You Don't Have To Camp Around

Went to see the latest Harry Potter film in the cinema the other day. It was bloody freezing. The cinema, I mean. Cineworld at West India Quay. It’s normally pretty good – much better than the apocalyptic Greenwich Odeon, where you never have to pay to see a film because you’re always being given vouchers as an apology for the standard of the last film you watched there. Honestly, seeing Wall-E with tramlines skittering across the screen like it’s the Keystone Cops, that’s irony.

Anyway, HP7. Good points; the first half-hour or so, it hits the ground running, and all the leads gave decent performances. Bad points; well, to begin with, Helen Bonham-Carter was incomprehensible, again, and Rhys Ifans, who you’d think would be ideal casting for a bohemian hippy, underplays the part so much that he just comes across as mildly bored by the whole Voldemort thing. Bill Nighy is also weirdly twitchy. But the first half-hour, all the stuff in London, all the stuff in the Ministry of Magic, is lots of fun.

The main problem, though, is that after that first half-hour, from the moment they put up that bloody tent, the film loses momentum and inexorably grinds to a halt. The next, what, two hours consist of maybe fifteen minutes of exposition, fifteen minutes of plot development, and about one and a half hours of rugged scenery. Honestly, it was like watching a cross between Highway and A Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party. At any moment I was expecting to see Pete Postlethwaite striding across the moors talking about winter fuel payments.

And it’s all coincidences. Harry just happens to find himself in the right part of the New Forest where a magic sword is hidden in an icy pool. Hermione just happens to spot a symbol on a gravestone. It’s aimless and frustrating. They materialize right next to where some Death Eaters (I think) are hanging out. They wander into the Ministry and end up finding the Horcrux amulet by accident. I realise this is a fault with the book, yes, but this was an opportunity to fix all that. None of these coincidences have to be so for plot reasons; look at the third and fourth films, which sort-out and boil-down the plots of those books beautifully and economically. But with HP7, I was mentally script-editing it as we went along – for something to do while watching it, more than anything else – “Oh, we could have come into this scene three lines later, and we really should have left it by now.” “This scene hasn’t developed plot, theme or character, no-one would miss it if it was gone.” Some scenes are just painfully slow, laboured where they need to be building pace.

One last example. About an hour and a half into the film, Ron wanders off. Half an hour later, it will come as very little surprise that he comes back again. In between those two points, absolutely sod all happens. Really. Sod all. You could have gone away, had some chips, read the paper, and come back and not missed a single story beat. There might be some confusion as to whether are heroes are searching for Horcruxes or Deathly Hallows, but nowhere near as much confusion as if you’d stayed actually watching the film.

And the ending. It ends on, hang on I’ll check – page 389 of the book. It’s not a completely arbitrary place to stop, but it comes after yet-another-escape, not a particularly exciting or important one – Dobby turns up to free Harry Potter, raising the question of why the bloody hell he never bothered to do that before in this film or any of the preceding 4 – and the whole you-know-bit is thrown away - like so much of the story, it happens off-screen. I was hoping this film would open the book up a bit more – because unlike the books, the films have never restricted themselves to only showing scenes featuring Harry – and show us some of the exciting stuff going on elsewhere while our heroes are working their way through locations from one of those shows where Alan Titchmarsh stands on hills and talks about Wordsworth.

Oh. And I haven’t even mentioned the vision with Harry and Hermione snogging in the nude. It was greeted with embarrassed laughter, I’m afraid. Watching it, I cringed from both ends at once. It just felt cheap and gratuitous, and even if you look really, really closely, you don’t get to see anything at all.

The Future Is Now

Just finished Last And First Men by Olaf Stapledon. It’s a ‘SF Masterwork’. I can’t remember why I wanted to read it, I must’ve read about it on Wikipedia and been intrigued.

First published back in 1930, Last And First Men not only pre-empted HG Wells The Shape Of Things To Come but exceeds it vastly in terms of scope. It is based around a similar conceit; that the author is acting as a conduit for a telepathic broadcast sent back through time from the distant future, and that the resulting book is not so much a novel as a fictitious history of events yet to take place. It starts in the present-day (i.e. 1930) and proceeds to cover the events of the next 2,000,000,000 years. It starts off quite detailed and sedate, but accelerates exponentially until, by the end, it’s covering the events of millions of years in a couple of sentences.

The book’s modern introduction quite cheekily suggests that readers should skip the first five chapters as they are dated and repetitive, which is true, but I think dismissing these sort of novels because they didn’t get the immediate future exactly right is missing the point slightly. What matters is not so much how much they got wrong, but what they get right, and Last And First Men is actually quite on-the-ball in terms of the Americanisation of world culture, for instance. That said, there is an excruciating bit about two world leaders having sex with a young woman on a desert island which is not only absurdly wide of the mark in retrospect, it’s baffling in terms of a 1930’s perspective.

Once you’ve got past the first five chapters the book hits its stride, and concentrates on its main theme – the future evolution of the human race. The book covers eighteen different human species, of differing attitudes and mental capacity, including water-based variations, flying humans on Venus, and by the end, a telepathic gestalt human race which has the ability to see back through time into the life of every human who has ever existed. Along the way they have a war with the Martians – who are a sort of floating cloudy jelly – wipe out the Venerians and have god-knows how many fallings-out with each other. As it goes on, the novel is increasingly concerned with ideas of philosophy, and at points where it’s discussing intelligences beyond our understanding, it’s a bit hard-going. But on the whole the journey is thought-provoking and worthwhile.

The book’s big influence is that it’s one of the first novels to discuss ideas like terraforming, group consciousnesses, and the idea of humanity deliberately genetically re-engineering itself to become more intelligent or to be able to survive in a different environment. I would’ve borrowed some of the ideas for a thing I’m writing but, alas, I handed it in before I got to the useful bits. I wouldn’t be the first to expand upon ideas found in this novel; Stephen Baxter’s evolution and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation spring to mind.

But in some areas it’s quite at odds with accepted SF ideas; in Last And First Men, for instance, mankind discovers nuclear power and then destroys the secret (although later on it is rediscovered and causes a world-wide apocalypse). Most unusual of all, though, is that this future humanity is one which barely attempts interplanetary exploration, except when absolutely necessary, and even after two billion years it has still not moved beyond the solar system; presumably either Olaf Stapledon thought such an eventuality was impossible, or would get in the way of the story he wanted to tell.

No Surprises

Gradually getting back into this blogging lark. I’ve even made a list of a dozen things to write about, and that’s without Getting Me Started On Politics.

There’s a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine in the shops. It comes in a plastic bag this month, for three reasons. One, because there’s a free poster. Two, to discourage people from reading it in Smith's (“What is this, a bleedin’ library?”). And Three, because the actual cover is a desperate cry for help. :)

My contribution is, of course, the comic strip, the fourth and concluding part of the epic The Golden Ones. Will Axos destroy Tokyo and take over the world? It looks quite likely on page 1, looks rather less likely by page 10. Along the way, there’s some stunning artwork by Martin Geraghty, inked by David Roach, coloured by James Offredi and lettered by Roger Langridge. They, along with editors Tom Spilsbury and Scott Gray, deserve all the credit. I just come up with the jokes and paragraph-long descriptions of things that might look cool. This month’s strip contains sort-of references to Godzilla, Harry Hill and Jon Pertwee’s catchphrase. I can’t wait until next month’s, though, it’s a Christmas special, with stunning artwork by Rob Davis, and an idea which will make people either go ‘Ahh’ or ‘WTF?’

Elsewhere in the magazine – I read it all, you know – there’s an interesting article on the differences and similarities between Doctor Who and soap opera (it’s a much better article than that dreadful one they once printed about it being a game show, and that other one about it being a comedy). In the article Gareth Roberts “asserts”, quite correctly, that the big difference is that Doctor Who stories are about surprises, the viewer not knowing what will happen next, whereas in a soap opera, the viewer does know what will happen next and the fun comes from watching the characters find out.

Where Gareth is wrong is where he says this “never happens in Doctor Who. Not once! Ever!” when I can think of three examples off the top of my head (I’m sure if I engaged Story-By-Story Fact Search I could find more). They’re all good examples of why the ‘audience knows more than the characters’ approach isn't a very effective way of telling Doctor Who stories.

First example is The Gunfighters, in which Doctor Who lands in Tombstone, Arizona shortly before the events of the OK Corral. However, in this story Doctor Who is written as a complete buffoon, so throughout the story the audience knows what is going to happen next while the lead character is in complete ignorance. This, I would suggest, is one of the reasons why this story is so frustrating and dull to watch; Doctor Who, rather than being one step ahead of the audience, is about twenty yards behind them.

Second example is The Two Doctors, where the story begins with the second Doctor and Jamie visiting a space station, which is then attacked by Sontarans, who kidnap the Doctor and take him to Seville (don’t ask why). After which we then spend the next hour of the story with the sixth Doctor and Peri as they investigate the deserted space station trying to discover what has happened. Not until the third episode, when everyone has got to Seville, does the Doctor start to find out stuff that the audience doesn't already know.

And the third example would have to be Daleks In Manhattan. In the first ten minutes or so of the first episode, we’ve seen that the Daleks are up to no good, building an antennae on top of the Empire State Building and turning people into their pig slaves, including the unfortunate Laszlo. We then spend the rest of the episode watching the Doctor, Martha and Tallulah finding this out; the Doctor analysing a green blob to discover that it comes from Skaro, home planet of the Daleks, Tallulah spending ages talking to Laszlo before she realises a) he’s Laszlo and b) he’s been turned into a pig... and so on.

(At this point some pedants may go ‘Ahh, but Jonny, doesn’t Rise Of The Cybermen have the same problem?’ To which I would reply, “No, it doesn’t, Rise Of The Cybermen had an extremely well-structured script in which the audience never knew more than the Doctor and his companions, and where the characters and monsters were introduced in clever and surprising ways, which was then undermined by the last-minute addition of a pre-titles sequence which contrived to give away all those surprises in advance.”)

Actually, I’ve thought of a fourth and a fifth. The Dominators & The Mark Of The Rani. And a sixth. The Time Monster. A seventh. The Twin Dilemma. An eighth. Fear Her. Must disengage Story-By-Story Fact Search. But it’s no coincidence these tend to be the least well-regarded stories amongst fans.