Jack B Nimble

Jack’s Bad Movies: Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner

IMDB’s Description:

A blade runner must pursue and terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space, and have returned to Earth to find their creator.

The movie says it is Los Angeles, November 2019. I guess LA has become a massive hellscape of gasoline refineries and endless rain.  Now we are treated to a cautionary tale of the pointless and sometimes dangerous field of amateur psychology. What is the purpose of dictating to a person the torturing of an animal? The subject, who obviously has deep rooted maternal issues, then justifiably lashes out due to the bumbling of the administrator. He clearly needs the assistance of an actual licensed professional. 

Now we are introduced to Deckard (Harrison Ford). He is a retired cop assassin (as if there is any other kind). He doesn’t even get five minutes looking through the want ads before another cop shows up and drags him back into the station. I guess the chief wants him back, and he literally has no choice. 

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Netflix’s Space Force: Season 2

Space Force

This season picks up some time (maybe 6 months?) after the end of Season 1. The astronauts on the moon were all able to safely return to Earth.  While season 1 had 10 episodes, season 2 only gets 7.

The season-wide theme is downsizing, err, I mean budget cuts. The current administration hates Space Force and just wants to slash their budget into nothing. The ridiculousness of the show has been amped up for this season. Did I say ridiculousness? I meant implausibility.  They have a single manned mission, already enroute, to Mars. But because of budget cuts, the actual landing on Mars is cut. How is this possible? It isn’t. I am guessing the greatest cost is building a spaceship and launching it. Since this has already happened, that is what is known as a sunk cost. So why scrap a mission that literally will cost nothing more? Because the writers are writers, and not people with brains.

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Jack’s Bad Movies: Ai Love You

AI Love You

IMDB’s Description:

A modern love story set in the near future where an AI building is powered by human feelings. Due to a software glitch, it falls in love with a real girl, escapes the building into the body of a real man, and tries to win her affections.

The movie opens to a cityscape with giant robot buildings. Some of them have arms, all of them have eyes. It seems like these buildings have massive arms for no better reason than to wave at people. The buildings all have their own AIs and names. They can cook for you. I’m not sure if they do much else. In the words of Tom Hanks in Big, “I don’t get it. It turns from a building into a robot right? Well what’s fun about that?” 

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Orson Scott Card’s The Last Shadow

Orson Scott Card The Last Shadow

Orson Scott Card’s The Last Shadow is the long-awaited conclusion to both the original Ender series and the Ender’s Shadow series, as the children of Ender and Bean solve the great problem of the Ender Universe—the deadly virus they call the descolada, which is incurable and will kill all of humanity if it is allowed to escape from Lusitania.

This book ties Shadows in Flight and Children of the Mind together into a final story that resolves those divergent story arcs. At the end of Shadows in Flight, Bean’s three children are left on the Herodotus ship in orbit around a new planet. At the end of Children of the Mind, Jane has mastered instantaneous travel and they have discovered a planet that they think might be the origin of the terrible descolada virus, which they have dubbed Descoladora. 

This book is good, if something of a let down story-wise (at least for me). At the end of the book, Card explains his rationale and difficulty in bringing the two stories together to reach a conclusion. I suppose I can understand that. Descoladora turns out to be more like the Island of Dr. Moreau and less of the source of diabolical new alien species (not to say there are not new alien species and they aren’t diabolical). It takes some weird turns. That being said it is still well written and does provide closure to the main characters of the Enderverse and the Shadowverse. 

I do think that the cover art is bizarre. I don’t remember anytime in the book there were two aircraft (or spaceships) that had landed on some kind of zig-zag aircraft carrier floating in the sky. 

Previous Ender Posts: 

Guide to either loving or hating Ender’s Game (film)
The First Formic War (Ender’s Game Prequel Trilogy)
The Second Formic War & Fleet School

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