The other day I found myself watching a soccer game. The players were not very good: defenders were constantly out of position, midfielders of the same team were bunching together and stealing the ball from each other, few passes were completed, and those that were often gave the impression of being accidental. Once, the goalie was even caught standing inside the goal when one team took a shot. Fortunately for them, the shot went well wide of the mark, despite the fact that it was taken a mere ten feet from the mouth of the goal.
Notwithstanding the poor level of play, I was enraptured. I cheered, I groaned, I shouted encouragement. I never missed a second of the action. What is more, I had just as eagerly watched the 30-minute practice that had preceded the game. The reason for my enthusiasm was that one of the players was my four-year-old son. There is a lesson there for storytellers of all stripes.
Oblivion is the second opus of director Joseph Kosinski, who also gave us Tron. It is a perfectly average movie on net, with some attributes rising a little above and others sinking a bit below. Of all the changes one might suggest to improve the film, the single most important one would be to populate it with characters we care about. The same thing that turned an hour and fifteen minutes of abject boredom into an engaging experience on a small soccer field in central Ohio would have dramatically improved every single scene of Kosinski’s work.
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Finalists for the 2011 Prometheus Award for best libertarian novel were announced just yesterday. One finalist, Ceres, by past award-winner L. Neil Smith, has already been reviewed on Prometheus Unbound. Also making the cut is Cory Doctorow’s For The Win. I have a copy of this novel and plan to review it soon, after I publish a few overdue reviews.
As a reminder to our readers, we are open to submissions of reviews (as well as news, articles, interviews). Even if you can’t contribute regularly, we’d like to have a number of part-timers on our staff who only contribute occasionally. We’re even open to one-time contributors.
So if you’d like to read and review one of the other Prometheus Award finalists, nominees, past winners, or another piece of fiction, we’d be happy to consider it for publication.
Below is the full press release from the Libertarian Futurist Society, which presents the Prometheus Award:
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[Warning: Some mild spoilers.]
If the making of a movie is a series of steps in a long path to the finished product, then the makers of Skyline trod boldly on the first flagstone, took a misstep on the next, stubbed their toes on the third and generally staggered off balance the rest of the way. The concept is as full of potential as one could want it to be: aliens invade, slaughter and eat the human race while a group of beautiful young people bunker down in an apartment building, fighting for their lives and arguing about what to do next. Great movies have been based on ideas no more complex than this, but the makers of those movies glided more gracefully along the rest of the production path.
Skyline, though not awful, is not a great movie, nor even a good one. It displays a respectable technical proficiency which any producer can purchase if his coffers are full. This and the aforementioned concept are its strongest points. It lacks artistry in all aspects where technical expertise cannot suffice, and suffers from that mild incoherence which results from underdeveloped and abandoned plot points.
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