Tag Archives: sci-fi

Captain America: Brave New World

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The bad thing about the post-Endgame MCU is that the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you need to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier[1] to understand where this new Isaiah supersoldier character came from or why he should matter. On the other hand, that means you will have seen Sam Wilson spend six episodes coming to grips with whether Steve Rogers made the right choice about if he should even have a successor, nevermind if it should have been the Falcon. It’s not that I object to people having more than one crisis of confidence. But if you’re going to do it in the long form exploration of the character first, then it isn’t worth wasting three minutes on a slimmed down conversation covering the same beats during the movie second. At the least, reverse the order so it’s not a recap, it’s an expansion! Either way, don’t pretend like you must cover this ground again in case I didn’t see the TV show you already made it mandatory for me to have watched to understand different ground you’re covering.

But honestly, that was the only thing about the movie that rang hollow. Brave New World is a solidly middle of the road MCU movie, which makes it noticeably above average for what they’ve released in the past six years. The deal is, there’s an enormous statue made out of a new thing that we’ve never heard of before[2] called adamantium, which is kind of a big deal. Might even be better than Wakandan vibranium, once people figure out all the applications. So once general, then later Secretary of Defense, and most recently President Ross[3] is trying to broker a treaty with several other nations to freely share “Celestial Island” and the adamantium, instead of fighting wars over it.

…unless of course he’s the same dick he has always been, and has a whole other agenda. That, ultimately, is the pivot on which the entire movie turns. That, and whether Sam can unravel the truth in time to save his cool elderly mentor and/or the world.

I think I liked it because it was good, but I will admit that I may have liked it because there was basically no noise about a multiverse. I’m not saying multiverse bad, but I am saying Something Else Once in a While good.

[1] One of the first couple of MCU TV shows they made, which also means it’s been a minute, unless you’re the type of person who rewatches everything for the tie-ins, in which case you’d have needed this, the first (or possibly second) Hulk movie, probably Civil War, and Eternals, at the minimum. But I’ll come back to this point.
[2] Well, we the residents of MCU Earth at least. We the viewers just maybe have.
[3] So that thing from footnote 1 where you have to be familiar with an ever-expanding, ever more intricate web of knowledge to even follow what’s going on in these movies? I’m sorry, but I can only say good things about this. I eat that shit up. It is awesome with a capital A++. If you want to say that’s a weakness of the movies, then you do not understand comics in the first place.

The Gorge

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A few days ago, before I got entirely sick, I watched The Gorge, whose preview I had been intrigued by while watching, I don’t know, probably an episode of Severance? I cannot say with any certainty if it was entirely a popcorn flick or if the fault is my being sick, but yesterday when I was preparing to write this interview, I had no idea what I had watched, only that I was pretty sure it was, y’know, something.

So there’s this guy who’s a sniper who is completely detached from his life and his job, just adrift, you know? And Sigourney Weaver offers him the chance to get away from it all via a year-long, top secret, completely isolated assignment. Like, too secret for her to even explain it, but when he gets there (via parachuting and a several mile hike), the guy he’s replacing is there to explain the deal.

Here, then, is the deal. Two towers, on opposite sides of a gorge. He is on the western side, representing the countries of the west, who have been tasked to guard the gorge from there. Also, there’s an agent in the eastern tower representing the countries of the east, who presumably has been offered the same deal, but since the two towers are not allowed to have contact, it’s impossible to be sure. In the gorge is… something. Perpetually clouded, but things crawl out sometimes, and the whole mission is to prevent them from escaping. Premise: set.

Execution: well, mostly good? Lots of exciting action set pieces, yay. Anya Taylor-Joy as the eastern agent was just fun all the way around. The main dude was… well, okay, more than a little wooden, and I could not decide if it was the character or the actor, so that’s at least better than it could have been on average, but honestly a wooden character isn’t much fun, either, so. Effects were, I was going to say A+, but all special effects these days are either great or (rarely) abjectly terrible, such are these days of the future.

Mostly worth checking out, with one caveat: the last line of the film is just an awful stinker. Be warned!

Star Trek: Section 31

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People have been lining up to deride Section 31, the most recent Star Trek movie that was originally supposed to be a TV series instead, and yeah, it definitely feels like a two episode pilot in a lot of ways. But is it really worse than Star Trek V? It seriously isn’t. Come on.

This is not to say the movie isn’t problematic. As a story, it’s perfectly fine. You take an anti-hero you’re already familiar with from previous stories, and she’s played by Michelle Yeoh in full scenery-chewing mode. And then you enlist her in a Suicide Squad caper with several other misfits-in-search-of-redemption, and they’re off to save… I dunno, probably the quadrant? …from utter destruction, in about 90 minutes. Dark antihero capers full of impossible odds, inevitable betrayals, and sudden death are cool.

But, and this is a big enough but that Mix-A-Lot is contractually obligated to like it:

But, this is Star Trek. Section 31 is the least Roddenberry thing that was ever introduced into Trek, and The Suicide Squad is about as big of a tonal mismatch with Trek as I can imagine, even when I acknowledge the existence of Section 31. (Which, if you don’t know, is the Federation’s black ops division.) So… yeah. As a story, it’s fine, like I already said. As a Star Trek movie… I’m glad they didn’t make it a series instead.

Jurassic World: Dominion

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I am really ambivalent about Jurassic World: Dominion, now that I’ve finally seen it[1]. If you are unaware, it’s the follow on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are now a worldwide phenomenon after the events of that movie saw them rescued from Isla Nublar and then let loose. My ambivalence is as follows: on the one hand, it was a perfectly serviceable dinosaur action movie, with thrilling set pieces and characters that we have collectively cared about for decades, all getting a deserved swan song.

But on the other hand, after 24 hours to think about it… it was obligatory without being hardly anything else. Here’s the thrilling velociraptor chase through the streets of Malta, because there was a bad guy with tech from the last movie! But really all it does is make it harder for our heroes to board a plane out of town. Here’s the ice lake dinosaur in the southern Alps keeping our heroes from reaching a door on the far side of the lake. And it’s like, obviously I want thrilling dinosaur chases and dangerous stalking dinosaurs, but… I guess it’s that for most of these set pieces, there were no believable stakes or sense of danger. And Chekov’s knife fight remains, as of this writing, unfought on the mantel, about which I am personally offended.

In the end, I’m not saying it was bad. I had legitimate fun, and it was nice catching up with old friends and seeing a vision of a fundamentally altered world. But I am saying that I’m glad this story is over. It seems like they’re moving on to a new story next year, and I’m good with that, because I like the world they’ve made. But yeah. It’s good to let stories end.

[1] Full disclosure: the only reason this movie bubbled to the top of the list is that we both want to see the new season of Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, which is set near or after the events of this movie, and certainly was released years after. (That said, it was pretty cool seeing technology from the original show referenced in Dominion, as though it really is all one giant continuity. I like those, and am annoyed when it’s not a two-way street between movies and streaming.)

Pánico en el Transiberiano

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I have learned about a new streaming service funded by libraries. My local does not offer Kanopy, but apparently they offer Hoopla. Which is nice, because the last two movies [that I haven’t seen] presented by my horror movie podcast were both available on said network. Thanks, Carrollton Public Library!

Anyway, the randomness this time was Hammer Studios[1] crossed with aliens, which is a hard sell since Hammer makes mostly movies with draculas. In fact, I’m being informed that this is not a Hammer Studios production, and my podcast people done screwed up. But in their defense, the movie stars both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so the only thing missing (aside from a dracula and/or some of its brides) was a couple of gallons of just enormously bright red paint. I can understand, when you’re desperate for a match, overlooking a little thing like not technically made by Hammer, if almost everything else lines up, y’know? They were in a real fix.

So, Christopher Lee is a paleontologist I guess, and he’s just dug up a maybe missing link in China, and now he’s on a train back to civilization with his find. But Peter Cushing wants to see inside Lee’s comically overprotected trunk in the storage compartment, which sets off an unlikely chain of events when the thing in the trunk is not as dead as previously believed, and is furthermore[2] a visitor from the depths of space and not the missing link at all! …sort of.

Soon undead alien apes and countesses and Rasputins and Hammer Studios talents and Tellys Savalas are running up and down the train, trying to solve the mystery without getting their eyes boiled out of their heads and/or without being caught and exposed as the alien. If Horror Express were wildly popular, one could easily imagine a hidden roles boardgame being developed from the IP. But my point is, hijinx ensue as they necessarily must have, until there is eventually a final showdown for the fate of humanity. (I mean, probably? It was after all just the one alien.)

Still, good times. I especially liked the sci-fi backstory,

[1] out of London, although the movie was made in Spain, and furthermore my brief research indicates this was not in fact a Hammer Studios production at all, and great, now I have to talk about this outside the footnote.
[2] I would consider this a spoiler, but as an alien was necessary to this being the movie I watched, the cat was kind of already out of the bag.

Kaijû sôshingeki

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Okay. Nine movies. I have watched nine movies, mostly to delve into the mystery behind how many Godszilla existed, to which the answer is, for now, still two. But at some point I also just wanted to finish. Skipping seven movies like I should have done is whatever. But skipping two movies after I’ve already seen five of them? (And before you ask: yes, it gnaws at me occasionally that I did not go back and watch the original Mothra movie and the original Rodan movie, before those characters were explicitly spun into the Godzillaverse. (Or were they there all along? I don’t know! Which is why it gnaws at me.))

But the point is, I’ve watched those nine movies, which means I’ve made it to Destroy All Monsters, which means I can go back to my horror movie podcast, finally! …yeah, this was a mistake, but nevertheless, here we are.

What has not existed in these movies so far is a timeline. Like, the early movies were obviously in the middle of the atomic age, set for when they came out. Some of the later movies involved deep space travel of the kind that we were not ready for in the mid ’60s, but which then again who knows, what with the advances that would have naturally sprung from having to fight giant monsters birthed or awakened in atomic fires. Irrespective of all that, I can say with certainty that this one is set in the distant future of the year 2000, where all giant monsters are safely collared and contained on Monster Island. There’s a moon base, and in all other apparent ways, we have reached utopia.

Until…

Oops, the monsters are wandering around destroying everything again, and also asteroid aliens want to take control of the world and run it themselves, and hmm could these facts be linked? Mostly, I’m just relieved that they got back to basics, if by basics you mean alien invasions and alien monsters vs earth monsters and a big showdown on Mt. Fuji. Which I very much do. This is I think a good place to drop out for now.

Kaijûtô no kessen: Gojira no musuko

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Son of Godzilla is the last movie I have to watch to bridge the gap between the original film and second one that will be covered in the double feature episode of the podcast I used to listen to, you know, back before I took a seven movie digression. It will be weird to get back to that, perhaps.

On the one hand, this movie is every bit as weird as some of the prior recent ones, and for some of the same reasons[1]. I think the reason it doesn’t work here is because the writers are no longer taking themselves seriously. Godzilla should not be a punchline, and yet he has become one. I mean, in this case he has not specifically become one, but since his son is, it feels like nearly the same thing.

Let me break it down. 1) There are scientists on an island trying to build a weather control balloon, to make things cold, to… I forget why. To transform deserts into livability? To harvest water? Something related to climate change before that was quite a thing, anyhow. 2) There’s a reporter who just randomly parachutes onto islands in search of news stories, which on the face of it sounds ridiculous, but then when you remember that some islands have frozen Godszilla and some islands have miniature twin prophets preaching the good news about Mothra, maybe it’s fair to say that this is a reasonable way to build a career in the northwestern Pacific. 3) There’s a mysterious lady on the island that none of the scientists know about, and possibly vice versa? 4) There’s a big egg. 5) Something goes wrong with the weather balloon experiment (again, not entirely clear on what, which is a defect in my character rather than the film’s), and when that something goes wrong, instead of making things cold, it makes things both hotter than ever and also radioactive, because why not? 6) So now there are some newly giant praying mantises attacking the egg, which hatches to reveal Godzilla’s son. Why Godzilla is only referred to as male and his pudgy kid is also only referred to as male are mysteries beyond mortal ken, especially when you consider that an egg is a plot point.

The rest of the movie is Godzilla’s son making pratfalls, and kind of bonding with the mystery lady, and learning how to breathe atomic breath, while a giant but not apparently recently-grown-due-to-radioactivity spider re-proves that Godzilla’s main weakness is being coated in silk.

What I still don’t know: does this mean there’s a third Godzilla coming when the old one dies or nobly sacrifices himself or something and then the son grows up, or does it mean the son will eventually expire in some similar way, or does it mean forever after until the series ends that there will be two of them? And man, can you imagine a teenaged Godzilla? That will be a bad time for everyone.

[1] Which are mostly: let’s see just how many disparate details we can cram into a single plot.

Kaijû daisensô

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So I’m still watching Godzilla movies, right? Invasion of Astro Monster is on the one hand not nearly as weird as Ghidorah was. But on the other hand, it’s a much weirder Godzilla movie. See, there are radio signals from a planet beyond Pluto, which they have decided to call Planet X, and also it’s right next to (as in seems like a moon of) Jupiter, and in conclusion you can tell that the same people who were spouting paleontological knowledge in the first movie did the astronomical research for this one.

So these astronauts meet up with the citizens of Planet X, where King Ghidorah is rampaging and forcing them underground, and since from monitoring radio waves or whatever they have learned about how Earth survived Ghidorah’s attack, would we mind ever so much if they could borrow Godzilla and Rodan, in exchange for medical panaceas?

The problem with depth of genre knowledge is if good guy aliens ever show up offering us the keys to the universe, we’ll screw it up immediately by not believing them for a moment, since obviously it’s a trap.

Later, some monsters get in big fights, and the world’s most annoying toymaker makes the world’s most annoying toy, inspiring Tim Burton in the process. Oh, also of note: this is the first Criterion edition of these movies to have an English soundtrack instead of Japanese with subtitles. I don’t know if that was a Max choice or Criterion itself, but it is definitely what I had access to. (Made watching it at work a lot easier, I’ll say that much.)

Mosura tai Gojira

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When I realized that there was a Mothra movie that predated her interactions with Godzilla, I came very close to falling into the Marvel trap. But since OG Mothra wasn’t available to stream anywhere, I narrowly sidestepped a grim fate. It is important I think to remind myself that I’m only trying to figure out what’s going on with Godzillas, and just how many of them there are. This is not a Toho deep dive.

It’s not, I said!

This brings us to Mothra vs. Godzilla. Last time, Godzilla was left to an uncertain underwater fate. Naturally, therefore, there are zero Godszilla for the entire first third of this movie. Instead, we are treated to a tsunami, and a giant floating egg in the nearby ocean, and tiny twin girls who want the egg back from greedy amusement park developers who bought the egg from local fishermen, and my point is, there’s a lot of things going on which would be familiar to people who watched Mothra and unfamiliar to people who watched Godzilla movies.

Later, it is implied but not outright stated that Godzilla washed ashore and was buried in mud by the same tsunami that brought the egg into the area, and therefore it is implied that this is still Godzilla #2. Which I’m good with. Later, the powers of journalism triumph over the powers of capitalism, and the powers of kaiju silkworms triumph over the powers of kaiju lizards, resulting in approximately the same ending as the last movie, except with more of a Spider-Man webshooters vibe. Also, they made sure to re-use the native villagers set, although then again how do I know the Mothra movie didn’t have it before the Kong movie?

I hope nobody cares how extremely filled with spoilers these reviews are.