Posted on March 14, 2020 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine yesterday evening. This is one is a bit topical, the constant narrative patching of Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker.
The Rise of Skywalker was released to something of a collective sigh. It was a spectacular mess of film, one full of dangling plot threads, unnecessary revelations and mountains of fan service. However, that messiness left a number of awkward lacunas, that were gradually filled in with supplemental material that revealed the nature of Lando’s arc and the identity of Rey’s father. All of this stuff radically alters the experience and understanding of The Rise of Skywalker, and the decision to strip that stuff out of the film itself illustrates how horrific the production process truly was. The awkward efforts to shoehorn this stuff back in are arguably comparable to the day-one patching of Cats to cover terrible special effects. This is not a flattering comparison.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist, skywalker, star wars, the rise of skywalker | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 6, 2020 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine this evening. This is one I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: the Ewoks.
Conventional fan wisdom is that the Ewoks are crap. After all, they don’t even get a look in when Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker returns to the ruins of the Death Star, ending up consigned to a brief cameo in the closing montage. There’s a certain strand of fandom that considers the Ewoks the weakest part of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. This is a shame, as the Ewoks are actually one of the best parts of the film. More than that, they are on of the best parts of the franchise. They speak to the kind of things that only Star Wars could do, that gonzo blend of wholesome and radical.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: ewoks, in the frame, return of the jedi, star wars | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 2, 2020 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine this evening. With the release of the second season of Altered Carbon, I thought it was worth taking a look at the recent trend towards retro-futurism, how modern pop culture is haunted by the ghosts of futures past.
Altered Carbon works best as a celebration of the cyberpunk genre, drawing from a wealth of sources like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner, steeped in nostalgia for a particular kind of future that was very popular during the eighties. It is not alone; after all, the first season was released after the Ghost in the Shell remake and Blade Runner 2049. However, it isn’t just cyberpunk that informs such nostalgia. Franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek have taken to looking backwards, while it’s hard to think of a modern piece of science-fiction that suggests a novel vision of the future.
It’s an interesting and unsettling trend, as if pop culture has given up on the idea of the future being different. Instead of imagining bold new worlds, pop culture seems instead to be recycling early generations’ hopes and dreams. You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: altered carbon, cyberpunk, future, nostalgia, science fiction | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 28, 2020 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine this evening. With the release of The Invisible Man this week, which is quite good, I took a look back to Universal Studios’ abandoned and cursed Dark Universe.
Frankly, there is no way to talk about the Dark Universe without acknowledging it as one of the greatest acts of cinematic hubris in the twenty-first century. The whole misbegotten experiment was transparently a result of Universal looking at the success of The Avengers, and deciding to built its own imitation using whatever properties it found lying down the back of the couch. The result was Dracula Untold and The Mummy (along with one of the most hilariously ambitious pieces of marketing ambition in living memory), two of the worst-reviewed blockbusters of the decade.
Luckily, The Invisible Man is a fantastic piece of work, a shrewd and sophisticated horror that is more interested in telling its own story than existing as a piece of “content” for a larger shared universe. You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: dark universe, escapist, film, Movie, the invisible man | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 25, 2020 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine yesterday. Because it was a light week for geek culture, I actually got to write a little bit about something I’ve thought far too much about; Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant.
Covenant is not a great film. It’s not even a particularly good film. However, it is a fascinating film. A large part of that is because it emerged in the middle of a wave of compromised big budget blockbusters like Suicide Squad, Justice League and Solo: A Star Wars Story, films that often felt like watching a wrestling match between the director and the studio. Covenant feels the same way, trying to reconcile Fox’s desire for an Alien prequel with Scott’s desire for a Prometheus sequel. However, what’s most interesting about Covenant is how that conversation seems to play out within the movie itself.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: alien, alien: covenant, auteur, conflict, film, Movie, Prometheus, ridley scott | Leave a comment »
Posted on February 24, 2020 by Darren
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine last Friday, looking at the debate around the “R-rating” that Birds of Prey earned.
Following the film’s release, there’s been a lot of a debate around Birds of Prey, particularly in light of its box office performance. One of the more interesting arguments has been around the film’s age rating, with several pundits arguing that the film did not “need” to be rated R, that it could have been cut to a PG-13 movie without losing anything of value. This is an interesting argument, one that deserves a little interrogation. After all, the scenes which likely earned Birds of Prey its R-rating – certainly the scenes singled out as unnecessary by such critics – are essential to its identity. They make the film unique and distinct.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: birds of prey, censorship, escapist magazine, identity, in the frame, pg-13, r-rating | Leave a comment »
Posted on February 21, 2020 by Darren
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine last Friday, discussing the inevitable armchair quarterbacking of the Birds of Prey box office.
The film under-performed at the box office in its opening weekend, particularly relative to some of the more bullish predictions. It pulled in an opening weekend box office closer to similarly budgeted films like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Ford v. Ferrari than breakout smashes like Deadpool or 300. As a result, there’s a been a rush to account for those results, which often boils down to an attempt to narrativise the film’s failure – to argue that the causes for that result are easily discerned by outside observers. Of course, those analyses often handily fit various pre-determined narratives.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: birds of prey, box office, escapist | Leave a comment »
Posted on February 19, 2020 by Darren
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine on Monday, to mark the news that Knives Out would officially be getting a sequel.
To be fair, this news was hardly a surprise given the box office success of the film. With a tiny budget, Knives Out managed to gross over three hundred million dollars worldwide. Even before the sequel was officially announced, it seemed inevitable. And it will most likely be another great time at the cinema. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to feel like the proper way to celebrate the success of Knives Out might not be to start producing Knives Out sequels en masse, but instead to simply make more movies like Knives Out.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: budget, knives out, lionsgate, originality, Rian Johnson, sequel | Leave a comment »
Posted on February 17, 2020 by Darren
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine last week, to mark the release of Birds of Prey.
One of the interesting aspects of Birds of Prey is the way in which it’s essentially a story about marginalised characters, characters who have historically been pushed to the edge of comic book narratives – erased and reinvented by the demands of universe-wide reboots, defined primarily in relationship to more popular male characters, and just generally subject to the whims of the shared universe. Part of what makes Birds of Prey so interesting is the way in which it builds that into the narrative, creating a story for its characters where the absence of Batman and the Joker is the entire point of the exercise.
It’s a very clever approach to the source material, and one which suggests a more fundamental understanding of the source material than many critics credit it. In some ways, it is a more faithful adaptation of the Suicide Squad concept than Suicide Squad, building itself around the flotsam and jetsam of DC continuity. It helps that Birds of Prey finds an emotional hook into this story and uses it to offer a feminist perspective on this familiar trope. After all, its notable that so many of these marginalised and erased characters are women.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: birds of prey, escapist, in the frame | 4 Comments »
Posted on February 10, 2020 by Darren
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine on Friday, to mark the occasion of the Oscars.
The Dark Knight was famously locked out of the Best Picture race. However, it still had a tremendous impact on the field. Eleven years later, the snub of The Dark Knight has profoundly reshaped what the Oscars actually looks like, causing the Academy to dramatically alter a couple of its core underlying assumptions. Most of these changes are for the better, sparking an expansion of the Best Picture field that looks to have broken its long-standing anchor to the Best Director category, encouraging the recruitment of a younger voting base, and even paving the way for populist films like Black Panther and Joker at the awards.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: best popular film, Black Panther, joker, Oscars, The Dark Knight | Leave a comment »
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