This review was originally published on Letterboxd, but Superman: Solar was removed from that service.
Superman saves the cow.
You can’t get mad at a fan film! It’s always nice to see people play the hits, and when Superman: Solar stays in that ball park it’s positively lovable. Much like the titular character, the film is at its best when allowed to ‘cut loose’ and do a flying action scene with a dynamic camera which captures no small percent of the dynamism of Man of Steel, the short’s obvious inspiration.
Everyone involved here is giving it their all, but the standard deviation of quality scene-to-scene ends up quite wide. For example, there’s a scene towards the end where Clark meets Lois Lane to accept a job at the Daily Planet suffers terribly from the choice of set location, which ends up making the placid Clark seem like he’s borderline harassing Lane simply by remaining present in the tight corridor. Lex Luthor has an extended cameo by a chap doing a stellar Jason Statham impression, which is certainly a new direction for the character — I wanted more of that guy. And the green screen is pretty competently done, with only some evidently strained lighting choices and backspill in the desert fight to complain about.
It’s that connection to Man of Steel which is Superman: Solar’s Achilles’s heel though. Snyder’s film is both saint and sinner to this adaptation, with constant commendably-executed visual references somewhat at war with a script that has a little of the ‘fix-it’ ethos about it. When it’s not dubious pablum put into the mouths of side characters (the Clarks “saved our business” says one man, so he won’t be turning them in to the FBI) the script is relitigating twitter arguments which border on theodicy. Aping Batman v Superman’s news studio scenes, a pair of broadcasters debate whether an invincible man is braver than the troops. A delightfully hard-nosed Lois Lane asks directly if Superman is a ‘dictator’, but is bizarrely placated when he basically answers ‘yes’.
The central conflict of the film isn’t drawn from Man of Steel however, it’s ostensibly pulled from the page of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman where Superman rescues Regan, a suicidal teen, from a rooftop. I’ve long argued that the page in question is very specific to the format and context and would prove difficult to adapt to another medium, and this does not dissuade me. The scene as adapted quickly swings into bathos, but the absurd dialogue between Superman and the teen — who gives a performance that rescues the affair — ends up coming round to its own poignancy. They connect, not because any of Superman’s mantras hit home, but just in that they make a silly shared conversation on this rooftop, and connect, and sometimes that’s all someone needs.
Damn Superman, gonna make the kid host you for dinner?
As I said above, ultimately it’s quite a fun watch. Making films is hard! Hollywood, with its outlandish budgets, often makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world. This fan film aims high, and I can’t hate that.
Blanc is meant to be at rock bottom here but damn if that doesn’t look like a good time.
Whenever someone asks me about Sherlock Holmes, I tell them the same (somewhat exaggerated) factoid: every single one of Doyle’s short stories about the famous detective concerns at least one character who has a dark secret from his or her time in the colonies. You can comically unravel a good number of the stories just by keeping an ear out for which character has been abroad and assuming that any mystery will have taken place therein. Why is Sherlock Holmes, a character who rarely if ever leaves England, so concerned with goings-on in lands far away? It’s because for all their pure-logic puzzle-box mystique, detective stories most often reflect the anxieties of the times and places they are written in. To have a mystery you must have secrets, and to have secrets you need anxieties. Sherlock fears the colonies, Poirot the precarious luxury of high soceity between the wars. Gervase Fen is very concerned about pylons and the electricity board.
So it is into this tradition that Rian Johnson’s Southern US detective Benoit Blanc steps with his duo of murder mystery films which reflect a modern anxiety: that the rich are going to kill us all. The first film, Knives Out, steps lightly as it weaves a (slightly) contrived story about ungrateful children and rightful inheritance. The naked inequality of it all is present but nudged to one side, and by constraining the world of the film to a single house Johnson is able to turn the world upside down at the climax, with struggling nurse Marta on top and the privileged rabble of disinherited children below. It’s neat, if fantastical.
The just-released sequel, Glass Onion, dives further into the mires of the present: it’s about an unfathomably wealthy tech entrepreneur and his chosen friends, it’s set in the COVID pandemic. It touches on the energy crisis, lingers extensively on social media and PR cycles, and has Dave Bautista playing a manosphere-aping supplement salesman.
He’s not quite as horribly tactile as Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor but Edward Norton’s variety of psychopath outfits are fun.
Edward Norton’s antagonist Miles Bron is a billionaire in the mold of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, someone with world-changing resources which he devotes to the expression of personal whims (c.f. child submarines or virtual reality headsets) in the face of the cosmic terror of actually changing anything. The story goes thus: six aspirational young adults used to meet in their local bar, sadly closed down by the present for undiscussed economic reasons, and talk about their individual dreams. Positive-vibes hypeman Miles Bron becomes the de-facto leader of the pack, who along with Janelle Monáe’s Andi Brand founded a generic tech megacorp the resources of which were siphoned into a level of success for the other four. Andi and Miles came into conflict over a dangerous new fuel research and Miles cruelly gave Andi the boot from the company she made great, by use in court of a crude facsimile of the bar napkin on which the company was conceived. Her friends all turned against her, Andi was set to expose the fraud with the discovery of the original napkin when she was murdered by persons unknown.
Already we have a fictional contrivance: the idea that for the creation of a tech company on the level of Facebook for instance there must have been someone who was uniquely talented. Andi Brand (a curious choice of surname) is the real talent in the duo, the true owner of the critical napkin that much of the plot revolves around. But the idea is ridiculous. Corporate creation myths are ridiculous. Facebook’s billion-dollar success story was fueled by a tech bubble and merciless exploitation of monopoly status. There are very few great ideas sketched out in margins, and none of them are about founding adtech firms — nobody ever scrawled ‘misrepresent video views’ on a snotty tissue. It’s interesting to note that this is the second film of the year with a scene where a money-making deal is noted on a napkin. In Elvis however, the napkin is representative of the scurrilous nature of the deal, the betrayal that must be hidden. Here it’s a case of good napkin v bad napkin.
Bad napkin.
Elsewhere in the story Johnson seems to understand this about the fabulously successful: that they write these stories about themselves. Bron’s affectation over the Mona Lisa is discussed in exactly these terms, as an attempt to mythologise himself and his ‘works’ by attachment to a recognised greatness. But in the case of the napkins, Johnson indulges himself, that fantastical climax from the first film reasserting itself in the suggestion that maybe everything would be fine if we had only elevated the right billionaire based on the right napkin.
Glass Onion has been lauded in some parts for its integration of COVID restrictions into the story, with some light, humourous character work around which characters are wearing which kinds of masks and how, as well as Blanc’s overall motivation being driven by lockdown-imposed boredom. I do think this is a bold thing to have attempted, although it’s a fool’s endeavour to try and view the events of COVID as if they are settled history: that time we all wore masks and some people continued to throw parties, ho ho. It could just as easily settle, as many do want, into a grand narrative about the unimaginably disgraceful actions of talentless governments, or else a story about wide, mass tragedy. It’s akin to watching early World War II movies which are unaware that the popular history of that war will yet be in large part determined by the events of the Holocaust.
Of course the movie also quickly sweeps the subject of the pandemic aside with some ambiguous super-vaccine technobabble in the opening scene. This isn’t really a story about that. It forms part of a conscious decision in the film to take aim at the stupidity of it all, the personal contemptibility and self-satisfaction of characters like Bron in place of a broader view of what actually makes them bad. It’s a focus on how Tesla’s “full self-driving” cars might throw themselves at cardboard children in the street while glossing over the more prosaic evil of torpedoing plans for public transport by turning up in the guise of Springfield’s Lyle Lanley and proposing all that money be spent on a ridiculous tunnel instead.
I’ve sold road tunnels to San Jose, Miami and Fort Lauderdale and by gum it put them on the map.
Curiously, Glass Onion is of a piece with The Dark Knight Rises in this regard: movies where billionaires have invented free energy but the ‘correct’ thing presented to do is to not use it to change the world at all. Probably a coincidence.
Coming back to the Mona Lisa, the painting is critical to where I think the movie fails on its own terms: at the climax. The film reaches a point where Blanc has successfully laid out the entire mystery, warts and all. We know who did what, and when, and why. In a callback to a point made earlier in the film though, Blanc and Helen Brand (the sister of the dead woman) have no recourse, no evidence, no legal route through which to see justice done. Solving the mystery does not provide closure or remedy the wrongdoing. This is a deeply unsatisfying way to end a movie however. So Blanc conspires with Brand to trigger an explosive climax: Using Bron’s new energy source, they cause a hydrogen fire at his Greek island estate, burning his possessions and the Mona Lisa along with it. As the characters painstakingly explain to us, this will permanently tar Bron’s name as the man who inadequately cared for a great work of art, a humiliation he cannot recover from. Seeing the wind change, his underlings abandon him.
Everyone knows it says “This is a fake” on the back anyway.
It’s artfully done but that doesn’t seem like much of a punishment to me. The oft-noted propensity for Teslas to catch fire hasn’t done much to blunt the enthusiasm of their owners for their chaotic CEO. Despite desperate attempts by culture war fanatics to make it so, Kim Kardashian damaging Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress hasn’t roused much career-damaging shame. The rotating door of treasured underlings cursing his name and accusing him of all kinds of crimes didn’t bring down the Trump White House.
There is an interesting conversation earlier in the film between Blanc and Brand which, in my opinion, hints at an earlier revision to the plot. Blanc emphasises the bloodless nature of the killing of Andi Brand, how there was no force and no violence involved. Any of the presumably-squeemish tech and politics nerds that make up Bron’s circle could have committed it. Helen Brand, by contrast, is not afraid to step into the tiger’s den — there’s a running joke about her getting drunk and doing something unwisely confrontational. The movie’s single pistol, which Bron used to try and murder Helen minutes before, is not present in the final scene. Personally, were I making the movie, I would give Helen more to do and say in the final seconds of the film than smashing a series of glass sculptures and accidentally making an incoherent reference to the Just Stop Oil protests.
I had totally forgot that Mark Gatiss is piloting a helicopter for some reason in this scene.
Another Sherlock, that played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s modern-day adaptation, had a mystery with an ending not dissimilar to Glass Onion. At the end of the third season, Sherlock faces off against a Murdoch-esque newspaper magnate named Charles Augustus Magnussen, who taunts Sherlock at the climax of the episode in a similar way to how Bron taughts Brand and Blanc. Magnussen cannot be shown to have committed any crime, and his privilege and wealth will see him out of any embarrassment caused. Sherlock shoots him.
If Glass Onion wants to be a fantasy, it should provide a properly fantastical ending. Miles Bron should be convicted and go to jail. If you can’t provide that, Bron should be immolated in a fireball of his own hubris. If you can’t provide that, Brand should shoot him. As it stands, Brand lights the touch paper, the grand explosion goes off, and the film cuts back to the lounge, everyone in place. Only property is damaged. To punctuate the point, Bron’s car falls through the ceiling. Like a Marvel movie, the only damage has been to innocent cars.
RIP.
One last thing I want to turn over in Glass Onion is the most unfair: Miles Bron has no children in the film. The previous film considered entirely children, figuratively speaking, so I can see why Johnson wanted to avoid going over the same ground. But the idea of children is as central to billionaires and their quest for immortality of any kind as anything else. For hundreds of years the desire of those with power to retain it forever was sublimated into inheritance and bloodlines. Rupert Murdoch has six. Elon Musk has ten. Donald Trump has five. Even Mark Zuckerberg has two. For sure, they’re all banking on human brain interfaces and cryogenic preservation first, but as a backup they’re happy to rely on the old ways.
It’s odd that Bron has no aspirations in this department, nor any indication that he has considered it beyond his prominently-displayed heterosexuality-affirming affair. The question of immortality is inherently visceral, concerned with decay and rot. Even on fire, Bron’s estate is spotless. The shards from his glass onion form perfect beads on the floor. It’s all so very pristine.
The child-free nature of Bron’s crew in Glass Onion allows them an uncanny childishness despite their advanced careers, but you cannot become the most divorced man in the world without children.
Last time I thought a lot about sentimentality as Andor escaped from space-prison.
“Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”
This is how Andor leaves us for now, and it’s in a typically idiosyncratic fashion. These final two episodes are more of a coda than a climax, as most if not all of the remaining tensions of the previous ten episodes are released and the main story is pared back to where it was nine episodes ago: Andor is leaving Ferrix and all his material attachments behind, to join the Rebellion with Luthen. Like Luke in A New Hope, Andor has been radicalised by the actions of the Empire and his personal loss, and is ready to give his life to the cause this bearded mystic represents — and so he does.
Having watched (until now) the indicated groupings of Andor episodes in batches, I watched these two week-to-week, feeling like the serialisation of the show had finally broken banks and flooded. I’m not sure if that’s the case, if Andor is now more TV than film, but I still wish I’d watched these two together. Episode 11 is mostly moving the pieces into place to make Episode 12 happen, with the exception of Luthen’s high tech escape from the tractor beam, a small moment of traditional Star Wars cool that’s almost (but not quite) in danger of spoiling Andor’s low-stakes mood.
Andor himself is mostly out of the way across the two episodes, listening to a beautiful rendition of Chapo Trap House on his space-iPod and getting trapped in a sticky white web by some aliens whose car he was trying to space-hijack. He has learned that his mother has died, though, and against advice heads back to Ferrix for the funeral. Diego Luna has had ten episodes in which to teach us the face Cassian Andor makes when he is in pain, and that effort pays off here.
Like that.
The big finale of these two episodes is the funeral riot on Ferrix, which proceeds in a true-to-life fashion from a mood of elevated tension, elite contempt, over-policing and flashpoint violence, before immediately becoming a mad dangerous crush. The Empire tactically loosened its grip on the people of Ferrix, and pays for it in all the accumulated retribution and resentment that are hurled back, alongside a pipe bomb. The industrial construction on the Death Star, glimpsed in a somewhat superfluous post-credit sequence, is mirrored here in the unsteady hands of a young man piecing together this improvised explosive, the explosion of which is another triumph in Andor of making small-scale action impactful and terrifying.
Having assembled all our main characters here, instead of having them play off each other we simply see how they react to the chaos, with (by turns) Luthen being distressed by it, Cinta taking it as the cover for tactical violence, Imperials of all stripes making terrible mistakes and misjudgements — most notably the officer who sends a single man to take a spiral staircase bell tower, but also Dedra in particular is unprepared for a situation in which she has to self-preserve. Syril on the other hand, despite all his other wretched qualities, takes the opportunity to be a hero of sorts. Andor, who has been in this situation far too often lately, sticks to the plan. Mon Mothma is blissfully unaware of any of this.
The marching band sequence that leads up to the funeral and speech, and disorder thereafter, is striking and beautiful, drawing on the shared culture of real-world mining communities and treating them with respect. In the heist episodes we saw how Empire’s power can be brought to bear to clear people from their historic land and exterminate their culture; here we see the action through which a culture can reassert itself back against Empire.
Ferrix is very well-realised.
In the final episode the show lurches to a halt whenever it has to cut back for the remaining Coruscant scenes, brief though they are — though Mon Mothma suggesting indirectly to the ISB that her husband might be the cause of all that missing cash is a typically smart story moment, and her daughter running a Mishima-esque traditionalism cult for her schoolmates is deeply funny.
The other notable scene on Coruscant is also strong. Dedra having found herself exactly where the action isn’t in the fight against the rebellion is funny, follows the dog-eat-dog rules we have seen in force at the ISB already, and is neat foreshadowing for how badly her show of force is about to go. Dedra and Syril both came to Ferrix to conquer and leave it bruised. Best for your career prospects to stay in the Imperial centre and watch from afar.
Time gives the ability for a character to blossom and Dedra’s villainy is stronger for having had the time over these episodes to first pull you in with her girl-boss rise to acclaim and then push you away again with the reality of the character’s underlying fascism. It’s true that great movies can establish a character with such depth in a handful of scenes — it’s also true that the worst ones try and fail. Andor has luxuriated in the time taken to flesh out these characters.
Andor’s mother, too, benefits in this way. It would be rote for a character who we only saw passive in life to speak posthumously of revolt. It would be better to see her feel that first spark of rebellion, so that we know what motivated her to want to fight back. But in having the time allocated to a TV show, Andor can have us know Maarva first, know the aspects of her character, and have us realise along with her that she has always been in rebellion. And that she’d want her cremated remains in the form of a brick be used to take someone’s face off.
The hotel’s faux-Imperial stylings have all been building up to this shot.
I was pleased that the “Luthen wants Andor dead plot” was both not compromised on (he really did want him dead) but also not dwelled on, set up only for the crushing final scene in which Andor, like Kino just a few episodes ago, has nothing else. One way out. Through the rebellion, or death.
The strand of plot between Vel and Cinta is thus left to lie, with a few scenes stressing how Vel’s pampered mores are clashing with Cinta’s fervour but not much else, save for a stunning shot of Vel running into the chaotic fog of the funeral uprising which in all honesty justifies their presence all by itself. It’s an odd loose end for a show that has otherwise avoided them at all costs though.
Andor is over then, for now. I’ll be interested to see if it can remain this good in the wake of critical success — I’m certainly hoping so. Much of my writing about Star Wars over this year has been grappling with the idea of what ‘good Star Wars’ is or should be, and this season of Andor is the most compelling argument that it can exist at all.
The fashion in which the series leaves off here is sufficient that it could lead into the (hacked, chopped up) events of Rogue One just fine. It’s always been enough to just place Andor in the company of characters in the nascent Rebellion and say “that’s how it happened”. So it comfortably allows a second season to succeed or fail on its own merits, unnecessary as a continuation of this story. Andor has, stray plots aside, come to a conclusion here.
Me, waiting for more Andor.
Andor being good has catastrophically unbalanced my ranking system so I’m going to abolish it.
Chronologically, if you want to follow me on my Star Wars adventure:
Really loved this. Loved the confidence to open the film with an extended one-on-one interview with the main character to an audience, a move that could easily prove as cataclysimically boring as those events often are. Loved the inverted front-credits — the Avengers could never.
Cate Blanchett dissolves into the character of Lydia Tár, a female trailblazer in a man’s world who not only resents both of those facts but also the question that prompts them. She furiously defends the practise of interpreting an artist through their life and their intent, but seeks to scrub every decision she herself makes down to a purely rational level. This culminates in two cataclysmic mistakes, wherein she seeks to avoid the appearance of impropriety by denying a promotion to her long-suffering assistant at the same time as she contrives an ‘objective’ route to seeing a talented young cellist granted a solo above more senior members of the orchestra.
A fun aspect is that despite everything, neither of these actions is strictly inappropriate: the cellist and the assistant both are talented! Some level of grooming them for success would not be terrible. But Tár lives in fear of others interpreting her in the same way she engages with the great composers, keeping her life so strictly compartmentalised she continues to work in an old apartment that she considers a terrible working environment, full of noise and distraction. She has a great, remote house with her partner and their child that would be better in every way, except that it would mean letting other people in. The compartmentalising isn’t just physical — the worst thing Tár does in the film, though it mostly happens off-screen, is ostracising one of her former mentees who is now stalking her. A partner or a friend would have been able to offer advice that could have helped them both. Instead, Tár becomes implicated in her student’s suicide, and not unfairly.
The film as a whole treads a neat line in keeping Tár sympathetic while not excusing her. She is brash, unpleasant, cruel. She tells terrible easy lies, cheats on her partner, neglects their child. But she excuses all this in herself as she excuses it in her heroes: as incidental to the music. It builds to the beautiful moment where Tár charged Mark Strong’s character on the conducting podium, throwing him to the floor. It’s a completely outlandish moment, ridiculous even within the world the film has established. But you can understand it — despite everything it seems justifiable, and as if the film may have slipped into a universe where she can stand at that plinth and through force of will along inspire the orchestra to play. Tár finally identifies that true note of passion/betrayed that will allow her to conduct the perfect Mahler’s 5th. You really want her to be allowed to continue.
The one part that felt slightly off to me was the sequence where, disgraced and out of Berlin, Tár goes back to what is presumably a childhood home and watches the old tapes of conducting that inspired her — a neat tie back to the cellist — who had the same inspiration but all different, and Blanchett deserves an award just for what her face does when the young prodigy says she doesn’t know who was conducting. As well though, she has a brief interaction with presumably a brother, who has a strong accent and notes that she changed her name from Linda to Lydia (the credits take this one step further and have him credited with the surname “Tarr”). As apropos as it is to Tár’s self-serving mantras about understanding the composer to understand the work, it’s too tempting to take this as the root cause of everything the character is. It goes too far, it’s too cruel, to try and take her name from her like this. For better or for worse — and the character does much that shouldn’t be forgiven — her identity is no facade.
The actual ending strikes a more agreeable note, with Tár shipping out to East Asia and rebuilding, alone, applying her exacting methods to what turns out to be a concert of video game music. The sequence is constructed like a joke, with a punchline, and would be easy to understand as a ironic punishment for the unapologetically snobby maestro — except that she takes it exactly as seriously as she did the (unfortunate) climax of her Mahler sequence in Berlin. There’s no suggestion that she considers this pursuit in any way humiliating or beneath her. She is uncomfortable and unhappy — but that was also true in Berlin. No matter how unacceptable it seems, Tár is content so long as there is music.
I’m currently reviewing Andor, piece by piece. How many reviews of Tár do you think will be written by people currently writing about Andor? Not enough, in my opinion. All links here.
