Neil Sharpson's Blog, page 16

“Everybody calm down. The X-Men are here. A dated metaphor for racism in the ’60s.”

Well damn, what do I do now?

By this point I have the formula for these X-Men review worked out like, well, a formula. A brief look at the history of the characters and storylines that inspired the movie in question, a few thousand words of recounting the plot with a couple of puerile gags masquerading as legitimate film criticism, wrap up, score, bing bang boom.

But goddamn, I do not want to talk about Cable and X Force.

Obligatory disclaimer: No bad characters. Only bad writers. Yes, there have been good Cable stories. Yes, I have enjoyed those stories.  Yadda yadda yadda.

But ultimately Cable is not so much a character as an icon. You know, like a bio-hazard sign. He’s the perfect poster child for everything that was just plain bad about the X-Men universe specifically and comics more broadly in the nineties. Masculinity exaggerated and distorted to the point of unwitting caricature. A backstory as incoherent as it is overly complicated. An emphasis on violence and “ends justifies the means” morality that walks riiiight up to the line of outright fascism. Guns, guns, guns. Pouches pouches pouches. Hell, considering Cable’s central role in fuelling the Comics Speculator Bubble it’s fair to say that this character very nearly killed Marvel comics.

Five. Million. Copies. Sold.

But okay, quick and dirty history of X-Force and Cable. By the early eighties, the X-Men comic book had gone from a weird little also-ran to a sales powerhouse under the creative direction of writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne. I’m actually currently in the middle of reading the entire X-Men run in order and, having gotten to this era I can confirm that, yeah, it absolutely lives up to its reputation. But by this point the X-Men had drifted pretty far from its original conception as a school for mutants. The main cast were almost entirely adults and, apart from the fact that they were mutants and therefore faced increased suspicion and prejudice from the normies, they were just a standard superhero team not much different from the Avengers or the Fantastic Four. Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter ordered Claremont to create a new team of young mutants and he came up with the New Mutants. Story goes, Professor Xavier is in mourning for the death of the X-Men (don’t worry, didn’t take) and gets guilted by his ex into recruiting a new team of teenage mutants. The New Mutants was a moody, introspective little book with a cast of emotionally damaged teens learning to cope with depression, trauma and isolation. And then Rob Liefeld took it over and turned it into X-Force, a book about a rip-off Terminator trying to prevent the future by shooting it in the face

Cyborg with glowing eye travels back in time to prevent a bad future. I feel like this doesn’t get talked about enough.

So when in the stinger of Deadpool where Deadpool’s all “Guess what, CABLE’s going to be in the next one!”? Personally, my reaction was:

“Are you threatening me, sir?”

So Deadpool 2 opens with Wade blowing himself to literal pieces as a fuck you to Logan and boys, boys, please. You’re the only two good parts of this franchise left, don’t fight. We flashback to a few weeks ago and see Wade living his best life, cutting a bloody swathe through global crime by day and returning to his lady love at night. On their anniversary, he gives her a skee-ball token. I do know what that is. We don’t have skee-ball in Ireland, nor its tokens. I’m sure it’s very fun.

Vanessa, the best girlfriend with the worst tattoos in movie history, tells him that she’s taken out her IUD and it’s time to try for a baby. Wade is overjoyed despite his misgivings about being a Dad due to his hellish, clown-porn saturated upbringing. But over the course of the next two hours the movie explores Wade Wilson recovering his sense of self-respect and worth as he embarks on the greatest superhero adventure of all: FATHERHOOD.

Nah, just kidding. They fridge Vanessa in the first ten minutes. 

Honestly surprised they didn’t do an “Austin Powers 2” and reveal she was an evil robot all along.

After killing the guy who killed Vanessa (I don’t know if the police actually exist in this universe), Wade sinks into a deep depression, traumatised by the loss of his one true love and the awful realisation that Do You Want To Build a Snowman? is just a rip-off of Poppa Can you Hear Me? from Yentl.

Sssh. Nobody tell him that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is just “Smack my Bitch Up” slowed down.

He visits Blind Al who offers her sympathies and tells him that we can’t really live until we’ve died a little and he decides to take that literally, after snorting all the cocaine he hid from her along with the cure for blindness.

This brings us back to speed with the opening scene and Wade blows himself to pieces. He sees a vision of Vanessa in the afterlife but she tells him he can’t join her because his heart “isn’t in the right place”.

He wakes up in the X-Mansion where Colossus tells him that the time has come for him to finally join the X-Men. Wade resists at first and wanders around the (as always) empty mansion bemoaning that the studio once again refused to pony up for any more mutants…only for the movie to very pointedly show us just how much money its predecessor made.

I mean, not “Jennifer Lawrence” money. Let’s not go nuts.

Colossus tells Wade that he has a good heart with a four figure body count and that it belongs here, with all these vulnerable teens. Wade takes that as a sign, and agrees to join the X-Men like in the comics. Unlike in the comics, he does not then decide to wear Jean Grey’s old Marvel Girl costume. 

Huh. How bout that? Marvel were teasing Ice Man being gay as far back as 2005.

Meanwhile, sometime in the future (which, lemme see, McAvoy’s still Xavier sooo…2003?), Cable  wakes up in the smouldering ruins of his home and finds that his wife and daughter have been char-broiled. Suitably motivated, he takes his daughter’s teddy bear and travels back in time to pre-emtpively kill the villain who destroyed his life, APOC…wait, fucking Firefist?!

What? Did they just throw a dart at a wall of names?

Well anyway, back in the present, the X-Men are called out to the Essex Home for Mutant Rehabilitation where a teenage mutant named Randall has gone berserk and is locked in a standoff with the police (oh, so they DO exist in this universe). Randall (played excellently by Julian Dennison) tells him his name is “Firefist” which leads to Wade making a load of fisting jokes (aaaaaaah, now it makes sense) and then knocking the kid out. The Headmaster (Eddie Marsan) thanks Wade and tells him that the school can take it from here but, to his shock, the kid begs to be sent to the Icebox, a high-security prison for mutants. Realising that the kid’s been abused, Deadpool shoots one of the staff and ends up getting arrested. Which, considering the number of people he’s murdered with zero consequence must have come as quite a shock.

“Don’t you know who I am?! I have plot armour!”

 Russell and Wade are taken to the Icebox and fitted with power-dampening collars, which is a bummer for Wade because one of his super powers is “not dying from cancer” and it’s kind of central to his whole motif. Cable attacks the prison to kill Russell before he can grow up to be FIREFIST, SCARIEST VILLAIN OF ALL TIME and Wade tries to defend the kid, getting his collar broken in the process. Cable beats Deadpool to a pulp and reveals that he’s from the future where dubstep is no longer a thing (and you thought Mad Max was bleak). He takes Wade’s skee-ball token, apparently for no other reason than to be a dick, and asks Wade why he’s defending the kid, and Wade pretends that he doesn’t care about Russell at all just as Russell walks in which is totes awks and also very traumatising for a young vulnerable teen who’s been betrayed by every adult in his life thus far. Deadpool blows one of Cable’s grenades which lets him escape the prison but also nearly kills him. Once again in the afterlife, he begs Vanessa to be let in but he still can’t cross over.

Deadpool realises that he needs to save Russell and resolves to break the kid out of jail. Fortunately, nobody seems to be looking for him because the justice system in these movies works the same as in the GTA games. If a cop doesn’t literally see you murder someone in front of their noses, you might as well be invisible. 

Deadpool heads back to his old friend Weasel’s bar and they put together a new superhero team, X-Force (boooooo!) so they can be summarily killed off in hilarious ways (yay!). And here the movie flaunts its big-budget balls by getting Brad Pitt to play the Vanisher, a character with no lines and who is only visible onscreen for less than a second. The only members of X-Force that Wade (and, indeed, we the audience) actually cares about are Domino (Zazie Beetz), a woman with the power of luck and Peter, a man with the power to just be a nice, chill dude. They try to bust Russell out of a prison-transfer convoy by parachuting on to it from above but, because Deadpool forgot to account for the wind, they all die horribly with the exception of Domino and Deadpool.

Cable shows up and we get a gun battle on a speeding prison van that would have been completely out of the question on the first movie’s budget. Unfortunately, ever since Deadpool abandoned him, Russell has gotten himself a new Daddy. Oh yeah, you know who I’m talking about.

Ha. Noooooo.

As part of this movie’s mission to fix every damn shitty thing Fox did to these characters we finally, FINALLY get a version of Juggernaut that does justice to the character. As Juggernaut and Deadpool face off, we actually see a demonstration of just how Domino’s luck powers actually work, which mainly seems to consist of her not doing dumb shit.

Some people make their own luck.

Anyway, as anyone who’s read Juggernaut’s Top Trumps card can tell you, Deadpool’s way out of his weight class and Juggernaut literally tears Wade in two and then he and Russell go to get revenge on the abusive headmaster.

Back in Blind Al’s apartment, Deadpool is growing a new pair of disgusting baby legs when Cable shows up and asks for his help, explaining that in the future Russell will grow up to be a psychotic mass murderer. Wade wants to save the kid and put him on the right path, so he tells Cable that he’ll help him as long as Cable gives him a chance to try and talk Russell down.

So Deadpool, Domino, Cable, Colossus and Dopinder (who’s gotten a taste for murder ever since he killed Bandhu in the first film) roll up to the orphanege and pretty much everyone gets some real good use out of the R-Rating. Deadpool tries to talk Russell out of killing the headmaster and apologises for leaving him alone in the Ice Box. He gives Russell a hug and it almost looks like he’s reached the kid but Russell blasts him and tells him that he can’t trust anyone any more. Out of ideas, Deadpool puts on one of the power dampening collars and tells Russell that if he wants to kill anyone, he’s going to have to kill him. Cable takes the shot and Deadpool leaps in front of the bullet, sacrificing his life for Russell’s. After a death scene which he milks for everything it’s worth because of course he does, Deadpool dies and is reunited with Vanessa in the afterlife.

Russell is so moved by his sacrifice that he decides that murder is not cool and this changes history so that Cable’s family were never killed (the movie deals with the obvious grandfather paradox this creates by totally ignoring it and you probably should too).

In gratitude, Cable uses the last charge of his time travel device to go back and place Vanessa’s skee-ball token in Deadpool’s chest pocket which blocks the bullet and saves his life, meaning we are still on for a trilogy.

***

So here we are, people. With the Fox X-Men movies definitively concluded it turns out that the most consistently excellent, faithful, artistically justified and emotionally sincere subset of movies in this whole thing starred frickin’ Deadpool.

The Stinger

Negasonic and her girlfriend Yukio repair Cable’s time travel device and give it to Wade who then goes back in time and saves Vanessa’s life. He then goes back and saves Peter’s life, but pointedly does not save Bedlam, Vanisher, Zeitgeist or Shatterstar.

I mean let’s be honest. There was no saving this.

He THEN travels back in time to Wolverine Origin and shoots the mute version of himself in front of Hugh Jackman just like I always fantasised, and then FINALLY goes back and shoots Ryan Reynolds before he can make Green Lantern.

And the audience went

This stinger made me feel like a dirty, dirty slut and I loved it.

Hey, was that Stan Lee?

That was Stan Lee, sort of. He appears as one of the busts in the X-Mansion.

Department of Duplication Department

Okay, so Yukio is played by Shioli Kutsuna in Deadpool 2 but the character was previously played by Rila Fukushima in The Wolverine.

“You will die, holding your heart. I will then get a cute girfriend. And say “Hi Wade!” a lot.”

How worried is Guinan right now?

Guina said some real dumn shit about the Holocaust and is currently suspended.

Wait, Magneto is how old?

We see James McAvoy as Xavier which means Magneto is currently who fucking knows when this is set or how fucking old Magneto fucking is.

Mutant Heaven has no pearly gates, only revolving doors.

Deadpool resurrects twice, Vanessa once.

Today, mutants are…

An out-dated analogy for…I mean, today mutants are at-risk youth in the foster care system.

This movie is…

INCRE-DEAD-ABLE!!!

Bleeding Deadly!

Dead Great

Dead Good

Deadly Dull

Dead Wrong

Dead on Arrival

NEXT UPDATE: 04 March 2022

NEXT TIME:  What do you MEAN his Dad’s not Fu Manchu in this version?!

Metropolis (2001)

My oh my. A year goes by so fast, doesn’t it?

Why, it was only last January that I was telling you all how there was a new Covid Variant which was causing our local school and créche to close, meaning I had to mind the kids all day, which meant I was getting absolutely no writing done. And now, look how far we’ve come!

The FUCKING variant has a FUCKING different NAME.

OH BRAVE NEW WORLD.

“Eh Mouse? Your eye is doing that twitch again.”“Yeah. I twitch now. Deal with it.”

Anyway. Yeah. Shorter review than usual. Not my fault. I wish this virus was a person so I could punch it in the dick, yadda yadda yadda.

In 1927, Fritz Lang created the future.

Metropolis, his sprawling, 2 hour silent epic is without question the most influential science fiction movie ever made, with its visual influence still to be seen almost a century after its release. Bladerunner, Star Wars, The Fifth Element, Futurama… its stamp can be seen on these and so many more. The basic iconography of the future as being huge, glittering skyscrapers through which tiny flying cars buzz like insects is still our visual shorthand for “future”. It remains, even to CGI-Jaded modern eyes, a jaw-dropping, visually spectacular film. Metropolis tells the story of young, naive scion of privilege Freder Fredersen who becomes embroiled in a worker’s revolution against the rule of his industrialist father as he tries to bring justice to the futuristic Metropolis of…um, Metropolis. He does this mainly by looking like he’s about to kiss literally every dude he meets.

If you were wondering about the difference in film quality between those images, the movie was actually considered partially lost for most of the last century until a partially damaged print was found in Argentina in 2008, once again allowing the film to be seen nearly in its entirety. And, like anything German that was missing for decades before being discovered in Argentina under mysterious circumstances there’s almost certainly an innocent explanation and we should not ask any more questions.

Metropolis posits a future where technology has allowed a small, pampered elite to live a charmed existence free of want and suffering while a massive, unseen labour force toils in virtual slavery to meet their every need.

But that’s not the movie we’re looking at here, but rather one of the roughly billion or so films that were inspired by it. Follow me now to Japan in 1949, where Osamu “Call me the Godfather of Manga in your Review or the Weebs Will Riot” Tezuka created his science fiction epic manga: Metropolis, based on Lang’s film. Sort of.

See, Tezuka claims he hadn’t actually seen the movie when he started creating the manga, and that the entire thing was based on a single still frame that he saw in a magazine. And I believe him. I haven’t actually read the Manga but a glance at the summary on Wikipedia tells me that Tezuka was probably ploughing his own furrow.

I…kinda wanna read this now.

To put it another way, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis have about as much to do with each other as Kimba the White Lion and The Lion King: Fuck and All.

But then, in the nineties, Madhouse decided to make a feature length animé adaptation of Tezuka’s manga, while also drawing in far more elements of Lang’s original film. The good news is that we got a film that frequently appears on lists of “Greatest Animé of all Time”. The bad news is that Sherlock Holmes did not survive the adaptation process. For, as we all know, Japanese Sherlock Holmes is the BEST Sherlock Holmes.

Metropolis 2001 wastes no time immersing us in the titular city, a gorgeous Art-Deco playground thrumming with swinging Jazz music.

Repeat after me: My retro-future sci-fi will have giant zeppelins or it will be garbage.

While the twenties aesthetic is obviously paying homage to Lang’s original film, we soon see that this Metropolis is different in several key ways. Most importantly; in Lang’s city there is only one robot, the iconic Maschinenmensch created by Doctor Rotwang to destroy the city and played by Brigitte Helm having more fun than any woman has ever had on screen in the entire history of cinema.

Oh what, like YOU’VE never crushed on a 116 year old German lady.

Sorry, got sidetracked. The big difference is that in Metropolis 2001 robots are everywhere, and have taken most manufacturing jobs, creating rampant unemployment and a bitter, politically radicalised working class.

The movie subtly and effectively weaves this necessary backstory into the narrative by having random characters standing around and saying things like:

“But we need robots for our economy!”

“Yes! But the human workers resent the robots and that’s bad for everyone!”

Writing.

Yeah. So, my big (and really, if I’m honest, only) criticism of this movie is that the script has all the grace and subtly of a cinderblock being pushed up each nostril. The dialogue isn’t bad per se it’s just thuddingly on the nose. Granted, I watched a dubbed version and it’s perfectly possible that the original Japanese was a masterclass in Wildean wit and if it is feel free to call me a filthy casual in the comments. Mind you, that movie’s insistence on baldly stating its themes directly to the audience is another thing that it absolutely shares with Lang’s original.

Did you know the Mediator between head and hands must be the heart? Well it must.

All of Metropolis is celebrating the creation of “The Ziggurat”, a massive sky-scraper that will allow Metropolis to extend its power over the whole Earth. Somehow. No one really knows how, but the good people of Metropolis aren’t ones to look world conquest in the mouth. The Ziggurat’s creator, billionaire industrialist Duke Red is asked by reporters if he’s going to enter politics now that he’s finished the ziggurat. But Duke pulls the old “I’m just a simple man of the people” and says that he has no interest in running against his good friend, President Boone.

Meanwhile, the celebrations are being watched by two new arrivals to the city: Sunsako, a detective from Tokyo, and his nephew Kenichi. To their horror, they see a robot protestor being gunned down by one of the Marduks, an anti-robot paramilitary group. Now, if you felt a slight twinge of familiarity then you may be thinking of another very well known animé that has security forces gunning down a political dissident before a shocked crowd.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this movie’s script was written by Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira and there’s definitely a lot of similar beats throughout the story, right up to its apocalyptic, body-horror filled climax. Which, I suppose, brings me rather neatly to the biggest incongruity of this thing. The character designs.

The story is tense, serious, often bloody tale of class struggle, urban unrest and horrifyingly powerful technology gone awry. That is, very much in the same vein as Akira. But the character models are still closely following Tezuka’s early-animé, heavily-Disnified design principles. Which means we get characters who look like this.

I’m not saying it’s bad exactly (in fact part of me really enjoys the incongruity of it) but there are definitely times when it works against the story. For example, take Rock. Rock is the adopted son of Duke Red, his chief enforcer and the leader of the Marduks (he’s the one who guns down the robot protestor). He desperately wants to win the approval of Duke Red who refuses to even acknowledge him as his son.

So, nasty scary guy with a dark, troubled, emotionally turbulent back story. And he looks like this.

Daaaaaaw. Looks like he’s on his way to the nearest Pokémon gym.

Anyway, the next day Sunsako and Kenichi visit the Metropolis police commissioner and tell him why they’re in the city. They’re on a manhunt for a fugitive named Doctor Laughton, who looks like his arch enemy would be some kind of sassy talking animal with a nineties ‘tude.

“Curse you Spunky Chipmunk!”

He’s actually wanted for organ-trafficking, illegal vivisection, animal cruelty and human rights abuses (see what I mean about the incongruous designs?). The superintendent says that the police are working flat out at the moment and he can only spare them a robot police officer. Shunsaku and Kenichi are sent to a basement where they meet 803DRPDM4973C, their new partner.

“Before I joined the force I was a crash test dummy.”

Shunkatsu struggles with the robot’s serial number and 803DRPDM4973C says that robots aren’t allowed have names. Shunkatsu says “nuts” to that and names him “Pero” after a dog he once had, who was a “good dog”.

You know, normally a scene like this where a being who’s only ever been referred to by a dehumanising code is given a name, it’s supposed to be heartwarming. But for some reason this falls a bit flat for me.

“Hey, what’s your name?”“FN2187. Only name they ever gave me.”“Well I ain’t using it. From now on, I’m going to call you Mister Whiskerpants.”

Pero tells Shusaku and Kenichi that if Laughton really is in Metropolis he won’t be on the surface, which is under constant surveillance, but in the lower, lawless levels of the city underground so they head down there.

Turns out Laughton is in Metropolis and is working for Duke Red. He’s created Tima, a super realistic gynoid based who Duke will use as the CPU of a powerful superweapon hidden inside the Ziggurat and who (on Duke’s orders) Laughton modeled on Duke’s dead daughter.

Look, we all process grief differently.

Actually, I’ve just realised something. I’m not entirely sure if “Duke” is a name or a title. I mean, I assume it’s a name but if not, my apologies to His Grace. Anyway, Duke is very pleased with Laughton’s work and leaves. But then Rock breaks into the laboratory to see what his father has been getting up to. Rock hates two things: robots and not being Daddy’s Special Little Man, so when he sees the robot duplicate of his dead step-sister who his father is planning on putting in charge of the whole world he goes berserk, shoots Laughton and sets the lab on fire.

Shunsako, Pero and Kenichi arrive just in time to watch Laughton’s laboratory go up in flames. Entering the inferno, Shunsako finds a dying Laughton who gives him a notebook right before he dies. Kenichi finds a naked girl stumbling through the flames and rescues her, but they both fall into the sewer and become lost.

Duke Red is furious at the news of the lab’s destruction, but decides to press on with the test run of the Ziggurat. This causes an EMP blast to bathe the city and causes many robots to go berserk until they’re gunned down by the Marduks. President Boone is advised by his advisors that Duke Red has gone too far and the time has come to move against him.

Well, how could you NOT trust a face like that?

I’ll be honest, I always thought there was a rather worrying anti-democratic strain in Akira, with all elected officials being depicted as corrupt, nefarious, incompetent or all three. And this script has more of the same. I mean, the President is basically ordering his government to take action against the man who treasonously used a superweapon against his own nation. I mean…yeah. Good. But it’s presented with sly looks and villainous cigars and a distinct air of “at last, now is our chance”.

“And then! I shall give the pathetic citizens of this city free healthcare! NYA HAHA!”

Meanwhile, Rock realises that Tima escaped the fire and begins tracker her through the lower levels. Shusaku and Pero notice him shifting through the ashes and realise that he’s the culprit and follow him, hoping that he’ll lead them to the missing Kenichi. Unfortunately, Rock goes down to Level 3, the sewage level, and Shusako and Pero have to lodge a missing persons report before they’ll be able to follow him.

Down in Level 3, Kenichi has been doing the whole “innocent child teaches robot what it means to be human” routine with Tima. Rock finds them and tries to kill them both but they escape.

You know what I just realised? I haven’t mentioned the backgrounds. Holy shit guys, those grounds in the back. You gotta see ’em.

In the wake of the brief robot uprising caused by the Ziggurat, the city’s working class humans stage an uprising and march on the upper levels. Pero tries to reason with the rebels and gets brutally gunned down as Tima and Kenichi watch in horror.

President Boone prepares to make a statement saying that he’s taking control of the military. Which…is not the most reassuring thing to hear your president say.

“You…weren’t in control?”

But before he can do that, he’s betrayed and assassinated by one of his generals and it looks like the political system is now totally under the control of an unelected billionaire tech guru.

Shunsaku meets up with Kenichi and Tima but they’re captured by Duke’s men and brought to the Ziggurat. Tima asks Duke who she really is and Duke tells her that it’s her destiny to save the world. But Rock suddenly appears and shoots Tima, revealing her circuitry. This causes Tima to enter a state that Machine Learning experts call “Bug Nut Shitballs Cray Cray” and she takes control of the Ziggurat and sets every robot in the city on a rampage and that’s just for starters.

Really connecting with her inner Skynet, Tima tells the humans that their entire race will be wiped out in seventeen hours. Duke Red tries to flee but is cornered by the rampaging robots. Not wanting his father to die at the hands of disgusting machines, Rock sets off an explosion that kills them both.

“Oh thank God, I think I see a way through!”“Don’t worry Father! We’ll be together in heaven forever!”“What? WAIT NO!”

As the Ziggurat burns around them, Kenichi tries to get his robot girlfriend to remember all the good times they had and recover her humanity. If movies have taught me anything, it’s that getting a killer robot to remember their humanity and override their evil programming is one of the easiest things that anyone will ever have to do. It’s always the same:

I MUST KILL HUMANS

But Killbot! Don’t you remember that time we had soup together?

OH MAN, THAT WAS SOME GREAT SOUP. I LOVE YOU.

So I am absolutely shocked to have to report that Kenichi fails at this one, incredibly simple thing. Tima doesn’t regain her sense of self and plummets to her death.

Buddy, c’mon, it’s not hard.

Anyway, Metropolis is completely destroyed but at least Duke Red is gone now and the robots return to normal. As is always the case after a violent revolution, all the parties involved decide to let bygones be bygones and just forget about all that unpleasantness. Kenichi decides that he wants to stay in Metropolis and help rebuild, possibly out of guilt for completely screwing the pooch with that botched robot redemption which was a total gimme. And so the movie ends.

Oh except for a single still image right at the end of the credits where we learned that Kenichi opened up a robot repair shop and managed to rebuild Tima.

Yeah. Not really important. Sneak that in at the end of the credits. That’s fine.

***

Best animé ever made? No. I can think of several animé movies I’d put ahead of it and it’s not like I’ve seen that much of the genre. It doesn’t have the emotional power of A Silent Voice, the visceral thrill of Akira or the “literally-everything-about-this-movie-is-perfect” quality of Princess Mononoke.

That said, if you love animation and you want a movie that is just a sumptous, gorgeous, visual banquet (and you’re not too pressed about story) then Metropolis delivers in spades.

Scoring

Animation: 19/20

There are sequences here that I would rank as some of the very, very best animation I have ever seen. Practically photo-realistic movement. But the rest of the movie, while excellent, doesn’t quite reach those heights.

Leads: 09/20

Where the movie is let down is in its characters. Kenichi and Tima are both bland, stock, and more than a little saccharine.

Villain: 08/20

I’d possibly rank this higher if I saw the original Japanese dub. None of the English voice actors were noticeably good but Rock’s performance sounded real phoned in.

Supporting Characters: 12/20

Sunsako and Pero have some nice moments.

Music: 18/20

An absolutely killer soundtrack of classic New Orleans Jazz means that Metropolis has atmosphere to burn.

FINAL SCORE: 66%

Next time I’ll be reviewing…

“WHAT ABOUT MIRABEL?!”“I’LL GET TO IT, JUST NOT YET! I GOTTA LOTTA COMPLICATED OPINIONS TO WORK OUT!”

NEXT UPDATE: 18 February 2022

NEXT TIME:

You boy! What day is this?

The Year of Grace 2021 has finally come to an end and I think I speak for most of us when I say: Showed Improvement, Less Virus Next Time.

Still though. Marginally less existential dread this go round and that’s always welcome.

Personally, this was a HUGE year for me. Oh yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

That’s right. I binged the ENTIRE series of Yes Minister.

Oh, and I also finally quit my awful job and published my first novel.

“Wow, that wouldn’t happen to be When the Sparrow Falls, currently available in all good bookstores?”

“That’s the one.”

“The same When the Sparrow Falls that was voted one of the ten best Science Fiction novels of 2021 by The Times?“

“Do you know, I think it was?”

“Wow! Must have done GREAT at the Hugos!”

“…”

“GET OUT.”

Anyway, huge thanks to everyone who read the book, your support means so, so much. Special thanks to Wrath of the Iotians, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Max Gladstone and The Quill to Live crew who were so, so supportive and really went above and beyond promoting Sparrow. Thank you all.

Anyway, movies

In 2021 I reviewed 1 Canon Disney movie, 1 MCU movie, 2 X-Men movies, 1 animé, 2 live action movies, 3 non-Disney animated features, 1 Bats Versus Bolts and 2 animated series.

Yeah, fine, I reviewed fewer movies than probably any year in the blog’s history BUT, you can’t deny there wasn’t a lot of shameless, book related self-promotion (on a serious note, Book 2 has been pushed back to April 2023 due to supply chain issues so I will try to update more regularly).

Whereas 2020 represented (I felt), a high watermark in terms of the quality of the movies I reviewed, 2021’s crop ranged from the mostly mediocre to the truly, catastrophically bad. Picking a best movie is a genuine challenge. Logan is one of those really good films that I…just…don’t…enjoy or want to see again so that leaves Evangelion as my pick for favourite movie that I reviewed this year.

I mean, you know I’m lying. But shush.

Worst movie? You know what it was. I don’t even need to say its name. Shout it out, on three. One! Two! Three!

Incredible film. Jaw-droppingly terrible. Genuinely impressively awful.

So that’s it. I hope you all had a wonderful year and that 2022 will be even better. Oh, speaking of.

What, you think I’m getting old alone?

Anyway, have a wonderful, safe and happy Christmas.

Nollaig shona daoibh go léir,

Mouse.

Balto (1995)

Back in my review for Roller Coaster Rabbit I called Steven Spielberg the “Forrest Gump of American Animation”. Pick any seminal development in the history of the medium over the past forty years or so and chances are Spielberg is involved somehow, showing LBJ his ass. But the problem with history is that a lot of it is really, really, really sad and few things ring a tear from my dusty old eye ducts like the collapse of traditional hand-drawn animation in the face of CGI like a proud old Mesomamerican Empire succumbing to hordes of plastic-faced, eyebrow-raised, pop culture spouting Spaniards. Perhaps the earliest death-knell of the hand-drawn animated feature was heard all the way back in 1995, ostensibly when the Disney Renaissance was still going strong. Balto, the third and (as it would prove to be) final film produced by Spielberg’s Amblimation studio was one of the biggest box office flops of the year, tanking so hard that Amblimation closed as an animation studio and now lives in quiet seclusion as a Self-Storage company based in Acton. Because, well, let’s just say 1995 was a bad year to be competing in the market of feature length animation.

You will know them by the trail of dead in their wake.

This was the first of many high profile examples of hand-drawn animation competing and failing against CGI movies which ultimately led to the near extinction of traditional hand-drawn feature animation, at least in America. But I think Balto’s failure can’t just be attributed to its unfortunate status as the first notch in CGI’s gun barrel. For starters, I know for a fact that I actively avoided this film. See, from the moment The Little Mermaid lit the touch paper, every studio in Hollywood had been trying to cash in on Disney’s success with their own Disney-esque movies. And I steered clear of them because Disney inculcates brand loyalty like a psychotic mother stroking her child’s hair and whispering “no one shall ever love you as I do, little one, least of all whatever whore you end up marrying”. In my defence though, most of the wannabe Disneys were god-awful and the more “Disney-like” they tried to be, the worse they tended to turn out. And Balto, even from a cursory look at the poster, wants to be Disney so, so hard it’s honestly a little sad. So I think that many people, like myself, had learned to distrust non-Disney movies that were clearly trying to be Disney movies. For as wise Mr Beaver once said: “if you meet anything that’s going to be Disney but isn’t yet, or used to be Disney once and isn’t now, or ought to be Disney but isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and get ready to leave a bad review on Rotten Tomatoes”.

As unexpected as the movie’s initial failure was its equally remarkable afterlife. Its home video sales were robust enough to spawn two sequels, meaning that there was definitely an audience for this film, just not one willing to go out in public to watch it. Which I find inexplicable.

“Oh Mouse. Sweet, innocent Mouse.”“Ah. The furries. Got it.”

So after a live action sequence featuring Miriam Margoyles as an old lady bringing her granddaughter to see the Balto monument in Central Park, we transition to animation and oh my word, what animation!

If nothing else, Balto is a visual triumph. The backgrounds effectively capture the jaw-dropping soul-stirring beauty of the Great White North, the animation is fluid and bouncy and beautiful and the character designs…well, we’ll get to that. Anyway, we open on a race between two husky teams, one of them being led by Steele (Jim Cummings). Now Steele is revered in the town of Nome as the strongest, fastest sled dog around. No one pulls sleds like Steele. No one leads dogs like Steele. No one’s got a swell cleft in his muzzle like Steele. In Nome, everyone is waiting for the racers to cross the finish line except one dog, the stray half wolf Balto, played by Kevin Bacon in a performance that will leave you genuinely scratching your head as to why this guy doesn’t get more voicework.

Now, no-one in Nome likes Balto because he’s…I guess you could say he’s a tramp. He’s a scoundrel. Breaks a new heart everyday. Which brings us neatly to those character designs. Holy fuck Amblimation, you’re so brazen it’s kind of a turn on.

I could go on but every time I google image search these movies I see some shit, man, so let’s just leave it at that. The movie Balto reminds me more of than anything is Anastasia. The process is simple, take an episode of early 20th century history, deep fry it in Disney tropes until it’s completely unrecognisable and serve straight from the oven. Just as Anastasia was Don Bluth’s attempt to make a Disney Princess movie, Balto is trying to make its own Disney dog movie. There’s a little Fox and the Hound, a dollop of Oliver and Company, a soupcon of 101 Dalmatians and big meaty chunks of Lady and the Tramp. In the designs at least. In terms of plot, it’s trying to cram as much Disney renaissance in there as it can fit in its pockets.

So the whole town is waiting for the dog race to finish, including an adorable little girl name Rosy and her furry-bait collie Jenna. All the female dogs in Nome are crazy about Steele except Jenna, who’s not like the other bitches. Steele wins the race and all the ladies swoon.

Okay, okay, I’m done shooting fishing in a barrel. So Balto sees Jenna and is instantly smitten, and tries to impress her by rescuing Rosy’s hat when it gets blown into the path of the race. In the process, he actually outruns Steele, which puts him right on Steele’s shit-list. Steele and his posse ambush Balto in an alleyway and mock him for being a “half-breed”.

So, a little history. Balto was a Siberian husky and one of many dogs who took part in the famous 1925 Nome serum run, delivering much needed anti-toxin to Alaskan communities during a diptheria epidemic, braving freezing blizzards and hazardous terrain. He was not a half wolf and he didn’t have to deal with racism, I mean, as far as I’m aware at least. Also, another dog named Togo actually led the team over far greater distances but Balto had a better publicist, I guess. A last little tidbit, Balto’s subsequent fame is credited with kickstarting the inoculation campaign that eventually all but eradicated diptheria in North America. So I guess what I’m saying is, if we want to end this pandemic before the Omega Variant kills us all, maybe start training a bunch of cute, photogenic labradors to administer Covid vaccines.

Miserable and dejected, Balto returns to his home on an abandoned boat, feeling sorry for himself.

“Riff raff. Street rat. I don’t buy that.”

Okay, now I’m done.

Later that night, Balto comes across Jenna waiting anxiously outside the doctor’s clinic where Rosy is being examined for a mysterious cough.

*Cough cough*“Spirit! Tell me she shall live!”

Balto shows Jenna how to sneak into the clinic (and, sidebar, if a prospective boyfriend knows how to break into the local drug dispensary he is almost certainly marriage material) and Jenna and Balto overhear the doctor saying that Rosy has diptheria, also known as the “Aw Shit” Disease, and that he’s all out of anti-toxin because all the children in town are sick with it.

Well, like all dogs, Jenna and Balto know that without a course of Erythromycin or Benzylpenicillin diptheria can become fatal in as little as two weeks and Jenna is distraught, despite Balto’s attempts to console her.

“Well, the disease only has a 5-10% fatality rate…”
“Dammit Balto! She’s immunocompromised, she doesn’t have anything close to those odds!”

Steele shows up with a length of sausages and invites Jenna to re-enact the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp but with more of a rapey vibe and she pulls the old “pretending to be attracted to the villain in order to manouver him next to a furnace and set him on fire” gambit.

“And your fur is sooo…twisted.”

Okay, THAT was the last one.

The next day, the town holds a race to find the fastest sled dogs to go get the anti-toxin and bring it back to Nome. Balto, realising that if he saves Rosy’s life Jenna will, y’know, pretty much have to that would be a very noble thing to do, enters the race and wins. But the musher refuses to use him because he’s just a random half wolf stray who’s never pulled a sleigh before, isn’t socialised to humans and also just because he’s fast doesn’t mean he’s got the discipline, stamina or strength to be part of a sled team, particularly relevant for a mission where the price of failure is dozens of dead children. The movie makes it out that the musher is being an asshole. The musher is not being an asshole.

The sled team sets out with Steele leading them, but when they get the serum they end up stranded at the foot of a mountain by a blizzard. Word reaches Nome, and the movie shows us Balto’s decision to go and find the missing sled team with a very effective, almost wordless piece of story-telling, where Balto wanders past the carpenter’s shop (who we saw building toy sleds at the start of the movie) and see him sadly building a row of tiny coffins. Major inflection point for our main character. Zero dialogue needed. It’s all done with the visuals and James Horner’s excellent score. That is just damn good film-making right there.

Now one thing I haven’t mentioned is that this movie has character bloat that makes Raya and the Last Dragon look like Not I. Every major character in this thing comes with a posse of between 2 or 3 supporting characters. Steele’s got his three dog lackeys, Jenna has her girl dog pals, Balto lives with a russian goose voiced by Bob Hoskins and a pair of polar bears voiced by Phil Collins (!). Is Phil Collins on the soundtrack? No, he bloody isn’t! Someone just said “hey, let’s get Phil Collins to voice the polar bears” and no one said “Phil Collins isn’t an actor, why, why would you even…what?!”. I mean, Phil Collins is actually perfectly decent in the role, it’s just…why any of this? Why the polar bears? Why Phil Collins? WHY?! But you know what? This doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it normally does. Because, as superflous as all these characters are…

It’s appealingly designed cartoon characters rendered in beautiful handrawn animation and that is a good thing to have in the world. I miss it and I need it and I am more than willing to give this movie a pass on some narrative profligacy because dammit, it made me happy.

Anyway, Balto, Jenna and a metric fuck ton of supporting characters sally forth to bring the sled team home. They’re attacked by a bear…

Ah, going for a deep cut. Nice.

…and Jenna is injured so she heads back with the other supporting characters and Balto forges on alone, with Jenna giving him her red bandana for good luck. Balto finally finds the stranded team, with the musher frozen to death, but Steele refuses to accept his help. Balto refuses to fight Steele, just wanting to bring the medicine back to Nome, but the other dog lunges at him fighting and falls off a cliff. The other dogs, impressed by Balto’s courage and decency, accept him as their new leader and he harnesses himself to the sled…somehow, and they ride off. But Steele isn’t dead, and decides to sabotage their journey by destroying all the markers Balto left to lead him back home.

Back in Nome, Steele tells Jenna and the other dogs that Balto and the entire team is dead but that Balto’s last words were that she and Steele should totally bang. All the other dogs are all “oh Steele is such a hero, Jenna should totally bang him” and Jenna is all “that was clearly a lie, and there shall be no banging tonight, thank you sir.”

Meanwhile, in the wilderness, Balto is slowly freezing to death but then he sees a vision of a white wolf who makes him realise that, actually, being half wolf is kinda badass when you think about it. Balto leads the rest of the team home, Steele is ostracised, Rosy and the other children are saved, Balto and Jenna presumably bang and a million Deviant Art accounts are born.

***

It’s shameless, I tell you! Shameless! But…you know what? There’s worse things in this life than listening to a talented cover band playing your favourite songs. Yeah, it’s a utterly brazen aping of some of Disney’s most popular canon movies, but I loved those movies (a hell of a lot more than what they’ve doing with the canon recently, I’ll tell you that much) and this at least is being done by a particularly skilled and crafty ape.

Scoring

Animation: 18/20

Beautiful, old school animation just like-a Mamma Disney used to make.

Leads 16/20

Certainly not inventing the wheel, but fine, well made wheels to be sure.

Villain: 13/20

Look, I love me some Jim Cummings but his voice is more suited to blustering assholes than outright villains and Steele didn’t quite grab me.

Supporting Characters: 10/20

Too. Damn. Many.

Music: 18/20

Excellent score from the ever reliable James Horner.

FINAL SCORE: 75%

NEXT UPDATE: I’ll be doing my usual end of year summing up around Christmas and I’ll hopefully have some exciting news to announce but the next review will be 14 January 2022.

NEXT TIME:

Wait. Where’s Superman?

“Sever the nerve.”

Paws in the air, the real reason why I delayed reviewing this movie was that I honestly can’t remember a review I’ve had less appetite to write.

I re-watched Black Widow for this review only a few days ago, and yet whenever I try to remember anything about it I get the mental equivalent of this:

And it’s not like it’s a bad movie! It’s not like it’s an anything movie frankly. It’s just…a movie. It’s a glass of cinematic water. Absolutely flavourless. It’s…I what am I even talking about again?

Oh right. Sorry, I keep forgetting.

My point is, I can write about good movies and I can write about bad movies but bland, perfectly acceptable movies are my kryptonite and I literally cannot remember a film that left me so utterly emotionally unmoved, in either a positive or negative sense, as this. So I probably am not going to break any word count records for this review. Hey, maybe a brief comics history of the titles character will help pad this thrill ride out? Worked before.

So like pretty much every interesting female superhero created during the Golden or early Silver ages, Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanova was introduced as a villain. She first appeared in 1964 in the pages of Tales of Suspense as a Soviet spy tasked with bringing down Tony Stark, embodying his two greatest weaknesses: beautiful women and Communism. In her early days she was less an ass-kicking super-spy and more a seductress, using her wiles to get any man she wanted to carry out her sinister schemes. And with a whole pantheon of super powered beings to choose from she used this power to ensnare…um…Hawkeye?

Won’t know. Won’t care.

By the end of the sixties she’d defected to America and become a superhero and proceeded to spend the next fifty years bouncing around the Marvel Universe. Never an A-tier character, she nonetheless maintained a fairly high profile and you could usually count on her being in someone’s book. Natasha as a character is something of a renaissance woman. She’s an Avenger. She’s a SHIELD agent. She’s Daredevil’s ex-girlfriend. She’s a superhero. She’s a morally dubious black ops assassin. She’s friends with Spider-man, Wolverine, Hercules…basically she’s the Kevin Bacon of the Marvel universe. If a given hero doesn’t know her, they know someone who knows her. And then something strange happened. In 2012, The Avengers was released and Black Widow, by dint of various factors like Marvel not owning the movie rights to some of their own most high profile female characters (like Sue Storm and regular Storm), won the position of Token Female Avenger almost by default. And suddenly, Black Widow was the most high profile female superhero in the world complete with lunchboxes, action figures (fucking eventually) and kids’ Halloween costumes. And…that’s kinda weird, right? That’s like if the most famous male superhero in the world was Punisher instead of Superman. Weird though it was, it didn’t last long. While there was a clamour for a Black Widow movie almost as soon as she appeared in Iron Man 2, work couldn’t begin until Ike Perlmutter was prized from Marvel’s hide with a set of tweezers. And by then, well, the moment had passed. It’s not 2010 anymore. We have had female superhero movies. We have had BIG female superhero movies. We have had superhero movies with female directors. Black Widow’s biggest claim to historical significance is that it is the first ever mainstream, big-budget Hollywood summer movie with Jewish women as its star and producer, director, and supporting actress and frankly that feels a bit strained (which is in no way intended to dismiss the oppression of three-person creative teams of Jewish women in the film industry and the incredibly specific hurdles they have had to overcome). And, as a trailblazer myself (what with being the first Greek-Cypriot Irish bisexual science fiction author), I think that’s great! It’s great that simply being a female led superhero movie is not enough any more to be considered a big deal. It’s great that the movie wasn’t burdened with the same expectations that Wonder Woman faced with being the first female superhero movie…

…whose existence decent God-fearing people will acknowledge. It’s good that it has a reason to exist other than being THE FEMALE SUPERHERO MOVIE.

Doesn’t it?

Okay so we flashback to 1995 where little Natasha Romanoff is living in Ohio with her parents Alexei and Melina and her little sister Yelena. While they seem to be a nice normal all-American family, they are actually a group of Russian agents planted in the US which already raises a couple of questions for me. Firstly, we run into the problem of the Black Widow being closely identified with the Soviet Union. See, this is the problem with closely linking a character with a real world nation, because you never know when that nation might suddenly fall apart like a rusty Lada.

Unrelated Image.

So already we have the problem of why Yeltsin’s government is planting sleeper agents in America. I mean this was the nineties baby! The Cold War was over, the Russians and the US were teaming up to fight Doctor Evil and Tim Curry had retreated to the one place untainted by capitalism.

Second, you might think that Natasha and Yelena are Alexei and Melina’s biological children. You know, they moved to the US as undercover agents and got a little too “into character”. But no, the kids are also spies. Why? Why have pre-pubescent agents? Are they going to start fomenting dissent and funnelling weapons into the US school system (talk about an exercise in redundancy)? I get that having children makes it seem less likely that they’re spies, but it makes it seem less likely because bringing children along on a hugely sensitive and dangerous years long, deep cover operation is an insanely risky thing to do and no sane person would do it.

Anyway, one night the children are told to pack their things because they have to get out of dodge. The family drive to a remote airstrip and have to make a harrowing getaway in a damaged Cessna which they fly all the way to Cuba, presumably fuelled by rainbows and happy thoughts.

They land in Cuba and Natasha and there they meet General Dreykov who’s played by Ray Winstone. Winstone is such an archetypical Lahndan Gangster type that I think this may be the first time I’ve ever seen him playing someone who wasn’t from the East End. Then again, what is Russia, if not the world’s East End? Anyway, Dreykov orders the girls to be taken away from their “parents” and over the opening titles we see their training in the Red Room, all set to a cover of Smells Like Teenage Spirit that I hate myself for loving as much as I do.

Anyway, it’s 2016 again (in the movie IN THE MOVIE CALM DOWN) and Natasha is hiding out in Norway after violating the Sokovia Accords. She receives a package which was apparently left for her in one of her former safehouses but ignores it to go into town to get some supplies. On the way she’s attacked by a mysterious masked figure in black who seems to have mastered the fighting styles of Captain America, Black Panther, Hawkeye and Winter Soldier. So this is Taskmaster.

Now, as I mentioned in the intro, this movie is remarkable only in the complete lack of strong emotions it evokes in me. With one exception. I will NEVER forgive them for what they did to Taskmaster. Watching this movie made me realise that Taskmaster is actually my favourite Marvel villain period, and you know what they did? They fucking DEADPOOLED him.

No, no, no. Not that one.

THIS one.

So if you don’t know Taskmaster (and to be fair, he’s a pretty obscure villain), he’s a wise-cracking mercenary who fights superheroes. Kinda like Deadpool, only less try-hard.

And there are so many reasons why I love this character. His power is cool, being able to flawlessly mimic any fighting style he sees. But more than that I love his whole attitude. Why does he wear a skull mask? Do his powers or motif have anything to do with skulls? No, he just thinks skulls are cool, fuck you. He’s not a cackling, maniacal supervillain, he’s just a working stiff trying to get by. He never kills the wives or girlfriends of his foes because he thinks that’s gross and also why would you do the one thing that will make a superhero actually kill you? One time he held a team of teenage superheroes prisoner and let them watch TV and order fast food as long as they kept their cells clean. He’s like the nicest, most wholesome scumbag in the whole Marvel universe. He’s a great character, and reducing him to just another generic, mute, unstoppable assassin is just such a goddamned waste. Also, I find it doubly hilarious that of all the villains to sic on Black Widow they chose Taskmaster because in the comics, Taskie is absolutely fricking terrified of Black Widow. Seriously, here’s a panel where Taskmaster has been told that Black Widow thinks he murdered someone she cares about.

Anyway, credit where credit’s due, most of the fight scenes in this movie are top notch, real nasty, bone-crunching affairs and this one sets the tone. During the fight Natasha barely escapes and decides to check the package she received. She finds several strange glowing vials and an old photograph of her and her “sister” Yelena.

She travels to Budapest and meets Yelena, who tells her that the vials contain an antidote to the chemical conditioning that Dreykov uses to to control the Widows. This is news to Natasha, because she believed that the Red Room was gone and that Dreykov is dead, because she killed him. Indeed, killing Dreykov was her qualification to get into SHIELD which means that she technically lied on her resume. Yelena was hoping that Natasha would give this info to the Avengers but Natasha tells her that they’ve broken up and are now working on their solo albums. Suddenly, a squad of Widows arrives and the two sisters have to fight their way through them and escape.

They two sisters go on the run, catch up, bicker, bond and eventually decide to take out Dreykov and the Red Room themselves. Unfortunately Yelena doesn’t no where the Red Room is so they have to bust their “father” Alexei out of the remote Sibernian prison where he’s being held.

We’re re-introduced to Alexei as a tattooed bear of a man arm-wrestling Russian convicts and bragging about battling Captain America in the eighties. Now, as those of you with advanced degrees in history might already be away, Steve Rogers was still chillin’ like a villain in the Arctic during that decade so what gives? I actually thought that that the movie was dropping a tantalising hint of other Captains America serving before Steve’s return (maybe William Burnside or Isiah Bradley?) but apparently no, Alexei is just delusional and thinks that he fought Captain America when he actually didn’t. Which in a way is more interesting, but in another, more real way, is not.

Anyway, the girls bust Dad out of jail in a sequence involving a helicopter, bazookas and a massive avalanche that any James Bond movie could be proud of.

“Man, this shoot was a nightmare. But it’ll all be worthwhile when people get to see it up there on the big screen.”

Alexei is delighted to see his daughters but doesn’t know where the Red Room is. Instead he directs them to Melina, who’s now working as Dreykov’s chief scientist on a farm. At a tense family dinner, Melina reveals that their original mission in Ohio in the nineties was to steal secrets from a HYDRA base that led to the creation of Dreykov’s mind control programme. She agrees to help the girls infiltrate the Red Room and calls Dreykov who sends his widows in to take them prisoner.

They’re brought to the Red Room, and learn that the super secret place that no one could find is actually a massive flying doom fortress. Because, as we all know, the sky is the best place to hide something you don’t want to be seen.

Natasha is brought before Dreykov who reveals that Taskmaster is actually his daughter Antonio, who Natasha had always believed to have been killed in her attempted assassination of Dreykov (a nice call back to Loki’s dialogue about “Dreykov’s Daughter” in Avengers). Natasha is unable to attack Dreykov because he has something called a “pheromone lock” installed in ever Widow to stop that very thing so Natasha “severs the nerve” by breaking her own nose.

I’m actually embarassed that I know so little about biology that I had to use google to make sure that was bullshit. It is!

So while Alexei battles Taskmaster, Melina shuts down the engines and Yelena uses the vials to free all the other Widows from Dreykov’s control. As the Red Room crashes down, our heroes escape and Dreykov is blown to pieces when Yelena hits his helicopter with a bazooka.

After a final battle with Taskmaster, Natasha manages to use the vial to break her conditioning. She gives Yelena the remaining antidote and a list of the locations of every Widow worldwide and tells her to get on that.

And the movie ends with Natasha setting out to rescue her fellow Avengers from their undersea prison

***

As if so often the case, it took Ms Mouse to point out to me what’s wrong with this film. This is a movie with a load of very talented people doing perfectly acceptable work with absolutely zero heart. There are plenty of superhero movies that are less technically proficient, that have clunkier scripts or shoddier plotting. That are shaggier and messier. But I prefer those movies because they also have a sense of joy and consequence. Black Widow is perfectly, utterly acceptable. It just feels like no one working on it was shooting for higher.

Scoring

Adaptation: 15/25

Fine. It’s fine. It’s fine! It’s fine…

Our Heroic Hero: 15/25

Scarlett Johannson gave my favourite performance as Natasha in Endgame, but if I’m brutally honest I haven’t been this unengaged with the character since Iron Man 2. It’s…fine, but she honestly seems a little bored.

Our Nefarious Villain: 11/25

I know there are some who claim that Dreykov “solves Marvel’s villain problem” (what is this, 2013?) but honestly for me he’s a lethal mix of one-dimensional and under-played. Just dull.

Our Plucky Sidekicks: 20/25

Probably the one element of the film that’s better than “fine” is Florence Pugh as Yelena, getting all the best lines and all the most emotional scenes, to the point where you kinda wonder why Natasha is even in this film.

The Stinger

Yelena visits Nat’s grave and is approached by the Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who offers her a chance to go after the man who killed her sister: Hawkeye.

And the audience went…

Yes. Disney DID just make this entire movie to force you to watch Hawkeye. You got played, suckas.

Are there X-Men yet?

Nary a one.

FINAL SCORE: 61%

NEXT UPDATE: 04 December 2021

NEXT TIME: We travel to the Great White North, where they use dogs as little horses:

Bats Versus Bolts: Marvel Animé

I know, I know, I know I said I’d do Black Widow. But that was before I realised a couple of very important things:

Not doing a horror themed post on Halloween is super lame.In the 1980s Toei animation did two animé movies based on Marvel’s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein.One of these movies is regarded as one of the worst animé ever made, which, as you can imagine, is a title with competition that is not merely “stiff” but positively turgid.Both of these movies are just sitting on YouTube, misshapen shambling things made and then abandoned by their creators to the cruelties of an uncaring world like…someone…I can’t think of a good analogy right now.

I mean c’mon! A crappy animated Marvel Bats versus Bolts on Halloween? How could I not?! I was BORN for this post. Seriously, this is what it’s all been leading to. My magnum opus. My masterpiece.

Our story begins in the late seventies when Toei Animation acquired the rights to the Marvel comics horror series Tomb of Dracula and Monster of Frankenstein. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who the hell buys the rights to a property based on Dracula or Frankenstein? That’s like paying for a Pornhub Account. They’re public domain for chrissakes! Why not just do your own version of the characters? Well, friends, you’re missing a crucial piece of relevant context, namely that Tomb of Dracula and Monster of Frankenstein were the mutt’s nuts. TOD in particular was one of the very best comics produced by Marvel in the seventies, with one of the all time great portrayals of the Count in any medium. From this acquisition came today’s movies Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned and Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein. They are…my God. Words fail me…

These movies are special. They are dear to me. Come, come.

The Adaptations

Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein (named in some English language publicity as The Monster of Frankenstein but never officially registered as such) is a fairly straightforward retelling of Frankenstein or, perhaps more accurately, the version of Frankenstein that everyone has had in their heads since James Whale’s iconic and still-never-topped version in 1931.

Doctor Victor Frankenstein is about to begin his experiment but just before he flips the switch his assistant Zuckel pleads with him to reconsider for he is tampering in God’s domain and so forth. Victor brushes him off and, in fairness, if Zuckel had objections he really should have raised them in the planning stages.  The monster comes to life, shit goes south, Zuckel loses an eye to the monster and Frankenstein flees back home and tries to forget any of this happened. The monster follows him home and soon people and farm animals are being torn apart like soft baguettes and Victor tries to track him down, all while dealing with Zuckel who’s trying to blackmail him. Credit where credit’s due, the movie makes some interesting story choices. The old blind man is now Frankenstein’s father and it’s hinted that Victor is continuing research that his old man began. The little girl (who is killed by the monster in most version) is now Frankenstein’s daughter and is ironically one of the few people to make it through the movie alive (seriously, this thing is like Hamlet by the end). The movie also shows some originality in its depiction of Victor’s lingering trauma over the process of creating the monster, and showing the monster seeking religious solace in a church after being spurned by its original creator. So, is the movie good? Oh fuck no. First, we need to talk about Harmony Gold.

“Harmony Gold” sounds like a name that would precede the words “…alleges that the former president…” but they were actually a production company that specialised in dubbing Japanese animation and dragging it to the West in chains to be gawped at. They are, to put it mildly, not particularly well regarded in the animé community. If you’ve ever seen an old animé dub from the eighties where everyone is talking in a way that seems like they had money for words but not for punctuation, chances are it was Harmony Gold that did it.  They dubbed both of today’s movies and, if you can imagine a spectrum with Disney’s dub of Princess Mononoke on one end, these are the movies that would be on the opposite side. But the movie’s problems aren’t just with the dub. I’ve seen a lot of cheap eighties animé and this is some of the cheapest and eightiest I’ve come across. The animation’s stiff and ugly, the backgrounds are simplistic and the tone veers wildly from horror to treacly saccharine. It also lacks the vital ingredient for any good Frankenstein adaptation: a sense of black comedy. Frankenstein (and this is a problem going right back to the original novel) is a fundamentally bleak and dour tale. It’s just endless cruelty and suffering and misery and unless you have an adaptation that is able to ring a bit of humour out of all these grisly goings on, any adaptation can become an awful slog. That said, I don’t want to shit on Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein too much because, for all its flaws, it has a story with a beginning middle and end and it tells it coherently. Which is more than can be said for Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned which is a mad, mad, drunken slut of a film.

Now, I’m not saying that you could make a great Dracula movie based on Tomb of Dracula. I’m saying you could make seven or eight great Dracula movies based on Tomb of Dracula. Dracula’s last living human descendant is recruited into a group of vampire hunters to track down the Count? There’s a movie. Dracula and Satan engage in a war for control of the underworld? Sign me up. Dracula is de-powered and has to face an array of human and supernatural foes using only his wits and fighting skill? Sounds awesome. Dracula returns to Transylvania and has to defeat a pretender to his throne? Who ain’t down for that, nobody that’s who. Dracula falls in love with a human woman and fathers a son who is then used by Heaven itself as a weapon against him? WHAT DRAMA. The trouble with Sovereign of the Damned is that it tries to do ALL OF THESE IN ONE MOVIE (clearly Toei felt they had paid for 70 issues and they were going to get their money’s worth). But here’s the thing, despite being absolutely crammed with plotlines, SOD somehow manages to be glacially paced and filled with scenes that go nowhere and accomplish nothing. This is one of the most gloriously inept screenplays I have witnessed in…well, I reviewed Felix the Cat in June so yeah. This is the worst screenplay I’ve seen in four months. But trust me, it’s a world beater. A scene with Dracula stalking and feeding on a woman is followed by another scene of Dracula stalking and feeding on a different woman. Literally the same story beat repeated. There are scenes of characters just wandering aimlessly looking for Dracula for minutes on end. There is a scene of a Satanic ritual where we stop the movie dead to watch the cultists painstakingly chisel a pentagram (actually a really inept Star Of David) into the floor and then we get the entire ritual. I have been to actual religious services in real life that took less time than this scene. Like, guys, you’re trying to squeeze 70 issues into 90 minutes: padding your time is not a priority. The sheer insanity of the plot would take too long to summarise here so let me just say if you’re asked at a table quiz: “What is the movie where Satan gets cucked by Dracula?”

This. This is that movie.

It is mind-bogglingly, catastrophically, hilariously, gloriously bad in every possible way. I love it and I strongly recommend you watch it without delay.

WINNER: BOLTS (Objectively. Bats in my heart)

The Monsters

Sovereign of the Damned has one ace up its deranged sleeve, its main character has enough of Gene Colan’s original Dracula design that he looks like an absolute boss.

By contrast, Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein’s monster “Franken” is just a warmed over version of Karloff’s monster, complete with flat head and neck bolts. He’s probably one of the more innocent and child-like depictions of the monster, never becoming verbal beyond a few garbled words. Honestly the only thing that really sets this monster apart from other depictions is his size, standing at around 11 feet.

By contrast, this Dracula has a real “One Eyed King in the Valley of the Blind” thing going on.  He’s honestly kind of a dumbass but he’s fortunate enough to live in a world where everyone else acts like they’re in some kind of surrealist improv troupe. He’s still capable of some spectacularly poor decision making, however.

For example: the movie begins with the previously mentioned Cucking of the Devil where Dracula gatecrashes a Satanic summoning and the head priest says “Oh you must be the devil, we’ve been expecting you, here is a hot lady for you to sire the Anti-Christ” and Dracula’s all “Kaaaaaay…” and then he takes the woman, falls in love with her and fathers a child. With me so far? Okay, so then Dracula gets a letter that basically says:

“Dear Mr Dracula. Hello! It’s us, the Satanists. We know you stole our Dark Lord’s side piece and fathered a child with her but hey, it’s all cool, no hard feelings. Why don’t you bring the baby to our secret hideout so we can throw you a baby shower? Lots of love, the Satanists.”

And…he does it. He takes the baby to meet the Satanists and the baby ends up getting shot. Oh yeah, this movie has zero swearing and almost no nudity but a fucking toddler still catches a bullet. So sometimes this Dracula is really dumb. And other times he’s stunningly perceptive. Like, okay, they bury baby Janus in the cemetery…

If I reviewed this movie and didn’t show this shot, I’m pretty sure I’d be sent to internet jail.

And then, in the distance, Dracula sees a mysterious light over his son’s grave and we get this line of dialogue:

DRACULA: “It’s shining directly over the place that Janus was buried, eh? Now I understand it! The enemy is going to bring him back to life in an attempt to bring about my downfall by making me confront my own son in a test of His heavenly powers against the black powers given to me by Satan! I must stop it!”

As will be a running theme, the contrast between the monsters is one of bare competence versus absolutely hilarious travesty. But damn it, this Dracula still has a dim smouldering ember of his comic predecessor’s greatness and that’s enough for me.

WINNER: BATS

The Scientists

Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein’s Victor Frankenstein is probably the best element in his film. Set your expectations to the “cheap eighties animé” setting and there’s a pretty compelling story here of a man haunted by trauma as his past sins close in on him. Plus, he’s a dead ringer for Ned Flanders and that never stops being funny.

“Hi diddly-hoh, fellow Frankensteinos!”

“Finally, someone normal to talk to!”

“….”

“Oh for God’s sake, you know I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Gentlemen please. Let’s not argue in front of our new guest.”

“…where’s 90s Frankenstein?”

“Hm? Oh he’s lying down. He was very tired after helping me with my research. He…went to pieces you might say. But he should be…up…soon.”

“WHY ARE YOU BEING COY WE’RE ALL FRANKENSTEINS WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID?!”

Sovereign of the Damned has Hans Harker, (renamed for some reason from Quincey Harker in the comics) who is the now elderly and wheelchair-bound son of Johnathan and Mina Harker and who fulfils the Van Helsing role in this story. There’s some cool little touches from the comics, like his wheelchair being a mobile anti-vampire arsenal. But he has has a very bad case of “eighties animé dialogue”. You know what I’m talking about:

“Yes my boy you might think that vampires are mere fairy tales but I know better for you see I have been waging a never ending war against these foul creatures of the night for many years and in fact that is why I am confined to this wheelchair as you can see it is filled with many weapons which I use to fight vampires but allow me to introduce you to the greatest weapon of all in our arsenal this is Elijah a dog who was lived for many years in a church before he was kicked out for drinking holy water and stealing from the church collection plate but it is he that we shall use to track down Dracula who is in fact your long lost ancestor!”

“Professor would you like a sandwich?”

“Yes a sandwich will provide me with the sustenance I need to continue my eternal war against the forces of darkness!”

WINNER: BOLTS

The Dashing Young Men

Sovereign of the Damned has Frank Drake, who is the actual worst. He’s Dracula’s last living descendant and doesn’t believe vampires are real. Or, he does believe vampires are real and thinks that Harker has no chance against Dracula. Or he thinks that Dracula is real but that he’s no big deal and will be easily defeated. He is consistent only in the fact that he remains, throughout the movie, a complete douche. He never actually says “Well excuse me Princess!” but I could swear I can remember him saying it which speaks volumes. You know how often in a movie there’ll be a scene where the older mentor suddenly attacks the young hero to test whether he’s ready? They do that here but, as I’ve already mentioned, Hans Harker is a parapalegic so this scene consists of Drake being chased around a park by an elderly man in a wheelchair.

I love this movie so much.

So when Drake does a back flip and almost chokes Harker out…it’s somewhat less impressive than I think it’s supposed to be.

Oh, but what I really can’t stand is Drake’s whole “woe is me” schtick over having to change his name because of the stigma of being related to Dracula. Like, come the fuck on, any guy with the surname “Dracula” is going to be beating off sexy goth chicks with a broom handle, get the fuck outta here.

Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein (gettin’ reeeeal tired of typing that out) also has a dashing young man, with emphasis on the “young” part. Philip is the crush of Frankenstein’s daughter Emily who decides to go hunt down the monster himself, a staggeringly stupid decision somewhat excusable by the fact that he’s like eight years old.

Guess how this particular battle ends.

Rest in peaee, buddy. Rest in peaee.

WINNER: BOLTS

The Perpetually Imperilled Ladies

Poor Elizabeth “Fridgebait” Frankenstein, always a thankless role. There’s really not much to say about her in this movie, she’s just there in the background, staring forlornly out the window and worrying about her husband’s slow descent into madness with an air of nondescript melancholy.

“Gosh darn it Liz, I shouldn’t have tampered in the Lord’s domain-diddly-ain.”

That said, her inevitable death is a little more proactive than usual, as she perishes trying to rescue her father in law from a forest fire.

In Sovereign of the Damned, we get Dolores. Dolores was a young woman who liked partying and dancing late at night which, of course, inevitably led to her becoming the intended bride of Satan.

“Plaaaay me the best sooooong in the world! Or I’ll eat your soul…”

But the name though. The name. Dolores. I’m just picturing her neighbours back home…

“Did you hear about Dolores? She was engaged to the Devil but then she ran off with this Dracula guy?”

“Oh my GAWD!”

I mean, there’s some dodgy gender politics at play here but engaging with that would mean taking this movie seriously and there’s just no goddamned way I can do that.

I will say that this movie ably demonstrates my rule that Ladies Love Playing Vampires. There’s a female vampire named Layla who is legitimately the only character in this thing performed with any skill and written with any wit.

WINNER: BOLTS

Are either of these movies actually, y’know, scary?

No. No. Not even a little. Not at all. Non. Nein. Nyet. Níl. Frankenstein at least seems to be trying to be scary whereas Dracula is just sitting in the corner eating paste.

WINNER: BOLTS.

Best Dialogue:

“Best” in this context means “line so bad it had me howling with laughter” so there is stiff competition.

I will always cherish the sight of Frankenstein searching for the monster in a forest while screaming:

“WHERE ARE YOU?! YOU MUST BE DESTROYED FOR THE GOOD OF ALL MANKIND! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND!?” *FIRES SHOTGUN WILDLY*

But then Dracula comes along with this beauty:

“Dolores, there’s a shameful secret about myself which I have kept hidden from you all this time. While it’s true I’m not a mortal man, I am not your beloved Lucifer Lord of Darkness whom you and your fellow disciples worshipped at the Black Mass. I lied to you.”

I hereby resign, and I urge all my fellow writers to do the same. We will never top this. It is folly to try.

WINNER: BATS.

FINAL SCORE: Bats 2, Bolts 5

Seriously, you need to see these. Here, go, go. Thank me later. Happy Halloween.

NEXT UPDATE: November 18th 2021

NEXT TIME: Okay, this time I’ll review Black Widow.

“Go. Don’t be what they made you.”

It’s always tempting, when a creator reveals themselves to be a bit of a shit, to look back on their past work and say “ah, I never liked ’em anyway”. This was certainly the case with comic book creator Frank Miller, whose politics took a hard right turn after 9/11 resulting in such works as Holy Terror, initially intended as a Batman story for DC before they dropped it like a hot, extremely Islamaphobic potato. This in turn led to many comics fans deciding that Miller had never been that good or important a comics creator to begin with. And, frankly, that’s not entirely unwarranted. Dodgy politics aside, a lot of Miller’s back catalogue simply hasn’t aged that well. There were always dodgy undercurrents of racism and misogyny in Miller’s work (he wrote origin stories for Batman and Daredevil that both had scenes of the protagonist fighting prostitutes), and knowing the path he went down makes those elements a lot harder to overlook now. Also, whereas Alan Moore (Miller’s contemporary and the creator he is probably most often compared to) brought a real intellectual and emotional richness to the comics genre, Miller’s most successful works were often empty showcases of style over substance. Sin City and 300 are visually striking as all hell. But ultimately, they’re hollow, emotionally stunted things. That said, there is at least one work that I will defend as still holding up (mostly).

There are female characters in this that AREN’T prostitutes! I swear ta God.

The Dark Knight Returns depicts an aged and embittered Bruce Wayne, coming out of retirement to fight the sky-rocketing crime and urban malaise that was such a feature of Reagan’s America. As he becomes increasingly violent and unhinged in his methods, the US Government sends in the only man they think can stop him:

What gives the story its power is the incredible weight of the history of these characters and an overwhelming, almost crushing sense of despair. This, Miller, seems to be saying, is how your heroes will always end; either bitter fanatics who were unable to change, or corrupted, toothless stooges who sold out to a corrupt status quo. This is how the World’s Finest Team ends, two old men beating each other to death in an alley way. And it’s depressing, and it’s cruel but it also feels true. And the inescapable knowledge that all those decades upon decades of stories and triumphs and battles of these, THE two greatest superheroes, that it was all leading to this awful, final confrontation? That’s when the story stops being merely tragic and becomes proper, classical, Tragedy. It’s Twilight of the Gods. It’s Ragnarok. It’s epic as fuck.

And that’s why Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice is fucking terrible.

Sorry, that’s one of VERY MANY reasons why that movie is terrible but I will never, for the life of me, understand why no one twigged that a fight between Batman and Superman means nothing if they don’t even know each other. That’s what gave the final confrontation in DKR its power. The weight of history. The tragedy of watching two men who once loved each other as brothers reduced to this brutal slugfest. All that goes out the window if they’ve just fucking met.

“Uh Mouse, isn’t this supposed to be about Wolverine or something?”

I’m getting there. Okay, with DKR Frank Millar created (possibly?) and popularised (definitely) the stock superhero trope of the Last Story. The Last Story is a tale (almost always out of continuity), that shows you how a certain superhero ends. They are almost always set in a bleak future, and will usually depict the hero coming out of retirement for One Last Job. These stories often will try to serve as a capstone, and a summation of the meaning of that hero. When they work, they work because they are able to deliver the things that most superhero stories by their very nature can’t; climax. Conclusion. Finality. Stakes. Characters can finally die and be at peace without an inevitable resurrection on the horizon. Arcs can be concluded. The story can finally end (at least, in this one corner of continuity). Pretty much every major character you can think of by this point has had a Last Story; Superman, Spider-Man, Punisher and of course, Wolverine, who’s died more times than Kenny McCormack and so has had plenty of opportunity for “Last Stories”. One of these, Old Man Logan was a miniseries that released in 2009 and was written by Mark Millar.

This series sees an aged Wolverine having renounced violence and living in a dystopian future where the villains won and everything’s awful and the Hulk’s an incestous cannibal who fucked his own cousin and spawned a whole tribe of inbred hulk hillbillies and Jesus Christ we made Mark Millar one of the most successful comic writers of the aughts what the fuck were we thinking?

Anyway, apart from both featuring Old Men Named Logan there is actually very little connecting Old Man Logan and the movie that it nominally inspired (thank fuck). Logan arose out of a desire of Hugh Jackman and The Wolverine director James Mangold to do something radically different with the character and genre. That is, after all, the great strength of a Last Story. You get to take some risks.

So how much of a departure is this from the previous X films? Hold onto your monocles folks, this movie actually tells us when it’s taking place. I know, none of that “in the near future” BS.

It’s 2029 and America is a dystopia. But not a “giant robots taking over” dystopia, more a “like the present but shittier and more depressing” kind of dystopia.

The movie begins with Logan passed out drunk in the back seat of a rental limousine. He is awoken by a gang trying to boost his wheels. At first he tries to reason with them but, after they shoot him and start kicking the crap out of him he finally loses patience and pops his claws. And now, for the first time in this series, we finally see Logan actually use those things for more than creative non-verbal profanity. The movie wastes absolutely zero time in earning its R-rating with spurting blood, severed limbs and just the most vulgar language.

Logan limps back into the car and drives away and stops at a gas station bathroom to ditch his bloodied clothes and clean up.

This scene is wonderful, wordless storytelling. We see Wolverine wincing and gasping in pain as his healing factor slooowly pushes the bullets out of his flesh to land in the filthy sink with an audible “clink”. We see his hands trembling as he slowly, painstakingly buttons his shirt over a body laid over and over with a patchwork of scar tissue. We see him looking at his lined, weary face and mostly-grey beard in the mirror as if he barely recognises the man staring back. Without dialogue we’re told a story of a man now paying the terrible debts of age and a life of constant violence. And this is why it was absolutely pivotal for Jackman to play this role, despite probably being a good two decades too young. It’s the shock of seeing the once virile indestructible Wolverine reduced to this that gives the scene its power. Like I said before, it’s the weight of history. You can’t cheat that.

Logan now makes his living as a limo driver, ferrying asshole frat boys, drunken hen parties and douchey businessmen to their destinations. He lives in an abandoned factory out in the New Mexico desert where he’s been keeping the now ninety-something Charles Xavier in a converted water-tower. Charles is now half senile and suffers terrible psychic seizures which make him incredibly dangerous to everyone around him. Helping Logan care for Xavier is the mutant Caliban, who humours the old man’s dotage like the Fool to his Lear. Which makes Logan…I dunno…Ophelia? Anyway, just as Jackman is finding all kinds of new layers to this older Logan, Patrick Stewart as Xavier is just…well damn. Look, I love Stewart’s Xavier but let’s be honest, the role was never really much of a challenge for him. He could play this part in his sleep. But here we get an Xavier who’s not simply the voice of moral certainty but a terribly tragic, deeply broken man filled with impotent rage at how his life’s work turned to ash. It’s a phenomenal performance, his best as Xavier (I don’t think that needs to be said) and honestly one of the best of Stewart’s career. The scenes of the long suffering Logan caring for a now half-mad Xavier spitting bile as he zooms around in his wheelchair feel less like a superhero movie and more like Endgame.

No, you basic bitches.

Yes, thank you.

Samuel Beckett’s classic Absurdist dark comedy play about two people who may be father and son trapped in a hateful parasitical relationship that they are unable to break due to the existential dread of their impending deaths, I’m glad we all remember it.

While out getting the drugs that keeps Charles from frying his brain like an omelette, Logan is approached by Donald Pierce, a man with a cybernetic arm working for the US government. I’m going to take a minute to praise Boyd Holbrook’s performance here. Obviously when this movie came out he was a bit overshadowed by Jackman, Stewart and Keen but I think he gives a wonderful turn here as Donald, charming and sinister. Anyway, Donald tells him that he knows about those gangbangers that Logan carved up at the start of the movie and tells him that a woman named Gabriela is going to try to make contact with him and that Logan should tell Donald when she does.

Logan wants nothing to do with any of this but when Gabriela approaches him she offers him enough money that he could buy a boat to take himself and Charles out on the ocean where they wouldn’t have to worry about Charles’ seizures hurting other people. Gabriela needs Logan to take her and her daughter Laura (Dafne Keen) to North Dakota. Logan reluctantly agrees.

Back at home base, Caliban tells Logan that he found an adamantium bullet in Logan’s pocket while doing the laundry and knows he’s planning on killing himself. Logan tells him to mind his own damn business and heads out to meet Gabriela. Unfortunately, he finds her murdered in her motel room with the last text on her phone being from Logan saying that he’s on his way. Which is what the kids, and most police forces, call a “bad look”.

Logan hurries back to the factory and finds that he has a stowaway: Laura hid in the trunk of his car.

I am genuinely struggling to remember a child performance that impressed me more than Dafne Keen as Laura. She has an intensity, poise, range and expressiveness that actors literally seven or eight times her age never master. She is scarily good.

Laura’s arrival lights a fire in Xavier and suddenly he’s almost his old self again, full of hope and optimism. You see, while Laura doesn’t speak, she can communicate telepathically with him and he knows that she is a mutant, one of the first new mutants to appear in years. In this future, mutant births have mysteriously stopped and the species is slowly dying out. While Laura has breakfast inside, Donald arrives with a load of hired guns to take custody of her. Logan tries to escape with Charles but he’s overpowered and Donald sends the goons in to capture Laura. There’s a bit here that I absolutely love, just a wonderfully subtle piece of badassery. Laura watches all these heavily armed guys coming for her on the CCTV screen and her reaction is to…calmly continue eating her cornflakes.

Outside Donald, Logan and Charles hear screams and gunfire and watch as Laura emerges holding the severed head of one of Donald’s men.

It’s a difficult age.

Logan watches in amazement as Laura pops some adamantium claws and starts killing enough people to cause a dip in the average American life expectancy. In the chaos, Logan, Laura and Charles are able to escape in Logan’s limo but Caliban is captured. Donald tortures Caliban until he agrees to help him track the other mutants.

Logan and Charles watch a video where Gabriela explains that a company named Transigen created Laura and several other mutant children as part of a covert weapons programme. But, as any parent could tell you, children cannot be controlled and so the programme was due to be scrapped and replaced with “something else”. Rather than let the children be killed, Gabriela and some of the other nurses staged a breakout and got the kids out. The other kids are waiting for Laura near the Canadian border where they’ll be crossing once they’ve been granted asylum. Logan has to get Laura there in three days. Oh, and one final bombshell; Laura was created from Logan’s DNA, making her his biological daughter.

The gang make a stop at a hotel in Oklahoma city where Laura and Charles bond over the old cowboy movie Shane, about a gunslinger who has to come to terms with the price of a life of violence just in case you were still trying to figure out the theme of this movie.

The trio have a narrow escape when Pierce and his men arrive and almost take out Xavier and Laura. Xavier has one of his psychic seizures which freezes everyone in the hotel and Logan is able to barely get them to safely. Donald’s boss, Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) arrives and tells Donald that it’s time to bring out the big guns…

Now, as we all know Logan has three superpowers:

Enhanced senses.Superhuman healing.An ability to be found be good, decent, Christian farmers who will take him in and give him food and shelter and not ask no questions cause that ain’t none of their business they’re just simple God-fearin’ folk who will inevitable be horribly murdered for helping him.

This time around its the turn of Will Munson and his wife Kathryn who invite the trio back to their farmhouse for dinner after they help after a road accident. Logan, Charles and Laura get to enjoy a nice family meal in a loving family enviroment which Laura seems to think is pretty neat.

Logan accompanies Will as backup when some local hoods shut off the farm’s water supply. Lying in bed, Charles thinks he hears Logan coming into the room and tells him that this was one of the best nights he’s had in many years and that he knows that he doesn’t deserve it. He’s finally remembered what happened to the X-Men (he killed them with one of his seizures) and he realises that he’s been running from his past ever since. Charles says that he finally understand Logan. And then “Logan” stabs him in the chest.

Honestly, X-24 is one of the elements of this movie I don’t really like, much as I can appreciate the flawless effects work it took to have Hugh Jackman fighting a younger version of himself. In a movie that makes such an effort to downplay the science fiction elements and keep everything as grounded and realistic as possible, suddenly springing an adult flash-grown clone (rather than a test tube baby) on us is a little jarring. And yeah, I get that X-24 represents Wolverine’s feral nature that he has to overcome but you know what other character has always filled that role?

Now, apparently Liev Schreiber was approached to reprise his role as Sabretooth but scheduling conflicts with his show Ray Donovan prevented that. According to interviews I read, Sabretooth was going to be an ally of Logan, not an enemy, but I think he would have been a better choice for the X-24 role. And I think Mangold would agree with me because X-24’s hair and costume have clearly been designed to resemble Schreiber’s Sabretooth as closely as possible.

Alright, so Will and Logan return to the house to find Will’s family and Charles murdered and X-24 carrying a screaming Laura out of the farmhouse. Will seemingly manages to kill X-24 with a tractor and Logan and Laura leave with Charles’s body which they bury in a forest.

While Laura watches in silence, Logan has a complete emotional and physical breakdown and collapses in the middle of the road. He wakes up in an emergency clinic where he’s been treated by the laziest doctor in the world.

“Doc I don’t mean to tell you your job but you sure I don’t need anymore bandages?”

Honestly the whole detour to the doctor’s office should probably have been cut. Laura boosting someone’s truck, somehow dragging Logan’s adamantium laced unconscious body into it and then driving all the way into town without getting arrested…I could buy her doing one of these things maybe, but not all three. Logan’s line: “I don’t know how you did this…” just makes it more glaring that she really couldn’t have, plausibly. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have just skipped to Logan agreeing to take her to North Dakota after they bury Charles.

Anyway, Logan really doesn’t want to take Laura to North Dakota because, y’know, he’s clearly dying but he finally gives up and they drive off. They finally reach their destination, a kind of Neverland of mutant kids. The kids leader, Rictor, gives Logan a drug that can boost his healing factor but warns him to use it sparingly. He also offers Logan his payment for brining Laura to them but Logan tells him to keep the money. Logan thinks Laura should be happy that he’s finally brought her where she wants to go, not realising that she’s started to think of him as her father. He tells her to take a hike angrily yelling “it’s better this way! Because I suck at this! Bad shit happens to people I care about”.

She answers: “Then I’ll be fine.”

 

Obviously KO’d be sheer weaponised “oof”, Logan wakes up the next day to find all the kids gone and headed for the Canadian border. But he sees Rice’s troops chasing after them along with a still-alive and fully healed X-24. And all Logan’s got is a bottle of medicine that will amp his powers up to insane levels before killing him so desperate last stand it is.

Not quite that desperate.

In the forest, all the mutant kids are captured except Laura who gets rescued by Logan and they team up to massacre the soldiers. As a family.

Logan confronts Rice who reveals that his father worked on the Weapon X programme and that he was the one that eradicated the mutant gene “like polio”.

Minor nitpick, but I don’t like that it’s some shady government plot that ended the mutants, and not just because my tolerance for medical conspiracy theories (even fictional ones) is considerably lower than it was in 2017. It just strikes me as weird that the guy who wiped out mutants is now creating new ones. That seems like it would be two very different skillsets. I also think it’s just more tragic and keeping with the tone of the movie if there really was no reason for the end of the mutants. It was just one of those things. The mutants thought they were the next step of human evolution. Turns out they were just a random fluke. They weren’t special after all. They’ll be gone soon, and it will be like they never existed. And that’s what the movie is about after all. Getting old. Life’s impermanence. Death.

Anyway, there’s a final battle with X-24 where Logan gets absolutely wrecked until Laura uses the adamantium bullet Logan was saving to shoot X-24 in the head. As he lies dying, he tells his daughter what he hopes for her.

LOGAN: Go. Don’t be what they made you, Laura.

LAURA: Daddy.

***

While it may not be my favourite comic book movie of all time, and is lightyears in tone from the movie I do consider the greatest comic book movie of all time, Logan has one thing in common with Into the Spider-Verse. It pushes and pushes hard against preconceived notions of what superhero movies can and should be. It’s almost certainly the best acted movie in the genre and the high watermark for its series. And it made me cry like a little baby.

The Stinger

No stinger. This is, after all, Logan’s Last Story. There’s nothing left to set up.

And the audience went

Hey, was that Stan Lee?

Stan Lee doesn’t do Wolverine films, we’ve established this by now.

Department of Duplication Department

So now we come to the riddle of Caliban. The X-Men movie wiki claims that the Caliban we see in X: Men Apocalypse and the Caliban we see here in Logan are the same guy which is why someone should tell the X-Men movie wiki that lies make Baby Jesus cry. Look, either Caliban grew a solid foot and a half, lost his Icelandic accent, gained a South West English one (all while living in America) and aged around two years in the interim between 1983 and 2029 OR there are two mutants with the same name and power-set. Frankly I find the latter explanation more plausible (or of course, this could be the first Caliban’s son). What clinches it for me is Caliban’s line to Donald Prince: “I think you’re confusing me with someone else”. You know what? I think we are.

How worried is Guinan right now?

Guinan used to worry about the timeline. But that was long ago. She used to think she was part of God’s plan. Maybe she was God’s mistake.

Wait, Magneto is how old?

Not that it matters, but if Magneto had made an appearance he’d have been 99.

Mutant Heaven has no pearly gates, only revolving doors.

Fittingly, death in this movie is very, very permanent.

Today, mutants are…

Immigrants.

This movie is…

X-CELSIOR!!!

X-traordinary 

X-cellent

X-pected standard

Un X-ceptional

Un X-cceptable

X-crement

NEXT UPDATE: 31 October 2021. 

NEXT TIME: Well, just in time for Halloween we check in with Marvel’s Spooooookiest Hero: Black Widow. I mean, spiders are scary. That works. It totally works. Man, I can’t wait to find out how Natasha survived falling off that cliff…

I’m speaking at New York Comic Con!

Hi all! This year as part of New York Comic Con, there will be a virtual discussion on AI and Cyberspies featuring Martha Wells (Hugo winner), Becky Chambers (Hugo winner), John Scalzi (Hugo winner), (Hugo winner) and Neil Sharpson (has a blog).

Join us at 10AM Eastern Time, 7th of October, more info .

The Little Mermaid, The Series: Scuttle

Wha’ Happen’?

Oh Disney’s The Little Mermaid The Series, how could I ever have doubted ye? After the snore-fest of Metal Fish I was resigned to this retrospective ending in a disappointing (if thematically appropriate) damp squib. Oh Mouse of little faith. Strap in folks, we’re riding this train all the way to crazy town.

So by this point I think it’s clear that the waters around Denmark are a fucking warzone because, yet again, we open on two ships blasting each other to kindling. A gang of pirates board a merchant ship, force the crew to walk the plank and steal every thing remotely shiny. During the fray, a gold goblet falls into the water and floats away.

Which is why gold is known as “the floaty metal”.

Ariel sees it glinting overhead and swims up to claim it but unfortunately for her, someone else has set his eyes on it:

That’s right, this episode shows us the first meeting between Ariel and Scuttle, everyone’s favourite solid C-tier Disney comic relief character. While flying overhead, Scuttle sees the goblet and flies down to pick it up, calling it a “Dorfburple”. Meanwhile, Ariel is swimming up to get it, calling it a “Shimmermajigger” (this girl and her jiggers, I tell ya what). This leads to a hilarious scene which cuts rapidly between the two of them with Scuttle saying “Dorfburple!” and Ariel saying “Shimmermajigger!” back and forth and back and forth. It’s especially funny when you realise that, without the editing, Ariel must just be swimming through the sea yelling “Shimmermajigger! Shimmermajigger!” while Sebastien and Flounder exchange very sad looks.

I tease, but this episode may have my favourite depiction of Ariel in this series so far in that for once she’s not just a bland smiling friend to every living ickle sea creature there is. In fact, this episode goes in a direction I did not expect at all for Ariel and Scuttle’s first meeting, but in retrospect is perfectly logical: they can’t fucking stand each other. In Ariel’s eyes, Scuttle is the only thing standing between her and the title of Ocean’s Weirdest Hoarder of Human Shit and that means the big chicken’s goin’ down.

“Get me my shivamajigger boys. And my castratamawhatsit.”

Turns out that Ariel’s actually afraid of birds, but she follows Scuttle to a lagoon and he tells her that the goblet is actually a gift that humans give to their very favourite birds and starts bragging about all the humans he’s met (pfff, bet he’s never met HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, though, has he?)

You’ve probably been reading this and thinking “Mouse, are you sure this is an episode of The Little Mermaid? Sebastien doesn’t seem to be suffering at all” and you are correct. Right on cue, an eagle swoops down and carries a screaming Sebastien away. Scuttle, anxious that this is giving birds a bad name, follows after along with Ariel and Flounder. Sebastien pinches the eagle and gets dropped on the pirate ship we saw before.

So this is the premise of the episode (for a show that’s so light on plot, Mermaid episodes take a loooong time to get going). Ariel, Scuttle and Flounder have to put aside their differences and work together to rescue Sebastien from the pirate ship, all the while Sebastien suffers like a perjurer in the eighth circle of hell. In between getting menaced by literally hundreds of demonic, red-eyed rats, he has to face yet another evil bird, the Captain’s parrot, Salty. Which is, let’s be fair, a very, very good name.

Another thing I find hilarious is that Salty keeps trying to tell the pirates that Sebastien’s on board the ship and their reaction is: “We don’t care. So there’s a crab on the ship. Fuck off, Salty.”

This script is around 90% more self aware than is typical for this show and it makes all the difference. Anyway, the episode reaches its glorious, sublime climax when the gang manage to rescue Sebastien who tells them that the pirates are planning on attacking a nearby ship and taking one of the passengers hostage. And then Ariel gets Scuttle to bring her an axe which she uses TO SINK THE PIRATE SHIP.

That’s right. Ariel is now second place behind Mulan in the Rankings of Disney Princesses Who Have Definitely Committed Mass Murder.

Nothing was ever proven.

And as she swims away, leaving the pirates clinging to their sinking hulk as the sharks close in, we see the passenger whose life she saved:

Awww, and they even managed to keep him on-model. Good for them

How was it?

The script for this one was notably better and even got a chuckle out of me in places. Also, did I mention ARIEL TAKES OUT A FRICKIN’ PIRATE SHIP SINGLE HANDED?

So how was it? Better than Princess Frickin’ Mononoke, that’s how it was.

The moral of the story is: You think that certain groups are evil, and you’re right. Just keep in mind that every so often one solitary member of that group might be kinda okay.

Does this violate continuity?:

A minor one; Eric catches a glimpse of Ariel and seems to know what a mermaid is whereas in the movie he had to have the concept of merpeople explained to him.

The original film also does not imply that Ariel has taken out an entire pirate galley and left its crew to be eaten alive by sharks but, frankly, that’s the movie’s fault.

And so Shortstember 2021 actually concludes on time. I know, I’m scared too.

NEXT UPDATE: 14th October 2021

NEXT TIME:

The Little Mermaid, The Series: Metal Fish

Wha’ Happen’?

There’s an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth where Captain Edmund Blackadder is being courtmartialed for eating a carrier pigeon. He’s not worried, though, as he tells his jailer that he’s retained the services of Massingbird, the greatest lawyer of the age:

Jailer:  I hear he’s a dab hand at the prosecution as well, sir.

Blackadder:  Yes, well, look at Oscar Wilde.

Jailer:  Ol’ butch Oscar.

Blackadder:  Yep! Big, bearded, bonking, butch Oscar. The terror of the ladies. 114 illegitimate children, world heavyweight boxing champion and author of the best-selling pamphlet “Why I Like To Do It With Girls.” And Massingbird had him sent down for being a whoopsie.

That scene kept running through my mind as I watched Metal Fish with its depiction of Hans Christian Andersen as a flame haired, barrel-chested adventurer of the deepest depths of the sea and not, as he was in real life, a wee Danish pastry who spent much of his life in an undisclosed location hiding from his own erections. But I get ahead of myself.

So as our episode begins Ariel is swimming into part of the ocean called “the wilderness” to meet with a merman named Archimedes. Flounder asks her why this dude is living like an unfashionable leper and she explains that other merpeople shun Archimedes because he is, like Ariel, a human stan.

“What? Does that make us crazy? Just because we love humans and want to be human and have legs and eat delicious fish?! HOW DOES THAT MAKE US CRAZY FLOUNDER, YOU TELL ME!!!”

Meanwhile, overhead, dashing rugged adventurer Hans Christian Andersen is on a daring sea voyage in between wrestling tigers and having proper sex with girls.

Andersen, who has no more lands to conquer, has set his sights on the sea herself. He says that he wants to know whether these legends of “mermaids” are true or just the manatee sightings of horny Italian sailors. He then draws a picture of what these mermaids might look like which just so happens to be a picture of Ariel with the most eighties hair you’ve ever seen.

Back in the ocean, Ariel has met up with Archimedes who…okay, tell me…am I the only one who sees this?

Is it just me? Anyway, Ariel shows him a “biggamajigger” that she found and he tells her that it’s actually called a “telescope” and graciously does not call her a filthy casual. Archimedes has actually met humans and spoken to them and tells Ariel that they believe that mermaids are mythical creatures with really eighties hair.

Ahhhhhh…it all makes sense.

While all this is going on there’s a subplot with Sebastien teaching a group of crab kids how to be scouts which I refuse to dignify with comment even though it takes up around half of the episode’s runtime. Instead, let’s check with Hans “The Man” Christian Andersen as he prepares to conquer the sea in his submarine, the Metal Fish.

I dunno. It rocks pretty hard, but I don’t know if I’d call it “Metal”.

Andersen takes the Metal Fish below the surface and marvels at the wonders of the deep. He passes Ariel and Archimedes who are obviously as freaked out as you would be if you were passed in the street by a haddock in a man suit. Suddenly, the Metal Fish springs a leak and sinks to the ocean floor while Andersen wrestles manfully with the controls.

“Curses! I’ve only I’d spent more time on my submarine instead of seducing all the crown princesses of Europe!”

As the Metal Fish comes crashing down it causes Sebastien to fall down a ravine and injure his claw. He goes to the palace and tells Triton that he’s been the victim of a USO (an Unidentified Sinking Object) and Triton immediately blames this on Long Nosed Echidnas I am of course joking he blames it on humans as he always fucking does. I mean fine, he’s right, but still…I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here. Anyway, Sebastien says “Humans! My worst nightmare! Apart from the one where you’re yelling at me…”

So…your life? That’s the nightmare you’re describing? Your life?

Meanwhile, the Metal Fish is filling up with water and all I can think about is why Hans has a portrait of some random dude hanging on the wall of his submarine.

Who are you? Why do you look so disappointed? What is going on here?!

Ariel asks Archimedes what’s going on and he explains that the human is running out of air that he needs to breathe. This leads to a line from Ariel that I consider a nadir for her character and for writing itself.

“Breathe? Air?”

You…you know what air is Ariel. You’ve been to the surface multiple times. And you weren’t gasping like an anti-Vaxxer in the ICU which means you MUST HAVE BEEN BREATHING AIR. UNLESS YOU HAVE GILLS IN YOUR ASS. DO YOU, ARIEL? DO YOU HAVE GILLS IN YOUR ASS? ALL THIS TIME?! ALL THROUGH MY CHILDHOOD YOU HAD GILLS IN YOUR ASS!? THIS EPISODE HAS RUINED EVERYTHING.

Archimedes tells Ariel that to save the human they’ll have to get Triton who conveniently has just arrived. And you know what I really dislike how passive Ariel is in this episode. She does absolutely jack shit in what’s supposed to be her story. Anyway, she asks Daddy to solve all her problems for her and Triton reluctantly agrees. Triton uses his trident to Deus ex Machina the Metal Fish back to the surface while make this face:

PLEASANT DREAMS

Hans Christian Andersen returns to the surface and gives up his life of devil-may-care sex adventuring to become a children’s author as we all all must eventually. And the episode ends with him reading from his latest book to a group of children while a narrator just throws his head in to remind us that “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen is available at your local library if you’re ever in need of a depressive and can’t get your hands on some bennies.

Oh, and then we cut to Ariel sitting on a rock in the pose of the famous statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagan. Except, she’s just a painting and the only thing they bothered to animate was her hair and the whole effect is unspeakably creepy.

“What is this strange…not water?”

How was it?

For such a weird, gonzo premise, it’s pretty boring.

The moral of the story is: Aw, don’t you worry your pretty little head about the moral of the story. Daddy will take care of everything.

Does this violate continuity?:

So not only HAS she seen a human this close, but we’re to believe that she could ever find another man attractive after encountering the awesome masculine paragon of virility that was HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN? Boy, I hope someone at Disney was fired for that blunder!