Comments on: Robotic Midsomers Murders

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:38:31 +0000

Oh, I quite liked the Whiteout comics original, as a low-key potboiling crime thriller. Have thought of zero things to say about the film though.

By: Alex S

Alex S — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:21:00 +0000

As with Whiteout, this was a comics adaptation where the usual ‘oh but the Graphic Novel (because that is a more adult term) was so much better, they totally lost the complexity’ does not apply, because in both cases the comic was a) a transparent pitch for a film adaptation and b) not very good.

By: Tracer Hand

Tracer Hand — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:42:11 +0000

To my mind, you hire Bruce Willis for one facial expression, the slightly bug-eyed one that says “This destruction is absurdly amusing”. Tarantino knew this and gave him a couple of great scenes in which to deploy it – finding the machine gun on the kitchen counter, and looking through the weaponry at the pawn shop before settling on a Samurai sword. Die Hard is full of it. And we get it here just once, when he’s driving like gangbusters after a hijacked surrogate who at one point manages to clamp herself onto his speeding car. And there it is, the bug eyes, the concealed WTFness – the Willis Look is a descendant of that line in The Thing, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

No the movie made no sense but I didn’t particularly mind. It’s too bad that the whole thing was premised on the old chestnut that “If you die in a dream/the Matrix/whatever, you die in REAL LIFE!” No you don’t. You just don’t. That’s the entire point!

By: Pete Baran

Pete Baran — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:07:51 +0000

I was going to do a double review of Gamer and Surrogates cos they have so much in common. But actually they are the antithesis of each other: Surrogates is a dull film with and charismatic star, while Gamer is an exciting film with a dull star.

When I say film in the above paragraph I mean “experience”. My take of Nevedine/Taylors “serious” film is coming up. A tough one to get a hold on cos it was almost brilliant, though its flaw was almost the same as Surrogates.

By: lonepilgrim

lonepilgrim — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:08:39 +0000

Can’t remember if you reviewed it but I found Gamer a far more compelling movie on a vaguely similar theme – I gave up watching Surrogates after about 20 minutes because it was so dull visually.

There’s a riff on the shit jobs avatar experience over at The Onion here:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ultra_realistic_modern_warfare

By: swanstep

swanstep — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:35:37 +0000

Because in reality with these perfect superhuman robot bodies, everyone is still doing the same shit jobs they were doing before. So the baker is now a robot baker, the cop a robot cop. And the bum, well a robot bum.
I agree this *sounds* like a kind of error. People tend to choose *very* glamorous/wish-fulfilling avatars of themselves for on-line worlds of various sorts, why wouldn’t they (so it seems) choose just as idelaized real world avatars? The real world could then become like the world of beer ads where everyone is a model etc..

But all of that’s a mistake. Total avatar-dom whether it’s done in the Matrix or out in the real world probably isn’t ever going to be computable/codable/done in simulation like that, rather it’ll have to (just as the movies respectively suggest) function like a prosthetic…. your whole nervous system tuned to your body with all of its very specific timing and inner emulational structure will having to do all the analog computation/non-computational being-in-the-world work that can then drive the Matrix or Real World into subsequent states. In sum, it’s no accident and almost certainly physically necessary that when Neo pops out of the Matrix he has essentially the same body that he had in the Matrix, and in Surrogates (which I’ve not seen) the same idea seems basically correct. Of course, as you mention, the idea that crime would end (as opposed to continuing in new forms) seems preposterous, and I’m sure there are many many other problems too, but non-arbitrary/non-wish-fulfilling total avatars are a (depressing) feature not a bug!