Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

My expectations for the new Jack Ryan movie were really stinking low. I've enjoyed the couple of Tom Clancy novels I've read (Clear and Present Danger and Without Remorse), but I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of the books. I loved the first three movies based on them though. Hunt for Red October is a great thriller and Alec Baldwin's Jack Ryan is a different kind of hero: an analyst who prefers to think his way out of problems rather than use violence. Hiring middle-aged Harrison Ford for Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger made a lot of sense then, letting the character continue to be an intellectual instead of an action star.

I never saw Sum of All Fears, partly because I'm not super fond of Ben Affleck as an actor, but also because I hated the concept of de-aging Jack Ryan. I was afraid that he'd become just another actiony superspy. I still have no idea if that was true for Sum of All Fears, though no one's ever recommended it to me as a must-watch, but it was also my fear for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. It felt like such a cynical gimmick for Paramount to reboot the series, like they wanted their own Bond or Bourne series and this was the way they were going to get it. If it hadn't been for the cast, I wouldn't have even bothered with it.

I can take or leave Chris Pine, but Keira Knightley and Kenneth Branagh are people I love. I'll watch pretty much anything with either of them in it. I'm also interested in Kevin Costner at this stage of his career. I was hot and cold on him in early days (mostly cold except for The Untouchables and maybe Bull Durham), but in spite of the huge problems I had with the way Pa Kent was written in Man of Steel, there were no issues with the way Costner played him. I was looking forward to seeing him mentor Pine in Jack Ryan.

Awesome Stuff: Galactica cast, buy Ming's cape, new pulp scifi, new Jack Ryan movies, Steam Wars, Chuck and Lost news, Caprica, and more

Battlestar Galactica at SCI FI's upfront



Tons of pictures and a brief report of the event at the Battlestar Blog.

Huge Sci Fi live auction on the Ebay

Includes Charles Middleton's Ming cape from Flash Gordon (1936), a hydraulic velociraptor from Jurassic Park, Michael Keaton's Batman costume, an original King Kong poster, and more. SCI FI Wire has the details.

Didn't like the ending to Cloverfield?

Pick another.

Wonder Woman statue



I'm not enough of a fan to fork out 300 bucks for it, but dang that's a nice statue. Real leather and fabric on the costume and everything. Not sure what the lasso's made of, but it looks real too.

Scifi is dead; long live the Kings

One of the reasons io9 cites critics as saying why the science fiction genre is dead is that "SF is now real life." To which I say, "Fine." I've always been more interested in the fantasy elements of it anyway. Hard scifi bores the crap out of me. Hard scifi is inexcusably deficient in Wookiees, ray guns, and space princesses.

Fortunately though, not all modern scifi authors feel like they have to realistically portray or predict the science. Maybe it's not real scifi, but I'll take S.M. Stirling's version any day. He describes his novel In the Courts of the Crimson Kings this way:

"In [the book's] timeline, we discover in the course of the 20th century that Mars (and Venus) are living worlds, with strangely humanoid inhabitants--[which is] confirmed by Soviet and American space probes in the early 1960s... The Mars of Crimson Kings is a dying but still habitable world, with the wreck of an ancient civilization that once ruled the entire planet under the Tollamune dynasty, when Earthlings were still cracking flints and fighting off cave bears."

New Jack Ryan movies?

Not interested. The franchise has already been killed by the Affleck reboot. Trying to start over yet again is like making a copy of a copy, even if Sam Raimi is directing. Unless of course they get someone really cool to play Ryan, in which case I don't care what the character's name is, I'll see it because it's a spy movie with a cool actor.

But honestly, if they want to just toss a Tom Clancy name on their non-Clancy movies to increase audience recognition, they should make them Mr. Clark movies and let Ryan appear as a recurring, supporting character.

Steam Wars and Undead Backbrain



Robert Hood's Undead Backbrain blog is fricking Awesome and you should be reading it. It would save me having to link to him every single day if you did, which is what it looks like I'll be doing if his content stays as consistent as it has so far. He's the one who turned me on to Automatons and that viking vs. aliens film.

Now though, it's all about Steam Wars, a steampunk giant-monster project by the guy who did The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Even if the film never gets made, it's worth the post just to see the concept art.

Chuck news (and a little bit of Lost)

The writers of Chuck are taking advantage of their strike hiatus to tweak the show a little. According to TV Guide's Michael Ausiello who attended the Chuck panel at Paley Fest, "'The idea is to own the fact that we've been off the air for several months, so there's a reset that's going to happen,' said (co-creator Josh) Schwartz of the second-season premiere, slated for September. 'We're going to bring in some fresh new characters, some new villains.'"

Lost producer Damon Lindelof moderated the panel and snuck in a bit of Lost news "by revealing the real reason the four-toed statue has yet to be seen again. After the monument first appeared 'we got a note back from the network that said, "This is too weird,"' he explained. 'I was like, "Do you watch the show? This is too weird?" Essentially, they said, "Could it be a six-toed statue?" I was like, "Someone explain to me why a six-toed statue is less weird than a four-toed statue?" And they're still noodling on that.'"

Caprica

I might change my mind once Battlestar comes back on and I start getting into it again, but right this second I need some convincing that the Caprica prequel series is going to be worth watching. It sort of sounds like Dynasty in space.