3 Movies - Edge of Tomorrow, Guardians of the Galaxy and Three Days to Kill

The movies I get from Amazon are in threes and I managed to get them all replaced this time around and watched one after the other.

First, Three Days to Kill, a (perhaps unintentional) comedy thriller staring Kevin Costner as an ageing CIA agent trying to reconnect with his estranged family and offered treatment for his terminal illness in return for one last job.

An inferior competitor to the Taken series, even the occasional stabs at comedy don't really work and the whole thing, although workman-like, is a damp squib. Only the action scene's redeem it a little, but even those are run-of-the-mill. Ignore.

Next up, Guardians of the Galaxy, based on the Marvel comics, one of whose authors is one of my favourites, Dan Abnett of the Eisenhorn\Ravenor series. Having been kidnapped by extra-terrestrials as a child, adventurer and thief Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) manages to acquire a metal orb that attracts the attention of villain Ronan (Lee Pace).

Not bad. The plot's pretty good, if relentless; the action well paced and the special effects gob-smacking and original. The characters are a little too cardboard for my taste: Vin Diesel plays Groot who only says the same thing over and over again, "I am Groot", so everyone got their money's worth there. Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer is better value, but Bradley Cooper adds little as Rocket. The 70's sound track and Quill's use of it to connect with his past, especially his mother, does add a human touch and stops it all being too alien. A good all-round pizza movie.

By the way, without looking at the credits, see if you can spot Karen Gillan from Doctor Who.

Last, but far from least, there's Edge of Tomorrow, the latest Tom Cruise vehicle. After an alien invasion of near-future Europe, U.S. Army spokesman William Cage (Cruise) gets accidentally caught up in the human counter-attack.

It's like an over-the-top mash-up of Independence Day, Groundhog Day and The Longest Day. The technology (me being geeky) is incredibly well realised with lots of vertical take-off aircraft (similar to the V-22 Osprey currently in service) and hovercraft, as well as the exo-skeletons. The plot's a bit convoluted but its origins as a Japanese short-story might be responsible for that. Cruise and Emily Blunt, as the soldier who's experienced the same time-looping before, do well enough, but there is a sort of forgettable quality about the story (in a similar way to a previous Cruise film, Oblivion). A good enough pizza movie if you ignore all the resurrection undertones.

Here's a thing. There's a school of thought that says that recent movies have a preoccupation with ageing, death, longevity or immortality. The reason for this is that the people who make the movies (star in them, produce or direct them) are the so-called post war baby-boomer generation and mortality is catching up with them. This is expressing itself in the films (Cruise is 52 and Costner 60) so the idea has some merit.

Pariah

Some may know that I am something of a fan of Warhammer 40,000 books. Mostly this is Space Marines killing lots of aliens, all very enjoyable and juvenile (remember Sven Hassel, lads? Like that, but in space). However, there is a significant amount that isn't and this is where you'll find Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn/Ravenor series. The latest in the series, and the start of a new story arc, has been published this year and is called Pariah.

Rather than being told from the perspective of the inquisitors of the previous two volumes, the narrator is a Pariah of the title, a psychic "null" called Alizebeth Bequin who can neutralise others' psychic powers. Like all of Dan Abnett's books, it's very well written, in a slightly Dickensian style. The whole series can also be bought as a digital package for those who want to start from the beginning. G'won, it's Christmas!

Monday: W40K books

When I read books, I tend to go through phases of reading. I read very intensely for a few weeks and then read hardly anything at all for about a month or so, and so on. When an intense phase ends, it's usually because I get distracted by this machine (programming) or because the book I'm about a third of the way through starts getting a bit difficult. I think at the moment I'm entering an intense phase. This is helped by reading Warhammer 40,000 books (W40K), published by The Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop.

W40K books are pulp military science fiction, but this is no indicator of quality as there are some very good authors, specifically Gav Thorpe, Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett. I've just finished Thorpe's Path of the Warrior and I'm about a third of the way through Abnett's Ravenor omnibus, having read the Eisenhorn omnibus previously.

Mostly, the books are from the human perspective, but Path of the Warrior has an Eldar, an ancient humanoid race, as it's protagonist.

Gav Thorpe does a very decent job of conveying the "otherness" of the Eldar, but the book takes a bit to get going and there are too few battles in it for my taste. How the protagonist progresses from warrior to "exarch" (leader) after only two battles isn't sufficiently explained, plus the novel, which is meant to be part one of a series, concludes with the death and transformation of the character.

Ravenor is much more mainstream, part of Abnett's Inquisition series.

In W40K, human religion is based on a semi-dead God-Emperor, opposed by demons, aliens and heretics. The Inquisition is intended to oppose these forces, and the novels are a bit like a kind of baroque sci-fi spy/horror novel. Sort of advanced steampunk, but without the steam and with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. And they're great. The plots are a cut above the average W40K Space-Marines-kill-everything novel but there's enough shooty stuff so you don't get to miss it too much.