Film Review: Lost in Starlight

 This Korean animated film on Netflix straddles rom-com and space adventure

Lost in Starlight begins on Mars, with an astronaut in a busy, vibrant housing facility for the team members recording a message to her daughter back on Earth. On the wall of her bunk, she has a small crayon drawing of an astronaut that her daughter made for her, and a vinyl record hanging up. But during the recording, a tremor shatters the entire facility, collapsing it on all of the astronauts inside, killing the entire crew.

Fast-forward some 25 years, and we meet the now-grown daughter who was to receive that message -- Nan-young. Despite losing her mom in that tragedy on Mars, Nan-young has pursued a career at NASA, as well, and she plans on being a member of the crew that will make humanity's first return voyage to the Red Planet since her mom and the others were lost. But her supervisors are worried about her -- not because she seems to emotional, but because she doesn't seem emotional enough.NASA removes her from the mission, believing that she never fully processed the loss of her mother, and that the psychological effects of arriving on Mars might prove overwhelming or unpredictable.

Upset by losing her spot on the team, Nan-young begins going through some of her mother's things, and finds an old, broken record player that she had decorated with crayon drawings as a child. She tries to find a repair shop that can tackle the record player, but has no luck until she literally bumps into Jay as she's going into a store and he's coming out. The record player falls to the ground, and Jay says he repairs machines like that. Some coincidence.

As Nan-young and Jay begin spending more time together, she opens up to him about how much she loves music, and one song in particular really helped get her through the long nights of studying in college. But she got the song off of a file-sharing site, and never knew who the artist was. She begins playing the song, and Jay confesses that he actually wrote the song with his old band, and he never knew anyone had heard it. Again, some coincidence.

As Nan-young continues her scientific work at NASA, she encourages Jay to get back with his old band and explore writing and performing again. He's reluctant to do so, but does reconnect with his old band mates, and agrees to play guitar live. Then suddenly, Nan-young makes a breakthrough involving plant-life on Mars, and earns a spot back on the crew. The public announcement goes out before she can tell Jay, and his feelings are hurt, leading to a rift before the mission.

Once the Mars mission begins, the film begins intercutting between their two narratives. Nan-young has to do a reconnaissance mission on the surface, and a windstorm comes up, seeparating her from the rest of the crew, shorting out her coms, and threatening her oxygen supply. Back on Earth, Jay has agreed to play and sing with the band at a festival date, and since he hasn't sung on stage in years, he's really nervous.So, one character is literally fighting for her life on an alien planet, and the other...has stage fright. 

This is where the movie lost me. The stacking up of coincidences early in the film was a little clunky, but I could get over it. For a good portion of the movie, it does play much more like a romantic comedy with a bit of sci-fi flavor on the periphery, so if it hewed a little more closely to rom-com meet-cute conventions, it didn't feel out of place. And the movie does a couple interesting things with the idea of the bifurcation of self in the face of past trauma, and finding ways out of that. But the climactic juxtaposition of a literal life-or-death, high-drama space adventure vs. taking a deep breath and singing a song in front of what looks to be about 100 people...it just didn't track for me.

In the end, I found myself reminded of movies that plowed similar ground, but which I enjoyed much more. Movies like The Martian or Your Name, where in the former dealt with survival on Mars and the latter with romantic partners trying to communicate across impossible distances, felt like they were big inspirations for a lot of the action of the film, and though I was reminded of them, Lost in Starlight never resonated with me the way those films did. Even First Man, about Neil Armstrong trying to compartmentalize his child's death while embarking on the moon mission, felt a little more emotionally impactful while dealing with very similar material.

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Nerds coefficient: 6/10

Posted by Vance K - resident cult-film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together 

Three Ruminations on the Themes of Elio

Alex saw Elio and had some thoughts

I know that this blog has already covered Elio, but I have had scattered thoughts about some of its thematic depths. The first part of this essay is a response to the review my colleague and dear friend Arturo Serrano wrote on this site regarding that film. He is an astounding critic and one I deeply admire (and I’m working with him on a shared world project), but there is one particular aspect of Elio that I feel his piece does not consider. It is regarding Olga, the aunt of the titular character, and how she fits into the broader narrative of the behavior of parental figures in regards to their children. Secondly, I consider the fate of the third child in the film that is thrust into a role that he does not want. Thirdly, I consider a parallel between Olga and Grigon that the writers almost certainly deliberately did not address.

Arturo makes the case that Elio is an inaccurate depiction of children who rebel against their parents (or parental figure, in the case of Olga, who is his aunt, and who stepped up after his parents died in an unknown event). He argues, basically, that Elio is rebelling against her because he sees her as abusive, and that the film agrees with him, even when Olga didn’t do anything wrong. He therefore argues that the film is wrong to condemn Olga for doing what anyone in her station would do.

This is where I disagree with my colleague and friend. I would argue that the film is not portraying Olga as an abuser. Consider all of this from her perspective. We do not know if Olga ever intended to have children, but in any case, she lost a sibling and the sibling’s spouse in some sudden awful event, and at some point must have realized that she must take over caring for her nephew very suddenly. She appears to be single, and she has a demanding job with the United States Air Force. I can very much imagine Olga having a conversation with Elio that resembles a conversation in 2025’s The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins, where two brothers who have likewise lost their parents are taken in by their uncle and aunt. There is a scene where the uncle point-blank tells his nephews that he and his wife never expected to have children, are inexperienced in the art of parenting, and should adjust their expectations accordingly. I can easily imagine a more tender, less wry version of that talk some years before the events of Elio. It is also similar to 2022's M3GAN, where Gemma is an aunt who is struggling to take care of a sibling's child; that film is very good at showing that exhaustion, and brings it down a horrifying direction.

One of the things that I think ought to be considered regarding why Elio wants to escape his life with Olga is the broader situation of his familial arrangements. Raising a child is hard. Raising a child by yourself, without a partner, is even harder. Raising a child without a partner while working a demanding job for the United States Air Force is harder still. It is, then, quite easy to imagine that Olga is running on fumes, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and after a certain point she has only so much to give, and that those points come with disheartening frequency.

When put in that context, I think a comparison with another recent Disney film regarding the treatment of parental figures is relevant. I refer to the 2025 live-action remake of Lilo and Stitch, which I have previously reviewed for this very blog. One of the things I praised that film was for explaining how difficult it is for the teenaged Nani, living in poverty and having suffered the loss of her parents, to take care of her little sister Lilo. Nani is slowly being ground down, having to forfeit a promising future to ensure her sister can survive. Without the intervention of close family friends (an intervention entirely absent in the original animated film), both Nani and Lilo would be sentenced to lifelong poverty. 

Elio made the mistake of not making the weight of all this on Olga obvious enough. What the film risks imparting, especially to younger viewers, even more especially girls, is to portray women with a certain martyrdom complex. Reading between the lines, one could argue that the film is portraying Olga as naturally a mother by virtue of being a woman. She is frustrated with her nephew, yes, and she wants her nephew to be a bit more orderly, yes (as so clearly demonstrated by her choice to send him to a military school). Perhaps more clearly, she wants him to be a bit more normal.

This is a bit of a side note but I think in one particular aspect the film really fumbled a very obvious way it could have solidified its central theme: that of the fake Elio the aliens sent to take his place. So much of this film is about what parental figures want of their children, and this fake Elio is designed to disintegrate. To put it more bluntly, the Communiverse has created a sentient being with the express purpose of dying when it is convenient for them. Despite being a clone and a tool, he is a character in this movie. He has significant screen time, and is the instigator of a number of important moments in the story, and yet he is never given the chance to come up with an original thought. Instead of contemplating this fact, he allows himself to disintegrate, making a Terminator reference in the process, and does so to allow the protagonists to continue in their adventure. One child in this movie is ordered to be normal, and another is ordered to be violent. A third child, however, is literally ordered to die. It would have required ripping the guts out of the film to accommodate this, or maybe bringing it up to the length of a TV show, but it was such obvious thematic content that is just left at the wayside. Letting a child die in this way while others got to live left a bad taste in my mouth.

In terms of thematic potentials left unaddressed, there is a very obvious one that the writers missed in terms of contrasting Olga and Lord Grigon. Grigon serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life; that much is clear. What is less clear, when taking in the film’s framing as perceived by an onlooker, is that Olga also serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life, namely the United States military. Can you truthfully say that a military whose ultimate antecedents are genocidal militias in colonial times, and is currently leveling Gaza, cares about life?

I know that such things would never get into a children’s movie. I know that Disney takes plenty of money from the American military. I know that Disney is committed to a vague midcentury form of patriotism that likes to pretend everything is fine and dandy. I know that Disney, ultimately, is simply not brave enough to challenge American empire that openly. I know that this film had advisors from the military. Ultimately, though, the film is still portraying a menace to the world as benign, and ultimately good. Fighting Kessler Syndrome is undoubtedly good, but it ultimately comes off as akin to the time when America conquered Veracruz and focusing on when American doctors fought syphilis in that city. It’s a good act, yes, but it came out of a very particular context, and that context is not one of altruism.

The United States has ratified the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the militarization of outer space. The United States also has laws preventing it from providing weapons to governments committing genocide, and yet it does so anyway. Unfortunately, as long as the world is divided into competing empires, I expect the Outer Space Treaty will be about as effective as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was (indeed, the wide variety of objects cluttering the atmosphere may well violate the treaty in itself). What I worry is that many adults who may be firing those weapons at whatever poor country may come in America’s crosshairs, at poor, defenseless children, will have entered that grisly service because they saw Elio in theaters and were enchanted by space, and by the military.

On a basic narrative level I enjoyed Elio. I did, however, leave the theater feeling like there was fertile soil to have done even more with what had been laid out. The whole film, while enjoyable, felt like a massive missed opportunity to explore issues it merely raised. I know that this is wishful thinking and in one instance not particularly likely due to the interests of Disney as a company. But it stood out to me all the same.

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

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.

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E10

In season two, I never expected to become such a fan of Luthen and Kleya.

In some ways, episode nine is the end of Andor season two in that it wraps up the Ghorman plotline and Cassian’s arc with Bix and his dedication to the rebellion. In the final three episodes, the season pivots to align with Rogue One and present the characters we expect to see in the movie (and wrap up the loose ends of the ones we don’t). While not as smooth a storytelling experience as season one, episode ten is an intense story that stands alone to show the beginning and end of Luthen and Kleya’s relationship. 

In “Make It Stop,” Kleya and Luthen prepare to meet Lonni (Robert Emms), their inside person at the ISB. This type of meeting has become even riskier after Mon Mothma’s speech a year ago. Back then, Cassian had urged Luthen to leave Coruscant because it was only a matter of time before the ISB found him, but Luthen has held on for another year. Even he recognizes the risk as he says to Kleya: “I think we used up all the perfect.”

When Luthen meets with Lonni, the plan that was revealed by Krennic in episode one becomes clear to Luthen. The energy program was a lie to obscure building the Death Star. Lonni was able to find this information by breaking into Dedra Meero’s files. Unfortunately for Lonni, Luthen’s dedication to the cause means Lonni cannot walk away with this information, and Luthen leaves him dead.

After Luthen walks away, the next shot is sideways, showing how this information has repositioned his worldview. Now, all that matters is that someone is able to deliver the information to the Rebel Alliance—but Lonni revealed to Luthen that Dedra is going to target him very soon.

Luthen leaves out Lonni’s warning about Dedra’s impending raid when he gives Kleya the information about the weapon and the engineer, Galen Erso. In a rare protective moment, Luthen insists Kleya leave with the information while he returns to the shop to burn their comms, knowing Dedra might arrive—and that she does. 

Watching Dedra and Luthen finally meet was a scene we’d all been waiting for and had a level of intensity that had me literally at the edge of my seat. After the violence of Ghorman and the espionage surrounding Mothma’s speech, this moment of doublespeak where they both, for a few seconds, play at not knowing the other, was a different kind of intensity. 

Luthen resumes his role one last time as the rare artifact salesman for the wealthy as Dedra walks in, claiming she has an artifact to sell him. At first, they test each other, such as when Dedra asks if everything is “real” and Luthen states there are only two pieces of “questionable provenance,” which is of course a reference to them standing there, but Dedra ends their conversation by revealing the Imperial starpath unit that had originally brought Luthen and Cassian together. Luthen knows this is the end for him, and Dedra revels in the moment, producing a memorable exchange between fascist and anti-fascist:

Dedra: “You disgust me.”

Luthen: “You want to know why?”

Dedra: “Everything you stand for.” 

Luthen: “Freedom scares you.”

He goes on to say one of my favorite lines from Luthen: “The rebellion isn’t here anymore. It’s flown away. It’s everywhere now. There’s a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.”

While Luthen has quite the bodycount to his name, one reason he’s good at what he does is because he is not exempt from this same violence. In order to take his secrets with him, he stabs himself. At this moment, the episode turns, and the second half focuses on Kleya as she realizes she must make sure Luthen dies. 

The second half of the episode is interspersed with flashbacks, including when Kleya and Luthen first meet. In a parallel to Cassian, Luthen rescues Kleya from another genocide committed by the Empire. He is complicit in this genocide as a Sergeant, his radio calling out the acts of violence being committed outside the ship he is currently hiding in: people are ordered to stand against a wall, followed by blaster fire and screaming. Other orders demonstrate the mass killing. It’s never made clear what planet this genocide is happening on, but it parallels Ghorman and Cassian’s planet of Kenari, where there are so few survivors. 

As Kleya prepares to infiltrate the hospital where Luthen is being kept alive by a machine, the flashbacks show them fencing antiquities and observing Imperial atrocities. At first, young Kleya, radicalized by genocide, is frustrated with their progress, but the more senior Luthen helps her keep from burning up in her rage: “We fight to win. That means we lose, and lose and lose and lose, until we’re ready. All you know now is how much you hate. You bank that. You hide that. You keep it alive until you know what to do with it.”

Even as a child, Luthen doesn’t call Kleya his daughter, and throughout the show, while there is care in their relationship, they appear more as partners than familial. Yet, Kleya’s careful mask comes down as she murders her way into the ISB-controlled hospital wing and reaches Luthen’s bedside. Without hesitation, she releases the machine keeping Luthen alive, but she does allow herself a brief show of affection before she hurries out, escaping back to the Coruscant hideout with the information about the building of the Death Star. 

While most of the episode is focused on Kleya and Luthen, Dedra is in the process of learning an important lesson about fascism—they eat their own. As Robert Evans and his co-hosts on It Could Happen Here point out in their breakdown of episodes 10-12, Dedra is a parallel of the spunky cop who breaks a few rules to take down the big bad, but Andor reveals the copoganda of this type of figure through Dedra, who is not someone we root for but rather a fascist who committed genocide. Dedra is arrested by the ISB even though she’s finally completed her longtime mission to capture Axis. She's worked hard to achieve this moment, but rather than be rewarded, she's immediately arrested by a man who used to be her underling and is now put in a position of power over her. She cannot breakthrough the fascist patriarchy even though she is a believer in their ideology.  

The episode’s final shot is a slow fade to black of Luthen’s body. Without him, it’s questionable if Yavin would have existed, and certainly, Cassian wouldn’t have joined the rebellion. While Luthen is not the most sympathetic character, he does dedicate everything to the cause, as he points out in his monologue to Lonni in episode ten of season one: “I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. […] I’m damned for what I do.” 

In perhaps a less dramatic tone, activist Dean Spade puts it this way: “Do I want to be in the fight until I die, even though I don’t know how it’s going to turn out? Because that’s how everyone who has fought for liberation had to BE. It’s being with the uncertainty. Part of that, for me, is shifting our sense of ourselves from some good outcome that can definitely happen towards just the pleasure of being with each other in the struggle.”

Many characters exhibit this sense of purpose, and the show demonstrates multiple ways of living in this moment, from Luthen’s loss of inner peace to Maarva’s speech at the end of season one where she describes how she’d live her life differently, declaring, “Fight the empire!” Luthen and Kleya are one of these paths, and the show makes few judgements about the different paths or tools to fight the Empire, but what it is important is that dedication to the fight.

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POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.

Double Feature: Weeping for Mother Earth

When nature can't speak for itself, is it our duty to carry its scars with us?

Let's forget for a moment the alarming detail that my progress through my TBR is still stuck in 2021 (I have a system, I swear). Without planning to, I recently read in succession two novellas that not only share the same theme, but the same publisher: Stelliform Press. A look at their website helps explain the coincidence, as Stelliform is specialized in climate fiction. But these two books in particular speak of a sadness that descends upon their characters and makes them suffer deeply for the forms of life that modern civilization has doomed.

In Octavia Cade's The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (previously reviewed on this blog), a new mental illness has emerged across the world. It's called simply Grief (always written with an almost audible uppercase initial), and it's a sort of super-ultra-hyper-mega-depression on steroids that is caused by awareness of our central role in causing environmental devastation. It's not just that we've killed countless precious species; it's that, more damningly, we were fully aware of it, knew how to stop, and didn't bother stopping. People afflicted with Grief are in a state of permanent mourning for the innocent creatures we've destroyed, to the exclusion of any care for humanity. So they abandon their daily lives and spend all their attention and effort in some form or another of obsessive artistry, which can become quite intricate, to channel their fury at the evil we've uncaringly caused. After a few months, Grief invariably results in suicide.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Zhang's After the Dragons shows us a world where all the dragons from all legends are real: they have evolved naturally on Earth, as another branch in the tree of life (despite the cover illustration, they seem to grow no bigger than dog size). As cool as they are, they don't fare too well. European dragons, being fire-breathers, were hunted to extinction long ago. And Chinese dragons occupy the niche of urban pests, like rats or pigeons. Some are bred for clandestine fights, some are kept in shelters waiting to be adopted as pets, some are butchered for use in traditional medicine, and some roam the streets subsisting on trash. Only their apparent resistance to air pollution draws enough interest in their preservation, because they could provide the cure for a new form of chronic respiratory disease that people acquire from living in big cities.

Cade's novella follows Ruby, a marine biologist whose friend Marjorie has contracted Grief because nothing was done to save the last coral reefs. In her new state, Marjorie calls herself the Sea Witch, and does nothing but compulsively cut out plastic bags into the shape of jellyfish. As it happens, jellyfish are Ruby's specialty, and they have managed to survive the warmer seas in the way coral couldn't. The implication is that the Sea Witch resents the jellyfish for moving into the places where coral used to live, and resents Ruby for being able to live in a dying world and not contract Grief. A seductive, poisonous argument is developed throughout the book: if human mistreament of nature is absurd, the only rational response is to succumb to the absurdity and throw oneself into the Grief. The magnitude of the evil is just too mind-boggling; aren't we complicit when we go on with our normal lives? Under this lens, to be untouched by Grief is a sign that one cares less than one should. However, in the book, Grief doesn't move people toward restorative action. Even those who apply their talents to reviving lost species intend to weaponize them to take revenge on humanity. This is the uncontrollable firehose of rage that ultimately leads those with Grief to the logical consequence: self-destruction.

In Zhang's novella, environmental damage is less obvious, but it lingers in the background of every space. Industrial pollution is slowly killing people at random, in the form of an irreversible rotting of the lungs that progresses over years. Our protagonist, Eli, is a medical student doing an exchange semester in China, where he researches the therapeutic applications of dragon physiology. He falls in love with Kai, who has all but dropped out of college after contracting the disease, and who now rescues stray dragons to give them what little first aid he can afford. Kai has cut off all contact with his friends and family, spending all his time in his one-man quest to save dragons, forgoing even his own treatment. But he knows that what he's doing makes close to no difference. He despairs for a world that grows warmer and dirtier and that has lost the due respect for such magnificent creatures. He barely has the energy to tend to the dragons that crowd his apartment, and scoffs at Eli's pleas to seek help for his condition. For Kai, his mission is too important for distractions. For Eli, such overexertion is merely a slower form of suicide. Where both agree is in the likely futility of individual effort in a civilization that has collectively decided to not care.

So we have these characters, Ruby and Eli, who care deeply for Marjorie and Kai, while the latter chastise the former for aiming their care in the wrong direction. They seem to be saying: Why do you worry so much about me, when the world is falling to pieces? Why aren't you instead doing what I'm doing? Why aren't you consumed by the insatiable empathy that this world deserves? What do I matter next to that? It would be easy to read these reactions as directed at the reader, as an indictment for our failure to do what must be done. And that interpretation has merit: it's true that Mother Earth needs emergency care right now. But these stories are aware of the paradox of individual action. I could tell you to stop wasting time reading this blog and go plant a tree, but we both know how little impact that will have. And yet, big, collaborative achievements are built from the synergy of individual actions. The malaise described in these two books is the simultaneous recognition that saving nature has always been in our hands, but if you look at a pair of hands, they're too weak and small to save anything. We made this mess, and it's up to us to fix it, but seriously, have you met humans?

So Marjorie fakes her suicide to force Ruby to reckon with what Marjorie considers her hipocrisy: Ruby may not mourn for the corals (and she got lucky that her jellyfish still live), but she'll do some mourning for Marjorie. After a while, as is normal for anyone, the mourning will end. And that, Marjorie thinks, is the problem: we grow accustomed to death too easily. What prevents us from reacting to the death of the world is that we already see death as a normal, everyday occurrence. It's inevitable, therefore we don't fight it, when it should spur us to action. When Marjorie shows up alive and confronts Ruby with these accusations, Ruby admits that her life was easier with Marjorie dead. When death happens, one is freed from the responsibility to prevent it. But the twisted logic of Grief doesn't stop at recrimination. It seeks to use the inexhaustible human talent for destruction and turn it back at its perpetrator.

Less consciously, Kai engages in a similar form of self-punishment, as if it could atone for all the other deaths. In his moral calculation, the deterioration of his body matters infinitely less than the dragons' crawl toward extinction. It doesn't change his priorities to hear that something in the biology of dragons could cure him. It barely registers to have Eli love him, because to Kai that's a waste of love. That's the peculiar cruelty of this form of sadness: it treats worth as an inherent quality instead of a human construct. The truth is that the universe couldn't care less if our biosphere were ruined forever; it's we who label it valuable. The type of self-denial that has taken hold of Kai makes him ignore the necessary logical implication that the work of healing nature only matters if we're around for it to matter to. Granted, humans are to blame for the ongoing destruction, but blame, too, is a human construct. Removing ourselves would only be a misguided pretense of heroism, and would provide no restoration. By itself, nature is just molecules bumping against molecules. For it to be beautiful, or important, or deserving of protection, we must assign those labels to it. Kai is right to care so much about endangered animals, but neglecting his own health doesn't help anyone. He fails to see himself as worthy of preservation, too. So he believes he's acting responsibly, even morally, in refusing Eli's love.

There is a tangible pain running underneath both novellas; a confession of guilt that recognizes that the purpose of reparation isn't to earn forgiveness; a clear-eyed acceptance of facts that doesn't entail resignation. The outraged cry that each hurls at the reader is more than justified; our complacent inaction is inarguably criminal. It's not a cliché that in killing the planet we're killing ourselves, and these stories explore what it would look like if we were deliberate about that equation. But the extent of the damage is so unfathomably immense that it short-circuits our moral intuitions: it's dangerously easy to want to punish all of humankind for the depredation committed by the big polluters. And there's a good argument to make for the shared responsibility of the entire human species. We, in aggregate, perpetuate our way of life by our small daily decisions. It's just too comfortable to go on this way, and that's a big part of the problem. You may have heard a similar position from political activists: it's dysfunctional to be well-adjusted to a dysfunctional world. The trick is how to stop the harm without causing more harm. When we target ourselves as the enemy, the thirst for revenge collapses into a black hole that nullifies every ethical standard.

Coordinating the big powers of the world to forget about profit for five minutes is, as recent history shows, not one bit easy. Of course, the authors of these two novellas don't have the answer either, which is why their stories end without reaching a complete resolution. What they do leave us with is a sobering assessment of the stakes of climate action at the personal level, which is the scale of analysis at which literature usually excels.

References
Cade, Octavia. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief [Stelliform Press, 2021].
Zhang, Cynthia. After the Dragons [Stelliform Press, 2021].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Tawny Man, Book 1: Fools' Errand

 In which love is complicated

Jacket illustration by John Howe

I was at a book event a month or two ago, in which Amal El-Mohtar described how her new book, The River Has Roots, is based in part on her own family. “There is nothing complicated about my love for my sister,” she said, so sweetly and earnestly that I found myself jealous of a woman I've never met.

This is the polar opposite of FitzChivalry Farseer, who will never, ever enjoy a love with anyone that is uncomplicated. Poor guy. Let’s poke him with a stick and see why.

Fool’s Errand opens with Fitz in his mid-thirties, living peacefully in secluded retirement under the assumed name of Tom Badgerlock. He’s got a cottage, some crops, some chickens, an ageing Nighteyes, and a teenage boy he’s adopted, Hap. This is the Fitz who was looking back on his past and writing his history in the first Farseer trilogy. We’ve caught up with him, and you can almost feel the dread collect around him, as he slowly realizes that Robin Hobb’s ruthless eye has, Sauron-like, turned towards him once again. (Or maybe that was just me projecting.)

There's not a huge amount of plot in this book. Fitz gets pulled back into Farseer service because Kettricken's son, Prince Dutiful, has gone missing. There's a bit of political kerfuffle among people who have the Wit, who have split into two groups: the Old Blood, who just want to live their own lives; and the Piebalds, who name themselves after a historical figure named the Piebald Prince, and use as their figurehead the memory of FitzChivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, who was murdered for who he was. They are, to put it mildly, an angry bunch, and because Hobb disdains simplicity, she takes their justifiable rage and turns them into absolute terrorist assholes. The whole Piebald/Old Blood conflict will be more important later in the series, but for this book, all the Piebalds do is connive a bit to get Prince Dutiful in their power, and Fitz and the Fool work together to stop them. That's it. The end.

So instead of discussing the plot, I want to get back to poking at Fitz with a stick, because that is absolutely what everyone else is doing in this series, and I want to join the club.

Over the first several chapters, Fitz gets a few visits from the old characters. Chade comes quite early, to ask Fitz to become Skillmaster at Buckkeep, now that Verity and Kettricken’s son, Dutiful, is coming into his own Skill. Fitz immediately says no, and as quickly as that, the visit is over. Remember, all of Fitz’s youth was an exercise in missed opportunities for connections, because service to the Farseer line does not allow for individuals to develop loyalties and affections that are not in service to the throne. Chade and Fitz became as close as two people so shackled to the Farseers can ever be, but it’s hard to miss the fact that, after a decade and a half, Chade’s visit lasts a single day, and ends when Fitz refuses to return to the yoke of royal service. There is love between them, but there is also obligation, and Chade will not let Fitz enjoy the one without the other. And, indeed, it’s not clear that Chade himself even knows what that looks like, having served the Farseers himself for many more years than Fitz has been alive.

Starling comes next. She visits Fitz regularly, sleeps with him too, but Fitz is well aware that their relationship is not anything to do with love. It’s convenient, it’s easy. Starling brings news and stories, and her presence offers some novelty into Hap’s otherwise quite constrained life. Her visits are also how Kettricken keeps tabs on Fitz, because no one ever lets a Farseer escape. Fitz is under no illusions that they share anything real, and so when Hap returns from an excursion with Starling to Buckkeep to reveal that Starling is now married, Fitz has no difficulties breaking off their sexual liaison.

I need to jump ahead to the next book at this point, which isn’t fully fair, but which I think is important to allow me to make the point I want to make here. Later, in Golden Fool, Starling is still grumpy at Fitz for breaking off their liaison, and Chade tells Fitz that it’s not just about hurt pride and sex. It’s also about Starling’s professional pride in her job as a minstrel. She has been a first-hand witness to one of the most monumental events in her lifetime—the reawakening of the dragons that drove off the Red Ship Raiders at the end of the Farseer trilogy. She is one of the very few people alive who knows what happened to Verity, and that FitzChivalry Farseer didn’t die in Prince Regal’s dungeon. She is a minstrel—and what’s more, she is a woman who is barren. Her sole chance of leaving a mark on the world is with her work, her songs, her histories. At her fingertips she has intimate access to the grandest story she will every encounter. And she must keep it secret. It is maddening, infuriating, stifling. At least while she was sleeping with Fitz she felt like she was still connected with this tale. When he calls things off, he shuts her out of this one thing that connects her to the sweep of history which will be forever out of her grasp.

So what we see with Chade and Starling is the mingling of what could be love with professional complications. Chade offers one kind of love, of a mentor, an uncle, a teacher—but it is conditional on Fitz’s service to the Farseers. Starling offers something that resembles another kind of love—but it is linked not to Fitz, but to the historical figure that Fitz will be remembered as. In both cases, whatever kind of love, affection, or connection that Fitz is offered is complicated by Chade’s and Starling’s professional concerns, which always come before simple human connection.

And then the Fool arrives. He’s changed color now; he’s no longer stark white, as he was in Farseer. He’s turned golden (hence the trilogy’s name, Tawny Man), he’s built lives and identities and an astonishing amount of wealth. He was Amber back in the Liveship Traders, and he knows a heckuva lot more now about dragons than he did two trilogies ago. But all of those identities are secondary to his primary self: He is the White Prophet, and he needs his Catalyst to help bring dragons back to the world, and so he comes to Fitz.

So here, too, Fitz’s oldest, truest, dearest friend offers him a love that is connected to professional concerns. The Fool loves Fitz, but the White Prophet also needs his Catalyst.

But here’s the difference: these two loves are not connected. As we’re going to see throughout the trilogy, there is everything complicated about the Fool’s love for Fitz, and vice versa, but the one thing that is not present in all those complications is the sense of a necessary connection between the Fool and Fitz’s relationship on the one hand, and their respective statuses as White Prophet and Catalyst on the other. The two things coexist, but they are not as fundamentally linked.

And this, I think, is what makes the Fool different from everyone else in this series. Everyone wants something from Fitz, not out of respect or concern for him as a person, but out of an awareness of the role he can play in their lives. Only the Fool is able to separate what he wants from Fitz as his Catalyst from what he wants from Fitz as a person. As the White Prophet, he knows that he must keep his Catalyst alive through the trials ahead in the next two books; but as the Fool, he grieves at what he knows Fitz must endure. (Really, the Fool is the only character in the whole Realm of the Elderlings who is aware that he's in a Robin Hobb book.) Throughout the whole series we're going to see Fitz waver and wibble about which version of the Fool's identity is the real one. But it's always clear to me, the reader, that the truest version of the Fool is the version Fitz knows. The version that loves him, uncomplicatedly, truly, as a person, not a Catalyst.

And Fitz, being a complete dumbass, can’t see it, can’t accept the Fool's love for what it is. Or he does see it, and absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. Nowhere is this clearer than when Fitz asks the Fool his name—not ‘Fool,’ not ‘Lord Golden’ or whatever name he uses for his current schemes, but his real name, the name his mother called him when he was born. And the Fool grins widely, makes Fitz promise to use that name, and then reveals, “Beloved. She called me only ‘Beloved’.” And when Fitz balks at this (because, I repeat, he is a massive dumbass), the Fool says only, “then I shall call you Beloved… Good night, Beloved. We have been apart far too long” (p. 119).

And how does Fitz react? He thinks, “Conversation was hopeless when he got in these moods” (p. 120). Blind! Wilfully unseeing! The one source of love that is offered to him, uncomplicatedly, and he pretends it doesn't exist—or worse, actively rejects it. We’ll see how that goes down in Golden Fool, next month. To preview the gist, however, just remember that Golden Fool is book 2 of a Robin Hobb trilogy, so, in short, it won't go well.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool’s Errand [Voyager, 2001].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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