Author: andrewfindlaywrites

Avengers: Infinity War delivers a lot of incredible action, but skimps on the other stuff

~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ 1 Comment

It’s here. One of the most impressive cinematic feats in the history of film — the capstone of a ten-year cycle of eighteen interrelated films. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has built such a gallery of heroes that they can pick and choose whomever they want for this party. The MCU also has an impressive track record when it comes to set-piece action scenes. Does Infinity War bring together all the threads of the series into the greatest sweater ever knit, a flawless action extravaganza to satisfy even the most rabid fan? Well, kinda.

Mild spoilers follow. Massive spoilers at the end of this thing, but there’ll be a big warning.


There’s a lot of running in this movie

 

The action itself is peerless. I won’t analyze each action scene, mostly because I lost track, but after a decade of practice the people behind the MCU really know how to put superhero powers on display. There’s a particular scene in which War Machine hovers above the combat, every doodad and whatsit on that over-soldered monstrosity deployed, raining hellfire — an apotheosis of violence and spectacle so pure that it becomes art. Dr. Strange is also impressive — of all the heroes, he seems the one most able to go toe to toe with Thanos with an inventive mystic arsenal. Iron Man has built himself some type of nano-suit (that suit has got to be his midlife-crisis Camaro, the way he won’t stop tinkering with it) whose flexibility and cache of new weaponry lends a pleasant variety to any Iron Man scenes.

Too Much of a Great Thing

The film doesn’t take long to run into a problem anyone who has made the mistake of eating a pizza by themselves is intimately familiar with — two slices are amazing, five is folly, and the whole pie is just exhaustion and regret. The film creates action exhaustion after about forty-five minutes. Each fight is amazing, the culmination of ten years of careful buildup, but like, all at once? Right now? For Christ’s sake, put some in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow. The high-stakes action-adventure explosionism almost completely shoves out any part of the movie that might be described as character-driven. Sure, it’s there, each marquee hero gets five minutes with the person s/he cares about to build narrative tension, but then they just run off to punch things. Punch things in an innovative, entertaining, incredible way, but still just punch things. The directors are aware of this — they insert a bit of comedy when, in the ultimate battle, Captain America sees Thor for the first time in years and they exchange a rushed hey-how-you-doing bro greeting before they have to get back to punching (again, amazing punching. Tremendous punching. Punching like you wouldn’t believe…but still, just punching). Take Black Panther for comparison. That film had the same great punch choreography, but it was also primarily character-driven. T’Challa was driven by the loss of a father and doubt of the legacy of his family and his country, and Killmonger was driven by a rage and pain beaten into him over decades. When the two of them meet, it’s about more than their fists. It’s really not in Infinity War. It’s about Thanos.

Never Trust a Man with a Big Magic Glove

Well, it’s not so much about Thanos as it is about stopping Thanos. He gets a few shreds of backstory like everyone else, but the problem is that while the other characters have ten years of worldbuilding stiffening them, Thanos is just that guy who wants to kill half of the universe, because trauma. There was a planet or something, who cares. Hey, did you see his Big Magic Glove?

Fighting Thanos is only a couple steps above fighting the literal abstract concept of death, which isn’t such a popcorn-eating dynamic. The best movies have antagonists who are as fully developed as the heroes (cf. Black Panther). Thanos is none of that. He’s “oh god oh god we’re all gonna die!” poured into a purple CGI suit. Come on, even his name — Thanatos is the Greek god of death.

Anyway, Thanos sucks as a villain, but again, it’s still a lot of fun to watch people punch him. Tony Stark and Dr. Strange banter a bit, then punch Thanos. Tony and Spider-Man banter, and then they both punch Thanos. It’s all great summer blockbuster fare, but it feels formulaic, and it’s a shame because the very best of the MCU movies manage to rise above that.

I’ll use my infinite power to remake the universe, but first could you open this jar of pickles for me?

Not only is Thanos a hollow character, but his main weapon makes no sense. The Infinity Gauntlet is a great concept — it harnesses the power of the Infinity Stones, giving the bearer ultimate power over every aspect of existence so long as they have all the stones. The problem is, even without the gauntlet being complete, having just a few stones (which Thanos has for most of the movie) should make him unbeatable. One example: the Reality Stone gives the bearer the power to alter reality. When all the assembled heroes are wailing on him in the climax, why doesn’t he just change the reality to one where he’s not repeatedly getting punched in his big purple face? When he used the Power Stone to throw a moon at Iron Man, why didn’t he just hit Iron Man directly with enough force to liquefy his bones? Oh? Because there’d be no movie then? Fair enough, but whenever that’s the excuse it takes something away from the narrative.

Massive Spoilers Follow — View Movie Before Proceeding

Also, the way the ending shakes out means the stakes are meaningless. Thanos succeeds and uses his Big Magic Glove to wipe half of the people in the universe out of existence. They just disintegrate into nothingness, including half of the assembled superheroes. If Captain America and Iron Man died, there would be actual concern about whether they’d come back or not. The people who died though already have other movies slated for release. Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, each of whom have just one solo entry in the MCU? T’Challa, the lead for one of the most wildly successful movies in the entire series? No. Their dust hadn’t even hit the ground before it was obvious they would be resurrected, which will be a pretty cheap way to start the next movie, right up there with “it was all a dream!”

The movie is definitely an achievement, and if you’re not a sourpuss you’ll enjoy it. The sheer scope of the film — tying together the disparate threads of eighteen other movies — is impressive, but the frame holding everything together starts creaking by the end. The lack of human, character-driven action at the center of the movie makes it feel so clearly like a constructed thing, a work of artifice. The unrelatable villain who wields a power with no rules and whose ultimate success exists just to give superheroes something to undo in the sequel doesn’t help the situation. It’s not the best sweater ever made, but it’ll still keep you warm. It’s just one arm is shorter than the other, and the bottom hem is unraveling. Ah well. It was a well-done action blockbuster, and seeing Captain America run around with a beard and long hair is, by itself, worth the ticket price.

Dread Nation: The Civil War Zombie Novel You’ve Been Waiting For

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Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation is the story of Jane McKeene, a seventeen-year-old who attends the premiere ladies’ school in all of Maryland, Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. Young women go there to learn proper tea service and the most efficient way to separate a zombie’s head from its body. It is set in the decades after the Civil War, which ended in a very different way in this alternate history. At Gettysburg, slain soldiers rose up and began eating the living, so both sides banded together to repel the zombie threat. Humanity lives in a handful of fortified cities — Baltimore, Philadelphia, etc. The West is wild and open, but dangerously unprotected. The Lost States of the South are, well, lost. The only way to live there is in a bunker. Congress signed the Native and Negro Reeducation Act, which made it mandatory for Native and African Americans to attend zombie-slaying schools and hold the line against the undead, continuing America’s history of forcing marginalized groups to perform vital nation-building services. I read it because N.K. Jemisin (who wrote the best epic fantasy of the decade) recommended it repeatedly, and because I have a weakness for postbellum alt-history zombie yarns.

seriously a good sci-fi book y'all
She kills zombies with sickles. With sickles! Get this book.

Slow* Zombies, Fast Pacing

Ireland’s pacing is top-notch. There’s nothing on this story but lean muscle. Each location, each character is described with only the words necessary to generate clear, vivid immersion. The narratives moves forward smoothly, impelled by alternating between the type of emotional involvement that YA does particularly well — the character you love is in a bad spot, is facing injustice or danger and you won’t be satisfied until you see how she gets out of it — and spare, bright action scenes like this one:

By the time I get to the girls I have a stitch in my side and my feet are screaming, but I push it all aside. I pick my way down the wall, jumping too early and dropping a sickle, nearly losing my balance when I hit the bottom. I grab my fallen weapon and pick my first target, a Negro girl wearing clothing that looks eerily like mine, and leap, sickle swinging to take the thing down.

Here’s the thing. If these were my sickles, my beloved, sharp, well-weighted combat sickles, they would’ve gone through the shambler’s neck like a hot knife through lard. But these are not my sickles. So the blade gets stuck halfway, the beast snapping its teeth at me and clawing at my arms as it tries to get free.

I place my foot behind the shambler’s and use my sickle to push it backward. Once it’s down I use a mule kick against the curved edge to force the blade through. The head goes rolling off down into the culvert and the body goes still.

Ireland somehow avoids breaking the sense of urgency and peril in the scene, even as the viewpoint character takes a paragraph to talk to herself about her sickles. Not quite sure how that magic works, but it does. The action is always satisfying, and each of Jane’s actions builds who she is.

* the relative speed of a zombie depends on how recently they turned — the newer, the faster

The Wind-Up Theory of Character Creation

Ireland builds her characters using minimal description. She gives an introductory sliver and then sets the character going. The clockwork engine of the narrative itself gives depth to the characters as they interact with each other. There’s the main character, Jane, who just wants to get home to protect her family. There’s her beautiful frenemy, Katherine, a fellow student at Miss Preston’s, whose dream is completing her education and becoming an Attendant (lady’s maid/zombie killer for the rich). There’s Jackson, the smuggler and once-sweetheart of Jane, who just wants to find out why his sister disappeared. There’s Gideon, the head scientist of a Midwest enclave who wants to use his knowledge to help humanity survive. Ireland introduces a character, gives a light description and an overriding motivation, and then, through interaction with each other and the narrative, who they are deepens, grows and changes. An example is the description of the white supremacist pastor who serves as the main antagonist of the book:

“The old man still smiles, thin red lips stretched garishly over large front teeth. His eyes are watery, the brown washed out to the color of a penny, his hair completely snow white and thinning. He looks like a walking skeleton, sun bleached and pale…”

There’s not a lot of description after this first introduction, but his actions throughout the book build every noxious layer of him.

It’s good to see Katherine and Jane, who start out as enemies, grow closer as they deal with the same difficulties. What’s great though is the book’s treatment of that required emotional geometry of the YA novel, the Love Triangle. It’s hilariously underplayed here. Jane basically looks at Jackson and Gideon every once in a while, thinks “they look good…” and then gets on with her life. She’s interested, and both boys are nice in their own way, but she’s got things to do. Very healthy approach compared to the general “OK sure, I have to save the world, but does he like me though?”

Original Sin

The moral shape of the book is impressive. It does not shy away from the founding sins of our nation, i.e. that most people who wrote the Constitution to ensure their own freedom thought owning people was acceptable. Even post-slavery, America is still built on the exploitation of marginalized groups. Ireland puts these concerns front and center, with “scientific” discussions from certain characters about polygenesis (the idea, current in the 1800s, that different races had different species of origin, a way to promote Othering and justify white supremacy). The main antagonist is a virulent racist. The two-tier racial system of zombie fighting, in which POCs are legally obligated to kill zombies to keep everyone else safe is most troubling, because it wouldn’t take much modification to make it work today. All it would take is a.) a zombie uprising, b.) the racial bias inherent in our legal system, and c.) a “Fight the Dead” program for convicted felons, because the 13th amendment has a hell of a loophole:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Fun, Not Fluff

Dread Nation has all the explosive, page-turning action inherent in a zombie novel, a spare but powerful style, and realistic interactions between vivid characters. It’s a great book — fun without being fluff. The foundation of its world and the stakes of its narrative are too heavy for that.

The problem with J.R.R. Tolkien

~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ 1 Comment
J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring sitting on a shelf
So great, and so unopened.

Tolkien is the single most influential fantasy writer in history, but I’m struggling with my re-read of Lord of the Rings

Few authors are as impressive as J.R.R. Tolkien, and few literary feats are as influential as The Lord of the Rings and its extensive legendarium. In the first half of the 20th century, Tolkien built a cohesive, powerful lore that would determine the shape of fantasy writing for decades. Fantasy without Tolkien is like astronomy without the solar system. There are other stars, like Dunsany, the Brothers Grimm, and the Arabian Nights, but the foundation and vantage point of modern fantasy would be annihilated. That being said, there are definite problems in LOTR that are keeping me from completing a successful reread.

Hobbits and MacGuffins

First off, everything in LOTR is subjugated to the Quest, to taking a MacGuffin of Power to a Place of Significance (credit for that phrasing to N.K. Jemisin). It’s a great quest, a beautiful quest. No quest greater. The problem is, once the ultimate outcome of the singular driving force of the books is known (they melt the One Ring, hooray!), a lot of the page-turning juice evaporates from the story. As Frodo evades Nazgûl, orcs, and barrow-wights, the certainty of his mission’s ultimate success makes the prospect of him becoming an abrupt damp spot somewhere in Eregion much less concerning, especially when I can remember every betrayal and obstacle along the way. No future readthrough of LOTR will ever be as exciting as the journey I took in 7th grade.

Right, Wrong, and Nothing in Between

Also, the morality of the world is so stark it’s barren. The characters range from demonic malefactor to angelic savior. Anyone between those two extremes is either an upstanding and respectable servant of good or a servile and contemptible thrall to evil — no one has complex motivations. For comparison, Voldemort is one of the most cartoonishly villainous antagonists in the history of the written word, but even Harry Potter had people like Snape and Draco. The first repents and becomes a double agent, and the second is just a particularly virulent bully who gets in way over his head. Neither is a gleeful servant of evil. LOTR’s absence of moral nuance leads to an empathic flatness — it’s hard to gain purchase on anything emotionally interesting. Not to mention this all-or-nothing black-or-white approach to right and wrong facilitates orcing, the problematic classification of a race as less-than-human and deserving of genocide. N.K. Jemisin discusses it succinctly here (she is the current apex fantasy writer, and fingers crossed that The Stone Sky wins her a third Hugo in a row). The presence of an entire underclass that deserves to be murdered in LOTR sours the whole narrative.

Who Run the World?

Finally, there are almost no women of significance. Margaret Atwood sums up the third problem well:

In Tolkien, there are hardly any women at all, only two, but three if you count the spider, which I do. With a name like Shelob you really can’t miss it.

If your first impulse is to say “But there are four women — you’re forgetting Éowyn!” you’re missing the point. The principal cast of characters is overwhelmingly male, so much so that their quest becomes kind of a stag party, which leaves the book with all the interpersonal depth of Hot Tub Time Machine. One of the major beauties of literature is how it explores the struggles and complexities of being human, and that’s hard to access fully if the main narrative is basically a bunch of dudes on a camping trip.

The good outweighs the bad, but not for me, not right now

Lord of the Rings is glorious, and always will be. I can still see, clear and entire, Fangorn Forest, the Mines of Moria, and the white towers of Gondor. I can smell the ale spilled on the floor of the Green Dragon at Bree and feel the bite of the cold wind on Weathertop. Middle-earth has been paying rent in my brain since I was in middle school. It smashed its way in through the sheer weight of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, the thick, heavy bones that support everything he wrote. Tolkien’s masterpiece is a wonder. It is irreplaceable and irreplicable, but the MacGuffin-based plot, the simplistic morality, and the lack of interpersonal texture are all making my 3rd readthrough difficult.

 

Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty’s Spaceship Murder Mystery Book, Is Incredible

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This Nebula Award nominee disorients and terrifies from the start and only tightens the screws from there

Your eyes pop open, and you’re locked in a pod with no memory of having entered it. You don’t know how to get out. You start remembering — you’re a member of a small crew on an interstellar ship. Your last memory is moving into your quarters and attending the pre-launch festivities. When you finally struggle free of the synth-amneo fluid cradling you in your pod (no small feat in zero-g), you see your corpse floating in front of you, among the rest of your slaughtered crew. And your (dead) body is decades older than you remember it being.

Body floating in space
It’s not clear from the cover exactly what happened, but it’s safe to assume it’s pretty bad

That’s how Six Wakes starts, bombarding the reader with particle after particle of WTF until the narrative splits entirely from the mundane world. It’s the story of six clones selected to tend an interstellar ship carrying thousands of frozen people to an Earth-like planet. Cryo-sleep is fine for the humans, but clones (which are, legally, a different species) can just regenerate themselves endlessly and run maintenance for the hundreds of years it will take their less durable counterparts to get from point A to point B. Once you legally become a clone, you can maintain a “mind map,” basically a terabytes-big thumb drive that holds an imprint of everything you know and are. When you die, your mind map is loaded into your new brain, and you wake up as a 20-year-old. Of course, you are sterilized by law, as you are considered your own offspring. You have to maintain a mind map, which is subject to search and seizure by the authorities at any time. If you kill yourself, you’ll never be resurrected, so even if you’re practically immortal, you still have to deal with your 80s every time.

The problem in Six Wakes is that the crew wakes up to see their old bodies strewn gruesomely across the cloning bay, with no memory of how it happened. The terror is deep and weird from page 1 — the crew knows they were murdered, but have no idea how it happened.

A ship whose habitable space is fairly small, the grimness that comes from being a fresh murder scene, and the fear of not knowing what happened aren’t even the main source of dread. The big problem, the terrifying problem, is that you’re certain one of the people you’re looking at killed you.

As the characters attempt to figure out what happened, they start learning more about each other. The most interesting part of the book, aside from the high concept of cloning, is this narrative trick of having the primary action happen in the most claustrophobic place, trapped on a ship with [a] murderer[s], but having each of the six main characters’ backgrounds happen all over a wide-open far future world, ranging from a jail cell in Asia to a hacking lab on the Luna colony.

In the primary “oh no we’re trapped on a murdership” narrative, the story terrifies and creates constant pressure. The secondary narrative, the six backstories that are key to figuring out what happened, expands and deepens the world by exploring how each multi-century old clone became who they are.

As more facts about each clone are slotted into place, the shape of their predicament becomes more and more clear — the deep dive into the psyche of each character builds the map of what happened directly prior to their emergency resurrection. Each step in the spare, high-tension environment of the ship propels the story forward, and each revelation of a character’s past lends the narrative a depth and majesty. It’s a welcome contrast, like rich cream poured over an acidic key lime pie — both are good alone, but together they’re perfect.

This is a murder mystery action thriller, with a heaping helping of “look at all this cool tech” thrown in. The magic of it is that the very basis of the mystery (oh no we died we better find out who killed us) brings up such profound questions of identity, of personhood, that the glorious pulpiness of fleeing a murderer is layered over the granite bedrock of serious philosophical enquiry — when I say “I”, who do I mean? What makes a person a person, and what can unmake them?

The novel is so good from the very start. I flipped through the first few pages in a bookstore months ago and immediately put it back, thinking it had to be a trick — no way can the rest of the book maintain that level of greatness. I picked it up when I saw it was nominated for a Nebula — it does deliver on the promise of the first five pages. There are a few things to nitpick (one specific part of the resolution, involving saliva, broke suspension of disbelief for me), but Mur Lafferty is a powerful, imaginative author. Any writer who can build worlds as deep and rich as she can, who can craft a story that delights with its inventiveness and terrifies with its revelations, is one who deserves rapt attention. I am definitely snapping up whatever book she puts out next.