Z/Web

You don’t expect much with a movie like this, but even I was disappointed with the way the characters and story were presented. Everything happens in a mishmash way, with tons of character backstory we’re not given (sometimes we are, and sometimes we’re apparently just supposed to know who is who). The feel is an odd one, as though half the movie got left on the cutting room floor or we’re only reading every other chapter in a novel.

That said, the plot is fairly simple. A bad guy makes himself look like the U.S. President and takes over the government, kills all the G.I. Joes (except for our heroic handful), and attempts to take over the world with a superweapon. And guess what? The Joes stop him! Quell surprise.

Pretty much what we have left is a series of action set pieces and a few joke or “emotional” scenes for balance. The action is quite good. Some parts, like the wild fights dangling from lines on the side of a mountain, are just ridiculously over-the-top and a lot of fun. The humorous bits are also good, and really help make the movie. (The dramatic moments are Transformers quality, which means they’re pathetic.)

Still, the whole thing is entertaining and pleasant enough. Visually it’s striking, and there are plenty of cool gadgets and guns. It’s meaningless fluff, but you already knew that.

Authors: Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

This is a fairly old book — originally published in 1981 — and it some ways it’s remarkable and holds up quite well, while other parts feel oddly dated. Set in the future in a high-tech amusement park called “Dream Park,” which is a little bit like Star Trek’s holodeck except more mechanical, players play games that are very similar to today’s RPGs (role-playing games).

The game concept is actually very neat. For example, the cast is partially made up of actors who play various roles defined by the gamemaster, and swords have holographic blades so that players are not injured for real (the computer indicates injuries via a player’s colored “aura”). There are rules so that the game itself must be winnable (the gamemaster can’t put players into impossible situations), and players (and the gamemaster) win gaming points for the successful completion of tasks. Note that this isn’t a video game: players actually hike and camp out and fight monsters and whatnot, and after several days in such an immersive environment, it’s difficult to not believe the game is real.

Layered onto this story about a game in progress, we have a murder mystery. Unfortunately, our authors are not good mystery writers and it shows. The murder is strange (and not very interesting — one of the park’s security guards shows up dead), and Dream Park’s reaction is even weirder: instead of calling the police, they send their head of security into the game as a player to figure out which one of the players sneaked away from the game and killed the guard and stole some top secret Dream Park tech. Apparently stopping the game would be incredibly expensive, as well as a publicity problem, so sending in a spy seems to be better approach.

However, once our hero gets into the game, there’s very little about the murder investigation. The story is mostly about the game (which is important, since if the security guy gets “killed” in the game, the jig would be up and the game would have to be halted), but what intrigued me about the story (the double agent aspect) isn’t very significant for too much of the novel. Worse, the resolution of the murder is weak and not very satisfying. If this was strictly murder mystery and not sci-fi, it would be terrible.

Still, the main aspect of the story is the game, and that’s very well done and quite entertaining. It actually sounds like a fun game I’d be tempted to play. (Far more interesting than today’s video games.) If you read the novel for the game rather than the mystery, you’ll enjoy it a lot more.

Another flaw is that because the game has so many players (and most are suspects in the murder), the novel introduces us to a gazillion characters — the Dream Park personnel, all the gamers, the various people in the adventure game the players play, etc. It’s quite a chore remembering who is who and for large portions of the novel I was very confused and couldn’t figure out what was going on. (The authors exacerbate this problem by frequently referring to characters by their last name for long periods, so that you forget their first name and when that’s used you don’t know who it is, or using character’s nicknames or game names.)

Overall, this is interesting for socio-technological reasons, and not so much as a great novel.