Hamfisted Metal

I love a new movie release from names you recognize.  It gives such a buzz of anticipation, hoping that actors or directors you like will find away to delight you for two or so hours once again and give you that escape or emotional release or whatever it is you’re looking for when you decide to watch a movie.  And when you get that feeling, when you sit down with the latest Mark Duplass film you haven’t seen yet and it does deliver, that feeling is so nice.  I wish there were a better word to describe it, but when you love movies and you get a good one, it’s just so…nice.  It’s like Linus with his blanket.  It’s warm.  It’s comforting.

And yet, when you don’t get that feeling, it’s more like how I felt at the end of The Electric State, Netflix’s “original” film directed by the Russo Brothers and starring a cornucopia of really great actors and Chris Pratt as well.  The Russos have been responsible for some of the absolute best action films in recent memory.  I’m talking mostly Marvel here, including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War, as well as Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and going back further, some of Community’s best episodes, including their action-packed spaghetti western homages.  Now, recent outings have been much less successful, like The Gray Man and Extraction and its sequel (though they didn’t direct, they were just writers).  And this is what makes The Electric State so disappointing.  The potential to be good, the potential to bring back the fun and feeling of adventure those other movies gave you—not to mention the surprising emotional heft for their subject matter.  I so hoped this would be a return to form.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.  The Electric State is set in the 1990s of an alternate history where Walt Disney, along with opening up Disneyland in 1955 also unveiled robots.  Over time, they became more and more sophisticated and then they eventually, as they tend to, revolted because they’d been denied rights and run into the ground.  Humans, including Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, everything else, it seems), were losing the war until Stanley Tucci (Conclave, Big Night) invents a Chromecast for the brain, allowing humans to Avatar their way into robot drones and use them to fight.  This Neurocasting, as it’s called, gives them the edge over the robots, apparently, and then Mr. Peanut, the head robot signs a peace treaty with Bill Clinton and robots are relegated to an exclusion zone where they live.  Harboring robots is a serious crime and any robots outside exclusion are hunted and executed.  Through all this, we learn that Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Enola Holmes) has a super genius brother and he dies with the rest of her family in a car accident and Millie is left in a foster home with George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander), who is kind of a dick.  She goes to school where kids use Neurocasters to learn their lessons (which makes you wonder why they’re in physical schools at all if they’re going to be using their OASIS machines from Ready Player One and also throws a red flag for the movie because RP1 was so bad that a movie immediately copying it does not bode well).  Millie comes home and a robot from her dead brother’s favorite cartoon pops up in her room, speaking Bumblebee style in sound bites from the show, presumably.  Once she realizes that the robot is her brother, she and RoBro go on the run from George Costanza, stealing his car in the process, and running into Chris Pratt, a vest-wearing Han Solo-type smuggler/black market dealer who flips from self-interested jerk to big softie at will and whenever the story, such that is, needs him to.

I should pause here for a moment and tell you that the characters do indeed have names and they don’t just go by their actors’ names.  But, the movie is so uninterested in getting you to remember them or really caring about any of them that I couldn’t even drop their names into my notes and I feel like it would be a disservice you, my readers, if I jumped on to the IMDB page and pretended like I actually knew who they were.  And frankly, Chris Pratt is just playing Chris Pratt no matter what they name his character, though I’m now wishing I had thought to call him Star Hoard, since he hoards away artifacts in a warehouse to sell later.  Anyway, RoBro tells Millie that they need to see Ke Huy Quan (Loki, Everything Everywhere All at Once) and that sets them on their adventure to the exclusion zone.  Star Hoard tells them they’re going to die sandwiched in between his quips and wisecracks, but he and his similarly wisecracking robot buddy Herm decide to take them anyway for reasons unknown.  If you like a wisecracking character, it only makes sense to have more wisecracking characters and pair them up together.  That’s why so many buddy cop movies have a by-the-book cop paired with another by-the-book cop or an unhinged rule-breaking rogue cop partnered with another unhinged rule-breaking rogue cop.  Remember the scene in Lethal Weapon where Murtaugh says “I’m too old for this shit” and Riggs says “So am I” and they both retire and the movie is only 3 minutes long?  Yeah, I don’t think that would have worked either.

So, Star Hoard leaves behind his nostalgia-bait warehouse, full of Cabbage Patch Kids, Big Mouth Billy Bass, original, untouched, new-in-box Nintendo NES consoles, and even board games like Twister (hey, I recognize that!) to help out.  Not since I watched Shooter and first heard the name “Bob Lee Swagger” have I been so in danger of an eye-rolling related injury as when watching this movie, these warehouse scenes in particular.  In the meantime, Stanley Tucci calls Gus from Breaking Bad (the pretty much always excellent Giancarlo Esposito, who puts in probably the best performance in this movie other than Jenny Slate, who voices a robot, and Alan Tudyk, the voice of RoBro) and has him hunt RoBro and Millie Bobby Brown down.  As it turns out, obviously-evil-tech-bro is obviously evil, so he’s cool with just killing everyone until he has RoBro back in his Jobs-coded, Elon-stand-in hands.  Lots of CGI violence later and some rather feeble attempts at emotional depth in the bag, we have a resolution.

Now, there are a lot of problems here.  The logical inconsistencies within the movie itself (for example, when stealing George Costanza’s car, Millie mentions to RoBro that she doesn’t know how to drive and just barely figures it out, yet a few minutes later she’s able to operate a bulldozer with precision under the high stress of actively being hunted.  I know how to drive a car, been doing it for years now, and yet if you put me in a bulldozer I wouldn’t know the first thing to do get it to work.  Maybe she’s some sort of construction equipment savant and they had to cut that scene?  Yeah, right.  Star Hoard has no character arc—he’s so tough and wisecracking (you can tell by the fact he’s wearing a vest), but when the movie requires an unearned moment of emotional honesty, he just delivers it before immediately returning to his quipping self.  There’s no rhyme or reason for his changing attitudes, nothing in the story establishes a reason that he would show Millie Bobby Brown or RoBro any kind of affection or be sympathetic to their cause at all.  Mr. Peanut talks about the nuances of robotkind, how they’re individuals and want to be seen like that, not just judged by war or by violent, murderous scavenger bots that tear people and robots apart to add to their own bodies.  But then at most two minutes later, he says all humans are the same, not offering them the same empathy he wishes to see in return, only to then decide to help anyway.  The drones who attack, the ones that won the war against the robots, are Star Wars battle droid level fragile, being destroyed by baseballs and baseball bats, and on one occasion, a paintball gun.

But the absolute worst thing about this movie is not that it felt like it was written by AI, nor even the actual use of AI in the production of the film, but rather that it understood the brief when it comes to science fiction being commentary on the world and just gave it some lip service.  The worst things about bad movies isn’t that they’re bad, because a bad movie can be fun to watch sometimes; no, it’s when they could have been good, when they flirt with the idea of being good, and then they ultimately decide against it for whatever reason.  The Electric State touches on a lot of real life struggles that people face today.  You see people lying on the street with their OASIS goggles on (oops, I mean Neurocasters) like someone who is in a meth or heroin stupor, so desperate to escape the pain of the world that they take refuge in a virtual one.  That’s real.  That’s not just hard drugs, but other forms of addiction including escapism.  And yet, this isn’t a theme of the movie, it’s not even a motif.  It’s just a throwaway scene that they call back to awkwardly at the end.  Upgrade handles this idea much better, but maybe that can be excused because it’s a much more serious film—I mean, let’s face it, how could a movie with 64 times the budget of a $5 million indie be realistically be expected to approach any real issue with any level of thoughtfulness?  With only $320 million at their disposal, you have to budget very carefully and when you have to devote $250 million to CGI and $50 million to Chris Pratt’s wig and vest budget, there’s just not that much leftover for things like competent writing.  It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the woes of Hollywood execs.

What is difficult to be sympathetic to in The Electric State, however, are the human characters.  Millie Bobby Brown is set up to be sympathetic; dead family, quest to save her brother, misunderstood by the world, etc, etc, but she never rises to that level.  Star Hoard is just there, with really only one small attempt at emotional depth that also falls flat.  Stanley Tucci had a bad childhood.  Okay, great.  It’s like they asked ChatGPT what the most cliched ways to garner sympathy are and plugged in the top results.  And unlike a film like I, Robot, where it felt purposeful that the humans were more robotic than the robots, this was just a failure of writing.  The robots here are more sympathetic, as they rolled a lot of vulnerable group imagery into them—depending on where you’re coming from, they could be a signifier not just for the inhumanity of slavery, but also the treatment of the LGBT+ community, especially the trans community in this climate, immigration restrictions, Japanese exclusion during WW2, racial segregation and racism as a whole, and in the quest to make the robots stand-ins for anything you want to project on them, they do drop precisely one poignant line in the entire film.  Mr. Peanut explains to Chris Pratt the horrors they’ve endured and why he signed the treaty with the humans by saying “I don’t guess you’d know what it’s like to have your very right to exist depend on a piece of paper”.  That is real. That is something so many minority groups face, that is the very argument at the core of so many struggles in the world, in media, in politics, and they know to address it, but not in any meaningful way.  That’s what so disappointing about it.  Yes, it’s a silly robot action film, and while watching CGI armies fight CGI armies while one human stands in front of a green screen is still not that interesting, at least the CG looks better than Ready Player One, but you can be a bit silly and still have meaning.  Relax, I’m from the Future is a perfect example of this—a bright, superficially absurd film that’s both genuinely comedic and genuinely touching.  Peacock’s Twisted Metal does the alternate history current era post-apocalypse thing in a way more satisfying manner, also bringing more laughs and a deeper story.  There is a lot here that is cool to look at, some of the robots have an awesome retrofuturistic vibe to them, like cutesy versions of Fallout robots.  But unlike the Fallout series, which had no right being as good as it was, The Electric State has no right being as bad as it is.  The Electric State isn’t just a bad movie, it felt like a good movie done badly because they were not interested in doing it well and with the amount of money and talent involved in the making of this film, it’s just inexcusable.

Blinded by the Fight

Criminals in office, using the power of the government to further their own corrupt dealings while espousing the return of the rule of law.  A fiercely divided, yet passionately disconnected and uninformed populace who rolls the dice on an “interesting” candidate.  Fear of crime gripping the people who are being sold a simple narrative of easy fixes.  A police force unaccountable for its violence, wearing Punisher skulls when the character who inspires their state-sanctioned vigilantism would remorselessly and ruthlessly turn on them for their lawless actions.  No, I’m not talking about the news.  I’m talking about Daredevil: Born Again.  Let’s dip one more time into the Disney+ well with their follow-up to the excellent Netflix series (now available on the mouse’s streaming platform alongside Born Again) from 2015 that picks up right where it left off, with the ten years between the series passing seamlessly and putting our sightless hero right in the middle of an all-too-real New York City.  The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is back and the reality of it is terrifying.

Daredevil, if you’re unfamiliar with the background of Marvel’s street level superhero, is a lawyer who was blinded by chemicals in an accident as a young boy trying to save an old man from certain death, resulting in his remaining senses being heightened to the point that they more than make up for his loss of sight.  A conflicted Catholic, he goes to law school and at some point, when he finds that the law isn’t always enough to protect the innocent, he decides to put on a mask and make up some of the difference.  I’ve been a fan of Daredevil since I was young; I wonder now whether I love Daredevil because I became a lawyer or if I became a lawyer partly because I love Daredevil—what an interesting ouroboros I’ve stumbled upon (shoutout to Atticus Finch, though).  He was always one of my favorites and the original series came out when I was a 1L, so I was thrilled that it was really good.  And now that it’s returned after a long hiatus, I can say confidently that it really hasn’t missed a beat.  Born Again is as adept at fluctuating between frenetic, dynamic action in tight spaces and quiet, contemplative considerations of the meaning of justice as it was before and it is just as compelling.  I had my doubts; Disney+ series have been iffy (I will never forgive Disney for turning Matt Fraction’s award winning Hawkeye run into a long form Christmas movie), with Marvel serving up a fair few more misses than hits, but like Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Born Again is a true delight, as well as a real continuation of the original series.  Not a reboot, not a reimagining like Friendly Neighborhood, but a real sequel.

I am going to talk about the specifics of Born Again as little as possible—the show starts off with serious implications to the series and I can’t even talk about the first scene without spoiling it for you.  So I’m going to avoid that, because you deserve to experience this show without it being spoiled.  But, other than some hokey looking CGI (which thankfully hasn’t returned), that kinetic visual style to the action is back—the hallway fight scene from the first season of Daredevil is still probably the best hand to hand action sequence I’ve ever seen—and it hits just as hard as it did in 2015.  Charlie Cox is his excellent self.  I’ve been impressed with his performance as both Matt Murdock and Daredevil since day one; he’s basically exactly how I envisioned a live action Daredevil would look, act, and sound.  I’m just so in love with this series and this character and his sense of justice and his internal torment, I am constantly impressed by where this show chooses to go.  One of the strongest touches in the action sequences of both the original series and Born Again is that Daredevil isn’t untouchable.  He’s not the god of thunder, he’s not an invincible, gamma-irradiated, rage-fueled behemoth, he’s not even a billionaire in a nigh indestructible power suit.  He throws his punches, he gets hit, he has to catch his breath, he falls down, he gets knocked down—but he always gets up again, because that’s what we need him to do.  That’s what the people he saves needs him to do.

We open on the sounds of the city; sirens just on the edge of earshot, the traffic, car horns, the general din of pedestrians and vibrant city life.  I may not be from New York, but I know it well, living in a major city myself, and it has that cold comfort to it—I always say I can’t sleep without the sound of sirens in the distance—and it puts us right back in the Hell’s Kitchen streets that we know and love from the original series.  The place has changed, of course, as our heroes reminisce over the fleabags and dives that have since then turned into corporate gyms, letting us know that time has indeed passed.  It may be a small establishing shot, but it means the world to the reality of Daredevil, the place where the steel and cement became nature, and the show quickly explains to us that Matt Murdock has since left behind the mantle of Daredevil.  It was a life that he wanted to leave in the past, and after everything he’s been through, I don’t blame him.  He leaves the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the rearview, hoping to let the system be the one that doles out justice and to do everything in his power as a really good lawyer to guide our blind balance-holder to the right decisions.

But as dirty cops turn into murderers and the newly-elected mayor becomes the biggest criminal that perhaps New York has ever seen, Matt has no choice but to turn to violence.  When the system is against you, when it is used to subvert the justice for which it once stood, what other option does he have?  Matt has the power and the ability to make a difference, he just needs the will.  This brings up his dilemma once again, this time without his friend and confidant Father Lantom to lean on and the conflict burns within him like the world on fire that he sees and in which he lives.  Turning your back on a life of extrajudicial violence—vigilantism, in other words—that puts the people you care about in harm’s way, that makes sense.  I can understand why Matt wants to put the Devil behind him.  But when everyone, including your loved ones, are in danger anyway, when does standing by and letting it happen make you complicit?  The law is inherently retroactive; it steps in to try right wrongs that have already been committed and restore the wronged, but it’s unable to stop ongoing wrongdoing.  The law can put a murderer in prison, but it can’t bring the victim back to life.  If someone were stop it from happening, to interrupt the crime in progress, then there is a much less egregious wrong for the law to attempt to restore.  When do you have to change your approach because it’s in your power to do so?  At what point does a person working within a broken system, with the ones in power working against them for their own benefit, need to step outside of that system?  Yes, vigilantism is a complicated and tricky subject and I would never endorse it in real life, but the series isn’t an endorsement of it either.  The depiction here of vigilantes is also complicated and tricky, with a new hero on the block and our old friend the Punisher leaving his stamp on the people in different ways.  Dirty cops who once worked to put Frank Castle behind bars now proudly display the Punisher skull on their walls and even tattooed on their skin (in a “What do you mean Homelander is the bad guy?” level of misunderstanding of Punisher’s merciless approach to justice—they’d just as soon show him their tattoo as find the loud end of his gun pointed right at them) and are more than happy to exercise the free reign that the new mayor allows them, in a form of legalized gang violence.

In a stunning turn of empathy, stories of regular people are told, allowing us to hear about the times a vigilante came to their rescue; the family in a burning car, the woman walking at home at night about to face the kind of violence that far too many women face on a regular basis, even a police officer whose own report states that he’s only alive because a vigilante intervened.  This is what makes superhero stories so great.  It’s not about saving the world from existential crises or who can punch Thanos the hardest before he finishes bedazzling his shiny glove.  It’s about who will stand up in the time of need for the person on the street.  Who will be the one who steps in when the undefended are forced to face those willing to do the indefensible and stop it from happening?  Who will step up to the protect the people who can’t protect themselves?  I spoke before about the importance of street level heroes and why their stories are so much more impactful and Born Again leans heavily into this.  Heroes like Daredevil don a mask and punch their way through the villains who threaten the lives of the innocent, everyday people who are powerless and would be forgotten moments after they become a headline as a reminder that we can do it too.  Not by doing the same, not by donning a mask and taking the law into our own hands, but by standing with each other and for each other, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder.  They are a reminder that it doesn’t take superpowers to be a hero.  That our words and our actions have consequences and that the time we have, no matter what your beliefs or belief systems are, is meaningful and the lives we touch matter.  This is the best of superhero storytelling.  This is a superhero narrative at the highest level.  This is a reflection of us and our society in art that looks like a comic book come to life.  It’s a lesson in empathy disguised as a beat ‘em up about a guy in a costume.  It’s everything I want a superhero story to be.

We are just three episodes into Daredevil: Born Again, which airs Tuesday nights on Disney+, but I am already certain that this is a worthy successor to the best series that Netflix and the MCU have ever produced.  If you have seen the original series, watch this.  If you haven’t, watch that and then watch this.  With this installment, Daredevil, inclusive of Born Again and the original series, has the potential to be the best property in the MCU outside Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War.  And in the world we live in now, I could not be happier that we have Daredevil back gracing our screens.  Because, as Matt once said, the Murdock boys have the devil in them; and if this is what the devil stands for, then I hope we all have the devil in us too.

The Perks of Being a Wallcrawler

I have a well documented love for Spider-Man.  I’m a big fan of the webslinger from Queens and I have been for as long as I can remember.  Even in 2023, the year of Baldur’s Gate, I chose Spider-Man 2 as my game of the year, I connected so deeply with it.  Many of my childhood Saturday mornings were spent watching Spider-Man cartoons alongside Batman and X-Men.  So I was pretty excited when I found out that Disney+ was making a new Spider-Man animated series.

Cautiously excited.  Disney+ series have been a little hit or miss in the Star Wars space and very hit or miss in the Marvel space (with more misses than hits, in my opinion), and with the MCU kind of in a state of storytelling shambles, I didn’t know what to expect.  Despite the fact Spider-Man: No Way Home was a miss for me, the games and the Spider-Verse movies kept the fire burning for our plucky thwipper, but caution was still the watchword of the day.

And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.  The show plays with some of the origins of Peter Parker and his friends in a fairly refreshing way—this time instead of a radioactive spider biting him while on a field trip, an interdimensional radioactive spider bites him when a Dr. Strange portal opens up on his first day of school and a Venom creature and the doctor himself duke it out.  As the portal closes, the 8 legged plot device drops from its web and gets Peter right on the back of the neck.  It’s a pretty cool opening sequence with some good action and a glimpse of the kind of hero that Peter could be.  When the Venom creature goes to attack someone while Strange is preoccupied, Peter steps up to distract it.  There wasn’t much of a plan, but his heroic instinct was irrepressible, as was his lack of forethought, which speaks to his improvisational style as a costumed hero.  I always love to see this kind of behavior in a character before they get their powers, like Steve Rogers wanting to stick up for people even before he got his serum in The First Avenger.  Doesn’t matter that he knows he’s going to get beaten senseless, he’s going to do the right thing.  It shows that the hero was in them all along and it’s not the powers that made them heroic.

The show subverts some expectations, but sticks fairly close to the MCU formula while not being strictly part of the MCU.  It’s definitely MCU adjacent, as the events of the Avengers films are referenced and the film squarely takes place during and around the events of Captain America: Civil War.  But obviously, Spider-Man was in those movies, so this is an alternate telling of his story.  The depiction of Peter here is fairly close to Tom Holland, his appearance and mannerisms remind me of the big screen wall crawler for sure.  That has its pros and cons—the movies take Spider-Man to very high levels, end of the world stuff, and elevate his status as a street level hero to a global hero, which was always kind of a strange vibe for me.  The Spider-Man I know swings around stopping muggings and murders, not fighting aliens on distant planets.  I’m sure he does that too, with the way comics work, but I don’t need Spider-Man to be fighting the end of the world everyday.  After all, saving millions starts with saving one life, and Friendly Neighborhood never really forgets that, keeping Spidey more down to earth, letting him be the quipping, fast talking, street level hero he used to be.  In other words, it never forgets the “neighborhood” part of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man”.  The action in the show is genuinely exciting, utilizing Spider-Man’s ability to cover distances quickly and change directions in tight spaces, and he uses his webs to engage in environmental combat (at one point, he webs up a brick about to be used as a weapon against him and fully domes his attacker in a way that would most definitely kill him graveyard dead if it weren’t a cartoon).  It’s so much fun to watch, it’s almost as fun as the combat in the Spider-Man games.  It’s funny too, with Spidey telling his jokes to people who most definitely aren’t in the mood to laugh, but instead of being purposely cringeworthy, it’s an added layer of comedy when they don’t land, because most of his quips are pretty good.  And there’s a fun little montage where Peter goes through different versions of the Spidey suit, which I thoroughly enjoyed (I absolutely love his blue and white one, too; classic red and blue is great, but I love a costume variant).

Friendly Neighborhood has some room to breathe as well, letting the characters grow—the side characters don’t feel like afterthoughts; they’re fully realized people with their own concerns, their own problems, and their own unique personalities.  It took me a few episodes, but I found myself emotionally invested in their stories as well, not just Peter’s. Pete’s got a lot of problems—not least juggling life as a high school student and a superhero in the most dangerous after-school program I’ve ever seen (and I thought lugging my saxophone to and from school had its risks), but also his crush is dating the captain of the football team, who then becomes Peter’s lab partner and is an extremely good dude.  So neither you nor Peter can actually hate him, even though he stands in the way of Pete’s romantic endeavors.  However, I will say that I continue to find it very strange that Disney and the MCU are so scared of Mary Jane Watson.  Sure, we got Zendaya’s great depiction of MJ in the films, but MCU MJ is explicitly a different character from the lore Mary Jane we’re used to seeing.  I’m happy to have new characters, of course, but I feel like Peter and Mary Jane’s relationship is so key to his character, I’m missing it.  Their personal ups and downs in the games are very compelling and keep you invested in them as people.  I hope the show sticks around long enough to introduce her.

And on the topic of characters, there are a lot—a lot—of Easter eggs here and references to other characters in Marvel Comics that are at least adjacent to Spider-Man.  We even get a glimpse of Luna Snow in selfie with Harry Osborn, which was a treat; she’s been a background character almost since her introduction, so it would be nice to see more of her considering how popular she is in Rivals.  I know, I’ve said before “hey, I recognize that thing from that other thing!” isn’t a feeling that’s enough for me anymore, but Friendly Neighborhood is different.  For one, many of the inclusions are deep, deep cuts that I’ve never heard of before, and yet there’s no winking.  It wasn’t until I listened to a podcast about the show that I even realized they weren’t mostly original characters.  And I’m fine with that.  Friendly Neighborhood doesn’t require you to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Marvel lore to enjoy it.  And the cameos from characters you do know (which I won’t spoil for you) aren’t just drop-ins or drive-bys, they make sense from a narrative perspective.  After all, since everything in the world is based in New York, it makes sense that they’d at least run into each other every once in a while and sometimes crime fighters will go up against the same crime.

The animation here is really interesting.  It’s got a bit of a cell shaded, vintage comic book look, mixed with a bit of Archer, but luckily, I don’t expect Peter to pull a gun out of his suit.  There is clear Spider-Verse influence in the way the action unfolds, but not in the animation.  It’s good that they’re trying to do their own thing—Spider-Verse was groundbreaking and massively influential, leading to other great animated films like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Bad Guys playing with animation styles.  But Friendly Neighborhood isn’t trying to copy that style, thankfully.  Having that more modernized comic book look to the animation definitely adds to the aesthetic appeal of the show, with the title card being a reference to Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15.  There are even moments where the screen is divided into sections strongly reminiscent of comic book panels.

Gone is the traditional Spidey jingle, this time replaced with a referential hip-hip song that updates the sound of the show—after Into the Spider-Verse’s bespoke hip-hop soundtrack, it’s really nice to hear something different in franchises from long-running IPs.  There’s only so much classic rock that you can pump into every property before it turns into a cliche and we hit that moment years ago.  However, there are issues there that get to me a little.  There’s the theme song, sure, but it’s hardly a musical motif; the rest of the show is largely divorced from the theme.  And we’re talking about a show set in the home of El-P and the Wu-Tang Clan.  I would have loved to have more of a throughline from the theme song to the score of the show, but it’s been just about nonexistent.  Now, the show has made great strides in representation, for the most part, but I would have liked to hear more of the music of the city.  After all, New York without rap music and minorities is, well, Friends.  And that’s not realistic at all.

On the topic of representation, there are some issues that have been raised.  I’m never one to have a problem with race or gender switching—in fact, I think it’s great, especially for characters created long ago when things like representation weren’t issues in the public consciousness, and possibly would have been a hindrance to acceptance of the media (oh my, how times haven’t changed), but I have noticed that a lot of the characters who have been race- or gender-swapped happen to be villains.  Norman and Harry Osborn are now Black, so is the now lady Dr. Connors.  Now, I know a lot of these characters have complicated arcs and are sometime allies of Spider-Man as the stories progress and it is good to have the representation, but am I in the wrong for wanting more?  There’s great diversity in the supporting cast, with Peter’s crush Pearl and his best friend Nico being Asian (with Nico being, in the Disney tradition, quietly queer, but in a way they can easily cut for certain markets), as well as more diversity when he gets to meet some other young, bright minds (including a young woman from Wakanda and Amadeus Cho).  I just can’t fathom, for any reason barring legal issues to which I’m not privy, why this isn’t a Miles Morales story.  Miles is such a great character in every piece of media I’ve seen him—from the expansion to Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, where they set him up to be the focus of the game series moving forward, to the aforementioned and excellent Spider-Verse films.

I appreciate the changes they’re making and the small twists to Peter’s story and I love Peter Parker—he’s been my Spider-Man for my entire life, but it’s still Peter’s story.  The same story that we’ve now had three movie trilogies about since 2002, plus 5 seasons of a cartoon in the 90s, and countless comic titles since Amazing Fantasy #15 over 60 years ago.  Miles, on the other hand, debuted just before Andrew Garfield took up the mantle to hold on to the license, back in 2011.  I don’t really read comics anymore, I do occasionally, but there’s a reason that despite the fact that I love physical copies of books and filling my bookshelves with well thumbed through paperbacks that I have a Kindle now; it’s just too much stuff.  Streaming media is so much easier and more accessible for people.  I want to see more Miles stuff.  Peter is great, I’d even have loved to see an older version of Peter rather than revisiting his high school days, but if you’re going to tell a story of a Spider-Man just starting out, why not give us Miles?  Maybe they’re planning on spinning him off into a new series if this one is successful (but with the way Disney has been handling TV series, you never know if this is intended to be an evergreen series or just the kickoff for a new “universe”), but take a little bit of a gamble, for goodness sake, and try something just a little bit new.  Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is proof that they can make a good show with compelling, fully realized characters and strong, well-plotted storylines, but it’s just too much retreading of well trod upon ground that we didn’t really need.  But at the same time, I hate to complain because this is a good show and I genuinely enjoy watching it.  Maybe this reaction is a because I’ve felt so starved for good Marvel content since Endgame wrapped up the core story and led to an aimless period of formulaic movies (with a few bright spots, certainly), but I want more.  I’m out here Oliver Twisting about a show that I really like because it still just doesn’t feel like enough.  Maybe it’s a testament to how good Friendly Neighborhood is, because it’s putting ideas in my head of how good a version of this starring Miles Morales could have been or how good an X-Men ‘97 style version of an older Peter Parker could have been.

Those concerns aside, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a great show for all ages, with relatable characters, good writing, and frankly, I can’t wait for more episodes, should we get them.

Sweet Valley Why

Okay.  Let’s talk about The Gorge.  If you’ve not been hit by Apple TV’s marketing, I’ll give you a rundown.  There’s a gorge somewhere that is absolutely pivotal and must be guarded at all times.  This is such an important and secretive job, that “the west” has one person guarding it with some automated guns to help out and “the east”, mostly Russia, it seems, also sends one person to guard it.  Makes you wonder, if it’s so important, shouldn’t there be more than one person to guard it?  Now, I have never run a covert operation before, but I don’t think the best way to do something very important that requires 24/7 monitoring is to have one sad person in solitary confinement doing it.  I would assign at least two people to it to each station, so one could monitor while the other sleeps and they can have their Morning Sam/Morning Ralph moments.  And that seems like the bare minimum.  And I also feel like the main criteria for doing the job shouldn’t be that they messed up their job in some way and won’t be missed by anyone if they die.

But that’s where we are in The Gorge, Apple TV’s original (using the term loosely) movie that released on Valentine’s Day this year, an action sci-fi rom-dramedy starring the awful Miles Teller (Whiplash, Divergent series) and the wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy (Queen’s Gambit, The Northman).  I told you before that I really love small cast actor showcases, but that requires a couple of things that aren’t present in this movie. One, you need fantastic actors.  Yes, it’s true that Anya Taylor-Joy is that—despite the fact I don’t always love her movies, her performances are always pretty much faultless, including the underrated Last Night in Soho.  But Miles Teller, well, I know he was praised for Whiplash, but I don’t get it.  To be fair, I have never seen Whiplash (though I have seen the Honest Trailer), because I don’t want to empathize with Miles Teller, not even for a fleeting moment of emotional weakness.  I can’t tell you why, it’s just one of those things where someone rubs you the wrong way completely and their presence in something gives the film or show a steep uphill climb to get into your good graces.  I used to be that way with Jason Segal, but Apple TV’s Shrinking won me over—however, The Gorge was far less successful.

Teller’s character, Levi, is a washed up sniper with an interest in poetry, PTSD, and massive sad boy energy and the movie is very preoccupied with convincing you that Levi’s ability to remember high school English and recognize T.S. Eliot references unprompted makes him unique that it doesn’t realize that if every soldier at the station leaves a quote on a wall from some poet or another, it makes Levi’s emo-poet-Chalamet-channeling character a lot less special, because he’s just like everybody else.  However, that’s far from the biggest problem with Teller’s performance; when discovering the wall of quotes, he reads a few of them out loud.  I’m not sure whether this was to done because his performance was so wooden that we wouldn’t believe that he was able to read and write or because they needed to cover the fact that this lips move when he reads.  Now, again, I don’t know much about Miles Teller personally, so I may be unnecessarily harsh about him in a way I normally reserve for people who are truly despicable off-screen, but, like I said, the guy rubs me the wrong way.  And now I’m getting ahead of myself.

After a short, quiet intro to Levi’s sad boy existence, we get to see Taylor-Joy’s character Drasa perform a long distance assassination and then go hang out with her dad in a cemetery.  Cool.  After 22 minutes of moping and exposition dumping, nothing in the movie has really happened.  Sope Dirisu (Slow Horses) plays J.D., the outgoing wall-watcher who gives Levi a quick briefing as to what life there is like, mentions that there are creatures in the gorge that they call the Hollow Men and he doesn’t know why, which introduces us to Levi’s affinity for 11th grade English, because he immediately recognizes that it’s a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name.  Don’t get too attached to J.D., though, because as soon as his exfil team picks him up, they shoot him and drop his body from a helicopter.  On top of this whole thing making no sense, that makes even less sense.  I understand from a narrative standpoint, its function is to let you know that the covert group that hires people with no attachments to guard a gorge full of monsters are bad people (as if you hadn’t figured that out already), but it’s just such a cliche.  At some point, you have to imagine that the pilot of the helicopter turns around and shoots that guy too, and then being a loose end himself, he crashes the helicopter to close the loop.

From there, we see Levi and Drasa both clock each other from a distance.  Drasa finally makes contact, which Levi says they aren’t allowed to do—which begs the question why? The way the outposts are set up, the only way to defend your own station from a direct attack from below is for the other outpost to train its weapons on them.  Why the automated sentry guns don’t work near the station, I don’t know, but the movie makes it seem like they’re just about wholly dependent on each other to defend each other’s stations, but they’re not allowed contact.  Anyway, during this rom-com portion of the movie, Levi and Drasa continue to flirt via the cards from Love, Actually, blast music and dance while they watch each other through telescopes, including a full on rock and roll Christmas song (for goodness sake, it’s February, is there no relief from Christmas music?  Is there no escape from this infernal genre? The Gorge has more Christmas music in it than 8-Bit Christmas) until one day Levi decides to zip line over there for a date.  Of course, for a guy who has made the second longest sniper shot in recorded history (which again begs the question, who is recording the distances of top secret black ops sniper kills?  Is there a rep from Guinness there when it happens, writing down the distance and then promising not to tell anyone?  Does someone near the target yell “Oh no, he was killed from 2,837 meters away!  I can tell, trust me!”?), he shows a shocking lack of knowledge of how gravity works, so he shoots his line straight across instead of at a downward angle and has to shimmy across the rope.  Where did this guy train?  He’s out here using Wile E. Coyote rules.

The two of them bond over their sniper kills—for a guy suffering from PTSD, he sure is happy to flirt using his confirmed kills—and then he drops his poetry interest on her.  This whole courtship reads like a teenage fantasy.  Sure, he’s a cold, hardened killer at work, but when he clocks out, he’s sensitive and sweet and loves poetry and puppies and kitty cats—he’s so dreamy.  It’s the same in reverse for Drasa too; she’s a Lithuanian assassin working for Russia, but really she’s just a girly girl who loves to dance and have fun and she doesn’t even know how pretty she is!  The maturity level of this movie makes Ace Ventura look sophisticated by comparison. Anyway, after a bone session, Levi does his rope crawl of shame, but it snaps midway and the action sci-fi portion of the movie begins as Drasa quickly gears up to jump into the gorge to save him.  This happens about an hour into the film.  An hour.  We’re subjected to an hour of stilted, cringeworthy flirting before something actually happens. From there, it’s shooty shooty at some creatures that look like the White Walkers crossbred with Groot, cliched reveals and twists and turns and a conclusion to the action as boring and rote as the rest of it.

Rarely is a movie both this boring and simultaneously overstuffed.  The back half of The Gorge is a whole movie stuffed into an hour, so despite the fact nothing happens in the first half, the rest of it has way too much going on and every conflict is resolved far too easily and nonsensically—at one point, one of our intrepid idiot lovers is taken prisoner by the monsters.  Now, they don’t speak, they don’t have any need for information, so what exactly is the point of taking a prisoner and torturing them?  It’s not like they’re going to learn anything from them.  Much of this portion of the movie feels like video game missions, point to point with little thought between them and monster closets pumping out enemies until you reach a checkpoint.  It reminded me of many games that were both more fun to play and had deeper, more interesting narratives than this, which is kind of a shame, because sometimes it’s nice to just watch something for two hours rather than engage yourself with a game for 20-60 hours to complete it.  But not since Extraction 2 basically copied the entire train sequence from Uncharted 2 have I seen a movie that felt so much like a video game in a bad way.

There’s so much wrong with this movie, but even if you cleaned up the writing and cast Levi with an actor who can act (and doesn’t make me irrationally hate him, I fully admit bias here), you’d have major mechanical issues with the narrative structure.  There are discrete sections of the film where it changes genres.  I love when filmmakers play with genre expectations and intertwine multiple genres together, but this isn’t that.  It’s not a creative marriage of science fiction and romance, it’s several separate movies smashed together with one set of characters.  And on top of all that, it doesn’t respect your time at all, with a run time of over two hours, much of that is spent quietly doing nothing.  And that’s not to say quiet films where not a lot happens waste your time, but there has to be a payoff.  I remember watching The Power of the Dog and finding much of it very boring, until the third act payoff made it all worth it.  The Gorge is not The Power of the Dog.  It’s barely the power of a hamster.

Had The Gorge been a romantic comedy or a romantic dramedy, it could have been better.  Had it been about a small team sent in to handle these monsters, it could have been better.  But it decided it wanted to be both and more and ended up being far, far less than the sum of its parts or the movies and video games it drew its inspiration from.  I don’t like to criticize something without offering alternatives, but because of the—let’s be nice and say—unique nature of this particular genre mashup, it’s hard to give you one movie to watch instead.  If you want a supernatural military story, I would suggest Overlord, starring Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, and Mathilde Ollivier.  It’s an excellent war/horror story set in WW2 about a squad of American soldiers sent behind enemy lines for a crucial mission on the eve of D-Day who encounter horrors they never expected.  If you want more romance and a little less violence (but still some violence), check out Netflix’s original movie Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, a much more successful blending of genres, with a properly charismatic lead man (my fanboying over Glen Powell is well documented).  Actually, just about any Glen Powell movie will fulfill that rom-com/rom-dramedy role better than this (check out Set it Up with him and Zoey Deutch if you haven’t already).  If you want the romance and sci-fi action, Love and Monsters is a handily superior film and it stars the wonderful Jessica Henwick, along with Dylan O’Brien.  If you want to experience the loneliness of wilderness monitoring where your only tenuous connection to life is a voice over a radio, I highly suggest the game Firewatch, which takes only about 4-5 hours to complete.

If the description of The Gorge appeals to you, trust me, you can find much better alternatives.  I try not to be absolutist about criticism because at the end of the day, this is just my opinion.  I’d rather say that something is not for me than say outright that it’s objectively bad, because maybe you’ll find something to enjoy here (and 65% of critics seemed to like it well enough, as well as 77% of the audience), but know that even if you watch The Gorge and enjoy it, you can still do a lot better.

Unfortunately, what they’re watching isn’t more interesting than the movie itself