Gripe, gripe, gripe


I saw Alien Resurrection last night on HBO (hey, don't knock it, I get free cable). Definitely a movie that's only worth watching for free.

The plot, for those who have had the fortune to not see the movie: a military science team clones Ripley (who, after all, when last sampled had a queen alien inside her, waiting to burst forth in a spray of gore). They extract queen from Ripley. They hire pirates (Arr!) to snag a few hapless schmucks to attach face-huggers to. They let the pirates have the run of this ship while the crew breeds up some aliens. And yet, these science geeks haven't quite grasped the fact that the aliens have acid for blood so the aliens kill one of their own, spread gore around, and escape through a large hole in the floor. Aliens kill crew. Aliens kill some pirates. Remnants of pirates and crew (along with Ripley, whose partial exposure to alien DNA in the cloning widget has turned her into SUPER-Ripley!) fight their way out. A robot fits into this somehow. Somehow, the ship ended up headed for Earth, and with too little fuel to change that heading or blow it up, Ripley just says heck with it and puts the engines on overdrive. Ship (which is big, by the way) crashes and detonates.

Okay, let's put aside the fact that cloning just Doesn't Work Like That. Let's put aside the fact that these people on a supposed military black project ship were not only complete idiots, but had the collective combat skill of a dyspeptic rabbit. They allow the pirates to smuggle weapons on board. Duh. They fail to take proper failsafes when containing aliens, despite knowing that these things have laid waste to at least three other ships, including a warship full of Space Marines, plus the odd planet or two. Duh. And most of all stupids, they don't immediately imprison the pirates' perky sidekick. *Duh.*

Nor do they show the aftermath, in which Ripley and the surviving pirates are executed for slamming a warship into good ol' Mother Earth (uh, where were the planetary defenses during all this? sitting on their thumbs??), since all the people who could explain this are dead, and all the evidence went up with the ship. Or down with the ship, as the case may be. Oooops.

I'd say "Well, they can't possibly make another sequel now..." but then, they actually killed Ripley in the last film, and that didn't deter them in the slightest.

At least the flick had the perky sidekick, who reminded me of an old second-string character of mine... yeah, alternately perky, angstful, whiny and with a perpetually put-upon expression plus some technical competance and a mean streak... yeah, Tris all right. Except for the fact that the sidekick is a robot, but since this film has a massive margin of error anyway, we'll just over-look that for now.

In other plotline rants, "Why I hated Trouble Express #3". This is partially a comics rant, but it's also a writing rant, sort of, so it should at least be vaguely interesting. Trouble Express is a small press comic about a galactic messenger service with a side order of special ops. It's not great, but it had been looking interesting, until this issue. This issue, our established characters take a back seat (they literally lay around until the last few pages and kibitz... and it's not even interesting kibitzing), so that the writer can show us an invulnerable battle cyborg massacring a garrison of mooks.

This is, as you can well imagine, about as interesting as watching paint dry, with the added kick in the groin that you had to pay money for the priveledge. If I want pretty pictures with no characterization or plot, I'll go buy an !mage comic, you cretins! This thing manages to be about as exciting as the Luftwaffe 1946 Technical Manual only without the benefit of nifty nuggets of technical detail. It's an entire issue of grade-C fluff. And do you know why it's fluff, gentle reader?

There's a reason fight scenes are interesting. There's a reason combat games are interesting. That reason is, quite simply, the 'threat'. People identify with characters in fights because those characters actually are in danger, and being in danger is an easy thing to identify with. Even if we know, consiously, that these people are the main characters, they're not in any real danger, it's still possible to suspend disbelief.

Watching a character who is in absolutely no danger whatsoever butcher dozens of hapless mooks is about as interesting as playing a first- person shooter in God Mode. Sure, the pictures are pretty, but don't you have anything better to do with your time? We see the mooks hose down this cyborg with copious firepower, from which she emerges without even having her hair mussed. Level of caring... shrinking... shrinking... gone.

To top it off, as if this wasn't enough, we get a nice little dollop of X-Men style existential angst at the end. The "ooh, I'm completely unkillable and unstoppable but damn if my life doesn't suck" sort of thing. Shut the hell up, I don't want to hear whining from some stupid wench who has a power level that would be considered copious even for most science fiction worlds. Cripes.

Thus, today's Writing Lesson: Don't make the fight scene the central focus of anything unless there's a reason for the reader to care. The reader will not care unless the protagonist is under threat. The protagonist can't be under threat if they're God. (Corrolary: God- Characters are Bad.) Well, unless the fight scene is played for yuks. But then, anything goes with Comedy.

Today's Good Example of an Omnipotent Protagonist: 
Author: Fred Galvin 
Date: 1999/05/04
Forum: rec.arts.sf.written 

Maybe the worst science fiction book ever: S. G. Gallego, JOHN SMITH,
EMPEROR, Guild Press, St. Paul, 1944. Author's foreword: "John Smith,
Emperor, combines the fantasy of Jules Verne with the Peace Program of
Pope Pius XII. By virtue of a unique invention, John Smith is able to
achieve control of the entire world. Earnestly seeking to use his power
for good, he institutes world-shaking social, political, economic and
moral reforms."


Bad writer. No cookie.

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