jon-oivind Reviews

Foundation: A Glimpse of Darkness (2023) Season 2, Episode 2

Massive drop in quality

[1/10 · 25 January 2024]

I am shocked at the drop in quality through the two first episodes of this season. The "Gaal and Salvor "-show is still absolute rubbish, but even worse than before. Writing and acting is absolutely appalling.

The Empire is still more classy in terms of acting apart from the princess who absolutely blows.

Then there is the sudden f-bomb explosion. What gives? They all of a sudden speak completely differently, all of them.

This is the greatest disappointment in a very long time. At least the production values are still top notch most of the time. I really hope it picks up again, this was just rubbish.

Foundation (2021– )

Great sci-fi, some great and weak casting

[8/10 · 12 January 2024]

A true epic and just what the doctor ordered to fill the void left by The Expanse ending. This review is based on season 1.

Great production values, design and in most parts storytelling. The weakest parts are mainly Gaal and Salvor. Gaal, especially, is jarring. I have not quite decided whether it is the London accent at odds with everyone else (except Salvor), the writing or the acting. She just comes across as too immature and spoilt/entitled for someone with her upbringing. Salvor is less annoying, but it does jar that a mission like this would not have an actual security expert that would not be so easily mislead and could more convincingly hold their own in a fight. Let's face it, the warden (orig mayor) is supposed to be a man for good reason. Apart from this I think the actress playing Salvor is mostly fine like most of the rest of the cast.

The actors playing the Empire are exceptional!

All in all, one of the best and most epic series in any genre of recent years.

iHuman (2019)

Engadging and a good conversation piece

[8/10 · 27 February 2020]

Tonje Hessen Schei clearly has an agenda with this film. It is not a neutral dissertation of AI, its potential and dangers. We are in the middle of a revolution in terms of AI, though true AI seems rather far away still. (Current ML, "deep learning" algorithms and synthetic neural networks are actually very primitive compared to the human intelligences that created them). Hessen Schei said in an introduction to the screening I attended that she thinks there is too little attention paid to and conversation about AI in terms of how it will change society, democracy and the way we live. Even though I use ML and "AI" in my work and know the tech fairly well, I still found the framing and the questions asked in the film to be engadging. Some of the talking heads come off as rather naive, despite all their apparent brilliance. I found it amusing that some of these highly intelligent people (probably inadvertently) support some level of pre-destination, i.e. that AI is inevitable. Also, it raises questions dating back at least Oppenheimer about the culpability of scientists. To quote Jeff Goldblums character in Jurassic Park "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." which more or less summarizes the theme of iHuman and why we should stop and think.

I would have liked to hear inside opinions from the big players like Google and Amazon, but ominously they refused to be interviewed.

I think the documentary was expertly made with both incredible audio design (think Sci-fi in general, Blade Runner I+II in particular) and visuals. Talking head fatigue is mostly avoided. Like I said initially, the film clearly has an agenda and the director is using every trick in her impressive arsenal to influence us, the audience. Some of the shots are amazingly beautiful as well. The shot of Juergen Schmidhuber looking out upon creation from his vantage point on top of the Alps is both amusing and has serious historical connotations.

PS! About the Schmidhuber scene, a previous reviewer wrote: "it's just another example of how millenials like this doc maker play with history :-)". Actually it is not. Firstly, Hessen Schei is most definetely Genaration X (born 1971 according to Google). Secondly, this is something that has nothing to do with generations but rather much more with having a sense of wit and visual humour. There have been plenty of similarly thematically loaded images in docs by Boomers, Xers (my gen) and Millenials.