Good Manners

Giving up on Season 2 now… going back to re-read the first three books, repair my memory, and forget the Amazon trash exists. The writers of the Amazon adaptation have (as with the “Rings of Power”) trashed a great story, without the ability to replace/enhance that story with a coherent alternative plotline. I could handle the plot changes better if they were done well… but they are not. So many engineered/duplicated “5 star ratings” here, just like when they were trying to prop up the “Rings of Power” ratings. So the correct rating is probably about 2 to 2.5… the middle of the parabolic shaped ratings distribution with the fake “5” levels allowed for. Not a good result given the budget… just like the “Rings of Power” shambles. The progressive skills development and reveals of the main six young people in the BOOKS… Rand, Perrin, Mat, Egwene, Nynaeve and Elayne… was fantastic. Their respective abilities develop and they gradually become these significant influences on the world and the upcoming battles. At the same time their relationships and characters develop, even in the face of the great challenges they face. The older characters are just the matrix that the development of the young people happens within. In this Amazon adaptation, the older characters… Moraine, Lan, the older Aes Sedai etc are the prime focus so far. Why? Was that the easiest way to down-size the young male characters? Instead we get… Rand… missing in action much of the time, no Heron-blade history, and very little of his romance with Egwene retained Perrin… a loveable, girl-shy, ripped-muscle blacksmith who develops telepathic/empathic powers as a wolf-friend replaced with a sooky, unsure, haunted individual, who interacts with the occassional labrador-sized budget “wolf” Mat… in the books also loveable, a larrikin, whose ability to influence the world’s coming events is hard to see at first, but starts to be revealed in the quarterstaff fight with the Warder trainees, and amazing luck…. no sign of him yet. Nynaeve… her role as a Wisdom, promoted before her time, and her personal mission of trying to protect the young people from the village from the plots of the Aes Sedai is just lost Egwene… probably the only one of the Two Rivers characters whose character in the Amazon adaptation is close to that in the book. The Wheel of Time books have the strongest set of female characters I can think of anywhere in fiction. And the message is all about the BALANCE of the two sides of the one power, the female and the male. Yet the writers still had to promote the female characters even higher and push their Hollywood-feminism agenda by weakening virtually all the male characters, excluding Lan. Sounds like the Rings of Power all over again. The Witcher series and the Game of Thrones were not perfect, But their script-writing leaves the agenda-loaded writers at Amazon look like amateurs, corrupted by zeal.

Total trash. Terrible plot, awful science, bad acting. A FEW good special effects, but they can’t make up for the rest of the garbage. I usually like Gerard Butler, and sci-fi is my preferred movie genre. But GeoStorm is one movie to skip. “The Day after Tomorrow” isn’t perfect but it leaves “GeoStorm” for dead.