Now we are free

 

I missed the first half of "Gladiator II" when it was shown on a Swedish cable channel just now, but I did see the second half. The movie seems to be both absurd, interesting and quite dramatic at the same time. Just as I expected. I suppose this means I missed the mutants! Or were they baboons? OK, so I watched that stuff on YouTube instead...

Couldn´t help thinking that the ending (when the warring multi-ethnic armies of Rome unite) is a symbol for the United States, color blind version. But surely the demise of the scheming Macrinus was something of an anticlimax? Note also the "conservative" tendency with the crooks being effiminate, weak, mentally deranged, and (ahem) a Black freedman. By contrast, the heroes are White, strong, martial and idealistic. Didn´t know they still made movies like this in 2024.

That being said, I suppose I now have to wait until the next time a cable network shows this extravaganza...

Halloween haunting

 

Credit: kallerna

So I just watched the movie "A Haunting in Venice" from 2023. It´s apparently loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, "Hallowe´en Party". Which obviously explains why Swedish television choose to show it now. I admit the movie was quite good. 

The year is 1947. The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot lives in Venice, Italy and refuses to take any new cases. Naturally, he is tricked into a situation anyway. In the film, Halloween is celebrated even in Venice. Poirot, a skeptic and atheist, participates in a séance in a supposedly haunted house. He exposes the medium as fake. Naturally, the hoaxer is killed in gruesome fashion and the game is on. 

The rest of the plot is very Agatha Christie-esque: everyone´s guilty of something, more murders follow and the full story turns out to be quite complex. You have to pay attention, rather than going into the kitchen and make a coffee! And yes, some of the characters are pretty colorful.

Since it´s a Halloween-themed flick, there is a supernatural element to the story. Poirot has an explanation (I actually suspected that the passing reference to Mithridates would turn out to be significant) but in the end, we are left to think that maybe some of the hauntings were real after all...

That´s probably all I can say in a short review (muh-hah-hah). Happy Halloween, kids. 

Feeding the enemy to the Goddess

 

"Feeding the Enemy to the Goddess: War Magic in Shaiva Tantric Texts" by Olga Serbaeva is an article originally published in the journal "Religions". It´s rather "in-house" and deals with some medieval Tantric texts on war magic. We are very far removed from the amorous pastimes of Krishna and Radha, or the dharmic law-and-order of Vishnu. This is a world of human sacrifice and black magic. The deity worshipped is often Kali, sometimes Kubjika or "Mahalakshmi" (really Durga), or the terrible Matrikas (Mothers) as a collective. 

Even apart from the human sacrifice, the rituals are clearly transgressive in nature. They involve offerings of the magician´s own blood, alcohol or unspecified "juices", which are perhaps sexual substances. The Goddess should be visualized as "howling like a jackal", the jackal being associated with the charnel ground. Human "omentum" (fat?) should also be offered. How has it been obtained? One particularly complex ritual feature an entire mandala made of corpses. If these rituals are conducted *before* the war, where do the human remains come from? In other cases, the enemy army is the sacrifice. There is also a ritual conducted in the middle of a battle field, after the battle is over.

The Tantric texts promise various supernatural results from the hideous rituals which will benefit the kings fighting the war. The power of illusion is central: the magician can conjur imaginary armies to scare the enemy, or take the form of the terrible god Bhairava. The author suspects, however, that the *real* purpose of this war magic wasn´t to aid the kings (that was more of an side effect used to "sell" the rituals to powerful patrons), but to make it possible for the Tantrika to obtain human body parts in a "legal" way. Thus, the rituals serve the religious or spiritual purpose of bringing the practitioner closer to the Goddess...

I´m not sure if that´s very reassuring, though.  

Capturing cryptozoology

 

The skeptical YouTube channel "Truth is scarier than fiction" reviews the recent documentary "Capturing Bigfoot", which makes a strong case for the famous Patterson-Gimlin film (PGF) being a hoax. Which is awkward for cryptozoologists and other true believers in the hairy beast, since the PGF has always been the best piece of evidence for Bigfoot´s existence. 

Of course, none of this will move the needle, since peopel were seeing Bigfoot (a.k.a. Sasquatch) before the PGF even existed. Indeed, it was these observations that inspired the PGF in the first place. So people will probably continue seeing (and smelling) the elusive creature despite the documentary and its scandalous revelations.

Besides, many of these people (the humans involved in Bigfooting) thrive on controversy anyway, so this is just more grist for the mill... 

A living god

 

I just read "Continuing Transformation: Shri Nath, His Gurus and His Devotees in a Timeless World" by Paul van der Velde, originally published in the journal "Religions" in 2023. It´s available free on-line. 

The article deals with the Pushtimarga, one of several Hindu groups which concentrate their devotion on Krishna. The Pushtimarga worship Krishna in the form of a boy-child, here called Shri Nath. The author concentrates on the potentially antinomian side of the Shri Nath cult and references several "vartas", devotional texts from the 16th century. It´s not clear to me how ecstatic the Pushtimarga sect is today, although the author does describe a rather chaotic and rambunctious worship service at the Nathdwara temple dedicated to the divine child.

Today, the Braj area around Mathura is associated with Krishna and Radha, but it was not always thus. Apparently, there is evidence that it was originally Shaiva. Vaishnava movements took it over during the 16th and 17th centuries. There were conflicts between two different Krishnaite sects: Pushtimarga and the followers of Caitanya. The former eventually banished the latter. Theologically, they emphasized two different forms of Krishna. As already noted, the pushtimargis worship the god in the form of a small boy, while Caitanya´s movement see him as an amorous young man. Krishna´s "girlfriend" Radha plays a central role in the peculiar theology developed by Caitanya´s disciples, while having a more marginal role in the Pushtimarga pantheon. Still, both movements have "sensual" traits. Vitthalnath, an important 16th century guru of the Pushtimarga, is described in near-erotic terms as extremely beautiful and attractive. 

One thing I didn´t realize before is that the Pushtimarga consider their gurus to be divine incarnations. Most are "partial" avatars, but the more prominent ones are clearly connected to Krishna or his companions. Thus, Vitthalnath is Krishna, while his elder brother and predecessor as Pushtimarga guru, Gopinath, was Balarama. The founder of the tradition, Vallabha, embodied the mouth of Vishnu or Krishna, but also the fire-god Agni (since he purified the world). Gopinath is said to have merged with the Balarama (Balabhadra) idol at the Jagannath temple in Puri. Note the similarity with the legend that Caitanya (supposedly an avatar of Krishna) merged with the Jagannath idol. As for the Pushtimarga´s own idols, they are considered to be literally alive. The author retells a number of strange anecdotes to this effect. Thus, one follower of Vitthalnath apparently claimed that the idol of Shri Nath had thrown stones at him (in the manner of a playful child), prompting him to throw a stone back at the idol! In another incident, the devotees blowed in a conch to wake up Shri Nath in the morning (i.e. "wake up" the idol) but the god-child simply continued sleeping. This was discerned by a devotee with mystical abilities...

The weird gender-bending characteristic of some Hindu mythology and even theology is present here, too. One Pushtimarga mystic saw himself as a cowherd boy playing with Krishna during daytime, and as a cowherd *girl* playing with the god at night. At least during the 16th century, the male temple priests would sometimes dress as females. Other "antinomian" traits are also present, as when one devotee claimed to play with Shri Nath on his back, pretending to be a horse...even to the point of urinating like the animal!

At least during the time under discussion, Muslims were considered extremely polluting by Brahmins. The "vartas" contain a story about a Vaishnava bard whose devotional songs were rendered impure by the (hidden) presence of Akbar the Great at the worship service. However, the Pushtimarga also has legends claiming that Akbar was secretely a devotee of Krishna. Even more "problematic" is a tradition about Raskhan, apparently a homosexual Muslim, who after various adventures manages to get initiation into the Pushtimarga by Vitthalnath, prompted by Shri Nath himself. 

The deeper point of all this is the distinction between the mundane world (laukik) and the divine ditto (alaukik). Krishna belongs to the latter, but intervenes in our mundane reality in various strange and paradoxical ways. He can break the Brahminical purity rules at will, indeed, this is part of what makes him divine. It struck me when reading the article that Krishna´s trickster-like quality resembles that of fairies in folklore. Indeed, the supernatural often comes across as deeply mysterious and incomprehensible to humans. Krishna resembles the fairy in other ways, as well. Note the similarity between the fairy ring-dance and the rasa-lila.

With that, I close this review.

PGF cult exposed?

 

 

Some reactions to the recent documentary "Capturing Bigfoot", which was released this Tuesday. Apparently, October 20 is National Bigfoot Day in the United States. At least unofficially. 

I haven´t seen the docu and I´m too stingy (and too lazy) to buy/download anything from Amazon, but the bottom line is that it disproves the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. Or *maybe* disproves it. Or is part of a gigantic conspiracy and hence doesn´t disprove ape-shit. 

Ultimately, it doesn´t matter, since people will continue to believe in Sasquatch anyway. Including the pro-docu people linked above! So nothing has really changed here. 

The goddess who dances through life

 

"The Young Goddess Who Dances through the Ordinariness of Life - A Study on the Tantric Traditions of Kerala" is a 2022 paper by Maciej Karasinski-Sroka and G Sudev Krishna Sharman, originally published in a special issue of the journal "Religion" dealing with Goddess traditions. The paper is now publicly available for free on a large number of websites. Believe it or not, it was recommended to me by our dear friend ChatGPT.

The paper / article throws the reader headlong into the complex and exotic world of Shaktism, specifically certain lineages of Shri Vidya in the southern Indian state of Kerala. While modern-day Keralans apparently regard Tantrism as a path open to everyone, actual initiation is in the hands of a small number of families (some of which identify as Brahmins) for whom Shri Vidya forms a central part of their group identity. Thus, Shaktism comes across as simultaneously both "inclusive" and "exclusive". Judging by context, all gurus and initiates mentioned in the paper are male. 

For these particular lineages, the principal form of the Goddess is Bala Tripura Sundari, here referred to as Tripura Bala or simply Bala. She is visualized as a girl-child and contrasted with Tripurasundari (a teenager) and Tripurabhairavi (presumably an adult). All three are forms of the same Goddess, often just called Tripura. However, in the mythology Bala is sometimes said to be Tripurasundari´s daughter. Bala´s mantra "Aim Klim Sauh" is associated with the rising of kundalini. Both the mantra and various hymns to Bala are said to bestow all kinds of benefits on the initiates, including rebirth as excellent scholars or powerful rulers! However, there are also popular beliefs that initiates will initially experience a lot of suffering and hardship to test their faith. 

According to the paper, Shri Vidya is originally a Tantric tradition from Kashmir and is still heavily syncretized with the form of Kashmir Shaivism known as Krama. This sect worships 12 or 13 forms of Kali, and the Bala mantra is sometimes combined with a Kali mantra. The Shri Vidya temples visited by the authors often contained symbols of Shiva and various fierce goddesses alongside a mound-like structure supposed to be the Shri Yantra, a geometrical figure associated with Tripura. One of the aggressive goddesses is reminiscent of Durga but referred to as Tripurabhairavi or Kali. And yes, the Shri Vidya adepts have a longstanding connection to practitioners of traditional martial arts?!

Karasinski-Sroka was allowed to participate in a Tantric initiation ritual in 2012 and describes it in some detail. One thing I noticed is that the preparatory rituals carried out by the guru are more complex than the actual initiation. There is also a funny anecdote about a dreamy initiate who seems to have confused the neighbor´s young daughter with the goddess Bala!

Very interesting, but frankly a bit bewildering...

Teal is blue

 

"Paranoid Protestants" is a three-hour long video about the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) from a skeptical (probably atheist) perspective. It´s interesting, to be sure, and it´s obvious that the narrator (who sometimes doubles as himself!) has done some heavy reading on the history and theology of this particular denomination. I actually learned some new stuff about both Adventists and others from this documentary.

However, there are also some rather obvious problems with this production. For instance, the Branch Davidians headed by David Koresh are prominently featured. But what on earth is the *real* connection between the cult at Waco and the SDA Church? Not that much, really. It´s like making a docu about atheism and throw in Jim Jones and the People´s Temple (who were "Marxists" and sometimes sounded like atheists). 

The content-creator also believes that apocalyptic Protestantism (including the SDA) is the main cause of so many Americans believing in conspiracy theories. But a more likely explanation is that both apocalypticism and conspiracism have a common cause independent of both, or that they are parallell phenomena influencing each other. 

With that, have at it!

The long night has come

I never even heard of this scy fy TV series before. "Gene Roddenberry´s Andromeda" (or just "Andromeda") was originally aired over 20 years ago. Somebody (unclear who) has started to upload the old episodes on YouTube. The link above goes to episode three, "To loose the fateful lightning", which I have been hate watching a couple of times now. More on that later in this review!

"Andromeda" is apparently based on some old ideas by the late "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry. It was produced by his widow, actress Majel Barrett. Judging by the four episodes uploaded so far, the series is similar to "Star Trek" but mostly lacks its weird charm. The good guys are called the Systems Commonwealth, somewhat imprudently dubbed "the greatest civilization in history". Following a civil war, the Commonwealth is destroyed and replaced by a dark age in which humans are constantly attacked by various evil alien races. The main character, Dylan Hunt, is a High Guard officer from the Commonwealth who miraculously survived for 300 years at the event horizon of a black hole. His starship Andromeda Ascendant and a *very* motley crew roam the galaxy, trying to restore the old civilization. 

In the third episode, Hunt and his associates encounter a group of teenagers and children onboard an otherwise abandoned Commonwealth space station. The youngsters have formed a quasi-religious cult, awaiting the appearence of a Messiah-like figure who can save them from the Magog and the Nietzscheans (two alien races at war with humanity). It turns out that the cult´s expectations are very concrete: the children need the High Guard access codes to battle ships armed with planet-killing doomsday weapons. As the sole survivor of the old Commonwealth, Hunt does indeed have the codes. 

What happens next is...interesting. The stranded children clearly expect Hunt (their long awaited savior) to be a militarist who will lead them in battle and utterly destroy the aliens. Instead, Hunt turns out to be an idealist and near-pacifist. One of his associates is a full-pacifist Magog who sounds like a stereotypical Buddhist (or is it Quaker). He´s darn ugly, too. Like the Jews in the New Testament, the children are disappointed when the Messiah preaches peace instead of armed resistance. Their mentality is clearly that of religious fundamentalists. 

However...

What annoys me with this episode is that the "cult" is clearly right. With a few exceptions, the Magog are evil. Like parasitic wasps, they reproduce by laying their eggs inside humans. Why *not* nuke their planets sky high? Already in the first episode, we learn that the Systems Commonwealth preferred to negotiate with this bizarre race rather than resist them, handing over the Nietzschean home world to the intruders. At the time, the Nietzscheans were key *allies* of the Commonwealth. This triggered the civil war which brought down "the greatest civilization". Sounds like civilizational suicide. Yet, at least in this episode, we are somehow supposed to draw the conclusion that the children are crazy fanatics, while Hunt is the adult in the room?!

Frankly, I never seen more idiotic pacifist propaganda.  

"Star Trek" is mostly liberal, but during the 00´s, there was actually a series in the franchise that was more Neo-Conservative: "Star Trek: Enterprise". I wonder if "Andromeda" acted as the liberal counter-weight to that show? I suppose those of us who didn´t see the series when it was first aired will find it in 106 episodes. Assuming the YouTube channel Andromeda Official really has the rights to show them!

Night vision

 

SPOILER WARNING

"Beck - Spår i mörker" (also known as "Beck 2 - Spår i mörker") is a 1997 Swedish film (or strictly speaking a Scandinavian-German co-production). Police officer Martin Beck is a fictional character developed by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but the film isn´t based on their crime novels. "Beck - Spår i mörker" features Peter Haber, Mikael Persbrandt and other famous Swedish actors. 

And now, the subjective part...

Almost 30 years later, the film comes across as very strange. It has a noir and cyberpunk feeling, but also concentrates heavily on Beck´s strained private relationships (which are much more mundane). One running gag is that Beck always has to break off his planned vacation?! Beck´s constant sidekick Gunvald Larsson comes across as "the crazy cop", while almost everyone else is incompetent. The plot itself was *extremely* unrealistic back in 1997, almost to the point of science fiction. Sweden was a much safer place 30 years ago. Today? You tell me.

Beck, Gunvald and Beck´s love interest Lena Klingström investigate a string of bizarre murders in the Stockholm metro. The assassins have hacked the security system and can turn off the lights and the power at will. Indeed, they seem to live in the tunnels. Curiously, no motive for the killings is discernable and the only clue is a Internet symbol meaning "death"...

It turns out that the murders are part of a computer game called "Final Doom", in which the players have to kill real people in order to "reach the next level". It´s never explained what this could possibly mean, but it´s heavily implied that the teenagers playing the game are actually a nihilistic cult. "Beck - Spår i mörker" ends with an American reporter revealing that a similar string of killings have been reported from New York. The cult is worldwide and presumably web-based. 

I suppose this noir film did tap into real fears about the Internet which existed back in 1997, long before most people even had access to the damn thing. Today, we know what happened. Violent cults (such as the notorious 764) do indeed thrive on the dark web. Also, youth gangs in Sweden recruit children on-line to carry out murders. It´s hard to believe that things will take a sudden turn for the better. In that sense, the high strangeness of "Beck - Spår i mörker" feels almost prophetic. 

Thankfully, the metro in Stockholm is still relatively safe!     

Heteroprax reflections

 

A dark-skinned Buddha preaching
to snake-spirits and tree-spirits!

A little gem from 2024.

Austro-Asiatic Buddha

The Order of Caesar

 

Credit: Walt Disney Studios

"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" is the latest film (2024) about a post-apocalyptic world in which apes have become the dominant life forms, spouting human-like speech and intelligence. Meanwhile, humans have regressed to a beast-like existence. Or have they? Unknown to the apes, some intelligent humans have managed to survive in underground bunkers and are plotting a comeback as a species, which would threaten the dominant status of chimps, gorillas and orangs. 

The main character, the smart chimpanzee Noa, is taken prisoner (alongside his entire clan) by the gorilla dictator Proximus and is faced with a tough moral dilemma. Either co-operate with the still-intelligent humans to save his clan, while risking a new war between apes and unforgiving Homo sapiens in the future. Or support Proximus, whose projected authoritarian kingdom could save apekind by capturing human high tech weapons, but at the expense of everybody´s freedom. Noa choses the first option, presumably setting the stage for a sequel.

There are obvious references to the original "Planet of the Apes" movie (1968) throughout this production, and I believe some scenes were actually taped at the same location. A funny difference is that the orangutans are the good guys. Noa meets the orang Raka, who belongs to the "Order of Caesar" working to restore peace between Pongidae and Homo. Caesar was the effective founder of the ape civilization, but generations after his death, few remember his message of tolerance or his laws. Raka can read and write, and comes across as a kind of monk-intellectual, trying to salvage as much knowledge as possible during the Dark Age. The catch is that the orang doesn´t know that some humans can still speak and have no intention of co-existing with their former circus animals. Thus, Raka is the archetypical "naive intellectual".

Even worse is Trevathan, a dissaffected and weak human who collaborates with Proximus against his own kind. Trevathan also looks like a parody of an intellectual, presumably a fatalistic and demoralized hippie resigned to the fact that his utopian dreams have been dashed. The man spends his time entertaining the gorilla-king with stories about the ancient glories of Rome, until his grizzly end. 

While somewhat interesting (*are* there LOTR-like elements in the plot? What about "MonsterVerse"?), "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" strikes me as an extended "Planet of the Apes" fan fic story. I´m not sure if the average viewer remembers all the details from the 1968 film! Still, a sequel might be worth doing. Is there some reason why the main character has a name resembling the Biblical character Noah, for instance? Do the still-talking humans have a doomsday weapon? Et cetera. 

With that, I close this review!  

  

Under the hill

 

For whatever reason, I feel like linking to this old blog post. 

Ecumenical mysticism

The Golden Child

 

"The Creator" is a 2023 science fiction movie. It comes across as a peculiar hybrid between "Blade Runner", "Star Wars" and the US war in Vietnam. The first portion of the film is interesting. In the second half, the Vietnam War analogies and Buddhist savior-complex becomes downright cringey. 

The story begins with a technological breakthrough: humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Something goes wrong and the robots detonate a nuclear bomb that wipes out Los Angeles. The United States promptly stops all AI development, but a competing nation known as New Asia refuses. The American military builds a space station called NOMAD to wipe out the Asiatic robots (and all human Asians who stand in the way). This may be an allegory for the fact that China is supposedly a world leader in AI technology. But as already noted, the similarity with the US intervention in Vietnam 1965-73 are also obvious. New Asia is clearly located in Indochina. 

The main characters have religiously inspired names: Joshua (compare Joshua or Jesus in the Bible), Maya (compare Buddha´s mother) and the robot "Alpha and Omega" (compare God or Jesus). A mysterious character is named Nirmata, apparently the Nepalese word for creator - according to ChatGPT, the term has no metaphysical connotations, but in the context of this film, it presumably does. New Asia turns out to be a strange place in which humans and robots live in peaceful harmony with each other, both apparently being Buddhists (or something like it). It´s clear that the robots are a stand-in for the Other, the excluded, the marginalized, and their armed rebel movements. The good guys are almost all colored, while the bad guys seem to be exclusively White (including a White female). Naturally, it turns out that the nuclear blast which destroyed LA might not have been the work of the AI, after all. 

"Alpha and Omega" (nicknamed Alphie) is a child, but also a Messiah-like savior with paranormal powers. She can control all technology and hence might wipe out NOMAD, which explains why the Americans want to kill/de-activate her. Note again that Alphie´s "mother" or creator is named Maya, suggesting that the child might be the Buddha. Note also that Alphie is artifically engineered by Maya, perhaps a reference to a virgin birth. It further struck me that there could be a weird parallel to the Biblical story of Joshua and the harlot Rahab, since the character Joshua in the film is tasked with infiltrating New Asia before NOMAD (= the nomadic Israelites?) wipes them out (like Jericho?). Note that he meets "Rahab"/Maya in an apparent strip club!

OK, so I´m a nerd...

Despite all the above, "The Creator" nevertheless feels like a self-parodic low budget production. Perhaps because the left-liberal message is too obvious. These days, films apparently *must* be like explicit pamphlets, otherwise the Woke autists don´t get it. Or something. Well, at least the religious allegories were *somewhat* hidden. One intriguing feature of "The Creator" is that the White Evil Empire isn´t really evil. The atomic explosion in California seems to have been an accident, rather than the result of a conspiracy. Thus, the US are misguided rather than actively malevolent. The worldview of the film turns out to be a form of milktoast liberalism in which everyone might at least potentially get along, rather than the hardline Marxism you expect from a "pro-Viet Cong" allegory. It´s all so "unproblematic".

OK, so I didn´t like this production. Or did I simply misunderstand its intended demographic? *Is* it a film for very young middle schoolers? Or for 24-year olds who think like 14-year olds?     

Not sure how many stars to give "The Creator". Perhaps two-and-a-half out of five. 

Metaphors decoded

 

Welcome to the Shimmer, earthling!

So I watched "Annihilation" from 2018. Or most of it. A Swedish TV/movie site claimed that it´s the most scary horror story ever made, et cetera. Naaah. Not by a long shot. In fact, I´m almost tempted to call it false marketing.

A mysterious alien presence takes over a territory in the United States. Patrols sent out to scout the area disappear after first going mad. Four women volunteer for a new mission to this scariest location on planet Earth. So what do four women, one of them a former US army soldier, talk about on an extremely dangerous expedition to the potentially deadliest place this side of the Andromeda Galaxy?

Why, their family relationships and former boyfriends, of course! 

Something tells me "Annihilation" couldn´t pass the Bechdel-Wallace test...

The women are weak, too weak for a realistic mission of this kind. In film like this, the actors should be manly macho men. Or female Israeli commando soldiers (hint hint). Maybe I´m missing some clever psychological metaphor. And oh, the mutant bear looked like the next cousin of the monster from "Prophecy" (a half-forgotten film from 1979).

But sure, there are some interesting angles here and there. The alien presence is called the Shimmer. It´s not clear what it wants, or even want something at all. The Shimmer has turned a wildlife refuge in Florida into a surrealist landscape that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. It´s actually quite beautiful, but also dangerous. People who enter the Shimmer get disoriented, suffer memory loss, or die under strange circumstances. The Shimmer expands (albeit slowly) and could potentially annihilate all life on the planet. During the dramatic finale, we realize that the alien quasi-intelligence can "download" our genetic signatures and memories, creating crude body doubles of real people. 

And maybe *that´s* the key metaphor of "Annihilation". The Shimmer is really a symbol of the Internet, AI and robots. It´s superficially beautiful (like AI-generated art), yet illusory and mechanical. Everything feels "wrong". The alligators are white while the plants form impossible hybrids. Some even look humanoid. The Shimmer turns us into robotic copies of ourselves, incapable of real relationships. And just like the Internet, the alien entity is quasi-intelligent but lacks a real purpose. It spreads like a computer virus in automatic fashion. Indeed, that´s how the main character Lena eventually manages to destroy the Shimmer: by making it mimicking an explosion, something the mindless system does until it self-destructs.

Or maybe not...

Three stars for this production. But no more.

Dan Brown´s Inferno

 

Credit: Exotic Indian Art (?)

The first time I watched "Inferno", I didn´t like it. At all. The whole thing felt extremely unrealistic (even for a Dan Brown story). Or like an extended European-Turkish travel guide for American tourists with fake cultural sensibilities. I considered it the worst of the three Dan Brown-related films. I don´t remember the exact year I saw the movie, but I do have a guess.

It must have been before the COVID pandemic...

Today? Well, when I re-watched "Inferno" earlier tonight, it struck me as a documentary. At least more or less! Above all, the film feels post-COVID rather than 2016 (the actual release date). 

The plot revolves around a group of eco-terrorists who have developed a pathogen which can kill half of Earth´s population. Naturally, the activists assume they are working for the greater good of the species or something to that effect. Their leader is a billionaire, a certain Zobrist, with all kinds of odd ideas. The WHO are the good guys (!) but it´s interesting that they are depicted almost as an intelligence agency. Think CIA or FBI. Other actors are looking for the bio-weapon, too. In one plot twist, a global security firm working on behalf of the genocidal Zobrist realize they´ve been conned and switch sides at the last possible moment.

It´s interesting to note that the terrorists are depicted as young, idealist and extremely well-educated. They are fanatics, but not obviously brain-washed. Zobrist is excentric but also rich and good-looking. It´s difficult not to think of, say, Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. But while Musk and Thiel are very much part of the establishment (and rather ugly), Zobrist doesn´t work for some secret Illuminati cabal. He seems to be a genuinely independent rebel. Come to think of it, all films based on Dan Brown´s novels are pro-establishment. (If this also true of the novels, I don´t know.) "The Da Vinci Code" defends sinister secret societies, "Angels and Demons" is implicitly pro-Vatican, while "Inferno" is about brave globalist agents trying to stop some kind of confused Woke utopians. 

If they had wanted to make "Inferno" even more realistic, the terrorists would have (perhaps unwittingly) worked for some next-level government black-op, while Zobrist would have been a powerful capitalist tycoon with insane takes seen as quite respectable among his peers...

But surely I´m just being paranoid, right? Right.   

The x is silent

 

So I just watched "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire", the latest film in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise. How do you make a sequel to a series of overwrought monster flicks? Why, you throw in even more overwrought monsters with extremely convoluted intra-monstrum relations...and off we go! Apparently, a lot of cringe and some silly Hollywood jokes are also part of the concept. Cringe as in "teenage angst", "mum-with-a-teenager angst" and "the myth of the noble savage". But OK, the Black conspiracy theorist is still kind of cute. The former love interest of the mum-with-a-teenager, not so much.

The x in the title is supposed to be silent, and is a wink to the Japanese entertainment industry where the cross sign in a movie title means "crossover". Seriously, does anyone even care at this point that a titanic production featuring both Godzilla and King Kong is technically speaking a crossover? Didn´t think so either. 

Besides, the real "crossover" (or rather near-plagiarism) is with "The Planet of the Apes". I can´t have been the only one who noticed certain relevant similarities. Since Kong has become the good guy, another primate has to be the bad one: Skar King, who is apparently based on gibbons and orangs. Our man Kong has to work overtime to show his competitor that hylobatids are the *lesser* apes!

Oh, and the special effects department had a lot of fun with this one, especially the scene where Kong and Godzilla have a little misunderstanding, destroying the pyramids of Giza in the process (although I think the Sphinx barely made it). Then it´s off to Copacabana for some new creative destruction! Humanity as a whole muddled through, however. So how do you make a sequel to *this* installment of the Titan saga? Well, the next MonsterVerse movie will be called "Godzilla x Kong: Supernova". I think we all get the drift... 

Still, fun to watch. After a fashion.        

Mormons and Cylons

 

Some clips from the original (1978-79) "Battlestar Galactica" series. The Mormon influences are obvious in these three excerpts. Most clearly in the first one. But note that the evil guy is called Iblis, the Muslim name for Satan!   

Heretics of Dune

 

I never read Frank Herbert´s "Dune" novels and probably never will. But of course I´m going to opinionate about them and the films anyway. How about that? My blog, my rules.

The story has an anti-imperial(ist) slant. The "spice" is obviously a metaphor for oil. But note that the evil space empire is based on Czarist Russia rather than the United States or the British Empire. And "Dune" was published during the Cold War. 

The Fremen are the wretched of the earth, the dark and oppressed masses. Their religion is obviously based on Islam. Paul Atreides is the upper class scion who breaks with his class and becomes a revolutionary leader. Note that both Bakunin and Kropotkin had an aristocratic background. However, Paul´s revolution against the Empire ends with him becoming the new emperor, while his fanaticized followers kills millions across the galaxy in a holy war or jihad. The parallels with the Russian revolution and its subsequent degeneration are obvious. Or with many other revolutions: the French, the Abbasid, and so on. 

In other words: the political perspective is "pessimist" and "reactionary". 

It´s also interesting to note that both the imperials and the revolutionaries are manipulated backstage by a strange matriarchal cult, the Bene Gesserit. The idea that popular revolutions are really the work of powerful secret societies is not new, of course. It´s a staple of far right conspiracy theory. And while "Bene Gesserit" is supposedly Latin, let´s be honest: everyone thinks it sounds Jewish. Indeed, their goal is to breed an Overman, the famed Kwisatz Haderach (this name is absolutely inspired by Kabbalist Judaism). Note also the sexism: the powerful female witches want to create a Supreme Male!

However, even in this pessimistic story universe, there does seem to be one path to societal change: enlightened despotism. If only the autocrat can acquire quasi-divine powers, the Empire can become an instrument for saving humanity from itself. In the first two novels, Paul can divine the future and therefore knows that the path he has chosen (which leads to the killing of 60 billion people) is nevertheless the lesser evil. In later novels, a descendant of Paul, Leto, becomes a human-sandworm hybrid (the sandworms are a kind of monsters worshipped as divine by the Fremen "Muslims") and after tyrannically ruling the Galaxy for thousands of years makes Humanity fit for freedom. Or something. Or something else. Yeah, well, so about that...

Note also that the Illuminati, pardon, Bene Gesserit have a similar perspective: the Kwisatz Haderach will "shorten the way" to the ultimate goal (note the similarity with the Mule in Asimov´s Foundation trilogy). But apparently this is too fast. Real change we can believe in takes hundreds of generations. Note also the irony that Herbert´s perspective doesn´t really seem that different from the degenerated imperial post-revolutionaries or even the Bene Gesserit. It´s all about elite control and mystical elite transmogrification. A further irony: in Herbert´s story, all religion seem to be obviously phoney, and yet, the "solution" is strikingly "religious" as well. 

And yes, "Dune" is considered a classic of science fiction, was a best seller and always got rave reviews in the American media. Hmmm...

Maybe everyone just misunderstood what the story was all about. Right? 

    

The holy war has begun

 

Credit: JJ Harrison 

So I just watched "Dune: Part Two" from 2024. The film is well-made and interesting after a fashion, but it moved me much less than I had expected. Certain aspects flet dragging. Such as...Chani, Chani and Chani. Did I mention Chani? 

This female Fremen warrior constantly tries to sway the main protagonist, Paul Atreides, from fulfilling his dark destiny. And of course fails. The whole thing isn´t just boring. It´s also similar to the Padme-Anakin drama from "Star Wars". Maybe George Lucas got the idea from the "Dune" novels, who knows, but in Hollywood terms, Lucas has the primogeniture. Oh, and Atreides accepts his fate without too much questioning. The choice is grey-grey rather than black-or-white. Again, like Anakin´s choice in "Star Wars".

I never read Herbert´s novels, and probably never will, but I did notice that all other film or TV adaptations of this space opera are extremely colorful and flamboyant, to the point of cringe. Or is it camp? Denis Villeneuve´s style is markedly different. We´re obviously on a desert planet, and part of the film is actually in black-and-white (the gladiator fight). Not even the pseudo-Russian aristocrats look too fancy.

The reactions to "Dune: Part Two" from "Alt Right" trolls on-line were...interesting. Sure, they complained about Chani, but nobody seemed to notice that "Muad´Dib" (i.e. Paul Atreides) is really *the bad guy*. But perhaps the Alt Right really likes the idea of a Muslim jihad destroying the based Space Empire? As long as a *man* is in charge who refuses to listen to His Annoying Girlfriend. LOL. Besides, isn´t Paul (who looks rather whimpish for a Muslim Mahdi) really manipulated backstage by a cultish matriarchal sisterhood?

Funny have people can miss even the most obvious things. 

With that, I close this little review.