Total Recall Reveiw

Now for the etc bit

So I went to see Total Recall last night, and I have to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, I pretty much only went to see it because it has Jessica Biel in it. However, this seems to be one of those rare occasions when I am wrong. Total Recall is one of the best films I have seen this year, perhaps a close second to The Avengers. It’s well thought out, visually excellent and just a lot of fun, think Sci-Fi Bourn Identity. The only thing I found a little distracting is that you can really tell this film is American, the anti-English sentiment just oozes out of it. At any rate, if you haven’t seen it, go and see it now!

WARNING! SPOILERS! Seriously stop reading now if you haven’t seen it, the next bit will ruin it for you.

For those of you who have seen it here’s what I think of it in depth. Well, the thing that surprised me was just how well don the film was, you don’t often see films with this convoluted a plot that are so internally consistent. Now if I’m honest this film is reasonably easy to second guess, there’s nothing terribly original in it, though there are some nice clever bits.

Let’s start at the beginning. I really like this world, I’m a bit of a fan of dystopian futures and this is one of the best I’ve seen. For those of you who’ve forgotten, or ignored my spoiler warning , the story takes place in both the United Federation of Britain, UFB and the Colony, (formally Australia) these being the only two places that survived the chemical weapons Holocaust (Nice to see a change from Nuclear). The two countries are connected by a giant elevator going through the centre of the earth, called the fall. It actually goes to one side of the core for heat reasons; this makes me slightly doubtful of the few moments of zero gravity. The earth’s core and inner core account for about 30% of the earth’s mass so there should still have been a significant amount of gravity. That said, this is a film and zero gravity makes for some excellent action sequences, so let’s forgive it.

As I said, the only thing I didn’t like much was the blatant anti-Englishness of this film. Now, there is some justification for this, Britain is one of only two countries to survive the end of the world, which I do like, and one does need a stark divide between goodies and baddies. But seriously, when his wife turns out to be a secret agent/assassin sent to guard him, her accent suddenly becomes upper-class English, it’s so blatant it’s ridiculous. By the way, after she started trying to kill him, did anyone else suddenly find her a lot sexier, not sure what that says about me.

The basic set up is that the UFB is the home of the rich and powerful, and the Colony is where the impoverished workers live. There is the UFB government on one side and the resistance lead by Matthias who are fighting for independence for the Colony on the other, they are accused of terrorist attacks at the beginning of the film. In the middle of this is Douglas Quaid (Collin Farrell). Early on in the film he decides to visit Rekall on the advice of a co-worker at the droid factory. He chooses a secret agent fantasy, but when it turns out he really is a secret agent, they must pull the plug before the conflicting memories destroy his mind. By the way, I thought this was a clever way of doing it. Then a team of soldiers burst in and arrest him but he somehow manages to kill them. He then runes home to his wife, but she turns out to be his secret agent babysitter and tries to kill him as well.

Finding himself on the run, Quaid gets a call from someone in the UFB to a hidden phone implanted in his hand. The stranger tells him this call is a failsafe and instructs him to find ‘the Key’ and to remove the phone in his hand before ringing off and leaving a bank code. Quaid then cuts out the phone with a broken bottle, this I just do not buy. Cutting yourself hurts, and pulling an electrical circuit out from under the palm of your hand would simply not be possible without anesthetic.

Slight unrealism aside, Quaid then goes to the bank where he finds a safety deposit box with passports, money and a recording of himself telling him to get to his apartment where he will find more information.  Ahem, Born Identity rip off. But it works well and I can’t blame them for copying a good film since they do a very good job of it.

Anyway, Quaid goes to the UFB using one of the passports and a sort of, neck ring that projects an alternate face onto yours, don’t know how that’s supposed to work or why it begins flickering for no apparent reason, but it’s a cool idea. So the fake passport fails and he ends up getting chased by the cops and his wife until Melina (Jessica Biel) shows up in a maglev car, these I really like, they’re a little reminiscent of Minority Report but better done. Actually that’s pretty much par for the course with this film, there’s basically nothing you haven’t seen before in one incarnation or another, but the execution and quality of this film is of a higher standard than any sci-fi film I’ve seen before.

After the car chase they go to his apartment where it turns out he left a hidden message for himself concealed in his piano, he unlockes this by using a piano ‘Key’ he found in the safe deposit box. This is clever and nicely set up earlier in the film  when Quaid talks about how he’d like to be able to play the piano, although I’m not sure it would work in reality. The important thing is that the message tells him his real name is Carl Hauser, who we know from earlier is the UFB’s best intelligence operative, but reportedly switched sides. It also reveals that there is a code to shut down the UBF’s army of robots, and that this code is locked away somewhere in his subconscious. To be honest I didn’t see this one coming. That said it is a fairly standard action film plot twist, but again, it’s very well done.

There’s then a chase through the very fun six directional elevators. This is the first big action sequence featuring the robotic police, or Synthetics as the film calls them. FYI if you recognise the guns the robots use, they were in MW2 I think, they’re a real gun called the KRISS vector and it has a rather clever recoil redirecting system, very futuristic, so kudos to Total Recall for that.

After the chase, Melina takes Quaid into the ruins of the old London underground where it turns out the resistance have re-animated a tube train, which now I think about it looked like it came from the New York subway. This train takes them out into the supposedly uninhabitable wastes outside the safe zone where Matthias is hiding out. Here they attempt to extract the shutdown code from Quaid’s subconscious, instead they activate some kind of computer virus hidden in his mind which calls in the UFB. This is the first time we meet Chancellor Cohaagen in the flesh and he reveals that there is no kill code and that Quaid is in fact a triple agent and it was Hauser’s idea to wipe his memory and set himself up as the ultimate deep cover agent, one who doesn’t even know his real identity, using the recorded messages to guide his actions.

Now this was predictable, I won’t say I knew it was going to happen, but I think most people could twig it as a possibility after they saw the second recording. Either way, after killing Matthias and taking Melina, Cohaagen tries to re-implant Hauser’s original personality. Again, predictably Quaid resists, and with a little help from his friend who called him earlier and directed him to the safe deposit box.

I should at this point say that the evil master plan of the UFB is to invade the Colony, kill all the inhabitants and replace them with a workforce of synthetics. I don’t quite get the point of this and it’s rather ironic, since, when we did have an empire, Australia was one of the few places we considered not worth the trouble of invading, we used it as a giant prison instead.

International issues from 200 years ago aside, with no kill code, Quaid must now rescue Melina and stop the invasion the old fashioned way, by which I mean with a bag full of explosives. So with the setup well established, what’s the final action sequence like. The answer is again, traditional, but very, very good. Lots of explosions and shooting in the excellent setting of The Fall on the way to invade The Colony. I was quite impressed with the use of gun recoil to move in zero gravity, and based on a few quick calculations that I won’t bore you with, it actually looks like a rather accurate demonstration of the principle of conservation of momentum.

Anyway, after a bit of running around and rescuing Jessica Biel, we get to the action climax. I was actually rather surprised to see that after all the explosions and maglev cars and rooftop chases, the action climax is actually a knife fight between Cohaagen and Quaid, but even more surprising is that it is believable. It’s not like the end of MI: Ghost Protocol where you simply do not buy that Tom Cruise could have his hands full in a fight with a fat Russian scientist. Here though, because Quaid has already been injured by a black super-synthetic, you can believe that Cohaagen would be a challenging fight. That said, Jessica Biel’s helicopter is unbelievably useless at reloading its machineguns. But, despite this, Quiad finally stabs Cohaagen just as his explosives go off destroying The Fall and with it the danger of a UFB invasion.

The only slight niggle I have with the ending is the way his wife turns up at the end impersonating Melina using a holographic head and tries to kill Quaid. It’s not bad or anything, it’s just a bit unnecessary. She doesn’t succeed in killing either Quaid or Melina so it changes nothing and I can’t help thinking it would have been better to just kill her when they got rid of Cohaagen.

So that’s the story and apart from one or two unanswered questions like what the UFB’s plan was if his memory hadn’t been reactivated at Rekall, I can’t fault it. There are no plot holes to speak of and though convoluted the story is easy to follow and quite well explained. True the script didn’t give much scope for a showcase of great acting, but that’s not the point of films like this, the point is the action, which is fantastic. It’s fast paced but not confusing and the fight scenes strike a nice balance between absolute reality and the stupidity of things like the Matrix.

So to conclude, if you haven’t seen it, go, now! If you have, well, this going to be one of the few films I’ll actually buy when it comes out on DVD.

I give it 4.5/5

Rimsha Masih and the problem of respectable religions

My first post was about my book, ‘Of Assassins and Kings’, my second was on the controversial fall in GCSE grades, so, staying true to the title of this blog my third shall be about Atheism.

Rimsha Masih, I wonder how many of you have heard that name; I first heard it this morning on The Young Turks. She is young girl living in Islamabad, Pakistan, about a week ago she was arrested on the charge of blasphemy and is now being held in solitary confinement partly for her own protection after she was attacked and beaten by a Muslim mob shortly before her arrest. Her supposed crime; ripping a few pages out of the Koran. Reports vary as to her age and mental state, most say 11, some say 14 or 16 and a few claim she has Down syndrome. What is not in dispute is that a young girl, a child, has been threatened, beaten, arrested and traumatized for ripping some pages from a book.

This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened in Pakistan, harsh Islamic blasphemy laws mean that anyone can be accused and arrested, facing a death penalty if convicted. Fortunately this barbaric punishment has not yet been inflicted upon anyone but it’s only a matter of time. Unless something is done, one day, it won’t be an arrest or a riot on the news, it will be an execution and perhaps Rimsha will be the first.

Religion asks for our respect, all religions, not just the extremists, demand unconditional respect and reverence for their beliefs. They do not understand that respect is not given, it is not a right, it has to be earned. I for one refuse to respect anything which can be used to justify the barbarism shown to Rimsha Masih.

And it is not just extremist Muslims who deserve our disdain and condemnation, it is all religion, Catholicism, moderate Islam, Anglicanism and Judaism, because all religion is to blame. They may not have been in the mob beating an 11 year old girl but they have created a world in which such a thing can happen. Religion gets a free pass and it has for too long, and it will continue to get that free pass so long as mainstream moderate religion exists and demands respect for its beliefs and holy texts. Anglicanism is probably the most innocuous of the mainstream religions, yet even it is in a small way responsible, because it cultivates this attitude of respect for religion.

The Catholic Church is currently fighting the legalisation of same sex marriage in Scotland. If any politician expressed the same sentiment, sighting their private beliefs as the justification, they would be shouted down and rejected as a homophobic bigot. But when the same sentiment is expressed by church men, garbed in the respectability of religion, they are taken seriously and anyone who questions them is told they are being intolerant of peoples private beliefs, private beliefs that must apparently be imposed on the whole of society. And while priests in Scotland preach from the pulpit the message that same sex marriage is a crime against god, Imams shout from the minarets of Islamabad, inciting a mob to attack a young girl for ripping up a book.

So if you are religious and you think your religion is harmless, think about Rimsha Masih alone in a Pakistani jail, too scared to talk, and ask yourself if your religion is worth the life and happiness of even one girl.

GCSE Recession!

Today’s top head line in every newspaper has been the surprise fall in GCSE results. For the first time since 1988 when they were introduced, the results have gone down. If you read any of the national newspapers you might think this was some kind of disaster or conspiracy with heart rending stories of children who just missed out and letters from distraught teaches, telling the government about how their pupils worked hard and deserved better, there is even some talk of lawsuits against exam boards.

I myself, and I suspect the government, intent to take the long view and discuss these results as part of a whole. When one does this, it becomes very clear that the dip is not so much a tumble over a sheer cliff, as it is a stumble over a small step. So without further ado, let’s get down to some hard figures.

This year the results fell by an average of 0.4 %. That means that this year, 69.4% of entries attained grade A*- C as opposed to 69.8% in 2011. Figures like these are always open to misinterpretation when taken out of context, so here’s the context.

In 1988 42.5 % of entrants received an A*- C grade. As you can see this steadily rose over the next 23 years, reaching a peak in 2011 at 69.8%. That is a 27.3% increase over 23 years which is frankly ridiculous. Taken as a proportion of the original 42.5% the increase in the number of students attaining grade A*- C is 27.3/42.5 x 100 = 64.2

A 64.2% increase in the number of students receiving grade A*- C can only be accounted for by grade inflation, primarily due to competition between exam boards. Some of it will be a result of improved teaching methods and curriculum along with a better standard of text books. This might account for a 5-10 % increase in the proportion of students receiving grade A*- C, as the bumps in the system were smoothed out, it cannot account for a 27.3% increase.

Put simply, in a well-run system, you would expect a slight increase as teachers, textbook writers and examiners adjusted to the new system. But then you would expect to see the results level off and remain fairly constant, fluctuating by 0.5-1% per year.

The fact is that whilst there have been accusations of late stage grade fixing by exam boards under pressure from the government, the real grade fixing  occurred over the past 20 years. It wasn’t malicious or even particularly deliberate, but simply an inescapable result of the current system; where independent exam boards are selected by each school. In this system, schools have an obvious incentive to select the easiest exams for their students, which gives the independent exam boards an incentive to compete to set the easiest exams. This can only lead to grade inflation, the latest fall in insignificant in comparison.

The real world implications of this dip have also been exaggerated. Figures for the number of student affected are hard to calculate, but it would seem that approximately 4000 students missed out on a grade C in English, receiving a D grade instead. This should not be ignored, as some of these students will no doubt suffer career wise. This is only for one subject but even extrapolating for other subject one would still end up with a relatively small number compared to the total number of entrants, approximately 1205000.

The secondary affect relates the schools themselves, some of which may be forced to close for not meeting government standards. These require that 40% of students receive five GCSE’s grade C and above. Frankly I have very little sympathy for these schools, if they cannot get 40% of their students to attain what is considered by many to be the minimum requirement in-order to proceed to higher education, then they are already failed schools, and any system that allows them to survive does a disservice to the students who could be better educated at schools which give a dam.

The last point one should remember about GCSE’s is that they are not there to give an absolute measure of a person’s abilities, that’s what university is for. GCSE’s are there to place individuals academically within their peer group. This is why grade boundaries are adjusted year by year via norm distribution calculations. These adjustments in grade boundary ensure that the proportion of students receiving each grade remains relatively constant, or so it should be. When done properly this means that GCSE’s give an accurate measure of an individual’s academic standing in society the year they took their exams.

So, when taken against the rises of past years, this blip barely registers and its effects should not be exaggerated to disastrous proportion, were it not the first time in 24 years, no one would even care. The fact that it is the first time is a poor indictment of past exams not the current ones.

So, a couple of days ago I published my book ‘Of Assassins and Kings’ on kindle and I thought I might start a blog, now I’m faced with the question of what to write. Well, the most appropriate subject would seem to be kindle, although that doesn’t give me much to write about since it really was very easy, so easy that I can’t help thinking that the days of new righters looking for representation are somewhat over. For those who’ve never tried to get published, which kind of includes me since I never actually sent the book to any publishing houses or agents, I should probable explain. The answer is that the road to traditional publishing is long, arduous and often unrewarding. It is so long in-fact that it is quite possible for publishing to take longer that the process of writing the book, up to 18 months for your book to hit the shelves, and that’s after getting an agent. It’s no better after publishing as limited print runs will mean that your book is off the shelves after only a couple of years. All this means that most authors never earn out of their advance, assuming they even got an advance.

By contrast, kindle direct publishing requires only a few hours on the computer to up load to amazon, then you wait twelve hours and there it is, your book on amazon, up for sale. To be honest I don’t expect to make any money off publishing, but to be honest I don’t care. I would if I had gone to the great bother of finding an agent and getting published, but I didn’t. I wrote the book for fun and any money I do make is simply a bonus.

My advice to anyone else who has written a book is, publish on amazon you might get lucky and find yourself rich. If not you’ll have lost nothing and had some fun writing. As regards the change I think this will make to publishing it’s quite simple. I don’t think kindle will kill it off; there will always be a place for traditional paper books. But I do think that there will come a time when new authors will simply not bother and amazon will become a proving ground for hopeful authors. Those who are successful in this arena will then find themselves approached by literary agents interested in their work. In essence, agents will turn into something more like head-hunters.

As regards the book, well, it’s on amazon, check it out and judge for yourself, at some point I’ll put the prologue up on this blog for people to read.