mini-reviews

[reverancepavane]

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: [film] A quite good ressurection of the original Planet of the Apes movies, in particular, the theme covered by the 1971 Escape From The Planet of the Apes, that being the origin of the apes. Although in this case Caesar is not the offspring of two time-travelling apes from the future, but instead postulates an alternative explanation for the rise of the apes. The only time I was forced to wear my disbelief suspenders was for the second time Caesar spoke. They really should have continued to sign. Well worth seeing, although I still scratch me head over all these films where Andy Serkis is listed in the credits and yet there is no sign of him in the film... War World: Battle For Sauron: [book] Now Don Hawthorne is one of my favourite military SF authors, because he's both seen the sharp end and doesn't write gun porn. Instead he writes quite strongly on the psychology of what makes a soldier, particularly a talented commander, and the uplifting military virtues of honour and chivalry (which are the reasons why soldiers are soldiers). The only time I've seen his work has been with short stories written in Jerry Pournelle collections, and interestingly enough, he specialises in what Jerry would consider to be the good bad guys, and does a very good job at doing so. His stories in the There Will Be War series featured the role of a heavy battalion of Soviet combat engineers in a post-apocalyptic future, and their steam train (the Iron Angel). In the War World series he wrote magnificently about the enemies of the First Empire in Pournelle's Future History, the Saurons Trade Bloc, again, capturing the essence of of a militaristic neohuman society (with cyborgs even) that couldn't quite understand why they were losing the war when they had so many advantages over the norms. So I was quite happy to discover a new book in the reissued War World series which was coauthored by him, and which apparently covered the events between his two War World stories. In fact the short stories do form the end papers of the book, but the filler between them appears to be entirely the work of the coauthor, John F Carr (Jerry's assistant/secretary). And like John's attempt to ressurect the H Beam Piper Lord Kalvan franchise, it doesn't read very well, being basically a listing of the events of the Battle of Sauron with none of the passion and excitement that was found in the flashbacks of the original story. It was very much in the style of many of those books based on a wargame where you can hear the dice rolling in the background. Except here the background was simply a lengthy drawn out silence, based on themes that don't mesh with the Saurons as envisaged by Don (and one supposes Jerry). If you can find copies of the original stories (which are apparently in the reissue of the collections), read those, and spare yourself the heartache of the fumbling attempts of a second-rate imitator. Then again, it does tend to match the calibre of most current military sf, which is either gun porn, or worse, Republican gung-ho tripe.

Comments

[maelorin]

Andy Serkis does do the acting that is transformed into Gollum and Caesar, albeit via computer-fangled wiz-jakery.

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Was feeling ill-humoured (phlegmatic and slightly choleric, with a touch of sanguine around the gills), and in my rapidly enfeebled state my attempts at other types of humour tends to get even more obscure than normal, especially in a media as devoid of expression as the electronic one. In other words ... I know. <grin>