The Bikeriders – a cool rider, but it didn’t floor me

The Bikeriders, like Furiosa, understands the raw power and coolness of a bunch of people revving motorcycles to intimidate enemies. Inspired by real people and events, and based on a book by photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyons, it is also a film which seems to draw heavily from The Wild One (the motorcycle club was formed in part as a response to one of the characters watching the film) and the idea of a rebel without a cause or a care. Johnny (Tom Hardy doing another incredible voice) is the aging family man leader of an outlaw motorcycle club that finds itself going through a rocky transitionary period between 1965 and 1973 as expansion, urban economics, and the effects of the American War in Vietnam reshape the world they live in. Austin Butler is Benny, the handsome, quiet rebel at the center of the film, who wants nothing more in life than to ride motorcycles, hang with his boys, and take on challengers. Jodie Comer’s Kathy carries the film as narrator and primary subject protagonist (where Johnny and Benny, with opaque interiority, become objects). Because she is the central interviewee for the journalist character, most of the film is through her eyes, and that which she did not see illustrates points which reflect her perspective.

Austin Butler has relatively few lines, so we don’t get any overwhelming insights into his personhood beyond what we can see in his actions. Benny is introduced when Kathy shows up the Vandals biker bar hideout so her friend feels safe on a date at a party. Johnny introduces himself, says he’s the head honcho, says he won’t let anything happen to Kathy, dodgily answering “nothing” when she wonders what might have happened otherwise. Benny hardly says a word beyond introducing himself, ends up taking Kathy on a motorcycle ride, wind in her hair, exhilarated, and after partying until the early morning, he brings her home, where her boyfriend angrily and concernedly waits. Benny stands vigil on his motorcycle for upwards of twelve hours, Kathy’s boyfriend leaves, and she marries Benny within the week. This film is about the events that follow, the consequences of her getting wrapped into this life, or being adjacent to it as he’s drawn further in and the Vandals motorcycle club gets twisted up in the forces of history and the easy corruption that grows in an undisciplined organization or organism.

The Bikeriders is a film touched by but not explicitly engaging with structural forces, a valid choice but which provides a narrow scope of perception and expression. Steeped as it is in the homosocial – guys being dudes, dudes rocking, dudes hugging and punching and wrestling and showing skin – it also clings tightly and generously to the homoerotic. One of the main throughlines in the film which you can see from the first trailer is that Kathy and Johnny end up in conflict over Benny – fighting over his soul, romantic love versus love for your bros; the interior conflict for Benny about his path toward the future.

Where it may be most interesting is as a demonstration of contradictions at the heart of a certain era in the past of American fraternal organizations. The grit and grime of this depiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s is notable because it is in contrast to the parallel hippie counter culture of free-love which has become, in the minds of some and the depictions of many, ubiquitous as representative of the historical setting. At the same time, the Vandals jackets and vests are often dirty or have a makeshift quality to them; the fashion of the men is a bit grungy, a bit between comfort, showiness, and utility, somewhere on the stylistic continuum between the polish of a 1950s greaser and a 1970s rocker. The general lack (though not complete absence) of persons of color or explicit queer characters is another storytelling choice which in the past would be unremarkable but is here noteworthy not because it sets the film back but because it expresses the singularity of viewpoint. The world as the Vandals see and experience it is not cloistered but it is separated from conventional retrospective notions of what was happening at the time, same as the characters are separated from conventional mainstream life. When the Vandals go to a local car show and end up in a brawl with another motorcycle club, the camera does show us some diversity in the crowd showing off cars, they’re just not mostly people the protagonists interact with.

Irrespective of that, the fictionalized firsthand account of the transformation of the motorcycle club is interesting because of what it reflects in the wider world. Johnny started the motorcycle club because he was a bit restless in a relatively charmed working-middle class home life. He started a motorcycle racing club and then decided he wanted a motorcycle hanging-out club. He took on castoffs and outsiders from around town (his best friend Brucie, played by Damon Herriman, or Army reject Zipco played by Michael Shannon among them), eventually from as far afield as California (Boyd Holbrook as filthy-toothed mechanic Cal and Normand Reedus as even grosser Funny Sonny). His Vandals were outlaws but perhaps not villains, and then they expanded and things got beyond his ability to control. He keeps trying to foist leadership on the man who wants it least, the one who he thinks the old guys and the new guys would respect, a man so disgusted by how things develop at the club that he eventually disappears. There’s a young man, The Kid (Toby Wallace) who is at first a small character in the film and later a catalyst within it – he and his friends see the Vandals riding through town one day and set out to be like them. They try to gain entry to the club and are rejected when, as a test, The Kid is admitted on condition he abandon his friends, not realizing that turning the back on his boys is the worst thing he could do in front of Johnny. They eventually gain admittance to the Milwaukee club (whose founding proposed by Happy Anderson’s Big Jack was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of what Kathy calls “the golden age”) and the Kid challenges Johnny.

I don’t think The Bikeriders romanticizes outlaw motorcyclists the same way a show like Sons of Anarchy does, for instance. Even the notion of a slightly softer past to contemporary outlaw motorcycle clubs has a realistic twinge of failure, grime, and listlessness to it. At the same time, I wonder about double standards in how I apply this critique to art and media about lawbreakers as opposed to art and media about law enforcers. Twelve years ago on a different blog, I wrote about how Martin Scorsese gets a lot of gruff for making criminals look cool, specifically with respect to The Wolf of Wall Street. My main contention in his defense was that we develop a society which rewards certain kinds of bad behavior. That white college students watch The Wolf of Wall Street and then produce party rap songs called “Jordan Belfort” is not an indictment of Martin Scorsese; if anything, it’s an indictment of American legal and economic systems which make the suffering of countless scam victims seem a worthy price for a yacht or a Lamborghini. It isn’t writer-director Jeff Nichols’s fault that motorcycles are cool or that Danny Lyon did such a great job capturing them looking cool in photographs he and cinematographer Adam Stone would have live-action storyboards to work with.[1] Moreover, what movies like Scorsese’s gang pictures and The Bikeriders do is to show that sometimes things that look, feel, and sound cool lead to or are made of dark and desperate actions and events.

The Bikeriders succeeds in that. Where it fails is a general lack of momentum; the way Comer’s narration is written and performed feels real, but there’s a lack of punch in the storytelling, as if the transition between setting up the characters as documentary subjects and showing what the Vandals turned into is lacking the right lubricant. The inevitable tragedies feel even more inevitable than tragic and sometimes Kathy’s talking so fast in this gossipy recollection that it feels as if she’s just recounting a couple bad weekends. Nonetheless, it isn’t her performance that is lacking (she is really carrying the film) but the narrative and thematic composition which feels like it is missing some propulsion. The film is far from lifeless, but there is little in the way of profundity. There is also an attempted sexual assault which, while it doesn’t approach the level of harrowing of a Heaven’s Gate or Blonde, does effectively strike fear into audience members and convey the club’s lowered standards of behavior.

Kathy’s discussion of the behavior and hygiene of the men of the club and the women adjacent to it is informative of her character as much as of the period. Her perspective isn’t treated as objective, per se, but as the most “normal.” The distinction between the women she likes (Rachel Lee Kolis as Johnny’s wife Betty, Phuong Kubacki as Brucie’s girlfriend Gail) and doesn’t (some unnamed, alluded to other characters) informs the hierarchy of respectability she has internalized even as she embraces the club in its flaunting of society and then rejects what the band turns into.

In a way, The Bikeriders is the story of a guy who had a fun idea to hang out with his friends, dressed it up in the aesthetic of criminality and ended up ceding control to people that wanted bad and worse because that aesthetic required action. If you engage in brawls and burn down bars, you can hardly be surprised if your life ends at the barrel of a gun. And if you can’t make the right man succeed you as leader, the wrong man will, anymore than you can be surprised if the guy who picked you up by looking hot on a motorcycle struggles to walk away from that life until it becomes a matter of life and death.

Final Score: 3/5

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[1] Can’t stress enough how cool motorcycles are. Since Arnold in Terminator, Batman, the Power Rangers, and Grease 2. I haven’t ridden one in more than a decade and I’m, like, itching to take a class and get my license. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to flying.

Tuesday – on Death and Remembrance

Tuesday is a supernatural drama film about death and grief which centers on the experience of a terminally ill girl, Tuesday (played by Lola Petticrew) and her imploding mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora), as they meet Death, who comes in the form of a size-shifting deep-voiced macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene).

The film begins by introducing the audience to the bird who represents death by having it show up in people’s last moments – a younger woman, stabbed near a bus stop, an older woman, expiring on a couch as she watches TV, a man lying in an alley after he’s been mugged – you hear the voices of their thoughts, hurried and panicked and overlapping, the denial, the pain. Next, we meet Tuesday and her nurse Billie (who Zora has in her phone as “Nurse 8” and who is played by Leah Harvey); Tuesday’s life is one of constant pain and loneliness. As she deep-breathes through a panic attack, the bird appears near her, growing in size large enough to do his ritual of passing a wing over to send her beyond this world. She gets him to hesitate, asking to wait for her mother. He assents after she helps him with a panic attack from being overwhelmed by the voices of everyone’s pain and gives the soiled bird a bath. She calls her mom, who is fiddling the day away at coffee shops and on park benches but refuses to answer the phone for Tuesday or Nurse Billie. Tuesday and Death listen to old school hip-hop (he knows all the words to It Was a Good Day), she introduces him to weed (which makes him briefly paranoid), and they flip through pictures of old history books so she can get his opinion (apparently Stalin was a prick and Jesus was very sarcastic). When Zora finally returns home, she eventually does battle with Death, winning after convincing Tuesday she was making peace, ingesting the battered and burned bird, and throwing the world (already off-kilter because Death hasn’t been doing his job all day) into total chaos.

The film follows as Zora and Tuesday relish what little time they have left, as Zora deals with the fact that she has been neglecting her daughter because of the denial of losing her. Her own life has become chaos and she has liquified every small piece of property or material asset in an avoidant self-destructive frenzy to pay bills while she does not work. Eventually, Zora accidentally reveals she’s assumed Death’s powers by consuming him and carries Tuesday on her back while going around England resolving the chaos she had caused to erupt. On a country beach, she gags up the re-formed Death, having a silent confrontation with him and then a teary-eyed confession to Tuesday, who is understandably pissed off. We don’t learn the details of Tuesday’s exact diagnosis, but we know she is in constant pain and that her mother couldn’t let her go because she does not know who she is or what the world is without her. She makes her peace with this but is still a wreck.

Death eventually comes to visit to check on Zora, who has very little in the will to live. Death refuses to take her, communicating to Zora that, while there’s no God in “any human way,” that “the afterlife” is the legacy and memory of the people that have died, and how we honor it. It’s a moral lesson that overlaps with the cosmologies and mythologies that say that we live on as long as someone is keeping us alive in their minds. It is at once a somber and encouraging message. Our life is just as we live it, our afterlife just how we honor those who came to pass.

I found the film very emotionally arresting from the first moments – I was so, so angry with Zora. I do not have any children and I cannot imagine the pain of losing them but I can imagine very easily the pain of feeling like your parents do not want you or wish you were something or somewhere else. Parents don’t have to genuinely feel those things for children to incorrectly infer them, and abandoning your child to the misery of that sort of speculation because you aren’t there to comfort them in their dying moments is revolting. Nonetheless, it felt very human, this pain of not knowing how to deal with a dying child. We don’t learn anything about Tuesday’s father and we don’t get the details of what Zora’s life was like beforehand. We don’t need them; it is sufficient to infer she had some career and that she has not been able to manage it as she slowly watches her daughter’s life trickle away.

If you think too hard about the central metaphor, it can fall apart. If you believe that the bird is physically appearing to everyone who dies, it simply does not make logical sense that it would surprise anyone. If everyone who has ever died surrounded by loved ones had seen the bird, surely they would pass that along. All the people that shot someone in a firing squad, or surgeons that lost someone on an operating table, soldiers involved in acts of mass death, and so on. But that only belatedly occurred to me. Mostly I thought of it as a metaphor for someone wrestling with grief and, moreover, if it’s a supernatural bird born of a bottomless void; I imagine it can appear to whatever small or large amount of people in a crowd as it wishes to. Generally, I thought it would not land before I saw it and, for me, it landed.

Death as a Giant Bird worked well because the lighting, sound design, and camera work in his early appearances helps convey anxiety and fear. It gives the film a sense of drama, yes, but also suspense and nearly horror early on, a sense of dread conveyed. I don’t know every mythological, folkloric, or religious tradition about death’s personifications, but as a bird I tend to think crows, ravens, and vultures. A colorful macaws covered in dirt and grime because of long years of work, who has nearly lost his voice because no one ever calls him to use it (Everyone asks “How will Death feel for me?” but no one ever asks “How’s Death feeling?”) was sweet. The feeling that I got was that the bird acts as an image that is simultaneously comforting and so strange that it affords a sense of wonder as much as fear in those last moments.

I also think that there is a boldness in creating a film with a supernatural construction of death that still ends in an atheistic place. Over 80% of the world’s people have some formal religious identity. Of the less than 15% of people that do not, many still believe you go somewhere when you die. As much as this film has a call to action, it is to honor the memory of those that die.

For my part, over the last nine months, I have not infrequently felt a deep hope that there is something beyond this world. I have not believed in any such thing for about half of my life at this point. But I have seen so many Palestinian children’s corpses held by their mourning parents that I have from time to time hoped beyond hope that there is something more for the many innocents massacred; heaven, reincarnation, whatever. If – as I usually believe and the bird Death says – all we have is this life and how we remember people as their afterlives, we have a solemn duty to make up for the suffering we have allowed or enabled.

The necessity of death is a difficult thing to wrestle with, as is the point of the film. The brevity of our time on Earth is what gives our actions and inaction meaning. Even in accordance with the religious traditions I know something about, what you do here determines what you get there – reincarnation, Nirvana, with Ra or Osiris, Elysium, Valhalla, Heaven, or Hell – all comes from how you live this life.

Tonally, this is a dramatic film with a lot of lightness to it. The comedy that exists is primarily a consequence or expression of Zora’s stubbornness. There is common and macabre humor, moments of sarcasm, moments of intense darkness. Even not having seen all her work, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is one of my favorite actresses, from Seinfeld and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Veep and last year’s You Hurt My Feelings. There are common threads in her performances from Elaine Benes to Selina Meyer and even Valentine Allegra de Fontaine in a couple of Marvel projects. I do not know if I have ever seen her so remarkably sad as in this film. Zora is a difficult but fully realized and empathetic character. This is the first I have seen Lola Petticrew and her conveyance of the sad, resigned, general lonely experience of being a dying young person apparently abandoned by all that once held her dear is touching. She is smart and defiant even in her apparent physical weakness. Leah Harvey, I sort of wish had more to do, but she is effective in her appearances, primarily as a counterpoint to Zora and Tuesday, especially effective while expressing the strange experience of dealing with the shock of a world full of the undead.

The most cinematographically interesting sequence is probably Zora and Tuesday traveling through the world ending life that should have already ended. The synth music alongside it gives it a spacey feeling, as do shots of the stars; the editing here giving a flow of time and space, giving the experience a mystical quality. The central special effect of the bird obviously contributes to the fablelike quality of the film, which I was worried would feel pat and trite but which felt like a marriage of old wisdom and modern experience. The film has an interesting temperament of both the grounded and otherworldly qualities of life and death. While its themes are familiar in some ways, Daina O. Pusić’s feature directorial debut, which they also wrote, is ambitious. I look forward to seeing what Pusić does next.

Final Score: 4/5

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the best Propaganda Film I’ve Seen since Top Gun: Maverick

…or at least Godzilla: Minus One

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the fourth movie in the Bad Boys franchise, the second after Morrocan-Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah helmed the series resurrection with 2020’s Bad Boys for Life.[1] The first two films (1995 and 2003) are staples of the Michael Bay canon, explosive R-rated action comedies starring Will Smith as sharp-dressing, loose cannon playboy cop Detective Mike Lowery and Martin Lawrence as his family man partner, Detective Marcus Burnett (they have since been promoted to Detective Lietuenant). The movies are about how challenging and rewarding it is to be a Miami Police Detective, through the practical effects and flare laden lens of Michael Bay’s (and his cinematographers Howard Atherton’s and Amir Morki’s, and now Adil & Bilall’s cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert’s) cameras, facing absurd exaggerations and personalizations of real-life problems. The title of the films comes from the song used as the theme for the TV show COPS (a reality documentary propaganda series that has been airing unceasingly in this country for 35 years), which Marcus and Mike have claimed as their own theme song. Joe Pantoliano plays Captain Conrad Howard, their exasperated supervisor in each of the first three films, dying in the 2020 movie and reappearing here through pre-recorded videos for a secret investigation into high-ranking government corruption that serves as the protagonists’ main quest. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a competent action comedy, and stands out for that.

Bad Boys for Life had the buoyancy of being a legacy sequel. That is, you could speculate it was pre-invested with goodwill by people that either regarded the past movies fondly (lots of general audience members) or knew those movies were successful and thought they would be an easy bar to clear critically (lots of critics). That film did succeed, as El Arbi and Fallah directed a film which is clearly in aesthetic and thematic continuity with Bay’s movies (he has a cameo though he does not, as with the new Transformers films, serve as an executive producer) while adding their own artistic flare. There is a special camera rig used for some exceptionally cool first-person gunfighting in the third act, and they just generally like to use close shots for comedic effect or intensity in action, though from time to time I also found that action moved too quickly to effectively follow.

Like the last film, Bad Boys: Ride or Die starts with Mike and Marcus speeding in Mike’s Porsche toward an important event. In Bad Boys for Life, it was the birth of Marcus’s grandchild. This time, it is Mike’s wedding. In the last movie, Mike got shot outside a party celebrating Marcus’s grandson; this time, Marcus has a heart attack dancing during Mike’s wedding reception, leading to an early interesting visual sequence where he crashes through water when he hits the solid ground, having a sort of vision that alters his outlook on life, feeling at one with the universe and thinking he is unkillable. Their brotherhood, concepts of patriarchal nuclear and extended family, heteronormative ideas about maturity and reproduction, all resound throughout the film. It is not totally unlike the “family” motif of the Fast & Furious franchise, though better written, performed, and directed.

What separates the Adil & Bilall brand of Bad Boys from the Bay brand is that the jokes aren’t as mean and the depictions aren’t as much crass and paper-thin stereotypes, generally though not without exception. They still have fast car chases littered with explosions, captivating gunfights, and they do a great job of mounting tension and anticipation, creating spiking levels of thrills. Writers Chris Bremner and Will Beal also do a great job of having Mike and Marcus play off one other, creating space for their comedic chemistry. There is something about Lawrence’s delivery that feels like it’s *almost* lacking in the early going, but which produces great naturalistic and fluid moments.

The plot quickly progresses to a point where the late Captain Howard is framed as being connected to “the cartels” and the Bad Boys have to find the real bad guys and clear his name. Their own innocence is suspect because they were Howard’s guys and because Lowery has an illegitimate son that was a cartel hitman, the antagonist from the last film who they have to work with in this one (Guyanese-British actor Jacob Scipio as Armando Aretas). Joe Pantoliano is in this movie at least as much as he was in the last one, and he died in that. Mike and Marcus end up on the run after they’re framed for hatching Armando when they were planning to use him legally for information assisting with the case. Among those chasing them is Howard’s daughter, U.S. Marshal Judy Howard (Rhea Seehorn), among the thin characters that fill out the background.

Ioan Gruffudd, the handsome Welsh actor that played Mr. Fantastic twenty years ago, is district attorney and mayoral candidate Adam Lockwood, who we learn at Mike’s wedding is dating Rita Secada. Secada (Paola Núñez) dated Lowery off-screen sometime between the second and third film, is the former head of Miami’s technologically advanced “AMMO” unit, and succeeded Pantoliano as Captain. Possible romantic tension between Mike and Rita does not really exist here, which feels like a missed opportunity considering the value of their butting heads in the previous film, though perhaps there is value to showing men and women can be friends after their relationships fail.

On the other hand, so much of the character’s presence, and that of the characters she’s related to, is about supercop mythos which fictionally validates – and so psychologically conditions the audience to accept – the huge amounts of money we spend on law enforcement in this country instead of supporting social services which might prevent crime. It’s a movie which believes in social media bounty boards for criminals, designer fashion-wearing, military hardware-carrying drug dealers participating in city-wide chases. There’s no police air support in sight – police must be configured as outgunned and undermanned against the octopus of organized crime. There is no logic within it that withstands any scrutiny; it relies on the premises that criminals are simply born evildoers because it erases poverty and deprivation as the circumstances in which antisocial behaviors broadly or lawbreaking discretely gestate and manifest. All these criminals are gilded, including DJ Khaled returning as Manny the Butcher, reprising a bit part from the previous film.[2] Tiffany Haddish plays the owner of a strip club, a former friend or informant of Mike’s, where her girls are also gangsters.

Vanessa Hudgens’s character, Kelly (AMMO weapons expert) is slightly more developed here, perhaps because there was more room with Charles Melton (Rafe in Bad Boys for Life) gone. Alexander Ludwig returns as Dorn, AMMO’s tech expert, and gets a personal pay-off from a set-up in the last film which makes his character richer through relationship. Eric Dane is the shadowy ex-military ex-DEA villain, James MacGrath. It would have been a bolder, more artistically interesting move to leave some ambiguity through to the end of the film about whether he was really with cartels or working for the federal government to control the cartels, but those are the sorts of decisions I imagine the Defense Department’s script readers don’t go for.

Besides the movie relying on the idea that bloated police budgets are very necessary by having them face off against paramilitary and perpetuating longstanding myths about who controls violence in the drug trade (much like The Firm and Cop Land do for graft), there’s a USMC recruitment ad right in the middle of the film. Reggie (Dennis Greene) was introduced to the series twenty-one years ago and I was surprised to see him return for Bad Boys for Life. We learn he’s a marine, he wears his uniform to his wedding; he’s a soft-spoken character that serves more as scenery than a supporting character, little more than an easter egg for longtime fans enjoying the continuity of family. In Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Reggie has a an epic kitchen showdown in some of the best staged close-quarters action in the movie while wearing a green USMC t-shirt, defending the family home from invaders. He has some minimal advanced notice of the home invasion by MacGrath’s henchmen because Mike and Marcus patch-in to the home security system with Dorn’s help. They serve as enraptured audience as he goes on a well-choreographed killing spree. Once the mission is complete, Reggie salutes the camera they are watching on. It’s a crowd-pleasing, cheer-calling moment. It is a Marine Corps recruitment ad in the middle of the supercop movie. I suppose it could be perceived as the cost of removing the third act turn in each of the last two movies where the cops invade foreign waters (Cuba working with anti-Castro militants in Bad Boys II, Mexico with loose clandestine federal backing in Bad Boys for Life).

There is a sentiment I heard sometime in the last several years that proposes that the propagandistic notions within film and television can be so absurd and outlandish as to almost be not worth mentioning. For instance, once cops are taking on the powers of superheroes they cease to function as cops and are so separate from reality that no one can possibly be reading them as the thing they represent. To put it generously, I think this is misguided. It is unlikely that propaganda can ever get so unmoored from reality that it ceases to function effectively to support its ideological goals just because it is outlandish; it needs more than that to fail. Captain America, for instance, literally serves propaganda purposes within the universe of the films he stars in, as part of the character’s origin being diverted to the USO and later used in classroom PSAs. This character origin turned comedic element underscores rather than undermines the imagery of a star-spangled man fighting aliens and being worthy of a magical, extraterrestrial hammer.

Propaganda that is of such high quality or so successful at engaging its audience that apparently critically-minded people overcome their own acknowledgment of its insidious nature to praise it is still very much propaganda. One might say it is especially successful propaganda, overcoming the apprehensions of people that should know better. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is perhaps the first movie I have seen where I tried to internalize that refutation; it is so over the top that I thought, “Oh, certainly people cannot think this is what cops do or are like.” And perhaps that is the case, but when I saw Rush Hour as a child it still made policing look appealing. And at the end of Bad Boys for Life I imagined police watching these movies must get a “rah-rah” sort of kick out of it just as earnest supporters of the military surely will for Reggie’s righteous rampage.

Corollary to the “people who should know better being done in” aspect is that there are people who just tire of hearing about it. There are people well-informed or aware of the propagandistic trends running through mass culture in our society to convince people of the rationality and righteousness of our status quo who have lost the feeling of novelty in seeing it pointed out because they realized that pointing it out alone doesn’t fix society. I empathize with the exasperation. What they may fail to realize, as many people do when engaging with any piece of art, is that their perspective and experience is not universal. Lots of people do not recognize propaganda because that is the nature of propaganda – to pierce it requires challenging its basic premises. This means questioning the social and political purpose of having so many movies and TV shows which position police as superheroes fighting shadowy, well-financed evildoers that seemingly sprout out of the ground as fully-formed vicious monsters. It is worth considering what the consequences of that are on society, and our responsibility to challenge and beware of it.

After its opening weekend, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is already on the road to sweeping financial success. It is also inextricably tied to the tradition of propagating myths about the necessity and utility of police, regardless of who’s in it and who it’s sold to. Irrespective of its success and its unexamined compromised ethics, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a competent buddy cop action comedy with interesting camera work and fun creative decisions, if a bit cliched in its storytelling. It is also full of callbacks, which can begin to feel tired and uncreative. It pays off a lot that is set up in the last film and may well end up being the centerpiece of a trilogy. Where it succeeds is getting the blood pumping, making the eyes open wide and the jaw perhaps drop. It elicits laughter frequently, leaning less on “we’re old” jokes than its predecessor, and invokes suspense. And I’m pleased to say I’m now familiar enough with Lorne Balfe that I recognized his composition and orchestration before I saw him in the titles; I love his technique. This is a well-made and entertaining film. Still, with the resources marshaled to create a movie like this, we ought to consider if these are the type of heroes we want to see forever. Luckily its R rating means it’s likely some deal of the audience understands that this is a fantasy of policing in no way reflective of their actual goals, methods, or circumstances of operation. There are more questions to be asked and a broader discussion to be had about the uses of violence as spectacle, but we’ll save that for another day to soon come.

Final Score: 3.5/5

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[1] Adil & Bilall, as they are known, were also among the creative team for the Disney+ TV series Ms. Marvel and directed the first two episodes of the FX crime drama Snowfall, created an un-aired pilot for a television adaptation of the crime comic Scalped, were attached to direct the fourth Beverly Hills Cop film, and directed the scrapped Batgirl movie, in addition to three successful features about urban life and the Moroccan diaspora in Belgium (2015 romantic crime film Black, 2018 crime film Gangsta, and 2022 drama Rebel).

[2] U.S. reggaeton artist Nicky Jam portrayed a secondary antagonist in the previous film, and both films feature many hip-hop artist cameos.

Furiosa – A Violent Premonition

It feels cliché to call visionary director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga “a revelation” but there was something revelatory about the experience – a thematically dark, aesthetically bright world that would be hell to live in but is paradise to visit for a couple of hours. Days later, sitting and typing, I am replaying sequences in my head, behind my closed eyelids, feeling like I am back in the cinema, watching Furiosa fail to escape her captors as a child only to later outlive and outwit them as an adult. There is triumph in the film, carried as it is by violence and madness. It is an engaging action film, an exhilarating epic, about the human drives for survival and exploitation, the dialectical relationship between collaboration and competition, and the danger a woman faces in a world run by sadistic, self-serving men.

Furiosa is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, one of two films I have seen three times in theaters, both in 2015, the one of the two whose quality I still stand by. My friend took me and I had a great time, so I took another friend, and we had a great time, so we invited some other people. This was in New Orleans in the sweltering summer of 2015, one which featured tremendous rainstorms and remarkable flooding. I mention all that because the Mad Max movies, especially these last two, are about climate catastrophe and the experiences of humanity in the wake of it. Amid genocide, global conflict, and elections inspiring despondence, the climate is still changing. Mad Max: Fury Road features a lightning sandstorm that I have not been able to get out of my mind since that day at the AMC theater in Harahan which, amid conversations about who destroyed the world and what it used to be like, make plain that the story of the setting is a warning for the present. Furiosa is more specifically character-driven while showcasing that same world. It is one of those projects that accentuates that prequels have value. An easy critique of the form builds on the idea that artists ought to, as Oscar Wilde put it, start the story as close to the end as you can. The story you’re telling is already the good stuff, why go in and backfill past allusions? There are many ways to do this that feel tedious and unsatisfactory, and we are replete with soulless, brainless products in the modern IP-wringing era of the new studio system. But there are some films and shows and books that explain things in a way that makes the original text they reference richer, fuller, and more vibrant by giving the audience a deeper connection to a character. Furiosa is one such film.

Furiosa takes place in post-apocalyptic Australia, in the desert Wasteland. Everywhere we see barbarism, easily recognizable as mankind reverting to baser instincts, using remnants of modern technology to rebuild society along the lines of a pre-Axial age reliant on scavenging 20^th century technology. There are self-important despots, makeshift armies of bandits and scavengers, strongholds built in caves, mountains, factories, and refineries, arbitrary despotic rule and nebulous necrotic social structure enforced by cruelty to subordinates. Since the mid-apocalypse or pre-apocalypse of the first movie, society has been fixated on automobiles and motorcycles, with a prominent place in the films for chase sequences and a prominent space in their stories for gasoline and car parts. The structure of this film feels more like the original Mad Max, where Fury Road had clear similarities with The Road Warrior. Here we have a tale of vengeance born from severing of the protagonist from their family and full of an evil motorcycle gang.

The film begins with Furiosa (Young Furiosa played by Alyla Brown) living in something like a hidden oasis, foraging with another young girl in a forest. They see bandits on motorcycles nearby, field dressing a deer. Furiosa disables one of their motorcycles but is captured – two women (Charlee Fraser as Furiosa’s mom, Mary Jabassa, and Elsa Pataky as Vuvalini general) chase after her, their small village alerted by Furiosa’s whistle. So begins her saga.

The film quickly establishes the nomadic scavenger nature of the people, both Furiosa’s villagers from “a place of abundance” and the bad. Everyone must be adaptable and rely on ingenuity; there are motorcycles affixed with car parts, outfitted so their fuel tanks and tires are easily replaceable. Furiosa’s mother is a crack sniper, dropping foes at great distance and with terrific mastery of short-term combat strategy and close-quarters combat. The stakes of survival, of keeping their home secret and eventually returning to it, are quickly established. Furiosa’s mother sacrifices herself so that Furiosa can return home, but she does not take the chance when she should have. She becomes the prized – and mercifully untouched – trophy of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a warlord with a chariot tied to three motorcycles, leading a tremendous horde of motorcyclists, comprised of gangs like the Mortifiers, led by the Octoboss (Goran Kleut). We see countless acts of psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, as cruelty and vengeance rule the wasteland. Eventually, Dementus meets Immortan Joe (played by Lachy Hulme replacing the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), strikes an uneasy barter, and the plot follows the shifting power dynamics among the major strongholds in the wasteland. Furiosa must avoid Immortan Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones reprising his role from the original) and falls in as a mechanic, hiding her gender and then proving her ability as a driver and shooter alongside Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the war rig for Immortan Joe and his Citadel.

The film is full of the roar of engines, of dust storms real and artificial, and carries with it a decidedly epic storybook quality. It is broken into chapters with enigmatic title cards, and Dementus’s self-tattooed “History Man” (George Shevtsov) serves as occasional narrator in addition to sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the world, providing an informative and poetic description of the history of warfare near the film’s apex, connecting disparate sequences rather than creating a rupture in the story. It alludes to conflicts that have come to pass in the real world and some that only might. Anya-Taylor Joy’s Furiosa is not wordy, but her trademark expressive eyes, her tenacity in her many moments of action and few moments of speech, make her fun to follow. The combined powers of director George Miller, cinematographer Simon Duggan, and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel do much to hone intensity and urgency in the ways action plays out, especially combat. Further, I would say what dialogue there is in the film is tuned a bit tighter than in its predecessor, not that that one was so bad but that it was occasionally clunky in its bluntness. Not that we need a movie to be subtle, especially one such as this, but things felt like they flowed better, with the silly names and jargon taken as seriously as there, amid all their bleak implications.

Nonetheless, there is something scratching at the back of me about this film that cannot go unremarked upon. A small controversy bloomed before its release because of the use of “A.I.” to transpose Anya Taylor-Joy’s face onto Alyla Brown in much of the early-middle parts of the film, combining their faces and then gradually giving way to Anya Taylor-Joy. Setting aside my instinctive blanket condemnation of “A.I.” as a nebulous marketing term for a wide variety of technologies, I did find it odd to see “Metaphysic AI” in the credits. I don’t like that as a direction where art is heading, especially after long strikes preceding contract negotiations for WGA and SAG-AFTRA which noted concern about deployment of so-called artificial intelligence at the expense of entertainment workers, and I don’t think directors get a blanket past on critique or inquiry just based on liking their previous work. I will nonetheless say that special effect was quite effective; I spent much of the film wondering how they used makeup or camera tricks to make ATJ appear to be a younger person. Now we know, in part.

In any case, there is a lot of phenomenal effects work in the film. The chase scenes are great, especially one that involves people flying with propeller fans and parachutes. That was some of the coolest thing I had ever seen. The battle atop the war rig, its very creation… even some computer imagery that looked cheesy in the ads, like Furiosa’s robotic arm, looked great on the big screen. There’s nothing quite like the car-consuming lightning sandstorm from Fury Road, but this one feels even more practical just as its narrative is more personal. This film ends in a way that reminds the audience of that one, snapshots that lead right into it, though some uncertain amount of time has passed between this falling action and epilogue. That’s a difficult needle to thread or line to ride, reminding the audience of why they were drawn to this in the first place without overwhelming them. We get backstory on characters from that film besides the titular one but it never feels hackneyed or shoehorned. The same is true of the lone cameo of the original title character. Somehow it all comes together as its own thing, difficult as that is for prequels to do.

I am glad we still get movies like this, by which I mean big, expressive, experimental action epics. “Blockbuster” is too often applied before a film is even released and has earned the monicker, but for the artistic connotations the term conveys, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga delivers. There are few imitators, even as there may be vaguely adjacent works – Fallout, Twisted Metal, and so forth. Only environmentalist auteur George Miller can provide us with Mad Max. We will probably get no more stories of Furiosa, but this one will be worth revisiting for a long time.

Related: The Making of Distant Futures

Thoughts on the 25th Anniversary of the Release of The Phantom Menace

Every year I am met with more anniversaries that make my head spin. The last good X-Men movie came out a decade ago this month. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones turned twenty years old two years ago. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace makes 25 this weekend and can rent cars without hassle.

It is an imperfect but beloved movie, reassessed by some of its past decriers as the trilogy’s metaphor for American imperialism and the slide from liberalism to fascism becomes ever more cogent, sometimes held in unalloyed regard by those who enjoyed it as children. I am not quite one of those. I have a vivid memory of quitting on Episode III specifically while watching it on DVD on my original X-Box. I remember being embarrassed at the battle droid voices in the midnight screening before that.

The Phantom Menace is one of two Star Wars movies I do not believe I have ever seen in a theater (the other being the 1977 original). But I have seen it several times, and in honor of the 25^th anniversary of its release, I thought I would share some thoughts:

I would have argued in the 2010s Star Wars as a whole and the prequels specifically could have done without the Phantom Menace. Setting aside the racist caricatures and awkward writing and performances in the films, there’s a decade between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, as opposed to the more reasonable three years between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. It felt like an unforced error, starting us so far away from the main action, ending the trilogy with a gap of twenty years still between the trilogies. Maybe you start with Anakin as a Jedi child, and focus the films on his growth that way. Instead, he is part of an ensemble in the first film; Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor) ends up the main protagonist of the trilogy (which is also interesting, especially in the second film where we see how much more interested he is in the adventuring part of being a Jedi than the tutelage part, though he maintains some joy in condescension toward Anakin). Spin-off shows filling gaps notwithstanding, it makes sense that the prequel trilogy is not just charting Anakin’s fall, but Obi-Wan’s life and Sheev Palpatine’s rise to power. Anakin is just a part of the story. Leaving the gap of twenty years is a creative choice that leaves a lot of space for interpretation but overall conveys a sense that there are twenty years of depression and stagnation across the galaxy. Still doesn’t make sense that the Death Star is so close to being finished at the end of Revenge of the Sith and only just starting to be used regularly in A New Hope, but such is life.

The Star Wars prequels are simultaneously an episodic melodrama about government corruption and a criticism of the uncritical worship of characters and stories by fans, wrapped in a shiny CGI-laden toy-selling bow for children. The Phantom Menace is a valuable artistic artifact of its time, beginning the political metaphor that carried through the Prequels and, as an example of both Lucas’s idiosyncratic style and digital mass-audience feature, showing how Hollywood began closing the door on individual acts of expression on large scale while committing further to the blockbuster model.

It’s also a jarring film if your last exposure to Star Wars is 1983’s Return of the Jedi. It is aesthetically several steps away from that film – its imagined science fiction universe much sleeker and more ornate. That’s in part because of different technological priorities in the production, but it’s also a tool for delivering a different perspective. The Star Wars prequels are less about war from the side of the warrior enmeshed in it and more from the side of the politician and the bureaucrat, if not the everyday citizen. The Jedi is reimagined, expanded from warrior monk to warrior monk-space cop, with all the subjective interpretation and application of laws and rules there implied.

My read on the prequels has gradually evolved to see it as George Lucas cutting the legs out from under fans’ hero worship of the Jedi (itself a silly phenomenon considering how often in the EU they were shown to be flawed before and after Luke’s new Jedi order) while creating a space opera for children about the tendency of liberal states to slide into fascism due to corporate capture of the state apparatus.

We learn in the Clone Wars cartoon that all the actual regulatory and enforcement bodies are atrophied and that the Senate hardly even pays the aids that work for it on Coruscant, but even with this first prequel film we see a trend that we’re reminded of in both of its sequels – the government is invested in its own largesse and maintaining ceremony but cannot help people at the margins. The government has overextended itself – the massive body of the Senate holds tens of thousands of representatives who cannot, by personal will or by government structure, facilitate a just society.

Watching The Phantom Menace, we’re introduced to capitol planet Coruscant by following a random spaceship navigating traffic and coming down into the planet’s atmosphere, and as we come to see Darth Maul and a figure who looks like The Emperor (and turns out to be Senator Palpatine, played in either case by Ian McDiarmid) conversant, we get a sense of the massive scale of the planet. There are thousands of levels of people on Coruscant – trillions of people. Small delegations in the legislature represent single planets or whole systems in different sectors of the galaxy, with voting representative delegations for banking clans, trade federations, and mining guilds.

Speaking of Sheev’s rise to power, one thing that really struck me on this most recent watch was the vast scale of the planet of Coruscant; in the second film, it reminds more of Blade Runner, but in The Phantom Menace it feels like Metropolis. It’s so big; the daytime scenes where you see the Senate building evoke tremendous scale. It’s a massive high-rise among high rises, dwarfing the many ships that fly past it.

Zooming in on the Jedi, their arrogance is on full display as they use mind tricks to maneuver every situation, flouting rules and norms as suits them. The casual cruelty inherent to their organization also apparent in the freedom/abduction of Anakin Skywalker. The boy who would become Vader is a slave; the Jedi free him because he is useful. They cannot free his mother without disrupting the order of things on Tattooine – don’t have the inclination to start a slave rebellion, even in the future once the conflict of the story is resolved. That he would hold onto such concerns is considered a sign of his weakness and hotheadedness. But, back to the film at hand, it’s said that he’s too old to begin the training, because of these attachments to his mother, this past he will not be able to forget as he executes his Jedi duties.

The Jedi Temple, which we see much more of in the following films, has its own strange look to it, but what matters there is the characters. There’s the Yoda-like lady Jedi Yaddle, who has no lines, disappears after this movie, and was not replaced with CGI in the remastering like Yoda was. More pressing is Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu, stoic with anger in his eyes, certain of Anakin’s potential but not interested in training him. I wonder, what happened to people the Jedi found out in the galaxy that they did not adopt into their order; shouldn’t they want to prevent just having loose Force users out and about? Potential Sith, as it were…

Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn as a character is a retcon that throws a wrench into Yoda and Obi-Wan’s previous relationship (Obi-Wan had told Luke that Yoda was the Jedi who instructed him). Midichlorians felt like an unnecessary scientific codification for the mystical ubiquity of the Force. More importantly, though, Jinn’s literal interpretation of Shmi Skywalker’s words about Anakin not having a father and the Jedi’s related “Chosen One” prophecy helped set up half of the political inquiry of the Star Wars prequels. It’s canonical that Anakin was made through the Force by Palpatine, instead of something more interesting and human like Shmi having an ill-fated relationship; I suppose this magical conception is preferable to implications of a slave suffering sexual violence in a children’s movie, but you know what else would have been interesting? If the chemistry between Shmi and Qui-Gon was evidence of an old tryst; if Anakin was Qui-Gon’s long lost lovechild and that’s why he was so intent on freeing and training him, underscoring the cruelty (or learned hopelessness) of leaving Shmi to her fate.[1]

Anakin’s arc over the films is fascinating – the Jedi need him and they use him, but they never trust him despite foisting the responsibility of a millennia-old prophecy and command of clone soldiers upon him. My read is that the prophecy was bullshit: in the third film, George Lucas introduces some ambiguity (notwithstanding whatever J.J. Abrams was trying to do in the climax to The Rise of Skywalker) about the prophecy, some doubt by Yoda about how they interpreted it to begin with. Mace Windu only starts to come around to the kid when they go to arrest Palpatine.

It’s obvious to everyone in the Jedi and the government that Anakin is sleeping with (secretly married to) a powerful(?) Senator, but no one broaches the topic and he thinks it’s forbidden, never has anyone he can entrust with his concerns about her dying. The few times he tries, in veiled language, to go to the Council for help, they fail him. “Train yourself to let go of everything that you fear to lose,” says Yoda, not realizing he’s doomed the Jedi Order and the Republic. Anakin’s main father figure never wanted him and has always treated him snidely as if resentful that Qui-Gon Jinn put the kid in his lap. Obi-Wan trained Anakin because he owed Qui-Gon and wanted to honor his memory, he grew to love the man, to be his friend, but in many ways, like he says at the end of the trilogy, he failed Anakin.

One of the clever, silly things they do in The Phantom Menace is have Natalie Portman play Padme, Queen Amidala’s handmaiden and bodyguard (secretly the queen) while Keira Knightley plays Queen Amidala (secretly her handmaiden and bodyguard Sabé). It strikes me watching the film now that the films would have a different narrative and political trajectory if Padme had really been the handmaiden and went on to become a Senator; i.e., if the films were about two young up-and-comers thrust into great power and responsibility.

Anakin (nine years old when fourteen year-old Padme meets him in The Phantom Menace) later marries Padme in a secret wedding at the end of Attack of the Clones. Five years his senior, she confessed her love to him as they were entering an arena to be killed. My read on this is that he was infatuated and she was sure they were about to die.  The flirtation beforehand was like her letting off steam or having fun.

But, back to Phantom Menace. Funny tweets notwithstanding, it’s clear that their initial feelings are platonic. I mean, the nine-year-old might have a crush on the teenager, but I don’t think it goes both ways. I am curious about the idea of an elected queen; George Lucas seemed to want the titles, pomp, and circumstance that came with having a monarchy while telling his story about intergalactic democracy falling into fascism. What’s fascinating here, to me, is how a planet’s society develops in such a fashion that they determine that elected child monarchs are their best hope for just rule and – in the case of Amidala and Naboo – training for that person to become their representative in the Galactic Senate.

Palpatine, who I don’t believe was ever king, orchestrates a nomination to the Supreme Chancellorship from his position as Naboo’s senator, manipulating the Queen and her doppelganger to call for a vote of no-confidence for his predecessor, Valorum. In a blunt bit of storytelling, Valorum’s hand is stayed on an investigation of the Trade Federation’s blockade and invasion by bureaucrats standing alongside him whispering in his ear (likely about the Senate Parliamentarian or some such nonsense). Much like his later promise to Anakin (to teach him the trick to eternal life and resurrection), he does not repay the favor done to him, living his alleged allies (and in this case, his technical superior) twisting in the wind. He’s nominated, but not yet elected, so the Republic proper continues to offer no help to the people of Naboo. Amidala has lost faith in the Republic and returns home, falling into the future-Emperor’s trap. The Jedi Council orders Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan to return with Amidala, and Obi-Wan is trying to impress on Qui-Gon that he doesn’t think the boy should be trained because he’s dangerous. As aforementioned, this fear of Anakin’s potential for danger creates the danger; a real self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fighting between Amidala’s strike team and the battle droids feels somewhat passionate on one side, but inert on most of the other. One problem I had with the films from my younger days and maintain is true is that the war taking place between droids and clones removes a human element about the cost of war. There are other metaphors at play in the use of slave labor, indoctrination, and the connection between the finance industry and the military-industrial complex, though perhaps not smoothly.

I found Gungan exile funnyman Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) generally less annoying on this watch than I have in some of the past. I generally found him amusing. I did find it funny that Qui-Gon’s attempt to use a mind trick on Boss Nass led to him sending them through the planet core – weak-minded enough to be open to persuade, but strong enough to still send them to their apparent deaths. Later Jar Jar is given a command for the sole reason that Nass thinks it will be funny if he dies on the front lines.

Jake Lloyd is fine as young Anakin. I think anyone who harassed him is a real piece of shit; the young lad gave up acting. Now, I don’t feel it was necessary to have a child protagonist for child hands to dig it. I wanted to be Luke as a child and we never see him younger than his late teens. However, in skewing the film younger, Lucas allowed the audience to grow with the characters. If you see The Phantom Menace at ten years old and then Revenge of the Sith at sixteen, you’re going to have a really engaging experience of learning about how storytelling works even if you’re not a kid that writes fan fiction or film reviews or whatever; just the subliminal process of understanding the story on a different level as a child than as an adolescent will be clarifying about your tastes. Anyway, the pod race sound design is fantastic, and it really stresses Anakin’s immense talent as an engineer and a mechanic that, at nine years old, he can build a racer to compete with professionals that travel the galaxy; such a good racing vehicle that, after he stalls out at the starting line, he’s able to come from behind and win the race from last position.[2]

The Duel of the Fates is a fun fight scene; I feel that the original films are still generally superior for emotional impact to those in the prequels, while the prequel films have much better choreography by and large.[3] But, Obi-Wan yelling “No!” as Qui-Gon is felled is a two-way narrative echo: in the real world, it echoes what we had already seen; in the universe of the films, it foreshadows Luke’s later experience seeing Obi-Wan die. In fact, while I don’t care for George Lucas deciding over the course of these films that learning to be a Force Ghost is a special technique you have to learn (I feel like it cheapens the spirituality by making it just a skill besides rendering a bunch of cool stuff more complicated before Disney rendered it noncanonical), Obi-Wan seeing this happen to Qui-Gon and being enraged by it before later giving up his own life peacefully (“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine) is meaningful without Qui-Gon teaching him to be a Force Ghost as a ghost, but it gains a wrinkle with that addition.

In the end, one of Padme Amidala’s security head Captain Quarsh Panaka (Hugh Quarshie) says the Trade Federation can “kiss their trade franchise goodbye,” setting up the plot of the next film. The Trade Federation is a founding member of the Confederation of Independent Systems, the “Separatists” or CIS. They don’t seem to have lost their ability to produce robot soldiers, thanks to the connections they make with the people of Geonosis. But they are eager to escape the control of the Republic. We know little of their inner lives, but they were the first pawns on the board for Sheev, the first moves he made and the central antagonists of this film while he manipulates from the darkness.

The thing that makes the prequels hard for some critical viewers is that they’re children’s films with a lot of adult themes. This is harder for adults than children because children don’t typically decide what is or isn’t appropriate for them. They don’t hear “trade federation” and “illegal blockade” and start worrying about the feasibility of intergalactic trade or asking an accountant or comptroller to start fact-checking the film. All the information they need to figure out if they’re having a good time – and, indeed, all a critic needs to know whether or not it’s a good movie – is take the information as given and apply it to the world as received. Any insights you have about the real world are only useful and applicable so far as they speak to the real world stimuli which George Lucas and his collaborators are responding to in the piece. Any real life insights about trade or politics that fly in the face of the universe are tertiary to the experience; to over-apply it is to at best mistake the metaphor and allegory for one-to-one recreation. Otherwise it’s sophistry and pedantry, isn’t it?

Feudalism is hard for kids to wrap their minds around but if you present them a film with a king, a tax collector, and a peasant, they can follow the story without a ledger or an abacus. They might miss that Palpatine is manipulating Amidala, but they migh tnot. They’re certainly capable of seeing the Jedi are treating Anakin unfairly and that he shouldn’t have had to leave his mother behind. Those things are textual.

I like the prequels more than I did the last time I watched them, and I’m really impressed that George Lucas was so willing to try things. Now we get family-targeted blockbusters on an annual schedule that feel like they have all their edges sanded off and undercut all their interesting choices or ideas. For all the subjective flaws of the Star Wars prequels, and the arguments that can be made over which story ideas could have been better executed, there were at least ideas at work and play here. They may just stand the test of time.[4]

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[1] He even uses the Force to influence the die to make sure it lands on the color representing Anakin when their owner, Watto, won’t let him bet for them both.

[2] I jokingly compared it on Twitter/X to Sergio (“Checo”) Pérez falling into 18^th during the Sakhir Grand Prix in 2020 and coming from behind to win the race. It was a great story on Drive to Survive, winning him a spot at Red Bull as he was pushed out of the Racing Point team that would eventually become Aston Martin. I don’t know who’s Lance Stroll in this picture, but I guess Qui-Gon is Christian Horner.

[3] (of course, there’s a huge step up in the fencing choreography between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back)

[4] Inevitably the Sequels will be reappraised and I’m not much looking forward to it. 7 is a remake of A New Hope, The Last Jedi is the most interesting and divisive so it may just be an unstoppable discourse-generating force for the next decade and a half, and The Rise of Skywalker is terrible but someone enjoyed it so someone will reclaim it as they get older. Because that’s how these things work. Critics and enthusiasts develop tastes within the context of a given childhood and adolescence and then even as their tastes change and grow some of that sticks to them and reoccurs.

Dune Part Two – On adaptation and Formative Space Fantasy

When I was in elementary or middle school, I went to a birthday for a friend of mine from church. He showed me Dune 2000 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert on his PC. It was one of those formative, mind expanding experiences – the introduction to a new genre of videogame, real-time strategy. I would later spend a lot of time playing Red Alert and the original Dune-inspired Command & Conquer. Dune 2000 was my first foray into Frank Herbert’s world; I can still remember sitting in that desk chair, learning about House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and Clan Ordo, learning to get my harvesters out of the spice fields to dodge the sandworm. In middle school, one of my uncles bought me the original Dune trilogy after talking it up to me while driving my brother and I to meet my mom at my aunt’s wedding. I struggled through the first book and then left it dormant until graduate school. I finished it between 2018 and 2019, and Dune Messiah and Children of Dune in 2019. God Emperor of Dune has been sitting on my bookshelf since 2021 or 2022. I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 in 2021, four years after it came out, in anticipation of his directing Dune. I remember being pleased and brimming with anticipation. I remember thinking about the intentional vacancies in the worlds he creates – the vastness and alienation, and the cleverness of that particular legacy sequel. I saw the first part of his Dune series and was absolutely riveted. It came out my birthday weekend and I watched it at home because it was straight to HBO and I was feeling a little wiped out. I wish I saw it on a big screen. I hope some day I still can.

One abiding criticism of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was that it felt like half a movie. Villeneuve had, after all, announced his intention to split the first book into two films. I saw David Lynch’s Dune last year and it put that complaint into a new light for me. That movie’s third act is completely a rush. It *should* have been two movies, is what I thought once I saw it. Now that I’ve seen Dune: Part Two, I almost feel like it could have been three. I suppose that’s why, after all, there’s a SyFy miniseries from the turn of the millennium.

Every generation, people are reintroduced to Dune as a concept. The 1965 novel won the Hugo and Nebula prizes for science fiction novel. In 1984, there was the Lynch movie. In 2000 and 2003, there were the SyFy miniseries. In 2021, 2024, and some near point in the future, we have Villeneuve’s trilogy. People jump to call the story orientalist and a white savior story without considering that there might be any intention or deconstruction there – which isn’t to say it can’t be critiqued for exoticizing the Arab world, but it certainly means people sound silly when the story is very explicitly about the danger of a charismatic leader planning to do evil. There’s something to be critiqued there about how the story overall, in Frank Herbert’s original writing, falls into a flattening of all ideology and an evading of the utility of violence in change or a great many other political limitations of a blanket anti-government ideology. But that’s not typically what I’ve seen. And, no doubt, it gets tedious to hear people repeatedly say “just you wait” about an obvious heel turn, but it should be easy to understand that people start repeating that mantra when the laziest armchair commentators can’t be bothered to engage with a text that explicitly addresses their reflexive critiques. Perhaps that’s neither here nor there, but it feels present.

I mention all this extraneous context because Dune fascinates me, because Dune is easy to love as a huge influence on space opera science fantasy at large, and because when you see a movie at its official opening weekend instead of an advance screening and you’re addicted to social media, your perspective is wrapped up into the context of assessing your experience in comparison to that of others. Or, that’s how it is for me, anyway. I’m continuing to cultivate my taste and, for better or for worse, Film Twitter is a place I find that fun to do.[1]

I really enjoyed Dune Part Two. I found that as a result of it being an adaptation – and one in a decently long line of audiovisual adaptations of the novel – its assessment as a film is inextricably tied to what it changes and what it keeps the same. I find this especially instructive in the long shadow of the conversations last year about historical accuracy in films. Adapting a biography or a true crime/history book are different tasks than adapting a novel, but people still levy critiques along the lines of what they think is noteworthy in history and what is left out in this new form.

Are we harsher with interpretations of existing fiction than interpretations of truth because fiction often has more explicit lines where truth has to be discovered and excavated? Do we give more benefit of the doubt about the corners which need cutting or the artistic license when what you’re working from isn’t art but reality, in all its inherent counterfactual fickleness? If so, I would think it’s because fiction is more knowable, does have specific intents behind it – but, then, it’s also prone to interpretation to begin with, hence the questions.

One problem I have is that there’s a real limit to any generalized conclusion, so how do you even answer those things? Not all people in any given group (even an especially if that group is “film critics’ or “Film Twitter”) agree on the merits of any given film. So, the question of “how do we weigh this?” will always be constrained because “we” isn’t all-encompassing. Yet critical arguments or staking out how we ought to, or how we might.

I do think it’s silly as hell to act as if Villeneuve’s Dune is inherently lesser than Lynch’s as if it is some objective truth and not a matter of taste, because it isn’t as grotesque and stapled-together or because the Guild Navigator isn’t in it. The Guild Navigator isn’t in the first book either. I think it’s critically weak and in bad faith to act as if the main thing a new adaptation of a source text should be compared to is the old adaptations. It makes some sense to me to measure them against one another in quality or value or, more problematically, as which is the more pure adaptation of the source. Either way, it makes way less sense to me to act as if Villeneuve’s Dune is a reimaging of Lynch’s (no one ever mentions John Harrisons two miniseries) rather than a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s work. And Jodorowsky’s is a figment – all potential, all ideas and what ifs, it only exists in the shared imaginary of people that watched a documentary or read a book about his plans and thought “wow, that would have been cool.”

The things people were most vocal about missing from this adaptation of Dune is his younger sister Alia as a galactically precocious child and the Sietch Tabr spice orgy. We only witness Alia as a fetus with whom Lady Jessica converses and a vision of Anya-Taylor Joy; I was fine with this. It felt like a creative choice that fit within the structure of what else was being produced and, again, I didn’t feel a need to contrast it with the other prominent movie version. I also don’t recall the spice orgy in Lynch’s Dune, but I don’t think it would have *hurt* to be in this film except that there’s only so much runtime and that I believe in the vision of the artist as presented.

What I would have liked to see is more of Paul and Jessica’s adaptation to the Sietch life from the cultural-domestic perspective; i.e., Paul becoming responsible for Jamis’s late wife and so forth. But I liked what was there – seeing Jessica seize power, seeing Paul wrestle with it. I also liked a couple things people pointed out online that I only noticed after rewatching Dune or only noticed through these discussions, respectively: (1) Paul’s visions in the first film don’t quite play out exactly as he thought when you get to the second film, in line with what he told the Reverend Mother after the Gom Jabbar test; (2) Paul, relatedly, has visions of a version of his life that never came to pass, a version where it is Jamis rather than Stilgar and Chani guiding him. It isn’t apparent from the film, and it needn’t be, whether this means Stilgar or Chani or both died in this other version of his path, but it’s interesting that he’s drawing from a world he can’t access in his decision making.

Another change I thought was interesting looking back was the place of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Ecologist ingratiated into Fremen culture. I had forgotten that, in the book, there’s initially some confusion for Paul and Jessica about the identity of Liet and Kynes, i.e., they didn’t know that was one and the same person. The obvious change in the first film is that they’ve made Liet-Kynes a woman. But, in the books, Chani is also Liet-Kynes’ daughter. This hasn’t come up in the films and I’m not sure it will; it might not communicate well with her distaste for/distrust of outsiders, which is being underscored with the way Paul seizes power (“THIS PROPHECY IS HOW THEY ENSLAVE US!”) and the way the film ends with her feeling hurt and distrust in her eyes as she leaves.

Listening to the Socialist Shelf podcast discussing the book and the films[2], I was reminded that the book ends with Jessica telling Chani to take heart, because history will remember she and Chani as wives, and people like the Princess Irulan as “mere” concubines. I wonder how these relationships will play out in the next film (I really hope Villeneuve ends up adapting the third book as well, but I’m trying not to hold my breath). In any case, removal of that line, of Jessica’s consolation of Chani amid the political machinations happening around the imperial succession, obviously connects to Chani leaving upset. The balance of power in the story shifts some away from Paul, even as he has power over the known universe: the dynamics of the story have him and his beloved at odds, her feeling like a used tool, a manipulated person, but also therefore as a standalone, possible rogue actor instead of actually being a tool because of her willingness to just go along with things.

This has gotten away from being much of an essay and is more of me rambling. I wanted to touch briefly on the new Dune RTS, which I only briefly tried since it is on Game Pass. There’s a lot of potential for RTS games in adapting this story, but this one makes some crucial mistakes. In order to give the Fremen more agency, it makes them a faction rather than just anonymous allies. In so doing, it gives them the same victory conditions as the Atreides or Harkonnens, which doesn’t make any sense within the story or the world. The Fremen are not interested in serving the Paddishah Emperor of House Corrino and helping his Navigators get spice. They care not for the integrity of the Imperium or the balance of power between the CHOAM and the Great Houses. That’s not their ministry, not their monkeys or their circus. So the game ends up feeling flat. Dia Lacina wrote about these issues at length in the game’s preview stage, but it doesn’t feel like that changed.

My point is that there are a lot of ways to adapt a story or a world. There will always be genre and structural limitations and the limitations of the perspective of the artist or artists involved in the creation of the piece. If you find a version of a story or a world bland or boring, that’s a legitimate criticism, and if you compare it with another version you find more valuable because of its wackiness or because it felt more artistically daring, that’s all good to. I like Raimi’s Spider-Mans more than the MCU films; I like the original Star Wars trilogy more than the prequels and the prequel trilogy more than the sequel trilogy. But, sometimes time, new technology, and a director not being hampered by the studio can make something better – I like De Palma’s Scarface much more than Howard Hawks’s, and I like David Lynch’s Dune, but my preferred Dune film adaptation is written and directed by Denis Villeneuve.

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[1] Everything prior to this point, except most of the paragraph before this one, was written in March. After this, it’s a mixed bag but mostly written in May. I ended up rereading my review after writing this and there’s a little bit of redundancy but I don’t care.

[2] That was the Apple link. Here’s the Spotify one. Listen to their stuff, it’s cool. They’ve had Vincent Bevins and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez on, among other guests.

Hanky Panky – Passion, but not Polish

Hanky Panky is a horror comedy set in a cabin in the woods, with mostly early-2000s TV movie production values, committed performances, absurd writing, and a final product that flits between “good” and “so bad it’s good” without ever settling into being boringly atrocious. This correlates with lighting and staging choices that make it feeling uneven and like it could have used another coat, but there is something admirable in the passion communicated by its amateurish qualities. I certainly laughed a lot, which is the main thing you want out of a comedy.

The stage is set when a couple’s romantic winter getaway turns into a friends-and-family affair. Sam (Jacob Demonte-Finn, with a talking handkerchief named Woody voiced by Toby Bryan) is already staying at the cabin when Diane (the cheerful and welcoming hippie played by Ashley Holliday Tavares) appears, soon thereafter finding it was supposed to be a couple’s getaway for Carla (Christina Laskay) and Cliff (Anthony Rutowicz), the former of whom is much more bothered than the latter. Her plan to ignore him while drinking is a bit upset, where his plans to get drunk and fish can go right along. Their marriage is in an acerbic place, and their friend Rebecca (co-director and production designer Linsdsay Haun) sought to bring them together with some friends, including Cliff’s brother Dr. Crane (writer and co-director Nick Roth) and his wife Lilith (Azure Parsons) who I wasn’t sure actually existed until her shocking and funny reveal. Chipper-and-odd neighbor Kelly (Clare Grant) shows up with a bunch of desserts and stays a spell. Toby Bryan, who led special effects on the movie, plays Rebecca’s brother Norm, with whom she has a weird relationship tied to a religion that’s initially only alluded to. We also see him fully frontally naked; it’s such an odd performance and I mean that in the best way. Awkward dinner conversation has Sam win over both Diane and Dr. Crane with his expertise in fabrics and clothier trades, while Carla broods.

Before long, there’s chaos, death, and Cliff and Diane on a psychic retreat where they meet an evil hat played by Seth Green. I don’t want to give it all away because, when I sat to down to write I was feeling uneven but now I just feel like this is a film you should experience as quickly as you can. It’s so bizarre, but clearly have a level of craft to it. It’s not especially sophisticated, but it’s nice when a group of people film a short and then come back together a decade later to make the feature-length version.

If I had to stretch, I’d say that Hanky Panky is a movie about the expectations we put on others and the harsh ways we can shape our perspectives, using judgment to create hierarchies of in- and out-groups, as well as how things like tangential shared passion or the pure guiding light of romantic attraction can build a bridge over the gaping metaphorical chasm of distance that can be ethnicity, religious background, or the extreme social awkwardness of a dinner party that seems accidental but was actually assembled by incestual alien-worshipping cultists. It’s a weird movie is what I’m saying in my mixed metaphors here. The main morals, in the few moments where the film is interested in those things, might be not to judge people and to be open to things, to care about people and let them care about you, and also to trust your gut. I don’t know, I really wouldn’t say this is a film concerned with a particular message besides “it’s fun to make movies with your friends” and “it’s good to get a little weird with it.”

Hanky Panky’s got a real Adult Swim, high-at-two-AM vibe, which is different from the initial Coen Brothers-adjacent vibe its opening scene gave me, with a man running through the snow and being murdered. Granted, I notice as you will that the actors’ names all have something like “demon” or “ghoul” interpolated into their name to let you know what kind of film you’re watching. The movie takes some odd turns, but it feels more like a throwback than something avant-garde. It’s a charming picture whose most structurally sinful scene might be a fight between inanimate objects on visible wires. That bugs me, mostly because I can’t tell if it was a matter of leaning into the rough edges or simply not caring to sand them down. Still, there are far too many untextured movies at our fingertips at all times; too few that look like what you and your friends would do with enough talent and effort.

Final Score – 3/5

Hanky Panky is available to purchase on Amazon Prime as of April 19.

Monkey Man, or, Dev Patel’s Baadasssss song

“Oh, Dev’s got the juice,” is what I kept saying to myself through the first half of the movie, what I communicated to my friends after watching the film about the action directing chops of director, star, and co-writer Dev Patel. Monkey Man is a movie you feel as you’re watching. You brim with hope for the hero and anticipation for the downfall of his enemies. This, to me, is what art is for. Does it make you feel? Does it make you think? Either is good, both are better. Does it entice you to laugh like a psychopath at the absurd, brutal, or ornate set-up and pay off-of a vicious, righteous kill? The best action movies do, Monkey Man does.

This multilingual revenge film is Dev Patel’s directorial debut, hard-hitting action set against the backdrop of criticizing Hindu Nationalism as a violent exclusionary concept and a mode of using religious identity to cover economic and environmental exploitation. Our protagonist, “Kid,” or “Monkey Man,” adopts the name “Bobby” from the bleach cleaner he uses in his kitchen job, on a revenge mission to kill police chief Rana Singh (Sikander Kher), a fascist stooge that assisted a religious leader, Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), and his chosen politician clear people from land. The film begins with a young Bobby (Jatin Malik) in his forest home listening to his mother tell the story of Hanuman, a Hindu ape deity and hero, a story – and the circumstances of his hearing it – which he recalls throughout the film.

We next see him as an amateur bareknuckle brawler who performs in a monkey mask, usually not better than second-best. The fight promotion is governed by a white South African named Tiger (Sharlto Copley) who maintains a huge gambling racket and in a manner seems to exemplify transnational colonial legacies. He addresses the crowd and says that whatever god they pray to they all (he included) worship money. Kid sleeps on a crowded floor with dozens of other men in a house in the slums, using his connections to get information about a woman that manages an establishment Rana frequents (Ashwini Kalsekar as Queenie), arranges to have her purse stolen and then transported across town, kilometers away from her. The camera work and editing in this sequence is especially dynamic, following motorcycles and scooters through crowded streets, children running over and under objects and through buildings, and so on. Much like the camera’s close eye on the bareknuckle kickboxing-and-grappling, the cheering crowds, and the juxtaposition between the slums and the urban centers of concentrated wealth they butt up against, this sequence paints a picture of deprivation, desperation, and ingenuity. Kid returns Queenie’s purse to her at her establishment in exchange for work in the classy brothel’s kitchen.

Being a good worker, Kid moves from the kitchen to doing bottle service, becoming friendly with Alphonso (Pitobash), meeting sex worker Neela (Adithi Kalkunte, who maybe has too few lines), and becoming accustomed to madame Queenie’s calculated capitalistic cruelty. Patel, cinematographer Sharone Meir, and the editing team use montage to show the character’s immersion into the world he is infiltrating, as well as training a dog he meets in the back alley to carry his black market-purchased revolver through a hole in the fence so Kid can avoid metal detectors. He spikes Rana’s coke in the top floor night club and confronts him in the bathroom. You think, wow, the showdown comes so early, and then things spiral further. A savage bathroom fight worthy of a Mission: Impossible film followed by a police chase on rooftops, through streets, and Kid incidentally fighting a machete-wielding pimp in a brothel, amid several more brutal run-ins with police along the same sequence. He’s shot off the rooftop, falls into the grossest water, and is nursed back to health at a hijra temple, where a community of third gender people is led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma).

In this first half of the film, at bars we see on TV the guru Baba Shakti speak in interviews of his humility and how he isn’t interested in politics, just helping people. Meanwhile, we hear offhandedly that there are concerns about the labor conditions of the factories where his branded health drinks are made, and we see directly that he ordered Rana to destroy Kid’s village. We also see news footage violence in the street done by members of the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement, attacking Muslims (and possibly Christians) and transgender people. These ideas are never developed in the way they might be in a political thriller or political-legal drama. The film is not, for instance, heavily or specifically interested in the recruitment and development strategies of the paramilitaries. (Though, I will say, I am generally in favor of focusing most of your ire on institutions like the police and holy men using religion as cover for their self-enrichment if you want a shorthand for expressing these issues.)

Nonetheless, what briefly seem like asides play minor roles in informing characters (Alphonso jokes that the kitchen manager doesn’t like him because of the “Muslim-Christian” thing, as opposed to him trying to take guys off the line to buy or sell drugs) or end up as set ups for major payoffs – hearing about and seeing transgender people being attacked by fascist mobs on the television leads to meeting the hijra who nurse Kid back to health; this in turn leads to Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man training with them, which makes him a more effective fighter; he uses their money to bet on himself through a proxy and returns their money many times over with a note reminding them of their own warrior heritage, so when he’s outnumbered in the final stages of his showdown with corrupt police and criminal goons, the hijra arrive as his allies. It’s smoothly and elegantly, but never boringly, done. At the hijra temple, renowned Indian musician Zakir Hussain plays the community table maestro who tells stories with his music, and helps Kid cultivate his striking combinations. It’s so cool. We get insights into individuals and social structures, and it is moreover artistically engaging. It is a combination of classic martial arts/action movie components alongside traumatic flashbacks, psychedelic visions that got me back on board when I worried we were losing momentum, and heartfelt conversations about humanity and spirituality. All thisall looks and sounds gorgeous.

The blood-splattering brutality is intense when it’s on, but also stops short of feeling extraneous. There’s nothing wrong with exploitation cinema or gratuitous gore from time to time (or all the time if that’s your bag), but here it mostly feels like sensationalized realism. I saw it opening weekend, but this review is late enough now that I can tell you it prominently features its protagonist training with transgender women to beat up corrupt cops. I’d have thought very highly of the film regardless, but that’s the sort of thing you post online as a “what more do you need?” recommendation. What you need is an exceptional execution of such a tantalizing promise, and Monkey Man delivers. Monkey Man is among the most entertaining films I’ve seen this year, a martial arts film which maintains a sometimes-grim seriousness while also effectively deploying humor.

Monkey Man is similar to Extraction in eyeing political corruption in South Asia, but feels more insightful and less exoticizing. The different circumstances of the protagonist (an Indian man moving through stratified space rather than an Australian mercenary dropping in for a rescue mission that goes wrong) changes the perspective of the camera and the audience. The wealth concentration and disparity it showcases reminds me of where I live and what I’ve seen in other American cities, the stark reality of segregated wealth, the blatant confrontation with the uneven distribution of the benefits and costs of capitalism. It made me think of the ways the present world political-economic system distributes risk and gain but also how the increased concentration we associate with the developing world is where we’re headed if political will doesn’t arise in this country to shift the direction of our politics. Maybe it is inevitable…

Monkey Man also made me think, as I often do, about how religion and seeking a connection with nature, with your fellow humans, and with a concept of the divine, can manifest in negative and positive ways in the world. Prevalent though it is, the anti-Muslim discrimination of the Amero-European West is not the only stripe of that sort of religious chauvinism. As long as organized religion has existed, it has had political ramifications and some forms of majoritarian tendencies. As cruel as that is, there is something beautiful about the fact that there has likely as long been resistance, violent and otherwise, as the excluded people whom the majority (or the ruling minority within it) try to paint out of the picture instead demand recognition and respect.

There might be many lessons to learn from how Monkey Man deals with politics – in religion, in physical space and wealth, in institutional corruption and intersections between vice, police, military, religion, and legislation. There might be a version of the film that deals with these problems in a more meticulous way. But this version is more than acceptable. The prime minister (whose name is “Joshi” but who does not appear in the IMDb or Wikipedia cast lists) is spared at the final fight, perhaps a nod to avoid censorship in India (the flags in rally scenes had their colors changed from the orange affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary to a crimson closer to what’s used by the communist parties in India). Monkey Man wants the guru after he’s dealt with the police chief, maybe an artistic veneer to commentate on a problem without being accused of encouraging violence against a head of state. I don’t know. I just know this movie is a tremendously fun time, a real badass flick that also made me think.

Final Score: 4/5

Alex Garland’s pretty and pathetic Civil War

Civil War is a movie I was not sure was capable of disappointing me because I accepted the premise expressed by the marketing demonstrated a low level of political sophistication in its inquiry. I found the movie visually striking at times but, in the end, it is simply afraid or incapable of making a statement more profound than “war makes monsters of us all.” All sides are bad, existing in a vacuum and causing destruction amid existing disorder; the existing power structure and any responses to its mercilessness are wrong. This is one in a long line of movies that think being cynical is the same thing as being wise, but lacks the rhetorical flourishes to take its faux-wisdom to the heights of spectacular entertainment that might preclude an unsympathetic reading. There are lots of movies with bad politics that are still fun to watch. This is a movie that wants you to feel good about being a patronizing centrist – it is the politics of amoral moralism; thinking you’re more righteous than rabble you won’t lower yourself to speak to.

The terrific cinematography and still photography creates a certain bleak beauty which has some charm to it. For this, Rob Hardy is to be lauded. Eventually, though, it feels like one of the lower-tier of Euphoria episodes – all style, no substance. Alongside that, the sound effects work help immerse the audience in Garland’s idea of the experience of being a conflict photographer. Nevertheless, the musical choices which work at some points to create dissonance and in others to reify theme, combine to create a wall of sound between the viewer and the characters, undercutting that intended immersion. It works alongside the pedestrian-at-best dialogue and thin characterization to consistently undermine solid performances, sapping them of their ability to evoke emotion.

But let’s take it back to the beginning, and what it is you are being immersed in and where your emotions are prodded but not aroused. Civil War begins with the audience meeting the president (Nick Offerman) as he prepares himself to give a speech. Then we see professional conflict journalists, photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and writer Joel (Wagner Moura), showing up to a protest in what is revealed to be NYC. Amateur photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) is shooting pictures. A police officer hits her with a baton while pushing angry, presumably thirsty, people away from a water truck. Anyway, Lee gives Jessie her reflective vest, then hides her behind a police car while a young woman holding an American flag detonates a suicide bomb while running toward the water truck. We never learn her aims or her opponents, she just represents senseless violence in the wake of collapse.

Jessie seeks Lee out at the hotel all the journalists are staying, then she and veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) hitch a ride with Lee and Joel, who are headed to D.C. to profile the embattled president. Along the way they find militiamen, soldiers, tragedy, and trauma. The audience gets to see what the U.S. might look like if it splintered into factions killing each other over… well, the movie doesn’t say what exactly, but presumably the distribution and administration of resources, since that’s what politics and war tend to be about. There is something engaging there, especially in the scene-setting shots of the early running and the display of the final showdown which comes about through a twist of escalation.

Civil War rests on an obvious setup – the United States is at war with itself for the second time, this time with twice as many factions. The factions, which you may recognize from the map used in marketing, include the Western Forces of California and Texas, the Florida Alliance stretching from Oklahoma to Tennessee in its northern section and from Louisiana to Florida in its southern, the New People’s Army stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Minnesota, and a chunk of loyalist states covering most of the rest of the country. People responded to this map with incredulity, but we’re all capable of suspending disbelief for a film.

Problematically, and to emphasize that this is a story about how scary and confusing war is, the impetus for the war and the conditions that led to multiple concurrent successions are not explored. While people who have lived and have never lived in California or Texas can be quick to point out their differences, it’s possible that something might unite them against the federal government; Georgia might balk to being part of “Florida,” but DeSantis and Kemp have plenty in common; and so on. The issue is that director Alex Garland doesn’t care to say what the table stakes are – is this a taxation issue, a border issue? It doesn’t matter for the story he’s telling.

Maoists taking over the Pacific Northwest, Mountain West, and Upper Midwest is arguably less believable considering the prevalence of rightwing militias in those spaces, but it’s conceptually interesting. This concept is not explored, though, it’s just a fun fact to help you form insinuations or stress the intensity of the situation. All we know is that they’re referred to as “Portland Maoists,” not what that moniker entails. “New People’s Army” isn’t even in the movie, it’s just in the advertising.

What is easily waved away as a plot or lore problem for the disinterested or open-minded viewer becomes a problem for basic storytelling and character motivation. Journalists are never neutral observers, as often as people within and without journalism confuse objectivity and neutrality. But these journalists don’t have a perspective except that they think the president is bad, as expressed through sarcastic interview prep done during their car ride that informs the audience as to what he’s been up to. Resource issues are alluded to, but it is unclear if they are a cause or effect – we know the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American dollar, that militia men in Western Pennsylvania are stringing up looters, that Americans are dropping bombs against other Americans in a presumably non-racially-motivated fashion, and that some men with .[1] Garland invites the audience to read what you want into why this is happening, what matters is *that* it is happening, as expressed by some soldiers engaged in a sniper duel later in the movie (“No one’s giving us orders. Someone’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill them.”). I find this unsatisfying and lazy, if not cowardly. The only allusion to material politics is that Jesse Plemons’s militia character has a hierarchy of what constitutes a real American, and therefore human deserving of life. But we don’t know any affiliation of theirs, so it doesn’t tell us anything about the world besides that the racists who currently have guns will still have guns in this hypothetical future. Wow, what a shock!

Civil War works to depict journalists simultaneously as callous and disinterested as well as brave truthtellers. They’re all cynicism and hardness wrapped up with idealism and ambition. If Garland has a bone to pick with journalists, this is again something one can permit for the purpose of a film, putting aside one’s own feelings. Artists should have perspectives and it is valuable if they are willing to take controversial stances because it allows people to test their own values against those stances, whatever the level of depth or consideration with which they are presented. I am also permitted to balk at American journalists being blasé about a civil war while simultaneously perplexed and disappointed that other people are trying to exist outside of it. This is a film that tut-tuts at actors and bystanders alike; it is an incoherent blanket condemnation of conflict.

Artists love to hide behind not wanting to be didactic, because it is a freedom to claim an absence of intention with their creation. But all movies have messages, even and especially those avoiding hard stances. Civil War isn’t a movie that’s trying to be about nothing, it’s a movie that’s trying to separate causes from effects while stressing how terrible the effects are. I did not reasonably expect that the president would be transparently coded as one or another American politician – it’s easy for liberals to project Trump onto him and for conservatives to project Biden. Such is the nature of the general consensus around things like the FBI and term limits that, absent the context of impetus, working to disband one and repeal the other doesn’t inform anything.

The stark and beautiful imagery, in the end, feels like it is in service to nothing. Moments of profound loss end up reminding me of the atrocious “He Gets Us” commercials because of the sound separating us from the characters. I feel especially bad for Kirsten Dunst and Stephen McKinley Henderson, who try to convey much while given little.

The only real character arc is unevenly executed – Jessie gets used to the circumstances of the job she is called to do and acts in a way where her contradictory values meet at an obvious climax. A story does not require a stereotypical hero’s journey, but it requires committed execution. The film has an unceremonious and almost abrupt end that creates a final note of dark comedy and ironic triumph. I don’t need ceremony, but I do need you to say something if you want me to think you are profound. Civil War is such a condescending, patronizing, marble mouthed movie that drools the marbles out to ask in the end “Well, what did you learn?” and expect a sort of “Really makes you think” response. If this is Garland’s last film, instead I say, “Good riddance.”

Score: 1.5/5 or 3/10

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[1] It’s happened before, but when I think of America bombing Americans I mostly think of MOVE in Philadelphia and the Tulsa Massacre.

Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters

Wicked Little Letters is a solid, frequently humorous, occasionally touching affair focused on the nebulously strict, religious-inspired patriarchal order of the interwar period in a seaside town in England. The film stars Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman as Rose Gooding and Edith Swan, a pair of women of opposite manners and juxtaposed social standing navigating the legal fallout of a short-lived friendship. Well-mannered devout Christian spinster Edith is among a rash of Littlehampton townsfolk getting abusive and offensive letters of unknown origin. Rose, an Irish immigrant who came to England after her husband died in the first World War, becomes the scapegoat for the criminal scandal because of her inauspicious reputation.

What did Rose do to earn this reputation? She’s from Ireland and is of less than exquisite manners. She’s unmarried and cohabitating with Bill (Malachi Kirby), with whom she raises her daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir). She is kind and friendly, but she isn’t nice and she doesn’t take people’s shit, which is just not the order of the day or the expectations of the environment. Rose goes to bars and sings and dances, and her short-lived friendship with Edith imploded after she refused to put up with chauvinistic condescension and insult by Edith’s father Edward (Timothy Spall) and his friends. So, Rose is arrested for the film’s titular letters based on lazy suspicion while Edith becomes a bit of a local celebrity because of her upstanding reputation. Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss (played by Anjana Vasan) is uncertain she’s done it but gets little help or attention from Constable Papperwick (Hugh Skinner) and Chief Constable Spedding (Paul Chahidi). Edith and Rose’s mutual friends Ann (Joanna Scanlan) and Mabel (Eileen Atkins) bail Rose out, then Gladys’s investigation leads her to work with the members of Edith’s Christian Women’s whist game to find the real culprit.

At the same time, we are reminded frequently of Edith’s strange place in life – her father sent away a man she might have married, and he maintains an archaic-feeling sense of propriety within his home, his honor tied to the prim and upright behavior of the only of his children not to have moved away. Edith and her mother, Victoria (Gemma Jones), are completely subject to his whims. There is an unspoken threat of violence, the domineering air of a sniveling and unhappy man thick enough to coat the walls of his home. In one moment of anger, he quakes about being the head of house and the captain of the ship, as if his life outside his home is a constant reminder of his internal inadequateness. How odd that his insecurity creates problems for the rest of the seaside hamlet. His cloistering seems especially intense for Edith, whose suppressed emotion bubbles out, it is revealed, into the cruel and silly-sounding letters she has sent all over town. Edith’s mother receives a letter so shocking she dies of a heart attack. Signing the witness form, Edith accidentally reveals to Moss that her handwriting is the same as that within the letters.

Moss gets kicked off the case that has become a national sensation because her boss wants a clean and quiet resolution that doesn’t involve much thinking. She and Ann investigate Edith, giving Rose’s defense attorney evidence to fluster Edith at the trial. In this series of courtroom scenes, the character of the respective women is almost more important than any evidence. Edith is purported to be unable to even read aloud the wicked little letters because she is so devoutly Christian and morally upstanding. Meanwhile, the prosecuting attorney discovered that Rose was never married and that Nancy was born out of wedlock, creating a wedge in Rose’s home life. Her daughter is upset because she feels her own reputation may have been harmed and her mother is of low standing; Bill is upset because she didn’t trust them. In the end, Moss, Ann, Mabel, and Lolly Adefope’s Kate – who comes around during the trial – spring a trap for Edith, securing Rose’s freedom.

One thing I like about the movie is that it does not call itself “based on a true story” exactly, rather beginning with a note that “This is more true than you’d think,” therefore lowering the expectations of strict adaptation of history. The changes from what really happened are therefore less offensive, though I remain mixed in my feelings about colorblind casting of historical characters. In a play it makes sense to me, but it creates a layer of unreality, especially when part of the story focuses on real bigotries and oppression (in this film, mainly sexism with some allusions to class) while waving away others that were as prevalent at the time. For instance, the presiding judge in Rose’s case is a black man in the film, as is her boyfriend; in real life, the first black British judge wasn’t appointed until 1962. The real life Gladys Moss was the first female police officer in Sussex in 1919, but the UK didn’t get their first Asian female officer, Karpal Kaur Sandhu, until 1971. Though I don’t know for sure, I can’t help but wonder if there is some measure of exculpating the audience as well as the society depicted in the film by bending reality around contemporary progressive mores. However, I do not think it is as cynical as when big budget pictures use tertiary inclusivity as part of their marketing.

This feels a more personal film, and arguably a more important one considering it’s dealing with historical facts and figures. But, maybe less self-important? The score and the sound cues allow for a mixture of dramatic and silly moments. The performances lend humanity to the characters even though much of their lives and interiority is not revealed to us. The resolution is triumphant but humble enough I didn’t roll my eyes.

Wicked Little Letters movie is a great reminder of how much the world has changed. Libel laws are a lot stricter in the UK than they are in the U.S., but on the internet anyway you can call people all manner of things without facing criminal charges. It is the case, though, that, depending on an individual forum board, Discord server, or social media site’s moderation policies, you might get pushed off the site; and if what you say is the right kind egregious and caught by the wrong people, your job might be on the line. The biggest system shock and compelling plot component exists in the reminders of how, as corrupt and inefficient as police are today, as broken as our judicial systems are, and as rampant and accepted as casual male chauvinism and misogyny remain, it used to be – systematically, if not ubiquitously – worse. At any rate, that is some of what the film is arguing. Wicked Little Letters fits neatly between See How They Run and The Banshees of Inisherin in tone, substance, the broad structure that determines genre, maybe even quality. I’m not sure whether it deserves to be lauded, but it deserves to be seen.

Final Score – 3/5