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City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare

He we are, the fifth book of the Mortal Instruments series--City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare. This book picks up where we left off in City of Fallen Angels, with Jace having disappeared with the resurrected Sebastian, and the search for them beginning before they can cause any real mayhem.

Of the three books of this second half of the series, I think this is the book that suffers the most from middle book syndrome. I think the biggest cause of this is the decision that was made somewhere along the road to make this book focus just as much, if not more so, on the romantic tension rather than the actual tension of finding Jace.

Instead of the action sequences that some of us, including yours truly, were hoping for, we get a lot of stuff going towards resolving the various love triangles that have cropped up over the course of the previous book.

We get the Simon/Maia/Jordan triangle. This one gets resolved with Maia favouring (her ex that turned her into a werewolf) Jordan. Thankfully, Simon doesn’t always need to be second-best to someone else, which was the fate reserved for him in the original trilogy--he does indeed get Isabelle, though not before significant amount of angst.

I do have to wonder how any author can get away with putting this many love triangles into one series. Even Stephanie Meyer had to stop at just the one main love triangle. Of course, Stephanie Meyer was also a hack who decided to have nothing else happen in the plot, while Cassandra Clare is capable of writing an interesting plot to go with her love triangles when she wants to. (This is ignoring the fact that when it comes to writing, I’m also a hack.)

I know the original trilogy had a lot of romantic tension, but I think a lot of that was justified because of the connection between Clary and Jace and their angst over their seeming family relationship. While I think it would have been more interesting if they decided to say, “Fuck it, we’re going to make this a thing anyway” and just ran with it, that’s possibly more the result of me spending far too much time on the internet, and it’s understandable why there was that angst there.

Plus there was at least some character development beyond the love triangle in that original trilogy. Clary was coming to terms with being a Shadowhunter and that her mother had decided to wipe her memories and keep all of this from her, and Jace had to deal with everyone being suspicious of him because of his connection to Valentine Morgernstern. 

In this trilogy, a lot of the romantic tension is between the side characters who really aren’t getting much character development otherwise. The bulk of Simon’s character development came in the previous trilogy with his unwilling conversion to vampirism (and also his childhood crush on Clary). In this trilogy, he’s come to terms with his identity for the most part and while he’s still angsting over the finer points of being a vampire, a lot of his development seems to be coming from his love triangles.

Speaking of romantic tension, Clary does spend a lot of time angsting over Jace here obviously. First she’s angsting over not knowing where he is, and then she’s angsting over how much of a Sebastian sycophant he is. 

I think if City of Lost Souls was primarily about this Clarly/Jace/Sebastian dynamic, it would have worked just fine. However, the other shit that was added drags the book down a lot for me.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

My biggest gripe with the TNG films

If you’re kinda new to my blog and are presently thinking, “Gee, isn’t there meant to be a review of Star Trek: Nemesis right here?”, it’s a good question to ask. The answer is I did it a while ago, and I’m really only doing the other ones make sure I’ve done all of them.

I think the biggest problem with the Next Generation movies is that, unlike the original series movies, they don’t really do a whole lot to expand the characters. Data does start using his emotion chip, but after Generations, it doesn’t really inform much of his behaviour.

This is a part of the reason why I liked Insurrection that I didn’t mention in my review of it. While it doesn’t dramatically change any of the characters, it shows that they still have room to grow (which is a point that Steve Shives covered in his review of the movie, actually). 

The real trouble was that this attempt to expand the characters never really informed anything that happened in Nemesis. This is really something that plagued these movies at every turn--whatever new character development was brought in for one movie was forgotten about for the next.

I suppose you could say the same about the series as well, but you kinda expected it to happen with the TV show because Star Trek has always been a very episodic affair. Even with the Star Trek shows that wanted to focus more on long-running story arcs like Deep Space Nine and the last couple of seasons of Enterprise, you still ended up with episodes like Hard Time, where things happened to O’Brien that potentially should have been informing his behaviour for the rest of the series but were forgotten about pretty quickly.

This is where the original series movies went absolutely right. What happened to the characters in one movie would inform their behaviour in later movies as well. Even though The Search for Spock was one of the lesser Star Trek movies, the death of David Marcus and the effect it had on Kirk still informed some of his actions during The Undiscovered Country; a movie made (and set) years later.

Perhaps this is a part of the reason why people are generally a little bit kinder to the odd-numbered original series movies than they are to the Next Generation movies other than First Contact. For the most part, the development meant something. Even in The Motion Picture, which I think is the absolute worst of the Trek movies, that Kirk was unhappy with being an admiral and really wanted to go back to being a captain is something that carried over to The Wrath of Khan.

Indeed, it seems like no accident that the movie featuring the original cast that’s considered by most people to be the absolute bottom of the barrel, The Final Frontier, is the one that had no effect at all on anything that came after. Of course there were other issues with the movie; but I think the correlation is there.

I think the Next Generation movies wanted to imply that there’d been some character development in the years between the movies, but I think ultimately this was a somewhat lazy approach to character development. Data had problems controlling his newfound emotions in Generations, but by First Contact, he’d found ways to control them. Surely it would have been good to show a part of this, given that this was a fairly big part of his character arc in Generations and he was important to the plot of First Contact.

This is the kind of thing that happened in just about all the Star Trek movies--one or more of the characters would get some form of development, but this would either be only vaguely mentioned or straight up ignored in the next movie. While Nemesis might not have been much better in many people’s eyes if there’d been some mention of Picard having spent some shore leave on the Ba’ku planet with Anij or that Data had taken Artim’s advice to “have a little fun every day”, I think it would have helped the character development.

Nemesis itself did bring up some interesting points about the characters. Was Picard inherently a good person, or was it because he was raised to be that way? This was something that was at the core of the movie, and it was paralleled by Data’s relationship with B-4 (though B-4 was something of a heavy handed name to give a prototype android).

While neither character really got the development they deserved in the movie, I think that bare minimum, it was kinda interesting to see this question raised. Of course, by this point it was too late to turn these questions into a full on deconstruction of the characters like what happened with Kirk in the original series movies (at least, for it to really be an effective one).

Really, the one place I think the character development kinda “stuck” was how Picard becomes something of an action hero during First Contact. This was when he was being confronted with an existential threat that could destroy everything he knew, only two years after having lost a ship (for the second time--he’d lost the Stargazer before the start of The Next Generation). He pretty much stayed like that for the next two movies.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t that the characters never really developed. Perhaps the problem was that for the people in charge of handling the franchise at the time, The Next Generation had ended too recently for them to really be able to go anywhere interesting with the characters over the course of four movies.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare is the fourth book of the Mortal Instruments series. 

Here’s a little background on this book: while City of Fallen Angels is labelled as being The Mortal Instruments book four, and has all the same main characters as the previous three books, this book is essentially the start of a sequel trilogy. Originally, this sequel series was going to be confined to a comic book, but for some reason, a decision was made to make it a trilogy instead of having it as a comic book.

Because of this, there seems to be a lot more filler stuff that happens in this half of the series as compared to the first half. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your point of view of the series thus far. If you generally preferred the action/fantasy elements of the first few books, then you probably won’t like a lot of the filler-y stuff that happens in these three books, but if you preferred the romance and love triangle stuff, then you may even prefer these three books.

Despite this half of the trilogy having a lot more filler, this isn’t as evident with City of Fallen Angels, which was generally much more plot driven than large chunks of the next two books. This book did manage to introduce some genuinely interesting concepts, like Jace needing to have his runes restored after being brought back to life at the end of City of Glass, and some of the stuff that happens regarding Simon.

By the same token, this book lacks the addictive quality of the first three books. This is the greatest sin of the second half of the series in general, really: instead of the strongly atmospheric element that made the first three books worth reading, City of Fallen Angels and the next two books, City of Lost Souls and City of Heavenly Fire, often feel like they’re professional fan fiction rather than real additions to the series.

This is ironic in a way, because some of the things added to the world of the Mortal Instruments series in City of Fallen Angels is really good. I think the series generally benefitted from there being a Praetor Lupus, but I think it was a bit rich for the introduction of the Praetor Lupus to just be a glorified reason to introduce another love triangle to a series that’s already riddled with them.

Simon really does get the short end of the stick when it comes to the love triangles. He was on the losing end of a love triangle in the first trilogy, and in this trilogy, he’s involved with another. It really is one of the main driving forces of his character development, which is a shame because by this point in the series, there’s a lot more going on for his character.

Overall, I think City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare is worth reading if you’re a hardcore fan of the original trilogy. However, while it does introduce a few new concepts, I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by it.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek: Insurrection

Star Trek: Insurrection, the third movie to feature the crew of The Next Generation, is one of the least popular Star Trek movies. It’s hated by a large number of Star Trek fans, and a lot of the people who were in the movie itself dislike it as well. This strikes me as odd for a few reasons. 

Firstly, of the Next Generation movies, Insurrection is the movie which is the closest in tone to the show. While this is often one of the main points of contention against the movie--that it could have been a two-part episode of the show and it wouldn’t have mattered--I think this is one the things that really worked about the movie.

A lot of the Trek movies had plots that could have been two-part episodes, or at least elements that could have fit right in with the kind of plot you’d expect in one of the shows. For example, in The Undiscovered Country when Kirk and McCoy are being held captive at Rura Penthe, the story set on the Enterprise with Spock and the rest of the crew working out the issues regarding the radiation and the apparent firing of the torpedo could have been out of a television episode, or at best, a television movie.

And yet, The Undiscovered Country is one of the movies that are generally regarded as being the cream of the crop of Trek movies. While there was a lot more happening in that movie than the firing on the Klingon flagship, it still had moments that would have been right at home on a television show. It’s almost like these movies are--and bare with me here, I know this is going to be a shock--are based on a television show.

Secondly, there is a moral position taken in this movie--namely that the needs of the many do not necessarily outweigh the needs of the few. This is especially the case when the “needs of the many” are being defined as they are here in Insurrection as being the medical needs of several million people, many of whom won’t start feeling the effects of the planet’s rings for years; and when the “needs of the few”, as defined by Insurrection, are the right to self determination and to keep their culture.

This style of moral position is quite common in the Star Trek universe. We see Kirk taking a similar position in The Search for Spock, where the option he chose was to risk provoking a shooting war with the Klingon Empire in order to restore the life of his friend.

We also see Picard making similar kinds of moral choices in The Next Generation, where he’ll choose to ignore the Prime Directive when he finds it inconvenient in order to save a culture. One example of this is the episode Homeward, in which Picard elects to save the populace of one village rather than to sentence them to death with their planet.

“Ah,” you say, “but the difference here is that the Federation is at war during Insurrection and there were strong medical benefits to those rings.” To this I respond, look at the effects of those rings--their healing powers were quite potent when you were being exposed to them (after all, la Forge could see without the help of twenty-fourth century technology on the surface of the planet), but faded fairly soon afterwards (he was blind again in Nemesis).

Even if the Son’a plan to extract the rings using the metaphasic collector and find a way of artificially exposing people to the radiation had worked, there was no way to ensure that this effect would continue over the long term. After all, the reason why the Ba’ku had been able to essentially live forever was because they’d lived on the planet for hundreds of years.

This brings up one of the weaknesses that I believe exist in the anti-Insurrection vitriol. While there were definite medical benefits to the rings around the Ba’ku planet, even the people who wanted to extract the rings knew that there was no way to have the benefits take effect quickly enough without extracting them.

Had they artificially exposed people to the radiation via hypospray, they would have to find some way of continuing the exposure over the long term; either because people would keep needing the treatments to remain well, or simply because the demand for the substance would become so high because of the ongoing war with the Dominion. 

It was pretty clear that neither the Federation nor the Son’a had any way of doing this, because had they been able to artificially replicate the rings’ radiation, they would have done so already. 

Of course, on the flipside, there is a weakness apparent in the movie--the villains’ motivation doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny. While they sought an extended lifespan by injecting themselves with the radiation and to benefit their own respective peoples, it was quite clear that this wouldn’t work over the long term. 

By the same token, it seemed like a lot of the main powers within the Son’a ranks weren’t exactly mentally stable. And in the case of Admiral Dougherty, there really have been very few admirals presented in the Star Trek universe that haven’t been evil for some reason or another.

The fourth reason why I think this movie isn’t as bad as everyone thinks is that of the first ten Star Trek movies, Insurrection really is one of the best shot. This is very evident during the title sequence, which is the most engaging of any title sequence of any of the Star Trek movies.

This is really a peripheral point in my mind, but it does factor in for me. While the CGI in this movie hasn’t held up very well at all, the cinematography has.

Speaking of Insurrection’s CGI, if you ever wanted an example of why movies should probably use both practical and digital effects, this movie is a pretty good example of it. While the CGI in First Contact has generally aged pretty well, it didn’t really do so here.

This is really the biggest thing that dates the movie. The only other thing this movie could have really done that would have dated it more would have been to include a soundtrack of the biggest hits of 1998. Thankfully, this wasn’t really a huge possibility thanks to Star Trek’s genre and setting.

Overall, I did really like Star Trek: Insurrection. There were a few places where I think the movie fell short, but for the most part, this is a movie I really liked.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

City of Glass by Cassandra Clare

City of Glass by Cassandra Clare is the third book of the Mortal Instruments series, and was originally going to be the final book. Then it turned out that the series was massively popular and was making Clare a lot of money, so she ended up writing more books set in the same world.

Of the three original books, City of Glass is the book that I feel was the weakest. While City of Bones was often marked by a set of characters that were unnecessarily cruel to each other, even by the standards of how teenagers normally act in real life; I feel like City of Glass dragged in a few places, particularly with some of the scenes between Sebastian and Clary.

However, the book did do several things I liked. It introduced the Shadowhunter home country, Idris, and more importantly, the only city in the country, Alincante. 

What I find odd about this series is that the Mortal War is almost exclusively defined as being the battle at the Brocelind Plain that took place in this book, but not any of the other stuff like the battle on Valentine’s ship that happened towards the end of City of Ashes.

It’s almost like it was a war in ancient times where it was like, “Yeah, the Persians tried to invade us but we fought them off at Marathon and then they just fucked off for like ten years.” (I’m sure eventually someone who’s right into ancient history is about to get very irate at that joke, but whatever.) Except it wasn’t really like that because Valentine had fought a couple of other engagements against the Clave and various Downworlder factions at this point.

Much like City of Ashes, City of Glass introduced some new characters. Perhaps the most important of these characters was Sebastian, who’s involved in various spoiler-y activity (I write, as if this blog has ever been friendly for people yet to read/watch the works I’m shitposting about). I think Sebastian was somewhat dull in this book for the most part in the scenes he was actually in, but scenes where people are talking about him are far more interesting.

Because of the existence of Sebastian and the grand reveal of his lineage (he’s Valentine’s son), this book eventually loses a lot of the incestuous lust related angst that helped define the previous book. Of course, this does mean that there’s a happy ending here, at least for the time being, but for the people who are more inclined to be edgelords, it means that the book doesn’t end with quite the same edge that existed throughout much of City of Ashes.

While not quite as good as the previous two books, City of Glass is still fairly readable; though it can drag in places. The action was fairly good though.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek: First Contact

Much like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the movie where the original cast came into their own in a cinematic format, Star Trek: First Contact is the movie where the cast of The Next Generation came into their own in the cinematic format.

Much like most of the Trek movies, especially those that are considered to be the cream of the crop by the fandom at large, First Contact does have a fairly heavy focus on the action/adventure side of things. However, unlike The Wrath of Khan or The Undiscovered Country, First Contact lacked any real attempt at a philosophical subtext. 

This isn’t much of an issue for most people, because on its own merits, First Contact is a very good movie. It does strike me as odd though that there was this conscious decision to not try to do this though, especially given that this does tend to be what a lot of the hardcore section of the fandom really likes about the franchise.

First Contact does do a lot of things right, though. Unlike Generations, First Contact has a lot of shots that make it feel like a movie, just through how the camera is moving and what they do with depth of field and so on. This was very much lacking in the movie’s immediate predecessor, which may as well have been a two-part episode of the series in terms of the cinematography.

We also get some development for Picard, who becomes something of an action hero for the movies. In First Contact, we get to see just how he’s dealing with the long-term aftermath of his brief assimilation by the Borg as he’s confronted by the Borg trying to take over his ship.

What Picard’s character development lacks is the kind of deconstruction that became the backbone of Kirk’s arc throughout the original series movies. However, this is also a movie that was still made very soon after the end of The Next Generation--even the last Next Generation movie, Nemesis, was still made less than a decade after The Next Generation’s final episode first aired on television.

Plus, The Next Generation was a fairly long-running series, having run for seven seasons. I think that any movie produced only a couple of years after the end of a long running show like that just doesn’t have the benefit of having the space from the series to be able to properly deconstruct it; especially when it’s been written by some of the same writers as the show.

What I think First Contact got right was the design (both the interior and exterior) of the Enterprise-E. I’d go as far as to say that the Enterprise-E is the best design of any of the starships named Enterprise presented throughout the course of the Star Trek franchise.

Plus, the design of the new uniforms introduced in this movie were very nice to look at. I think these were the best uniforms of the franchise, though I suppose the uniforms introduced in The Wrath of Khan were a near second.

Overall, I think Star Trek: First Contact was quite a strong movie, though I think it was made too close to the end of The Next Generation to really be everything it could have potentially have been.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare

City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare is really where The Mortal Instruments hits its stride. In this book, the major characters and their relationships to one another are pretty much as defined as they’re gonna get (though obviously there’s still some character development to happen), and they’re nowhere near as needlessly horrible to each other here as they were in City of Bones.

Plus there were some new characters introduced in this book who I think help flesh out the world a little more, plus balance out the weaknesses of the characters from the first book. The most interesting of the new characters introduced in City of Ashes was Maia, who was a part of Luke’s werewolf pack.

Valentine Morgernstern gets a lot more scenes in this book than he did in City of Bones. I think this is the thing that makes this book work so much better than City of Bones--the dynamic between Valentine and Jace seemed much more natural than a lot of the other character dynamics in this series.

The irony, of course, is that very few people in the Western world are related to people who intend to commit several genocides, thus making this one of the least realistic dynamics in that respect. But there was still that tension between a father and son that, in spite of their respective roles in the story, was fairly true-to-life--many teenagers will be drawn to impressing at least one adult in their life, even if that adult is abusive.

City of Ashes tried to add some shades of grey to the Clave through the introduction of the Inquisitor. While this does work to make the institution of the Clave somewhat adversarial to the quest of the main characters (as is often the case when you look at the relationship between protagonists and the powers that be in a lot of YA fantasy), I think that for the most part the morality of the series remains fairly black and white--Clary, Jace, and their various cohorts are still obviously the good guys, and Valentine and those who would support him are still obviously the villains.

Having an Inquistidor, and indeed a Clave, which is often skeptical at best of the heroes’ intentions does make the Clave something of an interesting middle ground, though. While they’re not obviously out to commit evil deeds, it’s fairly obvious that they’re inept a lot of the time, or they simply respond too late to actual threats because they’re undermanned.

I have to wonder how many Shadowhunters there were total across the world, though. I know there weren’t very many of them because they had to maintain a presence in every major city across the globe, but there were obviously enough of them for them to also maintain a small country in Europe, but by the same token the New York Institute could support a couple hundred Shadowhunters at a time if it had to.

And according to the wiki, it wasn’t even the largest one in North America; so there were clearly enough Shadowhunters to come down on a city hard and fast if they really had to do it--though it’s often implied that this means they have to leave other areas either unmanned or with a skeleton crew. Surely this isn’t the kind of population that can be sustained over the long term.

The big moral question in City of Ashes stems from the relationship between Clary and Jace. Here are these two characters who are clearly in love, but they can’t really be with each other because they believe they’re related. This is one of those issues where I kinda got the impression Clare wanted to go a little bit further than she did, but she also didn’t want to alienate a lot of her teenage audience.

Because they couldn’t really go down the edgy route where they end up capitulating and embracing their seemingly incestuous love, City of Ashes ends up taking the narrative down a somewhat emo route where both parties spend a lot of time angsting over this dynamic. I do have to wonder how this would have turned out if Clare hadn’t been writing with a teenage audience in mind.

Anyway, City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare is definitely a step up from City of Bones. Unlike a lot of books that are the second book of a series, City of Ashes manages to avoid suffering from middle book syndrome; and it does manage to make the moral questions involved in the series more complex than they had been in City of Bones.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek: Generations is the seventh Star Trek movie, but the first to heavily feature the crew of The Next Generation.

I think the biggest problem with Generations is just how rushed the script seemed. When The Next Generation was in its final season or two, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga were in the odd position where they were writing both All Good Things..., which was the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the script for this movie.

Of those two scripts, the final episode of The Next Generation was the superior story (and I’m not even that fond of the episode, personally). While Generations wasn’t a horrible movie, there really wasn’t anything about it which was particularly brilliant, either.

Because of how rushed the script seemed, a lot of the time the movie seemed like a bad collection of fan fiction tropes rather than an actual movie that was released in cinemas and people were expected to take seriously as an installment to the franchise. We had the Enterprise destroyed (again), we had Kirk and Picard teaming up against a villain, and we had recurring characters from the show on (namely the Duras sisters).

There was plenty of material in the movie that I think could have easily been a part of an actually good movie, had the work gone in to making it work properly on screen. Part of Picard’s character arc for this movie was his grief over the death of his brother and nephew in a fire, however I think this fell flat for a lot of people because these were characters that had only shown up once in the show, and were very rarely mentioned after that episode.

Had there been an episode or two of the final couple of seasons of The Next Generation that were dedicated to building up this relationship between Picard and his family on Earth, or bare minimum some scenes where it’s shown that he’s at least talking to them more regularly than previously implied, I think this would be an arc that worked far better than it did. However, this was just never the case.

To be absolutely fair, Patrick Stewart did do a good job acting the grief. It’s just that it seemed somewhat overboard, given that the relatives in question never got to do very much in the show (and weren’t even in the movie; they only mentioned to have died).

Plus, there was stuff about the plot that just didn’t make sense. If the Klingons were able to fire torpedoes through the shields, how come they weren’t modulating the shield frequencies to keep them from doing it more than once? Hell, why wasn’t constantly changing the shield frequencies standard practice anyway? And why didn’t they do a more through check on La Forge’s VISOR to make sure they hadn’t implanted any kind of device into it?

However, there was more wrong with the plot than just the final battle, though it was pretty stupid. I think that there must have been some easier way for Soran to get into the Nexus than to destroy several solar systems to get there. He clearly had a pretty detailed knowledge of where the Nexus was going and how long it was going to take for it to get there--surely he could also work out how to fly a ship into it in such a way to ensure that he got into the Nexus.

This is something that was obviously just ignored because the plot needed Soran to do something dramatic like blow up a solar system and then try to destroy another solar system (except this time, an inhabited one). However, this is something that just doesn’t hold up; especially in retrospect, given that Soran is an El-Aurian, a race which is clearly a long lived species.

Generations would have been a pretty good place to develop the El-Aurians as a species more. The movie had Guinan in it, and it had Soran; but we never got to see what El-Aurians were like when they interacted with each other, or given any indication as to what their society might have once been like or what their angst over the Borg destroying their world was like.

I think one of the biggest sins of Generations was trying to be a crossover movie. I can understand the desire for this to be the case, because at the time it wasn’t guaranteed that a Star Trek movie would be well received by fans or critics if it didn’t feature the original cast somehow or was about the original set of characters, even peripherally. 

This simply didn’t work. The Undiscovered Country had been a pretty good send off for the original cast, and there wasn’t any real need for any of the characters to return for this movie. There were already enough elements in this movie that would have worked had they been given the space to do so.

I think had the powers that be waited a couple of years after the end of The Next Generation to make Star Trek: Generations, the movie would have been a lot better. However, this isn’t how things worked out, and what we got instead was this bizarre mess of a movie that while not terrible, wasn’t anything spectacular either.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare is the author’s first published novel. It follows the story of Clary Fray as she discovers that her mother was a member of an elite demon fighting force known as the Shadowhunters.

This book was published in 2007. I think this book was very much a product of its time in a lot of ways--there was a lot of focus on love triangles here, though this would become far more prominent in later books in the series; which was very reminiscent of the kind of thing that you’d expect from something like Twilight.

However, there was still enough focus on the action and urban fantasy elements that you can still see the influence of the Harry Potter series, which was at the apex of its popularity when this book came out. I think it’s the combination of these two elements that make the Mortal Instruments series, especially the first three books, work as well as they did.

City of Bones mostly focused on introducing the world and the main cast of characters for the series. For the most part, these characters were very engaging; though I think Simon was the weakest character of the main cast.

What does strike me about these characters on rereading the series as an adult is how horrible they are to one another, especially during this first book. If any group of people treated each other as awfully as this group of people treated each other during this first book, I can’t imagine them wanting much to do with each other after a week or two; though they kind of have to do more stuff with each other because the plot demands it.

However, I think this is a pretty common thing in a lot of YA fiction. It seems like there’s a lot of groups of alleged friends that seem to spend more time being pretty abusive to one another than actually resolving the main plot. With City of Bones, they sidestep this by making sure it’s understood that a lot of the characters don’t exactly like Clary at first (with the exception of Simon, who’s the best friend).

This book did benefit from being very atmospheric. When you first read the book, it’s very easy to get lost in the series due to how strong the atmosphere is, because it will envelop you and never let you go.

This series does tend to be very strong on the love triangles. It isn’t as bad in this book (or, indeed, in the first three books in general), however they’re still present as the main B-plot for the books. I think this mostly stems from Clare’s background as a fan fiction writer--she was, at one point, one of the biggest names in the Harry Potter fan fiction community, though at the time she spelled her surname as Claire.

Something like five or six years ago, this did cause her to run into some trouble as she was accused of plagiarism. I’m not entirely sure what came of that now, because I never followed that particular news closely; but I’m sure if this post gets popular enough, someone will be kind enough to tell me.

I think the best aspect of City of Bones was definitely the villain, Valentine Morgernstern. The conversations he has with Jace and with Luke towards the end of the book are the highlights of the book, and I think he’s the best character of the series. 

While he was admittedly a fairly generic fantasy villain--he’s an extremist who wants to bend everyone to his own ideals of how the heirarchy should work--I think his scenes are often entertaining enough that you don’t mind so much.

At the end of the day, that’s really all you’re going to get from City of Bones: some entertainment. However, for the most part, it’s pretty good at what it does; though the later books do improve on this.

While fairly typical of YA urban fantasies of the era, City of Bones by Cassandra Clare still manages to be entertaining and atmospheric enough to have stood up fairly well to the test of time a decade (and, admittedly, several glasses of wine) later.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the final Trek movie to feature all of the original cast. It’s the opinion of this blogger that this movie is also the best of all the Star Trek movies.

The Undiscovered Country was a topical movie when it came out. It was 1991, the Cold War had just ended with the Berlin Wall coming down and the Soviet Union falling apart. This became the inspiration for The Undiscovered Country, which dealt with the thawing of the relations between the Federation and the Klingon Empire after Praxis, a major source of energy for the Klingon Empire, was destroyed.

The parallels between this movie and the thawing of US-Russian relations in the early nineties are sometimes very heavy handed, but this is the way Star Trek’s always been. Look at some of the more topical episodes of the original series which sought to be “take that” hits against racism, or look at The Voyage Home, with its strong environmentalist message--this is hardly a franchise with a history of subtle social or political messages.

None of this is a bad thing, however. While being heavy handed certainly would be a valid criticism of other movies, I think Star Trek has always had a history of making heavy handed political points work in its favour. This is certainly the case with The Undiscovered Country, which sought to be a movie about two enemies ending their cold war and working towards the alliance that we’d see in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

I think what The Undiscovered Country did best was what it did with Kirk. This was a man who was going to retire for real this time, sent on a mission to make peace with the people who’d killed the son he’d never really gotten to know. This was the first time that this was ever really dealt with in anything resembling depth, by the way.

I think in some ways, Kirk’s portrayal became a deconstruction of what we’d seen in earlier films. The Wrath of Khan had deconstructed him and shown how he responds when an old enemy returns for a pound of flesh, even though Kirk likely hadn’t thought too much about Khan for fifteen years; and just how he dealt with the consequences of his youthful excesses coming back to him as an old man.

By the time The Undiscovered Country came around, we’re lead to believe that Kirk is a person who’d made his peace with what had happened as a result of The Wrath of Khan for the most part. Even though he’d lost his best friend as a result of his battle against Khan, and then eventually lost his ship getting his friend back; they’d given him a new ship eventually and he did get Spock back.

However, The Undiscovered Country does something else. It deconstructs how Kirk reacts to having to make peace with his old enemies. While he’d previously been a Starfleet officer who sought to explore the galaxy as best he could, he was still, in his heart, a soldier (he’d even said as much in Errand of Mercy, the episode where the Klingons were first introduced). Since then, the Klingons had killed his son, something that he’d found he struggled to forgive them for.

This deconstruction of Captain James T. Kirk was what the movie was about as much as the thawing of Klingon-Federation relations. This was a man who had been fighting Klingons throughout his career after all, and to have to make peace with them after they’d killed his son before he had a chance to know them was the main source of the tension in the movie.

Often, it seems like the personal stakes in this movie seem to overshadow the larger political stakes here. If the attempts to end the hostility between the Klingons and the Federation failed, the best result would most likely have been that millions of Klingons die horribly because of the lack of power and medical supplies after Praxis’ collapse (and, in the long run, the collapse of the Empire because of it). The worst result would be a new shooting war between the Federation and the Klingons, which no doubt would result in tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.

This makes Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the original series movie with the highest stakes, both personally and politically. While it was often heavy handed with the allegory it was trying to make, I think what it does with Kirk is oftentimes interesting enough to make it worth watching repeatedly anyway.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

I rage silently that referencing the dying of the light has been done so much it's trite. It's become old hat, like so many classic songs killed because Hollywood needed a soundtrack and yesterday the drunkard composer got the sack before recording the song for which my soul longs. I yearn for an intertextuality that's made for mass consumption, but avoids making the assumption that sex will pass for originality or that sex and violence will make it adult in a world where everyone was in high school and knew someone who thought it was cool to make bad house party sex and schoolyard fights their cult. I rage silently that seeking originality has become synonymous with hating every blockbuster studios are creating when the real box office fatality is the small budget feature with a cast of characters that dares to be deeper than caricatures who do more than fight a creature. But most of all I'm yearning to make all the overdone references new again for the coming of that brilliant mind with a pen so their passion too might start burning.

I Rage Silently As I Yearn

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

So here we are. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the movie that a lot of people consider to be the worst of the Star Trek movies (though personally I think the worst is The Motion Picture). The following contains spoilers, by the way.

There’s no denying that The Final Frontier was a very bad movie. However, while The Motion Picture was a slow, dull movie; The Final Frontier did have some redeeming features, and I think it was possible to enjoy it in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way.

I think there were two main things working against this movie--the writing, and the decision to let Bill Shatner direct the movie.

The writing was the bigger of the two issues. When The Final Frontier came out, it was at a time when there was a writer’s strike. Because of this, there never really was anyone who was going to smooth over the movie’s rough edges and curb down on the things that were simply never going to work (like Spock’s rocket boots), and make the things that were just executed badly work a little better (namely, the introduction of Spock’s brother Sybok).

To the writers’ credit, there were a couple of character moments in The Final Frontier that I think really worked. One was Kirk’s comment that he always knew that he was going to die alone (a moment that was, for whatever reason, immediately followed up by a rendition of Row, Row, Row Your Boat), and the other was the scene in which Sybok offers to take each of the main three hero’s pain away only for Kirk to declare that he needs his pain.

This was the kind of brilliance that really made the original series, at its best, work. There was a kind of rawness in Kirk in this movie that I think, had the movie been better written, would have made him seem deeply human in a way that we rarely got to see in the original series.

There was a third moment in the movie that I think worked, though this was admittedly because of my own atheistic worldview. Near the end when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Sybok are talking to the entity at the centre of the galaxy, Kirk asks a simple question: “What does God need with a starship?”

While I think the idea of the crew of the Enterprise meeting god at all was a silly idea that probably shouldn’t have been made into a movie, I think this was a nice touch to what was, for the most part, a terrible movie. I think in this question, Kirk encapsulated what it meant to be a Starfleet officer--he had a curious enough scientific and anthropological mind that, even in that situation where he could have been killed for asking, he still asked the question.

However, I think it was a mistake to allow Bill Shatner to direct The Final Frontier. The mistakes he made with this movie were quite obvious--the movie had some obvious production mistakes, like the main trio going passed the same deck number several times as they rocketed up the turbolift shaft, the performances of every cast member was terrible for the most part, and the few action sequences of the movie were badly choreographed, even by the standards of a Star Trek movie.

In spite of all this though, I think it’s possible to enjoy Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in a “so bad it’s good” way, which is the way I choose to view the movie when I inevitably watch it once every three or four years. (These are the moments when I think, “Gee, it can’t possibly be as bad as I think it is,” for better or worse.)

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Hey idk who the hell thinks they have the right to tell you to kill yourself, but just remember that they're just a coward hiding behind the anon, looking to pick a fight and to cause trouble. I don't know you very well but just remember that you're an amazing person who deserves to live and be happy. I hope whoever that anon is stops and realizes what a shitty person they are. Stay strong my love xx

Thank you

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

She keeps a photo of me on the cabinet in the dining room. The photo nobody wanted to be in; from the era when I was so photoshy, like the timid puppy around strangers. You wonder why she keeps it. I look worse than Keith Richards, but I don't see any photos younger than ten years old there. Maybe the fault is not in how she chooses the photos to display but rather in how I see myself; but looking at the quality of the other photos there, you know that isn't the case.

A Photo of Me

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Someone should come watch Star Trek with me.

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Thanks. On the rare occasions I’ve received less-than-savoury anons, I’ve ignored them or deleted them on sight because I don’t think they’re worth paying attention to.

I told thesoliloquyofastranger to die. I hope they kill themselves

@thesoliloquyofastranger hey I have no clue why anyone is sending me these and I don’t even know you but no one deserves to die or have someone tell them to die. Just wanted to let you know that if you ever need to talk, my inbox is always open! These cowardly piece of shit anon doesn’t know their own worth so they have to target someone else. I just wanted you to be aware of what has been sent to me!

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

In 1986, the fourth Star Trek movie, namely Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, was released. This movie was true to the overarching scheme of the Star Trek movies: the even-numbered movies were the good ones, but the odd-numbered ones were often lacking.

The Voyage Home was Leonard Nimoy’s second Trek movie. I think it was a far better movie than The Search for Spock, but I also think it was a pretty unique entry to the franchise compared to its immediate predecessors for three main reasons.

Firstly, it was a time travel story. While there had been time travel episodes of the original series, some of which are still among the best episodes of the franchise, this was the first time it had been done as a movie. This really helped make the movie stand out from the other Trek movies because this was the only time there was a time travel Star Trek movie where the crew went to then-contemporary Earth.

Secondly, it was a comedy movie. It was, and remains, the only Star Trek movie to have gone the comedy route (though Insurrection would attempt it at times), and for the most part, it pulled it off in an endearing way. While it wasn’t ever as funny as something like Life of Brian or Office Space (at least in the opinion of this blogger), it was cheesy enough to remain in line with the slightly comedic feel of the original series.

This was the main reason The Voyage Home worked. While much like The Motion Picture, it had a crisis that would devastate Earth if it weren’t averted, the movie was nowhere near as dark as the previous three movies. This was the kind of tonal shift the franchise needed at the time because it risked becoming too dark an affair at the time, constantly dealing with the problems of a generation becoming old.

The third main reason that made this movie a fairly unique affair at this point was because it was the only Trek movie to date to not have significant amounts of time spent onboard ships named Enterprise. While a lot of the previous movie was spent outside of the ship, a lot of The Search for Spock’s most important scenes did involve the Enterprise somehow.

Of course, part of this was because the Enterprise was destroyed in the previous movie, but spending most of the movie off the ship allowed for the narrative to move in directions that I think it wouldn’t have done otherwise. Had it not been for this, I think it would have been much more difficult for The Voyage Home to stand out as much as it did.

Much like The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home allowed for a lot of the supporting characters to have their moment to shine. While none of the characters other than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy received any real amount of character development (which, at this point, they desperately needed), a lot of the scenes with the supporting characters have become some of the most memorable of the franchise. Nuclear wessels, anyone?

There was one more area where I think The Voyage Home really shone---its cinematography. A lot of the shots in this movie were incredibly beautiful, to the point where The Voyage Home was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for it. (Unfortunately, it lost to The Mission.)

The one thing about The Voyage Home that I can see rubbing a lot of people the wrong way is that its environmentalist message was a bit on the nose. By the same token, this message is far more relevant today than ever before; especially given the attitude of some elected officials towards global warming in general.

Overall, I think Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was one of the best of the franchise. While it wasn’t the funniest movie ever made, I think there were enough elements in the movie that worked for it to be a very solid movie anyway.