A Legion of Tedium

I got into a sneak preview of Legion last night. An oddity it was, too, since I saw the movie rep chase out a reporter–no press allowed. This usually means the movie is a gobbler and they don’t want adverse publicity to take away from that all-important opening weekend (which is likely to be the bulk of the revenue a film gets, good or bad these days).

Legion wasn’t a bad movie. It was simply predictable. You have your checklist of people to get killed off out there in the middle of the desert at a crummy dinner. Nothing new in the herd of zombies or foul-mouthed little old lady neck-chomping spider cannibals. Sort of cool, an angel that cut off his own wings. Wait, no, saw that in one of the X-Men movies. Everything in Legion was that way–been done before.

What did not track was God deciding to do in mankind again (screw that Covenant of the Rainbow, yeah) so he sends legions (the above mentioned zombies) to kill the woman and her unborn baby, said kid when born will do something. Or something. I get hung up on omnipotent, omniscient beings unable to accomplish small tasks. Archangels duke it out at the end in a nice fight scene. Who’da thought wings could be used as both bullet proof vests that shed machine gun bullets and as scythes? But simply getting born isn’t good enough–the kid has to survive and…do something. Or something else. Or something. Very unclear what the kid was or what he was supposed to be. Maybe, like John Edwards, God had a bastard and was trying to deny it? Like God is running for office? His constituents are hardly likely to vote him out, right? Child support a problem in Heaven these days?

Very confused. The fight scenes were ok. The movie was filmed in New Mexico. Not sure where. The roads looked like the ones around the VLA and Pie Town, but that can be said for roads all over the state.

The Prophecy is a far stranger, much better movie, not to mention having stars with more firepower than Dennis Quaid. Check it out, if you can find it. Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer, Christopher Walken as Gabriel, and it even has Virginia Madsen in it.

On the local front, it is snowing big time–this is the storm that dumped 3+ feet of snow on Flagstaff. Good day to stay in but must go to bank. Probably walk since the streets are iced over. God of War is once more sent off with rewrites. Work proceeds apace on The Genetic Menace to get it out into your hot hands (the hitherto unpublished second volume in the Star Frontiers series). Have a stack of mss to go through and then will pounce on a new short story.