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New Escapist Column! On “The Bad Batch” as a Show About Veterans of a Forever War…

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the release of the second season of The Bad Batch, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about one of the more interesting facets of the series.

The Star Wars franchise has always been intensely political. George Lucas tied the original films to the Vietnam War, and the prequels to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The Bad Batch feels like a culmination of this trend, a follow-up to the prequel trilogy, released in the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, that is very much engaged with the question of what happens to an army of soldiers at the end of an ostensible “forever war.” It’s a meaty theme for an animated series, and The Bad Batch is at its most interesting tapping into it.

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

New Escapist Column! On “Sicario” and the Forever War on the Final Frontier…

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. The teaser for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune playing in cinemas, and with the film celebrating its fifth anniversary this September, I thought it was worth taking a look back at Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario.

Sicario is a film about boundaries – both literal and metaphorical. Set at the edge of the frontier, on the Mexican border, it is story about blurred lines and brutal transgressions waged as part of a murky war with extremely abstract objectives without a singular and clearly defined enemy. As such, it becomes a story about the idea of war waged on the idea of the frontier, a grim and cynical update of both the western and the war movie for the twenty-first century.

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