Dual Perspective

A Boomer and a Gen-Zer take on The Rise of Skywalker.

The Boomer Review.
By Cecilia Calabrese.

My entire adult life has spanned the Star Wars Movie Universe. I turned 18, graduated high school, and started college in 1977. That summer Star Wars was released. My first paying job was as a “Candy Girl” (that was my official title) at a movie theater in Danbury, CT. Star Wars was the last movie I worked before heading off to start my studies in Marine Biology. Those were the days when “A New Hope” was merely a description of the story that began a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I only casually noticed that the 1977 film was “Episode IV” of a much longer saga. I took great delight in recognizing the sounds of Darth Vader’s breathing apparatus having been generated by SCUBA gear, being a SCUBA diver myself since the age of 16. Imagine my current disappointment in turning down the offer of an original Star Wars movie poster from my Manager, scoffing “who would want THAT?”…AHH, the foolishness of youth!

Through this prism of Star Wars nostalgia I watched The Rise of Skywalker (Episode IX) with great anticipation of what Easter Eggs were going to exist in order to maintain the attention of “my” generation. This film did not disappoint.

The opening sequence reminded me of the first scene opening A New Hope. It was visually appealing, fast-paced, and immediately grabbed my attention. Throughout the movie the brilliant use of familiar music at the right times were particularly appealing. I hope when you see this movie you pay attention to the sound cues. Not merely the music, however, but also certain dialogue and references. I am looking forward to seeing this film again to catch what I surely have missed.

If you are still on the fence about seeing this movie in theaters rather than waiting for its inevitable release on DVD/Blue-Ray, don’t wait! One of the things I enjoy about going to the movies is the chance to suspend reality for a few precious hours and be entertained. This movie does that, and, thankfully, in a much more enjoyable movie experience than Attack Of The Clones, the runt of the Star Wars litter (spoiler alert: NO Jar-Jar).

I found the expansive scenes beautifully filmed. The fight sequences were choreographed in such a way as to highlight the skills of each character, Jedi or not. Appropriate, if not slightly predictable, uses of harkening-back and foreshadowing complete the popcorn-movie experience.

This film has its weaknesses. The trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe at times felt a bit “Harry Potterish” (think The Deathly Hallows). It had a formulaic feel to me. What peril was our band of adventurers going to find themselves in next? I could have done without one particular interaction toward the end of the film, but I kind of “get it”, why that was included. It was fine and did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the film. I loved the interjections of humor to break the tension. The interactions between Finn and Poe were…well…adorable. They had great chemistry.

One fairly significant question was left unanswered, and it makes me wonder if there is already a vehicle in the works with the intent of filling that void. Time will tell.

My favorite parts of the film were when Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley were working out their “issues.” I felt that the two were well cast as Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey. Driver’s physical presence on screen is riveting. Ridley is slight-of-build, yet perfectly exudes her character’s inner strength. The contrast between their characters work well on screen.

The story arc was reflexive of previous installments in the Star Wars saga and gives a satisfying conclusion to known characters in the Star Wars Universe.

If you go to the movies to be entertained while leaving wanting more, this movie does the trick.

Cecilia Calabrese is the Vice President of the Agawam City Council and will serve as President of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2020. She is a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as a Registered Dental Hygienist, and a rental property manager. Married to her husband, Michael Calabrese, for 34 years, they have two grown children, Charles and Michaela Calabrese.

Cece has written featured articles in the Valley Advocate (Tom Duggan, Editor), as well as various Opinion pieces in The Springfield Republican and The Agawam Advertiser News. She is currently on the pre-production crew for daughter Michaela’s graduate film project. Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

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The Gen Z Review.
By Michaela Calabrese.

I’m gonna preface this review by saying I was born in 1997. The first Star Wars movies I grew up with were the prequels; and for a few blissful years I was able to enjoy them. The day came, however, when I was old enough to properly absorb the original trilogy.

Needless to say, my enjoyment of the prequels ended very soon afterward.

I won’t pretend to be the font of knowledge when it comes to the Star Wars saga. There’s plenty I don’t know about the extended lore, I can’t tell you the names of every planet in the Republic, and I certainly haven’t read all the novels or watched every episode of the animated clone wars. What I can tell you is the message I took from watching the original trilogy when I was young; the same message this new trilogy (in my eyes at least) has carried on for the next generation:

There will always be darkness in the world. It’s inevitable and terrifying and overwhelming at times.

But it’s not indestructible.

The first reviews for The Rise of Skywalker left me worried that this message would be lost behind clunky editing, bad writing, and a story that (according to some) was all over the place and a complete mess. This is not the movie I saw. The movie I saw had pacing issues and awkward lines, but it also had beautiful cinematography, a simple-to-follow narrative, characters I not only liked but really grew to love, and an ending which cemented the fact that Star Wars is still Star Wars even after forty-two years and three separate trilogies.

Let’s talk technicals, first. The beginning of the film definitely has an issue in terms of timing. The first…oh, let’s call it ten minutes or so…feel like they’re on fast-forward. There aren’t enough breaks between lines, and locations change at a rapid pace. This was what I was expecting for the whole movie. Everything felt rushed; like the director just wanted to get exposition out of the way so it wouldn’t impede the rest of the film. The opening crawl was frustratingly abbreviated, and even the first mission felt clumsy and out of place. Had this carried through the entire runtime, I would understand the negative reviews. I sat through The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when it was released with an accelerated frame rate and I left that film with a splitting headache. No WAY was I about to subject myself to something similar!

Thankfully, there is a major turning point during which the pacing slows down. Everything which must be established by this point has been established, and from here in the film allows itself and its actors to breathe. Thus, my major fault with the movie was solved and I was free to find other elements which could ruin my experience.

And then the film reached its third act…and I hadn’t found those elements yet.

The characters (aside from 3PO) are charming and work well together. The sets, though small and a bit hard to see at times, still fit well within the narrative, and the story moves in a very promising direction. I wanted the heroes to succeed, I wanted the villains to be thwarted, I felt the same childlike excitement that I had felt watching A New Hope in my living room when I was little.

Kylo Ren, my least favorite character for the past two films, evolves far enough that I began to look forward to his scenes. He feels more three-dimensional in The Rise of Skywalker than he felt in The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. Rey, likewise, has progressed away from the “wide-eyed outsider” trope into her own character. She was always very interesting, as well as being a great role model for little girls to look up to, but she becomes so much more by the end of this film. She finds her own strength, her own reasons to keep fighting, and she isn’t just parroting Luke Skywalker’s morality or Han Solo’s tenacity. She isn’t a protege anymore, but she isn’t cold either. She learns how to balance being stern and focused with being compassionate and kind.

The big question now: does this film work as a concluding chapter to the Star Wars saga? Well, that sort of depends on personal preference. For me, it absolutely does. The threads which were left at the ends of the original and prequel trilogies are tied up for me. There are other stories in the Star Wars universe which could be told, but this one has reached its final page. I want more, I’m always going to want more, but if this is all we get for a while then so be it. I have enough to hold me over.

Michaela Calabrese was born and raised in Agawam, MA and is now living her dream of studying filmmaking in New York City. Her graduate program has offered her the chance to direct a twelve-minute short film which will be screened for industry professionals. Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

7 Things that Still Bug Me about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

And The One Most Awesome Scene Ever.
by Michael Isenberg.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my favorite show of all time. A perfect storm of good storylines, quality violence, a great cast, and amazing dialogue (to hear what the writers have to say about the last item—they’re incredibly proud of it, and rightly so—see this segment “Buffy Speak” from the Season 3 DVDs). The show was known for innovative episodes like "Hush" which had no dialog for twenty-seven minutes and "The Body" which captured the numbness of those first hours after a loved one dies with remarkable realism. Buffy was also breakthrough television in the portrayal of lesbian characters. And as editor of Nerds who Read, I got to love any show where the heroes, when they have a problem, go to the library to research it.

Perhaps it was because Buffy was such great television that the handful of things about it that bugged me continue to bug me twenty years later. Here, then, are…

7 Things that Still Bug Me About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

7. Robots. The Buffy TV show was born amidst the “irrational exuberance” of the dot com era, so it no doubt seemed natural at the time to work some high tech into it. But in a show that was mainly about the supernatural, and where the main villains were vampires and demons, robots never really seem to belong. They just came across as silly.

Bonus challenge: Name all the robots that appeared in the series. Leave answers in the comments.

6. The Zeppo. The title of this Season 3 episode refers to Xander, practically the only member of the Scooby Gang who never had any supernatural powers. The comparison is to Zeppo Marx, the colorless Marx Brother. Unlike the mustachioed, wisecracking Groucho, the silent, manic Harpo, and the faux-Italian Chico, Zeppo was just a guy in a suit. The straight man. In this episode, Buffy and her friends decide that the threat of the week was just too dangerous for Xander, so they cut him out. He goes off on his own adventure while the rest of the gang stops the Apocalypse in the background. As if that's not bad enough, much of Xander’s adventure involves being unable to get away from some tiresome people he really doesn’t want to be with. As an introvert, I identify. And while things do work out for Xander in the end—he even loses his virginity—it still bugs me that his friends were mean to him.

5. Season 5. In this season, Buffy faces off against Glory, a slinky, glamorous hell god whose only wish is to go back to hell. Unfortunately, opening a portal to that alternate dimension will require killing Buffy’s sister, Dawn. Clare Kramer puts in a wonderful performance as Glory—she really captures the combination of ancient evil and modern humor that’s the hallmark of a Buffy villain. But I really don’t see the conflict here. Glory wants out of this dimension. Buffy wants Glory out of this dimension. Why are they fighting instead of working together?! I mean, seriously, THEY WANT THE SAME THING!!! With the resources of the Scooby Gang, surely they could have found some non-lethal way to send Glory home. It’s not as if they had never sent anyone to alternate dimensions before.

4. Season 6. A low point for the series, and for Buffy personally, who is working fast food to pay the bills, having sex with a vampire who makes her feel ashamed of herself, and struggling to be a single mother to little sis Dawn. To add insult to injury, just as she approaches bottom, her ex, Riley, comes to visit and he’s doing great. It’s painful to watch, but not as painful as two scenes of horrific violence against women that appear in this season.

From a dramatic point of view, the season is flawed in that “The Big Bad”—the three nerds Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew (Tucker’s brother)—just aren’t that bad. Even some of the Scooby Gang think the Trio’s schemes “seem really lame.” (I can just hear the Cinema Sins guy saying, “Comment in the writer’s room somehow made it into the script.”) The Trio aren’t worthy of Buffy talents. In fact, they were such weak villains that they’re not even the main antagonists in the season finale. That honor goes to Willow, who has temporarily turned evil. And then Buffy doesn’t even play much of a role in defeating her. She spends most of the last episode trapped in a hole.

Even the comic relief doesn’t work in Season 6. Kitten poker? In Buffy’s words, that’s “stupid currency.”

Just an awful season.

And yet, there are a few bright spots, in particular the musical episode “Once More with Feeling.” Frankly, most musical episodes of TV shows aren’t very good, but this one is an exception. It’s fun, the songs are great, and it blends seamlessly with the arc of the season. There’s just one thing about it that bugs me…

3. No consequences for Xander. The premise of “Once More with Feeling” is that citizens of Buffy’s town of Sunnydale just start singing and dancing, like in a musical, and Buffy must find out why. It’s rather lighthearted at first, but then there is new urgency as some of these people dance themselves to death. We eventually find out that a demon caused it all. A demon that was summoned by Xander. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he says in his defense. “I just thought there was going to be dances and songs.” He totally should have known what was going to happen. It’s fricking season six, you’re not new at this. Or did you forget what happened when you messed around with the Dark Arts in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered?” Not only did he summon the demon in “Once More with Feeling,” but then he just sat there and watched his friends struggle to figure out what was going on. He even misdirected them at one point. Not to mention that people died.

And yet, there were no consequences for him at all. This was unusual in a series that, to its credit, takes personal responsibility seriously. When characters screw up, there are consequences. There was even an episode called “Consequences.” If it’s a serious screw up, there might be a long journey of redemption, spanning multiple seasons. But in this case, nothing. No day of reckoning for Xander at all. DID I MENTION THAT PEOPLE DIED???!!!

2. The Willow Hostage Exchange. As the title of the Season 3 episode “Choices” implies, Buffy and her friends faced some difficult decisions that week. They knew that the mayor of the town planned to transform himself into a giant snake demon and kill a whole bunch of people. But in order to accomplish this, he needed a mystical box full of killer spiders known as the “Box of Gavrok.” The Scooby Gang steals the box from him, but during the operation, one of them, Willow, gets captured.

The choice they face is whether to keep the box, and thereby stop the mayor’s “Ascension.” It could save thousands of lives, but Willow would be killed. Or they could offer the mayor an exchange—the box for Willow—and keep their fingers crossed that they can find some other way to stop the Ascension.

Of course they went for the exchange—Willow’s a main character—but I often wonder how the rest of the series would have played out if they had sacrificed her instead. Yes, Willow would have been dead, but a heck of a lot of other people would have been alive—starting with the ones that died in the Ascension that didn’t get stopped. Subsequent to that, Willow repeatedly put other people in danger by her misuse of magic—at first because she was still learning, and later because she was addicted to it. None of it would have happened had she died in “Choices.”

Buffy herself died in the Season 5 finale, and Willow mojoed her back to life. Had Willow not been there to do that, a Buffy-less and Willow-less Season 6 would have played out very differently and we certainly wouldn’t have seen Willow turn to the Dark Side and nearly destroy the world in the season finale. And since the Big Bad in Season 7 was unleashed by the unintended consequences of bringing Buffy back to life, that whole season wouldn’t have happened at all. The numerous potential Slayers who died would never have been in danger.

Also, had Willow died in Season 3, she never would have met Tara. And although that would have meant that she wouldn’t have been there to bring the shy Tara out of her shell, it also would have meant that Tara wouldn’t have been in the path of a stray bullet meant for Buffy. Which brings me to the number one thing that still bugs me about Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

The Death of Tara

Tara was one of my favorite characters. She had such a good heart, and such a unique way of looking at things—making up her own names for the constellations because the real ones didn’t make sense, or avoiding the Internet because everyone’s spelling was so bad. Unlike Willow, she was able to use magic without being consumed by it. I even loved the way she decorated her room (I wish I could get a copy of that poster!). I was very sad to see her go, especially since series creator Joss Whedon played with our heads a bit. He put Tara in the opening credits for the first time in the episode in which she died. I went into the episode thinking how nice it was that her place on the show was finally secure.

Thanks for bearing with my rant. I would like to end on a positive note, though. So here then, as promised, is...

The One Most Awesome Scene Ever:

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Riley Punches Parker Abrams in the Face:

How can anyone not love Riley after that?

Got any pet peeves about BTVS that I missed? Please feel free to comment. Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Hello Giggles, The Uncanny Fans, buffy.fandom.com, fanpop.com, Lost Again, YouTube, Persephone Magazine, DigitalSpy.com, Entertainment Weekly

The Marxist in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle Season 4.
TV Review by Michael Isenberg.

Imagine a movie—a sort of messed up Red Dawn—about an underground resistance cell taking on a Soviet occupation of the US. Except instead of pretty Brat Packers dressed in Eddie Bauer chic, these alleged freedom fighters are Nazis. Actual Nazis who read Mein Kampf in their free time, are armed by the Third Reich (which someone survived into the Cold War era in this alternate reality), and are inspired to survive their considerable hardships by their vision of the day when, after the Soviets are defeated, they can set up their white, fascist utopia.

If such a movie ever were made, the studio would be boycotted, pickets would spring up outside any theater showing it, and everyone associated with it would be ostracized, never to work in Hollywood again—and rightly so.

And yet, if the roles are reversed, and the protagonists are communists instead of Nazis, and black instead of white, as is the case in the fourth and final season of The Man in the High Castle, this nightmare is somehow socially acceptable, thanks to some perverse double standard.

It’s not my intent for Nerds who Read to be a political blog. I have other platforms for that. Here I try to focus on the literary merits of books, movies, and TV in nerd genres like science fiction. But every once in a while, I’ll come across a work that crosses the line and needs to be called out for its politics. Which I think is the case with MITHC 4.

Two subjects which I'm not going to cover in any detail in this post are the racial aspect of Season 4 and whether or not the sort of communism I'm talking about is "real" communism. These topics are just too rich to do justice to here. The short version is 1) While I could understand how a historically oppressed people might be mistakenly attracted to communism, communism is an equal-opportunity evil--it's evil regardless of the race of the communists, and 2) Yes, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were real communism.

Based on the 1962 book by Philip K. Dick, which I reviewed on Nerds who Read last year, The Man in the High Castle is alternate history that explores the question: what if the Axis won World War II? It depicts a United States which is divided between a Nazi-collaborator regime in the East and a Japanese-occupied West.

Season 3 was exceptionally well-balanced politically, with elements that both Left and Right could identify with. Season 3 also exhausted the last of the Philip K. Dick source material—the original novel and two chapters of an unfinished sequel. So the writers of the TV series were on their own for the first time in Season 4, and I was looking forward to see what they would come up with. Sadly, the answer was a lot of leftist drivel. Cliché talking points are scattered throughout. For example, there’s trash talk about the American Flag. “This flag ain’t never done s--t for us.” We are also treated to Lib-splaining about how Franklin Roosevelt “completely rebuilt the economy. Ended the Depression.” (For another point of view, see Jim Powells’ FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. Here’s a review from the Foundation for Economic Education).

These talking points are mostly throwaway lines. The viewer could easily ignore them and get on with the business of enjoying the story. But the glorification of communism, in the form of a plotline about the "Black Communist Rebellion" resistance group, is harder to overlook.

Communism was every bit as evil as Nazism, both of them among the bloodiest ideologies ever to stain the surface of the earth. The countries that attempted it ended up suffering under totalitarian regimes, where personal interests were frowned upon and service to the State—or as they called it, “the proletariat”—was the only interest allowed. Free expression was brutally suppressed. Starving, impoverished citizens lived in fear of being denounced to the government by their neighbors, or even their own children. The terrifying knock on the door in the middle of the night was the overture to a trip to secret police headquarters. There detainees might face the torture chamber, or perhaps be shipped off to a gulag, where they could work themselves to death as slaves, if they didn’t die from cold or starvation first. Or perhaps Big Brother would just skip that step and send the detainee straight to the firing squad.

Living under communism was a horror. But don't take my word for it. Ayn Rand saw the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her bedroom window, and lived in communist Russia until 1926. She once tried to explain to skeptical members of a House committee what it was like:

We were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror—afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us-and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love—nothing but food and fear… Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can't even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don't know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.

Given that human life was nothing, and there were no rights of any kind, it's not surprising that the number of dead was staggering. Estimates vary and are prone to controversy, but the low end is 42 million people. A hundred million is more typical, with one estimate as high as a 160 million. For comparison, Nazi Germany is estimated to have killed 17 million people in the Holocaust. And this is the ideology that Amazon chose to glorify.

Granted, a movie or TV show can glorify something that is evil, and nevertheless give us an engaging, well-crafted story. A good example is Joker. Despite the denials of its defenders, Joker really did glorify nihilism and violence. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to watch a sick man’s descent into murderous insanity, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the movie as we head into award season. In contrast, the writers of The Man in the High Castle Season 4 didn’t even give us good storytelling.

Characters arcs painstakingly constructed over previous seasons were just ignored, especially those of Obergruppenführer John Smith and antiquities dealer Robert Childan. Promising plotlines were never developed. The pacing was awful—yawn-worthy almost all the way through. Then, in the last episode, there is a rush to set up the big final military confrontation between the Nazis and the Communists, a confrontation which (spoiler alert) is called off at the last minute, thanks to an ex machina decision by a minor character, and it made no sense. I just didn’t believe a person in his position would make that decision. This was followed by a final scene which, though it seemed mysteriously cool on the surface, really made no sense either and left many unanswered questions.

Do yourself a favor and give MITHC Season 4 a miss. Spend the time instead reading one of the many first-rate books that warn of the true nature of communism, written by people who actually lived under its yoke. In addition to Ayn Rand, whose heartbreaking We the Living and inspiring Anthem deal with the subject, two other authors comes to mind: Yevgheniy Zamyatin (We) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago). Maybe I’ll review one or more of these at some point. But not for a little while. Because I really don’t want Nerds who Read to be a political blog.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His novel Full Asylum depicts life under a Big Government dystopia. But since Zamyatin, Rand, and Solzhenitsyn already told the grim version of that story, Isenberg’s book is a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com. Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter.

Now *that's* how you do science.

The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul J. Steinhardt.
A Nerds who Read Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I have a longstanding complaint about science education.

When I was learning physics as an undergraduate, and during the first year or so of graduate school, the lectures only covered what, for lack of a better term, could be called settled science (Yeah, I get that some of you object to that term. But keep reading and it will be clear what I mean.) One didn't get a sense of how messy the actual sausage-making was—the false starts, the incomplete information, the unpredictable flashes of insight, the dead ends, the egos, the politics, the waits for time on the equipment, the perennial funding crises—students saw very little of this until they were well into graduate school and began their thesis research. Yes, there were undergraduate research projects, but they weren’t quite the same.

Perhaps it has to be this way. Most sciences require considerable grounding in the basics before students are ready to do productive work. But the flipside is that they don't get a sense of what the day to day pursuit of science is actually like until they have committed five or six years to it.

The general public has a similarly warped view of science, thanks to a failure to understand this paradox: that even though science eventually gets to a fair level of certainty, there’s a great deal of uncertainty and questioning along the way. We see this when non-scientists weigh in on the global warming debate. One side focuses only on the holy "certainty" of the end result, and refuses to question anything. The other side focuses only on the questioning, and refuses to believe anything. Neither really understands how science works.

Which is why I thought The Second Kind of Impossible is such a wonderful book. Written by Paul J. Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, this “extraordinary quest for a new form of matter,” tells a true story of science discovery, in all its glorious chaos.

The book takes its title from a conversation the author had with legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the early 1970s. Steinhardt, a Cal Tech undergraduate at that time, was presenting a formula for the motion of a Super Ball. The equation predicted that if the ball were dropped with just the right spin, it would bounce of the floor at a nearly horizontal angle.

“That’s impossible!” Feynman declared.

Steinhardt produced a Super Ball and dropped it with the required spin. In spite of Feynman’s skepticism, it behaved exactly as predicted. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The incident launched Steinhardt on a lifetime of thinking about the word impossible. “I had learned early on to pay close attention whenever an idea is dismissed as ‘impossible,’” he writes.

Most of the time, scientists are referring to something that is truly out of the question, like violating the conservation of energy or creating a perpetual motion machine. It never makes sense to pursue those kinds of ideas. But sometimes, an idea is judged to be “impossible” based on assumptions that could be violated under certain circumstances that have never been considered before. I call that the second kind of impossible. If one can expose the underlying assumptions and find a long-overlooked loophole, the second kind of impossible is a potential gold mine that can offer a scientist the rare opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to make a transformational discovery.

Steinhardt would hear that word “impossible” from Feynman again, and once again it was the second kind of impossible. The year was 1985 and Steinhardt, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had travelled back to his old alma mater to present his theory of quasi-periodic crystals, or “quasicrystals” for short. This previously unknown form of matter demonstrated symmetries that were, well, impossible, according to the laws of crystallography developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by René Just Haüy and Auguste Bravais. It is the story of quasi-crystals that Steinhardt sets out to tell in his book.

The book is divided into three parts, each with its unique character. The first, “Making the Impossible Possible,” tells the story of how a computer model of a rapidly cooled solid showed the symmetry of an icosahedron—the shape of a Dungeons and Dragons die, something “impossible” under the Haüy and Bravais laws. This set Steinhardt and his graduate student Dov Levine on the path that would eventually lead to a theoretical model of quasicrystals. Simultaneously, Dan Shechtman, of the Technion in Israel, discovered an actual, manmade quasicrystal. “Making the Impossible Possible” is the most scientifically challenging part of the book, with many diagrams of crystal structures, diffraction patterns, and Penrose tiles.

It only took about five years to develop the theory of quasicrystals, discover them in a laboratory, and get them accepted by the scientific community. But Steinhardt wanted to take the investigation one step further. He wanted to find quasicrystals in nature. And that would take another thirty years.

The second part of the book, “The Quest Begins,” reads more like a detective or a spy novel than a scientific text. In it, Steinhardt tells the story of a quasicrystal that was found in the collection of the University of Florence’s Natural History Museum. Steinhardt, somewhat prematurely, submitted a paper to the journal Science claiming it was naturally-occurring. When subsequently, objections are raised, he must race against the clock on an international quest to find the origin of the Florence crystal before the publication date, or face the agonizing decision of whether to withdraw the paper.

Along the way we meet many colorful characters, such as Luca Bindi, head of the Department of Mineralogy at the Florence museum. Bindi has an amazing intuition for which crystals are most worthy of study, and an uncanny knack for unexpectedly pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat, earning for himself the title as L’Uomo dei Miracoli—the Miracle Man. Not everyone Steinhardt runs across is so helpful however. For example, Steinhardt claims that Leonid Razin, who had been director of Russia’s Platinum Institute during the old Evil Empire days, demands a hefty bribe before he would say anything—and his old ties to the KGB may just still be lethal.

In one passage, about presenting the project to Ed Stolper, geologist at CalTech, Steinhardt really gives us a sense of the difference between how science appears when you study it in the classroom, and how it appears when you're in the middle of it, and in particular, the human element. It was a high stakes meeting. Stolper carried a lot of weight with some of the senior members of Steinhardt’s "red team"—who would probably bail in the face of a negative review from him.

My pent-up anxiety was slowly melting away as I listened to Ed. It is always hard for me to explain to my university students how difficult it is for a scientist, even an established scientist such as myself, to challenge conventional wisdom. Everything always appears to be simple to others in retrospect. They lose sight of the fact that making scientific progress is always a struggle that requires a great deal of personal endurance. There is a huge amount of peer pressure to conform. For example, after Luca and I suggested that our sample of metallic aluminum might be of natural origin, which was generally thought to be impossible at the time, we were subjected to more than a year of skepticism and withering criticism from certain experts, including our own colleagues on the red team. It had not been easy. The negative comments were sometimes so harsh that the two of us were left dispirited. But work is a great coping mechanism. We kept plowing ahead, incrementally gathering additional evidence to test our thesis. After fourteen months of hard work, it was greatly satisfying for me to hear Ed validate our efforts.

After a series of twists and turns, Steinhardt eventually learns that the Florence sample came from a remote region of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The third part of the book “Kamchatka or Bust” is an adventure story, as Steinhardt and his team travel there to obtain more samples, in the hopes of learning just how nature managed to create such an unusual substance, and whether it was formed deep in the bowels of the earth, or fell from the skies in a meteorite. As they travel across the tundra and up into the mountains in their two “Behemoths”—vehicles that resemble a trailer atop of tank treads—they encounter desolate but beautiful landscapes, fierce hordes of mosquitoes, deadly Kamchatka brown bears, spectacular rainbows, blinding storms, one case of hypothermia, heaps of fresh salmon and caviar, and gallons of vodka.

Now that's how you do science.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Amazon.com

The Meh-dalorian

The Mandalorian, Episodes 1 and 2.
A Nerds who Read TV Review by Michael Isenberg.

It’s hard to warm to a guy with a mask on. So much of our brains are wired for recognizing and responding to faces, that when we don’t get one, it’s difficult to make an emotional connection (with the possible exception of fear).

So if you’re going to have a main character who never takes his mask off, as is the case for the Mandalorian, then he better have something to compensate. Give him some memorable lines to say or some awesome superpowers. Or both at the same time. Remember when Darth Vader force choked that one guy and said, "Apology accepted?" That was bad-ass. Sadly, with the Mandalorian, all we get is blah-ass.

Disney's space western, The Manalorian, premiered this week to launch their new streaming channel, “Disney Plus.” Pedro Pascal plays the title character. The series is definitely set in the Star Wars universe, and fans will see much that is familiar: Boba Fett armor, bizarre CGI creatures, the Force, stormtroopers. Although, since this takes place after the events of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers have seen better days.

The first episode is rather paint-by-numbers, the sort of formulaic thing an unimaginative writer would come up with. We first see the protagonist bring in a run-of-the-mill suspect. There’s a bit of action, but mainly the sequence exists to establish who the Mandalorian is—a bounty hunter. Then he meets with the boss guy to get his main assignment, a higher value target. After a stop with the equipment guy to get his armor upgraded, it’s off to the desolate planet Arvala-7 for the mission to begin in earnest. It was a great formula when James Bond started it, almost sixty years ago, but it’s been done.

Given that it’s the first episode of a series, rather than a movie, there’s one more element to the formula. It has to end with a cliffhanger, in order to hook the viewers so they'll watch the second episode. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say much about the cliffhanger. Just that if you’ve seen The Clone Wars, you’ve seen it already.

Episode 2 is the Mandalorian’s effort to get off Arvala-7 with his bounty. He is hindered by a Crawling Fortress full of Jawas who stripped his ship while he was off doing Episode 1 things. Now he’s stuck there unless he gets the parts back. There’s one twist toward the middle, which you will see coming a mile away. There are some beautiful desert landscapes as the Mandalorian makes his way across Arvala-7, and also a fair amount of action. I like action scenes—I rarely want to watch a show that doesn’t have some. But they’re no substitute for being invested in the main character.

I did like one of the other characters—the Ugnaught Kuiil, played by Nick Nolte. Something about this character just works. Not sure whether it's the grumpy frown, the gravelly voice, the gentle humor, or the Rocky the Flying Squirrel helmet and goggles. We’ve seen his species before—they were the pig-like creatures who were the worker bees of Cloud City in Empire. The ones who tried to melt down C-3PO. Kuiil came to such a barren planet as Arvala-7 in order to find independence as a vapor farmer. “I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.” And he has a great catchphrase, “I have spoken,” which he is able to pull off without sounding like a dick. Sadly, Episode 2 ends with the Mandalorian saying goodbye to him and flying off into space, so I’m not sure if he’s going to be back in future episodes.

The ending of Episode 2 wrapped everything up rather nicely—no cliffhanger to entice me to Episode 3. I’m undecided whether to cancel my subscription to Disney Plus when the free trial ends, or keep it to see more of The Mandalorian (Yeah, I know. There are other things on there. But that's a whole 'nother discussion). On the one hand, while not a great series so far, it’s not bad either. Kind of meh. Might be worth watching if there’s nothing else on. On the other hand, if I really want a space western, I could just re-watch Firefly.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Forbes, Screen Rants, fb.com/tarryk.

Dark Fate at the Box Office...

...and it’s a shame.

Terminator: Dark Fate
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Twenty-nine million dollars. That’s all Terminator: Dark Fate managed to pull in from the domestic box office during its opening last weekend. To put that in perspective, the movie is estimated to have cost $185 million to make. The poor reception is a shame, because it’s a pretty good movie. It wasn’t mind blowing or anything, it’s not going to rock your world. But it’s good solid entertainment with action, humor, and some heart.

Given that schools don’t teach the classics anymore, a quick review is in order. The original Terminator (1984) tells the story of Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence which sometime in the future—Judgment Day—achieves consciousness, launches the nukes, and then builds machines to exterminate what’s left of the human race. The humans, led by one John Connor, fight back, and after an epic war, with heavy losses, beat the machines. In a final Hail Mary pass, Skynet sends a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger), back to the 1980s to kill Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) before John is ever born. It fails. In the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Skynet tries again, this time taking a crack at John himself. Not only do the heroes destroy the Terminator once again, they prevent Skynet from ever being created. The grim future is erased. Judgment Day never happens.

Or so they think. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), we learn “You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.”

We also learn that sometime between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, Sarah Connor died of leukemia.

Which brings us to Terminator: Dark Fate. It begins two years after the events of T2. Sarah and John are hanging out on a beach in Guatemala when a model T-800 Terminator appears without warning and kills the boy. It all happens so fast that Sarah doesn’t have a chance to protect him, as she had done all his life. As they go their separate ways in the wake of the murder, both Sarah and the T-800 are suddenly aimless, alone in the world, and stripped of their missions.

Fast forward two decades. Yet another Terminator arrives from the future (Gabriel Luna). It’s an advanced model, the Rev-9, with the capability to separate its liquid metal and solid components to act independently, which is kind of cool in a fight. Its mission is to kill factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who presumably will have something to do with defeating the machines someday. But the Rev-9 is not the only visitor from the future: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced super soldier, has been sent back to protect Dani.

Needless to say, as Dani and Grace alternately fight and flight from the Rev-9, they eventually cross paths with Sarah Connor and the T-800 and we find out what they’ve been up to for the past twenty years. Sarah still totally kicks ass, and you got to admire the way Linda Hamilton—who is 63—pulls it off. Dark Fate is worth seeing just for that. According to her trainer, a year of intense workouts and strict low-carb dieting went into her preparation for the role.

As for the T-800, in order to avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal much about the arc of his character. Suffice to say, it is rather touching.

The T-800 is also the main source of humor in the movie, and the basic joke is that the robot says un-robotlike things. It works, as it did in T2. Remember “Hasta la vista, baby?” One of my few criticisms of the movie is that, since the T-800 joins the others rather late in the story, there is a decidedly grim lack of humor prior to that.

Dark Fate has been heavily criticized—some are calling it a franchise killer—but frankly I thought many of the criticisms are undeserved. I am at a loss to find anything that’s so terrible about this movie to account for the flop at the box office. It certainly doesn’t suffer from the sort of cringeworthy moments that made past franchise killers like Batman and Robin so painful to watch.

What a real franchise killer looks like

Some critics complain that the murder of John Connor at the beginning erases the events of Terminator 3. I don’t see the problem. Altering the timeline will do that (Albeit what’s harder to explain is how his death prevented his mother from dying of cancer).

Nor did it bother me that the T-800 has aged considerably—Arnold is 72 years old now. Since this model is built from living skin over a machine interior, it actually makes sense.

Some of my right-of-center friends have criticized what they see as the movie’s politics and are gleeful about its flop at the box office. “Get woke, grow broke,” read one Facebook post I saw. I sincerely doubt these critics have actually seen the movie. It’s not really a political film. Yes, it has some female action heroines. It’s even been called “vagina-centric.” But this series has always had female heroines—Linda Hamilton has been badass since the beginning. Well, at least since T2 anyway. It’s not like Hollywood is rewriting anyone’s childhood for the sake of political correctness. Nor does Dark Fate have that mean-spirited girls against the boys vibe that made Captain Marvel so awful.

There is one scene in an immigrant detention center, which of course references current events, but again, it’s not really political. Pitch Meeting pretty much captured the spirit of it:

Writer Guy: I want the next big set piece to take place inside of a detention facility along the US-Mexico border, you know, get some social commentary going on. Producer Guy: Oh, okay. So what’s the commentary? Writer Guy: It, uh, you know, wouldn’t it look cool if a Terminator ran through one of those things? Producer Guy: That does sound cool.

Well, it is a cool movie. Ignore the critics and the box office and go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): CinemaBlend.com, Polygon.com, giphy.com

An Unambiguous Dystopia

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Every once in a while at Nerds who Read, we like to look back at one of the classics.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, but it continues to have relevance in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Occupy Oakland demonstrators were so inspired by its vision of an anarcho-communist utopia, that they chose it as one of the book covers they used to decorate their “shields” during a 2013 protest.

But when Ms. Le Guin first conceived the story that became The Dispossessed, it was not intended as a utopia. It was a character study. She recounts its birth in her essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” which appears in her 1979 collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like her book The Left Hand of Darkness, she says,

the origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever became clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time, a scientist, a physicist in fact I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was more attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time… My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and the novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeblemindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!” All right. All right, what’s-your-name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right, Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia. Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, the he might well come from a better place than this.

Thus Ms. Le Guin put the usual historical process in reverse. Real life communism begins with promises of utopia and ends with a Gulag. Ursula Le Guin began with a Gulag, and ends with promises of utopia. Such as it is.

The utopia is the planet of Anarres. Several hundred years earlier, a group of idealists had left its sister planet, Urras, to found a colony there. Since then, contact between the two planets was limited to a semi-annual supply ship and some radio contact reserved for the elite that wasn’t supposed to exist. Ms. Le Guin wanted to show how her utopia would unfold without outside interference.

The opening paragraphs are a rather ingenious depiction of a wall, which are well worth reading in their entirety:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks and roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important that that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

We then meet Shevek. As in the original short story, he is “escaping,” boarding the supply ship to return to Urras, the first person ever to do so.

From here the book alternates between chapters about Shevek’s experiences on Urras, where he’s lionized as a celebrity, and chapters recounting his life story up to his momentous decision to leave Anarres and return to the mother planet.

Frankly I found it slow going. Ms. Le Guin was so focused on her character, that she didn’t give us much by way of plot. For most of the book, there just wasn’t any conflict with sufficiently high stakes to have me wondering what was going to happen next. Yes, there were hints that Shevek’s hosts on Urras had some hidden agenda, but these were only passing mentions. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through, when Shevek set out to make his second escape, this time from Urras back to Anarres, that the pace picked up and I finally found myself drawn into the story.

On top of that, IMHO, Ms. Le Guin didn’t even succeed at what she set out to do in the first place, create a vivid character who was “attractive, I mean as a flame to a moth…too big for a short story.” I found Shevek to be a bit of a sad sack, a little boring, often passive, with an air of hopelessness about him. There was no flamey attraction at all.

But there is one aspect of the book that intrigued me (besides the opening passage), in a negative sort of way: the utopian aspect. Anarres is a society where all are equal, at least in theory. There is no private property—the absence of possessions gives the book its title. The needs of every citizen are met (sparsely) without requiring money or work. And yet they do work. “The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together,” Ms. Le Guin explains in a 2015 interview. “That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal…Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.”

Ms. Le Guin worked very hard on the utopian aspect of the book. “It took me years,” she wrote in the “Mrs. Brown” essay. “Reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where [Shevek] came from, and could see the landscape about him.” In an interview with Euan Monaghan, available on lithub.com she added, “I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.”

And yet, despite her hard work and schmoozing of bookstore owners, the Anarres utopia is a terrible place. The people barely survive at a subsistence level. Artificial heat and light are forbidden. Even on those rare occasions when there are resources available for them, it’s felt that such luxuries would undermine the virtue of poverty.

The so-called anarchy is not really without government. There’s a central agency that matches workers to available jobs. And when a road needs to be built, or a forest cleared, citizens are drafted, much like the corvée that reduced the medieval serf to slavery. The more perceptive Anarrans are well aware that their claim to have no government is a pretense, as Shevek’s friend Bedap admits at one point.

And yet the real power on Anarres is the amorphous pressure of public opinion. Those who are seen as not pulling their weight are ostracized, which is occasionally enforced by a barrage of rock-throwing. A similar fate awaits anyone with the effrontery to think for themselves. They’re cut off from the work that was supposed to be so fulfilling that they would do it without pay. Another of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, wrote an unpopular play and finds himself assigned to road work. As with dissenters in the Soviet Union, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even Shevek, working at a university, is barred from teaching until he gives up the original research the powers-that-be find threatening. I cringed every time an Anarran described himself as "free."

Anarcho-communism is not freedom. Like all forms of communism, it is fundamentally flawed. To take material goods away from people who produced them, in order to redistribute them to people who didn't, is morally wrong. Without the need to work in order to survive, not to mention the delightful possibility of growing rich, there is little incentive for anyone to put in effort. Without the price mechanism of the market, even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats lack the information they need to balance supply and demand. The result is chronic shortages. And when there are no checks and balances on the power of the collective, the pressure to conform is a tyranny as soul-crushing as anything government can impose.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin set out to create an ideal society, a utopian utopia, and judging from her various public statements, she was sincere about that. But the logic of anarcho-communism led her to its natural, grim conclusion instead. To her credit, Ms. Le Guin was too honest a writer to evade that logic. She never could escape from the Gulag that was the setting of her original short story.

Even Ms. Le Guin conceded, in her "Mrs. Brown essay" that Anarres was a utopia "of sorts." Some editions of The Dispossessed are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” I don’t know if that was Ms. Le Guin’s decision or her publishers’. But I would go beyond that. Anarres is an unambiguous dystopia.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His dystopian novel, Full Asylum, shows what America will look like if it continues down the path of socialism. But since George Orwell and Ayn Rand already wrote the grim version of that story, Dr. Isenberg wrote a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Domingoyu.com.

Not your Dress-up Doll

Battle Angel Alita, Vol. 1-5, by Yukito Kishiro.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I missed Alita: Battle Angel at the theater earlier this year, and am only just now getting caught up, thanks to streaming video. I found it very entertaining, with kickass fight scenes and real heart.

But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read. So, although comparisons with the movie are inevitable, my review today focuses on the original nine-part 1990-95 Battle Angel Alita manga, or to be precise, the five-volume 2017 “Deluxe Edition” re-release (each volume except the last contains two parts).

Some of the story will be familiar to viewers of the movie: How the cyber-doctor Daisuke Ido finds the head and shoulders of a cybernetic warrior discarded in the post-Apocalyptic “Scrapyard.” How he rebuilds her and names her Alita. How she joins him as a hunter-warrior, bounty hunters in a long, twilight struggle against rogue cyborgs. And how Alita fell into a star-crossed romance with the street urchin/handyman/spine snatcher Yugo, whose only goal in life is to leave the Scrapyard and move on up to the mysterious “floating utopia” of Zalem.

Mercifully, the manga does not include the tiresome Jack Skellington part of the story, the sequence in the movie in which the newly-rebuilt but amnesiac Alita darts about the Scrapyard, gleefully exclaiming “What’s that?” at each new sight. On this point, the manga is definitely superior to the movie: we get to the action that much faster (Yeah, I know. Jack actually said, "What's this?" But I think my point is clear).

In spite of this and some other added material, the makers of the Alita: Battle Angel movie (as well as the makers of the 1993 OVA) deserve praise for staying true to the source material, right down to duplicating some of the manga’s most iconic images.

But the movie covers little more than Volume 1 of the manga. After that, Alita goes on to have many new adventures, love interests, and battles. Volume 2 fleshes out her Motorball career. Volumes 3-5 revolve around the relationship between the surface dwellers and Zalem. The floating city imposes a cruel tyranny over the inhabitants below. Zalem appropriates nearly all the resources and manufactured goods of the planet’s surface, only enforces the laws to the extent that they bolster its own interests, and uses the Scrapyard as a dumping ground, with imagery that anticipates the Devil’s Anus in Thor:Ragnarok by two decades.

The people of the surface revolt in what becomes known as the “Barjack Rebellion”, led by the sometime Samurai, sometime centaur, always dangerous Den. Den is interesting in the way that Killmonger from Black Panther is interesting. He’s definitely the villain, and yet one can’t help thinking, “He has a point.” In any case, he turns out to be not what he seems.

We also see a lot more of Desty Nova in these later volumes, who we glimpsed in the movie, the Ed Norton character pulling strings behind the scenes.

My one complaint about the manga is I often found the fight scenes hard to follow. Seriously, what’s going on here?

But aside from that, I think this is a wonderful series. Part of its strength comes from the relationships between Alita and the people around her, in particular Yugo and Dr. Ido. In this respect she reminds me of another diminutive 1990s action heroine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alita’s crush on Yugo is far more layered than in the movie, a beautifully true-to-life portrayal of a teenager in love. She falls hard for this cute boy with a cool bandana and an adorable smirk who knows where he’s going. She waits outside his house all night for him to come home. She does his laundry and makes plans for their future together, at least when she’s not staring out over the city and moping about whether they have a future together. Alas, although he does like her, he’s not as into her as she is into him; he has his own thing going on. Thanks to these nuances, his choices later in the story make a lot more sense than they do on the Big Screen.

But it is Alita’s relationship with Dr. Ido that is the most touching, one of father and daughter. It’s not perfect. Sometimes he’s a great sounding board, for example listening sympathetically, albeit with a touch of amusement, to her romantic problems. Other times she has to lay down the law with him, as when he tries to forbid her from becoming a hunter-warrior.

Indeed the whole plotline about the Barjack rebels is just a side-mission for Alita: she crosses their path while on a multiyear quest across ruined landscapes to find Ido, who has gone missing. Through it all, they both make mistakes, some of which have serious consequences. But they do it because they care about each other.

Comparisons between Alita and Captain Marvel are ubiquitous on the web, and for good reason: both of their movies came out around the same time, both are women with incredible powers who do not remember their origins, and are therefore on quests to find out who they are. Both their mentors try to hold them back, ultimately without success. But IMHO, it’s these relationships with their mentors that set the two superheroines apart. Ido is motivated by love for Alita and holds her back, and even opposes her sometimes, in a misguided effort to keep her out of danger. Captain Marvel, in contrast, is a feminist parable in which her mentor, Yon-Rogg is the very embodiment of The Patriarchy; he holds her back because he wants to control her. Indeed all the males in her life are awful—with the exception of those who are comic relief.

I think this gap between the emotional resonance of Alita and the coldness of Captain Marvel is why audiences split on the two movies the way they did. As of the time I write this, Alita has a 93% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with only 53% for Captain Marvel. Interestingly, the critics, more politically correct, split the other way, 61% for Alita and 78% for Captain Marvel (For a more in-depth analysis of Alita, Captain Marvel, and feminism, see Ian Kummer’s post, “Alita, the Battle Angel, fights her feminist critics” on the Fabius Maximus website).

The other marvelous thing about the Battle Angel is that she’s just so badass. Absolutely unstoppable. In one fight, her opponent literally tears her limb from limb, until there is nothing left of her but her head, shoulders, and one arm. And yet, she wasn't finished. Which brings me to another comparison with Buffy, specifically the Slayer’s fight against Angel in the season 2 finale. Angel has her on the ropes and taunts her, “That's everything, huh? No weapons...no friends...no hope...Take all that away and what's left?”

“Me,” Buffy replies.

Alita shares Buffy's spirit, but is a little more primal about it. When it was her turn to be stripped of everything, she merely screamed out a battle cry and, pushing off with her one arm, jumped back into the fight.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Battle Angel Alita Kindle Edition, Fabius Maximus website, IMDB