Quick Reveiws

Been busy working and getting lost in the wilderness so I have been neglecting my reviews. Someday I will write full reviews for these but for now you will have to be satisfied with these short reviews.

Toy Story 3 (Green)

I love Pixar and I love this movie. It was the perfect ending to the toys story and if I wasn’t such a Douche Bag I might have even gotten teary eyed. For sure I got nostalgic for my Ninja Turtle toys and wondered where they were and what they were up to. Hope whoever has them is treating them right.

The only bad thing I have to say about this movie is that Pixar is so incredibly good at coming up with awesome original stories that it's a waist of creativity to go back to the same world of toys three times. I love this movie but I would have rather seen an all new Pixar movie.

Despicable Me (Green)

Solid animated movie for not being Pixar. It doesn’t have the heart of Toy Story 3 but I laughed more at this movie. The minions make this movie. I didn’t expect a lot and was pleasantly surprised with an entertaining children's movie (unlike Toy Story 3 which is just a straight up entertaining movie).

Salt (Yellow)

Salt is the worst title for a movie ever. They didn’t even use a Salt pun. Didn't even use the word assaulted. So disappointed. Not the best movie ever but not unwatchable. Wait for the DVD. It’s not worth the ticket price.

At one point Tom Cruise Had a choice between this movie and Knight and Day. He made the wrong choice.

Step-Up 3D (GRED)

Yes! The first (GRED) movie of the year!

Just so you know (GRED) means it’s so bad it’s good. But not good enough to see in theaters. Wait until it comes out on DVD, invite some friends over, and laugh at it together in the comfort of your home.

Stupidly simple plot. Horrible dialog delivered by professional dancers who can’t act. I laughed a bunch of times. It’s great. It also made me realize that 3D has a home in lame movies. They are already bad; the 3D can’t ruin what’s already ruined,

Best line (said in a monotone voice in what’s supposed to be a heated argument): “You better check yourself… Fricken ridiculous.”

The Other Guys (Green)

It’s no Anchorman but I still laughed more then I thought I would. I think it’s the best Will Farrel movie since the awesomeness that is Anchorman. Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock aren’t in it for very long but their exit was amazing as was the castreaction to it. Mark Wahlberg rocked as the angry guy and his lion vs. Tuna rant was alomst as funny as Will Farrells retort.

The only flaw is it falls into the trap of cop movie cliches and the third act lacked the comedy that held strong for the rest of the movie.

But it’s still worth a viewing.

The Expendibles (GRED)

(GRED) but very close to just being (RED).

Old men fighting. One liners. No plot. Millions of bullets.

Watching Sylvester Stallone run is so funny it’s almost worth the price of admission.

Under the Dome (Red)

By Stephen King

Starts out strong but ends as horribly as possible. It’s a very long book with a bunch of subplots. Most of them end with someone getting shot in the head. Which I guess is creative cause I never would have thought to do that twelve times in a row.

The ending is so uninspired it’s laughable. All the interesting parts are skipped over and all the lame Crystal Meth drug trips have pages and pages devoted to them.

The characters are cookie cutters of each other. The villain is an old man with a bad heart who people can’t say no to. For most of the book the Dome is just a background thought while they deal with people who are either way to dumb or way to crazy to ever be believable. Good luck trying to suspend your disbelief.

The villains name is Big Jim. His son is named Junior but in my heart I know there is a rough draft of this book where Junior goes by the name Slim Jim.

Pirate Latitudes (Yellow)

By Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton is one of my favorite authors (every one needs to read Timeline) but this book was very disappointing. Almost everything that happens in this book happens in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The only original stuff was the ship to ship battles. And they were cool enough to bump this from a (red) to a (yellow).

This book was found after Michael Crichton died. I wonder if he didn’t try to publish it while he was alive because he knew it wasn’t up to par with his other work. This definitely feels like a cash grab.

Plague Ship (Yellow) by Clive Cussler

(Yellow) means this. Only in book form.

There are three different kinds of Clive Cussler books. The Dirk Pitt books, the Kurt Austin books, and the Oregon books. Three series with three different sets of characters (there is some cross over but it’s insignificant).

This is my first Oregon book. I didn’t have any desire to expand into the Clive Cussler world. The Dirk Pitt books and the Kurt Austin books were already so similar that I figured it was just pointless to add another character to the same tired formula.

The formula is this.

Every Clive Cussler book starts out way in the past with some lame ancient mystery. Sometimes more then one mystery. These are always a struggle to read. They are very detailed and their relevance to the rest of the story is very little. For Plague Ship it was almost laughable.

Dirk/Kurt are in a large body of water looking for sunken treasure when they find a someone in distress. The someone changes from book to book but there is always a hot girl involved. They save the hot girl who also happens to be an expert on whatever the villains of that book are cooking up.

The girl helps them through a series of random over detailed usually underwater hardships so that they can get to the villain. The bad guys get more and more far fetched with each book that comes out. Plague Ship is a prime example. I'll get to it later.

The first big event of the book is always the biggest which makes the endings very anticlimactic.

Dirk/Austin are usually beat an inch from their lives by the end of the book. The girl is always there to comfort them and when they end up together she is gone by the next book.

There is always an exposition character who only does exposition. They are the most boring chapters because they just sit around and talk about ocean mysteries. Not as cool as it sounds. Mostly it’s like reading a text book.

That is how to write a Clive Cussler book.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy one every now and then. Sometimes I need a mindless action story.

But this Plague Ship book, my goodness. Prepare to suspend your disbelief as I drop a one line synopsis on you.

The bad guys are a group of people who are believe we are breeding ourselves to death so they are going to sterilize half the planet with a virus they found… on Noah’s ark.

I know right.

They don’t get into that stuff heavy until the last third of the book but when they do it slows the book right down. The first 100 pages were a page turner. The last hundred were a struggle to read. Just straight up boring. Mostly because it all revolved around several main characters being in peril and the question was were they going to die or not. I’ve read too many Clive Cussler books to know there was no way he was going to kill a good guy.

But for how horrible the villains were (and I am a firm believer that the antagonist is more important then the protagonist) there were some cool parts to this book.

As I said, this is my first Oregon book and now I know the Oregon books are the most unique in the NUMA world. The Oregon is a high-tech state of the art boat that looks like a piece of trash so it can sneak around the world and carry out it’s missions.

The crew is mostly mercenaries. Going from one job to the other. I thought this was cool at first but then I realized it didn’t mean anything because everyone on that boat has a heart of gold so money isn’t an issue. They always do the right thing, no matter what. A great quality to have but it makes for lame story telling (cause no one is really like that).

The captain is the most unique character. He is a real one legged pirate. But that’s not what makes him unique. He has some crazy prosthetics with hidden compartments that can hold guns and explosives and what not. It's pretty cool.

But the rest of the crew is just toned down versions of Dirk Pitt over and over. There is more of them so the antagonism gets split up between them so it’s not just one guy taking on the world like in every other Clive Cussler book.

There were some exciting chase scenes at the beginning of this book that kept me trapped in the story but it couldn’t be sustained. Just like in past books the most antagonistic part of the book is at the beginning. I kept waiting for a diabolical twist but instead I got the lame plot of sterilizing half the planet.

For this book the highs were entertainingly high and the lows were laughably low.

It averaged out to a normal Clive Cussler adventure.

The Saga of Seven Suns, Book 1: Hidden Empire (Yellow) by Kevin J. Anderson

If you are wondering about what that (Yellow) means then click here. I haven't used it for a book review yet but the traffic light system can be applied to anything. My breakfast of Honeycombs this morning was (Green)

So the only reason I bought this book is because it is the first book in a series of seven and it’s spine is bright orange. I saw half a row of bright orange books and decided to stop and check them out. Turns out it was a science fiction series written by Kevin J. Anderson.

Before this book I hadn’t read a Kevin J. Anderson book since I was a kid. It was the Jedi Academy Trilogy and the only thing I remember about it is that I thought it was awesome. I decided I could trust him enough to read the first book in the series. Plus, I was intrigued by the plot description on the back.

Turns out the book was a huge disappointment.

There are some cool things about this book but there are way more bad things.

First bad thing: way too many characters.

For a story like this a lot of characters is necessary. You have humans and these alien allies called Ildiran’s so naturally you will need some characters from each group. But then the humans get even broken down into even smaller groups. The members of the Hansa organization who are kind of bad guys but only to certain people, the Roamers who are a group of space MacGivers who can survive any environment, and the people of Theron who have very interesting skills involving trees. I’ll get more into these people later.

Each of these groups are represented by multiple characters and it seems like none of the characters are more important then the next. In other words, there is no protagonist.

It also makes it hard to even follow the characters, especially the alien ones. Some crazy thing will happen to the alien leader but then you won’t hear from him for a whole bunch of chapters so that by the time you do get back to him you’ve forgotten his whole story line and he becomes less important.

The structure of the book is way off. Too many characters spread out too far. Because there are so many characters it takes forever to get their individual reaction to these awesome event s that are happening. Example:

The book is about an alien race’s reaction to accidental genocide. The aliens are called the hydrogues and they live inside gas giants all over the galaxy. The Hansa accidently destroy a bunch of hydrogues in an experiment to turn a gas giant into a new sun (in the Hansa’s defense no one knew the hydrogues existed).

The accidental genocide happens about twenty or so pages into the book. The hydrogues don’t start attacking people for another 150 pages. That’s a 150 pages of being introduced to a dozen or so new characters.

It doesn’t work.

I’m fine with soft science fiction but there were some things here that even I couldn’t look over. There were people breathing the “air” while mining hydrogen. There is no breathable air in gas giants.

There are other things like this that take away the readers ability to surrender disbelief. I could go into more detail but I don’t want to ruin things for you incase you do decide to read this.

But as lame as some things are in this book there are somethings that I thought were cool.

The space MacGivers, the Roamers, were interesting. Just the way they were able to build something out of nothing was interesting. Too bad the Roamer characters that are featured are way boring and make predictable choices.

The human’s on the planet Theron are also cool. Certain groups on this planet have the unique ability to talk to The World Forrest. They can actually talk to trees. It makes their skin turn green. Not only can they talk to trees but as they spread the trees to other worlds they, who call themselves Green Priest, can talk to each other and relay messages. It a cool idea that adds some uniqueness to this universe.

The last cool thing is these weird insect like robots that are all over the place. There are thousands of them all over but no one knows where they came from. The alien race who built them is long gone. As early humans started exploring the universe they found these robots on random planets. They are mysterious and some people don’t trust them. Their story is interesting and to be honest it’s the only reason I started reading the next book.

Extreem caution when reading this book. It’s not as good as you think but there are good lessons here for you to learn from if you are looking to write your own science fiction book someday.

For starters, Orbit will publish crappy science fiction.