Film Review: Masters of the Universe (2026)

Lighthearted nostalgic adventure that doesn't take itself too seriously

Saturday mornings in the ‘80s were a sacred time for fantasy loving kids, a time when they could indulge in a range of fantastical animated adventures. Some cartoons were available in the after school hours as well. Long before cable gave us 24-hour kids and cartoon channels, and before streaming services gave us on-demand access to thousands of superhero shows, weekend and after school cartoons were the primary gateway to adventure. Among the curated selection of kids cartoons was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The series, based on an existing toy brand, gave kids the animated version of action figures from Mattel’s Masters of the Universe collection. In full disclosure, I will note that I am not a He-Man (or spinoff She-Ra) superfan, although I watched some of both original shows in their original runs and have sometimes watched other iterations of the series, including Netflix’s She-Ra reboot. I mention this because the 2026 Masters of the Universe feels very intentionally grounded in that original sense of childhood nostalgia. Depending on your perspective, you may find this a joyous relief or an irritation. For me, despite the film’s many shortcomings, I mostly found it to be the former: a fun, optimistic surprise in a sea of otherwise perfectly appropriate and timely cinema bleakness and intensity.

In the 2026 adventure, Adam is the young prince of Eternia, a magical kingdom with talking animals and sorcerers. He is small for his age and hesitant to fight. As a result, he is pushed around by the other kids in their weapons training sessions and looked down on by his father the king. Despite this, he is friends with his strong friend Teela and is encouraged by his teacher, Teela’s dad, the head soldier Duncan. Adam’s home is Castle Grayskull, home to a sacred sword of power and protected by a mage known as the Sorceress. When the evil sorcerer Skeletor and his partner Evil-Lyn attack the castle, the king’s forces are overwhelmed. The queen, who is from Earth, is forced to send Adam and the sword to safety through a portal to Earth. But in the fall to Earth, Adam loses the sword. Suddenly (one time skip later), fifteen years have passed and Adam is going on Tinder dates and working in HR in Oklahoma City. Despite his average life, he is obsessed with memories of his home planet (although no one believes him) and is determined to regain his lost sword. When he finally finds it, it triggers an attack by a fantastical creature, which leads to a rescue by his now grown-up friend Teela, who takes him back to Eternia. Adam must use the sword and his own inner strength to rescue his parents, free his people, and retake his kingdom from Skeletor.

The major strength of this film is the lead actors. Nicholas Galitzine is believable and enjoyable as a likeable but insecure everyman who knows he’s destined for more than the drudgery of his day job. Camila Mendes, who did several seasons as Veronica in Riverdale, is excellent as the no-nonsense, sharp, grown-up-in-the-room in all of the scenes. Idris Elba is, as always, perfect as Duncan, who ranges from tough teacher to substitute father figure to defeated and depressed drunk to fierce soldier. Kristen Wiig is also funny as Duncan’s sarcastic robot companion. There is even a Dolph Lundgren cameo, where the former He-Man actor gives Nicholas Galitzine some cryptic advice about the way to be a hero.

There are many funny moments in this film, including the opening scene where Adam is telling his complicated life story to his eyerolling blind date. Although not all of the jokes hit, the story is, for the most part, amusing and very kid-friendly. Unlike other superhero live-action films, Masters of the Universe opts for comedy and camp as its primary tone. The choice is a bit unexpected in this age of edgy superhero interpretations that are either grim or cynical. Masters of the Universe is closer to the tone of the Barbie movie or the live-action One Piece series. But it opts out of Barbie’s cerebral social commentary sarcasm or One Piece’s balance of outrageousness and grim intensity. It’s most similar in tone to the 2017 live-action Power Rangers, a film that tried to balance a modern, edgy aesthetic with classic, campy, kids show nostalgia. Power Rangers was a film that started off edgy/cool in the first half and then jarringly dove into campy kids nerdiness in the second half. However, Masters of the Universe has a clear target audience and vibe in mind, and stays consistent in its tone of lightness, kid-friendly playfulness and self-aware nostalgia.

In fact, the film is very self-aware of its campy nostalgia. Adam reps the old Prince Adam outfit by wearing a pink button-down shirt and jeans in his non-He-Man scenes. He repeatedly acknowledges the goofiness of some of the things he says or does, admitting that many of his choices are based on a child’s worldview and childhood memories he wants to reconnect with. Although he is an adult, it is clear he is emotionally stuck in his childhood trauma, loss, and insecurity. In the original He-Man animated series, Adam’s fearful or lackadaisical attitude was an artificial cover for his alternate identity. In Masters of the Universe, he has genuine hesitation and insecurities. And when he transforms, everyone around him knows he’s the same person with the same insecurities. This evolution of the premise is an asset to the story, to humanize both him and his connection to his friends. And it avoids the always annoying trope of close friends not noticing that the hero and their clearly identical alter ego are the same person.

However, despite the appeal of the story and the fun tone, there are some elements of the film that are confusing. Given the intentional and thoughtful characterization of Adam, it’s odd to leave out any reference to his childhood upbringing on Earth. He talks about life on Eternia as if it is the only thing he knows. In other lost prince/princess stories, we get at least a quick explanation of their survival. Superman was adopted by the Kents; Emma from Once Upon a Time was raised in foster homes in the U.S. The absence of even a passing explanation for his survival was a distracting plot omission that felt like a missed opportunity to give this Oklahoman Adam some personal context. His bestie and roommate Hussein is a likeable but underused character who mostly disappears from the plot without an opportunity to get to know about his connection to Adam. Another strange choice is an extended detour into Adam’s day job at a human relations company where his obsession with swords gets him in trouble. There is a particularly protracted scene of his boss (an excellent Sasheer Zamata) lecturing him on sensitivity in a way that paints her as a semi-villain (she seems almost like a corporate counterpart to Evil-Lyn), and the scene is clearly meant to mock corporate sensitivity lingo. The fact that a consent joke is twice used as a derisive punchline is another strange choice. Later in a crucial moment on Eternia, Adam initially opts for negotiation and empathy when everyone wants him to fight, but he is soon forced to abandon that approach in favor of fighting. This throughline is a confusing theme in a film that is otherwise fun, optimistic, and likeable.

Like many films lately, Masters of the Universe is at least thirty minutes too long, especially for something that is primarily a comedy adventure. It is a film that has plenty of kid-friendly content and doesn’t take itself too seriously. The very last scenes and the first post-credits scene emphasize this lightheartedness with a big homage to the original 1980s cartoon in its final send-off. Although it deals with themes of empathy versus aggression and self-confidence versus insecurity, the overall story is mainly a fun reminder of childhood imagination and adventure. Depending on your mood, that may be just what you need.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Self-aware nostalgia
• Solid acting
• Kid-friendly content and humor

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Microreview: Cold Storage

If exploding zombies are your thing…

Cold Storage is the latest iteration of the fad for fungus zombies, which seem to be still in vogue. This time, they’re the result of a medical experiment that was once aboard Skylab and everyone forgot about until it escaped an oxygen tank that fell on Australia. In an extended prologue, we witness the disaster that happened two decades ago when a comically understaffed team of experts went to contain the mutated organism and lost one member in the most gruesome way. This is the type of fungus that takes over the nervous system and compels the victim to seek a location for optimal dissemination. That’s scary enough, but on top of that, the infection ends up blowing up your guts all around you. The movie delights in showing the many ways this can deform a cadaver.

Another member of that ill-fated team, played by Liam Neeson, suffers an unspecified back injury that conveniently keeps him out of the main action in the present, when the military building that kept the last sample of the zombie fungus (now decommissioned and repainted as a self-storage facility) has a minor electrical mishap with catastrophic cascading effects: a freezer malfunctions, the fungus starts growing again, it breaks containment, and it climbs up the food chain until it becomes a problem for humans. Liam Neeson is dragged back from retirement to save the day again, but he spends most of the movie traveling to the site of the crisis, and most of the rest of the movie lying on the floor because his broken back can’t handle gunfire recoil. Why do you even hire Liam Neeson to not let him do Liam Neeson stuff escapes me.

Instead, our heroes are Joe Keery, fresh from saving the world in Stranger Things, and horror veteran Georgina Campbell, whose character is very tired of running from monsters and just wants to hide and wait. These two stumble into the whole world-ending menace because they’re bored and decide to investigate a weird noise in the self-storage facility where they work the night shift, and discover the alarm that was triggered by the broken freezing system. Meanwhile, the fungus has already spread to the local fauna, and when the shambling victims cross paths with our heroes, it’s time for them to run for their lives.

It helps that they have more plot armor than Bugs Bunny. The fungus zombies repeatedly ooze, spittle, burst open and projectile-vomit their gooey innards right next to our heroes, and somehow not one drop of infected material splashes onto them. When you consider that this fungus has been shown to be able to penetrate cement and metal, the protagonists’ eventual survival can only be explained because their names are on the poster and aren’t allowed to die. So the gore quota is met by an array of secondary characters established as unpleasant enough for it to be OK to enjoy watching them suffer the most spectacularly messy deaths. This movie has a lot of fun with zombie makeup, and even more fun with throwing zombie guts at every surface.

Cold Storage is the kind of supremely silly flick that demands out loud that you switch off your brain. There’s no point in pausing to question the multiple instances of military bureaucratic dysfunction that it must have taken for this plot to happen. Don’t expect any implied reflection on the problem of badly maintained public infrastructure or the irresponsibility of storing hazardous materials near civilian areas (one character has a small atom bomb hidden in a house with children, and it’s treated as a nonissue). Just sit and savor the spectacle of a screen smeared with squishy rotten organs. Hey, the world is ending anyway, right?

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Video Game Review: Pokémon Legends: Z-A & Mega Dimensions DLC

Old dog finally learns the trick it should have years ago.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Pokémon is undoubtedly the biggest juggernaut in entertainment history. It’s bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Mickey Mouse, bigger than Harry Potter, bigger than the entire MCU. And while I respect a publisher’s fear of altering too much of a known formula for an established IP, no single entry will derail this franchise. When Pokémon Legends: Arceus released, it temporarily assuaged my exhaustion with Pokémon’s turn-based combat. The game, while still turn-based, took some liberties with catching and including the player character in the world, blurring the lines between the trainer’s gameplay and their Pokémon’s. The follow-up games, mainline entries (Scarlet and Violet) reverted to norms with undesirable results. But finally, the toe Game Freak dipped in that pool of live action Pokémon gameplay with Legends: Arceus has become a full dive. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the step I’ve wanted the franchise to take for the longest time. And while there are still some kinks to work out, there’s a lot to be excited about.

This is the first full action Pokémon game (and no, I’m not counting fighting games with Pokémon characters or Pokémon Unite). That’s right, no more PP. Instead, the game gives each attack a cast time and a cooldown to ensure a balance between the strongest and weakest. Traditionally, a move like Fire Blast would only come with 5 PP before needing to be recharged; now, it simply has a longer cooldown time and a slightly longer cast time than weaker moves. This creates a new dynamic within the gameplay. You could use Fire Blast, but it might not be ready even after your next attack. Do you wait it out, reposition, and use it again, or do you try to get another two attacks during its cool down? (Fire Blast has a higher chance to miss, so I’m not suggesting you use it—just an example). When fighting wild Pokémon, you’ll find that you draw aggro before your mons do. It’s completely possible to get knocked out this way, and adds an extra layer of immersion to the gameplay, especially early on when facing down a powerful alpha Pokémon or rogue mega-evolved mon. Dodging wild Pokémon attacks while commanding your own to unleash on an opponent can be incredibly satisfying and kept me entertained throughout the entirety of my run.

That said, the combat still needs work. The pathfinding system can sometimes be egregious (which rears its head particularly in the Mega Dimensions DLC that I’ll get to later). Sometimes your Pokémon will line itself up behind a wall or a fence before firing off its move (only to hit into the building instead), sometimes the Pokémon will take a weird path to get to another part of the map before unleashing their attack, wasting your precious speed advantage over an enemy while they pelt your Pokémon in the back. Sometimes they’ll fall off a roof mid-attack. Heck, sometimes a Pokémon just won’t attack. I think what happens is they take so long to follow a path that the system just cancels out the attack you selected initially. When you choose to attack again, it works fine, but it wastes time. This mostly occurs when fighting in the city environment; arenas aren’t problematic.

Another issue I have with the battle system is entering my inventory. Most of the time it works well, but sometimes the game simply won’t let you access it when you need to (and this happens in a lot of the intense mega fights). The game essentially puts a freeze on your inventory access if a Pokémon is mega-evolving. I don’t know if it’s because they may or may not show a mega evolution cut scene (which becomes annoying after the first time you see it). Sometimes there is no mega evolving, and I still can’t enter my inventory. I just have to shrug my shoulders and swap my Pokémon out instead of using a potion and heal them later when it works again.

Legends: Z-A takes place in Lumiose City, and while not as large as a traditional Pokémon game world with all its regions, it makes up for that by expanding the city, incorporating rooftop exploration and placing wild Pokémon zones throughout the map. The world is bright and welcoming, even if some environments are underwhelming. Considering that Pokémon games always sell millions upon millions of copies, it’s a shame they won’t put more effort into hiring more people to help make the games look better. Some buildings are simple boxes with textures on them. Look at the screenshot above. I mean come on, Game Freak, you can do better than that. You’re charging full price for these games, so don’t give us a budget effort. Luckily, the Pokémon animations look good, as do the models themselves. It’s fun to watch my hulking alpha Dragonite float around behind me on the map.

One of the main gameplay mechanics of Legends: Z-A is an oldie they introduced over a decade ago with X and Y: Mega Evolution. Most of the Pokémon you’ll find throughout Z-A can mega evolve, which is necessary to help quell the rage of rogue mega evolved Pokémon. At night, you try to climb the Z-A Royale list. You start and rank Z and climb your way up to; you guessed it, rank A! You do this by entering battle zones at night and challenging other NPC trainers. You can pick up cards that give you mini quests to fulfill that fill your challenger ticket bar faster (for instance, land five psychic-type attacks on unaware opponents). Sneaking up on an opponent and landing a critical move is fun, though sometimes the game randomly makes you get caught unaware by an opponent and stuns you momentarily. This would only make sense if you were sneaking, and they caught you, but sometimes I’m running full at them for a battle and I get the de-buff anyway. Once you have a challenger’s ticket, you can face your next ranked opponent. This is the closest thing the game has to gym leaders, and many of the higher-ranked characters get used throughout the narrative and into the DLC.

For those of you worried about EVs and IVs, worry not. They’ve included it all. There are some specific Pokémon moves that have been altered to work in an action-paced setting, so you may find one of your favorite moves isn’t what it used to be. It’s also wonderful to have access to your Pokémon boxes anywhere you go.

There isn’t much going on in the story. It’s a typical “save the city” trope, but with a Pokémon skin. It’s not abysmal by any means, and I thank the heavens there isn’t anything so terrible as Team Star from Scarlet and Violet, but there isn’t too much here that will stick with me in the coming years. The characters are fine; some deliver some well-timed zingers, but mostly just serve the narrative. One thing I find bizarre is that there is absolutely no voice work. Why? This is 2025 (well, 2026 now, but the game released last year), so there is no reason for there not to be. It works in some games, but when characters are moving their mouths and no dialogue comes out, it’s odd.

The side quests are a mixed bag. Some are clever and genuinely made me laugh, while others are quite simple and boring. You never know which one you’ll end up with, unfortunately. A few were long and tedious, while others were engaging and well thought out. I particularly enjoyed engaging in the wild zones and catching everything available; it reminded me of the mainline games, and I always jumped over to a new spot whenever it was introduced.

The game ran smoothly (though I was on Switch 2, so I had a little extra processing power to back me up). Minus the in-game issues, I had no performance problems or stutters like I had with the last few entries in the series. Collecting Pokémon was a breeze, and battling was fun and intense. While there are still many things Game Freak should address with the Pokémon pathfinding, this is a massive step toward creating a more immersive experience with this series. I hope we get more advances in this direction instead of the uninspired Terastallization they introduced in the last games. With the power of the Switch 2, I also hope to see better effort from the developers to make the world look like it’s part of the number one entertainment IP in the world. There is a lot of good here, and I’m hoping it becomes great. If you want to see what a live-action Pokémon game plays like, it’s right here; it’s fun, and it runs well. If you remember wishing you could be more like Ash from the anime, controlling your mons around a battlefield, give this game your support.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10
Bonus: +1 for full-action gameplay. +1 for Pokémon designs and animations.
Penalties: -1 for poor Pokémon pathfinding. -1 for having to watch mega evolution a million times.
Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10

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Maybe save your money.

Mega Dimensions Review

I purchased Mega Dimensions for two reasons. One; because of my desire for mega evolutions that weren’t in the main game (that I thought were going to be, but I’d been misled by the advertisements), and two; because I had just about finished the main game when the DLC came out and was still enjoying the experience. Plus, I know myself; if I didn’t play it immediately after I finished the game, I would never have gotten to it. And to be honest, I wish I had saved my money.

That’s not to say that this DLC is broken or unplayable. It’s fine if you want something to do, but it is an expensive something to do that feels like a cash grab. At the price of thirty steep dollars (which is the most I’ve ever paid for a piece of DLC) I was hoping for something really neat, maybe an expansion to the map or a completely new zone. Instead, you get to enter the hyperspace Lumiose, which is essentially just recycled pieces of Lumiose with a different skin that you have to visit repeatedly. At first, exploration was interesting, but once I discovered it was simply a grind, it felt more and more like a chore.

They introduce two new characters with the content, one to help you with mega battles, and another that makes donuts to feed Hoopa, which allows the player to traverse hyperspace. The gameplay loop here comprises finding berries to craft donuts, which allows you to enter hyperspace, which allows you to research the other dimension (through minor tasks like catching Pokémon, battling, destroying floating Pokéballs) which allows you to find better berries. Once you progress through the story, you can create better donuts. All the Pokémon in hyperspace Lumiose start out at over level 100, so using your donuts will give you a level buff. You want to be at level 100 to maximize their effects; this content isn’t really feasible without having high-level mons.

The problem is the story is not enticing, and after a while, I simply wandered hyperspace Lumiose for better and better berries, but the whole thing is RNG. You’re not guaranteed the good berries. Worse yet, the donuts you make get random abilities, so if you want a specific ability (which is more important at higher levels) you lose out if you don’t get lucky (unless you save scum it by loading a backup save).

Besides increasing your level a certain amount, the donuts have other perks as well; calories being paramount. The more carbs a donut has, the longer you can stay in hyperspace. That’s right; the player is timed each time they go into hyperspace. The better the donut, the longer you can stay. But the higher the difficulty of the zone, the quicker your calories drain before getting ejected from the other dimension. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, and on the lower levels it isn’t. But on the higher levels, when my energy was draining incredibly fast and every single move counted and I saw my Pokémon take a random, unnecessary path around some area to come to do its move, or worse, whiff the move completely, I lost my mind a bit.

I finished the main part of the Mega Dimensions DLC. There was, as to be expected, a powerful Pokémon at the end of the trail, but the thing is, there’s even a bit more beyond the main DLC storyline. Rayquaza is teased early on, and I know Groudon and Kyogre come first, but I just can’t get myself to care. The donut system is bad, the story isn’t great, the flaws in the gameplay are exacerbated in the timed segments, and it’s expensive. It works mostly, which is fine, but it’s a grind. If you decide to pick this up, do yourself a favor and use Mewtwo and have it use psychic on all the floating Pokéballs in hyperspace. You’ll thank me for it.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 5/10
Bonus: +1 for cool new mega evolutions.
Penalties: -1 for RNG/Grind. -.5 for high price, repetitive content.
Nerd Coefficient: 4.5/10

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.

TV Review: The Copenhagen Test

A deadly game of stories inside stories, masks behind masks

You probably don’t need to be told about the less than cordial relationship that US society has with its immigrant members. Real life provides daily reminders. Even though the country itself is a plurinational entity built of and by immigrants, the prevailing attitude among the white people in power is that the rest of ethnicities are on permanent probation. In the new spy TV series The Copenhagen Test, that seemingly incurable paranoia in the American psyche is the shadow hanging over our protagonist Alexander, a son of Chinese immigrants who has done more than should be asked of anyone to demonstrate his patriotic loyalty to the US, but who somehow keeps having to earn the country’s trust again and again. This is the story of a good man begging for some basic respect from a system that doesn’t deserve him.

At some point in the past, Alexander was in the US Army. Because immigrants are never done proving their allegiance, during an overseas rescue mission he was subjected to a secret test: there was only one available seat left in a helicopter, and he had to choose between saving a foreign child or an American adult. He had received explicit orders to prefer the American, but he took the correct option (it’s not the option the test prefers, but it’s indisputably the correct one): he saved the child. This moment has cascading consequences for his career. Because he was falsely led to believe he left someone to die, he lives with PTSD and repeated panic attacks, which he hides from his superiors. Because he supposedly didn’t show enough loyalty to the US, he’s been removed from field missions and assigned to an office job. And because his Chinese parents anxiously raised him to be more American than baseball and hot dogs, he feels like an impostor.

So we have a protagonist with more than enough inner complexity to lead the show. And that’s only the backstory; we still haven’t gotten to the part where an enemy faction puts nanobots in his head to turn him into a live streaming camera. That doesn’t help his chances now that he’s applying for a spy job.

Against all odds, he gets the job, at a super-extra-ultra-secret agency that watches the other US agencies (we’re told it was created during the Bush Sr. presidency, which means the immediate context for the project must have been the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal). Alexander’s bosses are aware of the nanobots in his head, because he’s a walking radio emitter, and instead of kicking him out, which would alert the enemy, they decide to use him as a triple agent: he’s working for the US, but everything he sees and hears is still being broadcast 24/7 at the enemy, but he’s going to broadcast an edited version of his life in order to lure and catch the enemy. He’s not 100% sure his bosses aren’t planning to eliminate him in the end, and his bosses aren’t 100% sure he wasn’t complicit in hacking his own head, but they’re going to need to act like they trust each other if they want to reach any solution.

What follows is a fascinating pantomime, meticulously designed between Alexander and his bosses to give misleading information to the enemy without alerting either the enemy or the rest of the spies at the agency. And the architect of this believable fiction is a brilliant character: Samantha, an English lit graduate who was previously hired by the agency to concoct cover stories and predict threat scenarios. If you’re wondering why spies would need the services of a dramaturge, consider this: when you’re a spy, your entire life is a performance, and you need to be alert to subtextual clues in everyone else’s performance. You need to prepare against the most outlandish villain plans and push the right buttons to influence others’ behavior. Spycraft is about controlling information delivery and ascertaining human motivations, and that’s exactly where a creative writer excels.

So The Copenhagen Test isn’t the type of spy story that boasts shiny gadgets, cocktail suits, or acrobatic stunts. Its plot is more contained, less reliant on spectacle and more demanding of the viewer’s attention. Under Samantha’s direction, Alexander becomes a decoy of himself, letting his eyes and ears perceive only what his bosses curate, while being careful not to let the enemy notice that he knows he’s been hacked, or that his bosses know. As the story progresses, he starts suspecting that even his bosses are hiding stuff from him, so he adds another layer of pretense: he has to do all of the above plus conduct his own investigation without letting his bosses notice that he’s doing it.

With me so far? Great, because that’s only half of the complications.

The other half is another brilliant character: Michelle, an infiltration specialist who was originally hired by the agency to play the role of love interest for Alexander. But she has her own agenda in this whole mess, and she has ways of communicating with Alexander outside of either faction’s notice, so the visible faces of their relationship multiply thusly: the corny romance story they enact for the enemy’s eyes, the simultaneous digging into his loyalty that she does for the agency, the private messages they exchange when they’re in a place that blocks his head’s signal, and the extra level of subterfuge that she deploys in those moments, when she believes that he believes that she’s really on his side.

The result of this kabuki-grade dance of innuendo and misdirection is that Alexander, Samantha and Michelle play at all times the parallel roles of scriptwriter and actor and spectator. As I often say on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And The Copenhagen Test uses this example of a man’s loyalty being under constant test to suggest a uncomfortable idea: if there’s no difference between being a patriot and acting like one, then patriotism is simply a performance, and our identities as citizens and as political subjects are stories we continually tell each other. The whole edifice of society and its reciprocal responsibilities rests on a sustained belief reenacted daily.

The show gives us a dark parallel of this idea in the figure of the villain, whom we meet rather early in the season. He was a spy from the communist bloc in the ’80s, who betrayed his country for the promise of immigration to the US, but was discarded once he was no longer useful. Once again we see the theme of a society that weaponizes its membership: whereas the American government has failed Alexander by refusing to believe he’s American enough, it also failed the villain by luring him into believing he could be. This self-sabotaging pattern on the part of the US is also related to the loyalty test in Alexander’s backstory: the rules of the test are based on the unquestioned assumption that American citizenship endows a human life with greater inherent worth.

That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual trap that makes American exceptionalism possible: the belief that people’s worth can be given and removed, instead of just acknowledged. It’s the lie that Alexander still accepts, the motivation that drives all of his mistakes: the promise of a society where people don’t aspire to be respected, but to be usable. Alexander’s parents are perpetually stressed about not coming off as true Americans, so they overcorrect to the point of self-negation. His bosses don’t care if he behaves morally or if he hates himself for the choice they forced on him years ago; they only care about how much use can be made of him. And as long as he agrees that that’s the proper way for the land of the free to frame his personhood, he won’t be free.

Even in a healthy society, there’s a degree to which each of us must play a public role to convince the rest that we’re good and reliable. But in the uniquely spectacle-poisoned US, the show must go on. People like Alexander (or like Samantha and Michelle, who also are nonwhite) aren’t allowed to truly experience their lives, only to perform them—look American, sound American, seem American. Because the test doesn’t end; because in a society built on suspicion, the tools of spycraft become necessities of survival; because if you can be certain of one thing in these uncertain times, it’s that there’s always someone watching.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Not much changed when the Fire Nation attacked

The Avatar saga remains faithful to its tried and true formula: visually breathtaking, narratively uninspired

There are truly interesting ideas in Avatar 3 that elevate the themes raised by the first Avatar to questions of thorny significance to the story, and time after time, their resolution goes for the easy answer, the overdone cliché. The Way of Water could be forgiven for delivering very little because it promised very little. Fire and Ash promises a lot and still fails to deliver, which makes this entry in the film series a more regrettable (forgive the pun) misfire.

Let’s begin with the film’s central conflict: Spider, the human boy adopted by the blue aliens. After a sudden bout of cosmic bad luck, he ends up convulsing on the forest floor, with no more human-breathable air left in his mask and far from his stack of replacements. As a desperate last measure, our miracle child Kiri connects to the web of nature and reformats Spider’s entire body chemistry to allow him to breathe Pandora’s air. So far, so good: no more depending on a 24/7 mask to survive. However, Spider’s new metabolism opens the door to a nightmare scenario: he’s living proof that the human body can adapt to survive unimpeded in Pandora’s environment. If the bad guys figure out how to replicate the process, the entire balance of power in Pandora will shift in favor of human colonization.

Now Spider’s existence is a danger to everyone he loves, and his body is an invaluable source of biomedical innovation. The rest of the film has him ping-ponged between enemy factions that want to either cut him open for the benefit of Earth or cut his throat for the benefit of Pandora. But the movie chooses the wrong Na’vi as the mouthpiece for the latter position, and there are no lasting consequences for the personal ties that should have been damaged between Spider and his would-be executioner.

It has a jarring effect that the film brings us to this immense rift between Spider and the blue aliens, only to give everyone a happy ending where he’s welcomed by the ancestors as a member of the Na’vi without further issue. Let’s stress the point again: Spider was almost murdered by people he deeply trusts and loves, because they became convinced that his life put all of them in danger. And this betrayal comes after Neytiri has spent half the film insulting and neglecting him because she’s still grieving her dead son and Spider is a constant reminder of which people took him from her. After his near-execution, the relationship between Spider and the Na’vi shouldn’t be able to go back to normal, ever. At the very least, it should take more for him to take up arms in their defense again. Even his evil not-exactly-father, the half-Na’vi clone of the late Colonel Quaritch, shows him more respect in this film than his adoptive parents.

The other conflict in the plot, which the trailers gave much attention to but actually doesn’t affect the story that much, has to do with the Fire Nation Ash People, a tribe of pillagers who some decades ago survived a volcanic disaster and have since rejected the cult of the nature goddess Eywa. Now they live off piracy and worship the same fire that destroyed their old way of life. This is a fascinating concept that the film does nothing with. It’s one thing to present a schism in a pantheistic faith and create what is essentially a demonic cult; it’s much more compelling to do so in a setting where the nature goddess is demonstrably real and present in people’s lives. What does it look like to despise the natural flow of the life force when that force is visible and has a tangible will?

But also, what does it say about Eywa that she plays favorites between Na’vi clans? The Ash People’s backstory has them praying to be saved from the volcano, but Eywa refused to send help. In such circumstances it makes total sense that they’d form a new religion around fire, which proved to be the more powerful force, and that they’d turn to pillage to survive, both because they no longer have fertile land and because they no longer trust Eywa’s generosity.

Eywa’s will is actually one of the bigger problems with the plotting of the Avatar series. In the first movie, she saved the day via literal Dea Ex Machina, and Avatar 3 repeats the same trick in an identical situation. The critique of real-life environmental devastation is loud and clear: the humans of this future are too dim to notice the obvious intelligence of the space whales they kill for profit, but it takes a civilization-sized Idiot Ball to ignore a whole sentient biosphere telling you to stop.

When you introduce a deity into your setting, and this deity’s opinion matches your stance as an author, it’s very hard to avoid turning your story into a pamphlet. Eywa steers the plot at the times when it’s convenient, in the directions that help the author preach his message, and thus can’t function as a character in the way that the rest of the characters treat her. And the only time we’re told Eywa makes a questionable choice, i.e. letting the Ash People starve, it’s presented in a way that makes them the bad guys instead of Eywa. As often happens with supreme beings in stories, there are no lessons for Eywa to learn, no need for her to change her mind or grow. The story assumes she can do no wrong, even when it clearly shows it happening. Instead of being a character, she fulfills the function of authorial (forgive the pun) avatar that stalls or pushes the plot as needed.

Another character whom the story treats far more favorably than their actions deserve: Jake Sully, whose boot camp style of parenting will probably push Na’vi culture to invent psychotherapy on its own. Even allowing for the sad reality that the entire Na’vi people is in a war for survival, Jake has no excuse for the way he treats his children, and he’s repeatedly portrayed as heroic for it.

Avatar’s in-your-nose parable about colonialism and predatory greed has been repeating the same basic points for three movies, and doesn’t have any original perspective to add to the discussion. James Cameron has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his box. This film series should stop before its incomparably gorgeous landscapes can’t disguise the mediocre storytelling anymore.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 2

The gods watch over humans, but who watches the watchers?

Previously on The Legend of Lara Croft, we saw Lara learn to stop trying to save the world on her own and rely more on her allies. In season 2, we see her take that lesson to an unreasonable extreme and rely too quickly on a stranger who is obviously wearing a blinking neon sign that says, “Villain of the Season.”

This new antagonist, a rich entrepreneur named Mila, describes herself as being in the business of saving the world. To most people, that lofty goal takes the form of selling a new form of plastic that degrades more quickly. But in secret, she’s behind a series of thefts of religious relics, because her idea of saving the world is amassing enough supernatural power to press Delete and Reboot on reality. That’s why she’s collecting the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Orisha Masks: with the magic of all the Yoruba gods, she’ll become an uncontested force to deal with.

This plot sets for itself a very unstable tightrope to walk. Lara is still the star of the show, so she has to be the one to try to stop Mila from remaking the world. However, as a rich white Brit, she’s a distasteful choice of hero to save Yoruba relics from misuse. Even though the script takes care to have her eschew her late father’s less respectable methods, it still has to avoid portraying her as so ethical that she might come off as a white savior of Yoruba culture.

So the show’s solution is to have its main charater arc happen to someone other than Lara. This time there’s no personal lesson for her to figure out, so she cedes the moral spotlight to a new character: the human incarnation of Eshu, one of the Yoruba gods. At some point in the past, he had a moment of weakness and failed to protect his followers from a colonial invasion, and since then he’s lost his self-confidence and self-respect. On one hand, this is a compelling backstory for a character to deal with. On the other hand, it detracts from the thrill of the season’s climax, because Eshu happens to possess exactly the repertoire of divine superpowers that can immediately stop Mila, so a whole season’s worth of tragic losses could have been avoided if only he’d heard the requisite pep talk a bit sooner. That’s the core weakness of this plot: Eshu could have saved the day any time he chose to. All that was stopping him was low morale.

Because the focus moves away from Lara’s choices, this season doesn’t animate its action scenes in the style of a videogame like the first season did. Lara can’t be the hero in this story, because that would be horrendously problematic, so the role she fulfills is as a catalyst for Eshu’s return to heroism. It’s nice that she shares with him all the personal growth she acquired in the first season, although it feels strange that a god would need that kind of lesson.

In a way, the plot of this season resembles the plot of Eternals: someone is hunting down the gods in the present day, when they’re more or less retired after centuries of watching over humans, and the question implicit in the call to action is whether the human world deserves to be saved. Whereas the first season had humans debating whether divine powers could be trusted, now it’s the gods who debate whether humans can be trusted. That’s a neat way to carry a theme full circle.

One last, welcome addition to the show is the character of Fig, a professional assassin who works for Mila and ends up occupying a niche as Lara’s equal in martial arts. At every exotic location our protagonists visit, Lara has a fight with Fig that tests both of them in skill, strategy and endurance. It’s an exciting tension to follow, and apparently a thread that will be extended into a future season. So  even after searching for treasure in sunk ships, mounting a village’s defense with meteorite armor against modern guns, evading a shark in bloodied waters, and making it alive out of a crumbling Viking fort, there’s still much more to tell in The Legend of Lara Croft.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 1

For what does it profit you to raid all the tombs and forfeit your soul?

With the tiniest lip service to the ethical problems related to tomb raiding, the Netflix animated series The Legend of Lara Croft asks what that kind of life does to a person. Usually, in a Tomb Raider videogame, you’re mostly worried about the right timing of an acrobatic stunt and about the remaining number of bullets in a shotgun when angry dobermans come barking at you. In the show, it’s a given that Lara will succeed at everything, because she’s just that awesome, so the stakes become personal: is tomb raiding a worthy pursuit when it can get your friends killed, when it can attract the worst kind of enemies, when it can become an easy substitute for processing difficult emotions?

The adventure for the first season is nothing exceptional: it’s a globe-trotting quest to collect all the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Peril Stones before the bad guy does, because if one individual accumulates that much power—I’m sure you’ve fallen asleep by now. For the most part, the adventure is an excuse to boast gorgeously drawn scenery from every corner of the world, including Mesoamerican jungles, Mongolian steppes, Chinese rivers and French catacombs. The quality of the landscape drawing is one of the high points of the show.

Also, it’s fascinating to watch the flow of a videogame narrative play out in television. In every episode, Lara has to solve a puzzle rigged with traps, or fulfill a side quest to find some lost children before the villagers will help her, or jump between areas of a room in a precise sequence, or frantically run around a dinosaur to shoot it dead before it eats her. Some of these sequences are animated to have the “camera” follow Lara’s movements just as if they were happening in the game, and that’s a nice degree of attention to detail.

But what really makes the story interesting is Lara’s inner journey. At the start of the series, one of her traveling companions is killed, and she spends subsequent episodes processing her guilt and learning the difference between protecting her loved ones from the ugliest bits of tomb raiding and pushing them away for fear of losing them. She’s incredibly lucky to have the excellent friends she has, because their support stays unwavering through her worst tantrums. She eventually comes to realize that choosing the tomb raiding lifestyle is something she needs to do for reasons that matter to her, instead of doing it out of loyalty to dead mentors. In particular, she needs to learn to not use her adventures to distract herself from her grief and anger, because that’s the same mistake that the villain makes in his own quest for revenge, so he serves as a dark mirror of what she could become.

So, in between climbing cliffs and dodging bullets and deciphering clues and wrestling crocodiles and sneaking in secret lairs, she has valuable conversations with her allies that help her grow beyond her learned coping style. The messy feelings she harbors about the burden of the Croft name get resolved elegantly when she decides that she doesn’t have to follow the template of how her father defined the Croft legacy: the name belongs to her now, and she gets to define it in her terms.

I don’t know whether the Holy Grail of a good videogame adaptation has been found yet, but The Legend of Lara Croft clears the bar of not sucking. There’s enough dungeoneering for those who like dungeoneering, enough drama for those who like drama, and enough comedy for those who like comedy. Tomorrow we’ll see whether season 2 can stay the course.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

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.