Tag Archives: review

Book Review of “Out of Time” (2022) by Dave Sinclair

time

Cover art for Dave Sinclair’s “Out of Time”

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I don’t remember what made me buy Dave Sinclair’s time travel/spy book Out Of Time: An Atticus Wolfe Novel. It’s the first of the three-part series (somehow, I think readers expect series these days rather than standalone books). I suppose it was the theme. An MI6 agent in 2024 is suddenly thrust backwards in time to London, November 1963 and joins the same agency, encountering all manner of anachronisms from sixty years in the past.

Atticus Wolfe is an accomplished MI6 agent currently in London. He’s been stalking an international terrorist named Omar Ganim who has been raiding various scientific organizations and is believed to be building a devastating weapon. Wolfe has been unsuccessful in finding Ganim, that is until a twist of fate puts him behind his quarry on a street. With no time to call for help, Wolfe pursues and corners Ganim. He finds Ganim apparently ready to activate a bomb.

Wolfe plays for time, trying to talk Ganim down. Ganim insists he’s not a terrorist or murderer. He appeals to Atticus as a man of color, who, like him, has never experienced justice from the white system. He says he’s going back to fix the mess that the French and English made of the Middle East. There seems to be an explosion.

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Film Review of “DC League of Super-Pets” (2022)

superpets

Movie poster for “DC League of Super-Pets.” (CNS photo/Alon Amir, Warner Bros.)

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Who knew the first movie I’d see in the theater since Rise of Skywalker (2019) would be DC League of Super-Pets (2022). Let me explain.

My son and his wife went on a camping trip, so they dropped my seven-year-old granddaughter off at my wife’s and my house at 9:30 Saturday morning. My wife suggested we go see a movie together. After searching for what was available for kids, I wanted to see Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022). She’d already seen it but hadn’t seen the Super-Pets movie yet. Of the two, I knew “Minions” had better reviews, but what the heck?

As far as my overall impression of “Super-Pets,” let’s just say it was fun for seven-year-olds.

Actually, in many ways, it was pretty standard fare for a “buddy” movie. You have two buddies, in this case Superman (voiced by John Krasinski) and Krypto (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) and then a woman, Lois Lane (voiced by Olivia Wilde) gets in the way. Krypto gets jealous and that’s what causes all of the problems.

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Review of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” (2021)

afterlife

© James Pyles

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I finally managed to see Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) when I found the Blu-ray at my local public library. Actually, like the blurb says on the Blu-ray cover, it is “perfect.”

Not absolutely, but it was an amazing experience, especially for a film that is so different from the original (I still haven’t seen the 2016 gender-flipped reboot and we will speak no more about it here).

First of all, McKenna Grace totally nailed it as Igon’s nerdy granddaughter Phoebe. I was a little dubious about a bunch of kids trying to be Ghostbusters, but I really loved how the film pulled it off.

It’s such an unlikely setting, a rural town and former mining community in the-middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma, but it worked.

Callie (Carrie Coon), Igon Spengler’s (the late Harold Ramis) daughter and her two kids Phoebe and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) are evicted from the apartment somewhere (the location is never disclosed), and go to the only place left to them. A year ago, Igon died and Callie hopes to sell his farm to recoup her losses. No such luck.

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Book Review of “Infinity Engine: Transformation Book Three”

infinity engine

Cover art for Neal Asher’s novel “Infinity Engine”

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It’s been three-and-a-half years since I first started this trilogy with Dark Intelligence and almost three years since I read and reviewed part two, War Factory. Now I wrap up Neal Asher’s Transformation trilogy with Infinity Engine.

The hardest part of reading these books is keeping track of all of the characters. In Book One, Thorvald Spear seemed to be the central character and he still receives a lot of the focus, but the Black AI Penny Royal (I love the name) is the intelligence that is manipulating all of the other characters and circumstances to their own ends.

A main component was introduced in the last book, “Room 101,” a former weapons factory orbiting a supergiant star that, according to Penny Royal’s design, is being remade into something radically different.

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, The First Season

snw

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If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been reviewing, episode by episode, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Basically, it’s Kurtzman NuTrek designed to appeal to the old school “Star Trek” fan like me. Did it work?

Sort of.

First of all, let’s be clear that you can’t make a television show (or any art form) in 2022 and have it seem like it was created in 1966. All art is a reflection of its time. If you remade films like Casablanca (1942) or Gone With The Wind (1939) today, they wouldn’t be anything like the original classics because approximately eighty years have passed.

So expecting SNW to be like the original Star Trek starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy is completely unrealistic.

That said, I totally miss that era in science fiction and in television in general.

There’s almost no way to compare the two shows and yet, it begs the question was SNW “Star Trek?”

What makes Star Trek “Star Trek?”

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Ep10, “A Quality of Mercy”

old pike

Scene from the Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode “A Quality of Mercy”

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This is it. The final episode of season one “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” A Quality of Mercy. Yes, it was good. Yes, it had problems, big fat furry ones.

We start off being reunited with Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) who we saw in bed with Pike in the series pilot. They’re near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Batel has a mission some distance away while Pike, Spock, and Number One meet with one of the Commanders of a Neutral Zone outpost Cmdr Hasen Al-Salah (Ali Sassan). Things seem to be going well until the Commander’s young teenage son bursts in to meet Pike. Pike recognizes him as one of the two cadets he doesn’t save during his fated accident just seven years in the future. He internally freaks out and leaves.

Una follows him and yes, it’s another “my fate is haunting me” scenes.

Back in Pike’s quarters, he meets his older Admiral self, complete in the Rear Admiral’s uniform (maroon monster) we saw Kirk (William Shatner) wearing in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. He still has the Johnny Bravo hair, as big as ever for both of them.

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Ep9, “All Those Who Wander”

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Scene from Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode “All Those Who Wander”

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Finally got to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ep 9 All Those Who Wander. We’re near the wrap up of the first season. This one is the horror movie, monster episode. It’s been compared to Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Predator (1987), and if you factor in the cold, to The Thing (1982).

The Enterprise is already on a priority mission to deliver materials to space station K7, without which, all the station’s systems including life support will shut down. Now they’ve been ordered to find a lost starship, the USS Peregrine, which isn’t a Constitution class starship but sure looks like one. It transmitted a distress signal four days ago before crash landing on a desolate L class planet and has not been heard from since. The planet’s atmosphere blocks communication and transporter functions.

Pike decides to lead an away mission in two shuttles, allowing the Enterprise to complete it’s task at K7.

This is also a farewell party, complete with Pike’s cooking, for the cadets, Uhura plus two we haven’t met before, one receiving a promotion to Lieutenant. That means they are the “red shirts” and are sure to die.

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Ep7, “The Serene Squall”

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Scene from Star Trek Strange New Worlds “The Serene Squall”

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I just finished watching “Star Trek Strange New Worlds” E7 The Serene Squall which I think was more unintentionally humorous than anything else. It also rivaled E5 Spock Amok as the lamest show to date.

We start off at a Vulcan penal colony where T’Pring is entering a personal log. Log entries are a great way to give the audience insight into what a character is thinking, but they’re also a very Star Fleet thing. Since T’Pring works for Vulcan law enforcement “rehabilitation,” why would they have a parallel process.

Anyway…

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Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Ep6, “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”

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Scene from Star Trek Strange New World “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”

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I just finished watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S1, E6 Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach. I knew about the topic and the climax ahead of time and it still made me angry.

The Enterprise is on a routine mission to the Majalan System when they are hailed by a shuttle that’s come under fire. The shuttle had been traveling from a nearby moon to their world when an alien cruiser attacked.

Uhura is doing her security rotation and La’an is riding her pretty hard. The attacker refuses to break off after Pike contacts them and fires on the Enterprise. Pike gives the expected order to target their weapons and propulsion. Uhura is at the phasers and the enemy shifts course suddenly. She brings the spacecraft down instead. If it was that important, I probably wouldn’t have put an inexperienced cadet in that position, so it’s really La’an’s fault. Continue reading →

Review of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021)

no way home

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Just finished watching Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) last night. It’s about two-and-a-half-hours long, and like a lot of superhero movies, it tries to cram too much into that space.

The movie starts out where Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) left off, with the recording of Mysterio/Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) saying that Spider-Man (Tom Holland) killed him and that Spider-Man is Peter Parker.

Peter’s life goes downhill immediately and so do the lives of his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), his wingman Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), and even Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau).

Federal agents detain all of them, but in spite of all their bluster, they can’t really hold any of them except Hogan who has ties to the Stark technology used in the previous movie. Even that doesn’t stick very long.

There’s a cameo of Charlie Cox appearing as attorney Matt Murdock (Daredevil) and a cute little scene where he catches a brick thrown through the Parker’s apartment window from behind. It was a tragedy that Daredevil didn’t appear in the movie because a Spider-Man/Daredevil team up would have been awesome.

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