Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

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

Film Review: Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising

Superheroism is good and all, but who saves the saviors?

When we last visited the Madoka Magica universe in the Rebellion movie, our favorite relentless antivillain Homura rewrote the rules of the universe that her dear friend and savior Madoka had already rewritten. Instead of allowing a system where Madoka is a divine force awaiting all magical girls when they reach the end of their hope reserves, Homura brought Madoka down to Earth, erased her memory, and fulfilled her initial wish that Madoka should never become a magical girl. For the alien Incubators, this state of affairs is uncharted territory. Now it’s Homura who runs the show, and the Incubators don’t have a clue what to do. Where could the story go from there? We were all left wondering, an unbelievable thirteen years ago (gosh, I feel old). Well, Madoka Magica is finally back. The new movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, once again rewrites all the rules, revealing surprising bits of the setting’s lore and highlighting the questions that have been at the core of this story since the beginning.

The axis around which this whole cosmic epic revolves is the not-entirely-healthy friendship between Homura and Madoka. As you’ll recall, all the way back in the original TV series, Homura made the wish to be the one who would protect Madoka, while Madoka made the wish to save all magical girls from succumbing to hopelessness. This created an unstable dynamic that exposes some of the problems with the very concept of heroism. In order to change a basic law of the universe, Madoka had to renounce her mortal life and become a goddess. But Homura, as Madoka’s magically designated protector, will always have some measure of power over Madoka. Some inevitable questions emerge: Is it fair that Madoka had to sacrifice her humanity? Is protection a form of domination? Is Madoka OK with saving all magical girls except herself? Did Homura have the right to drag Madoka back to life if it meant annulling Madoka’s choice?

Walpurgisnacht Rising presents us with an unexpected extra complication: It’s little use for Homura to crown herself ruler of the universe when there are forces outside of the universe that don’t answer to her. Those forces irrupt into the story since early in the movie, seeking to punish Homura for her Faustian excesses of ambition. Turns out the dead magical girls that Madoka selflessly offered to save had their own opinions on whether they wanted to be saved, which means that the bulk of the movie is spent discovering the multiple competing agendas that threaten to break apart Homura’s utopia. If you thought the ending of Rebellion was a bit too hard to follow, buckle up, because Walpurgisnacht Rising comes with no training wheels. You’re expected to remember how the story was left off thirteen years ago, and to pick up the continuation immediately. So I can’t recommend watching this movie as your first taste of Madoka Magica; you’d end up hopelessly confused. Go back for a couple days. It’s just three prior movies (or a TV season plus a movie, if you prefer). You’ve had all these years to catch up. This movie has massive loads of plot to tell and no time to ease the viewer in.

Among the reforms that Homura has made to the universe, we learn of a new way of fighting evil spirits. She no longer lets the Incubators recruit new magical girls; instead, she grants temporary powers to a random girl, valid for one fight, and afterward erases her memory of it. That way there’s always some heroine available to defend humanity, but without the cost of losing a girl’s soul. The Incubators are understandably not happy with this arrangement, because now they can’t collect the emotional energy they came to Earth for. This new way of doing things goes on nicely until three unknown magical girls show up out of nowhere and start blocking Homura’s attempts to keep distributing powers. Each of these new girls comes with her own plan for how to re-re-reform the magical girl system. From this point on, it gets somewhat dizzying to keep track of who is a villain according to whom, but let me try to summarize.

First, as you may have guessed from the movie’s title, we’re shown the backstory of the super-mega-witch on steroids that Madoka defeated in the TV series: the dreaded Walpurgisnacht. We learn what kind of magical girl she used to be, why she turned into a witch, how she got so inconceivably strong, and what she has to do with the present plot. Since Madoka was the only magical girl with enough power to defeat Walpurgisnacht on her own, there’s someone who reasons that forcing Madoka to become a witch would release immense amounts of energy, helping the Incubators’ mission to delay entropy and keep the universe running. This subplot is rather brief, but it poses interesting questions about what it means to be a self-sacrificing hero. Lastly, we get to the central conundrum of the entire series: Will Homura allow Madoka to fulfill her cosmic role? One of the many revelations of this movie is that, in the same way that neither Homura’s method with temporary powers nor Madoka’s Law of the Cycle is the original way things were, the same is true of witches. Long ago, it used to be the case that magical girls experienced an arguably worse fate than becoming witches. Someone made an altruistic wish to fix that, and the result was that witches came into existence. Such a drastic retcon demands an explanation for how Incubators collected energy under the former rules, but this isn’t too significant for the dramatic effect of the story.

What matters about this retcon is that it goes back to the same theme we’ve seen before with Madoka and Homura, i.e. the idea that coming up with a perfect solution to help others necessarily takes away something from you. The karmic balance in the Madoka Magica series operates by a ruthless transactional logic. To save others, you have to lose yourself. To save you, someone else has to get lost. This unbreakable tradeoff underlies the fundamental tragedy of being a magical girl. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony that an Incubator isn’t a monkey’s paw; it doesn’t twist your wishes to screw you over a technicality. No, what happens is even more heartbreaking: the Incubator gives you your wish exactly the way you wanted it, and even then it doesn’t suffice to make you happy. In the earlier movies, Madoka’s big gamble to fix everything, followed by Homura’s big gamble to fix everything, only redistributed the weights of the problem instead of getting rid of it. In a universe where emotions follow the math of thermodynamics, some bit of happiness must by necessity be lost in every transaction.

I’m not sure I came out of the theater with a full idea of what exactly happens at the end of Walpurgisnacht Rising. The more we progress along the story, the more surreal the battle becomes, and at least to me it wasn’t clear who managed to save whom. But I don’t mind being confused when the artistry on screen is so absolutely breathtaking. The animation in Madoka Magica has always distinguished itself by a unique aesthetic that combines digital composition with physical collage to produce an incomparable atmosphere of weirdness. This new movie pushes its own style to even higher standards of visual experimentation. Don’t worry too much if you get lost in the plot. Relax in your seat and enjoy the marvelous look of this masterpiece of animation.

(And if you somehow figure out what on Earth that ending was about, please tell me. I still want to know.)

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Deja Boo: The Gate

A surreal '80s horror gem aimed ostensibly at kids is like if Dario Argento directed The Goonies

This is the scary movie for me—the one that has stuck most vividly in my mind since I was a child. Released in 1987, The Gate is a Canadian horror film that features a tiny Stephen Dorff in his pictorial debut. It's my first entry in our new Déjà Boo series, where we'll be revisiting the movies that made us squirm as kids.

The '80s were fertile ground for horror films, but this movie really has nearly every trope you could possibly want: monsters, demons, Satanic panic, body horror, zombies, minions, and rockets. It's jam-packed with spooky action that somehow landed only a PG-13 rating, though we all know that the censors were a bit looser back then.

The plot

Glen (Stephen Dorff) is a typical '80s kid—shy, uncool, but sweet—who wakes one morning to learn that the giant tree in his backyard has been struck by lightning. He and his friend Terry, a young metalhead, dig around in it and find geodes. Slowly, the hole starts getting bigger, and weird things start happening.

Glen's parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving him and his friend with Glen's big sister, who in true '80s fashion throws a house party. Unbeknownst to the kids, they speak the existence of a hellmouth into existence when words appear on a magnetic notepad. This, accompanied by the accidental sacrifice of the family dog into the hole, unleashes ancient gods that begin trying to escape.

The rest of the movie, I'll be honest, doesn't make a ton of logical sense. The kids battle off demons and ghosts that appear in the house, before Glen uses a toy rocket to defeat the final big bad.

I'm still not quite sure who the audience for this one was. Having the parents go away for the weekend is classic '80s kids-in-charge energy, and it's in good company with other movies like The Goonies and The Explorers.

But there are scenes and themes that are way too over the top for young folks, and I don't think it's cool enough for teenagers. Adults then? I'm still not sure. If it was aimed at kids, it's sort of an introduction to horror, in a sense. Nothing becomes repulsive to the extreme, but as a 10-year-old watching this, I was definitely microdosing body horror and Giallo vibes.

What scared me then

There are a few major scenes that have stuck with me over 30+ years, and they are honestly still creepy as hell. One is the scene in which Glen, having demonically grown an eye in the middle of his hand, has to stab it out with a shard of glass. I wouldn't have such a visceral reaction again to body horror until I was 13 and watched Nicholas Cage's character in The Rock stab a syringe straight into his heart as a poison gas antidote. These things stick with you, apparently.

The other scene(s) revolved around the animated/claymation minions from Hell. They gasp and run and claw and grab, all while being about 8 inches tall. Several scenes are gruesomely creepy, and evoke a more macabre Lilliputian from Gulliver's Travels.

Somehow I forgot completely about the scene where Glen, faced with an attacking, demonic version of his best friend, is forced to defend himself with only a Barbie doll. He manages to gouge out Terry's eye with the legs. Wild stuff. Sometimes The Gate is like Evil Dead 2, just absolutely insane but also kind of funny. See also: When Glen's sister straight-up yeets a boombox at a zombie to knock him down.

Another interesting thing I noted on this rewatch is how the film has two modes when it comes to sound: It's either complete silence, or foreboding instrumental dirges. The atmosphere, as a result, is always menacing, and it really serves to underscore the unease throughout the runtime.

What I noticed now

I can totally see why a young me found this movie scary, and I'm not sure any kid today could handle it any better. What struck me most now are the things that were a little quieter in the film. For one, the fact that the family dog dies and they don't even call their parents on their vacation to let them know. I find this near sociopathic-level behavior, and I say this as someone who adores Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Not only does the dog die, but Glen's sister's wannabe boyfriend is tasked with taking him to animal control(!?!!?!). When he finds out it's closed, he simply returns to the house and dumps it into the hellmouth. Absolutely not.

Anyway, moving on. The subtle background aspects that permeate The Gate are quite spooky—bugs flocking to a windowpane at night, up close chainsaw noises, eerie mists. Even the shadows your own toys cast in the moonlight can be unnerving. I experienced this many times as a kid even with the most benign of playthings. I remember getting a 6-foot tall cardboard cutout of C3PO and being scared to death waking up to him for the first few weeks.

I also found that seeing a kid’s perception of their own house being haunted is especially upsetting. It's supposed to be a place of refuge and love, so when demons start attacking it, you can feel vulnerable. Glen is interesting because he's not a bland and angelic Carol Anne, but he's also not incredibly self-assured. He’s a Final Boy, except everyone else lives—they just don’t contribute to their salvation as a group. Only Glen gets them out of their demonic jam.

The movie ends on a high note, with all evil crises avoided. The house, of course, is utterly wrecked, and as an adult now, I am annoyed by how much I kept wondering what it would cost to completely redo a living room wrecked by Satan.

Highlights:

• A young Stephen Dorff's film debut
• It's basically microdosing body horror for kids
• Great depiction of Satanic panic and heavy metal
• The Goonies if Dario Argento directed it

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.

Film Review: Toy Story 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: Arco

Look up and make a wish

First we have the far future. People live on platforms above the clouds, where they practice subsistence farming. With the help of multicolored robes adorned with pretty diamonds, they routinely travel to the prehistoric past to recover samples of usable species; there are hints that something caused an ecological catastrophe that made the surface unlivable. The family we follow has a girl and a boy, but the boy, Arco, is still too young to join the time-traveling expeditions. Because it’s a human universal, even after the end of civilization, that kids have an instinct for getting in trouble, the boy steals a suit and attempts a time jump on his own. As can be expected, he gets lost, and thus we have a movie.

Then we have the not too far future. The environment is still in the middle of falling apart; one day can bring a killer hurricane and the next a massive forest fire, and the solution of rich people is to have retractable glass domes built around their houses. That way you can have your dinner in peace while nature rages outside. The family we follow in this era has a preteen girl, a baby boy and a robot nanny. The parents are perpetually busy at work in some other city, and the girl, Iris, is tired of feeling lonely. So fate fulfills her wishes one day, when Arco crash-lands in her neighborhood.

The plot of the French animated film Arco brings to mind E.T., with the strange visitor hiding in a child’s house until they can return to their parents. The main difference in this case is that Iris and Arco can talk to each other. She’s excited about showing him all the cool things of her modern life, but he’s rather guarded about how much of his time she can be allowed to know. This dynamic only gets a brief time to develop before we have adult authorities, mysterious stalkers and natural disasters converging to get in the way of this adorable pair.

A curious contrast to the beauty of this moment in the kids’ lives is the stunted development of the trio of stalkers who jump out of nowhere to find Arco and obtain proof that time travel is real. They’re introduced as antagonists, but soon enough their clumsiness neutralizes any threat they may pose, and they spend the rest of the movie looking goofy and obstructing our heroes’ quest for no good reason. I hear many viewers enjoyed these characters; I found them mostly annoying.

One feature that stands out about the overall tone of Arco is how obviously it’s not an American or Japanese cartoon. It’s far too common for children in American cartoons to be overly expressive of their emotions, whereas children in Japanese cartoons can sometimes speak with such deep introspection that believability is stretched. The two lead children in Arco come off as more relaxed in their inner life, which makes the stakes feel starker later, when it’s time to panic. The naturality with which they let themselves feel their emotions ends up being key to the gradual way these two start falling in love without having a clue of what romance is.

There’s an element of irony in the suggestion that Arco’s description of the post-disaster world will inspire Iris to get to work to mitigate the disaster that in her time is still ongoing. But her success is more visible in the personal sphere. Her family life is strained because she almost never gets to see her parents, who work a lot to afford the storm-proof house where she lives. When one looks at the family Arco comes from, and the magnitude of the effort it takes for his parents to find him, the implication is that Iris changed a society where parents rarely spend time with their kids into a society where parents move heaven and earth to see them. This side of the story is more impactful than any environmentalist lesson that could be read in the plot. Viewers probably already know the dangers that surround us, so Arco can just show the full extent of the climate crisis without turning preachy; the images suffice.

The gorgeous animation and the careful balancing of tension and humor highlight the small tragedy at the core of the story: two children having a wonderful, one-in-a-lifetime experience whose full meaning they can’t yet grasp. They just know something special is happening to them, and they don’t have a name for it, and it will take them decades of growth to appreciate those fleeting days of magic. The part of the movie’s ending that is happy gives both Iris and Arco a blunt reminder of the cruelty of time, a hard truth that not even time travel can fix. That’s the thing about growing up: if it tastes bittersweet, you’re doing it right.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

The Duffer brothers stick the landing, bringing a close to nine years of epic storytelling

Volume II of the Stranger Things final season dropped on Christmas day, and when we last left our heroes, we discovered that Will could tap into the hive mind and hijack its powers—Will the sorcerer, indeed! I've now watched these episodes twice,  and simultaneously so much and so little happens in them. The vibe is a little different from Volume I, as somehow there's even more exposition to get through. Rather than go through the plot, I thought I'd go through what really works, and why the epilogue to episode 8 was fantastic.

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

After discovering some of Dr. Brenner's notebooks in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, Dustin pieces together that everything they thought was wrong. The Upside Down is actually a wormhole to  Dimension X, the place Vecna was transported to by El. It was sort of a Chekhov's Wormhole, though, as the crew had discussed wormholes in Mr. Clarke's science class years before. We still don't learn exactly why the Upside Down is the way it is, all decaying matter and dark skies, but ultimately that's less important than just knowing it was never the ultimate bad place. It's just a tunnel to another dimension. On the other side of the gooey, fleshy wall surrounding the Upside Down is sheer space, as noted by Steve's BMW getting sucked into it and vanishing into the galaxy.

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

Everyone's favorite science teacher is recruited to help build a telemetry device so they can locate Dustin and company, and watching him finally join was absolutely heartwarming. Without him, the kids never would have succeeded in the prior seasons, and his reward is getting to witness all the insane things that have led to this point. It's a very sweet payoff, and he adds a lot to the team. Also, I love that Mr. Clarke is always sleeping with a different member of the Hawkins High School staff. 

Karen "Walk 'Em Down" Wheeler proves she's a badass once again

Still recovering from vicious demogorgon slash wounds in the hospital, Karen saves the day yet again when Lucas, Robyn, and Vicki are cornered by demodogs. After ripping her IV out, she deftly places oxygen tanks into huge commercial dryers, triggering an explosion that takes them all out. Moms in '80s movies are rarely given such agency, and watching her stagger down to the basement to take care of the kids is truly epic. In the epilogue, we see a fully recovered Karen at the kids' graduation, her huge scars visible but worn proudly on display in a V-neck dress.

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

When the team finally makes it to Dimension X, they're set to face off against the corporeal forms of the Mindflayer and Vecna. A lot of folks online complained that the battle was too short, but the team literally spent 5 seasons getting to this point. I thought it was awesome, as it actually felt like watching a D&D game in real time, from Steve and Dustin stabbing the Mindflayer's belly to Nancy leading them into the trap where Robin and Lucas and Will could rain down fire from above. Also, Joyce getting to hack off Vecna's head with an axe was a gift she truly deserved. I don't think anyone suffered more than her throughout every season, given her constant panic and stress.

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

The two needle drops of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" were not only incredibly appropriate, the Duffer brothers somehow managed to convince Prince's estate that their show was worth granting the green light—no doubt because of the viral success that seemed all but promised. Having the record literally be the detonation devices for the destruction of the Upside Down is a fantastic choice, and El and Mike's final conversation set to "Purple Rain" is absolutely heartbreaking.

Why I choose to believe El is alive

A lot has been said about El's fate, but I think the Duffer brothers did it exactly right. By leaving El's death open to a different interpretation—namely, that she survived thanks to one final illusion by Kali—it gives everybody what they need. Some people are fine with a final sacrifice by a hero, while others (like myself) can choose to believe Mike's ending, that she escaped and is living far away, safe. I choose to believe she's still alive because it's what her character deserves, and at heart, I'm an optimist. But more importantly, I like that we, as the audience, get to choose our ending. It's like D&D itself! I personally don't need a ton of deaths to make a finale more meaningful.

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

By season 5, we're dealing with upwards of a dozen folks that we have to check in on (somewhat) equally, and that starts to make things cumbersome. I wouldn't trade Robin and Steve for the world, but the subplot of Nancy and Jonathan's relationship was given way too much screen time for a duo that most folks couldn't care less about. (There's a reason no one was buying the Jonathan Byers Funko-Pop.) Will's coming out scene, meant to be a vulnerable and tender moment for his immediate family and ride-or-ride friends, ends up giving his speech to a room full of people, including his science teacher, his friend's girlfriend he's never met, and Murray, everyone's favorite mean weirdo.

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things was the little show that could, made by an unknown duo of brothers with a super small budget. As the fame of the show grew, so did its budget, and by season 5, we had something that felt visually and thematically more like X-Men or The Avengers. Superpowers, excessive CGI, different dimensions—it all feels a little too much. The grandiose nature of the final season, for the most part, felt light on the nostalgia (the show's bread and butter) and heavy on the special effects. To put it another way: light on the bowl cuts and heavy on the white-out eyes of Will Byers. Vecna is the big bad in Stranger Things, but his motivations aren't entirely clear to me. He was abused, clearly, but he feels more like a Thanos than anything else, unfortunately. By giving him such a broad impetus, I think the show really missed out on a meaningful villain.

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

A product of both the extraneous characters and the Marvelification is the fact that the plot was fairly thudding. In Volume II, nearly every other scene sees characters grabbing objects and telling us the plot, "Imagine this record is Will, and this one's Holly." Everything felt jam-packed, with no room for characters to just be. It's more than just a sense of urgency, though, because it felt like something was missing. I read that most of the episodes went through some pretty extensive scene-cutting, and I think it's definitely apparent. The only time characters really have heart-to-hearts is when they're on the way to a battle. Maybe it's because the show finally lost a bit of the childlike wonder that made it so special, because the kids are all in their 20s now.

Overall

Season 5 is definitely worth watching, and I think it's a fitting conclusion to the near-decade-long run of the show. It suffers from the issues I mentioned (and more), but if you really loved the characters and the story, I think the ending pays off. When I looked up after the epic battle in the finale and saw that there were still 45 minutes left, I wondered if there was going to be another stand-off with Dr. Kay and her army.

Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow, thoughtful ending and watching our kids graduate. The scene of everyone putting up their D&D books on the shelf was heart-wrenching as they literally were closing the book on their childhoods.

Show endings are hard, because not every show knows at the outset how long it's going to last. While not perfect, the Stranger Things finale sticks the landing and leaves the viewer with a tale well told and a happy ending. And that's all we can really ask for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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.

Film Review: In Your Dreams

Maybe sleep on this one

It’s tricky to make a story about dreams feel like it has actual stakes. In Paprika, the danger is that the outlandish creations of the dream world are leaking out to reality. In Inception, the danger is that going too deep may make you lose your mind. And you know what you’ve gotten into if you start dreaming of Freddy Krueger. But if you’re telling a cute adventure for kids, you can’t make things too dangerous. Ultimately, the consequences of experiencing a dream only matter in the real world; that’s what Pixar’s Dream Productions understood so well. In the new Netflix animated film In Your Dreams, the danger for most of the plot is rather unclear; whenever a dream gets too scary, the kids simply wake up. It’s only in the third act that the script seems to remember that something must be at stake.

In Your Dreams plays with the double meaning of “dream” as “the random images your brain vomits while you sleep” and “a heartfelt desire” to turn the character of the Sandman into a sort of wish-granting genie. Our protagonist, a young girl called Stevie, is worried that her mother’s new job opportunity may cause her parents to divorce, so she embarks on a quest across the dream world to find the Sandman’s remote lair and ask him to fix reality. The fact that in stories involving the Sandman he typically has no power outside of dreams should give you a hint as to how the whole matter will turn out.

As derivative as the story gets, it should at least be commended for destigmatizing divorce and women who pursue their careers. But do children in the 21st century really need to be reminded that divorce isn’t the end of the world? One would hope not, but with the conservative bent that the culture is taking, I guess any progressive message is welcome.

The movie follows to the letter the basic scriptwriting advice that what your protagonist thinks they want is not what they actually need. Stevie thinks that she should defend the sanctity of the nuclear family, but what she needs is to learn to stop poking her nose in adult decisions she doesn’t understand. She’s the only character in the movie with an arc, and it leads to not trying to fix what’s not broken. It’s an odd way to resolve a plot, because it implies that things were already going to sort themselves out before she started overthinking.

There's a minor additional arc for Stevie regarding her relationship with her little brother, and it goes exactly in the direction one can predict in a story for kids. The fact that she’s written as a control freak who must learn to take it easy, while her brother is a chaos goblin who is not required by the plot to mature or discover any lesson in order to repair their relationship, points to uncomfortable gendered assumptions that the script seems unaware of. You know your choices in characterization need some extra work when your most interesting character is a smelly plush giraffe.

In Your Dreams does fulfill the requisite task of making its dreamscape look random and whimsical, which is what should be expected of a child’s unconscious, but there’s a disconnect between Stevie’s current worries and the content that her dreams show her. It’s curious that during her whole adventure she doesn’t encounter any dreams about her parents’ crisis, and instead she spends the movie’s runtime revisiting the greatest hits of her own oneiric repertoire. That’s a missed opportunity for thematic cohesion.

There’s an original piece of lore that the movie comes up with to explain nigthmares, which has fascinating implications worth pausing to examine for a moment. Because the Sandman can’t affect the real world, it’s actually very dangerous to ask a wish of him: he’ll only make it true within his domain, which requires you to stay trapped in it. To protect dreamers from ever meeting the Sandman, his counterpart, a giver of nightmares, distorts dreams so that you’ll wake up before you make it too far into the world of dreams. This means that nightmares are good for you, and you should be grateful that they keep you from a much worse dream experience. I can’t wait to see parents try to soothe their kids’ night terrors with this argument.

In Your Dreams is pretty to watch, but it’s far from the visual grandeur of Inside Out and somehow, amazingly, less deep in its themes than Slumberland. I can’t even recommend it for a couple hours of mindless fun. You can get that on your own by going to sleep.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: Never Let Go

What's there to be afraid of? Wouldn't you want to go see it for yourself?

In a remote house in the woods, a mother raises two kids. They have no contact with other people. This is by choice. They subsist on what they can find in the forest, but they're terrified of what could lurk out there. Whenever they walk outside, they tie themselves to a long rope whose other end is attached to the foundations of the house. As long as they're tethered to a place built from love, they can feel safe. There's no telling what might happen if they lost contact with the rope.

Never Let Go is a subtle kind of horror, one based on the anticipation of unseen things. It's no coincidence that the Bible gives "anticipation of unseen things" as a definition of faith. The mother (Halle Berry) has created a cultish dynamic in the house, constantly warning her kids about a nameless, formless evil that could devour them with a single touch without the protection of the rope. She makes them recite litanies and spend hours inside a dark box to purify their souls. It soon becomes clear that she'd have no problem killing any member of the family touched by the evil, and the dialogues establish that she has already done it more than once. Understandably, the kids are growing up in a very confused state, unsure of what they should fear more: the forest and its mysteries, or their mother and her zeal.

Several questions emerge as we learn what few bits of backstory the mother is willing to disclose. The central one in the movie is: Do you feel afraid because you're seeing monsters, or are you seeing monsters because you feel afraid? And also: Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? Are the archetypal intrafamilial betrayals (Hansel and Gretel's parents, or Cain and Abel) fated to reoccur in each generation? How do you tell when love is starting to demand too high a price? And what space is there for you to grow when the extent of your world is one person?

The child characters are far from prepared to face those questions, and the child actors convey that anxiety marvelously. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the more devoted one, happy to be disciplined and eager to prove his loyalty to his mother. Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is the more curious one, willing to question arbitrary rules and investigate what the real danger is. When the family's food supply dwindles to an alarming degree, and the mother makes a desperate proposal to ensure everyone's survival, the children's opposite perspectives finally clash, and the fragility of their self-imposed isolation is shattered by uncomfortable truths.

The ever-present rope that connects this family is a powerful symbol. A rope can be a lifeline, or it can be a noose. Adhering to an invariable rule of never letting go can blur the line between staying safe and staying trapped. The mother is eventually revealed to have lacked a healthy model of parental love, and the way she's chosen to handle her own turn at parenting makes the kids' doubts justified.

The movie plays a clever game with the audience's beliefs. The dreaded evil has so far been invisible to the children; it only manifests to the mother's eyes in the shape of people she's watched die. Why don't the children see it? Is the evil merely in the mother's head, or is it playing a long game to catch her sons with their guard down? For a good stretch of the movie's runtime, both possibilities are presented as equally likely. It's immediately obvious that the mother isn't entirely reliable, but (and here's one of the oldest tricks in the horror arsenal) what if she's right? What if the world really did end in mass murder and this family is all that is left?

Later plot developments that must not be spoiled give a cruel spin to these questions. The choices that the kids make when their mother is not next to them appear to demonstrate the resourcefulness of evil. Then again, the evil that those choices express wouldn't have happened if the mother hadn't taught them about evil in the first place. Do we become tainted from simply hearing about the human imperfections? Does this mean that not even solitude in pristine nature is a refuge from the flaws of society?

Never Let Go starts as a survival movie about a mother bravely fighting to protect her children, but it gradually reaches the idea that you cannot shield children from evil forever. They will grow, and you will die. They need to learn how to face evil without you, and if you seriously try to keep them safe forever, what you're actually doing is make them your prisoners. Obsession with hidden enemies typically leads to seeing enemies in each other. He who fights monsters, etcetera.

In a scene loaded with layers of meaning, the mother explains to the kids that pictures do more than show images: they show feelings. To me, that's an invitation to not read the movie literally. This picture is not simply the story of a family hiding from a threat that ended the world. It's a picture that says that our fears don't have to be our children's fears, that what creates enemies is the very concept of enemies, and that a form of love that is unwilling to let you go is precisely the form of love you most need to let go of.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

How come I never knew The Fall existed?

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pennant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review: Star Trek Prodigy season 2

Don't miss out on this masterfully produced series

By far the best of the new Star Trek series, Prodigy has just released its second season after being rescued by Netflix from Paramount's incomprehensible decision to cancel it. Set between the end of Voyager and the start of Picard (and possibly later than Lower Decks), Prodigy follows a team of teenagers who stumble upon an abandoned Starfleet experimental ship and use it to flee from the world where they've been enslaved. In season 2, having finally reached Federation territory and applied to Starfleet Academy, they become involved in Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway's secret mission to find the missing Captain Chakotay, who is stranded somewhere in the future.

As befits a sequel to Voyager, Prodigy is filled with the weirdest space anomalies and time travel complications. Furthermore, a season of 20 episodes of 20 minutes allows for a richer variety of settings, tones, subplots, secondary characters, side quests and individual arcs than has been the norm in the rest of new Trek. Although nominally targeted at children, Prodigy doesn't avoid the deep existential questions that were the staple of The Next Generation, and its space battles are breathtaking to watch.

The main cast undergoes phenomenal inner growth during this season. The Medusan Zero occupies the niche that previously belonged to Spock, Data, Odo and the Voyager Doctor: the outsider learning to adapt to life among humans/organics/solids/corporeals. Gwyndala has on her shoulders the responsibility of preventing an era of violence on her home planet. Jankom Pog has to learn to harmonize his unorthodox approach to engineering with Starfleet's clear preference for standardized procedures. Rok-Tahk continues her training as a scientist while dealing with the insecurities sparked by failed experiments. Murf starts to overcome the language barrier between himself and his friends. And Dal is served a big helping of humility to mitigate his Main Character Syndrome. Without spoiling the development in Chakotay's arc, I'll just say that ending up lost in the Delta quadrant again hasn't made him very happy.

It's curious to notice a couple of very specific elements that this season of Star Trek Prodigy seems to have borrowed from Doctor Who. Because the biggest danger to solve is a time paradox, but a time paradox is not a tangible villain to fight, a type of extradimensional monster is introduced that is drawn to time anomalies. Not only does it hunt people whose existence is causally tenuous; upon eating its targets, it removes them from the past and from memory. But this enemy is reserved for special occasions; our heroes also have to defeat political conspirators, slave catchers, a rogue AI, a deceptively alluring paradise, desert beasts that eat lightning, the turbulent depths of a cloud ocean, tribbles out of control, accidental universe-hopping, impossible technology pried from a genius imagination, a rival time traveler, the threat of interstellar war, and weaponized wormholes, all while sneaking around the limited trust that adults have in them and racing against the imminent unraveling of linear time.

I tell you, this show goes big.

A plot that hinges on restoring an earlier timeline brings up questions of acceptance versus regret. The show makes it clear that the preservation of one single original timeline is preferred by the universe, but for the story to have emotional impact, it also has to be preferred by the characters. Season 1 put our heroes through some horrible moments, and the writers of season 2 are evidently aware that creating a time travel crisis that can only be solved by reasserting past events the way they happened the first time means that our heroes must reach a point where they consciously choose to put themselves through the whole experience again. There's a feeling of amor fati in this authorial choice, a gesture of ceasing to wish that all the lived fear and hurt had proceeded otherwise. The way the universe is saved in this season is by means of a big yes to reality.

Another noteworthy detail in this season of Prodigy is the abundance of references to other Star Trek shows. As far as I could keep track, the script creates explicit ties to The Next Generation, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, The Voyage Home and even the Kelvin timeline movies. However, quite unusually for this era of Trek, the references don't steal the spotlight from the main events, and only appear when they're relevant. It's refreshing to see so much fan service without it being gratuitous.

It's unfortunate that Prodigy hasn't received the degree of acclaim that has been showered on other Trek series like Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks. This found family of lost children is not only a wonderful window into the setting of the Federation from an outsider perspective, but also, and more importantly, a door that invites future Trek fans to join in the adventure.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Double Feature: What's with all the imaginary friends?

There's a menacing whiff of unprocessed nostalgia in the Zeitgeist

Let's see: during a period of heavy stress and existential uncertainty, a girl who is still not done grieving her late mother meets a being from the realm of prerational imagery, one that is invisible to most people. Said being isn't happy about having once been a precious imaginary friend and then discarded. Fortunately, the girl is so lonely, what with her unstructured schedule and her less-than-consistent father figure, that she'll eagerly listen to its problems and stray far from her comfort zone to help it avoid a fate of eternal oblivion. In the process, she'll visit the land where imaginary friends live and learn the importance of balancing her burgeoning maturation with her whimsical creativity. She completes her arc by saying goodbye to her imaginary friend, but some part of it will always linger at the edge of other children's consciousness.

It's very interesting that 2024 has given us not only two separate movies with this same plot, but two radically different ways to do so: the monster horror film Imaginary, directed by Jeff Wadlow, and the family comedy film IF, directed by John Krasinski. In Imaginary, the creature's reaction to having been forgotten is a lifelong scheme of revenge; in IF, former imaginary friends resort instead to sad resignation and the occasional false hope. In both movies, the execution is messy and without impact. There is much a movie about good old memories could say about our volatile cultural moment, but the opportunity is wasted with lamentable laziness.

Interest in nostalgia comes and goes in waves. Just a few years ago, we had the Christopher Robin movie, which basically replayed the Hook formula. But this era is different. Remember the Netflix film Slumberland, which was nominally about another girl taking refuge in fantasy to cope with a parent's death, but ended up being about an adult's need to reconnect with his inner child. Imaginary and IF grapple with the same shared malaise: an overwhelmed generation's yearning to be tucked into bed, preferably with a light left on.

It's hard to blame them. Every day something shows up in the news that makes us recite, as a mutually validating mantra, "I don't like this timeline." This moment in history is laden with the widespread suspicion that at some point the writers of the show lost the plot and sent us down the wrong road. When did it all go to hell? Was it the pandemic? Was it Trumpism? Was it when Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, David Bowie, Anton Yelchin and Prince all died in the same year? Was it 9/11? Was it Reagan? Was it Nixon? Every living generation can name a key event when history got derailed and nothing has been right since, and now we've reached a saturation state where you only need to *gesture at everything* to describe the multidimensional trainwreck we're living through. So it's understandable that the art produced in our time is intensely backward-looking. This is not only reflected in the obvious nostalgia of remakes and reboots, but even in original stories, like Imaginary and IF, where the core conflict hinges on resolving our relationship with the soothing fantasies we grew up with.

However, the focus on imaginary friends weakens the message somewhat. As an element of Western culture, imaginary friends are rather recent; not enough generations have gone by to solidify these creatures' place in our collective mythology. The creation of an imaginary friend is a process that emerges in response to a need in the child; it's bizarre to ask us to think about the needs of the imaginary friend. Such an approach resembles the enthusiasm in paranormal circles about tulpas, a notion that the West appropriated from Tibetan Buddhism in a very distorted form. Psychological research has found that Western people involved in tulpa creation do so mostly as a way of coping with loneliness and anxiety. Whether or not self-declared tulpamancers are really producing anything distinct from themselves, what can't be disputed is that the subjective experience of believing that they've created a tulpa gives them forms of emotional and relational wellbeing that the rest of us associate with sustaining a close friendship. We're so fundamentally social animals that we'll resort to the most drastic of survival tactics to resist social atomization.

Depending on what generation you're part of, your introduction to the idea that imaginary friends have inner lives and thus deserve moral consideration may have come from the TV show Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends or from the movie Inside Out. Both stories connect the regrettable tragedy of abandoning an imaginary friend with the universal necessity of growing up. This is in line with prevailing Western attitudes toward childhood as a sort of primordial golden age we're eventually expelled from. We can idealize childhood to such an extent that maturation may feel like a tradeoff, with the privileges of adulthood coming at the cost of losing something equally precious. Much like the collective sense that human history took a wrong turn, we may also personally reach the conclusion that growing up wasn't all that good an idea.

The final step of this cultural evolution is the switch from "adulting is a scam" to "therefore, we should not leave childhood." And that's how we end up with a generation (and a mode of storytelling) that can't let go of nostalgia, because the idea of the future is just too scary. Imaginary warns that our childhood resents the passage of time and may resurface without warning to claim possession of us; IF asks why we should have to pay any heed to time at all. Notably, the unstated longing for a dead mother haunts both stories. (In Imaginary, this symbolic element is reaffirmed through the selection of characters who team up to rescue the little girl: a babysitter, an older sister, and a stepmother—the archetypal mother substitutes).

Our disappointment with adulthood thus creates an expectation of disappointment: since today's adults can't shake the suspicion that they grew up wrong, we're anxious that today's children will grow up wrong, and we don't know how to deal with what seems inevitable. We hurry to awkwardly apologize in advance for the horrible world the next generation will meet, but we're also frantically making work of art after work of art that teaches them to look back and find solace in the way things used to be.

This is the clue that explains this peculiar breed of nostalgia: the certainty that the future will judge us. We tell these oversentimental stories about fantasy creatures who fear being left behind, but we're the ones who fear being left behind. We're the ones who dread that the next adults will move on from us before we could finish figuring out what adulthood was. And the unbearable thought of the irreversible has found a creative escape valve in another trend of today's speculative fiction: the secret time-traveling organization that has to reverse the end of the world a dozen times every day. But that's a topic for another essay.

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

With the new Avatar series, one has to ask: What do we really want from an adaptation?

This version isn't perfect. It isn't horrible either. The world is at balance again.

Before anyone watched 2005's Batman Begins, one strong argument for its existence was that audiences' definitive memory of that world couldn't be allowed to be 1997's Batman & Robin. Such a lamentable misfire needed to be overwritten with something more dignified. The same reason explains the quasi-reboot of the X-Men films with First Class after the not-quite-beloved The Last Stand, the casting of Tom Holland to replace Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, and the ongoing quest to one day, finally, make a decent Fantastic Four movie.

An even harsher approach is to not restart the timeline, but resume it from a well-liked beginning that was less well served by its sequels: 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate is intended to ignore everything that happened after 1991's T2, while Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a deliberate erasure of the unfairly hated 2016 remake. Although this method is called "soft reboot," it's actually more aggressive, because at least a "hard reboot" doesn't go out of its way to discourage viewers from enjoying previous works if that's what they prefer (e.g. Godzilla, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan). While a "hard reboot" is content to do its own thing, a "soft reboot" executes a hostile takeover of an ongoing storyline and tells viewers to pretend that some portions of it never existed.

All this is necessary context before jumping into the rather complex relationship that viewers have had with the Aang/Korra franchise. The original cartoon show is now acclaimed as an almost perfect classic, but before the ending aired (and even for some time after), fan ships used to launch cannonballs at each other with the ferocity of Twilight subreddits. This situation didn't improve once the sequel series launched: one segment of fans flatly refuses to acknowledge Korra as part of the canon, another segment accepts only season 1, and yet another segment didn't believe the Korrasami pairing was official until the comic books spelled it out.

There ought to be a way for audiences to love a story without getting so petty about it. But one specific portion of such fierce protectiveness isn't totally unjustified: 2010's film adaptation The Last Airbender was so calamitously plagued with incompetence that any substitute was destined to be an improvement by default. And the 14 years fans had to wait for the palate cleanser couldn't pass fast enough.

The new live action adaptation, which just launched on Netflix, condenses the 20 short episodes of the cartoon's first season into 8 long episodes. Some plotlines have been condensed, others have been merged, and a few have been omitted. Whereas the cartoon took its time to explore at leisure the impressively varied and rich setting of its fictional world, the Netflix version focuses on a handful of key locations. This cutting and stitching of material isn't accomplished successfully. Sometimes an entire animated episode's worth of plot is wedged in as an easy-to-miss line of dialogue, and characters that are indispensable to the story but lived in locations that were removed from the adaptation appear now where it doesn't make full sense to find them.

For example, Teo, an inventor's son, no longer lives on a mountain, but he still has his mechanical flying wheelchair. The owl-shaped spirit of knowledge didn't even appear until the cartoon's second season, but here it makes a gratuitous cameo. Koh the Face-Stealer is moved to a completely separate plot in the Spirit World. And the traveling musicians from The Cave of Two Lovers are shunted to a scene of clumsily shoehorned exposition. The inclusion of characters and plot points that the cartoon didn't introduce this early in the story may be due to the fact that any show produced for Netflix exists under the hanging sword of capricious cancelation. Fire Lord Ozai, Princess Azula, Avatar Kuruk and even Fire Lord Sozin are shown much earlier than in the cartoon, consuming precious runtime in really unnecessary scenes that explain too much.

This is the main sin of this version of the story: it doesn't trust viewers' patience. The cartoon didn't  jump at the first chance to explain the backstories of Zuko, Iroh, Katara, or even protagonist Aang. It knew how to set up its mysteries and pay off its reveals at the right dramatic moment. The Netflix adaptation seems afraid of letting any question linger for more than two seconds. Part of this problem is caused by the quicker pacing, another part by the aforementioned risk of cancelation, and no small part by ongoing changes in viewers' preferences, namely the widespread misconceptions about what constitutes a plot hole. By this point in the story, the cartoon hadn't even revealed why the Air Nomads had been singled out for extermination in the first place.

What redeems the Netflix Avatar is the technical side of the storytelling. The combat choreography is flawless, and it takes care to represent the different styles of each elemental discipline. The degree of detail in set design is to be commended, as is the faithfulness of the casting (let it never be forgotten that the 2010 film is the whole reason why we have the word "racebending"). Even when the script leaves little space for emotional development, often replacing it with overstuffed lines of dialogue, the child actors do a fantastic job of portraying the anxieties of living through a world-changing crisis. Gordon Cormier understood the assignment perfectly: in the role of Avatar Aang, he knows how to channel with the same believability the enthusiasm of youth, the grief of absolute loneliness, and the paralyzing cluelessness of someone forced to grow up too soon. His antagonist Dallas Liu expresses the right mix of bravado barely concealing Prince Zuko's profound insecurity. As Katara, actress Kiawentiio displays both the tenderness of a gentle soul and the determination of someone who knows she can be much more. And Ian Ousley nails Sokka's brand of deadpan sarcasm every time.

In general, the visual effects are very good, except for a few acrobatic moves that look too obviously digital. And the makeup for Iroh and Bumi looks fake to the point of self-parody. As well-executed as this production is otherwise, it doesn't manage to justify its existence as something separate from the original cartoon. Unlike most reboots, this one retells exactly the same story viewers already know, which is always a recipe for unreachable expectations. Avatar: The Last Airbender set an incredibly high bar for fantasy animation aimed at children, and the openly confessed Game of Thrones-inspired grittification of this version doesn't make the story any more meaningful or exciting. It does fulfill more than satisfyingly the mandatory mission of giving fans something to show to newcomers that isn't the horrible 2010 film, but beyond that, it can't hope to match the first telling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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