Barbenheimer

Barbenheimer

Well, one of these movies is now on Netflix here and the other was finally released in theaters (being an Oscar winner gave them the cover they needed to justify showing it I suppose), so here goes.

Barben-

Robbed of much of its impact by omnipresent memes online. Not one single moment of this movie came as a surprise.

Thought the first 2/3 was pretty good actually, nicely done satire that bites pretty deep, until the last third does away with subtlety and starts pounding you over the head with it.

-heimer

Man invents nuclear bomb and forever dooms humanity to live in the shadow of annihilation (not to mention guaranteeing tens of thousands of Japanese would never live in the shadow of nuclear annihilation) and later must suffer for it by, um, having his security clearance cancelled. But not to worry, the guy who blackballed Oppie also suffered a minor disappointment in his career.

Truly, all these results are equally weighty. Karmic balance is achieved.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack attempts to perforate your eardrums.

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 1976 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.

Dune Part 2

Title: Dune Part 2

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Based on: Dune, by Frank Herbert

Visually impressive as always with Denis, but perhaps inevitably flounders on the structural reefs set up by the original source material. Denis aims to make the warnings of Paul’s story more explicit—that charismatic leaders are dangerous, for the more followers they have, the more their mistakes get amplified—but in so doing renders the central relationship of the story nonsensical.

Dune is a fucken weird book, you know. I’m not even talking about the flying bird helicopters and desert people orgies. Mutated fish people who fly FTL ships with the power of drugs. Subliminal messaging in human voices becoming a form of mind control. Genetic, ancestral memories giving you the ability to predict the future. Expecting a whoah there far-out psychedelic frenzy of a book to perfectly map onto social issues 60 years later is just…nuts.

So no, I don’t think it’s especially about “colonialism” or “oppression” or a “white savior” story. It’s waaay more fucked up than that. But Denis wants us to see that Paul is not a Good Guy and to do that he plays up the artificial nature of his messiah-dom, and sets his lover/wife Chani as the voice of reason in opposition to him. Why she remains attracted to him then is baffling (she’s not just a little concerned about him, mind you, but dead set on seeing him as an existential threat to her entire people). But eh. If you hire Zendaya and FloPu you gotta give them something to do.

Overall, it was still good. I liked the idea Paul is kind of trapped into becoming the messiah and the more he fights against it the more events conspire to force him down the same road. And the fremen going full fanatical jihad was suitably scary. Javier Bardem meanwhile, is reduced to going full Life of Brian mode in heralding a reluctant Paul as the messiah, telling his buddies “only the mahdi would say he isn’t the mahdi”—a line lifted almost straight from Monty Python.

Speaking of doing much with little material, a big shout out to the Captain of the Emperor's guard though, on the screen for less than 30 seconds but so memorable, grizzled old dude looks like he's seen some shit, could wrestle a bear and win, poses for the camera, squints with steely determination for a sec, charges into a dust storm and promptly gets obliterated. True hero.

To liven up your experience, I’d recommend sneaking in a bottle of tequila and doing shots every time the Harkonnens encounter a minor obstacle and, in a fit of reasonableness, immediately murder the fuck out of one of their own dudes. Denis’ portrayal of evil is a step up from the book’s pedo homosexuals, but not exactly deep.

I will, of course, be there to see the promised third movie on opening night.

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.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Amazon, a guy whose only other writing credit is "Star Trek Beyond", and a guy with no writing credits at all undoubtedly knew exactly what kind of furor they would stir up with their casting decisions on this show. Predictably, the subject of race has dominated the initial online response to the show's trailer, giving both reactionary and progressive voices plenty of windmills to tilt at. 

Is that too cynical? Probably. But Amazon as the voice of progress and equality? Amazon? Pee in a bottle warehouse workers Amazon? Come on. I think fucking not. 

From my admittedly distant, half the world away remove, it feels more like someone ticking a box, and that casting a couple of black folks is what passes for racial representation in American pop culture today. In short, an utterly empty gesture with no meaning beyond its own performance. 

And thus not really worth debating.

As a result, I don't care either way. The one thing I have long regretted about the success of the movies is how they have nearly drowned out all other representations or visualizations of Tolkien, but frankly no movie or show is going to affect how those stories live in my imagination. My Middle Earth owes more to Angus McBride or John Howe than it does to Peter Jackson.

So black elves, sure, why not. Knock yourself out. A beardless black lady dwarf, okay. Go for it. We've been through this half a dozen times already. The BBC's Troy series, the Witcher, and so on and on and on. The usual people will try to score points by squawking about it, the usual people will try to score points by defending it, years ago this might have been a productive battlefield but however sincere or heartfelt the emotions of the writers of the moment may be, I've been here, I've done this, it just feels like watching people go through the motions.

No, what turns me off from Amazon's effort is how generic it feels. Unlike the Lord of the Rings movies, which had the book to go on, this show is being stitched together from Tolkien's sketchy history of Middle Earth. And when you get a bunch of TV fantasy writers to sit down and write a show, they write the kind of show that TV fantasy writers write. Which is to say, they write the Witcher and The Wheel of Time and Letter for the King and Shannara Chronicles and the last three seasons of Game of Thrones and this looks no different from any of them.

They've turned Galadriel into a warrior princess because of course they have, that is the only way the writers can conceive of portraying a character as powerful. She has an anguished human friend because of course she does, shows these days are full of miserable people wallowing in their misery. There are hobbits because of course there are, every show needs cute comic relief.

To a certain extent that comes with the territory of being the pioneer--all the later imitators have got their shows in first, so Lord of the Rings looks imitative, but at the same time the unique and wonderful thing about the LotR movies was how grounded and historical it looked. Not fantasy at all.

The other obvious rebuttal to complains about loose adaptations is that if you liked the LotR movies you should be fine with writers adapting Tolkien, as the movies changed plenty of things. And indeed, I am rather fond of the movies--the bits that don't reek of cookie-cutter movie plotting 101 oh-no-i-need-a-dramatic-beat-here. Which the LotR movies have plenty of.

What works in the movies:

1. The Balrog and the bridge of Khazad-dum. The balrog in particular is A-1. Jaws like a refinery blast furnace. Superb.

2. The death of Boromir. Indeed I think I prefer Sean Bean to book Boromir--they really found the humanity of the character and brought it to the surface

3. Helm's Deep

4. Smeagol in all his slimy slippery glory

5. The ride of the Rohirrim

6. Eowyn confronts the Witch-King

7. Sam's indefatigable po-ta-toes down to earthiness

What is bloody stupid in the movies:

1. Aragorn grabs a ghost by the neck--a ghost, a being whose single, universal attribute is that its neck is non-grabbable, then slides down a mountain of skulls in pure early Peter Jackson budget horror film hamminess

2. Frodo tells Sam to "go home" at the border of Mordor, something like 3000 miles from home, because he suspects Sam ate a bit of bread

3. Faramir drags Frodo and Sam all the way to Osgiliath, nearly gets them captured, then abruptly lets them go

4. Sam, the most down to earth character imaginable, is asked what they are "fighting for" and instead of saying the most in-character and obvious thing possible ("home") gives some asinine speech about there being good in the world

5. Arwen is sick because of the ring or some shit, I don't know

6. Aragorn goes missing for a bit so he can have a wet dream with a horse

7. Treebeard is utterly unaware that Saruman has been cutting down trees in his own forest and which he is the guardian of (and whose defense is his entire reason for existence) until it is pointed out to him

Guess which of the two lists is entirely made up of things adapted by the writers.

Given Peter Jackson's spotty track record since the trilogy, I tend to ascribe virtually all of the success of the movies to the quality of the production design and the folks at Weta, with some left over for the stellar cast, and virtually none to the writing team. The changes were nonsensical and baffling and precisely what you get when people trained to write scripts write scripts. 

I will forever remember an interview in which British medievalist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said no modern author in their right mind would write the Council of Elrond chapter as they wouldn't trust their audience to bear with them. There's a lesson there, as I sometimes think there's a lesson in the enduring popularity of that other oddly-written SFF tentpole, Dune, in that what is seen as sensible or "necessary" for the medium is not always so. 

To quote no less an authority than my own brother, there are two ways to succeed: do what you do better than anyone else, or do something different from anyone else. The former is almost impossible, so it's a wonder so few people try the latter.

Book of Boba Fett: Chapter 7

"That's Boba Fett! He's from that other movie!"

This may just be the algorithm talking, but pick a show, any show, then go online and scroll through the hashtag, or the subreddit, or the Facebook group, or the YouTube search results, the official Discord server, pick your poison. My utterly unscientific analysis is that the posts you'll find tend to fall into one of about four categories:

1. Attempts to stir up controversy for clout

2. "What everybody gets wrong about... "

3. "... ending explained."

4. "Hidden Easter eggs in... "

Actual reviews by critics tend to get drowned out in the online forums that are our modern-day intellectual Boston Molasses Disaster. Instead you get numbers 2 through 4, and the tenuous thread I'm going to try to establish here is that all three are about the minutiae rather than the gestalt. Obsessing over tiny details rather than questions such as "What bits of it are good or enjoyable, which less so, and why?" All trees, no forest. 

"That's Luke Skywalker! He's from that other movie!"

Now, God and Coles Notes knows hand-holding people through the plot is nothing new, but what's interesting to me here is how much of #4 there seems to be. People with nothing to say about story or mechanics or drama or tension or humor or any of the things that make a story work will instead focus on the sports stats of every minor character briefly visible in the background of scene 3, or the provenance of the thing held by the protagonist in scene 5.

The Book of Boba Fett was a show made for such people. It is a show uniquely geared to generate the maximum neutral, opinion- and insight-free online chatter without actually telling a coherent narrative. 

"That's the Mandalorian! He's from that other show!"

Nothing, not one single thing in the entire show stands on its own. Boba Fett is only the protagonist because he became a fan favorite 40 years ago for having a cool helmet. He's on Tatooine because RotJ was on Tatooine. He lives in a RotJ palace, with RotJ pig guards and has a RotJ pet rancor. He's friends with the guy from the other show. Who gets a ship from the prequel movies. And then goes to visit, you guessed it, RotJ Deep Fake Luke Skywalker. And a lady from the Clone Wars show. Boba is also pals with a Wookie from the comics, but enemies with some blue dude from the Clone Wars show. Mando recruits another crossover guy. But then they're attacked by prequel concept art droids.

You know what I mean? Nothing original here, just a stream of actor and object cameos for people to compile lists about.

"That's Cobb Vanth! He's from that other show!"

And here's the thing: The online fans love it. Oh, they grouch about the fact that the plot is completely nonsensical and the putative protagonist disappears for 1/3 of his own show, but they forgive all when given a stream of things to identify and recognize from elsewhere.

It's just baffling for even mildly casual fans. I mean, I'm a moderate Star Wars nerd, but the final showdown between Boba Fett and Some Guy He Knows Apparently lacks any weight or tension because Some Guy appeared in all of one scene before the finale so we've had zero in-show buildup to this. I've got to go back and watch seven seasons of the Clone Wars just for even the remotest hope of understanding what this moment is supposed to mean to the two characters.

But okay, this show is for the fanatics, not the fans. It appears to exist as trivia list fodder, a string of facts to be recited to show how big a fan you are.

"That's Cad Bane! He's from that other show!"

The episode itself was rubbish, but does that even matter? It's essentially an hour-long gun fight directed by a man with absolutely zero flair for directing action. Two soldiers with jetpacks stand in the middle of a street and sportingly let their opponents shoot at them. Combatants take shelter behind a combustible hover-car, instead of the fairly incombustible stone building two meters behind them. Someone gets shot half a dozen times, limps to safety, and then is up and running around the next scene. People run away from invincible giant robots by fleeing down a street in a single group, rather than splitting up or taking cover or doing anything really. In order to fight against droids with shields impenetrable to lasers, our heroes decide to do lasers at them FROM SLIGHTLY HIGHER UP. 

All ends well though, when One Guy from That Other Movie kills Some Guy From That Other Show.

A fitting end to a show about other shows.

Book of Just About Everybody Other than Boba Fett: Chapter 6

Just... what an odd choice for the structure of this series. It's like Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau and the writers ran out of Boba material halfway through and said, "Screw it, let's do The Mandalorian again". So after four episodes of backstory and build-up, you get two episodes in which the putative main character appears for less than 5 minutes and has maybe one line. While Boba standing in the background and saying 3 words might be very on-brand for ESB-era Boba Fett, it is one of the weirdest, oddest things I've seen in a serialized SF show since serialized SF shows became a thing.

Book of Boba Fett: Chapter 5

What a great episode of "The Mandalorian" that was... Wait. What?

This episode kind of highlighted how aimless and flat "The Book of Boba Fett" has been--the most enjoyable episode all season has been the one in which the titular character never even appears.

It was a Mandalorian crossover.

It was a Halo crossover.

It was a Terminator 2: Judgement Day crossover.

The one thing it was not was an episode in a show that had anything to do with Boba Fett.

Also, prediction time: Grogu is going to escape the Knights of Ren by going full Frodo with a mithril I mean beskar undershirt.

I realize that sentence appears to be the work of a man suffering from a stroke, but you'll just have to trust me that it makes sense, 

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.

Book of Boba Fett: Chapter 4

I’d like, if I may, to talk about structure. May I? Yes I may. The one advantage to screaming into the abyss online is that it’s an uncaring abyss. It doesn’t care, that’s its whole thing. Do whatever. Talk about the structure of a kid’s science fiction show to your heart’s content.

So I will.

Boba Fett has a two-track structure, a present-tense story where our protag tries to establish himself as the successor to Jabba the Hutt, and a past-tense series of flashbacks that show what happened to Babs in between “Return of the Jedi” and this show.

It doesn’t work. And I think I’ve figured out why.

Because the two stories are totally unrelated.

Now let’s imagine you’re a massive Star Wars nerd and enjoy arguing about nerd shit like this. Well actually, okay, first let’s imagine you exist. Congratulations. Happy birthday. Now let’s imagine you’re a nerd. Lol, fucking nerd. Right, now let’s imagine your objection:

“How can you claim they are unrelated? The flashbacks are filling in the backstory and showing how Bobbie Boo got to where he is in the present day.”

Sure, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The question is, WHY? Why is this show intercutting the present-day narrative with flashbacks to tell us the backstory and show us what Bobbity Babs was up to? Why are flashbacks the best way to do that? How does the flashback structure contribute to the story the show is trying to tell?

The structure doesn’t work because it doesn’t answer any of these questions. The two stories are disconnected. Oh sure, at the most basic level it shows the ‘what happened’, but guess what—that is exactly what a traditional linear story does. And a linear story is much easier for our linear brains with their linear perception of time to understand. If you just want to show what happens to a guy, then a flashback structure is most definitely and emphatically not the best way to do it. At all. If that’s all you want to do, just show us what happened, in the order it happened.

Here’s our structure so far, with flashbacks in italics:

Boba gets sassed by the Mayor’s representative—he escapes the Sarlacc and is captured by Tuskens—he is ambushed by assassins—he saves the Tusken child and is accepted into the tribe—he interrogates the assassin—he witnesses the Tuskens being attacked by train guards—he confronts the Hutts—he leads the attack on the train—he recruits the Mods—the Tuskens are killed by bikers—the Mods save him from Krrrsantan—he rescues Fennec, tells her he wants to be a crime boss because he is tired of taking orders, gets his ship and kills the bikers—he holds failed talks with the other gangs.

Now here it is again, in chronological order:

Boba escapes the Sarlacc and is captured by Tuskens—he saves the Tusken child and is accepted into the tribe—he witnesses the Tuskens being attacked by train guards—he leads the attack on the train—the Tuskens are killed—he rescues Fennec, tells her he wants to be a crime boss because he is tired of taking orders, gets his ship and kills the bikers— he gets sassed by the Mayor’s representative—he is ambushed by assassins—he interrogates the assassin—he confronts the Hutts—he recruits the Mods—the Mods save him from Krrrsantan—he holds failed talks with the other gangs.

Here’s the question: Does your understanding of the story change in any way whatsoever with the linear version?

Nope. Not a jot. There’s no “EUREKA!” moment. No insight. If anything, it’s a helluva lot easier to follow. That’s because the flashbacks are being used just to deliver plot, but the plot points are totally disconnected from the present-day story.

Even as a standard, boring old mystery-box approach to withholding information from the audience in an attempt to get them to keep watching, this approach fails, because the answers the flashbacks are revealing aren’t the questions the audience is asking. When you tell us Boba Fett is now a mild-mannered, gentle man who wants to raise a family, our first question is not 'where did he get his gaffi stick?'.

There is no reason for the flashbacks.

Movies and TV shows and books should have a reason for what they do. A reason for their structure. A reason for shots and angles and edits. A reason for background music. A reason for dialog and why characters say what they say. There should be a reason.

“1917” should have a reason for its single-take cinematography. “Game of Thrones” should have a reason for killing off its characters. “Use of Weapons” should have a reason for telling half the story in reverse chronological order.

“1917” is a tense story and a single take heightens the tension. You are right there with these two soldiers through every agonizing, nail-biting step across the mud and barbed wire and rotting corpses of No Man’s Land. They can’t escape and neither can you.

“Game of Thrones” is a revisionist high fantasy that aims at psychological realism and kills of characters to drive home its theme: “In real life being a goody-two-shoes would just get the hero killed—See? SEE?”

“Use of Weapons” splits its narrative so that both the reader and the characters discover the key revelation about the protagonist’s past at the same time, at the end of the book. You and the other characters both get that sudden rush of EUREKA at the same moment.

While I’m on a roll, let’s take another example I saw recently: “King Arthur Innit Mate?” or whatever the title of the Guy Ritchie Arthurian movie was. So bonkers I won’t bother reviewing it, only to mention the premise is Arthur grows up on the streets of London rather than as the ward of Sir Ector and Sir Kay. So there’s an early scene where he’s being interrogated by Roose Bolton from Game of Thrones that is composed of a series of lightning flashbacks—"Where were you yestiddy lad?” “Aw, oi dindu naffin’ guv.”—Cut to: Young Arthur beating the shit out of some Vikings. It works because it has a point. It reveals Arthur’s character, eye ee the fact that he’s grown up to be a street thug, at the point of the movie where that is relevant information, eye ee he’s being interrogated by a guard about his activities.

It works (although the movie itself gloriously and weirdly doesn’t) because it has a point.

There could be a point to the flashbacks in Boba Fett, if, and this is a big IF, if they were related to the present-day story either in terms of revealing character, motivation or theme.

Revealing Character

A lot of people have commented that the Boba of this show is not the Boba of the movies. The man who had to be specifically told not to disintegrate people now prattles on about respect and keeps letting his enemies go or else hiring them. So the question is, “What happened?” and the show has now, four episodes in, told us that living among the Tuskens changed him.

In that case, the present-day narrative needs to center around this change. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Other characters should be commenting, questioning or challenging Boba on his new direction and the flashback scenes need to focus on the catalyst for the change in Boba’s character, not acts of derring-do as he kills monsters and boards trains. (Why does he save the child Tusken? Unclear! What aspects of Tusken society does he admire and why? We’ll get back to you on that one!)

Revealing Motivation

Another big question the show raises is why Boba even wants to be a crime lord in the first place. The last we saw him on the screen, the man was a ruthless mercenary, a lone gun, an outsider. What made him decide being a crime boss would be a good idea?

Once again, halfway through the season we’ve finally been given an answer: Because he claims he is tired of taking orders from incompetent bosses who almost got him killed.

Again, that’s not the struggle that has been dramatized. Yeah, working with Jabba nearly gets him digested by the Sarlacc right at the start of episode 1, but we’ve had no indication that this has sparked any crisis of faith until Boba just blurts out his motivation over a campfire.

If that’s the point, THEN MAKE IT THE POINT. Use flashbacks to show all the other jobs that went sour because of idiot orders from incompetent bosses. In the present day, make that his key appeal to the underlings of other gangs—for example, have him recruit Black Krrrsantan based on the fact the Wookie was sent on a suicide mission to try to kill Boba (instead of just saying, “Hey man, do you want a job?”).  

Revealing Theme

I left this one for last, because it’s the hardest as honestly there hasn’t been much of a theme to the show yet, other than maybe “everybody needs a family” or something along those lines. But again, if that’s the point then the editing between the two timeframes has to highlight the juxtaposition of the past (Boba as loner) and present (Boba as trying to create a family), or contrast the character of Boba (loyal to friends) against the antagonists (backstab each other). Focus on the focus.

The Hutts abandoning the Wookie when the assassination attempt fails fits this theme, but there needs to be more of that, really zero in on it, because right now the scene just comes off as strange and out of place, rushed storytelling, a sudden writing out of two characters only just introduced. Just spitballing here, but have the assassin start singing as soon as he is captured, have the train guards immediately turn on each other, trying to point fingers at one another for attacking the Tuskens (it was his idea—no it was HIS idea), dramatize for us the difference between their approach and Boba’s.

All I’m asking is that writers and producers of stories think about why they’re doing what they’re doing. Why is this the best way to do it?

Is, for example, a 1700-word blog post the best way to talk about this subject? Well obviously fucking not, it’s never the best way to do anything, ever.

But.

Still.

Ah, fuck.