“Mandate of Heaven” is now an audiobook, and it’s FREE!

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

Whether you’ve already read the adventures of treasure hunter Ethan Chase or if you’re new to this series, the good people over at Chirp books have a fantastic audiobook deal for you!

Mandate of Heaven, the first Ethan Chase adventure, can now be downloaded from Chirp books for precisely zero dollars and zero cents. Just click here to see this freebie for yourself!

What’s more, if you download this first audiobook, you can get the rest of the series, Solomon’s Fortune and Gold of the Jaguar, for only 99¢ apiece now through Monday!

That’s three audiobooks for just $1.98, less than the cost of the delicious Double Stacked Taco from Taco Bell that I am enjoying at this very moment (no, this post is not sponsored by Taco Bell but if a corporate representative from Taco Bell is reading this and wants to hook up a partnership, my email inbox is always open).

So if you, your sister, your best friend, college history professor, favorite nephew, congressman, or even your mailman are hankering for a good ol’ fashioned, Indiana Jones-esque adventure story, go to Chirp books now or share the link and join Ethan Chase on a globetrotting journey for a legendary treasure!

Film Review: War of the Rohirrim

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

After a long wait, I finally got around to seeing the latest media entry into J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-Earth this Christmas season, the animated film ‘War of the Rohirrim’. My short, spoiler-free review is that the film was adequate. I kept my expectations low as the release date approached, having learned my lesson from Amazon’s ‘Rings of Power’, and that ended up being the correct choice.

The film is fine. No better and no worse than that. Now, on to the full review!

Spoilers ahead

The film is your typical high-fantasy fare: plenty of swordplay, orcs and other monsters make appearances, and a bit of magic. Hera, daughter of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, is propositioned by her father’s rival, a warlord who seeks the throne, to marry his son. Insults are exchanged, the rival is accidentally killed by the king in a fistfight, and the man’s son, Wulf, vows vengeance.

(By the way, I will note that agreeing to a fistfight with a man who is literally called Hammerhand was probably not this villain’s wisest decision)

You can probably guess the rest of the plot. Some have always seen this level of predictability in Tolkien’s stories and any works derived from his writing as a weakness, but there’s something to be said for the simplicity of it. Not every piece of media we consume needs to be a series of curveballs. Is it nice to be surprised sometimes? Sure, but as we’ve seen with Game of Thrones, eventually you’ve turned convention on its head so many times that the twists become tiresome and expected.

So yeah. War ensues, lives are lost, families are broken, but Hera eventually leads her father’s people to prevail with a little bit of guts, a little ingenuity, and a healthy dose of high-fantasy magic.

What did I like about the movie? For one, the music was excellent. It always set the scene nicely and helped keep me in the story. The voice acting was also terrific. Brian Cox plays Helm Hammerhand the King and stole the show, as far as I’m concerned. As a matter of fact, seeing his name in the casting was what got me excited for this movie in the first place, over a year ago.

Miranda Otto, who played Theoden King’s niece Eowyn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, served as the narrator. I really appreciated that nod to the original trilogy and hearing her familiar voice first was like a warm welcome by an old friend as we returned to Middle-Earth.

Speaking of returns, the opening shot of the film has one of my all-time favorite transitions. It begins with live footage of a flyover of a hilly meadow and a rushing stream, possibly archived from the original trilogy, and as we get closer to ground the picture subtly swaps to the animated version. You almost don’t catch it, and it is beautiful.

Everything else was either fine or a tad disappointing. The animation was inconsistent: at times breathtaking and at others a little sloppy. One fear I had going into the film was that Hera would be your typical ‘Mary Sue’ character, inexplicably fighting off entire hordes of orcs on her own. Mercifully, she only engages in direct combat with enemy soldiers twice, and neither encounter crosses over into the absurd.

Some of the relationships seemed ill-defined, especially between Hera and Wulf, the main antagonist. They give almost no background to these two characters who are supposed to be childhood friends, so the emotional climax of the film doesn’t hit like the director intended.

Finally, I know I said I appreciated the nod to Peter Jackson’s original trilogy by bringing in Miranda Otto to voice the narrator, but there is such a thing as too many nods. Some of the dialogue for Helm Hammerhand was ripped directly from Theoden King in The Two Towers or The Return of the King, with only a word or two changed.

Come on, folks. You’re writing what’s supposed to be an impassioned speech and call to arms just before a battle. Are you really going to take this opportunity to plagiarize yourselves?

Also, Saruman the White is introduced at the end of the film, which was delightful, but moments later Gandalf the Grey is then mentioned. Apparently, he heard of Hera’s telling that she overheard some Mordor orcs discussing their master’s quest for magical rings, and he’s sent a letter requesting that she visit him.

This is wholly out of character for a guy known as the Wandering Wizard. When Gandalf seeks information, he does not send letters requesting that people come to him. He hops on his horse and arrives suddenly to demand an audience. I suspect they chose this route as a way to write Hera out of history. In Tolkien’s writings, she is not even given a name but she was made the main character for this story. How then to make it so that this heroine is not sung of in the annals of Rohan’s great battles? By giving the crown to her cousin, sending Hera off to meet Gandalf in a distant land, where, according to the narrator, she remained wild and free to the end of her days.

There’s more I could discuss but this post has already run long. All in all, as I said above, this film was fine. If you’re a Tolkien fanatic like myself, I highly recommend watching it, but only once. I won’t be adding this to my collection of Blu-rays.

Rings of Power: Season 2 Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

I was a week late but managed to avoid any spoilers online for Rings of Power‘s season finale, which I think is no small feat. However, I almost wish I’d seen a spoiler or two because the finale was deeply disappointing. Overall, this season was much better than the debut season last year, which suffered from poor writing and odd pacing. Then the finale came and it fell right back into those old problems.

(Spoilers ahead)

I’ve mentioned on my Twitter account before that I don’t like how Numenor is portrayed in this show, even as I accept that it’s largely due to the compressed timeline compared to the books. The decay and fall of Numenor took place over many centuries and obviously that won’t work when trying to make a show about all this. I get it, and I accept that.

What I refuse to accept is the infantile portrayal of Numenorians. In the previous episode, the rightful queen, Tar-Miriel, had passed what is essentially an ancient witch trial: jump into the sea and if the sea monster down there doesn’t eat you, then you have the Valar’s favor. The Numenorians in attendance cheer and accept her as their queen.

Fast-forward to this episode and Ar-Pharazon, the usurper of the throne, hands a committee of citizens called The Faithful a letter that says Tar-Miriel is in league with the enemy Sauron and based on this she is to be arrested. We never get to read this letter, all we get is the character saying, “Sauron?” after he glances at it for a second.

Worse yet, nobody questions the letter at all. Not one person wonders if maybe, just maybe, this convenient admission of betrayal was fabricated by a man who stands to lose everything if Tar-Miriel is installed on the throne.

The Numenorians are basically a race of demi-gods. They have seen the Valar, their very island was raised from the depth of the sea as a gift from the Valar for standing with the Elves in their war against Morgoth. But in Rings of Power they are stupid, fickle, cowardly, and worst of all, boring. Almost every scene set in Numenor is a colossal bore.

Which segues nicely into my next problem with the show. As aforementioned, I can deal with compressed timelines because it’s a necessity. But things wouldn’t have to be so compressed if the showrunners didn’t waste so much time on useless characters who add nothing. Isildur is given a short-lived love interest who added nothing to his character development. Both Theo and the elf warrior Arondir lost all use as characters when Theo’s mother, the only thing tying them together, was written off the show after Season 1, yet they receive vast amounts of screen time.

And the writing, which had been so much better, was just atrocious. If you’re going to shoehorn in not one but two names of the story (Rings of Power and Lord of the Rings), don’t put it in the same sentence. It wasn’t a cool moment as intended; it was just awkward. Galadriel also had a really dumb ‘go screw yourself’ line delivered to Sauron near the end of the episode that made no sense in the moment. And in another moment, one of the faithless Numenorians, instead of artfully deceiving Isildur about the state of affair back home, immediately revealed his evil intentions. What could have been a cliff-hanger of sorts was thrown away.

The storyline at Khazad-dum and the struggles the dwarves face is by far the best of the show, and I really have no complaints here. The casting is excellent, the sets and costumes are gorgeous, and the writing is brilliant.

In a climactic scene in the finale, when Durin faces his father the King who has been driven mad by the ring he received from Sauron, Durin tearfully says (I’m paraphrasing), “Remember when I was a wee lad and we would arm wrestle? You would let me push your hand down sometimes and I would think that maybe I had finally grown strong enough to beat you. Then in an instant, you’d flatten my hand back down. And I’d be reminded that no one and nothing was stronger than my father. Be strong for me again, Father. Take off the ring.”

Moments later, as the King prepares to sacrifice himself in combat with the awoken Balrog, he turns to Durin and says, “I never let you push my hand down, my son. Not for a second. You are stronger than you know.”

As both a son and a father myself, that really got to me. I grew up the same way, believing that no one and nothing in the world was stronger than my dad. Even well into my adulthood, when my dad had grown into his sixties and I had surely become the stronger man by then, I wasn’t sure I’d want to get in a fist fight with him. He was Superman to me as a kid, my own Man of Steel, and that image lasted for decades.

Sauron himself has also been a bright spot in the series. Charlie Vickers is brilliant as the corrupted Maiar, known in his deceitfully fair form as Annatar, the gift-giver. Vickers masterfully projects a subtle, malevolent aura, straddling the line between good acting and corny showmanship. It would have been so easy, I think, for a lesser actor to fail in this titanic role and come across as a Snidely Whiplash type of villain, but Vickers has nailed it, stealing every scene he’s in with a wicked gravitas. A sly look here, a carefully worded lie there, convincing others to do his bidding all while they believe it was their own idea, it all gives us just a glimpse of the unfathomable evil that simmers just below his surface.

There’s more I could say but this post has already run long and I wouldn’t ask you to surrender more of your time reading my complaints. I’ll conclude by saying that if there is a Season 3, I’m going to watch it. There was enough good from Season 2 to make me believe that the showrunners have at least a faint idea of what they’re doing. Their biggest crime of this season was, in my opinion, wasting our time with useless characters.

But man, that finale was a massive killjoy. It’ll take a while to rinse that foul taste from my mouth.

Book Review: “Lost in Shangri-La” by Mitchell Zuckoff

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

A coworker of mine who functions as my unofficial, personal librarian lent me a book recently that he thought I’d enjoy. The title? Lost in Shangri-La. Sounded like a fun adventure novel. I soon learned it was not a fictional tale of derring-do but rather a true story of a plane that crashed in an uncharted jungle of New Guinea during World War II.

The events took place in 1945, when the end of the war was in sight and certain areas in the Pacific theater were deemed relatively safe. New Guinea was one such place and it was for that reason that so many women from the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) were stationed here.

New Guinea was and is a beautiful island full of exotic locations that, in the time before the internet, were unimaginable to most Americans. Given the beauty of this far-flung land and the relative safety from enemy ships and planes, some pilots would regularly give tours to the soldiers and civilians stationed there. The tours became especially sought after when one pilot accidentally flew over an uncharted jungle inhabited by thousands of natives. This hidden valley was appropriately dubbed ‘Shangri-La’.

The reason this valley had remained hidden from outside contact for millennia was due to its location. Surrounded by mountains on a vast island surrounded by miles of ocean, there were no paths into the valley whatsoever. Even natives from other parts of the island were unaware of its existence. Planes that had flown far over the island were too high to see any details, and flying low over it was almost unthinkable due to the treacherous mountains and sheer cliff-faces.

I say all that to tell you how a plane could have crashed in such a location. The fact is that it took an exceptionally brave and highly skilled pilot to fly into that valley and get out again safely, even in the best conditions. On this particular flight, none of these things were present. The skilled pilot allowed his untested, ‘newbie’ co-pilot to handle the controls, even when a thick cloud descended over the valley. As a result, the co-pilot did not see a mountain stretching up in front of him until it was too late.

The plane crashed, engulfed in flames. Of the two dozen occupants, only three survived: Corporal Margaret Hastings of the WAC, Lieutenant John McCollum (whose twin brother died in the crash), and Sergeant Kenneth Decker.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the rest of the story, but it’s a fascinating tale of survival in the face of unimaginable grief and adversity. The trio of soldiers had to battle disease, hunger, and the jungle itself as they tried to find a way back to civilization from a jungle that had no maps and no discernable trails. But what scared them the most was the previously uncontacted native population. Would they help the trio of strangers, wounded and lost as they were? Or would the warnings of these people being savage cannibals prove true?

This is a great story not only for history buffs but anyone who marvels at the human spirit and the resilience it shows when we find ourselves in our bleakest moments. I recommend this to any lover of books and especially those lovers of non-fiction.

If you’re like me and this book only makes you hunger more for a fictional adventure through jungles and places lost to time, you can also check out my Ethan Chase treasure hunter series on Amazon! The ebooks are only $4.99 a piece and they come with some fantastic reviews.

Review: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

/ Peter Martuneac / 7 Comments

As usual, I was fashionably late in getting around to watch this Netflix blockbuster, but being a fan of all things Edgar Allen Poe, watching it was inevitable. And even if I wasn’t such a big fan of Poe, the premise might be far too interesting to ignore. It’s a dramatized version of Poe’s story of the same name, while the themes and plots of some of his other most famous works are woven into each episode.

The general plot goes thusly: Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, are the billionaire owners of a corrupt pharmaceutical giant on trial for a drug that has killed millions. Suddenly, Roderick’s children begin to die in mysterious circumstances and he finally invites the man prosecuting him, C. August Dupin, to his abandoned childhood home to ‘confess’ to his crimes.

Overall I enjoyed the series, but it never quite fully hooked me. There were several reasons for that. One, I find it odd that each and every one of Roderick Usher’s children are completely and irredeemably depraved, leading lives of unabashed debauchery and obsessed with their own pleasure. You mean to tell me not one offspring became just a normal, relatively well-adjusted person?

Two, the constant and forced profanity. As I’ve said many times before, I spent four years as a United States Marines. I was in the infantry. So I’m not some overzealous prude clutching pearls at any language that goes beyond ‘gosh’. But my goodness, what purpose does so much profanity serve?

It was even forced into common phrases, which got a huge eyeroll from me. For instance, instead of saying ‘he knows which side his bread’s buttered on’, one character says ‘he knows which side his d**k’s buttered on’.

Really? Did we really need to pepper in adult language in that line? It’s crass and it comes across like a 14-year-old who just recently learned some new swears. It’s juvenile.

Last of all, in the final episode the show suddenly became ham-fisted and preachy. I easily picked up on the themes and the message that the show’s creators wanted to convey throughout the series. At times subtle, at times a little in-your-face, but never sanctimonious until the finale. Madeline, who, by the way, is morally reprehensible in every way and guilty of several atrocities, deigns to sermonize the viewers in an exhausting monologue just before the climax.

Which would have been bad enough except that the show did not seem to want to push back on what she said or underline the sheer hypocrisy of it all. It was as if the show wanted us to nod along and applaud, to suddenly like this character and root for her devious designs.

And how’s this for ham-fisted? At one point the show’s main antagonist, a demon of sorts or perhaps even the very Devil himself, mentions someone else with whom they’d struck a deal and proceeds to clearly identify this ‘mystery person’ by lifting an infamous line from one of his 2016 presidential campaign rallies.

The other character, one we have just learned in this same episode has committed every crime from rape to murder many times over, chimes in with, “Any chance that his bill is coming due soon? Even I have my limits.” Cue an eyeroll so big I gave myself a migraine. No, Netflix writers and producers, I am not going to chuckle along with this mass murderer who thinks he is somehow less damned than anyone else in the world.

Aside from these complaints, and despite how much time I spent on them, I really did enjoy the show, even if it left a sour taste in my mouth. The adaption of so many Poe stories was a triumph. Even the names of all the main characters, they were all names from Poe’s works. It truly was brilliant work.

My highest praise, however, goes to the acting. These actors did such a tremendous job, but I especially want to single out Mark Hamill, who portrayed Arthur Pym, the lawyer and fixer of the Usher family. Even though I just lambasted his character two paragraphs earlier, I would be remiss not to mention how mesmerizing he was as ‘the Pym reaper’. Hamill stole every scene with a gravelly voice and grave, unchanging countenance. Anytime Pym took the stage, I had to sit up straighter and really focus on whatever was about to unfold.

So if you have a Netflix account and are a fan of dark urban fiction, this is a show I strongly recommend as long as you can deal with the excessive profanity and flashes of gore. I may even watch it again in the future, despite my problems with the show.