The Empire is watching… and who watches the Empire? The Emperor himself. This week’s Star Wars #7 sends our Rebel heroes on a dangerous mission to find the leak. (more…)

If you’ve ever been to this site before, you know that we like Big Shiny Robot!s. It’s kind of our thing. If you’ve read the site for a long time, you’d probably know that we’re big fans of Guillermo Del Toro as well.

It’s no wonder we’d be interested in this film.

I’ve been interested in it from the beginning, given Del Toro’s body of work, but I’ve tried to stay as far away from the hype as possible. I’ve watched a couple of trailers and had an extensive conversation with Travis Beacham, the writer of the film, but that’s about it.

But even staying away, I couldn’t help but feel some glimmer of excitement before I saw the film.

Now, settling into this movie, and having little frame of reference and expecting nothing more than giant robots fighting giant monsters, I wasn’t expecting a well-written, smart take on all the classic summer movie tropes. I wasn’t expecting to love this film so much. I wasn’t expecting to be completely blown away. I wasn’t expecting such a wholly engrossing film.

Pacific Rim tells the story of a world ravaged by monsters that come up out of the sea without warning and terrorize the population. The human response is to build giant robots to fight them.

That’s about all I was hoping to get. I was surprised to find a well-constructed world with that lived-in feel we all hope so much for in science fiction films. I was also surprised to find gravitas in the shared sacrifice of destruction caused by the Kaiju. That was, for me, one of the chief problems of Man of Steel. We were supposed to buy the human response to the Kryptonian invasion and instead we were given two dopey military men and they worked to stop Zod. The public in danger was represented by Perry White and we weren’t given a sense whatsoever of the human cost. Where Man of Steel failed in that regard, Pacific Rim knocks this out of the park. When a Kaiju attack happens, there’s a cost to all of humanity. Del Toro came as close to capturing national sentiment from something like, say, 9/11, on a global scale in this film. The world came together to fight this and it’s represented in all of the choices made about the film. Even if you like Man of Steel, you’ll have to admit that it’s simply done better here.

Del Toro imbued this film with the visceral feeling that ALL OF HUMANITY was at stake here, and that we could very well lose.

The film establishes its world and the stakes of it quickly and we’re left caring about who wins in the the fight between the giant robots (called Jaegers) and the Kaiju.

We’re also given a hero’s journey story, a few of them, from different characters, that all build to one of the most satisfying climaxes I’ve ever seen in a summer movie.

Every trope you can imagine from a big summer movie is on display in this film, from the rousing pre-battle speech and the gruff jock with a problem, to the down on his luck hero getting verbally abused by his commanding officer. Every twist and every turn of the classic summer film, which seems to be a genre on its own, is paid homage to in Pacific Rim, but it’s made fresh in every instance.

For most summer movies like this, Transformers, Battleship, etc. you’d be told, “Turn your brain off and you’ll enjoy it.” Not so with Pacific Rim. It’s a brilliant, careful reconstruction of this type of film and you’re rewarded for thinking deeper about things. After three days of processing this film, everything seems to get better with continued mental digestion, always a good sign for any film.

That’s not to say Pacific Rim doesn’t look pretty or punch hard enough. This movie is gorgeous and the fight scenes are spectacular. There are so many moments where the audience is practically begged to stand and cheer, but we were all too respectful of each other to actually do it.

Another thing I loved about this film was how it treated women and minorities. The woman in this film isn’t a love interest, she’s not a damsel in distress, and she’s not white. Mako, the female lead, is strong, kick-ass, and has to overcome reservations of her fighting on the frontline. She proves herself more than capable, though, and makes me twice as happy knowing I’m going to be bringing my daughter to this film. The other strongest supporting character is played by Idris Elba, who is the badass Marshal Stacker Pentecost. He gets so much cool stuff to do and be the guy in charge of everything.

It’s so much fun, it’s disgusting.

Seriously, this film made me happy in a way I haven’t been able to be in the theatre for a long time. Even Iron Man 3 didn’t provide it. It was so clearly put together by people who have a love of monster movies, but also great films. There were nods to classics like Chinatown, but also spiritual nods to things like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars. It was just a well-told, cleanly written story.

Hands down, this is the best summer movie of 2013, and I don’t see any on the horizon that can touch it.

The only question is: how soon until Marvel throws money at Del Toro to step into the Marvel Universe? Could you imagine him directing a picture with Dormammu as the bad guy?

I just got the chills.

Pacific Rim is not without its problems, but all of its enjoyable features more than make up for it. I’m giving this movie a perfect score.

See it, now and often. If it fails, then it’s your fault they don’t make good movies anymore.

I was excited to get into Magrunner and finally found a window of opportunity to hang out with this excellent title.  This works well for fans of <em>Portal</em>, <em>Quantum Conundrum</em>, and any first person shooter fan I believe.  For only $19.99 it’s a great buy, if you find it on sale during the rumored Steam Summer Sale, it’s even better.

I didn’t want to review this book.

Hell, I didn’t even want to finish it.

Star Wars: Crucible, billed as one last hurrah in for the Big 3 (Luke, Han, and Leia) in the expanded universe is nothing short of a boring, weird descent into things I just didn’t care to see in a Star Wars novel.

For the most part, the novel is harmless. It’s easily ignored and I would recommend that unless you’re hellbent on reading every book in the Star Wars EU, you just skip this one entirely.

And I apologize in advance, but there will be spoilers for the rest of this piece.

Crucible starts with Han and Leia Solo, two of the most important people in the galaxy, showing up to an asteroid field to help Lando Calrissian deal with some pirates in his mining operation. Small potatoes for a last hurrah, right? But more is going on that it seems and there’s some Mandalorians involved, and some guys from the roleplaying game, and a weird force nexus thing that means Luke Skywalker needs to come help with Lando’s mining dispute.

And some people (not me) thought the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems was bad…

The story meanders from there, it’s bland and I’ve tried hard to lose the details since I read the book, but it’s many of the small details that stuck with me and made me just despise this book.

For one, there is plenty of prose that just isn’t that good. There were instances where Luke would say something like, “May the Force Be With Us.” And then the very next line of text would be something like, “But the Force wasn’t with them and torpedoes exploded around them.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s pretty close. It’s just…  things like that, little details that make me feel like the whole thing is tone deaf to Star Wars. With Luke as the main point of view character for that chapter, even though it’s written in third person, there’s no way “the Force was not with them” would fly. How could something like that get by a Star Wars fan of any stripe?

Another particularly bad part of the book is when they suddenly need disguises to visit a casino and Luke and Leia just happen have passable make-up and Mission: Impossible quality disguise kits to instantly transform them into a Twi’lek and a Devaronian.

“But Bryan,” you’re saying, “That’s absurd. How would anyone buy Leia as a Twi’lek? Even with make-up, her lekku wouldn’t move.”

But the answer is simple. She spends the entire time in disguise twitching them manually with the Force. But even that would have been harder because inside the lekku was wear they were hiding their lightsabers from casino security.

I know, right?

It doesn’t make sense to me either. This ranks up there among Construction Worker Wedge finding weird shock paddles to discover Force ability and Bus Driver Admiral Ackbar, both from Jedi Search.

You know what else rubbed me the wrong way?

Creepy Leia.

In a spectacularly silly plot development right out of Blade Runner, there are replicant-like bio-clones in the book. And, since subtlety is no longer required in licensed tie-in fiction, anyone can easily guess that when the replicant character starts stealing Han and Leia’s blood, we’ll be seeing Han and Leia clones before the book is done.

And Han does. He sees a “creepy” clone of Leia.

And starts calling her in his head Creepy Leia. It seems far too contemporary a term or usage of the word to fit in Star Wars, and seeing Han use it in context was laughably bad.

And the Blade Runner like replicants? They all had problems. Like Jurassic Park and Deep Space Nine level problems. Remember the Lysine contingency in Jurassic Park? Remember the Ketracell-White from Deep Space Nine? Both the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the Jem’Hedar in DS9 needed an exterior application of certain protein sequences and chemicals to survive. It was a way to control them and keep a handle on what they were doing.

Well, no surprises here: if it was good enough for Jurassic Park and Star Trek, by the Force, it’s good enough for the “creepy” clones here in Star Wars.

After dealing with explosions, pirates, Mandos, replicants in need of Lysine, and weird RPG based threats, Luke, Han, and Leia enter a Wonderland of the Force that may or may not be related to Mortis from The Clone Wars. Inside they morph and die and come back in a trippy sequence where they only song I could think to score it with was not John Williams based, but instead Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. It was an LSD trip to Nth degree.

After they escape their deaths, they all come out and vow to take some time off and retire, riding off into the sunset of space one last time, and then talking about their retirement more and their need for it in case we didn’t get the hint.

And why in the world would I want to read page after page of Han Solo being tortured?

I would argue that this book is the single best reason we can give for hoping that Episode VII forces this Expanded Universe timeline into full, alternate timeline status.

It just wasn’t good. I’m sorry. Troy Denning seems like a very nice guy, but this book was simply not good. And for that, you just shouldn’t buy it. Or read it. Or even acknowledge its existence.

Zero Stars.

A copy of this book was provided by Del Rey/Random House for review.

On Saturday, I went to the movies for the first time in 20 years with my father. We went to see “The Lone Ranger.” my dad grew up with the radio serials, and later the television show, and the Ranger and Tonto have been his heroes for nigh on 70 years. So when he told me he wanted to go to the movies and see it, I jumped for joy and prepaid for our tickets.

You see, Westerns are kind of our thing. Saturday afternoons were spent curled up in the la-z-boy watching the old movies. My father was raised by a grandmother who was Cherokee, and she did an amazing job of educating him on what was real and what was Hollywood stupidity. My father grew up in the cowboy traditions but was well educated on both sides of the fence, so we usually rooted for the Indians (yes, we called them Indians) just as much as the cowboys. To this day, we usually spend Saturday afternoons with Jeremiah Johnson or Rooster Cogburn, and as such I have a deep love of the American Western – a genre that seems to be a dying art.

I have certain expectations when I go see an Action Western, and they are as follows:

• A beautiful score, with the melody in the treble strings and horns, and a syncopated rhythm in the bass section. One that does not employ the use of hoof sounds, but you hear them anyway.
• Beautiful location shots with mesas and/or mountains and sun so bright you can smell the desert dust.
• Train heists.
• Horse stunts.

I also have expectations from Gore Verbinski movies:

• Explosions.
• A giggle here and there.
• Also more explosions.

So, without giving anything away, I pretty much got all of that from this movie. This movie is getting panned, and not just for the political reasons, and I really don’t know why. What the hell were people expecting? You guys – I had so much fun watching this movie, and not just because I could glance over and see a glimmer of mirth on my 74 year old father’s face. Yes, there were some pacing problems (a couple of times I found myself thinking “less talky more ‘splodey, please”) but it has been a very long time since I have been in an audience that collectively gasped and winced and cheered, and that happened during “The Lone Ranger.” The visual effects both large and small scale were everything I have come to expect from a Verbinksi film – i.e. spot flippin’ on.

The characters were fleshed out enough for me to care, but Tonto is the only character to have a reinvented origin story. And to be sure – this is really Tonto’s film. It also falls into the recent trend of historical fiction revealing the White Dude to be an arrogrant, greedy, evil villain – which I have zero problem with, because it’s about goddamn time. I suppose now is as good a time as any to touch on the controversy, but being so white I am pale blue I have very little to say on the subject, and am in fact completely torn. On one hand, yes, it absolutely sucks that a white guy plays Tonto and that Tonto’s portrayal is an amalgam of native cultures. On the other hand, if we are looking to Hollywood to educate we might as well start the apocalypse countdown now, because Hollywood is a business, plain and simple. I tend to be a glass-half-full (read: naive) type person, and think that you can educate a child on the inaccuracies in film and spark a whole new interest, but I was lucky enough to have that experience, whereas I do acknowledge that most are not.

So yeah, if you go into this movie expecting high art and/or historically accurate representations of anyone, you are going to be mightily disappointed. But if you go in munchin’ some popcorn, sippin’ on a squishy and want to see some beautiful stunt work and some alarmingly beautiful train recreations (which, admittedly, are probably the cause of the film’s inevitable monetary loss), go for it. All in. And have an awesome time.

After the abysmal failures of the late 90s, Disney’s hand drawn animation efforts had taken a turn for the worst and no one expected much from them. But from 2000 to 2002, they came out with a trifecta of movies that defied expectations and, to my mind, resurrected their hand-drawn talents for a while longer.

All three movies that came out in that period were re-released on Blu-ray recently (along with their cheapquels of less quality.)

Each of them are worth owning and re-watching. All of them look stunning on Blu-ray. All of them are a delight.

We’ll take them chronologically.

The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Off the heels of the well received but fairly standard retelling of Tarzan from the year before, The Emperor’s New Groove was something different altogether. Settling in with a highly stylized indigenous South American vibe, the film took all of the things I hated about Hercules and seemed to make them good, somehow. Like Hercules, it has too much anachronistic pop culture and self-awareness to it, but instead of being annoying, this film makes it charming and timeless.

David Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt, and Patrick Warburton assembled to create a memorable voice cast that still gets quoted around my house to this day because the film is just so fun and funny. On rewatching, it still has a very breathless pacing to it that helps. And, like I said, it takes the weaknesses of Hercules, does them right, and turns them into strengths.

Perhaps they’d been paying attention to the Pixar model and fashioned a story that works on a variety of levels, with jokes that still go over the heads of my children and land squarely on my funny bone.

This film belongs in your collection, for sure.

Moving on to my favorite of the three films released:

Atlantis (2001)

Atlantis was as much a departure from The Emperor’s New Groove as The Emperor’s New Groove was from Tarzan. The directors took the bold adventure storytelling of Disney’s early live-action films and married it with the visual style of Mike Mignola and created a pulpy steampunk-like adventure, years before it had hit the mainstream.

Rewatching this film, I truly believe it was ahead of its time. The storytelling is fantastic, it’s equally funny and dramatic, it feels like the period it’s set in, and, above all, the visuals are gorgeous.

The story revolves around Milo Thatch, voiced by the always great Michael J. Fox, and his quest to find the lost city of Atlantis with the help of mercenary adventurers. The voice cast is filled out with the likes of Don Novello, James Garner, Leonard Nimoy, and Corey Burton, making it truly pop. It took risks most Disney films don’t, as well, making it all the more daring and alluring to an audience member like me. There’s a femme fatale character, strong and sultry. There’s a good guy turned villain in a twist with a voice perfect for the part. There’s just the right mix of comedy and adventure and excitement and it culminates into a battle the likes of which was clearly inspired by Star Wars.

It’s a breathtaking film and truly the first time I saw Mignola-like images moving in a way that seemed organic.

This is an underrated masterpiece of Disney animation and I hope it stops being overlooked.

This is definitely worth picking up for your collection. Immediately. Watch it and I dare you to tell me otherwise.

Last on the list of this renaissance is:

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

This film is a fun sci-fi adventure with a heart, set in a very stylized, water-color backgrounded Hawaii. The main protagonists are a bratty little girl and a bratty little alien who learn lessons about loyalty and who they are and what the meaning of family is.

This film works for me to a degree. It’s not one I rewatch with any regularity, the story after a few viewings seems bland, but that’s not really what you’re watching it for. For my money, this film shines the most in the animation and vibe. Who would ever think to match beautiful water-color backgrounds of Hawaii and the tone set by Elvis music to a science fiction fish out of water story? The vibe is the thing I love the most about this movie and it’s the thing I’m saddened to see go the most with this push for all 3D animated filmmaking.

There’s a charming warmth to the look and feel that you simply can’t replicate with 3D animation.

I do like this movie, but it’s the least of these three. It’s one my kids like much more than I do, and will probably watch it much more often than I do.

If you want this movie, don’t hesitate to add it to your collection as well.

It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of the Marvel Family. Unfortunately  in recent years, the fates have not been kind to the characters or the concept. When the new 52 came around, I had a bit of hope, but then we got the new costume, and the new name. When the Shazam backups began in the pages of Justice League, I outright loathed them. Rather than have a series of negative reviews, I decided to bide my time, and review the whole of the backups when it concluded. Now it has, and man I am glad I waited. Justice League #21 brings an end to the Shazam saga, and I find myself wanting more.

When we last left Shazam, he and Black Adam were in a standoff. Adam was demanding Billy give up the power of Shazam to save the lives of his foster family. The story picks up right there, and Shazam does the honorable thing and agrees. The tables are turned when Adam lets it be known they are connected like family. A light goes off in Billy’s thought processes and he does give up the power, but not in the way Adam would want…

This was a great moment. It evokes how the power was shared in the Pre-New 52 Flashpoint series, but more importantly, it makes the concept of the Marvel Family (I guess in this case, it’s the Shazam Family) even more central to the concept. The Shazammers proceed to dogpile on Black Adam, but experience wins as Adam is able to overcome the onslaught. When the seven deadly enemies of man (unleashed by Adam in a previous chapter) show up, Billy asks his newfound family to handle them (manifested in a demon reminiscent of classic Shazam villain Sabbac), while he takes down Adam himself.

The ensuing battles are great, and I’ll tell you why. The Shazam Family are truly heroic, cleaning damage, saving people, and get this, having fun doing it! I like my superhero antics on the bright side, and this is the first time in the new 52 that I’ve felt we’ve gotten this kind of dynamic, and I love it. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the interactions of the Shazam family are worth the cover price alone.

The climax of the battle has a lot of little nods to Marvel Family history. While not a humanoid tiger, Mt. Tawky Tawny gets a bit of screentime, and Black Adam’s defeat is straight out of his very first appearance. As the story winds down, we get two epilogues. One showing that new 52 Billy Batson may not be such an arrogant jerk of a kid after all, and another that sets up future stories with two classic villains. I absolutely cannot wait to see more Shazam stories in this continuity. Kudos to Geoff Johns for turning my expectations around, and major props to Gary Frank. His interpretations of the characters are full of personality, and I hope if there is an upcoming Shazam series, he gets to be the primary artist.

To be fair, I didn’t like everything about this issue. I still think calling the character “Shazam” is  wrong-headed. Even from a copyright standard, Shazam is now much more ubiquitous with the music app than it is with comics. Also, while the ending is intriguing, it’s almost exactly like the ending of the infamous failed post-Crisis re-imaging, Shazam: A New Beginning.

At any rate, I’m more excited about the future of these characters than I have been in years, and I am definitely going to pick this story up again if they decided to give it a dedicated collected edition!

Ania Solo and her friends have figured out there’s a Sith impersonating an Imperial Knight – but the impostor has caught up to them, in this week’s Star Wars comic: Legacy #4. (more…)

This week brings us a great kid-friendly digest-sized story from The Clone Wars, in which Obi-Wan learns a lesson as he tracks down an old foe during an R&R trip. (more…)

Darth Vader is on the trail of an ancient cult that has resurfaced in a plot to kill Palpatine, but is Vader the hunter or the hunted, in this week’s Star Wars comic? (more…)