UPDATED Hank and Janet Pym make Marvel's 1980s look very interesting (ANT-MAN review)

Marvel's Edgar Wright  'disaster' is actually the most Pixar of Marvel movies, great for a pre-teen audience, and rich in fascinating alt-history for Marvel's already rich alt-Universe. I'm going to list how much has now changed.
This has now been updated to show the original Ant-Man opening scene.

****LOTS OF SPOILERS******

In the very first scene we have a flashback to Marvel's 1989. It has a Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas - amazingly de-aged to look as it he's just walked off  Oliver Stone's Wall Street, quitting SHIELD before Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell aged to look in her 70s) and Howard Stark (John Slattery).

After this we can make a few assumptions

WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR

1972
Arnim Zola, HYDRA survivor and corruptor of SHIELD dies and is digitised
Tech note : presumably digitised on IBMs ...which would be appropriate for IBMs links to he Nazis pre WW2.

1974
Stark Expo flasback in Iron Man 2 has Howard Stark neglecting Tony.

Late 1970s
SHIELD ANT-MAN propaganda movie made (shown in another Ant-Man flashback)
Hank Pym refuses to hand suit over or the technology and becomes Ant Man himself.

1984
Natasha Romanov (Black Widow) is born in USSR,

Mid-80s
Pym and Van Dyne active as Ant Man and the Wasp.

1987
Janet Van Dyne becomes lost in Quantum Realm after disarming a Soviet ICBM by shrinking to sub atomic size.

1988 ?
Pym active as Ant-Man solo? The original Ant-Man opening scene apparently has Pym stealing microfilm from a Panamanian general. (In the first Edgar Wright draft this is set in the 1960s which would have put it outside the continuity listed here).

1989 
Pym quits because SHIELD (HYDRA?) is trying to replicate his work
Alexander Pierce secretly joins HYDRA

1991
Howard Stark and wife assassinated by HYDRA

Early 1990s (?)
Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford in Winter Solidier) has his life saved by up and coming SHIELD agent Nick Fury in Bogota.
Alexander Pierce gives up Directorship of SHIELD to Fury.


Notes
* In Ant -Man HYDRA sure is interested in the Pym's technology - and weirdly during the Project Insight revelations in Winter Soldier neither Hank, either of the Van Dynes (or Darren 'Yellowjacket' Cross) is listed as a threat to HYDRA. Hank quits only shortly before Howard Stark is killed and from what we know HYDRA must be aware of him. Does Pym know a lot more about the workings on SHIELD at that time than the others? Did he quit at HYDRA's insistence or was he tipped off?

* Hank Pym - an actual agent for SHIELD is not listed as a threat by HYDRA but Dr Steven Strange is on that list. So Steven Strange is known to HYDRA but not apparently to SHIELD. How long? Ant Man treated us to 1980s flashbacks - how far back could Dr Strange go? Anything is possible.... 1960s Greenwich village is my vote.

* Pym worked with Stark - did he work with Anton Vanko? Anton was father of Ivan from Iron Man 2, now revealed to have with a very similar grudge to Pym, in that convinced Howard was stealing his work.The reputation of the Stark's in starting to look less glorious with every movie.

* Unlike Howard Stark, Pym's treatment of daughter Hope looks like that an obsessive parent - what did he think of Howard Stark's neglect of young Tony? With similarly obsessive busy parents did Tony and Hope Van Dyne grow up together?

* When Pym revolts he refuses to hand suit over and becomes Ant Man. This is very reminiscent of Tony Stark's later behaviour with Iron Man suit. Was a young Tony a witness to some of that debate? How much of Tony's behaviour is actually inspired by Pym? <cough> Ultron

* The suited up Janet Van Dyne really looked the part as the original Wasp in another brief flashback. Her daughter, Hope, with her marital arts skills  and gun collection, hardly looks science material - can we assume she takes from her mother in this regard? Put it this way - would SHIELD allow a scientific asset as valuable as Pym go on tactical missions without backup? Suddenly Janet Van Dyne looks more likely to be a tactical field agent than Hank's lab partner and if a field agent she is most likely a protege of Peggy Carter,  This would make Janet Van Dyne Peggy Olsen to Peggy Carter's Joan, with Roger Sterling as Howard Stark of course. (Sorry - just watched the end of Mad Men).

* If so Janet's disappearance would be doubly traumatic for Carter who similarly lost Steve Rogers without trace. When did Carter retire? After Howard Stark's death in 1991? If so these few years, roughly contemporary to the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, look almost like a sudden coup by HYDRA, perhaps prompted by their failure of their Soviet project, LEVIATHAN (seen in Agent Carter).

* Van Dyne would also probably the same generation as Jenny Agutta's Councilwoman Hawley of the World Security Council (from Avengers, Winter Soldier), who is British and likely another Carter protege.

* Possibly Van Dyne (as Wasp?) recruited Romanov from the clutches of the KGB to make another generation of Carter protege's along with Maria Hill and Agent 13, Susan Carter (Winter Soldier again).

* Perhaps more likely - did Pym and Van Dyne ever cross swords with the Winter Soldier?.. I guess we might find out next year.

Finally - we all know who is going to be cast as Janet Van Dyne, so stop haggling over money and give her a call!

CZJ in Entrapment

FX's THE AMERICANS : One Black Widow after another

A glimpse at the red on Natalia Romanova's ledger in all it's harrowing detail.

FX's THE AMERICANS is destined to be a classic in retrospect. With all due respect to MAD MEN, in terms of domestic thriller it is really the closest current equivalent to THE SOPRANOS. I really envy those who will be able to watch this one day end to end without interruption.

I  watched the pilot last summer, couldn't believe how little attention it had got, showed it to someone else, and we then burned through two series in the next seven days.  As good as any classic cold war spy tv I've ever seen, including THE SANDBAGGERS and the BBC Le Carre adaptations, and at the same time a brilliant period drama (Reagan America) that rivals MAD MEN for capturing the real mood of the time the period. I bought 3 boxed sets of this show for friends last Christmas.

The pilot sets up the premise with KGB efficiency.  Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), are two KGB sleeper agents in early 1980s Washington, forced to live in an arranged marriage for twenty years who suddenly find that after having a family together - and quite a lot of other stuff they have in common - they've grown to actually love each other for real. The tragedy is they must make this and their family work in a world in which they both constantly lie, seduce and murder in the service of a ruthless foreign power. By the time the first series ends creepily to the tune of Peter Gabriel's 'Games Without Frontiers' (scariest music ever written about a BBC light entertainment show?), this show is totally addictive and really gets in the way of doing anything else

It has the best depiction of the period, early 1980s America, I've ever seen on the small screen. Most 1980s set dramas rely on the same John Hughes box of cliches - bright colours and teen angst. This show really recaptures the decade that was one faulty command decision away from the extinction of the human race. It is shot like gritty like grey sandpaper, so toned down colour pallet is virtually black and white. Alec Guinness's George smiley could walk in from the BBC version at at moment withut a shocking change in lighting or clarity. This is why they don't use stills as promo shots - this is the era we associate with DALLAS, but shot like CALLAN. It is Spielberg in negative.

So it is just a spy show in the 80s? No. Like TRUE LIES - but taken seriously  - this brings the  Cold War paranoia right into the domestic environment. Sometimes in THE AMERICANS the Iron Curtain cuts right across the dinner table. The 3rd Season particularly invades the home of the characters, as the domestic front starts to crumble when KGB Central asks the couple to recruit their own daughter to the cause.

The obvious advantage would be that a second generation KGB agent would be liable for high security defense jobs in the Pentagon. The obvious disadvantage is of course that the girl, played with incredible confidence and grace for a teenager by Holly Taylor, has not been through the Red Room process (or it's real world equivalent), and in total ignorance of her parents real identities has discovered religion via college.

How they expect to train what has become a young committed Christian to perform the acts required of Phillip and Elizabeth would be worthy of entire comedy series all on it's own - if we hadn't seen the shocking first attempt to recruit a second generation  spy at the climax of Season 2 (Spoiler : it didn't go well). The sheer impossibility of this is apparent to her parents, who are blinded both by love for their children and the unflinching Stalingrad like devotion to the cause.

A British version of this would stray into comedy at virtually every turn. The brilliant capacity for un-sneering sincerity in US drama is really shown in the sub-plot with Martha, Philips other wife. Martha is a lonely female employee at the FBI duped into marrying and spying for someone she thinks is working for FBI internal investigations. By the time she realises the truth she is in too deep emotionally and professionally to escape.

In a British show Martha would be a sad joke, but here, played with heartbreaking engagement by Alison Wright, she is almost the centre of the human tragedy taking place. The scene in which she thinks she marries her husband (known to her as Clark) while Clark/Philip's real wife Elizabeth is forced to attend as his "sister" is quite emotionally brutal all round - especially when it it revealed that as part of the KGB selection process, which led to a twenty year marriage with two kids, Elizabeth and Phillip never had a marriage ceremony themselves.

As a 'Black Widow' played for real, Keri Russell is terrifying, and  as hard as nails discovered in a tin at an abandoned camp during the Siberian winter. Infinitely more convincing a product of The Red Room as anything in the world of Marvel, you would hope writers working on any further iterations of The Black Widow in AGENT CARTER or the movies storyline are watching 'Elizabeth Jennings' religiously.

Good as the actresses are in this, it would probably be unwatchable without the restraint and humanity of Matthew Rhys who is the heart of the show. He has the seemingly impossible task of of engaging audience sympathy in a family of KGB murderers and with their mission. Core credit must of course go to the writers lead by showrunner Joe Weisberg - who virtually every episode prompts the thought "How the hell will they get out of this - and why do I care so much?".

One of the left field shocks is Richard Thomas, still best known to British viewers from The WALTONS, playing reptilian FBI supervisor Frank Gaad as if he had just walked off the set of the V alien invasion mini-series briefly popular at the time.

A constant pleasure is the almost Scorsese-like eye for brilliant period music. None of it obvious, a lot of it is British - such as Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac. One whole episode is devoted to the release of a Yazoo album!

Rhys and Russell are a real world couple now apparently, and I can't say I'm surprised. The chemistry between the two is immediately evident in the pilot. You wonder if the meta levels of role playing and acting in the THE AMERICANS make it easier for the performers to lift themselves out of the roles and get the downtime they deserve. Is this an actors dream - playing virtually every scene as a different character? Russell comes off worst here as most of her roles are utterly ruthless manipulating vamps that even HYDRA would think twice about employing.

Those Marvel fans who want an idea of the Black Widow's 'ledger' of previous crimes teased in Captain America : Winter Soldier and ignored in Age of Ultron? should watch "Elizabeth Jennings" at work in THE AMERICANS. It would be fascinating to watch how a character as committed to the cause as this, to be able to commit acts of that, ultimately chooses to retire to hang around with the likes of Tony Stark. I can just about imagine respect for Steve Rogers getting under the skin of Keri Russell's monster, or Banner, for obvious reasons, but likely she'd gut, skin and mount Stark first chance she got (though probably in  a different order).

So if it is so good why is THE AMERICANS so unknown in the UK?  Right now you can't even get to the official website from this country.
ITV bought it up. 
ITV showed two seasons of THE AMERICANS and dropped it like a stone. Those X Factor repeats are so much easier to sell when your overall share of the UK viewing audience drops by 5% every year. Maybe ITV would be more comfortable remaking THE AMERICANS themselves with Ant and Dec playing the Elizabeth and Philip?

Kingsman deleted scene?

PICS REMOVED FOLLOWING PATHETIC COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FROM PATHETIC  FILM COMPANY AFTER THEY'D BEEN POSTED ALL OVER THE INTERNET

Some sort of early 70s flashback establishing Michael Caine's Arthur character?

Found on this site,
http://jellyfishpictures.co.uk/jellyfish-portfolio/the-secret-service/
"Jellyfish worked on the VFX for the movie including a complex sequence involving Michael Caine looking 40 years younger"

Must say I thought Caine's character one of the darkest, and smartest things about the movie, and there is obviously a lot more to him than meets the eye.

*SPOILER*

Arthur appears to be one of the 'snobs' throughout the movie, but in his dying breath ("YOU DIRTY LI'TTLE FUCKER") he reveals a working class accent not unlike that of Eggsy, suggesting he has betrayed his background in a similar way to Samuel L Jackson's character in Django Unchained. I wonder if this was suggested during Jackson and Caine's scene together.

Agent Carter vs Black Widow of 1946 should be some showdown

You are not watching Agent Carter and The Americans because.. There is something better on !?!

I blacked out in a pub night before last, just after seeing Kingsman for a second time (it gets better). Because I can't get over this bloody flu I'm still stranded in London and had to get car MOTed here instead of Devon.
Would London garage this mean it is more expensive?
Apparently it is £700 in  - I'm sure-  essential break disk replacements.
I am Jack's total lack of surprise.

*Whatever*

What keeps me perky is my favourite tv of the moment, which is so good I'm unable to wait for the entire thing to become available before I watch it. This usually happens to me at the end of long runs series like Breaking Bad. Agent Carter has been instant watching material right from the off. There is enough Internet gushing over this as it is so I'm not going to add to this things already said.

It is actually teaching a creaking old misogynist it's like myself some things about how men relate to women that I wish I'd known long ago. In last weeks penultimate episode Peggy has to come clean completely with her male coworkers. After dealing with 1940s attituades in the workplace for first half of the series she loses it and tears a strip off them all, not just listing their sexist attitudes but categorising them, showing that their treatment of her varies from dismissive to over protective depending on their attitude to her - AND SHE DOESN'T NEED ANY OF IT.

Example : poor office nice guy Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj, even better than he was in Whedon's Dollhouse) gets ripped into for putting her on a pedestal...
I must have hit That button a few times over the years myself. It is the supposed proto feminist angle to Agent Carter that is putting viewers off so I won't lay it on any thicker than I have but a tv that makes you question you own attitudes for the better has to be good.

It's as instructive and funny about the period as Mad Man. Automats, all women boarding accommodation.... It almost seems more alien than 1920s Atlantic City.

And, it's funny. Cast members obviously aren't afraid to adlib and the banter between Carter and Jarvis fizzes like a unlikely cocktail of Fleming and PG Wodehouse. Atwell is obviously adding her own Britishisms, calling out Tony Stark's father as a 'wanker' at one point and breaking the seriousness with classic old school profanity like "Crikey Oh Riley!"
- the next.

The combat is about the best on tv. Actually its about level with The Americans to be fair, which I really should have covered on this blog before now. (Actually I'd probably also be watching that future classic series as fast as I can get hold of it if it wasn't so generally ignored and low profile that I'd not idea it had re-started. I promise to cover it when I get to season 3. Is The Americans the most ignored quality small screen drama ever?)

Here is ..Peggy and Jarvis dealing out bruises in refreshingly period fashion. You feel Bogart would have loved this, music is the very period Peggy Lee - "It's a Good Day"

Post by Agent Carter.

In what might be Agent Carter's final episode next week she will finally get to face the Black Widow of this era, "Dottie" (chilling performances from Bridget Regan) who has been skillfully built up as a scary superKGB psychopath, trained and indoctrinated from childhood. Dottie is  a character easily recognisable from  the doomed KGB recruits in The Americans in that she's been brutalised since infancy and sleeps handcuffed to her own bed, and easily recognisable as a Marvel character in that she can parkour down the levels of in an open stairwell like Daredevil.

Up against that Peggy's main superpower seems to be that she's ex S.A.S., and is an adorably feminine  total badass. I can't wait.

Aside from the pulp period thrills there is something deeply satisfying about the world buiding here if you are into this level of nerd-dom. History of the Marvel universe is being filled in from Agent Carter, slowly colouring in the background with the care of a landscape painter. Nothing so far looks out of place.
Serial incompetence at Strategic Scientific Reserve obviously leads to formation of S.H.I.E.L.D., less concerned with HYDRA now a new soviet threat, Leviathan, is making its presence felt. Leviathan's girl assassin program obviously leads to Scarlet Johonsenns Black Widow of 2012. If the path of Natasha Romanov from KGB to S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't follow a similar path to Elizabeth (Keri Russell) in The Americans I'll be amazed.

Peggy Carter will after this be seen in May in her 1960s incarnation recruiting Michael Douglas as Ant-Man, probably not long before Stark senior and his wife discover the truth about S.H.I.E.L.D and are assassinated  in an apparent car accident.

Hayley Atwell looks like has a career for life now, she can appear in flashbacks for various others characters for years and she can return to playing Carter in different eras as she matures herself. I would say though that if they want to cover Peggy Carter in 1940, busting out super soldier scientist Erskine from a Bavarian Castle under the rapidly mutating noses of HYDRA
(as depicted in the tie in comic CAPTAIN AMERICA : FIRST VENGEANCE)

and they want to use Hayley Atwell  - don't keep us waiting.

Marvel's WHERE EAGLES DARE starring Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving and Stanley Tucci ?
Please god give me this now.

Don't miss the chance to see Kingsman : The Secret Service with a big audience

“I’m a Catholic whore currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works at the military abortion clinic. 
So hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon madam” 

- Colin Firth kicks off the incredible Westboro baptist church scene in Kingsman, and probably the most unexpected movie martial arts career ever.

Was Tom Clancy Fox News Patient Zero?

This is the 2nd of 3 posts on Tom Clancy, this one giving a more personal perspective. The first post covered Clancy's predictions of military and cyber war confrontation in the South China Sea. The 3rd post will be a review of the new Clancy reboot JACK RYAN.

I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria  eloquently puts the argument that Fox News is a mental illness targeted at senior citizens.

I wonder if that applies to Tom Clancy? A  a typical Reagan conservative turned into a s frothing neo-conservative corporatist? Was Tom Clancy patient zero?

Yes I am a leftie, and yes I ...like reading Tom Clancy books. Or, rather, I did until 2005. This I've recovered from my Glastonbury 2005 diary

I try and escape into a book but Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon is the most racist piece of crap I’ve ever read and I’ve sworn not only that this will be the last Clancy but I’ll actually burn it so it won’t be passed onto anyone else.

Frankly I am not proud of burning any book ("National Socialist!") and my reaction to Bear and the Dragon was probably amplified by the state I get into at music festivals. It probably says a lot about me that I was reading a bloody Tom Clancy book at Glastonbury (what's the phrase? "always swimming against the tide"?)

Well, as evidenced by my review of Threat Vector it wasn't the last Tom Clancy I'd read - and as the author passed on recently I thought I'd add some personal appreciation here.

My history with Clancy
In the mid-80s a secret college secret fraternity, The Fast Jets and Napalm Society (the less repellent face of college conservatism believe it or not) were chief promoters of Clancy's books at my college. I ignored them until my interest was piqued as we streamed out of the movie for Hunt For Red October and they said
"Oh - that was just edited highlights from the book"

After that I started on Clear and Present Danger and, hooked by Clancy's skill as storyteller, I worked quickly backwards and forwards from his books from there. Clancy was a genius at pacing and writes a thrilling action scene full of believable detail, but I was also surprised, early on, at the nuances in the politics. Clear and Present Danger has almost a civil war break out in the Pentagon, with the FBI seeking to prevent the CIA conducting an "off the books" assassination program in South America.

In Patriot Games Clancy seemed to have a pretty even handed and informed view (for an American) view of Northern Irish politics. In Sum of All Fears Clancy suggests solving the problem of Jerusalem and Palestine is to take it away from Israeli control and have it run as a religious city state like the Vatican. (Something I see John Kerry seems to be considering right now - another example of Clancy being ahead of the curve)

Jack Ryan, Clancy's hero, as we first see him, also seems to be a more even handed, more cerebral version of Bond. He begins as a CIA analyst, not a field agent, and is often reluctantly drawn into situations he is not comfortable with on a danger or morality level.

The intrigue in Clear and Present Danger, as the FBI try and uncover a plot while the CIA is killing US soliders to cover it up is brilliantly gripping conspiratorial drama. Nuclear hotline scenes at the end of Sum of All Fears, as Ryan intrudes on the hotline between US President and Russian Premier to prevent a misunderstanding leading to a full nuclear exchange, are some of the most thrilling and tense scenes I've ever read in a novel.

Quickly the books fit you like a driving glove and become very comforting and addictive reading. I remember reading Red Storm Rising while a Brazil v England World Cup quarter-final* was on in the background! I'd avoided WW3 fantasies while The Day After seemed more likely, but after the fall of the Soviet Union Clancy's epic description of the Cold War going hot suddenly became one of the most gripping alternate history novels ever written. I admit I was using it to avoid England's inevitable collapse (thanks David Seaman) but I honestly can't think of more trouble I've had putting a book down.

Unlike Fleming's Bond Clancy has his character Ryan follow the career path of George Bush Snr and climb the ladder of success to eventually reach the presidency of the United States. At this point his books become quite interesting alt history fiction bordering on fantasy. Depressingly from Rainbow Six, his 1998 novel, onwards  Clancy's politics start to intrude more and more.

Debt of Honour (1994)  has the US involved in a surprisingly believable war with Japan which ends with the (now famous) climax of a 747 crashed onto the Pentagon. As the senior member of US government still surviving Ryan is forced to become President and from that point, Executive Orders (1998) we are firmly in an alternate universe refereed to by by fans as the 'Ryanverse'. By now we have swapped the technical detail for gripping alternate history but in the midst of great deal of wonderful White House plotting we are increasingly assailed by the odor  of Clancy's politicised agenda.

Some person with better political and journalistic skills should compare the great fantasy Presidents of our era, President Jed Bartlet from The West Wing, and President Jack Ryan from Clancy's books. I suspect the chasm between their policies would be breathtaking and quite revealing of US political debate.

Clancy obviously began as a supporter of Reagan era 'trickle down' or supply side economics (that which have blown deficits through the roof and brought the Western societies all the benefits of the late 19thC), but alternative 1998's President Ryan goes farther than any real US Republican ever has and introduces a flat tax rate, literally enshrining in law that the super rich pay the same rate as the poor. In our reality the likes of Mitt Romney can achieve this using tax dodges but a flat tax has never been put before US voters for good reason. Contrary to most opinion the US electorate are are not fools and would vote it out. Even Clancy realises a flat tax pushing reality and eventually it is repealed  by President Ryan's Democratic arch enemy Ed Kealty.

Ed Kealty is a bitter caricature of then real world President Bill Clinton. This version of the President who balanced the US budget after Reagan's deficit would be quite surprising, perhaps shocking to foreigners. But would be very familiar to anyone watching the new cable news phenomena at the time.
Roger Ailes launched Fox News on October 7th, 1996.

Eventually the Ryanverse would (apparently) be jolted back into line with our own by 9/11, which also happens in the Ryanverse, but before we get there we have his Siberian war fantasy The Bear and The Dragon, which is firmly in Cheney neo-con territory. Having ingested a gallon of Ayn Randian politics over the course of Executive Action I really finished with Clancy here. He begins the book with drawing parallels between China's one child policy, abortion, contraception and genocide and the holocaust - and no amount of Glastonbury scrumpy could make that digestible.

Did Clancy's politics really evolve?
Seen with more perspective it might be possible to see Ryan's books as a mirror of the Bush-Clinton era's with Ryan as Bush Snr and Jack Jnr, who inherits the 'action' role from his father from with a boneheaded confidence very reminiscent of Bush Jnr.

When I recently restarted Clancy with his penultimate novel Threat Vector, I found it another thrilling read (covered here) but full of telling detail revealing Clancy's increasingly anachronistic views

One of the first indicators in his penultimate novel that we are firmly in the newly Foxverse world of the Ryans when it transpires Jack Ryan Jnr's girlfriend has been compromised by a foreign intelligence agency. What mighty foreign force could have a CIA analyst working in their pay? This is revealed as the mighty Palestinian Authority.. Which is funny until you recall the frequent and serious history of Israeli spying on the United States, which has to my knowledge never cropped up in Clancy's books, which purport to be realistic on the subject of international espionage.

Later Chinese hackers are found to be using a server on US territory in Florida. Why? Apparently international cyber terrorists (or "Bad Guys") prefer to use server space in the United States because of less government "red tape". Indifferent to the irony alarm Clancy then has his heroes travel to Florida, waxing lyrical about the joys of travelling in a private jet. Travelling in a private jet and enjoying it is in itself is no bad thing, but recalls Lee Child's character Jack Reacher, who has in more austere times replaced Jack Ryan as cult literary action hero of choice. (Reacher is a penniless wanderer far more suited to Greyhound bus travel than private jets)

Perhaps the biggest indicator of Clancy's loss of perspective are the heroes of his later books, The Campus, a private spy agency. The Campus is so right wing and so lacking in irony that if adapted for screen they would look like a Christopher Nolan re-boot of Team America World Police - with the strings controlling the characters only visible to those with an awareness of modern political reality.

From the Clancy wiki

The Campus is an "off the books" intelligence organization and private military company established by President Jack Ryan, Sr .. Backed with one hundred blank presidential pardons, The Campus operates outside of any federal jurisdiction as it is not a formal member of the United States intelligence community.  ....The Campus is situated between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).  This enables The Campus to remain in the loop about intelligence briefings without the cumbersome organizational bureaucracy or political red tape.  The Campus operates under the cover of Hendley Associates, a financial trading institution.  Utilizing the intelligence brieifings from the CIA and NSA, Hendley Associates is able to see currency or market flunctuations ahead of most financial institutions and is able to utilize this information on the financial market.  The profits generated from trading on financial institutions are utilized by Hendley Associates to fund the operations of The Campus.  

After decades of Fox News Clancy's hero has become the villain from one of his own earlier books (Clear and Present Danger).

Jack Ryan Jnr fairly loathsome, with non of the bumbling vulnerability that Snr showed in the beginning of his career an an intelligence analyst in Hunt For Red October. Jnr also works as an analyst - but for the financial industry, surely a sign of the times and perhaps final grim proof of Clancy's talent for prediction. I'm hoping the fact that that Jnr is investigating financial crime in the last book, Command Authority, is a sign Clancy finally woke up to the real threat to his country and the world. As Fox News continues to be a real and present danger to the mental health of those watching it I'm not hopeful.

Pic at the top is apparently the Danish Air Force enjoying themselves (and who can blame them)

* thank you loyal reader

Tom Clancy's South China Sea and Cyberwar predictions summarised

It would be no exaggeration to say Tom Clancy, who died last year, was the Ian Fleming of the 1980s. He also had a famous knack for prediction, making his recent novel on South China Sea confrontations and Cyberwar something of a must read at the moment. It coincides with the release of another attempt to re-boot his main character, Jack Ryan, as a movie franchise.



This is the first of three blogposts on Tom Clancy. This first post summarises the events of Clancy's novel Threat Vector, which covers a confrontation between the US and Allies and China in the South China Sea. Currently a very topical subject. The second post will cover my own personal history with Clancy's books, how I've mostly enjoyed them despite seeing his politics follow the path of right wing US opinion, evolving from Reagan Republican to far right neo-con lunacy. The third post will be a review of JACK RYAN, the latest movie adaptation of a Clancy book - or at least that is what it appears to be.

"Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Japan and China should avoid repeating the past mistakes of Britain and Germany, which fought in World War One despite strong economic ties, according to his main government spokesman in Tokyo."

We should all be worried about current events in the South China Sea. This territorial dispute between China, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea seems to be driven by the Chinese military and a far right government in Japan which has the full backing of the United States. We have to hope diplomatic efforts in 2014 are more effective than 1914.
For Chinese and Japanese readers, in 1914 my country had completed a century as undisputed world super power, just four years and 1 million dead later it was a bankrupt client state of the United States.

One sense that this is 1914 all over again comes from the general acceptance that some confrontation will be inevitable. This is a satirical Onion headline from 2001 just after the China-US air collision of 2001.

First Chapter In History Of Sino-American War Of 2011 Already Written

based on recent events, this could be only a few years out. At the same time the reports and evidence of Chinese cyber attacks have increased, demonstrating their capability to disrupt and penetrate Western information networks almost at will.

Aside from being excellent with technical detail Tom Clancy had a talent for prediction, he famously depicted a terrorist crash a 747 onto the Whitehouse in his book Debt of Honour in 1994, predating the 9/11 attacks by six years.

According to Colin Powell
"Tom’s books were incredibly accurate. He didn’t invent impossible schemes. He invented things that could happen. Some things that have actually happened over years bore some resemblance to scenarios that he put  together. Tom could sense things and see things in a way that others couldn’t. Even though he wasn’t writing nonfiction, some of the things he wrote became reality."

Here are some more Clancy predictions.

Tom Clancy's Threat Vector, co-written with Mark Greaney, was published in 2012 and covers the events in the South China Sea we seem to be able to see developing right now. Much as I enjoy the pace and detail of Clancy's work, the politics and most of the characterisation I find pretty nauseating (I will go into this in detail in the next blogpost). This isn't so much a review of Threat Vector as a summary of Clancy's view of how he thinks the South China Sea situation could develop, written for those who would laugh out loud and give up at the first exposure to some of the John Wayne dialogue.

The events of Threat Vector :

• Chinese land troops on disputed islands in the South China Sea
• US backs its allies and moves carrier groups into the area
• As a warning Chinese hack US military satellite uplinks and have start hijacking all the US military drones. A hijacked drone destroy a US base in Afghanistan - to cause confusion the Chinese make sure all this is traceable to Iran. This is intended to distract the Americans from South China Sea events and is conducted not by the Chinese military directly but by a group of military trained hackers hidden by Triads. In Hong Kong (?)
• US special forces (along with Clancy characters acting as President Ryan's private spy agency, The Campus) try a rather desperate grab for Chinese hacker assets in Hong Kong and it is nearly a fiasco.
• Chinese declare an exclusion zone over South China Sea and there is a dogfight over the straights between PRC and Nationalist Chinese and US pilots.
• Effects of Chinese action in SCS go beyond US involvement as the Indians are formally warned to keep their ships out of trading with Vietnam. Indians ignore this and Chinese attack the Indian aircraft carrier with anti-ship missiles.
• Americans take their Carrier groups out of range of mainland Chinese missiles (but not their ballistic Carrier Killer, which is mentioned but never used)
• US navy threatens to blockade oil through straights of Mallaca which instigates full on Chinese cyber war, severely comprising worldwide communications, transport and the safety of assets such as nuclear power stations.
• With US and China on the verge of full scale war US president orders American pilots secretly fly alongside Nationalist China forces in Taiwan.
• Having been relocated from Hong Kong, the Chinese cyber warriors are now all (?) headquartered in the Chinese Telecom building of a city near the coast (?). This is destroyed in an air raid by Taiwanese planes flown by American pilots.
• In the background a group of semi-independent Chinese special forces which will be disavowed by the Chinese are defeated by The Campus, a similarly independent group of (corporate) special forces, who stage the death of a militant Chinese general by blaming it on the Chinese death squad.

We all live happily ever after.

Personal Observations 
With more knowing immorality this would be a great book. (Covered in next blog).

Few write an action scene as well as Clancy and the air raid is as close as Clancy ever go to writing the end of Star Wars.

The future of warfare is would seem to be low level covert special forces raids to attack cyber warfare centres. Cyberwar makes conventional (kinetic) military action against semi-private (and probably dispersed) very difficult. Direct military action would probably be limited to special forces, and all of this probably very mobile and probably most of it very non-official. Perhaps the most believable events in Threat Vector are semi-private (perhaps corporate) organisations doing the work of secret services which today are not not so secret.  Conflict between them is low level and could almost be mistaken for conflicts between crime gangs.

Clancy's non-official secret service is The Campus, which is basically Team America World Police - but even more offensive and ridiculous, as The Campus and literally paid directly by the finance industry (without inconvenience of it travelling through the political process, ironically one of the themes of his best early book, Clear and Present Danger).

I'm no more convinced that a team of elite Chinese assassins could operate in the US against IT centers than I am that a similar team of Americans (including the Presidents son!) can operate in mainland China. By the time you reach this in Threat Vector your sense of disbelief may be yearning to watch Thor 2 again.

When Jack Ryan Jnr, President Ryan's son (in a face mask) rescues a downed pilot from a Chinese mob in Rambo style after the bombing of the Chinese telecoms building - in China - he thanks the American pilot with words to the effect of
Those 8 ton of bombs you just used to flatten the China Telecom building may have just stopped a war!
which gave me my biggest laugh of January 2013. If the Chinese find some way to attack the Americans with irony they may be in trouble.

The destruction of this building somehow magically stops all the serious cyber attacks in a way that seems to work entirely without reference to how trojans actually operate. This is as much a cheat as it is fanciful, reminding me of those lame vampire movies where everyone returns to normal when the lead vampire is staked.

The effects of cyber warfare are seen entirely from the office of the President and amount to problems with infrastructure and connectivity. This is all disappointingly thin stuff from Clancy and probably obsolete 15 years ago. The recent worry that all IT hardware sourced from China contains built in back door access is ignored, perhaps because it leads to awkward questions about the relative importance Clancy's Republican "job creator" friends give to American national security compared to the god of the global market place.

This is the first the first time in a Clancy book we see limits to US Imperial power and if you've been reading him a while it is quite poignant, even if Clancy himself completely misses the chance to draw attention to this. The Chinese cannot be overwhelmed by superior technology and Clancy obviously has a healthy respect at least for their technical achievements.

The villian in Threat Vector,  Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, the head of China's cyberespionage and cyberwarfare militia, is a mixture of Dr No and Fu Manchu, revealing in every way Clancy's problem with the Chinese
"What should I do when I get to this address?"
"KILL EVERY LIVING THING"
I should note I recently gave up on Flemings DR NO after a reading a pretty shocking description of the uses of mixed race Chinese and Caribbeans so don't think I'm finding problem with Clancy alone. (Ian Fleming born : 1908, Tom Clancy born :1947)

The last real person I heard using the phrase 'Chi-coms' was Douglas MacArthur.

The Indian navy is directly attacked by the Chinese and - at odds with everything I know about Indians and Pakistanis - they take this lying down and then recede into the background to let the Americans take over the response. Interestingly the Indian's are still using the ex-Royal Navy Hermes (as Viraat) which, as I speculated in my carrier post, has outlived an entire class of Royal Navy replacement carriers which cost the British taxpayer in the region of £5-6 billion (Invincible Class)

In the ages it took to post this I was able to consider my own countries role in this. In that previous carriers post I speculated that the enormous Royal Navy super carriers being built now would have little real world use within flight range of Europe and would be dangerously exposed elsewhere without American cover. Maybe their long term use is not intended for home waters around the UK. I hope not.

Lastly I should say and Mark Greaney does a seamless job with (presumably) ghost writing Clancy's work and this could easily pass as a solo Clancy book in my eyes. If anything it seems toned down from the later silly excesses of Executive Orders and the Bear and the Dragon. I listened to Threat Vector as an unabridged audio book (see Ipods for Sleep) voiced by much maligned actor Lou Diamond Philips, who does a magnificent job keeping the cheese level down to a fresh Cheshire rather than decade old Camembert.
If only we could have Brian Blessed voice Clancy's Executive Orders we could have a comedy classic on our hands.

Agent Zig Zag, Skyfall, Argo, Flashman

Skyfall looks to be up for multiple Oscar's tomorrow night. My main problem with Skyfall .. i have to admit... is class, based on my own inverted snobbery

As introduced in that classic scene on the train in Casino Royale where Vesper reduces him, this new Daniel Craig Bond hasn't ridden up from a public school through the old boys club to the secret service, he has come up as a squaddie through the SAS. Daniel Craig's Bond is not the gentleman spy, but the ex-army (probably navy, probably ex-SBS actually) 'blunt instrument'.

Much as I love the earlier Bonds I could actually relate to Craig's Craig's version.

So finding out in Skyfall that, in this modern continuity, his parents really did die in a mountaineering accident, and he really did grow up in a Scottish castle, a bit disappointing. I know this is the way Fleming wrote it, but there is plenty about Fleming's Bond that is not to like.. and if you have read  Fleming's Britain of the 1950s, you'll know it is a world away from Britain of 2013. (I wrote something last year that tried to reflect the shock of the Fleming's 1950s if you are interested)

Not to totally disregard Skyfall, the opening titles,Macau scenes and the villain are truly magnificent BTW. But it easier to believe that a well bred James Bond is needed to socialise and seduce the power brokers of the world?

Well, as we continually find out, things happen in the real life world of  intelligence that just would seem ridiculous in a fiction. The events of Argo are competing with Skyfall for Oscars this year, and that story of hostages smuggled from Iran beneath the cover story of a star wars rip off movie treads a fine line of believability brilliantly.

The part time bass player with the punk band The Members ("Sound of the Suburbs"), who I sit across from at work these days at Deluxe MediaCloud, passed this incredible link from the NYT last week. Gérard de Villiers, the French equivalent of Ian Fleming ,has been writing racy spy novels for so long that he is a fully accepted member of their intelligence community and his plots reveal far more about recent history than the official version of events. So much so I'm hardly surprised that his novels are not on sale here.

But the real prompt for this post about spies and their believability was a Christmas present, Agent Zig Zag by Ben Macintyire. Yet another World War 2 history book, adapted as Radio 4 book of the week .. yawn.. but really this is different.  It is almost Blackadder Goes 1940s.

Imagine the womanising spiv character from Dad's Army finds himself in jail in Jersey when the Germans invade. Not being too well disposed towards his home country he volunteers for work as a spy for the Germans and lets all his considerable skills as a lying charmer go to work on them. He is inserted back into Britain to bomb the De Haviland Mosquito factory in Hatfield (now my alma mater BTW) but immediately gives himself up to MI5. By the end of the war he is perhaps the most successful double agent in history

Zigzag, real name Eddie Chapman, is very much a Roger Moore (louche adventure playboy) era Bond but lovingly lower class right from the off, and though though I'm sure the Zig Zag movie (see below) will make him Lord Peter Flint he begins as just a very upwardly mobile and resourceful Eas tEnd villain and pretty much remains so, in increasingly comical fashion, right to the end.

One insane piece of detail from the story, aside from the incompetence of the German spy agencies (so much so the allies wonder at one point if Chapman is a triple agent) one of Chapman's German Secret service rivals, a committed Nazi, is obsessed with Morris dancing and - after quitting the Abwher to join the fight on the Eastern from - is instead forced to become the Wehrmacht's chief dance instructor.

One very strange theme in this true story about WW2 is about Anglo-German friendship. Despite his constant rogue-ishness and his betrayal of everyone around him Chapman remains friends with nearly everyone, including his best friend, Stephan von Groning,  his handler at the German Abwher! Ben Mcintyre's masterful and touching summing up of the later careers of all the crazy characters in this story is worth reading the entire book for. Chapman's ability with women is truly staggering. One less than grateful female source rang Mcintyre after the first edition of the book to declare "He was an absolute shit you know, the handsomest man I ever met. But a prize shit" before hanging up without giving a name.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Chapman  is the constant connections to the Fleming's Bond series and the subsequent films. One of the gang of socialites Chapman finds himself carousing with in Soho is Terence Young, future director of Dr No and From Russia With Love. Later cast members remark on Sean Connery that his Bond is "simply doing a Terence Young impression". When at MI5 Chapman likely met the man on whom Quatermaster is based and, when working on a plan to deceive Kriegsmarine with a fictional U-boat detector Chapman almost certainly met Ian Fleming himself, then working for Naval Intelligence.

so the Zig Zag movie?

Getting the tone of the Zig Zag story will be awkward as it could be

 either be a 1940s Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy,

Or Catch Me If You Can, type crime caper

Or Mel Brooksian farce a la To Be Or Not To Be

It could be Terence Fisher era Bond film

It could be Lewis Gilbert era Bond film

It wouldn't even look out of place in Tarrantinos re-written history movies alongside Inglorious Basterds..( if it wasn't real)

The only person I can think to play Eddie Chapman would be Micheal Fassbinder, based on his star turns on period characters in Inglorious Basterds and Xmen : First Class. But Mr Fassbender is busy enough with many other projects, including apparently at crack at George McDonald Frasier's classic Flashman books, which immediately prompts another thought.. anyone.. anyone honestly who thinks the endlessly rogering, history meddling character of Sir Harry Flashman is a little bit unlikely really needs to read Agent Zig zag, because that unlikely life of 

Harry Flashman 1822-1915 

was aparently lived for real by 

Eddie Chapman 1914-1997

Don't delay gratification - William Gibson's Zero History

I've just finished Zero History, the final novel in William Gibson's espionage marketing trilogy. 

I delayed finishing to savour Zero History and I regret it. I should have powered on through, forgotten about the rest of my life and stayed in-mode, with my prose perception tuned to William Gibson's dissonant portrayal of reality and characters. As it was, I got distracted. Lost my edge.
The tight surreal descriptions of surroundings that make for such great poetry-punk in describing Gibson's contemporary 21st century really get frustrating when describing action scenes. When Zero History briefly turns into cyber-SNATCH at the end the need to read every paragraph twice stops being clever and quickly gets irritating.

The re-introduction of great characters from Pattern Recognition is a let down and although the characters from the near impenetrable Spooky Country are much better shown here they are continually undercut by a new boyfriend or new henchman appearing from nowhere to save the day.

As with the other Hubertus Bigend novels, Gibson's need to keep introducing minor characters is a real irritation, especially at the expense of great characters you would rather hear a lot more of. The Molly Millions of Zero History is Heidi Hyde, the drummer for Hollis Henry's defunct band, Curfew, who is consistently funny throughout and makes you wish the novel had been less about fashion espionage and more about eccentric ex-rock band members adjusting to life in normal society.

The more the arcane characters of Blue Ant (the accidental SPECTRE of ad agencies) and Curfew recede into the background and the more convenient romantic foils feature (I did not believe in Gareth or Fiona for a second) the less interesting Zero History became. The director or Blue Ant lets his daughter have a career as a dispatch rider in London? I'm not sure I would have believed in something like that in Neuromancer let alone the supposed reality of contemporary London.

Still, aside from the characters and the action which are problems common to the rest of the Bigend trilogy, Zero History has moments of real dazzling imagination and poetry. Reading most of Zero History was a real pleasure. More and more with Gibson the actual plot and characters are receding into the background behind the poetry of mundane detail. Less and less influenced by Philip K Dick and Ridley Scott, he's becoming more like Brett Easton Ellis and Ballard. 
Cabinet, is virtually a character in itself

I particularly like this, which fits easily with my experience of life:
Milgrim, speaks of Bigend's personal philosophy

He believed that stasis is the real enemy.. Stability is the beginning of the end.. we only walk by continuing to fall forward

It also gives us a fresh look at London from a foriegn perspective. WG is obviously obsessed with the retro-fit in London and Paris, and has never hesitated to tell us the the nationality of every person we meet - still influenced by the multinational Los Angeles bequeathed by Ridely Scott and Sid Meade in Blade Runner.
Gibson created another world out of that, The Sprawl, and the similarly other worldly and deliberately obtuse nature of his prose is hard but rewarding work to adjust to. It is just possible that had I not deplayed my pleasure to savour the book and stayed in mental WG mode to read straight through to the end I might have enjoyed a lot more.

In one chapter he makes more of an Ekranoplan than Sebastain Faulkes does throughout the entire of Devil May Care, which now I think about it was the last thing I finished. Maybe I should stick to Ekranoplan related fiction.
So, despite delay, I was feeling pretty good about actually finishing a book in pretty good time. 400 pages in two weeks. 

Then I hear, back in Parracombe, Peter Goode has finished the new Neil Stephenson ('his 'pattern recognition'), REAMDE, 1040 pages, in two days. "Very good, bit too much gun touting for my personal taste, but very readable, great characters I think and fun plotlines."
MF

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• Portions of this blogpost previously appeared in a drunken rant 24/3/12
• The automating line spacing and formatting in Blogger continue to be a mystery to me. If I formatted documents like this as part of my job I would be taken out and shot.