Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

SAND CASTLE (2017)

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Written by Chris Roessner based on his experiences as a machine gunner in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq, SAND CASTLE is pretty conventional as far as movies about modern war go, but its ring of authenticity and theme of futility in counterinsurgency overcomes this objection to offer a worthwhile experience. Critics and audiences didn’t seem to care for it a whole lot, but I liked it quite a bit. Though it’s no OUTPOST, it’s as enjoyable as similar efforts like HYENA ROAD.

It’s the eve of the Iraq War in 2003, and Private Matt Ocre (Nicholas Hoult), who’d joined the Army Reserve to pay for college, is fearful about what he’s about to get into. The troops roll out, and soon Ocre and his platoon are engaged in heavy street fighting. Soon after that, with the war all but over, he and a squad are tasked to team up with a Special Forces unit in a dangerous town called Baqubah. Headed by Captain Syverson (Henry Caville), the mission is to repair a water plant that was damaged in the fighting. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple task starts to feel frustratingly impossible as every step forward takes them two steps back as they deal with a hostile and fearful populace.

The movie has a lot to say about the contradictions and difficulty in fighting a counterinsurgency effort, as well as the difference between soldiers regarding what they’re doing as a job, which keeps them emotionally secure, versus a mission, where they care about the task, possibly too much. The action feels authentic and fairly intense, and the characters are likeable enough, especially Ocre’s sergeant (Logan Marshall-Green) and an Iraqi engineer trying to help the squad (Nabil Elouahabi, a terrific actor and veteran of war movies like HYENA ROAD and ZERO DARK THIRTY and TV series like GENERATION KILL). The only problem is Ocre himself; he obviously has plenty of fears and longings, but we rarely get to peer into his private world. He’s a good soldier at the best of times and a fair soldier at the worst. He’s important but not critical to the story, and the movie might have been improved if it had focused equally on the entire squad.

Overall, I don’t know if SAND CASTLE added anything new to an action-packed and thoughtful field, but I found it definitely a worthwhile watch.

ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME (2021)

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ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME (2021) takes a fundamental human trait–feeling rejected by a social group, resulting in paranoia these people actually despise you–and ramps it up into a black comedy. Overall, I liked it, and I was surprised at how much they wrung out of the premise to sustain it.

Eight years after graduating from university, Pete is back in England after working as an aid worker at a refugee camp. He receives an invitation to come hang out with some old friends to celebrate his birthday. Excited about reliving the fun of university life and reconnecting after so long, he drives to the large mansion owned by the father of one of his old friends. What follows is a weekend from hell as misunderstandings and bad vibes pile up to make Pete wonder if these people actually hate his guts.

The result is what I guess I’d call a social horror film, one of those comedies that produces almost zero actual laughs but a lot of uncomfortable chuckling. Pete can’t find his groove, has grown apart from these people, and their humor and inside jokes and horrible gags in the end leave him reeling to the point of the weekend reaching a surreal climax. By the end, you can see how Pete let paranoia get the better of him, but man, his friends are seriously jerks who never seemed to outgrow the rough horseplay of college.

In the end, I didn’t love ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME as it was all a bit one note, but I admired how it sustained and pulled off its clever premise, one I think almost everybody can relate to. It set a simple goal and effectively achieved it. Recommended for those looking for an odd bit of British psychological horror.

ICEFIELDS by Thomas Wharton

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Thomas Wharton’s CanLit classic ICEFIELDS recently came back to print with a new edition, leading to me discovering it for the first time. It’s quite beautiful, though more a story of a glacier located in Alberta and the park that forms around it than the thin, unrealized plot it presents. Overall, I enjoyed it, but this book is not for everyone.

In the story, the year is 1898, and Dr. Byrne is on an expedition on the Arcturus Glacier in the Canadian Rockies when he slips and falls into a crevasse. Hanging upside down, slowly freezing to death, a stray shaft of sunlight reveals a vision of horrible beauty suspended in the ice. After his rescue, he bounces back and forth between the site and England, spending more and more time alone on the ice, which he studies to determine at what year the thing in the ice will finally be exposed by its primordial flow. Whether it was real or an illusion becomes a lifelong quest and a relationship between a man and an icefield that trumps everything else.

Along the way, we are introduced to other people who live near the glacier: Trask, who after Jasper Park is formed builds a chalet there; Elspeth, who manages the chalet for him; Hal, a shy poet who works as a guide; Sara, a storyteller who nurses Byrne back to health after his fall; and Freya, a free-spirited travel writer and adventuress.

Writing style is always a matter of taste. For me, Wharton’s spare but powerful prose–with its short fragments and jumps in time–worked for me. I quite liked it. Having lived near the Rockies for nearly 20 years, I can’t put my finger on why exactly, but the CanLit style of authors like Wharton and Fred Stenson really taps into the feeling the vastness and wildness of this country can produce. The characters are all compelling and interesting, and I felt invested in Byrne’s exploration of the glacier and his lifelong quest to solve a personal mystery.

Otherwise, there isn’t much a plot, so to enjoy the read, you have to love the people and the fragmentary glimpses into their lives that follow the history of the province of Alberta from the turn of the century past the Great War, with the sprawling glacier brooding through it all. There’s a story about a British explorer told early on that seemingly promises a clue to Byrne about what he saw, but it fizzles out. Similarly, the central conflict and story kind of fizzle out as well with similar disappointment. Which is too bad, because it really could have paid off. Instead, it left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied and a little frustrated.

Overall, though, I enjoyed ICEFIELDS and recommend it for its interesting scenery, characters, writing, and love of nature, for those readers interested in something literary that’s enjoyable in the moment but doesn’t necessarily go anywhere.

TATTOO ZOO by Paul Avallone

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Written by Paul Avallone, a veteran who spent more than three years in the Afghanistan War as a Green Beret and then as a civilian embedded journalist, TATTOO ZOO is one of the best if not the best war novel of the War on Terror era.

The novel begins with the Tattoo Zoo, a regular infantry platoon assigned to a combat outpost in a remote valley in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, traveling in their gun trucks to a village in the Wajma Valley. Their mission is to escort two civilian contractors–a bright, lovable young woman and a sarcastic, experienced former Marine–who will interview the locals. As this is a counter-insurgency war for hearts and minds, these interviews produce intelligence about the battle space’s “human terrain”–the complex culture and tribal relationships that comprise local politics in Afghanistan.

When tragedy strikes, the Zoo finds itself accused of a horrific war crime and then in an even worse situation, trapped by circumstance by an experienced, numerically superior enemy force that is hell bent on their destruction. Can they win, or more to the point, will any of them survive what’s coming?

That’s pretty much the plot, though it hardly scratches the surface of this very long–no, don’t think long, think big–war novel. The first thing that drew me in was the voice, which is wry and playful but doesn’t pat itself on the back. From there, it just builds. We get to know a large cast of characters with some depth, showing the humanity of soldiers, and revealing the motivations and thought process of everybody from grunts in combat to the officers and NCOs who lead them to helo pilots defying orders to help people they don’t even know to the top brass trying to control the story. Not every character is likeable, but they all get their say, they’re all believable, and they all influence the story in some way like pieces that add up to a single chain of events that is really a mosaic of people and small events and decisions. I particularly enjoyed the way the soldiers aren’t cookie cutter heroes or victims or earnest hooah types but real people, some who fit the mold and some who don’t. Over time, Avallone leans on the humanity of his characters, offering a solid story that slowly reveals far more literary aspirations.

As a man who served in Afghanistan, the author has a point of view, though it’s not forced on the reader. Instead, he shows the folly of military counter-insurgency policy by offering up a worst-case scenario in which these policies are used against the Americans along with other tradeoffs. The enemy in this book knows what it’s doing, and it recognizes the battle space includes the American media and high command. Despite this point of view, Avallone gives the other side its full say about why these policies are in place. As a civilian, it made me wonder how the war could be won, with the military simultaneously being tasked with fighting an insurgency but with severe restraint to avoid civilian casualties, putting the soldiers at additional risk and with casualties being inevitable anyway in war, casualties that then prolonged the insurgency. Another theme I found engaging was the conflict between getting ahead in the military and doing the right thing.

Then there’s the action, which was riveting. I felt like I was watching OUTPOST, one of my favorite war movies, again. Avallone’s writing ensures you really care if these guys are going to survive this, and nobody is safe. As the siege wears on, there’s a lot of great shifts in the balance of power and use of tactics to push every edge. As a thriller alone, it’s topnotch stuff, though again it’s far more than that. Another thing I loved was you occasionally see a trope common in war films, like a dying comrade, but Avallone reinvents it by making it real, making it truly matter, and making you feel it.

In the end, yeah, I loved TATTOO ZOO. It really put me as a civilian into the boots of a soldier on the ground in the Forever War, it’s riveting as a thriller, and it goes much further to present a highly nuanced perspective on the war that respects its readers as adults. Highly recommended.

OUTER RANGE

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Amazon Prime’s OUTER RANGE, a New West drama with sci-fi elements, promised a new favorite show for me, and at first it delivers, only it quickly evolves into a sprawling soap opera that alternates between taking itself too seriously and not seriously at all.

Here’s the setup: At a family ranch in Wyoming, family patriarch and man of the earth Royal (the great Josh Brolin) lives with his wife (Lili Taylor), two sons, and granddaughter. The family feels the pain of Rebecca, one of the son’s wives and mom to the granddaughter, being missing for some months. An odd young woman (Imogen Poots) arrives and pays to camp out on the land. The neighboring ranching family, the Tillersons, are a bunch of spoiled rich people led by a patriarch (Will Patton) who has perverse lusts. A murder threatens to upend the order of things, driving most of the plot, as well as the appearance on Royal’s land of an impossible hole in the ground, filled with smoke, which appears to be some kind of portal, possibly through time.

There’s plenty to work with here. Beautiful scenery, terrific actors, good sound design, the tension between the ranching clans, the culture and contradictions of the New West, and a solid cosmic mystery that threatens the suffering of awareness of human insignificance. The ending pays off with a dramatic event and several powerful reveals. The show has been compared to LOST, though to me it was more a cross between FORTITUDE and THE LEFTOVERS. From the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, it appears the show has resonated with a lot of people, who seem to love it.

Not this guy, unfortunately, though I was super excited for this one. The heavy drama has that feel where you can picture the writers saying, let’s have this happen, that would be cool, without it emerging organically from the story, resulting in a feeling of artifice or senselessness for me. Royal is articulate and smiling when he doesn’t need to be and mum and distant every time it matters, especially to his own family. His wife broods her way through the entire show with a good performance by Lili Taylor but zero influence on anything in the story. Nobody seems to know how to parent the poor granddaughter, who appears to be raising herself. The Tillersons don’t really play a significant part in the story, the same with the sheriff who promises to be interesting but is kinda boring and one note. Characters change motivations and sometimes personalities, such as one of Royal’s sons making an ultimately selfless decision only to follow it up with an ultimately selfish decision. The directors often put themselves into the show with heavy-handed zooms and other camera work. The New West stuff is laid on so thick it sometimes feels like a truck commercial. There’s an odd and seemingly tacked-on theme, touched on in voiced over narration from time to time, about God forsaking his creation, which sounds good but doesn’t fit.

In the end, it just didn’t work for me. I think the show’s makers should have picked one path–FORTITUDE, with its utterly wacky TWIN PEAKS drama and crime procedural with a bio-thriller element, or THE LEFTOVERS, with its dead serious, sad, brooding story about people psychologically suffering due to an impossible event that can’t be understood. By riding the line between the two, we have a show that deviates between taking itself very seriously and not taking itself seriously at all, thereby not really accomplishing either. They also should have tightened the story’s focus on the hole itself. Or something, I don’t know, anything that would make me care.

Still, while it didn’t connect for me and turned into a slog, the show has undeniable charms, it comes together at the end with some interesting payoffs, and there’s enough here that while it missed for me, it might hit for you. If you have Amazon Prime, I’d say it’s definitely worth a shot if you’re looking for something weird and nice to look at it, something that might turn out to be a viewing gem for you.

THE NORTHMAN (2022)

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Holy cow. That’s it, that’s the review. Okay, there’s more to say, but that’s the gist. We need more films like this.

Directed and co-written by Robert Eggers (THE WITCH, THE LIGHTHOUSE), THE NORTHMAN (2022) is an historical epic roughly based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, which would go on to inspire Shakespeare to write HAMLET, one of his best known plays. In this story–the basics of which are spelled out neatly in the trailer–a young prince’s father is murdered, the usurper takes his mother as a wife, the prince positions himself for revenge, and then he fights to take it. Along the way, Amleth learns the truth of his childhood and discovers the potential of love after a life built on hatred.

This is a beautifully rendered film steeped in the violence of its era, but with just enough fantasy to make it feel mythic and just enough subversion and modern sensibility to make it relatable to a contemporary audience. Amleth’s life as a viking is hardly sanitized. The vikings made a living through slaughter and theft, and none of it is romanticized other than the rules of honor and familial obligation taught to a young man, which would define his life. The storytelling is plot driven, which is fine as it emphasizes its mythic nature and as the major characters are something of archetypes. The direction is downright artistic, from the gritty world building to the amazing score to the fantasy elements to the use of framing shots to establish the major characters as larger than life figures. The fantasy elements are familiar Norse tropes beautifully portrayed and incorporated in just the right measure, giving Amleth’s quest for vengeance a degree of fate to restore the natural order; in fact, more than anything, this is a story about fate. The actors, hot stars and crusty veterans alike, bring their A game as every one of them chews the scenery. The film clocks at two hours and sixteen minutes but never lags or wavers in its pacing, consistently holding my interest with every scene advancing the plot.

It wasn’t all perfect, as films rarely are. The accents aren’t always convincing, and I wasn’t sure about the casting of Amleth as a young man. I sometimes had difficulty understanding the actors when they growled or whispered lines.

These are honestly quibbles, though. Overall, I loved THE NORTHMAN and recommend it for those okay with violent films. I hope it influences Hollywood to make historical action movies that incorporate but aren’t dominated by a modern sensibility, and make movies that put such an equal strong emphasis on pushing every aspect of production to the limit. It certainly catapulted Eggers from being good to a must-watch director for me.