fevered.earth

  • Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver

    Mild spoilers for Rebel Moon and The Tortured Poets Department.

    That’s Jimmy.

    In Dave Moore’s multipart essay on Taylor Swift, ‘How You Get the World’, he speculates that the media conditions of the late 2000s produced a generation of ultimate media: acts and brands and series that came from the era of universal appeal but which persisted into the era of Spotify and Netflix, where we are all so micro-served in our wants and desires that the sun has set on fame or success at that level. There may be more acts as talented as the Beatles, but their success will be diffuse, celebrity arriving in dribs and drabs instead of a supernova explosion of fame. Taylor Swift, as you might expect, is Moore’s primary example of this in modern music. For cinema, Moore cites the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

    For over ten years the MCU was inescapable in pop cinema, an Imperial march through the box office the successes of which were only accentuated by the tragicomic failure of every attempt to replicate it. Warner Bros sank their own battleship trying to ‘fix’ Justice League to the Marvel formula; the less said about Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ the better. Even Disney — who bought Marvel wholesale — couldn’t keep Star Wars going for more than a handful of films.

    Getting the pictures of grain in early so I can fit them all.

    Now it seems likely that we are in the twilight of the MCU, with tepid entries like the sequel to 2019’s billion-selling Captain Marvel failing to make back its budget and upcoming fare like Deadpool 3 leaning on the ageing, uncertain legacy of the Fox X-men films for appeal. The Achilles’ heel of the MCU was always the unbroken chain of continuity; the fear of missing an essential entry and slipping from the zeitgeist. In this Disney have prepared the MCU a shallow grave, the integration of streaming service TV shows into the core narrative turning an occasional pleasant visit to the cinema into something you need to devote hours of downtime to keeping up with. Even a smart director like Sam Raimi can’t make an attachment to the six hours of 2021’s WandaVision completely optional.

    Taylor Swift by contrast has retained her throne, for now, as a new round of reviewers tangle with the fear that her popularity might be driving their positive coverage rather than vice-versa. The roles of critic, taste-maker and customer advocate are never as intertwined as they seem and fresh off her enormous stadium tour and movie Swift seems likely to shrug off any negative reviews for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, released April 19th (Paste’s review was posted anonymously for fear of fan reprisals). A double album is one of the traditional marks of an act falling to hubris, and Swift’s detractors might be hoping that 31 songs with lyrics like “What if I can’t have us/I might just not get up” will be enough to bring her down to earth again. Personally I wouldn’t take that bet. This kind of uncomfortably proximate emoting is Swift’s trade, her authenticity, and what might appear cringeworthy to outsiders is the beating heart of her appeal to fans.

    The Rebel Moon title cards are an absolute joy.

    A world away from all this but on the same day, Zack Snyder finalises his own double album with the release of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver. The journey of this one seems to have taxed whoever is in charge of managing releases at Netflix to a point beyond all comprehension; it’s hard to imagine a more unhinged market strategy than “two films, each with two cuts, but not at the same time, and they’re each about five months apart”. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and five months is not long enough to forget that the first part suffered deeply from being cleft in two like this. Arriving too soon to demand a rewatch of the first part, and effortlessly defeated in epic stakes by the recent blockbuster success of Villeneuve’s Dune, this latter half has not been set up for success. As with Ms Swift though, Snyder has a habit of beating the odds and confounding the critics — who may never forgive him for the trump card he pulled on all the nay-sayers and industry insiders by seeing his Justice League through to completion.

    In my review of Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire I speculated that Snyder was returning to his roots in doling out crowd-pleasing action with simple moral messages, with the risk being that Star Wars was yet another revered cultural artifact he might be perceived as mistreating. Star Wars is serious business, even now, and there’s something typically audacious in Rebel Moon’s refusal to emulate it too closely. There’s no force, no monks, no robot peasants. In this second part there isn’t even any planet hopping save for flashbacks and recaps. Snyder is mythopoetic where Lucas is spiritual — what unites his band of adventurers is life, living and working, and much of the first half of Part 2 is given over to seeing the protagonists of Rebel Moon working the land in common with the villagers they have come to save, sharing food and drink and dance. It’s an earnest message that casts into relief the difficulty of such human connection even in Snyder’s own superhero efforts — Batman v Superman in particular hinging on the distance Superman’s existence puts him and the people he aids. The MCU often inelegantly sidestepped this by having the heroes defend property in the quickly achieved absence of people; cars and buildings and other totems, Thanos meeting his final defeat when he knocks over the campus building. The lack of humanity can become distracting — the Avengers famously share a shawarma, but they don’t share it with Happy Hogan. Rebel Moon is deeply concerned with human behaviours — love, work, sex, violence — in a way that is often absent in modern films.

    It was a shame to watch this one on the small screen — there apparently were screenings in London this time but I wasn’t aware of them.

    Being in essence a two-hour final act, there’s not much room for structural game-playing here. We get an hour or so of beautifully shot grain harvesting with the expected nods to Magnificent Seven where they should be, and the brief story of how Admiral Noble got his groove back — in a joke that’s just a bit too arch for this movie, we’re repeatedly told that the resurrection process (a visual reference to The Matrix) may have turned him into a deranged psychopath. Naturally, his behaviour doesn’t change at all. Following this we get the scene which most resembles the first movie, as the members of the troupe who didn’t get to show off their deal in that movie fill in the gaps here in a series of vignettes. This includes a delightfully theatrical recounting of Kora’s killing of the magic princess, beginning with the King deciding to call his biggest, ugliest ship the ‘Peacemaker’ and ends with the string quartet playing a gun-toting Kora out of the room. It’s playful and stagey without being ridiculous or self-indulgent.

    More so than Part 1, the new film does flaunt some significant references to Lucas’ work. The invasion of the village, with walker tanks being airdropped in alongside ground troops as dust flies past the camera is a loving reproduction of the final battle from Attack of the Clones, and the topsy-turvy swordfight between Kora and the resurrected Admiral Noble at the climax has a similar sense of outlandish fun as the Obi-wan/Anakin duel in Revenge of the Sith, along with the spectacle of a great flagship crashing through the atmosphere. Closing the film out on a funeral pyre also highlights the affection this film has for that series. The comparison does throw up some areas where Rebel Moon’s reach exceeds its grasp, with the personal enmity between Noble and Kora always seeming more like pathetic competition than ideological clash. It’s not just that Vader is Luke’s father, it’s also that he’s a symbol of paternal authoritarianism to Luke’s hippy freewheeling. Kora on the other hand, though we’re shown that she has instinctually picked up the communitarian values of the village, is herself a product of the same Empire that Noble serves.

    Notably, there’s no contrivance to give them different coloured blades — in the end, they’re fighting over just one.

    What the interpersonal conflict doesn’t show though, the incidental details are happy to express — the extended sequence of communal labour is contrasted with what we see of the inner workings of the enemy dreadnought, with a clear reference to the class strata of Titanic whereby workers in the engine room shovel coal into great raging furnaces. Above this is some kind of spectral angelic computer, evoking Evangelion among other things, bound in a position of sedate submission as Kora installs explosives across its broad forehead, eyes flickering to light with the interaction. In the flashback, the senators of this Empire are aged and grotesque, the old stereotype of the Prussian noble, as they endorse Balisarius’s antiquity-themed coup. Old men of the future, in command as ever. There’s something pathetic in Noble’s repeated assertion that capturing Kora will win him a place on the senate — for all his love of the society he represents he is extremely blinkered about how it loves him.

    Notable by their absence, not compared to Star Wars but compared to the mode of nearly all modern genre films, are the quips. None of the characters of Rebel Moon are a Chris Pratt type and thank the heavens for it. There’s a confidence in the world of the film and the actions of the characters within it that liberates them from having to do the ritual ironic disavowal that pervades modern films. The villagers do not proclaim “oh damn!” on seeing the second wave of troops marching towards them because the villagers are in fear for their lives. The setting is taken seriously, and not just as a sort of pastiche the people within it are performing — the most obvious example of which being the world of The Marvels, where the planet of the sad refugee people is but a hop from the planet of people who just have to sing and dance all the time and so on. Rebel Moon is refreshingly straightforward: the soliders are competent and well-disciplined, the officers obey orders even if they disagree with them, and sensible decisions are made about tactics throughout. It’s a small thing, but it means when we then see Noble personally go on a trench warfare murder spree it’s exceptional rather than ludicrous. George Lucas always insisted that Star Wars was for children, and the comedic incompetence of the Stormtroopers was a reflection of that. Rebel Moon, with its R-rated director’s cuts hanging like phantasms in the distance, does not have such a commitment.

    Special mention to Ed Skrein’s face, even more of a skull mask here than in the first one.

    With hindsight it may turn out that Snyder’s peak of creativity and collaboration was his trilogy for DC, and he won’t seek out such intimate, introspective work on the grand canvas again. It may be that among fans there is much handwringing and disappointment over his experiments with cinematography and writing and the other elements he has, until now, sought out talented partnerships for. It may even be that unlike stablemate Michael Bay, Snyder never sees a broader reappraisal among critics as an auteur (with the concept more out of fashion than ever). Rebel Moon Part 2 currently has 18% on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Love and Thunder, a movie without a shred of the craftsmanship or soul that is present here, has 63% and is certified ‘Fresh’.

    Believing as many people have that critical consensus will build a universal (American) canon liberates a person from the tyranny of choice. There is no risk of feeling your taste to be inadequate when there is an objective numerical measure of its accuracy. But if the numbers are a fantasy, and the consensus was only ever a reflection of contingent aspects of production and not a guiding factor at all — if The Shawshank Redemption or Citizen Kane or Everything Everywhere All At Once is not in fact the greatest film of all time, certified as top of the list— then every person is in danger of being a philistine. This is a troubling thought. But more troubling is the idea that, captured by engines that only feed back to us what we already like, we end up with nothing but attempts to recreate the MCU. For as much as I don’t hate these films, we end up with The Marvels or Madame Web or Wonder Woman 1984 or Thor: Love and Thunder. Films made by committee, with artistic endeavour a secondary concern. As Snyder himself put it in a recent interview, we end up with the Happy Meal.

    The shot composition is showy all the way through, but they really have fun with Jimmy.

    Snyder’s work is unique and particular, and fervent in its earnestness. Despite all the homage and pastiche and the readily apparent melting pot of influences, Rebel Moon is an original sci-fi universe in an age of adaptations and sequels. Snyder, who once helmed the major competition to the MCU, knows the folly of trying to reproduce it. Even the clumsy sequel hook here is only that, a sequel hook. It’s not the work that destroys all the critics and haters — but then we had that one in 2021 and it didn’t last anyway. It’s just another decent movie by Zack Snyder. Perhaps for his next one he will take a leaf from erstwhile creative partner Christopher Nolan and leave genre behind entirely. Oppenheimer brought the intensity of a Batman film to historical biography. Perhaps Snyder could bring the rich visuals of Rebel Moon to philosophical fiction. Or perhaps he will keep producing these grandiose micro-epics for as long as Netflix will pay him. All things are possible.

    I would be sad to never see another film like Rebel Moon and I don’t know if another director is likely to make one. Everything’s filthy, the lens is constantly trained on the narrowest plane of interest and there’s a healthy, satisfying thunk to every noise and interaction. It’s not a new Star Wars — it may be that nothing can be a new Star Wars, nothing can be a new MCU, nothing can be a new Taylor Swift. But it’s an enjoyable movie by a director who is always pushing his own limits. The lousy division into two parts, the held-off pair of Director’s cut, the fancy lenses and lingering shots of grain and such may not be to everyone’s taste. Few things are. Cynics will sneer at the simple truisms like “connecting with people will help you break an addicition” or “mutual respect can bring people from different backgrounds together”. But Rebel Moon is authentic and honest in a way that will overcome all cynicism to those who care — an inimitable talent for reaching people that Zack Snyder shares with Swift — and that alone is more than enough to save it.

    Kora and the engineer share some kind of moment here. The scene I’m most looking to see extended.

    If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews. Thanks to Jimbot and Jamie Faith for feedback.

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  • Release of the Ayer Cut

    This is an additional coda to Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, my 2020 video essay about the movie Suicide Squad.

    17. (October 2021, ahead of announcement of a new Director’s cut for Suicide Squad)

    What are we?

    There is an importance to making art and art is important; making quiet, personal art, making large mass-market art. It’s the nature of the movie-making system that to paint on the largest canvas you have to compromise to commercial interests, commercial brands, ‘intellectual property’ — and the corrosive influence of that term has burned away more culture than any ‘modern mythology’ could hope to restore. But what comes out is still art, sometimes pop art, sometimes crass art, sometimes art we appreciate and sometimes art we don’t.

    Making art — making meaning — and showing it, or not showing it, saving it or destroying it. These are universal experiences. Showing art to each other is how we come to understand ourselves in relation to another human being. We cannot communicate directly, brain-to-brain. We only have words and images, and we use them to tell each other things we don’t even know we know.

    This goes some way to explaining the sense of natural justice to hearing that someone has prevailed against the machine and had their authentic vision made available, however much the nature of a collaborative artform means that the idea of any one ‘vision’ is illusory. It was right that the world got to see Blade Runner without narration, it was right that Ken Russell’s The Devils was liberated from the censors, and it was right that Zack Snyder got to release his Justice League. If this list is of films by directors with a fairly homogenous demographic, it is only because relief for this injustice, like so many others, is distributed unfairly. But that does not make any individual case less unjust.

    Which is all to say that it is as important that David Ayer gets to have his cut of Suicide Squad as it is when an indie musician releases a treasured album or a writer submits their first essay. It may not even be ‘good’, whatever ‘good’ should mean. It has probably come about as the result of some tedious bean-counting exercise; such is the world we live in. But we should celebrate that on the largest scale there is an affirmation that it is good for people to be able to create and release art for its own sake, and for the sake of creative integrity.

    I closed out my last essay by saying that “Suicide Squad is over, for now.” Somehow, against all odds, Suicide Squad has another attempt to explain itself.

    Editorial note: Contrary to rumour at the time, there was no announcement and Suicide Squad did not get another attempt to explain itself.

    Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ is also available in written form.

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  • 2023 review of films

    Expanding on my Letterboxd list, the new releases I saw this year and what they meant to me. Titles link to whatever gibberish I wrote at the time.

    18. The Flash

    In a year where I mostly didn’t bother seeing anything that I didn’t think would be good, The Flash has the indignity of being something that I went out of my way for despite expecting it to be a flavourless slurry. The production of this one is surely the nadir of Warner’s attempts to make a Marvel-like universe of DC films seaworthy, and ahead of release it seemed like it could only logically be an abomination in form and content. So it was with malice in my heart that I sat down to watch it in the cinema. But it surprised me — not offensively terrible except in certain specific ways and a tremendous sense of fun, some of the time. But the final third is a slog that just keeps getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing on this list that I can favourably compare it to.

    The suit looked really bad. Like a walking basketball, if you’re being kind.

    17. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

    It’s a tightly-sprung little diorama of 40 or so minutes, Wes Anderson’s adapation of a slightly obscure Roald Dahl tale that I must have read at some point as a child. I was a furious reader and Dahl is (or was) one of the archetypical British children’s writers. All of his tales have an enchantingly sinister edge to them that often crops up again in film adaptations, from the gothic trimmings of James and the Giant Peach through to the animalistic protagonists of Wes Anderson’s (there he is again) utterly inspired Fantastic Mr Fox.

    Anderson is deep in a particular style he’s been cultivating even as a subset of his well-known aesthetic, and it’s as on-show here as it will be in (spoiler alert) the Wes Anderson entry that is going to make an appearance higher up this list. I suspect the coherence and ambition of that entry makes this one pale unfairly by comparison, but it’s a wonderfully crafted little ditty that moves at a breakneck pace even though there’s not much of anything happening. No quarter whatsoever is given for the viewer to catch their breath while listening, which can be a frustrating experience if you’re half paying attention on a phone, but is a marvel to attend to.

    Cumberbatch is still good. He doesn’t seem to do much capital-A Acting any more, does he?

    16. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

    Tom Cruise! You were the chosen one! You were supposed to be a fixed beacon of care and deliberation in blockbuster movie making, not propping up one end of a flimsy tent that’s blowing about in the wind… or something. End metaphor. I set myself up with this one really, having done a marathon over several weeks of the preceding six (six!) entries in the Mission: Impossible saga. Fallout remains the high watermark, with this being a real let-down that’s way less than the sum of its parts, despite the usual set-pieces and ensemble cast. It’s the shabby treatment of Rebecca Ferguson’s character that rankles most, and we can only hope that the (now consciously uncoupled) sequel remedies that.

    It’s a great stunt, but what does it have to do with AI?

    15. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

    I knew this was well-regarded but I hadn’t actually planned to watch it; I’m not a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan, despite spending most of my childhood in front of Baldur’s Gate 2 on the family PC — at one time I could have identified any one of the several hundred items in that game from the icon alone. I’m also not a fan of mainstream American comedy, which to my refined British palate doesn’t feature nearly enough bon mots and/or upper class men putting regional accents on for fun.

    Having been sat in a room while this was on though, there’s plenty to appreciate — it is genuinely funny, and affectionate for the setting in a way that brings specificity to the comedy. Michelle Rodriguez solidifies her position as the safest pair of hands for your ‘competent number 2’ role and Hugh Grant, who seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance, is a scene-stealer even if he’s definitely only giving it 60%.

    Cute puppet, though the kinda janky movement is why they don’t do that so much any more.

    14. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

    In the gap between the release of this and now (only a few weeks), Swift has started to enjoy a little bit of a backlash, with critics pointing out that her feel-good, be-yourself non-specific feminism could be seen to be a little self-serving, and her silence on the genocide occurring in Palestine might suggest that selling records is a more prioritised leveraging of her pop culture cachet than doing good in the world.

    Of which, well, pop stars were never going to save us. Movies were never going to save us. It’s all worth saying — and saying so loud it becomes a problem for the great, crushing press engine that drives these stars forwards — but it struggles to become a moral imperative against enjoyment.

    As for the movie? Well, it’s nothing to write home about in terms of cinematography — a mostly prosaic camera is enough to show off the maximum-budget staging and on-stage choreography. On occasion there’s a shot that tells the big story here — Swift a giant astride the stadium — but no throughline. It’s all assuming that the staging and the Swift songs will be enough to sweep you along — and for me, they were. Taylor Swift dares you to suggest that her imperial days are behind her.

    This enormous woman will devour us all!

    13. John Wick: Chapter 4

    The audience in the cinema with me for this audibly groaned when he rolls back down those stairs. A positive groan, to be clear, an expression of solidarity with poor Mr Wick who has just so painstakingly climbed them. But still a groan — at four long entries, Wick’s unceasing tear of film revenge hasn’t lost anything in the stunt choreography column — and the addition of both Donnie Yen’s blind assassin and Rina Sawayama’s hotelier ninja provide plenty of opportunity for fresh ways of showing off there. But this series can only subsist on ramping up the action for so long before the always-overwrought plot collapses into tedium, and that’s feeling like it might come soon now.

    Great costuming, too.

    12. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    It’s such a hard one to love. It’s got all the warmth, all the creativity and feels exactly as fresh as the first one, but out of all the “part 1 of 2s” that somehow came into confluence this year it’s the one where it just didn’t work for me. Not helped by seeing it in the cinema, where it certainly seemed like there was some kind of audio issues over the first twenty minutes (a bit of hyper-focus on the centre channel for dialogue?). And two people sat to the right of us who interacted with their various foodstuffs to such an extent that we fled like cowards to the other end of the row.

    But yeah, the film has just set up its major conflict… and then it ends. And unlike Rebel Moon, the first film is right there as a complete, cogent unit that told one story end-to-end. This feels like a regression — that’s terribly unfair to all the artistry and beauty, but making this list I found it a difficult notion to shake.

    Ahhh they’re doing the thing.

    11. A Haunting in Venice

    It’s just for me, the guy who loved both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile! Branagh’s Poirot is such an odd project, taking on a role so recently lived in with tremendous aplomb for so many years by David Suchet. But he’s persisted with it, and for me as the person who is happy to see really any classic detective tale at all, I’m glad.

    Orient Express suffered from an identity crisis, with Branagh’s idiosyncratic take on the character and setting emerging out of step with the film — intense action sequences clashing with posed frame composition. Nile was a cinematic victim of Covid, ending up more than a little stiled. But Haunting delivers on the promise of Branagh’s Poirot at last — moody and atmospheric, it’s the best of the three.

    Tina Fey’s in this one. She’s fine.

    10. Master Gardener

    I saw this in a cinema in Valencia, of all places, away on a work trip. There was a great big cardboard display out for it in the lobby, which is a delightful thing to find promoting a new Paul Schrader film. I bought popcorn and soda and settled in to ignore the Spanish/Valencian subtitles, then afterwards walked back through the raucous streets of the old town to my hotel room.

    El Maestro Jardinero

    Schrader is retreading familiar ground in this story of a former Neo-Nazi turned flower-tender who falls in love with Quintessa Swindell’s millennial dilettante, but it’s done with such an eye for beauty and the hopeless pain and loneliness at the heart of every person that you won’t care. It’s tight, it’s thrilling, it’s unique — but my god, that ending.

    9. How To Blow Up A Pipeline

    Always fun to see a dramatic adaptation of a non-fiction book, and Daniel Goldhaber turns Andreas Malm’s book (which I sadly haven’t read) into a tense, small-scale thriller which approaches ‘Sorceror’ levels of tension. A group of activists each with their own reason to feel particularly passionately about the environment come together to do something about it: blow up a pipeline. Anyone with any kind of knowledge of activist groups can imagine from there the sorts of things that go wrong, but the true radical optimism of the film is in what it imagines could go right. Very few films have politics nowadays, so it was nice to go see one that did.

    It also looked really good, shot on 16mm film.

    8. The Pigeon Tunnel

    John Le Carre (fake name) tells tall tales about his disreputable father and time in the security services. It rivals F for Fake in the genre of documentary films that are actively messing with their you, but where in that film Orson Welles was actively setting out to disrupt the audience’s expectations of a documentary film, here veteran filmmaker Errol Morris (no stranger to deception and persuasion, mind) is desperately clinging to the rudder trying to keep this ship on course. At one point, prying ever so gently at his interviewee’s closely guarded secrets, he says “they think I should press you harder on this betrayal thing”, which provokes Le Carre into an absurd diversionary rant about his own sex life — but which reveals nothing. As enigmatic as one of Le Carre’s books.

    *whispering* That’s John Le Carre.

    7. BlackBerry

    The Thick of It mixed with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia mixed with Masters of Dune mixed with Bad Blood. The funniest film this year and probably the funniest film since The Death of Stalin. The rise and fall of Blackberry mobile phones, which were the undisputed top dog of business phones (‘Crackberry’, how quickly we forget) until the iPhone utterly obliterated it and left only a hard kernel of keyboard-phone devotees behind. Glenn Howerton manages to make a case for himself as a serious dramatic actor in a role which has him scream “I’m from Waterloo! Where the vampires hang out!” at a board of nonplussed executives.

    The most intimidating bald head.

    6. Rebel Moon

    This is generous, Zack! This ranking is generosity! Snyder’s reputation precedes him with all the internet’s worst critics and naturally this dreamy sci-fi action thriller has been received with the ceremony of a letterbomb, the audacity of doing Star Wars without involving the brand owner just too much for many. I’ve been a fully signed up Snyder sicko for many years now so this was high up on the anticipation list for me, and I got to see it in beautiful soapy 70mm at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. Snyder does what he does well on screen for two hours, though this may not be the one to convert to unfaithful.

    It’s the big Christmas Netflix release for this year, and Snyder’s take on the space opera has promise and promise and promise to spare — and of course, lots of utterly gratuitous slow-motion. But it’s part one of two, and (bafflingly) cut one of two, and cumulatively it’s hard not to feel some of the disappointment this year’s Spider-verse suffered from — but part two should hopefully only be a few months off.

    Brace for (bloodless) impact.

    5. The Killer

    Has Fincher been away? Since 2014’s Gone Girl there’s only been the 2020 cult hit Mank, about the writing of Citizen Kane, and well-regarded Netflix series Mindhunter. This then is something of a return to cinematic fiction, and he’s not missed a beat. Michael Fassbender’s titular trained killer muses existentially about the nature of his job, as a single missed shot unravels the whole thing. More than any other film on this list, the controlled, thoughtful nature of this is the foil to Dead Reckoning’s sprawling mess of plot sinew. There’s not a second out of place as Fassbender goes through the boring, everyday motions of hiring cars and unlocking storage lockers and memorably at one point signing up for a trial at a gym. A small slice of genius.

    Hits on the universal truth that everyone has their own special McDonalds order.

    4. Napoleon

    What if Napoleon were just a grotty little guy? Ridley Scott swerves the historic epic expectations and delivers the year’s second-funniest film in this unflattering portrait of old history-on-horseback himself. Critics slated it for bias, for mendacity, for simplifying the intricate historical events that make the Napoleonic era so attractive to lay historians. But it captures something so essential about self-assurance, self-doubt, self-pity in the dual protagonists of Napoleon and Josephine — both of who do as they will and let the whole world come round to agreeing with it.

    Much like the man himself, Scott’s great sprawling epic doesn’t give a damn if you like it or not. It’s stupid, it’s grandiose, it’s slapstick, it’s everything. Like Rebel Moon, it has a full-fat version coming in the new year. Unlike Rebel Moon, it doesn’t need it.

    Big hat.

    3. Oppenheimer

    I saw this on the biggest screen, the one at the BFI IMAX in London which I don’t think I’ve been to since seeing Watchmen there back in 2009. It’s an intoxicating experience, even if the three hours of film had me flagging slightly by the end. We had to get a taxi back it was so late.

    The badges look straight out of The Prisoner, but they were real.

    If Tenet felt like the peak of a certain cumulative thought in Nolan’s work, Oppenheimer feels like a whole new mountain. He keeps all the interpersonal tension, the motions of science and technology reflecting the behaviours of the people who enact them, but all the fiction is torn away, all the artifice. These were real people (and Nolan takes particular pleasure in showing as many of them to us as possible) but they may as well be in the plot of Interstellar with the scope of the world-historic change they provoked. Also it looked gorgeous in 4:3.

    It’s Nolan’s masterpiece, and I can’t see how he will top it. On that basis, it should be at number 1 in this list. But in a pairwise comparison of my own personal honest choice, I couldn’t place it above either of these next two films.

    2. Asteroid City

    Wes Anderson, as noted above, has started to make being Wes Anderson look effortless. Asteroid City is breezy, unassuming, utterly crushing, smart, unashamedly intellectual, silly, funny, lurid. If I watch it again I will cry. I might have cried the first time. Going back to The Royal Tenenbaums and presumably before, Anderson can tug the heartstrings when required with an expert finesse. But this is something more. It makes you feel for being human. I don’t know. Perhaps this is a film that will only be describable in the rear view mirror.

    The colour palette is superlative.

    1. The Creator

    Much like how Oppenheimer doesn’t deserve to not be number one, The Creator doesn’t deserve to be number one. It’s broken! It’s flawed! It doesn’t work at all! The film flies at a breakneck pace from scene to scene, setting to setting, allowing no time at all for establishment or inattention. Then, in the third act, it goes even faster. It doesn’t allow time for coherence, or explanation, or logic. Things just happen, images splashing across the screen. It’s left for the viewer to put them together into a compelling ending.

    If you’re not on board, it won’t work. But for me, seeing this on a last-minute trip to the cinema the day before it stopped showing, the imagery was enthralling. I can home talking about how incoherent it was and how it was in many ways a weaker retread of Avatar 2: The Way of Water. But it wasn’t weaker. It was stronger. And since seeing it that affection for it has only grown, to the point where when I did the pairwise comparison with the other movies on this list, it beat every one. The imagery is more direct, more vibrant than Oppenheimer. The story is more thrilling, more imaginative than Asteroid City. The subject matter is less tired than Napoleon. Every time, it wins. Unlike all the other flawed gems on this list, there’s no sign of an extended cut of The Creator. But perhaps that’s for the best; perhaps with a more complete version the spell would be broken.

    Didn’t see but will:

    • Barbie — I don’t watch films for children. But more seriously, the marketing campaign for this one was just a little bit too self-aware to click for me, and when the opportunity didn’t present itself I didn’t seek it out.
    • Blue Beetle — The latter DC cinematic universe is dead and gone and now’s the perfect time to start critically reappraising it.
    • Killers of the Flower Moon — I’m a philistine and a fraud and I should resign my stewardship of longmovie.club. There just wasn’t time to fit it in in a winter season full of films.
    • Maestro — I still haven’t gotten over Tár.
    • The Marvels — The latter Marvel cinematic universe limps on and I have no desire to start critically reappraising it.
    • May December — Might sneak this one in before the end of the year and silently edit it into this list.
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  • Scott Pilgrim’s Tidy Past

    Spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

    Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren’t really all that similar to the circumstances you remember. Such it was for me and Scott Pilgrim, which I read on the cusp of the age it concerns, living nowhere with even the slightest similarity to Toronto. I was in fact somewhere between the ages of Scott, a 23-year-old serial moocher, and Knives, his inappropriately young 17-year-old partner with whom he’s kidding himself at the start of the books. It’s a terrible age to be.

    When I bought the first three books I was stuck in a rut, studying a terrible Maths degree at a university in a field outside of Coventry. When I bought the final three, I had (possibly for the first time) made a significant life choice that would ultimately change almost everything about me — not uncommon, I’m sure, for a 20-year old. I moved, I changed what I was doing, and I started to change how I thought. I bought a guitar, of course.

    The story of Scott Pilgrim is the story of a young man who crafts grand stories about his achievements and successes, set in a world which makes many of these things cheekily literal. When talking about their school-years romance, band drummer Kim Pine describes how Scott fought his way through a River City Ransom scenario, defeating hordes of fellow students in hand-to-hand combat to rescue her. When Scott fells each of Ramona Flowers’ evil ex-boyfriends, they explode into a handful of change commensurate with their social standing. And when Ramona vanishes towards the end of volume 5 and his friends are either too busy or too far away to participate in his heroic pursuit of her, Scott enters something like a period of depression, drifting from place to place and struggling to put his self-image back together. When he does, it’s by recognising that his actions have always depended on and had an impact on others. Rescuing Kim was a great triumph for him, but their relationship always sucked for her.

    Much of the subtlety of Scott Pilgrim is lost or muddied in the collective memory because it was omitted from the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. The film was a necessarily condensed retelling that was scripted before the final book was even written, packing six books-worth of plot into a 1h52 runtime. And there is lots of subtlety to be found in the books, despite the bombast and the action and the video game theming — it may be hard to imagine now, but at the time the concept of a story being embellished with elements of video gaming was novel and exciting. The film sticks with this world of heightened metaphor, having the climax being Scott approaching the same scene twice, once as the embodiment of heroic love and once as the embodiment of a more mature self-respect. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s less emotionally complex than the long, drawn-out ennui Scott experiences over the final two books.

    Scott has always assumed that he will be the hero in whatever story he’s living. If he’s dating a high schooler it’s okay because it’s him, even if he’s dating a high schooler. If breaking up with Envy Adams made him feel bad then she must have been at fault, because it’s him and he’s feeling bad. What changes him is the realisation that he was prioritising fighting the evil exes — prioritising the story — over his actual relationship with Ramona. Ramona’s affection is not determined in a fight between Scott and a bunch of third parties. To reach that place though, he has to go through the breakdown of this assumption of default heroism.

    When I think of the Scott Pilgrim books, I think of those passages between volumes 5 and 6 where Scott is at a low ebb, feeling useless, propped up by his parents and failing on his own standards as well as anyone else’s. That’s much how I felt when I was reading them, having notably at one time scored a straight zero on an exam paper. It wasn’t even that I didn’t show up — I showed up, sat with the paper in front of me for the mandatory minimum thirty minutes, then left. What was happening, which I didn’t recognise at the time, was that despite whatever aptitude I had for the subject, I didn’t have any affection for it. I didn’t want to learn Maths. I’d just assumed for my whole life that I would. Questions like “Who do I want to like me?” are unanswerable if you’ve always assumed that anyone who knows you will like you.

    I don’t know if I always viewed myself as the hero in any story, but like most people I viewed myself to some extent as the protagonist, or someone whose job was to fill the role of the protagonist. What changed for me was the realisation that I could choose to do things in my life that I enjoyed. It’s an obvious realisation — but everyone has to make it once. With the help of my friends, much like Scott, I did just that. Brian Lee O’Malley has an earlier book, ‘Lost at Sea’, about a young twenty-something who goes on a road trip with some friends she belatedly realises have invited her along by accident, but has a great time with anyway. O’Malley has a real talent for capturing the young adult mix of absolute confidence and unbearable self-doubt.

    All of this is prologue to discussing how Scott Pilgrim is back. O’Malley, along with BenDavid Grabinski, has penned an eight-episode follow up series for Netflix, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, that apes the best elements of other legacy sequels like Matrix: Resurrection and Rebuild of Evangelion. The show starts as a direct adaptation of the books before veering off into an alternate sequence of events where Scott is out of the picture for much of the period of the original plot and Ramona instead is forced to reckon with her wants and responsibilities. Ramona of course was never so much of a fantasist as Scott, and so her story — while goofy, adorable and action-packed — is more easily resolved. She apologises to the exes who were unfairly hurt and the others simply find other relationships to obsess over. It’s a breath of fresh air with much in common with Matrix: Resurrections’ handling of Trinity, another female character who while she wasn’t underserved in her original appearances was still forced into a particular kind of role by the story having one set hero who wasn’t her.

    Scott has to return of course, and when he does it’s with the gimmick of time travel. Future Scott, a thirty-something with an impressive beard (and a coat he really should have thrown away by now) has hit a rough patch in his relationship with lifelong-love Ramona and decided that the only way to heal his broken heart is to reach into the past and have the relationship never happen at all. It all gets a bit silly from here, with the desire to give Ramona the agency in resolving this plot at odds with the fact that weird, buff, forty-plus Scott is the climactic villain. But the basic idea is sound: what would a character as flawed as Scott be doing in his thirties, if things had gone badly for him? Searching for the fault in his stars is as sound a choice as any. Catastrophising any blip into a grand narrative of failure. The positive side of always seeing yourself as the hero in any story is never seeing yourself as the victim. Future Scott realises — or is forced to realise, really — that his mistakes are his own doing and not some cosmic contrivance that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight.

    It’s an interesting approach to the question of what these characters went on to do which avoids — to some extent — the trap of writing a new dramatic arc with characters who already completed their story the first time round. It’s necessarily unsatisfying if Scott and Ramona actually lived happily ever after. It’s necessarily bleak if it all went wrong for them. The need for conflict in a new story means sequels and revisitations tend towards the latter — I’ve heard many complaints about the unkind future Dial of Destiny proposed for the character of Indiana Jones, left sad and alone after his many adventures. But neither route obviously leads to a compelling narrative. What’s needed is a new story, which is something that could always really be better tackled with new characters rather than the baggage of old ones. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off splits the difference: the future characters are speculations, what-ifs. The present characters have the interiority. Even if all the people who read it have grown up, Scott will always be 23.

    For myself, I don’t regret the path my life took to reach the point it’s at now. I hope that’s true in ten years time and I hope that’s true in twenty years time. And selfishly, I’d like to find myself able to revisit Scott Pilgrim and the gang again, if it’s as thoughtful (and funny) as Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. But if I don’t it won’t be a big deal. There was a time and a place where Scott Pilgrim meant a great deal to me, and while it’s nice to visit it I don’t want to get stuck there. I don’t want to go to war with my younger self, like Scott does. It’s a good lesson, but as with all the lessons Scott Pilgrim has to offer it’s sure to feel straightforward in retrospect.

    If you appreciate my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

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