2012, The Movie

I watched 2012.

I'm not sure why I did, other than it was a freebie from Half-Price Books when I took some books in for a return, but I did. It's a ridiculous film. Since the film is seven years old, I won't bother with a spoilers warning; instead, let's just say that it runs down to two subplots: one in which the wealthy nations of the world prepare three arks, each capable of holding a few dozen thousands of their nations "most valuable" citizens, the other in which John Cusack tries to rescue his family from the oncoming disaster.

The film is full of ridiculous CGI-style physics, and as disaster films go you can see that even in 2009 they didn't have all the visual bugs quite worked out. In the end, the "good guy" of the ark initiative wins a moral battle with the "bad guy", and saves all the strangers desperately trying to get onto the ark, and by doing so just happens to get the right people into the right places to fix a poorly-described problem with the ark.

What makes it a genuinely terrible film is this: Roland Emmerich seems to take an unhealthy delight in murdering ordinary citizens. The end of the film, where the crew of the ark makes the potential sacrifice of their life support in order to take on a paltry few thousand extra souls, doesn't balance out the utter delight the camera takes in pounding, burning, dropping, smashing, crushing, and drowning ordinary people by the hundreds. There is no hope in 2012, no real chance for survival; whatever's left over of the Earth after the great disaster hits is lifeless; every field on the planet salinated in the great tidal wave that roared across the whole planet in the final cataclysmic spasm that "resets" the continents.

Awful film. Do not watch.

★★☆☆☆

Beyond The Softness of His Fur, by TammyJo Eckhart

tl;dr: The hot sex scenes do not make up for a book whose moral anchors are non-existent. The author fails to live up to her premise because she doesn't understand what science fiction is *for*.

I really wanted to like Beyond the Softness of His Fur, by TammyJo Eckhart, but I'm afraid that any genuine pleasure out of this book was completely obliterated by setting. You see, the setting is sometime in the future, and our heroine, Emily, has received marching orders from her corporation that she must have "a pet": a biological, engineered furry companion with a limited mental capacity but an infinite capacity to absorb whatever abuse the owner wishes. Emily is a sexual sadist but so far only of the consensual kind. She selects Wynn, a pretty, male fox-morph built for her kind of pleasure, and the story sets off.

Wynn needs time at "the facility" to be "trained," to be oriented toward his new owner and his role for her, and the abuse heaped upon him because he's just "a stupid morph" is legion. Eckhart is trying to contrast people who are genuinely cruel, people who are "just doing their job," and consensual sadists like Emily (who, eventually, comes to recognize that something is very wrong about the utter one-sidedness of her relationship with Wynn), but she just can't.

Because her universe is probably the most poorly thought-out excuse for a sex story I've read in a while. It is, we are told, The Future. Our heroine is vaguely associated with an advertising corporation, but her role is so poorly sketched out it's only important as an executive role with which to ensnare her in something salacious. At one point she says there are "dozens and dozens" of other "elite pet genetics firms," but later says the one she buys from is but "one of four on the planet," yet if there's a world out beyond Emily's house, Eckhart hasn't thought much about it. There is no Internet.

I can stand Used Furniture; there are only so many ways to get around the universe, and making decisions about having or not having teleportation, wet nanotech, dry nanotech, artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and what have you are "one from column A, one from column B" decisions every writer has to make. But when the used furniture comes from all over the place, and doesn't come together into a coherent whole, stories fall apart.

It's awful to force a character to say something she wouldn't normally say because you need it said to move the plot forward, without regard to the discipline of writing about people, not caricatures. It's just as awful to force a technology point, or a cultural point, without regard to the actual discipline of world building.

And the culture in this story is simply impossible. Somehow the re-emergence of blatant slavery, by dint of growing our slaves in test tubes and mentally stifiling them, seems to have happened without much of a cultural ripple; I wonder if the downtrodden are simply so downtrodden they're just grateful the 1% have something to piss all over that isn't themselves or their children. I want Emily and her ilk to live in fucking terror of PETA and Earth First! and the Earth Anti-Slavery Society. There should be bombings of these "dozens" of places. This society could never have emerged in the first place without, as one commentor on the antebellum American South, the emergence of a constant, relentless, and definitive culture expectation that some people are born with boots and spurs, and some are born with saddles. Instead, the world is blithe and bonny. With furry slaves.

How is a morph "made"? Are they born "adult?" Do they get an education? How do they learn to speak? How long do they live? What happens when an owner gives one up? For a high-powered, wealthy executive who claims to be very interested in human behavior (she specializes in selling stuff, after all), Emily is utterly incurious about the origins, treatment, or moral consequences of the entire 'morph culture. Unfortunately, apparently so is the author.

The author wants you to be outraged that such a universe exists. I'm *glad* Emily is starting to develop a moral conscience by the end of the book; but the author mistakes strong emotions about the culture presented in the book with strong emotions about how poorly and ridiculously the writer proposes, or fails to convincingly describe, how that culture came about in the first place.

Don't bother. There's better.

Star Wars, The Force Unleashed II

I never got the original; I never had an original X-Box to play it on, so what I'm left with is the sequel. It's pretty weak. You get to play Starkiller, who may or may not be a clone of the original Starkiller, a Jedi Knight turned to the Dark Side, who was Vader's secret apprentice, but who was turned toward neutrality by the love of a good woman. It's a third-person shooter-cum-platformer; you do a lot of jumping around to get from place to place, and you do a lot of falling off things, too.

The Old Republic had no OSHA, apparently. There are very few railings.

The story line is thin indeed. The voice acting is insincere. Really, the only thing going for this game is the background design. It's very pretty. There's lots of lovely things to look at, and if you like hanging out in the Old Republic, there's a lot to like here. But you'll spend a lot of time dying until you luck out and muddle through some of the nastier boss levels, the last platformer level when you face Vader is frustrating in your jump-and-run (and often fall for no good reason), and your relationship with Juno is never really clear (other than "I wub her and she wubs me"). There's some good here, but only for people who want to hang out in the Star Wars universe one more time.

★★★☆☆