Bad Batch Finale Thoughts and Other Roundup

The final episode of the Bad Batch is up on Disney+. Shockingly, I have some thoughts on the subject.

This show definitely didn’t want us to walk away with a bittersweet thought about the end of it. Clone Wars ended on an emotionally devastating scene where Ahsoka buried almost the entire clone 501st Legion that had been featured throughout the series while still processing the horror of them betraying her in Order 66, followed immediately by Darth Vader coming to inspect the wreckage some indeterminate number of years later in the Imperial era.

Seriously, Star Wars fans who grew up with Clone Wars might never forgive Filoni for ending their childhood this way. I’ve seen TikTok videos of relative nonfans watching it who just burst into tears seeing Vader here, and just not being able to see him as Darth Vader for all the emotions that come to the surface with this in finding his old apprentice’s saber and the graves of all his comrades from the war.

Then Rebels ended with Ezra having gotten himself sent into parts unknown in order to remove Thrawn from the primary galaxy, and Ahsoka returning to help Sabine go find him.

The Bad Batch chooses to end on a much happier note…

No, not that one. It’s this one. But I had to put that one up first.

Omega lives. The remaining three Batch soldiers live. They manage to conclusively end the Empire’s hunting for them and live out what looks like most of the rest of their lives in relative peace, until Omega grows up and decides she wants to join the Rebellion as a pilot.

Compared to the other two major animated shows, that’s downright… upbeat and hopeful.

This all comes to a head after a long, and perhaps too far drawn out, build-up where Omega first escapes with Crosshair, then gives herself up again to be recaptured, and we find out that the whole facility she’s been held in is tied to the Emperor’s Project Necromancer. This same code name is also given in the third season of Mandalorian, and it’s clearly an effort to clone the Emperor past his eventual death. The first effort is clearly intended to use Force-sensitive children on Tantiss base, but cloning Force sensitives is not possible without something of a catalyst from other sorts of DNA, and as it turns out, Omega herself is the best catalyst the Empire has found. After the destruction of Kamino earlier in the series, this is the primary remaining cloning research under the Empire.

Omega is stationed with the other children this time, and helps break them out. She also breaks out the Zillo Beast we saw earlier in the series, revealing that this thing was truly Chekhov’s Monster to have been caught and brought to Tantiss in the first place. This creates enough chaos and diversion to let the Batch come back in and rescue her, although not before they’re caught and ambushed multiple times by the mysterious commando clones.

They manage to get the other clones held there out, with some help from Emerie. The other kids also are rescued. Everybody gets out. Echo and Emerie go off to find Rex, and there’s no particular sign of what happened to any of them. Hunter, Crosshair, and Wrecker live out the rest of their chronicled days on Pabu until Hunter is seen in the above shot with greying hair, and Omega outright grows up. They choose, after a lifetime of fighting, to conspicuously not fight once they’ve gotten clear, and they apparently hold to that — thus, why we don’t see the Bad Batch troopers during the rebellion era. They’ve retired once they free themselves. Omega, however, grows up and decides to join the Rebellion. Hemlock dies in the rescue. All of his data is destroyed. Nala Se sacrifices herself to make sure of that, despite Rampart betraying the rescue effort in hopes of rehabilitating himself with the Empire. And, very possibly, that means the Kaminoan race as a whole is now close to if not altogether extinct.

However, we also know that Moff Gideon manages to revive Project Necromancer at some point, to an extent that he is able to successfully clone Force sensitive versions of himself, and very possibly Snoke, and most likely leading to the clone of Sidious we see in The Rise of Skywalker. Whether that means that Gideon was able to recover the adult Omega and combine her DNA with Grogu’s during that series’ events, or if he found some other catalyst, remains to be seen. However, whatever Filoni has in mind to wrap up that story — perhaps in the upcoming Mandoverse movie — likely will close off these loose ends.

Either way, there’s a relatively happy ending here. For a change. The ending isn’t quite as memorable as the Ahsoka-and-Vader one (nothing in an animated series likely ever will be), but it was good. It closes the book on the Batch in a way that doesn’t leave them dead, even if Crosshair ultimately loses his shooting hand.

Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver

I’m not going to mince a whole lot of words: this movie was mildly entertaining and somewhat amusing drek.

Like, this movie pretty much stands out as an example of why even a relatively weak Star Wars entry is still better than a lot of other sci fi out there. The production values were all right, it was reasonably entertaining for what it was, and just about every part of the story was nonsense.

I get what they’re going for. It’s Star Wars crossed with Seven Samurai with the cinematography style of 300 or Snyder’s Justice League. And that’s kinda both a good and bad thing.

The first hour of the movie is a combination of having an origin story of all the main fighters as they get ready to fight. We find out that Kora fled the Motherworld not out of any moral objections to the Regent’s assassination of the King and his family, but actively took part and was scapegoated for it after it was over.

And in the midst of that is a bunch of slow motion montage clips of the glories of wheat production by hand. Because they’ve got to grow all this with hand tools even as they haul it all around with hoverboard carts.

Then lots of fighting and explosions and what not. Most of this isn’t as interesting as the first movie, frankly.

So… here’s the real rub: the whole premise of this movie is that this galactic empire needs the wheat produced in one harvest from a small village on a backwater moon somewhere badly enough to commit a dreadnought and all its troops aboard to seize it.

There’s just a bit of an issue with suspension of disbelief on the logistical ratios involved once it’s pointed out. I heard that in a podcast somewhere, and I can’t unhear it. Because it makes no sense at all.

Now… it’s not the nadir of sci fi premises. One of these days I will review Pitch Black for that, which is utterly silly in both its proposed astrophysics (which hold up even less in the era of Three Body Problem) and it’s xenobiology (predator-prey ratio is a thing, and this movie seems to have issues with that). And although Pitch Black is not a particularly great movie, it’s still visually pleasant and the character interactions good enough that it’s kinda forgivable. If I can suspend disbelief for that premise enough to kinda enjoy a movie there, I can do it here.

That said, this is not a particularly great movie, either. It’s just good enough to be interesting once, and that’s about it.

Movie rating: 2 out of 5 (pseudo-stars)

Mirror, Mirror

Julia Roberts movie that does a live action take on Snow White, with Lily Collins playing the Snow White role. Roberts takes up most of the movie, which is intended as a bit of a comic version of the story, and there are some elements of it that are modernized, such as no longer having a prince awaken Snow White, and the dwarves are rather roguish sorts. They make some references to the Queen’s effort to poison Snow with the apple, but the attempt isn’t successful. They’re clearly dancing around the IP from the cartoon without adapting it directly. It was… ok, but nothing terribly memorable. Frankly, it was more than a little bit dull and not terribly worth going into much depth over.

Movie Rating: 1.75 out of 5.

Finding Nemo

This is one of the better movies Pixar has ever made. Some even consider the opening scene of tragedy where Marlin loses his mate and most of his eggs, being left only with young Nemo who he overprotects as much as he can to compensate, to be similar to the mountain of tragic circumstances we see in the opening and climax scenes of Up. I’m not willing to go that far — Up is pretty easily the most tear-inducing movie Pixar has ever made, in my humble opinion, and everything else is several steps down.

That said, the movie’s take on sapient fish is quite humorous, with Ellen Degeneres’ Dory half stealing the show throughout the movie. However, by far the most memorable take is the voracious seagulls towards the end of the movie, whose entire characterization is comically reduced to a single word:

This monosyllabic mantra is arguably one of the best “character(s) only has one line, and yet smashes it beautifully” deliveries this side of the Mad King’s iconic “Burn them all!” from Game of Thrones. Even two decades later, the NFL uses the audio in homage to characterize the attitude of football players chaotically going after a loose ball:

@nfl

i call him squishy, and he will be mine! he will be my squishy 🐙🏈 #saints #panthers #nfl

♬ original sound – SarahJayne💜

The movie is not the most rewatchable of all Pixar films, but it still holds up quite well.

Movie rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Coco

This was one of Pixar’s better ones of the late 2010s, borrowing from the themes of the Mexican Day of the Dead. The key premise is an old philosophical saw that everyone effectively dies twice: the first time is when they put you in the ground, and the second is the last time a living person says your name.

There is apparently a Mexican tradition of forestalling the second death by honoring photos of those who have passed once a year in an effort to never forget previous generations of one’s family. As such, the movie posits that the spirits of the dead come to visit their family on the Day of the Dead, but in order to be allowed back into the material world, their photo must be on someone’s mantle being honored. (Nitpick: what would’ve happened before the invention of the photograph? Nobody got to come back?)

Into this motif, we have a family whose great, great grandfather left his wife to pursue a music career and was never seen again. As a result, a bitterness against music has befallen the rest of the family for generations, with every one of them cursing his name other than his daughter Coco, until we come to a pre-teen boy named Miguel. He idolizes a great musician named Ernesto de la Cruz, who was famous in a “Mexican Elvis” level of reference and had both a crazy-great music and film career. Miguel compares between a photo of his unpersoned ancestor with the head torn off the likeness and one of de la Cruz and realizes that de la Cruz has the same guitar as the man in the photo, and concludes that he is the great great grandson of the famous musician. He wants to play on the Day of the Dead in the plaza, which his family forbids because that’s what his near-forgotten ancestor did and was never seen again. They destroy his hidden guitar he’s been playing, and after a tremendous rage against his family, he seeks to steal de la Cruz’s and play anyway.

He finds that stealing the famous dead man’s guitar has catapulted him into the spirit world of the dead.

From here, he needs the blessing of the spirit of a family member to return. If he doesn’t get back before sunrise after the Day of the Dead, he dies and becomes a spirit himself.

His regular family refuses to give him their blessing without the condition that he never play music again, and if he breaks the condition he goes back. Unwilling to give it up, he seeks out de la Cruz to get his blessing again. Along the way, he meets a fellow named Hector, who apparently choked to death and is barely remembered by anyone but his daughter, and he’s worried he’ll fade soon. He says he used to play with de la Cruz, and offers to take Miguel to him if he’ll bring a photo back to the living so people can remember him.

De la Cruz seems unaware he ever had a great great grandson, but seems pleased by it. His entire afterlife residence is a giant shrine to himself, constantly playing clips from his concerts and films, and he comes off as quite the egotistical sort. Hector and de la Cruz clearly did know each other, and it’s an awkward exchange when it becomes clear that Hector apparently wrote basically all of de la Cruz’s songs before he died, to which de la Cruz says he wanted to play them to keep some part of him alive.

It gets more awkward when a clip from one of de la Cruz’s movies depicts a man being poisoned, and Hector realizes that de la Cruz said to him exactly what the poisoner says in the movie. It hits a little too on the nose when he further adds up that de la Cruz had shared a drink with him when he insisted he wanted to go home to his family, and realizes that de la Cruz poisoned him in order to steal his songs and propel his career.

Not long after, Hector begins to twitch as though he’s fading — his daughter is forgetting him. Then he speaks his daughter’s name: Coco, the title character and Miguel’s great grandmother. Hector, not de la Cruz, is Miguel’s ancestor, and the reason he never came back is not because he never wanted to, but because he was murdered.

A sad sequence ensues where de la Cruz takes and disposed of the photo Hector wanted Miguel to bring back, but Hector and his estranged wife play a duet together amidst all of it. His wife seems to forgive him, but it’s perhaps too late — the elderly Coco is the last living person who remembers him, and if she doesn’t pass on the memory before she dies or if she forgets him due to age, he’ll fade. However, Miguel’s time is up, and they give him their unconditional blessing to return.

There’s an absolutely heart rending scene where Miguel frantically finds Coco and plays the titular song of the film — “Remember Me” — for her. Hector played it for her when he was a kid, and it was always her favorite. His family starts to stop him, but when Coco clearly appreciates the song, they let it go on. It becomes clear that Coco is overjoyed to hear it again, and remembers her father. It then comes out that she has the lost corner torn off her father’s photograph to patch it when she somewhat conveniently pulls it out of a drawer, and the photograph is restored to the mantle for the next Day of the Dead. Hector’s spirit is saved, he won’t fade, and he gets to visit the next year, while de la Cruz’s fame takes a serious hit when the truth of his career is revealed.

I did find myself saying this during the movie… sometimes the worst people get the biggest audiences and followings. In the movies, karma usually catches up to them. In real life… it often seems not to.

This was a good one, although it had a few holes in it. The drama of the defaced photo that’s older than most of the living people in the movie where Hector’s face was removed, only to reveal that Coco just had it in a drawer the whole time, feels a bit too convenient in retrospect. The conceptual hole of what happened before cameras is also a thing. But the movie is still plenty good.

Movie rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Fallout, E1

Watched it. Visually interesting. Story wise, it seemed very trite. At some point, I’m just not that into post apocalyptic stuff. Lots of gratuitous violence, too, and not much of it seemed to serve the plot too well. I don’t know that I’m going to continue with it. I imagine bigger fans of the games probably would like it better. It had its moments, but I was frankly mostly bored watching it.

Thanks for reading.

Tax Day Roundup: Dune Pt2, Oppenheimer, Bad Batch S3 (so far), 3 Body Problem, Halo S2, Wreck-It Ralph

There are three, not two constants in life: death, taxes, and I’m a sci-fi nerd. I did my taxes a little while ago, and I’m not dead yet, so my long-waiting readers get to hear about the nerdness instead. So I’m going to start off with the most current stuff first.

Bad Batch S3 (so far)

The long-awaited final season of Clone Wars ended with Ahsoka mournfully burying all of the clone soldiers (save Rex), and Darth Vader inscrutably musing over the wreckage of her ship (and the audience’s childhood) and then walking away like it no longer mattered to him.

Now… read that brutal one-sentence summary of that ending again, and tell me I’m wrong. Because that’s our emotional baseline, and where we appear to being as we wind down the last few weeks of The Bad Batch is going into seriously dark territory, and I honestly have no idea how this is going to end even a little bit well.

Crosshair is back. (Yay!) Tech is still dead. (Sads!) We have now seen two different periods of glimpses of Tantiss Base, a black site where the Empire is seeking to research serial immortality for the Emperor with child experimentation. (Record scratch…)

Yeah. Child… experimentation.

This is a cartoon, remember. Its intended audience is kids. And that subject matter is squarely directed as an emotional punch right between the eyes to every kid watching this. “This is the Empire, kids. This place is not cool. And if they thought you were useful to them, they would totally lock you up in the day care from hell, just like this.”

This season is, in its own way, the cartoon version of Andor. Relatively minimal lightsabers (the appearance of Asajj Ventress being the lone exception), just a straight up statement of how horrible the Empire is to average people who had absolutely no wrongdoing that they’d committed to deserve what is happening to them. We literally see Cad Bane stuffing an alien toddler into a box to deliver him to the Empire, and then telling Emerie Karr that she’s asking too many questions when she wonders how many such children have been delivered in this fashion. Every part of this is calculated to say to a young audience, in imagery and terms they will understand, just how horrible the galaxy is with the Empire in charge.

It’s the kind of thing that would honestly have me wondering how many kids will be going back to school on a Thursday morning and then looking worried whenever they have to go to the nurse’s office.

Somewhere in the midst of this, we have shadowy covert clone commandos, a gradual mixing of stormtroopers to replace clones, a gradual “decommissioning” of the clones partly via similar experimentation, since they somewhat unwisely got rid of the bulk of the Kaminoans before they could share their notes on their successors in the Empire, and thereby alienated the only surviving Kaminoan they recruited to come with them.

And even if Dave Filoni is not about to try topping the ending of Clone Wars with a finale where the kids watch their audience-identification character die in the end (I feel somehow like that would be a step too far), this is probably not going to be pretty. Maybe the Batch manages to rescue all the kids this time, and Omega somehow finds a way to be put in a place where she can stay out of the Empire’s way and escape this hamster wheel of awful that this season is depicting. That said… we know the Empire is likely to resume doing exactly what they’ve been doing, even if they didn’t do it here. This is the darkest stuff directed at Star Wars’ core, target audience we’ve seen since “Master Skywalker, there are too many of them…” (In this context, I’m just going to dismiss Andor as simply not having been directed at the same audience as the rest of it, and even then… the implicit off-camera slaughter of little Jedi kids, with the one delivering that devastating line literally being chosen for his resemblance to a young Jake Lloyd to contrast just how far Vader has fallen from his beginnings, is quite a step or five further than Andor went.)

This is one of those things where the more you think about it, the nastier it gets. That said, there’s no chance I’m checking out of this ending.

3 Body Problem (Netflix)

Just to be clear, I am referring to the western adaptation that has been presented on Netflix, and not the Chinese one that is currently available on Peacock.

Oh, and I need to leave this here at this point…

This one is a bit of a nasty affair, too, but it’s very thoughtful as well. The series contemplates an alien species that hails from a planet in an extremely unstable orbit around all three stars of the Alpha Centauri system — thus the title of the show, postulating that it’s impossible to predict the conditions on such a planet orbiting around three suns, much less a life form that could actually survive such conditions. However, the core conceit of it is that this life form did, in fact, survive.

A young physics student, Ye Wenjie, starts out the series watching her father die under the beatings of a “struggle session” in the nadir of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, followed by a number of occasions in which male characters befriend her and then betray her in order to save themselves from the slightest inconvenience and/or take credit for her work. In many ways, this plot choice is a very, very brave one on the part of the original author, who was himself Chinese, and included this as a core motivation for said student to reach out to the aliens and decide that humanity is not redeemable. She receives a signal from alien intelligence, and figures out how to signal back. She receives a response, years later, that explicitly tells her that whoever received this on the other end was a pacifist, and she was fortunate that they received her message rather than the rest of their people. She is explicitly warned not to answer again, or they’ll come and conquer the Earth.

Her answer is, “Go ahead. I’ll help you do it. We’re beyond hope and can’t save ourselves anyway.”

It is my understanding that, in the original book, the author, Liu Cixin (credited in the western style as Cixin Liu), deliberately left these scenes a bit later in the story in an effort to avoid censorship by the Chinese government by de-emphasizing it with this placement. However, Liu asked the western adaptors to put it back at the beginning where he felt it belonged narratively. It is also my understanding that the struggle session scene where Ye’s father dies, in particular, has outright been left out of the Chinese TV adaptation. This is something of a window into the level of daring of the author, that something as salient as citing Maoism as the reason one of its victims wants to see humanity conquered by aliens ever got into a Chinese science fiction novel.

On reading into this, it’s also my understanding that Liu is the writer of the book Wandering Earth, from which the movie also present on Netflix was adapted. I had not made that connection before just now as I’m writing this.

The author’s views on individualism versus one-world government action are also a bit… scary to some conservative audiences, and it’s my understanding that a few politicians send a letter to Netflix with a bit of red-baiting as to why they were adopting this guy’s writings. However, the showrunners are the same guys behind Game of Thrones, and people familiar with that series will spot several actors playing significant roles in this one, mixed in with Benedict Wong from the Doctor Strange movies. I liked this adaptation a lot — more so than the brief bit of the Chinese one that I’ve watched out of curiosity — and would definitely recommend it.

I also understand that the author’s writings on the “dark forest hypothesis,” named after the title of the sequel novel, have been taken up as a strong influence on the conjecture on Fermi’s paradox — the question in scientific circles as to why we don’t have any evidence of alien life in spite of the abundance of extrasolar planets that are likely habitable — is that they’re all cautiously hostile and staying quiet to avoid extermination by other quiet, hostile potential enemies.

I definitely hope that the rest of the books get green-lit for a series as well. I’ve read bits of the first book after watching the show, but I don’t know how much of it I’m likely to keep going on.

Dune Part Two

Oy. This one is epic, and tricky to understand at face value. So here goes.

It is very, very important that a viewer of these movies understand that Paul Atreides is not intended to be a hero. Indeed, he’s deliberately intended to be a warning that you really should beware of your heroes. Everything about his rising holy war against the Padishah Emperor and the great houses needs to be understood in that light. While he believes firmly that what he’s doing is necessary for the greater good, the costs of what he’s doing are terrible, and his followers are firmly intended to be seen as fanatics, not fellow heroes traveling in a great and wonderful cause together. This was always Frank Herbert’s intent in writing the novels upon which these movies are based, and it is well adapted on the screen. (A similar motif is clearly behind the character of Danaerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, the modern fans of whom continue to fight what’s plain on the screen in a manner not seen his side of Star Wars fandom to this day.)

Timothee Chalamet’s role is a bit terrifying in this light, in that he knows that he’s likely to be doing some very, very terrible things, but ultimately finds that he must do them anyway, because the alternative is even worse. In a way, he’s Anakin Skywalker without the moral scruples of a universe saying that what he’s doing is wrong, and once he comes to be fully awakened with his version of the Force, he falls into his role with complete conviction that he is doing what he must, and falls into the necessary ruthlessness of it with barely a moment’s glance in the rear view mirror.

There is a bit of a shift of Chani’s character, as portrayed by Zendaya, from her depiction in the books. Book Chani dutifully goes along with this journey, becoming his true bride while his relationship to Princess Irulan is strictly political and is never consummated as a marriage. Chani, in this movie, becomes his lover and confidante, but as soon as he starts to descend into his ruthless path, she begins to pull away from him. She’s portrayed as the doubting conscience of this film here — she sees through the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit to pave the way for his coming as a means of enslaving her people, and when all of it comes to pass she never accepts him as a prophet or ruler. She tells Paul, “I will always love you as long as you’re you,” foreshadowing the later stages of the film where she no longer recognizes the man she loves. And, unlike the books where she accepts the political marriage to Irulan, in the film it is the last straw that convinces her that she must leave.

The film is magnificent, and I watched it twice in theaters so that I could see it one more time once I understood the themes a bit more. It helped a lot to know what I was seeing, and Chani’s line about loving Paul “as long as you’re still you” becomes much more telling when you know what’s going to happen, whereas it’s more easily missed when you don’t.

Movie rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Oppenheimer

Much as Doctor Strangelove is sub-titled, “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb”? Oppenheimer could be subbed “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Communist.”

This is a historical docudrama about the famous director of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bombs at the end of World War II. However, the story is told partly through the lens of his feud with Lewis Strauss, who engineered his blacklisting from government service via the stripping of his Q clearance as a suspected communist in the mid 1950s at the height of the McCarthy era. Hollywood, as a cultural center, has always had quite the institutional grudge against the evens and perpetrators of that era, so in modern times it rarely fails to make villains of those who aided in the Red Scare and victims of those whose careers were ended by it.

As a salient point, a number of historical facts need to be stipulated here. I don’t take a sympathetic eye towards McCarthy’s place in history, but that doesn’t mean that it was as simple or black and white as Hollywood often portrays it. I’m a bit of a history buff of this time, so this much I can relate from my own research and, to the best of my knowledge, I understand all of these things to be statements of historical fact:

• The Manhattan Project did, in fact, produce the first atomic bombs.
• The project did, in fact, have numerous Soviet spies who preyed upon the communist sympathies of many of its principals to work their way inside and leak information back to Stalin.
• As a result of this infiltration, Stalin knew of the project’s existence long before Truman did, as the latter was not informed until he death of Franklin Roosevelt and his accession to the presidency.
• The Soviets did, in fact, produce an atomic bomb of their own based on the information provided to them by spies inside Los Alamos — their first bomb test was largely a complete copy of the plutonium implosion device used on Nagasaki.
• Although Hollywood often portrays all targets of anti-communist suppression as unalloyed victims, the fact remains that the Soviet Union did, in fact, provide significant financial support to the Communist Party of the United States.
• In the Yeltsin years, post-Soviet Russia publicly released many of the old KGB records that make the extent of communist subversion completely clear.
• Our own information from the FBI’s counterintelligence wasn’t released to the public before the Russians spilled the beans, but our people knew it well in real time, too. Hoover wasn’t a total kook tilting at windmills.
• While there were indeed subversive elements to communist infiltration here, McCarthy et al were not entirely intelligent in their hunting for enemies, and did indeed ruin the lives of many innocent people who had no particularly treasonous designs or threat potential.
• In short: it was a bit of a witch hunt at times, but there were actual witches to be found, too.

So… all that considered, this movie can be seen in a somewhat critical light.

Strauss’ vendetta against Oppenheimer did unfold more or less as it was shown in the movie, and the denial of Oppenheimer’s security clearance did spring from that grudge. That said, Oppenheimer’s fraternization with known communists, in the early rage of the Cold War, would have absolutely been considered a legitimate security threat in that era, especially after the Soviet bomb program had literally sprung up from the Manhattan Project’s security failings. While the processes by which his clearance was revoked weren’t entirely fair, the argument can be made that they didn’t have to be, either. This stuff wasn’t a game, and the old Soviet Union was not a benign force in the world. I don’t have to be a right wing ideologue to say that — and, in fact, I’m not.

That said, Oppenheimer’s institutional guilt over what he had created is well realized in Cilian Murphy’s acting performance, and the movie is wonderfully crafted. My critiques of the historical slant of the movie itself, and its sympathies for the treatment of its title character in his own time with relatively little nuance to observation of the times, don’t change that a bit. I’ve watched it twice on stream and enjoyed it thoroughly both times. It’s also a bit jarring to see Florence Pugh going from Yelena Bulova to Princess Irulan in Dune to Jean Tatlock in this. I half expected to hear Ms. Tatlock speaking in a Russian accent, and Pugh thoroughly disappears into this role in a way that stands out to me for how much I’ve seen of her lately. Murphy and Downing are also excellent, and definitely both deserved their Oscars.

Movie Rating: 4.25 out of 5.

Halo S2

This one’s a bit less current and a bit less memorable. I watched the bulk of it fairly promptly, but at a point in time where I was alternating between it and The Bad Batch, my energy to keep up reviewing every episode waned until I had enough of a backlog that I had to write this whole thing to catch up.

Halo diverges quite a bit from a lot of the themes of the game. Out of a curious desire to apparently avoid treating the humans as strictly the good guys, the leadership of humanity continues to be portrayed as being not much better than the Covenant. I half expected that we would somehow bridge the gap somewhat whenever Reach fell, and that we would somehow scoop some subset of our characters onto the Pillar of Autumn so that we could come full circle back into something like the events of the first game.

Didn’t happen.

Jacob Keyes dies in the fall of Reach. The Pillar of Autumn is never shown in any form. The titular Halo ring is found in a larger battle over its location, instead of being found by the Covenant a bit before the humans stumble across it blindly. The Chief and Makee individually come there with a Sanghelli we’re eventually given to understand is supposed to be the Arbiter, although he’s purely a cohort of Makee rather than an alternate protagonist as he is in the games. We do see the Flood, but it’s a more microbial parasitic life form rather than the product of little blob like spore creatures, although their effect on infected humans is similarly creepy. The Flood are found not on the Halo ring, but in a lab on a human-excavated world.

It’s all enough of a divergence that, once I was left off the interest in conjecturing how much the story would parallel the games and it became clear that it was going to go its own way, and I was left judging the series on its own merits as such?

Eh. It’s fairly good. I don’t like the conspiratorial attitude of the humans — whoever made this clearly didn’t want to portray human government as benevolent or justified in its motives, didn’t want to cleanly show humans as being the good guys, or both. The story suffers a bit for it. The constant “human leadership is shadowy and can’t be trusted” undercurrent was frankly a little tiresome to me and hurt my enjoyment some.I

It was still worth watching, though, and if they continue to a season 3, I’ll keep going.

Wreck-It Ralph

This movie gets slept on by Disney animation fans, partly because it’s a big niche. That said, if you’re even a little bit of a gamer, this borders on must-see viewing. The movie is quite the love letter to video gaming history without making the main characters a straight adaptation of any one game.

The title character is a bit of a send-up of Donkey Kong from a game that is obviously intended to be somewhat similar, and ends in a game that’s an obvious send-up of Mario Kart. Somewhere along the way it manages to be a good story about being okay with who you are, and criticizing the dangers of jealousy of others and wanting to seize everything they have out of a sense of your own inadequacy. Alan Tudyk obviously enjoyed playing the main villain with more than a little bit of an homage to the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.

Movie rating: 4 out of 5.

Book Review: Echoes of War volume 1-2

Somewhere in edgewise, I gave in to one of the many Facebook ads I’ve seen about sci fi books on Amazon and bought this series for a whole dollar. I got through about two of them and change before I stopped.

In case you’re worried I’m a right winger, my thoughts on this should disabuse you.

The premise of the book postulates that, at some point in the near future, China and Russia realize a particularly militant form of atheistic communism that seeks to wipe all religious practice from the Earth. The various faiths of Earth invent the first faster-than-light drives to facilitate a mass exodus to flee as it becomes clear that the commies are not stoppable and they can’t hold out on the Motherworld. They settle down primarily on a planet called Canaan and found a free society with freedom of religion, something like a more religious take on the United Federation of Planets, except where religious observance and tolerance are explicitly taken as part of their core ideals. Muslims, Jews, and Christians show no sign whatsoever of the mutual intolerances that (ahem) create issues in the real world we live in. Eventually, the commies replicate FTL and find the good guys and resume the struggle in space.

The main character is a rabbi who finds himself becoming a prodigy of a naval commander, whose father died in the early years of the war against the resurgent commies once they find the diaspora of the faithful, but who holds tremendous guilt over taking of life and deals with it with a great deal of internal moral struggle that borders on crippling.

It’s a different take. So far, not so bad. As foundations of sci fi utopias go, it’s no more or less plausible a vision than any, and I can’t say as the commentary that observance of religion should be a unifier instead of a divider is an ignoble ideal. And the reluctant hero who must fight bug abhors killing isn’t so bad a place to start for a main character.

It becomes more than a little bit clear that the author, Daniel Gibbs, has more than a bit of an axe to grind in his writing, though. Religious faith is worn on almost every character’s sleeve. There’s a particular atheist scientist who is a prominent supporting character who, although he hates the commies as much as anyone else, he is often used as a straw man foil in what it obviously intended by the author as an argument for why God must exist. Numerous religious visions are experienced by protagonist characters that are largely intended to be taken at face value. The villains, whenever portrayed, are obvious caricatures of what I suppose the author and his target audience would fear, a virulent atheist menace whose adherents hate all religious observance as being superstition that must be stamped out, whether or not those who believe it want to be stamped.

The second novel kind of goes on in this vein, and plays up a random diplomat visit into completely inexplicable revelations of extermination camps of anyone following any kind of religion, so that the good guys can fight it all in obvious righteousness, with zero explanation of any sort of what motivated the planetary authorities involved into doing any such thing. We are, for lack of a better phrase, expected to take it on faith that it would happen.

I bogged down a few chapters into the third book when it started off in a stream of consciousness description of dozens of pages of religious observances.

I’m personally somewhat agnostic. I was raised Protestant, but I was always bored to tears by church as a kid and simply stopped going when I grew up. I don’t have any particular contempt for religious faith, and I’ll pray at family dinners with people more observant than I am, and recognize it can be both a good and bad thing in the world.

So frankly, while I was willing to read a certain amount into these novels out of curiosity and a direct intent to give it a chance, eventually the degree to which it got preachy just became too much to me. If you’re heavily religious and/or believe that the godless lefties are coming for your Bibles in real life? This is probably catnip for you. It’s my understanding that there’s more than a little bit of this kind of thing out there.

I was only good for a little over two books before I got tired of the preaching. I don’t have a problem with sci fi contrasting faith versus the militant desire to stamp it out, but I probably would’ve had an easier time with it if the faith involved was something wholly fictional, so that the moral questions involved could be absorbed without the real sense that this was trying more to be a window into the author’s paranoia about the role of faith in the modern world and the encroachment of secularism upon it, dressed up as a sci fi story. I somewhat like my sci fi to be at least somewhat escapist. Dune frankly did this better than this guy did.

…not that this guy has any business being flattered with comparisons to the best selling sci fi novel of all time.

But it was something I read. It held my interest for a few weeks to read on Monday evenings while my little one was in their parkour class. And now I’m done with it. It was interesting for the window into the author’s psyche it was no doubt intended to be, and I’m not angry for having read it or anything. But I can be done with it now.

Thanks for reading.

Mid February Roundup: Skiptrace, Mr and Mrs Smith (Amazon), Halo S2E1-5, What If S2E1

Catching up after about a month or so since my last post. I still have not had any urge to watch anything Marvel they’ve put out. I watched one episode of What If’s second season, and that’s about it. Somewhat entertaining, but not so much that I was inspired with any great urge to keep going.

So here’s what I have been watching, aside from Bad Batch…

Skiptrace

This was a 2016 Jackie Chan movie made and set in Hong Kong. It’s another of Chan’s semi-slapstick cop movies, and it starts out with him losing a partner while he’s looking for a crime boss called the “Matador.” It’s intended to be something of a mystery, but they dropped the occasional hint that was none too subtle that telegraphed what was intended to be basically all their key twists, and as such the shock reveals were less than successful. I won’t spoil it, it’s on Netflix, and if you’re a fan of Jackie Chan, it’s worth watching, but it’s far from his most memorable work.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Mr. And Mrs. Smith

Amazon made this show with the blessing of Brad Pitt and other producers of the original movie, and I was always a great fan of the movie, so I wanted to give this one a shot.

I’ll leave this here, so you can skip to the Halo section if you don’t want the spoilers.

This one is less casting the title characters as assassins so much as just general spies, and in this case both of the title characters know from the beginning that the other is a spy working for the same company. It’s a departure from the movie in that they’re both working for the same people, although it’s kept equally nebulous as to who’s writing their checks.

The company, in this case, is quickly shown to employ a large number of spies around as arranged-married partners, all of them code named John and Jane Smith. It also becomes evident when they make their first mistake that they’re effectively given a “three strikes and you’re out” rule, where three failed missions that don’t go to the letter of the company’s stated desires means that a higher order of Johns and Janes will come terminate them with extreme prejudice.

It was reasonably good, but the continuity wasn’t particularly good between episodes. More than once, it seems like they’re leaving a few too many loose ends that should eventually blow back on them, but in almost no cases do they ever encounter the same people twice.

Eventually they have enough failures that they’re ordered to kill each other, which leads to a soul searching series of conversations and fights very reminiscent of the fight between Pitt and Jolie in the movie. However, this is the company diverting them while the higher Smiths are assigned to hunt them down. The series leaves it somewhat ambiguous as to whether the two Smiths we’ve been following survive or not — the main clue is that Jane tells John, who appears to be bleeding out, that she only has one bullet left with the “other Jane” right outside the door of their safe room trying to get in, and then she makes her move. It cuts away to a view from outside, where you see and hear that three shots are fired. The most likely explanation is that the title Jane failed, and the “other Jane” killed them both. However, it’s possible that the title Jane managed to disarm her and won.

It’s a bit of a Sopranos style ending. That said, I suspect we may not be getting a second season with these same two characters, and if the series isn’t renewed, we can just assume the “other Jane” won.

Halo S2E1-5

Some time has passed in the storyline since we left the Master Chief with Cortana installed on his brain and apparently with the actual human comatose below her personality when he insisted she “take over.” It was indicated that the Covenant’s pet human semi-prophet was dead, and the Chief’s regular human self was as well. Halsey had apparently escaped, and so on.

They skip to a lot of shifts for no particular a reason. A new intelligence officer named Ackerson has taken over on Reach, and he’s made out to be an untrustworthy spook from the start. Every time the Chief finds evidence that the Covenant may have advanced further than the spooks think they have, Ackerson dismisses his reports and ultimately shuts down his unit to keep him quiet. It comes to a head when Ackerson refuses to tell another team he’s sending out that they may run into Covenant forces, or reveal to the Master Chief where they’re going.

The Chief eventually figures out that the other team was sent to another location on Reach itself, and when he goes to investigate, he quickly deduces that the Covenant are on Reach. Moreover, he sees Makee apparently alive, but no one believes him, not even his own people.

Admiral Keyes follows orders in having the Chief and his unit decommissioned and the Chief himself taken in for a psych evaluation, but when the other team of soldiers’ bodies is recovered, Keyes quickly figures out that the Chief was right all along, and worse, Ackerson likely knew it. Ackerson was conducting simulations of the situation with Cortana, and she tells him there’s no way to change it, which is left mildly mysterious as to what she means until it’s revealed Ackerson has known the Covenant is on Reach all along, and he’s been calculating if there’s any way to stop the planet from being glassed.

Moreover, Halsey is apparently in Ackerson’s custody to some degree on Reach, with no real explanation as to how or why she was apprehended. The former Spartan Soren comes into this, as he also wants to find Halsey, but he’s eventually sold out by his own crew in the badlands and brought in. Kwan Ha, the dissident the Chief meets in the beginning, has fallen in with Soren and acts to rescue his wife and son when his crew sells him out.

It’s a little confusing as to how all this ties together or how this continuity ties with what we saw in the first season, aside from the fact that an underlying theme of mistrust of the human authorities is still very prevalent. It still feels a bit like the human government is either not really the good guys or that they’re kind of their own worst enemies if not for the fact that there’s a genocidal alien alliance ready to wipe them out when they can’t get out of their own way.

That said, it seems clear that the pacing of this part of the series is intended to get us onto the titular Halo ring itself by the end of this season — the fall of Reach that kicked off the games 23 years ago went down in episode 4, and is not going to be the season’s climax. Frankly, it surprised me a bit that they did that in just one episode. Either way, the simple “humans good, aliens bad” story of the games (or at least the first three) is very much muddied up here, and I’m not entirely sure I like that. It was always portrayed as hard enough for the humans to fight off the Covenant in the games without their own leadership being this untrustworthy, but this is likely intended to make the Chief seem like that much more of an underdog when they get to Halo itself.

Meanwhile, Makee is indeed alive, and is in her own standoff with a character who’s obviously intended to be this show’s version of the Arbiter, who’s already starting down the thread of doubting the Prophets of the Covenant even before the Halo ring itself is discovered.

But Halo is obviously going its own way and is only tangentially going to resemble the games.

We’ll see how it goes. This series is going to share my attention with The Bad Batch’s third and final series over the next few weeks. That one, I suspect, is going to draw some tears — it seems very likely that most of the title characters aren’t going to survive, but I imagine Omega is. We’ll have to see how it shapes out, but I think their rescue attempt is likely to be successful in freeing her from the Empire, but I still expect that most of the rest of the main Batch isn’t going to make it out. Meanwhile, Dune Part Two is out, and I’ll get around to watching that in theaters hopefully soon.

Thanks for reading.

What I’ve Been Watching: No Hard Feelings, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Lift

I have been aware that Echo and the second season of What If…? are out there on the Marvel side of things. The first season of the latter was… ok, I guess, but didn’t exactly excite me too much to chase down this one all that fast, whereas the former is a spinoff based on a supporting character on Hawkeye, which I despised so much I spent a year cracking a running joke that it had never actually gotten made. Secret Invasion has now replaced it in the cellar, but… I am not particularly enthused by the prospect that this is going to be any good at all, so I’ve not started it.

I’m vaguely looking forward to the third season of The Bad Batch. I’m assuming it’ll probably end in tears, since the title characters are conspicuously absent from anything later in the timeline, and although they aren’t “regular” clones, they probably are aging quickly enough that even if they survive, they’ll have died of old age by the time of the prequels. The only character who might survive is Omega, I imagine, but the only reason she’d live is most likely so she could show up in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie.

So I’ve been watching relatively comedy things. Here’s what I’ve got.

No Hard Feelings

It’s my understanding that this was based on an actual Craigslist ad that the writers saw, advertising to hire a girl to date their son to help him with his awkwardness. The movie is based on the 32 year old Maddie, played by Jennifer Lawrence, answering such an ad to date Percy, a very awkward teenager heading to Princeton. The age difference is enough that the writers feel an obvious desire to dance around it a bit, but it mostly manages to be funny. Seeing Matthew Broderick as a grey haired dad was a bit of a trip — I’m so used to seeing him mostly as the awkward teenager in movies like this that seeing him as the greying dad was jarring enough I almost didn’t recognize him.

Rating: 3 out of 5. Good, but not something that one would rewatch much.

Lift

This is a heist movie that clearly had a strong desire to cast Kevin Hart as being as far away from the screeching comedy foil to everyone competent around him that he usually plays as possible. Arguably, they overdo it — he borders on perfect in just about all his decisions and handling of every swerve that inevitably comes along in a movie like this, to a point that I half expected him to bust out an Iron Man suit and turn out to be a mad scientist superhero. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays an Interpol agent after him that eventually is ordered to co-opt him to make a giant gold heist to foil a largely unexplained terrorist attack involving hacking water infrastructure that will apparently cause flooding… somewhere, somehow. However, since they start out hating each other and she wound up dating him when she was working undercover, it’s required for there to be romantic tension, culminating in her ultimately leaving the police and deciding to join his crew and be with him full time. Although we’re obviously intended to root for them somewhat, it felt a bit unearned that she would quit her job as an international cop and join the crooks.

Rating: 2.25 out of 5. Mildly amusing, but rather flawed.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Somebody gave an indie comic book adaptation a big budget. They lost most of the money, and deserved to. This movie is like if you turned the cantina scene from Star Wars into a feature length movie, but you never really stopped introducing random aliens and elements or bothered to explain basically any of why they were there except to thinly serve to move the plot along. I found myself falling asleep in my first sitting, but made myself finish just to see what the vague mystery of it all was the next day. It was contrived. The main two characters are almost completely wooden for the bulk of the movie until they finally start changing expression at the very end when it’s time for them to show outrage when they find out what happened that they’re supposed to be outraged about.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5. The visuals aren’t bad, but bad acting and way too much randomness to even be particularly coherent, and a lot of the CGI is just a little bit on the poor side, which kind of makes me wonder if this is just what $200 million gets you these days in the effects department with the cost of the good stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Holiday Movie Roundup: Godzilla Minus One, Rebel Moon Pt 1, Black Swan, Fifty Shades of Grey, Red Cliff (Spoilers)

In his busy holiday, I’ve made some time for movies. Here’s my thoughts on what I’ve seen.

Godzilla Minus One

There is really not much other way to say this: this is the best Godzilla movie ever made, and I don’t know that we even have a close second.

Why? Because they used the monster with actual pacing in a way that built suspense around his every appearance, and managed to make the film about the people and characters and plot without taking it away from the Big G in doing it.

The movie starts towards the end of World War II, with a guy who was slated to die as a kamikaze pilot — Koichi Shikihima by name — decides he’s not actually willing to die for a hopeless cause, and feigns problems with his plane in order to land on one of the remaining Japanese outpost islands. There, he’s left to witness a comparatively infant Godzilla come ashore and kill basically the entire airfield crew on the island, after he freezes from panic at a critical moment when he was told to use his plane’s gun on the beast. Godzilla was big enough it probably wouldn’t have killed him anyway, so the moment of fear likely saves Shikishima’s life. However, the survivor’s guilt and the cultural dishonor associated with refusing his dubious duty as a kamikaze pilot followed by his moment of self preserving cowardice afterwards leaves him deeply ashamed of himself when he returns to Tokyo after the war.

Japan itself is completely wrecked, and Shikishima learns that his parents didn’t survive the bombing raids. He finds himself taking in an attractive young woman named Noriko, whose parents also died in the bombing, and who has adopted a baby girl from a mother who also died. They wind up making up an awkward family by convenience, where they effectively become to the parents to this orphaned child that doesn’t belong to either of them biological, but comes to regard the two of them as her mommy and daddy. As they start to reassemble themselves, Shikishima takes a job clearing remaining sea mines from the war because it’s the best work available, and Noriko worries that he’s got a death wish due to his survivor’s guilt and won’t come back.

They encounter Godzilla at sea. The US’ nuclear weapons tests at Bikini have mutated the monster, as we all knew it would, and it’s much bigger and meaner now. This escalates to a place where Shikishima gets ashore to find Noriko, who is apparently killed saving him when Godzilla reveals that his atomic breath in this movie lights up like an actual low yield nuclear device.

The background undertones of the movie are very anti-nuclear and anti-war, making very clear that no faith in the wartime and postwar Japanese governments can be meaningfully justified. The latter is a necessary device to permit the movie to even be marketable overseas, of course, but it’s sincere nonetheless.

Various people come up with plans to try to kill people. One of Shikishima’s crew mates from the minesweeper expedition turns out to be a bit of a scientist, and he comes up with a plan to use freon coolants and fast-inflating life rafts to sink Godzilla and then raise him up from enough ocean depths that the rapidly changing pressures would kill him. Shikishima has his own plan: he digs up the last surviving mechanic from the island he finished the war on to rig up an experimental military plane to help the effort, but he also secretly asks that it be built as a kamikaze plane as well. With nothing he feels he has left to live for — he admits to falling in love with Noriko but could never bring himself to marry her because his own personal war wasn’t still over, and he reasons that their orphan child will be better off with a neighbor than with him by himself — he plans to hit Godzilla in the mouth after observing that the mines seemed to hurt him more from that area than naval weapons did.

It comes down to the end before we find that, when he flies the plane into the beast’s mouth to kill it (for now), his compatriot has given him an ejection seat and insists that rather than going to die, he should strive to live. Shikishima takes this as forgiveness, and does so. Then, when he comes back, having sent his neighbor a note to take care of his adoptive daughter, the neighbor is weeping as she bops him with a notification that Noriko survived the earlier Godzilla-induced atomic blast. Noriko, knowing his torment by now, asks him if his war is finally over, and he tearfully tells her that it is. It’s implied that they’ll finally get married and be happy.

…except that Godzilla isn’t really dead.

The end.

This was easily the most human story of any Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. Before, they’d have some human interaction, but the people were usually just vocal spectators, except for truly weird movies like Godzilla vs Megalon, where they kept toys that came to life to help in the kaiju fights. This was the first one where the plot of the humans came first and the monsters actually came second, yet without shoving Godzilla entirely to the background.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (Excellent, and will likely stay rewatchable)

Rebel Moon Part One

This could be accused of being a Star Wars knockoff, although it actually draws from other things as well. There is an obvious rebels versus the Empire Motherworld backdrop to the plot, mixed with a bit of Seven Samurai sort of ensemble cast (albeit with an obvious Han Solo like rogue pilot who apparently wants to be a good guy), mixed in turn with a clear Thanos-Gamora relationship between Kora and the usurping Regent of the Motherworld. It’s directed by Zack Snyder, so there will be plenty of melodramatic slowdown involved.

The main twists are that the Han Solo figure really is a rogue and sells them out, and the implication that reads rather strongly like, “who has a greater right to kill Thanos than Gamora?”

It’s part one of two. It was entertaining enough. Not as good as the better Star Wars movies, but better than the weaker ones.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Good, but not necessarily a classic)

Black Swan

Finally got around to watching this. No real point in recap, other than to say it was rather disturbing in its own ways, but I’m not sure how rewatchable this one is, either.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (Pretty good)

Fifty Shades of Grey

I decided to watch this one out of morbid curiosity. I’m not really into BDSM, but even if I was, I’m not sure I would’ve been all that impressed with this. There was almost no real plot other than Christian Grey wanting to tie up and bone Anastasia Steele, and her being vaguely tempted to let him. There’s basically nothing else to the entire movie.

Grey comes off as entitled and creepy. Steele comes off as naive yet apparently is supposed to be smart, too, but has plenty of convenient knowledge about what everything he brings up means even though she’s a virgin going into the movie.

The BDSM scenes are fairly soft core, so if getting your kink on is the point you’re watching this movie for, you may as well just go to PornHub. And there frankly isn’t enough to the non sexual parts to be worth watching it for either. I almost stopped about halfway through and had to kind of convince myself to finish it. It didn’t really get better.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (It’s a Hollywood quality production, but a pretty bad and trashy one. Unless you’re really hankering for a guilty pleasure, I’d avoid, and even if you are, there’s better ways to do it.)

Red Cliff

A historical drama about the real life Battle of Red Cliffs from just prior to the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history. There’s quite a few quite high end actors, including Tony Leung and Lin Chi-ling, who’s simply one of the more gorgeous Asian actresses I’ve ever seen and gets billed as a historical beauty who distracts the malevolent Cao Cao long enough for his enemies to capitalize.

The actual historical battle led to the continuation of a disunified China at the end of the Han Dynasty and is considered one of the more famous battles of ancient Chinese history. The film is mostly about the shenanigans and politics of Cao Cao and his enemies maneuvering to deal with one another, and the battle scenes are a combination of clever renditions of ancient warfare mixed with a bit of unrealistic but aesthetically pleasing hero fights. It was plenty entertaining.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Fairly good)

Thanks for reading.

Mid December Roundup: Wonka, Dune Pt 1, 2067, Marriage Story, The Good Place

Since Ahsoka concluded, I’ve been in odds and ends in my streaming habits, but I haven’t been totally inactive. This is what I’ve been watching:

Wonka

I watched this as part of a team building exercise at work. Timothée Chalamet stars in the title role of the movie, as the highly whimsical chocolate maker in an origin story, set in a European setting of some sort. The background of things seems vaguely Dickensian in its general theme, postulating frequently that “the greedy beat the needy,” with a fantasy mishmash of anachronistic 1930s-like squalor ruled over by wealthy people, particularly three crooked chocolatiers and the policemen firmly bribed and in their sweet pockets. Wonka finds himself in virtual indentured servitude in a washhouse through sketchy fine print in what’s initially presented as a generous lodging offer while he’s poor that turns swiftly into a debtor’s prison. His main avenue to freedom is to sneak out and sell his chocolate, while the barons who collude to control the market seek to keep him down.

The music is fine. The whimsy of the thing struck me as, pardon the expression, a bit saccharine, and the whole production is intended to be more than a bit silly and light, and it accomplishes what it set out to do without major pitfalls. The title character is not nearly as dark as many of his earlier incarnations, and the show is definitely intended for a somewhat younger audience. Keegan-Michael Key as the crooked police chief is one of the more humorous parts of the show, although seeing him made up as a white guy was a bit surreal.

All this said? I don’t know if I’d want to see this again. It was okay for what it was, it did what it set out to do, but I’m likely to forget it in a year. It’s worth seeing once… and exactly once.

Rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Dune Part One

I have now gotten in a third watch of the first Dune movie. We know the new one is green lit to release early next year, so I felt it worth trying again. I’ve come to a simple conclusion: this is the best science fiction movie since Revenge of the Sith. And I’m definitely including Rogue One among the list of its inferiors. (Side note: I have come to the conclusion that even the famous Rogue One hallway scene does not actually hold up very well, for the fact that Vader gets close enough to the rebel holding the Death Star plans in his hand to literally stab him and never thinks to use the Force to pull them away, even though he’s just done so to disarm all the other rebels in the hallway. Still a highly entertaining movie and obviously the best Disney Star Wars movie, but it has… issues.)

This movie is, for lack of a better term, art. Most other sci fi movies are done for popcorn or maybe to make a vague point or cash grabs (the many failed attempts to revive Alien and Terminator) or just general “hey, we’re tough and gritty” (the Riddick movies come to mind here). Various streaming services have done their own sci fi movies and come out pretty much forgettable. (One of the others will come later in this roundup.) I was perhaps a bit reluctant to embrace Dune the first time or two without being sure if the second movie would ever get out, but now I’m there.

Rating: 4.25 out of 5.

The Good Place

This is probably my favorite overall sitcom of the 21st century. While The Big Bang Theory and Frasier deserve honorable mentions, The Good Place stands out for its humor, depth of characters, and far greater depth in the subject matter it tackles without forgetting that it’s supposed to be funny than any other sitcom, ever. While following a motley crew of four souls through the afterlife, it weaves a tale that draws from Kant, utilitarianism, Christian theology of heaven and hell, and at the end in bittersweet fashion, the Buddhist concept of Nirvana bringing peace at the end.

The first season ends in the best plot twist in the history of sitcoms. I will say no more so as not to spoil it. But I will brook no arguments on this being at the top of the leaderboard for shockers in sitcoms.

The second season, while the humor is strong, is a bit of a mishmash in terms of the plot and where it’s going.

The third season ends with an excellent reflection of the state of morality in a very complex world.

The fourth confronts us with a very sobering thought on whether unmitigated paradise is something we would ever truly want, and whether even perfectly good times wouldn’t get dull when they’re never ending and there’s no balance to them — culminating in an unforgettable scene where all of the residents of the actual Good Place (the show’s allegory of heaven) are reduced to happy-drunk zombies whose will to go on has gone out, but are still consigned to eternity. It’s a sobering reflection on the concept of paradise.

All of it makes for literally the only sitcom I have ever felt worth watching again from beginning to end.

That said, it ended at the perfect time. If it had gone longer than it did, it would’ve been nearly impossible to keep this quality level going, so they ended it exactly when they should, and the ending is a bittersweet bit perfect goodbye to the characters.

2067

Atime travel movie that attempts to be very high in its concept and just doesn’t really pull it off. The plot is very new-age sci-fi: the Earth has basically exhausted natural resources to a point that the last useful plants on Earth have, for the time being, apparently gone extinct, which means that humanity is on the clock before artificial life support fails and we go extinct as well. A cockamamie plan is created to send someone forward in time to a period when Earth has been revitalized, in hopes of finding a cure for the blights that are plaguing the present time.

It comes off very contrived, tries too hard to be mysterious without really pulling it off, and the end surprises, while not being 100% predictable, are still 90% predictable. Could’ve been a Doctor Who episode half as long and would’ve been better at being weird with the Doctor’s offbeat charm, because it takes itself a little bit too seriously.

Forgettable actors. Awkward handling of time that isn’t nearly as clever as it tries to be. Also tries to be gritty and comes off a bit pretentious.

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Marriage Story

As a guy who’s been divorced a couple of times now, this was a hard movie to watch.

The couple that seems perfect together suddenly discovers that they’re not, and that — as perfect couples that seemingly never fight often are — it was coming at the cost of one of them burying their needs for the benefit of the other, and it comes apart when that person is no longer able to do so.

They can still remember all the wonderful things they loved about each other, but they can’t go on. He’s New York, she’s Los Angeles. He’s Broadway, she’s Hollywood. There was a strong overlap, but they were still from different worlds and could only be in one. And once the one who came from the other got homesick, it was inevitable that it would fail when the one whose needs were being met didn’t want to budge from what had seemed like a perfect life.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are really good in this. I don’t know that I want to watch it again, but it’s also hard to hold that against them.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Thanks for reading. Happy holidays of whatever sort you celebrate.

The Devil Wears Prada Review

I’m not going to bother with a spoiler warning on this, because I imagine everyone has seen this movie already who cares to, except for me until recently.

I didn’t expect this to be as funny as it was, but it was almost more of a comedy than it was a commentary on the fashion industry. Meryl Streep as the “totally not Anna Wintour” Miranda Priestly was a blast to watch, and Anne Hathaway as the efforting career climber assistant who finds herself questioning her life choices was just about as good.

So… I’ll say a few things, which I’m not sure I would’ve expected to hear myself say.

One is that, while Priestly was obviously intended to come off as a thankless taskmaster, she came off as a bit of a semi sympathetic character due to all the personal sacrifices she makes and the way the people in her life seem ready to discard her left and right. She’s still not entirely sympathetic because of her “boss from hell” ethic, but the character isn’t wrong that if a man did all the same things she did in the office, they’d just be considered a good and tough business man. While she does put a fair amount of emotional heat on her subordinates, she never cusses them out, she never overtly yells at them, and she takes chances on odd cases when she sees things in people that others don’t. I’ve had bosses in real life I would’ve gladly swapped for her.

Second… honestly, I thought Hathaway looked better in her more filled out looking sweater than she did in the various chic outfits she was wearing after her supposed makeovers. The various stuff she put on that slimmed down her figure frankly didn’t strike me as flattering, but then I’ve never been a huge fan of the Hollywood standard of ultra-thin beauty.

Third… Andy’s boyfriend Nate was a jerk. I realize he was supposed to be seen as the voice of average dweeb putting a reality check on Andy getting swallowed up in the world of fashion, but he came off as an entitled man-child who acted like it was a major crisis that his girlfriend’s job might mean she had something to focus on besides him. He’s judgmental about her career opportunities, whiny when work takes her away from him a little too much, and never once behaves in almost any way that suggests that he takes her priorities into account when they might conflict with his own. Even when he gets the job in Boston at the end of the movie and she leaves the fashion magazine to get a job as a writer, the obvious assumption is that she’s apparently just going to follow him to Boston and not stay in New York for her own job. Frankly, he came off even less supportive than Miranda did — Miranda even gave her a job recommendation after she left her hanging, which is something Nate clearly wouldn’t have done with as much forgiveness.

It’s possible I’m mildly irked because I might have known a few people who did that, but I honestly wanted her to ditch him and stick with the fashion magazine and let her career go wherever it was going to go. I realize that half of this movie is intended to represent the alleged emptiness of the fashion industry and therefore it isn’t allowed to leave Andy in that world, but Nate honestly struck me as a guy who didn’t deserve her, and the fact that her other friends sided with him over her made me question the value of her friends, to boot.

That said, part of the movie is about questioning the lack of work-life balance that goes into jobs. In that respect, the fact that Miranda expects Andy to be at her beck and call obviously is calling that out. However… that’s kind of how you make the big bucks in any industry. The big money comes with big responsibility.

That said, that the responsibility comes amidst an industry as flighty and (arguably) empty and backstabbing as fashion eventually turns Andy off, and she walks away from Miranda and back to her thankless boyfriend in the end, and to a job writing for another magazine which Miranda helps her get.

So in the end, while the movie is entertaining and is undeniably a bit of a minor classic, it’s hard to tell if I’m supposed to hate Miranda or grudgingly admire her. Miranda seems genuinely pleased in the end that Andy managed to succeed off the launch she gave her, but doesn’t take much time to enjoy it. So in spite of her effectively being the title Devil, she’s not all evil or monstrous. Meanwhile, a somewhat famous idol that comes off as a rival romantic interest for Andy turns out to be a bit of a manipulative and venomous foil for Miranda who’s coming for them all, in his own way.

It’s hard to rate this, though. There’s tons of debate about the meaning and who’s supposed to be the real good guys in the film (I came to understand rapidly that I was not alone in my dislike of Nate once I looked into reactions to the movie), but perhaps that’s a sign of a movie that’s more complex than it looks on the surface. There’s certainly no particular part of the movie that wasn’t entertaining, and I suspect it would hold up no matter how many times I watch it.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I have a longer backlog of movies I’ve watched lately, but I’m endeavoring not to blow them off in a mass roundup post like I’ve been doing lately.

Thanks for reading.

The Creator (2023) Thoughts (Spoilers)

I’m kind of glad I caught this one before it got out of theaters today. I’ve got quite a backlog of movies I’ve watched on stream, but this is the first one I’ve done in theaters since around July. It’s a semi fresh take on the “humans versus machines” theme that dates all the way back to The Terminator, if not the earlier Colossus: The Forbin Project.

So, without further ado…

The plot of the movie sets up like a futuristic humans versus machines, although it takes place about forty years from now. It imagines an alternate future where AI and robotics were invented in a time where it would’ve been not quite steampunk, but still somewhat anachronistic, so by the time we get to the 2060s, robots are pretty much sentient and living among humans as relative equals. However, an apparent AI issue leads to a nuclear weapon being used on Los Angeles, which becomes the hue and cry among western nations to eliminate sentient AI from the world in what starts out like a parallel to Terminator up front, except that the nuclear bombing only happens once. Asian countries don’t follow the lead to eliminate AI, and so the western nations, led primarily by the Americans, go to war to eliminate what’s left in what comes to be known as New Asia.

So once a series of exposition scenes introduce us to that, we’re shown Joshua Taylor, who we see in the beginning of the movie with his wife Maya amidst the islands of New Asia. He lost his parents and an arm and leg in Los Angeles. The “simulants” have come to accept him as something like a brother, and Maya is pregnant. However, not all is what it seems. There’s a raid by the Americans, working under the shadow of the giant low orbiting fortress called NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Aerospace Defense), which is visibly running targeting scan sweeps over the area while commandoes set down. They’re looking for a being called Nirmata, whom legend holds is the key creator of the AIs in the world, with the idea that destroying this being or thing can win the war.

However, we find out that Taylor is an undercover agent working with the raiders, which Maya doesn’t take too kindly to. She knew he used to work with them, but he’d evidently told her he was out of the service by now. She catches him trying to radio the attackers pleading with them to stop, because he doesn’t believe Nirmata is here, but he believes Maya can still lead him to it. This doesn’t dissuade them, and Maya runs away from him and to escaping boats of some form, only to be struck from an orbit-to-ground bombardment missile from NOMAD.

The movie skips to five years later. It’s not entirely clear where Taylor is holed up, but they’re constantly debriefing him to see if he remembers anything more from his undercover mission. He’s having nightmares about it and doesn’t want to admit it — which his superiors’ lie detector scanners catch, but they don’t call him out on it as long as he’s not lying that he remembers more about where Nirmata is. It’s not entirely clear why they think he would need this kind of interrogation, but it’s a first of many hints that he may not be on the right side.

Eventually he’s approached by the brass, who tell him Maya is still alive, and that a new super weapon is being made by the AIs called Alpha One, which can end the war and cause human extinction. They promise him they’ll get Maya out alive if he helps after he’s reluctant to help any other way.

They go on a raid to find the weapon, in order to summon in another missile strike from NOMAD. (It’s not made entirely clear why only one NOMAD vessel appears to have been built.) Taylor finds the weapon, only to discover that it’s a stimulant child watching a cross between anime and Rick and Morty about destroying NOMAD. Taylor finds himself unable to destroy it when she just looks up at him much as any regular child would, and exhibits no sign of defiance other than to repeatedly turn her cartoon back on when he turns it off with a gesture of her hands.

He notices a drawing identical to a tattoo that Maya had, and asks the child where she saw it. The child identifies it with her mother figure, and Taylor decides to try to take it away from his comrades seeking to destroy it, apparently doubting the gravity of what he’s been told about it… or maybe not really caring. The army quickly determines that he’s betrayed them and marks him to be killed while the survivors of the unit go to ground to track them, seeking to avoid local AI police and local people who hate the AI killers as much as the AIs themselves do.

This starts a very roundabout and lengthy second act where the child, who eventually becomes called “Alphie”, imprints on Taylor while still sympathizing with the other robots. Another undercover comrade who’s developed sympathies for the bots examines Alphie and determines that she’s a wildly advanced bot who can control other technology, and whose ability to do so will only increase with time. The suggestion that Maya made it from a DNA scan of their lost child shocks Taylor, who’s becoming more and more disoriented in his convictions as simulants wearing Maya’s donated face start to show up in his life again and again. (There’s a billboard shown in an establishing shot advertising requests for humans to donate their likeness to simulant models to show their friendship.)

Eventually he’s captured by his old friends amidst a police raid, and as his comrade is dying, he reveals that further secrets were kept from him during the raid that apparently had killed Maya: the attackers from NOMAD had positively identified Maya as being Nirmata herself. They chose not to tell him that, which explains a lot in context — why the raid didn’t stop when he tried to tell them Nirmata wasn’t present, why they kept pumping him for information with high tech lie detectors to determine what else he might remember, and also most likely revealing that they lied to him when they said they had any intention of getting Maya out alive. However, amidst all this, he also overhears the other AIs saying that their eventual hope is to get Alphie aboard NOMAD to shut it down and destroy it, and that they neither expect Alphie to survive doing so, nor have they even informed her of what she was designed to do.

This leads to a third act starting with giant AT-AT reminiscent treaded super tanks start rolling through the area destroying most everything in sight, seeking to find Alphie and destroy local resistance. The humans don’t seem to mind using AI driven armored suicide drones to run into the enemy AI midst and destroy themselves, but Alphie stops the second one after seeing the first detonate. A human commando wounds Alphie, which disrupts her control stopping it from exploding it, and Taylor runs to rescue her and get her out of the blast radius. The other AIs see this and conclude that Taylor is a friend after all. However, they find a comatose Maya, whom the AIs are unwilling to pull the plug on, even though there’s no hope for her survival. Taylor pleads for her forgiveness and does so.

In the midst of all this, the AI’s perspective of the war becomes clear. The destruction of Los Angeles was due to a programming error by the humans, as AIs would never do this on their own. The logic of this is frankly a little tortured in juxtaposing the supposed sentience, self determination, and benevolence of the AIs with the vulnerability that a coding mistake by humans would result in an AI’s most dastardly act. It leaves it a little nebulous as to who’s really the good guys in a way the movie is clearly not intending.

From there, the American humans are now clearly the villains. Taylor and Alphie hijack a lunar shuttle to get to NOMAD, she sneaks through a fight that ensues, and goes for the control center. The generals order NOMAD to fire on every known AI base while they still can in retaliation… although frankly this comes off a little odd as to why they hadn’t already done so and needed ground teams to spot for them so much. Nonetheless, the bombardment stops when Alphie shuts NOMAD down, and Taylor plants a bomb on one of the bombardment missiles with the intent of destroying the installation.

A bit of a thriller-paced escape scene, and ultimately Alphie makes it off in an escape pod with an assist from Taylor, but he isn’t able to get on. Out of sheer plot contrivance, a “last minute brain scan” that humans use to do some “speak with the dead” high tech necromancy has been taken of Maya and inserted into one of her AI lookalikes, so the Maya-simulant can tearfully run up to Taylor while NOMAD explodes around them. The credits run after a final shot of Alphie smiling that apparently the robots are free… because of course the west couldn’t simply build a second NOMAD.

So… it was entertaining, and very well rendered visually. The plot of it was a little too easy to see coming — it had a very obvious “Avatar With Droids” feel to it. The plot holes are numerous. The resistance apparently only has the ability to build one Alpha One, but once we know what she’ll actually do, it seems obvious that the plot will fail if the evil humans simply have more than one NOMAD. (From the ancient Internet wisdom of How To Be An Evil Overlord, rule 27: “I will never build only one of anything important.”) The idea that the child was going to imprint on him and we were going to wind up questioning whether Taylor was really on the right side was painfully obvious, and it’s perhaps a little bit heavy handed in the Dances With Wolves symbolism (which Avatar also shares in borrowing) that every single human hunter besides Taylor is white, while every sympathetic AI and human siding with them is played by a person of color. It’s obviously intended as a bit of a metaphor for western colonialism and militarism… again, as was Avatar.

The choice to release the movie in a time when AI is so up in debate in our society is perhaps an interesting one. It performed a bit poorly at the box office, likely partly due to that and the fact that the promotion of it was going to be lackluster in the tail end of the actors’ strike.

In the end, it was entertaining, but quite predictable. It colors very well within the lines that other movies have already drawn, but it still managed to execute on it reasonably well.

Rating: 3 out of 5. (Explanation of my scale.)

Thanks for reading.

Pre-Loki Roundup: Lost You Forever S1E1-21, Lord of War, Woody Woodpecker Movie, Ahsoka Followup Thoughts (Rant)

I’ve had a busy week with a new job and family stuff, so between that and just generally not finding the thought of starting a new series as appealing, I’ve procrastinated on getting around to watching the premiere of Loki‘s second season. I’ll get around to that some time today, but I’ve got a backlog of other stuff to write about for starters.

Lost You Forever, S1E1-21

Characters from the show. From the right to left… Xiang Liu, Tushan Jing (“Ye Shiqi”), Xiaoyao (female appearance), Cang Xuan, and Chishui Fenglong

I’ve been binging this one of late, which is a big part of why I haven’t started on Loki. Whenever I’ve got a spare hour or two, I’ve been knocking down an episode or two of this a night. It’s been talked about a lot in Asia, so I started on it lately.

It’s hard to categorize for a US audience, but it’s basically a Chinese fantasy political soap opera, performed in live action. The main character’s real name is a woman named Haoling Jiuyao, nicknamed “Xiaoyao” (rhymes with “bow wow”) by those close to her, but has (for reasons unexplained at the beginning) been shapeshifter into a male alias as Wen Xaioliu. Xiaoyao is a demigoddess princess of a powerful house that walks among humans, but whose spirit power has diminished badly over the last 300 years, and she doesn’t care because she’s decided she’d rather live a fairly common life as a physician anyway. A female actress plays the role in both the male and female phases as an adult, with clothing, hair, and makeup done differently to perform as both Xiaoliu early on and Xiaoyao later.

However, her childhood cousin (who, in this world, is not romantically off limits) Cang Xuan comes to town with a small entourage of spies and special forces to deal with an ancestral enemy of their house. Along with him comes Xiaoyao’s spoiled half sister Nian. None of them know Xiaoyao is Wen Xiaoliu, and due to their own undercover efforts and the amount of time it’s been since Xiaoliuhas seen them, she doesn’t recognize them either. Nian was born after Xiaoyao’s estrangement from her family, so she’s completely in a “spoiled princess who everyone roots to get taken down a peg” role.

Xiaoliu soon encounters a badly injured and tortured soul he/she nicknames “Ye Shiqi” (translates to “seventeen leaves”) when he initially either can’t or won’t remember who he is, and nurses him back to health. He is actually a greater spirit of another divine family named Tushan Jing, and since Xiaoliu is one of the few who actually seems to care about him as a person instead of a demigod, he takes quite a shining to him. He also deduces quickly from Xiaoliu’s reactions to him that this is originally a woman who appears as a man.

As if that’s not complicated enough, Xiang Liu, whose true form is a nine headed demon, but whose human form owes more than a little bit to Sephiroth of Final Fantasy game, also takes an interest in Xiaoliu for various reasons, and also figures out relatively quickly that this is a gender bending woman. There’s more than a little element of danger to this relationship, which takes on some serpent-and-bird or vampire-and-Lucy overtones without actually making Xiaoliu actually subservient.

So…. that’s the setup. Diminished divine princess has at least three suitors and both an identity and family trauma going on, and this goes on for roughly forty episodes of a season. I’m about halfway through it so far. I like it. Enough that I’ve stalled on starting Loki after Ahsoka wrapped up in lieu of watching (and enjoying) this. It’s more than a little entertaining, and I’ll have more to say on this when I’m done.

Lord of War

I’ve been aware of this for a couple decades, and finally found it for free streaming and decided to watch it. It’s one of those movies that seems just interesting enough to watch but maybe isn’t a true classic, but the subject matter is different enough to get me curious.

It’s about an underground arms dealer (played by Nicolas Cage) from Ukraine who capitalizes on the fall of the Soviet Union and some family connections in the crumbling post-Soviet military to make a living smuggling weapons around the world. It’s a very, very sordid life, gets him mixed up with drugs and more than a little bit of worry he was going to catch HIV in the pre-PEPFAR days of sub-Saharan Africa with all the women various dictators and warlords threw at him, and more than a little unwelcome attention from an Interpol-connected American agent (played by Ethan Hawke).

There’s a lot of rumors that this was based more than a little on the story of Viktor Bout, who was recently released from US prisons in a prisoner exchange. It also does more than a little bit of sleight of hand in how it tells the tale of the international arms trade, because in many ways the movie is more than a little bit of a veiled criticism of the degree to which the major powers of the world fuel all sorts of trouble spots with arms dealing, but it hides it in a portrayal of all the shady stuff that goes on in this world before making the comparison more explicit.

When Cage’s character is eventually caught by international law enforcement, he openly tells his captor that he’s not going to go to jail or even ever see the inside of a courtroom, because a general is about to knock on the door, walk in and tell him that this small time arms dealer is too useful in providing weapons to places the country would like them to be but can’t get its own hands dirty, so they’d rather he was filling that role than have him in prison. Sure enough, there is indeed a knock on the door, and his character is set free to return to his very dirty business.

At the end of the movie, the veil is ripped off the critique, as there’s an overlay text at the end stating that the five biggest arms dealers in the world just happen to be all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It’s a bit ham handed in its pivot, and it isn’t very well executed. The movie itself settles into more than a little bit of repetition in trying to shock with the dirty world this guy lives in, and I won’t lie and say that I found it a little dull once I settled in to watch it all and didn’t finish it in one sitting.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Woody Woodpecker: The Movie

My son wanted to watch it. It’s bad enough that it was only theatrically released in Brazil, where the cartoon is still pretty popular. It’s not hard to see why. It has a few amusing moments, but a few decades of Pixar fare left me surprised a bit that a kids’ movie this bad still gets made. If you’re not a die hard fan of the cartoons and don’t have kids, you will lose nothing out of your life by never watching this.

Rating: 1 star

Ahsoka Post-Mortem Reflection (Read: Minor Rant)

And now, the other reason I haven’t gotten around to watching Loki: I was disappointed enough by how this ended that I was simply in no hurry to start another Disney+ series, even when it’s a second season of the no-real-arguments best Marvel series on the service to date. This, on the heels of the third season of The Mandalorian and Secret Invasion, simply has me wanting to step back from Disney+ for a few days and not rush to see the latest thing.

As I said, I’ll get to Loki, but it was not a first day appointment for me.

First things first: this wasn’t as bad as The Book of Boba Fett. But it wasn’t particularly great, either. If Fett didn’t exist, this would be pretty easily the weakest entry Lucasfilm has put on this service. And the sad thing is, it didn’t have to be.

Ray Stevenson did a pretty dang good job of acting the role of Baylan Skoll, and drawing interest in where this character was going and what he was really after. And that makes the fact that Stevenson didn’t live long enough to actually see this story through all the sadder.

So now that the series is over, what we do we really know about Baylan Skoll?

• He is a survivor, in some fashion, of the old Jedi Order
• He chose neither to take up arms against the Empire nor join either the Inquisitors or the Sith, instead just acting as a mercenary
• He knew Anakin Skywalker, and that he became Darth Vader. This implies strongly he probably was at the temple during the purge and saw him there (much like Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi), but likely did not fight him directly
• He is strong enough to fight Ahsoka head to head and survive
• He was mainly interested in hitching a ride to find statues of the Mortis gods because… power reasons
• He evidently has a thing for hot blonde stoners as apprentices, but not enough that he won’t ditch them in a heartbeat when he wants to do something else

Okay, it’s possible I’m being overly harsh in that last part, but… let’s be real. Shin Hati spends the entire series looking around with a vapid stare (I don’t feel like going back through the series again to see if she actually blinks or count how many times she does it on camera if she does), she has no independent personality of her own except as an extra warm body with a lightsaber for action scenes, and while she has a moment of apparent (and justifiable) resentment when Baylan cuts her loose with orders to fight without him, it doesn’t really stop her. We have no idea where she’s coming from or where she’s going or why.

And while I didn’t immediately grasp that the statues Baylan settled on were of the Father, Son, and Daughter, now that I’m aware… I still don’t care. This whole character arc feels like Filoni either didn’t have enough for them to do and just needed lightsaber guys while giving Stevenson something to do that was cheaper than the CGI it would’ve taken to use him as Zeb. So much was left on the table with these two characters in the end, that while I wanted to be interested in them, and they did a good job acting out the scenes they were in… I’m at a loss for why these characters were really there. It’s very, very unfortunate to me that this wound up being Stevenson’s last role before Baylan Skoll gets recast like Dumbledore whenever this picks up in the future.

Thrawn. Oh, Thrawn. Lars Mikkelson did a fine job acting the role, and was not given enough to do. Thrawn wins, but there’s no particular moment where it’s clear he’s done something particularly brilliant enough that we’re left saying, “that’s a villain that accomplished something really smart.” He gets away, and technically wins, because that’s what the plot needed him to do. There’s no brilliant traps, no great swerves to let us know this was his fiendish plan all along. He just tells us he’s winning because he knows Ahsoka, and we’re supposed to just take his word for it. These various action scenes totally weren’t just seene filler, they were his plan all along to stall Ahsoka until he could leave.

In the mean time, it’s not at all clear why Thrawn needs to bring the giant hyperspace ring down to the surface instead of simply flying his ship up to it as soon as his mystery cargo is loaded and leaving the heroes behind, like, you know, someone who’s supposedly really smart would do once he knows his enemies have no further means of getting off the ground beyond Jedi leaping.

Ezra’s reappearance fell flat. I kept waiting for why I should start caring about a fifth season of Rebels any more than I cared about the first four when Darth Vader wasn’t on the screen. They didn’t give it to me. He’s been hanging out with alien snails. After they find him, they inexplicably keep traveling with the snails to chase Thrawn down instead of doing crazy things like, I don’t know, flying their ship back to go after him as quickly as possible so he doesn’t get away, instead of traveling at… um, a literal snail’s pace.

Seriously. They failed to get back to Thrawn quickly enough once they reunited because they decided they wanted to travel with the snails instead of leaving them behind.

And Sabine? Oh, dear, Sabine, what have you done?W

Well, to paraphrase Thrawn’s words earlier in the season, here’s what I see: Sabine completely undid Ezra’s sacrifice that was made to remove Thrawn from the main galaxy, stranded the most experienced light side Force user (and second most powerful, after Luke) known to still be alive in frack-all-knows-where, out of a purely selfish desire to see Ezra again, when she could have destroyed the map and prevented it all four episodes ago. And when Ezra asked her what’s going on and how all this happened, she conspicuously never has the guts to tell him. No, really. That conversation never takes place. “Hey, Sabine, how’d all these bad guys get this giant hyper ring out here to rescue Thrawn?” “Uhhhh…. uhhhhh….”

Wanna know how much sense that makes? Roughly as much sense as whatever conversation had to have gone into the modeling for this painting, captured in a meme I saw lately:

No, really. That’s how much sense this made. At least I can laugh about it a little this way.

So that’s where we are. Filoni gave us a prelude series where absolutely nothing got settled, the ending of Rebels gets completely undone, the character most responsible for it never is made to face up to the consequences of her actions, and the most interesting new characters created for the show came off as almost completely pointless and largely wasting the last performance of one of the principal supporting actors due to his untimely death. Along the way, we got one truly good episode that’s memorable, where Ahsoka meets the ghost of Anakin.

That’s it. That was the show. Thanks for coming, folks, please come to Star Wars Episode VI.V: Return of the Grogu, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Thrawn, due in theaters in 2024 no, 2025 REAL SOON NOW, DAGNABBIT!

Sigh.

I can put this much energy into it because I really wanted to like this show. But I don’t, much. And I’m kind of disappointed.

So, aside from having better things to do, that’s part of why I’ve waited three days to watch the premier of Loki. Now, perhaps, I can do so in greater peace. I’ve heard it’s pretty good, actually.

Because if they screw up Loki‘s second season, too? I may have to think good and hard whether Disney+ is still worth the money at this point. I mean, it’s nice to be able to pull up any scene in any Star Wars movie or show whenever I want, and that’s probably valuable enough to stick around. But… I’m at near zero confidence that the new material is going to hold up its part of the bargain, and I don’t know if the monthly subscription is worth the convenience of not just getting Blu Rays of everything I care about and forgetting the rest.

I’m not even sure if this kinda exposes that the streaming services are starting to struggle to justify their existence, in general. Disney+ always struck this Star Wars nerd who owns some double digit number of T shirts that get worn constantly as the least likely one I’d ever rage quit on. But right now? It’s in play.

No pressure, trickster god. Don’t let me down.

For those of you actually reading, thanks for bearing with me.

Secret Invasion E5-6, Star Trek SNW S2E6-10, Raiders of the Lost Ark, RED

I’m going to take the movie first out of this roundup post, because it’s freshest in my mind.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The last time I rewatched this movie was in college about thirty years ago. If I’m being totally honest, I don’t think I would have come back to rewatch it if it weren’t for “The Raiders Minimization.” This, for those who don’t know, was the episode of The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon Cooper (who is definitely on the short list of characters I would put on a “describe yourself in three fictional characters” meme, and when it went around a few years ago he did in fact make the cut) shows this movie to his girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler because it’s one of his favorites. He asks her what she thought, and she said it was entertaining “despite the glaring story problem.” Sheldon gets harrumphy and defies her to identify what could possibly be wrong with “the love child of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.”

And so she tells him, “Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story. […] If he weren’t in the movie, the Nazis would’ve still found the Ark, taken it to the island, opened it up, and all died… just like they did.”

It’s a bit of a troll shot over the bow from one classic fixture of nerd culture to another, but, while it’s fair to say in nitpicky ways that there are details of the movie that would’ve come out differently if Indy weren’t in the movie — Marion probably wouldn’t have survived the Nazis getting the medallion from her, and the final disposition of the Ark in a vast unnamed warehouse probably would’ve gone differently, and it’s an open question as to whether the Ark might’ve been opened in front of Hitler himself and/or some significant portion of his senior government officials, as opposed to just the Nazis and their collaborators we see in the movie — the thesis is fundamentally correct. Indy is, in the end, a bit of a spectator to what’s going on in the movie.

That said, even though I don’t revere the movie nearly as much as the fictional character of Sheldon Cooper is portrayed as (there’s a half serious likelihood I might never have bothered to watch it again if it weren’t for this episode), it somewhat misunderstands the real theme of the movie. The movie is, at the end of the day, a story of evil men defying the obvious will of God and paying the ultimate price for doing so. There are themes of Jewish vengeance fantasy, albeit less ostentatiously than Inglorious Basterds a couple decades later, in that the Nazis retrieve a key artifact from the Jewish faith, perform a Jewish ritual in order to open, and are punished for their effrontery with fairly literal divine vengeance by the angels released. Indiana Jones’ own role in the movie is as an archaeologist (with a side bent of tomb raiding that would foreshadow Lara Croft around the turn of the century) who has more respect when, in spite of his skepticism of the supernatural, recognizes the hints when he sees them and understands that it’s God’s will not to look at what comes out when the Ark is opened.

So… this movie breezes through things a little too fast. Evidently there are some obscure passages in the Old Testament about God’s punishment for looking into the Ark, but they’re never particularly clearly referenced in the film. It’s my understanding that there were deleted scenes establishing it that were cut so that it would be a surprise what happened to the Nazis. That said, it’s not made entirely clear why Jones knows to keep their eyes shut — there’s no explanation for this either before or after. Although the character of Toht is rather creepy throughout the movie, he’s never named in the film other than in the credits.

That said… I have to admit, I rewinded and rewatched the “shoot the swordsman” scene about fifteen times while I was watching this, and I did Google up where the Easter egg of C-3PO and R2-D2 showed up and made sure to spot it in the movie. So… the movie has its place in western culture.

Also, full disclosure: as a senior software engineer in a position of mentoring younger coders, I have been known to reference the experience of dying when you look at the Ark as a metaphor to warn them not to look at especially bad code. Amusingly, the main time I did this, a couple of more junior engineers went and looked at the stuff I warned them not to, and they both came back to me with these visibly despairing and disturbed looks on their faces as they expressed regret at having done so.

But for all of that, and the fact that Harrison Ford is somewhat famously happier about his role as Indiana Jones than he is about Han Solo in Star Wars… I am not a huge fan of this movie. It’s not even about the whole “everyone of color is either subservient, corrupt, or generally a background character” part of it, although that’s noticeably there in a way that doesn’t age terribly well 40 years later. I just… don’t really like the pulpy serial style adventure movies. I didn’t mind the Tomb Raider film much around the turn of the century, but that’s because I had a crush on Angelina Jolie. I’ve never had an urge to watch the more recent remake, and I’ve literally never played the games. I’m a sci fi nerd, not an adventure-archaeology nerd.

It’s well enough made that I kind of have to give it a 4. But I do so begrudgingly — I do, in fact, rewatch it, and there’s parts I find entertaining about it, and I suppose I don’t like it any less now than I did in 1980. It’s good. I can’t deny that. It’s just not my cup of tea.

Rating: 4 stars (out of a possible 5).

Secret Invasion E5-6

So, I initially, wrote a Mad Lib style recap for episode 5 similar to what I did for episode 4, and then frankly decided I didn’t care enough to finish it before I watched episode 6. Now that I’ve finished the series, I’m going to just boil this whole thing down to a simple question:

What was the actual point of this series? Do we really miss anything if we didn’t watch it?

Fiona Hill died, pointlessly. Real MCU consequences: none, other than getting rid of a fairly memorable background character.

Talos died. Number of people who’ll even remember who he was after this: approximately zero.

G’iah just became probably the most powerful character in Marvel short of a Celestial, Galactus, or wielder of Infinity Stones. It seems likely that Emilia Clarke will be an actress Marvel would want to put in a movie. My confidence that she’ll get a role interesting enough to justify this dog’s breakfast of an origin story? Approaching none. I’d love to be able to say something like “Khaleesi is coming to Westeros” like there was real promise of something exciting, but at this point? Marvel honestly feels like it’s jumped the shark so badly with the MCU that I simply don’t expect them to make this even slightly interesting.

The real Rhodey was in a hospital gown. This would tend to imply rebel Skrulls may well have had him since Captain America: Civil War. My confidence that he’ll get a project sufficiently focused on him to explore the level of violation of having been kidnapped by aliens for a decade? Zero. Not just “approaching zero,” but actually zero.

That’s just where we are. I would’ve said that Hawkeye was the only Marvel series I liked less than this one as recently as when the finale finished, just because I loathed it so much.

But let’s be real here. I just spent this entire series calling its principle villain “Garlik” as a self-amusing joke and was never made to regret it. He’s dead, Jim. Unless they’re faking us out on that, we never need to care about him again. Effectively, his whole impact is to make humans decide they’ll no longer put up with aliens… except that this basically impacts more or less zero characters we care about. (Sorry, I guess if they ever bring in the various Superman clones like Hyperion into this, it could be an issue. Wait, there’s no chance they’ll do that right, either.)

So… I may have to think good and hard as to whether this is simply the most forgettable series the MCU has put onto Disney+. Or, for that matter, what Marvel could possibly do that would make me genuinely interested in their movies again.

Honestly, the only thing left on the table is getting Doctor Doom right. Maaaaaybe Loki season 2. That’s about it.

We are going through a summer where Barbenheimer is a big thing at the movie theatres, and no MCU movie is going to be seriously remembered this year. (Yes, I realize we haven’t seen The Marvels yet. Does anyone really think that’s going to be making us feel like this studio has its mojo back? I sure don’t.) When’s the last year we’ve been able to say something like that?

Has Covid killed the MCU? Or has it simply died of old age?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2E6-8

So it’s been a while since I’ve caught up on these, so this is going to turn into a full blown roundup post at this point. However, Strange New Worlds has been justifying my continued attention much better than Secret Invasion did.

It wasn’t uniformly good. After episode 5 indulged the writers’ obvious desire to ship Spock and Chapel in truly strange ways, episode 6 had a bit of a weird plot where Uhura was hearing and hallucinating things. Eventually she figures out that aliens living in a deuterium gas cloud are trying to send her psychic messages as a gas refinery and the Enterprise herself are collecting the gas from their habitat for fuel without realizing they’re in there. They send her bunches of images of death, usually in the form of seeing her old friend Hemmer (who died late in season 1) in zombie mode, and it takes her a while to process that she’s not going nuts and that there’s an intelligent signal, when another crewman on the refinery has similar hallucinations and ultimately sabotages both the refinery and the Enterprise‘s engine nacelles as it’s gathering its own supply as well. When she gets Pike to sign off on destroying the refinery once she figures it out, the images immediately turn to a still-living Hemmer smiling at her in an expression of the aliens’ gratitude. This one was kind of interesting, but still a bit weird. Another “aliens of the week who we’ll never see again” episode.

That said, there was another appearance by James T Kirk, and I’ve got to say that I’m starting to really have Paul Wesley’s version of him grow on me. His empathy for Uhura was tremendous, as she starts to figure part of her fears are because she’s always been feeling survivor’s guilt over both her own family’s and Hemmer’s death. She’s had to get rid of most pictures of them from being visible in her quarters because she can’t bear the sight of them. And Kirk tells her the most awesome thing: “Don’t let death win. Remember them. Beat death by holding onto them.”

As a guy who’s hitting middle age enough that anxiety about mortality is kind of starting to set in with me at times, this was actually really, really cool, because I found myself adapting it in my mind to deal with my own worries: death eventually beats us all in the end, but it only has to beat us once. It doesn’t have to beat us down all the time on the way there. So don’t let it. That’s actually been very comforting self-therapy to tell myself whenever I start thinking about it again.

Episode 7 crossed over with the Lower Decks show by having two of the crewmen on the animated show, Mariner and Boimler, go through a time portal to the same location in Strange New Worlds’ timeline. This was kind of humorous, as Lower Decks is clearly just not as serious of a show, and the two characters engage in way, way too much obvious hero worship of the Enterprise crew to keep the timelines coherent. There’s a few moments between them and Pike where they act very, very uncomfortable in knowing his future, and he comments to them that they shouldn’t worry about tipping him off, he already knows what’s going to happen to him. Along the way, Mariner has a bit of a woman crush on Uhura, and both of them crush on Spock in their own ways (and are unnerved when he actually starts smiling here and there, because the Spock in their timeline never did). Meanwhile, the Orion in their own crew in the future insists that her grandmother was on the ship that discovered the portal they’re going through, and consider the idea that Orions were all pirates in earlier times stereotypical and racist. Trouble is, the Orions in the past don’t do much when they show up to subvert that expectation much, until Pike makes a deal with them to allow them to send the future folks through in return for letting the Orions pretend they discovered it instead, thus closing the paradox in question.

Episode 8, however… was good, and super heavy. It’s already getting compared quite a bit to a number of the more war-centric episodes of past Star Trek spin-offs such as In A Pale Moonlight (my personal favorite from all series), Siege of AR-558, and so on. The premise is relatively simple: a former Klingon general has defected to the Federation, and in an apparent sign of wanting to atone for his past brutality as a Klingon warrior, he professes that he realizes the emptiness of his home culture and wishes to find a way to pave the path to peace and end that culture’s destructive influence on the quadrant.

The problem is, he has a reputation as a notorious butcher in a battle that both Chapel and M’benga were medics in, and they saw a great deal of the horrors his troops committed on civilians and even children. To a fair degree, his troops even visited it upon his own people, as he apparently gave an order that anyone in the combat zone who wasn’t a Klingon warrior (including Klingon civilians) was to be considered an enemy to be killed.

And so, while Pike is trying to have official dinners as the Enterprise is ferrying him to a particular starbase, those two (as well as a few other veterans from the recent war with the Klingons) were simply not having it. Some add on extras on the service depicted McCoy having a very similar reaction, and Kirk’s own hatred of the Klingons extended as late as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which for my money is arguably the best Trek movie short of Wrath of Khan. So M’benga and Chapel are not exactly on untraveled ground here in not being willing to give up the anger at things the Klingons have done.

In the blur of delay while I was at this (and was applying for a job at Netflix that made me reticent to finish), two more episodes of this came by. I’m not going to lie… episode 9’s description made me groan a bit when I realized they were going to take the technobabble du jour into an excuse to make this episode a musical where everyone had to sing everything they’d rather keep hidden. That said, it actually turned out pretty good.

LaAn finally took her stab at mainline Kirk. I knew this probably wasn’t going to go well, because TOS Kirk obviously doesn’t have a descendant of Khan on his arm and, indeed, she isn’t even still on the Enterprise by the time he takes command. But I was curious how it was going to go, and I barely had time to ponder in my own head, “huh, I wonder how this would square with his time with Carol Marcus” when he reveals he can’t really engage in a relationship because he’s in one with Marcus now, and she’s already pregnant with the future David. Honestly, I’m curious if they’re going to have Alice Eve return to play her in this series, too, but I’ll assume they won’t.

This kind of breaks LaAn’s heart, and Spock’s is also somewhat broken when he finds out Chapel won’t even hesitate to leave him for a fellowship with a Vulcan medical expert. So… the TOS relationship non-statuses are kind of starting to come into play here.

Aside from that, they had some nonsense about how they fixed the musical gas cloud that’ll never happen again. To be honest, this is one thing I hope they get out of the habit of doing, coming up with random “hey, we want to shake up all our plot lines and do something weird, so we’ll make up a technobabble reason why it’ll happen now and never again!” I’ve counted about three or four occurrences now, and it maybe even weakens the episode where LaAn kisses alt-Kirk and meets child Khan for the fact that they went to this well so much.

The season finale was the Gorn some more, and a cliffhanger. The weird stuff ensues again, and we find out that Pike’s girlfriend is going to have herself some Gorn baby parasitoids of her own. Honestly, I’m not at all sure I like that they’ve turned the Gorn into Xenomorphs with starships at all, nor the fact that they’re having this many encounters with them before Kirk’s fight in the arena in TOS, which was presented at the time as a sort of first encounter.

So… the season was a bit hit and miss. The misses weren’t nearly as bad as Secret Invasion, and the hits were a lot better, so all in all, I’m okay with saying I liked this season better than most of the stuff I’ve watched this year.

RED

This film is the “old secret agents ensemble” piece with Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Karl Urban where there’s a random plot for why the CIA wants to rub out some retired agents. There are more than a few callouts to the original John Wick here, and while this one was played more for humor and suspense (and ultimately might more sustainable for not taking itself so seriously), it’s probably going to be remembered somewhat less as a legendary film for it. That said, it was enjoyable and made more sense than the later Wicks have.

Rating: 3.25 stars

Now I’m finally caught up and won’t feel the drag on my conscience when I start on Ahsoka next week.

Thanks for reading.