The anti-Western

I've written in this space before how Die Hard works as a meta-level defense of the masculine American hero, with its tacit ridicule of McClane's doubters and naysayers in corporate sleazeball Harry Ellis and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T Robinson. Total Recall does something similar… both formally in its male fantasy plot, and informally during the pivotal pill scene with Dr. Edgemar. The evidence supporting Dr. Edgemar's argument that Quaid dreamed everything after going under at Rekall is rock-solid, but you the viewer reject it because the adventure you're on is too fun to not believe in, real world be damned.

Westerns on TV and the big screen featured the kinds of heros Die Hard extolled, but the genre suffered a mortal blow in the late '60s and '70s when a darkening of public thought retinged American history with cynicism and shame. The revisionist Western, featuring morally gray heros, became de rigueur.

If anyone was going to revive the Western, it would have been Clint Eastwood, star of Sergio Leonne's Dollars trilogy and other Western classics like Two Mules for Sister Sarah, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and my personal favorite, Pale Rider. Spoiler alert: He did not.

"We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work… I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST." –Sonia Chernus, screenwriter of The Outlaw Josey Wales

Unforgiven won the Academy Award for Best Picture and is hailed by many as the best Western of all time. It's supposedly so good that it's the reason no one has tried to make a Western in 30 years (except for the vastly more entertaining Tombstone). That's wrong. No one has tried to make a Western since Unforgiven because Unforgiven systematically deconstructed and destroyed the genre. As film critic Jason Hellerman says, "what we saw made us not want to look back for a long time."

If Die Hard and Total Recall tried to revive or at least venerate heroism and escapism, Unforgiven shoots them in the back and stomps them into the mud. It's brutal, nihilistic, and joyless. The "hero," an assassin who abandons his young children, would be the villain in any other movie. (He even has a Villains wiki page.) The "villain," a sheriff protecting a Wyoming town from assassins, would be the hero in any other movie. The inversion is masterfully executed, but I hesitate to call it "good."

Daggett: "I'll see you in hell, William Munny."

Munny: "Yeah." [shoots Daggett in the head]

An example of how this movie deconstructs the Western is its portrayal of "saloon girls." What some women did to keep food on the table in the Old West was rarely hinted at in Hays Code–era Hollywood, to the extent the hero could flirt with a prostitute and a child who happened to be watching would be none the wiser. Unforgiven is not so politic and duly earns its Restricted rating in the very first scene by showing a man butcher a prostitute's face because she laughed when she saw his penis.

If that doesn't sound like typical Western fare, that's because it's not. The point of that scene (in addition to initiate the plot) is to hit the viewer between the eyes with the vulgarity of the Old West. It's a comment less about the Old West and more about the genre that artfully obscured the vulgar and profane to tell you a story, maybe even a wholesome story about men with moral fiber. Put another way, those stories were lies. This, here, is unvarnished truth. Get it?

As if Eastwood's intent wasn't clear enough, there's a character called Beauchamp, a writer of pulp Western novels, who is portrayed as a coward who lives vicariously through his heros, who sugar-coats and glorifies violence. The sheriff takes him under his wing to teach him how the West really is: lawless, amoral, unheroic. Even the way gunfights play out comes down to dumb luck. You see? Everything is meaningless!

It's ironic when a fan of this movie talks about this movie with any kind of reverence when the movie all but screams that it doesn't want to be revered. This person might even say his favorite scene is when Eastwood's Bill Munny shoots up a saloon to avenge his friend. It's a great gunfight, and it stands out as the only time the ostensible hero lets morality direct his actions. The same gunfight with same set-up would have a bigger impact in a true Western.

It took chutzpah for Eastwood to make Unforgiven, an indictment of the genre that made him famous. I'd hold it against him personally if he didn't have oodles of good will stored up from everything else he's acted in and directed. But for those whom the Western is near and dear, I wouldn't be surprised if he's still unforgiven.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Managing the flow of information

One of the reasons I hated Tenet, the movie that flopped last summer at the height of the epidemic and failed to save old Hollywood, was the obscurity of its action. Some of this could have been fixed with better acting, editing, sound mixing, and musical scoring. But most of it owes to the central conceit of the movie, that people and things can pass through a portal and invert their passage through time.

The Protagonist: "The cause comes before effect."

Laura: "No. That's just the way we see time."

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to make a $200 million action movie that reverses the order of cause and effect. The result is action that's impossible to understand, a muddle that doesn't make sense until it ends—or starts, whatever.

I've thought about that movie and what I can learn from it a lot since last summer. These big-budget blockbusters have no equal in terms of production value, but their scripts, whether written by committee or by one man, consistently fall short. Tenet doesn't work because of the fatal flaw of reverse chronology. Nolan's so devoted to the concept he withholds information until after you needed it. The action, instead of thrilling, is confounding like a Rubik's cube and similarly lacking in kinetic energy.

That's not to say I don't make these kinds of mistakes. A writing skill I've yet to master is managing the flow of information to the reader. That's giving the reader what he needs before he needs it. No more, no less. It sounds simple, but you can get really mixed up writing a scene with just two people, each one trying to deceive the other. I was working on a book years ago, which I never finished, that had a scene just like that. I must have written 10 versions of that scene. I couldn't keep straight what the two men knew, what they were pretending to know, and what they didn't know.

My go-to tactic to manage the flow of information is to hide it from the POV character. This can be achieved through simple ignorance or deception by other characters. That necessitates a reason for the POV character's ignorance, such as he's new in town, or young and naive. In the case of deception—well, people lie for all kinds of reasons. If you can link that reason to a unique facet of the setting, you're doing well.

The Martian by Mike Weir is many things. What I admire about it is the amount of information Mike Weir includes without being boring. The choices he made for the main character's personality, the narrative structure, and all the screw-ups and surprises facilitated the exposition. That information was essential to the book's plot and tone, which created a vicarious feeling of working side-by-side with NASA engineers on a high-stakes space mission.

It's wild thinking about the general lack of information in the pre-Internet era. Remember when you had to look things up in an encyclopedia? Now I can find the answer to any question that pops into my head in seconds. That we can instantly satisfy our curiosity about any topic under the Sun caps our imaginations a bit. When Michael Crichton wrote Timeline, he counted on the fact that you couldn't see through his quantum deception without doctarate-level research. If he wrote that today, would he take the same risk with the facts, knowing we could fact-check him on the spot? If not, we would have been deprived of what I regard as his best book.

With so much information at hand, it takes as much time to discern what's important as it does to discern what's true. The book I'm writing now has stonemasonry in it. I know nothing about stonemasonry, but the Internet knows everything. I don't have time to become conversant in stonemasonry or a hundred other topics my book touches on. I don't want to regurgitate every fact about stonemasonry to show the reader the stonemasons in my book are the real deal, either. What a writer does is show the basic knowledge of what's necessary for the scene to unfold—to know what's important—and discard the rest.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Total Recall appreciation post

As a youngster growing up without cable, it was a special occasion when a new movie found its way onto network TV. Over the years I compiled a decent-sized collection of heavily edited action-adventure movies. My tape of Total Recall featured in a rotation that included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Tremors, Die Hard, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Tango and Cash. Between 1997 and '98 my parents signed us up for cable and Internet. With those new leisure time offerings and my burgeoning interest in video games and books, my tape collection was all but forgotten.

Until this past week I hadn't seen Total Recall in over 20 years, maybe 25. My memory of the story was fuzzy, but some parts stood out as clear as if I'd been there: the buggy female disguise, the conjoined twin/psychic, the famous pill scene, and Sharon Stone in a leotard.

As I watched Total Recall with fresh eyes, I was gobsmacked. Clocking in at just under 2 hours, the pacing is perfect, leaving not a single minute for your mind to wander, but at the same time not overwhelming you with exposition. The diversity of content on offer boggles the mind, and none of it feels forced or out of place. There are enough ideas for five movies here, and they cohere marvelously. Let's run through them:

• Futuristic Earth society
• Memory implants ("Your brain will not know the difference, or your money back.")
• Agents, double agents, and triple agents
• Advanced Martian colony
• An evil dictator depriving citizens air
• Psychic mutants
• Ancient alien reactor designed to terraform the atmosphere

Add to all that Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Arnold Schwarzenegger things, Paul Verhoeven's unique take on violence, and Jerry Goldsmith composing the score, and you have arguably the best science fiction movie of all time. It's an entertainment masterpiece!

I won't get into whether the fantastical plot is the very simulation Arnold's Quaid character paid Rekall to implant in his memory. That's a fun conversation with no right or wrong answer. What's clear from the movie's opening scenes is Quaid's reason for going to Rekall is a nagging feeling that a lot of men can relate to. "I feel like I was made for something more than this," he tells his wife. "I want to do something with my life, to be somebody." Perhaps you think this line is ironic coming from someone who looks like Arnold and who's married to someone who looks like Sharon Stone. I think it just goes to show you even men who "have it all" have fantasies of being the hero.

So, much like Die Hard which came out 2 years earlier, Total Recall is a full-throated apologia for heroism in a world that devalues the untamed virtues of men. They simply don't make movies like this anymore. They will again if I have anything to say about it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

'Cinderella': more than the sum of its parts

Being the father of two little girls, I've spent many a sleepy Saturday afternoon screening 1950's Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. The debate over which is better has come up now and then between me and my wife. As usual with meaningless arguments, they never reach a satisfying conclusion, even when I'm right.

In all seriousness, I think Cinderella is better. Although I love the visual style of Sleeping Beauty and the climactic showdown with Maleficent, Cinderella is more cohesive and thus more engaging. Allow me to explain. I'll assume you've seen both movies.

In Cinderella, the B plot featuring adorable talking mice and Lucifer, the malicious cat, complements the A plot, Cinderella's persecution by her stepmother and stepsisters. The mice repay Cinderella's kindness by helping to fashion her a dress for the royal ball, and later to free her from the attic room. Lucifer, who tries to stop the mice in the end, is effectively doing the stepmother's bidding by keeping Cinderella locked in her room. The mice's plight is her plight.

By contrast, when looking for a B plot in Sleeping Beauty, one comes up empty. Princess Aurora is shown to be friendly with the woodland creatures, but they disappear from the story when she goes for a sing and a stroll with Prince Phillip. The closest thing that comes to a B plot is the question of whether Phillip will marry Aurora, and the tension this creates between their fathers. Unlike the tension between the impatient king and bumbling Grand Duke in Cinderella that leads to the royal ball and the glass slipper fitting, the tension here goes nowhere. It's literally put on hold for the third act.

Another point of disfavor for me is the means by which that comes about. When Aurora touches Maleficent's spindle and falls into a deep sleep, the fairies' solution is to cast a sleeping spell over everyone in the kingdom until Aurora wakes up. Huh? Perhaps the fairy tale explains this better, but the movie executes this device poorly. It's only by dumb luck Phillip escapes the spell by going back to the cottage where he expects to meet Aurora. He's captured by Maleficent instead.

Now we come to the climactic third act. Here Sleeping Beauty has the action/adventure content that's more my speed. Phillip's duel with the dragon is spectacular, and I love that his shield of righteousness and sword of truth evokes Paul's advice to the church in Ephesus.

One can't help but regret Phillip wasn't the main character of Sleeping Beauty. It would have given the duel, and his subsequent waking of Aurora with a kiss, more punch. Thinking on it, without the clue in the title, it's debatable who the main character actually is. Other than falling in love with Phillip, Aurora does nothing to drive the plot forward, and she's absent for the third act. The fairies have the most consistent presence from beginning to end, but theirs is ostensibly a supporting role, first helping Aurora, then Phillip.

Well-formed narrative structure can lead to seeming contradictions, such as the payoff of the Grand Duke putting the glass slipper on Cinderella's foot surpassing Phillip's slaying the dragon. With Cinderella, nothing feels out of place. Every scene supports her as a character, highlighting her admirable qualities, unjust persecution, and yearning for happiness. I have to work harder to connect to Aurora.

I do love the visuals, though.

Interesting tidbit: Helene Stanley was the live-action model for both Cinderella and Princess Aurora.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

A sham of a farce

I find one of the hardest parts of writing is matching character and motive. The temptation is to jury-rig characters' motives to orchestrate a sequence of events I want. It's something Rian Johnson struggles with as well, as I've concluded after watching Knives Out.

• If you think you're going to die because your nurse accidentally injected a fatal amount of morphine in you, and you want to make sure she isn't prosecuted for murder after you die, what do you do? Do you tell everyone in the house what happened and bid your family a tearful farewell? Do you write a short letter explaining the honest mistake and sign it? Neither of those, actually. You slit your own throat to make it look like suicide, instruct the panic-stricken nurse to manufacture an iffy alibi, and hope the coroner doesn't notice the morphine in your system.


• If you're plan to frame your granddad's nurse for murdering your granddad goes awry when the police conclude it's a suicide, what do you do? Do you ask the police if your granddad was under the influence of mind-altering drugs, knowing the bloodwork will put suspicion on the nurse? No. You anonymously hire a private detective who may find anything under the Sun, which may or may not include the bloodwork. When your granddad's housekeeper tries to blackmail you, what do you do? Do you rough her up until she tells you everything she knows, then kill her? No. You leave her to die slowly so she can tell anyone who finds her that you're the killer.


• If you're a cop investigating a suspicious death of an old man with an inheritance his family stands to benefit from, what do you do? Do you look at the bloodwork to see if he was under the influence? Do you take the nurse's medical bag into evidence? Do you review all available security footage of the estate to rule out foul play? Do you examine the study where the supposed suicide took place for suspicious entry? Nope. You do none of those things.


• If you're a private detective who's brought in by an anonymous client to find something the cops haven't found surrounding a suspicious suicide, what do you do? Do you conduct an immediate review of the scene and of the chain of custody of the evidence? Do you question potential suspects when they conveniently turn up at other crime scenes and subsequently evade the police? No. According to Rian Johnson, you carelessly disregard chain of custody and let potential suspects run nondescript errands minutes after leading police on a chase while you wait in the car. Good job.


• Last, but least, if you're a housekeeper whose boss just killed himself, and you spot his grandson a week later rummaging through the nurse's medical bag in the study, what do you do? Do you ask him what he's doing? Do you tell the police and let them sort it out? Of course not! Here's what you do: You assume the grandson poisoned your boss and proceed to blackmail him; you ask your cousin who works for the coroner to give you access to your boss's bloodwork; you then mail a photocopy of only the header of the bloodwork to the grandson and demand a secret meeting; and at the meeting with the person you suspect of murder, you bring no friends and nothing to defend yourself with. Well played.

It's not that the characters are stupid. It's that their motives for acting make no sense. Because Rian Johnson needed the movie to happen, he jury-rigged the characters' motives.

Farce may be the most difficult type of movie to execute because it's wink-at-the-audience funny as well as internally consistent in the genre its poking fun at. Hot Fuzz, Team America: World Police, and Tropic Thunder are excellent farces. Knives Out is a bottom-tier farce because of its baffling plot problems. The actors elevate the poor writing to mere mediocrity. The profane treatment of family is not a point in its favor.

Due to the 2020 demise of tentpole movies, a sequel to Knives Out, which was produced for a mere $40 million, seems inevitable. Don't see it. Read a book instead. Like mine! If you like hard sci-fi, check out Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll respond as soon as I can.

The best Christian movies

…are movies that aren't explicitly Christian. They're secular, but whether they know it or not they favorably convey Christian teaching. This may have been intentional with American movies of the past, but I think it's more accidental in American movies today and in movies from non-Christian countries. So let's dive in.

• The Big Country. Easterner James McKay, played by Gregory Peck, escorts his fiance west to her father's ranch. Referred to repeatedly and mockingly as "the dude," McKay refuses to defend himself against the slights and insults that are thrown his way by his father-in-law's ranch hands. Everyone reads his internal confidence and strength of character as weakness, including his fiance, but he doesn't care what they think. When challenged to a fight by Charlton Heston, he agrees, and they fight to a draw. "What did it prove?" he asks, gasping, afterwards. The look on Heston's face says it all. In my experience, there's no better cinematic example of turning the other cheek or being slow to anger than this movie.


• Nausciaä of the Valley of the Wind. One of my personal favorites! A young princess, the de facto leader of a meek yet thriving valley, must meet two threats to her people: neighboring kingdoms fighting over a powerful weapon, and a toxic jungle encroaching on the kingdom's border. Nausicaä advocates peace and detente with the jungle, but her message loses traction as the neighboring kingdoms wrangle for control of the means to annihilate the jungle and each other. The ohmu, the sentries of the jungle, can withstand any weapon man can wield, and threaten to overrun the valley. On the brink of disaster, the princess makes a final overture of peace to the ohmu, showing that love, not hate, is truly man's most powerful weapon. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)


• Flight. This comes with a caveat, as there's rampant drug abuse, profanity, and explicit sexual content throughout the movie. For that reason, I don't recommend it to Christians who are already familiar with Christian doctrine on sin. However, to secular people, this is a sneaky sermon in a movie. The narrative thread of the movie is Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, seeking exoneration from wrongdoing in his heroic crash-landing of a doomed commercial jet. (He was drunk while piloting the plane.) As an NTSB hearing looms, his freedom is at risk unless he can pass himself off as someone he is not (that is, sober and in control of his life). He tragically fails. Something becomes apparent in the movie's final scenes: Freedom from sin in many ways is more liberating than license to do whatever you want.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Is Inception overrated?

Short answer: Yes.

When you see an accomplished storyteller come down so far from his creative peak, you're forced to come to terms with where the cracks first started to show. Despite the merits of that piece, it's tainted by the artist's faults which would become more obvious in subsequent pieces, like a pretty woman who loses her mystique the more you get to know her.

For Christopher Nolan, that slide began with Inception.

Ten years ago you may have left the theater blown away by the thrilling visuals, the intertwining dream sequences, the booming Hans Zimmer score, and the subjectivism of reality (that Total Recall and The Matrix executed better). You may have thought it was one of the best movies you'd ever seen. I thought so.

We know now the emperor has no clothes. Nolan's first movie after Inception was The Dark Knight Rises, bloated, poorly paced, and scatterbrained. Then came Interstellar, whose plot in service of a theme of love completely falls apart in the second half. The final straw was Dunkirk, barely thrilling, deliberately confusing, and painful to the ears.

(Temper your expectations for Tenet accordingly.)

Nolan is a talented filmmaker, but his lack of restraint is his undoing. Inception tries to do too much. It's a bildungsroman set in an action movie set in a heist movie set in a sci-fi movie. Even if you execute all the individual elements perfectly, the balancing act is impossible. You risk giving the audience whiplash with all the abrupt narrative shifts. It's how a 2.5-hour movie can feel rushed. When the credits roll, I'm not sure what to feel. I'm just overwhelmed.

My biggest beef with Inception is the incessant expositional dialogue. Nolan said the decision to hit the heist movie tropes helped justify the large amount of exposition. The problem is there's more exposition needed to tell this story. It's not just that Cobb is trying to get home to see his kids. It's that he can't get home because his wife killed herself and framed him for her murder because he incepted the idea in her mind that her world isn't real. This exposition is needlessly drawn out over three scenes, two of which are momentum killers.

Another problem with Inception's exposition relates to the rules of shared dreaming: They keep being rewritten. One rule very clear from the start is that you wake up when you die in a dream. Not so in the Robert Fischer job because of the sedative they use. Useful information that Cobb should have shared with the team, yes? When Fischer dies, Cobb assumes the mission failed, but someone has the bright idea of recovering Fischer from limbo. Wait, you can just go into limbo and revive a dead guy one dream level up? This on-the-fly rule bending feels more like a convenience to the script than a natural outgrowth of the setting.

The fights in Inception are poorly shot and poorly choreographed. Let's take a scene in the beginning of the movie. Arthur is crouched next to a sleeping Saito while Nash is trying to wake Cobb who is in a chair on the edge of a bathtub. Arthur tells Nash to dunk Cobb in the tub. At the same time Saito wakes up and pulls a gun on Arthur. (Why is there a gun under Saito's pillow? Never mind.) Cobb falls in the water and wakes up. Saito walks past Arthur, takes Nash hostage, and points the gun at Arthur. Cobb knocks Saito down from behind. Nash elbows Saito in the face and knocks him out. The sequence is unrealistic and makes Arthur look feckless. It's unclear why this needed to happen and why it had to happen this way. A lot of the fight scenes are like this, the spinning hallway fight being a notable exception.

There are countless little oversights in Inception that bug me. Something as simple as how Cobb can't see his kids' faces resounds thematically for his tortured soul, but think about it. The kids' nanny can't email him a picture? Projections of Cobb's subconscious repeatedly interfere with the job, but no one else's projections interfere. Why not? Cobb, not the stewardess, slips the sedative in Fischer's drink on the plane. Why? I could go on.

All that being said, I don't dislike Inception. I like it for what it does well, namely its score in service of the tempo of different dream levels, stunning visual design, and how it shows the invasion of someone's mind and the planting of an idea.

The latter is of particular interest to me as a writer. Cobb's simple, well-meaning deception drove his wife to kill herself, an unrivaled setup for a tragic hero that should be front and center in the narrative, not diminished to a revelation after the 2-hour mark. Just as poignant is Fischer's reconciliation with the memory of his father. The finale in the vault just feels right as the culmination of the plot and character progression. My eyes still water when Fischer sees the pinwheel in the safe.

So, in all a good movie, but far from Nolan's best, and farther still from the best. Here's my ranking of his movies. (I haven't seen Following.)

1. Memento
2. The Dark Knight
3. The Prestige
4. Batman Begins
5. Inception
6. The Dark Knight Rises
7. Insomnia
8. Interstellar
9. Dunkirk

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

If you're looking for something to read, you can read the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Die Hard and heroism

I like Die Hard a lot. Mostly because, like The Abyss, it leverages its setting to create unique and thrilling set pieces. Instead of 2,000 feet under the ocean surface, we're 30 stories up in a skyscraper. The setting is heavily involved in shaping the plot, and I find that aspect of action movies to be very satisfying. (As do most people, I suspect. The "Die Hard in X" action sub-genre is a testament to this.)

Die Hard has more things going for it, though, like the buildup to the action. This sets the movie apart in my opinion. It takes its time setting up John McClane as a stuffy jerk. People don't remember this, but the first 20 minutes show you a man who's easy to dislike. He has a wandering eye. He curses under his breath when he finds out his wife is using her maiden name. He makes an ugly comment about Japan not celebrating Christmas. He starts an argument with his wife soon after they meet. Bruce Willis fills McClane's shoes so comfortably that you buy in to who he is and why he's at Nakatomi Plaza. Then the action starts.

The action in Die Hard has gravitas. There's a scene early on that shows McClane stopping an elevator so he can get on its roof. It's a short and simple scene, easy to execute, but does so much to ground the action in the setting and show McClane's cunning. After seeing that, you readily suspend your disbelief when he stops his freefall by catching the edge of an air duct.

I wrote a year-and-a-half ago that McClane is not an archetype. I was wrong. He is many archetypes. He's the reluctant hero. He's the fish out of water. He's the scrappy underdog. He's the red-blooded American working class. His wife is the strong independent woman, then the damsel in distress. Hans Gruber is the suave criminal mastermind and the cold-blooded executioner. Whoever says you shouldn't use archetypes doesn't know how to use archetypes.

The two biggest roles after McClane, his wife, and Gruber belong to Al Powell and Dwayne Robinson. Good cop and bad cop, respectively. Or so I thought until this video by David V Stewart made me rethink it.

Powell is the true believer, the man who processes what his senses and instincts tell him and reaches the correct, although improbable, conclusion. Robinson is the skeptic, the one who's mind is made up and won't let something unexpected push him off what he's staked his career on knowing.

We love Powell and hate Robinson because we want to see McClane redeem himself as a heroic man, a protector of the innocent. There's a mini-metanarrative at work here. Powell represents our hope in great, self-sacrificing men, while Robinson represents our cynicism about selfish human nature. When McClane and Powell hug at the end, the validation of hope resounds.

Roger Ebert famously hated the Powell-Robinson dynamic. I admit it's a little lowbrow, but it's effective in raising the movie's stakes beyond the lives of the hostages at Nakatomi Plaza. Can modern man be virtuous and strong? Do American heroes live on in these times? Die Hard shouts yes.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

The brilliance of Heat

Heat is my favorite movie. Its taut, visceral, character-driven narrative is something I've always wanted to capture in my writing.

There's a scene towards the end of the movie in which master thief Neil, played by Robert DeNiro, and his girlfriend are driving to the airport to flee the country. En route, he receives a phone call from his handler notifying him of the whereabouts of a fellow thief who double-crossed him. After he hangs up the phone, the camera lingers on his face, and you can tell he's thinking, choosing between an act of wrath and vengeance, and getting away clean.

Earlier in the movie, Neil, feeling heat from the police, asks his crew whether they want to go through with one last heist. Michael, played by Tom Sizemore, rationalizes his desire to go through with it, even though for him the reward probably isn't worth the risk since he's financially secure. Neil tells him so, and Michael's true colors show. He says, "For me, the action is the juice. I'm in."

Both scenes are so beautifully straightforward and understated in their gravity. The characters make their choices, their fates in their hands. Forget the perfectly choreographed heists and the best urban gunfight ever put to film. What really propels Heat into the stratosphere is its characters.

The movie has a dense, linear plot that works in the movie's margins, usually in the background, offscreen, and at the ends of scenes. The focus of every scene, rather, is on the characters, and there are a lot of them. Their goals, conflicts, and vulnerabilities are richly exposed. We see them cope with their lives, good guys and bad guys alike.

DeNiro and Al Pacino obviously do much of the heavy lifting, but everyone has a moment to shine. They're not complicated people, but they have depth and the script shows that in a direct, sophisticated way that I haven't seen done so well in any other movie. The brevity of these scenes is key, as drawing them out would have bogged them down in clichés and melodrama.

The rubric of a post-industrial Los Angeles provides the backdrop for these broken people scrabbling for meaning in their lives. These people are flesh and blood products of their environment, yet they are not robbed of agency. Their choices, as explained above, carry mortal weight. And often they lead to suffering, which is a poignant commentary on life.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of my new sci-fi book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

What The Abyss does so well

The Abyss is not my favorite James Cameron movie, nor do I find the novelization by Orson Scott Card very compelling. Most people's assessment of the The Abyss is that it's either an underrated gem or it's bloated and has a bad third act. I tend to fall in the former camp, although when I look at The Abyss, I usually don't think about the third act at all.

My fondness for this movie is disproportionate to my assessment of its quality. What I admire about The Abyss--what I think it nails perfectly--are strong characters and taking advantage of the unique setting to drive the action.

First of all, I love how The Abyss establishes the main characters' personalities and lets them steer the plot. Coffey, as the gung ho, increasingly unstable antagonist, makes decisions that Bud, the go-along-to-get-along hero, must adapt to. Eventually, though, Bud must oppose Coffey for the survival of his crew, whom he cares deeply for.

Lindsey, the bull-headed engineer, cares more about her oil rig than anything else, but she changes when she discovers alien visitors. She's what I call an idea person; she falls in love with ideas--first her patented underwater oil rig design, then inquiry into alien life. Her personality and newfound fascination with aliens chaffes the crew-first Bud and the paranoid Coffey, who sees the aliens as a threat.

The B plot, the reconciliation between estranged husband and wife Bud and Lindsey, meshes well with the various plot beats and gives oomph to the stakes in the second and third acts.

Despite the claustrophobic setting--more on that in a bit--the plot gives these characters ample room to breathe. All of them shine as their wills and individuality have direct impact on key plot points.

What I really want to talk about is the action. The Abyss takes place at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea on an oil rig that is designed to operate at extreme water depth and pressure. The rig is supported by a barge on the surface via an umbilical, by which the rig is fed oxygen. In the first act, the barge drifts off course because of a hurricane, dragging the rig by the umbilical along the ocean floor, tossing the crew about like rag dolls. The crane on the barge then detaches and falls to the ocean floor, nearly crushing the rig before falls into a trench and dragging the rig even farther. The rig stops, poised on the edge of the trench. It is very nearly torn apart, subjected to extreme mechanical and electrical failure, then parts of the rig are flooded. For the rest of the movie, the crew face a pending oxygen deficit.

This setup to the rest of the story brilliantly draws from the novel elements of the setting to excite the audience and boost the tension to breathless, white-knuckle levels. But you ain't seen nothing yet. The second act is coming.

After some alien encounters and jousting between Coffey's SEALs and the crew, the mentally unravelling Coffey decides to act. He sequesters the crew and prepares one of the submersibles to deploy a nuclear warhead, which is programmed to strike the suspected alien base. Bud swims outside the rig through freezing water to reach the diving pool and fight Coffey. Coffey gets away and Bud dives to stop the nuke from deploying. Lindsey arrives in another submersible and a duel between Coffey and Lindsey ensues. Coffey's submersible is disabled, and he sinks into the trench and dies. Lindsey's submersible floods and she drowns. Bud carries her back to the rig and administers CPR, miraculously bringing her back to life. Whew!

The deep-sea environment, the layout of the rig, the submersibles, the dive suit... all these pieces that are exposited in the first act are put to excellent use to create thrilling action set pieces in the second act. This sequence feels like a slow devolution of the technology that enables man to survive at extreme depths, until at the end of it we're left with the simple act of reviving someone from drowning.

I can't think of a better example of a movie integrating its setting with the execution of its action-driven storyline. I took lessons from The Abyss when thinking about how I wanted the action to play out in Tendrils to the Moon, first in space, then on the surface of the Moon. I won't pretend that I succeeded on the same level, but that's the effect I was aiming for.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. I invite you to read the first 3 chapters of Tendrils to the Moon for free, and see if the last 9 chapters are worth your time. The paperback version is on sale at Amazon for $8.99. The ebook is still a mere 99 cents, and is available in a variety of formats via Smashwords.