Thinking Out Loud: I believe a man can fly...

Despite being raised Catholic and being a practicing Buddhist for a few years, I tend to think of myself as an Atheist, often throwing Humanist and Positive-Nihilist in there for good measure. I don't have a lot of "heroes" because I'm not one to believe in people to the exclusion of their flaws. Gandhi slept naked with his underage niece. Nelson Mandela was, in his youth, by most definitions, a terrorist. Arthur C Clarke fled to Sri Lanka to escape child sex charges. Weather or not you personally believe that a person's good deeds can somehow "outweigh" their bad, in the end, we are all human and all flawed in a great many ways. Yes, it does matter that sports stars get caught out committing crimes and getting the charges brushed away just because they can kick a ball well, because children take that on-board and begin to assume that being "good" in one respect eliminates the "bad" that someone does. It seems, as humans, we must worship in our lives, be it a god, a person or an ideal. Why not Superheroes? 

I know that sounds a bit nuts, but really, what or who is better suited to be the "secular saints" in our contemporary society than Superheroes? Before his patriotic revision in the 1950s, Superman stood for "Truth, Tolerance and Justice", that's a hell of a philosophy in just three words, and that's only the one hero. Take a look at most superheroes and you'll see that the classic ones can be boiled down to a single virtue or concept. Spider-Man represents Public Responsibility. Wonder Woman represents Compassion. Invincible represents Optimism. Atomic Robo represents Ingenuity. There's a Hindu pantheon's worth of heroes out there to take our leads from, if we're just willing to endure the stigma of telling people that we look to something created by Stan Lee for our moral guidance. Is it really that much more strange than worshiping an undead carpenter, Sumerian storm god or Tom Cruise? Hell, there's at least the rationalist advantage of being able to recognise that these characters are fictional, and therefore, hopefully, not worth killing each other over. 

Look, I'm not saying we need a religious revolution or that this should be our new cultural norm, but maybe, just maybe, when you're looking to give someone (especially a child) moral guidance, reach for Ultimate Spider-Man before you reach for the New Testament. Now, I'm sure that comment is offensive to some, but mostly those who find my being an Atheist, Polyamorist, academic and/or anarcho-communalist (take your pick) to be offensive and probably didn't make it past the first paragraph anyway. Superheroes can be our new idols, our secular saints waiting to guide us and even help us learn from their mistakes and our own. These characters are immortal, though in a manner in which they stay with us throughout time, changing who they are and what they mean to us. Put your hand in the hand of the man with heat vision.

Superhero Media: Transformers - Age of Extinction

Well, it took three films to get here, but Age of Extinction is actually pretty watchable. The normal Transformers series problems are here, like the overly-long third act, occasionally difficult to follow action and too many superfluous characters. Making the overall quality of the film better are elements like better looking Transformers, a human protagonist who isn't Sam and some decent world-building. After the Battle of Chicago in Dark of the Moon, both Autobots and Decepticons have been ruthlessly hunted by the CIA and only a few are left. Cade Yeager is a down on his luck inventor, trying to hold on to the family home and fund his daughter's College when he acquires a damaged Optimus Prime hiding in an old theatre, soon the CIA is after him and he, his daughter and his daughter's boyfriend are on the run alongside the surviving Autobots. There's something interesting in one of the antagonists of the film being the CIA, especially given Michael Bay's propensity to glorify the American Military-Industrial Complex, but nothing really comes of it sadly, with the reveal that it was the doing of just a couple of corrupt people in charge. 

It seems that someone finally showed Bay what Transfomers actually look like, because all of the Autobots are nicely colour-coded, so you can tell who is in each scene without squinting! I still can't remember any of their names, other than Optimus, Bumblebee and Hound, but at least I know which one I'm looking at. There are several villains in Age of Extinction, the above-mentioned CIA guys, a resurrected Galvitron and an intergalactic Bounty Hunter, Lockdown. The film chooses to represent Lockdown as being from Cybertron, but the Transformers Wiki indicates that he's a different alien who clashes with the Autobots. Lockdown is a really neat villain, kind of like a combination of Lobo and The Collector, he would be great in a variety of supers games and settings, I'm even considering something similar for Kill Team, which I'm getting pretty into right now. I wonder if this was a first attempt at building the "Hasbro Cinematic Universe" that keeps popping up in the film industry rumor mill. Could Lockdown have been conceived as a rogue Space Knight or something from MASK? We may never know, but it's nice to have a decent villain in the film. 

What stops this from being a genuinely "good" film is a problem, once again, with the human characters. Cade is actually fine, probably one of the best human characters in the franchise, the difficult relationship with his daughter is a bit cliche, but works fine with the tone of the film. The issues mostly revolve around the boyfriend, Shane, the nature of his relationship with Tessa, and the reasons for him in the narrative. The core of the conflict between Cade and Shane is that Shane is 20 and Tessa 17, which really isn't a big deal until Shane states the specific Texas State Statute that means it's not statutory rape for them to be together. That's kind of creepy. Not the age difference, when I was 23 I dated an 18 year-old and no one really arced up at all, but pointing out a specific law that makes it "not a crime" smacks of someone on the crew wanting to point that out for a long time and not having the opportunity to do so. Someone creepy. With a fixation on teenage girls long after they're of an age where that's appropriate. After that, Shane just kind of fades into the background and doesn't do anything to drive the plot. Age of Extinction is far from perfect, but is probably the best film in this series; if you only give one a go, make it this one. 

Miniatures Finished: Like nothing you can understand...

Ok, so I've posted my David Lo Pan before, but now I've finally finished the rest of his crew. 

 Northstar and Eureka Miniatures. 

 So you'll notice that they're more Doctor Who "Tong of the Black Scorpion" than Big Trouble in Little China "Wing Kong", this is because I use them for Empire of the Dead, but take out the muskets and they're perfectly serviceable for the modern age.

 I picked up Tribal and Brutal at the recent Little Wars Melbourne, so once I get Jack Burton Painted up, I may have to do some Big Trouble in Little China games. 

Superhero Media: G.I. Joe - The Rise of Cobra

I was born in 1986, so GI Joe was never a major thing for me, about all I really know comes from Robot Chicken, references in The Venture Bros and that episode of The Toys That Made Us. What I do know about the franchise makes it seem like there's a lot of potential for storytelling, with Cobra originating as domestic terrorists, the Joes being drawn from different countries and military branches and the whole clandestine international peacekeeping task-force that's always been done better in Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD comics. The film starts in pre-revolutionary France where a Scottish arms smuggler has a Dumas-esque iron mask welded to his face. In the modern day, a top-secret military convoy transporting bleeding-edge nano-tech missiles is ambushed by Cobra forces. Except that they're not Cobra. Yeah, Cobra doesn't actually appear in this film as an entity until the final minutes, the Joes spend most of the film fighting a rogue weapons dealer and his company "Mars". 

Again, I don't really know a lot about GI Joe, but isn't doing a film without Cobra kind of like doing SHIELD without Hydra? A lot of the iconic characters are there, like Storm Shadow, The Baroness and Zartan, but they're working for Mars and Christopher Eccleston, who, yes, becomes Destro at the end of the film, but isn't doing that right now. Duke and Ripcord are recruited into the Joes, team up with Scarlet, Snake Eyes and Heavy Duty and chase the Baroness around the globe, who turns out to have been Duke's ex-fiance. Even as someone who doesn't have a lot of interest in or emotional connection to GI Joe, I found the Baroness of The Rise of Cobra to be a grating character, not such much in performance, but in execution. From what I know, the Baroness is a classic femme-fatale, alluring but diabolical and calculating, dedicated to the cause but canny enough to keep herself alive at the expense of others. In The Rise of Cobra, the Baroness has been brainwashed into being Mars' seductress for a scientist they'll need for one scene and breaks free when she remembers how much she loves Duke.

I don't need to be a fan to know crummy storytelling when I see it. If a character is already one of the most popular in the franchise, they typically don't need a great deal of tweaking when being shifted to a new medium. The changes to the Baroness are even more stark when considered in contrast to Snake Eyes, who, aside from a costume update, remains essentially the same and is somehow the most compelling character in the film. As I mentioned above, there are some great ideas and concepts in the GI Joe franchise, and I'd like to see what could be done with it in better hands. This really isn't a film that I can recommend for anything, except maybe the Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow fight (which you can see on YouTube) and putting Rachel Nichols in black leather for the entire film (which you can see on Google). The design is pretty slick though, and is easily a route that any SHIELD film could have gone down before Marvel Studios took over.