Star Wars Infinities: What Might Have Been

On Amazon Prime Reading they added a bunch of Star Wars comics a few months ago.  A lot of them are the more recent Marvel ones after Disney acquired the franchise but there were also some collected reprints of the pre-Disney era under the banner "Legends."  One volume called "Infinities" was from the pre-Disney era but even then it wasn't considered canon because it's a collection of four What If or Elseworld stories.

The first three are basically like the old "What If..." issues Marvel used to do that would speculate on stuff like, "What If Captain America was never found frozen?"  Or if he had never been frozen in the first place.

There's one What If scenario for each movie.  The first one presents a possible story on if Luke's torpedoes had gone down the vent but exploded prematurely so the Death Star isn't destroyed.  They cheat a little in that while the Death Star isn't destroyed, it's damaged enough that it can't just blow up Yavin and kill everyone there.  Instead, Leia, the droids, and everyone on Yavin is captured.

Meanwhile Luke and Han escape the Empire and Ben Kenobi's ghost tells them to go to Dagobah.  It's funny that when Yoda goes into his shtick annoying Luke and saying he'll take him to Yoda soon it's Han who recognizes the con for what it is.  Luke begins training while Han and Chewie lay low for a while before taking off to start smuggling again.

While Luke is training to be a Jedi, the Emperor and Vader are training Leia to be a Sith.  Five years later she's about to become the head of a new Senate based on the "Justice Star," formerly the Death Star.

When Luke is finished training, he, Yoda, Han, and Chewie take the Falcon to Coruscant.  Yoda goes aboard the Justice Star and uses his Jedi mind trick to control Tarkin.  Meanwhile Luke confronts Leia, Vader, and the Emperor.  Leia turns and she and Luke fight the Emperor until Vader turns as well.  He tells Luke and Leia to go while he keeps the Emperor busy.  The Emperor is destroyed when Yoda crashes the Justice Star into the planet, destroying the Imperial seat of power.  By then Luke, Leia, and the droids have escaped with Han and Chewie.  Hooray.

This was probably the best of the three.  It really would have been interesting if Leia had gotten to confront the Emperor because that's something we never saw in the series.  And really besides torturing her on the Death Star and capturing her in Bespin, Vader and Leia didn't have much interaction either.  And Yoda crashing a Death Star, how epic is that?

The second scenario is if Luke had been killed by the Wampa.  Again it cheats a little as Luke has time to tell Han to go to Dagobah to become a Jedi.  At least Han thinks the message is for him.  As the Imperials invade Hoth, Han, Leia, Chewie, and the droids get on the Falcon to escape.  Han does the trick of latching onto the back of a Star Destroyer and then drifting away with the garbage.  And like the movie, Boba Fett follows him to Bespin.

At Bespin they meet Lando only this time they've managed to arrive ahead of the Empire--though not Boba Fett.  It's Fett waiting for him but with Lando's help they take him down and freeze him in carbonite.  Han and the others leave for Dagobah just ahead of the Empire.  In retribution, Vader destroys Cloud City, killing Lando.

When they get to Dagobah, Leia finds out she's the one meant to train as a Jedi.  She stays to train with a purple lightsaber while Han and Chewie leave to raise money to pay Jabba off.  Except Jabba doesn't want money, so he takes them captive in his palace and feeds them to animals in his pit, though not a Rancor like Luke fought.  Han and Chewie are able to escape, but Threepio is left behind.

Vader goes to Jabba and takes Threepio with him.  Taking Threepio apart he's able to find out that they went to Dagobah and so goes there thinking he'll find his son.

Han and Chewie are also going to Dagobah, where Leia is finishing her training in the cave when Vader shows up.  Yoda confronts him and sort of mind melds with him to fight him on the astral plane or something.  But Vader escapes to kill Yoda.  Leia confronts him and they fight briefly with Vader getting the upper hand before Han shoots him and he dies, repenting his life of evil.

Kind of lame that Leia needs Han to save her.  And too bad about Lando and Threepio in addition to Luke.

The third one was an even weaker scenario.  What if...the negotiations with Leia in bounty hunter disguise had gone awry when Jabba hit the captured Threepio too hard, killing him?  And while trying to rescue Han from Boba Fett, Leia hit his carbonite slab with a blast so that when he's revived he's blinded permanently.

While Luke goes to Dagobah after he feels Yoda dying, Leia, Lando, and Chewie track Boba Fett to Endor, where they rescue Han and Fett is killed.  They take Han's carbonite slab back to the Rebel fleet where they find out he's blind.

Meanwhile Luke's X-Wing is captured and he's taken to Vader and the Emperor, but not before he gets a message off to Leia telling her the truth of their parentage.  She steals Boba Fett's ship and flies to the Death Star where she's captured and taken to Luke, Vader, and the Emperor.

Lando leads an attack on the Death Star, which like before is a trap and so they have to fight for their lives.  On Endor the Ewoks attack both Imperials and Rebels and in the chaos the Falcon is able to go down and blow up the shield generator so Wedge can blow up the Death Star's reactor.

Luke and Vader fight until the Death Star starts to blow up.  The Emperor flees while Vader can't kill his kids so they take him to the hangar, where the Falcon picks them up and they rejoin the Rebel fleet.  The Emperor has escaped but Vader joins the Rebellion in a suit of white armor.  I mean sure he killed like millions of people but now he's a good guy!  Um, yeah.  Hooray?

This wasn't really that good.  Just meh.

I guess the point of all of these is that in the end the Rebellion would always defeat the Empire.  Suck it, Empire!

That was only about 55% of the book.  The rest of it was an adaptation of The Star Wars, the early rough draft of the original Star Wars script.  There were a lot of differences between this and the finished product we all know and love.

First the Luke Skywalker character is named Anikin Starkiller.  Luke Skywalker is an old general who's more like Ben Kenobi.  Leia is still a princess, though not of Alderaan because Alderaan is the seat of the Empire.  Darth Vader is a general of the Empire who has a scar on his face and a red robot eye but otherwise is normal looking.  The Emperor is a normal-looking guy.  And Han Solo is a green alien sort of like Greedo in the final product.

The basic story is that the Empire wants to take over this planet Aquilae.  That planet is ruled by a king and defended by General Luke Skywalker.  Meanwhile on a distant planet Anikin, his father, and younger brother Deak are attacked by a Sith, who kills Deak.  The father takes Anikin to Luke to train him to become a Jedi.  Luke uses Anikin sort of as an intern, assigning him to go pick up Leia from a private school.

The Empire launches its attack, which isn't going all that well until they kill the king and force the queen to surrender.  Luke, Anikin, and Leia go on the run to a port where they meet Han Solo to get off the planet.  They crash on a planet and meet the Wookies and Luke saves their prince--Chewbacca, who looks pretty much the same.  Luke trains the Wookies to pilot Y-Wing-looking fighters while Anikin and Leia fall madly in love.

Leia is captured by a Sith, Prince something-or-other who wears sort of the bottom half of a Vader mask on his face for...reasons.  Anikin, Luke, and Han go to the enemy space fortress (the Death Star-ish thing) to rescue her.  Anikin winds up teaming with the Sith against the Empire to save Leia while the Wookies launch an attack on the fortress.

In the end the Empire is defeated and Aquilae becomes the seat of the Rebellion.  And there's a big medal ceremony and celebration.  So the overall story has a lot of similarities but there are a lot more locations and characters that really made it impossible to film in 1976 when George Lucas was a relative unknown and they didn't have $300 million to spend on these things.

Really the way this looks makes it more like the Star Wars ripoffs that came after the first movie was such a hit like Battle Beyond the Stars and Star Crash.  There were some of the weaknesses we came to see more in the prequels like the "love story" between Leia and Anikin where they didn't like each other and then just spontaneously decide they love each other.  Still, it's an interesting read just to see sort of what Lucas was thinking at the beginning and how it all turned out.

If you have Amazon Prime it's free to read so definitely worth an hour or two to read what might have been.

The Dangers of the No-Cebo Effect

The previous entry I talked about watching season two of FX's Legion on Hulu.  I mentioned that in some of the episodes they had these segments where Jon Hamm narrated about some psychological diseases like the sort of short films you might see in school and that wind up getting riffed on by Rifftrax, only these had better production values.

For instance, one talks about the "no-cebo" effect.  A placebo is giving some people a sugar pill and telling them it's a real drug and often someone will feel better despite not receiving real medicine.  A no-cebo is giving people something fake and telling them something bad will happen.  The example in the show a doctor gives a guy a glass of sugar water and tells him repeatedly "This will make you vomit."  What happens?  As he tries to drink it he starts gagging.  They didn't say it but it made me think that this is pretty much what hypnotism is.  I swing a watch or flash a quarter or whatever and say, "You are getting sleepy" and even though it shouldn't actually make you sleepy, you think that it will and thus you do.

In another segment Jon Hamm talks about how humans are really the only animals (that we know of) who shape their reality.  An example in this is if you teach a kid that red is green and green is red he'll grow up believing that to be true.  So then the kid steps out into traffic and is killed because he thought traffic was going to stop because the light was green.

Another segment explained to some extent the "plague" in the first half of the show.  In an example a cheerleader's parents are arguing loudly and as a subconscious response she develops a weird tic with her arm moving involuntarily.  Then this spreads to all of the other cheerleaders in the squad because seeing someone sick can then make you sick.  Like maybe if someone comes into the office with the flu you might think, "Oh shit I'm going to get sick" and then that's what happens.  To what extent was it biology and what extent was it psychological?  Hurm.  The simplistic way to think of it is it's like when someone else yawns and so then you have to yawn.  Or maybe just reading the word "yawn" you felt a tremendous urge to yawn.  Yawn, yawn, yawn...did it work?

The no-cebo effect especially got me thinking about some recent movie flops and the 2016 election.  Movies like Solo, Justice League, and the Fantastic Four reboot failed miserably even though they weren't really that bad of movies.  (I've only seen the latter two but I'll give the former benefit of the doubt.)  A lot of what I think happened was a sort of no-cebo effect.  The first two I mentioned there were stories about changing directors and massive reshoots.  Fantastic Four there were stories about how the director and studio butted heads over the movie also resulting in reshoots.  In Justice League there was all that crap about digitally removing Henry Cavill's mustache and with Fantastic Four there were people blathering about Kate Mara wearing a wig in the second half.

All three of these movies had all these negative stories running ahead of their release and I think it created a no-cebo effect.  People heard all this bad stuff about these movies and thus assumed the movies must be bad, hence they didn't go watch.  And as I said I didn't think those movies were THAT bad.  I mean people acted like they were the second coming of Plan 9 From Outer Space when really they just weren't as slick as Disney's Marvel movies.  I mean if you hadn't heard about Henry Cavill's mustache or Kate Mara's hair would you have really noticed?  Probably not.

I think we saw the same thing with the 2016 election.  Republicans spent basically 25 years planting bad shit about Hillary Clinton in people's minds.  The previous three years up to the election there was all that Benghazi bullshit that amounted to nothing and then there was all that bullshit about "her emails," especially the Comey memo just a couple of weeks before the election.

None of this shit actually amounted to anything, but like with the movies I mentioned I think it poisoned people's minds.  They heard negative things about Hillary and thus thought negatively of her, either then voting for Trump, staying home, or voting third party.  It didn't help that Hillary is not charismatic or a good speaker like her husband and Obama.

Speaking of, Michelle Obama's mantra of "when they go low, we go high" only helped doom Democrats in 2016.  By not mentioning the many, many negative things in Donald Trump's past they did the opposite of the no-cebo effect:  they made people think these things must not be important because hardly anyone was talking about them.  The racism, the affairs, the divorces, the bankruptcies, the sexual harassment, and all the creepy pervy shit he's said about his daughter could be conveniently forgotten because no one was hammering these home except maybe some people on the Internet who could easily be blocked or the likes of Michael Moore and John Oliver, who people could conveniently not watch.

I actually read an article along similar lines.  The guy who wrote it worked for the Democrats running against David Duke in the early 90s in Louisiana.  By "going high" and not mentioning Duke's racism and white supremacist ties the first time the Democrat candidate very nearly lost.  The second time when they stopped "going high" there were still as many active and latent racist white folks voting for Duke but it motivated more people of other colors to vote.

The guy's conclusion is that Democrats need to be hammering home all the shit Trump has done in his life.  And maybe now you can see why.  The more negative stories you can put out about someone (only in Trump's case it wouldn't even be "fake news") the more people will associate him with negative feelings.  It's like a subtler, less violent version of what they did in A Clockwork Orange to Malcolm McDowell.

If Democrats "go high" again in 2020 they're again going to lose unless maybe there is a recession or something to get latent racists to not vote for Trump.  Because like in 2016 if you don't keep hammering this stuff (and now there's a lot more thanks to the Mueller report) people will assume it must not be important and ignore it.  Meanwhile Trump will be blathering on about the "best economy ever" (not even close) or an "invasion" of brown people--again demonstrably false.

In his own bumbling way Trump uses the no-cebo effect with his dumb nicknames like "Crooked Hillary" and "Sleepy Joe" and "Crazy Bernie."  It doesn't matter whether it's true or not; if he keeps saying these things then people might associate them with that person.  It's not facts that matter; it's our perceptions of reality that matter the most.

Another of the segments in Legion mentioned that humans are pattern-seeking animals.  This is something we developed to find game and avoid predators when we were cavemen and it's still hard-wired into us.  As you can see this entry and probably about 60% of the other entries on this blog are about finding common patterns between shows and movies and books and whatnot.  So it's not my fault if it's boring you; I'm just following Nature.  So there.

Legion Season 2 is Basically The Godfather 2 With Mutants

A few weeks ago I finally got around to watching season 2 of FX's Legion on Hulu.  This was actually the season from last year as the third and final season is airing on FX now but since I don't have FX and probably am not going to buy it off Amazon or anything I'll just have to wait until next year.

I really liked the first season but it had been a while since I'd seen it back when Comcast still did "Watchathons" and actually let you watch shows on channels you don't have a subscription to.  I probably should have watched the first season again because going into it there was a lot of, "Who's that guy?" and "Oh, right, that's who that is."

A basic recap of the first season is there's a mutant named David Haller who is the son of Professor Xavier (who of course we never see or hear in any form because it would be totally impossible to get Patrick Stewart to do a cameo despite that he's starring in a TV show on CBS All Access and does voice work on American Dad and Family Guy so it's not like he's adverse to doing TV--but I digress) and has spent most of his life drugged up and/or thinking he's crazy.  At a mental hospital he meets a girl named Syd who has the power to switch bodies with anyone she touches so like Rogue she can't really touch people and wears gloves all the time.  Then he's recruited to go to this place called "Summerland" where he finds out he has an evil entity called "The Shadow King" in his head.  He finally drives the Shadow King away and is ready to kick back with Syd when suddenly an orb shows up and beams him up.  Got it?  No?  Whatever.

Season 2 picks up months later when David reappears with no memory of what happened.  He's taken in by "Division 3," which is a really weird place that seems like it escaped from a Grant Morrison Doom Patrol comic.  The head of the place is an Admiral Fukya who has a basket over his head with which he watches everything going on in the building and uses androgynous android minions to do his bidding.  The cafeteria has this little river flowing through it with boats that have plates of food on them that you just take what you want.  It's neat but wouldn't the food get cold?  And it doesn't seem very sanitary.

Anyway, a bunch of people are infected with some weird plague where they just go catatonic, standing in place with their teeth chattering.  Division 3 wants David's help to find the Shadow King, who they think is responsible.  To this end they build him sort of a Cerebro thing only it's a sensory-deprivation tank he floats in and focuses his mental powers.  By fiddling with some cords they get it so he can traverse time and space and meets Syd in the future who seems to be missing an arm and is wearing ragged clothes and tells him he has to find the Shadow King's original body because they need the Shadow King to help stop some future threat.

When they go out to look for the Shadow King in the desert he attacks Division 3 and kills a bunch of people and turns one into a pig and one into a fish.  Still David is trying to play both sides, telling Division 3 he'll help them while also promising the Shadow King to find his body so he can go away and leave everyone alone.

It takes about 2/3 of the season before the big reveal that probably shouldn't be a surprise if you're familiar with the comics on which this ostensibly is based.  That big threat in the future?  It's David!  So future Syd wants him to help the Shadow King stop him.

In some intro segments Jon Hamm tells about various psychological disorders, some of which I'll talk about in a future entry.  What they don't talk about is the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It's where you think something and then consciously or unconsciously make that happen.  Like in school if you think, "I'm never going to pass this test" and then don't study very much and flunk it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Future Syd believes David is the ultimate threat and as we watch the last two episodes play out it is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy because by first getting David to help the Shadow King and then more directly helping the Shadow King, she helps get her past self kidnapped by the Shadow King, which then causes David to torture someone almost to death and seeing this she turns against him.  Which then the only solution he can see is to try to erase her memory of the bad things he did.  Which you could say is a rape of her mind.  When everyone finds out about this they try to imprison him, but he escapes and decides to stop trying to be a hero.  So Future Syd is right that he does become a monster, but isn't it really because SHE pushed him into it?  If she hadn't abducted him at the end of season 1 (and I never really understood the point of that; was she trying to kill him or use his past self against his future self or use his past self to find the Shadow King's body in the past?) and pushed him to help the Shadow King, maybe he would have found the Shadow King's body and they could have destroyed it and he and Syd could have lived Happily Ever After.  Or not.  Who really knows?

But with the last two episodes it really did make me think of the second part of The Godfather.  In the first one Michael Corleone wants no part of his mob family's business but is thrust into it when his father is shot multiple times and his hot-headed brother Sonny is murdered.  At the end he's taken his father's place at the head of the family while promising his wife that he's going to make the Corleones legit.

In the second one he's still trying to do that but is thwarted by rivals and a revolution in Cuba.  Meanwhile at one point he asks his mother if by being strong for his family (or Family) a man can lose said family.  Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies!  Because of course that's what happens.  His wife finds out all the shit he's been up to and leaves him, taking the kids with her.  In the end Michael is famously sitting alone, having no one left except some henchmen.

By the same token, in the last episode once Syd (and everyone else at Division 3) realizes the shit David has been up to, they turn on him.  In trying to save Syd and their love he winds up going too far and losing her.  And then he says "Screw you guys, if you want a monster, I'll BE the monster."

Besides The Godfather 2 you could also draw parallels to Breaking Bad.  Walter White's initial goal in getting into the meth business is to make enough money so his family can survive without him.  But once his wife finds out all the shit he's done and that he inadvertently had her brother-in-law murdered, she leaves with their son.  So Walter also ends up alone until he dies in the improbable shootout at the end.

In his own fumbling way I think that's what George Lucas was going for in Revenge of the Sith.  Anakin tries to protect Padme from being killed but in the end winds up killing her and being alone as Darth Vader.  It just wasn't done nearly as well as the other three examples.

Like Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad and a lesser extent Al Pacino in The Godfather, I thought Dan Stevens does a really good job of making David seem relatable and not like a monster.  Even when he does torture someone or mentally rapes Syd, you don't feel like he's doing it because he's evil (bwahahahahaha) but out of a misplaced sense of love and loss.  At the end when they're trying to cage him, I felt bad for him and was somewhat glad he was able to escape.  That's good acting and characterization.

Usually if a show is only 8 episodes I'll complain about it being too short.  The second season of Legion was expanded from 8 to 11 episodes and actually I don't think that really helped the show.  Instead it wound up with a lot of bits that seemed extraneous, like the five-minute dance-off sequence in the first episode.  Or two episodes I mentioned in a previous entry that really didn't have a lot of relevance and just slowed the momentum down.  8 or 9 episodes probably would have been enough to tell the story they wanted to tell without padding it too much.

I have no idea how many episodes are going to be in the third season; maybe I'll find out next year.

Letterkenny: A Show About Nothing

Last post I talked about how I don't usually watch things that are recommended by algorithms but if I see a commercial a bunch of times I might decide to watch the show when I reach the point of "What the hell."  Letterkenny on Hulu is one of those shows.  I saw the commercials a bunch of times and finally reached the point where I didn't have anything in my queue I wanted to watch so what the hell?

Seinfeld was branded as "the show about nothing," to which Letterkenny could say, "Hold my beer."  Most of the 42 episodes of the show have little in the way of narrative structure or even much of a point.  To write a plot description of most episodes would be pretty pointless.  It'd basically be:  a lot of rambling, drinking, and occasional fist fighting.  The end.

The eponymous town in Ontario has three main groups of people:  hicks, hockey players, and skids.  The hicks are led by a young farmer named Wayne, his younger sister Katy, and his friends Daryl and "Squirelly Dan."  They start off pretty much every episode with some kind of discussion that usually has nothing to do with the rest of the episode.  A couple of them they actually go through the alphabet from A to Z with some words or phrases relating to each letter about...whatever.  Other times they all do parts of what is sort of a monologue.

Unfortunately then most every episode has to devote time to these two douchebag hockey players:  Jonesy and Reilly.  If you watched the original Mighty Ducks movie there was one nerdy kid who'd be like, "Trip.  The Tripster.  The Tripmeister.  The Trippenheimer..."  Imagine two of that kid going on like that for five goddamned minutes.  And like the beginning of the show it really has nothing to do with what else is going on.  In season 1 they're just normal junior hockey players, in seasons 2 & 3 they go up to senior hockey, season 4 they just hang around the gym with a couple of gay guys, season 5 they're assistant coaches on a women's hockey team, and season 6 it's back to the gym with the gay guys.  Besides the gay guys they have a coach whose catchphrase is "It's fucking embarrassing!" after which he kicks something.  And when they or the gay guys aren't riffing for an uncomfortably long time, they have an enemy named "Shoresy" whose face is never shown and is usually doing a naked handstand in a shower.  All he does is make jokes about fucking their moms.  Occasionally they do interact with the hicks, especially Katy, whom they've both dated individually and together.

The third group is the "skids" who are a small group of emo meth heads led by Stuart.  They deal meth and other drugs and most of the series dress sort of like the gang in A Clockwork Orange.  Stuart likes to use fancy words and imagines himself to be a great DJ though when he has a concert in town Katy is the only one who shows up.  They briefly went out before her even briefer modeling career.  One season a girl named Gae joins their group and she and Stuart become a thing.  She returns in season 6 to get Stuart in rehab and then they go to "the city" to sell GHB.  The skids don't usually get as much air time as the hockey players so they're slightly less annoying.

There's often something that almost resembles a plot.  Like in the first episode Wayne had sworn off fighting when he was with some girl, but once they broke up he decides to prove he's the toughest guy in Letterkenny by beating some of the other local toughs one-at-a-time in his driveway.  That season ends with the seemingly dramatic announcement that a Native girl named Tanis is pregnant with Wayne's kid and Katy is going to "the city" to become a model.

Well don't worry there won't actually be much story from this.  Tanis gets an abortion and Katy comes back with blonde hair and two dudes who leave after one episode.  And we'll never speak of any of this again.  Similarly at the end of season 4 Wayne has been seeing a girl named Rosie but is tempted to get back with Tanis.  Well don't worry, the start of next season he goes to Rosie and she's just up and decided to move to Vancouver.  Problem solved!  Wayne and Tanis go out for a couple of episodes before breaking that off.  At the end of season 5 Wayne meets a French-Candadian girl and at the end of season 6 he has a ring to propose to her, but I wouldn't expect anything to come of that.

There are a few episodes that actually did a fair job of having something close to a real narrative.  Like one where Wayne and Katy get a $5000 inheritance from a dead relative and so decide to host a Shark Tank-like thing in their barn where the various characters try to convince them to fund some stupid project.  In the end they just use the money for a big drinking party.  Another episode they have a town spelling bee.  For some reason the hockey coach tries to rig it for the two dickweed players by giving them really easy words, though in the end Katy wins.

Though the best episode was when Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder, She's Out of My League, Goon) guest stars as "Hard Right Jay," an alt-right asshole who shows up in town to organize a protest of renaming the Letterkenny Chiefs soccer team to something less racist like Rough Riders.  They're holding their own Charlottesville-style rally on the field when the hicks, hockey players, and skids all band together to beat the shit out of them.

I guess the thing is that when they get all the factions together then it becomes something like a real show.  Otherwise it's just three groups doing their own shit and nothing really comes of it.  That's probably why the holiday episode at the end of each season (there was a Halloween, Easter, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and I think two Christmas ones) is usually better than many of the normal episodes because it brings the characters together for the most part.

You might ask then, why the hell did you watch all 42 episodes?  Boredom, mostly.  But also I think it's like the Union Station books that I've talked about a few times where there's not much in terms of a narrative or conflict resolution but there are enough amusing bits that it makes it mostly enjoyable.  I just fast-forward through most of the hockey player shit.

The thing with the hockey players reminded me of when I was watching the second season of NBC's AP Bio on Hulu.  When Jack the AP Bio teacher and his students are concocting some harebrained scheme the show is great.  It's just that I hate all of the secondary characters.  I mean almost literally all of them.  Like if 99% of them were written out of the show I would not give a shit at all.  The hot redhead accountant they added in the second season is the only one I'd keep.  The rest can die in a fucking fire.  If there were a season 3 I'd hope for that to happen as a "very special episode."  In the same way if the hockey players got a contract to play for the Siberia Huskies and were never heard from again that would make me happy.  And if the skids got thrown in jail for 3-5 years that wouldn't be bad either.

Really the parts with the hicks sitting around Wayne and Katy's produce stand or on the porch of their house reminds me of a live action King of the Hill only with more swearing and sex talk.  So a gritty, younger, Canadian, live action reboot of that show.  If they'd just taken that concept and run with it, using the hockey players and skids as true foils to the hicks then it'd be a much better, more coherent show.

So should you watch it?  I'd wouldn't say that's a hard no.  Now go get a fucking Puppers.  (Puppers being their beer of choice.)

Algorithms: The Real Rise of the Machines

A year or two ago I watched a documentary on algorithms that was pretty interesting.  You don't really realize just how much influence these things can have in our daily lives.  Google and Facebook are obvious examples of algorithms, but there are so many more that affect us in ways we may not comprehend.

What really got me thinking of this was people on Twitter talking about Netflix's cancellation of an adult cartoon called Tuca and Bertie after only one season.  What pissed off a lot of people is that the Netflix algorithms weren't pushing the show.  Even the creator of the show said it didn't show up in her recommended shows.  That's like Amazon not recommending my books to me.  Though maybe in that case because it knows I've already read them.  Similarly other people with Netflix shows aired their grievances; Jonah Ray of the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 claimed fans had trouble finding out about season 2.  That seems weird because I don't even have Netflix and I knew about it from the commercials on Pluto TV.

How often do you watch a show because it's recommended to you by Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or whatever?  Not many for me.  Maybe if a person I know recommends it then I'll give it a try.  Or sometimes if I see a commercial enough times and reach the point of "What the hell?" I'll watch it.  That's how I got into Tuca and Bertie's predecessor Bojack Horseman.  Very rarely I'll see something on the recommended row and decide to give it a try, probably more with movies than TV because there's less investment.

Still, the idea is that to some extent sites can control your viewing habits, especially if you're too lazy to do your own looking around for stuff.  As I've said before, in Marketing class in college we talked about one of the most important rules of marketing:  people have to know something exists before they can buy it.  You can't watch a show if you don't know it exists.

In the 2016 election we saw how Facebook's algorithm can affect people.  The propagation of "fake news" was rampant and trolls proliferated.  To what extent it swung the election is hard to judge but it sure as hell didn't help things.  Facebook's head android promised Congress things would change, but have they?  Probably not much.  Not unless you stop following the fake news sites and block the trolls yourself.

But anyway, the whole topic of algorithms got me thinking about how machines could completely take over our world without our knowing it.  SkyNet doesn't have to launch a bunch of nukes and build a bunch of Terminators.  The Matrix doesn't have to enslave us in a virtual prison while impractically using us as a source of fuel.  All they have to do is control the algorithms and we'll dance to their tune.

Think about it:  our news can be controlled through social media algorithms, where we shop can be controlled with search engine algorithms, what shows we watch can be controlled by streaming service algorithms, what's on our grocery store shelves can be controlled by manufacturing/transportation algorithms, and even how long it takes you to get to work can be controlled by traffic light algorithms.  As more of the decision making gets turned over to AIs, it'll be even easier for machines to control us behind the scenes by controlling what we see, hear, and do.  We'll be their puppets without realizing it.  With how we've fucked the world, maybe that's for the best.

Hey Now Don't Dream. It's Over.

Dream sequences have been a staple of books, TV, and movies pretty much since forever.  Even the Bible has dream sequences; Revelations was pretty much entirely a dream sequence.  So it's a tradition, though not really a great one.

A lot of the time in stories a dream sequence is kind of a deus ex machina, leading to some great revelation that can help the hero figure things out or come to some conclusion.  Which really makes them lazy writing most of the time.

But really the worst is if a dream sequence drags on too long because unless you're doing something like Inception or A Nightmare on Elm Street (or my book Higher Power) the dream or dreams aren't really moving the plot forward.  It's just spinning its wheels, waiting for the dream(s) to end to get back to it.

Recently I caught up on more of Tom King's run on Batman.  The 10th volume is called "Knightmares" and except for the first issue it's pretty much five issues that are all dreams as Batman has been drugged by the Flashpoint Batman (also at least briefly the Batman of Earth-2), Thomas Wayne.  One issue he's confronting Professor Pyg who reveals himself to be Batman's son Damien.  Another Bruce is seemingly living happily with Catwoman while Constantine keeps telling him it's a dream.  Another the Question is interrogating Catwoman about the note she left Bruce when she left him figuratively at the altar.  An almost silent issue has Batman chasing a masked figure into the sewer who turns out to be the Joker.  Then there's a fun issue about a bachelorette party at the Fortress of Solitude with Catwoman and Lois Lane getting lap dances from Superman androids while Bruce and Clark Kent have dinner and play chess at Wayne Manor.  Finally there's another issue where Bruce confronts Catwoman as a way to prompt him to snap out of it.

And while most of the issues weren't bad or boring or anything, they didn't really add anything.  The whole thing could have just been one issue or maybe two at most.  I mean maybe Batman is coming to some inner realization but otherwise there's nothing happening to move the overall story forward.  Which makes it kind of frustrating.

Similarly I've already ranted about Archer having not one, not two, but three coma fantasy seasons.  Finally at the end of season 10 he finally wakes up from the coma three years later.  Which is ridiculous.  At most one coma fantasy season would have been enough, though only one or two episodes would have suited most viewers a lot better, I'm sure.  Because while these coma fantasies might be fun and entertaining in their own way, they aren't really moving the overall story forward.  At all.

Recently I also watched season 2 of FX's Legion on Hulu.  I know the show is supposed to be weird and trippy but it was annoying when he finds out that the Shadow King basically killed his sister and swears revenge...and then the whole next episode is just a bunch of Elseworld tales showing various parallel worlds like one where he ends up an old homeless guy or another where he winds up becoming an evil billionaire or one where he has a wife and kids and seemingly normal life.  It was interesting and not a bad episode but like a dream sequence it's killing the forward momentum of the show.  Similarly there was a whole other episode where he's in his girlfriend's head and seeing her memories over and over.  The first time especially was great but then it's repeated like a half-dozen times and again this episode doesn't really move the overall story much.  The basic point is "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" which we could have figured out in less than an hour.

So I'd say to nix dream sequences and the like as a general rule, but if you're going to use them, don't dawdle over them.  Keep your story moving before your audience moves on to something else.

The Snyder Cut: Fandom's Bigfoot

Ever since Zack Snyder left production of Justice League ostensibly because of his child's suicide, fans have been clamoring for the mythical "Snyder Cut" of the movie.  Even over two years later people are still debating whether or not it exists and whether or not it should be released.  Besides fans "experts" and celebrities like Kevin Smith have weighed in on it.

For what it's worth, I don't think there's a real, finished product out there.  As some people on Twitter have mentioned if there's anything it's probably a rough cut or "assembly," the sort of thing the crew watches to see if they got what they needed.  That being the case not only would it probably be 3-4 hours long, but also it would look like shit.  Have you ever seen the actual footage of a big CGI-heavy movie before they add all the effects in?  There are green screen backgrounds, people in motion capture suits, and basically people pantomiming because the lasers and whatnot haven't been added.  (And Superman would have a mustache, as was reported on to death.)  It would be laughable to watch more than a few minutes.

Unlike a lot of fans, let me apply some logic here.  Justice League was a flop even though it made like $800 million worldwide.  Now if there were a finished product of an alternate version, don't you think WB would have released it by now to make some extra money to offset their losses?  I mean this is the same company that released THREE versions of Snyder's Watchmen on DVD:  the theatrical cut, Director's Cut, and Ultimate Cut that included the animated material originally put out as a separate product.  And again with Snyder's Batman v Superman there were two editions:  the theatrical version and Ultimate edition.  They're clearly not adverse to putting out multiple versions of one movie if it suits them, especially Zack Snyder movies.

So if there were a finished alternate version of the movie they'd just be leaving money on the table and considering how the movie performed, I doubt they'd do that.

On someone's blog I read recently she talked about the deeper issue here:  the spoiled fandom that in the age of social media thinks it's entitled to whatever it wants.  I mean like all those idiots signing online petitions to completely remake season 8 of Game of Thrones because they didn't like it.  Or wanting to refilm The Last Jedi, something I would support, though not for the racist reasons as a lot of the people supporting that.  I'd want to refilm it for story content, not to erase ethnic characters.  But unlike a lot of fans I know that's unrealistic.  There's no way HBO would spend the millions and millions of dollars to reshoot a new season of Game of Thrones.  And even then, who decides what the ending would be?  Do we take an online poll?

And even if HBO did that or even if WB released "The Snyder Cut" do you think fans would be happy?  I doubt it.  They'd just bitch about something else.  There'd probably be conspiracy nuts saying "That's not the REAL Snyder Cut!  Release the REAL Snyder Cut!"  Even if Zack Snyder himself went to their houses and showed it to them, they'd still deny it.  Because some people are just like that.  Unfortunately in the age of social media those people can actually be heard.

There's that old story about a guy who tried to please everyone and wound up pleasing no one.  That's why most of these whiny fan petitions don't get listened to:  even if companies went to the time and expense of trying to please them they'd still bitch about something.  And if you give them an inch they'd take a mile as the old saying goes; you give them the Snyder Cut and then they'll want all kinds of shit.

I'm just saying.

The Boys Isn't For The Girls

Last entry I talked about Amazon's new series The Boys based on a comic by Garth Ennis.  On Twitter a woman was complaining that the first episode "fridged" the main character's girlfriend and then had a rape scene so she wasn't down with it.  And, well, it's a good thing she didn't read the source material because it's like a million times more misogynist and sexually depraved.

If you're wondering, the idea of "fridging" comes from Green Lantern in the late 90s when Kyle Rayner's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a fridge for him to find.  Among women especially this became symbolic of comics killing or maiming or otherwise incapacitating a hero's girlfriend solely to motivate the hero.

Which if you watch all 8 episodes of the Amazon series this wasn't strictly "fridging" the girlfriend.  The main character, Hughie, and his girlfriend Robin are talking about moving in together when she suddenly explodes as the speedster A-Train literally runs right through her.  This is what leads Billy Butcher to recruit Hughie for his team and for Hughie to accept.  So in that sense it is "fridging" but later on it becomes a catalyst for finding out about this "Compound V" stuff that is like steroids for superheroes.  So in that way if it had been Hughie's dad or a male friend who had been run through the impact would have been exactly the same.  And in this context it wasn't entirely about just giving him motivation.  It was like Watchmen where it begins with a murder and that eventually leads to unraveling a whole big conspiracy.  Though admittedly Watchmen is pretty misogynist too, though less sexually depraved.

Since the show is on their network, Amazon made the first volume of the comic free on Prime Reading so I read the first six issues or so.  At least in that the girlfriend thing is a "fridging" because there really doesn't seem any reason for it except to provide motivation for Hughie to join Butcher's team.  In the comic she's not run over by A-Train; he throws or punches or whatever a villain who flies through Robin at such a high speed that she explodes--except for the arms that Hughie is still holding when paramedics arrive.

Next there's the rape.  It's not a rape in the sense of throwing a woman down and forcibly entering her.  Starlight is a young girl from Iowa with superpowers who's picked to join "The Seven," the series's version of the Justice League, though it's more like the Crime Syndicate from Earth-3 in that while they pretty much have the same powers as the Justice League they're totally evil.  Anyway, upon joining she meets her idol Homelander who then drops his pants and tells her that to become part of the team she has to give him a blow job.  And also A-Train and Black Noir, the Batman-ish character who's really more like Snake Eyes of GI JOE.  If she doesn't do it then she'll be sent back to Iowa to live out her life as a second-rate hero.  So guess what she does?  And finds no sympathy in the only other female "hero" Queen Maeve, who deals with her problems by drinking.

In the show it's mostly the same situation, except it's only the Aquaman-ish character The Deep who drops his pants.  And later gets his come-uppance when he's raped by a woman in Sandusky, Ohio, where he was sent to after Starlight inadvertently publicized what happened.  I'm not sure how much of that happens in the comics since I haven't read beyond the first volume; I think that was probably added in light of the #metoo and #timesup stuff.

So the Amazon series is actually a lot tamer than the comic book series.  If you're complaining about that, well, definitely don't read the source material because as I've laid out it's worse.  You also have a team of young heroes having sex with a bunch of prostitutes and in a park Billy Butcher has his bulldog Terror sodomize an old lady's Shih-Tzu.  For obvious reasons the bulldog is not in the TV show.  But the TV show does have The Boys shoving a bomb up an invisible "hero"'s ass and exploding him, so there's that, not that they really show much other than the exploding.

I guess if I'm a good liberal I should hate the show and the book, but I really don't.  I mean the blowjobs and dog sodomizing are a little too extreme but it's the world of the show.  Super "heroes" are assholes and the people fighting them aren't really much better.  It is what it is and you either accept it for that or don't.  But clearly if you're the type who's going to complain about "fridging" on Twitter then you aren't going to enjoy it.  Fair warning.

A couple of Fun Facts on how the show and comics are different:  first off in the comics Compound V is something The Boys use to fight superheroes.  For a short time it gives them the strength, speed, and healing ability to go toe-to-toe with most of the superheroes.  When Hughie takes some he winds up punching through a young hero and killing him.  As I said, in the show the Compound V is used like a steroid.  It's also given to babies to make them into superheroes.  There's this whole big conspiracy on distributing the drug to hospitals to create heroes, but also to terrorists to create supervillains.   

In the show Hughie is an American played by Jack Quaid, who really looks more like a Michael Shannon and Rainn Wilson hybrid than Dennis or Randy Quaid.  In the comic books he's Scottish and was actually modeled after actor/comedian Simon Pegg.  Which as an Easter egg Simon Pegg plays Hughie's father in the TV show.  In an added coincidence Karl Urban plays Billy Butcher and they were both in the reboot Star Trek movies.

Another Easter egg in the show is that two of Vought's marketing writers are named Seth and Evan, like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, two of the producers of the series.  We find out when Billy and Hughie visit a support group that Seth's penis got broken off when a hero he was sleeping with turned to ice when she orgasmed, basically turning his dick to a Popsicle like liquid hydrogen.  So, yeah, this is definitely not a nice PG-13 show.  You've been warned!

Does Absolute Power Corrupt Absolutely?

At the end of July Amazon Prime Video premiered The Boys, which is based on a comic by Garth Ennis.  The show is about a small team of guys (and one woman) who terrorize superheroes.  The idea being that in this universe most superheroes are secretly assholes, especially the biggest one "Homelander" who looks like Captain America, has Superman's powers, and is a complete sociopath.  He murders numerous people and we find out he raped and impregnated the wife of one of the main characters, Billy Butcher.

About a month or two before this I read the first book in Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners series called Steelheart.  In it some weird red star called Calamity suddenly appears and people start to get superpowers.  Except inevitably all the people with superpowers turn evil.  The eponymous Steelheart is naturally the Superman-type character, only of course evil.  (And he has the power to turn stuff to steel, hence his name.)  Steelheart and other "Epics" force the governments of the world to capitulate and then split the world up amongst themselves.  Ten years later a kid joins this group called "The Reckoners" who go around assassinating Epics.  With his help they're able to finally kill Steelheart.

So in both of these cases people who get superpowers are inevitably assholes and/or evil.  In The Boys the evil is mostly kept hidden thanks in large part to the evil Vought corporation while in Sanderson's books the evil is usually on full display.

Which brings up the title of this entry:  does absolute power corrupt absolutely?  Greek philosophy says yes.  If you got superpowers, how long until you started to use them for evil?  I mean if I got Superman powers, how long could I resist the temptation to walk into a bank and take the money to pay off all my debts and shit?  I'd say about as long as it'd take me to get to the nearest bank.

Or maybe you don't use it for outright evil.  Maybe you sell your powers to the highest bidder like a mercenary.  Or like in the recent Shazam movie set up a demonstration to essentially do super-powered tricks for money.  And like in The Boys you could probably eventually set yourself up with all sorts of endorsement deals like an athlete.  If you follow sports at all you know the sort of shit a lot of athletes get up to in their personal lives because they have all this money and easy access to booze, drugs, and floozies.  See Tiger Woods, Pacman Jones, Michael Vick, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Aaron Hernandez for some recent examples of athlete malfeasance.  Plus there are numerous DUIs and such every single year.

I hate to say it like this, but DUIs and a few sexual assaults is almost a best case scenario.  The absolute best is that you'd only use your powers for good and be squeaky clean like Superman or Captain America or Spider-Man.  The absolute worst case scenario is that like Steelheart you decide to take the world (or a chunk of it) for yourself and force all the unpowered people to be your slaves.  Maybe like Sanderson and Ennis I'm a bit cynical about this because it's hard to see most people actually being squeaky clean if they suddenly have superpowers.  If you go digging it's hard to find anyone with money and/or power who is absolutely clean.  Now if you give someone like that superhuman strength, invulnerability, flight, and heat vision?  We're all fucked.

But maybe you think you could resist the urge to just take whatever you want--or think you're owed.  Good thing we'll probably never have to find out.

How Important is the US Box Office?

Last month I read this article on Tony Laplume's blog about the top movies of 2018 in terms of money.  He listed both the domestic and worldwide top 10 and I thought it'd be interesting to crunch the numbers (or just look at them on Box Office Mojo) about just how much of the movie's earnings came from the USA (domestic) or from the international market. 

Taking a sample of 15 major releases of the last year, you can see the results are somewhat mixed:

The two horror movies on the list--Halloween (2018) and A Quiet Place--had the highest percentage of domestic earnings with Halloween's at 62%.  Solo, which was a flop for Star Wars movies, had 54% of its paltry earnings come from the USA.

When it comes to superheroes, note the two movies featuring black heroes as the lead characters had just over half their earnings come from the USA while Aquaman and Venom had only about 30% and 25% respectively come from the domestic market.  It's interesting that Black Panther and Aquaman had almost the same overall take and yet the distribution of that money was widely different.

Since I'm not an expert like Scott Mendelson I can't really draw a lot of conclusions about this.  There are of course some factors that come into play like some movies don't get into as many international markets.  That might explain why a smaller movie like A Quiet Place had most of its money come from the USA.  And that like Halloween and Deadpool 2 was rated R in the USA, which can also affect how many people here and around the world will be able to see it in theaters.

But I think you can see just how important the international market is becoming, to the point some movies are making 3/4 of their money from it.  If you track the numbers like Box Office Mojo there's probably been a growing share of the box office coming from international markets as the rest of the world catches up to the USA in terms of disposable income and access to big Hollywood movies.  That can be good but also it can be a bad thing as typically if you want a movie to do well overseas it means you can't take many risks for it in terms of casting minorities in lead roles or deal with LGBTQ material for instance.  So not everyone will be sharing the wealth.

With #TheOrville Off to Hulu is There Any Room For Sci-Fi on Broadcast TV?

During ComiCon in San Diego, it was announced that The Orville would be moving from Fox to Hulu for Season 3.  Which means I don't think there are any real science-fiction shows on the major four networks anymore.  Unless you want to count superhero shows like Agents of SHIELD on ABC (already scheduled for cancellation in 2021) which I don't.

Other than Syfy I'm not sure there's any real sci-fi on any broadcast networks anymore.  And even Syfy doesn't show all that much real sci-fi anymore.  They mostly seem to show crappy reality shows, wrestling, and lame Asylum movies like Mega Corgi vs Giant Tree Sloth.

Really sci-fi's history on ordinary TV has always been somewhat troubled.  The recurring problem is that sci-fi shows are more expensive to produce and don't easily get big ratings.  Even classic shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek were kept to shoestring budgets and often were perched on the edge of cancellation.  And there's a long list of shows like Firefly that got one season or maybe two before they met the network ax.

Last year Amazon picked up Syfy's The Expanse, the new season of which should be out this year, and now with Hulu picking up The Orville and developing a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy show it really does seem that streaming is the only hope for sci-fi programming anymore.  Besides those two shows you have Black Mirror on Netflix, the new Twilight Zone and Star Trek Discovery on CBS All Access, and soon at least one Star Wars show on Disney+ to name a few.

This is good for sci-fi fans, but the problem is that the streaming market is most likely a bubble that's going to burst in a couple of years like the dot-com bust in the early 2000s.  Once that bubble bursts and streaming companies are no longer tossing around money like a drunken trust fund kid at a strip club, how many sci-fi shows are going to survive?  I'm sure a few will since sci-fi shows have been around pretty much since TV began (and before that on radio, I guess) but if I'm looking to the future I'm not all that optimistic.

Is anyone else more optimistic?  Or maybe you know of some shows on broadcast TV that I missed.

The Importance of And

This is not a writing post.  This is a post about movie credits.

I'm not sure when it started.  Maybe it's always been around.  Anyway, if you watch movie credits there's usually a sort of order to it.  You have the stars of the movie and then some supporting players AND then you have "And" which is usually some supporting actor played by someone of note.  Like in the credits for The Dark Knight you have Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, AND Morgan Freeman.  So you have top billing going to the hero then some other people AND then single out one person to be last.  Is it just random?  I don't really think so.

When watching the credits for a movie (end or beginning) you can usually tell how big a movie is by the quality of the AND.  If the AND is someone like Morgan Freeman then it's definitely a big budget movie.  Or if the AND is some C or D-list "star" then it's like the movie isn't huge but they at least saved up some money to pay for someone people might have heard of.  If the AND is no one you've ever heard of, then it's probably a really low budget movie.

When you watch something like the Avengers movies that has so many notable names it's fun to try to guess who the AND might be.  Though it was weird to me that in Avengers Infinity War the AND was Chris Pratt.  I mean he seemed too main a character and really has Chris Pratt been around that long that he should be singled out like that?  Maybe his agent lobbied the hardest or got it written in the contract or something.

Along with and you also have WITH.  That's a way to single out multiple actors, but WITH is not really as important as AND.  I mean you're being singled out but there can be a lot of WITHs and only one AND so I maintain the AND is still more important.

Besides Infinity War there were a couple of other Marvel AND choices I disagreed with in the last couple of years.  For Black Panther there were a lot of great and important actors.  You had Angela Bassett who was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe.  You had Forest Whitaker who won an Oscar.  Maybe one of them would be your AND?  Nope.  The AND goes to...Andy Serkis.  Who was nominated for a Golden Globe but has never won an important award and is mostly known for playing CGI characters.  AND more importantly in the first major black superhero movie you give the AND to a white guy?  Really?!  It's like saying, "All these black actors are nice, but you know who's really important?  The white guy."  It'd be bad optics if anyone but me cared about this.

It's the same thing with Captain Marvel.  It's the second major female superhero movie and who does the AND go to?  A guy.  I mean OK Jude Law's been nominated for two Oscars and some Golden Globes but he never won anything.  Meanwhile you have Annette Bening who was nominated for 4 Oscars and won two Golden Globes and she's a woman but she's only a WITH?  Again it's like saying, "This accomplished woman is important BUT not as important as a man who's accomplished less."  Again, it's just bad optics.

Anyway, if you're watching a movie with friends, maybe bet each other on who will get the AND credit.  You might be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised.

On the Nature of Daylight

I probably could have made this a Facebook post but just as many people will care if I put it on my blog.

Anyway, I heard this song called "On the Nature of Daylight" on my Pandora "Nighty Night" station that I usually play at night.  When I heard it I thought it sounded like something from a movie because my station plays some soundtracks like Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, etc.

It turns out it's originally from Max Richter's album The Blue Notebooks in 2004.  But when I looked it up, I found out it has been on the soundtracks for Arrival, Shutter Island, and Stranger Than Fiction so you might have heard this song without realizing it.  I think it seemed familiar to me more because of Arrival than the other two because I've seen that one more recently.  And re-watching that movie the song is featured in both the beginning and the end of the movie; I was pretty sure it was in the end but not the beginning so I was half right.

Anyway, in my research I found out there was recently a new video made for it starring Elisabeth Moss of The Handmaid's Tale show, though not as that character.  I'm not sure if the link above is for that but here's another link if that doesn't work.

If you have Amazon Prime you can listen to the whole album on Amazon Music.  None of the other tracks are quite as good though one "Written in the Sky" is like a short piano version of this.  Actress Tilda Swinton provides vocals on some of the other tracks, but not this one.  By vocals I don't really mean singing; it's more of a spoken word kind of thing.

Anyway, to me this song feels like a sort of spiritual sequel to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" which has also been featured in a number of movies like Platoon and Prince of Tides.

They both start off slow and build to a finish, though Richter's doesn't quite build to the crescendo of Barber's.  And they're both inspired by nature:  Barber's Adagio was inspired by the flow of a river and Richter's is about daylight and entropy.  They're both really beautiful, at least to me.  Just take a listen and decide for yourself.  Though if that version of Barber's Adagio is too slow for you, look for the William Orbit version that's like a club mix of it.