Last Action Zero

After a brief cameo in Superman, Peacemaker is back.  Now, I’m on record (somewhere, probably) being fairly critical of the first season of Peacemaker.  I found it was a peculiar combination of the Agents of SHIELD problem (where its placement, both in the franchise and narratively, meant that there could never be any real stakes in the show, so it felt like a pointless exercise in meaningless world-building) and extremely juvenile humor that lacked both punch and creativity (one of Peacemaker’s recurring jokes was calling Steve Agee’s character “dyed beard” because he dyed his beard; pause for laughs).  I was in the minority, from what I could tell, and I am still fine with that (I still can’t believe Twisters is sitting at 75/90 on RT, I’m happily in the minority there), because a little hair metal and John Cena’s endless charm can’t paper over all cracks (including the hair metal; sorry if that’s your genre, but it has never been mine).

But, John Cena (Deep Cover, Vacation Friends) does have endless charm and that made for a certain amount of promise in the show, even if in the first season that promise was largely unrealized outside of a few bright spots.  Not least of all, in addition to Cena, was Freddie Stroma, whom I’d never seen before, but apparently he was in Harry Potter as a character named Cormac McLaggen, which sounds like it should be a pun, but isn’t.  Stroma plays Adrian Chase, also known as the vigilante called Vigilante, a goofy, insecure nerd who just wants to make friends, but also is on a violent crusade against criminals, killing them by the truckload.  Just don’t get him started about crows.

The rest of the cast is back as well—Jennifer Holland (The Suicide Squad, Brightburn), as the tough as nails Emilia Harcourt, Danielle Brooks (A Minecraft Movie, Orange is the New Black) as Leota Adebayo, and the aforementioned Agee (You’re the Worst, New Girl) as John Economos.  It also adds Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Zero Dark Thirty) as Rick Flagg Sr., who, if you don’t know, has serious justified beef with Peacemaker, and Tim Meadows (Bob’s Burgers, Mean Girls) as ARGUS agent Langston Fleury, who is monitoring Peacemaker with the help of Economos.  He also has a condition that he call bird blindness, where he can’t tell one bird apart from another, except for vague sizes.  You see an eagle, he doesn’t know whether it’s a duck or a sparrow.  It’s completely ridiculous and felt very Brooklyn 99-coded, especially with Tim Meadows’s delivery, which is so good that he makes something that otherwise seemed like a throwaway gag feel like a defining characteristic for a character.  Also returning, of course is the abundance of metal over the soundtrack (hair or otherwise; to be completely honest, it’s so not my genre that I’m not at all familiar with the nuances).  There’s still the over-the-top violence at times, there’s still the silliness and ridiculousness of it, there’s still the awful TikTok dance opening sequence (new song, new dance, still an immediate press of the Skip Intro button), there’s still a trained eagle that is capable of taking down full squads of trained operatives.

But this time, it’s…good?  Not the music, mind you, but the show.

The first two episodes had quite a lot of setup and what I call Peacemaker moments, where it’s just so comically over the top that it fails to find the actual funny along the way.  But, after being rejected and relentlessly, unsparingly humiliated by Maxwell Lord and the Justice Gang, Peacemaker goes on a The Boys like bender/orgy and opens a dimensional portal to a parallel universe where his father and brother are still alive and they’re heroes, not white supremacist scum.  Now, if you rolled your eyes at the mention of multiverse stuff, you’re not alone; I did as well.  But it seems like James Gunn is using the multiverse for a different purpose than you usually see.  A lot of times the multiverse is used for cheap shock value, such as killing characters unceremoniously or having them act contrary to their established behavior, or showing a nearly identical world to ours where some differences are odd, but ultimately small, like people maybe eat pizza with a spoon or have hot dog fingers.  But Gunn is taking us down a different path.  Chris, as Peacemaker prefers to be called out of costume, is getting a look at a different life.  He’s getting to see how things could have been if he had made different choices and hadn’t become vilified for his actions.

Of course, there’s more to who we are than just our choices, as big a percentage as they play in our conceptual makeup.  How we’re raised and who we’re raised by play a huge part in that as well; and Chris had a bum start.  Not only was his father a white supremacist murderer, which is probably not the best example to be as a father, he also killed his brother in some sort of backyard child gladiatorial competition that his father was holding.  It was a complete accident, but he’s lived with the grief of that his whole life; it’s what made him so desperate for his father’s approval while he constantly heaped blame on Chris.  It’s not hard to imagine how different a person Chris would have grown up to be had that not happened—instead of being so under the thumb of a truly horrible and despicable man, he had what seems to be a regular father.  I mean, what little we see of his alternate dad’s character, it’s not like he’s Mr. Rogers, but basic human decency would have been exponentially better.  And he doesn’t have to live with the trauma of his brother’s death.  He was a literal child at the time, being forced to fight by his father; on a real level, he carries no blame for that.  His father is who should carry all that blame.  But it was Chris’s fist that struck the blow that led to his brother’s death.  Which isn’t the kind of thing easily rationalized.  It was still his fist, his punch that was the direct cause of brother’s death on a physics level..  And Chris has been living with that weight on top of him since the moment it happened.  The idea of a world, of a life, where the worst thing that ever happened to you never happened, now that is very appealing.  Perhaps more than any drug.  Shield yourself from your worst trauma while getting a reset button on everything that comes after that event?  It’s tempting.  Even more so than the Morpho machine.

Not only that, Peacemaker is a portrait of a work in progress.  His character has actually changed and grown over the course of the first season and the work he’s done is evident.  He no longer relentlessly belittles people due to his own insecurity.  He’s grown a real closeness and sense of camaraderie with his former team; to the point where they have a little get-together when Economos returns after being stationed away, he makes a heartfelt, but short speech about how no matter where they may go, they’ll always have each other.  That doesn’t sound like the talk of a hardened, unfeeling murderer.  In fact, the team’s relationships with each other have taken center stage early in the season.  Despite no longer working together and all facing hardship after the events of season one, they have stayed close.  They talk to each other, they lean on each other, they look out for each other.  Chris’s growth has been great to watch, turning him from a character I had trouble getting behind into a person I really want to root for.  He’s really trying to be a good person, not just some indiscriminate killer in the name of someone’s idea of justice.  Not even his own; it was the one imparted to him by his father.  Allowing Cena to play into his innate goofiness to portray a more genuine Peacemaker instead of a brash, mean, insulting ass plays so much into Cena’s strengths.  He’s got the goofy, lovable big guy thing down better than anyone else in the game and it’s really to the point that his mere presence in a movie or series pushes it up a level for me.

It’s a compelling look at redemption.  I’ve said before that not all characters can be or should be redeemed, but it often is the case that those who seek redemption are worthy of it.  They’ve realized the error of their ways, they are remorseful, and they want to do better.  Be better.  At least when we’re talking about fiction; real life, well we’ve all seen and heard enough hollow apologies over the years to know that’s not real.  At the time of writing, three episodes are out on HBO Max (again), but by the time you read this, the fourth will have aired.  But after the third episode, I can finally say that I’m on board with Peacemaker.  It really feels like Gunn is building to something meaningful and deeper than we’ve seen from the series previously and I really hope that he pulls it off.  Chris seems like he’s on a journey to earning redemption and the temptation that is pulling him away from it is strong.  Strong as I’ve ever seen, really.  That level of wish fulfillment at your fingertips can’t be easy to deal resist.  I am looking forward to his struggle and I’m rooting him to come through it a better man.  There are some new characters as well that have yet to really do much, but I’m hoping to see them fleshed out a little bit more.  Tim Meadows is obviously being played for comic relief, which is great casting, but also introduced is ARGUS agent Sasha Bordeaux, played by Sol Rodriguez (Star Trek: Picard).  So far she’s just been playing a tough boss style of character, but it would be nice to see an expansion of these characters in the revitalized DC cinematic universe.  The DCEU was in dire straits before James Gunn stepped in, with miss after miss overshadowing the few decent films they released over the years, like Blue Beetle.  With Superman, the second season of Peacemaker, and the upcoming Supergirl, as well as the incredible The Batman and its upcoming sequel (though technically outside of the DCEU bubble, Superman’s score dropped a big reference to it, giving me hope for Robert Pattinson’s inclusion in this burgeoning cinematic universe), like Marvel, it seems like DC may finally be righting the ship.  And I’m thrilled about that, really.  I was always a bigger DC fan growing up (especially Batman), so seeing DC shake off the numerous poor movies their name was attached to is really heartening to see.

Peacemaker airs Thursdays directly on HBO Max at 9PM Eastern, on a weekly release schedule, thank goodness.

Tuesdays with Morbidity

Regular readers (or anyone who read last week’s post) will know that I love a good mystery.  I am one of the whodunnit’s biggest fans, I can’t get enough of them.  I love serious mysteries, I love cozy mysteries, I even dig supernatural mysteries.  I’m also a pretty big fan of Richard Osman, British game show host, Taskmaster contestant, frequent Would I Lie To You? panelist, and tall, funny man.  And he’s also an author.  So when I found out that Netflix was adapting the first book in his The Thursday Murder Club series, I was pretty excited.

The titular club is a group of retired senior citizens who get together every Thursday to theorize on cold cases.  The group, at the beginning of the film, consists of Ron, played by Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), a former trade union leader; Ibrahim, played by Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Iron Man 2), a psychiatrist, and Elizabeth, who is quite tight-lipped about her past, played by Helen Mirren (The Queen, F9: The Fast Saga).  It’s not a far walk to imagine that with this much talent, you’re in for top notch acting and they do not disappoint.  They are all predictably excellent at the craft and they bring their considerable experience and poise to their roles with aplomb.  Eventually initiated into the Thursday Murder Club is Joyce, played by Celia Imre (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nanny McPhee), a former trauma nurse who they draft in for her medical expertise and keen eye for detail.  Joyce is a new resident at Coopers Chase, the retirement village where they all live and she’s looking for something fulfilling to occupy her time, so she jumps at the opportunity to join the team.

The plot of the movie is very “save the rec center”, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because this sort of thing is still relevant today.  The owner of Coopers Chase is Ian Ventham.  He’s slick, he’s sleazy, he’s in the middle of a divorce precipitated by his infidelity, and he’s ably played by the very talented David Tennant (Fright Night, Staged).  It’s really fun to see him play such a particular sleaze because all reports show that he’s actually a good guy; but he’s so good at playing someone you want to hate.  Ventham is no different, as he plans to dig up Coopers Chase’s adjoining cemetery, build luxury flats, and evict the residents of Coopers Chase so he can use the grounds as part of the apartment community.  Cue the fundraiser concert, the ski jump contest, or the Sweded movie push.   Well, maybe not this time; the residents gather and try to figure out a way to stop him, and one man stands in his way: Tony Curran, his business partner.  A rough and tumble kind of guy, he vows to do everything he can to protect the residents of Coopers Chase from Ventham’s plans.  Unfortunately, he comes home to ransacked belongings, an assailant still in his house, and his own murder.

After all, you can’t be the Thursday Murder Club if a body doesn’t drop.  Sorry, Tony, but if you don’t die, our protagonists are going to have to take up quilting.  And no one wants to watch quilting for 1 hour and 58 minutes (most competitive quilting events only last 45 minutes to an hour, I’m told; if competitive quilting is a thing, this joke is really not going to land).

Along the way, they meet PC Donna de Freitas, played by Naomi Ackie (Mickey 17), a young former London police officer who has transferred to the countryside and is sent to Coopers Chase to give a talk on home safety after Tony’s death.  They seem to hit it off quite well, with Elizabeth especially hoping that she can be a source on the force for them the way their friend Penny—the only woman on the police force in her day—who is sadly now in hospice care used to be.  They all chat about their backgrounds, getting to know one another, but Elizabeth is quite cagey when asked about what she used to do.  The woman likes to keep it a little mysterious, what can I say?  But she is intent on getting PC de Freitas on her side and assigned to the Tony Curran murder.  It’s a rather clever little ruse they hatch that’s very fun to watch.  Kind of like a Faceman scam from The A-Team, but with more tea and blood pressure medication.  So, much like Joyce, she’s drafted in to be a source, but she takes much more cajoling.

As more bodies drop and the TMC has to start examining their own neighbors for motive, the stakes ramp up.  But Elizabeth always stays cool.  She has this Jessica Fletcher bravado, putting herself into dangerous situations often, armed only with the confidence that she’ll somehow make it out unscathed.  It can be frustrating to watch sometimes, because whatever her background may be, at the end of the day, she’s an 80 year old woman who can be easily overpowered by even just younger senior citizens, let alone actual young people with murderous intent.  Although the film is about the club as a whole, Elizabeth is definitely the main character.  I’ve not read the books, so I don’t know if it’s more balanced in written form, but perhaps that’s one of the flaws of turning a book into a movie instead of a series.  It doesn’t always feel like we have as much time with the individual characters.  But, luckily, Helen Mirren is one of the greatest actresses of all time and despite her seeming lack of self preservation, Elizabeth is a good character to follow.  Though I definitely want to see more from Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim; I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be uncovered inside that head of his.

The cast of characters is rounded out by Jonathan Pryce (Slow Horses, The Two Popes) as Elizabeth’s ailing husband, Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Killing Eve) as Bogdan, Ventham’s new contractor from Poland, and Tom Ellis (Lucifer), playing Ron’s former boxer son, whose career was cut short by injury.  As the accusations swirl and the evidence mounts up, fingers get pointed in all sorts of directions.  And while I can’t say it comes to the most satisfying conclusion, I also can’t say it was unearned; but the film doesn’t really encourage you to play along, rather it wants you to just enjoy the cleverness and ingenuity of their schemes and investigations.  It is definitely fun to watch, but it doesn’t have the smart writing and direction to push it into the realm of all-timers like Knives Out and Glass Onion, nor does it have the charm and pith of See How They Run.  But despite all this, it’s still a good time and if you like cozy murder mysteries like Father Brown or Death in Paradise, you’ll definitely like The Thursday Murder Club.  And as a first film based on a debut novel in a series, it more than shows enough promise to be turned into a successful series of films.  There’s potential here and talent to spare, so I am really hoping that Netflix sticks with it.

It’s drawn a lot of comparisons to Hulu’s brilliant Only Murders in the Building, but I don’t see it.  Yes, on the surface level, there are similarities; a group of people living in the same place get together and solve crimes.  But the impetus is completely different.  Only Murders is about true crime enthusiasts, those many with that morbid fascination (the character Dove from Bodkin sums up my thoughts on the subject perfectly: “True crime podcasts aren't journalism.  They're necrophilia.”), who become investigators when crime shows up at their door.  Thursday Murder Club is about a group of like-minded investigation nuts who have always been interested in solving cold cases.  It’s a meaningful distinction—the crew in Only Murders were passive participants in necrophiliac entertainment, our protagonists here seek out the unsolved in order to solve it.  There’s more than enough room in your streaming schedule for both; it doesn’t at all feel like more of the same (not to mention that Only Murders is so deeply New York and Thursday Murder Club is so deeply English countryside that they might as well live in two different planes of existence).

Despite the relatively low stress nature of the movie and the inability to really play along with the mystery, there is a depth to it that I found quite compelling.  There’s the undercurrent that runs through the film about the cost of forgetting people’s humanity.  In western society, the elderly are discarded, forgotten about, and considered a burden.  Human beings, who have spent their whole lives doing things, the way anyone else has.  Considered an inconvenience.  Maybe they raised a family, maybe they had jobs, and then at some point, we decide their useful life has come to an end, so like a fridge that gets carted off to the garage, we set them aside and ignore them.  Migrant workers, like Bogdan, overlooked and dehumanized at best, demonized at worst, and often victimized and trafficked themselves, are treated so poorly and left to live on the fringes of society (and in fear, if they live in the US instead of the UK right now).  And yet, here we are, with a group of retirees solving murders and running circles around the proper coppers and a migrant is working for a despicable man so he can send money back home for his sick mother.  Even Ron’s son, the injured boxer, is insecure about his usefulness in the world after his career as an athlete ended.  The movie doesn’t explicitly ask the question, but it left me wondering what exactly does it take for us to forget people’s humanity and see them as things?  Why do we look at people through the lens of their utility instead of the lens of their humanity?  I’m not sure that The Thursday Murder Club intended to get me thinking about this or contemplating mortality as I watched Elizabeth caring for her husband who is fighting a losing battle against dementia.  Or thinking about legacy as the Thursday Murder Club passes the torch from Penny to both DC de Freitas, who continues her legacy as a young woman in a male-dominated police force and to Joyce, who becomes a full-fledged member of the club?  But if that were the intent, well done.  Because it worked.  And if it weren’t, well, bravo anyway, because here I am.

Even though The Thursday Murder Club is a flawed film, it is a foundation for them to build on and give us deeper, more realized mysteries in the future.  It’s worth a try.

School of Goth

I’ve never seen The Addams Family in any form other than their Scooby-Doo crossover from the 70s, that I saw on Boomerang as a kid.  So I have no basis of comparison for Wednesday, but after years of people telling me that I should watch it, I finally decided to give it another try.  Yes, another.  I did load it up once on my Netflix app to try it out when it first released, but when Enid gave Wednesday the same tour you see in every “new student at a high school” movie, I immediately bounced off it (after getting halfway through Do Revenge, I was more than teenaged out).  You know the scene.  Plucky established student shows the new kid around and gives a quick and reductive rundown of the social cliques, who are very conveniently standing in their respective groups all in the same place so the exposition can get out of the way in one scene.  I rolled my eyes so hard (having seen the exact same scene in Do Revenge just prior) that I almost fell over.

But hearing the fervor about the second season (a scant three years after the first was released), I decided to give it an honest try.  Once I had clenched my teeth through said cliched scene, I found myself starting to really enjoy it.  So let’s get into it.

Wednesday is an “outcast”, one of any number of people with magical powers—psychics, vampires, werewolves, gorgons, sirens, etc.  Your basic motley crew of mythical creatures in teenager form, which in itself sounds nightmarish even before you add the powers into it.  At the start of the show, Wednesday drops a bunch of piranhas into her old high school’s pool to get revenge on the kids bullying her brother, necessitating her change to Nevermore Academy, a kind of Hogwarts for outcasts (the difference here being that it’s not written by she who shall not be named) where Wednesday can be herself, or at least closer to it.  She’s got a very Buffy-like reputation, which was a fun sort of callback to one of my favorite and formative TV shows.

At this point, you’d be excused for thinking that the rest of it is going to be teen drama and dances and in-group in-fighting, and while there is plenty of all that, it all sort of changes once the bodies start dropping, which happens almost immediately.  Wednesday takes it upon herself to investigate, which seems to get under the skin of just about every authority figure around.  The school’s principal Larissa Weems, played by Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones, Severance), has a political agenda to serve over something as simple as people being murdered by a monster in the woods.  You see, in this world, the surrounding town knows about the outcasts and what they’re capable of doing.  This was a surprise to me and it raised all sorts of questions.  Does the whole world know about these outcasts or is it just a proximity thing?  Wednesday is no slayer, it’s not a secret who she is or what she and her family or the other outcasts can do, and it seems everyone is just cool with it.  Well, not cool—the outcasts aren’t called outcasts because they’re warmly embraced by the so-called “normies” who don’t have powers, after all.  But while they haven’t quite pulled out the torches and pitchforks, Weems is conscious of the fact that they are never that far away from that moment.  So she wants to keep things quiet, kind of understandably.  Sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane; The Lincoln Lawyer), however, is quite happy to get into the murders (the ones he believes happened, that is), but wants Wednesday to stay the hell out of it because he believes Gomez Addams, her father, is guilty of murder.  Probably not a big stretch based on what little I learned from the show about the Addams family, murder seems very much in their wheelhouse.

So we’ve got a girl with powers exiled to a new school (Buffy vibes, very good for me), which happens to be a special school for societal rejects like her, and murders that she seems to be the only gumshoe willing to solve, which gives me huge Veronica Mars vibes, another great show.  And Wednesday draws on these influences to great effect, leading to a highly entertaining show with a compelling mystery that leaves you satisfied when it’s concluded.  Like the first season of Veronica Mars, the reveal is handled very well; all too often, the idea of a mystery needing to be a surprise in the post-Lost, terminally-online, constant discussion era results in nonsensical twists that serve to surprise rather than make narrative sense.  When the killer is revealed at the end of Veronica Mars season one, there’s a head smacking moment where you think to yourself “How did I not see that? The evidence was there the whole time!”  As someone who really likes to play along and solve the mysteries in the many whodunnits I’ve seen over the years, I appreciate this construction so much more than just the surprise for the sake of surprise, which can leave you feeling duped by the story and wondering why you wasted so much time on the show.  Wednesday may not be the perfectly crafted mystery that Veronica Mars was, but it’s not that far off.  And that’s one of the things I really liked about this show; it’s a proper mystery set in this fantastical world.

Of course, at the heart of Wednesday is Jenna Ortega’s performance as Wednesday herself.  Ortega (Scream, Death of a Unicorn) is so savagely deadpan, her one-liners, insults, and bon mots often left me laughing out loud (her quip about the black dahlia especially springs to mind).  She expertly delivers them and really gets into the character.  I thought it would be difficult to make a character like Wednesday, a particularly goth kid in a world of dark and goth kids, charismatic and fun to watch, but she is fantastic in the role.  Every moment that you get with her feels well done and properly characterized—she feels like a real person.  The writing, of course, shoulders a great deal of that responsibility, but the moments where Wednesday’s sense of justice shines through and her shameful feelings of compassion and empathy take center stage are some of the most satisfying in the show.  Ortega has already been in some big films and TV shows, but after seeing Wednesday, I am genuinely excited to see what roles she sinks her teeth into in the future, because she looks like the real deal.  She is able to do so much with a character that could easily feel like a one-note in the wrong hands and yet you find yourself constantly on her side and rooting for her (which is a pleasant change from characters like Sabrina Spellman in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, who often felt very foot-stampy and gratingly indignant, though for good reason, to ill effect).  Wednesday is very intelligent, very quick, and physically capable, though she prefers to use her intellect to solve problems rather than physical prowess or even magic.  But then again, she’s not exactly afraid to use either, and she does so regularly.

Wednesday’s foil is Enid Sinclair, the bubbly, plucky established student who is also Wednesday’s new roommate.  As you can imagine, they don’t get along very well at the beginning, and not just because Wednesday isn’t the getting along type.  Enid is everything that Wednesday isn’t, her complete opposite in just about every way.  Wednesday is clothed head to toe in black at all times, she’s uninterested in anything typical teens are interested in, she’s got nothing but contempt, seemingly so, for everyone around her.  Enid, on other hand, is effervescent, an optimist, draped in bright colors and fuzzy sweaters when she’s not in her school uniform.  If this were a buddy cop comedy, Enid would be the side character that both the main characters don’t like because she’s just too positive and cheery all the time.  But again, thanks in part to Emma Myers (A Minecraft Movie, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder) and the writing, despite being the absolute antithesis to our protagonist, she’s just as fun and likable to be around.  And the interactions between the two characters as they reluctantly become friends through the shared hardship that is high school are often comedy gold.  Enid also develops a soft spot and strong friendship with Thing, the disembodied and reanimated hand that Wednesday’s mother Morticia sent to spy on her, which makes the character all the more endearing.  That she can not only converse with, but also empathize with and befriend a hand is surprisingly sweet to watch.  She’s also got a lot going on—Enid is a werewolf who has yet to make her first change, which causes a lot of tension in her family.

And even with all these great performances (including the supporting cast of Luis Guzman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the feature film version of Wednesday herself, Christina Ricci), there’s more to love about this show than just all the fun and murders.  Wednesday is a show with a point of view and something to say.  It’s got the obvious allegory to other marginalized groups, and the kids at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters—I’m sorry, Nevermore Academy—can stand in for racial and religious minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, or just about anyone else whom society at large has decided is outside of their norms and therefore ripe for persecution and hatred.  The outcasts, plainly and aptly named, are great signifiers for that.  In addition, the show speaks to the colonialism, puritanical terror, and legacies of hate.  Much like the Fear Street films, there is a long, deep story that binds the narrative of Wednesday together and gives meaning to the show greater than itself.  There is something very powerful about allegorical storytelling and I think Wednesday does a great job of utilizing this method to tell these stories.  With a surprising level of depth in what seemed like a fluffy teen show, it won me over pretty squarely.  In addition to that, there’s also a lovely soundtrack of orchestral versions of classic songs, including a rousing rendition of “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones done on Wednesday’s cello.  It is a fantastic choice for the score and I adore it.

With the second season wrapping up on Netflix with its midseason drop on September 3rd, there’s still enough time to binge your way to the conclusion before it gets spoiled on social media (clearly the worst thing about the binge model, but that’s a discussion for another day).  And I would definitely recommend giving it a try because a genuine surprise is hard to find in entertainment and this was genuinely a surprisingly good time.

Once More With Man of Steeling

I have never really cared about Superman, not even when I was a kid.  The closest thing I ever really got to Superman fandom was watching the cartoon, mainly because it was in the same Saturday morning kids’ block with Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men, which were the real stars of the day for me.  There was also a brief dalliance with Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, mainly because I had a crush on Teri Hatcher, but the less said about that poor excuse for a Superman, the better.  I barely gave a first thought to the Brandon Routh films, let alone a second, nor do I have any love for the Henry Cavill films, though Man of Steel was okay-ish, I guess (the rest of the Snyderverse is well worth forgetting, in my opinion; though it had some good ideas, it was plagued by terrible execution and worse CGI).  So I wasn’t very excited for a new Superman, especially as I felt James Gunn’s Peacemaker dropped the ball after a strong start with The Suicide Squad.  But, when I heard the buzz around Superman, both positive and negative (especially when it comes to who was negative and for what reasons), I really wanted to get out and see it, but the timing never worked out for me; it was pulled from theaters and released on digital the day that I was free to go see it. So, I bought it. It’s always a risk buying a movie you haven’t seen, especially digitally, when you’ll have to look at it in your library forever, but at $5 more than renting, it was an easy decision, especially as spoilers were starting to fly hard and fast every time I opened up any sort of social media I had to dodge them like so many wrenches being thrown at me.  But boy was I glad that I did.  Just as a disclaimer, this will be a full blog post and not a “Lone Wolf and Stub” entry, so I will discuss the story a bit and its messaging, but I will, of course, avoid major spoilers.

The movie starts with a text crawl—a brief establishing blurb where the world is quickly explained—3 centuries ago, the world got metahumans.  3 decades ago, a baby fled a dying planet and showed up on ours.  3 years ago, that baby put on a cape and started being a hero called Superman.  It’s so quick, but I love this.  I’ve said before that I’m tired of living in reboot land where we see the same origin stories over and over, and this gives us that in media res beginning that you get in a movie like Star Wars and thank goodness for that.  I don’t think I ever need to see a baby loaded into an egg and shot towards Earth again, just as I can live without ever seeing Uncle Ben die again.  We step into the film with Superman crash landing into the snow outside his Fortress of Solitude having just suffered his first defeat to someone called the Hammer of Boravia after Superman stepped in to stop the heavily-armed and well trained Boravian military from invading neighboring Jarhanpur, a country depicted as not having much of a military at all and seemingly very poverty-stricken.  There’s a strong allegory here that I won’t get into, but it’ll be obvious when you watch the movie if you’ve seen even a little of the news in the past few years.

He whistles for Krypto, a superpowered dog he’s looking after, to drag him home because he’s just too hurt to get the rest of the way.  As the Fortress comes through the ice and the doors open, Supes is greeted by a message from his parents on a loop and a team of robots there to help him.  Unsurprisingly, the lead robot is voiced by the ever brilliant Alan Tudyk (Resident Alien, Rogue One) with unending charm; it’s a small role, but Tudyk’s mastery as a VA is abundant and clear.  The robots get him some concentrated yellow sunlight to heal him up, but his spa day is cut short when the Hammer of Boravia attacks again, prompting Superman to intervene, being dealt yet another defeat at the Hammer’s hands.  Except this time we see that the Hammer’s strings are being pulled by none other than billionaire Lex Luthor and a team of analysts, helping the Hammer counter every single one of Superman’s moves.  As Superman struggles to get up and the crowd of onlookers helps him to his feet, one of them quips that Supes probably shouldn’t have gotten involved in the Boravia/Jarhanpur conflict.  Superman doesn’t respond to him, but the look on his face is clear without him ever having to say a word.  To do nothing to stop evil when you have the power to do so is in itself an evil act.  And not one that Superman can abide by, regardless of borders and allegiances (Boravia is a longtime ally of the United States, whereas Jarhanpur has been fairly the opposite).

And now this is where I want to talk about the characterization of Superman himself, played by David Corenswet (Twisters, We Own This City).  I have to admit that even though I’ve seen Corenswet in a few things before, I never really knew who he was until this casting was announced, so I had no preconceived notions as to how the character would be played.  Unlike, for example, the idea of Robert Pattinson playing Batman, to which I had an immediate negative reaction and was unbelievably happy to be proven wrong; Pattinson was incredible in The Batman and I loved his performance.  And the same goes for Corenswet here.  We get precious little time with Clark Kent being Clark Kent, but Corenswet’s depiction of both Clark and Superman were absolutely fantastic.  He’s not just a Boy Scout, which has been, throughout the ages, the biggest criticism of Superman’s character; rather, he’s got a personality, he genuinely cares about all living things, he trusts and is kind and always fights to find the best solution for everyone involved.  He is often shown breaking off from a battle to protect innocent bystanders, human and furry friend alike, even saving a squirrel.  In a lesser film with a lesser performance, that could be cheesy, but Corenswet plays it with such an earnestness here, it just works.  The actor disappeared into the role, he became Superman in a way I have never seen an actor disappear into Superman before.  The other big criticism I’ve heard about Superman as a character is that he’s so invulnerable that it’s hard to invest in his struggles, which is one I’ve had as well.  And that’s not the case here—by starting the movie with his first (and subsequent second) defeat, showing him left bleeding alone in the snow, the vulnerable Superman is here.  And that’s one of the biggest strengths of the film.  I don’t usually give an actor this many column inches, so to speak, but Corenswet’s performance here reminds me of when I first saw Chris Evans (the best Chris) play Captain America in the MCU.  He’s a representative of an ideal that’s fallen to the wayside, a callback to a time when we could say things about the world and pretend they were true, and it’s done in a time when we are surrounded by so much horrific ugliness in every space of life that it makes me want to scream constantly because I’m always angry.

While most heroes’ greatness is defined by their villains, a good chunk of Superman is defined by Lois Lane.  And I think, and this is going out on a limb considering how much Superman content I’ve skipped over the years, that Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Courier) gives perhaps the best performance as Lois Lane I’ve ever seen.  She’s got that spunky reporter, punk rock kid fighting for the truth thing down pat and every frame she’s in is a joy to watch.  I wasn’t the biggest Maisel fan, even though I unapologetically love Gilmore Girls (although as a manly man who likes sports and punchin’ stuff, I’ve never seen it of course), but Brosnahan was absolutely brilliant in that show and it comes as no surprise that she is fantastic here as well.  It’s a real treat to see her talent hit the big screen.  And much like the rest of Superman, we are treated to seeing Lois and Clark in a relationship already, having dated for three months (there’s a 3 motif here that I picked up on, but can’t explain, so if anyone who has seen the movie clocked that significance, please leave a comment down below and fill me in).  We even see them getting into a bit of an argument when Clark agrees to be interviewed by Lois because Clark has been pulling a Peter Parker and interviewing himself.  The interview, as you can imagine, does not go well, with Clark getting frustrated at Lois’s questions; unlike his own fake interviews with himself, Lois is a real, hard-hitting journalist who isn’t putting her boyfriend’s feelings ahead of the integrity of the news (remember when journalists had integrity? Lois is herself an ideal to live up to here, just like Superman himself). 

During this interview, Clark’s moral views come to the forefront as he exasperatedly explains his actions to Lois; “People were going to die!” he exclaims.  It’s as simple as that.  Geopolitics is a big complicated mess for those involved as optics and allegiances and repercussions are often being put ahead of impact and issues, but for Clark it’s exceedingly easy.  He wasn’t acting as a representative of a country, but as a man who saw something wrong about to happen and stepped in to stop it.  That’s all that mattered to him.  People were going to die and he had the power to stop it and he did.  Not allies, not resources, not strategic relationships; simple and refreshing right and wrong. When Lois and Clark speak later, she mentions their fundamental differences: Lois doesn’t trust anyone, she’s a skeptic at heart and a rebel to boot, whereas Clark trusts people, loves them, and finds them beautiful, for all their messy imperfections.  If there is a way to stop harm from coming to them—or any living thing—even harm doled out by his own fists, Superman wants to find a way to stop it or at least mitigate it.  He’d rather find a solution to a conflict rather than just burst through the wall and punch his way through it.  And that kind of kindness is rare and should be celebrated.  Superman doesn’t need to be edgy and dark to be interesting; he needs to be what he is in this film.  Brave, but not fearless.  Strong, but not invulnerable.  Empathetic, and not weak.

Luthor’s the weak one; filled with hate and rage, he is everything a Superman villain needs to be.  He’s a genius, he’s resourceful, he’s charismatic and effective.  He’s evil and poison drips off his every word and expression.  And he’s played by Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class), who has been putting in excellent performances since About a Boy.  He is the perfect foil to Superman and the perfect billionaire villain for the world we live in today.  And because the movie is structured to give him the last three years to work on a plan to get rid of Superman before the first frame, it’s so much more believable.  Not only that, he’s fighting in a very 21st century, terminally online kind of way in addition to all his regular supervillain stuff, which roots his plan in our reality.  Always nice to see.  Luthor’s rage and envy of Superman fuels his crusade against everything that is good in the world; there is no human cost too high that Luthor won’t pay it to accomplish his goals.  He is the complete opposite of Superman, for whom any collateral damage is too much.  And I couldn’t imagine it being played better by anyone else.  Much like Corenswet in this film, Nicholas Hoult simply disappears into Lex Luthor.

The supporting cast here is great too; of course Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), Captain Hammer himself, is a scene stealing powerhouse as Green Lantern Guy Gardner, with the worst haircut I’ve ever seen, and Edi Gathegi (X-Men: First Class, For All Mankind) as Mr. Terrific, the hero with a name worse than Guy Gardner’s haircut, who damn near steals the whole show.  They’re rounded out with Isabela Merced (The Last of Us, Alien: Romulus) as Hawkgirl, who has some great banter with Gardner.  Absolutely wonderful trio as the Maxwell Lord-funded superhero group the Justice Gang (which makes them sounds like an old west posse), though the idea of a corporate-funded superhero team isn’t as explored as I would have liked it to be and neither are the three of them.  But I understand it; the decision not to go into that was probably made for runtime and/or story flow; after all, the movie isn’t really about them and it fits the universe where superheroes are just around.  It also might be something to put a pin in for future DC movie releases in the Gunnverse era.  The fears that Superman would just be Guardians of the Galaxy with Superman in it were largely unfounded; there are definitely more MCU actors in this than I expected to see, but it’s still very much a Superman film.  I don’t mind at all the inclusion of the Justice Gang because, again, it was pulled off very well.  I know some fans (and/or preemptive haters) were hoping to see some sort of Batman appearance, but the best I can give you is that there is a song in the score that harkens back to Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”, a central piece of music and musical motif all throughout The Batman.  When I heard it, I sat up and said to no one “That’s Nirvana!” very excitedly.  A subtle hint that somewhere down the line, we might see David Corenswet and R.Pats cross paths despite all the statements to the contrary.

But more important than all that is what this movie represents, what it means, and its message. Superman is a character who is, finally, after years of brooding and smoldering intensity, a Superman who represents an ideal that we can and should work to attain.  Like Captain America, he isn’t a dark reflection of our reality, but rather someone who would sacrifice himself for what we’re supposed to be, for the promise we’ve made but haven’t yet kept.  They’re characters we’re meant to look up to and want to be like, and I love that.  Superman doesn’t care where you’re from or what lines have been drawn because who you are isn’t defined by your heritage, by where you came from, by what your parents want you to be.  You are defined by your actions, your choices, and the person you choose to be. Strength and punching are not nearly as important as choosing a path that helps people when you’re able to.  If you can stand by and watch contently as children are slaughtered solely for the patch of dirt that they happened to be born on, then you can never call yourself a hero.  Superman is a reminder that even though conflict can be bigger than we are, that a call for justice lives within each and every one of us. That all life is precious regardless of where or how it came to be.  I know I’ve said this before, so I’ll spare you the embedded Paddington 2 clip, but Superman made me want to be a better man.  Because it’s not just haters online who are filled with anger, it’s me too.  And I think it’s a lot of other people who just make the decision not to spread their anger or wallow in it, a lot of people who don’t let righteous anger turn into a hate that darkens their soul.  It made me feel so deeply that empathy and kindness are not just the real punk rock, but they are the only way forward in an increasingly hostile world that somehow Superman has gone from something that didn’t matter to me at all to something I am excited for and, frankly, can’t stop thinking about.  Superman the man gave me hope.  Superman the film gave me hope, not just that James Gunn’s DC project is headed in the right direction, but along with The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts, comic book movies are on the way back after years of the middling installments.  Superman is a beautiful film because it, like the title hero, strives to find beauty in everyone and encourages us to do the same.