Film Review: The Dog Stars

Artsy vibes in a slow-paced, post-apocalyptic search for meaning

Post-apocalyptic adventure is always in abundant supply. Shows like Paradise and The Last of Us, films like A Quiet Place and Leave the World Behind, books like Station Eleven, and even dark comedy anime like Zom 100, are among many that torment us with difficult questions and terrifying imaginations. These stories imagine contemporary society decimated and desperate, struggling to survive by using long forgotten skills. And, we have the irony of characters longing for their lost society while realizing the greatest danger, in their new devastation, is often other humans. The Dog Stars is a new film from Ridley Scott which explores this familiar territory from a slower and more character focused pace. Rather than concentrating on the typical screaming and running (which are also present), the film has long stretches of quiet memories, contemplation of the stars, and simple acts of work and fellowship. This storytelling style is appealing, at least initially, for those who want a quieter story. However, it becomes harder to sustain as the story makes unusual narrative choices.

In the near future, a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, leaving much of society and the societal infrastructure decimated. In a mountainous area outside of Denver, Colorado, a kind-hearted young mechanic named Hig (Jacob Elordi), manages to have a comfortable, subsistence existence in partnership with a grumpy, ex-military survivalist, named Bangley (Josh Brolin). Hig is also a pilot and periodically flies his beat up small plane into the remnants of Denver to scavenge supplies and to visit his former small home to grieve his deceased wife. He also visits and supplies an extremely isolated Mennonite community whose leader (Benedict Wong) has taken in various orphans. Hig’s only connection to his former life is his dog Jasper. In the aftermath of the devastation, the greatest threat is other survivors, who Bangley nicknames “rats.” They move in mobs and attack and destroy at random. The “rats” are treated as inhuman, almost zombie-like, although they are not zombies. After a falling out with Bangley, Hig flies away in search of a mythical town called Grand Junction, hoping to find community and meaning for his life. However, a crash landing connects him to an isolated farmer, Pops (Guy Pearce), and his daughter, Cima (Margaret Qualley), a former New Yorker and med student who came home to Colorado just before the pandemic. The film follows Hig and his various companions as they search for meaning and navigate survival amidst the danger and devastation of their new existence. 

Surrounding this narrative is the rural, mountainous terrain often seen from Hig’s small plane. The slower pace is comparable to a film like Train Dreams, last year’s Oscar best picture nominee, in which an ordinary person accepts extraordinary changes with sorrow, calmness, and introspection. While Train Dreams had an ultimate message that was poignant and powerful, The Dog Stars is a journey with jarring changes in tone that make its ultimate message unclear. 

The film’s greatest strength is the powerful but understated acting of the four leads. For the most part, the story is told primarily through the protagonist Hig’s perspective. Hig is a kind-hearted hero, grieving his wife, helping orphans, and catching the eye of the farmer’s daughter. The film also connects us to Cima, Pops/Jack, and Bangley who also all feel like archetypal characters. Bangley is the angry, loner, warrior. Pops is the salt-of-the-earth protective father. Cima is the strong, attentive, caretaking love interest. All of the characters feel historical rather than futuristic. This vibe is unexpected but it does fit with the theme of society unraveling and returning to its earlier periods. Of the four leads, Cima is the closest to a contemporary character and, in many ways, is the most relatable with her longing for coffee shops and commute playlists, rather than comfortably settling into their new life of subsistence farming and isolation. The slow paced storytelling works in the first half of the film due to the understated but powerful acting of the four leads. The authenticity of the characters draws you in and creates meaningful and engaging tension.

However, as the film progresses, the narrative begins to take strange turns that undermine the original literary feel of the opening scenes. Eventually, the story starts to feel like more of an old-fashioned Western than a speculative post-apocalyptic survival film. The repeated moments of the settlers trying to fight off the uncivilized marauders start to feel uncomfortable, as if we are suddenly watching a different movie with a different theme. Then, the movie takes an even weirder turn when the group encounters “civilized” people who are equally cruel and barbaric, and are weirdly costumed in the style of the residents of the Capitol in The Hunger Games. The messaging seems to be that both “city” people and “wild” people are evil, and at some point it’s unclear who the target audience is for this story.

As someone who enjoys slower paced character exploration, The Dog Stars has a lot of appeal. Especially since the acting is excellent, and there is a bit of romance and a classic green flag hero. The theme of finding joy and community in moments of devastation is one that seems particularly resonant. However, the overall storytelling is, at times, undercut by some unexpected narrative choices and significant thematic shifts. While the story strives to be ultimately optimistic, especially in the last scenes, the thematic inconsistencies likely mean that, at the end of the film, viewers can’t help but feel uneasy, on multiple levels.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Slow paced, post-apocalyptic journey
• Strange and jarring thematic choices
• Solid acting and archetypal characters

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Video Game Review: Luna Abyss by Bonsai Collective

Beware of delving too deep

Luna Abyss is a soulslike, although it’s more on the roguelike end of the spectrum. A mythic sci-fi story from the small UK based developer Bonsai Collective, it tells the story of a world in which a new moon arrived in Earth orbit and changed everything.

It is very definitely post-apocalyptic, but the bounds of that apocalypse are tantalisingly never quite fully laid out—it’s hinted that when the moon arrived, it devastated Earth, but the game itself takes place entirely on the new moon, and the colony that established itself there has, too, been largely destroyed.

Left in its wake is a prison system that sends inmates down into the colony and the moon’s depths to retrieve lost tech and, occasionally, hunt criminals.

Your character comes from Earth and was selected for imprisonment not because of a crime but because of a random(?) change in your physicality which marked you out as someone the All-Father declared should work on these reclamation runs.

Given a 9,000 day target to work off, with bonus deductions for successfully completed retrievals and goals, you have a long way to go.

The game is pretty linear, although I don’t think that’s really a criticism. There is some backtracking later on as you get the chance to go places and explore secrets new abilities make possible, but they’re relatively minor, and I didn’t get bored in the exploration because the goodies you find are always interesting or useful.

The story is told largely through found artefacts, with hints and conversations with enigmatic NPCs leading your progress. There’s a light reliance on Norse myth (with the presence of the All-Father being the central conceit), but this is a techno-mythology, and the only supernatural element is this second moon and its presence over the Earth.

All of which goes to say that the story has some familiar tropes but deploys them in its real interests, which is about confinement, illness as life, loss as driving force and how fate (or chance, depending on your bent) governs us and remains inexplicable no matter how hard we fight to understand.

The mechanics are nice and chunky, and they do not punish you for their own shortcomings—one of my biggest beefs with soulslikes and action RPGs is how you can die because you get stuck in a wall while an antagonist swings through it, or a sequence gets locked in and no matter what you do it can’t be broken. These feel like punishments because of poor design and have had me walk away from a game because I don’t have time to push through shitty design masquerading as difficulty.

As a result, platforming sections and big boss fights never feel like they’re trying to trick you into disaster for the fun of it—their challenge is in there on itself, and you beating it isn’t a fight with the controls but in learning how the game works and then navigating that difficulty. This is my kind of challenge.

The colour and sound are coherent; the music in particular is atmospheric and really elevates the setting, which is techno-organic with a sense that pipes might come alive or walls breath when you’re not looking. The saturated reds and blues that feature strongly give Luna Abyss a strong sense of identity, and are used to do more than simply paint the screen.

Bonsai Collective have delivered a strong and very playable game here.

The reason I play games, though, is for the narrative (I’m not your person to review MMOs because I HATE grind). Luna Abyss’s story works for me. It’s a touch opaque at times, and you need to slow down and piece things together to understand all the nuances here, but even someone paying no attention is going to pick up the broad strokes of families at war, of ambitions defeated and the idea that we make our own dooms. In Luna Abyss, the road to hell was absolutely paved with good intentions.

For a small studio, this is a big game with a satisfying story.

Highlights:

• Great gameplay
• Fabulous mythic SF story
• Fabulous character design

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a great game with really enjoyable gameplay and an interesting story.

Reference: Luna Abyss [Bonsai Collective, 2026].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

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

Book Review: Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

When we fly through the galaxies, will our worst side come with us?

As human civilization broke apart in vaguely defined wars, scattered groups tried to preserve what they could of human history and culture in colony ships sent in all directions, without means to communicate with one another or any coordinated plan. As far as each group knows, they're all that's left from Earth. One of those ships, the Arkhangelsk, found a barely inhabitable planet where a new beginning could be attempted. The colonists have to live underground, though, because the surface is lethally cold, lethally irradiated, and lethally low in oxygen. Those who need to briefly walk outside for work reasons must wear thick protective suits and carry their own oxygen. After a couple of centuries, they've made their little society work, even if they're dangerously short on genetic diversity and their rusty machinery is held together with bubblegum and prayers. This community has sworn off the petty divisions that tore apart humans on Earth, and is committed to a nonviolent approach to law. Life is rough and precarious, but it still goes on. Even as they face one impossible challenge after another, they're proud of the fragile survival they've managed to snatch from the hostile conditions of their new home.

So it's understandable that their entire conception of their place in the universe goes out the window when another colony ship comes knocking at the door.

The new ship left Earth much later, after the wars ran out of steam and civilization had a chance to restart. The crew didn't even know that the Arkhangelsk had succeeded at colonizing a planet; the reason they arrived there was to build a relay antenna. Like the members of the first trip, they carry their own cultural memory of what Earth is like and what the lessons of history are. When they make contact, purely by blind luck, with the descendants of the Arkhangelsk, the first point of conflict, albeit implicit, is about their differing views on the true character of the human species. Those who arrived first believe that they need to constantly watch out for the worst impulses of the human heart; those who arrived later believe that humans have demonstrated the capacity to drag themselves up from rock bottom. There we have a microcosm of every point of inflection in human history: two cultures with incompatible principles, trying to interact and understand each other. Is mutual destruction a natural tendency or a choice that can be avoided?

We follow two narrators through the novel: Anya, an officer of the peace in the underground colony; and Maddie, the former doctor and now emergency captain of the newcome ship. Both carry the weight of tragic losses that have come to define them until the moment they meet each other. Amid the unforgiving hardships necessary to keep the colony functioning, Anya's little daughter was the only bright spot in a dull, directionless life. After losing her to one of the diseases typical of a population going through a genetic bottleneck in a radioactive planet, Anya has been merely going through the motions of a job that gives her no satisfaction and that her neighbors resent her for. Currently she's investigating a row of disappearances that most witnesses suspect to be suicides; the tacit consensus is that, although the colony strives hard to stay alive, there's very little to live for. So whenever there's news that another inhabitant has walked out and vanished in the snowy wasteland, the prevailing attitude that Anya finds is that no one blames them. Meanwhile, reluctant captain Maddie has been struggling to complete her mission after a navigation accident pulverized half her ship and most of her crewmates. Thrown by circumstance into a position of leadership she's still quite unprepared for, she now has to convince the Arkhangelsk colonists that her team comes with peaceful intentions, even as her mission is to help Earth send many more ships their way.

The most enjoyable part of reading this novel is the complicated interplay between two factions that are sincerely trying to present themselves as friendly yet keep giving each other the wrong impression. From the colonists' perspective, the visitors could be carrying all the evil ideas the Arkhangelsk ran away from when they left Earth, but also a potential solution to their genetic bottleneck. From the visitors' perspective, the colonists have cultivated exactly the kind of close-mindedness that doomed Earth in the past, but also valuable metallurgic expertise that could help repair their ship. As both groups proceed with as much mutual fear as mutual need, the slow-motion trainwreck of their diplomatic efforts raises questions that go deeper than culture shock and point at humanity's stubborn failure to learn from history. Will the world wars that ended civilization erupt anew in this remote settlement? Is survival the highest imperative, for the sake of which the rest of our common interests must be surrendered?

This novel has answers, but they're by no means final. The cosmic irony of the human condition isn't that life stops right at the moment when we think we've got it figured out; it's the much more unnerving fact that, when we think we've got it figured out, it keeps going.

Reference: Bonesteel, Elizabeth H. Arkhangelsk [House Panther, 2022].

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: 28 Years Later

The third entry in the series is a breathtaking glimpse at brutality, humanity, and hope

The week prior to seeing 28 Years Later I reactivated my long-dormant account my local video rental store to catch up on the series, since 28 Days Later isn't streaming anywhere. I reacquainted myself with the rage virus (it's important to remember that the infected in these movies are NOT living dead zombies, but deeply ill human beings with a horrible disease) and remembered that the focus in the series (like all good post-apocalyptic media) isn't on the monsters but on the people left behind. I think some folks forget this key part of dystopian storytelling.

If you want just a run-of-the-mill shoot 'em up of infected, play Call of Duty: Zombies with unlimited ammo. The nuance is in the horrible reality and choices that human must live with in a post-apocalyptic society, and the thrill and terror comes in knowing that we're only a failed power grid away from having to make similar choices.

I loved this movie, and was in awe of its intellect, direction, acting, and storytelling. It takes the traditional zombie film and adds so much lore expansion that it ends up surpassing the genre entirely.

28 Years Later opens with a throwback to outbreak day as a young British boy named Jimmy watches The Teletubbies as a horde of infected break into his house. He manages to escape to the local church where his father is welcoming judgment day, allowing himself to be killed while Jimmy escapes yet again. (This is the first part of a bookend that we'll revisit later.)

Flash-forward 28 years and we're in what appears to be a thriving small community that's separated from the mainland by a tidal causeway. Things seem nice, if a bit old-timey. Spike, a 12-year-old boy, is being taken to the shore to go hunting with his father Jamie in a sort of rite of passage, and the two embark on their voyage to raucous celebration and cheer. Spike's father sees the voyage as a sort of respite from his ailing wife, Isla, played by Jodie Comer, who is suffering from a disease that the local population cannot name nor cure.

Hunters and searchers are free to go visit the mainland, but one rule of their society is that you do at your own risk—no rescue parties will ever be launched. When Jamie and Spike make landfall, the countryside, which is England untouched by industry, pollution, or commerce, is a vibrant green. They're out for only a short while before they come across the first new evolved form of infected appear—the slow and lows, which are large, slow-moving, and consuming enough calories from the ground to survive on non-human protein like worms. (This reminded me of the bloaters and shamblers from the Last of Us, and it's fascinating to ponder how these two IPs have influenced each other by leapfrogging around various installments over the years.)

This is such an important point, since in prior films the infected died after around 7 months due to starvation. The existence of the slow and lows means that the virus is evolving and mutating. Once again, you have to keep remembering that the infected are not dead—it's so easy to forget and just think things don't make sense.

Seeing the feral groups of rage-infected human is fascinating because they're living together in what appears to be harmony—a sort of society, almost. Humans, no matter what, are still social creatures. And their depiction in 28 Years Later is far different from the brain-thirsty, mindless hordes of zombies in other movies.

Okay, back to the plot: Spike hesitatingly makes his first kill on one of the slow and lows, and he and his father continue on their journey. They next encounter an Alpha version of an infected—enormous, smarter, and more cunning. Also, he's possessed of a comically large phallus that's impossible to ignore in every single shot it's in.

The existence of an Alpha infected is not only incredibly cool, but also makes total sense given its place in the grand scheme of humanity. Maybe he's just the examplar of an evolutionary new type of human—homo sapiens ira, ira being the Latin word for 'rage.'

The Alpha hunts in such a menacing way that Spike and Jamie are forced to sprint back to the island over a half-flooded causeway, cutting it close to the wire before making it in.

This scene is my absolute favorite in the movie, as it's visually stunning to watch, the panicked running kicking up saltwater as the northern lights and bioluminescence in the waves throw colorful shadows all over the scene—all while the looming Alpha bears down on them with cruel efficiency.

Fun fact: 28 Years Later was filmed with hundreds of iPhones. Contrast this with the fact that the original 28 Days Later was also filmed on a portable camera, and it's fun to see just how much video technology has changed in three decades.

Back on the island, the town celebrates Spike's victory as Jamie lies about how courageous Spike was. The scene is very Wicker Man-esque—in fact, the entire vibe of the isolated and strangely violent island society is very folk horror. The town seems frozen in time because it is, as society is regressing to hunter-gatherer-type activities along with very clear gender roles.

In this isolated island world, Queen Elizabeth II will forever be the monarch hanging in frames upon their walls. Underscoring this thematically is director Boyle's decision to splice in footage from Henry V films, along with the incredibly creepy recitation of the poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling.

Later on that evening, Spike sees his father cheat on his mother with a townswoman, which disillusions him as to his father's god-like status. While on their mainland sojourn, Jamie told Spike about a doctor that lives alone and isolated on shore, but mentions that he's crazy and anti-social.

Spike, stewing in his anger and disillusionment, takes Isla the next day and escapes to the mainland in search of this doctor, hoping to help his mother heal from the disease that's affecting her mind and body.

On their search for the doctor, they meet up with a Swedish soldier who was shipwrecked, and he's the sole survivor after members of his team were killed by the infected. There's a fascinating scene where the soldier discusses everyday normal things like online delivery and smartphones, which Spike has absolutely no knowledge of. Another thing it's important to remember about this universe is that only the UK is ravaged and quarantined—everywhere else in the world it's the modern day with all of its conveniences and technology.

The trio comes across an abandoned train that's echoing with shouts of pain and investigate it. An infected woman, feral after years of living with the rage virus, is alone and in the process of giving birth. From start to finish, this scene is absolutely WILD and moving and shocking. Isla, an empathetic mother, approaches gently and actually assists in the birthing process.

For a brief moment, it's just one woman helping another, as has been happening throughout all of human history. The infected woman delivers a regular infant (though most definitely a carrier like the mother in 28 Weeks Later). As the mother begins raging again, the soldier shoots her, and Isla grabs the baby and keeps moving as an Alpha then in turn kills the soldier. Isla and Spike, a new baby in tow, continue on their journey to find the doctor.

This point is where people begin to either start loving or hating 28 Years Later. Up until now, it's been a straightforward look into a new civilization and a raucous infected bow-and-arrow turkey shoot. Pretty standard.

But once Isla and Spike encounter Dr. Kelson, the film turns into an incredibly moving treatise on family, loss, and grief. Meeting Dr. Kelson is a delight, as it's a bald Ralph Fiennes-covered-in-iodine jump scare (a very welcome one, of course!).

Kelson has been living alone and coexisting amongst the infected, in a sort of Jane Goodall-type way. When he saves Isla and Spike in their first meeting, he blows a morphine dart at the Alpha rather than shooting an arrow at his heart. This is the first time I can recall in a "zombie" type movie that someone is approaching them with a nonlethal motive. Again, this could be because they're not zombies, and as a doctor, Kelson appreciates a person's humanity, however little of it there may seem to be.

Kelson is not crazy, despite Jamie's insistence, and over the past 30 years has been building an elaborate Bone Temple as a monument to the countless dead in the UK. He bleaches and sterilizes bones for this process, and the result is towering pillars of femurs, arm bones, and skulls, and it's very reminiscent of catacombs in Europe.

Kelson evaluates Isla and realizes it's metastatic cancer. With her wishes, he euthanizes her while Spike is slightly sedated, returning with her cleaned skull so that he can place it atop the piles of skulls.

This scene is wild, to be fair, but it works for a number of reasons. Isla is finally no longer suffering. Spike is learning first-hand how cruel and horrible and indiscriminate death is. He also is realizing that in this world, no matter grief-struck you are, you cannot stop—you have to keep moving, keep evading, and keep trying to live.

He returns to the island and drops off the infected child, whom he's named Isla, and leaves a note saying that he's going to off on his own for a while. The island that had raised him, he has realized, is not the only way forward.

The movie could have ended here, and it would be completely fine. But we get a few minutes of Spike wandering through the green countryside before being overrun by infected. Then, a posse of jumpsuit-clad long-haired blonde men jump to his rescue—it's Jimmy from the beginning of the movie all grown up! And he and his gang kick butt Power Rangers-style and save Spike.

Now, as a non-British person, I neither knew this was a strange allusion to British entertainer Jimmy Savile nor do I feel qualified to really speak as to how jarring this was for British people to watch. Savile worked with children and was a known predator and abuser, but I didn't know any of this until watching TikToks later about it. For a more in-depth discussion of it, check out this article.

I thought this bizarre ending was truly surreal and definitely very different tone-wise, but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the movie. I've not been able to stop thinking so many different parts, and I can't wait to watch it again.

And good news for fans—28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is set to release January 16, 2026 as the first installment in a new trilogy. And yes: that is roughly 28 weeks later from now. We see what you did there, Danny Boyle.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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.

Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping

This Hunger Games prequel explores Haymitch Abernathy's backstory—a gift for die-hard fans, even if it follows the usual formula

In 2023, we got President Snow's prequel: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. And now, in 2025, we get the painful history of Haymitch and what he experienced during the 50th Hunger Games (which takes place about 24 years before the first book in the series).

Haymitch is reaped from his home in the coal-mining District 12, and as it's the especially evil Quarter Quell, joins 47 other teens from around Panem.

If you've read any Hunger Games books, you're well aware of the formula they adhere to: Homey Domestic Scene, Tramautic Reaping, Travel, Parade, Training, Arena, Brutal Fighting, Multiple Violent Child Deaths, and Victory. Yes, it's a format, but it's somehow always entertaining. Collins writes not only overarching themes well —rebellion, hope, sabotage— but also the small details of a character's inner world. That's what makes the books so different from the movies. Both are great, of course, but the novels are primarily one character's inner monologue as they experience horrific events.

Our boy Haymitch is footloose and fancy-free prior to his reaping, in love with a girl name Lenore Dove and working part-time for a bootlegger. It's interesting reading Sunrise on the Reaping when you know Haymitch will end up the sole survivor of his Hunger Games, and it's utterly tragic knowing that he ends up an alcoholic to escape the trauma that followed him out of the animatronic arena.

The best part of the book is also maybe what some people will complain of—the surprise appearance of other beloved characters. Other folks have called it fanservice, which is an exceedingly overused term when it comes to criticizing gargantuan works of IP. Personally, I loved it.

When my girl Effie Trinket turns up as a college student, it was like seeing a lost-long friend. I shrieked! And when Mags makes bean stew for the District 12 tributes, I wished I could have been in the kitchen with them. It's the small, memorable moments that make the world so lived-in and addicting to read.

Did the world need to see all of the various backstories of these and other characters, including a young Plutarch Heavensbee and a (younger) Beetee? Personally, I love every single glimpse into the Hunger Games world, so for me the answer is a resounding Yes.  One thing about me is: I'm always, always going to read a new Hunger Games book. But some of the things we learn about the featured characters also help subtly explain both their motivations and actions years later in Catching Fire—like how Haymitch knew about the rebellion and the plot to rescue Peeta and Katniss.

But the opposite argument is that we didn't necessarily need to be reminded that these games are brutal, that President Snow will absolutely destroy everyone you love, or that rebellion is somehow always brewing in the Districts AND the Capitol.

And yet we keep eating these books up. Every generation of these characters somehow carries on the flame of rebellion in the face of absolute brutality. And as for us readers, we'll continue to be here for every iteration with mockingjay pins on our bags and three fingers raised in salute.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10.

Bonuses: Effie Trinket, no one on Earth could ever make me hate you.

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: Paradise

We all have our ways of coping with death. Unfortunately, this lady has all the money in the world

Stop me if you've heard this one: after a worldwide disaster destroys the modern world as we know it, a few lucky survivors have moved to a secluded underground habitat to ensure that humankind will endure. However, some years later, the assassination of this small community's leader will risk exposing the secrets of the people who actually run the place, and it will be a random nobody's mission to pursue the leads while still dealing with grief over a lost love, a death our protagonist blames the authorities for. Whom can you trust after the world has ended? How do you even get away with murder in a secluded panopticon? And what's really going on outside the shelter?

The Hulu series Paradise isn't entirely unoriginal. It does a fine job of turning post-apocalyptic drama into a meditation on the various ways we learn to keep living after a loved one dies. Each of the few thousand survivors who live in this underground city has someone to mourn, and the extensive flashbacks that take up a good portion of each episode's runtime provide the necessary context for the main cast's seemingly extravagant choices. The viewer ends with a complete idea of what makes these characters tick, even if sometimes it's a broken moral compass.

All through this first season, characters remind each other (and the viewer) that the placid, uneventful imitation of American suburbia they live in doesn't make up for the billions of deaths that happened on the surface on a single, horrific day. If they were ever on their way to getting too comfortable, the loss of their leader is a shocking reminder that death still exists, and no shelter will ward it off. That realization hits especially hard for the billionaire who funded the entire project, a grieving mother who has embarked on a Quixotic mission to keep death away from her remaining child, the world be damned.

This is the most interesting character in Paradise. Normal people understand that death is a thing that happens and our efforts against it can only succeed so many times. But the founder of this underground city is the world's richest woman, and having so much unchallenged power tends to warp your idea of what's possible. One flashback reveals that, when she heard that environmental devastation was imminent, her first thought wasn't to look for ways to use her fortune to save the world; she looked for ways to use her fortune to save the one person who matters to her. She's already lost one child, and now she lives in permanent alert mode. To keep her living child safe, she'll let civilization go to hell if it comes to that. And as the season progresses, the viewer discovers how many deaths she'll consider acceptable for this monomaniacal goal.

When you believe you're prepared for the end of the world, but one day it takes you by surprise, whatever life you manage to build afterwards will be defined by your actions at the moment of crisis. Paradise builds on that idea, and it traces a few parallel plots that mirror each other: parents who make ugly choices for their children's sake, brokenhearted widowers with survivor guilt looking for absolution, desperate people pushed into impossible dilemmas. Although several characters are already dead by the start of the show, their presence haunts every episode. This is a story that relies very heavily on flashbacks, because the way the living characters are written requires the viewer to keep in mind the details of their past in order to make sense of their current actions. The screenwriters seem to be making an argument that every person, even the ones you dislike, is carrying some burden that explains who they are, and empathy for your fellow human requires that you acknowledge how their pain molded them.

Then again, how do you feel empathy for an unfathomably wealthy person who manipulates several scientific geniuses, hundreds of unsuspecting construction workers, and her own government into indulging her fantasy of safety? We've all heard (and some of us have been) parents who say they'd do anything to protect their children. That sentiment looks quite different when it touches someone who is actually able to do anything.

For a show about an entire underground city, Paradise doesn't look particularly impressive. Part of the reason is that the community is intended to remind people of home. Still, the set design is so lacking in an identity of its own (*cough* Silo *cough*) that some of the flashbacks in the outside world are easy to misread as taking place in the underground present. The show also suffers at times from clumsy dialogues and characterization, with some plot developments transparently contrived for the sake of drama. The songs selected as thematic summaries of each episode come too close to the cringey side of in-your-nose-ness. And again, the overuse of flashbacks is a sledgehammer against any hope of maintaining a sense of cohesive pacing.

The draw, despite these failings, is to be found in the performances. As our protagonist, Sterling K. Brown does a solid job of portraying barely contained fury under a face of professional equanimity. Krys Marshall, who has been fantastic in For All Mankind, is here a complex player in the murder investigation, struggling to balance her conflicting loyalties with her sense of justice. Gerald McRaney is positively frightening as the type of domineering patriarch who can bend a nation's fate. And pay close attention to Nicole Brydon Bloom's meticulously controlled performance. Just saying.

This first season ends in the right cliffhanger that was reasonable to expect, and I wouldn't object to seeing more episodes set in this strange, messy, delusional last hope of humankind. But let's say I won't exactly jump in exhilaration if it comes to happen.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: In The Lost Lands

Based on a George R.R. Martin short story, In the Lost Lands feels like a dystopian video game that's all style and no substance

As as sci-fi fan, I will forever be chasing the high of taking a chance on a film like The Fifth Element and being rewarded. It's rare that a standalone, non-franchise movie delivers these days, and I love supporting new ideas, however absurd they may seem. I wanted so badly for Jupiter Ascending, for example, to be great. (It is, but in a terribly silly way.)

Thus, when In The Lost Lands appeared on my radar, I was excited. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of video game movie renown, it tells the story of a decaying future civilization and a witch's journey. And like The Fifth Element (and all of Anderson's Resident Evil movies), it features Milla Jovovich, who is absolutely breathtaking on screen. She is Grey Alys, a sort of Jessica-from-Dune-type witch who also, for some curious reason, can never refuse a job. She teams up with Dave Bautista, who plays what is essentially the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Which brings to me the setting, arguably the most interesting part of the movie. I'm a sucker for a wasteland, and this movie seamlessly creates a world that is equal parts Mad Max: Fury Road, Fallout, and the aforementioned Dark Tower. The biggest debt is to Mad Max, as the looming citadel structure even features a craggy skull-shaped entrance and a fleet of black-smudged faces à la warboys. Everything is dusty, dirty, and church bells ring out in slagged iron cathedrals.

My favorite (and most interesting) part revolved around the clearly evil post-capitalist and christo-mechanical church faction—sort of a post-apocalyptic Templar deal. Their motivations and machinations aren't ever clearly explained, but the vibes are high. They're the bad guys, and they have on Templar smocks, have dirty faces, and wear aviator sunglasses.

Overall, the movie trucks along fine. There are a few interesting battles and fights, and the sweeping shots give "crumbling civilization" in some visually epic ways. At the end of the day, though, it's a movie cigarette—probably bad for you, but entertaining for a few brief moments. Folks familiar with Anderson will probably already know this.

The most unbelievable part of the movie for me wasn't the unexplained character motivations or gravity-defying stunts: It was the fact that three different women are attracted to Dave Bautista, the main gunslinger character. I've only really ever noticed him as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy, so it was wild seeing him as a leading man. 

Unless you're an Anderson head, you'll probably skip this one. But if you have some to kill, it's a perfectly fine movie to watch on a rainy Saturday and enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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.

Review: Future's Edge by Gareth Powell

At its heart, this standalone space opera epic is the story of three people coming to terms with each other

Of all the Gin joints for him to walk into, he had to walk into *hers*.¹ Ursula Marrow, running a bar in a refugee camp on the planet of Void’s Edge, has her ex-husband Jake walk into it, seeking her help. Ursula has a strange link to a weapon that might slow down the implacable Cutters, who are steadily destroying civilizations and wiping out intelligent life as they go (that was the fate of Earth, if you must know). Ursula could have gotten on the STL ships to get even further away from the enemy, but she’s still running her bar by the camp at the edge of the galaxy arm, before the doorstep of the void that the STL ships are fleeing into to escape the Cutters. And now her ex needs her help again, in her capacity as a former xenoarchaeologist with a unique link to that aforementioned weapon (everyone else who has tried to link to it has, in fact, died). But in the two years since she last saw him, during the chaotic and desperate evacuation of Earth, he has gotten a new wife... his sentient spaceship, The Crisis Actor.

Ursula, The Crisis Actor, and Jack are at the center of Gareth Powell’s Future’s Edge, a standalone space opera epic novel. It first and foremost runs on how these three characters get along, even as interstellar civilization (humans and others) is quite literally falling apart due to the Cutters. The novel’s point of view is almost exclusively Ursula’s; aside from the brief and revealing shifts to The Crisis Actor, we mostly stay in Ursula’s head. We don’t get a narrative from Jack, so we have these two most important characters in his life; and the way they regard and react to him, the ex-wife (human) and the current wife (AI/spaceship), makes for a fascinating engine for character development, growth and drama. Add in a constellation of secondary characters, some from Jack’s life, some from Ursula’s, mix well, and you have an engaging cast for the end of the world.

I want to explore a little more and engage with Ursula as a character. Even with everyone dealing with the mental fallout of a world that is on the edge, Powell explores substance abuse in having Ursula be an alcoholic. That word is never used, the subject is not brought up, but the reader can see that her alcoholism is a symptom and a consequence of what she has been through. Jake, by comparison, clearly is suffering some PTSD from having been in a constant state of war for the last couple of years. This gives an interesting and sometimes disquieting angle to his relationship with The Crisis Actor.

Non-humans, especially AIs, are a feature of Powell’s work all the way back to Silversands and Ack-Ack Macaque. Powell seems very interested in including characters in his works who think close to humans, but are not quite humans, and have to engage with humans who have varying if not wrong expectations of what a non-human intelligence is or should be like. There’s a fascinating conversation in a desperate moment where Ursula orders The Crisis Actor to turn on her emotional circuits, because she’s frustrated with her overly logical intelligence. While I have enjoyed AIs of various kinds in previous works by Powell, having The Crisis Actor in this three-way relationship mess comes off as one of the most interesting instances in his oeuvre.

And the novel is populated with more non-human characters, a diverse cast across a variety of spectra. Powell effortlessly makes his books inclusive and with characters with whom a wide variety of readers can identify. While our power trio is the main focal point, I enjoyed a variety of the characters in secondary roles as well. Like our protagonists, they, too, bear the scars and costs of this grinding, implacable, genocidal war.

We are presented with a rich, interesting world. I’ve read enough of Powell to see the lines of what he likes to do, tying one or more characters very directly into his worldbuilding in a fundamental way. Having Ursula’s link to the weapon, that starts as a MacGuffin and turns out to be so much more, is our hook to really engage a character, and by extension the reader, into the fabric of the world. Revealing just what the weapon is, what it does, and how Ursula ultimately uses it is the capstone of this novel, along with some final revelations of what the actual nature of this universe, its Precursors and the antagonist Cutters really are. What Powell sets up he ultimately pays off for the reader in the denouement. I was quite satisfied with the resolutions, both of characters and overarching plots.

We get an interesting method of FTL (and not-so-FTL travel), we get lots of neat technology and weaponry from the small to the ship-sized, and we get Precursor and other alien technologies. This is a cobbled-together set of people with sometimes very ramshackle (or not very well understood) technology living on the ragged edge, trying desperately to hold off the Cutters and find the means to evacuate more people to a place hopefully out of their reach. This is a novel after the destruction of the Earth, after all. Humans (as well as other species) are raging against the dying of the light. That’s why Jake and Ursula’s efforts to try and find the weapon are at the same time a use of resources that cannot be countenanced, yet maybe the only thing that might help a few thousand more people escape. Desperate stakes, desperate hope, desperate odds. That hangs over the heads of everyone in the novel.

Precursors and their remnants are not exactly a new thing in science fiction, of course. Given the age of the universe, the idea that there have been civilizations that have risen and fallen in the big wide universe goes back to the cosmic horror of the 1920s, if not even further back. And xenoarchaeologists go hand in hand with the existence of fallen, lost civilizations. Powell’s take on xenoarchaeology, his Precursors, and the monstrous reminds me of a variety of potential inspirations and parallels, ranging from video games (the Star Control and Mass Effect series) to authors like Frederik Pohl with his Gateway series. The novel, like many that feature xenoarchaeology, does tackle and provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Future’s Edge is lean and mean, folding in high-octane action sequences with tender, intimate moments that give the characters space to grow, breathe and come to terms with each other, all with a killer high concept. The novel never flags, and just when you think that the social elements are getting long, Powell drops in an action sequence... but on the flip side, he makes sure those action sequences are not just a single straight line without healthy pauses. This is a real feature of Powell’s writing, and this novel shows him skillfully wielding his craft in a page-turning way.

This is an excellent story that gets resolved in one volume. One can imagine more adventures in this ’verse, but the story of this trio of characters and their coming together is complete. Despite the MacGuffin, the story really ends when their character arcs are resolved. I have a lot of questions about this world and its future, and I wouldn’t mind reading more from this rather ravaged setting. Future’s Edge may tell of a time after the end of the world, but it shines with hope.

Highlights:

• Strong trio of primary characters, flawed, entangled in complicated relationships, and interesting
• Engaging, deep and interesting worldbuilding
• It’s after the end of the world as we know it, no one’s fine, but we’re still raging against the dying of the light

Reference: Powell, Gareth. Future’s Edge [Titan Books, 2025].

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

¹ The book is set after the end of the world, and with the remnants of humanity trying to hold onto what cultural icons they have left, there’s a discussion in the book at one point about movies. And yes, Casablanca is one of them. Trust Powell as a writer; he knows what he’s doing.

Film Review: Flow

A breathtakingly beautiful tale about a determined cat, his idiosyncratic animal companions, and the devastating effects of a catastrophic flood on an alien world

For a short-ish animated feature that has zero dialogue, Flow is wildly entertaining. It follows a young black cat as his quiet world gets subsumed by a flood of biblical proportions. He manages to escape on a rickety sailboat that manages to pick up other animal straggler survivors, including a stiff and rigid secretary bird, a can't-be-arsed capybara, and a greedy lemur—all while avoiding the barking and chaotic pack of dogs on a rival boat.

I know, I know. This sounds silly and saccharine. I'm not one for animated movies generally or animal adventure tales specifically, but Flow is different. Granted, I'm a nautical obsessed cat-lover, so that may explain a lot. But this movie is adorable, visually stunning, and makes you think without really any exposition at all. It's quite a feat, and I'm honestly in love with it a little bit.

Who is this cat?

Our protagonist is a scruffy little black cat who spends his days romping around the forest near his home, which contains dozens of hand-carved cat statues. It's unclear if his owner is alive, dead, or missing—but something seems off, especially when the flood comes. Our cat is all cat, from his constant low meows to his slicked-back ear planes when he's scared. He's vulnerable in so many ways, not the least of which being his world invaded by ever-rising water—every cat's nightmare. But animals, even cats, are much more resourceful than we give them credit for. So yes, he learns to swim, to interact with a lemur, even steer a boat. Seriously. But more on that later.

The achingly beautiful world they inhabit

Even though it's not billed as such, this movie is essentially a mystery. What caused this flood of epic proportions? Where's the cat's owner? Why are there no humans escaping the flood? What's that dragon thing?

On the animals' voyage sailing through the diluvian world, one wonder if it's even Earth—it could be a million years in the past, or a million in the future. It could be an entirely alien world! As they sail through the remains of (presumably) human civilization, you can get really lost in your reverie.

The colorful, meditative animation makes every scene absolutely serene and gorgeous. It's like playing a cozy Nintendo Switch game for 90 minutes. It reminded me, even, of playing Stray, a recent puzzle video game where you play as an orange cat that's trying to escape a cyberpunk city inhabited by robots.

Animal fantasy that's refreshing and not cloying

Here's the thing: If this was a Disney movie, I probably wouldn't watch it. No shade to Disney movies, they're just not my thing at this point in my life (though I did love Coco). But having the animal characters be wordless makes them somehow more real, if that makes sense. They're still fantastical, in that they know how to get on boats and then take turns at the rudder, but not ridiculously so. There's no crab with a Jamaican accent singing "Kiss the Girl." And yet you're never left wondering what's happening and you're never bored.

Part of the film's success stems from how expressive the animals are—Flow excels at depicting wide-eyed terror to bemused stubbornness. It's a bit hard to explain exactly how compulsively watchable this movie is, but I assure you that it's true. There are parts where you're so worried about this little black cat that's it like if Homeward Bound was directed by the Safdie brothers.

But it's worth it.

Also, there's an amazingly wholesome trend of pets watching along with their owners right now. This is also true, I can confirm. Here's my cat, Goose, intently watching:

Baseline Score: 9/10.

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.

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Film review: Kalki 2898 AD

A clash of past against future, tyrants against gods, ambition against destiny

The latest blockbuster to come from epic Indian cinema, Kalki 2989 AD is India's most expensive film so far. Set in a far future beset by hunger, despotism and hopelessness, it follows a handful of improbable heroes struggling to bring about a new era of peace.

The background context for this film is the Kurukshetra War, a pivotal moment in epic Indian literature. According to the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata, two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fought each other brutally for eighteen days over control of the Kingdom of Hastinapura. Toward the end of the war, one formidable soldier allied with the Kauravas, Ashwatthama, upon seeing that his side was losing, hurled a weapon of divine might against princess Uttara, who was pregnant with the last surviving heir of the Pandavas. The hero Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, stopped the attack and cursed Ashwatthama to walk the earth for centuries.

The film takes these events and gives them a continuation in our far future. The opening credits, which consist of a digital animation of scenes from the Kurukshetra War, end in a close-up of a CGI shoot of grass that blends into an identical-looking, real shoot of grass. The meaning is clear: the realm of myth extends into the real world. In this future setting, the Kali Yuga, the cosmic era ruled by sin and perversion, is nearing its end, and the hero Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu, who will restore the world and put an end to evil, is about to be born. Unfortunately, the tyrant who controls the last surviving human city has a habit of kidnapping fertile women for horrific experiments to try and extend his own lifespan. It is one of those women who is carrying the foretold savior of humankind.

Kalki 2898 AD does a good job of explaining the basics of its massive lore, but for Western viewers it wouldn't hurt to brush up on their Hindu mythology. Much of the emotional impact of the plot (especially the return of Ashwatthama as an eight-foot-tall badass immortal) relies on the audience's assumed familiarity with and personal investment in Hindu eschatology. This is not like watching a movie about Hercules or Achilles, where we know the relevant myths but don't take them as historical fact. Rather, imagine if the plot of Left Behind happened in the setting of Mad Max, and, more importantly, imagine that you're a devoted believer. The tacit position of the film, and of its intended audience, is that the Mahabaratha narrates actual events that happened in real life. Whereas Western scriptwriters and directors will probably not feel any reverence for the Olympian gods, to a huge portion of the Indian population the Hindu gods are very real. Keep that in mind as you sit to watch.

Once the stakes are defined, the film becomes a series of frantic chase scenes between bad guys and good guys trying to snatch this desperate pregnant woman who never asked to occupy such an important position. Combat scenes are a mixed bag: while Ashwatthama (now tasked with protecting Kalki's mother until he can be born) commands every scene he appears in with his imposing presence and impeccable acting (no surprise there, since he's played by cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan), his sometimes rival, a bounty hunter named Bhairava, is comparably strong, but the visual effects used in his fighting moves are too obviously fake. Nameless mooks get smashed against the walls like bowling pins, making Bhairava's battles (even the all-important one at the end) look more comical than awesome.

Visual effects in general are a problem with this film. Landscape shots look impressive, but the objects moving in the foreground seem copied and pasted from a stock photo archive. Together with the Zack Snyder-style yellowish tint that was applied all over the film, the disorienting editing between sequences and even within the same scene, the ill-advised use of fast motion for dramatic effect, and the cringeworthy sense of humor, these moviemaking choices rob Kalki 2898 AD of the majestic aura it wants to claim.

Your enjoyment of the protagonist, bounty hunter Bhairava, will depend on how much patience you have for the lovable rogue archetype. Take Han Solo, but replace Chewbacca with KITT from Knight Rider, and you'll get the idea. It's interesting that Bhairava starts the movie in opposition to the aims of divine prophecy, but gradually becomes an antiheroic figure who fights the villains for selfish reasons. Alas, the rest of the cast isn't fleshed out at all. The expectant mother of the god Vishnu is treated as a standard-issue damsel in distress; the generic mid-level commander who persecutes our heroes is stuck in the role of generic mid-level commander; the supporting heroes are an interchangeable collection of cool gadgets and catchphrases; and the minor villains are disposable meat. That's a common problem with plots built on prophecy: characters don't need to grow, because victory is already written in stone.

This film is the first entry in a planned Kalki Cinematic Universe that has already produced a prequel series. Accordingly, Kalki 2898 AD ends in a cliffhanger that renders much of its plot moot. In a discouraging imitation of Hollywood's worst habits, the film even has a post-credits scene that teases a bigger battle with the final boss. It's clear that the producers want to go big with this, but the studio needs to hire better scriptwriters, and the visual effects aren't yet at a level capable of delivering a spectacle deserving of awe.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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