Thanks to an accumulation of annual leave, I had three weeks off this month, and spent a fair portion of it desperately trying to make a dent in the massive pile of library books that I’ve brought home from my new place of work. This is not as much fun as it sounds, as after a while it began to feel more like a chore than a pleasure, which is not how you should be spending your holidays.
Rest assured, I also went on plenty of walks, and took my friend’s daughters to the movies (Barbie again). Spring has finally arrived in Aotearoa, and I’m soaking up all the available Vitamin D after what feels like a very long, cold and dark winter.
When it comes to the general theme of this month’s reading material, I temporarily put aside Slavic Fantasy and focused instead on what can only be called Old English Children’s Folktales. There were plenty of books based on English folklore or set in specific English locales, with titles like Sisters of the Lost Marsh and The Green Children of Woolpit and By Ash, Oak and Thorn. In terms of their general collective vibe, think The Borrowers by way of The Wind in the Willows.
Viewing wise, my choices were much less themed. We had another movie night at work, and thankfully everyone seemed to enjoy Casablanca (I say that because it was my recommendation). I finally caught up with Netflix’s Wednesday, which means I also watched the two The Addams Family films of the nineties. My sister introduced me to Vigil, a show I didn’t even know existed before she told me about it (which is very weird, since I usually have at least heard of most things) and rather sadly completed Carnival Row and The Nevers, two shows that vibed perfectly together, not least because they were both completely screwed over by their networks.
I did however manage to get in one unofficial “trilogy” – that is, three projects that were directly inspired by the works of H.G. Wells: the 2019 adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the 1979 film Time After Time, and the 2001 miniseries The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells – all so different, and yet all standing as a tribute to the reach of this man’s vision.
And three of these projects featured Eleanor Tomlinson!
Luna and the Treasure of Tlaloc by Joe Todd-Stanton
The fifth and sadly final book in Joe Todd-Stanton’s series on the Brownstone family, a huge clan of adventurers and explorers, whose children often end up participating in exploits involving gods and mythical creatures from all over the world. So far we’ve dealt with Nordic, Egyptian, Chinese and Greek mythology – now this deal with the comparatively little-explored Aztecs.
Its heroine is a bit different too. Luna Brownstone is more of an anti-hero, who commits herself to stealing precious artefacts for her own self-gain after her parents are betrayed by those the family had been coming to assist. She’s especially interested in the gold treasures of Central Mexico, whose people are suffering through an unprecedented drought.
She arrives just as a young Aztec girl called Atzi is sent by her people to petition the rain god Tlaloc for deliverance, and Luna quickly makes herself part of the quest. Of course she’ll learn the value of friendship and unselfishness by journey’s end, though along the way we’re threated to Todd-Stanton’s gorgeous illustrations, including at least four of his favourite two-page spreads filled with monsters, obstacles and other dangers, and which depicts several versions of his characters traversing its perils.
The story itself serves as an early primer for Aztec mythology, features two adorable little heroines, and leaves us with what is hopefully the promise of more adventures to come. This was promoted as the last book, but our narrator in the framing device is surrounded by portraits of his extended family – surely more of them could have their tales told.
Once Upon a Hillside by Angela McAllister and Chiara Fedele
This is a very lovely book, which reminded me of Natasha Farrant’s Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror in its structure. Set on a single hillside in Dorset, it contains seven short stories that take place in seven distinct time periods: the Stone Age, Roman times, the Middle Ages, 1650, the Victoria Era, 1930 and today, with seven young people (six girls, one boy) having an adventure in the countryside.
What connects them is that each successive child finds a token left behind by their predecessor – an engraved arrowhead, a carved dog, a magnifying glass – which becomes a precious keepsake.
Neolithic Tani provides her tracking abilities to her tribe, Roman twins Lucilla and Corio tend a wild hare back to health, Ailith is trained by her mother in the healing arts, only for them to be accused of witchcraft, young Liddy finds his family while working as a crow-scarer, Clara solves the mystery of a seemingly haunted excavation site, siblings Peggy, Dennis and Stanley struggle to adapt to the countryside while their parents go job-hunting, and modern day Amari tries to cope with an ailing grandmother and overworked parents.
Together they paint a portrait of the dizzying span of time humans have been upon this earth, yet remain connected by the things that really matter. Some of the stories end a little too neatly or tritely (no less than three involve families realizing the solution to their problems is just to move to Dorset) but it’s a wonderful idea for a book, and accompanied by bright, evocative illustrations by Chiara Fedele. This would make a great gift for a young reader.
The Moth Keepers by Kay O'Neill
A children’s graphic novel by a kiwi writer/illustrator, it depicts a fantasy world based on the high alpine regions of Aotearoa: specifically, the Southern Alps and Tongariro National Park. I suppose this is a little ironic, as the fictional setting is a vast desert, the one ecosystem that New Zealand doesn’t have.
Instead, Kay O’Neill draws inspiration from the symbiotic relationships that exist between flora and fauna, in a very gentle story about a young fox-girl (in a community full of people with rabbit ears, quail feet, or horse bodies) learning about her place in the world. I know this comparison comes up a lot in my reviews for children’s graphic novels, but this one really does feel like a Studio Ghibli film, both in its low-stakes storyline and anime-like style.
The central myth of this world is that of the moon spirit, who was so lonely that a group of desert dwellers chose to live under the stars to keep her company, leading to two distinct cultural groups: diurnal and nocturnal communities. In gratefulness, the moon spirit bestows on her people a gift of Moon Moths, which pollinate a tree that provides all sorts of useful benefits.
In the story proper, young Anya has taken her place as a protector of the Moon Moths, guiding them across the desert with a lantern in order to keep the trees healthy and thriving. But it’s a lonely existence, out there in the vast deserts all by herself each night, and over time she finds herself wondering if she’s made the right decision.
Unusually for a fantasy story, it’s not the world that’s at stake, but just the inner turmoil of a single person that needs to be resolved. O’Neill seems to take great pleasure in depicting the details of this desert culture (the foods, the chores, the celebrations, the clothing) and several of the community’s stories – such as the tale of the moon spirit or that of a young ghost girl – are rendered in a slightly different style and colour palette than the rest of the book. The moon spirit in particular has a gorgeous design: a combination of owl, griffin and Chinese dragon.
It's a very soft and gentle offering from a writer/artist best known for The Tea Dragon Society books. Gonna have to track those down...
Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki
Here’s something that caught me by surprise: a graphic novel by Hayao Miyazaki, first written in 1983, but only translated into English in 2022. So it’s something that feels brand new, but is also one of the first projects Miyazaki ever put out into the world – that’s a strange thing to be, and you can see the genesis of many of his more famous stories and films in this compelling little tale.
Based on a Tibetan folktale called “The Prince Who Turned into a Dog,” it involves a young prince called Shuna who hears rumours of a beautiful golden seed that might feed his impoverished people. Setting out on a journey into the wilderness, he has many dangerous adventures and suffers the miseries of the world before reaching a far-distant shore where the “god-folk” cultivate their crops.
Having escaped with a few grains, the point-of-view shifts to a pair of young sisters that Shuna liberated from slavery earlier in the story, who find Shuna without his memories, a voice, or even the ability to behave as a human. As they gradually nurse him back to health, the seeds are sown and begin to sprout...
According to translator Alex Dudok De Wit’s afterword, Shuna’s Journey is not a manga, but what the Japanese call an emonogatari, or illustrated story, in which there are captions instead of speech bubbles. Miyazaki’s watercolours are gorgeous, but his true genius is in not delving too deeply into explanatory world-building. The reader never learns exactly what happened to Shuna after he escapes the island of the god-folk, and many of his experiences remain mysterious in nature (such as an early encounter with some spooky people who live onboard a massive grounded ship). A lot of questions are left unanswered, but not the most important ones – and Miyazaki knows the difference.
His usual themes are all present and accounted for: a brave, self-sufficient heroine, humanity’s loss of a symbiotic relationship with nature, the horrors of war and unchecked capitalism, but the story is also serves as the wellspring of many of his later works – almost too many to list.
There’s a lot of Nausicaä here (the desert landscape, vast edifices, dwindling natural resources, a small, windswept kingdom with a protective young monarch) and Princess Mononoke (Shuna is a dead ringer for Ashitaka, and his steed simply IS Yakul, though here that word becomes the name of the species rather than the personalized name of the creature). The eerie peace of the god-folk’s home also reminded me of Luputa in Castle in the Sky.
It's a fascinating, dream-like book, a worthy read on its own merits, but also as an early glimpse of the artistry Miyazaki would soon unleash on the world; a primer of his key interests at the very beginning of his career.
Mary Anne and the Great Romance by Anne M. Martin
On the heels of Mary Anne’s framing narrative in Babysitters Winter Vacation, she again takes centre-stage in the first of a two-parter that deals with the wedding between her father and Dawn’s mother. More Mary Anne. Hooray.
After what feels like interminable introductory exposition (we’re well into entire chapters of these books being superfluous to anyone familiar with the series, as they’re just page after page of explaining everything) we get into the familiar formula of dual storylines, in which a babysitting problem runs parallel with a major event or issue in one of the protagonist’s lives.
In the first, the girls in the club become aware of increasing tension between twins Marilyn and Carolyn. In the other, Mr Spier – that sly old dog – pops the question to Mrs Schafer during a surprise birthday dinner with Dawn and Mary Anne. The girls are delighted at the prospect of a huge wedding and reception, only to learn it’s going to be a small civil ceremony instead.
The weird thing about this book is that I’m pretty sure it spends more time on the twin drama than it does on the lead-up to the wedding and the merging of the Spier/Schafer families. In fact, the two adults in the room seem to have put very little thought into how this blended family is going to work: he’s a neat freak, she’s a slob. Mary Anne worships her kitten, Mrs Schafer doesn’t like cats. The Spiers are carnivores, the Schafers are vegetarians (maybe, they might just be health food fanatics – it’s never really made clear).
A lot of conversation and planning needed to take place before they tied the knot, and even then Mary Anne is totally blindsided by the fact she’ll be moving to Dawn’s house (and into her room, even though we’ve just spent the entire B-plot discovering that the twins are fighting because they need separate spaces). The excuse is that the Schafer house is supposedly bigger, but you KNOW Martin doesn’t want to give up the house with the potential ghost and the secret passage.
It’s all a bomb waiting to go off.
Some more notable things: Mr Spier comes across as a right weirdo. According to Mary Anne, he doesn’t like her using the word “hey”, he only permits her to wear clear nail polish (colour is for whores, I guess?) and doesn’t like being interrupted. Okay, that last one is fair enough, but after Mary Anne does so, she has this bizarre thought a few minutes later: “I knew he’d forgiven me for interrupting him.” Er, being interrupted is annoying, but it’s not a cardinal sin requiring forgiveness. Oh Mrs Schafer, what have you gotten yourself into?
Over in the Marilyn/Carolyn plot, the girls observe that Carolyn is feeling left out in the wake of her sister’s popularity, but don’t twig to the fact that Carolyn’s friend “Gozzie Kunka” is someone she’s made up. Just how dumb are these girls?
It made me laugh that the entire club went to the wedding (I mean of course they did, even Mallory and Jessi who have absolutely no reason to be there, or to care about being there) and so I can’t be accused of being too mean to Mary Anne, she does get a nice moment when she slips Kristy a note reaffirming the strength of their friendship, knowing that she’ll feel insecure about Mary Anne and Dawn becoming stepsisters.
Dawn’s Wicked Stepsister by Anne M. Martin
So, that bomb I mentioned? It goes off here. As you can tell from the title, the point-of-view switches from Mary Anne to Dawn, and deals with the difficulties the Spiers and Schafers have in becoming a blended family in a single household.
I went over most of it in the above review, but some of it is really stupid. Like, why does Mr Spier keep serving his wife bacon when he knows she never eats it? Why do Dawn and Mary Anne think it’s a good idea to share a room where the whole subplot of the last book was that the Arnold twins had to have their own space?
I’m also back to thinking that Mary Anne is THE WORST. She gives Dawn the silent treatment when she’s mad, brags about having a boyfriend, claims that her skirt on Dawn look a little “tight”, passive-aggressively tells her: “don’t think of yourself as someone who can’t get a date, okay? It’s not healthy,” and generally acts like a tradwife-in-training.
There’s also one incredibly sloppy continuity error, in which Dawn states she wants to save up money to buy Mary Anne a “now we’re sisters” present to make up for the one Mary Anne gave her. Except... she didn’t. In the last pages of the previous book, it’s clearly stated that DAWN was the one that gave MARY ANNE this gift. Did the ghost writers get their wires crossed?
And how is this situation resolved? With the girls calmly and maturely discussing their differences? Of course not! Dawn gaslights Mary Anne into thinking she’s being haunted by the ghost of Jared Mullray by claiming she has a babysitting job and then doubling back to the house to ring the doorbell and leave creepy gifts on Mary Anne’s desk via the secret passage. I’d call foul, but Mary Anne has been so insufferable up till this point that she fully deserves to get scared out of her wits.
In the B-plot, the entire Pike family comes down with one malady or another, requiring the babysitters to pull double-duty in looking after an entire household full of sick kids. The MVP turns out to be Kristy’s brother Charlie, who not only picks up the Pikes’ groceries, but sticks around to help cook a meal for them. He’s not just a taxi service for a bunch of teenage girls!
Kirsty also gets a nice follow-up from the previous book, in which Dawn goes to her for advice on how to handle Mary Anne’s behaviour, and Kristy comes through for her without any jealousy or pettiness. It’s also the book that introduces Carol, Dawn’s father’s new girlfriend (though we only hear her voice over the phone when Dawn rings her brother).
Also, this wedding/marriage two-parter is notable for being the first books in the series to get published in the nineties. It’s full-speed ahead into the decade of leggings and scrunchies.
The Mulberry Tree by Allison Rushby
Damn, I have had this book checked out of the library for so long. Months ago I read The Ghost Locket and The Turnkey of Highgate Cemetery by the same author, but for whatever reason didn’t get the chance to immediately follow up with this one. And it’s probably my least favourite of the three.
Immy and her parents have moved to a tiny village in Cambridgeshire after an upheaval in her family. Her father was a GP whose elderly patients required him to sign off on their driver licenses, only for one of them to ignore her father’s rejection of renewal, and end up killing a young mother and her daughter with his car – which Immy’s father blames himself for. This is annoying on several levels, from the fact that this is tragedy was obviously in no way his fault, to the fact that none of this is thematically connected in any meaningful way to the ghost story.
The best ghost stories are often a metaphor for something else going on in the protagonist’s life, though this backstory is only tenuously linked to the weird occurrences that follow. The family end up staying in Lavendar Cottage, where an ancient and twisted mulberry tree takes up all the space in the back garden. The real estate agent is reluctant to lease the place out, there having been two reports of girls going missing on their eleventh birthday while living on the property.
Local superstition tells that the tree took them, a story that is all the more spooky due to there being two very large knots in the tree trunk: human-sized knots. You know how this goes: the family scoff at this story and end up leasing the place, only for inexplicable things to start happening...
SPOILERS
Immy starts to investigate the history of the place, but unfortunately, the story doesn’t come to a particularly satisfying conclusion. As in, Immy figures out the problem with the tree (it’s angry that a small sapling that grew from one of its cuttings was removed from the garden, as it considered this to be its child – yes, really) and once Immy returns a branch from the “daughter” tree, she ends up resetting time itself so that neither of the girls ever disappeared.
Up until this point, there has been no indication whatsoever that time travel was a thing that was possible, much less changing the entire course of history. It almost feels like the book switches genres right at the finish line, which results in a very lopsided read (here I was thinking they’d cut the knots off the tree and find two skeletons, though I suppose that’s a bit too dark for a children’s book).
I liked Rushby’s other two books just fine, but this one didn’t quite hit the mark.
Sisters of the Lost Marsh by Lucy Strange
This is another historical mystery by the author of The Ghost of Gosswater, though one that veers more toward fantasy than ghost story. According to the afterword, it was heavily inspired by Thomas Ingoldsby’s The Ingoldsby Legends, which Wikipedia tells me is a collection of myths, legends, poems and ghost stories based in and around Romney Marsh in Kent and East Sussex. The author goes on to cite several more historical anecdotes, works of art and folklore traditions that inspired what she called her “rural gothic fairy tale.”
And whatever else you may think of the story, it is imbued with the distinct, heavy atmosphere of this time and place. The dialect, the local colour, the descriptions of the marshlands and the people who live there... Strange vividly captures the setting of her story, to the point where I could almost smell the brackish water and hear the wind in the reeds. Top marks for ambiance.
As for the story, it involves six sisters living with their abusive, drunken father and their elderly grandmother. The eldest are Willa, Grace and Freya, and the youngest (also triplets) are Dolly, Deedee and Darcy. Their mother is long-dead and their father is obsessed with a superstition that spells out the fate of his six daughters: “Be sure the first girl marries well, the second in the home to dwell, a third maid can do little harm if set to work upon the farm. Four and five must both be wed, or six will bury you stone dead.”
As a result, Grace has recently become engaged to a local man called Silas in exchange for a fine horse. She’s not looking forward to the match, and neither are any of her sisters, who know Silas to be just as bad as their father. When a travelling fair comes to the village, the elder girls take the opportunity to sneak away and eke out some enjoyment from life before their inevitable parting – though when the fair moves on, Grace is nowhere to be found.
Interestingly, the protagonist of the story is neither the eldest daughter nor the youngest (as you usually have it in fairy tales). Instead, third daughter Willa decides to go after her missing sister, following the fair through the Lost Marsh and its dangers. It’s important not to get too intrigued by the curse, as despite some fantasy elements, this story is really more of a coming-of-age drama, in which Willa – and to a lesser extent – her sisters, must learn to brave the world around them.
The Green Children of Woolpit by J. Anderson Coats
I knew going in that this story was based on a “true” story – in the sense that there are very-real records from the Middle Ages of two children that were found in a wolf pit near the village of Woolpit, who spoke a language no one understood, would eat nothing but raw beans, and – strangest of all – had green skin.
Coats takes the barebones of these records and shapes her own narrative around them, resulting in a poignant and rather bittersweet story about the dangers of the fey and the power of stories. In the autumn of 1160, the dreamy and easily-distracted twelve-year-old Agnes hears frightened voices calling from the nearby forest. She leaves her chores and discovers two children in a deep wolf pit: a boy and a girl with green skin.
Speculation rages as to where they come from and who they are, though Agnes is sure they’re Fair Folk, or the Good People, who are subjects of the King Under the Mountain. Desperate to be “the girl in the story,” Agnes is drawn to the pair of them, and easily persuaded that they’ve come to the mortal world to find her specifically. Knowing that she was a foundling, whose mother gave her to her adoptive parents before disappearing into the night, Agnes is thrilled at the news she’s the missing princess of the Good People, long-searched for and finally found.
But of course, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Soon enough Agnes finds herself trapped under the mountain, not as a beloved princess but a lowly servant.
Coats winds in a lot of lore about the fey: the sickness caused by salt and iron, the effects of glamour, their inability to lie (but skill in bending the truth), the swift passage of time while you’re in their kingdom, the dangers of eating their food – it’s all here, and woven into the story beautifully. As ever, our young heroine must use her wit and cunning to escape her captors, but Coats adds an extra level of depth in how Agnes – rather gullible, but fiercely compassionate – navigates the world around her through the familiar beats of the stories she’s been told.
She’s constantly comparing her situations to the tales she’s heard over the years, and parsing whether or not the lessons in them are applicable to the problems she’s facing at any given moment. There’s room to critique the lack of female solidarity in the old fairy tales (as she says at one point: “there should be more stories where girls help one another”) and how easy it is to imagine yourself in the role of heroine.
It can get surprisingly dark at times, with scenes of what the Romans did to the early inhabitants of the British Isles (which helps explain the desperate choices of one important supporting character), and an equally surprising bittersweet ending. Let’s just say not everyone lives happily ever after, not even those that deserve to.
By Ash, Oak and Thorn by Melissa Harrison
This is a very sweet little book... which is part of the problem. It needed a little more bite, a few more sharp edges, especially given its subject matter. Moss, Cumulus and Burnet are three members of the Hidden Folk: tiny fey caregivers of nature who remain largely hidden from the human world, even as the wilds they inhabit are further encroached on with each year that passes.
One fateful day, the tree in which they live is felled by a freak storm, and the trio realize they’ll need to go in each of their own kind if they have any chance of survival. So off they go, from the quiet neighbourhood in which they live to brave the dangers of the wild world: predators, motorways, vast distances, and the fact that two of them are slowly succumbing to a strange invisibility that’s taking over their bodies.
Yeah, it’s largely the plot of The Borrowers, mingled in with a bit of Enid Blyton and The Animals of Farthing Wood – even a dash of The Wind in the Willows, what with the characters’ reverence to the god Pan. According to some of the quotes and blurbs on the cover, it was inspired by a book called The Little Grey Men by an author called B.B., who I had honestly never heard of before now. This may well come as a shock to some, as I get the impression that it’s quite a famous book series, and even won the Carnegie Medal. So, er... as a children’s librarian I should probably get on that.
The odd thing about this story is that it’s not really what it purports to be about. There’s a lot of discussion about how human beings are destroying natural habitats, and yet none of the obstacles our three protagonists face have anything to do with mankind’s destruction of the natural world. It’s a storm that brings down the tree in which they live, and the terrifying disappearance of Moss in the book’s final chapters is due to a feral cat.
And the big mystery that’s woven throughout this story – why the Hidden Folk are gradually turning invisible – isn’t even resolved. That’s for the sequel, By Rowan and Yew.
There’s a great love here for the English countryside: the flora and fauna, the turn of the seasons, even the phases of the moon, and it’s not a surprise that the final pages contain birdwatching tips and glossaries on all the natural elements the book has been exploring. But there’s something missing here, something that was present in all the stories that it clearly drew inspiration from. Maybe it’s just a little too cozy when it should have been perilous.
The Queen’s Man by Sharon Kay Penman
I’ve read a couple of Penman’s novels over the years and have a huge amount of respect for the research and commitment to accuracy that goes into her novel-writing (correct me if I’m wrong, but she’s considered one of the most historically accurate writers of medieval fiction, no?) Most of her books are centred around real-life figures and the events that shaped them, but she takes a different tack with this four-part series by centring them on an original character.
It's 1193 and Justin de Quincy has just learned that the clergyman who has served as his benefactor and patron is in fact his father. In disgust at the man’s dishonesty and hypocrisy, he leaves the only home he’s ever known to seek his fortune in London, only to foil a highway robbery along the way. Unfortunately, the man he tried to protect from bandits loses his life, but not before putting a letter in Justin’s hands and imploring him to deliver it to the Queen.
The missive informs Queen Eleanor that her son Richard the Lionheart has been captured on his way home from the Crusades, and is currently languishing in an Austrian prison. Knowing that her younger son Prince John has designs on the throne of England, the Queen hires Justin to investigate the messenger’s death further, to ascertain whether or not the crown prince had anything to do with it.
Learning that the dead man was a jeweller called Gervase Fitz Randolph, Justin travels to the man’s home in Winchester and begins to ask questions, quickly realizing that the man’s family all have reason to want him dead. Not only that, but getting embroiled in court politics (including a fling with one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting) puts a target on Justin’s back, and catches the attention of Prince John himself.
As ever, Penman writes concisely and carefully, ensuring not only that details of the distant past are correct, but that the characters think and speak the way that twelfth-century people actually would. This works in both the book’s favour, in terms of setting the scene, but also its detriment, since Penman being such a stickler for accuracy means that the question surrounding Randolph’s death (was he killed on the orders of Prince John for the letter he carried?) is already answered well before the end of the book.
But that hardly matters, as I enjoyed this – and there are three more of them to look forward to!
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
I’ve just finished reviewing the third season of HBO’s His Dark Materials, so is there anything to say about the original text, which I concurrently read alongside watching the show? Yeah, a little.
This was published in 2000, which means I would have been about sixteen when I read it for the first time, and I recall being a tad bewildered by it. After the staggeringly formative impact that Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife had on me, I have to admit that this was a disappointment. Where was the no-holds-barred battle between Asriel’s forces and the Kingdom of Heaven? Where was the almighty payoff for mysteries like the alethiometer and the subtle knife? Was Mary’s role as “the serpent” really just to tell the children the story of her sexual awakening?
I’ve certainly come to appreciate and understand it more over the years, but... well, first impressions count for a reason. In this most recent reread, I wondered if perhaps some of my dissatisfaction stemmed from the lack of atmosphere that was so prevalent in the previous two books. I was enraptured with the vivid descriptions of Oxford in the first book and the beautiful deserted Cittàgazze of the second. Here, most of the action takes place in the desolate wastelands of the underworld, or the equally grim adamantine tower that holds Asriel’s forces. There’s no sense of place like there was in the previous books.
Pullman’s credo that a writer only has tell the reader what they need to know for the story to work also leads to some rather questionable creative choices. Like sure, I don’t blame Pullman for not being particularly interested in the logistics of what it would take to wage war against a massive fleet of angels. But I would also have enjoyed reading about it. The details would have been fascinating. Can we get George R.R. Martin onto it? That’s the sort of thing he’d love, and as it stands, the final battle not only happens largely off-page, but we get no real closure on who actually won.
But for better or worse, Pullman is the sort of writer who is more interested in the challenge of how a two-inch tall man can get a key off a guard’s keyring than in the movement of vast metaphysical armies.
He also skips some fairly important narrative steps in an attempt to wring a coherent, small-scale story out of his massive backdrop, as there are plenty of other examples of him just making things happen to expedite the plot. Like, John Parry magically knows that a bomb has been targeted at Lyra while in the land of the dead, and later tells the children that their daemons are in Lord Asriel’s world. How does he know this? Well, he was a shaman, so he just knows.
Some things aren’t explained and don’t need to be; they’re better off mysterious, like John Parry inexplicably being in possession of Lee Scoresby’s mother’s ring, or the origin of all the prophecies (gyptian, witch, alethiometer) that identify Lyra as Eve, or how the philosophers made the subtle knife in the first place and how a bearer is identified by losing two of his fingers. Yet in this book, I wanted more connective tissue in this sprawling narrative; a little more care in tying everything together.
There are too many coincidences, too many “well that’s convenient” moments. In the book, Xaphania is little more than a plot device who turns up at the end of the story to explain everything to Lyra and Will. We learn nothing else about her, despite her being the one that apparently discovered and then blew the whistle on the Authority not being the creator.
There is also a fair share of retcons. In The Subtle Knife, the angels are depicted as strong and dangerous; now they’re explicitly weaker than human flesh to make Asriel and Mrs Coulter’s defeat of Metatron more plausible. I suspect that Pullman originally had another destiny in place for Mrs Coulter, as Serafina made a big deal in the previous book about etching the woman’s name on one of her arrows – here Serafina barely appears, and ends up breaking the arrow in half.
Asriel does a complete one-eighty on the subject of Dust, telling Mrs Coulter in the first book that it’s sin, and that he plans to destroy it. Obviously this doesn’t make any sense by book three, so he has to tell her: “I thought you would prefer a lie,” in an attempt to make her come with him.
Look, stories change and evolve in the telling of them, and characters are obviously capable of telling lies, but in this case you can tell Pullman just had to cover for a discrepancy.
There’s also the fact that conclusions to a few subplots go completely ignored. Throughout the course of Mary’s adventures in the world of the mulefa, she has a few run-ins with terrible white birds called the tualapi, who destroy their homes and food stores for no readily apparent reason. They were left out of the adaptation for good reason, as they serve no discernible purpose in the book itself, and their presence is never properly dealt with (when the gyptians arrive at the end of the story, it’s briefly mentioned that the birds are “keeping their distance” and that’s it).
And some things just plain aren’t explained that well. The book has Tialys say, on hearing that Lyra and Will plan to break the dead out of their holding cell: “This will undo everything. It’s the greatest blow you could strike. The Authority will be powerless after this.” Er, why? And how? I mean, I can put together some of the pieces through what the text implicitly suggests: we know the dead returning to the world of the living and dissipating into Dust will increase the amount of consciousness in the world – but how does Tialys know that? And couldn’t Metatron and his angels just close the window and add more guards to the land of the dead?
And why are all the dead locked up in that place anyway? To deliberately prevent Dust from accumulating in the world? I suppose that had to be the reason why the Authority made up concepts such as heaven and hell – to control people while they were still alive – only to throw them in the metaphysical equivalent of the garbage bin once they died. But since all the windows between the worlds have to be closed by the end of the story, how does the dead dissolving into Dust help anyone but those in the mulefa world?
Yes, I’m overthinking it. In many ways Lyra and Will’s journey is a metaphorical one, not a logistical one. Maybe we’ve all been spoiled by nitpicking YouTube videos and articles which purport to “explain” the end of television shows, which makes us want answers on absolutely everything instead of letting the story just tell us what it wants. But in this case, the fact this is a book that has something to say, and that this message often gets in the way of the actual story, means you can see Pullman pulling the strings to get his characters where they need to go, and to say what they have to say, in ways that don’t feel particularly elegant.
Which means that some of the bigger mysteries do require an explanation. The structure of a story should be sturdy; the water clear all the way to the bottom when it comes to the crux of the matter. It wasn’t until this reread that I realized Dust was mainly in danger from the abyss that opened in the wake of the Magisterium’s bomb, and I’m still not totally sure if that’s correct. There’s just so much more that I wanted to know.
But the reason I feel this way is simply because I found the entire trilogy so fascinating. All my nitpicking should be taken as a compliment, as these books totally changed my approach to stories (especially fantasy) in a myriad of ways, from its prose to its world-building to the way it linked the story of Genesis to the experience of growing up and the underlying themes of Pullman’s own inventions – the daemons, the alethiometer, the Spectres.
The richness with which Pullman described his worlds, often with so little words – it’s like a magic trick. That profound and private relationship he crafts between humans and daemons was like a world unto itself. I really feel like I’m exploring another universe whenever I crack this trilogy open, and I can say with certainty that I’d never read anything like it before – or since.
Casablanca (1942)
What’s left to say about the most famous film of all time? It was movie night at my place of work, and I was a little nervous about this one since it had been my recommendation. Thankfully it seemed to be received well among the attendees, but so it should – it still has all its power, all its suspense.
I did a little bit of research into it this time, and was fascinated to discover that no one working on the film – not the director, the scriptwriters or the actors – had the faintest inkling that the finished product would be as iconic as it has since become. The budget was low and the script was adapted from a relatively insignificant theatre play. To everyone involved, it was just another project in the Hollywood churn, which perhaps is what worked in the film’s favour: no one had any preconceptions or egos weighing them down.
It's the reason why people would be hard-pressed to tell who you directed this film, and why there are no obvious stand-out shots that define the work as a whole: it was cleanly and simply made, straightforward and workmanlike.
But that’s fitting for a movie with such emotional complexity. The relationship between Rick, Ilsa and Lazlo is surely one of the most famous love triangles in cinematic history, and yet the script knows what it’s doing when it comes to how they respond to each other in any permeation of the triangle. Rick is embittered, yet is humbled by Lazlo’s nobility. Lazlo loves his wife, but is devoted to a higher cause. Ilsa is by no means unhappy with Lazlo, but her heart truly lies with Rick.
That at least, is one interpretation of the characters and their dynamic. The richness of their internal lives means that there are several ways a person can grasp what really happens between them, and the ambiguity is the reason we’re still pondering them all these years later.
For instance, when Ilsa breaks into Rick’s apartment on that fateful night, armed with a gun in case he doesn’t give her what she wants, what is her true motivation? She wants to save Lazlo’s life obviously, and if she’s desperate enough to murder, does that mean she’s desperate enough to lie? Can she make Rick believe she still loves him in order to secure those transit papers for her husband?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. To me, she’s being utterly sincere to Rick throughout these scenes. But the fact that it’s at least a possibility she was playing him speaks volumes as to the quality of the writing and performances.
Then there’s Lazlo. As it happens, Roger Ebert had a very critical view of this character, saying: “He is a heroic leader of the Resistance, but he has no humour and no resilience. If in peacetime he finds himself in political office, I believe he will be most comfortable in a totalitarian regime. When at the end of the film Rick tells a lie about what happened between himself and Ilsa, in order to preserve Ilsa's image in Laszlo's eyes, Laszlo hardly seems to care.”
Um, what? Not resilient? The man withstood torture in a concentration camp. Comfortable in a totalitarian regime? He’s devoted his life to the overthrow of the Nazis. And I have a completely different take on his seeming indifference to Rick’s lie: this is an astute and emotionally intelligent man. He knows that Rick is lying about whatever went on between him and Ilsa, knowing full-well that his wife fell in love with someone else during his absence. But he accepts Rick’s falsehood because he loves her and respects the man who has just saved his life.
Come on Ebert, the whole point of Lazlo is that he’s the only man in Rick’s estimation worthy enough to make him give up the woman he loves. And yet, Ebert’s take is a reading that the film allows for, such is its depth and ambiguity.
There is also something of an urban legend that states that nobody knew for sure how the final scene at the airport would play out (and who would be getting on that plane) until the day of shooting, which subconsciously filled the actors with the suspense and confusion required to pull off this famous sequence.
This is disputable, as the Hayes Code was in effect at the time, and never would have allowed Ilsa to leave her husband for another man. But then, perhaps this is the one time that we can be thankful it existed. The movie would have lost all its power had she stayed behind; if Claude Rain’s character had been proved correct when he said: “love has triumphed over virtue.”
(Speaking of Claude Rain, that’s my personal complaint about this movie. By the end of the story he’s a friend to Rick and an amoral ally to the cause. But a significant subplot of the film involves him pulling a Scarpia Ultimatum on a young woman whose husband is desperate to get to America; something she’s seriously considering going through with to get the required travel papers before Rick intervenes. So... Claude Rain is a monster, I don’t care how many suspects he rounds up).
Aside from that, Casablanca is simply a perfect storm. Everything and everyone came together at precisely the right time and in the right way to make this story happen – almost accidentally. If there were such a thing as a God of Films, then he had a heavy hand in the creation of this one.
Time After Time (1979)
This was the first of three H.G. Wells based stories I watched this month, and it came with one hell of a premise: what if Wells really did invent a time machine, only for his friend John Stevenson to turn out to be Jack the Ripper, who steals the machine and flees into the future, forcing Wells to follow him and try to negotiate the technology, culture and social mores of the early eighties while tracking down the most famous serial killer of all time?
That’s a lot, and the film doesn’t entirely know what to do with it all. The first act plays out exactly as I described in the first paragraph, with Herbert George Wells arriving in 1979 and finding that the future is not in fact the social utopia he envisioned. What’s more, he’s on the hunt for the Ripper, who is fitting into the future just fine. In the film’s most iconic line, he says: “Ninety years ago I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur.”
It’s odd in a way, as many of elements in this story would be derided as woke by today’s insane standards, what with Stevenson gloating about how easy it is to purchase a firearm and Wells enthusiastically applauding women’s liberation, while others are cringingly dated. At one point Amy casually states: “I’m not a dyke,” and later (when Wells asks for her consent before they get intimate) she replies: “Herbert, I’m practically raping you.” Uh... why would you say that? Why would anyone ever say that??
Malcolm McDowell and David Warner are two of my favourite character actors, and it’s a lot of fun watching the two of them play against each other here – especially McDowell, who is still best known for A Clockwork Orange. Seeing the difference in performance between the psychotic Alex and the mild-mannered Wells only proves he never really got the A-list career that he deserved.
On the other hand, Mary Steenburgen is also present as the requisite love interest/distressed damsel, and I’ve no idea what’s going on there. I’ve seen her in plenty of things where she puts in a good performance, but here she just seems completely zoned out. Her declaration of love to Wells (followed by an immediate smash cut to a completely different scene) and her reaction to the gruesome murder of her co-worker are downright funny.
Still, it’s a fun movie. The premise is a winner, the two leads are game, and there’s some amusing Fish Out of Temporal Water throughout. And hey, was that Corey Feldman?!
Now, I wonder if I should track down the short-lived 2017 series based on this film...
The Addams Family (1991)
In anticipation of Netflix’s Wednesday I naturally had to go back and watch the two nineties movies, which for any Millennial is the definitive take on The Addams Family. Raul Julia and Angelica Huston are the Gomez and Morticia, and Christina Ricci’s take on Wednesday is the performance that solidified this character as a Deadpan Goth Girl (which she really wasn’t in the comic strip or the sixties television show).
And yet, perhaps because I haven’t seen this movie in such a long time, I wasn’t hugely blown away (no pun intended, given the film’s climatic scene). There is the barest thread of a plot: Gomez’s brother Fester went missing some years ago, only for a shady lawyer and a professional loan shark/con-artist to come up with a plan to get their hands on the Addams’ family fortune: use a lookalike to pose as the long-lost Fester and ingratiate himself into the household.
Said lookalike is the con-artist’s son Gordon, who initially struggles with the eccentricities of the Addams clan, only to eventually discover he has a lot in common with them. That’s because he is the long-lost Fester, suffering from amnesia and brainwashed into thinking he’s someone else entirely (which is explained in literally the last scene of the entire film). The bad guys are defeated, the brothers are reunited, and the family is whole again.
The thing is, most of the runtime (or so it felt) is made up of small vignettes of the family being... well, the Addams family. Gomez and Morticia are obsessed with each other, the kids play dangerous games with knives, electricity and other sharp implements, and the likes of Grandmama, Lurch and Thing get their own little skits as well.
They’re not bad; some of them are extremely funny (no one alive would cut the “are they made from real girl scouts?” gag) but they’ve got nothing to do with the plot. In many ways, it feels like the film would prefer to be a very long string of Addams Family sketches than having to bother with the Excuse Plot of the missing Fester.
But that’s simply the nature of the movie, take it or leave it. For me, the most interesting part of watching it was having some of my misconceptions resolved. For instance, it surprised me that the Addams family lived in such a derelict house: I remembered it as being an opulent Gothic mansion. Also, Wednesday is not as completely emotionless as later depictions (like the animated movies and the Netflix series) portray her as: there are plenty of times in which she’s happy or visibly frightened. Also, I was not expecting that brief appearance from Sally Jessy Raphael!
But really, this movie was just the warm-up act for...
Addams Family Values (1993)
This is one of those rare cases in which the sequel is indisputably better than the original, and it’s all down to two things: Joan Cusack as the villain and the film’s devastating parody of summer camp, overenthusiastic counsellors, white privilege, and America’s valorisation of Thanksgiving in the Wednesday/Pugsley subplot.
It takes everything good about the original film and elevates it. Obviously, the stellar cast is back – not just Angelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci, but a larger role for Mercedes McNab as the snotty girl scout. This time around the vignettes serve the plot and not the other way around, drawing upon Fester’s loneliness as a bachelor and the birth of a new Addams baby to justify the arrival of Joan Cusack’s Debbie Jellinsky, a nanny hired to take care of the children.
Joan Cusack is phenomenal in this, to the point where she almost (almost) steals the movie from the Addams family itself. She’s a black widow who sets her sights on Fester’s fortune, neatly disposing of Wednesday and Pugsley at summer camp when they get too suspicious of her activities, and throwing everything’s she’s got at Fester himself (not that it’s difficult, it’s pretty much love at first sight for him).
Her performance is so darkly hilarious that even her body language and voice modulation can make me cackle. There’s a scene in which she’s simply wrapping a package, and her entire being is just oozing with malicious intent. Likewise, her shift from breathless, wide-eyed ingenue to spiteful, raging murderess is something to behold. In my opinion, Cusack makes this movie, and no one else could have done it but her.
But the studio also recognized that they had something in Christina Ricci’s Wednesday, and her adventures at summer camp are a fantastic send-up of wholesome all-American holiday traditions. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol play camp counsellors who are the absolute antithesis of the Addams family, and so manage to be utterly terrifying in their relentless enthusiasm and cheerfulness.
It becomes their mission to bring Wednesday into the fold, and truly, there is no greater gag in the history of cinema than Wednesday and her cohorts being taken to the Harmony Hut for some social conditioning. They’re put in front of a TV and VCR, Wednesday visibly braces herself, and then we cut to the exterior of the cabin as Julie Andrews belts out: “THE HILLS ARE ALLIIIIIIVE” through the trees.
And of course, the deliberate sabotage of the racist Thanksgiving play. Few things are as cathartic as that particular sequence, though it amuses me to imagine that if it had been filmed today, half the audience would be bawling about how woke it is, and the other half would be complaining about cultural appropriation.
Also, I couldn’t help but be chuffed that the film features Christina Baranski, Nathan Lane and Cynthia Nixon (the latter two in cameo roles) who thirty years later feature together in The Gilded Age. It’s a small, small world.
Definitely a superior sequel in every conceivable way.
The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (2001)
Storytime! Ages ago, my parents had Sky Television, which was the New Zealand equivalent of cable. Then one day, they decided to not have it anymore. And I was in the middle of watching this miniseries when the feed cutout. Now thanks to the power of YouTube I’ve finally finished what was so rudely interrupted over twenty years ago.
Back in the early noughties, the Hallmark Channel was putting out a huge number of sci-fi/fantasy miniseries, most of which were divided into two or three parts, and all seemingly produced by father/son duo Robert Halmi Senior and Robert Halmi Junior. There were dozens of them: Merlin, Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, The Voyage of the Unicorn, Jason and the Argonauts, The Monkey King, The Snow Queen, The Odessey, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – some of dubious quality, but others surprisingly good.
This was one of the surprisingly good ones, though also something of a curiosity piece. It’s one of those shows that make you wonder how it got made and what was the pitch; a production with a reasonable budget and decent cast, but also a bizarre structure and other odd creative choices.
The whole thing is based on six of H.G. Wells’s short science-fiction stories, though they’re presented as events that actually happened in his life, and which inspired his writing in the years to come. Along with his love interest Jane Robbins (more on her in a bit) Wells investigates phenomena such as an accelerating drug that allows a professor to move faster than sound, a man displaced in time, an extra-terrestrial crystal of sinister design, and a truth-telling serum that’s tipped into London’s water supply. Most of the stories take place at the university where Jane is teaching, and their deepening relationship is woven throughout each episode.
It’s a clever way of showcasing some of his lesser-known fiction, though the whole thing is wrapped in a framing device that feels completely unnecessarily. In the first episode, an elderly Wells is introduced to a young journalist who is visiting to write a profile on him, only for him to confront her on the fact she’s actually been sent by Home Security. The second episode has the two of them go to a military base, where Wells explains the nature of some strange artefacts that he wrote about in his past, and is reunited with an old work colleague.
Finally, the two of them return to Wells’s home, and he regales her with a couple more stories about his past. Then she leaves, and he gets to writing again. Um... okay? It’s such a strange way of structuring the whole thing, as nothing that happens in the framing device has any bearing on the stories themselves, and it has no real narrative arc in and of itself.
But perhaps it’s because of these strange creative decisions, rather than in spite of them, that I found this project so charming. Longer than a movie, shorter than a television show, it’s something that almost certainly wouldn’t be made today – or if it was, there’d be tighter editing, better computer effects, more action/suspense/melodrama, and franchise potential.
As ever, some of the faces that turn up are amusingly familiar, though with twenty years melted away – most notably a very young Dominic Cooper as a lab assistant who becomes trapped in hallucinations of a shipwreck on a deserted island. The journalist is non-other than Eve Best, currently kicking ass and taking names as Rhaenys Targaryen in House of the Dragon, and in a supporting role are the unmistakable cheekbones of Kate Fleetwood who features in The Wheel of Time as Liandrin Guirale.
Then there’s Pip Torrens as a man who gets more than he bargained for with a hair-growing tonic, who I also watched this month in The Nevers, filmed over twenty years later. Man, time flies. (On that note, I also found Torrens’s kind-but-no-nonsense housekeeper in The Nevers vaguely familiar, and sure enough – she was in this as well as a kind-but-no-nonsense landlady).
As for the man himself, H.G. Wells is played by Tom Ward, the guy you call if you can’t afford David Tennant. Amusingly, everyone calls him “Wells,” including his girlfriend, presumably because someone on the writing staff thought the name Herbert was too dorky. Katy Carmichael is in the rather thankless role of love interest Jane Robbins, though the show at least makes her a teacher at the Imperial College of London, and she’s fairly involved in the adventures that follow.
That said, a little research on the real Wells was quite eye-opening – he was already married to his cousin at this point, and divorced her so he could marry Amy Robbins, one of his students. Her name wasn’t even Jane, he just called her that because he didn’t like the name Amy – which explains both Mary Steenburgen and Elinor Tomlinson’s character’s names in Time After Time (above) and The War of the Worlds (below).
In all honesty, I can’t bring myself to recommend this. It’s weird and uneven and it drags in places. But like I said, it’s a curiosity piece that has its own distinct charm for being so unlike anything else. I’m fascinated that it exists at all, and that I finally got to finish it after two decades of waiting.
The White Queen (2013)
It’s been ten years since The White Queen aired, kicking off a number of subsequent miniseries based on Philippa Gregory’s “historical-romance” novels, which was reason enough for me to revisit it. Ten years already? Yikes.
I’m not entirely sure if “historical-romance” is an established phrase or if I’ve just pulled it out of thin air, but it neatly incapsulates the specific subgenre of what Gregory writes: dubiously-researched historical fiction which has an emphasis on the role of women and their love stories with powerful men. Yes, there is an air of condescension around that description, but there isn’t a sordid rumour or scandal that Gregory won’t take as genuine fact – including nonsense like Richard III seducing his niece, or the Woodville women dabbling in witchcraft, or Queen Elizabeth successfully rescuing one of her sons from the Tower of London.
Watching these adaptations, you commit to the melodrama of it all, or you go mad.
Covering over twenty years of history and the main events of what would become known as the War of the Roses, the miniseries actually adapts three of Gregory’s novels: The White Queen, The Red Queen and The Kingmaker’s Daughter: Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beauford and Anne Neville, respectively. Through the eyes of these three women, we see the court intrigue and power struggles that made up the behind-the-scenes drama of the ongoing conflict, in which they had to find ways to exert their power in subtle ways. As the tagline said: “men go to war, women go to battle.”
In this sense, you can tell the show struggled a bit. On the one hand, the role of women during fifteenth-century warfare and politics was rather limited. On the other, passive heroines don’t make for interesting protagonists. So the screenwriters – and Gregory herself – had to come up with various ways to imbue their female characters with more agency, like how the Woodville women are now real witches that can conjure the weather, or how Margaret’s husband inexplicitly asks her for instructions on whether the York princes should be rescued or assassinated.
And yet, I can’t complain that the show doesn’t commit itself to a female perspective, from Isabel Neville realizing that she’s simply a pawn in her father’s politicking, to Margaret’s use of piety and prayer to protect herself, to the obvious advantage Elizabeth Woodville has over other women when it comes to her beauty and fertility. Women are the lead characters of this drama, the windows through which the audience watches the War of the Roses play out, and it never faulters from that objective.
It’s also a reasonably even-handed show, with very few outright villains. Elizabeth and Anne Neville are always on opposite sides of the conflict, and yet each is a sympathetic character, whose suspicion and dislike of the other is rendered completely understandable. Even Margaret, who is the closest thing the show has to a villain, has understandable motives and a few moments of rather pitiable vulnerability.
In many ways, she’s the show’s most fascinating character. Is she a religious fanatic who will do anything to put her son on the throne? Yes. But she’s terrifying because ultimately, she’s right. Her son becomes King Henry VII, exactly as she ordained it.
Naturally, it’s packed full of familiar faces – though for many of the performers, this was their big break. Rebecca Ferguson is obviously the standout (currently saving the world with Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movies) but a very young Faye Marsay is also impressive (who has since ticked off a lot of franchise boxes: Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Star Wars...). David Oakes kicks off his career as the guy who plays slimy connivers in period dramas, James Frain and Janet McTeer are as solid as ever, and Rupert Graves damn-near steals the show as the brutally pragmatic Lord Stanley.
Keen eyes can also spot Joey Batey (Jaskier), Otto Farrant (the latest Alex Rider) and Dean-Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon) in some of their earliest roles. I was also amused to recognize Andrew Gower and Eve Ponsonby, who I also watched this month in Carnival Row.
Basically, it’s a stacked cast, though its most memorable male performance would have to go to Aneurin Barnard as Richard III, who gets a far more sympathetic treatment here than Shakespeare afforded him (though that’s par for the course these days, thanks to the Ricardians). It’s a shame he hasn’t really become more notable in the decade since, as he has the acting chops for stardom. In any case, his Richard is introspective and melancholic; a man trying to do the right thing but not entirely sure what that is; too honourable for court politics and yet eventually dragged down by them.
The show absolves him of responsibility for the death of his nephews, a historic possibility that I’m open to, though in all honesty – this guy had one job, to put his nephew on the throne, and he very much did not do that. Casting him as a villain in the centuries to come might not have been fair, but you can’t say it wasn’t reasonable.
If you allow yourself to indulge in the glossy hair and the pearly white teeth and the gorgeous outfits, there’s a lot to enjoy with this miniseries, and it’s easy to see the inspiration for Game of Thrones in the War of the Roses – some of the backstabbing and side-switching defies belief. In fact, I may just continue down the line of period dramas that cover the Tudor dynasty: this was followed up by The White Princess and The Spanish Princess, and then of course there’s The Tudors and Becoming Elizabeth...
The War of the Worlds (2019)
I have nothing to back this up, but it almost feels like halfway through the production of this latest take on H.G. Wells’s famous invasion story, the producers realized Eleanor Tomlinson was a bigger name than Rafe Spall and so started tampering with filming to make her the protagonist.
I was looking forward to this adaptation given that my only real familiarity with this story is the 2005 Tom Cruise vehicle, which had its problems to say the least. Yet going in, I knew this miniseries hadn’t been particularly well-received either, despite returning it to its original setting (late Victorian England).
It got off to a good start, though with some interesting wrinkles. I know enough about the book to know that the unnamed first-person narrator is a thinly-veiled expy of Wells himself, and so making protagonist George a married man who has left his cousin-wife and taken up with a younger woman called Amy (as Wells did himself) wasn’t an egregious change. The problem is – this doesn’t really go anywhere, or mean anything. The couple get a few sidelong glances and sniffy remarks from the neighbours, but it naturally has no relevance when the tripods start to attack.
My favourite part of any invasion story always comes after the setup about the family dynamics and how cheerful/unhappy everyone is, but before shit hits the fan and the grim task of just surviving kicks in. It’s the part in which the characters know something strange is happening, but not what exactly; there’s a growing sense of foreboding and confusion, and we the audience are left with that excruciating sense of helplessness due to the fact that we know precisely what is going on and cannot warn the characters.
This sequence is handled well here, what with the steady ratcheting of dread and panic, and follow-up scenes of the destruction of the village and the massacre at the beach are rendered remarkably well for what must have been a television budget.
Unfortunately, in episode three the whole thing loses its way. Throughout all the episodes we’ve been sporadically shown flash-forwards of the time after the Martians have been defeated, but not before their terraforming red weed has been eradicated from the planet. No one really knows why the former happened, and nobody is interested in trying to reverse the latter.
I’m aware that the book ends on a relatively cathartic note: not only have the Martians been defeated by earthly bacteria (which is common knowledge), but the narrator is reunited with his wife, whom he had counted among the dead. No such luck here. Humanity is on the brink of extinction, no one much cares about Amy’s theory that typhoid might destroy the red weed, and her son (one of the few children left on Earth) is very sick. It just ends without any sort of hope or closure at all.
Neither does it settle on its theme. Early on, Amy remarks “all life is selfish” in regards to her relationship with George, which feels like it might be the show’s thesis (many characters abandon others in order to save their own lives). Between George, Ogilvy and the unnamed clergyman, there’s some discussion about God’s will versus Darwinism and which of the two people should turn to for survival.
And of course, George eventually states the obvious: that it’s all an analogy to imperialism, with the British Empire now suffering the same fate as the people and countries they’ve colonized throughout their history. Look, it’s not like I disagree with what he’s saying, but you’re not meant to spell out the allegory! That defeats the purpose of an allegory!
So in the end, it just sort of fizzles out. How George and Amy get separated for the first time is very contrived, as is George’s temporary enlistment in an army garrison (why would they want an amateur mucking up their operation?) And ultimately George pointlessly sacrifices himself so that Amy can get away, even though they probably both would have been fine if they’d hunkered down and stuck together.
Some old reliable faces turn up here: Rupert Graves (the second thing I’ve seen him in this month, after The White Queen), Jonathan Aris (ditto, he having played Lord Roke in His Dark Materials), Robert Carlyle, Harry Melling, and hey – that’s Freya Allan and Joey Batey, right before their big consecutive breaks in The Witcher! I’m glad I watched, as it’s certainly compelling while it lasts, but much like the Cruise/Spielberg offering, it ultimately has nothing to say.
Vigil: Season 1 (2021)
I’m stunned that I had no idea of this show’s existence before my sister told me about it. I wasn’t too captivated by the pitch either (“murder mystery in submarine”) but felt I had to comply considering I had even less interest in the other show she keeps trying to get me to watch: Foundation. (Which I’m not opposed to, just very skeptical that it’ll get renewed enough times to complete its story).
In any case, Vigil is a six-part procedural with a twist: most of it takes place on a submarine, in which our lead investigator struggles with claustrophobia, a hostile crew, and an inability to communicate properly with her colleagues back on shore. The ever-reliable Suranne Jones (how does she find time to be in everything??) is sent to HMS Vigil for what her superiors hope will be a straightforward investigation into the death of a crewman on board, presumably from a drug overdose.
But of course, things are never simple. Jones finds evidence that the drugs were planted on the body, but her every effort to discover what exactly happened is stonewalled by the crew. Everyone has their secrets, and just to make things even more complicated, the submarine cannot cease in its mission, it being a nuclear deterrent in a very delicate balancing act with other world powers.
Meanwhile, Rose Leslie plays Jones’s colleague and ex-girlfriend, who is following her own line of inquiry on the surface, involving a camp of nuclear protestors and what she comes to believe is a Russian sleeper agent. It’s to the writer’s credit that these parallel plots are nicely balanced, and although the investigation on the submarine is clearly the show’s drawcard, it’s certainly never boring when we join Leslie on land.
The flashbacks to Jones’s traumatic past were rather unnecessary, and reminded me of the similarly tragic backstory given to Florence Pugh’s character in The Wonder (seriously, not every female investigator needs to be grappling with trauma and/or grief – it’s okay to just let these women do their jobs, I promise!) But aside from that, it’s compelling a compelling watch, though I question the need for a second season. This was a near-perfect one-and-done. Thanks sis.
Wednesday: Season 1 (2022)
That was... fine. Aside from Jenna Ortega’s impressive commitment to the role of Wednesday (she never even blinks on-screen, or so the internet tells me) I have to admit that I was a bit bamboozled by the runaway success of this show, which is apparently one of the most-viewed and rewatched shows in Netflix history, even beating season four of Stranger Things for how many hours were watched.
I suppose taking a familiar IP – in this case, The Addams Family – and putting its Breakout Character in a fresh but still familiar setting (a boarding school that is essentially a spookier version of Hogwarts) and shaping the storylines around a generational mystery, with gorgeous set design and directing/composing contributions from Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, was a recipe for success.
I’m only being half-sarcastic. I mean, there’s nothing in that sentence that’s bad, but it still feels so manufactured in a way – like the best possible outcome of taking a survey of what people are watching and then deliberately parsing that through an AI show generator. It’s good enough, with a neat premise, great visuals, and a generally decent story... but on some level it’s still deeply mediocre.
Oh, it was created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar? Okay, that explains everything. EVERYTHING.
After being expelled from high school after she takes vengeance on her classmates for bullying Pugsley, Wednesday is sent to Nevermore Academy for outcasts, which her parents attended when they were young (which begs the question, why wasn’t Wednesday already at this place?) As mentioned, this school is essentially a spooky version of Hogwarts, where the students are werewolves, vampires, sirens and other weirdoes, though Wednesday still finds herself an outcast among outcasts.
The premiere throws in everything but the kitchen sink, with a generational mystery involving Gomez, a student trying to kill Wednesday to avoid the fulfilment of a premonition, a vicious monster on the loose that’s killing residents of the nearby township, festering resentment between said township and the students of Nevermore that dates back to pilgrim-times, dozens of fellow classmates and teachers that try in their different ways to connect with Wednesday through various school activities, and Wednesday herself trying to cope with her psychic visions.
That the underlying story holds up as coherently as it does is a point in the show’s favour, though that doesn’t mean that said story is particularly elegant or clever. The culprits behind the killings are obvious from the moment they step onscreen, the historical conflict between the God-fearing pilgrims and the poor-downtrodden outcasts is material we’ve seen a gazillion times before, and plenty of the subplots involving Wednesday’s fellow students (Enid can’t transform into a werewolf, Bianca’s mother wants her to lead a cult) don’t really have much to do with anything.
And that Wednesday-centric love triangle. Oof. This was an astonishingly bad idea, and I couldn’t buy for a second that Wednesday would be into either one of these boys (or that she could even tell them apart, to be frank). We’ve seen what kind of guy Wednesday likes in Addams Family Values, and it was the dorkiest dork that ever dorked: an asthmatic David Krumholtz. By that logic, this Wednesday should have been into either Rowan or Eugene. Bonus point for the first guy, since he actually tried to kill her.
I also found it interminably annoying that one of the olden-day characters is referred to as “Goody” as though it was her first name. This was not a name, it was an honorific, short for “goodwife.” Please tell me I wasn’t the only one bugged by this. It’s like when people refer to the burning of Salem witches, or use the word “hung” instead of “hanged” to describe executions.
But it’s never unwatchable. The production values are sky-high, and everyone certainly looks the part. It’s nice to see Christina Ricci and Gwendoline Christie, even though the latter is criminally wasted. Thing was a lot of fun, as is Fred Armison as Uncle Fester for a single-episode appearance.
But at the end of the day, I feel as though I’ve read and/or watched this story a million times over the year. It was a generic supernatural teen drama, though admittedly with a very different type of female lead (kudos to Jenna Ortego, who was clearly fighting that love triangle nonsense every step of the way). The whole thing had very little to do with The Addams Family beyond the names and aesthetic, and they were clearly the vehicle used to get this show greenlit. In that sense, this is comparable to the likes of the CW’s Nancy Drew and Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, which also have absolutely nothing in common with their source material beyond the names. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly something that’s becoming more common in recent years.
Maybe the fact it’s just so generic is what made it so popular.
The Nevers: Season 2 (2023)
Another one bites the dust – though in hindsight, The Nevers never stood a chance. Between HBO destroying its intellectual property for tax write-offs and Joss Whedon’s misdemeanours and Covid restrictions and probably a thousand other things, The Nevers was always on shaky ground. This technically isn’t even season two, but the last six episodes of the first.
Which is a shame, because it’s my jam. Best described as “Victorian X-Men” but with more women, it leans more towards sci-fi than gas-lamp fantasy due to the reveal that the powers which have manifested within a multitude of people living in an alt-world Victorian England are the result of a time-traveling alien known as the Galanthi. After the creature drifts through the upper atmosphere on a certain day in 1896, various people with seemingly nothing in common besides being marginalized (which explains why so many of them are women) gradually start to realize they’ve been gifted – or cursed – with strange abilities.
Naturally they’re regarded with suspicion by society at large, though under the patronage of Lavinia Bidlow (a wealthy woman in a wheelchair, just to drive those X-Men comparisons home) many of them find sanctuary at St Romaulda's Orphanage, which is run by BFFs Amalia True and Penance Adair. The former has glimpses of the future and the latter is a genius inventor who instinctively understands machines and their inner workings.
But as the first six episodes gradually revealed, there was something more to Amalia: she made cryptic comments about when she was from, seemed oddly unimpressed with Penance’s technologically-advanced inventions, and on the whole acted more like a middle-aged soldier than a young Victorian lady. Yup, she’s a time traveller too, sent back to this era and put in a new body to fulfil some undefined purpose given to her by the Galanthi.
All this we learn in the first six episodes, along with a dark conspiracy to exploit the Touched (as these individuals come to be known) by various groups of unknown origin, who may or may not be working in league with each other. It’s a solid enough premise, and was delivered at such a hectic, exhilarating pace that it was impossible not to get caught up in it.
Some fairly established names turn up: Olivia Williams, Tom Riley, Nick Frost, James Norton, Claudia Black, Eleanor Tomlinson, Pip Torrens – though it also provided a well-deserved leading role for Laura Donnelly, who feels like she’s been on the verge of her big break for years now. High production values, twisty plot, great dialogue, fascinating supporting cast – this show had everything it needed to become a hit, but of course – it aired in 2021. Like I said, it never stood a chance.
These last six episodes answer some questions, but it’s clear that the writers were just getting warmed up, with an open-ended conclusion that is not remotely satisfying as a wrap-up to the story. I’m so tired of getting invested only to end up disappointed.
Because that “fascinating supporting cast” I mentioned? Really was fantastic. Primrose, the six-feet tall teenage girl with beautiful manners. Myrtle, the young omniglot who can understand everything but communicate nothing. Desirée, the prostitute whose clients can’t help but pour out their secrets to her. Bonfire Annie, who shoots fireballs from her palms, in a budding relationship with Nimble Jack, the dapper transgender thief who can form energy shields. Harriet, a Scottish Sikh who’s studying to be a lawyer. Horatio, the West Indies doctor that can heal with a touch. Su Ping Lam, a tiny woman with supernatural strength (played by the woman who was in the Po suit in Teletubbies!)
They were a wonderful, charming, delightful ensemble and I’m mildly devasted that we’ll never see them again.
Carnival Row: Season 2 (2023)
The similarities between Carnival Row and The Nevers are somewhat amusing: a “magical” minority class faces horrific prejudice and violence from the rest of the population, in an alternative version of London that leans heavily into a gas-lamp/steampunk aesthetic, culminating in the minority’s safe haven being invaded by a murderous mob. By watching both you can also play the “guess what show this crazy name comes from” game: Vignette Stonemoss. Amalia True. Tourmaline Larou. Desirée Blodgett. Piety Breakspear. Primrose Chattoway. Imogen Spurnrose.
And you guessed it – cancellation. I suppose I should be grateful that this one at least got a definitive ending (even two more episodes than its previous season) but in a way it’s just as frustrating to watch since you can see the parts of the story that have been put on fast-forward. Developments that were clearly meant to unfold over a number of episodes – even seasons, as I believe the original plan was five in total – are now either accelerated (Agreus and Imogen’s sojourn in Ragusa was probably meant to last much longer, not to mention be more even-handed in its portrayal) or dropped completely (there was a lot of talk about Philo being the subject of a prophecy in the first season, something that has now disappeared entirely).
There are two major characters who are abruptly killed off mid-season who had plenty of mileage left in their arcs and absolutely would have been spared had the show continued, and others that perform sudden about-faces when it comes to their allegiances and motivations (turns out Sophie was far more sympathetic than she initially appeared in season one, though this reveal comes as more of a “huh, okay then” moment than a “whoa, this changes everything” eye-opener). In a word: truncated.
My sympathy mostly goes to show creator Travis Beacham, for whom this was apparently a passion project that he’s been trying to get off the ground for nearly ten years. It must really, truly suck to have to chop up your vision to this extent, especially after a three-year hiatus between seasons to account for Covid, the lead’s maternity leave, and a lengthy post-production period. At least it looks amazing.
For what it’s worth, the story still works. It’s engaging and nuanced and takes place within some of the most detailed and fascinating world-building I’ve ever seen. Where The Nevers was a gas-lamp/sci-fi mashup, this leans more towards steampunk, though both occur in alternative histories. Here a generational war has been waged between Britain and Russia (or the Burgue and the Pact) over Tirnanog, an Irish-coded realm of pixies, fauns, centaurs, kobolds and other fae-folk, most of whom have been displaced from their homes and forced to seek refuge in the Burgue.
Arriving as unwanted refugees, many find work as domestics or labourers, while others are relegated to the ghetto-like Carnival Row. All of them face daily prejudice from humans, who see them as little more than animals – a situation that gets worse as various murders, kidnappings and other frightening events start to occur.
If season one’s plot revolved around the hunt for a Jack the Ripper-like killer, then season two is more interested in the wider political landscape of its invented world. This doesn’t exactly work out in the show’s favour, since there is simply no time to delve very deeply into the inner workings or delicate nuances of Ragusa, the new country that’s introduced this season, which has recently undergone a revolution and overthrown the old regime.
I’ll give the writers the benefit of the doubt and believe that their portrayal of fantasy-communism (complete with Eastern European accents, the sharing of manifestos, and everyone calling each other “comrade”) was originally meant to be more even-handed, especially when compared to the cruelty and classism of its political counterpart, the industrialized Burgue.
Because I agree that communism is bad news. It looks great on paper, but the moment it hits reality, everything falls apart. In the real world, I absolutely advocate for reform and progress without political violence, and so it came as no shock to me that the paradise initially presented to Agreus and Imogen quickly reveals a rotten core, even as they acknowledge it has its advantages (such as giving them leave to be together without racial prejudice). I’ve no problem with demonstrating that revolution is a double-edged sword that comes with a hefty price.
But in the wider context of the story (and in so many stories – *stares at Marvel*), it ultimately means that we’re looking at yet another fantasy analogy that turns a left-coded desire to overthrow political injustice into a bunch of mass-murdering, war-mongering hypocrites, in which our our protagonists are eventually made to desperately defend the status quo. Really? Really? And of course, because the show was cut short, it stands no chance of really delving into the complex nitty-gritty of any political reform: the good and the bad.
There’s a really good (albeit brief) conversation between Agreus and Vignette, in which the former (a faun trying to integrate himself into the Burgish upperclass) defends capitalism/classism as something that inspires people to work hard, that revolution must be done peaceably and slowly, and that waging war will only leave the world in ashes – all those familiar talking points. Vignette counters with the fact that nobody gets their rights by asking nicely, that the world he describes is one she’ll never see in her (or her grandchildren’s) lifetimes, and that he’ll never be accepted by Burgish society. As toxic as this particular phrase is these days, it’s a solid example of Both Sides Have a Point.
But ultimately, I’d side with New Dawn. We’ve just spent two whole seasons having to watch the disgusting racism and classism of the Burgue, including a scene in which its citizens scream abuse and throw garbage at the fey-folk (including children) as they simply try to leave for their homeland. It genuinely boggles the mind that I’m supposed to care about any of them. I’m with Vignette – burn it all to the ground.
(Not helping is that they cast Joanne Whalley as the New Dawn revolutionary. Sorry not sorry, but I’d follow Joanne Whalley anywhere).
But then of course, by doing the “right thing” and trying to save the very people that have treated them like excrement for the last eighteen episodes, our surviving heroes get to live happily ever after in a world that’s magically gotten better during a convenient time-skip. Agreus and Imogen can safely declare their love to society. Humans and fae-folk mingle happily in a cleaned-up Carnival Row. Tirnanog has been declared independent of its colonizers. All off-screen.
There is some lip-service given to the fact that there’s still a lot of work to do, but c’mon. It rings so false, and ends up feeling like a cautionary tale about being not being TOO mean to your oppressors, lest you become like them, or that if you’re part of a persecuted minority, all you have to do is play nice long enough for the people standing on your neck to see the light and maybe stop trying to kill you. One day.
When will a story have the balls to commit to an overthrow of right-wing politics, even if it’s just to scare the shit out of Tories or Republicans or Nationals? That’s something I’d like to see in fiction.
Okay, a few more things. I was reasonably happy with the way the shipping endgames played out, though I can’t disagree with some of the bemused comments from Tumblr which are forced to admit the more hetero ships worked better on-screen than the gay ones. I’m not talking about Philo and Vignette, who never really had much spark, but Tourmaline and Darius, who form a very sweet little friendship/crush in the time they share together.
But honestly, the couple with the most chemistry is the unexpected pairing of Philo and Kaine, the latter being a member of the fae and one of Vignette’s cohorts. They only get a few scenes together, but holy shit – they just crackle with chemistry, whether it’s a reluctant team-up to break Vignette out of prison, a silent “now what?” exchange when they get caught, or a close-quarters knife fight that culminates in one stitching up the wounds of the other. I mean, damn.
Vignette is another casualty of the condensed season – she changes her mind and switches sides so many times that she just comes across as a fickle brat. What’s more, her constant flip-flopping ends up costing the life of the show's hottest guy, which kinda makes me hate her. On the other hand, I’ve absolutely no idea what was going on with Tourmaline throughout most of this season or what any of her visions meant, but hey – she got her happy ending. As the character who seemed the most obviously marked out for death, I’m good with that.
Also, the monster is meant to be terrifying, but just looks silly.
Ah well, at least we got an ending. It’s really sad that that’s a rare thing these days.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1994)
My fourth month of all things Indiana Jones temporarily leaves behind the movies for what many fans believe is the only truly good sequel of the franchise. And it’s a computer game! I have to admit, my own private Indiana Jones trilogy is Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Last Crusade, and this: Fate of Atlantis.
And it just feels so satisfying to play something that is well-crafted, beautifully detailed, and which has clearly had a lot of time and thought poured into it. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is all those things, which captures the tone and aesthetics of the franchise, while delivering on a multi-branched story that could have very well made for a fantastic Indy movie – well, minus the whole “multi-branched” part.
And some aspects of the gameplay are just so clever, like how it opens in what looks like a treasure cave of some kind, only for Indy to burst through the windows in a shower of glass and reveal that he’s actually in Barnett College, searching for a specific artefact. We don’t know what it is at this point, and the controls are limited to just wandering around. But if you click on the right thing (a trapdoor, a rope, a bookcase) Indy ends up crashing through all five floors of Caswell Hall, from the attic to the furnace room, with a short pause at each descent in which the credits appear. Finally he discovers a small horned statue in a locker, and heads across the campus to his office where Marcus and a man calling himself “Smith” are waiting.
Of course, “Smith” ends up being a Nazi spy, who makes off with the statue at gunpoint. From there, Indy must contact a former colleague/archaeologist called Sophia Hapgood, who has since become a psychic. She gives lectures on the Lost City of Atlantis, and claims to have a spirit guide from that very place, who feeds her with information about how the city was designed and the technological marvels that existed there.
Realizing that the Nazis are interested in her expertise, Indy flies to New York to warn her, leading to the pair of them teaming up to try and beat the Third Reich to whatever remains of Atlantis and the energy source found there that could shape the course of the impending war.
Basically, the designers knew there was a lot of setup to get through before the gameplay could properly start, and they do a great job of breaking up their exposition with mini-puzzles and cut-scenes: first Indy attempting to find the Atlantean artefact at Barnett College (which also gives the player a chance to familiarize themselves with the place, as he returns to it later) and then in trying to bypass security at the theatre in New York to see Sophia.
There’s also a clever detail in that with many of the early conversations, Indy is given an array of replies that have no impact on how the character he’s with will respond – but the choices listed at the bottom of the screen widens the context of what he’s talking about, giving the player a greater understanding of what’s at stake.
It’s a great way of easing the player into the world and its objectives: first to find the Lost Dialogue of Plato, which is said to contain clues about Atlantis’s location, and then a variety of Sunstones, Moonstones and Worldstones, which operate as keys to various Atlantean outposts in places such as Algiers, Crete and Thera. Along the way, there may or may not be adventures in a German submarine, a hot air balloon, a deep-sea diving suit, and the streets of Monte Carlo.
I say “may or may not” because at a certain point the gameplay branches into one of three possibilities: Fists, Wit or Team. I didn’t realize it until this replay, but how Indy gets into the theatre at the start of the game (whether he moves crates to reach the fire escape, diplomatically manages to talk his way past the doorman, or simply punches the guy out) determines which of the three paths Sophia will suggest when the time comes for the game to diverge.
As you might have guessed, Fists requires Indy to fistfight various Nazis during the course of the game, Wits is more oriented towards complex puzzle-solving, and Team has Sophia tag along and occasionally take control of certain situations. Each path is distinct, even when they take place in similar locations.
For instance, the labyrinth under the island of Crete is visited in each one of the paths, featuring many of the same puzzles, and all culminating in a room containing a scale model of Atlantis. This screen also includes three separate doors, and depending on what path you’re on, the successful solving of the puzzle will open one of these doors – a different one for each story.
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Characters can also change from one story-strand to another: in Fists and Team, Omar Al-Jabbar is a relatively helpful guy. In Wits, he’s more of a villain. Furthermore, if you chose to play each of the three paths, you may attain some spoilers for the others – in Team, Omar conceals his identity from Indy and Sophia, but if you’ve played Wits or Fists, you’ll immediately know it’s him. Other times the storylines echo each other: in Wits, Alain Trottier is lured to Monte Carlo with the promise of a (non-existent) séance with Sophia, while in Team, this is the tactic she and Indy use to get him into a hotel room to obtain his Sunstone.
It’s also interesting to see how each path might skip certain characters or locations. In Wits and Team, Trottier is a fairly prominent character. In Fists, he gives you his business card and disappears completely. In Wits you’ll find a secret compartment at an Algiers dig containing an Atlantean statue; in Team it’s a Sunstone, and in Fists there’s nothing there at all.
Team omits the island of Thera; Fists skips the adventures on the submarine. Team and Fists require Indy to obtain an amber fish; in Wits it’s switched out for a statically-charged comb on a string. You might get chased by Nazis in trucks across the desert, or it might be the local law enforcement on camelback. Sometimes the Nazis are ahead of Indy at every turn, other times they don’t overtake him until the finish line.
All the paths will eventually coincide when Indy reaches Atlantis, at which point the gameplay will become more-or-less identical no matter which path you took to get there (though there are still some potential variations, such as what to do about Sophia when her spirit guide takes over her body, or who ends up on the plinth of the machine that makes mortals into gods).
Which is all to say: this is such a rich gaming experience, one that’s designed to the best of its ability to remain fresh and surprising each time you play it. There was clearly a lot of research done into the mythology of Atlantis: the concept of it being built in three concentric circles, the use of orichalcum to fuel its machines, and the inspirations taken from Minoan civilization (particularly their love of bulls). As a result, everything looks and feels like it belongs to a specific culture, one grounded in real historical precedence.
And it’s gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous! Just look at some of these stills:
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In short, it simply feels like an Indiana Jones adventure in a way that even some of the films (Temple of Doom; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) do not. There’s a familiar-looking boulder at one point, a couple of allusions to previous adventures, and a huge, muscled Nazi who I’m pretty sure is a nod to Pat Roach, who appeared in all three of the original Indy films as an intimidating physical threat to our hero. And in one of the paths (I’m pretty sure it’s Fists) there's a moment in which Indy has to cross a ravine by flicking his whip onto a stone outcropping and swinging himself across – and as he does so, the Indy theme briefly plays. It’s such a fun little moment, though it has no further impact on the gameplay. It’s simply there to make you smile.
Unfortunately, vibing so well with the films also extends to the female sidekick. I’ve said in the past that this franchise has no great female characters, and Sophia is no exception. The writers lean into the old Belligerent Sexual Tension for her and Indy that was so popular between fictional couples in the eighties/nineties, in which perpetual annoyance and resentment is a solid basis for a romantic relationship. It also provides an example of writers a. knowing that a damsel in distress is an outdated trope, b. needing it to happen anyway for plot-purposes (she gets captured twice in every path) and so c. trying to avoid the worst clichés by having their female character – you guessed it – Complain About Rescues She Doesn’t Like.
I mean, she’s a helpless damsel, but she’s feisty about it! That alleviates the sexism, right? Not helping are scenes in which Indy forces her to volunteer in a knife-throwing demonstration by pushing her into the arena, later insulting her weight to convince her to crawl through a narrow tunnel, and bestowing not one but two Forceful Kisses on her. She's even a damsel on the cover art!
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| Lady, he has literally just rescued you. |
Plus, her voice actress made her sound eerily like Willie Scott, which can’t have been on purpose. Still, I’m told Sophia was popular enough with the designers to turn up in future games, though I’ve no idea in what capacity.
But with the exception of that one sour note (which I have to admit is par for the course for this franchise) there’s very little to complain about with this game. It’s gorgeous to look at, it’s innovative and clever, it has immense replayablility value, and it just feels like an old school Indiana Jones adventure. I know I’m not the first to feel like it’s more akin to the spirit of the franchise than some of the movies.
I love Casablanca! I do find the general cultural consensus around
ReplyDeleteLazlo as boring (When Harry Makes Sally repeats this sin) quite baffling - ok maybe Ilsa wasn't passionately in love with him like she was Rick, but he is unambiguously compelling and heroic and she did genuinely love him too.
There's nothing more charismatic and - resilient - than Lazlo rousing the band and crowd to sing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis. He turns the entire room of fearful observers and pragmatic collaborators into a resistance in less than a minute.
And that was the movie's best scene! You can see the love and awe on Ilsa's face when he does that, and Rick knows it too. Like he says, if she doesn't go: "you'll regret it, and soon."
DeletePassion dies out after a while, whereas she has purpose and common cause with Lazlo (Rick points this out too: "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world").
Plus, it's by giving her up that Rick emulates Lazlo for the first time. Damn, this movie is just so RICH.