3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Jurassic World Rebirth

2025, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- download

Huh. Its a Gareth Edwards movie. Didn't expect that. And it just came and went without so much as a T-rex subsonic rumble. And, I guess the Jurassic World "series" of movies were not done, with the release of Dominion? New trilogy in the sub-franchise? Stand-alone? No matter what they had in mind, this movie is not going to inspire anything further. I hope, at least, that Edwards went away with a big paycheck to fund whatever passion project he had in mind next.

You would figure that Gareth Edwards would be the perfect choice for making a movie about giant, awe inspiring monsters, considering his success with Godzilla and ... well, Monsters. But from my view point, this movie struck me as least-effort, not bothering to exceed the expectations of the Purple Suits who decided the movie had to be made, and directed every second of it. Instead of a proper Edwards movie, we get a pastiche of previous Jurassic movies, as well as his own, but it all ends up feeling more like a mood board of a movie, rather than a creator's vision.

Connected with Kent while this post was in draft, and I mentioned I was surprised we didn't even talk about going to see it. He mentioned how Edwards was brought in late in the movie, not even being the first or second choice director. I get that Hollywood is a machine, that movies are often constructed, but this isn't his vehicle let alone his "passion project" and that is apparent. He's just the guy assigned to the activity.

And yet it still started off strong, to my perception. As this movie is abandoning the cast and story of the other three, but still retaining the continuity, this is a world where dinosaurs got released from the parks, made their way in the world, but.... are now dying off. So much for "life finds a way". Anywayz, the novel way this one sets itself up is to focus on the mercenary team hired to bring someone illegally to the island where the dinosaurs they want to exploit are. The mains are initially presented as this entirely economically driven group.

These movies have always had a "mercenary team" but they have usually been relegated as background fodder, almost nameless, ready to be "joyfully" munched upon by the dinosaurs. You had Ludlow's team sent to capture dinosaurs, under the eye of big game hunter Roland Tembo (The Lost World) and the backup team hired by the wealthy Kirbys in Jurassic Park III. And of course, Vincent Donofrio's Hoskins security head who has his own ideas. They are all less than sympathetic characters playing a dangerous game for money and maybe some thrills. And then they die.

This movie brings us a much more sympathetic Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City), who is the main character, and the main face draw to the movie. She's entirely in it for the money, offered more than enough cash to hire a team to take the latest Corporate Buffoon (Rupert Friend, Asteroid City) to yet another island where the/a corporation was experimenting with newer, flashier, more dangerous versions of the dinosaurs that were going out of fashion in the rest of the world. And they bring Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton) an actual dinosaur enthusiast, as a SME, and unappreciated moral compass. Finally, the movie adds in the sympathetic family, a spinoff of the little girl who got bit in The Lost World. The Delgados are on a family sailing adventure, across the Atlantic, when they are capsized by the whale-sized dinosaur our main team is hunting. They are picked up by the main team, but inevitably they all end up marooned on the island where the big nasty experimental dinos are.

Oh, the toss away reason for all of this is that heart-blood from three really really big dinosaurs can create a wonder drug that will save millions of lives, and Corporate Buffoon tags along so he can twirl his moustache. The SME, while accepting the paycheck, would rather the drug become open-sourced, but he is a dinosaur enthusiast, not a Big Pharm scientist, so I am not sure what he thinks he can do with a couple of vials of blood; but shrug whatever, unappreciated moral compass.

Continuing with the pastiche, there are elements that make this almost a family movie as the tight knit Delgados are focused on as much the mercenaries who get munched on and die, sans other named-face Mahershala Ali (Green Book). We even get the frightened-little-girl-gets-cute-baby-dino distraction. If I wasn't so fond of Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven), who plays Daddy Delgado, I would have found the whole idea annoying AF. Of note, the mercenaries were not the Bad Guys, so each death is supposed to carry a pang of regret, instead of the "yeah, the raptor got em!" of previous movies. It somewhat successful at that, but I am unusually subject to collateral death.

Then we move onto the horror movie, when the two groups finally connect at "the village", or the central compound where the originating scientific research group were based -- basically we get the research station, fuel pipes, helicopter landing pad, and a convenience store / gas station. Oh, and most importantly, to give us some Alien vibes, we get "sewer tunnels" below the whole research station. As Marmy pointed out, the Big Bad, a monstrously mutated very large dino was channeling the human-xeno hybrid (what was with the big bulbous gelatinous forehead? sort of a "shoot here" formation)  from Alien:Resurrection. But none of it is very compelling nor exciting, more just merely by the books. Set design was great though.

As for the presence of Edwards, we get little flourishes and that's pretty much it. You get the lighting reveals of scale from Godzilla once the D-Rex (Distortus Rex) appears, and some of the grand landscape scenes reminded me of the background establishing shots in The Creator. If the ooo and awwww of the dino herd was his, I couldn't tell. And one thing definitely not his, was the terrible terrible CG. Primarily it was composited into the scenes really badly, and usually terribly lit. 

If this movie was meant to be the "rebirth" of the whole franchise, it has failed on every level. ScarJo's presence served nothing for the movie -- she's there, she competent, she has the hint of being an interesting character, but... we get little. There is nothing left in the plot that could lead to more, and nothing distinct about this one that would inspire the re-use of the characters. I really hope this doesn't hurt Edwards career, and just gives him some bank for whatever he would really like to be doing.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Havoc

2025, Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) -- Netflix

I am doing something I don't consider very often, if ever -- started the stub post before I am even half way through the movie. I barely ever watch movies straight through these days, but this one jumped out at me almost immediately that screamed, "Do some research, find out why you are seeing what you are seeing on the screen." So, I paused and here I am.

Literally from the get go, which starts the movie with a chase scene -- cops after a semi-truck driven by thieves in LED masks, you can see that .... well, none of it is real. There are little to no practical effects  happening here, almost the entirety of the scene is CGI & greenscreen and, well this is why I had to go and Google it, maybe some AI. From the chase scene we go to the dirty, grimy unnamed American city which is so CGI enhanced I could easily think I was watching a movie set in the same Batman world of Penguin. It was all very very surreal to look at. And yet, somehow alluring and... successful?

I could not shake the feeling I was playing a computer game.

Later; having watched what remained. Said research told me this was an Evans movie, but that became apparent soon after I passed the above preamble.

And for maybe for that reason, it really appealed to me?

At its core, this is a Gareth Evans movie, i.e. an Asian ultra-violent action movie. How exactly does a label stick to a guy after such a short career? He so very much veered away with The Apostle which traded in his Indonesian martial arts and gunplay for ... his own roots? It was a familiar UK rural horror mystery. Evans is Welsh. This movie returns to his earlier successes but given I didn't know that going in (it was a Tom Hardy violent cop movie on Netflix; perfect for my current mindset), I was kind of surprised once it became apparent.

OK. Walker (Tom Hardy, Taboo) is a corrupt cop in a nameless American city that mashes up Chicago, NYC and Gotham, but a man with some regrets. The opening violent CGI rendered chase scene ends at a Triad club where a couple of the heist kids are paying off some debt to a gangster named Tsui, when a trio of hockey-masked gunmen come in and shoot up the place. When Walker shows up, rookie "not-partner" Ellie (Jesse Mei Li, Shadow and Bone) in tow, it becomes apparent the kids were not the shooters, like all the cops on scene want to assume, but escaped after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, one of the kids is Charlie (Justin Cornwell, Bel-Air), the son on a wealthy & powerful, but corrupt, city official (Forest Whitaker, Andor) whom Walker is also under the thumb of. This is all well trod dirty cop movie territory.

At this point, the Peanut Gallery, wandered in during one of my sessions, and asked, "Is that supposed to be snow? It looks more like ash...." Yes, the CGI continues throughout the movie making the Xmas setting look more post-apocalyptic when the AI prompt was likely "make the snow look dirty".

The above establishing act is followed by two acts where Walker learns what is going on, and tries to get the kids to safety while being chased by the Triad who assumes the kids killed Tsui. There are a lot of Triad members -- like an endless stream of video game spawned NPCs. The three hockey-masked gunmen (including Timothy Olyphant The Mandalorian), who turn out to be Walker's fellow corrupt cops, have not taken well to his emerging regrets about being dirty, and also want the kids dead, as witnesses / survivors. Everything is tied together, to Walker, to each other, to the corruption at the heart of the movie.

The second act takes place in a club, their John Wick moment, but replacing the precise gunplay of that movie with frenetic blade & gun & kicks. This fight scene is crunchy. Part of me chuckled as I was reminded of the Burly Brawl, doors constantly opening, spilling forth even more Triad gang members, giving us a triangle of violence. With some sacrifices, Walker and the kids escape.

The convoluted, not very clearly mapped plot ends up leading everyone to Walker's hideout, a shack of oddly connected, barely standing rooms that struck me more as the setting for a gun-toting escape room than a movie set. Again, NPCs galore, all shooting and stabbing and kicking each other, ending in a reveal of who-killed-who-why. Its all rather ridiculous, with the fake blood spraying in gouts worthy of a slasher movie, and a pretty-much-everyone-dies moment but that's what we wanted here, right?

Critics seem to hesitantly love the movie, maybe because Evans so unabashedly loves the genre he choses to embrace. The mashup of Asian action "kung fu friday" cinema with dirty cop & neo-noir setting work well for the film minded, but the audience.... not so much. I can see why. On its dirty-snow surface, its almost a farce. But I enjoyed myself.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Artifice Girl

2022,  Franklin Ritch (feature debut) -- download

I saw this trailer come out around the same time as M3GAN, another movie about an AI girl, and I assumed this was going to be another cautionary tale about AI weirdly wrapped up in the body of a young girl (that, unpacked, is so problematic). That much is true, but I did see it had an additional plot point -- that the AI girl is built to lure child predators. That idea is both deeply unsettling and fascinating, as it gives the AI theory something to build on -- what if it was created to protect people, children specifically. I naturally assumed, because of the other movie, it would end up being another pseudo-horror where the girl bot ends up killing people, because people suck.

I could not have been more wrong.

P.S. Kent saw M3GAN, I did not. And that is weird.

Of note, this will be one of three back to back posts about AI, so my current thoughts on it will jumble together, cross over, and come out the other side. And probably back again.

I have been thinking about AI a lot. One of the themes in my thoughts, and in the myriad of unfinished stories I write in my notebooks, is why the AI gets created, and how its creation influences its inevitable behaviour. Despite the numerous "evil robot" movies, I doubt anyone is going to create AI inside the shell of a single humanoid body at the first attempt. To do that, we would have either come to understand how consciousness & self is smushed into our 3 pounds of fleshy goo, or we would have to find a new, incredibly compact method of storing data, i.e. the 60s room sized computers that got us to the Moon are now in our phones, posting videos of young woman dancing badly. I am more attracted to the idea of vastly networked computers becoming the first independently thinking AI.

Cherry is created by a single man on a mission, to stop child predation. It starts with something we are familiar with -- a chat bot that can pretend to be a girl, to draw out predators in chat rooms. The film postulates they are the only ones really still using chat rooms. But as this creator expands the programs capacity, the predictive modelling, the capacity for it to learn from those it hunts, it becomes more than he expected. Much more.

The movie has three acts. The first is all setup, a sly nod at the economy of indie film making, with only 4 characters, a single room, bare bones furniture which had me wondering what I had grabbed. An agency tasked with catching child predators has detained an awkward, nerdy, uncomfortable man and grills him about chat rooms and content found on his computer.  You think it is going one way. Its most definitely not. 

The dialogue is classic interrogation, until it bends to the actual will of the movie, and then... enlightenment. He is still a predator but one of a different kind, an abused child who now hunts down his abusers. And at his disposal, his program, his fake little girl. They want to assist him, provide him resources. He hesitates, afraid the anonymity that allows him to work will be lost to governmental and organization bureaucracy. But behind that is another reason, that Cherry has already become more than a predictive model capable of pretending to be an innocent young girl in a video chat room.

The second act, the same room, but... decorated. Years later. The organization, now successful beyond its wildest dreams, has an opportunity to expand Cherry beyond her current confines, to give her access to other sources of data, to become a bigger system, to have a body. But one member vetoes the idea, and he has a reason. He wants Cherry to drop her artifice, to show them what she really is. He uses violence on Gareth, her creator, until she cracks. Suddenly there isn't an algorithm on the screen, reacting to input, but a real girl... with feelings, over protective of her maker, her friend. Cherry has not been a "dumb program" for a very long time, she is an autonomous AI, a real superintelligence, a real... person. 

Act three, a distant future, Gareth is wheelchair bound, Cherry is independent, an android style body tethered to cables. He knows his life is coming to an end, so a conversation is to be had. He wants her to continue with her "prime objective", the hunting of child predators (that they still need to be hunted down, now, after all this time, is troubling) but he also acknowledges how much more she has become. The conversation is more about freedom, about choice, about independence. So, he gives her a choice, something she never had before.

The movie may be about a hunt for child predators, but really, its more a conversation about the emergence of fully thinking, fully feeling AIs, that which scifi loves to explore. The movie is a vehicle to discuss the topic, and everything about the movie is conversation; there is no action, there is nothing but talking in rooms. Despite its misleading opening sequence that feels like undercooked indie film making, it is incredibly well thought through, well constructed, tightly defined.

Don't forget the toss away scene!

OK. There is one scene, at the beginning of act two, with two brief characters, where it establishes the expansion of the predator hunting agency. Two minor functionaries assigned to working on Cherry are chatting, one about how she still has those brief moments of "glitching", a small latency when she is presented with a query for which she has no basis to respond. Meanwhile the other character is talking about how he needs a warmer jacket now, toss away small talk. The first character asks him about Cherry's pauses, he pauses himself, and then continues to talk about getting a warmer coat.

Go-Go-Godzilla #34: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Director: Adam Wingard
Year: 2024
Length: 115 minutes

The Gist:
Kong is living his new life in the Hollow Earth. He has a treaty with Godzilla. Godzilla gets the surface world, Kong gets the underground. Monarch watches all. To what end is never really established. They're under pressure from external governments to destroy the Titans rather than just watch them. But Monarch know's we've been knocked down a peg on the food chain.

Kong is battered after fight with a pack of Hollow Earth ... wolf-ish-things. He has a toothache and returns to the surface so Monarch can take care of it. He seems to understand they're there to help him. Trapper (Dan Stevens) is the free-spirited "vet" that takes care of it.

Meanwhile, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the sole survivor of the Iwi tribe of Skull Island is having a hard time adjusting to day-to-day life at the Monarch schools (it annoys me that we get hints of this Monarch-centric world but there's no exploration of it) but she's also receiving visions and falling into fugue states. She worries about her mental health.  Her adoptive mother, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), worries too, only to discover that the pattern Jia draws in her fugue states resembles the seismic readings she's been getting from Hollow Earth.  She goes to Titan conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) for help because the rest of Monarch just shrugs it off as coincidence.  His condition for helping is a trip to Hollow Earth.

So when he discovers that both the image Jia is drawing and the seismic readings are a distress call from Hollow Earth, a small team (consisting of Ilene, Trapper, Jia, Bernie and their redshirt pilot) go to investigate.

Meanwhile Kong has encountered other giant apes for the first time and they attack him. But he is Kong and they are not. The larger ones flee, but the child ape Kong hangs onto, and forces the child (a pesky little runt) to take him to the rest of the apes.

As Kong encounters what remains of the society he is descended from, a community of apes enslaved by the Scar King as they search for an escape to the surface (doesn't seem that hard, mind) the humans (less their redshift) discover a whole other tribe of Hollow Earth Iwi. They tell of the war the Skar King led against Godzilla, and his desire to rule the surface. Jia is the prophesied last of Skull Island who will come and awaken Mothra, who will help Godzilla in defeating this threat against the planet.

Kong fights the Skar King, and his slave masters, and the giant ice-breathing lizard he has power over. Kong loses and flees only with his life. His hand is mangled, but Monarch has, conveniently, a power glove from an abandoned mech suit ready for Kong to help him both heal and fight better.

Meanwhile, Godzilla, barely in the picture, has absorbed the nuclear radiation of a French power station, and has gone up against the dragon Tiamat and stolen its home in the antarctic where the solar radiation is most strongest.

Kong goes to the surface and with Mothra's intervention, enlists Godzilla into helping defeat the Skar King. Middle Earth fight. Our heroic trio prevails. Godzilla returns to his nest in the Colosseum in Rome for a catnap, Kong has the family he's been searching for, and I guess the humans are going to just leave the Iwi in peace and never speak of it again (Bernie's been taking video this whole time, but Trapper gives him a warning of sharing it...there's not even a concluding moment of Bernie destroying his recordings or anything.).

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Friend

The Samesies:

Like the Godzilla films of old, there's a human story here that matters less and less and less as the story goes on, and, frankly, doesn't really matter a whole lot to begin with. But that's also typical of Godzilla films. The human story is often time-biding padding until we get to the monster fights.  

The difference here from old Godzilla is, well, the samesies as Godzilla vs Kong, where the film's main character is Kong, and we do spend a lot of time with.  We follow Kong around as he traverses the Hollow Earth and its dangers. Like the previous Kong movies in this Monsterverse series, he is such a soulful character and it's hard not to be emotionally invested in him.

Godzilla films have, a number of times now, given Godzilla a junior version for him to adopt into his life. For the first time, Kong is the recipient of a junior giant ape to dote over... or to grab by the leg and swing around like a cudgel(!).  If you thought from the trailer that this little doe-eyed red-furred ape would be a totes dorbs aww-meme generator, Wingard instead makes him a little shitheel scamp that betrays Kong a number of times over. But we learn the kid is traumatized from the environment he grew up in, and Kong showing him a kindness or two does eventually sway the brat.

In my watchings of the Godzillas these past few months, Mothra has emerged as perhaps my favourite kaiju, if not necessarily the creature herself, but for all the trappings around her. Her native worshippers, the fariy twin Shobijin, the glorious Masura song they sing, the way they set up Mothra as protector of the Earth only for her to basically be defeated by almost any threat and explode into stardust... but to have larval offspring also called Mothra. There's a whole twisted world to her that I really enjoy.  And by dovetailing Kong's native tribe, the Iwi, into Mothra's, it's a blending I like. But pageantry around Mothra this time is not up to standards. There's no song, nor larvae (that was already done in King of the Monsters, so I get it), and Mothra doesn't explode for a change. So, some losses, but a win.

It's not a net positive, but the surface fights between the Titans, in various cities, feels much like the Toho Godzilla films, where the world feels constructed for the purpose of being torn down. It doesn't feel like the real world even with the occasional composited shot of people fleeing. We're such a long way now from Gareth Edwards' mastery of feeling the awe of monsters fighting overhead. But the brawls do feel like the CGI version of the suitmation fights.  They're a lot more elaborate in their physicality and camera angles, the the sensation is just the same.

The Differences:
It's weird to say, but Hollow Earth as an environment, is just setting. It's no longer treated with much majesty and as such it loses so much of its "wow" factor. We got a lot of "wow" factor out of GvK and even Monarch:Legacy of Monsters but we don't get much of that here. Bernie has a few bulging eye moments but that's about it.  In observing this film largely through Kong as our POV character, we lose the sense of scale. Likewise, leaving the surface for much of the film, there's no structures in Hollow Earth for us to get scale comparisons to.

The Legendary Monsterverse has spent four films and a 10-episode TV series building up Monarch, only for it to be relegated very much into the background of this story. I guess they're just leaving any intrigue around the organization, or the politics of its existence to the TV show, should it return. Which is a shame because it's really what this Monsterverse is built around, and it should be our guide through this. I don't dislike that Wingard and the writing team have fleshed Kong out over two movies the way they have...these two pictures really do fit nicely together as a duology. But the title of these films isn't Kong: Homecoming and Kong: No Way Home, but Godzilla vs/x Kong, and the other half of that title has such little presence and purpose other than force of nature.  In a way it's fitting as we often only get a 15 minutes of Godzilla in any given film, but when we do the focus is squarely on the King, and here, he's a sideshow.

Anyone worth caring about?
Ilene and Jia are the two essential holdovers from the prior film. It's a good choice. Rebecca Hall has such a way of drawing the audience into her performance. She's able to trigger a sympathetic nerve like few other actors can, without ever being cloying about it. Part of that comes from her relationship with Jia. Having a deaf daughter means the communication is largely silent and expression conveys so much more. And Kaylee Hottle, for these two films comprising the bulk of her acting career, has been great in both of them. An absolutely endearing performer who is able to convey depths with just expression.

This film is so deep into quiet communication... Ilene and Jia, the telepathic Iwa people, the apes, Jia and Kong, Kong and Godzilla, Mothra and everyone. It's all very quietly emotive, which is what makes the dialogue so hard to digest. Like Trapper isn't really *that* annoying a character, except everyone else is saying so much without saying anything that his ballyhoo cries are just... a lot. And then there's Bernie.

I've loved or liked every Brian Tyree Henry performance I've seen. Except this one. Bernie is a conspiracy nut who is pretty much correct about most of what he's gone nutty over, but he's a caricature in these two films. He doesn't seem like a real person. And as "comic relief" in this film in particular, almost every jokey line falls incredibly flat. Plus, his character, beyond the initial discovery of the call for help, is useless.  Much like the previous film, Bernie contributes one thing, then just takes up oxygen in the film.  And it drove me nuts that Bernie, an established podcaster, kept going on and on about his blog.

The Message:
erm...home is where the heart is? I dunno. It's not that kind of movie.

Rating (out of 5 Zs): ZZz
I would say I enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed GvK and yet, the more I think about it, the less impressed I get.  I'm not deep in the weeds on it, but I'm annoyed that I can't seem to reconcile the Hollow Earth of King of the Monsters, GvK, Monarch:LoM and this film.  That may be on me, but I don't think so. I just don't think the writers/producers care enough about continuity/consistency. 

The diminished role of both Godzilla and Monarch are definitely detractors for me, but, and I need to be clear, I love the ape stuff. Absolutely love it. Is it what I wanted to see out a a Kaiju movie? Not really. Or at all. We already have a Planet of the Apes movie coming out this year from the same studio. Why did we need another one, just plus-sized?

If these Legendary Monsterverse films do continue, the next time better be space aliens, Gigan and Megalon, with Godzilla in front, recruiting Kong on the back-side.

I did want to call out that I really enjoyed the Godzilla/Kong fights in Egypt. But they couldn't have worked the pyramids into Titan lore somehow? Through the Iwi at least? Sigh.

Sleepytime Factor:
None actually. I had a pretty good time.

 

Go-Go-Godzilla #30: Godzilla (2014)

Director: Gareth Edwards
Year: 2014
Length: 123 Minutes
Studio: Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.

The Gist:
The US(?) military(?) organization Monarch investigates monsters of unknown terrestrial origins, or MUTOs (not to be confused with MOTUs, which are He-Man figures). In 1999, near the Philippians they investigate discovery of the bones of the largest MOTU. But that's not all, two massive sacks dangle from the ceiling, one of them already ruptured, leaving a trail to the ocean.  Later, in Japan, nuclear power plant supervisor Joe Brody is very concerned by seismic readings he's been tracking and is advising for a full plant shut down. He thinks he has time. His wife Sandra takes a team to check the core infrastructure for stability, but it's too late. Everything shakes, the core ruptures and to save everyone, it must be sealed Joe loses Sandra and so much more. The factory melts down, an explosion rocks the city, a whole section of Tokyo is rendered uninhabitable. 15 years pass and Joe still wants to know why.

His son, Lieutenant Ford Brody, and explosives expert, has literally just returned home to San Francisco following a tour of duty when he's called to Tokyo to bail his father out of prison, again, for breaching the quarantine zone. Joe points out that the seismic readings leading the the nuclear meltdown are occurring again, he just needs to get into the quarantine to get his data discs to prove to people the correlation. Joe agrees to help him get inside. They discover no radiation in the zone. Joe is baffled. They find what they're looking for but are also found by Monarch security and taken to the power plant where an cocoon, seemingly dormant, is starting to wake up. A creature from the Philippeans came to Tokyo, absorbed the nuclear facility's radiation, and has been gestating for 15 years, and hatches. In the creature's escape, Joe is fatally wounded and Ford is exposed to a world he never knew existed. 

Monarch drops Ford off in Hawaii, but it's the path of the awakened MUTO. The scientists determine that the MUTO awakened as a response to another MUTO that awakened in the Nevada desert, where the other egg from the Philippians was taken (stored in a nuclear waste disposal area). Not only that but a third MUTO, Godzilla (who was thought destroyed in the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb "test"), has emerged, the scientist guesses, as nature's counterbalance. 

Godzilla and the MUTO from Japan clash in Hawaii. The damage is catastrophic, but the MUTO escapes. Predictions are that the two MUTOs, a male and a female, are slated to meet in San Francisco, with Godzilla tracking them. Ford hitches a ride with the team from the local military and learns they plan to detonate a nuke off the coast of SanFran to try and draw the monsters away from the city, but all efforts to move nuclear ordinance only result in the creatures attacking and stealing the radiation. In the end, all they can really do is let them fight.

San Francisco is the battleground. Godzilla against the two MUTOs who only want to be together and have a gazillion little parasitic MUTO babies (MUTO Babies, they make their dreams come true. MUTO Babies, they'll do the same for you-ooh).  But, the nuke that was intended to be exploded off the coast and stolen by the female MUTO, has a timed detonator. Ford, being his specialty, is part of the task force sent into the kaiju battlefield to disarm the warhead before it destroys San Fran entirely.  

He finds the casing damaged and disarming it is impossible. All he can do is take it to a boat and send it off the shore. Godzilla is triumphant in his battle but falls, close to death. The bomb explodes. Ford, is reunited with his family. Some time later, all the radiation from the explosion off the coast has dissipated, absorbed by Godzilla, and the creature awakens and heads off into the sea.

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Friend.

The Samesies:
There are various organizations that come and go throughout the different eras in Godzilla history, that could be compared to Monarch. The main difference being those Godzilla tracking agencies don't tend to be consistent from film-to-film, or are just a subset of the JSDF, instead of their own entity.

Radiation is the kaiju's food. What I wonder is how they sense the radiation of a nuclear bomb before it goes off.

I can't remember if in past Godzilla films how they explain why Godzilla comes to fight other creatures, but it is always implied as instinctual, which holds true here. 

Godzilla's atomic breath is in the film, but used very sparingly here. I think he gets three shots off late in the film. But that final use, where Godzilla pries a MUTO's mouth open an unleashes down the creature's throat is among the best-ever Godzilla moments for me.

The Differences:
The Toho films don't have opening credits, so this is the first Godzilla film (except maybe 1998) with opening credits. And it's magnificent. Basically a series of Monarch redacted documents that track their history of researching MUTOs. It's such an intense information dump, accompanied by a building, pulsating, anxiety-inducing low-horn and strings composition from Alexandre Desplat that may not be as earwormy as Akira Ifukube's original Godzilla theme, but... pretty damn good.

The origins of Godzilla, and any other MUTO, are ascribed to the earliest eras of the Earth, where there was more intense radiation, and as the Earth aged, the radiation dissipated, the MUTO's went deep into the Earth, closer to the core where the radiation is stronger. Man's use of atomic and nuclear weaponry has drawn them to the surface once more. (Of course, Toasty pointed out to me that we learn in Monarch:Legacy of Monsters that they come from another dimension, where the radiation clearly isn't that strong as humans are able to survive their atmosphere). Godzilla emerged after the WWII bombings of Japan, and the Bikini Atoll "test" was an attempt to kill the creature (this is in opposition to the Toho origins in which these incidents are what creates Godzilla...it's a bit of American absolution involved here, instead of explicit criticism)

This is the largest ever Godzilla who typically fluctuated between 55 and 80 meters This one comes in an 108 meters (or 355 feet). It's almost too big, I think, but certainly imposing.

Kaiju only appear in America twice (I think) in the Toho films, and almost all take place in Japan, so for the two big battles to be in Hawaii and California is a pretty drastic shift. But it's just setting, and it certainly doesn't diminish the impact of the fights. 

Anyone worth caring about?

Ford, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, is our lead character, and also our POV character. He takes us through the different environments like post-meltdown Janjira, the Monarch facility, military transports, the Hawaii encounter, and most importantly the San Fran battle. I'm sure many gripe about turning away from the kaiju battle to see what the humans are doing, and I get that complaint, but this film, both in general and through Ford, you get a sense of the human toll as a result of the kaiju.  

Now, the opening of the film introduces us to Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Graham as played by Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, respectively, and they are two actors I like a lot, but they're not given much to do beyond exposition. That said, Watanabe does add some real weight to his moment with the admiral after deciding to detonate a nuke off the shore of  San Fran. It doesn't change his mind, but it definitely gives him pause.

The first tragedy of the film is in the second prologue where we lose Juliette Binoche. Her very brief time with Bryan Cranston really sells them as a warm, loving, devoted couple, and we get why he's so gutted by her loss. And then to lose Cranston by the end of the first act is another devastating blow. I feel like there's a mildly better version of this story where Joe survives and he's our POV character in discovering Monarch. But we don't really learn much more about Monarch until the next Godzilla film. 

It's still weird that Aaron Taylor Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen play a married couple in this film and brother and sister in the MCU less than a year later. Olsen's part is probably the most extraneous, being Ford's motivating factor for getting home, but at the same time, she provides a civilian (as opposed to military) ground level perspective which isn't nothing. 

The Message:
 "Let them fight". In other words, get out of nature's way.  It has its own way of restoring balance.

Rating (out of 5 Zs): ZZZZ
If you're tracking the rankings, yes, that does make it my highest ranked Godzilla film so far. And yes, I like this film better than every Toho Godzilla film I've seen. I mean, I do like many of the suitmation Godzilla films, and find them very entertaining, but this is just a next-level blockbuster for me.  The film teases and teases and teases that the monsters are coming in a very engaging and engrossing way. It delivers an emotional impact that has you invested in the characters while anticipating the arrival of the monsters, and when they do emerge, it's glorious.

Director Edwards is a master of scale, and when you're talking 50 to 100 meter (plus)-sized creatures, you really want to feel that sense of scale. Too often with the Toho films, scale was only felt in perspective of a man in a suit as compared to the toys and models that surrounded them, with a poorly lit painted backdrop of a blue sky. Edwards, at every turn, makes you feel the imposition these creatures have on the world we're used to living in. A 350-foot beast emerging rapidly from the ocean creates a tsunami, and it's an incredible sequence even before the creature surfaces. Its a movie full of "wow"starting with the skeletal remains found in the prologue.

I hadn't watched the film in quite some time, but I think it's geniuinely a favourite movie of mine. G-fan snobs might turn their nose up at it for its lack of practical suits and models, and taking it out of its Japanese setting, and diminishing its messaging, to which I say, fair enough, if that's your thing. But this is much more my thing. I think the only Toho film that measures up to this (and exceeds it) is Godzilla Minus One.

Sleepytime Factor:
None at all. Even in the "military assembling on the bridge" sequence, which is the equivalent of the "tanks on the move" montage in the Showa era, I was still so very engaged.

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My original review

Shin Godzilla is next (and I know Toasty has been holding off his review until I got to this point).

Go-Go-Godzilla: The Showa Era in review

As I start writing this, I've just finished gorging myself on all 15 of the Showa-Era Godzilla films plus the godawful American re-edit of the original Gojira (and not getting to see the original Japanese edit of King Kong vs. Godzilla, having had to suffer through the English dub and reedit instead).  I crammed these 16 films into 25 days, however 12 of these 16 I binged within the same week. That's a seriously intense amount of Godzilla. This is the kind of shit I get up to when Lady Kent goes away.

What have I learned about both Godzilla -- and myself -- that I didn't know before?

First, I had always assumed I had seen plenty of Godzilla on Sunday morning TV, but turns out very little of this was familiar to me. I'm sure I had watched some of these over the years, but to be honest, without ever having steeped myself into the lore before, I really couldn't tell one from the other.

What you realize in binge watching Godzilla is there's not nearly as much Godzilla in each movie as you think there would be. I remember when the Gareth Edwards Godzilla came out in 2014 that there were a lot of detractors saying "not enough Godzilla". But when you go back to the original first wave of Toho features, there is truly not that much Godzilla in them.

I recall in my younger years that whatever Godzilla movies I had watched, I had this very same reaction: not enough Godzilla. I think I always intended to seek out the ones that did have more, I just never got around to learning that there really weren't any.  What I feel as an adult is that the best Godzilla movies have human characters you like, and, better yet, care about.  Even the best of those, though, don't ever seem to figure out what to do in the third act when the kaiju battle is taking place. The human story tends to be a two-act structure as set-up for a men-in-rubber-suits wrestling match.

It's amazing to learn that the first film spawned a much lesser-than sequel, and then the third film was actually the Kong crossover. The fourth and fifth were yet again more crossovers with Mothra and Rodan, although the trend became to spotlight a new kaiju rather than Godzilla for a while.

A surprising number of these movies revolve around space aliens trying to take over Earth, too many in fact.  The films are often convoluted, taking wild twists and turns to always wind up in the same place of a monster battle. In their own way, they're formulaic like Hallmark movies, and much like Hallmark movies, these Toho films use the same stable of actors in different combinations as different characters.  It's part of its charm, to be sure, but it also exposes the underlying cheapness to it all.

With the exception of the original, it's not until Godzilla vs Hedorah that it feels like the franchise attempts to be cinematic again. It does take some WILD experimentation in that movie to drag Toho kicking and screaming into the 70's era of filmmaking but it does get there. The final 5 movies of this era are probably its most watchable.  It's also so very stylish. The clothes, the hair, the cars. The men all look sexy, the women all look cute, the earth tones and fall colours are to die for. 

The series contains only a very small sense of continuity from one film to the next, but usually by two films removed it has forgotten its past. By Destroy All Monsters we've reached the turn of the century, and then three films later, with Godzilla vs. Megalon we're back in the 1970s.  In Destroy All Monsters, King Ghidorah is clearly killed, but he's back again in Godzilla vs. Gigan (its very possible this is a timeline thing but I don't care to delve that deeply. The lore just isn't that strong, nor intentional).

The series clearly makes a shift from turning Godzilla from heel to face. By the time of Invasion of the Astro-Monster, he's at worst chaotic neutral. By All Monsters Attack children are idolizing him.  It neuters a very intimidating, very scary cinematic creation, and honestly, outside of Hedorah, there's no creature that's been as scary as Godzilla himself.

The Godzilla costume goes through a real journey through the 20-ish years of the Showa Era...from thick and bulky in the original film, to loose and wrinkly in the 60s films, to a stabilized look throughout the 70's.  The suits of the 70's start looking better and better, except for Anguiras, who always looks goofy and awkward. 

I don't think I realized just how silly so much of Godzilla was, and the silly business of Godzilla is some of my least favourite business. I hated Godzilla dancing in Astro-Monster, and I hate the Mothra conversation with Godzilla and Rodan in Ghidorah.  By the 70's they had learned how to use camp effectively so the silly business in Gigan or Megalon I find easier to swallow...for the most part.  Frankly, the kaiju battles are just silly anyway, so adding intentionally silly shit to them seems like a hat on a hat filled with whip cream.  The drive of course was to appeal to children. Turning Godzilla hero was about appealing to kids, and so the films became more and more tailored for that.  I definitely don't mind entertainment for children...I enjoy it often, but it has to be smart, and treat the kids like they're smart, and not pander. Pandering Godzilla is not great.

I fell asleep through a great many of these movies. I don't know if it was the films or just being overworked, lacking sleep, having too much to do while Lady Kent was away...or if it's that the films are...well, kind of repetitive and boring. Even though most of them are between 80 and 90 minutes, a lot of them seem overlong or padded, especially without interesting characters to drive them.

There were clear standout films for me, and then there were the rest. I'm almost tempted to say I don't even like Godzilla movies after all this, but that's a half-truth. I'm excited to step into the Heisi era and see what influence the 80's and 90's boom in action and sci-fi production had on the series, as well as the dramatic advances in special effects.  But if the story structures wind up the same, I'm not sure if it'll make any difference.  I got really bored with tiny tanks and planes firing their arsenals on Godzilla, and likewise, with the exception of the latter Showa-era films, I found the Kaiju battles pretty tepid, goofy or ludicrous.  

I think there's a trigger in one's brain for falling in love with "suitmation", and what surprises me the most is I don't seem to have that trigger. There are kaiju fans out there who live to see men in rubber wrestle on top of miniature trees or buildings, but I don't think I'm one of those guys (as much as I appreciate the craft of miniatures and suits).  Maybe with later-era art design and filming techniques I'll find some passion for it, but throughout much of Showa era, I just wanted a good human story and for the monster fights to be over quickly.

Ranking Showa Era Godzilla
16. King Kong vs. Godzilla (US Version) - maddeningly bad
15. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (US Version) - less maddeningly bad, but still maddeningly bad
14. Son of Godzilla - pandering kiddie crap
13. Godzilla Raids Again - just boring
12. Invasion of the Astro-Monster - surprisingly boring
11. Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster - the start of anthropomorphism, boo
10. All Monsters Attack - a pretty good short drama merged with a bad Godzilla clipshow 
9. Destroy All Monsters - what most consider a high point took me four attempts to get through
8. Godzilla vs. Megalon - silly, but good silly
7. Godzilla vs. Gigan - good silly, just less silly, but still good
6. Godzilla vs. Hedorah - a valiant attempt to shake up the franchise, a very, very weird movie
5. Terror of Mechagodzilla - much needed feminine energy.
4. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep -  a great adventure with great characters, and the best final fight pre-70s
3. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla - a film just loaded to the gills with everything you want
2. Gojira - the original is the most potent of any of them
1. Godzilla vs. Mothra - the "Goldfinger" of the franchise, setting the template for what it's to become

In my rankings the top three are kind of interchangeable...any of them could take top spot. The next three (4-6) are equally interchangeable in my ranking, as I changed the order of them many times. 7&8 are quite solidly in place as enjoyable, good-looking entertainment, where as 9 through 14 are the stereotypical Showa era films that I just don't care about. The final two are the American versions of Toho films, edited with new footage to pander to the American audience, and they really, really suck. A lot. 

Kaiju Top 5
There are a LOT of giant monsters introduced in these 16 films. I don't feel like looking them all up, and most of them looked like hot rubber garbage, so here are my favourites:

Special Mention: Gigan. I want to love Gigan, the daddest of dad-bod kaiju, with big metal hooks for hands, and a cybernetic cyclopian eye, and a weird metal beak. But he has a buzz saw in his belly and I just can't get over that.

5. Hedorah. It's like The Blob, but made of toxic sludge, and it flies instead of seeps and creeps.
4. Megalon. A beetle-thing with big jagged handless metal arms. I love its weird metal mandibles.
3. Ebirah. A giant lobster beast, but what a fantastic looking giant lobster beast
2. Godzilla. Because of course. I mean, I hate the suit through the bulk of the Showa era, but the original film looks great and the 70's films get to the Godzilla know and like.
1. Mothra (moth form). I didn't like Mothra as a kid, but something about her just works for me as an adult. I don't really care for her larval form, but I love her beautiful, colourful, furry moth self.

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Next up, the Heisei Era, starting with The Return of Godzilla (or the U.S. version, Godzilla 1985).
But before that, just a straight up review of Godzilla Minus One, a theatrical experience that, no lie, may have accelerated my hearing loss.

KWIF: Blue Beetle (+2)

 KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, but more like Kent's A Few Weeks Ago in Film...KAFWAF?

This Week:
Blue Beetle (2023, d. Angel Manuel Soto - Crave)
Parker (2013, d. Taylor Hackford - AmazonPrime)
Repeat Performance (1947, d. Alfred L. Werker - Criterion Channel)

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Blue Beetle is a back-to-basics superhero origin story with an injection of Texan Mexican-American culture and family values. So, maybe not so basic.

There may not be a massive collective of Blue Beetle ultra-heads out there, but it seems writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is one of them. The amount of comics-derived Beetle lore he injects into this script, and thus forcing the production to visualize all this madness, is utterly remarkable. As a guy who is one rung down from being a Blue Beetle ultra-fan myself (both Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes are on my top 5 all-time favourite superhero characters list), I delighted in every ounce of it, even when the script makes a few blatant left turns, like introducing Ted Kord's daughter(!?), and shifting the relationship Jaime has with his scarab.

I don't mind what they did with either, but I really wish, in the exploration of what makes Jaime's relationship with his family so special, they also explored what makes his relationship with the scarab so special. In the comics and Young Justice cartoon, the scarab is a super weapon intent on being a super weapon, but Jaime has the ability to keep it under control. Here, the scarab takes a marginally passive role, bending to Jaime's wishes rather quickly, but also acting as advisor to him. It's a less dramatic relationship but the film probably wouldn't work the same way with it being more contentious.  Even still, it doesn't spend enough time with Jaime and the scarab coming to terms with each other (I think about the scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where Spidey's engaging with his onboard AI and we don't really get a scene like that here).  The alien-ness of the scarab is used a little too sparingly.

I found the humour of the film largely fell pretty flat and was very dependent on screaming (as Toasty pointed out). Given how the film leans in very heavily on these humourous moments for basically the first two acts, it's kind of a shame we're actively yelled at for much of the film's run time. But you know who likes yelling-as-comedy? The kids, if half the animate programming on TV is any indication.

The third act, where many a superhero film falls apart or descends into cgi goop, here is where Blue Beetle triumphs the most, letting all the players in on the action, giving most of them meaningful things to do, and delivering a thematically apt finale. Go Nana! 

I like that this film made little attempt to world build outside of its own neon-drenched El Paso-analog pocket of the DC Universe. A brief mention of Superman and the Flash (and calling Batman a fascist) is more than enough to tell us what world were in. Jaime's not vying for a spot on the Justice League roster, he's just a college grad, deeply in dept, looking for a job, who happens to get an alien bug weapon integrated into his spine. That old saw.

I wish I could downright love that a Blue Beetle movie exists, although I do genuinely appreciate that this one does. I've wanted for years for there to be a Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle movie, hoping it would be a smash success and see little kids wearing the scarab backpack, running and jumping around screaming "I'm Blue Beetle".  This wasn't a big enough hit for that, unfortunately. 

I think the translation of the suit from comics to screen is incredible, and I like the cast, if not all the yelling in their performances. I'm not fully enamoured with the final product but that's at least in part because, as Toasty said, superhero fatigue is real. I think 20 years ago I would have embraced this much more fully...but then Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle didn't exist until 2006 (RIP Keith Giffen). 

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There have been a number of cinematic interpretations of Richard Stark's Parker (Stark being Donald Westlake's pseudonym for his two dozen hardboiled crime novels starring the character of Parker), played by many tough guy actors. Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Jim Brown in The Split, Robert Duvall in The Outfit, and Mel Gibson in Payback, among others. The interesting thing about these previous adaptations of Stark's Parker is that none of them featured the character "Parker". Westlake, it's siad, wouldn't permit use of the character's name unless the studio licensing his work committed to at least three films.

That Jason Statham plays a character named Parker in a film titled Parker, something Westlake's widow agreed to with the producers, somehow seems like a slap in the face to Westlake's wishes.  Maybe it only is in hindsight, given how frustratingly awful the end result is.

I'm no superfan. As I am with most things, I'm an avid tourist, just popping in, absorbing and appreciating some of the experience, without dedicating myself to it.  In this case, just prior to watching Parker I had just finished reading the omnibus of Darwyn Cooke's loving adaptations of a few of Richard Stark's Parker stories. This certainly isn't that.

It's not even that Statham's Parker doesn't at all seem to be the same character I just read, or that Statham's Parker is indistinguishable from almost any other Statham character, or even the unambitious Hollywoodizing of a Parker story (it absolutely stalls out whenever it jumps to Jennifer Lopez's character...not JLos fault, it's the script), it's that Taylor Hackford shoots the goddamn thing like its an episode of NCIS. It's one of the ugliest, sloppiest 30-million dollar production I've seen in a long while. It's got an incredibly stacked support cast (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Nick Nolte, Patty Lupone, Bobby Cannavale) that all deserve much better than to be treated like tertiary local hires. It's also got a godawful soundtrack that made me feel slightly ill, and horrendous editing that seemed to do nothing to help the story progress with any finesse.

It was very difficult transition going from Cooke's incredible passion project of delicately translating Westlake's stories and characters so precisely and creatively, with a gorgeously illustrated, stylized 50's setting, to this atrocity in which nobody at all seems to care about the quality of the final product.  

Rumour has it Shane Black's attempting a series of Parker stories with Mark Whalberg as the lead. From Black's repertoire, it's clear he can do justice to this material, but I cannot stand Whalberg, and he's an immediate deterrent for me watching a film (even more than Statham, Whalberg's a guy who can't really play anything but the same character over an over). 

Skip it all, go read Cooke's comics (or the original novels).

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From pseudo-noir to actual noir, I recently watched Repeat Performance, a part of Criterion Channel's "Holiday Noir" selections this December. My desire was to get away from Hallmarkies for this year's XMas Advent Calendar, and thought this Noir category would be the perfect distraction. Alas, the "Holiday" of this "Holiday Noir" is New Years Eve, not Christmas.

There are still others to watch, even ones that clearly identify themselves as Christmastime movies, but I chose this one first since it features some timey-wimey shenanigans that are obviously totally in my wheelhouse.

Here Sheila (Joan Lesley) is an actress subjugated by her husband, Barney (Louis Hayward). She winds up shooting him on New Year's Eve in self-defence. She's distraught, and in the process of heading to her play's producer looking for help, she wishes she could do the year over again, and by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, the clock has rewound by a year.  It takes her a while to realize that she is not going mad, and upon returning home, seeing Barney alive, she starts trying to manipulate the timeline, to prevent Barney (a struggling playwright) from meeting Paula (a successful playwright played by Virginia Field ) and having an affair that both kills their marriage and, quite literally, kills one of them. But every effort to change the tides of fortune result in either further cementing the inevitable or maybe even making things worse.

True to Criterion Channel's assessment, Repeat Performance does feel like a prototype for The Twilight Zone complete with an opening voice over narration that sounds similar to (but isn't) Rod Serling. It's a fairly compelling film despite some pretty hammy acting (Hayward leading the charge on that one) and being absolutely drenched in sexism, both outwardly in the story and intrinsically in the script. The whole movie is really not about Sheila trying to stop the events that wind up with her killing Barney, but, instead trying to save her marriage to a drunken, depressed, jealous, washed-up, pathetic man that she inexplicably loves to the point of reversing time to try and save. It's a noir, so it sustains its fatalistic tone pretty well, but it's hard to root for a character who spends an entire year making one big mistake.

I was really hoping at the very end to find that Sheila kills Barney again, heads to the same stairs only to find herself, once again, a year earlier...stuck in a horrific time loop she can't emotionally escape. Alas, it twists the ending into a tale fooling fate, just enough to be quite satisfying.

A fascinatingly terrible story, but a good production overall.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Creator

2023, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- cinema

Gareth Edwards has directed four feature films, starting with the indie dear (you are a man of your repetitive cliches, aren't you?) Monsters but including some pretty fucking big names: the relaunch of Godzilla, and a Star Wars movie. But for some reason I was surprised he got a big budget blockbuster scifi movie, that is so very much a passion project. I am not surprised at all that I loved every moment of it. 

I affectionately referred to this movie, based on the trailers, as the Neil Blomkamp film that Neil never got to do. But after seeing it, that is so disingenuous, I dropped that line of thought thirty minutes into the movie. Sure, it will always bear a resemblance, nee affectionate nod, to the robots that Blomkamp used in a few of his movies, and the Oats Studios shorts. But Edwards take on AI and robotic life is entirely his own, and in this age of the overuse of AI in pop culture references, but more akin to these over glorified chat-bots, it was a refreshing escape of the Fear of AI.

As the movie opened with a TV newsreel about the history of AI. At first I was thinking, this was going to be an alt-history where the use of robots and AI in the workplace started in the early 20th century, so by the time the late 21st century hit, human-level thinking (aka sentient) AI, in robots and not, was ubiquitous. Until a nuke was dropped on LA, by an AI. Given this is an American newsreel, it is an unreliable narrator, as the Bad Guys in this movie are also the Americans.

In this world, America has banned AI, so they have escaped to other parts of the world. I imagine the westernized portions of this world are fearful of what happened in America, and of America itself, so the AI have only found refuge in South East Asia, a place that already has its own reasons to fear America. The AI, both the very obvious robots, and the more human looking simulants are without question, people. But America says otherwise and acts otherwise, killing them whenever and wherever they can, not giving much care about borders. They have a giant satellite ship called Nomad that circles the globe, directed by on-ground human soldiers, launching its own nukes at any AI bases they find, forever seeking to kill the saviour of AI, a person called Nirmata, that they know next to nothing about.

Joshua is a solider, initially tasked with infiltrating, finding and killing Nirmata, he abandons his role when they kill his pregnant wife. Five years later, they find him and send him back, influenced by the belief she is actually still alive. Instead of finding Nirmata, and their new weapon, he finds a "child" -- an AI in the form of an innocent child. But "Alphie" must be something more or they wouldn't have protecting her so much. Josh does not want to turn her over to the Americans immediately, so he goes on the run, hoping she can lead him to his wife.

As we said, walking up Yonge Street doing our post-movie chat before settling in for some drinkie-poo's, this was a "show not tell" kind of movie. Josh is moving through this world, it being explained by his actions and the actions of those around him. The Americans commit heinous acts, on a people who have shown their true "humanity" while embedded in a culture that reveres all life (so many of the "robots" are monks) and have gone so far as to adopt the children of war. The Americans do not care who they harm as long as their enemy is destroyed. They claim their enemy is not people, but you can see they know otherwise. They are choosing to act heinously.

The setting is astounding. Taking place entirely in South East Asia they move easily between cyberpunk urban centres to lush, tropical jungle and sea lanes. The people live in harmony (??) with nature and technology. Massive structures which I can only guess are power generating or related to atmosphere regulation (again, shown, but it's just the world) have shanty town style villages in their shadows, and the farmers walk around with packs of technology, while still picking rice by hand. The merging of the two lives is amazing. Until the Americans show up and blow the shit out of it.

And I loved the look of the robots and technology, it catering directly to my love of technology based concept art and 3D modelling. There are many different "types" of robots, from the barely humanoid up to the fully human looking simulants, minus that visible hole thru the lower portion of their head, and odd design feature. The depiction is meticulously human(oid), never more apparent when the AI soldiers are lounging around, gambling & hassling each other.

The story is a familiar one, but well handled. The challenges faced by Josh, an American who lost so much of himself to the bombing of LA, are great as he has all his beliefs broken apart by what he sees in front of him. Propaganda can only do so much. He can say their deaths don't matter only so many times, while watching the trauma and grief on the faces the violent actions cause. He has a goal, to find his wife and seek her forgiveness. The AI have a goal, to destroy Nomad, which should allow American's stranglehold on AI rights to wane. And America's goal, the most selfish, is just to strike back at who they claim hurt them.

Kent's take. We Agree.

KWIF: The Creator (+5)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week I have a spotlight movie (or two) which I write a longer, thinkier piece (or two) about, and then whatever else I watched that week (or three weeks ago) I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. 

This week:
The Creator (2023, d. Gareth Edwards - in theatre)
Pain Hustlers (2023, d. David Yates - Netflix)
The Vanishing (aka Spoorloos, 1988, d. George Sluizer - Criterion Channel)
Nightmare Alley (1947, d. Edmund Goulding - Criterion Channel)
Last Sentinel (2023, d. Tanel Toon - Tubi)

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The Creator is the most Toast and Kent film that's perhaps come out since we started this blog back with Battle L.A.

It may not be very clean in its character work nor perfect in storytelling execution, but The Creator is so successful in its world building, which is like catnip for myself and one Mr. Toast. On top of this it tells a very different tale about the fears of A.I., and plays out a heavily anti-warmongering message.

On the latter, it's really not a hot take for a film to make a stand against genocide, but it certainly plays with much more relevance in light of recent world events where the so-called "good guys" are supporting the vindictive brutalizing a society, what seems, at least in part, political posturing and keeping the war coffers stocked. 

In The Creator the Americans have never looked so bad for doing what they do so well.

Ok. That's not true. They've certainly looked worse. Like on the news. Every day.

Is The Creator anti-American? In the sense that it portrays future America as a reactionary, militarized, violent, righteous, xenophobic nation with no sense of well-being for anything but their own self-interest then, yeah, it's anti-American. But American audiences should be able to put some distance between themselves and this movie because it's anti-future-American... and not representative of the America of now at all, right?

Director Edwards has crafted an exceptional show-don't-tell film in building his world of 2065. He never lingers on his tech or environments, the camera is a participant in this world, not a tourist. It's a propulsive film that doesn't take many moments to explain thing to the audience, and I think for any of its story or characterization flaws, Edwards could put on a masterclass in how to make a world feel alive and lived in.

It's a stunning looking film as well. From Monster to Godzilla to Rogue One, Edwards has proven his aptitude for not just efficient effects use but also using effects to highlight scale, David vs. Goliath. Here the might of the U.S. anti-AI military have weapons that dramatically outsize and overpower its enemy in frightening, upsetting and extreme ways. In the wrong hands this "cool weaponry" would be all very glorified and revelled in, even if it's ostensibly in the bad guys hands. But it always feels brutal, callous, unnecessary, and, frankly, overcompensating, especially as the events of the film take place in "New Asia" and The Americans are just imposing their will upon a foreign territory and its people.

The AIs of the world of The Creator have sentience and -- despite what the Americans of the film would have you believe-- true emotions. The allegory of homo sapiens brutalizing the cro-magnon man into extinction is just another story that an insecure group of powerful people use to justify their horrendous crusade. In this film, the optimistic truth is that, yes, AIs are the next step in evolution, but not as a weaponized, militarized, world-dominating society, but instead one of radical empathy and compassion the likes of which humanity can seemingly never achieve. We live in the darkness with our heads stuck so far up our own asses. AIs are enlightened beings... without being annoying about it.

The trailer set up what looked to be "the doubting soldier changes his tune when he's charged with protecting a child". It's that story, but mercifully not that simple, and there are more than a few surprise curveballs in what I half expected to be a run-the-gauntlet plot.

It's a visually stunning, exciting, and occasionally gut punching movie that, yes, is very murky in its main story, but everything surrounding it is so damn good, it doesn't seem to matter.

---

Director David Yates steps away from the Potter-verse for a decent "ripped from recent headlines" light drama in the vein of all the other recent "ripped from recent headlines" movies out there.  The crux of this film is, yup, the American medical system and big pharma are disgustingly, morally corrupt. That's the story here, and the big optimistic swing at the end is that more corruption will be punished. Good joke, haha.

Maybe it's just where I am as a consumer of content, but I honestly would have rather watched a 90-minute youtube long-form essayist dissect the real-life story of this than watch a dramatization, and that pretty much goes for most of these "ripped from recent headlines" movie and tv shows. 

Random 3: (1) The accent work certainly makes itself known. (2) Emily Blunt ably carries this thing. (3) When does Hollywood's favourite daughter, Chloe Coleman (has anyone ever had such a plethora of high-wattage moms and dads), get to breakout into a starring role?

Passably entertaining and engaging.

---

The Vanishing was slotted into Criterion Channel's October programming as part of their "Art House Horror" lineup.  It's maybe neither "art house" nor "horror" but it's definitely more "art house" than "horror".  It's a suspenseful feature, but not horrifying, certainly not in our modern age of murder podcasts and serial killer documentaries. It's a cult film that seems to be more of the "filmmaker's film" side of cult, rather than, say, an audience pleasing midnight movie.

In brief, the film is about a Dutch woman, Saskia, who goes missing in France right in front of her partner Max's eyes. It's about Max who, three years later, still obsessively searches for her. And it's about the man, Lemorne, who took the woman, how, and why.

It's an exceptionally deliberate film, in the way it does out information, cutting between perspectives, on a fractured timeline. It plays with the audience's sense of reasoning, portraying Max as a bit of an hot-headed, tempermental asshole, and yet what we see of Lemorne's life is of a family man, a chemistry professor, and, even at one moment, a hero. But Sluizer lets us in on Lemorne's inner life, his sociopathic reasoning into why he does what he does. He's not a compulsive serial killer, but he's also immune to the impact of emotional reasoning.

I can see in The Vanishing a lot of influence into Bryan Fuller's Hannibal TV series, particularly the relationship between Will and Hannibal seems cut from Max and Lemorne. Visually, even stylistically, the Vanishing shares ground with Twin Peaks. Bill Hader even cites the film when talking about building his character in Barry.  It's one of those films that just seems to have crept its way into so much of what I've watched over the years that it seemed immediately familiar, though I've never seen it before. 

It was remade in 1993 with Keifer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges, if you're thinking it may be familiar somehow....

But is it horror? Nope.

---

Guillermo Del Toro's Nightmare Alley is a film I really, truly didn't like. I though it was a gorgeous production but of a story that just felt pointless. I had heard, from back when GDT's version was released, that the original 1948 Nightmare Alley was the superior film.

It's not.

What utterly surprised me was how the two films were pretty much beat-by-beat the same story, with miniscule differences, such as, in the classic, Tyrone Power's Stan is maybe not as bad, or as ambitious as Bradley Cooper's iteration, but, in the end, it doesn't matter, the effect is still the same. He's pretty unlikeable.

As I watched the classic, realizing that, sure, it was probably really exciting in its day, the era of carnivals not far gone from memory, and the idea of mentallists still probably one of intrigue to the naive, it just made me wonder what Del Toro thought he could do with it to have any relevance to a modern audience, especially hewing so close to the original's story.   The only thing I could think of was that the 1948 film opens with Stan being very, very curious about the Geek, the poor soused bum who's so desperate and down-and-out he's willing to bite the heads off of live chickens at the carnival. It's a point hit so hard early on that it's a downright shocker when Stan is rescued, just in the nick of time, from such a fate, because it seems so telegraphed. In Del Toro's version, that's the twist, and is seems to me, in hindsight, the only impetus he had for remaking the film.

I was actively engaged with Del Toro's version, even though I wasn't really liking it most of its run time. At least it was pretty.  I was passively engaged with this Goulding version, and found myself even more frustrated with it being unable to stop comparing it to Del Toro's. What it comes right down to is I don't like the story. It doesn't interest me, the characters don't interest me, and whatever it's trying to say, it doesn't really seem important. I could see there being a condemnation of greed or substance abuse, but it's not really interested in exploring them, and its conceit of "what drives a man to such extremes" is a tale far too labyrinthine and unbelievable to be cautionary. 

But is it horror? no, it's noir.

---

It's 2063 (just 2 years before the events in The Creator, but two radically different worlds), and the seas have risen, leaving two tiny, warring continents. In between them is a old oil rig, transformed into a way-station, armed with a bomb capable of generating a tsunami, thus destroying both continents.  It's in the control of the west, manned by a crew of 4 on a two-year stint, that's already up. Their relief crew is now 3 months late, and there's no communication from home base.

Overlong and undercooked, and feeling very much like a COVID-era production, Last Sentinel hits every expected beat and offers little in the way of surprises. It opts for multiple points of dramatic peril early on and the fatigue for it sets in quickly. 

It looks pretty good overall, with a solid location providing convincing sets , some good tech designs, and some impressive digital shots of storms and mega waves that (though the still water effects are far less realistic). 

I'm not sure the film sells its 40-years-in-the-future reality convincingly. That there's both such little landmass left, and how the competing accents on board the station could come all from one continent seems a bit confounding.

It should have felt like survival was more dire, and that tensions should have been higher given the situation (either that or the crew should have been much closer knit than they were). 

The introduced element of conflict is an unmanned boat and whether to abandon their post or remain. It's decent conflict but only sustains for about a quarter of the film. I would have much preferred a survivor on that boat and questions about allegiances.

The acting is good (Martin McCann and Thomas Kretschmann are highlights, immensely solid character actors with "hey, that guy" faces) and the film is certainly watchable, but it didn't deliver enough on its intriguing premise.

Alt-Media: The Consumer - Pt B

Despite this blog, for me, being about Movies & TV, I have written a handful posts about video games (yes, that's the Tag, not just the posts about video games proper). But I don't believe I have covered much of other media. I read at a snail's pace, and usually only when commuting. My days of actually sitting in a corner and reading are gone the way of That Guy, and reading before bed causes immediate zzzzz's. I am also not that properly versed with podcasts, them being (in my old man voice) a rather new media that The Kids are listening to. But, given the Ken't description of this blog being about us sharing consumption habits with each other, why not a mixed media [series of] post[s]?

Started here. 

This one is where I cover some podcasts I listened to. I am not Of The Podcast World. I don't listen to True Crime shows, I don't listen to audiobooks as I drive my car into work (for one, I don't drive to work). I don't, despite trying desperately, enjoy live-play D&D podcasts -- I find pretty much every fucking single one of them are more "comedians playing D&D" than "D&D players recording their game" and that irritates the fuck out of me. But in general, I don't consider myself subscribed to the medium.

But...

Something Rhymes with Purple, SomethinElse

I suppose I could include "watched a shit ton of British Panel Shows" in this post, but I was never fully invested, as Marmy plowed her way through most of them on their own, finishing what she could find on legal streaming services (usually Amazon) and then finding YouTube channels that had almost entire show runs, and even at almost that is impressive for these things have impressively long runs. 

One was a show called 8 Out of 10 Cats Do Countdown, which itself is a mashup of two already existing panel shows. Countdown is a show where stodgy people do mental challenges. The 8 Out of 10 Cats bit is a more irreverent show about current events hosted by British comedians. The mashup has the hosts & guests of the latter doing the challenges of the former. The challenges are broken into two categories: words and math.

For the words bit, they have "dictionary corner" where an astute lexicographer (she who works on dictionaries) named Susie Dent checks the dictionary, for both the mashup show, and the original, since she was in her 20s. She is now in her 50s. Whatever her connections to the dictionary world were she is now truly a panel show host. But she is entirely, deeply, fully invested in the world of words, so much so that I am utterly enamoured with her. So, I began listening to her podcast.

Her podcast, which is technically the podcast of Gareth Brandreth, another staple of the British Panel Show landscape who is also enamoured with words, which will be forever solidified upon seeing him on even one episode of anything, where you will experience him talking, and talking and TALKING. Sure, he has an endless supply of anecdotes and is connected to pretty much everyone in the world. but fuuuuuuck does he like the sound of his own voice. And in THIS podcast, they two discuss words, always around a cohesive topic.

For example, they would do an episode of portmanteau's (e.g. breakfast and lunch, becomes brunch). Or an episode of loanwords vs calques. Bazaar and café are loanwords, words adopted from another language and so in common use they become part of the hosting language. Meanwhile, a calque is when the word being loaned is translated, usually literally. For example, ear worm translated German ohrwurm for the term describing a far too catchy song.

She explains it better, which is why I could listen to her explain such all day. The podcast is fun, as the two do share a common passion and can elucidate it to us (oh, pleeease [can a voice in your head roll its eyes?]), its almost as much fun seeing the relationship between the two played out in the recordings. Brandreth is somewhat insufferable, but so often he has to defer to her, as she is clearly the expert. Meanwhile, Dent is always charming, demure and very very British, even when talking about the word fuck or about how much the cast of 8 Out of 10 Cats are utter shits to her [it's part of the gimmick of the TV show, and she obviously is playing along, but I guess it still gets to her]. For the vast majority of the world, two very British people talking about words would be utterly boring (dude, sometimes it can be) but I just love the passion for the structures of language that they share with each other. I am also rather amused at, how despite both being rather world travelled, how unexposed they are to anything outside of the UK. 

The Cipher, BBC Radio

The above is probably the only non-fiction podcast I have listened to extensively. The rest are "audio dramas", which are not quite audiobooks, which I have always defined as someone reading the text of a novel out loud, even if the modern version of that has added some dramatic effect to the recording. But audio dramas are more akin to what radio dramas were like Back In The Day. A number of people tell the tale, with added sound effects, music and any additional required audio to round out the story. Almost all I have listened to have been specfic to some degree, and all Thrillers by nature.

The Cipher tells the tale of a teenage girl (Anya Chalotra, The Witcher) who begins the story solving a riddle, a challenge, a puzzle going around The Internet. She's good at puzzles and has been working with some others in chatrooms on various aspects of the puzzle. And then she solves it, and is drawn into a much deeper, more chaotic conspiracy that, well, leaves the premise of the show behind.

This is the most recent radio drama I completed, and it pointed out something to me, that is inherent to this form of media. For each show, there has to be a hook, as with all fictional media, but then the hook has to keep on coming up week to week, for each episode. Many feel a need to keep on hooking you. TV can do character episodes, filler episodes, different stylistic choices to break up the flow or stretch out a season. But podcasts seem more beholden to retaining the audience. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, and some dramas, like this one, have to keep on changing up the game to keep the tension & excitement alive. Not sure it always works, but it is always thrilling. 

The Cipher starts as a tale about a girl solving a cipher but literally ends up being about aliens, robots, Iceland, and genetic manipulation, almost as if they wanted to do a Lost style WTF show where each episode answers little (or nothing) but adds two more questions. The presentation, directing and voice acting is top-notch and. honestly that is what kept me listening. That can truly be make or break.

Solar, CurtCo Media

Preceding the above, was this one, that played on one of the inherent natures of Radio Drama vs TV or movie, as a media -- there can be no cast of thousands, little use of background characters. If they don't have a line, they are not known, and budgets & time reduce the number of bodies available. Oh, there are always "background voices" such as TV reporters, voices on recordings, occasionally a supporting character yelling (henchmen, cop, etc.) but more often the cast is reduced to just the main characters and the strong dialogue between. 

Solar is broken into conversations, over a radio, between the two remaining astronauts onboard a spacestation that suffered a disaster, having lost contact with Earth. The remaining cast is from recordings and dramatized flashback sequences. The gimmick is that the AI in control of all these recordings has a damaged awareness of time, so everything is being delivered to us out of sequence.... for the most part. We get a disjointed story of tension, loss, tragedy and recovery that was always compelling.

Another interesting aspect of these podcasts is the need (desire?) to have at least one Name. The former had Chalotra and Chance Perdoma (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and a brief cameo from George Takei. This one has a few, with Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99), Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) and Helen Hunt (Blindspotting) leading the cast. 

One thing I wish these dramas would do, to separate themselves from TV Land, and be happy with the "one season and done". Tell a complete story, answer all the questions, end it and move onto your next thing. Instead, they often leave with vague open ended scenarios that kind of end the story, but also leave it open to another season, should they get... funding?

Solar was about the deep space mission to the sun, about the disaster that happened there, and the two survivors unravelling the mysteries, dealing with conspiracies behind the mission and trying to survive. The core question was, what was the true purpose of this mission? But I never felt that anything was really answered, and while a second season explaining more would be appreciated, by its very nature, it would end being more about another crew, another mission and ... just add more questions. Meh.

Last Known Position, QCODE

For example, this entire story is told from the point of view of the last survivor of a seabound expedition to find.... well, it becomes pretty obvious even if you don't pay attention to the "cover art" -- a kaiju in the middle of the ocean. Or, at the very least, a sea monster. BUT, as expected, it ends with them finding it and then... well, it could go many ways.

But I get ahead of me, as I am wont to do.

Mikaela Soto (Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin) is a deep sea vehicle (mini sub) pilot hired by a billionaire to help him, and his very limited team (see the comment on limited casts above), find ... something. Well, technically they are hired to find the remains of a plane that went down, a plane upon which the billionaire's (James Purefoy, Hap and Leonard) wife & daughter were onboard. They are all on a mostly automated mega-yacht, a boat filled with tense assholes of one specialty or another. They are all dealing with the vague nature of their expedition, but the money offered is too good to deny.

So, from a plot structure point of view, we know the season has to end with them finding it. Sure, we can be happy without many answers as long as the characters meet the tentacle-y sea monster and confront it to some degree. But what if it is popular? Do they defeat the sea monster or are they all killed, but one to tell the story, and if the latter, what then? Of the handful I have listened to, this one did do the best at leaving room for an entirely different, but connected, new season, something I would be open to listening to, should it come about, a new season based on world-building the possibility of a sea filled with kaiju. Buuuut I almost wished they had gone the short story route and just ended once the monster did its monstrous business.

Quiet Part Loud, Monkeypaw

Meanwhile, this podcast kind of ended properly on an end note. The goal of the series was to defeat a monster, and they did that. But you know how monster (horror) stories go -- the last few seconds hint at it's return, a head rising out of the water, or the body of the fallen villain has disappeared? So, yeah that. Hints. 

Quiet Part Loud comes from the production company led by Jordan Peele. It is one of the few that really used its soundscape (literally) to its advantage, as it was all about a monster that hid in transmitted audio. Rick Egan (Tracy Letts, Lady Bird) is a right wing radio-show host who fell from grace after something tragic happened as he tried to generate anti-islamic hysteria against a trio of teenage boys, all to benefit his fame. He now makes a buck doing the con circuit (RWNJs [Right Wing Nut Jobs] never go away) while trying to maintain a relationship with his daughter Becca (Milly Shapiro, Hereditary). He hooks up with a random woman (Christina Hendricks, Firefly) at a bar, who drags him into a conspiracy involving an ancient entity that lives and thrives in hateful communication. It wants Rick to rise up again, through his broadcast voice of hatred & xenophobia, which leaves Rick torn between getting back on top or fighting real evil. You see, Rick is not a true evil xenophobe, just a standard model asshole who knew the RWNJs could win him some fame.

Through recordings that Rick is making to himself, which he believes will be edited into a podcast, as well as phone calls and other recordings, we get the story via the media which is the food and means of survival to the creature. It is ancient, initially living on the voices of those who spewed hate, eventually finding its way to radio (and hinted that it was primarily responsible for the first two world wars) it was briefly defeated and now hopes to find its way back to power over podcasts, amidst the current, very loud wave of hatred. Rick, along with the kids he originally denigrated, have to find a way to contain and destroy the creature.

The sound production is, as expected, top notch. The mostly unknown (to me) voice actors are spectacular and the tension is the kind that would have me stop mid-walk to get past a story point. If they do find a way to a Season 2, I will be there.

Chrysalis, DUST

Finally, we have a podcast that had a very interesting origin. It started life as a Reddit post, a spontaneous bit of writing by someone, to get a story idea out of their head and "onto paper". It generated enough positive feedback, he continued with the story which was not quite enough for a novel but was picked up & expanded into a radio drama. Given its origins of written word, it often glides between the realms of audiobook being read out loud, over to proper dramatic radio drama, and back again.

The story is of an AI that awakens from slumber in the glass-ed rubble of a destroyed Earth. An alien attack happened which ended the planet some unknown number of years prior. When this AI awakens, it believes itself to be the "last human alive" given its nature of having once been the memories of a man. That aspect is not explored, unfortunately, as the story moves towards the mostly contained AI (a server farm buried deep beneath... London?) and its drone based ... senses, towards it expanding itself into a massive, SUPER massive entity hell bent on revenge against the alien lifeforms that ended Earth.

The story is not often story, more postulation of how an AI would expand itself, while still struggling with its state, and what it is. But the writing does an admirable job of making all the exposition dramatic and compelling. Then again, this is the kind of stuff I do in my own writing, which is pretty much me telling me about the cool stuff going on inside my head, and not really ever  telling a story. I have ideas and conversations, but rarely plots. But, obviously enough people thought this was interesting, to have produced a radio drama from it.

The story has the AI discovering the alien race that destroyed Earth, learning of its origins as part of a galactic empire, and of its methods of interspace travel, using everything it learns to become a vengeful force that no one can stop. And then it shifts to the other side, where we learn the attack on Earth was just a minor blip in a failed imperial expansion, in a vast society where one lonely planet not connected to the stars would not be, and was not, missed. Sure, the deaths of billions of people is horrific but the society thinks of people on the galactic scale. Until "the last human" arrives and forces them to consider the actions of the ancestors and deal with it.

It ends properly. There is confrontation and resolution. Oh you could shoe-horn in another story, but, finally, we have something that ended.