Review (Part 2 of 2): Big Hero 6: Like Frozen, with less singing and more robots

This is the second part of my review of Big Hero 6. The first part of the review can be found here. 

This part will have unmarked SPOILERS.

Brotherly Love

I wasn't merely being glib with the title, when I compared it to Frozen. Where the heart of that movie is all about two sister who deeply love each other, this one is about two brothers. As they're concluding their heart-to-heart, they suddenly see a fire at the exhibition hall.

Holy shit, is this a great scene. They run towards it, and Tadashi realizes that the professor is still inside. There is the initial flinch of self-preservation, but he steels himself to run in. Hiro grabs his brother, but Tadashi tells him that Callaghan is still inside, and he pulls away. He hurls himself into the burning building, which EXPLODES, bowling Hiro over.The scene really conveyed the size and the danger of the fire and the explosion. They were frightening on a visceral level.

It's followed by muted scenes of the funeral, and the wake. The movie has such a fine eye for detail, like when Cass brings up a meal for Hiro, and puts it in the place of the uneaten meal she had placed there before. This part was hard to watch, in part because it was so true. Jen and Lily were crying, and I had something in my eye. Tadashi is absolutely my favorite character. He wasn't some sacred martyr, who existed only to die in to move the hero on to the next point in the Heroic Journey. He was a decent fellow, he tried to use his gifts to help other people, but he had a personality.

And Hiro's coping, or lack of it, rang true. There's such a profound depth of grief with a loss like this, and people often retreat inside themselves, away from those who can help them grieve.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter

Hiro accidentally activates Baymax, and discovers an intact microbot, which seems to be trying to rejoin the others. Baymax follows it to an abandoned factory, and Hiro follows him. They discover that somebody is manufacturing microbots. That somebody is a weirdo in a Kabuki mask, who sends the microbots after the pair.

I thought the animation here was extremely well done. The swarm simultaneously looked real and like nothing on earth.

They escape, and Hiro concludes that the masked man must be the one who killed his brother and stole his bots, so he gets to work upgrading Baymax with armor and badass karate moves. One thing I liked was that Hiro says "Unbelievable." two or three times, but not to the point where it's reduced to a catch phrase. That just seems right, as everyone has their favorite phrases that they repeat under similar circumstances.

With the newly badass Baymax, Hiro follows his lone bot to the harbor, after discovering that the warehouse has been abandoned. The masked man emerges. Hiro discovered that he was followed by Tadashi's friends. He wants to fight the masked man, but the others pull him into Wasabi's subcompact car and flee. An excellent car chase follows, ending only when the car plunges into the bay.

Upgrades

They walk to Fred's mansion. He mentions his parents are away on vacation on their private island, and gestures to a family portrait, where the dad looks suspiciously like Stan Lee. (I later learned that Stan Lee shows up in the post-credit scene, but my fidgety eight-year old didn't want to wait.)

Hiro upgrades Baymax again, and builds his friends some armor. A friend observed that it seemed unconvincing that a young kid was so immediately accepted into their lives, but I think he was acting as a surrogate for his brother. Tadashi was gone, they loved him, and knew he loved his brother, so they transfer that affection on to Hiro. The training montage here is great, and goes on for exactly the right length.

Baymax had scanned Kabuki-Face during their earlier tussle, and now that Hiro has upgraded his scanner, he scans the entire city and locates the subject on an island just off the coast. They arrives and find that the island has been quarantined, and on exploring they discover a former Krei Tech lab that was inventing Stargate looking teleportation gateways. Video footage shows that the test pilot entered one portal, but did not emerge from the second when the first malfunctioned.

Then the masked man shows up behind them and throws a huge chunk of concrete at them. Baymax protects them, because that's what he does. They fight, and the heroes knock his mask off, revealing not Krei, as they had expected, but Callaghan.

Quelle Surprise

He monologues briefly, explaining that he started the fire that killed Tadashi in order to cover his theft of Hiro's microbots. Hiro orders Baymax to kill Callaghan. Baymax refuses. Hiro pops out his healthcare chip, leaving him with only the combat programming. Baymax goes full-on end movie Iron Giant, and aggressively attacks Callaghan, throwing aside those team members who try to intervene. The sound here is muted and it's a wonderful addition to the impact of the scene.  It's only when Honey Lemon manages to slot the healthcare chip back in that he stops.

Hiro and Baymax fly off alone, and return to Hiro's workspace. This is a heartbreaking scene. Hiro is falling apart, and trying to get the slot back open to remove the chip. Baymax tells him that this is not what Tadashi would have wanted, and Hiro replies "Tadashi is gone!" and he finally breaks down crying when Baymax asks if killing Callaghan will make him feel better. It's all in Baymax's soft, sympathetic monotone, and it's all wonderfully delivered.

Baymax shows Hiro some footage of Tadashi running the initial tests, and Hiro's friends arrive. They review the footage from the island and discover that the test pilot was Callaghan's daughter when they see her last name on her helmet. (I think that's why they went with the less common spelling of the name, as it makes it easily to identify her as his daughter.)

A hate so big...

I love Callaghan as a villain. He reminds me of Magneto. I applied Roger Zelazny's line about a hate so big that it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty to Magneto in an earlier review and I think it applies to Callaghan as well.

His actions, at first, are not unreasonable. If someone hurt my daughter, you better believe I'd become a supervillian to get revenge. He sees the opportunity to hurt Krei like he'd been hurt, so he sets the fire as a distraction when he's sure that no one is in the building, and uses it as cover to steal the bots, which will be the instrument of his revenge. He had no way of knowing that Tadashi would be in a position to run into the building to save him, and when he angrily tells Hiro that Tadashi shouldn't have done it, this doesn't mean that he doesn't regret what he has done.

Would he have gone through with it had he known the consequences? I'd like to think not, that affection for one of his prized pupils would have convinced him to try another way. But things happened as they did, and we'll never know.

A slight digression here (yeah, I know, mark that one off on your Josh blogging bingo card. It's right between excessive use of italics and run-on sentences), that ties back into my larger point. John Byrne was tasked with rebooting Superman into the modern era in 1986, and one of the best changes he made was re-imagining Lex Luthor as corrupt businessman, which is the interpretation that dominates today.

Silver Age Lex Luthor might have built a weather control satellite and used it to blackmail the world (or more likely, to ruin Superman's vacation, Silver Age villains having no sense of perspective). Modern Age Lex Luthor would patent the satellite and license it out, making much more money than he ever could in criminal endeavors.

And that makes sense. From a strict cost-benefit analysis, super-villainy is seldom a practical solution to any problem. However, it works here. I figured out his identity as the villain from almost the first moment I saw the professor. I was thinking, "Hmmm...respected robots professor gives up job he loves to become supervillain? Unlikely." But when we consider that the only thing he's living for anymore is revenge, then it's a reasonable, or at least rational path to his goals.

However, he is a villain. It's not a reasonable response to drop fifty tons of rocks on a group of kids snooping around your lair. If it were, most episodes of Scooby Doo would end verrrrry early.

He's a great counterpoint to Hiro, as well, who is dealing with his own rage and loss, and who not incidentally, also tried to straight up murder the architect of that loss. Hiro had someone to pull him back.

"I want my daughter back!" 

Now that our heroes know that Callaghan is going to kill Krei, they intervene to stop him. Krei has bankrolled the construction of a new facility to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Callaghan arrives and uses the nanobots to assemble to defective portal over the building. The visual was very well done and the way the bots moved things into place reminded me of Doctor Octopus' arms. Krei begs for his life like Count Rugen, offering Callaghan anything he wants, and Callaghan replies the only way he can, "I want my daughter back!"

The heroes fight and win, but Baymax scans the portal and determines that Callaghan's daughter is still within, in "hypersleep".  Hiro and Baymax venture in and rescue her, though Baymax sacrifices himself so that Hiro and Abigail get get out. 

I'm a little torn about this. On one hand,  it's a bit of a cop out. On the other, I'm sick and tired of writers fridging female characters simply to give a little motivation to the (male) main characters. On reflection, it's a cheat, but one I'm happy to live with.

I love Callaghan's expression when they're putting him in the police car and he sees his daughter. It's almost unreadable, but my interpretation is that he's so happy to have her back, and despondent that she'll know him as a monster.

When setting things up in Tadashi's old lab, Hiro discovers Baymax's personality chip clutched in the rocket fist he had used to push the pod out of the portal. I figured that's where they were going, but I didn't see how it had been accomplished. I'll have to watch the home video version closely to see if we're shown it, or if it happens off-screen.

Hiro rebuilds Baymax, and the team continues as superheroes.

Conclusions

Outstanding. I loved almost everything, and I've already addressed the few quibbles I had, so I'm just going to summarize what I loved about it.

Mister Rogers once famously said

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."

I liked that the heroes were decent without being bland. Technology is only a tool, but I like they wanted to use that tool to help people.

Tadashi was my favorite character, and I like that he built a robot to help people, and that his last act was to attempt to save someone's life.

I liked that it showed that smart people come in all shapes and sizes and colors.

I like the gender balance, and that the ladies were the first one into the fight.

I like how it addresses that grief is real, and it can be overwhelming, but in time, things will get better.

Doctor Who: Top Ten List of the Master's Worst Aliases

I never could take the Daleks seriously, but I always loved the Master, with his rubber masks, needlessly complicated plans, "Did somebody order A LARGE HAM?!" delivery* and wink-wink-nudge-nudge aliases.

Those aliases are the best. I like to think he's snickering to himself, daring some faceless UNIT soldier to inspect his ID and say (in the voice of the squeaky-voiced teen from the Simpsons "Um, Master M. McMasters, M.A., M.S., sir? You're not part of our usual cleaning crew?") so he can kill him with his ridiculously impractical combination shrink-ray/death-ray.

The excellent TARDIS Data Core has a listing of the aliases used by the Master, in the original series, the reboot, and all spin off media. I wasn't aware of how many there were, or how ridiculous they got.

Note that, with two exceptions, this list is a collection of "So Bad they're Good" Aliases.

1.) Professor Thascalos: This was in the Time Monster,  slightly later in the Third Doctor's run, after the Master had already used the pseudonyms Colonel Masters, Martin Jurgens (Anagram of Master Gunnjir, the spear of Odin), and the Reverend Magister (Latin for Master, but also close enough to set off alarm bells. Fortunately the Master brought his Clark Kent glasses for this one.) Thascalos is worthy of special note, because it's freaking Jo Grant,  who points out that it's Greek for Master. He's not even trying at this point.

2.) Estro: This is your run-of-the-mill "X of the Daleks" story, noteworthy for two things. It attempts to explain the Master's decaying form in The Deadly Assassin by telling a story of how he was overpowered and outmaneuvered by Susan (Foreman), easily one of the most feckless companions of the original run. Seems legit to me. Also, he uses the name "Estro", which is Esperanto for Master. What is this, Incubus?!


3.) Tremas: Not quite an alias, but don't they teach parents anything on Traken? Giving your child that's an anagram of "Master" is just begging for trouble. Interestingly, Geoffrey Beevers played the Melkur in this episode, and he was married to Caroline John, who played Liz Shaw opposite the Third Doctor. I always thought that the Doctor should have mimeographed a couple copies of translations and anagrams of "Master", and distributed them to UNIT's staff. I'll he tried that, but Liz Shaw intercepted them on behalf of her future husband. Diabolical!


4.) Kalid: Boy, I don't even know what was going on with this shit. The Master steals a Concorde, which hopelessly dates the episode, and dresses up in a ridiculous costume for no reason. "Aha! Doctor! You thought I was an alien asshole with needlessly complicated plan, but I'm a different asshole from the one as whom I briefly disguised myself!"

5.) Fake Names in the Credits: These were a staple of the Davison era. They ran the gamut from the rather mundanely believable James Stoker to the WTF of  Leon Ny Taiy. The Doctor inhabits a world where people name their children "Romanadvoratrelundar", and Leon Ny Taiy still doesn't sound like a name!

6.) Sir Gilles Estram: I actually kind of like this one. The makeup is less than convincing,

"They were all out of Roger Delgado, so I went as Tony Ainley instead."

and again, the Master didn't expect the Doctor to show up, so there was no reason to disguise himself. But the name has a kind of endearing goofiness, so I'll give it a pass.

7.) Mr. Seta: Big Finish's early audio plays are dirt cheap, so there was a time when I would pick up a handful without paying too much attention to what the plot was, as even their weaker outings are generally pretty good. I was listening to Dust Breeding, and just as soon as I had the thought, "This had a pretty strong beginning, but now it's beginning to drag," somebody asks Mr. Seta to identify himself and he replies, "I am the Master, and you will obey me." and just like that, my interest perked back up. I'd have to listen to it again to see how well the Master's ruse holds up. I don't know if it was because I couldn't give the story my full attention because I was at work and the anagrammatic elements were obscured because it was an audio work, and I didn't know how the name was spelled. But this is one that I didn't see coming.

8.) Mister Saxon: Ostensibly an anagram for "Master No. Six", but that's torture the English language doesn't deserve. Jon Simm is outstanding, as is Derek Jacobi. Unfortunately, I'd been spoiled for this twist ahead of time, but I really think it could have held up. Simm is so much fun to watch in his jovial evil, and his dance to the Scissor Sister (sadly cut from the Netflix version! Boo!) remains one of my favorite moments of the new series.

But the Internet remembers!

The detail that I liked most about his early appearances was his wife, Lucy. You can see what looks like a partially healed black eye in that clip. Russell Davies was not always the most subtle storyteller, but I think that visual does more to hammer home the sheer pettiness of the Master's evil than his order to kill one-tenth of the world's population.

9.) Missy: I called it. But in fairness, everybody called it.  It's hard to keep a twist like this for an entire season, particularly for a property with a focused and (I say this lovingly) obsessive fandom. Either you can go the Lost route, and make stuff up as you go along, or you can  play fair and drop hints and just be resolved to the fact that everyone in on the Internets is going to pool their collective  knowledge and puzzle out the conclusion ahead of time. Once in a while, someone pulls it off. Veronica Mars more or less did it, but that was more than ten years ago, they had a much smaller fanbase, and it was for only one season, and some people did figure things out, though, as I recall, there wasn't a consensus. My point is, it's not easy to do this, and I'm not without sympathy.

Of course, Moffat fails to live up to even the tiny amount of charity I'm willing to extend, and bungles it completely in other ways. The always excellent Whovian Feminism (Go read the whole thing) points out the problematic aspects of the character, chiefly, that Moffat writes the Master-as-a-woman just like he writes every other female villain character on the series. She just can't wait to get it on with the Doctor. This interpretation cheapens the character, because it suggests that women can't look beyond their most basic urges.

And the number one best/worst alias of the Master is:




10.) Steven Moffat: He even clumsily disguised his name

Mister Moffat, Writer

becomes

Master: Reform if Twit

It seems this incarnation of the Master has already insinuated himself into the highest echelons of the BBC, where he has ruled unchecked for years. It may well finally be this Master who brings the Doctor low.




* TVtropes has its own large ham entry just for Doctor Who.

"Every movie has cool girls!"

Yesterday, I called Lily over to watch a clip from I movie that I thought she'd enjoy. I said, "Come on. This movie has a cool girl in it!" and she replied "Every movie has cool girls!"

And I thought, "Well, every movie that we show you," and I'm simultaneously happy that she thinks a movie needs to have cool girls in it, and concerned that she's going to be acutely disappointed when she discovers how sexist and regressive so much of geek culture is.

Five things that will not actually make your movie better

Wow, this sounds like the title of a Cracked article.  This is my humble list of concepts that pop culture believes merge flawlessly like peanut butter into chocolate with any other property, but in fact, do not.

It's not a list of things that are bad. It's not a list of things I don't like because they're popular. Disliking something because it's popular is a particular trait of geek culture, and it's just as ridiculous as liking something because it's popular.

This is a list of things that I can enjoy in moderation, but they've all become so ubiquitous that they really hold no surprises anymore, and I'm less interested when I learn that one of these things will be present in a story.

Usually Bad 

1.) Zombies: Sorry, Jeremy, but oh, boy.

 Let's do an image search for "Sexy Zombie".

100 + more. Sweet, merciful Romero.

I've argued in this post about zombies and in this one about Berserkers that zombies work best as an environmental threat, something that's only dangerous if you're careless or screwed by your fellow humans. I like zombie movies, but I think zombies are only scary in the absence of a functioning society. Even the granddaddy of them all, Night of the Living Dead, recognizes this. The dead were spontaneously reanimating, and a couple people in close proximity to a cemetery had a really bad night, but by the end of it, a bunch of rednecks were making a game of killing the zombies.

Also, if all else fails, use bears.

The exception to the zombie rule is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book shamelessly plagiarized by that hack, Jane Austen.


2.) Tesla: Not the band.

(Well, okay, the band. They suck, but they're not awkwardly shoehorned into every property imaginable.)

Need 22nd century technology in the late 19th century? Nikola Tesla did it!

He's the patron saint of geeks. He was unquestionably a brilliant scientist. Like the other items on the list, he's not good or bad on his own, but he's ridiculously overexposed. I blame Elon Musk and the Oatmeal.

3.) Steampunk: Close cousin to number 2. Sometime a steampunk aesthetic can work. The Legend of Korra is outstanding example of building a steampunk look organically. It's mixed with a 1920's Shanghai vibe that gives the series a very cool look and feel. Unfortunately, for every cool Korra mecha tank (see below),













we have three Abe Lincolns with minigun arms.

"Looks like you brought a derringer to a minigun fight, Booth."
From the awesome site, Unnecessary Steampunk.

4.) Knight Templar: Ugh, these guy. I think that each of the above properties work well in their own milieu, but I can't say the same for the Knights Templar. They never work, and they're fucking EVERYWHERE,

We still use swords in the 21st Century. 

5.) Benedict Cumberbatch: The Mary Sue used to be an absolutely outstanding site until they abruptly merged with Geekosystem. Quality fell off a cliff, and now every other article is a warbled squee of "Maisie Williams/Joss Whedon/Benedict Cumberbatch did something!!!!!"

The Internet seems to want to cast him as everyone from Luke Cage to Sharon Carter, and while TMS is hardly the only offender, they are certainly among the most egregious.

Borderline

Bill Murray: A friend sent me a link with this message: "Did either of you see that Bill Murray has a movie out in which it looks like he just plays Bill Murray?"

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/stvincent/

I replied: I think we're nearing peak Murray. I love the guy, but dang, is he everywhere! I would hate to see the day when I see a headline about him and think, "Ugh, him again?", but, unfortunately, such a future is no longer inconceivable.

Usually Good

Cthulhu: The Cthulhu Mythos  is something that gets mashed up with a lot of stuff. An old acquaintance from my time at the comic store (and Jen's time at her church. You thought I was joking about Unitarians worshiping Cthulhu) wrote the 463 page Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance. It was published in 1999, and, due to the explosion of online publishing, I'd bet that it would be twice that size if it were written today.

Opinions will differ, but I think the reason that the Mythos meshes with other properties better than the other things I mentioned is because it's not just one thing. Read the Lovecraft eZine's submission guidelines to get an idea, or Wikipedia's piece on the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. It's more than just monsters with unpronounceable names and lots of tentacles; it's broad enough to encompass a number of interpretation, and that's why it's not a red flag like so many of the things listed. Are there terrible Mythos stories? Of course there are, but in general, it's not the Mythos elements that make them bad.

Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 9: Flatline

Alas, this is just a placeholder post until I get around to seeing the actual episode. I hear it's good, though.