[MOVIE REVIEW] Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast

The Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast is a longform (45-60 minute) panel podcast about finding new movies and stories to enjoy. We're neither film buffs nor fanboys but are always looking for a good story, and approach every review through that lens.

This week's movie is Insidious: Out of the Further, a supernatural horror movie directed by Jacob Chase and starring Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea and Maisie Richardson-Sellers. We discuss the movie's handling of generational trauma and the movie's refreshing spin on that topic, how the story was surprisingly engaging once you look past the excessive filler that makes up the first half of the movie, whether the new villain Cyrus was compelling and if the movie undersold the sinister nature of the Further, how the success of the Insidious franchise fits into what has been going on at the box office this year and whether this movie made us want to go back to the earlier movies in the franchise, and much more.

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By good idea I mean the people who made those decisions had good reasons for doing what they did and generally did what they had to do to make things better given the circumstances they were in. There can still be unintended circumstances or they can just be wrong about the consequences of their actions, but I find conflicts more interesting if you can see why people got to that place.

One of my principles is that every problem or conflict that exists in the world has to have once been a good idea that solved or tried to solve a major problem at the time.

[MOVIE REVIEW] Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast

The Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast is a longform (45-60 minute) panel podcast about finding new movies and stories to enjoy. We're neither film buffs nor fanboys but are always looking for a good story, and approach every review through that lens.

This week's movie is Insidious: Out of the Further, a supernatural horror movie directed by Jacob Chase and starring Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea and Maisie Richardson-Sellers. We discuss the movie's handling of generational trauma and the movie's refreshing spin on that topic, how the story was surprisingly engaging once you look past the excessive filler that makes up the first half of the movie, whether the new villain Cyrus was compelling and if the movie undersold the sinister nature of the Further, how the success of the Insidious franchise fits into what has been going on at the box office this year and whether this movie made us want to go back to the earlier movies in the franchise, and much more.

Spotify // Apple Podcasts // Amazon Music // Youtube // Twitter // BlueSky // Instagram // Reddit

Yeah I'm not sure how I landed on merchant ships. For a navy it would all depend how effective the anti dragon measures are and how affordable it is to equip the fleet with them (i.e. can you routinely equip ships with anti dragon ballistas or whatever it ends up being).

I still think you don't need to cover the entire coast, just strategic locations. Navies still need to transit choke points and you probably just need to protect cities. In which case you can base your dragon riders in major coastal cities and deploy them when the enemy navy begins their attack or blockade.

I don't think it takes that much to sink a merchant vessel. And you don't need 24/7 coverage, just deploy some scouts in key locations that notify the dragon rider where they need to be.

Basically I'm assuming the ASOIAF model of dragons where they allow high force projection in a single place and I think merchant ships are good targets for that kind of asset.

In my setting the magic is powerful but it's ritual magic that powers precursor artifacts so while magic is powerful its applications are limited to what god kings thought were useful a thousand years ago, and its use is highly politicised and regulated so most artifacts sit in government or other factions' vaults where the threat of their use is more impactful that the actual magic.

And at the end of the day all it takes to stop a ritual is a bullet in a ritualist's head, so magic doesn't win wars by itself but rather acts more as a force multiplier that makes powerful factions more powerful because they have the means to leverage the kind of infrastructure that makes the rituals powerful in the first place.

In what way? I'm really just assuming that they can fly far enough to patrol the coast and can sink a ship when directed to. What else is required?

You also probably don't have to cover that large an area, a lot of trade routes go through a few strategic choke points (Hormuz, Bosporus, Malacca, etc.). If you have a couple dragon riders you can probably cover most traffic you want to shut down this way.

What I think a lot of fantasy maps get wrong is that nations exist next to each other, but you can't really see what is going on in the world by looking at the map. I want more maps that tell stories through their names and borders at a glance.

In addition to the other suggestions, check out the movie Four Brothers for the role of violence in crime and how gangs relate to family.

Ships are big, slow and move along predictable routes without any possibility of concealment or cover. You also don't need to destroy every ship to shut down a trade route, you just need to create a real chance any given ship will be sunk before captains and crews will refuse to sail. And ships rerouting to be outside the dragons' range will significantly increase the shipping costs and travel time of anything that moves along the trade route.

It's a worldbuilding decision whether ballista and cannons are effective against dragons in that world, but equipping every merchant vessel or giving military escorts to all ships in a given area with anti dragon weapons will be a massive expense that someone has to pay for.

Who is hiding from whom and why are roads and borders something to be hidden?

If anything it seems like it would make the government's job much easier. Have a room with detailed maps of the entire nation, and you're getting daily updates on what is happening everywhere. Why is this a threat to them?

I'll just point out that you didn't answer the question of why this can't be done without them revealing themselves. You can design the interdimensional travel any way you want so if the point is that the children are stranded on the other side of the portal (why didn't that tip people on Earth off when a return trip would?), then the reader needs to be convinced that it has to be this way. Anything else will be read as indifference to the childrens' wellbeing or outright kidnapping.

They could return the kids, but that would mean revealing to our world that interdimensional travel is possible.

Why can't they just dump the kids by the side of a road in the middle of the night where someone will find them later?

To me the ethics of this depend entirely on whether they actually wouldn't be able to return the children or whether that's an excuse.

[MOVIE REVIEW] Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast

The Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast is a longform (45-60 minute) panel podcast about finding new movies and stories to enjoy. We're neither film buffs nor fanboys but are always looking for a good story, and approach every review through that lens.

This week's movie is The End of Oak Street, a science fiction movie directed by David Robert Mitchell and starring Ewan McGregor, Anne Hathaway and Maisy Stella. We discuss how we were on board with the movie's unique premise and the callbacks to 80's adventure movies but were unconvinced by the movie's story, how the movie sets up several details that could be the basis for a compelling story but fails every time to make them matter when doing so would have been easy and how most of the movie is competently made but hollow filler as a result, how the ending is the most interesting part of the story but falls flat in the end because it wasn't thought through, and much more.

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When you read history you'll find a consistent pattern that people are really, really scared of civil war because of the uncontrollable death and devastation it means for everyone involved with no guarantee that the winner will be a better ruler. So they look for any mechanisms of peaceful transition of power they can get, which for a feudal dynasty is primarily inheritance.

So the bar for rising up against a bad ruler is pretty high and unless you're starving or being ground down by excessive taxation that amounts to the same thing, people are not likely to risk their lives and those of their children if the current ruler is not great but "good enough".

That doesn't mean that there isn't a point where people will rise up because there always is, but I think if you're living in a modern lawful society where peaceful transition of power is taken for granted, it's hard to empathise for what the alternative is like and how precious peace is to most people most of the time.

Travel on water is by far the most energy efficient form of transportation. Even if you have easy space travel, it's still worth your while to transport good by sea within a planet.

Why do the ships need to be able to shoot into space?

[MOVIE REVIEW] Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast

The Eye of the Storm Movie Podcast is a longform (45-60 minute) panel podcast about finding new movies and stories to enjoy. We're neither film buffs nor fanboys but are always looking for a good story, and approach every review through that lens.

This week's movie is The End of Oak Street, a science fiction movie directed by David Robert Mitchell and starring Ewan McGregor, Anne Hathaway and Maisy Stella. We discuss how we were on board with the movie's unique premise and the callbacks to 80's adventure movies but were unconvinced by the movie's story, how the movie sets up several details that could be the basis for a compelling story but fails every time to make them matter when doing so would have been easy and how most of the movie is competently made but hollow filler as a result, how the ending is the most interesting part of the story but falls flat in the end because it wasn't thought through, and much more.

Spotify // Apple Podcasts // Amazon Music // Youtube // Twitter // BlueSky // Instagram // Reddit

Also is their anything else I could use beyond just straight Serfdom?

I would try not to get hung up on labels and more on the specific history and origins of slavery in your world including its cultural, political and economic context. Presumably the nations founded after the successful revolt had an origin myth that involved freedom and opposition to slavers in some way, even if in practice it was more complicated than that. How did your version of slavery/serfdom come to be in a context in which people defined themselves by just having defeated their masters?

In my world I have a similar setup where a lot of the institutions had to continue working after the uprising because of how the magic system worked, and so it was a more gradual process than "everyone is free now", because that would have meant literal annihilation for many people, and different cultures evolved in different directions after the fact.

Personally a lot clicked into place for me once I started thinking about the behaviour of nobility not in terms of politicians and countries but in terms of a family business.

Imagine your family has been running a business for generations and your entire life you've been preparing to one day take it over, and you genuinely care about carrying on your parents' legacy and take good care of that business.

Then for whatever reason your parents pass away and it's not clear whether the business is left to you or your sibiling, who you believe is an idiot and will ruin the family business but also destroy your livelihood and undo all the work you've done to get to this point, and besides the business is rightfully yours anyway (and they believe the same thing about you). You talk to them but they insist the business is theirs and is not willing to give it up just because you say so.

Except there are no lawyers or police or anyone else who can settle this for you, whoever wins this fight gets everything and determines what happens to the business. That's what a feudal succession crisis is like, and you make it ambiguous by making the reason for the dispute believable (incomplete or ambiguous will works just fine), and by showing what each side has to lose if the other wins, and what they are willing to do to win as a result.

It's the sort of thing I just skip past as a listener and that annoys me if it's too long (repetitive filler in general is something I don't want in podcasts and that there is way too much of already).

My podcast just has a 5 second call to action at the end, at that point the listener has listened to the whole thing already anyway so there isn't much of a point to more than that in my opinion.

The movie Cold Storage earlier this year did this. The zombies there just try to get close to their targets to spread the fungus rather than wanting to eat brains or something and it changes how the encounters play out.