Agents of SHIELD: The Girl in the Flower Dress and Atlantis: White Lies

Finally, Agents of SHIELD presents us with an episode with some real pace and kick to it, as Centipede's machinations threaten to expose Skye's true loyalties, and put a man with pyrokinetic powers in deadly danger.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this episode is that our second example of the Rising Tide is such a colossal douchebag that it's hard to feel much sympathy with Skye knowing that these were the hypocrites she used to hang with. On the plus side, however, it brings that particular subplot into the open before it has a chance to get old or annoying, and the new direction is honestly more interesting.

Some nice touches this week as well, such as the importance allotted to the giving of a name, and also Coulson's determination to save the super of the week, and his sadness to realise that he can't.


And then, Atlantis, which honestly gets dumber by the week. Conspiracies and secrets this week, as well as a comedy subplot about Hercules' unhealthy obsession with his pet racing beetle. Jason also got to establish himself as not merely dumb and dull, but also less awesomely superhuman than previously shown, which pretty much renders him completely pointless in his own series.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Earth

The second series of Avatar: The Last Airbender picks up Team Avatar - a term used in fandom, but also coined in-universe by Sokka, during a period of envy over the cool names of elite military units - as they emerge triumphant from the North Pole to travel to the Earth Kingdom and study Earthbending.

Earth is in a lot of ways darker than Water. In particular, Prince Zuko is replaced as primary antagonist by his sister Azula, whose lethal confidence stops just short of parody, and finds himself an outcast, mired in an emofunk despite the best effort of Iroh, who remains the boss throughout this series. Aang's struggles with the nature of the Avatar's calling continue, as Earthbending does not come naturally to him and the awesome power of the Avatar state both places him at risk and demands that he give up the people he cares for most.

There are also a couple of especially dark episodes, such as the one which explores Zuko's childhood and Appa's Lost Days, which recounts the arduous and ultimately futile journey of the kidnapped Appa to be reunited with Aang.

This is not to say that the series loses its sense of humour. I would pay good money for a buddy cop series featuring Iroh and Toph, the blind Earthbender who joins the team; a well-bred but still ill-mannered self-made-waif who teaches herself to bend metal just to prove she could.

Earth also develops the philosophy of its universe, mostly through Iroh, although with contributions from Toph and mad Earth King Bumi, and the emotional and spiritual balance of the four elements.

The end of the series is a major downer, but we've moved briskly on to Book 3: Fire.

Star Trek Movie Musings - Generations

So, here we are in the Next Generation era of Star Trek movies and straightaway we're back to the problems of the Motion Picture, in that this is essentially an episode plot made bigger and, alas, more stupid.

We begin with the apparent death of Captain Kirk, and then cut to the crew of the Enterprise D playing dress up on the holodeck, which is a little jarring, especially as we then launch into Next Gen's favourite subplot, Data's emotions, which means we get Brent Spiner overacting for half an hour (which would be less annoying if he weren't actually a good actor, which he is).

Then we get the rest of the film in the company of my least favourite recurring character, Guinan, the effortlessly wise bartender who is awesome at everything. You may have guessed that I'm not loving this so far. In its defence, it does have Malcolm McDowell and Patrick Stewart chewing the scenery at each other, but then it turns out that Kirk's dream life is living in a cabin in the mountains and doing the same thing every day and how does that make sense even before Picard points it out?

Hmm. I seem to have left this one for several months unpublished.

Okay, briefly then, it took the original series cast three films to wreck the Enterprise; it took the Next Gen crew one. Not so impressed.

Agents of SHIELD: Eye Spy and Atlantis: Twist of Fate

On the strength of Eye Spy, I'm glad to say that Agents of SHIELD seems to have found its footing. This week's episode had no new backstory not directly related to the plot, which was also a furthering of the central arc, and allowed the characters to stretch their legs and run for a while. FitzSimmons get a proper tech line, while Ward and May each have their action spot, and the pairing of Ward and Skye is starting to come into more focus (with 'you're gonna have to bromance him' scoring highly on the line of the week stakes).

Meanwhile, Atlantis continues to be as silly as ever, but it's still quite fun. I really hope that some of these mythological tie ins pay off though.

Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.

Agents of SHIELD: The Asset and Atlantis: A Boy of No Consequence

Episode 3 of Agents of SHIELD continues, I am sad to say, to be workmanlike. We get some glimpses of character development, in particular from the friction between the consummate pro Ward and the ultimate dilettante Skye, and from another hint as to what actually happened to Coulson, but that leaves fully half the main cast with not a lot to do but stand around a table.

Now, it's a good cast, but they are basically standing around a table, and Agents of SHIELD needs to nail down the pacing needed for a 45-minute ensemble arc show or kill half of them off, because at the moment its just not quite there; for me at least, although I really want it to be. It's got everything in place to be great and it has its moments, but so far, it's only okay, and in today's genre-rich environment, that isn't quite enough.

Ladies and gentlemen: Our hero.

Moving on to something that still isn't as good as Agents, but has the distinction of being better at least than it has on paper the right to be, and that is Atlantis.

In A Boy of No Consequence, Jason leaps to the defence of an old ma and winds up punching the queen's nephew. This means, thankfully, that we get some actual character development for a female character. Not Ariadne, who remains pretty bland, but the wicked queen Pasiphae, who seems to have two strikes against her already, being both a wicked queen and Ariadne's wicked stepmother, whose loutish nephew is both Ariadne's intended and the jerk Jason lamped in the street.

As a consequence, it's the bull-leaping for our band of pals, and Jason must get his team to work together to avoid a life of jumping over angry cattle. Add a little Greek voodoo and a sudden but inevitable betrayal, mix well and serve with some doubtful CGI.

And yet, I find it hard to look away.

Perspectives on Horror - Frailty and Red Riding Hood

 I strongly suspect that this is not going to be anyone's idea of an obvious movie double bill, but bear with me.

Frailty is actor Bill Paxton's directorial debut, a Texas-set paranormal thriller in which a young man (then mega-heartthrob Matthew McConaughey, looking disheveled and ragged) attempts to convince an FBI agent that his brother was a serial killer through a tale of their father's religious visions, while Red Riding Hood is a Twiclone based on the titular fairy tale, complete with a forced love-triangle and a heroine with largely self-inflicted problems.

Not, I confess, a logical pairing.

But...

Here's the thing. Neither film is exactly a horror film, but both draw a vein of horror from the manipulation of perception.

First up, spoiler-free reviews:

Frailty is a compelling drama, well-acted and directed, and by turns chilling and thought provoking. It is well-worth seeing.

Red Riding Hood wants to be Twilight, without being Twilight, and has far less to say than it thinks it does. It is still worth seeing, because it's fun, and being from the director of Twilight it is very, very pretty to look at.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would suggest choosing Frailty.

Beyond this point, I need to discuss particular plot points, so there will be spoilers.

Frailty opens with Fenton Mieks approaching the FBI Agent in charge of investigating the 'God's Hand' killer to announce that the killer is his brother Adam. He proceeds to tell a story of the two brothers and their father, a good man who one night announces that God has sent an angel to tell him that the end times have come and that he and his sons must hunt down and destroy demons in human form. Only they can see the demons and their sins, he explains, and Adam accepts this, even as Fenton sees his father's descent into madness and relentless pursuit of a random list of names.

And then the film turns everything on its head simply by shifting its perspective, with a twist that does the two things that a twist ought to do: It takes you by surprise, and then immediately convinces you that it shouldn't have done.

Red Riding Hood is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Valerie, soon to be given the eponymous cloak, a good girl in a village beset by a werewolf. After the wolf kills her sister, a professional hunter is summoned and the long 'truce' with the beast breaks down, with Valerie caught in the middle of it all.

Except... if viewed from anyone else's perspective, the story is somewhat different. Valerie isn't the innocent people think, or that even she views herself as. She is actually resented by her friends, bears some indirect guilt for her sister's death, and when pressed proves to be selfish, vicious and somewhat amoral. She scorns the village catch, Henry (rich, handsome, honest, sharply intelligent and devoted) for her long-time inappropriate squeeze, Peter (moody, surly, emo hair, although he is at least also loyal to a fault), but won't do so openly and is then willing to stab Peter on a hunch that he might be the wolf, but when he is infected, decides that he's so dreamy he gets a pass. At the end of the film, she is also immensely dismissive of people who, despite their own fears, envies and frailties, when push came to shove were willing to stand up for her against a monster, be that the wolf or the hunter.

It also has a twist, which again I didn't see coming, but I'm not sure that I should have done, which makes it a little less sound.

And there's a rave scene in the middle which is as jarring as the one in the first non-existent Matrix sequel, and even more anachronistic.

Agents of SHIELD - 0-8-4

Say what again! I dare you!

So, last week was the big opener, and now we have the first 'regular' episode of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (in which I am not going to bother putting the full stops anymore, because it slows my typing right down and because simply capitalising is a perfectly acceptable convention for acronyms), 0-8-4 (apparently SHIELD's code for an object of unknown origin).

I confess, on this one I was a little underwhelmed, in part I think because it was sort of a continuation of the pilot. With the team thrown together from highly disparate parts by Coulson, this is the 'coming together as a unit' episode, and honestly I would have liked to have seen this as part of perhaps a longer pilot episode, or further into the season following a longer establishment of the initial divisions within the team. I also recognise that there are concessions to be made to the conventions of the format, but part of me suspects that they threw in Nick Fury at the end of this one as a nod to the fact that it felt like a necessary episode, rather than a stand out.

There was a lot to like here, don't get me wrong. I felt that they established both the divisions in the team and the individual strengths very well, especially given the time constraints, and in particular they navigated a difficult path in having the team initially get played without making them look like complete chumps. It then proceeded to give pretty much everyone a chance to shine (Skye looked like being stuck with being an informed badass until the save with the safety card, which was a nice touch).

There is a risk still of setting our leads up to look like fools, with Skye being revealed as a Rising Tide mole this early, but I am willing to cut the series some slack.

0-8-4 is not an awesome episode, but for an essentially utilitarian episode we could have got a lot worse.

Atlantis - The Earth Bull and A Girl By Any Other Name

So, this weekend I got caught up on a couple of shows. More on Episode 2 of Agents of SHIELD later; first, Atlantis.

Taste the cheese!

Merlin was a bit of a surprise hit for the BBC, I think. They obviously had some hopes for it, but I suspect that they never really envisaged it lasting five series. Remarkable then that the makers seem to have chosen when to end it, with their final season of ever-increasing doom (which I still need to catch the end of, IPlayer desktop having failed me on that and Being Human, but it is doubtless that which positioned them to pitch the replacement series Atlantis.

In short, a young man named Jason is searching for his missing father, lost while exploring the ocean depths in a submarine. During a dive, he is draw helplessly into a bright light and awakens on the shores of an island, dominated by the mighty - if slightly underwhelming - city of Atlantis, which he of course believed was a myth. The city stirs memories, even as he encounters names he knows well - Pythagoras and Hercules, as well as the Minos family - in a world out of step with history, yet filled with mythology.

The opening episode sees Jason face off against the Minotaur, after taking Pythagoras' place as sacrifice (I was, I should say, deeply disappointed at his failure to leap forward and declare 'I volunteer as tribute'), only to learn that the cursed monster was once a man who knew his father, and that his true identity is a source of deadly danger to him. In the second episode, A Girl by Any Other Name, a rescue mission takes an unexpected turn as Jason and co rescue a girl named Medusa from the clutches of the bloodthirsty Maenads.

Where I always viewed Merlin as a story taking place in a post-Apocalyptic recreation of Camelot, Atlantis is openly crossworlds, with the Oracle (Juliet Stevenson, bringing some serious thespian muscle to the proceedings) telling Jason that his old world (the modern day) and the world of Atlantis are but two of many. Of course, it could just be a form of purgatory, where a disheveled and unreconstructed Hercules helps dying archaeologists to 'go to the tavern' and so pass on, but currently I'm not putting money on that.

So, it's not Greek mythology, just something very like it. Okay; I'll buy it. Thousands wouldn't.

As hard as I try to avoid comparisons, there are a number of similarities to Merlin in the basic set up. A hard, unforgiving monarch (although currently Alexander 'Genre Credibility' Siddig's Minos is looking positively fluffy next to Sarah Parish as Queen Pasiphae), and a bromance (apparently already known as Python) between an awkward, brilliant geek and a natural warrior. The decision to change up and make Jason the outsider-hero, with the adorkable Pythagoras as the deuteragonist, is the big shift. Jason also has access to secrets, as Merlin did, with the Oracle as his thespian Dragon and the pervy clothes-removing gateway between the worlds in place of magic, although the latter at least has not yet been given much relevance, besides his familiarity with the square on the hypotenuse and an ability to weird out satyrs. I hope to see more of it later, and if he hasn't built a tank by the end of the series, I will be very sad.

Now, unfortunately, Jason brings a lot of Arthur's traits to the series: he's tough, he's manly, he's a bit of a dish, and he's about as interesting as woodchip. Jack Donnelly isn't a bad actor, so much as an actor with not much to work with. I am also unconvinced by his supposedly incredible physical abilities, so far shown with a less-than-superlative bit of jumping, a little parkour-lite and an arrow dodge. On the plus side, there is a convincing natural chemistry with Ariadne (Aiysha Hart), if only because she is equally dull. Bereft of the spotlight, Robert Emms' Pythagoras is lovely, but so far a bit of a cypher, leaving the star turn - at least among the central group - to Mark Addy's drunken has-been Hercules.

Overall, the series has been a bit of a sausage fest so far, and it remains to be seen if any of the other female roles - Pasiphae, Ariadne, Medusa - will ever manage to be as interesting as the Oracle.

I am sold enough to keep watching, for a while at least, but I can't really say more than that, and I am less inclined to give it the leeway of a new series than I am with, say, Agents of SHIELD, by which token I suppose I can say that it has won my interest, but not my indulgence.

But seriously...

One line of narration...

...or two episodes of stock cartoon romance...

...it's still a more convincing romance than Twilight.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Water

We've had some disagreements about M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar: The Last Airbender in our household. Hannah thinks it's great, and that the anime bores unfairly dismiss it as different to the series; I think it is a beautiful film with some very real problems, especially in terms of pacing and failure to 'show, not tell'. I also point out that Avatar: The Last Airbender is actually not technically an anime, but a western 'anime style' animation, but that just gets me glowered at, and rightly so.

Anyway, that's not why we decided to watch through the series on Lovefilm, but it's something to bear in mind.

Avatar is set on the world of Pandora, where the peaceful Na'avi...

No, wait; I'll start again.

Avatar is set in a fantasy world (and it is the entire world, Book 1: Water takes us from the South Pole to the North in 20 episodes), divided between four great cultures, the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, the Fire Nation and the Air Nomads. Each culture has its own signature mystical elemental martial art, or bending art, allowing them to control their nation's element. For centuries, the four were in balance, watched over by the Avatar, who mastered all four elements, and was reborn - like the Dalai Lama - into each culture in turn in a never-ending cycle: Water, Earth, Fire and Air.

A century before the start of the series, the Fire Nation mobilised its vast military and set out to conquer the world. The Avatar vanished, only to be found by a brother and sister of the Southern Water Tribe in episode 1. Book 1, like the film, then charts the journey of the Avatar - Aang, lone survivor of the exterminated Air Nomads and titular Last Airbender - and his comrades, Katara and Saako, from the South Pole to the North, in order for Aang and Katara to learn Waterbending.

In some places, the series is much better than the film; in particular, it tends to be more willing to think big, especially when it comes to Earthbending. Moreover, the Earthbender prison makes more, which is to say any sense in the series. Far more time is devoted - because it is available - to Aang's growth as a character, and the same goes for Katara and Saaka. My biggest complaint - the condensing of the key relationship between Saaka and Princess Yue to a single line of narration - stands, although the series still only gives it a few establishing scenes.

The arc story is compelling, although the quality of the individual episodes varies, with a few employing pretty blatant straw man aesops, but when it is good it is good. Certainly, I am looking forward to moving on to Book 2: Earth.

The one thing I feel that the film did noticeably better than the series is the final siege at the North Pole. While not perfect, I found that the great wave in the film worked better for me than the series' giant glowing aqueous carp man. Your mileage may vary.