The Mark of Kane.

The whole thing started with one of those odd leaps for which the internet has become famous. You know, those The Carpenter and the Walrus moments when you're looking at shoes and ships and sealing wax and end up doing a search for cabbages and kings?

In this case, it started on one of those list sites, the ones that show you galleries of "Disney for Adults" or tell you "The Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sperm".*  I honestly don't remember what the list that caught my eye was dealing with, but the keynote image was from the movie adaptation of Solomon Kane, and it occurred to me that although I knew that a film version had been in production, I'd never seen the results anywhere. Surely it must have been released by now, I thought.

So off I went in search of Solomon Kane.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Solomon Kane is perhaps the second best known creation of pulp author Robert E. Howard - his best known, of course, being Conan the Barbarian.  Unlike Conan, Kane's adventures are set in the more familiar historical venue of Elizabethan England, although many of Kane's adventures take place in Northern Africa, where he fights vampires, zombies, and (of course) nameless things from before the dawn of Time.  

Solomon Kane, as described by Howard in Red Shadows**, the character's August 1928 Weird Tales debut, was:

A tall man, as tall as Le Loup he was, clad in black from head to foot, in plain, close-fitting garments that somehow suited the somber face. Long arms and broad shoulders betokened the swordsman, as plainly as the long rapier in his hand. The features of the man were saturnine and gloomy. A kind of dark pallor lent him a ghostly appearance in the uncertain light, an effect heightened by the satanic darkness of his lowering brows. Eyes, large, deep-set and unblinking, fixed their gaze upon the bandit, and looking into them, Le Loup was unable to decide what color they were. Strangely, the mephistophelean trend of the lower features was offset by a high, broad forehead, though this was partly hidden by a featherless hat.

That forehead marked the dreamer, the idealist, the introvert, just as the eyes and the thin, straight nose betrayed the fanatic.

This fanatical idealist, armed with rapier and flintlock, appeared in twelve short stories and three poems, and like Conan made the leap to comic adaptations many years ago.  On that basis, it would seem only a matter of time before the movie world turned its gaze upon this grim Puritan righter of wrongs, who at least offers script writers a bit more depth and complexity than his barbarian colleague.

However, as with Conan, there's always that possibility that the character might have suffered in translation, so I decided to look for an evaluation copy online before investing in a DVD or Blu-ray version. A little casual investigation revealed that the film had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, which seemed like more than enough time for a few bootleg versions to have made their way to the Internet. Now, normally in these situations one is spoiled for choice, and in a way, I was, but not in the usual way.

First I downloaded what turned out to be a very nicely dubbed Russian version, passed on innumerable French and Spanish copies, then found an English version which, although it weighed in at an acceptable 1.2 GB, was a terrible copy made by shooting the screen of a TV set, and finally found a reasonably good English version - which lost sync on the sound about an hour in. Then there was the French version subtitled in Korean...

Okay, obviously something is up here.

Having booked the day off in an attempt to use up vacation time from 2010, I decided to bite the bullet, trot over to FutureShop on Broadway and satisfy my curiosity by purchasing a copy. Or so I thought. Nothing on the shelf in either the DVD or Blu-ray sections, not even a Solomon Kane divider.  Okay, so off downtown to HMV. Nope, not there, either. Just on spec, I checked the downtown FutureShop - nothing again.

With a bit of a frustrated frown, I returned home to purchase a copy online, only to discover that there was nothing on either amazon.ca or chapters.indigo.ca.  Ironically, you can buy fifteen different versions of the movie poster on amazon.ca, but not the actual movie.  Amazon.com had a DVD version, but only in a European region code, nothing that would play on a North American player.

Subsequent investigation revealed that not only had there not been a North American theatrical release, the scheduled Region 1 DVD release date of June 2010 seemed to have come and gone without result as well. I also discovered that the movie was produced in a co-operative British-French-Czech effort, which might explain why North American distributors had turned their back on it as a "foreign" film, in spite of good reviews, acceptable box office, and noteworthy DVD sales overseas - in fact, Solomon Kane was the top selling DVD and Blu-ray disk for its first week of release in the UK.

My impression from the various downloaded versions was that although unfortunately the plot of the movie version isn't derived directly from any of the original Howard stories, the film admirably captures the spirit of the character. Unlike most heroic fantasy movies, it takes itself completely seriously - there are no bumbling sidekicks, no slapstick humour, and lead actor James Purefoy offers a convincing and believable portrayal of a man who has attempted to redeem himself by turning his back on violence and returning to his faith, but who abandons that attempt in order to save an innocent.  If I had to sum it up, the creators of the movie handled their material with respect, which is not a statement I'd feel comfortable making in regards to 90% of the fantasy movies that I've seen (Peter Jackson's treatment of The Lord of the Rings being an obvious exception.)

And maybe that's the reason for its lack of acceptance in the North American market. Fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote an article entitled Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? in which she talks about what she sees as a basic American distrust of fantasy, or at least of fantasy as an aspect of adult life, which would go a long way to explain Van Helsing, The Scorpion King, or the Conan movies, with their self-conscious nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach to the genre.

Is Solomon Kane a brilliant fantasy movie? No, not really, as far as I can tell it doesn't rise very far above its roots in 1920s pulp fiction. But it's a serious fantasy movie, and that if nothing else should deserve a little recognition.

- Sid

* Just for the record, I was there for "Starcraft II Wallpapers".  Frankly, I feel that I know all that I really need to know about sperm, thank you.

** Available as a free download at:  http://manybooks.net/titles/howardrother07Red_Shadows.html

 

This, That, and the Other.

Just some quick updates regarding previous postings.

Whatever book that's from.

Okay - the pivotal scene at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where the dragon fights the giant sea serpent/leech from Edmund's nightmares at the Isle of the Dark, where they've gone to find the last of the seven magical Swords of Aslan which will allow them to dispel the evil and rescue the islanders who have been sent as offerings to the Darkness? Very well presented in the movie version, I thought - which is probably good, considering that it doesn't have the least connection with the original text.

Doctor Who: The Next Generation?

"New teeth - that's weird."

David Tennant's first line as Doctor Who.

Ex-Doctor Who David Tennant is now engaged to girlfriend Georgia Moffett*, the woman who played his cloned daughter in a 2008 episode of the show and who is the actual daughter of another ex-Doctor Who, Peter Davison.  And they're expecting a baby. Forget new teeth, David, this is weird.

Fame is where you find it.

Writer and ex-coworker Annie quit her job a few months ago in order to work full time on her young adult fantasy novel.  Wow, imagine if she turns out to be the next J. K. Rowling and people flock to the posting on my blog to read her first interview!

Meh - somehow I doubt it will be enough to get me onto Oprah.

Fun for the whole family.

I somehow missed the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road when it was in commercial release, and had some difficulty finding it at a reasonable price after its release to DVD. (Odd how some movies never seem to get onto the 2 for $20 shelves at HMV. For example, District 9 has just now come down in price as well, but I'm debating going Blu-ray for that one.) However, as part of my holiday gift certificate purchases, I found a cheap copy at Amazon.ca and dropped it into my shopping cart.

Without reprising the plot, let's just say that the movie beautifully (if not completely faithfully) captures the desperate, nihilistic tone of the novel.  Okay, maybe "beautifully" isn't the right word here, but you get the idea.

If you can't say something nice.

And finally, words cannot express my pleased astonishment at having received a comment from Scott Francis, the author of The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, on my posting about his book. Good thing my comments were positive!  But I think that it would be a salutary experience for everyone who's put their opinion of someone else's work online to have the object of their criticism reply in person. 

- Sid

* By the way, Ms. Moffett has huge geek cred - in addition to being a Doctor's daughter, The Doctor's Daughter, and the Doctor's fiancée and the mother of his child (perhaps his daughter), her mother, Sandra Dickinson, played Trillian in the BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  As they say in Wayne's World, "We're not worthy..."

 

Virtuality 2: Fallout 3

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

William Gibson, Disneyland With The Death Penalty

To my surprise and disappointment, I've just reached the conclusion of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, the current version of the Fallout game franchise.  Based on my reactions, you might think that I didn't enjoy the game, but my surprise and disappointment were at the fact that the plotline of the game had reached its climax - in my mind, I was far from finished playing. 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned virtual realities and the fact that millions of people now spend a lot of time immersed in some digitally manufactured world or another.  For the last couple of months, I've been one of those people as I crept through the wreckage of Washington DC in 2277, and wandered the blasted landscape that surrounds it.

Fallout 3 is set in a future that results from an alternative America, an America that seemed to have stopped developing culturally in the middle of the last century.  There's a 50's aesthetic to everything: buildings, weapons, robots, even hairdos.  It's especially noticeable in the wrecked cars that dot the landscape, which explode if shot, leaving behind a legacy of radiation - apparently they're powered by uranium rather than premium unleaded.  This design aesthetic is matched somewhat by the cultural feel of the game, with its rampant anti-communist sentiments and reliance on justice from the end of the gun.

In this world, it's a war in 2077 with the Chinese communists which has led to the downfall of society. The player controls a character who has been raised in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, but who leaves at the age of 19 to follow his father out into the unknown radioactive world outside.

And that was the part of the game that impressed me the most, the almost endless blasted wasteland that the area around Washington has become.

For any readers who are unfamiliar with the basic first-person shooter paradigm, the action generally takes place in what is generally referred to as a dungeon-based system, derived from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons tradition. It's basically rooms - admittedly, rooms of differing sizes and dimensions, with stairs or hills or elevators or windows or walls, but essentially rooms.  You walk in HERE, and you exit THERE.  Games like Halo have expanded the landscape, but essentially one follows the path laid out by the designers.  You kill everything in the way, find the exit, and you're on to the next set of rooms, never to go back.

Fallout 3 has its share of "dungeons" in the form of caverns, subways and buildings, but they're all part of a huge area known as the Capitol Wasteland.  The Wasteland is a vast, sprawling interface between locations, marked by burned buildings, collapsed freeways, pools of toxic radioactive waste, giants scorpions, and the occasional distant thud of a boobytrap explosive being triggered.

The scenery is marvelous.  The game takes place over time, and so the player sees the Wasteland at all times of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the lighting effects match all of these time perfectly.  If you come over the crest of a hill, the sun will get in your eyes and blind you, and the night time landscape is a flat mix of bluish grey that effectively conceals all sorts of dangers.  Dustdevils swirl over the shattered pavement, and the wind stirs the dried grass as you walk through it.  Streets and buildings are littered with the detritus of the American Way of Life:  lawnmowers, cups, empty bottles, and a thousand and one other items to be salvaged and sold for the currency of choice - bottle caps.

It's not an endless landscape, one does eventually discover the borders, and a critical eye will spot that there is a library of stock elements that sometimes repeat - note the identical mirror-image trees to the left in the picture above.  But even with its limitations, the Wasteland is an astonishing creation in terms of size, variation, and unpredictability.  Roving bands of mutants or raiders can appear at any time, and it's never possible to return to a location without the possibility that the enemies that were disposed of during your last visit have been replaced by new and different challenges.

The other element of the game that really set it apart for me is the moral compass that it presents. From the very early stages in Vault 101, every action and interaction, every choice and decision, has its consequences in terms of karma.  Are you polite or rude at your 10th birthday party?  Do you speak with Old Lady Palmer or ignore her to harass people for gifts?

This approach continues when you enter the outside world and are faced with more significant moral challenges. Most empty houses are unowned, and as such the possessions therein are up for grabs.  Enter someone's home or business, and you can still take things, but your karma diminishes and you may be shot by someone - or you can shoot them and take whatever you want.  If you find a bound captive after killing some cannibal mutants, do you free them or ignore them?

Apparently I'm quite a good person at heart.  I killed hundreds of people, but they were all evil.  I looted scores of houses and buildings, but they were all empty and ownerless.  I freed slaves, refused to become a hired killer, and gave water to the beggar outside of Megaton, the town built around an unexploded atomic bomb - which I defused to save the inhabitants from radiation poisoning instead of blowing it all up for 500 caps.

Having finished the game with a ranking of "Saviour of the Wastelands", I'm a bit tempted to go back and play it again as an absolute bastard.  If nothing else, I'd like to find out what the consequences are - it would sadden me deeply to discover that it really doesn't matter.

- Sid