fevered.earth

Tag: Movie Review

  • Emersonian (Megalopolis)

    Contains detailed discussions of things that happen in Megalopolis. Go see it first.

    Filmed on an LED volume; put that in your pipe and smoke it.

    It’s easy to take a film like this at its own myth, and much of the marketing in the run up to the release has encouraged you to do so. The now-infamous trailer consisting of machine-apocryphal negative quotes about Coppola’s earlier films, the much-vaunted selling of Coppola’s vineyard to fund the budget, the tactically-leaked tales of late improvisational nights smoking weed in the production trailer with the cast. It all contributes to an image of this film as something special, something which has taken an above-and-beyond effort to see realised — something which has loftier goals than the average flick. It’s always going to be hard to sit in the cinema and see that collapsed into an actual film.

    Does Megalopolis crumble under the weight of expectation? Not quite. True, it’s not that weird and the giddy fervour with which critics have spent the last month damning it to hell as an incoherent mess (46% on Rotten Tomatoes, for anyone whose soul is withered enough to care) seems really a bit of a put-on; no-one is risking their cushy access to Oscar screeners or whatever by dunking on this ‘independent’ film. It’s a well-made film with some judacious if budget-bound visual effects. It has a mercurial cast of talented and famous actors who are well-suited to their roles. It’s not particularly radical in structure — there’s a nod to formalism with the occasional act-breaking title card but mostly it follows a classic Hollywood plot structure with a few break-outs into something weirder (Protagonist Cesar’s drug-fuelled breakdown; the final Megalopolis montage) and a few things that are ostentatiously typical — the scene where Cesar sees old flame Wow Platinum at the park and offers her his coat is sublimely executed, but could have come from Love, Actually.

    We’re never given any real explanation for why Cesar is playing with this prism. Perhaps he just thinks it’s neat.

    What’s actually weird in Megalopolis? There’s two main aspects, and both bear comparison to some other controversial directors. The acting in Megalopolis is not at all naturalistic — it has an element of the Shakespearean. In fact many scenes feel like they have come from an adaptation of some unknown discovered Shakespeare: the way in which we follow around the members of one or two families as they explain the popular politics to us through their encounters recalls Romeo and Juliet; the plot itself of course is filled with references to antiquity and to Julius Caesar. The good nephew who hides his virtue in controversy and the bad son who wages war on his own King is a twist on personal favourite Henry IV Part 1. And so the acting is grandiose, prone to monologue, and allows the actors reign to interpret the dialogue as they will. Adam Driver’s delivery of “You think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?” is not something you will see emulated in any other movie this year. George Lucas, of course, filled his Star Wars prequels with similarly stylised performances and dialogue and was pilloried for it — Coppola perhaps had some of the Tom Stoppard-inflected monologues from Revenge of the Sith in mind when scripting Megalopolis, with its odes to a dying republic and portraits of the people who let it become so.

    The other aspect is the earnestness, with Megalopolis being a distinctly funny film — again aping Shakespeare, every indulgent moment of drama is defused with a little following slapstick — that is nonetheless bereft of the cynical humour that has become the mode for big Hollywood presentations. What does this mean? Well there’s several dick jokes and no “well that happened” moments. Alongside this cheeky humour, the actual meat of the film is similarly direct: Driver’s Cesar wants to build his dream project, the titular Megalopolis. The film wants you to want him to build it. There’s no interrogation of the merits of doing so — indeed other reviews have noted the lack of any class perspective whatsoever. It’s about the pure power of creating, the inherent worth in having the will to see something done. Naturally this recalls the cod-Nietzschean energy of Ayn Rand’s infamous The Fountainhead, another epic about a man who wants to build a thing. But Megalopolis is not Randian except in the most broad of strokes. Cesar’s high goals set him above the other characters but not in terms of rational self-interest, or in a way that is permissive of him to be cruel. Rather, the other characters are simply fallen, craven, too beholden to this existing world to open their eyes and see the next one approaching fast.

    This next world admittedly seems to involve a lot of petal-like buildings that flap around a bit. In the film’s driving metaphor, Cesar is able — by some virtue of his artistry or his engineering or his connection to the wonder-material Megalon — to stop time. But we never see him use it for any deliberate purpose. It’s only used for the artistic ends it’s already a metaphor for. Similarly, the shorthand for the Megalopolis project and it’s world of boons ends up being a sort of space-travelator; it’s a city that’s literally going to help you get to where you want to go. America like Rome is a dying Empire, so in this America Madison Square Gardens is literally a circus. Cesar at one point misses his dead wife while suffering from a hole in the head. It’s an exceptionally literal film in many ways.

    What could it mean?

    Where Megalopolis disappoints is in its handling of gender, the classical trappings being something of a lure to encourage you away from noticing that Cesar lives in a world where there are only three women: grasping climbers, frigid mothers and beautiful perennial muses. The climbers appear in the twin figures of Wow Platinum, the TV gossip host whose role is elevated significantly by Aubrey Plaza’s performance, and Taylor Swift-alike Vesta, the virginial singer who makes a brief but significant appearance at the halfway point of the film. Platinum is a perfect foil for Jon Voight’s slightly hateful, slightly loveable wealthy banker Crassus. Unlike the feckless Clodio (who has the classic Disney villain cross-dressing trait) and his two sisters, Platinum has the drive and the ability to outmaneuver old Crassus, who she marries after dumping a disinterested Cesar — so it’s a shame that of all the characters in the story, a violent death is reserved for her.

    Similarly, there’s an odd edge to the reveal that Vesta — the subject of a ludicrous and deeply satirical auction for her virtue — is in fact not a virgin, or a teenager, or American. Do those things count against her? Should we be good Kantians and hold the subject of this horrid circus to account for lying, even in these circumstances?

    Cesar’s mother is perfectly unloveable and a non-entity beyond that, perhaps to drive home his need for unconditional love from Natalie Emmannuel’s Julia. Much of the film is spent in discussion of Cesar’s previous muse Sunny Hope, who was driven to despair by his mercurial nature — and his cheating. Modern replacement Emmannuel’s Julia has the most difficult job in the cast, keeping any kind of edge on a character written as permanently doe-eyed and bowled over by the great creative virtues of the man she is muse to. Her big moment is getting to say “stop time… for me!” Furiosa this is not. It’s a huge missed opportunity for this ostensible vision of the future to be so hide-bound in its women characters.

    Much like the film’s politics, it looks neat but it’s unclear what it’s actually meant to do.

    As mentioned above, the film plays with being political, with having something specific about politics to say. Where it settles is not exactly deep however, and it’s more than a little reactionary. Rich dilettantes playing with the emotions of the mob are dangerous. Indulging fascism will bring some truly stupid people to power. Rioting is bad. It’s not much to sink your teeth into and even the ostensibly political framing of the corrupt old-world mayor who serves corporate interests is quickly rinsed out and replaced with an interpersonal conflict about Cesar marrying his daughter. The climax of the film has Cesar address the audience directly (okay, it’s somehow the second-most-direct address to the audience in this film) to beg them to dream big and shoot for the stars and so on. I couldn’t decide whether the slightly bathetic nature of this was intentional or not; I think it wasn’t. It’s a Mishima speech, one given by a character too detached from the world of regular people to have any purchase or impact. He’s hollering from that balcony but the noise from the planes is just too loud to hear what’s being said. It’s enough to wrap up the plot, but I didn’t feel inspired much at all.

    Which I think is the ultimate problem for Megalopolis — Coppola wants to inspire us to debate, to think, to create society anew — but he doesn’t actually have any idea how. Taking a single rich family as a microcosm of society as a whole is useful for telling a story, but it’s a difficult way to offer something tangible. How To Blow Up a Pipeline could at least suggest blowing up a pipeline. Becoming Barron Trump is simply inaccessible for most people. There are plenty in the world who remember that the world was made by people, made by their choices. Rediscovering that is important, but it’s not even a first step. For me, Megalopolis can’t even claim to be reigniting that flame — the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything made a much more compelling case for the inadequency of our politics to our ever-changing nature.

    Is it perhaps unfair to expect a film to reinvent politics. But it’s only even a notion because this is Francis Ford Coppola’s Film That Reinvents Politics (and Art, and Love, and Everything) which is maybe a silly thing to aspire for a film to be. I wouldn’t change it though. And as a mere film, it has unique moments, spectacular visuals and a beating heart. That’s enough, I think.

    If you like my writing, please watch my 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.

  • Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire

    The retro styling on the title card is very nice — I almost want the rest of the film to be this nostalgic.

    “Zack Snyder is making his own Star Wars.” It’s a bold premise. For better or worse, the film immediately begins to take shape in your mind — and from a filmmaker whose divisive reputation precedes him, there’s a strong temptation to assume what kind of film this will be before seeing a single frame of it. Zack Snyder’s Netflix production Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire wasn’t made on a shoestring budget, and by definition it can’t capture the blissfully ignorant innovation of making an off-brand Star Wars — a Starcrash or a The Man Who Saves The World with the ambition to do it all from scratch, in a period where the image of Baby Yoda wasn’t plastered on every lunch box. But there’s still some of that cheeky thrill in hearing “Zack Snyder’s doing an R-rated Star Wars,” as if you might have heard it on the playground at school and immediately started calculating how you would trick your parents into renting it for you.

    There’s already so very much Star Wars nowadays — mostly vented from the great Disney+ orifice, but it’s still only been four years since The Rise of Skywalker arrived on the big screen. People once had to wait sixteen long years for a new cinematic Star Wars experience. Unimaginable now in a world with Ahsoka and Andor and The Acolyte and so on. So the challenge for this new two-part space opera is to shake itself free of diminutive comparisons and distinguish itself as an original science fiction movie and setting.

    The first question is: which Zack Snyder is at the wheel? The contemplative, existentialist director of Man of Steel? The director wedged into the mythic/pulp aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Or the artisanal lens enthusiast of Army of the Dead? Naturally there’s a bit of each (especially that last one, with some truly beautiful lenses put together for this one ), but more than any other self-reference Rebel Moon sees Snyder return to the blushing, hyper-stylized action of 300, albeit with the benefit of hindsight and many years more experience.

    The soft focus is paired with rich, deep shadows for a unique, ghostly look.

    Much like the under-appreciated Jupiter Ascending, which had the Wachowskis exhibiting a similar competency, Rebel Moon treats its classic pulp sci-fi locales as a given, trusting the viewer to immediately clock the idyllic space-farm, the hive of scum and villainy, the Blade Runner city, the old West and so on. These varied settings are bound by a rich saturation and contrast in the colors that forms a coherent visual throughline; a comforting intensity that’s established in the lurid opening shots on protagonist Kora’s home moon of Veldt. As well, the infamous slo-mo — which has often been restrained or absent in Snyder’s work post-Watchmen — is back here in force, ratcheting the tension up in a way that will make you sad this initial release isn’t actually R-rated and can’t yet feature the heavily implied explosions of blood.

    The visual coherence helps the viewer keep up to speed, as the film moves at a breakneck pace through the second half of the story. The plot of Rebel Moon is explicitly that of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai — or more directly John Sturges’ adaptation of that story, The Magnificent Seven. The traditional peasant village comes under threat from an evil empire and sends out representatives to recruit itinerant heroes, any they can find, to defend it. The opening act is given the most time and attention, laying out the lives of the villagers in such a way that their plight is apparent and human, as well as showing the evil empire engaged in some classic evil empire behavior: more Caesar than Palpatine, the fight is over grain tribute rather than lofty ideals (at least at first).

    The dreadnought in low orbit evokes similar imagery from last year’s The Creator.

    Similar to Magnificent Seven, the gathered recruits only get the space of a single vignette to distinguish themselves in. Even these, though, have evidently been cut to the bone to hit that two-hour runtime. It’s still intelligible — all we need to see is the indentured blacksmith strutting confidently towards the beast-too-wild-to-be-tamed to understand what’s going on, for example. Unlike this year’s other novel sci-fi epic, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, there’s never a sense that the film has engaged the plot compression unit to such an extent that things have become dreamlike and abstract. The worst thing you’ll suffer is disappointment that we don’t get to spend more time with the various rogues who end up getting recruited.

    The final act is the least complete, given the difficult task of not resolving the plot before part two arrives in a few months’ time. It’s a hard sell, as hard here as it was for Across the Spider-verse or Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning earlier in the year. A movie should have an ending. There’s an action showdown as you might expect, all flashing lights and dramatic violent flourishes. But without the catharsis of final victory or the establishment in that tight runtime of something like a Death Star to blow up, it feels like what it is: a midpoint. But even if this finale is more “wait and see” than it is overwhelming, the stinger right at the very end promises a sequel which might upend all sorts of expectations for how this story plays out.

    It casts the hexagonal grid motif the Marvel movies have settled on in a certain light.

    Being a knock-off is permission to break all the rules, and Rebel Moon knows this full well. Is there a C3P0? Yes, and he gets shot. Is there a cantina? Yes, and it’s flirting with being a brothel. Is there a Han Solo? Well, no spoilers. And will it be trashy as all hell? In a clear statement of intent, the film opens with a girthy, tumescent space cruiser crossing the threshold of a great yonic portal.

    Despite the headlines, Star Wars (and Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven) aren’t the only inspirations Rebel Moon is playing off. Excalibur is another obvious one, with the king dead or dying and his errant knights sickly and dispersed across the land. The Perceval here is Anthony Hopkins’ entrancing ‘Jimmy’, the C3P0-like pacifist robot who immediately breaks from that mold by shooting someone dead and fleeing into the forest to discover himself, only reappearing at the close now decorated with deer antlers. Comic relief, Jimmy is not.

    The taming-the-beast sequence owes much to Avatar, though I somehow doubt featuring in a Zack Snyder film will quiet the “no cultural impact” crowd. Of course, George Lucas never shied away from having a character mount a great computer-generated beast — there’s one in all three prequel films. The Bennu, a griffin-like winged beast, is a fine addition to this canon.

    Star Wars is when there’s a weird little guy in it.

    The most notable element of classic Star Wars that is missing is, sadly, the space politics. A much-mocked Lucas fixation, the scenes of machinations in the galactic senate or boardroom tables full of Imperial officers griping are lacking here. The tone is more in line with Dune, with us meeting or hearing about individual power brokers within an Imperial hierarchy but without even the token bureaucracy represented by Dune’s Mentats. And (delightfully for this PG-13 cut) we get to see just a little Baron Harkonnen moral decay on the part of the Imperial forces, and a touch of eXistenZ-aping body horror in the process.

    There’s more than a little of The Witcher creeping in around the edges too, especially in Kora’s flashback retellings of the story of the young princess. The backstory of Snyder’s universe here is more fantastical, more Lord of the Rings than Lucas’s tragedy of the republic — it’s good Kings and bad Regents, and prophesied children who will bring peace to the realm. And with a gothic God-King, a great empire across the stars that’s just maybe a little bit fascist, and a concerning undercurrent of implied necromancy , it’s hard to escape the touch of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting.

    A caped figure looms over a youngling.

    It’s unclear if Rebel Moon will be the Zack Snyder film to win over his detractors. Having made himself deeply unpopular in some circles with his mythopoetic take on DC’s superheroes, applying the same techniques to another sacred cow risks solidifying his reputation as an iconoclast — or worse, a contrarian. Netflix, who you can assume would very much like to have ‘Netflix’s Star Wars’, have engaged in an all-out marketing blitz, plastering the film across their media outlets and building small interactive moons in various cities. The film itself risks being swallowed up in all this external drama, but it’s enjoyable and distinctive enough to stand by itself. There are few big-budget films with a comparable ambition of style and motion and a director visually talented enough to realize that ambition. Rebel Moon is worth seeing on that justification alone.

    Is it Star Wars? Perhaps predictably, what makes Rebel Moon most interesting is all the ways in which it’s not Star Wars. Able to vary in characters, mood, setting and tone, Rebel Moon is fresher than any attempt to do this sort of thing since Jupiter Ascending. That film was compromised by running out of the hard cash required to see the full vision on screen. The fate of this film has been gambled on what has so far been a losing proposition, the two-part film epic. Like young Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine, we can only hope the old master has rigged the dice, and Rebel Moon realizes all this potential when part two lands next year.

    If you enjoyed this article I have conveniently already reviewed Rebel Moon Part 2. I’ll probably end up reviewing the extended cuts when they arrive in the summer also; subscribe to get them by email when I do. 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. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

    This article was originally written for Blood Knife which is currently on hiatus.

  • Superman: Solar

    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.

  • A Class Onion (Glass Onion)

    Spoilers, naturally.

    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.

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to me here on Medium or to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ available on Youtube now. I wrote about Andor for Blood Knife earlier this year. You can follow me on the billionaire’s folly.