Podcast 616 is a podcast looking at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was thrilled to be invited to join Dan Owen for a discussion of Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, which is a movie I enjoyed considerably more than most.
It’s a fun and broad discussion, which delves into questions around auteurship within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the paradox of superheroes, the question of power, and the challenges in adapting concepts like the Deviants for the big screen. It was really fun to roll up my sleeves and delve into this discussion with Dan, which allowed me to chat about everything from my blind spots with certain characters to the way in which the plot and themes of Eternals feels true to the spirit – if not necessarily the art – of Jack Kirby.
You can listen to the episode here, or click the link below.
For many Star Trek fans, The Wrath of Khan remains the most beloved and most brilliant entire in the franchise’s cinematic canon. However, it’s notable that The Voyage Home was a much more populist hit, resonating with general audiences. For a decade following the release of The Voyage Home, it provided a template for the franchise for a decade. However, with the release of First Contact, the balance of power shifted. Suddenly, the franchise found itself caught in the gravity of The Wrath of Khan, which exerted a powerful gravity on the franchise’s direction and development.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
“I have Queen and Country on my side. That is all that I need.”
“She here with you right now, the Queen?”
War of the Sontarans is a basically functional episode of Doctor Who, even if it feels like a rough draft of a more interesting premise that moves quickly enough to dance over the more obvious cracks.
In some ways, War of the Sontarans feels very much like a proof of concept for Doctor Who: Flux, a demonstration of how exactly Chibnall is going to turn that frantic season-opener into a sustainable six-episode miniseries. War of the Sontarans settles down, severely trimming down the number of plot threads in play at the end of The Halloween Apocalypse. Diane and Claire are nowhere to be found. The Weeping Angels are entirely absent. Joseph Williamson only makes a minor appearance, serving primarily to remind audience members that he still exists.
“Queuing for petrol, Queuing for petrol. Queuing for petrol. And I’m on a horse.”
So War of the Sontarans feels very much like a conventional episode of Doctor Who, albeit with considerably more plot crammed into comparatively less space, and with a secondary subplot that more directly ties into the larger arc. It’s not the most elegant way of structuring an event story like this, but it is a more workable model for six weeks of Doctor Who. This is an episode of television that will be easy enough for casual audience members to follow, even if they haven’t seen The Halloween Apocalypse. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that this is easier to follow than The Halloween Apocalypse.
For all the plot and narrative hijinks at work in War of the Sontarans, the episode is remarkably straightforward. This is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. War of the Sontarans touches on a variety of interesting ideas, but never lingering on any of them or pushing them too far into their more compelling implications.
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Jenn Gannon and Deirdre Molumby, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.
So this week, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.
The galaxy is in turmoil. Rumours swirl of a plot against House Atreides. As Duke Leto Atreides takes control of the desert planet of Dune, he tries to track down the traitors in his midst. Meanwhile, his son Paul finds himself on the verge of an awakening that will have a profound impact on the future of mankind.
At time of recording, it was ranked 127th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the recent trailer for the upcoming Book of Boba Fett, it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on the character of Boba Fett.
Boba Fett is an interesting character, in large part because there has always been a huge dissonance between how cool he looks and how cool he acts. This is the more compelling facet of the character, the dissonance between the characters as a cool action figure and his general uselessness within the larger narrative of the saga. George Lucas seemed to play with this idea very pointedly and purposefully, and it’s a nuance that many subsequent takes on the character have tended to ignore or overlook.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
The obvious point of comparison is Jackie. Both are movies directed by Pablo Larraín, offering a tightly-focused profile of their young, famous, female subjects. However, while Jackie is very much about a character who is cannily and carefully cultivating a mythology out of tragedy, Spencer is perhaps about a character failing to do just that. Jackie Kennedy was able to build the myth of “Camelot” in the wake of her husband’s death, a monument that would last generations. Spencer imagines its female protagonist crushed beneath the weight of a national myth, learning that “no one is above tradition.”
A sorry estate of affairs…
Diana Spencer remains a fascinating figure. She has a strong hold on popular culture. Her narrative is a driving force in the second half of The Crown. There was a spectacularly ill-judged attempt at a more conventional biopic with Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana. Her ghost haunted The Queen. Diana is often described as “the people’s princess”, but there’s something unsettling even in that affectionate appelation. It is, after all, possessive. It opens up the question of whether Diana was every truly allowed to be herself, or was instead beholden to everybody else – the royals, the public, the ghosts of royal consorts past.
Spencer is very much a companion piece to Jackie, but it feels more like a ghost story. It is haunting and ethereal, its subject flinching even from Larraín’s gaze. The result is enchanting, but also deliberately and effectively frustrating. Spencer is a fable, complete with all the echoing space that such stories usually contain.
So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with every second Monday’s article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.
With the release of the latest trailer for The Batman, it seemed like a good time to delve into a recurring debate among Batman fans, the argument over whether portrayals of the character are too dark and gritty. It’s a strange argument, given that the only solo Batman movie in the past decade has been The LEGO Batman Movie, so it’s worth unpacking.
It is easy to understand why this is. There have been Marvel Studios movies directed by Oscar-winners before; Joe Johnson won an Academy Award for visual effects on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Taika Waititi recently won a Best Adapted Screenplay award for JoJo Rabbit. However, there is something tangibly different about seeing a big budget blockbuster coming from an artist who won both Best Picture and Best Director at that year’s Academy Awards.
It also makes sense in the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There have undoubtedly been Marvel Studios films with strong senses of authorship: Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. However, those movies all feel quite a long time ago. Although one can perhaps pick up traces of Cate Shortland’s personality in Black Widow or Daniel Destin Cretton’s interests in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, those films feel very familiar and very rote.
Red eyes in the morning…
There is tangible sense of opportunism at play in way that Marvel Studios has positioned Eternals as an auteur-driven project. After all, the studio has a long and complicated history with directors who have distinct visions; Patty Jenkins, Edgar Wright and Ava DuVernay have all suggested that the company’s culture is not particularly welcoming to creatives. In particular, Zhao’s assertion that she oversaw the movie’s action sequences exists in the context of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, who recalls being told that if she chose to direct Black Widow, she would not be allowed to direct the action scenes.
Again, context is important here. Eternals is really the company’s first director-driven project since Black Panther, which is a big deal given the studio’s history of beginning pre-visualization of scenes and special effects “before the cinematographer or director has signed on to the project.” While movies like Avengers: Infinity War, Captain Marvel, Ant Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home are all varying degrees of entertaining, none of them feel like the work of a filmmaker who has something particularly pressing to say about the modern world.
Superfriends.
All this tension plays through Eternals, the fine balancing act between a director with a very distinctive artistic sensibility working with a studio that appears eager to launder its reputation by association, while also being anxious that this auteur doesn’t get to go too far. In some ways, Eternals feels like a limit case for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an example of just how far the studio will allow a creative talent to stretch a rubber band before aggressively snapping it back into the default position.
This is the challenge facing Eternals. It goes further than any Marvel Studios film in recent memory, but that’s still not far enough.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With Dune continuing its dominance at the global box office, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the movie’s size and scale.
It is stating the obvious to describe Dune as “big.” However, the description is accurate. Still, what’s notable about Dune is how Denis Villeneuve uses that sense of scale and spectacle. Dune is so large that it often threatens to burst out of the IMAX frame, to break the confines of the generous format. Villeneuve uses that size to underscore the core theme of the book, the question of how small these individuals can seem when confronted with systems and forces that operate on unimaginable scales.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
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