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.

For Zoom the Bell Tolls

Sometimes I don’t know where to start because I’m so overwhelmed by a movie’s brilliance that building something to share with you and paring down the themes in a way that I hope will inform your viewing experience should you take the time to watch said movie can be hard when staring at a blank screen.  The movie I’m bringing you today is not that kind of movie.

No, today I’m bringing you a movie that is so bad, I don’t know where to begin with it at all.  I’m talking about the 2025 Prime Video original film, War of the Worlds.  Starring Ice Cube (21 Jump Street, Three Kings) and Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives, Nespresso: The Detective).  A COVID-19 production, it was filmed entirely remotely and is told through computer screens and phone footage.  That’s not the best way to make a film, as admirable as it is that it could have been done during the pandemic; why this movie took 5 years to get to streaming, I’ll never know.  But by now, it feels like the death knell for this format of storytelling, after films like Searching (2018) and Missing (2023) and shows like Staged (Britbox’s excellent pandemic dramedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen) and Modern Family managed to do it so effectively.  Unfortunately for anyone who wants to delve into this creative form of storytelling, it will forever be haunted by the ghost of War of the Worlds; this feels like the “jump the shark” moment for this narrative structure.

Adapting any novel is difficult, especially trying to take one that is so outdated and has many adaptations to its name already.  And it proved to be too difficult a challenge for the team behind this one.

Will Radford (Ice Cube) logs into his job at Homeland Security, firing up the invasive surveillance machine to spy on just about everyone and everything—people on the streets, government buildings, and above all, his own children.  Radford is about the most unsympathetic protagonist I can remember watching in a long time; as he’s going about his threat checks, he gets a call from Sandra NASA (Eva Longoria).  I’m not sure if her name is Sandra NASA, but since she also works at NASA, that would be quite the coincidence.  Am I the only person who puts first and last names in their phone?  After undergrad, I looked at my contacts and realized having 8 entries that just said “Mike” (and one that said “Mike vodka double shot?”) wasn’t a very efficient way of keeping in touch with people.  Was that one Mike with 8 different phone numbers?  Was it 8 different Mikes?  There’s no way I knew that many people named Mike.  Anyway, she’s asking about very strange weather patterns that are becoming dangerous.  He immediately dismisses her and reiterates that all he cares about are human threats, not the weather.  Not only is he running a seriously invasive surveillance program that goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection in a very dystopian governmental program, he also loves to spy on his adult children.  He calls up his very pregnant daughter Faith to criticize her for buying a muffin for breakfast and tells her to eat a single hard boiled egg instead.  And then he hacks her fridge to point out that she’s not eating enough protein. 

Just normal dad stuff, right?  Not at all controlling, red flag behavior.  Then he hacks his son Dave’s computer and deletes a video game off it because he thinks games are a waste of time.  Not considering at all that his son’s job involves video games; he just wants him to stop doing whatever he’s doing and join the NSA so he too can be an invasive, rights-violating surveillance jockey for the government.  When his son’s protests, he justifies his work because having your rights violated is better than being killed by terrorists.  Which is an insane thing to put in a movie that you’re releasing in 2025, a time in which masked men are rolling up in unmarked SUV and black bagging people on the street in the name of a safer society, but I guess this was written during the pandemic, so we weren’t worried about being put in concentration camps back then?   It’s okay though, he’s got a dead wife, which is a shortcut to making us care about him.  Right?  If this is the society we’re fighting for, let the aliens win.

After that lovely interchange between father and son, Faith’s boyfriend Mark calls him up to ask him to reconsider going to Faith’s baby shower.  Now, I know what you’re thinking; Radford sounds like he’s be a damn ball at parties, of course they want such a fun guy there.  But no, as it turns out Faith never invited Radford to the shower and he didn’t know it was happening.  So, taking a moment to reflect on what behavior as a father would lead to his daughter not wanting him to share in that wonderful moment together, he realizes his mistakes as a parent and starts to make positive changes in his relationship with his children.  I’m kidding, of course.  His immediate response is to hack her computer and spy on her iMessages with her boyfriend so he can see what they’re saying about him.  Very healthy.  Not at all a massive violation of trust.  And also probably not something you’re supposed to do when working at DHS.  If one of his coworkers caught him using government resources to spy on his adult children, he’d have been in lots of trouble.  Luckily, for some reason in this massive DHS building, he’s the only one there.  He’s the only one in the room, he’s the only one seemingly in the building, and they never explain why or even address it a little bit.  While he’s dropping electronic eaves on his daughter, they slot in the heaviest-handed foreshadowing I’ve seen in a movie in some time.  Mark reassures Faith that she’s going to save the world someday with her work, a “Cannibal Code” that will rewrite DNA to attack sick cells.  If you’ve seen any adaptation of War of the Worlds before or read the book or have seen Independence Day, you know where that particular thread is going.

But being predictable isn’t this movie’s problem.  It’s hard not to be at least a little predictable when you’re adapting a 125 year old novel—some plot points are going to make their way into the public consciousness in that time period, as much as you try to avoid spoilers.  Everything is this movie’s problem.  The writing is baffling at times, the special effects are horrendously bad, often using spotty connections and pixelated VC calls to try to cover up the fact the CGI looks terrible.  For a reported $65 million budget, it feels like someone is walking around with $64 million in their back pocket.  Back in 2010, Gareth Edwards made Monsters for $500,000 and did the special effects on his laptop in his bedroom and that looked better than this.  And so much of the movie just doesn’t make sense.  While helping the FBI conduct a raid on Disruptor, an Anonymous-like hacker group, the lead FBI agent puts him on FaceTime and walks into the location with her phone up in one hand and her gun in the other so he could watch the raid as it happens.  Shouldn’t the FBI have more specialized gear for that sort of thing?  Don’t tell me that bodycams are just cell phones taped to people’s chests.  Doesn’t matter though, not a single shot is fired as the hacker they were after wasn’t where they tracked him to.  But after that, meteors come raining down all the over the world, peppering the globe with what looks like a massive meteor shower.  In a very Star Trek: The Original Series moment, Radford is thrown around a bit in the shock of nearby crashing meteors and spills his coffee on himself.  It is a cheesy and an unintentionally funny moment, one of many in the film.  Also, throughout the film, there are numerous news reports that are always immediate, accurate, and tailored for Radford to hear exactly what he was hoping not to hear.  It constantly takes you out of any modicum of immersion that you can have in this movie.  Furthermore, global networks go down, leaving the world’s militaries stranded and planes falling out of the sky; yet when it’s convenient for the plot, everything is working again with no explanation.

Sandra gets to one of the crash sites and, yes, video calls Radford to show him around it.  A lot of this movie is based around nonsensical Zoom calls where the person on the phone is doing something that they most definitely should have two hands free while doing and also not splitting focus to look at their phone.  As the video feed gets conveniently fuzzy, we see the big reveal; there’s something alive in the meteors!  Now, in addition to this pixelated video mechanic not being a compelling storytelling device, much like the conveniently cutting out radios in Jurassic World, it also feels like a shameless way to shove product placement in our faces.  Throughout the course of this movie, we see FaceTime, Zoom, Microsoft Teams (RIP Skype), iMessage, and WhatsApp, at the very least, and that’s just in the communication app space.  Not only is Faith’s boyfriend an Amazon delivery driver, the phrase “see what’s in their Amazon shopping cart” is used multiple times and someone is even bribed with a $1,000 Amazon gift card.  You know, just in case you forgot you were watching the movie on Amazon’s video streaming service.  Anyway, the aliens start blowing a bunch of stuff up, including the lead FBI agent.  Good thing these characters are all so one-dimensional or that might have been sad.  His son calls him, trying to give him what he says is important information, but in typical fashion, Radford dismisses him outright and argues with him for seemingly longer than it would take for Dave to give him the information in the first place.  So instead of listening and possibly getting something useful, he just hangs up.  Remember, we’re supposed to root for this guy.

All this happens about 25 minutes into the movie, which doesn’t seem like a long time to wait for the big reveal that aliens are coming in your alien movie, but it’s nearly a third of the way into this 91 minute film and it feels like it was an hour.  Or two.  I was honestly shocked that it was only 25 minutes because it had been such a slog to get there.

Radford watches footage from all over the world, the camera cuts to him writing out what’s happening as it happens, because watching him watch it happen probably isn’t enough for us to get the idea.  The movie wants it extremely clear that the aliens who crash landed on Earth and started blowing everything up are really not great folks.  He gets in touch with Faith, who for some reason decided to leave the building where she was sheltering because despite being a very smart scientist, she’s incredibly stupid and the movie apparently can’t happen unless an alien tripod attacks her, leaving Radford worried that she died for a few seconds.  Because still in the midst of a global attack that is probably killing millions, if not billions of people, the only thing we care about is the protagonist’s family and it’s the only thing he seems to care about.  As she’s running away and holding her phone on FaceTime, she falls down.  Actually, pretty much everyone who is running from something on a video call falls down, sometimes multiple times.  It’s as if trying to look at a phone while running from chaos is a bad idea.  So her leg is impaled and Radford decides that he’s going to go save her.  He runs to the door and it won’t open. “Damn it, they locked it”, he narrates to us in the most unintentionally laugh out loud moment I’ve seen in a movie since I watched Lena Waithe pretend to hand Tye Sheridan a virtual Chucky doll in Ready Player One.  Unable to get through the locked glass—yes, glass, the famously impenetrable material that can never be broken by less than superhuman means—door or the glass walls of his office, he settles for hacking a Tesla to get her to a safe place.  They have an overwrought heart to heart about the baby shower; you can tell that they thought it would be some sort of emotional catharsis, but it’s executed with the panache of a middle school play.  And during this, he starts to write her an email about how hard being a parent is.

We get the reveal of what the aliens are up to and some more very not-surprising reveals as well, and the whole world comes together to protect our “way of life”.  Not our very existence, no, our way of life.  It makes it seem like the aliens came down to gently get rid of social media and make us be nicer to each other, not exterminate the human population.  And so on and so forth, heroic actions abound, conspiracies exposed, and the movie finally comes to an end.

I try my best to find things to like in every movie I watch, I really do.  After all, movies are art and there’s subjective interpretation and most of the time, people put a lot of care and effort into bringing these pieces of art to us.  But War of the Worlds doesn’t feel like there was care and effort put into it.  It felt like a commercial product incompetently made and offered for our consumption.  This is a movie that makes Electric State look watchable and like The Gorge, it felt more like it would have been an engaging game rather than a movie.  This is a movie with a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and I’m still trying to figure out how 3% of critics (and 21% of audience reviewers) found anything enjoyable about this movie.  The moments of unintentional hilarity are not enough to redeem War of the Worlds or turn it into a so-bad-it’s-good movie; it’s just bad.  If you’re in the mood for down to earth alien invasion sci-fi, I would highly recommend not wasting your time on this and instead watching the aforementioned Monsters (while Gareth Edwards has had more misses than hits at the helm, Monsters put him in line to give us Rogue One) or the absolutely deep, well-thought out, well written, well acted, and well directed Attack the Block, which is everything that this movie is not.

And readers, if you felt like the pictures included in this post were a bit repetitive, imagine what it was like watching the movie because that’s pretty much how it went. 90 minutes of Zoom calls and Ice Cube reaction faces until the credits roll.

Night Bawler

Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

“Aubade” by Philip Larkin

It’s not often I open a post with an excerpt from a poem (in fact, it’s never happened before) and don’t worry if poetry’s not your thing; it’s not a new format.  But the movie I am bringing to you today reminded me so much of this poem, that I’ve had open in a tab in my browser since I first heard it in an episode of Devs in 2020, that they’ve become forever intertwined.  Meet Orion, the boy with so many fears that he keeps a sketchbook to document everything he’s afraid of.  And it’s a lot.  Murderous sewer clowns, cell phone cancer, mixing up his words when called on in class even though he knows the answer, cats, dogs, etc.  He’s scared of getting picked on by his bully.  He’s scared of standing up to his bully and accidentally killing him graveyard dead.  It’s pretty much everything.  At one point, the bully grabs his sketchbook and goes through his fears and Orion just thanks him.  It was such a pitiable moment that the bully doesn’t even know where to go from there.  Orion is the poster child for anxiety.

At the end of the school day, he is the only student who doesn’t hand in his permission slip for the class field trip to the observatory—you guessed it, because he’s afraid of everything from the bus ride over to being crushed by the exhibits falling from the ceiling.  Then, as he arrives home, he reveals the saddest fear of all; that his parents will move away while he’s at school, leaving him on his own.  That’s completely unfounded, from what we see of his parents.  They seem supportive of Orion; they understand his fears and they don’t think something is wrong with him.    They don’t try to correct his behavior and they’re never disparaging in any way.  There’s no “that boy ain’t right” moment with Orion’s parent.  Sure, they want to encourage him to face his fears, but they don’t push him and there’s no talk about trying to fix him, which is very refreshing.  And then, as night falls, we get to see Orion’s greatest fears come to fruition.  Darkness.  And death, can’t forget death.  He lies awake at night trying to imagine what death is like—the vast, meaningless darkness that awaits us all, enveloping us in its nothingness.  It’s at this point that I should note that Orion is a 5th grader, about 11 years old.  Wait until you get to your 30s, kid.  It gets rough.  And that’s how the first ten minutes of DreamWorks’ Orion and the Dark goes.  Good god, this is a relatable movie.

And then the dark shows up.  I mean Dark, the embodiment of darkness, the being that makes the nighttime all across the world as the sun dips itself beneath the horizon.  He’s fed up with how afraid Orion is of him and how much his screaming and crying at the darkness interrupt his nightly work.  But more than that, Dark is hurt.  Most people are afraid of him in some way or another, people think he’s evil or ominous or foreboding.  As Dark, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), explains it, “so much of how you see yourself is through the eyes of others”.  It’s painful for him to be hated by so many and Orion, voiced by Jacob Tremblay (Room, Luca), is the one who hates him the most.  Dark makes a proposal: Orion comes with him for the night to witness what he does and hopefully he’ll see that the dark isn’t so scary after all.  Of course, Orion refuses at first because he’s, well, too damn afraid.  But not wanting to be afraid of everything for his entire life, he reluctantly agrees to go with Dark.  It’s at this point, we cut to the future, with Orion the adult played with real Colin Hanks energy (which makes sense because, as I looked it up, he is voiced by Colin Hanks of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and King Kong fame) telling the story to his own daughter Hypatia.  This was an unexpected form of narrative structure, but a nice one—the scenes with adult Orion and Hypatia are unbelievably cute, reminding me of 8-Bit Christmas’s narrative structure.  It’s not the easiest structure to pull off, but when it works, it’s so satisfying.

Dark introduces Orion to the rest of the Night Entities, taking a break between time zones: Insomnia, Quiet, Sleep, Unexplained Noises, and Sweet Dreams.  The character design here is really interesting; Quiet is an adorable mouse-like fluff ball, Insomnia a bug like creature that buzzes in your ear, Unexplained Noises a bit like a robot.   They don’t love that Dark brought a kid around, but they go about their business anyway, trying to help Dark convince Orion that there’s nothing really all that bad about the night.  Although, if you’re keeping track, Insomnia and Unexplained Noises probably aren’t the best examples; being two Night Entities meant to keep people up at night, whispering your insecurities into your ear and making you wonder just what the hell made that sound (it could be a murderous sewer clown heading your way).  We also meet the one everyone loves to see—Light.  Light, voiced by Ike Barinholtz (Neighbors, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), is exactly what you expect him to be: the embodiment of morning, daytime, and sunlight, the thing that brings life to the planet.  Together, they form the constant cycle of day and night that envelopes our world, though they can never be in the same place at the same time.  Should Light ever catch Dark, well, what happens when you shine a light into a dark corner of a room?

From there, the two of them go on their adventure together, with Dark trying to get Orion to confront his fears and, well, sometimes failing.  As Hypatia likes to point out to her dad, parents may like simple stories with neat resolutions, but that’s not real.  And as Hypatia puts it, the only stories that really help are the real ones—so while simple stories may be the most convenient for parents to convey complex moral conundrums in easily digestible ways, that’s not how they always work out.  Just because you face your fears doesn’t mean they go away and certainly not something as primal and evolutionary as the fear of the dark. Cavemen probably didn’t invent fire to cook meat (since we all know it tastes better raw anyway); I mean, I’m sure warmth on cold nights was one of the motivating factors, but a fire fending off the dark of night is most certainly one of the reasons as well.  So true stories resonate more because they’re true and I think we can see the value in being honest about things, especially with children.  I think that sort of honesty imbues kids with realistic expectations for life (just like Orion’s parents telling him to face his fears rather than be fearless).  There’s something so human in honesty, a vulnerability that people connect with, and that’s something this movie definitely is. Honest and vulnerable.

Even the things we’re afraid of can have fears of their own; as Dark faces his own existential crisis, he tells Orion that his fear is more easily managed because Orion is there with him.  And I think that drives home one of the messages of the film, that simply being there for someone—not offering solutions, not trying to “fix” them or their problems (an issue I, admittedly, have myself, but I’m working on it)—can make as much of a difference as anything else.  One of the things that I find most interesting about Orion and the Dark is that Light isn’t the enemy; he’s not an antagonist, as much as Dark seems envious that people are happy to see Light and very much less than excited when he rolls around.  Light’s not the enemy, fear is.  It’s the voice in our head that says we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not tall enough, not enough period.  This is a movie about how we need ourselves and each other to get through the world, because it is a scary world out there.  Just watch the news for 30 seconds, our reality is terrifying.  But it’s through facing our fears that we grow.

The movie isn’t about eradicating fear.  It’s about learning to live with it and through it, not letting it dictate our lives and stop us from experiencing what life has to offer.  Fear can paralyze us and keep us from truly living.  Some fear is good, natural, and necessary.  But it shouldn’t determine our every action.  Bravery may save no one from the grave, as Larkin told us, but it may save us from ourselves.  This is a movie that is ostensibly for kids, but it’s about real adult issues.  Orion has very real fears that go beyond the worry of saying the wrong thing in class—the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of being alone; these are real things that grip adults everyday.  We live with this fantastic fear of everything and somehow most of us are able to cope with it and make it through our days.  The nights, though, those can be quite a bit harder.  Like Orion, I myself have spent many nights staring at the ceiling, with Insomnia whispering my insecurities and fears in my ear, the ever-present thoughts of what has and will and will not come to pass.  [T]his is what we fear—no sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with…but slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape, and we go about our daily business.  Unlike Orion, we don’t get mythological beings to guide us through facing our fears; instead we have to rely on each other.  A burden shared is a burden lightened.  And that is the overarching message here; that with each other, with empathy and understanding, we can face the fears that would otherwise petrify us in place, turning us into stone like we just lost a staring contest with Medusa.

Orion and the Dark may be an animated film, but it’s definitely not just for kids.  It is as deep and complex as the night itself, but funny and heartwarming as well.  Orion is a perfect stand-in for anyone who has felt fear or anxiety gripping at that pump in their chests, and it’s shocking to me that this hidden gem went as under the radar as it did.  It’s rare that a movie approaches fear and anxiety with such care as this does and it deserves to be celebrated.  It lacks the catchy tunes of KPop Demon Hunters, but it’s every bit the real, adult story that Demon Hunters is.  It was apparently released straight to Netflix after the failure of Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken to avoid taking a bath at the box office, it snuck through 2024 being an anonymous film, despite its 91% RT score, that is quite simply one of the strongest, most beautiful, and most real stories I’ve seen.  This is DreamWorks dipping into some of that Pixar magic for 93 straight minutes.  And I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Requiem for a Scheme

As the saying goes, cats have nine lives.  Zsa-Zsa Korda has more.  When we meet him for the first time, he’s sitting on his private plane, which explodes, killing the only other passenger, before crashing.  An assassination attempt, nearly successful, and his seventh plane crash.  He’s survived the previous six and, despite a vision of the afterlife, in which his own grandmother doesn’t recognize him, he survives this one too.  And that’s how Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme begins.

One close call in a long line of many, Korda decides to name his only daughter Liesl (sounds like), an aspirant nun, as his sole heir and executor of his estate.  His nine sons (some biological, some adopted) seem none too happy about the idea, one in particular sharpening his toy crossbow bolts and taking a few potshots at dear old dad while he explains the scheme to Liesl.  It’s a grand scheme in Phoenicia, the former name for parts of Syria and Lebanon, taking an arid area, going deep, and essentially stripping it of all its natural resources in a highly lucrative operation that will make a wild amount of money for his family for generations to come; 150 years by his estimates.  Korda, played by Benicio Del Toro (The Usual Suspects, Sicario), is an absolutely ruthless businessman and he doesn’t care a damn thing about anyone or anything but the money.  Much to his daughter’s dismay, played by relative newcomer Mia Threapleton (The Buccaneers) in her first Wes Anderson film, he uses the most underhanded tactics to get his way, including slave labor and causing famine in areas of operation so people have no choice but to work for him and take his meager wagers.  Make no mistake, Zsa-Zsa Korda is a terrible person, an awful father, and perhaps an even worse husband, as he’s currently on three dead wives, with rumors swirling that he murdered them, including Liesl’s mother.  But he has this Rasputin-like ability to survive the many attempts on his life—the multiple plane crashes, of course being the most dramatic, but this is a guy who tests everything he eats and drinks for poison, and with good reason.  I mean, I kind of want him dead and he’s the protagonist.

Meeting with Liesl, they see each other for the first time in years and Korda tells her about the plan and tries to coax her into leaving the Church so she can fulfill these duties he’s trying to thrust upon her.  Initially hesitant, due in no small part to her belief that, as rumors say, Korda murdered her mother, Liesl resists and states her devotion to the Church.  He emphatically denies it, of course, but there’s still doubt in her mind—and yours, when you’re watching.  Eventually she’s convinced after a dinner at his large home with her brothers.  It’s an odd affair, as there’s no fondness between father and sons and Korda’s staff is treated with indifference.  One of the sons says that the soup is good, so Korda summons her to tell her so by banging his foot on the floor twice, prompting the cook to come upstairs.  You can see the real apprehension in her face; she has no idea what will happen when she gets up there.  The meeting between Korda and Liesl is absolute comedy gold.  There’s a deep strangeness between the two and when Liesl finally acquiesces, they go so far as to replace her rosary with a more secular one—the absurdity of the statement left me laughing out loud.  Now, to be fair, I don’t know much about Catholicism, but I’m pretty sure that the rosary is inherently tied to religion and I can’t imagine how you would have a secular version of that.

In the background of all this, there is another scheme in the works, as a shadowy meeting of competing business tycoons and governments who are threatened by Korda convene to find a way to neutralize him.  After all, if someone keeps trying to kill your protagonist, you’ve got to figure that someone is out there orchestrating the whole thing.  And indeed they are, but in this case, the cabal says that killing Korda is over the line; they just want to ruin him, not take him off the map entirely.  Which, I suppose is good and an interesting introduction to one of the main themes of the film, morality and sincerity.  We see two opposite ends of the spectrum at the beginning of the film: Liesl, the pious aspirant nun, fully sincere in her beliefs in what was considered a traditionally moral organization, and Korda, as cutthroat a businessman as you can imagine, someone who only values money even over life and is only barely convincing when he says that he would never murder anyone (or have anyone murdered, which I feel is a distinction that, if you have to make in the first place, casts serious doubt on anything you say you would or wouldn’t do).  The cabal here represents the first of many gray areas that get introduced in the film; obviously they’re not the best folks out there, but they do have lines they won’t cross, which suggests some sort of moral compass within them.  And not one from religion, that’s for sure.   

After Liesl joins up with Korda, he replaces his tutor, a person he hires to teach both him and his children things about their areas of expertise.  The last tutor, you may remember, was bifurcated when the plane in the opening scene went down—he was the passenger who died.  Enter Bjorn, played by Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Barbie), a professor of entomology and some other unimportant disciplines.  It surprised me when I realized Michael Cera has never been in a Wes Anderson film before, because he’s such a natural fit.  He has that deadpan awkwardness down to a highly skillful degree and fits in so well with all the rest of the delivery in Scheme.  It’s pithy and quick, but no one ever makes a joke in the fiction of the story.  It’s purely an absurdist measure—in the world of the narrative, this is how they act and it’s perfectly normal.  But from the outside looking in, I would wager that Scheme is the most laugh out loud Wes Anderson film I’ve ever seen.  I spent a couple hours whiling away time in a hotel room this weekend watching Happy Gilmore 2 and because I couldn’t put together a coherent thought about it other than “I didn’t like this”, I dove into Scheme when I returned home and found myself laughing out loud even more than I was cringing at Adam Sandler’s antics. 

The casting choices are many of the Wes Anderson mainstays, like Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade (another perfect fit for this kind of deadpan comedy), Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, and Rupert Friend, and seeing a newcomer like Michael Cera bed into his first Wes Anderson movie so well shows off why Anderson is so keen to work with the same people over and over again.  There’s obvious aesthetic and vibe to Wes Anderson films and its makes sense to work with actors who are on board and familiar with it already.  There was really only one other notable newcomer to the Wes Anderson ensemble (outside of Mia Threapleton, of course) in the form of Riz Ahmed (Rogue One, Sound of Metal); a small role, but acted well with a surprising amount of laughs generated from the dramatic actor and rapper.  I was surprised not to see perennials like Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzmann, and Owen Wilson in the film, but that’s fine, because it was packed with tons of great actors and actresses in mostly very good cameos (I’d say only Scarlett Johansson’s casting felt off; her character and performance were very forgettable in a movie full of noteworthy performances).

Speaking of Wes Anderson’s aesthetic and vibe, Scheme has it in spades.  It immediately looks and feels like a Wes Anderson film, and if that’s a positive for you, then I think you’d definitely like this.  It’s even set in 1950 to help fit that aesthetic.  If you’re on the fence about Anderson, it’s still worth a shot; but if you absolutely can’t stand him, you’re not going to enjoy the film because he’s not doing much different with the way he’s making his film here than he does with the rest of the films he’s made thus far.  But there is one thing that struck me as very different from the movie that got me to perk my ears up and start to revisit his work after being kind of a Wes Anderson hater for much of my life, Asteroid City.  Yes, both movies are stylized and at least somewhat absurd, but Asteroid City drew me in with its portrait of profoundly sad people in a very strange situation.  From there, I gave The Darjeeling Limited a try and while it didn’t beat out Asteroid City for me, I liked it quite a bit and it was also about profoundly sad people.  I don’t know what it says about me that as I get older I am enjoying and identifying more with movies about sad people in strange situations, but there you have it.  However, Scheme isn’t about that; Liesl is lonely, sure, being in a convent and all, and I’m sure Korda is lonely as well, living a solitary life despite being surrounded by staff and children, and fending off near-constant assassination attempts is its own sort of intimacy, I suppose.  But I wouldn’t describe either of them as sad or depressed.  Longing, perhaps; looking for something that’s missing in their lives, even though they don’t quite know what it is yet.  But not sad.  And I think that’s what lends itself to this more overtly comedic film; even though there is depth to it, it is very funny.  In a way, the idea of seeking morality and sincerity in a world of chaos and relentless mercilessness is funny in itself, but not in a “ha ha” funny kind of way, more in an odd funny way.  However, Anderson and the cast bring this absurdity out to you in expert fashion.

But it’s not just funny, there is depth here.  Yes, there’s a lot of religious imagery and every time Korda has a near death experience or even nods off unexpectedly, we’re treated to a black and white vignette of Korda meeting his maker, being judged for his actions, and all the stuff that tends to come along with that.  What ensues is a journey between two opposite ends of the morality spectrum.  Liesl faces temptation, both in the form of both Korda’s money, always a corrupting influence, and Bjorn, who is immediately smitten with her.  What we see throughout the film is a painting of people trying to find acceptance and understanding of themselves in a mad world.  The idea of living a moral and sincere life that comes from within yourself instead from an external source, like religion, runs through the entire film—it starts with a despicable protagonist and ends with something else.  Korda has to learn a new way of interacting with the world as he realizes that he is indeed incomplete with the life that he’s been living.  Every major character in the film needs to change to live a life true to who they are and a good one as well.  So on top of being really quite funny, it’s a fairly beautiful film and I kind of can’t wait to watch it again.

The Phoenician Scheme may not make a fan out of a Wes Anderson hater, but if you’re open to his very distinct style of filmmaking, the brisk 1 hour, 41 minute film is worth your time and it’s available for streaming on Peacock.  With a 77% RT score, I was, like Liesl, hesitant myself, as I’ve discussed the curse of corporate mediocrity in the 70% range, but this doesn’t fall into that trap at all.  I, for one, am looking forward to revisiting even more Wes Anderson movies that I might have passed over because this is three in a row now that have really spoken to me.  It’s a movie that asks you to help yourself to a hand grenade and in this case, my answer is an emphatic yes, please, I’ll take one.