The film is gorgeous. Often jaw-droppingly.

The first indicator that Pete’s Dragon had the potential to be something special was the hiring of David Lowery, whose previous film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a moody, slow, and Malickian drama that was critically acclaimed and underseen. I saw it just prior to seeing this, and the contrast reminded me of Spike Jonze and his masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are. I don’t know if Pete’s Dragon is as sophisticated and singular as that film, but it’s definitely just as powerful and perhaps more so for its accessibility. Though it never talks down to kids and deals with some very difficult subject matter, Pete’s Dragon maintains a safer overall approach. But I was reminded of the way Where the Wild Things Are, which to me is the gold standard for sophisticated movies about and for kids, weaves wonder and drama together into a relatively daring emotional core.

I dare you to feel nothing in the opening minutes of Pete’s Dragon. This is a movie, like the kids movies I grew up with (Land Before Time and The Neverending Story come to mind), that is unafraid to be as sad as it is happy. Whenever the movie could veer into a bouncy, safe, and condescendingly “kiddie” version of a sequence, it refrains. Lowery keeps the movie grounded even when you’re watching a giant CG dragon splashing in a stream. These scenes definitely owe a debt to How to Train Your Dragon but the association is a positive one, helping the audience to completely buy Elliot and his puppy-like behavior. This is key because where many films of this kind would under-utilize the “fantastic” elements, like big green dragons, and focus instead of human drama and safer, more familiar scenes and characterizations, Pete’s Dragon spends only the amount of time on that stuff as is needed to serve the story and its emotional, thematic beats. If anything, some characters could have used more time, but overall it’s a good thing that the film keeps its focus centered on the dragon and his boy.

SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE, THOUGH.

Elliot only looks scary. Sometimes.

In the opening sequence of Pete’s Dragon, the movie declares both its ethos and its emotional core in a simple interaction between a four year old and his parents. As they drive through the forest road, the father says they’re “on an adventure” and the mother tells the little boy that he “may be the bravest boy she’s ever met”. Little Pete (played here by Levi Alexander, who will own your heart in seconds) smiles happily and through him we are instantly transported to the magic and wonder of a children’s untarnished perspective of the world. If it’s about anything, Pete’s Dragon is about maintaining that perspective even into adulthood and even when faced with overwhelming loss. Imagination and the courage to be you are also key themes.

Ultimately, a car accident robs Pete of his parents but not his courage. He goes deeper into the forest and encounters a creature straight out of fairy tale. The dragon is actually a local legend, but only an old man named Meacham (Robert Redford, who also sort of narrates the movie) really believes in it. Years later, Pete (now played by Oakes Fegley) has grown up playing with Elliot, the warm-hearted and intelligent creature that usually acts pretty much like a gigantic dog with wings. He even looks like a dog. Pete can still talk and even read a bit, having retained only the book Elliot is Lost which is about a little lost dog that represents both Pete and Elliot in ways that connect them inextricably to each other. Are they aware of this? There are hints that Elliot understands very well what the book means.

There’s something engaging and uplifting about the way they play together.

Because Elliot is so well designed and so well thought through in terms of scenes and sequences in the film, it’s easy to believe he’s really there even when the plot brings him further and further into familiar environments. Though Disney wowed us back in spring with its fully realized CG animals in The Jungle Book, this feels like a much bigger achievement. With the technology becoming so good for the visual fidelity, losing a lot of that “plastic” look that CG creatures had ten years ago, it’s now the little things that inch a character forward into believability. The challenge of lighting a creature like Elliot in a forest with its broken light, dappling, and variant shadows, is one that not everyone who sees this movie will appreciate. But it all helps to make Elliot feel like a real thing, which is integral for obvious reasons.

While Pete grows up in the woods with Elliot, the nearby town has begun to encroach closer to their territory, putting them on a collision course with the locals in the form of a forestry company. Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a no-nonsense conservation officer who loves the woods and tries to protect them from the overzealousness of Gavin (Karl Urban) who is a bit of a jerk but ultimately not a bad guy. His brother Jack (Wes Bentley) is more measured, stoic, and seemingly sensible. This is partly because he’s dating Grace, which influences him to temper Gavin’s ambitions to push deeper into the woods, and partly because he’s a parent. Natalie (Oona Laurence) is curious and intelligent and naturally drawn to Pete when she encounters him. Tying it together is Meacham, who is Grace’s dad and who’s made-up stories about the dragon are  a smokescreen for the brief moment of fleeting “magic” that he discovered when he actually did meet Elliot once upon a time.

Elliot would startle most people.

Pete likely grew up never seeing other people, so it’s natural (if a bit contrived) that he takes an interest in Grace and the loggers when he and Elliot’s path crosses theirs. Because this movie is nuanced and intelligent, no one comes out and says “she reminds him of his mother” but you can see it written all over Pete’s face. Pete’s curiosity about the other humans naturally pulls him toward them, and away from Elliot, who Pete knows needs to be kept hidden. Elliot himself turns invisible when people are nearby, a natural or magical camouflage that explains both his ability to remain unseen (even though he spends a lot of time out in the open too) and his inherent shyness. Humans who he can trust are probably hard to come by. But Pete is different, he senses something and the film communicates his yearning, which is not loneliness, purely through cinematic language and performance.

Pete follows the loggers one day when Elliot is asleep. He sees Natalie, another kid and probably the only one he’d be able to ever remember seeing, and his guard kind of drops. She chases him into the woods and they begin the kind of organic play that two kids, strangers but ultimately akin, might do in a field or a park. This is ultimately what gets Pete caught and dragged into the world he accidentally left behind six years prior.

This is the best sequence in the movie, I think.

Though it’s fun to watch Elliot do stuff and though the emotional beats in the movie are earnest, well-earned, and moving… it’s the bit where Pete escapes the hospital and runs through town bewildered and wild that strikes the deepest chord for me. Part of it is the way Lowery refrained again from going cheap and obvious with a fun soundtrack. The music here is deeply sad and lonely, underscoring the way Pete is both uprooted from what he knows and cast astray in a world he only recognizes enough to scare him. Though this is sad, there are also these moments of triumph when Pete moves through town ignoring the usual rules and obstacles, his courage and physicality highlighting those moments in a way that is also moving. It’s that heady mix of happy and sad that this movie does so well, all tied up thematically and stylistically in this one sequence. Though I was choking back tears many times through Pete’s Dragon, this was the one bit where the movie fully defeated my manly refusal to cry.

Even though the story of Pete and Elliot going their separate ways for a bit is tinged with sadness and yearning, it’s also a story of Pete rediscovering family. There’s this quiet, profound moment where Grace echoes the exact words his mother said to him earlier in his life: “you may be the bravest boy I’ve ever met”. These words validate Pete and his experiences in a way that probably no other words could, not only because to Grace he isn’t some escaped patient or beast-boy, but also because Pete needs a mom. It’s as simple as that, and the movie often has this way of reminding us of these very simple emotional needs and feelings which we usually overlook in stories as being trite. Because Pete’s Dragon is never saccharine, moments like these elevate the movie rather than making it cheesy or cloying.

Gavin ultimately means well.

I was worried about the film’s inevitable conflict between Gavin and Team Elliot, which begins to include more people as Pete convinces them that Elliot really exists. Gavin is kind of dumb, but he’s not a bad guy. He doesn’t know what he wants to do once he catches the dragon, he just knows that’s what a man does with beasts in the woods: demystify, control, conquer. He’s obeying his programming and the film briefly underscores that this is in direct contravention of the sense of wonder, magic, and reverence that humans can (and maybe should) have for nature and the other creatures who live in it. Meacham represents that point of view, while Gavin represents a point on the other end of the spectrum, but not so far that it’s actually a polarity thing. In fact, it’s interesting that this movie has no corporate goon or something to represent the willing exploitation and corruption of nature. Instead, it just has people who are doing things for grounded, relatable reasons. Even Gavin. This is what keeps the latter stages of the film from being consumed by its Free Willy-ish chase scene and rescue.

It also helps that the whole affair has an unexpectedly reasonable, measured pace and feel. There’s no hysterics, not even from Pete. The whole thing is calm, really, until the moment presents itself for a rescue to be attempted. Even when there’s a chase, no one is trying to hurt anyone else. However, Elliot is after all a fucking dragon and though the legend says they can breathe fire, he is never seen to until this moment. It’s interesting because this is when Elliot’s unknown nature is fully revealed. He breathes fire down onto the bridge where the humans have gathered to try and capture him, and he doesn’t seem to care much who gets hurt or why. He’s caught up in a reflexive and angry response to humanity’s ignorance. It’s a wonderful moment, because there’s real danger to characters we care about and because it reinforces the fundamental personhood of this magical beast by having him respond to Pete. He is exactly like Pete, an orphan who needs a family, and it’s amazing to think that it’s a scene when he’s literally melting stone with his dragon breath where this idea is completed. It’s a bit like The Iron Giant, and I’m sure this movie owes that one a debt just as it owes Free Willy, E.T., and How to Train Your Dragon.

How can you say no to that? Dog people are gonna go crazy over this movie.

Pete’s Dragon is one of the saviors of the summer of 2016, which has been a shit show. While The Jungle Book was excellent, somehow Pete’s Dragon feels like the bigger surprise. It’s not just a film that is laudable for not talking down to kids, it’s also one that shows the beauty of simplicity in storytelling and the grace notes that come from trusting the audience, even if they are children. All the simple set ups are satisfyingly paid off, making the movie feel full and complete even when you can see those pay offs coming. It’s a strong example of the notion that good stories have endings that are obvious and inevitable given everything that comes before.

But I think my favorite thing about it is how powerfully it presents the benefits of imaginative play to children. Though it presents this idea with no judgment, with affection for the characters who have forgotten, it really wants us to remember what being a kid is like and how healthy it is to not kill that inside ourselves. Films like Pete’s Dragon can help adults remember, and reinforce positive and celebratory representations of children and children’s experiences and perspectives. It validates that stuff just as the mothers in the film validate Pete (and Elliot) for being who he is, lost and found and lonely and loved.

The most beautiful movie of 2016.

I saw Pete’s Dragon and Kubo and the Two Strings within a day of each other and they were wonderful companion pieces. Both films represent the very best in movies for kids, even as they give the adults tons of thematic richness potentially too complex for the kids to fully understand. They’ll feel stuff that stays with them, that they won’t recognize as coherent until long after its taken root. That’s the power of movies like these.

I have been a fan of Laika since Coraline and I would argue that ParaNorman is a masterpiece… but Kubo and the Two Strings blows all their other work out of the water. This is a movie that bleeds ambition, beauty, confidence, and grace. Every frame is a work of art and the kind of spectacle that will leave you scratching your head when you realize just how much of this movie is stop-motion with paper dolls and puppets. In Laika films, CGI is used only to enhance and to give backdrops, but you will have a hard time believing that.

Kubo is one of the best adventure movies since The Lord of the Rings, featuring the same tropes of quest narratives that are so well established but also very much taken for granted. It’s also heavy in a way that might surprise you. More even than Pete’s Dragon, which has an indie movie softness of tone, Kubo presents moments of powerful emotional weight that are punctuated by wonder, happiness, and humor. This movie is so well realized that it’s almost shocking how good it is. 2016 has been kind of a dismal year for films, but kids’ movies have consistently been great and Kubo is the best of them.

SPOILERS WILL NOT MAKE THIS MOVIE BETTER

Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a one-eyed boy living with his mother outside a simple village. Every morning, he goes down to the village and tells a mythic story of a samurai named Hanzo and his battle against the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, who kills it in his few scenes). He plays his shamisen and enchants colorful paper into the shapes and figures of his story, to the delight of the townsfolk. But he must hurry back to his mother every evening to avoid certain doom because… the story he tells is also the story of where he comes from.

Kubo is about the importance of memory, that we both save and create for ourselves, in the face of nihilism and loss. Heavy stuff, like I said. Kubo’s memories are not really his, but his mother’s… and she is slowly losing them. Every day it is harder for her to remember him, her stories of her father the Moon King and his anger at her betrayal: falling in love with Hanzo and giving birth to Kubo. He yearns for his father, but has no real memory of him. And it’s an attempt to connect with his father that puts him directly in the danger that his mother has protected him from. Because of this choice, which is so meaningful because of what memory represents to the characters and the underlying themes of the film, Kubo embarks on his big adventure.

The film is occasionally pretty intense and frightening.

With only his monkey charm, brought to life by his mother’s magic, to protect him, Kubo must journey in the Far Lands to find three pieces of armor which can protect him from the Moon King. The Monkey (Charlize Theron) is a taciturn but loyal protector, betraying moments of vulnerability and concern only when she thinks Kubo can’t see her. The Moon King already took one of Kubo’s eyes, and wants the other, dispatching Kubo’s frightening aunts to catch him. In the Far Lands, part of the heavily Japanese fantasy world of the film, they also encounter Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), a samurai trapped in a body with only broken memories of his past. He believes he once served the legendary Hanzo, which prompts him to swear himself to Kubo. Now a threesome, they are guided by a small paper version of Hanzo, from Kubo’s stories, who shows them where to go to get the gear Kubo needs.

Most adventure movies are relentlessly paced. If you compare, say, The Force Awakens to this movie, you’ll see there are many structural and tonal similarities. However, Kubo has more in common with A New Hope for being confident in its plot and storyline enough to pause and let the characters breathe. There’s time for the audience to learn about each of them, and to enjoy how they bounce off of and support each other as their journey goes on. There’s also the very fairy-tale twist that both Monkey and Beetle are really Kubo’s parents, transformed by magic. Where Monkey knows who she is and hides the truth from Kubo because she knows her death is imminent, Beetle simply doesn’t remember who he really is. In both cases, memory and truth intermingle in a way that resonates with what Kubo wants and needs from them. He suffers from their loss and he needs memories to chase away that pain, to transform it into empathy and inner strength.

So Kubo’s story is both about the family you find and the family you lost.

All of the plot and character stuff is steeped in the mythic and the mystic. The logic of the Moon King’s designs on Kubo, and the way the celestial family works, are presented as tales, but inseparable from the fabric of the universe of the film. Humanity’s ability to perceive suffering and loss, but to make connections and memories and find love, are what the Moon King wants to take away from Kubo. This isn’t just thematic or symbolic, but registers as a fundamental aspect of the Moon King and the representation of who he is as a character. He’s a fascinating character because what makes him evil isn’t malice but indifference. He’s literally blind to the suffering of mortals, while he lives in the heavens with his family and never changes or understands. That’s what he wants for Kubo, and

Theron’s venom (as Monkey) when she describes them to Kubo, especially in the word “perfect”, is not only a great moment for a performer, but really a pretty profound statement about the messiness of life, which we don’t ask for but should see as nuanced, complex, and not really one thing or another but both. In other words, Kubo and the Two Strings is philosophical about the human experience, strongly presenting as an existential narrative about overcoming nihilism with existential humanism. In the simplest terms, this is a movie about taking the good with the bad. But the way it presents that idea, that realization (which Kubo has by the end) is far more complex and meaningful than just shrugging one’s shoulders and “getting on with” the tragedies and troubles of life. The act of remembering is also an act of creation, and the narratives we construct make us who we are.

Kubo’s heroism is multi-dimensional, and we see him adopt many roles and skills to overcome challenges before he finally settles into the path that’s truest for him. It’s not this.

This is why the ending is so good. Even though his parents are really dead now, at the hands of the Moon King’s daughters, and Kubo is swearing revenge… he doesn’t go through with it. He throws down the armor and the sword of his father and picks up the shamisen of his mother, using their tokens as strings. That’s a beautiful pay off in itself, but it’s that Kubo uses a sensitive magic to give the Moon King back his humanity that makes this ending sing. It’s a very Japanese trope for the villain to have their humanity redeemed in the end, a classic gesture of harmony and equilibrium being re-established rather than undone. The film doesn’t have a character state this, it just tells you visually and through character. As Kubo prompts the villagers to help him construct a “memory” for the Moon King, who has lost his, that memory is a kind one that represents a redemption and also a new balance. Kubo has lost his parents, but his grandfather is still family and humanity in the face of inhumanity is always better than eye for an eye. Which is why Kubo and his grandfather each keep an eye, a visual representation of the balance that has been created. This film is full of stuff like that.

I loved every minute of Kubo and the Two Strings. It’s a less accessible film in some ways than something like Pete’s Dragon but remains part of Laika’s strong and unique oeuvre of aesthetically inventive films that give kids fantasy worlds they can occupy with all the nuances and big stuff that exists in the real world. They aren’t safe places, these movies, as each of them presents frightening and challenging characters and concepts, heavy themes which are often expressed in a way that could be thought of as more geared for older kids. But that’s what makes them so important, so vital, because we have got to let kids grapple with this stuff by their own lights. There’s real merit in that, and it goes that step further than Disney or Pixar’s films which are also wonderful but seldom as weird, or challenging, or memorable.

It’s that time of year again, friends. Check here for the 2015 list.

As always, my list is half a “most disappointing” list and half a “these movies are truly awful shit” list. I didn’t see that many bad movies in 2016, the first half of which was overloaded with small good movies and big bad movies. I struggled to make ten which either means I am getting softer as I age or I’m just not seeing enough movies anymore.

2016 has been a dogshit year for most things, but not for cinema. It’s been one of the busiest years of my life, though, which is why these lists are harder than usual. Ever since I went back to school I’ve had less time to commit to hobbies that require a lot of energy… this blog counts, believe it or not! As a result, I’ve written fewer reviews and if writing is memory than there are just way too many gaps in my memory of movies I saw this year.

Oh well.

10. Jason Bourne

Review

This movie was fine. And that’s the problem. At the end of the day, it didn’t just bridge the gap between Ultimatum and a post-Bourne Legacy return to the franchise, it sullied the whole thing by caving to action movie cliches. There’s also that this is a movie that makes Bourne repetitive as a franchise by going just that much further into rehashing its trademarks. There comes a point where the trademarks become cliches and Jason Bourne hit that hard.

9. War Dogs

This is a movie that rides the coattails of similar, better movies. Neither Miles Teller nor Jonah Hill deserve that because they’re both great actors who chose to do this movie for obvious reasons. However, between its mix of so-obvious-it-hurts musical cues and weird fixation with Hill’s character (who is a mix of his and Leo’s characters from The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that War Dogs shamelessly apes), this movie never met a cliche it didn’t love. Instead of being interesting, it just feels like a lazy remix of much better movies many of which came out way too recently for this shit to get a pass.

8. Warcraft

Review

Objectively, Warcraft is really bad. Every year there are one or two movies that have some heart, some chops, something special… but just fail to do anything with it or fall victim to various types of problems and end up being either mixed bags or worse. This year, that is totally Warcraft and while I suspect I’ll rewatch it more than any other movie on this list, I can’t deny its many and obvious faults any more than I can stop wishing that Duncan Jones’s cut would see the light of day.

7. X-Men: Apocalypse

None of these movies is really any good. But they really are sort of the last holdout for the idea that comic book movies are inherently frivolous bullshit. This is also, somehow, what allows people to keep forgiving the X-Men franchise even though it doesn’t earn it. It’s just “fun” they say. Mistakenly. Sometimes even this movie is fun, but mostly it’s stupid and vainglorious and meaningless. Now with 10+ comic book superhero movies coming out per year, the bar has to get raised. Even within the Fox universe, that’s already happened with Deadpool, which is ten times more fun, coherent, intelligent, and respectful of its audience than any X-Men movie. But hey, maybe Logan will be good right?

6. Star Trek: Beyond

Review

Much like Jason Bourne its the refusal to grow beyond a nuts and bolts formula that holds Beyond back. A big difference between the two properties, though, is that the formula in Bourne actually worked. None of these latter day Star Trek movies have been particularly great, and this is their third outing where it’s painfully obvious (from behind the screens drama to what we actually see) that they are still “figuring it out”. And this time, “figuring it out” means aping Disney’s far better, far more confident work with the MCU and Star Wars. Like War Dogs, Star Trek: Beyond owes all its best stuff to much better movies that came out basically yesterday. That said, the Sabotage sequence is awesome and is what props this movie up in the “slightly less bad” half of this year’s naughty list.

5. Independence Day: Resurgence

I have very little memory of watching this very pretty but very dumb disaster. It’s a movie with some great ideas that never get to be in the driver’s seat of the movie. Instead, it’s all about the visuals and the poorly constructed plot. The widened scope of Independence Day, where we see how the invasion is impacting a bunch of people separately and together, is probably its best quality. In this ill-advised but well-intentioned sequel, the widened scope feels cheap. Like it’s copying the lesser copies of its predecessors. Movies like Battleship, which while just as bad are also crazier and more entertaining than Resurgence.

4. The Darkness

There were a few bad horror movies this year. This was probably the worst. Not only because it’s a boring retread of much better ghost/haunting movies that have been all the rage since Paranormal Activity refreshed the genre, but because it is also fundamentally racist. It wants to be Poltergeist so bad it hurts.

3. The BFG

This movie sucks and I turned it off. Could not connect to its buffoonish characters, its weightless visual effects (and over-reliance on them) enough to make it through it. A lot of people loved this movie, though. So maybe I’m wrong. No, wait, wait. No. I’m not wrong, it’s them.

2. Batman vs. Superman

Hoo boy. More pages have probably been written about this piece of shit than any other movie this decade. What could I possibly add to it that hasn’t been said already? Most people who saw this movie were at least disappointed, or struggled to hang on to the handful of good moments and ideas it has (Battfleck, Wonder Woman’s theme music… ugh…). I think this movie finally broke the Batfans. I hope so, because if it didn’t then nothing will.

1. Suicide Squad

Review

Wait. That bit I said about lots of pages being written about this piece of shit? Up there, for Batman vs. Superman? I could easily say the same thing here. Suicide Squad is an absolute trainwreck, a Rorschach test for the psyche of your friends and family who occasionally talk to you about movies. People who love Suicide Squad unironically should be studied. This movie is a masterclass in how to get in your own way with cliches, plot contrivance, unmotivated characters, bad effects, and really icky gender politics. Of all its many crimes against humanity, Suicide Squad‘s most overlooked and egregious is still its limp, confused, and self-indulgent misogyny. Did I say the bar is too high to get away with X-men movies? Whatever bar there is gets used for pole-dancing by this movie. It is almost admirable how anti-quality it is. Like a superhero version of Kevin Smith’s Tusk. Maybe Ayer, a filmmaker I rather like, attempted to make the anti-superhero movie in a more interesting way than advertised. But I doubt it. This has the WB’s typical superhero movie problems with the added benefit of putting Ryan Gosling’s line in La La Land into a new horrific perspective: Hollywood worships everything but values nothing.

Another year another cinematic enema. I feel better. Do you?

You will after watching this:

I was really tempted to do a Top 16. But no. I have a pretty large Honorable Mentions list (as per usual) and a lot of hard cuts were made so I’m going to maintain the tradition of just 15 movies.

Here’s the 2015 list, by the way. And this year’s Worst list too.

2016 was a year of collision. Not only in the broader culture, but in the stories we’re telling and how we’re telling them. The two most consistently good subsets of films were diametrically opposed genres: horror and adventure films ostensibly aimed at kids. There were a lot of horror all-timers this year and they make up a third of my list. There were also a lot of kids’ movies that just worked for people, even when they didn’t work for me (The BFG or The Little Prince). The ones that I loved, again making up a third of this list, are also all-timers.

This is also the year where the WB wrongly doubled down on the grimdark of their comic book movies, while Disney showed us all how to actually be dark without being stupid with, of all things, a Star Wars movie. For a lot of people, 2016 is characterized not only by a measurable uptick in conflict but also a lot of  darkness. But I think one of the reasons why I responded so much to both horror and lighter fare is because the contrast reminds me that the collision between horror and hope is kind of what it’s all about.

I think the movies I loved most were about finding yourself (from Pete’s Dragon to The Handmaiden), which seems trite, but each one meditated on that struggle and showed, in different and equally powerful ways, how who we are and what we do comes from finding and loving and being true to ourselves. I’ve been thinking about my life a lot this year, mostly because I’m on the cusp of the elusive “career” that most people hope will give their lives some definition and structure (working toward this is why there are so few reviews on this blog now). As a result, I’m thinking about the balance and trying to find it — maybe more than ever. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I like to think that we all are, as a civilization and as individuals, especially now.

The usual disclaimer:

I acknowledge that this is a subjective list. Trying to objectively compare the quality of any of these movies, one to the next, is impossible. It’s apples and oranges. You can like one movie more than another easily enough, but it’s far more difficult to make a case for why one is better whether you like it more or not. For me, writing film criticism has most often been about trying to get at those qualitative things that exist in spite of personal preferences, it’s about trying to be objective in an arena that is usually assumed to be subjective. It’s about not conflating what I like with what is good, to the fullest extent possible. My Top 15 lists are not about these things. They are about ranking my favorite movies, about summarizing the year, and about taking stock.

15. Sing Street

Sing Street is a wonderful coming-of-age story that uses the music of the 80’s as a kind of framework for going through phases of thought, behavior, and philosophy. Conor is a boy who starts a band mostly to impress a girl but also, deep down, to connect with his disaffected but passionate older brother. Instead of being excuses so that Conor can learn something, both Raphina and Brendan are rich characters in their own right. This movie exudes heart and manages to be fresh and tons of fun without leaning too heavily on the coming-of-age or garage band tropes it frequently includes. This movie compares favorably to La La Land in a bunch of ways and I found it to be more honest and more relatable.

14. Slash

Another coming-of-age story at heart, Slash trades nostalgia and music for sexual confusion and the backrooms of the internet, where people from all walks of life get together to write stories about beloved fictional characters… fucking. In Slash, the community is treated with a lot of respect and dignity through the earnest searching of its two leads. Both characters are trying to figure out who they are in a world of limiters, labels, expectations, norms, and their own desires. Their journey frequently defies easy definition, which is the whole point. This is not only the first feature film made about slash-fiction, it is also one of a very few that deal honestly and directly with fluidity in the sexuality and identities of young people, who for the first time in living memory are afforded a certain amount of freedom (in parts of the world anyway) to explore what they want and what they can be. Even if you have difficulty relating to the sexual identity confusion or the peculiarity of the slash community, this is also a story about finding your tribe and letting yourself be whatever kind of weirdo you are. Slash has the potential to be a powerful film for LBTQ+ and gender spectrum youth, something that speaks directly to them without ever talking down to them.

13. Zootopia

I don’t know what crazy geniuses decided to do a Disney talking animals movie as a neo-noir about busting gender conventions and exposing the racial overtones of the drug war but I am glad they did. Zootopia is top to bottom a surprise, one of those “movies for kids” that really does have something to offer almost anyone. Yeah it’s got cute talking animals, but it’s also got ridiculously detailed and rich world-building. Yeah it’s got obvious jokes like DMV sloths, but it’s also got a direct (if occasionally confusing) addressing of real-world social problems. Disney is notorious for playing it safe generally while pushing incrementally forward for representation and progressive values in our entertainment and while this is a talking animals movie, it uses those animals to talk about race, class, and social justice. It weaves easily accessible themes like not judging people by appearances with deeper commentary on how that judgment leads to prejudice and abuse. This is how you make something entertaining, fun, slightly ridiculous, and yet deeply meaningful.

12. Deadpool

Speaking of entertaining, fun, really fucking ridiculous, and yet deeply meaningful… if you would have told me last January that I’d be putting Deadpool on my Top 15 for 2016 I would have scoffed. And yet! Deadpool isn’t just an irreverent and super funny movie (one of the funniest of the year honestly), it’s also got tons to say about using humor to support others and heal through trauma. There’s thematic richness in this movie, and a more believable love story than all the MCU movies stacked on top of each other. With the inspired inclusion of Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, it’s also a better X-verse ensemble movie than any one of the X-Men movies. I think Deadpool surprised a lot of people, not least of all Fox who need to just get out of the fucking way of any future sequels.

11. Everybody Wants Some!!

At first glance, this would seem like just a shaggy hangout movie from the master of shaggy hangout movies. This time it’s about manly pursuits like baseball, sideburns, beer, and big mustaches! But it’s also a gentle look at the problems with masculinity, with hyper-competition and running around being aggro all the time. More than that, it’s about insecurity and learning to live with insecurity. It’s not exactly a feminist perspective on masculinity, but it’s definitely honest about what men do to each other and how our hierarchies and preying on each others’ vulnerabilities help to prop up the toxic expectations and behaviors we so often go through life with. At the same time, this is a movie that is oozing with kindness and affection for pretty much all its characters. The one exception is Jay, a ridiculous cartoon of a man that will nonetheless remind just about everyone of men they know or have known. It is not particularly critical, instead focusing on male friendships that can form in spite of the roadblocks we put up to safeguard our vulnerabilities in a world we’ve been taught to believe doesn’t give a shit about them. I think that’s a really valuable message for men, especially after the many, many eruptions of blatant misogyny in popular culture this year.

10. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Like The Force Awakens, Rogue One is a flawed attempt to continue the rehabilitation of the Star Wars franchise. However, what it does have for flaws (too many cameos, Tarkin CG zombie, undermining its own villain all the time) is more than made up for by its gorgeous aesthetics (on that level, it’s a masterpiece — easily the most cinematic Star Wars movie), cohesive plot, subtle characterizations, and bold choices when presenting a grimmer, more grounded dimension of the Star Wars universe. Though this movie was heavily re-edited, it is a grand counter-example to the usual outcome of that process. Instead of being a stitched-together mess, Rogue One manages to do what The Force Awakens could not: be a story that doesn’t rely on contrivance and coincidence to propel itself. It also widely expands the location palette of Star Wars. Its story, being a prequel and ending with a foregone conclusion, may not feel vital or necessary in the grand scheme of things but I would argue that it’s more important that the story works and it does, which really surprised me. It also takes a huge step forward in representation. The only visibly white hero is a woman, while the others make up a tapestry of globally representative faces, voices, and talents.

9. Captain America: Civil War

Civil War embarrasses all other ensemble superhero movies before it (and some after it) while also presenting a sort of blueprint for how these movies can and should be done. Somehow, in a runtime just over two hours, the Russo brothers and their team found a way to include more characters than I could name off the top of my head and give almost all of them arcs and ways to contribute to the story and themes. I remember writing that I wish Warcraft had been delayed a year so that they could steal some ideas from how Civil War juggled two opposing sides that an audience is asked to (and would naturally) feel sympathy for. There’s a lot of fan-service in Civil War but the MCU masterminds have managed to show why that’s not a bad thing in itself. We go to superhero movies to see larger than life characters doing larger than life things, and we revel in thirty minutes of rule-of-cool for perfectly valid reasons. But if the fan-service is delivered cynically, to sell tickets maybe, and without any real affection for the proceedings or meaning baked into them by a solid story with stuff on its mind, then it becomes something cheaper and something wrapped up in moments that rely on iconography. It becomes Suicide Squad. This movie is the anti-Suicide Squad, y’all. Even if you can’t get excited about Marvel’s characters, I think it’s impossible to deny that they care about their stories and they care about their audiences.

8. The Invitation

Karyn Kusama rocked my socks with Jennifer’s Body and here she’s back again with something very different to offer. A lavish, beautiful movie about the crossroads of grief, paranoia, and true madness, The Invitation is getting tons of attention and deserves all of it. If you’re in Canada and haven’t watched it yet, you need to log in to your Netflix right away and fix that. I classify this as a horror movie, but it’s firmly in the psychological horror category. It is notable how restrained it is right up until the climax unspools all the rich, textured characterization the film spends two thirds of its time setting up. Logan Marshall-Green is a revelation here, delivering a performance that is going to be talked about for years and will hopefully open up more doors for him after Prometheus probably slammed them in his face four years ago. Kusama is a great already, and I think The Invitation is going to mean we see a lot more from her in the foreseeable future. Notice I segued to talking about the lead actor and the director there? Well that’s because I can’t say a whole lot more about the movie without giving stuff away. You gotta see it. Even if you typically don’t like horror movies.

7. Pete’s Dragon

Review

Disney had a good year. I think they are responsible for half the movies on this list. They’re just a powerhouse these days, making amazing movies that consistently manage to bridge the divide between commerce and culture. Pete’s Dragon really surprised me, especially after I watched David Lowery’s previous movie and realized that this would be a little like hiring Terrence Malick or John Nichols to remake Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Probably the biggest thing that Lowery brings to the table, what really makes this one different from what it could have been, or what other similar movies largely are, is his mastery of tone. Pete’s Dragon is always on point with its tone, if not always with other elements. The musical choices, the restraint (as opposed to broadness) in every scene, seem meticulously thought through to maintain an honesty that belies the fantasy. It was maybe the first movie I saw this year where I really responded to the central element I talked about above in the preamble (but is echoed throughout this list). The power of being true to yourself is a big part of Pete’s Dragon, of which I wrote “Imagination and the courage to be you are also key themes.” I saw that again and again in the films of 2016.

6. The Handmaiden

It might be stretching the definition of horror too much (for some) to include The Handmaiden in that category… but c’mon, this is a Park Chan-Wook movie. His movies, and South Korean cinema in general, are rife with tonal shifts and genre experimentation (it’s also a heist movie, a gothic romance, and a feminist superhero movie). The Handmaiden is no different and while its genre interests aren’t always in horror, I think horror is seldom very far from its mind. Here it’s the horror of a life completely controlled by the sexual objectification rituals of men. This film is like the carefully constructed costumes Hideko wears: each layer reveals something new, usually some new and deeper bondage. As the film plays with your expectations and its own narrative to eventually reveal an uplifting and powerful tale of reclaimed female sexual identity, you seldom know exactly where you’re being taken but you’re always on the hook. Both Hideko and Okju hide who they really are, from everyone but each other, and a big part of the fun is seeing how their initial attraction morphs from manipulation to something much deeper.

5. The Neon Demon

Review

I’ve been excited to see this movie pop up on a lot of best of the year lists. I really thought I was going to be an outlier on this. Like many of Winding Refn’s weird oeuvre, The Neon Demon has grown on me since I saw it. Like The Handmaiden it deals with the objectification rituals that characterize the lived experience of our concepts of “beauty”. However, unlike The Handmaiden, The Neon Demon is more interested in this as a story of how this experience plays out when it’s mostly women participating in it. Like Everybody Wants Some!! it is almost wholly invested in the experiences of its subject gender… just way less nice about it. In this film, Nicholas Winding Refn is all about the amorphous psycho-sexual poltergeists that live just below the surface of our waking minds, making The Neon Demon something of a throwback acid-trip horror movie. And it is a horror movie. I would bet that it’s easily the most horrific movie on my list, lacking humanizing elements that make horror movies full of people to root for and evils to overcome. Instead, The Neon Demon leaves you with nothing good, not even the realizations it might force you to confront about yourself and others. I think this is a movie that laughs at the notion that there’s a net positive power in truth. Here, the truth is every bit as much the enemy as artifice. It’d be interesting to watch this movie alongside The Fits, which might be the anti-The Neon Demon. What does it say about me that I liked The Neon Demon so much more?

4. Moana

One of the things that struck me about Moana is that its formal storytelling structure is perfect. Even Disney regularly stumble on this, mostly as they try and meet the demands of four quadrant appeal while also keeping the story true to character and coherent. Much as I loved Frozen, it has chunks that don’t work. Everything in Moana works. From its classical quest narrative structure to its thematic thrust (all about the connection between self-discovery and the courage to get shit done). At a robust two hours, Moana takes its time living in its world and making sure that both Moana and Maui are full, vibrant characters. It might seem counter-intuitive that such a long movie (for this type) only really has two major characters, but it also showcases the things that make stories good, and the best part is that it uses the same structure as the traditional stories of cultures like Moana’s, and very much like the First Nations peoples of Canada and elsewhere. There’s a revitalization of indigeniety in North America and I feel like Moana strongly speaks to that.

3. Green Room

Ugh. This movie still gets under my skin. It might be one of the few Top 15 movies I never watch again. Oh who am I kidding, I’ll definitely watch this again… just to see if I still react the same way to its unabashed meanness. I watched it way before Trump won the election and the alt-right got ready to take over America. Green Room really effectively speaks to the tension between well-meaning white folks and scary, organized, hateful white folks which even the FBI says are the greatest domestic terror threat in North America. Between what’s happening in the real world, this movie, and Imperium, Neo-Nazis seem a very credible threat all around. But that said, this is an almost defiantly apolitical movie, I think. Though well-intentioned, the good guys are punks and anarchists who live in a van. They are hardly the establishment left. They may, though, be what is now called the scumbag left. If Jeremy Saulnier (please also see Blue Ruin) has social commentary on his mind, maybe that’s where he was coming from. I kind of think it’s a happy accident though, making this movie culturally relevant while also being just an amazing throwback siege movie with a clinical, nasty attention to detail and horror in its violence. Again, some would say Green Room is not a horror movie. That is bananas.

2. The Witch

This movie came out of nowhere and is just brilliant. I’ve seen it more times than anything else on this list. Even more than Civil War and each time it is simply mesmerizing. Every element of it is precise and effective, though its verisimilitude is precisely what throws some people off. People were maybe hoping it would be more overtly scary but I challenge you to find a more oppressive, elementally horrifying film than The Witch. Maybe I personally respond to that existential, cosmic sense of smallness in some horror stories more than others, though. It’s definitely oozing out of every pore in this film. However, unlike The Neon Demon, it does have a dimension of overcoming something… just doesn’t play out like you’d expect. Like the ladies in The Handmaiden, Thomasin is also oppressed and caged by the beliefs and preferences of others. Like those ladies, Thomasin defies and escapes. The major difference is that she may be giving in to real evil by doing so, but part of the magic of this movie is the way you are seduced right alongside Thomasin, confronted with the appeal of “living deliciously” when the alternative is utterly bleak. Maybe Black Phillip isn’t so bad.

1. Kubo and the Two Strings

Review

What can I say? At the end of the day I’d rather pick my way through Moria with the Fellowship or ignite a lightsaber than examine my existential dread. I’m an escapist and Kubo and the Two Strings was the best escapism on offer in theaters this year. It is very similar to Moana but even more aesthetically rich. It has the brilliant quest narrative that reaches the same redemptive conclusion as Moana‘s does. They would be amazing companion pieces, but it’s Kubo‘s handling of existential dread alongside its adventure story that pulls it ahead. I guess I can have my cake and eat it too. I lied when I said I’m an escapist, or at least I’m not just an escapist. I’m also an existentialist and Kubo delivers a lot by confronting nihilism with narrative, which I think is one of the most important tools humans have for dealing with the more horrific parts of being alive in the universe as we know it. One of the best tools a narrative has to do that job is to slow down and breathe with its characters and themes, letting audiences inhabit the world and connect to it in ways that many contemporary films forget to do. Like most of the other movies on this list, Kubo has to embrace his true self to be a hero and that self is a challenge to the usual conventions of masculine (violent) heroism. That’s the key word, really, “challenge”. Kubo and the Two Strings is my favorite film of 2016 above all because it’s challenging. Which isn’t to say there aren’t other challenging films on this list, or that Kubo is even the most challenging (it’s not). It’s just that element in conjunction with everything else is what makes this movie pure magic.

Honorable Mentions:

The Fits
Arrival * (this movie probably should be on the above list, however I was half-cut when I saw it and I have read the story, to which it is very similar. I am eager to rewatch it soon)
Hardcore Henry
Gods of Egypt
Rebirth
Midnight Special
Hell or High Water
10 Cloverfield Lane
I Am Not a Serial Killer
La La Land
The Shallows
The Jungle Book
In a Valley of Violence

Didn’t see:

The Mermaid
The Edge of Seventeen
Knight of Cups
Cafe Society
The Infiltrator
Snowden
The Birth of a Nation
Moonlight
Manchester By the Sea
Nocturnal Animals
Lion
Little Sister
A Monster Calls
Train to Busran
Paterson
American Honey
Tickled

Boom. I got 2016 done and I only reviewed like four movies on this list. That is actually bad for me because the distance of months between viewings makes reviews valuable as ways of gauging my initial (usually very positive) reaction to a movie and how I feel days or weeks later. Oh well. I’ll get more in next year! I thought I was maybe done with this blog, but going through these year end lists has been really fun so I guess I’ve still got a film critic in here somewhere.

Being a somewhat original historical action movie for people who really like skiing.

Yes. This. I am bringing back Friday Night Netflix, a very sporadic feature I used to do around the time I first started this blog. Back then I wrote these as a way to review movies I’d seen a bunch of times that I figured were underseen but easily available on Netflix. Now I’m expanding that to include movies I’ve never seen before, also easily available on Netflix, whether I like them or not. And no, Netflix doesn’t pay me to write these, but they certainly could and I wouldn’t mind.

Anyways.

For The Last King, a Norwegian and Irish co-production about an interesting period in Norway’s (very interesting) history… I guess I kind of liked it? It’s more like an 80’s buddy movie with delusions of historical epic than it is like a Kingdom of Heaven or even the show Vikings. The production is detailed and the action is coherent, but the story is about as straightforward and characters as archetypal and broadly sketched as an 80’s or early 90’s Schwarzenegger vehicle. None of this is bad, but wrapped in a package that lacks any particularly standout performances or “holy shit” moments, it might not be propulsive enough to hold the interests of people who can see a better version of basically the same stuff elsewhere on Netflix (The Last Kingdom for instance).

That said, this movie has some novel action (skiing fights!) and takes place in an unfamiliar setting. Norway and Scandinavia are usually explored in terms of the Viking era and rarely any other era. This movie takes place in the 13th century during a civil war period. You don’t really need to know much background, but this movie sent me down a wikipedia rabbit hole of Norwegian history so hey, interesting stuff.

Why yes, that IS Tormund Giantsbane!

The movie is about two agents of the King and a baby. It is kind of like a less humorous but classic action comedy setup, really. They are Torstein (Kristofer Hivju) and Skjervald (Jakob Oftebro) and it’s their job to escort the King’s secret infant son somewhere safe before the bad guys, called Baglers, find him. These two are “Birkebeinerne” (the film’s alternate, better title) and that seems to be a kind of opposing political faction, loyalists I guess, opposing the Baglers. Along the way, Skjervald’s whole family is mercilessly killed by the Catholic knights that back the Baglers (the church but not Christianity itself are painted in a pretty negative light here) and the King is murdered by an asshole. Mostly the plot unfolds as Torstein and Skjervald try to outrun the church knights that are hunting them in order to kill the King’s heir and secure a Bagler victory.

If that sounds complex, don’t worry because it isn’t. Characters broadly declare their motivations and have somewhat repetitive exposition scenes to establish very basic plot points. The script is very, very stripped down. Game of Thrones this isn’t. But I can’t really fault it for not being a morally ambiguous tale of ambition or whatever, I think it’s fine that it’s a throwback movie. I do kind of wish it had more to sink your teeth into though. That didn’t have to be complicated inversions of loyalty and circumstances, but I definitely felt my attention wandering around 2/3 of the way into it. What’s here isn’t very dramatically engaging and it’s too restrained to be all that memorable in terms of quotable dialogue or exciting action.

The action scenes kind of swing between “competent” and “somewhat engaging”.

I guess I mean to say that the action scenes should have been treated more like showpieces. Instead, the movie seems mostly uninterested in them. There’s actually not that much action in the movie, and most of it is realistic in the sense that people get tired and fights are over fast. There’s some satisfaction in that, but after half a movie watching Torstein carrying around his big double-bladed axe, you definitely want to see him use it more than he does.

One place the movie does deliver the goods is in its handful of action sequences and chase scenes that center around skiing. Torstein and Skjervald are skiing gods and they zip around shooting arrows and hiding behind horses and it’s pretty cool. There’s even on big scene where a bunch of dudes on skis attack mounted warriors.

Kind of blurry but it goes something like that.

Skis as modes of transportation in and out of battle are a thing I don’t think has ever been done in an historical action movie before. That definitely works in the movie’s favor, especially for people who really dig the sport. However, it often feels like the only real trick up this movie’s sleeve and they potentially over-rely on it as a way to sell the action.

All in all, this is far from a bad movie. It’s just a little too rote to recommend enthusiastically unless one of its elements is interesting enough or if you just really like the genre and/or Norwegian history. If they’d leaned heavier into any one of the elements that make it up, the buddy throwback stuff or the historical intrigue or the novel action scenes, it would probably have been a hidden gem.

I gave it 3/5 stars on Netflix.

One way to get free satellite.

So in anticipation of Diesel returning with another ridiculous but maybe good-hearted action franchise, I watched xXx for the first time since high school and saw xXx 2: State of the Union for the first time ever. I think most people (who give any shit) are surprised that Diesel has been so successful at resuscitating the key roles that made him famous. Maybe it’s because he didn’t wait a score of years to do it, like his action star predecessors have (and thus mostly failed). Maybe it’s because he has some talent as a producer and seems to be able to gather good people. I think a big part of it is that Diesel consistently has a lot of fun and wants to share the fun, both on screen and off, with all his fans. There’s something infectiously charming about the man, even when characters like Dominic Toretto and Richard B. Riddick don’t call for him to use much of it. Xander Cage, however, returning to a defunct franchise after like 15 years… well, that’s a different story.

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is head and shoulders a better movie than either of the first two. It accomplishes this primarily by bringing in a lot from the Fast and Furious playbook, mostly in terms of building itself around a colorful ensemble of characters. It doesn’t quite work as well as, say, Fast Five did because it hasn’t had five movies to build a weird sort of following for even the most ridiculous and sketchy of its cast. The Return of Xander Cage mostly has the job of introducing a large, diverse, and kick-ass team which might pave the way for many more of these movies the way Fast Five did for that. Can Vin Diesel really be the core of two extremely similar relentless fun and stupid action franchises? Why the fuck not? I mean, his movies might be mostly dumb but they are consistently well made. Fast and Furious has a heart of gold and xXx has been weirdly infused with socio-political commentary in each of its three entries. I think what matters more than that, though, is Diesel seems to consistently be able to work with directors and writers who find the fun kind of stupid, and not the frustrating and insulting kind. I love action movies, and I love when the raise the bar to ridiculous new heights (which this one really does) and I appreciate not being treated like an idiot even though I am watching underwater motocross chases. It may be too subtle a thing for some people, but it’s a big part of the reason why I love most of the Fast and Furious movies and why I think I kinda loved xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.

Always with the sleeveless shirts though.

One of those Fast and Furious elements that Diesel has probably ensured made it into this franchise is consistent callbacks to the previous movies, meaning that each new one is infused with a sense of history through all kinds of references. Compare this with the exceedingly half-assed X-Men movies which, fundamentally, aren’t too different from either Fast or now xXx. Those movies rewrite almost all of their history with every entry, leaving a confusing and aimless morass that fails to offer any depth. It is crazy to me, and I’m sure others, to even say this… but the Fast and xXx franchies are able to achieve some degree of depth simply by remembering their histories. This is a huge part of what made Fast Five work for people in a way that probably none of the other movies did, and which revived the franchise. I’m not sure if it’s as successful here, because xXx never started from the far more grounded place that The Fast and the Furious did. Regardless, it’s an interesting start.

The movie opens with the death of Augustus Gibbens (Samuel L. Jackson) and openly lampshades the character’s similarities to Nick Fury in doing so, the same way Fast and Furious 6 lampshaded the “superhero team-up” skeleton it was based on by consistently referring to The Avengers. Four years ago I said that we were now going to live in a post-Avengers world, cinematically speaking, and it’s interesting to see permutations of that long after others have tried (sometimes with mixed results) to replicated the formula that made the MCU become the juggernaut it is now. By the way, lampshades aren’t the only shades being thrown by this movie. Because xXx started as an EXTREME SPORTS take on the floundering James Bond franchise, it sort of sees itself as the red-headed stepchild of the spy genre and while it has a fair mixture of homages and lampooning, it gets in a particularly funny jab at the Bourne movies. It seems appropriate to spend so much time talking about the context of this movie since it is so very very aware of its own context and constantly reaches out for that.

Bringing back Ice Cube is a big part of what I mean. Fans love this kind of shit.

Anyway. Wow. This review is getting railroaded by discussions of context big time. Where the fuck was I?

Right. Gibbens. So he dies recruiting a new X agent, a sort of distracting cameo by a professional soccer player. Whoever did this crashed a satellite and wants to use the same technology to mess with the world’s intelligence apparatus. In a very secret meeting, a bunch of world intelligence experts get together to talk about it only for that meeting to be crashed by a team of super insane X-like dudes led by Donnie Yen.

Naturally this prompts Marke (Toni Collette), Gibbens’s sort of successor to go find Xander Cage (Diesel). He then drops her commando team and gathers his own group of misfits. All the characters get fun intros and they all mostly work when they have things to do, particularly Ruby Rose. Kris Wu, playing a dude who just kind of DJ’s and is a party boy, doesn’t really work so I hope they give him more to do in the inevitable sequel or ditch him. He’s probably the only character who never really finds a niche or ever has much to say that’s fun or interesting.

Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa have a ridiculous blast in this movie, especially Jaa whose character is a flamboyant masterpiece.

Cage chases these guys to the South Pacific where he learns that they all have somewhat similar backgrounds: they’re all part of the X program! As Cage says many times, “X takes care of its own” (which is this movie’s version of “Family!”) so a sort of bromance/rivalry develops beautifully between he and Yen while one of the big surprises of the movie, Deepika Padukone as Serena, has a similar thing going with Cage but with sexy overtones.

To stay on Padukone for  a moment, I went into this movie thinking that Ruby Rose would be the female lead, likely without any romantic stuff and more of a buddy of Cage’s. That relationship is there (if a little underdeveloped, since Rose buddies up more with Padukone’s character and it’s awesomer that way), but it’s actually Padukone who is the female lead. I was ready to be impressed having a genderqueer lesbian actress be the female lead of a big fucking action movie (thank you Diesel), but instead it’s an Indian actress and that’s pretty awesome in itself. I don’t think that’s ever been done before, honestly, and Padukone kills it in this movie.

She has chemistry with just about everyone.

Even though Cage looks like Dom Torretto and dresses exactly like him, they are very different characters. Torretto is far more a part of the cinematic action anti-hero tradition of yesteryear, engineered partially by guys like Steve McQueen and then reformatted by Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis. He’s gruff and manly and physical. Cage is a very different guy, easy and casual and funny which takes advantage of Diesel’s boyish charm and allows him to use it to lift up the characters and actors around him, which is a thing he has done well consistently throughout his career and may be part of the secret of his recent successes. No one will ever say Diesel is a great actor, but he did some stuff in this movie (mostly facial tics and comic timing) that reminded me what he can do when he’s got his hair down — so to speak. Instead of using his physicality to be menacing or macho, he is mostly just a big goofy teddy bear as Cage and what can I tell you, it just works.

However, the real MVP of this movie is not Diesel or Deepiak Padukone or even Donnie Yen (who is going to get big in the mainstream finally)… it’s fucking Nina Dobrev.

Nina Dobrev, man… from Vampire Diaries?

This person:

And yes, I think she knows she rules in this movie.

I confess to watching the first three seasons of The Vampire Diaries and I remember Dobrev as a somewhat above average CW actress working in a role and series that really wasn’t asking her for much and probably would go on forever, preventing anyone from seeing what else she can do. Well, I was wrong. Dobrev walks into this movie and it feels like it’s going to be Ramsey from Fast 7 all over again, a boring-ish tech girl who is mostly just around. Instead, Dobrev makes a fucking entrance. She walks right up to Diesel and delivers the best bit of dialogue in the movie (until her next long bit, from the scene the above pic was taken from). She totally steals the movie and will surprise anyone who knows her.

xXx mostly has bits where you laugh at the sheer audacity of its action scenes and set-pieces, but has a few moments of character or dialogue that are actually pretty funny. Dobrev gets the lion’s share of those moments. Rory McCann, as a getaway driver (?) and weirdo whose layers are only barely scratched at in this one, gets a few more.

And this sort of shit gets the rest.

Beyond laughs, I mentioned earlier that the xXx movies sort of have socio-political commentary. Well, they do! I’m not saying it’s particularly coherent or savvy but each movie does stop to comment on issues of the day, particularly militarization and surveillance. Fuck man, in this and State of the Union, the bad guy is the United States Government. In Ice Cube’s go-around (which has some interesting and prescient racial themes), it’s a seditious faction that wants America to be real strong (countered by a president who seems now to be a John Kerry stand-in). This time, it’s just straight up the government. What’s interesting about it is that it was probably intended to capitalize on the discourse of government corruption and society’s growing distrust of the mechanisms used to, supposedly, protect it. However, with Trump’s election (something they could not have foreseen), it becomes more interesting by going beyond possible dog-whistling for the anti-government tools who partially got Trump elected in the first place, but as reassurance for the frustrated and incredulous folks who are very much anti-Trump and already preparing for a period where they are going to probably be pretty anti-government too. So this part is accidentally interesting? I think we can safely say the movie is not to be taken as pro-Trump in any way, especially as there’s a weirdly left field bit where they fight a bunch of Russians and make identifying these Russians as Russians a belabored and obnoxious point.

More generally, the movie addresses the reckless power of surveillance, which is here boiled down to a MacGuffin for convenience’s sake. It has more than one point of view, with different characters being able to stand in for various real world points of view on the subject of surveillance and information technology on the geopolitical stage. That is something, but the movie gets murky when it tries to figure out where exactly it stands on anything. At the end of the day, Cage and his team are nominally government agents (or maybe they’re not anymore?) even if they are temporarily opposed to the very government agencies that created them. What comes of that in a post-Trump world? What kind of sequel are we gonna get, where the bad guys are the CIA? Hollywood loves to worship and shit on the CIA at the same time so I guess we’ll see. If a sequel manages to be as fun as The Return of Xander Cage, I’ll be there. Especially if Diesel is able to keep up his track record of producing movies that feature exciting, diverse casts of old favorites like Sam Jackson or Kurt Russel while bringing on relative newcomers like Deepika Padukone or Ruby Rose.

Only gifs will suffice.

EDIT: I totally forgot to finish this review. Oh well, better late than never! Sorry if it’s kind of weak, though. This movie is out of my system now that I sit down to finish.

John Wick was a movie that I was pleasantly surprised by. However, I underestimated the pop culture impact it would have. I am super glad that it has also changed peoples’ minds about Keanu Reeves, who I’ve always liked, since this a movie that he’s so inextricable to that you couldn’t have one without the other. There are sly jokes about his career in both movies (including small roles and cameos for actors he has worked with in the past, in his most iconic roles) and it shows a bit of awareness that Reeves has consistently been an actor underestimated and underappreciated. For a long time, the most common grudging compliment was that at least Neo (The Matrix) was a role no one else could have played quite the same way, but I think that may be even more true of John Wick. When I talk about how inextricable this character is to Reeves, a good example would be his reputation as an actor that works hard, is incredibly focused, thoughtful, and committed. Who else does that sound like?

Anyway. John Wick was not a movie that demanded a sequel, but I’m glad it got one. One of the most surprising parts of that movie was the way it subtly hinted at its alternate world, lurking just in the shadows. It’s a world of stringent and ritualized codes of behavior governing the top echelons of global crime and the chess pieces that move within their world. The hints of this world, from the gold coins to the “neutral ground” of the Continental Hotel, were tantalizing and gave the movie something special. If anything, it’s the world more than the character that needed its story to continue. Though I’m sure it was tempting to blow the doors off for Chapter 2, writer Derek Kolstad and director Chad Strehelski wisely maintain the now-signature restraint and focus that reflects their anti-hero. Good stories are often fractals and it’s clear now that this is the way these guys are constructing one of the most exciting original cinematic franchises to come along in recent memory.

Chapter 2 doesn’t so much attempt to “top” the first one as refine it. This movie had a bigger budget, more locations, and a wider scope on the shadowy world Wick walks in and out of. What I think is most interesting about it, though, is that it doesn’t try to repeat the emotional beats of the first movie more than to remind us of Wick’s core motivations. Instead, it focuses on the stark philosophical ethos of Wick’s world and its globalized reach, with ornate parties and larger-than-life tribes, families, agents, and powers. It’s like a fucking vampire movie, really. And that isn’t to say that it’s got any explicitly supernatural elements, just that the tropes involving the power structure of its world are very reminiscent of vampire fiction in which ancient customs govern the affairs of equally ancient clans as they rule the world from the shadows. It seems that Kolstad and Strehelski really know what they are doing in terms of deliberately pacing their exploration of that world, keeping John Wick central at almost all times so that we experience the world as he does, as if we’re not strangers but have catching up to do. This shows that we’re in good hands as Chapter 2 ends with a major shift in their world and more tantalizing hints of what’s to come.

When we do see NYC, it looks grander than in the first film.

John Wick 2 picks up like minutes after the last one left off. He got his new dog and he got his revenge, but Mr. Wick never got his car back so that’s what he’s up to as we rejoin him. Who has it? None other than the brother of the bad guy in the first one! We’re treated to a fun little mini-movie that feels like a bridging sequence and light-hearted rehash of the whole first movie. Same haunted stories about Wick, same oily Russian gangsters, same rain-soaked night-time fisticuffs and gunplay. The brother is played by Peter Stormare, starting what I hope will become a trend in future John Wick movies of bringing in heavies from Keanu Reeves’s filmography. Hugo Weaving would kill in a John Wick movie. So would Lambert Wilson. When Lawrence Fishburne shows up as an unlikely ally (possibly the man Wick was supposed to kill in his retirement mission?), you can see that these movies really are both a brand new, surprising action juggernaut and also a love letter to Keanu Reeves and his career.

Once Wick settles down with his car and his dog and everything being right in the world, a new oily European fella enters the mix. This time it’s an Italian, Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and he comes mostly in peace, because Wick owes him a favour. The mythology around Wick’s exit from the criminal shadow world he once inhabited came at a high price, apparently, and the new movie effortlessly weaves off-hand backstory from the first one back into focus here. It turns out that Wick’s “impossible job”, which was his price for retirement in the first place, could not have been done without Santino’s help, which prompted a “blood-oath” sealed in by blood in a ritualistic medallion. Now Santino expects Wick to help him secure his sister’s seat at the “High Table”, which is never fully revealed (movie three!) but hinted at to be a kind of council of criminal empires from around the world. This is the way John Wick 2 capitalizes on one of the most surprising and interesting parts of its predecessor: a wider world of coins, contracts, oaths, and Continentals is out there and New York is just one battleground.

It’s a blast watching how people react to Wick.

The fate of New York is ultimately a big part of what Wick ends up doing. He helps Santino, but bitterly. When Santino’s sister, Gianna, discovers Wick they have this great conversation and there’s this haunting death scene… it’s really the best stuff in the movie. It’s where John Wick 2 is operating at the operatic level, where it shows that it’s got more in mind than the first movie and the chops to pull it off. There’s a sense of decorum around all this danger, an element which keeps it fun and engaging but still unrealistic enough that we’re okay with the many, many henchfolk that Wick executes brutally. The catacombs sequence is just amazing all around, and it’ll probably stand out as the most memorable part of this film even though it’s almost always giving you the goods.

This decorum also lets the movie introduce a few more characters that are like Wick. Well, not really (cuz no one is), but sort of. In the first one, it was easy to deduce that nobody in NYC was really on his level. Here we watch him fight waves of assassins like himself, and they really put him through his paces. Especially Cassian (Common) who really brings the goods here and will be a big hit as a character, such that I expect him to show up again. He has two great fights with Reeves, one of which has an intermission that is truly and remarkably hilarious. That’s another thing to point out, really… John Wick 2 has a sense of humor that is fully embodied in Reeves’s dry and casually prepared interactions, facial expressions, and body language. However, there’s more humor here than you’d expect and it rises fully out of the world this movie presents so it’s really just a blast to see scenes like the subway shootout where the arch ridiculousness of this world is undermined and addressed in fine form. Even though it’s not as funny, they are doing the same thing when they tease a big fight with Ares (Ruby Rose) and she winds up being completely outmatched. They are playing with expectations, even those of the characters in the film.

RUNNNNNNNN!

In other words, John Wick 2 may feel serious and certainly Wick himself is, but these movies are not taking themselves super seriously. They know what’s up, even when they layer in some slightly heavy-handed symbolism. The symbolism works here because this is a world of aesthetics, where everything from the clothes to the guns to the setpieces are chosen from character, so it isn’t about just having a cool location or cool clothes but also always staying informed by the writing, in the sense that the world and characters as written feel like they’d choose to hang out in the Met and wear bulletproof suits.

Honestly, that attention to detail reminds me of The Matrix. The Wachowskis surely thought the counter-culture clubs and technogoth costuming were cool and I think audiences agreed, because it was kind of new and familiar (especially to cyberpunk fans or card-carrying goths and hackers). More than that, it felt like the kinds of outfits and places to hang that characters like the human rebels of The Matrix would choose for themselves.

John Wick 3 is going to be cray.

After helping Santino, Wick has another reason to get revenge and the movie does sort of meditate on this… is Wick addicted to vengeance? Is the honorable code of the “Continental” and “High Table” world really just an excuse to repeat violent cycles that wind up consuming whatever could be good about having those codes in the first place? Even though the John Wick films are not philosophically inquisitive (they aren’t spending a lot of time asking questions), they are still philosophical, like all great crime movies.

By the end of it, Wick violates a sacred law with full knowledge of the consequences. Though Wilson (Ian McShane) seems to favor him and even though Santino was a dirt bag, Wick is still declaring war on the world he left. And the beauty of that is, of course that’s where this was always going. It had to. It locks into place with a click, a familiar click, and even more than after this sequel was announced last year, we’re ready for more.

Such a feature would be useful for adults and the internet sometimes.

Finally a Batman movie I can fully get behind. I am well known for having mixed feelings about the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, especially on the writing level. I’m particularly mocking of the cultural impact, where you can’t get through a comment thread anywhere without someone doing the “____needs/___deserves” line, and the weird legions of maladjusted young men who rose up in the wake of criticisms about the Nolan movies to literally threaten the lives of film critics and people who disagreed with them.  Entirely the wrong lessons were drawn by fandom of those movies. I really feel for the long-time and holistic fans of Batman as a character and part of the larger DC mythos. To me, they are constantly abused by Hollywood. DC fans in general. There are those super serious fans out there who are probably predisposed toward hating and dismissing this movie, but I would really urge them to give this a chance. Because it’s not just a parody of Batman and his fandom and legacy, it’s also a huge fucking love letter to fans of the character, of comic books, and of nerds in general.

Except something weird happened when The Lego Movie arrived. Batman was a major character and he was not only a series of jokes about the silliest elements of the character, he was also really funny.That’s got a lot to do with Will Arnett who doubles down in this movie to deliver maybe the best cinematic Batman to date, but it also owes a lot to the way the writers and directors are also huge Batman fans and able to draw on almost a hundred years of cool shit, silly shit, and flat out weird shit for this version of the character. It seemed weird to set a movie around him, like we were all surprised that The Lego Movie wasn’t just a toy commercial, but a Lego Batman movie? That had to exist just to sell more overpriced licensed Lego, right?

Wrong. Lego Batman is legit. I wasn’t sure that the absence of Chris Lord and Phil Miller would be a good thing for this movie, but Chris McKay seriously knocks it out of the park. It takes more out of The Fast and the Furious and Deadpool than it does out of any existing Batman property. It’s full of humor that threatens the fourth wall, including numerous references to the other Batman movies and the age of the character. There’s a great vocal cast having a ball here. Biggest surprise? This movie has a strong emotional core about a lonely Batman who needs to let people in so he can relearn the value of family. If there are any missteps it’s that some parts are a tad underwritten (there were something like 6 writers on this) and it maybe relies too much on flat, bombastic superhero action. But for the most part, it re-appropriates the pseudo-stop-motion aesthetics of The Lego Movie, riffs on 78 years of Batman lore, and makes fun of the silly aspects of the character while also reminding us that Batman was always silly and that this is perfectly okay.

Also, this movie both makes fun of Suicide Squad and manages to be better at the core concept. That is just a win all the way down.

Batman is at once a stand-in for middle aged men and young men, both being vulnerable to delusions of grandeur and crippling emotional stuntedness and resulting loneliness.

In Lego Batman, Batman (Will Arnett) has completely overtaken Bruce Wayne. This is a Bruce who loves being Batman so much that he wears the cowl almost all the time, unless Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) makes him take it off. Batman is where he has placed every scrap of his dubious self-worth and it culminates in lonely dinners and longing gazes at old family photos when he thinks no one is looking. This is a sad Batman, where the gadgets and toys aren’t the product of a hyper-competent mastermind but of a damaged, overcompensating, manbaby. This is incredibly appropriate both in terms of undercutting the iconography of the character, but also in the way the film draws parallels between Batman and the kind of lonely nerds who may be attracted most to him as a character. The toys and memorabilia aren’t all that different from the stuff nerds like me enjoy collecting, and it’s completely harmless until it’s a fixation which gets in the way of our lives.

In a whiz bang battle that feels like only the latest in hundreds for the character, Batman duels all the villains in his rogue’s gallery, who are led by a weirdly sympathetic and delightfully homoerotic version of the Joker (Zak Galifianakis). As Batman trounces them, Joker pleads with him to recognize their mutuality, their essential bond. But Batman refuses, hiding behind machismo and a kid-friendly version of the “no fucks given” superficiality that hangs off masculinity like an ill-advised, anachronistic cloak.

This is probably the one time where if someone said their favorite character in the movie is the Joker, I won’t feel a need to slap them upside the head.

Joker hatches a scheme to get up in Superman’s (Channing Tatum) super-prison, the Phantom Zone, to unleash a bunch more villains from all over nerd fandom (Sauron is in there, so’s Zod and Daleks and even the fucking Wicked Witch). As Joker rips Gotham apart with his new pals, his only wish to prove to Batman once and for all that he is important, Batman goes through the process of learning that other people are important and should be valued. He learns about finding a family! It’s fun, unexpected, and occasionally very moving.

Fixated on new commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), Batman, dressed as Bruce Wayne, accidentally adopts Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) who refers to Batman and Bruce Wayne as his “two dads” (brilliant) until he finds out they’re the same guy. Cera brings a wide-eyed earnestness and hilarious lack of subtlety to the role, and it’s the best (only?) thing he’s done in quite a while. Not only does he need to learn how to appreciate his new Robin, he also has to learn to appreciate Alfred and Barbara as more than a means to his own carefully constructed and rabidly defended fantasy of adulation from the people of Gotham, who are an abstract to him until he finally gets his shit together.

Having Alfred eventually suit up is an inspired choice.

If I can mention something that didn’t quite click, it’d be Barbara’s storyline. At first it seems like it’s going to be a great reimagining of the Babs-to-Batgirl arc, but instead gets third fiddle until Batman suddenly and with no real connective tissue in the actual movie, decides Babs is not his love interest but his platonic co-worker. It’s cool that the movie doesn’t shoehorn a romance, especially when Babs makes frequent references to Batman as being old, but there’s something missing (maybe a scene or two) that makes the transition more smooth. Babs doesn’t show much interest in Batman, it’s true, but Batman needs to have a moment where he realizes his infatuation transforms into respect and friendship. You can glean it from what you see, definitely, but it’s like a blurry spot on a photograph, which makes me think it’s an underwritten part of the no doubt many drafts this movie went through before being finalized.

Though I’m spending a lot of time focusing on the deeper characterization this movie presents, it’s not as if this is some kinda Charlie Kaufman meditation on the existential crises of old white dudes. That stuff is there for adults to appreciate as they watch this ostensible kids’ movie. But like The Lego Movie, this one is also filled with great jokes especially if you like Batman and Lego. Even if you don’t, there are great one-liners, sight gags, and extremely creative references all over the place here. It’s packed to the brim with solid content and it never lulls or drags except in the slightly overdone action sequences, but even those are broken up with gags and moments of beauty derived from the way the Lego medium is used.

That robe kills me.

There’s this sense that Batman is a serious character. This has to do with serious takes in the comics (The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, etc) which work or don’t work depending on who you ask, but mostly it has to do with the Nolan movies which ushered in an era of movies that take superheroes so seriously that it has become its own running joke. Its own useless can of shark repellent sprayed on everything the WB is trying to do with the DCEU to the ruination of all. I’m not saying a serious, Michael Mann style take on Batman was unwarranted or shouldn’t have worked. I’m saying that Batman is and always was a super silly character and the Achilles’ Heel of any serious take on the character is in forgetting that. Zack Snyder kind of hates altruistic superheroes because he is an objectivist and so he has finished Nolan’s (also probably an objectivist) work of robbing the fun out of these characters. No one in their right mind thinks that Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman or the Dark Knight trilogy are fun movies. Even Suicide Squad couldn’t stop getting in its own way long enough to be consistently fun. These movies don’t have to be fun. It’s okay to try serious and grim once in a while, but the MCU and Deadpool prove that you can be pretty dark and pretty serious while also remembering to be fun. I think after five or six straight movies where everything is serious and grim, it’s refreshing to find the fun again.

Lego Batman is super goddamn fun. It utterly embraces the goofy cartoonishness of its comic book origins, rather than deconstructing them to death. It’s definitely having so much fun at the expense of Batman, and everything that’s been done with Batman for literally decades, that it might be a bit tough for the super serious Batfans to accept.   I had a hard time getting my thirteen year old daughter to want to see this because she thought a comedic take on Batman was a stupid idea. And she doesn’t give a shit about Batman. It’s just that’s how successfully Nolan and Snyder have reduced the character to that one grimdark dimension in the popular consciousness. Kids grew up with hyper-serious Batman and they’ve forgotten about shark repellent Batman. Thankfully most of them like Lego and Batman so much and so generally that they, like my daughter, saw this movie in droves. And it will remind them and hopefully Warner Brothers that Batman can be fun.

Because fun works.

His body is a roadmap of all the mistakes they’ve made with this character in 17 years. This time, Logan comes correct.

People have been waiting a long time for this, but they maybe didn’t know it would be like this. Cryptic way of saying that people love comic book characters, genuinely love them, and want Hollywood to do right by them. Too often, they get it wrong and the fans think they know what they want. But does anyone really know? I doubt many people would envision Logan as the “right” interpretation of the characters. But it is. I doubt many people would have expected, after so many mixed and outright bad X-Men movies, for Logan to be so much better it’s not even funny… but it is.

The thing is, it got here by not giving a shit about the silly trivial details that the nerdiest fans get so hung up on. Logan’s hair, for example. Or why Professor X suddenly has some. These things aren’t really important, but they are the superficial details that the big fans obsess over all in the name of “getting it right”. It’s why some people are going to be bent out of shape that this isn’t an Old Man Logan adaptation (terrible comic anyway). So what makes Logan “right”, then? I think most simply because it focuses on having a good story that these characters can fit in, rather than the other way around. This movie is light on plot, but dripping with subtext and incredibly strong characterization. We’ve been watching Hugh Jackman play Wolverine and Patrick Stewart play Charles Xavier for almost twenty years and they were always a big part of the reason why people kept coming back in spite of the stupid shit the X-Men movies have gotten up to in that time. That’s an era of performances in movies that didn’t deserve them. So now, for their final go around, James Mangold made a movie that does deserve them.

At the same time, it’s important to realize that this isn’t sudden proof that sadness and violence is what makes a “good” comic book movie. It helps make Logan good, because those elements interact with some mature themes and storytelling. Without that, with only the grim and the violent, you get DCEU movies. Logan is strong alchemy, and I don’t think it can be replicated any more than Deadpool can. There’s contextual stuff happening here and it’s a big part of why this movie is blowing everybody away. But if you skipped to the finish line, we’d have this good movie maybe but we wouldn’t have a movie that makes people grip their chairs or feel like they’ve lost a friend by the end. Context is everything.

SPOILERS, BUB.

The functional elements of the story are pretty simple and all the better for it.

No one cares less about the X-Men continuity than Fox, who changes it every outing. No one except for maybe James Mangold who has twice now made Wolverine movies so far outside the continuity that it mostly ceases to matter. There are references here and there, but these last two movies have been able to refine their way to something by avoiding that mess almost completely. This time, he did it by setting the movie in the future. Logan takes place in 2029, when new Mutants have stopped being born and the old ones have mostly died or gone into hiding. Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Logan (Hugh Jackman), who goes by his birth name James Howlett now, have outlived them all along with Caliban (Stephen Merchant). They live together on the edge of nowhere in El Paso, Texas, barely keeping themselves going.

Logan works as a limo driver to get the money together for the drugs Charles needs to dampen the really harsh effects of what seems to be a degenerative brain disease. His seizures can, when they go off, kill everyone around him and there’s a strong implication that this is exactly what happened to most of the other familiar faces from their shared past. Logan is hard-drinking, slow-healing, and vaguely suicidal. While Caliban worries at him, acting as the trio’s den mother, he hides a single adamantium bullet: the only thing that can kill him besides time.

This movie beats the holy shit out of Logan.

Far from an idyllic life, it is nonetheless shattered when Logan’s past comes knocking one last time. It turns out that new mutants have been born, but they were created by a company called Transigen. There’s actually tons of subtle storytelling around Transigen, so they’re not just Staple Badguy Factory #323. The movie slowly builds a world around Logan, which works really well since this is kind of a road movie, and that world seems to be largely the fault of Transigen. Using the DNA of mutants, mostly long dead, they created a girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) who is biologically Logan’s daughter. A rogue nurse (Elizbeth Rodriguez) from the company’s secret project tries to save Laura with Logan’s help, and he is slowly and reluctantly drawn in to one last adventure. The backbone here is the relationships between characters, and this backbone could work even in a movie about normal people trying to figure their shit out. At its barest level, this is a movie about an angry, broken, and fundamentally sad middle aged dude who is waiting for his deranged dad to die when all of a sudden he is forced into a relationship with an estranged daughter he didn’t know he had. This is the movie. Add in Transigen, 20 years of X-Men movie baggage that is subtly interwoven in the movie, and some really incredible action and you get Logan. But that backbone is key.

Ostensibly, Logan is a road movie. But it mixes in elements of Westerns, neo-noir, and gritty action so well that it feels like a singular genre. Everything works together so well that you get the feeling James Mangold always had this movie in him. It’s hard to find a guy who has tried more genres and very different types of movies than him, and you can see that each one has left its mark. There’s a synthesis happening in Logan that becomes really noticeable when you get the context of who Mangold is. Again, context is everything.

But people who came to see Logan claw people in the fucking head will be happy too.

The first third of the movie is relentlessly bleak. A stark tone is set and you’re left wondering how in fuck the movie is supposed to summon up any momentum to propel these characters outside of just waiting to die. There’s a certain amount to which Logan’s boiling rage, maybe the thing that’s really keeping him going, and his (pretty funny) bickering with Caliban and Xavier keeps it light enough to prevent the movie from going up its own ass. But the movie really gets going when Laura shows up, and I’m here to tell you that I’d be hard pressed to pick out a movie that uses a kid better than Logan does. It helps that Dafne Keen is phenomenal and just completely steals the movie in most of her scenes, especially the action. Her feral cries of unbridled rage are an echo of her father’s, and there’s a recognition and bond that forms between them as the movie goes on. It’s not very different from the beats of The Last of Us (Logan even looks quite a bit like Joel). I’m sure that’s a coincidence, but it’s not a coincidence that people really respond to this stuff. It gives the movie so much emotional heft and motivation that the action scenes, cinematic and cool and bloody as they are, also have an integral element that is usually missing from slicker, less subtle action-heavy movies (including other superhero movies). The movie doesn’t over-rely on action and it doesn’t go big unless it has to, but you really feel every blow and every wound because you care about the people this shit is happening to. Logan slowly convinces you to get invested, to give up your detachment, and that’s something I think genre movies (especially comic book superhero movies) have a hard time doing.

Another thing I really liked about Logan was that its world-building is very present and often very (subtly) political. There’s a whole thing about Transigen operating behind the scenes to orchestrate, even accidentally, the end of the mutant subspecies. They seem to be a subtle shot at corporatism and particularly companies like Monsanto. Genetic tampering gone really wrong, but in a way almost no one notices. There are times in the movie where people drink and eat stuff with the packaging clearly shown and it seems like product placement but it’s actually setup for a bit where the bad guy, Dr. Rice (Richard E. Grant) explains that the mutant gene was turned off, meaning no more mutants, because Transigen laced its food products from its industrial farms with stuff. Now it’s trying to create new ones, but failing in their central goal of making mutants controllable. Transigen, in a very real way, has created this world and their presence is felt throughout the movie, making messes and using its “Reaver” mercenaries to clean up after itself. Led by Donald (Boyd Holbrook), the Reavers are a bunch of ex-military types who themselves seem like a commentary on the lost lives and lost limbs of soldiers in America’s many wars. Give them new limbs, a new war, and they’ll be oppressors. In the sense that Logan is a Western, Transigen are the cattle barons employing PTSD Civil War vets to step on the little people in the semi-mythic “valley” that this movie references, in a paired homage to Shane. There’s a concern for this kind of shadowy corporate exploitation running under the surface of the movie, just enough to give it some weight and not enough to let it distract from the core story. That’s doing it right.

Move over, Hitgirl.

The movie also has some not so subtle digs at its own context. Laura reads X-Men comics, which Logan points out are bullshit. He talks about suiting up as a way to draw attention to yourself, to play the part of a hero. He wants none of it, though Xavier pushes him to remember that a hero isn’t about how you look but what you do. You can be a hero in small ways, with sacrifices and nobility and sheer giving a shit. It’s a wake-up call in some ways, I think, where the movie is speaking directly to us. This theme of the importance of caring for others and doing something about it has been present in all the best superhero movies, over and over again. A direct response to the “no fucks given” and fake cynicism that is way too easy to get sucked into.

Logan is going to be a huge hit. A lot of people are already drawing a direct line from Deadpool, which was another R-rated superhero “gamble” that paid off in spite of the many very good reasons for anybody to be skeptical about it. I do think Deadpool‘s success helped Fox realize that they shouldn’t lose their nerve about an R-rated Wolverine movie. They let Mangold make the movie his way and the confidence and focus of that vision will pay off. What I hope is that we don’t see a bunch of movies trying to mimic what makes Logan work. You need to lay down groundwork, you need to provide or rely on context for magic like this to happen. This isn’t a “roadmap” to making people take comic book movies seriously. It’s not going to validate your obsessive nerdy fandom by taking this shit “seriously”. Nothing about Logan is forced. It’s got real heart to balance its grim and gritty take on what is, conceptually, a truly silly character from a truly silly medium. What I want is for Fox and other studios to trust filmmakers to make these movies with something to say, rather than trying to hit boxes from a “Make that Marvel money” checklist and failing miserably to do that because they have no understanding of how Marvel makes that Marvel money.

I mean let’s not forget this is a movie where he fights a clone of himself while bonding with another clone that is treated as his child.

That’s what’s missing from other movies that try to force “maturity” through signifiers like violence or swear words. I mean, those elements are trivial. Getting excited about Xavier saying “fuck” fifteen times or Wolverine sticking his claws in some dude’s skull… that’s only human, but it doesn’t make something more real or more “adult”. It’s trivial and it’s okay that it’s trivial.

What makes Logan real and “adult” is the way it treats its characters and its world. It takes their humanity seriously, not their fucking wardrobes. Iconography is something I’ve thought about a lot since watching DCEU rain garbage on itself and light it all on fire last year. It’s the way these movies almost invariable fall into the temptation to focus on iconography, in service of what? That angry dude on the internet who hashtags #notmywolverine because there’s no spandex? Or the guy who really wanted to see Hulk incest-raping She-Hulk and creating a brood of backwater Hulkbillies? That’s iconography, toying with it and using it to create shock and intrigue… but there’s no substance in there. It’s about twisting the tangible details or just lighting them on fire and you can get away with that for a while, because shock sells, but at the end of the day it’s hollow unless you’re actually trying to say something. Which is why I think Mark Millar is a hack.

Every aspect of the movie is stripped down as much as possible, bare and raw, in service of its story.

What Logan is trying to say is pretty simple. It’s saying that there’s always time to give a shit, to find fulfillment by caring and acting. That’s not going to blow any minds, but the power of it is real power and it’s incredibly moving and hard-fought to make a movie like this that could just as easily have been shallow and trivial. To not trivialize a fundamentally trivial medium is a tight rope to walk, and I really hope more filmmakers like Mangold come along to play with the “genre” (it’s not really a genre, more of a sandbox for genres to play in) of comic book superheroes and say something interesting with it and not just put the toys in positions where it looks like they are fucking or decapitating each other.

I guess a quicker way to say what I’m trying to say is that scenes where Xavier tells a goofy old man joke and makes Logan smile are just as important as “finally” seeing Logan stab dudes “for real” with his badass claws. Scenes where Laura mimics mannequins to show Logan sympathy, because she has so little socialization or real experience to draw from, are just as important as scenes where she rips off dude’s heads and throws them around at other dudes. That tension is where this movie lives. A tension that is often missing in genre movies, so focused on iconography and the superficial trappings of genre, and they are poorer for it. That tension is profound and I think most people can relate to it because we do want larger than life characters and action and worlds, but we also really want to see ourselves reflected in them. Logan has that and it’s what people are responding to. It’s why it might be the first X-Men movie to make grown men, maybe with daughters of their own, to choke back tears and listen to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt on repeat.

Yeah.

I’m not super up on Key and Peele so I don’t really know the work of Jordan Peele but I have a feeling now that I should get acquainted. I saw Keanu and thought it was a bit similar to Pineapple Express but otherwise pretty good, and I’m aware of some of the most famous sketches Key and Peele have done. Mostly, though, I entered into Get Out without a lot of preconceived notions about Peele as a filmmaker. After Get Out, I’ve gotta say that I hope the rumors he has several more thematically similar movies planned are true.

Get Out plays like an homage to classic low-key horror from the 70’s and 80’s, movies that were big on atmosphere and low on flashy effects or obvious scares. I didn’t find Get Out to be particularly “scary” but that hardly matters. I think a horror movie doesn’t have to be scary in a visceral “looking over your shoulder at on the walk home” kind of way to be effective, and besides it is possible that non-white viewers will find it much more viscerally scary than I did as a viewer who passes for white and has not had to deal with the kind of shit that happens. That said, Get Out is incredibly unsettling and creepy, especially since it is punctuated by expertly placed comedy, like little release valves that tease some of the tension away just so Peele can double down on it a scene or two later. You’d never know this was Peele’s first horror movie, especially since humor in horror is a difficult rope to walk for even veteran filmmakers and it’s walked so very well here. Get Out is already one of the best movies of the year, and will probably go down as a hugely fresh perspective in horror, a genre that is at once welcoming and desperate for them.

Ultimately, Get Out is getting notice less for being a horror movie and more for being a movie that uses horror to discuss race. It’s worth noting that the way it’s a horror movie seems to be a seamless hybrid of horror from an urban black perspective (and urban is not here intended to be code for “street”) and classic atmospheric horror. The racial commentary is well constructed, wryly illustrated in dialogue and the premise/playing out of the story, and is unflinchingly confrontational without being polemic (and therefore much more difficult for assholes to dismiss). Some of its humor and perspective reminded me of the similarly clever Atlanta, so if you dig that but don’t usually like horror, this still might be a movie for you.

SPOILERS ARE POISON FOR HORROR MOVIES, SO QUIT READING NOW.

In some ways, this film feels like a long sketch gone horribly and hilariously wrong.

Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) has been dating Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) for about five months and things are getting serious enough for her to invite him back to her parents’ place in upstate New York (I can only assume). He is nervous that they’ll be kind of weird about his being black, especially because Rose says she never told them. She dismisses his nervousness, referring to their bumbling liberal values and he somewhat reluctantly goes along with it. He likes this girl, he knows meeting the parents has gotta happen sometime, and all this plays out like a pretty regular scene from a dramedy or romantic comedy about relationships. Except for that its preceded by a quietly piercing scene where a black man (Lakeith Stanfield, who also plays my favorite character from Atlanta) looking for a friend’s address is “randomly” abducted by a dude in a mask. The neighborhood looks uncomfortably white, like the car the attacker drives, and none of that is an accident but it’s just subtle enough. Subtle enough that any viewers still possessed of the notion that this is just another horror movie (but with more black folks than usual) can keep that notion going a little longer. To the extent that this movie was made to be at least aware of white audiences, Peele seems loathe to give away the conceit of his movie too quickly. Better for the ignorant viewer to slowly internalize what they are seeing and hearing.

That said, even as early as the first meeting with Rose’s very white parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), you start to develop a sense of where Peele is going with this movie, or at least how he is going to get there. Dean makes several comments (his attitude to deer, in particular, when the movie takes time to show how Chris empathizes with the deer they hit) that could seem innocent on their surface, but felt coded and vaguely threatening. My sense of this was that Chris, who seems to want to just keep his head down and get through the bullshit, would notice those things but have to choose between reacting to them (prompting drama with his girlfriend’s parents) and ignoring them as perhaps being products of his own sensitivities. That’s a trap, a kind of self-inflicted gas-lighting that masquerades as self-awareness and self-checking. I think this is something that will be immediately recognizable and insightful for viewers who go through this or are, like me, at least aware of it. I think that’s an early signal of the level Peele is operating on throughout this film, which is absolutely rich with this kind of layered meaning. The one way I can relate to it is when I’m around wealthy people and sometimes wonder if my being different is being subtly called up in their comments and questions. There’s actually a dimension of class in the movie: though Chris is a successful photographer who seems to be living a comfortable life in an expensive city, the Armitages are a whole other thing.

Keener has never been really creepy in a movie before. Didn’t know she had this in her!

More overly threatening is Rose’s brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones). If I can pause to give this movie a quick nitpick, it would be this character. Jeremy is wild and angry and demented (he’s the guy who chokes out Stanfield’s character at the beginning), and the performance works for that but it is also infused with hamming that seems to be a clumsy attempt by Caleb Landry Jones to be super actorly. Here, his voice and accent choices (completely different from his family’s) are just distracting and play like he’s in a different movie from everybody else. I didn’t buy the character fully and it weakened any scene he was in. And I generally like Landry Jones as an actor, just not this kind of obnoxious attmpted-scene-stealing performance. It reminds me of shit Ryan Gosling used to do (better) back in the day.

As the weekend proceeds, Chris becomes increasingly aware of a sense of wrongness around him. The way Missy aggressively admonishes his smoking habit, only to ambush-hypnotize him late one night, feels like the first sign that the visage is slipping. And Chris struggles to maintain his “everything is cool” demeanor as the Armitages and their parade of rich white fucks give him ever more reason to drop it and leave. Part of the tension of the movie is just how long it takes Chris to wise up, and I think this is part of the point though some might dismiss it as trademark horror movie stupidity and get annoyed. Chris always seems to be struggling just  a bit to stay casual and calm. The struggle is not dramatized, and is delivered subtly through Daniel Kaluuya’s incredible performance. Without this at the center of the movie, I think a lot of the complexity Peele is going for would be lost or easily ignored in favor of surface elements.

Also an MVP though!

Kaluuya’s sincerity and quiet expressiveness would be one thing on their own, but Peele can’t stay away from comedy and uses it here to great effect. His main vehicle for this is Lil Rel Howery, playing Chris’s friend Rod. Rod gets to pop in and comment on Chris’s experiences whenever the movie needs to jettison some tension. His over-the-top paranoia about Chris’s situation, right from the get-go, is part of why Chris is able to sustain his own delusion that nothing all that weird is happening. With Rod giving voice to premature and hilarious fears and anxieties, Chris can safely dismiss them and keep up his side of the pretense. I think that’s a brilliant way to show how having a sense of humor about racial tension can be both a gift and a curse, something I imagine Peele is acutely aware of.

In the end, though, Rod is almost 100% right about what’s going on in the Armitage house. Even though it sounds fucking outlandish, even his quickly dismissed notion that it’s magic (magic doesn’t exist!) seems to have some merit. In some ways the layering of the comedy and horror in Get Out echoes The Cabin in the Woods on a mechanical level, and I think that includes having the slightly ridiculous supporting character be ultimately right about everything. Just think about how crazy Get Out goes with the hypnosis/mind control thing… it’s not just hypnosis, but a kind of occult (look again at those pictures on the basement walls) body-jacking enterprise. It’s very much magic.

Stanfield is just… creepy. The movie lingers on him in all his scenes as “Andrew” as if Peele really wants the fascination to settle in.

The thing I kept thinking about with regard to what Get Out is saying about race relations between black folks and white folks is that it comes down to a move from overt hatred and racial phylogeny (though these elements are very present in the movie too) to a deeper kind of ownership, and therefore enslavement, of black human beings. When blind art dealer Hudson (Stephen Root, one of the most well cast actors in the movie) explains to Chris why he has been chosen for the body-switching. He highlights all the myriad reasons that explain Chris’s question “why black people?” and they all represent the facets of the ways white culture co-opts, steals from, colonizes, and ultimately enslaves black culture. Being cool like black people (literally embodied by Stanfield’s character being a jazz musician), being physically powerful like black people, being virile and sexually exotic like black people, and finally having the soul of black people. So it becomes about dismantling and re-purposing blackness, especially black bodies, so that they remain useful and productive for the oldest, whitest assholes on Earth. If Peele wanted to drop his mic at that point, I’d totally understand but he doesn’t even stop there.

What I thought was an incredibly well-placed punch from Peele, taking the above steps further, was this idea of Hudson being blind both literally and figuratively, and coveting Chris’s eyes as well as his “eye”, his perspective of the world as an artist. His soul, really. The black soul, especially the soul of a black artist, is the final thing to take, right? And it’s no accident, as if anything in this movie is, that photography and light and the eyes are so integral to the way the body-jacking is both enacted and disrupted. It seems that Peele is putting forth a thesis that more than wanting to enslave or destroy black folks because they are subhuman, white racists actually covet blackness and wish to possess or embody it themselves. When that clicked, it was the feeling I described about getting it. It’s not that I suddenly “get” racism or understand what it’s like to be black or anything like that. It’s more that I got what Peele was saying, and honestly he’s saying it so well that it’s probably hard not to get it (I hope?). In spite of the joke-like structure of this realization, there is nothing funny about it. It’s so existentially horrifying as an outsider that I can only imagine how angry and sad such a concept must feel to black folks and nonwhite folks who regularly face people demonstrating the kinds of motivations and fucked up psychology that this movie dramatizes.

When everything falls into place, Chris doesn’t flinch from what he has to do.

Though Chris kills the evil Armitages without a lot of hesitation, there’s almost no pageantry or cinematic artifice around it (like in, say, Django Unchained). The catharsis is low on fanfare, and there’s a sense of Chris being resigned rather than vengeful. Because so much of the movie is filled with intention, I wonder about the intention of this. Chris mostly just wants to “get out”, and he does try to take Georgina (Betty Gabriel) with him, but he doesn’t fully rise up in a typical horror movie table-turning. It must have been tempting to make him a temporary action hero, or symbol of black anger at white oppression (like in, say, Django Unchained), but Peele shows restraint here as well and goes fairly low-key (but still very intense) for the escape sequence. Perhaps the main point of this sequence was to show how absolute the damage done to Georgina and Walter was, that they could not be saved and could not save themselves. With these black-looking people acting mostly as part of the danger Chris is in, the consequences (tragic?) of that relationship in the intensity of those last few scenes might have been what Peele wanted the viewer to focus on.

I had a hard time focusing on anything other than Alison Williams, whose performance in this movie is absolutely unnerving. If the Armitages all represent different aspects of the hatreds, prejudices, aggressions, and psychologies that motivate exploitation and oppression of nonwhite people, Rose is probably the scariest. Dean seems to be that careful urbane white supremacist who uses the language of the left to disarm fears while dropping coded dehumanizing ideas into his seemingly casual remarks. Jeremy is seething rage and violent, toxic masculinity turned racial. Missy is control and domination of behavior and impulse, shown through her weirdly over the top attitude about smoking and the way she dominates her own family. Meanwhile, Rose is a total sociopath, switching emotions on and off as need be and becoming a complete blank slate whenever she’s not being Rose. Her chasing Chris out with a loaded rifle was way scarier to me than anything Jeremy said or did. I know Williams from Girls and though Rose resembles Marnie when she’s playing the part, I didn’t know Williams could do the cold lizard-like thing she does here. Just… *shudder*.

On the subject of performances, Betty Gabriel destroys. Wouldn’t be the same movie without her.

There have been some articles written about the way Get Out may be commenting on interracial relationships, specifically that they shouldn’t happen. Some of this stuff seems a little silly given that Peele is himself engaged to a white woman, but I do think there’s a point to be made about those privileged young white women, like the fake Rose we see for most of the movie, who are maybe falsely “woke” and who use both their privilege and their struggles as women to justify a grasping, entitled sense of what it is to have any kind of identity struggle or struggle against oppression. I know young women who are like that, who think any struggle is fair game to speak for and who collect signifiers of their feminism or their intersectionality as merit badges to trot out whenever they want to appropriate someone else’s struggle. I want to point out that I know white men who do this shit too, but typically they lack as strong a sense of confidence in their wokeness because to even pretend to be woke is to acknowledge their own massive privilege, which puts them rungs above even the whitest woman in the world in the hierarchies of privilege. But that’s the libtard cuck snowflake in me speaking, so the fuck do I know?

Whatever I do or don’t know, I have to believe that not all white people are inherently, incurably racist. I have to believe that while some white girls just want to freak out their parents with a black boyfriend, or earn some kind of social consciousness merit badge by same, there are just as many if not more who are aware of their own privilege and can forge a meaningful connection to a black man on a basis of awareness and communication. It’s possible that the odds are against this, though. Especially in America. But all the same, I don’t think that Get Out is a horror movie about interracial relationships. I think it’s a horror movie about the black experience of a certain and pervasive type (or types) of white agression.

Either way, it’s a great fucking horror movie.

This movie is totally hollow.

Over time, an unofficial rule of this blog developed and it is that I don’t typically go back and review movies from a previous year. There are always way too many and not enough time in the current year so I usually concentrate on what I’m seeing in theaters. For Assassin’s Creed, I am going to make an exception. Because I’m mad at it. It is so, so bad and the worst part is that it’s kind of regular type bad (it’s a lazy, shallow mess) rather than interesting or ambitious type bad. If all a video game movie can hope for is to be some shade of bad, I’d prefer the ambitious and bizarre bad of Warcraft to this any fucking day.

About the nicest thing you can say about this movie is that it’s occasionally gorgeous and very occasionally has some interesting ideas or revisions of the Assassin’s Creed “lore” as we might know it from the games. I played those games in the halcyon days before Ubisoft decided to make it an annual release and drive anything good about it to the merry land of tedious repetition and stagnant innovation. Still, I was cautiously optimistic about this movie because the trailer was stylish and there’s some solid talent both behind and in front of the camera. I was one of the people who liked Justin Kurzel and Michael Fassbender’s previous collaboration, 2015’s Macbeth adaptation. If Kurzel could bring his grit and eye for imagery to a video game movie, all the better. And he did, sort of, which is why there are shots in Assassin’s Creed that are great and might even trick some viewers into believing it’s ever more than some pretty packaging for a completely boring, by the numbers plot-driven vanity project. And it does feel like a vanity project for Fassbender.

All that being said, Assassin’s Creed is what I called “regular type bad” so at the end of the day, its many sins will be glossed and forgiven by people with an investment in what it offers: the elusive and fleeting thrill of seeing moments from a video game brought to life in a movie. There’s also that people probably genuinely want this movie to be way better than it is, that will fill in the yawning gaps it leaves everywhere (but especially with characterization, of which there is almost none) with dismissive “they explained that” statements. And yes, this movie explains itself a lot, right from the half-assed opening text, but it rarely if ever does anything else.

A movie where Bobby Sands is actually part of an ancient order of anarchists? That would be kind of disrespectful, right?

Assassin’s Creed is all plot, full steam ahead. We don’t get to know any of its characters and they frequently elucidate their motivations and reactions in stilted, awkward dialogue which often feels cryptic or like the characters are talking past each other. It seems like a first draft or a script that was chopped up during post-production to cut this movie down from two hours plus to its fairly lean one hour-forty minute final runtime. Interestingly, this movie clocks in at one hour-fifty-six minutes and fifteen minutes of that is credits. It’s kind of bizarre and suggests major post-production problems, which were rumored before the movie was released anyway (it was pushed back almost a full year too).

So maybe it’s not surprising that the story feels half-baked and the characters are kind of just there. Our “hero” is Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) who watched his dad murder his mom (played by the director’s wife, Essie Davis) sort of and then spent the next thirty years living a “life in the shadows” before killing a pimp and being executed for it. Abstergo, a shadowy corporation, plucks him from the clutches of death and inducts him into an experimental facility where they use shitty CG and a giant robot claw to force certain people to confront their genetic memories in search of an elusive and mysterious object. Scientist Sofia (Marion Cotillard) wants to eradicate VIOLENCE ™ by finding the source of “mankind’s” FREE WILL ™. Any philosophical nuance in these concepts, particularly how the Templars use violence to end violence, is barely touched on past a snarky remark from Cal. Sofia’s dad, a bored Jeremy Irons who mostly just stands around and looks at shit, will take all the credit for finding the Apple of Eden, a device only Cal can find the location of. They want it because they belong to the ancient Illuminati-like Templar Order, which wants to eradicate FREE WILL ™ and control people? Opposing them are the Assassins, whose anarchic “Creed” is often cited (because it sounds kinda cool) but never really means much to anyone in the movie. It just boils down to this movie checking boxes, and it rarely seems to aspire to more than that.

Cotillard is totally victimized by this movie. It’s barely a performance.

The Apple is just a MacGuffin and the movie feels like it’s about to break into a Community style parody of itself. Cruelly, that moment never comes. Instead this nonsense is treated as seriously as possible but it’s never lived in the way the mythology and lore of other high-concept genre movies, like say superhero movies or Star Wars, is. Let’s look at the best example: the characters. The only real characters in this whole film are Cal and Sofia, with everyone else existing to advance the plot, do badass stunts, or just kinda be there. A more specific example? Take Maria (Ariane Labed)… wait, you don’t know who that is? Of course not. She is never named in the movie. IMDB told me her name. She’s the badass maybe-lover assassin that hangs out with Cal’s ancestor. She’s in every scene he’s in almost, but she is never named and never has a personality. Then she is fridged in the laziest most callous way imaginable. I thought we were done with shit like this, Hollywood.

That’s exactly in line with how the other secondary characters are treated by the way. In the present day, there’s a bunch of captured Assassins living in Abstergo’s facility. It’s a cool idea, especially when the movie clumsily tries to show that they want Cal dead for the risk he poses. But none of these people have a character, not even the great Michael K. Williams who calls Cal “Pioneer” for seemingly no reason (but more on this later) and tries his best to look and sound wise. The other Assassins seem to be just waiting around for Cal to show up and lead them, but the movie never ever takes the time to set up why they never escaped at any other point. It’s so easy for them to bust out once the time finally comes, and there’s literally nothing Cal brings to the table to change anything besides his fucking pecs. In a less lazy or tooled up movie, there’d be some reason why the breakout couldn’t happen until Cal got there, is what I’m saying. And this movie is just full of poorly motivated things like this.

She is awesome and the movie does not respect her.

The whole 1492 Spain bit of the movie is a wash. It was cool to make it all in Spanish, and there’s an action sequence halfway through the movie that totally works and reminds you what is neat about Assassin’s Creed‘s take on movement. But interesting things like the connection between the “free-running” style of the Assassins and their “free will at all costs” ethos is never explored or even mentioned in this movie. It’s just rule of cool all the way down, which is exactly what makes it hollow and uninteresting past the eye candy of watching stunt doubles run around CGI buildings. The plot of this portion of the movie is skipped over and rushed through, but it has something to do with the Inquisition and the last Muslim power in Granada about to be snuffed out. There’s a hidden prince and everything, but the movie doesn’t care about any of this at all. Again, it’s kind of cool that the Assassins are trying to protect a Muslim dude, but the movie never pauses long enough to get to know anyone or anything so it just feels like iconography. Which is kind of one of the few things this movie does well, and which is often, sadly, enough to get movies adapted from insular nerd properties a pass from a certain demographic of viewers.

Speaking of rule of cool… what in fuck is up with the Animus? There is literally no reason to bother wasting what must have been a huge portion of this cheap-looking $180mil movie on this shit. The robotic claw is cool, but all the goofy cuts back to Fassbender climbing around holograms are a total waste since we just don’t need to see any of that. It doesn’t really look good (it’s cheap and weirdly lit, because holograms) and it serves almost no purpose. Near the end of the movie, when Cal has a poorly justified and unearned epiphany about whose side he’s really on, the Animus is finally used in a semi-interesting way to show him a row of his relatives, including his mother, to remind him of the legacy he comes from. It hints at a more interesting story, where Cal’s motives were more relatable, clear, and well-drawn. Imagine this movie where Cal seeks answers about his past, his ancestry, etc because he feels disconnected and lost? I hate to ask for a different movie, but what we get here is a gruff “resisting the call” and a low-key resentment for any kind of authority. It’s lazy riffing from the Big Book of Character Cliches and despite Fassbender doing his best impression of a brooding action badass, it never goes anywhere except the most lazy and perfunctory place possible.

Why don’t the Abstergo goons have guns? Why is taking off your shirt necessary for the final Animus run?

If I were rewriting this movie, I would find a way to make the story informed by the characters. Cal was orphaned and set adrift by this crazy ancient feud, shouldn’t he want answers and be self-motivated to find them even if it means flirting with becoming a Templar or carelessly helping them get what they want in a devil’s bargain? This feels like what the movie is trying to do, but it never gets there. Wouldn’t it also be more interesting if Sofia’s daddy issues dovetailed with Cal’s search for understanding, maybe prompting her own less-clumsy discoveries about her self? Instead, we get awkward and arch dialogue about ENDING FREE WILL ™ and how Templars have used religion and consumerism to combat it. It’s all very youtube “Elmo is Illuminati” deep. It could have been so much fucking better with just a little more care and detail.

Now back to “Pioneer”. This movie has a weird undercurrent of American chest-thumping going on. It’s just subtle enough to be missed, but once you see some of the more unanchored and weird things from this lens, they start to make more sense. The best gateway into that is the way Moussa (Michael K. Williams, though his character is never named) calls Cal “Pioneer” all the time. Let’s think about how Cal isn’t Irish like his dad. By the way, that scene with Brendan Gleeson was a nice touch but incomprehensibly written, like so much of the movie it was groping for something intelligible – a turning point in Cal’s self-understanding and motivation – but never achieved it.

Er. Anyways.

So Cal is American. His servile black ally inside Abstergo, with whom he never shares even a moment of camaraderie, refers to him as “Pioneer”… and the Apple winds up in the hands of FREE WILL ™ ally Christopher fucking Columbus. Only Americans, and only some of them, still see ol’ Chris the pillager as a hero. The movie recasts him and, somewhat more subtly, America as icons of FREE WILL ™. The Apple is always referred to cryptically as the “seed of mankind’s first rebellion” and where does it wind up? In a country that sees itself as a nation of free-thinking rebels, bastions and defenders of FREEDOM ™ for all “mankind”. That’s some affirming shit for this movie’s target audience, no doubt. Because it’s so clumsy I don’t really think it’s that insidious, but it is really fucking stupid and patronizing. It’s also cringey for the non-American viewers who, like me, might prefer a more brazen and adorable brand of American exceptionalism in American movies. Where’s Michael Bay when you need him?

Also patronizing.

My main issue with Assassin’s Creed is that it goes on for an hour and forty minutes and doesn’t really tell a story. It has a plot, and it has cardboard cutout characters, but the richness and texture of a fucking story just isn’t here. That is an egregious sin for a movie to make, especially a movie that takes upon itself the mantle of latest contender for an actual good video game movie. Warcraft was not good, but it did have a story. So did Mortal Kombat, which remains probably the best video game movie ever.

I always write stuff like this and hope/assume people know what I mean by story. Stories have to have five mechanical elements (plot, character, setting, theme, and conflict), and one could say Assassin’s Creed is paying lip service to them, but none of them work. Even the relative simplicity of storytelling in something like Star Wars leads to a tangible understanding of these five elements, which is what gives the thing richness and texture and meaning. When your plot is lazy, your characters lacking essential features, your setting poorly illustrated or squandered by other missing elements, your themes unclear or confused, and your conflict muddled by similar lack of clarity… you’ve got a movie like Assassin’s Creed and these movies come along pretty often, to be honest. Most big budget genre “epics” tend to be hopelessly tampered with or stripped down to appeal to the lowest common denominator, winding up as McEpics that all make the same mistakes and fail to impact the pop culture in a meaningful way. Assassin’s Creed will stir up vaguely positive feelings in some people, but it’ll never have any staying power. Like a Cowboys and Aliens or a Transformers movie, it’s more concept than anything else and concepts alone just don’t make satisfying stories, no matter how many pedigreed actors you get to mumble your lines or how many underpaid animators you can leash to fill 1492 Spain with smoke and grime.

The sense of scale in this movie is just masterful.

I really, really didn’t like 2005’s King Kong and it was really the beginning of my reappraisal of Peter Jackson as a filmmaker (George Lucas 2.0). I only saw it the one time and while people have reassured me that it’s got redeeming qualities, and I’m sure it does, I have never had the desire to revisit it again.

Kong: Skull Island on the other hand? I think I’ll be rewatching this one a ton. For one thing, it’s fucking gorgeous. So well designed and beautifully shot. It’s an obvious course-correction after Godzilla 2014’s very mixed bag, and this might not sit well for fans of that movie, but I loved it. Mostly what this means is that Kong has a diverse cast of human characters that are fleshed out to varying degrees and have charisma and meaningful arcs (for the most part). Godzilla had one dude who just kept being inexplicably there for everything. Kong simply does it one better by paying a little more attention to the humans and also by making sure Kong is around early and often. It maintains the somewhat distant perspective on Kong that Godzilla had with its titular beast, but I actually kind of like that. It’s better if humans are sort of watching this big ape-god and arguing among themselves about its true motives and traits. It gives it a slight tinge of cosmic horror, where even with all the jawing about it we’re pretty sure no one really ever understands these great monsters fully.

In most ways, Kong plays like a very old fashioned adventure movie. It has a playful sensibility with tons of visual gags and a critical attention to small details that helps it pull off that swashbuckling tone. It feels like the cover of a 60’s Hollow Earth novel come to life, right down to the action figure hero and heroine. I was not expecting something with this much scale and confidence from Jordan Vogt-Roberts, whose previous movie Kings of Summer is one I really liked but is almost laughably smaller in every conceivable way. Still, Vogt-Roberts might owe a debt to Gareth Edwards but he very much makes his own mark in the Kaijuverse that they are trying to build. I think he’s the best bet for bringing together that inevitable movie where Kong and Godzilla throw down.

There are a lot of people in this movie, a healthy mix of characters as well as “redshirts”.

Kong opens with a dogfight over an uncharted island in 1944. The two pilots, one American and one Japanese, soon realize they are in a very strange place. Flash forward to 1973 with Bill Randa (John Goodman) and his protege Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) trying to secure funding for an expedition to said island, just as political problems seem poised to create a lot of upheaval in Washington (spoiler: Nixon gets impeached). In short order, many characters are introduced in a truly economic sequence of getting people together and ready to go to the island. Whole half seasons of television shows are spent on the kind of storytelling that is done here in a few short minutes. I hope people are paying attention to this because it’s incredible work, really, and probably going to be overlooked because it’s one of those “invisible cogs” of cinematic storytelling and plot momentum.

They need a cover story so they get with John Ortiz and his band of surveyors.

They need protection and helicopters so Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), a grumpy soldier who is pissed about giving up on ‘Nam and his unit, are assigned. Packard’s unit is full of good side characters, including Toby Kebbel (more on him later), Shea Whigham, Jason Mitchell, and Thomas Mann… all of whom get a few broad character notes, fit nicely into a familiar type, and even get to play around with expectations and tropes the audience might have in mind.

People who like Hiddleston and Larson are gonna have a lot to like. Both of them are instantly iconic and able to shoulder the aesthetic weight of their characters, which often does the heavy-lifting in terms of characterization overall.

Finally, they need a guide so Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) peels himself off a fucking movie poster somewhere else to join up. The last recruit is Mace Weaver (Brie Larson), an anti-war photojournalist who comes to document the trip and immediately butts heads with Packard over the war, connects with Conrad over their outsider status, and gets more character development in her introduction scene than there is for anyone in all of Assassin’s Creed.

Some people have nitpicked that there are too many characters to do them all justice, but I think they’re wrong. While not really an ensemble picture, Kong is filled with subtle and economic (there’s that word again) characterization but isn’t afraid to also go big, sometimes with mixed results, when the time is right. I got the sense that many of these characters, especially the soldiers, represented different points of view about American military adventurism (a criticism of which is embedded all through this movie’s subtext). The characters talk to each other, they bond, they bicker, they sometimes get into heated confrontations. But there’s some heart here, mostly in Mann’s youngster Slivko and Kebbel’s awe-struck and contemplative Chapman.

Kong 2017 feels like Kebbel the same way 2005’s version felt like Andy Serkis.

One of my biggest struggles with the movie, actually, was the unceremonious way Chapman dies moments after experiencing a moment of quiet realization about the island and its megafauna. He is sort of like Jim Caviezel’s character in The Thin Red Line, actually. Just enough that you’re reminded of that movie, but not enough that it’s distracting or threatens the overall tone of Kong.

Ultimately, I think I get why Chapman dies the way he does, but it was hard to see the statement in its perfunctory execution. Vogt-Roberts repeats a version of this when Whigham’s character tries to do a heroic sacrifice for the group, only to be splattered against a wall by a Skull Crawler’s tail swipe. It’s a play on a trope which is then summarily undermined in a way that is sort of funny to me, but I think might seem to be overplaying the hand a little. The weakest characters are probably Brooks and San (Tian Jing) but even they transform from academics to hardened survivors by the end, which might not be a three dimensional dramatic arc but is more than many movies bother to have for minor characters (let alone major ones).

Ladies with flare guns. Was Vogt-Roberts trying to one-up Jurassic World?

The real heart comes from Marlow (John C. Reilly) who picks the movie up and runs away with it about a third of the way through. He’s the American who crashed on the island in ’44 and he delivers a pretty big exposition dump which would be a misfire if not for Reilly’s enthusiasm and vaguely unhinged performance. Though the trailers and a few early scenes make him seem like he’s going to be sheer comic relief and maybe threaten the tone of the movie from a different angle than Kebbel’s character does, it’s reigned in just enough to make room for legitimate badassery (samurai sword!), themes of transgressing political boundaries in the name of friendship, and a whole lotta heart. It’s no surprise that the movie’s credits are devoted to Marlow and not Conrad and Mace or some other surviving character. Marlow’s life, lost to a war in a profound sense, is interesting because it indicts World War 2 alongside Viet Nam, which is a fucking whacky thing for a movie to do even in 2017. WW2 is usually untouchable, but Kong reaches out a hand paw to gently, subtly take a shot.

Speaking of its anti-war themes, Kong does do what the trailers show and have its monstrous “hero” slaughter a lot of American soldiers. This is discussed by the characters, and the tension between the pursuit of vengeance and just trying to survive or move on forms a lot of the conflict between the human characters. Packard pretends he’s trying to save Chapman, but really he is just Captain Ahab hunting down his nemesis, on which he has projected not only the deaths of his men but also his deep-seated frustration about what he feels as his superiors giving up on the war he fought and probably fought hard. He’s understandable, in other words, but no less awful in the end. On the other hand, there’s Kong who winds up having pretty good reasons for being himself. I mean, the first thing the humans do when they get to the island is bomb the shit out of it, which turns out to not be about geology, but about Randa’s misguided attempts to right a wrong in his past that completely reframes the character. There’s also that Marlow’s experiences have helped the others to understand (to varying degrees) what Kong is all about and that there’s a much deeper threat to worry about, which Kong is probably necessary to fight. Perhaps this is supposed to be a metaphor for the fixation on Communism as a way for America to miss the Skull Crawlers for the Kong when the real threat was global destabilization, economic disparity, etc. Seems like something that might deserve more thought. Beyond any subtext, there’s the evidence that this movie tries really hard to humanize the characters, all of them, even when they do bad things. It gives it a touch of sophistication that surprised me and that, honestly, this movie could have gotten away with not having. It could have been as cartoonish in its politics and morality as it is in its setting and aesthetics and no one would have blinked.

I love getting more especially when I didn’t ask for it.

It’s easy to get audiences on Kong’s side, and while there’s some waving at the idea of Kong digging blondes, it’s not overdone.

The thing I think people are going to most appreciate about this movie, though, is its sense of scale. Especially in the last third, there are shots and sequences I won’t spoil here that will just drop jaws. Some of it is in the trailers, but a lot of it isn’t. Before the final showdown(s), the movie very deliberately paces the encounters with Skull Island’s various beasties, all of which are treated as animals with their own ecological niche that is interrupted by the newcomers. When it becomes time for Kong to throw down with the big Skull Crawler, the movie doesn’t deflate but rises to the occasion and becomes an incredibly satisfying battle royale that I think will impress the people who thought Godzilla didn’t have enough of this or that Pacific Rim was too darkly lit to be fully realized. Kong stomps creepy lizard ass in broad daylight, folks. Suffice it to say that the screenshots I’ve poached for this review just don’t do this movie justice whatsoever.

All in all, I went into Kong with slightly diminished expectations after some early mixed reviews suggested that the movie would be shallow and rushed. I disagree with those claims, as what I found was a lot of unnecessary (if we’re honest) depth in a well-paced adventure movie. And I do mean adventure. A lot of “adventure movies” are really just action movies because they never quite achieve the tone and atmosphere of an adventure story. Kong does this with aplomb, comparing more to something like Jurassic Park or Star Wars: A New Hope than to a John Wick or Rogue One. It has wonder, takes time to world-build and explore, and never loses sight of its sense of daring-do and fun even when things get grim. It’s not like adventure is a superior genre, though. It’s just rare because you can’t be lazy about it and in the pursuit of what makes money “works”, big budget movies usually cut corners and undermine their own tonal aspirations. That doesn’t happen here, so if you think you might like some buckles in your swash and a little of that old fashioned adventure, this is a great movie to remind you of what that’s like. Beyond that, though, it’s just a great movie and I think people should start getting excited about this Kaijuverse thing now.

This movie will totally prey on your irrational fear of triangles.

The Void is a movie where it is best to go in without knowing too much. However, to make sure the right people see this I will say up front that if you like cosmic horror (Lovecraft and/or Stephen King) and John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing you are primed to love this. It was made for you.

Beyond its horror pedigree and fairly game achievement of its ambitions, it is interesting to note that The Void is a partially cowdfunded film. That’s pretty cool to think about since not only are practical-effects driven movies like this one fairly rare nowadays, crowdfunding proves there’s both an appetite for them and the potential for more to be made.

Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski wrote and directed the hell out of this film. It has a fairly simple, straightforward premise that unfolds into truly eerie territory. One of the best things about it is that it gets at ya fast and often, spending only the minimal time on set up before getting into the good stuff. If you’re tired of horror movies that wait too long to show some monsters or tip the hand of weird shit going on, you’ll like the way this one is structured.

THERE ARE SPOILERS… IN THE VOID.

The setup feels like the beginning of a great Stephen King short story.

The film opens with a brilliant fakeout. We watch as a couple is chased out of a home and into the night by a pair of assailants. One is executed and the other escapes, and you’re invited to think that the attackers are a couple of evil dudes who are going to kick off whatever hijinx this movie is going to get up to. When the escaped “victim”, James (Evan Stern) runs across local cop Carter (Aaron Poole), he is taken to a hospital late at night where a diminished staff is trying to take care of a few local patients. The hospital has recently suffered a bunch of fire damage and only a small wing is still open.

Once Carter gets James there, the weird shit quickly begins. Triangle-faced cultists surround the hospital so that no one can leave, people start to lose their shit and attack each other, and the two guys from the fake-out opening show up and complicate things… just as one of the nurses turns into a truly disgusting and fucked up monster. Think The Thing or James Gunn’s Slither.

These guys are super scary and very well used throughout the film.

Most of the movie is about trying to survive this hospital of horrors. Most of the characters are thinly sketched, which might be a weakness in the film, but there’s also some meat in there too. The script takes a shot at creating some ambiguity and nuance through Carter’s relationship with his (ex? estranged?) wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe). They have strained relationship where they clearly still care about each other, but a tragedy in their past colors their interactions and gently builds up toward their ultimate fates.

While Carter tries to both wrap his head around what’s going on and keep everyone alive, he is afflicted with apocalyptic visions and moments of vertigo or hallucination. This starts to affect others as well until Allison is taken and forces Carter and friends to directly confront the horrors lurking in the burnt out hospital. The Triangle Cult is hiding all kinds of evil shit down there, including Cronenbergs and evil labs and flickering mood lighting.

Carter is kind of a great character in a way.

One of the things I like about Carter is that he feels like a throwback to the 70’s and 80’s genre heroes. Characters like John McClane or Roy Scheider in Jaws or Ed Harris in The Abyss are not walking off the overs of GQ and seem kind of ordinary, scrubby, and not all that heroic or inspiring… at first. Carter is implied to be a bit of a fuckup, but he has courage where it counts and it’s satisfying to watch him find it even though it is framed by one of the film’s only real narrative issues (more on this later).

Though they stick around til the end, the two killers from the beginning of the movie (who turn out to be hunting the Triangle Cult to avenge their loved ones) don’t get as much depth as Carter. The mute Son (Mik Byskov) always seems more willing to help than the aggressive Father (Daniel Fathers), but it’s the latter who gets the closest thing to an arc. Beyond them, the only character with an arc is junior nurse Kim (Ellen Wong) who is kind of a stock millennial character until she starts having to directly confront what’s happening.

Shit gets icky.

That narrative issue I mentioned earlier is the treatment of Allison. All of the characters in the film are fairly well acted, with people like Ellen Wong and Daniel Fathers able to imbue their characters with shades of depth through sheer performance. One of the things the movie does well is evoke Stephen King’s theme of regular people finding their courage and using it to overcome extraordinary circumstances. Allison and Carter are both brave and both face what’s happening in their own ways. However, Allison is taken and fridged and then becomes relegated to the usual horror trope of “woman character = capacity for childbirth”. This is not to say that there isn’t thematic or narrative justification, because there is. To talk about that, though, will require getting into the motivations of the film’s central villain, Dr. Powell (Kenneth Walsh).

Powell is doing all this to bring his dead daughter back. Over the course of the film, he both dies and comes back to life and taunts Carter with his seemingly rational perspective on the horrors that are happening. He started the “triangle cult” in his search for immortality and power over death. But his motivation is actually incredibly understandable and human, especially in light of the inhumanity he creates in pursuit of it. This is really good stuff, because usually villains in these kinds of movies are seeking power or enlightenment for their own sake. It also ties into Carter and Allison’s character arcs, where both salvation for a loved one and the connection between parents and children are relevant to everything that is happening. Carter and Allison’s loss makes sense as a vehicle through which Powell will bring his own child back, and there’s a narrative sense in Allison being this pregnancy vessel, cliche though it may be.

Powell was getting up to just no good.

The problem is that it’s all kind of cheap, especially if you’re not as generous as I am about the parent/child/loss subtext as I am. I think it’s a case of interesting intentions that aren’t necessarily well executed, due to relying on a somewhat dehumanizing trope and not doing a lot to rehabilitate it until the very end. In other words, there’s a lot of ways the filmmakers could have complicated their own device with Allison and kept her as a character, rather than pushing her aside to just provide motivation, horror, and ick factor. It seems like they kind of got that, too, because they partially salvage it in the film’s ending shot which includes Allison, standing with Carter in the Void, facing down whatever cosmic horrors lurk there. It’s a good way to end the film.

The Void is robust and satisfying all the way through, but I can see some people getting turned off by its copious gore and ambiguous cosmic horror elements. Personally, I don’t mind either of these things (ambiguity seems to be part and parcel with cosmic horror) and I loved this movie even if I cringed a little over Allison.

No one will accuse this movie of not looking great.

Ghost in the Shell as a 20 years removed live action adaptation of a seminal anime film is at once completely unnecessary and completely inevitable. We live in a weird period where the tropes and signifiers of the cyberpunk genre are everywhere we look. It makes a sort of sense that the most influential pieces of that history are being reclaimed and re-positioned for modern audiences. Not only is Ghost in the Shell a thing that happened, but Blade Runner is getting a sequel, shows like Incorporated also pay direct homage to and update the William Gibson and Margaret Atwood cyberpunk vision for the 2010s. But when you watch Marvel movies or the CW superhero shows, the technological gimmicks as well as many of the technological themes stories address (artificial intelligence, human enhancement, etc) are also present.

This is because we kind of live cyberpunk now, we’ve got all the big elements: sketchy corporations accruing more and more power, poorly understood technological progress unevenly distributed and always dovetailing between transcendence and frivolity, and a world where high-tech gadgets and cybernetic crime, warfare, and identity are taken for granted.

So what time could be better than now for an adaptation of Ghost in the Shell? This movie’s historical and iconographical relevance is only rivaled by its failure to address another cornerstone of our times: the latter days of white supremacy in an increasingly global context. Make no mistake, Ghost in the Shell is a very political film but it accomplishes this accidentally and becomes a “useful fool” in the discourses of identity politics, racial/cultural hegemony, and the gyre of entertainment representation. Now, maybe you’re not interested in all that shit. Read the review anyway, because I’ll be getting into the more technical stuff that works or doesn’t first. If you’re looking for a quick summary of the kind I usually put here, let’s say that Ghost in the Shell is… okay. Too much of the narrative is simplified or compromised, and while the imagery and action is beautiful and memorable it also frequently feels cheap outside of the really great practical effects and props that are sprinkled throughout the movie. It also has pretty rad music, though they should have used the ’95 theme more.

//SPOILERS//follow.review

Isolation and dehumanization are themes that are present but sort of clumsily executed.

In the film’s opening, we are introduced to an overlong crawl explaining the world (but leaving out important terminology like “ghost” that is frequently used in the movie) and a completely unnecessary scene where villainous Cutter (Peter Ferdinando) and conflicted Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche) discuss their latest project, a unique cybernetic body housing a human brain and destined to work in counter-terrorism with Section 9. Did I mention this scene was unnecessary? They don’t bother to explain Section 9 and otherwise deliver information we already know or are hearing too soon. Better to do a cold open, but they completely chicken out. So Ghost in the Shell is off to a great start.

It gets better during the scene where Major (Scarlett Johannson) defies orders and intervenes in a corporate meeting between representatives of Hanka Robotics and an African political organization. Creepy geisha bots, camouflage body suits, and ugly thugs with uglier cybernetics… you’ve seen the trailers. This is when the movie is at its best and thankfully it offers like three times as many action scenes as the 1995 anime. All of the action is good and, like the plot of the film, it mixes up stuff from the anime film and other media in the Ghost in the Shell sphere. One of the reasons, by the way, that I never became a super big fan of Ghost in the Shell is the three or four different versions of the same story that exist across manga and several overlapping anime series which frequently re-adapt the same storylines as if attempting to emulate American comic book superheroes. And who knows… maybe that’s what they were doing? In any case, the barrier to entry for Ghost in the Shell fandom is kind of stacked. Which is relevant to this review because it is part of the reason why I disagree with people who thought a live action film was a bad idea. More on that later.

If you haven’t, check out the Tested coverage of WETA workshop’s work on these things and other Ghost in the Shell props.

Major Mira Killian is the most cyborg of the cyborg hitters in Section 9, joined by her partner Batou (Pilou Asbaek) and an unfortunately marginalized multi-ethnic and interesting-looking support team. Their boss is Aramaki (Beat Takeshi) who always speaks in Japanese and has one of those hairdos where the art department unwisely decided to try and emulate ridiculous anime hair. Aramaki should have been a cool character but instead, he’s distracting even when he gets badass moments. Others’ mileage may vary on that, though. More interesting is Batou, who looked silly as fuck in the trailers but in whom Pilou Asbaek is able to infuse a quiet, affable humanity that nicely balances Major’s stoicism. Batou was possibly my favorite part of Ghost in the Shell. Their relationship is central in the movie, which is exactly right and one of the wiser story choices director Rupert Sanders and his writers made. Major, meanwhile, shows off Scarlett Johansson’s seeming fascination with quiet, transhuman, calculating characters. She seems to like playing characters that are on the outskirts of humanity (Her, Under the Skin, and Lucy demonstrate this) and this is no different. However, it does showcase her physical acting. As the Major, Johansson gets to act with her whole body and even her walk is informed by the character, which tells you what a character who is a woman of few words cannot verbalize.

The attack on the geisha meeting was carried out by a shadowy figure called Kuze (Michael Pitt) and most of the second act is about tracking him down. Kuze is a fascinating character and is the most stark example of an interesting visual theme in the movie that also represents one of its few departures, and most interesting one by far, from the source material. In the Ghost in the Shell stuff I have seen (the ’95 movie, Arise and parts of Stand Alone Complex) the cybernetic enhancements are usually aesthetically pleasing or at least functional. In this 2017 adaptation, they are ugly and kind of scary and underline the tension and anxiety of humans merging with technology. Nowhere is that better embodied than in Kuze, whose appearance is an intricate and powerful statement about the world of the movie, where this character fits into it, and its somewhat sparsely illustrated underlying themes. It helps that Pitt completely owns the role, coming out of nowhere to create a performance and character that transcends the flawed film he’s in. The scene where he interrogates Major is probably the best in the film, and both actors will make you think you’re watching a far better movie during it.

There’s also some really weird underlying shit between them.

The intersection of this film’s politics/social relevance and its storyline appears toward the end of the second act as Major finds out more about where she really came from, what Hanka Robotics has been up to, and why Kuze is so bent on vengeance. To come back to my earlier comment about not thinking an adaptation of Ghost in the Shell was by default a bad idea. See, I think Ghost in the Shell is an amazingly potent platform for exploring both the philosophical and ethical issues of technology as well as the social justice, representation, and identity issues this movie’s very existence raises. It is only too bad that it fails to really accomplish anything with any of that. To talk more about this, I need to explain a couple of things my readers may not be aware of.

First off, Ghost in the Shell has been catching heat for its racialization of its lead characters since the casting was announced. At one point, they were allegedly looking at using CG to make the actors look more Asian. The movie largely tries to sidestep this stuff by resetting the story in Hong Kong and frequently adding characters, visuals, and reminders of the multi-ethnic, global context this adaptation takes place in. This is a departure from the isolationist Japan of the 1995 film, where almost all the characters were ethnic Japanese and this was probably an integral part of the world-building. Here, it makes some sense that Major “Mira Killian” is white and though some of the world-building changes were probably done to retroactively justify casting a white lead in an ostensibly Asian role, it almost did the job of saying “hey, we aren’t just shoehorning a white person into an Asian context but changing the context so everything fits”. It’s a flawed argument in many ways, since they would still have been shoehorning a white person into an Asian context (Hong Kong instead of Tokyo but still). So you can kind of see how they were trying to secure this movie against deserved criticisms from a representation and identity politics standpoint.

It’s a nice touch having a multi-ethnic team, but none of them have any real screen time so it falls flat.

The second thing I want to explain is what is called “race-blind discourse”, which is a kind of logic for dealing with racism that is all too common among well-meaning but somewhat ignorant people. Race-blindness is people who say they “don’t see colour” or who react to the anger and complaints of nonwhite people, in this case North American audiences, with “why does that matter?” or meritocratic justifications (meritocracy is a fiction only white people are privileged to believe in) like “best person for the job”.

Race-blind discourse is an “ideal world” reasoning, which only works if we actually live in a world where race doesn’t matter. Yeah, we all understand that race is a social construct but social constructs do, by design, have real world implications and outcomes, especially in North America. A good example would be another argument typically trotted out by people defending this movie, including screenwriter Max Landis, who say that the reason it had to be Johannson is because no Asian actress could have opened a $100million+ scifi action movie, so without Johannson there’d be no movie. Well, the lack of bankable Asian actresses is not some cosmic law handed down on stone tablets. It’s a consequence of racial privilege in the Hollywood system which manifests itself most obviously through representation issues. It’s circular as fuck and a very poor argument to address what is a systemic problem. Yeah, it’s true that there are no Asian actresses who could have played this version of the role in this version of the movie. But throwing up our hands like this is exactly why this shit continues. It’s easy for white people to do that, but ask nonwhite friends (if you have any) what they think about this shit and you’ll either get a response that satisfies and reinforces white fragility, or you’ll get some truth that it will be up to you to deal with.

Another example in the form of apologia for this movie is the fact that its Japanese creator, Shirow Masamune, doesn’t care about the whitewashing and gave it his blessing. Yeah, duh he doesn’t care. Japan does not have the same social or racial issues that we do and because this movie was made for North American audiences, those issues matter whether Masamune cares about them or not. He is not the gatekeeper here, Japanese and Asian-Americans are.

The film also misses juicy opportunities to comment on its cultural impact and instead doubles down on unwise attempts to cover its ass.

Race-blind discourse is how anyone involved with this movie thought it was a good idea for “Mira Killian” to really be “Motoko Kusanagi” all along. Yes, in this movie Scarlett Johannson’s hot white cyber bod is housing the brain of a young Japanese woman. This could have provided a rare opportunity to rage against the systemic issues that lead to Johansson being cast in the first place, as an Asian character with white skin. Kuze was also Japanese before he was whitened by Hanka Robotics. While some have stretched the movie’s reach to say that yes, Cutter and Ouelet being white and designing white bodies is a subtle dig at white Hollywood executives whitewashing everything nonwhite, I don’t think this is really intended by the movie. There will be a lot of debate about this, though, and I’m sure some people will say it’s there but muted by attempts by Sanders or whoever to protect their career by not twisting the knife too much. I have a different theory.

I think they were really hoping that Major’s Japanese identity and backstory would satisfy some of the complaints that this movie was casting and proceeding in very poor taste. However, this is even poorer taste even though I understand the logic of wanting to push past all the thorny racial politics shit and just be like “hey, she has a Japanese mom and there’s some heartfelt scenes here and COLOUR OF SKIN DOESN’T MATTER”.  I liked the departure from the original where now Major has a family and more human, emotional connections. But I don’t think anyone should follow this movie where it’s asking them to go, in terms of ignoring the fucked up nature of Major’s ethnic past and current body to enjoy them feels. It seems to me that Sanders et al could have made this more meaningful by using some of that runtime to directly address these issues. Even if it was still problematic, at least an attempt would have been made. Without this, it’s just a mess all the way down.

I don’t know what feminist critiques will make of the bodysuit, but I think they did a good job of trying to be true to source and reducing the gratuitous qualities.

Rupert Sanders showed he had chops back in Snow White and the Huntsman, a movie that I sometimes think I’m the only one who liked, but he really needs to either become a good screenwriter or do smaller budget movies with better screenwriters and more authorial control. It’s obvious that a team of people were brought on to Ghost in the Shell to “right the ship” at some point or points in its production. There are telltale scars, which are typical when a movie is recut or reshot or cut down from a much longer running time. It’s impossible to know, unless you were involved, whether this was to address the race issues or restore confidence in a movie that by all rights should be more challenging and weird than it is, or the more conventional and boring typical big budget movie problems of pacing, performance, and production issues.

Overall, Ghost in the Shell is worth a watch even if you only give a shit about one of either the cyberpunk stuff/intellectual property or the social justice issues it raises. I happen to enjoy both and find this movie a fascinating watch in the wake of other social commentaries happening in genre entertainment right now (Get Out and Sweet/Vicious come to mind). Even though Ghost in the Shell fails to address its own troubling subtexts and themes and even though it frequently looks cheap and sounds hollow (bad dialogue, my gawd), it is also pretty well-crafted and well-designed. In my opinion, it’s best enjoyed as an exercise in its own shortcomings and as an interesting marker of a cultural period where maybe, just maybe, people are starting to realize we can and should do better.

Oh boy. Buckle your seatbelt, dear reader. This is gonna get… massive?

I bought my 360 back in 2007 to play Mass Effect. I was blown away by the character creator demos, was becoming a fan of Bioware thanks to KOTOR and Jade Empire, and was just primed and ready to go. What followed from there is probably one of the all around best video game franchises of all time, and certainly the most consistent set of games Bioware has ever created. Mass Effect 2 is probably one of the greatest games of all time. Unfortunately, they had some trouble sticking the landing and bringing the trilogy, which was ambitious as all get out, to a satisfying close (for most people). Bioware has always been a responsive company (some would say reactive or reactionary) and they were quick to try and fix issues. I think that history will be kind to Mass Effect 3 and I know I’ve softened on its narrative issues after a few years and playthroughs.

I’m not sure what history will make of Mass Effect: Andromeda. All I know is that I have a fucking lot to say about this game and I know that I’m gonna miss and leave out tons anyway. Good and bad as it is a very mixed bag and because I played Horizon: Zero Dawn just before, I was inevitably let down here. So it’ll probably wind up being mostly bad as I catalogue and process the laundry list of complaints I have about it. This game is the definition of death by a thousand cuts. For a lot of players who picked it up at launch, Bioware will never be able to recover that critical first impression even as they scramble to fix glaring issues that by all rights should not have been present at the launch of such an expensive and anticipated game, one which also had a five year development cycle. But having said all that, I still found a lot to enjoy. Major missions are very satisfying and there are many memorable moments in the game. While Andromeda mostly gets by on those bits where it does the familiar very well, I do look forward to playing it again once it’s been patched a bit more.

I will break this review into sections for ease of reading and so that you, reader, can focus on elements you maybe care most about. Most people play Bioware games for the story, and I’ll start there, but please don’t ignore the section on Technical Issues because I promise you that some of that shit will rob you of enjoyment and it’s best to be forewarned about them. Also note that I won’t really be discussing Multiplayer as a I barely got into that (it’s been a buggy mess with major connection issues) and it’s not the reason I play Mass Effect or Bioware games anyway.

It may go without saying but there will be spoilers to follow…

MASSIVE SPOILERS (hehe)

Section 1: Narrative

Hey, cool ship.

The premise of Andromeda is that sometime between the first and second Original Trilogy Mass Effect games, a group of colonists from all the major Milky Way species embarked on a 600-year voyage to the Andromeda Galaxy, specifically the Heleus Cluster, in order to make a new home. Before setting out, they engaged in an extensive propaganda and recruitment campaign that no one mentions in the OT because Bioware had no idea they were gonna make Andromeda back then. Give that it’s a bit of a retcon, it’s well handled and winds up tying into the Reaper threat in a satisfying but still mysterious way. Unfortunately, it’s too early to tell what route Bioware is gonna go in connecting Andromeda as a franchise (and it will be that) to the OT. The sense I get from the intersections in this game is that they have plans but they are (thankfully) unlikely to roll the Reaper threat into Andromeda.

This is because Andromeda has its own version of the Reapers. Of course it does. See, the thing is that Bioware has a kind of formula they always do. Not unlike the Marvel movies, really, especially in that it’s a formula that basically works as a skeleton to hang these big branching narrative games they make. Andromeda does not deviate from the formula, which is a bit disappointing in some ways but also completely inevitable and maybe even understandable. The problem is that they aren’t basically transposing the formula into another IP, they are recreating it within the same franchise. This makes Andromeda there most self-referential game ever, which explains why some people feel like this game is “Mass Effect fanfic”. This also means players are probably going to be thinking about the “samey” quality the story has with especially the first Mass Effect rather than, say, remembering how that game felt pretty similar to Knights of the Old Republic back in the day… or how more recently, Dragon Age recalls Mass Effect, or vice versa, since Andromeda is very much Dragon Effect post-Inquisition.

But more on that later.

I love the new armor designs generally.

What is this formula? There’s a great post about it here, but basically it’s a set of functional “steps” in the narrative which Bioware games tend to use. Sometimes there are new steps, sometimes they are mixed and matched, and sometimes a few are absent. But there’s a definite formula going on. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Not in and of itself. Again the problem is that usually this formula shows up across multiple IPs, but gets developed and experimented with over those IPs where Bioware has made sequels.  The problem is that Mass Effect: Andromeda is, structurally and in other ways, basically a remake/reboot of the first Mass Effect and this has to be disappointing on a pretty fundamental level, one that goes beyond my subjective ideas or desires for a new Mass Effect territory and into a place where you gotta be critical of what’s underneath it.

That is, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game that plays it almost completely safe.

For example, let’s consider the new aliens encountered in the game, of which there are two. The first are the Reaper-like kett. Some people are going to want to stress that they aren’t really like Reapers… but yes, they are. There are many, many details that are different and even the overarching concept of the two factions is different, but the functionality is the same both narratively and mechanically. Both the Kett and Reapers use species’ own genetic traits against them, both the Kett and Reapers are introduced in the “first game” and promise to be more developed, and probably a primary series antagonist, in later games. Both groups seem completely evil, though I’d say the Kett show more promise for being complicated than the Reapers ever could (though Bioware took that as far as they could with the Leviathans). So there’s potential for the “paths to split”, and I’d say Bioware is planning to do that but they mostly didn’t do it here. And that’s crucial. The game does redeem this somewhat through themes, which I’ll talk about later.

Don’t really know how to feel about how damn adorable the kett are to me. The Archon, the big bad, is especially cute. Like a weird kitty. kett… cat… kitty… coincidence?

The angara, the other species, are so much like the Milky Way species we already know that it becomes even more jarring. They are nicely developed as a faction and as a collection of individual characters you interact with, especially given how focal they have to be when they’re the only new friendly species to learn about, but are also too familiar to feel especially… special? Like with the Kett, they work better thematically, but unlike the Kett they are also interesting narratively because so much of the narrative is about building bridges and negotiating relations between the Milky Way species and the angara. That is good stuff and provides most of the interesting thematic weight in this game. Not everyone will even be bothered by the way this species could have been in the Original Trilogy quite easily, but I was and some of that is pretty subjective so I’ll save it for later (I know I’m saying that a lot, sorry).

Back to the main plot of the game. It’s very much like Dragon Age: Inquisition in that it’s fairly short, taking place over a handful of story critical missions, but goes big enough and has enough twists and turns to be mostly successful as a Bioware story. If you can ignore the formula and focus on the unfolding mystery and inter-species politics that form the main differentiating details, you’ll have a pretty good time with it. The rest of the setup is that you’re one of two Ryder siblings, both accompanying their dad to Andromeda to help him in his role as the Human Pathfinder. Each of the major Milky Way species had its own Ark, and each Ark has a Pathfinder whose job it is to scout, study, and lead the way in the new galactic surroundings. When your dad dies, you’re left with the job and forced to solve problems and mysteries that are way over your head. There’s already an invading alien species here, torturing the locals, and there’s ancient alien technology to discover and unlock or avoid as the case may warrant.

The angara. Like most of the game, a very mixed bag.

The mysteries are interesting, as is the collection of huge, seemingly overwhelming problems Ryder has to figure out. This stuff provides a fairly satisfying context and backdrop for the adventure, and justifies its open world and episodic plot momentum to a certain extent. There are a lot of things to do in the game, ranging from very “gamey” bits that plagued the large maps of Dragon Age: Inquisition (for example, much-maligned fetch quests and long bait-and-switch “follow the x” quests) but the developers also seem to have taken a page from CDProjektRed’s book and created some fairly good little mini-stories in the side-quests, one of the secrets to the success of The Witcher 3 and probably one of the only intersections of game and narrative design that can truly justify an open world.

A lot of the tension in the game comes from just how overwhelming it all is and much of the simple enjoyment of the story is in the dialogue, which is largely irreverent, snarky, and funny. Mileage is going to vary on that, big time, but this is a much more light-hearted game, tonally, than the OT usually tended to be. At least overall, because there are still moments of awe, darkness, emotional lows, and so on. I don’t subscribe to the somewhat popular view that the game is badly written or “unrealistic” because of its tone. I do have a hard time believing that Scott Ryder is 22 years old based on most of the facial presets, though. Ryder is not as hardened (or as old) as Shepard and seems to come most alive when you’re playing them as sarcastic and caught between bewilderment, bemusement, and a sort of petulant anger at their circumstances. There’s a lot of complaining about the tone of the game, but I think most of it is ridiculous. Yeah, the stakes in Andromeda are pretty high, but there’s really a pretty good mix of reactions to it in the characters, especially the main crew of Ryder’s ship, The Tempest.

Section 2: Themes (Colonialism)

Characters like Akksul really hammer the themes home.

This really deserves its own section even though it’s not been talked about as much I would have expected. Bioware, being a Canadian company full of Canadian employees, means that there’s a certain perspective on colonialism that may not be shared everywhere this game is played. As a fellow Canadian and someone with extensive education in the history and problems of colonialism both in Canada and elsewhere, I definitely anticipated some kind of addressing of this stuff when I first heard of the game’s premise. Yeah it’s all well and good that Milky Way folks are looking for a new home, but we knew early that there’d be other people already there calling it home, and the bad shit that historically happens when the one meets the other is basically what people mean when they say “colonialism”.

I’m happy to report that Andromeda engages with this in very interesting ways. Not only is the Andromeda Initiative prepared to be taken as aggressive colonists like our European ancestors largely turned out to be, but they also have protocols that reflect a more enlightened level of responsibility, efficacy, and value-laden policy. Of course it gets shot to tell way before Ryder arrives on scene, thanks to the many problems the AI encountered when it got to Heleus, but good intentions still matter a bit. What is interesting about it to me is that the kett were there first, acting very much in the role of Colombus-like first contact settlers/explorers. They played nice until they didn’t, and the angara have suffered mightily. In many ways, they are very much like the indigenous populations of North America, South America, Asia, and elsewhere. They have always resisted the hostility of the kett, who are blatant imperialists, and react to the new Milky Way colonists with fear and mistrust due to the experiences they’ve already had.

Because of the focus on the experiences of the angara, let’s say that a wide range of reactions and attitudes about colonialism are explored.

This maps super well to Canadian history, where while there was no Manifest Destiny and where the defining project of colonization has been coexistence, all positives have been marred often by colonial/imperialist anti-coexistence policies that have are now rejected and commonly understood as assimilationist, genocidal, and inhumane. When the angara shudder through stories of their loved ones being taken and turned into something else, I know very much what part of the history I share with Bioware is being drawn from. I have indigenous ancestry but have not been raised in an indigenous culture, so I can only imagine what players of Andromeda with centered indigeniety will feel when they go through these sections of the game.

To its immense credit, Bioware handles this shit in a complex, nuanced manner that they are not going to get much credit for due to the low visibility of these issues and the way they are often pushed aside or buried by settler-dominated North American culture. Past that, Andromeda has caught its share of flack from newly emboldened internet trolls who spend their free time complaining about progressive values popping up in their video games. Inclusion somehow became a dirty word, but I for one am thankful that Bioware seems incredibly committed to values like equity in the way they do representation and inclusion in their games. They aren’t perfect and there are issues like tokenism and gratuitous male gaze that plague their games, but by and large they seem to be interested in being the change they want to see in the world, changes which are railed against by the privileged in video games as hard as they are anywhere.

Section 3: Characters

Meet the new crew, same as the old crew.

Bioware games are about their casts of major characters as much as they are about anything. Andromeda, more than most, feels like it is remixing concepts and details from all their games. And again, this isn’t a problem as much if it was more “Dragon Age characters with Mass Effect versions” as opposed to that and “OT Mass Effect characters with Andromeda versions”. On the one hand, you have series staples like the two human squadmates that you begin with, solidifying the anthrocentric perspective of the Mass Effect series yet again. On the other hand, a seasoned Bioware fan can tie each of these characters’ personalities, background, and overall concepts to a handful of specific examples of other Bioware characters. For example, Peebee is basically Liara 2.0 though this time with a dash of Sera from Inquisition thrown in (and spread out between her and Liam really). Most of the characters in Andromeda are like that, and while they have storylines and motives and characteristics that set them apart somewhat, it is still surprising and disappointing that they feel so much like New Hotness versions of characters we are already familiar with. The mistake here is not only trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle of the OT, but also in taking characters that are by now much beloved (like Liara) and “tweaking” them. It’s like 90’s edge versions of the X-Men or something.

That being said, Andromeda is famed for having more dialogue and voiced lines than any other Bioware game to date. There is a lot of commentary and character-enriching interactions in this game, especially with the squadmates. Technical issues and weird design choices take some of the joy out of that, but I think people will emerge from Andromeda pleasantly surprised by a few characters and with new favorites to add to their rosters of Bioware and/or Mass Effect series faves. Another caveat, though, is that it’s clear that they preferred certain characters to others and underwrote a few, especially the non-squad crew of the The Tempest. Gil, Kallo, Suvi, and Lexi all feel shorted by the narrative and since Gil is the primary homosexual male romance option in the game, this choice flirts with egregiousness more than a little and Bioware has to answer for it on social media already. One of the things people miss when they say shit like “why does it matter?” or “keep your gay agenda out of my game!” is that for queer and questioning gamers (probably gamers of colour as well), Bioware games are one of the few corners of the whole industry where they can find representation, where they can fire up their consoles or computers and see versions of themselves reflected back to them in the characters they play as or with. This is so rare and it needs to be safeguarded.

Jaal is easily the best new character, but he also basically boils down to “cuddly Javik”.

With a smaller, tighter squad there is a higher focus in this first game on “found family” than there was in the first Mass Effect. It really took three games and a handful of critical DLCs to really sell that in the OT, but Bioware knows how much their fans love that shit so they definitely go for it in Andromeda and prove, like they did in every Dragon Age game that you don’t really need a trilogy of 30-hour games to pull this off… maybe you just need one 100-hour game to do it. Again with the varying mileage though.  Likewise with the romances, which are a bit bizarre here. I liked the core characters and I liked that Andromeda lets you flirt and mess around a bit before committing to romances, but they also locked much of the full culminations of flings and romances behind the main story, creating a jarring situation for people who try to resolve their romances and commitments before embarking on the final mission. One amusing and maybe intentional (I hope so) side effect of this is that you can wind up feeling pretty guilty as a Ryder who plays the field and leads people on. Peebee and Vetra both have sweet, earnest scenes where they try to take the relationship to the next level and it’s hard to turn them down which feels like a slightly disapproving, or at least consequence-laden acknowledgment of your cavalier attitude toward the romantic feelings of characters in the game.

There are other things that work or don’t work for the characters in this game. Good stuff would be the Ryder family saga and any of the secondary characters that come in and out of the narrative at different points (Bradley is a good example). Some one-off characters are memorable, but most are not and while Bioware does a good job aping some of that Witcher 3 magic, they have a long way to go yet.

Section 4: Gameplay and Design

Not a lot of new here.

One of the places Andromeda reactions have been almost unanimous is in the disappointment at many of the gameplay and design choices. They range from baffling or self-defeating at worst to “promising, needs improvement” at best. And yes, this includes the combat. Being that this was Bioware Montreal, which has been widely reported as Bioware’s “C” team, who have never before made a full game (they made Mass Effect 3‘s surprisingly excellent multiplayer). A lot of the problems are hung on them, but I really think Andromeda‘s design flaws are the result of way too many fucking cooks in the kitchen and a likely heavily compartmentalized design process.

Sections of the game’s core loops and elements, the menus, crafting, open world level design, and combat balance, all feel like they were designed by completely different people. The level design of the major self-contained episodes in the game, the critical missions and major side story content (like loyalty missions) are vintage Mass Effect and by far the most satisfying experiences in the game. If you skip the vast majority of the rest of the other shit the game offers and instead focus solely on that content, there’s a good argument that you’re playing the best possible version of this game.

You spend huge chunks of time driving this around.

A lot of game content from the first Mass Effect returns and it really feels like they were trying to refine and perfect different aspects of that game and its sequels. Everybody hated driving the Mako, so the Nomad controls much better but you still spend way too much of this game driving around, stopping for a too-short fight or some widget on the map, and then carrying on. Open worlds in all their glory, right?

A lot of the time, Andromeda feels completely at odds with itself. For example, the game wants you to roam the galaxy and enjoy the beautiful art assets so they set many side quests and little rewards out in the stars to enjoy. The problem is the game launched with a baffling amount of travel time, forcing the player to watch overlong and vainly choreographed scenes of planets coming into view diagonally (and slowly) before rewarding you with extremely paltry chunks of resources for the game’s poorly designed crafting system. These rewards, by the way, are seldom worth going for. This is bizarre since I refuse to believe no one in the design process of this game pointed out that generous resource rewards would be a great incentive to players who aren’t inherently interested in obsessively scanning every place.

The Profile mechanics are a mess.

Another example is in the combat, which many reviews claim is the game’s best part and major redeeming quality. I think the combat is well designed, but the underlying mechanics and systems really hold it back. Take the opening up of Ryder’s skill tree to include all possible combinations of the traditional six-class (now seven) system in Mass Effect. The game pays lip service in many ways to concepts of exploration and experimentation, not only in the narrative and world-building, but in the gameplay mechanics. However, swapping profiles is (on console) a tedious process and the game frequently locks its most experimental elements behind arbitrary limitations. There is a lot of variation in weapons and gear in this game, but you can’t freely change stuff out and there is no practice range to test new or experimental weapons. You’re constantly forced to engage tedious menus, load screens, travel time, and other processes to “explore and experiment” which means the game is consistently undermining its own gameplay priorities.

Some good news? The profile system has a cool in-universe justification and the skills are satisfying when they work like they’re supposed to (like… there’s no physics damage in this game and no one is sure if it’s a feature or a bug). If you can get over the shit you have to put up with to actually experiment with character builds and skills/armor/weapons combinations, you will find a lot of interesting depth and many rewarding playstyles. Of course, true to form you can’t really say anything good about Andromeda without an immediately qualifier, I’ll talk a bit more about why combat is kind of undermined more below.

Gorgeous, though.

I tend to be pretty easy going toward open world games but I don’t have much use for Ubisoft’s policy of filling maps with endless stupid shit to collect, and I really dislike obvious attempts developers make to pad out their game length in this way. What makes it worse to me than it would be on its own is that padding out game length is a reaction to the worst types of gamers, whiny little shits with too much time on their hands who have therefore decided that quantity = quality and convinced game developers to pander to them with their favorite pastime: bombarding social media with poorly justified and myopic negativity. Andromeda kind of deserves a lot of negativity, but even in this case those fuckers took things way too far. Confirm that for yourself by spending a few minutes on youtube.

Anyway, Bioware tries to capitalize on the open world design of Inquisition with a similar (to that game) focus on gorgeous scenery, interesting corners to explore, and tons of little things to do. Most of it is definitely in the Ubisoft vein, which is annoying, but Andromeda does course-correct from Inquisition by making travel more forgiving and making sure most side quests have meaningful or amusing dialogue interactions at the very least.

There are moments like these, sometimes that’s enough to carry a play session.

Focusing more on combat, I found there were many really great fights in the bigger, more narrative missions of the game. These missions had well designed and paced action where you really felt like you were fighting. Because the combat is more three dimensional in terms of movement and avenues of attack or retreat, there is often a very dynamic feel that can become sublime if you have a great loadout of skills and weapons and are able to end those incidental fights quickly and with style, or if the design and difficulty of an engagement means you are forced to swap profiles and gear like Alec fucking Ryder in the game’s opening missions. The vast majority of combat takes place in the open world, however, and is undermined by a series of annoying design choices, some of which I’ve mentioned already.

The two biggest ones are the reliance on health/damage resistance to drive difficulty and the relative smallness of many of the encounters. To the first point, you’ll find yourself hard pressed to kill even the weakest regular kett with even the most showy combos or fully evolved powers. They almost always require an annoying extra hit or two to die, deviating a lot from the satisfying crunchiness of the OT’s combat (especially in the latter two games). The solution in the OT was to throw a lot of enemies at you and mix up their tactics and resistances to force you to use your narrow range of gear and skills effectively. Because Andromeda is almost stupidly more complex on the level of possible loadouts, the compensating choice was to make enemies blanket resist all forms of damage in similar ways and to similar extents, which too often makes fights even with very diverse enemies feel pretty much the same. It also means certain combinations of powers, modifications, weapons, etc are grossly ineffective in almost all situations, which again undermines what the game seems to want you to be doing: exploring and adapting. By the time you’re getting to the end, you’ll either have figured out the narrow range of things that work well or you’ll be hitting the stupid scaling bugs that mean enemies continue to get dramatically more powerful even as levelling and gear progression completely falls off. Thankfully that’s more a problem for New Game+ which is otherwise an awesome feature for a Mass Effect game and one of the choices they made that I really would approve of… if it fucking worked right.

I guess this brings me to…

Section 5: Technical Issues

I guess this isn’t a technical “issue” per se…

Andromeda launched in a laughably unpolished state. It’s probably one of the most unpolished major releases I have first hand experience with. It’s funny because Dragon Age: Inquisition launched with almost all of the same issues (banter bugs, animation issues, content not firing properly, missing content, etc) and it seems like they really just doubled down on the limitations of either Bioware’s skills or the Frostbite engine. Honestly, I’m not sure at this point where Bioware just needs a big infusion of technical skill and improved workflow, or if Frostbite just can’t really do the games they want to do with it. Given that the issues with Inquisition are well documented and Andromeda is almost the same game with different assets, it’s pretty unforgivable and frustrating that it was allowed to launch this way. Of course, it came out just as EA (who own Bioware) were ending a sales quarter, so there’s really no excuse other than pure profit mongering for this shit. I won’t even go into the bizarre choice to demo the first 10 hours of the game, which really got the hate ball rolling and prepared the whole fanbase that eagerly anticipated the release of this game for the range of severity of disappointment that most of us are now left with.

Some of these issues have been fixed in the games sole patch (heh), which was released weeks after launch. Bioware has been very quiet about huge problems with the game that have not yet been fixed, perhaps worst of all being the way saved games seem to bleed into each other. This was also a problem with Inquisition, apparently, where for whatever reason saves on completely different character profiles would have weird connections to other saves and characters, causing bizarre bugs and progression issues like characters being mentioned before they even enter the game, or quests concluding/firing off out of sequence. This is why the New Game+ feature doesn’t really work currently. There are quest-critical items that stay in your inventory and that the new save registers which fucks up the order of their related quests. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg with regard to quest bugs, inventory bugs, and the mysterious and bizarre connection between the game’s alert system (for its journal, codex, and inventory) and the proper functioning of the banter. Because dialogue and character are so critical to Bioware games and why fans like them, that Andromeda launched and floated for weeks with a version of Inquistion‘s banter bug is just another in the thousand cuts, but definitely a fucking big one.

Even now, they still can’t make certain aspects of character customization work.

I guess this maybe should be in the “Design” section, because it’s hard to tell what’s an explicit choice and what’s a bug, but hey… that fucking character creator, amirite? Much has already been made of just how badly Bioware fucked up a central element of the Mass Effect experience, but I’ve got my own shots to take here so bear with me. You’ve already read 5000 words of this anyway, what’s a few hundred more?

It’s by now a running joke that Bioware cannot create convincing character models no matter how hard they try. But the fact that Andromeda barely looks like a current gen game on that level (the environments sell it better) is telling. The funny thing about is that Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s robust character creator was a slam dunk part of its design, and they easily could have replicated that here. Instead they tied the presets directly into other aspects of the game, namely the appearance of Alec Ryder, and forgot to explain the mechanics of it to the player. So you’ve got people who end up not only creating Ryders that look nearly identical to other peoples’ no matter what they do, but ones that are totally out of sync with how Papa looks. The presets are supposed to be mirrored across the siblings and Alec, but they’re all terrible looking so players naturally mixed and matched and ended up with hilarious results.

Shopping and organizing inventory is just awful with these menus.

I figured this out quick so it wasn’t a big issue for me, but what I really can’t understand is how Bioware still can’t design beards that fit properly to a hairline, let alone decent hairstyles, tattoos, makeup, and scars. Again, these elements were nearly perfect in Inquisition but they are just a mess here. Hair and facial hair are especially terrible with a couple of good options for either Bro or SisRyder and a bunch more that are flatly lit, untextured, and give that gross plastic helmet effect which is just not acceptable in a 2017 AAA game.

The Witcher 3 was released over a year ago and looks better. Dragon Age: Inquisition is two plus years old and the same engine but runs on previous gen hardware and looks mostly better. Horizon: Zero Dawn is very similar in terms of models and animation to a Bioware game and came out a month prior to Andromeda and looks so much better it’s embarrassing. But most embarrassing  of all are the many visual comparisons to Mass Effect OT that wind up favorable to the OT. This is especially evinced by the diversity of faces for alien characters, where the baffling decision was made to make all the aliens in Andromeda share one or two face models. As if no one was going to notice in a game this fucking big.

Conclusion

Hot take: I like the Tempest visually more than the Normandy.

So a lot of this review was pretty negative. Unfortunately, it’s all accurate as far as I’m concerned. I played the game for over a hundred hours (across one playthrough, and I don’t think I played especially slow though I did try to do everything), partially out of devotion to the series and partially due to sunken costs. I did want to see where the story went, I did come to care about the characters and world, and I did enjoy the game on many levels (especially visually) but most of those levels were based on its familiarity and similarity to other games. Mostly it is not satisfying on its own, though I wonder how it would have been received if it was a brand new IP with no original Mass Effect trilogy shadow looming over it. Enjoying Andromeda is very much a process of renegotiating your expectations in real time. You have to enjoy the game in spite of itself, by coming to grips with its many technical problems and shortcomings and seeing what’s left.

I know it’ll get sequels and I really hope they spend some time ironing out this engine or just abandoning it. There’s no way it’ll be acceptable for Bioware to launch an Andromeda sequel in a similar state, and they should really be focused on making sure the next launch is a good one because this was really not and it’s already cost them in PR and brand strength. To say nothing of the faith placed in them by one of the most devoted and active video game fanbases out there. I opened this review by describing my personal history with the Mass Effect franchise because I belong to that fanbase, more or less, and I have a sour taste in my mouth after Andromeda. I had major problems with Inquisition but that game had a truly experimental, out on a limb feel to it… it was the first like it that Bioware made. Andromeda is way too much like Inquisition to forgive the same flaws all over again, so I just hope it’s a sophomore slump and not the shape of things to come.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this and let me know if I got something wrong or left something out or if you agree/disagree with me. Talking about this game is something I’ve been craving since it came out, but I’ve noticed that the early response turned many of my friends (who were fans of the OT) off enough that they haven’t played it yet. In some ways, this review is for them.

Is there a more instantly iconic cast in Hollywood?

I am pleased to report that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (I’ll refer to it simply as Vol. 2) is, as many of you have found out for yourselves over the past week, every bit as good and in some ways much better than even the first one. Vol. 1 was a great surprise and still the boldest movie Marvel has yet made. Vol. 2 doubles down on the world it created and the characters that inhabit it, losing the freshness a little (which is being overstated as a complaint) but managing to improve on those few significant weak spots the first one did have.

One of those is the way certain characters were shorted much of an arc as the plot took over the movie. In Vol. 2 this never happens and no character, and there are so fucking many of them, gets shorted. They all have satisfying arcs, even Kraglin (Sean Gunn), wisely depending on interactions with each other. For people who like Marvel movies and fans of The Fast and the Furious franchise, this will feel familiar. It’s in pairings, parallels and polar opposites, that juggling so many characters and arcs becomes possible. Vol. 2 pulls this off with aplomb and manages to weave through tonal shifts, some of which are pretty shocking and risky. A stronger commitment to the sadness and loss hinted at in Vol. 1 is also demonstrated here, giving this goofy space movie an emotional core that is hard to find even in serious dramas. If I could compare that to something, it’d be a Pixar movie, where they definitely understand that the juxtaposition of light heartedness, humour, and fun against deeper, darker, and unresolved feelings provides a strong base for engaging drama and characterization. Not only this, but James Gunn managed to infuse this one with some pretty heavy existential and philosophical weight, which I’ll get to later on. I didn’t expect that.

All the way back when testing revealed that Vol. 2 was the MCU’s first movie that scored 100s (whatever that means), the hype has been real. There’s already a pretty misguided mini-backlash against this movie, fixated on gags that don’t quite land or the way the second act dismisses the overarching plot in favor of briefly becoming a shaggy hangout movie, but this stuff seems nitpicky to me. At the same time, I totally understand just how hard it is to deal with a movie as anticipated and hyped up as this one was. Your mind always wants to find that one thing wrong with it, so I take these nitpicks as a great sign personally. If the worst someone can say is that the space fruit ripeness joke feels a little forced then this is one helluva movie, right? It so is.

Drax (Dave Bautista) gets so many scenes like this, laughing all the way through ’em.

We rejoin the Guardians as they are wrapping up a job for a gold-skinned species of pompous assholes called The Sovereign. Though they have become something of a famous group of heroes-for-hire, they are still a bickering family of giant egos, painful backstories, and neuroses (particularly daddy issues, as some have remarked, this is kind of Daddy Issues: The Movie). They are far from a well-oiled hero machine, in other words, and therefore instantly recall the fractious but well-meaning differences that drove the Avengers apart in Civil War. That said, the Guardians are not the Avengers, being far more familial. It’s clear that writer-director James Gunn, on his second time out with these characters he largely recreated and defined from their origins, is much more interested in that element than in the somewhat loftier and more abstract “what is a superhero even?” type of questions that define the Earth-bound Marvel heroes.

Anyway, these issues sort of drive the mischief and ego-centrism of stupid choices these people make throughout the movie, and the question is far more about whether they can resolve this stuff as opposed to whether they can save the galaxy or what it would mean if they did. People hoping for a more conventional adventure might be disappointed by this sequel’s emphasis on character development over spectacle and large stakes action (though both are hugely, ridiculously present anyway) but I think that’s misguided. Vol. 2 is really the best synthesis of the whiz bang escapism we all see these movies for, and a deeper more meaningful story, that MCU has yet produced and this alchemy has kind of become their specialty.

The design of the locations in Vol. 2 are far more informed by the 60’s flavour of psychedelic space opera than pretty well anything produced recently. The colors and geometry are striking.

Rocket (Bradley Cooper) steals some of the precious batteries the Sovereign initially hired the Guardians to protect from an extra-dimensional monster. He does this to spite them, because they are stuck up super snobs, and also just to be a pest to Peter (Chris Pratt) and the others. He claims it’s greed, but we learn throughout the film that he’s really just pushing people away before they can do the same to him. I can relate. Meanwhile, Nebula (Karen Gillan) was part of the deal with the Sovereign and Gamora’s (Zoe Saldana) plan to make her face justice for the events of Vol. 1. Naturally, the two of them also have major issues to sort out and thankfully this does not happen off screen as Gamora’s character arc mostly did in Vol. 1 (one of the aforementioned weak points of that movie).

The ensuing space chase with the Sovereign’s fleet of drones leads the Guardians to crash land on a forested planet just after being rescued by a mysterious dude surfing on a space ship. By the way, all the scenes with the Sovereign drone pilots, which are basically like a big arcade, fucking rule. The Sovereign, despite being a huge annoyance more than a really dangerous villain (which is entirely the point), offer so much rich and delicious commentary and symbolism that I could spend a whole other review-length piece just talking about them.

The mysterious spaceman is… Kurt Russel!

Even as the Sovereign dispatch the Ravagers, still led by Yondu (Michael Rooker) who is facing a sort of existential crisis, to find the Guardians. Yondu jumps at the chance, in spite of a dressing down he gets from an old friend and fellow Ravager captain (Stakar Ogord, played by none other than Sylvester Stallone). It appears that the Ravagers were once more than mere space pirates and kidnappers, and Stakar reminds Yondu of what that means just as the lovable blue bastard doubles down on the shitty choices he has made. There’s a brief scene just before Stakar shows up where Yondu is buttoning up after apparent fraternization with a sex bot and it shuts down, its job done, and he looks at it with such loneliness and resignation that Rooker immediately gets us on Yondu’s side even though we’re gonna find out he has been part of some very heinous shit.

On the forest planet, the mysterious ally catches up to the Guardians. A grey-bearded dude comes out of a beautiful egg-like ship and claims to be Peter’s dad. Ego (Kurt Russel) turns out to be a Celestial, a kind of cosmic entity who wrapped a whole planet around his cosmically scaled and cosmically powerful brain. Ego wants Peter back, has been looking for him, and all of a sudden the daddy issues are super ignited. But this is also Peter’s chance to have a family, the one he always dreamed of, even if it’s at the expense of his found family among the Guardians. Gamora literally tells him that she had thought he’d found it already, but that’s mostly the crux of Peter’s story and many daddy issue stories in general: once we meet our dads, they tend to disappoint us.

The movie is completely and totally aware of what it’s doing here, too, and never shies away from recalling the touchstones of North American absentee “cool dads” as an archetypal character. Kurt Russel is perfect at this, to the surprise of no one.

While Rocket, Baby Groot (Vin Diesel), and Nebula stay behind to fix the ship, Peter takes Gamora and Drax to Ego’s planet. His body is a manifestation and needs to return from time to time, as his assistant Mantis (Pom Klementieff) explains. Mantis, by the way, is the character in Vol. 2 who likely has the thinnest storyline and least attention in spite of the fact that she is heavily involved in both exposition (which might be unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) and developing Drax’s poignant but terse story. I think you could argue that Mantis’s character development happens in parallel with Drax’s, with their bonding (watch for the scene where Mantis accesses Drax’s painful memories of his wife and daughter… just holy shit) serving to propel Mantis from Ego’s side as she begins to experience a conflict in her loyalties.

At this point in the film, the second act breaks a few steps away from the typical superhero formula and becomes something like a Richard Linklater film. When I say “shaggy hangout movie”, I mean when plot takes a backseat and conversations, reflection, and characters being introspective takes over. Most of Vol. 2‘s second act is like that, and it really slows the movie down. Again, this is something people might be disappointed by but I’d say what Gunn is doing here is not only rewarding to people who care a lot about the Guardians. And also for people who like their superhero movies to offer something more to chew on than spectacle, particularly the obligatory spectacle that most superhero movies have hard-coded into their DNA and usually struggle somewhat to justify. Marvel is getting better at this, and it really shows in Vol. 2. When the third act kicks in, it’s among the best the MCU has done and that’s really good news when third acts and villains are two of the things they’ve had the hardest time getting right.

Speaking of Ego…

Villains. Let’s stay on that for a bit because it’ll allow me to transition to talking about the thematic weight I think Vol. 2 has. There are really three villains in this movie, and because Gunn knows how to differentiate between the kinds of villainy and threat they pose, it never feels overstuffed or distracting. Ayesha and the Sovereign are more annoying than existentially threatening, playing a part that feels like an inversion of the Nova Corps. from Vol 1 while also serving many of the needs of the plot, including offering a hint of what’s to come in Vol. 3. Taserface (Chris Sullivan) and the more evil ravagers are a foil for Yondu, Rocket, and Baby Groot specifically, their paths dovetailing with the rest of the cast at specific moments. Taserface and Ayesha are minor villains and while they’re memorable, fun, and get plenty to do, they are not the highlight here.

Kurt Russel’s Ego is probably the best villain in the MCU. Yes, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has finally been eclipsed. It will be hard for the Russos to top Ego for Avengers: Infinity War in my opinion, as so much of what Thanos (Josh Brolin) probably will be as a villain is overshadowed and precluded by Ego. I hope I’m wrong about that, but time will tell and I can always talk about that when it does. For now, why is Ego such a great villain? I think it has a lot to do with a few really specific features of the character and his position in this story. For one thing, there’s the personal villainy in what he does and did to Peter. Another key part of it is his overall motivations, which are at once so huge and terrifying that they befit a cosmic pseudo-deity, but are also so petty and small and human that you almost feel sorry for him even as you look on the eons of bones of all the children he sired before Peter, murdered for being disappointments but really for not being Ego. The last piece is what Ego represents thematically. Vol. 2 is not a very subtle movie, I mean there’s literally a bit where Ego summons a ball of light and proceeds to play catch with Peter, a reference to Peter’s earlier, somewhat childish desire for a relationship with a dad which can be symbolized by something so arbitrary but at the same time so wholesome and elementally American.

Star-Lord is who Peter pretends to be, more than most MCU characters he embodies the themes of the “secret identity” that are classic in comics.

Ego is considered by many schools of thought, spiritual traditions, and branches of philosophy to be an illness of the mind. Though Freud popularized the actual term we use, the destructive self-absorption of the “I” is well understood, even though we have many cultural practices, traditions, and institutions that reward us for feeding our own individual egos and the collective ur-egos of things like nationalistic pride. In its trademark unsubtle fashion, Vol. 2 presents the physical manifestation and embodiment of these ideas in Kurt Russel’s character. A guy who seems well-meaning but is ultimately, to such an extent that it’s kind of mind-blowing, all about himself. This is so literal that his universe-threatening plan is to literally make everything into himself, an Ego so fragile that it will only suffer itself to exist. This gets at the heart of how people react poorly to differences in others, particularly differences in opinion and practice. I recognize this shit in myself and how difficult it is to push down those urges to correct others, to safeguard my own interests and opinions ahead of anyone else’s, often in a manner that is obnoxious or potentially destructive. We are all guilty of that and it’s a constant struggle because not only do we do it to others, but the reactionary and aggressive instincts of our egos often also feel like the first and most powerful or sensible defense of that inner core self, that ego, that feels so threatened by others. Ego, the character, is the ultimate spoiled brat manbaby. Because he thinks life is disappointing and can only filter it through his own perspective, he’d prefer to replace it all with his self-image rather than deal with the harder path of actually understanding anything. This is also why it’s so rich and meaningful that his assistant is an empath. Empathy is one of the ways we kill our ego.

Beyond the very cool psychological themes Vol. 2 is doing, and even if you don’t care about the more abstract ego stuff, it’s still brimming over with psychological commentary on how families (dys)function and what it means to reconcile, to reach out, to see the self reflected in the eyes of another and to therefore recognize both selves (master-slave dialectic is pretty much the whole subtext of Yondu and Rocket’s relationship, but it also permeates all the relationships in Vol. 2). I think Vol. 2 should finally put to rest the silly claims that the DCEU movies are where people go for the “rich psychology”. What a crock.

Yondu is where Vol. 2 gets really fucking earnest. Uncomfortably earnest. Uncomfortably real.

On top of all that stuff I just said, the Ego stuff in Vol. 2 also works as a prong of the movie’s subtle and not so subtle criticism of religion and specifically the central Christ myth of Christianity. Ego is an obvious stand-in of the god of Abraham. He’s New Testament affable, charming, and maybe even loving. But he’s also the kind of guy who puts tumors in peoples’ heads and deprives sons of mothers for reasons that aren’t as mysterious as they are petty and self-serving. He’s also Old Testament spiteful, jealous, and terrifying. This makes Peter’s eventual spurning of martyrdom and deification so meaningful. Ego taunts him that he’ll be ordinary and he asks “what’s so wrong with that?”. We could use a Jesus more like Peter Quill.

Ego is an excellent criticism of the poorly examined implications bound up in the mythology of god. What that unchecked power really means when it’s used to do such bizarrely petty shit. Likewise, the Sovereign are more jokey and ribbing criticism of the pretentious opulence of not only the Catholic church but of the newer brand of evangelical Christian prosperity nonsense, ie: the superchurches and riches sucked from poor people duped into buy their way to their own fortunes and everlasting glory. You would not expect this kind of biting criticism from a Marvel movie, and I think it’s so well hidden and well constructed in exactly the way that fundamentalists tend to miss that Gunn ultimately gets away with it. I don’t know what Christian audiences will make of this stuff but I’d be curious to hear about it.

People have talked about the “troubling” violence and tone of this scene, so I guess I will too!

There’s a pretty spectacular sequence in Vol. 2 where Yondu wipes out hordes of ravagers with his arrow. A lot of comment has been made that this is a weird sequence because it is essentially gleeful mass murder. I’d argue that killing loads of bad guys for thematic and cathartic reasons is just a norm in our entertainment and as long as it isn’t just empty spectacle, then it probably serves a higher purpose and has narrative value even if we would abhor such violence in real life. Movies are visual and often reduce complex psychology and philosophy to visual spectacle and violent, chaotic imagery. To wit, the complexity of the conflict between Peter and Ego is visualized as a dramatic cosmic super-battle. Here, Yondu’s break from the Ravager he was and the evil he did (unwittingly in service of Ego) is visualized as a massive act of destruction. He isn’t just killing Ravagers and blowing up ships, he is thematically and symbolically killing that part of himself and committing to long-suppressed instincts of heroism and selflessness. He is actually overcoming the damaged part of his own ego, alongside Rocket, so he can go save someone else instead of serving just himself. Rocket’s motives are bit more questionable since he “wants to kill some guys” but the scene is really all about Yondu.

Now, this might not convince anyone that such wanton and gleeful violence is okay, but I’d argue further that violent images serve a purpose. Unlike the thesis of Westworld which criticizes this whole concept (“these violent delights have violent ends”), I think civilization means intermittent progress toward humans, especially men, suppressing and thereby altering their instincts toward physical aggression and violence. At the same time we do have violent thoughts and urges, and cinema (all fantasy/escapism really) can provide us with a potentially harmless outlet and means to momentarily indulge the catharsis and release provided by doing so. That’s just an opinion I have about this, because I’ve thought a lot about how to reconcile my own personal tendencies against violence with the fact that I do enjoy violence in fiction that I would never enjoy witnessing or participating in outside of that realm. It’s maybe a weird topic to get into in a Guardians of the Galaxy review, but the fact that this is a Guardians of the Galaxy movie with a scene like the Yondu vs. Ravager scene in it is what brings this up anyway. I say great, it’s always fun to rethink and revisit one’s opinions with recent and meaningful examples and scenarios to draw from and bounce off of.

The finale is incredible. It’s awesome, sad, funny, and awesome.

Ultimately, I think Vol. 2 is one of the MCU’s biggest successes. It is definitely their single most successful straight sequel, even more so than Winter Soldier which many say is the MCU’s best overall film. Comparing MCU films to each other is like comparing your kids, fun but also kind of fucked up. Usually when I think back and go, “what were the best movies this year?” I tend to shuffle superhero movies into kind of their own category, but in 2017 we have not one but two superhero movies that break out of their mold quite a bit and aspire to be more, and about more, than the average. That means both Logan and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 are already some of the best films we’re likely to see this year, and they are certainly so good at just being comic book superhero movies that fans of them will get everything they want and more.

It would have been easy to make this review a listicle cataloging all the best moments and funniest lines in Vol. 2. If I didn’t talk about the comedy much it’s because I think that this movie is straight up hilarious kind of goes without saying. There’s so much here that you barely have enough time to process a visual gag, line delivery, or bit of character humor before it’s on to the next one. Many of these are not even meant to be caught on the first viewing, but will reward subsequent viewings. Basically, it’s a more confident and consistent version of the comedy of Vol. 1. It’s a lot like other MCU movies, undercutting serious or earnest moments with a tension-defusing (and ironically aware) joke or line, but it has something special that I think James Gunn and the amazing cast have created together and is unique to this franchise. And part of that is what allows this movie to end on such a sad note, which I assume many people didn’t expect.

That’s more clever, I think, than people realize. A lot of fuss gets made about sequels being able to recapture the magic of a solid first chapter and I think Gunn wrote Vol. 2 with a lot of awareness of that issue, especially as an issue of audience fixation more than a real storytelling problem. A clear choice was made to focus on character over plot by placing both the powerful and vengeful Sovereign and the universe-threatening machinations of Ego a notch under resolving deeply personal and resonant character arcs in emphasis. Likewise, a choice was made to end the movie on the sadness and redemption of Yondu’s death and the recognition that follows. This is the real surprise, the way Gunn tried to wield audience expectations like Peter wields his father’s light. I think when Peter says the review quote, “I’m gonna make some weird shit”, we’re hearing James Gunn through him. I am so glad he’s already working on Vol. 3.

Wasn’t gonna end the review without a Baby Groot parting shot. What do you think I am?

Pick it up. You know you want to.

So if we take a really loose version of the Arthurian mythology, marry it to a cockney London (er… Londinium) gangster story, sprinkle in a bunch of references, some in tribute and some mocking, to other fantasy movies… this is what we get? This is what we get. The result is ridiculous and will offend the sensibilities of just about every type of nerd out there. Your history nerds will scratch their heads about everything from wardrobe to chronology to props, your mythology and literary nerds will want to know why King Arthur is suddenly Robin Hood, and your fantasy nerds might be placated by the most awesome magic sword in the history of magic swords, but their literalist tendencies will be set alight and pissed on by this movie’s utter disregard for consistent or coherent world-building. And we already know what the movie nerds think. Spoiler: they are not happy.

For my money, King Arthur is a more enjoyable movie than either of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock films mostly because it dares to be far more bonkers and far more often at that. But it also has the same issues, including an overly dour colour scheme which mars some otherwise beautiful compositions and sequences. It also has an overly smug lead, which I’ll talk about more later. The visual issues are compounded by a really bad (in my theater anyway) use of 3D. Like, 2005 bad. This movie is so dark that many of the aesthetic details especially in CG-heavy scenes are lost. I would bet that this is not a theater issue but one with the quality of the post-processing, since many people are complaining about the uninspiring visuals of the movie. They aren’t totally correct, there’s a lot to love visually here, but the movie consistently holds itself back by being 3D for absolutely no fucking reason. When I get to see it again, it will not be in 3D and I’m hoping the visual elements register more clearly more often. On the other hand, the music in this movie is brilliant. Even the non-score anachronistic songs. Forget the term for those, but they are well-used here.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is overall a baffling movie. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s fun here, because this movie actually is plenty fun, it’s just that the whole thing doesn’t really come together the way you want it to. There are many elements that work well, especially when the movie isn’t taking itself seriously, but many more that do not. It’s a huge boys’ club, with almost no female characters and the few present get very little to do besides support the male hero or die trying, but it also wins some diversity points by not pretending the medieval world was lily white the way the racists like to. Some will accuse King Arthur, kind of wrong-headedly, of casting it like it’s taking place in Modern London rather than ~500CE Londinium. It’s a fascinating exercise, really, because here we have this remix, this mash-up, and who better to do that with Arthurian myth, especially with the music video sensibility that King Arthur displays, than Guy Ritchie? But honestly, did they ever stop to think if they should do it? No, they did not. They were planning like five of these. I doubt we’ll even get two.

MY KINGDOM FOR A SPOILER WARNING.

Elephants in England! Why not!?

You kind of get the sense of what you’re in for in the opening minutes of the movie. All that big fantasy Lord of the Rings battle shit from the trailer? Yeah, that’s the prologue. And in this prologue, you get a big old wallop of epic fantasy right out of a Clash of Clans commercial mixed in with your first taste of what would charitably be called a punk rock inclusiveness of fantasy elements from better movies. Those elephants aren’t in this movie for any coherent reason. They are here because Ritchie or one of the screenwriters saw the Mumakil in The Return of the King and was like “fuck yes” and that’s all. But it’s not that annoying because man, the elephants are also fucking mountains (more things in this movie are actually mountains than you’d think). How do you not love insanity that delicious?

I mean the best way I can articulate this experience in analogy is to say it was like waiting outside for a taxi cab and having the yellow submarine show up floating on fucking air and full of Beatles. Like, more than four. Every time you think the movie is done doing this to (for) you, it isn’t. So if that sounds like a good time, hey step into my office because I have a product you’re gonna love.

Wait. A ludus?

In this movie, humans and mages (a race here) live together in relative harmony until Mordred (Rob Knighton) conjures an army to attack Camelot where Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) protects England with excalibur, his baller sword. His bling blade. His… you get the idea. When this happens, Uther’s brother Vortigern (Jude Law) betrays Camelot in collusion with Mordred and kills his brother, usurps the throne, and creates a totalitarian state where mages are hunted and purged so that he can be the only one. Uther’s son Arthur (Charlie Hunnam, eventually) survives and grows up on the mean streets of Londinium in a vaguely post Roman England. There is literally a replica of the Roman Coliseum in the city… is that historical? I don’t even know!). Calling it England is the least bizarre thing happening with how this movie decides to place itself in its fantastical pseudo-history. Try not to let it bother you.

In one of Ritchie’s several Super Guy Ritchie self-referential sequences (which are honestly one of the best things about this movie), we watch in a series of rapid repetitive shots how Arthur grows up to be a hustler, a brawler, and then the don of a small Londinium mafia that seems mostly to be involved in the sex trade. Arthur grows up in a brothel, you see, plagued by nightmares about his dead mother whilst being raised by many surrogate mothers to which he feels a rather strong bond of loyalty. In Arthur’s big “save the cat” (another basic bro screenwriting trope showing up) moment, he beats up some vikings (I know, just try to forget it for now) to pay them back for beating up one of his prostitutes. He’s a good guy, you see, he just doesn’t like attention.

Unfortunately for Arthur, HBO sent recruiters.

So because Arthur just wants to keep his head down and do his larceny in peace and quiet, of course that will not happen. He is the mythic “born king” prophesied (by who? doesn’t matter, nerds!) to return and take the throne back from Vortigern by pulling the sword out of the stone that is also his dad. Yes, yes that sentence is… accurate. I told you about all the mountains, didn’t I? Occasionally the world of King Arthur offers inexplicable but tantalizing elements that it, laudably, often doesn’t bother to explain… like why all the teleportation? But at the same time, this stuff gets inexplicable in the bad way where it just doesn’t make any fucking sense and feels random, thrown in, and sometimes incredibly out of place… like why all the teleportation? You almost have to respect how little this movie cares about any of the stuff we normally take for granted in a fantasy movie, historical fantasy or otherwise. Almost. It would totally work if it managed to commit to any of the broad ingredients that went into its peculiar stew, but instead it tries to be all the things without fully inhabiting any of them. At the same time, there are many pleasant surprises… like all the teleportation. There’s also a giant snake that is on the good guy side for a change (usually giant snakes are bad). In one of the rare moments where the movie is as funny as it thinks it is, a character remarks that they hate snakes while another says “everyone hates snakes” as she is convincing him to allow himself to be bitten by one. You know what? You kinda had to be there.

Because Vortigern is concerned by this “born king” hullabaloo, he has all the men of a certain age in the kingdom delivered to Camelot, which has become Mordor (complete with evil tower), and makes them try to pull the sword out while the slave children he’s selling to the vikings look on in… approval? These scenes, by the way, are a strong demonstration of this movie’s muddled and baffling aesthetic choices. For one thing, Camelot is instantly iconic, looming over a giant bridge like Drangleic Castle in Dark Souls 2. For another, that Hunnam is the only person in the movie always wearing resplendent white is used to good effect in a really wonderful shot of him standing alone on a ship of other anonymous English nobodies. But then the “blacklegs”, Vortigern’s stormtroopers, look pretty much like guard extras from a Once Upon a Time episode. In one of the early seasons, where all the costumes looked like they came from Value Village. You’re left wondering how these things over here look so good and obviously have a lot of thought behind them, but then these other things over there feel so goofy and out of place. You may wonder this plenty of times during King Arthur. Try not to let it bother you.

See what I mean? Actually, in this shot they don’t look so bad. But why is David Beckham here?

So Arthur gets the sword, passes out because its power and the memories it stirs within him are just too darn much, and then gets taunted by Vortigern for the first of a handful of times they meet which play out pretty much the same. After this, it starts to get personal for Arthur and after he’s rescued by the resistance led by Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou, doing what he always does and being furniture in white people movies) and Goosefat Bill (Aiden Gillen on a brief and passionless furlough from Game of Thrones). Together, they start moving toward an inevitable showdown with Vortigern, but there are some twists and turns along the way, including a few more of those music video sequences Ritchie does so well: Arthur in the Darklands, in particular, is a standout. As is the Lady in the Lake sequence which briefly took me out of the movie with how great it was. The big Londinium foot chase heavily featured in the trailers is also great, as are the show-stopping excalibur sequences. Though mileage is gonna vary on those.

I do have to mention that all these characters, which should be colorful and memorable like in the great Guy Ritchie movies of yesteryear, fail to amount to much. I kept saying to myself “almost!” whenever a scene would try to charm us into giving a shit about any of them, but ultimately their scenes and banter all feel underwritten and anonymous, lacking the strong voice and sense of character that is necessary to make memorable characters in a largely dialogue-driven movie. If you’re hoping for Snatch level stuff, you’ll be disappointed. That said, the banter is entertaining even if it never really rises to the levels I hoped for. There are also emotional beats that work on the strength of the actors’ abundant charisma, when they’re allowed to display it. One death, in particular, is allowed to hang over the movie for a few moments before the movie does another rail and kicks into overdrive again. But it’s the unexpected surprises like that death scene that ultimately save the movie from being a complete joke or just disappointingly forgettable.

Motherfucker hasn’t aged a day.

It’s funny about Jude Law, though, because while he’s an exception the above, he has so much more in him than what he’s allowed to do here. There’s an interesting pathos to Vortigern, he is probably the most three dimensional character in the whole movie, but it’s all too restrained. Either he needed to be more charming and Loki-ish, or he needed to be more sniveling and Joffrey-ish. As it is, he straddles this line in the writing and performance which manages to suggest both types of villain while embodying neither. He’s never quite arch, and never quite despicable. I suspect that’s by design, but it feels somewhat out of place in this movie… like he’s in a different one where we’re meant to feel a lot more sympathy for him than it’s possible to do here. The movie just doesn’t have time for that shit. Having said that, Vortigern eventually reveals (it’s showing not telling, thankfully) that he is really just a little man who wants to be a big man, and this makes him kind of sad instead of delicious or despicable as a villain. The magic he uses to kill Uther and take the throne visually reinforces this idea by having it turn him into this hulking evil Dark Lord that looks like something out of a Warhammer or Darksiders game. But inside, he’s just a petulant little brother for whom the movie provides zero motivation besides a craven lust for power, though there’s that brotherly jealousy lurking between the lines. Thor did it better. Still, the symbolism and thematic potency of the ruin created by small-minded, twisted men who want desperately to be feared is not lost on me. It’s something, and it’s more than almost every other character gets in the movie.

Arthur himself is not a character that is going to win anybody over on Charlie Hunnam. He’s good at the fast-talking scoundrel stuff, he’s very charming and good looking, but the depth of the roles I know and love him for is just not here. Arthur isn’t Jax Teller in LARP drag, I’m sad to say. And fine, he didn’t need to be, but what we get instead is almost full on Gary Stu. Arthur is always right, always a step ahead, always patronizing the other characters and is often smug and self-satisfied while he does it. His only challenge is himself, his own unmotivated, obligatory reluctance. He barrels over everything else, even mega-Vortigern who dispatched his daddy quite easily. All Arthur needs is that final burst of inspiration to almost cartoonishly shrug Vortigern off while taunting him, which he does deserve, before finishing him off. You could say Arthur’s characterization is all about his projecting a veneer of macho “no fucks given” to hide his trauma and uncertainty about his role, but it’s a razor thin read.

Magic eyes!

In fact, there’s a lot of that going on in this movie where themes are lightly touched on but never committed to. The mages, for example, often feel like the screenwriters are reaching for something topical about immigrants or minorities, but really just using a (razor thin again) version of the “chosen people/Jewish persecution” trope to make Vortigern look extra evil. The mages, as a group or species or whatever they are, never get any real development besides what the name implies: they can do the magics. So were they saving that for a sequel? Are you as tired of that mentality as I am? Take another example, a scene where Back Lack (the actual name of Neil Maskell’s character) makes fun of another character for having an education, “this is what education gets you”, only to be undermined by the character turning out to be right and Arthur capping the moment with a smug, mocking “this is what education gets you”.  I mean, is there any compelling reason why his Londinium crew even follows him? Not that we see. So while the UK has a very troubled relationship, like many western countries do, with education… the movie winds up not on the side of its surface-level tough guy from the streets schtick, and actually valuing and championing a thing like education.

I had this feeling like there was some commentary being run here on aspects of British culture, particularly an obnoxious and boorish flavour of soccer hooligan (football firm!) masculinity, but for every bright spot challenging that shit (pro-education, sex positive!), there’s a scene like the English barons bit where they are all wearing the flamboyant costumes from the Elizabethan era and are being mocked both by the characters and the movie itself for their pretentiousness and probably for their fashion sense too. Because they look and talk gay, guys, get it? King Arthur is not about that erudite Globe Theater shit, it’s about that googling “what is Brexit?” shit. It’s embarrassed by the aesthetics of one era of British history while cobbling together a viking-punk aesthetic that is mostly make believe but probably meant to stand in as a “when men were men and men wore drab tunics”. I’m saying this is a very confused movie. Maybe it’s down to competing sensibilities in the creative team. Who knows?

More damning still than something potentially dog-whistley like this, though, is how King Arthur treats the scant women in it. No dog whistles there, just typical bullshit.

This is the one female character and she has no name and no arc.

Called only “the mage” (Astrid Berges-Frisby), the one female character in this movie who is not beaten or killed for being associated with Arthur, gets to look ethereal and do some magics but not much else. People are gonna say she’s supposed to be mysterious that’s why she has no name, but those people are fucking kidding themselves. You get the sense that she’s supposed to be Arthur’s Yoda while Bedivere and Bill are his Obi Wan and Han Solo, but the movie is moving too relentlessly fast to ever bother to do more than imply these archetypal relationships and roles while hoping you’ll pick it up, not pay too much attention, and stick with the ride. I usually hate that tendency in tentpole movies and while it’s a significant flaw here, the pace and attention span is inextricably linked to its frequent (but not quite defining) tone and approach of irreverence. It’s like the movie is deliberately pushing aside most of the stuff we’re used to and expecting from a movie like this, and that would be admirable if only it wasn’t trying to have its cake and eat it too by refusing to be so creative and energetic with the backbone of its story and characters. It’s a Brexit movie through and through, trying to stick it to the snobs while also retaining dignity and legitimacy that it can’t seem to fully earn. It’s brazen disregard for genre and narrative propriety is exciting, like saying “fuck” in church, but ultimately shallow and misguided.

Put another, less political way, this movie is a street magician. Its good at sleight of hand, tricking you while pretending to be doing a magic trick. It offers a lot of flash, a lot of stuff you don’t expect to see, and it’s almost enough to make you forget about the osteoporosis that cripples its skeleton. The term “half-baked” exists for movies like King Arthur. These things I’m pointing out don’t make it a bad movie but I think reason demands that we understand that these things are part of why it isn’t a better one. Sexism, for example, is bad, especially if its unaddressed. Same can be said for over-reliance on cliches and tropes to do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to bother actually writing scenes where characters and audience discover things together organically. This stuff is bad for obvious reasons. It doesn’t need to completely ruin a movie, and liking a gleefully sexist movie (going with this aspect as an example again) doesn’t necessarily make you sexist or dumb, but movies that don’t perpetuate sexist cliches and/or tell their stories almost fully in the form of cliches are objectively doing something right. I think we can all agree on that much.

So about that magic sword though.

Okay. So. Like I said before, King Arthur has a bevy of different discrete references to other fantasy shit. There’s a lot that is never explained, doesn’t seem to fit into the rest of the world-building, and if you’re charitable you can chalk this up to a rare genre movie that doesn’t feel the need to explain every little thing. Maybe they wanted to delve into things like the Darklands, the bizarre (and clearly Dark Souls inspired) ancient ruins and architecture sprinkled here and there, as well as what’s up with the mages and particular the oft-mentioned-but-never-appearing Arthurian staple, Merlin. One thing that is explained, though, is excalibur. It gets its own origin story and a somewhat unique set of properties. To this movie’s credit, it really commits to this stuff (for a change). To me, a sword enthusiast, it’s pure candy to watch a movie where they’re like “why yes, this sword can smash fucking buildings and slow down time”. For others, it’ll be just one more goofy straw in the strawpile, but also maybe the thing that breaks the camel’s back? I can see people basically rolling with this movie only to check out when the super heightened, super stylized excalibur sequences kick in. But I loved them. As forgettable as the rest of the action in the movie is (that Londinium chase scene notwithstanding), the excalibur scenes are a big payoff, particular the first time you see Arthur go hog wild in Kung Fu George’s (yes, that’s his fucking name, I don’t know how I feel about it) kung fu Roman ludus.

But there’s a catch. Of course there is. This is some Zach Snyder shit. In fact, this movie suffers a lot from the Zach Snyder disease. As much as I used to love his work, up to Man of Steel basically, youtube essayist Nerdwriter hit the nail on the head when he described Snyder as a filmmaker who specializes in discrete (also bombastic) moments that are impressive and generally work really well, but float sort of separated from the muddled or absent coherence of the rest of the movie they happen in. King Arthur often feels like a Snyder movie, honestly, and the style of the excalibur sequences looks like a straight lift from the “super fast superhero” fights in Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman (which are themselves descendants of the Burly and Super Burly Brawls from The Matrix trilogy). That might ruin the fun for you a bit, but again I’m not trying to do that. It is kinda fun, even in those Snyder movies. Faora and Wonder Woman’s bits in them were some of my favorite bits, where Snyder’s eye is unmistakable and at its best. While King Arthur might have some of the narrative and stylistic problems that tend to plague Snyder’s movies, it has way more energy, charm and humour (if not self-awareness) than any recent Snyder film. It’s miles and leagues and furlongs better than fucking Batman vs. Superman, in other words.

A magic sword that makes your eyes glow blue and turns you into a superhuman? Didn’t I write this story when I was like 12?

King Arthur is a deeply flawed movie, but it is never boring. A lot of people will come out of it and defend it as “entertaining”. And this is true, ultimately, but beware people who insist that entertaining is good enough. When I was younger, I would have eaten this shit up and it would have been my favorite movie ever. But when I was younger, I was dumb. Kids are easily bamboozled by baubles like magic swords and giant elephants, and apparently older people with arrested development never quite shake that off. King Arthur does have that potential where the elements that really work can win you over and make you forget about all the shit that doesn’t. At the same time, some of its more egregious issues are difficult to overlook. It’s okay for a movie, especially one like this, to be a bit of a boy’s club. That might not be a popular opinion (some would say it’s never okay), but neither is the other side of it: it is not okay to treat women this way in a story, even if your story is a “men’s story”. Women should not exist, as characters, just to be fridged. It can be overlooked in King Arthur to an extent, if you’re charitable, because very little characterization is present for anyone, but men are certainly more represented even in the shallow tropey way that is present here. I mean, there’s Boys’ Clubs and then there’s He-Man Woman Haters Clubs, and maybe King Arthur isn’t quite the latter but I doubt women in the audience who are aware of representation issues are going to agree with that and they are who I listen to. So I won’t say to try to not let it bother you. It should bother you.

And no, I’m not saying you need to gloss over the issue by having a token “strong female character” thrown into the mix. You just need to let female characters actually be characters and not just fodder for the plot. Like Maggie (Annabelle Wallis), I didn’t forget about her you pedants, but the movie definitely does by kicking her out so whatever her fate is, it happens off-screen. It’s extremely lazy. You also need women to be more than sexy (even if it’s weird) motivation elixirs for the heroes. When Arthur unleashes the fury of excalibur to save the mage (again, she doesn’t even have a name), it somewhat undermines an otherwise standout scene (one of my favorites… if I forget about what motivates it) by making it all about how the male hero finds his motivation only when the female character is physically threatened. She exists to fulfill these kinds of boring, tiresome cliches. Extremely lazy again. The upside is that Berges-Frisby is pretty good at being weird, which makes her somewhat interesting to watch even when most of her moments are just fake magic words, uncomfortable looking hand gestures, and close-ups of her eyes (magic eye effects are huge in this movie).

Sorry, Charlie. I know you were really looking forward to that parade.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about King Arthur, it turns out. It isn’t quite bonkers enough, like a Gods of Egypt, to inoculate itself from the “legitimate” criticism I try to do around here. But it isn’t bad or stupid enough, like a Conan the Barbarian (the fucking remake), either. It’s a coke dealer of a movie, talking fast and sounding good but not really able to fully hide those dilated pupils or that shaky hand.

I can’t in good conscience recommend it, especially in a year as stacked with wonderful as 2017 has been so far, but it’s got its charms if you can overlook its many flaws. I suspect it’ll go down as the Warcraft of 2017. I feel like, in many ways, this review has been reminiscent of my review for that movie, but less tinged with sadness because I honestly think Ritchie doesn’t deserve the cheerleading for this one that Duncan Jones did for Warcraft. King Arthur lacks the whole-hearted ambition (misguided though it was) of Jones’s vision of Warcraft. Ritchie can do movies like this in his sleep, and it doesn’t feel like he was really stretching his capabilities that much, or at least if he was it is undermined (that word pops up a lot in this review, eh?) by his self-referential self-indulgence. If they do get a sequel to King Arthur, I really hope they tighten the writing and give the secondary characters, especially the ladies, a lot more to do while also taking the time to give Arthur more to struggle against than just himself.

Feels much more like the original Alien in terms of design and aesthetic.

Alien: Covenant is getting positive reviews it just doesn’t deserve and that I didn’t expect. The negative reviews make more sense to me, though I don’t fully agree with them. I think it boils down to a collective sigh of relief that it is not nearly as bad or as stupid or as bewildering as Prometheus was. At the same time, it almost makes me miss that movie. Which, if you know me at all, would seem a completely fucking loony tunes thing for me to say. I hate Prometheus and though I tried many a time, I never made it through a rewatch. That movie just falls apart about 45 minutes into it and never, ever recovers. But, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, at least it had some ambition, misdirected and poorly executed though it was.

Covenant is not really a good movie. It isn’t terrible, though, it’s just kind of there. Like I was saying, I find myself aligned neither with the ridiculous positive reviews nor with the ridiculous negative reviews. They all make points, some solid and some not so much, but I feel squarely in the middle in terms of my critical response. This was a movie where I couldn’t summon up much ire over the parts where it did get stupid. Nor did I really feel much in those moments where something interesting, whether visually or narratively, happened.

I don’t know if Covenant could rightly be described as a boring movie, but like Mass Effect: Andromeda, it does feel like a pseudo-remake of the first one. A movie that arises not to put a bold new chapter in the Alien book, but to basically try and remind us why we liked these movies in the first place. This is a problem because it fails by playing it too safe, too conservative, and by splitting its priorities so distinctly and unimaginatively that you wind up feeling like you’re watching three different movies, stapled together so ineptly that it becomes distracting if not ruinous for the whole franchise.

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU *SPOILERS*

This spaceship design is indelibly phallic. Like… more than most.

The Covenant (real subtle) is a colony ship on it’s way to a planet called Ogidae-6. Along the way it stops to recharge using giant and very cool solar sails. There’s a random stellar flare and the ship is briefly crippled by power outages and damage. The crew of 15 awakens to a hellscape of klaxons and dying or at risk crewmates. The captain, James Franco, is engulfed in flames as his cryo pod fails. His wife, one of the many married pairs in the crew is Daniels (Katherine Waterston in a breakout role, one of the few really bright spots in this movie). She becomes our lead point of view character whose closest friend seems to be the android Walter (Michael Fassbender).

After this, the new and fairly whiny captain is Oram (Billy Crudup) who isn’t really up to the job and thinks everybody is out to get him because he is Christian. Thankfully, though there’s Biblical allusions galore in this film, the ludicrous collective fiction of Christianity as a persecuted religion is quickly dropped and never emerges again. I honestly don’t think I could have sat through that.

An early sign that this movie at least tries to improve on Prometheus is that bad decisions actually get challenged occasionally.

Because they understandably don’t want to go back into hibernation after seeing a few people die in that state, the crew opts to go looking for a rogue signal they pick up from a planet nearer to them than their destination. This planet was passed over in initial scans and the signal appears to have a human origin. Oooh. Space mystery. But! Sunshine used a very similar plot device and much better. Here, it seems like the facade is quickly going to crumble and they’re just going to go “oh good idea, let’s go” without pausing to think about it. Daniels, however, is smarter than anyone on the crew of the Prometheus (and the Covenant for that matter) and roundly questions the intelligence of going off on an adventure after what has happened. Oram caves to the pressure of the crew, probably in a misguided attempt to win some of the respect he feels he doesn’t have (we never see any evidence for this really, though Crudup wisely convinces us that Oram doesn’t deserve it anyway). So it’s off to Mystery Planet they go.

Once there, they are quickly assailed by a version of the space spores of Prometheus and aliens start hatching and all hell breaks loose. David (Michael Fassbender), long-haired, rebuilt, and hermit-crazy rescues a few of them and takes them to an alien city full of frozen dead bodies in horrific poses. No one comments on the evidence of an alien civilization. No one. It’s a very and deeply Prometheus thing to omit. It’s just too jarring for these people to simply roll with it. This also basically happens in Prometheus, where it’s even more egregious since finding aliens is the whole point of their mission. In Covenant, it’s distracting and silly but less integral to the plot or themes. Trying to be fair here.

The aliens come out of the back this time, guys!

This is when the movie switches from being a rather generic, if nostalgic and therefore agreeable retread of the original Alien into being another pretentious fucking David movie. Once David shows up, his machinations take over the whole movie and everything else gets pushed to the side. There’s some nominal character development for Oram, Tenessee (Danny McBride, who is good here), and Daniels. But the main show is David. The movie does briefly come alive in a few David moments, particularly the flute scene with Walter (flutes have this inexplicable totemic power in these movies, I guess). But we quickly realize David is evil, he murdered Shaw (Noomi Rapace) brutally, and he plans to murder and experiment on all the assholes from the Covenant too. Yawn.

What’s worse is that Covenant decides to try its hand at yet another version of the aliens origin, this time that David actually designed them (right down to the colour and the iconic eggs and facehugger designs) iteratively after he wiped out this whole alien species and turned their planet into a very pretty graveyard. He even quotes Ozymandias in case you don’t get it. This is the worst because in the David scenes, you’re watching a movie that thinks it is very, very clever even when it is very, very not.

I liked David better as a very archly performed head.

The thing with Shaw is pretty ugly. This is what the character is reduced to? I wonder if Rapace pissed Ridley Scott off somehow. It’s pointlessly and distractingly cruel. I know some people are going to think it fits because it shows just how evil and/or amoral David is, but it’s literally the most boring possible explanation for what happens to her.

Add to this that Covenant fails to follow up on the one interesting promise made in Prometheus: that in the inevitable sequel we’ll find out more about the Engineers, so that they stop being so dumb. Instead, they have one big city and no world-building besides a vaguely Biblical-era architectural and costuming style. We never know anything about them. They are less than a one-shot Star Trek species from the kind of underwritten episode that also rubs your face in the Biblical allegory of two androids, referring to each other as brothers, bashing each other’s heads in with a rock.

This being a Scott movie, there are several visually stunning moments.

Inevitably, a third movie takes over from the David movie. This one is again a retread of Alien, with a bit more of Aliens thrown in to, I dunno, spice things up? There’s a big action finale, with ludicrous acrobatics that are just a tad less ludicrous than the spaceship evasion shenanigans of Prometheus. The crane arm and terraforming cargo bay seem intentionally reminiscent of Ripley’s showdown with the queen in Aliens, but at this point it wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve stopped caring. The movie tries very hard to convince you that Walter makes it off the planet, while the whole time you’re pretty sure David took his place. It tries so hard, in fact, for so long that I was briefly convinced Scott and his screenwriters had decided to fake out the fake out and end on a more positive note.

There is something interesting about the way the movie motivates it’s “gotchya” horror ending far more than most of those kinds of endings. There’s also something interesting about David floating around in the Covenant making ready to continue his experiments on the 2000 sleeping colonists. However, it’s such a hand-wavey shot to the continuity of the franchise that you just know Scott is planning 2-3 more movies in this storyline to bring us round again to the Nostromo. This means that the exercise feels pointless on its face: why bother doing these movies if you’re just going to leave people wondering how in fuck it’s supposed to fit in with Alien? Making people interested in the franchise to see where the continuity is going is absurd when what should really matter is where the fucking story is going. They are not the same thing.

The aliens are glossy, CG, and boring. David is the “true alien”, a theme trying so hard to be clever and profound that it’s almost cute.

At the end of the day, the Alien franchise never needed these Prometheus era movies. The origin of the aliens is kind of boring and unnecessary. David made them! Oh how clever. But this is why Ridley Scott keeps putting David front and center, he’s far more interesting but still not as interesting as these guys seem to think. If they bothered to explore any of the philosophical and science fictional ideas they are alluding to, it might be something, but instead it’s always shallow and predictable and forced. It’s a great idea, a bigamist marriage between anxiety about artificial intelligence, psychological anxieties about creating new people that might suck, and the tropes and aesthetics of the Alien franchise. It’s a great idea, but it needs better authors.

Alien: Covenant doesn’t save the franchise, it’s more like a quick patch job to hold the decaying bits together for just one more go round. It’s too average, and often feels like a generic also-ran, one of those movies like Pitch Black that tried to be sort of like Alien while adding its own spin. The spin here, though, is more of the shallow theological musings that were such a drag in Prometheus. These are movies that actively try to make dumb people feel smart by employing the philosophical rigor of an episode of Ancient Aliens and positing that “hey what if God is a dick?” is some kind of transcendental insight. I’m sorry, but no. And thus, Covenant trades the unpredictable and chaotic and insane stupidity of Prometheus into a boring and predictable stupidity that it only briefly holds at bay by trying to correct some mistakes, like unmotivated bad decisions and endlessly contrived events that feel like cardboard props to threaten the cardboard humans not played by famous people (with a few exceptions noted above).

Is she with you?

Wonder Woman is good. Like, Marvel Phase 1 good. In fact, it owes such a massive debt to both Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor that the weird and often toxic fandom around DCEU and their obsession with being “better than the MCU” is even more ironic than usual. However, forgetting about those kinds of people as they so richly deserve leaves the question as to whether it should count against this movie that its creative team bothered to finally learn something from their wildly more consistent and successful counterparts at Marvel. I don’t think so. I think good superhero movies with actual shit to say is a tide that raises all the ships. I have given this current generation of DC superhero movies a lot of shit, we all have, but most of us still want them to be good.

And with Wonder Woman, there’s a glimmer of hope that they can be. People are looking for a fluke reason why Wonder Woman is good, like this success couldn’t be replicated without secret handshakes and spinning around in place an arbitrary number of times before sitting down to write the script or pick up a camera or whatever. It’s nonsense. This movie is good because it gives a shit and the people who made it give a shit. They aren’t embarrassed or cynical about this being a sincere story about heroism. They lean into it. On top of that, it’s probably one of the most if not the most culturally significant superhero movies there is. It’s embarrassing at this point, 10 years into the era of shared superhero universes, that we’re only now getting Wonder Woman. I will talk about Wonder Woman‘s feminism and its impact (including some similar ideas), but I also want to point my readers to a great piece by BMD’s Meredith Borders, who offers a nerdy woman’s perspective on the significance of this movie.

That all said, there are definite imbalances and flaws in the movie. I’ll talk about them below, but by and large this movie stands up well against the MCU, or I should probably say alongside it? Honestly, I don’t think many people would be able to make a meaningful distinction between MCU and DCEU properties using Wonder Woman as a basis. And I think that’s okay, but it may disappoint DCEU fans who are looking for something more distinguishing besides just beating Marvel to the punch on having a movie focused on a woman. Wonder Woman focuses on what works best for these kinds of movies: character, humor, symbolism, and heroism.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The part of Italy that stood in as Themyscira is jaw-dropping gorgeous.

Wonder Woman‘s first moments feel like a bit of a misstep, actually. It begins with Diana (Gal Gadot) in the present, living in Paris as some kind of archaeologist. She receives a package from Wayne Enterprises. It’s the picture she was trying to get from Luthor in Batman vs. Superman. This is the one bridge to the shared universe that this movie bothers with, thankfully, but it also presents the movie with an unfortunate framing device. Having Diana reminiscing the events of this movie while sitting at a desk staring at a hundred year old photograph just feels weirdly artificial, especially alongside the dull voice over, and probably should have been left for the movie’s epilogue rather than bookending it.

Ultimately, it’s a bit of a false note but a minor one. More of an issue is the dry first act, which features Diana as a curious and energetic child being raised among the Amazons of Themyscira, a paradise hidden away from the world of men. She’s the only child there and her mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) is fiercely protective even as her own sister Antiope (Robin Wright) urges her to begin training Diana against an uncertain future. These scenes are beautiful, with Themyscira’s on-location photography giving the increasingly artificial and CG-laden environments of Wonder Woman an early feel of realness and presence. The Amazons are cool, a clan of ascetic warrior women who remember mythology as history. It’s also pretty cool that all the speaking roles are done in an Israeli accent to match Gal Gadot’s, which also gives this hidden culture a mystique it wouldn’t have if they all used British accents, which is a norm in this kind of thing.

Nielsen and Wright are excellent in roles that actresses their age simply never get. More roles like this in movies, please.

Hippolyta is reluctant, fearing Diana will learn too much about who she is… which audiences will pick up immediately during a cool-looking but very info-dumpy “bed time story” that sets up the mystical underpinnings of the movie’s story. Ares attacked all the other gods, killing ’em all, but not before Zeus could leave the Amazons with a weapon to stop him if he ever emerged again. It’s pretty obvious where this is going, so again I think it’s another small false note that the movie devotes so much time to setting this up in one of the least interesting ways possible. I don’t want to play the “they should have…” game, but just imagine if instead of Diana in Paris, Wonder Woman opened with a Fellowship of the Ring or Thor: The Dark World style prologue?

The condition to let Diana be trained is that she has to be the fucking best, pushed harder and made tougher than any other Amazon. But Diana holds back, showing her real power only rarely and to her own surprise. There’s a good mix of shock and delight from her as she discovers what she can really do and her slow development from Amazon to Goddess over the course of the movie is treated subtly, with deft hands, making each new feat a revelation unto itself. This is a brilliant and satisfying way to handle it and while it’s not being talked about that much, I think it’s one of Wonder Woman‘s best and most fresh interpretations of superhero tropes.

The Amazons kick piles of ass. Robin Wright disappears into Antiope and honestly, I never would have imagined her in a role like this. Which is, again, why it’s so great.

Everything’s going pretty well for Diana until the day Hippolyta feared and Antiope anticipated finally arrives. A German plane crashes into the water off the coast of the island, witnessed by Diana who immediately goes down to investigate. She pulls out an American pilot in a German uniform, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine). Though I said the first act is a bit dry, I mostly meant the pre-Steve Trevor and Gal Gadot parts. When Gadot shows up, Trevor follows not far behind and together they carry most of the rest of the movie on their shoulders. Trevor’s appearance is followed quickly by a force of German soldiers which are in pursuit. They are fought off by the Amazons in a stirring battle scene, but not without great cost. The action in this movie is usually very good, with a bit of dodgy CGI (especially environments) in later scenes. Here, the fight is mostly practical and focused on the ancient tactics and weaponry of the Amazons. It is shot on a real beach, so enjoy that while it lasts.

Trevor reveals he’s a spy who infiltrated German ranks to discover dangerous gas weapons being developed by the movie’s bad guys: a rogue, hawkish general called Ludendorff (Danny Huston) and a sinister, deformed chemist called Dr. Maru (Elena Anaya). They’re trying to disrupt an armistice by proving that the Germans can still win the war if they unleash horrific weapons. When she hears this, Diana is sure that this is the result of Ares’s influence. She’s determined to stop him, hoping to lead a force of Amazons back into the world of men to help them out. She sincerely just wants to help, but her mother forbids it. Before long, Diana decides she’s going to go anyway. This is not the first time someone tells her what to do and she looks inwardly and decides for herself. Her tendency to do that is the heart of her heroism, her feminism, and her inspirational presence in the movie. It’s what makes her her.

She thinks the sword is more than a sword, which is a cool inversion of the importance of Mjolnir in Thor and thus the influence of Thor in this movie.

She sets off with Steve Trevor, but not before Hippolyta can give her a reluctant blessing. This signals the end of the uneven first act and the beginning of the best part of Wonder Woman, which is so often the worst part of other big action-adventure movies: the second act. When Diana sits on the boat bantering with Steve Trevor about sex, the rules around “sleeping” beside men, and so on, you feel the movie coming fully to life. Gal Gadot also cements her ownership of this role, another irony when a common sentiment among people following the marketing was that you didn’t hear Gadot talking in the trailers much because she wasn’t a good enough actress and they were trying to minimize how much the marketing relied on her. Total bullshit, I’m happy to report, as Gadot breaks out in a major way with this film. She was the best part of Batman vs. Superman (well, her theme song was anyway) and stood out in the Fast and Furious movies she was part of, so I’m not really surprised. I do think, though, that tearing her down before anyone even saw the movie was just more of the veiled or unexamined sexism that has dogged this movie since day one. Gadot inhabits Diana fully. She’s got the heart, humour, grace, and beauty down pat. You can also draw a direct line between her buoyancy and optimism to the quieter, more mature woman in Batman vs. Superman. It’s subtle, but it’s trackable that we’re seeing two different versions of the same woman, separated by time and experience.

It’s also amazing, by the way, that in spite of the fact that the Wonder Woman costume is still basically a cheerleader outfit, both Jenkins and Gadot manage to instill in Diana a sensuality, a femininity, and a charisma that is never gratuitous, oversexualized, or otherwise pandering to the male gaze of the fourteen year old boys you assume the WB would be desperate to appease (given the sophistication of their recent DC movies). Diana is also allowed to express many kinds of femininity throughout the movie. She can like babies and still toss dudes around in a bar fight. My one regret is that they didn’t pause in the Veld scenes long enough for her to learn to like beer. SO CLOSE!

Lucy Davis steals every scene she’s in. Oh and Pine is pretty good too.

The second act is worth examining in detail. This is the part of the movie where Diana is dropped into the war-torn Europe of the early 20th century. She resists the prescribed roles for women right out of the gate, sometimes humourously and other times in a way that will make you want to pump your fist and cheer her on. She barges into places she’s not allowed, she openly challenges the decorum of an aristocratic and cowardly elite, and she refuses to, as Meredith Borders said, stay put. You can basically play a drinking game out of all the times people, especially Steve Trevor, tell her to not do something or to stay somewhere, and she just ignores them or argues with them until they back down. This stuff has major baggage, which some viewers will be unaware of. Women constantly get shit for speaking up for themselves and their points of view, and often they don’t have the power Diana does to just step past or outside the institutions, norms, and power they are challenging. Which is why Diana is inspiring. She does her.

The flagship scene of this movie, the moment when Diana first assumes the full mantle of Wonder Woman, is a scene just like that. She is in the trenches, finally seeing the front of the war she’s been trying to get Steve Trevor to show her. There’s horror in spades, and the lines are frozen by German guns even as their compatriots pillage nearby towns. A woman begs Diana to do something about her village, behind enemy lines. She wants to climb up out of the trenches and take the field, but Trevor says “no man can cross that”. She goes anyway, and kids, it’s fucking triumphant.

Spoiler: the bomb asplode.

This was my favorite scene in the movie, a great big spectacle sequence of whiz bang heroics supported by a very simple thematic heroism. Diana sees injustice and she gets up and does something about it. This is so much in the vein of MCU’s Captain America that it becomes painfully obvious that this kind of selflessness and bravery is exactly what the “heroes” the DCEU have been missing. I really hope WB is smart enough to double down on this in their future movies that feature this character. Build them around her, not fucking Batman.

What also helps this sequence, and the second act in general, is that it takes the war about as seriously as a comic book superhero movie can. It’s far from the cartoon of Captain America but it’s not quite All’s Quiet on the Western Front either. I was impressed by Jenkins’s willingness to pause on moments of pain and horror, because doing so is exactly what makes Diana’s inspiration meaningful both to the characters in the movie that follow her across No Man’s Land and to the audience who will likely remember this scene long after they forget how fake looking the CGI sets are.

This movie also makes an earnest and mostly successful effort to make its secondary characters feel like real characters.

The squad Trevor and Diana put together for their mission to stop Ludendorff and Maru is made up of character actors getting to do some juicy stuff in roles that are usually underwritten to the point of meaninglessness. To compare Wonder Woman to Captain America: The First Avenger yet again, I challenge you to remember anything about the Howling Commandos except Bucky and the dude in the bowler hat (yes I know who he actually is). Here, we get a diverse bunch of “smugglers, liars, and murderers” that all have more going on than their first appearances, which to be fair are a bit problematized by an over-reliance on markers of their otherness. For example, the American First Nations character is referred to as “The Chief” (Eugene Brave Rock) and we should be past that even in an historical movie where it’s probably likely a Native’s white buddies would call him that. Sameer’s  (Said Taghmaoui) fez hat and Charlie’s (Ewen Bremner) ostentatious kilt are slightly less egregious examples of the same kind of iconographic shorthand that feels lazy. I’m unsure if Jenkins was trying to make a point by juxtaposing these images with the depth of the characters in the actual script, but that I’m unsure suggests that any efforts toward that end were unsuccessful.

If we set aside those issues, there is a lot to enjoy and appreciate about these three. Sameer reminds Diana that many people struggle in their identities, that skin can be as limiting in an oppressive world as one’s plumbing. Charlie boasts about his killing prowess, but screams in the night with memories of his victims. Chief, meanwhile, is thoughtful and aloof, preferring to take no sides and make his way as best he can. They all represent, along with the roguish but well-meaning Steve Trevor, different sides and dimensions of the masculine types that we all see all the time, that we all take for granted by aspiring to or modelling. They are all also damaged. Sameer can never be what he really wants to be, Charlie is a direct criticism of the Call of Duty style glorification of war and killing, Chief is an example of tough guy stoicism hiding deeper pain, while Steve Trevor has to learn that he doesn’t have to always save the day, “be the guy”, that helping is sometimes enough. It’s a big deal that all these dudes choose to fight for Diana, that they are somewhat healed by her and by helping her. Sometimes that just means getting out of her way, other times it means listening and supporting. Buried within the spectacle of Wonder Woman is a primer on the better ways men could treat women if we could only stop placing ourselves above them.

Gadot skeptics will be won over by the payoff in her relationship to Charlie. Her “but who will sing for us?” line is delivered with such openness, empathy, and affection that it could break your heart for both of these characters. And it’s a moment so small and so masterful that it could be easy to miss. So don’t miss it.

The second act is really just great. It’s the third act where the deficiencies in the script, on a structural nuts and bolts level, really start to show. Wonder Woman‘s weakest element might be its script, but even so it’s a script that is rich with symbolic intention (to be fair, a lot of that could have come more directly from performance and direction). Up to the point where Sir Morgan (David Thewlis) reveals that he is Ares, not Ludendorff as previously alluded to, I think it’s fair to say that the script is far from the most important part of the movie anyway. Often a movie lives or dies by its script, but Marvel proved that you can have movies with weaker scripts and make it on great characters, rich themes, and the charisma of performance. For a long time, Marvel movies had only passable or outright bad third acts where all the whiz bang superhero shit would coalesce into an obligatory CGI battle that lacked a certain spark, or over-relied on the MCU’s signature underwritten villains. Wonder Woman has this problem, which the MCU has largely begun to fix in its own movies, but it isn’t enough to bring down the whole enterprise.

However, it’s still a blight on the movie, so here we go: Steve Trevor’s sacrifice is a cringe-inducing lift from The First Avenger and represents the movie trying to have its cake and eat it too (has Trevor really learned to be an ally if he rushes off to play the self-sacrificing hero first chance he gets?) and feels divorced from Diana’s storyline at that point. This is made most clear by the bizarre choice to show the same scene of his last words to Diana twice, once with her unable to hear him and the second time, in her memory of the moment, able to. It’s bizarre and cheapens the impact of his final act, hackneyed though it may be. Pine sells it all pretty well, and in focusing on Gal Gadot I have somewhat marginalized just how good he is in this movie (he’s really fucking good), but ultimately this is a thing that a good character/performance can’t patch. It would be a different story if what Diana was doing felt as consistent with the preceding movie as what Trevor and the squad are (trying to destroy the evil gas bombs). Instead, Ares shows up and gives Rote Villain Speech #946 before using a bunch of generic and unmotivated super-powers to try and kill Diana because, you guessed it, she won’t join him in killing all the wicked humans.

Ohai obligatory Snyderverse Christ imagery! I guess it counts for something that it’s a lady-Jesus this time.

This Ares stuff is pretty goofy. However, they are able to redeem it partially with a pretty rousing (if sentimental) speech from Diana about what she believes in, in the end. It’s love, love, love. This will seem silly to the precious edgelord fourteen year old demographic, but they lack a nuanced understanding of the word love. They’re also busy boycotting the movie over “women only” screenings. Many people of all ages seem to have these issues. Oh well. It’s not about them anyway. For once.

Diana says love and she’s talking about empathy, compassion, kindness, self-sacrifice, altruism, and belief in common decency. She’s talking about looking at the young men taking off their gas masks and waking up from Ares’s influence and feeling love, not vengeance and hate. She’s, in other words, talking about the exact opposite of the retaliatory barbarity of aggressions carried out around the world in the name of higher principles, but never in the name of love. Gadot is Israeli so whether or not she personally (some have had a problem with her politics it seems, but I don’t know much about it) believes what Diana believes doesn’t really matter. This movie believes it, and it says it way out loud. I wrote a list of all the things we do in this world in the name of higher principles, but never love, but I’m not going to include it because hey Evan, calm down. It’s enough that the movie believes it, and I think it’s as big a moment as any other in this movie. I think it’s one of the things I’ll remember, and definitely an idea that I hope remains in future DCEU movies, especially if WB learns the right lessons from Wonder Woman. Because I want them to be good.

It’s all resting on his shoulders now!

It’s late, I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t a chance to see The Fast and the Furious 8 or otherwise known as The Fate of the Furious (I’ll refer to it as Fast 8 as we go) when it first came out. Weird time of year for me, what can I say? I’m seeing more movies now, though, and I finally got around to the latest entry in one of my absolute favorite franchises. This is a key entry, too. When Paul Walker died, everybody asked “how the fuck is this thing gonna work from now on?”. Many critics wondered whether the series would focus more centrally on Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) with the beloved ensemble taking a back seat. The central relationship of the series was always Dom and Brian (Paul Walker) and it seemed like there were two possible directions for this to go: try and replace Brian, or center it on Dom alone (at least for now). It looks like they decided to focus on Dom after all, and the results are just fine though that central relationship is certainly missed.

In many ways, Fast 8 feels more thematically grounded and focused than the last few. This was a bit of a surprise, and worked better than I think a lot of people might have expected given the general attitude about Diesel’s ability to shoulder a movie. I think he’s pretty good, though, and while he isn’t stretching the emotional range of Dom much here, there are a few nice subtler moments and we’re definitely seeing Dom in a new situation. With the key relationship of the series missing, Fast 8 decides to trouble the very thing that has kept the characters and the audience along for this very bizarre and now very lengthy ride: fambly.

Is Fast 8 better than the last few movies? Not really. As always, the highs are pretty high but I think this is maybe the least light-hearted of all of them and offers less of the jokes, camaraderie, and goofy warm heart the series is known for. Of course, all this stuff is still here, but this is also the entry where Fast 8 goes darker. That’s not going to work as well for some people, but I think this movie is less uneven than Fast 7 was (particularly the action). The important question isn’t even really if this movie lives up to the rest of the franchise, because of course it does, it’s more about whether it leaves you with a sense that this franchise can keep going without Paul Walker. I think it can, but I think Fast 8 is unable (and probably this is intentional) to fully get to a new stable dynamic on its own. There are seeds of it, but it’ll probably take the next movie before we see where they’re going with certain elements, which this review will explore in detail.

DOING SPOILERS A QUARTER-MILE AT A TIME

The trailers may have suggested a “dark” Dom, but the movie never holds back from showing us how conflicted he is and how unwilling.

Fast 8 opens with a series staple car chase. We’re reminded charmingly if familiarly of the ethos of Dom and his weird movie universe. Here he’s winning the respect of a local thug in Havana, Cuba. He and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are on their honeymoon and things seem peaceful for the crew until Hobbes (Dwayne Johnson) calls them back to recover the EMP device that’s now made its way to Berlin. The crew gathers and goes to work, but not before a mysterious woman entices Dom to some sort of side deal, using leverage the movie only reveals later. This mysterious woman is the cold mastermind Cipher (Charlize Theron), a control-obsessed super-hacker who is brought to life by Theron with her special brand of intense, feline menace. People who loved her performance in Snow White and the Hunstman will love this too. She’s just great at villains.

The job goes okay, again it’s a charming but familiar “super car” sequence and serves as a refresher taste of the time honored car-based action and jokes at Roman’s (Tyrese Gibson, still the secret weapon of the franchise but less so in this one) expense. Tej (Ludacris) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) also return, but the crew is starting to feel small and in need of some additional fresh blood. Especially because this is the second movie that still can’t figure out what to do with Ramsey besides give her something for Roman and Tej to fight over, which is still kind of gross even if the movie also gives her room to show how dumb she too thinks it is. I was really hoping for her to reveal she’s into girls, since a gay character is something Fast 8 still hasn’t done even though it’s one of the most diverse franchises, if not the most, in Hollywood history.

The answer to the series’ diminished cast is NOT Scott Eastwood, I fucking promise.

When Dom splits off, stealing the EMP device and apparently going rogue, Hobbes winds up in the same jail where Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham, stealing the movie) is being held. These two immediately engage in the most flirtatious and delicious homoerotic rivalry since the 80’s. It completely makes up for the relative lack of lightness and humour throughout most of the rest of the movie, and you can feel the fun and self-awareness oozing out of Statham and Johnson. People have been asking for a spin-off with these two characters for a reason, and they may even get it. However, I think that’d be a bad move for the series as the only new character is Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood), a guy who should work on paper but feels too much like a lame attempt at a Brian 2.0. Eastwood just isn’t his dad and cannot bring this character something to get him off the page. Everything he says and does feels lame and forced, from being dressed down by Nobody (Kurt Russel) to finally unclenching later in the movie when the Fast crew finally infect him with their irreverent way of doing things.

The Shaws factor big into Fast 8, providing one of two sets of tracks laid down for future entries in the series. Deckard is back and almost instantly charms his way into being part of the team. Every one says they won’t forget what he did, killing Han (Sung Kang), but everyone actually does. The movie really needs the audience to get over it too, so they somewhat clumsily wrote the Shaw brothers’ misdeeds into their supervillain’s backstory, so some of the responsibility is shed by the Shaws. Now that Fast has an actual supervillain that isn’t the Shaws, it makes sense that they be the way this series changes up the cast. However, fans have been hoping that it’ll turn out Han didn’t die in Tokyo and I think this, too, would be a wise thing to bring into the canon because it’ll not only bring back the amazing Sung Kang, it’ll help everybody buy into the Shaws being incorporated into the Fast Fambly.

Oh Deckard, you scamp! We can’t stay mad at you.

Though Cipher’s leverage keeps him doing her dirty work, Dom is never passive and never not trying to rebalance the scales. It’s actually him who brings the other Shaws into the mix after Nobody secures Deckard’s help (he just wants a chance at Cipher). Owen (Luke Evans) briefly returns to help out, all scarred up and sheepish after his fuckery has cost his brother so much. And centering this Shaw alliance is a surprising turn from Helen Mirren as the Shaw Bros’ mother. When I heard Mirren would be in this and who she’d be playing, I expected an urbane and pompous British lady. Instead, she’s a cockney gangster moll who knows exactly how to get her boys to play ball. This stuff is a lot of fun, but only in the movie briefly though the Shaws seem to be set up to be a big part of whatever happens going forward.

Dom needs their help to get the upper hand on Cipher. She’s got hostages and while many theorized it would be Han or maybe Dom’s sister Mia, the movie wisely keeps to the “Brian and Mia are done” book-closing sentiment of Fast 7‘s ending. Instead, and totally left field, it’s Elena (Elsa Pataky) and a baby she’s kept secret from Dom so that he could get his life with Letty back on track. The baby, who Dom later names Brian, totally seems like the kind of thing that would get Dom to betray his people. I was pretty satisfied because I half-expected the reason for his “dark side” stuff to be much less plausible. That said, the movie kills Elena off and some fans are not pleased with the way this was done. I kind of think arguments that it’s fridging are overstating things since Dom is already motivated to save her and the baby, and her death doesn’t advance his storyline whatsoever… it simply ends hers. Would it be nice to keep Elena around? I think so, I always liked the character and felt like her “ending” in Fast 6 was a great series moment. But people die and villains sometimes kill them, even just to make a point. Cipher thereby cements her villainy in a much more final way than any other similar character in the series, except of course for Deckard who killed (or maybe not?) Han, a much more beloved character than Elena.

Still, I totally understand where people are coming from when they say that they were just trying to get rid of the character because they didn’t know what else to do with her.

The movie is far more interested in what’s going on with Dom and Cipher than anything else, except maybe for the bromance of Deckard and Hobbes (who is so mad at Dom). This means the rest of the cast does take a back seat to the main priorities of the movie, but I don’t think this is a big deal. They still find time to sneak the Mexican brothers from Fast 5 back into the mix for a cameo, and Dom turning the tables on Cipher is as satisfying as the metaphoric he trades with her is lame (but in a way that is delightful and perfect for this series). While the rest of the crew is doing the next phase in the evolution of this series’ progressively more outlandish and high-stakes action sequences (the next one really will have to take place in space or something), Dom is just trying to save his kid. This gives the movie its personal stakes, something this series has almost always tried hard to have and, goofy as it is sometimes, managed to have. It’s one of the reasons why people like these characters and their silly movies. There’s always someone who needs help and, as the prologue in Cuba suggests, people who are willing to help as long as there’s respect and some good old fashioned hyper-masculine bonding.

By the time the third act action climax started to unfold, I started to become worried that Fast 8 was going to be the most “grounded”. Aside from the ridiculous bit where Cipher uses a remote controlled horde of cars to steal nuclear missile codes and Dom plays car-tug-of-war with his whole crew (and boy is that a fun bit of nonsense), I was like “is that it, Fast 8?” and feared that things weren’t going to reach those ridiculous heights again. I am pleased to report that I was super duper wrong. It’s just that Fast 8 spaces that shit out and saves those ridiculous, completely implausible moments this series has become famous for. It saves them until the movie really needs to hit that release valve of bonkers, physics-defying car-based superheroics that push a triumphant and signature Fast series climax into the stratosphere.

I mean, it’s still a Fast movie after all.

This is a series that has been knowingly raising the bar in its own universe for the size of threats, the resources of enemies, and the set-pieces involved. Every installment takes it up a notch. Fast 6 featured weapon-cars like Owen’s, superhero tricks like Dom’s insane leap to save Letty, and climaxed in a Hercules airplane. Fast 7 had TWO instances of flying cars and ended with a chase/fight against a goddamn predator drone and military attack helicopter. Fast 8 gives the team a tank, an arctic battleground, and a Russian nuclear sub to contend with. All that and the Shaws flying fucking jetpacks to invade Cipher’s evil plane. Where do we even go from here? I’m stoked to find out, because I know that franchise writer Chris Morgan will push it to the limit again. The logical next step is transforming mecha-cars all fusing Power Rangers style into a giant robot, or maybe battling an alien invasion, or racing rovers on the Moon or Mars. If we’re really lucky, we’ll get all of the above by the time Fast 10 rolls around.

Dom being a dad now is an interesting shift. I wondered what they had in mind with this since Brian’s fatherhood was such a big part of his story in Fast 7. How can Dom be Dom and also be a dad? Maybe instead of going even bigger for the next one, the series will switch gears (hehe) and become even more internally focused than Fast 8. What if they did a time jump with the new central relationship being one of Dom and Brian as father and son instead of unlikely brothers and comrades? I could see them going for this, especially since Diesel is 50 while Dom is still probably in his mid-30’s. Moreover, it’d be a way to bring Lucas Black into things, since there’s no way the dude can convincingly play a teenager anymore (which Fast 7 demonstrated). Shit, it’s just as much fun for me to speculate about this as it is to speculate about the future of the MCU after Infinity War wraps up.

Just marvel at this.

I was worried about a lack of awesome car bullshit, but then this movie responds to a giant fiery explosion threatening Dom’s life (that’s him down there in the lower right corner) by having his fambly circle him with their cars, impossibly shielding him from the hellfire!

Whatever they do, I’m definitely still along for the ride.