There You Are

Conditions: Eerily calm

Brave New World
 
So Microsoft are all excited about their new interface for the future they’ve been working on, called Hololens. They see computers evolving to become a very personal and fluid experience. Essentially you would don these big goggle things that will then activate all sorts of virtual interactive screens all over your surroundings, and even allowing free standing 3D images to appear. You can then interact and move around these digital displays. It’s a very funky promotional video for the future.

Here’s the problem. Computers, like everything else, are an object, a tactile device. You use them in various ways to do various things. Microsoft (and various other corporations) believe that what we want is for them to evolve into these virtual things that will always be around us. I don’t think that’s the case. Humans like tactile things, they just do. Virtual books and e-readers have become quite common, and yet we prefer actual books that you can feel and touch. Technically we could live on pill-based supplements mixed into protein shakes, morning noon and night, but we don’t – we prefer proper food in variety. Ultimately we don’t want virtual clever things, we want real things we can interact with physically. And that’s why all this virtual interface design stuff is clever, bold, and ultimately doomed.



Film Review: Exodus: Gods and Kings

This is one of the oldest tales around, so there shouldn’t really be any surprises for anyone, which given director Ridley Scott’s last few films then perhaps this is a safer way to go. We are swept into ancient Egypt where under the Pharaoh his son Ramses and his not-son Moses are good friends and involved in the various problems with ruling. A bit to do with fighting back to back against vicious hordes, but mostly to do with those pesky Jewish slaves. When the Pharaoh kicks on there becomes a little bit of tension over who will now rule, thanks to some silly prophecy thing that pops up out of nowhere. Then everyone finds out Moses is actually one of the slaves too and Everything Changes. The story winds on, Moses banished, then returns to lead an uprising against the Pharaohs. Ridley gets his chance to gleefully unleash CG plagues against the Egyptians, then finally the Exodus itself, topped off by the last battle.

It’s all fairly solid, meat-and-potatoes cinema really. Christian Bale executes himself well as the troubled leader, and while his counterpart Josh Hutcherson sadly doesn’t have as much to do as the hounded Ramses, he at least is convincing. As you’d expect, everything looks amazing, from the details of the costumes to the big sequences of landscape and waves and the plagues. Ridley hasn’t missed a trick here, and has delivered a very good looking and well made film in the style of Gladiator past.

The only real surprise is in how God, or at least god’s agent, is portrayed. Here he is a small boy with a decidedly petulant attitude, a British accent, and some strange scrapes on his head, as if he recently accidentally walked into a tree or something. Moses in exile gets married, has a couple of kids, then gets hit in the head by an avalanche, as you do. When he comes to there the kid is, that no one else can see, demanding he go back to Egypt and free the slaves. As we go along Moses has various scenes of dialogue with the invisible kid, which doesn’t seem to concern the other commanders as much as I would have thought it would. While that itself might be vague, the last plague where every first born male in Egypt is killed at midnight leaves no doubt as to God’s might and power. But while Ramses cries out about what kind of just God would do such a thing, all Moses can do is chew his beard and sheperd his people away. It’s a good film, but not a deep one. Two facial boils out of five.



- Peace out