The Great UnGoogling Side Story: The Optimal Death of Prime

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

I've been invested in the Amazon ecosystem for many years. You might even say I was an early adopter, especially when they expanded their offerings from books to DVDs. It was simply the best place to get movies if you had particularly obscure tastes like I do. I mean, if Suncoast didn't have it, it might as well have never existed.

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about everything wrong with Amazon. If you do, let's just say their convenience comes at a steep price, and I don't just mean the flow of money. 

Speaking of money, I had a Prime membership for years. It seemed like a no-brainer; 2-day shipping, Prime Video, Music... You were paying for the streaming service but with a boatload of perks. 

As time has gone on, however, the perks have not increased in value. In fact, many features have ducked behind paywalls and has left my membership feeling rather anemic. 

First, there was Amazon Music. Instead of giving you unlimited plays of certain songs, everything went to a Spotify-like shuffle mode. The entire catalog was available, but you'd have to wait for it to randomly show up. The biggest problem with this was that it affected any singles or albums that you purchased. This was resolved eventually, but that it happened in the first place showed how much of a rushed solution this was to a cashflow problem. 

After that, they started putting ads on Prime Video. Here I was paying about 140 dollars a year, and they were still going to have me sit through ads while watching movies and shows. Rather than make a new, ad-supported tier to draw in new users (like HBOMax and Netflix), they changed the tier I was already in to the ad-supported one. Simply put, this is not what I signed up for, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Ironically, I wouldn't have minded if they simply upped the price of Prime as they've done in the past. I pay it annually because that is much more convenient than juggling monthly charges. However, getting rid of the ads on Prime Video requires a monthly charge of 3 dollars. There's no option for me to pay more annually. Bear in mind, I also pay for Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so this was turning into a mess. I can understand making those a separate charge, but now they're going to nickel and dime me on a service I already paid for in advance. 

Another service I'd paid for annually was Disney+. However, after that business with Jimmy Kimmel, an increase in their annual price, and now their current deal with OpenAI to flood Plus with slop, not only did I not renew my Disney+ subscription, but I'm not giving them any money for the next year at least, including going to their movies. I'm not paying for slop. If they want in bed with OpenAI, they can have each other.

Speaking of AI, Amazon made their own AI deal that served as the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have an array of smart speakers around the house. They're very handy. I use them for kitchen timers while cooking, controlling lights, making grocery lists, playing music (if I don't mind the shuffle mode), and sometimes as an intercom with my roommate, among other things. Again, very handy. Alexa Plus, meanwhile, is only handy in the sense I want to put my hands around its neck and squeeze its damned life out of it. At first, it was offered as a beta program and an update to the Alexa app. In addition to the hassle of dealing with how everything was rearranged in the app, using the new Alexa Plus was equally tedious and even counterproductive. Without getting into the weeds of how virtual assistants work, they replaced Alexa's hard-coded routines with a chatbot that turns nearly everything you ask it to do into a big production. I almost wouldn't mind it except everything took slightly longer than it normally did. I swear the first time I tried adding something to the grocery list in the new app with Alexa Plus, it took about five minutes. Full disclosure, I've used AI chatbots before, and I hate them. I hate everything about them. It gets under my skin because chatbots are essentially what customer service jobs want you to sound like in a call center scenario. It's that mode of speech which tries to sound casual and friendly but is so forced as to be legitimately insulting. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it as well; it's trying to sound so human that it backfires. 

I tried to back out of the Beta program, and was successful, but only until the app update forced Alexa Plus onto me. If I kept my Prime membership, I was getting Alexa Plus whether I wanted it or not. 

This led me to look into my Prime membership and see just what exactly I was (and wasn't) getting for my money. One of my favorite aspects of Amazon is something called Subscribe and Save. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, you lump so many items together in a single shipment and set them to be dropped off at regular intervals, and this not only comes with free shipping, but discounts on the goods in question compared to one-time purchases. This is how I get my cat food, kitty litter, paper towels, bath tissue, and even my protein bars. Having boxes of paper towels and toilet paper dropped off on my front step instead of dealing with it during a Target trip is so convenient. It's pretty much like having a bulk store membership only you get everything delivered. I'm even using it for my roommate's colostomy supplies. I was convinced that all this was part of the Prime membership; it seemed like the next logical step from the 2-day free shipping that Prime offers. Looking into it, though, it turns out this is not tied to Prime. It's a completely separate service that anyone can sign up for. 

That was my a-ha moment. The only thing that my Prime membership was offering besides 2-day shipping on some items with no minimum total in the cart was Prime Video, and that was really not worth having the ads on it for what I was paying. If I really want to see something, it's easy enough to just wait for the whole series to drop, pay for a month (maybe even shell out the extra 2 or 3 dollars to watch without ads), and then binge the whole thing before the time goes up. My roommate's a little disappointed as she's a big Critical Role fan. Even though this membership won't lapse until June, that means future seasons of both Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will have to be consumed via the binge and run model.

I wonder how long before Amazon enacts an "x-months minimum" stipulation to their Prime Video memberships. 

A July 4th Post About Videogames Because I Can

Nostalgia is not only a drug; it is the ultimate abusive relationship. You start out loving something before growing tired of it. Eventually, you stop caring about it potentially to the point that you hate it. Next thing you know, it’s been years since even thinking about it and suddenly you want it back to the point of putting tears in your eyes.

Believe it or not, there was a point in time when we collectively hated translucent casings on our electronics. We thought it looked downright ugly. It’s only been in recent years with the rise of identical-looking smartphones and samey notebook computers that we look back on those see-through housings with fondness. From the perspective of those old laptops and music players, we’re standing outside with a Bluetooth speaker over our heads blasting love songs via Spotify, only probably way more pathetic and certainly not going to end the way that movie did.

I was thinking about all this today having just beaten Monument Valley on my iPad, including all its add-on chapters. I know I’m about eleventy-billion years late to the party on these games, but they’re new enough to me to be interesting and old enough to everyone else to be retro. I got it through Netflix, who is delisting the game a few days from now. I’m probably not going to get to the sequels in that time, but maybe I’ll just buy the damn things from the app store after all.

Speaking of abusive relationships, puzzle games and I have a similar standing as RPG’s in that I love them dearly, but I don’t have time for them. I have a rather addictive personality, and as such generally don’t play games on my phone because of the distraction and time sink. If I want to play a game, I’ve got to work for it, fire up the Playstation or the Switch and sit my ass down on the couch. There are still games on my phone, mostly as a contingency plan if I’m stuck somewhere for a while and need my dopamine fix. The exception to that is Pokemon Go, which I’ve been playing religiously for some years now. In my defense, at least that game has me get up and out of the house when it isn’t exhaustingly hot or blisteringly cold. When it came to Monument Valley, I was certainly aware of the games, but I never gave them much thought. I saw a few screenshots and clips of gameplay and my response was a resounding, “It’s probably okay, but so what?” It reminded me of a game I tried out on my PSP called Echochrome. The games have a fair bit in common in that they both involve navigating Escherian landscapes using a combination of dream logic and lateral thinking. Echochrome predates Monument Valley by a few years, the former very much still a product of buttons and joystick gaming while the latter was born and bred to work with a touchscreen, be it a phone or, better yet, a tablet.

This led me to thinking of similar sort of puzzle games, ones that involve navigating a space rather than simply sliding blocks or matching tiles. One of these games is Crazy Castle for the NES. Specifically, and depending on what region of the world you reside in, Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle (more on this in a moment). The game has you navigate a scene while dodging enemies in order to collect a number of carrots before moving on to the next level, of which there are 60. For a NES game, that number certainly seems crazy, until you realize each level only occupies about two screens worth of real estate and they employ a kind of modular construction. I remember my brother and I losing our minds at the idea of Bubble Bobble having some 100 levels, until we realized each level was only a screen and of a similarly repetitive level design. Although I do remember playing Bubble Bobble as a rental from a local grocery store in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, I never actually played Crazy Castle. I don’t even think I knew it was a puzzle game. Frankly, in my mind, at that time a puzzle game consisted of falling blocks or sliding tiles. I do remember seeing the game at the same grocery store and reading the back of the box. What stood out to me most was this image of Bugs Bunny embracing a female version of himself in a blue dress. According to the text blurb, this is Honey Bunny, a character who has appeared in a few classic Looney Tunes shorts, though her design has never been set in stone. The image on the box baffled me because of how much like Bugs she looked. In fact, she looked like Bugs when he’s wearing a dress to fool Elmer Fudd. On the whole, it seemed weird to me to give Bugs a love interest at all, much less in a videogame, as if someone said, “It’s a videogame! You gotta rescue a damsel!”

It turns out the reason for the love interest is rooted in the game’s origin. This was around 1989 and in Japan the game originally starred Roger Rabbit (his wife Jessica being the captive Honey Bunny). As for bringing it to America, there was a problem. There was already a Roger Rabbit game on the NES and not produced by Kemco. So, the game was reworked graphically to feature Looney Tunes characters.

More games would be released in the Crazy Castle series, at least 5 depending on how you set up your spreadsheet, with multiple versions of each one depending on the region of their release. For the Japanese version of the second game, Roger Rabbit was replaced with Mickey Mouse. North America would still get Bugs Bunny right up until the 5th game in the series, which would star Woody Woodpecker. As for other regions, intellectual properties varied, from Garfield to the Ghostbusters to a Danish troll named Hugo.

It’s interesting to compare these titles to Monument Valley and Echochrome in terms of their presentation. In Echochrome, the character you have to guide around the impossible objects is an articulated artist’s mannequin, going with the game’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic, almost as if you’re playing a prototype rather than something finished. Monument Valley has you take on the role of Princess Ida, a small and silent little girl in a white dress and conical hat as she traverses a sea of soothing color gradients and isometric architecture. While the game has a story, it is not emphasized beyond some cryptic lines of text, the ending being almost symbolic more than anything concrete. Ironically, Crazy Castle has an equally anonymous quality about it, so much so that any number of characters and scenarios can be swapped out as needed, leaving the game with no real identity of its own. The closest thing the game had to an original character was in the Japanese version of the third game, with Mickey Mouse being replaced by Kid Klown, who would go on to have his own series of completely different games from Kemco. This game would see a release in North America, though its connection to the Crazy Castle franchise was nowhere to be seen as it does play a bit differently than the Bugs and Woody entries.

Having a major IP attached to a game creates a number of problems when it comes to preservation. While an original cartridge of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castles is neither rare nor fetching some high price on auction sites, it’s not been made available through any current console platform, namely the NES library of the Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how exactly the licensing deals work for that particular service (notably they haven’t removed or retired any games from the library, unlike Netflix), but having to deal with both a game developer/publisher as well as the owners of the license, in this case Warner Bros., has got to be a nightmare. This is the unfortunate fate of many licensed games, especially older games from the 8 and 16-bit era. They’re made to cash in on name recognition, they sell as many copies as they can, and then they fade into the haze of memory until suddenly they’re wanted again.

If Gex can come back, maybe there’s still hope for Crazy Castle.

A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media. 

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur. 

Maxed Out

I have officially allowed my Disney+ subscription to lapse following the closing of The Mandalorian's second season, and cashed in a free 30-day trial of HBO Max via my cell provider. Jury's out on if this was a good move, but there's no loss in either case. I'll renew my subscription to Disney+ when the new Star Wars content rolls out, but as far as keeping HBO Max past the trial period, that's less and less likely. For starters, HBO Max is about twice the monthly cost of Disney+. This puts it closer in the Netflix realm of streaming services, but despite having the Warner Bros. shield hovering over the operation, the amount of content present is simply nowhere near Netflix, and even Disney+ offered a pretty decent bang for the buck. To be fair, not all content on Disney's linear/terrestrial television channels like XD are simultaneously available on D+, namely the newer seasons of ongoing shows like The Owl House. I believe Ducktales had a similar arrangement as well, not unlike a movie having a theatrical run before coming to home media. It's intriguing that a show on basic cable can still make more money than a dedicated streaming platform. It's like that supposed paradox about food courts in malls, that while the leasing costs can almost surpass that of a standalone restaurant, the returns more than make up for it because of the location. 

Speaking of movie theaters and restaurants, I think the YouTuber ADoseofBuckley put it best when he said of the lockdowns, "I miss movies the most, and movie theaters the least." Don't get me wrong, nobody loves movie theaters more than me, but you can love something and still not miss it. In fact, although there was a time when I was going to the movie theater literally once a week with my roommate, I would hardly consider our venue of choice to be a movie theater. Rather, it was a restaurant that just so happened to show movies. Actually, that's a slight exaggeration as only two of their screening rooms had the full dine-in experience, whereas all the others were more in the self-service vein. Couple the restaurant experience with the fact that we took advantage of a promotional offer that meant movie tickets for new releases were only 5 dollars due to seeing them on an "off-day" like Tuesday, and this was on the whole a pretty sweet arrangement. We may have to deal with the occasional annoying patron, the kind who use their speakerphone for all their calls no matter the location. Yes, they put their phone away by the time the movie started, but the "call" still continued if that makes sense. Maybe it's a cultural shift or I simply have less patience for people lacking basic self-awareness, but the social experience of movie theaters has become painfully overrated. 

To go off on a minor tangent, let me tell you about the relationship between malice and ignorance. Thinking you're the most important person in the world and nobody else matters is obviously malice, while thinking you're the only person in the world is ignorance. I was on a return flight from visiting family when, as we were about to take off, I heard sounds from the seat behind me. At first, I didn't think anything of it. I figured someone just got messaged a short video or clicked on some ad and in the next 30 seconds or less, all would be quiet in time for the jet engines to kick in. However, it kept going. I realized someone was sitting behind me, laptop out and open, and was watching a movie or TV show using only the built-in speakers of their device. Ironically, if this guy was simply talking to the person next to him, even if a little loudly, I wouldn't think anything of it. You're in a small, enclosed space with people. You're going to talk to them, moreso if you already know each other. I guess it's because of the expectation. I expect people to talk to each other, hopefully at a reasonable volume that most other people aren't bothered by it, but effectively turning your seat and all those seats in a given radius around you into your own personal living room is not what I expect when I take a flight. Much like the previous notion of him simply watching something super-quick before putting his phone away or switching to another activity, I kept trying to give him the benefit of the doubt until the seconds became minutes. The reason I didn't say anything beyond the paranoid possibility of creating an uncomfortable atmosphere I'd be on the receiving end of for the entirety of the flight was because I couldn't find the right vocabulary to arm myself with. I don't mean I couldn't think of how to diplomatically inform this gentleman that I had no interest in hearing his favorite episode of Fargo. What I mean is I was having trouble processing the situation to begin with, much less coming up with a way to solve the problem in a way that wouldn't invite worse ones. The flight attendant came to my rescue, as well as that of everyone in that aforementioned radius. 

She asked, not said, but asked, "Sir, do you have headphones?" 

I love this woman. All these years later, and despite knowing her only through this small exchange within earshot of me on an airplane, I love her. Furthering my fortune was the revelation this one-man living room was firmly in the ignorant category rather than the malicious one. He didn't get uppity or haughty or stubborn. Whether he dug out his headphones or simply stopped the episode, I know not and care as little. I did however remain more than a little baffled at how it would never possibly occur to him that watching a movie on your laptop in the presence of strangers is more than a little bit... off-putting. Again, I don't feel this comes from a place of, "I am entitled to this!" but that's such a small sliver of daylight to navigate and I wish more people could understand that as nobody can read your mind nor travel in time to learn potentially redeeming context about your circumstances, all we have to go by are the results. When you do something that arrogant people do, you'll be seen as arrogant. It's that simple. It's hardly fair, but that's the price we pay for our agency, autonomy, and privacy. 

Going back to the social experience of watching movies, whether it's in a theater/restaurant or on a laptop perched on an airplane's tray table, I was legitimately intrigued to go all in on a full year or even six months (per their upsell that follows signing up for the 30-day trial) of HBO Max despite the cost. The Old Worm recently made headlines by announcing a bold experiment of releasing movies in theaters the same day as on their HBO Max platform. 

Behold, the Conqueror Worm

This sort of "simulcast" has been done before on more than a few occasions, though usually for smaller, independent productions that likely weren't banking on a return for the theatrical portion of their run. The results of these past efforts are largely inconclusive, as most theaters are either unwilling to sign up for this experiment, or are more likely not interested in the small, budget-friendly personal pieces given the deluge of blockbusters they've got to pick from. What's different about this run, besides the fact it was completely unplanned by anyone and everyone outside of the Water Tower's private conference rooms, is simply the scale of the operation. Wonder Woman 1984 is not a small movie. It’s one of their major blockbusters, the kind of blockbuster that needs a theatrical run to make back its exorbitant budget. The same goes for the other pictures on the list, including a fourth Matrix, a third Suicide Squad film (assuming you count Birds of Prey/Harley Quinn as number two), a second Space Jam, and a rebooted Mortal Kombat. That said, a big budget does not equate to a big welcome. 

I've already talked at length my reservations about the third attempt at Dune, so the ability to stream it in the comfort of my own home doesn't sweeten the deal very much. Most of the other films listed in the Dubba-Bee's 2021 vision net a similar reaction from me, with the sole exception of King Kong vs. Godzilla (and maybe The Suicide Squad, if only for a morbid fascination with the first film). However, that release date falls outside of the 6-month window by a few weeks, which I can't help but assume is by design. In fact, even Dune has been pushed back to later in the year. Its first delay was due to the Coronavirus lockdowns, so a delay of a few months was understandable. That's exactly what happened with WW84, previously slated for the summer of 2020. However, with it now being delayed by over a full year, coupled with Home Box Office's push for the 6-month plan, and it's looking like the service may not have as much confidence in their bold experiment as previously believed. 

It's an adequate concern for theaters to be nervous about protecting their investments. At the same time, the promise of an early release and a large screen is simply not enough for many people anymore. The dine-in add-on is a step in the right direction, and its only apparent shortcoming is the unexpected circumstance of a global pandemic. 

I'd say it's high time drive-ins made their best move for a comeback. 

Frankly, Clover, I Don't Care-a-Toss

I liked Cloverfield. It was a legitimately novel approach to the kaiju genre that more or less delivered on what it promised: a giant monster's city-wide rampage caught on a camcorder. 
10 Cloverfield Lane is a serviceable little thriller that tries too hard to create tension and banks even more heavily on a "twist" so predictable that painting itself into a corner is a charitable description. It's that episode of the Twilight Zone you've never actually seen but know the premise and ending to because it's been referenced to death by everything else. Again, it's serviceable. 
The Cloverfield Paradox is... a mess. It's a mess from the start. If there's an underlying issue that plagues all of the films in this series, it's that they try wearing too many hats. It worked better for Cloverfield because the genres it tries to mesh have enough elbow room to gel with one another. 10 Cloverfield Lane tries to be a psychological thriller playing off paranoia and speculation about the unknown, but forgoes the character psychology/social commentary in favor of a flashy action set piece of payoff that's almost insulting. Its attempt at genre mixing fails because the parts are incompatible. 
The Cloverfield Paradox has this problem and then some. I could almost demonstrate this mathematically, but let's talk about what it means for something to be derivative. There's nothing inherently wrong with a movie being derivative or familiar or even formulaic. Everything borrows from something that came before, sometimes mixing and matching from other somethings along the way. Being derivative does become a bad thing when you miss the all important second step of referring to the past, and that's learning from it. Borrowing works best when you build on what you borrow, shoulders of giants and all that general wisdom. Not only does Paradox borrow from a number of sources without adding its own flavor to the mix, but it handles them so clumsily and ineptly that I wouldn't even call it experimental if I was desperately trying to be nice. If there were more jokes beyond token banter among the characters, I'd think it was a parody. 
Going back to what I said about building on what you borrow, one of my favorite horror movies is Event Horizon. If you've never seen it, it's about a ghost ship in space and the salvage crew sent to find out why it mysteriously vanished only to reappear with the crew's innards painting the walls. Needless to say, something's gone horribly wrong, and it's about to get worse. Granted, this isn't an especially great film (it's certainly aged quite a bit) as its premise loses steam around the halfway point and even gets a bit goofy towards the start of the third act. However, the reason it works is that albeit it's not exactly a surprise when we learn just what we're dealing with, it builds up to it. It creates an oppressive atmosphere with just enough plausibility that your suspension of disbelief can boot up slowly enough to ease you into the sillier bits of the narrative unfolding before you. 
Now, nearly 20 years later (I was a sophomore in High School when Event Horizon came out), I'm watching this ParaCloverDox mashup and in the first ten minutes, a talking head on a news program the characters are watching warns that this super-science power plant in orbit could not only rip open the fabric of space-time, but actually summon monsters and demons. He uses those exact words and even gets called on them by the interviewer. Why should I care about anything that happens in a movie if the movie itself practically tells me to my face that there's nothing to care about? 

Seriously, I think this movie decided to go to Netflix instead of theaters to save itself the embarrassment of trying and failing to stand alongside the likes of Interstellar, The Europa Report, Alien, Solaris, Event Horizon, 2010, Total Recall, and even The Black Hole (which also knew how to build up an atmosphere and get people invested enough to ignore the goofy parts, and did so about 20 years before Event Horizon). 

If you want me to say one good thing about it, it's Elizabeth Debicki. She played an alien queen in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and brings a commanding presence to this CloverLaneSlusho nonsense that does not deserve her. 

Blame My Paranoia

I hope I live long enough to see 3D printers this big.

My formal introduction to the work of Tsutomu Nihei follows a rather common pattern. I saw Knights of Sidonia on Netflix, and from there I found the rest of his bibliography, though I've yet to dive into any of it. I found out about Blame! through Classic Game Room, along with Biomega. Comixology filled me in on the rest. 

I'm currently waiting on the arrival of a somewhat obscure DVD as part of a not-quite review that discusses some oddities in the dynamic of digital versus physical media, a kind of meditation on the unadvertised mission statement of my weblog, discussing examples of media that don't fit broadly established genres or categories and subsequently fall through the cracks. 

I watched Blame! knowing very little about the story of the original manga. I'd read some snippets here and there, either descriptions or reviews, but beyond Kiri (Killy?), his weapon, and the Terminator-like setting of humans against machines, I had no real clue what to expect. This led to a bout of what could best be described as cognitive dissonance. My mind had expectations for the storyline that went in the polar opposite direction, though hardly to my dismay. It simply makes me wonder if anyone else may have the same quasi-existential experience. 

In the distant future, humanity has effectively cracked the post-scarcity economy, allowing us to build and create without any real restrictions. The megastructure that results from all this is maintained entirely by machines under the guidance of a supercomputer called the Authority. Under the Authority, robots called Builders continue to expand the structure while Safeguards enforce security. At some point, thanks to a contagion, humans lose the ability to interface with the netsphere (the internet), leaving the Authority to make like the brooms from Fantasia and carry on as it always has with only the vaguest of direction. Builders now build without rhyme or reason, a la the Winchester Mansion but on a larger scale, and Safeguards kill humans on sight, classifying them as interlopers. Many millennia pass, but small pockets of humanity manage to eke out a living despite the constant threat of extermination. 

Our story starts with a group of upstarts from a village of human survivors scavenging for food against the better judgment of their elders. A veritable Mickey Mouse operation from the start, the plan goes horrifically awry and about half the party is butchered by killer department store mannequins. The remaining few are about to meet the same fate when they bump into a stoic man in black who wipes out the Safeguards with one shot of an otherwise unassuming firearm. He asks if anyone possesses something called a Net Terminal Gene. The kids have no clue what he's talking about, but insist he come with them to meet the other villagers on the off-chance someone can help. 

The old man of the tribe, known only as Pops, explains that Kiri is a traveler, known through oral traditions, like most of their knowledge. Sadly, what they know as far as what Kiri is looking for is extremely limited, almost superstitious. One story stands out, though, that of a ghost that lives below the village in a place called the Rotting Shrine. 

To the surprise of likely no sci-fi fan worth his salt, said ghost isn't a ghost at all, but a holographic projection. It appears to be of a woman, but the message has become distorted and corrupted beyond coherency. Walking right past where the humans fear to tread, Kiri unearths the head and spine of an android and employs what people in the tech industry know as Emergency Repair Procedure Number 1: hit it. 

This is the part where the ignorance of the humans in the story and my own ignorance of the original source material collide and merge into a twisted ladder of not quite dramatic irony and an assumed idiot plot. The android introduces herself as Cibo (pronounced "Shee-Boh" for some reason) and starts telling the story of how she came to be as she is... without really explaining what she is. She says she's a scientist who tried to restore order to the megastructure. The whole time this is going on, all I can think is, "So, she's a human consciousness transferred into a robot? But, if that's the case, how can Kiri perform a retinal scan? Why would that work?" Furthermore, I thought, "Given one of the villagers previously established that there are Safeguards which can take on human forms, do we have any reason to believe what Cibo is saying?" Then there's the villagers, who don't seem to question any of this whatsoever, though to be fair only believe about half of what they're being told. That's when Cibo drops a line I'm going to paraphrase for emphasis: 

"Take me to the automated factory and I'll make anything you want. Even food." 

I dunno. I can imagine quite a lot.

Again, knowing nothing about the source material, tell me that line is anything but a massive red flag billowing in the wind. I mean, there's "Too Good To Be True" and there's frigging magic beans, Hansel and Gretel, Gingerbread Man riding a fox that say ring-a-ding-ding-ding.... The point is, for the next 10-15 minutes, I was almost yelling at my screen, "Tonto! Don't go to town! They're gonna beat y'up again!" I was ready to write off the villagers as cannon fodder and the story as an idiot plot. An idiot plot is a plot wherein the only reason anything transpires the way it does is that the protagonists are total morons with no common sense and even fewer survival skills. Think about it: here's a group of people who hide from robots that want to kill them, and now here's the skeletal head & shoulders of a robot promising them anything they want if they take her to a factory... that's automated... as in, run by robots.  

Where the Hell is Admiral Ackbar when you need him!? Do these villagers really have no concept of what a human being is supposed to look and act like, especially a dead one? Did they see the first Hellboy movie too many times? To be fair, the team that decides to go along with Kiri to this factory have their fair share of doubts. The fact is, given their circumstances, they have no reason not to go. I was expecting a bleak story, but this was starting to get ridiculous, drawing out what seemed like an obvious betrayal in the making. While things do go horribly wrong, Cibo's actually on the level. That's not a spoiler; that's saving you from the embarrassment of energy wasted in anticipation of something that never happens. 

It turns out Cibo is the M to Kiri's James Bond. The story of the manga has very few recurring characters and generally flimsy alliances. Cibo, however, is as much the face of Blame! as Kiri, to the point she takes the trope of Main Character Immunity to almost comical proportions, even in the short span of the film's run time. 

There's a real Ship of Theseus theme to Cibo that I rather dig; that she was a normal human being, then gradually augmented herself, eventually reducing her very "self" to a stream of data, transplanting herself into a completely synthetic body, and even transferring/copying herself from one form to another as needed. We typically apply it to inanimate objects like ships and tools as a meditation on sentiment, but applied to an existential context it becomes infinitely fascinating and equally terrifying. At the end of the day, all "we are", all that "I am" is a string of memories, shaped by experiences, and stored imperfectly in a fundamentally frail physical form. 

Speaking of physical forms, I'd said before I was waiting for a DVD to arrive, which was true when I started writing this a few days earlier. That situation has changed:  

Thanks RightStuf

Things are going to get complicated.