Dredd 3D – reviewed by Howard Watts

Dredd 3D certainly deserves its 18 rating. Now, I’m not a great fan of 3D – I find it false from a film POV, an augmented reality akin to Google’s project glass: https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts – a Sinclair C5 for the noggin, with apologies to William Gibson. Wearing those huge 3D glasses makes me feel like a participant at a Buggles convention, thankful for the darkness of the cinema. It’s not reality, and for me not how film should be presented. Dredd bears this out with abundance, many scenes not tailored specifically for the 3D effect suffering (as have other 3D films in recent years) from foreground distractions and blurry black artefacts.

Dredd is brutal, unrelenting, graphically violent on screen, implying it off. It’s full on – but lacks colour, favouring the grey tones of despair. The soundscape thunders around you, a marching drum of determination, punctuating its claustrophobic setting. Sight and hearing are bombarded – perhaps to the point of admitting, “too much!” Hardly a Buggles convention.

A triple homicide takes Dredd and his rookie mutant psychic, Anderson, to the Mega Block, Peach Trees – a gigantic self-contained town where they discover the culprit. Hoping to take him back to the Hall of Justice for interrogation, the perpetrator’s boss, Ma-Ma, puts Peach Trees into lockdown, cutting it off from the outside world. Dredd and Anderson find themselves pitted against every resident of the block that believes they have a chance against them. Anderson’s Psi powers learn that Ma-Ma is responsible for the manufacture and distribution of the drug, Slo-Mo, a drug that slows the user’s perception of the passing of time. Here’s where 3D comes into play, the bullet time effect championed by the Matrix movies given a respectful nod. This effect works well for the most part, but there is an element of “grain” to these scenes. I’ll admit I’m a fan of long locked off establishing shots, of which there are plenty, allowing the eyes to roam around the shot, picking out the details. Unfortunately these scenes are too long, and the eye (perhaps ruined by too many quick cuts in recent years) finds itself returning to parts of the frame already explored – in essence, we’re left waiting for a cut. Saying this, I found myself drawn in by these scenes, as they are needed amid the frenetic activity – a well deserved catch-your-breath break. During Dredd and Anderson’s ascension no punch is pulled illustrating Dredd’s determined removal of the obstacles in their path. The Slo-Mo scenes (how can the camera suffer the effect of the drug?) of various “Judgements” are paced perfectly. You know that bullet’s going to hit right there, but when it does… In contrast, some of Anderson’s combat scenes are shown in real time – to devastating effect. But I found myself thinking the 3D effect should have been utilised for Anderson’s “Psi” scenes, rather than the focus pull.

Karl Urban’s portrayal of Dredd is faultless. The “grim chin” expression from the comic is perfectly translated, his voice, a mixture of Eastwood’s Harry Callahan and the original (remember that?) Boba Fett, his walk akin to Robocop at times. Urban has said he researched Dredd’s voice, finding a description in 2000A.D. as “a saw cutting through bone”. This is perfectly realised by Urban, a self confessed SF fan.

In comparison to Dredd of 2000A.D. it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Production design’s budget seemed to have been spent mostly on VW camper vans, concrete scree and fibreglass body panels for unrecognisable modern day cars and motorbikes. Mega City 1 isn’t that mega, more embryonic. There are a few plot/common sense problems – Dredd telling Anderson to conserve ammo, then a few scenes later shooting a security camera. Anderson’s gun (as per the comic) explodes when used by a perp, when it should have simply electrocuted the user allowing the gun to be picked up again by its Judge owner. The choice of some words is strange at times, and out of character – the CGI repetitive – the opening of Peach Trees identical to that of the lockdown, with the same lighting, time of day and camera move used. These issues aside, Dredd is a ride from start to finish, and I can only hope if there is a sequel, Urban remains and the city grows around him.

Dreadstar Omnibus, Vol. 1, by Jim Starlin – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Dreadstar Omnibus, Vol. 1 by Jim Starlin (Dynamite Entertainment, ebook, 377pp) begins poorly, with a long recap of events that took place in the Marvel graphic novel Dreadstar (not included), as well as hinting at a bigger story that preceded it (explained more fully in chapter eight). Vanth Dreadstar is, as far as he knows, the sole survivor of the Milky Way, and arriving in the Empirical galaxy he did his best to ignore the two hundred year-old war between the Monarchy and the Instrumentality, found a wife, became a farmer, and lived a quiet life among peaceful cat-people until the Monarchy decided to wipe them out. His wife dead, Dreadstar decides there’s work be done, gathers a band of rebels, and that’s where we come in, ready to read twelve chapters originally published as the first twelve issues of Marvel’s ongoing Dreadstar.

It’s a shame that filling in that backstory takes up so much of the first chapter – when as I’ve shown above it could have been done rather more swiftly! – but that’s the last time the book could fairly be accused of moving slowly. It gets better with every page that follows, events moving at a breakneck pace. It’s much like the equally readable Star Wars and G.I. Joe comics Marvel were publishing at about the same time, but enhanced by the sense that these are the real stories of these characters, not just spin-offs. Our heroes are an interesting bunch – a cyber-psychic, a cat-man, a wizard and a rogue – but their leader, Dreadstar, is sometimes hard to like. For example, when he meets a vengeful survivor from the Milky Way, he fights him to the death, admittedly with good cause, but he doesn’t bother to explain that he didn’t destroy the Milky Way on purpose. He walks away from the fight happy to have vanquished evil, with little acknowledgment that he was in part responsible for its creation.

Dreadstar has a pair of good antagonists in the High Lord Papal, dog-collared dictator of the religious Instrumentality, and Z, scheming chief strategist for the Monarchy, whose appearance is so obviously inspired by Darth Vader it makes Dark Helmet look like an original creation. I don’t think that’s an awfully bad thing, though. The recent acquisition of Lucasfilm for $4bn made me reflect on how few attempts we see these days to copy Star Wars, and how much I’d like to see more. What was the last science fiction film to have anything of that feel? The Fifth Element, Firefly? Anyway, Starlin addresses this point with winning directness in chapter twelve, when we see four very familiar figures step out from the spaceship.

The artwork is clear and easy to follow, but with many clever touches, such as in chapter five, “The Commune”, where a long thin vertical panel down the right of the page is used to illustrate the brute Tuetun falling to his apparent death while cat-man Oedi moves on with his mission. Unusually, it’s well worth browsing the book’s pages in thumbnail mode to get a sense of how varied its use of panel structures is, always to serve the interests of the story. Originally writing in 2003, Walt Simonson in his introduction identifies the panel layouts as one of the things that makes Dreadstar feel very much of the eighties, but it’s a style that will win the comic new friends now, as the double page splashes and irregular panels of the last twenty years begin to feel like relics of another age. Nothing suits guided view better than rectangular panels. It’s worth noting also that the artwork, although not completely recoloured, has been scanned and retouched from the original film, so the colours are bright and unmarred by the vagaries of actual printing.

Dreadstar isn’t an entirely grown-up comic in tone and characterisation; more a typical comic of its time with a few touches of adult subject matter. In that sense it might suffer in comparison with, say, a modern comic like Saga, which in many ways is very similar, with its ongoing war between two great, unsympathetic empires and a small band caught in the middle. But then Starlin produced these comics at a time when the adult readership of comics wasn’t as well established as it is now. In some ways, it has the beating of more recent comics, in particular with regard to the density of its storytelling. Each chapter of this would take up at least a trade paperback of most modern comics. Even in just this first volume, major story arcs – things I took to be part of the comic’s ongoing premise – come to unexpectedly early conclusions.

That’s left me very curious as to where the comic will go next, and I could quite happily have read another twenty or thirty issues of this before moving on to something else; I’ll be sure to buy them as they appear on Comixology. The book is recommended to anyone with a taste for space opera and Marvel comics from the same period. Don’t expect too much from it and you should be able to pass a few enjoyable hours in its company.

The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

You say potato, I say Sir Francis Drake wandering off-course with a sack full of sprouting ideas. The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (Doubleday, 2012).

When plans for Willis Linsay’s “stepping” device are posted online, humanity suddenly discovers the capacity to travel “east” or “west”, one world at a time (without iron but with quite some nausea) across a seemingly infinite number of parallel Earths, all of them untouched by humankind. For Joshua Valienté, a “natural” stepper who can traverse the Long Earth at will, this offers the chance to seek out the Silence that has called to him ever since his somewhat unusual birth, while for the rest of the populace it brings turmoil, upheaval and the bittersweet prospect of an endless frontier. Accompanying the ever-evolving super computer Lobsang, Joshua embarks on a voyage to uncover the cosmic significance of the many worlds opened up by Willis Linsay . . . and to find out what strange force is driving other humanoid life back towards the “Datum” Earth.

As a writer Terry Pratchett is best known for his thirty-nine (to date) Discworld novels, which in the modern world of pre-ordering seem regularly to become New York Times Bestsellers even before they are written. But while Pratchett’s comic fantasy made him by turn of the millennium the most shoplifted author in Britain,[1] the often satirical advancement of his Discworld civilisation (which at its behavioural heart bears many striking resemblances to the real world, despite resting on the backs of four gargantuan elephants who themselves stand stoically atop the shell of an astronomically large space turtle), has by very dint of its popularity kept him from traversing the science fiction path upon which he first embarked with The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981). Pratchett does, however, find time for the odd non-Discworld novel – the masterful Nation, for instance, in 2008 – and with The Long Earth he returns at last to an idea he started working on twenty-five years ago, before the growing success of Discworld (by that stage at book three, Equal Rites) prompted him to shelve the project.[2]

Pratchett has on rare occasion collaborated with other authors – most notably with thentime fledgling novelist Neil Gaiman for the compocalyptic fantasy Good Omens (1990) – and in the case of The Long Earth and its as-yet-unwritten sequel, his teaming up with science fiction heavyweight Stephen Baxter clearly signposts an intent to pursue the quantum worlds scenario for its “hard” SF rather than humorous potential. Yes, there are unconventional nuns, and the stepping device used to travel between worlds is powered by a potato. True, the book features a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated within a computer and so legally declared the world’s first human being of artificial intelligence. But the scenario Pratchett and Baxter have posited does not lend itself to out-and-out humour, and so these absurdities are presented with something akin to a loss adjustor’s matter-of-factness – almost without exception the many worlds setting is used with utmost seriousness to explore the evolutionary and behavioural aspects of people and society. Anybody expecting The Long Earth to be “Pratchett” and, ergo, comedic, will instead find what humour there is to be wry and distinctly understated – more a faint watermark, in fact, than a text-spanning belly laugh.

Pratchett deserves kudos for stepping out beyond his (and his readers’) comfort zone, but for all that “Datum” Earth and the stepwise worlds offer scope for intellectual and imaginative exploration, The Long Earth as a novel presents itself in somewhat ungainly a fashion (beyond even the rather sic-ly possessive apostrophe mishap of page eighteen). One key aspect of Pratchett’s Discworld books has been their sense of unfolding mystery, whereas in The Long Earth, although various “what’s happening here?” breadcrumbs are dropped in with the usual Pratchett artfulness, they seem almost immediately then to be gobbled up by parrots who digest the scenario and subsequently exposit its erstwhile mysteriousness in squawking information dumps. The storyline is stop/start for much of the book’s first third, and even when it picks up momentum and, through Joshua’s and Lobsang’s dirigible exploration of the expanding westward frontier, takes on some of the unfolding intrigue of Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and sequels, there remains to the nonplussed reader a certain homogeneousness of character and dialogue, while the narrative itself drifts unconcerned past incidents of suspense, and continues to be broken up by the insertion of tangential and, in the case of one section that presumably is supposed to depict Australian Aborigines, rather incongruous vignettes. The overall impression one receives is that Pratchett and Baxter kicked around some (very good) ideas regarding what would follow in the wake of their hypothetical Step Day – indeed, that they went off separately and developed a set of one-off or minor characters – but that they couldn’t quite find a way to incorporate these as a cohesive part of the larger story. Perhaps it could be argued that the jumble of thoughts in some way evokes the confusion and disorientation that humanity experiences in the novel, but in all honesty this smacks more of an apologist’s devotion than an unbiased appraisal. In unvarnished truth The Long Earth is more of a prolonged literary brainstorm than a novel.

Notwithstanding this assessment, it remains clear that Pratchett and Baxter have put a great deal of consideration into their “what if...?” scenario. The Long Earth might well be worth reading just for its concepts, and now that its authors have taken the first step in exploring the consequences both of infinite resources and of the evolution of humanity and human society, further books in the series may indeed offer up properly boiled potatoes and a smoother voyage across the many permutations of stepwise imagination.

1. “Terry Pratchett’s fantasy world”, 27 May 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/354117.stm

2. Flood, Alison, “Terry Pratchett enters parallel worlds of science fiction”, 16 June 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/16/terry-pratchett-science-fiction-book

Interzone #243 (ft. Theaker) – out on Kindle

The latest issue of Interzone is now out on Kindle. It features fiction by Jon Wallace, Jason Sanford, Priya Sharma, Chen Qiufan and Caroline M. Yachim, colour illustrations by Richard Wagner, Warwick Fraser-Coombe, and Martin Hanford, an interview with Adam Roberts, and much more.

But of course the very, very best reason to buy it is that it also features a review by me, of The Wurms of Blearmouth, Steven Erikson's latest Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novella.

Links:

Interzone #243 on Kindle UK
Interzone #243 on Kindle US
Print subscriptions to Interzone (and other TTA magazines)
The Wurms of Blearmouth on PS Publishing's website

The Super Barbarians, by John Brunner – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The first paragraph of The Super Barbarians by John Brunner (SF Gateway, ebook, 2655ll) sets the scene; it’s fifty years since our first interstellar war was lost, twenty-five since the Great Grip was loosened, ten since humans were accorded rights on Qallavarra, home planet of our conquerors. The Vorrish have an elaborate social structure and a convoluted language to match, but despite their military superiority they seem lacking in certain areas: their cars are imported from Earth, there are members of their nobility who cannot read or write, and superstition runs rampant. All are things that Gareth Shaw, a lowly human in the Household of Pwill, begins to realise he can turn to his advantage—and that of all humans.

Though The Super Barbarians is far from being one of Brunner’s masterworks, I would have enjoyed it very much had this particular edition not been such a mess. It’s interesting in that it’s a tale of the indomitable human spirit, of aliens who just can’t—at least in the long run—cope with our wiles, determination, hard work and technical know-how; not at all what you would expect from the author of dour, pessimistic novels like Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. One suspects it was written very specifically to appeal to Ace, its original American publisher. There’s no doubt that the storyline panders to our vanity as a species, but it makes for a fun, pleasant and hopeful book.

Unfortunately, this Gollancz/SF Gateway edition of the book was, like the previously reviewed Dumarest 4: Kalin from the same publisher, utterly dreadful, clearly having been scanned in and never checked, with ridiculous mistakes from start to finish. Typical errors included: “On the Vorrish side it was tempered with a land of puzzlement”, “This was another point they bore in mind when dunking of us”, “Where is he JIOW?” and an order “not to supply any more of this poison to my 8011” (meaning son). It’s clear that Gollancz only got all those thousands of books out so quickly by cutting all the corners. And it’s not as if the books are particularly cheap. I won’t buy any more SF Gateway books without checking the Kindle previews; wish I hadn’t pre-ordered so many before they were released.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #42 - out now! (Plus two free books!)

Not a dream, not an alternate reality, this is your real life and this is really happening: Theaker's 42 is here, at last!

Fiction: “The Powers That Be”, Sophia-Karin Psarras; “Drydock”, Mitchell Edgeworth; “Old Men Who Reach into Guitars”, R.M. Fradkin. Plus the Quarterly Review, by Jacob Edwards, Stephen Theaker and Howard Watts.

Books reviewed: Clementine, The Ebb Tide, The God Engines, The Long Earth, Mere Anarchy, The White City, The Yellow Cabochon, Dan Dare. Films reviewed: Dredd 3D, Looper and Snow White and the Huntsman.

There are two big changes this issue. Although Lulu and Feedbooks have been brilliant for us over the last few years, from this issue we’re moving the print version to Amazon POD, for the sake of improved distribution and cheaper postage for readers, and the ebook into the Kindle store, to give us a little more flexibility with the ebook formatting.

Delivery from Amazon is free with Super Saver delivery, or if you're a Prime member, effectively cutting three or four pounds off the cost of buying an issue.

Moving the ebook to the Kindle store does mean there's a minimum price for it, but our plan is to make each new issue free on Kindle for the first five days of its release, and then again whenever a new issue is released. If we end up accidentally selling a few copies in the spaces inbetween, we’ll tuck the money into Christmas cards for contributors.

If you are a fan of the epub and pdf formats of the magazine, our plan is to make them available as a bonus to anyone who gets the Kindle or print editions. Just send an email quoting the relevant code (see the editorial) to theakersquarterlyfiction@gmail.com and we’ll send a download link.

I hope that our next issue will be out in December, back on schedule, so see you again very soon.

Links:

Kindle edition (UK)
Print edition (UK)

Kindle edition (US)
Print edition (US)

Contributors

Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford who provides the cover to this issue and a review of the film Dredd 3D.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways, editing #45 and (most merrily and in time for Christmas 2012) #55 of their Inflight Magazine. The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

Mitchell Edgeworth is a young writer living in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. His fiction has been published in The Battered Suitcase and SQ Mag. He tweets as @mitchedgeworth and keeps a blog at www.grubstreethack.wordpress.com.

R.M. Fradkin currently lives and works in Italy. The one thing she expects to be constant in her life is writing: not doing so “would be like living with laryngitis for the rest of my life”.

Sophia-Karin Psarras is a sinologist who, through no fault of her own, has recently become inextricably caught in a web of doctors (and all secondarily-related species).

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. He has also reviewed for Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal.

FREEBIES

To celebrate each new issue of TQF we offer a book or two free on Kindle. This time it's Michael Wyndham Thomas's extraordinary The Mercury Annual and my entirely ordinary Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting!

The Mercury Annual – Kindle UK, Kindle US
Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting! – Kindle UK, Kindle US

The War of the Worlds (XBLA) – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I’ve been meaning to review The War of the Worlds (XBLA) for quite a while, but to do that I felt I had to finish the game, and that hasn’t happened; in fact, I don’t think I’ve got anywhere near the end. Written by Christopher Fowler, and narrated by Patrick Stewart, this side-scrolling platformer sets the story in 1950s London, which puts a very interesting twist on the narrative. For example, the player hears BBC radio broadcasts announcing the invasion. Though it was a game I bought less to play than because I thought it would be interesting to review, I was surprised by how good it was, at least at first; a bit slow, maybe, but diverting, beautiful, and often quite frightening.

However, it has two huge problems. The first is that the game is far too difficult, with fiddly controls, tripod-high difficulty bumps, instant death, and widely-spaced checkpoints. The children were frequently in hysterics at my lacklustre attempts to escape the death rays. I doubt I’d have kept plugging away if it hadn’t amused them so much. The second problem is that the difficulty level turns its biggest strengths—the excellent animation, narration and writing—into weaknesses, as you get sick to death of seeing and hearing the same things over and over. If you’re a fan of games with old-school difficulty settings, this might be worth a go, but it’s definitely not recommended to more casual gamers.

Le Voyage dans la Lune, Air – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Le Voyage dans la Lune (EMI, CD, 32 mins plus DVD, 17 mins) isn’t the first soundtrack work by Air (that would I think be The Virgin Suicides (2000), an album so heartbreaking I could only listen to it once)—but it is nevertheless very special. The music began as pieces to accompany the restored colour version of Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, which is included here, and so, before discussing the music, a few words for the film. Though most right-thinking people have a natural abhorrence of the colourisation of black and white films, this is something rather different; it was made at the same time as the original film under the supervision of Méliès himself, with every frame of the story hand-painted: the debate at the academy and the preparation of the rocket; the journey to the moon; the hallucinatory sleep sequence; the battles with the insectoid lunar inhabitants; the triumphant return home. Every bit of it is visually astonishing, and the colour is amazing, the brush strokes clearly visible. The film has lost none of its interest or entertainment value: the only disappointment for my children was its short length. If someone made the same film today you’d be impressed by their cleverness; that Méliès did it in 1902 is beyond belief. Or rather, it would be, if we didn’t have the evidence on DVD. And what about that Jules Verne, eh? Inspiring hit films for over a century now! (Shame they’re not all as good as this one.)

The album takes a slightly different order to the film. It opens with the drums, spikes and querulous voices of the “Astronomic Club”, but ends with “Lava”, which begins like something from a seventies film and turns into the theme from Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or “Journey of the Sorcerer”, as Eagles fans might know it), music that comes from the mid-point of the film. The “Retour sur Terre” takes place in track three, a short piano-led piece that could have been drawn from the Moon Safari sessions. It leads into track four, the exuberant, punchy Geoff Lovesque “Parade” which soundtracks the final sequence of the film, and then we’re back on the moon with “Moon Fever”—imagine an extended version of the ambient introduction to Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now”—and the aggressive synth-funk march of the “Sonic Armada”. The rocket departs at last in track nine, “Cosmic Trip”, with a breathy glide that probably doesn’t quite replicate the experience of being shot into space in a huge bullet. Which is all to say that this isn’t a science fiction disco opera in the style of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds (for all that it makes you wish Air would write one). But it works wonderfully as an album, the order of the tracks making musical, if not logical, sense, the shifting moods—from pleasant drowsiness to the bold loopiness of your very best dreams—constantly provoking interest. Where vocals appear, they tend to be slow, often spoken, mostly in English, usually with a sense of disorientation. The announcer of the countdown to ignition in “Seven Stars”, for example, sounds rather like a drunk Tom Hardy (and so of course that is one of my favourite tracks).

Easy listening for science fiction fans, perhaps, but I’ve listened to few records more often this year and anything new I buy will have to do very well to catch up. It’s the kind of album of which you simply cannot tire. Unless you get up and march around your office whenever “Parade” comes on. Which I don’t.

Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

As part of Portishead, Geoff Barrow has created four of my favourite albums of all time. Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One (Invada UK, 56 mins), in collaboration with film and television composer Ben Salisbury, may be a side project, but it is very nearly as superb as his other work. This isn’t actually the soundtrack to the forthcoming Dredd, whose composer is Paul Leonard-Morgan. But it did apparently begin there, as exploratory sketches, and it says a lot for the music that although they didn’t end up working on the film, the musicians involved felt those ideas were too good to leave unexplored, and came back to finish them off.

The nineteen tracks begin with “Lawmaster/Pursuit” and end with “Helmet Theme (Reprise)”, the titles between having titles like “Justice One”, “Iso Hymn” and “Titan Bound”. It’s fair to say, though, that while one hopes the actual Dredd film matches the one this album evokes in your head, without a tracklist you might well think this the music for a new outing for Snake Plissken or MacReady, so closely does it stick to the template of a John Carpenter soundtrack. Track seven “Exhale” is an exception, but even that sounds like a lost track from Blade Runner. If that makes the album sound derivative, well, it is—but it’s also exceptionally good.

Musically it doesn’t seem to be very complex, most tracks simply contrasting ambient hums and noise with a repetitive synthesizer line or two, but it is extremely effective. I loved the parts of Third where weird sf sounds would poke through, so to have that element unpacked over a full album was for me an unexpected treat. One criticism I could make is that the short cover of the card case, while very dramatic, leaves part of the actual CD exposed, but that won’t be a problem until the CD leaves my stereo, and it seems to have settled in for a very long stay.

Super F*ckers by James Kochalka – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Super F*ckers by James Kochalka (Top Shelf, digital collection, 146pp) is one of the most puerile things I’ve ever read, and therein lies its charm. Its characters throw swears around like they’ve just learnt them, dumb teenagers who have realised they can make their peers laugh with mindless abuse despite a lack of wit. The book is a spoof on teams like the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Justice Society of America and the Teen Titans, with their club houses, rule books and membership try-outs.

Team leader, at least as long as Superdan and Percy are lost in Dimension Zero, is Jack Krak, the Motherfucker, a Steven Gilligan* in black tights who is slowly losing his mind, but gets most of the best lines. Almost everything he says is funny, for example (picking out a couple of the less offensive lines): “I’ve got a super thirst ’cause I am a super DUDE” or “I’m CHRISTIAN now, motherfucker! Check it out!” (*I know that barely anyone reading this knew our chum Steven Gilligan, but trust me, he talked exactly like the Motherfucker—and he would have loved this book.)

Jack Krak’s team-mates include sweet but unloved Grotessa, whose symbiotic partner Grotus achieves sudden popularity when the guys realise they can get high smoking his slime; Princess Sunshine, who has to brush her hair exactly one thousand times to charge her radiant beauty powers; and newbie Wilbur, a.k.a. Computer Fist, who survives the tryouts (wannabes fight in a pit and the survivor joins the team!) but makes the mistake of admitting he’s also used his CPU-enhanced gauntlets for beating a different kind of meat. Only Vortex ever seems to save the universe, and he doesn’t even wear a costume.

Definitely not a book for everyone, and certainly not for children (although any scamps who got their hands on it would love it—nothing kids like more than swearing and jokes about wee and fighting), but it’s bright, colourful, obscene and highly childish, and a great deal of fun if you’re in the right mood. Every few pages or so there was a panel I just had to show Mrs Theaker, the look on her face being very nearly as entertaining as the book itself.

The Cosmic Horror Colouring and Activity Book! by Jess Bradley – reviewed by Lorelei Theaker

The Cosmic Horror Colouring and Activity Book! by Jess Bradley (self-published, 28pp) is great for kids any age. They will love this book because it has fun activities and brilliant colourings of Cthulhu and his enemies/friends. At the end of the book there are some snap cards to cut out and play with. Also provided, two photos of Cthulhu, one of him graduating and a normal photo of him. One of the fun activities is doing a maze to move Cthulhu somewhere, but you could get trapped in a picture of Cthulhu or a dead end.

All kids will absolutely adore this activity/colouring book. It will be fun because they can do some of the activities over and over if they don’t write on them and the fun will never stop. And the pictures are great and the illustrator has done great detail. And again, every kid will adore it!

The A to Z of your online life

Type each letter of the alphabet into your browser’s address bar and note the results to draw a self-portrait with your favourite websites…

Here’s my list...

• amazon.co.uk
• britishfantasysociety.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=recent
• costsandfees.co.uk
• digitalspy.co.uk
• ebuyer.com
• facebook.com
• goodreads.com
• howhipsterareyou.com
• imdb.com
• john lewis [search term]
• knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/1.html?1326968049
• lovefilm.com
• mail.google.com/mail/
• news.bbc.co.uk
• o2 [search term]
• pornokitsch.com/2012/10/new-releases-mammoth-best-new-horror-23-stephen-jones.html
• quidco [search term]
• rhysaurus.blogspot.co.uk
• shocklinesforum.yuku.com
• http://ttapress.com/forum/search.php?search_id=newposts
• uk.mail.yahoo.com
• virgin [search term]
• wikipedia.org
• xbox.com
• youtube.com
• zehuti.com

I think the search engine ones are where I haven't been to a site beginning with that letter so it just threw up something random. That hipster quiz is just a random quiz link from Facebook that I never actually did…

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot, ebook, 4253ll plus extras), is the first in a series that has so far run to three volumes (the sequels being Camera Obscura and The Great Game). It’s set in a world much changed since Amerigo Vespucci landed on the island of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Caliban’s people, Les Lézards, have installed themselves as the rulers of our island nation, whales sing in the Thames, the police are supported by automatons, airships fly overhead, and Moriarty is Prime Minister. Orphan is a young poet given to literary mischief, rebel rather than revolutionary, but when tragedy strikes a mission to Mars his need to set things right throws him into an adventure that will take him from London to the Mysterious Island of Jules Verne, and leave the future of the planet in his hands.

The Bookman didn’t bowl me over to quite the extent that Cloud Permutations and Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God did (reviews of those two should appear in our next issue), and it wasn’t as challenging, but I had a good time with it. Part of the book’s appeal is that Orphan’s choices are not easy; there are few people he can obviously trust, and many factions battling to come out on top. Irene Adler—in this world, a police officer—seems honest and trustworthy, but isn’t her job to protect the status quo? Or the Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing robot: sincere and intelligent, but his ultimate interest is the survival of his own kind. Or the mysterious Bookman? The Turk says he “almost never deals directly”, but he takes a direct hand with Orphan, promising everything he wants if he succeeds in his quest. All this intrigue and mystery gives the novel an interest beyond the spotting of celebrities fictional and historical—though that is, admittedly, fun.

The ebook has a few small issues. Paragraphs are separated by a couple of millimetres, at least on actual Kindles (on Kindle apps it disappears)—hardly noticeable, but annoying once you’ve seen it. In a few places words are split by spaces, and other words are welded together; probably where they were hyphenated in print, and "may" appears for “might” in a few places. Unattractive straight quotes are used, and there are no chapter marks, only section marks. But I mention that stuff mainly because it interests me, not because it should stop you from purchasing this inventive, entertaining novel.

The Darkness Compendium, Vol. 1 – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Even James Kochalka’s Super F*ckers seems grown-up compared to The Darkness Compendium, Vol. 1 (Top Cow, digital collection), which is 1169 pages of anatomically incorrect pin-ups, misogyny and lumpy dialogue. Possibly the worst comic I’ve read, and certainly the worst comic of which I’ve read almost twelve hundred pages, it did become moreish after a while, in the sense that it never asked anything of my brain, except when it came to grasping the dangling strands of a bunch of daft crossovers. It’s telling that the book’s most significant events (aside from Jackie gaining his powers at the age of 21) occur outside its pages, in a Batman crossover that isn’t included here.

Jackie Estecado is the wielder of the Darkness, a supernatural force, one of three that battle for supremacy over our realm (the others being the Angelus, usually manifesting as a sexy woman in a Borat bathing suit, and the Witchblade, owned by Sara Pezzini). He’s young, dumb and full of you-know-what, and such an idiot that, after finding his new powers come at the cost (pun intended) of killing him the second he impregnates a lady, it takes him five hundred pages or so to realise that doesn’t prohibit non-procreational sexual pleasures. Some parts of the book would have you think he’s a hitman with a heart of gold, but to believe that you’d have to ignore some thoroughly unpleasant behaviour.

The best issues are those written by Garth Ennis, but even then the reader has to peer past the poster art to imagine what the book might have looked like in the hands of an artist who can tell a story—and with Ennis as writer, you can’t help wishing it was Steve Dillon or John McCrea, although to be honest their talents would have been wasted on this rubbish. So why did I read it? Because I’ll buy any comic if it’s cheap enough, and once I’ve started a book I like to finish it. A couple of issues towards the end feature Cervantes as a character, as if to mock the reader who made it that far: you read a twelve hundred page book and it was this one? Even though you haven’t yet finished Don Quixote? Idiot!

Along with this I bought a bunch of later books in the series written by Phil Hester, and they can’t be as bad as this, surely? I’ll let you know.

Jago & Litefoot: The Bloodless Soldier by Justin Richards – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Henry Gordon Jago is a theatrical impresario who has lost his theatre, Professor Gordon Litefoot a respectable doctor who helps the police when they have a body to examine. They met for the first time on television, in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, one of the fourth Doctor’s best-regarded stories. Jago & Litefoot: The Bloodless Soldier by Justin Richards (Big Finish, 1×CD, 50 mins) is the first in a series of audio adventures, sold in box sets of four stories. Their “investigations of infernal incidents” have been successful enough to reach a fourth series, but I’m starting at the beginning. Or almost the beginning; they were previously to be heard in The Mahogany Murders, one of the Companion Chronicles, but I missed that one. Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter return as Jago and Litefoot, respectively, their full-blooded, plummy tones giving the story an instant gravitas. They play their roles with complete conviction, approaching the material with the same seriousness they might give to a Radio 4 adaptation of a classic literary novel. The relish with which they discuss the food and drink served up by Ellie at their favourite pub made this listener wish he was right there at the table with them. The word I’m looking for is gusto!

And that’s the way their characters approach this story, of an army captain brought back from India with a nasty wolfish infection. While his loyal men try to find a cure, one less loyal subordinate looks to exploit him for money—which gets Jago involved. In parallel, Jago is called to examine a clawed and bloodless body left by the captain’s feeding.

This was one of my favourite Big Finish dramas so far, despite the absence of the Doctor. The story is quite short, but works very well, and the emotional conclusion, where Jago and Litefoot are faced with the same terrible necessity but only one can go through with it, tells us much about their respective strengths, and why two such different characters should find such support in each other’s company. I wasn’t keen on Hari Sunil (an Indian Van Helsing who travels to England to stop the curse spreading) being played by a white actor affecting an accent—nor on his proving so ineffective when it mattered!—but had I not seen the cast list I doubt I’d have griped; the acting throughout is in fact very good, as is the sound: I’ve rarely heard such alarming noises emanating from my stereo’s speakers! Overall, a very good adventure, and I’m very glad of having another three stories in the series one box set to look forward to.

Prometheus – reviewed by Howard Watts (*spoilers*)

It was around 1980/81 when my mother sneaked me into a flea pit with her in Brighton to see Ridley Scott’s A L I E N, and I’d like to make it perfectly clear from the outset: I’ve been waiting for someone to address the origins of the “Derelict” and its occupant, the “Space Jockey”, for umpteen years since walking out of the cinema way back then. In advance of seeing the film I was familiar with the imagery from various books such as the Alien Photostory and The Making of Alien. Even then, Hans Rudi Giger’s “Space Jockey” seemed to me to be such a grand figure fused to his chair, peering into what seemed to be either a telescope, or perhaps a weapon. He appeared lonely, as if his proud appointment somehow involved a great sacrifice on his part. Despite the mystery surrounding his true purpose, I wanted to know more about him…

Doctor Who: The Essential Companion – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Doctor Who: The Essential Companion (BBC/AudioGo, 2×CD, 160 mins), written by Steve Tribe and narrated by Alex Price, stitches together snatches of dialogue from the fifth full season of new Who, from The Eleventh Hour through to The Big Bang. It introduces us to the eleventh Doctor and his companions, Amelia (later Amy) Pond and Rory Williams, and then introduces them (or the Doctor and Amy at least, Rory often being dead, left at home, or erased from the space/time continuum) to countries built on space whales, daleks serving cups of tea, crashed spaceships full of weeping angels, alien vampires in Venice, the dream lord, silurians, Vincent Van Gogh, football and the Pandorica: all the things that made season five so wonderful.

The two CDs do an excellent job of summarising the storylines and celebrating the best lines, and every now and again the narration has a nice take on what’s going on. Those who have seen these episodes, surely its target audience, will find it serves as a pleasant reminder of the fun we’ve had, although my children have never got very far into it before asking to watch the actual episodes instead. For those who haven’t seen the programme, it might intrigue them to give it a try, but would spoil all the surprises. It’s all a bit pointless in an era when you can just load videos of the episodes onto an iPod and listen to them, but I can’t bring myself to dislike anything so full of wonderful dialogue, not least the “Hello Stonehenge!” speech, included here in full.

Prometheus – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Ridley, Riddled, Didley, Diddled. In Greek mythology Prometheus was a trickster god who betrayed his own kind and allowed the Olympians to gain ascendancy over the Titans. He championed mankind (as then it was, prior to Pandora), not only saving them from destruction at the tempestuous, lightning-wielding hands of Zeus but also giving them (or giving them back) the secret of fire and—to pull further on the thunder god’s beard—duping Zeus in perpetuity out of the meat of all sacrifices offered to him. In punishment for his duplicity Prometheus was chained to a rock and had his liver torn out daily by an eagle, forever and ever until even Franz Kafka lost interest and declared this ongoing repetition to be thoroughly pointless.

Students of the cinema will note several key features of the Prometheus myth: firstly, that the protagonists (with the possible exception of the eagle) act almost entirely without motivation; secondly, that for its dramatic impact the tale relies heavily on the evocative, grandiose and (to a large extent) shocking imagery conjured by its narrative; and thirdly, that the story rollicks along quite shamelessly over plot holes and the rocky logic of convenience (most notably in the rough-as-guts abdominal surgery that is perpetuated upon Prometheus in the name of entertainment). For all its symbolism the legend of Prometheus remains perilously light on substance.

Cut to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which draws not only on the original Greek myth but also upon subsequent connotations of lone scientific endeavour and experimentation gone wrong. (Hence, the frequently overlooked “or” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.) Scott is renowned for his cinematic creation of immersive science fiction worlds (Alien, Blade Runner). Indeed, he is a doyen within the genre, and it is little surprise, then, that he renders Prometheus with all the sensory grandeur and visceral suffering that is warranted by its mythically portentous subject matter. So far, so good, and as archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw and the crew of the spaceship Prometheus travel in search of the “Engineers” who bequeathed star maps to all of Earth’s ancient cultures, it seems that the film may indeed impart to the viewer much of the epic mastery it so undoubtedly promises.

And yet, it doesn’t take long before Shaw and company (surrendering their weapons to the goodwill and high spirits of Christmas) throw good practice to the wind and so charge on in to explore the caveat…

Prometheus is overly ambitious in its aims, seeking not only to symbolically embody two contrasting mythologies but also (unofficially) to prefigure Alien—the Scott and sf/horror archetype with all its innate expectations—and also (we might fear) one or two as-yet-unfilmed “prequel sequels” that, once bequeathed the Promethean gift of fire, will burn with little purpose beyond elucidating the specially created obfuscation of Prometheus itself. Where successive scriptwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof fail (or succeed, depending on your viewpoint; but in either case, they’ve done it terribly) is that they’ve imbued Prometheus with all the structural integrity and narrative coherence of the original trickster myth. The paucity of logic that they’ve brought to the script—and let Scott’s complicity here be noted—must surely be worthy of some award, even within the moth-eaten wardrobe of Hollywood’s finest; for Prometheus on the big screen is a story with more holes than plot, and as the credits roll and the conspicuous absence of consulting logicians gives way to an innumerable flock of liver-ripping effects artists, one cannot help but voice the irreverent thought that each of these (doubtlessly talented) individuals must surely have in some way sponsored one of the film’s groundbreaking array of logical non sequiturs and effects-without-cause.

When Titanic was released in 1997, would-be viewers who knew of James Cameron were split into two factions: those who preached the word “Terminator” with great if indiscriminate fervour; and those who more cautiously adopted the stance, “Yes, but unless there’s actually a Terminator onboard the boat…” And upon this distinction, plot- and theme-conscious cinemagoers were saved while those who romanticised about an omnipotent director went oh-so-tragically down with the ship. Now, whereas Titanic was quite blatantly a trap, advocates of Ridley Scott may find Prometheus a more insidious lure to avoid. It is, after all, clearly Alien-esque as a prequel (although, so too did Predators pass as Predator-esque; at least long enough to ruin 2010), and in contrasting the masked humanity of Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) with the monstrous evolution of the Promethean android David (Michael Fassbender) it draws obvious inspiration also from Blade Runner. Moreover, Prometheus is visually bountiful (a Scott trademark that may be enough for some viewers) and carries a cleverly dissonant score by Marc Streitenfeld, the measured dose of which evokes a sense both of majestic, space-faring enterprise and unsettling, best-left-alone secrets. Yet, where Streitenfeld succeeds in wielding the musical staff à la Jerry Goldsmith or Vangelis, the same cannot be said of Ridley Scott in reprising his own role as classic dark science fiction “engineer”. For all that Prometheus might carry itself as a sovereign majesty cloaked in nuance and mystery, hinting as if at some greater meaning just beyond reach, for the most part Scott merely rehashes Alien and Blade Runner themes—bringing nothing more to them than a cinemagoer would by heating up old popcorn—and while doing so presents a supposedly new, quasi-religious take on the SF universe, which, although overtly pursued, remains poorly developed and indeed deliberately unfulfilled. In stark reality, Scott’s touch is little more than the shambling and gratuitously exhibitionist gait of Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor dressed only in clodhopping moonboots.

Ultimately, the “Ridley-Scott-ness” of Prometheus is nothing more than a façade (or perhaps an enormous carved head that really has no business being there). The support cast might make the most of their screen time—particularly Idris Elba (Captain Janek), who is characterised astutely “against” his current small screen persona in Luther—but the lead actors are given either clichéd or cardboard cut-out roles (sometimes both), and in all other respects the movie suffers from the clunky chains and fearsome improbability of its script. Lines are dropped in with the subtlety of spanners, drawing attention (perhaps unwisely) to plot points that are significant only in that they further preclude any possibility of the story being taken seriously. Motivations are sacrificed to the sanctity of myth. Style, in short, triumphs over substance, to such an extent that Noomi Rapace (Shaw) subjects herself to an extemporised Promethean gut-rip so ludicrous that it can only have been inspired by too much red slushee and one of those “skill-testing” machines that can often be found in the cinema foyer—the ones where people enamoured with soft toys can attempt to snap one up by manoeuvring a dainty metal claw into position above a fluffed up pile of cuddly aliens. The individual gaffes perpetrated within Prometheus are too numerous to catalogue without comparative reference to a George W. Bush highlights reel, but suffice to say that Scott, Spaihts and Lindelof have chained their story to its rock without any input from bona fide cryptologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, astrobiologists, or even gastroenterologists—once seated the audience is force-fed such codswallop that it finds itself spattered not merely with plot vomit but with the actual, exploded remains of stomachs seeking to jack-in-the-box evacuate from their infected carriers.

Such is the epically shallow and turgid nature of Prometheus that even the characters themselves seem to find its script difficult to swallow, a highlight being when Sean Harris as Fifield (a geologist) realises he’s been scripted in by accident and spits the dummy, declaring, “I like rocks. I love rocks. Now, it’s clear you two don’t give a shit about rocks. All you do seem to care about is giant dead bodies, and I really don’t have anything to contribute in the giant dead body arena…” Whereupon he stomps off back to the ship; but of course, as the person in charge of mapping out the structure they’re exploring, loses his way and doesn’t make it. Pinned to their seats as the eagle twitches its beak, disgruntled ticket holders surely will empathise.

Worldsoul, by Liz Williams – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Worldsoul is a city somewhat adjacent to our world, and the subject of a fine novel by Liz Williams (Prime, tpb, 312pp). A year ago the Skein left Worldsoul, leaving its inhabitants to fend for themselves, but so far, despite the burning flower attacks from unknown enemies, they haven’t found a way to work together. The factions are too busy battling each other to deal with the problems the city faces. Mercy works in the Great Library of Worldsoul, strapping on weapons before going into the stacks to fight anything that escapes the books. She’s worried about one of her mothers, who sails the Liminality in hopes of finding the Skein, but won’t let it interfere with her work. Jonathan Deed is the Abbot General of the court, performing magic with the aid of grimoires, demons and gods, who wants control of the city. Shadow is an alchemist, more involved than she would like with Suleiman the Shah, and then even more involved with an ifrit. Mareritt is an ice queen, perhaps the original ice queen, who rides through legends in a sleigh that carries the severed heads of kings. Ancient myths, the nightmares of our oldest ancestors, are escaping from the stories that held them, and though “the mind is the best weapon of all”, ancient celtic swords, powerful magic and ninja skills will come in handy too.

There are many things I liked about this book; one is that it didn’t dive straight into a pigeonhole. There are other books that share its themes—there’s a nod to Mythago Wood in the mention of the “Holdstockian layer”, and there are echoes of Thursday Next and Michael Moorcock—but I never had that sense of seeing a few key signifiers and thinking, right, that’s what we’ve got here, that’s what’s going to happen. The only way to get a hold of this world was to pay attention to the book (and I suspect I still don’t quite have it all figured out, not that I’ve let that stop me writing a review!).

It’s the first thing I’ve read by Liz Williams, so I can’t say how it bears up to her other work or fits within her oeuvre; that is a weakness of the review, but gives me lots to look forward to reading. This one had nearly everything I look for in a book; exciting action, interesting mysteries, striking characters, good writing and fighting librarians. As far as one can tell from a review pdf the book is nicely designed and typeset, and the cover art is excellent. Don’t be put off by the new-agey title; it seems less blowsy after reading the book and makes sense; fairy tales are “the engine that runs this city”—the Liminality is (I think) the physical manifestation of our myths and legends, what could be called the soul of our world.

Unlike a fairy tale, Worldsoul doesn’t end with a happily ever after. There’s a battle, and a heroic sacrifice, a surprising revelation, and then, just as it looks like there might be an ending, a major event, Paul W.S. Anderson-style, that promises a sequel and does much to make the reader want one.

The Dark Knight Rises – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

And where … and where … and where is the Batman? The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan, released July 16, 2012.

Gotham City is at peace and Batman hasn’t been seen in the eight years following the tumultuous events of The Dark Knight. With the vilification of his alter-ego and the financial losses suffered by Wayne Enterprises in pursuing then abandoning a clean energy project with unforeseen destructive potential, Bruce Wayne has sunk into a reclusive abstinence from society, mourning the life he could have lived with Rachel Dawes had she not been killed by the Joker. When Commissioner Gordon and rookie police officer John Blake uncover a villainous new threat lurking in Gotham’s sewers, and cat burglar Selina Kyle then allows Wayne’s fingerprints to be used to disastrous ill-effect, Batman must emerge to save his city from the fanatical machinations of Bane—a cogent, Herculean villain who trained under Wayne’s former mentor, Ra’s al Ghul. The menace is palpable but the Batman has aged and Wayne Enterprises is vulnerable. As Bane’s ruthlessly conceived schemes play out, both Gotham and her maligned protector will fall to new depths of despair and helplessness.

Many of Generation Z’s cinemagoers—indeed, quite a few of Generation Y’s—will have received their first live action Batman experience from Batman Begins (2005), rather than Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) or, going back to the 1960s, anything starring Adam West and Burt Ward. In this they have been fortunate. Sixties Batman was very much of its time and may have charmed the Baby Boomers with its colourful, slightly camp style, yet in many respects it formed the light-hearted nadir for a superhero who was born in 1939 under the hardboiled pulp star and then moulded by DC Comics with all the grit and dark overtones that characterised the early 1940s. Tim Burton rendered the Caped Crusader in his own, inimitably kooky style with Batman and then Batman Returns (1992), but then came non-Burton offerings Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997)—not to mention Catwoman (2004)—and with these pastiches all the quirkiness and menace suddenly gave way to parody and badly drawn melodrama. Generation X was horribly scarred; and yet, from their disillusioned and downtrodden ranks was born Gotham’s greatest hope: director Christopher Nolan.

Those who disavow the prevalent waft of overblown cinematic fluff—and there are some in every generation, surely?—will have tattooed Nolan’s name on their back-of-the-hand “remember to watch” notes after viewing his thriller/noir classic Memento (2000). The Prestige followed in 2006—and yes, Inception (2010), for all that it was hyped beyond the realms of its audacious designs—but before that there was Batman Begins, the “prequel” whose two sequels now show it to have been not a prequel at all, but rather a pulp-inked rewriting that blots out entirely those Kilmered and Jonesed, Clooneyed and Schwarzeneggered turkeys, and any other best-left-Berryed mistakes of the past. (And, collaterally, Tim Burton’s Batman; Vale, Vicki Vale.) Aged just 42, Christopher Nolan nevertheless constitutes an “old school” director in every sense that counts—shooting on film rather than video and taking an admirable stance with regard both to 3D movies (“It’s well suited to video games and other immersive technologies, but if you’re looking for an audience experience, stereoscopic is hard to embrace.”) and to CGI (“There are usually two different goals in a visual effects movie. One is to fool the audience into seeing something seamless, and that’s how I try to use it. The other is to impress the audience with the amount of money spent on the spectacle of the visual effect, and that I have no interest in.”)[1] Nolan crafted Batman Begins as an exploration of character, and although The Dark Knight (2008)—despite Heath Ledger’s much acclaimed portrayal of the Joker—may then have strayed too far into stony faced machismo and action sequences, The Dark Knight Rises concludes the eventual trilogy (Nolan didn’t set out with the intention of making one)[2] in a bleak yet uplifting, gripping yet down-to-earth manner—one that will be respected, hopefully, by any future purveyors of Batman on the big screen.

Batman Begins (140 mins) and The Dark Knight (152 mins) scored 8.3 and 8.9 respectively on IMDB. To some extent it is on the back of this previous success that The Dark Knight Rises (164 mins) has, at time of writing, been able to scale the heights of 9.1—in running for 2¾ hours (a considerable investment of screen-time for cinemas that could just as easily be selling tickets at the standard 90 min fare) the film takes the opportunity to develop characters and to play out a story that in more rushed circumstances could have presented as garbled and (an obvious risk) comic-book clichéd. There is a certain amount of comic-strip logic running through The Dark Knight Rises, but Nolan (who also co-wrote the screenplay) keeps it in check and ensures that the drama and spectacle remain, in large and at heart, both human and grounded. The musical score helps in this respect—courtesy of Hans Zimmer, a Prince in his own right—and of course the acting: Christian Bale spends less time as Batman this time around, and more as the physically frail and mentally anguished Bruce Wayne; Anne Hathaway looks for and finds her inner Hedy Lamarr in pussyfooting around as nascent Catwoman Selina Kyle; Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception) is believably earnest as officer John Blake (whose stature, looks and—spoiler—little-used birth name, hint cleverly—then a little too blatantly—at his involvement being, in fact, a backstory); old hands Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and (in particular) Michael Caine provide excellent support; and Tom Hardy (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Inception) deserves special mention for being able to bring presence and nuance of delivery to a lead villain who not only has his face mostly obscured but also his voice filtered. Bane, like Batman, has derived from his childhood suffering a single-minded strength both physically and of purpose; Hardy pitches his performances perfectly on the common ground between the two characters, and in doing so crafts an adversary as chilling in his self-control as either Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger were in embracing their demented extravagances. Bane’s effectiveness is testament both to Hardy’s finesse as an actor and to Nolan’s determination to pursue new ideas rather than upsizing and rehashing with each instalment of the franchise.

The Dark Knight Rises is a grim film—even its occasional snatches of humour are more laconic than lightly buttered—yet this bleakness is what lies (or at least should lie) at the armoured heart of the superhero ethos. After all, Batman and his ilk are spawned ultimately of despair and need, not choc tops and frivolity. (Even the overtly comedic Mystery Men (1999) recognised this and so gave gruesome shading to its heroes’ hapless masquerading.) And if The Dark Knight Rises is, at times, a little heavy on its symbolism, well, then so be it; it’s no more than the consequence of Christopher Nolan’s shining the spotlight so brightly. So long as the Bat-Signal continues thus to cut its silhouette faithfully through the fog, citizens X, Y and Z of Gotham will have much cause to seek out and embrace the pervading, cinematic darkness.

1.   Christopher Nolan, interviewed by Jeffrey Ressner, “The Traditionalist” (http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1202-Spring-2012/DGA-Interview-Christopher-Nolan.aspx/)

2.   “Nolan Talks DARK KNIGHT … And More!” (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39348) [December 5, 2008]