Sherlock Holmes

Meh.

What an astonishingly average movie. Despite the lavish commercials and full court press by its marketing, Sherlock Holmes is not very entertaining and tends to drag. Like the best Holmes stories, the viewer/reader has no chance of solving the mystery, because Holmes has access to information no one else can (for example, a poison made from a specific variety of rhododendron). And so the joy in the story must lie in other places, perhaps the method by which the story is told or perhaps in the chemistry between those stanchions of camaraderie Holmes and Watson.

Taking the second point first, there is very little chemistry between Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law). The original stories make it clear that Holmes could be petulant and perhaps a bit childish at times. He is also a man of obsession and addiction. As one might expect, Downey has the petulant part down to a T; but it goes a little too far, to a level of willful brat. Holmes is a monomaniac, letting nothing get in the way of his sleuthing, to the point of forgetting other things in his life. But Downey's Holmes delights in picking on Watson—testing drugs on his dog or playing the childish game of "I'm not touching you." His childishness is acerbated by Watson's impending nuptials to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), an act that threatens to take away Holmes's favorite toy. For his part, Watson is played as a suffering parent, recognizing that the child Holmes is not dealing with the emotions well but moving on. I did like that Watson is given his own personal foibles, such as a gambling problem, but then nothing is ever done with them. Petulant child meets exasperated parent, over and over. It's only when the two of them are fighting villains and henchmen that they appear to have any fondness for one another beyond the chasing the game. An overly psychological analysis might suggest that they fight well because they are taking their aggressions out on their foes, but I won't go that far.

As for the story-telling, its heavy-handedness detracts from any possible joy that could come from it. Sherlock Holmes's skill is in deduction, from taking minute sometimes unnoticeable evidence and reasoning out its importance. We really only get to see this take place a few times, once unfortunately when Homes is trying very hard to embarrass Watson's intended bride. Of course, the denouement of the movie has Holmes spelling out how he worked out the mystery via flashback, and the audience is allowed to see why the camera lingered for a few moments over a vat of frogs (seriously). But there is never any doubt who the villain is, Lord Blackwood (played nicely by Mark Strong) is portrayed as evil incarnate, lacking only the maniacal laugh as his plots come together. The result is that the film moves in fits and starts from scene to scene, propelled by uncovered evidence intermingled with a few moments of Blackwood's villainy. And of course, there are scenes where the shot lingers on some vital clue for a few seconds—and you can never know why—that just slow down the pacing.

The plot also contains a new ability for Holmes, the ability (most Ravager-like) to predict every move of a fight and what his appropriate response should be. First we get to see it in slow motion as Holmes works it out in his head, then we get to see it real time as his schedule succeeds. I can't say what this special bonus feature does for the story-telling—telling the audience what is going to happen before it happens is cool exactly once. But it adds nothing to Holmes's character that we don't already know and he doesn't use it in every fight, making it somewhat useless, especially when he gets tossed around by the foes on whom he chooses not to use it.

The story itself involves Lord Blackwood's plot to take over England using a secret society and an apparent skill at magic. When Blackwood is onscreen, he really does take it over, and I look forward to finding other work by Mark Strong. But his scenes with Holmes never feel like much more than tongue-waving and "nyaah-nyaah" sounds coming from the two of them. And that the plot is advanced by Blackwood's inexplicable desire to publicize his nefarious scheme, to the public in general and personally to Holmes, seems dazzlingly stupid of what was otherwise a brilliant plan. If only he could keep his trap shut, he probably would have succeeded.

You'll note that I have not even mentioned Rachel McAdams's Irene Adler, who really is nothing more than a plot device for the movie, used to propel the movie forward and to add the special "twist" at the end, the twist that anyone who knows anything about Holmes should have been able to figure out from its first hinting. She performs okay, never pushing the role to be give it any sort of life beyond its flatness utility in the plot. I think that's a shame, because the idea of Sherlock Holmes having a love interest is so strange to most viewers that it could have been exploited for interesting story points. Instead, it falls on the cliché of "good woman gone bad."

I will say that Victorian London's drabness and filth are portrayed well. There is a real feel for what the city may have been like, though I'm not sure how accurate the depiction was. The result is a comparatively dull backdrop, since only once do we really see any characters with whom we cannot easily relate and the backdrops are nearly always cityscapes.

Seeing the trailers and movies, I was concerned that Sherlock Holmes would twist the character too far from his source. The gleeful fisticuffs and general merriment between the characters seemed to stray too far from the characters I know. As it turns out, the trailers and commercials show the only real excitement between the characters, while the rest of the movie is taken up by two men who can barely be in the same room together and only work together out of love of the chase. The movie has far fewer action sequences than the trailers imply, which potentially makes it that much stronger a film. But ultimately, the writing and directing just fail the characters and otherwise strong actors.

It's a shame really; despite its blandness and predictability, Sherlock Holmes proves to me that in fact Downey could play a very effective version of Conan Doyle's archetypal sleuth. It's just that this movie never really gives him the chance. And while I know there are sequels planned (and why not—it's making a boatload of money), unless I see something that indicates they will rise above the listless and pro forma story in this movie, I'll have very little interest in seeing any further adventures for Holmes and Watson. (I do think, however, I shall go find Young Sherlock Holmes in order to see a movie that takes a great deal of joy in the characters….)

Avatar

Movies have sure come a long way since Tron.

Mrs. Speculator being finished with her classes this semester, we decided to take in a movie for the first time in months. It turns out that we both had doubts about Avatar, based on the commercials for it, but we went to see it anyway, just to get out of the house if nothing else. We didn't reckon on how far out of the house we were going to end up going.

Let's just get this out of the way up front. Avatar is a brilliantly conceived and made film, lush with the possibilities of cinema and technology. It is breathtakingly gorgeous, astonishing and mouth-droppingly realized. The commercials for the movie are on a small screen and only 2-D, taking away from the power and, I have to say it, majesty of James Cameron's vision. But in 3-D and on a big screen (and I imagine the bigger the better), this is an epic and powerful movie that has relatively minor issues which only seem important after you walk out of the theatre.

When computers and cinema first began to interface, the plots of the movies very often had to explain away the clunkiness of what was onscreen. The computer parts of Tron took place in a mainframe, so of course everything was drawn in straight lines and didn't appear very "natural." And the space sequences of The Last Starfighter were copied onto an arcade game as a plot device, so of course they looked very similar. Slowly, over time, the CGI work in movies became another tool in the box, a tool whose success was determined by how much it didn't stand out. And now James Cameron has successfully wedded 3-D and motion capture and CGI into a movie whose world is so immersive that you are forced to forget the gee-whizziness of how he did it and just experience the world. I don't recall a single instance of the old 3-D standby, where weapons or people (or juggler's balls in House of Wax) come flying out of the screen at you; instead the 3-D works as your vision works: things are closer to you than other things and perspective works. It is how vision works outside of the movie theatre, and then Cameron wields this powerful tool in what I believe is the first successful rendering of a planetary romance in cinema history.

Planetary romance is a sub-genre of speculative fiction that deals with exotic planets and attempts at human interaction on them. The standard plot of planetary romance is that the traveler spends about half the story learning about life and survival on the exotic planet and then is faced with a crisis, usually having to do with his continued existence in the exotic locale—sometimes the protagonist must fight to remain at his new home and sometimes the hero must fight just to survive. For the reader, the strength of these stories is the detail that goes into the world-building, the creation of an alien biology that is both marvelous and consistent at the same time. Often, the exotic environment becomes a character in its own right.

The story Dune has a lot of elements of planetary romance in it. Herbert spends a great deal of time having Paul learn about life on a desert planet, deftly handling the sometimes catalog-like descriptions of planetary romance by having Paul fight for survival and learning the life of the Fremen. And as should be expected from the economy of story-telling, if an exotic element is introduced and described, you are likely to see it come back later in the story. The problem with adaptations of Dune to cinema is that they are never immersive enough. The desert life affects everything on Arrakis and often movies just sort of use it as a touchstone rather than making it a theme of the story. And I believe that this because, in part, there was no really effective way to capture it, until now.

Cameron introduces us to the world of Pandora (damn allegorical names of planets), a jungle world that humans have decided to exploit for a powerful mineral that has been named "unobtainium" is a pique of irony. Giovani Ribisi's the corporate shill, tells Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) that it is worth "20 million per kilo," setting up the conflict that drives the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, Pandora is inhabited by the tall blue catlike Na'vi, a people who are attuned to their planet's biospehere and (to drive the point mercilessly) use bows unerringly, have feathers in their clothing, and wear face paint when they go to war. But Pandora is poisonous to humans, so scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) creates the avatar process, where human/Na'vi hybrids are created and somehow a human's consciousness is transferred into them via some sort of computerized remote link (the process of how the human gets to the exotic locale is never terribly important to a planetary romance). These machinations, however, are merely prelude to the explorations of Pandora and her people that they facilitate. Jake becomes an avatar and explores the planet, its biology, and finally its culture.

True to the best planetary romance traditions, Jake accidentally gets lost in the new world and is forced to try to survive on his own, generally making a hash of it until rescued by the lovely princess Neytiri (Zoe Soldana). But this faithfulness to the tropes of the genre slips into the background as Pandora moves into the foreground. Cameron and his crew had to have spent untold hours working out the biology of Pandora, and having it make sense while making it devastatingly beautiful in its exoticness. With Neytiri as his guide, Jake first learns to survive, then to thrive on Pandora. The fauna he finds there is tantalizingly similar to life on Earth, but different enough to invoke awe. And all of it is astonishingly realized via the seamless interaction of CGI, motion capture and 3-D. I have never been so totally immersed in an environment in any film, never been so captivated by landscapes and dioramas. Sadly, the creatures have names that are gibberish to the viewer, so I can only describe the hammer-headed rhinoceros thingies and the six-legged cat-like predator that hunts them without referring to them by how the Na'vi call them. Fully half of the film is spent travelling around the planet and learning to admire and love it as the Na'vi do. It is these moments wherein lies the power of Avatar. Suddenly there seems to be nothing impossible for movies to portray, and its potential takes up as much of the after-movie conversations as do any other aspect of it.

But a successful popular movie cannot be satisfied with being only a catalog of an exotic place, a travelogue. The conflict is established—humans want unobtainium and, wouldn't you know it, the biggest deposit of it is under the holiest of Navi shrines, the Tree of Souls. And suddenly Jake has to decide which is more important, human need or (talk about your loaded question) the right of sentient creatures to their own lives and way of life. The allegory becomes heavy-handed, with Ribisi yelling things like "It's a jungle; there are more trees!" and the grim military commander (Stephen Lang) describing the Na'vi's defense of their own planet as acts of terrorism. So Avatar falls back on other tropes in its second half—the greed of the corporate world and how it affects worldview, the advanced technological warrior versus the native fighting on his home ground and with his own weapons, the outsider human taking a role of leadership with the native warriors. The second half proceeds exactly as you would expect with no surprises, especially to a well-read speculative fiction fan. Nonetheless, Cameron's new technologies still make these rote scenes spectacular, and the battle scenes are beautiful and terrible all at once.

And everything ends up exactly like you would expect, which isn't a bad thing because, really, the movie is just a means of conveying the awesome new tools that Cameron has brought to the table. It just so happens that the story is better than the plots of Tron or The Last Starfighter, and so the focus can be more on the story than on the tools that bring them to life.

Avatar is ground-breaking and a high-water mark for the power available to storytellers. The result is that not only do I have a wonderful experience to try to hold on to, but I now so desperately want this technology applied to other projects. Rumor has it that Andrew Stanton is doing similar things with John Carter of Mars (without the 3-D) and so a story I grew up loving and a film I have been partially dreading suddenly becomes potentially far more powerful. I would love to see Dune attempted again with these tools in hand. And then the other stories that need filming become possible—imagine an immersive Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama. If you are a fan of speculative fiction or of movies (or of both), you owe it to yourself to see Avatar. You must see it in 3-D, because I cannot imagine the 2-D version will have anywhere near the same power. And you need to see it on a big screen. Waiting for this to come to DVD will simply not be sufficient unless Cameron has somehow worked out how to funnel all the movie's power to a 40-inch 2-D screen.

I've seen the future, and it's exciting.

Halting State

I'm not sure any writer has better insight into near-future technological advances than Charles Stross. Part of this expertise clearly comes out of how well he understands the technology of today and the culture that surrounds it. But, in addition, Stross has a remarkable insight into the human animal, realistically portraying how people respond to input, including doing the really stupid things we are known to do. He doesn't fall into the writer's trap of having smart people do stupid things, but instead we discover that people who sometimes appear smart have chinks in their armor, and maybe they aren't that smart at all (or perhaps blinded or self-deceived). When someone fails in a Stross novel, it's clear that they earned it.

Halting State uses online gaming as a stepping off point to imagine a fascinating future where computing creeps more and more into daily life on a permanent basis, including near-perpetual human-machine interface though something like glasses. But Stross also plays fair with these advances, showing their glaring weaknesses and their effect on society, including an even bigger division between those who understand the technology they are working with and those who are merely consumers, who become targets of hacking and social engineering grown more mature as the technology advances. In many ways, Halting State parallels the great Snow Crash in its just-over-the-horizon future, relying on bite-sized changes rather than the massive cultural shift that Snow Crash predicts. And since Snow Crash has hyperbole embedded in its make-up, its action and characters are over-the-top and sometimes rollicking, while Halting State is more sedate, perhaps even pedestrian by comparison, and thus, ultimately, more believable in its future.

Since I have been involved with online gaming since the late 80s, I've been aware of how elements of the game get moved into the mainstream. My focus has always been on the social interaction and how the gaming world more and more is becoming mainstream and not only a microcosm of the "real" world but influential in the lives of people who don't play as fads and customs are exported. Stross recognizes some of this but is more focused on how the technologies are adapted into mainstream applications and, further, on how games will be used by non-gaming companies for more mainstream applications. The novel, a using a narration that rotates through a developer, a light player and someone who doesn't play at all, offers many different points of view, giving this future a breadth and depth not available from a single point of view or the point of view of several similar characters.

The novel opens with the police called in to investigate the seemingly innocuous crime of a virtual bank being robbed in a gaming world. The first narrator, Sue Smith, arrives at the Edinburgh headquarters of the Hayek Associates, administrators of the economics system of the game Avalon Four. She is a sergeant in the Edinburgh police force and quickly realizes she is over her head as the geeks she encounters speak a language she doesn't understand about a place she has never experienced, an online gaming world. As an outsider, her viewpoint allows the reader to begin to grasp the concepts they probably don't know either, and it becomes clear that a virtual robbery can have real-world implications—the items stolen from the bank can be sold in markets (think eBay) for real money, and if the news that the items that gamers spend months retrieving can be stolen without hope of recovery, the game company's stocks will plummet.

Enter the second narrator, Elaine Barnaby, a forensic accountant employed by the insurance company for Hayek Associates. The insurance company wants to protect its interests, of course, but Barnaby is also a pawn in the internal political games of that company, feeling like she has been sent to the hinterlands in exile (compared to London) while the rest of her team gets to go home. Unlike Sue, Elaine has some gaming experience and is relatively familiar with some of the concepts. But like Sue, she is suspicious of the people at Hayek and their motives and offers more emotional insight into the ongoing plot.

Jack Reed is the final narrator: a recently unemployed game developer, hired on a contract basis to help Elaine's company understand the inner workings of Avalon Four. His role in the narrative is the expert, finding new threads in the investigation and then describing those findings in layman's terms to everyone else. However, Jack is also something of a savant—he is emotionally stunted despite his enormous talent as a programmer and his knowledge of the hacking community. His character could be the most off-putting if not for Elaine's interpretation of him and for what I believe to be a brilliant narrative decision by Stross.

The story of the investigation is told in chapters that rotate between these three narrators serially, and as one might expect, they come together to pool their information during the investigation. But unexpectedly, each chapter is delivered in second-person narrative ("you" instead of "I" or "he"), actually putting the reader in the minds of the narrating character and revealing their thoughts and motivations while hiding the things they don't know. If that sort of shifting viewpoint were the only intention of the different narrative style, it really wouldn't have been necessary to use second-person. But since the novel is ostensibly about gaming, a medium that is pretty much solely delivered in second-person, Stross's own writing further exemplifies how lessons learned from the gaming industry can be applied to mainstream culture, in this case media.

In short order, the characters discover that nothing in their investigation is as it appears, and all of the mirages center on a tightening spiral of using technology for other than its original intent and on progress being based on the benevolent intent of technology's users. And this deviation from original intent is what makes the book so human despite its fantastic foundation: despite the core of technology, the story centers on the human. Relationships develop between the characters, especially Elaine and Jack, and Stross's narrative technique allow the user to see, even feel, the struggles people suffer through in every kind of situation. Ultimately, there is no way that a reader can solve the mystery; there's too much that is derived from Stross's imagination, and so while the action moves the story along, it is the characters' interactions and growth and insight into the brave new world that resonates with the reader.

And like Snow Crash, the predictions that Halting State holds border on the terrifying, if only because they seem so very likely to happen and happen soon. Especially interesting to me were the daily uses of technology that seem likely just because they make life so much simpler, and we know progress is founded very much on uncomplicating our day-to-day existence. And yet we are generally willing to overlook the cost of such simplicity, which is usually an underlying complexity that creates holes in security such that the devious can exploit us. And again, Stross recognizes the role that stupid, selfish decisions can play in a story (one might argue that choosing unsafe simplicity over safe complexity is one such decision), and the denouement is rife with wry cynicism as the perpetrator and their motives are revealed.

As an extrapolation of existing technology, Halting State is an understated (and thus that much more eerie) tour de force, a compelling work of science fiction. As an exploration of the struggle to be human in our rapidly changing world, it is a throwback to the most classic of science fiction writing. The result is at time action-packed and at others thoughtful and distressing. And always a solid read, another example of Stross's growing stature as not only a writer of speculative fiction but as a just a writer in general.