Links and Updates

So what did you get for Christmas? I got Covid, which meant I didn’t get a Christmas. I’ve finally dragged myself out the other side of my sick bed, though I still feel like crap and barely have the energy to type this (the post you’re about to read was written about a day before the symptoms really hit).

I’m ticked off, as I was able to avoid the virus for this long, but I suppose I knew deep down it was going to catch up to me eventually. In any case, I hope your Christmas was better than mine.

My last Links and Updates post was a bit miserable, as there’s been so little to look forward to this year and so much more that has been unceremoniously cancelled. And then, in the past couple of weeks, something happened – the promise of good stuff!

And yes, a lot of it is prequels and sequels and remakes and continuations, but they appear to have a level of care and quality involved that piques my interest...

The whole internet is talking about the latest Doctor Who episodes, and the fact that Ncuti Gawa has finally been introduced. I’ve watched the three David Tennant specials, and cannot WAIT to see the Fourteen (or is it Fifteenth?) Doctor in action. I am genuinely just so thrilled with this casting, even to paper over Russell T. Davies falling so completely back into his old writing habits.

The long-gestating Furiosa movie suddenly has a trailer! Much like Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s burst onto the screens out of the blue, and though I wasn’t exactly clamouring for a backstory to this character, it would be unwise to bet against George Miller. And Anya Taylor-Joy? No complaints there.

A few posters and teaser trailer has been released for the second season of House of the Dragon, and – who am I kidding? I’ll be watching it along with the rest of you, though probably as a binge rather than on a weekly basis (assuming that HBO or whatever it’s called now sticks to its original weekly releases). It has dragons and tragic Sapphics, what more can I say?

Ditto the second Dune movie, which is boasting some evocative character posters and a compelling trailer (though I’m intrigued by the fact there’s no sign of Alia – that character is going to be a hard nut to crack). It’s not going to be a cinema-going experience for me, but I may end up watching the two films back-to-back on my friend’s giant television.

The release date for the fifth and final Star Trek Discovery has been set for April next year. I was never an uber-fan of anything in this particular franchise, but I’ve been casually enjoying this one and will be sad to see it go. Five seasons isn’t anything to be ashamed of these days.

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron looked (unsurprisingly) gorgeous, though I’m trying to limit how much I know about the story before I see it. One of the great joys of discovering Miyazaki in my early/mid-twenties was that I had absolutely no idea what any of the films were about, and could be suitably dumbstruck as a result.

Some of the first promotional stills for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu have been released, and if anyone can do this story justice, it’s him.

I saw this trailer for Faraway Downs and was completely bewildered, thinking that Baz Luhrmann rewrote and reshot the entirety of 2008’s Australia as a big-budget miniseries. (Not helping the confusion was that my colleague referred to it as Far and Away, which is of course the other historical epic that Nicole Kidman starred in back in 1992). Turns out that’s not the case, he’s just reassembled existing footage to tell the epic across a much longer runtime. I’ve never seen Australia, but this looks rather interesting, if not just for the novelty of Luhrmann returning to the project so long after its initial release (and failure).

As for Percy Jackson... sorry, I’m not risking it. There’ll probably be a second season, but there’s simply no way they’re going to get through all the books and spin-offs in a satisfying manner. If they do, I’ll watch when it’s all finished.

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Adam Driver has come out and said that he originally signed onto the Star Wars sequel trilogy with the understanding that Kylo Ren would never be redeemed, as a direct (and deliberate) inverse to Darth Vader’s arc. Why does this trilogy keep taunting me with how good it could have been??

I imagine Disney has spent most of this year wringing its hands over financial failures such as Indiana Jones and The Marvels (and in the larger scheme of things, The Flash and Mission Impossible) and in all this discussion of failing blockbusters, I honestly think audience disinterest can be traced back to The Rise of Skywalker. It instilled the unconscious expectation that the bigger the brand, the more empty and hollow the product, catering to lowest-common-denominator fans and shippers, with nothing interesting or worthwhile to impart.