Pandemic Art Project #2

 

The work can speak for itself.
Somewhat custom design.
It took 11 months to complete, though there were several months during the winter when I didn't work on it at all.

Rebels: "Rebel Assault" (Ep. 4.09)

-- "All right, let's make this count."

Stormtroopers are way too easy to knock out. Just barely tap their helmets and they go down. Why bother with the helmets at all?

Last episode, Hera was only a captain; now, she's a general.

And, by the end of the episode, captured.

Yeah, sure, it's a spoiler. Oh, well.

The rebels attempt to take out the TIE Defender production facility on Lothal... and fail miserably. Totally. You have to have moments like these to show why Thrawn is so feared.

Anyway, Kanan takes off on his own to rescue Hera -- remember, they kissed! -- but the Loth-wolves intervene. Why? Well, it's all part of the larger story that's happening. I'm assuming we'll find out soon enough.

Not that I want Rebels to be over with, exactly, but I am eager to get to the end of this story.

And, actually, I want to watch the newly released final season of Clone Wars, which I plan on doing once I'm finished with Rebels. There are parts of Rebels I've really come to like, but Clones Wars is the superior series.

"So the rebels have come... at last."

"You're good at distractions."
"I am?"

Rebels: "Imperial Supercommandos" (Ep. 3.07)

-- "Strategy is an art. Maybe I'm luring you into a false sense of security."

Oh, wow, it's been a while since I've done one of these. I've just been busy, I guess.

But this was a good, and exciting, episode to jump back in on.

Of course, the Mandalorian stuff is always good. Or, at least, interesting. This one was both.

This episode ties back to... oh, I don't know, some episode or other, back in season two, I think. Another Mandalorian episode, but I'm not going to go look it up, right now. At any rate, in the earlier episode, the Rebels cook up a deal with a Mandalorian outpost for safe passage through their system.  But that outpost has gone silent, so Ezra and Sabine, along with a "guest," go to check it out. They fear the Mandalorians may be setting a trap for Rebel ships passing through the system. Oh, the deal? Well, it wasn't exactly reached by choice on the part of the Mandalorians.

When they get there, though, the find that the base has been wiped out, everyone killed. Those responsible? Imperial Supercommandos. And they are pretty cool looking, let me tell you. They are also traitor Mandalorians who joined the Empire, which is part of why they're so cool. They're like hybrid stormtrooper/Mandalorians. And what kid didn't want that action figure back in the 80s?!?! Or now, probably.

The episode is actually a lot more complex than what I've gone into here, but, hey, no spoilers, right? Well, I guess I kind of did give a spoiler about the commandos... excuse me, supercommandos! But, hey, it's in the title, so I'm going to give it a pass.

And, well, we find out a thing about Sabine, and I think that's going to come back to haunt her. Or us. I am writing this on Halloween evening, so I'm going with the haunt... Hey, you know what? No one ever goes trick-or-treating as a ghost anymore. Did Charlie Brown ruin it for everyone?
Maybe no one ever went as a ghost? Except me... Because I did, sort of, when I was 11: the ghost of Scooby Doo. Yeah, I'm not going to explain that.



"What took you so long?"
"I was using strategy! It takes longer!"

Rebels: "Vision of Hope" (Ep. 1.11)

"...I have a feeling. Today's the day."
"Well, I have a feeling you're going to get stunned if you don't stay in the moment. This moment."


Ezra has his first vision. Visions of the future are all the rage, you know. Of course, visions are difficult, at least visions of the future are. As Yoda said, "Always in motion is the future." And there's the question of whether Ezra is just seeing what he wants to see.

But, anyway, our rebels are all alone, operating completely independently of any other groups and without any kind of funding or support. They're doing it because they hate the Empire and what it stands for. That does not, however, mean they want to be operating independently of anyone and everyone else. In fact, they really want to be tied into a larger network. And this episode brings them that hope...

We also get to see one of Ezra's cadet friends from that episode where he went undercover in the academy.

The series is beginning to have the feel of being an ongoing story rather than being a series of single episodes, so that's good.


"Wait. You know what I smell like?"

Rebels: "Breaking Ranks" (Ep. 1.5)

"Don't worry. I've been training to be a Jedi."
"Yeah, right. Who isn't?"

In this episode, Ezra goes under cover.

In many ways, this is the mirror to the Clone Wars episode "Death Trap." In that one, a young Boba Fett went undercover as clone trooper cadet; in this one, Ezra goes undercover as a stormtrooper cadet. In that one, Boba was attempting an assassination; in this one, Ezra is trying to steal something the crew of the Ghost needs to save lives. In that one, Boba betrays the friends he's made; in this one, Ezra risks his life to save the new friends he's made.

There's one other significant interesting difference:
Throughout the Clone Wars series, we see the clones being trained to work together, trained to be one unit rather than a bunch of individuals. And, as close as the clones were to each other, they still had to be trained to work together. In this episode of Rebels, though, we see the stormtrooper cadets being encouraged to work for themselves individually, even to the detriment of their fellow stormtroopers. [This might explain why stormtroopers never hit anything.]

Also, there's a brief bit with the Inquisitor, a bit which may be a reveal on what the underlying reason is for the method of training for the stormtroopers.

The only negative I have about the episode is the video game nature of the particular training event happening in "Breaking Ranks." And how easy it is after the commander built it up as the most difficult thing they'd ever face. Yeah, I know it's 20 minute cartoon, but it seems like they could have come up with something more interesting and dangerous enough to be believable.

Star Wars: A Discussion (Episode IV)

I suppose we're up to the place where we finally start talking about The Force Awakens, but this still isn't a review. Not, yet, anyway.

If you've read the previous posts in this series, it will come as no surprise to you that the lead up to The Force Awakens was a big deal in my household. We had our tickets not long after they started pre-selling them, so something like a month in advance. My oldest son, who is working on a suit of stormtrooper armor so that he can join the 501st, spent the last year pouring over every tiny little detail released about the movie and engaging in all kinds of theories about it.

I pretty much constantly had to tell him not to tell me the stuff he was finding out online, because I wanted to go into the movie with as little knowledge as possible about it. I already knew more than I wanted to know about the general premise of the story because of all of the Star Wars lore I accumulated back in the 90s before Lucas announced that he was going to make the prequels.

My younger son fell somewhere in between us. He wasn't searching out information, but he wasn't opposed to being told things, either.

It's an interesting thing watching an event draw closer for someone who has been highly anticipating it. See, although my oldest son saw all of the prequels in the theater, he didn't really remember doing that. He was only three for Phantom Menace and, although he was old enough to remember going to see Revenge at the theater, all he really remembered of that was all of the people in costume while we were waiting in line to get in. His memories were all about the movies themselves because he'd seen them so many times on DVD; he had no real memories of the experience of going to see them.

That's not like me, I remember the experience of going to see A New Hope the first time I went to see it. I remember everything about it, including how badly I needed to go to the bathroom and being unwilling to do that because I was so enraptured by the movie. But, then, it was a full year before I got to see it again, so I really had to hold onto that one memory very tightly. And I did, too.

Yes, those were the years before, even, VHS players.

But it hasn't been like that with my kids. Their lives have been full of Star Wars pretty much from the start, so all three of them were very much looking forward to going to see a new Star Wars movie while being old enough to be able to remember the experience of going to do that, my oldest son most of all. You could see the tension growing in him as we got closer, especially in that last week. He was both excited and scared, scared that it wouldn't be as good as he hoped.

He's the reason I saw it twice on "opening" night, Thursday, December 17. We already had our tickets for the 7:00 show, but, back at the end of the summer, he picked up a job at a movie theater. They were doing an actual midnight showing for the employees, and he could bring two people: that was me and his brother. Let me just say: Midnight is not a kind time when you got up at 5:00am. Even for Star Wars.

So... We all went to the 7:00 show, and we all really liked it, but... Okay, so, my wife and my daughter just straight up liked the movie. Enough for them to want to see it a second time (which we did, making my third) and for my daughter to want, now, to go see it again. Neither of them are much into re-watching movies. After coming out of the first showing, my sons and I all felt like we needed to see it again before being able to properly evaluate it. Which is not to say that there were any doubts about likability. But the movie is fast. It's really non-stop action, like a roller coaster, which I'm sure is what Disney was striving for, and there's no time during the movie to ever stop and think about what you're seeing.

That was actually what I said to my wife when we came out of the theater, my only mark against it on that initial viewing: It was too fast. That one thing distracted from the Star Wars-ness of the film, much like the new Doctor Who series is also too fast. Don't get me wrong, I really like the new Doctor Who series and David Tennant comes in at second on my favorite Doctor list (though Capaldi is really excellent, too, and has the potential to hit #2), but, sometimes (frequently), I miss the thoughtfulness of the older shows. I miss that problems were solved by thinking, not by running around (the running is a big deal in the new series). [Part of what I like about Capaldi is that he has brought back some of the thoughtfulness.]

There is a lot of running in The Force Awakens.

Okay, so, what I'm going to say right now is that I like the movie. A lot. But it still only comes in at 4 of 7 of the Star Wars movies, maybe 5 of 7. One of the top 3 is one of the prequels. Next post, we'll talk about why.

Pacific Rim (part 2)

As I said last time, Pacific Rim was an amazing movie to watch. Seriously impressive visual display. And it leads off with it, too, as we start out right at the first Kaiju attack. The problem is that it's a prologue, and a prologue with voice over, at that. I really don't enjoy that kind of thing in movies. To compound the problem, it was the prologue to the prologue. Yes, the movie had to have two prologues. Just about the time I was allowing myself to get into the movie and be unannoyed by the prologue, we find out that what should have been the beginning of the movie was just another prologue. So, now, we're something like 20 minutes into the film, and the actual movie hasn't even started.

That issue with the storytelling ends up being the movie's greatest flaw. Basically, they started what was an epic tale spanning years and skipped to the last battle. There's no emotional connection to any of the characters, no foundation for the arbitrary scientific-sounding crap they fling at you in the same way that chimpanzees fling poo (and, yes, I have a story about that... for another day), and no logic to the things that happen. IF they had started at the beginning of the story or, at least, closer to it, they could have built something more believable. It's kind of too bad, because, like I said, visually amazing.

I'm not even going to get into the specific story issues. They are just too numerous to list. In fact, I'm sure I've forgotten most of them. Let's just say this movie is more hole than cheese (Swiss cheese, you know).  I'll sum it up this way: After the movie was over and my friends and I were comparing notes, so to speak, they were all about how great they thought it was. But I wasn't saying much. Not much more than it was amazing to look at, at any rate. And they're used to this from me, to me being the one most likely to not like a movie, but I was really trying not to say anything, but I guess I had this look on my face, because they were all like, "What? What was it that you didn't like? Because it was amazing." So I said I would share the one thing I thought was the most stupid (the arbitrary choice to have two pilots because the "neural load" was too much for one pilot (like I said, there's a lot of scientific-sounding crap flung at the audience to achieve what they wanted in the story, but that "neural load" crap is just that: crap)), and one of the guys started to respond with "but the right hemisphere and the left...," and I just kind of looked at him, and he stopped, and, then, all three of them started spewing various stupidities from the movie. And that lasted for something like half an hour, and I never brought up another thing. So, see, all three of these guys that walked out of the theater loving the movie couldn't hold the stupid back once the gate was open, much like the Kaiju gate in the movie.

I wish I could say something positive about the acting, but there's nothing there to talk about. No one was horrible, but no one was great, either. Or, even, all that good. It was a 'fest of mediocre. Okay, Charlie Day was good, but he was as good as it got. I mean, Idris Elba was so flat, they had to give him a nose bleed to pass for emotion.

The whole movie was like getting a giant present wrapped in the most awesome wrapping ever: glittery paper, bows, a great card, but, when you open it, you find an open package of chewing gum or something. To put it another way: big hat, no cattle.

But I'd still say to go see it at the theater, because it's just that kind of movie.

So... The movie ended, and we were heading out, trying to follow this other guy that had been with us, but he was on call there at LucasFilm, so he was heading back to his desk, so we started out going that way, too, so we ended up going off through the building into areas I had never been...

And there was just so much cool stuff! Around one corner was a display case with a tyrannosaurus Rex model in it from Jurassic Park and, down the hall, a case with a model of the foot structure of the T. Rex. And, of course, more movie posters. And, in a little lounge area, a suit of silver robot armor from some commercial ILM did at some point, and, on the other side of that, a set of Tatooine Stormtrooper (sandtrooper) armor! I so wanted to touch it; I mean, it was right there, but I restrained myself. There were display cases of models all down the halls; I don't even remember them all. And, in a room that I could see into (but the door was locked), a full-sized model of some Sith Lord. It was dark in there, so I'm not sure who it was, but the red lightsaber was very visible. It might have been Darth Maul, but it could have been one of the characters from Clone Wars, too.

The walk through the hallways of the LucasFilm building was more than worth any number of bad movies. Next time, I have to make sure I have my camera with me.