Collider

The Large Hadron Collider frequently appears in the news but how much do we really know about it? We know it is a particle accelerator built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN for short) which was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs Boson, but what do those scientists really do in that 27km long circular tunnel?

For those who have always wanted to know more, Collider, an exhibition at the London Science Museum, aims to make the strange world CERN, the Large Hadron Collider and particle physics accessible to all.

The exhibition begins with a short introduction video, which briefly explains what CERN and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) are. The video features several scientists of different ages, nationalities and backgrounds and focuses on the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. This establishes the overriding theme of the exhibition clearly in the audience’s mind.

Collider focuses primarily on the collaborative nature of modern physics research. CERN has 20 member nations (19 from Europe and Israel) as well as 7 observer nations (including the US, Russia, Japan and India) which check their findings. Collider talks in detail about the challenges and advantage of having people of different languages and cultures working together on the mammoth LHC. Through videos we get to meet various members of the LHC team and we can see how diverse they are in terms of age, gender and race.

As well as talking about international collaboration, Collider also attempts to dispel the view of scientific breakthroughs as one man’s eureka moment.  The theory of the Higgs-Boson was originally proposed by five different physicists through three different scientific papers and it is near impossible for one person to claim the discovery as their own.  Even Professor Peter Higgs, after whom the elusive subatomic particle is named, has openly said that his work is part of an ongoing collaborative process. 10,000 people work on the LHC and the exhibition makes the point that scientific breakthroughs are the product of many people’s hard work.

Experimental particle physics is not the most accessible of fields and the Science Museum attempts to cater for visitors of all ages and levels of scientific understanding. A lot of effort is made to make sure Collider does not go over the heads of younger visitors whilst still remaining interesting to grown ups and those with an active interest in physics.As the visitors travel through the exhibition they observe white boards with illustrations of the processes which go on inside the LHC. These are simple enough to be understandable to pre-teen visitors but also provide a summary for older visitors.

Adjacent to these white boards are cross section diagrams of the components of the LHC, which go into much more detail of how the machine operates. Collider is certainly accessible to people from a non-scientific background, however I felt a lot of the ground of the exhibition had already been covered. The LHC and the Higgs Boson are frequently discussed in articles in mainstream media outlets, such as BBC News and the Guardian. As a reader of the science section of these publications, I felt I already knew a lot of what was in the exhibition. I can imagine that people who read the popular scientific press (New Scientist, etc) would find there was not much new to learn from Collider.

Where the exhibition really excels in its use of media; video, audio, projections, photographs and graphics are all interwoven throughout Collider to make a complete portrait of LHC. The photographs of the LHC are especially beautiful, full of amazing details. This was an exhibition that put a lot of effort into using all the mediums available to great effect.

It is too simplistic to imagine that the Higgs-Boson research is the only piece of important work that goes on at the LHC.  Collider does focus very heavily on this better known discovery, particularly on the moment it was announced.  As important as the Higgs-Boson is, there is a wide range of research done by the LHC which Collider overlooked.

At the end of the exhibition there are sections focusing on the other mysteries being investigated by CERN such as dark matter, dark energy and gravity’s relative weakness as a force. This was a well-chosen note to end on. One mystery is solved but more pop up, yet CERN, the LHC and their massive team of scientists from all over the world are still working hard to probe the enigmas of the universe.

I left the exhibition feeling stimulated and uplifted. Overall, Collider is very positive in mood. It also works hard to display the stereotype of physicist as old white men, pondering strange mathematical problems. Collider shows how accessible science can be, and how diverse it is; I hope it inspires visitors from all around the world that anyone can make a contribution to science.

Dune Retrospective

It is difficult to overstate just how important Dune is to science fiction. Originally published in 1965, Frank Herbert’s seminal masterpiece won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In addition to being a huge game-changer of the genre, Dune remains the best-selling science-fiction novel of all time. It casts a long shadow over the genre; the single ecosystem of Star Wars’ Tataouine is a clear nod to Arrakis,  and other sci-fi classics such as Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass also draw heavily on the book. What is the appeal of Dune and why has it lasted so much longer than that of other books?

Dune is set in a far future in which interstellar travel is made possible through consuming the mind-expanding ‘spice melange’. Melange originates from one planet only, the desert world Arrakis, also known as Dune. 

The novel follows Paul Atreides, whose family settles on Dune when his father is appointed the planet’s new ruler. However, the rich resources of Arrakis mean that House Atreides soon comes under attack.

Paul’s father is murdered, forcing Paul, the heir apparent, and his mother to escape. They only survive by joining the ranks of the native Fremen, who hold him as a messiah figure. Eventually they overthrow the new rulers of Dune, leading Paul to intrigue his way to becoming Emperor of all of humanity.

Published in the mid-1960s just before the advent of the flower power generation, a novel about a mind-expanding drug captured the mood of the time. The clear Middle Eastern allegory (Herbert based the Fremen language on Arabic) added to the novel’s relevance. Since then, the fascination Dune inspires in authors and readers alike has allowed it to maintain its high status. Dune has also inspired artists in other mediums, David Lynch directed and filmed an adaptation in 1984, and in 2000 the Syfy Channel produced a three-episode TV version.

Dune has also inspired many video games, particular Westwood Studio’s Dune 2. Released in 1992, it was one of the first strategy-based video games and established a lot of the conventions that strategy games still use today. Dune 2 was an important precursor to Westwood’s seminal Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn which was released three years later. It seems that whatever medium Dune is adapted into, it sets the mould for how things will be done in the future.

Today, Dune remains consistently popular, but significantly lags behind in followers when compared to famous sci-fi franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek etc. This is partly because Dune is a lot less accessible than these stories. The book is long and does not go out of its way to explain what is going on. Instead, the reader is immersed into a strange world of ritual, mysticism and political intrigue. You are never quite sure what is real and what is illusion, what is fantasy and what is science. Dune is a book which tests the reader and does not give easy answers. It is no wonder that it has inspired artists to create great works and technical innovations. Sadly, its esoteric nature prevents it from being as popular as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Dune was the first ‘grown-up’ novel I read aged 12 and it opened my mind to the amazing world of the science fiction novel. I was already a huge Star Wars fan but Dune showed me the how complex and imaginative the sci-fi novel can be when the author is able to create a whole world and immerse the reader in it. Dune is perhaps the best example of this experience of complete immersion in book form.

What is lacking is a screen adaptation which captures how magical the book is to read. The David Lynch version captures the mood of the novel but drops most of the plot to fit into two hours, while the 2000 TV adaptation maintains the plot, but fails to translate the mood accurately. Many fans feel that an adapted that captures both could catapult the novel to the same level of popularity as Lord of the Rings but it has always eluded audiences.

Chilean surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky attempted to adapt the book in the mid-1970s. Despite putting together an impressive team including Orson Welles, H. R. Giger, Salvador Dali and French comic book legend Moebius, he was unable attract funding. Perhaps Jodorowsky could have successfully translated the book into a film or maybe he would have just added to the opaqueness which surrounds Dune. For those interested, the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which explores the story of this would-be adaptation, is really worth a watch.

Dune may not be quite as famous a work as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but it still stands as a titan of the genre. This masterwork hardly needs a blockbuster film adaptation to maintain its popularity. With each generation, thousands of science-fiction readers rediscover the book and love it. I frequently tell my non-genre-reading friends that if they want to read one SF book, it should be Dune, as it’s a true pillar of science fiction.

Day of the Doctor

Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner for Doctor Who has been a hit and miss. It started out very strongly with the 11th hour and Matt Smith bounding out of the TARDIS to wave his hands around and talk quickly. However the last three years have had their share of turkeys including the unwatchable Let’s Kill Hitler and cringworthy Cold Blood. So when it was announced that Moffat was to pen an extended episode to mark the 50th anniversary of the show expectations where divided to say the last.

The anti was certainly upped for The Day of the Doctor, David Tennant and Billie Piper were brought back, British cinema legend John Hurt was signed up and classic villains the Zygons were resurrected. The plot jumps between the last day of the time war where the Warrior Doctor (John Hurt) is considering using a weapon called The Moment to destroy both Time Lords and Daleks. The Moment itself appears in the form of Rose (Billie Piper) to show the doctor what he will become if he uses The Moment. The plot then moves between Elizabethan England where the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) is attempting to stall a Zygons invasion and present day where Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) and companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) are investigating strange events at the National Gallery

Moffat’s has packed a lot of plot into 76 minutes and the episode did benefit from a second viewing, as a result some of the impact was lost on the night due to confusion. However what did come across was the excellent interplay between the principal actors especially the three Doctors. Hurt can out act the other two in his sleep but David Tennant reminded us all why we loved him so much with a few snappy one-liners. Coleman also turns in a strong performance, especially considering her character is underused in this episode. She provides the heart for the main emotional climax to the story and almost steels the scene from Hurt. Smith continues to be a charming as the foppish, dandy Doctor but he cannot manage the seriousness that Tennant had to balance out his own take on the character.

The plot itself does work well when you can follow it. The Zygons have a full story are not just rolled out to add some nostalgia value to the special. Their story has a clever twist resolution that Doctor Who can do so well when it gets it right.

For those who have hated Moffat’s term as showrunner, there is more ammunition here. It is unclear where this story fits into 11’s chronology - he was last scene in his own grave on Trenzalore but is now out and fine. However the most dislikeable part of the Day of the Doctor is the show’s ability to rewrite the rules of its own universe. The plot makes fundamental changes to the world of Doctor in a manner which is unfair on the audience. In a show that is as free as Doctor Who, what rules and events that have been established need to remain written in stone and not be changed whenever the writer feels like throwing on an extra narrative barbule.

Despite this, Day of the Doctor is a welcome addition to the cannon of Doctor Who episodes. Director Nick Hurran bring a grand, cinematic look to this episode which works well to increase the sense that this more than the average Doctor Who special. The plot is tense and well placed with a fitting emotional conclusion. Where this episode really shines is the interplay between the Doctors and the excellent acting from all three performers.

Day of the Doctor is not strong enough to silence all of Moffat critics, but considering how up and down Doctor Who’s important episodes can be (contrast The Parting of the Ways with The End of Time Part 2) this episode certainly falls into the up part of the spectrum. As a long running fan of the show I enjoyed it a lot, especially the little nods to the fans such as Nicholas Courtney’s cameo in a photograph and brief glimpse of the twelfth Doctor. As the history of Doctor Who continues to be written I can say that this important milestone has been properly observed.

Gravity

Veteran film critic & general British institution Mark Kermode once described 3D cinema as ‘phoney-baloney gimmickry’. To date there has been little evidence to contradict him. A raft of 2D animated & live action movies have been aggressively upgraded to 3D for dubious commercial reasons. Audiences have complained of headaches, blurred vision or not being able to see any difference.

It seems that no film can use 3D to enhance the narrative experience and this technology will be confined to the dustbin of cinema gimmick along with the double feature and scratch-and-sniff. Now director Alfonso Cuarón has created Gravity, a film which might just redeem the new format.

Gravity is a film that is designed for the big screen. After leaving the cinema I felt the impact of that movie would be lost on even the best HDTV/Blue-Ray home entertainment combo. I paid extra to enjoy it in IMAX and felt that even a traditional smaller cinema would lose something of the film’s visual flair.

There is plenty of spectacle in this film. There is spectacle in seeing the international space station ripped apart in a moment and there is spectacle in watching the continents on Earth slowly pass underneath the protagonists. However what is really impressive about the film’s visuals is Cuarón’s long sweeping camera shots that move around, above and below the subjects, as weightless as the astronauts the film focuses on.

The spectacle is also in Cuarón’s wide shots, full of detail, most of which would be lost on a screen any smaller than IMAX. Gravity is a big film, big in budget, big in scope and big in impact.

The plot can be written on the back of a postcard. Sandra Bullock is Ryan Stone, a medical expert who is currently installing a prototype medical scanner to the Huddle Space Telescope. She is assisted by Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) a veteran astronaut on his last mission. When a Russian satellite is destroyed it creates a global domino effect of expanding space debris. These collide with Stone and Kowalski, destroying their shuttle and hurling them into space. The two must work together in the most inhospitable environment to survive and make it back to Earth.

Plot is not the focus of Cuarón’s hard-sci-fi disaster movie, instead this film is all about the visuals, mainly the 3D which is used to create a sense of depth. The 3D shows us how far from Earth the protagonists are, the scale of the international space station and the distance between objects in orbit. Cuarón creates a feeling of openness and emptiness greater than John Ford did in his classic westerns. Space is a frontier that opens onto nothing and where fate is cruel to people who venture there.

The 3D is also used sparingly, when it can be most effective. Only a few times during the film do objects fly out of the screen towards us, and these are during the movie’s most intense moments. To break up these spectacular scenes of orbital destruction, Cuarón uses long sweeping shots, moving around characters, in and out of their point of view and across space. He aptly moves from long shots to extreme close ups without an edit.

However great the 3D is, visuals alone cannot make a film great. Gravity has a great character and a great performance at its heart. The danger to Ryan feels very real and is subtly conveyed by Bullock’s stunning performance. A significant amount of the film is given over to her, alone in space, trying to survive. It is hard to act through extended close up shots without any other actor to bounce off but Bullock handles her character masterfully.

She creates a convincing arc for the character from nervous space virgin at the start, through the extreme terror of a helpless victim to commanding confidence by the end of the film. Truly this is a film to challenge an actor and Bullock delivers an Oscar-winning performance if ever there was one.

Ryan is a great character: she is played well, has a strong backstory, convincing character arc and genuine emotional responses. I rooted for her more than I have any other recent hero or heroine from a Hollywood blockbuster. In her simple terror and the everyday nature of her character, we as an audience can really relate to her. We are able to put ourselves in her position and see the action of Gravity through the character’s eyes.

The simple story perfectly facilitates this. When Ryan succeeds I felt like cheering and when things look bleak for her I felt a real lump in my throat. This was partly due to the seriousness of the film. Throughout I thought it was a real possibility that this film would not have a Hollywood ending and that Ryan might be left drifting alone and cold in space when the credits rolled.

A great film is made by combining impressive visual trickery with strong story and empathetic characters. Gravity is a movie that has all three. However, the visuals are the greatest achievement here; for the first time 3D was used to enhance the narrative experience and not just to provide a great visual experience. It perfectly conveys a sense of weightlessness in space as we watch screws or pieces of satellite debris float past.

Gravity is a movie that makes use of the entire film-maker’s tool box to create a visually spectacular and deeply emotional film. The 3D is amazing, but without the good characterisation and strong performances it would not be enough to support the film. Other directors of 3D movies should take a leaf out of Cuarón’s book. This is how it is done.

Thor: Dark World

What do the Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel all have in common. They fall down in the third act. They all start off pretty well, but all three fall apart at the end. When they expand into bloated action set pieces and the story is lost in an attempt to cram as much spectacle as possible, these films fail to capitalise on their promising opening and middle sections. Contrast these films to the great action movies on the 1980s: Aliens, Predator, Die Hard. These undisputed classics of their genre only become tighter and more focused in the third act. The action boils down to one-on-one conflict of hero against villain where good can ultimately triumph over evil.

Sure, there is plenty of spectacle in Aliens's final conflict but it does not end with a hundred eggs hatching and Ripley fighting off hordes of aliens. Instead it ends with her fighting the queen; it’s a battle of alien terror against a human fighting for survival.

In the end these films become a distilled version of themselves, not an expanded version filled with nameless, faceless, pointless characters who only exist to be punched by the heroes. Many Hollywood action blockbuster now have a third act problem; however good they are in their set-up and development, these films fall apart at the resolution stage.

So does the latest offering from Marvel, Thor: Dark World break the mould?

The quick answer is that this film is much better structured than previous Marvel titles. The plot flows together well and leads to an appropriate conclusion. After the film-makers have established the main characters in the audience’s mind they can get on with the action, skipping the need for a tedious ‘introducing everyone’ stage.

The plot of Thor: Dark World is little more than an excuse for a series of action set pieces. It makes little sense and hangs on a series of bizarre coincidences. At some time in the distant past Thor’s grandfather defeated a race of dark elves who wanted to destroy all light using a weapon known as the Aether. Now the nine worlds are about to align and the dark elves have returned to use the Aether to destroy them all.

Thor’s love interest Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) accidentally finds the Aether in an abandoned warehouse in London, which is pretty convenient given otherwise there would no point in having her in the film. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns to save her from the dark elves, have a brief period of emotional angst and then stop the dark elves destroying all nine worlds. The only snag is that to do all of this, he must enlist the help of his treacherous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

It’s not uncommon for action blockbuster to place the plot and characters as secondary to the action, and in this case it is worth the series of beautifully designed, thrilling set pieces. It is also nice to see that this movie does not end with excessive property damage like Man of Steel & Avengers. That was getting boring. The final action scene in Greenwich doesn’t lack spectacle but manages to keep the action much tighter in focus as Thor battles against the dark elves’ leader (Christopher Eccleston).

Ending the film with Thor facing off against a super-villain is much more interesting than watching a group of people fight an army of faceless alien villains whose motivation is unclear at best. I can see why it was necessary to end the Avengers that way; watching six superheroes fight one villain wouldn’t be that thrilling. That’d be a pretty one-sided fight as the Avengers are pretty bad-ass.

However in creating these characters who possess enormous power, I feel the film-makers have lost the relatability of their protagonists. Die Hard’s John McClane is an everyday man in a strange situation, something we can all relate to. Superheroes are special by their very nature and are thus more difficult to relate to. Thor makes this problem worse by asking the audience to place themselves in the shoes of a Norse God.

We are supposed to relate to Thor via his real world problems – namely, his love life. Thor’s father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) wants him to find a nice Asgardian women like Sif (Jaimie Alexander) who has no discernible personality and almost no screen time. However, there is no tension in this story, partly because of Alexander’s lack of screen time and partly because it is clear from the start that Thor and Jane Foster will end up together.

The rest of the film has little emotional resonance. The big emotional moment in the middle of the film falls flat and doesn’t make Thor any more sympathetic as a character. This isn’t helped by Hemsworth’s terrible, wooden performance.

The rest of the cast are little better, however. Eccleston is unrecognisable under layers of make-up and does little more than fill the role of a two-dimensional villain. Hopkins phones in his performance and the usually very watchable Portman is on worse form than usual.

Idris Elba, who could act the socks off the rest of them in this sleep, turns up for five minutes as a pointless character. Only Hiddleston as Loki delivers in the movie. He is the only one with a credible emotional reaction to the main emotional scene. Hiddleston clearly delights in playing the trickster Loki and manages to be both funny and dark alternatively throughout the film. All the other characters are either there as window dressing or are completely pointless.

Thor is still a great character for an action movie: tough, courageous, lots of enemies to fight and nine worlds to save. The series of action set pieces both in London and in Asgard are breathtaking and stand up to the impressive legacy of action scenes the Avengers movies have built up. The visual effects, set design and combat choreography are all excellent which is what you want from an action film.

Despite this I was left with the feeling this was a very average movie. In many ways, it was acceptable and somewhat of an improvement on previous films in the franchise, but it offered nothing new or innovative.

I preferred the more paired down ending to a huge expansive set piece, the characters came through better and none of the visual impact was lost. Overall Thor: Dark World is one for the Avengers fans. They’ll love it for sure, but the general cinema audience might be left a bit cold.

What Is Horror Comedy?

The sky is possessed by an unearthly glow. The moon is a pale in colour and frightened. You stand beside a road cutting across the land like a rough scare of the skin of the world. Tenebrous and indescribable alien beings are eating in a nearby diner. Behind you cults practice bloody sacrifices to undying, ancient gods that sleep beneath the earth. Before you strange hooded figures perform eldritch rituals in front of a black, faceless monolith. In the background there is a pigeon. You have awoken in a world that is somewhere between reality and your nightmares. You are late for a PTA meeting. Welcome to Night Vale.

Horror and comedy sound like the complete opposites of each other. One aims to create positive feelings within the viewer, the other unpleasant feelings. However they are both broad churches, filled with many sub-genres, some of which have more in common than is immediately apparent. Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast from Common Place Books, is only one recent example of horror and comedy meeting to great effect.

Horror and comedy have been combined several times in the past, with the emphasis sometimes leaning towards one or the other.The League of Gentleman popularised the combination in their hit sit-com for the BBC and later in a film. Channel 4 has produced Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a comedy drawing heavily on the seminal horror works of Steven King, James Herbert and Lars von Trier’s excellent horror TV show The Kingdom. Mark Z. Danielewski’s ergodic bestseller The House of Leaves falls within the horror genre but can also be read as a spoof of an academic monograph. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead is a standard zombie horror movie, populated by characters from a rom-com.

What all these works have in common (aside from combining horror and comedy) is that all use a touch of the surreal to meld the two contradictory genres together. Surrealism has a long history of being successfully employed in both horror and comedy. From Monty Python’s Flying Circus to The Mighty Boosh, surrealism in comedy is well established. Many of horror’s greatest authors use surrealist elements in their stories, from the mixing of sleep and awake in the writing of HP Lovecraft to Steven King frequently giving life to inanimate objects in many of his novels.

The horror/comedy crossover genre is usually bent towards the surreal and Welcome to Night Vale is no exception. My own attempt to write a Welcome to Night Vale style opening feels more like a scene from a Francis Bacon painting than a work of conventional horror. Welcome to Night Vale draws its influences from a wide range of surrealist horror, most notable the short stories of HP Lovecraft that set the tone for the podcast.

In the American desert town of Night Vale, a community radio station gives regular updates of local news and events. However, the town is beset strange creatures and horrific events – from mysterious hooded figures and an ancient underground city, to a man in a tan jacket who no one can remember and the nameless, indescribable, monstrosity that is the station’s management. The strange thing is no one in Night Vale finds any of this unusual, however, Lovecraft’s influence is written all over the town and podcast.

It is difficult to take the writings of man who believed that space is a black-soupy liquid either, through which alien beings could swim, seriously and it is in this where Welcome to Night Vale is able to meld Lovecraft’s wired fiction horror style with surrealist comedy. It is this combination which makes Welcome to Night Vale distantly from the torture porn sub-genre of horror, popularised by the Saw movies, which is currently hugely popular with cinema goers.

It is also this unusual combination which makes it different from horror spoofs like the Scary Movie or Scream franchise. Whereas these seek to embrace the conventions of the horror genre and find humour in how ridiculous they can be, Night Vale mocks and subverts these conventions. Horror if often accused of being formulaic and so deep is this criticism that even spoof horror is formulaic in its approach.

Welcome to Night Vale is not a conventional modern horror but like House of Leaves, it feels like a breath of fresh air into a genre which too often falls back on tired formulas and generic stories. Welcome to Night Vale finds a new way of examining the horror genre and draws on the deep roots of modern horror which go back to Lovecraft. Like the best horror/comedies, it cleverly moves between the two genres, never going too far down one road or the other.

Horror/comedy is not something new and but it is a different way of thinking about horror and comedy, informed by the best cannon works of both genres. I would recommend anyone interested in either genre download Welcome to Night Vale and be amused and creeped out in equal measure. If you live in the town of Night Vale then follow the stations own advice: “turn on your radio and hide”. Goodnight Night Vale.

Retro Gaming Events

A teenager is wearing a down vest and washing the bonnet of a DeLorean DMC-12. Sadly this model is not fitted with a flux capacitor and I haven’t travelled back in time to the mid-80s. It’s simply a retro gaming event in my home town of Leicester.

This sort of sight is common at many retro culture events. The young man in question charges visitors for a picture wearing his puffed-up red vest and sitting in the iconic car – all proceeds go to research into Parkinson’s disease, which Michael J. Fox suffers from. By itself, the vehicle would be of little interest outside car enthusiasts’ circles, but when combined with an event centred on entertainment from the 80s and 90s, it is a huge hit. These events are popular across the world. Retro is in, from music to fashion to gaming. We are in an age of culture which looks to the past more than ever before. The 1960s wanted to throw off the mistakes of the past whereas the 21st century wants to embrace them. We can see it in sequels to long-dead film franchises (Rambo, Die Hard, Bill and Ted), and the return of the down vest and fedora to high street fashion. We can see it in the return to popularity of lost arts, from burlesque to board games.

Our modern culture is not so much informed by the past as borrowed from it. The old expression that the classics never go out of style has never been truer. For my generation, retro culture is more than nostalgia for the music and TV shows of our childhoods. It’s a rejection of bland modernity and a desire to live in a different age where big ideas and grand narratives were still fashionable, and careful craftsmanship was put into creating culture, rather than relying on spectacle and mass production. This image of the past has a lot more to say about how we view modernity than what the past was actually like but it is still a powerful idea that has many followers. The above-mentioned event in Leicester was just an example of the disaffected cast-offs of modern culture coming together to yearn for a different time. This yearning is expressed by watching Back to the Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, eating retro sweets that are not sold in shops anymore and playing classics gaming titles on N64s and Dreamcasts.

Gaming is one of my main interests and gaming is very much a part of this cultural discourse, however for gamers, these retro events are even more important. Aside from the nostalgia and the feeling of being born out of time, retro gaming events are where gamers go to escape the omnipresent generic triple-A titles that dominate the popular spheres of gaming. There is a feeling that what once was a vibrant, original art form has faltered as budgets ballooned to point where only large entertainment conglomerates, focused on the bottom line, can afford to make mainstream games. This has constrained freedom of expression and the art form’s ability to innovate, and has led to formulaic products. Gamers are angry at this, and they flock to retro events to express their dissatisfaction. Beyond making a comment on the state of the art, retro gaming events also perform a conservation function in that they archive, maintain and exhibit the history of the medium. This is where new generations of developers go to find out how the bold steps of the past were taken. It is also where they can see what might have been, the roads not taken and the evolutionary dead ends.

The collective learning of 40 years of game development can be sampled in a few hours at a retro gaming event. Games are an interactive art form and as such in these retro gaming events fans can grab hold of the pass and explore under their own direction. As a gamer, I want developers to bring back what games used to have. Golden Eye on the N64 is clunky to play, the interface is brutal and the interaction is severely limited but it remains immensely playable 16 years after it was released. At the Leicester event I spent a considerable amount of time playing the Golden Eye multiplayer. So ingrained is that game in my cultural education that every map, level weapon, every piece of body armour or hiding spot came back to me within a few minutes of playing the game. It takes something special to leave that deep a mark on a person. I question whether we still be playing GTA V, and remembering it this way, sixteen years after its release. Some of my favourite recent games have taken it on board; I can see the influence that retro games are having on the recent explosion of indie titles.

Games like Papers Please are a small step backwards graphically but a huge step forwards in terms of narrative and interaction. With indie games you do not need a huge budget, expensive graphics or support for Kinect, you just need a good idea, which is the appeal of a lot of retro games. Streets of Rage was just fun to play and did not take itself as seriously as Halo does. Sim City taught us that everyday problems can be the basis of a game, Civilization showed us how we could create our own eon-spanning narratives.

For gamers, retro gaming events are more than a way of embracing retro culture; they are an artistic movement in themselves and I feel they hold the key to the future of gaming. We could wish for a DeLorean with a flux capacitor to travel back to 1985 and do things differently. Or – while other art forms are looking to retro culture only to remember how great things used to be – we could use the collective wisdom of past gamers to change the future.

Top Ten Spaceships

From the Star-Destroyer flying overhead at the beginning of Star Wars to Klaatu’s flying saucer descending in the original Day The Earth Stood Still, the idea of a spaceship goes hand-in-hand with what we expect from sci-fi. Where would science fiction be without space ships? It would certainly have lost a significant proportion of its iconography. To celebrate this I have chosen ten ships which stand out to me as great icons of the genre. This list is by no means definitive (neither ships mentioned above is included) but these ten vessels are essential to the narratives of their stories, and they’re fiction design classics as well.

10. The Lying Bastard – Ringworld

This one takes some explaining: built by Pierson’s Puppeteers – a cowardly two-headed alien race from Larry Niven’s Known Space series – the Lying Bastard is technically advanced and packs a few nifty tricks.

Though the Puppeteers detest violence, this personal vessel (large enough to carry four in cramped conditions) is filled with tools which could easily be used as weapons – a disintegration ray supposed to be used for digging, a flash-light with a beam so powerful it can cut someone in half. Hence our protagonist, Louis Wu’s affectionate nickname for the ship.

The Lying Bastard is also protected by the Puppeteers’ impervious hull, which comes in handy when the ship collides with the Ringworld and the novel gets interesting.

9. Serenity – Firefly & Serenity

Serenity, a second-hand Firefly-class ship and the setting for Joss Whedon’s short-lived Firefly, has as wonderfully iconic design. To me it’s like a duck, odd-shaped and bulky on the ground but surprisingly graceful in the air.

Serenity may be small compared to the settings of some stories but it has enough secret hidey-holes filled with stolen goods and the occasional fugitive to keep the audience interested. More than anything, the crew of Serenity are a family and no family is complete without a home. Whedon lovingly brings it to life for this cult season of TV and the subsequent film.

8. Red Dwarf – Red Dwarf

In the future, there will still be shit jobs; this unavoidable truth is the essence of Red Dwarf, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s sci-fi/comedy show. Huge, lumbering and most of it serving no visible purpose, Red Dwarf is a place where the downtrodden of the future toil away for little money.

It has an AI with an IQ of 6,000 (or the same IQ as 6,000 PE teachers), a surviving crew of four (one human, one hologram, one cat and one android) and is vast enough to contain any number of comedy capers. One piece of advice: make sure you know one of their garbage pods when you see it.

7. Luke’s X-wing – Star Wars

No, not the Millennium Falcon; the real hero among Star Wars’ ships is Luke’s dependable X-wing. The star of sci-fi’s greatest David and Goliath scene, Luke must pilot this fast but well-armed single person star-fighter down the equatorial trench of the Death Star to deliver a photo-torpedo to the enormous battle station’s only weak spot.

The Millennium Falcon plays only a supporting role in this, one of cinema’s most dramatic scenes. It’s Luke in his plucky X-wing we root for, breath held as he presses the fire key and launches those missiles down an unshielded ventilation port. It helps if you have the force on your side at the final hurdle but you need an X-wing to get you there first.

6. Planet Express ship – Futurama

In the year 3000 you wanted some soft toys delivered to the moon, Planet Express would be your first call. Another great example of blue-collar jobs in the far future, the staff of this delivery company frequently ends up in trouble on simple delivery jobs, always relying on their trusty nameless vessel.

The ship has been everywhere with its human, robot and lobster crew, from the University of Mars, to Roswell in 1947. The only thing they won’t deliver is presents for Santa.

5. Nostromo – Alien

Continuing on from Red Dwarf, it seems to me the worst job you could get in the future would be working on the intergalactic mining vessel Nostromo. Made almost entirely out of tiny ducts, pipes and small spaces for nasty things to hide in, the ship is managed by what looks like a computer from the late 1970s.

Its crew is so obsessed with getting their bonuses that they barely have time to investigate a mysterious signal they pick up on their travels. When they do, they discover science fiction’s most vicious predator and spend the rest of their short lives running or being attacked in the ship’s escape pods. All in all, not a great ship on which to be a crew member.

4. The Truck – Galaxy Truckers

Galaxy Truckers is a brilliant board game in which you assemble your space truck out of tiles picturing spare parts and then send it on a run around the stars to get the stuffing knocked out of it. Bits fall off, crew members get spaced, the guns never point in the right direction and usually the whole thing is lopsided. We love this game, because no matter how well you build your ship at the start of each round, it always ends up in port hobbling along on its last engine, with a large hole in the side.

There’s a fine art to building robust space trucks and no human seems to be able to master it.

3. Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints – Surface Detail (Culture Universe)

No list of spaceships would be complete without a mention of the late Iain M. Banks and his amazingly named Culture vessels – runners up for a position on this list included Serious Callers Only, Grey Matter and Funny, It Worked Last Time. However the prize must go to Surface Detail’s Fast Picket Ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, a vessel which is basically a self contained war fleet, capable of breaking into a fleet of smaller, deadly warships. In one scene, the FOTNMC takes out an entire enemy armada in a few seconds, displaying the Culture’s vastly destructive military power which goes along with their utopian lack of laws, leaders and social structure.

The casual cruelty and moments of sudden viciousness of the FOTNMC show the dark side to the never ending sex and drugs free-for-all that is the Culture.

2. The Normandy – Mass Effect

If I were going to fly around a hostile galaxy and fight ancient killer machines, I would want a ship like the Normandy. Piloted by Seth Green’s Joker and crewed by a bizarre rag-tag group of aliens and humans, The Normandy is as versatile as its captain, Commander Shepard.

There is enormous fun to be had exploring each layer of the ship and talking to every crew member, finding out their backstory and getting their opinion on the last mission they went on. Like Serenity, The Normandy is a home and its crew members are a family. Throughout the Mass Effect series you get to know each personally and the Normandy is the perfect setting for this.

1. Discovery One – 2001: A Space Odyssey

Without 2001, there would be no Star Wars and without Star Wars there would be no sci-fi summer blockbusters or triple A games. It all began here in 1968 when Stanley Kubrick teamed up with Arthur C. Clarke to expand one of his short stories into a film. What resulted pioneered a lot of special effects that are now a staple of modern sci-fi.

The most intelligible part of the narrative takes place on Discovery One, a ship sent from Earth to investigate a mysterious black monolith that has appeared in space around Jupiter. The ship has an active crew of 2 and is run by its AI, HAL. Unfortunately, conflicting parameters in HAL’s programming drive him to become murderous. More than the terminator, HAL is logical, cold and unwavering in his killing of the crew of Discovery One, leading to some of science fiction’s most iconic scenes. The mission was a failure but 2001 was a huge success which changed science fiction forever.

Honourable mention: The TARDIS – Doctor Who

Technically not a spaceship, in that she rarely does any flying, but a special mention must go to the Doctor’s mind bending, bigger-on-the-inside space and time travelling device.

It’s huge, unknowable and full of surprises. Its ability to always go somewhere interesting is one of the greatest plot devices in TV fiction. A piece of trivia for anyone keeping track: since Doctor Who was brought back in 2005, all regenerations have taken place in the TARDIS console room, including the Master’s and the Doctor’s fake one during Journey’s End. If only those walls could talk.

C&C: Tiberian Dawn

From the first time I played the first mission of the original Command and Conquer (aka Tiberian Dawn) I was hooked. Frank Klepacki’s Act On Instinct blasted out at me as my pixelated mini-gunners stormed a beachhead and routed a Nod position. I became addicted to the satisfying boom each tank made when it exploded or the pitiful scream infantry let out as they are gunned down.

This is war sanitised and made acceptable for any teenager; enough science-fiction to reassure the player it’s pretend-carnage, and enough reality to make the game feel immersive and believable. This is a game that hooks young minds and takes them to a strange place where solider fantasy and resource management skills collide, where a glowing green substance grants victory and the villain might just be the world’s first murderer.

Tiberian Dawn was a milestone in strategy gaming and the perfect combination of reality and fantasy; it was a game made for the sort of player who read Tom Clancy and watched Dr Who. When the Command and Conquer series first burst onto our screens, it was quickly apparent that I did not want to be playing anything else.

From the second you load up the game, Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn grabs you and takes you into its world. In a short introductory sequence, an unseen character is channel-hopping, switching between over-the-top soap operas, bizarre children shows and news broadcasts. All seems very familiar, but through the snippets of news and documentaries, the player is introduced to the world of the Tiberian saga.

The mysterious plant-like substance known as Tiberium is spreading across the world, leeching minerals from the soil and bringing them to the surface in crystal form. This has made mining for raw materials much easier but also unleashed a new global conflict. New power bases are rising, battling to control as much Tiberium as possible. The militaries of the West have combined to form the Global Defence Initiative (GDI), while the Brotherhood of Nod, a shadowy terrorist organisation led by the enigmatic Kane, is spreading dissent and chaos throughout the Third World.

Tiberian Dawn’s story is the perfect cover for a simple resource management and tactical system, and couldn’t be better suited for the player to quickly and easily get to grips with the gameplay. Each mission is a condensed version of the global conflict; two armies clash over a limited bounty and ultimately whoever possesses the most Tiberium will be victorious. The events come across as plausible in spite of the futuristic premise, mainly because the rest of the game is grounded in reality.

The vehicles are based on familiar designs, slow moving heavily armoured tanks, fast machine gun armed jeeps and buggies, supply plains and jump jets all ripped from press coverage of any modern war. There are a few outlandish exceptions, the stealth tank, the ion cannon, the mammoth tank and the obelisk of light, but the near future setting and the prohibitive cost of these weapons within the game make it all seem very realistic.

Realism is also served in the between battle sequences. Tiberian Dawn was one of the first games, if not the first game, to use video footage in cut scenes. You are briefed by a real human sitting behind a desk in a manner you assume is similar to how actual commanders are briefed before battle. Receiving your mission from a person, rather than a blocky mass of pixels whose dialogue is printed across the bottom of the screen, helps the player to believe they are participating in a real world conflict. When the player engages in battle the control system is simple and effective. A menu on one side provides you with all your building options illuminating the need to click on different buildings to see what they offer. The ability to hoop many units at once (this was also an innovation first offered by Tiberian Dawn) makes directing large forces across the battlefield easy.

The game is huge amounts of fun to play and I always get a small thrill of excitement as soon as the new tank or jeep rolls out of my war factory. Similarly new missions are an opportunity to discover what new units have been unlocked and to see how they can be incorporated into your strategy.

The two warring factions are distinct and require different playing styles. GDI units are powerful, slow and expensive, like most western powers they rely on technological superiority and small effective fighting forces. Nod units are plentiful and fast, relying on hit and run tactics and the diversity in their armies. This makes their moves difficult to predict, like any well-known terrorist organisation/freedom fighters.

On both sides, the missions get very difficult as you progress through the campaign and the player gets a huge sense of satisfaction from victory. The game does not have several difficult settings, it has only one: very hard. The plot is slowly drip-fed to the player and has several intriguing twists and turns.

The game has been criticised for relying too much on tank rushes as an easy means to victory, but I would argue that it is impossible to tank rush without grabbing early control of Tiberium. It is in securing access to this scarce resource that the real skill lies.

Agricola: the board game

Sometimes you just need a huge, complicated board game. Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola is a game that is difficult to learn and harder to master, but doing so creates enormous satisfaction; its appeal lies in its complexity.

Agricola is about as realistic a simulation of a medieval farm as it is possible for a board game to be, without getting unpleasantly close to manure. The rules are quite complicated and I won’t go into them here, but the essence of the game is to allocate your farm workers to tasks which either gather resources or spend them improving your farm. Each task can only be allocated once per turn, creating fierce competition for the task cards. However as the game progresses, new tasks are made available which alleviates the pressure somewhat. At various points, your clan of farm workers will require feeding, so you have to keep one eye on your food resources while attempting to expand your farm.

Though it is mainly focused on resource allocation, the narrative of farm life is carefully woven into the game. You must build new rooms in your house before new workers can be born, showing that the family is expanding as it matures. Fields must be ploughed and sewed before bread can be baked. Each section starts with a spring breeding season when your animals multiply, and ends with the autumn harvest when your family must be fed. The story is subtle but ever-present as your farm grows from a few wooden rooms into a medieval manor house with its own livestock, kitchens, grain fields and vegetable patches. The game is beautifully designed, with hundreds of cards and small wooden counters.

There are a host of occupations, minor and major improvements, food and building resources that players need to keep track of to avoid ruin when it comes to totalling up the scores at the end. Great attention is paid to every detail of medieval farm life. A range of building improvements and hired hands are available for your farm; there is a card for every occupation from a basket weaver or stone mason, to traveling players or a pastor. Similarly your farm can have an outhouse, a stone oven, a duck pond, a clay pit and so on. Serious time and effort has gone into including as much medieval farm iconography into Agricola as possible and making it all work within the game mechanic.

One of my favourite aspects of the game is that so many of these cards are exceptions to almost every Agricola rule. Even failing to feed your family at a harvest can be cleverly reversed using the right combination of minor improvements and occupations. The sheer number of cards in Agricola means that there are no certainties and that no two games are ever alike. The key skill Agricola encourages in its players is efficiency in the allocation of tasks, in other words getting as much done in as few moves as possible. The scarcity of task cards means that when you do allocate a worker, the move must accomplish as much as possible. Many of the cards allow you to do two things at once, such as expand your house and build a minor improvement. When you choose a task you must make it work for at least two strands of your long term strategy. Similarly the game teaches you to always have a backup plan, as the task you want to allocate will often be snatched by the player before you.

All of this multitasking is geared towards making your farm as diverse as possible, and so are the many-pronged strategy and the backup planning. When scoring time comes at the end of a game, points are allocated for how many different types of animals and crops you have. Specialising in cattle will only take you so far and the points deducted for the areas of the game you did not explore will offset any bovine benefits. Only a diverse, rainbow farm will secure the player a winning score.

Agricola is not perfect; the competition for task spaces can create a perverse incentive whereby blocking the strategies of others is better than advancing your own. This leads to games of stifled growth and tit-for-tat plan-stumping where mutual cooperation would perhaps be better, or at least more fun. This aside, Agricola is the most fun it is possible to have when indoors, wearing a dressing gown, and pretending to be a farmer. If you like your games long, complex, and with an edge of realism, look no further than Uwe Rosenberg’s masterpiece.

Elysium

District 9 exploded onto our screens to commercial success and critical acclaim in 2009. The racism allegory and genuinely original storyline captured the minds of cinema-goers bored to cynical tears by too many formulaic Hollywood blockbusters. Now director Neill Blomkamp is back, his new sci-fi film tackling the wealth gap.

Elysium depicts a literal and vast gap between the rich and poor; the uber-wealthy orbit above the Earth in Elysium, a cartwheel-shaped paradise in space complete with beautiful homes, clean air and perfect medicine. The rest of humanity lives back on Earth, in cramped mega-cities whose infrastructure is collapsing from over-population.

Matt Damon is Max, a former car thief trying to go straight with a factory job and win the heart of his childhood sweetheart Frey (Alice Braga). When he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at work, he soon realises that only the perfect healthcare of Elysium can save his life.

Meanwhile on Elysium itself, defence secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is under criticism for shooting down a shuttle attempting to land illegally on the station and for employing the ruthless mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley). Soon Max is caught up in Delacourt’s plot to stage of coup on Elysium and the plans of Spider (Wagner Moura), a gang leader intent on overthrowing Elysium. The plot starts out strong and manages to weave its many threads together well. It quickly establishes the setting and characters, grounding them in the audience’s mind. However this expert story-telling does not last long; about halfway through the film, we are back to standard action movie fair with Max fighting Kruger, who has kidnapped Frey.

The characters are not nuanced but this is a film that benefits from iconic characters. Max is an acceptable everyman trying to make his way in an unfair world and Damon plays the part well, as we’ve come to expect from him. Foster is clearly having fun, camping it up slightly as the heartless Delacourt. Copley puts in a good turn as the disgusting South African hired killer, and Braga also does her best with a severely under-developed character. The stand out performer is Moura, who takes Spider from terrifying gangster to loveable freedom fighter.

Where Elysium really comes to life is in its visual representation of the wealth gap. Life on Earth is dirty, but illustrates wonderfully the resilience of human nature when faced with adversity. Housing consists of shacks built on the sides of damaged skyscrapers, and every device is cobbled together form several broken ones. Spider’s makeshift HQ is high-tech but clearly salvaged from scrap, displaying his understanding of machinery. His only option on poverty-ridden Earth is to learn how to make and fix things. We see this in the most deprived areas on Earth today and it shown brilliantly in this film. The contrast between Earth and Elysium is stark; the space station is presented as a late 1980s vision of the future, all geometric shapes and blocky single colour graphics. It would have been easy to give Elysium an Apple-like aesthetic, complete with motion control and touch screens, but this representation would have dated quickly. The visual subtext is clear; Elysium’s wealth has isolated its inhabitants from understanding their complex technology, whereas scarcity has forced the people of Earth to be clever.

Where Elysium does well, it excels. Where it does poorly, it becomes a generic Hollywood sci-fi, action blockbuster. The visuals are detailed and clever, whereas the characters are largely transparent. The plot starts outs strong before petering out, but is well supported by the principal players. As a successor to District 9 it has too much Hollywood blockbuster and not enough original ideas. The metaphor is strong, but not developed in enough detail to really resonate with the audience. Fans of District 9 will be entertained but this is clearly the weaker of the two films.

Doctor Who Casting

A fan's relationship with a show is a lot like a deep personal friendship. We love spending time with them and get great emotional satisfaction from their company but what separates a casual friendship from an important one is this: our friends let us down sometimes but we stay friends with them anyway. Sometimes being a fan of a huge, high profile show like is a lot like that. Even when they let us down we keep loving them. Peter Capaldi has just been announced as the new Doctor, bringing to an end weeks of speculation. This is about far more than a casting decision; a fan's answer to the question 'Who should play the next Doctor?' is frequently taken as a referendum on their opinion of the entire direction the show has taken recently. Beyond that, your opinion on the direction Dr Who has taken is treated as a reading on your entire socio/political worldview.

I can see how the fact that the new Doctor is another straight white man is emblematic of the fact that in today's supposedly equal society the top positions are still reserved for a straight white man. I know this is a huge issue, but I still love this show and I forgive the things I love when I feel they have wronged my moral compass. Despite this I am very pleased at the casting of Capaldi for the same reason. I love this show, as a fan, and want it to be as good as possible.

I am happy because Capaldi is a brilliant actor, excellent at comedy and drama, he is an Oscar winner, a veteran stage performer and can bring a real sense of gravitas to a role. He will make this show better and be a brilliant Doctor. I am sure of this because he is an actor with the experience required to carry off a role like the Doctor well. There are, of course, many actors who fall into this category and are not straight white men. I would be thrilled if Idris Elba or Olivia Williams had been cast because I can make the exact same claim about them. On the same note, I would have been disappointed if Sue Perkins or Aneurin Barnard had been cast because I honestly cannot say the same things about them.

I want Dr Who to be as good as it can be; a show as expensive as this to make won't last long unless it is good. I am not saying this is where the debate should end. It should and will continue until we have a talented and experienced woman or member of an ethnic minority playing the Doctor. I cannot endorse someone of whatever gender or ethnicity playing the Doctor if they won't make the show a good as it can be. A bad minority actor in a main role will only tarnish the excellent cause of getting more women and ethnic minorities into lead roles on major TV shows.

This is when we move onto the other area of Doctor Who in which your opinion is treated as watermark for your views on the world: the prevalence of computer effects on the new show. A certain contingent of fans want Doctor Who to return to the days of papier mache walls and villains made out of tin foil and coat hangers. A lot of people have warm feelings of nostalgia about this era of Doctor Who, and some of the characters from this time were genuinely scary.

However it needs to be remembered that a lot of the wider audience remember Dr Who as being really bad. Bad in a loveable way, but still really bad. Until Russell T. Davies brought the show back in 2005, it was both a national treasure and a national joke. I want Doctor Who to be as good as it can be and that means realistic looking villains and not characters made out of whatever car parts were found in a skip behind the studio.

Doctor Who cannot solve the world's sociological and political problems, and it cannot restore to its previous position of prominence the art of puppet making, but it can be a great show. It can be entertaining, it can raise important issues and it can remind us what we used to love about TV. It cannot do any of these things if it is a terrible show and it certainly cannot do any of these things if it gets cancelled.

I will always love Doctor Who because it is an important part of my own childhood and I am a die-hard fan. Again, I will forgive this show its mistakes along the way but I stand by my assertion that today is a good day for the show. Capaldi will be a great Doctor. Every fan has a complex relationship with their favourite shows and I am not expecting everyone to subscribe to my view. The debate should continue and there should be a Doctor from a minority background but that doesn't mean Capaldi isn't a great casting decision.

To really get the most out of being a Doctor Who fan, we need to understand what all the different ilks of Whovians want from the show. I want the show to be a good TV show and casting Capaldi as the Doctor is a part of that. Lots of people want a whole range of different things and fans are striving to understand this so we can all get what we want from the show.

Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro is an interesting choice of director for a colossal summer blockbuster about giant robots and sea monsters, but if you think about it, it’s a completely appropriate choice.

He enjoyed commercial success with Blade II and Hellboy, brought visual splendour to the big screen with Pan’s Labyrinth, and received international critical acclaim for the Devil’s Backbone. Del Toro has a distinctive visual style that works in both small scale, intimate horror movies and huge summer blockbusters.

In the near future, an inter-dimensional rift has opened at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and huge alien monsters known as “Kaiju” have begun rampaging across cities on the Pacific Rim. The nations of the rim have put aside their differences to combat the alien threat and build “Jaegers”, massive Kaiju-fighting mechs. Each Jaeger requires two pilots who have to know each other intimately for the “neural handshake” to be successful. Most Jaeger pilots are sibling- or parent-and-child teams.

Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) was a Jaeger pilot with his brother until his brother was killed in a Kaiju attack on Alaska. Five years later, the Jaeger program is being wound down after several defeats by new, larger Kaiju. The Jaegers’ commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) persuades Becket to return and team up with new co-pilot Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) for a final Jaeger attack on the source of the Kaiju threat, the Pacific rift.

It sounds like standard summer action/sci-fi blockbuster, but it is in the execution that this film excels. Both the Jaegers and the Kaiju are beautifully realised, with attention paid to the tiniest detail of how they walk, turn and fight. The film takes place on an epic scale which del Toro emphasises with his photography. In one especially impressive scene a Jaeger picks up a ship to use as a club to beat a Kaiju; this should give you an idea of how massive we’re talking. Note that this film is certainly worth seeing in IMAX to fully appreciate how enormous the Jaegers are.

In the hands of a less talented director, this would just be a film about special effects but del Toro puts a human story at its heart. Charlie Hunnam conveys Becket’s loss and self-doubt effectively and makes his new-found confidence believable after he teams up with Mori. The neural handshake is an effective method of characterisation, as we see different aspects or the characters’ lives when their thoughts mix inside the Jaegers. When Becket is transported back to Mori’s youth and sees her parents die in a Kaiju attack, that’s Mori’s back story effectively filled in one scene.

The film has a lot of strong performances, Rinko Kikuchi conveys the pain of her character’s loss convincingly, and Robert Kazinsky is excellent as Becket’s cocky Australian rival Check Hansen. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman put in a good turn as a pair of scientists working on the Jaegers, and there is a great addition in the cameo by Ron Perlman, of Hellboy fame, as a dealer of black-market deceased Kaiju bits. However, the stand out performance has to be the always-brilliant Elba, who delivers the film’s most stirring speech with Shakespearian gusto as he bellows ‘We are cancelling apocalypse!’

Aside from pure ‘Robots and monsters are cool’, one of the story’s key themes is cooperation. The Jaegers are built around the idea of working together; they are manufactured by the nations of the world pooling their resources, and must be operated by two warriors fighting as one.

This is not a surprising or new theme from del Toro, who has explored fascism in Spain in previous films, though characters setting aside national and cultural differences to come together against a common evil is always good to watch. My main criticism of Pacific Rim is that it focuses too heavily on the American and Australian Jaegers, relegating the Chinese and Russian Jaegers to minor supporting roles.

Pacific Rim is beautiful to watch with amazing visuals and gorgeous character design, and as much attention is paid to the villain’s appearance as to the heroes. This is one of those films that really could have gone either way, but in the hands of del Toro and his excellent cast it could just be the best film of the summer.

Grass Retrospective

Frank Herbert’s Dune casts a long shadow over science fiction. The epic masterpiece is a classic that towers above other genre works, and has many imitators. Grass by Sheri S. Tepper is a good example of a sci-fi book which wears its influences on its sleeve, as it borrows the single ecosystem planet, the quasi-feudal power structure and the sense of mysticism interwoven with science, but Tepper’s book has depth beyond this – she has created a rich world, as distinct and original as Herbert’s own.

In the future. humanity is dying rapidly due to the spread of an incurable plague. Only one place in the galaxy is free from sickness, the planet Grass. The Westriding-Yrarier family are sent to Grass to investigate the reason behind the lack of plague, and to discover whether it could lead to a cure. Upon their arrival on Grass, they find an insular society based on hereditary privilege. The wealthy ‘Bon’ families engage in the sport of riding Grass’ native mounts, fearsome beasts much larger than horses. However the mounts have a strange power over those ride them, one which the Bons refuse to discuss. This, coupled with the disappearance of several teenage girl riders, leads Marjorie Westriding-Yrarier to suspect that Grass and the mounts hold a dark secret.

At first glance, the world of Grass will look familiar to sci-fi readers. We have a future society more akin to the past than present, and an alien world populated by strange creatures. Tepper has created a fascinating mystery to inhabit her world; not a scientific quest, but a more a familiar intrigue, based on a closed community with a deadly secret. Grass is a community hostile to outsiders that hides murders behind a wall of silence. The real drama of Grass does not come from alien creatures or intergalactic plagues but from something that could occur in the real world.

Tepper has a distinct voice for a sci-fi author, not only as a woman writing in a male-dominated genre. Her background as a mystery and horror writer is evident as Grass sweeps you up and carries you along. In some ways it owes more to the closed militaristic community of Anthony Price’s Gunner Kelly than to Dune. Unlike most sprawling sci-fi epics, Grass doesn’t have a sprawling cast of characters, and all have real humans flaws and tragedies. Aside from having to deal with deadly plagues and monstrous beasts, Marjorie is confronted with a family under pressure.Female protagonists in sci-fi can be problematic as many are reduced to sex symbols.

Some authors try to avoid this with another trope: the aggressive warrior woman, a female protagonist with traditional male traits. However, it is important to remember that a strong character who is female is not necessarily a strong female character. Grass avoids both of the above problems; Marjorie is richly developed and faces real human problems. She is also a mother, a somewhat unusual trait for a sci-fi protagonist, something she shares with Dune‘s Lady Jessica Atreides.

The substance of Grass owes a lot to Dune. There is a family ripped apart by the circumstances of this strange world. There is the mystery of the planet’s animal inhabitants, and the degree or their intelligence. There is the wider picture of a future society centred on a single powerful figure backed up by a religious order. This said, Grass avoids many of the major pitfalls of attempting to imitate Herbert’s masterpiece. As a novel, it does not feel bogged down, the plot moves quickly and the sense that the central characters are under threat is ever present. It keeps the reader interested in the story and turning the pages. Eventually the implied threat becomes manifold in a series of heart-stopping action scenes which were among the most engrossing pieces of writing I have ever read.

Grass is a good example of a novel firing on all cylinders; it is well crafted, engaging and very exciting to read. Tepper’s great strength is her experience writing novels that are rooted in reality. It makes her characters easy to relate to and gives her narrative strong pace. In a few scenes towards the climax of the novel she really excels in writing gripping drama. Grass owes a large part of what it is to Dune but a closer look revels the book has more substance than others who have tried to mimic the best selling science fiction novel of all time.

Man of Steel

There is a drive to make superhero movies with meaning rather than just being empty special effects filled Hollywood blockbusters. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the best example of the superhero genre done with integrity and substance. It has set the mould for a lot of ‘dark and gritty’ superhero films to follow. Now Superman is given the dark and gritty treatment with director Zack Snyder veteran of 300 and Watchmen.

The film certainly has style as the effects are beautifully realised. I appreciated the design consistency in the Kryptonian technology and the clear thought that has been put into how this advanced civilization will interact with their devices. Attention has been paid to make sections of the film based around the Kryptonian characters visually distinctive, appearing to be both alien and familiar.

The entire opening section of the film takes place on the planet Krypton and is the film’s most exciting sequence. The visuals, plot and acting are firing on all cylinders. Russell Crow is excellent as Jor-El, the lone voice of reason amongst a dying planet. The special effects continue to be impressive in the section of the film based on Earth. With modern effects technology Snyder can show how powerful Superman is which this film does well. The problem with doing this well is that it we struggle to empathise with a character who is nearly invulnerable.

As Snyder can show how powerful Superman is, he needs a villain who is equally powerful. Lex Luther can be an anti-climatic villain as he relies on a tricking Superman. What Superman needs is General Zod, someone his equal in power who Superman can have a physical confrontation with, this makes for a stronger climax to the film. This film borrows from the Superman II model that Superman works best when he has someone to punch. Michael Shannon is very good as the exiled Kryptonian military commander, clearly enjoying the role of a pantomime villain. The other supporting cast are also very good, Kevin Costner, Laurence Fishburne and Richard Schiff all turn in strong performances. This has the potential to be a complex and interesting superhero movie.

It just fails to deliver on the promises it makes. The film is too long and losses pace in the second half, descending into an endless stream of action spectacles. By the end of the movie I was suffering from blockbuster fatigue, an over exposure to epic fights scenes leading to a desire for a different variety of drama. Henry Cavill is too wooden to make either Superman or Clark Kent a relatable character and becomes more wooden when he dons the red cape. The film needs more development of Clark Kent as a character and less time spent focusing on him as Superman. This could have easily been achieved by cuts from the unnecessarily long action scenes.

The plot of the film is almost inconsequential and serves only as a vehicle for explosive action sequences. The same can be said for a lot of enjoyable Hollywood blockbusters but having a strong emotional relationship wit the protagonist is essential to making these films a success. Man of Steel lacks an engaging plot or an empathetic protagonist to fill the essentially dead time between action scenes.

Man of Steel is an action spectacle with too much action and a lack of substance. There is little development of the Clark Kent/Superman character, no emotional core to the film and no real sense of a plot. The effects and design, as well as the supporting cast, work their hardest but they cannot fill the gapping void at the centre of this film. This is a solid effort to make a more meaningful Superman movie but fails to be anything more than another identikit Hollywood blockbuster by being a film that lacks meaning.

EToo London: A new way to interact with E3

E3 can be a frustrating time for game fans. Sure, we get very excited about seeing the previews of this year’s upcoming titles and feeding off the media hype cloud for a few days. The previews can be disappointing or exceed our expectations but what is most frustrating about E3 is the exclusivity of it. Not only do you have to be invited but it takes place in Los Angeles, so the chances of a European fan actually attending a preview or press conference are slim to none.

There is little that can be done about the expo's location, but there are ways to engage with E3 whilst in the UK. Keith Stuart (games editor for the Guardian) and Georg Backer (of BAFTA games) have launched EToo (@etoolondon), and taken over the Loading Bar (@drinkrelaxplay) in Soho. They will be running workshops and events all week so that those of us in London can get a little of the E3 flavour. On top of that, they will be watching the E3 coverage and live streaming their reactions every evening, in a show called EToo After Dark. You can follow on Twitter and YouTube and if you are free in the day time I highly recommend you get yourself down to the Loading Bar to get involved. If you are not, then tune in online each evening to feel like you are part of the E3 experience. So what did EToo have to say about E3 itself?

Doubtless the biggest event so far has been Xbox One Microsoft’s Press Conference. It featured previews of a new Halo game, as well as Battlefield 4, Titianfall and others. Despite stunning in-game graphics and trailers packed with that Hollywood blockbuster reach-out-and-grab-you effect, these Triple A titles failed to generate much enthusiasm from the EToo team. There was criticism that some of the big titles would be available on other platforms and thus did not set the Xbox One apart as an original or special system. Its hefty price tag also drew attention; Xbox Ones will ship at $499 in the States and £429 in the UK.

Beyond that, the prevalent feeling was that the new generation of consoles were not innovating enough, undermined by an over-reliance on shooters and sequels. Nothing startling or original. The mood was overwhelming one of blockbuster fatigue - yes, the preview of Titianfall made it look like an octane-fuelled thrill-ride but game fans have controlled giant robots in battle before. Been there, done that. Other than better graphics and sound effects, what would Battlefield 4 accomplish that the first three instalments of the franchise did not?

gamestickThe energy levels picked up later on when the team behind Game Stick, the British Kickstarter sensation, came on the show to talk about their portable console launching next month. Game Stick is an Android-based console that is the size of a mobile phone and connects via a dongle to the HDMI socket in your TV. It's cheap, portable and an open platform, everything the new offerings from Sony and Microsoft are not. The launch of Game Stick is generating real buzz not only because it could open up the living room gaming market to smaller players, but also because it could widen the appeal of gaming.

This could be the device that draws in phone and console gamers alike. From their Etoo After Dark interviews, I also get the sense that the Game Stick team were young gamers, passionate about the art form and wanting to take it to new places. A stark contrast with the mock enthusiasm of Microsoft executives. One EToo panellist pointed out that, when the Battlefield 4 preview video malfunctioned, the startled executive was left on stage with nothing to say. Where is the desire for a studio to engage directly with its audience? Where is the passion for gaming, for this game in particular? Enthusiasm should ooze out of a speaker to convince us, the fans, that this game is worth our time and money.

EToo highlighted the ongoing conflict in the games industry; powerful graphics, huge maps and rich online experiences have taken Triple A studios to heights never before imagined, but now the industry is languishing under expanded budgets and a shortage of good ideas. Like Hollywood execs, game studio execs fall back on tried and tested formulas and franchises and something new is seriously needed to shake up the establishment.

I have found EToo an interesting way to engage with E3, much better than my usual second-hand following of events via Twitter and blog round ups. This felt like I was involved with something accessible. The games industry could learn a lot from EToo - success is not about huge budgets and spectacle, but in finding new ways to conenct with audiences who have become jaded with the way things are.

We’re seeing a change in the way E3 is being covered, how long before we see a change in what is being presented at E3?

The Most Dangerous Game

Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game famously describes people hunting other people for sport. However humans aren’t alone in gunning for our world’s top predator. To celebrate the release of After Earth, set on a planet where everything has evolved to hunt humans, this is my Top Ten Nastiest Creatures With A Taste For Homo-Sapiens.

10. Weeping Angels – Dr Who

Not the Doctor’s best-known enemy but certainly one of the scarier from his more recent adventures, the Weeping Angels are among the oldest creatures in the universe. Why they look like a statue from our recent past is never explained, but it is this every day disguise that I find especially scary. The minute you look away, that innocent statue over there will reveal the quantum monster within, and zap humans into the past to feast off of their potential energy. After watching an Angel episode of Dr Who, you will be convinced that every sculpture you see has moved while your back was turned. So just remember, whatever you do, don’t blink.

9. Velociraptor – Jurassic Park

For years Jurassic Park was my favourite film. A Spielberg on top form filled his audience with equal parts wonder and terror at the sight of living, breathing dinosaurs. Never had good and evil been so clearly defined than in the contrast between the reptiles who eat plants and the reptiles who eat you. The standout dino from this film is undoubtedly the raptor. Yes, T-Rex is a brute but Spielberg’s improved raptors are clever, they hunt in packs, can open doors and display almost human emotions. My favourite moment is the irony of our heroes almost being eaten in a kitchen. All fans of the film should read this Wikipedia article on what science tells us raptors were actually like.

8. Wraith – Stargate Universe

Stargate has many alien villains but none quite as scary as the Wraith. Using advanced technology to harvest humans as a food source and spread fear across the galaxy, this bizarre progeny of humans and a life-sucking spider feeds directly off human life force. What makes the Wraith interesting is the sad inevitability of their story. They need to kill humans to live, and despite their cruelty they are still people trying to survive. The Wraith exploit the tragedy most vampire stories overlook or over simplify, the fact that they simply don’t have a choice.

7. Genestealers – Space Hulk

No one wants to be trapped in a confined space with something dangerous – let along something that is mainly made out of claws and wants to rip you apart. This is the main premise of Space Hulk, a Warhammer 40K spin-off in which humans explore abandoned space ships and try and avoid Genestealer attacks. The Genestealers are perhaps 40K’s most iconic alien menace, and in Space Hulk they came into their own. This game cleverly subverted the open space aspect of the 40k tabletop battlefield with its tight and confined setting. As a game it borrows extensively from films to capture a claustrophobic mood. The Genestealers are alien predators distilled: vicious, tough, fast and driven by murderous urges.

6. Polymorph – Red Dwarf

What do you fear most? Snakes? A bad case of indigestion after a vindaloo? Or perhaps this giant, killer monster? The Polymorph is a well-known Red Dwarf creation capable of turning into whatever its prey fears or hates the most. It is dangerous in itself, as it also sucks emotions out of its victims’ heads, but it is the Polymorph’s ability to transform into other creatures to torment its targets that makes it really special. Red Dwarf makes use of its limited budget to create a villain that is memorable and leads its fans to ask themselves the dreaded question – if I met the Polymorph, what would it turn into?

5. The Thing – The Thing

Another creature capable of changing its shape to infiltrate human circles, The Thing first attacked Kurt Russell in 1982, making him question his closest friends. An alien who crashes near a human research post in Antarctica, The Thing then disguises itself as its victims to pick them off the one by one. This film is John Carpenter at his finest, being genuinely nasty. The sight of characters split apart into unnatural configurations of organs as the Thing changes from its human form into its alien body is so unsettling that it has left a permanent impression on me.

4. Reavers – Firefly

People hunting people will always be scary. From Scream to Duel, the idea of being hunted by another person touches a deep chord of fear within us all. What makes the Reavers even scarier is the mindlessness of their aggression. The primary antagonists of Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity, they move quickly and kill without reason. The perfect illustration of how narrow the line between civilisation and savagery can be, the Reavers hunt, torture and kill for no other reason than perverse thrill.

3. Predator – Predator franchise

Anything Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot kill is worthy of a place in this list. The nameless intergalactic skull-collectors first appeared in cinemas in 1987 and have since made the leap to comics and games. Unlike some other creatures on this list, the predators are made to look vaguely human and point of view shots throughout the film put the viewer inside their heads. However, their complete lack of remorse or restraint sets them apart. As space’s ultimate sportsmen, who hunt and kill for fun, they are a reflection of our own viciousness towards each other and other living things.

2. Slake Moth – Perdido Street Station

Giant dream-sucking moths from another dimension? It can only be a China Miéville novel. What I find scariest about the Slake Moths is how entirely unlike any other creature in the Bas-Lag universe they are. In a world populated by so many bizarre beings, it takes something truly aberrant and outlandish for Miéville to describe it as alien. The villains of Perdido Street Station start life as curios caterpillars but soon grow into huge vicious predators with indescribable limbs and hypnotic wings. The Slake Moths stalk the night in the city of New Crobuzon, feeding off the dreams of their prey. They hunt humans as a source of food but unfortunately for us, they have limitless appetites and their feeding drains their victims heads’ of all thought. Another genuinely terrifying aspect of the Slake Moths is the way that they eat your mind, but leave your body untouched.

1. Alien – Alien, Aliens, etc

A strong candidate for any scariest creature in science fiction award, the Alien has terrorised audiences in a number of media since it first exploded out of John Hurt’s chest in 1979. What begins as a routine planetary exploration trip for the crew of the Nostromo ends up with a monster chasing them through their own ship. The aggressive extraterrestrial of unknown origin boasts acid blood and two sets of razor sharp jaws, including one on the tip of its tongue. However, what makes it really scary is how unpredictable the alien is. It is clearly intelligent, but is so different from humans that we cannot communicate; leading to inevitable violence of the most basic and animal kind. Following the initial encounter, the Alien has appeared in a series of sequels, games, books and comics as well as several high profile crossovers with the Predators. The Alien is the original monster, delivering utmost terror with the tagline “in space no one can hear you scream.”

Eon Retrospective

How much scientific knowledge do you need to enjoy science fiction? It goes without saying that a lot of sci-fi fans will have at least a basic grasp of scientific concepts, but even that is by no means necessary for every work in the genre. To enjoy Star Wars, the viewer only really needs to understand what a planet is, the physics behind the hyper-drives or light-sabres are incidental. Other works of science fiction require a greater understanding of various disciplines; Eon by Greg Bear is a good example of this.

First published in 1985 and set in 2005 Eon follows a group of scientists as they investigate The Stone, an enormous asteroid that has appeared in orbit around Earth. They discovered that The Stone has been hollowed out into seven chambers, some of which contain abandoned cities, the seventh of which appears to go on forever. As the scientists investigate the mysteries of the Stone and the infinite corridor, the political situation on Earth deteriorates. The ongoing Cold War threatens to become the hot war while a group of Russian Cosmonauts prepare to invade The Stone to claim it for the Soviet Union. On top of this the builders of Stone have become aware of human presence on the asteroid. Humanity’s fate quickly becomes intertwined with that of the builders of the Stone as the enigma of its origin is revealed.

The Cold War aspects of the story have aged poorly. EonSome of the political scenes come across as unintentionally comical, mainly those featuring the West German Space Defence Force (Bear wrote Eon four years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall). The Russian characters border on Cold War stereotypes, while the subservience of the Chinese to the West is as far from our reality as the novel’s Soviet moon base. Bear is better at predicting the science of alien races than the politics of the near future.

This is a novel about scientists and a scientific investigation, so it follows that there would be a lot of scientific discussion. A large part of the book is given over to an extensive and truly fascinating description of the Stone. The more I read the more I wanted to know, particularly about about the infinite Corridor. Bear’s writing style is dry and factual, reading at times like an academic paper. This can make it hard to connect with the events described, but a lot of high stakes drama keeps the book entertaining. As the characters probe the mysteries of the Stone and the Corridor, their discoveries are explained by what sounds to me like convincing science, adding to the book’s overall sense of realism in an extraordinary setting.

I am a big fan of science fiction, but my scientific knowledge is limited to what can be gleamed from the Guardian’s science pages and occasionally New Scientist. Most of my understanding of science comes from science fiction and could very well be nonsense. As someone with little in-depth knowledge of science, I found Eon to be a convincing read. Bear seems to know what he is talking about and his description of the Corridor and the theoretical universe it inhabits will convince a scientific-layman of its realism. At times I found the more technical aspects of the novel difficult to follow, but this did not prevent me from enjoying the book. A greater knowledge of science might have helped me appreciate Bear’s work more but it is by no means necessary to follow the plot. Like the best science fiction, it involves complex science but does not require a PhD in astrophysics to enjoy.

There is plenty in Eon for non-scientific readers, with strong characters, human tragedy and a deep and fascinating mystery permeating the novel. Bear draws the reader into his world, deeper and deeper into the Corridor, one million kilometres at a time – that will make sense when you read the book. There are also a lot of classic sci-fi plot elements; expect aliens, flying cities and inter-dimensional travel.

Star Trek Into Darkness

We know that JJ Abrams is a well-known creator of visually stunning action/sci-fi blockbusters. From an alien trashing New York in Cloverfield to a high-speed train crash in Super-8, his movies make full use of the big screen. It follows that his take on Star Trek is to seize the potential of a space adventure to deliver a spectacular romp through Gene Roddenberry’s much celebrated universe. So how well does Star Trek work as a grand spectacle of the silver screen?

All the essential elements of a blockbuster are present in Star Trek. The action set pieces are amazing; the sequence involving the fight on ships flying through a recently devastated city is especially breath-taking. The space based action is a joy to behold, genuinely tense and realised with vivid CGI, these give a real sense of the scale on which space combat takes place.

The plot is unobtrusive enough for a sci-fi blockbuster. James T Kirk (Chris Pine) is a young maverick captain in Starfleet. He clashes with Spock (Zachary Quinto), his first officer, who sticks dogmatically to the rules. When Earth is attacked by an unknown terrorist, Kirk and his crew must pursue the mysterious villain to where he is hiding on the Klingon home world. The plot promises plenty of high stakes drama and delivers on most of it.

The relationship between the heroes is well developed as is the relationship between the heroes and the antagonist, played by Benedict Cumberbatch who delivers the film's standout performance. Cumberbatch puts his stage experience to good use and is wonderful as the larger than life villain. He draws your attention whenever he is on screen and when he is not you eagerly await his return.

Pine and Quinto are also very good in their respective roles and provide the emotional core around which our empathy rests. Their scenes together are subtle enough that we feel privy to the character's psychology whilst being sufficiently straight forward that they do not slow down the plot. One scene involving an emotional exchange through a glass door conveys the essence of the relationship between these two iconic characters with simple efficiency and touching sentiment.

This film is more than just another summer sci-fi action spectacle, there is plenty here for Star Trek fans. There are lots of nods to the 60s TV show in dialogue between the characters. All the favourites from the show get an important role to play from Bones (Karl Urban) to Uhura (Zoe Saldana). There are also lots of references to the Star Trek films of the 80s and clever reversals of famous scene that serious fans will love. A cameo appearance from the Tribbles will please the fans greatly.

Star Trek Into Darkness will satisfy both fans of Star Trek and cinema goers interested in an action spectacle as there are strong performances as well as an established franchise continuing in strong form. JJ Abrams has created another enjoyable film to add to his already strong filmography. Star Trek ticks all the boxes of an action/sci-fi blockbuster and will certainly be one of the big commercial hits of the year. This is one film that is certainly worth seeing on the big screen.

Iron Man 3

Are superhero films also sci-fi films? Are they a subgenre of this larger storytelling form, or are they a genre in their own right? Some would argue that super heroes are their own genre with their own set of iconic characters, classic stories and narrative conventions. Superhero films frequently use sci-fi elements in their stories: aliens, mad scientists and advanced tech crop up frequently, but they use these in a way distinctive to their own genre. Some have argued that if the conventions of a set of films are well known enough that they can be parodied, this makes them a genre. Kick-Ass distills the essence of the superhero film as a genre in the same way that Blazing Saddles sums up what a western is.

Iron Man 3, which opened at cinemas nationwide last Thursday, has many sci-fi elements within it. Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark is in charge of a technology empire and is a scientific genius capable of building incredible machines. Despite this, he cannot sleep and his relationship with his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is falling apart. At the same time, a terrorist known as the Mandarin is attacking America with hi-tech man/machine hybrids.

It all sounds very much like a sci-fi film, also when you consider the plot is constructed around a series of high octane action spectacles, like a lot of recent sci-fi films are. One of the film's strongest scenes involves Stark using all his Iron Man skill and technological agility to save people falling from a crippled Air Force One. The villains are classic sci-fi evil cyborgs, and this film borrows very much from the Superman 2 ethos that we empathise with the hero the most when he is hitting someone capable of hitting him back.

The movie also has a lot which is characteristic of superhero films and not sci-fi films - mainly that it is built around one strong performance, as opposed to an engaging story. Iron Man 3 is mainly sold on Robert Downey Jr's charisma, which is extremely entertaining. He has the acting chops to carry the emotional scenes and is brilliant at the comedy moments, especially in one-on-one dialogue exchanges with Don Cheadle's War Machine or a child played by Ty Simpkins. Cheadle is also very good in his supporting role, as are Paltrow and Guy Pearce. A special mention should go to Ben Kingsley, who delivers an astonishing transition as the Mandarin and can almost match Downey Jr for being serious and comic in the same film.

The story of Iron Man 3 is almost inconsequential, which is not typical of plot driven sci-fi films, but the action and general sense of a film not taking itself too seriously carries the viewer through.

Iron Man 3 has more in common with the conventions of the superhero genre than that of a sci-fi film - conventions which are clearly defined enough in this film alone to make the case for superhero films being a genre in and of themselves. Downey Jr is stellar in the title role, with enough magnetism to carry the whole film, and all the other elements are present to make this a thoroughly enjoyable superhero movie. The final action sequence involving a horde of cyborgs and up to forty Iron Man suits is breath taking. In terms of sci-fi, Iron Man 3 lacks the main appeal but as a superhero film, it excels.