“That sort of thing is to be expected in a movie about time travel. But, in addition to being about time travel, Tenet is also about a charismatic secret agent saving the world and a beautiful woman from a Russian-accented megalomaniac with a superweapon, with all of the fights, chases, and dramatic confrontations endemic to the spy thriller genre.”
Lorehaven | Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ Collides with Itself
The gracious folks at Lorehaven have decided to run my review of The Chiveis Trilogy by Bryan Litfin. You can read the review here. (I did not like it.)
Slowly at first, then with plummeting acceleration, Chiveis devolves from a mediocre adventure story into something that I can only describe as comprehensively bad. It is predictable to the point of self-parody, ridiculous to the point of surreality, and its presentation of Christianity is so poor and muddled that I suspect it would do more harm than good to non-Christian readers.
This past week I played Sea of Solitude (2019) and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). Sea of Solitude is a surrealistic game about loneliness and sadness. The Muppet Christmas Carol is… A Christmas Carol… with Muppets. On the surface, these two artworks would seem to have little to do with each other, but I found a significant thematic dissonance between them.
Everything in Sea of Solitude is an unsubtle metaphor for chronically sad people, their emotional states, or the triggers for those states. It uses environment and character designs that embody feelings of sorrow and emptiness to tell the story of Kay, a young woman with a troubled family life. While there are unique aspects to Sea, what struck me about it was this similarity it shares many other contemporary artworks: it does a good job describing sorrow, but it does not suggest any real remedy for it.
Continue reading Sea of Solitude vs. Muppet Christmas Carol