Day 664

Aka Sunday 25^th November 2018

A bit of a quiet day today, I took my nephew to the park and he had fun playing fetch and playing on the adventure playground, the only downside was that we couldn’t get the boomerang to work. We could throw it, and it would even start to turn, but it never turned all the way and came back to us. I also read some comics:

‘Dead Rabbit’ #2 see our titular hero team up with an old work friend and rob a bank, but things have changed in the years since he retired and it doesn’t go as planned and the bad guys are getting closer. In two issues Gerry Duggan (writer), John McCrea (artist) and Mike Spicer (colourist) and Joe Sabino (letterer) have created a world that feels real, with relatable characters that you want to see triumph or at least break even. 9/10. Although the future of 'Dead Rabbit' may be in doubt, as the 'Dead Rabbit Bar' are suing them for using their trademark/copyright.

Things continue to move forward as we follow several separate strands in ‘The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion’ #2, by Gerard Way (story), Gabriel Ba (art), Nate Piekos (letters) and Nick Filardi (colours) and we can start see how some of these (maybe all) strands will met up. A nice issue, but as it’s setting up the rest of the series it is a little light on conflict/drama. 7/10. 

…and I watched ‘Passengers’, a sci-fi film starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are passengers on a spaceship on a 120-year journey to a colony on a distant Earth-like planet. Because of the long journey time all passengers and crew are kept in hibernation for the majority of the journey, but, due to the spaceship passing through an asteroid storm Pratt’s hibernation pod is damaged and he wakes up ninety years early. He tries for a year to get help, to get into the crew hibernation quarters to get one of them to help, to turn the spaceship around, to fix his pod, but nothing works and the only company he has is the robot bartender, played to a tee by Michael Sheen. 

During this time Pratt goes a little crazy and wakes up Lawrence for company, but he doesn’t tell her this and they have a great time together (after Lawrence gets over the shock of realising that she will die on the spaceship), but she finds out the truth when the bartender tells her (thinking that Pratt already had). Which obviously sours the relationship between Pratt and Lawrence. But they, with help from Laurence Fishburne, playing a crew member, patch things up when fixing other problems, problems that would cause the spaceship to blow up, caused to the spaceship when it travelled through the asteroid storm.

When I first sure the trailer for ‘Passengers’ I thought it looked interesting, the premise reminded me of something ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘The Outer Limits’ would use but had to many shades of rom-com to it. But now it’s on Netflix I can watch it without worrying that I’ve wasted my money and it’s not bad, there’s interesting parts about loneliness, about infatuation/stalking and what you would do to survive (i.e. would you condemn someone to living and dying on the spaceship, just so they can keep you sane?). 

But there are bog standard spaceship in peril and rom-comness, it would be interesting to see what the film would have been like if they dropped the spaceship being in danger last third and focused on the repercussions of Pratt falling for/becoming infatuated with Lawrence and waking her up early, which meant that she would die on the spaceship and never reach the colony planet. 7/10.