“Thing is, you ain’t that thing no more. What you used to was.”
True Detective season 2 ended up being so bad that it makes me doubt whether or not the first season was actually as amazing as it was or if it was just carried on the backs of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. That isn't to say that the only problem is the casting choices - it might be a step down from those two in a way, but Rachel McAdams is always great, Taylor Kitsch fills his role fine, and Colin Farrell pulls a good performance almost entirely out of his ass. Farrell's Velcoro is a nothing, some terrible approximation of cop character tropes that would have sunk horribly without a skilled actor there to keep it afloat, which is pretty interesting considering he is acting across from Vince Vaughn so often. I say it is interesting not because they have chemistry - they don't - but because Vince Vaughn is also given a terrible character that has to say idiotic things every ten minutes, except the difference is that his performance faceplants like a drunk gymnast. Nic Pizzolatto writes dialog like he has never heard a single human being speak.
None of this is helped by the story either. True Detective season 2 is eight episodes of television with maybe three episodes of actual plot spread between them. Plot elements that feel like they should have taken longer are rushed into an episode or two while parts that should have been developed quickly end up lasting the entire season. Nobody involved in putting this season together seems to have any concept of how pacing should work. Almost nothing of import or interest is verified or revealed until the last three episodes, and in those three episodes those reveals come entirely in clinical spurts of expository dialog. The main characters end up feeling so removed from the story - and from each other - that they sound like robots reciting Wikipedia plot synopses when this happens. When it does all come together and all the characters finally end up intersecting, it is so unfulfilling that you feel like maybe you took a wrong turn on the remote and ended up in a different show. That is almost a compliment in a way though, as the times when season 2 least resembles True Detective and everybody just shuts up - the meth lab shoot out, the penultimate episode, the sudden change of focus in the finale - it almost works. Too bad those moments, few and far between as they are, continually become weighed down under the shambling misshapen beast that is the main narrative. Somehow, and I really have a hard time wrapping my head around this, this show has figured out a way to have very little plot and also be comically overcomplicated.
All of this could have been fine with the right choices in the tone of the show, but those choices were not made. It seems like Pizzolatto has completely and utterly misjudged what it was people enjoyed about the first season, and I don't just mean that because he jettisoned 99.9% of the interesting vague occult stuff. All of the great scenes of interpersonal character development have been replaced by shots of Los Angeles freeways. He saw everybody go wild about Rust Cohle and went "hey why not have an entire cast of fatalist mumblers this time, people will love it!" No Nic, nobody loves it. You wrote the television serial equivalent of a 40 year old dude in a Tapout shirt reading Camus and sniffing a jar of his own farts. The only positive of this season is now we have yet another creator who can be added to the ever growing list of "People Who Should Never Have Complete Creative Control Over Anything." Good job buddy, you will be super happy talking narrative development with George Lucas and Vince Russo at the next meeting.
WATCH if you, for some reason, think there aren't enough overly complicated and paper thin cop dramas about people with dark pasts. DON'T WATCH if you want the first season to remain unsullied.
Absolutely hilarious to me that the very goofy super entertaining openly melodramatic cowboy soap opera has become a culture war talking point for the kind of insufferably tedious people that spend all their time on Twitter virtue signaling about how much they hate virtue signaling instead of spending time with their grandkids or something.
Yellowstone is purely ridiculous in its plotting, completely removed from the reality of modern ranching in a microcosm and 'western' politics as a macrocosm, and incredibly fun because of it - especially Kelly Reilly and Wes Bentley who 100% realize what kind of show they are in and what kind of performances it needs - but good lord, the absolute irony of its most ardent and passionate fanboys who take it way too seriously being the kind of fake cowboys that the show itself considers its internal enemy is so delicious that it actually makes the show better in of itself. Newsflash, if you think Yellowstone is owning the libs or whatever I can guarantee you are closer to the try hard out of towners in the valley desperate for 'authenticity' and cosplaying in their cowboy hats than you are to the Duttons, the same way most people who think they are Ricks are really Jerrys.
The first three seasons are all good and get better the more over the top they get, but season four seems to be running out of steam, most likely because almost half of the running time was used as backdoor pilots for at least three spin offs which we all know is the signal of a show stretched too thin, but as long as they resist some of the more obvious pitfalls due to it catapulting into the mass audience it should stay solid.
For fans of Deadwood, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, and Passions.
"Stop acting like this is normal!"
I, like most people, am a fan of the Walking Dead comic books. I, like a lot of comic book readers, believe it either should have ended already or should wrap up very soon. I, unlike apparently quite a lot of people, do not find the Walking Dead television show to be anything better than decent at best. Still, I figured despite that I would give Fear the Walking Dead a solid chance since the "society falling apart" part of the zombie apocalypse formula tends to be the most entertaining.
Right off the bat, Fear the Walking Dead greatly bungles the pacing of the show. Of the main characters, three of them are either useless or already insufferable, which is not a great start. It is only six episodes in to what will most likely be 1000 episodes of show since the general public for some inexplicable reason still devours zombie stuff with a spoon, but those six episodes have done nothing to really make me believe any of these characters have potential. Salazar is kind of great - mostly because Ruben Blades does a hell of a job. Colman Domingo's Strand is so mysterious and actually intelligent that he immediately gets rocketed up to the top of the Interesting Character List. Kim Dickens is a great actress but the wishy washy and frankly generic motivations of Madison Clark give her very little to work with. Cliff Curtis on the other hand has even less to work with through Travis, and seems to put next to no effort into it. Travis goes from "hey don't teach my kids to shoot guns during the zombie apocalypse" to "well guess I better start beating people to death" and Curtis doesn't add anything to either performance. So far, Travis Manawa is the front runner for the 2015 Arthur from Showtime's Camelot Award for most show shattering lead character. Looks like you've finally got some competition Ephraim Goodweather!
Things don't get much better as the show goes along. The human element and the social commentary aspects of zombie fiction have been almost entirely excised from the medium, so the success of zombie stuff tends to fall on how exciting or suspenseful or scary or whatever the actual zombie scenes are. Fear the Walking Dead sadly does not offer much in that regard either. After so many seasons of the main show, and countless other zombie properties ebbing and flowing through pop culture, there isn't a ton of room for Fear the Walking Dead to offer anything different. When it does try and ramp up and give you something exciting, it feels like it is on such a small scale that it doesn't even matter. How you can take the literal end of the world and make it feel like its more the end of a sound stage in Burbank I don't know.
The worst part though, beyond everything else, is that the child show inherits the most damnable trait of the parent show - every major moment hinges entirely on a character or characters being a complete moron. The military can't shoot 2000 zombies, Travis doesn't want somebody teaching his kid how to shoot a gun in the fucking zombie apocalypse, oh we should just leave the addict alone I'm sure that would be fine, i'm sure its just light reflecting off a disco ball or something kid don't worry about it and trust the military, sure guy who is part of the group that wants to kill us all I'll let you go since you seem so trustworthy, hey man stop beating on that guy who just shot one of us, hey do you think maybe somebody should guard the giant building full of shambling death monsters, etc etc etc. Nothing here feels organic at all, because the only way the writing team knows to move anything forward is by either killing somebody or making somebody more brain dead than the creatures they are fighting.
Fear the Walking Dead suffers from the exact same problems that the Walking Dead does, except without the comic book's established plot and a constant stream of strong acting performances to fall back on. This makes it a far less enjoyable watch. It still has room to grow and isn't nearly bad enough to completely give up on, but these six episodes are not a strong start.
WATCH if you only buy new Call of Duty games for zombie mode bro. DON'T WATCH if you know you won't be able to look past every character passing the idiot ball around to kill time.
"When you look back after a long life, you'll realize there's nothing that's really worth risking your life for."
Before I get into the parts where I turn everyone against me by being super critical of this show, I just want to say that Fate/Zero is utterly and completely superior to Fate/Stay Night in every possible regard. It just isn't a timeless classic.
Fate/Zero tells the story of the Fourth Holy Grail War, a war that involves magically adept "masters" summoning legendary heroes from the past in order to do battle for the ephemeral Holy Grail. The servants in the war fall into a series of broad classifications related to their martial focus - archer, saber, rider, caster, etc. The grail ostensibly grants the winner of the war any wish they desire, but in practice it is just a huge MacGuffin that intricate conspiracies and bad ass fights can happen around. With multiple groups and families of mages all with individual goals and desires competing against each other to get a hold of the Holy MacGuffin, there certainly is not a dearth of either of those things in Fate/Zero.
While that story ends up being interesting enough by the time it wraps up, the actual pacing of it is really puzzling to me. Fate/Zero starts, stops, and sputters almost randomly with no discernible flow from plot point to plot point. The biggest example that comes to mind is the abrupt shift from the big battle with Caster to the info dump between Archer and Kirei, to a series of episodes that are entirely Kiritsugu's backstory. Fate/Zero falls victim to the ol' "two characters sitting around in a room talking for 15 minutes" thing in order to stretch out the periods between climactic beats, and it feels as if the show underestimated just how important momentum is to this genre. The odd pacing makes Fate/Zero feel as if it is just a few episodes too long.
It is very noble of Fate/Zero to put such a strong focus on the characters themselves considering how simple it would have been for it to rest entirely on the appeal of watching historic bad asses bad ass against each other, but the flip side of that is that focusing on so many characters means that nobody feels unquestionably important. I consider Rider and Waver to be the main characters - almost entirely because they have the most entertaining interactions and the most consistent arc - but considering this is a prequel to Fate/Stay Night you would assume that Saber and Kiritsugu are the important ones. The time it spends on developing the characters is great, but it is burdened under the weight of its own obsession with showing the viewer a constant stream of convoluted twists. A lot of these twists negate the quieter character work that previous episodes may have spent their time on. Again, like the problems with the story, Fate/Zero doesn't do well when it tries to balance all of its plates
Those glaring problems with the shows pacing become less glaring when you realize that Fate/Zero puts all its eggs in the big loud moment baskets, and it pulls the majority of those off even with a heavy reliance on deus ex machinas with unnecessarily goofy names. I singled out the Kiritsugu Emiya backstory vacation as an example of the show's mishandling of story pacing, but the fate of Natalia Kaminski and the VAMPIRE BEES~! is a hugely well done scene even if it comes in the middle of a series of episodes that almost feel like an OVA more than two episodes in the final third of a series.
With all of that said, due to Ufotable's high quality animation and a wonderful soundtrack, these shortcomings are all much easier to deal with than the similar complaints against Fate/Stay Night. Again, while I imagine the creators and fans of Fate/Zero would consider the plot to be its strongest point, for me it is completely the aesthetics. And what wonderful aesthetics they are. The character designs from the over the top details of the servants to the subtle differences in the masters, all the way down to the wonderfully drawn backgrounds, Fate/Zero looks wonderful. The fight scenes are where things really distance themselves from the back, as the fluidity of the animation sells every attack as important.
Fate/Zero might be an uneven tale, but thanks to high quality animation and some really awesome moments of over dramatics it is one completely worth experiencing.
WATCH if you like awesome fights and want to bask in the glory of a Shirou Emiya-less Fate story. DON'T WATCH if your eyes are heavily susceptible to injury from the large amount of eye-rolling that TYPEMOON's in universe vocabulary may cause.
"I can't believe all of you are so worked up over a silly treasure hunt."
Mars Daybreak is the kind of anime that you forget about almost as soon as you are done watching it. It serves a purpose - and it certainly isn't terrible - but it becomes almost immediately obvious that this exists to chew up a few hours of television when ntohing major is available to be aired. There has to be an average for there to be classics, and Mars Daybreak is certainly average.
The story of Mars Daybreak takes place on Mars, as you may have guessed. This version of Mars was originally colonized centuries ago, but since the original colonists were either piss poor at terraforming or really into irony 99% of the planet's surface is covered in a huge ocean. The only land based colony is on the summit of Olympus Mons, while the rest of the people live their lives on giant city ships or, as the protagonists have chosen, as mech suit piloting pirates. It is the kind of thing that might have been relatively warmly remembered as an obscure little afterthought if it would have come out in the 80s, but as an anime from 2004 it doesn't stand out despite the decent premise.
The main characters are inhabitants of the Ship of Aurora, a pirate ship that takes the role of Robin Hood on the economically depressed planet. Most of them fit into a very basic anime archetype - young hero with a secret destiny, tsundere childhood love interest, little sister surrogate, guy voiced by Steve Blum, guy voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch, and guy voiced by Crispin Freeman - but surprisingly enough they are all solidly endearing. The best characters tend to be the ones that either operate entirely over the top, or actually seem unique. There is a sentient dolphin in a dive suit and a talking cat. It might not be surprising to point out that Mars Daybreak doesn't take itself particularly seriously, instead shooting for more of a lighthearted theme which is one of the lone bright spots of the whole thing.
A lot of the more lighthearted humor stuff actually lands which isn't something I say often. Usually in these also-ran or average-as-hell anime, the humor is so hackneyed that it is wavers between ineffective and intolerable. It even got me to laugh at a rapid fire amount of completely obvious jokes related to the robot keepers of the ship being named "Balls." "It can't fiddle around with the Balls." "I control all the balls on this ship." "We balls are able to move around." "More balls!" .
While the characters are easy to care about, the aforementioned setting of Mars Daybreak is its strongest feature. Both of these things are routinely ignored by the threadbare and poorly developed plot though. Too often it ignores the vast reaches of an economically depressed Mars ocean and the unique ideas that could foster in order to present what is really just a simplistic mech anime. I like mech anime, I like pirate anime, I like anime with a Robin Hood theme, but Mars Daybreak takes all of the most worn out aspects of those three themes and doesn't do a whole lot more with itself. The first half of the show is fine enough, but by the time it actually gets around to fleshing out the plot and paying off storylines it runs out of gas. Most of the second half of the anime is complete stand alone filler, and none of the writing is strong enough to make the filler episodes do the characters or settings real justice.
Still, my love for pirates and my inability to truly not be entertained by any anime that has lines like "we comrades of the revolution will never succomb to the tyranny nor yield to the sadistic oppression of the state." It ends up being a half assed Eureka Seven or a toothless Gurren Lagaan, but it ends up being a hard anime to completely hate.
WATCH if you need to have something on in the background while you do something else or are a BONES completionist. DON'T WATCH if you think the common-hero-with-a-great-destiny thing is a bit waterlogged by now.
"The only people a superhero can save are the people he sides with."
An entire review of the Fate/Stay Night anime adaptation can be boiled down to a single sentence; Shirou Emiya fucking sucks.
Seinen anime can easily be tanked by a terrible lead, and Fate/Stay Night is obviously no exception. The burden of Shirou Emiya is like wearing a full suit of armor while trying to go for a swim, no matter how strong a swimmer you are there is no chance of you keeping your head above the water. And no matter how good some of Fate/Stay Night's individual parts may be, it can't be saved when Emiya is constantly dragging it down. Then again, if you strapped Shirou in a suit of armor and tried to drown him he would inexplicably survive anyway since he is already wearing impenetrable and indestructible plot armor. Dude catches more certain death than Rasputin and just shrugs it off while being one of the most consistently stupid, selfish, and unlikable characters around. And that is his final form! At no point does he improve, learn anything, or develop.
The Emiyalbatross is a double shame, because Fate/Stay Night is a fantastic concept at its core. In the story, the Holy Grail appears every so often and some of the mightiest heroes in the history of our world are summoned to fight for their human masters in order to gain control of it. This leads to some really fun battles and great character designs that, if it weren't for the massive amount of missteps, would have been enough to make this an easy recommendation. Some missteps are on Studio DEEN's part due to how drab a lot of the animation gets outside of the battles, but most come as the plot is further revealed in the second half of the anime when the pace slows down considerably and twists are dumped on the viewer in some very unconvincing ways. Unconvincing twists are nothing new in anime, but when so much of Fate/Stay Night's second half revolves around the "romance" between Sabre and Shirou, oh boy does that second half drag.
The nature of Fate/Stay Night also works against itself. Considering it starts off in a hole by being an adaptation of one of those visual novels but with all the sex scenes removed - which leads to some painfully awkward scenes like "the place where the threesome probably went" and "the place where awful Shirou probably makes Excalibur puns while guilting Sabre into sex because he is just the worst" - it is just too much for the anime to recover from thanks to how truly terrible Shirou is as protagonist. I think I'm being generous by giving this an average score, but I don't think saying so is as controversial an opinion as it would have been when this was at the height of its popularity. The far superior, and completely Shirou-less, Fate/Zero did a lot to overshadow Fate/Stay Night while shining a light on its shortcomings.
WATCH if you have a unique form of blindness that renders you incapable of seeing any of Shirou's scenes. DON'T WATCH if you can just Youtube the two opening themes because they are pretty solidly the best part of every episode.
