Station Eleven

Hey everyone, here’s a very quick, spoiler-free post on why I found Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven disappointing. I actually read the whole thing before I decided to review it this time!

For 90% of my time with the book, I actually thought I was going to come away from it feeling quite positive. Then I got to what I guess passes for the climax of the book, and that changed quickly.

The story takes place before and after an apocalyptic flu pandemic (the opening chapters are great if you want to flash back to early 2020 and feel really anxious), with initially-disconnected characters and plot threads that are gradually intertwined, in your typical literary fiction “people’s lives connect across space and time in unexpected and beguiling ways” (85% of all literary fiction is about this). As far as those kinds of stories go it’s pretty well done, especially in the second half when the different threads start coming together.

However, having gone to all the work of setting this up, the pay-off is extremely underwhelming. The climactic action of the story comes really abruptly and is dealt with in the space of a few pages, via means that don’t really have anything to do with the protagonist or any of the plot elements established up to that point–even though (and this is the part that kills me) the scene in question does actually bring in all of those elements, in a way that seems like it’s going to really tightly wrap up all the book’s thematic strands. They’re just not relevant at all to what actually happens.

The impression I get is that Mandel was fed up with the story and wanted to wrap it up even though the story seemed like it had enough fuel to keep going for a lot longer. At the point it goes into the climax, it felt like there was another third of the book still left to go.

Station Eleven got a TV series adaptation recently which, going by the episode descriptions, seems to flesh out the ending much more as well as tying one particular character more tightly into the rest of the plot, so apparently I’m not the only person who noticed these problems.

The Deep House

[Note: I have Covid for the first time and will likely be out of action for a while as I recuperate]

Haunted House stories have been around so long that they’ve evolved into an easily-recognised standard narrative structure. You start out with unseen voices and half-glimpsed shadows, move on to electrical interference and creaking doors, and then right around the time our protagonists are seeing actual apparitions, they stumble on the secret room or whatever that reveals the house’s backstory.

This is such a common story structure that it’s long since ceased to even be a cliche. If you make a horror movie following these beats, not even the most fresh-faced viewer is likely to find the result frightening or engaging.

But what if the house was Underwater? Would that inject some life into the hoary old formula?

No, it turns out, but The Deep House gives it a good try anyway.

Our protagonists are Ben and Tina, a go-getting young couple looking to get famous on Youtube by exploring haunted locations. Traveling through France, they learn about a well-preserved house at the bottom of a reservoir from a creepy guy who is obviously evil, and decide to dive down and have a look. It does not go well.

This is an arresting idea for a horror movie, and at first it appears to be making good on its promise: the underwater scenes are moody and atmospheric, the fact that the interior of the house is eerily well-preserved is something the audience is allowed to figure out before the characters do, and in general I was fully on board with wherever the movie was going during its opening act.

Alas, things quickly start to go awry. To begin with, the movie doesn’t just adhere rigidly to the classic tropes of the haunted house story, but to the much more specific cliches that were birthed by modern found footage movies (The Deep House switches back and forth between first-person found footage and traditional camerawork). You’ve got the girlfriend who recognizes the danger for what it is and wants to walk away, who is coupled with a stubborn boyfriend who refuses to put the camera down and stop poking the hornet’s nest. You’ve got the creepy local who leads the duo to the haunted location and who is clearly up to no good. You’ve got a backstory involving occult rituals and human sacrifice in service to some vaguely-defined demonic/witchy entity.

It turns out that putting all of this underwater doesn’t actually make it feel any fresher; in fact, it introduces brand new problems.

When things are calm and our two leads are leisurely exploring the house, the movie does a good job of balancing the murky darkness of the lake bottom with letting the audience see what’s actually happening; no it’s, not particularly realistic that there’s tons of light pouring in from the outside, but making the house realistically dark would have been annoying.

This goes out the window as soon as the really spooky shit pops off. Suddenly, the camera lens (the movie usually switches to found footage for these scenes) is obscured by swirling bubbles, flashlight beams and silt, such that at times it can be difficult to figure out what’s even supposed to be happening.

This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the scares are a little hard to parse just on their own terms. There’s one bit where Tina either gets attacked by hanging chains or is pulled into some sort of whirlpool—I honestly couldn’t tell which—and there’s a recurring thing where the underwater drone the couple are using gets possessed or something and starts emitting a sinister red light. I’m still not really sure what’s going on with that.

Like a lot of found footage movies, The Deep House doesn’t really know what to do with itself once the low-key build-up phase ends, and so we get lots of interminable scenes of Tina and Ben yelling each other’s names over and over again, a big clumsy exposition scene where the backstory of the house is explained in way more detail than is necessary, and then some confusing and disorienting action.

Even the underwater gimmick, ostensibly the movie’s main selling point, gets essentially discarded for a big chunk of the middle of the movie—a lot of the scenes in the second half could have taken place quite easily in an ordinary house instead of a Deep House, and the fact that Ben and Tina are running on a strict oxygen time limit is forgotten about for just long enough that the concept loses all tension.

Overall then, this is a case of a really interesting idea that the film makers didn’t seem to know how to actually turn into a compelling movie. Kind of a shame.

Durgan vs Elfe: The Rings Of Power

Hot on the heels of Sad Dragon Family And Friends, here’s my review of the first episode of The Lord of The Power: The Rings of Ring.

In contrast to Game of Thrones, my level of fandom for Tolkien is pretty much non-existent: I saw the three LOTR movies once when they came out, liked them but didn’t love them, and have never read a single word of the man’s writing. I have zero familiarity with the material this series is drawing on, nor do I care at all about how faithful it is to said material.

So as a non-fan just looking for a high budget shiny fantasy series to watch, how was the opening episode?

The Rings Of Power takes place in Middle-Earth’s second age, a time that came before the third age but after the first age. I assume that means something else to Tolkienheads, but for normal people all you need to know is that this is long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of the Rings. It’s prequel time, baby! Those always turn out well and are universally embraced by fans.

Anyway, the elves have finished up a long war against Morgoth, the first Dark Lord who attacked their homeland centuries ago, and everyone is convinced that the threat is gone and an era of peace is at hand. Everyone, that is, except for returning protagonist Galadriel, who is convinced that Morgoth’s lieutenant Sauron is still out there and getting ready to finish what Morgoth started. She is, of course, correct about this, and when the threat becomes apparent to the wider world the different races of Middle Earth have to start putting their differences aside to face it. Presumably this eventually involves forging the titular rings of power that cause so much trouble in the Third Age.

As I’ve said before when it comes to fantasy on the teevee, the opening episode needs to do a lot of work very quickly in terms of introducing the setting and characters. Arguably Rings Of Power is in a worse position in this regard than House Of The Dragon, as the latter is sufficiently similar to its original installment that the show only needs to get viewers caught up on the small number of changes, whereas Rings Of Power is like a thousand years before the books and movies and pretty much everything is different apart from the major races of Middle Earth. How does the show balance conveying all of this information while getting the actual plot moving?

Well, it…doesn’t.

Despite looking absurdly gorgeous, the first episode really left me cold due to its heavy-handed, expository writing. Characters come on screen and bluntly explain who they are and what their deal is, or engage in clumsy as-you-know conversations with other people. All the poetic faux-Tolkien dialogue in the world can’t disguise how hacky this is. I constantly felt that the storylines spinning up seemed like they should theoretically be very engaging, but the clunky writing kept me on the outside.

The episode’s editing is also rough, with a lot of scenes ending slightly too quickly so that the pacing feels off. Elsewhere, the episode continues with one character’s story when it seems like it should, for the sake of pacing, be cutting to someone else, and vice versa.

This was all off-putting enough that I didn’t end up watching the second episode, despite intending to. I’m going to go back and give it another shot at some point—the end of this first episode, when the actual plot kicked in, was already getting more interesting—but for the moment, House Of The Dragon wins this round.

The Purge Season 1

The Purge is an IP that seems to be in a perpetual state of wasted potential. The first movie infamously squandered its fascinating premise on a rote home invasion plot, but even the sequels always felt like they were failing to really make good on the promise of the franchise’s central idea.

Enter the Amazon Prime series of the same name. With nine to ten episodes a season, can this extended Purge finally succeed where the movies didn’t?

The premise, for those not familiar: it’s some vague number of years after an authoritarian group called the New Founding Fathers have taken control of America, and one of their big innovations is the Purge, an annual “holiday” where for one night all crime is legal. This is supposedly aimed at reducing crime by letting people get all of their crime urges out in a semi-controlled manner, but its actual purpose is to reduce the population of homeless, poor, minorities and other people the NFFA considers a drain on society.

So just like in the movies, it’s Purge night and a diverse cast of characters find themselves, for one reason or another, out on the streets and in danger. This time around we’ve got a teenage girl looking to sacrifice herself at the behest of the Purge cult she’s joined, her estranged Marine brother who would rather that didn’t happen, a finance executive who hires an assassin to kill someone and then gets cold feet, and an upwardly mobile young couple who attend an NFFA party in hopes of securing funding for their business ventures.

Right away we’ve got a more interesting selection of protagonists here than “person whose car breaks down ten miniutes before the Purge siren goes off.” A big reason for this is that the expanded scope of a series lets the show take its time getting the characters out of the safety of their secure enclaves rather than rushing to the action as soon as possible. In fact, one of the multiple plotlines takes place almost entirely behind fortified doors, the show making the point that holing up somewhere isn’t necessarily any safer than being out on the streets if you can’t trust the people you’re holed up with.

Having four different viewpoint characters whose storylines don’t intersect until the end of the season (in quite an elegant twist, I might add) lets the show take a more expansive look at what kinds of trouble a hapless citizen can get into on Purge night beyond just being chased by machete-wielding killers in masks. One of the constant criticisms of the movie franchise is that it focused on murder to the exclusion of all other kinds of crimes, and the series remedies this to an extent. 

Yes, we still mostly have people in zany costumes killing each other for funsies, but there’s other illegal activity highlighted like human trafficking, contract killing and—in probably the darkest and most disturbing scene the franchise has ever featured—sexual harassment. The show uses an admirable level of restraint when it comes to that last topic rather than going as over the top as it does with the violence, which if anything just makes the sequence more horrific than it might have been otherwise.

In a show with four main characters who mostly operate on completely separate story arcs, some are inevitably less interesting than others. My personal choice for the most disappointing protagonist is Jane Barber, the finance exec who sets out to stop the assassination she put into motion. For most of the series she was actually my favourite character, but in the last episode she delivers a speech about how the Purge is bad actually–a conclusion she had already reached by episode three–tries and fails to stop the bad guy, and then gets unceremoniously killed. I kind of get the feeling the writers ran out of things to do with her before the end.

In the past I’ve advanced the idea that the Purge movies are aimed primarily at angry American liberals. Given that this is a franchise featuring—in an entry released in 2016–supporters of a far-right US regime rioting after their candidate loses an election, maybe that’s fair enough. I still wish they were a bit more subtle about it. Like, I know rich dipshits in real life don’t pay taxes, but having the rich dipshit just blithely announce that he doesn’t pay taxes is a bit on the nose.

Despite these issues, this first season is for my money easily the best Purge-related piece of media that’s been released. Unfortunately the franchise seems to have reached its apotheosis just as its appeal started to wane, as the series was canceled after the second season. So, let’s see if the inevitable reboot in ten or so years can keep the momentum going.

Scheduling note

I’ve slipped into a little blog lull which is likely going to continue for some time due to my health issues and dealing with some personal business. Content will resume in a few weeks, hopefully.

The Grace Of Kings

Note: Going to take December off blogging, and possibly some of January as well, whilmst I work on some longer blog posts

My search for the Good Fantasy Series continues with Ken Liu’s The Grace Of Kings, book one of the Dandelion Dynasty series. I’ve previously enjoyed Liu’s editorial efforts in Broken Stars, but how’s his original fantasy? Let’s find out.

The Grace Of Kings is about the island land of Dara, long been divided into constantly-warring Tiro states but as of the beginning of the story is united under the reign of Emperor Mapidere following the conquest of the rest of the continent by the kingdom of Xana. The people of the former Tiro kingdoms appear to have made peace with their subjugation (or are smart enough to pretend that they have), but the desire for rebellion still smoulders beneath the surface, as demonstrated by an audacious attempt on the emperor’s life in the book’s opening chapter.

When the aging emperor enters a terminal decline, the carefully-maintained order of Xana’s authority quickly unravels and all of Dara is soon in open rebellion. Among the figures that rise to prominence in the next few years, two stand out: Kuni Garu, a shiftless gangster turned unlikely populist rebel leader, and Mata Zyndu, last scion of a distinguished clan and a near-superhuman warrior. The two start out fighting together to support the rebellion, but as Xana’s fall draws nearer, it becomes apparent that Kuni and Mata’s wildly divergent ideas about what the post-rebellion world should look like will lead them into inevitable conflict.

The Grace Of Kings is a bit different from the standard template of western political fantasy bricks that you might be familiar with. Written more like a semi-mythologized work of history than a novel, the story takes in a panoramic view of the events unfolding in Dara, freely bouncing around between viewpoints and skimming over mundane events to get to the important moments. This is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means the book cuts out all the boring shit that usually clogs up fantasy novels: events that in other stories could easily take up an entire novel are dispensed with in a single chapter, while a chapter’s worth of material often goes by in a single paragraph. You’re not going to find any long travel sequences or interminable battles here.

On the other hand, the book’s pacing can sometimes get a little bit too fast, feeling as though it’s speeding through an abridged summary of its own story. Kuni Garu becoming the leader of a bandit group literally happens in a few sentences; towards the middle of the book, huge reversals in the fortunes of entire nations get even less than that. Characters rise to positions of power or lose everything between chapters, often with very little description. On balance I prefer this approach to wading through multiple volumes of side-plots that don’t have anything to do with the main story, or pages upon pages of pointless worldbuilding, but at times it can make the whole book feel a little sparse.

Speaking of worldbuilding, I liked the relatively low-fantasy setting of the book. Apart from the usually-oblique intervention of Dara’s gods and the occasional prophetic dream, there really isn’t any magic here to speak of, certainly not the kind that an army commander can reliably call on to turn the tide of a battle. Even Mata’s superhuman strength and double-pupilled eyes are unusual, but treated like a natural occurrence that just happens from time to time.

(This was going to be longer but migraines, bottom line book pretty good, would check out sequels)