Recently, a new X-Men movie made it to the cinemas. I quite liked the first three X-Men movies. I wasn't very impressed by the prequel-movie Wolverine, which tells the story of one of the characters.

Now there's X-Men first class. Again a prequel, but from a different perspective. Wolverine only has a very short cameo appearance, this time the movie telling the story of many other X-Men characters. Prequels are difficult. They must tell a story that already has some fixed points and a fixed outcome that's already known my most viewers. The new X-Men film suffers exactly from that problems.

The movie does a very brave task - it tries not only to tell a prequel story to the other movies, it also involves a whole bunch of historic events. From the nazi concentration camps to nuclear weapons and the cuba crisis. This sounds like too much for a science fiction movie, but surprisingly it handles this part not so bad. It even motivated me to improve my history knowledge and read something about Argentinia's role in hiding nazis after the second world war (some german information here). It seems the movie is pretty close to real history in that respect.

But there's another problem in this movie. I found the main plot just doesn't fit. And that's due to the fact its a prequel where the outcome is already decided:

(please stop reading here if you haven't seen the movie and still want to see it - spoilers ahead)

The development of the charakter Erik Lensherr alias Magneto. As the victim of some cruel experiments by a mad Nazi scientist, his life is one of anger and revenge. But his opponent - and all viewers of the other X-Men movies already know that - has a role which is exactly what Magneto's role will be later. So in the end, he kills him - and then just replaces him. All allies of his biggest enemy just become allies of him. That just doesn't make sense.

(now you can read again)

All in all, it's still a pretty good movie. If you like such movies, it has its moments. But the in my opinion illogical story destroys a lot.

Final word: We had two X-Men prequels now. But X-Men 3 ended with a perfect cliffhanger. It should be resolved at some point - I'd like to see X-Men 4.

Pioneer One is a science fiction series. What's special about it: It's completely supported by donations and it's distributed via BitTorrent. It comes under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

I read about the first episode a while back, but I forgot about it. Recently, I stumbled upon it again and took the opportunity to watch it. Up until now, just two episodes are completed, Episode three is announced for 28th of March and Episode four is in production. Further episodes will depend on the donations they get.

The rough story: A space ship is coming down over Montana and lands in Canadian territory. It spreads radiation, so the first suspicion is that it might be a terrorist attack. They find a probably russian human inside the ship, unconscious, with signets from the Sovjet Union. Their suspicion: The Sovjet Union has sent humans to settle on Mars and this one is a child coming back. The case is investigated by members of the US department of homeland security.

I found it pretty good. You can see overall that it's an independent production (for example the offices just don't look like offices from the US department of homeland security), but that makes no odds. The storyline is exciting, the actors do their job pretty well, the characters are interesting. My favorite character until now is Zachary Walzer, a scientist who's been endorsing Mars missions to the US authorities for a long time.

From the story concept, I'm not sure how this will make a very long series. At the moment it sounds like at some point they know what's going on and then it may not be interesting any more. Though there were some hints in which direction it might get to continue the story after that. I'm looking forward to see more.

If I raised your interest, go ahead and download Pioneer One.

Today I found a note about the movie The Codebreakers. It's a free-licensed (cc-by-sa) documentary about free software in development countries.

It brings up different examples about successful usage of free software in different parts of the world. Worth watching.