Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so sometimes when
you go online and find a really great story that helps you get through the day –
then you are quite lucky. And sometimes you go online and see the next installment
of JW’s online motion comic, and that is something else. So, let us talk about
it.
…Well, first let us make a shout-out to Netflix’s upcoming ‘The
Witcher’ series. It is shaping up to be the next GoT series and rightly so,
because it’s author, Mr. Sapkowski, had written the original ‘Witcher’ as a
series of books, not unlike Martin’s ASOIAF series, but with some differences:
for one thing, the first book (or two) of ‘Witcher’ are more like series of
stories and novellas rather than proper novels. For another – Sapkowski has
actually finished his ‘Witcher’ series, while Martin’s ASOIAF, (which separate
from HBO’s GoT, FYI), remain unfinished, for all sorts of reasons, but still
unfinished.
…Will I be watching Netflix’s version of ‘Witcher’? Having
actually read the original novels, I’ll probably pass – yes, the goal isn’t
unlike that of Martin’s ASOIAF, or the ‘Jupiter Ascending’ film that’d come up
to the movie screens few years before now, (i.e. before 2019) – it’s a space/fantasy
opera, full of swords and sorceries and politics and plots. There are actual
monsters – ghouls, vampires, sirens/mermaids, etc. There are dwarves and gnomes
and elves. It is everything that a fantasy fan wants, but you can only read the
entire series once before having enough – it will stoke the fires of your inner
fan for months to come. That said, I want to point out that the word ‘Witcher’ is
nonsense: Sapkowski’s own word for it is ‘wiedzsmin’ or something similar, (I
don’t know the Polish language all that well), which roughly means ‘man-witch’
or ‘witch of a male gender’ in other languages, and in English language
specifically, there are several words that also have similar meanings, words
such as ‘sorcerer’ and ‘warlock’; J-Ro has actually used the latter in her ‘Tales
of Beedle the Bard’ story anthology, remember? …Probably not, since between ‘the
Cursed Child’ and the current Newt Scamander series J-Ro has really muddled her
own fandom, but it is there. Why did the English language adaptations of
Sapkowski’s series had to create the word ‘Witcher’ and the good old ‘warlock’ could
not serve is anyone’s guess. Human logic is one of those reasons as to why real
life sucks.
And why does real life suck in this instance? For personal
reasons – sometimes your life just changes for the worse and you cannot do
anything about it, no matter how much you struggle to figure out a way out –
but we digress. In other news, Weinstein – Harvey Weinstein – paid 25 million
to get the charges dropped and be a free man – so much for #MeToo, put
otherwise.
Listen. Back in 2016+, the whole damn process was supposedly
precisely aimed at this sort of thing – for men in power not to be able to buy
their way out of their crimes… but this is exactly what Weinstein seems to be
achieving… so it all comes back to money. Not surprising – post Cold War, the
U.S. philosophy was increasingly dominated by capitalism and it was all about
the money, so now that the country is trying to distance itself from the
all-mighty dollar – it does not work. It does not work for several reasons, including
the one that is that from the 1990s onwards the U.S. increasingly tried to be a
utopia and it failed for all sorts of other reasons, but regardless, money and
the money cult do not make things any better either. ‘Frozen 2’ is a typical
example of that… but we have talked about this movie already. Let us try to
talk about the latest installment of JW’s motion comic, as we promised.
…Okay, here we got no money or philosophy, but a direct
continuation of the first two parts; it even features Rebecca Ryan the news’
anchor and her nameless husband as well more new characters. Two of those
characters are zoo workers – an Afro-American woman named Rachel, (yes, JW
seems to have a problem with names that start with the letter R for some reason)
and her Anglo-American co-worker, (of male gender), while the third is a
journalist reporting to Rebecca, named Julie. Again, by utilizing the motion
comic format, JW avoids from giving any characterization to any of its’ human
characters at all, and as for the non-human characters…
…As for the non-human characters, this week’s motion comic
featured that good old favorite, Rexy the T-Rex. Here, the motion comic picked
up where the last JW film ended, (among other things): Rexy confronted Leo the
lion at a zoo, and here we get to see what happened next. Nothing much, sadly:
Rexy and Leo roared at each other some, and then human-piloted helicopters
arrived and led Rexy off into some ravine. Kind of a letdown, especially since
Leo was not backing down from a fight: the keepers may have been able to take
wives and cubs to safety, but not him, as you can see in the motion comic.
Maybe in the future installment he and Rexy will be able to have their final
face-off? That would not be bad, especially since the actual franchise was
never against blood and death, until now…
…Here I am talking about the pteranodon. The motion comic
itself is confused as to how to call them: it calls them both ‘pteranodon’ (as
a plural) and ‘pteranodons’ (ditto) within a couple of sentences, so let’s call
them pterosaurs instead. In the motion comic, Rebecca wonders if they’re the
same pterosaurs that were seen at lake Mead, and then one of them picks up some
random guy off the street and drops him into a fountain, (so the shmuck
probably survives this fall), and that’s problematic on so many levels.
Firstly, the lake. In the U.S., there is a lake Meade, which is located in Pennsylvania,
and is not a lake, but an ‘unincorporated census-designated place’, whatever
that means in normal English, and second, there is a Lake Mead, which is a lake,
albeit an artificial one, which lies on the Colorado River. Which one was
talked about in the motion comic is anyone’s guess.
Next, the pterosaurs themselves. The truth is that Crichton
never wrote about pteranodons – his pterosaur species was the Cearodactylus, a
flying reptile that looked more like the ornithocheirus from the 4th
episode of ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ (1999) – no horn on the head, and the jaws
aren’t a toothless beak, but have teeth that function like a fish trap and a
keel-like ridge as well. Why the franchise decided to replace them with the
pteranodons onwards from ‘The Lost World’ film if not from the original JP one –
is anyone’s guess, but by now the pteranodon are firmly a part of the JP
franchise. Live with it.
…Living with the fact that the entire JP franchise, starting
from the already mentioned ‘Lost World’ film depicted its pterosaurs bipedal like
birds at least some of the time is harder. People know that on the ground pterosaurs moved on all fours like bats
rather than just on their hind legs as birds do: just look at Hatzegopteryx in
the final episode of ‘Planet Dinosaur’ (2011): the show showed scientific proof
that on the ground those aerial monsters moved on all fours. So why are JP
pterosaurs bipedal? Let us blame Dr. Wu, I guess.
Finally, the matter of size. Pteranodon was one of the bigger pterosaurs back in the 20th
century, (maybe even the biggest back
then), but now Quatzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx shadow it: Pteranodon has only
a 9-m wingspan; theirs was much bigger and they were even larger than the
pteranodon was. So how did this flying reptile became so much larger than a
human as shown in this motion comic, (not in any of the movies, mind)? Again, it
is probably the fault of good doctor, so let us move on to the final part of
this discussion:
I.e. on one hand, this motion comic is not so bad, the plot
is fairly straightforward and the characters are consistent. On the other, the
plot is also unsatisfying and tries to have it both ways: there are scary
monsters, (I am sorry, but a T-Rex is certainly a monster, albeit a real life
one), but also – that no one gets hurt.
Yes, this is the sort of ambiguity that has haunted the
Western movies lately, ever since Rose Tico mentioned about defeating the First
Order with love, not with violence. This is not how it works; this is not how
it worked in the original trilogy, it was more of a ‘speak softly but stand-up for
your principles’ instead, so Rosie, you got it all wrong. Still, the SW9 film is almost upon us, so it will be
interesting to see as to how team Resistance co. defeats Palpatine and etc. Real
life may suck, but often there are movies (and the like) to carry us through…
This is it for now, however – see you all soon.
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