Category: Review

The Huntress: Rune of the Dead

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★★
“Can’t see the wood for the trees. SO. Many. Trees…”

In 9th-century Scandinavia, teenage girl Runa (Stefansdotter) lives deep in the woods, with her mother, Magnhild (Idah), blind grandfather Ragnvald (Beck) and younger sister Bothild (Lyngbrant). Father Joar is notable by his absence, having gone off on a Viking raid to seek fortune for the family, and is now well overdue. However, he did at least train Runa to be a markswoman with the bow. Problems start when she finds a wounded warrior, Torulf, lying in the forest, and brings him back to their cabin, much against Magnhild’s wishes.

Torulf turns out to be a colleague of Joar’s, who tells a tale of the raiders looting a burial site – only to find vengeance coming out of the grave after them. He and Joar are the only two survivors. And when Joar returns shortly afterward, his arrival puts the whole group in peril, because of what’s inexorably following him. It’s only really at this point – two-thirds of the way in – that the film remotely begins to entertain. Up until this point, there has been a lot of sitting around the woods, and the director appears never to have heard of the maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Witness Torulf’s lengthy and frankly, boring, description of the situation, which would fit better into a Nordic saga recital than any cinematic retelling.

If the makers had gone for a siege type of film from the beginning, with the family barricaded in their cabin, and trying to fend off an unstoppable horde of barrow wights, this might have worked. It’s what I was expecting going in, and what I was waiting to see. And waiting. And waiting, while slow-moving coming of age family drama unfolded instead. I actually liked Stefansdotter in the lead role. Indeed, most of the performances are solid enough, and the same goes for the technical aspects. There was clearly some effort put in – the score, for example, is nicely done – and the forest provides a lushly appropriate backdrop against which any number of entertaining things might have unfolded. In a different, more interesting movie, anyway.

We finally do get the hand-to-hand (and hand-to-bow) battles for which we have been waiting. But only after a point by which the end credits would already be rolling on better-paced features. Even there, it is a bit on the dark side – though after my issues with Immortal Wars, the bar of what qualifies as “a bit on the dark side” has been raised considerably. This is nowhere near as bad, and you still can tell what’s going on, with a bit of peering. There’s a rough energy here which works, although the main impact is to make you wonder where the hell it has been for the rest of the movie. The makers should have sat down to watch the not-dissimilar Flukt, and built on what worked there, such as its steady flow of tension, instead of offering us 90 minutes of meandering around the woods.

Dir: Rasmus Tirzitis
Star: Moa Enqvist Stefansdotter, Yohanna Idha, Viva Östervall Lyngbrant, Ralf Beck

A Private War

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★★★
“You’re never going to get to where you’re going if you acknowledge fear.”

The profession of journalist is not exactly well-regarded by many people these days. So it’s nice occasionally to be reminded that they can still potentially be action heroes, risking their own lives in pursuit of the truth. In this case, it’s Marie Colvin (Pike), a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times newspaper, who lost an eye while covering the civil strife in Sri Lanka, leading to a piratical eye-patch for the rest of her career. Most people would treat that as a sign from the universe to look into a change of profession. But Colvin was made of sterner stuff, despite a hellacious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, with which she largely coped by drinking heavily. So she and photographer sidekick Paul Conroy (Dornan) continue to venture into the world’s hot-spots, whether it’s Iraq, Libya or Syria. There, they expose the terrible human cost that the conflicts have on the local population, without apparent concern for their own safety.

It’s not a spoiler to say this doesn’t end well, for Colvin was indeed killed in Homs, Syria in a January 2012 explosion. And that’s kinda the thing which both drives the narrative and irritates the heck out of me. The film opens and closes with the quote from its subject at the top. However, to counter-quote her with Arthur Conan Doyle, “It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.” As depicted here, it seems as if the journalist almost had a death-wish, spitting in the face of danger long past what was prudent or even had much purpose. There’s little or no acknowledgement by Colvin that a dead writer won’t be able to achieve much. If you don’t get out safely to tell the stories you have gathered, what’s the point? You can argue, to some extent, it’s this and her other flaws which render its heroine human.

On the other hand, I found it extraordinarily hard to relate to Marie, with her choices and subsequent actions being so entirely alien to me. She insists on getting right to the core of suffering, even if this means asking its subjects brutal questions. Is this laudable journalism? Or a close cousin to the reporters who shove microphones at victims of tragedy and ask, “How do you feel?” Director Heinemann was responsible for the very good documentary Cartel Land, but seems to struggle a bit when he has to generate the narrative, rather than just recording it. We get only fragments that hint at Colvin’s character, such as a habit of wearing expensive bras, because she declares, “If anyone’s gonna pull my corpse from a trench, I want them to be impressed.” While there’s no denying the bravery of her chosen profession, or her qualifications for this site (albeit in the unorthodox wing!), and former Bond-girl Pike is excellent, I wasn’t left with any deeper appreciation of the why, rather than the how, of her life.

Dir: Matthew Heineman
Star: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci

Beyond Fear

  By

★★
“Carry on camping.”

Former WWF star Lesseos, where she was known as the Fabulous Mimi, carved out a small career for herself in low-budget action films, mostly in the mid-nineties. Though the ones we’ve covered before, such as Double Duty and Pushed to the Limit, aren’t exactly classics. This, unfortunately, continues that trend, with far too much sitting around campfires, and not enough action. Put another way, it’s a movie which is in tents, instead of intense. [Thank you, I’ll be here all week…] Lesseos plays wilderness guide and former mixed martial-arts fighter Tipper Taylor, who has been contracted to take a bunch of noobs out for a few days of camping. Unfortunately, one of them, Vince (Axelrod), happens to witness and videotape a murder at a campsite. The two perpetrators need to recover the incriminating footage, and set about stalking the party through the wilderness, abducting Vince in an effort to get him to hand over the cassette.

This eventually leads to what is largely the film’s sole redeeming feature: a fairly lengthy and not badly-staged rural brawl between Tipper and Boar (Bower), the most brutal of the villains. The key word, unfortunately, is “eventually”. Because, to reach that point, you have to sit through well over an hour of the most mind-numbing chit-chat you could possibly come up with. It feels as if the original script was some kind of ensemble relationship piece, onto which the makers decided at the last moment to bolt on some fisticuffs. This feels most obvious during our first exposure to the heroine’s talents, in a thoroughly clunky scene where she literally pulls over to try and break up a fight between two vagrants. Instead, everyone is given a deeply uninteresting back-story. For example, Vince and his wife are lottery winners, now working through problems with their marriage, and Tipper is feeling guilty over her final MMA fight, which left her best friend paralyzed.

None of which has anything to do with the main plot, and so can entirely be ignored. Though I can’t over-stress just how much of this nonsense there is. If you’re looking for an open-air soap-opera, this should be your jam. Which is a bit of a shame, as Lesseos brings an easy, likable charm to Tipper, making her someone for whom you want to root. Her fighting style is stiff –  though I should clarify, this is intended in the pro wrestling sense, meaning hard-hitting, It’s clear that’s where her background lies, with moves like drop-kicks not typically being part of the martial arts armoury! The problems here lie elsewhere, with a plot which just doesn’t foreground its action elements, never manages to set up Boar and his ally as any kind of credible threat, and all but entirely fails to explain why Vince never bothers telling anyone – least of all the authorities – about the snuff movie he recorded. Though I must confess to having laughed at the line in the trailer, “Mimi believes in women’s rights… lefts and uppercuts,” it’s all remarkably poorly thought-out, and I couldn’t help feeling that Mimi deserves better.

Dir: Robert F. Lyons
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Verrel Reed, Robert Axelrod, Wayne Bower

Touch of Iron, by Timandra Whitecastle

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Owen and Noraya Smith are twins, in a world where such siblings are looked upon as cursed. Brought up as charcoal burners, they leave their village so Nora can avoid an arranged and unwanted marriage, and have the forture – whether good- or ill- remains to be decided – quickly to encounter the party of Prince Basham. He is scouring the country in search of a magical artifact called the Living Blade, which will grants its wielder great power. Assisting him is the half-wight Telen Diaz, a pilgrim/fighter. Owen joins the party, hoping to become a pilgrim himself; Nora decides to return home, but that option is removed from her as the village has been taken over by bandits. Fortunately, Diaz has followed her and is able to lend assistance when necessary. Nora eventually becomes his student in the fighting arts, and they all head to the temple/brothel of Shinar where the immortal seer Suranna can provide insight to the blade’s location. But the cost of her information is perilously high, since she has plans for both Nora and Diaz.

I believe this is what’s called “grimdark” fantasy fiction, which is basically as it sounds: in its simplest terms, think Game of Thrones rather than Lord of the Rings. I’ve no problem with the resulting “mature” content. Much of it here does seem necessary to the plot, though the concept of a vast, hidden city in the middle of nowhere that’s a gigantic, all-encompassing pleasure palace does pose certain logistical queries. There was also something slightly creepy about teenage Nora increasingly crushing hard on eighty-seven-year old Diaz – even if half-wights, like half-elves, age very well. I have a couple of other nitpicks. An almost entirely untrained Nora is capable of going all ninja and taking out an entire platoon of brigands. And there’s an assault on the city that comes out of nowhere, and whose purpose and participants both seem ill-defined.

With the negatives out of the way, on the positive side, I really liked Nora. She has a very sharp character arc over the course of the novel, but always seems to have been a bit of a bad-ass, even as a charcoal burner. It’s clear there’s a very significant future in front of her, and I sense she and Suranna will end up facing off down the road. I appreciated the way the heroine largely doesn’t care about the Living Blade; such apathy is pleasantly refreshing, though I suspect that opinion is going to change before long. Whitecastle has a good eye for world-building as well, giving the reader enough of an impression, without getting bogged down in too many details. It appears future volumes may concentrate more on Diaz. As I found him about the least interesting of the major characters, that will stop me shelling out for more. Still, as a one-off this made for an entertaining enough read, though I felt the first half, before they arrived at Shinar, was stronger and more interesting.

Author: Timandra Whitecastle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Living Blade series.

Locked Up (TV)

  By

★★★
“Back behind bars.”

While this Spanish series started off back in 2015, it perhaps suffers through not having been watched until recently – in the wake of shows like Wentworth and The Yard. There are too many elements which left me feeling “Hang on: haven’t I seen that somewhere before?” For instance, the thread where a motherly inmate gets Alzheimer’s and pleads with her cell-mates to kill her before it destroys her mind entirely? Liz Birdsworth, in seasons six and seven of Wentworth. So, I guess your opinion on this may vary, depending on your familiarity with the genre. Also like Wentworth, the main protagonist is someone who is not a hardened criminal – but ends up becoming one, over the course of the show. 

In this case, that is Macarena Ferreiro (Civantos). She gets seven years after becoming the patsy for her boss’s fraud. She stumbles across the location of a robbery haul, which brings her into conflict with… Well, just about everyone, but the key persona is Zulema Zahir (Lobato), the top dog of the prison. The five seasons (40 episodes in total) revolve around their love-hate relationship, though as usual, there are a good number of side stories and supporting characters, on both sides of the bars. Again, some of these may feel rather familiar, with the show going through the usual tropes of power struggles, warders good and bad, and criminal activities. It’s solid enough (and offers more nudity than the other shows, if that’s of interest!), just all too familiar at this point.

The show was originally cancelled after the second series, but after a significant pause was then revived for a third and fourth season. That delay required significant cast changes, due to the cast having moved on – Civantos’s other commitments meant Macarena became a secondary character. They also had to “transfer” to a new prison, as their existing sets had been taken over by another show (Money Heist, also on Netflix). But the real weirdness begins after the end of Season 4, which has an air of absolute finality to it. But, wait! There’s more! For Vis a vis: El oasis, followed. Set a decade later, Macarena and Zulema have teamed up, to become an armed robbery duo. 

They recruit some of their old pals to pull off the dreaded ‘one last heist’, robbing the wedding of a cartel boss’s daughter. Needless to say, it goes about as well as ‘one last heists’ always do. Initially, it feels a bit like an unwanted supplement. But it ends up as probably the most relevant to this site, with the women holed up in a motel, in the middle of the desert, and under siege by the boss’s army. By going outside the prison walls, this offers most scope for genuine invention, and it’s likely why I felt this to be the strongest season. I just wish I hadn’t had to go through four series of generic prison drama to reach it.

Created by:  Iván Escobar, Esther Martínez Lobato, Álex Pina, Daniel Écija
Star: Maggie Civantos, Najwa Nimri, Carlos Hipólito, Roberto Enríquez
a.k.a. Vis A Vis (Face to Face)

Annie Oakley (film)

  By

★★★
“Annie Gets Her Gun.”

While not exactly an accurate retelling of the life of noted sure-shot Annie Oakley, this is breezily entertaining. Indeed, you can make a case for this being one of the earliest “girls with guns” films to come out in the talking pictures era. There’s no denying Oakley (Stanwyck) qualifies here. The first time we see her, she’d delivering a load of game birds – all shot through the head to avoid damaging the flesh – to her wholesaler. When barnstorming sharpshooter Toby Walker (Foster) blows into town, Annie ends up in a match with him, which she ends up throwing, due in part to her crush on him. She still gets a job alongside Walker, in the Wild West show run by the renowned ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (Olsen) and his partner, Jeff Hogarth (Douglas). But Annie and Toby’s relationship fractures after he accidentally shoots her in the hand, while concealing an injury affecting his sight.

This hits the ground running, and roughly the first third plays decades ahead of its time. Don’t forget, this was made only fifteen years after women were granted the right to vote across the entire United States. Its depiction of a strong, perfectly independent woman as personified by Stanwyck is great – there’s also Walker’s former “friend,” Vera Delmar (Perl Kelton). When sternly warned the saloon she’s about to enter is no place for a lady, she breezily replies, “Oh, I’m no lady.” I’m quite impressed this was able to get through, given the rigid imposition of the strict Hays Code, beginning the previous year, with its goal “that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated.”

Almost inevitably, it can’t maintain this pace. There’s too much footage of the Wild West Show, which seems to consist largely of people on horses milling around the arena. I guess people were easily satisfied in those days. Meanwhile, the romance between Oakley and Walker (an entirely artificial construction, with Walker never existing as an actual person), fails to be convincing. Somewhat more interesting is the portrayal of Chief Sitting Bull, the Native American warrior who also became part of Wild Bill’s show. While depicted largely for comic relief – witness the scene where he turns out the gas lights in his bedroom by shooting at them – he is played by a genuine Indian, Chief Thunder Bird, which is considerably more progressive than some movies. He is also instrumental in Annie and Toby’s reconciliation.

Stanwyck does an excellent job of depicting the heroine, portraying her as someone absolutely confident in her own talents. I’d like to have seen more development of her character: as is, the one we see delivering quail at the start of the film, is almost identical to the one we see making up with Toby in its final shot. Sadly, the subject didn’t live to see her life immortalized in film, having died nine years before this was released. I think she’d probably have been quite pleased with her depiction.

Dir: George Stevens
Star: Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Melvyn Douglas, Moroni Olsen

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[Show slideshow]

Stalked

  By

★★
“Lacking in military intelligence”

A promising idea has its concept snuffed out by shaky execution and even worse writing. Sam (Rogers) is a former solder and now single mother. When her child falls sick, Sam heads for the chemist’s for medicine. She never gets there, being abducted in a van and rendered unconscious. She wakes in a large warehouse-like facility in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a military production facility. She’s not the only woman there, and finds that an invisible adversary, using advanced tech to cloak his presence, is taking advantage of the weekend to turn the place into a stalker’s amusement park. However, Sam’s background perhaps gives her a very particular set of skills, unavailable to the other victims.

I’m generally fairly oblivious to script-holes: Chris is considerably better at spotting them. But here, even I could see the glaring flaws. This is supposedly a cutting-edge military facility, yet the security is so bad, a child can literally get in. The motivation for the villain is poorly drawn, and it’s never explained how the lowly caretaker – for that’s what he is – manages to get to use all of his wonderful toys. Do the army also let soldiers take tanks off to drive around on the weekend? But it’s not as if the film has any confidence in him as a bad guy, for even after Sam has managed to avoid his threat, she then has to handle a military drone. Just one – for like I say, security is pretty bad. And it can easily be taken out with a conveniently to hand brick. If we ever go to war, I swear, we are screwed…

If the film had made much of Sam’s background, supposedly in the engineers’ corps, that might have helped. Watching her MacGyver her way against her opponent, using the plentiful material at hand could have been fun. But that would have required thought, something largely absent from the script. There are few points at which we are ever convinced of her military background, and the scenes where she is “fighting” her invisible opponent, all too often reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about self-wrestling. It’s a shame, as Rogers is by no means terrible otherwise, and is quite empathetic.

The same cannot be said for the ending, however. It’s understandable that the writer-director felt the need to tack something on, after the considerably underwhelming confrontation with the drone. What he delivers is the ultra-cliched finale where someone isn’t who they seem to be, but turns out to be the killer. No, those are not a pair of fidget spinners, they are my eyes rolling at this “twist”. At least he has the good grace not to stretch this out, bringing things to a ending that is brisk to the extreme. It’s clear the budget on this was limited, and I forgive it that. The lazy plotting is considerably harder to forgive.

Dir: Justin Edgar
Star: Rebecca Rogers, Nathalie Buscombe, Ian Sharp, Laurence Saunders

Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand

  By

★★★
“Hello Catty!”

We reviewed Hellcat’s Revenge last year, and I’m pleased to report this is a small but palpable improvement from Kabasinski. Most of the players from its predecessor return, notably biker queen Cat (Neeld), who quickly finds herself framed and locked up in prison. There’s a target on Cat’s back, courtesy of rival gang leader, Rosie (Hamblin), who has formed an unholy alliance with the warden, and slips easily in and out of jail to manage her business, through a basement tunnel. She has driven both Cat’s gang, the Hellcats, and that of her lover, Snake (Kabasinski) off the streets, with the latter supposedly killed. That’s not the case – cue “I thought you were dead” comments to Snake, which I feel have to be an Escape From New York homage – and we soon learn, down is not out. For the tunnel out of jail goes both ways, and can also be Cat’s escape route, allowing her and Snake to take on Rosie and her crew.

It’s nice this largely addressed the issues I had with the first one. For instance, the lack of motorcycles isn’t a problem here, since this time round, it’s more a women-in-prison film – not many bikes in the slammer. And when pursuing the WiP path, it’s a good slice of fun, even if not much more than the usual tropes from the genre e.g. evil warden, sadistic guards, laundry-room brawls, etc. I particularly liked the turn of Dutch (who was in part one, playing a different character) as long-term inmate Vegas. Also: approaching seventy, if the IMDb is to be believed, and still doing a shower scene? Mad props. Hamblin, too, simply looks like a scary prison inmate, all piercings and face tattoos. In a film like this, that’s half the battle, and there’s no shortage of the requisite attitude and jailbird posturing to be found across the female characters.

The film is less impressive on the outside, not least because in the middle, Cat ends up becoming a supporting character in her own film, with Snake taking over. This isn’t as much fun, coming off as more like a low-rent episode of a Sons of Anarchy wannabe [and I speak as a fan of that show], with Snake carving a lone furrow there. I couldn’t help wishing they’d just stuck within the closed confines of those prison walls, where things appeared to be moving along quite nicely, thank you for asking. Things do perk up again once Cat is busted out of jail, and we get the expected face-off between Cat, Snake and their allies against Rosie and her minions. As in the first film, the limited resources do limit the scope of the action, though there’s a “bullet through the head” effect which was a good effort. It’s all slightly more polished this time, and that progression is what you want to see from any low-budget film-maker. Here’s to the next film being Cat III… :)

Dir: Len Kabasinski
Star: Lisa Neeld, Donna Hamblin, Deborah Dutch, Len Kabasinski

The Doorman

  By

★★
“It’s like Die Hard, in a… building?”

Kitamura is one of the few people to have made two films given our seal of approval: Azumi and Sky High. Throw in the amazing (just not heroine oriented) Versus, plus Godzilla: Final Wars, and there’s a case that in the first half of the 2000’s, he was the best director working in the action genre. But since moving to America, his star has largely faded. This may be the most lacklustre to date, a shameless Die Hard knock-off, which adds nothing except a series of cliches, courtesy of the godawful screenplay by Lior Chefetz and Joe Swanson.

These begin with its heroine, Ali Gorsky (Rose), a Troubled Ex-soldierTM, suffering from PTSD. She has returned to New York, and through a relative, gets a job as a doorman at an apartment building undergoing renovation. It turns out the husband (Evans) of her late sister lives in the building: cue the Family DramaTM. Over Easter weekend, the place is taken over by the villains, under the leadership of Cultured EurovillainTM, Victor Dubois (Reno). He’s after hundreds of millions of dollars of paintings, hidden inside the walls of an apartment, because… Best not ask. And what are the odds? It’s her brother-in-law’s apartment. Fortunately, she’s out getting mint sauce (no, really) when the bad guys come to call. So Ali can spend the next hour, scurrying round the building, picking off the thieves and trying to rescue her family, while exchanging not very witty banter, about zodiac signs and the like.

The problems with the script here are multiple, such as its blatant foreshadowing. Things like the building’s secret passages are dumped in there so blatantly, they might as well be preceded with an intertitle, “THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER.” What’s good, isn’t original – and what’s original isn’t any good. The use of PTSD here is simply a crutch, for no real purpose: we never believe it’s a genuine malady. Meanwhile, there’s Rose, who has done supporting work in other action franchises e.g. John Wick and Resident Evil, but proves incapable of carrying a movie herself. Firstly, she makes for an extremely unconvincing soldier, looking as if she might blow away in a moderate breeze. More damningly, she seems to have just the one expression, a combination of concern and annoyance. While not inappropriate, given the circumstances, it certainly outstays its welcome.

All of which would have tolerable, had the action been up to snuff. By and large, it isn’t, with only very occasional moments of the inventiveness which made Versus such a joy. It doesn’t help that most of the film takes place in half-darkness, leaving the viewer to peer into the gloom and try to figure out what’s going on. I guess this is just about watchable, if you’re in an entirely undemanding mood. However, I keep watching Kitamura movies in the hopes of him recapturing his former glories, and I keep being severely disappointed.

Dir: Ryuhei Kitamura
Star: Ruby Rose, Jean Reno, Rupert Evans, Aksel Hennie

Destiny Lost, by M.D. Cooper

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This is the second book from Cooper here, after Outsystem, and has some of the same characters. Initially, it seemed to have a shot at being considerably better, with a first half which was impressive. Unfortunately, it couldn’t sustain this, and ended up dropping back to a similar level and for similar reasons. If you’re interested in SF which is so hard, you could use it to cut glass, this is for you. But I’m not typically a fan of books which need to include a twenty-page appendix of “Terms and Technology” at the back. Especially when half of them don’t help much, e.g. “A CriEn module is a device which taps into the base energy of the universe, also known as zero-point, or vacuum energy” – glad that’s cleared up. And some of the rest are superfluous: any fan of SF won’t need to be told what “FTL” travel is.

In this world, that faster-than-light breakthrough allowed humanity to occupy a swathe of the galaxy, but the resulting wars triggered a dark age from which we are now only just recovering, in the ninth millennium. Sera is a transporter-for-hire, who’ll move anything, anywhere for the right price. But when one commission brings down unexpected heat, she cracks open the package, and is startled to find it contains Tanis Richards. She was a colonist from Earth, whose ship set off over five thousand years ago and is only now reaching its destination. While events overtook them,  her ship, the Intrepid – its construction was the subject of Outsystem – carries long-lost technology, on which everyone, from pirates to stellar alliances, wants to get their hands.

One such pirate, Rebecca, kidnaps Sera, seeking to swap her for Tanis and access to her tech. But both Sera and her crew, helped by the colonist, are made of sterner stuff. Through this section is when the book is at its best, combining interesting characters with a conflict which is taking place on a personal level. All seems lost for Sera and her trusty AI, when she’s secreted away in Rebecca’s headquarters, hidden in the depths of dark space, outside our normal universe. Yet, through grit and determination, she manages to return to her allies, then prepares to take the fight to Rebecca, as well as reunite Tanis with her crew. It’s a very good, gripping read. Unfortunately, after that is where things go a bit pear-shaped.

For once everyone arrives at the star-system of Bollam’s World, the hard SF elements really kick in, as if Cooper wanted to make up for the time lost earlier. It becomes more like watching a gigantic game of three-dimensional chess, with vessels of various kinds moving around and firing weapons at each other, for lengthy sections. Rather than technology enhancing the human elements in the story, it threatens to overwhelm the characters entirely, and even a (not exactly surprising) revelation about Sera’s origins couldn’t stop this from becoming laborious by the end. Quite a few typos, such as a reference to a “grizzly task” when no actual bears were involved, don’t help matters. I’ll not be going further in this series.

Author: M.D. Cooper
Publisher: The Wooden Pen Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 13 in the Orion War series.