media log

The synopsis makes it sound like Oshii's Tron: all the characters in the film play a video game called Avalon. A small group has been investigating deeper levels of Avalon and who's behind its creation. We're not told that all of society is centered around Avalon, but I guess we can assume so, since every character we meet plays it and supposedly you can make a lot of money just by being good at it. A few minutes in, the sepia palette and stoic lead made me think it might be more like a Soviet post-apocalypse film with hints of Ghost in the Shell (the writer of which wrote Avalon). You'd hope that it borrows the philosophy and existential dread from the first part with the aesthetics of the second part, but what you get is the meh of both worlds: a female main character, Ash, with a black bob wig who's too cool to speak much or make expressions and the fellow lifeless characters she meets along the way, who don't so much lead her down a rabbit hole as they drop key phrases like "Nine Sisters" or "ghost girl" which she types into a computer terminal before eventually encountering these things for herself simply because she was introduced to new people up the chain of command.

A lot of the static shots made me think of anime in which the creators are trying to get as much screentime as possible out of a single shot, adding as little new animations as possible, which obviously you don't need in a live-action film but can give it an interesting rhythm and dimension if done right. Personally, I think this just dragged the film down and attempted to induce meaning into insignificant things like Ash turning her head or loading her gun.

The last act does have some life to it, with one or two interesting visuals including a choir whose presence strongly suggests Ash has ascended to some kind of enlightenment or real world beyond the world existing as a mere casing around the video game she plays. This is an interesting premise but it relies on the viewer's familiarity with things like The Matrix to infer why Ash's world is the way it is and what happens when she escapes it. It doesn't bother doing any of the things that, to me, are most fun about these types of cyberpunk stories: Avalon is a dreary war simulator rather than being a stimulating alternate reality, there is no world-building, it gives Ash very few connections to either the real or "real" world to create moral or emotional conflict, and we get no sense of what living in Ash's world is even like, because the entire film is spent either just over Ash's shoulder while she lights a cigarette or feeds her dog, or with her when she asks someone about Avalon.

Clearly Oshii and Ito wanted to tell a story about transcendence here and its (incredibly subtle, at at all even vaguely elaborated on) interesting twist is that maybe transcendence isn't a good or pleasant thing. I usually love thinking about themes like this. But I do need to feel something about the transcending character and what she's transcending to care. I had a similar shrug in response to the same themes in Ghost in the Shell, which I suspect is beloved namely because of how its aesthetics, and this movie is essentially Ghost in the Shell without the aesthetics.

I do think this is worth rewatching and I suspect I either misremembered or missed a lot of it, but I'm not especially motivated to spend another 107 minutes of my life on what feels like a pale rehash of better cyberpunk stories. ... Read Less

I have to admit upfront, nothing in this show quite lived up to the excitement of the very first scene with all the scientists discovering a signal from space, but no piece of media ever seems to whenever it has a scene like that. Scenes like that always make me think of the Wow! signal and that simple, bare-bones exclamation--how nothing ever came of it and how impossible a challenge it is, narratively, to earn the outburst.

There are a lot of old ideas here borrowed from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I Am Legend, Omega Man, etc. but it still feels like a fresh take, I think largely because of how Carol is written: with acidic female rage and acerbic independence, but profound vulnerability. It brings interesting new context to the idea of being distrusting. The tragedy of being a distrusting person is that you put up barriers between yourself and this vast variety of people who could enrich your life in so many ways, but what if everyone was just one hive-mind you should absolutely not trust? Would that distrust become an asset? One that could end up helping everyone body-snatched but being an even bigger emotional and psychological hurdle for you than ever before?

I spent most of this show just falling in love with Rhea Seehorn's face and talent. I appreciate the shots of almost blindingly bright blue sky, the sparkling cleanliness, the shiny oppressive optimism. One scene I initially didn't fully appreciate in the finale makes a very visceral case against the homogenization, showing the cheerful dismantling of a culture and seemed icredibly relevant to our current wave of anti-immigration. It's really clever how the show pits these cases for humanity and diversity against Carol's very individual and often self-righteous ways of rebellion--interesting that she's a writer in that she only sometimes seems able to articulate around her privilege and anger why humanity in all its flaws is worth preserving, making me wonder if her character arc will ultimately be coming around to her own initial resistance from a more authentic and humanitarian place. Which! Also reminds me! very much of today's online virtue signaling and adopting "correct" opinions without any real empathy or critical thinking behind it.

I really enjoyed where this show took me despite it not being what I wanted, which was V-but-good or cosmic existential alien intrigue. It seems committed to the coyote vs roadrunner routine of Carol's scheming, which was entertaining, while it still has heart and stimulates my brain. ... Read Less

I'ved tried, oh I've tried, to stay away from multi-book series, but every piece of genre fiction that interests me seems to belong to this category. Someday I should count up how many times I made it to book 2 in a series. I'm sure it's fewer times than I can count on both hands.

About the only thing this shares in common with the Dune books is that it's set in space. Where Dune is so far into the future that it reads like esoteric fantasy, this is very much in the vein of hard science fiction. Many of the concepts it rushes through to explain the unfolding events are either above my head or invented.

It does have the taste of a written-after-the-fact prequel as it seems mostly concerned with explaining how a rogue, disembodied consciousness came into being on a multi-generational spaceship. There are four characters: a doctor named Prudence, a priest named Flattery, and two engineers named Timberlake and Bickel. They wake up on a spaceship destined for Tau Ceti, only to find that the ships's organic mental core (OMC) has gone insane and can no longer get them where they need to go. They have to somehow replace the ship's consciousness to finish their journey.

You can sort of predict where it's going based on their job titles alone. Prudence embodies the physical and the senses; Timberlake represents control and order; Flattery is concerned with spirituality. Bickel may represent innovation and problem-solving in theory, but in execution his role seems to mainly be intuiting what's happening (sometimes with what seems like little basis) and explaning this to the others in a series of epiphanies that each shock and disturb them. This is really the entirety of the novel: Bickel announcing what's going on with increasing clarity while the others react with increasing dread and/or resistance.

Revelations here have the mark of great plot turns--they're disturbing and interesting, while feeling so obvious that you must have known about them subconsciously from the start. But there was a lot about this story that disappointed me. With how capably Herbert turns the situation from wonder and excitement to psychological horror, I would have hoped the claustrophobic nature of the characters' circumstances would've been better portrayed. Instead, they continue to feel like strangers separate from and relatively unconcerned with each other, though that might be entirely plausible with them all being so focused on a singular task.

The biggest disappoitment and the hardest to forgive is that the consciousness whisered and warned about in such hushed, reverant tones more or less just appears after a sequence of swift decisions the crew makes despite spending so much of the book arguing about the dangers of making them. Herbert plays a lot of the dangers-of-artificial-consciousness hits like "Should We Play God?" and "Won't It Immediately Kill Us?" and "We Don't Even Understand What Consciousness Is" while peppering in quotes from Frankenstein as chapter introductions, but it suffers the same problem that almost every book about these ideas suffers: it can only discuss them and, at best, show the characters discussing them. It fails to tell a story that truly conveys what it would feel like to experience them.

I'm still going to read the next book; hopefully it fulfills more of this one's promise.

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