Review: Salem's Lot (2024)

This movie rushes through its vampire-infested, small Maine town, eschewing exposition in favor of trying desperately to come off as a Mike Flanagan project

Spooky season is upon us! And Max has finally released its modern retelling of Stephen King's classic vampire novel. Interestingly, this movie was shot in 2021, but it's only just now being released. Something definitely happened in the interim, as there are glaringly huge holes in the storytelling—release the 3-hour director's cut now, cowards! After all, the novel on which Salem's Lot is based is incredibly dense, and the 1979 TV-movie version (directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre) was 2 episodes long and 183 total minutes.

The plot

Ben Sears, a famous writer, has returned to his hometown in Maine to get inspiration for a new book—specifically the old spooky Marsten House. Vampires start showing up, however, and quickly the locals all begin to get turned into bloodsucking, ghoulish creatures of the night. Ben teams up with a shockingly competent child, a local woman, a doctor, and a high school teacher, and together they battle the undead and try to convince the cops to do something.

What works

This movie is slick, and it definitely has some very cool practical effects re: vampire faces. The overall vibe is fun and spooky, and the way crosses light up when vampires are near is very cool. Lewis Pullman—most recognizable as Bob from Top Gun: Maverick—anchors the film very well. Fun note: While watching, I was like, "Man, he looks like Bill Pullman! Wait...Pullman..." then I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, Lewis is his son!

What doesn't

Unfortunately, this new retelling is almost all style and no substance. It wants desperately to be as engaging as any one of the recent Mike Flanagan Netflix shows—think Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor, and Fall of the House of Usher—but it doesn't quite hit the mark.

The main issue with this movie is that when you adapt a Stephen King novel, you have to spend some time with characters. King creates characters not out of thin air, but out of pages upon pages of fully realized backstory. Either you love it or hate it, of course, but you'll never be able to say that he doesn't make a fully lived-in feeling in his worlds. The parts they do keep tend to be King's rather dated, somewhat clunky dialogue. They should have updated that, too, since they changed other parts.

Salem's Lot (2024) doesn't do this. The film sacrifices tons of much-needed exposition for basically just spooky vampire moments. And even though I hadn't read the book in a few years, I could tell that missing links between characters were just glossed over. Ben and his romantic interest, Susan, have maybe one date and then they're just together. (Interestingly, I was transfixed by the actress who played her, Makenzie Leigh, because she has the most intense case of iPhone Face I've ever seen. (What's iPhone Face, you ask? It's when a modern actor looks a little too modern—as if you're unable to believe they've never not seen a smartphone and are thus out of place in films set in more analog times. The exact of opposite of iPhone Face? Jon Hamm, Eva Green, Keira Knightly).

Reader, even national treasure Alfre Woodard (with a Maine accent) couldn't save this movie.

It's not horrible—you'll have fun on a cool October night if you just want some spooky vibes. But don't expect a lot of backstory or depth. Think surface-level vampire frights that won't keep you up at night.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Review: Scavengers Reign

 Hopefully the move from Max to Netflix will help this fantastic series find a broader audience

Scavengers Reign is an animated sci-fi series (very much) for adults that sets up a great premise, then unfurls its surprises judiciously, dispenses its violence suddenly and shockingly, and episode-by-episode, earns its emotional pay-offs. 

When the colony ship Demeter is forced to crash land on the planet Vesta, the crew members rush into escape pods. But upon landing, they find themselves distributed across the planet’s surface, with no way to communicate with one another. With no way of knowing if any other crew members survived the crash, Azi and her robot Levi (a pair), Sam and Ursula (a pair), and Kamen (on his own) each make the decision to try to make their way back to the Demeter. Not only does it seem like the only way to survive and possibly get off of this planet, but there is also a shipload of colonists in cryosleep on board.

But the thing about Vesta is that it’s crawling with flora and fauna — and all of it, if it considers human space travelers at all, considers them food. Or worse…hosts.

Azi and Levi work well together, but when some spores get into Levi, the robot begins changing — and, profoundly. Where will this hyper-speed evolution end? Kamen, wracked with guilt over something that happened on the ship, and experiencing increasingly material hallucinations of his wife, makes a cuddly friend. But Kamen, blinded by these hallucinations, misses some…warning signs, let’s say. Sam, the oldest member of the crew, seems like he might hold Ursula back, until something about Vesta begins agreeing with his constitution. But when his ability and drive tips toward the superhuman, alarm bells begin ringing for Ursula.

And unbeknownst to any of them, the Demeter itself is facing challenges of its own. If any of the survivors manage to navigate this hostile planet and get back to the ship, what will they find when they get there?

When I was a kid, survival fiction had a big boom. I read books about kids stuck under houses, alone and bitten by rattlesnakes, stranded in the woods, stranded on a glacier, stranded on an island, you name it. My teachers characterized them as man vs. nature narratives, rather than man vs. man, or man vs. self. And they were everywhere. Gendered nouns aside, the dawning realization I had in the first episode of Scavengers Reign that this was a character vs. nature survival narrative dressed in sci-fi clothes got me very excited. But over the course of the 11 episodes, creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner find ingenious ways of developing cascades of character vs. character and character vs. self arcs that build upon one another and interweave with the overarching struggle against a planet that is both indifferent to the survivors and also stunningly lethal.

The writers also seem to have done their homework on Earth creatures that use unconventional camouflage or seemingly innocuous enticements to attract prey, because there is a stunning breadth of metaphorical tripwires present on Vesta, many of which the characters are able to navigate, but some they aren't. So each time a character experiences awe at seeing some magnificent offering of a brand new world, and when they feel drawn to it, the sense of dread that began around the edges of the viewer's experience creeps ever closer to the center of the frame.

Because when characters die in Scavengers Reign, it hurts. And each time it happens, that death has broader consequences that ripple out across the narrative. As Sam says, in a line that pretty much sums up the characters' experience of Vesta, "God damn this place."

On just a storytelling level, beyond the widening narrative that continues to bring surprises, the flashback structure deployed to various degrees throughout the different episodes parcels out information just as needed, giving the viewer crucial context when it is the most meaningful and feels the least like exposition. And lest I forget, the art and animation style is gorgeous.

I could spend a lot of time exploring the symbolism and metaphorical structures that weave in and out of this show, but that's not what this review is. Instead, this review is just to encourage folks to jump in and watch, because in the notes I made to myself while watching the series, the last thing I wrote feels like a good way to sum up my overall feelings about Scavenger's Reign:

This is extraordinary science fiction.

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Highlights

• Compelling characters who reveal more of themselves as we spend more time with them
• Beautiful environments and creatures that evoke Studio Ghibli in many ways, and then bend and contort them into horrors
• A rich text that rewards re-watching and reconsidering the characters, their motivations, and their ability to accurately perceive their own situations at any given time

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by Vance K - cult film nerd, music guy, Emmy Award-winning producer/director, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together. 

Review: Fantasmas

A loud, cheerful satire of the roles the world demands we play

From the same mind that produced the horror/comedy show Los Espookys and the heartfelt immigration dramedy film Problemista, the new HBO Max series Fantasmas dials the surrealism up to eleven and makes the screen explode in possibilities.

Fantasmas is set in a world where colorless crayons are a hit idea, where an expressionless robot can become a talented actor, where a performance artist stays in character 24/7, where the letters of the alphabet have distinct personalities, where you can send your dreams to a lab for interpretation, where all men of a certain age secretly share a bottle collection hobby, where doctor appointments last exactly 90 seconds, where Santa Claus is sued for exploiting his workers, where customer service agents are subject to karmic justice, where the TikTok algorithm is a jealous goddess with no love for her faithful, where mind uploading is a viable treatment for a skin condition, where a fashion designer specializes in listening to toilets and dressing them, where gay hamsters have their own dance club, where water speaks, where gossipy mermaids hate Halloween, where an evangelist Smurf made of ceramic is a social media manager, where all online influencers live in the same house, where a portrait of a corgi hosts a trapped demon, where a goldfish runs a private detective business, where a reality TV producer keeps his mother's living brain in a jar, and where being hit by lightning gives you special perceptive powers. Somehow, all this fits in six half-hour episodes.

None of this is treated as strange or unusual. This is the hallmark of magical realism: the noteworthy thing about the social media manager is not that she's a ceramic Smurf, but that she's mediocre at her job and her fees are outrageous. The fact that a demon is trapped in a portrait isn't as interesting as his lack of success on Grindr. We're not expected to focus on the impossibility of a goldfish detective, but on the fact that she's mean to her assistant. This constant realignment of perspective is a requisite for the message contained in Fantasmas. In this world, false things are transparently portrayed as false, even though they continue to have their effects. The absurdity of bureaucracy is highlighted by the way IDs are called: "proof of existence." You can be standing right in front of a potential employer, landlord or doctor, and still they'll ask for your proof of existence.

The set design for the show goes out of its way to draw attention to the artificiality of institutions: the interior of a corporate office, an apartment, a hospital, a school, a courtroom, a restaurant, a jewellery shop will be shown from a wide angle so you can see the false walls that delimit the set. On the other hand, exterior shots use an obviously painted background to represent the streets of New York, another sign of artificiality. The fictitious spaces where the story happens don't bother hiding that they're fiction. Accordingly, this version of New York is populated by image-obsessed aspiring celebrities, Instagram junkies jumping through the hoops of brand promotion, fake friendships, performative social advocacy, commodified identities, staged drama, plastic surgeries, and the occasional murder. It's a voracious place where survival requires compromising more and more parts of your true self.

Which leads us to the hidden heart of the show: a teenage student who resorts to bullying to hide his insecurities about masculinity. By reinforcing in himself the expected norms of male behavior, he's put himself on the road to becoming another bearer of falsehoods. The narrow mental trap he's living in doesn't let him notice the vigorously queernorm milieu that is the adult world. This character has very few scenes in only half of the episodes, but his arc is the whole point of the story.

It takes a while to notice this, because the narration in Fantasmas has an extremely unconventional structure. The random appearance of a secondary character will often prompt a prolonged digression about their personal life and worries and quirks. The trick is that these digressions are so interesting that the viewer never notices that the episode's pacing has been broken. Many of these disparate subplots converge in the season finale, in a manner that may land a bit too conveniently, but the sweet earnestness makes up for it. In the middle of such fierce competition for likes and gigs and sponsorship deals and other substitutes for human validation, the world of Fantasmas still has spaces where true self-expression can flourish.

There's a meaningful blend of magical realism with queernorm in Fantasmas. Latin audiences will recognize the deadpan casualness with which robots, ceramic Smurfs, talking hamsters and incorporeal people coexist with the rest of New Yorkers. Magical realism is all about close familiarity with the fantastic in everyday life. But in addition to it, Fantasmas takes this acceptance of difference and paints it queer: the fact that people of all body types interact without creating arbitrary hierarchies means that there's no single mandatory way to exist. Fantasmas proposes a world where no one raises an eyebrow because your cab driver dresses more fabulously than anyone else in the city, where the undocumented worker delivering your dinner also happens to be the world's most talented tailor, and most importantly, where you shouldn't have to prove to others again and again that you exist.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review [TV]: The Regime

Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country can do to you

Every tyranny encounters opposition. But there are also, under every tyranny, a number from among the population who mold themselves to match what the tyrant demands of them. That raises a valuable question: what type of citizen does authoritarianism want? The typology of dictators has been catalogued extensively in political philosophy, but what about those on the receiving end of absolute power? If we could envision a nightmare scenario, where the common human being gladly consented to being controlled, what would be the traits of such an aberrant political subject?

The HBO Max series The Regime shows the mutual cycle of enablement and abuse that would emerge if the archetypal wielder of total domination crossed paths with the archetypal wielder of total submission. We know what happens when an oppressive ruler meets resistance, but The Regime suggests that the reaction can be equally explosive when the oppressive half of the equation is paired to an obedient follower who understands that they're living under tyranny and willingly accepts it.

In The Regime we meet Elena, the head of state of a fictional Central European country. She is a psychopathic narcissist who barely cares to perform empathy before the public eye. She never leaves the obscenely luxurious government palace, detests meeting in person with citizens, holds in the highest reverence the embalmed corpse of her father, routinely borrows a child to be seen with at public events, and fosters a cult of personality where she plays the role of loving partner to everyone. To fill the smoking crater where accountability and rule of law should be, she love-bombs her people in florid speeches calculated to simultaneously seduce and infantilize. She weaponizes her sex appeal like a gender-swapped Vladimir Putin while pummeling dissidents with an iron fist clothed in raunchy lace. Adept at terrorizing the nation with a gentle, motherly smile, she's an Isabel Perón convinced that she's really Evita.

And then we meet Herbert, a soldier hated across the nation for his brutal role in suppressing a protest. The depths of his self-loathing make him a danger to himself and to everyone around him. He follows obsessive rituals of self-punishment that worsen after he's hired in a minor position at the government palace, accidentally finds himself at the right place and the right time to save Elena's life. She promptly starts giving him bigger and bigger roles in her administration until he ends up being her personal enforcer, bodyguard, advisor, confidant, propagandist, policymaker, medic, and dietitian, despite his dangerously multidisciplinary ignorance. He's happy to serve as a pawn to his queen in all but name, but the dynamic of their relationship is too volatile to remain one-sided. His encroaching influence over her turns him into a hulky Rasputin in jackboots and a high-and-tight cut. But he's no crafty schemer: he's a cauldron of bubbling emotions desperate to be told in which direction to let them boil over. An incurious simpleton, fluent only in violence both given and received, he's the perfect match for Elena, the burning, furious yang to her cold, dark yin. He's someone who yearns to become just something. He's what remains of a human being once all self-respect has been extirpated with a bear trap. He's the ideal citizen of totalitarianism.

It's with morbid fascination that one watches Elena and Herbert bolster each other and injure each other and inspire each other and destroy each other. Their damaging codependence becomes indissoluble in the way that addicts feel compelled to seek more poison. And here the relationship between oppressor and oppressed grows a few symbolic layers with disturbing significance. Ever since modern democracies emerged within the still prevailing economic system, politicians have known that campaigning is advertising is persuading is seducing is cajoling is beguiling is captivating is enchanting is exploiting is controlling is conquering is possessing. The emotional tropes that apply between lover and beloved can also apply between ruler and ruled. There's an unmissable erotic dimension to the act of delegating power onto a representative, a dynamic of submission and trust that requires vulnerability and expects exclusiveness. Elena and Herbert jump into bed with the mutual sadism of one who unabashedly seizes and one who dejectedly gives up, both aware of their alternating roles as user and used.

The result of this mix is necessarily misery for everyone else. A tyrant alone can still cause harm by reiterated acts of combustion; a tyrant with a follower is a harmoniously rolling engine of predatory impetus.

And yet, the final episode of The Regime reveals that the components of this self-sustaining despotic machine are three: alongside the head of state and the common citizen, you also need the businessman. You need the complicity of private power in order to return to a semblance of stability each time a crisis blows up. It has been said that money is the mechanism that allows two parties that dislike each other to deal peacefully instead of bringing about mutual annihilation. However, the businessman is no less a giver and receiver of violence than the other members of the triumvirate of dystopia. The Regime seems to be saying that, even if one of the three gets eliminated, the system can still function with few mishaps until the next cycle of abuse and enablement can get going. Tyranny is a monster that feeds on itself, incapable of telling apart appreciation and absorption. The warped eroticism of complete control doesn't cease to be, even then, a force of creation.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

How do you bring fresh material to superhero metaphors?

By explicitly focusing its conflict on a persecuted Black family, Gray Matter goes into themes the X-Men movies haven't addressed in a long time

Once upon a time, mutants were a metaphor that stood in for any oppressed minority. The writerly intention was noble, but for the purposes of a rhetorical device, it's always been a faulty one. Normal people can't oppress the superpowered. Fortunately, this incongruity between the metaphor and the reality it aims to represent opens the way for a different, more narratively and philosophically interesting type of story: that of mutant outcasts persecuted by a faction of their own peers who have internalized the prejudice they've heard from the dominant society. Recently, Sense8 did a fantastic (and undeservedly cut short) job with this type of villain. This month, HBO Max has launched a smaller but no less poignant variation on the same idea: Project Greenlight graduate Gray Matter.

Ayla (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Aurora (Mia Isaac) are a mother/daughter team of perpetual fugitives, changing cities every few months so that their psychic powers are kept out of the radar of a vague, undefined enemy. The plot suffers from slightly too low tension in the first act because we haven't been shown what they're running from; we see Ayla trying to teach Aurora how to control her gifts, but Aurora doesn't feel motivated to learn when she doesn't even know why they're going to so much trouble. Here the plot draws from the old reliable trope of the overprotective parent who keeps secrets that their kid would be better off knowing.

Cue the classic X-Men moment where Aurora accidentally hurts her love interest, and we jump rather abruptly into the second act, where we finally meet our villain. From this point on, it's your standard mad scientist conspiracy thriller, with Aurora stuck trying to figure out how to throw a sinister organization off her family's scent. Superhero problems start to displace the carefully laid out subtext of the first act, until the climax ties the hanging threads a bit faster than the viewer can process the implied message. In general, the action scenes are more restrained, and therefore more dramatically impactful, than the multicolored splashes Marvel has conditioned our eyes to gorge down, and the cinematography makes laudably resourceful choices with the clearly limited budget for set design. Numerous shots have a single bright light in the background (either the sun or a potent lamp) aimed directly at the camera, a trick that shifts the viewer's depth perception and makes the modest sets look more spatially complex.

It's all very superhero-keeps-punching-villain-until-finally-superhero-punches-harder-and-wins, but the particulars of this family add some valuable talking points to the old and recycled conversation on the meaning of superheroes as a persecuted minority. Most obviously, Ayla and Aurora are Black—almost the only Black characters in the movie. Ayla's anxiety about raising her child in a dangerous world is easy to translate into the real-life struggles of Black famlies in the US. In one scene, they rehearse all the safety tips Aurora has memorized, a conversation with specific resonances in our world. Ayla's lessons for Aurora include how to look nonthreatening, how to behave if she's detained, how to keep herself always in check lest she draw attention. Sound familiar? Don't be too visible, don't take up too much space, keep your guard up, don't confess to anything. But also, Aurora needs to learn how to fight back and how to understand the ethical grounding of her fight.

Aurora puts her crash course in superhero ethics to logically pragmatic use at the ending of Gray Matter. In doing so, she blows up decades of pointless discussion about the proper use of superpowers. Even if the way the scene is edited may strike the viewer as too fast and unsatisfying, it shows that this movie takes the trope of persecuted mutants more seriously than the X-Men movies were able to. If the superhero genre is to maintain any relevance as a conversation about power, it needs to become more honest about the poison of internalized shaming that still pushes many into a state of disempowerment. Gray Matter may not ever make Marvel-scale money, but what it has to say about the desperation caused by systemic injustice is more than we've heard in a decade of digital explosions.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Last of Us (HBO)

 Good adaptation, great show.

Adaptation. A dirty word in the world of video game fandom. How many times have fans been promised a television show or movie that would faithfully depict their beloved intellectual property, only to miss the entire soul of the game they love and bring some shoddy representation to a different medium? Book fans know the feeling and have been dealing with the struggle for a while, knowing how infrequently justice is done in depicting the source material. For video games, that struggle is even worse. A few recent exceptions like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Arcane: League of Legends are wonderful additions to the small list of great video game adaptations, and the legendary Pokemon anime is still going strong. But what of successful live-action adaptations? Well, HBO’s The Last of Us may be the best one yet.

As someone who still highly reveres the original The Last of Us title for its engaging, laser-focused narrative and memorable characters, I was instantly interested in the show. I’ve played every iteration of the game multiple times; The Last of Us (PS3), The Last of Us Remastered (PS4), and The Last of Us Part I (PS5). Normally, I would immediately dismiss the relevance of any video game adaptation due to the history that precedes them, but the more information I gleaned, the more interested I became. The perfect storm of Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann, Playstation, HBO, and a wonderful cast of well-known actors was enough to give a fan hope. Not because The Last of Us needed an adaptation, but because it would be nice to see this world and these characters be brought to a new audience. The Last of Us is a highly cinematic franchise with over five hundred Game of the Year awards (the most for any modern franchise), so it wasn't too difficult to see how this could transition to a passive form of entertainment.

The Last of Us season sne does a lot of things right. The first two episodes are quite similar to the game's opening sequences. The first scene of the first epsiode portrays multiple men on a talk show discussing a potential fungus that could end the world if, god forbid, there was an increase in global temperature. An eerie silence washes over these men as they contemplate the possibilities of such abject destruction of modern society. What seemed a mere talking point becomes a feasible idea, one that makes the viewer and talk show participants pause. A harrowing moment to open the show’s first season, and a fantastic deviation from the source material.

To pull the player into Sarah and Joel’s relationship, they expand Sarah’s role and flesh out her story a bit. This helps create the initial bond needed to pack the show’s first punch. And it is done incredibly well. Considering The Last of Us has one of the best openings in a video game, it was a breath of fresh air to see it carefully recreated for the show. There’s an underlying sense of tension that sticks with the viewer throughout the entire episode, even in the calm moments. An impressive feat, and a reminder to the viewer that no one is ever safe in the post-apocalyptic world of The Last of Us. Admittedly, there was a ridiculous moment when an infected popped up from the ground in a silly and uncharacteristic way. A momentary break in immersion. However, before the credits rolled on the first episode and Depeche Mode’s Never Let Me Down Again plays to the view of the coming storm, I felt satisfied. Not only was I pleased with the deviations that did right by the source material, but by the show’s faithfulness to it, and to the overall quality. Joel and Tess received their cargo in the form of a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie, and I was excited to see the next episode.

This feeling of satisfaction continues into the second episode. Again, the introduction of the episode diverges from the show, where we are introduced to a mycology professor (played by the wonderful Christine Hakim) in Jakarta, where the beginning of the outbreak occurred. And just like episode one, this sequence left me with chills. This is also the first episode where the viewer encounters Clickers (the most memorable enemy from the game) for the first time. All I can say is bravo. The costume work, the behaviors, and the sound effects (which are used in the game) work brilliantly and inspire a sense of fear and panic. Not to forget, the underlying tension from the first episode remains here. There’s a heightened fear of being in control of the character who can instantly die from a Clicker. Though a passive media, the show did the confrontation in the museum justice.

As Joel, Tess, and Ellie make their way through the ruins of what was once Boston, the characters unfold before the viewer; their intentions, their mannerisms, and their desire to be doing anything else. The ending of the episode changes from the main characters being surrounded by FEDRA soldiers and instead having a horde of infected come in to finish the job. In doing this, they introduce tendrils; a way for the Cordyceps fungus-infected individuals to communicate over long distances. By killing an infected near a tendril, the protagonists alarm a massive host of infected enemies to their location. There is an odd, rather uncharacteristic, invasive, and bizarre moment with Tess and an infected near the end of the episode that confused me. The scene was certainly horrifying, but also lore-breaking. The overall episode was terrific despite minor missteps and kept me excited for episode three.

Titled “Long, Long Time”, episode three is an interesting case. While the game focuses on Joel, Ellie, and others they meet along the way, the show deviates by taking time away from them to look in on other characters. Episode three is the largest departure from the source material. Instead of having the character Bill reluctantly assist Joel and Ellie on their journey, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann decided to take Bill’s story in another direction. In what is one of the finest hours of television I’ve seen, Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett put on a beautiful performance of a gay couple surviving in the apocalypse. It’s strong, poignant, and reminiscent of the opening of Pixar’s Up. A tale of love, struggle, and acceptance. My issue then is that has nothing to do with what was going on in the previous two episodes. Episode three puts the plot at a standstill for over an hour. And while they eventually tie everything together, those ties aren't strong enough to justify an entire episode away from our protagonists. As a standalone episode, Long, Long Time may bring you to the verge of tears and consider your mortality, but in the overarching view, it’s just a beautiful bump on the road back to our protagonists.

With Joel and Ellie back in the driver’s seat, the show’s plot moves forward with episode four. This episode sees the protagonists sneaking their way through a rebel-infested Kansas City. A few important moments happen in this episode between Joel and Ellie, like the beginning moments of trust budding between them. This episode uses some of its time to show a departure from in-game Joel to Pedro Pascal’s version; he’s growing old and showing vulnerability. He can't hear as well and needs Ellie’s help to escape a hairy situation. He accepts how useful she can be with a gun and shows her how to use one properly. A big moment in the game, though slightly underwhelming in the show. The primary issue with this episode, and episode five for that matter, is the focus on the character Kathleen (played by Melanie Lynskey). The rebel leader that had overthrown the Kansas City QZ has too much time in the limelight. Every time that part of the plot appeared, I simply wanted to get back the main characters. The character was not a convincing leader and I had difficulty sympathizing with her.

As I got to episode five, and more and more time was spent on this Kathleen character, I realized how much time the viewer missed with Henry and Sam (the two newcomers to the show). A lengthy part of the game is spent with these characters, getting to know them, observing their relationship with the brothers, and the friendship that grows between them and the main protagonists. Instead of simply having two brothers trying to survive the apocalypse, the show tries to force the viewer into a sense of sympathy by making the younger brother (Sam) deaf, and eventually revealing that he had Leukemia. It’s a weight that doesn't need to be there. Sam being deaf wasn't much of an issue, but it made it difficult—with the amount of time given—for the viewer to bond with his character. Instead of sympathizing with him as a character, we are merely sympathizing with him for his plight, which I think is much weaker than what is presented in the game. Had less time been spent on Kathleen’s story, I feel like it could have been fleshed out better. That said, Keivon Woodard and Lamar Johnson (Sam and Henry’s actors) put on a great performance. The penultimate scene of this episode puts on a bit more dramatic flair than is necessary and creates a bit of a deus ex machina that is only briefly mentioned in the previous episode. The final scene, however, is spot on.

After a traumatic ending to episode five, episode six sees Joel and his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) reunited. This episode again, shows a more vulnerable Joel, speeding up much of his character development to ensure a connection with the viewer. I found this to be one of the weaker moments in the episode. The memorable scene between Joel and Ellie, however, is handled beautifully. It’s well-acted and takes lines from the game, word for word. The final scene leaves a bit to be desired compared the intense escape for survival portrayed in the game, but it leaves the episode on a cliffhanger…

Which isn't continued until episode eight. But before that, there’s episode seven. Which, like episode three, puts the main plot on freeze. Entitled “Left Behind”, episode three is a flashback to when Ellie got attacked by an infected. The episode itself is well done and explores the relationship between Ellie and her best friend Riley, but where the game hovers back and forth between its main narrative and the flashback, the show is wholly focused on the past. Leaving the viewer hungry for more, then dangling the present story in front of them while they tell another is an interesting tactic. Doing it two times in a season that has only nine episodes is rather foolish.

Once we get back to the present, we meet a new character David (Scott Shepherd). A leader of a local settlement who has more to him than is initially revealed. David reveals to Ellie that he is kind, yet violent. That he wants to lead, and he wants her beside him. A man in his fifties, and he's trying to court a fourteen-year-old girl. The entire sequence is unsettling, and Bella Ramsey (Ellie) counters Shepherd’s David perfectly for an entrancing episode. Without a doubt one of the season’s best. A return to form from the first two episodes.

The finale of The Last of Us is, unfortunately, the shortest one. It’s packed full of action and successfully wraps up the story between Joel and Ellie, even if it feels rushed at times. There’s a specific moment in the show where the show writers bludgeon the viewer with their messaging. In the game, Joel’s progress is easily noted in his actions and his shift of tone. He doesn't have to say, “You saved me,” because you feel each action takes the characters to where they are. The show also makes a point of showing that Joel’s decision is more justified in saving Ellie. The bloodbath that occurs close to the end of the episode leaves the viewer with a more solid perspective on Joel and his willingness to kill for what he wants. When the final lines of the show are uttered, they pack less of a punch than they do in the game, but they’re still powerful. Nine episodes spent (well, seven really) building trust between these two characters, all to end on a massive lie. One that needs to be swallowed by Ellie. And both Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey finish strong.

Some of the deviations enhance the story of The Last of Us, like the beginnings of episodes one and two, as well as the intro to episode nine, which sees Ashley Johnson (Ellie’s voice actress in the games) play Ellie’s mother. Some deviations, like episode three, bring an interesting perspective that enhances the lore but also damages the pacing. Then there are the bad deviations, like the Kathleen storyline in episodes four and five. Despite all the changes, the core of The Last of Us is here. As an adaptation, it does a great, though imperfect, job of representing the characters I’ve loved so much over the last ten years. As a tv show itself, it's fantastic. One of my favorites in recent years. Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann did a terrific job adapting this project to television. And though I would have liked to have seen more infected encounters throughout the season, the overall character arcs and performances were handled well. Whenever they announce a season two, I eagerly await not only the show itself but the fan response to it. If they do as well with season two as they did with one, viewers are in for quite the spectacle (and quite the debate as well). The Last of Us is never bad, and frequenelty great. It’s weaker than its video game counterpoint at times. In some cases, it outshines the game, and that’s something to be applauded.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 8/10

Bonus: +1 for some clever, lore-buffing deviations. +1 fantastic performances. +1 for creating an underlying sense of dread and tension. +1 for Clickers.

Penalties: -2 for trying to manufacture sympathy. -1 for two pace halting episodes. -1 for Kathleen storyline/character.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Recap: The Last of Us Episode 9 — Look for the Light

Content warning: Spoilers for this episode and the entire season; brief discussion of suicide. 

Short and brutal season finale sees our heroes making impossibly hard choices in the name of love — at the cost of the truth.

Avid fans of The Last of Us have had a week to emotionally prepare for this final episode, all while knowing it was going to be a shockingly brief 43 minutes — the shortest running time of any episode this entire season. 

We See Where Ellie Gets Her Badass-ness

In the opening scene, we’re introduced to Ellie’s mom, Anna, played by Ashley Johnson, who provided motion capture and voice acting in the original 2013 video game. As someone who’s played the game several times, I went absolutely feral when I got to hear new curses and grunts from the voice of Ellie. Having video game-Ellie play TV-show-Ellie’s mom imbues Bella Ramsey’s portrayal with even more gravitas — Ashley created and shaped the character, but Bella is perfecting it. 

The episode opens with a harrowing foot chase as an in-labor Anna eludes shrieking, off-screen Infected through a forest. She enters a farmhouse just as her water breaks, and collapses against a wall as she begins the process of giving birth.

A Post-Apocalyptic Birth Gone Horribly Wrong

In modern-day America, giving birth is one of the most dangerous activities a woman will ever engage in. In a post-apocalyptic hellscape, can you imagine how unlikely it would be to go off without a hitch? No running water, no epidurals, no clean bed. And in this case, no one to even help deliver the baby. 

This episode, we had been promised, was going to be the origin story of why Ellie is immune to the cordyceps virus. Just as Ellie comes out, Anna is bitten by a runner on the thigh. She grabs her switchblade — a visual leitmotif that will run throughout the entire episode — and cuts the umbilical cord to prevent the virus from spreading. 

And there we have it — this is the reason why Ellie can be bitten and not turn. Her immunity is spoken of as an impossible occurrence throughout the season by everyone who learns of it. Does this mean Anna was the only person ever to be bitten just as she gave birth? Is that the only way immunity happens? It also leads to other, weirder thought experiments. Would an infected 5-month pregnant person ever give birth? Would the baby be stuck inside a tiny Infected fetus? What if Anna had chosen to breastfeed the newborn Ellie? Would that have changed her from immune to simply infected? 

Your Legacy Is a Switchblade 

Anna’s involvement with the fireflies is made apparent as Marlene enters the house to find Anna cradling Ellie. Marlene, we find out, has been friends with Anna their entire lives. As a final favor, she asks Marlene to save her daughter— to make sure she knows her name is Ellie, that she finds care, and that she’s given her switchblade. This brief moment hit me in the gut. Imagine a world where your only inheritance is the knife that your mother killed a fungus-infected human just as you were being born. 

Your life is owed to this knife, and you, in turn, will carry it around with you as you grow into a young adult yourself, using it to kill the same creatures that are plaguing humanity. Luke Skywalker has his lightsaber. Indiana Jones has his whip. Ellie has her switchblade. Anna then asks her friend to kill her, a final act of mercy from Marlene now that Ellie has been shepherded away by a soldier. Marlene refuses initially out of love, and for a brief moment, you wonder if she will let her friend become a hideous, twisted version of herself. 

You picture a postpartum Anna doomed to turn into a runner, then wander through the house for years. Would she turn into a clicker? Before you can continue down this depressing thought spiral, Marlene returns and shoots her. This is Ellie’s origin story. Her birthright is a violent act of love. 

Boggle, Giraffes, and a Promise 

We shift to the present, finding Joel and Ellie entering Salt Lake City, where they’ll find their final destination, the Firefly hospital. Joel has recovered from his shiv wound, and Ellie is physically okay after her ordeal with David, but she is definitely not emotionally okay. She is aloof, distant, and sad, despite Joel’s new-found emotional availability. 

He finds a Boggle game so they can play later, and he talks about teaching her guitar. The two have switched roles — he is becoming more emotionally available, and she is shutting down. They are so, so close to completing their goal, and Ellie, it seems, may believe that their future is not set in stone, despite saying that she’ll follow him wherever he goes. (This made me tear up, a la “where you go, I will go” from Fried Green Tomatoes). 

She doubles down when he offers them the choice of just going back to Jackson, with its enticing warm food, electricity, and movie nights. No matter what, she tells him, they have to finish the drill. You can almost picture in Ellie’s head Riley, Henry, Sam, Tess — people whose deaths she wants to make mean something with her immunity. 

Moments after making this solemn and very adult declaration of determination, we see that Ellie is, however, still a child. While crossing through an abandoned building, she discovers a wild horde of giraffes grazing in a baseball field, and gets close enough to feed one. (Shocker — they used a real giraffe! The entire time I watched this scene I kept thinking “Wow, that’s some good CGI!”). This is a tender moment where Ellie gets to experience the childlike awe of a spotted leopard horse with an impossibly long neck. 

Giraffes are wild-looking, even to our modern sensibilities, so imagine a child born after the breakdown of society getting to meet one. Ellie has many firsts in the show, including a first car ride, but meeting a giraffe is incredibly special. 

Choices, and Who Gets to Make Them 

As they approach the hospital, our duo gets overtaken by Fireflies, and Joel wakes up in the hospital. Ellie, he is told by Marlene, is getting prepped for surgery. Joel instantly knows what's up, and says “Not her.” It’s here where the idea of choice comes into play. 

Ellie didn’t know that she was going to undergo surgery, and she definitely didn’t know that she wasn’t going to make it out alive. (The cordyceps virus grows in the brain, so the procedure would necessitate brain surgery she wouldn’t survive). Some argue that Ellie, had she been told, would still have agreed to do it. 

Her devotion to the cause would give her life meaning. But Joel, who has acknowledged his feelings, cannot, will not let this happen to his baby girl. It’s not just love for Ellie driving him. Like Bill, his role and purpose in life has become protector again, and he cannot lose this. The last time he lost his purpose — Sarah — he almost died by suicide. 

Marlene spares his life, gives him Ellie’s switchblade (there it is again) and instructs two soldiers to walk him to the interstate. Joel, as we expect, attacks them and begins making his way to the operating room to save Ellie. This part of the video game is very long, and it requires you to kill dozens of Fireflies. It’s also a tough level, difficulty-wise, and it took me probably a few hours to clear it. 

Who Decides Who Lives or Dies? 

Here’s the fascinating thing, though: It wasn’t until watching this episode that I felt conflicted about all of the deaths Joel rains upon the Fireflies. He is brutal, and ruthless, and methodical. When a soldier puts his hands up asking for mercy, Joel shoots him anyway. By the time he gets to the OR, he has murdered at least a dozen people. 

This is one of the reason why the show is so much more emotionally devastating than the game. Human expressions and gestures will always outperform the uncanny valley of digital renderings. Did I cry and feel moved at the video game? Of course. But the show is next-level emotion with world-class acting. 

The way he walks slowly and changes out weapons and loads in ammo is calm, cool, and collected. He’s on a mission to save his daughter. But I couldn’t help but think about the mass shootings in America today. What’s the difference? One man’s will against a group of people. Of course, victims of mass shootings tends to be innocent bystanders — children, teachers, concertgoers. The Fireflies, on the other hand, are a paramilitary organization.

But are the lives of these soldiers worth less than one little girl? When he opens the door to see Ellie lying anesthetized at the table, the surgeon tries to stop him. Joel kills him. He grabs Ellie from the table and leaves the hospital, having left carnage in his wake. He encounters Marlene in the parking garage, and she tries to stop him, as well. 

She tells him that she alone knows the cost of what she is doing, having promised Ellie’s mother she’d care for her. Joel kills her, too, the final obstacle to their escape. He can't risk anyone coming after them, either.

Wanting to Believe 

Ellie awakes in the back of their stolen car, as they speed away from Salt Lake City back to Jackson. Joel lies to her, saying that they didn’t need her after all, and that the hospital was attacked by raiders. She doesn’t quite understand, but falls back asleep, exhausted. 

Fast forward a few days. The car has broken down, and they have to make the last few miles on foot. At this point, Joel is positively ebullient as he talks openly about Sarah — the most we’ve seen thus far in the show. You can tell how excited he is about the future, about spending time with Ellie in Jackson in a functioning society.

Ellie knows something is up, and on a promontory overlooking the promised land of Jackson, asks him to swear that everything happened as he said it did. She knows he’s lying, but wants desperately to believe him — believe in him. He doesn’t miss a beat, and swears it. After all, he’s done, this short lie is the least of his bad deeds. If the did discuss the truth, she would have said that he took away her choice, her meaning. 

But the Fireflies did the same thing by not telling her she would die. Who trumps? It’s impossible to say, just as it’s impossible to know whether the Fireflies’ surgery would have been successful. Her death, then, would have been all for naught. 

What’s Next? 

The show ends abruptly at this scene, and we can only assume they head to Jackson and start a relatively normal life together. For video game players, we know what happens, but for TV viewers, it’s all up in the air. As someone who’s played both games, I can only say one thing: I really recommend finding a way to play the sequel, if you can. Spoilers abound, and it’s going to be a long two years before the next season, baby girl. 

The Math 

Baseline Score: 8/10 

Bonuses: +1 Ashley Johnson (the original Ellie in the game) is fantastic; real-life giraffes!; incredible readings from Ellie’s joke book; a morally gray but loving choice in the final minutes.

Penalties: -1. Only 43 minutes! This could have been stretched out into a two-parter, for sure.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. Video game nerds gets incredible payoff and extra details that add to, not detract, from the original story. 

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A cohost of Hugo-nominated podcast Hugo, Girl!,  she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley.

In 'Station Eleven,' you don't give up just because the world has ended

You'd think lethal virus stories are in bad taste these days, but Station Eleven is the triumphant cathartic release we didn't know we needed

Station Eleven, the miniseries adaptation of the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, follows the lives of a handful of survivors of a global pandemic that ended civilization. That sounds exactly like the last thing we'd want to see on TV during a real global pandemic that might, perhaps, really end civilization. But what this story has to offer is completely different from your standard post-apocalyptic drama. Except for news reports in the background of a scene, we don't see the masses out of control, fighting over scraps and forming unstable factions, or the desperate horror of watching passersby drop like flies. The incalculable toll of death is implied.

What this story is interested in showing is how life persists after so much death. Showrunner Patrick Somerville famously pitched the series as “a postapocalyptic show about joy.” We follow Kirsten, a young actress randomly paired with a stranger who shelters her during the first weeks of the pandemic, and whose sudden brush with tragedy makes her so hypervigilant that she casually carries a knife with her at all times. We follow Clark, a gentle but bitter middle-aged man who ends up leading a community of survivors permanently stranded at an airport, and whose unlikely ascent to power eventually changes him from conservator to conservative. We follow Tyler, a neglected child of self-absorbed parents, whose repeated experiences of rejection and mistreatment mold him into an emotionally stunted manchild with a vendetta against the past. What connects their journeys is how they were touched by the death of narcissist womanizer and movie star Arthur, as well as the graphic novel Station Eleven, self-published by Arthur's ex-wife Miranda. In particular, the twin trajectories of Kirsten and Tyler will be shaped by their drastically differing readings of the same text.

You don't need the backdrop of a lethal pandemic to tell a story about the power of stories. In fact, Mandel's original intention wasn't even to write a novel about the end of the world; she just liked the image of wandering actors bringing joy to village after village. You may as well remove the whole pandemic plot from Station Eleven and see it for what lies at its core: the double-edged power of performance. Both Kirsten and Tyler have been deeply moved by a story, and both will reenact it at key moments of their lives. However, Kirsten uses performance as a balm (at one point a spectator remarks that the troupe of actors brought "new life" to their town), while Tyler uses performance as a weapon. As for Clark, his fear of things decaying makes him keep them stuck in place, where he continues to tell stories about them but doesn't let the story around them move forward.

To explore this theme it doesn't really matter that the plot happens in a setting where almost everyone is dead, because those who are left alive still face the same old question of how to live. What should we do about the things that time takes from us? Make beauty from them, like Kirsten? Lock them inside a display case, like Clark? Or burn them, like Tyler? This is not a story about finding meaning after the apocalypse; it's a story about finding meaning, period. The trappings of world-ending catastrophe are only there to enhance the emotional content, to make the implicit explicit.

This is why it doesn't feel distracting when the plot of Station Eleven jumps between time periods. The path of things from A to B can find more useful routes than a straight line. It doesn't feel like a different world when we see the scenes before the mass death. It's all the same story. It's always the same story. That the world has ended does not change the fundamental questions of life.

However, the path of things from novel to TV series did meet with some bumps. The character of Tyler is made much more ambiguous in the adaptation, but without the benefit of added nuance. Whereas he was unmistakably a monster in the novel, here he is given a tentative chance of redemption. This defuses the tension that sustained the story before it's given a proper answer. Once Kirsten and Tyler realize that their lives have been shaped by their love for the same book, the main conflict of the series becomes about which relationship to art (and which relationship to the dear deceased Art) will prevail. Kirsten takes a page from Hamlet and orchestrates a session of psychodrama where Tyler's moment of growth is to achieve the basic human decency of not slitting Clark's throat. In a way, this fits with their characterizations: once again, Kirsten gets to use performance to heal things, Tyler uses it to break things, while Clark stands still and describes the way things were. That works; that's who they are. However, in proportion to the significance of the conflict, it's rather anticlimactic. We spent plenty of time following Miranda's determination to preserve her artistic integrity and create her masterpiece, the only part of her that survives the death of all things, and the way in which the rival interpretations of her work are left not-quite-resolved leaves a deflated feel.

The actual resolution comes later, when Kirsten reunites with her old friend and rescuer Jeevan, and he says he's happy that his family will get to meet her in person, because for years all they've known of her are his stories, and this time they'll see the real her.

In this beautifully shot, movingly acted, sharply written, captivatingly edited, epically scored version of Station Eleven, that is the final victory over oblivion: the moment when a story comes alive.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +1 for Dan Romer's soundtrack, +1 for the power duo of Hiro Murai and Christian Sprenger, who together bring a flawless sense for shot composition.

Penalties: −3 for watering down Tyler's villainy.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Paying a visit to Lovecraft Country

 

SFF television is quickly becoming more active in discussions around the politics of race.

A lot has been made out of the fact that a significant portion of the audience of HBO's new Watchmen had not heard a word about the single worst act of racial violence in American history until they saw the first minutes of the first episode. A gripping reminder, perhaps, of the indifference that the contemporary America feels about the more shady bits of its backstory.

Turns out that I was actually better informed than many of my fellow viewers because I had some cursory knowledge about what went down in Tulsa in 1921 – thanks not to my keen grasp of history but to another piece of SFF: the novel Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. The Greenwood massacre is something of a formative experience for important characters in both the newest interpretation Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, even though in the latter it is a more of a living memory for them as the story is set in 1950s.

I read the book a couple of years ago for Nerds of a feather, flock together and have since been waiting for the TV adaptation to materialize. Now that the first episode has been out for a week, I guess it's a good time to say a word or two about it. I'm obviously writing this without seeing eight tenths of the first season, so let's hope that the upcoming episodes won't render anything I say completely silly. Time will tell, for example, if we'll see the Tulsa events on screen at some point.

For television, Lovecraft Country was developed by Misha Green with people like Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams as executive producers. Ruff's novel-looking collection of interconnected tales was initially a proposal for a TV series, so maybe the process should be called reverse engineering rather than adaptation. Whatever took place, it carefully preserved very much of the source material, at least judging by the first two episodes. Not counting one gender-swap and surname changes, every character seems like they are lifted straight from the book.

The story starts with the protagonist Atticus Freeman returning home to Chicago through states that are unfriendly for black people such as he, and running into vehicle trouble on the road. Now we meet him on a bus as opposed to his own car in the novel, but either way, getting where they are supposed to go is way easier for whites when the car breaks down.

The problem of traveling in Jim Crow America and staying safe is a central to the plot in many ways. Atticus's family is in the business of publishing a guidebook called The Safe Negro Travel Guide which lists the establishments in which black customers can expect to be welcome and stay alive. Even though it sounds like one, it is not a dark joke. Books like that really existed, and having Atticus's uncle George compile them in the story provides an economic solution for drawing the extended family in sticky situations and adventures.

So, the show is called Lovecraft Country. George and Atticus are huge fans of pulp literature and science fiction, including H.P. Lovecraft, and they get into a discussion about his works right in the first episode. There's remarkably little love for Lovecraft to go around these days, compared to just ten years ago. Even though his problematic batshit insane racist views were discussed here and there, Lovecraft was one of the absolute greats of fantastic horror.

For decades, nobody questioned the fact that a World Fantasy Award trophy that was a bust of the author who had written, for example, a poem titled "On the Creation of Niggers” describing a creature that was half-human and half-beast. When the bulby-eyed Lovecraft statue was finally retired in 2015, his most ardent admirers were so unhappy that they even returned the trophies they had previously won. As much Lovecraftiana is published as before, but the most memorable new works explicitly take aim at the racial attitudes of Lovecraft and his works. Victor LaValle's "Ballad of Black Tom" rewrote the "The Horror at Red Hook" from the viewpoint of a black protagonist, and other such works are making it hard to even think about Lovecraft without considering his politics.

In Lovecraft Country, all the Lovecraftian monstrosities are there to make a very specific political point. Indeed, Shoggoths are roaming the night and there are things with way too many eyes and tentacles (and consonants in their names), but evil-wise they are nothing compared to the darkness of Jim Crow. It's a good premise, even though it reduces the Lovecraftian to a gallery of slimy monsters, missing all the bleak lonely horror that I would actually consider Lovecraft's claim to fame. Beings from alien dimensions and the fact that there used to be towns where non-whites are killed if they don't leave before the sun sets are both terrifying.

One could argue that all the Lovecraftian elements are more or less window dressing and could be replaced with other horror lore just as easily. What is borrowed from Lovecraft are some names of horrific creatures, obsession about ancient magic books and assorted plot elements. What cemented his reputation and got him canonized is, I think, the cosmic horror and the feeling of being alone and in constant danger in a cold, brutal universe.

This is a feeling you don't get to experience with Lovecraft Country. Here, good triumphs, family takes care of each other and the atmosphere is cozy. That's probably as anti-Lovecraftian as it gets.

The novel is a happy book about awful stuff in which nobody is really going to get hurt. In the last pages, we leave the black cast laughing together when they have again defied all odds and made it out of their latest adventure in one piece. It's not yet certain that the show will be all like that. Actually, the second episode which just landed might suggest that the main characters can get hurt more seriously here, but the future episodes will tell what kind of Lovecraft Country we are going to be able to visit this time.

I'm sure that somewhere there are Lovecraft nerds itching to remark that the story isn't entirely accurate in all bibliographic details, and they're right. Lovecraft's vile poem mentioned earlier was never published and it had not yet been even discovered at the time when Atticus, his father and uncle George are discussing it in Lovecraft Country. Personally, I don't particularly care as it makes a better story this way, but it's a bit fast and loose here and there. In all honesty, I don't think that actual black science fiction fans in the 1950s would be as understanding as Atticus and George are about the undertones of Lovecraft's work. At times they feel more like stand-ins for contemporary SFF fans, but that's how it is. Lovecraft Country is entertainment and not a dissertation. 

SPACEFARING KITTEN, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018. @spacefaringk

Microreview [Film]: Fahrenheit 451

With some dystopian themes taking hold in our everyday reality and the success of Handmaid's Tale TV series, it may seem like a good time for HBO to revisit other classics of dystopian science fiction. This year, they released a new movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 – the novel about firemen burning books because different opinions and worldviews create unhappiness, and about literati rebels fight back by the way of illicit bookcrossing and memorizing whole novels.

The story is recognizable for the fans of the novel, I guess, even though writer-director Ramin Bahrani (together with his co-writer Amir Naderi who is an established director in his own right) has played around with the characters and events quite a bit.

There's a lot to modernize in a novel that is a 65 years old speculative future, of course, but I wouldn't describe much of it as very successful. There are new books to fight about, for sure: We see the book-torching firemen burn a copy of a Harry Potter novel and Clarisse McClellan – transformed from the teenage neighbor appearing in Bradbury's novel into a fire brigade's unwilling informer and eventually the protagonist's love interest – is memorizing Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Instead of soap opera parlor walls (or whatever it was everyone was addicted to in the novel) the citizens of this new world seem to be obsessively consuming reality TV broadcasts of raids by the firemen. It is never explained and it has no consequence for the story, but all the emoticons and comments appearing on the building-size displays suggest some kind of social media aspect to this technology, even though everything and everyone seems to be firmly under the bootheels of their paramilitary rulers. Any amount of free expression is hard to reconcile with the vision, so the world starts to come apart at the seams if you consider it too closely. Some hard drives get torched with the books and there are computers and networks around but the rebels mostly stick to reading and smuggling dead-tree editions which seems a bit unpractical.

The main character is still Guy Montag (played by Michael B. Jordan) from the novel, a fireman who starts having second thoughts about what he's doing, but Bahrani has completely dropped his wife to make room for Montag's romance with McClellan. As a consequence, the film doesn't have a person who would stay desensitized by the stale state-approved entertainment as a contrast to Montag who has woken up. That's perhaps one of the biggest things making the film less engaging. Showing us only the conflict between firemen and their opponents leave much of this dystopian world unexplored.

Of course, there's only so much the film can do, given its source material. Fahrenheit 451 is ultimately making a philosophical armchair argument, and transforming that into high-adrenaline political action was never an easy task. For anybody living in 2018, banning fiction as a way to lessen tensions between different worldviews is as nonsensical a proposition as it gets, because practically all other imaginable kinds of human interactions (social media, journalism etc) are much more effective in polarizing societies around the world today. Perhaps this would have been an interesting theme to look into in the movie adaptation, and quite possibly something that Bradbury would be thinking about if he was writing Fahrenheit 451 today.

The haunting character of fire brigade captain Beatty played by Michael Shannon, the musical-esque opening scene in which firemen sing in their fire truck, and occasional cool visuals are about the only solid things about this movie. In addition, the ending is your cup of tea if you enjoy over-the-top poetic and metaphoric moments and can manage to suspend your disbelief in the book-loving rebels' arguably rather silly master plan.

The Math

Base Score: 4/10

Bonuses: +1 for "Down the red-hot valley, lo! The phantom armies marching go! Salamander ho! Salamander ho!"

Penalties: -2 for missing so many opportunities to be a relevant adaptation of a novel that was highly relevant

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10 – "Very little good I can say about this"

Reference: Fahrenheit 451 [HBO 2018]

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Westworld at Mid-Season

Too mysterious for its own good?

HBO's new series Westworld hit the mid-season mark this week, and it feels like there's enough there to finally talk about in terms other than wild internet fan theories.

If you haven't been watching, that's cool. I wanted to weigh in without spoilers, on what the show's actually doing (and maybe not doing), and if it's worth checking out. I remember seeing the original 1973 movie for the first time about five years ago, and I wasn't floored, but it was cool and it occurred to me that if I'd seen it when I was 12 or 13, it maybe would've been my favorite movie. It was a pretty straightforward wish-fulfillment sci-fi adventure. And hell, Westerns and robots? Man, sign me up.

HBO's new series is anything but straightforward — and that goes for both on- and off-screen aspects. I saw the first trailer for the show right after the 2016 Television Critics Association press tour, when HBO's president of programming was confronted with a series of questions about the pervasiveness of violence against women in its shows. Coupled with Emilia Clarke's repeated calls earlier this year to "Free the Penis" and get some more equitable nudity on Game of Thrones, this show is arriving at a moment where it's under the microscope right from the jump in a way previous HBO shows maybe haven't been. And the first Westworld trailer did nothing to assuage the violence-against-women accusations leveled in those TCA panels. Quite the opposite.


But what about the show? Well, that's where I'm a little bit at a loss how to talk about it. The long and short of the story is that there are a couple of guys visiting the futuristic resort of Westworld, where you can live out your fantasies (violent and sexual, mostly) with AIs that are indistinguishable from real people. The operators of the park start to notice something is wrong with a few of the units, and the signs point to a couple of them "waking up." Meanwhile, the guests in the park don't know any of this is going down, and one guest in particular, The Man in Black (Ed Harris, not Johnny Cash) has a secret mission he's on that no one else knows about. The pilot episode does the "alternate reality" bit to perfection, and I found myself caught up in the giddy feeling of "this would be so cool, to actually walk off a train in the Old West!" I'd like to think I wouldn't be as big an asshole as the guests on the show, but it seemed cool. But the storytelling is so oblique, so insistent that "there are lots of mysteries going on," that to be honest I didn't have much of a connection to anyone in that pilot episode, and if they hadn't, toward the end, gotten into the notion of these robots waking up, I don't think I would've stuck around for episode two.

But I did stick around. And this is where the internet comes into the story again. Because of that obliqueness in the storytelling, because there were clearly lots of different breadcrumb trails being laid out in different directions, but none of them explored in depth (yet), and because the internet abhors a wild-theories vacuum, we got a lot of real elaborate fan theories right from the start. My favorites are that the show is actually taking place in two distinct time periods, but I think subsequent episodes have ruled that out, for the most part. The issue for me is that I can't separate the experience of watching the show from its footprint in fandom. I keep looking for clues to an eventual, massive reversal, but it could very well be that the show is just weaving mysteries and moving linearly. It's kind of pissing me off, to tell you the truth, now that we're halfway through season one and I still basically know that the robots are waking up, but not anything else.

So there's that. And then in Episode 5 they did Free the Penis, but not as much as they freed the boobs again. Probably half the episode takes place during an orgy in a bordello, and I found myself right back to wondering if the purpose is just titillation, or... What are we doing here, guys? Are we really driving at insights into humanity and what consciousness means, or is that just a flimsy framework for showing gold-painted boobies?

But without equivocation, I can say that the performances are fantastic. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton both play strong, interesting characters, and their performances are truly kick-ass, especially considering how much of them they have to give while naked. Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris are all amazing. Even if I'm not sure that the ride is going somewhere I'm going to feel totally satisfied getting to, I'm happy to spend an hour a week watching these amazing performers.

Posted by Vance K - cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musicians, and Emmy-winning producer.