Narcos

This came out in, what, 2015, maybe 2016 I think (no I can't be bothered to look it up what do you think this is, a reputable blog or something?), anyway breaking news, really securing my rep as a writer and critic on the cutting edge of the scene. It’s a kind of docu-drama I guess, a fictionalized re-enactment of key moments in the life of Colombian 70s-80s cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

First off, let me confess I only watched this because I kind of liked Boyd Holbrook’s performance in “Logan” and I’m kind of burnt out on any and all things Disney (Am I going to watch the next Marvel D+ series coming out next month? Oh you bet I am). Or serialized shows generally that aim to just go on forever, like the Simpsons, shows that exist only to go on existing.

It’s nice to have a show that has a definitive endpoint in mind. 

Second off, great mustache work all round. Really, hats off to the mustache wrangler. Amazing stuff. Everybody rocking the 80s porn ‘stache, the pencil, the handlebar, the horseshoe, the Miami Vice stubble, you name it. First-class follicles.

Third off, watching this is almost exactly like watching the old “Unsolved Mysteries” TV show from the 80s, which might be a deliberate nod given the time period, look it up on YouTube if you don’t know what I’m talking about, anyway where Robert Stack would narrate a re-enactment of some crime or mystery or other. Narcos has almost the same format, stretched into 10-episode seasons: Boyd Holbrook does a bit of serious narrating, cut to 5-minute re-enactment of the life of Pablo Escobar, cut to archive news footage from the period, rinse and repeat.

Especially in the first half of season one, this gives the show a kind of jerky stop-and-start pace, with the years just racing by, pausing only for three lines of dialog between Pablo (hands on hips, joint in mouth) and his cousin Gustavo (hands on hips, cigarette in mouth, hunter cap on head).

Boyd is a DEA agent, Pedro Pascal his partner, and the two are ostensibly main characters but they don’t do much other than angrily swear to take down Escobar about twice per episode. That’s on the powdery side of thin for characterization, and gets old pretty quick, particularly when you realize these boys have been sniffing too much of their own product and ain’t got a hope in hell of actually catching the man—it’s all just so much hot air.

The show is set almost exclusively in Colombia, so on the one hand it provides a look at America’s War on Drugs from the outside, as it were, from the viewpoints of both the drug dealers and the government that had to deal with them. I think this format lets the USA off a little lightly, okay a little very extremely lightly, as the market whose combination of ravenous, insatiable appetite for cocaine and flailing, desperate attempts to squash the consumption of cocaine helped create people like Escobar.

It's also good though to move away from the US as the center of all creation and see how all the flailing affected people in the country it all started in, caught in the crossfire, kind of double victims here, of drug lords empowered by American money and pawns in a war waged with American money, victims of the consequences of both America's hypocritical love and hate of drugs. The insights into the internal workings of Colombia's politics and attempts to deal with Escobar wound up being the most interesting part of the show.

Loki Episode 6

Haha, hoho, here’s what I said at the end of my review of last week’s episode:

“In many ways then, with only one episode left and having only barely scratched the surface of its premise, this is starting to feel like Marvel’s version of Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy”, an entire season whose raison d'être is setting up either a sequel or some other piece of the MCU.”

Boy, when I am right, I am right.

The whole thing did indeed turn out to have been an exercise in scene-setting, shuffling pieces into position and revealing the MCU’s next Big Bad:

Some Guy.

Yes, yes, I know, comic book fans tell me he’s supposedly “Kang the Conqueror” who is apparently not related to Kodos haha still killing it with the Simpsons references 20 years later, but within the context of the show itself, he’s Some Guy. He does no conquering, kanglish or otherwise. If you know nothing about the character, just as I don't, then there is nothing within show itself to make the reveal anything other than a baffling non-event.

We spent six weeks building up to Loki and Other Loki meeting:

Some Guy.

The two journey to the castle at the End of Time, and meet Some Guy. They sit down across a table from Some Guy and for the next 15 minutes he explains what exactly the TVA is and why he created it. To whit: If you have infinite (or nearly infinite) universes, then the bell curve and normal distribution of human experience says you will always have universes in which a ruthless, ambitious conqueror will arise and seek to dominate all of reality. The only way to prevent this from happening is to have only one universe, where said conqueror does NOT arise, and ruthlessly eliminate all other realities.

Some Guy then gives the two Lokis a choice: Let him live and go back to their lives in the one and only reality, or they can kill him, in which case multiple realities will emerge, and the law of probability says a power-crazed dictator will arise again. Boy Loki wants to let Some Guy live, revenge-crazed Girl Loki wants him dead, they fight, because the only people in the MCU who can threaten superheroes are other superheroes, Boy Loki sems to win Girl Loki over with the power of luuurve, but doesn’t really. She kills Some Guy, thus spawning the creation of multiple realities, a conclusion that everyone who knew the titles of the upcoming Spider-Man and Doctor Strange movies was already expecting. Credits end with the announcement of season 2.

How to evaluate this then: As an episode, as a series, as part one of a larger story?

As an episode it is, quite frankly, one of the worst cases of tell-don’t-show I’ve witnessed in recent televisual entertainment. It’s mostly Some Guy sitting at a desk and telling his life story, only cutting away to inconsequential scenes with other characters every once in a while to obscure the fact that it’s mostly Some Guy sitting at a desk and telling his life story.

As the end of the series, it’s a startlingly dull climax. I know comic book fans are losing their minds over the introduction of Kang the Conqueror into the MCU, but for those of us unfamiliar with his kangic conquering, he’s just Some Guy. Yay, the MCU is finally going to feature Some Guy. By which I mean the Big Bad has been absent the entire series so the only thing we’ve seen him do is sit at a desk and tell his life story. Which by my reckoning is not, though I may be made of sterner stuff than the average television viewer, especially big, nor bad.

The basic concept, I dig, a sort of Darwinistic survival-of-the-most-ruthless multiverse in which wiping out other realities becomes not evil, but a simple matter of self-defense. Free will must be limited in order to ensure there is any free will at all. That’s an interesting moral dilemma, which is a shame, as we’re only introduced to it about 10 minutes before the end of the season.

As a result, it’s not a dilemma we’ve seen dramatized in any way shape or form on our screen. We’re just told that this dilemma exists. One revenge-crazed person gives it precisely zero thought and kills the guy preventing it from happening anyway. So the climax doesn’t even really work as the climax to the season.

As part one of a larger story? Hm. Television shows with story arcs that span multiple seasons are nothing new, so I suppose in hindsight it was maybe unfair of me to criticize the show for lack of direction and clarity, but this is the Internet so there’s no way in hell I’ll admit to that. Double down, my friends, always double down.

In all seriousness (okay, in a modicum of seriousness), one would not fault, say, “The Fellowship of the Ring” for not getting even halfway to Mordor, or to use more recent examples, season one of “Game of Thrones” for not giving us a winner to the thronic game, or season one of “The Witcher” for not resolving everything about Geralt and his adoptive daughter, Ciri. 

Taking the analogy further, one does not get angry at a chapter for not concluding the story, nor irritated with a paragraph for not ending the chapter, nor disappointed with a sentence for not ending a paragraph. 

I suppose the difference is framing and expectation—the way a storyteller begins to tell their story determines the boundaries we set on that nebulous concept of a "story", and sets our expectations for how much story we will get, and at what pace or speed. If you begin watching in the expectation the show will deliver an ending, at least to this particular arc if not the Lokis’ whole story, in six weeks’ time, then finding it was all just piddling about before the story actually gets going will feel like a bit of bait and switch.

In retrospect I find it renders the whole season rather hollow. It was all a bit of screwing around, stalling for time until the cliffhanger so that Marvel could reveal:

Some Guy.

Bad enough that the titular main character, Boy Loki, has been reduced to second fiddle tagging along with other, more interesting characters, but then even his more interesting Girl Loki self is revealed to also have been no more than a prop, a way of maneuvering this fictional universe into position to reveal:

Some Guy.

I’ve found this to be a trap some longer-running shows seem to fall into. “Vikings” didn’t seem to be about anything, just stuff happening to a bunch of Vikings (the Siege of Paris storyline being the one exception, and a standout because of it). I tried watching Netflix’s “Travelers” recently too and it had the same problem—time travelers from a “12 Monkeys”-ish dark future travel to our time to change our future/their past, and just, kind of, do stuff. They seem to accomplish their main mission halfway through the first season, but then the show just keeps going for another two and a half seasons as far as I can tell. Stuff keeps happening. Not stuff with any greater direction or point, just. Stuff.

You know what? I don’t buy it anymore. Maybe this makes me the old man being angry at the cloud, two Simpsons references in one post I'm just killing it here, but no, I don't buy it anymore.

An entertaining story should have some kind of point to it. A satisfying, entertaining story should not rely on half a dozen other bits of future, unreleased entertainment in order to be entertaining. Yes, season one of “Game of Thrones” was setup for the quasi-Wars-of-the-Roses style Lannisters versus Starks battle, “The Witcher” was setup for Geralt reuniting with Ciri, but they delivered clear conclusions to their mini-arcs. Likewise, “Dune” ends with Paul becoming emperor, “Star Wars” with the Death Star blowing up, or even “Phantom Menace” with the trade route taxation or whatever tf it was getting worked out. 

Entertainment can be part of a larger property yet still deliver a satisfying arc that has a definite conclusion.

It should not, in other words, be a six-hour intro for:

Some Guy.

But here we are.

Loki Episode 5

Having exhausted all possible criticism, I find myself forced to choose between either repeating myself or actually being nice about the show.

Having exhausted all possible criticism, I find myself forced to choose between either repeating myself or actually being nice about the show.

Having … okay, well you get the joke.

Instead of recapping the show, let’s talk about what’s really important here: Me. 

And my opinions. 

To whit, my main trouble with the show is its kind of flabby structure, sort of aimless meandering between plot points without clear conflicts or objectives that would provide tension and suspense, favoring instead to keep the audience in a state of perpetual bewilderment in the hopes that people enjoy being outsmarted by their entertainment choices.

Even as a mystery I find it unfulfilling, as the show presents not one mystery, but a kind of series of Russian matryoshka nesting doll mysteries, in which mysteries are presented and then immediately solved in the next episode, only for another one to be presented.

This most recent episode was a case in point. When we left off last week, it was suddenly revealed that getting dematerialized by the time cops of the TVA doesn’t actually kill you—Boy Loki is supposedly disintegrated, only to wake up in a post-apocalyptic New York and find himself facing four different incarnations of himself: Homemade cosplay Loki (Richard E Grant), kid Loki (not Richard E Grant), black Loki with a hammer (still not Richard E Grant) and literally an alligator Loki (could be Richard E Grant, who knows, the man has a formidable range). So we are left with two mysteries: Where or when is this? Who are these other guys and what are they doing there?

Well we get our answers in the first ten minutes or so: It’s the “Void” at the end of time, which we didn’t know was a thing until we were suddenly introduced to it just now so there’s not much you can say to it except “oh, huh, okay”. It’s the place where everything the baddies at the TVA want banished is transported to, so that whoever it is can’t muck up the timeline anymore (being at the end of time, and all). The end of time apparently involves a beastie that’s kind of a cross between the balrog and the smoke monster from “Lost” that devours everything, which is also not a thing we were aware existed until just now. Eliciting another rousing, “oh, neat, I guess” from the audience.

The other Lokis are all, like our main Loki, “variants” that somehow accidentally changed the canonical timeline, got caught and packed off to the Void. What are they doing? Not a lot. Hanging out in an underground nuclear shelter, basically. Quite how they managed to find our Loki whilst evading an all-devouring smoke monster is a bit of a mystery, but whatever keeps the plot going I guess.

My point being, all the questions you had at the end of last week have now been answered. Since none of the answers have any grounding in anything that’s come before, you’re just left with a kind of dull acceptance. Sure. Why not.

During the meanwhilst, Girl Loki captures TVA Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and demands to know what’s really going on with the TVA—who is in charge? Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) appears to change sides, but doesn’t really. Cornered and desperate, Girl Loki disintegrates herself rather than allow herself to be captured by Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw)—supposedly in the hopes that this will enable her to find Boy Loki, though she would have no reason to suspect disintegration does anything other than what it says on the tin, unless she’s read the script.

She meets up with Mobius (Owen Wilson) and then with Boy Loki and his merry men (viz himself, himself as a kid, himself, and himself as an alligator). There follows the one stretch of the show that’s actually pretty good, including some humorous bits between Mobius and Old Loki about whether or not the alligator is really a Loki (“Well, he’s green,” observes Old Loki, “although he could be lying.”) There’s also a nice quiet bit between Boy Loki and Girl Loki as they contemplate the future and what will happen should they win.

So I’ll give the show two points: One, the structure for this episode is clear and dramatic, the struggle to subdue or kill the smoke monster and escape the Void. Two, it really nails the character bits when it isn’t trying to push the plot from twist to twist. Owen x Tom has been gold from the get-go (though the sudden shift from hostility to best friends has been a bit sudden, but we’ll let that slide and assume a lot of time has passed off-camera), and here both Owen x Richard and Tom x Sophia are amusing and, dare I say it, even a bit touching. Though the beats between Tom and Sophia probably should have come in episode 3 and thus feel like a rehash. But I’ll take what I can get.

We end on a climax that is a bit of a repeat of the climax to the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, in which our heroes join hands in the midst of purplish-black CGI smoke and use the power of friendship (or twu rub in this case, perhaps?) to make some glowing fireworks, find the emotional fortitude to overcome the enemy, and then triumph. The smoke dissipates, revealing a portal to a castle at the end of time and, presumably, the lair of who- or whatever is behind the TVA.

It’s a serviceable cliffhanger, I suppose, and probably the only one the writers could have gone with, since “Who really runs the TVA?” is the only mystery left unexplored. It’s not a particularly compelling one to me, as we weren’t even aware that was a mystery until last episode, so we’ve had all of 40 minutes buildup to it, and while we’re on the subject, from a structural standpoint not introducing your villain until the very last episode of the series feels like an extremely odd choice.

We are left with a main character who sort of staggers through the story, repeating the same beats, constantly bewildered, never exercising any real agency. It’s Girl Loki’s story, and the show would probably have been a thousand times better if it hadn’t been bogged down by the need to focus on a character (viz Tom Hiddle starring as Boy Loki) who isn’t all that central to the story, really.

In many ways then, with only one episode left and having only barely scratched the surface of its premise, this is starting to feel like Marvel’s version of the Netflix flop “Jupiter’s Legacy”, an entire season whose raison d'être is setting up either a sequel or some other piece of the MCU.

I know Marvel is addicted to trying to interconnect anything and everything so people feel obliged to watch every bit of product the content manufacturing machine churns out, but this is the first time I’ve felt that was the only reason for one of their properties to exist.

Loki Episode 4

Let us begin, as the show itself does, with a quick recap of the story so far:

Avengers Assemble Loki (Tom) breaks the MCU continuity and picks up the magic Tesseract stone during Avengers Endgame, thus escaping Thor 2 and 3 as well as Avengers Infinity War but not escaping a black-clad SWAT team from the Kafka/Gilliamesque Time Variance Authority (TVA) time cops who Don’t Approve of That Sort of Thing.

Tomki is saved from callous and disinterested disintegration at the last minute, by TVA Agent Mobius (Wowen Wilson), who needs his help to track down another MCU canon-unfriendly Loki.

This they then do.

Said Loki turns out to be… dun Dun DUN… a GURL (Sophia).

Sophki and Tomki escape the TVA by fleeing across time and space to a purple-grey moon called Lamentis where, in a refreshing break from the SF trope of things crashing into planets, a planet is about to crash into them. 

This it then does.

Cue cliffhanger ending.

While the back and forth between Owen and Tom has been fun to watch, thanks mainly to both actors’ ability not to overplay their hands and let the vulnerability and humanity of the characters shine through, I’ve found the plot a bit shapeless and meandering, probably because the writers’ instincts seem to be to treat the narrative like a mystery that must be kept from the audience, rather than a superhero action flick where all is on display.

Given that Disney-Marvel-Pixar-Lucasfilm is three quarters of the entertainment world these days, I think it’s great that shows like Wandavision and Loki are starting to experiment with the boundaries and possibilities of the superhero genre. However. I think mysteries have their own conventions. To put it as stupidly and crudely as I can (and I am exceptionally stupid and crude), in act one you set up the mystery, act two allow your protagonist to follow the clues and decode the mystery, then in act three reveal and confront the antagonist.

This they have not done.

Instead of being upfront with the mystery or conflict or issue it is trying to resolve, each episode of Loki answers one mystery, only to immediately set up a new and completely different mystery, meaning I don’t feel there’s any forward momentum or progress being made. Instead, we get a similar set of plot points and near-copies of various scenes cycling around and around like the show is its own little time loop.

So as we open on the doomed moon, Sylvie (Girlki) gives us her sad, touching flashback origin story (which probably could have fit into episode 3 instead of the pointless toing and froing), in which we confirm that the TVA are actually the bad guys, not poor Sylvie. Boyki is touched. They hold hands. And Wowen appears at the 11^th hour to rescue Tom. Again.

On a side note, I think the show breaks its own rules in order to get the couple (does falling in love with yourself count as narcissism if it’s technically a different person, or incest? Hm) out of a jam, as the whole point of going to an impending apocalypse was that, since everyone is about to die, non-canon people can do literally anything without affecting the timeline. Here, we are told that two gods of mischief potentially making a bit of mischief beneath the sheets, wink wink, would create a “Nexus event” though quite how—since they were 2 seconds away from a fiery death—I do not pretend to understand.

In any event Loki is captured, again, and interrogated by Mobius, again. Tom reveals Loki’s bad-boy brashness is a cover for his insecurities, again (actually for about the third time so far, I think). Tom also tries to convince Owen that he’s working for the bad guys. Mobius goes to talk to his boss, Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and that’s too good a name not to spell out in full), again. She informs him Tom and Sophia are scheduled for execution.

Which seems like another one of these pointless scenes to me. Instead of saving people you intend to kill from certain death, you could, and I apologize if my reasoning here is a little complex but bear with me, you could—you know. Just. Not.

Anyway, the chat with his boss is enough to raise Owen’s suspicions, so he decides to do a bit of snooping.

This he then does.

With astonishing speed Owen discovers his entire life is a lie. He saves Tom only he doesn’t—instead Own gets caught and disintegrated by Renslayer’s goons. OR DOES HE? 

That’s the trouble with killing off characters in a show entirely built around time travel, particularly a post Endgame Marvel show about time travel: We all know the show is going to cheat. Sure, sure, show, Owen Wilson is dead. Sure, we believe you.

So the net effect of this sequence is to subtract one Owen from the show, but Tommy and Sylvie are still destined for the chop. They are brought before the Time Keepers, the supposed leaders of the TVA, break free thanks to an oddly useless bit of help from one of the time cops now sympathetic to Sylvie (earlier Nice Cop breaks Sylvie out of prison, only to put her straight back in again, only to throw her a weapon at the dramatically appropriate moment), and a rather awkward stick fight breaks out.

In the fight, one of the Time Keepers gets their heads knocked off, revealing they are actually a brainless android. “But who created the TVA?” cries Tom. Ooh a new mystery, how lovely, how delightful not to know who the antagonist is two thirds of the way through the series. Certainly this has never happened before in a Marvel show and certainly not Wandavision.

Anyway, Tom is about to confess his feelings for Sylvie, again, when he gets disintegrated. OR DOES HE?

No. No he doesn’t.

Cut to a mid-credits scene that I nearly missed because none of the first three episodes had ones (yes, very sneaky, fuck you too show), where Tom awakes in a post-apocalyptic New York and finds himself face-to-face with Comic Book Loki (Richard Grant), Kid Loki and His Pet Alligator Loki Complete With Horned Crown and Hammer Loki Or Something Look I Don’t Know He Was On Screen For Like Two Seconds. Another mystery. Great.

It may be that when all of this is over and the final shape is revealed everything in this show will turn out to be perfectly placed and paced and all fit together as seamlessly as Tom Cruise and his Motorcycle, but the actual process of sitting through it is just a tad frustrating. Unless audiences have been conditioned to spend the entire time not quite understanding what the fuck is going on.

The mid-credits scene is a pretty good encapsulation of my beef with the show. No warning or foreshadowing or set up we were going to have a mid-credits scene. No hint that being disintegrated by the TVA means anything other than being wiped out of existence. Not even a whisper as to who all these other Lokis are and what they’re doing hanging out in the ruins of a New York City. You’re just presented with a series of baffling moments and expected to be happy because this show thinks that pulling the rug from under your audience and going “TADAAA!” is somehow synonymous with good TV.

There’s a danger in playing too much to the audience’s reaction, I think. As someone much smarter than me once remarked—and I won’t credit them because nobody likes a smarty pants—it’s the difference between Olympic wresting and WWF wresting. Olympic wresting can get the audience on their feet, but that’s not its sole objective. Whereas the only reason anybody in WWF does anything is to get a reaction. Now call me an elitist snob or whatever you will (it’s okay it’s the Internet I can’t hear you) but I for one do not think it’s healthy if all your entertainment is as hollow as professional wrestling.  

The phrase ‘subverting expectations’ has much to answer for. Our current Lost/Game of Thrones/Rise of Skywalker fetish for keeping people guessing at every point in the story means the audience is reduced to vegetative spectating, a kind of lumpen potateriat.

Even a mystery, I think, has to be clear about what the friggin mystery actually is. Be clear about what is unclear. We in the audience have to know what it is that we don’t know, so that we can look forward to knowing. Suspense requires anticipation. I can’t anticipate this show because I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen from moment to moment. So there’s no suspense. I have no idea what mysteries are going to be solved because I don’t even know what the mysteries are.

Ah, makes me want to get a stiff drink and watch Mad Max again.

This I then did.

Loki Episode 3

Ha ha, it’s Loki 2077.

(Loki proceeds to fuck everything up)

Yep. Definitely Loki 2077.

That’s a nerd joke for you. The rest of you just skip to the next paragraph.

There’s a sequence in this week’s episode that perfectly captures this series’ sense of plot progression:

l  Boy Loki and Girl Loki have snuck aboard a train heading to Location A

l  B & G Loki are discovered

l  There is a Fight

l  B & G are thrown from the train

l  During the scuffle a device is broken which means the Lokis’ plan is in SHAMBLES and they are DOOMED

l  After a brief discussion they decide ... to walk to Location A

So everything that happened was kind of pointless. They didn’t need to sneak onto the train at all, they could have walked. The consequence of the device being broken was that they decided to do the thing they had already decided to do.

All we get out of the entire sequence is a bit of banter between Tom Hiddleston (Loki One) and Sophia Di Martino (Loki Two) and her Mancunian accent. Tom gets to rehash his character backstory about being quite close to his adopted mother while Sophia gets to drop vague hints and tell us precisely nothing. This is also in line with the show’s penchant for repeating plot points we’ve already been over.

Fans will squeal about the character development but no it bloody well isn’t don’t be so daft, it’s a reiteration of things we already knew about Our Loki (mama’s boy) and deliberate obfuscation about Other Loki. Oh, and iTs CaNoN tHaT tHeYrE bIsExUaL jesus this era is going to look pathetically fixated on people’s sexual orientations in 10 years’ time isn’t it.

(I wonder if Sophia’s offhand remark she has a post-apocalyptic relationship with a postman is a reference to the Kevin Costner movie/David Brin novel of the same name? IT’S CANON SHE’S FUCKING KEVIN COSTNER doesn’t get you Twitter retweets though so probably not.)

Otherwise, it’s Tom reenacting his relationship with Owen Wilson, only now it’s with Sophia. Have Tom bicker with someone he’s supposed to be working with, how very original. To be sure there’s sparks there, a bit of fireworks even, and Tom can play charming yet vulnerable like nobody’s business so the interplay is fun to watch, but I can’t help the nagging feeling it’s not actually in the service of anything related to the story. 

And why does Sylvie, who is supposed to know all about the planet in question blowing up, not know where the Ark is? Whatever.

We still don’t know quite what Sylvie/Sophia is aiming to do or why—I THINK that as an unwitting “Variant” much like Tom she has been hunted by the TVA and has decided to strike back and destroy her pursuers rather than quietly submit to erasure, but that’s kind of conjecture on my part. As I keep saying, some clarity with regards to your antagonist (or perhaps deuteragonist at this point in the plot) would really help grease these narrative gears.

The only progression or new information that we get is that the TVA is also staffed by Variants, meaning they’re all kind of witless dupes too, including Owen/Mobius. So the TVA is pretty well solidified as the “real” bad guys of the show and a jet ski future for Mobius is looking more and more likely. Though it does make Sylvie/Sophia murdering all those other TVA guys kind of gross—look, the baddies can either be “mooks” that are just obstacles your hero can vanquish without worrying about morality, OR they can be real, live humans with their own hopes and dreams, but suddenly switching from one to the other is going to make half your story feel very, very odd.

See also: Stormtroopers are just brainwashed kids, now let’s go murder-fuck a couple thousand of them.

At least we got to see where the entire special effects budget went: on a kind of grey-purple planet that could be Vormir but isn’t, with an astonishingly fake-looking planet in the sky, plus a kind of “Snowpiercer” train that also steals the save-the-rich premise from the same movie, and a single cut action sequence lifted from “1917” only the people are patently just running around in a circle while the camera spins on a tripod.

It all ends in a kind of cliffhanger which gives Tom yet another chance to strike almost exactly the same pose he held at the end of episode two.

I think I joked about this time-travel show ending up being kind of a time loop like Tenet or something, but this repetition and recycling of scenes and conversations ain’t funny.

Loki Episode 2

Well, we had some highs and lows this week.

The highs, or singular high really: The relationship between the two leads. Part father versus son, part by-the-book veteran versus young maverick, part crook working with the cops, it’s comfortingly familiar but that’s exactly what gives the actors room to play. Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki have one or two nice moments, one in particular that is revealing of Mobius’ character in a clear yet unvoiced, understated way:

See, company man for life Wilson keeps a Jet Ski magazine on his desk. He’s never ridden one, being a lifer, living to work rather than working to live. Loki presses him on it. Why jet skis? Well, they look great. The conversation then elides into the nature of Wilson’s job, and more to the point, what happens if he is successful: Order. Eternal, predictable order. Wilson really captures the air of a man repeating the company line with his best smile while simultaneously showing us how it’s crushing his soul.

Great scene, loved it, nice character-building work there. Hope it pays off at the end and Mobius gets the freedom he secretly craves.

The rest of it I’m less enthused about it, precisely because it lacks the clarity of the character byplay.

We’re two episodes in to this six-episode series, a third of the way through, and here is the sum total of what we know about our antagonist:

It’s a chick.

Motivations? A little fuzzy. Methods? Ya got me there. Goals? Search me, pal.

All we got is the surprise twist reveal that it’s a woman, which might have been more surprising or impactful if people related to the show had babbled a little less about Loki being genderfluid and thus given the game away to such an extent that even I was able to predict the twist.

What does Bad Loki do? Attacks a bunch of Minutemen, which incidentally is exactly what she did at the end of episode 1 so a bit of repetition there, huh show. Not really advancing the plot ya know. Anyway, she steals a time charge thing that erases stuff in a radius around it and kidnaps one of the time cops. She had also left a stick of “Kablooie” gum with a kid in medieval France in Ep 1, which now turns out to be part of a plan to lure the time cops to find her in 2050 Atlanta.

Wilson, Hiddleston and one of three women of color cast in secondary roles to make up for having two white men in the lead show up. Naughty Loki beats up Nice Loki. Then sends the time charge thingies to various points in history, which apparently screws up the timeline for some reason. Then she escapes.

Why does she need to lure the team to her hideout? Why do the time charges screw up history? Why does she even want to screw up the timeline in the first place.

Dunno.

Compare this to, say, InfinityWar: Boom, scene one, here’s the bad guy, here’s what he wants to do, here’s how he’s going to do it, let’s rock. Clear stakes, you know what the good guys need to do, I can now focus on the scenes before me rather than wasting time trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Good Loki is also a bit confusing. He gives every indication of thinking he can take over the TVA from the inside, in which case what is with the scenes of him moping over his dead mom, friendship with his brother or destruction of his homeland (another bit that is kind of a retread of character development from ep 1)? One more thing I’m hoping will have a payoff somewhere along the way, because as of now he goes from sobbing over the death of his people to putting salt on a salad in five seconds of show time.

So, for the second episode in a row, I mainly feel that the story is spinning its wheels, playing for time just as Loki does, trying to delay for as long as possible telling me what is actually going on. Repeating beats we already had in episode 1. There are a number of scenes were you just have to wonder what the point of it was—like Evil Loki beating up Good Loki, nothing is achieved other than wasting two minutes of show time and letting Tom Hiddleston pose dramatically under Red Alert lighting. Doesn’t move the plot forward or reveal new information. Just there to provide a bit of action since, as I mentioned last week, the writers feel the need to have a guy walk in with a gun every once in a while just to keep things moving along.

Another culprit is the character of Judge Renslayer, whose role in the series so far has been to pad out the timing and give Wilson somebody to react to for five minutes each week.

As a result, I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be looking forward to next week. Girl Loki seems to have already executed her plan. Boy Loki has escaped the TVA but I’ve no idea what he means to do with his newfound freedom. Don’t know about you guys but a third of the way through a story I’m not sure I should be drawing a blank as to what happens next.

As for the rest. Well, the less said about the terrible, tiny, tiny set for “Pompeii” the better. Green screen work on par with the opening shot of the “Gobi Desert” and that’s not a compliment. Loki and Mobius figuring out Other Loki is in Atlanta makes zero fuggen sense. Kidnapped space Nazi going “It’s real, it’s real,” just more mystery boxing of the plot. Stop it, just stop it.

Loki Episode 1

Well, it’s a setup episode, like they used to do at the beginning of each season of “Game of Thrones”, and spends the bulk of its time reminding you who people are and what they are trying to do. I can foresee we might reach some kind of terminal endpoint with this, where each Marvel movie or show has to devote increasingly long stretches of time to the backstory before it can move forward. A bit like that subplot from “Hyperion” with the girl living her life backwards and her family makes longer and longer videos to explain what’s happening to her until she loses it and screams at them to stop.

Marvel, I beg of you: Stop.

So. Yes. We’re re-introduced to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in all his brittle egotistical glory, a pre-End Game Loki who skipped over the last five or so Marvel movies and landed right in the middle of the Gobi Desert only it’s quite clearly a green screen and hats off to people working under pressure during a pandemic but really, the light doesn’t match at all and it was quite jarring, sorry.

NuLoki is promptly arrested by jackbooted quasi-Nazi time cops emerging out of Quantum Leap doorways (er, Minutemen from the Time Variance Authority, sorry this is a crowded genre and the tropes are everywhere) so we can have both Loki’s life story and The Premise explained to us.

To whit: There is only one timeline, and a bunch of time cops arrest and execute anyone who tries to change things or create alternative timelines. Though some time travel is apparently allowed. But deviating from your “path” is not. I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense—the arbitrariness of the TVA is probably the point. Anyway, somebody with a grudge against the time cops is going around killing them.

NotLoki is frog-marched off to his Kafkaesque trial in a sort of 70s style version of the dystopian bureaucracy from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, replete with black jokes about the absurdity, inefficiency and unfairness of it all, before Wowen Wilson’s Agent Mobius saves him from imminent erasure.

There follows the narratively demanded refusal of the call to adventure that literature professors have insisted every protagonist must go through. Mobius wants !Loki’s help, but he’s not having any of it. To convince him, Mobius shows a highlight reel of past Marvel movies, plus a rather long anecdote where it is revealed Loki was mysterious hijacker “D.B. Cooper” back in 1971 which is a real thing that happened. TIL. (I hope this becomes relevant again—Loki does tell the stewardess he’ll see her again which is foreshadowing 101—otherwise that was a hell of a waste of time).

This gets to the one part I thought was poorly written in an otherwise slick script, where the writers couldn’t seem to settle on a motivation for Loki2’s turn and gave him ALL the motivations: He got his own mom killed and regrets it; He realizes how pathetic his ambitions were next to the power of the TVA; He sees the future in which he reconciles with his brother, and how it leads to his own death.

They also threw in a rather pointless chase sequence, written presumably out of the instinctive realization the episode was 90% exposition and they needed some action to keep people’s eyes open. So Loki escapes, then immediately goes back to the place he escaped from. It’s writers like this who scrap the Council of Elrond in favor of people screaming at each other. Trust your audience, folks. There seems to be this tug of war between the needs of episodic television, where each 50-minute chunk needs its own climax and resolution, and the needs of a miniseries, where the action can rise over the course of several episodes. There might be a happy medium, but this isn’t quite it.

As a result, I’m not quite sure what Loki’s motivations are. Is he determined to change his life around, or just sees the TVA as a way of getting what he wants? Leaving it vague and confusing might be a deliberate choice but if so, probably a mistaken one. We just had one series—Wandavision—that was all about obfuscating what was going on in the plot. We don’t need another one. Show me what your protagonist wants to do and let me enjoy the ride with them.

The episode’s ending does not inspire confidence in the writers’ desire to let the viewer in on the plot. There’s a twist reveal that was fairly obvious from Mobius’ line of questioning to Loki, so I give them credit for a proper setup there, but it is then immediately followed by a cloaked figure doing a bit of murder. Having just revealed who the antagonist is (supposedly), not showing their face in the very next scene is a dead giveaway you aren’t being entirely straight with us, show.

I do so very much hope they aren’t going to play J.J. Abrams Mystery Box keepaway with the plot all season. No more three-quarters reveal of who the real antagonist is. Here’s the protagonist, here’s the deuteragonist (Wow!), here’s the antagonist, these are the stakes, let’s get to it. Boom. That’s all you need to do, show.

Wither next for the series? Well, I’m not keen on the initial setup’s assertion that the entire history of the universe is already known, as that doesn’t leave much room for free will. Personal taste there, but Loki does voice objections to that thinking, so although it might be wishful thinking I do hope the whole idea of a deterministic universe gets a little exploration. Maybe the conclusion of the show will be that there is not one timeline, but many, and the TVA was wrong to try to police it in the first place? Like I say, the TVA do wear a little too much black to be the good guys here.

Side note: Not a fan of criticizing writers for everything their characters say, as some characters are SUPPOSED to say shitty things, but telling the villain the purpose of his existence is to help people be their better selves is, however narratively true, kind of a big middle finger to everyone Loki ever killed. I mention this because Marvel does kind of have a thing where the lives of normies don’t really matter, they’re just props for our heroes, and the line is said by Mobius who I think is supposed to be kind of sympathetic, a put-upon middle manager fighting against red tape in his own organization.

As for the cloaked figure at the end, I’m betting that presages a more radical variant of Loki than the one we’ve gotten to know. There’s been a lot of talk on social media about Disney and Tom confirming Loki is “genderfluid” so I’m betting the antagonist is a female version of our antihero. Either that or the show is a perfect loop and Tom ends up pursuing a future iteration of himself.

Black Panther

I avoided this one for a while on the assumption it wouldn't be "for me." As in, it wouldn't resonate with me but then it wasn't supposed to so any criticism would come from misunderstanding the intent. I decided to give it a shot after one reviewer pointed to this movie as an example of how to structure a good action movie -- i.e. the villain has clear, identifiable goals and you understand their motivation and how they try to achieve their goals; the heroes likewise have clear goals and take clear steps to thwart the bad guy; each scene moves this conflict forward and escalates it until the final showdown.

And on that criteria I give it an 8/10, not perfect, but pretty damn good. There's a little too much assumed empathy with the bad guy and understanding his motivations is maybe easier for Americans than British-born Canadians living in Japan. So yeah, that part is maybe not "for me."

The structure also has one odd twist, and maybe I'm being hard on it here because I was told what a masterpiece it was, but the bad guy and arms dealer Klaue team up in one scene for a museum robbery, go their separate ways, then the bad guy rescues Klaue from the good guys only to shoot him. Now hands up if you can spot the extra steps here.

Honestly I think Wakanda is one of those Marvel world-building concepts which, like the Blip, make less and less sense the more you look at them (such as, a technologically advanced society that is also an absolute monarchy where rulership is decided by ritual combat), but if you understand it as a story-telling device then it does the job of setting up the whole "Our country first" versus "Duty to help others" debate. 

My other quibble would be the chase scene in South Korea is just awful, Star Wars prequels bad, bad CGI, actors half-heartedly shouting flat and dull lines while evidently looking at a greenscreen.

Otherwise, yes, mechanically, structurally, this movie works. I complained about Falcon Plus Winter Soldier being overstuffed thematically and watching Black Panther really highlights that kind of problem in the writing.

Obligatory postscript about the death of Chadwick Boseman. Lost a cousin last year to cancer, so really, fuck everything about this horrible disease. I've no idea how they'll continue with the next Black Panther movie "Wakanda Forever", but I bet you any sum of money it opens with a tribute to Boseman. Godspeed.

Army of the Dead

First up, at 148 minutes this movie is too damn long. Not that there's any arbitrary ideal length for a movie, every movie should be as long as it takes to tell its story. But one easy way to check if it's too damn long is to ask yourself, after each scene, "What was the point of this?" If you can't answer the question on half the scenes, then guess what, the movie is too damn long.

The premise of this Ocean's-11-meets-I-am-Legend movie is achingly simple: crew break into a Vegas casino infested with zombies. This is not a story that takes 148 minutes to tell.

Not that it isn't fun in places. The middle stretch, once the team is actually in the casino and things slowly start to unwind, has some charming team-building and genuine tension. But the first third drags on for too long and sets up things with no payoff, and the last third is just people slow-motion running and shooting things.

Dave Bautista, getting a leading man role here, is the leader of the crew. He's hired by Hiroyuki Sanada to retrieve money from the zombie casino before the US government nukes it. He's supported by a Hispanic mechanic (Ana de la Reguera), dude with a chainsaw (Omari Hardwick), a German safecracker (Matthias Schweighofer), a pilot (Tig Notaro CGIed in after the previous actor was accused of sexual misconduct), a guide (Nora Arnezeder), a CoD Zombies Twitch streamer (Raul Castillo) and his redshirt I mean buddy (Samantha Win), plus a slimy camp guard and Dave's daughter (Ella Purnell) also tag along, PLUS there's Sanada's shifty right-hand-man who is played by an actor who could be David Hasselhoff, but isn't (it's Garret Dillahunt).

Is that too many characters? Yep. It's overcrowded, and trying to stuff it all in leads to scenes that either drag on for too long, or else have no reason to exist at all.

For example, the Twitch streamer brings along another friend, who immediately chickens out when he learns the details of the mission. This contributes nothing. 

We learn that there are some "alpha" zombies led by some kind of super-smart king zombie, and in a really icky scene, learn one of the lady zombies is/was pregnant. This contributes nothing.

Notaro gets a bunch of unfunny scenes trying to fix a damaged chopper. There could have been tension in the will-the-chopper-actually-fly scene, but she fixes everything in advance and the lift off no problems. Contribution: Zero.

Dave has a heart-to-heart with his daughter where we see he is motivated not by greed but by guilt and desire to be a better father--good!--this is shortly followed by ANOTHER heart-to-heart with the mechanic where SHE reveals she is not motivated by greed but by her love for Dave and no, we don't need everyone's in-depth motivations and this literally repeats the emotional beats we just had. Also, the Mechanic is immediately killed after. So yeah. Negative one contribution.

There is, of course, a double-cross, but honestly the reasoning behind it so ludicrous and manages to makes the entire premise of the movie dumb, like, zombie dumb.

The other things that drag the movie out are Snyder's evident affinity for slow-mo gunfights and having things be out of focus. Used sparingly, either might be effective, but sheer repetition kind of drains the energy here.

I said it was fun though, didn't I, and it is in the middle-stretch. Matthias Schweighofer in particular absolutely steals the movie as the German safecracker. He's the only character with any kind of arc (goes from scared of zombies to able to fight zombies), and his relationship with Omari Hardwick's hard-ass merc is the only one that shows any development or genuine warmth as Hardwick goes from despising the deadweight to genuine comradeship. Plus Matthias is an absolute hoot as a physical actor. 

In fits and starts there's also some genuine tension. Like redshirt Samantha Win is predictably offed early on due to the double-cross, but the movie still gets tension out of this: As she fights through swarms of zombies, we wonder not whether she will survive, but if she will live long enough to reveal the double-cross.

More of that kind of smart writing could really have come in handy but instead we're back to slow-mo bullet fests. Cue sequel hook. Roll credits.

Venom One, No, Not "There Will Be Carnage"

This was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, wasn’t it? I’m trying to figure out where this went wrong and it’s weird because none of the individual parts, taken in isolation, sound all that bad, it’s just they never quite combine into a coherent whole. Basically, I think the movie tries to do too many things, and as a result does nothing particularly well.

I didn’t write it so I’m kind of trying to read minds and guess what happened here, but it does feel like a good idea butchered through rewrites or edits in an attempt to check certain boxes that didn’t need to be checked.

What is this movie even about? The minimalist, bare-bones outline of the plot is: “Down-on his luck reporter Tom Hardy gets infected with an alien being that gives him superpowers. The two must prevent a tech-bro tycoon/mad scientist who wants to bring more of the aliens to Earth for Reasons.”

You look at that, and you realize that the first sentence has almost nothing to do with the second.

How does Hardy being down on his luck move the plot forward?

Well, gives him a reason to dislike the tycoon. Check that box. What, you mean a reason other than the whole “infect the entire human race with alien spores” thing? Uh, yeah, well, that doesn’t come up until the final act, in a scene where a space shuttle is readied for launch in five minutes.

Why does the alien symbiote agree to help Hardy prevent this from happening?

Well, it likes him for, um, reasons. I don’t know, there’s a throwaway line about them both being losers, whatever that means. Check that box.

Just, so many scenes and beats don’t seem to have a reason for existing in this movie.

After he’s infected, there’s an extended sequence where Hardy/Venom break into a news corp office tower so he can plant evidence that the tycoon is up to no good. After his escape from a SWAT team whose rules of engagement are apparently shoot to kill for offences like breaking & entering (hey, this is America, so… maybe?) this never comes up again. Cool action scene (even though we already had one), check.

Immediately after, we discover that the alien goo thing is slowly killing Hardy. Second Act hurdle, check. At the end of the movie, Hardy is reunited with his alien goo. The health problems are never mentioned again and Hardy looks quite chipper.

Well into the third Act, the tycoon is ALSO infected with an alien spore thing. Before he is infected, the tycoon plans to find more alien spore things because he thinks human-alien hybrids are the next stage in evolution (idk man I don’t write this stuff). After he is infected, the tycoon plans to… find more alien spore things. Huh. Okay. Third Act twist, check.

In all this mess I think what should have been the heart of the movie, a kind of odd couple slash buddy cop action-comedy with Hardy and the alien sharing his body kind of gets lost. You can kind of see glimpses of it in the first chase scene where the tycoon’s goons try to capture the pair (starting by attempting to ram them with explosive kamikaze drones, look I really didn’t write this thing) with Hardy playing the oceanically out of his depth reporter unwittingly and unwillingly turned superpowered killing machine.

Hardy is good in these scenes though eccentric and uneven in others. Eddie Brock is a tough character to make likeable, a charming but self-centered asshole who lacks the brains of a Tony Stark or Stephen Strange to balance it out, and the part feels like it was written for a much younger actor. With Hardy, he seems more arrogant man-child than headstrong kid. What does Brock want? I don’t really know. What does Venom want? I… don’t know. What are Brock and Venom trying to achieve? Mainly to stay out of the bad guy’s clutches—it’s only at the very end that their motivation switches to stopping the bad guy’s plan, but then again the bad guy only came up with the plan 10 minutes before the ending so you can’t really blame them there. 

Still, being unable to answer those questions makes these guys to relate to.

Same goes for the rest of the cast. Riz Ahmed as the big bad spews a couple of lines about how awful the Earth is and how humanity needs to migrate to the stars, so I guess he’s a kind of Elon Musk not-quite-parody, but quite why he thinks bonding with aliens is the way to go is all a bit say-wat-ish. And then he gets infected with the alien which changes his goals and motivations… in no way whatsoever. Huh.

There’s also an ex-fiancée and her new boyfriend in there. Yup. They exist in this universe. There’s a kind of funny moment between Hardy and the no-longer-ladyfriend about her pet cat mainly notable because the joke actually lands. Otherwise, they’re just plot devices.

All of these issues could, I think, maybe have been resolved if there was greater focus on what this movie was going to be about. Odd couple learn to appreciate each other? Okay, gotta give each of them something worth appreciating. Then show how their adventures drive the realization. Dramatic climax where they finally learn to work together to stop the bad guy. Boom. Roll credits.

I did write that, so you can blame me for that one.