Shogun (2024), based on Shogun (1975), also adapted as Shogun (1980)

 

Title: Shogun

Created by: Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks

Based on: Shogun by James Clavell

Network: FX/Starz/Hulu/Disney+ it’s complicated, okay?

 

Shogun, the 1975 novel by James Clavell, is a fictionalized account of the journey of William Adams, an Englishman who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1600.

I, the 1974 human being by Mr. and Mrs. I Senior, am a distressingly nonfictional person who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1998.

The two events are related.

Shogun, the 1980 miniseries by NBC, first sparked my interest in Japan and led to my visit and subsequent ensettlement 18 years later.

I was thus quite interested to see

Shogun, the 2024 miniseries by FX, an adaptation of the 1975 novel

Shogun, and to compare it to my memories of the 1980 miniseries,

Shogun.

It is an ambitious failure.

It’s sporadically brilliant. Individual scenes absolutely sparkle, as joyful as a sake cup filled to the brim, as beautiful and delicate and understated as a spray of cherry blossoms, as sharp-edged and pointed as a katana. The actresses in particular, Anna Sawai (Mariko), Fumi Nikaido (Ochiba) and Moeka Hoshi (Fuji), present a master class in saying everything while saying nothing. A sidelong glance. A cup raised to cover a smile.

On the darker side, there’s also a fascinating study of an abusive relationship between an outwardly brash but inwardly sentimental man who mistakes possessiveness for love, and the woman who refuses to cave because she refuses to acknowledge him at all.

But the whole thing feels a bit muddled, and this is because

Shogun, the adaptation of the novel

Shogun, doesn’t actually want to adapt the novel at all.

The novel is nearly as old as I am, and wears its years with about as much grace, viz none whatsoever. Mr. Clavell was captured by the Japanese army during WW2 and spent years in a fairly nasty POW camp, but to his credit came out of the experience determined to understand the people who’d held him prisoner. He gives it a good college try but the book does contain a number of inaccuracies, and subscribes to some of the more offensive stereotypes about Japanese people—about the second conversation the local have about our English protagonist is to marvel at how big his penis is.

That said, it is not a “white savior” story, which much like “gaslighting” or “woke” is a term the Internet seems eager to stretch into oblivion. The protagonist John Blackthorne (as William Adams is called in Mr. Clavell’s version) spends over 1000 pages in Japan, and if you keep a carefully track of the number of people he saves over the course of this epic, at the end your tally will be: 1. He saves one guy. In an earthquake.

He, er, also loses his ship, the woman he loves gets blown to bits, and the man who controls his life ends the book by musing on the fact that Blackthorne is effectively a prisoner in the country.

Blackthorne/Adams does potter about feudal Japan, befriends the man who will one day become Shogun, Yoshii Toranaga (based on Tokugawa Ieyasu), falls in love with his translator Mariko (the historical Hosokawa Gracia), fights some ninjas, and learns about the Japanese people and culture. He is, in essence, a reader stand-in, the portal through which an audience unfamiliar with Japan could learn about it.

But that evidently still didn’t sit right with the creators of the new 10-episode limited series,

Shogun.

In this iteration, they decided to focus more on the Japanese characters than their white, Western visitor. Which, on the face of it, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. 2024 is not 1980 and we don’t really need someone to hold our hands and explain to us what a samurai or sushi is. Japanese culture, especially animation, has gone global. It also feels a bit too Last Samurai to have yet another story set in Japan that is all about the white guy being cool and getting the best girl.

So, fair enough.

The trouble is, the creators then had to build a show that wasn’t about a white guy in Japan, based on a foundation that was about a white guy in Japan. And the cracks, my dear friends, are painfully obvious.

The story of Blackthorne/Adams is the story of a man encountering a new culture, learning about it, growing to appreciate it, and eventually assimilating into it, at least to a certain degree. He does not really do much else. If you do not want to tell a story about intercultural understanding, then do you not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams. And if you do not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams, there’s not much point in putting him in your story.

That’s a problem. Your story should be about whatever your story is about.

What that means is the Shogun miniseries begins, as the novel does, with the arrival slash shipwreck of Blackthorne and his crew of Dutch merchants slash pirates in a fishing village on the Izu Peninsula, where they are imprisoned, interrogated, and boiled alive (in one case), before Blackthorne is taken to meet the local warlord, Toranaga, and is introduced to a Japanese-Portuguese interpreter and noblewoman named Mariko.

Round about episode 4 the story then decides it doesn’t really want to be about Blackthorne (played by Cosmo “we have a Tom Hardy at home” Jarvis) anymore, and he sort of hangs around for the next half-dozen episodes bleating about his ship and men, before the show attempts to give us a satisfying resolution to the story by having a scene of him working alongside the local villagers.

This doesn’t satisfy as an ending, because the journey between episodes 1 and 10 hasn’t been about him assimilating into this culture at all. He’s wandered about in a befuddled haze for 9 hours or so and accomplished absolutely bugger all.

The story would rather be about Mariko (played by Anna Sawai), who let’s face it is a more interesting character. She’s not only the daughter of Akechi Jinsai (historical Akechi Mitsuhide), a famous traitor who ambushed and murdered his liege lord, but also a convert to Christianity in a country deeply ambivalent about this foreign religion, and one of the few people to speak a second language (English in the show subs for Portuguese in real history). But if it is about her, what’s this whiny white dude doing in her show? Why does he get to start and end her show? He adds nothing to her arc, does nothing to influence any of her decisions, and even the romance from the novels is largely repressed here.

It would also like to be about Toranaga (actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who seems to play the Asian elder in every Hollywood movie now that Ken Watanabe has gone back to Japan), the cold and ruthless manipulator who uses and discards people like pawns in his quest to eliminate his rival, Lord Ishido (historical Ishida Mitsunari) and become the supreme ruler of Japan. But if it is about him, why are this English fella and minor noblewoman taking up so much of his time and why does he pay them any attention when the future of the country is at stake?

In the meantime, the show goes out of its way to downplay any contribution Blackthorne might make to the plot. Does he have anything to teach the Japanese? No. Do they want to learn shipbuilding from him? No. Do they hope to use him to open trade with the Dutch? No. Do they learn anything from him at all? No. Does he learn anything from them? Not really. By the end of the show, he can speak one or two words of Japanese.

If Shogun wanted to be an outsider story, great. Very popular choice. Gives the reader a guide who can introduce them to this make-believe world as they learn about it. Hobbits in Lord of the Rings, the kids in Narnia, John Carter on Mars, all that good stuff. Ease us into the world of the story. And then: A crisis. Our outsider protagonist must use the knowledge and skills they have developed to take control of the situation. They move from passive observer to active participant in the story. They take control. Only here, Blackthorne never does. His arc stalls, he treads water, and then we’re supposed to be happy that everything somehow worked out for him.

It manages to come across as very dismissive of the historical Adams, who apparently became a valued advisor on nautical matters to the Shogun and helped promote trade with the Dutch. He married, settled, and had children. In the show, Toranaga snidely laughs him off as someone he keeps around like a jester, because “he makes me laugh.” As a white dude happily living and working in Japan, it’s disappointing that nobody has the courage or imagination to end the story exactly the way it did in real life, with Adams the white dude happily living and working in Japan.

But then, once you take out the one unique thing about this story (the first English guy in Japan) it becomes just another samurai flick, albeit with more of a political bent. I tried getting my Japanese wife to watch and she gave up after about five minutes, saying “It’s just another taiga drama” (historical drama TV shows that have aired in Japan almost every year since 1963: Nothing new, in other words).

We’ve seen this with Halo, with the Witcher, the Wheel of Time, World War Z, and if writers don’t want to adapt the original source material, I would suggest they don’t adapt the original source material. Create something new! Yes, yes, I know the name is a label slapped on the cover to attract eyeballs, but it does result in a ramshackle end product, crudely folded together like amateur origami.

A shame, because the non-Blackthorne bits of the show are often bloody brilliant.

Through a Genre Darkly

I had fun waffling about cyberpunk in the last post, so here’s another one, this time harping on another genre I like to talk about: grimdark fantasy.

Much like cyberpunk, it’s a genre that is both long-lived and has recently enjoyed something of a revival, thanks to the televisual kinomatic extravaganza that was HBO’s “Game of Thrones” (about which, I’ve pontificated about here and here).

The genre itself goes back much further, of course, with one obvious touchstone being Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone stories that started in 1961, while the word ‘grimdark’ was inspired by the 1987 tag line of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” Since then we’ve had a range of authors from Stephen R Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” to R Scott Bakker’s “Prince of Nothing” and is there something about having the initial R that makes you a nihilist, and oh yes also Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” series (here and here) and Steven Erickson’s numerous and ponderous Malazan books.

Grimdark fantasy is often described as the antidote to Tolkien, a gritty, dirty, messy genre for everyone who rolled their eyes every time Galadriel broke into song or Middle Earth was once again saved at the 11^th hour by the unlooked-for arrival of a flock of Very Large Birds Indeed. Grimdark is unepic fantasy, populated by angsty antiheroes, hard-faced warriors with anger management issues, villains who might have a point actually, and lots and lots of stage blood.

Iconoclasm can feel terribly clever when you are young, lord knows I was an insufferably contrarian smart-arse from age about 10 to 30 (well, probably long after that, truth be told). Realizing that, despite your parents’ admonition to tell the truth, work hard and be kind to others, it was actually quite possible and perhaps even advantageous to do none of those things and still be successful, can feel like an enormous betrayal.

Grimdark is above all an angry, hurt cry of rejection of the beautiful lies that epic fantasy tells: Life isn’t like that. Good does not always triumph. Good is boring, evil is interesting. There are no heroes, everyone is flawed. Nobody really thinks they are evil. And so on.

Hello, Kullervo

Proponents always trot out the same handful of rationalizations for the genre’s popularity. The dark times we live in, you see. As though the year of our lord two thousand and twenty were in someway harder to live through than two world wars, an influenza epidemic that killed more than the first war, the worst economic collapse of the century, the AIDS epidemic or the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

As you can tell, I don’t think there’s anything especially new or innovative about rejecting or subverting epic fantasy tropes. Here is the most grimdark story I’ve ever read:

A boy is orphaned when his parents and family are massacred. He is brought up by his parents’ killers, rebels against them and is sold into slavery. He escapes, meets and seduces a girl who he later discovers to be his own sister (unbeknown to him, she escaped the massacre). When she realizes they have committed incest, she commits suicide. Blinded by fury, the boy returns to the family that raised him, slaughters them, and then kills himself. The end.

Pretty grim, eh?

Here’s the thing, though. That’s the story of Kullervo, a Finnish legend written down in the 19^th century, but based on a much older oral tradition. It’s also, pretty much beat for beat except with more elves and dragons, Tolkien’s story of Turin Turambar, which he first began in 1917.

To flog the dead horse a few more times: Gilgamesh is a tyrant and despot whose best friend dies, and later he fails to win either immortality or eternal youth. Achilles is a selfish arse and dies in the Iliad. Beowulf gets eaten by a dragon. King Arthur is killed by his own son. So it goes.

To my mind there’s nothing especially new or modern or even particularly anti-Tolkien about having troubled heroes who do terrible things. That is, if anything, the default to which Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a rare exception.

I'll Show You Realism

Nor do I think there is anything innately more “realistic” about letting the bad guys win. George Martin may very well be correct, for all I know might does indeed make right, but a quick glance at history and a fall back on a slightly different idiom should tell us that he who lives by the sword dies by it. For example, let’s have a look at the Roman Emperors who were murdered by their own Praetorian Guard: Caligula, Galba, Pertinax, Julianus, Elagabalus and Aurelian and that’s not even going into all the ones murdered by their own regular troops.

The dictator who rules for a lifetime is a relatively modern invention, and medieval rulers who tried to act like tyrants and despots were more likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a hot poker enema a la Edward II (yes, probably apocryphal, but still a good story to tell).

Being a ruthless bastards isn’t any more of a shortcut to success than being virtuous, generous and kind. Honestly, it’s all a bit of a crap shoot. You always hear about successful authors who got a break because someone assistant’s wife just happened to read the manuscript and insist it must be published, or showrunners whose first-ever pitch was greenlit because they have famous parents or the man who became president of the United States mainly because his father had been too, and my takeaway is that quite frankly nobody, neither good nor evil, has the slightest fucking clue what they’re doing. Evil works sometimes, sure. So does being good. That’s the only reality.

What Audiences Really Want (What They Really, Really Want)

But of course all these claims at greater realism are a decoy, a smokescreen, because we all know fiction isn’t really about reflecting reality, fantasy fiction doubly not so. I mean, the name of a genre is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t it: Fantasy. Not reality.

The whole point of speculative fiction, non-mimetic writing and fantasy as a literary, marketing genre is that it draws on myth and magic, legends and fairy tales, in order to present a world which is very definitely NOT our own. Sure, you could write a story that is essentially just the real world with a couple of elves in the background, but then my question becomes why (other than the commercial reasons) is this marketed as fantasy? Grimdark fantasy, like all fantasy, is not a reflection but an exaggeration, a specific attempt to highlight and twist something we find in our world. In this case: the atavistic taste for revenge, and the desire to indulge our darkest impulses.

Fans do not flock to watch “Game of Thrones” or pick up the latest god and wizards tome because they’re looking for an accurate depiction of the human condition. Grimdark is as escapist as epic fantasy, merely in the opposite direction. It indulges all the things we’d like to do in our darker moments, the co-worker we’d cheerfully strangle, the careless driver we’d like to run off the road, the rude shop clerk we’d like to stuff inside their own till. Grimdark lets you vicariously live out those fantasies in all their visceral glory.

In that sense, the genre is regressive and conservative, not iconoclastic. Nihilism and the refusal to believe in any kind of positive change, preferring instead to indulge in revenge fantasies, is inherently pro-establishment, because they’re the ones who benefit if nobody tries to change anything. Audiences want to have their caked blood and eat it too, to feel they’re doing something rebellious while engaging in the very boggiest of standard entertainment.

(This American need to be at once both the rebel underdog and the invincible champion is probably worth exploring. Maybe next time. On the same note, I make plenty of digs at America’s expense in this blog, but to be fair, most of the Americans I’ve met have been wonderful, kind people. This kind of ribbing is just what you get for being so big and famous and dominating the discourse all the time.)

It's Not All Bad Though

The only exception I’ll admit is grimdark that is satire, either of other grimdark works or of the nihilistic mindset it supports. And to be fair, the Terry Brookses and Tad Williamses and Robert Jordanses and Brandon Sorensonsons of the genre can stand to be brought down to earth every once in a while lest they get too carried away. It’s worth pointing out that for all their medievalist and poetic trappings the modern epic fantasy is still ultimately about dudes killing other dudes with swords.

Abercrombie gets this, I think, with his alcoholic princesses, dashingly brain-dead swordsmen, manipulative mentor wizards, perfectly pleasant torturers and barbarian berserkers with a heart of … if not gold, then brass maybe. I think Warhammer 40,000 also had this, until a certain cohort of fans started taking the setting at face value (you can still see traces of humor in the dimbulb orks, for example).

In line with my unwarranted American-bashing above, I note that this kind of satire seems to be a particularly British thing. I’ve seen this elsewhere too, with reams of American publications warning you not to try humor. I think the default American mode of communication is sincerity, which is why political discourse gets so overheated, nobody can look at the topic or themselves from an ironic distance. Whereas British people seem much more keyed to look for or expect life to be absurd. But I’m digressing.

I note in closing that the “Game of Thrones” fandom has more or less evaporated now that the show is over (whimper not a bang, there) and the next book nowhere in sight (next year, says Martin, and we’ve heard that before). That suggests a lack of staying power, a lack of purchase or foothold on the imagination, and thus a shallowness to the Gotcha! adolescent epiphany that life sucks. We know, dear. That ceased to feel insightful by about age 16. These days, it’s the hopeful fantasies that feel ground-breaking and innovative.

Munich--The Edge of War

Yes I know after "Bodyguard" and now this, this blog's putative mission to discuss science fiction and fantasy now stands even more exposed as the hollow travesty of a lie that it is. Ah, but here's the thing, you see: Fuck you. Also historical fiction is kind of fantasyyy so there. 

This is one of those historical fictions that might as well not be. There's a fictional main character, played by whatsface from "1917" (I used to pretend to care and put the actor's names in brackets like this, but really, who am I kidding?) and a fictional counterpart on the German side (ditto), but they exist purely to provide an outside perspective on events and don't actually contribute much to the plot other than allow it to happen around them while they either look flabbergasted (1917 guy) or like they are biting down on seething rage (other dude).

The subject is the Munich agreement between Britain, France, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to hand over the Sudetenland. It's mildly revisionist, arguing that British PM Neville Chamberlain's (Jeremy Irons, the one man who has a decent role here to sink his teeth into) desire to keep Britain out of a war in 1938 was both principled--as a man who had witnessed the horrors of WW1--and the smart thing to do as the Empire was unready for war.

The main plot is a bit dull, really. The whole point is that attempts by the fictional British and German protagonists fail to achieve anything, and they never try especially hard, so the rest is sort of watching people toing and froing to little effect. The movie only comes to life when Jeremy Chamberlain is in it, and does his stuffy British best to play a man with a conscience trying to play a lousy hand.

As to whether or not Chamberlain deserves to be rehabilitated, I have my doubts. If the Empire was unready for war, then surely so was Germany, and allowing Hitler some easy wins probably not only cemented his popularity and hamstrung the opposition, but also gave him access to greater resources, such as Czechoslovakia's industrial base. For an amateur like me it's impossible to judge whether the "betrayal" of Chamberlain had any effect on British morale and determination to fight 

Still, as far as the narrative goes the movie makes its point and executes it well enough, though it could easily have done so without the useless fictional viewpoint characters.

Eternals

I’ll admit I watched this, as opposed to say, “Shang Chi”, precisely because of the critical drubbing it received (47% on Rotten Tomatoes, 52 on Metacritic). Just naturally contrarian that way I suppose.

It’s definitely the least Marvel-y Marvel movie, though I’m not sure that makes it actually good. The differences are kind of refreshing. The heroes do not spend the whole movie trading quips back and forth to ironically comment on the action. The final battle is not fought against a faceless army of CGI monsters. More to the point, the movie is easily at its weakest when it tries to do all the typical Marvel things—the action sequences are kind of rote and uninspiring CGI fests shot in near-darkness, the humor mostly falls flat, and attempts to tie it into the greater MCU feel incredibly forced.

Whatever the talents of Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao (haven’t seen her other movies, to be honest), a Marvel movie was not the best fit. There’s some genuinely intriguing and original dynamics going on between the characters and some beautiful cinematography, but it all feels squeezed into the straitjacket of the superhero action genre.

It is overstuffed, even at two and a half hours long. We’re introduced to a team of 10 superheroes called the “Eternals”, or rather, we’re introduced to three superheroes, and then another one, and then another two, and then another and then and so on and so on.

About three-quarters of the movie is spent on scenes of people standing in a rough V formation somewhere with austere natural beauty, and then explaining the rest of the movie to whichever character they’ve just met. This doesn’t leave much room for the villains, of which there are two, just to further compound the problem.

The premise is that these Eternals have been sent to the Earth by a “Celestial” super-being called Arishem, supposedly to protect humanity from alien predators called the Deviants. In flashback we see the Eternals killed the last Deviant sometime around the year 1500 and then they… just kind of hang out for a bit. Jump to the present day, when Deviants start to reappear and the Eternals have to get the crew back together again. One. Person. At. A. Time. By standing in a rough V somewhere with austere natural beauty.

It turns out though that the whole mission is a cover story, and their real job has been to ensure Earth reaches a big enough population for a new Celestial to be born out of the planet’s core, a process which is going destroy the Earth and kill everyone living on it. Celestials, in turn, are responsible for birthing new stars, which leads to the creation of new planets and new life. The circle of life etc. thank you Lion King. In theory the dilemma facing the Eternals is whether it is better to sacrifice humanity so that other worlds and other species may get a chance at life, or to save the Earth at the cost of the unborn godling.

The trouble with this, as in all of Marvel’s high stakes “save the universe” stories, is that as part of a franchise the result is a foregone conclusion, so the dilemma never feels like much of one. Oh, two or three characters voice reservations, but human-genocide is too extreme to make us feel it’s a real option and the majority of the team is just instantly and immediately on board the “save the humans” train without a second thought, so we never really explore the question in any detail.

It’s just one way the movie raises interesting questions or ideas, then immediately discards them.

The concept of a superhero movie where the superheroes discover they are not, in fact, heroic at all is an intriguing one, but like I say the instant they discover the truth (after Arishem just blurts it out) they immediately start behaving heroically. In some ways it does feel like a rehash of the concept from Captain Marvel, but there at least her immediate switch to hero mode made sense, whereas with the Eternals it’s just baffling—if they were created-slash-programmed by the Celestials, why lie to them about their mission? Why not program obedience into them?

Another casualty of the obfuscation of the plot is the Deviants themselves, which are revealed to be another creation of the Celestials, originally designed as a kind of predator-extermination device to ensure humanity has enough ecological space to evolve, but which escaped the Celestial’s control and ran amok. The parallels between Eternals and Deviants are kind of toyed with, but ultimately the only narrative purpose of this thread is to act as a red herring to distract you from the big twist/reveal. 

Along the way the movie also raises and then skips over things like the dementia of Thena (Angelina Jolie), the loss and (almost immediate) recovery of faith by the group’s tech whiz Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), and the philosophy of telepath/mind control guy Druig (Barry Keoghan) who thinks humanity would be better off if he was allowed to force us all to be nice.

One or two characters say the word “family” a couple of times as if that was the movie’s theme, though I think it works better as a tale about duty versus emotion or empathy.

Cut the number of characters in half and focus more on the dynamic between the putative leader, Sersi (Gemma Chan) and not-Superman-but-c’mon Ikaris (Richard Madden) and I think you would’ve had a decent flick. Madden in particular is the best thing here, with a juicy role and a character torn between duty and affection (the romance with Chan lacks on-screen chemistry though, especially compared with the instant and easy affection of Keoghan and Lauren Ridloff, who plays yet another hero I haven’t had time to introduce yet).

The conclusion, mid- and post-credit stingers are all typical Marvel fare, setups for future sequels and introductions of some character you’re supposed to know from the comics. Two people who were quite happy to see humanity exterminated are suddenly friends with the family again. Someone hugs another character who quite literally stabbed them in the literal back with a literal dagger literally two scenes ago. Ha ha, no hard feelings. Some dude shows up and after a dramatic pause says, “Hi, I’m Gleepwurp.”

For all that, I do feel a lot of affection for this movie. A lot of it is just seeing guys like Richard Madden and Kit Harington again. I kind of feel bad for them the way Game of Thrones ended, so seeing them in other roles is like seeing an old high school friend doing okay. Like, I was delighted to see Madden in his little part in ‘1917”. Good for you Rich, don’t let that show get you down, keep on doing your thing. Same for you Kit. I have this irrational urge to give them a hug and tell them it will all be okay. Dad’s here, buddy, dad’s here. I got you.

Hm. Guess it did turn out to be about family after all.

Mother/Android

Another Netflix original, starring the girl from Kick Ass and a guy who isn't Will Smith. 

It's kind of the baby plot from Children of Men but with zombies only they're robots.

I thought it was above average for a Netflix op, 7/10, like a pretty good B movie y'know. It's kind of a mishmash of familiar elements, but Ms Ass is a fine actor who carries the movie and the pregnancy outfit the whole movie.

Although the geography makes zero sense: They want to escape to Boston so they can take a boat to Korea and have any of these people ever looked at a map before. In any case, the Korean lady wears a bearskin hat which is cinema language for Communist so the whole plan is pretty sus tbh.

I think the point, and the title, is that one dude says humans are soft and emotional that's why we'll lose the robot apocalypse, but Kick Ass keeps doing the ruthless, cold blooded, rational thing to save her baby, right to the end. So she was just as biologically programmed as the robots were? Maybe.

Don't Look Up

Professional comedians always tell you to throw away the first idea that comes into your head. Keep digging, that's when you get to the really funny stuff.

Don't Look Up is a movie composed almost entirely of first ideas.

It is a collection of the easiest, most obvious, laziest takes on all the targets of its satire: politicians are corrupt, TV is shallow entertainment, boomers are racist, tech bro superheroes never benefit anyone but themselves, science deniers are dummies. It's satire written by the top comments on Reddit. A collection of viral Tweets. 

The premise is that astronomers Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio discover a massive comet on a collision course with the Earth and try to warn people so we can do something about it. The Trumpish president (Meryl Streep) and her Don-Junior frat-boy son (Jonah Hill) find science boring and care more about the midterms, and blow them off. The two astronomers go on TV, where they get second billing to a pop star's (Ariana Grande) break-up, finally galvanize the nation into launching an attempt to knock the comet off-course, only to have it aborted by a weirdo Gates-Jobs-Musk tech giant (Mark Rylance) who wants to mine it for minerals needed to build smartphones. Their grassroots campaign to get people to look at the visibly approaching comet is met by a campaign with the rallying cry "Don't Look Up!" The tech giant's plan goes horribly wrong, of course, but not before he escapes on a spaceship. Then everybody dies.

It's a heavy-handed metaphor for global warming, or the COVID-19 pandemic, or any major social issue really, the cynical take that our society is by nature incapable of fixing any of its mistakes, and we're all doomed.

There are flashes of biting satire here and there--such as Jennifer Lawrence being confronted by her parents, who demand that she not bring "politics" (i.e. the fact that there's a giant fucking meteor headed for the Earth) into their house.

Most of it doesn't bite, because it's just the most toothless and banal restatement of the most common complaints about modern society. It doesn't satirize its targets, it just repeats them, without adding anything new or original. 

The movie also doesn't have a good grip on its tone, I think; the satire sometimes inclines to dry, black comedy, but then veers to silly over-the-top farce, like Ron Perlman's foul-mouthed geriatric astronaut using his pre-mission announcement to thank "the gays".

There's also just a lot of junk, though. The movie is about 30-45 minutes longer than it has any right to be. Scenes that either have no purpose in the story, or go on and on and on, like Ariana Grande singing an impending meteor song for five minutes, or DiCaprio's blowup with his wife who proceeds to throw all his medication at him, one by one, after announcing what each one does. A lot of scenes feel ad-libbed, in that the actors are kind of just talking without aim or purpose, just kind of rambling in the hopes that the scene will turn out OK.

I bet the movie was an absolute blast to make. Looks like the actors were having just the best time ever. As a consequence though, it does feel like the director, writer and actors are laughing at the audience, slightly smug and condescending. There's a crack about politicians being too stupid to be as evil as we think they are--thus putting the writers above both politicians and the general audience. 

Are they right though, are we doomed? It modern society congenitally incapable of taking action on any major issues or threats it faces? This movie won't convince you either way, being far too safe in its criticisms and repeating hot takes that have been around on social media for the last decade. 

For what it's worth, all of the criticisms ring true, if not especially insightful. Is the world going to hell in a handbasket? Yeah, does look that way. Is it too late to do anything about it? Probably. 

This movie won't change that, just make certain people feel better for being right. 

The Witcher: Season 2

The Witcher: Season 2

I didn’t think it was a bad season, really, but then I also don’t think it was an especially good one. It seems to have tried to fix things that were never broken, while nursing along all the broken things from the first season.

Before I complain though, I’ll be nice. I thought Jaskier (Joey Batey) was miles better this season, maybe because the overall tone was a bit darker, so the comic relief was more of a relief, maybe because the writing was better, less dependent on one-liners and more character-based.

At one point he shares a look and a smile with a bearded dwarf lady, barely lasts an instant, but it’s screamingly funny precisely because they don’t beat you over the head with it, just trust you to know the character and know what the look means.

There’s another bit shortly after where he and Geralt (an obscenely muscular Henry Cavill) are doing a walk and talk and he does a pitch-perfect imitation of Geralt. Again, nice little moment, building off our familiarity with the characters.

Then there’s a big, long scene where a dock worker complains he didn’t realize one of Jaskier’s songs took place in two timelines, ha ha, meta joke about the first season. Well, we’ll fix that with a purely linear narrative in season 2, hurrah for making stories more generic and predictable.

Which leads me to the point about trying to fix things that were fine.

The narrative invention is gone, and instead the suspense and drama are interrupted every two minutes to check and see what’s happening in the five other story lines (spoiler: Not much).

It’s also far less monster-of-the-week, more tired old “chosen one who might save or destroy the world” and you’ll be forgiven for checking if you’re accidentally watching Wheel of Time or not. Instead of twisted fairy tales, we get people possessed by demons being told to “fight against it!” and other staples of the genre.

The first episode is probably the best, and lo and behold, that’s the only one this season that has a monster-of-the-week setup. It’s a twisted take on “Beauty and the Beast” that dares to wonder what kind of woman would be attracted to a lion-boar-man living in a haunted mansion, and if such a person might not be the scarier of the two.

The rest is a fairly muddled and muddy tale about “destiny” which—and this is the killer—absolutely refuses to tell you what the friggin’ destiny in question actually is in anything but the vaguest terms imaginable. Something about the end of the world and the “Wild Hunt” and the “Conjunction of the Spheres” and “Elder blood” – the last of which seems to mean being part elf, but since there are whole tribes of elves running around it’s not clear why being marginally related to them is relevant. There’s also something called “Ithlinne’s Prophecy” but don’t worry, the show never bothers to explain what that is.

The other main story arc is about some ancient demon thing which, death stroke number two, absolutely refuses to tell you what it is friggin’ attempting to do in anything but the vaguest terms imaginable. “It feeds on pain” or something to that effect, which is great, just kind of generically evil without any goals then. “It wants to do bad stuff.” Very exciting.

So, we have a demon thingy which wants to do something, not clear what, and this may or may not have something to do with someone’s destiny, not clear what that is either. It’s the writerly urge to obfuscate and misdirect striking again, and it’s death to any kind of dramatic clarity or tension.

The dialog is pretty ropey, filled with lots of ponderous pronouncements which I think are meant to sound deep and meaningful, but are almost invariably just straight up baffling nonsense, like bullshit buzzwords spouted by a Lexus car commercial. “Fear is an illness, if you leave it untreated it can consume you” … “It’s not a question of price; it’s a matter of cost” … “True luxury should be compassionate, engaging and deeply personal.”

People keep saying these things but there’s no weight to them, nothing in the story to actually back them up.

“She's tougher than she looks,” says Geralt of Ciri (Freya Allan), his adopted daughter who he has known for all of half an episode. How the fuck would you know, Gerry? She’s ridden around on your horse for a day or two. Not exactly an Olympian display of fortitude.

The production design, directing and cinematography of the show are all kind of off-kilter, really. To examine a dead tree-monster thing (kind of like an evil Ent), Geralt rips random bits out of it with his bare hands. He goes to meet a kind of high priestess person, who o-VER e-NUN-see-AY-tes eh-VERY sy-LA-ble. There’s a wizard whose beard looks like painted-on asphalt. Telekinetic spells that blow people backwards ALWAYS do it in slow motion. There’s a bit of a Marvel-style reveal at the end of the last episode of … some woman, idk, she’s kind of there but gets no introduction or explanation.

Just so many bizarre choices.

I’m not sure I’m adequately conveying the atmosphere here. The bottom line is these people do not talk or act like human beings. It’s all just slightly off.

The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog

This will be short as there isn’t much to criticize.

The Power of the Dog is probably Hollywood’s second-best advertisement for traveling to New Zealand, next to Lord of the Rings. Here, NZ is subbing for Montana, and the landscape is NatGeo gorgeous, absolutely stunning, and the cinematography is very Every Frame a Painting level delightful. Lots of artsy shots of people silhouetted and perfectly framed in windows and doorways, very symbolic “inside looking out"/"outside looking in” shots for a psychological drama all about feelings that have been repressed and buried inside.

It’s glacially paced though, and extremely small stakes, so I can see this won’t be for everyone. Climactic scenes involve someone asking his brother to wash up before dinner, a dude playing the banjo in his room, and someone braiding rawhide into a whip. There are no guns at all, only two deaths, neither shown on-screen, and only one body. It's a movie that will have you as physically far from the edge of your seat as possible, real middle of the cushion stuff. Still, it’s a brilliant script, particularly adept at Show Don’t Tell, managing to communicate immense depth and turmoil to these characters without saying a word.

This is horribly unfair of me, but I’m afraid all that subtlety also makes the rare head-thumpingly obvious scenes stand out all the more, such as finding a secret stash of illicit magazines that the owner has—in a fit of self-destructive madness perhaps—carefully and self-incriminatingly written their own name on, or alcoholism being communicated by the tired trope of finding a whiskey bottle in the bed.

I don’t quite buy Benedict Cumberbatch as a charismatic bully or tough-as-nails cowboy with psychological insecurities though. I’ve seen lots of praise for his performance, but I don’t think he really has the physical presence for it. Director Jane Campion said there were lots of actors who can do tough, but not many who can also do vulnerable, and while she is an award-winning director and I’m a dipshit rambling online, Imma disagree and say Benedict can do vulnerable, sure, but asking him to play an American cowpoke was a stretch too far.

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons both slip right into their roles, but the one performance I was impressed with was Kodi Smit-McPhee as Dunst’s son. He’s very good at the gawky, painfully uncool kid who seems like an absolute wimp, then gives us a peek at his startling and alarming knack for violence.

All the obliqueness and opaqueness means it’s a movie that’s up to you to interpret in some ways, especially the relationship between Benedict’s guy’s guy cowboy and mama’s boy Kodi, and it’s nice that the movie never comes out for or against any of these characters.

It’s up to you to decide what you make of it, and I make it to be a damn fine advertisement for New Zealand.

The Last Duel

The Last Duel

Caught this on Disney+ after it had been unceremoniously dumped there, following a slightly less than stellar theatrical run which can’t have lasted more than a month or so. 

I can see why, too—up against the likes of Dune (Part One!), released while we’re still mid-pandemic and saddled with both a tricky subject matter (viz: rape) and a 2.5-hour run time, not to mention Matt Damon AND Ben Affleck with dodgy facial hair, it’s a wonder this got made at all. Director Sir Ridley Scott can blame millennials all he wants for this failure, but honestly it’s the kind of movie that probably belongs on streaming these days, not the theater.

The movie is based on historical events, and the first thing I did when I heard about this movie was look it up on Wikipedia and let me tell you, HOT DAMN JESUS WHOO CHRISTING SHIT the reality of said duel is incredible.

Which is a shame, because the movie isn’t.

It’s not a bad movie, though the casting choices (and beards) are a little odd and the insistence on realistic indoor lighting gave me eye strain. No, mostly it isn’t that great because it is just plain old too damn long.

The Last Duel does the Rashomon thing of retelling the same story three times from the perspectives of the three main characters: First, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), a prickly knight with easily wounded pride and a penchant for suing people; second, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), a dashing, womanizing squire and favorite of the local Count (Ben Affleck), who is accused of raping Jean’s wife; and last, Jean’s wife herself, Marguerite de Carrouges (Nicole Holofcener).

It strikes me as an odd way to construct the story, because I thought the whole point of Rashomon was that none of the versions was trustworthy, and everyone distorts the story to fit their viewpoint. So you’re not sure who is telling the truth, or if an objective “truth” is even an achievable thing.

Whereas The Last Duel very definitely does NOT want you to have any doubt about what really happened. Each chapter begins with a title card saying “The Truth According to (Character Name)” then fades to black, except for Lady Marguerite’s version, where the words “The Truth” remain on the screen for a second or two. The movie wants to you accept that her version is fact, the others fiction.

But the structure of the movie actively works against that conclusion. Her version is presented after two very slanted alternatives, first Jean’s in which he is painted as a noble warrior done dirty by an unappreciative liege lord and his sly, cunning favorite Jacques, and then a second in which Jacques claims the encounter was consensual and no rape occurred. So when we are presented with Marguerite’s story of an aloof and uncaring husband and lecherous, libidinous squire, she comes across as too perfect; we are already primed to be suspicious of these stories.

But the movie can’t doubt Marguerite. 

You simply can't imply that she's lying about the whole thing. Not now, not in this day and age, not in this climate, not in this economy. She must be telling the truth.

This fact takes the wind out of the whole "conflicting stories" structure. What's worse, it's not even a movie about finding out the truth. The second half goes to great lengths to point out that the whole trial had absolutely nothing to do with the truth at all. So why, I cannot help but wonder, employ a technique designed for a movie about the murkiness of the truth when your whole movie is about how nobody is interested in the truth? Techniques should be used for a purpose. This one isn't.

The only thing the retellings achieve is shed a little light on the mentality of the characters, especially the two male protagonists, but that’s not really enough to justify going through the whole thing three times. Yes, we get that Jean is less worried about the harm to his wife than to his honor and reputation. Yes, we get that Jacques is so used to getting his way with women that he cannot even conceive his advances are unwelcome. He remains convinced no rape occurred because in his mind, none did. 

We could still get all of that with a straightforward chronological retelling, without the structural trickery.

The production design and performances don’t really do anything to elevate the material. As I said, the movie feels wonderfully authentic in all its dimness and Monty Python and the Holy Grail esque muck, but it can be a trifle hard to make out what is happening at times. It’s not quite desaturated, but does feel as if a blue filter has been applied to everything to make it all feel a bit cool and damp. 

Meanwhile Adam Driver is as watchable as always, and Holofcener is solid if unremarkable, but Damon is an odd choice for a blustering bully, and Affleck is positively bizarre as the buffoonish libertine Count Pierre d’Alencon, totally out of step with the tone of the rest of the movie.

The actual duel itself I thought got off to a good start, but became a bit too Hollywood fight scene for my taste. In the actual duel, Jean was clearly outmatched, just getting his arse constantly handed to him, but here they have to do all these little action moves and reversals and surprises and I actually found it LESS entertaining than just reading the boring old words on the boring old page.

Arcane

Arcane

Well I went into this the way the Internet intended and insists is the only true way to experience televisual entertainment: Absolutely clueless. Utterly unspoiled by even the tiniest, remotest hint of knowledge about premise, setting or plot. God’s very own fool experiencing the Platonic ideal of in-cave viewing experiences. The very tabulaest of rasas. Have never played or even seen gameplay of League of Legends, don’t even know what a MOBA is, just assume it’s either a kind of crypto or a type of NFT. In short: a complete idiot.

In this complete idiot’s opinion, it’s really rather good.

Let me get the bitching out of the way before I sing its praises though. The plot involves two magical substances neither of which is particularly well-defined: There’s “Shimmer”, a purply glowing liquid which seems to be vaguely narcotic and/or addictive but also turns you into a violent monster but also heals you from injury but also kind of does whatever the plot needs; Then there’s “Hextech” which is blue glowing stuff, which um, glows. And is blue. Also does whatever the story requires, really.

Arcane is set in a city divided between the “haves” in Piltover, who have a monopoly on clean, environmentally and sanity-friendly Hextech, and the “have-nots” in the squalid slums of Zaun across the river, where drug lords have flooded the streets with Shimmer. The conflict between the two halves of the city plays out through the relationship between two sisters, big sis Violet (“Vi”, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) who’s solid if a little fond of punching things, and blue-haired little sis Powder (Ella Purnell) who is a few sprinkles short of a shaker in the sanity department.

That would be a very solid basis for a story, but the trouble is that to stretch it out to nine episodes, the show has key characters change their minds about Hextech, the Piltover-Zaun conflict and each other about three to four times per episode. One hero swears to destroy all Shimmer production in the city, then decides not to, then decides to stop anyone else from trying to destroy it, then decides not to do that either, all in the space of about 15 minutes.

Such vacillating works well with an unstable character like Powder, but when everybody’s core motivations is spinning 180 at regular intervals, it just gets hard to keep track of what each character is trying to do.

For all that tangle though, this is a genuinely well-made show. Don’t even need to qualify it with “for a show based on a video game whose fans are infamous for being a bunch of arseholes.” It’s just a very solid production.

The animation, by French animation studio Fortiche, is just delightful, a stylish and vividly colorful blend of CG and cell-drawn animation. It’s a clean, realistic yet not uncanny valley style. The characters’ eyes, in particular, are mesmerizing, expressive, almost glowing. Shot composition and transitions from scene to scene are fresh, imaginative and creative.

The voice acting is similarly excellent, even with a couple of stunt-cast Hollywood names in the major roles. Just excellent, top to bottom, conveying the weight and emotion of the words quite wonderfully.

The world these characters is a little narrow, to be sure, but I think it’s as broad as the story needs, leaving the rest of the world to be fleshed out in future. I think that’s a smart move, rather than trying to dump it all on the audience from the get-go, and definitely makes it easier for someone like me to get into the story. It’s a fun blend of steampunk and fantasy, “Dishonored” with a dash of “Brazil”, just dark enough to keep things interesting.

In short, it just ticks all the boxes all the way down.

The end result is a show that is kind of oddly addictive, which is a nice feeling really. It’s been so long since there was a show that I felt compelled to keep watching, just to find out what would happen next.