Here are some cool and interesting links I’ve came across the past week:

• Whatever Happened To The Original Cast of ‘Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers’?: I knew what Amy Jo Johnson went on to do, but it’s interesting to see what happened to the others.
• Space Archaeology’s Prometheus Review: I totally agree with this; a lot of what was wrong with Prometheus comes from having stupid scientists.
• What If Things Had Ended… Differently? FED by Mira Grant: Mira Grant gives us a glimpse of what could have been the ending of Feed. I’m glad she didn’t go this way though; I much prefer the actual ending.
• Pocket Princesses: Awesome comic series from Amy Mebberson featuring the Disney princesses living together. It’s currently on hiatus, but they’re so funny, I hope it returns soon!

• Joss Whedon’s Interview with Rutherford D. Actualperson: Awesome letter from Joss to his fans about The Avengers.
• The 22 Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar: Storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a list of storytelling rules that’s she learnt while at Pixar.
• The Git Rap: “I won’t git merge your branch if the code is bad, your pull request has no tests and you know that’s sad”
• Paramount Celebrates 100 Years of Glory on Cool Gallery 1988 Poster: Awesome poster with 104 movies. How many movies can you recognize? Here’s just 9 of them:

• Hangman – You’ve Probably Been Playing It Wrong!: What order of letters should you use while playing hangman? This post actually looks at the frequencies of letters in words from a dictionary and shows how you should play.
• Valve’s Handbook For New Employees: Valve looks like such an amazing place to work!
• Toy Adword Wordclouds: Visualization of the words used in ads for toys. Guess which one is for boys an which for girls. It’s from more than a year ago, but still interesting to see (and I predict there wouldn’t have been any drastic changes in the past year for it to be massively different now).

• The Floppy Disk Means Save and 14 Other Old People Icons That Don’t Make Sense Anymore: I don’t agree with all the examples he gives, but there are definitely some icons which might seem a bit strange nowadays.
• Museum of Endangered Sounds: Cool idea, but I’m kind of disappointed that the dial-up sound of modems isn’t among them.
• Why I Write “Strong Female Characters”: Good post from comic book writer Greg Rucka.

It’s been 5 days since I saw Prometheus at the IMAX and a part of me can’t stop thinking about it. Prometheus is one of those movies where the opinions seem to be quite diverse, and I thought I should jump in with my take on the movie. This will be one of my split reviews where I first give a spoiler-free review and after a big enough warning sign go into some more detail.

If you’ve seen my blog posts from the past month, you’ll know that I only saw Alien and Aliens for the first time a couple of weeks ago… They’re just movies I somehow never got around to seeing, and I’m glad I finally did. I loved Aliens, but I’m not as a massive fan as some people I know, mainly cause I haven’t had as much time to invest into it as some.

Prometheus is a sort of prequel to the Alien franchise, set 30 years earlier, but in the same universe. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) are archeologists who uncover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, which leads them to the unexplored moon LV-223. Joining them on their mission are David (Michael Fassbender), an android, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a Weyland Corporation employee sent to oversee their mission, and a bunch of scientists (I just *love* writing plot summaries, I’m so good at it).

The first thing that comes to mind when discussing Prometheus is how drop dead gorgeous it is. It’s got some of the most stunning visuals I’ve seen this year, and it looks awesome seeing it on a huge IMAX screen (I had a lot of problems with the 3D though, but I think that was more of a problem with my contact lenses). Everything seems so well designed and looks sleek and suitably sci-fi-y; the interior of the space ships, the space suits, nothing looks out of place (well, almost nothing. The one thing that ruined it a bit for me and jerked me back to reality was seeing my own kitchen tools in the background in one of the scenes.)

I think the weakest part of the movie is its plot. I won’t go into too much detail here (read on after the spoiler warning for more), but it’s not the smart, intelligent sci-fi movie that I was hoping for. Half of the story feels predictable, the other half feels contrived; there are some plot jumps that depend on stupid character decisions that feel forced. Prometheus does raise some interesting, worth-thinking-about issues, but I just wish it dealt with them a bit better.

Noomi Rapace is great as Shaw, bringing the right balance of a strong yet vulnerable woman. There are parts of her character that I didn’t like, but that’s got more to do with the plot than with her acting. I constantly had a feeling there was more depth in her character that we didn’t get to see. I feel pretty similar about Charlize Theron’s character. She’s great as the bitchy ice queen, but I can’t help but think they could have delved much more into her background. The highlight of the movie though is Michael Fassbender. He’s awesome as the android, David, and has some of the best moments in the movie.

Regardless of the weak plot though, I did really enjoy Prometheus. It’s not the sci-fi I was hoping it would be, but it’s still an interesting movie and one that’s worth seeing in the cinema. It’s one of the most gorgeous and well designed movies of recent years. Despite all that’s wrong with Prometheus, it did make me think and I can’t help but like that about this movie.

Scroll down past the photo to hear my spoilery-y thoughts about Prometheus.

Beware! Here Be Spoilers

As I said above I’m not a huge Alien fan, so I’m not as invested in the continuity as some other people might be. In general, I think Prometheus almost did a pretty good job with being a sort of prequel: it’s set in the same universe, on a different planet, with different aliens. And up until that very last scene, it made perfect sense. Showing the Alien in that last scene though kind of ruined it for me. I might be wrong and this might be actually explained in whatever Ridley Scott has planned for a sequel, but how I see it is that they’ve now implied that Aliens are part “weird beige monster”, part Engineer and part human. That would mean that somehow the Alien from Prometheus ends up being on the planet of Alien and Aliens, or there was another combination of monster + Engineer + human. If it wasn’t for that final scene though, I think I would have been perfectly happy with the continuity of Prometheus (I’m open for anyone pointing other stuff out though).

My main gripe with Prometheus is how weak the story is. The more I think about it, the more holes I keep discovering. Not considering the continuity aspect, a lot of the plot seems flimsy and predictable. Shaw’s pregnancy, Weyland being on board the ship, Vickers being Weyland’s daughter; you could see those plot twists coming from a mile away. Which would have been okay if they then had any impact, but each of them get handled in too quick a manner which didn’t feel right.

Besides that the underlying motivations of each character seems off; they all make decisions that don’t follow what we know about them. Why doesn’t Shaw get angry with David about her pregnancy? Some meaningful glances between them show that she clearly knows that he was behind it. Why is Vickers even on the ship? She’s mentions something about not wanting to be stuck in a board room, but wouldn’t it have made more sense if she was forced to be on the ship because of Weyland? And don’t get me started on the so-called “scientists”. They make some of the most idiotic decisions in the movie, jeopardising their own mission. Taking off your helmet in a complete alien environment? Trying to pet a weird worm-like creature? Yes, they’re scientists and they’re supposed to be on a ground-breaking, brave expedition. That doesn’t mean that they should throw caution in the wind and act like complete dumb-asses.

Finally, let’s talk about the “aliens”. I like the whole concept of initially having a virus as the monster, but I never got that claustrophobic, scary feeling that the Alien movies were so good at. It touches on it lightly when Shaw finds out she’s pregnant and tries to operate on herself to remove it, but after that one scene we go back to as it was before (and she seriously recovers that quickly?!? Okay, it’s a super special medical operating device, but that quickly?!?). Viruses are interesting, but that’s mainly when you see how paranoid and scared the characters become when dealing with a virus. In Prometheus it’s mainly the viewer who is aware of the virus and how dangerous it is, but I don’t think that’s enough for it to be truly terrifying.

Then in the last act we also get the Engineer. In theory he sounds scary: here’s one of the creators of mankind and he now wants to destroy us. It’s like finding out your parents want to kill you. And yet… why? It all feels hollow without there being any explanation of why the hell they now want us dead. Also: if this Engineer was “frozen” for the past couple of centuries and this planet was a super secret military base, why didn’t his home planet respond? I understand that this might all be explained in a sequel, but without this explanation the threat of the Engineers feels meaningless.

What did you think of Prometheus? Did you love it? Hate it? Somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments; I’m curious to hear what everyone else thought about it!

A couple of days ago I posted an awesome short called Spoiler (watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet). The director and writer of it, Daniel Thron, kindly agreed to answer some of my questions about it!

Can you tell me a bit about your background – how did you get interested in filmmaking?

I’ve been a film nerd since I was a kid.  Stuff like Star Wars obviously blew my mind, but I also used to stay up late to watch The Movie Loft on TV38, where they used to put on movies like Serpico, The French Connection, Sorcerer, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, etc – all uncut.  Really set a groove in my head as to what movies should feel like.

I didn’t pursue film immediately though, even though I always talked about it. Instead, I started doing freelance illustration, and sort of stumbled into videogames as a texture artist.  It was a while before I really got my act together. But I ended up doing more and more concept work, and was soon storyboarding sequences for in-game movies. Finally I ended up directing them – I did the cinematics for the Eidos’ ‘Thief’ series and some others. And that gave me enough of a reel to get into the VFX industry, where now I’m primarily a matte painter and concept artist for Digital Domain.

It was here that I met Karl Denham (Spoiler’s producer and cinematographer), and we’ve worked on a ton of projects together, including the feature film he directed, ‘The Waver,’ which is in post now. He also shot Ben Hansford’s hilarious ‘Tron: Reboot’ web series that I star in, in some sadly tight spandex.

Where did the idea for Spoiler come from?

Spoiler came to me when my wife and I were house-sitting for Karl while he and family were vacationing. At the time they lived in a large apartment – a great place, but the complex itself had a really strange sort of fortress-like flavor, and it had some problem with its alarm system – night after night the whole place would start ringing for no reason. I had some really bizarre dreams out of this, one of which turned into the basis for the script.

Karl and I are both big zombie movie fans, but that genre is definitely stuck in a rut. There have been some amazing breakout novels that take a different tack – World War Z, which is fantastic, or The Forest of Hands and Teeth – but movies all seem to break down into repeats of 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead — so it seemed like a real opportunity. We wanted to make something that could essentially be an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, only a little zombified. Our favorite films work like this, Blade Runner could be a Dashiel Hammet story easy. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a love story that happens to be sci-fi.

Can you tell us a bit about what went into creating Spoiler?

The production of the film itself was strung out over a number of weekends; we had a very, very small crew and almost no money (the budget was around 4 thousand bucks); everyone was working for free, donating time we could never afford in a million years. Luckily, working in VFX, we got a lot of great folks on board — Dan Platt, who did the makeup for our zombie, worked with Karl on Tron: Legacy, and did a lot of the practical effects for Exorcist III (the unsung great Exorcist movie!), and the my friend David Bryant, who played the trapped husband, has also been doing VFX for years. Much of the settings were utterly stolen, guerrilla style stuff — including a lot of the apartment exteriors. It was pretty amazing that we had guys running around in HAZMAT gear, and no one gave us a hassle, but there it is. The actors are all friends of ours, as well — I’ve known Michael Faradie and Luke Albright for many years, and have been dying for a chance to work with them.

The technical stuff: We shot almost everything on Cannon 7ds, though some of the interiors were shot with Panasonic HVXs with lens adapters. The 7ds are amazing because they are so portable and light-sensitive that you can pretty much shoot anywhere with a skeleton crew. We lit some of the scenes with ipads — no kidding. Chris Stack, our godsend of an editor, cut on Final Cut Pro, and the color work was done by Karl in After Effects.  But all of this is for nothing without great sound design, and I owe Robert Flynn a case of whiskey for saving our bacon.

Will you return to the world of Spoiler?

We are so excited by folks response, it’s hard to describe, but yeah Karl and I are looking at both a feature and TV development, and have had a lot of serious interest in both. We’re really proud of the world we built out for this thing, and this short only shows a fraction of it, so we’re anxious to expand. We’ve talked about the possibility of a Kickstarter campaign as well, so hopefully we’ll be sending you some good news shortly! But in either case we are so psyched that you dug the picture, and can’t wait to start shooting some more stuff.

I just started this book last night and so far it’s pretty cool. It’s the first in a new series from Seanan McGuire, who has previously done the October Daye series and the Newsflesh trilogy (but under the Mira Grant name). McGuire writes awesome female protagonists and her new character Verity Price seems kick-ass; she’s a professional ballroom dancer/cryptozoologist (read: monster hunter).

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night… The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity-and humanity from them. Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she’d rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance. Sounds pretty simple, right? It would be, if it weren’t for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family’s old enemies, the Covenant of St. George. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed. To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone’s spreading rumors about a dragon sleeping underneath the city…

It’s available on Amazon.com for only $7.99.

I own a lot of skater dresses; it just suits my body type the best, accentuating the good bits, and hiding the bad. Most of the ones I have though are quite boringly in just one colour. I would love to add some more nice patterns to my wardrobe. This Alice In Wonderland inspired print from New Look is exactly what I’m looking for:

It’s available at New Look for only £22.99 and comes with the thin belt depicted in the photo.

What do you think? Yay or nay?

I spent most of yesterday evening watching the E3 media briefings; they’re always fun to watch and you always get to see all the new trailers. I thought I’d do a roundup of the cool stuff I’ve seen so far; there are some games that look awesome and I can’t wait till they’ll come out.

Assassin’s Creed

I loved the previous Assassin’s Creed games, but I hadn’t really found anything to be excited about in AC3. Setting it in the US during the revolution just doesn’t appeal to me at all (I was hoping for London or Paris). Seeing these trailers though reminds me that it definitely is an Assassin’s Creed game and that like the others I’ll most probably fall in love with it. Connor still doesn’t seem as crush worthy as Ezio was though.

Halo 4

I’ve only played Halo CE so far, but seeing this trailer makes me want to play the others!

Tomb Raider

The Tomb Raider games were some of the first games I truly was addicted to, so I’ve been curious to see how this reboot turns out. I like the look of it, but it doesn’t feel like Tomb Raider to me yet; so far it seems more like Uncharted, but with a female protagonist.

The Last of Us

I’m not sure yet about The Last of Us. The gameplay looks so smooth and fluent, but I’m wondering how much choice as a player you actually have (and how much is on rails). The world and the characters look interesting though, so I’ll most probably give this game a try.

Watch Dogs

This looks like it good be quite fun! It doesn’t seem like your normal type of gameplay, and I wonder how much freedom you get to hack into and mess around with stuff. Interestingly enough the QR code cube a waiter is wearing in the second video actually leads to this website…

BEYOND: Two Souls

Ooh, this looks good. I still haven’t played Heavy Rain, but it’s been on my To-Play list for a while.

ZombiU

Awesome trailer. It actually looks like London (unlike Mass Effect 3, which didn’t look even remotely like it). If it wasn’t on the Wii, I’d be really excited for this. As it is though, I can’t help but think that it won’t live up to the awesomeness of the trailer.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist

I haven’t played any of the previous Splinter Cells, even though Cristiano keeps urging me to play Splinter Cell: Conviction (apparently the co-op is a lot of fun). It could be fun, but it looks a little too realistic for my tastes.

Matter

Looks like Portal meets Tron.

Rayman Legends

If I was a kid, I would have loved this! I used to play Rayman with my brother and sister, but we would always have to take turns who could play. Being able to play this new game with up to 5 players is already cool, add to that your powers are determined by what type of controller you have and it’s pretty awesome!

Los Angeles coroner Tommy Rossman is the man they call when things go wrong.

This so reminded me of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series! I really like the idea of a post-zombie attack world that isn’t completely rundown and apocalyptic; it’s just our world, but with extra contingencies in place to deal with zombies.

Les Miserables is one of those musicals of which I know the words of its most famous songs, but have never actually seen in its entirety. I am really looking forward to it though; the cast looks amazing. Ever since the 2009 Oscars, I’ve wanted to see Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway do a musical together (on a sidenote: I found out that Hugh Jackman’s opening number that year, which I keep on watching over and over again, was actually written by Community’s Dan Harmon! Awesome!).

Anne Hathaway sounds great! It’s not the prettiest version I’ve heard, but I’ve always found that this song doesn’t necessarily have to be sung prettily; Hathaway brings the right type of distress and sadness into it. I can’t wait to see the final cut of this!

Another song I’m really looking forward to is On My Own. They wisely cast Samantha Barks in the role, and she can definitely sing this song:

Geek + Geek = Awesomeness. I love John Scalzi‘s books, and was already looking forward to his next book, Redshirts (gee, I wonder what that would be about?). I also love Jonathan Coulton‘s songs. Put those two together and what do you get? The new theme song for Redshirts:

What if the afterlife was ruined by lawyers? This is an awesome video created by Tom Scott. It’s been out for a while now, but I just hadn’t gotten around to posting it; ah well, better late than never: