Hachette Unveils the Ultimate Dungeons & Dragons Novel Collection

This article is sponsored by Hachette Partworks.

For over 50 years, Dungeons & Dragons has brought together fantasy fans of all ages with everything from tabletop gameplay to stories based on its epic realms. Now Hachette Partworks is sharing a whole treasure trove of Dungeons & Dragons literary stories with its novels collection, bringing together 100 of the greatest D&D novels ever written. This includes some stories that have long been out of print, with fans finally able to read these classics for the first time in years. And to commemorate such an extensive launch, Hachette has pulled out all the stops to make this collection a must-own for all Dungeons & Dragons fans.

Among the highlights in the Dungeons & Dragons novels collection are the works of celebrated author R.A. Salvatore, including his landmark set of stories The Legend of Drizzt, which originally began publication in 1988. Salvatore’s work helped define the Forgotten Realms, a fan-favorite setting that has been immortalized further in video games like Baldur’s Gate and gone on to inspire many a D&D campaign. Even beyond the familiar trappings of Dungeons & Dragons, these are among the most beloved high fantasy stories of all time and should be a fixture in any fantasy fan’s bookshelf.

Another gem in Hachette’s Dungeons & Dragons novels collection is The Finder’s Stone, a trilogy of novels written by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb. Also set within the Forgotten Realms, these stories follow adventurers Alias and Olive Ruskettle as they embark on quests and vanquish evil wherever it surfaces throughout their journeys. The Dragonlance Chronicles are also part of this novel collection, republishing stories by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman that detail an epic saga of might and magic during a sweeping conflict known as the War of the Lance. This collection is carefully curated by Matt Chapman, the current editor of Tabletop Gaming Magazine and the former editor-in-chief of Dragon+, with Chapman providing introductions identifying the importance of each story and ensuring this collection is by fans and for fans.

For readers who have more specific books that they want from across the wide, wide world of Dungeons & Dragons, the books will begin receiving a trade release on Sept. 9, with new books available approximately every two weeks. But Hachette has truly gone above and beyond to make the whole set stand out together, even as impressive as each of the individual books in the collection are. Which, of course, leads us to talk about the publisher’s subscription service, with the first two books starting at a reduced introductory price of £2.99 for the first book and £6.99 for the second book before moving to £11.99 for the remainder of the subscription run.

Hachette has opened a subscription service for fans to ensure that they get the novels on a regular basis as well as offering the novels through trade release starting Sept. 9. The novels in this collection are being published as hardback books with foiled covers and exclusive spine artwork by Javier Charro, showing an interconnected image of fan-favorite Dungeons & Dragons characters together in action, which will really get the books to visually pop from one’s bookshelf. The subscription ships two novels each month, steadily providing 40 years of Dungeons & Dragons to subscribers.

To sweeten the subscription deal, Hachette is offering primo incentives for people who subscribe to the novels collection before the end of 2026 while supplies last. Subscribers get a set of engraved silver and gold-colored bookmarks, a mug designed after Dungeons & Dragons, a pair of bookends with the Dungeons & Dragons symbol, a specially branded dice tray for your next D&D campaign, and a free book as part of the subscription. These are all impressive bits of swag for any Dungeons & Dragons fan to show off with their books, giving other players a strong sense of FOMO.

Speaking of FOMO, this is all a limited time offer so don’t wait until it’s too late to get in on Hachette’s extensive Dungeons & Dragons novels collection. With 100 novels in an impressive hardback and illustrated spine format, just the books themselves alone are well worth the price of the subscription for this high fantasy labor of love project. Really, no major Dungeons & Dragons fan can go without it, bringing back some of the most beloved stories the enduring fantasy franchise has ever told, some for the first time back in print in decades. Hachette Partworks have been delivering fan-forward publications for years, and with the Dungeons & Dragons novels collection, they’re setting a new bar for curated book collections.

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Reminds Remakes Are Interpretations, Not Copies

“Hey, listen!” Just reading those words is enough to make anyone who has played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sit up and pay attention. Link’s fairy guide Navi says those words approximately ten billion times while traversing across Hyrule’s past and present to prevent Ganondorf from using the Triforce to conquer the world. Annoying at first… and second… and third, Navi’s little interjections are as much a part of the game as the various puzzles and boss battles.

So fans would be forgiven for being slightly taken aback by the trailer for Nintendo‘s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The trailer is full of familiar sights and sounds, from Link’s various grunts as a kid and an adult to him targeting the enemies he strikes with a sword to the sound of the Ocarina itself. Moreover, the remake has a darker, more realistic feel, replacing the bright cartoon visuals of the originals—which is exactly what a remake should do.

Remakes are, of course, nothing new to video games. As soon as Pong left arcades and made its way into living rooms, people learned that games had to go through some sort of change in order to work on a different system. Often, the changes are a result of hardware abilities and limitations. Pac-Man at home, whether the depressing Atari version or the impressive Intellivision port, didn’t look and sound the same as it did in the arcades. As much as we loved to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on NES, we knew it fell short of the four-player brawler we got at Chuck-E-Cheese.

However, Nintendo also showed us that remakes can take advantage of stronger hardware to give us a game that retains the same basic mechanics, but presents them with better graphics and sound. The Super Mario All-Stars compilation on the SNES played as both an update and a celebration of the games from the previous generation, allowing the screen to match the way the games made us feel.

But with the Ocarina of Time remake, Nintendo is showing us something different. It’s showing a game that has a lot of qualities of the version we first played on the Nintendo 64 decades ago, but is ultimately a new game. The first half of the trailer plays the greatest hits, giving us shots of Link doing the usual combat and puzzle actions that we’ve done during hundreds of replays. However, the shadows are a bit darker and the textures a bit more pronounced, creating a change that goes beyond transitioning from polygons to fully-rendered people and involves matters of tone.

The second half of the trailer only intensifies those feelings, as it adds voice acting and newly designed cut scenes, replacing the mostly static images and subtitles of the original game. Suddenly, Zelda and Darunia the Goron have voices, and they don’t sound like we expected when first played the game. Suddenly, Ocarina of Time isn’t the same game we played before.

But that’s not a bad thing, especially if we think of video games as art instead of just entertainment technology. If they’re just entertainment technology, then we can and should complain when the new technology doesn’t entertain like the previous technology did. But if they’re art, then we need to allow room for the work to change in order to be perceived differently. We need to let video game remakes be interpretations.

Other forms of art have long had to wrestle with questions of interpretation in adaptations and remakes. Consider one of the best examples of adaptation and remake, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell and the three movies based on it, 1951’s The Thing from Another World, 1982’s John Carpenter‘s The Thing, and 2011’s The Thing.

Campbell’s original story focuses on a group of researchers in the Antarctic who repel the attack of a telepathic and shapeshifting alien. The 1951 movie takes the premise and turns it into the sort of sci-fi adventure popular during the nuclear era, complete with a group of jocular soldiers and scientists battling a vegetable creature with a definitive shape. Carpenter’s version amps up the gore and the cynicism that reflects his view of the 1980s, building to a far more ambiguous ending than either of the two other versions. Likewise, the 2011 movie is a product of its time, a Hollywood IP cash in that repeats familiar beats and emphasizes audience recognition.

While audiences may prefer one version of The Thing over the others, no one thinks that the worse versions cancel out the best. Heck, few think that even the worst versions shouldn’t exist. Instead, we understand them each as interpretations of the same story, valid in some degree in their own way.

In fact, we don’t even need to leave the world of video games to understand the importance of interpretation. Recall the 2002 Resident Evil remake, which still confounds people expecting simply an updated version of the original game. Resident Evil 2002 cuts out whole scenes and moments, giving the characters new voices and dialogue, creating a game that doesn’t just play differently from its predecessor—it’s effectively a whole new experience. While gamers hardly embraced the remake upon first release, it’s now accepted as the definitive way to play Resident Evil, especially for newcomers. The original version now only appeals to purists who want to recreate the experience of the game in 1996.

Which is also fine. The 1996 version of Resident Evil didn’t disappear when the remake came out, and those who want the pure experience can still find copies to play, anymore than each version of The Thing erased previous versions. If anything, Resident Evil 2002 enhanced the 1996 game by highlighting two different approaches to the same material.

Ultimately, gamers need to view The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time through the same lens. They need to accept this new version not as a copy, but as a distinct game that interprets the original without repeating it. And if gamers prefer one version over another, that’s all the better, because those good points of the original stand out even more. They can still get yelled at by Navi in every version of the game, whether she’s telling us to look at bright polygons or shadowy modern textures.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake releases on the Nintendo Switch on November 5, 2026.

Paul Greengrass Reveals The Uprising Began With the Title ‘The Hood’

Paul Greengrass knew he always wanted to make a quasi-Robin Hood movie well before his deeply naturalistic historical epic, The Uprising, had the famous rogue’s name added to the poster. The film is still very much in the vein of the realpolitik thrillers Greengrass made his bones on early in his career with the Irish Troubles-set Bloody Sunday (2002) and the 9/11-based United 93 (2006), plus more recently in Captain Phillips (2013)—although this time with a far more exotic sheen in 1381 England on the eve of the fabled Peasants’ Revolt. Even so, he didn’t mind when Focus Features revealed in the marketing that the movie about peasants marching on London is also a chance to “Witness the Rise of Robin Hood.”

“When I wrote the original screenplay, I called it The Hood, so that tells you where I was,” Greengrass tells us during a Zoom conversation. “I called it The Hood because after the Peasants’ Revolt, people told stories of outlaws, most particularly outlaws of the hood, and so my hero’s journey was always gonna go from being a simple farmer to ending up being an outlaw. I never called him ‘The Hood,’ but he puts the hood on and he puts the mask on, and he confronts the king, and at that point, you’re in a cinematic world. You’re in a sort of mythic world.”

So he never had a problem with the film’s marketing revealing that facet of the movie: “You have to suggest what your movie is about, [and] it’s totally part of it.” However, the movie is so much more. It is, in fact, a passion project that began for Greengrass back in the days of the pandemic when he discovered a book by Barbara Tuchman about another world that came out of an even worse time of pestilence and paranoia. In England, it’s estimated anywhere between a third and half the population died from bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. For the survivors, the wheels of the world had come off… including for the peasants who revolted by marching on London after their taxes were raised yet again to fight a distant war in France.

Below we discuss with Greengrass the historical reality of 1381 England, what echoes and lessons he sees in it for our world today… and why he thinks it is the reason we have the Robin Hood we know and love in the 21st century.

I imagine like a lot of children of the British school system that you were at least somewhat familiar with the Peasants’ Revolt.

Very much so. I don’t think children today are taught about the Peasants’ Revolt in England, but when I was a boy you were.

You’re saying it’s taught even less now? Because I was curious if in the UK it was taught as a success for the rights of individual freedom.

I think that’s what it was for sure. I think that we were taught it was one of the important moments, but I don’t recall my kids being taught about it if I must be honest, but I wouldn’t read too much into that… but history was sort of taught [in my time] mostly about how the power of the king, or the kings and queens and aristocrats, and how that power ultimately over centuries was transformed into people having individual and democratic rights.

That was the structure that you were taught, and in that story the Peasants’ Revolt was a very important moment, of course, because it’s the first moment in European history when the ordinary man and woman come center stage to say my rights matter and they articulated a very clear set of economic and political rights… but obviously the rebellion was crushed, and yet the dream of the rebellion lived on and it succeeded. And it succeeded in a number of important ways.

It changed the way people felt about themselves. They understood that they mattered, and you can see that because after the rebellion, that’s when the legend, these outlaw legends really began in England, particularly Robin Hood, but not only Robin Hood, although he was the most popular of those outlaws. Because people told outlaw stories, I’m not talking about courtly poets, I’m talking about the people down in the taverns and village squares, they told stories about outlaws because it was a way of keeping the dream alive. We tell these stories about this outlaw who stands up against the powerful at a time when we feel powerless.

That’s interesting because on this side of the pond we obviously know about Robin Hood, and we hear a lot about Richard the Lionheart, and we’re taught in our schools about Magna Carta, but we are not taught about the Peasants’ Revolt. I believe you’re one of the few films that have been made about the subject. So I wonder if you think that’s at all because it is seen as such a demarcation point, especially on the left and among socialist groups?

Let me take those point by point, because this is a really interesting set of questions. First of all, the Robin Hood that you’re talking about is Robin of Locksley, the dispossessed aristocrat at the time of King John. That Robin Hood is a Victorian version of the Robin Hood legend. The original authentic Robin Hood ballads were the story of a simple man, a yeoman who was an outlaw, much like the character who ends up in The Uprising.

So there was no person called Robin Hood. The phrase Robin Hood, or Rob Hood or Rob of the Hood, existed before the Peasants’ Revolt, and it just basically meant a criminal. It’s some moniker given to a criminal or an outlaw. It was after the Peasants’ Revolt in the years and decades after that the legend and ballads of Robin Hood began to emerge and other outlaw ballads, that’s when people really told stories about this character who stood up against the king. But he was an outlaw and a much, much different figure to the Robin Locksley that you’re talking about. That’s hundreds and hundreds of years later.

So that’s point one, but as to your second point: on the left, people have always pointed to the Peasants’ Revolt for sure, but I think that’s a pretty obscure sort of part of the discourse, if I could put it that way. The Peasants’ Revolt, when I was a kid, was different to Magna Carta, because Magna Carta was the king meeting the nobles. It was an aristocratic fight. The Peasants’ Revolt was different.

They didn’t care about the peasants in the Magna Carta.

No, they were irrelevant! What was fascinating to me about writing this film was that it was a spontaneous uprising. It came out of nowhere. Of course you can look at the world as it was then, ravaged by plague, a failing government, corrupt oligarchs jealously guarding their power, a weak young king who was deeply mentally ill too, and an enraged population believing that the elites were corrupt and not listening to them, and rigging the system against them. That was the world of 1381, and it sounds quite like our world today, really, doesn’t it? That’s as it seemed to me when I started writing the film.

While obviously there wasn’t a real man called Ploughman, he’s my fictional hero, but that village looks pretty much like Brentwood would have looked like, and the tax collection would have been the tax collection, and for sure it began with a violent altercation when the tax collector came to town and started roughly assaulting the young women in the village. It’s attested that that’s how it began. What was unusual was it spread incredibly rapidly all across southern England within a matter of days and coalesced into this coordinated march by ordinary men and women in their tens of thousands on London at a time when there were no armies there. The armies were in Scotland and France, and the crown was effectively defenseless.

You had then this week of high drama as they got to London, negotiated with the king, were betrayed and the rebellion was crushed, but they got inside the place and trashed the place. It began peacefully with very clear and specific aims and was actually initially highly disciplined, but then like all revolutions do, it descended into violence and chaos.

That violence, as well as the ideals and aspirations, it all begins with people challenging their institutions. After the plague, peasants began challenging their governments, their churches, in the 1300s, but I feel like right now, we’re living in a moment of retrenchment where people are pulling away or burrowing down. Do you see this movie as a reminder to the opportunity we as a society might have at this moment?

When you make a movie you start by trying to decide what sort of movie you want to make. Do you wanna make a sci-fi movie, do you want to make a romantic comedy? I wanted to make a sort of historical epic, that’s kind of what was in my mind. I very much admired Spartacus, [Stanley] Kubrick’s movie, very much, and I very much admired Ridley’s movie Gladiator. I love those kinds of movies. So when I was looking to do a story about an English [event], I thought, ‘Oh, I could do like a Gladiator, Spartacus type movie, but it’d be my version of one of those movies, because I’m not going to have the same sensibility as either Ridley or Kubrick.

So I’ll create a fictional character and I’ll try to tell a hero’s journey through these dramatic events, which were so important in the evolution of the story of individual rights in our societies, I mean, historians hold a mirror up to the Peasants’ Revolt [to today]. There’s a brilliant book by a historian called Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, and it’s about the 14th century, the chaos of the 14th century, but it’s really all about how that instability of which the Peasants’ Revolt was the most important part of it, led the way to the evolution of individual rights and on through the individual rights, the fight against the crown, the American Revolution, the Constitution, it’s an unfolding story of the Enlightenment and the evolution of democracy, and it was a foundational moment.

But all of that’s irrelevant because you’ve got to craft an entertainment, you’ve got to craft a movie. Although I was very struck by how contemporary it all felt, to go to your question—this starkly divided world between the oligarchs protecting their wealth and this sense generally of rage out there that people feel a bit locked out by a system rigged against them—that all felt very contemporary, but in the end, it doesn’t give you your film. It’s part of what you’re dealing with, but you’ve got to craft your hero’s journey, your entertainment, characters that you want to follow, and tell it with economy and give it scale and drama and all the rest of it.

So it’s in your mind, it’s part of what makes the film interesting, but it’s not your purpose; its purpose is to give people a great experience. Like I loved when I saw Spartacus in the cinema or when I saw Gladiator.

The Uprising is in theaters on Friday, Sept. 11.

The Best Movie Reboots That Were Actually Worth Watching

Hard reboots, soft reboots, remakes, legacy sequels… Hollywood uses many tactics to keep valuable IP alive. Yet those tactics have also made the definition of “reboot” fairly muddy.

Mad Max: Fury Road stretches the limits of what we consider a “soft” reboot, in that director George Miller engineered it to fit into the franchise without erasing his original films. 2018’s Halloween is a soft reboot “requel” that also functions as a direct sequel, while Ocean’s 11 kickstarted a new series of successful films off a remake.

But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, very few studios have the guts to wipe their franchise slate completely clean, start again, and actually get a good movie out of that effort, so today I’ll shine a light on the movies that pulled off the near-impossible and gave us a hard reboot truly worth watching.

I’ll set aside my personal appreciation for certain reboots here. I quite liked 2016’s Ghostbusters, but I know I’m in the minority. Man of Steel is great to some, disastrous to others. I also genuinely enjoyed Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider effort compared to the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptations of that video game series, but its mixed reception keeps it off this list, and the same goes for Mortal Kombat.

I could argue all those films are worth watching, but many would simply disagree, so let’s take a look at the real, solid-gold franchise reboot gems of the last 20 years…

Casino Royale (2006)

Casino Royale was definitely not a remake of the 1967 parody of the same name, though that was loosely based on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book. Instead, this 2006 Bond reboot forged its own path, propelling Daniel Craig into the limelight as the new 007 in a franchise reboot that dispensed with most of the cheekiness and tropes of the previous films and reinvented the character for the 2000s.

Fighting fan perception that he had been miscast as the suave secret agent, Daniel Craig shut up those doubters pretty damn quickly in his first Bond outing, which saw a more brutal 007 set out to take down terrorism financier Le Chiffre (a typically frightening Mads Mikkelsen) at a poker game at the titular Montenegro casino.

Along the way, Bond’s genitals are tortured, and he manages to evade other attempts on his life, but is still hit with tragedy despite ultimately succeeding in his mission. This was a new Bond, a new style, and a new day for the franchise: a desperately needed fresh start that succeeded by shedding the cringier side of 007 and embracing a colder reboot that really paid off in the post-9/11 era of geopolitical nastiness.

Batman Begins (2005)

Who better to tackle a superhero franchise than Christopher Nolan, a man who could never knowingly put less than 100% into making something very silly, like a wealthy man dressing up in a rubber suit and beating up bad guys, into a very serious and dark matter indeed that felt true to some of the greatest DC Comics stories featuring the character?

Gone were the comic book splashes, dark fantasy, and whimsy of the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher era when Batman Begins first came to town, replaced by a jaw-clenching Bruce Wayne in Christian Bale and genuinely terrifying villains in Liam Neeson’s bin Laden-esque Ra’s al Ghul and Cillian Murphy’s psychologically twisted Scarecrow.

Batman Begins marked a whole new trilogy and style for the Caped Crusader, rebooting the franchise from its previously campy Batnipples and dizzy color wheel into a compelling arc for Bruce Wayne, whose attempts to heal from his childhood trauma were at war with his desire for vengeance and love, and although the film would later sit in the shadow of its sequel, The Dark Knight, it remains a solid reboot that finally got audiences to take Batman seriously.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

After the original Apes movie series dwindled in the early 1970s, a panned remake followed much later in 2001. But its box-office success didn’t help to signal renewed interest in seeing those damned apes on the big screen anytime soon, and Fox went back to the drawing board.

Eventually, 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes came from extensive behind-the-scenes tinkering. The work absolutely paid off, and the first film in the reboot trilogy found critical and commercial success.

The film’s upsetting, altered origin story wisely begins earlier, in an all-too-human 2016, when a biotechnology company tests its Alzheimer’s drugs on chimpanzees. These scenes are upsetting and scary, with a female chimp rampaging and being shot to death, and her intelligent baby chimp, Caesar, later locked in a cruel animal shelter.

Featuring a stellar motion capture performance from Andy Serkis that brought Caesar to life onscreen, and real emotional stakes between the character and the humans he grows up with, Rise builds logically toward the original films without feeling the need to dismiss them, even when deftly rebooting the universe and promising more profound depth to it in the future.

Star Trek (2009)

Rebooting Trek was no small feat, but J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman proved they were up to the task when they chucked out decades of memorable adventures in the final frontier and put their own spin on the Original Series characters for 2009’s Star Trek.

Casting was half the battle. We didn’t really need anyone pretending they could do a good impression of William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy; we needed actors who could take the characters of Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc and make them their own, and Abrams found actors who could harness some of the original cast’s energy, yet were still dedicated to making the sci-fi hokum of the film’s “United Federation of Planets good guys vs alien villains” story fly.

Where Star Trek fails a little as a hard reboot is in its decision to bring back Nimoy’s Spock with some timey-wimey space nonsense, but even that serves the story in its efforts to reboot the franchise by drawing a new timeline in the sand so that people who were only just getting into Trek understood that they could go back and check the old stuff out, or not. It was entirely up to the individual.

Subsequent films and their issues may have ultimately derailed Abrams’ reboot series, but Star Trek worked on almost every level, surprising many who thought it would fail outright.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

While many fans agree that Andrew Garfield was a great Spidey, his Amazing Spider-Man reboot movies felt like they were lacking crucial pieces of the superhero crowd-pleaser puzzle that would have made them truly memorable. Uneven pacing, underdeveloped villains, and a sense that Garfield was just a little too cool as Peter Parker undercut some great lead performances and a romance between Garfield and co-star Emma Stone that crackled on and off the screen.

But when Tom Holland arrived to reboot Peter Parker in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War, audiences immediately warmed to him and suspected he’d be one of the greatest casting choices ever made. That was later confirmed in his first reboot movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he managed to embody both the sadness of Tobey Maguire’s spin on the character and some of the coolness Garfield brought, while also putting his own stamp on Peter Parker’s wholesome and wide-eyed yet utterly awkward enthusiasm.

Though Homecoming was mired in the MCU’s ongoing continuity, the movie kicked off a new era for Spider-Man that has become Sony and Marvel’s most financially successful series, proving a hard reboot can overhaul a franchise without bringing in legacy actors and storylines for nostalgia’s sake. At least, until No Way Home came along.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

It may have been a disappointment at the box office, but that doesn’t make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a bad movie. It’s certainly worth watching despite its failure to make a splash in theaters. Indeed, with no connections to the previous Dungeons & Dragons trilogy, Honor Among Thieves was wildly popular with critics who couldn’t have imagined it turning out to be such a terrific and funny reboot, and it still has fans crying out for a sequel today!

The filmmakers and cast do a phenomenal job of capturing all the larks of role-playing fantasy game characters, including a cheeky bard played by an energetic Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez as a tough barbarian who is tired of putting up with him, Justice Smith’s pining sorcerer, and Hugh Grant on fine form as a smarmy rogue.

With plenty of jokes and a heist structure that works for both the group and the story, Honor Among Thieves is a tremendously good time that puts the uniquely crap previous trilogy in the rearview and yells “hey, let’s have a great time!” It’s really unfortunate that not enough people wanted to play.

The Batman (2022)

Batman makes the list twice thanks to Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot, The Batman, which not only had the unenviable task of trying something new after Christopher Nolan had impressed audiences with his own DC trilogy about the Caped Crusader, but also had to quickly follow Ben Affleck’s spin on the character from the DCEU’s muddled movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, which the actor had suddenly stepped away from due to various issues.

Against all odds, The Batman successfully rebooted DC’s popular character yet again with a story about a younger Bruce Wayne, played by Robert Pattinson, whose real-life weirdness seemed to fit a stranger, more disconnected Wayne as he faced major comic-book villains in only his second year fighting crime in Gotham City. Colin Farrell’s hilarious Penguin juxtaposed nicely with Paul Dano’s squirrely, oddball villain, The Riddler, while the movie thoroughly embraced the noir detective angle of Bruce Wayne, rarely seen in previous live-action Batman movies.

Tense and visually impressive, Reeves certainly understood the assignment with The Batman, and while the film’s reliance on exposition occasionally got in the way of its pacing, it was largely viewed as an excellent reboot that probably would have been followed up with several sequels by now, had it not been for big changes behind the scenes at both Warner Bros. and DC.

Star Trek-Loving Billionaires Just Don’t Seem to Get Gene Roddenberry

“You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs, money! I didn’t build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity.”

You would be forgiven for thinking those words were spoken by Jeff Bezos, the megabillionaire who owns Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin. But as most Trekkies could tell you, those words were spoken by Zefram Cochrane, as played by James Cromwell in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

Of course among those Trekkers is also Bezos. In fact, Bezos got to tell William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, how much Star Trek meant to him in the latter’s new book, William Shatner … and You, excerpted in Variety. After explaining the ways in which he loved Star Trek as a child, Bezos said that one of his goals with Blue Origin “is to help humanity on its journey to the Star Trek future.” Yet if Bezos is going to realize that dream, he needs to pay as much attention to Star Trek‘s material reality as he does to its depiction of the stars.

To be sure, the primary plot in Star Trek: First Contact deals with the Borg plan to go back in time and conquer Earth before the advent of deep space flight and the founding of the Federation. However, the film is also about Zefram Cochrane himself. First introduced in the Original Series episode “Metamorphosis,” where he was played by Glenn Corbett, Cochrane is a hero of Starfleet and the Federation, the man whose selfless construction of Earth’s first warp-capable ship set humanity on a path into the franchise’s utopian future. However, when the Enterprise crew goes back in time to 2030 and meet Cochrane (now played by James Cromwell) on the eve of his historic flight, they find not just a slovenly drunk who considers himself a failure with Cochrane’s ID card; they also discover a craven capitalist, who hopes that his invention will make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Whatever Cromwell thought when he delivered those lines in First Contact, released in 1996, he probably wouldn’t have dreamed that any one person could one day be worth $265 billion, like Bezos is in 2026. Inequality has grown widely over the past 30 years, to the point that Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page hold the lion’s share of the world’s wealth, while the masses go without. And yet, Bezos looks to Star Trek of all things as a model for the future.

Save for an poorly-chosen nod to Elon Musk in Discovery (and even then, it came from the mouth of someone from the evil Mirror Universe), Star Trek has always understood inequality and the pursuit of wealth as contrary to the good of society. Captain Picard puts it plainly in the season one Next Generation episode, “The Neutral Zone,” when a rich man who cryogenically froze himself awakens aboard the Enterprise and starts making demands based on his money. A confused Picard tries to explain that such things no longer matter. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions,” he states, before putting it bluntly, “We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Conversely, the Deep Space Nine two-parter “Past Tense” shows how massive inequality leaves humanity hamstrung, unable to advance. Only when the poor rise up in the Bell Riots, ultimately caused by Captain Sisko, does humanity begin moving toward its better future.

Yet the best example of Star Trek‘s ethos may be Cochrane himself, as portrayed in First Contact. Materialistic as he is, Cochrane is not heartless or craven. Rather he simply cannot imagine anything beyond the capitalist system put in place. In his mind, one succeeds by earning lots of money, therefore he puts his genius to work, creating a product that he can exchange for cash.

However, the arrival of Riker and the Enterprise crew shows Cochrane something different. As Picard tells Cochrane’s partner Lily (Alfre Woodard), “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.” When Lily asks if that means people don’t get paid for their labor, Picard reveals that such a system no longer even exists. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” he declares.

It’s this example that eventually expands Cochrane’s mind and shows him a different way. For us viewers, Star Trek does that expansion, reminding us that the system we currently have in place does not need to be, that other forms of life are possible. Of course that requires someone paying attention to the actual message of the show and looking beyond the limitations of their imagination, something Bezos might seem incapable of doing. But if even Zefram Cochrane can change, perhaps there’s hope for Bezos yet. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always hope in the future.

Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump?

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

Did Godzilla Minus Zero Just Confirm King Ghidorah’s Return?

In the final seconds of the latest trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero, the humans look on in horror. Not surprisingly before them stands a returned Godzilla, the beast who they thought they destroyed in the previous movie, Godzilla Minus One. In fact, they are witnessing Godzilla fall to the ground, as if dead, despite the fact that they spend the trailer preparing for his reemergence. But instead of relief at the sight of the fallen kaiju, one of the onlookers admits with dread in his voice, “This isn’t Godzilla we are talking about.”

So what is the true threat of Godzilla Minus Zero? The trailer doesn’t actually state it outright, nor does it reveal another kaiju. But anyone who noticed that golden lightning and that hideous shriek we hear at the end can take a hint: Monster Zero, aka King Ghidorah, is about to make landfall in Godzilla Minus Zero.

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, who also provides the special effects, Godzilla Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after the events of its predecessor. Former kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe) seem to have put those grim postwar days behind them, and devote themselves to raising their adoptive daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a survivor of Godzilla’s previous attack. However, when mysterious analyst Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa) predicts Godzilla’s return, Disaster Response Berau chief Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) considers taking drastic measures, despite the warnings of biologist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), who helped defeat Godzilla last time.

Based on the trailer and the thematic concerns of Godzilla Minus One, those measures will likely involve atomic weapons once again, forcing the country to weigh how much destruction it’s willing to wrought in the name of safety. That question will be underscored by the reveal that it’s not just Godzilla this time around. Another monster has arrived to further threaten Japan.

Fans have long suspected that more monsters will join the Godzilla Minus franchise for a number of reasons. First of all, while Minus One worked as a back-to-basics film, Godzilla movies often quickly expand into monster mashes with more and more kaiju joining the fray. Secondly, the logo for Minus Zero, with its circular design and shades of blue, recalls Mothra, one of the more popular kaiju.

Nothing in the Minus Zero trailer suggests that Mothra won’t be in the new movie. But nothing points to her inclusion either. Instead everything seems to suggest that King Ghidorah is on the way. Ever since his first appearance in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), King Ghidorah has served as Godzilla’s chief antagonist, a winged dragon with three heads and an unquenchable appetite for destruction. If Minus Zero wanted to show that humanity had more to worry about than just Godzilla, King Ghidorah’s the perfect choice.

But is that the choice that Yamazaki makes? We don’t see one head, let alone three in the Minus Zero trailer, nor do we see anything spreading its wings. But that golden lightening and the hideous screech are both King Ghidorah’s trademarks, which means things are likely to get so much worse for the heroes of Godzilla Minus Zero… and so much better for audiences.

Godzilla Minus Zero releases in Japanese theaters on Nov. 3, 2026, and in North America on Nov. 6, 2026.

Revisiting ‘90s Era Satanic Panic in Carry the Darkness

Carry the Darkness recalls a time and place that should be intimately familiar for its writer-director. After all, Douglas Forrester shot much of the film literally in the small Maryland community he grew up in, which while hundreds of miles from West Memphis, Arkansas was nonetheless gripped by the same fears in the 1990s: teenagers in black, teenagers listening to heavy metal, just teenagers.

It’s also a great backdrop for a genre indie that inspects incidents like the “West Memphis Three” incident in 1994, wherein kids like Damien Echols were dubiously convicted of murder based largely on charges of alleged Devil worship. (Echols was later set free in 2011.)

Forrester’s Carry the Darkness similarly follows Travis Baldwin (Joel Meyers), a metalhead gaming teenager in 1993 who is lured by a mysterious, and apparently quite literal, paranormal element during his own town’s Satanic Panic. And in a conversation ahead of the movie’s Sept. 8 release on VOD, Forrester and the actors behind the horror indie project discuss their various inspirations behind the film, from real life panic to lighter ‘90s touchstones, such as The Fugitive and a video game that is definitely NOT Mortal Kombat. For realsies.

I was very happy to see references to Paradise Lost in some of the press materials. So I’m curious Doug, where was your interest in that at the get-go? Did you tell the cast to see certain things before starting this movie?

Douglas Forrester: I don’t think I mandated anything to be to be watched necessarily, but I definitely talked to them about the sort of baseline influences. Paradise Lost came to me especially through my brother. He was also kind of a metal-head back in the day. He introduced me to a lot of that stuff. And then the other influences, like Twin Peaks and The X-Files and The Fugitive as well, everything from the early ‘90s and especially 1993, they just all fall on that year for some reason. Those are sort of the baseline influences. But I don’t know if I mandated something like “You must watch this.”

Helen Laser: You were nice about it, but you sent me two episodes of X-Files and said, ‘I really want you to see these.’ You gave me your Hulu so I could watch them!

Joel Meyers: Yeah, it was strongly suggested to watch Paradise Lost, which I did, all of all six hours of it.

I want to talk about locations. You use a dam on the poster that is quite striking. Is that a specific location from your childhood?

Douglas Forrester: It is specific, funny enough, we didn’t have a script for those scenes that we shot there. I mean, most of those scenes are just like [the actors] existing in space. And I was like ‘damn with the schedule, we need to go there!’ That space was something that I was familiar with from my childhood. So a lot of the exteriors and stuff were areas around my parents house where I grew up. When I was writing the script, a lot of it was built around the geography that I was familiar with.

Joel Meyers: I remember several long car rides after the shoot where Doug and I would be in the car and we would go back and forth. We had some long rides out to various parts of Maryland and Long Island and other wooded areas and something came of it.

As a Long Island guy, I’ve got to ask: where in Long Island?

Douglas Forrester: Some of the woods was the Stony Brook campus, which we got to use because I’m an alumni of their MFA in film program. The other abandoned Gateway space, if you will, was at a place called Whirlwind Preserve in Glen Cove.

Let’s talk about the gateway that leads into the ‘darkness,’ both for creating it and then witnessing it. What was your feeling for going into what seems to be a horrific place to be so bright and open when you’re shooting it?

Joel Meyers: I think it was another part of the film that was discovered as we went. In part from the story and in part from the places we had access to, as often dictates indie filmmaking. The church chapel space is one that we found later in the process, and I just felt like the disorientation of that was really important to throwing off not only the characters, but also just the experience of the story going through it. I think so much of the story’s about these characters not necessarily seeking out this darkness or this presence, but it’s kids stumbling into something they don’t understand. It gets weirder and weirder and that became kind of a driving force behind that last third of the film especially.

Douglas Forrester: Absolutely. I mean, I remember calling our DP and having many, many consultations throughout. And then of course you build it, then you reconstruct it. I don’t really know if it was supposed to be such a sort of shapeshifting type of space initially, but because we couldn’t be in that area after dark, I had to figure out how we could day-for-night, some of it, or make it like very close to evening. This space was supposed to target each of them specifically and feel like it’s beckoning each of them individually, and targeting them—acting as a metaphor for what was going on in the world at the time.

I know it’s not abnormal for a lot of actors, but what is it like going back to pretending you’re in high school, while also acting in an area that you didn’t grow up in yourselves?

Jaden Gant: I actually just got out of high school, it was like my first acting job. So I had to learn the lines in drama class. It was, honestly, just having fun and trusting one another. That was the biggest thing, really.

Joel Meyers: And trusting Doug too, as the one who was allegedly there for more of the ‘90s than any of us. I think to do a period piece like this is such an endeavor on a low budget. The ‘90s lived strong in Doug’s parents house, so that definitely helped put us in the mindset. That’s where we started our first leg of the shoot was in Maryland, so we all kind of got to dip our toes into the world.

What is it like recreating a version of Mortal Kombat for your own movie?

Douglas Forrester: That was a whole experience in itself! We had to make something that was evocative of it, and so from the get go it was like a sort of knockoff of the game. I had one of my friends from college, Jacob Beers, do the music for it. And it was two Jacobs actually, a Jacob that did the music for it and a Jacob that was the lead game designer.

It’s a playable game. It is literally what you see on the screen and VFX supervisor screen recorded him playing the game with five controllers connected to a laptop and then put that through all the CRT filtering to make it look legit. But it is an app that I have on my computer that is playable so hopefully that will be our viral sensation.

This film deals with the duality of human beings: who we are expected to be and the darker parts we hide. Are there parts of yourselves you could feel while exploring that dichotomy, either as a writer or an actor?

Douglas Forrester: A driving thing from the get-go was always “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and I think that’s in the wrongfully-accused genre as well. All the way back to The Count of Monte Cristo to The Fugitive. I think that you have to embrace the negative aspects of yourself in order to become a better person, and that was the sort of coming of age aspect of it.

Stars Helen Laser: I thought that the choice to have it be teenagers was really important because I think that when you are at that age, you’re sort of mainlining emotions and you’re also mainlining the world and finding out what it’s supposed to be and who you’re going to be. It’s a point in your life where you’re making decisions like, ‘What’s the kind of person I want to be?

[Before that moment], you’ve had people deciding everything for you. And now you’re finally having a little bit of control. Are you going to use that control for good or are you going to lose control or use it for bad? And so I love the idea of it being, you know, people who are just about to be adults and they’re having to make decisions for the first time and figure out who they are.

Joel Meyers: Yeah, I think that is also very much the Damien Echols part of this story. You watch the documentary, and it’s been a number of years since I’ve seen it, but there are moments in it where you’re watching him testifying, and you’re like digging yourself in your own hole here. You read his book and what shines through is how much of just a kid they all were and how much they were being accused of being into witchcraft.

That time in life, it’s so hard to know how to channel your interest and your emotions, especially when the world is throwing judgment at you. I remember that being a big part throughout the process as the guiding light. It can’t be a black and white thing here. There has to be a gray area, and in the movie, there are things that Travis does that are unforgivable to a certain extent. That was also an important part. He’s not completely innocent in all of this, but he’s also not completely guilty. There are forces beyond his control that he doesn’t understand.

Douglas Forrester: Trying to capture this sensationalism of those things. It’s you picking your issue throughout the decades of the culture wars. And that day it was the music, listening to Metallica and wearing all black.

Jaden Gant: Especially playing Jordan, who was told what to do his entire life and his goals. I like the idea of him kind of making that choice, making a choice that you know is wrong, figuring it out, and experiencing it for yourself. You learn a lot about yourself doing things that way.

Joel, you obviously spent some time playing Albus Severus Potter on stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and now there is that new HBO series coming out. Clearly you couldn’t play the same character, but is there any weird desire to go back to being a part of that world?

Joel Meyers: I mean, look, if they call, a job is a job, I’m sure it’s a great paycheck. I’m still a huge Harry Potter fan after being in that show for two years. And if that isn’t a testament to the franchise, I don’t know what is. I would love to go back to the Potter universe.

Spider-Noir Is Canceled, But Nicolas Cage Isn’t Complaining

In the current streaming landscape, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Even an Emmy-winning Spider-Man series with a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score can get canceled after just one season, as proven by last week’s confirmation of Spider-Noir’s disappointing fate on Prime Video.

If star Nicolas Cage is upset by the Spider-Noir news, he isn’t showing any sign of it right now. In a comment to Deadline, the 62-year-old actor simply stated, “For me, one season is perfect, having said what I wanted to say with this dangerous, innovative, pop-art Spider-Man. Onwards, upwards, inwards.”

Cage may not be disappointed by Spider-Noir’s “one and done” status, but those charmed by the series may feel rather differently. Many had already praised the show’s story of an alternate-universe Spidey, Ben Reilly, who struggles to keep his day job as a private investigator in 1930s New York while resisting the urge to return to life as the city’s lone superhero, The Spider. Cage also seemed to feast on the material in the Prime Video show, giving fans a highlight reel of the kind of fantastic acting choices only he can make as Reilly.

Prime Video has never confirmed the budget for Spider-Noir, which was available to watch in both color and black and white, but rumors once swirled online that it may have spent up to $400 million making it. K.C. Lauf, who worked on Spider-Noir’s second unit crew, also revealed on Threads that the color version of the series was originally unplanned and it “required reshoots for almost a year,” which may have increased the cost of making the show considerably. Even if the streamer spent half as much as the rumors suggested, its ultimately underwhelming viewership could have contributed to the cancellation decision.

Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television’s Marvel deal is set to continue, despite Spider-Noir’s cancellation and a previous effort based on the character of Silk shelved before it even got off the ground. That show was reportedly nixed in favor of pursuing Spider-Noir, but now that a bow has been tied on its lone season, it’s unclear which Spidey spinoff project will make it to fruition next. Deadline reports that one such project is “nearing a series order,” though “its concept is being kept under wraps” for now.

Admittedly, Spider-Noir had largely wrapped up its own story when it concluded, but fans had hoped for more adventures in the future after Ben Reilly and his secretary Janet Ruiz (Karen Rodriguez) finally teamed up to manage their private investigation business together.

The Wachowskis May Decide the Fate of The Matrix 5

After The Matrix Resurrections debuted to an underwhelming box office and middling reviews in 2021, it became clear in the aftermath that the blockbuster franchise’s studio, Warner Bros., wanted a reset, with trades reporting that director Lana Wachowski would stay on as an executive producer of a proposed fifth Matrix movie but essentially hand off the new installment to Drew Goddard, the screenwriter behind this year’s smash hit, Project Hail Mary.

Things have gone a bit quiet since then, but in March of this year, Goddard suggested he was still writing the script for the fifth Matrix and also spoke highly of the fourth one, saying he was “deeply moved” by it and that the Wachowskis’ movies had “a profound impact” on his creative voice, adding, “I take this responsibility very seriously. I feel the weight of wanting to do right by the fans, wanting to do right by the creators and wanting to do right for myself as a fan.”

Since The Matrix 5 is set to become the first film in the series not directed by either Wachowski, it has also been somewhat unclear how much sway the sisters had over it, but in a new interview with KCRW’s The Business (via Dark Horizons), Lilly Wachowski, who co-directed the first Matrix trilogy, has been chatting about Warner Bros.’ ongoing desire to make another film.

“Warner Bros., they wanna make another thing,” Wachowski said. “They’re always gonna wanna make another thing. Personally, I don’t wanna play in that sandbox anymore. I’m kinda done.”

Despite having no interest in making more Matrix movies, Wachowski did update listeners that “there may be a thing that’s happening with Drew Goddard,” but revealed “he doesn’t wanna go forward unless he gets our blessing. And so, it becomes this complicated situation where, maybe we’re gonna stick our noses in a tiny bit and see how we feel, and if we wanna pass on our blessing to Drew or not. So, it could be something that’s coming down the road, but it’s still unknown.”

So, while the 2024 announcement that a fifth Matrix movie would be pressing ahead made it seem like quite a straightforward process and even a sure thing, it does sound like Goddard is still trying to not only nail down a script that would honor the original filmmakers and reward fans of the previous films in the series, but also write a story that secures the Wachowskis’ blessing for it to go ahead.

The irony of making another Matrix can’t be lost on Goddard. Lana Wachowski made sure that The Matrix Resurrections went out of its way to pose meta questions about whether another movie in the series should even exist, poking fun at sequels, reboots, fan expectations, and even Warner Bros. It may take a really unique and worthy idea to argue that The Matrix 5 is worth pursuing.

The Most Intense Sci-Fi Movie of the Year Began with a Fishing Trip Near the Korean DMZ

Director Na Hong-jin can be unexpectedly modest for a filmmaker who has a penchant for making near three-hour genre epics like The Wailing, 2016’s supernaturally-charged horror movie about mysterious killings in a small town that became the toast of Cannes. Before that, The Yellow Sea saw the South Korean auteur tackle the action genre with similar verve and ambition. Yet even with his latest film conquering world cinema with a scale that is absolutely astonishing, Director Na remains curiously humble about Hope, a film which has no less on its mind than the end of the world.

Mixing horror and action both this time around in a larger science fiction stew, Hope is a stunning achievement in which the small town of Hope Harbor is absolutely decimated by an initially unseen primal force. Our erstwhile hero is Police Chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), an almost hapless figure who attempts to lead viewers through a devastation he can barely grasp. Soon, however, other heroes emerge like rookie cope Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a far more competent alien killer, and a group of wily hunters who take it upon themselves to track the unseen mysterious beasts in the woods, including the veritable, horse-riding cowboy Sung-ki (Zo In-sung).

It’s really an ensemble piece about how humanity reacts to the threat of the other, which in this case comes from the literal sky. And as Director Na explains to us, the idea for something so grand in scope can begin as simply as observing what it can really mean to go fishing in the Korean wilderness.

“I would say Hope is a lot of different inspirations,” Na says when Zooming with us from South Korea. “It would be the town I saw while I was on a trip, or the people I met while going fishing.” Traditionally this would sound like a relaxing holiday, but the way that Na explains his experience, it can become all-consuming alternative way of life—and a glimpse into a different side of humanity.

“I went on these fishing trips with people who didn’t really have real jobs,” the director recalls. “They only worked short-term jobs in order to get the money to allow them to fish. And I went on a lot of trips with these people, with the group sometimes as large as 10 people. Other times it was just two people, but… I had so much fun because these were not the kinds of people I’d met before.”

What intrigued the filmmaker wasn’t just that they liked the sport; it’s that they seemed to lived for nothing else: “They don’t go home, they don’t shower, they don’t sleep, they just continue to fish.” It’s a lifestyle that greatly influenced Hope’s vision of humanity, something that’s “more primal and instinctive.” Another way to say that, then, might be tribal.

Indeed, while the film is ultimately a stylish action spectacle wherein the film’s hunters come face-to-face with aliens from beyond, the trick of the film is that the extraterrestrials (played unrecognizably in motion-capture by famous Western actors like Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander) are also revealed to be a culture unable to comprehend the squishy humans they meet in the East Asian woods—and noticeably near the minefields of Korea’s Demilitarized Zone.

“During the time when I was just starting to find the inspiration for the movie Hope, there was a lot of news on the television about an impending war in Korea,” says Na. “So I think all of these things added up.” There can be surprisingly tense action sequences, including a spectacular third act chase of alien versus horse, but at its heart this is a sci-fi film about what happens when communication is perceived to be the last resort if not outright futile.

Says Na, “The aliens are metaphors for victims of society, and humans, in contrast, would represent the assaulters. So at the end of this movie, these two opposing sides, the assaulters and the victims, their perspective and their story converge, and the movie asks the question of what kind of future lies ahead for them.”

Thematically it’s a potent idea, yet we suspect what might stay with viewers is sequences like the extended first act wherein Hwang’s hapless police chief is going virtually door to door in his ruined community, trying to find the unseen beast that left a bloody trail of carnage in its wake.

“Jaws was certainly an inspiration,” admits Na, “but the truth is it’s not just Jaws that start out that way. I think most movies of this kind share a similar beginning, but I did want to try to differentiate it from other movies by making that opening sequence a lot denser and to expand it more than other movies.” The amount of time Na resists showing his aliens, and keeping the mystery eternally off-screen, is near fiendish, with extended portions of the film living in the real-time dread of what is around the next corner.

The patience to twist the knife is also what makes Hope a bit rare in the action genre, at least from a Western perspective. With its lengthy 156 minutes running time, Hope runs the exact same length as The Yellow Sea and The Wailing, although the director swears such symmetry was not by design.

“I did not do that on purpose, it just ended up being that way,” he laughs. It still ended up making one of the most singular and memorable genre experiences of its year. That’s some kind of hat trick for the helmer.

Na opens in U.S. cinemas on Sept. 11.

Lanterns: Who is Sinestro?

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns, season 1, episode 4

Finally, the renegade Green Lantern has arrived. After a brief tease at the end of Lanterns’ second episode, we now see in full the conversation between Hal Jordan and his mentor Sinestro. Despite the gravitas that Ulrich Thomsen brings to the brief exchange, despite the instant power of a The Silence of the Lambs homage used to frame the interaction, Sinestro remains the biggest stumbling block to casual fans brought in by the show’s True Detective approach. We can accept space cops with wishing rings; but why does the bad guy look just like the devil, and why does he have such an obvious name?

Yet those who know the comics recognize in Thomsen’s performance some of the grandeur of the character on the page. For more than 60 years, Sinestro has not just been one of the most destructive villains in the DC Universe, but also one of its most compelling; a truly tragic figure whose cunning is only matched by his compelling worldview and connection to Jordan. The comics establish Sinestro as a complex figure whose evil deeds are means to a greater end, making him a sympathetic bad guy, no matter how diabolical he may appear.

When he first appeared in 1961’s Green Lantern #7, by John Broome and Gil Kane, Sinestro seemed like a basic sci-fi villain. At the behest of the Weaponers of the Anti-Matter planet of Qward, whom Hal Jordan had already fought several times, Sinestro apparently kidnaps an entire city as part of that classic Silver Age plot, to trap the hero and kill him. Despite the central cliché, Green Lantern #7 already shows Sinestro to be a villain with greater depth than his fellow evildoers. That depth only grows as writers further develop the character over the next several years.

Thaal Sinestro hails from the planet Korugar, where he became the Green Lantern of Sector 1417. Trained by Abin Sur, Hal Jordan’s predecessor in Sector 2814, Sinestro immediately proved himself to be an exemplary Lantern, thanks to his keen mind and vast willpower. Despite his reputation, Sinestro always loved the power granted him by the Green Lantern ring, and he slowly began to embrace that power more openly. He became convinced that the only way to keep his people safe and to maintain justice was to rule his people harshly.

Sinestro became the dictator of Korugar, but he managed to hide his methods from the Guardians, who chose Sinestro to mentor Abin Sur’s replacement, Hal Jordan. Although initially horified by Hal’s reckless approach, Sinestro recognized in the Earthling great potential and something of a kindred spirit. Like Sinestro, Hal mistrusted the Guardians and doubted that their machinations would keep the universe safe.

However, Hal’s actions eventually drew the Guardians’ attention to Korugar, where they saw that he had become a dictator. Disgusted, the Guardians stripped Sinestro of his power and banished him to the Anti-Matter Universe. There, Sinestro allied with the Weaponers of Qward, who fashioned for him a ring to oppose that of the Green Lanterns. Sinestro wore a yellow ring, which exploited the Green Lanterns’ weakness to anything colored yellow.

While the yellow ring granted Sinestro incredible power, it is his cunning that makes him dangerous. He would lay traps that undermined the various Green Lanterns, destroying the home world of the Lantern Kilowog and infecting Kyle Rayner’s mother with a deadly disease. Even when the Guardians executed him for his crimes and trapped his soul in the Central Power Battery that energizes all of the rings, Sinestro found a way to depower nearly every ring, effectively decimating the Green Lantern Corps. From inside the Power Battery, Sinestro possessed John Stewart and infected Hal Jordan with the Parallax fear entity, turning the latter into a genocidal villain.

More recently, Sinestro used the Parallax entity to form his own version of the Green Lantern Corps, dubbed the Sinestro Corps. Where the Green Lanterns use their willpower to enforce justice, the Sinestro Corps channel fear, creating order on a universal scale.

Even when leading an army of monsters to terrify planets into submission, Sinestro believes his motives are pure. He has seen how chaos can lead to misery and injustice. He has seen how even great people give into their basest instincts. And he has seen how the plans of the Guardians of the Universe are themselves reckless and craven. Sinestro believes that fear and order are the only way to save the galaxy, and he’s willing to do anything and manipulate anyone to achieve that goal.

It’s that steadfast belief in himself and his methods that makes Sinestro such a dangerous figure, even when trapped in a cell at the start of Lanterns. As we saw in the previous episode, the Guardians have their own sneaky plans with John Stewart, and Hal Jordan has reasons to be suspicious. That’s particularly true when Manhunters are involved, as they also stem from the Guardians’ failed plans. So it makes sense that Hal would consult the one person who mistrusts the Guardians as much as he does.

Of course, Sinestro responds to Hal’s questions by listening attentively and asking sympathetic questions. And that’s exactly what makes him dangerous, especially as Hal feels more and more threatened. Sinestro clearly senses fear, and fear will give him the opportunity to manipulate Hal and seek out his own form of justice, devilish as it may seem.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9pm EST on HBO and HBO Max.

Lanterns Episode 4 Review: Hard Traveling Heroes

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 4

It’s been 35 years since Clarice Starling offered quid pro quo with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. And yet the “evil mastermind in prison” trope hasn’t lost any of its potency. That’s a good thing for Lanterns, as the show has finally brought in the big bad of the franchise, the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro. Sinestro has perhaps been the biggest barrier to expanding Green Lantern’s popularity. He’s obviously evil in his design, from his sinister name to his devilish look, all of which makes it hard for the average person to accept that he was once the greatest Green Lantern, whose betrayal shocked the Guardians and his close friend Hal Jordan.

The brief scene at the start of the Lanterns episode 4 “The Weenie,” directed by Geeta Vasant Patel and written by Breannah Gibson, erases all doubt. Much of the credit goes to Ulrich Thomsen, whose understated take keeps viewers less into the show’s sci-fi elements from getting tripped up by his pink skin and prison cell on a distant planet. The pained expression he gives Hal as he asks leading questions about John Stewart sets the stage for an episode filled with deception, heartache, and the most alien wackiness that Lanterns has had thus far.

On a plot level, “The Weenie” finds Hal and John’s investigation coming to a head as they uncover the identity of the Manhunter, albeit via a circuitous route. First, the duo burrow under Macon’s ranch to find a cache of weapons. That leads to a confrontation with the man—and his manhood, as Macon strips naked in a power move that’s played delightfully off-kilter by Garret Dillahunt. Macon allows them to leave with their suspicions intact, but John is dissuaded by the arrival Zoe, who intimates during their intimate moments that she holds the power in the Macon home.

But when Zoe’s car gets blown up by a satellite, John and Hal call upon Kerry’s surprisingly robust computer hacking skills to trace the machinery to a man called Hector Hammond (Jason Manuel Olazabal), a business magnate who runs a meat packing plant in Rushville. The mixture of grimy slaughterhouse work and clean, high-tech equipment brings to mind the juxtapositions that Lanterns co-creator Damon Lindelof explored in Watchmen. In a standout scene, John and Hal enter a white room, where a portal opens and a cow walks through. Immediately, lasers train on the cow and slice it to pieces, splashing blood on everything except John and Hal, who stand protected in a green bubble.

The scene also highlights the humor that’s been present throughout Lanterns. Of course, Hal’s braggadocio always gets a laugh, but the series regularly pauses for goofy bits. Here, the exploding cow leaves Hal speechless, complete with a slack-jawed expression by Chandler, while John gets the one-liner: “That’s why I’m a vegan.” The jokes on Lanterns land almost every time, yet never come at the expense of the concept itself, which leaves could be open to derision.

The cow explosions leads the two to Hammond who, despite his convincing lack of passion, proves to be a decoy, a one-time engineering student named Hector Gutiérrez recruited by Macon to serve as a cover. But his threat to kill John’s parents, a threat that visibly shakes the heretofore unflappable trainee, is enough to convince Hal that his would-be replacement didn’t cry at Zoe’s death because she was the Manhunter.

Despite all the twists and turns, “The Weenie” unfolds in a legible manner, largely because of the now well-defined chemistry between Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre. Once again, Lanterns showcases Hal’s arrogance and competence, a trust in his gut which is, indeed, never wrong. But “The Weenie” gives more space for John to show off his skills, ranging from an awareness of the operations on the Macon ranch to conjuring a complex construct to burrow through the ground.

Even better, the episode shows Hal and John actually coming to like one another and admire each other. Pierre registers the hurt in John’s eyes when the Guardian reveals that Hal has called him uncreative in field reports. But when Hal’s genuinely impressed at the quality of John’s drawings—prompting the younger man to declare “I’m creative”—the two take a moment to admire one another.

The strong chemistry between the leads only makes the web of influence constricting around them so frightening. The series asks both Laura Linney and Poorna Jagannathan to play aliens masquerading as humans, and both succeed in different ways. Linney has always had the ability to play steeliness under her characters’ sprightly blond bobs, but here she adds an aloof quality that radiates condescension. When the Guardian muses to John about his surprising lack of determination, her words obviously work to manipulate him, but Linney delivers the lines with so little passion that we almost believe she’s simply musing to herself. Conversely, Jagannathan plays Zoe as someone who genuinely cares about the people she encounters, who has no need to boast about her power and merely states it as a fact.

With all of these alien forces converging on Hal and John in Rushville, one gets the sense that Lanterns is ready to embrace the extreme parts of the Green Lantern mythos. After all, “The Weenie” does put Hal in his suit for the most screen time. Yet, the episode also wisely focuses on the building and rupturing friendship between Hal and John, proving that no matter how many robots from outer space or pink-skinned criminals they may encounter, the heroes of Lanterns are all too human.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.

Green Lantern Illuminations:

The idea of Abin Sur transporting a Manhunter when he crashed on Earth echoes the miniseries Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn, 1989 Hal Jordan reboot by writers Christopher Priest, Keith Giffen, and (unfortunately) Gerard Jones, and penciller M. D. Bright. In that story, Abin Sur was transporting a creature called Legion, who sought vengeance against the Guardian and who broke from its containment and forced a crash landing.
Hector Hammond debuted in Green Lantern #5 (1961) by John Broome and Gil Kane. A petty con artist who gained telepathic powers and a giant brain when he was exposed to a meteor, Hector Hammond has been one of GL’s worst enemies. Casual fans might remember him as the character that Peter Sarsgaard played in the 2011 movie, and he’s currently the most nauseating rich jerk in a world filled with rich jerks in the pages of Absolute Green Lantern and Absolute Green Arrow.
Is Hal’s mention of a planet of sentient tentacles a reference to Penelops, the one-eyed, tentacled Green Lantern from the planet Penelo?

Oscar Season Now: Welcome to the Rest of the Year

Early September is traditionally a quiet time at the multiplex. The last holdovers from the dog days of summer movie season—your Spider-Mans and Odysseys, as well as August risks like Coyote vs. Acme—continue to do dwindling business. Meanwhile new and skewed genre films are taking their chances in the off-season. But for everyone else outside the industry, now’s the time to think about schools reopening and vacations ending. In the biz, though? This is among the most important weekends of the year!

At last, Oscar season has come.

As the cottage industry of year-round awards prognosticators and Oscar bloggers will attest, the rat race to the Academy’s big night never really stops, with the first major film festival of the year occurring at Sundance’s vaunted heights in the dregs of January, even as the previous year’s Oscar race rages on at its fiercest din. There is also the most prestigious fest of the year in the South of France: Cannes. But those events are by design (or posture) supposed to be above the fray of politicking and horse-racing. September, on the other hand, is the month where we get what could be called the Big Four, starting yesterday with the oldest film festival in the world: Venice.

The Venice Film Festival was indeed a novel idea when it was co-founded nearly a century ago by Giuseppe Volpi—a devout fascist who was so enthusiastic about being minister of finance for Benito Mussolini that he named the first festival awards the “Mussolini Cup for Best Italian Film” and the “Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film.” Ah, history!

These days Venice has a more respectable reputation as the first of virtually back-to-back events that also include the Telluride Film Festival (beginning on Sept. 4), the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10), and the one I’ll eventually cover, the New York Film Festival (Sept. 25). Each has their own legacy and flavor that might be invisible to the casual observer, but they all amount to the building blocks necessary to create momentum in a campaign narrative (or collapse it in abject failure once the critics’ knives come out).

Anora, the Best Picture winner from Sean Baker in 2025, premiered in May’s storied Cannes Film Festival but then built momentum at Telluride and Toronto in September. And while last year’s winner One Battle After Another loudly skipped the fests to have a wide U.S. release like a big damn Hollywood action movie, seven of the 10 Best Picture nominees still played in the September festivals, often more than one. Bugonia and Frankenstein even had their world premieres in Venice, Hamnet in Telluride, and Marty Supreme in New York.

“I think for a filmmaker, you’ve got to just want to get into one, but there is prestige about certain ones that you want to debut and get your first eyes on you,” Clayton Davis, the chief awards editor at Variety, previously told me for Den of Geek magazine. The optics vary of course, with Toronto being seen as more populist while Venice is the most elite since there is a celebrity-dotted jury that gives out the coveted awards, and it invites a literal European sensibility comparable to Cannes. And as Davis noted, “A lot of people don’t want to blow their load at Cannes because then you have to sustain the buzz for eight, nine more months.”

Still, this year is intriguing since Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera publicly defended the lack of Hollywood studio movies at Venice, which set the tone for the rest of the Big Four. According to Barbera, none of the year’s remaining Hollywood movies deemed promising enough for Venice were ready in time for September, save Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise’s Digger, but WB “decided to release [the film] by relying on the element of surprise, bypassing all the autumn festivals.”

One might wonder if the dangers that befell Todd Phillips when the same studio brought Joker: Folie à Deux to Venice in 2024 to absolutely scathing reviews and word-of-mouth had something to do with this as well. (In Phillips’ defense, his first Joker somehow won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2019, setting the supervillain movie on a path to be a major Oscar player.)

Be that as it may, this year’s festivals already are lining up some intriguing options. Probably the buzziest film at Venice that no one’s seen yet is Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which stars Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen (Pattinson also looks pretty predatory in the trailer). Danny Boyle’s biopic about Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul behind Fox News, The Sun, and the modern day iterations of The New York Post and Wall Street Journal, is also premiering at Venice before going to TIFF. Werner Herzog’s beautifully titled Bucking Fastard, complete with both Mara sisters(!) as twins who must speak in unison is likewise going to TIFF and New York after its Venice premiere.

Meanwhile Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to the heart-rending (and awards winning) A Real Pain is The Debut, which charmingly features Julianne Moore as a housewife who loses herself in a community theater play. It’s going to Toronto and then New York, as is A24 stablemate Club Kid, Jordan Firstman’s debut feature about a washed-up party promoter that already made waves at Cannes. Conversely, Tony Gilroy’s palette-cleanser after a decade in Andor and Star Wars land, Behemoth!, will premiere its love letter to writing music for the screen in New York, as will Spotlight director Tom McCarthy’s new dramedy about the world discovering climate change in 1980, A Statement.

… And to just show you how much the industry and world cinema has evolved, so will Takashi Yamazaki’s hotly anticipated Godzilla Minus Zero, which seems to very much have its kaiju-sized eyes set on an Oscar campaign after Godzilla Minus One won for Best Visual Effects in 2024 and was (unfairly) snubbed a Best Foreign Language nod.

Yep, awards season is here, and this time they got a Godzilla. Batten down the hatches.

Dan Stevens Understands What Made RoboCop Work So Well

With the announcement of his RoboCop TV series for Prime Video, James Wan effectively told fans, “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” Okay, maybe that’s overstating it a little, but there’s no question that even the biggest RoboCop devotee has reason to be skeptical about another take on the classic 1987 movie, even from a filmmaker as well liked as Wan. After all, none of the sequels or remakes, or video games have really been able to capture the spirit of the original.

Yet a recent observation by star Dan Stevens has us cautiously optimistic that Wan and company know what they’re doing as they try to follow the character’s prime directives. “It’s very funny. It’s satirical,” Stevens told The Hollywood Reporter about the series. But the real interesting part came when he talked about what the original film means to him. “It left an imprint, and I probably saw it too young. It was, perhaps, my first exposure to extreme violence.” With that observation, Stevens clearly understands the importance of the first movie and the character.

Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner and directed by Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop presents itself as a straightforward supercop story, not unlike other Hollywood hits of the era, such as Lethal Weapon or Beverly Hills Cop. Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy as a good cop and a family man transferred from his quiet precinct to the hellscape of Detroit where he’s almost immediately gunned down by Clarence J. Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang. The mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) uses Murphy’s brain and face to create RoboCop, a weapon against crime.

However, as Murphy regains his memories and investigates his murder, he discovers a plan among the executives at OCP to use rampant crime to destroy Detroit and replace it with their own metropolis Delta City. The whole thing ends with RoboCop killing the bad guy, complete with a one-liner, just like an ’80s action movie should.

As generic as that sounds, RoboCop is a Verhoeven movie, which means that it’s filled with plenty of social satire and excess that undercuts the action tropes. Verhoeven intercuts the action with television commercials and news reports that reveal chaos under a glossy corporate sheen. Even the movie’s final line, in which RoboCop identifies himself as “Murphy,” plays less like a happy ending (he’s recovered his humanity!) and more like the police department putting a sympathetic face on their war machine.

Nowhere is that satirical undercutting of action tropes more clear than in the violence that Dan Stevens notes. In one of the movie’s best scenes, the malfunctioning ED-209 obliterates some corporate schmuck in a boardroom. The shots of him getting blasted seem to go on forever (despite being cut down to appease MPAA censors), passing from something exciting to something horrifying, to something darkly funny, especially when after the shooting finally stops, another executive shouts, “Somebody wanna call a goddamn paramedic?”

The violence changes RoboCop from just a standard action movie to something terrifying and bizarre. That’s especially true if like Stevens and a lot of RoboCop fans (including this writer) you saw the movie way, way too young. RoboCop feels like an action figure come to life, so of course he’s going to appeal to young kids. But where something like G.I. Joe taught kids to love the American military and C.O.P.S. taught them that the police were cool enforcers of justice, RoboCop teaches them that police, corporations, and criminals are all part of the same milieu.

To be sure, every RoboCop entry since the original has tried to retain that quality. RoboCop 2 and the recent video game have their own comedic commercials, and the 2014 remake featured Samuel L. Jackson as a Fox News-style commentator. The TV show and the comics made villains out of men in business suits who disregarded human life while trying to save a buck.

But none of them have matched the original RoboCop‘s ability to make the critique work alongside the action, to make the violence so excessive that we turn away in disgust or chagrin more than we cheer. But if Dan Stevens can keep Wan focused on traumatizing today’s kids the same way the original movie traumatized him, then the Amazon RoboCop series might match some of the power of the Verhoeven movie.

The RoboCop TV series is now in pre-production.

Silo Season 3 Ending Explained: What Really Happened to Daniel?

This article contains spoilers for “Troy,” the season 3 finale of Silo

“How long?” asks Daniel Keene when he jolts awake from a period of cryosleep. “Seven years,” replies Dr. Victor Crnkovich, suggesting that he had to bring him back from cryosleep quickly this time.

Daniel’s true identity has been repressed since the nuclear bomb went off during the flashbacks of the penultimate episode of Silo, but he is still haunted by brief images of his beloved Helen. Unfortunately, thanks to what we can only assume was a pretty destructive dose of Victor’s memory drugs after he was dragged underground, Daniel now believes he is called Troy and must function as a key member of Silo 1’s terrifying task force.

This season, we’ve followed the congressman closely in a series of revealing flashbacks that led to the discovery of Per Stensen’s silo project. We saw him reject Per’s offer of an important engineering role. We watched him meet the love of his life and the future mother of his child. Indeed, Daniel’s sweet, gentle nature has been a balm compared to the billionaire tech-bro’s dismissive, entitled plans for humanity and the horrors that still endure underground.

Yet the happiness he found with Helen felt doomed from the outset. Not only was it doomed, but in Silo’s season 3 finale, “Troy,” we also discover that Victor and the others have successfully turned Daniel into a monster, and it’s horrifying.

Let’s dig into what really happened to Daniel a.k.a. Troy at the end of season 3 and how it might shape the show’s fourth and final season.

The Real Fate of Silo 17

Troy works in a cold, clinical environment. Silo 1’s version of a situation room is all business, with dim lights yet clear visual targets on screens. The former Daniel Keene has been brought back to deal with Silo 17’s rebellion in the first time jump, and after he listens passively to a frightened young Jimmy Conroy talking to The Algorithm, he walks over to the situation room and is introduced to Susan, who we know is actually his sister, Charlotte. Daniel doesn’t recognize her. The drugs have stripped them of their close connection. Susan is just another senior drone commander.

As we watch helplessly, Troy and Susan attempt to deal with Silo 17’s rebellion under Victor’s watch. Using poisonous “compound” and ordnance, Troy orders the massacre of the denizens of 17, who finally make it overground to realize the environment is actually safe. But under Silo 1’s laws, these fugitives must not contact or “contaminate” another silo, no matter the cost.

Susan is triggered when she spots two of the women who have escaped from 17 kissing on the monitor. It seems to remind her of her relationship with Anna before her memory was wiped. She refuses to carry out Troy’s orders, citing an opportunity to enforce the “infallibility” of the Pact, a guide to silo living that we know Victor let AI write with only minor editing. “There are women and children out there,” Susan says. Troy looks at her coldly and dismisses her. Later, he’s even disappointed that she wasn’t killed for her insubordination.

Victor pleads with Troy to consider the ramifications of killing the escapees. Troy refers to “the Directive” and dismisses his concerns. The person we once knew as a kind, caring man is simply no longer there. We know that Daniel would never do this, even when facing a threat of termination. Indeed, the very idea of the silos held little appeal to him. But lies have replaced his identity. Troy is in charge now. He orders the fugitives to be poisoned en masse and cleans up the rest with drone bullets. “Fire at will,” he says, viewing the carnage with no emotion whatsoever. As their screams grow louder, he notices Victor’s discomfort and asks to cut the audio.

The people of Silo 17 didn’t die because the world above ground isn’t safe; they died because of Troy’s misguided belief in a directive, one that continues Per’s 500-year social experiment. If Daniel ever became himself again, we doubt he could live with the horrors of almost 10,000 deaths on his hands.

Paradise Lost

Season 3’s flashbacks haven’t really been about why the silos were built or why The Algorithm and the Pact demand such a high cost. Those questions are as irrelevant as why a child might hold a magnifying glass over an ant. Instead, the flashbacks have shown us how a series of misjudged decisions by a disgustingly wealthy man, a rogue senator, and a pioneering doctor turned a sweet guy with a bright future into a cold, calculating mass killer.

Daniel, once a politician who seemed to want to make things better, was truly inspired by Helen’s need to uncover dark truths about the government’s covert operations. But a part of Daniel remained ambitious and keen to work his way up. Eventually, both Helen’s love and their sickening encounter with Per changed Daniel’s ideology and future plans, yet by removing his identity and past with the memory drugs, Victor has managed to tap into the kind of monstrous politician Daniel could have become had he climbed the ranks all the way to the top without a family to consider or care for; cold and uncaring in the face of human suffering.

Throughout the finale, the memory of Helen’s face occasionally returns to Troy, and he begs Victor to help him find out who she is. But the pursuit of this knowledge is not wholly about missing her or even simple curiosity. Helen represents the warmth and love that Troy used to be capable of as Daniel; the humanity that has been torn from his soul. He keeps asking after her because a part of him is screaming to get out and make Troy stop. But this part of him is locked away in a box deep inside his subconscious.

If given enough of the memory drugs, could this very suppression of self have happened to Camille, or to anyone else expected to make fatal decisions against the silos? Absolutely, which is why it was so important to see Juliette’s tragic loss of self in the first half of this season.

Victor’s Choice and the Meaning of Moby Dick

Victor repeatedly pretends to help Troy find out about Helen, but he’s actively chosen not to do so many times before. His suicide is sudden, shocking to Troy, but inevitable. As the man behind the curtain and the voice of The Algorithm, Victor can no longer live with his failure to stop yet another rebellion, this time in Silo 18 after being tricked by Camille, and its inevitable cost in human lives.

He doesn’t know how the situation will turn out. After Camille forces enough distraction to complete a mission to cap the devastating Safeguard, it seems unlikely Juliette will repeat the mistakes of Silo 17 and lead the people outside to certain death. However, she and Camille have proved more than a psychological match for Victor.

Later, he admits he was relieved when Silo 18 triumphed against the Safeguard. He is sick, he is tired, and he can no longer wholeheartedly defend the Pact or the Founders’ directives without understanding their futility. This season’s flashbacks painted Victor as a medical professional who sought to do no harm and help those struggling, but now we see his work has served only as a tool of fascist control in a billionaire’s experiment.

Whatever good Victor thought he could do as a key cog in the silo project has completely eroded. He glances at a copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a tale of humanity’s futile attempt to conquer and control the wild, powerful forces of the natural world, and puts it aside before he chooses oblivion. Per’s obsession with his white-whale project has led to nothing but misery and loss.

Staring at Victor’s body, we find out that he only really wanted to be awake when he could be around Troy, as though he was clinging to a part of Daniel that he himself had helped to destroy. “He knew me from before, but obviously he couldn’t say,” Troy concedes. With Victor having permanently taken himself “off shift,” Troy is left to deal with the fallout of Silo 18’s rebellion alone.

The Eyes of Juliette Nichols

After successfully capping the Safeguard, Juliette and her confidants make their way down to the door in the digger void that Lukas Kyle discovered. Silo 1 calls this 18’s “Forward Vault,” and the group’s arrival there interrupts Troy’s plan to find another way to kill everyone. When Juliette challenges him on his ability to do so, Troy seems to compromise by saying that as long as 18 makes no attempt to contact another silo, Silo 1 won’t try to hit them with another Safeguard. Juliette lies when she accepts 18’s side of the bargain.

When the group says they need to focus on their own survival and defend themselves against any threats, Juliette says that’s what Silo 1 expects them to do, but “They won’t be prepared to defend themselves against us.” Their new mission is clear: find a way to take out or take over Silo 1.

Troy lingers on a close-up of Juliette on the monitor when he finishes speaking to her. Her piercing blue eyes stare out at him. Then it cuts to a close-up of Troy’s own piercing blue eyes. While it isn’t explicitly stated, it feels like the show is teasing that Juliette is actually Daniel’s long-lost descendant, born from Helen’s bloodline in Silo 18.

After his confrontation with Juliette, Troy looks at a blueprint for 18, perhaps still formulating another plan. His work is interrupted by a sudden video message from Victor, sent just before he took his life. As a parting gift, Victor finally gives Troy the name of the woman he has been seeing in his visions: Helen Drew. For the first time, we see Troy show emotion. He cries as he repeats her name aloud. At that moment, we finally see Daniel, not Troy.

The Final Season of Silo

The chess pieces have moved into position for a potentially explosive fourth and final season of the show. Silo 18 will use its knowledge of the all-too-human minds still controlling the decisions in Silo 1 to plan its attack. Meanwhile, Silo 1 will likely try to safeguard Silo 18, despite Troy’s compromise.

But how deep down the rabbit hole will Troy go to find out what happened to Helen Drew? Will he discover what happened to their child? Will he find out who he really is and manage to unlock the Daniel Keene who has been pushed deep down inside of him? Will Juliette turn out to be his great-great-granddaughter? Where is Per Stensen? Can Rosalind Thurman and Henry be overthrown? Can Silo 18 manage to get Daniel on its side? And will the people in 18 finally manage to make their way overground to live in the safe world of the future?

Season 4 still has many questions to answer, but season 3’s ending sets up what could be a triumphant swansong for the Apple TV show, pitting Juliette against those in Silo 1 who have long decided who lives and who dies. Bernard Holland gambled his life on Juliette being the one who could finally change the fate of the people still trapped in the silos underground; only time will tell if he was right.

All episodes of Silo season 3 are now streaming on Apple TV.

Every Muppets Movie, Ranked

As proved by the recent Disney+ special The Muppet Show, Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s group of felt puppet performers work best on the stage. Their mix of personalities, their wacky bits, and their absolute love of show business suits the variety format that made them famous. Yet like every true showbiz player, the Muppets truly long to be on the big screen, which is why they’ve starred in 11(!) feature films together.

Moreover, most of the Muppet movies are good to great! But they’re not all equal, so let’s look at the eight theatrical releases and three direct-to-TV and video features starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and the rest of the Muppet gang.

11. The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005)

While they definitely vary in quality, none of the Muppet movies are bad. None, except one: The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz. On the surface, the movie is exactly what one would want from the Muppet movies of its era. Instead of trying to replicate the madcap nature of The Muppet Show or any of its successors, the movies treat the cast as actors staging a production, just like Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. But here’s the thing: The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz is tonally off and deeply unfunny.

Ashanti stars as Dorothy Gale, who gets taken away from her Auntie Em (Queen Latifah) and Uncle Henry (David Alan Grier) in Kansas and lands in the world of Oz. There she and Toto (Pepe the Prawn) must find the Wizard (Jeffrey Tambor) with the help of her new friends the Scarecrow (Kermit), the Tin Thing (Gonzo), and the Cowardly Lion (Fozzie). Helping or harming her progress are the four witch sisters, two good and two bad, all played by Miss Piggy. Pleasing as that premise sounds, director Kirk R. Thatcher and his team of screenwriter include far too many edgy, bland gags, including a bit about Fozzie accidentally tweaking Gonzo’s nipple.

10. Kermit’s Swamp Years (2002)

From this point on, none of the Muppet movies are bad. But Kermit’s Swamp Years isn’t particularly good either, at least not to anyone who isn’t in the film’s very young target audience. Directed by David Gumpel and written by Jim Lewis and Joey Mazzarino, Kermit’s Swamp Years is exactly what it sounds like: the story of young Kermit leaving the swamp and making his way into the world of humans.

One would think that Kermit would be drawn from the swamp by the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood. Instead this movie suggests that Kermit leaves his home when his froggy best friend Goggles (Joey Mazzarino) and the bully toad Croaker (Bill Barretta) get captured by pet store owners who sell them to science teacher Dr. Hugo Krassman (John Hostetter). With the help of stray dog Pilgrim (Cree Summer), Kermit saves his friends from dissection and learns how to speak with humans… all of which is fine for a kid’s story, but barely feels like a Muppet story.

9. It’s a Very Muppet Christmas Movie (2002)

Whatever one thinks of Disney’s stewardship of the Muppets, It’s a Very Muppet Christmas Movie illustrates exactly why a change in leadership seemed necessary. This made-for-TV movie does feel like a proper Muppet film, and the characters are all deployed well and consistently, but It’s a Very Muppet Christmas Movie, written by Tom Martin and Jim Lewis and directed by Kirk R. Thatcher, plays as an obvious parody of It’s a Wonderful Life, signaling a franchise that has run out of ideas. Also Joe Rogan is in it.

The movie finds the Muppet Theater again on the brink of foreclosure, and Kermit wishing he’d never been born. To save the theater from aggressive banker Rachel Bitterman (Joan Cusack), Kermit has to reassemble the gang—which includes coaxing Piggy to leave her lucrative gig as an extra on Scrubs—and help him mount a production of Moulin Scrooge. Despite the fact that the show is a hit, Bitterman’s tactics force the foreclosure, driving Kermit to wish he had never been born and… well, you can guess what happens from there. A trip through memory lane follows, including a nod to The Muppet Movie, which only highlights the severe dip in quality that It’s a Very Muppet Christmas Movie represents.

8. Muppets From Space (1999)

Muppets From Space will always have a bad rap, as it’s the first movie to break the Muppets’ original theatrical run, leading to the aforementioned straight to TV and video entries. And, to be clear, it is easily the worst of that bunch, a ramshackle tale written by Jerry Juhl, Joseph Mazzarino, and Kenn Kaufman that Tim Hill directs without much discernible style beyond a strange decision to feature a lot of funk music on the soundtrack. Yet there are some solid gags and some fun bits with next generation Muppets, particularly with Bobo the Bear, that makes Muppets From Space better than its reputation would suggest.

Muppets From Space seeks to answer the biggest unanswered question of the original cast: what, exactly, is Gonzo? After being struck by lightning, Gonzo is convinced that he’s an alien from outer space, and he begins to maniacally search for a way to contact his people despite the warnings of Kermit and his friends. Gonzo’s efforts draw the attention of secret government organization C.O.V.N.E.T., ran by the hapless K. Edgar Singer (Tambor), who kidnaps Gonzo and sends him to be vivisected by Dr. Phil Van Neuter (Brian Henson). That synopsis just scratches the surface of the plot, which too often mistakes lots of incident for zaniness, drowning out the movie’s few genuinely funny bits.

7. Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

As this list will show, The Muppet Christmas Carol is the triumph of the post-Henson projects, a perfect encapsulation of what the Muppets can do as characters and performers that points the way to new storytelling avenues. That movie’s immediate successor, Muppet Treasure Island, mostly follows the Christmas Carol model. And yet, where Christmas Carol is vibrant and beautiful, Treasure Island is merely competent and enjoyable.

Brian Henson is back to direct, with Kirk R. Thatcher and James V. Hart joining Jerry Juhl as screenwriters. The late, great Tim Curry takes the lead human part as Captain Long John Silver, the notorious pirate captain who is surrounded by Muppet versions of the characters from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, including Kermit as Captain Abraham Smollett, Piggy as Benjamina Gunn, and Statler and Waldorf as wise-cracking ship figureheads. However, the movie also features a number of human characters, including Kevin Bishop as lead Jim Hawkins (joined by his best friends Gonzo and Rizzo, of course) and Billy Connolly as former pirate Billy Bones. Perhaps it’s the unbalanced human-to-Muppet ratio, perhaps it’s the lesser source material, but Muppet Treasure Island never matches the treasure that is its predecessor.

6. Muppets Most Wanted (2014)

Like Muppets From Space, Muppets Most Wanted abruptly brought to an end the characters’ second theatrical run, and Muppets Most Wanted also is better than its reputation would suggest. Yes, the film does feature Ricky Gervais as the human lead, and it does have a general sense of resignation, the feeling that it’s just repeating past beats. After all, the movie begins with a number about the diminishing returns of sequels and ends with “Together Again, Again,” which just repeats the song from The Muppets Take Manhattan.

That said, director James Bobin’s second effort, working from a script that he co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller, in some ways improves upon 2011’s The Muppets—mostly by downplaying Walter—and stands a solid caper in its own right. The plot involves the evil frog Constantine, an Eastern European doppelgänger of Kermit who escapes prison and swaps places with the green hero, leaving our favorite frog stranded in a gulag run by Nadya (Tina Fey in one of the all-time great human performances in a Muppet movie). Constantine does get a little too much screen time and Gervais is grating, but the songs by Bret McKenzie are a delight, and Sam the Eagle does some of his best work playing off Ty Burrell’s Interpol agent.

5. The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

The Muppets Take Manhattan is the worst of the original three Jim Henson and Frank Oz Muppet movies, which means that it is still fantastic, just not quite perfect. Directed by Oz from a script that he wrote with Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, The Muppets Take Manhattan is the best filmic representation of the show’s celebration of all things Broadway, and even its utter disregard for continuity is one of its charms.

The Muppets Take Manhattan opens with the cast graduating from college, hot off the success of their show Manhattan Melodies. Full of stars in their eyes, the crew makes their way to Broadway where they’re certain that they’ll be greeted as stars. But after being nearly fleeced by a con artist (Dabney Coleman, of course), the gang loses hope and goes their separate ways. Worse, Kermit gets hit by a car and suffers amnesia, thinking he’s an ad executive named Phil. Muppet movies often use separation as a plot point, and while this isn’t the best example, it does build to the sweetest climax, the song “Together Again” and the marriage of Kermit and Piggy. The fact that the whole thing plays as an alternate universe story only makes it more dear, a special bit of Hollywood magic.

4. The Muppets (2011)

It’s amazing how well The Muppets has aged, given how legacy sequels and the self-congratulatory nostalgia they invite have become the banes of blockbuster cinema. Even more than The Force Awakens, which came out a whole four years later, The Muppets set the mold for movies that celebrate fans for being fans and turn songs and beats originally designed to entertain children into dirges about lost innocence. Also The Muppets introduces Walter, whose whole special talent is whistling, and that’s not even the most annoying thing about him.

The Muppets once again deals with the gang getting back together after a long estrangement, specifically to save the old Muppet Theater from being destroyed by businessman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper). After overcoming their differences, they all reconvene, put on a show, and sing “Rainbow Connection” together, and it’s beautiful. The thing that keeps The Muppets from turning unbearably self-referential is the infectious energy brought by Jason Segel, who takes the human lead and co-wrote the script with Stoller. The movie also features a charming romantic turn by Amy Adams and the incredible songs by Flight of the Conchords‘ Bret McKenzie. The Muppets may just be about how great it is to love the Muppets, but it makes a pretty compelling case.

3. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

By this point on the list, it’s clear that Muppet movies fall into three categories: origin/coming together stories, standalone adventures, and adaptations. Each of the top three films represent the best entries of those categories, starting with the greatest adaptation, The Muppet Christmas Carol. Directed by Brian Henson and written by Jerry Juhl, The Muppet Christmas Carol justifies its entire existence by casting Fozzie Bear in the role of Scrooge’s old boss Mr. Fezziwig, renamed here Mr. Fozziwig.

That bit of happy coincidence signals just how well-suited the Muppets are to the Dickens tale. Michael Caine still deserves every bit of praise he’s earned for his committed take on Scrooge, playing the old miser’s redemption arc without a hint of irony despite the fact that he’s surrounded by Muppets. Likewise, the songs by Paul Williams stand as some of the best in any Muppet movie or Christmas movie. But the true magic of the film is just the Muppets themselves, who map perfectly onto the original characters, whether it’s Kermit as the guileless Bob Cratchit, Piggy as his resentful wife, or Gonzo as, who else, Charles Dickens.

2. The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Of the three categories of Muppet movies, standalone adventures are the toughest sell. They eschew the origin stories and character dynamics established by other films, but they aren’t adaptations, so audiences have a hard time realizing that they’re watching the Muppets play characters, not themselves. That confusion is too bad, because the standalone adventures can be really fun, as demonstrated by The Great Muppet Caper.

Directed by Jim Henson from a script by a team of writers, The Great Muppet Caper casts Kermit and Fozzie as twin reporters, who go on assignment to England with their photographer Gonzo. There Kermit falls for Miss Piggy, just as fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg) has the priceless Baseball Diamond stolen by her ne’er-do-well brother Nicky (Charles Grodin) and his band of supermodel thieves. Does any of it make sense? No, but The Great Muppet Caper has so many great gags and commits so hard to the pretense of the actors putting on a show that it somehow feels like the most pure Muppet movie, even if the gang never gets on a stage.

1. The Muppet Movie (1979)

The appeal of the original Muppet Show came from the way Henson and Oz turned their love of Broadway and showbiz into manic shenanigans. Ask most kids, and they’d tell you that the manic shenanigans were the most important part. But The Muppet Movie understands that it was always about the love too. The Muppet Movie, directed by James Frawley and written by Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns, has plenty of wacky nonsense, including a gigantic Animal chasing away the evil Doc Hopper (Charles Durning) and his sidekick Max (Austin Pendleton). But its most indelible moments are all heart.

The Muppet Movie is the first origin story film, one that begins with Kermit alone in his swamp singing “Rainbow Connection,” one of several fantastic Paul Williams songs in the film, and ends all of Henson’s characters—including those from Sesame Street and Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas—performing it together on stage. But The Muppet Movie stands out because of its road movie format, which allows the cast to encounter strange human characters every time they stop to pick up a new hopeful going to Hollywood. That hope with every new walk-on allows The Muppet Movie to sustain its sweet sensibilities, proving that no matter how wacky the Muppet stories get, it’s always about love.

Avengers: Doomsday’s Off-Script Approach Follows Original MCU Model (For Better or Worse)

Avengers: Doomsday is easily the most important movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, both in the fictional world and in our own. Within the MCU, Doomsday sees the arrival of Doctor Doom, who will surely use the incursions that threaten to wipe out the multiverse as a means to shore up more power. Within our timeline, Doomsday is an attempt to revive interest in a somewhat 2020s franchise, in part by bringing back favorite actors like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans.

With so much on the line, one would think that Kevin Feige and directors Joe and Anthony Russo would be working to make Doomsday as precise as possible, poring over every scene and every line of dialogue months before arriving to set. But it turns out the opposite is true.

“We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” Joe Russo told Variety this week. “We like to see what the actors bring to the characters. Sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.” Those comments are true, at least as far as the MCU is concerned, because that improvisational approach helped make Iron Man such a success in 2008, starting the path that leads to Doomsday.

In 2008, just weeks before Iron Man hit theaters, director Jon Favreau shared “the dirty secret” about superhero films with the website SuperHeroHype. “These movies don’t really have scripts which are locked in a traditional sense,” he revealed. “The script is unfortunately the last thing to get proper attention.” Instead Favreau explained that he relied on improvised lines between star Robert Downey Jr. and his co-stars. “Hopefully, it gives [Iron Man] a more naturalistic feel than most of these big movies that feel very sort high-bound by the size of the production.”

Favreau’s gamble paid off. Iron Man was a colossal hit, not so much because of its big action set pieces; most viewers would be forgiven if they couldn’t recall the specific beats of the climactic fight between Iron Man and the Iron Monger. Rather the film dazzled viewers because of Downey’s sparkling performance and his chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts. And most of that came from improvisation, a playfulness that cut the seriousness and big sci-fi concepts with a dash of humanity. Even the most famous line in the movie, the one that cemented Tony Stark as the center of a shared cinematic universe, was improvised by Downey: “I am Iron Man.”

The playfulness between characters has always been the defining quality of the MCU. Some of the films certainly have memorable fight scenes; people still cheer for the hand-to-hand combat in The Winter Soldier, and Joss Whedon brought splash-page bravado to big oners in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. But the primary draw remains the MCU’s likable characters and seeing them hang out together. The shot of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes sitting in a restaurant and munching on shawarma is just as important to The Avengers as the tracking shot that shows them each using their powers against the Chitauri.

Clearly Avengers: Doomsday wants to harness some of the warm feelings audiences have for MCU characters. Even if the film has a perfect explanation for Victor Von Doom to look exactly like Tony Stark, even if the return of Steve Rogers will seem like the natural progression for the character we’ve known, everyone knows they’re actually back because Marvel wants to play the hits again. It’s the same reason the film will feature all of the Fox X-Men back together despite the actors having said goodbye to their characters countless times at this point.

With all that in mind, it makes sense for the Russos to go back to first principles of the MCU. Doomsday will gather charismatic, well-liked actors, put them in a room together, and let them riff on the characters that they’ve made into global icons. But that impulse to return to what worked before also risks everything less stellar with the MCU. The franchise managed to overcome early problems like a lack of defining villains and a tendency to build climaxes around lasers pointing into the sky to offer some truly inspiring movies. Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and Black Panther. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame remain triumphs, the rare instance of bringing serialized storytelling to feature films.

Yet, those success have proven to be culminations of the Marvel style. There’s nothing more to be done or said with the style, and some audiences are tiring of it. Even very good films like Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or Thunderbolts* fail to connect with viewers because audiences have seen it all before and it doesn’t impress them anymore.

Doomsday could have been a chance to change course for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Doctor Doom is the purest comic book villain to ever exist, something more outrageous and compelling than even the franchise’s previous greats like Loki and Killmonger. The Secret Wars storyline that it adapts from the comics is a superhero epic of the highest caliber. Doomsday gave Marvel and the Russos an opportunity to revitalize the franchise. Instead they’re holding to a method that worked great two decades ago but feels diminishing now. By ignoring their movie’s script, the Russos are ironically following a well-worn script, and we already know how that ends.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on Dec. 18, 2026.

The Best Martin Scorsese Movies Not About Gangsters

Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.

Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.

Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.

Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.

Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.

A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.

The King of Comedy (1982)

It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.

Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.

Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.

Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.

The Aviator (2004)

A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.

Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.

Silence (2016)

Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.

Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.

Has The Walking Dead Franchise Successfully Redeemed Negan?

After a third-season episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City suggested that Maggie and Negan were always fated to form a connection with each other in any universe, a portion of the fandom reacted badly to the notion. Though the show’s creators seem to have no intention of making their relationship romantic, the idea that Maggie and Negan could even have a more important cosmic connection than Maggie and her late husband Glenn seemed outrageous.

As anyone who quit The Walking Dead when Negan first dealt his deadly blows to Rick Grimes’ crew almost a decade ago will often tell you: Negan killed Glenn, and did it sadistically; nothing can ever make up for that, and nothing ever will.

That remains true on a vital level. No amount of good deeds can bring back Glenn, Abraham, or anyone else Negan killed or terrorized. He can never undo the things he’s done, and seeing him pal around with Maggie and her son Hershel is always going to rub some fans up the wrong way.

But The Walking Dead has increasingly argued that Negan can be redeemed, even if he can never be absolved, and this very human debate will always leave people standing their ground on both sides, no matter who might be in the character’s orbit.

Negan Smith vs. the World

In the real world, a murderer can eventually show remorse or accept responsibility. They can change their behavior or even dedicate the rest of their life to helping others. It’s a personal transformation that never erases their past deeds. Murder is irreversible. No act of kindness, however well-meaning, can compensate someone’s family for their loss, so societies will always remain divided over whether murderers can ever truly be redeemed because their fundamental path to redemption began with a horrifying act that drew a permanent line in the sand that even decades of good behaviour cannot erase.

There’s also a big difference between recognizing that someone has changed and saying they deserve forgiveness. A murderer may regret what they did and become a different person, but they still have to accept that their victim’s loved ones may never forgive them. Maggie will never forgive Negan. Yet in the third season of Dead City, she decides that her hatred for Negan and her quest for vengeance are destroying her chance to live a happy life. Maggie, exercising her own agency, believes Negan has changed and chooses to let it go for her own benefit, not his.

But believing that someone can change doesn’t mean we should minimize their crimes. Like Negan, a murderer can spend the rest of their life trying to atone for something they can never truly make right. Fans have every right to hate Negan and object to the franchise’s continued focus on him, but for others, his journey remains compelling. It’s just that some of the reasons it remains compelling are more complex and problematic than others.

Negan Smith vs. the Fandom

Straight off the bat (no pun intended), we have to accept that some fans find Negan to be a hugely charismatic and unpredictable character, and that can be a lot of fun to watch! Indeed, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance has been consistently fantastic as Negan has moved away from being a more two-dimensional villain. Morgan also wouldn’t still be playing Negan almost a decade later if people weren’t interested in seeing him remain on their screens.

Admittedly, The Walking Dead could have killed Negan off years ago, but why should the character get an easy way out when we can see him forced to live with the consequences of his own actions? While that’s a capital-punishment argument for another day, watching Negan navigate the irreversibility of his crimes gives his story an emotional complexity that many redemption arcs simply lack. We typically see the baddie locked up and forgotten, or killed for their crimes. The Walking Dead wants us to see there is another option, at least narratively.

However, Negan’s innate humor and swagger can make him so entertaining that some fans glom onto him, and that’s often fairly viewed as a real problem. His victims’ suffering can fade into the background. Our cultural fascination with the idea that a charismatic man who behaves monstrously can still be “fixed,” especially when he has a sympathetic backstory, has also proved problematic in the character’s development. Who cares why Negan became a monster when the people he victimized aren’t getting the same amount of attention?

But when we set aside his charisma, we can perhaps see that both sides of the Negan debate often fail to recognize that two viewpoints on the character can absolutely coexist: some of us can be fascinated by his transformation while still believing that the things he did should remain unforgivable.

Negan Smith vs. Negan Smith

Ultimately, whether the franchise has redeemed Negan is up to each viewer. Yet if you stopped watching The Walking Dead and its spinoffs years ago, you might not have all the details you need to actually decide because Negan’s story isn’t even really about whether he is good now. It’s about watching him repeatedly confronted by experiences that force him to reconsider what kind of man he wants to be. It’s a relentless, Sisyphean internal struggle between the old Negan and the Negan he’s becoming.

That’s hard to navigate for both Negan and the audience, as he still uses his old, violent ways to “do better.” But while the old Negan killed Hershel’s dad to assert dominance, a redemption-seeking Negan repeatedly puts his life on the line to protect Hershel. He watches over him. It doesn’t make up for murdering Glenn; Hershel simply acts as a living reminder that Negan can choose to act protectively. It’s a choice he has to make again and again in a string of volatile situations.

Though many fans have also complained about the very idea of putting Negan and Maggie together in their own spinoff show, Dead City has proven effective because Maggie is the person least able to let either the fans or Negan forget who he used to be. The franchise keeps both versions of him alive: Negan the “monster” and Negan the human being. That he and Maggie may be cosmically connected to teach each other uncomfortable lessons makes sense, because both face a choice every day. As that iconic Shawshank Redemption moment suggests, they can either get busy living or get busy dying.

Every major stage of Negan’s story gives him another opportunity to behave like he used to, and he has increasingly chosen to act differently while hampered by setbacks. He may never be fully redeemed, but he may yet find his place in the world.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 7 Review — Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 7.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has gleefully played around in lots of different genres and movements. This season alone it’s tackled film noir, horror, and whatever you call it when the bulk of the main cast turns into puppets. (Do The Muppets technically count as a genre?) At this point, it’s probably more of a surprise that the show hasn’t done a soap opera episode yet. But “Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” is here to correct that obvious error, and the result is an installment that not only embraces many of the genre’s most outlandish tropes, but finally forces its characters to confront some of the very real emotions this season’s pinball-style narrative has managed to avoid.

Here’s the thing about soap operas: they’re actually extremely well done character stories. Yes, they’re ridiculous in a lot of ways, full of unnecessarily tight close-ups, melodramatic pauses, and repetitive dialogue. There’s way too much close talking, most dire medical conditions (and their cures) aren’t what anyone would call technically accurate, and pretty much every character has a long-lost twin or secret child waiting in the wings. But what keeps people coming back to these kinds of stories week after week isn’t the insane plot twists, but the characters. Soaps shine at depicting relationships, both romantic and otherwise, and their stories put raw feeling center stage in a way that a show like Strange New Worlds doesn’t often get the chance to do.

“Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” is almost certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea in terms of storytelling, if only because the concept of something like “Days of the Enterprise” is deeply over the top. From Pike waking up with cosmic amnesia after a shuttle accident to casting Deidre Hall—who’s played psychiatrist Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives for 50 years—as the ship’s counselor meant to help treat him, it’s an hour that pokes affectionate fun at a genre that someone in the writers’ room clearly loves. (See also: the reference to an “Abbott-Chancellor collision” that name-checks two of the major families from The Young and the Restless. I see you, soap fan on the writing staff. And I appreciate you.)

Like most ridiculous things on Star Trek, the Enterprise crew finds itself in this predicament thanks to unexpected interference from an unseen alien force. This time around, it’s once again the still-unnamed onscreen Trelane, who appeared in season 3’s “Wedding Bell Blues.” The Q-esque figure has commandeered Pike and his crew as part of what is essentially a school project about humans and their emotions, attempting to use what he calls “body cleaning theater” to impress his Proctor with humanity’s potential. (Said Proctor, it should be noted, is also wearing an elaborate, extremely Q-coded set of robes. Bring on the cosplay.)

But also like many ridiculous things on Star Trek, the soapy setting is an elaborate framing device that serves an emotional purpose. “Space adventures leave little time for humans to deal with their inner struggles,” Trelane tells Pike when he’s called out about his latest trick. And, to be fair, he’s not wrong. This season has been a nonstop romp through very different kinds of genres and stories—Pike himself admits in the premiere that he’s been signing the crew up for constant missions ever since Batel “ascended”—and hasn’t devoted a lot of time to much in the way of introspective character work. This hour doesn’t completely fix that problem—whatever is going on with La’an is still kind of a mess—but it’s a welcome step in the right direction.

That it’s Pike who is unaffected by Trelane’s soap opera reality makes sense. He’s already lived through multiple alternate realities and timelines, including a future where he wasn’t disfigured and the better part of a lifetime spent with Batel. (Maybe he’s becoming immune to it at this point!) That it’s this wacky setting that finally forces him to confront the grief he’s been running away from all season is a well-played emotional twist.

Much of this hour relies on Anson Mount playing the snarky and disbelieving straight man to the increasingly soapy chaos unfolding around him. (“Computer, am I in a simulation?”) Truly, this show should let him be funny more often. He has great comedic instincts as an actor and one hell of an eye roll. But it’s Pike’s unexplored sense of loss about a life not lived that provides the true emotional engine of the hour, pushing their way through Trelane’s false reality thanks to a subplot in which Uhura is led to believe she’s somehow the captain’s long-lost daughter. It’s played for laughs initially, given that we know quite a bit about Uhura’s tragic backstory involving her very real and sadly very dead parents. But the story ultimately forces Pike to face (quite literally) the daughter (Anna Mirodin) he had Batel shared, a girl who never really existed but lives in his heart as though she did.

Star Trek has poked at these kinds of themes of before, most notably in The Next Generation’s “The Inner Light,” but Strange New Worlds puts its own spin on the theme as Pike is forced to reckon with the idea that just because the daughter he remembers having wasn’t real, it doesn’t make his love for her any less genuine or her loss any less painful. It’s heartbreaking stuff, made even more so because it’s taken so long for him to acknowledge this pain he’s been carrying. We’re seven episodes into this season, and this is the first time his grief has even really been directly addressed. Part of the reason it’s so painful to witness is that it’s gone generally unseen for so long. (Apparently I can witness many heavy things in this franchise with relative equanimity, but an ugly crying Christopher Pike is not one of them.)

Pike’s heartbreak isn’t the only real emotion “Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” forces its characters to face. It touches on M’Benga’s professional anxiety, Ortegas’ post-Gorn PTSD, La’an’s complicated feelings about Spock, and Uhura’s longing to grow into the next phase of her adulthood. This isn’t an hour that necessarily offers any concrete answers to any of these issues, but maybe it doesn’t need to. After all, as any good soap opera will tell you, it’s the feelings that matter.

Revisiting The Specials, James Gunn’s First Superhero Movie

Nobody makes superhero movies like James Gunn. Even if greats such as Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan have produced incredible films about people in capes and cowls, Gunn’s combination of off-beat humor, utter sincerity, and love for the weirdest parts of comic book worlds make him the ideal superhero auteur, a fact he proves with films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Superman. But no artist starts out perfect, and Gunn is no exception. In fact, 2000’s The Specials, Gunn’s first-ever superhero movie as a screenwriter, is pretty awful. Yet in spite of its clear signs of immaturity and rough edges, The Specials does feature some indicators of the artist that Gunn would become, namely a respect for the disrespected parts of the superhero world and surprising moments of pathos.

Directed by Craig Mazin, who worked on Scary Movie 3 and Superhero Movie before making Chernobyl and The Last of Us, The Specials establishes itself as a Gunn project right away. The movie focuses on the titular team, the seventh-most popular group of superheroes in the world. Moreover, instead of following the team at the moment of their greatest battle or most significant victory, The Specials shows us how they spend their time off: mostly bickering with one another about who’s to blame for their sorry reputations.

Led by the Strobe (Thomas Haden Church), the Specials consist of the team secretary Ms. Indestructible (Paget Brewster), breakout hero the Weevil (Rob Lowe), the spacey Alien Orphan (Sean Gunn), her caretaker Power Chick (Kelly Coffield), the creepy Deadly Girl (Judy Greer), the Atom analogue Minute Man (James Gunn), genius Mr. Smart (Jim Zulevic), and newcomer Nightbird (Jordan Ladd). The team also finds themselves regularly joined by Amok (Jamie Kennedy), a blue-skinned former villain who like to just hang around.

At the start of the movie, the team thinks they’re on the verge of their big break, as they’ve signed a merchandising deal with Kosgrov Toys, but when the toys prove to be cheaply-made and inaccurate—and worse, that no one at the company cares to make better figures out the lowly heroes—the Specials disband. For the Weevil, the dissolution of the group offers a chance for him to make the big time and join the Champions, this world’s version of the Avengers and the Justice League. But Weevil’s decision disappoints not only Ms. Indestructible, who is married to the Strobe while low-key sleeping with Weevil, it repels the still-idealistic Nightbird.

In that summary, one can see the sort of emotional tension that makes Gunn’s other superhero work so great. Once again, he’s working with a bunch of losers who have no reason to believe in themselves. Yet they have to stick together because no one else will accept them, and that bond becomes the catalyst for great things. Whether it’s the Guardians being forced to save the Galaxy from the threat of Ronan the Accuser or the 11th Street Kids thwarting an alien invasion in Peacemaker, Gunn knows how to make that storyline work.

However, The Specials leans too hard into 2000s cynicism for the sweetness to stand out. Not only does Gunn really lean into the crass jokes, most of which are delivered by Jamie Kennedy at his most irritating, but the entire structure of the movie undercuts the possibility of pathos. The film regularly breaks into a mockumentary style that includes other media images of the superheroes, setting up a distinction between the heroes as they’re presented (inspirational and good), and the heroes as they are (cynical and crass).

Furthermore, the costuming and limited budget means that Mazin and Gunn don’t have the ability to show the Specials redeeming themselves, something that Gunn can do in his better-known superhero work. None of the characters really wear costumes. The Weevil dons a mask, but he also wears a t-shirt adorned with a logo tucked into his pants. Strobe and Ms. Indestructible have lightening bolts on their red shirts, which only makes the military-looking outfits feel even more fascist. Deadly Girl and Power Chick’s sole notable visuals are in their hairstyles while Minute Man has a jumpsuit that makes him look like he’s hosting Mystery Science Theater 3000. At least Alien Orphan is green, but even then he’s clad in a nondescript black shirt and jeans.

While these visual elements shouldn’t be a problem in a film about heroes on their day off, they do make the characters feel pathetic; they’re broke cosplayers with unwarranted arrogance. Add in the fact that they use their powers off-screen, and the whole movie seems to be laughing at the heroes for their pretensions, not sympathizing with their failures.

This isn’t to say that The Specials completely lacks merit. Brewster, Lowe, and, to a lesser extent, Church find pathos in their characters. The scene in which Strobe realizes that his wife is having an affair with Weevil is played silently and perfectly, even if the hasty editing undercuts the emotional punch. Likewise, Weevil’s speech to the members of the Champions in which he reminds them why they became superheroes in the first place has strains of the sweetness that Gunn would later develop.

Unfortunately, they are strains that don’t get developed in the still quite raw experimentation in The Specials. Instead the movie appears still indebted to Troma, the straight-to-video provocateurs who gave Gunn his foot in the door. Even so, the title matters if only because it gave Gunn space to work the nastiness and cynicism out of his system, paving the way for a filmmaker who can handle every superhero, from the perfect Superman to the pathetic Polka-Dot Man.

HBO Harry Potter Trailer Reveals New Snape, Quidditch, and Hogwarts But Still Feels Old

“Are you really Harry Potter?” wee little Dominic McLaughlin is asked by another incredulous first-year Hogwarts student at the end of the Harry Potter teaser from five months ago. That intriguing bit of marketing really leaned into elements from J.K. Rowling’s book series glossed over 25 years ago in the Christopher Columbus movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, such as just how miserable muggle school is for the Boy Who Lived. But by focusing so much on what is essentially the prologue, we didn’t get much flavor of what the real series is going to be about.

That show is thus on much better display in the full trailer for the first season of HBO’s Harry Potter reboot, aptly titled for at least this year as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Whereas the secrets of Headmaster Dumbledore’s school for witchcraft and wizardry was only teased in the previous marketing, its total breadth is now on display. There is the sorting hat brought out beneath the floating candles of the great hall where Harry, Hermione Granger (Arabella Stanton), and all the rest have their fates decided; the botanical gardens are setting down roots; and a wizard’s idea of chess makes its move.

Some of it even looks a bit different than how we might remember it based on the Warner Bros. movies from the 2000s. The Quidditch field outside the classrooms looks a lot humbler in size, as well as faintly more stately with its Victorian-flavored markings; and Paapa Essiedu is teasing a more youthful and, perhaps, even more openly anti-Potter Severus Snape when he menaces, “Let’s hope you show some talent with the Quidditch pitch, Potter. You’ve certainly not exhibited any in here.”

The last line feels subtly counterintuitive to how Alan Rickman might have read the same dialogue 25 years ago… and therefore desperately needed because despite new castings and other seemingly arbitrary divergences from the production design choices of Columbus and WB a quarter-century ago, the film feels inescapably familiar. Which is both its advantage as a piece of IP extension and its burden as a creative endeavor.

To be clear, it is far too early to pass any sort of judgment or critique on what HBO and showrunner Francesca Gardiner has achieved in their adaptation. But the main challenge of the series remains in the foreground throughout the sizzle reel: why make this again? Admittedly, it’s a question that’s dogged any remake going back to the days of when MGM would shamelessly churn out technicolor versions of their own black-and-white classics from 20 years prior. But at that time, there was no home media, no memes, and no YouTube clips to accompany audiences’ childhood nostalgia.

There was also no need to feel obligated to remain slavishly faithful to the same source material. The alleged advantage of the Harry Potter TV series is that by making each season run 8-10 hours, it will doubtlessly have more time to carefully dramatize every single scene and inflection of Rowling’s pen, which previously had to be amended, shortened, and even supplemented with directors’ own ideas in a cinematic format. This is visible simply by virtue of the TV show having the correct UK title with “Philosopher” in lieu of “Sorcerer.” Nonetheless, the core elements folks love in these stories—the life-defining friendships between Harry, Hermione, and Ron, Quidditch, the sorting hat, or Dumbledore’s twinkly mentorship versus Snape’s foreboding alternative—were all faithfully adapted the first-time round. Beautifully so in many instances.

The first teaser for Harry Potter intrigued me more since the lonely isolation of Harry’s childhood as an unwanted and unloved orphan in his aunt and uncle’s home is an aspect of the story the film series barely examined. Yet I imagine this trailer will win more fans based purely on it tickling the nostalgia of the aspects of the story that so many fondly cherish. It might be nice to be on the Hogwarts stomping grounds again, but I’m not convinced yet this will feel like anything more than a 20-year reminisce about glory days gone by.

Harry Potter premieres on Christmas Day on HBO and HBO Max.

Wonder Woman 3 Could Never Happen in the New DCU

Paradise is officially lost, at least for Gal Gadot. The star recently expressed her disappointment that a third Wonder Woman movie with her back as Princess Diana and Patty Jenkins directing did not come to pass. “They told me the opposite!” she said of Wonder Woman 3 on the Happy Sad Confused (via Variety) podcast. “They told me, ‘We’re going to do develop it with you.'”

Shocked though Gadot may have been, we suspect many DC fans were not surprised when news came that there would be a recasting. Even setting aside the disappointment of Wonder Woman 1984, and the fact that James Gunn‘s initial announcement of upcoming projects that he and Peter Safran were doing in the new DCU included Paradise Lost, a fantasy show set on Paradise Island, it seemed unlikely Gadot would return, particularly after Jenkins moved off Wonder Woman 3. More crucical, however, is that a third Wonder Woman movie could not happen in the new DCU because, like Superman and Batman, the character is just too important to carry over from a very different interpretation of this universe.

For those who don’t recall, Gadot’s Wonder Woman debuted in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, seemingly shoehorned into the middle of the conflict between the titular heroes in order to set up the Justice League. Even though Jenkins found a hopeful, uplifting approach to the first Wonder Woman movie, one that even managed to make Gadot’s performance read as ethereal, Diana remained ensconced in the larger plans for the DCEU. She played a central role in both versions of the Justice League, making her just as anchored to the crossover movies as Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman.

As she should be. Wonder Woman has long been understood as part of the DC Trinity, the three central figures in the comic book universe. She splits the difference between Superman’s optimism and Batman’s brooding humanity, giving us a character who longs to inspire “the world of man” but also understands all too well the desire for war. No proper representation of the DC Universe exists without Wonder Woman at the center. Which is exactly why Gadot could not return.

In the same way that David Corenswet’s affable and scrappy Superman has nothing to do with the sad, lonely god that Cavill played, Gadot’s Wonder Woman does not seem tailored to the universe Gunn is building in this decade. True, Gadot’s Wonder Woman had more sweetness than any other DCEU character—recall her delight at seeing a baby in the first film, or urging people to choose their best selves in the sequel. But she’s too tied to the brooding Batman and Superman with whom she was introduced. If they go, she must go too. It’s a pity, but it also leaves room for a different take on Wonder Woman.

Of course, at this point, someone will point out that Gunn’s DCU has carried over characters from the previous regime, particularly those involved with his first movie for the company, The Suicide Squad. Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, and Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn all first appeared in the David Ayer movie Suicide Squad, which also featured appearances by Ezra Miller’s Flash and Affleck’s Batman. Furthermore, the events of Peacemaker‘s first season are still canon to the DCU, which includes a finale where Miller’s Flash and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman appear.

However, that doesn’t appear to be as big of a problem as one would think. Gunn’s DCU is a soft reboot of the past, so that some parts are canon and others are not, even if there are some similarities. Season two of Peacemaker opened with a montage of scenes from the first season, including the part in the finale when other heroes finally arrive, just as Peacemaker and the 11th Street Kids have defeated the aliens. However, in season two, it’s the Justice Gang from Superman arriving, complete with Hawkgirl, Mister Terrific, and Guy Gardner.

As that retcon shows, Gunn is perfectly capable and willing to rewrite the past and retain things from previous versions of the universe. But Wonder Woman is too important of a character to just hand wave away. She deserves a proper introduction, and she deserves to have a place of prominence in the new universe.

Which she may be getting sooner rather than later. We’ve long known that Adria Arjona has been cast for the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, which will see several heroes involved in the fight against Brainiac, including Blue Beetle (another returnee from the previous universe), and the Green Lantern John Stewart. After initial rumblings that Arjona would be playing the space Princess Maxima, signs seem to indicate that she’ll instead be taking on the role of Wonder Woman.

If Arjona is indeed going to be Wonder Woman, then Man of Tomorrow is the perfect place for her to join the universe. The entire conceit of Brainiac attacking while ARGUS is sending metahumans off-planet to Salvation means that she’ll have a reason to finally emerge from her secluded home on Themyscira, and that she’ll have a stage to distinguish herself among the heroes.

That’s the way to bring Wonder Woman into the new DCU, far better than simply retreading a path that no longer makes sense for the universe.