continuity | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as an Exercise in Justifying Nostalgia…

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Star Trek: Picard at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Thursday morning while the show is on, looking at the third season as the show progresses. This week, the premiere.

The third season of Picard is a staggering work of fan service nostalgia, a collection of imagery and iconography that the audience recognises, with little to tie it together beyond assumed familiarity. Part of what is so interesting about the series is that it seems to understand this. Picard is largely built around justifying that nostalgia, to itself and its audience, as if trying to desperately reassure viewers that it’s fine to give up the future and retreat into the comforts of an illusory past.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: continuity, fan service, nostalgia, picard, retro, star trek: picard, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The “Ant-Man” Movies as the Most Marvel of the Marvel Movies…

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the upcoming release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, and the way in which these films – for better and worse – feel like the statistical mean of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Part of what in interesting about the Ant-Man movies is how little they actually adapt from the source comics, largely marginalising characters like Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne in favour of porting over out-of-continuity characters like Hope van Dyne. They deliberately structure themselves to avoid key character and plot beats from the comic book franchise, and so offer the purest distillation of the adaptation storytelling of the comic book film franchise. The Ant-Man franchise is the Marvel Studios franchise that feels most generic, most cribbed together using the studio’s narrative shorthand.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: ant man and the wasp, ant-man, ant-man and the wasp: quantumania, characters, comic books, continuity, in the frame, Marvel Studios, mcu, paul rudd, storytelling, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as Fan Service Methadone…

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Darren

The end of the second season of Picard effectively wrote out the bulk of the show’s new cast members, explicitly to make room for a nostalgic revival of Star Trek: The Next Generation, featuring cast members thirty years removed from that series. The result is as pandering and condescending as one might expect, suffering from many of the same fundamental issues of the first two seasons, stripping out anything distinctive or unique and replacing it with a shallow petina of nostalgia. It’s cynical, it’s hollow and it speaks to a fundamental emptiness with so much modern pop culture.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: continuity, emptiness, fan service, hollowness, meaning, nostalgia, picard, shallowness, star trek: picard, star trek: the next generation | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the DCEU and the Chasing of the Shared Universe…

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last weekend. Since James Gunn and Peter Safran have taken over the running of the DCEU, they have made a number of dramatic cuts and decisions, including the reporting scrapping of the company’s Wonder Woman and Aquaman franchises. There is some suggestion that the entire primary cast of the shared universe is gone, and that the team is starting over to rebuild a new shared universe from scratch.

It is a bold decision, and one that sidesteps a fairly obvious question: why are DC so excited for a shared universe? After all, it was the company’s over-enthusiastic pursuit of that ideal that left their continuity feeling like a mess in the first place. For all the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared universes are not easy to build, and DC has enjoyed a surprising amount of success with standalone projects like The Batman and Joker. Why is the company throwing everything away to try a strategy that already failed for them, and is showing signs of wearing off for their main competitor?

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: comic books, continuity, dceu, James Gunn, share duniverse, shared universe, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Willow” as a Show About Divorce…

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Willow at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Wednesday evening while the show is on, looking at the legacy sequel as it progresses from one episode to the next.

Willow is very obviously a show steeped in the fantasy and the blockbusters of the eighties, reflecting the originl film on which it is based. However, the show is rooted much more film in that era than it might appear. As the show approaches its middle point, it becomes clear that showrunner Jonathan Kasdan has built Willow as an extended metaphor for familial dissolution, tapping into the themes of divorce and separation that permeated so much pop culture during the decade.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: continuity, divorce, eighties, family, jonathan kasdan, pop culture, star wars, the battle of the slughtered lamb, themes, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! On “The Rings of Power” and the Limits of the Franchise-Era Mystery Box…

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Darren

We’re thrilled to be launching a fortnightly video companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch every second Monday, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel. And the video will typically be separate from the written content. 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.

This week, we took a look at The Rings of Power, the prequel series to The Lord of the Rings. In particular, the way that it is built around so many mystery boxes. It’s a problem facing a lot of modern franchise media, where these shows attempt to keep audiences hooked by building elaborate mystery boxes around established lore. The mystery box was a problem for early serialized television at the turn of the millennium, and it is a shame to see it return in the streaming age of franchise media, where the answer is always nostalgia.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: audience, canon, continuity, franchises, in the frame, mystery, mystery box, nostalgia, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Star Trek: Lower Decks” is Embracing Its Own Continuity…

Posted on October 25, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Lower Decks, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+ in the States and on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom. The penultimate episode of the third season released last week, and it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the series.

With the end of the third season fast approaching, there is an interesting shift taking place in Lower Decks. The animated show is built around Star Trek fan services, driven and shaped by continuity references to earlier shows in the franchise, particularly those from the nineties. As the seasonw raps up, it is interesting to see Lower Decks embrace the idea of continuity itself. Trusted Sources is an episode that explores evolving Star Trek continuity from the early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation to the final sweeping epic of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and finds continuity within Lower Decks.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Star Trek | Tagged: canon, continuity, references, star trek, star trek: lower decks, the escapist, trusted sources | Leave a comment »

Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor (Review)

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Darren

“Forced regeneration. Forced degeneration.”

The Power of the Doctor is in some ways a fitting conclusion to the Chibnall era, and an illustration of the era’s lost potential.

Trained for this.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Television | Tagged: blockbuster, Chris Chibnall, continuity, doctor who, fan service, nonsense, the doctor, the power of the doctor, time travel | 6 Comments »

New Podcast! Rarely Going – “Star Trek: Lower Decks 3×09 – Trusted Sources”

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Darren

I was delighted to join the wonderful Kurt North for an episode of the animated Star Trek podcast, Rarely Going.

Trusted Sources is the penultimate episode of the third season of Lower Decks. It is an episode that is obviously teeing up the season finale, but it is also an episode that is engaged with the idea of continuity. Lower Decks is a show built around references to past Star Trek shows, but the third season of the show has seen Lower Decks becoming just a little more comfortable in its own skin. Trusted Sources is an episode about how these seemingly episodic adventures can build and escalate to pay off in interesting ways.

You can listen directly to the episode below or by clicking here.

Filed under: Star Trek | Tagged: breen, comedy, continuity, episodic, history, podcast, rarely going, Sitcom, star trek, star trek: lower decks, storytelling, Symbiosis, trusted sources, we made this | Leave a comment »

296. Jaws: The Revenge (Jaws ’87) – Shark Week 2022 (-#27)

Posted on July 29, 2022 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Emma Kiely, and this time with special guest Jason Coyle, 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.

This week, we’re doing something a bit unusual. To line up with Shark Week, we are covering the Jaws franchise. So today, rounding out the week with Joseph Sergeant’s Jaws: The Revenge.

Following the death of her son Sean in a freak shark attack, Ellen Brody becomes convinced that her family has become a supernatural magnet for sharks. Her surviving son Michael convinces Ellen to travel to the Bahamas, where she meets a mysterious sea plane pilot named Hoagie. As a relationship begins to blossom between Ellen and Hoagie, Ellen discovers that perhaps there are some secrets that can’t be escaped.

At time of recording, it was ranked 27th on the lists of either the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.