Series Minded: Resident Evils

 [Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop.] 

Resident Evil (2002, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004, d. Alexander Witt - crave)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007, d. Russell Mulcahy - crave)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012, d. Paul WS Anderson)
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016, d. Paul WS Anderson)

PREAMBLE

I remember when the first Resident Evil film came out. Fans were not happy. But fans, especially the ones who rage extensively online (yep, even in 2002 it was a thing), are so rarely happy. Anything but a very literal translation is usually met with some form of derision. Resident Evil, the movie, apparently, wasn't anything like the video game (not that I would know). For instance, its protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the game (how dare they), and the movie takes place just as the outbreak is starting, sort of like a prequel.

Look, I've never played the game, probably never will. Of the many hobbies I have and things I care about, video games are far, far down the list (a few notches below crockery and just above marbles). Any adaptation of a video game has to work as a standalone movie for me, it can't be all about easter eggs and knowing winks or shortcuts in storytelling because the fans already know certain things. I always heard that the Resident Evil movies were not very good movies on top of being not-great adaptations of the games (including from Toasty who had some positive things to say about the first one (less so the second) here, and the third one (less so the fourth one) here, and then the final two here.)

Yet, in spite of being not very good, the Paul WS Anderson-era of Resident Evil bore six(!) films, earned a pretty decent amount of money every time, and apparently managed to build its own fanbase of appreciators.  Something can't flourish for this long without there being some redeeming quality to it, right? Right?

I'll be honest, I've never really wanted to watch these (although I've always been curious about the one [edit: Apocalypse] where in the trailer Jovovich is running down the side of Toronto's City Hall ...that image has stuck in my mind) but two of my podcasts are recapping the series leading into the new Zach (Barbarian, Weapons) Cregger-directed Resident Evil adaptation this fall, so I figured...why not just dive in...?

ONE

I really did not like this first movie of this Resident Evil franchise. I was bored and annoyed for most of the film. This is a bad sign for my viewing the rest of the series, which, from a quick gander at Toasty's reviews, does not seem to get a whole lot better (holding out hope for Extinction). 

Anderson is not a terrible director, but he's also not a great one. He's got a proficiency in B-movie genre fare that most others do not. His films look alright for their budgets and have ambition in the scale they're trying to operate in, but they mostly fall apart in the story. He's good at fashioning moments, bad at developing characters. Here he's playing with a horror genre (zombies) and turns it into an action movie that's basically aping Aliens. There's nothing scary here, and little real tension.

First, we're given a mystery. Someone has let the T-virus loose in the underground labs of the Umbrella Corporation. And then we meet Alice, who wakes up naked on the floor of a spacious tiled shower in a massive, creepy, mostly empty mansion with no memory of who she is. Another mystery...Alice, who the fuck is Alice? And then some spiky-haired douche (but not really a douche, appearances can be deceiving...poor Eric Mabius and his resting douche face) turns up at her door, says he's a cop (but he's clearly not...another mystery!), before a team of draped-in black special ops-types with heavy weaponry and night vision goggles come busting in (Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, and other zombie fodder). 

They take Alice and spiky hair along with them as they board a train car inside the house! There's a train inside the house, guys! There they find another amnesiac, Spence (James Purefoy) on the train, which takes them deep into the Earth into a supposedly massive underground complex.  The virus is loose, all the scientists and technicians and security that were there are now zombie-like flesh-eaters, as well as there being other security devices and experiments that are exceptionally dangerous.

Even though it's not a direct adaptation of any Resident Evil game, the film is basically like watching a video game. It follows the ever-dwindling group of characters as they traverse through the labs, fighting zombies and zombie dogs and "the Licker" (a so-so cgi effect in an otherwise largely practically-made film), among the escape rooms and other threats they face, all with the objective of escaping on the train before the lock-down timer goes off and they're trapped in quarantine forever. Hey, watching people play video games can be entertaining. This one, not so much.

The stuff about "who set the virus loose?" is painfully obvious, the "why" barely matters to the plot or characters. If Alice had her full memories from the get-go, nothing about this story would be different, and so the reveals of her past and what she knows feel perfunctory, and lack anything of interest or insight into her character. Beyond Jovovich being a performer Anderson's camera loves (Jovovich and Anderson would eventually marry), there's nothing to invest us in on Alice as a character (or anyone else for that matter)  which makes it really bizarre to me that there's five more of these films with this character.

The good: Michelle Rodriguez, just a powerhouse presence.
- The digital map explaining the mansion facade, the train, and the underground lab complex.
- The laser tunnel sequence. Makes absolutely no logical sense, but the highlight moment of the film.
- The last shot, teeing up the sequel, a great shot, even if the sequence leading up to it is basically the same as 28 Days Later. Cribbed or parallel thinking?

TWO

Resident Evil: Apocalypse finds Alice leaving an abandoned Umbrella facility where she's been experimented on and now has superpowers (super strength, heightened senses and reaction time). The city is being evacuated because the plague is starting to run rampant. Apparently there's, like, only one bridge out of Raccoon City and there's a big fortified gate that can shut it down, so the Umbrella Corp. does just that, leaving many of their own people inside. One of the Corp.'s chief scientists (an overqualified and under-utilized Jared Harris, wheelchair bound and with the tiniest of eyeglasses) is on the safe side of the wall but refuses to leave as his daughter is trapped inside.  Using the city's ample surveillance network, he searches for Umbrella assets with the promise of helping them get out of Raccoon City if they rescue Angela.

Instead of giving Alice the assignment and letting her pick up new allies in this riff on Escape from New York, the story decides to spend a whole bunch of time with new characters like halter-top/short-shorts-wearing gun-nut cop Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), S.T.A.R.S. agent Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and spunky civilian Lloyd Jefferson Wade (Mike Epps). Much like the first film, none of these new characters are given much of a personality, and since we spend so much time away from Alice, we really get no character development with her either. 

Alice was barely developed at all in the prior film. Here anything that changes her is strictly plot and/or world building (and maybe extruded from video game lore). Near the climax of the film, Alice has to fight the Nemesis beast (think a hulking, fleshy, zombie Robocop), who she discerns is spiky hair from the previous film, and she has an emotional breakdown (well acted by Jovovich, but nonsense in context...her and spiky hair spent maybe 8 hours together and barely got to know each other, why is she so attached?).  By the end of the film Alice is dead and I feel nothing. But then she's resurrected and, again I feel nothing.

Apocalypse gets too hung up in all the wrong places. It wants to explore it's newly created mid-catastrophe environment but it's not in the slightest interested in the characters exploring the space or how they might be feeling in this situation. But, by the sheer fact that it's working in an open environment and the massive increase in scale, I actually enjoyed this more than the last one despite being a worse directed, acted and edited film.  

I'm always delighted by seeing Toronto on screen and how it is used in movies. Here it's "standing in" for Raccoon City, but key T.dot landmarks like the C.N. Tower, City Hall, and our streetcars (not landmarks, I know, but iconic) are everywhere. Toasty speculated that Raccoon City might just be alternate-reality Toronto... perhaps a world where Toronto was annexed by the U.S. by force (one of the city's buildings is shown sporting an American flag), handed over to a massive corporation by a corrupt government as an experimental testing ground, and militarized (as well as flooded with guns...). 

The good: The garbage chute escape.
- The City Hall descent.
- The ending newsreel that exposed the Umbrella Corp's evil deeds in Raccoon City, but then quickly dismissed as a hoax in the media (obviously Umbrella has the money and cache to influence the truth)... the most honest part of the film. 
- Toronto.

THREE

Extinction opens not just rehashing but reusing Alice's awakening-in-the-shower-with-no-memory scene from the first film and then puts her in the laser hallway, which she escapes and then through into a clinic's hallway where there's a host of dangers that eventually kills her. Her body is taken above ground in the middle of the desert where a chain link fence holds back a significant amount of zombies. Her body is tossed into a pit full of other Alices.  Like traversing through a video game, Alice must learn the patterns, die and try again.  That's one way of introducing to us that Alice is a clone.

The world has wholly become an apocalyptic wasteland. The T-virus didn't just kill all the people but pretty much all life (vegetation included) on the planet. Where the first film was a James Cameron homage, and Apocalypse was largely a John Carpenter nod, this is George Miller Mad Max pastiche all the way.  

Alice wanders the deserts. We learn mostly to evade the Umbrella Corp, who is trying to track her. We're really not sure what else she's doing out in the wastelands. Meanwhile, LJ and Carlos - who we met last film (no sign of Jill Valentine though) - are back, travelling the deserted highways convoy-style, looking for food and refuge, the safety of what remaining survivors they can find is their primary concern. They're led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has no specific objective other than survival.

Meanwhile, evil Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), introduced at the end of the last film as a head scientist at Umbrella, is back too. He answers to some dyed blonde dickhead who always wears sunglasses indoors (Jason O'Mara) . Isaacs has gone rogue and is doing projects off-book and consuming massive amounts of Umbrella's resources. 

By the end of the first act, Alice has met up with the convoy, where she has to use her telekinetic powers to save the survivors (where'd those powers come from? Well, that's Isaac's experiments, changing the T-virus into a genetic enhancement, but only Alice clones seem to respond to it without it going horribly awry). The use of her powers trips alarms and gives away their location. There's a fight in Vegas wastelands where Isaacs unleashes a horde of experimental zombies and only a few survivors remain afterword. But now they know there's a helicopter and Alice found a book that tells of Arcadia, a location of, possibly, a zombie-free community in Alaska. So they need to make a full frontal assault on the Umbrella labs entrance in the desert to capture the chopper and for Alice to...I dunno, get revenge on Umbrella? Still not sure her motivation 3 films in..

Director Russell Mulcahy of Highlander fame attempts to inject some actual horror into the proceedings, but Anderson's script is still too invested in sci-fi, action, superheroes and world building for this to be truly scary. But this time around the director leans into his actors and lets them have moments which inform us as to who they are and who they are to each other, if not necessarily presenting a specific arc for any of them. Mulcahy gets better performances out of his actors than in prior films, but some of the tertiary performers and voice-over work is still quite terrible. Mulcahy's film also eschews the "electro-rawk guitar" soundtrack that still sounds so cliched and '90s for something more traditional and atmospheric (decent work here from Charlie Clouser).

The film ends with Alice facing off against a mutated Dr. Issac with Alice discovering the reservoir of clones. (Anderson clearly cannot get enough of his not-yet-wife)

The good:  A murder of zombie crows are pretty much the only scary thing in 3 movies.
- Ali Larter makes for an effective stoic leader.
- The scene where you can see the plentiful highway traffic moving in the desert background...oops. Made me laugh.
- This one is much gooder than the prior two, I will have to agree with Toasty on that one.

FOUR

Ten years post-Matrix and here we have Anderson's totally unapologetic Matrix-riff as Alice and her clone army, clad in pleather and spandex, armed with samurai swords and automatic handguns, assail a tower complex which is Umbrella's Tokyo-based headquarters. So much slow-mo, so much bullet-time-on-a-budget. The blonde dickhead with sunglasses (no longer Jason O'Mara, instead Shawn Roberts aping the vocal fry of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith), is the big final boss, having injected himself with the next evolution of T-cells. Only one Alice manages to escape on the plane with him before he explodes Toyko. He injects Alice with a serum that nukes her T-cells (and thus depowers her...just as the superhero boom is taking place? How curious). The plane crashes. Alice survives.  

This first act could have been the finale of a whole other movie but I imagine they didn't have the budget for all the Alice duplicates for a whole film (and even still, here, it's a pretty dodgy effect anytime there's more than one Milla on screen).

So Alice takes small plane to Alaska where she seeks the Arcadia refuge she sent Claire and the others to in the chopper. There she finds a plethora of planes and nobody but an amnesiac Claire. Again, they could have built a whole movie around "Alaska" and what happened to the survivors from the previous movie, but Anderson sets it up and closes it out (sort of) in a matter of minutes. 

Alice and Claire fly from Alaska to L.A., unbeknownst to them they are being tracked by satellite. In L.A.  they spy a small band of survivors on the roof of a very large building which turns out to be an old prison. in the middle of L.A. Kay.  Alice even without her super reflexes still manages to land the plane (The building is surrounded by zombies so it's the only place they could land...taking off again is a later problem).

There they meet a rag-tag group of survivors, including a wannabe actress, a big shot agent and his assistant, a creepo, a superstar basketball player (his fancy watch billboard is just across the way) and a prisoner who claims to be special forces and erroneously confined...and with the knowledge of how to get out. Turns out the prisoner is, improbably, Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) and not a dangerous offender, which would be more interesting if it was, like Riddick. If you think there's some tearful reunion or the sight of her brother would help with her memory problems or there would be any emotional or character-building resonance at all, you haven't been paying attention to Paul W.S. Anderson's career.  

Anyway creatures get in, people die. Surprise surprise but the one's with plot armour make it out alive and to the Arcadia which is an Umbrella mobile lab on a container ship where all the survivors are now in stasis tubes for later experimentation. Oh and blonde dickhead with the glasses is still alive. He has a big brawl against our gang of survivors but is defeated, he escapes on a VTOL but accidentally blows himself up. Ha ha. Alice and friends commandeer the Arcadia only for Umbrella to send out an absurd number of VTOL assault craft to their location. The end.

The score shifts only away from the 90's rawk guitar of the first two films (but deviating completely from the third's more traditional score)  with Tomandandy bringing their electronica sounds to the rawk guitar but toning the edgelord vibe down just a smidge. It's not outright awful, but it still feels remarkably dated for a 2010 movie to sound like this.

The good: Conceptually I really, really liked the opening sequence of an army of Alices. In actual execution it's pretty shaky. But a nifty opening that acts as epilogue to the prior film and prologue to this one.
- Happy Claire is back...I guess. Except in giving her amnesia they've stolen the grizzled wastelands veteran archetype Ali Larter brought to the character last film. She disappears for extended sequences here for no reason.
- Always happy to see Wentworth Miller, but Chris turns out to be such a big nothing of a character. (wait, these are the good?)
- Boris Kodjoe brings a lot of innate charm as pro-basketball player/athlete Luther West. It was a shame to see him killed, but then pretty awesome to see he survived. But we don't ever see him again in the remaining films so he's probably dead like everyone else.
- The interior of the Arcadia was pretty damn cool. A great set (which they obviously redressed three times over to look like three separate rooms, but hey, no shade cast...literally and figuratively).

FIVE

Colour me shocked. Resident Evil: Retribution's opening sequence was insanely awesome, a five minute slow-motion special effects extravaganza that tells the tale of Umbrella's destruction of the Arcadia and Alice's survival (of course) backwards. I repeat, backwards. It opens with Alice floating in the water and slowly pulls her to the surface and inverts her splash into the Pacific, back up to the boat two-guns firing. The Arcadia just being bombarded by a fleet of VTOL as the reverse slow-mo shows us all the massacre and destruction and the fight Alice nobly put up as it backs all the way to the closing shot of the previous film (also Jill Valentine [Sienna Guillory] is still alive but now working for Umbrella, but I didn't actually recognize her because of the 100% different look). This may just be the highlight of Paul W.S. Anderson's career. This could be the accompanying visuals to, like, a Radiohead or Bjork music video (we get a decent Tomandandy composition over it though). But I am also shocked that this ostensibly kills off Claire and Chris Redfield and undoes what little victory Alice managed to have at the end of the last film (just as the fourth film undoes what little victory Claire and the survivors had in escaping  on the helicopter). But do we ever actually feel the weight or horror of these crushing blows? Hell no, that would involve Anderson having to invest in the emotions of the characters, and he's just not interested.

Then, as these films do, Alice explains, in brief, everything that came before...all the twisty-turny plot bits from four movies, in large part to remind us that cast members from the first, second and fourth films exist.  As such this film will see the return of Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory, Boris Kodjoe and, of course the blonde dickhead with glasses is back. After Alice's recap, the open sequence plays again, only this time in forward motion at regular speed, and it's, like, a 60-second sequence that moves far too quickly to be impressive.

Alice is captured, wakes up inside an Umbrella facility which is a massive sealab somewhere off the coast of Northern Russia. She's set free by Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) with the aid of blonde dickhead with glasses who, surprise surprise, no longer works for Umbrella and is now trying to take it down (we only learn at the very end of the film that the AI "Red Queen" is trying to destroy all of humanity).  A team of special ops agents including Luther, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (an overqualified Kevin Durand) invade the facility to blow it up and hopefully rescue Alice and Ada beforehand.

Unlike the prior 3 films which just layer plot point upon plot point, this one goes back to the simple action-movie premise of "escape the facility alive", and has very little in the way of plot, and just the tiniest smidge more characterization, but only for Alice, who discovers that all of the testing simulations in the facility involve clones, sometimes clones of her, and sometimes those clones are mommy to a precious little deaf girl. So now Alice is a mom, even though not really, and once again it's unclear how or if the memories of clones are transferring to Alice (though it sure seems they are).

If Anderson is aping other directors' works with each film, here he's in his Zack Snyder mode, where most of the action sequences seem to be operating in slow motion. Anderson's compositions aren't as pretty as Snyder's, but they are just as illogical (why did so much of this need to be in slow-mo? What is the dramatic impact of it being in slow-mo?). Is it all just to pad the film out (this is about 10 minutes longer than the previous films which all clocked in at a tight 90 minutes or so).

In the end, Alice and her "daughter" and a few chums escape, head to Washington DC where blonde dickhead with glasses (Shawn Roberts still doing that Agent Smith impersonation) is sitting in the Oval Office and injects Alice with the T-virus again so she gets her powers back. He says she's the ultimate weapon in humanity's last stand against the Red Queen, and we pan out to see the city completely beseiged by zombie creatures of all sorts. I really don't know how one woman is supposed to turn the tide against all that.

This was the worst entry since the first, just action sequence after fight sequence, greenscreen nonsense around every corner, not a lick of character development here. Bringing back all the greatest hits characters from prior films amounts to little or nothing at all. If anyone, Jovovich included, has more than a dozen lines of dialogue, I'd be shocked. There's next to nothing here, no purpose for it existing beyond it resolving the end of the prior film and setting up the next one. Alice could literally have fallen in the water off the Arcadia and woken up in Washington and we wouldn't have missed, really, anything.

The good: That opening sequence. 
- I want to say it's nice to see Michelle Rodriguez back, but she's sorely misused (though not as badly as Colin Salmon who might as well have just been a mannequin for all he contributes).
- It was good to see Luther back, RIP.
- I love a sealab, and I love a sealab blowing up.
- Maybe my favourite parts of any Resident Evil movie is the skeletal wireframes that show us the set-up of the Umbrella Complexes.

SIX

Like the other films, Alice provide an opening monologue for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. But instead of being a catch-up of the prior films Alice provides us some key background details on the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the invention of the T-cells and how it all started getting out of control. It's information barely even hinted at before now explained in 4-minutes of voice over after 14 years and five films without it. It provides a certain context to what came in the past films, and would have been information any decent production might have provided us in the first, or at latest, second film in the series.

Also like the other films, The Final Chapter begins by usurping the end of the prior film. Washington D.C., where we ended Retribution, was "a trap" according to Alice, and is now almost completely obliterated (it looks only marginally worse than what Trump's done with the place). Alice and a few creatures and the air raid sirens seem to be all that's survived (so, you know, her "daughter" and the other survivors from the last film...all dead).

Much like last film where suddenly blonde dickhead with glasses turns out to be Alice's unlikely ally, now the Red Queen finds Alice and asks her to help unleash an anti-virus which will stop the infection globally. It's located in the wastes of Raccoon City. The Red Queen predicts within 48 hours the remaining 4000-iish humans left on Earth will all be dead. So Alice is given her maguffin as well as her quest and her time constraints. And the promise of ending the T-virus plague also means ending her own life.

After the cut, we find Alice has been driving for 12 hours and still has 418 miles to go (... if Raccoon City is Toronto, that's only 477 miles away...what has Alice been doing all this time? And if she's travelling on Interstate 64, she's going the wrong way. Also, I have to presume that most of the remaining 4000 humans left are Umbrella goons). She's picked up by Dr. Isaacs (turned out she killed his clone in Extinction) who's just out roaming the wastes in a convoy of pretty rad-looking mobile battle tanks. She escapes and with 17 hour to go arrives in Raccoon City, which has a big crater in the center of it from the nuke. 

She's knocked unconscious, again, and wakes up to find Claire Redfield and a handful of highly agitated survivors. With Issacs' battle tanks and the crawling hordes of zombies behind them on their way, there's yet another threat level to Alice getting into the Hive and recovering the anti-virus, and, unexpectedly, answers to everything she's ever wanted to know (also, as Toasty pointed out, involving a whole lot of retconning of the answers sort-of given in Apocalypse and the way the Wesker/Isaacs relationship was portrayed in Extinction... I could be upset if I, or even anyone involved in making this stuff, actually cared).

At first I thought Anderson might be channelling I Am Legend with a "last (wo)man on earth" tale, and, frankly, that could have been a pretty good take for this film. But Anderson's ADHD kicked back into high gear and there's side quests galore and a cast of new (and old) survivors who get no development but exist only to be killed. Yet, somehow, this is much more focused than any of the previous films. Well except for the fact that Anderson's opted for a Paul Greengrass-esque hyperactive editing style (gone is the slo-mo of Retribution, now tracking the fight choreography and action is the challenge).

The ticking clock gives The Final Chapter a decisive through line, and returning to Raccoon City and the Hive where it all started finds the series coming back full circle. It's by no means an opera but, in the process of Alice getting the cure and defeating the Umbrella Corporation, she finds her origin story and the answer to her true purpose all along. I mean, she been a pretty blank void for five films, having answers as to why and giving her a sense of progress for the first time is quite rewarding.

The good: hey, character development!
- Claire's back!
- A clear purpose for this story.
- Answers, background, details!
- A plethora of neat set-pieces, actually. 
- A somewhat satisfying resolution.

---

FINAL THOUGHTS and 

I honestly wound up liking this whole experience far more than I thought I would even if only two of these movies even come close to touching an objective quality of "good". The fact that Anderson wrote the whole series and had pretty tight control over it means that, in spite of everything, it's got a pretty singular voice to it (if not necessarily vision)...one which cares very little for its characters or happy endings or internal consistency/logic.  It's never not an action series, and it only seems to flirt with its horror elements occasionally, and probably flirted with bringing in actual video game elements just as much (and when they were brought it, whether specific zombie creatures or characters, they're almost all ...whaaaaaat? Character designs from the video games seem quite out of place in the world of Anderson's Resident Evil.)

I found the films and their weird pacing and flow both challenging and charming. Almost everyone Alice encounters dies, even when it appears as if she's saved them. The way in which Anderson undoes all of Alice's good work is kind of hilarious actually (it would be more upsetting if we had any real reason to care about any of them). There's an insane amount of gun violence in this film, a real "guns solve everything" mentality to the pictures (even though, clearly, guns solve nothing), and it was always at its most interesting when the characters had to use hand weapons or makeshift weapons than guns. The underlying moral is corporations are a lot scarier than zombies are...a sentence which gives me a weird sense of deja vu.  I'm not sure I'll ever come back to these films, but I did indeed get some entertainment out of watching them.

RANKING

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
3. Resident Evil: Afterlife
4. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
5. Resident Evil
6. Resident Evil: Retribution

Series (re)Minded: Scream VI & Scream 7

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop. Kent tackled the first five entries of the Scream franchise three years ago and now follows-up with the next two entries in the first-ever Series (re)Minded] 

Scream VI (2023, d. Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin - Crave)
Scream 7 (2026, d. Kevin Williamson - in theatre)

The only reason I was aware Scream 7 was out this weekend was because my teen asked me if we could go see it. I said "Sure, when does it come out?" thinking it was months in the future. "Friday," they responded and I was a bit dumbstruck. "I haven't even watched Scream 6 yet." (Turns out neither had they).

At this point with the Scream franchise I get very unenthused with its formulae. I was already pretty tired of it by the time I did my "Series Minded" write-up of it three years ago.

"There are definite elements I like to the series, but the samey-ness of the series gets tedious when watching back-to-back-to-back(-to-back-to-back-to-back)."

"The "whodunnit" of the sequels are diminishing returns."

None of that has changed. I had gotten tired of the killers who are obsessed with the mythology of the franchise (or the meta "Stab" franchise, in-universe) in my binge watch of the prior films, and the sixth entry didn't change that tune.

Scream 6 opens with Samara Weaving waiting for her blind date at a bar when she gets a call. We know where this is going. When she's dead in a back alley at the hands of a Ghostface killer, he steps back, looks at his handiwork, and then pulls off his masks revealing it's Tony Revelori (I knew I knew that voice). I was ready to accept a different type of Scream movie, one where we already know who the killer is, and know that he's after the survivors we met in the prior film.  That's different, way outside the nor...oh and now he's dead by another Ghostface. Fine, back to business as usual.

It doesn't take long before sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega) and friends are deep in the mix of murder. I did like what Sam was wrestling with in the film, a bit of bloodlust from her own genetic mental health disorder, but also being the subject of conspiracy theories that, as the biological daughter of Billy Loomis, she's actually the mastermind behind the last batch of Woodsboro murders. Pretty much every other character here, though, doesn't have such inspiration backing them up.

The film makes it clear early on that Sam cannot even be a suspect in any of this so the conspiracy is toothless, holding no weight beyond our sympathies. The film doesn't give the characters much time to feel any of the weight of what's happening to them (again) though.

It took me a while to remember what happened in the previous film, but the script gives us more than enough prompts and reminders to piece it all back together. Generally I liked the "core four" of the film (Barrera, Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) both as characters and performers enough to root for them not to die.

The film manages to drag Courtney Cox's Gail back into the scene, but it feels as disingenuous here as it did in the previous film, and even more empty without Dewy as part of the duo. They position her as "the legacy character to kill off" but don't fully commit. In fact the film doesn't fully commit to killing any of the majored players.

Kirby (Hayden Pannetiere in another boss-ass haircut) also returns (last seen in Scream 4) likely as a sub for an absent-due-to-contract-disputes Neve Campbell, but I was psyched, and while she's not an active part of the film as much as I'd have liked, she's still my favourite character of the franchise. I want to see a Kirby

KIRBY!!! <3<3<3

spin-off series, each episode hunting down a serial killer in a new amazing haircut.

The reveal at the end of Scream 6, like all but the first Scream seems as flawed as all others in the series (save the first film) where the script and story are basically pointing fingers at everyone meaning that trying to suss out suspects as an audience member is a futile effort. Once they get to the reveal, it doesn't really matter who's under the suit(s) or why they're doing what they're doing. It all feels pretty contrived.

 I said about the reveals and the story being so intricately tied to the characters and obsession with mythology, well, that continues to hold true. But what's the alternative, that it's just a crazy killer, or two (or three) that almost randomly want to kill Sydney/Gail/Sam/Tara/etc?  Because that's what Scream 7 ostensibly does, and it sucks just as much as you think it would.

(I really don't like saying anything "sucks", as it's so pedestrian and inconsiderate a critique, but truly, the reveal moment of Scream 7 does, in fact, suck.)

There's really no way for the franchise to succeed in its killer reveals at this point. It's either got to be connected, or it's got to be random, and the former is played out and the latter is utterly uninteresting. Just one of the many reasons the franchise needs a very, very long rest.

Due to some really gross political posturing shit, Barrera was unceremoniously kicked off the series, and I think Ortega left in solidarity. (Ortega has a good career going, she could take the hit, Savoy Brown and Gooding could very much not and return here as Gail's assistants). As such, the studio backed up the dump-truck full of cash to Neve Campbell's door and got her back on board. It was really their only move, other than capitulating to being dumbshits and hiring Barrera back).

They also brought creator Kevin Williamson back, both as writer and director, and he...sort of...phones this one in...a bit. 

Williamson's latest sticks to the tropes of horror but tries to abandon franchise formulae which, at times, makes Scream 7 feel like it's too far apart from its own series, and yet, escaping the franchise formulae also seems virtually impossible.

Here, the Ghostface killer has come for Sydney in her new home, targeting her daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). When the killer makes the calls, though, it's calling now using a facetime-like app and we see the scarred visage of one Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). The big question that the film wants you to puzzle over, that really wants you to invest in is..."Is it really him?"  But eagle eyed viewers will note neither Sydney nor Gail ever truly believe it despite what someone else in the film might try to convince them of. (My kid had a very good point in that the Stu Macher here seems more like how he might be characterized in the "Stab" movies, in-world, rather than the actual Stu, who Sydney knew personally for years. Sydney *could* have played a "tell me something only Stu would know" game with him, but that would give the game up too quickly...and this film, and this series, is all about playing games).

Where Scream 6 very much felt like a franchises coasting on fumes, but still moving forward, Scream 7 is the series in neutral coasting down a slight slope, about to come to a complete stop at any moment, no inertia left. The cast of Scream 7 is doing their best to sell that there's still some juice left, but it's only half convincing when everything around them seems so tired.

Campell, looking fantastic, completely comfortable in Sydney's shoes, and owning a no-bullshit attitude, looks strong pushing this stalled-out franchise just a few more feet forward. She works well with everyone on screen on screen. She's still a star, but clearly doesn't give a shit about what that means.

I'm at the point with this series where the very idea of anyone putting on a Ghostface costume is just the height of absurdity. I balk a the whole "Ghostface" thing that opens every film, the phone call and the impossibility of being in two places at once or even as two people, coordinating and orchestrating. Ghostface has moved beyond two doofuses surprising people in a killing spree to being far stronger and more resilient than any regular human. The Ghostface that kills most of the people in a film is not the same as the one, two or more people revealed to be the killer at the end of the film, and it's so hard to ignore.

The series has also lost its ability to really have meaningful kills. Being stabbed once is like a slight nick, easy enough to keep going, while being stabbed four or five times doesn't mean much if you've got the right plot armor. The certain characters that get to still be alive after violent stabbings in each of the sixth and seventh entries of the series just undermines the stakes of the series. You basically know who is going to get it and who they wouldn't dare kill off before the first act is finished.

The most daring thing the next Scream film could do is to disconnect itself entirely from everything else in the franchise, just a Halloween-style psycho killer out on the prowl, but, I dunno, in a shopping mall like Dawn of the Dead. Being meta by mixing plots, rather than remixing itself.

---

Ranking Screams

1. Scream
2. Scream 4
3. Scream 2
4. Scream (5)
5. Scream 6
6. Scream 7
7. Scream 3

KWIF: A House of Dynamite (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Usually when I take a week of work just to have time off I spend much of that time consuming and writing about movies. We'll stupid mice in the house have had me checking and repositioning and rebaiting traps, cleaning up messes and hunting for nests while only getting 5-6 hours of sleep at night because they're stressing me out. In the other times, I've been boardgaming or rearranging the house for new shelving so I haven't had much time at all for movies. Poo. 

This Week: 
A House of Dynamite (2025, d. Kathryn Bigelow - netflix)
Final Destination 5 (2011, d. Steven Quale - rental)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025, d. Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky - crave)

---

A House of Dynamite is a political procedural taking the audience through a "what if" scenario from as many vantage points as it can in its just shy of two hour runtime. That scenario asks what would happen if a rogue missile was launched from an unknown source. What would we actually know? What could we actually do? And by "we" I mean the United States government officials and military personnel who are in charge of monitoring and responding to such things. [I'm not really part of that "we" statement].

Because of the nightmare landscape that America (and much of the world) is in now, politically and socially speaking, A House of Dynamite already feels out of date. It's a film that presents an intense and terrifying scenario that assumes competency at the helm of all these levels of decision making, which we're all (mostly) keenly aware isn't the case anymore. Hell, there's a character played by Moses Ingram that is a FEMA agent... does FEMA even exist anymore?

The commander-in-chief here is played by Idris Elba (with a real wonky American accent...didn't he have a better one nearly 20 years ago in The Wire), he loves podcasts and basketball, so he's very Obama-coded. Honestly, somehow I feel more comforted by an Obama-like presidency where there may be a nuclear strike on American soil than I do about anything the cheeto-in-charge is doing these days.

The film takes place in three segments, each focusing on a few central players. In the first it's Anthony Ramos at a military monitoring station, Rebecca Ferguson at the White House Situation Room ("the Whizzer") and Moses Ingram's FEMA agent as she gets evacuated to the safety bunker in the Appalachians. The subsequent two segments loop back to the other sides of conversations being had from different perspectives, be it Tracey Lett's STRATCOM Commander, Gabriel Basso's deputy national security advisor, Greta Lee's foreign military expert, or Elba's president, among others.

I get the impulse to really drill down deep into the procedural aspect and try to show this situation from as many different points of analysis and decision making as possible, but it only leads to diminishing returns as we keep looping back. There are far too many characters to really care about any of them, so all we have to really care about is the situation, and, somehow, it's not strong enough to sustain itself satisfactorily.

There's no doubt that Bigelow is a great filmmaker, and this is constructed so well, with a commitment to detail and nuance, and it is an incredible feat of editing, but it presents its conundrum, repeatedly, and it doesn't have an answer. America is about to lose a major city to a nuclear strike that may or may not have been intentional. Does America retaliate against an unknown enemy with a show of strength, and if so, against whom? Will the nuke actually hit the city, or the nearby major body of water? And will the nuke actually go off?

There's a lot of positing that this film teases and tease and never resolves. It's going for "clever" but it's just edging the audience with no relief, and it makes the journey a frustrating one.

---

James Wong and David R. Ellis see-sawed on the Final Destination franchise for four years, each with a slightly different take on what the spectre of death should look like, and how the films' protagonists would deal with death's designs for them. It would have been more fun if each of the directors' second efforts weren't so bad.

With fresh blood in the form of unremarkable director Steven Quale from a screenplay by soon to be accomplished screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) they present the Final Destination equivalent of a workplace sitcom.

The scenario the protagonists here face is a ludicrous but thoroughly entertaining bridge collapse. It's a pretty epic spectacle that is the series' second best disaster to date (though about to be trumped by the next film). It's shot decently enough, the special effects aren't as atrocious as the previous two films, and the script has all but gotten rid of the cast of characters you just immediately want all dead.

Here wanna-be chef Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) is on a bus on a work retreat when he has a vision of the bridge collapsing. Stuck in traffic on the bridge, he manages to rile up a few other passengers who follow him off the bus and to safety as the bridge collapses. This includes his best friend/manager Peter (Miles Fisher), his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) who literally just dumped him, intern Candice (Ellen Wroe) and a few others who will all die horribly later.

This is a series that's all about the deaths, and the fake-outs leading to the deaths. It's about teasing the audience with possibilities before executing Death's design. Final Destination 2 did this the absolute best, and while this doesn't fully live up to that, nor does it really recapture the magic of discovery of the first one, it's pretty decently entertaining throughout, with some particularly squicky kills (one involving a laser eye surgery laser that had me flinching)

There are two big diversions here. The first is the inclusion of Courtney B. Vance's FBI agent who is investigating Sam's vision, wondering if Sam committed an act of domestic terrorism, only to come to understand that as connected as the dead are, there's no corporeal perpetrator. I really would have liked the whole movie to be from his perspective, as he comes across the scenes and he and his team need to try and unpack what happened, Will Graham from Hannibal-style ("this is my design"). The second is a new explanation as to how to end the cycle from Tony Todd, "Mr. Final Destination" himself. In this case, it's killing someone else and taking their remaining time for one's self. It's an interesting premise on its own that, while constituting the focus of the third act, doesn't get explored much outside of its needs for a horror film.

If you pay close enough attention throughout the film, the coda shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still a delight and probably the best ending of the series.

---

14 years later and Final Destination is back, and bigger than ever. Enough time has passed with the series laying dormant to build up a nostalgic reverence, plus the current state of Hollywood is all about exploiting intellectual property so a new Final Destination was inevitable.

What wasn't inevitable was the love and care that seemingly went into this franchise re-launch. It's not that the film is straying very far out of its lane, but rather it just navigates the series and its concepts in a manner that seems to indicate the writers (Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor) and directors Stein and Lipovski are all real fans of the series and have been thinking about how to freshen it up for some time.

The centerpiece of the film is its opening prologue, an epic 20-minute sequence set in the late 1960's where a young couple (Max Lloyd-Jones and Stargirl's Brec Bassinger) are out for a special evening at the newly opened Sky View restaurant, a posh space-age joint at the top of a Space Needle-esque building. They encounter some class-based prejudice that threaten to ruin their evening, but it turns out all it would take is a little 10-year-old shit chucking pennies from the lookout to destroy the whole facility. It's a spectacular disaster, at least the rival if not the better of the highway disaster from Final Destination 2.

The whole sequence is so vibrant and colourful with that gauzy 60's feels to it, and the polite menace beneath chipper smiles that I really wanted the whole movie to be a period-set Final Destination. Alas, it was not to be, as we smash cut from the collapsing building to a modern day lecture hall where Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has just awaken, screaming, from the nightmare. It's a recurring vision she's had, and she thinks the woman in it is her grandmother.

It turns out it is her grandmother, Iris, in Stefani's vision. Iris has been estranged from the family for decades. She was an intense mother, overprotective to a fault, hounding the family about safety once grandkids were born. Nobody will talk about her, so with the only clue she has, Stefani goes to meet her grandma for the first time as an adult, at a remote cabin in a clearing in the woods surrounded by all manner of defences to ward off death. Iris is a kook, but we watchers of the franchise know that despite how nutty she appears, Iris is right.

Turns out Iris had that same vision and saved everyone from the Sky View disaster. But the ripple effects have been a constant in the 55 years since. Death is still cleaning up this mess, and it's only now catching up to Iris's family. [In this explanation, but no hard connective threads, it assumes that the events of the previous movies are all connected to this one event]. Stefani thinks Iris is crazy until Iris says "seeing is believing" and she intentionally lets up her guard for one second, affording Death the opportunity to claim her right in front of Stefani. Stefani tries to convince her dad, uncle, cousins and brother of the danger that's coming for them but it takes two freak accidents before they start seeing things her way.

As much as I wanted the fully-period-set Final Destination, Bloodlines offers a thoroughly entertaining and trope-twisting entry into the series. While I seem to like the hamminess of FD2 more there's a playfulness to Bloodlines that's hard not to be amused by. I mean the sequence where Stefani's cousin jogs off into the background only to get hit in the head by a soccer ball, sending her off balance and into a big garbage bin which is then promptly picked up with the side arm and dumped into the back... maybe the best single moment in the franchise for sheer delight in execution.

The deaths aren't as Rube Goldberg-ian as I would have liked them to be but they are plenty gross, with more than a few that had me squirming in my seat while also giggling in delight.

This also is probably the most accessible cast in the entire series. There are no annoying characters or performers here, for probably the first time since the first movie, we're actually not rooting for these characters to die.

This also marks Tony Todd's final on screen appearance, shockingly gaunt, but still full of gravitas and an absolute legend.

[poster talk, briefly - the Final Destination series has had a skeleton-based focus for most of its poster life, with the first two films being the very late-90's-styled muddy blue and black, shadow-heavy group head shot which got real boring real fast. But Bloodlines' main poster, selling the whole "space needle" thing is vibrant reds and oranges popping off, real solid seller. My favourite though is the series of four posters selling the backyard barbecue and the dangers lurking there...just a real deviation from the norm of the series while also maintaining the skull motif]

---

I've really enjoyed my time watching Death work its designs out on screen. Regardless of how bad some of the acting or directing or scripting could be, there was always entertainment value to be had. It's super obvious that the third and fourth entries are the worst of the bunch, which means the rest are all great fun... four out of six is pretty good! Plus, Final Destination: Omen is apparently in production, this time a cruise ship disaster. Keep em coming I say.

Ranking Final Destination:

1. Final Destination 2
2. Final Destination
3. Final Destination:Bloodlines
4. Final Destination 5
5. Final Destination 3
6. The Final Destination

Series Minded: Trons

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop]

Tron (1982, d. Steven Lisberger - Disney+)
Tron: Legacy (2010, d. Josef Kosinski - Disney+/Blu-ray [my internet crapped out about halfway through so I had to switch formats, and let me say physical was so much better])
Tron: Ares (2025, d. Joachim Rønning - in theatre, IMAX 3-D)

Tron debuted in 1982, 43 years ago, as an extremely modest success, at least financially, making its budget back and a little extra for the Disney coffers. But it was not the nu-Star Wars smash that its corporate overlords had hoped. Toys went on discount, and the merchandising blitz and tie ins came and went. It’s only resounding wins were the piles of quarters dumped into its fairly radical (and still alluring) arcade cabinets.

Steven Lisberger’s idea for Tron would basically become the template of so many Pixar and Pixar-esque films: a what if x-inanimate objects or concepts had feelings and lives and culture and civilization. In Tron’s case, it’s a “what if programs were real?” The reality they exist in is called The Grid, and it was all conceived in a nascent computer age where 64 kilobytes (practically the size of this text document) was considered a lot of processing power. The general populace didn’t really understand computers on a technical level and were barely familiar with them on an operational level. It’s also like the screenwriters of Tron weren’t all that knowledgeable themselves. Either that or they liberated themselves from the restraints of that knowledge in order to make their techno-fantasy world, and frankly it’s a better film for it.

Tron, at its core, is about world building, with a story about a user getting trapped in the digital world as he seeks evidence of a corporate executive having stole his ideas for himself. The bad guy is Encom VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner, The Omen) whose master control program (MCP) started life as a chess game and evolved into a bloatware tyrant absorbing all useful programs and trashing the rest as it rampages its way through corporate and governmental systems. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Starman) created a half dozen very lucrative video games that Dillinger stole, passed off as his own, made the company some serious cash and got promoted and while Flynn fired. But Flynn has friends on the inside of Encom who help him get access to find the evidence he needs, only the MCP uses an experimental digitizing laser to zap Flynn into the digital world.

The titular Tron is, effectively, a security watchdog program, and Flynn needs Tron’s help if he’s going to both escape and bring down Dillinger as well as his tyrannical MCP.

Tron opens on the Grid with Flynn’s Clu avatar (also Jeff Bridges) driving a tank through the vector-graphics inspired world, communicating back and forth with Flynn as it seeks the evidence Flynn’s looking for but is overpowered by the MCP’s response team. Clu’s failure immediately takes us to the real world, where we see Dillinger interact with the MCP, concerned over yet another incursion, as well as introduce us to Flynn’s friends Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and Dr. Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan, Caddyshack). Alan is the creator of Tron, while Lori is the designer of the digitizing laser. There is a half-hearted love triangle (Lora is Flynn’s ex, and is currently dating Alan) that extends to the Grid when Flynn meets their avatars Tron and Yori.

The in-Grid world had three primary designers. Legendary French comics illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud worked sets and costumes, primarily, with neo-futurist designer Syd Mead creating the film’s vehicles, and digital commercial artist Peter Lloyd creating the landscapes. As much as the film is known for its extensive use of then cutting edge computer effects, much of it is trick-of-the-eye as painted backdrops and clever use of light and shadow as well as rotoscoping and a lot of manual processing was necessary to build the world. It was a strenuous and laborious process to create the look and feel of the Grid, shot in black and white, with up to ten layers of processing as well as merging with digital effects… it’s the only film of its kind like this and it never fails to impress. It’s so damn unique.

The film’s other trick-of-the-eye is in its use of sound to flesh out its world. There’s nothing else that sounds like Tron, effects wise. As the Skywalker Sound library has gotten pillaged over the years and the sound effects of Star Wars have bled into other films and television, the sounds of Tron remain uniquely its own. Rather than using the primitive 8-bit audio sounds from video games of the era, sound designer Frank Serafine built everything specifically for the film. 

Wendy Carlos, composer known for her pioneering digital compositions, most notably for her scores to A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, creates her own digital audio soundscape here. Like those Toto or Tangerine Dream scores of the fantasy and sci-fi films of the early 80’s, Carlos’s score feels so very coded to its time. Electronic music was still exceptionally primitive at this time, but even at this era, it was being blended into rock and pop to greater effect than as its own enjoyable compositions. But the mix of score with visuals as well as technical adventurousness now cements the film to its time and it feels so pointedly a snapshot of an era, a piece of history [something not lost on the makers of the new Tron: Ares, but also sadly not replicated].

Tron is simultaneously not a great movie and also a mindblowing one. It’s so awkward in its conception of programs as living beings, and the society of The Grid makes no sense, and their worship of users as deities seems especially cruel, but at the end of the day, when Jeff Bridges is your guide into an adventurous world of kick ass games like disc wars and lightcycles, it’s too enjoyable to really care that deeply about where it goes wrong.

The first resurrection of the Tron property came with "Tron 2.0" in 2003, a first-person-shooter videogame that was a sort of testbed for the appetite for new Tron content. It was modestly well received and modestly successful. Modesty would be an enduring theme for Tron.

2010, though, had designs on blowing the modesty right off of the perception of Tron. Josef Kosinski’s directorial debut would cost at least 170 million dollars to produce, and every damn penny of it is up on the screen. Kosinski, an architect by training, really wanted to reintroduce The Grid for a modern era. To do so he would design the living hell out of it. Though indebted to the first film, and holding true to the light-piping effect, and the bold colours, Kosinski and his team really leaned into the shadows and contrasts with this film, to make the colours pop even more, and boy do they pop.

The light cycles, the Recognizers and the tanks, the buildings, the costumes, the landscapes, they’re all taking those original designs and reimagining them with absolute love and care. The vision of Tron: Legacy is an utterly stunning one, and just may be the most eye-popping movie ever made. Not even joking.

The story of Legacy is a sweeping one, following Kevin Flynn’s kid, Sam (Garrett Hedlund, Pan) as he gets sucked into the grid on what he thinks is an accident, but turns out to be the work of a new Clu, designed by Flynn years earlier to create the perfect system. Unfortunately Clu became a tyrant, chasing the impossibility of perfection, with nothing to guide him. Kevin Flynn has been trapped in the grid for about 20 years, he missed Sam grow up, and he watched his other baby, the Grid, fall victim to authoritarian rule. The world inside the Grid is just as bad as the outside.

On top of the drama of Sam reuniting with his father, and Clu’s own “father issues” , the film seeds the story of the ISOs, a unique breed of program that sprang up organically, not programmed. New life. Flynn was on the cusp of introducing them to the world when Clu’s regime took over, and his jealousy and distrust of ISOs led to mass extermination. The only survivor is Quorra (Olivia Wide, House M.D.).

Flynn and Quorra must get Sam out of the Grid and into the real world before Clu does, as he’s breeding an army to head in to the real world  and make it the “perfect system” too.

Tron: Legacy, while certainly not the first of the “legasequels” definitely was at the forefront of the trend that ran wild in the 2010s and still has not abated. It’s also one of the best, if only because it’s “franchise restarting” designs didn’t yield a film that feels unresolved by the end of it. Sure, there were seeds for where a follow-up might go, and yes Cilian Murphy was cast in a small role as Ed Dillnger’s kid as foundation for a larger role later on, but the story of Tron: Legacy is self-contained much in the same way Tron was. It builds the world, tells its specific story and it ends with a basically happy ending.

Rewatching Tron: Legacy [which I seem to do often] is always transportive. It is a world I get sucked into and a world I am absolutely transfixed by. It’s not just visually attractive, it’s sexy, without ever intoning sex. It’s just pure dopamine fuel, eye candy so sweet you’ll have ocular diabetes afterwards. The sound design, once again, is on point, but unlike the first movie where even the footfalls announce themselves, here the sound design is so clearly second in line to the Daft Punk soundtrack.  The soundtrack is part of the otherworldliness of the Grid, it’s so well integrated into the film that it feels like it’s impossible to separate the sounds from the visuals… and yet, the soundtrack is such incredible listening on its own. But the reverse likely isn’t true…as pretty as the film is, it loses much without the score.

Bridges hit his academy award-winning elder statesman phase at this exact time, with his Crazy Heart Oscar win the year before and True Grit reteaming him with the Coen Brothers the same year, it’s a reminder of just how much he brings to any film he’s in. Nearly every line delivery (only exception: “Nice!”) is pure gold, carrying either the full weight of Bridges seniority, or his post Lebowski Dude-ness, sometimes both at once. The first Tron movie would be primarily a curious relic without his affable persona as its demi-heroic lead.  Garrett Hedlund got a bad rap at the time of being another of the “bland” young leads that Hollywood was trying to force out into the theatre. I don’t think Hedlund particularly pops, but he’s definitely got character, and his performance is full of subtlety.  He’s not the brash, big-talking, jokey hero… he plays a thrill-seeking rich kid with daddy issues as a very down-to-earth, likeable, believable guy..with daddy issues.  Olivia Wilde’s Quorra is maybe the only “born sexy yesterday” character that should be given a pass. The camera is definitely in love with her, but it’s never objectifying her. The camera looks at her like the way she looks at Sam, intrigued, captivated, curious and admiring. She is a skilled fighter, and she’s full of curiosity. She’s not dumb, but she’s only experienced life inside the Grid, and so her wanting to know more of the outside world where her mentor comes from is naturally her focal point with Sam. It’s too bad the character doesn’t have more of the weight of being the last of the ISO’s, the trauma of having watched her entire race get eradicated, sitting on her shoulders, but, to paraphrase a Bridges line, that would be, like, a total bummer man.

There are few movies I love watching more than Tron:Legacy, and there are few theatrical experiences that legitimately blew my mind like Tron:Legacy. For a long time I held out hope that Kosinski would return to Tron and deliver another all out audio-visual assault, but I knew once Top Gun: Maverick became the biggest movie of 2022 [not a legasequel, btw, as often erroneously ascribed] that we would not be getting Kosinski back on Tron unless he had an absolute passion to do so. He does not.

So Tron:Ares being announced not long after Top Gun: Maverick was a definite surprise, and one that I welcomed… with trepidation.

The first trailer whetted the appetite, as it presented light cycles and Recognizers moving through the real world (Vancouver) and seemed to maintain the same bold contrasts of Tron: Legacy. Those jet black blacks and those vibrant popping trails (mostly red in Ares’ case). The soundtrack, at first, was the tag on the end of the trailer. Nine Inch Nails. Yes, it’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the duo responsible for many of the best soundtracks of the past dozen years, but they’re doing it as fucking Nine Inch Nails! Getting the band back together! It would go on to be the major point of the film’s marketing, boldly proclaiming the NIN soundtrack early and often in commercials. So we know the producers at least did  one thing right.

But the flipside was the film stars Jared Leto.

Leto (House of Gucci) is a frustrating performer and as a human being, real suspect. Reports of his “method” antics on set, and reports of his real-world activities leaves nothing but a bad taste in one’s mouth. On screen, he can deliver performances that range from incredible to damn annoying. It’s a backhanded compliment from Fight Club – “I felt like destroying something beautiful” (referring to the scene where Ed Norton bashes Leto’s face in during a fight) – that’s hard to erase from one’s memory every time you see him.

So this film had a lot of goodwill thanks to Tron: Legacy and NIN, but also had an uphill battle.

The end result is kind of a draw.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, the less-than visionary director of the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (for now) and the Maleficent sequel from a script from David DiGilio (The Terminal List), the creative impetus is not anything other than “make content to see if the property is still viable”.

With Tron: Legacy, the film was accompanied by a blitz of toys, comics, video games, an animated prequel series, merchandizing tie-ins. It didn’t gross the near-billions that I think Disney was hoping for, but it was a modest success at 400 million globally, and it’s had staying power, in no small part thanks to the Light Cycle rides at Disney parks.  Tron is never going to be the cash cow that Disney wants all its properties to be, but if the property is treated with reverence and care, then the fanbase will keep coming along.

There’s no multimedia merchandizing blitz for Tron:Ares, and even less love and care shown for the property in the movie itself. The film plays out nothing like the adventurous world building of the prior two films, and instead opts for a 2000s-era action film centered around the good guys and bad guys chasing a maguffin. It’s not exactly paint-by-numbers, because the Tron elements force at least a few intriguing deviations, but where those deviations SHOULD have been the story of the film, it can’t seem to get back to its nonsense plot fast enough.

Tron: Ares opens much like Tron:Legacy does, with a voiceover from Bridges explaining the Grid, and then news highlights filling the audience in on what’s happened in the world of Encom in the years since. The point here being to close the door on any further adventures of Sam Flynn and Quorra while tepidly introducing both our human protagonist, Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Past Lives) co-CEO of Encom, and Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, X-Men: Apocalypse), the newest head of Dillinger Corp.  Both companies are in a race to bring the digital world to reality, and they’ve developed the 3-D printing technology to do it, to create living things and functional products, except the technology only lasts for 29 minutes before cohesiveness fatally breaks down. Eve wants to use the technology for the benefit of society and Dillinger wants to use it to make weapons.

Eve has discovered “the permanence code” from Flynn’s records and Dillinger wants it and will do anything to get it, including sending his Master Control Program, Ares (Leto), off Grid and into the real world to find Eve and take the code from her by force. The mission is successful, except Ares is discovering emotions and humanity in himself, and wants the permanence code for himself. The result is against programming, protecting Eve at all costs. So Dillinger sends the ruthless Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith, Bad Monkey) after them and she takes control of Dillinger Corp, prints out her own army, and is willing to decimate The City (Vancouver) to do so.

The plot seems like your standard direct-to-streaming sci-fi action movie premise, and lacks most of the Tron flavour. Our main “Grid” protagonist, Ares, is a nothingburger of a character, much like many a lead from said 2000’s-style action spectacles. Ares is just a curious program who has such a strong desire not to be a program anymore that he defies orders. He’s a weapon with a heart. He’s the Terminator in Terminator 2, with Athena being the T-1000. It’s largely been done before, and mostly better.

Leto is fine in the role, inoffensive, but there’s no real charm either. The character should be discovering himself, but there’s nothing behind the performance that says that’s what he’s doing, he just seems like a wide-eyed know-it-all who knows he doesn’t know it all (it’s really hard to power wash the smarm off of him). We’ve seen the little digital boy wants to be a real boy story so many times by now, it’s beyond cliche and nothing new is added to that cliche here. There is a scene where Ares encounters a legacy program of Flynn and we get even older than The Old Man Bridges, still full of more charm and life and unique energy than Leto 30 years his junior. 

Greta Lee does so much of the heavy lifting in this film. She has an innate sense of self-awareness that at once displays strength, smarts, confidence and vulnerability. She’s so alive, blood-pumping, playing against a character with barely a spark of life in him, whose veins bleed cold code. Jodi Turner-Smith needs to remain cold-cold-cold to the point of evil, which is always a flaw in these stories. They even state in the endgame that she was just fulfilling her programming, but at times it comes off as vengeful, emotional, and it’s too much for the character. I’m sure it’s what Turner was asked to do, and she does it well, I think it deserved more restraint. Peters as Dillnger is, again, an underbaked character. He’s so singularly focused on his objective that there’s no sense of calculation, just an idiot with a one-track mind. Gillian Anderson (American Gods) plays his mother, his advisor, the CEO he succeeded, and she’s trying to be the voice of reason and conscience and he ignores her. The conflicts between mother and son should be fascinating, but they’re like bargain basement Succession riffs and Peters falls short of being anything but a comic book villain.

The best moments in the film are two “Grid” sequences: the first in which Ares and Eve must escape Dillinger’s grid, and the second is Ares’ journey into the 1980’s Grid.  Both should have been full-act adventures on their own, instead they are mere sequences within the film that don’t amount to a whole hell of a lot. The ‘80’s Grid is largely a nostalgia tug that, sadly, has no reason to execute an action sequence (wouldn’t it have been more fun if Athena had infected the Grid and resurrected legacy protective programs and Ares had to find Tron to help him escape.... Or something?).  The journey into Dillinger’s Grid comes at the right time, right at the time where I was about to check out of the film for not really having the same vibe as the other films in the series. It just doesn’t last long enough and doesn’t explore what life in DIllinger’s militaristic Grid is really like.

The climax of the film, with Athena bringing a Recognizer into the real world (I don’t think that hangar bay was big enough to print that out completely…some assembly required?) is really the only “Tron-in-the-real-world” aspect that fully delivers on awe. The light cycles riding around Vancouver never quite feel tangibly part of their environment, and people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets, well, often feel like people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets. The Recognizer sequence seems to get, late in the film, how Tron-stuff works in the real world, but it’s still a sequence that feels like an action sequence and lacks real narrative thrust.

I watched the film in IMAX 3-D, and I have to say that 3-D technology, in IMAX at the very least, has advanced leaps and bounds since the last time I watched a 3-D movie. The depth of field seemed well orchestrated (especially where the light trails were involved) and the 3-D-ness of it all rarely called attention to itself. At the same time, I did have to wonder if some of the difficulty I was having with appreciating the action sequences was because of the 3-Dness, or if it was how Rønning shot the film. I didn’t have full clarity on the action sequences at all times. The fight choreography was also seriously underwhelming.

The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is huge. It delivers, mostly. Because it’s playing with aspect from Legacy and the original, there are obvious nods to the Carlos and Daft Punk scores (and Carolos and Daft Punk sounds outside of their Tron work) as well NIN seem to crib notable sounds from Radiohead, Bjork and Massive Attack which left me puzzled as to the intent of the nod (I wonder how many would actually notice). It’s a kick ass soundtrack that, unfortunately, isn’t in complete lock-step with the film, and at times overpowers the imagery on screen.

Tron: Ares is satisfactory (but not satisfying). Like the prior two films it has an ending, but offers a braindead post-script (two actually) that tease where it could go in the future, and we're never going to get there.  Outside of it’s soundtrack, is not daring in any way. It does not live up to the legacy its predecessors established, and never fully feels connected to its past despite all the references and desperate efforts to tangentially connect it (really, the “permanence code” should have been related to the ISOs, to Quorra, but I suspect Disney was hoping to cater to a new new audience more than servicing an existing fanbase…and fair enough). It’s true crime is just being generic in its storytelling and action sensibilities in having the real world and the digital one collide. There should be more meat on those bones.

Tron:Ares will, unfortunately, put the lid back on the box for at least another 15 years before Disney decides to dust it off again. We'll see then what kind of effort they're willing to put into this modest property.

[Poster talk... quickly, as I've been at this for long enough. The main Tron poster, of Tron and Yuri and the ascending data disc in the (original) laser-in-the-sky is one of the series' most iconic images, so it was obviously replicated for both Legacy and Ares. Legacy tries to sexify it up a bit with Quorra's hand on Sam Flynn (which doesn't happen in the film), while Ares spoils the whole meeting of Ares with Flynn in the 80's Grid. Not sure how I feel about that. I really don't like the Ares' poster representing this, though).

Other posters for OG Tron are pretty clunky.  For Legacy, there's a plethora of posters highlighting all the gorgeous visual elements of the film, the costuming and vehicles with a big focus on the light cycles. Ares likewise focuses on the light cycles heavily in its posters.  I like the poster that highlights that Legacy introduces a new vehicle (though Legacy did not have a plane or glider poster which is too bad). Ares only introduced one new vehicle, a sort of monster truck/snowplow hybrid, and it didn't make the posters.

I didn't talk about Legacy's "digital de-aging" here, but it's curious that there are many posters spotlighting Clu and his weird cgi-reconstruction of Bridges young face.

Ares' poster series delivers the usual spate of character posters...so boring. It also leans heavily into the red accent of the film, but ignores the Triangle motif that the film tries to establish early on, only to abandon by the end of the first act. There are some Leto posters and just as many Turner-Smith posters, so, to quote Flynn... Nice. There's also a heavy focus for Ares on Tron-in-the-real-world including a series of posters with a light cycle driving through or past famous international landmarks. Meh.]

 

Dragon Tattoos - a Lisbeth Salander ReWatch Post

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2009, Niels Arden Oplev (Flatliners) -- Amazon
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2011, David Fincher (The Killer) -- Amazon

From cozy to the bleak mysteries that the cold Scandinavian countries are known for...

I never wrote about either. The first was pre-blog and I haven't rewatched in recent memory, and the second... if Kent wrote about his cinema viewing in 2012, I would assumed I would have seen it at the same time, or not long after. Don't know why I didn't write about it.

Anywayz, rewatches as excuses to not entirely focus on a new movie. Most often rewatches are also excuses to not have to write, because not-writing requires an excuse instead of just making a choice, but when neither of the movies have been originally written about, then I any excuse would inexcusable.

Note, I just decided to do this as a double post, having only just finished watching the first. The second is yet to come.

...

All done.

Sometimes I sit down with a movie and almost immediately, I notice what I [want to get] get from movies, what I enjoy, what makes me wiggle into my seat, settling down for some good viewing. Its not something I can easily vocalize (it makes one wonder why you are writing about things, if you state you are not adept at "writing about things") but I know it when I see it.

The movies are based on Swedish novelist Stieg Larrson's books, which were published posthumously.

The movie opens with the end of the trial of journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nykvist, John Wick; Daniel Craig, Knives Out) for libel; he has lost. He had been pursuing a story of a corporate mogul with ties to arms sales when the juicy evidence he had unravelled, proven to have been false. He knows he was setup, provided easily fact-checked but too juicy to ignore details on the CEO, but he cannot prove it, and it has brought about his own downfall instead of the company head's. It is also damaging the reputation of the magazine he works for, the same magazine his girlfriend works at as editor. Their relationship is an affair. Blomkvist will be fined a sum of money that will empty his bank accounts, and he will spend six months in jail -- but he is given 3 months to get his affairs in order, and likely time to mount an appeal.

What I liked about this opening was about how much was packed into so very little time. There are so many details we are not led by the nose to see, we just get to collect them from what is presented. Blomkvist is more than a bit arrogant, having seen himself as an untouchable crusader, but he is also flawed -- sleeping with his married editor while still being friends with her husband is... odd. Mikael is not exactly a handsome man, an already divorced man, a bit aloof from even his family. Even at Xmas dinner, he steps away to take a phone call, much to their annoyance.

The call is from a handler of one of Sweden's most storied companies -- the Vanger corporation. Their family patriarch Henrik wants to hire Mikael to investigate a delicate matter, something he knows the journalist is good at. Its not quite a murder case, but it could be. In the 1960s, Henrik's favourite niece disappeared, and after a fruitless search, was assumed murdered & disposed of. But Henrik has been receiving a piece of art (pressed flowers) each birthday, something she did before she she disappeared. He believes her murderer is taunting him, and wants it sorted out before he becomes too old to do anything about it. He has vetted Blomkvist, using an investigation company the handler for Vanger has hired, one that makes use of a punk hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, Prometheus; Rooney Mara, Her).

Lisbeth's story is very counter culture. She's all black leather, tattooed, dyed black hair, piercings, pissed-off-at-the-world attitude and socially unrepentant. She has good reasons to be. She's a ward of the state, basically a young adult who the country believes needs supervision, because of a horrible horrible past. She had a case worker, someone she cared for and who had a lenient hand in dealing with her, but the man had a stroke and now she has been assigned someone new, someone who immediately bulldozes past all boundaries. This man is a horrible human being who works such cases to manipulate & abuse vulnerable young women.

The movie begins with just a Venn diagram connecting the two main characters, but eventually Mikael brings Lisbeth actively into the investigation. She's not exactly the trusting kind, but is intrigued why this very vanilla, and also much older, man is keen on her assisting. Primarily its because she has computer skills he doesn't, but also because Vanger's handler said she is one of the best researchers he has seen, and Mikael needs someone to do the researching grunt work, especially when he finds details that lead to a series of murders, of young women, going back to the 50s. The movie ends with the two very tied together, emotionally & sexually, and invested in each other.

The general story stays the same between the two movies. I haven't read the novel so I cannot say where one or the other may diverge away from, or closer to, the original source material, but in general I like the way the original Swedish movie plays out these details. The original just seems .. less polished, and I like that here. Fincher's always seems so detached, so unemotional, except when it decides to do Lisbeth dirty, by having her fall for Mikael, become vulnerable, and get her feelings tread upon. The story always brought the two together, sexually, but Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth is where the detachment should lie -- when she sleeps with Mikael, it is for sex, for release, and ... well, just a bit of manipulation on her part. She knows what older men want, and uses it. Rooney Mara's version seeks a further connection beyond the story in the movie, and has her feelings hurt.

Then again, both movies really do her dirty, but definitely by cutting close to details from the book. Lisbeth's case worker rapes her; multiple times, the next more violent than the last. I am sure the novel, which was called "Men Who Hate Women", was unflinching about the rapes, as it is said, Laarson used the books to work through an incident in his own life, where he did not step up and stop of the rape of a woman named Lisbeth, but its been more than a decade since we decided, we don't need to rape women fictionally to find some catharsis in our male lives. These scenes are brutal and hard to watch. And to be honest, don't contribute much to the story beyond giving more weight to how horrible Lisbeth's life is, how easy it is for men to abuse women, and how she takes care of these things herself. She doesn't need no fucking white knight, and in many ways, is definitely Mikael's saviour. Just the scenes where she responds to the violence, compared to him being winged by a gun shot, show the strength in her.

I do like these stories, but its a bit exhausting how the "uncover the serial killer" genre so desperately relies upon the abuse of young women. And the even more tiring "displaying of the kill" aspect just leaves me, especially in this world today where misogyny is having a rise to power again, a little despondent. 

Maybe that's why I need my cozy who-dunnits. Or maybe I just need to find a genre where people dying isn't key?

Why did one of the Fincher posters have to be so fucking sexual, with Daniel Craig standing behind Mara's nude body, an arm wrapped about? Fucking edgelord poster designers....