JW: Motion comics part 3 - Dec 13

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 4^th 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 20^th 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.

JW: Motion comics part 2 - Dec 7

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. The American government, true, seems to be putting their own spin on it with the impeachment that is authentically impotent; the best you can hope is that Pelosi never implemented it but for the plan that it will keep the Democratic party from turning upon each other and fracturing instead, but won’t know for quite a while yet. On with the show?

Rather, with the ‘motion comic’ – recently the JW franchise released the second installment of its’ motion comic. In it, we meet the rest of the journalist’s family – we are talking the same woman from part 1 – Rebecca Ryan – and learn that her husband, in particular, is working in the U.S. Wildlife department. What is so special about that? This is a good question, because as far as character development aspects of this motion comic go, they are weak. So far, this motion comic is an exposition dump, showing various interactions of humans with dinosaurs, sea reptiles and pterosaurs – nothing more. It is a variant on the closing scenes of both the second JW film and the BBR short feature – humans are interacting with the returned prehistoric beasts of the Mesozoic and so far, there is a national alert and what else have you. The mother of the family – Rebecca seems to be sceptical of this whole hysteria for some reason, but we never see it in this installment, because it focused on the still-nameless father of the family, and he encounters a couple of fighting dinosaurs on his own. (The rest of his family is elsewhere, on the route to school or wherever). I.e., it is less of an exposition dump and more of a shock-and-awe dump instead. Yay!

Ok, let us talk about dinosaurs. So far, from BBR onwards, humans are little more than cardboard features: the family in BBR did not even have names; as I said before, the cast certainly has names and you could see them in the credits, but the characters – nope. The first installment of the motion comic actually had named human characters – Rebecca Ryan, the journalist mother of the family – and Beau, the newspaperman from Hawaii – but here no go. That is somewhat weak and dehumanizing, so let us try to focus on dinosaurs instead. The news showed us a pteranodon harassing an airplane, (probably because it never seen one before back in Isla Nublar), a pack of compys’ running around someone’s backyard, and a pair of boy scouts encountering a stegosaurus. Again, we have seen variations of these encounters all over the franchise, so let us go for the main event: Mr. Ryan’s encounter with the battling dinos. There are two of them: a Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus, and-

And Ankylosaurus is depicted incorrectly. Sigh. Since there are no professional paleontologists in our audience, let us just go with the statement that there were two main groups of armored dinosaurs: the Jurassic stegosaurs and the Cretaceous ankylosaurs. Clear? If it is, let us move onto the team Cretaceous in particular. It was also divided into two main groups: one that had clubbed tails and one that does not.

Back in 1999, Impossible Pictures™ released the ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ mini-series. The final episode featured an Ankylosaurus – several of them. It had a tail club, and its’ scuted armor was relatively smooth, almost like that of an armadillo, for example. However, in the fourth episode of WWD, there was another dinosaur – Polacanthus – that was more closely related to Ankylosaurus than to Stegosaurus, but it had no tail club, and its body armor was much less smooth and spikier. It belonged to the nodosaur branch of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs.

Yes, actually, the Polacanthus is a bad example of a nodosaur – the nodosaur branch of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs were studied, and are known, much less than their ankylosaur cousins were, but basically? Ankylosaurs had tail clubs and small spikes on their body armor, if any. Nodosaurs had no tail clubs, but their body armor was much more formidable looking. The armored dinosaur that featured in JW’s second motion comic had both notable body spikes and a tail club, making it a chimera.

Pause. Yes, Dr. Wu admitted directly in the first JW film that none of their dinosaurs were authentic; they were homunculi, concocted in the labs by Dr. Wu and his fellows. That is fair, but it also rather undercuts JW’s intended messages – that life finds a way and that people now have to co-exist with the Mesozoic animals. They do not and it does not. Since all of the dinosaurs were initially created in labs, they could have been made incapable of surviving on their own in the wild – in fact, the first JP novel made them so, supposedly: they were incapable of manifesting Lysol and had to take it as a dietary supplement instead. The novel ended with Costa Rica possibly being invaded by a force of animals that needed supply of foods rich in Lysol – beans and chickens – but which were quite independent of surviving on their regardless. Of course, they were raptors too – but we digress. The point is that the rebooted JW franchise could’ve made its’ dinosaurs like this within its’ canon – artificial homunculi that gained independence of their own and which now run amok like a bunch of Frankenstein monsters… period. Instead, we still got a horde of artificial dinosaur-shaped homunculi running the world and no one is acknowledging it.

Is this distinction important? Yes, even though it really should not. The truth is, test-tube animals are still seen as inauthentic, especially within sci-fi genre, and are treated very differently from ‘authentic’ or ‘real life’ animals. TLK, for example, is not a sci-fi movie, even though it features talking animals, for example. The online game ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ actually features official hybrid dinosaurs, made by Dr. Wu, so artificial dinosaurs are JW canon even beyond the I-Rex and the Indoraptor, so why haven’t the American military and/or government try to use someone like Dr. Wu to create some sort of a virus that would target those ‘artificial’ dinosaurs, (all of them, really) and rid the world of them?

…Yes, this probably will not happen – wherever the JW-3 movie will take the narrative for the conclusion, this will not be this, most likely, and for good reasons: artificial viruses are bad. Natural viruses are not much better, but still. That said, given how stupid the American government (and its’ military) are running USA in real life, it would not be too surprising either if they were to make or to do something just as stupid in the upcoming JW-3 movie, (2021). As it is, we will just have to wait for both its’ release and the release of the next JW motion comic installments. Considering that right now we got human characters that are as developed as cardboard cut-outs and dinosaurs that are completely unrealistic, (come on, Ankylosaurus is not obscure, it is almost as well known as the Tricerotops and the T-Rex are), and are executing something that seems to be somewhat reminiscent of 'The Day that the Dinosaurs Died' documentary from the Discovery channel (2010), I'm not keeping my hopes are. ('The Day' has its own flaws, but we'll talk about it some other time).

This is it for now. See you all soon!

P:NW, ep 1x01 - Oct 29

Last night I watched the first episode of Primeval: New World and so far I am of a more or less ambiguous attitude towards it.

First, the good. The technology/CGI side of the show was done very well, as always. IP always knew how to create realistic images of prehistoric/imaginary beasts, etc. As computer creations, the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and anything else that the new team will encounter will be top notch.

The team itself, however, is something else. Basically, P:NW scriptwriters took the concept of the last season of "Primeval" – a six-person team and run with it. Connor Temple, the only character of the previous show to appear on P:NW up-to-date may be taking the role of Lester, or perhaps a senior team member who'll keep all the youngsters in check. And speaking of Connor, I admit that he has grown noticeably more competent than before and also sneakier – I'm not so sure that I like it. He also may be the ARC agent who had saved Evan from a dinosaur attack in the past, dying in the process, but until there is more information about that event, I'm not drawing any specific conclusions.

What about the new characters? As I said before, they have begun to form a 6-person team, just as in the last season of "Primeval", and Evan Cross, in particular, appears to be a younger version of Philip from the last season of "Primeval" as well, or at least that's how Connor sees him. In reality, Evan is probably more like Tony Stark (aka the Iron Man of Marvel comics©), an eccentric millionaire/inventor, who is also a superhero and a man of action. Just like so many other comic heroes, he is driven by his past, when a carnivorous dinosaur ate his wife when Evan and her snuck into a building and found a time anomaly. (More about the dinosaur later.)

If Evan is Tony, then Angelika Finch is Pepper Potts: she's the CFO of Evan's company, and is somewhat of a big sister to him, too: she keeps Evan grounded when he appears to be carried away – just as Pepper did with Tony, though with a slightly higher level of success. When in the beginning of the premier Evan tries to use Mac Randall to get away from a meeting with Angelika (Ange) – that was definitely a sibling interaction, sort of.

Angelika is also something of a neat freak, I suspect, and that is why she's going to be paired up with Lt. Ken Leeds – a Mulder-like character, who may be great at researching, but also really likes his things messy: maybe it drives his creative urges or something like that. His character didn't have much screen time in the first episode: so far he appears to be a tie to the Canadian government for Ange and Evan, and nothing more. He also has a big file on Evan and his company, Cross Photonics, so he may end up being Nick Fury (or at least agent Coulson) to Evan's Stark.

If Angelika is being paired with Lt. Leeds, then Evan is paired with Dylan Weir, an environmental activist and a police officer of some sort. The scene when Dylan and Evan fall through the time anomaly into the Cretaceous, and Dylan ends up on top of Evan (Dylan is a woman, though her name is manly – couldn't they go with Sarah, or Tanya, or something like that?), is pretty straightforward: Dylan is going to help Evan get over the loss of his wife (killed in part by his recklessness, BTW), and probably end up the next Mrs. Cross, though IP shows aren't big on weddings, I should note.

I also note that Dylan appears to be more laid back and accepting than Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis was: she just accepted that there are radiomagnetic time anomalies in their uni-verse/dimension and went with the flow. Well, I don't see why not.

The last two main characters are Toby Nance (another woman with a manly name) and Mac Rendell. Mac Rendell is a daredevil and Evan's right-hand man: sort of a cross between Stephen Hart and Matt Anderson, I suppose. Toby is more like Jess, save that she isn't anywhere as fashion-conscious: guess the show's scriptwriters did their best of trying to differentiate P:NW's characters from their predecessors.

Sadly, that is probably P:NW's weakest part – the script. The actors, let's say it now, did a good job of sounding out their characters and to make them look real. The characters themselves are flat, though: Evan was the only one who's got some sort of a personal story behind him so far – probably because he's the central character (Buffy to Connor's Angel, if you would), and a personal story for the central character is a must. The rest of the P:NW characters (the supporting cast) have to go without it.

The second script flaw is the lack of a villain. "Primeval" had plenty of villains: Oliver Leek, Christine Johnson, Ethan Dombrowski, Philip Burton, and, of course, Helen Cutter made formidable opponents to the original ARC team. Because, let's be fair, modern humans, especially on their home turf (the 21st century) can outthink and outmaneuver any dinosaur or other prehistoric reptile, if given enough time. P:NW cast really needs a human opponent to test their mettle; otherwise the show will remain inferior to its predecessor.

Finally, there's the scientific angle, or rather – the lack of it. Ever since IP parted from BBC, it was steadily moving away from pseudo-documentaries ("Walking with" series) to true drama ("Primeval", P:NW, "Sinbad"). That said, they can still create more documentary-like shows, like "March of the Dinosaurs" (2011) movie, but they clearly are moving into more fictive shows instead. Maybe BBC, Discovery Channel, etc., are squeezing them out of the documentary niche, who knows?

That said, the lack of paleontological knowledge in P:NW is glaring. Pteranodon is depicted as man-eating bird of prey, literally: it has killed at least one person before it died. There were carnivorous and semi-terrestrial pterosaurs by the end of the Cretaceous, the azhdarchids, like Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx, but Pteranodon belongs to a different family, the pteradontids, and it behaved more like a gull or a pelican, hunting for fish in the inland seas. Considering that IP was working with Pteranodon for a long time, since 2002 in "Chased by the Dinosaurs", they clearly know this, so why did they make it into a monster? If they needed a killer bird, why not use a teratorn instead? (Basically, a giant condor from the Ice Age.) Now that would be a giant bird of prey – literally and figuratively.

Then, the raptors. Evan calls them Utahraptors, but IP had problems with their identity from the time of "Primeval": influenced by the Jurassic Park movie franchise, their raptors are just generic sickle-clawed dinosaurs without any allegiance to any specific dromaeosaurid species; here the problem is that Utahraptor lived and died out just before Pteranodon appears on Earth, so they couldn't co-exist. Either that, or P:NW is doing something new with the time anomalies, which is another possibility.

Finally, the big dinosaur that ate Evan's wife, Albertosaurus (as identified on the official site). A smaller, more gracile relative of the T-Rex, Albertosaurus appeared several times in IP productions, but this version is mostly based on the aforementioned "March of the Dinosaurs" movie, except that it lacks feathers ("March" therapods were all feathered instead), and has one of its front claws bitten off. Odds that it will be P:NW's "villain" for this season at least quite good, since Albertosaurus had plenty of strength and speed, a nasty disposition and a decent amount of intelligence. If so, then P:NW can quickly devolve to a "man vs. beast" kind of a plot, and its characters lack "Moby Dick's" complexity to accomplish that sufficiently well to keep P:NW afloat for consecutive seasons. (Most of IP series, not counting "Primeval", are one-season hits.)

So. Good CGI and technology, decent actors and a flawed script. Right now, P:NW can go anywhere, and I will eagerly look over its journey.