A[nother] Prime Month

I was on Amazon placing an order for some coffee beans when I was offered another month free of Amazon Prime. “Sure” I thought, as I clicked; it had been a while (almost a year in fact) since my previous “Trial” [Link 1][Link 2][Link 3].

The first thing I looked into was The Grand Tour as “Lochdown” was prominently displayed in my list, but this just lead me to the latest episode of Grand Tour which I’d already seen… which I’m sure is just like Three Men in a Boat, but with more pratting about, and three boats. [I’ve figured this out now; Lochdown and others are there for me to watch.]

Next up was my chance to catch up with The Expanse. However, before I did that, I decided to catch up with where I had already got up to by re-watching the last episode of Season 4; Episode 10, Cibola Burn.

There turned out to be a couple of things I hadn’t picked up on the first time around.

Firstly, there is a scene where Holden and Naomi are in the Rocinate’s canteen (I assume… I can get in a muddle remembering/figuring out where people are – perhaps they were travelling at speed*) drinking coffee. Coffee drinking scenes have been known to irritate me, namely because I can’t help but watch closely to the acting to see/hear if they are really drinking anything. You might be surprised how often (in any number of shows) how often the actors will use empty cups; you can tell by how they handle the (obviously) empty cups, sip something that surely should be too hot if it’s truly freshly made as portrayed, and do a fake swallow. Why can’t they at least have water in the cup?? In this scene in The Expanse we not only have the added sound of an empty cup being put down when we’d seen the beverage be made, but prior to that, when Naomi made it and put the lid on the cup (as they have to in space with no/low gravity) she didn’t act it out quite right and was placing the lid on the cup as she was turning and moving away from the machine. #fail

*Scott Manley, a fellow fan of The Expanse series, does a good job of explaining artificial gravity in this video.

Secondly, due to the fact that I had recently watched Total Recall (the original one from 1990 starring Schwarzenegger), now watching the explosion scene on Mars in The Expanse where a bomb goes off in the base, shattering all of the glass and sucking all of the air out, made me see that as a total complete rip-off of the similar scene in Total Recall which was also on Mars. Even Decker in space at the end, I consider, could be seen as a modern, yet less silly, take on the eye-popping effect used in Total Recall (which used the best of CGI in the late 1980s).

I have, also, finally ordered the fourth Expanse book to accompany the series thus far, aptly titled Cibola Burn. I meant to have read it following my previous viewing of this episode, but perhaps I had elected to wait for the price to drop a little (it’s still around £7.50).

Now, what else to watch?

I see The Tomorrow War in my list and I mistakenly thought it starred Tom Cruise, and seeing it was about time travel, mistakenly thought it was a sequel to The Edge of Tomorrow.

But no, that’s Chris Pratt and it also stars her from Chuck (Yvonne Strahovski). It features time travel and I quite like things of that nature.

Johnny Mneumonic is there, “set in the year 2021…” starring Keanu Reeves (not that I like The Matrix, Speed, Bill and Ted, The Exorcist… at all… #sarcasm) that should be a hoot, a techy film from the 1990s… lets see how things should have been.

Here is Keanu in a seen from this film… the desk reminds me of ‘Neo’s’ apartment in The Matrix.

Boss Level… “Trapped in a time loop that constantly repeats the day of his death…” how original… I might have to watch this just to see how original it is… Speaking of Loops, Tales from the Loop is still on the first season.

The Crossing… “Refugees from a war-torn country 250 years in the future start showing up to seek asylum in an American town” reminds me of The 4400 who were 4,400 people who were presumed dead or missing over the past 50 years who turn up looking exactly the same as the moment they disappeared, but some of the returnees now have special powers.

Jupiter Ascending is there, I could watch that again.

Treadstone is from the world of Jason Bourne and I watched those films last time, so this series might be worth a watch. I’m reminded that there are a million Bourne books I could read if I really wanted to get more into the Bourne stuff, but you know, my reading pile has limited capacity.

OMG, Baywatch Remastered… I could watch this and finally figure out if there is actually a storyline each episode (honestly I can vaguely remember bits of them from watching them back in the day) [rather than just Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson running on the beach pretending to rescue people…].

Falling Water might be interesting… “[It] is the story of three unrelated people who slowly realize that they are dreaming separate parts of a single common dream. The deeper they dig, the more they come to realize that the visions [in the dreams might just] hold the key to the fate of the world.” I like dream stuff. There are two seasons to watch too.

Here are a few more to end my list of “what I might watch”:

Alien Code
Out of Time
InnSaei: The Power in Intuition
Breakpoint: a Counter History of Progress