…and then Torchwood arrives and it gets really weird.
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I’ve just watched Future Shock: The Story of 2000 AD (being a documentary about the decades-long history of the British comic book institution – most famous for Judge Dredd, but home to a vast array of other settings/characters/stories – and its wider influence on the comic industry generally).
Well… I watched the main documentary in one sitting several days ago – but there were 5 hours of bonus features along with it (mostly longer interviews), and it took me a few more days to get through those.
Having been particularly intrigued by Pat Mills’ talk of Slaine’s origins in weird Celtic mythology, I’m now finding the impending 2000 AD Shop : Slaine: The Horned God - Anniversary Slipcase Edition a bit tempting. Whether that’s a good or a bad idea, I can’t tell!
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Oooooh!
I do love that story. I went to a 2000AD 40th birthday convention (in 2017?) and met a load of the artists. There was a panel on Slaine and everyone who worked on it immediately after Simon Bisley’s paintings for Horned God were saying “…How the hell do we follow that?”
(Also I got to talk to David Roach who was my favourite Anderson artist)
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So today I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, without having the faintest clue that it was riffing off an actual event, or recognising any of the characters, except Bruce Lee.
It doesn’t really work that way.
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Oh, wow. Yeah. If you’re not on edge waiting for the thing you know is coming, that might be a weird one.
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So I finally got around to watching most of the new Dune and Dune II.
I say “Most of” because there were a few moments that were so boring I couldn’t help but skip ahead. Not “boring” in the traditional sense, I suppose, but in the “I have read the books, watched the old movies, and gosh I know what’s going to happen now” kinda way? The duel between Feyd Raltha and the survivors of Arakeeen for example. I just couldn’t be bothered. Nor with the following scene between him and the Bene Gesserit. Yawn.
But aside from those moments, gosh a really lovely retelling. I still have issues, but they’re minor (mostly: how are there still scenes that are so boring I can’t be bothered to watch?) and/or tactical (the way the Fremen attack the harvesters is… stupid? Like, very, very stupid. And the final attack on the Emperor’s Palace is… gosh it’s stupid. Not even in a “wow this would be cool to show” kinda way, but in a very “Nobody involved in this has any idea how to run a battle”).
The new ending is… menh. It’s fine. Thematically appropriate, albeit unsatisfying and makes Stilgar to be utterly idiotic (which, yes, fundamentalists often are, but wow).
It does however make me moderately excited for a third movie. Because I won’t know what’s going to happen (I’ve only ever read the first Dune), and I do legit like Chani as a character. So there’s potential?
Anyway. Beautiful movies, and I love most of the design choices they went with.
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And yet, there are various indicators that he definitely wanted it to be possible for someone to view the film this way. But those indicators are strongly contradicted by the arc and narrative of the film itself. Weird.
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I admit that compared to previous iterations I had seen, this had the theme and the look spot on. There are some parts of it that are a bit “eeek”, but considering how bad it could have been, or other versions have been, I cannot complain.
If you haven’t read the second book, you could be in for a treat (if well done). The novel is short and to the point, which I don’t know how well it will work on the silver screen, but the story has very good points and what happens in the interplanetary background in the years after the end of the first book could lead to some epic scenery.
After that the story becomes more and more psychedelic in the following books, which I think it will be a struggle for the general public (it was for me, and I consider myself quite the sci-fi fan).
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Is that when Kyle MacLachlan tells Natalie Portman how he feels about sand?
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Watched Matrix 2-4, and was pleasantly surprised. I loved Matrix 1, but back in 2003 something about 2 annoyed me enough that I never watched 3. Now I finally have, and I don’t regret doing so.
As an aside, I don’t think I have ever skipped ahead when watching a film, or even felt tempted to do so. I might get distracted, look at my phone, but I can’t skip ahead without worrying about missing something important.
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I am currently on Episode 5, Season 1 of Shogun, and I am… hmm.
It’s well-made. There are a few bits of grit in the story that annoy me… “Torunaga” instead of “Tokugawa,” and “Ishido” instead of “Ishida” (I mean, seriously, that one’s a “Why bother?” level of name-change). I’m pretty sure the Taiko’s name was Toko-something and he served under Oda, not Goroda, in uniting Japan… and so on, and so forth.
Granted, Blackthorne instead of Adams… fine. Is his importance inflated? Yes. But if I imagine it’s a story told from Blackthorne’s perspective, I can imagine that he’d actually believe that he was as important to Torunaga/Tokugawa as the show makes him out to be.
Oh, and the katana. I’m sorry, but katana are just swords. They’re as good a sword as could be made with the utterly crap iron the Japanese had access to, but they’re not all razor-sharp, behead-peasants-with-a-flick-of-the-wrist Masamunes. Anyway.
Historical weirdness aside, it’s pretty good! A good balance of tension and action with backroom politics. Torunaga/Tokugawa is very, very good, and Ishido/Ishida is a great counterpoint.
I guess my complaint is this: the actual Sekigahara/Japanese Civil War in 1600 is utterly fascinating. Betrayals! Counter-betrayals! Desperate sieges and letters arriving days too late to change the entire course of history! Armies stumbling into each other in the fog! Why not tell that story, instead of this… waves hand vaguely… approximation of that story?
I’m enjoying it enough to keep going, though. It is well-made.
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If you use historical character names, then you get people complaining about historical inaccuracies …
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You made me do a Google into Japanese sword quality and the “utterly crap iron” angle seems hyperbolic? It seems like Japanese swords were no better or worse on average than European swords from the same period. So yeah, “just swords”. I didn’t pay particular attention, but the effectiveness of the sword seemed to be reflected by the skill of the swordsman? There’s certainly mention of failing to hack through a neck with multiple attempts, at least.
I think you’ll be satisfied by the relevance of Blackthorne to the events by the conclusion.
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This would grant you a very heated argument and proposal to be beheaded among some circles. How dare you go against the katana, that amazing god given blade that chops tanks in half?? Folded a million times to make it indestructible???
Jokes aside, katanas are particular swords that must have been really good for what they were intended, as they lasted for many centuries in Japan. As we say in Spain, comparisons are hateful.
It is hyperbolic. But Japanese steel was worse than European simply because it was not made out of crucible iron, so it contained more impurities that gave it less durability. Hence why the folding technique was used, to minimise the influence of these “weak points” in the metal structure. But this technique has been used in Europe for millennia.
Katana are different from European blades mainly because the are partially quenched unlike European swords (this gives the blade its famous curve), making the blade less springy (more likely to bend, but less likely to snap), their edge very sharp, but also very brittle, and they have nearly zero hand protection.
They are beautiful pieces of art and craftmanship, and for that and their great significance in Japanese culture, they have been magnified and glorified by Hollywood and modern culture, but they are, like any sword, full of advantages and disadvantages.
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(Just btw, for the last year or so my day job has been translating patent applications mostly from a Japanese steel corporation, mostly going deep into multiple decimal point percentages of chemical components of steel and steelmaking techniques for various purposes. So while I don’t know or care about swords, “wot makes good steel” is something I know more about than I ever expected to.)
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Because they are adapting a well known, well loved book. Not making a history documentary.
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GURPS eventually codified this as the Cool Ethnic Weapon bonus, for appropriately cinematic games.
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The Japanese iron process was very unusual. First, they used low quality ore — mostly iron bearing sands that were only around 5 percent iron, as opposed to better hard rock ores that are 70 percent. I am not clear on whether this is because good ore did not exist, they didn’t know how to mine it, or some other reason.
They also used very large (tall) furnaces, that were not very hot (not complete melting), which resulted in different types of iron at different levels of the stack. the forge welding done for swords and the like took the good steel from the bottom, and mixed it with a particular higher section, and ended up with a steel that was pretty comparable to early European steels, and not as good as Indian stuff (India had a bunch of ore sources that were perfect for low tech steel making). European steel making technology got better, Japan kept doing the same thing, so depending on what point in time you compare, Japanese steel was better at the beginig, an much worse later.
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I don’t think saying that Japanese iron of the time was crap is hyperbolic… and I think, as more intelligent commentators have noted above, that the katana’s entire importance was linked very directly to how rare and bad Japanese iron was.
To put it differently, the amount of effort to turn low-grade iron into really good steel is remarkable, and therefore anyone who had a good katana was walking around with a lot of man-hours worth of effort. I think by WW2 the Japanese figured out industrial sword-making and so katana started to become cheap and commonplace, but that tidbit of “information” comes from Snow Crash, which is a work of fiction and therefore I can’t back that up with any actual factual sources.
(I have heard that both Spain and India had cheating-levels amount of iron, which is why late Medieval weapons are all Spanish steel if possible, and I’ve heard theories that Excaliber was originally a legend about an Indian sword that made its way through Europe and into Britain, obliterating any sword it clashed against. But I digress.)
But that’s a lateral shift in blame, not an absolution. The book is obviously Historicalocity (Historicalish? Historicalistic?). When it was written, I assume the author safely assumed that the audience probably knew next to nothing about Japanese history (heck, most Canadians barely know anything about Canadian history) and therefore could claim they were making a new, creative work and the few people who knew it was just a historical-ish retelling would be the minority.
But when they made Shogun, there’s no reason not to change the names back, and keep the rest of the story the same. I mean, I don’t think anyone who watches… I dunno… The Crown screams about historical inaccuracies in an artistic retelling? Or… gosh, I dunno… Braveheart? Shakespeare in Love? Gladiator?
It’s a weird choice, is all I’m saying. And I’m not sure it’s really a defensible one other than to shrug and claim laziness?
I think dscheidt already covered the iron angle sufficiently.
The choice to adapt the novel doesn’t seem even slightly weird to me, let alone indefensible.
There have been a lot of historical dramas covering this period, with varying degrees of historical accuracy and scope. As I understand it (without having read the book) Shogun is primarily an adaptation of the novel. Changing the characters to their historical counterparts but following the plot of the novel would be weird. Also changing the plot to be historically accurate and not making use of the novel would be even weirder. Given the success of the TV series in the West, it seems more reasonable to assume that the association with the novel helped rather than hindered.
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