Reading/Watching Log #115

This month, I gorged myself. I had two weeks off and I challenged myself to watching something from each of the biggest franchises and/or networks on the planet: Star Wars, Star Trek, the MCU, the DCU, Disney Animation, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, The Lord of the Rings, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Muppets, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter (don’t worry, didn’t pay for it), Mission Impossible, Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, Doctor Who, Dune, Indiana Jones, Max Mad (or rather Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), The Terminator, The Predator, The Matrix, Alien…

I also managed a few slightly more “second tier” things: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, The Wheel of Time, short films from Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda and Toy Story, as well as the making-of documentary of Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway, since the show’s final season won’t be out until November. Oh, and I threw in a Stephen King movie for good measure.

And because I’ve seen every single episode of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I made do with a comic book and a tie-in novel respectively. Along with that, I read the graphic novel adaptations of His Dark Materials, and the last book of the Mortal Engines quartet.

Whew, did I miss anything out? I had only one condition to this little project: that everything from each of these franchises had to be something that I had never seen before, the goal being to fill in the gaps of as much of the big-name stuff as possible. It was all pretty exhausting, actually.

Not everything got ticked off: there simply wasn’t any material for James Cameron’s Avatar, or The Chronicles of Narnia. Other stuff like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, The Musketeers, Robin Hood and King Arthur-related media I decided to hold off until a later themed-month, as they aren’t so much franchises as they are stories about specific individuals.

All of it has coalesced into one giant blob in my mind, and there was just so much of it that there’s absolutely no way I’m reviewing it all individually. Aside from the books, I’ll comment on everything only briefly, though there are some projects that I absolutely intent to revisit and discuss in more detail later on (Andor, The Wheel of Time, The Rings of Power).

One more thing: as gluttonous as all this looks (and felt) I felt rather sad on completing it, as I almost certainly won’t be able to do this ever again. The Wheel of Time has been cancelled, and I doubt there’ll be any more Ghostbusters, Pirates of the Caribbean or Mad Max Sagas (at least not ones that I’ll ever want to see). So in many ways, this felt like the end of an era.

But for what it’s worth, it was a lot of fun.

The Firebird (Isaac Theatre Royal)

My first ballet of the year! This was a teeny-tiny bit of a disappointment simply because I was looking forward to seeing the traditional story of the firebird, as per Russian/Slavic folklore, with Prince Ivan and the wizard Koschei and the firebird feather and the imprisoned maidens – only instead it was a modern retelling, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The effects were pretty amazing, with light projections that really made it appear as though water was rippling over the stage, and that the firebird really could burst into flames. The gist of the story was a simple death/rebirth narrative, in which the firebird is caught and then freed again (not a million miles off from how Disney depicted the story in Fantasia 2000, complete with Stravinky’s familiar score).

I’d been waiting to see this one for a while, as the initial showing was cancelled during the second wave of Covid in New Zealand. It was also a rather short ballet, as the entire first act was given over to a completely different story based on Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, a novel I knew next to nothing about. The dance featured a conceit that wasn’t explained to me until after the show was over; that the dancers I assumed were meant to be twins were actually two sides of the same person; her body and psyche dancing together. I would have been nice to have known that before the show started.

So even though I’m never going to regret going to the ballet, this wasn’t quite what I expected. I still don’t feel like I’ve actually seen The Firebird. On the other hand, the Dracula ballet is returning in October and I got my tickets the SECOND they were available. I’m going with some former coworkers who are also hyped to see it, so I may have to revisit all those Dracula films again this Halloween.

Ashes of the Academy by Faith Erin Hicks, Peter Wartman and Adele Matera

Chalk this down as yet another Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novel (like The Mystery of Penquan Island) that I had no idea was getting released until it was quite literally in my hand. Set entirely in the Fire Nation and focusing on the characters who live there (Zuko, Mai, etc) this delves a little into the post-war restoration of the Fire Nation and the growing pains of recontextualizing its role in the Hundred Year War.

As revealed in earlier books, Zuko has been reunited with his missing mother Ursa and discovered he has a little half-sister called Kiyi. She’s now attending a Fire Nation Academy with a new curriculum – one that the teachers are leery about teaching, particularly the headmistress Shihan. Sensing pushback amongst the staff, Zuko enlists Mai as a teacher who can report back to him on the internal politics of the facility, and she surprises herself by quite enjoying this new calling in life.

There is some interesting commentary here about the nature of history and the way it can be whitewashed (naturally, a lot of Fire Nation people don’t appreciate being regarded as the villains in the Hundred Year War, something we saw a little of in the show itself, during the episode where Aang infiltrates the Fire Nation school and comes face-to-face with its anti-Air Nomad propaganda). Unfortunately, the story moves away from this angle pretty quickly, and Kiyi all but disappears from the third act.

Instead, we get Mai pondering her time at the Academy and her early “friendship” with Azula, which was precisely as manipulative and one-sided as you can imagine. In fact, she comes across as so psychotic that it’s now difficult to understand why Mai decided to team up with her in the show’s second season.

But we get a few updates with the other characters: Ursa is still wondering what went wrong with Azula, and Ty Lee briefly cameos. There are also references to things that happened in prior graphic novels that I’ve since forgotten about: apparently Kiyi was kidnapped by something called the Kemurikage? And Zuko and Mai have broken up again?

Like most of these books it’s a pleasantly diverting offering that shies away from making too many important developments considering new Avatar shows are on the way. This one is a bit more lopsided than its predecessors in terms of its plot structure, and I wish they’d gone a bit deeper into the topic of the “history is written by the victors” angle, but it’s pretty inoffensive all things considered.

Xena Warrior Princess: All Roads by Genevieve Valentine

I have watched every single episode of Xena Warrior Princess, so in searching for something from the franchise I hadn’t experienced before, I turned to the comic books (and not a moment too soon as my library is getting rid of the comics app that lets me access such titles – boo!) Penned by Genevieve Valentine, whose blog and books I’ve recommended before, it takes place sometime post-Twilight of the Gods arc. Continuity has always been a bit scattershot in this series, so I decided not to worry about it too much. Gabrielle has short hair and Ares is mortal, that’s all you need to know.

It ends up being a Rome-centric story, which is a good choice since they were always the best episodes in the actual show, with Xena and Gabrielle hearing that a nomadic group of warrior women known as the Harpies are burning villages and slaughtering innocent people. Having known them in her past, Xena finds this doubtful, and sure enough, they’re being framed by Roman propagandists.

Our heroes meet up with the women, who are warriors from some of the most significant locales in the show: the Land of Chin, the Mongolian Steppes, India, and Norseland. Their leader is Chilapa, the Amazonian Queen who actually appeared in the final season of the show, while another is the daughter of Xena’s former love Borias, who also appeared briefly in the show as a child, and who addresses Xena as “stepmother” just to mess with her. 

They all join forces to take on Rome, and it’s a story that feels like an episode, albeit with a few too many characters (nine new women overall, which made it hard to keep track of them all). There’s a fairly drastic change in art style about halfway through which is a little distracting, but it’s a fun and faithful-to-the-spirit-of-the-show take on the material. It leans into a lot of established character work, such as Gabrielle’s role as a peacemaker and storyteller, and even touches on those times in which she had prophetic visions. In other words, Valentine is familiar with the source material, which is crucial for any successful continuation. 

Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife by Clément Oubrerie and Thomas Gilbert

I really wanted to include His Dark Materials in the “read/watch something from every important franchise” line-up, but how? I’ve read all the short stories and watched the HBO show, and the last book in Pullman’s latest trilogy isn’t due till October. Well, how about the graphic novels? There are tons of novel-to-graphic adaptations these days, to the point where they’re feeling a little bit like the literary version of live-action remakes of animated films, with the implicit tagline being: “an original story, but far less work to read.” Or at least they would were it not for the genuinely talented artists involved, and the chance to add visual details to stories that are only possible through this particular medium.

As far as I know, The Amber Spyglass hasn’t been adapted yet, though these two were originally designed and published in France, then translated into English later. The first is illustrated by Clément Oubrerie in quite a sharp, spikey style which kind of fits the tone of the story, though I can’t say I liked that much. The second is by Thomas Gilbert, and unfortunately his art is even more unappealing – quite blobby and cartoonish.

But each one is very faithful to the source material, and it’s obvious that everyone involved understood what this story is actually about (which is more than we can say for the film and even the HBO television series at times). A few things are rejiggered in reasonable ways – for example, the first book opens with Asriel’s zeppelin landing at Jordan College, and Lyra is first seen when she leaps out of her hiding place to prevent her uncle from drinking the poisoned Tokay.

But I’m now of the firm belief that daemons simply don’t translate to a visual medium. The great joy of reading the book for the first time was being presented with the reality of the bond between humans and daemons, and gradually coming to understand that the latter is analogous to a person’s soul – something that is never explicitly spelt out in any of the three books. But as with the films and the television show, which had to explain what these creatures were, the graphic novels flounder when it comes to their meaning and purpose – furthermore, to keep things simple most of the daemons retain a singular form, even those of children (despite the fact it’s a fairly crucial plot-point that children’s daemons can shapeshift before “settling” in adolescence).

In Lyra’s case, Pan is almost always a white marmoset, and the fact that young daemons can change form is stated by a character instead of demonstrated in the illustrations. And yes, I get how challenging this would be for an artist to keep track of, but their changeability is the whole point. If this was a reader’s first introduction to the concept of daemons, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

There are some more interesting details though, such as panels in which daemons converse with each other, often with opinions that don’t match their humans (this was very rarely seen in the books), and at least one scene in which children create a distraction by having their daemons turn into miniature dinosaurs and dragons in order to fight each other (it’s largely meant as a sight gag, since it would be very easy to lose control of the implications of shapeshifting daemons – I mean, why wouldn’t all the children just turn their daemons into giant fire-breathing dragons and raze Bolvanger to the ground?)

These novels also throw into relief more of Pullman’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, I’ve always loved the sheer width and breadth of exposition that Pullman shares in the opening chapter, seemingly effortlessly through Asriel’s lecture to the scholars and Lyra’s reaction to it all, without feeling the need to delve into too much unnecessary detail (such as when someone jokes that Iofur wants a daemon above all things, and Lyra is confused, since not having a daemon isn’t possible. Here, the graphic novel cheats by including a panel that prematurely reveals Iofur is a polar bear).

But I also think (much like George Lucas’s “Chosen One” prophecy in the Star Wars prequels) that Pullman’s use of prophesies and how Lyra must remain ignorant of them, are pretty extraneous all things considered. As it is, the story gets rather clotted with prophesies, whether or not Lyra has to be aware of them, her role as the second “Eve,” the fact that she’ll be “the betrayer” (which Pullman clearly changed his mind on, switching it from unwittingly leading Roger to his doom to abandoning Pan in the Lands of the Dead)… I get that it’s important she’s identified as the second Eve, but you could remove everything else and I don’t think it would have made a difference to the choices she makes and the circumstances she finds herself in.

There are a few extra bits and pieces strewn in here, adding extra verisimilitude, as well as some inspirations drawn from other adaptations (the golden monkey is referred to as Ozymandias, which was the name given to it in the stage play, and Doctor Cooper is gender flipped into a woman, as in the HBO show). Asriel is assisted in his climactic experiment at the end of Northern Lights by an unidentified witch’s daemon, and the strange occurrence with the gyptian spies, in which one describes their misadventure in vague terms (“the place was dark, and full of forms and sounds that were confusing in their frightful movements”) is here dramatized as involving a giant bat. John Faa is depicted as a young man with shoulder-length white hair, and his interactions with the gyptian who was in favour of turning Lyra over the authorities is expanded on – and it involves a knife fight!

I also enjoyed other little narrative filigrees, like a goodbye between John Parry and the tribesmen he was living with, the sheer extent of the natural upheaval after Asriel opens the door between the worlds, and the fact Thomas Gilbert updated the Oxford setting to the modern day. It leads to a clever little scene in which Lyra notices everyone looking at their cellphones, and realizing she can get away with reading the alethiometer in public.

Graphic novels obviously provide the opportunity for plenty of striking visuals: when Mary speaks to the Shadow Particles, the panels switch between her as a nun discussing theology with another sister, and her sitting at her computer with the helmet on her head – the blocking exactly the same in each image. At another point, Will and Lyra sit in a house in Cittàgazze beneath a painting of Jacob wrestling the angel, and there’s a bit of an Easter egg when a cinema in Lyra’s Oxford has “Milton’s Paradise Lost” on the signage over its doors. I also liked the image of Lyra leaving Oxford with Mrs Coulter in a zeppelin while the barge carrying Roger leaves the docks (unknowingly) below her.

There are some amazing spreads of the Arctic tundra, a gorgeous rendering of Trollesund with Scandi-style buildings, an interesting take on Svalbard which actually looks like a real palace (not just a massive bear-cave), and a wonderful visual on the witch’s consul: a giant cavern between the roots of an even bigger tree that grows on an icy cliffside, accessible only by air. And of course Asriel’s great fortress, which looks like a construct built in hell itself.

Another panel has Lyra conversing with Serafina in the hot air balloon while the latter is reclining on her snow-pine branch, and what follows is a dreamy sort of sequence in which Lyra can seemingly defy gravity in the witch’s presence – or at least is imagining she can. It sounds random, but I dug it. It’s the inexplicable and unexplained nature of certain elements that made the original book so interesting in the first place – like how we never really found out how Mrs Coulter’s daemon could stretch so far away from her, or if he even could in the first place. It’s left tantalizingly unknown.

The Spectres are suitably terrifying, as are the zombified people they leave in their wake, though I wasn’t quite as fond of the angels and their weird rectangular wings (though I suppose I understand the logic behind it, as Pullman does describe them as something more like architecture than organic matter). It also doesn’t stint on the graphic nature of Pullman’s text: it fully depicts the grisly scene of Iorek ripping Iofur’s jaw from his face, and the tortured witch at the start of The Subtle Knife is drawn as naked.

That said, there are also a couple of oddities. Early on in the first book, someone describes Grumman’s daemon as a serpent, which definitely isn’t the case – either in the second graphic novel or the book on which it’s based. The gyptians float around in big sailing vessels instead of canal boats, Tony Makarios is now inexplicably called Tim, and for some reason Doctor Lanselius is described as someone who doesn’t like to be asked questions. Er, as the consul between witches and humans, isn’t answering questions kind of his job?

There are also some rather strange additions. Two of witches that accompany Serafina into Cittàgazze are called “Flora” and “Medea,” which certainly don’t sound like names Scandinavian-inspired witches would go by. Another sequence has Will use the Subtle Knife to cut through a room in which several men that have been left braindead by the Spectres are having a game of cards around a table – it’s a suitably macabre image, but I’m pretty sure the victims of the Spectres aren’t capable of playing cards once they’ve been drained of all consciousness. We also get a rather strange depiction of John Parry’s archaeological expedition, in which the Russian spy that accompanied him is killed by a giant Inuit spirit. I don’t remember that in the book!

Still, the best part of any re-presentation of an established story are the extra bits and pieces that a fresh version can provide. (That’s what all these live-action remakes of Disney films don’t understand – they’re not bringing any extra depth or meaning to the source material). What these graphic novels did for me was something I thought would be impossible, at least for another few years – make me want to read the novels all over again from the beginning. I mean, I’m probably on my tenth or eleventh reread by this point, and it wasn’t that long ago I watched the HBO series.

But there you have it, I’m once more preoccupied with this trilogy and all its glorious details, from the macro (Dust, the war in heaven, the story of Genesis) to the microscopic (alethiometers, daemons, the little details that bring these worlds to life).

There were some things that Pullman wisely left ambiguous, though that doesn’t stop me from being powerfully curious about them. How did the philosophers of Torre degli Angeli make the Subtle Knife in the first place? Why were the Spectres so afraid of it? Why was Tullio trying to get it, and what was the deal with the rightful bearers losing their fingers? How did Charles Latrom know about the knife, and what was his history with Giacomo Paradisi?

And the end of this story always makes me regret that most of Will and Lyra’s journey in the third book is that interminable journey through the underworld – man, I’d love to have seen what happened if they’d taken the Subtle Knife to Lord Asriel, as John Parry instructed them to.

I can now look at this story with something of a more cynical eye when it comes to Pullman trying to get his pieces into place as neatly and swiftly as possible – something about this format makes his narrative shortcuts more obvious, such as Charles Latrom and John Parry being in possession of staggeringly convenient levels of information without explanation, or Lee Scoresby taking it upon himself to track down John Parry with very little motivation (which turns out to be Parry using his shamanic abilities to call him).

And it’s not a huge criticism. This is first and foremost a children’s trilogy, and sometimes you just have to get where you’re going; likewise I remember a quote from Pullman that stated an author isn’t under any obligation to explain everything if it gets in the way of “what happens next?”  So he’s doing it all on purpose.

That said, I’m not entirely sure how someone completely new to this story would approach these graphic novels; I felt that a lot of stuff about the daemons and the Gobblers and the kidnapping of children was glossed over in the first book, but as a long-time fan, it’s always nice to get a brand-new perspective of a familiar story.

Dawn Saves the Planet by Anne M. Martin

Poking around various online reviews, it would appear that this book pretty much single-handedly turned Dawn into one of the least popular characters of the series. It’s a Very Special Episode about the importance of environmentalism, and even though that is in fact a very important issue, I can’t think of a single story that’s ever managed to convey the subject in an interesting, non-obnoxious way. Still, Dawn gets the last laugh. If the world had listened to her back in the nineties, perhaps we wouldn’t currently be facing a climate change crisis.

The gist of it all is that Stoneybrook Middle School requires students to complete an environmentalism project of their own choosing. Dawn and Stacey team up to host some “ecology classes” for their babysitting charges, an idea which is met with an unlikely amount of enthusiasm among the children of Stoneybrook. These classes serve as a device to lecture the reader about the basics of recycling, saving energy/power, and not buying plastics, while the babysitting chapters involve various kids trying to make their homes environmentally friendly (the book attempt to depict them as being overly militant about it, but if you’ve ever been around kids that have a new hyperfixation, it’s not that bad).

However, Dawn starts to get aggro about how everyone else isn’t as committed to saving the planet as she is – it’s the whole left-coded “it’s not your values, it’s how you go about spreading them” type of villainy that’s about twenty years early, and largely exists because we have to derive drama out of doing the right thing somehow.

Other chapters involve Dawn organizing a recycling plant at SMS and getting her feelings hurt when she’s not voted to be its chairperson by the student body (which is weird because she was up against an actual adult, so I’m not entirely sure why the issue was even put to the vote in the first place, or why the students had a say in it) and an eco-fair as the standard “big community event” that the babysitters always get involved with at the end of each book.

Honestly, the best parts were when Woody Jefferson and Trevor Sandbourne bring in a gourmet picnic for school lunch just for fun, including brie, pâté and sparkling cider, and when the babysitters comment that the Ohdner kids have the measles. This is a family that gets namedropped occasionally, but as far as I know, never appear on-page. And honestly, I hope they never do. I like them as mysterious placeholders that we know absolutely nothing about, quietly living their lives in the margins of this series.

Stacey’s Choice by Anne M. Martin

Another generic Stacey title for another generic Stacey story that revolves around the difficulties of being the child of divorcees, and sadly not about how she has to choose between the lives of two babysitting charges. (I checked and Sophie’s Choice came out in 1982, so they must have known the implications of that title).

Stacey’s mother is applying for jobs all over Stoneybrook and running herself ragged in the process. After Stacey is called out of class to be informed that her mum collapsed during a job interview and was taken to hospital, she goes a little overboard in scheduling around-the-clock care for her. (I was going to complain that of course it was only the Stoneybrook mothers who are roped in to provide free nursing to Mrs McGill while she’s unwell… then I realized the absolute last thing I would want as a sick person would be for all the neighbourhood dads to turn up at my house trying to help. *shudder*)

A problem arises when she realizes she’s meant to visit her father in New York that weekend in order to attend a celebratory dinner for his new promotion. She decides to make it just an overnight stay, but ends up worrying about her mother the whole time, ducking out of the function to make phone calls and insisting that they leave the party early so that she can catch the morning train. Mr McGill isn’t happy about any of this, but Stacey channels her mother and points out that she wouldn’t have been his only choice for a date if he wasn’t such a workaholic. Way harsh, Stacey!

On returning to Stoneybrook, she discovers that the neighbourhood mums are a bit irate because it turns out that Mr McGill had hired a private nurse to be with his ex-wife while Stacey was away, and – dude, you didn’t think to tell anyone this? I’m also not entirely sure why Stacey’s mother needs this level of care for a bout of pneumonia. Yes, it can be very serious for the elderly – but a healthy middle-aged woman with no prior health conditions?

There’s not really much of a moral here, unless it’s “you can’t be everything for everyone all the time,” but we all know that this isn’t going to have much effect on Stacey in the long run. And didn’t she already dealt with her parents’ complete inability to communicate with each other in Stacey’s Emergency? Guys, maybe your daughter wouldn’t have such neuroses if you weren’t always forcing her to be the parent in the relationship.

As for the babysitting B-plot, it’s a rather banal, yet still somehow endearing story about the various neighbourhood kids going a little crazy with mail-order purchases. They end up buying all sorts of things they don’t need, like moondust and bust developers, only to discover that it’s all a load of junk. They decide to go door-to-door to sell their purchases, performing a variety of skits, raps, dances, and reenactments of commercials as they go. The gag is that they end up making money for their performances, but nobody wants to actually buy anything. Which doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me, because if you’re giving these kids money, you may as well take something off their hands, right?

An altogether forgettable instalment, although it does establish two plot-points that will pop up regularly in future books: the opening of the Rosebud Café, and Mrs McGill’s successful job application to Bellairs.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Here Be Monsters by Cameron Dokey

I have also watched every single episode of Buffy, so I had to turn to the novelizations in order to check this particular box. Written by Cameron Dokey (who contributes to a lot of franchise tie-ins) this is a rather odd story, even for a pulpy paperback. Set in season three – which I suspect is every writer’s favourite setting given it features the best configuration of the Scoobies – Buffy is approached in the shopping mall by tough girl Suz Tompkins who reluctantly asks for her help.

Her friend Heidi and Leila have gone missing, and she knows Buffy is the one to call when people disappear mysteriously. The villains of the story are twofold: first are Webster and Percy, two southern vampires who were turned by their mother during the Civil War, and who are very quickly dispatched. Their mother subsequently swears vengeance on Buffy by calling on the goddess Nemesis, who challenges Buffy to a trial to prove that her actions in slaying the vampires were just.

As collateral, Joyce is taken to the vampire momma’s mansion where the trial is to take place – this consists of Buffy facing down visions of past triumphs that become failures (Cordelia is mutilated by Marcie Ross, Xander’s head is severed by the She-Mantis, Willow is drained to resurrect the Master) before fighting a giant spider.

The Scoobies don’t get anything to do but watch from afar (via Willow’s magic) and the “guest star” Suz isn’t particularly well-drawn. And of course, you don’t need me to tell you that a Southern vamp and a Greek goddess don’t really mesh together – one is very low stakes, the other super high stakes. You can have one or the other in a single story, not both. But everyone is in-character and Dokey captures their voices well – there’s even a nice little scene in which Joyce is putting together a photo album of Buffy’s childhood and Celia (the deceased cousin that appeared in “Killed By Death”) is mentioned.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

This is clearly the odd one out in this month’s list, as Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy isn’t anywhere near big enough to be considered a franchise (though it has just been adapted into an anime series, which I’ll get my hands on eventually). But the steam-punkish subject matter meant it vibed too well with His Dark Materials and the Mortal Engines series to not be included.

Set in an alternate-history on the cusp of World War I, in which the Great Powers are divided into Clankers (Germany and Austro-Hungary, who construct massive tanks and engines of war) and Darwinists (Britain + France + Russia, who rely on animals that have been genetically modified into a range of living tools, vessels and weapons) the story begins with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – not by Serbian students, but a poisoning later that evening. From this starting point, every two chapters alternate between the story’s dual protagonists.

The first is Prince Alek, the son of Duke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and the second is Deryn Sharp, a young English girl who has disguised herself as a boy in order to join the air-force and fulfil her dream of flying. While the former goes into hiding with a band of loyal retainers in an attempt to elude enemy forces that perceive him as a threat, the latter struggles to hide her true identity as she’s taken onboard the type of airship that the book is named for: a mighty leviathan. That is, a living whale that floats through the sky like a colossal zeppelin.

Naturally their paths will eventually cross, though for the greater part of the book Alek is in a race to reach the Swiss border, while Deryn is mostly concerned with keeping up her ruse as a young man. (And reminiscent of events in Here Lies Arthur, she too gets exasperated with the endless posturing of the boys around her).

Aside from this survival aspect of the story, we’re also introduced to Nora Barlow, a scientist who is using the leviathan to transport a mysterious crate of eggs to Turkey for reasons unknown to Deryn and the rest of the crew.

Westerfeld plays around a bit with his take on history, though more with minor details and aesthetics than any of the major events that led up to the Great War. For example, he keeps the true anecdote about how Ferdinand’s secret affair was discovered after a prospective mother-in-law discovered Sophie’s portrait in a locket he carelessly left behind him, but has Ferdinand survive the initial assassination attempt at the hands of Bosnian Serbs, only to be poisoned at a dinner party later that evening (according to Westerfeld’s afterword, this was simply because he wanted his story to begin at night).

And of course, Prince Alek never existed, though I was surprised to find that Nora Barlow did – and that she was indeed a geneticist descended from Charles Darwin (and lived till she was 103!)

Much like the Philips Reeve and Pullman, Westerfeld’s gift is in presenting a masterfully created world for his characters to inhabit, one that feels completely realistic despite the presence of towering war machines, giant jellyfish balloons, flying whale ships, talking lizards that relay messages, and not-extinct-anymore Tasmanian tigers. Even though the pseudo-science is bonkers, it still feels very grounded and authentic, as seen in Deryn’s thoughts on the leviathan itself: “according to her aerology manual, the big hydrogen breathers were modelled on the tiny South American islands where Darwin had made his famous discoveries. The Leviathan wasn’t one beastie, but a vast web of life in ever-shifting balance.” In other words, the giant whale-ship contains a range of other genetically modified “beasties,” from bats to bees, which creates its own self-sustaining eco-system.

And though the characters are a little tropey, I enjoyed both Alek and Deryn. I’ve always liked stories about the privileged class getting a taste of how the other half is forced to live, not to mention Sweet Polly Olivers. In this case Alek’s class-culture shock is both satisfying and poignant, while Deryn is the personification of the word “pluck.” Westerfeld can’t resist a little ship teasing towards the end (at least on Deryn’s side; Alek still doesn’t know she’s a girl by the end of the story) but I won’t hold it against him.

From the jargon (“scientists are “boffins,” “gone crook,” means “gone bad,” and “clart” and “barking” are used as swearwords) to the different applications of science and how they affect the thought-processes of each character, you’re never in any doubt that this is a living, breathing, three-dimensional world. It’s been so long since I read this trilogy that I’ve forgotten pretty much everything that happens in the next two books (I can’t even recall what’s in the MacGuffin eggs!) so I’m looking forward to reading more – perhaps in conjunction with Pullman’s upcoming The Rose Fields and Reeve’s Bridge of Storms. Their work just goes so well together.

A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve

I cheated with this one, as I have in fact read it before, but so long ago that I had forgotten most of the details. As the fourth and final book in the Mortal Engines quartet, Reeve leans hard into the bittersweetness of it all: the end of Municipal Darwinism, the death of several main characters, and poor Shrike going on alone into the far-distant future.

All things considered, it was never going to live up to the third book, which was a masterclass of plotting and character. This story is spread too thin across too many subplots and new characters: Hester and Shrike, Tom and Wren, General Naga and Oenone Zero, the Stalker Fang and Wolf Kolbold, Pennyroyal, Theo, Fishcake, Cynthia Twite, the surviving Londoners, even Sathya, briefly – it’s a stacked deck at this point.

The main threat is Stalker Fang, who now has the necessary codes to activate a space station and destroy the world. Her plan is so straightforward that so much else has to happen in order to delay her, which means there are bursts of action followed by long stretches of moving around, and ultimately her strength is so great that there’s no hope of overpowering her – so eventually Tom just talks her down.

I dunno, the story just plateaued instead of rising to a climax in a way that’s difficult to properly describe. There’s just too much going on and it all fell a bit flat as a result.

It's been over twenty years since the events of the first book, and a couple since the third (in fact, the quartet can be fairly described as being divided in half: the first two books feature Tom and Hester in their youth; the second two in their late middle age). Tom and daughter Wren are traversing the Bird Roads in the Jenny Haniver, though Tom is concealing his serious heart problems. He’s going to have to tell her sooner or later, as he has no idea where Hester is, and knows he doesn’t have that much longer to live.

But one day while trading, he spots a woman who looks exactly like Clytie Potts; a fellow historian from London before it was destroyed. She denies it, but Tom is struck enough by the resemblance that he and Wren mount an expedition to follow Clytie into no-man’s-land, and hopefully find answers to the rumours that perhaps London isn’t as decimated as everyone’s been led to believe.

As ever, Reeve is a master at world-building and descriptive turns-of-phrase, whether it’s humorous (two brothers are featured, called Lego and Duplo), charming (“people whispered eagerly to each other in New German; a handsome language; the words had corners”) or scathing:

Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by the Lost Boys) and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guest-houses and frolic in the Sea Pool, but there was a certain sort of person – well-off artists from the comfortable middle-tiers of cities which the war had never touched, and spoilt young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them – who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting.

They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage palling against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Orc with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St Jean Les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

Sometimes he even switches to first-person, just because he feels like it:

“Ooh, what’s this? Here on the high seas of the desert, where the rippling horizons seem more liquid than land, something solid has appeared. It is just a speck at first; a dark triangle shimmering above the silver mirages that lie across the dunes, but it grows clearer and harder by the moment; a blad, a shark’s fin, a black sail bellying in the desert wind. Listen; you can hear the sand singing under racing tyres. Look; you can see the sun’s reflection like diamonds in a line of portholes.”

He's one of those writers that make you feel a bit helpless, because you know you’ll never be as effortlessly good. Looking back over the quartet and prequel trilogy in their entirety, his real gift is making horrific systems of governance seem normal and even morally justifiable. The Municipal Darwinists are completely convinced of their superiority and their right to prey upon smaller cities, much like how the characters of Gone With the Wind had no qualms about owning slaves (as a matter of fact, the Darwinists have slaves too).

Reeve simply presents his world as it is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. This also informs his depiction of the war between the Darwinists and the Anti-Tractionists; the Townies and the Mossies. No to sound all “both sides,” but well… Reeve does account for both sides of this particular conflict, pitting the horrors of the traction cities against the fanaticism of the Green Storm, a splinter group that breaks off from the Anti-Traction League. About halfway through the book, we’re told: “That morning’s patrols had reported all the barbarians sitting safe and snug and stationary on their own lines, almost like real people.” A few pages later, Wren is informed: “they’re not people; only Mossies. They chose to live like animals on the bare earth. Now they will die like animals…”

Suzanne Collins would recognize this rhetoric, as she also identifies dehumanization of the enemy as the first step to radicalization. Against these great forces of power and destruction, there’s very little our protagonists can do. They’re not leaders or soldiers or politicians, and though they’re not just reactive to the events going on around them, it’s still very clear that their central goal is simply to survive.

As such, this book (and perhaps all the books) is shot through with a deep sense of melancholy, all of which is suitably kicked off with Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Hester is never reunited with her daughter, and instead choses to die with Tom by taking her own life. Fishcake lives out his life, haunted by the question of whether or not he did the right thing by abandoning Tom. Pennyroyal tries to do the right thing for the first time in his life, and it’s all for naught. Katherine and Bevis (who died in the very first book) are mentioned, the latter via a never-before-mentioned Engineer:

“She had had a child of her own, once, but in those days the Guild of Engineers had taken all infants straight to the communal nurseries, and she had never known her little Bevis… if she had not been a logical, disciplined Engineer she would have found the world too sad a place to live in.”

Then there’s this:

“It’s good to see that our young people are getting on with the serious business of falling in love with each other, despite all these trivial distractions… A London historian’s daughter and an Anti-Tractionist. Maybe they’re the future.”

So says Chudleigh Pomeroy, head of the Guild of Historians, who dies in his sleep later that night. Then there’s poor Shrike:

“Long ago, before he was a Stalker, he had had children, and when they were sleepy and he had carried them to their beds, they had lain just as limp and heavy in his arms as Tom and Hester lay now.”

Having read Fever Crumb not too long ago, I know exactly who these children are and where they ended up.

And then there’s Oenone, who tries to provide spiritual comfort to Hester in her darkest hour:

“Do you remember what it was like to be a tiny child? When everything was possible and everything was given to you, and you knew that you were safe and loved, and the days went on for ever? When we die, it will be like that again.”

I’m pretty sure Reeve stands more on the agnostic side of the “atheist/believer” spectrum, but damn; he understands the promise and comfort and allure of religious belief like an absolute expert on the subject.

So despite some of my misgivings about the structure (it lacks the sense of urgency that was so prevalent in Infernal Devices) and the character overload (Hester doesn’t turn up until chapter ten) and the anticlimactic conclusion (Shrike doesn’t actually do anything in this story, though I liked that ultimately his purpose is to remember, not destroy) I was completely verklempt when it came to the book’s emotional torque. It’s been so rewarding to revisit this series, and if there wasn’t so much else to read, I could quite easily start from the beginning all over again. These are absolute must-reads, and it's a damn shame that the film was such a disaster.

Thankfully, there’s another story on its way (Bridge of Storms, due next January) though for those curious, my favourite volumes in the series remain Infernal Devices and A Web of Air.

***

Okay, here we go, a rundown of all the big franchises that I devoured this month…

When it comes to House of the Dragon, there’s something to be said for spectacle. If the first season was a slow burn to all-out war, then the second season is… also a slow burn to all-out war. And yet, there’s spectacle. There are dragons, castles, costumes, fight scenes, set pieces – the whole shebang, and it’s impossible to be bored while watching.

That said, it’s pretty obvious that the showrunners had their plans cut short, as the season ends on a vague sort of montage at the end of the eighth episode, as opposed to the expected ten. Daemon spends an interminable amount of time having weird visions in a giant castle, and everyone else just sort of fluffs around. Still, I liked that we got more of the smallfolk perspective (which will be very important later), and some fascinating glimpses of past-and-future events.

You can’t watch Olivia Cooke’s Alicent and not feel a small measure of pity for her, and it was fun to see Freddie Fox (from Slow Horses) as Gwayne and Michael Elwyn as Simon Staunton (he was Marian’s father in Robin Hood!) Engaging while it lasted, but I get the feeling audiences got a bit impatient with it.

In the last season of Star Trek Discovery, things go out on a reasonable high (though as above, I get the feeling the showrunners thought they’d be getting more, and so had to tack on an epilogue in the final episode just to give it proper closure). I can’t say I found the story-arc all that compelling, in which two young renegades race the Discovery crew to clues that lead to nothing less than the meaning of life itself, but I’m fond of these characters and it was a satisfying way to say goodbye.

I’m glad Mary Wiseman returned fulltime, as her truncated appearances last season gave me the impression she’d left the show, though this time around Detmer and Owosekun only appeared in a few episodes! What happened?? It’s actually a bit weird, as they’re missing entirely for the first few episodes, then appear without explanation in their usual positions mid-season, and then disappear again for the rest of the show (notwithstanding a brief cameo in the finale). They were my favourites!

This show was never super-popular, but I casually enjoyed it, and this season did what final seasons should: one last adventure that brings (mostly) everyone back for a final swansong.

I don’t really have a lot to say about The Rings of Power, even though I thought it was a big step-up from the first season – which I also liked well enough. Some plotlines are clearly more engaging than others. I loved anything to do with the dwarfs, Sauron’s psychological manipulations, and our first onscreen appearance from Tom Bombadil, but wasn’t as involved with… well, anything to do with the human characters, even though Cynthia Addai-Robinson always looks gorgeous.

Sometimes the storytelling genuinely surprised me, such as when the opening sequence ended up being a prolonged flashback to how Sauron ended up on that raft back in season one, and Sophia Nomvete as Disa continues to be my favourite. And I don’t care how you feel about this show in principle, if you didn’t feel just a little shiver at seeing the Entwives, there’s no hope for you. I’m glad we’re getting a third season.

Speaking of third seasons, this ended up being the total amount that The Wheel of Time got. I was super bummed to hear the news, though the writing was on the wall when a renewal wasn’t announced during the airing of this latest season (which is what happened for the first and second). This was a show that kept getting better with time, and once our main characters split up in order to undertake their own personal missions, every story-arc this season ended up being as interesting as the others.

As it is, the story ends on a very open-ended note, and I absolutely do not have the time or inclination to find out what happens next by reading those massive books.

Then there was Dune: Prophecy, another high-concept, high-budget sci-fi/fantasy/political series (there were quite a few of them this month!) I generally liked it, though I agree with the general complaint that there aren’t enough aesthetic or technological differences between it and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, despite being set several thousand years before Paul Atreides’ birth. Also, there are only six episodes, and the years-long wait between seasons when you only have that many episodes is just plain exasperating.

But you’ll be unsurprised to hear I loved that it was female-centric, with the cast headed by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as Harkonnen sisters (in fact, the latter turned up three times this month, as Queen Morgase in The Wheel of Time, the voice of an Entwife in The Rings of Power, and then here – she obviously likes her speculative fiction). We get a deeper look into the inner workings of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood and their manipulations across the various political factions in the universe, so it goes without saying that the Bechdel Test is passed with flying colours.

Ncuti Gatwa’s stint on Doctor Who ended earlier this year, and I get the feeling that people weren’t very happy with it. I’ve no idea what Russell T. Davies did to lose the goodwill that surrounded the show at the start of Gatwa’s debut, but it can’t have been anything in this season since I thought it was a pretty strong run of episodes. Gatwa is pure magic in the role of the Fifteenth Doctor, and new companion Ruby Sunday has a strong arc that’s driven by the search for her mother. I especially loved that it turns out that despite all appearances, the mysterious mother in question is just an ordinary person who gave her daughter up for perfectly normal reasons.

(That said, I call foul on the rather stupid origin of Ruby’s name. In footage of the night she was left at the church as an infant, her hooded mother turns and points dramatically – but it was just at the signpost of Ruby Road, thereby giving her child the name “Ruby”. But here’s the thing… nobody was around to see her mother do this, so how did they know to call the baby this? Likewise, there was no reason for her to point with such an intense gesture. Who was performing for? The scene was immensely bewildering on a number of levels).  

To tick off the MCU box, I watched the first offering that Disney+ dropped, which was WandaVision, and I generally liked it even though the last episode inevitably devolves into a boring CGI slugfest in the sky. It’s a shame in a way, as a lot of this show was hinting at Wanda being some sort of being of destiny or creature of prophecy (we hear the phrase “the scarlet witch” for the first time, uttered in such a way that it feels like a moniker that’s been applied to her) but this angle fizzled out.

But Wanda was an obvious choice for a supporting character from the films to give her own limited series to, and the show ends up being at least partly a meditation on grief and its agony. No one has lost more than Wanda in this series, so it’s not surprising that she ends up using her magic to construct a false reality based on the American sitcoms she watched as a child – and that she’s prepared to use lethal force to defend it.

Government agents called in, along with a collection of sub-supporting characters from various other films (Randall from Ant Man, Darcy from Thor and a grown-up Monica from Captain Marvel) to try and talk her down. It’s clear from that synopsis just why people disparagingly speak of “doing homework” when it comes to grasping the finer points of the MCU at this stage, and sometimes it gets too cute for its own good, such as casting Evan Peters as Wanda’s brother (he having played the other Quicksilver in the X-Men franchise, a twist that ultimately means nothing).

It's fun while it lasts, though some questions remain, such as why and how was Wanda’s fake reality being broadcast? Why was the song called “Agatha All Along” when in fact she had nothing to do with Westview’s creation? And where the hell was Hawkeye while all this was going on?

Over in a galaxy far, far away, Andor finished up its sophomore season, taking us right up to the events of Rogue One (Cassian literally flies off to meet the informant we see in his first scene of that movie). Sadly, there were no cameos from Jyn or Bodhi, and one rather irritating cast-change (it took over two years to make this, you’re telling me Jimmy Smits wasn’t available in all that time? Even more annoying is that most of his scenes probably could have been shot against a green screen and then superimposed in, as they’re all close-up conversations. And I bet Smits is kicking himself, since this is the best material Bail Organa has ever had).

But as with the first season, the writing on this show is so above and beyond anything else in this franchise that it’s almost a little embarrassing. It naturally starts to get a little prequelly this time around, as events needs-must start to align with Rogue One (the reappearance of Melshi in particular is framed as very fanservicy, though it was a lot of fun to see returning actors fill those bit-parts around the rebel council table on Yavin) but reaches new levels of emotional torque with sequences like the lead-up to the Gorman massacre and Kleya’s one-woman mission to “rescue” Luthen. I was truly, literally in a cold sweat watching these events unfold.

There is a lot more to say about this show, so rest assured that I’ll be watching it again soon and giving it the proper in-depth rundown that it deserves.

That wasn’t the only Star Wars show I watched this month. I ended up getting through The Acolyte as well, and I’ve got mixed feelings. It’s unfair that it was cancelled so unceremoniously (along with countless other projects that streaming services commission, then never bother to complete) as I was intrigued enough to have returned for a second season. I liked the show’s exploration of the Force and the different ways to tap into it, as well as the thematic/symbolic echoes of the wider saga, such as the use of twins, a mysterious fatherless birth, and mentions of extensive M-counts (I’m probably the only person alive who doesn’t hate the idea of midichlorians, since it reminds me a lot of Philip Pullman’s Dust). 

But you won’t be surprised to learn I wasn’t particularly into the show’s take on the Dark Side. It’s no secret I’m not a fan of the type of dynamic that emerges between Mai and Qimir, and I think it’s safe to assume this show was written by a Reylo, for other Reylos, in which being seduced by the Dark Side amounts to little more than using your powers to inflict vengeance and having hot sex.

That said, I can’t fault a show for being what it wants to be, and it’s obvious that Leslye Headland had a clear vision for the story she was telling (unlike the sequel trilogy, which just ended up throwing meaningless fanservice bones at the audience). The way Mai’s relationship with Qimir unfolds is at least done deliberately, and at no point is she held up as some sort of guiding, redemptive light for him. The narrative clearly centres on Mai and the question of whether or not she can be seduced to the Dark Side.

And yet, in order for the Dark Side to come off as a legitimate option, the Jedi must become a bunch of self-righteous, unappealing pricks. Meanwhile, Qimir kills a child and refers to her afterwards as “it,” then waves off the words that describe this murder as “semantics.” And it’s just… am I going mad? How am I supposed to want Mai to end up with this guy after that?

I know this is the part where the fans come screaming “it’s just fiction!” at me, but why establish him as a child-killer if it means nothing, either to the story or to Mai? Mai, who was actually friends with the victim! It was downright incredible to me when fans started gushing about how little alien-critters grazed around Qimir’s cave, thus proving there was nothing to be afraid of, or when Qimir states his life’s philosophy is just to have the freedom to do what he likes. But what is that exactly? The show never really explains.

Of course, I have no idea where Headland was going with all of this, so perhaps Mai would have given into the Dark Side only to find that it was an empty lie, or Qimir been revealed as a cruel and dishonest master. We’ll never know how it ends – and yes, that’s disappointing. I liked the overall story more than I disliked that particular dynamic.

And hey, this is a semi-good segue into the last full season of television I watched this month, which is also dominated by annoying thwarted shippers: the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s absolute shite, largely because it (surprise, surprise!) is more interested in placating entitled fans than actually telling a decent story – though that was already an uphill battle since this story was told to near-perfection back in its original animated format. I hate everything about this, let me count the ways:

The dialogue is stilted and unnatural, in which characters state their emotions outright instead of reacting naturally to circumstances. (My personal favourite is when Aang says: “I can’t let anyone down again. Not again.” Yes, he says “again” twice. It’s hard to believe this is still somehow better than M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 film).

The lighting is glaringly artificial and the CGI is average – unsurprisingly, Appa and Momo look creepy, and bending lacks its naturalistic power and grace. It’s horribly obvious that everything is being shot in the Volume, as despite the vast landscapes surrounding our characters, they never move from a tiny little space at the very centre of the screen (which is the only physical place for the actors to stand).

The costumes are garish and fake-looking; the fur especially is obviously synthetic, and you can tell the fabric is thin on the Water Tribe coats. How have they not all frozen to death? Oh, and the fake hair. There is so much fake hair.

They also try to make everything darker and edgier, which means actually dramatizing the Air Nomad massacre (yes, we get to see all the monks get viciously burnt to death). Though Aang returning to the world was framed as a source of hope in the original series, here everyone is just relentlessly miserable, and the more pronounced theme of isolation and mistrust between the nations isn’t really improved upon by Aang’s visitations.

There’s also plenty of tedious gender politics by people who have no clue whatsoever how to handle it – my favourite example would be when the women of the Water Tribe enter the fighting to defend their homes in the final episode, even though they have no combat training whatsoever. Girl power, try not to die! This from the same people who remove Sokka’s chauvinism, and thus all his internal growth across the course of the season.

(The animated version by no means discounts the right for women to learn how to fight, but it also celebrates the importance of women-directed healing, as well as the more passive – though no less effective – sacrifice of Yue, which are two things that Katara internalizes as important parts of her own sense of self, as demonstrated when her climactic scene in the finale has her a. defeat Azula without landing a blow, and b. heal an injured Zuko. Fuck me, that show was good).

In hindsight, the most obnoxious thing is that they’ve clearly made this for people that have already watched and loved the animated series. Every time a new character is revealed (Jet is a good example) they leave a beat for the “ooh!” moment, since apparently recognizing a thing from another thing you watched years ago is the only reason we watch stories these days. I suspect that a brand-new viewer would be completely bewildered by what happens on the screen; it relies too heavily on prior familiarity with the material.

And because there’s so little new ground to tread – partly because the animated series did everything it needed to and partly because they’re too scared to do anything new or innovative with this material – we get answers to questions such as “where did Katara get her water flask?” and “how did Aang get his bison whistle?”

If I had to pick out a few positives, I suppose some of the real locations were nice to look at, and Iroh is held accountable for his military campaigns in a way he never really was on the cartoon. Ken Leung as Zhao is the only actor who speaks words like they’re coming naturally to him and not just read off a script, and Suki’s mother was a nice new addition (though they messed up Suki). Plus, they added a three-tailed fox, one of the staple creatures of Chinese mythology that never ended up in the animated show – which was a bit of an oversight in some respects.

But their worse crime is the treatment of the characters. Everyone suffers to one extent or the other, but Katara definitely gets the worst of it. The thing that gets my goat about the shippers who wanted her to hook up with Zuko are all the faux feminist screeds they’ve come up with in the intervening years, which only exist in order to elevate their shipping grievances to the level of a serious social injustice.

All that blather about how she became an “air-bending broodmare” and a “voiceless prize for Aang”… well, how do you like her now she’s been written YOUR way, as meek and bland and stripped of all her important attributes? It's neatly summed up with the fact that it is not Katara’s anger that releases Aang from the iceberg, but a timid attempt to waterbend.

These days it’s more important that a female character is likeable than human, and since we’re terrified of girls being righteously angry instead of sweet and submissive, Katara has been remade into a vapid girlboss nurturer – just the way fandom likes them. Because the less complicated a girl is, the easier she is to project on, so in this case I really hope they do go ahead with making Zutara canon. Like Reylo, it deserves to exist in an embarrassingly inferior product.

This is the future of female leads, and right on cue there are new reports that Toph will be characterized as more feminine. Just FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF FOREVER!!

Basically, this is just more worthless live-action slop that doesn’t need to exist and probably got a bunch of other good projects cancelled.

***

Well, those were the shows I watched from start to finish, though I also ended up watching plenty of pilot episodes as well. In lieu of any other Indiana Jones material, I watched the first episode of Young Indiana Jones and… well, it was kinda weird. I have to believe it was formatted differently when it first aired on television, as the episode I watched involved two profoundly different plots, one in which Indy goes to Cairo with his parents, meets T.E. Lawrence and Howard Carter, and gets mixed up in the theft of a jackal-headed headpiece, and one in which he travels to Tangiers, sneaks out of the house, and is nearly sold into slavery by some brigands. Surely it originally aired as two separate episodes?

The first episode of Skeleton Crew was fun enough, though so far removed from anything do to with Star Wars barring its aesthetic that I’m not surprised it flew under the radar (not for nothing was it described as The Goonies in Space). For me, the most interesting aspect was the presence of Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who is going to be Buffy’s newest protégé in the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. And yeah, she’s good.

Having watched the first two seasons of The X-Files ages ago, I caught up on the first episode of season three and realized I had absolutely no recollection of everything I’d watched prior to it. I’m going to have to go right back to the beginning and start again, aren’t I?

Watching Loki and Peacemaker in tandem was rather funny, since both come from extended cinematic comic book worlds and feature a villain-turned-anti-hero who is responsible for several murders, and yet the two couldn’t be more different in tone, even as both take the first steps on redemptive arcs. I can’t say I was particularly enthralled by either of them, but I also won’t say that I’ll never revisit either.

Now, onto the movies! The Hunger Games was represented by The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, in which people with extremely silly names begin to establish elements of the Hunger Games that make it such a hideously watchable spectacle. Before a young Coriolanus Snow got involved, it was little more than kids fighting in a mosh pit; afterwards it involved sponsors and obstacles and interviews with the participants. It doubles as his backstory, which mercifully did not go for “his girlfriend died in the arena and that turned him evil.” We should have had more faith in Suzanne Collins than that.

I think it worked better as a book, but I love the fact that these films cast relative newcomers in the main roles, and then surround them with the likes of Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage, who play characters called Volumnia Gaul and Casca Highbottom. Amazing.

The final Pirates of the Caribbean film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, is completely dire, even if it came up with a solid hook: remove the curse that was placed upon Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner at the end of the third movie, which made him unable to step on land except for one day every ten years. And who better to sort this out than his son, glimpsed briefly at the end of that third movie and who is now all grown up. It’s a strong starting point, but then the rest of the movie happens – namely Johnney Depp as Jack Sparrow who just comes across as a sad drunk. Remember when this character had a low cunning that allowed him to surprise the audience by coming up with deranged plans that actually worked? Yeah, that’s totally gone. This is just a sad parody of the character, and the most damning aspect  

On a more positive note, I found myself enjoying the two Ghostbusters legacyquels: Answer the Call and Frozen Empire. This actually shocked me, as I went out of my way to avoid both of them when they were first released. And yet, they ended up being what (I think) a long-distant sequel should be: a chance to catch up on old favourites, but clear the way for a new generation of characters. In this respect, I much preferred the second film, as the first was just a retread of the whole Zuul/Gozer/possessed gatekeeper storyline from the very first Ghostbusters. The second has an original plot, even if it does struggle with extreme character overload.

But I enjoyed the vibe, the in-jokes, the cameos, and of course, finally bringing to life the New York Library lions. Every time they appear in the original Ghostbusters, I anticipate them coming to life, and then end up disappointed that it doesn’t happen. I clearly wasn’t the only one.

For the sake of completion, I ticked the Harry Potter box by watching the third and presumably final film in the Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them series (don’t worry, I didn’t pay for it) which stands as proof that bigotry really does rot your brain. Seriously, this thing is virtually incoherent. I honestly had no idea what was going on at any given point. There are characters who are introduced with much fanfare who do absolutely nothing relevant to the plot, and that whole thing involving Ezra Miller fizzles like a wet squib. Lally was very clearly meant to be Tina (whose actress could only cameo for whatever reason) and obviously foreshadowed plot-points (such as how the qilin should have bowed to Dan Folger’s character, thus proving the worth of Muggles in front of the Wizarding World) go in completely random directions instead. Really, the only nice thing I can say about this is that the costumes are gorgeous.

As for Jurassic World… look, I was warned in advance that Fallen Kingdom and Dominion would be terrible (a coworker told me he’d rather rewatch The Rise of Skywalker, the one film that didn’t make it onto my catchup schedule this month as I have no desire to ever see it) but with that in mind, I could just sit back and watch the pyrotechnics. The most disappointing thing about the first movie is that its initial premise of “evacuate the dinosaurs from the island before a fatal volcanic eruption” could have easily been sustained for the entire runtime IF the filmmakers had been interested in the logistics of this mission. I could have quite happily watched an entire film of experts struggling to do the impossible and save as many dinosaurs as possible with all the obstacles and frustrations and danger inherent in such an undertaking. Instead the film leaves the island early on, and the rest of story takes place in a stately mansion where blackmail auctions for the dinosaurs are taking place.   

The second movie is pure gibberish, but hey – we got to see Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum reunite for the first time since the original film. Plus, they course corrected the franchise’s most glaring mistake and romantically reunited Alan and Ellie. To this day it bewilders me that the first film is Alan learning to like kids and prep for fatherhood, only for all that development to be flushed down the toilet.

But I couldn’t fathom why they decided the main threat of this film should be giant locusts of all things. Why not follow the established thread of dinosaurs being weaponized that was touched upon in previous movies? Then Ellie could have been reintroduced investigating a murder, and realizing the raptors are being trained for assassinations or combat situations. Clearly schlocky Hollywood screenwriters need to call me.

Then there was Furiosa, subtitled as being part of the Mad Max Saga, which naturally was as exciting and explosive and astounding as the film which made this character famous in the first place. Anya Taylor-Joy was a natural choice for a younger version of Charlize Theron, though I was pleasantly surprised by just how much time was spent with Alyla Browne, who plays Furiosa as a child. It’s not until the halfway mark of the film in its entirety that we see Taylor-Joy take over the role. My one complaint is that there isn’t enough space given to Furiosa and her relationship with the Wives. This the crux of Mad Max: Fury Road, and yet there’s nothing in this film that sheds any sort of illumination on why she would risk it all to save those five girls – not even any sort of bond with their mothers.

Mission Impossible was represented by Dead Reckoning Part I, the franchise’s second-to-last offering, and there’s not a lot to say about it except that it has all the hallmarks of a Tom Cruise vehicle: stunts, running, heists, falling, frantic exposition, more running, and exploding envelopes. I mean, I have no idea what the plot to this one was, and I can’t say I care either – it did what it was meant to do. My biggest complaint is that they unnecessarily killed off Isla Faust, who was quite easily the best female character in this whole thing. Regardless of Rebecca Ferguson’s schedule, they could have easily just written her out.

To my mind, the sci-fi franchises of Terminator, Alien and Predator are closely linked (well, quite literally in the case of the last two, as there are explicit references to Xenomorphs throughout the Predator films) and I managed to track down material from each of them that I a. hadn’t seen, and b. actually wanted to watch. For The Terminator, I saw the anime series called Terminator Zero, which essentially just retells the first film with a few plot variations. Oh, and it’s animated. I’ve honestly forgotten most of it already, but I suspect it was still preferable to watching Genysis.

Alien: Romulus was a perfectly acceptable entry into the franchise, even though it too just follows the basic plot of the very first film with a few minor altercations. I liked the bond between Rain and Andy (the requisite android) but felt the death of Kay in the final act was unbearable cruel, and only done so they could turn her pregnancy into gratuitous Body Horror. For Predator I turned to the anthology series Killer of Killers (even though I still haven’t seen any of the original movies) and really enjoyed what it had to offer, from the different time periods, the distinctive fighting styles of the different characters, and the overarching plot that brings it all together in its final act.

To complete the sci-fi theme, I finally tracked down The Animatrix, which I haven’t seen in all these years, despite seeing all the films. Some of the short films were obviously better than others, but “Final Flight of the Osirus” was of most interest considering it plugs straight into the events of the sequel. I remember thinking that the animation looked amazing back when I glimpsed it in 2003, and now it’s horribly dated!

Moving into animation (specifically Studio Ghibli, Pixar and Disney Animation), I found there were more misses than hits. The Boy and the Heron was predictably beautiful and thought-provoking and melancholic, but for whatever reason, I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to fully immerse myself. And I can’t even tell you why! At a later date I will return to it and give it my complete attention, as I know I haven’t done it justice.

I did however, enjoy Porco Rosso (which I watched on a different night), which felt like vintage Miyazaki in regards to all of his favourite subjects – particularly flight. And although I know certain people hate the English dubs, Michael Keaton was the perfect choice for the flying porcine hero. My only complaint is that we never get a clear idea of how or why he was turned into a pig in the first place!

As for Pixar, there were a few I had to catch up on (though I spared myself Cars 2 and 3). Elemental was promoted as their first romance film, and I have to admit that between that and the concept of “what if the four elements had feelings!” I was a little cold on the premise. As it turned out, this is best described as an immigrant story, with the Lumen family trying to make good in the big city despite prejudices held toward them – but much like the fantasy setting in Onwards, the “talking elements” concept isn’t all that relevant. This could have been about actual people, and it would have made only cosmetic differences to the film.

Inside Out 2 handles things better, and is a natural continuation of the first film now that Riley has hit puberty and must deal with emotions such as embarrassment, ennui, envy and anxiety. As in the first movie, the real-world stakes are hilariously low compared to the internal adventures of what Riley’s anthropomorphized emotions are going though, but it was a fun return to form for Pixar.

That leaves Elio, which was a very lovely and charming B-tier Pixar offering. As in, there’s nothing wrong with it, but the studio’s glory days are far behind them at this point. Still, even B-tier Pixar is better than most studio output, and perhaps we should be impressed at how coherent this turned out despite the huge changes in premise and story that were hinted at in the two (very different) trailers.

(And no, I didn’t watch Lightyear either, as I’m still working on my ongoing posts about the Toy Story franchise as a whole. That, and I’m kind of dreading it based on its reception. How do you mess up a Buzz Lightyear movie?)

And now Disney Animation: one that flopped and one that made bank, even though neither were very good. Wish was profoundly bland, which is rather unforgivable considering this was Disney’s offering for their 100th Anniversary, and it’s impossible to walk away without thinking: this was the best they could do for such a milestone? The screenwriter was Jennifer Lee, which explains the unnecessarily convoluted plot which should have been more elegant (she also wrote Frozen 2, which spent so much time world-building and adding lore that it totally forgot to explain why Elsa has ice powers – the very question it was purportedly meant to answer).

The animation looked cheap and rushed, so methinks they wanted to rush this by a deadline on realizing they had nothing else for their anniversary. I doubt we’ll ever see Asha in the Disney Princess line-up, so maybe she can start a support group with Elionwy, Tiger Lily and Raya.

Moana 2 did much better financially, though this was a big step down in regards to the story. It was apparently originally conceived as a Disney+ show, which explains the episodic-like structure and the open ending, not to mention the complete lack of publicity until only a few months out from its release date. It was nice to see these characters again, but Moana was such a perfect movie that it really needed no embellishment. I’ve already forgotten most of what happened in this one, and talk of an impending live action remake makes me want to smash something with hammers. Like, it genuinely makes me furious that we’ve come to this: remaking animated films less than ten years since their release. (See also: How to Train Your Dragon and Avatar: The Last Airbender). The greed and imaginative voidance just repulse me.

Oh, and The Wild Robot was also watched. It was good, but so overhyped. I had people telling me it was the most incredible animated film of all time and it’s… not that. Again, nothing wrong with it, but hitting some very well-worn story beats along the way. The big surprise was Transformers One, which ended up being (relatively speaking) a surprisingly sophisticated look at the early friendship between Optimus Prime and Megatron, as well as the greater world of these robots in disguise.

I hadn’t caught up with the Muppets in a while, and so was shocked to realize that The Muppets was released in 2011, well over ten years ago. Buh? It’s the standard “getting the gang back together” hurrah, so I ended up liking Muppets Most Wanted better, even if they went a bit overboard with the cameos (you should have five or six celebrities involved; don’t cast a familiar face for every single walk-on role). But it had a more original story, and I can’t say I missed Jason Segel or Amy Adams’s characters.

Somehow a Stephen King film got thrown in here – perhaps because he’s a one-man franchise of his own, and it ended up being the Firestarter remake, mostly because I wanted to see Ryan Kiera Armstrong again. And yeah, she’s good. This movie on the other hand? Woof. Probably the worst on this very long list.

Now, brace yourself, because I ended up binging all the DCU and MCU films – or at least the ones I hadn’t seen yet. And yes, it was as painful as it sounds, even though a few managed to surprise me.

I have the feeling I enjoyed the (now defunct) DC cinematic universe a lot more than most people did. Sure, they were a bit too grimdark – especially under Zack Snyder – but because I’m not a devoted fan and because there are so many iterations of these characters, I didn’t mind a little shakeup in the tone. And whatever else you may think of him, Snyder expertly cast Jason Mamoa, Ezra Miller, Gal Gadot and so on. Even Ben Affleck was a pleasant surprise as a middle-aged Batman.

Okay, here goes: Black Adam wasn’t bad as a quasi-spinoff to Shazam, and I’m hard pressed to think of another film of this nature to take place in the Middle East. It’s a shame we’ll never see Aldis Hodge’s Hawkman again, and that the much-vaunted return of Henry Cavill as Superman is dead in the water. As for Shazam: Fury of the Gods, it follows its predecessor for being a much lighter and softer offering in this franchise, and it’s almost worth it just to see the trio of Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and Rachel Zegler as ancient goddesses. It too ends with an astoundingly optimistic stinger which see the return of Mark Strong’s Doctor Sivana and a talking caterpillar (?) that ain’t going nowhere.

Blue Beetle almost got lost in the shuffle as a perfectly by-the-numbers superhero origin story, but may still live on as an animated series in the old continuity (though I haven’t heard anything about that in a while, so I probably shouldn’t hold my breath). Aside from the Reyes family, this was the most formulaic of the lot. As usual, when minorities have to “wait their turn” for the spotlight, they always end up with the short straw.

Then there was The Flash. Don’t judge me, but: I didn’t hate this. Yes, the CGI was monstrously bad and the plot concerning Barry’s mother’s death and his father’s incarceration had already been done much better on the CW’s Flash, but… I can’t help it, I liked it! Fun cameos, an interesting take on Supergirl, a few twists I didn’t see coming – and it was pretty special seeing Michael Keaton as Batman again. It was a massive flop and everyone hated it… but not me. Finally, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closed out this particular chapter on the DC, and so at least it went out with a semi-roar rather than a whimper. For the most part. Granted, it had the plot of a video game and Amber Heard’s diminished screentime is very pronounced (that said, she was in it more than I had anticipated) but it closed off some dangling storylines and went out with a modicum of dignity. Well, sort of. How on the nose is it that the very last scene is Patrick Wilson’s Orm eating a cockroach?

(Also, the franchise finally falls to casting changes, with different actors playing Barry Allen’s father and King Atlan. This is the first time it’s happened, unless you want to count Amber Heard’s British accent in Justice League. Perhaps I should just try to embrace The Other Darrin. Make it a game – which actor will get swapped out?)

But that’s it! In hindsight, it’s a little odd that no less than three of the major stars playing these heroes ended up getting so beset with controversy, but for what it’s worth, I would have turned up for a continuation of the Justice League follow-up teased in the director’s cut nightmare sequence, if not simply because I think stories should be allowed to get finished, no matter their quality or popularity. (Except that proposed Kylo Ren movie. Please don’t make that one). One day I’ll catch up with James Gunn’s new take on the DC material, but I think I’ll let them accumulate first.

Which brings us to the MCU and – whew. I truly know the meaning of the term “superhero fatigue.” I had to stop after Deadpool & Wolverine because it was just too much.

My favourite ended up being the first one I watched: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was fun and colourful and engaging, centred on a brother/sister relationship (rare!) and a platonic male/female friendship (even rarer!) With the presence of Tony Leung, it boasts one of the franchise’s best villains – granted, that’s a low bar, but it’s not the usual portrayal of a left-coded extremist with admirable goals who goes about achieving them in the wrong way. Instead, Wenwu manages to be misguided but also a fairly terrible person. My biggest complaint is that it contains the single worst case of Trinity Syndrome I’ve ever seen, in which the low-achieving parking valet is the protagonist over his sister, who fights against gender-based discrimination and runs a lucrative fight club.

I can respect The Eternals for taking a big swing and striking out rather than just sticking to the usual formula, but that doesn’t change the fact this wasn’t great. Too many characters, too little time – plus asking us to believe all the hitherto-unmentioned cosmic underpinnings to the entire universe are enough to spark a worldwide existential crisis. Still, it’s a shame we’ll probably never see any of these characters again – like Shazam, it has a very open-ended stinger, and the film itself practically ends on a cliffhanger.

Spiderman: Far From Home was a somewhat bland, low-stakes epilogue to the whole Infinity War Saga, and there’s much more to say about Spiderman: No Way Home, which came very quickly on the heels of its predecessor. I have to admit it’s very impressive in the way it juggles its own cast with Spidermen and supervillains from two other continuities entirely, including Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe and Jamie Foxx. That it manages to close off an emotional arc for Garfield’s Spiderman, after he failed to save Gwen Stacey in 2014, only to successfully rescue MJ seven years later in 2021 – I mean, that’s… well, a pretty prime example of why these interconnected, fan-servicey, legacyquel long-running franchises aren’t all bad.

As for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, I accidentally watched it before No Way Home, when it clearly takes place afterwards. Ah well. I was annoyed on two points, firstly that there was too little connective tissue between the confused and grieving Wanda we spent time with in Wandavision, and the cruel and ruthless Wanda we find here. (So was Wandavision a Start of Darkness story the whole time? They really should have set that up better, especially since I only watched it to prime myself for this movie!) Secondly, this wasn’t really a sequel to the first Doctor Strange film. Remember when that ended with Mordu going around stealing magic from people like Benjamin Bratt? I wanted to see where that story was going, and instead it’s been swallowed up by the studio’s need to slot this into the whole “Multiverse Saga” thing.

As I was warned that Thor: Love and Thunder was an uncomfortable mix of Taika Waititi’s absurdist sense of humour alongside devastating plot-points such as Jane dying of cancer, an anti-villain losing his faith, and several kidnapped children, I could prepare myself for a very tonally insane movie. And it was. Wakanda Forever was next, and by this time I was getting exhausted. The reason I was largely content to stop watching the MCU after Endgame was because I didn’t really want to face the reality of Chadwick Boseman’s death, which I knew this film dealt with. Why not just keep him alive but off-screen? Why not set this story during the five-year blip? At this point, Queen Ramonda has mourned her son’s death three times, and then she ends up dying herself.

I can understand Ryan Coogler’s desire to honour Boseman’s passing, it just means there’s a palpable sadness to this film, with a story that seems rudderless without its star. Again, I’m reminded of how frustrating it is that that minorities always have to wait their turn (Iron Man was released in 2008, Black Panther exactly ten years later in 2018) since one of them literally died in the interim.

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special would be narratively unnecessary were it not for Mantis disclosing that she’s Peter Quill’s half-sister and wanting to soften the blow of telling him by kidnapping Kevin Bacon as a Christmas present (and I have to admit, Quill’s reaction when the truth comes out is very sweet), which takes us neatly into Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3. This chooses to focus on Rocket Racoon and his past as the experimental guinea pig of Chukwudi Iwuji’s High Evolutionary, which leads to all sorts of heartrending moments between CGI animals.

Though I commend Gunn for not forcing Gamora and Peter back into a relationship when this is clearly not the Gamora we spent the last three movies with (she died in Infinity War), he still includes one of his favourite sequences in which a mass murder is committed (in this case, the genocide of an entire planet) and then brushed aside like nothing important happened.

Next up was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and oh man, is it over yet? It seems to be general wisdom that this was one of the worst MCU offerings in recent years, though honestly, all these films are on a single tier of quality to me – if one is better or worse than the others, it’s in fairly superficial ways. The biggest problem here is the loss of the supporting cast (Scott’s ex-wife and her second husband, his cohorts Luis, Kurt and Dave) which kept these stories fairly grounded. Instead, Ant-Man is injected into a “save the world” story that’s at complete odds with his status as a low-stakes superhero. Even the film seems to be aware of this, as his sole motivation from start to finish is the safety of his daughter, and it’s really Michelle Pfieffer’s vehicle in a lot of ways – even if that requires a lengthy introduction to Jonathan Major’s Kang, a character that’s now been jettisoned).

Finally, Deadpool & Wolverine. For the most part I enjoyed it, even though its central premise is severely messed up. Because Wolverine died in Logan (2017), the universe that Wade lives in is deteriorating because he was an “anchor being” that keeps the timeline relevant. So basically, the world will die without its main character? It makes even less sense when you consider that the events of Logan were set in a post-apocalyptic future – which means that it hasn’t even happened yet!

Cable, Domino and Russell are completely absent (so much for that found family), Wade and Vanessa have broken up (despite probably being the best couple in this entire romantically-stunted franchise) and the Time Bureau from Loki get involved to try and set things right… or do they? I only watched the first episode of Loki, so I’ve no idea if the portrayal of them here tracks with their treatment in that show. But Emma Corrin was fantastic as Cassandra Nova (find a way to bring her back!), the cameos were a ton of fun (as with Garfield’s Spiderman saving MJ, having Chris Evans return not as Steven Rogers but Johnny Storm was a stroke of mild genius, as was finally letting Channing Tatum appear as Gambit) and – look, Professor X wasn’t even in this thing, but when Wolverine passionately tells Cassandra that he would have torn the world apart to rescue his sister… I got a little choked up. Ditto when Wade/Logan mentally spend what they think are their final moments with the people they love – Wade with Vanessa and Logan with his identity as an X-Man, and how the final credits contain a short love letter to all the Fox-produced superhero films.

And… that’s as far as I got. I didn’t even touch most of the Disney+ shows or the three most recent films, because I’m done. I’m spent. Call me when Doomsday is over.

***

Okay, I’m nearing the end of all this. Because Stranger Things doesn’t air until November, I watched the documentary that tracks the development of the Broadway prequel: The First Shadow. Unsurprising, it doesn’t give away much of the story, but the months-long leadup to opening night is possibly one of the most stressful things I’ve ever seen. Absolutely nothing goes right: the special effects don’t work, the script is being rewritten right up to the finish line, and everyone is completely stressed out from start to finish. The most eye-opening moment is when most of a conversation between the director and the screenwriter is bleeped out because they’re discussing a crucial plot event that the Duffer Brothers have asked be removed from the show because they want to save it for the fifth season.

I haven’t heard from anyone that’s actually seen the show, but if it’s objectively good in any small way, then it’s nothing short of a miracle based on the Development Hell that it went through.

That I watched the first season of the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon seems a bit random (I mean, they’re a franchise, but not a massive one), but I enjoyed the film and I knew this show would serve as a bridge between it and the sequel, so I wanted to check it out. It’s fine. The animation is obviously 2-D rather than 3-D, but they brought back all the original cast and took the opportunity to explore a little further into each turtle’s personality by separating them.

Okay, I’m gasping for air at this point, but we’re finally reaching the finish line. Toy Story, Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda (three out of four being the Dreamworks animation franchises) were represented by short films since I’d already seen their feature-length offerings in the past. Shrek: Thriller Night is just all the characters dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Lamp Life tells us what Bo Peep got up to between her departure from Andy’s house and Woody’s rediscovery of her outside the antique store, Dueling Dumplings is about two minutes of Po and his new apprentice fighting over dumplings, and Gift of the Night Fury ended up being a cheat since it turns out I’d seen it before, and just forgotten about it. Basically, the Vikings celebrate their version of Christmas.

And that’s it. Whew. If it seems like I did absolutely nothing but sit on my couch for the entirety of July… well, that’s probably not far from the truth. In my defence the weather was bad, I was on annual leave, and I did make this something of a pet project for myself. Also, when you average two films a day – one first thing in the morning and the other the last thing at night, you tend to churn through them quite quickly.

For the most part, it was fun! A lot of films that had been hyped up fell flat, and others that were box-office bombs ended up being quite enjoyable. There are plenty that I’ll revisit in the future, and plenty more that I hope to never see again. But given that nothing really dies these days, I think I might start “banking” more franchise instalments, and do all this again someday…