Wife and I watched a few movies this weekend, a bit late to the market for these but thought they were good nonetheless.
Blew through the Hunger Games books a while back, and while I think they’re an externalized rehash of Ender’s Game, they’re still pretty solid for a YA trilogy.
Mockingjay is (as far as I can remember) pretty faithful to the book; in fact I’m pretty impressed that it’s as dark as it is, given the target audience. Also not hard to sell a conservative on the general storyline of a an oppressive central government exploiting its federal subjects. Biggest flaw of the series as a whole is that I can’t really believe that the math works out, if all the districts are similarly sparsely populated (District 12 is mentioned at some point to house 10k people), I’m not sure that the central government/city could be so lavishly supported.
Aside from that fairly minor nitpick though, the movies have been pretty good, and they treat the idea of children as soldiers/props in an adult’s war pretty well.
Watched last night, a great lighthearted movie about a kid and his robot nurse turned superhero.
My hopefully not too spoilery thoughts:
- 15 year old developing a swarm of miniature robots controlled by thought might not be a great idea.
- Connecting your AI robot programmed to make people healthy to networked databases probably isn’t a great idea.
- Teaching your AI robot to fight seemed like a great idea at the time is pretty much what the makers of SkyNet thought.
- Definitely no potential pitfalls to having your robot create a genetic database of the entire city.
Aside from my dystopian thoughts that ultimately Baymax will turn into a nannying version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow man sterilizing all of the genetically “unhealthy” residents of San Fransokyo, I loved this movie.
Big Hero 6 reminds me a lot of How to Train your Dragon, in that it deals with the darker aspects of real life without being too heavy or succumbing to the dark and gritty trope. It puts kids into (admittedly stylized) real life problems like loss without treating them like children (oh that guy’s just sleeping for a long time) and without severely, irreversibly damaging them (Batman). It’s a good, healthy balance to tell kids (and everyone, really) that life continues and trauma can and will eventually fade if you’ll let it.
I’m more inclined to hold grudges and have watched people who are much worse about keeping score grow increasingly bitter and resentful until finally they can only see their life through the prism of if-x-hadn’t-happened-to-me. That’s a dangerous and lonely place to be, so anything that encourages people away from that path seems like a good thing to me.
