Category: Film

The Marvels
published by Marvel Entertainment (which feels self referential, but isn’t)
2023

[Me, shouting:] THIS IS AN ACTION COMEDY. Viewers laughed loudly in the theater with delight at appropriate moments when I saw it! I enjoyed it. It was intentionally silly. It was perfectly FINE.

But whoever was responsible for most of the ad campaign should be interrogated and maybe have to spend a few years locked up with Loki, or perhaps reading rival DC’s hate mail.

The film previews were misleading. Maybe the ads came out during the writers-strike or were the work of an evil intern, but they featured dead Avenger flashbacks about fighting great evil, rather than costumed musical numbers involving a hot prince singing to Captain Marvel while she dances in a ballgown-version of her battle costume. (This was a surprise worth saving to delight my fellow movie-goers, but STILL.)

Captain Marvel herself doesn’t seem to be having fun through much of the film, as the weight of possibly being a war criminal weighs heavily on her (ooopsie). Luckily, Ms. Marvel is having enough fun for everyone. And Monica Rambeau is grounded, consistent, and capable, playing it straight between star-struck Ms. Marvel and gloomy Captain Marvel.

If you like action hero comedies with mismatched buddies, disapproving parents, musical numbers, hot princes (hello, Park Seo-Jun!), secret marriages, flerkin kittens consuming Nick Fury’s staff, fangirls, and very poorly timed body swapping, this is a ‘light romp’ in superhero-dom that you might enjoy.

Dune
published by Warner Brothers
2021 (Part 2) 2024

The most beautiful science fiction films I’ve seen recently are these two films. Based on books by Frank Herbert, they tell a story of extractive settler colonialism, in which one feudal family is assigned by the emperor to rule a colony, but this leaves them vulnerable to the jealous emperor’s sabotage. Instead of being fully destroyed, the survivors foment an uprising that takes control of the substance that makes intergalactic travel possible, which threatens to undo the emperor completely.

Dune (part 1) shows the fall of that sabotaged feudal family, House Atreides. Dune Part 2 shows the beginning of uprising against the emperor’s go-to saboteurs, House Harkonnen, which will lead to war for the galactic empire itself.

The architecture is striking; the scale of it, the focus on shade and shelter, the efforts to shape the machine-like city to withstand sandstorms… The vehicles are impressive, with the vast scale that space would logically lead to (though landing such craft on planets with gravity seems less practical from an engineering standpoint, and more as a display of power toward unwilling subjects). The dragonfly-like craft are especially pleasing…

The acting is GOOD. If you’ve seen prior versions of this story on tv or film, you’ve seen both sincere efforts and cartoonish camp. This story plays it straight; the actor playing Paul Atreides is young enough to pull off the role of a conflicted youth persuasively, rather than being played by a full adult with painted rosy cheeks who is bigger than the people referring to him as ‘the little one;’ the villains remain over the top, but in a properly menacing way, more as plausible abusers of power than merely as monsters in appearance.

There are many things to admire, including the scale and pomp of many large gatherings, and the parts of the story that are simply about a boy and his mother trying to survive. The story scales up and down without losing the narrative. Technology scales from space weapons to knives, and still works seamlessly.

It’s really lovely to watch. You’ll need time – these are long movies – but there is a lot of story to cover in these books, and it never hurts to spend time looking at the beautiful patterns wind makes on sand – or how spaceships look when they explode in flames.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
published by Apple TV+ (1 season/10 episodes so far)
2023-

We San Franciscans can be vain about our beloved City, so OF COURSE we have to watch the Godzilla movie about the “G-Day” attack on SF in current times, and remark on the rendering of the monster-smashed high-rises and relocated subway stops that appear in this fun series.

The premise: Godzilla and other giant Titans are real, and can periodically leave their connected universe to appear on (and destroy parts of) our world. How our worlds connect was the focus of the parents and grandparents of two of our three young current-era protagonists, who track down solider Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell now and by his son, Wyatt, in Shaw’s youth) to learn more about Titans, their world, the missing father of two of the leads, plus the government agency, Monarch, that turned against Shaw.

The series does a good job of telling the past and present stories without jarring us – we always know which era we are in (thanks, Russell father and son!) – and of showing a version of our current world where Titan evacuation drills are just a thing we do.

The older generation of characters, Doctors Miura & Randa and Lt. Shaw, have great chemistry, and I love seeing scientists as the leading characters. Their monster-chasing adventures have an old-school, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark feel in the best kind of way (and in a different era), but with less camp. Their grandkids are persistent in the right way, though their shaky bonds are shaky for plot reasons; once they free him, older Shaw herds them to where they need to go.

This is a fun, San-Francisco-smashing version of a Godzilla mythos, and I would like to see another season.

In early 2022, I wrote out a retrospective of what I had been watching, and I feel like it is time to do that again.

Foundation
published by Apple TV+
2021 (Season 1) & 2023 (Season 2)

These are the first two seasons (20 episodes total) of a series based on Isaac Asimov’s books about a galactic empire, and the organization set up by a mathematician to cushion that empire’s fall.

There are several stories overlapping across these series. Key figures include Hari Seldon, the mathematician who predicts the fall of the empire; Gaal, the mathematician who leaves her anti-knowledge planet and is immediately at risk of execution for associating with Hari; the Brothers Dawn, Day, and Dusk, genetic emperor clones who rule as a set in staggered life stages, decanted whenever one of them needs to be replaced; Demerzel, the last survivor of the empire’s attack on her kind, who is a ruthless and eternal enforcer of the empire’s rule; and the people who follow Hari, who appear to pose an existential threat to the empire.

Elements I enjoyed about it, that kept me eager for new episodes:

• a high-stakes story about the future of humanity and its variations on thousands of worlds
• scientists as leading figures within the story, including women of African ancestry in key science and leadership roles, in a ‘diverse’ future that looks like my port-city culture NOW
• pleasant futuristic design of objects, grand spaces, technology, and mathematical displays, but with grubby and worn elements (away from the wealthy) adding realism (including truly remarkable interstellar ship life/suspension pods)
• the character variations of Brother Day, as played by Lee Pace, who seems to enjoy the role, especially the Season 2 version of him I described to a friend as “louche” (which Google/Oxford describe as “disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way”).
• the general lack of warp-speed travel for most people, meaning that going to sleep in a suspended-aging pod and leaving your planet for a long trip meant everyone you knew would be dead long before you reached your destination
• the display of the dirty elements of empires, such as genocide, prison camps, slavery, exploitation, obligations to provide young people as tribute to the ruling class, and so on
• the disappointing persistence of anti-knowledge religions, and anti-knowledge repression, which I appreciate because it is entirely too realistic
• Good pacing.

Foundation is enjoyable sci-fi / drama, and I look forward to future seasons.