Space Battleship Yamato

The movie starts, like all good space operas, in the silence of space. Blaster fire reflects off the eye of a lone pilot; the camera pulls back and we see she is part of a squadron; the camera pulls back more and we see an invasion of alien battleships against an Earth backdrop. Earth ships fire against the invaders, but their weapons are useless. The admiral sends a cruiser to attract enemy fire as he takes his flagship to safety.

The enemy are the Gamilas. They bombard Earth with meteors for reasons unknown, and now the surface of the Earth is radioactive and uninhabitable. The surviving remnants of humanity have retreated to caverns underground, and scientists expect humanity to become entirely extinct within a year. Scavengers roam the surface in pressure suits, looking for scrap metal to help the war effort. One such scavenger finds a mysterious glowing capsule.

The scavenger is Susumu Kodai, brother to the battleship captain sent to die in the opening. The message is from far-off Iscandar, and contains a schematic for a weapon (the wave motion gun), a star drive (the wave motion engine) and a location in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Humanity’s last hope is to build a ship — the Space Battleship Yamato — that can break the Gamilas blockade and bring help from Iscandar before Earth is lost and humanity entirely destroyed.

WARP!

The original Space Battleship Yamato ran for several years on Japanese TV in the 70s and in the US as Star Blazers in the 80s. Leiji Matumoto’s distinctive characters (tall, willowy women, boylike men with wild hair), themes (anachronistic future tech) and mature plots brought an intensity to animation viewers had rarely seen. Instead of the episodic cartoons until then, Yamato told a continuing story. Each episode counted down the number of days left to Earth. As the series progressed, the crew of the Yamato met the blue-skinned Gamilas and their leader, Desslar, personally or in battle many times, with each earning a grudging respect for the other.

Adapting such a well-known and complex story to the screen is a challenge. When M. Night Shyamalan tried to bring the three seasons of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” to the screen with 2010′s “The Last Airbender”, the heart and humor that informed the Avatar’s similar quest (defeat the Fire Nation before the coming of a comet made the Fire Nation omnipotent) was forgotten, leaving a lifeless mess with a poor, last-minute 3D conversion to darken the already muddy film.

“Space Battleship Yamato” never slows down. Plot and back story are filled in during the film’s few quiet moments, when it catches its breath between crises. Why does Susumu Kodai join the crew of the Yamato at the last moment, knowing its Captain Okita was the one who sent his brother to his death? Why is ace pilot Yuki Mori so angry with Kodai? All the questions eventually get answered.

Fans of the original Yamato will find a few changes. The blue-skinned Gamilas are now a sort of crystalline insectoid hive mind called Desla, and the relationship between Gamilas and Iscandar is closer even than that in the original. The sake-swilling dwarfish doctor in the original is now a woman (but still a sake lover). The sarcastic robot in the original is now an equally sarcastic PDA carried by Kodai — and he gets a bit of fan-service of his own near the end. Yuki Mori is now a pilot instead of bridge crew, but remains Kodai’s love interest. And a lot of people who are alive in the series… are dead, or die, in the movie.

By turning the Gamilas into a mainly off-screen presence and shortening the trip to Iscandar (what took eleven months in the anime apparently takes about a month in the movie), the movie keeps the urgency up and the focus on the main characters. The significantly different ending to the movie makes sequels based on the further adventures of the Yamato in the original series unlikely.

Kodai and Mori on the Yamato bridge

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s not easy to bring animation to live action without seeming a parody of the original, but Yamato lifts some scenes shot-for-shot from the original, including the costumes in many cases, without irony. Well, except for Captain Okita’s beard. I never did buy that.

It’s an epic adventure set in the post-Battlestar Galactica reboot age. There is loss. There is no certain outcome. Victory could still lead to defeat. Life might not go on. There are epic space battles, cool special effects, a meaningful romance, guilt, pain, respect and friendship.

It’s space opera. But, I like space opera, and I liked Space Battleship Yamato: The Movie.

The Yamato says goodbye to Earth

Related posts:

1. Gimme Some Space: Star Trek Online, Pirate Galaxy, Space Paranoids Klingon meets Breen. Breen goes boom. Star Trek Online’s launch...
2. EQ2: Why I Won’t Watch an EverQuest Movie I just heard the news that SOE might be considering...
3. EQ2: Is your Fae a SPACE ALIEN? Recent reports from the newly discovered Tower of Zet in...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Well, given the state of PvP as aptly described by The Friendly Necromancer, where endless reshuffles and easy access by everyone to the most powerful healing spell in the entire game combine to make duels extremely lengthy affairs, I’m not sure how Wizard 101′s Season 1 Arena will work out, but they’re going to be having a go at it.

Without the superior gear available as rewards from World of Warcraft’s arena battles, I’m not sure how many people will really want to do hours long duels (even the 2v2 I was doing with my balance wizard + random partners tended to last ages), but for good or ill, the promised arena battles and pvp ladders are coming today. The standings are by level and by overall success, and come with badges and rewards you can’t get any other way, so if you think you have a meaner killer instinct than your everyday, common, pig-zapping wizard, why not visit Diego in Unicorn Way and sign up?

Sean Emeraldweaver, a Wizard101 blogger from Alaska, wanted me to show his video advertisement for his blog, Automagic. Hey, I’m proud to write for Sean’s second favorite blog ;) It’s wonderful to see so many new W101 bloggers. The game definitely deserves more press!

Related posts:

1. Wizard 101 Arena Season 1 Given a games company founded by the developers of the...
2. Wizard 101: Killing me softly with your spells High level players gathered at the duel masters Wizard 101′s...
3. Wizard 101 slices repeat instance XP What with open grouping and a broad kid appeal, Wizard...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I scurried my way to visit a housing turtle as soon as I finished patching Wizard 101. I wanted to get started decorating my house as soon as I could, but which?

I’d been thinking about buying one of the Wizard City castles, but when I tried to decorate it one last time on the Test server, I found the outside difficult to work with. I talked it over with Kasul, and he convinced me to go with a Marleybone home.

He was right, of course. After all, the builder turtle for Marleybone was named by the people who read this blog! The very least I could do was give him my business!

Thomas came by to offer some decorating tips, and some friends of his popped in, and one of them had this fantastic idea to go do some 4v4 dueling. Off we went, and we were soon matched up against four identical wizards in Krokotopia garb. But though they were lower level, they were professional duelers and more than held their own in the battle, especially once Thomas’ friends took off leaving us, a Death and a Life wizard, hardly powerhouse damage casters by any means, holding the bag.

The other team had more than enough Rebirth treasure cards to slow the fight down, and of course I could match them Rebirth for Rebirth, so the fight couldn’t end until all of them ran out of mana eventually. After about half an hour of a pointless fight we never asked for, we excused ourselves and took off. Dueling? Nah, not any more. Rebirth has made 4v4 duels last forever.

There ARE some unique housing items available for duelists… so maybe someday.

I traveled the worlds of the Spiral looking for found or bought items. This is only the bare beginnings, I have a lot more stuff to find, but — here is my parlor. There’s a settee under the bay window that you can’t see, two overstuffed chairs in front of a roaring, candlelit fire, a piano and bench with the Life symbol above, and a bed upstairs.

This is my park. A maple tree dreams over a still pool, and a found jade column sits decoratively in the back.

My sorcery room. If I ever get the urge to return to Dragonspyre, I can sit and wait here until the feeling passes. I didn’t even know I HAD this little underground room until I found it, entirely by accident, while exploring. It’s my favorite room so far :)

Next time, I’ll be going from boss to boss seeing if they have anything for me, and I’ll probably bring Allison to double my chances.

I hope Kraysys drops something nice….

Related posts:

1. Wizard 101 Player Housing ON TEST! Welcome to my island! This was truly LATE breaking news!...
2. Wizard 101 unveils player housing! Hinted at by Quinn Hexthief a couple weeks back, KingsIsle...
3. Wizard 101: Housing goes LIVE Wednesday! We’ve word from Ravenwood that the newly-named Builder Turtles are...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Sadly, the writers for Star Trek Countdown don’t just use common SF tropes to tell their story, but ignore BASIC science. It is disgusting.

The set up: A star goes supernova unexpectedly, threatening the civilizations of known space.

Supernovas are deadly, deadly things. You don’t want one going off in your GALAXY, much less in a local system. A supernova in our stellar neighborhood, within a hundred or so light years, would cleanse every system of all life through sustained hard radiation, and possibly take other systems to death with it as new stars eventually form from its remnants.

But if a star a hundred light years went supernova, we wouldn’t know about it or feel any effects from it for — wait for it — one hundred years. We wouldn’t see the light from its explosion for a hundred years. If we had faster than light travel and witnessed its explosion from close by and then instantly traveled back and looked back at it, we would see what that star looked like a hundred years ago, fat and happy and non-explodey.

There’s also a question of volume. If you took our Sun and exploded it so that it swallowed up every bit of matter in the solar system, the Sun would be so diffuse that it would be hard to tell you were inside the star. It definitely couldn’t sustain fusion. It would just be a fairly small and easy to miss cloud of gas. Our Sun’s fate, by the way, is to eventually become a planetary nebula — a shell of gas with a white dwarf star at its core. We don’t get to become a supernova. But moving on –

Page 12, volume 1: Supernova defined as a star that increases its volume without losing density, enough to swallow nearby SYSTEMS. Um, no. Supernovas destroy nearby systems with hard radiation, not by expanding to swallow them up.

Page 17. Spock and Nero observe the supernova in real time through a common telescope. No. Your ships may travel faster than light, but light only travels at the speed of light — that’s why it’s CALLED the speed of light.

Page 49. The distant star’s surface expands enough to touch and destroy Romulus.

Thought experiment. Let’s say you have one pea. This is your galaxy-killing star. You have a pea-inflating machine which can blow the pea up to any size, but without adding anything into it as it expands with one exception: If, while expanding, it comes across any other pea, then it can add that pea to its mass. A pea plant, cans of peas in a store, pea soup, all our fair game. It can take as many peas as it can get, but only peas.

Question is, will this giant, but incredibly diffuse, pea be any danger to a city a hundred miles away?

The eventual solution the good guys come up with is to trigger the supernova into becoming a black hole, which will suck all the evil supernova stuff into it but won’t suck anything else in. Also, apparently, all the hard radiation which is the real killer. Their magic bullet — and that’s what it is, by the way, a small bottle of something called Red Matter which turns supernovas into black holes — turns the ex-star into a pit of blackness which will tear apart and swallow any matter in the universe that should orbit too close to its event horizon, except star ships, which can pass through safely. Matter-ripping singularity in space for most, but a portal to — wherever? The movie will show us — for star ships.

I dunno. I’m sure it will be a fun movie, but do science fiction movies really need to show such contempt for science? Would it have killed them to have taken the basic effort to actually have SOME real science in the movie?

Of the towering science fiction franchises in the last fifty years, Star Wars and Star Trek, we didn’t expect science in Star Wars. It’s a space opera, it was always meant to be an adventure story with magic and wizards. But Star Trek? The show that had Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Theodore Sturgeon and many other respected names for episode writers? The show that at least nodded now and again in science’s direction?

Gone.

Related posts:

1. MMO: Science Fiction MMO Outline #1 — “Book of Days” Inspired by Wilhelm and Potshot, who both see the barriers...
2. Star Trek Online: Taking Command I made Captain in Star Trek Online tonight; that’s level...
3. Star Trek Online Perpetual’s real challenge with Star Trek Online will be making...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I couldn’t be more thrilled! If my blog works correctly, you should see a post with the contest details appear magically at around 11AM EST. The contest will run for ten days, so you have plenty of time, but get your votes in early :) Everyone who chooses the eventual winning name gets a prize, and the first one to send in the name that eventually gets chosen gets something even cooler!

Must be something in the air, because suddenly, everyone is talking about — FONTS. Yesterday, Todd Klein told us about the dangers of using Microsoft’s Comic Sans MS font face, today, Bryzon at Bryzon’s Blurbs points at some videos of cartoons translated to animated text, and science fiction problog io9 takes us through a baker’s dozen fonts for alien languages.

Words are GOOD. MBP over at Mind Bending Puzzles wonders if today’s kids could get excited about the sort of text adventures we all used to play in the 80s — and finds that they can!

Russian-American mathematician Tanya Khovanova examines how the major prizes in the field of mathematics are stacked against woman. Tanya’s blog is an inspiration and often quite a lot of fun besides.

Syp over at Bio Break, whose every post I love, has a theory why gamers just don’t pick a MMO and stick with it! Seven theories, in fact. Beau at Spouse Aggro wonders if it’s just because we’re really bored. TERMINALLY bored.

That’s it for today. Check back later and enter the W101 contest — turtle isn’t going to name itself!

Related posts:

1. Wizard 101 Comic Contest Isaiah Spelldust of Defenders of the Spiral is having a...
2. Wizard101: HOUSE-A-PALOOZA CONTEST! THE CONTEST HAS ENDED! SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE...
3. EQ2 Expansion Watch Contest Here’s the contest (no prize except everlasting eternal fame… you...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If you don”t watch The Middleman, you should. And if you DO watch, but via torrent or something, well, watch it on TV (I do, now), or watch it online — ABC Family streams each show after it airs, and people watching via the web in that way definitely support the show.

It’s way better to support these shows while they are still on the air, than to discover them on DVD years later and ask, plaintively, why they don’t make shows like THAT anymore! Just what I have to say about Firefly…

Related posts:

1. The Middleblog Just discovered the blog of Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator, writer...
2. Jericho, Lost, American Idol and my first DoG raid on EQ2 You can get a sense for how popular a show...
3. LotRO: Save a horse, ride a hobbit! Oh, this isn’t a real post. Just was so happy...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day.

This leads into the song “Freeze Ray”, about a gun he wants to invent that will freeze time, so it would be easier to talk to her. He’s interrupted by his friend Moist, who has the power to make stuff damp. He’d been on a date last night with the super-villainess Bait and Switch. At the end of the night, he’d been hoping to go home with Bait, but… oh well.

Among the sopping wet pieces of mail he delivers is a letter from Bad Horse, the evil equine leader of the Evil Society of Evil, which leads right into the song, “Bad Horse” (and where did those cowboys with the painfully fake mustaches come from?).

The thing is hilarious. It’s short, has four fantastically funny songs (the other two are the one Penny sings as she tries to get signatures on her petition to convert an old building to a homeless center, and the song that ends in a three-part harmony between Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, and Penny, “A Man’s Gotta Do”).

I won’t spoil anything — but watch it. There will be two other “webisodes”, and even though all three together will likely be only half an hour — I’d buy the DVD.

edit — link to Joss Whedon’s post about Dr. Horrible, how it came to be, and what will become of it. Next episode is up THURSDAY and after July 20 they will no longer be free to watch, though it’s well worth paying.

Related posts:

1. EVE Online: Do you hear the people sing? It’s been awhile since I’ve written about EVE Online; it’s...
2. Why I Blog From a comment on Tobold’s excellent post about the tank...
3. Skinning my Blog I finally got sick of the default skin for this...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I mean, I just can’t believe where you (not you, those other people) get off always telling me TV is crap. Every single season I have to come back and say, look at this, this, and this. Now my preggers (but not for long) sister has just revealed she has just started getting into Battlestar Galactica. Welcome to three years ago, Hillary :) Finally, though!

So anyway. The Middleman. You’ll love it. You overseas people, it’s just now starting to hit the torrents.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I have two guitar controllers for the Xbox 360 and two more for the PS2. My desire to invest in more guitar controllers is precisely zero.

And yet, I wanted to find a game to play for my PS3. It’s great for watching Doctor Who on the big screen (“The Stolen Earth” — AMAZING.) but I feel really frustrated that I haven’t been able to find even one game for the PS3 worth the $60.

I thought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith would be the one. But it wasn’t for sale when I went. I played the Guitar Hero demo system they had set up near the Aerosmith display, thinking it was a preview for the new game. I realized, though, as I worked through the set list, that this was Guitar Hero III, a game I’d played through once on the PS2, but was so turned off by the awful boss battles that I never played it again.

I went home, plugged the PS*2* in, and played Guitar Hero III again. I was AWFUL. Absolutely HORRID.

What followed was at least an hour or two of calibrating the game for the new widescreen TV. Ahhhhh…. I could play again.

I mean, when you can’t even hit the notes at the very slowest speed in practice mode — it’s not you.

Anyway, I wanted the game for the PS3, but it’s the exact same game as for the PS2, and I already have the controllers for the PS2 (and they remain my favorite of all the controllers). The picture was a little fuzzy but the music was just as loud.

I WANT to believe. I WANT to believe that the $400 lump of metal and plastic beneath my TV is worth more than just a REALLY GOOD media controller to someone who isn’t into shooters and war games. (PS3 fans go WTF? What other kinds of games ARE there?).

My search for a game that I can show people that will justify the PS3 continues.

Related posts:

1. Rock Band 2 announced We knew it was coming, and it’s here. Rock Band...
2. GH2: Bonding Andrew finished Guitar Hero 2 on Medium before I finished...
3. I Wanna Be a Guitar Hero Note: I just found out that it sucks to be...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Matter by Iain M. Banks — Banks’ returns to his much-anticipated stories of people at the fringes of his Utopian spacefaring civilization, The Culture. In the Culture, all boring work is down by non-sentient machines, the intelligent machines and human-kinda people basically do what they want and live in gigantic spaceships or massive orbital stations, and are really kind of boring. Since it’s no fun being part of the Culture if you can’t fiddle with other less advanced civilizations, the Culture stories almost entirely focus on the Special Circumstances crew; those who have a taste for harsh living and interference.

It’s a good thing they do, because what’s happening in the local Shellworld could mean bad juju for the entire galaxy. Shellworlds are gigantic artificial planets built as a series of nested spheres by an ancient civilization that had surrounded the galaxy with them back in the day. Their original purpose was unknowable, but since they all left, and the civilizations of the galaxies beat back the other aliens who were systematically destroying the Shellworlds, colonists have arrived now and again to start new lives amidst massive alien tech.

Matter starts us out in the middle of a war between two feudal societies both pulled into the Industrial Revolution by covert alien influence. Level 8 of the Shellworld attacks Level 9. Betrayals, intrigue, flights, a trip into the vastnesses of many alien civilizations (including eventually the Culture), the invasion of Level 8 by Level 9 in retribution, a massive waterfall slowly wearing away the cliff that covers an ancient alien city, a princess sold to (assumed) slavery in the Culture, a prince deposed… Matter splatters bits of color all over the canvas to begin, and by the time its filled in the rest of the painting, you’ve read galaxy-spanning space opera at its finest. I would recommend Matter as a good introduction to Iain M. Banks’ science fiction.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson — Here’s when I fell in love with this book.

The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.

And it all moved.

Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. “So alive,” Diane said.

One night, the stars quietly went dark. Every satellite in the sky came crashing to Earth. People panicked. The Earth was veiled by an opaque field they came to call The Spin, and it wasn’t just making astronomy impossible, it was pulling the Earth into the future; a million years outside the Spin were a single year on Earth. Hardly anyone believed this until an ill-considered nuke strike against one of the orbiting structures thought to be responsible for the Spin dropped the veil slightly for awhile, and the effects of accelerated time were all around.

The rapidly aging Sun making life on Earth unprotected by the Spin increasingly impossible. The people of Earth plot a desperate plan to use the passage of time itself to save them from an inevitable death in the corona of the expanding Sun and to find out just how and why they were abducted by the Spin at all.

SF is full of stories about unknowably advanced aliens who put a shield around the planet to protect us from the galaxy, the galaxy from us, punishment, judgement, as an incubator — whatever. It’s a common trope. What sets The Spin apart is Wilson’s incredibly apt portrayal of how life can continue on a world where something incredible has taken place… and yet people still have to work and eat, taxes must be paid. The story of life under the Spin is interwoven with a tale of life after it; both tales give clues about the other in an indirect way that doesn’t spoil many surprises. The eventual reveal of the Spin’s purpose is telegraphed far enough in advance that we needn’t wonder too much how the book will turn out; what’s important about the Spin is not its end, but the journey there.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — I loved Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as much as anyone when I was a kid. Remove the libertarian politics and add more sex, and you have Old Man’s War.

In the future, Earth has colonized the stars. But it’s a busy place out there, and nothing is given for free. We have to fight for places to live, fight to keep them, and fight in revenge when they are taken from us. Life in the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) is brutal, and usually short. They need lots of willing recruits who are glad of whatever extra time they get to defend the colonies. And they get them in the senior centers of good old Earth. For a promise of renewed youth, the elderly of Earth are sent out to fight and die for the colonies. A writer and his wife sign up for the CDF when they are 65; if they make it to 75, they are allowed to ship out. He makes it, she doesn’t. From there we follow Rico’s career is a space marine, dropping onto strange planets to kill what they need to kill, trying not to be killed, and watching the idiots who don’t follow order die, and good friends who did, also die. Can an old man in the body of a twenty year old find love among the stars and also stay alive long enough to enjoy it? It could happen. If you loved Starship Troopers for its tales of brave soldiers fighting every description of homicidal alien, you’ll enjoy this acknowledged homage to that classic of SF.

—

Tor keeps sending books to me and I have to keep putting them on my Reader. I found a site that publishes classic SF works that have fallen out of copyright in electronic form, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Cory Doctorow just posted his latest work, Little Brother, about a group of teens who use brilliance and technology to throw off the creeping Big Brother-ism that is engulfing the US and Britain, and I’ll be giving that a glance as well.

Currently finishing up Julian May’s The Golden Torc just for fun.

Related posts:

1. Stardust Mini-review Magical, funny… a great film. If you liked Princess Bride,...
2. Book reviews… I promised Hillary that I’d occasionally post about the stuff...
3. Adventures in Monopoly: Bear reviews Chess Also, “Sorry” is short for “Sorry I’m not playing Parcheesi”...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.