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.

Mad Max: Fury Road’s Casting Process Sounds Like It Was a Battle of Its Own

It took George Miller a long time to make 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. He began developing the project around the turn of the millennium, but the director faced major setbacks, including filming location challenges, budget concerns, and the fact that his former leading man, Mel Gibson, was no longer a viable casting choice. Yet when it finally arrived, both critics and audiences seemed to agree that the post-apocalyptic action film was worth the wait.

With Gibson out, Miller had replaced him with charismatic English actor Tom Hardy, but before the movie’s cast was even locked down, a handful of stars went through what sounds like an arduous audition process to land roles in Fury Road, and this week, some new stories have emerged about the battle to make it to Miller’s wasteland.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot recently told host Josh Horowitz that she and Marvel mainstay Tom Hiddleston went through a four-hour audition for Fury Road in London that she described as “crazy,” but that they both lost out, which she was surprised by because she “felt good about the work that we did.”

Unlike Gadot, Kat Dennings (Two Broke Girls) auditioned opposite Hardy when it was her turn to impress Miller. It apparently took an incredible six hours to complete, and Dennings compared it to “an acting class, if it was the worst day of your life.”

On Threads, Dennings revealed that “At one point, they had us switch roles. They had the camera and had us like running around the corner. The worst part of it, I do believe, was when the acting coach told us to say the lines without saying the lines, encouraging us to just make noises instead of the lines.” She noted that Hardy seemed to thrive in the acting exercise, but that she was “dying.”

Dennings felt moved to share her audition story after an earlier interview with Michael Fassbender about his own Fury Road experience started recirculating on social media. Fassbender had spoken of his trial for Miller as “one of the worst auditions” he’d ever done, adding, “Oh my God, it was awful.”

Fassbender also admitted to arriving late to his audition. “I arrived, and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and they were like, ‘Fine.’ And then George Miller has this acting coach… and it was like, it was so excruciating,” he recalled. “I’ve been classically trained, so I have my process of, obviously, there’s an objective that the character has and activities that I’m gonna play to get it. So I felt like you’re teaching Granny how to suck eggs here. This guy really got on my nerves.” Ultimately, Fassbender said that he “couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

Previously, Hawkeye star Jeremy Renner revealed that his Fury Road audition was “the weirdest thing,” but also confessed that Miller’s movie was thankfully the last time he had to audition for anything. “It was a whole different experience [than most auditions]. You had to have someone watch you go through the comic and read the script, and then you leave it behind, you have to sign your life away, and this whole thing, security guards, it’s like, ‘what?’”

Though the cast that Miller landed on did a great job and Fury Road would go on to be nominated for ten Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards, winning six of them, none of the awards it was in contention for recognized the film’s performances, focusing on the direction, editing, and visuals instead.

Onslaught’s Adam Wingard Wants Michael Myers ‘Run Through a Military Filter’

There is something mythic about a climactic moment only teased in the Onslaught trailers and marketing. A mother, wounded, bloodied, and defiantly badass stands with a chainsaw-in-hand and an eyepatch-on-face against an otherworldly, demonic force with glowing eyes and heavy weaponry. The tableau might be worthy of a John Trumbull painting—or at least a John Carpenter poster.

That is of course by design for director Adam Wingard who counts the filmmaker behind The Thing, They Live, and so many other cult classics among his foundational influences—when he was a boy he even told his mother his favorite movie was Big Trouble in Little China. Yet there’s something deafeningly modern about this spooky moment in Onslaught. After all, his boogeyman-shaped villain is not a serial killer with a knife, but a veteran with an assault rifle. And his Final Girl opponent is likewise a woman who served and now endures a complicated memory of her time in America’s ever-multiplying Forever Wars. That distinctly American tension between admiring service and the horrifying war wounds they leave behind in the 21st century has been a fixation for Wingard, whose Onslaught marks the second genre movie that marries American patriotism with the trappings of horror. The other is 2014’s cult classic The Guest.

“It’s funny, I’m scared and distrustful of the government and the military industrial complex, but I have a lot of respect for veterans and people who serve, so it’s a complex situation,” Wingard observes when we catch up on the eve of his A24 release. “That’s the reason why I’m attracted to that world, because I’m torn in many directions.”

Indeed, the Tennessee-boring filmmaker grew up in a world he’s essayed through multiple genre films, be it the neglected military families of Onslaught and The Guest, or the survivalist twist on slasher fun in 2011’s breakout horror-comedy, You’re Next.

“I have a lot of friends who served, and one of them, my friend Caleb, is in the movie,” Wingard reveals. “He was actually in the Air Force and served in Iraq. He went over there during the invasion, and he’s in a couple of sequences in the movie.” Most intriguing still is his cameo in the film’s opening credits sequence, which is designed to tell the saga of another fixation for Wingard: American conspiracy theories. The title cards set up the movie’s pulpy premise of Nazi scientists and their super soldiers, but it notably includes an image that is not paranoid fiction; it’s Wingard’s childhood buddy sitting on Saddam Hussein’s throne holding an M16 in his mouth.

“I reached out to Caleb, and I was like, ‘Hey, when you were in Iraq, did you have any photos that might be interesting for me to take a look at for this?’” the co-writer recalls. When Caleb described the image, Wingard begged, “Please send that over!”

The filmmaker is playing with the more sensational and pulpy aspects of military mythology, but the aforementioned empathy for those who serve remains centered and even hallowed in the film. Wingard muses the lurid genre approach to a sensitive topic is a bit like a spoonful of sugar with your medicine, and a still welcome departure when compared to all the Iraq and Afghanistan movies around the late 2000s, which Wingard suspects “nobody really gave a shit about because they were just so depressing.” Nonetheless, he wants his movie to be a good time: “This movie deals with a lot of serious things but ultimately doesn’t take itself too seriously. If you see something in it that you know resonates with you, I think it is in there, and if you just want to have a good time, then fuck it, it works there too.”

Someone for whom it works on all levels with is Adria Arjona, the American actress who dominates the screen as a former soldier living with PTSD in a nigh abandoned trailer park alongside other vets. They will all have to make a stand together, too, when the aforementioned Nazi-engineered super soldiers come calling.

Likely best known right now for being the rebel with a touch of tragedy in the Star Wars series Andor, as well as one half of the sizzling rom-com team opposite Glen Powell in Hit Man, Arjona moves smoothly into the Final Girl role, coloring the characterization with Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor shadings of grit. For the half-Puerto Rican performer it was a personal thing as well.

“I was trained by two vets. I did a lot of research on my own, but my uncle’s also a marine, so I spoke a lot to him,” Arjona reveals. “I focused a lot on training and doing as much research to pay tribute as I possibly could.” The prep work even brought her closer to her family, although she laughs heartily when asked about the best piece of advice her uncle gave her.

“I don’t know if I could share it, he’d kill me,” she muses. Finally she allows, “He really emphasizes how real and how abandoned he felt, and that loneliness that he felt coming back kind of stayed with him. I didn’t know that side of my uncle. My uncle to me is such a happy dude and so fun, and he loves ballroom dancing now, and I just think he’s the coolest. So I got to meet my uncle in a different way because of the stories that he shared and the reality that happens behind closed doors.”

Michael Myers Timestamped in the 21st Century

The reality that informs the fantasy is there but in its bones Onslaught is always intended to echo the Carpenter-infused mix of fun and dread that makes simple stories like Michael Myers hunting babysitters with a knife in Halloween so iconic. Admittedly though, the idea of what a boogeyman might be today has shifted.

“I saw these killers as being like a Michael Myers-type thing, but I wanted to see those slasher concepts run through the filter of military,” Wingard explains. “I’d not really seen that before, and what’s interesting about that is when you have violence in a slasher film, somebody can be getting killed in the most elaborate way possible with some sort of sharp weapon, a butcher’s knife or a chainsaw, and audiences are weirdly going to have fun watching that. But when you put guns into the mix, it becomes more disturbing.”

In fact, the one genuinely terrifying moment in Onslaught doesn’t resemble an ‘80s B-movie at all. Instead modern real-world horror comes into focus when the three traumatized killing machines set their sights on a busy Friday night at a truck stop.

“Even though this is a really fun movie, I wanted to have that one serious moment where it makes you think about the reality we live in,” Wingard says, “and I wanted this movie to be the kind of thing where 30 years from now, you look back and it feels like it has a timestamp in the moment it was created, because I think that’s what all good horror films do in their own way. To me, the massacre sequence is kind of my biggest fear, this fear of a thing happening.”

It certainly captures America circa 2026, but that makes the ending so much more satisfying where Arjona’s Celeste and her tormenters alike are deliberately separated from their arsenals—she is a vet—and must meet on a literal field of combat in the old-fashioned way: chainsaws at daawn!

“I love the choice that Adam made early on in the movie where I don’t get to my arsenal,” says Arjona. “You see it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, man, this woman is equipped for everything, and the fact that I don’t make it back there was such a brilliant choice.”

It gets back to those influences that are at the heart of a kid who once cited Big Trouble in Little China his favorite film, and even today freely admits that Onslaught begins with Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and then tries to out-gonzo the faux-documentarian “true story” vibe of tough guys and gals under siege.

“From the beginning, I always called this an A + B movie,” explains Wingard, “and what I mean by that is I wanted it to deliver on all the levels that you want a B-movie to deliver on, but in a slick A+ package with all the references and experiences I’ve had as a filmmaker over the years making big movies.”

While selling the film to indie distributors, he even brought a high-resolution photo of the ghouls in another Carpenter cult darling, The Fog.

Says Wingard, “When I went to A24 to pitch the film—I basically had a meeting with them before I gave them the script because I wanted to set the stage—the one image I brought was this famous cover art of The Fog where it’s just the silhouettes of the ghost pirates, and their eyes are glowing and they’re just standing against a fog bank. I was like that’s what we’re gonna do with these killers.”

It’s something almost classically spooky in a reconfigured, modern context—and it looks downright cool when finally juxtaposed in a chainsaw duel.

Onslaught is in theaters Friday, Sept. 4.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Most Irrelevant Episode Is Also Its Best

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine regularly tops the list of the best series in the franchise for a number of reasons. The series has some of the most complex characters in all of Star Trek, starting with Captain Benjamin Sisko, played by the inimitable Avery Brooks. It has a unique theme and setting, not only taking place on a space station instead of a ship but also exploring religion and culture clashes. But perhaps most importantly of all, DS9 features the Dominion War, a threat to the entire Alpha Quadrant that forced Trek to break out of episodic television and tell an ongoing story that spanned across not just episodes but seasons.

So it’s no surprise that one of the best episodes of the series takes place in the seventh and final season, at the height of the Dominion War. What is surprising, however, is that the episode has next to nothing to do with the Dominion War at all. Instead “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” is all about Sisko and his crew playing a game of baseball, illustrating in the process everything great about the best Star Trek show.

From his very first appearance in the DS9 premiere “Emissary,” Sisko established himself as a different type of Star Trek character. Starfleet appointed the captain to lead the station Deep Space Nine right as he planned to leave the organization and focus on raising his son, Jake, after the death of his wife. The cause of his wife’s passing? The Battle of Wolf 359, the infamous Borg attack on Starfleet forces orchestrated by Jean-Luc Picard when he was transformed into Locutus of Borg.

No sooner does Sisko accept the assignment than a wormhole opens up outside the station and he’s summoned by the aliens living inside of it. To the Bajoran people, who had been recently freed from the oppressive Cardassians, the aliens in the wormholes are Prophets, the center of their religion. By being contacted by the Prophets, Sisko has become the Emissary, an important figure in their religion. Complicating things further is the fact that the wormhole eventually is revealed to connect to the Gamma Quadrant, which has been conquered by the warlike Dominion. Now that the wormhole leads to the Alpha Quadrant, Sisko must rally everyone—not just Starfleet but also the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire—into a force to repel the invaders.

Yet, throughout those heightened stakes, Sisko maintained his attention on what he loved: his son Jake, of course, his difficult but loving father Joseph, his eventual second wife Kassidy Yates, and baseball. So when the starship USS T’Kumbra docs on DS9 and its Captain Solok, an old rival from the Academy, starts talking smack about baseball, Sisko cannot help but stop everything and challenge the haughty Vulcan.

Take away the fact that half of the players are aliens and that the whole thing takes place on a holographic projection in a part of a space station, and “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” could play like a sitcom episode. Sisko wants to win at all costs and initially micromanages his subordinates to the point that they’re ready to walk out on him. But he eventually realizes that they need to band together and gets himself tossed from the game for arguing with the umpire (security chief Odo, of course). In the end, Sisko even learns to trust bumbling Rom, who winds up with a heroic moment via his well-timed bunt.

After the game, the team all convenes in Quark’s bar to celebrate their moral victory, despite the 10-1 loss on the scoreboard. The party confounds Solok, and it is illogical, even to viewers: why in the world are we pausing the epic story for a baseball game? Why does a guy as complex as Sisko have to learn such a trite lesson? What is this feel-good nonsense in the middle of a war?

Yet the answer is right in front of both Solok and the viewers. The baseball game represents everything that Starfleet and its allies are fighting for. As befitting their name, the Dominion wants to control every aspect of its subjects’ lives, turning them into an indistinct mass. The United Federation of Planets represents humanity at its best, having set aside its differences and pursuit of power, giving space for people to follow their muses.

So when Sisko leads his people in a game of baseball, he’s actually doing an act of resistance. He’s showing the Dominion and its Cardassian allies (and his own allies in the Vulcans) why they have to fight back, why they can’t give up, even when the war seems unwinnable, even when Starfleet violates its own principles with Section 31. They have to persist so that people can have the freedom to be themselves, to enjoy their lives, and to play a game of baseball.

The Most Embarrassing Moments in X-Men History

For more than 50 years, the X-Men have been the subject of some of the best superhero stories ever made. This part and parcel for a world defined by the always compelling mutant metaphor, in which social outcasts fight to save a world that fears and hates them, their ever-cool costumes, and their ever-more-complicated romantic entanglements.

And yet, the X-Men are still superheroes in an ongoing soap opera. That means they’ve had many, many embarrassing moments. Sometimes these embarrassments stem from compelling character choices (e.g., teenage Jean Grey using her powers to out Iceman), and sometimes they’re just products of their time (e.g., Dazzler). But some embarrassments are just embarrassing—useful reminders that even the coolest kids do things that are dumb from time to time.

Marvel Comics

1. Logan Is Named By a Leprechaun

Wolverine is the best at what he does, and what he does is sell a whole lot of comic books. It’s easy to see why Logan became the definitive X-Men character, what with his claws and his attitude and his improbable hair-do. Logan hits that sweet spot between tragic hero forever unable to atone for the bad things he’s done and unrepentant romantic; a man who longs for a love he can never have.

Still… doesn’t change the fact he he got his name from a leprechaun. Yeah…

In 1977’s Uncanny X-Men #103 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum, the X-Men visit Cassidy’s Keep, the ancestral home of Irish teammate Banshee and his cousin/general enemy Black Tom. When Juggernaut starts making trouble, a leprechaun called Padraic offers to help Wolverine get into the battle, addressing the Canucklehead as “Mr. Logan.” Wolverine responds in shock (in part because, as he tells the leprechaun standing in front of him, he doesn’t believe in leprechauns). Fortunately, he doesn’t have to deal with the reveal at that moment, because it will take several more issues before even Wolverine’s teammates learn about Logan’s name, and it will take decades for readers to find out where the name came from.

kitty pryde is racist in X-Men God Loves Man Kills
Marvel Comics

2. Kitty Pryde Says Slurs. A Lot.

Wolverine may be the definitive X-Men character, but Kitty Pryde is the ideal X-Men character. When she debuted in 1979’s Uncanny X-Men #129 by Claremont and John Byrne, Kitty was an awkward 13-year-old trying to make sense of her powers. She came of age with the X-Men, and while she’s one of the team’s most complex and compelling characters, she had a lot of growing pains along the way. We could include on this list her habit of changing codename and costume every couple of issues, or her romance with the legally adult Colossus (that’s obviously more on Claremont than on the character).

But easily the most embarrassing part of Kitty Pryde’s past involves her habit of using racial slurs, including the N-word. It occurs most notably in three issues written by Chris Claremont: 1982’s God Loves, Man Kills (illustrated by Brent Anderson), 1985’s Uncanny X-Men #196 (illustrated by John Romita Jr.), and 1986’s New Mutants #45 (illustrated by Jackson Guice). In each instance, Kitty’s trying to make a point about the bigotry faced by mutants, arguing that humanity too often treats people as subhuman. While we believe that a privileged kid could be so reckless with her language (and, to be fair, Kitty is Jewish, and often included slurs against her people in her litanies). But that doesn’t make these instances any less embarrassing to read today.

New Mutants Graduation Costumes
Marvel Comics

3. The New Mutants Graduation Costumes

Even though she vociferously refused to be counted among their roster, Kitty Pryde set the model for the teenagers who would become the New Mutants. Launched in an original graphic novel in 1982, the New Mutants represented the second generation of students at Xavier’s school. Although Professor X initially insisted that they never become superheroes like their predecessors, the New Mutants absolutely do find themselves constantly forced to use their powers against bad guys, walking in the footsteps of the original X-Men.

And Xavier always knew that would happen. So when their elders disappear in Uncanny X-Men Annual #10, written by Claremont and penciled by Arthur Adams, the New Mutants decide it’s time to join the big leagues. Declaring themselves the new X-Men, the team dons “graduation uniforms,” perhaps the ugliest set of costumes ever seen in a mainstream comic. It’s not just the obvious stereotypes chosen for Mirage and Karma. It’s also the extraneous pouches on Cypher’s tech jacket, the bland nothing that is Wolfsbane’s get-up, and, worst of all, the helmet that Cannonball wears—as if no one realized he’s nigh-invincible when he’s blasting! Fortunately, the graduation uniforms only make a few appearances, and the team settles into less ugly suits. At least until Cable shows up and changes them into X-Force…

Angel and Husk in X-Men Comics
Marvel Comics

4. Angel and Husk and Husk’s Mom

This entire list could consist of nothing but moments from writer Chuck Austen’s run on Uncanny X-Men, which lasted from 2002’s issue #410 to issue #443 in 2004. On one hand, Austen had been dealt a tough hand, forced to write the companion book to Grant Morrison‘s dazzling New X-Men. On the other hand, Austen responded with his own set of big swings, which often felt less like mind-benders and more like head-scratchers. Austen gave us “The Draco,” which retcons Nightcrawler from being a pure-hearted guy who happens to look like the devil, thus proving that no one should be judged for their appearances, into the actual scion of Satan, thus proving that “no, you were right to judge him.” Austen also gave us the time the X-Men almost built Iceman a new body out of their collected urine, a plan proposed by one Alex Summers (more about him shortly).

But the most embarrassing part of Austen’s run involved the romance between founding X-Man Angel and Husk, younger sister of New Mutants founder Cannonball. Thanks its sliding timeline, it’s sometimes hard to track the ages of various characters. But the relative math going from original member Angel (who even had a superhero career before joining the team) to the little sister of a New Mutant is enough to solidify a substantial age gap between the two. Worse, Angel and Husk consummates their romance at the end of the “She Lies With Angels” storyline (Uncanny X-Men #437–441, penciled by Salvador Larroca) when he lifts her up in the air above the Guthrie family home. We don’t see what happens, but we do see the various articles of clothing that drop to the ground, raining not just on their teammates but also on Husk’s mother.

Havok in Ultimate Avengers
Marvel Comics

5. Havok. Just… Havok.

It can’t be easy to live in the shadow of Cyclops, the leader of the X-Men and one of the most respected heroes in the Marvel Universe. But even if we cut him a little slack, Alex Summers, aka Havok, finds incredible new ways of making himself look stupid. Introduced in X-Men #54 by Arnold Drake and Don Heck, Havok joined after the initial team and before the 1970s relaunch. Moreover, he was a fun, if indistinct character in those days, more interesting for his relationship to Cyclops and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Polaris.

But since then, Alex’s life has been a cavalcade of mistakes. There was that time he became the Goblin King, the right-hand man to the evil Goblin Queen Madelyne Pryor. He gets himself brainwashed into serving the anti-mutant government of Genosha, and later takes a job leading the U.S. government-sponsored team X-Factor. He fumbles his relationship with Polaris time and again, tries and fails to be a good step-dad while dating a nurse named Annie, and eventually gets sent to an alternate universe filled with evil doppelgängers of his friends and allies. More recently, Alex gave a big speech about how “mutant” is a slur and shouldn’t be used and then signed up for a new incarnation of X-Factor, this one run by obviously amoral tech bros. Havok, we love you, but you’re an idiot.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Proves Video Games Can Be Action Movie Storyboards

Marvel sucks at following its comic source material. Even if that’s not always a problem, it is a commonly acknowledged fact amongst the fandom who have mourned the design and quick dispatching of Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder or the introduction of Star-Lord as Ego’s son storyline in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Marvel’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox has now allowed for the MCU to include many key figures that were missing from some of the most important story adaptations that it took from the comics. The introduction of Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, along with the origins of the mutant inhibitors, shows that Marvel is now on a new trajectory that includes a full roster of fan-favorite characters. But what if the studio didn’t need to follow comic sources at all? What if there’s another medium that can provide a stronger blueprint?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has broken the $2 billion mark at the box office — making it the highest-grossing film of this year and the 4th highest-grossing movie of all time. It has been arguably the biggest success that the MCU has seen yet, outperforming Avengers: Endgame’s $357 million box-office domestic debut with $360 million. The MCU and Sony’s fourth Spidey joint venture succeeded in something that Hollywood has been trying to do with varying results – using games as effective source material, or more accurately: the storyboard. 

Mr. Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, has been an active gamer for years, having spoken to ScreenRant in 2022 about playing Uncharted while filming Spider-Man: Homecoming. Holland would go on to play Nathan Drake, Uncharted’s main protagonist in the film adaptation. He has also been vocal about using Insomniac Games’ 2018 video game Marvel’s Spider-Man, available on Steam and PlayStation, as inspiration for the action scenes of the newest web-slinger’s film.

“For me, a lot of those finishing moves, a lot of our stuff was influenced by that stuff,” he told IGN. However, it wasn’t just him who was inspired by the games during the filming process — Holland explained in further detail how the action designers are also gamers.  

“A lot of the action designers and stunt people we had were huge gamers,” he explained. “They were able to experience things in those games that made them excited, and they would just screengrab the moves they really liked and bring them into the writers’ room and show it to me. And then we’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s sick. Let’s try to figure out how to do that for real.’” 

While the film took elements from the game, it didn’t use it as a bible for the storyline. Trying to use any other iteration of a Peter Parker adaptation would have backfired. One, because Holland’s Peter was erased from the memories of everyone he’s encountered, and two, because his Peter had strayed far from the street-level supe initially depicted by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Marvel’s Spider-Man actor Yuri Lowenthal.

This movie proved that Marvel can make street-level superheroes and be successful. The video games proved it first by giving fans what they want — immersive action. 

Immersive storytelling is now becoming a necessity to capture the attention of younger audience members. For film, that means drawing people in — making characters feel like real people. Spider-Man is a character that has always felt more human than superhero, with Parker’s empathy leading every action in both his day job and web-slinging side hustle. Marvel’s Spider-Man balanced Parker and Spider-Man extremely well. There is the understanding that both Parker and Miles Morales understand their impact on their communities and their responsibility to protect those they live alongside as public servants. 

A connection between Spider-Man and the audience is built through conversations between Miles and Peter as the former inquires about the latter’s experiences as Spider-Man. Players get to see Spider-Man’s combat intellect and his ability to improve as a fighter as the game progresses and he goes from a rookie to an experienced hero. Seeing Spider-Man as an experienced fighter versus the bumbling kid that neatly grafts onto the character’s evolution in Brand New Day. Bringing in the video games’ action moves gave Spider-Man a fighting style that Holland previously didn’t deploy. Now, his Spidey is agile, gritty, and feels like a true arachnid. 

The popularity of gaming has changed the franchising formula. Movies once acted as the light bulb to create games, furthering lore, or allowing players to make the choices they wish their favorite characters would. Now, games act as the catalyst for action movie ideals — many wishing that films would add the choreography, motifs, and dialogue that has made gaming the newest hit in immersive fan culture. 

The current Hollywood wave of game adaptations has given us HBO’s The Last of Us, Netflix’s Arcane, and Prime Video’s Fallout – all projects whose aesthetic and visual language are massively influenced by the games themselves. Next up is Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil film, which looks to really use its gaming inspiration as a storyboard. The Mary Sue reported on a Q&A panel in which Cregger spoke in-depth about bringing the Resident Evil games visuals to his upcoming film:

“I feel like people my age and younger who are raised playing a lot of video games, we have kind of inherited this visual language from the game. So this is kind of third-person perspective where you’re following the character, but you’re seeing the world around them. And as they turn and look right, we swing and we look right. When Austin [Abrams] looks up, we drop the camera down. We have to make sure that everyone is choreographed together, the operator and the actor so that so that we’re shifting our attention at the right time. That’s something that the games do so well, you know, this sort of third person visual language. It’s really effective at immersing you in a location and in a place.” 

Cregger is correct. There is a visual language to games like Resident Evil that makes their on-screen adaptations so enticing because the creators put in so much effort to become fluent in that language. From new cinematography methods to incredible special effects, games are challenging films to step their game up. And Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a hopeful step in the right direction towards a brand new day in gaming as inspiration.

Superman 2’s Adria Arjona Opens Up About Reteaming with James Gunn

Adria Arjona is careful when deciding what to say next. A charismatic and quickly ascendent actor who stole scenes in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man and Tony Gilroy’s Andor, she is now about to be seen wielding a chainsaw and some ferocious mama bear energy in Adam Wingard’s giddy throwback to John Carpenter vibes: Onslaught. And during our conversation of that upcoming film, she is thoughtful and open, revealing how her own familial history influenced her American vet heroine stuck in a Michael Myers campaign.

Yet when the topic turns to her mystery role in the upcoming Man of Tomorrow, aka Superman 2, she becomes reticent, even cautious while considering what to say of working on set with co-stars like David Corenswet (Superman) and Milly Alcock (Supergirl).

“What can I say,” Arjona muses, “because if I say I saw them, or if I didn’t see them, [is it a revelation?] I don’t know.” What she can warmly talk about is working with a filmmaker she’s known for more than a decade. A pair of them, actually, since current DC Studios co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran produced 2016’s The Belko Experiment, a clever horror/sci-fi bender that Gunn also wrote.

“It was really fun to see James Gunn,” Arjona confirms, “who’s an old friend of mine. He gave me my first movie ages ago. I was in my early 20s, and it was my first studio movie ever. [So] to go, I don’t even know, 12 years later and then be back on a set with him? It feels kind of full circle.”

Obviously both have seen their careers change extraordinarily since then, but Arjona catches herself when she says he’s changed since those heady days when he was still making R-rated genre fare.

“He’s done so much since, but he’s still the same guy that I met years ago, and I’m still the same person,” Arjona admits. “Obviously I’ve grown as an actress, so it was really cool to reunite…. On the first day on set, it can be so nerve-wracking, you don’t know who to trust, you don’t know who to lean on. You’re like, ‘Okay, how does this director work? What is his sort of vibe?’ And in this case, it was just easy because he’s my friend, and I’m like alright, I trust you. You got me, and you got my back. That was pretty cool.”

Whether that included working with Corenswet or Alcock remains to be seen, although the shroud of secrecy around Arjona’s casting has elicited an avalanche of speculation and rumors among DC faithful and comic book movie watchers. The most popular theories suggest the American star has been cast as the new DC Universe’s Wonder Woman, whilst others are convinced she will be playing a deeper cut in comic book lore apropos of Gunn’s sensibilities, including Maxima, an alien queen from the planet Almerac. We suppose the truth will come out closer to Man of Tomorrow’s 2027 release date.

What we can say for certain is that Arjona is joining quite the cast that also includes a returning Nicholas Hoult as battle-bot-ready Lex Luthor, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Eli Gathegi, Nathan Fillion, and Isabela Merced as the Justice Gang, and German actor Lars Eidinger as the menacing new supervillain on the block, Brainiac.

Man of Tomorrow opens July 9, 2027. Meanwhile come back later this week for our full conversation on Onslaught.

Coyote vs. Acme Reception Confirms the Looney Tunes Have Long Deserved Better

There are several ways to look at the Coyote vs. Acme opening this past weekend. The first is that the movie performed well past expectations and deserves a carrot in addition to a well-timed “what’s up doc?” for its effort. This picture was, after all, generally projected to earn between $11 and $14 million by industry prognosticators, yet wound up grossing $15.9 million in the U.S. and nearly $24 million worldwide in its opening weekend. That’s incredibly strong when you realize Ketchup Entertainment only spent about $10 million marketing it, a pittance compared to its estimated $70 million budget. It’s also nearly double Ridley Scott’s Dog Soldiers, which opened to $8 million in North America.

 This is definitely a victory lap for Ketchup, Looney Tunes fans, and just lovers of cinema in general. The movie Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav previously patted himself on the back as taking “courage” to bury for a tax write-off just outgrossed the debuts of four WB movies this year: Evil Dead Burn, They Will Kill You, The Bride!, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. And it did this without a major studio’s marketing apparatus (and budget) behind it.

Nonetheless, the news is still a little bittersweet when coupled with the fact it’s still “merely” the third best Looney Tunes feature film debut, opening well behind Space Jam: A New Legacy when it launched with $31 million in July 2021 despite the world still being in the throes of the pandemic, and WB in the midst of a misjudged decision to release its entire 2021 slate day-and-date in theaters and on HBO Max. It is also below the first Space Jam, which opened to $27.5 million way back in 1996, an astounding $58.5 million in 2026 dollars. It’s likewise beneath the adjusted opening of 1988’s seminal Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its $31.6 million gross when shifted for inflation.

This is understandable. Ketchup Entertainment is an independent distributor and they picked up Coyote vs. Acme only after the studio whose logo is synonymous with Looney Tunes begrudgingly shopped the title following turbulent online backlash against the shelving of yet another nearly finished film—this one now generally recognized as a good time with Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner, and the rest of the Looney Tunes gang. Its qualified success, then, is yet one final, reassuring confirmation that the Looney Tunes have wallowed under misuse for decades.

Once the crown jewel of not only Warners IP but also American animation in general (at least this side of Disney), the Looney Tunes were passed down from each generation to the next since the 1940s as an almost timeless entertainment and crash course in physical comedy and vaudeville patter banter. There are of course exceptions (hence Peppy Le Pew’s humorous cameo in Coyote vs. Acme), but even many of the dated elements have their charms. As Coyote vs. Acme director Dave Green previously told us, he first discovered who German-born character actor Peter Lorre was as a child by watching old, 1940s-era Looney Tunes shorts. And if you’ve seen his new movie, it seems safe to say he is determined to carry on that tradition.

Admittedly a significant reason the Looney Tunes persisted through the decades is because of now dying or dead distribution models: cartoon shorts created to go in front of theatrical entertainments, or between double bills, in the 1930s through ‘50s were phased out after the rise of television. Yet those same shorts found new life on syndicated TV for decades before rising to renewed heights with mini-millennials thanks to nascent children-oriented cable channels like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the 1990s.

But even before the collapse of the cable model in the 2010s, WB has systematically undermined and undervalued the Looney Tunes characters through multiple studio regimes and pivots. It wasn’t David Zaslav who quietly removed the Looney Tunes from cable rotations in favor of doomed attempts at reboots that misunderstood the anarchic joy of these characters in the 2000s. (Seriously, check out the 2005 opening for the superhero-tinged Loonatics Unleashed if you want to know what true millennial cringe looks like.) And before that, while the characters were still highly popular, the original Space Jam replaced the Marx Brothers-flavored chaos of the original Bugs Bunny shorts, or for that matter Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for an 88-minute Nike commercial where Bugs and the rest of the Toons are all BFFs suppliant to Michael Jordan.

… Still, even that seems charming when compared to Space Jam 2, which not only continued Bugs, Daffy, and the rest as subservient to the brand of new(ish) NBA legend LeBron James, but they further became a vehicle to get LeBron opposite the IP that then-studio owners AT&T really cared about. Hence awkward sequences of Merrie Melodies’ Granny doing the Trinity kick from The Matrix and LeBron riding shotgun to the War Boys on Mad Max: Fury Road in a movie ostensibly meant for children. More bizarre was a climax besotted with sneaking in extras dressed as Beetlejuice and Droogs from the originally X-rated, 50-year-old A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Yes, keeping old cartoon shorts from the FDR or Truman Years relevant was always going to be an uphill battle as time marched into the 21st century, but never mind the classics. By and large, WB executives seemed to neither care or understand the treasure trove legacy they inherited in the same way Bob Zemeckis did when he turned Who Framed  Roger Rabbit into the highest grossing movie of 1988, or its executive producer Steven Spielberg when he successfully legacy sequel’d the characters (before that term existed) in the early 1990s with Tiny Toons.

For most of the last 30 years, no one making Looney Tunes movies or TV shows seemed too concerned about the fundamentals, especially on the corporate side. But Coyote vs. Acme does. And despite having an extremely limited marketing budget while attempting to appeal to families with children who might never have heard the Road Runner say “beep, beep!” before this weekend, they were still able to do decent box office numbers.

Now imagine what could be done with these characters if they got this kind of support more than once every three decades?

5 Other Tom Cruise Movies That Deserve a Legacy Sequel

Who, in 2026, expected Tom Cruise to announce a legacy sequel to Days of Thunder? To be sure, the 1990 Tony Scott movie has its devotees, thanks to a sharp script by Hollywood legend Robert Towne and strong performances from Nicole Kidman, Robert Duvall, Michael Rooker, and others. But the movie is very much Top Gun 2.0, a retread of Cruise and Scott’s Air Force picture, just made glossier and more bombastic for being stuck on the ground.

However, it’s that very Top Gun connection that makes Days of Thunder 2 appear to be a viable idea. Few would have thought of Top Gun as anything other than a bit of blockbuster nostalgia inseparable from the 1980s. And yet, Top Gun: Maverick proved to be a huge crowd pleaser, entertaining audiences in 2022 perhaps even more than the original did in 1986. So, with that in mind, maybe Cruise knows what he’s doing when mining surprising properties for legacy sequels. Here are just a few ideas to throw his way…

Risky Business (1983)

Tom Cruise already had a few films under his belt by 1983, including playing Steve Randle in Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Outsiders. But Risky Business did serve as the debut of Tom Cruise as we know him, the ideal Hollywood movie star of the blockbuster era, complete with perfect teeth. Written and directed by Paul Brickman and supplemented by a Tangerine Dream score, Risky Business gave the 1980s their own version of The Graduate, with Cruise playing aimless rich kid Joel Goodsen, who has a coming-of-age experience with a slightly older sex worker named Lana (Rebecca De Mornay). By the end of the movie, Lana and Joel seem to have moved past their initial transactional relationship and will be embarking on a real romance.

A legacy sequel would have to catch up with a much-older Joel who has become the very thing he tried to avoid. He inherited his family’s wealth, which only builds on the job he secured through his father’s connections. Yet, Joel still finds his life unsatisfying, and so when his own wife and children leave him alone to go on a vacation, he decides to relive his past glories, which brings him back into the orbit of Lana, now running an escort service but equally unable to escape her fate. Where the original crackled with youthful energy, the sequel would be full of regret, as Joel and Lana realize that their love was never enough to bridge the class gap between them.

Legend (1985)

The passing of Tim Curry has many cinephiles thinking about Legend, Ridley Scott‘s gauzy fantasy film. Curry played the Darkness, essentially the Devil himself, infecting a world that can only be saved by the rustic Jack O’ the Green (Cruise) and Princess Lili (Mia Sara). Obviously, Curry wouldn’t be able to replicate his incredible performance. But as Prometheus and Alien: Covenant show, Scott has no problem revisiting his past work, and finding new and interesting things to say beyond the mere nostalgia buttons.

The original film had an ecological message, positioning Jack as the defender of nature. In the official ending of that movie (several alternates were also shot), Jack vanquishes the Darkness and proposes to Lili, a marriage that will bring peace to the land. The legacy sequel to Legend could reveal that Lili never truly escaped the Darkness’s thrall, and that she and Jack have been corrupted. With the land once again in peril, a new hero needs to rise and finish the work that Jack and Lili started, giving grumpy old Ridley plenty of space to (rightly!) grouch about industrialization, big corporations, and the continuing failure to save the environment.

The Color of Money (1986)

The most obvious Cruise movie on this list is The Color of Money, because The Color of Money is itself a legacy sequel! In 1986, Martin Scorsese adapted Walter Tevis’ 1984 novel The Color of Money, which was a sequel to Tevis’s 1959 novel The Hustler. The Hustler, of course, was turned into a 1961 movie that starred Paul Newman as Fast Eddie, an up-and-coming pool shark who challenged the old champion Minnesota Fats. In Scorsese’s movie, Newman reprises his role as Eddie, now an established pool master who must take on the challenge of Vincent (Cruise) a new challenger. While Eddie tries to hang onto his youth and defeat Vincent, he also tries to warn the younger man against following in his footsteps.

It would be the most natural thing in the world to simply continue the narrative for a third movie about the legacy of Minnesota Fats. Now, Vincent has become the old hand, who has all the respect that Minnesota and Fast Eddie once enjoyed, but he also has the same problems, despite the way that Eddie tried to dissuade him. A newcomer arrives in town and makes his own claim to greatness. Can Vincent succeed where his predecessors failed and teach the young one a thing or two?

Magnolia (1999)

Shortly after Days of Thunder, Cruise’s career took a surprising turn. Instead of simply reinforcing his position as a reliable box office draw, Cruise endeavored to be a respected actor, and put himself in the hands of some of the greatest auteurs of his generation. That’s how we get him playing a sexually frustrated doctor in a fantastic New York City for Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut or as the chilly assassin Vincent in Michael Mann‘s Collateral. The most interesting of these performances may be that of Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s delirious and sprawling Magnolia.

As Mackey, Cruise interrogated his own screen persona, playing a hyper-masculine figure who rallies a group of disaffected young men in seminars entitled Seduce and Destroy. Over the course of Magnolia, we see how Frank’s misogyny stems in part from that of his father, a powerful television producer who abandoned his sick wife, leaving Frank to care for his dying mother alone. A legacy sequel could involve Frank reconciling with his past behavior, long after his father’s own death, while a whole new generation of young men pick up the Seduce and Destroy methods that he once taught. Would Anderson make a sequel to Magnolia? That seems unlikely, but in a world where David Fincher is making a sequel to Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, anything is possible.

Minority Report (2002)

Few Cruise movies lend themselves to sequels better than Minority Report, his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Adapted from the Philip K. Dick story in a script written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, Minority Report takes place in a future where precognitives allow the police to see crimes before they happen. When Chief John Anderton of the Precrime Unit (Cruise) is charged with murder, he must not only prove that didn’t commit the crime, but that he wouldn’t commit the crime. In doing so, Anderton reveals a conspiracy that leads all the way to the unit’s director, Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow).

Apropos of a Spielberg film, Minority Report ends on a happy note, with the precogs freed from the job they were forced to do and allowed to live a life of peace. But as demonstrated by The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg can get pretty nasty when he does a sequel. So a Minority Report sequel would involve Anderton getting called back into service after a new variation of the precog division gets put in place. When another young agent finds himself falsely accused, Anderton’s the one person who knows how to upset the system, and bring about justice once and for all.

Onslaught Review: Adria Arjona Channels John Carpenter Vibes

Forty years ago, a movie like Adam Wingard’s Onslaught would have all the markings of a John Carpenter flight of fancy. This is after all a picture with diabolical Nazi scientists working for the U.S. government; experimental super soldiers who look ever so much like masked, Michael Myers-shaped serial killers; and one woman who is smart and badass enough to take it all on with a pint-sized child by her side. (Okay, so there’s a dash of James Cameron in there too.)

But what’s remarkable about the 2026 revival of such delightfully lurid genre trappings is how much more visceral and immediate it feels in a current climate where Nazi-saluting billionaires hold powerful, if brief, positions in the U.S. government, and veterans like Adria Arjona’s reluctant mama bear Celeste seem often left to fend for themselves. By virtue of being an A24 release, there is definitely a high-minded ambition to director Wingard and co-writer Simon Barrett’s approach, right down to the movie confronting the most popular boogeyman of the 2020s zeitgeist: that unkillable beast we call “trauma.” And yet, these are also the happy horror mavens of slippery tonal mashups like You’re Next and The Guest. So after nearly a decade in the blockbuster realm of studio IP (particularly for Wingard), they seem energized and eager to strut along the demented stomping grounds of their youth, and to this time play it as slick as the obvious Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog influences.

In other words, Onslaught is simply cool as hell whenever it lets Arjona rip, often quite literally once a chainsaw gets involved.

Before that cathartic release, however, the baser pleasures of Onslaught lie in how patient the picture is during an economical first act that doesn’t waste time, even as it makes sure to stop and savor the lasciviousness of its table-setting. Hence before we are properly introduced to our heroine in the present, we first meet Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), the grandson of a German expat who retains his family’s unhealthy interests in science and eugenics. He also could fit just as easily in a ‘70s grindhouse flick (or a mid-2000s revival from a certain auteur) as Wingard establishes how suppliant he is in his adopted homeland when old Hans crawls on hands and knees before the toes of his handler and wife (a vamping Rebecca Hall).

It seems Hans has been experimenting on seriously wounded veterans from America’s various Forever Wars in the deserts and has perfected three killing machines whose brute force cannot stop, will not stop, until they meet an immovable object. Her name’s Celeste.

Also a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Celeste is content enough to make ends meet by working as the superintendent (or perhaps glorified kapo) for the other vets who populate a remote trailer park in the American Southwest. She’s friendly with her avuncular neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and tolerates the rants of her conspiracy theorist deadbeat tenant Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), but mostly wants to keep her head down and lick her wounds in perpetuity. That is a problem for her ex-husband, though, and more pertinently their young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), whom Celeste sees only every other weekend.

Unfortunately, today turns out to fall on the same weekend where the Nazi down the road reaches a crescendo in his work, raising serious questions as to whether this trailer park of abandoned American soldiers was purposefully left in the path of any potential lab breaks? There are plenty of other civilians, too, who get in the way of the three murderous super-soldiers, leading to a rather meek and stoned government fixer (Drew Starkey) to clean up the mess by any means necessary.

Onslaught has plenty of subtextual ice beneath its calm surface, but the shrewdness of Wingard and Barrett’s approach is their refusal to dive deeper, at least in terms of exposition or superfluous dialogue. The worldbuilding of the film relies almost wholly on aesthetics and “vibes,” to use the modern online parlance. The picture retains the inviting sleek neons of Wingard’s detour into Godzilla vs. Kong kitsch, but it pairs nicely here with the stark, barren landscapes of the desert at night.

Shot mostly in crisp wide and medium shots and diegetic lighting, the darkness of the red waste juxtaposes the otherworldly fluorescence of a gas station’s overhang, and the multitude of stars bear witness to the carnage exacted on a trailer park. The film echoes the primal simplicity of Carpenter’s best films in the 1970s and ‘80s while chasing The Guest team’s more current muses.

One of those is the aforementioned cynicism and paranoia of governmental authority that feels a lot less like a pulp novel in 2026, but it is also the dread of parental responsibility adorned by Celeste. Embodying that woman, Arjona appears to be on the cusp of stardom. Already a beguiling presence in Hit Man, and a haunting one in Andor, she gets to tap into some Sigourney Weaver and modern Jamie Lee Curtis grit here and looks ripped straight from a Drew Struzan poster when rocking a chainsaw in one hand and a makeshift eyepatch-bandana across her face.

The sparseness of the film’s overall approach, however, doesn’t leave her with enough firm ground to stand on if the goal is to create a 21st century Ripley. Arjona and the film find quiet joys to layer the character when Celeste teaches her estranged daughter how to eat a burrito, but there’s not enough meat between the characters of mother and daughter to really drive the emotional heft of the film.

Truthfully, Onslaught is just too eager to bask in the weird-kid choices of Dan Stevens, who three films in appears to be a kind of muse for Wingard, or occasionally drop the gallows fun for a genuinely disturbing sequence like when the super soldiers mow down an entire convenience store of civilians. Even a third act reveal about one of the merciless Shapes’ past doesn’t quite add the gravitas Onslaught might hope to the final showdown between past and present, Celeste and the vet they now solely refer to as “The Butcher.”

Nevertheless, Onslaught rips and roars when it stops to smell the gasoline. The movie and its makers seem to genuinely fret about the direction the world has taken, even in the scant 12 years since The Guest last visited the veteran experience in genre uniform, and now they examine it with a retro sense of aesthetic cool that’s grown increasingly rare. Sometimes you just want to see mom grab the sniper rifle, say everything is going to be alright, and then expel the boogeyman in a blaze of glory. Onslaught offers that by the buckshot-full.

Onslaught is in theaters on Friday, Sept. 4.

Lanterns Has Finally Fixed John Stewart’s Backstory

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 3.

Everyone going into Lanterns knew there would be weird stuff. After all, the HBO series adapts a long-running DC Comics franchise about space cops who can make constructs of whatever they imagine by channelling their willpower through a wishing ring. But even the most dedicated GL fan was probably shocked by the opening of the premiere episode, in which John Stewart Sr. stood his young son in front of the family garage, drew his pistol, and shot an apple off the boy’s head.

The scene shocks viewers because of the father’s utterly bizarre behavior and because of the boy’s surprising calmness as it happens. Moreover, it shocks viewers because the scene depicts a home life for John Stewart that differs from the one established in comics. With the latest episode, “OutKast,” Lanterns fully develops that home life in a way that continues to diverge from portrayals of John Stewart elsewhere, but manages to synthesize the various versions of the character across media, resulting in a surprisingly coherent look at one of DC’s most complicated characters.

Green Lantern Rising

If you ask the average superhero fan who John Stewart is, they’ll probably tell you that he’s a Green Lantern, that he’s stoic and tough, and that he’s a former Marine. Those same fans would be shocked to go back and read John’s first appearance in Green Lantern #87 (1971), part of the legendary Green Lantern/Green Arrow run by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. That issue begins with Guy Gardner, Hal Jordan’s emergency back-up on Earth, getting injured and put into a coma. With Guy out of commission, the Guardians select a new potential replacement and send Hal to inner-city Detroit to train him.

Before introducing himself, Hal stands on a rooftop and watches John intercede when a pair of police officers hassle some Black men playing dominos on the sidewalk. John’s cocky attitude offends Hal, who pleads with the Guardians one last time to reconsider their choice. When they refuse, Hal begins training John, and his discomfort only grows. John almost immediately proves himself capable of wielding the ring, but he also refuses to wear a mask, he takes “the superhero gig” for “laughs,” and hesitates while rescuing a racist senator and presidential hopeful from an assassination attempt, making a blackface joke when the hate-monger gets doused with oil.

Stewart has a few more appearances around the DC Universe, but it’s Len Wein who upped John’s status. When Wein became the main writer on Green Lantern, he brought John up to the big leagues, making him Earth’s full-time Lantern in issue #185 (1985), penciled by Dave Gibbons. Wein, and especially his successor Steve Englehart, developed John into a three-dimensional character, keeping his passion for social justice but allowing him to be a full person, not just a loud caricature. Under their tenure, John became fully integrated into the DC Universe, even serving on the Justice League of America… a tenure that does not go well for him.

John Stewart’s Odyssey

The first major change in John’s personality comes shortly thereafter, in one of the clunkiest stories in the character’s history. In 1988, DC published Cosmic Odyssey, an event comic written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Mike Mignola.

In this New Gods-focused four-part story, the Justice League fights against a universe-ending threat, splitting into groups to save various planets. John and Martian Manhunter get sent to Xanshi to fight off an attack, which includes a bomb at the center of the planet. Full of himself, John captures Martian Manhunter in a bubble and sends John away to defuse the bomb himself. But when he finds it, John discovers that the bomb is yellow—the one weakness of a Green Lantern ring at the time—and the planet explodes.

John has been written as a braggart, but that was out of character, even for the time (rumor has it that Starlin mixed up John Stewart with Guy Gardner, and somehow it got past editorial). Yet, it gave John pathos, especially when the Green Lantern Corps was destroyed by Sinestro at the end of Englehart’s run that same year, leaving only a few Lanterns in the entire universe. During that period, the supervillain Star Sapphire murdered John Stewart’s wife and fellow Lantern Katma Tui in a story published in 1988’s Action Comics #601, by Christopher Priest and Gil Kane, leaving him utterly devastated.

Thus, when the disgraced writer Gerard Jones started writing a relaunched Green Lantern book in 1990, he had a broken, disillusioned John to work with. Jones used that guilt to continue building on John throughout Green Lantern, and especially in the spinoff series Green Lantern: Mosaic, drawn by Cully Hamner, which ran 18 issues from 1992 to 1993. That series followed Stewart as he tried to protect a planet comprised of cities from alien worlds (and one from West Virginia, foreshadowing Lanterns‘s depiction of Rushville, Nebraska). Jones portrayed John as a mosaic himself, deeply introverted and insecure about where he belonged. For every time he asserted himself, whether that be telling off the Guardians or Jordan, John fell back into a period of introspection and questioning.

That depiction was the norm for most of Stewart’s stories that followed, especially after he gets paralyzed after a fight with the villain Grayven. Even after regaining his ability to walk and rejoining the Justice League in the early 2000s, writers portray John as thoughtful and sensitive. That is, until they start taking cues from a particular TV show.

A Whole New League

On November 17, 2001, the first episode of Justice League hit screens. A spinoff of Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League, and especially its successor Justice League Unlimited, told epic stories befitting the world’s greatest heroes. The team’s main lineup mostly followed the big seven heroes of the DC Universe, swapping out Aquaman with Hawkwoman and making John Stewart instead of Jordan or Kyle Rayner the team GL.

Voiced by Phil LaMarr, John Stewart of Justice League was very different from any depiction we’ve seen before. He wasn’t just quiet and thoughtful, nor was he given to any sort of braggadocio. Instead, he was tough and quiet, making him easy to pair with that show’s young and brash Flash. Moreover, Justice League introduced a totally different backstory for John, making him a Marine with the mind of a tactician.

As often happens, this version of John Stewart began to make its way into the comics. In particular, once Geoff Johns started revamping Green Lantern in 2004, John became canonically a tough, focused Marine. Furthermore, Johns made Stewarts’s military record canon, even including a flashback that showed John and his fellow Marines getting into a fight with Jordan and his Air Force pals. By the time the DC Universe rebooted with the New 52 in 2011, and then un-rebooted with Rebirth in 2016, the quiet arcitect John Stewart was gone and only the tough Marine remained.

Lanterns’s New Light

That complicated history makes “OutKast” all the more remarkable. As we saw in that episode and its predecessors, John is once again a Marine, someone trained to take orders and follow them to the letter. He waits patiently to assassinate his target, neglecting all other needs, in the same way he’s been waiting for his chance at the ring. But “OutKast” also shows that this destiny was thrust upon him. John has the soul of an artist, and would have rather spent his time designing new buildings and sketching birds than doing military drills.

To its credit, and especially to the credit of Aaron Pierre and his multifaceted performance, both of these qualities feel true to the character on screen. Finally, John Stewart is everything we’ve seen in the comics: he is passionate, he is thoughtful, he is proficient. He knows how to take orders, he’s willing to push back against authority, and he is deeply sensitive.

Lanterns makes clear what has only been suggested so far by the comics and other media, that John Stewart is perhaps the most three-dimensional superhero in the DC Universe.

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

Lanterns Episode 3 Review: Shedding Light on John Stewart

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 3.

For its first two episodes, Lanterns has been very much an HBO show and a Chris Mundy show, mirroring the showrunner’s work on True Detective and Ozark. The addition of Ozark star Laura Linney to the Lanterns cast might seem to reinforce that feeling, but episode three, “OutKast,” gives space for the other two creators to shine, Damon Lindelof and Tom King. Part high-concept surreality in the vein of Lindelof’s work on The Leftovers and Watchmen, and part meditation on war-related trauma in which King specializes, Lanterns lets the mystery be for a while to take a deep look into John Stewart.

As such, “OutKast” finally lets Aaron Pierre cut loose, no longer forcing him to keep Stewart’s emotions in check. The result is a complex piece of television that sees Lanterns embracing its sci-fi concepts and using them for rich, humane storytelling.

As Hal has pointed out and Green Lantern readers already know, the ring chooses its wearer, scanning the planet until it finds someone without fear. However, John was specifically chosen by the Guardians, which makes him an unusual case. In “OutKast,” we see how that selection process works. We’re taken back to presumably 1986, the night that Abin Sur crashed in Rushville and the ring eventually chose Hal Jordan. Before landing on Jordan, the ring arrived at the Stewart home and asked John Sr. (J. Alphonse Nicholson) if he was afraid. Unlike Hal, the elder Stewart reacted rationally to the presence of a green bubble appearing in his room and levitating him above his bed, answering, “Yes.”

The event leaves John Sr. traumatized and emasculated, forcing his wife Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) to hold the family together. When a Guardian (Linney) arrives at the Stewart house to offer her condolences. Impressed by Bernadette’s temerity, the Guardian floats the idea of training John (played by Jayce Eiland as a boy and Cairo Cash Lee as a teen, both excellent) to be the perfect Green Lantern, stripping him of fear from birth. This training not only leads to the William Tell games that we saw in the pilot, but also creates tension within himself and with his brothers. In particular, being forced to become a fearless soldier, namely a Marine sniper, destroys the gentle, artist inside of John.

For as much as “OutKast” breaks from John’s established backstory in the comics, it does smooth over the character’s development over the years. While he started out as a community activist in his first appearance in Green Lantern #87 (1971), John soon became a sensitive architect, only for the animated series Justice League to reimagine him as a no-nonsense Marine, something carried over into the comics. In “OutKast,” writer Vanessa Baden Kelly and director Stephen Williams find a middle way through those characterizations, making John into a man with a soul of an artist, the demeanor of a soldier, and a longing for connection to his family and Black culture in general.

It’s one thing to write a character with so many multitudes, and quite another to embody it, which makes Aaron Pierre’s work here particularly remarkable. When John reconvenes with the Guardian in 2016, as part of a time-bending interview process, Pierre has space to express his emotions, his frustration with how his life has unfolded and his desire for it to gain meaning by getting the ring long since promised him. We see how John developed his ability to take orders with his interactions with a gruff commanding officer, but we also see his first signs of hating Jordan, when the Green Lantern disrupts John’s mission by capturing his target.

Just as good are the supporting cast, particularly Nicholson and Jones as John’s parents. Through them, we see how John developed the two sides of his personality, albeit in a surprising way. Despite his exterior as a soldier, John Sr. has the sensitive side that makes his son such a great artist, something Nicholson conveys with an expressive face, which seems to be on the verge of tears, even when firing a weapon. Conversely, Jones conveys Bernadette’s genuine care for her family through a steely exterior, one that offsets the nurturing nature one would expect of a mother and teacher.

Thanks to these performances, John Sr. and Bernadette advance a theme that Lanterns has been exploring since its pilot, this question of fear and fate. Social expectations prevent either of John’s parents from being who they want to be, forcing his father to take on some sort of masculinity and his mother to be feminine, despite the fact that the expression doesn’t match either person’s desire and personality. And yet, the parents cannot help but inflict the same on their child, grinding away the person he wants to be in pursuit of the ideal superhero, a Green Lantern.

That’s a bold move, one that we rarely see in superhero stories. Even when it requires some sort of sacrifice for Bruce Wayne to be Batman or Peter Parker to be Spider-Man, their stories tend to frame the moment of putting on the costume as some sort of victory, the fulfillment of identity. Thus far, it doesn’t seem like the same will be true of John Stewart. The ring may very well be his, just as Hal Jordan thinks. But embracing his destiny as Green Lantern may, ironically, be the culmination of John Stewart’s worst fears.

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

Green Lantern Illuminations:

  • Great as Linney is, some may be disappointed that we don’t just get a proper on-screen Guardian. But there is comic book precedent for a human-looking Guardian, as Appa Ali Apsa a.k.a. Old Timer or O.T. took on the appearance of an older white man to travel the country with Hal and Oliver Queen in Green Lantern/Green Arrow.
  • Speaking of Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Guardian’s confusion about American racism and our terms for race recalls the infamous scene from issue #76 (1970) by John Stewart’s creators Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. There, an elderly Black man accosts Hal Jordan and accosts him for helping the orange-skins, the blue-skins, and the purple-skins, but never doing anything for the Black-skins.
  • “OutKast” rewrites John Stewart’s backstory, which means that we don’t get his sister Ellie, who has been recently added to the comics as a living hard-light construct. But we also don’t have to deal with the terrible story from Green Lantern #147 (2002), in which John suddenly remembers that he killed his kid sister Rose in a car accident.
  • John’s target has the code name Grey Wolf. Grey Wolf is also the name of the Chechen Batman, part of the international group Batman Incorporated, and was first introduced in 2022’s Batman Annual #1 by Ed Brisson and John Timms.

Rogue Fortune Puts a Puzzle-Fueled Twist on Dungeon-Crawlers

Between games like Hades and Diablo, the dungeon-crawler space has plenty of fan-favorite titles, but Glowmade is bringing something fresh and vibrantly exciting to the genre with its upcoming game Rogue Fortune. Developed by Glowmade and unveiled as part of Gamescom 2026’s Xbox Showcase, the game is set for a 2027 launch on on Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 5, and the Nintendo Switch 2. In addition to the expected hack-and-slash action and exploration with a roguelite mechanic to keep the experience surprising across every playthrough, the game also introduces a puzzle-solving mechanic.

Rogue Fortune has players delve into dungeons to recover as much loot as they can, with a variety of character classes available for them to choose from, each with their own unique mechanics. But the most intriguing element within the game has players regularly organize relics with geometric components that they’ve obtained as they proceed on their gold-grabbing quest. These puzzle configurations have different effects and perks depending on how they’re organized as players harness their arcane potential. It was this mechanic that got Glowmade particularly excited in the project while distinguishing it from the other dungeon-crawlers that are already out.

“We just love these games and wanted to make one that’s super cool. We don’t just want to make the same game again because that’s been done and done really, really well,” explains Glowmade studio head and co-founder Jonny Hopper in an exclusive interview with Den of Geek. “Mike Green, who is our design director, he’s been doodling with this tetromino-shaped puzzle mechanic in his head for a while now. He’s always wanted to use it. There are a couple of examples, but there isn’t really anything that does this well or this particular kind of inventory management puzzle in a dungeon crawler like this. That’s a fun challenge and a gap.”

These puzzle pieces are assembled at locations found throughout the various levels of the dungeons, giving players a chance to reconfigure their build before diving back into the hack-and-slash action. This isn’t just done by sticking as many relic pieces together as players can but by organizing and interfacing them together to get the most out of their potential. This adds another major strategic element to the game and one that the creative team at Glowmade can’t wait to see how players use to their advantage once the game launches.

“The thing that I’m really looking forward to seeing is when people start to ‘break’ the game,” Hopper shares. “They feel like they’ve made a build that’s so OP that it shouldn’t be allowed. We probably know that it can happen and we haven’t tried to stop it because it’s fun and rewarding. You become like a real force of destruction throughout the level. That’s a really exciting thing to see.”

More than just providing an underlying narrative premise, the gold-grabbing element to Rogue Fortune is also a major part of its gameplay and the strategy on how to proceed. Players constantly are picking up gold as they progress through dungeons but every major action and setback also costs them gold, taking away from the loot they’ve accumulated so far on a given playthrough. Upon completing a level, players can leave the dungeon with the treasure that they’ve gathered or run the risk of delving deeper to gain even more loot or even spend some of their gold to upgrade their character. This adds another strategic element to the game informing how players proceed.

“The game becomes different because you’re not blitzing about dodging everything,” observes Hopper. “You’ve got to think about how you approach it differently. There is that strategic element that I think is really interesting. Just because you can complete the game on the default character class does not necessarily mean that you’re going to breeze through.”

While so many dungeon-crawlers feel perpetually shrouded in darkness, Rogue Fortune provides players with much more vibrant environments to explore. The classic medieval fantasy tropes are still there, but there is a brighter art design with colorful magic and warmer levels than many fans of the genre may be accustomed to. For Glowmade, this fit right in with the studio’s sensibilities as they were designing and building the game.

“If you saw King of Meat, you know that it was different but also recognizably similar in terms of the art style. Adam Sibbick is our art director and he’s able to put these wonderful things in his head onto paper,” Hopper adds. “To use the skills of the people that we’ve got, we let them build that house style and marry that with the tone of the game. Just because it’s a dungeon, why does it have to be dark? It’s magical, arcane, and mysterious, so how does that manifest itself? With orbs of light, lava, and loads of weird stuff that we haven’t shown yet. All of that stuff is just cool and a slightly different take on it.”

Set for a multiplatform release in 2027, Rogue Fortune is ready to bring a unique twist on the dungeon-crawler genre, one that favors strategy on multiple fronts and promises that no two playthroughs will be alike. Bringing fresh and vibrant fun, the upcoming indie game retains what makes the genre so appealing while subtly redefining what its gameplay can be.

Rogue Fortune is developed by Glowmade and will be released in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Beyond The Avengers: Marvel’s Forgotten Other Superhero Teams

Even those most excited for Avengers: Doomsday have to admit that this upcoming Avengers film isn’t really an Avengers film. In fact, none of the Avengers movies past Age of Ultron have really been about a discrete team of Earth’s mightiest heroes. And that’s okay, because the Marvel Universe is vast and rich, but the Avengers have name recognition. So if the MCU wants to capture the feel of a major crossover event, they’re going to have to shove everyone under the Avengers banner, even if not everyone’s a member.

The comics don’t have that problem, which means that there’s much more room for variety on the page. In the more than 85 years since Marvel Comics #1 hit shelves, countless combinations of superheroes have gotten together under various names. None match the grandeur of the Avengers or the popularity of the X-Men, but these 10 all deserve more attention, even if the average moviegoer didn’t know they exist.

Agents of Atlas

We all know about SHIELD, the high-tech espionage agency originally fronted by Nick Fury. Ever since Samuel L. Jackson appeared at the end of 2008’s Iron Man as Fury, SHIELD has been at the center of the superhero universe. But in the comics, things are a little different, and SHIELD had a predecessor in the form of the Agents of Atlas.

First properly introduced in the 2006 miniseries Agents of Atlas, by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk, the team was an early group of superheroes brought together in the 1950s to deal with extraordinary threats. Under the guidance of FBI Agent Jimmy Woo, the team consists of heroes from the early days of Marvel Comics, back when they were called Atlas Comics. There’s the goddess Venus and Namor’s cousin Namora, adventurer Jann of the Jungle, intelligent simian Gorilla-Man, and spaceman Marvel Boy. Together, the group went on pulp adventures that brought the early days of superheroes into the modern era.

Champions

Strange as it might seem now, the first two Avenges line-ups didn’t make much sense. The first was just a collection of Marvel’s most popular heroes, and the second was a batch of also-rans who just got recruited into the big leagues. But by 1975, the Avengers were solidified as Marvel’s flagship team, so the company tried to put together another grab back of characters. Enter, the Champions, who debuted in 1975’s The Champions #1, by Jenny Blake Isabella and Don Heck.

The original line-up was led by Hercules, who gathered together the most obvious group of LA-based heroes to fight Pluto, god of the underworld. Obviously, you need Ghost Rider, a supernatural character. But then Herc also grabs the super spy Black Widow, and former X-Men Angel and Iceman. Somehow, the team won and managed to hold a series for three more years, only to fall into obscurity, until a new, young set of Champions—led by Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and Miles Morales—formed in the 2010s.

Defenders

Like the Champions, the Defenders were a grab bag team. Unlike the Champions, that inconsistency was a feature, not a bug. The group who started in 1971’s Marvel Feature #1, by Roy Thomas and Ross Andru, consisted of Doctor Strange, Hulk, and Namor, three guys who had nothing in common and didn’t want to be around each other. Yet, they recognized that their powers actually worked well together, and thus a “non-team” was born.

The non-team concept never made much sense, but it did allow the Defenders to keep taking on more and more unlikely members. Characters rotated in and out, welcoming Silver Surfer and Doctor Strange’s partner Clea, and eventually being led by Nighthawk of all people. The rotating cast makes for some fun deep dives, but it also makes it hard for the book to hold an audience, forever resigning the Defenders to the c-tier of superhero teams.

Alpha Flight

In the movies, the Avengers are presented as an international team, under the guidance the shadowy faces from around the world who run SHIELD. In the comics, the Avengers tend to work for the American government, despite counting non-Americans such as Black Panther and Thor as members. Thus, various other countries have their own super-teams in the Marvel Universe, including Russia’s Winter Guard and Canada’s Alpha Flight.

But Alpha Flight is more than a collection of the mightiest heroes of the Great White North. They’re inextricably tied to Department H, the government agency that participated in the Weapon X program that turned Logan into the killing machine known as Wolverine. Thus, Alpha Flight not only often has something sinister about it, but the team often intersects with mutants, having first appeared in 1979’s Uncanny X-Men #179, by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. Yet, despite the sometimes nefarious nature of their bosses, Alpha Flight often makes for thrilling stories, thanks to its unusual line-up, which includes the jovial Puck, the gamma-irradiated Sasquatch, and the arrogant mutant Northstar.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Before rushing to the comments to point out that everybody knows about the Guardians of the Galaxy, note that I’m not talking about Starlord and his band of 21st century adventurers. That line-up of the team didn’t exist until 2006, when Marvel relaunched all of its cosmic characters. No, I’m referring to the original Guardians of the Galaxy from 1968’s Marvel Super-Heroes #18 by Arnold Drake and Gene Colan. That story took place in they 3007, when Charlie-27 returns home to his planet Jupiter to find it conquered by the reptilian Badoon. Together with Vance Astro, Martinex, and Yondu—all survivors of other conquered planets—Charlie-27 forms a resistance group called the Guardians of the Galaxy.

For the next few decades, the Guardians were mostly a curio, showing up to join the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One or fighting alongside the Defenders whenever time-travel shenanigans occurred. In 1990, the team finally got its own book, written and penciled by superstar artist Jim Valentino. Valentino’s book framed the Guardians as the Avengers of the future, and turned the resistance tale central to the concept into something more hopeful and superheroic… at least until Star-Lord showed up to hog all the fun.

Heroes for Hire

MCU fans might be a little miffed that the description of the Defenders above made no mention of Luke Cage or Iron Fist. That’s because those guys were never members of the Defenders in the world of the comics. Instead, they had their own team called the Heroes for Hire, something very different than what we saw on screen. As their name suggests, the Heroes for Hire were working-class superheroes, people who did good deeds but needed to earn a living, and thus charged for their services.

The first incarnation of the Heroes for Hire were less a team and more of a duo, a business venture that Luke Cage and Danny Rand put together in 1978’s Power Man and Iron Fist #54, by Ed Hannigan and Lee Elias. In the fallout of the Onslaught event that killed the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, Danny and the Golden Age Human Torch (more on him in a minute) launch a new Heroes for Hire, one that eventually includes Ant-Man, She-Hulk, Deadpool, and, yes, Luke Cage. That incarnation remains in place today, albeit with a rotating crowd, reminding us that even the good guys need a pay day.

Invaders

Speaking of Golden Age heroes, the very first superhero team in the Marvel Universe came long before Marvel Comics existed… sort of. Timely Comics, Marvel’s predecessor, first gathered together its most popular characters in 1946’s All-Winners Comics #19, written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and penciled by various artists. That team included Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch (originally an android, not Johnny Storm) and his sidekick Toro, Namor, the patriotic Miss America, and a yellow-clad speedster called… the Whizzer. No, this isn’t a Garth Ennis comic.

Dubbed “the All-Winners Squad,” that team only had one further appearance before the collapse of the superhero market meant that Timely would focus on teen romance and sci-fi comics instead. But after superheroes were a hit again, writer Roy Thomas and artist Sal Buscema revisited the idea in 1969’s Avengers #71. There, the All-Winners Squad were retconned into the Invaders, a superhero team devoted to fighting the Axis Powers (with none of the racism that marked the comics actually published in World War II). Since then, modern versions of the Invaders have come and gone, with the now-grown Winter Soldier or one-time Captain America John Walker a.k.a. U.S. Agent on the team. But they’ll always be in the shadow of the original All-Winners.

New Warriors

Stan Lee famously hated teen sidekicks, which is why he resurrected Captain America without poor Bucky in the 1960s. But he did see the value of teen superheroes like Spider-Man, and soon the Marvel Universe had a handful of super-powered adolescents running around, but no equivalent to the Teen Titans to gather them together. But the X-Men did have the New Mutants, the next generation studying at Xavier’s school, so Marvel decided to give the Avengers their own analogue in the New Warriors.

Debuting in 1989’s The Mighty Thor #411, by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz, the New Warriors were bunch of superpowered teams assembled by skate-boarding hero Night Stalker to wage a war on crime. The first group included the mutants Firestar and Marvel Boy, the Green Lantern analogue Nova, Namor’s relative Namorita, and the upbeat Speedball. Eventually, the team would be defined by ‘90s edge, particularly as it gains members such as the angry and aptly-named Rage, and as Nova runs around in a red muscle shirt as a costume. For fans of the team, the silliness is part of the appeal of the New Warriors, which is why the concept gets updated (and becomes immediately dated) every decade or so.

Power Pack

For those who like young heroes, but don’t want to deal with adolescent angst, there’s the Power Pack, the cutest bunch of moppets in the Marvel U. Created in 1984 by legendary X-Men editor and writer Louise Simonson and artist June Brigman, the Power Pack brought some much-needed whimsy to the Bronze Age. The Power Pack generally consists of four siblings in the Powers family. Eldest Alex a.k.a. Gee can control gravity. Julie a.k.a. Lightspeed leaves a rainbow trail when she flies. Jack the Mass Master can change the size and density of things, while Katie a.k.a. Energizer can shoot power balls.

The kids gained their abilities when the horse-like alien Aelfyre Whitemane learns that their father has discovered an anti-matter converter. To protect Dr. Power from the evil Snarks, Whitemane (or “Whitey”) imbues the children with special abilities, setting off a series of fun adventures. Throughout the years, the Power Pack has gained new members, most notably Franklin Richards of the Fantastic Four, and have taken on new names. But the team always works best when it’s just a family, defending the Earth together.

X-Statx

If the New Warriors were too edgy for some, just wait until you get a load of the X-Statix. Created by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred and introduced in 2001’s X-Force #116 as, yes, a new version of X-Force, the X-Statix applied early 2000s cynicism and media savvy to the world of mutants. This team were not feared and hated; they were loved and admired, at least from afar. The team was put together by the mysterious Coach, who worked with the government and media conglomerates to create a sexy group of doomed heroes who would become ratings gold.

Even after changing their name to the X-Statix, the team embraced that ethos. Random and shocking deaths could happen at any time, which could make the book feel cynical were the characters not so well-drawn. Team leader Mister Sensitive, whose mutant ability gave him senses heightened to an almost debilitating degree, and the teleport U-Go Girl prove to be among the most complex characters in the Marvel Universe at the time. As befits the central concept, X-Statix had trouble sustaining the mixture of strong character work and a death drive, so the team rarely lives on past its initial run (save for inexplicable breakout character Doop). But those first issues are enough to establish the X-Statix as one of Marvel’s best, most underrated teams.

40 Years Later, People Still Misunderstand the End of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

When moviegoers walked out of theaters in September of 1986, having just watched David Lynch‘s fourth film, Blue Velvet, they felt a variety of emotions. Some were disgusted by the existence of people like Frank Booth, Dennis Hopper’s aggressive embodiment of evil. Some were angry at suburbs and small towns, the idyllic places that Lynch just laid bare in his film. And some were angry at Lynch himself, for having submitted cinematic scion Isabella Rossellini to such debasement on screen.

Few, if anyone, were feeling optimistic. This despite the fact that, for all of its nastiness, Blue Velvet ends on a hopeful note. After all that’s happened, small-town boy Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and his high school girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) look out the kitchen window to see a robin perched on a branch. After the couple takes a few minutes to bask in the sight, a guileless Sandy asks with a smile, “It’s a strange world, isn’t?” For many viewers, that question was the final stab of the knife for Blue Velvet, the final proof that the world was sad and dark and scary. But that reading misses the optimism present not just in Blue Velvet, but in all of Lynch’s work.

Now It’s Dark…

It’s not hard to see why Blue Velvet‘s first audiences would read that final scene sarcastically. After all, Blue Velvet is a nasty film, right from the very beginning. The opening credits—displayed, naturally, on a blue velvet curtain and set to the titular Bobby Vinton song—give way to suburban iconography: a white picket fence, rose bushes, a man watering his lawn. But then the man, Jeffrey’s father, suffers a stroke and collapses, clutching his chest while his little dog yips and laps at the water streaming from the hose.

From there, the camera pans down, below the perfectly-manicured lawn that Jeffrey’s dad had been maintaining and into the dirt. Within the soil, we see grubs and worms and all manner of creepy crawlies, writhing while some ungoldly noise blares in the soundtrack. The scene doesn’t just set off the plot, giving Jeffrey a reason to return from college to his hometown of Lumberton and reunite with Sandy. It also plays like a statement of intent. From that moment, Blue Velvet tells us that it will explore the evil under the facade of American life.

Viewers find even more evidence for that theme throughout the film. Blue Velvet concerns Jeffrey’s investigation into a severed ear that he finds while walking in a field outside his house. That investigation leads him to the apartment of the seductive and troubled lounge singer Dorothy Vallens. Dorothy’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Frank Booth, a malevolent criminal who uses his leverage to assault her, physically and sexually. Once Frank discovers Jeffrey, he takes the boy on a journey into the underworld, a cesspit of evil that has always existed on the periphery of his peaceful town. By the time a naked and bloodied Dorothy stumbles down Jeffrey’s quiet street, into Sandy’s perfect little home, it’s clear that the darkness can no longer be ignored.

But David Lynch’s work has never been about ignoring darkness.

One Chants Out Between Two Worlds

The broad strokes of Blue Velvet‘s synopsis could apply to nearly any Lynch project. It obviously recalls Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017), the television series that Lynch made with Mark Frost. Across three seasons and the prequel film Fire Walk With Me (1992), Twin Peaks showed how the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) unveiled a cosmic struggle of good and evil playing out in a quiet lumber town in the Pacific Northwest. Wild at Heart (1990) juxtaposes the passion of lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Dern) to all manner of nastiness and madness, including Willem Dafoe as perhaps the most stomach-churning character he’s ever played on screen.

Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006) relocate to the decidedly less-quaint Los Angeles, but the same tension appears. Whether its the love shared between saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), the big screen dreams of ingenue Betty (Naomi Watts), or the integrity of actress Nikki Grace’s (Dern) film project, these pure pursuits all give way to corruption and darkness. Not even Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the septuagenarian who rides his lawnmower across the Midwest to visit his ailing brother in The Straight Story (1999), Lynch’s G-rated Disney movie, can escape the madness of life, as demonstrated by a scene in which he and a fellow veteran recall their experiences in the war.

Lynch has never been afraid to look at darkness, and for many, that’s been the primary appeal of his work. Nothing encapsulates that perspective better than the 1997 David Foster Wallace essay, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in which the late author identifies “Good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims’ various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread” as “thoroughgoingly Lynchian.”

The Mysteries of Love

It’s hard to disagree with Wallace’s assessment, and his invocation of Dahmer, when we see the end of Blue Velvet. The bird at which Jeffery and Sandy marvel looks unreal, patently false and mechanical. That’s because its dead, the corpse of a real bird that died during the shoot. Lynch saved the corpse and turned it into a puppet, an echo of the “Fish Kit” art piece he made in 1975, in which parts of a real vivisected fish are presented as parts of a model to assemble.

And yet, Wallace’s pessimistic argument must also ignore everything else happening around the scene. To read the ending of Blue Velvet as cynical, one must believe that the movie asks us to mock Jeffrey and Sandy when the beam smiles at one another. One must think that Lynch is using the Julee Christie song “Mysteries of Love” incorrectly, somehow not recognizing that she’s singing about love and clarity through the darkness. Most implausibly, one must assume that Lynch is being ironic.

David Lynch, whom Mel Brooks famously described as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” was anything but ironic. Sincerity shoots through his work, from the genuine dread of fatherhood that drives his debut feature Eraserhead (1977) to the crowd-pleasing moment he works into the otherwise audience-unfriendly Twin Peaks: The Return, in which a concert recording of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” plays as thwarted lovers Big Ed (Everett McGill) and Norma (Peggy Lipton) finally come together. Time and again, Lynch juxtaposes the nastiness of the world with unabashed hope, a combination so shocking that people like Wallace have to reject it and take it all as a joke.

But Agent Cooper’s love of coffee in Twin Peaks is not a joke. The appearance of Glinda the Good Witch from Wizard of Oz at the end of Wild at Heart, urging Sailor to return to Lula, is not a joke. And the wide-eyed wonder with which Jeffery and Sandy gaze at the robin in Blue Velvet is not a joke. Rather, these are affirmations of goodness against a world that is awful, a world that has to have people like Frank. Forty years ago, too many viewers missed that affirmation and laughed off the ending as just a bit of suburban satire. Today, it’s clear that we need Blue Velvet‘s demand for goodness more than ever.

Silo Season 3 Episode 9 Is a Masterclass in Apocalyptic Dread

This article contains spoilers for Silo season 3 episode 9, “Farewell”

Silo’s third season has flipped between the past and the present, with occasionally mixed results. In both eras, our characters have searched for answers, but in the penultimate episode, it all comes down to “why?”

The first half is flashback-free and focuses on Bernard Holland’s (Tim Robbins) final sacrifice. Things are bleak in Silo 18, so its former head of IT decides to provide the rebellion with the ultimate distraction so they won’t be gassed into oblivion. Yet things are somehow even bleaker when we finally cut to Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen Drew’s (Jessica Henwick) sunny, happy, and promising past for the back half of the episode.

After rejecting Per Stensen’s (Colin Hanks) offer to get involved in his silo project from the ground up, Daniel and Helen take the NDA money and embrace a quiet life, excited to start building a family. Their curiosity gets the better of them, though, and when an offer emerges to view the risible AI bro’s futuristic folly, Daniel and Helen decide to check it out. When discussing it with their OBGYN, she describes it as a “chocolate factory,” and a look flashes over Daniel’s face, the first of many that will scream “something is terribly wrong” in this installment of the show.

The Creeping Dread

Charlotte and Anna’s beautiful Atlanta home, where Daniel and Helen stop to catch up, is overflowing with lush greenery, but even the trees and plants feel claustrophobic, and the weather is gloomy and overcast. The foursome smiles and laughs as they reminisce and chat about the future, but they’re crowded for dinner in a muted room. “The light’s finally at the end of the tunnel,” says Anna of the silo project’s unveiling, and Charlotte remarks that it’s not daylight they see, but a train. The dread of Stensen’s upcoming event is already palpable, and we’re not even there yet.

As Charlotte and Anna discuss the hardships of the last six months, the light from the fire pit dances across their faces. It should be cosy, but after seeing the fire rage in the tunnel following Holland’s walk up the plank, it’s anything but. “Have you heard of the Pact?” Charlotte asks Helen, and we’re about to get a painfully brisk history of the sacred rulebook. Charlotte simply dismisses it as “some crazy shit” that Anna co-wrote with Dr. Crnkovich.

Later, Crnkovich admits, “AI wrote it, we just did some editing,” because of course it did. He also has a distinct feeling that if Daniel had been around, he might have noticed some key pieces were missing from their puzzle. “Hopefully, we’ll never have to find out if we did a good job,” Crnkovich says, and the bodies of everyone killed by the consequences of the Pact roll in their graves.

When a sweeping yet ominous score finally shows us the completed silo project, no breeze stirs, and the sky’s light casts a slightly sickly hue over our characters. Daniel and Helen arrive to find they’ve been separated into different tourist groups, with Helen ushered into Silo 18, her bright red jumper a visible warning of things to come. Meanwhile, Daniel is sent to Silo 1, where all the important people are. The couple reassure each other, but we know what this means. If anything happens, Helen will be having her baby far away from Daniel, and we start to get a gut feeling that something is definitely going to happen.

The project’s visitors were selected by a lottery we suspect was based on genetics, but is Stensen crazy enough to trap them all underground for 500 years to remake the world as he sees fit? Yes, absolutely. Silo’s Elon Musk stand-in has already proved ambitious and pigheaded enough to see his project through to completion, and he holds so much power with the U.S. government that he can make anything he wants happen.

The End of the Beginning

When we finally set eyes on a distracted, vaguely uninterested Stensen, he watches none other than Peter Gabriel himself perform a soundcheck for the evening’s festivities. Gabriel’s melancholy song gets under our skin as everyone else listens, bemused by his presence. As viewers, we already know the legendary singer-songwriter will probably be dead, along with his descendants, because Crnkovich casually mentions he’ll be visiting the doomed Silo 17. Charlotte’s absence at the tech check is notable, and Daniel’s worry turns to panic when his texts to her go unanswered at first, then return with an out-of-character response.

A suspicious Henry tries to keep Daniel close to Silo 1 as he attempts to connect with Helen. The tension builds, the score darkens, and every facial expression speaks volumes. When the nuke goes off, we know it’s no accident. Stensen clearly arranged it to force everyone down into the silos so he could see his project play out in his lifetime. It’s unclear whether just one nuke went off in Atlanta or whether the rest of the country was sacrificed to make his project worthwhile, but one nuke is enough to inspire our horror and despair at his absurdity and madness.

“Farewell” ends with the nuclear blast flowing across the land and Daniel’s future blown to smithereens as he escapes toward the entrance to Silo 1 with Henry and, presumably, Anna, Senator Thurman, Stensen, and Crnkovich. The most important people herded into the ruling silo and the project’s “crazy” AI-written Pact, while hundreds of thousands must live with the decisions of just a few, following an obnoxious trillionaire’s design and a flawed algorithm.

The Fundamental Question

The episode is a masterclass in apocalyptic dread, split between past despair and present desperation, with Holland still teasing an uncertain future. “Somewhere in Silo 1 is a person,” Holland tells Juliette before he goes outside to die. “Flesh and blood. No different or better than you or me. A person deciding our fates. Turns out, after all this, the wizard is nothing more than a man behind a curtain. And if that man were in this room right now, I’d kill him with my bare hands.”

We’re not in Kansas anymore. It’s way too late to stop Stensen’s plan, yet Holland seems certain that Juliette is the unifying force who can finally reach Silo 1 and change everything. Holland’s voice holds hope, but the events we see play out in the rest of the episode are so mirthless and drenched in foreboding that we can’t imagine anyone standing a chance against those left in Silo 1 and what they have decided is the right way for people to live.

The survivors ask themselves, “Why?” The answer is that one rich man decided he could. Nothing more, nothing less. It hits as close to home as it does miles underground.

Silo season 3 concludes on Apple TV on September 4.

Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Carol Freeman Is the Franchise’s Most Competent Captain

When one thinks of the canonical heroes of Star Trek, the names Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway leap to mind. Each of these captains went on fantastical adventures, inspired the loyalty of their crews, and broke Starfleet protocol more than a few times along the way. Looking at The Original Series, The Next Generation, and most other Star Trek shows, one gets the sense that being a captain is all about following your gut and trusting your instinct, even if that means you make giant messes that you’ll have to clean up later.

And that’s exactly why Carol Freeman is the greatest captain in Star Trek history. Commanding the USS Cerritos on Lower Decks, Freeman had to deal with the least glamorous missions. The biggest threats that her crew faced involved cast-offs from other shows, the hapless Pakleds or embittered Nicholas Locarno. But those low stakes just meant that Captain Freeman could spend time delegating tasks, guiding her crew, and doing the work of the United Federation of Planets… you know, the stuff Starfleet captains are actually supposed to be doing. And she did it better than anyone else.

At the beginning of Lower Decks‘ third season, Captain Freeman’s daughter Beckett Mariner embarks on a Search for Spock-style plan. At the end of season 2, Starfleet officers arrested Freeman for destroying the Pakled planet, possibly in retaliation for their attempts to kill her in earlier episodes. Convinced that her mother could do no such thing, Mariner gathers her fellow lower deckers and launch an invasion on Starfleet headquarters… only to discover Freeman herself, walking free.

How did Freeman escape without Mariner’s help? By trusting in the system. Turns out, a Starfleet investigation found Freeman innocent of all charges. Instead, they discovered that the Pakleds blew themselves up, all part of yet another scheme for power amongst the oft-squabbling people. Thus, all of Mariner’s scheming, all the classic Star Trek intrigue and adventuring she planned was unnecessary. Freeman followed the rules, and everything worked out in the end.

Which is exactly how it should be. While modern viewers, well aware of the injustice and bureaucratic blocks that exist in our current system, understand Mariner’s motivations, we also have to remember that Star Trek takes place in a utopian future. Things have gotten much better by the 24th century, and institutions like Starfleet and the Federation are beacons of civilization, not oppressive forces that require resistance. For that reason, the most heroic thing that a captain can do is to just do her job.

Which is exactly what Carol Freeman does. Throughout the five seasons of Lower Decks, she receives her orders and completes them admirably. She doesn’t always like the job handed to her, nor does she always do them with great magnanimity. Take the mission she’s given to negotiate peace with the Pakleds earlier in season 2. Freeman gets the job because she dealt with the aliens in season 1, but she takes it mostly because she hopes that pulling off the assignment will get her a promotion to a better ship. She doesn’t go about it by following her instincts, like Kirk, or by giving some grand speech, like Picard. She goes about it like a regular human, completing the task given to her.

Freeman exhibited a similar mindset in the season 5 episode “Upper Decks,” when she and the Cerritos‘ senior crew encountered the insectoid species called the Clickets. Freeman accidentally allows a Clicket disguised as a scientist to board her ship and bring him closer to the peaceful Bughoon to steal their cloaking abilities. Moreover, she initially forgets about the culture of the Clickets, despite having encountered them before. However, she does eventually remember that Clickets hate compliments, and she arms her crew with that knowledge, allowing them to fight back.

One might point to Freeman’s career-building approach to negotiating peace with the Pakleds or her getting duped by the Clicket as signs of weakness. Surely, Kirk would never allow himself to be tricked in such a way, nor would Picard treat the job so callously. But that’s because Kirk, Picard, and most of the other captains put their own ambitions and feelings and aspirations over the job itself. They were too busy valorizing the duties of Starfleet Officers or holding grudges against Klingons or talking to wormhole gods or doing whatever the heck Janeway wanted to do to think about the job itself.

But not Carol Freeman. Captain Freeman does the job, because she believes in the job. And that’s the entire point of Star Trek. Star Trek takes place in a world where humanity has matured and created institutions that better their conditions. As much as other captains say they believe those institutions, too many of their stories are about them defying those institutions and their rules (what’s the Prime Directive again?). The way those guys talk, no one should be surprised when admirals advocate for space genocide on a regular basis.

By doing her job well, but not spectacularly, by following orders, even if that means getting it wrong from time to time, Captain Freeman reveals faith in Starfleet and, by extension, faith in the future. More than any other captain, she shows that humanity can actually improve and that we can move out of our infancy, no longer acting like egoistic little adolescents who steal ships and fly them into black holes, but like people who have a job to do and do it for the good of everyone.

Remembering the Failed Green Lantern Movie Starring Jack Black

Brightest day has finally arrived for Green Lantern fans. Despite all the hand-wringing leading up to its premiere, the HBO series Lanterns is finally here and it’s really good. Just as importantly, it’s really strange, filled with way more DC cosmic lore than the early True Detective-style stills led us to believe.

Lanterns is so good, in fact, that it finally washes out the bad taste left by the last live-action adaptation, the awful 2011 movie that starred Ryan Reynolds as the most unlikable version of Hal Jordan. Bad as that movie is, the night was almost even blacker for Green Lantern fans. Throughout the 2000s, a totally different Green Lantern movie went into production, one that would have been a low-brow comedy starring Jack Black as Earth’s latest ring wielder.

Back in the 2000s, studios knew that people liked superhero movies, but they weren’t entirely sure what a superhero movie was supposed to be. So while that era saw big hits like Spider-Man and Batman Begins, it also saw some big, weird swings, like The Spirit, Catwoman, and the first Ghost Rider movie. That confused mindset drove Warner Brothers to look at one of their most beloved superheroes and decide that the right person to bring it to the screen was Saturday Night Live writer Robert Smigel, whose most notable superhero work was writing the Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon shorts.

To his credit, Smigel knew that he may not be the best fit for the project, and tried to convince WB to make the movie about an original creation instead of an established character. But when they insisted on a Green Lantern film, Smigel looked into the property a found it pretty funny, actually.

“I did a quick review of the specifics of Green Lantern. And I thought, Well, of course this could be a comedy,” Smigel told Vanity Fair in 2011. “Basically just the premise that the wrong guy gets the ring and can do all kinds of goofy visual jokes—because the visuals are so potentially ridiculous. What appealed to me about it on a comedic level was that, in order to be a superhero, this requires no physical skill or talent. All it requires is owning this ring. Automatically, that’s a comedic premise.” Once he saw the vision, Smigel knew exactly who should play his goofy superhero: Jack Black.

The script leaked to the internet (which is explicitly a first draft) reads exactly like what you’d expect from a raunchy R-rated, Jack Black comedy from the ’90s. Black plays Jud Plato, a slacker with no future who goes on the reality series Fear Factor. When Jud eats a dead animal head without hesitation, the host (Joe Rogan?) declares him utterly fearless, a declaration that comes just when the Green Lantern power ring searches for a new host. The ring chooses Jud, and wacky shenanigans ensue.

Jud uses his ring to make babes to feed him food and captures bad guys in a giant condom. At the climax, he goes up against an astroid shaped exactly like Pikachu, foregrounding the video game-based alien invasion from Pixels. The movie even takes place in a world where superheroes exist, so when Jud tries to save the planet by moving it out the way of the oncoming meteor and inadvertently causes endless natural disasters, he creates a construct of Superman to fly around the Earth backwards, just like in the 1977 movie.

That said, Smigel’s Green Lantern script is actually far more faithful to the lore than one would expect. Smigel actually drew inspiration from Emerald Dawn, the 1989 miniseries by Keith Giffen, Christopher Priest, and Gerard Jones, penciled by M.D. Bright, which gave Hal Jordan a gritty post-Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot. In Emerald Dawn, Jordan’s predecessor Abin Sur gets attacked by a creature called Legion, a gold-suit wearing blob that wants revenge against the Guardians. When Abin Sur’s ship crashes, the ring finds alcoholic Hal Jordan, who learns to shape up under the tutelage of his mentor Sinestro, and eventually defeats Legion by violating the orders of Sinestro and the Guardians.

The Green Lantern script has the same basic set-up: Abin Sur crashes after getting attacked by Legion, and sends his ring to search for a successor. But when the ring malfunctions, it finds Jud instead of Jordan. After messing around for a while, Jud gets taken to Oa by Sinestro for training, where he also meets Kilowog and Tomar-Re. Jud’s misbehavior results in him losing his ring, even as the Legion threat grows more pressing. Those events give Sinestro reason to institute a harsh order over the Green Lantern Corps, revealing the authoritarian side.

After an act of valor earns Jud the right to wear the ring again, he learns the truth: Sinestro intentionally sabotaged Abin Sur’s ring, which not only allowed him to get killed by Legion but also to find an improper host and assert order. In the final act, Jud defeats the renegade Green Lantern and helps find his replacement, a woman from the same planet named Katma Tui.

From that synopsis, the Smigel Green Lantern movie doesn’t sound so bad. But then again, one need only look at the 2011 movie to remember that fidelity to the comics doesn’t automatically result in a good movie. Sometimes, you have to veer from the source material to tell a good story. Fortunately, Lanterns veers in the right way. The Jack Black Green Lantern movie? Not so much.

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

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 6 Review — Off Hour

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 6.

The countdown to the weekend turns disastrous on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a tension-filled hour that threatens the crew with certain death, slowly begins to shift the pieces into place for the show’s conclusion, and reminds us all why we care about these people so much in the first place.

One of the more interesting things about Strange New Worlds is that, for the most part, we know how it ends. Pike will be promoted to Fleet Captain and turn over the U.S.S. Enterprise to James Kirk. (He’ll also end up horribly disabled and disfigured, but let’s all agree to just not think about that.) M’Benga is no longer chief medical officer. Scotty is chief engineer, with an almost preternatural connection to the ship he serves. Una, presumably, moves on. (And one hopes Ortegas, La’an, and Pelia do too.) This week, we see the beginning of that process, as both M’Benga and Chapel contemplate their professional futures, and Scotty learns to trust both his instincts and his ship. 

(The episode also introduces Star Trek: The Original Series character Dr. Philip Boyce (Brian Markinson), though beyond being kind of a jerk who really doesn’t seem to like Chapel, it doesn’t actually go anywhere. Maybe next week!)

“Off Hour” is, on the surface, the story of a terrifying accident, as the Enterprise is suddenly yanked into a slipstream wormhole and badly damaged. With the show’s primary cast split into four separate locations and barely able to communicate, all face seemingly insurmountable challenges and outright deadly threats as conditions steadily worsen. The episode’s pacing is relentless throughout, a ticking clock repeatedly appearing onscreen to count down the minutes until the ship passes the warp threshold and Enterprise essentially disintegrates. 

A high-stakes, surprisingly dark story, multiple characters are badly injured, put in life-threatening situations, and forced to make split-second choices with their crewmates’ lives in the balance. Given how many Strange New Worlds characters must survive this episode simply because The Original Series exists, it’s remarkable how genuinely tense almost everything about this hour feels. Sure, we all know that M’Benga is going to somehow make it through after being literally cut in half by a lab table. But there’s more than one moment when it seems almost certain that Strange New Worlds is going to throw canon out the window. It’s a testament to the strong writing of this particular installment that things we know to be impossible, narratively speaking, feel more than a little bit likely. 

Smartly, “Off Hour” makes up for the plot armor of it all by upping the story’s emotional stakes and grounding its more outlandish moments in the relationships between its characters. Putting M’Benga and Chapel at odds—they argued about the possibility of his leaving the Enterprise—adds palpable desperation to her desire to save his life, and her refusal to give up on him is a reminder that perhaps he’s not as alone as he thought. It’s a lovely bit of emotional catharsis, and a nice callback to the way they’ve always had one another’s backs in the past. 

The relationship between M’Benga and Chapel is one of Strange New Worlds’ most interesting—but not in the way most of us probably expected. The two are not only colleagues, but they’re also genuine friends, trauma-bonded war veterans who served together and know each other better than almost anyone else on the ship. (The only relationship that likely rivals theirs in terms of depth and longevity is Pike and Una’s.) Of course she’s going to defy all logic, good sense, and a direct order from a superior officer to try to save him, or die alongside him in the process. Babs Olusanmokun and Jess Bush have never been better, often conveying their shared fear and determination to be brave for one another through little more than subtle facial expressions. 

Comparatively speaking, we aren’t nearly as familiar with Scotty and Pelia’s relationship. They have a shared history and a clear mentor-student dynamic, but their bond is as much about what they do as who they are. They love starships, the Enterprise in particular, and sometimes that love requires as much of a leap of faith as any of the choices being made by Chapel and M’Benga in sick bay. Strange New Worlds gets a lot of mileage out of Carol Kane being funny; this week it finally remembers to let her be heartfelt, and the idea that Scotty’s reputation as a miracle worker technically begins with Pelia reminding him to see the immense possibility in their relationships with these machines is, well. It’s genuinely lovely. (Or maybe I just like the idea that this framing means that a little piece of Pelia stays with the Enterprise for decades after she’s left it.) 

Not everything about this episode is perfect. M’Benga’s horrific injury has a whiff of Grey’s Anatomy about it, as a magnetic lab table essentially holds the two halves of his severed torso together, keeps his major organs in place, and prevents him from bleeding out. (Is this possible? Maybe, but I certainly didn’t want to Google it.) The ultimate fix for the ship’s seemingly certain doom is pretty ridiculous—theoretical ghost particles known as “strong force neutrinos” are not only in the wormhole all around them, they can somehow heal M’Benga and provide the Enterprise with the power it so desperately needs.

If this sounds completely made up, that’s because it generally is. “You’re saying that strong force neutrinos can heal M’Benga and make fuel?” Pike asks incredulously at one point, speaking for us all. “Almost sounds too good to be true, I know,” Scotty says, and at least this iteration of Star Trek is sly enough to openly lampshade its nonsensical technobabble rather than expecting any of us to really follow it. It knows that’s not what we’re really here for, anyway.

No, what we’re interested in is these people, who come together in a variety of collaborative, supportive, sacrificial, and occasionally physics-defying ways when they need it most. While Strange New Worlds has become known for its big narrative swings and boundary-pushing framings, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded they aren’t what makes this show so special. And it’s the quiet moments—M’Benga finishing his lame joke, Chapel requesting to be officially assigned to the Enterprise, Pelia and Scotty pressing their palms in tandem to the walls of the ship—that stay with us, long after the flashy wormholes are gone.

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on September 24.

Ridley Scott’s Third Alien Prequel Will Focus On David and the Dangers of AI

Alien director Ridley Scott is still keen to move forward with a third prequel film in the beloved sci-fi franchise. He began making the prequels in 2012 with Prometheus, which fans felt left many questions unresolved. Another movie that tried to answer some of them, Alien: Covenant, followed in 2017, but it underperformed for Fox, and the studio eventually moved away from Scott’s vision.

In a new interview with The Los Angeles Times, Scott suggested that a third film is still in the works, and noted that the plot would continue to revolve around David, the advanced AI android played by Michael Fassbender, who will be creating a “brave new world for himself,” adding, “AIs can go off. And if they do, it’s like a bomb.”

Though Scott doesn’t currently use AI himself, he seems thoughtful about the subject. “The uneasy question is: Can the AI only be as good as the information fed into it? If I say ‘Here’s a blank canvas, write me such and such,’ would that just be a melange of millions of other scripts? Probably. But the danger is it’ll pass that point and become smarter than we are.”

Scott created a ton of new lore in Prometheus and Covenant that aimed to explain who created the original Xenomorph and why. Prometheus introduced David as Peter Weyland’s tricky android servant. Accompanying Weyland on an expedition to LV-223, he became fascinated with the Engineers and their biological “black goo” substance. Eventually, he traveled to the Engineers’ homeworld and killed everyone, spending the rest of his time experimenting on the remaining life there as well as the archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace).

In Covenant, a new crew arrives on the planet and meets David, who escapes by posing as their identical-looking android, Walter. David puts the surviving humans in hypersleep and stores Alien embryos alongside them in an attempt to build a new species on Origae-6, a planet with a breathable atmosphere selected by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for colonization.

Little is known about Scott’s plans for the third prequel movie, but it sounds like it will continue to follow David’s story beyond the events of Covenant and toward the ultimate creation of the Xenomorph that appeared in the original Alien.

Following Covenant’s disappointing debut, the Alien franchise has moved on without Scott at the helm. Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus told a story set between the events of Alien and Aliens, while Noah Hawley’s TV series Alien: Earth is set two years before the events of Alien. Though Romulus was a success, a further film set in the Alien universe hasn’t yet materialized. However, a second season of Alien: Earth is currently in production in the U.K.