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Jane Got a Gun premiered on January 29, 2016. I had been looking forward to it since I learned of its existence, and with the film finally, finally hitting the big screen, of course I had to see it on opening day. It was a bright, unseasonably warm day for winter in Ohio, and I went to the nearby AMC for an afternoon show in a nearly-deserted theater.

I enjoyed the film from the start. It was not just good, it was surprisingly good. Then, at a certain point, about halfway through the film, the drama reached a critical point, and I can distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, no–I certainly hope they’re not going to…”

But hold up a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself, diving right in to the memories and not putting things in the right order. Like the film’s heroine Jane Ballard (Natalie Portman) says at one point, “It’s hard to remember how things seemed… when you know how they actually turned out.”

Jane silhouette

***

The behind-the-scenes story of Jane Got a Gun begins in 2012, with a script by Brian Duffield, to be distributed by Relativity Media, directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Natalie Portman. Michael Fassbender was cast in the role of Dan Frost, Jane’s former fiancé. However, Fassbender soon left the part, and was replaced by Joel Edgerton, who had originally been cast as the villain, John Bishop. Jude Law and Bradley Cooper were both briefly on board, before finally Ewan McGregor was cast as Bishop. In the middle of all this, Ramsay left the production less than amicably, causing more turmoil that was resolved in part thanks to the timely intercession of lawyer David Boies.

Ramsay was replaced by Gavin O’Connor. O’Connor, Edgerton and screenwriter Anthony Tambakis then re-wrote Duffield’s script, and filming finally took place in 2013. The filming itself seems to have gone smoothly–in the words of Edgerton, “We’re winning out there.”

Relativity Media had initially scheduled the film for a February 2015 release. But it was delayed, and Relativity filed for bankruptcy in mid-2015. Fortunately, there was another studio that had agreed to distribute the film, and the rights to Jane Got a Gun were released from Relativity and secured by the Weinstein Company, which scheduled the film for distribution.

The Paris premiere was scheduled for November 15, 2015, but was canceled due to the November 13 terrorist attacks. The film finally premiered in Germany in late December 2015, and in France and the United States in January 2016.

Of course, I can’t talk about a Weinstein Company film without also talking about the infamous film producer, who was then about a year away from being publicly disgraced. One of the many unsavory aspects of Harvey Weinstein’s personality that came to light after his downfall was that he would occasionally sabotage his own company’s films. I have no idea if anything like that happened with Jane Got a Gun, but the decision not to screen the film for critics can’t have helped its chances, and undoubtedly contributed to its poor showing at the box office.

It was a film dogged at every step by negativity, with only cursory promotional efforts, in a relatively unpopular genre, and hamstrung by a misleading title that makes it sound more like a fast-paced action picture than what it really is.

And after all that, it was gone as soon as it had come. It was only in theaters for about three weeks and grossed about $3 million against a $25 million budget.

As anyone who followed my blog at the time knows, I loved the movie. I wrote a glowing review. Two glowing reviews, actually, because I wrote about it again in more detail when it came out on home media. And owing, I suspect, to the scarcity of other reviews, these were some of my most-viewed posts ever.

Which speaks to the fact that a major reason it wasn’t more successful is that not many movie-goers ever knew it existed. And I’d argue that the reasons not many movie-goers knew it existed can tell us a lot about the movie business, the entertainment industry as a whole, and American culture generally.

That sounds like quite a leap, I know. (Or, as Dan Frost would say, a “very big jump, my friend.”) To begin with, let’s talk about why Jane Got a Gun is significant to me.

***

Jane
Jane Ballard (Natalie Portman)

Natalie Portman is probably my favorite actress, and part of the reason for that, as I’ve discussed before, is her willingness to experiment. She doesn’t let herself be typecast, but is willing to play all sorts of different roles in different kinds of movies. I respect this risk-taking. Portman films aren’t always good, but they are almost always interesting.

I also like movies that take place in remote, bleak desert settings, and the New Mexico landscapes of Jane Got a Gun are just gorgeous to my eye. While I could do without the washed-out lens filter, the sweeping vistas and extraordinary rock formations make the setting instantly compelling.

I went into Jane Got a Gun hoping to see Natalie Portman in a good old-fashioned western adventure, and as a bonus, see the always-entertaining Ewan McGregor as a villain I loved to hate. And I got all that–but the movie surprised me at the same time, even while delivering on all fronts. How is that possible?

Time for one of my Socratic movie quizzes: what’s Jane Got a Gun about?

Okay, since many of you haven’t seen it, I’ll give you the cliffs-notes summary answer. It’s not the real answer, of course, but you know what I’m like. And anyway, a little plot synopsis will be handy to have as you read this.

Jane Got a Gun is about Jane Ballard, a woman who was kidnapped by a gang of criminals, escaped with the help of a man whom she married and built a new life with, only to find herself once again pursued by the gang, and forced to seek help from her ex-fiancé, Dan Frost, whom she had until recently believed died in the Civil War.

Dan on Ridge
Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton) gazes forlornly down from a ridge.

Ah, Dan Frost. He’s as good a place as any to start with where this movie surprised me. Previously, I knew Joel Edgerton as young Uncle Owen in the Star Wars prequels, where he has about two minutes of screen time and does nothing but stand around and hold a dirty rag.

After you watch Jane Got a Gun, it’s impossible to watch the scenes with Owen in Attack of the Clones the same way. In the scene from Star Wars, Portman and Edgerton are both unremarkable, standing vacantly with no lines or “stage business” to do. In Jane Got a Gun, every scene between the two is filled with tension–Edgerton can convey so much emotion with simply an expression, or a grunt, or a small gesture. And as Edgerton said of his co-star’s talents, “We’ve actually coined the phrase ‘The Portman’ to describe how she can say a line without saying a word, just with a look.”

This illustrates one way in which Jane Got a Gun runs contrary to modern sensibilities. Characters–especially the good characters–do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but for the most part behave with reserve and restraint. We only see Jane and Dan kiss in flashbacks–circumstances dictate they must keep their feelings controlled, and the few glimpses we see of their emotions bubbling close to the surface are moments of intense drama. Even as they prepare to fight for their lives, the couple is reminded constantly of their past.

One good example of this is the transition from Jane’s memory of a carefree afternoon with her fiancé back in Missouri to the grim present, as the sweaty, tired figure of her former lover takes a break from digging a defensive trench to check the vast desolation for any sign of the Bishop gang. Without a word being spoken, Portman’s face and the soundtrack convey the bittersweetness of remembering happier times.

Jane and Dan
Jane and Dan, in a flashback

***

I’ve lent my copy of Jane Got a Gun to a great many friends, at first just out of a sense of wanting to share something I enjoyed, and over time out of an interest in the different reactions they would have to it. Some of them have loved it as much as I do. Others thought it was just middling, still others have called it boring and bad.  One friend told me he thought it was dull, but that perhaps that was an intentional choice, to capture the slower pace of life in the 1870s. Another friend of mine, who generally hates any movie made after 1965, complained about the lens filter but said his wife called the character of Jane Ballard “just about perfect.”

I’ve seen the movie enough times that it gallops by, but at the same time I guess I can understand how some would find it slow… sort of. Well, maybe. No, not really.

Here’s the thing: if you’re used to loud, fast, big, action-packed spectacles of movies, then I guess this would seem slow. And yeah, the title does imply that’s what this film is going to be. A pulse-pounding Wild West shoot-’em-up with a female gunslinger, kind of like the 2006 film Bandidas. Maybe that’s the kind of movie Duffield’s script originally called for. And there’s nothing wrong with that kind of movie. I like Bandidas.

But Jane Got a Gun isn’t that kind of movie. It’s mostly quiet, punctuated by a few moments of intense action. There are no over-the-top special effects or stunt-work. Because it’s not about the action scenes; not really. That’s why the title is so misleading. To say nothing of some of the posters…

(If you’ve ever wondered if people who make movie posters have to watch the movie beforehand, the answer is pretty clearly “no.”)

Jane Got a Gun is not about guns, even though there are guns in it. It’s not about Jane avenging the wrong that was done to her, although that does happen. It’s not about a frontierswoman proving herself just as adept a sharpshooter as the men, although that also happens.

Jane Got a Gun is actually about listening to other people.

***

I think 2016 will be remembered as a very significant year in history. I mean, every year is significant to a historian, since they are all part of a linked causal chain of events, but 2016 is going to be one of those dates that everyone will know, like 1776, 1865, 1939, and 1968.

2016 was the year when the American political system and the unending noise machine of modern communication combined to produce systemic shocks right to the heart of our centuries-old system of government. In 2016, all the fissures and divides across the nation were laid bare, and the repercussions are still being felt, and will be for decades; perhaps centuries to come.

2016 was the year that people shouting at each other through mass media finally, irrevocably, unforgettably, changed the landscape of American politics.

What does this have to do with Jane Got a Gun?

You know how sometimes you’ll hear about how a movie perfectly evokes the “mood” of a certain time? What pretentious critics, like me, call the “zeitgeist?” For example, how Taxi Driver supposedly captured the rebellious alienation of the 1970s.

Jane Got a Gun does the opposite of that. Jane Got a Gun is like if you captured the essential spirit of 2016, and then made something that was in every way the antithesis of it.

Jane and Dan’s relationship changes when they stop arguing and start listening. Dan’s relationship with Jane’s husband, Bill Hammond, changes when he stops making assumptions and listens to what Jane says about him. Even at the climax of the film, when Jane finally confronts John Bishop, she waits to hear what he says before bringing him to justice–and is rewarded for doing so.

It’s a quiet, old-fashioned movie, about the importance of understanding and reconciling with other people. There are villains, yes; but the real drama of Jane Got a Gun is in the relationship between Jane and Dan. It’s more of a romance than an action film, but a romance set against the backdrop of bleak and desolate frontier; a society being built in the shadow of a nation ravaged by war.

Bishop
John Bishop (Ewan McGregor)

It’s not a Civil War movie, but the recent war has clearly left its mark on the characters, in all sorts of ways, as when the aristocratic John Bishop (who clearly avoided serving on either side) jovially shows off his war souvenirs to Frost. He casually tells the former soldier, while regarding an officer’s pistol used at the battle of Shiloh: “Shiloh means ‘place of peace’ in Hebrew.” Frost, having become all too familiar with the horrors of war, grimly replies, “Ain’t nothin’ peaceful about Shiloh.”

Much of the film is about coming to terms with the after-effects of something horrible, whether it’s Jane overcoming what Bishop and his gang did to her, or Dan overcoming his suffering in a prison camp. And that’s why it’s set in the post-war West, when the country was struggling to build anew, after enduring trauma.

Jane Got a Gun is a film about healing. It’s hard to imagine a film more out of sync with the atmosphere of 2016.

***

In an interview promoting the film, Portman described it as “very American.” Indeed, I’d argue that Jane Got a Gun is possibly one of the most quintessentially American movies made since the turn of the century. It’s a Western, which is the stereotypically American genre. It’s about a pivotal period in the nation’s history–essentially, a re-founding period when the modern United States was being created.

And to quote from the production notes:

Jane Got a Gun was created by an international grouping of cast and filmmakers including Australians Joel Edgerton and director of photography Mandy Walker, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, and Irish dialect coach Gerry Grinnell-all bringing new perspectives to the classic American Western.

Portman offers, “It’s always wonderful when people make art in unfamiliar surroundings. Tolstoy’s theory is about how art is about making things strange, and with an Australian and a Brazilian on board it’s already strange and so it’s immediately art. That’s why Sergio Leone made such great Westerns – to have that completely different, non-American vision of the West.”

Put all this together with the production difficulties, and you have a behind-the-scenes narrative that’s nearly as much of a romanticized vision of America as the classic Western genre itself. In my second blog post about the film, I wrote:

Jane Got a Gun evokes the best of the American frontier mythology: hope and triumph in the face of harsh and unforgiving circumstances. That it has such a diverse international cast and crew only adds to this feeling, as people of different nations coming together is very much the story of America itself.

There have been times when I think about these kinds of assertions and wonder, “Am I overstating this? Reading too much into it; seeing things that aren’t there?” I’ve been known to do that sometimes, so it’s certainly possible.

But then there’s this behind-the-scenes photo:

Jane Flag
Left to right: Edgerton, Portman and Tambakis. Source

***

Does Jane Got a Gun still matter? Maybe that’s the wrong question. With the exceptions of the people who made it and me, it’s not clear that Jane Got a Gun mattered much to anybody in January 2016.

Does it matter to anyone else now, five years later?

This is the part where I’m supposed to say something like, ‘I’d argue that it does, because…’ or something of the sort. Certainly, it would be pretty rotten of me to lead you all the way down this particularly winding memory lane only to tell you no, it doesn’t matter.

But I can’t answer the question. It’s your call to make, dear reader; not mine. Pretentious critics–again, like me–think we can persuade people, that we can shape tastes, that we can, in some sense, tell people what to think of a film, or a book, or a painting. But we can’t. All we can really do is describe the complex, personal reactions that we have to art.

***

The really key scene in Jane Got a Gun; the one that I think is the emotional heart of it, is the one I mentioned at the start of this post, where for a moment, I was concerned the plot would go in a really stupid direction. It’s the scene where Jane walks out to Dan as he’s digging a defensive trench. Seeing him again has brought back a lot of memories for Jane, and she wants to try to smooth things over with him, on what could be their last day alive. So she says, “Why’d you change your mind to help me?”

Jane knows the answer, of course; and so does Dan: he loves her, even though he thinks she left him for another man, even though he’s probably going to die because of her–he loves her. But Dan is still furious at her, and besides which, she’s married. So he can’t say it, instead grumbling, “I dunno.”

This escalates to a tense discussion in which the two former lovers rehash their past, and all the choices that led them here, each one increasingly blaming the other, until finally Jane says, “You know what, Dan…”

I thought she was going to tell him to leave. I foresaw the most hackneyed Hollywood story imaginable: Jane tells him to get lost, Dan rides off in a huff, only to ride back in at the 11th hour and save the day.

But that didn’t happen. What happened instead is what sets Jane Got a Gun apart.

***

In an interview with Elle magazine in 2013–shortly after filming wrapped on Jane Got a Gun—Portman said:

The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a “feminist” story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.

One of the contemporary criticisms of Jane Got a Gun was exactly this–that Jane doesn’t single-handedly go in guns-blazing and wipe out Bishop and his gang. Jane Ballard isn’t a one-woman army, and if she were, the film would be worse for it. She fights back, but she does so in a way that makes her relatable.

She is, in other words, “a real person that we can empathize with.”

The film works, or doesn’t, to the extent that the audience is prepared to empathize with the characters. That might be true of most films, although I’d hesitate to say “all films”–there are some that pretty clearly rely solely on spectacle or nostalgia or fan service to sell themselves. That’s one reason Hollywood loves their sequels and franchises so much: it’s easier to expect audiences to continue following characters they already know.

Jane Got a Gun is a throwback to another era of filmmaking. That much is obvious just by virtue of it being a Western. Westerns used to be a staple of Hollywood in the 1950s and ’60s, but have since become increasingly rare. It’s also a throwback in its self-contained nature. Even if it had been a financial success, it’s hard to imagine it spawning a “Jane Ballard” franchise.

It’s a good match for me, because I am a throwback to a different era of filmgoer. I follow movie stars more than franchises, much as audiences did at the height of classic cinema. I saw Jane Got a Gun because it had Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor in it. (And after seeing it, I watched a bunch of Joel Edgerton films.)

I love the film for the cast’s expressive performances, that communicate so much in so few words. I love the haunting, melancholy soundtrack.  I love the vast, sprawling desert setting that is both harsh and beautiful. I love the tight, spare script, that takes us on a journey that is at times very dark, but ultimately uplifting. I’m not ashamed to say I think I could recite the entire film from memory, but I’ll end this retrospective by quoting just two more lines.

The first is the one that I’ve been teasing you with throughout this review. The one that encapsulates the film’s theme–the empathetic optimism that enables Jane to triumph over all the darkness in her life. The line she says after, “You know what, Dan…” The script might have gone any number of directions just then, and maybe in previous iterations, it did.

But what Jane says next is the insight that makes me come back to it again and again, that makes it a film so blatantly out of step with the cultural mood of its epoch, and so wonderfully timeless. After everything she’s suffered, all the misery she’s had to endure, Jane takes a deep breath to collect herself and says to her former lover:

You might want to see a day where the sun don’t just shine on your story. Because there is a whole world out there of other people’s tales, if you just care and listen.

To which, dear reader, I will append only these words, that Dan says to Bill Hammond at a particularly tense moment:

…and I want you to think about that with the shank of time that you’ve got left.

***

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This is one of those made-for-TV Christmas movies. It’s not a Hallmark or Lifetime movie, but it’s the same kind of thing. There’s an over-the-air channel that shows nothing but these kind of films during December. I can’t stand most of them; they tend to all hew closely to a formula that goes like this: the prince of some non-existent country meets a woman with a regular job, they fall in love, they have some sort of absurdly contrived misunderstanding and break up, and then they reconcile in the last five minutes.

Also, the writing tends to be dull, the acting usually isn’t anything special (sometimes the “villains,” like jealous sisters or whatnot, are good) and it’s just generally unmemorable.

Christmas Crush is different. The premise is that the protagonist, a young woman named Addie (Cindy Sampson), makes a wish after a friend tells her wishes can come true at Christmas. Addie wishes for her next-door neighbor to fall in love with her.

She’s thinking of the shy but charming Sam. (Robin Dunne.) But she doesn’t know that an old acquaintance of hers from school, Pete Larson, (Chris Violette) has just moved into the other apartment next to hers. And when her wish comes true, it’s Pete who falls in love with her, becoming obsessed, following her around, bringing her unwanted gifts, and even breaking up with his actual fiancée to propose to Addie. Naturally, all this ruins her attempts to go out with Sam, since from his perspective, Addie appears to have been simultaneously dating an engaged man.

Now, it’s true: a supernatural magical Christmas wish is an even more outlandish premise than the prince-traveling-incognito plot I complained about above. Princes at least actually do exist. But it’s the details that matter. This is a modern version of Victorian dramatist W.S. Gilbert’s classic “lozenge plot,” in which a magical device causes some sort of upheaval to the social order. He used this most famously in The Sorcerer, a comic opera in which a magical love potion causes everyone to fall in love with the wrong person.

Gilbert got his start writing pantomimes. These were entertainment staples of Victorian Christmas, and featured similar outlandish plot conceits. They featured stock characters and generally relied more on spectacle than writing to wow an audience, but there’s a clear line of descent from the craziness of Christmas pantomimes to Gilbert’s signature topsy-turvy satires. (And to be honest, it goes all the way back to Saturnalia, a Roman winter festival during which traditional social norms were temporarily suspended.)

What made Gilbert’s impossible supernatural devices work so well is that they were the only impossible element. Gilbert would create one bizarre, fantastic concept, and then have everything else proceed with perfect logic and consistency from there.

The same thing is going on here. Addie, Sam and Pete all behave logically and consistently given the one absurd premise. The characters’ personalities don’t change on a dime for the sake of the plot. The entire story is based on watching the hilarious consequences of Addie’s non-specific wish play out.

That’s the other thing about this movie: it’s funny. The script is snappy and clever. There’s an extended scene with Addie trying to talk to Pete’s ex-fiancée in a Christmas store that makes me laugh out loud. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the performances of the supporting cast: Konstantina Mantelos as Pete’s jilted fiancée is great, as is Erica Deutschman as Addie’s friend Drea. It was nice to see the two female leads working together as friends, instead of being rivals for the same guy.

There is also the character of Mr. Donner (I couldn’t find the actor’s name.) He is an important client of the firm Addie and Drea work for, and there is a subplot with them planning a Christmas event for him. There’s a running joke where someone will call it “the Donner party” and someone will quickly correct it to “the Donner event.”

Donner never speaks throughout the film. His performance is purely in his expressions. I loved this touch. Screenwriters take note: less can be more.

The film culminates with the Donner event, which includes an impromptu song by Pete in another over-the-top effort to woo Addie. Addie then gives a speech about the power of Christmas wishes. I won’t say more, even though it’s not really the kind of movie you can spoil. I mean, we all know what the ending will be.

And yes, I guess there is a last-five-minutes reconciliation with Addie and Sam, too. But again, it’s how it’s done that matters. Addie’s wish wasn’t to marry a prince, or a millionaire, or even to get married at all. She just wants to go on a date with a guy she likes.

This movie is fun. Everything about it is a cut above the usual Christmas TV movie fare. The writing is wittier, the acting is better, even the set design is more believable. Normally, people in these movies live in fabulous winter estates. But these characters just live in apartments, albeit very decorated ones.

It’s easy to make fun of feel-good holiday movies because most of them are bad. But you could say the same of most big budget Hollywood movies, actually. Most instances of every form of entertainment are fairly forgettable, to be honest. The fun is in finding the ones where the people who worked on it went the extra mile to make it good. Christmas Crush is one of those.

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Note this should not be confused with the 2005 film of the same name starring Matthew McConaughey, or the 1943 film starring Humphrey Bogart, or the 1995 remake of the same, or either of two Bollywood films.

Whew! That’s a lot of films named after the desert. But we are presently concerned with the one that stars Brooke Shields as a young heiress named Dale Gordon whose dying father asks her to race his custom sports car in the 1927 Trans-African Auto Race, composed of racers representing all the major European stereotypes–snooty French, goofy Brits, and of course, evil Germans.

But Dale has another problem: the stuffy upper-class twits who run the race won’t allow a woman to participate. So she disguises herself as a man right up to the starting gun. Not until she is safely off on the race does she remove her disguise.

Unfortunately, the desert which Dale has to cross is also the battlefield in a war between two Bedouin tribes. She and her two crewmen are kidnapped by a member of one tribe as she tries to take a shortcut, and dragged to his tent. She escapes from his clutches and wanders out into the desert, but is shortly recaptured.

One of the tribe leaders intends to force himself upon her, but he is stopped by his nephew, Sheikh Jafar, who is the leader of the tribe, I guess. It’s sort of unclear whether he or his uncle is really in charge. I guess Jafar is technically the boss, but he’s a young guy, and obviously he defers to his uncle’s wisdom and experience.

Uh, except… all his uncle wants to do is assault their new captive. Jafar is not okay with that, and so outmaneuvers his uncle by marrying Dale. However, she doesn’t want to marry him, and soon they are interrupted when an enemy tribe attacks the camp, using an armored car provided to them by the German racer.

Dale has sticks of dynamite in her car for some reason, and runs out in the middle of a machine-gun battle to place the sticks in the path of the enemy vehicle. This is miraculous enough, but she then runs back behind friendly lines, picks up a rifle and shoots the sand-colored sticks of dynamite, causing them to explode just as the car drives past!

If a script wants us to believe something like that, they need to establish that a character is an expert sharpshooter first. Even then, it’s a bit hard to believe. But I find it impossible to accept that someone could pick up a rifle they’d never fired before and make those kinds of shots.

Anyway, after fending off the attack, Dale has won the respect of the tribe, and she marries Jafar after all. Then, after a night of passion, she remembers that she came here to fulfill her dying father’s wish and win the stupid race, so she sneaks off to her car and drives off into the desert, accompanied by Cambridge, an Englishman and former member of the faculty at the university of the same name, who is now living among the Bedouin for some reason.

Things seem to be looking up, but then unfortunately Dale is once again kidnapped, this time by the chief of the other tribe.

Seriously? This is the third time in this movie that she gets kidnapped. This is lazy scriptwriting if ever I saw it.

Naturally, Jafar leads a party of war to raid the enemy village and get her back. After initially refusing, his uncle agrees to take his faction of the tribe along. Dale meanwhile fights back against her captors–she’s getting to be an old pro at fighting kidnappers–and so, as Jafar’s men attack them, the tribe decides to dispose of her, and obviously the most efficient way of doing that is to FEED HER TO THE LEOPARDS.

Yes, they have an execution pit, dug inside of a cave, with leopards in it. And there’s even a central sacrificial pillar and everything. Clearly, these desert nomads have not been wandering far if they have time to make an investment like this.

But Jafar arrives and rescues Dale from the leopard pit. His uncle perishes in the fighting, and I guess we’re supposed to feel bad for him?

So, Dale gets back into her car and rejoins the race. As fortune would have it, her shortcut was so much faster that even with all the delays, she’s back on track at the same time as the other drivers are closing in on the homestretch.

Naturally, it comes down to her vs. the evil German racer in a final dash for the finish line. It’s neck-and-neck when the German’s wheel pops off, and Dale pulls ahead.

Having fulfilled her father’s dying wish, Dale goes back to Jafar and rides off to live as his wife, thus ensuring that her entire plot arc is defined by men, lest anyone get concerned that she might be independent or something.

All right; I’m sorry. That’s awfully snarky, isn’t it? Look, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these plot elements–either the fulfilling her father’s dream, or the romance. It’s just… Dale doesn’t seem like a character. She seems like a plot device. Everything she does is reactive. It’s a little thing, but it would have been much more satisfying if Jafar had come to be with her at the end, rather than her going back to him.

Part of the issue, admittedly, is the acting. Brooke Shields “won” two Razzie awards for worst actress for this movie. Frankly, I think that’s a bit harsh. She’s actually decent in the first few scenes; it’s only once she gets to the desert that her performance starts to fall flat.

Brooke Shields is a good actress, and for the most part, the other performances are equally weak. (The exception is Sir John Mills as Cambridge.) So to me, that suggests this is on the director, Andrew McLaglen, more than the cast. Originally, Guy Hamilton, the director of several Bond flicks including Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever, had been hired to direct. I suspect he would have been better. Hamilton’s sometimes campy humor, while in my opinion too over-the-top in the world of 007, would have been perfect for this movie.

Sahara sometimes seems almost like it’s going to be a comic adventure, but it never quite gets there. It’s missing something–that wink to the audience that great adventure films like Raiders of the Lost Ark or the 1999 edition of The Mummy have.

So, how did I hear about this movie, and why am I talking about it?

I saw the poster on Henry Vogel’s Twitter page, and had to check it out. And while it was in many respects not nearly as good as it could have been, it did have some gorgeous desert scenes. I just cannot get enough of these barren landscapes. Brooke Shields is no Peter O’Toole, and Andrew McLaglen was definitely no David Lean, but even so there are are some shots in this movie that evoked the sweeping sandy expanse of Lawrence of Arabia. (There was one shot in particular that I’m pretty sure was a deliberate homage to that great desert epic.) And the music is by Ennio Morricone, so you know it’s good.

I’m normally against re-making films. (See my review of Tank Girl.) But this is a rare film that could use a remake. As John Huston–who would have been another good choice to direct this script–once said, the films that should really be remade are not the hits, but the ones that fail. There’s a lot of potential in this movie, but so much of it was wasted.

Of course, a remake should probably have a different title, since as we have seen, “Sahara” is overused. It needs to be something pulpy–how about Dale Gordon and the Great Trans-African Auto Race? Then get Rian Johnson to direct and Gal Gadot to star. You’re welcome, Hollywood. This one’s free, but any more ideas will cost you.

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My friend Patrick Prescott has recommended this movie many times. For further in-depth analysis of its themes, see his posts here and here.

Friendly Persuasion is about the Birdwells, a Quaker family living in Indiana in 1862. They are good people, though they each have their flaws. The father, Jess, (Gary Cooper) is a little too competitive when it comes to racing his friend to the meeting. The teenage daughter Mattie, (Phyllis Love) is a bit vain and boy-crazy. The youngest son, Little Jess, (Richard Eyer) is prone to anger as young boys often are, and the oldest son Joshua (Tony Perkins), too, can be tempted to fight.

And Eliza (Dorothy McGuire) the family matriarch, can if anything be a little too prim, as when she takes a hard line against her husband’s affinity for music. More about this in a moment.

In large part, it’s a family comedy-drama. The humor is not over-the-top, but in little things, as when Eliza denies to her children that she danced in her younger days–not really appropriate for a Quaker minister–but then unconsciously taps her hands and feet in time to the music when the family goes to a local fair. Or the way Jess tries to beat his friend in a race to meeting, while Eliza shoots disapproving looks at him. It makes the characters relatable. (I have friends who get much the same looks from their spouses when we get carried away talking about fantasy football.)

The film is based on a book, The Friendly Persuasion, by Jessamyn West, which is a series of vignettes from Quaker family life. It has the feel of being a loosely-connected series of episodes rather than a tightly-plotted tale. But that’s not a flaw. The Birdwells are a pleasant family to spend time with, and it’s always amusing when some element from an earlier episode comes back into play–as when some Quaker elders pay Jess and Eliza a visit while Mattie and her cavalry officer beau are playing music in the attic. (No, that’s not a euphemism!)

What I really like about this film is its portrayal of conflict, or more accurately conflict resolution. Even when it’s something as simple as Eliza and Jess’s dispute over his purchasing an organ–she says she won’t stay in the house as long as a musical instrument is there, and goes to sleep in the barn. Feeling abashed, Jess follows her out and spends the night with her, and they come to a compromise. Cooper and McGuire have great chemistry together–it’s an extremely romantic scene, and what’s more, it’s a very unusual kind of romantic. Most movie romances go for the easy stuff–the excitement of courtship and new love and so on. It’s much harder to portray a couple who have been married for a long time, been through thick and thin together, and still have an underlying affection. But that’s depicted very clearly here.

I really admire this. It would’ve been so easy to play it for cheap laughs by having Eliza seem like just a humorless goody-two-shoes, or Jess seem like just a sort of Quaker Ralph Kramden. But the script doesn’t take the easy path, and the actors play the roles with appropriate nuance.

The screenplay was written by Michael Wilson, who also co-wrote scripts for classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia–two of my favorite films. However, he didn’t receive screenwriting credit for these, or Friendly Persuasion, because he was blacklisted after he was accused of being a communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

(After some digging, I found a transcript of Wilson’s testimony before HUAC. It’s here, and I strongly recommend reading it, because it helps put Friendly Persuasion in context. I also tried, without success, to find Wilson’s speech to the Writer’s Guild of America on receiving a lifetime achievement award in 1976. Based on the part quoted here, I suspect it’s interesting reading.)

At the end of the film, the civil war begins to impact the Quaker community, and the Birdwells eventually are forced to face challenges to their pacifist ideals. Joshua goes off to fight over the objections of his parents, and when a Confederate raiding party comes to their farm, each member of the family is confronted with a choice of whether to fight or hold to their beliefs.

And this is where the film becomes more than just a family drama and something else entirely. As Pat says in his review, the film implicitly makes the audience ask if they would be able to show the same restraint that the Birdwells do. The family is tempted, yes, and they stray from the path of perfect Quaker doctrine–but not nearly as much as most people would. Watching the film, thee can’t help but ask if thee could do what Eliza or Jess do–giving food to enemy soldiers ransacking thy land, or letting a man who had just killed thy friend go free.

I know what my answer is, and I suspect it’s most people’s answer–and that is why the Birdwells’ courage is of a very different sort than the heroes of other Hollywood period films. They don’t handle things the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood characters would, that’s for sure. (Ironically, given Wilson’s blacklisting, the film would later be used by President Reagan as a symbolic gift to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to illustrate the need for peacefully resolving conflicts.)

Not many movies can make thee ask deep, uncomfortable questions about morality while also being highly entertaining. This film manages it, and all without ever being preachy or sanctimonious. It doesn’t tell thee what to think; it just introduces thee to some characters, and asks thee to put thyself in their shoes.

Now, there are a few technical gripes I can’t resist making. This movie is over 60 years old, and it shows its age in some respects. 1950s Hollywood production designers could never seem to resist using anachronistic makeup and hair styling, and a few of the clothes look like post-1900 materials. Also, although the film is set in Indiana, it’s very obviously shot in California. Maybe most people wouldn’t notice this, but to a native Midwesterner such as myself, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

But these are just nit-picks, and shouldn’t for a moment deter thee from watching it. Better to have dated production values and a timeless theme than to have a sharp-looking piece that has no heart or wit. Friendly Persuasion is a forgotten gem. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but it seems to have largely faded into obscurity. That’s too bad; because it’s a really charming movie. I’m very grateful to Pat for recommending it. If thee like classic movies, and want something a little different than a typical historical-war drama, I highly recommend it.

Also, there is something interesting about the way the characters talk. See if thee can figure out what it is. 😉

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220px-Color_Out_of_Space_(2019)_posterNote that it’s Color out of Space, not The Color out of Space. The H.P. Lovecraft story it’s based on includes the definite article. (Also, Lovecraft used the spelling “colour.”) I’m not sure why they changed it.

Before I talk about this movie, I’d better briefly discuss that Lovecraft story. The plot is this: a meteorite crashes on the property of a New England farmer, and soon, the vegetation and animal life begins to mutate, and the farmer and his family begin to suffer mentally and physically. The culprit is clearly the strange color seeping from the meteor–a color like none ever seen on earth. As Lovecraft’s narrator puts it:

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness.

Eventually, as is often the way in Lovecraft stories, the farmer and his family go mad and die. Witnesses describe seeing the mysterious color shooting into the sky, and the farm is reduced to ashen desolation.

Lovecraft considered the story one of his best. Personally, I think it’s pretty mediocre. It’s a cool idea–imagine, a color no one has ever seen!–but as a story, it’s kind of plodding. The farmer goes out one day and the chickens have mutated. Then the next day, the cows have mutated. Then the next day his son starts feeling ill. And so on. Each time, people wonder, could it possibly have anything to do with that weird meteorite? (Answer: duh.)

Lovecraft wrote the story in 1927, and the framing device is that it’s being told to our narrator by an old man who is one of the few who still remembers the bizarre event, which began in 1882.

The film adaptation places the setting in the present-day. It’s still a remote New England farm, but they have smartphones and internet connections and TV. Also, the family is given a pointless backstory. The mother is a cancer survivor. The eldest son is a pot-smoker. Oddest of all, the daughter is Wiccan, which makes it feel vaguely as if the film is trying to make some sort of moralizing commentary, although it’s not very coherent if it is.

Whenever people adapt Lovecraft stories, they try to flesh out the characters. And unless you’re Audrey Driscoll, that’s usually a bad idea. Lovecraft sort of, um, hated people, so his characters are generally little more than cardboard cut-outs. By his own admission, he didn’t care about human interest elements. I get that this goes against normal screenwriting advice, which is to make people relate to the characters, but it’s better to stick with the flimsy sketches Lovecraft used than to do what this film does: try to make them interesting by giving them random quirks and eccentricities. This made them seem like a bunch of oddballs even before the meteorite strike.

The bigger problem here, though, is the modern setting. In 1882, if a meteorite hit and began to poison the groundwater, you can imagine that the rustics wouldn’t immediately connect the two things. Likewise, you can see that if a malignant extraterrestrial entity began devouring everything on your property, you’d have fewer options for escaping. Even riding into Arkham would mean a long ride on treacherous roads.

In the present-day setting, none of this applies. The film tries to convince us that these people are super-isolated, and that somehow nobody believes this meteorite is worth looking into, and that everybody is so stupid they crowd around the meteor crash site right near the well, and don’t think that maybe that’s a concern, even after they know there is something wrong with the water.

This is two strikes against the movie, but these issues could be overcome. Otherwise, it plays out more or less like Lovecraft’s story: gnawing dread, weird mutations, unfathomable eldritch abominations from unlighted realms in infinite blackness, blah blah blah. The family gradually dies horribly, the farm is reduced to ash, and only our narrator, the surveyor Ward Phillips, is left to tell the tale of the horror from the stars that he witnessed.

But there’s another problem here. The first two strikes were understandable. But now we’re really down to the very core of the issue.

Lovecraft wrote a short story that asks the reader to imagine a color no one has ever seen. Now, that is, of course, impossible. We literally can’t think in those terms. We know the colors that we can see, and imagining another can’t be done. It’s a brain-teaser; trying to think a thought that’s literally unthinkable. It’s not enough to sustain an entire story, in my opinion, but it’s a neat concept.

Do you see the problem now?

This movie ought to have been called The Magenta Lens Filter That Killed Everyone. That’s what happens. We get a bunch of weird hallucinogenic magenta effects, hideous mutants bathed in magenta light, and then eventually it all ends in a magenta-colored explosion of static.

I’m sorry, but that’s not effective. It’s nothing against magenta; any other color would have been just as ineffective. Because it wouldn’t have been a new color. It couldn’t be.

Of all Lovecraft’s stories, this is the one that is by far the least-suited to being adapted for the screen. The idea of a new color is the only thing driving it. Take away that mind-bending premise, and you’re left with a story about some people gradually dying of radiation poisoning.

What really irritates me is that this movie so badly wants to be a film like Annihilation, a 2018 science-fiction/horror film also premised around the concept of a meteorite causing sinister mutations.

The thing is, Annihilation had explanations for why its characters behave the way they do. The main characters are a team of military scientists entering the poisoned zone created by the meteor. First and foremost, they’re doing it because they’re trying to understand the bizarre phenomenon that’s occurring, and second they each have personal psychological reasons for wanting to find answers. They all have solid justifications for being there, and not just running away screaming, which would be most people’s logical reaction.

The plot of Annihilation is structured as a journey. It’s always reminded me a bit of the Fisher King from Arthurian legend, complete with a protagonist who must journey into the dangerous unknown on a quest to heal both themselves as well as the sick land around them. It has an arc to it.

Color out of Space has no arc, no structure. It’s just a lot of weird special effects that gradually get more grotesque. (For the record, Annihilation‘s alien-mutant color palette was also more creative.) There’s no development. Which, to be fair, is also true of Lovecraft’s story, but again, he at least had an interesting idea at the core of it. The film doesn’t.

This film is the first in a trilogy of Lovecraft adaptations planned by director Richard Stanley. The next one in the works is The Dunwich Horror. 

Well, hopefully that film will at least be better than the dreadful 1970s version. But Dunwich is another odd choice for an adaptation. In many ways it’s similar to The Colour out of Space–remote New England farmers troubled by blasphemous creatures from the depths of space unimaginable. Yawn.

Why don’t they adapt one of Lovecraft’s good stories, like “The Music of Erich Zann” or “The Haunter of the Dark”? “Nyarlathotep” and “The Hound” are creepy, unique, and evocative–good candidates for cinema. Or just throw a pastiche of Lovecraft ideas together and call it Azathoth. Any of those would be better than this.

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Fifteen years ago today, my mom and dad took me to see Revenge of the Sith. I was not quite 15 years old. We had seen all the Star Wars movies together in the theater, and so of course we had to see what was then expected to be the last one.

TIME
It’s not the most significant thing Time magazine ever got wrong, but this cover didn’t age well.

I loved the movie, as I had loved all Star Wars films. It was dark and unsettling, and it had a message to it. Maybe it was a message only I could see, but it was a message all the same. More about that later.

On the way home afterward, we went to our local Borders bookstore. We always went to Borders (and Toys “R” Us) after the movies. This is something I suspect kids a few years from now will completely cease to understand—bookstores, toy stores and cinemas are all being shuttered, replaced by streaming, online orders, e-books and so on. These things are safer and more convenient, but make for less memorable experiences. If not for brick-and-mortar stores, I would not to this day recall walking across the parking lot with my dad, talking about whether or not it was ridiculous for Obi-Wan to come swaggering up to General Grievous like he does.  I would have no memory of the way the clouds outside the store gathered on the horizon, portending a late spring storm in a way that I thought was just perfect given the mood of the film I’d just watched.

One thing I can’t remember is if we got the novelization at Borders or if my parents had already bought it for me and saved it as a gift. But either way, I recall reading it later that day and being enthralled by Matthew Stover’s prose as he retold the story of the film, adding depth and nuance to the characters, explaining their thought processes in certain key scenes.

Another memory that sticks with me from that day is a feeling of gratitude. I can distinctly remember thinking how happy I was to get to see a Star Wars film with mom and dad one more time. I was semi-aware that I was getting older, growing up, and for an instant, at least, was conscious enough to appreciate that moments like this wouldn’t last forever, and that I’d better be thankful for that one. I remember this vividly, because it’s such an important insight, flashed as if spoken by some deity of Greek myth (who were said to do such things) into the mind of an otherwise typically arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boy.

For I was arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled, make no mistake about it. I was only dimly conscious of it at the time, but Revenge of the Sith is a story designed to speak to arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenage boys. I had but recently been introduced to the joys of literary analysis thanks to Gayden Wren’s A Most Ingenious Paradox, and was far from good at it, but even I was aware, for the first time, that this story was meant to do more than just entertain. It was telling me something else.

George Lucas has talked many times about the deeper meaning of the Star Wars prequels. He has said repeatedly that they were meant to explore how a democratic society can give way to authoritarianism. While drawing parallels to many different times and places throughout history, Lucas once claimed that his fictional galaxy most closely resembles the Roman Republic–and its eventual transformation into the Roman Empire. 

In my opinion, this attempt at social and world-historical commentary is what sets the prequel trilogy apart from Lucas’ original trilogy, not to mention the Disney sequels. Nothing in the original films was explicitly designed as a commentary on forms of government and phases of a civilization’s existence. Sure, there are rebels and there are imperials, but it was only meant as a fun space adventure in the style of Flash Gordon. 

The non-Lucas sequels have turned it into more of a space soap opera—a family saga, like the epics of old mythology. The family saga thread runs through the prequels as well, but only to the extent that Lucas meant for Anakin Skywalker’s personal story to mimic the life-cycle of the Republic itself.

Of course, careful readers will note that above I have said that this sets the prequels apart, and of course, setting apart is exactly what a prequel should not do—its aim is to tie together, to make a coherent whole of a story.

Revenge of the Sith fails catastrophically in this regard. A callback to the original trilogy’s first spaceship interior and a shot of silhouetted figures watching the twin suns set do not begin to make up for all the ways in which Revenge of the Sith not only does not tie-in with the originals, but actively contradicts them. For example: how do Yoda and Obi-Wan even know the Lars family exists? Why do they give the children to them, and not to, oh, say—Padmé’s family? You know, their actual grandparents?

In the novelization, Stover tries mightily to make it all add up, but even he cannot square this circle—or perhaps, circle this square, since the whole idea is supposed to be that we have come back to the beginning.

The prequels are best understood not as an earlier part of the story told in Star Wars: A New Hope, but as a separate series of spinoff films meant to tell an entirely different story. This story is about how a constitutional republic is gradually replaced by a tyrannical government that imposes its will through naked military force. 

To put all this in context: at the time Revenge of the Sith premiered, the United States was divided over the Iraq war and the broader “War on Terror.” Some feared that President Bush, and especially Vice-President Cheney, were expanding the powers of the executive branch far beyond what was normal or healthy. The scene where Anakin tells Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” was seen as being a reference to Bush’s “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

I was just becoming politically aware at the time, and finding out that my favorite movie series also was relevant to politics was pretty exciting, and I was delighted to study the social commentary aspect of the films. 

But because Lucas was writing a drama, and not simply a dry treatise on forms of government, he needed a protagonist for his exploration of how republics collapse, and that is where Anakin Skywalker comes in.

Nobody much likes Anakin Skywalker as he is portrayed in the prequels, and for good reason. He demythologizes Darth Vader, who was an ideal villain in the original films. Hayden Christensen’s performance is uneven at best; although any actor probably would have struggled with some of the lines he’s given.

I’ll admit, reading the book so soon after seeing the film may have colored my impression of the character. Anakin’s behavior, which on the screen is over-the-top and ludicrously unstable, seems in the novel to be the product of an emotionally-drained, profoundly exhausted man struggling to think clearly. If you understand him to be suffering from extreme sleep-deprivation, as the novel explains, some of Anakin’s actions make more sense.

But even then, there are inherent flaws with his entire story arc that Stover couldn’t completely correct. Although I dislike the term, Anakin is what’s typically called a “Mary Sue,” in that he has everything handed to him on the basis of nothing more than some vague talk about prophecies and midi-chlorians.

Viewed this way, the Star Wars prequels are the story of a spoiled child who gets privileges he doesn’t deserve. In Revenge of the Sith, he’s granted a seat on the Jedi Council and doesn’t even seem grateful for it. (This is somewhat explained in the novel.)  He’s a brat who keeps demanding more and more to feed his insatiable ego, throwing tantrums whenever his older, wiser teachers give any hint of a rebuke. As someone with a far better ear for the English language than George Lucas once put it:

“Ye Gods, it doth amaze me

A man of such a feeble temper should

So get the start of the majestic world

And bear the palm alone.” 

And this is what I mean when I say that Revenge of the Sith is a story about and for spoiled teenage boys. The moment I’ll never forget from Revenge of the Sith—the emotional climax of the film—is the scene on the Mustafar landing pad when, soaking in the afterglow of a rage-fueled bloodbath, Anakin brags to Padmé about his newfound power. When she reacts in predictable horror, he flies into a rage and chokes her—ultimately leading to her death.

I could write a whole post about Padmé’s death and how it makes no sense. As if a strong woman would “lose the will to live”—after having just given birth, no less! Everything about Padmé up to that point tells us that she would, if anything, be motivated to fight harder for the republic she loves. And that’s not even touching the ludicrous plot hole it creates with Return of the Jedi when Leia is somehow able to remember her mother.

But remember, Revenge of the Sith is targeted at a very specific audience: arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boys, and arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boys aren’t empathetic enough to realize how contrived this is. No, what I remember thinking at that moment was:

Dude was married to Natalie Portman and he threw it all away because he was angry and wanted power.

Revenge of the Sith is a cautionary tale about where acting like an arrogant, narcissistic spoiled teenage boy gets you: you lose your lover, you lose your best friend, and you get mentally destroyed. (The fact that Anakin is also mutilated and burned alive is in line with the longstanding dramatic tradition of physical injury symbolizing psychic or spiritual wounds.)

As Stover writes, describing in the second person how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker:

“You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were only thinking about yourself… it is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith—because now your self is all you will ever have.”

It’s a morality tale, and characters in morality tales are rarely notable for their depth or nuance. This is a key thing to understand about Revenge of the Sith, because it makes a lot of its weirdly clunky dramatic choices more comprehensible. The fact that the entire universe seemingly revolves around Anakin Skywalker—a classic flaw in any story guilty of Mary Sue-ism—is because it’s fundamentally a story for narcissists. Stover himself makes mention of this, in a passage told from Mace Windu’s perspective:

“Skywalker no longer had a shatterpoint. He was a shatterpoint. The shatterpoint. Everything depended on him. Everything.”

The tragic irony is that Anakin thinks he’s doing the right thing; he thinks he’s helping the people he loves, but only because he’s too solipsistic to think beyond what he himself would want. He sells his soul to the devil to buy eternal life for Padmé without ever bothering to think about whether that’s what Padmé would want. In typical Faustian fashion, he is left with nothing at all.

This underscores the other obvious way the prequel trilogy is unlike the other Star Wars film cycles: it ends on a downer. It is a tragedy; a story of decline and defeat. The film tries to de-emphasize this slightly in the final scenes, but the novel’s ending is much more melancholy: “The long night has begun,” the final paragraph tells us, and Stover’s last image is not Owen and Beru watching the sunset, but Obi-Wan riding off to begin his exile. 

By filling in Lucas’ visually stunning but sometimes incoherent sketch with rich details of nuance, emotion, and backstory, Stover’s novelization makes the story of Revenge of the Sith vastly more layered and complex. It’s a story of manipulation, betrayal, and civilizational collapse. Above all, it’s a story of how a young man’s passion and fear cause him to destroy himself.

Perhaps I feel this way because I saw it at just the right time in my life, but more than any other Star Wars film, it’s about coming to terms with the end of something: for the characters in the story, it’s the end of the republic, the end of the Jedi, the end of a romance. For audiences at the time, as well as George Lucas himself, it was about the end of cinematic Star Wars. And for me, it was about the end of my childhood. I grew up with the Star Wars movies—the special edition was released in theaters when I was seven, and I had followed it to the cusp of adulthood.  

Of course, as we all know now, it wasn’t really the end of Star Wars. About a year and a half later, I found myself playing what I still consider to be the single greatest Star Wars story ever written: the video game Knights of the Old Republic II, which to this day remains one of my favorite works of fiction. And, for good or for ill, there has been a whole new crop of Star Wars movies, and no doubt there will continue to be.

But for all its flaws, Revenge of the Sith is the one I always come back to. It’s the darkest one; the one that isn’t about heroes toppling the evil empire, but about how the evil empire can be brought into being when we grow complacent, when we become arrogant or hard-headed, when we give in to our worst tendencies and emotions. 

And it’s also about celebrating those who fight on even amid such dire circumstances, battling valiantly against overwhelming odds. As you can tell, there are many lines I cherish in the novel, but the one that I think of most often is this, from early in the book, as Stover introduces the massive space battle that kicks off the story:

 “[T]he adults are wrong, and their younglings are right. Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.”

I love that line. It’s so beautiful and so poignant. It’s about how there can be something noble, even amidst decay. It’s about finding something to hold on to, even when everything is collapsing around you. And for me, that’s what Revenge of the Sith is–at once a final, nostalgic glimpse at the joys of being a child who could be mindlessly entertained by a movie about space wizards, and a recognition that at some point, I had to move beyond such things; that sometimes such hero fantasies lead to more harm than good.

How much of that is the film, how much is the book, and how much is my own recollection of my 15 year-old self’s mindset, I can never say for sure. All three are forever intertwined in my memory, and that’s why Revenge of the Sith will always be special to me.

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jojoLet me start by saying I’m pretty tired of World War II films. There have been a lot of good ones, but there have been so many that at a certain point, I became exhausted with the period. It feels sometimes like the movie industry is barely aware of other times in history.

It’s understandable, of course; the period is full of drama, tragedy and fascinating stories. And the Nazis, with their horrific atrocities, cruel ideology, sinister iconography, and reputation for machine-like efficiency, are the perfect villains.

But all the same, I’ve seen so many movies about WWII that it takes a lot to convince me another one will contain something I haven’t seen before.

Jojo Rabbit is a film about a ten-year-old German boy named Johannes Betzler. Johannes is a fanatical believer in the Nazi party, even as the tide of war is turning against them. He is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, and his joy at learning how to fight for the Fatherland is only momentarily dampened when two older boys taunt him for his refusal to kill a rabbit in order to prove his devotion, which earns him the mocking nickname “Jojo Rabbit.”

He is consoled at this moment by his imaginary friend, to whom he often turns for encouragement: his ten-year-old mind’s idealized version of Adolf Hitler.

Imaginary Hitler is played primarily as a goofy, comical slapstick character, egging on Jojo’s fantasies of fighting glorious battles in a jovial, often nonsensical way. He seems like a lovable if rather silly father figure–something which Jojo craves since his own father is away in the war.

Unfortunately, taking his imaginary friend’s advice leads Jojo to an accident with a grenade, from which he needs a lengthy rehabilitation period. During this time, his mother Rosie more or less demands that the Hitler Youth leader now demoted to office work find odd jobs for her son while she is out working.

Jojo is assigned menial tasks such as distributing propaganda posters. One day, on coming home, he hears a noise from the bedroom that belonged to his now-deceased older sister and goes to investigate. He discovers a hidden panel in the wall, where there is a small nook concealing a teenaged Jewish girl named Elsa.

Jojo is terrified, and Elsa commands him not to tell his mother that he knows about her, threatening him with his own Hitler Youth dagger. Jojo retreats to his bedroom, to discuss with imaginary Hitler what to do about this existential threat.

Jojo, of course, believes completely in every anti-Semitic trope Nazi propaganda ever employed. And of course he would–it’s all he’s ever heard in his whole young life. However, since Elsa is older and stronger than he is, and since revealing that his mother is sheltering her would get her into trouble as well, Jojo is left with only one choice: to negotiate.

The result is a series of cautious interviews with Elsa, during which Jojo asks her various questions in an effort to learn the secrets of the people he so fears. Elsa at first is annoyed by his absurd, bigoted questions, and gives facetious answers, but slowly, the two form an almost sibling-like relationship.

Meanwhile, Jojo’s mother tries to manage things as best she can. In one touching scene, she and Jojo argue during dinner–she is gladdened by news of the Allies’ advance, Jojo is outraged at her disloyalty to the Reich. Jojo says he wishes his father were there, and, incensed, Rosie puts on his father’s Wehrmacht jacket, smears soot on her face like a beard, and gives a stern-but-loving impression of her husband.

This scene was fantastic. If you want a taste, you can see the beginning of it here. Prior to this, I’ve only seen Scarlett Johansson in action movies and one dreadful period drama. I was really impressed by her performance in this film, and this scene was the best example.

As the situation deteriorates further for Germany, things become more and more desperate. The film’s comedy mixes with horrific tragedy. The horrors of war, and of the Nazi government in particular, are not sugarcoated despite many of the film’s lighter elements. There is death and destruction and more than one heroic sacrifice. And at the end of the horror, Jojo and Elsa are faced with a very different world than either of them grew up in.

I’ve skipped over quite a lot in this review–there are some extremely interesting supporting characters in this film, such as the Hitler Youth leader Captain Klenzendorf and Jojo’s friend Yorki. Every performance in the film is terrific, but it would take quite a while to describe exactly why.

Normally, I would try to give them all their due, but this is another one of “those” reviews, where I need to go on at length and build up my case, so I’m not going to give you an analysis of every character on top of that. I’m sorry to do this to you twice in one week, but I just had to post this on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day.

Jojo Rabbit is a very polarizing film. Carrie Rubin, whose opinion I value extremely highly, called it her favorite film of the year. On the other hand, CineMuseFilms, one of my favorite film blogs, considered it one of the worst movies of the year.

What’s up with that? (If you’re expecting me to answer this straightforwardly like a normal person; I’m very sorry. You must be new here.)

Let’s start with the most basic question: what kind of film is it? It’s usually listed as a comedy-drama. Sometimes words like “war” or “dark comedy” or “satire” get thrown in as well.

So what’s the comedy part? Well, as I said, imaginary Hitler does a lot of silly, goofy, slapstick stuff. Many of Jojo’s lines are humorous, in the way they depict a naive child trying to seem mature and wise despite having been brainwashed with propaganda all his life. And the supporting characters do some comical things–such as Captain Klenzendorf’s ludicrously flamboyant redesign of the German uniform.

What’s the drama part? Well… it’s World War II. People get killed. Including–I’ll try not to spoil too much–good people. People we like, who don’t deserve it. This ain’t Hogan’s Heroes–the stakes feel real.

This definitely qualifies it as “dark comedy,” in the sense that the humor revolves around very non-humorous subjects. And most dark comedies are also usually satires.

For example, take the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. It’s a slapstick comedy about the political struggle in the Soviet Union during the power vacuum created by… well, you’re smart; you can probably work out what event they were dealing with.

The point of mixing grim subjects like state-sanctioned murder and blatant propaganda with vulgar comedy in Death of Stalin is to underscore how fundamentally absurd the Soviet government was. The situation was bleak, but also laughable in the sheer illogical madness the lunatics in charge had created in their relentless pursuit of power.

There is something similar going on at times in Jojo Rabbit–maybe most obviously in the scene where the gestapo raids Jojo’s house, in which, despite the deadly seriousness of the situation, there is a bit of comic business where everyone must greet everyone else with a “Heil Hitler!”

But there’s more to the story here. After all, slapstick satires of Nazi Germany and its leadership are not exactly ground-breaking. For example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator or The Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (both released in 1940) covered that concept pretty well.

The key lies in the opening credits, when we see footage of cheering crowds saluting the real Adolf Hitler, set to a German version of The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This segues to a scene of young children frolicking at the Hitler Youth camp. It looks almost pleasant; kids having a good time at summer camp–except for the extremely unsettling presence of swastika banners and SS lightning bolts.

I remember seeing a documentary once about Hitler’s rise to power, and the way his speeches and events attracted throngs of cheering supporters. From what I gather, during his ascent he really did have an almost rock star-like following, complete with groupies.

Hitler-as-lovable-imaginary-pal/celebrity… young children playing amid symbols that every modern audience instantly associates with death camps and bodies piled in ditches… what on Earth is this film saying? If it’s out to satirize Nazism, why make it look so benign; like some sort of fan club?

One of the most interesting aspects of crowd psychology is the observation that people in large groups are not as smart as any one of them is individually. The old saying about groupthink “none of us is as stupid as all of us” summarizes it well. Large groups of people are roughly as intelligent as children–naive, easily-swayed, and in search of a leader (parent) to guide them.

Understanding group psychology is critical to understanding Nazism and the other authoritarian movements of the early 20th century. Once you realize that while 1930s Germany may have been composed of many brilliant individual scientists, doctors, artists, designers, soldiers, thinkers, tradespeople, businesspersons etc., their collective psychology was about as easy to manipulate as a ten-year-old boy’s: anyone who seemed confident and strong and promised them grand adventures of glorious conquest while wearing cool, scary-looking uniforms could get plenty of buy-in from the people.

Obviously, that didn’t work on everyone. But it worked on enough people. Tragically.

We all know, now, that the Nazi upper-echelon was composed of people who were evil psychopaths. Armed with this knowledge, it is unsurprising that the policies they implemented were evil and insane. The student of history looks back and wonders, “Why didn’t the German people see what was happening?”

The answer is that the evil psychopaths were handed the levers of power with the consent of enough of the people. This is not because all of these people were as evil or insane as the men they ushered into power, but because they, in the child-like state induced by mob psychology, were all too eager to be deceived by the implausible ethno-nationalist fairy-tale they had been told.

The German philosopher Oswald Spengler said of Hitler, “We need a real hero, not a heroic tenor,” implying that Hitler was merely play-acting at being the kind of leader the country truly needed. Despite this, Spengler voted for him anyway–because he too, despite being a man of learning, was susceptible to ethno-nationalist flights of fancy. So it goes.

Put in patriarchal terms, Hitler was playing at the role of father to a nation that collectively wanted just such a figure. Hitler tried to present himself as following in the tradition of beloved strong leaders from Germany’s past, like Otto von Bismarck and especially Frederick the Great. But he wasn’t. Both Frederick and Bismarck were pragmatic administrators, not single-minded zealots willing to destroy their own nation in a doomed bid for martial glory.

I dislike allegorical interpretations as a rule, but I think it’s reasonable to read Jojo and the imaginary Hitler he creates to stand in for his absent father as a representation of the German national psyche at the time–believing in comforting lies rather than admitting the awful truth, until the appalling costs become too great and too personal to ignore.

My interpretation of the film is that it’s a dramatization of how a collective mental disease progresses. But collective anything is difficult to portray, and so young Jojo is the substitute for “the people”–a malleable mind representing herd psychology.

I said before the film was polarizing, and so you may well ask, did I love it or hate it?

Well, I loved it. I thought it was one of the best World War II films I’ve seen, because it offers an insight into just how such a horrific event could have happened. Usually Nazis in film are portrayed as nothing more than cardboard villains, but in this film, the truly sinister thing about Nazism is made apparent: the awful seductiveness of it. How it could so easily become normalized, especially among young people who knew nothing else.

But if you were expecting a true satirical comedy, I can see you would be disappointed. Even offended, perhaps. Because the objective of the film isn’t to satirize Nazism. It’s more of an examination of how Nazism took root, which is a very dark and uncomfortable subject, and it’s frankly not very much fun to think about, so they sprinkled in some jokes. Otherwise it would just get too damn dispiriting.

And whatever else may be said about Jojo Rabbit, it isn’t dispiriting. It ends on a hopeful, if bittersweet, note. The fever has broken, the film implies, and the children have a chance to build a better future.

by on

Star_Wars_The_Rise_of_Skywalker_posterHoo boy.

Look, folks, let me warn you up front: this is going to be one of those where I go on at length. There are going to be tangents, digressions, and detailed analyses of minutiae. Lots of spoilers, obviously. But you know, I think I was the last person in the world to see this movie, so I bet you already made up your own mind about it. This review is probably not going to be helpful to anyone as far as deciding whether they see it or not; it’s purely a form of therapy for me. So don’t feel like you have to read it. Or at least for balance, you should read Joy V. Spicer’s review of the film. She enjoyed it more than I did, and also, well, she’s just a fantastic reviewer and you can never go wrong reading a review that she has written.

Now, before we begin, some perspective: I first saw Star Wars when the Special Edition came out in 1997, when I was seven years old. I was thrilled when Han Solo arrived to save Luke during the Death Star attack, and I was shocked when Vader revealed he was Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back. I was terrified that Emperor Palpatine would triumph in Return of the Jedi, and I watched in awe as the climactic battle of Naboo played out in The Phantom Menace. I swooned over Padmé in Attack of the Clones, and I… well, actually, maybe I’ll save my thoughts on Revenge of the Sith for another time. But the point is, I’ve been watching Star Wars movies for a while now.

I loathed The Force Awakens, but I thought The Last Jedi was a great improvement. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from this installment. And I’m still not.

This movie is baffling. It starts off with the massive revelation that the Emperor, who we last saw being thrown down a miles-long shaft aboard a space station which blew up shortly thereafter, has somehow returned, announcing his resurrection in a broadcast stating that he intends to resume his malevolent designs.

And sure enough, the first thing that happens is Kylo Ren’s arrival at Palpatine’s HQ on the planet Exegol. Exegol, we are informed, is the legendary hidden world of the Sith. Whatever happened to good old Korriban?

Palpatine orders Ren to kill Rey, promising him the aid of a massive fleet of Star Destroyers, which he has up till now been concealing.

In the scheme of things, this is a minor gripe, and one that could reasonably have been raised as far back as the origins of the Empire’s military in Episode II, but: where the devil do they get all this stuff? Is there a factory somewhere that churns out Star Destroyers? If so, why hasn’t some enterprising rebel destroyed it?

You see, I wasn’t kidding before. This is going to be a long ride.

The film now cuts to Rey, who is training in the jungle where the remains of the rebels are hiding out. Sensing that Ren is up to no good, she is distracted from her training, and has a few brief chats with Princess Leia. I thought it was awfully sweet that they wanted to make sure she still made an appearance, despite the sad fact that Carrie Fisher passed away before the film was made. It was a nice idea to do as a tribute to the late actress. However, the fact that the scenes had been repurposed from The Force Awakens was painfully obvious.

Meanwhile Finn, Poe, and Chewbacca have gathered data from a spy within the imperial fleet, which tells them that Palpatine is on Exegol, though how to actually get there is not clear. Fortunately, from notes found among Luke Skywalker’s belongings, Rey learns that Exegol may be found through something called a “Sith wayfinder,” which Luke had been looking for.

And here again, we must pause. There are two questions this raised in my mind: first, how does nobody know where anything is in this galaxy? Every third thing is on “the outer rim” or the “unknown regions.” Their ability to map things in deep space seems decidedly worse than our own on present-day earth.

But that’s a mere technical gripe. The bigger problem here is the assertion that Luke was looking for this mystery planet. The Last Jedi makes it quite clear Luke was not looking for anything other than to live out his days as a hermit. This attempt to retcon Luke’s motivations undermines his behavior in the previous film, and weakened his character. Now, maybe I could let this slide except for… well, lots of things, which we shall get to in due course.

Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewbacca and C-3PO all head off to the planet Pasaana to find a clue to the Sith wayfinder. Not the wayfinder itself, per se, but a clue–a clue possessed by a Jedi hunter named Ochi, who back in his day had landed on Pasaana.

Unfortunately, Kylo Ren and his droogs, the Knights of Ren,  also arrive in hot pursuit. Ren, establishing a pattern that he will follow throughout, decides not to make use of his massive numerical and technological advantages and instead attack Rey alone by trying to run her over with his spaceship, an attack which she easily thwarts.

Ah, also, I should mention that I’m not telling this in strict chronological order, though trying to hew fairly close. The film is so fast-paced and frenetic that it’s difficult to remember what order things occurred in. For example, there is also a minor sub-plot involving the spy in the Imperial ranks, which seems important but we ultimately learn isn’t really. Also, at some point on Pasaana prior to Ren’s attempted vehicular homicide, our heroes met Lando Calrissian, who has helped them to locate the clue–a dagger, found near the late Ochi’s ship, which contains a clue written in the ancient Sith language. C-3PO’s programming prevents him from translating–the Sith language is so evil that it has been banned from being spoken aloud.

This is progress, after a fashion, but alas; even though Ren’s attack on Rey failed, his forces were nevertheless able to capture Chewbacca and haul him, the dagger, and the Millennium Falcon, aboard a waiting Star Destroyer.

All is not lost, however; because Poe suggests using Ochi’s ship to travel to the world of Kijimi, where a there is a specialist who can alter C-3PO’s programming to enable him to speak the forbidden Sith words. Kijimi is also home to Zorii Bliss, an old flame of Poe’s who wears a Rocketeer-like helmet and lives the life of a rogue, constantly tangling with the authorities.

Lest you think me incapable of saying anything nice, let me state clearly that I loved this character. Even though her appearance didn’t quite fit in with the Star Wars aesthetic, it looked so cool I could forgive it. I loved her chemistry with Poe. I loved the fact she never removes her helmet, but, in one of the few quiet scenes in the film, she does lift her visor to reveal her eyes to Poe. It’s a small, subtle thing; but it illustrated the intimacy between them perfectly. I’d gladly watch a full-length movie about Zorii and Poe’s adventures together.

But back to the story: the droid specialist, Babu Frik, wipes C-3PO’s memory, enabling him to speak the dagger’s message, which reveals the location of the wayfinder. At the same time, Kylo Ren’s Star Destroyer arrives, and Rey senses that Chewbacca is aboard. The heroes hasten to board the ship to rescue him, with the aid of a medallion Zorii gave Poe that… entitles the bearer to enter any Star Destroyer, apparently? I dunno, seems like the crew could just, you know, look out the window and notice it’s not one of their ships docking.

As fortune would have it, Ren has departed for Kijimi at almost exactly the same time the people he’s hunting are boarding his destroyer. It’s a wonder they didn’t pass each other. Again, Ren does not utilize his resources well.

Aboard the Star Destroyer, the heroes split up–with Rey running off to find the Sith dagger, hidden in Ren’s quarters, while Poe and Finn rush to save Chewbacca. Perhaps underscoring her mysterious connection with Ren, Rey shares his knack for going it alone without explaining where or why to anyone else.

Honestly, this sequence on the destroyer was one of my favorite parts of the film, and it gives me a golden opportunity to talk about something I really liked: the weaponry.

I talked about this a little bit in my review of The Last Jedi, but the small arms designs in these new films are fantastic. Weapons in the original Star Wars are basically old firearms with various gewgaws attached–e.g. the stormtroopers’ carbines are Sterling submachine guns, and Han Solo’s blaster is a Mauser C96. And there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it does seem a little jarring for futuristic weapons to be recognizable as antique Earth weapons.

The weapons in Rise of Skywalker are still based on Earth firearms, but the modifications are far more extensive. First up, we have Poe’s blaster, which is a modified Sig Sauer:

300px-ERD_Glie-44
Image via The Internet Movie Firearms Database

I love the look of this–a well-shaped grip that fits naturally in hand, but a properly sci-fi barrel that we can easily imagine houses the “laser cells” or whatever.

There are still a number of Sterlings being carried by the stormtroopers, but they’ve been outfitted with white plating that makes them look much more futuristic. Rey and a couple other characters use these small, almost derringer-like pistols that have a very elegant curve to them.

And then there is the pièce de résistance, the thing that convinced me that I had to take a detour when I wrote this review to talk about it. It’s not actually in the part of the film I’m currently discussing, but this seems like a good opportunity to bring it up:

Blaster rifle

Look at that thing! Compact, sleek, and menacing. You’d never know it, but it’s built around a Glock-17, obviously heavily modified. Here it is being carried by the elite Sith troopers:

The-Rise-Of-Skywalker-Sith-Troopers-Force-Powers
Image via NewsLocker

(By the way, the source for much of the background information above is the Internet Movie Firearms Database, which is a truly handy reference site.)

I know these seem like very minor details–and to be honest, they are. But details matter in movies, and especially in sci-fi. Set and prop designs tell us about the world in which the story takes place.

I also just loved the whole gunfight sequence–in particular, one long tracking shot of the heroes gunning down stormtroopers as they race through the halls. That was great. It called to mind similar scenes from A New Hope, but actually better. Again, I’d cheerfully watch a whole movie that consisted of Poe and Zorii doing that.

Poe and Finn rescue Chewbacca, but are quickly captured, and just as quickly freed again by General Hux, who has decided to betray Ren and help the rebels. This was an interesting idea, and I was curious to see where it went. As it turns out, the answer is nowhere–Hux is quickly executed by General Pryde, who easily slides into the role of “sneering imperial officer.”

Meanwhile, Rey retrieves the Sith dagger from Kylo Ren’s quarters, and has a vision of her parents being murdered by Ochi. She then has a sort of telepathic duel with Ren, continuing the odd psychic relationship between them established in The Last Jedi, which enables them to somehow project themselves across vast distances so one can physically contact the other. Ren then returns to the destroyer in person, and reveals the big secret that Palpatine told him: Rey is Palpatine’s grand-daughter. Ren explains that the strange bond between them is what is known as a dyad in the Force. It’s very rare, although it will be old hat to anyone who played Knights of the Old Republic II.

For the umpteenth time, he urges Rey to join him and rule the galaxy, and once again she refuses, escaping with the others aboard the Millennium Falcon.

If you can’t tell by now: this movie is filled, absolutely overflowing, with references to earlier films in the series. This scene is an obvious callback to the “I am your father” scene in Empire. At the very beginning of the film, Palpatine repeated a line from Revenge of the Sith verbatim. (“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some would consider to be unnatural.”) We’ve already had “I have a bad feeling about this,” and it was delivered by Lando, who has finally been heard from again for the first time since Jedi. It’s typical to have an ensemble reprise of the big numbers for the finale, but at this point, it felt a bit heavy-handed to me.

Little did I know…

They continue on to the coordinates C-3PO gave–to the Endor system, where they find the wreckage of the second Death Star. Rey realizes the dagger points the way to the location of the wayfinder, but before they can venture within, they are halted by a woman named Jannah, leader of a group of ex-stormtroopers who have rebelled against their commanders and formed a mounted infantry unit. She tells Rey and the rest that it’s too dangerous to enter the wreckage and they had better wait, but Rey once again ignores this and ventures ahead without telling anybody. She and Kylo really are made for each other, aren’t they?

The Wreck of the Empire’s Death Star is stunningly well-preserved. Remember, it was blown into tiny pieces and then presumably burned up in the atmosphere when crashing onto the planet below. And yet there are nearly-intact TIE fighters, stormtrooper helmets, and even the Emperor’s old throne room still lying about–a bit moldy and wet, for sure, but in fine shape considering the circumstances. Inside the remains of the throne room where Luke confronted Vader and Palpatine, Rey finds a hidden chamber containing the wayfinder, and upon picking it up, is confronted with a Dark Side doppelgänger–again, evoking Luke’s experience on Dagobah in Episode V.

Of course, Kylo Ren shows up, seizes the wayfinder and destroys it. He and Rey then proceed to fight a protracted lightsaber duel in the sea-tossed wreckage.

A word about lightsaber duels, if you will indulge me. And if you’ve come this far, it’s pretty clear you will.

In my opinion, the best lightsaber duel in all of Star Wars is Jinn/Kenobi v. Maul in The Phantom Menace–the “Duel of the Fates,” as the accompanying musical score is titled. And that score is a big part of what makes it feel so epic, but it’s also the pacing, the choreography, and the way it’s intercut so perfectly with three other action sequences. It feels, appropriately, like it’s the first maneuver in a grander battle, as the name implies–a lethal cosmic dance in which the course of galactic history itself is being shaped.

All the other battles pale in comparison–the ones in the original trilogy feel dull and restrained, and the subsequent ones in the prequels became unrealistic and exaggerated to the point of absurdity in a futile effort to top the climax of Episode I.

All the good things I said about the Star Destroyer shootout earlier? This is the opposite of that–this duel, like all the lightsaber duels in the new trilogy (and there aren’t that many), feels hamstrung and stiff. The energy and thrill just isn’t there. Even the Original Trilogy’s duels, while technically unspectacular, were at least interesting in that they felt organic and spontaneous, rather than labored and plodding.

The duel ends with Ren about to finish Rey off when he receives a telepathic message from Leia, imploring him to stay his hand. He does, which allows Rey to stab him in the stomach. However, Rey regrets this immediately and, using Force powers presumably inherited from her infamous grandfather’s line, heals his wound. She then departs aboard Ren’s starship.

Meanwhile, the psychic energy Leia expended to communicate with her wayward son has proven lethal, and she dies surrounded by the remaining rebel forces. Poe, Finn and company return to the rebel base and learn of Leia’s passing away, at which point Poe is promoted to general. (Which is kind of odd, because he’d been busted back down to captain in the last film. I’m not sure exactly how ranks work in this outfit, but if we assume it’s comparable to the U.S. Air Force, that’s a three-grade jump.)

Ren, meanwhile, stands on the Death Star ruin, brooding and staring out at the sea, when what should appear but a vision of Han Solo. Despite having been murdered by Ren, Han apparently bears no hard feelings, and offers his son words of encouragement. He tells him that “Kylo Ren”–the identity Ben Solo assumed when he turned to evil–is dead, and his son still lives. The vision, or ghost, or whatever he is, disappears, but now Ren is Ben once more.

I complained in my review of The Last Jedi that this Force ghost business was getting out of hand, but now it’s to where you can’t swing a lightsaber without hitting one. Almost literally, because we next see Rey on the planet where Luke Skywalker had been hiding. She is burning Kylo Ren’s ship (with firewood, apparently?) and throws Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber into the blaze when it is caught by none other than the spirit of Skywalker himself.

Ghost-Luke lectures Rey about the need to not simply hide out, as he had done, but to confront the Emperor and save the galaxy. He leads her to Leia’s lightsaber, which princess-turned-general had constructed decades earlier, when Luke trained her in the ways of the Force. Luke instructs Rey to take both sabers and go to Exegol to face Palpatine. Then, for his next trick, Luke reprises another scene from Empire and lifts his old X-Wing out of the water.

I felt like I should hold my lighter aloft each time they played one of these “greatest hits.” But instead of doing that, let me pause here to do something that Rise of Skywalker rarely does, and surprise my audience.

Anybody here remember the 2013 film, Star Trek: Into Darkness? I reviewed it on here back when it came out. One of my big problems with that movie is that, not to spoil too much, Kirk dies, but Dr. McCoy revives him, using Khan’s regenerating cells, which are treated effectively as a cheap plot device that allows us to have a Capt. Kirk death scene, and then to have a living Kirk again at the end of it. I think it’s kind of supposed to be an homage to how Spock sacrificed himself in the original Wrath of Khan, but the difference is, Spock’s death took an entire sequel film to undo, as opposed to being reversed in five minutes. That feels cheap. There’s no drama in a world where a character’s death can be undone in an instant.

Why is this relevant? Only because J.J. Abrams directed both Into Darkness and Rise of Skywalker, and in the latter, I see this same cheapening of death. Nobody really stays dead in Star Wars anymore–even if they die, they can come back as Force ghosts, which enjoy ever-increasing power. Palpatine is back as a zombie or something. Even minor things, like C-3PO’s memory being wiped, are soon reversed, as R2-D2 quickly restores him from a backup.

Something similar also happened in the video game series Mass Effect. The protagonist, Commander Shepard, dies during the prologue of the second game, only to be restored to life during the opening credits. Again, this cheapens it. The audience isn’t going to worry a beloved character might die if they know they can just come back later.

Remember, it was supposed to be a really big deal in Revenge of the Sith that Darth Plaguies could stop people from dying. By Rise of Skywalker, try not to stop people from dying. Rey has already brought Kylo Ren back to life once. There are no stakes; nothing feels important.

Case in point, to get back to the story: Palpatine sends one of his new Star Destroyers, which is equipped with a Death Star-caliber cannon, to destroy the planet Kijimi. There’s real emotional resonance because it’s like, the fourth-oldest of the new planets introduced in this film, and Zorii was there, so we had really become emotionally invested in it over the last forty minutes.  Right? Right?

The rebels are able to track the signal from Luke’s X-Wing as Rey pilots it to Exegol, and decide to launch a final daring assault to wipe out Palpatine’s fleet before it can disperse. Lando and Chewbacca meanwhile depart in the Millennium Falcon to see if they can possibly scare up anyone else in the galaxy to help the small rebel fleet.

While the utter insanity of the space battle–which somehow turns into a ground battle that sees Jannah’s mounted infantry charge across a destroyer on horseback–rages overhead, Rey makes her way to Palpatine’s throne room. Palpatine launches into his classic “strike-me-down-wth-your-hatred-and-join-the-Dark-Side” routine. And for some reason, it appears to work, as Rey seemingly goes along with the Sith ritual.

But then Kylo Ren–I mean, Ben–arrives, and joins the fight on Rey’s side. Together, the pair stand before Palpatine, who then drops the pretense at temptation and instead absorbs their force energy into himself, granting himself even more power.

Meanwhile, the desperate rebel attack on the massive fleet goes poorly. Poe and his forces are badly outmatched and find themselves facing annihilation. But then Lando and Chewbacca arrive, leading what is, by far, the biggest fleet of ships ever assembled in a Star Wars film.

I would have liked to know how Lando pulled this off. He’s actually one of the few characters who you could sort of imagine doing it–he’s charming, charismatic, well-connected, and presumably knows a lot of people who owe him money and favors. I would have enjoyed, say, a five-minute montage of him cajoling, flattering, arm-twisting, flirting, bartering and threatening everyone who’s anyone into lending their ship to the cause. But alas, no such luck. He just shows up to save the day with no explanation, in another blatant throwback to an Original Trilogy moment. But I’ll admit, even as corny and predictable as this was, it kinda worked for me anyway. Even my heart of stone warmed a little at the idea of everyone banding together.

And I do mean everyone. Remember what I said earlier, about how the destruction of Kijimi had emotional resonance because that’s where Zorii was? Yeah, I was kidding. She’s fine, and comes back to help our heroes in the big space battle. And I can’t even really complain, because she’s my favorite of all the new characters.

Before we move on, one other thing I like about the space battles in this movie: the noises the spaceship cannons make. They have this great percussiveness that makes them feel really powerful. I liked that. Admittedly, sticklers may complain about the fact that they are making any noise in space, but, you know, in the words of Harrison Ford as quoted by Mark Hamill, “It ain’t that kind of movie.”

Meanwhile, back in the heart of all evil, Palpatine throws Ren–that is, Ben–into a deep abyss, which you would think Palpatine, of all people, would know is not an effective way to kill someone in this galaxy. He then turns his attention to Rey, but she has just had a moment of tremendous psychic clarity during which she communes with the Force ghosts of all the Jedi–we hear the voices of all the big names speaking to her.

Renewed by the spirit of all the Jedi dead and gone, Rey defeats Palpatine, reflecting his Force lightning back at him. She then slumps to the ground, apparently dead of exhaustion.

But then Ben emerges from the pit and, somehow, manages revive Rey using Force powers of his own.

I’m just going to pause here to note that Anakin Skywalker betrayed all his allies and turned to the Dark Side specifically for the purpose of acquiring this very power, and yet he never got it. Palpatine implied that he possessed it, although all indications are that he was lying, at least at the time. And yet both Ben and Rey have learned it without  ever having even taken the final exams at the Jedi academy.

Anyhow, Ben revives Rey, she kisses him, he smiles at her, and then falls over dead. It is not clear why Rey does not revive him.

With the Emperor dead, the massive rebel fleet easily wipes out the destroyers and everyone heads back to the jungle planet for a celebration. Somehow, all imperial forces all across the galaxy are defeated simultaneously, allowing for a victory montage similar to the one at the end of Jedi. The best part is the wordless exchange between Poe and Zorii. Have I mentioned I like them?

And then Rey heads off to Tatooine in the Millennium Falcon, to make a pilgrimage to the Lars homestead.

All right, we’re almost to the end, but I’ve got to pause here one more time. The Lars homestead is iconic for us as the audience, because we all remember seeing Luke Skywalker standing there, staring wistfully out at the twin suns setting. That’s a great moment–but it makes no sense for it to be iconic in-universe. I mean, even Luke himself was doing that because he couldn’t stand the Lars homestead and wanted to get away from it. It’s hard to imagine that he, or anyone else in the galaxy, would remember it as a historically important place.

Admittedly, this isn’t totally the fault of the people who made Rise of Skywalker. This problem goes back to Attack of the Clones, when Lucas contrived the plot so Anakin and Padmé would visit the moisture farm, and then again in Episode III, when Obi-Wan somehow knows about the place and, rather inexplicably, brings baby Luke there. It’s as if Lucas confused what was significant to the audience with what was significant to the characters. And Disney just picked it up and ran with it.

This points to the real problem that afflicts Star Wars: somewhere along the way, the people who make it forgot what it was about. Back in 1977, Luke Skywalker was an everyman–the whole point of his character is that he is just a regular guy who dreams of being the hero of an epic adventure. And sure enough, that’s what he does! The promise of Star Wars is that anyone can be a hero.

And then Darth Vader turned out to be Luke’s father, and ever since there’s been this family drama aspect to the story that keeps diverting it. That’s why the prequels focus on Anakin, and why the sequels focus on Rey’s heritage.

Ah, actually, let me correct that: two of the sequels focus on Rey’s heritage. The Last Jedi conspicuously made it clear that she didn’t have a heritage of note. She was everywoman, a no-name swept up on a grand adventure. In that regard, The Last Jedi is the one that’s truest to the spirit of the original film. And look what it got for it: they spend most of the first act of Rise of Skywalker undoing the stuff that happened in Last Jedi.

Oh, which reminds me, if I may digress from this digression; what happened to Rose and Finn’s romance? Rose is barely in this movie, and Finn spends more time with Jannah than with her. What’s up with that? I liked Rose.

Anyway, returning to the main digression: my favorite Star Wars stories are the ones that don’t hinge on questions of who is related to whom, but on the individual adventures, triumphs, and tragedies that take place in the vast universe and cosmology that Lucas created. A New Hope was one adventure in that universe, but there is room for many more. And over the years, there have been some fantastic ones, from the story of the exiled Jedi who learned to live without the Force, and in the process came to understand the true human cost of war, to the story of the decadent Republic that collapsed into a frightful tyranny.

Star Wars is a playground; a galaxy far, far away where the imagination is free to roam. Why restrain it by turning it into the muddled story of the Skywalkers and Palpatines feuding like Hatfields and McCoys when there exists the potential for so much more? I think the fact that The Mandalorian has proven much more popular than The Rise of Skywalker just goes to show that people didn’t want a “Skywalker saga,” they wanted Star Wars!

Okay, that’s enough of that. Time to wrap this thing up, which is just what Rey does with Luke and Leia’s lightsabers, enclosing them in cloth and burying them in the sand outside the old farm. An old woman comes by–apparently having trekked into this vast desolate wasteland just to check if someone happened to be at the colossal wreck of an old moisture farm–and asks Rey who she is. She replies, sensibly enough, “Rey.” The woman then asks, “Rey who?”

Rey looks over her shoulder for a long, and what must seem to the old woman very awkward, moment, at the Force ghosts of Luke and Leia. Then she answers, “Rey Skywalker.” And with that, she turns to look at the twin suns setting, and the credits roll.

I have this haunting fear, whenever I carry on like this about a Star Wars movie, that you all will think I’m one of those crazed fans who furiously creates internet petitions whenever he doesn’t like something in a movie. I’m not quite that bad, I promise. Star Wars is fun, and while I may say harsh things about it sometimes, I enjoy writing about it, and I enjoy making fun of movies when they are silly. The Force Awakens annoyed me maybe more than it should have, because it felt so cynical to me, but oddly this film didn’t strike me that way. It’s kind of a disjointed incoherent mess, but it feels like it has a heart. Not a brain, nor a central nervous system, but a heart.

Anyway, that does it for the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The Last Jedi was sort of interesting, the other two were just pastiches of Star Wars moments jumbled together kind of at random. At least that’s how it seemed to me. But then, Star Wars is a cultural phenomenon, and even flawed Star Wars stories have a way of striking a chord with people, if they see them at just the right moment in their lives. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime. But not now. I have gone on far too long already.

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V
I think most people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, right? It usually gets assigned in high schools, and as a result, most of the familiar tropes of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state are ingrained in our culture: telescreens broadcasting propaganda, a police state violently crushing all dissent, and of course, the corruption of language to control the population’s thoughts.

Orwell didn’t invent these ideas, of course; he merely extrapolated the methods he observed being used by dictators like Hitler and Stalin into the future, resulting in one of the seminal works of 20th-century literature.

V for Vendetta reimagines what Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been like if Batman had been there.

Is that a bit flip? Maybe you think so now, but let’s look at how this film begins: we have pretty young damsel Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) walking home after curfew in a crumbling, futuristic London when she is attacked by government security agents known as “Fingermen,” who, upon finding a damsel, immediately propose to put her in distress. Already this movie is off on the wrong foot with me.

But then, the hero of the piece enters the scene: V (Hugo Weaving), a mysterious terrorist or freedom fighter wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, who rescues Evey from her attackers and then proceeds to give the following melodramatic speech:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

He goes on like that for a while longer, and then takes Evey to the rooftops of London to watch as Old Bailey is demolished while the 1812 Overture plays over the public address speakers.

Okay, I can accept this character is a terrorist with a flair for drama. I can even accept, although it’s logically impossible, that he managed to miraculously time his rescue of Evey so that they could be on the roof at the stroke of midnight on November 5th.

But why the 1812 Overture? Why is a piece of music written by a Russian to commemorate the Tsar’s defeat of Emperor Napoleon I’s Grande Armée being used by a man who is supposedly fighting to liberate England? Why not use something from the English Civil War? For that matter, wouldn’t he see Napoleon’s defeat as a bad thing? A victory of the Tsarist aristocracy over a People’s Army?  V is really much more like Napoleon than he is like Guy Fawkes, but that’s for later.

I know the reason the filmmakers used the 1812 Overture, of course: it’s because it’s a great piece of music, and it works well dramatically. But it feels contrived–an empty spectacle, lacking earned emotional weight. In truly great cinema, the filmmaker’s hand is invisible; the spectacle must arrive organically.

Anyway, later that day (?) Evey goes back to her job at the TV station. It’s not exactly clear to me what she does–apparently she’s some kind of assistant for a variety program hosted by Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry). She takes delivery of a bunch of boxes which prove to contain more Guy Fawkes masks, and soon after, V launches an attack on the television studio.

Meanwhile, police detective Finch (Stephen Rea) is working to figure out who attacked the Old Bailey, and from security camera footage, realizes Evey may know how to find V. He races to the television studio, but in the confusion of V’s attack, fails to capture him or Evey.

V takes over the airwaves and broadcasts a message to the people, condemning the government of High Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt):

[W]hile the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. 

And how did this come about? V addresses that as well:

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.

Finally, he tells the bewildered citizens his demands:

I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

And with that, V departs, leaving a bunch of captives clad in Guy Fawkes masks. A policeman attempts to stop him on his way out, but Evey distracts him. The policeman punches her, but V knocks him out and takes the unconscious Evey to his secret underground lair.

Yes, his secret underground lair, full of priceless art, luxurious furnishings, and various other trinkets which V has acquired over the years. And here we must ask: exactly how scared can you be of a government that, for all its Orwellian bluster, can’t find a flamboyantly-dressed terrorist who resides in a maze of tunnels underneath their own capital city? I mean really, this would just not happen on Big Brother’s watch.

V explains that he needs Evey to stay with him for the entire year, until next November 5th. If she leaves, she could be captured and tortured to give the government information on his whereabouts. Evey gets mad at V, and then immediately forgives him. Evey does stuff like that–her psychology is based purely on the dramatic needs of the scene she happens to be in.

V then enlists Evey’s help in a campaign of murderous revenge against various people in the government–the host of a propaganda talk-show is first on his hit-list, followed by a sick, perverted priest. Evey continues her policy of doing random things and tries to get the priest to help her, but he doesn’t, because he really is a vile, twisted monster. V kills him, but Evey runs away and back to Deitrich’s house. Deitrich welcomes her and confesses that he, too, is a subversive whose activities the government would not look kindly upon–he owns a Quran and a collection of homoerotic photos.

While all this has been going on, Finch has been pursuing his own, much better, storyline. He has been uncovering connections among V’s victims, and traced them all to an experimental facility called Larkhill, where government prisoners were subjected to cruel and ultimately lethal experiments with biological weapons. This is further confirmed when V kills a doctor who experimented on him at the facility.

Meanwhile, Deitrich, for some insane reason, does a sketch on his television show mocking Chancellor Sutler, which prompts the police to raid his house. Evey escapes momentarily, but is knocked unconscious and dragged to a prison where she is tortured and her head shaved.

While imprisoned, she finds a note hidden in a small hole in the wall. It’s from a young woman named Valerie, previously imprisoned for being a lesbian. She recounts the rise of Sutler’s fascistic party and their murder of her partner. Evey takes courage from reading Valerie’s words, and refuses to submit to her captors, even when they threaten to kill her and offer her freedom in exchange for information about V.

At last, Evey is released from her cell to find that she’s actually back in V’s subterranean bat-cave! Yes, all along, it was V torturing her, as a test of her loyalty, as well as, he claims, a way to free her from fear. By losing her fear of death, Evey is now liberated! Or something.

This is stupid. First, it makes V seem less like a freedom fighter and more like just another gangster, almost as bad as the people he’s fighting. And second, it once again forces us to consider the question of “How the Hell has the Government Not Noticed V’s Fake Prison Adjacent to His Underground Art Museum?”

Meanwhile, Finch has pretty much pieced together the mystery of Larkhill. The biological weapon being tested there was a deadly virus, which then-Secretary of Defense Adam Sutler deployed against his own population in order to induce panic. Blaming the attack on terrorists, Sutler then used the promise of restoring order to lead his party to an overwhelming majority. Meanwhile, the upper-management of the Larkhill program enriched themselves by controlling the distribution of the vaccine.

Finch’s faith in the government is shaken by this. (Why he ever had any faith in this blatantly corrupt horror show is less clear.) Meanwhile, V is busy setting up dominoes on the floor of his secret lair to fall into an intricate mosaic of his “V” logo. Seriously, there’s a scene like that. It’s a metaphor, I guess.

V then distributes Guy Fawkes masks all across London, inspiring the increasingly discontented populace to rise up. Sutler responds with a heightened police and military presence to fight the angry mobs.

Once again, we reach November 5th, and Evey finds V and learns his ultimate plan, which is to send a trainload of explosives rolling into Parliament.

Yes, a train. Somehow there is an un-patrolled train tunnel leading into Parliament that the supposedly intrusive police state knows nothing about. These people aren’t totalitarians, if only because “totalitarian” is derived from “total,” and their control over the public is clearly not total. This state’s power ends at the ground, and anything that goes on below that is the Wild West.

V tells Evey that it’s up to her to pull the lever that will send the bomb-filled train on its way. He says that both he and the regime he is destroying are part of an old world, and the people who outlive both will make a new world. “They deserve to make that choice,” he says. I actually liked this bit. It’s a nice illustration of the philosophical concept of thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis.

V heads off to confront Chancellor Sutler, who has been betrayed by the head of his secret police. V then kills them all by bringing knives to a gunfight. (Only in Hollywood, folks.) However, in a small sop to plausibility, he sustains mortal injuries in the process.

He stumbles back to the train station and dies in Evey’s arms, telling her that he had been living for revenge every day until he met her, at which point he fell in love. It’s not really clear why–there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about her. On the other hand, since V has presumably been living alone in the catacombs all this time, you can see he would have been susceptible.

Evey loads V’s body onto the train and sends it on its way. Meanwhile, a huge mob of citizens wearing Guy Fawkes masks storm the military barricades surrounding parliament. The soldiers, with their government decapitated, stand down, allowing the crowd to surround the building and watch as it is blown to pieces, again accompanied by the 1812 Overture. Finch finally catches up with Evey, and as they watch the building explode, he asks her who V was. She replies, “He was all of us.”

One big problem I have with this film is that despite the omnipresent Guy Fawkes imagery, it seems only dimly aware of who Guy Fawkes actually was. V is fighting a religious extremist government; Fawkes was a religious extremist. And he was kind of a screw-up, judging by what a catastrophe the Gunpowder Plot turned out to be for him.

The film tries to draw on a lot of historical material to give it weight, but it doesn’t understand the historical context of its own references. The 1812 Overture was one example; another is V’s repeated references to The Count of Monte Cristo. V spends the lonely hours in his base of operations watching the 1934 film adaptation of the novel by Alexandre Dumas. V identifies with the protagonist’s quest for revenge.

Here’s an interesting factoid about The Count of Monte Cristo: the protagonist is sympathetic to Napoleon, as was Dumas himself. Quite frankly, if you want an example of someone who successfully led a movement to destroy a failing government and replace it with one that was at least semi-functional, Napoleon is a much better example to follow than Fawkes.

I know my loyal readers are wise to me, and will say I only think that because I’m an unreconstructed Bonapartist. Well, it’s a fair cop. But there are other historical figures who fit much more closely to the mold of what V is trying to accomplish. Oliver Cromwell was a religious zealot and a murderous thug, but at least his revolution succeeded for a while. Another possible model would be Alexander Kerensky, who arguably did what V does at the end of the film, giving the people a choice in their future. (In Kerensky’s case, the people did not choose wisely.)

I don’t think the filmmakers ever quite made up their minds about the age-old question asked of every fictional character: what’s their motivation? V’s motives are murky: he talks a lot about symbols and ideas, and how his masks and theatrical terrorist acts symbolize some idea or other. But when we find out he’s seeking vengeance against specific people in retribution for things they did to him, he seems less like an idealist and more like somebody who’s been wronged and is looking to get back at the people who wronged him.

There’s nothing wrong with either story. Stories about idealistic freedom fighters can be good. Stories about people seeking revenge for some wrongdoing can also be good. But by trying to be both, the end result is that V seems almost as hypocritical as the government he’s trying to destroy. That idea itself could be quite interesting. “He who fights with monsters…” etc. But the film doesn’t explore that either. It suggests we’re supposed to view V as unambiguously heroic, as Evey, the on-screen proxy for the audience, does–despite the fact that she is almost certainly suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

It took me years to finally watch this movie all the way through. I’d start it, get fairly deep into it, and then get so irritated I’d have to stop. Part of it may have been the dialogue, which takes a lot of words to say a little. People frequently say things like, “Can I ask you something?” to which the other character replies, “Yes,” and then they go on. Fat like that ought to be cut from a script.

But despite this, I wouldn’t say I hate this movie. It’s not what I consider a good film, but it is interesting. It has a cult following, and it’s easy to see why: it’s weird and offbeat and a bit subversive. There is a wealth of promising material here, but it’s not utilized as well as it could have been.

And yes, I know it’s based on a graphic novel, and no, I have not read it.

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KOThis is a modern take on a classic mystery setup: an older gentleman (Christopher Plummer) is murdered in his country estate, and there are plenty of suspects, each with possible motives for committing the crime. Into this atmosphere comes detective Benoit Blanc, (Daniel Craig) a master detective who has been hired to solve the crime. In addition to this mystery, he also is faced with a related question: who hired him in the first place? To aid him in solving the crime, he enlists the help of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the deceased gentleman’s nurse, who has an uncontrollable physical reaction to lying.

There are a lot of things I could say about this movie—about the eclectic cast of suspects, each one of which is unique and interesting, or the absolutely brilliant dialogue, or the intricately woven, well-paced plot and satisfying resolution. And then there’s Craig’s incredible performance as Blanc, which would be a showstopper by itself. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and, I’m pleased to report, makes full use of the color palette, as opposed to that washed-out greyish-blue that’s so prevalent in modern movies. 

Honestly, I could go on at length about so many things in Knives Out, but it would feel like taking a beautifully assembled jigsaw puzzle apart piece-by-piece to do so. The beauty of it is in the full effect of the finished product, and audiences deserve to see it all fall into place in the film’s own time. This movie is so fresh, so energetic, and so much fun to watch that it doesn’t need a critic’s eye to analyze or interpret. It’s just a good old-fashioned detective yarn that’s a pleasure to watch. 

One thing I will say is that this is how you do an homage to a particular style or genre of story. If you like the classic murder mystery tales, you don’t need to “reboot” or “modernize” Poirot or Holmes; you just need to tell a good story of your own that follows the same principles Christie or Doyle used. That’s what Knives Out is, and it’s wonderful. One of the best movies I’ve seen in years.