably the first John Wick movie that is the top of my list, but this movie certainly ranks near the top and will not disappoint.
I tried reading Cabin at the End of the World, the novel in which this movie was based on. I wasn’t a big fan of the writing and didn’t make it to the end of the book. So, my expectations weren’t all that high coming into this movie, although I do usually enjoy watching M Night Shamyalan movies. What I wound up watching was a movie that had a very interesting premise that worked at certain levels but wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. In other words, it was a good but not a great movie.
As I mentioned, the premise which the movie operates from is pretty fascinating. A group of strangers break into the house of a family with a cabin in the remote recesses of the wood and explain to them that they have to voluntarily kill one of their family members in order to stave off the apocalypse, and it made me wonder how I would handle things if I were in the shoes of this family. There was good mystery and tension about what these intruders initially wanted and if they were hostile. One of the issues I had with the movie was predictability. It wasn’t too difficult to tell just what people were going to die and what decisions were going to be made at the end of it. I thought the acting was quite good, especially Dave Bautista, who played a very different kind of character than I have seen from him in the past. Also, I liked the fact that the movie provided a definitive conclusion, whereas the book apparently doesn’t.
In all, although I did love this movie, it was fun to watch and I would recommend it.
Smile is the kind of horror movie that works mostly for intangible elements that it brings to the table. The music is creepy. The scares hit at the right times. The acting is pretty credible. There is good creepiness throughout the movie, and it builds pretty well.
What the movie lacks is originality. The plot involves a psychiatrist, Rose, whose patient tells her about being stalked by an unknown entity who is always smiling at her. This eventually drives the woman crazy, and she commits suicide in front of Rose. Now Rose is being haunted and stalked by the same entity that was terrorizing her patient. What she finds is a pattern, where the person who recently committed suicide witnessed a person committing suicide and then goes crazy that goes back to twenty different people. This sort of thing has been done and done again—a curse that keeps being passed from person to person involving an evil entity that must be broken.
So, the movie doesn’t score points for originality, not just in the premise, but within the movie, where it was easy to predict what was going to happen next. Still, it had enough good horror within it to be an enjoyable movie that will make you smile—pun fully intended.
