From: jack.bohn64@gmail.com   
      
   Caught this on TV the other night.  I'd seen the trailer while at some other   
   movie, and had been interested in the idea of (at least) 5 waves of attack by   
   aliens against Earth.  Not enough to buy a ticket, though.   
      
   Turns out I would have been disappointed if I had paid to watch it.  They   
   fairly quickly run through the first 4 waves: an EMP takes out most of our   
   electrical equipment,  an earthquake sends tsunamis across the coastal cities,   
   (I guess a number of    
   earthquakes, in each major body of water, which solves the head-scratcher of   
   every city in the world being at the same time of day)(our viewpoint is in   
   Ohio, which, I guess means we have a wave coming out of Lake Erie, making me   
   question how small a    
   major body of water the aliens targeted)  a bird flu that spreads to humans,    
   and... almost forgetting already... I guess it's being hunted down by things   
   that assume our appearance,  which we are told about, but which our main   
   character does not    
   experience until we are worrying about the 5th wave.  Well, that's quite a   
   collection, goes from fairly quick and easy, if brute force, to something   
   still using simple force, but needing a lot more setup, to something that   
   needs a lot more information    
   and work (one character tells us that the aliens have visited before) to   
   essentially one at a time -- well, I guess each wave will be to diminishing   
   returns.   
      
   It all felt fairly superficial. as if just a background for the YA story,   
   which itself wasn't that engrossing.  Well, wait, what are we comparing it   
   to?  It came out early in 2016, "The Walking Dead" was in the middle of season   
   6, in Alexandria, with a    
   giant zombie herd bearing down on them. (while they were filming they had to   
   know about the prison/the Governor arcs, yeah, the book came out in 2013, 3rd   
   or 4th season,) Spielberg's "Falling Skies" had come and gone, and syfy"s   
   "Defiance" had given it a    
   go.  One example of the "standard apocalypse background" that I'm complaining   
   about is a highway scene: lanes of dead cars for miles, with the occasional   
   body or suitcase/cooler scavenged through and discarded.  But this was a   
   slow-motion apocalypse: the    
   cars weren't evacuating, it was a normal day when the cars died, and there was   
   still enough government in place for the quarantine, would they not have   
   noticeably cleared a lane for the still-running vehicles we see later?  As for   
   the quarantine, I have    
   no real post-2020 critiques, I just hope no one has posted clips of it tagged   
   with my least favorite word of the decade, "prescient."   
      
   It came from a book, part of a trilogy.  The movie does a good job of being   
   self-contained in its story, although when they do their equivalent of blowing   
   up the Death Star, they do their equivalent of explicitly evacuating all the   
   command staff.  It was    
   not a good advertisement for the books for me.  Do the aliens eventually make   
   sense, or is it like the joke about dungeon monsters in between adventuring   
   parties?  I can believe it if I was told the movie dumbed down the story;   
   there's room to have lost    
   a lot from even an old '70s 180-page paperback, let alone a modern 500-pager.    
   And yet, 500 more pages of this is not what I'm looking for.   
      
   --    
   -Jack   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)