I’m a little late to the party, but I just gotta say that this paranoia some are having that Obama’s support is basically just a bunch of naive/ ignorant/ cult worshippers is (a) dumb, and (b) insulting. Since when is getting excited about a candidate a bad thing? Hmmm?

By now most of y’all must have seen the Obama-support video Yes We Can. Even with my Cynicism Fader pushed way up, I found it affecting. Maybe we can’t, but I still want to believe we can.

Of course, something like this will always give rise to something like, um, this.

Isn’t the Internet swell?

FULL DISCLOSURE: Steve and I are close friends, and this is a review of the movie made from his book.

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I hope Steve won’t mind if I review the movie here…

I confess, I went to see the movie with some apprehension. How well would it adhere to the books? Would the changes irritate me? I was pleasantly surprised. Though it diverges substantially from Steve’s book, some of my favorite scenes and characters from the book were there. Many of my immediate concerns melted quickly away.

Frankly, I loved all the leads. Christensen had a smoldering broodiness that worked just fine for me, leavened with a wry irony. Bilson played well opposite him, with a down-to-earth and subtly sarcastic sense of humor. She and Christensen were frankly adorable together. I loved their lovemaking scene! And Jamie Bell was on fire as Griffin. Samuel L. Jackson played the head Jumper hunter with an inexorable and chilling competence — I want to see his character explored in greater depth. Michael Rooker and Diane Lane as Davy’s parents had small but appealing roles, though they were both woefully underutilized.

The story had a great premise, played out at tremendous velocity, and it did well at the box office as a consequence. But it does have its flaws, and on reflection, I have a theory about what the systemic problem is. Bear with me; this will take some room to develop.

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Science fiction and fantasy are technically difficult forms, because of the peculiar expository burden that they carry. (Incidentally, I am shamelessly stealing from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, my editor’s wife and herself an editor, who has an excellent lecture on this very subject.) Liman’s kinetic visual style is deft and spare. He doesn’t talk down to his audience — he assumes we are smart, and can figure things out. On the whole, this is a good rule to follow. And he put this technique to good use in THE BOURNE IDENTITY and MR AND MRS SMITH.

But with SFF stories, viewers have less context to rely on than they do for non-SFF stories, so they need more things spelled out more explicitly.

Teresa provides this analogy. Each new concept the writer poses is like an object they are asking their reader (or viewer) to carry. The more possibilities you open up without narrowing them back down, the more weight you are asking the audience to carry as they go along — the processing cycles your audience has to go through to get what it is you mean. Ultimately, if you don’t resolve some of their questions soon enough, they grind to a complete halt, and give up trying to understand what’s going on, ending up confused and bored. (Incidentally, this is why it is such a huge technical challenge to teach computers to understand natural language. We rely heavily on pattern matching to help us understand meaning, whereas computers process primarily sequentially. So they can get stuck in these series of infinitely nested do-loops, trying to figure out which of a massive set of combinations is both meaningful and plausible.)

Here’s just one example. The rules for jumping are subtle and complex. If you know what they are, it’s easy to see why, for instance, a Jumper can jump into a setting with lots of people there and nobody seems to notice. As Steve explains it in the book, people know that a person can’t just disappear, or appear out of nowhere. So they just assume they blinked, or their attention wandered. They fill in a plausible alternative. But if you don’t know this, the way Davy and Griffin just keep popping around can cause confusion and throw you out of the movie.

There were plenty of places where Liman expected the viewer to trust him that there are rules. Lots of people were willing to give this to him. But lots weren’t.

In short, to reach its broadest possible audience, the movie needed more connective tissue — both in terms of the emotional context, and in terms of some of the ground rules for the science fictional concept. More exposition, in other words.

Liman had clearly thought his world and his characters’ motives out well. For those of us who have read the books and the graphic novel, and understand all the backstory on the Paladins, and the rules of how jumping works and so forth, all that context was there, and everything made sense. We could just enjoy what happened. It just didn’t come through clearly enough for many who weren’t familiar with the world and the concept. (Also, moviegoers are trained not to worry too much about plotholes and so on, anyway — to just sit back and enjoy the ride. This aspect of Hollywood personally makes me a little crazy, actually. Logic matters — especially when you are doing SF, dammit!)

Many of those who didn’t get all the details of how things work in Liman’s version of the JUMPER universe won’t overwork it. They’ll be willing to give Liman the benefit of the doubt and just enjoy the story. This is partly because of the sheer brilliance of his craft, and also because he is incredibly honest as a storyteller. Reportedly, one reason he liked JUMPER so much was that the first thing that teen Davy does when he discovers his power is to go out and rob a bank. This aspect of Steve’s book was one of its great strengths. That won Liman a lot of credit with me. Also, Liman is just balls-to-the-wall as a storyteller — he hurls himself enthusiastically through the story, and pulls us along at a giddy pace.

I would not have complained if he had made David a bit more sympathetic early on — this is part of that connective-tissue issue I talked about. But David’s journey is compelling enough as it is. I like a little moral ambiguity and conflicting loyalties sprinkled into my story diet. Davy starts out desperately needing to escape a bad situation. He discovers this great power and uses it to make his life better, but becomes selfish and alienated because of this. He finds out that he can only really be happy by engaging with others. And to do that he has to take some risks. He has to start caring, and committing himself to making a difference. So he does.

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Thumbnail: The movie has technical problems. But Liman is so good a visual storyteller that the movie succeeds anyway. This is a much smarter SF movie than many I’ve seen. See it before it leaves the big screen. B+

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20-Feb-07: I’ve tweaked this for clarity since I put it up.