Valley Girl.

Valentine's Day 2019 will see the release of Alita: Battle Angel, James Cameron's return to the big screen as writer and producer, with Robert Rodriguez in the director's chair.  The movie is based on Japanese writer/artist Yukito Kishiro's 1990 manga series, which was translated into English and republished by Viz Comics in 1992 - as far as I know, I still have three or four years of the black and white Viz editions tucked away in storage with the rest of my comics.

The comic book version of Battle Angel Alita tells the tale of a have/have not world where the sky is dominated by the isolated floating city of Tiphares*, which rains down its trash onto the Junkyard that lies below. Cyberphysician Daisuke Ido, an exile from the city, is wandering through the piles of junk in search of spare parts when he stumbles upon a discarded cyborg head and upper torso which still holds life.  He takes this fragment of a person back to his laboratory and repairs it.

He names his discovery Alita  - she has no memories of her name, or of her life before her re-awakening in the lab.   However, when she discovers that Ido has a second life as a bounty hunter, she also learns that her subconscious mind contains an instinctive knowledge of Panzer Kunst -  the "Armoured Art", an acrobatic cyborg martial arts technique originally created for zero-gravity combat.
 
The comic follows Alita as she also becomes a bounty hunter, finds - and loses - love, participates in the brutal and deadly sport of Motorball, and eventually ends up as a ground agent for the rulers of Tiphares.  From what I gather from the trailers, the movie combines the first three parts of Alita's life into a single plot.  Based on those same trailers, the movie completely nails the visual style of the comics - and that's where I'm concerned.

For the most part, the quality of the art direction is a good thing. The sets look good, and the casting is spot-on:  Christoph Waltz is perfect for Alita's enigmatic saviour Dr. Ido, Mahershala Ali is identical to the villainous Vector, and the glimpses that we see of the more robotic cyborgs are an excellent evocation of the over-the-top cyberpunk look of the manga.

However, it's the character of Alita, as played by 33-year-old actress Rosa Salazar, that worries me.  Her digitally reworked face is intended to match the stylized manga convention for wide-eyed female characters, and I can't help but feel that it pushes her character into the trap that has captured so many computer-generated characters:  the Uncanny Valley.

 

The concept of the Uncanny Valley was introduced by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the negative reaction that people often have to near-duplicates of humanity.  As representations of a person get closer and closer to reality, the response becomes more and more positive up until a point where it dips down sharply before ascending once again.  That dip in the curve is the Uncanny Valley.

The problem is that we perceive these almost-but-not-quite perfect copies of humanity as being weird or creepy - the "uncanny" part of the term.

Computer animation is constantly flirting with the Valley. The characters in the 2007 film Beowulf, 2001's  Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express from 2004 and the digital Princess Leia** from Rogue One in 2016 are often cited as prime examples of Valley - characters that come disconcertingly close to achieving life, but not close enough.  The Alita that I've seen in the trailers, with her enlarged anime eyes, may be sliding into the Valley as well.

It seems odd to pick on her modified facial features when the movie is full of extravagant combinations of human and machine,  but as the concept of the Valley suggests, it's the closeness to actual humanity that creates the disconnect.  The less human a character looks, the less likely they are to trigger that sense of dissonance that characterizes the Uncanny Valley.

That being said, I'm willing to trust Cameron's instincts.  After all, the same sort of comments might be made about the semi-feline blue aliens from Avatar, and audiences seemed to have no problem spending close to three billion dollars at the box office to experience their world.

But even then, unlike Neytiri and the Na'vi, Alita is actually intended to be almost human - is she human enough? We'll see what the audience decides on the 14th.

- Sid

* There are some odd changes from the Japanese language version to the Viz release:  the city of Salem becomes Tiphares, Junk Iron City changes to the Junkyard, and Gally is reborn as Alita.  The movie version obviously kept her  new name, but I don't know where the rest of the proper nouns ended up.

** Digital Grand Moff Tarkin was a bit more positively received - it's a fine line.

" If I don’t get a rose tonight, it’s the biggest upset of all time."

"My brand is the pensive gentleman. He could have a glass of good scotch, he could have a book in his hand, he could have a flower in his hand giving it to a lady."

Jordan Kimball, Season 14, The Bachelorette

- Sid

Where we're going next.

Canada's most renowned astronaut, Colonel Chris Hadfield, will be hitting the road to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing* in his "Exploration: Where We're Going Next" tour. The tour will see the heavily decorated astronaut, engineer and pilot discussing the history and future of space exploration.

Regular visitors to The Infinite Revolution will already be aware that I'm a bit of a Chris Hadfield fan:  as such, probably not a surprise that I've just purchased two tickets to his next speaking tour - which, surprisingly, appears to be restricted to Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.  Hmmm...visiting friends in Western Canada at the end of April and decided to do a few talks for beer money, Commander? 

- Sid

* Which is actually not until July 20th**, so he's jumping the gun a little.

** And Neil Armstrong didn't step onto the surface until the 21st.

"Under a red blood moon."

"Now that's some science fiction stuff!"

Karli Thomas

Anyone else go out to watch the total lunar eclipse tonight?

- Sid

The Omega Calculation.

 

Last night I dreamt about the end of the universe being discovered by Caltech physicist Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory - how ironic that my subconscious mind would want a show named after the start of the universe to answer the question of when it was going to end.

I have no idea where my dream came from. We did watch an episode last night, and there's been a lot of speculation as to how the show, now in its last season, is going to wrap things up, but I can't imagine that they'll take the extreme route that I created during REM sleep.

The elevator pitch for my dream is simple: Leonard is working on his own project out of envy for Sheldon and Amy's super asymmetry theory and accidentally discovers the calculus that maintains the universe, the actual math that drives the wheel of time.  However, it's not good news: he also determines that the solution to his Time Equation is finite - the wheel will cease to turn, and very soon.*

He's unable to convince anyone that he's right, and in the final moments before Time literally runs out, Leonard throws his arms around Sheldon in a final hug, and says, "Oh well, goodbye." and the screen goes black.

In the murky logic of the dreamworld, at first it was just the end of the show, then it became the real end of the world, with everything going black.  The two scientists left the university and wandered the streets, and Leonard ran around the end of a dumpster and jumped out into the rising darkness that was replacing reality.

However, Sheldon refused to accept that the world has come to an end, and thrust his consciousness back against the arrow of time in hopes of somehow finding help to change things, but the end of the world followed him back through history, erasing everything as it went.

At that point, I awoke, bleary-eyed and disconcerted in the winter morning darkness, and, to be honest, a little pleased to be able to hear the splatter of rain against the window - it was a very realistic dream considering its subject matter, although probably not a plot that Chuck Lorre is going to steal for the show's finale.

Karli, lucky woman, dreams mostly about her relatives - that must be nice.

- Sid

* I feel that some of the credit for this dream should go to James Blish, who used a similar plot concept about the end of the universe in The Triumph of Time, the fourth book in his Cities in Flight series.

The Long Dark.

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

- Carl Sagan

I’ve made a huge mistake, and I’m probably going to freeze to death because of it.

Not to worry – my IRL existence is safe, but my virtual self is in big trouble. I’m currently playing The Long Dark, a challenging survival game set in a northern Canadian environment, and making the wrong decision in the game’s virtual winter can easily be fatal.

In this case, I’ve taken some time away from the game’s storyline module to play in Survival Mode, which I’ve actually found to be more interesting than the plot-driven version. There are a lot of computer games where the name of the game is to stay alive, but generally it’s as a part of some other goal. The Long Dark strips that pretext away and reduces the gaming experience to its most fundamental challenge: survival.

 

The concept for the game, officially released in 2017 by Vancouver-based indy game developer Hinterland, is that your small plane has crashed on Great Bear Island due to a geomagnetic disaster* that has disabled all electronic and electrical devices. In the story-based version, the player attempts to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of their sole passenger following the crash. In the Survival option, the player is simply dropped into one of the nine connected maps that make up the island, where they attempt to survive in the hostile winter environment for as long as possible by raiding cabins and lumber camps for supplies and clothing, foraging for edible plants and meat from dead animals, or attempting to trap or kill the island’s wildlife. The opposition: the remorseless Canadian wilderness in wintertime.

 

The game’s interface is elegant in its simplicity. Four gauges and a health bar located at the bottom of the screen provide the player with a dynamic overview of their constantly changing statistics. There are five ways that you can die in The Long Dark: hypothermia, exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and trauma – things like falling off a cliff or having a fatal encounter with a wolf, moose or bear.**   Cold is a constantly gnawing opponent: different weather conditions will drive the player’s temperature down to a greater or lesser degree depending on their clothing and the last time they had a hot meal, and wet snow will soak through your protective layers and reduce their efficacity.

 

The more supplies you carry, the more calories you burn, and the faster your stamina goes down. Thirst is always a problem: melted snow is an easy solution, but you need to boil it in order to avoid illness. Food offers the same danger – food poisoning from a moldy chocolate bar or uncooked deer meat will exhaust or even kill you if you don’t immediately treat the symptoms with antibiotics, rest and herbal tea.

However, the player has a variety of survival tools at their disposal. Cottages, fishing huts, trailers and abandoned vehicles contain a wide range of useful items: food, clothes, water, beds, fireplaces and stoves, simple tools such as knives or hatchets, and, most importantly, a refuge from the weather. The winter landscape is littered with firewood, edible plants such as rose hips or cattail reeds, and the occasional frozen deer carcass – a good source of meat, as well as hides that can be cured to make durable clothing, or gut that can be dried to make a bowstring.

If your archery skills are good enough, you may be able to shoot one of the winter hares that sometimes make an appearance, and if you’re very fortunate, you may find an abandoned rifle and ammo that will let you hunt for bigger game. Be careful, though – the smell of fresh meat may attract wolves or bears, and encounters with either one are likely be fatal, although lighting an emergency traffic flare will keep them at bay for a while.

My current incarnation has survived a couple of wolf attacks, and has recently had ribs broken by a charging moose who came at me a lot faster than I expected. Those broken ribs have slowed me down, but I've kept moving regardless - once resources run short in a given area, I feel a need to move on before I become desperate for food.  I'm also overladen with supplies, which can slow your progress to a crawl.  Up until now, I've been happy to trade mobility for resources, but I may begin judiciously editing down my load, in hopes of picking up some speed.

 

That aspect of gameplay is one of the few reasons that I might not recommend this game to everyone. The Long Dark requires a lot of patience. Even when unburdened by equipment and clothing, travel is time consuming, and anyone who wants to stay alive is also going to need to spend a lot of time sleeping, crafting, cooking and in some cases, just waiting out bad weather in a convenient building.  And there's a lot of bad weather to wait out - welcome to northern Canada in the winter.

The weather, good and bad, is the most impressive part of the game.  Although the game's graphics are rendered in a deliberately abstracted, hand-drawn style, the combination of visuals and sound effects create a completely plausible environment, to the point where it's hard not to shiver in your chair when the wind picks up. The game's weather physics are both evocative and – pun intended – deadly accurate. Having spent my formative years in Ontario's snow belt, I've had the dubious pleasure of experiencing the full range of winter weather: blizzards, thaws, gentle snow, fog, and -40 degree weather, when the sun is bright and the cold is like a knife in your back. The Long Dark recreates all these options far too well - it's not a surprise to discover that Hinterland is a Canadian company.

 

The game's designers are obviously happy to make their Northern connection part of the action. Maple leaf flags are a constant part of the landscape, and there are several little Canadian jokes scattered throughout the game, including a comment about leather shoes*** that would be fine for Bay Street but not for the snow, and a helpful guide to the correct pronunciation of the word “toque”. (Tuke, if you ever need to explain that phonetically.)

The Long Dark accomplishes its goals as a survival simulation so well that it's difficult to think of anything they should change.  Skis or snowshoes might be a useful option to speed up travel, and it would be interesting to include the false remedy of alcohol for those times when you're starting to shiver. There's another option that they've ignored entirely - every now and then I find the corpse of a fellow traveller who has failed the test, but unlike discovering the carcass of a deer or wolf, there's no option showing the amount of meat available for harvesting.  It's a grim reality of survival that desperate people have resorted to in the past, but perhaps it's just as well that they didn't feel a need to recognize that kind of desperation in a computer game.

That being said, my current survival situation is desperate enough. I was exploring the abandoned Carter hydroelectric dam when I innocently went through an emergency exit that put me outside in the path of a blizzard. Like most Emergency doors, there's no return access, and now I’m trapped outside: exhausted, freezing, and unable to start a fire in the howling wind and the driving snow.

Surprisingly, I manage to survive the storm. I find a spot in the lee of a storage shed where I’m able to light a fire and warm up a bit, which allows me to take a quick nap in my sleeping bag without dying from the cold. As I search for a way up to the top of the dam, I stumble upon a hidden entrance point that lets me back into the calm darkness of the facility’s generator room, where I’m able to get some real rest and bring my temperature fully up to normal.

However, my respite is short-lived - literally. A couple of days later, I'm repeatedly mauled by a bear while scouting for a route down to a river, then a wolf ignores my defensive emergency flare and finishes me off, ending 35 days and six hours of staying alive.

Oh well, as the saying goes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.  Either way, 35 days (and six hours) is the new record to beat.  Let's see...Start A New Survival Game...

- Sid

* This may not be as unlikely a possibility as you might think, apparently the Magnetic North Pole has been moving around quite a bit recently.

** The game’s creators acknowledge that wolves rarely attack humans, and that they have exaggerated the perils of being attacked by a wild animal in the interests of game play.

*** I originally typed this as “leather shows” which might also be fine for the Bay Street finance crowd, who knows.