Highway To Mars

Well we end the year the way we intended to start it. The apocalype joins me to talk the best Doctor Who episode of the year. Moffat definitely save the best for last by us martians. Hope everyone has had an excellent christmas.

So Doctor Who is gone for another year. The Apocalypse has decided to break up with the good doctor while I enjoyed it. So rather than adding much more to the volumes already spoken about Doctor Who we look at the generations and their perspective.

So I finally managed to find time to go to *a* movie with the Apocalypse.  As it turns out most of the movies we have made it to in the past 12 months are Dystopian Future, so we thought we would talk Dystopian future and why it resonates so much with modern teens.

The doctor has twice been put on trial for crimes by his people, been convicted of interfering (to do good) and forced to regenerate, has faced countless moral quandaries and saved the universe more times than I have had baked beans on toast, which admittedly isn’t that often.  So why after all that is there something of a question mark held over his head?

Okay so the right way to play a game series is to start at the end, bumble through clueless then go back to the beginning and spend the next whatever going oooooooohhhh…. Riiiiggghhhttt.  This was the exercise I undertook at the beginning of the year that started the beginnings and endings theme.    Even though it’s a crap way of accessing the story it does take you on an interesting journey when it comes to getting to know the characters and the mechanics of how the universe works.  Out of that exercise in mind bending confusion, I managed to distill out a bunch of things that worked for me and some things that don’t.  For the record, still haven’t finished mass effect but I love the universe it plays in.  Also, I done got it wrong often…. but hey isn’t that really what gaming is all about.

As we kick back into Highway to Mars we are going to be covering a lot of beginnings and endings and how things change. One that is likely to cause a lot of discussion in the coming months is the transition between Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi. The apocalypse joins me to talk about this transition through the context of one mildly spoilerific scene in the first episode. Sorry no big reveals, this is mostly about how a more classic doctor is likely to work in the modern world especially for a younger audience.

So Martian Central has been busy fishing and Sci-fi work has been hard to come by. However just after breakfast the Apocalyse and I took out time to challenge each other to a science fiction quiz and of course I totally pned her teenage ass. Really… Truthfully… I will just nip off now to die in shame.

Stranger in a Strange Land is one of those must reads in science fiction. In part it is an examination of us as humans, in part it is a mirror to us and in part it’s Heinleins examination of things in politics, religion and society that were clearly on his mind. Telling a Jungle Book style story of a boy raised by martians that comes to live once more amongst humans, he goes from curious innocent to the architect of his own destruction. Is there a message in this for us, probably but it’s so many messages that you best just read the book and work out which ones are for you. While this does carry the language and lifestyle of earth 1950s or rather what people in 1950 imagined the future to be, it’s still quite accessible today. Lord knows what would happen if anyone were silly enough to try make a movie out of it.

Yet part of me wishes someone would have a go… Anyone know how to bring Stanley Kubrick back from the dead?

Metal men facing off against one another? What better challenge to throw at the apocalypse. Nobody likes the new robocop, let’s just get that out of the way but I thought this might be a bit of fun to compare the two at the risk of the internet melting down at my profanity. So like a good dad I showed her the R rated original which I might add was tamer than many M rated horror movies she had seen, well except Murphy having his hands blown off. Just saying we both love both versions and really don’t like comparing them because they are such different beasts but hey, we did so strap in for a bit of robocop smacking down.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! They cried. How can you do this? Now I have been among those that have said no to a remake on the grounds of love for the original. It’s a habit I am trying to kick and for the past year in general I have managed to stay clean. I did have an early waver when I first heard Robocop was being remade and now I am glad that I managed to successfully stay the course. The girls loved this film in a way they never would have with the original. They connected with the more human elements, the slower story telling pace and relative to the original, the lack of violence. This was a story relevant to them, robots will play a big role in their future and it asked questions of them they are only just considering. It was poignant, timely, and well executed. A vibrant discussion ensued over sushi. The fact that it is so different from the original will upset people but really do we need yet another dystopian future? I for one enjoyed the fact that it took a point of view that suggested man’s successes would bring new moral challenges, because they will. It’s not the Robocop of old but personally I loved it for what it was. If people want to remake films like this, they can do it any time they like.