Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 8

Where things stand with my Patreon

Folks may have noticed that there’s been no new content on my Patreon in the past couple of weeks. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to try to lower my subscription prices before starting my next review series. The site has been losing patrons rapidly, and I’ve realized I’m just charging too much for the limited amount of content I’m able to offer. Lowering prices will hopefully make the site more accessible, since money is less of an issue for me now and I really just want more people to read my stuff.

But Patreon wouldn’t let me change the price of a tier that had active members. Since I had so few members left, I decided just to ask them to temporarily cancel or switch to the $1 tier. But it’s taking longer than expected for everyone to get the message, it seems. Also, apparently the two patrons who temporarily cancelled are still listed as active members until November 1, so I may not be able to change prices on those tiers until then. That was my mistake, for not knowing how the cancellations would work. I should’ve just asked everyone to switch to the $1 tier.

Hopefully this will all be worked out by the start of next month and I can resume posting, with lower prices that I hope will attract a larger audience. My next series in Reviews will be an exhaustive revisit of the Alien Nation franchise, including the original feature film, the TV series and movies,  and every novel and comic. I’m really proud of this one and I want a lot of people to read it — but, paradoxically, I need everyone to unsubscribe first (temporarily).

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In other news, I finally got all my printer and scanner software installed. I’d already downloaded the most current software from the manufacturer’s site months ago when I first tried installing the printer, but I hesitated to risk installing it, since I wasn’t sure how I’d finally gotten the printer working and didn’t want to risk messing it up. But I began to suspect that the problem was simply that I’d had the USB ports arranged the wrong way, with the printer plugged into a USB hub that was plugged in turn into the “in” port on the back of the plug of the cooling-fan platform that was plugged into the computer. Now, I have it switched around so the hub goes directly into the computer and the fan goes into the hub. I suspect that may be why the computer finally recognized and auto-installed the printer. So on that theory, I figured it was probably okay to try installing the software. And indeed, this time it installed pretty much instantly. Though to my surprise, the only thing that installed was scanner control software, instead of the combined printer/scanner thing I was expecting. But that’s okay, since the printer can be controlled from various programs, and the scanner software was the thing I was lacking. (The bare-bones generic scanner app I downloaded before only worked for scanning images, not documents.)

Also, I finally discovered that the grocery-store app on my phone lets me scan bar codes, which makes it way easier to reorder things when I run out. Neat!

STAR TREK ADVENTURES enters a new era!

It’s been a slow year for new releases by me, but my third Star Trek Adventures campaign of 2023 has just come out, and thanks to STA continuing to expand its license to incorporate new series, it’s my first time writing something that ties in to Star Trek: Picard.

Star Trek Adventures: Children of the Wolf

A mission to resettle Romulan refugees into a sector with a troubled history leads to a discovery that may cause even more problems. Difficult decisions lie ahead if you wish to avoid more conflict. 

Your ship has been tasked to assist in the massive effort to evacuate and resettle citizens of the Romulan Star Empire ahead of the imminent supernova of the Romulan sun. This is a fringe Federation sector near the Romulan Neutral Zone. The sector had been previously conquered by the Dominion and later liberated by Reman commando squads whose actions caused the citizens they were liberating to mistrust them further. As such, there is some resistance in the sector to accepting Romulan refugees, and when evidence of unexpected ship movements comes to light, the local governor demands you investigate.

When the investigation uncovers the truth of those ship movements, you and your crew may find yourselves caught between opposing factions with conflicting responsibilities to resolve. Will it be possible to negotiate a compromise? If not, which side should you favor in order to do the least harm?

Although this is a standalone adventure, a bonus one-page mission brief provides inspiration for continuing the mission.

This 24-page PDF adventure for the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game is written by Christopher L. Bennett, and is set post-2385 in the Star Trek: Picard era with the player characters being the crew of a Starfleet vessel. This adventure also contains advice on adaptation for use in other Star Trek time periods.

This product requires a Star Trek Adventures core rulebook to use. This is a PDF product; upon purchase you will be emailed a link to access it. There is no print version of this product. You will receive a standard version of the adventure PDF.

TM & © 2023 CBS Studios Inc. © 2023 Paramount Pictures Corp. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

As usual, I contributed a column about the the game to the Modiphius blog:

https://www.modiphius.net/blogs/news/children-of-the-wolf

Children of the Wolf is available as a downloadable PDF from:

Modiphius (US)Modiphius (UK)DriveThruRPG

I still have one more STA campaign yet to be released, though I doubt it will be out before 2024.

The falcon outside my window

That title isn’t a metaphor. Here in Cincinnati, the city government started a breeding program for then-endangered peregrine falcons in 1990; they’re evolved to nest in cliff faces, and skyscrapers make a pretty good substitute, so breeding programs in various cities’ downtown areas have been quite effective. I live on one of the hills overlooking Downtown Cincinnati (actually the Ohio River Valley was carved out by a glacier and the surrounding “hills” are what used to be the level ground, so they’re all close to the same height), and I’ve often seen peregrine falcons flying above the overlook park near my apartment. I recently saw one perched on a utility pole on the street nearby. But this afternoon, I was surprised to see a falcon sitting on a bush directly outside my apartment! Here’s the Google Drive link to the low-quality phone video I managed to take:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b23_Je6MoEkKPLF8u4hoMesarUvZbPcO/view?usp=sharing

I wish I’d caught it later, because it came back while I was uploading the video, and I got to see it make a brief flight from the bushes to the branch of the pine tree in front of my building’s stairs. It’s remarkable to see a falcon so close to my everyday spaces, given that I still remember when they were considered rare and endangered.

What worries me a bit, though, is that an orange tabby cat from the neighborhood has been hanging around the building lately, and was on my balcony earlier today. I hope the cat and the falcon don’t cross paths; I’m not sure who’d come out ahead in that encounter, and I wouldn’t care for either answer. (Why are the deadliest animals so often the most beautiful?)

The latest on my computer problem

I finally contacted my mini-PC’s manufacturer about the problems I’ve been having. Here’s what I told them in my e-mail yesterday:

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If I leave the computer idle for around 45 minutes or more, it will sometimes automatically reboot. I thought this might be an issue with automatic updates, but I adjusted the Windows 11 settings not to reboot automatically, yet the problem continued. Also, in some cases, rather than rebooting, the computer will simply become unresponsive. The power light is on, but the screen is dark, it doesn’t react to any keyboard inputs, and pressing the power button does nothing. The only way I can get it to unfreeze is either by unplugging the unit or pressing the reset button with the end of a paper clip.

The problem seems to be gradually worsening. On several occasions, the computer has frozen in this way when I have attempted to hibernate it, although it doesn’t happen every time I hibernate. I’ve been trying to manage the problem by not leaving the computer idle for too long and shutting it down completely at night. But this morning, the PC froze after I turned it on without promptly entering my password (since I went to the kitchen to prepare coffee), even though that has never happened on startup before.

I’ve checked the event viewer in an attempt to find the cause of the forced reboots and freezes, but it gives no indication of any problems I can recognize. The only mentions are notations saying “The previous system shutdown at [time and date] was unexpected.” On one occasion, I let it sit in frozen mode for an hour to see if it would automatically reboot, but it did not. The computer was warmer than usual during the time it was frozen, suggesting it was active; but when I checked the event viewer afterward, it showed no sign of any activity during that hour, as if it had been turned off. That makes me wonder if the issue is with the power systems.

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They wrote back with the following terse message:

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Hello, there are 4 suggestions.

1. Go to the Settings menu – Detect Updates. Patches and system upgrades to the latest version. Keep the network working.

2. Go to the Settings menu – System – Recovery

3. Re-upgrade the BIOS (provide the serial number on the bottom of the PC)

4. Back up your data and reinstall your Windows 11 system (system files and licenses available).

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I was hoping they’d have a clear idea of the problem, but this seems like just a boilerplate answer, throwing out possibilities. I know it can’t be option 1, since I’ve gotten multiple updates. Option 2 is too vague, and the options listed in the Recovery menu seem kind of drastic. Options 3 and 4 also seem drastic, and I don’t know how to do them.

I’m starting to think my best option is to take the PC to a repair place and provide them with the above information. It would cost more than doing it myself, but they’d be better qualified to diagnose the problem and carry out whatever steps were necessary to fix it.

As always, I’m open to advice, explanations, and suggestions from more computer-savvy readers.

Printer postscript

Well, I was relieved that I got my printer/scanner installed in time for my important tax document to arrive, which happened today. But I ended up having to hook my printer up to my laptop after all, because the bare-bones generic drivers and scan software that installed in my desktop don’t let me save a scan as a document instead of an image, let alone combine multiple pages into a single document that I could upload to the tax prep site. (The image files were too big to upload.) Oh, well. At least hooking up the laptop worked, though I wasted a lot of time and effort before I resorted to it.

I’m tempted to have another go at installing the latest version of the printer software from the manufacturer’s website, but it didn’t work the first time I tried it. I suspect, though, that that was because I tried to install it before I uninstalled the older version. But what if it clashes with the generic driver I’ve got now? I hesitate to try it and risk screwing things up again.

Printer finally installed!

Well, I’ve been putting off trying to get my new computer to recognize my printer, since I’ve been busy with rewrites on Arachne’s Legacy, and since I still haven’t fixed the problem with the computer occasionally freezing or restarting when I leave it on too long, and I wasn’t sure if I’d need to get it replaced. Well, actually I’ve been managing the problem by avoiding it, making sure I don’t leave the computer inactive too long, and also doing hibernation less in favor of full shutdowns, since it only seems to freeze on hibernation if I’ve done it several times in a row (at least, so far). So I haven’t had much problem with it lately. I’m not sure how sustainable this strategy is, since I’m concerned the issue could be a symptom of a problem that could worsen. But for now, it seems like a manageable issue, at most an occasional inconvenience.

Anyway, I’ve been informed that the inheritance-related tax document I need to get last year’s taxes done is finally on the way, barely in time for the extension deadline, so I realized I needed a working scanner so I could upload my tax documents to my preparers. At worst, if I couldn’t get my mini-PC to recognize the printer/scanner, I could just control it from my laptop instead. But I decided I’d give it one more go, so I finally got around to uninstalling the printer and its drivers, then trying to reinstall it with a different, hopefully more current set of drivers.

Now, after I’d done that, at first I couldn’t remember how to install the drivers, or locate the site where I’d found them before. But then I discovered I didn’t have to! Apparently the computer just automatically recognized the printer and applied its built-in drivers, which for some reason it didn’t do the previous times. Maybe it updated its drivers since then, or something. But anyway, even though I don’t know how it happened, I now have my printer installed, so I’ll take it. And scanner, though I had to download a separate app for that. I don’t have a dedicated printer control app now, but it seems I can do that through the Settings menu, as well as through my various programs with their own print menus.

And wow, it took me over two months to get to this point. That’s how long I’ve gone without needing to print or scan anything, which goes to show how non-urgent this was. But it’s one more problem solved, which just leaves the unresolved reboot issue.

Oh, and one other reason to be glad of this is that it means I didn’t waste my money on that new printer cable.

Also, there was a very brief power outage here last week, so I have confirmation that my new battery-backup power strip provides uninterrupted power to my computer and wi-fi — at least long enough to wrap things up and shut down smoothly. So that’s good to know.

Thoughts on GAMERA -Rebirth- (spoilers)

Gamera review index

The second animated kaiju series currently on Netflix is GAMERA -Rebirth- (Gamera Ribāsu), the first released Gamera production since Gamera the Brave in 2006. It’s produced by ENGI, an animation subsidiary of Gamera’s owner Kadokawa Corporation, and is directed and co-written by Hiroyuki Seshita, who was one of the directors for Netflix’s Godzilla Earth trilogy. It’s animated in a similar cel-shaded 3D style, with the character movements created through motion capture like in Netflix’s ULTRAMAN anime, but the bizarrely low frame rate makes the animation so stiff and jerky that it’s hard to see the point of capturing realistic motions. The series (season?) consists of six episodes of roughly 45 minutes each, an interesting contrast to Skull Island‘s eight 20- to 25-minute episodes. I watched it with the original Japanese audio, and it’s that version I’ll review.

-Rebirth- is set in 1989 Tokyo and centers on three 6th-graders: a fairly average boy named Hiroki (Hisako Kanemoto, the current voice of Sailor Moon‘s Sailor Mercury), nicknamed Boko (though Netflix subtitles it as Boco for some reason); a nerdy conspiracy nut called Junichi (Aki Toyosaki); and Satoru, nicknamed Joe, who’s in the same class but is bigger than the others and has a deep adult voice (Yoshitsugu Matsuoka). In episode 1, “Over Tokyo,” they’re trying to save up to buy a ham radio set so they can stay in touch when they go to different junior high schools.

We learn this is an alternate world where the Apollo program has continued for 20 years and established a permanent mining operation and settlement program on the Moon. There are also glimpses on the news of a series of attacks on populated areas across Asia by a swarm of giant birds that we saw at the beginning when they were released from deep underground, apparently by accident, by a “Eustace Foundation” research team.

The kids’ clubhouse is in a hollow tree in a swampy area, and when Junichi discovers a fair-sized turtle trapped in some roots, Boko risks himself in deep water to free it, over the others’ objections. Junichi thinks it may be a new species, but Boko sets it free rather than taking it to a museum. Later, after they save enough money to buy the radio set, they’re confronted by bullies, sons of the American personnel at the nearby USAF airbase, which is called Fussa Base (as an approximate anagram of USAF, I’d guess). In the Japanese audio, the bullies are the kind of “American” characters who speak fluent Japanese peppered with the odd English word pronounced with a thick Japanese accent. You’d think, since this was a Netflix co-production, that they could’ve cast some actual English speakers to whom Japanese was a second language. But then, all the American military officers are shown speaking Japanese to each other.

Anyway, the bullies, led by a blond kid named Douglas Osborn but nicknamed Brody for no clear reason (Subaru Kimura, the voice of Vice from Kamen Rider Revice), beat up our trio and steal their money. The kids make an elaborate plan to get back at them with homemade weapons, confronting them in a video arcade, but before their fight begins, the Shinjuku district comes under attack by the swarm of “birds,” this show’s interpretation of the anvil-headed pterosaur Gyaos, the only Gamera enemy featured in every incarnation of the franchise (and the only Showa-era Gamera monster ever brought back until this series, not counting manga and games). The two groups of kids watch from a rooftop as the F-15s are cut down by the Gyaos, and there’s an odd, probably satirical sidebar of a bunch of Japanese Self-Defense Force tanks sitting idly while the politicians debate whether to deploy them. (This is a rather dull running gag through several episodes.)

When the kids are attacked by smaller Gyaos, Boko does the noble thing and comes to the rescue of the cowering bullies, and they’re all rescued when Gamera finally shows up and fights off the swarm of Gyaos. Boko wonders if the gigantic creature could be the turtle he rescued, as little sense as that makes. Gamera destroys all the Gyaos including the giant boss, then flies away when the USAF reinforcements attack him.

In episode 2, “Under Current,” the three friends and Brody are taken to the Eustace Foundation base by researchers James Tazaki (Mamoru Miyano, the voice of Ultraman Zero and Death Note‘s Light Yagami) and Emiko Melchiorri (Saori Hayami), apparently Japanese-Americans, though their Japanese is as fluent as everyone else’s. Tazaki is a “negotiator” hired by the Foundation, while Emiko is one of its scientists. They explain that Eustace, a major energy research firm, discovered various ancient kaiju deep underground a decade ago and were tasked by the government with researching them. They’ve determined the ancient kaiju fed on humans, with a particular appetite for children, so the Foundation wants to interview and monitor children who’ve survived kaiju attacks, giving them 1989-cutting-edge handheld communicators and life-sign monitors to stay in touch. This seems kind of strange, but it will be justified later.

Anyway, Tazaki and Emiko identify the “bird” monsters as Gyaos but say they haven’t yet named the big turtle, which they assume was fighting Gyaos over which one would get to eat the kids. Boko intuits that its name is Gamera.

A bunch of kaiju eggs that Eustace was monitoring suddenly hatch and break out into the sewers, killing a couple of guards. Brody overhears his father, base commander General Osborn (Kazuya Nakai), talking about puppy-sized kaiju in the sewers, and he uses the communicators to invite the other three kids to become “vigilantes” and hunt for them. Boko is fired up by Tazaki’s words about how the kids could help them defend the city; Tazaki presumably meant through the information they could provide, but Boko takes it too literally and goes with Brody. Junichi comes out of curiosity, but Joe joins reluctantly, resenting that their bully has appointed himself their new leader and clashing with him the whole time they’re searching the sewer. This culminates in a confrontation where they’re somehow unaware that they’re arguing right next to a giant kaiju, which I suppose was intended to be less obviously present than it was in the final animation.

Their arguing wakes the kaiju, and they’re barely saved by a military team from the base. Once they get outside, Tazaki and Emiko are shocked to see them there and get them into a car to drive away when the giant ceratopsian “lizard,” which they identify as Jiger, breaks out to the surface. The car is overturned as a result of Jiger’s battle with the military and the kids watch as Gamera arrives and fights Jiger. When the US jets attack Gamera, allowing Jiger to inflict significant injury with its stinger, Boko realizes Gamera is protecting them and urges Brody to stand up to his father and convince him over the radio to attack Jiger instead. Brody finds the courage to do so, and Gamera recovers, wins, and flies off. Afterward, Osborn slaps his son for his defiance, and we see what shaped Brody into a bully. But Joe now accepts him as a friend.

In episode 3, “Run Silent, Run Deep,” the next step in Eustace’s research turns out to be, for some reason, to take the four kids to a research base for study and protection, on a tricked-out Foundation boat carrying a weird crystal called orylium, which lets them detect kaiju somehow. This is a nod to the Atlantean orichalcum from the Heisei Gamera trilogy. Emiko and Junichi bond as fellow nerds over the fancy equipment and weapons on the boat, while Tazaki and Joe both hate being at sea.

Another boat carrying child survivors of the Gyaos attack is destroyed by Zigra, which was a shark-like kaiju in the original, but here is more like a giant manta or sea dragon with an insanely long tail. The characters realize the kaiju are hunting the children who’ve had previous kaiju encounters, though it seems Zigra is too far away to reach their boat before it arrives at its destination. Junichi, a fan of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, figures out that the kaiju’s locations correspond to the shape of the lost continent of Mu — the Pacific counterpart of Atlantis, often featured in kaiju movies and tokusatsu shows, even though it was first proposed by a British-American archaeologist in the 19th century. Nobody takes Junichi’s idea seriously.

Zigra turns out to be capable of supercavitation, surrounding itself with an air bubble to swim incredibly fast, and attacks the boat. Gamera defends them long enough to evacuate the kids and the Eustace duo to a submarine docked to the boat’s keel, though the claustrophobic Tazaki panics and tries to escape by helicopter instead, barely avoiding Zigra’s destruction of the chopper. Gamera loses the fight, but disorients Zigra with some kind of radio signal confusing its sense of direction, delaying it enough to let the sub escape. Junichi has the idea to use the kids as bait to lure Zigra onto land so Gammy will have the advantage, picking an isolated radio tower they can use to amplify Gamera’s recorded disorienting signal. The boat/sub captain dismisses it as a child’s daydream, but Emiko backs the plan. Just like in the Showa Gamera movies, it’s the kids who have the brilliant ideas while the grownups are useless.

Conveniently to the plot, the sub crew has to stay with the sub to protect the orylium, so the kids and the Eustace duo have to run to the tower and rig the signal themselves. Zigra almost gets them, but Gamera defeats it in an anticlimactically short battle; I guess he really did have a decisive advantage on land. Boko gets a headache just before Gamera arrives; it’s clear they’re bonded somehow, like in the Heisei trilogy.

Afterward, Brody is jealous that Junichi is hogging the cute Emiko’s attention, and Boko and Joe casually say that girls like to talk to each other. Brody is stunned to realize that the short-haired, androgynously dressed Junichi is a girl, and is instantly smitten; I guess he doesn’t meet many girls. And I had to go back through this draft and edit all my references to “the boys.”

In episode 4, “KILL,” the group finally reaches a Eustace Foundation base on an ocean platform, atop a deep shaft leading to the mummified body of the squidlike Viras, the first kaiju discovered. (Junichi speculates that kaiju could be extraterrestrial, a nod to the alien origin of the Showa version of Viras.) The kids are put through medical tests and taken to cushy quarters well-equipped with food, manga, and games, but Joe mistrusts the Foundation, and he and Boko have their first-ever fight over it. Boko not only trusts the Foundation, but trusts Gamera to protect them if there are any more of the kaiju attacks that Joe is tired of facing. They find the door is locked, and Joe breaks out through an inevitable air duct, with Junichi following, not to escape but to investigate the base. Those two have a parallel conversation with Boko and Brody back in the room, discussing how Boko and Joe first met when the latter saved the former from a bully, with an embarrassing aspect that spawned their nicknames, but the puns didn’t translate well in the subtitles.

Meanwhile, Tazaki is also sick of it all and suspicious of the Foundation’s motives, after they cover up a report of a kaiju eating Zigra’s body. So he tells Emiko that he’s quitting — after asking her out. Before he can leave, though, said kaiju attacks the base. It’s Guiron, the knife-headed kaiju, but an exceptionally lithe and agile version that moves impossibly fast for a creature that size, jumping into the air and head-flipping so its knife strikes are exceptionally powerful. It trashes the base while the kids try to get back together, and Emiko gets trapped under debris trying to find them. Gamera shows up, and it becomes undeniable that Boko is right; Gamera is protecting the kids even to the extent of standing there and taking damage from Guiron’s attacks to shield them. Like in the original movies, Gamera sustains extreme damage, getting an eye gouged out, an arm cut off, and Guiron’s knife-head driven clear through his torso, but Boko is confident he’ll prevail anyway. And somehow, he does; despite sustaining what should be mortal injuries, Gamera retracts his head and limbs and does a jet-propelled spin like the Showa original, except it’s much faster and basically turns him into a buzzsaw that bisects Guiron before flying off to heal.

The kids end up in a malfunctioning elevator that drops them to the bottom of the shaft, where they find the orylium crystal broken out of its casing. When Boko touches it, it activates a holographic projection that all the kids can see. This leads into episode 5, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” where the projection reveals that an ancient civilization called Hemueden (remembered in myth as Mu, I suppose, and perhaps as Eden?) bred the kaiju as a radical population control measure to kill back humanity to a sustainable level, with the main kaiju Viras somehow activated to breed rapidly by consuming children with a particular genetic “code” that Boko has in abundance. Some rebel group stole Gamera and turned him into a defender of humanity, though we don’t see the details.

Turns out Emiko and the Foundation are evil. They’re trying to re-enact the plan that failed the first time due to Gamera, though it isn’t clear whether they’re descendants of the Hemueden or just discovered what they did and decided to recreate it for some reason. The Foundation bosses that Tazaki’s been reporting to are on a Moon base where they’ll ride out the global apocalypse they’re engineering (though their communications with Earth lack the 3-second lightspeed time lag that should be there). Though it turns out that Emiko, the niece of a Foundation head who killed Emiko’s mother to get to that post, has gone rogue and accelerated the plan in order to shut out the Moonbase people, who don’t have enough supplies to survive the wait. She plans to ride out the kaijugeddon on an orbital base.

When Tazaki, an outsider to all this, sees Emiko suddenly switched to cold, ruthless “Let’s feed the kids to Viras” mode, he appears to go along in the name of his own survival and profit, but then helps the kids escape along with an injured ally named Dario, getting to the Moon shuttle before Emiko can, and barely launching before the revived Viras’s tentacles grab the shuttle.

But Viras fires an energy beam at the shuttle, which the returning (and still-amputated) Gamera deflects enough to be a glancing blow. Dario is killed and Tazaki knocked out, so the kids have to get themselves and Tazaki to the escape pod. Of course, it turns out to be damaged in such a way that Joe chooses to sacrifice himself to use the manual launch lever which for some reason is outside the escape pod. Gamera kills Viras, whose corpse improbably falls from low orbit right back to its starting point, destroying the Foundation base. Then Gamera catches the escape pod when its parachute fails to open, but when the kids (minus Joe, whose fate is ambiguous) emerge safely on the ground, Gamera is near death.

Episode 6, “Childhood’s End,” reveals that Emiko survived Viras’s impact, but a baby Gyaos (shown in flashback to have been augmented somehow by Aunt Nora and the evil Foundation heads) cuts itself out of the wreckage and eats Emiko, along with Viras’s remains, and grows huge. Meanwhile, Boko and the others convince Tazaki that they need to save Gamera, overcoming his reluctance with the pragmatic argument that Gamera’s their only defense against kaiju and the Foundation. The government mobilizes Japan’s best medical experts to treat Gamera, and the JSDF tank squadron is finally mobilized to defend him, getting a big battle scene against the giant S-Gyaos.

The doctors struggle to halt Gamera’s deterioration, but Boko and the others remember the orylium flashback showing how Gamera was saved before using a piece of the crystal, so they’re able to jumpstart his regeneration, but not before S-Gyaos attacks. When the tank squadron is routed (with the two speaking characters we know coincidentally being the only survivors, a trope I find annoying), Boko makes himself a decoy to draw S-Gyaos away from Gamera, ending up at a cliff near a lighthouse in an homage to the original movie. Gamera shows up to save him, and there’s a pitched battle where S-Gyaos gets the upper hand and — eww — literally sticks its tongue down Gamera’s throat, injecting something, until it’s overcome by the combined fire of the tank commander and General Osborn’s bombers. Osborn is risking court martial by getting involved, but Boko’s mother gave him a good talking-to and shamed him into protecting his son and hers.

Gamera finally defeats S-Gyaos, but the injection was a Foundation RNA virus meant to put him back under their control. The kids and Tazaki somehow know Gamera’s turned evil, although the only sign is that his eyes have turned from green to red. When he turns to attack them, Boko insists Gamera is too tough to succumb, and indeed Gamera overcomes the brainwashing and… okay… he fires all his energy in a beam that blasts clear through the Moon and destroys the bad guys’ base. How did he know where they were? Anyway, he disintegrates, leaving an egg behind. Is “he” the right pronoun?

Things get back to normal, except Tazaki, err, uses Foundation technology to found his own tech company and invent the modern touchscreen smartphone 17 years early. Uh-huh. The egg hatches into a baby Gamera (Toto?), justifying the series title, and a tag reveals that Joe’s alive.

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This was okay, but nowhere near the heights of the Heisei-era Gamera productions. Like way too much franchise media these days, it was more about referencing and remixing elements from the franchise’s past than innovating a new approach to it. All the kaiju are reinventions of ones from the Showa series (omitting only Barugon), and the story returns to the Showa focus on child protagonists who are protected by Gamera and outthink the adults in finding ways to fight the kaiju. The final episode’s end credits feature a laid-back guitar version of Gamera’s Showa theme song. Meanwhile, Rebirth borrows the Heisei trilogy’s idea of kaiju being genetically engineered creations of a lost ancient civilization, as well as its overall dark and violent tone, and Asagi’s role as Gamera’s psychically bonded “priestess” in that trilogy is reflected in Boko’s implied bond to Gamera, although it’s never really explored this time. And there’s an attempt to evoke Gamera the Brave‘s gentle childhood focus, though without the emotional weight of GtB. The government taking custody of the wounded Gamera and trying to revive him with crystal energy also evokes GtB, plus there’s the birth of “Toto” at the end.

But it doesn’t really add up to much or have anything to say. There’s some fairly good character work, but there isn’t any real theme that I can see. The Brave was a rich, meaningful movie because it used the kaiju elements as an allegory for a soulful exploration of a boy dealing with death and loss. And the Heisei trilogy had its allegories for environmentalism and its subversive commentary on the government and military. But this doesn’t feel like it’s really about anything on a thematic level. It’s a surface homage to previous incarnations without the depth of the two more recent ones.

In particular, I’m not fond of how it emulates the Showa movies’ tendency to be incredibly sadistic to Gamera and basically just treat it as the poor guy’s lot in life to be brutalized and tortured in service to human children. Boko is nominally shown to care about Gamera, but it seems more like rooting for his pet attack dog to come protect him, no matter how much he suffers. Gamera is basically treated here as a living weapon, created to destroy like the other kaiju but captured and reprogrammed by the Hemueden resistance. The government’s attempts in Gamera the Brave to restore Gamera for use as a weapon were portrayed negatively in contrast to the children’s compassion and wish to help a friend in need, but here, the children and the government are both on the same page, trying to regenerate Gamera so he can fight. It’s much more callous. Boko does try to sacrifice himself to protect Gamera, but it doesn’t feel earned by what’s come before. The overall portrayal of Gamera is very impersonal, giving us little reason to care about him. There’s no sense of Gamera as a character, no personality to him. I know, that’s an elusive thing to convey in a kaiju fight, but it can be done. For instance, many of Godzilla’s most effective battles convey his ruthless cunning and adaptability, his ability to devise clever tactics to retake the advantage after facing a setback. Here, Gamera is just an entity that predictably, mechanically shows up to save the kids, destroys the other kaiju, and goes away. He’s more a plot device than a subject of sympathy. They’ve focused so much on making the fights intense and gruesome that it feels kind of empty otherwise.

Up to now, the Gamera franchise has been divided into two distinct eras: the original Showa-era films, which were mostly terrible (with Gamera vs. Barugon being the only moderately decent one), and the two Heisei-era incarnations, which were very different from each other but both brilliant in their own ways. This first Reiwa-era incarnation of Gamera falls decidedly in the middle, nowhere near the depths of the originals or the heights of the Heisei revivals. It’s reasonably well-done in some respects, but ultimately hollow, not really about much of anything beyond homage to previous productions. And as Gamera’s first animated incarnation, it’s rather disappointing, undermined by the low frame rate of the cel-shaded 3D resulting in stiff, often lifeless character animation and depriving the action animation of fluidity.

It’s also not really clear who the intended audience is. The storyline is written to focus on children and to emulate the approach of the child-oriented Showa movies and The Brave, but it’s a TV-14-rated show with fairly graphic violence and horror on the level of the Heisei trilogy, including civilians getting dismembered and eaten on-camera and lots of blood. There’s also the odd choice to use explicit profanity in the English subtitles, even though the Japanese interjections being translated are far milder.

If this had been the first Gamera production since the dreadful originals, it would’ve been fairly impressive in comparison. But the Heisei trilogy and The Brave raised the bar incredibly high, and Rebirth doesn’t even come close.

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Thoughts on Legendary’s SKULL ISLAND (TV, 2023) (spoilers)

It’s time to revive my kaiju movie review series, since Netflix has recently debuted new animated series in two kaiju universes, Skull Island and GAMERA -Rebirth-. I’ve watched them both and will be reviewing them in consecutive posts.

Skull Island is the first animated series in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, a combined reboot of the Godzilla and King Kong franchises. The Kong-based series was written and developed by Brian Duffield, directed by Willis Bulliner, and animated in 2D by Powerhouse Animation. Rated TV-14 for violence and language, the series tells a single serialized story in 8 episodes.

Skull Island is, unsurprisingly, a sequel to Kong: Skull Island, set about 20 years later in either 1992 or 1993, according to the producers. This would put it 2-3 years before the events of the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, and Legendary seems committed to keeping everything in a unified canon, but even “canonical” comics and novels often get overwritten by new screen productions. We’ll see.

Episode 1, punningly called “Maritime Pilot,” focuses on Charlie (Nicholas Cantu, Leonardo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem) and his father Cap (Benjamin Bratt), who are on a civilian (evidently non-Monarch) cryptozoological expedition on the Once Upon a Maritime, a boat owned by Cap’s Japanese partner Hiro (Yuki Matsuzaka) and his son Mike (Darren Barnet). Nobody in this show has a full name. Charlie is tired of living on the boat and wants to go to college and meet girls, although it seems to me there are some attraction vibes between him and Mike, who’s uninterested in girls. (Hiro and Mike speak subtitled Japanese to one another, but speak English with American accents. I’d guess Hiro was an immigrant early in life and Mike was born in America, hence his name, though I suppose it could be a nickname for Miko or Michinaga or something.) Cap lives and breathes his work as a cryptozoologist and doesn’t understand why his son would want anything else.

Charlie rescues a teenage girl adrift in the water, a girl we’d seen in the cold open making a violent escape from another boat. Named Annie (Mae Whitman, Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender), she’s tough, feral, and unfamiliar with many words and concepts. She says she had a dog with her, one she’s confident can take care of itself. She’s being hunted by men from the other boat, which disappears soon after Cap’s crew spots it. The Once Upon a Maritime is attacked and sunk by a squidlike kaiju (which implicitly sank the other boat), and Hiro is killed before Mike’s eyes. (The kaiju is known behind the scenes as the Kraken, since the show’s makers were unaware that there was already a kaiju called the Kraken in the MonsterVerse comics. Although, really, what else would you call it? I was calling it a Kraken in my head even before I looked it up on the wiki.)

Episode 2, “The Last Blank Space on the Map,” opens with a flashback of Hiro and Mike getting a map to Skull Island from a Vietnam vet whose buddies were among the few survivors of the events of Kong: Skull Island. So Mike blames himself for his father’s death. Charlie and Mike wash up on a beach where they’re attacked by giant crabs, and are rescued by Annie, who’s from an island but not this island. They’re confronted by more gunmen pursuing Annie, but she’s saved by her dog, who of course is a dog-lion kaiju the size of an elephant, named Dog. Meanwhile, Cap is washed up separately and encounters Irene (Betty Gilpin), who claims to be an innocent shipwreck victim but turns out to be in charge of the group of mercenaries on the island, whose named members are Sam (Phil Lamarr) and Wells (John DiMaggio) — finally, a surname, but no first name.

Kong finally appears in episode 3, “What’s Up, Croc?,” saving Charlie and Mike from a crocodile variant that’s much more of an endurance predator than normal crocs, though it’s unclear if Kong knowingly saved them or was just preying on the croc. (Aren’t gorillas herbivores? Well, they do eat insects, and the size difference is comparable.) Annie arrives on Dog’s back, and the boys decide to stick with her for protection. Mike confesses to Charlie that he and his father were one of several groups hired to search for the island, evidently including Irene’s mercenaries. (The island doesn’t show up on radar due to EM interference.) For no clear reason, Mike conceals that he sustained a chest wound in the Kraken attack, and it’s worsening.

Meanwhile, Cap and Irene’s mercs work together to survive, though Irene won’t confide much. But they’re searching for Annie and under orders to take her alive. Annie, meanwhile, tells Charlie that she grew up on a nearby island with only Dog for company and doesn’t know how old she is or why the mercs are after her.

The Kraken destroys the helicopter called in to evacuate the mercenaries. Irene makes a crazy plan at the end of episode 3 to make use of a giant hawk that took one of her mercs, luring Annie and Dog to its hunting ground so it will take Dog and leave Annie unprotected. The setup for that plan spans the entirety of episode 4, “Breakfast Fit for a Kong.” The mercs split up and Cap gets to know Irene and the head mercenary Sam, who’s surprisingly charming and soft-spoken for a gun-toting mercenary. The trio finds a field of giant flowers that Irene geeks out over, revealing herself to be a botanist, but then one of the flowers flytraps her and Cap and Sam have to cut it down and drag her out. Cap talks about how his long-ago sighting of a playful dragon-like kaiju (which the showrunner denies was Godzilla) changed his life like nothing else except becoming a father. He also explicates the Hollow Earth theory (confusing Sam, who thought there was lava inside the Earth — close, but it’s called magma when it’s underground), which Irene apparently was already conversant with.

Meanwhile, Annie and Dog kill a dodo for breakfast, using the boys as bait to lure it out (though why would a dodo hunt humans?), and Annie casually reveals that she and Dog met when their respective fathers killed each other. They subsequently teamed up to become masters of their island. Charlie falls into a giant ant tunnel, but Dog is not obedience-trained and can’t be bothered to save Charlie. Mike follows Charlie down without a plan to get out, reinforcing my sense that he’s in love with Charlie. Annie resolves things by joining the boys in the hole and putting herself in danger from a giant ant, feigning a cry for help that brings Dog running. Charlie is starting to fall for Annie. Meanwhile, Irene is concerned that her mercs will shoot Annie in revenge for Dog killing several of them already.

The trap is sprung at the start of Episode 5: “Doggone It.” Annie gets tranked, and Irene is implausibly calm as Dog charges her and gets grabbed by the giant hawk at the last possible instant, carried off to parts unknown. Charlie and Mike see that Cap is with them, but Mike has Charlie stay behind where he’s safe while surrendering himself. This backfires, as a mysterious figure in an ape mask directs the giant hawk to carry Charlie away, where he’s reunited with Dog at some kind of giant temple of Kong’s ape species (as seen in Godzilla vs. Kong), which is where Kong hangs out. Charlie tries to make peace with Dog and work together to get down to ground level and help Annie. Charlie notices Kong wistfully stroking a human-sized necklace hanging on the temple wall.

Meanwhile, Mike gets sicker from his wound, which for no comprehensible reason he still hasn’t asked anyone to treat. Irene turns out to be the person that hired Hiro and Mike to search for the island a month ago, but the other ship found it first. Irene figures out that Cap knows where Charlie is since he didn’t ask for help finding him, and Cap realizes that Irene is Annie’s mother. They’re interrupted by the bizarre sight of a whale soaring over their heads. It’s been flung by the Kraken, who has incredible aim, since it lands right in Kong’s temple’s front yard. The Kraken is calling Kong out.

Episode 6: “Terms of Endearment” focuses on Irene trying to get through to Annie, with flashbacks to the 6-year-old Annie losing her father (DiMaggio again, I think) and bonding with the juvenile Dog. The shot of Annie burying her father with a bright plastic toy shovel is wrenching. Their yacht was wrecked on the island, and the wealthy Irene presumed them dead until the wreck was sighted recently, then hired the mercs and Hiro to track it down. The whole conflict has been a misunderstanding provoked when Dog attacked the mercs and they fired in self-defense.

Meanwhile, Charlie continues his one-sided bickering with Dog until they get back to the camp and everyone’s reunited, with Dog pouncing on Irene and Annie not calling him off until her mother apologizes for it all. But then the Kraken attacks the camp and kills another mercenary, and the team is almost out of bullets, with no way to fight the kaiju. Charlie proposes siccing the giant ape on it. Weird to see a Kong story where nobody knows Kong’s name.

Episode 7: “You’re Not a King, You’re Just a Stupid Animal” remedies that somewhat, since nearly the entire episode is a flashback to some years earlier. And it’s weird. Kong is living happily on the island where a bunch of villagers live, but they apparently aren’t the Iwi from the movie, they’re a bunch of multiethnic people, some wearing what appear to be leftover military helmets from the expedition in K:SI. The only speaking one is Kong’s best friend, a green-eyed, Spanish-speaking (and English-subtitled) young woman credited as “Island Girl” (Fryda Wolff). She talks to him about her dreams (including dreaming of a robot Kong, an unexpected nod to Mechani-Kong from King Kong Escapes) and chastises him for his overaggressiveness when he picks a fight with a trio of giant chameleons that almost kill him and Island Girl, as well as the giant hawk, who turns out to be Kong’s hunting bird, bringing him food like a trained falcon. The fight sequence is overly long and plays fast and loose with physics when Island Girl falls off a cliff and has time for Kong to leap up and fail to save her, followed by the hawk swooping down to catch her. She also improbably survives a fall from a great height by landing on a chameleon’s body.

Anyway, when Kong washes his wounds after the fight, a drop of his blood rouses the Kraken, and it subsequently kills all the villagers, including Island Girl, giving Kong a revenge motive. He hangs Island Girl’s necklace on his temple wall as a remembrance, though how his huge fingers got it off her is left as an exercise for the viewer. Change aspect ratio to the present day, and Charlie explicates his crazy plan to steal the necklace to anger Kong so he’ll chase them out to where the Kraken is. This brief bit is the only English dialogue in the episode.

Episode 8: “You’ll Never Catch a Monkey That Way” has Charlie insist on carrying out the admittedly crazy plan over everyone’s objections, except for Annie, who’s excited at the prospect. Charlie stands up to his dad’s attempt to stop him, and it resolves their debate about Charlie going to college. Irene gives orders and takes Sam aside to “show him something,” but it’s actually to let her guard down and cry on his shoulder about Annie.

The plan goes off as, well, planned, but Charlie realizes Dog is too slow to escape Kong with both of them riding him, so he unwisely jumps off in the middle of the jungle, where he gets captured by the ape-masked people, who say he’ll pay for what he did to Kong.

But that part is after Kong has been lured to shore and gotten attacked by the Kraken, seen in full at last. The fierce battle rages on way too long; after Kong is dragged under and apparently kills it by stabbing it with the wreck of Cap and Hiro’s boat, a nice bit of payoff, it then resurfaces and he has to kill it twice more before the sequence finally ends. And that’s after he sees Dog struggling against the undertow, with Annie reminding him of Island Girl, so he saves Dog, whereupon both Dog and Annie get swept into the water again in Kong’s final battle with the Kraken… and Annie hits her head and wakes up two weeks later in the unfamiliar environment of a big-city hospital. Cliffhanger!

Ugh, I’m tired of cliffhanger endings. If you’re going to do a season as one big story, that story should be able to stand on its own and have a real ending. It’s fine to set up some new phase for the story to move into afterward, but just stopping things when nearly everything is left dangling is unsatisfying. It’s a crude tactic to get an audience to keep watching by holding the next part of the story hostage. It’s more challenging, but more worthwhile, to give them a complete, satisfying story so they’ll want to see the next story you have to tell.

Aside from that, though, Skull Island is pretty good, with some provisos. The character work is good (albeit with some poorly motivated choices like Mike hiding his wound), and there’s a lot of clever dialogue writing, though the nonstop witty snark does wear thin after a while. It’s interesting that there are no real villains in the story, besides the Kraken; the conflicts are mostly a tragedy of errors and misunderstandings.

Some parts could work better, though. I’m only guessing that Mike is being subtextually written as gay; if that’s not the case, then he’d just be the stereotype of a sexless Asian male character. Also, Mae Whitman’s vocal delivery as Annie is just too normal, too fluent, for someone who’s had no human contact between the ages of 6 and 16. I’d think she’d either barely talk at all or have her own idiosyncratic speech pattern that only she and Dog understand. The digression in the 7th episode was an odd choice, introducing a lot that got no explanation and presumably was mostly setup for season 2. And some of the action sequences went on way longer than they needed to.

It’s strange that this was done as an 8-episode series, considering that it’s six 20-minute episodes bracketed by two 25-minute episodes, so the whole is less than 3 hours long. While I appreciate the time taken to focus on character interplay, the pacing is still more decompressed than it needed to be. This could easily have been tightened up and presented as a single movie under 2 1/2 hours. I daresay it would’ve been better that way.

As far as continuity goes, this show makes me wonder just how committed Legendary really is to a consistent canon across all productions. There are plenty of inconsistencies between this show, K:SI, and The Birth of Kong in how they portray Skull Island. For one thing, the permanent storms surrounding the island in the other works don’t seem to exist in the show. The show and the comic both introduce multiple new species to the island’s ecosystem, yet have none in common besides Kong and the movie’s Skullcrawlers. The show’s non-Iwi villagers are an oddity. The comic, naturally, does not depict the giant ape-people temple, since that concept from Godzilla vs. Kong hadn’t been created yet when it was published. Its flashbacks show the apes’ home base as a cave in a barren waste, although for what it’s worth, those flashbacks were in the villain’s mystical visions and may not have been accurate. The one consistent element between the animated series and the comic, at least approximately, is Kong’s size as of the 1990s, between his heights in K:SI and GvK.

Skull Island was good enough that I hope it gets a second season to resolve the dangling threads. (Indeed, this might well be the sort of thing Netflix often does with its animated series, splitting a single production season into two release blocks several months apart, so there may be a second half already made.) But this season would’ve been stronger if it hadn’t felt so incomplete.

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Back online

Well, it took 6 days, but my phone and internet are finally back up. After nobody showed up as scheduled on Friday, I waited over the weekend, then gave them a chance to come on Monday, and when that didn’t happen, I called yesterday (Tuesday) to check on the progress. Frustratingly, their records showed that someone did come out on Friday, identified some problem outside, and “handed it off to Maintenance,” whatever that meant, reporting the problem as fixed. They never actually contacted me to check whether it worked or not, which is upsetting.

So they scheduled another visit for today, and this time, fortunately, the tech actually arrived within the scheduled window and managed to fix the problem. Just in time, too, since I’d reached my monthly limit on my smartphone’s mobile data. For the second time, it was some kind of broken connection at a switching station miles away, so the tech had to call someone at that station, send a “buzzer” signal through my phone line for them to track, then wait for them to check through hundreds of connections to find the right one. But I’m finally back up and running, for now, at least. Hopefully that fiber optic upgrade the building manager promised will happen very soon.

Incidentally, I looked into the local news on Sunday, and it turns out that police blockade on the street by the library was due to a shooting, with the suspects still at large at the time. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about walking around the block to find another route to the library.

Now that I have wi-fi again, I’m probably going to have to contact my PC’s customer service people. That thing where the PC freezes up with the power light on happened again, this time when I tried to hibernate it, rather than after a period of idleness. I decided to let it sit in frozen mode to see if it would automatically reboot as I suspected, but after an hour, it hadn’t, so I had to use the paper-clip reset button. It was warmer than usual during the time it was frozen, suggesting the auto-reboot might be an overheating thing. But when I checked the event viewer afterward, it showed no sign of any activity during that hour, as if it had been turned off. I wonder if the problem is with the power systems or something.

More tech troubles

On Thursday, my phone line went out again, and the Internet went dead less than half an hour later. I made an appointment for a tech to come on Friday, but of course they never showed up; there aren’t enough techs trained in the old copper phone lines, so they never arrive on time. Which means I’ve been wi-fi-less over the weekend, relying on my phone for Internet. I’m now on wi-fi at the library. I was planning to watch a show here, but the resolution is too low to be worth it. Odd, since I’ve been able to watch video here before. But there are four other people on laptops along with me, so maybe that’s why.

Anyway, with nothing to do on my mini-PC but write, I’ve let it lie idle a lot, and I’ve discovered that the thing causing it to shut down after a period of inactivity is not the hard drive deactivation, since I had that set for 5 hours and it shut down after not quite an hour of inactivity. To clarify, this is the kind of “shutdown” where the power light is on but the screen is dark and the computer doesn’t respond to anything. Last time, I had to unplug it to reboot it. Since then, I realized there’s a recessed reset button you can trip with a paper clip. I tried letting the computer sit on sleep mode for a couple of hours, but it went from sleep mode to the unresponsive mode! So that happened twice in one day.

I have a suspicion now that it starts out with that unresponsive mode, then after a while it self-reboots. That seems more likely than it doing two different kinds of shutdown. But I didn’t want to let it sit in the unresponsive mode and wait to see what happened.

The best option I can think of is just to shorten the time before it hibernates automatically, to less than the time it takes before it freezes. But I’m not certain how long that is. I’m pretty sure it took longer in sleep mode than in active mode. Anyway, I habitually left my laptop on all day because it’s so slow getting started and closing down, but this computer goes on and off so quickly that there’s no reason not to sleep or hibernate it when I’m away.

Still, I wish I could diagnose the problem and fix it, rather than just trying to avoid it.

Anyway, when I reached the library, the road to its parking lot was blocked by a police car, since apparently there’s a crime scene nearby. I parked in Burnet Woods across the way to investigate, but I wasn’t sure if it was okay to park there while going to the library, so I walked around the block to see if there was a way to approach from the other side. I should’ve just looked up the map on my phone, since it was a considerably longer walk than I expected, but I did find another way in.

I hope the phone/internet repair person comes tomorrow. On the plus side, the building manager says we will be getting an upgrade to fiber optics soon. I hope it’s very soon, and this is the last time I have to deal with these frequent outages.