No Thugs in Our House

 

The Odyssey

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Himesh Patel, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron

directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento, several Batmans, that one with John David Washington we don't talk about, Oppenheimer, etc. [the "etc." here is doing an embarrassing amount of work])

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Florence Pugh and Marisa Tomei

directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (some indie stuff, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Wonder Man)

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OK SERIOUSLY THIS TIME, THERE WILL BE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS FOR A NEW-ISH MOVIE, SO THIS IS A GENUINE WARNING. NOT FOR THE ONE THAT IS BASED ON A 5,000-YEAR-OLD STORY THOUGH, COME ON

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It's not easy to make a summer blockbuster anymore, I get it. You have to contend with the changing paradigms of what a movie studio is and how it manages (or doesn't manage) risk, and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most studios are run by spreadsheet dipshits whose only real responsibility is to keep an eye on how leveraged their private equity patrons are and whose only common denominator seems to be how much they kinda hate movies and TV.

I'm not minimizing the fact that these types of big-rollout films are a massive financial investment that carries actual risk to some degree for studios, not just "risk" in the way noodgey consultants talk about it. Like there are rooms right now in corporate offices where a hired outsider is giving a presentation where at least one of the slides is going to quantify as a percentage how much sexual harrassment is "survivable" and a pros/cons breakdown on whether or not the health care plan should include support for transgender employees. What constitutes a good financial decision these days is so much more complicated than the Golden Age of Hollywood where the primary consideration was whether a studio executive wanted to bang one of the leads. Now it's a spaghetti-map flowchart of knock-on decisions for global entities with a dizzying array of holdings and assets across an array of industries. If a massive film fails, they'll have to balance out the expenditure with write-offs and insurance claims and offsets in other lines of business. Maybe that means if, say, The Flash underperforms, we have to lose a few thousand acres of rainforest or fire everyone in an athleisure-wear sweatshop in Bangladesh, but the only measurable "evil" in 2026 is if the number doesn't go up at the correct angle on the graph. We can all agree on that.

The fact is that sometimes these films do miss relative to their investment, without even addressing the quality of the product, and vice versa. It's not like Star Wars Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker lost anybody any money, even though we'd all rather do 600 burpees over a puddle of our own sick than watch any of it again. But we keep getting more Star Wars because it's time not necessarily because someone has a good idea. This has been the issue that has plagued the post-Endgame Marvel movie franchise system as they keep cranking and cranking and cranking out product to meet concepts of tempo and expectation to statisfy the investor class and prediction markets, not because, say, someone as reliably awesome as Ryan Coogler has a burning need to make something that results in a wonder like the first Black Panther movie. And every move nudges the risk meter in one direction or the other, pushing them to make wronger and wronger decisions, so you end up with a super messy Doctor Strange movie that everyone is frustrated with (even though it's mostly fine), but somehow Blade with Mahershala Ali gets cancelled, in some ways explicitly because the Doctor Strange one turned out to be a miss.

Reliability is hard enough to find in this marketplace run by crouching, shuddering, mewling hedge fund babies and the people they hire in their image, but we knew already that there are a few poles on which we could pitch our tents in any weather: Spider-Man and ancient Greek myths of dubious authorship (as directed by the guy who made a blockbuster out of a very talky movie about a science dork). All know this.

Even as superhero movie fortunes (in a literal sense) wax and wane, with varying levels of think-pieces generated by their failures especially (doubled if a woman is featured as a lead or co-lead), for some reason the two reliable exceptions are films about Batman and films about Spider-Man. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the film so worrying they had to reboot the whole thing with a whole different English person pretending to be a Queens boy, made over $700 million worldwide, almost the exact same number as 2022's The Batman, which was hailed as a return to form for the character, despite featuring the sleepiest of all the Batmen to date.

Brand New Day had a lot going for it then, separated from the chaff and clutter of a bunch of Avengers baying for screen time and character arc. Totally unfairly, then, Destin Daniel Crestin and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers also hit us over the head with a truly excellent expression of the genre. They were helped immensely by an insanely gifted core of performers, which feels like shameless overkill, but these are the factors that result in the second highest box office opening week of all time.

Also, hey, remember Troy? It's kind of a meme because Brad Pitt is so weird in that movie and Orlando Bloom is such a little bitch, but if you're going to be portraying a demi-god with priorties outside the scope of human morality and a sniveling princeling who runs off with a powerful king's wife, respectively, those are the right outcomes, in terms of characterization. OK, Greek-poetry-based films maybe aren't quite a "franchise" in the modern sense. I know it feels like a reach going back to Troy to talk about Homeric epics on screen since that was over 20 years ago, but in the whole scope of how long the stories have existed, that's lightning fast really. Spider-Man has only been around since like the 1960s. Dude is WAY behind.

Both The Odyssey and the latest Spider-Man rely on epic and spectacle in different ways, and both do so exactly to the sensory-pummeling levels we've come to demand. Both are, in their ways, about journeys of transformation and self-discovery, The Odyssey you'd think in a more literal sense but Spider-Man is out here sort of maybe becoming a whole-ass spider? That part wasn't entirely clear, but it came with a cool blacked-out eyes effect for Tom Holland. Not exactly shipmates-being-sculpted-into-pigs, but it was going for something.

The Odyssey itself exists at much more of an emotional remove than Spider-Man, mostly because we've had three other movies now to live in the character dynamics (Peter Parker, MJ and Ned) that are centered in this iteration the way fan service and (literal) magic were in the previous one. In fairness to No Way Home, they made that into something really good as well, but Brand New Day is a rough and poignant metaphor about post-high school separation, isolation and the struggle with becoming someone separate from the safe context of your childhood friends and family, although here in a sci-fi extreme case where literally everyone forgets who you are (instead of just feeling that way because you're 19).

Odysseus has the opposite problem is that nobody forgets who he is, which is a real pain in the ass for his wife and son, a super-power-free Tom Holland again. Everyone back in Ithaca is stuck in a grinding stasis because they just can't get past Odysseus as an idea, as a place-holder, with Penelope literally doing and undoing her weaving night after night just to keep her grubby swarm of Tinder stalkers off her ass. They're in his house, fucking up all his shit, eating up his food, asking where the hell he is, while he's out there literally on a 20 year boys' weekend that includes all the stops at every roadside attraction including, literally, hell.

I'm not going to compare the two directly... but OK Spider-Man is way better. You have to mark it out as even with the casts almost since there's so much overlap (if I'm Jacob Batolon, I'm pretty mad I'm not in The Odyssey. There's already all this bullshit "race controversy," no reason you couldn't have also had a Filipino), but Spider-Man also has a truly excellent and story-crucial turn from Sadie Sink, who isn't in The Odyssey at all. AND Brand New Day has ninjas. Red ninjas. And they fight Spider-Man. I know The Odyssey had a lot of cool enemies too, but they didn't really fight, they just made the Greeks yell "BACK TO THE SHIPS!" as they just barely avoided having their shit wrecked over and over. Ninjas win.

Now we wait for the next Window of Film Distribution Profitability, which will be around Christmas time, this time with a built-in spectacle of so-called "Dunesday" when Dune Part 3 releases on the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, two films which will of course in the aggregate also include Zendaya and Florence Pugh and Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland and what I like to call the off-brand less-American version of Tom Holland, Timothée Chalamet. You can't really manufacture reliability on your returns, but I guess when it comes to blockbuster movies, you mitigate by using the same 8-10 bankable movie stars, pair them with some franchise IP and that's it. Literally nothing else works. Sorry, Paul Rudd, apparently you don't make the cut.

Melissa Benoist Is Doing Fine, Everyone

Supergirl

starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa

directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl; I, Tonya; Cruella)

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IT'S BEEN OUT LONG ENOUGH, YOU EITHER ALREADY GOT SPOILED ON IT OR WON'T CARE. EITHER WAY, YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED

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Did I want to go see Supergirl? Come on, I'm a heterosexual man, what interest could I possibly have in a superhero movie starring a girl? And this one is practically a dare, it's got "super" and "girl" right in the the title. It would be less of a provocation if it was just called I Bet You Won't, You Little Bitch. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take that? As confused as I am by the idea of a woman who doesn't need rescuing by or guidance from a man, I was obligated to go pay money for a ticket and sit through the experience of viewing to confirm my pre-existing completely rational hate for this film.

Ha, I'm just kidding, everyone knows the online dipshits who review bomb every movie that has a female lead don't actually go out and see the movies they so loudly (allowing ALL CAPS to count as "loudness") decry as anathema to something something birth rates something something testosterone levels, etc.

Me, of course I made a special effort (leaving my house, buying a ticket, meeting up with people I like, seeing a move I either like or dislike, discussing it afterward) to take in Supergirl. Like most of the rest of the woke mob, just about everything I do is about virtue signaling. Movies are about escapism, sure, but sometimes they're also about escapism-ing from little things like patriarchy, am I right? It's an effort to spend my money on things that everyone objectively knows without experiencing them are "bad" (a Star War with a girl, a Greek myth film with a black lady in it) so that I will be seen by... someone (TBD) to have done the "right thing." It's the exact same kind of smug contrarian satisfaction people like me revel in. Like if you see trash on the ground in public near a trash can, what is the point of picking it up and putting it in if no one is around to witness you doing it? Sometimes I'll stand there for like ten minutes waiting for a quorum of citizens to be in eye-sight. Think of this review like that. If you're reading this, I've been waiting a week-plus for you to see me. Your validation is both implied and appreciated.

I trudged along to do my self-deputized civic duty, with my partner and one of my adult children, stiff-backed in a reclining theater chair and ready to do my totally passive part in the fight against whatever coherence-free agglomeration of points of view drive review-bombers and the rump remnant still inexplicably active on Twitter.

Imagine the conflicting emotions when I'm out there, trying to bring down centuries of misogyny and oppression by buying a movie ticket and sitting completely still in the dark for two hours after enduring 40 minutes of advertising about a range of things from Milk Duds to a local home re-piping service, and I find myself entertained at certain points. A complication and a distraction, neither of which are going to win me any kind external value from any kind of online crowd on any sort of social media, 98% of whom are probably bots.

Ah, but then I remembered I'm not active on any kind of social media. If you really are looking for a constant, clean hit of pure dopamine, just exist in this world and have it wash over you every now and again that you've been too lazy, contrarian or pre-emptively overwhelmed to be a Very Online Guy. It's the same feeling of relief you get as waking up from a bad dream you're sure was real at the time. Except, OK, the circumstances of the dream do follow you around in real life in all spaces, public and private, but you're just not hooked up enough to let it hurt you in the squishiest places.

Even here, though, I'm seven paragraphs in and I've only talked about the online discourse, with no mention of the actual film at all. You can call it hypocrisy if you want, I call it reliable content generation in volume.

Is it true I see all the woman-led superhero films that reflexively get derided by a very small, but determinedly unfuckable minority of online dudes and their robot friends before release? Yes, but please understand that I also went to see The Flash, so it's less a gender-specific political statement than a sign of terminal completism on my part. Far more an act of compulsion than defiance, but as long as it looks like defiance because it accidentally aligns with my politics, well, not every good thing we do is the heaviest of lifts.

Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl was introduced in a sort of epilogue scene at the end of Superman last year, and James Gunn's new effort to make DC movies into a thing picks that up directly. This movie is a re-telling of the acclaimed "Woman of Tomorrow" storyline that ran in the Supergirl comic book earlier this decade. This is always a good move, to pull from a fleshed-out and well-received narrative, though it doesn't always come out (see the two major swings taken so far at the "Dark Phoenix" X-Men storyline, yikes).

The criticism has been that the setting is grim and dull, the color palette is beige and gray, the story is dark and dour (people trafficking)... I do definitely agree that it feels like a tonal and aesthetic step backward (chronologically, not necessarily artistically) after the explicitly intentional decision to make Superman optimistic and brightly colored to the point of being, dare I say it, frickin' goofy. But Superman paid off and did well even in a dimming market for theatrical-run superhero films. I do agree that this film is kind of sludgy in bits, which in context makes some of the decisions feel retread, recycled, past sell-by. Films can look however the filmmaker can pull it off, of course, but this was asking for trouble.

And though this isn't a James Gunn film, it absolutely has his Guardians of the Galaxy fingerprints on it as some of the thematic overlap in its planet-hopping setting amongst space scoundrels and its reliance on a pop-music soundtrack to add propulsion and layers to both interstitials and action set-pieces. Not poorly done, but it does feel like a copy of a thing, with just a slight degradation in clarity and resolution.

That said, the central relationship between Milly Alcock's Supergirl and Eve Ridley's Ruthye feels rooted, a well-realized vehicle linking the character development in the A-plot with the interspersed telling of the Supergirl origin story.

Jason Momoa's Lobo doesn't need to be there, that's all fan-service, as fun as the character is (inherently I mean, not necessarily in this application). And of course this story has to clear the same hurdle as every other Krytponian superhero story, like why don't they just smash all the bad guys in Act 1, Scene 2? Making her jaunt to red-sun planets intentional is smart, setting us up for a payoff we see coming when she's powered up and fully unleashed in the dénouement, but they doubled down a little too hard with a whole "green sun" section that stepped on the momentum of the narrative. It's not dissimilar to the section of The Mandalorian and Grogu where "Pedro Pascal's" character gets incapacitated, giving the sidekick time to shine, but as much as I like Eve Ridley, she's no Baby Yoda. Plus all they really gave her to do was wait in a cave and get captured. It's even less inspiring than it sounds.

Overall I've been struggling with movies of this type and intent, like the B-tier characters in a shared narrative. The mass appeal of Superman and Spider-Man and Batman and a team-up Avengers movie are apparent and will draw the biggest budgets, the most advertising money, the easiest amount of cultural awareness and cachet that will all justify (at least in intention) a theatrical release in the movies-as-a-second-screen-on-our-phones era. We're a lot of years and a lot of filmed frames-per-second removed from 2008 when B-tier Iron Man came out and was accidentally really good. Then Thor came along in 2011 and gave us the mistaken impression that we should expect automatic success from comic book movies regardless of the prominence of main character. Since then Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and all the sad fuckers in Sony's Spider-Man intellectual property stable (except Venom, those movies did OK) re-set the expectations levels to pre-2008 calibration, though studios seem a little slow to recognize this.

Colored by the anti-buzz, I surprisingly genuinely liked it, but there's no denying, though the rhetoric around female-led films is still poisonous and embarrassing, this movie lost a shit-ton of money. That's certainly not Milly Alcock's fault, it's more a lesson of: make these movies with smaller budgets, but don't try to make it look like it had a larger one. Otherwise you set yourself up for a kicking on an Ant-Man sort of scale. Which can be way bigger than it sounds.

A Trip to Bountiful

The Mandalorian and Grogu

starring Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White('s voice), Jonny Coyne, Shirley Henderson('s voice), Martin Scorsese('s voice?!?!?) and Pedro Pascal('s voice, mostly)

directed by Jon Favreau (Swingers, two of the Iron Mans, Elf, Daredevil [the Ben Affleck one])

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NORMALLY THIS IS WHERE A SPOILER WARNING WOULD GO, BUT COME ON, BABY YODA LIVES, IT'S FINE

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One of the recurring segments of the old Muppet Show, was "Pigs in Space," which I remember always looking forward to because it was vaguely sci-fi shaped and I had been exposed to Star Wars by that point. Just to be clear, The Muppet Show in its original first-run airing I was far too young for, though I was definitely alive by then. I don't know why it's important to me to make it clear to you that I was aware of "Pigs in Space" in second-run syndication, probably on daytime television. I'm ok with you assuming I'm a giant dork, but I draw the line at letting you think I'm a Boomer.

In retrospect, I couldn't tell you a single character or plot scenario or even the premise of the sketch beyond the titular pigs in the also titular space, I just know it was presented as something Star Wars adjacent, which was satisfying enough for me at the time. I've looked it up for the purposes of writing this and apparently Miss Piggy was a recurring character, which I should have definitely just have assumed, but again, if asked, I couldn't produce a single piece of trivia about the thing beyond the fact that it made me sit up and take notice, with not only anticipation but a certain amount of relief, as in: oh yes, at last, the space thing is on, no more waiting through this bullshit. Of course as I got older I understood that the "bullshit" was, like, Madeline Kahn being a big bright shining star while co-starring around a bunch of felt socks with googly eyes stuck on, but those first impressions didn't register anything as subtle satire, talent or even actual entertainment. I didn't even apparently actually give the first fuck about pigs, as long as I got the in space.

That's really the best way to understand a lot of my interaction with both Star Wars and Star Trek content these days. It used to be true with Marvel and DC movies as well, things I'd always wanted to see when I was a kid and would sit up a little straighter for when, as an adult, their trailers would pop up ahead of whatever it was I was seeing instead (at that point, probably a totally different DC or Marvel film. We all remember the 2010s). Ever since Star Trek: Enterprise and then The Force Awakens 15 years later, I had to transition through the phase of rising to defend "the good parts" of shakily executed things I wanted to automatically like, to myself as much as (or more than) to other people even though it was evident to everyone that the quality was what it was. It's not that those projects or their postcedents were necessarily bad, it's just that they weren't obviously good either. And then, yeah, eventually The Rise of Skywalker comes out and there's no more room behind you left to retreat, it's all been sawn away by JJ Abrams and you're full Wile E. Coyote, standing unsupported in the sky, suspended by habit and hope vs. the pitiless reality of gravity, a contest that resolves itself exactly in the way you'd imagine, every single time.

I'm not only older now, but I'm fully on the other side of full psychosis fandom. I still watch the stuff, just now with arms crossed, daring it to impress me; dubious, but with just a crack left ajar for the light of something that is actually good to break through, like Andor or more recently the visually gorgeous Maul--Shadow Lord. The latter may end in a lot of noise and an overused climactic cliche of a Vader reveal (see also Rogue One, Jedi: Fallen Order, etc.), but it's pretty, fluid, thoughtful noise where people do cool flips and shit, so I was down. I'd have forgive Daredevil: Born Again season 2 if there had been one goddamned ninja in it, but no, I had to settle for some decent performances and all the ultimately unresolved angst masquerading as character. I'm going to need way more spin kicks if you want my thumbs-up, show about a guy who is a blind karate man.

I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu with the right kind of skepticism then, with a bar low enough that anything short of "Somehow, Palpatine returned" was going to clear it. The question was by what kind of margin?

And the answer is: eh, enough. I watched the whole thing, on a last-second whim of a plan with my youngest adult child. And I wasn't ever entirely bored, nor did I audibly groan at any of the ideas, characters or dialogue, which is saying something considering it included our first ever look at a Muscle Hutt, the swole-ass son of the merely swollen Jabba.

The Hutt in question is called Rotta, meaning this one is a soft sequel to another Star Wars low point, the cringe minefield that was the pilot film for The Clone Wars animated series. That one I had watched out of parental obligation as I had three children under 10 at that point, all of whom I naively and irresponsibly already exposed to Star Wars, setting my own petard in place upon which I was then hoist. What that awful film brought us as two things: an improving-to-the-point-of-genuine-excellence Clone Wars series over many years and the rise of showrunner Dave Filoni, who now famously has never had an idea he was willing to throw out. On the one hand that gets you the knowing hat-tip of fan service with Rotta in this movie along with Zeb from the Rebels series and a cameos by Filoni himself as an X-Wing pilot, paying off your attention even if it was to stuff you didn't necessarily like on the first helping. On the other hand, you end up kind of wishing for just one new idea.

Look, the Baby Yoda is very cute, as are the even-smaller-than-Baby-Yoda creatures ported in from Rise of Skywalker our wide-eyed Grogu gurgles and waddles around with. The puppet-action of Grogu and his wee alien pals (I'm not looking up the species, nerds, I told you I'm past that) is very charming and carries the last third of the movie as much as any action set pieces do. But overall, this doesn't really pay off or bring forward any character information established in any of the seasons of The Mandalorian, all of which I watched,. Three seasons only really got me some saved time in the beginning since I didn't have to pay attention to any exposition establishing the characters.

To this film's credit, though, there is almost no exposition. All you really need to know is that the silver man and his little frog pal find people, and they're sent off to do so from the geriatric retirement home for X-Wing pilots led by Sigourney Weaver. The main antagonist our title characters mostly interact with, some kind of lizard-robot in a sombrero, is pointedly mute; they just go about their business antagonizing.

It's all very efficient but still feels bloated somehow. It's entirely inessential and doesn't accomplish much in the lore department. In some ways that's a nice break from every other part of the Star Wars franchise very needily screaming in your face LOOK HOW IT'S ALL CONNECTED! REMEMBER THIS GUY FROM THE OTHER THING? YOU LIKE THAT, RIGHT? SAY YOU LIKE IT! But at the same time, you do come away from a series of fights with a series of monsters in an escalating scale of both size and grossness, wondering whom this is for and for what purpose. Entertainment? Sure. But is Star Wars about entertainment anymore, absent the more blatant pieces of fan service? When this film starts, our Mando and Grogu are an established team doing low-level jobs for their preferred employer. It ends with that status quo exactly in place, subtracting only the two hours it took us to get there.

It was fine. My instinct to wait for streaming for essentially a two-parter episode of a show I kind of forgot about was probably the better way to go. But I went with my son, whom I'd gotten into this mess in the first place by letting him watch any of this stuff, which is the kind of experience I'm happy to say is almost as envigorating and appealing as the opening titles of Pigs in Space used to be when I was, like, seven. Almost.

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Note: published on a Wednesday, one day early, because of Having A Life. It's inconvenient, but it does occur occasionally.

Hot Fuzzy

 

Avatar: Fire and Ash

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jack Champion, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco

directed by James Cameron (Aliens, the only good Terminator movies, True Lies, the one about the boat, Avatar 1, Avatar 2, plenty of other stuff)

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THIS IS NORMALLY WHERE I WOULD PUT A SPOILER WARNING, BUT LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS FILM

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OK, I'm not trying to be a snob here. There is something inherently irritating about the way James Cameron talks about this whole Avatar project and the unique message he thinks he's trying to convey through it, but if you aren't all caught up, we're just three films in now to the exact same story Kevin Costner told in Dances with Wolves like 35 years ago. Or Edward Zwick and Tom Cruise told again 15-ish years after that with The Last Samurai. If you haven't seen those films, the message is basically this: the problem is white people. The solution? Adopt a white person to lead the rebellion against the white people, which ultimately fails, underscoring the tragedy of the western colonial mindset but also reaffirming "well, there's really nothing you can do about it ultimately..." I guess the main difference is in those two examples a) the resistance was led by two charismatic movie stars and in these, they're led by Sam Worthington,* and b) it's taken three very long movies already and Jake Sully refuses to get around to dying tragically yet heroically in an act of futile defiance.

Again, not a snob dismissing these films out of hand, it would just be easier to take if James Cameron just said he was out to make a big dumb shooty popcorn movie and not trying to inspire people to save the world or whatever. There are of course major elements of this film and its two predecessors as a whole that work on that first level, but the more of the story we learn about, the only real-world translatable questions its going to raise will have to do with how we spend our increasingly precious disposable income on things that are kind of shit.

So there were a couple of strikes against it. Not prejudices necessarily, because I've earned my skepticism over, what, seven-ish hours of movies so far? Also, this is the third Avatar film and they seem to have made NO SERIOUS ATTEMPT to work the number 3 into the spelling of the title, like Fant4stic or F8 of the Furious or F1. Hm, in retrospect, maybe only movies that start with F are allowed to do that? Plus there's no obvious place to stick a 3 in Avatar, like maybe Avat3r, but that looks dumb. Best I can do is Avatar: Fir3 and Ash, but also, not great. OK, you get a pass on this one, James Cameron, but the other skepticism is valid.

The other thing Cameron talks about incessantly is how hard it is to make these movies and how intent they are on pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible in film with CGI and motion capture and... OK, I gotta hand it to him there. Although the overall visual impact is undermined by the excessive length of these films (this is not the last time I will mention this, almost certainly. These are long!) which makes the parade of UBER-GRANDE visual-scapes become overwhelming, like white noise for the eyeballs. There isn't a single frame that looks bad or out of place, per se, but they still have the problem of emotional detachment from all the grandeur, as the cartoon CG of it all is still a bit most-expensive-Lego-set-ever, with all the limits on investment in any of its survival implied therein. So when these giant things are all exploding or catching on fire or being harpooned (again), there's no real sense of loss or shock. You feel like they could just to go back to the previous save game and reload, try the level again. Astoundingly pretty, but in a weirdly forgettable way.

This is not the case, however, for the motion capture, specifically with the facial performances. Zoe Saldaña and Oona Chaplin specifically, holy shit, these are legitimately great performances. My son and I talked some shit after walking out of the theater, but I also said Chaplin was on some Oscar-level shit. She speaks no English in this role, so it's all raw emotion and she's absolutely riveting, genuinely scary. That was necessary because the main antagonist played by Stephen Lang has been neutered by his own nonsensical actions in the plot and mustache-twirling so as to be a non-threat. Chaplin's character, almost tragically, gets relegated to being his girlfriend, but she still pops off. That is not a joke about having had to see it in 3D.

Is there a plot? Well, yes, but it's literally (and I'm using that correctly here: literally) the same plot as the last movie. The Sullys are in danger and have to move around but in the end they have to fight against the military and the company hunting whales, which they resist by rallying the locals and getting the animals to help them. The kids also get kidnapped by Stephen Lang again, who neglects to kill any of them before their parents have an opportunity to affect a rescue. At least in the last movie one of the kids died! But he threatened them like four different sequences in that film alone, plus the ones here! I'd have more respect for the character if he would just murder a child, that's all I'm asking.

Otherwise, this all feels like a placeholder for some larger arc's grand denouement that we will possibly never get to see. That means nothing gets resolved, in terms of plot (see above) or character. This is supposed to be about a family, but this family spends the whole movie so mad at each other, you find yourself pondering the idea of space-divorce among these cat people. The only bonding that gets done is when they're out there murdering gringos, and that only starts happening because the run-time of the film said it was time to do that. Sure, I'd like to trust that this is all going somewhere, but I'm also going somewhere every time I leave my telework-disallowed job to come home. It would be a bad idea to do 400 circuits of the office parking lot before I decided it was time to head in the actual direction I needed to go.

Yeah, if I had to describe this film in one TL;DR log line: it's 400 circuits of your office parking lot. Just with better scenery.

PS: also I didn't realize Kate Winslet was in this until I read the credits at the end of the film. Normally I'd give an actor praise for disappearing into her role, but it's harder to do when they literally disappear.

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*OK, this was kind of mean, but it's not fully Sam Worthington, it's a cartoon version of him. I've honestly forgotten what actual Sam Worthington looks like.

We Will Not Be Mentioning Dean Cain

 

Superman

starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Nicholas Hoult

directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy [all volumes], Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad)

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THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILER WARNING WOULD NORMALLY GO. But this is a 100 year old story, what am I going to spoil for you at this point? OH MY GOD, HE CAN FLY?! Get over yourselves

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There was a time when I used to collect comic books. Luckily for me, that was back when your hobbies defined not only your entire personality but also carried with them a certain amount of social determinism. What you consumed and how you consumed it still had weight, it was related still to your choices, your discernment, where the things you curated by exclusion (comics? yes. organized sports? yuck, no) ended up sorting and excluding you from certain life paths at the exact same time. That's right, I collected comics back when meant something, primarily that you were several years away from the possibility of getting laid.

Speaking of that, let's just get this out of the way, so you know: this Superman fucks. They don't show it or anything (though we're all still curious about the logistics, or at least we have been for at least 56 years), and they even show it less than did back in Superman II with that weird silver beanbag thing, but as movies have become more and more sexless in the 21st century, explicitly (no pun intended) pushed aside by more action and quippy dialogue in the now-ubiquitous Comic Book IP Cinematic Universii peopled entirely by de-genital-ed men and women who spend a lot of time really violently working through a lot of pent-up pent-up-ed-ness by punching through whole buildings and shit, it's established very clearly that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are definitely smashing. On the scale of things about the re-emergence of this beloved cultural icon to concern ourselves with, should this be the first thing, straight out of the gate? Well, name a more important one, I'll wait.

That's what I thought.

Here's the point I'm making:* the hardest thing to do with Superman is to make him a person in a world and not a weird, stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. The challenge of Superman is a problem of scale. How do you bring a demigod down onto the plane of squishy, puny mortals? Of course there's a way to make a good and decent Superman movie that explores his otherness, but that's only really been tried in earnest once, by Bryan Singer, and what you got is a final shot of Superman creeping on his ex and her happy family from afar, like a lion pondering a frolicking clutch of baby gazelles. Yes, they took pains to establish that that Superman fucked as well, even producing a child, but it was way before the story started and in the end you couldn't help but feel like it had been an experiment or maybe an accident. Also that had Kevin Spacey in it, so the whole thing had the ick on it in retrospect.

And I did like Henry Cavill in the role. He was purpose-built from scratch to wear the suit, but Zack Snyder's default mode is stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. I have inexplicably seen almost every piece he's created, none of which are ultimately necessary but even the really unnecessary ones I've seen, and he has yet to actually produce a piece with a single recognizable human character.

Shout out to local Inland Empire homie Tyler Hoechlin doing his dang best on TV, but cinematically, it's been a lot of misses. The closer we've tried to get to movie Superman, the farther and farther he's drifted away from us, arguably since Richard Donner got replaced most of the way through directing Superman II. It's like we are the comic book collectors and the character is all the girls I knew in high school: aloof, inaccessible, inscrutable, and SUPER busy on--sorry, what night did you say again?--yes, that night.

I never collected any of the Superman titles directly, but for some reason or another, this character in film has always been important to me. Probably because early-days HBO showed Superman II on a goddamned loop with, like, Beastmaster and 9 to 5 and a few others. I can't tell you why I'm less emotionally invested in subsequent expansions of the Beastmaster cinematic representations, but the first Superman I knew was Movie Superman. That's where he fits. That's what I want.

If you've read any other reviews, it won't surprise you to know this is... really good. I'm relieved as much as I am happy about it. I'll say if I have to critique anything, it's that James Gunn understands the Superman Problem exactly the same way I do and makes that the center of the entire film, scene after scene, in every interaction with every character. The grand denouement follows a thunking, heavy re-set of Superman Is An Earth Person Too involving his excellent human adoptive parents, crescendo-ing into him literally screaming this at the antagonist.

All of this comes out in a very human performance by David Corenswet, more grounded by his use of the word "dude" in a few select scenes than by any philosophical soliloquy. The line between Superman and Clark Kent is kept deliberately wobbly to the point of almost not existing (Clark playing Clark where not everyone knows he's Superman exists for exactly one scene). He doesn't change who he is, he just has magic glasses (seriously) so people can't tell. Superman is a great big goob, un-self-consciously uncool in a way that makes him cool again. He definitely could have gotten away with collecting comic books in the 1990s.

Hoult's Lex Luthor is... trickier. I'll be honest, I don't know what I want from my Lex Luthor anymore. We've had goofy schemer (Gene Hackman), boring bumbling dumb creep (Kevin Spacey) and guy-in-manic-episode (Jesse Eisenberg). This is a better, larger, scarier version. He's obviously and overwhelmingly a mad scientist, he has the quiet bitterness and rage you want, the Javert-ian obsessiveness, acts of wanton and outright, unmistakeable malice. He's cool without trying, even though he's trying so hard, which is a weird space to be in. At the end, I think he gets a bit too much of a comeuppance as I think I like my Lex a little oilier, a little better at hiding the raging monster from the public, but for what they were going for here (Superman is more humane and thus more human than the Earthborn Lex), it worked. And I don't think the performance of Nicholas Hoult can be faulted in any respect.

As for who carries this thing, it's Hoult or Edi Gathegi. Corenswet is up there the most (literally! Two separate roles!) and he holds both the screen and the emotional center of the story, but he does get upstaged a tiny bit by The Theme (the stuff I said before about Superman being "human"). Gathegi just sneaks out from behind a flashy and funny part by Nathan Fillion (Isabela Merced is grossly under-used) and makes a supporting role a co-starring one every time he's on screen.

Also the CG dog is good.

If you saw any Guardians of the Galaxy, you know James Gunn does fun and funny and joy and sentiment, visually and story-wise, and that happens here in a long overdue counterweight to the infestation of grimdark that has lingered on DC properties since 1989 Batman gloomed it up to fight the lingering image of 1966 TV goofin' that was the Adam West Batman. Comic books are basically science fiction. The stories only need to be "grounded" if you lack the confidence to try. This is bright. It does its share of goofin'. And all to entertaining effect. If I would have ever read any Superman comics when I was a kid, I would have been just as satisfied.

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*100% meant to make it and am definitely not now improvising to cover. This is in print, so there's no way for you to prove any lack of pre-meditation, sorry. Except maybe my entire previous body of work, yes, that may give something away... 

Part 8 of the Trilogy

 

Mission:Impossible-The Final Reckoning

starring Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hannah Waddingham, Esai Morales, Tom Cruise, Tramell Tillman, Shea Briggs, Greg Tarzan Davis, Nick Offerman for some reason, Henry Czerny and Angela Basset

directed by Tom Cruise's Stunt Coordinator Christopher McQuarrie

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YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW THIS MOVIE WILL GO BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT SEVEN, BUT THIS IS THE SPOILER WARNING ANYWAY

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OK, let's get this right out of the way up front: this movie isn't very good. But is it a good Mission:Impossible movie? That's a separate, more complicated question. Now that these are purportedly over, we can take a step back and consider them in a fuller context, both one by one and in relation to each other.

1. Mission:Impossible: First, I'm not sure how to set this titles off from this list because they use all the punctuation, both colons and dashes, in all of them. You're just going to have to figure it out. Anyway, I remember this being fine. Emilio Estevez gets his face impaled by an elevator shaft that is somehow decorated with what looks to be a giant scimitar for some reason. A helicopter blows up in a train tunnel. Sets the tone: fucking goofy, but really going for it, maximum effort at all times. Basically a movie version of Tom Cruise as a personality.

2. Mission:Impossible 2: Really genuinely terrible. John Woo only makes one movie, the plot of which is irrelevant. I blame him for the recurring motorcycle thing in M:I (he loves motorcycles), though it's funny Tom didn't carry over the slo-mo pigeons and churches. Thandiwe Newton largely wasted, should have been brought back at some point, but no. They got the IT dork from the first movie back for this newest one, but not her, not once? Lame. Anyway, almost killed the franchise.

3. Mission:Impossible III: OK, J.J. Abrams kind of sucks, but he knows how to create mystery and tension, even if he's ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ALLERGIC to resolving any of those things. The secret here is he doesn't try. Focus on character (in this one, they actually tried to give Ethan Hunt character), with real emotional stakes AND get Philip Seymour Hoffman to sell these beats as something of a plot and Bob's your mother's brother. The one that set the formula. I can see now most of the rest of the entries relied on the goodwill this one established. It's legit good.

4. Mission:Impossible-Ghost Protocol: Yay, we lost the numbers in the titles, but being really honest, for these next several, I'm going to have to go back and figure out which one we're talking about because they get all super similar. I think this is the Jeremy Renner one where they do that building climb? That part was dope.

5. Mission:Impossible-Rogue Nation: Couldn't tell you the plot if you started shoving bamboo splinters under my toenails, but I'm pretty sure this is the first Rebecca Ferguson one, so automatic 10 out of 10.

6. Mission:Impossible-Fallout: Renner disappears, but we get Henry Cavill cocking his arms like they're a shotgun in a bathroom fight scene. Also Michelle Monaghan comes back as Ethan Hunt's wife from back in III when they tried to make him a person, which actually worked pretty well. I did a whole write up for this one already, but basically I liked it? "It's just some people throwing really interesting punches and breaking shit," I said at the time, which, hey, there's some high praise.

7. Mission:Impossible-Dead Reckoning: Again, total honesty, I forgot everything about this until I offered to rewatch it with my domestic partner lady so we could go see the new one this past weekend. She hadn't been to a movie theater since pre-COVID, so we prepped the night before and wowee, is this not great. Stunts are good, set-pieces are good (the one with the train at the end is pretty great actually), but the plot and the Esai Morales character, bless him for trying, is tacked on and so forgettable, they actually forgot to put in him like 95% of the next movie.

As far as Final Reckoning goes, yeah, that's about what you need to know about it. The franchise built itself to it's first real peak (III) on the scaly, pointy back of the Godzilla-sized talent of Philip Seymour Hoffman and his ability to make you hate his terrible guts, but what you get by Installment 8 is symptomatic of the slow whining hiss of the helium coming out of this balloon (and, to some degree, injected into Tom Cruise's very puffy face) over the course of 20 years. The "bad guy" is literally nobody, it's nothing, it's the idea of a bad guy in the form of a googly blue waveform thingy that sometimes gets an extreme closeup and arguably more screen time than Hannah Waddingham's American accent.

It's not novel or interesting to note that by now they think of the stunt set-pieces, which are of course still great, and then just plug in the rest of the "plot" to mark the time between them and call that a script. I can't tell you how they filmed that submarine sequence (rotating set I think), but the blend of CG and practical was really well done. It achieved what these films must achieve or fail entirely, making you feel tension in a situation where you know absolutely that the hero will survive in the end. As a result, even when these are new, they feel like prequels even in real-time because the end result is blatantly, obviously, graspably knowable. Nobody goes into it thinking "Oh, is this the one where the bad guy nukes the world and escapes after killing the hero/es?" No, you're thinking of Avengers: Infinity War. This is a Tom Cruise movie and Tom Cruise (the actual human, not the character) has more rigid rules for how he's depicted than Thor or Captain America.

What did the blue-eyed Entity do? It doesn't matter. What was Esai Morales' Gabriel's relationship to it? I dunno, it doesn't matter. There's an empty space left deliberately at the hole of this film that can only be filled by people talking about how Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt is the only person in the whole world who is pure enough to "do what needs to be done" and then just being OK at leaving it there, details-wise.

Does he get a weird distorted face from being FOR REALS on the outside of a plane flying at hundreds of miles an hour? Of course he does. Does he die and come back to life? Stop trippin', you know the traditions. And does he say to his group of homies that "the only people we can trust are in this room right now?" I don't think they'd be allowed to release it if he didn't. And, finally, does someone at the end who doubted him ALL ALONG say "He did it... the son of a bitch actually did it"? LITERALLY THE SON OF A BITCH ACTUALLY DOES.

Nothing about this film will let you down if you come looking for just those things. But did you think that, possibly, Hayley Atwell was brought in to set up a successor, to continue the story starting at her IMF origin in the last movie? Ha, gotcha, loser! Her big moment here is she gets to grab a thing real fast because of how good a pickpocket she is. She contributes zero plans, has zero agency (ha), reduced to serving as a setter-upper of things that Tom Cruise will finally arrive at and make worth it. She develops nothing; remember she was a pickpocket the first second we saw her in the last movie and she's still basically that at the end of this one. Basically she got the John Boyega treatment from all those Star Wars movies he was in: promising character setup shoved off to the side to make more room for the safest, most predictable bullshit. But that was JJ Abrams, and we've already established the he sucks. Maybe that's all you need to know going in to this one? It's like JJ Abrams made it, but Philip Seymour Hoffman was, in the most profound and existential of ways, unavailable.

I'm Sorry, What Was I Saying?

 

Severance, season 1 and 2

starring Britt Lower, Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Sarah Bock, Dichen Lachman, Michael Chernus, Merrit Weaver and John Turturro. And also sometimes Christopher Walken. And, less frequently, John Noble. And Gwendoline Christie? And Sandra Bernhard? And Robbie frickin' Benson? Casting is drunk.

created by Dan Erickson (this is the first show he's run, as far as I can tell). Also somehow Ben Stiller is involved? I don't know, he shows up in a lot of interviews.

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This is definitely one of Those Shows, so if you don't want spoilers, STOP READING the rest of this thing, which will said things in. END OF WARNING.

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It's been a minute since I took the time here to review anything, at least since the the underwhelming final season of Umbrella Academy back in September of 2024. There are a few reasons why probably, like 1) that's right around the time I got a cat, 2) Thursday writing nights have begun overlapping with Thursday date nights, 3) logistically it's been harder to spend a long time really digging in to something since I have to work from the office again, since February, and 4) yes, that was right before the election and everything since then has been a tiny bit of a political, logistical, constitution and now-purposefully-economic disaster. The point is, for whatever reason, these things take up a lot more time and thought than a normal post I tend to squawk out like an improvised minor concerto of armpit farts between getting home from work and leaving to go see my lady friend. If you're not sure why any of this constitutes an especial challenge, well, I just spent a not-insubstantial paragraph on vamping and throat-clearing. This kind of thing is for the focused and the clear-headed, which, yeah, see above embedded numbered list.

First, I have to say I didn't quite realize that I was a genius until Apple TV had put out six episodes of season two. That's about the time I realized maybe I was interested in watching this show, which means I absolutely did not have to experience the annoyance of waiting three years between the MAJOR SUPER CLIFFHANGER ending season one and the start of the second. My girlfriend and I were able to pretty well binge the whole thing until we caught up with 2-3 episodes to go. Waiting for those was annoying enough, so three years, yeah... maybe I can't call myself a real fan since I didn't have to wade through that hazing, but I'm not really the type to volunteer for pop-culture battle scars anymore. I was one of the people who bought tickets for The Waterboy more than once just because it was showing the Star Wars Episode 1 trailer ahead of it. I'm all set for dork bona fides, thanks very much.

When we first fired it up, of course we were struck by the high-concept high-concept-ness of it all. The pilot is one of the best pilots I've ever seen, maybe the best one since Lost in 2004 and certainly since Game of Thrones in 2011. And if you know how both of those high-concept shows went out at the end, well, things don't bode super well for Severance if it's on that same upside-down-J curve trajectory.

Of course Lost and GoT suffered from different debilitating infirmities that resulted in them dying whimpering deaths at the end. And Severance resembles the former far more than the latter, even though it also features Gwendoline Christine savagely beating a man to death with her bare hands just like GoT did. No, Lost fancied itself a Great Big Bag of Mysteries that, after the finale, became clear that it was mostly full of dirt clods and old underwear. That's the trap for Severance, of course, that maybe all the quirky weirdness and out-there-ness it swims in as a medium will similarly be exposed as just a bunch of shit the writers made up as they went along that, in the final reckoning, can't ever really be reconciled. When Lost was finally over, we were all mad because it looked like TV but in the end, it felt like math homework.

What Severance has over Lost is that it isn't pretending that it's in our regular world. It has internal combustion engine cars and people speaking English and suburbs and corporations, but all the details of the world are bound by their own history and logic. That gives the writers way more leeway to make something of it without risking the jarring and straining of fitting the (at best) metaphysical or (at worst) fucking goofy mechanics of a world overlaid on our own, like Lost. Of course that also makes it more similar to GoT's closed-box world, and that didn't help it as much as you would have thought FLYING GIANT DRAGONS might have.

At first I was apprehensive and kind of mad early in the first season: the logic of the world was going to have to be so meticulous, with no bleed-over between characters and facts between Innie World and Outie World, it was forcing my anal mind* to track every detail to make sure these clever fuckers weren't trying to cheat me. So far, season one? Fucking aces. Season two? Eh, they're trying to have it both ways a bit; you can feel some of the strain.

This show obviously asks a lot of its actors, most of whom are playing two totally different characters who only happen to look exactly like them. Adam Scott of course I've seen in everything forever, and it's nice to see him outside of the Everyman types he normally plays to be kind of a loser/dick as Outie Mark Scout. We empathize because he's a widower, but he's a mean, antisocial dipshit mostly, which was kind of nice. Innie Mark S. is more in line with Standard Adam Scott Man, but is an appropriately gormless (at first) paper doll, which serves to outline both versions of the character a bit more starkly, and gives him a ton of places to grow.

We spend far less time with the Outie versions of Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and John Turturro's characters, but they each get at least one episode to breathe the outside air (Cherry's one word scream "Gretchen!" in season two is the highlight line reading of all the episodes. Talk about making the most with a little). Britt Lower is the low-key star of the piece, as the audience surrogate new employee at Lumon on the Severed Floor. The writers put her all the way through it in season one, which she marches through with her now-signature strut, with rage and fear and the clear-eyed surety of a coyote caught in a foot trap: there's no question what needs to be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it.

The production design, the camera work, the editing, all of it is really second to none, some far and away the best I've seen on a television show, which is what you should be feeling on productions with unlimited money. With some blank hallways and faux fluorescent lighting, they've achieved more here aesthetically than Amazon Prime has with a billion dollars on Rings of Power. It's a joy to look at and to be emotionally abused by.

Like most high concept shows, however, the most fun is in the first season when we're establishing the rules of the world and watching the characters come to grips with it. Season two means we have to watch the writers struggle with maintaining fidelity to their own limits, which can be fun, but you can feel the strain. The overlain story is more melodrama than drama (the dead wife ISN'T REALLY DEAD?!), which, OK. The most interesting storyline, Mark's risky "reintegration" procedure, is where it bogs down the most as the stakes and ticking-clock of it are sort of suggested but then awkwardly set aside when it's inconvenient for other story beats they're trying to cram in.

I'm embarrassed to say I'm of two minds about it, though: you have to admire the producers and writers giving themselves something this hard to do, but at the same time, when it's not quite hitting, you feel it all the more. You can feel in season two when they are saying "just trust us..." when characters make decisions to drag things out for... reasons... or plot points are just kind of tied off, most egregiously with Karen Aldridge's Dr. Reghabi who a) murders a guy, which is never spoken of again and b) makes a big deal about how important Mark's reintegration is, but just nopes out when it's time to nope out.

But again, those points leap out because of how tight everything else is. I like how the lore of the world doesn't really matter in detail (I don't really need to know anything about Keir or whoever else, just keep shout-singing his songs, Patricia Arquette), it just keeps everything tied together in the neatest bow it can manage, even as the package keeps getting bigger.

Normally I'd say it was a massive failure that I don't really care if Mark gets his not-dead wife back, but that's also kind of the point of the show. Mark Scout is the b-antagonist of the piece really, behind of course Lumon itself. The kernel of the show is that the lives led on the Severed Floor are lives, which is something Cherry's Dylan insists on over and over (if someone quits, you don't have a going-away party, you have a funeral). Everything outside is a threat to their existence, most immediately their Outie personas. The show did a lot of work to make the Mark-Gemma relationship feel as real as possible this season, but Helly R. and Mark S. are the stars of this show, your put-upon protagonists. Gemma escaped? Great, good for her, I'm anti-torture as a rule. But the Real World in this reality is always dark and cold and snowy and bleak. Let's spend more time down in the climate controlled basement, where it never snows and the overhead lighting is always on. If this show has any analog to giant flying dragons, this is where they'd live anyway.

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*that's not an awkward phrasing, that's where I keep it

Some Rain Must Fall

The Umbrella Academy, season 4

starring Elliot Page, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Ritu Arya, Aidan Gallagher, David Castañeda, Robert Sheehan, Tom Hopper, Justin H. Min, Victoria Sawal, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, David Cross, Liisa Repo-Martell and Colm Feore.

created by Steve Blackman (The Associates, Private Practice, Legion, Altered Carbon)

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IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS, WHY ARE YOU EVEN READING THIS FAR, MY GOD, STOP

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Look, there is a lot going on. And I don't even mean specifically with the show I'm ostensibly reviewing here. In fact, it could be argued that there's a lot less going on in Season Four (the final one!) than in all the previous ones. The story is not particularly convoluted in terms of plot line compared to previous arcs. In fact, by working in six episodes instead of the previous three seasons' order of 10, just in terms of volume there's 40% less going on already. The tone is also so much less self-serious than some of the earlier seasons, and it wasn't that heavy a show in the first place bar a few scattered moments of gravity. But this kind of lightness is welcome in this period of stomping, inevitable trudge toward a presidential election, an absolutely crushing heat wave here, some stupid health issues, some stupider car issues and the emotional work of integrating a new pet into the house (more on that in some other post later on). Of all those swirling things, Umbrella Academy is the only one thoughtful enough to break up the proceedings with at least one fart joke. That's the level I'm looking for in late Summer 2024.

In times of darkness, that's when you crave the light. I didn't even list the darkest dark, the premiere of season 2 of Rings of Power on Amazon Prime; I didn't want things to turn bleak. Don't worry, I'm back in the care of a professional therapist, I'm processing it all.

I didn't read any of the comic books Umbrella Academy is based on, so I can't be caught in the trap of despair and self-loathing that something like Rings of Power dooms me to. The great gift of ignorance means I only understand any of these characters (so many!) as they are presented in this context, with no preconception or expectation in place to be thwarted. Apologies to Messrs. Way and Bá, but I don't need to feel the kind of parasocial proprietorship about, like, Number 5 that I do about Celebrimbor or whomever.

So this is a nice escape! And I should complain about only six episodes of something I like when I might have expected 10, but look, I'm beginning to gain the kind of perspective in middle-middle age where, hey, I'm just grateful anything came out at all. I've developed enough empathy to imagine what it would have felt like to have been a big Batgirl fan. Just be happy it showed up at all! But you have to be careful with the gratitude mindset; for the less vigilant among us, that's a path that can lead to the unironic Live Laugh Love signs above the sectional couch.

Besides the shorter overall running time, what's new about season four? Well, they cast Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman as the heavies, which is automatically good news. It's only a stunt to cast a married couple as a married couple if one or both of them suck. Instead, these are not only two effortlessly charismatic performers, but their commitment and timing elevate everything they've been in individually and they play beautifully of one another. Their characters here aren't quite different enough to literally play off one another; they present as a unit, which works just fine for an antagonist. Just one could have done it, but in the end it's a por qué no los dos scenario. Everyone is better off for it.

For the rest of it, I really had to take a beat to match my expected speed of viewership to its trajectory, as it really skips off the simmering familial tension vibe that undergirds the whole premise of the macro-story--what if you and your siblings all had the same daddy issues and also super powers--and lands in a way more self-consciously broad comic space. This comes at the expense of some of the characters, but you were going to have to lose something when you cut episodes, and it was character that got it in the neck, like Allison in season 2, episode 8. She also lived, just in a diminished form.

Tom Hopper's Luther, Number One, he with the daddiest of the daddy issues, comes off the most changed, released from a running thread of sulking resentment to burst out into the broadest comic figure as a hirsute, space-suited stripper, complete with tin-foil banana hammock. There are way more wide smiles and laughing from Luther in these six episodes than the previous 30 combined. The earnest naïveté they had played for a few goofs in previous seasons is still there to some degree, but what could feel hacky, superficial and dismissible on its own reads as something like relief for this last run. It's a little reward for Hopper and for those of us along for the whole ride, which is the point.

Sadly, almost none of the other characters come off as well. Diego and Lila's trapped-in-suburbia subplot is forced and boring, though Ritu Arya can't help but be a force of gravity all her own as a performer in everything she's in (seriously, go back and watch season one without her, you can feel her missing). Robert Sheehan's Klaus, the previous seasons' brilliant comic relief, is left with a tedious and contrived subplot to keep himself and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) busy until the apocalypse. Elliot Page as Viktor is dragooned into being the plot-starter-offer and Justin H. Min as Ben, who never had much of an active role in previous seasons, is completely wasted as a lumbering, bitchy plot point eventually literally swallowed up by some kind of gross body-horror CGI.

All of this is to say that the plot kind of doesn't matter, and the writers agree. There's really only one goal here and that's to get seven Hargreeveses and Lila into a shiny circle of sacrificial light for the sake of the universe and make us all cry. And that's effective enough. Aside from an extended kaiju bit toward the end, any powers and effects-heavy sequences are more or less missing, which is fine since I don't think one person in the group has the same powers that were established back in the first season. They all just can kinda do whatever it takes to get us out of the predicament in the scene, which is fine. The message is clear: look, don't worry about the details, just spend some time with your pretend friends so we can all say a proper goodbye.

To be fair, the writers do try to give us one last emotional set-piece with Lila and Number Five being stranded together for years in alternate timelines and falling in love, an interesting and complicated button to put on a relationship that started years ago as literal murderous rivalry. Aidan Gallagher, by a good stretch the youngest of the cast, is given a lot to carry in both the emotional narrative and keeping up with Arya, and he acquits himself brilliantly. He's had the hardest job from the beginning, portraying an old man in a boy's body, and here even at 20 years old, he's got he chops to pull off the weariness and hurt the payoff requires.

Aside from that, it's all a bit broad, as I've said, not just comedically but plot-wise. There's a twist in the tale at the end that matters not at all. Colm Feore remains underused as he was in every season save bits of season three when he makes up half of a comedic double-act with Sheehan, but that just underscores what was left out. I get that Sir Reginald works best as a looming figure of memory and threat, but it's still frustrating to have someone so capable get so little to do.

Unlike most superhero things, it doesn't end with fighting a big beam of light in the sky nor in a last-second reprieve where all the protagonists are somehow actually OK. It cuts in the way Spiderman Far From Home tries to cut, but without the edge of future repercussions to sink the blade as deep as it might go. In the end what happens to them in the story is what happens to every character in every series studios eventually just stop making: they cease to be. The writers/creators here just chose to make it an explicit plot point. Which I liked.

The Occidental Tourist

Shōgun

starring Anna Sawai, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cosmo Jarvis, Tadanobu Asano, Moeka Hoshi, Takehiro Hira and Shinnosuke Abe

created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks (Counterpart)

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Can you spoiler something that is thinly veiled history? The basics of the story have been around for like 400 years, if you haven't heard it by now...

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There's a story Jason Alexander tells about being on Seinfeld in the early days, where he's trying to figure out the character of George, but he's kind of struggling. At one point he reads a script where something absolutely ridiculous happens to George that absolutely strains the suspension of disbelief, so he goes to the writer and says "Look, about this script, this would never happen to anybody and if it did, there's no way any human would respond this way," to which the writer responded "What are you talking about? This definitely happened to me and this is exactly how I responded." By now you probably guessed: that writer? Jeffery Dahmer.

No, that's a joke, that kind of perspective would have made Seinfeld in some ways at least compelling and watchable instead of the absolutely unrelenting cringe-fest that has aged worse than Married... With Children. That isn't a joke really, if you watch M...WC these days, it looks like a time capsule, perfectly pitched to the swamp of crudeness it was born in (early Fox TV, bad lighting on harsh video, lazy jokes leaning on sexualization and gender cliches) so the political incorrectness now feels defanged by seeming desperate, to the point of almost being quaint. Seinfeld is just a reflection of Jerry Seinfeld overall, whose presence on anything in the 2020s is an automatic no-go for me: smug, self-serious, small-minded, weightless and artless while always LOUDLY INSISTING on both his integrity and his own hilarity. If you feel like that's too harsh, watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is Seinfeld without Seinfeld: it's loose, artistic, risky, messy, crass, willing to swing and miss and actually funny. Probably not a coincidence.

How did I get here? Oh right! The gravitational pull of how much Jerry Seinfeld sucks can really divert a line of thinking. Anyway, sometimes you hear a story and you think "this is too far, I can't stick with this," but it turns out a story about an English guy who ended up interacting with and advising the most powerful person in Japan in about 1600 is actually based on a real thing. The names and the details of events are changed in Shōgun as a work of fiction, but the veneer is a single-coat stain, no primer, so all the wood grain is visible underneath.

It's simultaneously an adaptation of James Clavell's 1975 novel and the 1980 TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain (I think all miniseries at the time were required to star Richard Chamberlain. Union rules). There's almost no way I saw it when it first came out (I'd have been 5 or 6) but I definitely saw it at some point in my youth on some rerun. My memory of it is just a few flashes, like the earthquake sequence and one exchange when Richard Chamberlain balks at being offered the company of a courtesan and, when asked if he'd prefer a male one, angrily denies being a "God-cursed sodomite," which struck me as funny at the time, even though it'd be much later that I'd understand the almost subliminal irony. Otherwise I remember it being very colorful and kind of goofy, a bit overcooked (an Orson Welles voice-over narration!) and very, very exotic.

And that's what the 2024 version has absolutely zero time for: exoticism, orientalism, fetishization. The costumes are still elaborate and period-evocative, but the presentation doesn't leave any room to see the non-western characters as anything other than characters. The 1980 miniseries famously did not translate any of the spoken Japanese, filtering all the understanding of the story through the eyes and ears of the whichever Europeans happened to be present, keeping the Japanese cast as inscrutable and explicably foreign as any 1980 production might be expected to. Everything passed through Richard Chamberlain's expertly blow-dried head before it got to us. In retrospect, imagining anyone or anything mitigating between an audience and its experience of Toshiro Mifune is insulting and wasteful, for everyone involved.

We're spared that kind of bullshit in 2024, so we get to experience Hiroyuki Sanada in the same role directly. It's clear from the beginning that Cosmo Jarvis' John Blackthorne is barely a pawn, more a lamprey on the side of a series of increasingly larger fish. Any control or even influence he feels is thwarted time and again by reveals (almost every episode) that his wants and needs, really any agency he begins to imagine for himself, is the blind end of a complicated political double-bluff at varying levels executed by other people who are too busy for his bullshit. His survival feels like a series of accidents, which to be fair, is probably pretty accurate for anyone over 25 in 1600 or thereabouts.

Sanada's Toranaga still gets very little revealed internality, but instead of being the victim of western writers not being able to imagine a Japanese person as a person, who he is comes out at a rush in one conversation toward the end of the final episode, with Tadanobu Asano's Yabushige, that finally contextualizes every move, every inflection, every subtle smirk or harsh word in the nine episodes preceding. Playing it tight ends in a satisfying payoff of the characterization built over the full 10 hours. It encapsulates literally every measurable story beat, further complicating every sacrifice and tragedy of an already knotty and bloody plot. Proportionally he doesn't have a ton of lines or screen time, but his choices and presence (or even the threat of) have to carry everything. Luckily, he remembers he's Hiroyuki Sanada, so he pulls it off with very little visible effort.

Sanada is complemented by the two other principle point-of-view characters, portrayed Jarvis and Anna Sawai. I don't know that I ever really came around on Jarvis' performance all the way, but the role is mostly "frustrated tourist," involving a lot of grumbling and stomping and shouting, primarily about the treachery of Catholics (which, you know, fair enough). Like Sanada, the true nature of his character's role is only really revealed at the end, where he's finally allowed to express a few more colors, and I felt a bit more sympathetic toward kind of a doormat character. Anna Sawai is great, probably the best audience analogue for centering us in the historical moment. It's a tribute to both the writing and her performance that she's not burdened with a bunch of expositional lectures to the smelly Englishman and instead is allowed to breathe life into the reality of what they are trying to convey through the suffering and endurance of this one woman in these circumstances, both high politics and the bloodily personal. It's the fact that she doesn't play the restraint that makes it all the more either chilly or tragic when the necessity to reel it in is imposed on her.

I could talk about this a lot more, but this is the second week in a row I'm reviewing I thing and I can really go on and on. For Shōgun, a lot rides on the writing, the production design and the performances of the leads, but the life of any story is in the secondary characters and this one really lucked out in Tadanobu Asano and Moeka Hoshi who end up embodying, respectively, the high intrigue and the personal stakes of the interweaving stories. It's like they're the Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander of this thing, but if you had replaced a dud like Jerry Seinfeld with someone sublimely good, like Hiroyuki Sanada. You'd have to had called that show something else, but I'm failing to see the downside there either.

The Weather Underground

Fallout

starring Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Frances Turner, Kyle MacLachlan, Leslie Uggams, Michael Emerson, Moises Arias and Sarita Choudhury

created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner (first time showrunner-ing, as far as I can tell, way to go, you two!)

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Spoilers for this show. Spoilers for Fallout games. These are subjects I know WAY too much about. Warning ends here. If you're mad after this, I don't really know how else to help you.

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This is going to surprise some of you, but I wasn't always the exact age I am now and I didn't always know all the stuff I already currently know. You see me in person or read what I write here, whatever, your first impression might legitimately be: a being out of time, preserved in amber, spontaneously generated fully formed by a world in need at the exact moment he was needed. To that I'd say: do better, World In Need. If you're going to manifest a savior in the form of a single conscious human, you should have aimed higher than one whose primary skills lie in an above-average typing speed and the ability to keep the rind in a single piece when peeling a citrus fruit. I know you're thinking "that's actually legitimately impressive if we're including limes, their skin is so thin..." and you're right of course, but it's not going to do a lot for the problems of, like, microplastics in the drinking water, that's my point.

No, my history as a human--and I apologize if this comes as a shock--includes previous years where I was younger than I am now, up to and inclusive of 1997, when there were probably already microplastics but nobody knew to freak out appropriately about them yet because we were all too busy playing a top-down 3D isometric post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game called Fallout. I don't want to assume everyone had the exact same experience of being 23 years old that I did that year, but here we are 27 years later talking about a television series based on that exact game (and its postcedent iterations) so I can confidently at least say I was far from the only one. And these were the days before the mainstreaming of gamer culture, so this is for the naysayers (mainly my wife at the time) who were certain the hours locked in a dark room in front of a humming CRT monitor would amount to nothing. But now look at me, in 2024, a testament to my own relentless self-belief and commitment and DEFINITELY NOT any kind of clinical psycho-chemical imbalance, qualifying me to over-write a blithely anonymous review piece in a cramped, unlit corner of the internet for you today. I'd like to thank my mom once again for never looking into Ritalin.

Since this is about the TV show, I won't break down for you the entire history of the intellectual property, the hands its gone through since the first iteration, the state of the franchise or the dispositions of the studios involved in developing, maintaining and releasing further games and their success/failure rates as stewards of the story. You can find loads of those all over the internet already and nearly 100% of them all end more or less the same way, with some version of "...and Todd Howard is a fussy little bitch." Boring!

There has also been plenty written about the now-out-of-favor binge-drop version of the show's release, with Amazon dropping all 8 episodes at once, something they haven't done in ages. Apparently a complicated state-of-the-human-condition expressionist long-form word-poem piece like Reacher needs an IV-drip weekly scheduled doling out, presumably so we can savor the minimalist character work of Alan Ritchson and whoever paints him that shade of bronze every shooting day. As luck would have it, however, I found myself severed from my (already minimal) sources of motivation or ambition by an invasive gut virus as Fallout came out, so I was in perfect position* to take the whole thing in.

I find myself in a similar state to where I was when Rings of Power debuted, Amazon's last high-budget crack at something very near and dear to the root geekness of my wee, misshapen heart. I was able to be somewhat sanguine about RoP in the moment (though I've become less charitable over time), but Tolkien and Fallout fandoms are two different things. For Tolkien, the books (literally) are closed. There's a finite amount to know since Tolkien died before I was born, so the keeping of the info feels precious, meticulous, lawyerly; there's a default pedantry to it constantly bristling against incoming offenses like mild inaccuracy or, worse, any indication of a level of interest below this type of grammarian's fanaticism.

With Fallout, it's a thing that has already passed through the hands of several studios, in several forms, with a lore and structure that necessarily grows, without a single source like Tolkien to devote one's imaginary and unasked-for service to. As a result, going into the show, I was ready for it to be what it was going to be: just another version of a many-versioned thing. As long as it wasn't, you know, shitty.

I didn't know the names Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner going in to the show, but I did know executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan from Westworld, which had the right spiritual vibe (especially in the final season) for a Fallout adaptation, so I was confident enough. Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten I didn't really know, but Walton Goggins always delivers, usually as bad guys, even when the role is generic and underwritten like in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Under a shit-ton of (mostly) practical make-up, he cuts a jagged and rough figure, forgiven for having sometimes inscrutable or overlapping motivations encounter to encounter because he's playing a literal survivor, (as everyone is to some degree) uncompromised by any code past "not being the one who dies" in any exchange. There's a freedom to the character and the performance that he only trades in at the very close of the last episode when he finds a main-story quest of his very own.

As far as faithfulness to the game series, there's a lot the series really gets right. The games all have basically two settings, the protagonist's present and the echo of the alt-history past that birthed it. It's always a retro-futurist atomic age America locked in resource wars with China some time post-World War II, with all the implied and amplified features therein like anti-communist paranoia and an unchecked capitalism completely untethered from scruples or ethics, where there is no line between product and consumer. Everything is fuel for the engine of wealth generation for a select few (selected for worthiness, of course, by their wealth in an uncomfortably prescient and present tautology), where even they realize too late (always too late) that there was always another dividing line between them and the corporations (like Vault-Tec, correctly centered here) reaping profit out of misery and inventing streams of revenue above even their heads. The difference between the show and real life, then, is basically null.

There's always been a dark symmetry between the hyper-gore of exploding heads and limbs of Fallout combat for entertainment and the in-game universe's rendering of human life as fodder for either immolation or needlessly cruel experimentation, the latter of which is the truth of literally every vault in every game, no matter how peaceful or idyllic it might seem. The show understands and translates this with utter fidelity.

It's what the show gets most right: the lies exist as rot under everything that seems foundational. The transactional nature of human life is exaggerated and extorted to extreme degrees, where humans are traded as slaves or food by other humans (or mutated versions thereof) in exchange for literally bottle caps (the in-game currency) from the long-dead Coca-Cola analogue and every single community, however large or small, trying to build some version of a civil society on an scale is constantly under threat, one stiff, slightly radioactive breeze away from disappearing from the featureless, sandblasted map.

These are the stories the show tries to tell, with Ella Purnell coming from her literally sheltered existence learning the grim realities of the struggling surface world and Aaron Moten's Maximus, no less naive for having lived in a different bubble, his made of brain-poisoning lead-lined steel topside.

The stories felt true to the spirit of the games, with a main trunk-quest for Purnell's Lucy deflected into tangents by side-quests and companion actions. The grand ending suffered for making itself kind of static and expository, largely wasting a hugely charismatic Surita Choudhury as the ultimately overhyped Moldaver and reducing Lucy to like four lingering close-ups of her tear-stained face while an airborne invasion and running firefight was supposedly going on all around.

The production design was gorgeous and nearly perfect. Plus as a SoCal person, I'm always biased towards stories set here. A Fallout story with zero super mutants or forced evolutionary virus (if you don't know what any of that means, just think of bits of the the Vault 4 storyline with the lab on Level 12, except with even more body horror and more exploding heads), but I guess that's what the potential season two is for: literally everything else I want and/or don't know I need yet. No pressure.

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*couch-mounted, supine, almost inaudibly moaning

Dirtball, Parte Deux

 

Dune: Part II

starring Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Stellan Skarsgard, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling, Austin Butler, Dave Bautista and Javier Bardem and also Christopher goddamned Walken

directed by Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Sicario, Arrival, the other Dune [not the 1980s one])

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It's been a few weeks since I saw this one, in a big ole IMAX theater with a bunch of strangers and my children, on a Thursday of its opening weekend. I don't know that it was the first time post-pandemic that we'd all rushed out together to see something in a crowd like this at the first opportunity, but I haven't spent a lot of time doing the math on it either. Even at the time, I was too wrapped up in the earnest, eager present-ness of the moment to realize I could have invested some money in the viral sandworm-themed popcorn bucket, that has now emerged as a force on the collectibles market. The joke is that it has an orifice you can take in any manner and by any angle you prefer, which is a nice change of pace as usually if you're spending $24.99 on what amounts to about eight cents' worth of popcorn, the only one being fisted is you.

We saw it in IMAX, as I said, so we paid the premium price for tickets, over $100 total for the four of us just to get in, before we'd even have considered the horny commemorative popcorn bucket. Sure, we got the pleasure of experiencing a film projected on essentially the wall of a blimp hangar, but as premium-price experiences go, IMAX is by far second choice to the "Dolby" theater at our local AMC. That's the one with the leather reclining seats that take up so much space, they impact capacity, which is probably 1/3 of the IMAX one. Sure, the seats are aging and kinda sticky, but still mostly function as designed. But the perception of scarcity and the fact that I'd waited too long (four days in advance! still already gone!) really put a damper on my viewing experience as I rocked my IMAX seat as far as it would deign, yielding about the same experience as an economy flight to Salt Lake City. Well, like that I guess if the airplane seat in front of you had a viewing screen embedded in the back of it large enough to defeat the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft, imperiling all on board. I haven't read up on the issue yet, but I guess there's a non-zero chance that's one of the problems with Boeing 737 MAX?

Movie hype in our culture in general is really at an all-time post-Avengers low. All the social and economic momentum of the Marvel/Star Wars compulsion phase of our collective being has waned to the point of being spent. People want to look to the abject failure of Madame Web as evidence, but none of the spinoff Sony Spider-Man-adjacent projects are a good indicator. Outside of the Venom ones, rescued by the inalienability of Tom Hardy, who demands to be reckoned with, they've all been memes factories. I haven't seen a frame of Kraven the Hunter, but we already know its entire life in the zeitgeist will be, like, two seconds of Russell Crowe from a trailer screaming "I've got a CRAVIN'!" in some half-Australian accent (as all his accents are) or something equally stupid. The half-life of these things are getting increasingly halved. You already forgot about the Jared Leto vampire one, don't lie.

This Dune sequel carried a little bit of juice, at least it felt like it did. Even adjusted for unflation,* $82.5 million for an opening weekend is a sad pittance, but in this economy and the fact that it's a three hour movie about being sad on/near/under sand, it sure feels like a hit!

Is it good? Reader, I thought it was. I walked out and the first thing I said when we breached the glass doors onto the Plaza of Retail in front of our mall cinema was "well, that was some confident film making." It is one thing this version shares with the David Lynch Dune from the 80s, something anyone adapting these wacko-ass stories has to bring to the table or risk getting straight-up sandwormed: unregulated chutzpah. If you aren't willing to get weird, this isn't the project for you. Nobody wants to see Zack Snyder's Dune. We already saw Zack Snyder's Star Wars and it somehow made George Lucas seem like Yorgos Lanthimos.

Villeneuve likes his sci-fi and has made a name with knotty, conceptual ideas and long stretches of pictures over dialogue in things like his Blade Runner sequel. There's room for feeling and experience, senses and sensation over exposition, leaning heavily on sound and production design to convey where words would just be in the dang way. Is there too much of that in a movie that nearly three hours long? Maybe. But while it feels heavy, it never feels burdened, even when it does hand-wave its way through some plot points at the end.

The cast continues to do what it does, centered mostly by two of the most gifted charisma merchants out there selling in Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem. Ferguson has less to do in this one than in the first, a bit more trapped by the circumstances of the means of survival for herself, her son (the Chalamet boy) and her very chatty unborn daughter, but is still the best thing to watch when the camera is watching her. Bardem is kind of doing something else while everyone is busy acting all around him: inhabiting, being, making the landscape and culture exist through him as a totem, a vessel, a thing all stories reliant on world-building require. He is, as my GenZ gamer kids say, carrying.

He sort of as to as it couldn't be Chalamet, the de facto lead of the thing, as his arc requires him to be stifled out of being by wading through the act of becoming for the entire thing. It works in the sense that you buy it in the end when this slight waif of a boy, who will never be physically anything other than he is, but still cuts a creditable figure as a war-leader and physical threat.

Austin Butler gets the showiest, weirdest part and leans in to make it showier and weirder, for which I will always be grateful. I was surprised and delighted by his doofy-ass choice to basically do a Stellan Skarsgard impersonation as a speaking voice (even more impactful since he rarely is asked to use it). It's not easy to make psychopathic alopecia with a knife into something worth watching, but he lands it.

The star, more than the first one, is the filmmaking itself. The sense of strangeness, isolation, grief are conveyed as much by the scope and scale of the way everything is presented (the landscape most of all) than by the actors. And then for some reason, right in the middle, an absolute batshit pre-war German expressionist film breaks out, an overwhelming audience pummeling in the form of public bloodletting, fascist-adjacent crowd hysteria and a stark alien-ness, all in an almost entirely monochrome palette that hasn't been tried in mainstream cinema really since Sin City. It's the primary task of good science fiction to insist to the audience "You are somewhere else," which this movie achieves here, both for the viewers and as a crucial dividing line for the plot. These Harkonnens are a different breed of cat; the kind you know will eat you if you die alone in your house. 

It's possible my positive response to the film is a reaction to a general restlessness in pop culture, where there doesn't seem to be anything coming to really lust after, in the healthy way people eager to be parted from their money can experience the experiences offered. Maybe it was the writer and actor strikes that we're paying for now, with a lull in new high-level offerings, making something this polished feel more satisfying than it is. It is, after all, the middle part of a trilogy, which is often something of an unfinished thought. And yes, I'd say it feels that way too. But given the absolute insanity of what is to come in the Dune story, maybe the instinct to keep the plot stuff as an afterthought is to give us a chance to breathe before we have to try to get our minds around the what-the-fuck-ness of what's to come.

Or maybe I'm just being too generous. Empire Strikes Back and Two Towers brought the thunder and they were middle movies. Literally zero trees in this one, let alone talking trees. Try harder, Frenchman.

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*After Rebel Moon and now that Jennifer Lopez one where she fights robots with another robot, the stay-at-home-ification of event movie watching is upon us. We're not adjusting for quality here (you heard me say Rebel Moon, right?), just budget and intent. $357 million worldwide in four days, we may never see your like again.