Fantastic Stories of the Imagination #220. Adam-Troy Castro

horrible happens, the stories are “dark” in the way a suddenly windy day is dark: one gets the unsettling feeling that somewhere someone’s life is being destroyed by a subtly malevolent wind. And subtle is the word. Throughout the tales, there are cruelties — subtle, small, disproportionate, or murderous — and one cannot clearly decipher where the originating wound began. Loss, grief, and insanity are set into motion in such mundane way that human life feels very fragile indeed.

      I’ll just say that this slender volume caused me no end of trouble to read. I love omnibus stories but when the POV characters are nameless, are speaking about other nameless characters, or to other nameless characters... well, the preponderance of pronouns and nameless characters can be frustrating. I kept thinking I should’ve bought an highlighter — preferably six or seven of them in different colors. And yet, this is a rewarding puzzle and a book every writer should read. Ogawa gives the pertinent parts of the protagonists’ histories — those telling clues that connect all the characters of all the stories. The tiger skin coats, the kiwi-filled shed, the lost father — all are clues to characters treading the psychological border of insanity and bordering each others’ lives. I highly recommend this book, and these stories touched my heart more than all the others mentioned in this review.

      

      I considered reading the original Japanese light novel, All You Need is Kill, on which Edge of Tomorrow is based. But reconsidered. In the future I’ll do a comparison/compare review of Asian stories versus American remakes but not now.

      Edge of Tomorrow is an alien invasion movie crossed with Groundhog Day. The protagonist, cocky protag Major William Cage, is a smug media priss — an artist, if you will. His war reports have helped to enlist soldiers to fight the invading gigantic bug aliens. For reasons that make no sense whatsoever (and which seem to exist solely to make the older Tom Cruise a replacement for the younger hero in the original Japanese novel) Cage has been enlisted to be an actual soldier at the front. Turning war into art and media pap is one thing; living war is quite another. Cage doesn’t want to go to the front but ends up there anyway. Think Verdun and the Normandy Invasion. Except that our protag knows diddly squat about being a soldier. He is wearing unwieldy armor he cannot operate, has no allies, and is blacklisted. On his first day of battle, all the humans get slaughtered. Our hero dies. Aliens: win; armed forces of the world: zero.

      But then, Saving Private Ryan gives way to Groundhog Day and Gears of War: Cage wakes up again. And again. He’s not really thrilled about finding himself dislocated in space and relocating in time. This film is in medias res taken to the nth degree and our hero has some worldbuilding to figure out. Why is he waking up? Why does he keep dying? Who will believe his flaky story of the day repeating itself? How can he escape this time loop? How can he learn what he has to learn and meet whom he has to meet to stop the human armed forces from meeting their demise? And, believe me, there are many many deaths that Cage and his colleagues must endure.

      I related to the character’s journey, even if Cage — or was it Cruise — felt somewhat distant. But don’t look for heart in this film. Yes, the aliens are deadly, and yes, the film depicts warfare well. But because there are no character backstories, this film is a mental exercise. Where this film excels is in the execution; the first half is expositional perfection. The act of learning and the toils of puzzling through has never been shown so perfectly. “Trial and error” and muddling through was never this deadly.

      But then the second part of the film arrives. It’s plain old linear storytelling once Cage finally learns the “secret” and has escaped the death loop. So the second half of Edge of Tomorrow lacks something. This is also where we should see how terrifying real death is. After all, Cage has been dying a lot, but he knew all his other deaths would cause him to a return to life. One would think the screenwriter would differentiate between the new realization of “death without hope of rebooting” and Cage’s previous deaths. But nooooooo. Then the WTF-ending arrives, an ending which seems like fan service for HEA-loving Americans.

      Perhaps I’m a romantic but seriously, aren’t heroes allowed to die anymore? If you’re going to have a character sacrifice himself, shouldn’t he actually die? In the end, Edge of Tomorrow comes off as an empty mental puzzle and a film about death which doesn’t take death seriously. But kudos for the visualization and depiction of what a learning curve looks and feels like.

      And no... so far no one has called this film Borgesian.

      ❑

      Carole McDonnell is the author of The Constant Tower, published by Wildside Books.

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      Reviews: The Magic Lantern: To Start With by Adam-Troy Castro

      So last issue we launched this space with this magazine’s first installment of The Remake Chronicles, a look at the stories that get made and remade in motion picture form. This issue, we initiate the feature that will more-or-less alternate with it: The Magic Lantern, a movie review column that will occasionally deign to cover whatever giant tent-pole offering pays the bills at the multiplex this month, but will somewhat more often concern itself with the offerings that most genre fans don’t know about, the treasures and less-than-treasures that can be found in various formats, either theatrically or on home video.

      Not to put too fine a point on this, friends, we find this work holy. Too many of us can discuss the same dozen movies ad nauseum, but have absolutely no familiarity with that which hasn't been focus-grouped, market-tested, and sold to us via sneak-peaks, artfully planned leaks, interviews, and divers other species of carefully molded salesmanship. Very few of us know that the best films are often those that few of us have heard about, that star nobody anyone has ever heard about, and that won’t ever form the toy inside a Happy Meal. The genres of fantasy and science fiction horror are particularly rich with such offerings, and if the titles in question can be provided with a little more circulation, it’s possible that more fans turning to the subject of genre film will be able to talk about something other than why Avatar sucked, why Charlize Therone could have easily leaped out of the way of that giant toppling horseshoe, and why M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is even worse than the movie he made before it.

      Seriously, guys, there really are other movies to check out. Some of them require some searching. Some of them require you to sit through subtitles. Many are worth the time you would have spent watching the movies you already know by heart. I mean it.

      Take this fascinating comedy... about boredom.

      

      The Bothersome Man (Norwegian; 2006). Directed by Jens Lien. Screenplay by Per H.V. Shreiner. Starring Trond Fausa Aurvåg , Petronella Barker Per Schaaning. 95 minutes.

      A man is delivered by bus, on which he’s the only passenger, to a ramshackle way station in the middle of nowhere. From there he is delivered by car to a metropolis of exceeding blandness. He is kindly provided with a job and an apartment. The job is not challenging and the apartment is functional. People are polite enough, and the women reasonably willing to respond to his overtures. But no conversation he ever joins ever has any life to it; no pleasure of the flesh he indulges in gives him any satisfaction; every interaction he has with any other human being is utterly without color and energy. It is like living in a cocoon of cotton wool. It’s even worse than Boise, Idaho.

      A taste of what awaits him is provided in the very first scene, an creepy flash-forward set on a subway