You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted.
In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye.
There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.
Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Wong Kar-wai’s indirect, sci-fi tinged sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 (2004).
00:00 Welcome
06:06 The Hairy Bird (1998) 08:22 Leonor Will Never Die (2023) 13:00 Smoking Causes Coughing (2023) 17:50 The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 – 2012) 26:56 Nimona (2023) 31:36 The First Wives Club (1996) 38:48 Oppenheimer (2023) 47:00 Touch of Evil (1958) 53:10 Talk to Me (2023)
It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads. Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library). I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development. I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi. Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture. Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy. What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform. Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway. For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD. Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.
By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming. Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime. It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date. It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo. It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget. There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out. Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones. Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation. Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).
Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025. No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm. Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights. Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes. The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far. Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination. Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand. These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.
There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking. Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis. I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course. Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation. There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script. The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss. Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine. There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi. In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll. I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).
There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced.
Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step.
Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating.
Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them.
Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar.
And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together.
There’s something adorably quaint about the recent sci-fi action picture 65, in which a sweaty Adam Driver going to intergalactic war with dinosaurs in Earth’s futuristic past. Driver is technically playing a space alien, but he has no physical features that distinguish him from Earthling humanity: no antennae, no fins, no gills, nothing beyond his usual unique physique. When he arrives on Earth, he removes his helmet and vocally declares the air breathable. His weapon against our prehistoric planet’s dinosaur creatures is a ray gun. Whether intentionally or not, 65 is essentially a dumb-as-rocks throwback to 1950s schlock. It plays like a basic-premise remake of an MST3k punching bag with a title like Beasts of a Savage World or Journey to the Planet Earth, updated with modern CG but thankfully not softened with modern self-referential irony. There isn’t much to the film beyond its bar napkin premise, in which Driver drives a spaceship into Earth’s dirt 65 million years ago, then fights off the dinosaurs (and dino-adjacent monsters) that attempt to eat him along with the only other survivor of the crash. The film’s only real value beyond the novelty of watching Driver shoot laser guns at dinosaurs, then, is in comparing how differently modern action schlock handles the premise from how Atomic Age sci-fi might have over half a century ago.
The major modern affect that drags down 65‘s entertainment value is the compulsion to overexplain itself with expositional context. Directed by the screenwriters of the similarly weighed-down A Quiet Place—Scott Beck & Bryan Woods—the film is seemingly fearful of YouTube fanboy criticism of its “plot holes” & fanciful outlandishness. Because humanity evolved after dinosaurs went extinct, Driver must belong to another humanoid race of people to share the screen with the towering beasts. Surviving a spaceship crash alongside a young adolescent passenger is apparently not enough motivation for him to protect her against this far-out world’s Jurassic beasts; it’s also explained that he has a daughter of a similar age back on his homeworld, whose diaries in his absence are doled out through a device lifted wholesale from Interstellar. Between the film’s opening storybook narration informing us that these events occur “prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space” and the unnecessary prologue set on Driver’s alien planet, it isn’t until 40 minutes into the runtime that our hero actually shoots a laser beam at a dinosaur. And since the film is only worth the novelty of its one-sentence premise, that’s a huge problem. If 65 were made in the 1950s, Driver would’ve been from Earth, crash-landed on a similar planet with its own dinosaurs, immediately opened fire, smooched an “alien” babe, discovered in a last-minute twist that he had merely time-traveled backwards, and the whole thing would’ve been wrapped up in 65 minutes to leave room for the next movie on the drive-in double bill. The dinosaurs would’ve been stop-motion too, and maybe even borrowed from the footage of a better-funded picture. Roger Corman is still alive & working somewhere out there, but Hollywood really doesn’t make efficient, delirious schlock like it used to, mostly because every fanciful creative impulse now has to be “justified” to keep online cynics at bay.
Still, I appreciated that this modern DTV action treatment of a retro pulp sci-fi premise never slips into winking-at-the-camera Deadpool irony. Although Driver has a knack for comedic delivery, the world is better off being spared of his alien-invasion equivalent of Kong: Skull Island. I suspect that happened because Beck & Woods are largely humorless in their craft and were somehow unaware that they were making 1950s sci-fi pastiche in the first place. Whatever the reason, the movie’s self-serious tone is a great counterbalance to its glaringly unserious premise. Its internal aversion to irony & camp does mean that it’s a little boring in stretches (especially in the dino-free opening half), but it’s a pleasant, cozy kind of boring. 65 is crash-landing on Netflix soon, but its ultimate, ideal presentation is in afternoon daylight programming on whatever basic cable channel dads nap to these days. As a creature feature, it’s got a playfully unscientific approach to what counts as a “dinosaur.” As an Adam Driver vehicle, it’s going to make for a delightfully odd footnote in what’s sure to be a delightfully odd movie star career. It was also partially filmed in Louisiana swamps (the parts that weren’t filmed against green screens on New Orleans sound stages), which gives it an extra layer of novelty for local napping dads, too tired to find the clicker.
I am reporting from deep within the bowels of New Nerd America: a pop art dystopia in which nerds have decidedly won the culture war and allowed the media landscape to rot in decades-old rubble instead of encouraging anything fresh to flourish. What I mean to say is that there’s nothing especially interesting to me in theaters right now, because all the local marquees are cluttered with nostalgia-bait IP. Our poptimistic celebration of vintage nerd culture has gone too far, to the point where nearly all American screen space has been gobbled up by bajillion dollar intellectual propertie$ that service some long gestating fandom: Marvel fans, DC fans, Mario fans, Transformer fans, Fast & Furious fans, Little Mermaid fans, oscillating fans, and fans of the Boogeyman. Even the more artistic alternatives to this deluge of summertime corporate schlock—the new Spider-Man and the new Kamen Rider—are reverently referential to the nerdy histories of their titular superheroes; they just happen to be better crafted than most other nerd-culture nostalgia stokers currently on the market. In these moments of early-summer panic, I always think back to Spielberg’s dystopian adaptation of Ready Player One, a movie that mourned the cultural brain rot of a society willing to dwell in the artistic triumphs of the past instead of innovating new populist art for the future. As you’ll remember, Ready Player One was a critical failure upon its release, mostly for its association with its vapid source-material novel, which celebrated the dawning of the New Nerd America with uncritical nerdgasmic glee. I personally thought Spielberg did a good job of undercutting the nostalgic poptimism of Ernest Cline’s book, though, the same way that Verhoeven “adapted” Starship Troopers into an argument against its own militaristic thesis. To me, Ready Player One was a nightmare vision of a near-future Hell dominated by 1980s nerd culture bullshit (one we’re already living in just five years later). The only way its Pre-Existing IP Futurism could possibly look fun & celebratory is if nerds were still the pop culture underdogs fighting to earn wider cultural respect for their personal pet obsessions. Basically, it’s as if everyone misread 2018’s Ready Player One as a remake of 1984’s The Last Starfighter.
There’s something fascinating about the pop culture ouroboros of The Last Starfighter borrowing heavily from early Spielberg, then being echoed in Ready Player One, which was then adapted into a legitimate Spielberg film with outright contempt for its own source material. Like in Cline’s celebration of New Nerd America, The Last Starfighter is the story of a Fanboy loser who proves the local Haters who doubt him wrong when his video gaming skills end up saving the planet instead of just wasting countless hours of his youth. The 1980s setting means that he’s addicted to an arcade cabinet instead of a VR headset, but the spirit remains the same. Lance Guest “stars” as a frustrated, go-nowhere teen who earns the high score on his trailer park’s communal arcade game while all the Cool Kids are off enjoying a social day at the beach. The game turns out to be an intergalactic recruitment tool for a noble space alien army who need the nerd’s joystick skills to win their space-laser war with a vaguely defined enemy. Instead of directly adapting the gameplay “plot” of a specific game the way most Video Game Movies would (the animated Super Mario Bros movie being a recent example), The Last Starfighter instead portrays the reason nerdy kids obsess over those games in the first place. It’s a live-action illustration of the escapist power fantasy the medium offers its pasty shut-in players. And since video games were still a nerds-only proposition at the time The Last Starfighter was produced, it’s a charming prototype for the much sourer escapist power fantasy that would be echoed in the Ready Player One novel, which is a gloating celebration of the dominant pop culture of its time. The Last Starfighter is almost just as much a celebration of 1980s kitsch as its 2010s equivalent. Its titular arcade game is a shameless Star Wars rip-off; its space-age adventurism is directly informed by early Spielberg titles like E.T. & Close Encounters; and its basic video-game-recruitment premise is essentially a too-soon remake of Tron‘s. It’s so deeply steeped in 80s nerd shit that its inclusion of a DeLorean-shaped spaceship feels like an homage to Back to the Future, even though it was released a year earlier than that Zemeckis touchstone. There’s just something wholesome about that reverence for 80s nerd culture being filmed when it could still get you dunked in a toilet or shoved in a locker, as opposed to it being screen-printed on every Target brand t-shirt on the shelf.
Not every aspect of The Last Starfighter is wholesome & quaint. In my dusty DVD’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the movie’s “continued popularity”, the computer effects artists behind its creation are loudly proud of their contribution to modern blockbuster filmmaking, claiming that The Last Starfighter was the first feature film to primarily use CG effects to produce its “real world” space-fighting environments. The early-80s CG has aged about as well as you would expect, often giving the film the feel of a vintage PC video game instead of a proper sci-fi picture. It was certainly ahead of the industrial curve, though, which you can tell in how improbably advanced its star-war graphics look in the arcade gameplay vs. how surreally dated they look once our nerdy hero is playing the game “for real.” It was also made in a time before programmers were brave enough to attempt computerizing their space alien characters, so there are thankfully plenty of adorable rubber-mask monsters cheering on & fighting alongside our fanboy gamer hero. The computer animation team did a decent job for their era, but they could have done even better if the studio had given them the proper time & resources needed to complete the project. Even in my DVD’s victory lap featurette, they complain about the stress of completing the project on time, having been given an impossible 6-month deadline to finalize their effects work. As a result, they rushed the project to completion, putting in overworked, undercompensated hours to make sure the movie could hit its predetermined release date. In that way, the New Nerd America is nothing new at all. The way the computer animators behind all the nostalgic fan service behemoths currently on the market are treated by the studios who subcontract them is bottomlessly cruel & abusive, especially considering how much money their employers are making on their undervalued labor. The Last Starfighter was a template for modern nerd culture filmmaking both its reverence for schlocky 80s pop art (which was at least fresh & interesting at the time) and in its exploitation of the actual, real-life nerds behind the keyboards that made it come to life. I’m going to guess that the Ready Player One film, no matter how much higher in quality than the Ready Player One book, also participated in that modern industry standard, which has only gotten worse as the demand for this kind of material has exponentially risen.
I didn’t revisit The Last Starfighter in order to heap more praise onto a five-year-old Spielberg film most people hate or have totally forgotten. I also didn’t revisit it to make some kind of Galaxy Brain point about the state of modern populist filmmaking. I revisited it because I was bored, I wanted to watch a movie, and nothing currently playing in theaters looked novel or exciting enough to justify leaving my couch. However, I did venture out the next day to sell my Last Starfighter DVD (along with other dusty pop culture leftovers) and was greeted with two bittersweet responses from the incurably nerdy clerk at my local 2nd & Charles: 1. “We’re no longer buying back DVDs,” which is a real heartbreaker for me — the end of an era. And, 2. “That movie’s badass,” which I hope is the same reaction whoever picks up my copy from the Mid-City Goodwill has as well. It turns out these 80s nerd culture leftovers aren’t worth all that much after all. They’re meant to sell popcorn & digital downloads for a few months then promptly be forgotten forever, which would be the ideal amount of reverence for this kind of nerdy pop art if it weren’t for the fact that all of its latest examples are regurgitations of past triumphs.
As omnipresent as superhero media feels in pop culture right now, I honestly don’t think it’s much more prevalent than it was when I was a child in the 80s & 90s. It may be more aggressively marketed to adults now, but it’s always been around. The major difference between post-MCU, post-Dark Knight comic book adaptations and the Saturday morning superhero schlock I grew up with is that adults are now expected to take them seriously as meaningful art, each with their own decades of backstory worthy of literary study. As a child I was aware that characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men had long-running, epic scale stories that stretched beyond the thirty-minute episodes of their respective animated series. I would tune into those episodes sporadically, though, and I didn’t really need to know their larger stories to enjoy the simple pleasures of their violent Good Guys vs. Bad Guys morality tales. In contrast, now you have to watch Batman learn ninja skills for an entire origin saga before he can start Batmanning in earnest. You have to watch 30 feature films, several streaming series, and a non-denominational holiday special to fully appreciate a talking raccoon whooping ass in space. Context & lore used to matter way less in our long-running superhero epics, or at least they used to be secondary to novelty & iconography. That’s why it was so thrilling to return to that vintage style of Saturday morning superhero storytelling in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, which hurls you directly into the continued adventures of its titular cyborg superhero without any expectation that you’ll have done your decades of televised homework before arriving at the theater. Its approach to lore is confusing the same way the subtextual meanings of an abstract art film can be; you’re not expected to know the answer, and it’s freeing to admit you’re lost and just enjoy the ride.
Yes, Shin Kamen Rider is technically connected to a network of other Anno-revived tokusatsu franchises—Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the latest Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot—all bundled under the banner of the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.” Unlike with the MCU, however, each title in the SJHU is designed to work as a standalone project, only crossing over in action figure toy commercials instead of Cultural Event double features like Infinity War & Endgame. Shin Kamen Rider‘s connection to Anno’s other two “Shin” tokusatsu titles is more one of method than one of narrative. It carries over all of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla, now streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga. All you really need to know is that our titular hero is a grasshopper-hybrid cyborg man who escapes the evil laboratory that augmented his body and vows to destroy it before they augment the rest of humanity. Anno doesn’t bother with Kamen Rider’s origin story, nor even his escape from the lab. He invites the audience to join in three or four episodes into a Kamen Rider TV series, then zips through the next half-century’s weekly storylines so quickly there’s no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on. You just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink. And if you blink, so what? There’s still plenty for-its-own-sake pleasure in watching the heroic grasshopper cyborg man beat up the evil cyborg spider man, the evil cyborg bat man, the evil cyborg mantis man, and so on, regardless of why he’s doing it. I didn’t grow up with the Kamen Rider TV series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience watching the Americanized tokusatsu series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, where I would enjoy whatever random, out-of-order episodes I happened to catch on a schedule I was too young to control, continuity be damned.
The paradox here is that while Anno is not taking the longform lore of superhero storytelling all that seriously, his SJHU movies are much more emotionally earnest than the jokey, sarcastic heroes of The MCU. While all modern Marvel heroes have borrowed a touch of self-satirical Deadpool snark, Anno takes the emotional stakes of his outlandish superhero premises 100% seriously. Shin Godzilla is a scathing political satire about the inefficiency of bureaucratic government in the face of genuine public crisis. Shin Ultraman is a loving tribute to humanity’s go-getter resiliency despite that governmental failure to unite & protect. Shin Kamen Rider is more of a brooding, Upgrade-style tale of a hero horrified by the violence he’s capable of, isolated & alienated by the biological weaponry of his augmented body. Despite its jabs of soulful remorse between fight scenes, though, it still indulges in the retro kitsch of reviving a 1970s children’s TV show for its 50th anniversary – mimicking the cheap-o action cinema style of its source material for modern audiences’ semi-ironic amusement. Anno frames every establishing shot and character movement with the attention to visual detail he brought to anime, so that a leather glove casually falling to the floor is afforded the same heft of a building crumbling or a world ending. He carries over the extreme wide-angle camera work of Shin Ultraman but frees it from that film’s drab office spaces, so it feels less like Soderbergh doing anime and more like the first-person-POV of a bug. There’s an inherent visual absurdity to following a cyborg grasshopper man on a motorcycle from one insectoid enemy to another that Anno never shies away from, but he also takes that heroic bug man’s self-conflicted emotions seriously as he stares at the blood dripping from his leather-gloved hands. It’s a tricky tonal balance to achieve, no matter how easy Anno makes it look.
You do not have to be specifically nostalgic for the original Kamen Rider TV series to enjoy the Shin Kamen Rider film. It does help to be generally nostalgic for the episodic superhero media of yesteryear, though, assuming you’re old enough to remember a time when you were only expected to vaguely know what Batman’s deal was to enjoy a Batman film. Before the streaming era, it took a lot of effort, time, and money to be a nerd-culture completist, and it was okay to dip your toe into this kind of thing mid-adventure – encouraged, even. All that really mattered was whether you were enticed to buy the action figures.
Things sure do seem awfully final these days, don’t they? There’s a part of my brain lighting up right now that hasn’t been active since my last days of high school, alongside parts of my brain that hadn’t felt this flush with fear hormones since the last time I was worried about the Rapture. Past lovers have reappeared at a rate of about one per month since last summer like my own personal Broken Flowers, a succession of insights into the me that could have been. Things are so dark and bleak sometimes that I’m not really sure what to do with myself. So much of what I’ve been seeing and writing about lately are about completion, ending, and finalizing triptychs that it feels pervasive. Then again, I’ve always had an unfortunate tendency toward apophenia, and my brain chemicals have been all over the place since, within the past two weeks, I spent days upon days expecting that I was going to have to put down my elderly cat (he rebounded, the little comeback king—he’s dying, but not today, and not this week). It’s also theorized that the human brain is wired to find patterns even where none exist, and since the smallest number of “things” in which we can find patterns is three, it’s possible there’s something innate and instinctual in humans that causes us to see triptychs and trilogies and triads and three-part godheads as complete. We’ve known this for hundreds of years, given that Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric “Omne trium perfectum”—essentially, “Everything that comes in threes is perfect,”—in the 4th century B.C.E. Brandon and I texted about this recently, as he wanted to give me the chance to write about Beau is Afraid before he took a crack at it since I had covered both Hereditary and Midsommar. Also relatively recently, and more in line with what we’re talking about today, I wrote about how I went to see the most recent Ant-Man out of a sense of obligation to close out the third and final part of something that had relevant sentimental value to me as a person and as a member of this site.
I wasn’t planning to see this movie in theaters, if at all, ever. No one’s public persona is 100% accurate to them as a person, but Chris Pratt’s bungling of the goodwill that Parks & Rec and the first film in this series bought him via (at best) poorly conceived social media posts has made me not really all that interested in seeing him in a big budget film. I don’t expect celebrities to adhere to an old-fashioned studio contract morals code, and I appreciate that people in the public eye are expected not only to tolerate the fact that they have virtually no privacy but to even use what little privacy they have to essentially buy more stock in the interest economy by posting their private moments to their verified social media accounts. I really do. But man, there was something about that post about having a healthy child with his new wife that left a really bad taste in my mouth, even if it wasn’t an intentional dig at ex-wife Anna Faris or a reference to their special needs son; it churned my stomach. On top of that, I just haven’t been able to make myself care much about the MCU, as I’ve mentioned the last few times I’ve covered it, and with that last Ant-Man being such a miss for me, I can’t work up the interest to check these things out most of the time, let alone the compulsion. But, on a night when all my friends had plans and I was facing some pretty strong writer’s block, I took my MoviePass down to the [redacted] and I got myself a hot dog and a blue ICEE and sat in a sparsely populated theater on what seems like it’s the last of these. And it was good.
Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 opens on a downbeat note. Peter Quill (Pratt) is still in mourning for the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in Infinity War, a situation exacerbated by the fact that a different, time-displaced version of Gamora from before the two met now exists somewhere out there, not caring at all about his existence. The Guardians have settled in on Knowhere, which you may (and are expected to) remember as the severed head of a long-dead god-adjacent being. A depressed Rocket (Bradley Cooper) is forcing an entire settlement of people to listen to Radiohead’s “Creep” over the loudspeakers and as a former radio DJ who struggled with mental health issues, I have to say: relatable. His reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), who puts our little raccoon friend into a coma, and the Guardians are unable to use their handy automated medical equipment because there’s a kill switch on his heart. You see, the man who cyborgified Rocket in the first place, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) left behind a failsafe to protect his proprietary interest in Rocket, whom he is attempting to recapture. Nebula (Karen Gillan) proposes that they reach out to one of her contacts who might be able to get the group inside the headquarters of the H.E.’s megacorp and get the shutdown code for the kill switch so that they can get Rocket medical help before he dies. This involves the rest of the team, including Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel), and Drax (Dave Bautista), reuniting with the version of Gamora who does not know them. It’s not as simple as all of that, of course, as the attempted heist goes awry and requires them to track down the Evolutionary himself, with all the unusual fleshy detail that we’ve come to expect from James Gunn, a jailbreak of nice Village of the Damned kids, a telepathic dog feuding with Kirk from Gilmore Girls, an octopus man selling drugs in a back alley, bat people, and unexpected needle drops from the likes of Florence + the Machine and Flaming Lips. As this plays out, extended comatose flashbacks reveal the extent of the torturous experimentation that left Rocket the difficult, bristly, prosthetic-obsessed sapient Procyon lotor about whom we’ve all been suspending our disbelief for the past eight years.
There’s a lot more going on thematically in these movies than in the other recent products/content than this organization is creating, and as a result there’s a narrative cohesion here where all three movies are in greater communication with one another than, say, the Thor movies, which went from decent origin story to dour table-setting to wacky throwback comedy to whatever happened in Love and Thunder (I don’t know; I didn’t see it). On a very surface level, these movies, like a lot of Gunn’s work, can be described as a feature length Creepy Crawlers commercial, but there’s something that’s genuine here underneath all of that, and more moving than it really has any right to be. Personally, I think that the scenes in which we see Rocket bond with other more abominable abominations that have been experimented upon by the High Evolutionary set foot a few inches over the line into saccharine territory, but schmaltz, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a foregone conclusion that the sweet otter character voiced by Linda Cardellini at her most warm isn’t making it out of those flashbacks alive, so you’re never able to relax and appreciate the scenes that they’re in because the other shoe is always hovering just out of frame, ready to drop. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that seeing the frail and dying body of Rocket hit me personally because of the resemblance to the recent extreme health situation of my cat; it ended up pushing too far into the treacly territory for me as a result, but that won’t be the case for everyone, and hasn’t been based on the reviews I’ve seen.
These movies are about fathers, and about god, and about the fact that we (in the west at least) form our images of what constitutes “god” around the concept of “father.” In the first film, Gamora and Nebula are constantly at each other’s throats to prove themselves to their shared father, Peter viewed Yondu (Michael Rooker) as his surrogate father even though the man had actually kidnapped him as a child, and Drax’s motivation to join the team was as vengeance for his lost wife and daughter. The second film saw Peter meeting his biological father, who was also, in many ways, a living god; Yondu sacrifices himself for his surrogate sons and finds meaning in bettering himself through fatherhood, and Gamora encourages Nebula to break free from the influence of their father as she has. Peter’s father being a nigh-omnipotent living planet was a kind of apotheosizing of that father-as-god concept. Now, in this third and presumed final film, the narrative is once again focused on the relationship between one of these characters and their father/creator, but this time it’s Rocket, and it plays out as a story about a god who, in seeking an ephemeral “perfection,” created something that he didn’t understand and which threatened his ego by demonstrating the ability to exceed the creator’s own intelligence. That’s not normally the kind of story that’s told through creator and creation; that’s the story of a father and the son upon whom he heaps all of his own insecurities and coping mechanisms. Beyond that, the jailbreak mentioned above ends with Drax finding himself with the opportunity to be a father again, in a new way.
I’ve mentioned in the past that I often divide finales/endings, at least of mass media, into two broad categories: the “Everybody goes their separate ways” ending and the “The adventure continues” ending. They’re both equally valid, conceptually, and the former is frequently the right narrative choice for a broad spectrum of stories; sometimes a piece of fiction ends in a place where characters have no choice other than to separate, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not sometimes bummed out by them. They can’t all be “God bless the brick house that was! God bless the brick house that is to be!” This is a definitive finale, and I don’t think it’s a surprise that the ending, despite concluding on an optimistic note, left me a little blue. That’s not to say that there weren’t jokes aplenty here (it took me until about the halfway mark for me to reach a point where it felt right to laugh, despite many gags throughout), but there’s a surge of love for the movie that feels more like people are just happy that there’s a good Marvel movie that everyone went to see rather than interacting with the text directly, because the text is weird in a way that mainstream audiences are normally more squeamish about. There were moments that made me think of Basket Case 2, of all things, which is a strange thing to say about a movie in this larger franchise, owned and operated by a monopolistic media empire. The consensus on this one is positive, and you can count me amongst that number, but at this point, these films have to advocate for themselves or not. This one does.
Swampflix 