[7.4/10] Watchmen is not a carbon copy, rehash, or recapitulation of, well, Watchmen, which is to say that the most admirable thing about this introduction to the television series is that it is clearly of the world and characters brought to life on the comic book page by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, clearly indebted to their approach and their style, but is also clearly its own thing. In an age where franchise extensions are ubiquitous and even nominally original films and T.V. shows offer reheated versions of familiar tropes, that in and of itself is refreshing.
That’s not to say that “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”, that mouthful of a title for an opening episode, doesn't take pains to remind you what its inspiration and source material is. The catch, and the thing that makes the premiere a little more admirable than other late sequels, is that those references and remembrances have a twist that reminds you of what came before while channeling it into what’s happening now.
So you have the chance to see the iconography of smiley face through a classroom baking demonstration. You have the same circular visual motifs in aerial shots that create the tableau of a clock face. With that, you have an ambient sound track of ticks to make the audience nervous, for clocks and bombs and more, at the same time some characters literally verbalize the onomatopoeia. You have police cruising around in something akin to Nite Owl’s ship. You have a crowd of Rorschach worshippers quoting his most famous speech from the comic. You have, as promised in the final pages of the original graphic novel, the legacy of a Robert Redford presidency. You have little baby squid falling from the sky and concerns that batteries from old Dr. Manhattan-technology cause cancer. If you’re a fan of the original Watchmen, there’s plenty to latch onto here.
But the trick is how those homages are used -- as a bridge to the current setting and the exploration of topics that were, at best, tangential to what the original Moore/Gibbons comic were exploring. “It’s Summer” ends in the same way as the first issue of Watchmen started, with a murder mystery over the untimely death of a member of the old guard, and his blood dripping down on his pin of choice, only now, the victim is a police sergeant, not a masked vigilante, and the blood is dripping down onto his police badge, not the iconic yellow expression that’s come to represent so much.
And therein lies the difference, and what makes Lindelof’s Watchmen admirable. It’s using the same iconography and approach to get at something different, something timely about the tenuous connection between law enforcement and race and justice in the same way that nuclear annihilation was timely in the 1980s. It represents a transformation of Moore and Gibbons approach, something that channels their spirit, without just following a cookie cutter roadmap or reconjuring the same conflict and themes in a shiny new box.
I like that approach. I like the themes that Lindelof and company are chewing on in this opening stanza. I like the character at the center of the narrative. I like the concept of police identities being hidden and every interaction rigorously authorized and recorded as something to wrestle with. I like the notion of the post-squid attack United States having to deal with Rorschach-worshipping, hard right, conspiracy theorizing domestic terrorists as the legacy of *Watchmen*s most famous character.
I am intrigued (if a bit apprehensive) about how the typical dynamics are mixed and inverted, with the conservative white vigilantes going after a police force that, in this opening episode at least, prominently features African Americans. I like the bizarre dichotomy between Nixon and Redford as opposing symbols on that axis. I like an aged, secluded Ozymandias clearly still haunted by the memory of Dr. Manhattan.
I just don’t love the execution of all of that just yet. This is HBO, so everything looks pretty damn good. There’s a slickness to the production, a fluidity to the action scenes, and an attention to detail in the cinematography and production design that let you know this is a high class production. There is style here and competence here, reflected in the quality of the shots, the construction of the world, and the performers enlisted to bring it all to life.
And yet there’s something oddly soulless about it all. For touching on such hot topics, and channeling such a well-felt story, “It’s Summer” struggles to feel like a real human story, rather than one of metaphors and abstractions finding convenient purchase in various characters. Pilots are tough, needing to introduce the major personalities, places, and conflicts of the story, and this one does it all ably, on top of drawing noticeable but not over the top connections to its inspiration. But there’s little here that grabs you with its realness instead of tapping you on the shoulder with its intriguing but strangely detached vibe.
Still, there’s enough here to chew on, and enough promise to keep coming back.# Watchmen the T.V. series gives away the game a bit in its 1921 silent film opening, giving us a cinematic throwback to match “Tales of the Black Freighter” from the comic. It’s a story about who can lay claim to being the arbiter of justice, who can rightfully wear a mask, and who can be treated and as worthy of enforcing the law in a time and place where racial tensions and disparities make that suspect. That’s what Lindelof and company want to get at in this, and their focus on the 1921 Tulsa ravaging of the black community that gets the son of one of the perpetrators hanged almost a century later, one who seems to have far more but overcome his father’s prejudices, it sets a tone for a show ready to touch a nerve, to challenge its audience, to get at the heart of current cultural divisions in this country.
It remains to be seen whether addressing those issues is enough to make up a compelling story, let alone one that carries the mantle of one of the definitive literary works of the twentieth century. Still, “It’s Summer” promises a series that takes its cues from the original Watchmen, but aims to emulate its spirit, not just its beats, which makes it worth seeing through beyond this first, solid but unspectacular outing.
[7.7/10] There are three versions of the same motif in “Martial Feats”, three moments when Angela has her arms wrapped around someone, supporting their weight, before something major, and a little insane, goes down.
The first is the most straightforward. She, along with Looking Glass and Red Scare, help pull Chief Crawford down from his noose. It is a moment where she is losing a father figure, seeing someone she trusted, who was family to her, taken away from her by vigilantes. There is profound pain in her eyes when she watches the body bag zipped up, and tries to remain calm rather than immediately taking her revenge on Nixontown, even as her brutal beatdown shows how much anger she’s holding under the surface.
The second is a flashback to the “White Night”, where she’s holding her husband close, playing and flirting in the final moments before Xmas. Until all of a sudden, a man in a Rorschach mask barges in and, in a harrowing scene, tries to kill her. The result is an explanation for her closeness with Chief Crawford, a shared survival of something hellacious that hit close to home, that emboldened them to stay in the fight despite tremendous risks, that brought them together as something closer and more significant than two officers on the same force.
And the third is her lifting Will into her car after placing him under arrest. It comes not only after she has learned that her Chief, the man she trusted, was hiding a Klan robe in his closet, something to undermine the faith and love she thought they shared, but also after she learns that this man who claims to have killed Judd Crawford is her biological grandfather. It is something to tear her world apart, to rewrite everything she thought she knew about someone close to her, and a reason to take seriously someone who claims to be his killer.
What does it all mean? Well I think the key is in the opening scene, where we see the development and distribution of a letter to black soldiers fighting in World War II, asking why they fight for a country that treats them as something lesser, that doesn't give them dignity despite serving under the same flag. It seems like that sparked something in (presumably) Will’s father, a realization that despite serving with and under their white counterparts, there was a different war to fight, a level of trust and respect they were not going to get, which gave him, and now gives Angela, reason to question the justness of the battles they’re fighting.
A third of the way through, the Watchmen T.V. series is about the murky intersection of race and politics and service and our national institutions. But it also seems to be about an awakening in Angela, one that opens her eyes to realities she thought she knew, of lines between black and white she thought she understood, that are starting to become much more blurred with the light Will’s little lantern is shining on them.
Much of that falls on Regina Hall to carry, and she does an outstanding job here. Whether it’s selling Angela’s surprise at the revelation about her grandfather, her responding with determination and resolve and tremendous pain after hearing about how many of her comrades were gunned down, her reserve curdling into vengeful anger at Nixontown, or her understanding, concerned interactions with her son, all give Hall a hell of an opportunity to show the different layers and shades she brings to this performance.
It’s also an episode that helps build out the world, fill in the blanks for little questions that we might have assumed we knew the answers to, but couldn’t know for sure. We see what exactly the “White Night” was and how it affected the relationship between the police and “The Cavalry.” We learn that Angela and her husband adopted the children of her old partner who was killed that night, something the kids’ grandfather (Jim Beaver!) is clearly none too pleased with.
And we learn more details about the “Redfordrations” -- the financial recompense offered by the U.S. government in response to the violence enacted against black people in America, including the Tulsa Massacre of Black Wallstreet depicted in the opening episode. I’m apt to slate Watchmen a little for resorting to pretty raw exposition for this, but holy hell, it’s hard to complain when they have Skip f’n Gates do it, and include a DNA test to boot. It’s a revelation that helps connect the show’s political themes to something concrete, an effort to portray a right wing backlash to a left wing government trying to take steps to make amends for the abhorrent things in our country’s past, and to establish Angela’s place within that maelstrom.
We also see Veidt trying to make good on Dr. Manhattan’s suggestion that he might try to create a little life on his own. Ozymandias is trying to recreate tomatoes, emotions, people, and seems to be coming up short each time. His part of the episode seems to take place separate and apart from all the other goings on, without much of even a thematic tie. But it’s an intriguing side-story, one of obsession with his old blue compatriot, and one of trying to find passion and, yes, life in something he can create and control.
And last, but not least, we get a look at the “American Hero” T.V. show, giving us a scene of Hooded Justice’s backstory that...well...looks a lot like the aesthetic and style of 2009 Zach Snyder film. I’m not sure if there’s a broader point here, beyond vaguely slating the earlier flick. But maybe the purpose (along with the FCC’s disavowal) is to show the way that these exploits are still being lionized, still meant to inspire and give a hagiography for a form of vigilante justice that has nuts in Rorschach masks going on organized cop killing sprees. It’s a form of justice that the likes of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre once believed in, folks who may have something to do with Will getting picked up and carried off into the night sky.
They’re the other image that comes to mind when I think of two people holding one another in the way that Angela holds her husband, her surrogate father, and her grandfather here. I think of Dan Dreiberg’s dream of the two of them in the nuclear apocalypse. I think of the newsstand owner and his younger reader reaching for one another amid the squid’s blast. I think of these people reaching for one another in these horrible situations, seeking that last bit of connection amid terrible events. And maybe that’s what Angela is waking up to, a human connection that alerts her to something rotten, something ominous, waiting just beyond the horizon.
[9.1/10] Jean Smart is a revelation. Her Laurie Blake has a Dr. House-like aura, far from the semi-naive young woman following in her mother’s footsteps, she is the uber-competent, seen-it-all, as cynical as she is capable representative of the old guard. “She Was Killed by Space Junk” puts a lot on Laurie’s shoulders, and a lot on Smart’s shoulders, and the result is Watchmen’s best episode yet.
What makes the character's entrance work is that she is both a bridge to the original Watchmen story in the most direct way yet, but also someone who can offer a different perspective on the main story of this new series. So far, despite our sojourns to visit Veidt and the occasional flashback to Germany, this series has treated Tulsa as the whole world, with all of the events, political intrigue, unrest, and character having their lives orbit this one community and its larger tensions.
Bringing in Laurie Blake, the daughter of the original Silk Spectre and The Comedian and the head of the FBI’s anti-vigilante task force, as the feds’ representative to investigate Sheriff Crawford’s death, helps pull back our perspective a bit.
We see someone who treats Keane Jr. (who, I’m a little ashamed to admit, I just now realized is likely the son of the author of the original anti-superhero act) with contempt for his ambition and politicking rather than admiration and respect. We see someone who cuts through the protective veneer that the Tulsa police force has erected around itself, quickly getting secret identities, “racist detectors”, and closed ranks local communities in and intuitive, almost causal way. And we see someone who casts explicit doubt on masked cops being any different than the masks vigilantes she’s developed a sincere contempt for over the years.
So much of Watchmen’s early going has been steeped in Angela’s perspective on this community, on the threat the police are responding to, and on its major players. By filtering this now-familiar world through Laurie’s perspective, someone who comes with the authority of being an original Watchmen lead character out-of-universe and her family history in it, it gives the whole situation a different spin. Like the feds descending on a town with very specific power balances and investigating a ground-shaking murder in Twin Peaks, Laurie and her junior associate arriving in Tulsa gives us one more reason to question the rightness of what’s going here, on either side of the thin blue line.
In a much more direct sense, we’re left to wonder what’s going on either side of Adiran Veidt’s property. To be frank, “She Was Killed by Space Junk” more or less stops dead in the middle to check in with him. We see our most tactile outing with “the smartest man in the world” yet, watching as he draws up blueprints, sews and severs, and eventually creates a suit for one of his automatons to “explore the great beyond.’ That is, until, the experiment fails and his efforts to rectify it leave him running afoul of “The Game Warden.”
That leads me to my (admittedly somewhat out there theory): What if Ozymandias is on Mars? What if Veidt’s “captivity” as described in the letter, is him being transported somewhere by Dr. Manhattan, the erstwhile game warden, so as not to be subject to any threats or investigations on Earth. And now, Veidt is trying to test the limits of his gilded cage and see if he can make it out of his enclosure. There’s a bizarre, separateness to every part of Veidt’s story so far, something that seems itching for a big reveal to let everything fall into place, and that’s the best stab I can make at it so far.
But apart from my grand theorizing, Veidt’s interlude still seems like a detour from the major story of the episode in the from of Laurie arriving in Tulsa, sizing up Angela, and proving herself a formidable presence in the town and in the series. Part of how the show establishes that is with some of its best action sequences and most taught moments of tension.
That comes in the early scene, where Laurie smokes out a Batman-esque masked adventurer by tipping him off to a bank robbery, having her team be the bank robbers, and then springing the trap on him. It’s a great way to establish Laurie’s take-no-crap bona fides, her ability to get into the heads of the vigilantes, and her brutal sense of justice with her willingness to shoot the target in the back (with the implication that she didn’t necessarily know his body armor would stop the bullet).
And you see it at Sheriff Crawford’s funeral, where a member of the Seventh Kavalry (explicitly made a Klan equivalent in the text), tries to hold Senator Keane Jr. hostage with a suicide vest he claims is connected to his heart. Laurie doesn't hesitate, just grabs the ankle-holstered gun she snuck in and pops the guy in the head, with the bullet inches away from the senator. Turns out the hostage-taker was telling the truth, and Angela has to drag his corpse into the grave and push Crawford’s coffin on top of it to stifle the explosion. It’s a hell of a set piece, showing the two women’s capabilities when they work together, even if their exchange later in the episode shows them at odd.
But it also shows Laurie in line with someone unexpected -- her father. The woman we meet decades after the events of the original comic has taken her father’s surname, and with it, his worldview. Like her dad, she now works for the government, calling masked adventurers “jokes” and does the bidding of the FBI. Like her dad, she thinks all of the noble-minded vigilanteism is bullshit. And like her dad, she’s seen too much, done too much, lost too much, that to be anything but caustic would be too painful.
That’s why the piece de resistance of “She Was Killed by Space Junk” is the frame element of the episode, where Laurie tells a joke (well, technically two jokes) to Dr. Manhattan through a box that’s theoretically sending the message to him on Mars. It sums up her nihilism, where no matter whether you’ve done good, done bad, or don’t recognize the distinction, everyone’s going to hell anyway, so you may as well act accordingly.
Her tears on the phone, her final laugh at the absurdity of the car that falls out of the sky, signify the ascendance of someone who still remembers falling in love with Jon Osterman, who still laments that Dan Dreiberg is (apparently) in jail, and who has assumed the mantle of The Comedian, in deed if not in name. The original Watchmen was about the toll that a life of masked adventuring would actually take on the heroes we so admired in the comics pages. “She Was Killed by Space Junk”, then, is about the toll the events of Watchmen would take on the people who lived through it. Through the character of Laurie, and Smart’s tremendous performance, we see The Comedian’s legacy rearing its ugly head, long after the man himself, and the events his death spurred, have been laid to rest.
[9.4/10] When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed a number of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and if it would be able to catch them all. Showrunner Damon Lindelof, of Lost fame, is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. And while his series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about the institutions of power and those marginalized by them, and while it threw in one eyebrow raising plot point after another, to answer all of the former, and tie together all the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest (person) in the world to do in a satisfying fashion.
And yet “See How They Fly” somehow does it.
The finale of Watchmen’s first (and, blue god willing, only) season tells us what Lady Trieu’s angle is, how it fits with the Seventh Kavalry’s plot, how Ozymandias factors into it, what Dr. Manhattan’s role is, how it intersects with Will Reeves’s plans, and what Angela Abar’s place in these grand events is. It tells a story of so many people seeking power, seeking vindication, seeking adoration, and then puts it in the hands of the one person who wasn’t looking for it.
It also allows us to understand not only the plot mechanics that led to the second momentous rain of squid of sky, but the motivations of everyone who reached that point. The racist, status quo-preserving rationale behind the Seventh Kavalry’s scheme has been clear for some time now. But “See How They Fly” accounts for the consequences of Cal Abar’s moment of reflex on the White Night. It accounts for the collection of watch batteries from the pilot. And it accounts for their failure, the assumption that they’ve thought it all out and have all the right answers. The truth, however, someone much smarter is pulling the strings, and even left to their own literal devices, the forces of Cyclops would have turned themselves to mush anyway.
That someone is Lady Trieu, and in Watchmen’s last character-defining, plot twist-revealing vignette, it sets her up as Adrian Veidt’s inheritor. She is, through one enterprising refugee’s machinations, his daughter, one who has matched, if not exceeded, his genius. She is playing the Seventh Kavalry, letting them do the dirty work of capturing Dr. Manhattan so that she can dispose of them and localize him in one fell swoop. It is another instance of a Veidt being one step ahead.
But we understand, for the first time, why Lady Trieu is doing this. She claims that it’s to better the world, to use the power that Dr. Manhattan sits on to eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, to clean the air, to fix all that ails us. But she does not seek that goal for pure altruism and, like her father, she’s shown a disturbing propensity to use whatever means are necessary if her goals are just. Instead, the episode suggests that all of this is an effort to impress her parents, to gain their approval, to show herself worthy of the gifts that she’s been given and to prove that she can build herself up to the highest heights of human achievement on her own, as Ozymandias challenged her to do.
But it’s Ozymandias who thwarts her. He declares that she cannot be trusted because she suffers from the same sins he does: vanity and self-aggrandizement. He tells his compatriots that she has to be stopped because she’ll soon demand that everyone bow down before her, because he knows it to be true of itself. And in one of the many little bits of irony and connection in the episode and the season, he uses the frozen corpses of the veritable offspring of his giant squid to crush his daughter, must as he used the frozen corpses of Dr. Manhattan’s children to ask her for help.
There’s two ways to read that scene. The first is as a rare moment of self-recognition in Veidt, knowing what he would do with that power and why, given the hell he’s been through, where it would lead, to the point that he resolves to stop it. The second is another instance of, true to the show’s themes, a white male going to great lengths to preserve the status quo and prevent a person of color from overtaking his position and assuming his legacy.
Either way, the triumph if brief for Veidt. Whether his pronouncements are accurate for Lady Trieu, they’re true for himself. Ozymandias seeks veneration and adoration. He got to save the world, but grumbled miserably for decades because he never got to take credit for it, never got his due from the people he put in power or the lives he preserved. On Europa, he had the thing he always wanted -- endless appreciation and devotion from all those around him -- but it was given reflexively, without due, and thus became hollow and even maddening. And in the end, he saves the world once more, and gets to take credit for it, both for now and for 1985, but it’s also his downfall.
That’s the other cruel irony and the button put on the stories of Laurie Blake and Looking Glass. After everything, the two of them decide to arrest Veidt for the lives lost amid his gambit from the original comic. For Wade Tillman, it’s enacting justice against the man who wrecked so much of his life, who left him so scared for so long, in the name of a well-intentioned lie, but a bloody lie nonetheless. For the former Ms. Juspeczyk, it’s the chance for her to have agency in this story, to take charge rather than be more of a bystander to larger forces as she was in 1985, given time to reflect on what happened and her place in it. And for Ozymandias himself, it’s the price he pays for being known, the music he must face for returning home, the cost he finally has to account for instead of his gilded cage of anonymity.
But the thing that he and his daughter share is that they’re not able to thwart a god. Even though Dr. Manhattan is trapped in his lithium prison, even though he’s mentally disoriented from whatever Keene Jr. and Trieu have done to him, he still has the wherewithal to transport away the people whom he knows can stop this, and to spend his last moments with the woman he loves. If Ozymandias was sent to his own private hell, Jon Osterman spends his final seconds on this Earth in his own private Heaven, experiencing all of his best moments with Angela at once.
As much as Watchmen is a story about racism and its institutional infestation, as much as it’s about masks and what happens when people put them on, it’s also a story about love. It is, as the episode name-drops, another thermodynamic miracle in the making, of two people coming together despite lightyears of distance between them, and the way it changes the world.
That change takes a little dealmaking though. William Reeves gives Dr. Manhattan up to Lady Trieu in exchange for her rooting out and eliminating Cyclops. But Cal very probably knew what the result would be, even suggested the trade to Hooded Justice. Reeves’s plan was to stop the organization he’d been fighting for nearly a century. Dr. Manhattan had even bigger plans, ones that may have widened even Will Reeves’s aspirations here.
As the season’s penultimate episode portended, Dr. Manhattan left something behind for his wife, a piece of himself that would give her godlike powers. In the final scene of the episode, she consumes it, and while the episode ends too tantalizingly soon before she can walk on water, the implication is clear.
So many people in this episode reached toward Dr. Manhattan this season, so many aiming to replicate him or supplant him or best him. But the person who receives his abilities is not someone who sought it out. It’s someone who it was given to, who it was earned by, through her capacity to love, for her capacity to try to save what might be unsaveable, for her willingness to fight and appreciate what’s lovely and wonderful even if it’s only fleeting.
But it’s also someone who has awoken to the injustices that lie under her nose. When Will Reeves offers some comfort and commiseration to his granddaughter, it comes with one admonition -- that for all Dr. Manhattan did, he could have done more. THey’re the words of a man who seems to know what’s coming. His project, and the project of Lindelof’s Watchmen, was to show an awakening in Angela, an internal transition from someone who believed, like Reeves himself once did, that the systems could be fixed from the inside, that they could be welcoming to and changed by people who looked like them, but that the color of law was never going to supersede the color of their skin in the people who tried to hold onto the power that badge conferred. Hers is a tale of epiphany, of understanding, of an insidiousness in the institutions she risked her life to protect that was, unbeknownst to her, ready to chew her up and spit her out like it had done so many others.
So she takes the power that would never be willingly forsaken by those who possess it. It is, in its own subtle way, a radical message. It’s radical because it ties in with a moral that David Simon, who chronicled faltering institutions himself on The Wire once put it, that when those institutions have fully failed you, the only thing left to do is pick up a brick. Will Reeves couldn’t find justice from the police department or the sterling heroes that were supposed to help him, so he found it himself, often in bloody terms. Watchmen firmly suggests that these institutions retain the same debilitating stink of racism in 2019 that they did during the time of Black Wall Street, and ends with Angela Abar picking up one hell of a brick.
The way Angela’s son looks at her own mask, much as William Reeves’s son did his, suggests (as Watchmen inevitably must) that this cycle isn’t over, that the age of heroes and vigilantes and those who’ve suffered trauma finding a way to exercise it in the name of justice isn’t over just yet. Topher has suffered his fair share of trauma today, and long before. When Ozymandias kills The Game Warden, his erstwhile servant asks him why he made him wear a mask, and Veidt responds that masks make men cruel. Only time will tell whether Angela’s son will don the same type of hood his mother and great grandfather did, if he will mete out justice with the same sort of cruelty, and on whom.
But the other way that Watchmen is radical come in whose hands it puts the responsibility and the ability to obtain that justice. While superhero stories can come in many stripes, most often they are a power fantasy. A strapping hero, often one the reader or viewer can see themselves in, fights for truth and justice and the American way with a force and a level of excitement that the muddy grays and grim realities of the real world can’t match. It is, if not as radical as the show’s political message, then certainly bold, for the show to declare in Angela’s raw egg cocktail and first, tenuous step, that it’s time for a change in who gets to assume those power fantasies.
It is remarkable, then, how well this show puts everyone in place and builds, thematically and narratively, to that moment. In the end, Watchmen finds a reason to bring everyone of significance to the show’s story and themes into the same location, as though each vignette and sequence we witnessed led to this moment. It reaches its climax at the same place it started, in what was once Black Wall Street and the theater where young Will Reeves saw a black hero in a mask and borrowed his name and mission. For a show that, from its first frame, asked probing questions about who holds power, how that intersects with the color of law, and who gets to be inspired by the power fantasies of masked adventures, it answers all three with a woman of color about to walk on water.
Each setup had a payoff and each payoff had a setup. Almost every seeming loose end is weaved together by the final frame. There are still queries that can be raised, objections that could be lodged, but everything that the series set up it knocked down. It seems too easy to say -- for a show that trod into such messy territory, that tugged on so many knotted threads of both the real world and its fictional one -- but there’s only one word to describe Watchmen and its ending. Clockwork.
TL:DR Watch Alien, then Aliens, then play Alien: Isolation, then watch the assembly cut of Alien 3. You're done after that.
I've thought of a lot of different ways I could open this review, but I'm going to do something simple... and start with a checklist; a list of questions for a typical audience member.
Do you want a suspenseful slow-burn gripping horror movie? If you answered yes, you're not going to get it at all.
Do you want a memorable and unique action thriller with new and exciting ways to show suspenseful gripping warfare? If you answered yes, you're not going to get that either.
Do you want memorable and interesting characters that go through arcs, have interesting personalities, and you eventually become really attached to them? If you answered yes, you're looking in the wrong fucking place, boyo.
Do you want a philosophical interesting study of human nature that chronicles the creation of a deadly species; one study that makes you question the existence of mankind? If you answered yes, you'll get a very shallow and uninteresting concept like that doesn't go anywhere, but it's kind of there.
Do you want a shitty lackluster horror movie that relies on tons of jump-scares, no tension or suspense, absolutely retarded humans that don't act like real people, sprinkles of exposition and pseudo-intellectual dialogue about creation, absolutely atrocious looking CGI, and constant copycat recreations of stuff that happened in the original Alien? If you answered yes, THEN THIS IS THE MOVIE FOR YOU!
Alien: Covenant is really an anomaly of a movie for me. I've never been so confused at the choices made by a director and a screenwriter, while I was watching the movie. I really want to know what was going through their heads. I want to ask them this one question: "What was the goal of this movie?"
As a horror movie, it fails on every front imaginable. You know that movie "The Cabin in the Woods"? The movie where the scientists release toxins into a typical horror movie cabin to cloud the visitors' judgement, and that explains why so many horror movie characters make really stupid decisions? Yeah, imagine that concept, but it was done for serious. The absolute baffling and obviously illogical choices some of these characters make, actually make me roll my head in utter disbelief at how stupid these colonists are. They don't wear helmets when going onto an alien planet, they don't follow any sort of protocol, they don't follow any code, they decide to poke everything they see, and generally act like incompetent children. The fact these people were given the task to colonize another world and be responsible for the lives of over 2,000 colonists is unbelievable. I don't buy it for a fucking second.
Continued from the last paragraph, there's this one scene about 1/3 into the movie, where one the passengers gets infected with this kind of bionic metal floating thing and instantly becomes sick. He's dragged back to the space shuttle that's landed on the planet and is put into the medical room. Girl 1 gets locked into the room with Infected 1. Girl 2, who was already on the space shuttle, locks them both in and refuses to open the door. Infected 1 starts to shake rapidly and something starts to pop out his back, blood flying everywhere. Girl 1, for some fucking reason, decides to hug Infected 1 like the dumb shit she is. The little xenomorph pops out Infected 1's back in a little blood sac, and proceeds to attack Girl 1. Meanwhile, Girl 2 is acting like frantic spaz and goes and grabs a shotgun. She opens back up the room and walks slowly to Girl 1, who's being ripped apart by the alien. She then slips on the pool of blood like a fucking idiot and accidentally fires the gun. She gets up and tries to scramble out of the room, and then gets her foot caught in door, crippling it, again, like a complete idiot. The alien chases her out of the room into the cargo bay of the shuttle, where she proceeds to just shoot wildly until she fires at a gas canister, blowing up the entire space shuttle, stranding all the other passengers on the planet.
Now, when it comes to logic in movies, I'm not harsh on it at all. I'm actually an advocate for suspending disbelief and just accepting that sometimes, people do dumb shit when they're scared. Yes it's true, people when they're clouded by emotions, will act incoherently or stupidly. I firmly believe that in movies and I know people will write characters like that to make them more believable But this... this scene, was so fucking infuriating to watch. Was it supposed to be silly? Was it supposed to be scary? What was the point of this scene? I was watching a really pathetic human acting like a complete moron acting crazy, until she decides to shoot a gas canister. The entire sequence was really just sad to watch, and not in a good scary way.
And even as an action sequence, it's not thrilling or intense either. I wasn't riveted or on the edge of my seat as the events before me unfolded. I knew exactly what was going to happen, with the xenomorph poping out Infected 1's back, but this raises me to a big point that I want to bring up, one of the fundamental biggest problems I had with the movie, besides the fact it's not scary:
The xenomorphs themselves are not scary at all. I'm actually amazed people are giving this movie a pass, rating it with like a 3/5 or higher. I just don't believe that in the slightest. When I think of Alien, I think of claustrophobic terrifying corridor encounters with a deadly and unknown hostile life-form that could kill you in an instant. This nail-biting and tension-filled wait for the thing to go away. Ridley Scott, with this movie, effectively ruins what makes the Alien scary. I have NO problem with Scott trying to explore the mythos of the alien universe, and even explain where the xenomorphs came from. I don't particularly like it, I think it ruins the mystery of the alien, but I can appreciate Scott trying to do something different. But the way the aliens are showcased in this movie, don't make them out to be the terrifying monsters that lurk in the shadow, waiting to strike and then pounce back into the darkness, just ready to sneak up on you. They're now just generic movie monsters now, not exhibiting any of the familiar traits or behaviors of xenomorphs from the original trilogy. Instead of hiding and lurking in the shadows like a deadly creature, these fuckers are running out in the open, just attack humans aimlessly. I felt like I was watching a Friday the 13th movie, but if Jason Vorhees was just skinned over with a alien suit. When I see a xenomorph just come up behind a naked couple in the shower, I don't think of alien, I think of Shylock cliche horror from other movies that are terrible, especially the Friday the 13th sequels. When I see a xenomorph attack a fucking security camera for no reason, other than to give the audience a little laugh, that doesn't feel like Alien. I'm not saying the movie has to be the same as the original, hell, far from it. I want them to do stuff that's different, but you have to understand the rules and behaviors of the world you're exploring first. It's like Ridley Scott forgot the movie he was trying to make.
Another two problems I have with the xenomorphs, are the visual effects and the animation. It's sad to me to think that human suits from over 40 years still look better than CGI from this year. I don't know who was in charge of creating the digital effects for this movie, I don't know if they were rushed or something, but effects for the aliens was fucking terrible. Not once was I convinced in the whole movie, that what I was looking at was a real alien that posed a threat to the humans. The glossy and horribly modeled xenomorph models looked like they were from a low budget experiment project, not a big budgeted blockbuster. But even with the awkward and awful looking models, I felt the animations were all wrong. Thank about what a xenomorph is: It's an alien that infects it's host and then takes the form of the host it infected. 100% verifiably based on what we've seen in the alien universe thus far, when a facehugger infects a human, the resulting xenomorph looks and moves like a human. It stands upright and walks like a human. When a facehugger infects an animal, let's say a dog, the resulting xenomorph movies on all-fours and acts like a dog. We saw this in both Alien and in Alien 3. But for some reason in Alien: Covenant, when the facehugger takes over the human captain, the resulting xenomorph moves more like an animal... running on all-fours. Which, if you think about it doesn't make any sense, based on what we've seen. Yes, Ridley Scott could just be rectonning Alien 3 because "most fans didn't like it," but this animation fundamentally undermines what the term "xenoMORPH" stands for. The embryo morphs into the lifeform it's taken over. It takes the physical traits from it's host. But besides that glaring error in the choice of animation, the actual digital movement of the xenomorph model looked really fake and stupid. The way it ran down corridors and up and down ladders was not convincing in the slightest.
And even when the horror doesn't work, the action doesn't work either. You'd think they'd be able to get one of these elements right, but nope. Because there's no tension in the air and xenomorphs are just running out in the open like deer or whatever, there's no reason for me to get invested in the close-encounters action that's happening. Sure, some people shoot some guns and there's a part at the end where newcomer-captain Daniels is dangling off a space shuttle, but none of the action feels new and fresh. In fact, most of it feels extremely anti-climactic. It feels kind of tact on, like Ridley Scott was making one movie and realized, "Oh yeah, I have to make this a little exciting for audience members. I'll just throw in an action scene here and there. That'll shut them up." None of it feels earned. It just feels like it happens for the sake of happening, and Scott doesn't try to do anything unique with the direction. I was thoroughly bored in every 2 action scenes. The xenomorph just follows the heroes out onto the second space shuttle that comes down, and chases them like a generic bad guy. What happened to the alien sneaking up and avoiding detection, luring the victims into a false sense of security?
The climax of this jumbled mess was literally a carbon copy of the ending from both Alien and Aliens. New-captain Daniels and Danny McBride's character lure the xenomorph into the cargo bay back on the main ship, and then blow the fucker out into space. Same shit again. Nothing original or done differently. I'm really getting sick of it.
Okay, now will all my grievances out of the way, all of my anger hopefully vented, there is one thing critics and audiences are trying to give this movie credit for, or even justifying their reason for the movie earning a fucking 3 stars or higher. Michael Fassbender. He's the center of the movie. He's the core of what this movie's about. The very first scene is his character David, from Prometheus, having a discussion with his creator. This gets them into a talk about what it's like to create, and where humanity will go. Is the role of humans to die off and make way for the next creation from father? Ridley Scott tries to use Fassbender as a tool to try to talk philosophically about life and death, and the horrors of creation. There's a back and forth sequence in the middle of the movie where David and Walter, another synthetic android that looks like David, have a conversation how David has followed in his fathers footsteps, and experimented to create his own life, effectively building the alien xenomorphs. Yes, the synthetic David actually created the xenomorphs, which, I'm okay with the writers doing something interesting like that, but... it doesn't go anywhere or try to answer real serious questions. It just brings up some empty blanket questions about creation and why it's horrific, but never does anything with it. In one scene with the original captain from the colonist crew, he gets taken over by a facehugger, and later, when the xenomorph chestbursts out of his stomach, sad piano and violin music plays, trying to poise some kind of greater question about the xenomorph. To me personally, it doesn't do anything other than just make the aliens not scary anymore. It actually makes me not scared of the xenomorphs anymore. Now they just seem like toys a man came up with, which is fine idea... if the man who created them was actually scary. Michael Fassbender does a decent job with the material he has, and he's a fine actor, but in no way is he intimidating, and I don't believe for a second that he created the xenomorphs. Also, this raises the question, what about the alien queen in the movie 'Aliens'? Where did she come from? The xenomorphs aren't a race like previously thought? Why isn't this explained? Oh, I have to wait until the NEXT sequel to learn that. Goddamn it.
When it tries to be smart, it doesn't work. When it tries to be scary, it doesn't work. When it tries to be action-packed, it doesn't work. When it tries to add depth to the characters, it doesn't work. I didn't like really anything this movie had to offer. I thought some of the music was decent and Michael Fassbender's performance was alright, but that's not enough to save a movie like this. When I think about Covenant, then I think about Alien, it just makes me sad. The original Alien was a groundbreaking masterpiece that worked because it was filled with tension. Ridley Scott is now just using the Alien franchise to try to act pretentious, calling Alien: Covenant a "thinking man's Alien movie." Oh, bite me, Ridley. Your movie isn't smart in any way. It's terribly paced, horribly focused, not scary, not interesting, and not worthy anyone's time.
This is the Attack of the Clones of the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott is now George Lucas, trying to claim ultimate ownership of the franchise. It's quite sad. Very disappointed in this disaster.
Dune was an amazing visual and audial experience, and it definitely captured the vibe of Dune very well, but it lacked almost all of the depth of the book, from the lore, to the characters, and especially the plot. They cut out a huge chunk of the plot in the book, almost all of the political intrigue, and that resulted in it feeling incredibly rushed and the decisions of the characters often seemed odd and unexplained. For example, in the book, House Atreides know that House Harkonnen is planning a trap, they know the Emperor has turned on them, and they know to expect the Sardauker. They also strongly suspect there's a spy among them, and the drama surrounding this is incredibly interesting, and acted as a brilliant build-up to Doctor Yueh's betrayal. Alas, all of this was cut, and the film suffered for it.
Another fairly major gripe I had was the portrayal of Lady Jessica. In the book, she was an incredibly powerful character and was feared and respected by all. She was calm, collected, intelligent, and strong. In the film, she comes across as a mentally unstable mess, constantly crying and having mental breakdowns, and very little of her Bene Gesserit power was shown.
I had mixed reactions to the other characters. Paul and Leto Atreides were great, but Rabban Harkonnen felt very odd and not like a Harkonnen at all. Thufir Hawat was also disappointing, first they made him fat when he's supposed to still be strong (albeit ageing) warrior, but then they removed any mention of him being a Mentat and cut most of his scenes from the book.
And let's not forget to mention they cut my favourite scene from the book, which featured a dinner party and acted as very important character development for Paul, as well as showcasing the political situation on Arrakis as well as the extent of the Bene Gesserit powers.
In general, it felt like this film was less of an adaptation of the story and more of an illustration of it - omitting much of the plot, lore, and character development, and replacing it with beautiful visuals and music. Overall however, despite my disappointments at the various cuts and changes, and although I will continue to wonder what could have been achieved if the story had been split into 3 films instead of 2, this remains a fairly faithful adaptation of a book which is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen, and as a result I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the sequel.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie was so bad, contrived and uninteresting that I almost stopped watching 30 minutes in, but I persevered. This is an extremely action-packed movie for kids, and that's about all it is. It is little substance that might interest actual adults. The plot is thin as paper, the casting is awful - Charlie Day and Chris Pratt as Italian plumbers ... really?? - and there's no heart or reason to care about any of these characters. As for the casting, comedian Sebastian Maniscalco is the most Italian person in the main cast, and he's relegated to playing a minor character named Spike. As someone who grew up playing Mario Bros in the 80s, it was cool to see the characters on the screen and to hear some of the 80s music. The computer graphics were tight, but by most other metric by which we measure movies, this was a dud and a waste of time unless you're watching it with your kids or unless you're 8-years-old.
[4.7/10] The Super Mario Bros. Movie may be the least adventurous film I’ve ever seen. It isn’t bad, per se. But it is utterly generic and painfully, mind-numbingly safe. It exists to arrange a bevy of familiar Mario elements into something vaguely resembling a story, spackle in some off-the-shelf heroics, and then hope to bathe the audience in enough fanservice that no one will realize this whole endeavor is creatively bankrupt.
Well, it worked. At the halfway mark, it’s the most financially successful film of 2023, and has set all manner of box office records. So damn us all, I guess.
It’s a shame because that sort of performance doesn’t just mean we’re destined to get sequels and spin-offs of this until the heat death of the universe. (See also: Mario’s Illumination stablemates, the Minions.) But it also means we’ll see a flood of more films like this one: unimaginative, deep as a thimble, and content to ply the viewer with little more than what they already know and like.
I want to be charitable here. Like the vast majority of red-blooded young men of the last forty years, I grew up on Mario in all his forms: from 8-bit sprites to HD juggernauts to colorful typing instructors. Generously, you could excuse The Super Mario Bros. movie as a film for very young children, full of color and light and spectacle to keep their attention, without anything meant to challenge them or go above their heads. As a shiny diversion that is all frosting and no cake, the movie is fine -- perfectly suitable to entertain a moppet for ninety minutes or so.
The problem is that kids’ movies, even ones fit for very young children, don’t have to be this devoid of genuine creativity. The classic eras of Disney, the high points of Pixar, and the best outings from Dreamworks all matched stunning artistic achievement with unassuming depth, creating profound works that were nonetheless accessible to younger audiences. The Super Mario Bros. movie has none of the same ambition; instead resigning itself to moving recognizable cartoon action figures around a series of familiar playsets for an hour and a half and then calling it a day.
The best and worst part of the movie is its sheer volume of pandering fanservice. Almost every recognizable element of the Mario universe -- the main characters, the allies, the baddies, the setting, the power-ups, the songs, the races, the platforming, the moves, the musical stings, the catchphrases -- is packed into the film’s runtime. There is next to nothing original here. Just an assemblage of recognizable pieces awkwardly strung together at a quick enough pace so the audience doesn’t have to go more than thirty seconds without being able to say, “Hey, I remember that thing!”
It is the polar opposite of the much-maligned live action Mario film from 1993. (Despite borrowing the earlier movie’s “Two Italian plumbers from Brooklyn get inadvertently transported to the world of the games” premise.) Whereas that film departed from the source material in ways that were both bold and utterly baffling, its modern day counterpart is a cinematic glass of warm milk served in the same glass fans have been drinking from since 1981. Instead of moving away from the look, feel, or components of the video games even in a little bit, The Super Mario Bros. Movie plays it embarrassingly safe, reassuring fans that everything they like and recognize from the various Nintendo Entertainment Systems is here and faithfully recreated, no matter how uninspired the ultimate rendering may be.
Some of that might be forgivable is the parts of the movie that are, well, a movie weren’t so excruciatingly generic. Mario himself is a standard-issue hero guy. Peach is a stock action girl. Donkey Kong is the usual semi-friendly rival. The shopworn “save the world” plot is buttressed by nothing but a heap of feeble fetch quests. The celebrity voice-casting is almost uniformly uninspired. Their performances range from tonally miscalibrated and god-awful. And every character is paper thin. There is no story beat too hackneyed, no joke too tepid, no needle drop too played out,, and no moment too shallow to warrant anything but immediate conclusion in this bland, big screen ricecake.
The movie is not without some charms. Jack Black elevates the material, as usual, bringing a Dr. Evil-esque mix of bluster and harmlessness in his role as Bowser. His dynamic with his poor underling is stock but amusing. The nihilistic Luma is the movie’s most peculiar inclusion, but also its funniest. The writers and animators do find some mildly clever excuses to shoehorn Mario’s platforming prowess from the games into the film. And visually, there’s a bit of panache in Mario and DK’s speedy pursuit, a confrontation with a giant-sized Bullet Bill, and the final superstar showdown between the Mario Bros. and Bowser.
Aside from those uptempo moments there, The Super Mario Bros. movie is, at best, nothing to write home about from a visual standpoint. The film’s stylists want to retain the cartoony look of the original characters, but have them move and emote in realistic ways, which lends the film an odd uncanniness the whole way through. The character and world designs are almost exclusively gussied up versions of the ones from the games. And the attempt to blend real world textures with an exaggerated world comes off mismatched.
The writing is no better. If you squint, you can make out the faintest of arcs in Mario and DK impressing their dads, Luigi discovering his courage, and the titular siblings finding strength in working together. But the plot progression and character beats are as threadbare as anything else in the movie. By and large, the narrative here is a mere skeleton to hang Mario references onto, which I guess means it serves its purpose.
That’s the best you can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It is a gentle, unchallenging, spectacle-and-nostalgia delivery mechanism more than it’s an actual film. In an era when fans have revolted when franchises dare to take chances, to depart from expectations, to offer genuine surprises and have the temerity to move things forward; this movie is composed of nothing but simple, easily-digestible pablum that asks absolutely nothing of its audience and barely asks anything more from its creators.
In that, it succeeded. Rather than give myself over to existential rhapsodies like the film’s Luma, I don’t want to gaze up at Lakitu and declare that the sky is falling. One need only look at the runaway success of Across the Spider-Verse to have hope that there’s still room for gorgeous, inventive, and above all ambitious animated films at the multiplex. But The Super Mario Bros. movie is still a sad reminder that, with the right name and iconography in tow, a movie doesn’t have to be creative, or even good, to enjoy beaucoup success at the cinema.
