Hilary Swank 2020: Away and The Hunt

[shevek]

So, over on a Youtube livestream chat, someone brought up a sci-fi series on Netflix that they recently enjoyed binge-watching.
It's called "Away" and it's supposed to be a realistic, near-future look at a manned mission to Mars, and it starts Hillary Swank
as the mission commander.

So I scoped "Away" and it turned out to be worthwhile. They're very meticulous about the science (probably even more careful
than the creators of The Expanse), and that's a good approach, given that the story is supposed to occur only about ten years from
now in 2030-ish. The crew is cast to represent the current spacegoing powers on Earth: USA, Russia, India, China and E.U. (although the E.U. guy is British? Guess they didn't think about Brexit. And he's also an adopted African from Ghana raised by a Jewish family..
a whole conceit which seemed a bit forced and unnecessary).

The other aspect of the story is the emotional impact of how being away from their friends and families for three
whole years affects the crew of five people on the ship, which is called the Atlas. As a result, there's a ton of tear-jerking scenes
in this show to the extent that they overdo it, and another boatload of references to God and religion.

Anyway, you get quickly sucked into the relationships between the five crew members once you dig into the 1st and 2nd episodes, but reading some of the episode summaries, I could see that there is also quite a bit of decompression going on in the storyline (pretty much every single that can go wrong on a spaceship does go wrong for them over the course of ten episodes). So I watched EPs 1-3,
then skipped ahead to EPs 7-10 to save some time, and I think it was a good strategy.

I won't reveal to whether they get to Mars in one piece or not, but suffice it to say if this series is not one-and-done for some reason,
they do have a means and a motive to continue into at least one more season. That is to say, if the writers haven't utterly run out of every possible combination they can think of to create interpersonal conflict amongst a cast of five characters.

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So in a related story, one of the main actresses in Heroineburgh has a secondary but important role in an upcoming Blumhouse Productions horror movie to be released on October 13 (and we're proud of her, she's very talented, and this couldbe her first
IMDB credit..not sure yet about that). Before I heard about the movie, I didn't realize exactly what "Blumhouse Productions" was, so I looked it up, and now I do: one of the most successful movie production teams in recent memory, they're responsible for a ton of horror and gore films that were filmed low-budget but made a ton of money, like The Purge, Paranormal Activity, Happy Death Day and the latest installment of Halloween.

I looked at the Blumhouse list and recognized "The Hunt", which is a movie that came out in theaters on the very week that the Covid lockdown began (same weekend as the Bloodshot movie). I'd heard some controversial things about it, so I figured I'd check it out, and lo and behold, it also stars...Hilary Swank! And Betty Gilpin, the super hot Liberty Belle from the GLOW series.

For those who didn't pick up on the hype a few months ago, "The Hunt" is about a club of elite snotty liberals who kidnap Trumper
redneck "deplorables" and hunt them down on a private estate for fun and sadism. The movie was originally supposed to be released last year, but it was delayed until March 2020 because of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings (ironically while El Paso was indeed a lone right-winger inspired by Christchurch, the Dayton tragedy was committed by a kid inspired by Antifa).

I was expecting this movie to be a preachy woke mess like the Watchmen TV show, because Damon Lindelof is involved. But it turns out that even though he does take the opportunity to drop plenty of politically-correct buzzwords into the script, there are also many violent twists and turns that the viewer doesn't expect, and even the final outcome is not what you would think, given the way that the movie starts out.

I won't reveal any more of the details so you can check it out for yourself, but what I can say is that if you are into two beautiful women (Hillary Swank vs Betty Gilpin) in decently tight clothing fighting it out to the death using every conceivable weapon they can find in a large house, you will get a kick out of the climactic moments. The fight lasts quite a long time, and there are plenty of places that you can pause to savor it.

Hillary Swank is definitely doing some good work nowadays!

[ivandobsky]

Away looks schmaltzy. If I were sending a crew to Mars, I'd select people who were undramatic. I'm not claiming that this show is unrealistic, since the people who run NASA may think differently, or act as if they think differently. See https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-re ... ic-objects

I still have some faith in Elon Musk.