movie thoughts … Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

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batman_v_supermanWas this supposed to be DC’s long-awaited response to The Avengers?!

Woof.

I didn’t really care for Man of Steel, but it was alright … at least it had a decent plot up until the Superman vs. Zod destroy everything battle scene that just seemed over the top even for a superhero movie. But this one was just blah … almost boring … frankly, it felt very forced.

First of all, I hated the characters – Henry Cavil returning as Superman had even less emotion than ever, and Batman … I don’t even think it was Ben Affleck’s fault – he was sort off irrelevant due to how polar opposite the character was written from what we’ve come to expect from Batman, especially after the epic trilogy that Christopher Nolan gave us.

So before, Batman used to be this ace investigator with all sorts of neat gadgets, and a set of morals, and he was all stealthy and altruistic … but this Batman is kind of an idiot because he steals his intel instead of doing any real work, he’s violent and vengeant, and he wears a suit of armor like he’s fucking Iron Man or Sir Galahad … WTF?!

How Batman even runs around in that massive suit is beyond me…

Oh yes, and Jesse Eisenberg – the guy who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network – should’ve stuck to Facebook because he was pretty awful here, too, like he was trying to play The Joker, but without any real plot.

I mean, if we didn’t all know that Lex Luthor is Superman’s arch-nemesis, I’m not sure if we would’ve had any real indication why he was fucking with him. Maniacal, but without any real backstory like The Joker to make us care.

Anyway, pretty much the whole plot was kind of a bore, which again is tough compared to the rich and vibrant storyline that we saw Christian Bale go through in The Dark Knight trilogy. I was actually surprised because just watching the blockbuster names scroll by in the opening credits, it really seemed like it should’ve been a knockout movie … but Jeremy Irons as Alfred??? The role literally felt beneath him the entire movie, and that’s after Michael Caine absolutely blew the role away!

Even Lawrence Fishburne, who I know played the same character in Man of Steel, just felt miscast and out of place – like somebody booked all of these grade A actors and then never thought that they actually needed a worthwhile script to read.

It seriously felt so weak, it was like a child wrote it – Batman should steal the kryptonite to use against Superman, then Lex should kidnap Superman’s girlfriend…AND HIS MOM, TOO – you know, just in case one isn’t enough! And can we bring General Zod back with those laser eyes just like Superman’s … but maybe make him look like one of the trolls out of The Hobbit because those were really sweet!

Oh yeah, and in the end we’re gonna kill off Superman. You know, because what better way to tease Justice League than by killing off their leader before they even have a chance to assemble or whatever their catchphrase is supposed to be.

I mean, seeing Wonder Woman was neat for about the first 15 seconds, but then to instantly have her infinitely stronger than Batman, too, kind of made you wonder why Batman was even in the movie in the first place. The only time he really stood a chance against Superman was after taking an uncharacteristic potshot and even that was only temporary, so what’s the point?

And as a final thought, I’m kind of tired of this whole political back and forth between humans and superheroes in these movies, too. When I watch a superhero story unfold, I don’t care what senators think, and I don’t want to see our heroes standing before Congress or signing contracts that we know they’re not going to abide by anyways. If there’s that much bullshit about humans not being able to weigh the good with the bad, let’s see some superhero action in other realms for a while and let the humans deal with shit on their own for a while!

Seeing Superman standing before a Congressional hearing was embarrassing, and he didn’t even have a chance to leave with a good quip like Black Widow always does.

Were the old Superman movies this bad, too? This kind of makes me curious to go back and watch the classic movies with Christopher Reeve because those are supposed to be great. 

This version, sadly, was not.

Does the web need to be filtered now more than ever?

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I remember back in 2001 when we had relaunched Just Laugh, it was a big deal for us to finally get listed under the humor section in Yahoo’s directory.

Like, I got a big packet of information about Yahoo in the mail and everything – it was kind of cool!

Looking back at estimates, there were around 30 million websites on the Internet in 2001, whereas nowadays some 15 years later there are closer to one billion websites and the number of users has increased by a factor of six to nearly represent half of the planet now being online and connected.

In a lot of ways, the growth is absolutely amazing to see what the Internet has become and how people now have access to wealths of information that no one person could consume in their entire lifetime.

On the other hand, however, a lot of it is crap and it seems like at least with regards to news and the search for reliable, factual information, often times there’s more to mislead people than information that they can actually count on … if they can even find it in the first place…

Case in point is a quick search that I wanted to do this evening about last week’s shooting of Alton Sterling because a lot of rumors have surfaced that maybe he wasn’t allowed to be carrying a gun in the first place because he was a convicted felon. Here are the top results of my search:

Screen Shot 2016-07-09 at 10.32.22 PM

As you can see, the top result – with its loaded headline and all – is from BearingArms.com, which is a pro-gun blog with ties to the NRA’s lobbying division. Not exactly the fair and unbiased resource that I was hoping for! The other sites aren’t much better, regurgitating reports from other publications with a bevy of linkbait stories on both sides. Of the two most reputable hits, USA Today and New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, neither story actually cites whether Sterling was legally within his rights to carry a firearm on the night he was killed by police.

Whenever we talk about web filtering software, we always think about protecting children from adult websites, but what about protecting any users from misleading and unreliable ones? Not so much as a form of censorship, but in the second wave of a digital age where websites are a dime a dozen and literally anyone can publish on the Internet now, maybe there’s some value to being able to say, “Only give me news content from vetted, accredited sources that I know I can trust.”

Granted, one could argue that social media already filters the modern web in a lot of ways – not all of them positive – but I don’t necessarily want to only view the articles that other people I follow have decided to share socially. In a way it’s kind of funny that the Internet would one day evolve to in fact having too much information, but it’s a good problem to have. I always laugh when people criticize Wikipedia as a source for information that the hardbound encyclopedias at the library still have their flaws, too, so maybe this is just the next challenge of the information age – figuring out how to connect people with the right information in a sea of clickbait and negligibly sourced garbage.

Don’t tell Marissa Mayer now after just shuttering the directory service that Yahoo was once famous for, but maybe they were on to something with curating the best links of the web after all!

A Reason for Garbage Comments

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I have a theory about why social media sites like Facebook garner such terrible discussion in their comment sections based on something that I’ve observed from some of my own writing that I’ve published recently.

I’d love to see some actual statistics on how many users actually click through links on Facebook vs how many leave comments because when I compare the pageviews that I’m seeing on some of my more “lively” posts, the numbers aren’t even close! I suppose it doesn’t really surprise me, though it’s disappointing in a way to think that so much of social media commentary is reactions and agendas pushed solely on reading the headlines and not actually delving into the content that myself or another writer took the time to put down on the page…

It’s a relatively new phenomena with digital media because it’s not like print or television or radio really give their viewers the opportunity to only consume the lead without also hearing the actual story. I mean, you could turn the TV off or only read the front page headlines and then walk away to go about your typical, everyday rants, but social media is really the first platform to give that live commenting option where readers have an up front venue where they can speak his mind without actually considering his source material whatsoever.

Does that need to change?

I eluded to some of my greater concerns about Internet comments in my Thing-a-Day post yesterday with why I specifically don’t allow comments on many of my own websites, but what if sites like Facebook took an extra step to lock down the comment box until a user at least clicked on the link that the comments referred to?

It wouldn’t be a perfect solution because you could easily get around it by instinctively clicking the link and then immediately closing it, but the majority of users probably aren’t likely to do that anyways.

Then again, you’d have to look at the stats to see if it’s even the majority of users who comment without reading or if it’s really just an issue with that increasingly vocal minority that’s likely to cause headaches no matter what type of restrictions you opt to put in place.

Dream Journal : The Most Immersive Superhero Movie EVER

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It has been billed as The Ultimate Superhero Movie, meant to put viewers in the middle of the action like never before … and that was certainly an understatement, to say the least!

It started out like any other Marvel movie – we watched as Galactus slowly gained powers while the Avengers muddled about … a little 3D here, a bit of audience interaction there … until one way or another, the audience itself found ourselves all gaining mild superpowers – mostly limited flight or something non-threatening like that…

The battle started in some sort of mall and was a lot like the Spider-Man ride over at Universal Studios where Spider-Man keeps warning the guests to stay out of the way because it’s too dangerous. We seemed to spend most of our time flying around the area, dodging projectiles and trying to get a better vantage point to view what was happening on top of shelves or buildings or whatever they were. It was after the Avengers themselves were nearly defeated by Galactus that things really took a turn for the worse and we saw the ultimate angle that the show had been boasting about.

Our audience watched in awe as the theater itself seemed to open up into a much larger area that combined the audiences of several theaters together while we watched Galactus himself grow to the size of a small building before turning his attention to us and causing the audiences to run and scatter. Balloons fell from the ceiling, which we were told to pop in search of power-ups that could help us to defeat Galactus, though it was tough to focus on them because the giant would randomly pop up from behind the buildings that had appeared for us to take shelter behind, glaring down at us menacingly as we did whatever we could to avoid his gaze.

Occasionally if we were lucky enough to make it up to a rooftop, we could see the likes of Iron Man and Thor and Captain America planning a new assault on our foe, though it always seemed to fall short as he just continued growing larger and more powerful still…

At one point I actually found myself crawling underneath one of the buildings to evade detection, as the buildings in real life seemed to be inflatable like the decorations people put outside of their houses for Halloween and Christmas. Making my way to the back of the stadium, I frantically saw a corridor in the rafters and flew up high to take shelter in what appeared to be a storage area where a couple of other audience members had already taken refuge.

It was then that we all watched through the cracks as Galactus gathered his power into a laser that fired from his head in all directions at once, pretty much taking out every superhero around him as he slowly stormed out of the building, though we were lucky to miss his death rays on account of being all cowardly and hiding and whatnot!

Eventually as he disappeared into the distance, several of us decided to follow just to see what would happen next, commenting how the technology that enabled what we were watching was neat, however due to how expansive the arena was we really had no idea what the actual plot of the story was at that point because we weren’t always able to keep our eyes and ears on the main heroes on account of all of the running that we did ourselves.

In fact, when we finally reached the next area where the heroes had planned to confront Galactus one more time, by the time we arrived the entire scheme was actually in motion and although it looked like maybe some of the audience members were enlisted to help, it was still hard to tell.

What we thought was the last confrontation took place on a rooftop that I was able to fly up to see just as Iron Man was finishing shrinking Galactus down to a normal size and disassembling him, thus stripping him of his powers … though one way or another, Galactus enjoyed one last laugh as the heroes were celebrating their victory by emitting his rays one last time – now weak enough not to injure, but instead to strip the audience of the mild superpowers that they had gained at the beginning of the show.

…of course, the main heroes were able to avoid this blast…

The dream ended with masses of us walking back to where we first starting watching this epic movie, discussing both the highs and the lows, with just about everyone agreeing that it was definitely cool, though we all needed to watch it again in a normal theater to actually be able to follow along with the story that we had just participated in ourselves! 😕

movie thoughts … Concussion

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movie-concussionGreat movie – Will Smith nailed the accent to a T and I was surprisingly engaged despite not caring the least bit about sports, however we can’t really discuss this movie without bringing up the elephant in the room…

Why in the world do we still play football if it’s so freaking dangerous?!?!?!

As we saw the doctor’s research pan out and then begin to hit the public eye, it almost began an eerie foreshadowing of how the movie was ultimately going to end because clearly with the NFL still raking in billions every year, it’s not like this research that was published more than a decade ago has had any sort of significant impact on the perception and enjoyment of American football across the country.

Thankfully the story ended somewhat happily with Dr. Omalu continuing his investigative passion after turning down a lucrative government job offer, despite the league’s dumbfounding response where they kind of, sort of listened, but at the end of the day they’ve settled lawsuits that they tried to cover up the impact of concussions without actually taking any steps forward to help reduce the impact in the future!!!

I guess that’s what I was waiting to hear, even if just in the closing commentary before the credits, that perhaps new advancements in helmet technology or something was working hard to prevent these injuries from devastating the players after they’ve left their prime, but while they’re still enjoying their hard-earned retirement … and yet nothing of the sort was really offered up in that regard, which is sad because if you do the math, figure that it’s roughly a few hundred players in the NFL at a time taking these deadly risks every game, and millions of fans idolize the sport while billions of dollars are being made in the process…

…but still, is all of that worth it if the very players you’re cheering on the fields are literally killing themselves for the sport of the game?

I mean, it quickly becomes a complicated debate because if we’re being honest here – most of us do things that are bad for us all of the time, whether it’s not taking care of our health or driving less than responsibly on the road or even things like substance abuse, etc… We all take risks that gamble with lives, be it out of laziness or in exchange for pleasure or addiction, and so from that angle when you consider just how passionate people are about this sport, it’s not really a surprise that findings that could/should challenge the viability of the game wouldn’t exactly be greeted with open arms if it could mean having to find something else to do on Sunday nights.

It’s mostly just a tragic tale for me, not being in the slightest bit vested in football myself, aside from in general just not wanting to hear of people dying of preventable diseases, that is. It seems like common sense to me – brain fragile, don’t bash brain into other brains – but then again, there are plenty of other things that I don’t get about professional sports like the amount of public money that gets dumped into building new stadiums, only to have the teams blackout games for local viewers if the stands don’t get filled, but I digress.

Final thoughts – fantastic movie, amazing performance by Will Smith, and there’s no way my kids are going to play football without one hell of a fight. 🙁

Geeks and Spies and Robotic Defenders

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Rumor has it I haven’t done one of these what have I been watching on TV posts in quite a while, so let’s do a bit of catching up here on this Friday evening, shall we?

Voltron – Legendary Defender (Netflix)

I think I was cautiously excited about this latest reboot of my beloved Voltron when I heard the news that Netflix was going to take a stab at it because quite frankly, I’ve watched bits and pieces of the one that ran on Nicktoons and I wasn’t impressed.

Legendary Defender, however, turned out to be a great re-imagining of this classic story while adding plenty of new flavor and a whole lot of fun, too. Hands down, Rhys Darby takes the cake with his hilarious role as Coran … it’s literally like how you would imagine Murray from Flight of the Conchords if he were promoted to be the advisor to the Voltron force, and it’s wonderful. I think in a lot of ways, his over the top comedy style helped make the show more watchable for me as an adult when admittedly if you look back on the old version I watched as a kid, I truly adored the lions and the assembly of Voltron, but pretty much everything else in between was very repetitive and boring…

Which was another surprising thing about Voltron: Legendary Defender because I was really impressed about how well thought out the storylines seemed to be throughout the season, and even leading into potential new seasons to come. One of the early Coran quotes that got a chuckle out of me went something like, “You need to be able to form Voltron over and over again – until you can do it in your sleep!” just because the old show was so formulaic … short story arc, meet robeast, fight it with the lions, form Voltron, end credits … whereas this version had a couple of episodes where I don’t think they even got around to forming Voltron because it didn’t fit with the larger story.

Anyhow, really good start and I look forward to seeing what they do next with season two. And if they manage to somehow sneak in the epic assembly anthem that we all associate with forming Voltron, then I’d dare say that the series will then be truly unstoppable! 😉

The Night Manager (BBC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYXsYSvmilE

This was one that I admittedly stumbled upon quite by accident, but I didn’t want to get started on it knowing that the episode on the screen was like 3 of 6 and it seemed just intriguing enough to watch from the very beginning…

And good god, was I right! It was really neat to see both of these guys in two very different roles after having mainly known them from playing House and Loki … particularly, it was hard at first to picture Hugh Laurie as a villain, but man did he just have it seeping from him by the time all was said and done. It’s funny, too, because after the short clip mid-series that I saw, I actually thought that the plot was going a completely different direction, so it’s really important to start from the very beginning. But it was good, and it would’ve been really hard to watch this thing through one episode a week because we plowed through all six episodes in two nights.

Silicon Valley (HBO)

Silicon Valley has kind of been up and down for me because it’s almost like watching The Office when you work in an office where the jokes are funny, but you also think, “Oh my god, I just had to deal with something like that last week…” – like the conflicts between the sales and the engineering teams, or the company deciding that it’s more profitable for them to fire people than it is to actually drive their business forward…

Still, I do love the characters on the home team and they’ve always got some bizarre riff that makes it worth enduring all of the business failures along the way … I think half the fun alone comes from watching Gilfoyle and Dinesh go at each other all day. 🙂

Marvel’s Agent’s of SHIELD (ABC)

Admittedly we haven’t been watching this from the get-go, but more so decided to give it another shot and then quickly got sucked in after watched both Agent Carter and Jessica Jones. When I first heard of the concept long before ever watching an episode, I didn’t think I’d really care about all of the other SHIELD agents who aren’t superheroes, but Clark Gregg is pretty much made to play that character and it’s pretty impressive how he brings this new team together to drive a powerful storyline that does a surprising job of complimenting the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they’re taking place, but without the need for the high budgets that would come from having somebody like Captain America or Iron Man make a guest appearance!

Lots of twists, though some (like Grant turning evil or Fitz’s trauma) I wasn’t really a fan of, but the story was engaging right through the whole SHIELD is Hydra debacle (that I really hated, BTW) and I hope that ABC doesn’t stuff it in the corner and instead sees fit to let them continue on with the story for more seasons to come.

Unlike Agent Carter, which got cancelled recently but I think we’re all still pulling for to get resurrected for another season… 😛

Dream Journal : Best View Ever

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I had rented out office space in a really cool tower downtown to work on my writing, and had just shown up to do some work, however as I was getting settled I noticed some other people gathering in the shared space nearby, gazing out the window, so I went to see what was going on…

The most breathtaking view could be seen out the floor to ceiling windows of the skyscraper – a luscious display of gigantic mountain tops with a blanket of green forests at their feet and the clearest blue skies overhead. I never really made the connection why we saw these images that weren’t at all local to our area, at least until I took another step closer.

In addition to these amazing windows, the building also featured an observation deck that overlooked the same view … two long and curving walkways extended out from each end of the floor and eventually came together to meet in the center where we could climb up to experience the even more expansive view that was now impressively immersive. I stared in wonder and even took a few photos for online bragging purposes later, until my ear caught one lady who seemed to be curating the area and was explaining everything that we were seeing.

It seemed that the incredibly realistic scenery that we were now almost surrounded by, despite our offices being 50 feet away, was actually computer-generated. We couldn’t wait around to see it because they specifically only changed it up at night to avoid giving away the illusion, but the entire viewing area was surrounded by this sort of IMAX dome projection screen – but way higher resolution – and this woman could program it to show whatever she wanted … luscious mountainscapes, endless oceans, even the moon!

Eventually we all walked back down the dual walkways and disappeared into our own personal offices to toil away at whatever it was that we did there. It sure seemed like a hell of a bragging right for having found the perfect office space to inspire my creativity, though, that’s for sure!!!

Toddler Fortifications – Bedtime Update

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(continued from today’s Thing-a-Day post entitled Gate Breach…)

It felt a little cruel and wicked witch-like after literally locking Christopher in his own bedroom earlier for naptime, so after taking a few hours to regroup, here’s my new defense scheme that I’ve planned to hold out the night:

  • The primary gate at his bedroom door – the one he can climb over – is slightly elevated off the floor, but now not enough for him to be able slip under. I’m not sure if it’s too tall for him to climb and he can still just pop it out of place with a good blow, but that’s ok…
  • All other doors in the adjacent hallway have been closed off and locked, so if he does escape from his room, there’s really nowhere else for him to go. Note that the laundry room is apparently the one door that isn’t lockable, so in theory he could slip in and gain access to brooms and other weaponry, but I did lock the outer door leading out to the garage, so any attempts to sneak out to his getaway vehicle should ultimately prove to be futile.
  • And lastly, the outer gate that normally keeps him out of the hallway and isolated in the kitchen / living room / playroom area of the house has now been secured to instead keep him in the hallway should he ever get this far. This he will not like because unlike the other gate at his door, this wooden gate is still taller than he is, offering maximum security at admittedly a premium price. That said, if it ends up getting put to the task, we may need to look into picking up another one to replace the inferior gate at his bedroom door…

As of now, he’s been under lock and key for approx. 25 minutes and despite much crying and protest, this upgraded security system seems to be keeping the toddler at bay. Now it’s just a matter of time to see if we make it through the whole night.

This is my house – I have to defend it!

…from my wandering, bedtime-resistant two year-old son… 😛

A Heavy Heart for Orlando

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This has been a real shitty weekend.

Friday night saw the death of YouTube musician Christina Grimmie who was shot while she was signing autographs outside of the venue where she had just performed.

And then Saturday night brought the worst mass shooting in US history as a man walked into a gay nightclub and gunned down 50 people, presumably because he was homophobic and possibly had ties to ISIS.

A lot of words want to come out, but none of them feel quite right.

I’ve spent a bunch of time watching social media scroll past the last couple of days as these events have unfolded just an hour’s drive from my home, and I know that in the past I’ve occasionally mused about whether I should’ve gone into journalism instead of the path that I’m on now, but in watching all that’s transpired this weekend, I say with great sincerity that I don’t know if I could do it.

Watching these people trying to sort out fact from rumor, all while everyone around them is screaming for answers and they’re fighting the misinformation spread by colleagues who might subscribe to less stringent journalistic standards like getting one’s facts straight and not just using each other as news sources to push their headlines … in world where less people want the answer as opposed to just an answer that they can like on Facebook before moving on to the next thing in their news feed, often times it seems like it would be such a thankless job for such a huge emotional toil…

…and here, I just write jokes about poopy diapers and funny names to call to your own farts. 😛

My sister, who recently moved to Orlando, pointed out how scary it all is because it just shows how things like this can really happen anywhere – you never know when you’re out to have a good time and a crazy person shows up with a gun under their coat, looking to take out their frustrations in life on a crowd of innocent people. I live in Tampa with my family, but we spend enough time in Orlando to be considered part-time residents anyways and this kind of thing could’ve just as easily took place at Disney Springs or at one of the new attractions on I-Drive, or even at the local mall down the street from our house.

It just makes you feel so helpless because you can’t do anything to prevent what happened – that’s all said and done. And you can’t stop your own life out of fear because what’s the point of living if you don’t get out and actually live your life?

So instead we cry, and we hold hands, and we do our best to honor the victims through vigils and prayers and happy thoughts in the face of this cowardly evil. Whether it’s enough or not is kind of irrelevant because at the end of the day, it’s all that we can do until we’re ready to exercise anything that we’ve learned from these events to change the political side … if there’s even anything that can be done, anyways.

Through it all, I would say that there have been a few shining lights this weekend that I’ve personally observed myself:

  • The journalists who take pride in what they do to share the facts and not let all of the rumor and assumption get in the way of that effort as they strive to inform the people in the best way they know how.
  • The people who lined up across social media to share all of their kind words about the talented Christina Grimmie, and then literally lined up around the block today to give blood which has been in short supply after the shooting.
  • The people of Orlando who take pride in their city and just wanted to share their support – a slideshow of scenes from the various theme parks with all of the employees and characters sending their love was one of my favorites!
  • And lastly, believe it or not, the politicians who offered their condolences without taking advantage of these horrific incidents. There will be a time and a place where we’ll expect actions and words, but those that weren’t boisterous get an extra point in my book today.

I admittedly don’t really know how to end this, so I’ll wrap things up with a couple of choice tweets that I liked this evening…

Dream Journal : The Inescapable Maze

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It all started with me working another year at scout camp … reluctantly.

It had seemed clear after the previous year that I didn’t really want to return, and yet there I was, with the pitiful paycheck compared to the real world to prove it. There were a couple of upsides, though – for one, somehow my veteran staff member status had attracted me a fair number of fans, many of who came bearing gifts for me when they first arrived at camp, so that was cool!

And also, I had significantly nicer accommodations than ever before, in that my room was comparable to a suite at a nicer hotel, and I didn’t even have a roommate to share it with, so definitely a step up from the tents and even later cabins that I’d called home while I worked there before.

That said, it was still a really weird experience because everything at the camp I had once known had been redesigned and moved, and nobody could produce a map … well, one guy did, but it was literally a map of the USA, but divided into boxes, with each box being a campsite or area or dining hall or whatever. So it was basically useless, and I spent a lot of time just wandering around, trying to find my dinner because they’d also changed how everybody ate – instead of the staff eating with the campers, all of them got to go first … and the food was buffet-style in another room which I never did end up locating.

I did find the dessert tables and treated myself to a small piece of chocolate cake, but I never got around to eating it because I wanted the rest of my dinner first.

So one day it was announced that the staff was going on a trip – a bit of a team building exercise – and so we all boarded this futuristic-looking train and rode for hours and hours until I eventually started to get the feeling that something didn’t feel quite right. It was almost as if the scenery off in the distance around us was on some sort of loop, like it didn’t really exist in the first place, but before I could question it they suddenly announced that we had arrived as we approached this city that looked like it was having some sort of celebration…

In fact, right as we were passing over this pond on our way to the terminal, or so we thought, we saw a rocket that looked a lot like a missile launching out of the water that appeared to be aiming straight for us. Instead, it just sort of hovered next to the train before exploding overhead in a bunch of fireworks, but it still felt wrong because by now the train had stopped entirely and our host was walking down the aisle, asking if we were ready for the adventure of a lifetime.

It was then that I noticed the significant restraint system built into each of the chairs that we were all sitting in, and for some reason as I looked down at the water below us, I got the instinct that we were about to get dropped into it, which terrified me as I scrambled to buckle my harness as most of the people around us did the same while our host just sort of laughed at everyone before finally saying, “Good luck…” and then, she was gone.

Or we were gone, possibly, because despite everyone buckling in, we all soon found ourselves underwater anyways, fighting for survival as the group was presented with a couple of different paths that we could take … none of them being back up towards the surface.

After about twenty of us or so made it down one corridor and were eventually able to surface, we found ourselves staring at a large, brick wall blocking our path until suddenly we heard a great cackling and a very large, red man appeared … who bore a striking resemblance to Mon*Star from the old 80’s cartoon, Silverhawks.

*ahem*

It soon became clear that he was our adversary in this bizarre “adventure,” as he laughed maniacally and then proceeded to explain how part of our group had already perished. It seems that one of the paths that we hadn’t taken did indeed appear to lead to the surface, but before you could get there you had to climb a large staircase. Mon*Star then waved his hand and the brick wall behind him showed the illusion of a staircase. At the top of this staircase, he explained, our friends would find a special cache of weapons to aid in their escape, however ultimately they wouldn’t matter because in the time that it took everyone to figure out how to use them, his minions would’ve ripped everyone to shreds.

Mon*Star then waved his hand again and the illusionary staircase became an open corridor, to which he beckoned us to proceed and said something ominous before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

Eager to get away from the treacherous waters before they presented any new dangers, we all ran forward down the corridor much like herded cattle until we ended up in what was very much a giant maze. Almost systematically, it seemed that our group thinned out smaller and smaller with each turn. Somehow I got separated off from the rest and wandered for a bit inconsequentially on my own before I eventually reconnected with some people who were all streaming seemingly towards a dead-end at the end of the hall.

When one of my friends saw me dipping back into line, they discretely patted me on the back, which was when I noticed the wings that everyone was now wearing and saw that my friend had donated an extra pair to me.

The line soon took another dark turn when suddenly our foe appeared again, this time cackling from above as he threatened, “I see you found the wings, but do you know how to use them?! Better learn quickly…” 

Suddenly the floor beneath our feet began to smoke and catch fire, with screams erupting throughout the crowd as many soon found that flying was more difficult than they would have anticipated. I was one of the few who escaped to the next floor of the maze where we oddly enough found a bit of assistance in the form of our favorite superheroes, each of whom were able to lend their powers to one individual if you touched them. I first encountered The Hulk and envisioned smashing Mon*Star through the wall and ending this sick, little game of his, but then after careful thought I came across another hero – The Mighty Thor – who seemed even more beefed up than usual as he handed me Mjölnir and then also offered to take me to “someplace that I might find interesting…”

Eager to put the famed hammer to use for flight purposes because my own wings had since vanished, I followed Thor out the window that looked much like that of a castle … surprised that this level of the maze even had windows … and then found myself on a landing one level up where we looked out onto the clouds, with many other castles poking through the sky just like the one that we stood on. Thor then explained that each was a separate level of the maze, featuring things that people would recognize from popular culture. All of the towers were linked by the maze, as I would soon find that in fact the level beneath us that was previously his realm could now be revisited to discover the lair of Mon*Star himself…

The God of Thunder then disappeared without another hint and I proceeded to hover back down, determined to end this bizarre dream, however as I hid behind one of the columns in the large hallway, even holding the mighty hammer still in my hand, one look at Mon*Star as he came walking down the hallway with his goons convinced me that I didn’t have what it took to down the evil beast … at least not yet.

Unfortunately, several of my companions who had found their way to Mon*Star’s lair on their own didn’t feel the same lack of confidence and proceeded to blitz the red armored creature from their own hiding spots, which quickly became an ugly bloodbath that I knew even my own participation wouldn’t have changed. I did, however, see an opportunity to explore more of Mon*Star’s lair while the others kept him occupied, and slipping away down the hall past the fray, only to discover a lightly guarded warp zone that the boss man himself used to transport himself to the far reaches of his maze.

After quickly throwing Mjölnir to dispatch the guards that stood nearby, I jumped inside as soon as I heard Mon*Star screaming in victory and went off to explore the rest of the maze in search of a weakness that I could use against him.