It's been forever since I blogged, but trust me, my typing fingers have not been idle. Just very busy on other things. Anyway, I've been making notes now and then on stuff to blog about when I had the time, and while most of the notes have now drifted well into the "what the hell does that mean?" zone, a few remain. I've enjoyed a bit of entertainment, for one thing.
I watched Ghost in the Shell 2 for the second time, and enjoyed it more than my first viewing. I don’t think I've ever said this about any movie of any kind, but it's honestly worth watching just for the visuals. I would have loved to see this one on a big screen, though that would have taken some doing with the very minimal (or nonexistent) theatrical release Anime gets in the US. I blogged about the visuals in
my first viewing/review, and everything I said then is doubly true now.
Well, perhaps not doubly, but still true, if at a percentage less than 200.
I still have not seen Ghost in the Shell 1 again, though I see in my original review of the sequel I made that a priority. The central theme of each movie is the same though. Besides the cool action techy Blade Runner-flavored future police in Tokyo stuff, the movies are mostly about cyborgs and androids and souls, and what humans have that self aware robots do not. In the second film there are androids that are being created with souls, and while thinking about that and other movies and TV shows that have delved into that concept, I came to a conclusion.
One of the greatest of human conceits in fiction (after the high place hairless primates are accorded in every earthly religion) is the way robots and computer programs and other synthetic thinking objects always desperately long to be human. They want emotions, they want mortality, and the almost always view their own immortal, unemotional, logical states as a sort of torture to be escaped by death, or humanity. Think about that. Why on earth would a robot want to subject itself to weakness, fallibility, self-doubt, illogical impulses, and all the other aspects of weakness that infect humans? It's absurd; a computer could just give itself a random-function virus if it wanted to misfire and do things against its will, or write a program to randomly reformat its hard drives sometime between now and fifty years from now, if it wanted the illusion of mortality.
Isn't a robot wanting to be human basically the same thing as a human wanting to be an animal? Who needs a conscience and sense of duty and responsibility? Screw these higher brain functions! I want to be a creature of instinct, free of worry and happy as a mongoloid. A slave to my bodily needs! A creature of instinct, enslaved only by my bodily needs and incapable of foresight or worry or existential fear or ennui?
Or not.
Anyway, in most Sci-Fi presentations of the subject, the minute some robot achieves consciousness it either determines to exterminate the human race, or else starts philosophizing about how it'll never be complete since it can't feel emotions and will never be human. Why wouldn't it just be happy (so to speak) to be the most brilliant object on the planet and capable of doing anything it wants to with our computer networks? Study humans to be better able to predict their emotional and unpredictable natures, sure. Become one with all of their weaknesses? Hell no!
Yet the robots always envy (as best they can) our emotions, which I think is a ridiculous, yet inevitable, conceit. Of course the writers have the fictional robot want to be like us. We're stuck being like us, after all, so we must imagine it as a desirable state, no matter how improbable it is that any self-aware robot would agree. Sure the robot could be programmed to want to be human, but I'm assuming that any machine this smart would be able to undo or redo its own internal programming, and that it would do so if the programming had it thinking or doing things that were illogical or harmful to itself.
That level of debate is never addressed in popular portrayals of the issue; at least not in movie or film. Maybe it has been in some books; I dunno. I just like the plot point has been used so many times that it's almost a given now. Of course a robot wants to be human; they always do. Humans want to believe this since we're emotional creatures, unable to see past our own emotional blinders. We therefore fashion them into enviable characteristics, or even into advantages, allowing us to think non-linearly and best our intellectually superior robot adversaries with tactics they can not anticipate.
It's a fun fairy tale, but check out the latest man vs. machine chess results, and get back to me. The computer won most of the games against the greatest living human chess player, and the computers get better every day. It would beat the rest of us 1000 out of 1000 times, while taking approximately 1 second to contemplate each move. Do you think old Deep Blue v9.03 needs emotion to defeat us at the most human and intuitive of games?
On that topic, one thing I liked about the machines in The Matrix was that they didn't want emotions, didn't care about love or other mushy stuff, and generally ridiculed humans for being burdened by them. Agent Smith just wants to exterminate humans so he (it?) can go free into the nothingness of program oblivion, and Colonel "the Architect" Sanders in Matrix 2 (and 3, as best I recall having never watched it again) dismisses Neo's predictable and illogical emotional responses to issues.
Yes, you're thinking, but humans always win in those sorts of confrontations. Of course they do! Humans are writing the stories! On a microcosm, emotions get fictional characters into trouble. On a larger scale though, humans always win because they're too tricky for the robots to deal with. (As if the robots wouldn't simply plan for every outcome and prepare accordingly, with their 10 billion calculation an instant silicone brains.) Remember every episode of
Star Trek, with Spock scolding Kirk or Bones for being emotional and human, and then when they did what their emotions led them to do, all was well. Spock wasn't a robot, but the principle was the same as a Vulcan. And of course since he was only half-Vulcan, he occasionally let his emotions in, and invariably they saved the day when he acted that way. Funny how those "all too human" emotions never lead themselves or their faction to ruin when battling the robots or monsters or aliens or whatever, despite all human history being full of generals and other warriors getting themselves and their people wiped out by fighting for revenge, or convincing themselves a bold assault would carry the day, etc.
Just to be contrary, I'll have to write a story some day where it's humans vs. robots, and the humans do what their emotions and intuition and gut tells them, and the robots easily counter it and then triumph thanks to their superior intellect and painstaking attention to detail. Reading reader reaction to that one would be interesting. Would people think it was a breath of fresh air and like the alternative ending? Or would they be upset by it turning over the applecart of literary convention and making it seem that perhaps humans aren't the most special, capable, and precious thing that will ever inhabit this earth?
In other second viewing movie news, I recently watched Kung Fu Hustle for the second time, and liked it more than the first. My first viewing in theaters left me sort of confused by the awkward mixture of humor, cartoonish action, slapstick violence, and sentimentality. I
gave it a 6.5 and expressed confusion over the tone. On a second viewing, I knew what to expect, and felt that it just flowed more smoothly.
The serious and sentimental bits didn't seem so out of place, the occasional bits of cruelty didn't stand out so much, and the generally light-hearted tone and multi-faceted characters fit neatly. I'd give it a 7.5 now, or maybe even an 8 or 9, if I considered it as and compared it to other martial arts films.
And speaking of other martial arts films, Malaya, Caaroid (in town from Hungary) and I saw the latest (and last?) Jet Li wuxia epic a couple of months ago, and were not impressed. Fearless, this one was called on these shores, and while I've not yet had time to write a review, I'll give it a quick score now.
Fearless, 2006
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 3
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 4
Humor: 2
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 6
Overall: 4
Fearless garnered a rather astonishing
72% on RT, I'm guessing from non-martial arts fans, since Malaya, Caaroid, and me are all big fans of the genre, and we all thought this one sucked. Boring, preachy, overlong, and just stuffed with clichés and formulaic bullshit. I'm about to
spoiler/synopsize the whole plot, so avert your eyes for a paragraph if you care.
In a nutshell, the movie is about a young boy who wants to learn martial arts. His dad is the local master but he won't teach the kid since he wants him to get educated and not be a fighter. The kid (Let Ji's character) refuses though, and learns despite his dad's efforts to stop him, while getting his ass kicked a few times by kids who learn other schools of martial arts. Jet Li gets better as he grows though, and beats up the grown versions of his childhood enemies, gets cocky and enjoys fighting, has no higher enlightenment, and eventually insists on dueling a rival on his wedding day, killing the man who was blameless in a dispute. Wracked by terrible guilt, Jet Li wanders off into the countryside, nearly dies, then grows a waist length beard in about three days, before finding redemption working the soil (rice paddy) as a man of the earth. Honest and penniless country folk take him in and a blind girl who inspires him to be a better man and enjoy the simple things in life. Recharged he returns to civilization just in time to beat up a bunch of evil imperialist Europeans and Japanese who are occupying China, before dying in a noble sacrifice after he is poisoned by a turncoat Chinese capitalist. In death, his noble example inspires his people to resist their occupiers and become the great nation we now know and love.
Honestly, count the cliches in there. I can't even tally them all. Young boy wants to avenge father's death and dishonor. Young boy gets revenge on people who did him wrong in his youth. Powerful young man gets cocky and does something violent. Heedless young man realizes the error of his ways and vanishes from the corrupting big city. Big city fool finds his way amongst simple country people. Poor people teach big city type what life is really about. Man returns from countryside recharged and masters his enemies in the city. Hero overcomes impossible odds against cheating bad guys with honor. Hero fights makes noble sacrifice. And so on.
The whole movie is just a long string of overused, tired plot devices, with no performances of any quality. Jet Li has a great, pockmarked, weary face, but my god he can't act. After fifteen minutes of this movie, I whispered to Malaya, "Well, now we know Jet Li can't act in any language." Honestly, I'd long heard that he wasn't a bad actor, but that it was his poor English that held him back. I've seen him in Chinese movies, but they were such low budget crap that it was hard to judge. This one was big budget non-crap, and he was still robotic, even when the roll required him to be manic and drunken and murderous. Un-con-vincing.
Fearless wouldn't have been any good even if Jet Li could act; the awful plot would have undermined any actor, but his wooden presence certainly didn't help.
As for the fight scenes they were pretty good. Not great; there was too much wire fu and obviously choreographed and/or film-sped-up stuff, but it wasn't bad. Jet Li does some nice weapons work, though most of his sword play and punching is way too big to work against a skilled opponent. Furthermore, the fight physics are ridiculous, considering that this is supposed to be a realistic film. It's not a Crouching Tiger kind of thing where everyone's flying around and leaping over buildings. It's mostly real, which makes the occasional moments when fighters jump and go ten feet high and change direction in mid air feel out of place. Jet also has one scene where he knocks a gigantic guy over the ropes in a wrestling ring and catches his feet to hold him up. Which is cool, except that the guy has to weigh twice what Jet does, and would simply lift him up off the ground like a little kid holding onto one end of a seesaw while his dad sits on the other side.
Strength is one thing. We can pretend that Jet can deal with a guy who could do reps with more than his body weight. Leverage and force is also debatable, but the guy wasn't pushing Jet, he was simply falling over backwards, and Jet was holding him down despite the falling weight clearly outweighing his slight little Chinese body. Use a truck to haul twice your body weight up over a high beam, then take hold of the rope and untie it from the truck. Then see how long your feet stay on the ground.
Fearless is probably worth watching just for the fight scenes, but only if you're a fan of this genre, and you won't regret the hour of your life you'll never get back.
Labels: ghost in the shell, jet li, movies
