Reviewer746 Reviews

Shrek (2001)

Shrek: An Essay on Conformity & Diversity in Western Culture

[8/10 · 28 January 2024]

At its core, Shrek is a story about nonconformity, about casting off the pretenses and disguises people use to assimilate with Western standards of beauty and socially acceptable behavior. The fairy tale creatures in Shrek's world represent marginalized groups whether they be ethnic minorities, non-gender binary, or etc. Who are pressured to conform to society's unspoken rules.

Duloc is an idealization of a highly conformist society where individuals, told when to ooh and ahh at the royal wedding, have about as much autonomy as the marionettes in the mechanical choir. The magical nonconformists, apparently formerly held as slaves, are, at the start of the film, in the process of being cast out entirely because, as Farquaad tells us, they are the only thing standing in the way of his perfect society.

The homogenization of society has obvious adverse effects on conformists, but the movie isn't about that. It mostly revolves around the psychological impact of rejection on nonconformists who become minoritized groups. Shrek isn't a loner by nature. As the movie progresses, we learn that he only puts up walls as a reaction to society's irrational rejection of him. Fiona suffers a life-long crisis of identity, deeply desiring to be strong, independent, and adventurous while also trying to conform to the idealized image of the princess in the tower.

The resolution isn't the magical creatures going off to live together with Shrek in his swamp. The resolution is the dictator gets eaten and the rest of society validates the beauty of the non-conformists and is better off for it, with everyone singing and having a good time at the end.

It surprises me that this strongly political theme seems to have escaped almost the entirety of Shrek's fan-base who are convinced it's nothing more than a mindless fairy-tale adventure/comedy with some witty adult innuendo sprinkled in.

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Oh My God, They Hacked the Deer

[9/10 · 4 January 2024]

Contender for film of the decade, Leave the World Behind isn't a disaster-survival movie any more than Sam Esmail's Mr. Robot is a series about computer hacking. To appreciate this film, the viewer must temper expectations of realism and a survivalist's type of closure - whether all ends well for the characters depends entirely on the audience.

The relevance of this film is in how perfectly it captures the stress-induced exhaustion of the American public since... let's say 2016. Like in The Road, the nature of the attack is intentionally vague, and the events shown somewhat illogical. Like an impressionist painting, the conveyed feeling of impending doom matters more than the content detail. In an era where half of Americans polled think a civil war is inevitable, but nobody can say exactly how it will happen, highlighting the dysfunction in our society is more material than the mechanics of the umpteenth tale of doom and destruction.

Each character can be interpreted as representing different perspectives on the American Left. Through this lens, the film is an introspective critique and warning that the fragmentary nature of the Left can be its undoing, a frequent public speaking point of a certain former president who happens to be one of the film's producers.

Amanda is an educated, upper-middle-class suburban white woman blissfully unaware of how deeply conservative many of her preconceptions about people really are. Her job as a salesperson puts her at odds with her espoused political beliefs and she reconciles this by rationalizing that everyone else is just as two-faced and distrustful. She claims to be disgusted by the endless economic striving, the petty competitiveness of the city where everyone climbs over one another towards success. She says she wants to leave the world behind, but the vacation she plans is nothing more than a celebration of the capitalist virtues she claims to be fleeing - paying thousands of dollars to pretend, for a time, having acquired a massive house in the Hamptons close to the beach. The Sandfords aren't exactly leaving for the mountains of the Yukon. Their vacation isn't a change of location but rather a change of socioeconomic status. Not until the end of the movie, when her daughter is at risk, does Amanda abandon her preconceptions about professions, status, wealth, race, etc. And embrace Ruth as a person, not as a con artist or a spoiled brat or anything else, but just as a person.

Clay is an educated, upper-middle-class suburban white man whose shortcoming is indecision. Like so many of his peers on the academic left, he thinks that simply being inoffensive will suffice. He's going to watch the world burn content in the knowledge that he didn't make any enemies along the way. He doesn't ask the Scotts for ID when they show up at the door in the middle of the night because he's afraid of being offensive. He tries to remove himself from the tension between Amanda and the Scotts rather than being an effective mediator. When finally forced to make a decision about helping someone, he locks up and runs away from a Hispanic woman in distress. Being forced to take a stand sends him into such a panic that he flees like a maniac from what ends up being harmless paper flyers. Not until the end of the movie, when his son is at risk, does Clay become an effective mediator, symbolically positioning himself between a successful black man and a working-class white survivalist.

Rose, sporting a NASA shirt, has her head in the clouds for most of the film. She feels more connected with the cast of Friends than with her family or anyone else around her. Despite being the youngest and not even having been alive when Friends aired, she seems to have, as Ruth puts it, a nostalgia for a time that never really existed. The appeal of shows like Friends certainly isn't the comedic writing, which was awful, it's the comfort of a close, reliable community. Rose represents the younger post-pandemic generation, estranged from personal relationships, confused by politics and the world at large, and seeking shelter in the simplicity of media, especially romanticization of a more functional society where people were "there for you".

Before leaving the Sandfords, it's worth mentioning that, like most of the viewing public, they're unaware of the references to America's racial history sprinkled throughout the film. Knowledge of the past empowers us, and when we're ignorant of the White Lion landing at Point Comfort in 1619, it leaves us powerless, unequipped when scars of the past come back ashore with massive force, renting the very fabric of the nation asunder. Once again, passivity is insufficient. Active engagement is essential.

Ruth's specialty is active engagement. She has no problem calling out the other characters on their shortcomings and she's not afraid of being confrontational. But her assessments are often shallow and incomplete. She's a gatekeeper of the liberal cause; she wants to drive other people out of her house, throw away potential allies and isolate herself and her father. At the end of the movie, she acknowledges the overlap in her beliefs with Amanda and they become allies against the... spooky deer.

G. H. Is the most difficult character to analyze. He's a successful black man who's been forced to live in the basement of his own home, a room which, is architecturally quite different from the rest of the house - darker, with more wood, almost reminiscent of the bowels of a slave ship. Yet he takes all of this in stride, he's the bigger man. He doesn't get angry but remains calm and shows magnanimity to those around him. He's in a relative position of power, having received some forewarning from his friend at the Pentagon as well as being the only member of the group holding a gun. He could have driven the Scotts out of the house at any time, but he lets them stay and more than that he lets them stay in comfort. Through the whole series of events, he must be asking himself "what do I owe any of these people?" He finally breaks when, after giving so much of himself, he encounters his neighbor, the survivalist, who has completely abandoned all the virtues of a functional society and embraced an animalistic survival-of-the-fittest mentality. "Why am I doing so much when this guy won't even lift a finger to help?" It's the principle of the thing that makes G. H. pull the gun on him. In a lot of ways, I see our former president in the G. H. character - frustrated with the people around him, both allies and enemies, and struggling to hold true to a core set of principles that seem increasingly irrelevant in the contemporary landscape.

The movie ends with Rose watching the last episode of Friends. At least she gets closure. As for the audience, all we're left with is a call to action. Will we be there for each other when the rain starts to fall?

Arctic Void (2022)

Bokeh: Reloaded

[1/10 · 6 July 2023]

Now with more tobacco and firearms placement!

Seeing what a smashing success Bokeh was for the Icelanders, the Norwegian tourism board decided to make pretty much the same movie but in Svalbard.

Filmed on location in Pyramiden, the movie's target audience is people who've never heard of Pyramiden. This is why it makes sense that our characters are surprised that a ghost town abandoned decades ago doesn't have any people in it.

The plot, if you can call it that, is identical to Bokeh - some tourists are seeing the sites when suddenly they experience a paranormal event and find they're the last people in the world. What do they do? Why, they go around and see all the touristy stuff, of course.

Come on Norway, you guys just found enough phosphates to power the world for a hundred years. Do you really need to make these god awful tourism adverts? As Hank Hill would say: "You're not making tourism better, you're just making movies worse."

Forrest Gump (1994)

If baseball is America's pastime, Forest Gump is America's movie

[7/10 · 18 October 2022]

If baseball is America's pastime, Forest Gump is America's movie. For better or worse, this film encapsulates so much of the American psyche. It's less a fantastical depiction of historical events as it is a record of Americans' reactions to those events. A cultural summary with its finger on the pulse of the collective conscience, and perhaps simultaneously something more sinister...

At its simplest level, Forest Gump is a story about a good-ol' southern boy, descendant of a Confederate hero, who, despite being a bit slow, achieves outrageous success simply by being a good person. He participates in all of the virtues of conservative Americana - succeeding in sports, fighting in the war (but not getting injured too badly), succeeding in sports again, starting a successful business, and investing wisely. He does all this while being largely unaware of the plight of those around him, even his closest friends and love interest.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend, deeply scarred by her father's abuse, is set down the dark path of liberalism. While Forest is busy succeeding in all the conservative virtues of athletics, military service, business, and investment, Jenny fails in all the liberal virtues of higher education, pacifism, black power, free love, and drug use. Forest repeatedly offers her an 'out', a path to redemption, salvation from her unholy liberal ways, but she rejects him at every turn until it's too late.

Jenny's life is a train wreck, Forest's life is a nonstop rocket to the moon. Jenny adopts liberalism. Forest is a model of conservative virtue. This dynamic requires further investigation lest we prematurely conclude that Groom is implying southern conservatives are slow in the head. On the contrary, Forest's story is, in many ways, like the charming and not-entirely-truthful success stories wealthy southern conservatives tell about themselves, brushing the uglier aspects of their personal and family histories (often involving slavery, exploitation of workers, tax fraud, corruption, etc.) under the rug. It has long been the tactic of southern businessmen to play the part of the simpleton to hide their wily nature. Far from being an indictment of southerners as mentally impaired, Forest is a southern conservative paragon. Jenny, on the other hand, offers evidence that liberals must be deeply scarred people, and Lieutenant Dan provides corroborating evidence.

Like Forest, Lt. Dan is a veteran, but unlike his innately fortunate subordinate, he's seriously injured in Vietnam and comes home bitter. Much like Jenny, his trauma induces him to go down the path of liberalism and he suffers as a result. Unlike Jenny, he finds redemption, returns to the light, and embraces conservative virtues once again, even trying to dissuade Forest from giving his friend Bubba's family any of the profits from a company bearing his name. Who says redemption into the light of Conservative Jesus requires a charitable heart?

The important difference between Forest, the conservative, and Jenny and Lt. Dan, the liberals, is that Forest deals with his disability and never sees himself as a victim. Jenny and Lt. Dan see themselves as victims, and this, according to Groom, is a necessary precursor to the liberal disorder.

There's no denying that Forest Gump is a classic, entertaining movie with a compelling narrative - and in this way too, it is the charming mythology of a white southern elite's backstory, refined subconsciously over decades to be retold around the country club or memorialized on little plaques that adorn park benches. There is a dichotomy between Forest's conservative success story and the other characters' liberal failure-to-redemption arcs. The intensely negative portrayal of the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, free love and drug use, are part and parcel of the conservative lens that the historical events depicted in the film are presented through. The 'real America' wasn't civil rights, anti-war, etc., it was the fantastical success story of a white southerner, and if you deny it, you weren't paying attention.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Why Does it Fail?

[5/10 · 18 October 2022]

With nearly the same creative team behind the masterfully made Lord of the Rings trilogy, why did The Hobbit trilogy fall so flat for most viewers? Was it merely that the bar had been set too high by LOTR? Here are the most plausible reasons I can come up with.

1) They Tried to Remake LOTR

This is the single biggest problem with The Hobbit movies, the kernel of their woes. If not for this, they might have let del Toro remain as director. If not for this, they might have had good original score instead of derivative music with not a single memorable track. If not for this, they might have kept it as one or maybe two movies instead of stretching it into a trilogy. The money people wanted another generation-defining hit and, in their greed, they ruined any hope for The Hobbit to be good. The tone of the films does not at all match the tone of the source material. They used the source material as a plot guide while overlaying the tone and epic scale of LOTR - it just doesn't work. The Hobbit was a wonky children's story but the investors wanted another mature, adventure fantasy epic. The whole adaptation process was confused by this contradictory creative impulse.

2) Poor Source Material

The Hobbit is an inherently challenging book to adapt to the screen. For one thing, there are too many Dwarves in Thorin's company. I consider myself a hard-core Tolkien fan but I can hardly remember more than half of their names. I certainly can't connect names to the faces of actors and it doesn't help that, unlike the Fellowship, their names all sound alike, all derived in some form from the Poetic Edda. The Dwarves in the company don't really do anything in the story either. They're just sort of there because 13 is an auspicious number. The only real characters in the company are Thorin, Bilbo, and Gandalf (Balin's role in the expedition to reclaim Moria having been retconned later on). The Battle of Five Armies isn't the climax of the story either, it's more like a dessert, a bit of action for the kiddies. It's described in all of like two pages but in the movie they tried to portray it like the Battle of Minas Tirith. The Hobbit simply does not exist in the same universe as LOTR or the Silmarillion or etc. - the lore links were penciled in later by Tolkien for those other works. The episode with Galadriel, Saruman, and the Necromancer doesn't even show up in The Hobbit.

3) Over-Reliance on CGI

The LOTR trilogy was already suffering from this before it was through. In Viggo's words, The Hobbit was at least 10x worse. Characters feel weightless, their movements lacking the subtle imperfections of real people. The CG orcs look too clean, too crisp and the fact that there is not a single practical effects orc in the trilogy subconciously tells us there is no real antagonist - our heroes are just fighting a render (or worse, a dude in a suit with little balls all over it). There is no synchronization between action and audio. Weta Workshop's concepts are still just as good as the first trilogy, maybe a little high-fantasy by comparison, but their realization mostly or exclusively in CGI is extremely disappointing.

4) Creative Exhaustion with the Source Material

They should have let del Toro direct. We would have gotten an original take on Tolkien's work which is exactly what was needed because, as previously mentioned, The Hobbit and LOTR don't exist in the same universe. PJ poured his soul into the original trilogy and he didn't have any gas left in the tank for The Hobbit - the money people brought him in because they thought it would make the investment safer. As it turns out, lightning doesn't strike twice even when you reassemble the same cast and crew. I think this is probably the least important of the reasons why The Hobbit failed, the financial pressures of the studios and the political situation in New Zealand might even have been more important factors, but I won't get into that.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

The Perfect Adaptation

[10/10 · 18 October 2022]

Most who've seen Jackson's Lord of the Rings recognize it as a masterpiece, a near-perfect adaptation, and perhaps even a life-changing experience. Certainly a once-in-a-generation cinematic achievement. The film perfectly captures the tone, narrative style, and depth of worldbuilding of J. R. R. Tolkien through meticulous attention to detail, clever insertions of original dialogue, masterful props and practical effects paired with revolutionary, yet modestly implemented CG effects, a memorably soundtrack, and a love for the source material that simply seeps out of every frame.

Jackson's entire LOTR trilogy is a treasure, but Fellowship is the undeniable crown jewel, one of the finest films ever made. What sets it apart from other installments in the fantasy genre to make it the greatest of all time?

1) The Source Material

Almost every other installment in the modern fantasy genre is heavily derivative of Tolkien's work. Given that Fellowship is the perfect adaptation of the source material, the only way to make a better fantasy movie would be to have better source material. Good luck finding any.

That said, I think Tolkien's passing benefited the film's chances of success. While he lived, he was inclined towards harshly criticizing adapters for the slightest deviations from his 'lore'. There is a version of the live action LOTR films that would have had Tom Bombadil and all the other silly, unedited digressions from the books, or that would have based its artistic style on Tolkien's watercolors instead of the much more visually captivating works of professional illustrators John Howe, Alan Lee, and Ted Nasmith.

2) Love of the Source Material

Evidently, the filmmakers weren't just cashing in on a proven franchise like modern adaptations. On the contrary, they were taking a massive risk because fantasy film up until that point had been a flaming mess. The creative directors and the crew at large had to have a lot of faith in and reverence for the source material to make a good movie. PJ approached the project in many ways like a documentary, wanting to capture the essence of the source without injecting his own tangential messaging.

3) The Necessity of Practical Effects

This can't be overstated enough - CG has ruined modern fantasy and historical film. In its current state, it is a time- and money-saving shortcut that produces worse results than practical effects. The harder the industry leans into CG, the worse movies are getting. The creativity that comes with having to use practical effects on a budget is totally lost when you can just hire a CG firm to use the latest software suite with at least theoretically infinite range. CG makes actors act in a void of undefined dimensions, their movements always perfect, lacking the subtle imperfections of the real world. Practical effects obviously don't guarantee a quality result - it's a risk, but you have a chance at greatness. CG is a cheap and reliable road to mediocrity which was realized in later LOTR films.

Even before the LOTR trilogy was through, CG was rearing it's ugly head and becoming problematic for Jackson who started leaning hard into the latest tech as soon as it became available and the second and third movies suffered as a result. By The Hobbit it was game over. Fellowship is a masterpiece in no small part owing to the fact that PJ had no choice but to use practical effects.

4) The Perfect Storm of Investment

Given the shoddy state of 90's fantasy film, the planets really had to align to bring in as much investment as PJ got for these films. This may never happen again, especially given the current trends towards the use of AI and CG in writing and production.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

A Mad Max Movie That's Actually Good?

[7/10 · 18 October 2022]

Fury Road is the first, dare I say it, genuinely good Mad Max movie.

The first film was blah. Yeah, it's all about the V8, and other subtleties of Australian culture, but the movie just doesn't have much going for it. The second movie is where things start to pick up. The camp factor goes off the charts but it works and it earns its place in the post-apocalyptic genre. Third movie with Tina Turner was a trip and a half but it has some magic with the kids from the plane and the final fly-through of a ruined Sydney model. But let's face it, these weren't good movies. The best that can be said of them is that they were so campy they were memorable enough to earn a spot in the hall of fame.

Fury Road has production value. It has a plot that sort of makes sense. The casting is good. It has well-paced action sequences and killer practical effects and a suitable soundtrack. It's one of the few movies made in the 2010's with an ending that leaves you wanting to know what happens next. Overall, a very entertaining movie.

Red Planet (2000)

The 'Evil Twin'

[4/10 · 18 October 2022]

Of Mission to Mars.

Both movies were hastily put together, not out of any creative impulse, but purely to capitalize on the spike in public interest in Mars exploration after the 1997 Pathfinder mission with its Sojourner rover. Both involve manned missions to Mars in spin ships, both expeditions encounter some sort of disaster in Mars orbit in order to kill off a few characters and inject some drama, and both involve the discovery of alien life on the surface. Both premises are highly derivative with cookie cutter dialogue and plot structure hastily adapted to a Mars theme.

Both were also staples of my childhood, but I can honestly say that I did not remember the dialogue in this film being so utterly pathetic. It's as if they didn't have time to write a proper screenplay so they just unboxed a premade 'action adventure movie script', slapped a Mars theme on it, and called it a day. This is some real straight-to-video stuff. There's very little abuse of scientific jargon because they don't even attempt to use scientific jargon. The ship gets hit by a 'solar storm' and it's just 'dead in the water'. Sure, that's sufficient information...

The CGI is somewhat worse than Mission to Mars. At least they tried to hide it tastefully in that movie, here they're trying to make it the main attraction, 10 years too early.

Mission's soundtrack is pretty pretentious but at least it's not total garbage. Red Planet gives us 90's club music. This movie would have been better with less audio in general, let us take in the few worthwhile panoramic shots in peace.

OK, OK, OK. The bit where the Russian lander has a little distressed cartoon bear cosmonaut is pretty memorable for its originality. I mean, it's sort of unintentionally hilarious, but it's memorable. The design of the killer robot is also pretty iconic, totally impractical, but iconic. And the scene where the bug creatures move in unison across the plain is pretty interesting. So this movie has its moments. But on the whole, pretty bad.

Mission to Mars (2000)

The 'Good Twin'

[5/10 · 18 October 2022]

Of Red Planet.

In 1997, around the time both of these movies must have entered the early planning phase, NASA landed the first rover on Mars - Sojourner. One of Pathfinder's mission objectives was to detect the past presence of liquid water on the surface, a discovery which would improve the odds of there being or having once been life on Mars.

Mission to Mars and Red Planet are fairly unimaginative science fiction flicks that give the impression of having been thrown together quickly to capitalize on public interest in Mars. Both present unoriginal takes on the prospect of life on Mars, one expounding the seed hypothesis and the other going for more of a scary monster theme. Both feature interpretations of rovers - Mission to Mars having a cross between Sojourner and MER with the mannerisms of a curious puppy dog. Red Planet's more advanced, autonomous, and as it turns out murderous bot is even more animal-like.

This movie doesn't really come alive until the closing act, the opener is just an astonishing collection of clichés, expository dialogue, mediocre performances, cheap effects, and violence to high school-level science.

The Mars rover, which appears to be a cross between the existent Sojourner and planned (as of filming) MER, isn't a scientific instrument, it's a cute little doggy. A lone survivor sends a choppy message back to base "they're all dead". "You've only modeled this on paper, we don't know if it will work". "They wrote the book on Mars" - must be some book, god this dialogue is terrible. Dude assembles the "exact genetic composition of his ideal woman" using a single twist of the double helix. He goes on to explain how the genetic differences between a human and a frog are encoded in a single twist of a double helix. Later, our team of scientist-astronauts confuses amino acids for chromosomes. Mind-numbing stuff.

I won't lie, there is some magic in this movie's closing act. The concept of ancient Martians seeding Earth isn't original, the CGI didn't age well, the soundtrack is trying its absolute best to convince us this is a great epic. But there is something there. Why do the Martians take only one human? Surely not as a specimen as that would be useless, but then again the writers were clearly incapable of thinking scientifically about anything else in the film. Did they take Jim as a tourist? Seems a bit pointless. There's a sense of 'sailing to Valinor' here - not a death but not exactly continuing to live as we usually imagine it; transcending life on Earth. But that's about as deep as it gets: wonder at the mystery of the ancient aliens.

Mission to Mars has a lighter more hopeful tone than Red Planet, to the point of unbelievability. There is silly action and death in the opening act, tragic death in the second act, but the final act is so hopeful and uplifting that the rest of the movie becomes largely unimportant - it's all about that CGI scene inside the Face.

All told, Mission to Mars isn't a very good movie. It's mostly just a capitalization on the Mars excitement following the Pathfinder mission.

The Incredibles (2004)

Family Superhero Escapism or Objectivist Propaganda?

[8/10 · 19 July 2022]

The Incredibles is a childhood classic that I continue to cherish. It's impossible to deny the neoliberal messaging, shoehorned into the dialogue, but the movie still succeeds as escapist family fun through the strength of its animation, impeccable pacing common to the big blockbusters of the 00's, and cliche family dynamic that doesn't take itself too seriously - a perfect mix of action and comedy that makes for a quality superhero flick.

The opening act builds up a lot of conservative American themes only to tear them down later in the film. Mr. Incredible is a middle-aged white American man with a steady job that he finds unfulfilling and a yearning to relive the glory days of his pre-marriage youth. He lives in a suburban home with his nuclear family, his kids that he's not really that interested in, and his nagging wife. He complains about how society celebrates mediocrity (all the kids get trophies), a very conservative trope and one of the core premises of the movie. He wants to rebel against the bureaucracy of his workplace, the lawyers who upended him, and his family that's tying him down.

Second act - "Men at Robert's age are often unstable, prone to weakness." Mr. Incredible embarks on a series of misadventures that almost get him killed. His rugged individualism gives way to celebration of the cooperative as his family works together to rescue him from the villain's clutches.

The story develops naturally, all the characters are developed perfectly. It's a great ride from start to finish with just a couple hiccups...

The line "when everyone's special, nobody is" is delivered twice, once by Dash when his mother tells him that society just wants them to fit in, and once by the villain, Syndrome, when revealing his core motivations. The whole opening act of the movie is Bob rebelling against societal pressure to just be a normie. Why are the sentiments of the heroes and villains so... aligned? Is The Incredibles objectivist propaganda?

I'd say no, for the simple reason that people who think this way are confusing terms. The Reagan-era conservative leadership recognized the shortcomings of Randian objectivism, namely, the religious-right's distaste for abject selfishness. So they tweaked Rand's theories slightly to make them more palatable while maintaining the underlying principle that some people deserve to be at the top of the social hierarchy by natural or God-given right. Instead of trying to justify selfishness, the new ideology says the public should trust these exceptional individuals to act altruistically and ultimately in our best interests. This is the basis of Reaganomics and all of modern neoliberalism.

Brad Bird isn't injecting Randian objectivism, he's injecting neoliberal exceptionalism and doing quite an awkward job of it too. These lines of fairly straightforward ideological dialogue are eminently ignorable for most viewers and strike those of who are really paying attention as off color. But, it's not just those lines, there is a consistent theme throughout the movie.

Gilbert Huph, Bob's boss in the opening act, represents bureaucracy, rules and regulations, red tape. In the plot, his industry, the insurance industry, is part of the reason why the government was pressured to outlaw super heroes. Simply being in the private sector doesn't shield Huph from Randian or neoliberal condemnation. Not all industries are created equal in the eyes of conservatives. Lawyers, insurance agents, compliance specialists, and of course politicians, regulators, and anyone in the public sector is derided while people who 'actually make things' are praised. Of course you will find a lot of conservative white collar paper-pushers, but even they themselves will often say hypocritical things about their own industries. The point is, Gilbert Huph is the Randian archetype of a leech - delighting in using his bureaucratic power to keep the Übermensch from achieving their true potential.

Syndrome, the main villain, is a self-made billionaire, inventor of fabulous technologies, surely he would be a Randian hero? Rather, he is the archetype of the scheming leech. That he was able to kill so many Übermensch doesn't indicate his superiority over them. The core concept of Atlas Shrugged is that the leech-class is able to oppress Taggart and Rearden and the other capitalists - this doesn't prove the superiority of the "looters". Syndrome is an ambitious, genius inventor, the cleverest of the normies, but still a normy. The thought of his ever being included in the pantheon of super heroes is never entertained by any of the characters. In the opening act, Buddy says "not every super hero has powers", but all the heroes we meet in the film do have powers that all of the villains lack.

Syndrome has only two motives: 1) to attain the status of the Übermensch for himself and 2) destroy the Übermensch by granting total equality and mediocrity for all. This is the precise hypocrisy that Rand ascribes to the 'leeches' - they jealously desire the Übermensch's power but at the same time they seek to destroy them as a class. It's the communists taking over the wealth of the private sector and then setting themselves up as incompetent potentates.

You could argue that the entire super hero genre (if you can even call it a genre) is based on these ideas - some people are inherently better than others but it's OK because they're gonna look out for us. But whereas most super hero movies are pure escapism, The Incredibles makes exceptionalism its core message. I think The Incredibles is a great family movie and I enjoy watching it. But it's impossible to deny that Brad Bird injected deeply conservative messaging into the movie. If anything, the movie is great IN SPITE of the political undertones, which are awkwardly shoehorned into an otherwise typical super hero story.

The Lost Room (2006)

Brilliant Satirization of the Contemporary Suspense Genre

[8/10 · 17 April 2022]

The Lost Room can only be appreciated as a satire of serialized dramas like Lost that run on pure suspense. The core premise is that you don't need a large budget, crack writing, skilled acting, a logical plot, or even closure to have a successful series. All you need is heaps of suspense which The Lost Room derives from a collection of mundane objects one might find in a motel room. A pen, a key, a comb, and other such miscellany are imbued with magical powers as a result of an event about which it is imperative that the audience learn as little as possible for as long as possible.

In the first episode, a shady deal goes down in which the buyer brings with him a little collapsible door on which to test a magic key. The absurd logic of the series is immediately laid bare. Next, Pen Guy shows up with his own magic item which imbues him with the power to... stab people. We're ascending into comedy now. It's soon explained that the Object seekers want to keep knowledge of the Objects secret. We can only surmise that Pen Guy forgot this modus operandi when he left burnt bodies phased through the ceiling for the police to ponder.

The Key, aside from raising ontological questions about what constitutes 'a door', opens a portal to the titular Room from which magic Objects can be removed. Such a powerful item, which can be used to attend football games without buying tickets, is clearly of tremendous value, and so Pen Guy attempts to recover it. He lays a trap in a warehouse by having his henchmen collect all the doors in a heap and burn them because it's more dramatic than just leaving them open. Our hero arrives on the scene to trade the Key for his daughter and delivers the best line of satirical dialogue on the whole series:

"What does the gun do?" "It shoots bullets really fast."

Because if you're going to have a Pokemon battle, you'd be shocked to see anything but a Poke Ball in your adversary's hand. After losing his daughter to the Room, our hero attempts to look up Pen Guy using his alias "The Weasel" which is, incredibly, enough information for the police to go off of. Our hero befriends Pen Guy and it is in this episode that we get the second best dialogue in the series:

"Check the bag." "A door knob?"

If you don't buy the satire by now you're just being obstinate. The plot beats just write themselves and we're soon introduced to Comb Guy who has the power to stop time. Knowing this, Joe attempts to apprehend him by yelling at him from across a parking lot. Hilarious. We continue to fly through the series, suspense building up all the while, until finally we meet the Occupant who delivers my third favorite line of dialogue:

"One object is destroyed, another is created. Conservation of objects."

Whatever they were paying the writers, it wasn't enough. The series ends perfectly without even the slightest hint of explanation for anything we've just seen. The suspense transcends into wonder. What an experience.

Star Trek (1966–1969)

Classic Sci-Fi Optimism

[5/10 · 7 April 2022]

I've always had mixed feelings about Star Trek and the countless sequels and copycat serials it engendered. On the one hand, I appreciate the vision of a rational, egalitarian future where diversity is a given and considered a strength and humanity actively works to confront and correct their history of violence and prejudice. On the other hand, I simply cannot take the 'forehead prosthetic' aliens and all the historical fantasy plots they bring with them seriously. I concede that TOS has its share of original sci-fi plots. Unlike Star Wars, it is, undeniably, science fiction. But the deluge of mostly historical-themed, recycled Studio City props, sets, and costumes makes the viewer really have to strain to discern the underlying sci-fi concept when one is present at all.

Here are a few of my favorite things about TOS:

• Every time they encounter a more advanced alien species, which is just about every other episode, Kirk's first instinct is to fight it, with his fists if need be. Spock doesn't even need to try to look logical next to this halfcocked baboon of a man.

• Kirk is an absolute animal. Every time a woman walks by, even a member of his own crew, he gives a her a creepy seductive look. Every time he's alone with a woman someone throws on an Isley Brothers slow track and he starts doing his Frank Sinatra routine. You'd think he'd be more familiar with his 400 crewmen, but no, every time he sees a female crew member it's like the first time he's ever seen a woman. They could power the ship's engines for years just on this man's libido.

• The rate that the Enterprise saves the galaxy from certain doom begs the question as to who was filling that role before the Enterprise came onto the scene? Who were those unsung heroes, those guardians of the galaxy who bought time for humanity to evolve to the point of building space ships? And have they simply retired now that the Enterprise is on the job?

• I never cease to be amused by the lack of harnesses or restraints of any sort on the Enterprise. They clearly have some sort of physics-defying inertial bubble around the ship that keeps the crew from feeling the full acceleration when the ship goes to "warp speed" and engages in all the other crazy maneuvers it engages in, and yet, every so often they get hit with something powerful enough that the crew feels a few g's and, for lack of harnesses, they just fly out of their chairs and roll around on the walls and floors.

• The total lack of protective gear for the "landing parties" is pretty amusing since it's the cause of so many of their problems. They're constantly being infected with stuff, dealing with poisonous environments, being shot at with primitive weapons, and yet they insist on beaming down in nothing but their tactical t-shirts and mini-skirts.

• What are the colorful dots the Enterprise is flying past in the exterior shots of the ship? They can't be stars because they wouldn't be able to see the light from stars while moving so many times faster than the speed of light.

• I love how the ship is supposed to have all these advanced computers and yet every time they need to aim and shoot at something Kirk just eye-balls it.

• I also love how every time Spock needs to interact with the ship's computer, he has to read something off a tiny periscope-type thing. Apparently the big screen on the bridge is exclusively reserved for looking at tiny colored dots flying by.

House M.D. (2004–2012)

Couldn't make it through the first season

[3/10 · 28 February 2022]

It's the romance subplot between the 24 year old, straight out of med school doctor and her 46 year old mentor and employer that got me. The fact they thought it would be a good idea to cement this romance subplot in an episode about a pregnant 12 year old is too disgustingly ironic for my taste. It's like they're trying to offer a justification by analogy - see, even a 12 year old can consent, the age-gap doesn't matter! He literally gets the idea of accepting a romantic offer from his coworker who's half his age by watching how everything turns out OK for a pregnant 12 year old. I know, I know, 2005 was just a different time, but COME ON.

This is just one of many male hero fantasy shows with a legal or medical theme. A synthesis of successful media paradigms that had been around for decades, a safe bet. House is a no-nonsense lone-ranger who outsmarts everyone around him and cuts through red tape to save the day. The supporting cast seem to only be there to make House look even better by comparison with their general apathy or incompetence. Every episode has the same plot structure with tidbits of contrived interpersonal drama thrown in to keep people entertained. The medical jargon is mostly correct from what I can tell, they obviously hired some consultants, but let's be real, that's not why anyone watches medical dramas. No, they're watching because the show has an attractive cast that lives within a cute little world-within-a-world. Who's gonna hook up with whom? Who's House's favorite? Who's gonna get fired? All so terribly interesting... The frequent references to medical soap operas in the first season are just confirmation, poking fun at a gullible audience.

Underneath all of the overt racism, misogyny, homophobia, and general bigotry that passes for wit, House is actually a nice guy who genuinely cares about people. Too bad the whole show revolves around his hallmark 'come backs' that have all the wit of a spoiled white private school 5th grader - telling a black presidential candidate he won't win because "it's called the White House of a reason"... ffs. House isn't going to waste your time with phony beside manner, he's gonna tell you straight up that you're dying and how he's gonna fix you (actually, he'll confidently try to kill you first but he'll get it right eventually). He says what he means without worrying about who he offends. He doesn't vote because it's a waste of time. He must be a "handsome doctor" because everyone keeps calling him that. There are only two women in main roles on the show and they both have a romantic interest in him - he picks the one half his age. He was an anti-masker before it was vogue. He doesn't just think everyone around him is a moron, he knows it.

I struggled to get through the first season, what with every episode having the exact carbon copy plot structure, but I can't get past the romance subplot, too cringe. Here's a summary to save you some time:

Step 1: Some Hollywood B-lister is doing an every-day activity when suddenly they collapse to the floor. Roll opening credits.

Step 2: A random supporting cast member tries to convince House to take the patient. House dismissively speculates that the patient is suffering from a common ailment before noticing some unusual symptom or feature that piques his interest.

Step 3: House convenes his team of mostly useless supporting cast, presents them the symptoms and says "differential diagnosis people". The team throws out a bunch of random conditions that House shakes his head at before finally agreeing to a mode of treatment. So begins treatment #1, which is doomed to fail because we're only 5 minutes into the episode.

Step 4: Treatment #1 predictably fails, the patient experiences a medical crisis usually involving seizing, choking, or becoming unresponsive. The word "stat" gets thrown out like candy and the crisis is resolved between cuts. House reconvenes the A-team and asks "what can cause these symptoms" to which A-team replies "nothing known to medicine". House stares hard at the whiteboard before recommending treatment #2. One of the A-team protests and they decide that this treatment will either make the patient better or kill them. But that's a risk House is willing to take. House and/or one of the other doctors has to persuade the family that they got it right this time for sure (even though we know they haven't because there's still 20 minutes of run time left).

Step 5: Treatment #2 fails, the patient is now on death's doorstep. House has an epiphany while performing an unrelated task and decides on a mode of treatment in the absence of any sort of tests or evidence. The other doctors and/or patient's relatives strongly protest this time but it's ride or die so everyone folds.

Step 6: We only have 5 minutes left in the episode so treatment #3 has no option but to work. Patient is cured and undergoes a full recovery and everyone is happy or they die because their underlying condition was untreatable and everyone is real sad. The End.

So that's the plot structure but not the show. The actual show, what people are really here to see, mostly consists of contrived interpersonal intrigue that gets stuffed into the down time between plot beats. It's a modern soap opera people.

The Boat (2018)

All is Lost: The Silly Version

[3/10 · 25 February 2022]

At least on face value, The Boat covers a lot of the same territory as Robert Redford's 2013 movie All is Lost - a sailor must use his wits and experience to survive at sea under dire circumstances. But whereas Redford faces off against natural forces and gives us a believable survivalist story, the sailor in The Boat is primarily pitted against supernatural forces giving us an unintentionally hilarious story.

The boat's name, aside from being the most cliché sailboat name I know of, hints at a mythological narrative inspiration. Aeolus being the keeper of the winds occasionally troubled sailors, but in The Boat his methods are less 'partisan deity' and more 'psycho clown'.

The Boat is a bit like Jaws, but instead of a giant shark there's a cursed 1991 Beneteau First 45F5 that's out to getcha. It literally follows our hero around, stalking him. He tries to run away from the boat. The closing scene where the camera slow pans through the cave to reveal, loitering ominously just beyond the harbor, the terrible, the horrifying... Beneteau... had me on the floor gripping my sides with laughter.

Sure, the movie teases the viewer a bit with the possibility that there's someone else on the boat with our man, a smuggler, a child, a British tourist turned psycho killer, but it's pretty obvious from the opening act that something supernatural is at play. It's unfortunate that the extent of the film's survivalist component revolves around the casual observation that a lot of the control lines on a Beneteau First 45 are within reach of the guest head port. The rest is mostly unintentionally hilarious, like building a raft out of the head door and the fenders.

I suppose the production value is decent, but I simply can't take seriously a horror movie where the antagonist is a fiberglass boat from the 90s. What an utterly bizarre premise for a movie.

The Expanse (2015–2022)

Wait... where's the rest?

[9/10 · 14 January 2022]

That was not an ending. At best, that was a teaser for future content. At worst, that was a brilliant show getting axed right in the middle of its story.

This is just surreal. How can a show with such excellent writing end like this? The pacing has been impeccable from s1e1 all the way through s6e5. They weren't even rushing the last season with a budget of 6 episodes. They pushed all of the rushing into that very last episode - "oh s-, guys, we only have one episode left, we gotta tie this all together quick!"

It's not like Amazon axed them out of the blue mid-season (although it sure feels that way), they had plenty of warning, plenty of time to plan. Maybe they obstinately kept running the show as they would have right up to the finale and then just threw everything in there at the end as a coded message to the fans? Can't blame me for dreaming.

Shall we count all the plot threads that they didn't even attempt to conclude?

• What will the Laconians do with that mysterious, potentially physics-defying, game-changing protomolecule ship? Maybe they'll use it in the final epic battle between Marco and the Roci. Maybe they'll use it to take over the ring space and start an interstellar empire. Maybe they'll... just look up at it wistfully for several episodes without using it for anything...

• What happens with the ominous red ring entities? Is Holden and co. Going to figure out a way to use them against the Laconian protoship? Are they going to wake up and threaten all of humanity like Holden has been warning everyone about since season 3? Are they going to be used to... just kill Marco in a really lame and anticlimactic way? These things ended up being the Night King of the Expanse universe.

• What about the dog aliens that revive dead children with their protomolecule magic? That must have been important, right, because they spent an entire episode's worth of time on that subplot. No? Not going to do anything with that one either? Fine, just end it right at the climax just before we get some hint of what's going on. The whole subplot is just a collection of timewasting, meaningless scenes.

• What about Prax' new yeast strain designed to increase crop yields? Does that help the Earth in any way? For that matter, what happens with Earth? Does the nuclear winter just get worse and everyone dies? Does it get better and everyone's fine? Maybe Prax just saved the Earth, or maybe the biosphere is permanently damaged and people will have to migrate to the ring worlds. Guess we'll never know.

• What happens on Mars? Does everyone leave for the ring worlds? Do some remain behind as the planet turns into something more like the Belt? We'll never know.

• What happens on Ceres? When the allied fleet left, I guess they all just starved to death.

And the plot threads they did try to tie up aren't concluded very well.

• They did Marco dirty. They built up an epic battle between Marco and the Roci for three seasons and then he just gets merc'd by mysterious forces totally beyond his control and understanding. His final epic battle, if you can even call it that, is literally getting side-swipped by a minor character whose name I don't remember. Drummer taking Marco out would have been more satisfying than what we got, but no, she just casually loses, her whole fleet is destroyed in 5 seconds and contributes next to nothing to the battle, and Drummer gets to look like a tactical incompetent in the finale.

That battle between Marco and the Roci that they, for reasons that will forever be mysterious to me, decided to randomly insert into s6e3 should have taken place during the massive finale battle. If they needed to remove Filip from the ship beforehand, then they could have removed him beforehand. That battle is how Marco should have gone out, it's how his character deserved to go out. Instead, he gets beaten by the Roci not once but twice. He's just a big loser.

And another thing: Holden doesn't want to be the one to kill Naomi's son but then... he ends up killing him anyway (as far as anyone knows). In fact, he had more plausible deniability in the first encounter with the Pella because it was Bobby who launched the torpedo whereas in the second encounter it's Holden who suggests overloading the cargo ship's reactor. Naomi has a flashback to holding her son as an infant but aside from that she ends up being a-OK with the whole thing so what was the point in sparing Marco in the first battle!?

• The ultimate battle between the Free Navy and the combined fleets of Earth, Mars, and Drummer's faction happens OFF SCREEN!? Are you KIDDING ME? This is like if Peter Jackson skipped the battle of Minas Tirith and wrote it so that Gandalf just tells the gang that a few orcs made it back to Mordor. When they were talking about blowing their whole CGI budget on this last episode were they referring to the unintelligible pod confetti in the rail gun skirmish? This series has given us the most epic space battles I've ever seen and they just nope'd out of the pièce de résistance. Unreal.

• Immediately after the rail gun skirmish, in which faceless extras are the only casualties, there is a highly discontinuous cut to a round table meeting where the factions are meant to conclude a peace. This absurdly rushed cut was the first hint that they weren't even going to attempt to tie up the Laconia subplots. This meeting scene is also very cringe in its own right. Why is the administrator of Ceres, who sided with Marco and mocked Drummer as a pet of the Inners even after Marco abandoned Ceres, a party to the meeting? She's obviously a radical but now she's fine playing nice with the Inners? Why has Avasarala done a complete 180 in her attitude towards the Belters? It should have been her idea to make Drummer the admin of Medina Station, that would have completed both of their character arcs and solidified the alliance. But no, in the end she reverts back to season-1-Avasarala looking at the Belters like she's ready to gravity torture them after having just told us how much she changed not one episode ago. I swear, somebody just pontificated about judging people by their actions not their words. All we got from Avasarala were words about how much she's changed.

If Earth and Mars were so opposed to letting the Belters be independent and/or control Medina Station, why would they have agreed to let Holden pick his own VP and then just resign? They would have seen that coming and even if he managed to pull one over on them they wouldn't have accepted it - it's just too contrived. But we're never going to get to know how that plays out because OOPS the show is over.

And there were an unusual number of absurd plot holes in this episode.

• Wasn't the assault on Medina and the ring station supposed to be Plan B? They ended up not needing plan B at all because the Free Navy just gets spanked off screen.

• Here's a fun one for all the people who think there's too much AI and automation in the Expanse (/s) - If humans who can't survive much more than 15g could make it through the rail gun barrage by sending in a massive number of container pods that the guns couldn't shoot down in time, why didn't they just send the pods themselves (sans occupants) as high velocity projectiles to disable the rail guns? Better yet, why didn't the Martians just use missiles? They were planning on taking Marco in a ship-to-ship fight anyway, they didn't need to capture the rail guns. If they absolutely needed to use humans to capture the guns, why didn't they send in the cavalry instead of just 30 dudes? Every Martial Goliath suit still available should have been part of that operation, no?

The Roci flying off and becoming just another star in the expanse would have been a pretty good ending if the show had actually had a few more seasons or at least a few more episodes to actually conclude. The cute little continuity Easter Eggs and guest stars from earlier seasons don't make this ending better. The icing doesn't help a cake that's gone bad.

I can't rewatch Game of Thrones because of how it ended. In my opinion, the Expanse has been better than that show season for season and I don't think this finale is nearly the cluster that GoT had. But knowing that so many plot threads are never going to be concluded and so many characters are going to get really weird endings is probably going to put a damper on my inclination to rewatch this series. This was just not a good way for this otherwise brilliant show to end.

Looking around the place, it seems everyone's defending Amazon. Surreal. There are either a lot of shills or a lot of suckers who bought into the whole "Amazon saved the Expanse" PR. Amazon bought up a vulnerable IP with a dedicated fan base, slashed the budget, gave it no marketing whatsoever, and axed it in the middle of its story. In other words, they made out like bandits without actually investing any risk in a worthy project. And no, you're not going to hear anything critical of Amazon from the folks working on the Expanse because they're under contract. Give it a few years and I'm sure Naren or Ty or somebody will let slip how frustrated they were that they had another 2-3 seasons lined up and instead got brutally axed in the middle of a season without even enough episodes to have a chance of tying any of the plots together in a reasonable way. Holy run on sentence, Batman! Amazon doesn't have a lot of quality content. Their in-house series and the bargain bin stuff they rotate in isn't worth the subscription fee without the Expanse on their lineup. Goodbye Prime membership!

To the showrunners and all the creative talent that made this series what it is - cheers to you! You guys are awesome. Thanks for a great ride. I'm sorry that your project went the way of so many other niche sci-fi properties. I hope you find new partners who are more realistic about the scope and dedicated to quality because I'd sure love to see this story concluded.

The Matrix Resurrections (I) (2021)

Theory: It's Intentionally Bad

[1/10 · 28 December 2021]

Warner Bros had been pressuring the Wachowskis for more Matrix movies since 2003. Sometime around 2019 they made it apparent that they were going to go ahead with 'resurrecting' the franchise with or without the Wachowskis' input. They were threatening to hire a screenwriter best known for making Marvel super hero movies (and not the best installments of that unfortunate franchise either) who wanted to develop a Matrix "expanded universe". Lilly Wachowski still flatly refused to be involved in the farce. I can only guess that Lana reasoned that she wouldn't be able to simply wash her hands of the franchise. Just as the awful new Star Wars movies reflect on George Lucas even though he's no longer involved with them, a resurrected, never-ending, money grubbing zombie Matrix franchise would still reflect poorly on the Wachowskis. It may be WB's IP but it was the Wachowskis' creative work.

So Lana hatched a bold plan - make a Matrix movie so bad and so unprofitable that WB will realize it's not worth trying to squeeze any more money out of the franchise and just let it rest in peace. One terrible movie is a black mark on the franchise, but hopefully the true fans will see it for what it is and disregard it, and it won't be nearly as bad as the zombified Matrix-themed MCU cash cow that may have resulted if Resurrections had been even moderately successful. The first act (40 minutes) of Resurrections isn't a massive mise en abyme - it's a not-so-subtle coded message that explains the motivation for the film.

"But look at this place. We did this, together. Now what? Things have changed, the market's tough. I'm sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy." "What?" "They informed me they're going to do it with or without us." "I thought they couldn't do that." "Oh, they can, and they made it clear they'll kill our contract if we don't cooperate."

But what about the previous scene where Lana makes fun of Matrix fans, represented by the game developers, who think they understand the original trilogy by reducing it to trans politics, crypto anarchy, allegory for capitalist exploitation of the working class, or bullet time action sequences? Isn't this fourth-wall-breaking reference to WB just more fan bashing? I don't think it is. The original trilogy may not have been solely about any of those things, but they were all certainly themes, Lana isn't disavowing them. The dialogue concerning the mise en abyme, the original trilogy, is all genuine, I think the dialogue about the sequel is also genuine and meant to convey that we're about to be treated to a movie that Lana didn't really want to make.

The movie proper is one big second act from minute 40 to the end. It's mostly fan service: you wanted fist fights, bullet stopping, hover ships? Well here you go, enjoy it. But there is some subtle messaging in there. Whereas the original trilogy was about human autonomy as a linchpin to some Gödelian ceiling the machines had reached in their existence (as well as trans politics, crypto anarchy, allegory for capitalist exploitation of the working class, and bullet time action sequences ;), Resurrections is about the Blue Pills, the people who want to stay in the Matrix. It's a critique of modern dependence on social media - we're inserting ourselves willingly. The dividing line between the Matrix and the 'real world' is no longer clear, hence the color palettes and character costumes in the two domains are now almost indistinguishable whereas they both served as a clear demarcation in the original trilogy. It's a critique on the modern managerial class who've transitioned from the suit & tie Agent oppressors to the always-casual-Friday, wants-to-be-your-buddy boss who's still the same old oppressor but in a new costume. There is a semblance of a good, meaningful story here, possibly an earlier script that involved people willingly returning to the Matrix en masse. But alas, the purpose of Resurrected wasn't to be good.

What we get instead is lots of bland action sequences, poorly written dialogue, unremarkable effects and soundtrack, poor audio levels, forgettable characters, contrived character resurrections, and a plot that's barely holding it all together. Overall, a pathetically poor execution, as, I can only hope, was intended.

People have mentioned that some of the Wachowskis' other projects since Revolutions have been pretty lackluster (looking at you Jupiter Ascending), but Resurrections is something else. It's not just bad, it's literally a bomb meant to lay the franchise to rest. Honestly, I would give Resurrections a 3 or 4 out of 10, but I feel some obligation to go with the 1. I hope WB receives the message loud and clear - hands off, let it be, "IT IS DONE."

Foundation (2021– )

Finally, Genuine Science Fiction

[9/10 · 23 November 2021]

Finally, a sci-fi series that actually features interesting fictional science concepts, has entertaining drama, and isn't just pure fantasy with spaceships. It's refreshing to see a grand space opera done well for TV. The drama is good, the pacing is good, the action isn't purely gratuitous (for once), the writing is brilliant, the casting is excellent.

I hope Apple completely ignores all the angry white men brigading this series over its casting choices (go back to Parler and collectively suck a lemon ya trolls). The casting is perfect, one of the show's strong points if anything.

It should be immediately obvious from the first episode, even to someone who's never read Asimov's Foundation series, that this show is not going to follow the books closely. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There's nothing I despise more than criticism of an adaptation on the basis of infidelity to source material - a lazy criticism that carries absolutely no weight. The source material is but an inspiration. I hope the showrunners go disco with it, take it any direction they want, they clearly have the inspiration and the skill to craft it well.

If this series continues to be as good as the first season it's going to give the Expanse a run for its money as the best modern sci-fi serial.

Gladiator (2000)

Facelift of 60's Sword-&-Sandal

[5/10 · 17 October 2021]

I've always been confused by this film's popularity, especially among supposed history nerds. It rubs me the wrong way that so many people continue to compare Master & Commander unfavorably against Gladiator when this film is such a wreck and that one is such a masterpiece.

The best thing about this film is the acting. I can't fault anyone involved. But that's where the accolades end. The dialogue is like something out of a comic book - simple and overly dramatic. The adventure elements are cut short to make room for the action, which is mostly just downright silly. The sets and costumes are comic-bookishly silly and anachronistic. The overly dramatic action score works fine for Pirates of the Caribbean, a comedy, but not so much when it's meant to be taken seriously - I honestly think this movie would have been better with less film score.

It's hard to tell what's happening in the opening battle sequence. The Romans (wearing anachronistic armor, using stirrups, shooting fire arrows and employing ballistae and testudo in a field battle) appear to be fighting an army of at least a dozen Germans. The Roman battle lines immediately disintegrate into a classic Hollywood-style mêlée upon contact. The fighting involves extras tapping each other with their weapons in low-fps slow-mo. Sloppy combat between extras usually works fine in the background but not as the focus of each shot.

The dialogue in the opening scenes after the battle is extremely poor. The script that sets up the plot of the whole movie reads just like a comic book. It's even worse than the original from which it was lifted almost wholesale (The Fall of the Roman Empire).

Why are they using film score inspired by 18th century flamenco music to indicate to the audience that Maximus is from 2nd century Spain? The helmets in the colosseum are comically anachronistic and ahistorical.

Commodus is an interesting historical figure. I can't help but feel that Gladiator wasted potential by opting to be nothing more than a sloppy, ahistorical amalgamation of 1960's Rome flicks retailored for modern audiences.

Passengers (I) (2016)

Descent Physics, Terrible Engineering

[6/10 · 17 October 2021]

Here's your choice: spend the rest of your life alone, or force someone else to spend the time with you potentially ruining their life as well but giving yourself some companionship. What do you do?

I would... build a better ship. The problem with this movie isn't the core premise, or the acting, or the sets, or the effects, or even the physics. The problem is that the engineering is so poor it makes the premise feel extremely contrived.

Why does Jim have access to so much personal information about each passenger? He clearly wasn't successful in hacking into any of the ship's restricted systems.

The ship should probably have a semi-isolated power source for the hibernation pods as a backup in case of surges. Surge protectors have existed since the 1940's and they're in a ship moving at 63.3% of the speed of light.

My car tells me when my tire pressure is low. The space ship traveling at 0.63 c doesn't have any way of knowing that the main reactor control computer was struck by debris?

The ship is projecting critical failure (although it doesn't know why...) and doesn't have protocols to wake up the crew?

If the ship is traveling at 0.63 c, and the asteroids shown in the collision sequence take as long as they do to strike the ship, those are some huge asteroids. We're talking planet sized asteroids. I'm guessing this was just done for cinematic effect.

Instead of providing a direct line to the crew, the kiosk in the main deck gives Jim their physical location? Because calling them directly is inappropriate but having crew walk up to the flight deck to discuss in person is just fine.

Are we actually to believe that the company didn't put protocol in place for early hibernation wake-ups because they're just so confident in their advertising that the pods never fail? Literally every other system on the ship is working under the assumption that the crew could wake up at any time.

Why is there only one medical pod (and apparently only one medical bay)? There are 5,258 people on board and the capacity for treating patients is... one at a time.

Why does using an AED (or the other basic resuscitation tools shown) require the presence of a certified medical professional or special access codes?

Sure is lucky that the second person woken by accident happened to be a senior crew member.

Why does the ship announce the gravity assist if the passengers are supposed to be asleep?

Vivarium (2019)

reading the positive reviews doesn't reveal the film's true theme

[2/10 · 29 June 2021]

The positive reviews of Vivarium fall into two categories.

The first camp, representing the clear majority, is convinced that the film is allegorical and meant to depress us with a story about raising an unwanted child in the endlessly bland and inescapable suburban hellscape of the UK. You can forgive people for thinking this since all of the symbolism, the dialogue, the cinematic style, every aspect of the film in fact indicates that it's a criticism of the suburban life cycle. Our heroes are literally trapped amongst endless rows of depressing, identical houses, raising a child they didn't really want and weren't ready for. The mother attempts to care for the child while the father works a meaningless job digging his own grave. Finally their child buries them in the same house and the cycle repeats. You can't blame people for hoping that the movie has some sort of meaning.

Now, our second camp of positive reviewers have seen their share of nature documentaries and they know that the common cuckoo is a brood parasite which allows or forces other bird species to raise their young. These reviewers have seen the light, read the secret meaning between the lines and they're convinced this makes the movie better somehow. All of that obvious suburban symbolism, and indeed the name of the movie itself, was just there to trick you - the movie actually has no meaning, it's just a silly alien thriller and that's what makes it great!

Alas, the movie is neither a worthwhile commentary nor a thrilling sci-fi horror. As an allegory, it fails to be poignant. As a thriller it fails to be thrilling. One B sci-fi concept does not a good movie make.

Monsters (2010)

It's about the drug war, we get it.

[5/10 · 20 June 2021]

Monsters was a low budget attempt to combine the sci-fi political allegory of District 9 with Cloverfield-esque horror. While it fails utterly in the horror department and the plot itself makes very little sense, I think Monsters is a better political allegory than District 9, or at least, I like the underlying message more.

Monsters is a thinly-veiled allegory about the war on drugs at the US-Mexico border. The giant terrestrial cephalopods, which everyone refers to as simply "creatures", variously represent drugs or drug cartels. Their source is the jungles of Latin America and they're pervasive. The film even goes so far as to assert that they're innately harmless, only reacting to the violence directed against them. The militaries of the US and Mexico are never going to succeed in rooting them out of the jungle and no border wall, no matter how absurdly tall, will ever succeed in keeping them out of the US. But they're not the real monsters. In the end, it's those who perpetrate the war on drugs who are shown to be the monsters, it's their actions that cause collateral devestation.

The allegory gets a heavy-handed at times. We see a building with the writing "que son los 'monstruos' NO BOMBING" with little peace symbols in the O's which gives the movie's title away a bit early. We even get a scene with a truck driving around blasting "stop the bombing" and a few scenes later the paramilitary guys explicitly tell us that the cephalopods are just part of nature and it's only the bombing that elicits a violent response from them. There's very little room for ambiguity in this movie.

And, naturally, the plot makes no sense. Our protagonists don't even consider air travel and we see a number of downed jet aircraft, so the implication is that travel by air and sea is too unsafe during "peak season". A further implication is that it's gotten so dangerous that the US no longer maintains foreign embassies. And yet despite this, their original plan was to... take a train straight through the 'infected zone'. Sure... The movie's whole raison d'etre is foiled by the suggestion that they just go south and/or take a connecting flight. I also find it odd that they chose to write the photojournalist working in Latin America as someone who can't speak a word of Spanish.

It's also apparent that the filmmakers have never been to the US-Mexico border as they seem to be under the impression that Mexico is covered in dense jungle and dotted with ancient pyramids all the way up to the border where the terrain transitions abruptly into Texas Gulf Coast prairie. Seriously? The border region is the core subject of the film and they didn't even bother to check what it actually looks like on Google Earth? There are definitely no Mesoamerican pyramids within sight of the border either.

I like the premise of the film but the allegory is overbearing at points and the details of the plot and setting are downright silly. Monsters is arguably an improvement on District 9's concept, at least I enjoyed it more, but it didn't break any new ground and has gone unnoticed as a result.

Ondine (2009)

Simple Male Fantasy

[3/10 · 17 June 2021]

This movie doesn't have much going on beside the classic male fantasy of a beautiful woman falling out of the sky, or being pulled out of the ocean, as the case may be.

Our protagonist doesn't have any sort of hurdle to overcome. His priest buddy even says as much - Syracuse' only problem is coming to grips with his amazing good fortune. The universe provides him with a beautiful woman who gets along great with his daughter, he suddenly starts catching more fish and making more money, his daughter is miraculously cured (in a scene that skips a beat right after the car crash), and to top it off, his ex's boyfriend ends up being the only casualty of the Romanian drug dealers. What a lucky guy...

The cinematography is alright but not great. The filming of the showdown with the drug dealers is just... bizarre. I guess the moral of the story is that Romanian immigrants are only O. K. if they're attractive enough.

Take Shelter (2011)

Misunderstood

[6/10 · 15 June 2021]

I myself misunderstood this movie and rated it harshly in my first review. It's that ending. That ending which when interpreted literally says "congratulations, you've just wasted 2 hours of your life watching an evangelical survivalist fantasy." After hours spent hoping that they wouldn't vindicate Curtis' delusions at the last moment, seeing that scene evokes a visceral reaction.

But mulling it over, I kept coming back to the very last line when Samantha says "OK" with a very peculiar intonation. It's not an OK of remorse as in "OK, you were right", it's not an OK of panic as in "OK, let's get the hell out of here." It's an OK of resignation, of acceptance. Samantha isn't seeing the same storm as Curtis, she's seeing a completely different storm, one that's torn their family apart in a matter of days. She's seeing, and for the first time accepting, the impact that paranoid schizophrenia is having on her husband... and possibly on her daughter. "OK, this is our life now."

That Hannah, the daughter, can also see the storm in the final scene seems, at face value, to support the idea that Curtis is vindicated and the storm is real. But then we remember that Curtis' condition is hereditary and that Hannah has spent an awful lot of screen time staring out the window at rain storms. She also displays some sort of anti-social behavior in one of the earliest scenes in the movie. The horror that Curtis is facing throughout the movie, quickly losing his mind just like his mother, is only half the picture - Samantha is also confronting the reality that her husband and possibly her daughter are afflicted by an incurable mental disorder which is only just manifesting and from which no shelter can be taken.

Other elements of the story don't cohere with the vindication interpretation of the ending. The dog has nothing to do with the storms and yet Curtis gives it away to add evidence of his paranoia. The supporting characters, coworkers, family members, etc. Don't seem to be doing anything immoral or otherwise deserving of the damnation that surely accompanies the literal maelstrom Curtis convinces himself that he's prophesying.

Had the movie opted for a literal vindication ending it would have been utterly ruined in 20 seconds flat. But instead it seems the ending is much more nuanced and actually supports the narrative of the rest of the movie. It came down to a coin toss with that ending, but it seems Take Shelter is an honest depiction of a man suffering from mental illness who goes to great lengths to deny the reality of his situation at significant cost to himself and his family. Far from being grouped with "mystery box" movies like 10 Cloverfield Lane, Take Shelter is more like a better version of Relic that skips the campy horror elements while still delivering a gripping narrative.

Lost (2004–2010)

Lost the Plot

[1/10 · 2 January 2021]

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Lost was nothing more than a capitalization on the success of Cast Away and Survivor. There were other popular serials in the American television landscape at the time, but the choice of 'survivors on a desert island' is too coincidental. Viewed through this lens, the premise of a never-ending serial filled with plot holes and lacking a satisfying conclusion makes a lot more sense. It's just what happens when the ratings and money finally run out on a serialized drama that never had a planned endpoint.

I didn't watch Lost when it was a cultural phenomenon during the Bush years so I didn't have the experience of eagerly hypothesizing about the meaning of all the secret numbers and little clues about the nature of the island. But I know people who did and I know that was basically the whole appeal of it, so it doesn't surprise me how much hate the show got when it ended without explaining... well, basically anything. But honestly, viewers should have seen that one coming. The show-runners were milking this one for all it was worth and had absolutely no plan for tying all the illogical, physics-defying, B-sci-fi tropes together in a satisfying, let alone meaningful, way. Best they could hope for was that people would simply forget all the nonsense they were being fed season after season.

The main problem with this show is that none of the characters actually do anything and none of their arcs are brought to conclusion. And how could they do either when the modus operandi of this show was to go on forever? Sure, we learn a lot about their backstories through flashbacks and we're treated to some fairly contrived romance, but none of the characters undergo any sort of development, transformation, awakening, or really any change at all for. Jack's main personal crisis is his relationship with his father and... it's sort of resolved by fiat when Sawyer tells him about that time he had a brief conversation with him in a bar. Sawyer's main crisis is that he turned into the con-man-murderer that he spent his whole life chasing and... this is apparently resolved between seasons when he settles down with Juliet at the Dharma camp. Kate's personal crisis is running from the law and her own guilt over hurting people she cares about and... this is just never resolved. Hugo's thing is that he thinks he's cursed because of the magic numbers, the same numbers which were being broadcast across the South Pacific (broadcast from purgatory apparently, or maybe Australia is also in purgatory, why not)... and this is also never resolved. John Locke isn't sure if he's just an ordinary guy with limitations like everyone else or if he's the chosen one and... he never finds out because he gets killed and reincarnated as Ahriman. Jin and Sun don't have anything to overcome beyond Jin being such a conservative arshole and... this just sort of happens gradually over the course of his learning English and accepting 'civilized Western attitudes towards women'. Said's main conflict is whether he's just a murderer-torturer or actually a good person underneath and... this isn't resolved as he joins Ahriman in the end, looses all sense of compassion and turns into the Terminator... but then he saves the gang on the submarine so I guess he's good after all? Good thing Ahriman put that C4 on the sub so Said could go to heaven. Bernard and Rose don't do a single thing, they're just glorified Red Shirts.

And that's the just the main problem - there are lots of other problems.

The CGI is terrible. Lord, it is bad. And it's not like they didn't have good CGI in 2004. The "smoke monster" is almost an inside joke - couldn't decide on the plot fast enough so they literally made the monster smoke and mirrors. The set, costumes, location, CGI, and basically all the audio (including the soundtrack) have a very low budget feel. The attractive men always have 5 o'clock-shadow-beard. The attractive women always have layers of makeup and lip-gloss. In the entire first season, Locke is the only one who has the survivor-on-a-desert-island look going for him while the rest of the characters give the impression of actors vacationing in Hawaii.

By the second season, they've realized the show's going to go on for a while so they really start drawing it out. We're treated to the same footage repeated over and over again, episode after episode. Action lasts only a few seconds between flashbacks which no longer advance the plot by revealing the motivations of the main characters but rather serve only to kill time and provide soap-opera-esque character intrigue. The new characters who are introduced are reduced to mundane levels of dialogue lest they reveal too much of the plot (which the writers themselves haven't gotten to yet). The lack of basic communication between characters is astonishingly frustrating and makes it very difficult to enjoy watching the show as the seasons go on.

The abuse of scientific jargon in this series is unreal. Are we supposed to believe that everyone, all the flight 815 survivors, all the Dharma Initiative scientists, everyone who's ever been on the Island is so ignorant that they would describe the magic light under the island as "electromagnetism" simply because it's a science-y sounding word and they don't know any better? Try Google-searching "pocket of electromagnetism" and see how many results you get that aren't related to Lost. Desmond's explanation for how the hatch works makes absolutely no sense. Mr. Faraday says "light scatters differently here" implying that physics as a whole works differently on the island, but that's really no excuse for all the characters to think that it's possible for a radio tower to block communications on walkie-talkies or satellite phones. Purgatory may have alternative physics, but the rules of logic still apply to what the characters are doing and saying.

I'll wrap up with some advice for anyone considering re-watching Lost: Every time you hear a character mention "The Island" in the personified sense, replace it with "The Plot" and the show will make a lot more sense as you watch it. *Character gets blown up by dynamite* "The Plot was done with them." "This is what the Plot wants, it's what the Plot demands." Whenever these characters are talking about the Island, they're really talking about the show itself in a not-so-subtle way. I'm convinced it's another inside joke from the writers.

Since you've read this far, here are some Lost tropes and plot hiccups for your entertainment.

Tropes

1) Character A passes out. Character B shouts "GET THEM SOME WATER!"

2) Character A asks Character B a question which is important to the plot. Character B can't answer because it's time for another flashback.

3) Character A is running at top speed through the jungle. Trips on something. Character B teleports to their location and stares at them ominously.

4) Kate is completely useless. They turn her into a tracker randomly in the middle of the series just so she has something to do in a few episodes even though tracking and general-outdoorsy-stuff was already Locke's job. Aside from that she does absolutely nothing but serve as a love interest for two dudes at the same time.

5) Sawyer is completely useless. All he does for two seasons is horde all the critical supplies everyone needs and yet somehow he's one of the main characters.

6) The fourth wall is broken by making several explicit references to "Red Shirts" and then treating most of the 40+ survivors like Red Shirts.

7) Jack heals everyone even though by season 2 we discover he's wasting his time because injuries heal themselves on Purgatory Island and the only people who ever die were chosen by God to do so.

8) In the middle of his dialogue, Jack turns his head 90 degrees to look at something off in the distance for dramatic effect. Sometimes he does it multiple times before he can get through a single line of dialogue!

9) Character gets beaten within an inch of their life and immediately stands back up to deliver a monologue with not but a spot of blood on their lip.

10) Nothing happens in season 3. Nothing. They spend a lot of time building up to the death of a hobbit but he returns in season 4 anyway.

Plot Hiccups (list is not exhaustive, not even close)

1) The hatch's alarm system is on a timer but the function of the magic button requires manual input. Knowing this, why is everyone so skeptical of Jack's suggestion that it's just a social experiment?

2) Why were the Others (stupid name) so interested in kidnapping children? We'll never know.

3) Why were the Dharma people and the Others at war? We'll never know.

4) Why do pregnant women who conceive on purgatory-island die but women who conceive off the island survive? Maybe the assumption is that women who die before conceiving, and thus end up on purgatory-island, get to be with their unborn children... in purgatory... whereas women who conceive when they're already in purgatory get an instant pass into heaven or sent straight to hell.

5) Why did the Dharma Initiative think it would be a good idea to set up a system that could douse the entire island in lethal chemicals? Or did they only set that up for their own camp?

6) The atomic bomb, which was the subject of a whole season's plot, did nothing. It presumably didn't even exist since the world where flight 815 makes it to Los Angeles is also still purgatory. So I guess the whole time-traveling island thing was just for fun then.

7) The chemistry teacher Red Shirt dies in Hawaii-purgatory and is reborn in Los Angeles-purgatory. Sucks for him.

8) Richard tells everyone that the Island is "hell" and then just one episode later he says Jacob told him what the Island really is (presumably not hell).

Utopia (2020)

For the love of god, stop saying "Utopia"

[4/10 · 2 January 2021]

The word is spoken in every other line of dialogue and I'm sick of hearing it.

The title of the series and the visuals in opening credits reel imply that the plot is going to revolve around major crises facing the human population: climate change, pandemics, hunger, etc. Our lead character, Sam, confirms this with a little speech about these issues in the car on the way to the convention. But by the end of the first episode it's obvious that this is all pretense.

Far from offering an interesting take on any of the crises facing the modern world, the series seems to be based very closely on a comic book - shock value through violence with no meaningful message. I hate the impression that I'm watching animated panels from a comic book, but this is the feeling I get watching two random ginger assassins walk out of a bush and then die in a pointless action sequence.

Too much of the plot is revealed in the first episode when we learn that the mise en abyme comic book is going to serve as the plot for the series. They reveal that John Cusack is Mr. Rabbit way too early. What's the point of setting up Mr. Rabbit as this larger-than-life comic book super villain when you're just going to associate him with John Cusack's face an episode later? I feel like the first episode was written as a hook by completely different writers and then the writers from Resident Evil took over.

Our main character is killed off in the second episode, purely for the shock value, and replaced by her murderer, Jessica Hyde, a thoroughly uninteresting and unsympathetic character whose only virtue is her proclivity towards violence, an ability which, incidentally, completely diffuses any threat posed by John Cusack's hench-hitmen. All these assassins in his employ are set up as the Cousins from Breaking Bad but then Jessica Rabbit effortlessly slaughters them Hanna-style in the next episode. What have we to fear when the arch villain and his goons are so incompetent?

I get the impression that this show has very right-wing writers. It's funny to watch comic book nerds get murdered, right? The violence is stereotypical-sexist. If women need to be killed, their deaths are either especially shocking or "boss fights" - it's like nothing's changed since James Bond movies in the 70's. The frequent news broadcasts used for exposition tell us that the arch-villain head of the pharmaceutical company is dismissing the claims against his company as "right-wing conspiracies" implying that he and his big-pharma company are somehow left wing which completely flies in the face of reality. And most of all, it's guns, knives, and tactical training that define a character's worth in this show.

The show sets itself up as having some sort of deep message. What is it, I wonder? That big-pharma companies are run by a bunch of liberal death-cultists? What a great message to put out there in the middle of a global pandemic. Or maybe the message is not unlike most silly action movies - your value as a person is measured in your ability to kill other people in cool action sequences.