Month: July 2016

The Martian Novel by Andy Weir (Spoilers)

The Martian by Andy Weir

After seeing the movie was I was all hyped to read the novel, I thought that it would be great! I was wrong. Here follows why and yes there is going to be mentions about the movie throughout because I just can’t help be compare the two. They are joined in my mind and the movie is what got me reading this novel.

It was a perfect example of why the first person does not work for a whole novel. In places maybe but for a whole novel? Nope. The characters were cold and besides the many and long rants about how much of what and science stuff (more than there needed to be) there was little to entertain the eye around the story. Mark Watney did not make up for this lack. Without a face to show emotion or a third person narrative to show the reader the emotions there was nothing much to connect to. In truth, I was bored. It just ran along in a dull day to day entry log that was filled with stuff that had could have been said with half as many words and gotten to more interesting things faster. In a way this was a novella stretched to the length of a novel. For the worse I feel.

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Review – Star Trek Beyond

The USS Enterprise crew explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a new ruthless enemy who puts them and everything the Federation stands for to the test. – IMDB

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek Beyond opens nearly three years into their five year mission to explore deep space. Except for the occasional bout of failed diplomacy, life on the Enterprise has becoming fairly routine. One might almost say boring. Fortunately for them they are getting some much needed ship leave and they head off to the newest Federation Space Station, named Yorktown.

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Doctor Who isn’t really about time travel

The purpose of this article is to support the possibly controversial claim that for a show which claims to be all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn’t actually involve all that much time travel. Oh, sure, the Doctor has a time machine, but it tends to be used only as a means of getting to wherever he wants to go (or, as she herself once put it, wherever he needs to go), rather than time travel actually being relevant to the plot of the episode. Most episodes start with the Doctor and Companion turning up somewhere in the TARDIS and then staying in the same time zone all the way through; as we shall see, very few involve time travel which couldn’t be removed with no effect on the storyline.

I’m going to examine all the episodes of the Russell T Davies era, i.e. the Ninth and Tenth Doctor stories. Mainly this is because I haven’t finished watching the whole of the Moffat era yet, but I also suspect my point will be better made here since the show has tended to go further into issues of time travel, time paradoxes and so on under Moffat’s leadership.

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Jack’s Bad Movies – The Fifth Wave

Four waves of increasingly deadly alien attacks have left most of Earth decimated. Cassie is on the run, desperately trying to save her younger brother. – IMDB

Fifth-Wave

The movie opens with a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz) exiting the woods and approaching a gas station. She is carrying an AR-15, so this is either a post-apocalyptic society or the Deep South. She starts looking around for supplies and stumbles upon a guy who is wounded. He’s asking for help, but our presumptive heroine seems pretty nervous. He’s reaching for something, is it a gun? Too late, she shot him. Turns out it was a crucifix.

This movie is called The Fifth Wave, so we clearly need a recap of the first four (since we don’t know them). Aliens show up unannounced and hover silently over major cities, just like in other movies you’ve seen (Independence Day, District 9). Ten days later a massive EMP hits the whole Earth (presumably) and knocks out all the power. Planes fall from the sky (a la Revolution). This is the First Wave.

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