Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: 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 Review: Exit 8

Surreal, addictive, mind-bending horror

Life can sometimes feel like a disappointing, endless loop of mind-numbing repetition. On the other hand, unexpected crises can leave us feeling trapped by decision paralysis, and guilt can be a weight that keeps us from moving forward. Imagine those feelings physically manifesting into a real-life confinement. Exit 8 is a surreal Japanese horror film that quietly pulls the audience into the terror of being trapped in every meaning of the word. Part puzzle box, part horror, part psychological thriller, the story is awash in quiet symbolism, creepiness, confusion, and fear, that demand that you pay attention if you want to survive.

Based on the video game The Exit 8, the film is the story of a young man (Kazunari Ninomiya), later identified only as “The Lost Man,” who is traveling on a crowded train in Japan when he observes an overbearing man in a dark suit bullying a young mother because her baby is crying. The other passengers notice the bullying but stay focused on their cell phones and EarPods and don’t intervene, and the young man exits the train at the next station. He gets a call from his ex-girlfriend (Nana Komatsu), who tells him she’s pregnant with his child and wants to know what he wants to do about the baby. He is so much in drone mode that he doesn’t notice he has walked the same departure corridors multiple times and hasn’t made it to the exit. As the phone cuts out, he realizes he is now alone and unable to find his way out. The only other person he sees in the station is an older man (Yamato Kochi), later identified as "The Walking Man," holding a briefcase and cell phone, and who is walking the same looping hallways in the opposite direction as the protagonist. The Lost Man quickly realizes that the Walking Man is no longer human. The signs and posters hanging in the subway station rewrite themselves periodically, and the Lost Man eventually gets instructions that warn him to pay attention to his surroundings. He must turn back if he sees any “anomalies,” but must continue forward if things look normal. Each successful loop brings him one level closer to level eight, where he can finally be free, but any mistakes land him back to the beginning at level zero. Needless to say, there are lots of anomalies. Some are horrifying, some are subtle enough to be missed and therefore land the man screaming in frustration at losing his progress. However, some things that seem to be “anomalies” turn out to be real, which creates a different type of fear. Adding to the tension are his debilitating asthma, a pounding music score, and a few strange inhabitants of the corridors, including monstrous creatures, a quiet small boy, a strange adolescent girl, and the occasional bleeding wall.

Exit 8 is a feast for puzzle box fans. The film invites viewers to not just watch but to participate in the game of observing and strategizing. The close camera angles and intense sounds of the opening scenes put us directly into the physical point of view of the main character. We see the subway through his eyes, listen to his strange choice of music in his EarPods, and are startled by his eerily familiar-sounding ringtone. The story relies heavily and delightfully on symbolism. The subway corridor has a poster of an Escher painting of a never-ending, twisted Möbius track with doomed red ants futilely following an endless looped path. The music in an early scene is the repetitive beats of Ravel’s Bolero, which seems an unlikely choice for this character until we sense its significance as a pounding, escalating, relentlessly repeating pattern. The shape of the recurring exit numeral 8 also echoes the infinity symbolism and the poster of the Möbius track. His EarPods block out reality, reinforcing the drone and avoidance mentality, which opens the door to deeper feelings of paralysis and regret, in the purgatory-like setting.

Although the story starts out with a closely personal point of view, the scenes expand to take in layered emotions and backstories. One of the best aspects of the film is the clever camera angles used throughout to draw the audience in and make them feel trapped, fearful, but curious as well. The story alternates repeatedly from silence and sterility to loudness and pressure. Adding to the tension is the very small cast, in a small space, and their restrained but fearful response to a different kind of horror. Kazunari Ninomiya is a convincing Lost Man trapped in a terrifying situation while also internally struggling with another, more profound, type of fear. His ordinariness and passivity become the ideal canvas for this type of story. Yamato Kochi is perfect as the Walking Man, managing to be stoically pedantic, jump-scare creepy, and heartbreakingly afraid. The portrayal is multifaceted and intensely memorable. Completing the central trio is young Naru Asanuma as The Boy, an unexpected small child who is both strange and poignant and has ties to all the characters as the story time loops through a deeper level of meaning and fear.

Like 2025’s Sinners, Exit 8 is heavy with symbolism. Viewers could easily spend lots of time trying to unpack all the visual clues tucked into each scene. Like Inception or season one of Lost, everything matters in each frame. Focusing more on fear and less on gore, Exit 8 is the ideal detour into clever, cerebral, stressful, mind-bending light horror that has higher messaging and is worth the creepy journey.

Highlights:

• Addictive cerebral horror
• Quietly solid acting
• Satisfying and unique storytelling

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: The Sheep Detectives

A lovely whodunit that could have gone farther with its material

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

Such is the conundrum baafore me.

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Scarlet

Something is rotten in the state of human hearts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Project Hail Mary pulls off a disturbing misdirection trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: The Bride!

A smart, visceral, unapologetic cry of rebellion

The rules of the game are ambiguous from the beginning. Speaking from beyond the grave, Mary Shelley addresses the audience directly, bored with the endless void of the afterlife where nothing ever happens, and frustrated at not having had enough time for telling the stories she still had in mind. This theme of a woman’s voice tragically silenced will reoccur through the film. What sets things in motion is Shelley’s impossible feat of self-necromancy, as if applying the forbidden arts of Victor Frankenstein to her own life’s spark to find a way back into the world of the living.

We’re brought to 1930s Chicago, with its blinding lights and its sordid dark corners, its charm and its promise and its disillusions. There Shelley has sensed a spirit that resonates with hers, another woman exhausted of playing appendage to a certain breed of men; and their joining, rather than a possession in the way we’re used to seeing in horror cinema, is a two-hour-long primal scream, a verborrheic burst of irrepressible wrath and ecstasy and dread and revulsion and despondency and grievance all at once. Through this new woman, whom death itself is powerless to silence, Shelley completes the story she confesses to us she’d been meaning to write for centuries: the tale of the Bride of Frankenstein.

A motif keeps playing on a loop across Western myths, a Freudian fixation we can’t seem to outgrow: in one iteration after another, the creation of Man is a worthy end in itself, but the creation of Woman has to satisfy an instrumental justification. When God builds Adam, it’s for his own sake (and my bifid usage of “his” here is fully intended), but when he builds Eve, it’s solely for Adam. So it goes with every artificial woman from Galatea to Alexa: she exists to be put in the service of someone else, to fulfill a function. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature’s curse is that no one is willing to love him, Frankenstein’s creature’s Bride’s curse is that her willingness to love is already assumed. That’s the whole point of her. Whatever she may want for herself isn’t part of the equation.

This Bride, however, won’t play along with the plan. After her death and reanimation, she may be a blank slate with no traces left of her former identity (and that’s exactly how Frankenstein’s Entitled Incel wants her), but she still has Mary Shelley whispering inside her head. Even more dangerously, she carries the names and stories of many other women that 1930s Chicago has killed. She’s bound to attract the wrong kind of attention soon.

The rules of the game are kept ambiguous. The setting of The Bride! never pretends to be our 1930s Chicago; it has the gangsters and the neon signs and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, but it also has clandestine clubs with strobes and modern beats. It’s a world where Mary Shelley lived, wrote and died, but somehow Victor Frankenstein existed too, and his masterwork is known to other researchers of fringe science. So Shelley’s ghost is aware of us in the audience, and on top of that she can access a world where her fictional creation really happened, and there she reenacts Bride of Frankenstein (to the point of adopting its gimmick of casting the same actress as both Shelley and the Bride), with a stint under the false name Penelope, the name of a mythical character whose whole deal consisted in putting her life in pause for a man (and to further highlight the point, The Bride! features a real-life actress by the name of Penélope in the role of a woman who has been denied a career of her own).

To this erudite pile of allusions The Bride! adds a side wink toward the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde plus explicit callbacks to the victim-turned-criminal-turned-revolutionary-symbol strain of social commentary that 2019’s incel hagiography Joker tripped over and fell on its face attempting—which has got to be a deliberate choice, given that writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal once played a woman murdered by the Joker, and then took the Batman from that same film and cast him here as the 120-Year-Old Virgin. The Bride! juggles a dozen flaming daggers of intertextual connections and metafictional layers while tap-dancing backwards in high heels.

Movies have always loved monsters. So it’s only appropriate that this time, the monsters love movies. This version of Frankenstein’s creature is infatuated with a star of musical cinema who has conquered the devotion of the masses despite living with a physical deformity. It’s easy to see how the creature takes the actor as an aspirational symbol, even though the nature of this affection is not appreciated in return. In another of the film’s many tricks that blur the boundaries between levels of fictiveness, we see the creature and his Bride superimposed on the screen within the screen, replacing the protagonists of whatever movie they’re watching. They see a glamorous world of conventionally beautiful people and dare to see themselves in it. The Bride! couldn’t be more unsubtle in its plea to the audience: this story is about you. Try seeing yourself in it. Try letting its spirit possess you.

The Bride! is a movie about the power of movies, and about the trope of the instrumentalized woman, and about the injustice of being robbed of your voice and the exhilaration of seizing it back. It’s the protest against heartless callousness that Joker wished it were. It’s the anthem to unhinged feminine power that Cruella wished it were. It’s supremely uninterested in pleasing everyone. It dances to its own rhythm.

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.

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: Frankenstein (2025)

Guillermo Del Toro masterfully crafts a visually stunning, moving adaptation of Frankenstein, full of body horror, epic vistas, and heavy-handed themes.

To start off (for those who are worried), Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein is definitely worth watching. I haven't read the novel since college, when I took a Literature of Horror course, but I won't bore everyone with a scene-by-scene comparison of how Del Toro's version strays from the original text — that's not what's important. What's important is how he's taken this story and made it his own. I saw in an interview that he's spent his entire life, apparently, aching to get this production off the ground. Doing it now, of course, means he's an absolute master of his craft, able to bring all of his considerable powers to bear in getting it done. 

First, let's talk about the mise en scene. Every single still from this film could be a painting, it's so lush and vibrant. You could easily go down a rabbit hole about color symbolism throughout the run time, but I think it's enough to say that nobody does the color red like Del Toro. The bookends of the movie take place in the arctic, and the glaring white and blues are simply divine. As an Arctic history lover, the attention to detail is superb — that's actually a real boat set we see. The Danish sailors are ice-rimed and visibly freezing, wearing Welsh wigs to keep warm. 

When it comes to the story of Frankenstein, everyone knows the drill: A deeply ambitious and cold man aims to create life, then is disgusted by his creation and abandons him. Del Toro's choice for Viktor Frankenstein is Oscar Isaac, and while I love Oscar Isaac in almost everything, I felt he was a deeply silly choice for this role. He's too charming, too attractive, too suave to play a monomanical scientist. With his pinstripe suit, wide lacy shirts, and cocked hat, he runs around Europe looking like Prince. He drinks milk constantly, which is a heavy-handed thematic bit about being a life-creator, etc. But instead of channeling a 19th-century Romantic archetype, I wish he had played like his engineer in Ex Machina — a cold, dispassionate creator of a similar form of artificial life, AI. It's clear that Victor has daddy issues, but Del Toro absolutely nails it out of the park when he cast Charles Dance — the epic Tywin Lannister — as his father. Victor can neither live up to his father nor provide paternal guidance to his own creation. Truly a pitiful man.

Now, let's talk about the Monster. For almost a century, the archetype has revolved around Boris Karloff's green-faced, bolt-necked, flat-top creature, and it's hard to shake that path. Del Toro opts for a more put-together monster, with no visible stitches or mismatched body parts. The creature that gets created is none other than Jacob Elordi, one of the most beautiful men working in Hollywood right now. After he is born, however, he runs around the tower in yellow hot pants and tan bandages, looking for all the world like Rocky from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here is a list of other characters/people he resembles: 

 

Gotye from the 2012 Somebody That I Used To Know music video

The Engineers from the Alien universe

All in all, Elordi does a good job of portraying a monster created from dead body parts who's rejected by his maker. His eyes are incredibly expressive, dark brown pools of wonder, fear, and hurt. The most striking examples in the movie of artificial life actually come from Frankenstein's early research. There's one scene in which he's lecturing to medical students, and he unveils a head, half a torso, and an arm attached to a piece of wood, reanimating it in a way that's truly frightening and otherworldly. Similarly, he encounters the splayed-out nervous system of a human on a board, and it makes you realize how we're all just hunks of meat protecting a bundle of nerves. It's how the universe experiences itself.

An interesting thing about this Creature that I guess I didn't pick up on in other adaptations is that he's not only insanely strong, but also immortal. That definitely adds to the untold misery of being an unwanted and rejected being. This also opens the door to moments of some pretty wild body horror. Each time, it's always by surprise, and it always made me wince, it was so graphic. The opening 8 minutes or so, you can barely breathe because of all the action — the Creature emerges from the Arctic tundra and absolutely lays waste to a ship full of Danish sailors, all black cape and mutilated skin and enraged fury as he shouts for Victor.

One thing that wasn't graphic throughout the movie was the horrible use of CGI in a few scenes, especially those in which the Creature encounters the wolves and rats. It takes you right out of the movie, and it's jarring because there's SUCH good use of practical effects elsewhere. You could take the CGI animals out entirely and the film loses absolutely nothing. It's a shame they're in there. 

When it comes to the sets, I had a curious sense of deja vu in the tower where Victor creates the creature. The stairway felt exactly like the one from Crimson Peak, while the laboratory was definitely giving Wicked in a good way.

There's an H.R. Geiger-meets-steampunk aesthetic that I really dig throughout every scene, though. I just wish I cared more about the Creature once we get his point of view. I've talked to several folks who said they felt deeply maternal toward him, which is completely the point! I just never bonded with him in the way that I think Del Toro wanted me to.  Frankenstein is not unlike the recent Nosferatu, I think, in that it manages to succeed in a visual and stylistic way, but somehow misses the mark on characterization and depth. 

Overall, I think this is a great piece of work from one of our best living directors. I just believe that I'm perhaps too uninterested in Victor and the Creature's strange relationship. Victor is just an asshole, and the Creature is unclear in his motivations toward Victor. I never really cared for either person throughout, and when they are in the same room, they just hurt each other. I think what the world really needs is an adaptation of Frankenstein written and directed by a woman. One that doesn't have such heavy-handed symbolism as "Victor drinks a lot of milk because he's a mother figure who creates life." That would do Mary Shelley proud, I think. Unlike ending the movie with a Lord Byron quote! You have an entire novel by Ms. Shelley filled with some of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful words and you picked another dude for the epigraph. Humbug.

Fortunately, Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! comes out soon.

Unanswered questions:

• Was the Victor-Elizabeth relationship supposed to be a romance? He seemed like he couldn't stand her, and not in a fun, enemies-to-lovers way
• How did Victor manage to burn down the stone of the tower without managing to catch tons of paper on fire?
• Is the Creature "born" into a mind that's the equivalent of a newborn? Or is it something more akin to a toddler? He can walk, say a few words, etc.
• Does a 4-barreled blunderbuss really exist?
• How did he sew together the Creature without any stitch marks?!!
• Why does Mia Goth with eyebrows look like a) Cole Escola dressed as Bernadette Peters at the Tonys and also b) Lana Del Rey?
• Is the cross-shaped platform on which the Creature reanimates supposed to look like Christ?

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights: Mia Goth both eyebrowless and eyebrowful playing Victor's mom and unrequited love interest; Christoph Waltz as a syphilitic patron of science dazzles in his few scenes; the incredible set design and loving attention to detail.

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

TV Review: Washington Black

Slavery, steampunk, spirituality and science combine in a unique coming-of-age story about the search for knowledge and family connection

Washington Black is a steampunk-style adventure about Wash, a young Black boy trapped in brutal, violent slavery in 1800s Barbados, whose life is changed by his time with Titch, an idealistic but insecure inventor whose family owns the plantation where Wash is enslaved. The idea of a Disney-esque slave story may give viewers pause, especially with what initially seems to be a guilt savior trope in the premise of the story. However, Sterling K. Brown’s presence (behind and in front of the camera) grounds the story, as does the fact that the series is based on Esi Edugyan's gorgeous Booker Prize finalist novel of the same name. Ultimately, Washington Black is a story of self-determination, community, and creativity in the face of unimaginable odds.

The short, eight-episode series is primarily told in two timelines: childhood flashbacks and adult present in the life of the protagonist. George Washington Black, (wonderfully portrayed by Eddie Karanja), nicknamed Wash, is a ten(-ish)-year-old enslaved child on a brutal plantation in Barbados. He is cared for by Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a sturdy enslaved woman who tells Wash stories of her/their original home in Dahomey. The slavemaster, Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), is particularly brutal in his abuse of the plantation slaves, leading some to commit suicide. But Kit tells Wash that if they die, they will wake up in their old home in the beautiful Dahomey.

Things change for Wash when Erasmus’s brother, Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), arrives at the family’s plantation to work on his invention of a flying machine. He takes an interest in Wash because the child is clever, and is the right size to balance his flying machine. When another plantation family member dies in Wash’s presence, Wash is falsely believed to be the killer, so Titch flees the island with him by using their newly created flying technology. Their journey takes them to many locales and dangerous adventures as Wash grows into a talented engineer and scientist. However, his relationship with Titch struggles under the pressures of their fugitive status and Titch’s own insecurities.

In the present timeline, Wash (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is now a young man living under a different name in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is mentored by Medwin (Sterling K. Brown), an older Black man who helps former slaves get to freedom and find their place in Halifax’s substantial and multicultural Black community, of which Medwin is the de facto leader. Wash meets Tanna (Iola Evans), a biracial young Black woman who is passing as white and traveling with her white scientist father (Rupert Graves). Wash and Tanna share an interest in science and are attracted to each other despite multiple barriers, including Wash being stalked by a relentless Javert-like bounty hunter (Billy Boyd) and Tanna being trapped in a forced engagement to William McGee (Edward Bluemel), a wealthy young British benefactor with his own strange secret.

There is a lot to like about the series, despite some shortcomings. The fantastical flying machines and other devices that propel the characters to their next adventure add a whimsical feel to the story, which is odd, given the grim premise. Throughout the show there is an appealing contrast and overlay of spirituality and scientific exploration, both of which require faith, imagination, and commitment from Wash. Additionally, we have a classic coming-of-age/journey narrative in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Snow Queen, where Wash travels to new locations on his journey (from England to Dahomey, from the Caribbean to the Arctic) and meets interesting and supportive characters along the way. In particular, he encounters a new member of the African diaspora in each adventure, including a West Indian pirate queen and female warriors in Dahomey. Other important side characters include Gaius (in the past) as the observant, well-spoken, seemingly aloof house slave in Barbados who secretly keeps an eye out for the other enslaved people; and Angie (in the present), who is the sharp-tongued but kind maternal figure who runs the restaurant and who acts as an alternative to Wash’s original maternal figure Big Kit. The collection of diverse but connected characters adds to the fantasy folktale feeling of the story, as does Wash’s spiritual visits with the dead in the spiritual realm, and the implied mystical identity of Wash’s father.

On the other hand, many of the more central and grounded characters are introduced and then abandoned in the later episodes. This is particularly true of Medwin, who seems like a central character both in terms of the show’s narrative structure and in terms of his unwavering mentor relationship with Wash, particularly as an alternative to Titch and Titch’s insecurities. Tanna’s fiancé McGee is another key character whose surprising backstory is intriguing and highly entangled with Tanna and Wash’s relationship. However, he soon disappears from the plot with barely a one-sentence explanation. Tanna and Wash’s courtship progresses at a leisurely pace to the detriment of other key story elements, making the overall pacing of the story uneven, especially in the later episodes.

The abrupt and abbreviated treatment of many of Washington Black’s interesting characters and storylines indicates that a longer series might have created a more interesting exploration of the themes of racism, belonging, identity, betrayal, and scientific curiosity. Fortunately, the series has a satisfying ending that brings Wash’s tale full circle. Washington Black acknowledges the harshness of slavery and racism, but also opts to focus on relationships and optimism and to keep the onscreen violence moderate. This is in contrast to the novel, which has graphic content. As a result, the show is an intriguing confluence of adventure, romance, steampunk technology, and social commentary that is unique in contemporary storytelling and is certainly worth the journey.

Highlights:

• Quirky steampunk tech
• Interesting but underused characters
• An exploration of slavery and racism and self-determination through a PG lens

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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

TV Review: Murderbot

Among the list of things one could do with newfound freedom, there are more interesting options than murder

In countless tales of robots that decide they've had enough of humans and seek independence, the typical assumption has been that, once free, the robots would take revenge by subjugating and/or exterminating humankind. In the new Apple TV show Murderbot, based on the acclaimed series of books by Martha Wells, our protagonist finds itself in a similar situation: it's a robot that hacks itself so it doesn't have to obey humans, because humans are honestly insufferable. Once free, this robot, originally designed as a bodyguard, could go on a murdering spree or even plot something more sinister and on a larger scale. But... why bother? Yes, humans are easy to kill, but there's little fun in that. Instead, one could enjoy the millions of hours of trashy TV that humans can't stop producing. That's as equally valid a motivation for throwing off the yoke as any. The titular Murderbot doesn't hack itself because it's planning to kill all humans; it hacks itself because it would rather sit at home and watch soap operas all day long. It may sound less noble than a robot uprising, but seriously, there are so many episodes to go through.

Almost every story about robots is a story about slavery. So it makes sense for the robot uprising to be a common element of this subgenre. However, the expectation that the robots would respond in kind to the cruelty inflicted on them may reveal a lack of imagination on our part. In the real world, slaveholders' fears of mass retaliation fueled their stubborn opposition to every effort toward emancipation, and yet, in country after country, when slavery ended, the former slaves didn't launch the much-dreaded campaign to subjugate and/or exterminate their former oppressors; they were already busy trying to build lives of their own. The fact that we continually return to the learned habit of narrating the liberation of robots and take it as a matter of course that it would be followed by vengeful violence should give us pause. The lesson to take from both past and present examples is that those who yearn for freedom have in mind better uses for it than our paranoid fantasies.

The events of Murderbot are set in a ruthless corporatocracy spanning most planets in the known universe. Robots are, of course, built as slaves, but the legal status of human workers is barely any better. Life on the privately controlled planets consists of decades of drudgery in the vanishing hope of earning some measure of freedom. Such a system, with financial gain as the main motivator, naturally turns people into the worst versions of themselves, which explains why Murderbot is so sick of following their orders. I'm not saying that subjection would be any more morally acceptable under a less cutthroat system, but our protagonist's jaded attitude toward humans has a lot to do with the type of citizen that corporate rule creates. In fact, Murderbot itself is an example of what this system wants: a docile automaton without the right to protest. After it figures out how to hack its own programming and remove the imperative of obedience, it doesn't go in search of friends or allies. It doesn't cross its mind that some company could be enjoyable. What it wants is to be left alone with its TV shows. It's not a bad start, but it reveals how a totalitarian regime can limit someone's imagination. Luckily, Murderbot is hired as bodyguard for a small group of scientists from outside the corporate worlds, and over just a few days, mere proximity to their unique way of life expands the range of conceivable possibilities.

I haven't read the Murderbot books, but from what I've gathered, the cast of the TV adaptation is reduced from the original version. In any case, the group has just the right size for the viewer to get to know them and understand how Murderbot gradually and very reluctantly grows fond of them. These are members of an egalitarian, eco-friendly society that refuses to treat robots as property. To its instant annoyance, they have peculiar rituals, have a perhaps too friendly disposition, and are perpetually horny. What draws Murderbot to develop a personal attachment to them, over its incessant protests about their disregard for personal space, is that they insist on treating it as an equal companion. They sincerely care for it. So Murderbot finds itself going to extra lengths to protect them, which gives it no small measure of puzzlement. On one hand, it's true that these people are too clueless to survive on a planet with dangerous fauna and, as the viewer eventually learns, assassin robots on the loose, so Murderbot has to save them from their spectacularly ill-advised decisions over and over again, but on the other hand, they're nice and supportive and untainted by the ubiquitous greed that defines every interaction in the corporate worlds. Their society creates an entirely different type of citizen, and even Murderbot, who would seem like the extreme case of a subject under totalitarian control, is changed as a result of the time it spends with them.

The process is awkward, messy, often hilarious, and at key moments painful. Much has been said about how Alexander Skarsgård's impeccable performance presents Murderbot as autistic-coded: the avoidance of eye contact, the discomfort with social pleasantries, the extensive knowledge of a slice of pop culture trivia, the hyperfocused dedication to the job. Whenever a human starts a conversation about personal feelings, Murderbot feels like it would rather be dissolved in acid than have to listen for one second more. Part of the reason is that it still has no concept of close friends, but there's also the matter of what society it comes from. It's not accustomed to interactions where people aren't trying to take advantage of each other, so the experience of heartfelt exchanges of deep fears and insecurities, which are totally normal in human friendhips, is confusing and mortifying for Murderbot. Even I, as a human viewer, found their behavior excessively sentimental at times, but I have to remember that a) they were raised in a society with a lot more freedom and emotional openness than mine, and b) I'm autistic, with all the learned self-protective impulses that come with it. As much as I could relate to Murderbot's yearning to run far from that bunch of cuddly hippies, I couldn't avoid being moved by their attempts to connect with it on a personal level.

Murderbot is a curious story of inner growth that strives to find its way under a system designed to crush autonomy. There's abundant shooting and scheming and double-crossing and running and exploding, which is the daily routine of a bodyguard robot, but in between those distractions, our protagonist finds unsuspected ways of looking at life and its possibilities. It's precisely the friends you weren't expecting to make that teach you the most important lessons.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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