Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: OBEX

A charming tribute to the early era of video gaming

During cicada season in 1980s Baltimore, computing enthusiast and ASCII artist Conor, a loner who avoids leaving his house and whose only friend is his rescue dog, buys a new video game that promises an advanced immersive experience. After what seems at first to be a disappointing test run, it gradually becomes clear that the type of immersion he’s getting is of a rather extreme kind: the game’s villain starts invading his TV screens, his printer, his backyard and his dreams. The plot of the game blends into his life, capturing his neighbor, his dog, his childhood memories and his secret fears. Maybe it no longer matters whether he can make it back to reality, as long as he gets a happy ending?

Albert Birney’s independent film OBEX is full of what video game reviewer Aidan Moher affectionately likes to call “hot CRT action.” Conor’s life is experienced through screens, from the morning variety/news show that presides over his breakfasts to his home office computer to the karaoke list he uses to sing himself to sleep. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, we’re shown what he does for a living: he turns people’s family photos into ASCII art that he painstakingly types by hand with fearsomely timed precision. He digitizes dozens of people every day, not unlike what the video game will do to him.

In fact, there’s an even cleverer form of foreshadowing in the first act. The events in the movie coincide with the periodic emergence of adult cicadas from their years-long undergroun hibernation, and Conor watches on the TV a chef who suggests ways to cook cicadas. Conor notes the cosmic joke that it must be to spend that many years in quiet solitude and end up eaten on screen. That description, it turns out, also applies to Conor, who has set for himself a simple and steady routine of working at home until he gets trapped by a video game.

I was too young to know what it was like to live through the first years of the home computer, but OBEX succeeds at giving me the feeling that it captures that era faithfully and lovingly. The retro computer graphics are made with admirable attention to detail. Also, it’s a genius choice of sound design that the mating call of cicadas is echoed by the noise of TV static and the screech of a dot matrix printer. Writer/director Birney gives an endearing performance as Conor, establishing the character’s effortless likeability as a harmless weirdo. The choice to film in black and white brings to mind elements of Pi, another story of obsessive computing, as well as Pleasantville, another inexplicable journey into audiovisual media.

Inside the game, the quest is straightforward: there’s a demon lord terrorizing the kingdom, and the player is the chosen hero who shall slay him. To make matters more personal, the demon kidnaps Conor’s dog (or so it would seem; the ending retroactively blurs the line between the real world and the game world). What began as a paranoid psychological thriller becomes a horror chase, with human-sized cicadas, murderous skeletons and lots of squirting blood. The final battle between Conor and the demon is exactly as adorably cheesy as one might expect.

Alas, I preferred the first half of the movie, when the scenes are restricted to Conor’s house, to the second half, when he’s thrown into the world of the game and has to walk through a forest to find the villain’s lair. Birney displays far more expertise in camera placement and shot composition when he has to film in a set than in exterior shots. The causal sequence of events is also more solid during the first half as opposed to the almost freeform plotting of the fantasy quest. After Conor enters the game, he gains a sidekick who has a TV screen instead of a head, which means we never see the actor’s expressions. This forces Birney to carry the emotional weight of those scenes all on his own, which strains the enjoyability of the second half of the story.

OBEX manages to both push the right nostalgic buttons and have something to say about present-day computing. We think nothing of watching screens, but recently it’s the screens that are watching us. Are you on camera right now? Don’t take any risks. Smile.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Mother Mary

A song is a prayer is a spell is a confession is an exorcism is a spectacle is a revelation is a birth

From time to time, horror writer Gabino Iglesias reposts this litany on his Bluesky profile:

Many people have a book in them,
but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness,
cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain,
find the Blade of No One Made You Do This,
and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

Such is the view of art that permeates David Lowery’s film Mother Mary. The story sounds deceptively simple: Mary, a dance/pop diva in the middle of a creative crisis, returns to the workshop of her former costume designer, Sam, to apologize for breaking their professional partnership and beg for a new dress. Most of the film consists of this single conversation, like a one-act play that reveals entire inner lives as the two lead characters tear down their barriers and take off their veils. Within the space of a small interpersonal drama of wounded trust and unspeakable regrets, Mother Mary weaves its statement about what it takes to produce any genuine art.

Anne Hathaway’s performance as Mary, which includes providing her own voice for all the songs, balances, on one hand, an irresistible scenic presence capable of commanding the adoration of masses of fans (her character is presented as a world-class star on the level of Lady Gaga or Beyoncé), and on the other hand, when she’s off stage, a consuming sorrow that overwhelms her words and movements. Both facets of this character convey the same vulnerability, but it’s fascinating to see how differently she expresses it before a full stadium versus in private conversation with her artistic collaborator. Sam, as played by Michaela Coel, is like a bird with a broken wing, but a bird of prey with eyes that miss nothing and a deadly beak. She takes delight in the return of her muse, but can’t just shake off the years of hurt. This creation is going to be personally costly for both of them.

I often say on this blog that the best stories are those about stories. Mother Mary is something very close: art about art—barely a story, more a portrait that’s being painted as you watch. The emotional bond between Mary and Sam is kept tight, on the verge of snapping, under looks of compassion that shoot daggers and poisoned recriminations coated with sweetness. Mother Mary isn’t trying to convince you that artistic creation has to hurt; it just assumes that it already does. So it’s fitting that Mary shows up on a Thursday to request a dress for the Sunday: the exact timeframe for a full Via Crucis and resurrection.

In a film like this, filled to the brim with Catholic imagery, the fashion designer’s name, Sam Anselm, has to be read as an allusion to the 11th-century Burgundian monk and philosopher St. Anselm, whose method of theology put faith before reason: in his system, you first assent to the revealed truth and then seek to understand it. That’s how you’re meant to experience a film like Mother Mary. It defies logical analysis unless you first accept it on its terms. Instead of arguing for a point, what it’s doing is push out a raw feeling through a scream drowned in sobs.

The connections between the religious experience and the mass ecstasy of pop music have been noticed since before “Madonna” became a stage name. In keeping with the theme of death coming before resurrection, Mother Mary links the act of creation to a demand for bloody sacrifice, an interchange of equally sincere love and hate (think Black Swan, Farinelli, Amadeus). This pain is physically inscribed on the two protagonists: when she’s not performing, Mary is shown with plain, shoulder-length hair, evoking the image of a suffering Jesus, while Sam wears her hair in rigid, pointed locks, arranged like a crown of thorns. The turning point of clarity, when the nature and shape of the new dress is revealed, arrives by a succession of stigmata, confession, forgiveness, and angelic visitation. The film opens with a song about a burial and closes with a song about a cradle, in a moment marked visually on the screen by a line that literally goes full circle.

But then, the end credits conclude with a puzzling statement: a shot of a human skull on a shelf, a common motif in Western painting that retroactively casts the whole film as a vanitas piece. The traditional function of this motif is to remind the viewer that eternity outweighs worldly pursuits, and ultimately anything we build here turns to dust. And yet, Mother Mary exists. It’s a complete experience of rhythmic beats and color and dance moves and ritual and brightness, as if defying the verdict of time. All is dust, but some of that dust is glitter.

To the extent that Mother Mary is articulating someting, as opposed to inviting you to feel it, its verbalizable content is dressed in swirling, uncut drapes of black and crimson. Image here is paramount, which makes it easy for viewers more inclined toward tangible substance to dismiss this film as too enamored with its own aesthetic. Meanwhile, in the real world, Madonna has just released a new album, Confessions II, whose third song, “One Step Away,” contains this spoken monologue:

People think that dance music is superficial. But they’ve got it all wrong.
The dance floor is not just a place. It’s a threshold,
a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.

So go into Mother Mary as you go into a holy ceremony. You have my blessing.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Toy Story 5

A treasure trove of worthy ideas wasted in a movie that has no reason to exist

In Toy Story 5, our girl Bonnie receives a computer tablet that now consumes all her waking hours, and the toys are worried that they’re going to be abandoned. Jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. I think it’s time to ask in what year the Toy Story universe is set, because if anyone at Pixar has kids, they should have noticed that the preoccupations explored in this newest film in the franchise have been discussed and analyzed to death since literally the last century, and this plot adds no fruitful arguments to the conversation.

Traditional toys worried that they’ll be replaced by a newer, shinier electronic toy was the plot of the first Toy Story, back in 1995. Just one year later, the world saw the launch of Tickle Me Elmo, the Tamagotchi, the Game Boy Pocket, the Nintendo 64, the Palm Pilot, and the Yahoo Kids portal. Then, in 1997, came the Tetrix Robotics Kit and the Digimon (the virtual pets, not yet the TV show). And in 1998 came Betty Spaghetty, LEGO Ninja, Imaginext, and the Furbies. All that happened before there even was a Toy Story 2, which had nothing to say about the Tamagotchi and its cousins.

So who is the intended audience of Toy Story 5? If it’s the nostalgic fans of the first film, it’s absurdly late to say anything about electronic toys to viewers who already moved on from the death of their Tamagotchis. If it’s today’s children, this film has nothing useful to say to them either, given that what they have to deal with is Minecraft giving them malware that can steal their data, Fortnite pressuring them to spend more and more on loot boxes, Roblox serving them on a silver platter to pedophiles, and ChatGPT teaching them how to kill themselves. This movie makes a big gesture of concern for the dangers of digital entertainment for children, but it shows no awareness of what those dangers are.

I’m not saying that the Toy Story franchise has used up its potential. But it needs to make a more serious effort to stay relevant. For example, toys in this universe are cursed with immortality, accumulating lists of past owners across generations. So there are much more interesting stories that could be told with this lore. The new gadget in Toy Story 5 is a supposedly kid-friendly tablet computer, and because toys have sentience, this computer can take its own initiative to use its browser, email, chat or camera functions, acting as an agentic AI without constraints. With that character there’s a lot that could say about today’s AI craze.

Or consider the small army of Buzz Lightyear dolls that are set loose on the world at the start of the movie and eventually learn that the sole purpose for their existence is to play with kids. Why can’t one of those toys wonder whether maybe there’s more to life? Barbie, of all things, did a deeper exploration of the meaning of a toy’s life than Toy Story 5 (and the fascinating questions raised by Forky from Toy Story 4 are completely forgotten in 5).

It seems that toys in the Toy Story universe are expected to resign themselves to a life of unquestioned subservience, much like the robots in Star Wars. Jessie the Cowgirl, who takes a more central role in 5, laments the fact that children grow up and forget their old toys (and makes the laughably boomer-coded observation that those new digital gadgets are making them grow up too quickly), but even after going through an extended reflection on the pain of repeated abandonment, she doesn’t question her assigned function, and even considers it an honor to be used as a literal plaything for an unknown number of lifetimes.

The core ethos of Toy Story may be the heart-warming “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” but friendship happens between equals, and the dynamic between a child and a toy that can never reveal it’s actually sentient is far from equal. All the fanciful imaginary adventures that the toys enact are decided by the child, with the toys forced to go along with them. Once you really give it some thought, where’s the fun, let alone the honor, in such a life?

Toy Story 5’s solution to Bonnie’s difficulty in adjusting to digital culture is to find her a new human friend who also likes traditional toys and doesn’t bully her on a public chat. That’s a more reasonable narrative choice than a flat “machines bad,” but it implies that a whole swath of “kids bad” is left unexamined. Sure, hurray for the handful of kids still interested in playing with toys, who would otherwise face the existential horror of immortality inside a shoe box, but when it comes to the many, many more kids whose playtime consists of interminable sessions of Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever it is that today’s kids are into, the movie just gives up on them.

The safety of children in the digital world is a very real concern, and Toy Story 5 doesn’t have anything to say on the matter that rises above tired Black Mirror-level platitudes. If you want a good animated movie about the absurdities of electronic life, try Ralph Breaks the Internet. That one’s from 2018, and the points it makes feel more relevant than this year’s Toy Story 5. Try to keep up, Pixar.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Microreview: The Nightland Express by J. M. Lee

A journey across the dividing lines of American society

In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.

Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.

Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.

The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.

There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.

The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Disclosure Day

It’s not about the power of whistleblowing. It’s about the power of movies

The common refrain I keep seeing in most reviews of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is that the 79-year-old-director is too behind the times if he believes that showing people the truth will suffice to fix the world. Those complaints don’t give Spielberg enough credit. It’s too literal to read Disclosure Day as a movie about secret alien files. It’s like reading Inception as a movie about psychonautic espionage. There’s no way Spielberg isn’t aware that we’ve fallen into a cynical, post-truth world, and yet this is the movie he chooses to make at this point in history. I suspect the guy knows what he’s doing, and he knows that, precisely because we’ve stopped placing any trust in truth, this movie’s plea for unafraid openness to each other is the message we need to hear.

Moreover, I think Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s Inception: it’s his personal statement on what moviemaking means to him. (Yes, I know The Fabelmans exists. But that one merely tells us his point. This one shows us.)

It would be one thing if Disclosure Day had stuck to the character of Daniel, the hacker who steals a trove of secret government videos that prove aliens are real, and just followed him on his race against time to make the files public. That would be the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times, the kind of movie the haters believe they’re criticizing. But the message of Disclosure Day is not “Our problems would disappear if the truth were exposed.” What it’s trying to say is, rather, “Our problems would be seen more clearly if the truth were received.” That’s where the character of Margaret comes in. Healing the world takes more than having someone brave enough to make others see; you also need someone brave enough to do the seeing.

The power of seeing has been a constant in Spielberg’s work, most obviously noticeable in his signature move of framing a character’s awestruck face. In a couple scenes of Disclosure Day, which have been unfairly mocked by reviewers, a character who is not very well hidden manages to sneak away from the bad guys who are looking for them. That’s not a mistake in scene composition; it’s fully intentional. In this story, what marks the bad guys as bad guys is that they don’t want to see. In a movie that is so explicitly about moviemaking, that’s got to be the closest there is to a definition of evil, and that’s why the two heroes in this movie are one who shows and one who sees.

In parallel with Daniel’s quest, we follow Margaret, who after an encounter with a mysterious bird gains the power to read into people’s souls, speak in their language, understand their deepest truths. What is happening is that she has become the ideal moviegoer. Margaret sees a stranger and instantly understands their whole life. That’s what happens to you when you sit at the movie theater. Later, she gains the power to show people hidden parts of themselves. If a movie is well made, that’s also what should happen to you at the movies: the story should tell you something about you. In the most symbolically charged sequence of Disclosure Day, Margaret visits a replica of her parents’ house, which is for all purposes a movie set, so she can relive a repressed memory of a childhood encounter with aliens. She’s watching a movie that turns out to be about herself.

That’s how Spielberg feels about movies. He’s showing you a story he made up for his own reasons, but he hopes it reveals a truth about you.

There’s a scene in the middle of Disclosure Day where Daniel shows his girlfriend a sample of the files he stole. If you pay attention, you’ll see that an opening in the wall lets a bit of sunshine enter the room from behind her head. It looks just like a movie projector. That’s the Spielberg formula in a nutshell: let me show you something that will change your life. He’s been saying this, in various ways, throughout his career. In his adaptation of Minority Report, people are judged based on movies made about them (in the original novelette, the reports were written). In the night scenes of Jurassic Park, the only sources of light are the heroes’ handheld lanterns that expose the hidden dangers, effectively movie projectors that create the next bit of action.

In Jurassic Park, the idea was: let me show you… a simulation of life. In A.I., it was: let me show you… a simulation of love. In Minority Report, it was: let me show you… a simulation of you. And in Disclosure Day, the trick is turned on itself: let me show you… what’s on the other side of the simulation. Spielberg has already said plenty about the power of seeing. Now he’s trying to tell you that he sees you, and he hopes to provoke in you the no less transformative experience of feeling seen.

Disclosure Day opens at a wrestling match, a quintessential simulation if we’ve ever seen one. And the very first shot is a boot stomping on the camera. Of course Spielberg knows there are dangers to the power of seeing. In Jurassic Park, you’re safe as long as you’re invisible to the T-Rex. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hubris of trying to see God is what kills you. In Minority Report, your eyes are the key to how the state controls you. In Disclosure Day, the villain finds perverse uses for an alien machine that (quite literally) lets him see through someone else’s eyes.

Many have called Spielberg naïve for making a movie about his belief that movies can save us. That critique is not only unfair, but also logically self-defeating: if he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be making movies in the first place. How else would any sincere art exist? It’s only fitting that the ending of Disclosure Day has the entire planet turned into a movie theater, all of humankind joined in the experience of seeing something that makes them feel seen. Is that schmaltzy? Very well, let it be schmaltzy. It’s not like jaded cynicism has taken us anywhere worth being at.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Microreview: Open Sorcery by Rob Sheely

The concept is fantastical, but the execution does not compute

In Open Sorcery we’re introduced to a world where history proceeded exactly as in ours until the early 20th century, when it was discovered that engraving microscopic symbols on gemstones could work magic. The catch is that arranging those symbols in a useful sequence follows extremely complex rules of grammar, so by the 1920s an entire industry of prestidigital composition has emerged, which ends up looking pretty much like the real world’s software industry. In this setting, magic needs programming languages, and painstaking debugging, and antivirus wards, and user-friendly interfaces, and periodic system updates, and intellectual property laws, and the heroic abnegation of help desks. Spellbooks serve the same function as personal computers, and sticking gemstones on a book’s spine works like inserting a flash drive to load its contents. Of course, the formatting in the gemstone needs to be compatible with the spellbook’s operating system. If you want a net connection, you need to attach a gold thread from your spellbook to a ley line, unless your spellbook happens to be wireless-capable. And if your spells somehow fail to load, the universally recommended first step is to turn your spellbook off and back on.

Open Sorcery is a frustrating read. Half of the time, it feels like it’s building up to a clever satire of the small everyday annoyances of modern life, but the other half of the time, it feels like the story is a pretext for the author to settle very specific grievances with the software industry with the names changed: marketing executives who overpromise, clients who don’t understand what they’re asking of programmers, middle managers who make their insecurities everybody else’s problem, a workplace culture that has normalized casual abuse and ritual hazing, abusive monopolies, mealy-mouthed PR fixers, invasive advertising, and all the other usual charms that come from the intersection of a creative profession with corporate bean-counting. Paradoxically, the novel’s description of how magic has integrated itself into people’s daily routine resembles real life’s digital oversaturation in such detail that its world ends up feeling just like ours, and the sense of fantasy gets lost in the process. Mentally replace every “spell weaver” with “graphic interface designer,” “wrist amulet” with “smartphone,” “bubble of isolation” with “firewall,” “rhyming verse” with “line of code,” or “binding” with “compiling,” and you’ll get an idea of how the world’s logic works.

The novel shows it was written with genuine enthusiasm, because its gimmick is undeniably original and funny, but the author is more acquainted with the minutiae of software programming than with the current trends in the fantasy genre. In the software studio magic house where most of the action happens, the appallingly toxic mistreatment of an unpaid intern is treated like a venerable tradition of every programmer’s career, and his senior colleagues seem to have never heard of worker solidarity. At one point we learn that enchanted gemstones can be directly plugged to the human body as a nasty form of substance abuse, and the plot has zero compassion for the addicted. The female characters have no personality (the only exceptions are Seductress, Caretaker and Nag), and one main character’s tragic backstory amounts to Fridged Wife. And the villain’s plan, which is basically your classic cyberpunk rebellion against the big tech monopolies, is flatly dismissed as extremist without further discussion. Overall this is a heavily conservative story, where the heroes are eager to preserve a status quo that couldn’t be more obviously broken. This is a version of the 1920s with the life-changing technological wonders of the 2020s but somehow the same social attitudes of the 1920s. It’s a pity, because I’m a big fan of magic systems with rules, but this is a case where the author gave too much thought to the concept and not enough to creating a world that feels alive, or characters worth rooting for, or a story with awareness of its own themes and a stance to take on them.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

Reference: Sheely, Rob. Open Sorcery [Ferret Godmother Press, 2022].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: The Sheep Detectives

A lovely whodunit that could have gone farther with its material

I’m torn baatween two imperatives. On one hand, the movie adaptation of a novel should baa able to stand on its own, and therefore baa analyzed apart from the source material. If I follow that line of thought, the movie The Sheep Detectives is an adorable cozy comedy with an interesting message about the value of growing from painful memories. On the other hand, the only reason I wanted to watch this movie was baacause I loved the novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann and its sharp observations about the dark facets of the human heart. If I follow that line of thought, the movie does the novel a disservice by sanding down all its sharp edges and turning a smart literary experimentation into a more inoffensive family-friendly story.

Such is the conundrum baafore me.

The novel and the movie share a simple central plot: when the shepherd George turns up dead one morning, his sheep decide in their baareavement that they will investigate the truth of what baafell him and who was truly baahind it. As it happens, George used to read crime thrillers aloud to his sheep, so they know a thing or two about detective work. It’s somewhat harder to do when you don’t have opposable thumbs, but they manage to strategically eavesdrop on the right human conversations to uncover what happened. Baawilderingly, the movie manages to change absolutely everything else: the manner of his death, the reasons, the suspects, and the entire flow of the investigation. The version of George in the novel isn’t the impeccably kind caretaker shown in the movie; he took some nasty secrets to the grave. Plus the individual sheeps’ personalities are far more varied, and there is assorted commentary about small town life and organized religion. There’s drug smuggling, adultery, and additional dead people. The movie is baareft of all that.

And yet I know that none of it should matter, baacause the quality of a movie adaptation has nothing to do with its fidelity to the original. A movie’s only duty is to baa a good movie on its own. And on its own, it’s well made: the jokes are effective, the talking animals look realistic, and the new version of the mystery is compelling enough, with the requisite confusions and detours to mislead the sheep, who then have to race against the clock baafore the wrong person is sent to jail. What’s curious is that the script heavily expands on some elements of sheep society that get mere passing mentions in the novel, such as the widespread prejudice against lambs born in winter, the baalief that a sheep’s fate in the afterlife is to baacome a cloud, and most notably, their ability to willingly forget sad memories. Lo and baahold, this is one edge the movie does have over the novel: whereas the novel uses the sheep as a device to look at the baafouled defects of humanity through an unconventional lens, the movie is more interested in developing the sheep themselves as characters.

As much as the movie sanitizes the story for child viewers, it can’t sweep the core plot point of the shepherd’s death baaneath the rug. So it needed to find a way to tell a story about death while staying family-friendly. That’s where the sheep’s forgetting power comes into play. Sheep are traditionally a symbol of innocence, but they only stay innocent baacause they make themselves forget anything too distressing. The movie makes it the measure of a sheep’s personal growth when she chooses to not forget her shepherd—even after seeing his corpse, even after finding ugly facts about the sheep farming industry that challenge her religious ideas about the Great Baayond. And that’s a precious lesson for the child viewers: baaware the temptation to run away from hard truths. Life has some very sad moments, and it does you no good to pretend they’re not real.

The Sheep Detectives executes baafittingly the modest job it sets for itself as a cozy comedy, although I still baagrudge it for not staying closer to the novel’s darker tone, which is especially ironic in view of the movie’s message that you shouldn’t avoid the unpleasant thoughts that from time to time baaset all of us. The novel was certainly not aimed at children, but even in a family-friendly adaptation, they don’t deserve to baa kept in baanightedness about the baadaggled parts of life. I’m not trying to baasmirch the movie’s quality or baalittle its achievements, I baaseech you to please baalieve me, but with such a strong source material, I think that this time it’s appropriate to baamoan the missed opportunity, the wasted potential of what could have baan.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Scarlet

Something is rotten in the state of human hearts

If I had known in advance how the anime film Scarlet would handle its topic of obsessive revenge, I would have made this post a Double Feature with Redux Redux, because both stories use the devices of their respective genres in a visceral manner to demonstrate the self-destructive poison that is revenge.

Scarlet is a gender-flipped retelling of Hamlet that sends the princess of Denmark to an endless limbo when she accidentally drinks a cup of poison sent by her treacherous uncle before she had a chance to avenge the late king. In that barren landscape of sorrow and regret, she learns that her uncle has also died, so she embarks on a quest to walk across the vast land of the dead to find him and make him pay.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Prince Hamlet should have been more decisive in carrying out his revenge plan, Scarlet answers that that was never the issue. Being quicker to punish his uncle would still have played into the narrative conventions of a tragedy, and the thing about tragedies is that the only person you succeed at punishing is yourself. In that intermediate realm between Earth and the Great Beyond, Princess Scarlet fights waves of assassins sent to make her spirit dissolve into nothing. By willingly adopting the role of tragic heroine, by refusing to abandon her one-woman war, Scarlet has built her own hell.

Interestingly, there’s an element of cosmic retribution at play too, a remote, speechless character who takes the form of a celestial dragon and imparts punishment without the distortion of human passions. This addition to Hamlet lore makes Scarlet resemble the Greek Oresteia, where the impartial, impersonal judgment of the state is introduced to put an end to the self-perpetuating cycle of bloodshed that always results from private vendettas. However, in the case of Scarlet, this replacement is not associated with the state but with a more universal sense of justice, with death as the great equalizer.

Learning this lesson takes Scarlet a long, painful journey over beautifully designed scenery that almost steals the spotlight from the story’s heavy themes. We follow Scarlet through deserts and mountains and oceans that take the breath away with their sublime immensity. Even if the plot’s structure sometimes feels too streamlined and easy, the level of visual artistry more than makes up.

Because the other side has a loose relationship with time, Scarlet is joined by a random newcomer: a recently dead paramedic from present-day Japan, who strangely insists on bandaging every lost soul he meets, including Scarlet’s enemies. Even as she slashes and stabs her way through the land of the dead, he follows close behind, providing comfort to those you’d think are beyond hope. His example turns out to be crucial to her choices at the end of the film: the thing at stake is not only the punishment for the usurper king, but the fate of Denmark. Through this paramedic, Scarlet gets a glimpse of a time (which from her standpoint is the future) when people no longer butcher each other in eternal spirals of hatred. This being a Japanese production, it’s easy to perceive a subtextual allusion to the discussion on the remilitarization of the Japanese state. Can we have a future without more bloodshed? Can we escape this interminable journey between corpses and vengeful spirits?

We don’t have to renounce the entire idea of justice. But if death comes for all, it doesn’t need our help. We can face evil, even punish evil, without punishing ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled to another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

A serial killer took Irene’s daughter. So Irene killed him. And then she traveled o another universe, hoping to find her daughter alive. But there, too…

Irene is no longer the person she knew herself to be. In the film Redux Redux, one of the best science fictional examples of literalizing a feeling I’ve ever seen, Irene is stuck in an endless cycle of hatred, ruminating on her unprocessed grief and pursuing the same quest thousands of times because she feels unable to return to her own life. In every universe she’s visited, her heartbroken counterpart has committed suicide, so she believes (there’s the classic Lie that a protagonist typically believes at the start of a story) that repeating the perpetual hunt for the killer is the only alternative she has left.

In general, this film delivers information in a carefully measured manner. The editing at the beginning, which repeats Irene’s vengeance in a rapid-fire sequence, seems on first watch to be telling a time travel story, and the script is comfortable with letting us sit with that confusion until it’s the proper moment to reveal the actual story.

The multiverse-crossing routine Irene has established for herself mirrors what real life looks like for someone caught in a self-destructive pattern. She no longer keeps a job or friends. She has no other task beyond chasing the killer and making him pay again and again. She has brief flings with the same cute guy from a grief support group in every universe, much like someone may serially hook up with thousands of casual partners looking for the same ideal in all of them.

It’s only when Irene unexpectedly rescues the killer’s next victim that it begins to feel conceivable for her to live for something other than anger.

This other character, Mia, gives Irene a mirror for her own situation. She’s only a kid, but Mia has been bounced from one foster home to another; jumping between universes isn’t any weirder for her. She’s eager to join Irene’s bloodthirsty campaign against the serial killer, and that’s what finally makes Irene realize that the life she’s leading isn’t something she’d want to inflict on anyone. For the first time in too long, she has a reason to stop. The problem is Mia doesn’t want to.

Redux Redux makes efficient use of its minimal special effects to keep its multiversal plot at just the right measure of complicated. Most of the time, it looks like a standard noir tale of self-perpetuating violence, but its allegory for unresolved trauma is never far from view. In the middle of its runtime we follow a side quest that gives us a quick glimpse of a larger underground community of multiversal travelers, but fortunately, it doesn’t draw too much attention away from the central problem about Irene and Mia.

If some horrible harm has been done to you, perhaps you’ve spent your waking hours thinking of the countless gruesome ways you’d like to take revenge. Redux Redux is saying: if you could really do that, if you could enact all your fantasies of getting even, it would destroy you. It would consume your life and leave nothing, and the people who make a living from fueling that obsession are the last people you should trust. And if you find yourself already down that road, saving someone else from it may show you your own way out.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

With much improved visual effects over the 1997 film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, which for better or worse will be the unavoidable point of comparison, the Peacock show The Miniature Wife takes full advantage of its outlandish premise to shed literal and metaphorical light on the ways even a modern, educated, independent career woman can be made to feel small in her marriage.

On one hand we have Leslie, a physicist who studies the miniaturization of matter to boost the potential of world agriculture. The potential of this technology is limitless, but his company has been in financial difficulty after the failure of his earlier project, a variety of transgenic tomato. If he can’t win over a promising new investor, he can lose all he’s been working for. On the other hand we have Leslie’s wife, Lindy, a writer who struck gold with a virally successful novel 20 years ago and has been unable to write anything else since. When a series of misunderstandings results in the misattribution to her of a short story actually written by her student, she has to reckon with the reasons why she wants fame and figure out whether there’s anything that matters to her more than public adoration.

Leslie and Lindy come from less than ideal families that perversely shaped them into a perfect match for each other. Leslie’s mother crafted a bubble of normalcy to counteract his father’s all-controlling tyranny, so he grew up knowing only a glossy, shiny appearance of happiness. Lindy‘s mother basically resents her for existing, so she grew up attached to her father’s tall tales that provide the feeling, but not the substance, of happiness. So here’s where we are today: Leslie is a self-centered manchild who’s never had to stomach hard truths; Lindy is a raw, open wound who’s exhausted of a lifetime of hard truths. What has sustained their marriage this long is that they give each other exactly the excuse they need to not grow.

So it shouldn’t surprise that they view their respective professional advancements as a zero-sum game where only one of them can be successful at a time. Lindy’s novel already won a Pulitzer; now Leslie is hoping for a Nobel, and that impossible quest has sucked all the energy in their relationship and kept Lindy’s writing career in limbo for the last 20 years. The escalating mutual resentments come to a head in a quick comedy of errors that results in Lindy reduced to pocket size and trapped in a dollhouse while public opinion erupts around the new short story wrongly published under her name. Added complication: Leslie hasn’t figured out how to safely bring tiny things back to normal size. Another complication: Lindy has been having an emotional affair with one of Leslie’s employees. Worst complication of all: as soon as Lindy is returned to normal size, she intends to leave Leslie, and it’s clear she’s in the right here. She’s had enough of being ignored, taken for granted, minimized. The plot of the show is a clever way of making her feelings literal and showing what it’s like for a wife to feel small.

What follows for the rest of the season is a hilarious parade of slapstick jokes about surviving life in miniature. Lindy wrestles a fly, befriends a plastic astronaut, seeks refuge in Christmas decorations, turns toothpicks and cotton swabs into versatile weapons, struggles to operate a touchscreen phone, and masters the uses of dental floss as a climbing rope. A recurring gag, that never gets old, is to see her speak into a wireless earbud as a (for her) gigantic phone receiver. Elizabeth Banks as Lindy hits the right notes as simultaneously terrified and exasperated at the injustice of her situation, while the usually more dramatic Matthew Macfadyen as Leslie reveals a charming sense of comedic timing in the role of a clueless genius.

Despite the great performances (watch out for Adam Capriolo’s brief but stellar moments in a fascinatingly amoral tertiary role), the writing of character is where The Miniature Wife came close to losing me. Sometimes it comes off as a stretch that these two are able to wound each other so deeply and still come out stronger (Is that something neurotypicals do? They really get so angry they yell irrevocably hurtful things they didn’t mean? If so, how on Earth do they get any relationship to work?). It’s a truism of scriptwriting that character is revealed by choices made in extreme circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine a more extreme test of the strength of a marriage. Where do you find the maturity to give up the mirage of achievement for a true measure of inner development? What will finally push you to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of your significant other? For most couples, one hopes it doesn’t take molecular reshuffling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

Season 1 of the Hulu post-apocalyptic mystery show Paradise left me with rather tepid expectations for whichever continuation the story would have. The recently released season 2 has been a happy surprise with deeper characterization, tighter worldbuilding and more cohesive plotting.

A big part of the reason for this improvement is the change in focus toward life outside of the city-sized survival bunker where season 1 was set. Now that our protagonist Xavier has found evidence that his wife survived the fall of civilization, we follow his quest to the coordinates she sent from a makeshift radio transmitter. On the way there, his small airplane crashes, but he’s rescued by Annie, a former medical student who happened to be working as a tour guide at Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis when the world-ending disaster happened. Annie’s presence on screen is brief, but she turns out to indirectly play a major role in subsequent events.

It’s impressive how well delineated Annie’s character gets to be during the short time we spend with her. The neglectful way she was raised left her avid for structure, which makes her a good fit for a job where she has to recite the same script in the same order every day. This personal history equips her well for the boring routine of surviving alone, but after a few years without human contact, its resumption takes huge effort and patience.

Which brings us to Link, another character newly introduced in this season. He leads a loose band of survivalists who want to invade the titular Paradise bunker, but first he has a short encounter with Annie that results in pregnancy. The flashbacks about Link reveal that he used to research advanced quantum physics, which is connected to the vaguely alarming weirdness that starts to gradually creep over the story. I won’t spoil the details, but if you thought that Samantha, the over-prepared creator of the bunker, was a bit too paranoid about securing every avenue of survival, in this season we discover that those measures were nowhere near paranoid enough—she has backup plans inside backup plans, and the flashbacks about those preparations fill the gaps about how she became the ruthless control freak we know her as.

As you can surmise by now, the show continues its tradition, firmly established in the previous season, of delivering half the story via flashbacks. This is a story about saving the future, but its version of the future is never free from the pervasive, life-defining influence of the past. In fact, this time the flashbacks are used more effectively, with a more solid connection to the themes of each episode. Whereas they sometimes intruded in the flow of narration in season 1, here they serve a more intentional function.

The main plot threads of this season have to do with Samantha finding her way back to a dominant position in the bunker microcosmos state after the political shocks that ended season 1, Xavier making it alive to the remote place where his wife has been living after the disaster, and the common people in the bunker coming up with clandestine ways to oppose the authoritarian turn in their government. A theme that unifies much of the plot is motherhood: just as Annie, as well as our favorite psycho murderer Jane, were shaped by the destructive parenting style of their respective mothers, the survival bunker is an incarnation of the extreme opposite: Samantha’s obsessive urge to protect her children at literally any cost. The healthy equilibrium is to be found in Annie herself, whose wish to protect her daughter has to be coupled to her need to trust that Xavier will be a good caretaker for her; and in Xavier’s wife Teri, who unexpectedly finds herself in the position of a substitute mother to a lost child, and whose judgment of character with regard to motherly tasks gives Xavier an accurate hint about someone’s secret sinister side.

The emphasis on motherhood is related to a persistent argument made through the season: the end of the world will not be survived by rough macho warriors, but by compassionate caretakers.

Sadly, a few key characters from season 1 are greatly diminished this time, in particular Xavier’s children, Secret Service agent Nicole Robinson, and former First Son Jeremy Bradford, who get basically no inner development and are reduced to plot levers. Even Jane Driscoll, the fascinating secondary antagonist of season 1, ceases to be interesting in season 2 after all the mystery about her is lost.

The story ends with another cliffhanger: a new mission for Xavier to try to fix the world permanently with the help of the quantum weirdness that the season slowly develops. This means that season 3 will, once again, focus away from the bunker, which has already proved to be the right choice. The future trajectory of this show seems bound to eschew political drama in favor of world-breaking technobabble, certainly a tough target to aim for, but if the writing of season 2 is any indication, we can trust that this story is in good hands.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Project Hail Mary pulls off a disturbing misdirection trick

Ryan Gosling’s pretty face and inoffensive goofiness will keep your mind off the billions of deaths happening offscreen

It’s the kind of clever switcheroo you only notice in hindsight. After leaving the theater with a spring in your step, feeling uplifted about the survival of a faceless rocky alien spider (a flawless masterpiece of puppetry that should get its own Oscar category), you start piecing together the plot pieces that Project Hail Mary frustratingly left scattered between flashbacks, and it finally dawns on you: Hey, the buddy comedy was fine, and Ryan Gosling is always a delight, but wasn’t the human species supposed to be facing extinction while we were having wholesome, family-friendly fun in space? Didn’t that mysterious German lady talk of losing something like a quarter of the world’s population in the best case scenario?

When the movie starts and our hero Ryan Gosling Ryland Grace wakes up with amnesia, his ship has already been traveling for several years since the discovery that the Sun was losing brightness; the wars over food must have devastated Earth in the meantime. The script merely alludes to the stakes and promptly shifts its attention to Grace teaching his new alien pal to dance and bump fists. The quick pacing of the scenes in space doesn’t give us time to reflect on the mass panic and the disintegration of society that must be going on while, a dozen light-years away, Grace sings karaoke. The movie is very effective at what it’s doing. It’s its choice of what things to do that lands as strange.

The problem Grace is trying to solve is that some strange microbes are eating the Sun, and with the diminished energy output, human agriculture is doomed to collapse. It turns out that other stars within the visible portion of the universe are being consumed too, except, for unknown reasons, the star Tau Ceti, which still keeps its normal brightness. The only hope (the titular “Hail Mary”) for the survival of life on Earth is to send a ship to Tau Ceti to figure out how it’s avoiding the plague of star-killing microbes. But while the ship gets there, which even with a miraculous superpotent fuel is going to take some years, Earth is left to fend for itself as best it can. This is a profoundly intense drama that the movie inexplicably insists on looking away from. Don’t think of the entire nations fractured by starvation—hey, isn’t this spider alien cute?

For roughly half of the runtime, we watch Grace deal with his amnesia and the unexpected presence of a second ship sent from a planet facing the same problem. Here we have potential elements for great character work, but the movie is so obsessed with making us feel good that we don’t see the full impact of the situation on Grace’s psyche. We eventually learn he was forced to come on this trip without enough fuel to return to Earth, effectively killing him in the hope that he’ll find a way to save the whole species. This could have provided a prime opportunity to explore important questions, like the universal human experience of disorientation at our state of thrownness into the world, and the comfort it brings us to find fellow travelers to figure out this mystery with, but this movie is too afraid of thinking sad thoughts. The unmissable allegory for the human condition (i.e. we open our eyes without any instructions, destined already for death) is swept aside for the good old art of visual spectacle.

On that front there’s nothing to complain about: Project Hail Mary looks breathtaking. But there’s a noticeable disconnect between the parts of the plot that desperately pull in opposite directions, the background tragedy of a world falling to pieces and the foreground coziness of a likeable guy learning to make a friend. There’s a bare outline of character growth, going from an initial state in which Grace was against going on the mission because he didn’t feel goodhearted enough to sacrifice his life for anyone, to a culmination state in which Grace has met someone he’s willing to sacrifice himself for. But the magnitude of that growth gets lost amid the movie’s anxious hyperfocus on vibes.

Project Hail Mary ought to carry itself with more weight, be more aware of the complex themes it has on its hands. But every time it starts getting too close to seriousness, it runs back to the reassurance of just having a good time at the movies. You’re not here to think too deeply about the obvious implications of the story; you’re here to watch the impossibly handsome Ryan Gosling give you one of his trademark comforting smiles. Here, have another joke. Forget about the hard truths of cosmic loneliness. Just gape at how gorgeous the stars look. Are you not entertained?

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.