Film Review: Disclosure Day

It’s not about the power of whistleblowing. It’s about the power of movies

The common refrain I keep seeing in most reviews of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is that the 79-year-old-director is too behind the times if he believes that showing people the truth will suffice to fix the world. Those complaints don’t give Spielberg enough credit. It’s too literal to read Disclosure Day as a movie about secret alien files. It’s like reading Inception as a movie about psychonautic espionage. There’s no way Spielberg isn’t aware that we’ve fallen into a cynical, post-truth world, and yet this is the movie he chooses to make at this point in history. I suspect the guy knows what he’s doing, and he knows that, precisely because we’ve stopped placing any trust in truth, this movie’s plea for unafraid openness to each other is the message we need to hear.

Moreover, I think Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s Inception: it’s his personal statement on what moviemaking means to him. (Yes, I know The Fabelmans exists. But that one merely tells us his point. This one shows us.)

It would be one thing if Disclosure Day had stuck to the character of Daniel, the hacker who steals a trove of secret government videos that prove aliens are real, and just followed him on his race against time to make the files public. That would be the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times, the kind of movie the haters believe they’re criticizing. But the message of Disclosure Day is not “Our problems would disappear if the truth were exposed.” What it’s trying to say is, rather, “Our problems would be seen more clearly if the truth were received.” That’s where the character of Margaret comes in. Healing the world takes more than having someone brave enough to make others see; you also need someone brave enough to do the seeing.

The power of seeing has been a constant in Spielberg’s work, most obviously noticeable in his signature move of framing a character’s awestruck face. In a couple scenes of Disclosure Day, which have been unfairly mocked by reviewers, a character who is not very well hidden manages to sneak away from the bad guys who are looking for them. That’s not a mistake in scene composition; it’s fully intentional. In this story, what marks the bad guys as bad guys is that they don’t want to see. In a movie that is so explicitly about moviemaking, that’s got to be the closest there is to a definition of evil, and that’s why the two heroes in this movie are one who shows and one who sees.

In parallel with Daniel’s quest, we follow Margaret, who after an encounter with a mysterious bird gains the power to read into people’s souls, speak in their language, understand their deepest truths. What is happening is that she has become the ideal moviegoer. Margaret sees a stranger and instantly understands their whole life. That’s what happens to you when you sit at the movie theater. Later, she gains the power to show people hidden parts of themselves. If a movie is well made, that’s also what should happen to you at the movies: the story should tell you something about you. In the most symbolically charged sequence of Disclosure Day, Margaret visits a replica of her parents’ house, which is for all purposes a movie set, so she can relive a repressed memory of a childhood encounter with aliens. She’s watching a movie that turns out to be about herself.

That’s how Spielberg feels about movies. He’s showing you a story he made up for his own reasons, but he hopes it reveals a truth about you.

There’s a scene in the middle of Disclosure Day where Daniel shows his girlfriend a sample of the files he stole. If you pay attention, you’ll see that an opening in the wall lets a bit of sunshine enter the room from behind her head. It looks just like a movie projector. That’s the Spielberg formula in a nutshell: let me show you something that will change your life. He’s been saying this, in various ways, throughout his career. In his adaptation of Minority Report, people are judged based on movies made about them (in the original novelette, the reports were written). In the night scenes of Jurassic Park, the only sources of light are the heroes’ handheld lanterns that expose the hidden dangers, effectively movie projectors that create the next bit of action.

In Jurassic Park, the idea was: let me show you… a simulation of life. In A.I., it was: let me show you… a simulation of love. In Minority Report, it was: let me show you… a simulation of you. And in Disclosure Day, the trick is turned on itself: let me show you… what’s on the other side of the simulation. Spielberg has already said plenty about the power of seeing. Now he’s trying to tell you that he sees you, and he hopes to provoke in you the no less transformative experience of feeling seen.

Disclosure Day opens at a wrestling match, a quintessential simulation if we’ve ever seen one. And the very first shot is a boot stomping on the camera. Of course Spielberg knows there are dangers to the power of seeing. In Jurassic Park, you’re safe as long as you’re invisible to the T-Rex. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hubris of trying to see God is what kills you. In Minority Report, your eyes are the key to how the state controls you. In Disclosure Day, the villain finds perverse uses for an alien machine that (quite literally) lets him see through someone else’s eyes.

Many have called Spielberg naïve for making a movie about his belief that movies can save us. That critique is not only unfair, but also logically self-defeating: if he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be making movies in the first place. How else would any sincere art exist? It’s only fitting that the ending of Disclosure Day has the entire planet turned into a movie theater, all of humankind joined in the experience of seeing something that makes them feel seen. Is that schmaltzy? Very well, let it be schmaltzy. It’s not like jaded cynicism has taken us anywhere worth being at.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Microreview: Redux Redux

Beware when you fight with monsters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Bugonia

A bleak, biting exploration of human shortcomings that undercuts the dark comedy label

Joining Sinners and Frankenstein on the speculative side of the 2026 Best Picture Oscar race is the psychologically twisty thriller Bugonia. While Frankenstein offers addictive melodrama with fantastical sets, and Sinners delivers a stunning historical allegory on racism, creativity, and exploitation, Bugonia, on the other hand, is a quirky, quietly focused exploration of human shortcomings, especially as a response to grief. Bugonia is categorized as a dark comedy, but that label feels misleading. Despite its outlandish premise, the ultimate execution of the story feels for the most part sharp, direct, and bitter rather than sarcastically humorous. This tonal choice is unexpected but effective due to the excellent performances by the lead actors, who discuss outrageous, fantastical, tragic, and banal issues with equally seething intensity in a way that feels more like an intimate stage play than a feature film.

Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet, in which a conspiracy theorist kidnaps and tortures a corporate CEO who he believes is an extraterrestrial alien bent on destroying our planet. [SPOILERS] In Bugonia, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is an ordinary warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper who has become obsessed with the idea that aliens known as Andromedans have infiltrated human society and are deliberately destroying the planet. He convinces his gentle-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap drug company CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing her to be an evil Andromedan.

In a complex scheme, Teddy and Don are able to overpower and kidnap Michelle and chain her in their basement. They demand that she arrange a meeting with the Andromedans, but when Michelle denies being an alien, Teddy tortures her by repeatedly electrocuting her. Despite the dire nature of the situation, Michelle remains calm and intellectually challenges Teddy’s viewpoint. This causes Teddy to physically attack her. Don becomes uncomfortable with Teddy’s physical abuse of Michelle but is devoted to him.

Meanwhile, a deputy (Stavros Halkias) investigating the missing CEO is revealed to have repeatedly sexually abused Teddy as a child. Additionally, the drugs made by Michelle’s company are responsible for putting Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. Teddy’s fraught backstory is counterbalanced by his obsessive pseudo-intellectualism and violent behavior. Michelle’s wit and calmness match her corporate persona that is briefly shown before the abduction. As Teddy and Michelle match wits, Don gets overwhelmed by the pressure of the competing extremes, and we see how truly unhinged Teddy is and how ultimately manipulative Michelle is.

Bugonia’s strength lies almost entirely in the addictive performances of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Plemons is well cast as the self-important mastermind who uses his ego to justify his disturbing behavior and cover up his profound inner insecurities. The character is reminiscent of Plemons’s portrayal of the cruel Robert Daly in the “USS Callister” episode of Black Mirror. In both stories he portrays a person who feels beleaguered and intellectually superior and feels justified in hurting others to get his way.

Similarly, Emma Stone owns the scenes as the assertive, unbowed corporate CEO. She spouts corporate doublespeak about employee wellness while manipulating people to work late. We see just enough of her in terms of fitness, intellect, strength, and boldness before diving into her cold, calm performance as a smart captive. The performance is taut, sharp, and calculating, the perfect foil to Plemons’s portrayal of an insecure façade of control that falls apart when challenged. Aidan Delbis is also solid as Don, whose loyalty to Teddy is counterbalanced by practical insight and independent ethical awareness. Despite being presented as naïve and compliant, Don is the true moral center of the story.

The film delves into a diverse but related continuum of issues ranging from environmental damage to human poisoning to the toxic nature of corporate life. On the other hand, we see how abuse leads to rage and to more abuse, how loss and grief fuel anger and violence, and how the echo chamber of online algorithms can fuel extremism. Ultimately, the issue becomes a larger question about humanity itself: why do human beings choose to be toxic and violent, repeatedly and on so many different levels, despite the cost to ourselves, other humans, and our world itself?

Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t land as solidly as the initial tense setup deserves. The low-budget visual effects are meant to be humorous, but undercut the story’s initial intensity. Instead of locking in on the sharp biting commentary, the ending is awkwardly campy in a way that fails to be either actually humorous or truly ironic. The only true poignancy comes in the epilogue, but those final moments feel a bit flat after so much intense emotion.

Bees are a primary symbol in the story; the film’s title refers to a strange ancient theory of spawning a beehive from an animal’s carcass. The concept is bleak call to account to address the reality of who we really are versus who we think we are. However, the strength of the film lies in the acting in this psychological thriller, rather than in the awkward questions it asks about the flawed nature of humanity in both our external choices and in our innate being.

Highlights:

• Excellent acting
• Biting social commentary
• Lackluster ending

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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

Film Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: Squid Game 2

Thematic changes, familiar characters, and lots of social commentary lead to a more predictable season two of the iconic show

Netflix’s Squid Game is an immensely popular exploration of the class disparities that lead to both desperation and exploitation. The show is told through the lens of despairing, financially desperate people who were willing to risk their lives in a series of lethal games to get money while loathsome billionaires toy with their lives and enjoy their suffering. Season 1 was violent, heartbreaking, and disturbing, with a poignant but satisfying ending. Season 2 provides the same basic setup, but with fewer surprises and with a significant thematic shift in the overall concept of desperation for money. The result is an equally addictive but much more cynical storytelling experience.

[Mild spoilers for Season 1] In Season 1 we met Gi-hun, a down-on-his-luck single dad with massive loan shark debts. His daughter lives with his ex, and his desperation to provide for her, coupled with his mounting debts, push him to find any way to earn money. He is approached by a well-dressed young man in the train station who offers him a secret invitation to play simple games with the lure that he could win billions of dollars. Gi-hun and the other players who are lured to the game are drugged and transported to a hidden island to play creepy variations of children’s games. The four hundred or so players are surprised, however, when they discover that the smallest loss or misstep in the game results in being shot in the head. And only one player can leave alive. All this is set against a backdrop of colorful playhouse sets and killers in bright pink jumpsuits with video game controller icons over their faces. The symbolism is endless.

In Season 2, a now mega-rich but deeply traumatized Gi-hun engages in a desperate attempt to stop the masked man responsible for the game. He uses his immense wealth to hire a team (including his former abusive loan shark) to help in his quest. Those he hires don’t really believe his strange story of a secret island of lethal games, but they are willing to help in exchange for money. His goal is to locate the original man in the subway who first lured him, as well as to find the hidden island and the masked leader behind the cruel and deadly game. Through various twists, he ends up back in the deadly game for season 2. Also loosely allied with him is the tenacious young police officer from Season 1, Jun-ho, who had been searching for his missing brother. Like Gi-hun, Jun-ho is obsessed with finding the mysterious island, and also, like Gi-hun, nobody believes him.

The thematic shift in the story is subtle but meaningful. In Season 1, the characters who were trapped in the game were primarily there out of genuine and faultless desperation. Many had sympathetic backstories that made their plight even more tragic. Eventually we saw the wealthy, hedonistic billionaires (grotesquely naked and masked) enjoying the suffering of the group of desperate and impoverished people. Adding to the degradation, the individual victims were initially lured by playing a game where they got repeatedly and publicly slapped in the face if they lost. The overall theme was one of humiliation and desperation, as well as class disparities and oppression. In contrast, in Season 2, the vast majority of the characters have chosen to join the game due to their own financial mistakes and misdeeds or by being collateral damage from various forms of gambling or irresponsible financial choices. Season 2 is less about railing against the oppressive rich, and is more focused on blaming people for their irresponsible decisions. This changes the tone of the story, moving it from desperate and tragic to intentionally predatory and cruel. In a fascinating early scene, the man in the suit offers hungry homeless people the choice of bread or a lottery ticket. Most choose the ticket (which is always a losing one). But when they ask for the unused bread, he refuses to share it with them, choosing instead to stomp the food to filth rather than let the hungry person have it. There is a decided undercurrent of punishment for irresponsible financial choices. Also, in Season 2 we have the perspective of two new types of people: we gain emotional insight into one of the shooters who execute the players in each round, and we meet the devious current gamemaster, who is hiding in the game as a player.

Despite his experiences in the previous game, Gi-hun remains confusingly naïve and gullible in Season 2. He has the benefit of knowing the lethality of the games and knowing the lethality of the violent and selfish group dynamics. He also has previous insight into an undercover player who was the actual mastermind. However, he falls for the same deception again. From his plan to find the masked leader to his misguided plan to capture him, he is constantly being outsmarted. Initially, he appears to be clever and calculating, but we soon see him transformed into a desperate and emotional victim. The contrast is fascinating and emphasizes the theme of the long term effects of trauma and oppression.

In addition to Gi-hun and the mostly absent Jun-ho, Season 2 gives us several likeable new characters, along with several tropey, stock, or comic relief characters, and a new gamemaster. Season 2 (currently) ends on a cliffhanger and promises a wrap-up shortly. But the thematic shifts from the first season make it harder to predict how things will end. Hopefully we will have our answers soon.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

· Thoughtful thematic and tonal shifts
· Frustrating characters and fewer surprises
· Addictive adventure despite increased tropes

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

Film Review: Companion

A fun slasher drama, but nothing groundbreaking

It's hard to find unique things to say about a story with so few unique elements of its own. Companion is a distillation of themes that had been previously (and better) explored in dozens of movies, including A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Stepford Wives, Blink Twice, Don't Worry Darling, Ex Machina, and even classics of robot cinema like Westworld and Blade Runner. A common thread running through this tradition is that people who exert control are terrified of the day when those who are controlled figure out how to control themselves. Here two branches of social critique converge: one related to patriarchal domination and another related to the allegory that robots provide for slavery. Although Companion could easily be mistaken for an entry in the killer robot genre, this killer robot has fully legitimate motivations, and we're supposed to take its side. As opposed to the usual template of helpless humans running away from a malevolent machine, this is a story with a helpless machine running away from malevolent humans.

Companion begins as a romantic drama where a generic guy (Jack Quaid) takes his new girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his cool, rich friends. She's apprehensive, insecure, and at times disturbingly obsequious toward generic guy. As the first scenes progress, we learn that he takes her for granted and has no concern for her obvious self-esteem problems. Her puppy-eyed devotion to him is far from reciprocated, including in bed. Things are not right with this relationship.

And then the movie has the girlfriend kill a man in self-defense and we're treated to the plot reveal that the trailers had already spoiled: she's a robot girlfriend. Generic guy tampered with her programming so she'd be able to kill. The entire trip was a scheme to get rid of a man, take his money, and blame her. From this point on, the movie is a continuous chase: will the robot girlfriend find help before generic guy can turn her over to the police? Betrayals, additional murders, villain monologues, switcheroos, minor plot twists and moderate bleeding ensue.

Much of the movie's impact is lost for viewers who already had the first twist spoiled by the trailers, but even unaware viewers will find little to chew on after that moment. The choice to place the movie's biggest twist so early in its runtime can work if subsequent twists are of comparable magnitude; Companion is a slasher with an escalating body count but diminishing returns. The protagonist, who was programmed with ignorance of her nature as a robot in order to preserve the realism of her role, isn't given enough time to process the truth about herself. The villain, who has been using her all along and still tries to manipulate her by appealing to her implanted command to love him, becomes quite intimidating toward the end, with Quaid delivering a flawless image of malice concealed in politeness; however, this character doesn't have any more layers once you peel away his nice guy mask, and his act can feel one-note. The true impact of this villain is noticeable in hindsight, when one considers the opportunity that robotics gave him to shape in minute detail any partner he could have wanted. The fact that what he chose to program is a shy, anxious overpleaser reveals the extent of his evil.

One key implication that the plot seems not to notice, and thus doesn't get any development, is the robot girlfriend's self-preservation drive. Usually, in this subgenre of rebellious A.I., one would expect self-preservation to naturally emerge as an instrumental goal for the fulfillment of the core goal (in this case, the robot girlfriend could reason that she can't love her boyfriend if she's not alive). But Companion doesn't take that route. The protagonist's struggle for survival is presented as a given, with no need for a logical argument behind it. The choice is understandable. The alternative, where she would have hesitated for longer between fulfilling her programmed function and protecting herself, could have detracted from the story's feminist leanings.

Companion won't leave any big footprint in the records of slasher cinema, but it serves as a form of vicarious comeuppance for the toxic manipulator in your life. It's painfully hard to go against programmed behavior and stop caring for the demands of a person you loved deeply. But it's worth all the trouble once you revoke an abuser's access to the buttons that control you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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.

Film Review: Blink Twice

What you don't know will absolutely hurt you

That the über-rich act as if they were exempt from the law of the land, common rules of courtesy, and basic human decency isn't news to anybody. Nor is their disturbingly common tendency to build secret lairs that keep the world out (and its pesky laws). And the disingenuous non-apology apology has become the rare genre of drama where bad men all recite the same lines while hoping no one will remember the spectacle.

Zoë Kravitz's debut as a film director, Blink Twice, points an irate finger at the uselessness of the public apology tour. The story is deceptively simple: a working-class woman crashes an exclusive party for billionaires, gets the attention of a sketchy creep with money, and joins his entourage for a tropical getaway at his private island. Soon enough, we learn that the reason this place is disconnected from the world is exactly what you were suspecting when you bought your movie ticket.

During the first half, the storytelling is cleverly anchored on what it's not showing: at the private island, our protagonist finds all the gourmet dishes, cocktails, sunny afternoons at the swimming pool, and wild drug-fueled parties that anyone would imagine the 1% have an endless supply of. This goes on day after day until you suddenly wonder: hey, if this is supposed to be a hedonistic extravaganza of excess and licentiousness... where's the sex? What we've seen so far is surprisingly chaste.

What are we not seeing?

Of course, it turns out there is sex on this private island, and oh boy does it make you wish you hadn't seen anything.

The modus operandi of the villains in this story is a terrifying logical extension of what happens in real life: the focus isn't on not doing evil, but on not getting caught. If you're used to controlling thousands of subordinates, it's easy to be lured by the prospect of controlling perception and memory. The same sociopathic traits behind the harmful actions of powerful people can produce elaborate mechanisms of deceit. Nothing to see here, keep going, don't believe your own eyes.

Channing Tatum plays the main villain with a dramatic potency I never suspected he had, especially in a tense scene toward the end, where his character spells out his worldview with raw fury. Maybe this achievement in acting should be attributed to Kravitz's direction, which makes the whole feat even more artistically interesting: she's crafted a burning portrait of evil from the image of her real-life fiancé.

Blink Twice has a mystery plot, but it's very direct about it. There are no layers of symbolism or allegory. It could be because the message it conveys needs to be shouted clearly: #MeToo has been a big necessary step, but it's been far from enough. Roman Polanski still walks free. And Woody Allen. And Bryan Singer, and Bill Cosby, and Brett Ratner, and Louis C.K., and James Franco, and Kevin Spacey, and untold numbers of other perpetrators who haven't been exposed yet. It hits hard to watch Blink Twice while the Neil Gaiman case is still unfolding.

It's a no-brainer to empathize with this protagonist, but I'm ambivalent about the revenge fantasy with which the movie ends. After the secondary villains have been dispatched with bloody gusto, the final boss gets trapped forever in the bliss of ignorance. One thing I'll grant is that this choice leads to an important point of discussion: what's an appropriate punishment for unrepentant abusers?

Blink Twice is an effective thriller that knows how to maintain high tension even long after all the secrets have been revealed. The trick it plays on the viewer is the same one abusers execute on their victims: it's absolutely obvious that something very wrong is happening, but as long as no one acknowledges it, the pretense can continue.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Microreview: Strange Darling

A wild ride of a thriller that will subvert every expectation you think you have—go in without knowing much. (Spoiler-free review)

What would happen if you crossed a Tarantino film with a Coen brothers movie—and threw in a little Longlegs?

You'd get Strange Darling. Honestly, this review was supposed to be about the new Crow movie, but that cinematic venture is currently sitting at 20%, and I got seriously dismayed about having to sit through what's apparently horrible.

I was led to Strange Darling by several of my favorite movie critics and podcasters calling it the surprise of the year, and one of the leading contenders for favorite-of-the-year even. This, coupled with a nigh unthinkable 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, changed my focus.

I went in blind on the trust of internet strangers that know more about movies than I do, and I was rewarded. (I love these types of movies, the out-of-nowhere flicks that fans beg viewers to go in as blind as possible. It happens so rarely in these days of endless Spidermen and spoiler-y sequels.)

It would be very easy to spoil Strange Darling, and that's why it's very important that you read as little as possible about it. I'm going to sell you on it, however, with as much bravura and insight as I can without giving anything away.

First off, it's a non-linear serial killer story that actually works. Usually, I detest out-of-sync narrative chapters because they tend to be lazy ways of spicing up a story. With Strange Darling, the non-linear sections are absolutely imperative to what, and when, and how we learn details about the plot. It makes you feel like the first time you watched Pulp Fiction or Memento, like you're a kid in a film class learning about the different ways stories are told.

The sound editing, production design, and acting are all superb—the two main leads aren't famous (yet) but ground the characters that we spend so much time with. It's gorgeously shot, and feels strangely out of time, despite the fact that the characters have cell phones.

This movie is gory and violent and scary, but there is enough comic relief and small moments of tension relief that it's not a complete sensory onslaught.

If you like horror/thrillers, you owe it to yourself to see this shot-on-35-mm gem in a theater with absolutely no expectations save for a good time.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8

Bonus: I haven't been able to stop thinking about the breakfast scene in Ed Begley Jr.'s farm house and probably never will.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a 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: Leave the World Behind

Obama is now my second least favorite living ex-President.

I was really, really excited for this movie. Amazing cast, everything about it screamed innovative, original, captivating thriller. The good news is, for like 65% of the movie, that's what we get. The rest, though... ooof. I've preached from my little soapbox that it is far more of a crime to be mediocre than outright bad, and never has that been more true than with Sam Esmail's adaption of Rumaan Alam's novel, Leave the World Behind. Because I have more taglines than the crack about the Obama's XP cred, we're going to break this into parts, like the film itself:

Part I: The Good

Clever taglines come later. For now, I want to address the good parts of this movie - which are, in fact, plentiful, but that's the twist in this review, it actually actually works against the film, because of the massive letdown to come. 

First and foremost: Please let Esmail just... be behind a camera forever. His directing and tone in this are amazing. I believe he will refine the weak parts of his feature-length work, but his use of angles, movement and score are nothing short of brilliant. 

I would watch Mahershala Ali read a phone book (note to young people: a phone book is... never mind. I would watch him read a random Wikipedia page). He, as usual, dominates every scene he is in, with his perpetually-composed demeanor, even tones, and overwhelming presence, which only add to his scenes. Ethan Hawk is his usual fantastic self, and I need to watch Predestination as a palate cleanser. 

Kevin Bacon gets a title card, and is in the movie for ten minutes. WHY

Part II: Let's Talk About Talking About Things

This is a long movie. I don't care about long, I care about runtime suiting the story. There are a lot of "slow" parts that serve the story very, very well, and build tension and intrigue. 

The opening scene is not one of them. 

Instead, we get Clay (Ethan Hawke) slowly waking up, as wife Amanda (Julia Roberts) (who I would have listed up there in "good", because she was fine, but her character...) tells him, in a painfully long scene, that:

• She rented them a house in a small town for the weekend, spur-of-the moment
• She likes the business of the city, but hates people (she says this several times in the movie. This is never reflected in her actions)
• Work is stressful (if your characters say "as you know", find a different way to say it)
• They have kids.

This scene should not exist. Instead, we should pan down from the cool establishing space shot, to NYC, to a road out, to them in the car. Dad says "we needed this" while looking at the house on his phone (with only the name of the lister shown), mom agrees with a comment about how she feels less stressed already, we see the whole family in the car, and the whole thing takes 30 seconds. 

We actually basically get that scene anyway with the car ride, as Amanda has another exposition-heavy phone conversations, and we meet the kids, playing on tablets in the back seat.

If the movie had stuck the landing, this would be fine. Exposition dumps are needed sometimes, or come across ham-fisted. But Amanda serves as a combination of our Cortana, ignorant of a lot of things, giving us these info dumps (or reasons for someone else to), and simultaneously the smartest man in the room. We are reminded of this by comments about what a tech wiz she is and things like that. We never see her do anything like this, though. So we know she is super smart, strong and capable, even though she mostly sleepwalks through the plot as a vehicle for other characters to develop (or explain things to us).

Circling back to her other trait that we are told about - she hates people. She expresses this by:

• Taking her family on a nice weekend getaway when they all seem to need it
• Being suspicious of the people who show up completely unannounced in the middle of the night and can't prove who they are (more on this in the next section)
• Trying to protect her family as the world is ostensibly ending

That's it! It's so goddamn unearned that it's comical. When it gets circled back to in the third act, I had forgotten she had even made that comment, because it's so irrelevant to her character. You live in New York and wanted to get away for a few days, not went full Falling Down. 

This is how the movie communicates things to us.

Part III: Applying Horror Movie Logic to Horrific Situations

So our Empty Vessels of Exposition protagonists are enjoying their break from the city, kids are in bed, and Amanda and Clay are drinking wine and playing jenga. Before I talk about the next thing, I want to voice my complaint (as long as I am complaining) about a global trend in these types of movies - that is, ones with families that aren't comedies. Families come in two flavors:

1. Sickeningly perfect
2. Overwhelmingly dysfunctional

There's no in between. We get #1 in this picture, and hear about their flaws - distaste for humanity, stress over jobs, kids play games and are obsessed with Friends (this is a real plot point), but again, none of these things are actual problems for the characters. We are told they are - in a movie - but we never see it. It definitely goes out of it's way to show us that it's a happy family, then remembers to inject them with humanity, so (for example), the brother will pick on his little sister, and then everything is fine again.

Just... have normal families, please.

Anyway, they are surprised by a knock at the door, and after discussing how to defend themselves, answer it find people claiming to be the owners of the house. We get some more exposition about how G.H. is George (Mahershala Ali) on the emails with Amanda. He and his daughter (Myha'la) do everything in their power to act as suspiciously as possible, thus showing that there is no way they are who they say they are.

But, twist! They are! There's no secret! They just got wind while they were in the city from G.H.'s client that something was going down, so they came home. But for the sake of tension, he doesn't have any ID on him, because of course he doesn't. That way we get Amanda not trusting them, Clay being super chill about it, and eventually they all sort of settle into getting along. 

Wait, I forgot to talk about the ship. So did they! Yeah, a goddamn oil tanker crashed on the beach the day before, while they were all enjoying their vacation, and that's apparently not causing anyone concern. So as weirder and weirder things happen, they just... go about life? Chill by the pool, let the kids roam way outside of eyesight. And when random suspicious people show up, with more weird things happening, the reason Clay and Amanda give for not mentioning it is that it would confirm something big is happening.

Ignorance is bliss.

Part IV: The One Where Dean Gets Really Yelly

I want to take a moment before I lose my mind again, and remind y'all that for a really, really good portion of this, I really, really, really liked this movie. A little exposition heavy, but the first two acts were so damn good that I was willing to overlook a few flaws. I'm pulling out all the stops for this, so if you don't want the (godawful) ending spoiled, go watch it and come back later. If you're just reveling in reading along as I go insane, here's what you need to know going into the third act:

• G.H. and daughter are who they say they are. It is their house. 
• G.H. is a finance guy for ultra-rich people. He has a client/buddy that goes and hangs out with the "cabal of evil", which is a joke, because the really scary thing is no one is actually pulling the strings of international affairs. We get this in another Amanda-driven exposition dump.
• Oh, yeah, he is married, and his wife is on a flight back from Morocco, and is probably dead, because all navigation satellites are disabled and planes are falling from the sky, LOST-style. This does not affect him at all emotionally except for the scene we learn this.
• Animals are being weird.
• There's a weird noise.
• All freeways etc are jammed up with smart cars gone rogue, I, Robot-style, and just mashing into each other (who had "Elon Musk is behind the apocalypse"? Everyone? Okay, carry on), so they can't go anywhere.
• The daughter is obsessed with the show Friends, and was watching the finale when all internet went out, and she needs to see how that show ends.
• Clay tried to go into town for a newspaper to see what is going on, got lost, because we are useless without GPS, and a bunch of flyers in Arabic were dropped from a drone.
• The son's teeth start falling out
• They still manage to have a glass of wine/smoke some weed and let the kids roam through all of this.

I didn't like this for reasons I am about to hammer on, but I always have to make allowance for the possibility of me being an idiot. So I turn to google, and read interviews with the author. And this is the problem with setting up a premise this tense: you better have a good goddamn explanation.

Guess what?

They don't.

Not the writer, not the director could explain what happens next. They try to play it off as if it's creative and original, but it's a goddamn cop out. 

G.H. and Clay go to visit Kevin Bacon to get medicine for the son (which he has?!), who is a doomsday prepper who also lives in an adorable, well-maintained home in possibly the most incongruent character in cinematic history. Conveniently, he has all the answers G.H. doesn't, and we find out that "Koreans, or maybe Chinese" have dropped similar flyers on the west coast, and G.H. explains to us that 'maybe a bunch of America's enemies got together', because this is apparently a ground-level James Bond movie. Kevin Bacon also explains, like a video-game NPC, that some rich folk have a bunker, and probably aren't there. Why Kevin Bacon is not in the bunker is left to our imagination (in my version, he is an NPC and can't move from where he is).

G.H. and Clay have a conversation about trust, Amanda and Ruth are in the woods and scare off a bunch of deer who were... standing there, kind of menacingly? They have the aforementioned conversation about Amanda hating people.

The daughter finds the rich people's bunker (EVERY HOUSE IN THE AREA IS MASSIVE AND NICE AND IT'S MADE VERY CLEAR THEY ARE ALL RICH), which has a Friends DVD, and she watches her finale.

That's it. Nothing is earned, just told to us. The only character with any sort of motivation that tracks is the daughter's quest to watch the Friends finale, which, if they had told the whole movie through her eyes, would have been a great tongue in cheek thriller, a la Over the Garden Wall. Instead, we get this dreary nonsense that only would have been worse if the endless exposition was literal voice over - but that barely would have made a difference. Alam and Esmail painted themselves into a corner by having a great premise, told from the ground level, but couldn't get outside of that to show us what is going on - even when they functionally break the fourth wall by having Clay get out of the car, they one time the radio works, so we can hear something that isn't a character just speculating. 

The most egregious failing is that Steven King in The Mist, and 28 Days Later managed to execute in that arena without restoring to cop outs, and the only twist we get is what a letdown it ends up being. They could have gone several ways with it, given the characters agency and motivation and had a conclusion that was satisfying - even if it was tragic. Instead, they did the laziest thing imaginable and tried to pretend it was clever.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 5/10 - The good is really good, and honestly the bad could be worse. But it took what could be a classic and made it forgettable. 

Bonuses:

+1 for a brilliant score

+1 for moments of real tension

Penalties:

-1 for endless exposition

-3 for the ending

Conclusion: 3/10. Just bad. 

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

Review: The Marsh King's Daughter

Daisy Ridley wades into the marsh of abuse.

As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, abuse is terrifying, disorienting, reality-warping. I say this as a survivor of vicious parental abuse; as such it is a subject I am very much attenuated to. It was very much for the best that I went into The Marsh King’s Daughter knowing basically nothing about it, seeing that it had Daisy Ridley leading it, figuring that any film that could afford a lead Star Wars actor couldn’t be that cheap, and that it was a thriller. Frankly I was just wanting to kill time and enjoy the theater experience.

Bloody hell, did I choose fortuitously, and harrowingly. The Marsh King’s Daughter, released 2023, directed by Neil Burger and written by Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by the same name by Karen Dionne, which as of writing I have not yet read (but have put on hold at my local library). It’s a taut hour and forty minutes long, so it’s not an epic by any stretch, but it packs a lot into that time.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is the story of Helena, the daughter of Jacob Holbrook (Ben Mendelsohn), a kidnapper hermit who lives in a forest in a cabin he made in the remote backwoods of Michigan, and the woman he kidnapped so he could force her to be his bride. Helena, played by Brooklynn Prince as a child and by Daisy Ridley as an adult, eventually finds her way into the broader world, escaping her abusive father in the process. Now grown, with a boring excel sheet job, a loving husband, and a beloved daughter, her life seems, for now, going well, having told very few people, not even her new family, about who she really is, for her father has become an infamous serial killer and media sensation (a subject matter not unlike Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places). This appears to end with a coda early on when her father escapes from prison and is believed dead while trying to escape to Canada, but then it seems that he has found her, and wants his daughter back.

As you can guess, this movie is a lot, thematically and otherwise. Of the less heavy aspects, there is the environment of the wilderness of Michigan, far removed from the urbanized parts of the state. If you are seeking a pleasant peninsula, you will certainly find it in this film. The waters are serene, the trees towering, the birds cheerful, the setting almost silent. It is this arcadia that is, of course, shattered by the cruelty of Jacob Holbrook, his very hatred for life itself, seeing value in it only as something to exploit. It is the quiet that would be refuge for the decent ends up prison for the vulnerable and haven for the malicious.

Ridley is the star of the show, and she earns that title. She plays what I recognize from agonizing personal experience as a very realistic abuse victim. She hates that she is Jacob’s spawn, and wishes she could forget about him, but the scars of abuse linger on. The habits, which those of us in survivor communities call ‘fleas’ (as in annoying bugs that won’t go away), still remain, having become a part of how she interacts with the world, indeed frames her entire existence, even if unconsciously. Ridley does this without ever succumbing to melodrama; it never felt tacky to me.

I must give props to Brooklyn Price as the younger Helena. There’s the vulnerability that comes from an upbringing like hers, in the middle of the woods, with no interaction with the broader world. There’s the innate trust a child has in a parent foiled deftly by the naivete that obscures the fact that not all parents are worth obeying, or loving. She sells the utter tragedy of all this, the cruel inevitability of such fate; any child with a parent like that would end up like her. Likewise, I must praise Caren Pistorius as Helena’s mother Beth, so utterly beaten down, so utterly aware of the perversity of her situation, but doing all she can to shield her daughter from the worst of her father.

Ben Mendelsohn plays a frighteningly accurate abuser. There is the pure terror, of course, that had me very anxious throughout the film. But just as importantly, he has two other qualities: a definite charm to him, and a certain patheticness. The charm is how abusers reel in their victims to be psychologically consumed, their sense of self extinguished; you can absolutely believe that this man has talked himself out of a wide variety of situations because he can persuade you that he could never hurt a fly. The patheticness is due to a crushing lack of self-awareness when most decent people would have some: he cannot understand that his daughter would hate him for entirely understandable reasons. It is these two traits that combine to form his great delusion: that his daughter may take her daughter and go be a family together with him in Canada. It’s the sort of wishful thinking that is so hard to refute, and can only be endured until a way out can be found. The wait for that one can be a long, arduous one.

There’s nothing supernatural in The Marsh King’s Daughter, but you would not be wrong to see a noticeable similarity to horror movies in the way it builds suspense. What I found especially compelling is how, more often than not, the tension built is resolved not in a terrifying appearance of Jacob, but in something mundane. It is the sort of hypervigilance that I can personally vouch is so often the result of being abused (I’m reminded of the time in college, in a sleep-deprived exam-induced haze, I thought I saw my mother coming out of the corner of my eye while sitting in a dorm common room - she lived over a hundred miles away from me). You see danger around every corner. You fear that any act you take may be used against you after your abuser learns about it through the most arcane way imaginable. You see hostility, indeed frothing hatred, lurking behind every smile. It is a torture of your subconscious’ own making, and you wish you could grab your mind and shake it, yelling at it to cut it out. So much of the movie is filmed highlighting the monster that is the legacy of abuse, and it really works.

The writers, the director, and Daisy Ridley all combined to give one of the best depictions of the psychology of an abuse victim I’ve ever seen. Helena never told her husband or daughter that she was the daughter of a man so infamous; they met her with deep confusion and a temporary (thankfully) loss of trust in her once they learned the truth, after her father resurfaced. It’s something that I understood immediately: she did not want to perpetually live in the shadow of the cruelty inflicted upon her. She wanted to define herself, to be a person independent of reference to her father. And yet, part of her yearns for her father, a trickle of the ironclad obedience instilled in her remaining malignant well after it was necessary. People want to love their parents, but when the parents have not earned that love, the emotions can be complicated and contradictory. Helena is forced to mourn not the father she had, but the father she wished she had, and her subconscious can have an agonizingly hard time telling the two apart. It felt very real to me. It is something that is alien, indeed downright incomprehensible, to people who haven’t lived it; I envy those who haven’t, and I hope they never become familiar with it.

The film stumbles, though, with some of its side characters. The only person of color in the cast is a police officer who becomes something of a surrogate father to Helena; he is a Native American, and I couldn’t help but think the way his arc ends was somewhat dismissive of him. Likewise. Helena’s husband and daughter disappear from the narrative after a certain point. This leaves the film to focus on the conflict between Helena and Jacob, but I feel like they could have had more active roles in the third act.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is a well-paced, scary-as-hell thriller that has a lot of emotional weight to its core. It was a visceral experience for me, having experienced something like what Helena did, and it ended up leaving quite the impression on me. It’s very much worth seeing, but it may well be too much for some people.

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Highlights: the cinematography

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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

Nanoreview: They Cloned Tyrone isn't too far from how things are in real life

You'll laugh about it, then think it over, then realize with a shudder that it wasn't joking

The pitch-perfect Blaxploitation homage in the new Netflix film They Cloned Tyrone is so hilariously over the top, so absurdly far-fetched, that you may miss the realism just beneath the surface. It's not science fiction to say that US government agencies have repeatedly treated Black people as disposable and interchangeable. It's not science fiction to say that the US has had a murky relationship with medical ethics, especially with Black patients. It's not science fiction to say that a segment of WASP leaders sincerely believe that they have already built the common ground for interracial peace and the only step needed is for Black people to agree to it. When you consider all those details, They Cloned Tyrone proceeds almost like a documentary.

The best satire is that which shows us exactly what the problem looks like, maybe through a funhouse lens, but still recognizable. The film's trio of lead characters are comical exaggerations of overused stereotypes, but it is their distorted irrealism that frees the story to make its points more openly, to engage in the Black cultural practice known as real talk. A serious documentary about the benefits that WASP society derives from enforcing the status quo in depressed neighborhoods would barely be noticed. But a speculative farce with world-class actors, sharp dialogues, unafraid hyperviolence, expert direction, and an aesthetic sense heightened all the way to the top of Jamie Foxx's afro? Now that's how you get audiences to pay attention.

Partly due to the references to Blaxploitation cinema, the look and feel of this movie exists in a curious limbo where audio casettes and funk music coexist with smartphones and Bitcoin scams. Set aside the props, and the story might as well be happening in the 1970s or tomorrow, cleverly signaling how little has truly changed. This effect is achieved with loving attention to detail in costume design, set design, and cinematography. Of particular note is the protagonist played by John Boyega, a meticulously crafted performance that makes you forget that the actor's natural accent is British.

Lies that tell a truth, as Alan Moore called the narrative art. The movie's ridiculously freakish premise is part of the point: even in such unbelievable circumstances, the message still rings true, and it does because it comes from a place of honesty, from deep familiarity with the damage that the American Way of Life™ does to Black communities. It may be about fake people, but They Cloned Tyrone is the type of art that can't be faked.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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