The Endless and The Fated Sky
Feb. 5th, 2025 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearOver the weekend, I watched an interesting film called The Endless. It was ostensibly about two brothers who had escaped a "UFO death cult" and were trying to make a life for themselves in the outside world. The younger one has fond memories of where they lived before to the older one agrees to go back for a visit (in the hopes that he can demonstrate that they're better off out of it). And then things get very, very weird...
There are interesting questions about the meaning of life, self-determinism and the effects of dedicating yourself to a higher power. But there's very little explanations or internal consistency as to how things work, once it becomes clearer what's really going on. That's not necessarily an issue, since the mechanics of the situation are very much not the point of the film - but it was still something that annoyed me. What annoyed me more was that the music, the style and certain aspects of what happened kept me on edge for the whole thing, making me constantly think that something really horrible was going to happen that would stay in my brain and cause me ongoing trauma - nothing actually did, but it made the viewing experience less than ideal for me.
What I found most interesting about it was that the writers/directors were also the stars - and they named their characters after themselves...
I also finished relistening to The Fated Sky, the second Lady Astronaut book by Mary Robinette Kowal. It largely charts the progress of the first manned mission to Mars (in the early 1960s) in an alternate history where a meteorite strike presages the Earth becoming uninhabitable in a few decades.
This instalment in the series continues in the vein of the first, which great characters, a strong storyline, interesting societal politics, excellent narration by the author (apart from some truly terrible accents) and lots of emotion. I'd forgotten how sad it is and how much of a time jump there is at the end, but I still really enjoyed it.
There are interesting questions about the meaning of life, self-determinism and the effects of dedicating yourself to a higher power. But there's very little explanations or internal consistency as to how things work, once it becomes clearer what's really going on. That's not necessarily an issue, since the mechanics of the situation are very much not the point of the film - but it was still something that annoyed me. What annoyed me more was that the music, the style and certain aspects of what happened kept me on edge for the whole thing, making me constantly think that something really horrible was going to happen that would stay in my brain and cause me ongoing trauma - nothing actually did, but it made the viewing experience less than ideal for me.
What I found most interesting about it was that the writers/directors were also the stars - and they named their characters after themselves...
I also finished relistening to The Fated Sky, the second Lady Astronaut book by Mary Robinette Kowal. It largely charts the progress of the first manned mission to Mars (in the early 1960s) in an alternate history where a meteorite strike presages the Earth becoming uninhabitable in a few decades.
This instalment in the series continues in the vein of the first, which great characters, a strong storyline, interesting societal politics, excellent narration by the author (apart from some truly terrible accents) and lots of emotion. I'd forgotten how sad it is and how much of a time jump there is at the end, but I still really enjoyed it.
