Film Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again

It takes chutzpah to give the name "Rebirth" to a sequel that fails to make the case for why your franchise shouldn't stay dead. It takes even more chutzpah to admit as much in your movie's actual script: as our expert characters explain, people used to queue enthusiastically to see a good dinosaur show, whereas now they can't be bothered, and the only reason these bizarre abominations haven't been put out of their misery is that they're super expensive to make and the company still hopes something useful may come from them.

At least this time there's encouraging news: Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are mercifully out of the picture, and in their place we get actors who can act. But the spectre of those two still haunts Jurassic World: Rebirth, because the dialogues haven't gotten any better. Fortunately, the latter half of the movie is mostly action set pieces, so there's not much talking to cringe at, but the beginning, when the characters are convincing each other that returning to the land of people-eating monstrosities isn't an obviously bad idea, is full of tortured technobabble and predictable jokes.

The script sticks so faithfully to established movie tropes that the cast can be neatly classified as follows:

• Family of innocent bystanders who of course won't get eaten because they're adorable;
• Trio of heroes who of course won't get eaten because their names are on the poster;
• Suddenly introduced crew who of course will get eaten because someone has to.

That being said, the actual confrontations with various types of dinosaurs are put together with proper care for the rhythm of dramatic tension, so there are many moments when one truly fears for the characters who can't die. Also, after a shipwreck splits the cast in two teams, the editing maintains a good sense of when to cut between their respective subplots. The flow of action is consistent and engaging. As survival adventures go, this one is quite enjoyable. But the movie doesn't do the core part of the assignment, which was to justify its own existence.

When 2015's Jurassic World introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs, it was a clever allegory for the arms race that was taking shape between increasingly unimpressed moviegoers and increasingly desperate moviemakers. But the sequels that followed haven't known what to do with that idea, and became further incarnations of what that first reboot wanted to criticize. The moments of Spielbergian awe at the majesty of primeval colossi have ceded the stage to instinctive revulsion at uglier and uglier experiments that make for curious action figures but don't have a narrative reason for being in the story.

Rebirth closes off the opportunity that the ending of Fallen Kingdom created and Dominion squandered: the repercussions of a world where dinosaurs are running loose and interacting with today's ecosystems. The new status quo declares that, actually, dinosaurs aren't compatible with the environmental conditions in most of the planet, and they've settled in a narrow band of territory near the equator, where it's hot enough for their tastes. OK, I can buy that. But the excuse to visit them this time is too contrived: a pharmaceutical company needs living tissue samples from the biggest dinosaurs because something about their massive hearts can provide a treatment for coronary disease. Can you use DNA from their fossils? No, it has to be from living animals, for reasons. Can you make your own clones and take the tissue samples from their embryos? No, it has to be in the restricted island where every government forbids to go, for reasons. Can you use blue whales, which are actually twice as big as the mosasaur? No, it has to be from the scary ones that eat people. For reasons.

So the plot makes zero sense, but at least the characters aren't annoying and the action is competently directed. If only the script hadn't yielded to the temptation of adding yet another dinosaur hybrid for no reason. What could have been a thrilling ending to the adventure ends up delivering a titan-sized eyesore that turns out to be too easy to get rid of. There's even a prologue that foreshadows this monster, with a deadly accident that could have served to comment on the dangers of our modern way of life (a lab is destroyed because someone was eating a chocolate bar), but that plotline goes nowhere. If you can get past the mediocre dialogues, lazy comedy, and shoehorned character motivations, Rebirth clears the bar of not being terrible, which by this point seems to be all we get to ask of a Jurassic sequel.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: Ballerina

Change the accoutrements and this movie would be low fantasy - prove me wrong

Ballerina is, on some level, a blatant cash grab, more so than the other John Wick movies, by virtue of being an interquel. It is an interquel because it needs to be set at a time when John Wick, the man you hire to kill the boogeyman, is alive, and by the end of the fourth movie John Wick is dead (spoilers for a movie from 2023, sorry). Trying to slot in a film between two other films in a sequence is ungainly at the best of times (the good people over at TVTropes have discerned a rather thorny continuity issue with this movie vis-a-vis the other movies in the series). But, for this movie, I choose to look at its continuity in the way I look at James Bond movie continuity, where the whole thing is malleable and something of a mess, and as such I will care about continuity about as much as the films will.

Ballerina contains within itself another iteration of the John Wick series’ spectacular worldbuilding. This series has the best worldbuilding I have ever seen that has not a single obvious supernatural element to it. By virtue of being set in a criminal underworld, there is room for all sorts of weird micro-societies and cultures, some of them bordering on a religion. The one that takes pride of place in this film is the one in which our protagonist is immersed. It is an all-female organization of assassins and bodyguards who, in addition to all their combat training, also have to learn to be first-class ballerinas. You see your main character, played by Ana de Armas, be grilled in her ballet technique intercut with her more obviously violent education, and by the end of it the stage on which she practices is covered in blood. Ballet as an art form is brutal on the body, as shown in previous John Wick movies as well as 2018’s Red Sparrow, and for that reason is so often juxtaposed with more violent endeavors. On an aesthetic level, it works as a juxtaposition between beauty and death, and the whole thing feels like something out of a fantasy novel, or even a Greek myth about the Amazons.

The Ruska Roma, the ballet/homicide organization that our protagonist, Eve Macarro, joins in the beginning of the film is confronted with an enemy that likewise feels like something out of a fantasy novel. This organization is a religious/homicidal cult whose raison d'être is shrouded in mystery (which is a polite way of saying somewhat vague, but it works) that has existed for centuries, and based in a town in the Austrian alps. In some ways, they are the perfect mirror of the Ruska Roma, also being fanatical and cold-blooded. Every little bit of world-building you get here is through character actions, rather than ham-handed exposition or hackneyed dialogue. You are finding out who these people are right alongside Eve, and the strangely impassioned but always scary behavior makes for a compelling villain.

An aside - there is a bit where the head of this cult in the Alps mentions that a leader of said cult has not had to flee in two hundred years - I would read the shit out of fan-fiction about this cult’s involvement in the Tyrolean Rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, because I am a fucking nerd.

The action here, as in all the other John Wick films, is spellbinding. There is the obligatory shoot-out in a nightclub, this time in New York. As familiar as such scenes are in this series, the film still justifies its presence by virtue of the use of the bright, contrasting colors used decoratively. You also get a good deal of mileage out of that town in Austria run by the cult; there is a well-done fight in a kitchen with use of kitchen utensils (in a manner far more creative than this year’s Novocaine). You will also get the most off-the-wall usage of flamethrowers I have ever seen in any film ever, as well as the most creative use of a hose I have ever seen in any film ever. The series has, fortunately, not devolved into cliché.

Ana de Armas brings a strong presence to her leading role as Eve Macarro. Eve is what I would imagine John Wick himself was like as a young assassin learning the ropes (and how to hang people with them) of the homicide business, but of course gender-swapped. Eve has to build up a tolerance of killing, something John Wick has had the entire run of his namesake series, so there is a trepidation here that has to be overcome. Her gender, of course, changes a lot. The most spectacular, and most poignant, of these is during her training in the Ruska Roma, where her superior tells her that she will be weaker and smaller than any man she fights, and she must always remember that. This immediately cuts to Eve fighting a man in a spar; to make up for the difference in size, she attacks his groin repeatedly, and he is clearly in incredible pain. Throughout the movie, you see a woman turning from someone relatively normal, albeit having gone through a tremendous loss, into an amazon who can dance.

Only a few days after I saw this movie, I read David Foster Wallace’s (no known relation to the author of this piece) essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, whose namesake essay is about his time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He finds a brochure aboard the ship with an essay-cum-advertisement by the acclaimed writer Frank Conroy. Wallace is quite perturbed by this essay, not because it isn’t good (on a craft level, he says, it is superb), but that nowhere it is disclosed that Conroy was paid for it. This essay, argues Wallace, is an advertisement pretending to be art:

“In the case of Frank Conroy's ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

This is an argument that I think is worth thinking about in relation to big media franchises, of which John Wick has most certainly become in recent years. The purpose of a media franchise is to be enjoyed first, and then to advertise future works in the franchise for the ultimate financial gain of the franchise owner. John Wick, the man, the character portrayed by Keanu Reeves, is something of a modern folk hero, in what Henry Jenkins described as “a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” The question, then, are franchise films art? Is Ballerina art?

I would argue yes. So many great works of painting and sculpture are here in this world for us to appreciate because of the patronage of the wealthy; hell, the art on the Sistine Chapel is a prominent example. It bears mentioning here that Ballerina started out as an original project before being retrofitted into the John Wick universe. Like the great works of the Renaissance, Ballerina owes its existence to men of great wealth, but ultimately it has enough substance, enough meat on the bone, to be enjoyable.

(also the song at the credits is extremely catchy)

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Dog Man

Let's pretend the unsanctioned decapitation didn't matter, and let's have a deep conversation about parenthood and growth

First, a confession: it's been a long time since I've tried a story targeted specifically at very small children. I'd forgotten the tons of suspension of disbelief required to simply sit and enjoy the mayhem. But apparently, from what I can gather, there's been some great storytelling going on in that area, with the likes of Peppa Pig and Bluey straddling the line between wholesome and topical, and even commentators finding fuel for discussion in the politics of Paw Patrol. So I guess I should start paying more attention to that segment of SFF.

Another confession: what drew me to the new DreamWorks animated film Dog Man wasn't this realization of a gap in my screen watching record, but simple morbid curiosity for how a production for kids was going to handle its spectacularly gruesome premise: the titular hero is a Frankenstein-ish monstrosity built by sewing the head of an almost-dead dog onto the body of a (now most definitely) dead man. Dr. Vladimir Demikhov would be proud. Because this is a fun adventure in bright colors, the movie cheerfully brushes away the obvious questions about animal cruelty or the fact that a man has been decapitated to create this abomination. Look, a dog walking on two legs!

Following the long and rather strange tradition of severely injured characters technomagically transformed into obligate crimefighters (think of The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, Inspector Gadget, M.A.N.T.I.S., Max Steel, or Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex games), Dog Man promptly resumes the frenzied chase for an evil cat called Petey, whose crime is... getting revenge on Dog Man, I guess? We aren't told what was the original misdeed that kickstarted this cycle of dramatic arrests and creative prison escapes, but the sequence is undeniably funny.

(Also, let the record show that I protest this slander against cats.)

This first part of the movie goes like a breeze and helps the viewer get used to the lightning pace of the story. Not only are we treated to a beautiful picture-book art style, with clouds that look like crayon scribbles and canine howls that visually reach from one scene to the next; we're asked to switch off our brains and delight in the rapid succession of cuteness and absurdity and pathos and newfound joy.

Petey the cat only changes tactics when he runs out of ideas for increasingly wackier doomsday machines (I am impressed by his seemingly infinite R&D budget), and when he tries to create a duplicate of himself, he ends up with a child duplicate of himself. And that's when the actual theme of the movie is presented to us. This is more than a slapstick series of loud, splashy cartoonish antics. If it were only that, it already does it pretty well. But what Dog Man is actually about is the question of inborn tendencies vs. conscious choice.

Little Petey is sweet, friendly, optimistic, and without one drop of cynicism. He can see the best side of the worst people. Adult Petey, the typical jaded edgelord, wants to teach him that life is the opposite of that. But after a messy series of mishaps, Little Petey gets the chance to spend some days living with Dog Man. And Dog Man is going through the same identity crisis: does he want to be a policeman with serious obligations, as his human part, or a fun-seeking dog, as his other part? His canine instincts have already interfered with his duties too many times by now, but he doesn't know what other job to do.

I find it reassuring that Dog Man acknowledges the difficulty of this question. It even introduces a quick subplot about adult Petey's father that helps the young audience get a sense of how learned mistakes can be perpetuated across generations. Evil, as the plot demonstrates, is more a matter of actions than one of immutable nature. So is love. That's a precious message to present to the children who will be too amused by the endless gags to notice upon first watching. But a few years from now, when they want to revisit the immensely entertaining experience that was Dog Man, they'll find the strong heart that was beating at the center of it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Creature Commandos

A raunchy, visceral, uncompromising statement of intention

The new iteration of DC-derived stories has a curious choice of opening chapter. With narrative threads vaguely connecting to The Suicide Squad (the good one) and its spinoff series Peacemaker, the HBO Max series Creature Commandos reanimates a discussion that should have been declared resolved decades ago, but that the current era of superheroes seems to have forgotten: What if you could fix the world with just one little murder? Never mind that the first half of the series is about trying to prevent that murder; if you've met self-appointed protector of humankind Amanda Waller, you know that her extensive skill set doesn't include moral consistency. So throwing away money and lives to defend the princess-heiress of Pokolistan from sorceress Circe and her army of easily duped incels, only to change her mind and throw away more money and lives to have said princess-heiress murdered anyway, is exactly on brand for her.

Writer/producer/director James Gunn surely knew that starting this new DC saga with a team story would prompt parallels with the Justice League. Namely, how is this team different from its more heroic counterpart? What is it that makes the Commandos a dark mirror of the League? That kind of comparison isn't new. If you want answers about why Superman doesn't kill (and, therefore, why Zack Snyder doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle the Justice League), all you need to read is the 2001 story What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way? by Joe Kelly. Much like the Snyderverse drew from the gray worldview of The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman, it seems the... Gunnverse? is drawing from the genre's own reaction to that excess of cynicism.

So let's return to our initial question, which can be rephrased like this: Can the value of one life be purely instrumental? In such Kantian terms, the question touches the core of why Amanda Waller operates the way she does. Her extreme brand of pragmatism bypasses any consideration of principle, and the same logic that makes her stage a clandestine operation to protect a foreign head of state can as easily move her to favor the opposite strategic objective. How does this make sense to her? Easy: a high-profile political assassination with unknown cascading repercussions isn't any more problematic to her than forcing inmates to risk ther necks for uncertain gain. The life of a princess-heiress or the life of an unjustly incarcerated metahuman are just assets to her, usable or disposable according to whatever arcane moral calculation is going on in her head.

And this is why Gunn chose Creature Commandos as the first entry in the new DC-verse: to establish a clear demarcation over against the messy position the Snyderverse started with. The version of Superman that Snyder presented in his 2013 film Man of Steel is a semidivine figure whom puny mortals should look at in awe, but not look up to; one with no ties of loyalty to humankind beyond his personal attachments: he fights to defend his adoptive mother, but he couldn't care less about innocent bystanders. That's how he was raised: Jonathan Kent taught him that he should let people die if helping them would expose his secret. Martha Kent taught him that his immeasurable power came with no responsibility. With the worst role models in the history of the character, the result couldn't be other than what we got: a Superman who is no hero. The absurdly contrived scene where we're expected to agree he had no other choice available but to kill General Zod set a dour tone that persisted for the rest of the Snyderverse. A Superman who kills was joined by a Batman who tortures and brands people and a Wonder Woman who has lost her faith in humans. That is not how you build a team of heroes.

Creature Commandos exposes what happens when your idea of saving the world doesn't contain an iron clause on the absolute value of every life: you lose sight of what you were trying to fight for. Waller's ill-fated adventure in Pokolistan ends with the death of the victim she was supposed to protect, as well as the deaths of members of her own team who shouldn't even have been in prison. The reason why they were available for her to exploit in the first place is the same broken logic that ranks lives in order of importance. You can't call yourself a defender of the world if you don't equally care for every single life in it. The numerous flashbacks that reveal the origin of each member of the Commandos go back to the same theme of according life an instrumental as opposed to absolute value. Waller believes she's using a team of monsters, creatures whose past misdeeds render them only worthy of being used, but the truth is they're all innocent. She's the real monster, and the unstated implication of the show's message is that Snyder's Superman is a monster on the same scale as Waller. Gunn needed to make that clear before introducing his own take on Superman.

There's nothing naïve about a Superman who doesn't kill. Via reductio ab absurdum, Creature Commandos shows the natural result of abandoning that basic principle, and helps set the tone for a renewed view of superheroism that doesn't fetishize power for its own sake or treat conflict as a utilitarian calculation. The superhero genre is in crisis because it's embarrassed of itself, averse to sincerity, willingly corrupted by cynicism. However tonally voluble and structurally disjointed, Creature Commandos was a necessary laxative for all the rotten beliefs that have clogged up the genre. With the slate clear, it's time for Superman to once again show the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

First Contact: Akira

A classic and fundamental movie in the history of anime lives up to the hype, 35 years on

Anime.

For someone who is as visually focused as I am (amateur photographer and all), it will be a surprise to readers that my knowledge and consumption of anime is minimal. Mostly due to circumstance, and luck, and not having access to cable shows and channels that featured anime, by the time anime was widespread and easy to consume, the bewildering variety of anime kept and keeps me from trying to dive in. My watching of anime ever since has been mostly scattershot. A few episodes of things like Dragon Ball Z. Cowboy Bebop. And a few other random episodes here and there of odd series that I’ve come across. So my education of anime needs a lot of work.

As far as the purposes of the First Contact project were laid out, I wanted to pick a piece of classic anime. And so we come to Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 cyberpunk action film Akira, based on his 1982 manga of the same name.

Akira is the template, the herald for anime to be accepted and watched and studied by adults, and has influenced generations of anime, and Western movies, ever since. In some ways, though, I’ve seen parts or images or motifs from this movie, and I’ve been seeing the “Akira Slide” for decades now, particularly in animation. I never knew that Akira was really the origin for the visual. What was also clear, upon watching this film, is how many other images and motifs were also clearly borrowed from  it. Recently, I watched an episode of What If? that features a horrible and distinctive transformation. Imagine my surprise when, while watching Akira, I saw what that What If? episode was clearly borrowing from and referencing.

And I had always heard in a second-hand way that Akira was an inspiration for The Matrix. I had accepted this as received wisdom without understanding what that meant, until I finally watched Akira. When Tetsuo holds up a shell coming at him hanging in midair, I could see the bullet-time of The Matrix. The stylization and the visuals of the action sequences, the fluid motion and movements of characters were clearly forerunners of what was done in The Matrix (and therefore movies that borrow from The Matrix are borrowing from Akira). Also the idea of someone ordinary developing psychic powers that can change the world is in fact the central theme of Akira, although it goes in very different directions.

And such visuals! Even beyond these and other iconic images, the palette of the movie is gorgeous. Hundreds of hand-painted colors make the saturation of the film unbelievably gorgeous. In our current era of muted and underlit palettes, watching Akira was a riot of color and imagery that threatened to overwhelm me at times with the sheer power of what was on screen. Even scenes in tunnels and sewers (and there were more images of sewers in this film than I was ever expecting) had a visual key and style to them that is at odds with a lot of modern cinema—to Akira’s benefit. I could always follow what was happening on screen, see it, and experience it.

I am not so focused on sound and music in movies and television as some people are, but I was also struck by the clever and nuanced use of music. The use of Indonesian gamelans as well as Japanese Noh music was, to me, unique, and striking. The music counterpoints the visuals, both in the action beats and in quieter moments.

And then there is the topicality of the movie. This movie works so well on its background and worldbuilding as it does on its main plot that both feel very resonant, even today. As of the time of the writing of this piece, we are facing a world where protests and unrests against oppression and for freedom of speech and right to assemble are being met by violent reactions from people in power. Throughout Akira, we see in things as subtle as posters and graffiti, and as visceral as brutal police and army crackdowns against demonstrations, the struggle to be heard, to have a voice, to change an unjust system. The movie is not subtle that this is a post-war dystopia, and it even has a coup, to boot. Can a movie filmed in 1988 and set in an alternate 2019 have something to say about our present of 2024? It turns out, in the case of Akira, most definitely yes.

And I do want to expand that to talk about the final thing that struck me about this movie, and something that readers of my book reviews know I am concerned about, and that is the worldbuilding. Neo-Tokyo, the city built next to the ruins of the one shattered in World War III, is a vividly imagined and realized place. From visuals to settings, to small details and touches, Neo-Tokyo feels like a lived-in place with people of all strata of society trying to get along. It’s a city that feels real, a place you could go and be immersed in the experience. Granted, that experience would be alarming, with authoritarian police squashing dissent, violent and out of control biker gangs of young hooligans, and a full-on cult to a being named Akira, but it would all feel holistically and organically real.

And the movie’s plotting and pacing are very well done. We start with the image of the start of the Third World War... but what that image means and its implications are held in reserve until the end of the movie, when we answer another question: Just why is this movie named Akira? The main characters are Tetsuo and Kaneda. Just who and what Akira is (and consequently, why the movie is named Akira) is a slow building and compilation that mirrors a lot of what the rest of the movie does. I have discussed the worldbuilding, that starts with us seeing the Capsules and the Clowns and in a systematic and patient way. We add in the social dynamics of the police and society, and then our introduction to the ESPers, and then the military that controls them. The plotting is similarly a crackerjack piece of work, starting us with the small-time problems of a couple of gangs, and leading to, well, consequences not just for Neo-Tokyo, but for the entire world and the entire universe. It all feels like a logical progression, and what starts off as a story with small stakes winds up with the largest of stakes by the ending.

But for all of the visuals, the worldbuilding, the plotting, and even the sound, what makes this movie a true classic, one that truly justifies me tackling it as part of the First Contact project, is the thematic currents and subcurrents throughout the movie. It’s true of a lot of SFF that theme is what brings you back to the table for rereads and deeper dives. Akira’s themes are both worn on its sleeve and also reward watching and contemplation. Questions of government (military vs. civilian), the uses of power and controlling power. Press freedom. Violence and lawbreaking vs. authoritarian tyranny. The power of found families and chosen relationships. One can see in Akira an echo of Godzilla, and so we get into questions of nuclear war and nuclear power. As the movie goes on, we get into even weightier themes that approach apotheosis, the Godhead, and the future of humanity itself. All this condensed into a visually stunning, entertaining and kinetic anime movie that clocks in at a lean and mean 2 hours and 4 minutes.

My only regret is that I did not give Akira a try sooner.

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POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: The Fall Guy

Tip your local stunt people

The Fall Guy starts out with a premise that I don’t think anyone can really dispute: that stunt people are the real unsung heroes of Hollywood. We all love the thrilling action scenes in big-budget blockbusters, but we so often forget that the actors in those scenes are not the actors who are on the movie posters and advertisements. They go, all too often, completely unrecognized, even as they take all sorts of punishment (I’m reminded of the stunt guy in an episode of iCarly who fell from the ceiling for the part and broke all his ribs. I hope he’s doing okay). So, on some level, that’s what this movie is doing: bringing the trials and travails of stunt actors to the big screen, deliberately, putting the spotlight on their efforts and how they make the movies the world adores.

The Fall Guy, released in 2024, directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, is loosely based on the 1980s action show of the same name; I’ll admit that I haven’t seen it, nor did I know it even existed before I did the research after seeing the trailers for this film (a look at the internet makes it seem this was not an uncommon experience). It’s a show that has, so far as I can tell, dropped off the map entirely until now. Yes, in some sense it is another incidence of remake mania, but if it’s for things that are basically unknown, and the end result is entertaining, I’ll give it a pass. As TVTropes is fond of saying, tropes are tools, and here the tool is used well.

The Fall Guy is mostly set in Australia, where a big-name Hollywood film production for a blockbuster sci-fi epic along the lines of Mad Max or Dune is being shot by an ambitious director played by Emily Blunt. Through a series of odd events, an old flame shows up on set, a stuntman played by Ryan Gosling, to do some of the stunts. The two had fallen out over certain dramas on a previous film set, and their relationship is tense, but the flame shows signs of rekindling itself. Gosling’s character is a stuntman for a famous action star played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Now, all of that sounds like a Hollywood production, understandable even in its odd little relationships, but the star has disappeared, and his producer, played by Hannah Waddingham, suggests that it involved some shady business.

I feel like, on some level, all the characters are stereotypes, but the film uses them knowingly. Perhaps the biggest element of subversion in this domain is that the ambitious director looking for a big break is a woman, who Blunt provides both dogged determination (but, I think, never outright ruthlessness) and deep tenderness. Perhaps the most rote is Taylor-Johnson’s character, who is basically every narcissistic leading man who has gone past the point where he remembers where he came from. To be clear, that is not a bad thing; it’s a character type that works in context, and he gets some great lines, delivered with appropriate presumptuousness.

But the star of the show is clearly Gosling’s character, who is, in something that feels very meta, not the star of the show. He’s a daredevil and a maverick who is good at his job and he knows it, and indeed he loves it. Gosling and Taylor-Johnson play against each other in a thematic sense; Gosling has ambition but has never been corrupted by it, while Taylor-Johnson has fallen so deeply into that abyss that he has no idea which way is up. Gosling’s character is what Hollywood should be: decent people having fun making movies so the rest of us can enjoy it (and perhaps write about them on blogs). Taylor Johnson’s character is what Hollywood unfortunately is: brash, arrogant, and willing to throw lord knows how many people under the proverbial bus to make it to the top and stay there. Gosling’s character knows that he has limits, that he is mortal; Taylor-Johnson’s character has come to think that he is God, and we know what happens when the wealthy play God.

The Fall Guy is something of a romantic comedy, albeit with more explosions and people in odd costumes. This works as well as it does because Gosling and Blunt have a certain chemistry that just works. They have both believable flaws and believable reasons for being attracted to one another in the first place, and all of this is bolstered by some great lines, such as one when she just realized he arrived in Australia and all their issues, long suppressed, have come to the fore, in a way that is both heart-rending and uproariously funny, a combination that is no small feat for all involved.

There’s a certain element of metatextuality here, although one relatively subdued compared to films like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, so deftly reviewed by my colleague Arturo Serrano on this blog. The sci-fi epic that is being made in the film (which, in my opinion, looks like it would be an entertaining film in its own right) is a big, bombastic story, and this film is about the not quite so bombastic but nevertheless big (in their own way) stories that come from the process of making those stories. It’s something that works better for a collaborative medium like film (not much excitement in the actual process of writing a novel, for example - although this year’s Argylle did that, and in my opinion succeeded reasonably well). This becomes a little stronger in the end credits, where you see the actual stunt crew for this film about a fictional stunt crew; it makes me wonder if anything interesting happened on this set.

The Fall Guy is pure and simple fun, and uses its scaffolding to hold up an edifice that knows who built it, and wants you to know that. It’s both high-octane and very human, and balances those two strands well. It’s worth seeing in theaters - there’s an amusing ‘thanks for keeping movie theaters open’ bit at the beginning, which is funny, and there’s a mid-credits scene that is also very funny. I feel like seeing this film at home would lessen the effect somewhat; let the love letter to the genre be seen in its most traditional haunt.

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Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: Boy Kills World

Schadenfreude: the Film

There’s something gleefully demented about a certain sort of action movie that turns what would be horrific in any other context into something funny. Mel Brooks once said, “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” Certain films, such as Boy Kills World, released for general audiences in 2024 after a festival run in 2023, seek to expand that latter point much farther than just falling down manholes, and see humor in the most demented of ways for human beings to leave this life. This film, directed by Moritz Mohr and written by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, is one that absolutely glories in finding interesting new ways to kill people.

The setting of this film is distinctly ambiguous. It is a city in some sort of tropical area, with no particular geographic location even mentioned. The ethnic composition is diverse, and everyone appears to speak English, perhaps due to globalization, or perhaps due to translation convention, as TVTropes so helpfully pointed out (and I feel like I should have realized it myself). In any case, it feels almost like an old-school utopian work’s setting, a place of jungles and savannahs with an interesting form of government designed to play host to the fantasies of educated white people. Perhaps I am biased by having recently read Thomas More’s Utopia, but it feels like that sort of setting, except with more graphic violence and Schadenfreude.

This city has been, within living memory, taken over by a family of business empresarios who rule its inhabitants with an iron fist. Their rule is capricious, their enforcement arbitrary, their laws frivolous, and their aesthetic tastes decidedly gauche. Your protagonist is first seen as a boy, growing up in the dawn of their rule, and through a series of somewhat convoluted events he finds himself exiled from his family, living in the jungle with a master martial artist, learning the art of fighting and killing.

You would be right in assuming that a lot of the characters are somewhat cut-and-paste from other action movies. The trainer is something of an Orientalist stereotype of East Asian martial arts master, training your white male hero (played by Bill Skarsgård) in that which he will use to gain his revenge. What makes Skarsgård’s character unique is one of the film’s saving graces: he is deaf. This means he interacts with the world in an entirely different way than most action movie protagonists, and he narrates much of the film in his own head (he was not born deaf). Other characters, though performed well, are either stereotypes or just odd, perhaps offensively. There is a Black character who Skarsgård’s character is not familiar with, which means he cannot read his lips, and this is rendered by him speaking in coherent albeit nonsensical sentences, which are followed for the sake of comedy; this felt like a caricature in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The villains are your typical evil rich people, something like those of The Hunger Games, who get some good hammy dialogue and some amusingly sadistic moments. There’s a femme fatale of sorts who wears a helmet almost the entire film and is almost constantly baring her midriff, which likewise felt stereotypical, although to the film’s credit she has a compelling arc of her own; indeed she is the source of much of the film’s emotional weight. She has the most compelling performance, supplied deftly by Jessica Rothe.

But the real reason why most people would show up to this film is that they were lulled by its promise of deranged graphic violence. A moviegoer seeking such things will be amply pleased by this film. It reminded me in several ways of The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a funny and demented action-comedy from a few years back starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds being, respectively, Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds. The most recognizable performer in Boy Kills World is Sharlto Copley, so it doesn’t get to reap the star power the former film does, but it is more fantastic than the previous film, so the action is less moored in reality and therefore novel in its own way. The high point of the film, depicted to some degree in the trailers, is on a Christmas-esque set of a cereal advertisement for the company that is sponsoring the ruling family’s annual bouts of mass murder. It’s certainly a creative set piece; that alone makes this worth the price of admission.

Boy Kills World is an action movie with the sense of humor and aesthetic of Francisco Macias Nguema. For those unfamiliar with him, he was the autocratic ruler of the small African nation of Equatorial Guinea from 1968 to 1979 who had 168 suspected enemies of the state rounded up in a football stadium and shot or hanged by executioners dressed as Santa Claus while Mary Hopkins’ famous cover of Those Were the Days played in the background; a select few were fed to ants. It took a constellation of odd, perhaps demented minds to make Boy Kills World; the product has its flaws, but for a certain type of person, like myself, it is a good time.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights: graphic violence, also graphic violence.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review [Video Game]: Children of Morta by Dead Mage

Full of heart, but could use a bit more soul.

As the Corruption spreads across the land, infecting animals and terrain alike, it is up to a single family to push back the darkness; the Bergsons. They are tasked with bringing light to fight the shadows that have consumed Mount Morta, and in the process, discover the truth behind the corruption. While seeking the truth, each family member finds that they have something to contribute to the cause and raises their sword (or hammer/daggers/staff) in support.

Children of Morta’s story mode sports hack-and-slash dungeon crawler gameplay with rogue-like elements. Through the course of the game, the player uses different Bergson family members to navigate the beautiful modern pixelated levels. While the levels are procedurally generated, the boss battles for each sector stay the same. The main connection to the rogue-lite genre lies in the game’s random level generator and having to restart an entire area upon death. That said, meta progression is strong and you won't find yourself caught up for too long. For more of a challenge, players can either A) increase the difficulty, or B) play the game’s rogue-lite-specific mode (which cuts most meta progression and is more demanding).

Upon booting up the game, I could see the care and attention that went into the beautifully realized world of Children of Morta. The modernized pixel art is vibrant and elegant. The detail is evident, and the shadow and lighting play is top-notch. Each character's design is distinct, despite their simplicity. And the Bergson's home, which was crafted to exude warmth and comfort, does so with ease. Playing this game puts the player back at the Bergson estate quite frequently between runs (either from death or from completing a dungeon), so it’s nice to feel comforted when I was welcomed home.

The story is narrated much in the same way as a story book, or popular indie darlings like Bastion. Ed Kelly lends his smooth voice to the narrator role and injects just the right amount of balance of emotional investment. He seems to care for this family of heroes, and it helped get me invested, even when I found the writing trite. The attempt to create a gripping tale involving this unique family shows a lot of heart, care, and attention. The writing sometimes does this a disservice, as the narrator’s lines sound like they could be plucked right out of a book titled “Generic Fantasy Mumbo Jumbo 101”. This isn't to say it’s all bad, far from it.

Sometimes when one of the Bergsons comes back from a dungeon, I was greeted with a cutscene. Unfortunately, they never added a pause button during cutscenes, so if someone needed to ask me something in the real world, I would have to ask them if they could wait a few moments. A rather odd oversight. While I generally enjoyed the cutscenes, as they expanded the world and lore, they didn't always feel properly paced. When you first start a dungeon, every time you die or complete a floor, you'll get new cutscenes. Then they dry up for a while, leaving an opening until you get to your next dungeon. Some cutscenes are very short and feel randomly placed. For most of the game, however, they are quite welcome.

The beauty of Children of Morta’s gameplay is in the character variety. Instead of simply having new weapons to unlock over multiple runs, you unlock new characters, each with their own unique abilities and skill trees. My favorite part about these skill trees is that leveling up one Bergson helps all Bergsons. For instance, if you reach a certain level with Lucy, all characters will spawn with a gemstone when they start a run, level her up further and she’ll create a distraction for another character when they’re in a tight spot! This helped me to level up characters that I wasn't initially as fond of (Mark and Kevin) and learn how to use them with less consequence. Mark and Kevin were initially a bit too squishy and needed to be close to damage enemies, so it took a while for me to adapt to them, but in the end, I enjoyed all of the characters. I appreciated that the game gives characters fatigue (which you can clear with a rare egg). This makes it difficult to do too many consecutive runs with a character because their initial health will be reduced (more and more each time). Giving them a break means trying another character. Thankfully they're all enjoyable (though Lucy was always my favorite). The only issue I had with having so many characters was the effect it had on cutscenes. The narrator would always say “the Bergson” (i.e. “The Bergson looked upon the corpse in horror.”) instead of the character’s name, which I understand from a financial and development point of view. But it was at times immersive breaking, especially when playing with the add-on character who wasn't a Bergson.

The game provides a good amount of diversity between its three main levels (which are divided into sub-levels) but doesn't offer much challenge later in the game. For instance, I beat the final boss with almost no effort. While far from being a reason to dislike the game, it did make the end feel less rewarding than it should have been. The enemy and boss battle variety is solid, especially considering the length of the game. I always enjoyed running into a red or yellow-outlined enemy for a higher challenge. The enemies are quite different depending on the biome, and it’s fun to figure out how enemies react to different characters' moves and devise a strategy.

I did experience a few mishaps throughout the game where my character froze or the game froze on the loading screen. When my character froze the few times I died and collected my earnings (though it was annoying because it also added fatigue to a character I wanted to continue using). In the case of the loading screen, I had to reset my system, which meant I lost all progress running through the level. It didn’t happen many times thankfully, but still irritating.

Dead Mage has concocted a neat little title that blends traditional dungeon crawling with a few rogue-lite elements in a beautifully wrapped package. Though Children of Morta's story didn't always grip me due to some generic fantasy writing, it still managed to keep my interest enough with its interesting setting and charm. Even if I found that the writing could sometimes come off as cheesy, it was still a pleasure to hear Ed Kelly narrate it. While by no means the best rogue-lite-inspired game, Children of Morta is still a game worth exploring for its visual beauty and fun gameplay variety. If you've never played the rogue-lite genre, this may be a great entry point. Oh, and it drop in has co-op.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10

Bonus: +1 for beautifully realized art, world, and lore. +1 for fun character selection.

Penalties: -1 for some trite writing. -1 for occasional bugs.

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10

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.

Argylle is every cliché it thinks it's mocking

It's bold, to put it mildly, to make a story about storytelling that has no clue of how stories work

Matthew Vaughn's new spy film Argylle is clearly proud of itself for stacking so many secrets inside secrets, although the trick is not executed as elegantly as a Matryoshka, its artfulness befitting more a turducken. Twist after twist pile up in absurd proportions without even the benefit of being surprising, killing the plot by starvation moments before it would regardless have died of strangulation. It's possible to tolerate a ridiculous movie that is aware of its ridiculousness. It's torture to live through a ridiculous movie that knows it's ridiculous and also believes it's being clever.

Argylle kicks into motion by shaking the world of novelist Elly Conway, whose cheesy spy fiction has veered too close to real life and attracted the attention of actual spy agencies. So, for the first third of the movie, it looks like we're in a higher-stakes version of Stranger than Fiction. How is Elly able to predict international crises in such detail? That's a big premise. Alas, the plot twists in Argylle quickly fall into a routine of replacing the viewer's suspicions with a less interesting alternative. Oh, does Elly somehow sense the future? No, it turns out those events already happened. Oh, is her new spy friend plotting to kill her? No, he was speaking in hyperbole. Oh, is a close relative secretly also a member of the bad guys? Well, yes, but he wasn't really a relative, so the emotional impact is lost. Oh, did Elly betray her spy friend? Sorta, but only as part of an overcomplicated gambit that goes nowhere because she forgot a password. Every time a twist seems to steer the narrative in a more exciting direction, the next twist deflates the excitement and brings the plot back to the mundane. Argylle doesn't use its twists to reveal more substance beneath, but to disguise the absence of substance. There's never a resolution that satisfies the viewer's curiosity; only the disorientation of continuously having to discard all that was said a moment ago.

To this basic filmmaking sin is added the misuse of the character of Elly as a writer. For the duration of the film's starting pretense that her imagination is connected to the events in the background, there's a fleeting hope that our heroine will take advantage of the devices of storytelling to anticipate the bad guys' moves and break their plans. After all, who better than a mystery writer to solve a mystery? But soon enough, the script expressly disavows that promise and turns into a more boring type of story. We weren't following Stranger than Fiction; we were following Total Recall. Everything we believed was special about Elly is the part of her she no longer has. Worse still, later we learn that Elly, the professional narrator, has been living a narrative crafted by someone else, and once again there's the missed opportunity to play with the power of stories to convincingly simulate reality. What does it say about the nature of storytelling that the unwitting subject of an entire fictional life ended up using fiction to unconsciously liberate herself?

There's no use in expecting answers. By this point, what little coherence still remained has gone out the window. We can almost hear the director giggling proudly, convinced that his genius has blown our minds, but he's just punched them repeatedly into a bloody pulp. Quick successions of betrayals and reveals of past betrayals make the actual, hidden plot so nonsensical in hindsight that reason gives up, rendered defenseless to swallow the hyperviolent extravaganza that ensues. And then the director goes deep into an exploration of the pointless question that no one asked but cinema seems unable to move beyond: Is mass killing an art form? I haven't watched John Wick, so I may never know. But Matthew Vaughn seems to find a form of beauty in a duet of machine guns in the middle of smoke bombs that form the shape of a heart, shortly followed by a disturbing blend of Olympic-level skating and serial slashing. Are we meant to laugh? Or look in awe? Or shake our heads at the shared acknowledgment that all spy fiction is inherently unserious? The tone of these scenes is so unstable that their intricate choreography is wasted on the confused audience.

The escalating ridiculousness in the last third of the movie culminates in a couple of reality-breaking twists that don't even register in the viewer's by now desensitized awareness. Sure, this character was never dead. Why not. Sure, this other character who isn't even supposed to exist can show up in the flesh. Go ahead. Who cares. Oh, this was all along a spinoff from the Kingsman franchise? What the hell, nothing matters anyway. Austin Powers already told all the jokes there were to tell about James Bond, so what's left for the rest of filmmakers is to mock themselves in a self-referencing death spiral as cosmic punishment for needlessly keeping this genre alive.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Review: Silent Night

John Woo shows that silence is golden

So the old saying goes, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” John Woo was quite eager to point out that the aforementioned proverb does not preclude brutally murdering the people about whom you can say nothing nice, all the while saying absolutely nothing. That is what he shows off to you in his 2023 action movie Silent Night, released December 1st, written by Robert Archer Lynn, and starring Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi, Harold Torres, and Catalina Sandino Moreno.

The movie begins in medias res, as Brian Godlock (Kinnaman) pursues criminals through the streets of Las Palomas, New Mexico. He fights them, to a point, blood covering his sweater with a reindeer on it, for it is Christmas Eve. But then he is shot in his neck, and hastily hauled to the hospital. He survives, but his vocal cords are destroyed.

You then realize that, earlier on that seemingly bucolic Christmas Eve, he and his wife Saya (Sandino Moreno) are playing with their little son in their yard. Father and son tussle, making memories for a lifetime. However, at that same moment two criminal gangs are having a gunfight-cum-car chase through the streets of Las Palomas, bullets flying every which way—and into Brian’s son, felling him right there. This is what prompts the chase, and the injury that would render Brian mute.

Then you come to understand the central gimmick: this is an action film with none of the dialogue, none of the wit, none of the jokes that other films of this genre would. There is only sweat, tears, grunts, bullets, blood, and death. It is an interpretation of the genre that takes its tendency towards grit, already nigh-canonical, and strips it down to the bone. There are no belles-lettres to dignify any violence, no heroic speeches to justify it, no loving words exchanged to soften its perpetrators. That renders the experience very, very raw.

There are some words spoken, but never by a named character. You hear radios with pundits pontificating about interest rates or police officers during a firefight, mourning their dead. There are also written words, mostly text messages, and it is in those that so much of the pathos comes from; you see Saya trying to comfort Brian, that sort of frantic texting that happens when you’re stressed and perhaps can’t think straight.

Brian’s rage festers through the coming year, the passage of time marked by a calendar, particularly emphasizing each holiday. You get the impression that the very idea of a ‘holiday’ is now stained in this family. Months after that fateful Christmas, you can still see the tree they had put up, gifts wrapped in gaudy colors in their living room. It’s a potent metaphor for their grief, as they almost approach something resembling normalcy after this crime, only to be reminded that some days are supposed to be special, yet that specialness has forever been marred by bloodshed for them.

Of course, this being an action movie, Brian seeks to take revenge in an appropriately violent way. He trains by himself in his garage, learning firearms and martial arts from instructors, and everything else from the internet. That last bit stands out to me; I haven’t seen many action movies taking advantage of the digital world like that, but it’s very believable, in our world of 3D-printed guns and terror manifestos spread through nasty internet fora.

Woo and company show Brian’s descent into hell, into more bloodshed, into rage, with heightened realism. His wife leaves him to live with her family, overwhelmed by his monomaniacal pursuit of revenge. This feeds Brian's vicious cycle: his obsession alienates her, she stays away, this makes him angrier, and he commits more to the course of action that she rejected. He is later seen in his car, watching her painting in the apartment building where she apparently now lives. It’s more than a little stalkerish and uncomfortable, but very believable as Brian descends further into his abyss and you wonder if the abyss itself is a little perturbed by the experience.

As you may expect from the absence of dialogue, much of this movie conveys emotions through body language. You have to recalibrate your senses for this experience, for Woo makes you lurch ever closer to muteness, giving you what must (of course) be only an approximation of never being able to speak yourself. You become focused on expressions, on gestures, on the way people move, to a degree most movies never really give you reason to, for words are far more direct. Here gesture does not ornament dialogue; it is dialogue. I’m impressed by the entire cast being able to do this; I’m also impressed by how the characters who are not directly hurt by this evil act also never speak, and it never feels forced. This would be gimmicky had a lesser director tried it (and inevitably failed), but Woo and company pull it off. I’m reminded of Aneesh Chaganty's 2018 film Searching, which also has a gimmick, but doesn’t let it feel like one.

The violence, then, is not prettified by the doublespeak sometimes used to make murder sound acceptable. It is bullets flying, oil burning, people dying in sprees. It is a wild, animalistic violence, the sort of carnage you would expect our prehistoric ancestors dealt on a regular basis, long before humanity fashioned its grunts into tongues. Even as cars ram into each other and machine guns are fired on full automatic, the movie is primal, refreshingly and enjoyably so.

The portrayal of the villains is interesting; they are street criminals, gangsters of the type that occur in many American cities. It is through opulence that they are characterized, especially their boss, with his glitzy suite adorned by something resembling a massive chandelier dominating the space. He gets a scene where he dances with his lover, a woman who herself gets in on the action in a spectacular sequence involving a stairwell. There’s tenderness here, of the sort that is evidence of a finely honed skill of dissociation, of trying to separate the nice things he can afford from the considerably less nice work that allows such luxury.

I do wonder, though, about the casting a bit. As in many action movies, the hero is white, while the goons who killed his child and whom he then hunts down are of many races. On the other hand, his wife is portrayed by a Colombian actress, and the good police officer is Black. I don’t know how good this is, but something about the whole thing irked me a bit. Not enough to ruin the movie, and I don’t think it was anything intentional (although I could certainly buy an executive demanding a white male lead for it to go through), but it felt unfortunate, on well-trod ground that need not be trod again.

All things considered, Silent Night was an invigorating experience. This is action cinema without the flourishes, without the frippery, with only the animalistic instinct that leads to taking each other’s lives senselessly and without reason. This is a film that is, on some level, honest, even if there are undoubtedly layers of Hollywood-ese in it, as Hollywood does. It’s the most unique action movie I’ve seen in a long time, and I recommend it for anyone interested in this genre.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights: one particular action scene involving cars.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: Freelance

John Cena plays John Cena and I found that enjoyable

John Cena is a wrestler, and a meme, and perhaps a walking assemblage of potato salad. I remember my classmates in fourth grade being obsessed with him, although I never was into wrestling. I do remember being impressed with him in The Suicide Squad, which was a rather odd film, albeit an enjoyable one. It was him alone, really, that made me want to see 2023’s Freelance in theaters, directed by Pierre Morel and also starring Alison Brie and Juan Pablo Raba.

The best comparison I have for Freelance is The Hitman’s Bodyguard, that zany action-comedy from a few years back featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds being Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds. The latter as a film is very much a buddy movie with a good deal of heart under all the killing, with a sadistic streak to it. Freelance isn’t quite that, but it has its own emotional core, plenty of humor, and a star that the whole film is clearly banking on.

John Cena plays a former US Army special forces operative who was honorably discharged after an injury in combat. He returns to America, marries, has a daughter, and becomes a lawyer helping the downtrodden. Despite the stability and love from his family, he misses the action and the camaraderie of the Army, and yearns for more excitement; this begins to cause problems in his marriage. One day, an old Army buddy walks into his law office, offering him one last job in a Latin American country teetering on the edge of stability. Cena, unsurprisingly, accepts. His job is to provide security for a journalist (Alison Brie) who is the first journalist in decades to interview the country’s reclusive dictator (Juan Pablo Raba). This looks to be a pleasant, simple, quiet job, but this all changes when the dictator’s nephew mounts a military coup against him, announcing this with a hail of bullets in the vehicle carrying the three of them.

I found myself liking Cena in this movie a lot. There’s something very funny to me about how a man with such brawn, such clear strength, is at first relegated to the dull and tedious life of a lawyer; it feels like something out of an old comedy. When the action kicks in, he is very much in his element, and he has the fortune of delivering several great lines. I like, too, his softness, with his daughter and his wife, but also with the people he’s stranded with in this jungle. He has a willingness to try to understand people, even people he has every reason to hate (and oh boy, does he meet such people), and perhaps see something else in them. In a genre dominated by protagonists who are set in their convictions and their opinions, there’s something refreshing about that.

Alison Brie does a very good job as the intrepid reporter sent to a dictatorship for a scoop. Her character is coming off of some professional tragedy in this film, and she is eager to prove herself, to clear her name. Her character is also the conduit for one of the more clever ways I’ve seen in movies of addressing the omnipresence of smartphones in modern life. You think, for a second, that they’ll do another lazy trope of a vain woman always taking selfies, but no - she’s recording the action on her phone, in hopes of a big scoop. It felt real to me, in a world where wars are now playing out in the palms of our hands.

Juan Pablo Raba rounds out the leading trio, playing the dictator of this small, resource-rich fictional Latin American country that feels too far from God but too close to world financial markets. He strikes the right balance between loathsome, as dictators always are, and charismatic, as they also often are; they never would have risen to power without it. He’s Hugo Chavez adapted to the norms of Hollywood, or perhaps a snarkier, funnier Lazaro Cardenas. He has all the vices of these dictators, to the point that he can verge on the stereotypical, but Raba brings enough charm to the role that he is enjoyable in it.

Freelance uses a trope that I don’t particularly like: fictional countries that are clearly in a real region. To me, someone who has spent much time trying to learn about the world, it comes off as the writers being too lazy to research a real country. It is the film’s portrayal of Latin America where, in my estimation, it really stumbles. This country felt Central American, or maybe northern South American, the sort of place the CIA would have overthrown a democratic government in the name of stopping Communism but in reality at the behest of the United Fruit Company. The politics is suitably chaotic, with a ruling family that is at each other’s necks. I am not the hugest fan of how the film portrays the opposition, which feels somewhat cliche (this is redeemed somewhat by the participation of the opposition in one of the film’s most entertaining scenes), but it did some interesting things with the military, and how some of its soldiers are more than simple automata obeying their orders. With some more spit and polish, it could have said something interesting about how no ruler rules alone, but the script didn’t bother to venture there. There’s a real attempt to depict the diversity of this place, unreal as it may be. Overall, I’m certain those with more familiarity with Latin America could drive a truck through the gaps in the region’s portrayal, but to my gringo mind, at least, it wasn’t the worst.

This is a film that, in its concerns, strikes me as distinctly middle-aged, reminding me of Olympus Has Fallen and its sequels. The characters here are well into their careers, all with regrets, all having to see their professional identities challenged in some way. One wants the excitement and purpose of his youth, one wants a restoration of her credibility, and one has to find out his fate when his people seem to have had enough of him. There’s a clever thematic spine here that is easy to miss. When should we give up our youthful dreams and accept reality? It’s a hard question. It also figures in Cena’s character’s personal life. His marriage is on the rocks, and this affects his interactions with Brie’s character in a telling way, a way that underlines his innate kindness.

There’s also something to be said as to how the film portrays masculinity and its intersection with American military culture. I had the luck of reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collection No Time to Spare recently, and she muses about traditional male friendships, the intense camaraderie they can foster, and the undercurrent of violence that so often underlies them. I thought the film could be read in dialogue with Le Guin on that score, and it enhanced the experience.

It was not until I wrote this review that I learned that this film has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; it makes me question my taste, and fear that I’ll have my critic card revoked. In any case, it was a pleasant enough way to spend an evening before going to dinner. It doesn’t reinvent action cinema by any stretch, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Form your own judgment of it, if you’re so inclined.

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Highlights: Cena's character

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.