When Rick and Morty Don’t Get the Star Wars Movie They Want

So, by now, you’ve seen the latest Internet dust-up. No, it’s not over health care, or the massive tax break for the rich, or the ongoing cockroach cluster that is the American Media sex scandal, or the fact that Disney is now an Intellectual Property Monopoly unto itself. It’s not about food, or oil, or governmental overreach, or Russia, or corporate culture run amok.

It’s about Star Wars.

Luke looks a little dark in this poster.
I wonder what they could have been
trying to convey with that?

Yeah, you heard me, Star Wars. The 8^th chapter in the seemingly interminable saga of the Skywalker Dysfunctional Family, the 9^th movie in 40 years. And we’re not done with it. That is, most of us aren’t done. We’re waiting patiently for Episode 9, when the trilogy of trilogies is complete. We’re even going to sit through a Han Solo movie that no one asked for, while we wait.

But some of you—and let’s be clear about this: it’s a vocal minority, and we know that now, don’t we?—some of you feel as though you didn’t get something you were promised. And what exactly was that, hmmm? You were promised a movie that advanced a storyline that has been in motion—glacial, inexorable motion—since 1977. And you got it, in spades. Two-and-a-half hours’ worth of space fights, lightsabers, starships, and obligatory ancillary merchandise out the wazoo. So has it always been, and so shall it ever be.

So, what’s your problem?

Ben Shapiro’s Laundry List of complaints—many of which fall into the round file alongside stuff like “You wouldn’t hear the explosions in space, duh!” but it also includes a jab at the "Social Justice Warrior" message in the movie, as well. And this bit of incisive journalism about the unanswered questions plot holes in the movie, and, as writer/artist Jamal Igle notes, none of which are plot holes.  Gerry Conway’s political repositioning of the movie certainly accounted for some of the uproar. Apparently, Star Wars should never be about something, unless that something is friendships and space ships and laser swords. Darren Yohan went the opposite way and justified everychoice made in the movie.

The Teaser Poster. That red and white
color scheme that ran through the
posters? That was intentional. I
wonder what they could have been
trying to convey with that?

So, there was, once again, a gulf of difference between the fans and the critics. But was there? My evidence is anecdotal, largely empirical, and wouldn’t hold up in court, but since I own a movie theater that is playing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I have the luxury of asking my audience—passionate Star Wars fans, the lot of them—what they thought. Here’s their general consensus:

Most of them found one thing to not like, or question, or say, “I’d rather they...”. But then they hasten to add, “But I loved it. It was fantastic!” Now, this certainly may be partially due to the glow of having just seen the movie, but I’ve got repeat customers in week two who are only liking it more as they come out of the theater.

This isn’t all fans, of course. Many folks I know didn’t like the movie, for what I’d consider to be articulate, concrete, and specific reasons. A few of them are even mad about it. After all, for some of us, this would be considered yet another disappointment, after (just to pull one out of a hat) Episode I: the Phantom Menace.

For one fan, though, it was too much to bear. He started a petition on Change.org to get enough signatures so that Disney would strike the movie from the Star Wars canon. As of this writing, it has over 59,000 signatures and counting.

I am not joking. I wish I was.

Novelist and screenwriter Chris Cargill fairly Mjolnir-ed the nail on the head thusly on Twitter:

C. Robert Cargill‏ @Massawyrm Dec 20
There has been a gawdawful Holiday Special, two unwatchable Ewok feature films, three reviled special editions, three despised prequels, a complete embarrassment of a feature length animated Clone Wars movie... ...but Episode VIII is where you draw the line canonically? Huh.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about the guy who started this whole thing, Henry Walsh. After the story went viral, and he started getting death threats (because, see, that’s what happens when stories go viral—they explode and their spores get all over everyone and this trigger mutations and that’s how you get more trolls, get it?), he rolled back his statement. Here’s the quote from the newsweek article: 

"Hey guys I need to be honest here," Walsh wrote on Tuesday. "I put this petition up because I was upset and I was on strong pain medication."  Walsh, who is from Avondale Estates, Georgia, explained that he was recently in a car accident, and was "frustrated and medicated" when he created the campaign. "It was a bad idea at the time and I feel that we are pooling our efforts in not a healthy direction." 

Walsh recommended everyone who signed his petition (46,394 people and counting) check out other, more pressing issues on Change.org. "I couldn't get the help on GoFundMe to help pay for my surgery, and yet *this* gets this kind of attention," he wrote. 

Then, in a second update on Wednesday, Walsh announced he would update the petition every day to highlight a new cause, starting with A Force For Change, a fundraising effort by Star Wars fans, currently raising money for Unicef Kid Power and Starlight Children's Foundation. 

Walsh added that he still really hates The Last Jedi.

In a follow up article, on a website closer to home, he added to the story:

 Walsh said he tried to rein it in, telling people to devote their energies to helping someone who needed it and reminding them of the petition’s humorous intentions. That made things even worse. 

“The people supporting the petition decided I was a sell out and Disney had bought me off,” he said. “I wish Disney had bought me off. I could use the money." 

Walsh has had a tough year. An accident left him wheelchair bound and he moved to Avondale Estates to find treatment for his condition and get back on his feet. He said when he saw the movie – the longest “Star Wars” film ever made – he was in physical pain due to sitting up the whole time. 

After the film, he was venting online when someone suggested he write the petition as Professor Walsh, a persona he used when he wrote for the “Star Wars” fan site, “Ask a Jedi.”

“I was hired to be controversial, so we created the Professor Walsh persona, which is like if you take me and ratchet me up to 11,” he said. “Professor Walsh was always highly critical and aggressive in a critique.” 

He said when he created the petition, “At the time I was really frustrated with the film. It was, ‘Hey, let’s do this. It will be great. We’ll get 20 or 30 people and it’s gonna be a laugh and that’s it.'” 

But not everyone got the joke, he said. 

“Funny thing about ideas on the internet,” he said. “It seems, not everyone realizes things aren’t supposed to be super serious.”

But, see, here’s where Henry Walsh got it wrong, so very wrong. He knew exactly what this would do. I am not unsympathetic to his situation, okay? As one of the people on www.askajedi.com, he was an authority on Star Wars, especially the Expanded Universe...you remember, all of that stuff that was the first thing to go when Walt Disney bought George Lucas’ hot mess? That stuff. So, this guy, who was a big deal, a decent writer as far as fan-scholars go, and someone who had all of the answers, suddenly had no answers.

Then he got hit (literally and figuratively) with a couple of tragedies; things that would have thrown any of us into a real funk. And he didn’t have any (or enough, or the right kind of) insurance to cover the cost of his surgeries. So he started a GoFundMe campaign, and it didn’t exactly light the world on fire. But he never thought to go back to his old stomping grounds and say, “Hey, all of you Jedi fanatics, I need a little help, here.” He could have done so easily, even though the site no longer seems to be regularly updated, I’m positive this kid is online in other Star Wars forums. He could have asked for what he needed, and I’ll bet you some Star Wars fans who GET it would very likely have gladly dropped a donation to help him get a brace so he could have mobility back. Because that’s what a Star Wars fan would do, as the hundreds of non-profit Star Wars charity groups across the country would tell you.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he decided to pull a Rick and Morty and pitch a hissy fit about the Szechuan Sauce. 

Now I’m not going to aim this directly at Henry, because again, I am sympathetic to his medical condition, and the effects of pain killers, and also I understand about stupid lapses in judgment on the Internet. Also, I appreciate his efforts to back off of his original stance and highlight other groups that need help and support on gofundme and change.org.

This next part is aimed at the 59,000 and counting Star Wars fans who signed that ridiculous petition: just who the hell do you think you are, anyway?

I’ve spoken before about fans taking ownership of the Star Wars movies, but there’s a big difference between a director monkeying around with a film and changing fundamental characters and endings, years after we all decided we liked them just fine the way they were, and a group of fans who are acting like middle management at a dog food company, rejecting a commercial proposal because it doesn’t hit the right notes for them. “Yeah, no, we were thinking of something just like the old Chuck Wagon ads, but not exactly that, but basically that, even though they are old and we’ve all seen them before. We’re going to need you to take this back and rework it. We don’t quite know what we want; we’ll let you know when we see it.”

Um, that’s not how this works, y’all. I can’t believe I’m defending Walt Disney, Inc,. here, but this is exactly the movie they wanted to put out. I’m sorry that two full years of rampant speculation and countless hours—no, make that weeks—spent on the Interwebs, explaining the reasons for your theory as to who Rey’s parents were in detail—with frames from the film, to back it all up—all of the arguments, friendly and otherwise, about Kylo Ren, Snope, The First Order, all of it—well, I’m sorry that none of that fan-activity amounted to diddly-squat. You weren’t, in fact, the first person to figure it out. No one figured it out. The slate has been wiped clean. The Etch-a-Sketch has been turned over and shaken. Too bad, so sad.

And if that’s why you’re so pissed—that none of your guesses were correct—then you’ve got the same pants to get happy in, Rick and Morty, because you have clearly and completely missed the point of Star Wars, watching movies, and I daresay, interacting with people.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

By the time I was a teenager, in the 1980s, I was used to being lied to by authority figures. My first political scandal I remember was Watergate, and “I am not a crook!” hung in the American Lexicon for at least twenty years or so. Two fingers up, jowls shaking, say that phrase, and people go “NIXON!” So, between Saturday Night Live, Mad Magazine (I was too young for National Lampoon—good thing, too, or I would have been insufferable), a slew of post-modern films designed to challenge accepted narratives, The Iran-Contra scandal, “Read My Lips: NO NEW TAXES!” and oh, GOD, what else? I stopped trusting adults as soon as I hit puberty and never looked back.

This did include—and moreover should have included—Lucas’ plans to make six more Star Wars movies. We should have stopped after Return of the Jedi. I see that, now. I didn’t believe Lucas when he said he was done. Well, I did at the time, but when the re-mastered digitally-enhanced Special Editions were released for the 25^th anniversary, I began to think maybe he was going back on his end of the bargain. And boy, did he!

Most of ya’ll weren’t around to see the reactions from Generation X. We were just like you, if we can be perfectly honest about it. We were pissed. Pissed about all of it. Especially The Phantom Menace. I’m sure most of you have seen “the Fandom Edit” version, where some enterprising young pirate cut all of the Jar Jar Binks scenes out of the movie. And can you blame him? We weren’t over Greedo shooting first—that was still being hotly debated—and now here comes this new Star Wars, for a new generation (Lucas mentioned his kids several times in the interviews before the world “turned against him” and he shut himself off from the fans).

But it blew over. The second Prequel (the one I like to call “the apology”) was at least watchable, if not enjoyable. And that last one—well, see, we knew how the story was going to turn out, so there was zero suspense, zero tension, and zero surprise, unless you count Mace Windu getting killed, or Darth Annie slaughtering all of the young Jedi children like he killed all of the Tusken Raiders who kidnapped his mother in the previous film. But whatever. We had to come to grips with the notion that Star Wars was not "ours" anymore, because there were eager dads showing the movie to their kids, hooking them on Darth Maul, lightsaber fights, the toys, the collectibles, all of it. Lots of dads got to vaguely relive their wonder years with their kids in tow.

And we made a kind of peace with this new trilogy. We had to, for one simple reason: the franchise wasn't ours to monkey around with. It belonged to Lucas, and he made that abundantly clear when he decided to release the Special Editions with all of their nonsense. He did it even as he had growing contempt for his fans. There's a lot of spite in the prequels, an almost "because I said so!" vibe. Daddy was mad at us. And for a while, we were mad at him right back.

But then we shrugged and said, “yeah, well, I’m just not going to buy them when the come out.,” or “I’ll own them, for the set, but I’ll never watch them.” Whatever it was you did or said to get you over the hump. The six movies, such as they were, represented a complete arc. The birth, life, transformation and redemption of Darth Vader. It was not what we were promised. But if you stepped back and looked at it as a complete thing, it held up as someone’s vision, if not the original idea. And if you’ll notice, that’s where Lucas stopped. 

There's your Must-Have Christmas
item for 2017. See? Star Wars will
never really let you down. And now,
neither will Walt Disney, Inc. 

Then Lucas sold it all to Disney for two billion dollars and laughed all the way to the bank. And who can blame him? I’m sue he was sick to death about hearing how he invented the modern blockbuster and doomed the planet to an early extinction event at the same time. How Star Wars revolutionized an industry and inspired a generation and the prequels were the worst thing to happen to filmmaking since Howard the Duck.

So, this new Disney-backed trilogy is announced, and since everyone didn’t like the prequels, let’s get the original gang back together. Only, you didn’t like that, because it was too much like the other one. So, now, the new one comes out, and it completely upsets the apple carts, and you’re crying like four-year-old with a scraped knee. Unbelievable.

There is nothing in this movie that is any dumber, any more illogical, any less make-sense-able, any stretching of the imagination to the breaking point that is in ANY of the other Star Wars movies. Leia’s little floating stunt? You didn’t like that? Midi-Chlorians, asshole. In fact, that should be the counter for everything you don’t like about The Last Jedi, from Porgs on down. Midi-freaking-chlorians. Give me strength.

This reminds me of something from the Simpsons:

Close enough, right?

Writer and Director Rian Johnson has given us all a gift. He took all of the stuff that didn’t make sense, that you didn’t like, that you spent months of your life trying to work out in your head so that it made sense, and he swept the table clean. There are no more Legos on the board, now. And what he replaced it with really set some of you off. If your explanation for why you're so mad includes the word "agenda," then you're a nickel-plated imbecile. 

There was a comedian, Greg Davis, in the 1980s, who had a character he called “the Punk Rock Magician,” and it was a silly gag, really. He put on a fake mohawk and held up things like a rubber chicken with a nail in its heads and say, in an affected cockney accent, Iss an eelooosion!” and when people laughed, he’d yell, “Fuck Yew!” More than once in the routine, he’s grab the mic, lean out across it like Johnny Rotten, and say, “I’m fewlin’ you an’ you don’ like it!” Boy, do you NOT like it. But that’s okay. You’ll settle in, just as we did. And are doing. After all, this isn’t the first time we’ve been lied to. We’re Generation X. Our zeitgeist is held together with half-truths, lies, and fabrications of all kinds. Welcome to adulthood, y’all.

Episode 9, the last one, in two years’ time, will finally, after 43 years, put an end to Lucas’s nine-movie odyssey. Ambitious in 1977 to the point of ridicule, but now a completely doable thing. And we are going to watch that movie with fresh eyes, and no idea what’s coming. No more Luke, Leia, and Han. I hope Chewie takes the droids and flies into the sun. Let’s just end this thing. It’s gone on for too long. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited for the movie. I want to see it end. I think the world that Lucas created still has life in it. And I want to see new movies set in that world. Whether we go back a thousand years to the Old Republic and find out how the Jedi and the Sith separated, or whether we go forward from the remnants of Episode 9 (I hope it’s the former), I’m looking forward to new characters and new stories that don't take forty-three years and three generations to wrap up. But first, we have to clear this embarrassing clunker of a promise—a stack of lies and deceptions—out of the way so there will be an end to it all and you can let go of it. That’s what youfans want, even if you’re going to hate it so much that you’ll only watch it three times, instead of your usual five.

From the Vanity Fair photo shoot.
Still gets me every time. 

Maybe at the end of all of this, we can apply a little perspective and think that maybe, just maybe, this whole shebang was little more than a sleight-of-hand trick that we watched so much we figured out how it was done. We keep wanting the magic, but we can see how the trick works. We can’t have it both ways.

Here’s the final link. It’s the only one that really matters. It’s Henry Walsh’s GoFundMe page. If you can spare anything, please help him out. As a fellow Star Wars fan. Regardless of whether or not he liked Episode 8. Let’s be the people that Ben Kenobi and Yoda would have approved of. Do what you can, if you can do anything. No hate. Just love. Positive messages only. https://www.gofundme.com/help-me-get-a-prosthetic-brace

Four Weddings and A Funeral--the TV/Movie/Comic Edition

There’s been a lot of great geekery going on television lately, and for the most part, it’s been very impressive. Comics have exploded in a way that I don’t think anyone expected. There’s a show on every network, it seems, streaming or otherwise, that you can tie into a comic book in some way.

Not my Joker. Not my Series. Y'all have fun with it.

Fair warning: I’m not going to talk about Gotham, or any of the other shows I’m not currently watching. I tried Gotham for two and a half seasons and came to really, really dislike the show from its premise on down to its writing. That’s clearly not a show for me, and if you like it, good on you. It’s not my jam. And I really don’t feel like dumping on the show, since I know it’s popular for some folks.

Instead, we’re going to talk about what I DO like right now. I know I’ve used the phrase “embarrassment of riches” before, but it’s really true. You have to be old to appreciate it—like, older. Forty or older. You have to be able to remember back to when we were all watching Batman and Robin in the early 1990s and thinking to ourselves, “Well, it was nice while we had it.” Or watching the first episode of M.A.N.T.I.S. on television and thinking, “This really could have been something.” You had to have been bitterly disappointed when The Flash was cancelled from CBS because it was too expensive to make and no one but us was watching it.

You really do need to be in your late forties-to-early fifties, or older, to really get it, as I have talked about at length before. But rather than lecture you kids today, I’m going to talk about what’s positive, mostly, and where I think we may be heading, which may not be positive. 

Hey, look! Vampire Bill got a new job! 

The Gifted

Fox has one card left in their stable: the X-Men Franchise, and boy, are they squeezing blood out of a turnip. I don’t mean this in a necessarily negative way. But let’s face it; the movies all kind of cancel each other out. The best one (X2) is negated by its sequel, (X-Men: The Last Stand) and all the rest have been fair to middling with flashes of greatness here and there. The only thing that tips the “franchise” in the win column is that each successive Wolverine movie got better and better. But I don't want to overlook the phenomenal Legion mini-series that came out last year (and neither should you).

In 2018, we are coming to the end of the Intellectual Property Film Rights Options—I mean, the end of the X-Verse as we know it (because why think like a realist when you can ignore the billions of dollars changing hands as if that in no way influences the creative decisions being made). There are three X-movies on the film schedule. Deadpool 2, which has a spectacular chance to suck, for one reason, and for one reason only—I suspect we’ve seen everything that made the first movie work already. It’s no longer a surprise, and so, my prediction is that the film will disappear up its own asshole. I’d rather it didn’t, but I just don’t think lightning is going to strike twice.

Not when X-Men: Dark Phoenix is on the schedule, as well. Which X-Men will it be? Will Famke Janssen come back from 2003 to reprise her role? Who can say? At this point, who cares? But it COULD be a good thing, if they let it be the send-off that gets us to The New Mutants.

Tonally, this movie looks a lot closer to Legion, which was a total surprise for everyone who watched it (go watch it if you haven’t; it seems to be in the same world—maybe—as Gifted). If Fox is smart, and wants to recoup some of those buckolas they’ve been paying out over on the news side of the media empire, they need to pivot the movies into X-Men TV, because what they are tentatively doing is remaking the X-verse for a multi-series TV empire. 

The Gifted is great. It’s really fun. It seems to be set in a universe that is somewhere past The Days of Future Past story, but not post-apocalyptic. They are playing their cards close to their chest on this (this is studio-speak for “we don’t know if we’re going to get the movie rights back or not”), so every episode reminds us, through familiar mutants like Polaris and Thunder Bird, that “we don’t know what happened to Professor X and the rest of the X-Men! Magneto may be dead for all we know!”

To that, I say, Good, and Good Riddance. All the X-fans ever really wanted was to see their beloved characters on the big screen. They didn’t have to actually do anything, or say anything; they just had to show up, in a movie that didn’t suck. Well, that score card is pretty well punched through. What’s left is the idea, the conceit of the whole comic series: there are these folks born different, with powers and abilities, and they are feared and distrusted and hunted by the government, detained without due process, tortured by their captors, turned to be used against their own kind...are we seeing the metaphors yet?

That’s always been when the X-Men books (and movies) were at their best. Gifted embraces that ideal. It’s fun to watch Polaris have powers like Polaris. It’s fun to watch Thunder Bird track. The new kids, the POV family, have interesting powers that are a deep cut into the X-verse.

Runaways

Not to be outdone, and weirdly, not to be repeated, either, is Runaways, something of a surprise hit as a comic and now, also, a surprise hit on Hulu as well. The premise is a lot like the X-Men, if you say, “It’s teens on the run from the authorities for their powers and abilities.” But here’s the cool twist: These kids, teenagers all, have been friends for years because their parents know each other. These forced friendships have broken up following the unexpected death of one of the kids. They end up through various plots together during one of their parental get-togethers, and that’s when they discover that their parents are actually (dun-dun-DUUUUNNN!) SUPER VILLIANS. Well, in the Hulu series, they are a cross between Doctor Doom and Scientology. So, villainous-enough, maybe?

It’s not quite that obvious initially in the Hulu series, but all of the beats are there, and in that way that Marvel Media has of surprising me, one of the greatest things about the comic book series is included in the show. I don’t know how often we’re going to see Gertie’s watchdog, but oh, oh, oh, when it showed up initially, I came up out of my chair. Yep. They got the dinosaur right.

Don’t expect it to be a straight one-to-one transfer; that’s not how we do things, anymore. Instead, revel at the characters themselves, how “right” they got them, and how instantly recognizable they are from the comics, and then enjoy a slightly more streamlined storyline and more character development as the teens try to figure out what’s going on and how they can stop it. The Hulu series is just as entertaining as the comic.

The Punisher

I had to slide into this one gradually. I took several days to watch it, and I didn’t grab it the weekend it came out. It just didn’t feel right. I’m glad I waited, though, because this was one of the best Netflix series, and certainly the best Punisher on film, hands down, game over.

This series, of course, takes place after Daredevil Season 2. Frank Castle is dead, according to the whole world, except for a few people who helped him go underground. When he gets found by a man in similar circumstances, he’s not happy about it. But their partnership is what saves the series and makes it eminently watchable, even as there is blood and gunfire and horribleness happening.

The biggest and maybe best surprise was the amount of story space given to veterans suffering from P.T.S.D., which was used as a legal defense by Matt Murdock, and mentioned in the second Captain America movie—never in a negative way, I want to point out. But this series goes deeper and shows what one bad day can do to someone. Even though the story slant is firmly in Castle’s direction, it’s impossible to not sympathize and also empathize with everything he’s been through. Right up until the white skull on the black vest comes out, right, I mean, you can’t solve every problem with a gun. Just THIS particular problem. That’s how the Punisher sees it; it’s his job to finish what he started, and with good reason, considering what happened to his family.

I realize this kind of show is not for everyone, but what Netflix and Jeph Loeb got right is in acknowledging the rather simplistic, nudge-nudge-wink-wink this is really Deathwish in disguise comic book origins, and instead finding interesting ways to personalize the story and make Castle a real person and not a walking, talking, gun-toting cliché (which is why all of the movies failed--we didn't need the Punisher in a world where we already had Charles Bronson and Rambo). I think Jon Bernthal realizes he’s got the part that will define his career and he should be nominated for an Emmy. He's going to be smart in moving this character going forward and I think he’s treating the material with care and respect. This really gets me excited for Daredevil Season 3.

The Berlanti-Verse

I have a love-hate-love relationship with Greg Berlanti and his clutch of DC Comic-based shows. I love that he is consistently sticking it to The Man (Warner Brothers film division) by sneaking in characters that he’s not supposed to have. And I have to commend him for the sheer surface area of what he’s been able to build with four shows.

But sometimes, those shows are not good. Well, okay, your mileage can, will, and does, vary greatly, but I will say it this way: sometimes, the CW-ness of the shows overwhelm me to the point that I am angered and nauseated. And yet, I power through. I went back to re-watch the first season of Arrow because they did a Flash two-parter in season two. And I jumped into The Flash with both feet and was rewarded with Gorilla Grodd. GORILLA GRODD. I was more cautious about Supergirl, mostly because it premiered on CBS, but also because, well, I’m not a 12-year old girl. Over at the CW, the Lesbian quotient has doubled (yay!) and so has the manufactured drama that plagues every single show on that network. The worst show of the bunch is, of course, Legends of Tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, especially if you disagree. One, you’re wrong. And two, to explain everything that series gets wrong would take more time than anyone alive has to waste, so you’ll just have to trust me.

All that said, the team-ups have been fun. First Arrow and The Flash did it (and had the brass balls to call it “The Brave and the Bold,” too), which really highlighted the tonal differences in the shows. After that, people started hopping all over the multiverse (yeah, there’s a multiverse on CW, right now, and it looks a LOT like something from a comic book). My favorite, personally, was the Constantine/Arrow cross-over, just because they could.

Then they tried this big-ass alien invasion cross-over last year that really fell flat. But that was in the middle of a depressing Arrow season, a depressing Flash season, and a completely off-the-rails clusterfuck over at Legends of Tomorrow. That was 22 episodes of the team just showing up and blowing things up, as near as I can recall, with the best villains from the other three shows constantly one step ahead of them.

Thankfully, this year’s stories have righted themelves after a wobbly start. The Flash is more fun (Ralph Dibny? The Elongated Man? COME ON!), Arrow is 35% less tragedy porn, Supergirl seems to have settled into a groove where she is, in fact, the super hero in the how and not Mon-El, or Jimmy Olsen, or anyone else.

And Legends of Tomorrow continues to be a shitshow, with one major change: Rip Hunter has rebuilt his Time Police, and they have, as an organization, come to the conclusion that these buffoons have no business mucking with time travel. A point on which we can all agree. But they insist on cleaning up their messes, which at least acknowledges that yeah, they are bad at this, and they need help.

Then they did the cross-over event: Crisis on Earth-X

Holy Crap.

Congratulations, boys and girls, you got me, and you got me good. The multi-Earth cross-overs were among my favorite JLA comics as a kid, especially when it featured anything having to do with Earth-X, the Earth where the Third Reich won World War II. So, all of the Golden Age characters who were giving the Nazis the what-for back in 1943 were still doing it to this day.

This was our four part cross-over. And it was good. It was really, really good. We got to see some old friends, previously thought to be dead on our Earths, alive and kicking here in Earth-X (I won’t spoil the surprises for you) and we were introduced to one of my favorite Golden Age characters, still fighting on Earth-X. Again, no spoilers, but let me just say, Lou Fine would be proud. Well, maybe not proud, but certainly tickled.

The roster, the sheer amount of heroes, and of course, the splitting off into teams to get things done, was straight out of my early comic reading days. Not a lot of plot complications, either, and only a little carry-over of drama from each series. Mostly, they were all united on kicking Nazi ass and getting back to the proper Earth. And as much as I liked the villainous, Ratzi-Scum counterparts to Green Arrow, Supergirl, and the Flash, I couldn’t help wondering if we are going to see an Injustice League for next year’s cross over. I wouldn’t put it past Berlanti. He beat everyone to the punch with this four part extravaganza.

The Inhumans

I saved the worst for last. I’m going to go ahead and call this the first real failure on Marvel’s part to get their characters onto the screen. Maybe if this was 1994, this would have been killer-diller. But in the wake of all that we have seen—and that includes Iron Fist—this was a disaster from start to finish.

I have heard tell that this particular showrunner didn’t have the same amount of ramp up time for Iron Fist, and had to go straight over to The Inhumans afterward, with no breaks and no downtime. Months instead of years. Okay, we get it. This is a hard job. So, we’re going to lay some of the blame at Jeph Loeb’s feet for trying to turn a marathon into a sprint, and then we’re going to talk about the real villain afterward.

But first, let’s all remember how excited we were when we saw the trailer and Lockjaw dropped Black Bolt off in the middle of a city street. They did it again! Is there nothing Marvel can’t do? Well, actually, yes. They can’t do The Inhumans to save their lives. And they may have screwed up other stuff, in the process.

We get to meet the royal family, living in their city on the dark side of the moon, as per the comics. Gorgon stomps on a rover that took a picture of his hoof, so someone is now convinced there’s life on our moon. Meanwhile, Maximus the mad, powerless as an adult (what?) decides to lead a rebellion. So he cuts off Medusa’s hair, thus saving the special effects budget, and they all end up teleporting to Earth—Hawaii, specifically.

What follows is seven episodes of the Inhumans doing not-very-inhuman things as they have to navigate the morays and weird ways of 21^st century Hawaii. Karnak hits his head, so his power doesn’t work right. He can’t see the outcomes anymore—a crying shame, since his power was one of the coolest ones to watch play out visually. Gorgon? He falls in with surfers who are special forces or some shit. Medusa, sans hair for the entire series (and the one time they animated her hair, it looked like shit), ends up with the scientist who has been trying to prove her rover didn’t just crash on the moon.

Meanwhile, Maximus is scheming with the human scientist to send him back through terragenesis to get powers, since he didn’t get them the first time. Oh. And the peasants are revolting. And Crystal finds a nice blonde haired guy who is NOT named Johnny Storm, okay? He’s not. But he knows a vet who can fix up Lockjaw.

You know what’s missing? About two seasons of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. where they spent show after show meticulously setting up Inhumans, Terragenesis, the Terragon mist, the whole damn thing. There was a tiny—and I mean, three sentences—attempt to connect one of the big hanging plot threads to this garbled mess. Oh, the questions! Oh, the insufficient answers!

Medusa knows how to get on a public bus, but doesn’t know how an ATM works. No one’s powers really work on the show until they are needed. Two previous cast members—better actors, really, but truthfully, the whole cast—wasted on this Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing show. I kept expecting someone to find a Hatch just off the beach. It would have made more sense than what we got.

I’m just going to pitch something: instead of running into ordinary humans, and having to explain who they are to everyone they meet, how about having them run into Coulson and SHIELD? Now the explanation is three lines of dialogue, and we’re all caught up anyways, because we’ve been expecting this payoff on Agents of SHIELD since the whole fershlugginer Inhumans plotline Started!

Cancelling Agent Carter remains very high on the Stupidest
Things ABC did in the 21st Century List. Unfortunately,
The Inhumans just knocked that decision out of the
top spot. Here's Peggy with the Howling Commandos,
one of my favorite episodes in the series, and a good
excuse to run this picture of Hayley Atwell as Agent
Carter and Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan.

So, now there are questions: how are you guys King and Queen of anything, asks Daisy. Mac says, we’ve found other abandoned bases with these portals. And the Inhumans say, those were our former homes. It was decided, many decades ago, that we needed to leave Earth for our own safety...(cue the flashback) Now it’s SHIELD in the 1980s and we have another excuse to see Haley Atwell as Peggy Carter in her role as SHIELD’s former top agent. Maybe even squeeze in a two-eyed Nick Fury for fun. Or Sam Jackson with a high and tight. Anyway, they decide to use the considerable tech that they are all hiding—maybe even make one last deal with Wakanda before that relationship sours—and send them to the far side of the moon, where they will never be found.

Now we don’t have to explain why they speak the same language we do. We can even show them watching our television. And when Maximus finds out that there was some tech that never got cleaned up (or was intentionally withheld, as per Fury’s instructions), he realizes he’s got a whole new group of Inhumans who will potentially fight for him on the moon where they can be rulers instead of hunted and poked and prodded like freaks.

See, there’s your pitch. And it’s got everything we wanted in it. Only, you know, without the bullshit. Don’t bother with it. I would be very surprised if it wasn’t quietly mulched and buried.

So, The Inhumans becomes the first real Marvel stumble. It’s certainly fixable. It can just be ignored, since it literally touched nothing else to begin with. Or it can be restarted (use my outline or any of the dozens of other great ideas that sprang to mind when you were reading my pitch—for they will ALL be better than what we got). But why was it so bad? Why even go to all of the effort? Why hire a showrunner, why get these great actors (who made the best of a bad situation, I promise), why do all of this stuff?

It comes down to the real enemy here, and you’re not going to like it: Disney. This whole Inhumans push was always intended to be leverage against Fox for the X-Men franchise. As those options ran out, as those extensions were activated, as those movies were made, it was all a countdown to Fox re-negotiating with Marvel (now owned by the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the entire world) to keep on doing X-stuff. It was a dare to see if Fox would blink. Their reply, by the way, was two pretty good X-Men movies, a hellacious Wolverine finale, and a Deadpool movie that surprised everyone except die-hard Deadpool fans, such as they were. Oh, and Legion, and Gifted. So, this idea that Fox is going to meekly hand over one of the few things in their stable of franchises that is putting butts in the seats is ludicrous. And we need to stop talking about re-starting the X-Men at Marvel, or doing an X-Men/Avengers crossover. It’s time we put away childish things and look at what’s really going on here.

Folks, at this point, we’re done with comics. Storylines don’t matter. Characters don’t matter. All of those, “Wouldn’t it be cool if...” and “You know who I’d like to see in a Deadpool movie...” discussions are nice, and fun, and we can still have them, but the people in control of all of this—and I mean all of it—it’s in the hands of accountants and C.E.O.s at very large corporations who consider these characters, created at these small companies for decades and were brought to life with pen and ink and paper and color, who you grew up with and are maybe even still inspired by—these men sitting in board rooms consider The Inhumans, The X-Men, Spider-Man, Deadpool, and all the rest of them, as “product.” Specifically, Intellectual property. And it’s something you’re all going to start learning about, whether or not this Fox deal goes through or not. You’d better hope it’s not. (Note: I am not advocating for the site, but the article is cogent and succinctly outlines the good and the bad from such a deal going through).

See, they don’t care about storylines. They only want profits. I know a lot of you are saying, “no duh, we know that, stupid!” but it bears repeating right now. We’re all loving the Marvel movies, and they are doing great things, and that will keep right on happening as long as the movies continue to make the same, or more, as the last movie. They can dip down a little bit, sure, because hey, they can’t all be The Titanic, now, can they? But if the Marvel train ever loses its momentum, you know who’s stepping in? Disney, with their 2 billion dollar investment. See, they have shareholders to make happy, and they don’t want their stock to go down. That’s why they acquired the Marvel characters to begin with. Also Star Wars and Indiana Jones. That’s strategy, not love.

Just be aware, and stop frequenting all of those websites that offer up fifteen reasons WHY the X-MEN is a GOOD BUY for DISNEY and instead start looking at the financial pages of Variety. Watch the deals being made. Follow the money. That’ll tell you more about what’s really going on than Rotten Tomatoes.

Edited: Fixed a network.

I Come to Bury Blade Runner 2049, Not Praise It

Nice poster. 

This entire article is a spoiler. You have been warned.

I’ve got real problems with Blade Runner 2049, but they are not the problems you think. Specifically, I have a real urge to throw this movie and everyone associated with it under the bus. But I’m going to untangle my ire and see if I can’t get to the heart of what’s bothering me. There’s a series of errors occurring in meat-space that have all conspired to create a false narrative around this film.

Fans got it wrong. They didn’t want this. They never did. Even if they say they did, they didn’t really. And right now, fandom is shearing off into two camps, as per usual; folks who are tearing the movie to pieces because it doesn’t look like what’s in their head, and folks who are blindly adoring of the movie because it’s “transcendent” and “evocative” and they dare not dislike it for fear of being accused of “not getting it.”

Critics got it wrong, for the most part. They were the ones granted early access to the film and they didn’t talk about what’s really wrong with the movie. They used words like “transcendent” and “evocative” to cover up the fact that they had no idea what they just watched and didn’t want to seem as if they didn’t “get it.”

Dennis Villeneuve and his whole team got it very wrong. Blade Runner 2049 is a Jurassic Park T-Rex: its makers were so pre-occupied about whether or not they could make it, that they didn’t bother to ask themselves whether or not they should make it.

This is a thing that should not be.

I think the thing that bothers me most is the reaction I’ve seen from some people akin to profound relief and satisfaction, as if they’ve been waiting patiently for three decades for them to “finally get it right.” Let me re-iterate: No one asked for this. The reason why it has slowly morphed into a beloved classic of the science fiction film genre is because there was only one of them, and it more or less worked right the first time. It didn’t need a second chapter, and it damn sure didn’t need to be re-kickstarted into a “franchise.” This whole project is a disservice to everyone. And it was doomed from the get-go.

Not my favorite Harrison Ford movie.

But let’s back this up 35 years, first. The problem begins in 1982 when Blade Runner first appeared. Ridley Scott was (comparatively) at the beginning of his career. Blade Runner was his third movie, after The Duellists, which was seen by maybe seventeen people, and Alien, which was seen by all of North America. He’d done some TV and music video work prior to that, but Blade Runner was clearly his most ambitious movie to date.

It was based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” by Phillip K. Dick, and it was the first of many Dick-inspired films appear, with widely varied results. To wit, there’s not much of the story in the movie, but then again, it was 1982, and we weren’t really expecting there to be. Also, Blade Runner ends up asking questions that are similar to the kinds of questions Dick wrote about, so this movie gets a pass from most die-hard SF readers and fans.

The movie starred Harrison Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark, at the apex of his "Young Bogart" phase. Sean Young co-starred, doing her best Veronica Lake impression, and then there’s Rutger Hauer, an actor who was literally cast in everything he’s been in since based entirely on the strength of his performance as Roy Batty; i.e. "Hey, is that Rutger Hauer? Boy, did he get fat!" "Yeah, but he was the shit in Blade Runner, wasn't he?" The film is front loaded with great co-stars and character actors, each one bringing something different to the mix. Darryl Hannah plays a killer sexbot. M. Emmet Walsh is Deckard’s old boss. Edward James Olmos plays a skeevy cop named Gaff. Brion James, William Sanderson, James Hong, Joanna Cassidy...it’s smorgasbord of talent, okay?

Noir-style lighting, expertly applied, with no guessing as to where the light was coming from.

The film came out during this great period in early 80s cinema; ILM was an established entity by this time, and could turn in some impressive special effects, but it wasn’t so easy to do that you could sacrifice story or plot to make your spectacle. You still had to make an actual movie. And while Blade Runner spends a lot of time swinging wide over chilling hellscapes of over-developed cities in a flying car, there’s not too much else going on to distract you from the main story.  Also, there were a lot of downbeat endings, sort of a holdover from the 1970's flirtation with "realism" in cinema. It was okay, for example, to have a "happy for now" ending. Lots of movies from the early to mid-80's had that feel to it. It's like films were deconstructing themselves, even as people like Lucas and Spielberg were trying to stitch them back together again. But I digress.

Ford plays Deckard, a former cop known as a Blade Runner (why? Sounds cool, I guess) that hunts down and “retires” rogue Replicants—artificial workers who sometimes get wise that they are being used for slave labor and decide to rebel, run, or cause trouble. Pretty cynical. Deckard is done with that business, but apparently, he gets called back by his old boss for “one last job.” While he’s on the job, he meets Rachel (Young), and as soon as he does, he’s doomed. We find out pretty quickly that she’s a Replicant, like the ones he’s hunting. Deckard gets leads, drinks a lot, and runs the Replicants down, one by one, all while dealing with Rachel who keeps insisting she’s a real person. She’s got memories, photographs, see? She can’t be artificial.

 

One of the most used and most dramatic stills from the film. 

We find out that the Replicants who are rebelling want more life—they were only supposed to be active for five years. Eventually the head of the Tyrell Corporation, the maker of all the Replicants, has to tell that to Roy Batty, the leader of the gang of miscreant Replicants. “The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very brightly, Roy.” Weirdly, that does not satisfy Roy, who was looking for more than platitudes. But by now, Deckard has caught up to him and they fight, and Deckard is clearly outmatched. But Batty recites some amazing dialogue and dies right in front of an immobilized Deckard. The movie ends with Deckard grabbing Rachel and heading for the country. She may have a limited lifespan, like Batty. Maybe not. But Deckard decides it’s worth it, because they love each other.

Neat movie. Really makes you think in places.

Only, that’s not the end of it. Ridley Scott decided several years later that he didn’t like the movie. There’s voice-over narration in the film, see, and it was added under protest because the studio couldn’t figure out what was going on in the movie. The V.O. really heightened the “film noir” aspects of the movie. Also, the ending was tacked on, see? Another studio addition. So, Scott released a Director’s Cut, with more scenes of the flying car zooming over horrifying cityscapes, more Vangelis music, no narration, and an ending that was abrupt and jarring. Case closed, right?

No. It turns out that Scott really didn’t approve the director’s cut, and now there is a third version out there, a workprint that was screened once, and THAT is the closest to his vision. Oh, but there’s also a UK Director’s Cut that’s slightly different...sigh. By the time the dust had settled, there were a total of five different prints of Blade Runner, including the Ultimate Final cut that Scott DID approve of, complete with computer re-coloring because we can do that now.

But central to most of these do-overs was a scene where Deckard falls asleep and dreams of a unicorn. Based on that, for literally twenty years now, there’s been a friendly debate about whether or not Deckard was a Replicant himself.  Watching the movie that way completely changes the film. Especially since—and this is very important to note—there is literally zero indicator of this throughout the film.

 

There is more expression in this still than in the whole of Blade Runner 2049.

And don’t start on me with that “But Mark, the clues are there if you’re paying attention...”

First off, Chuckles, I’m not Sherlock Holmes. I’m not even John Watson. I’m a guy watching a movie. I don’t want subtle clues. I want scenes with plot, story, and dialogue in them. Heck, you can even throw in sub-text, if you like. I’ll sit there all day and discuss what it means with you. But at some point, you need to cue your audience in to what you want them to know in some way.

“See how much damage he takes? That’s a clue, man!”

Well, yes, but all of the signifiers in this movie are telling me it’s also a film noir homage, and one of the classic tropes there is the Herculean amount of concussive force the detective hero soaks up on his skull without permanent brain injury. So, if you signal to me this is a film noir, and then you have Deckard getting continually beat to shit, I’m not going think, “Hmmm, he must be a secret robot!” I’m going to think, “Oh, they’re doing the old Sam Spade schtick.” The only way it works is if in act three you let it slip that he’s a secret robot. If you keep it a secret, then you either didn’t think this through or you just didn’t want anyone to know in the first place.

This is one of the major problems with directors going back after twenty-five years and monkeying around with their movies. They aren’t the same people, anymore. They are bringing a completely different brain to the process. Early work is early work. If you want to revisit it, the best thing you can do is identify the themes you want to expound upon and put them into a new project.

 

Another great example of how to light an actor so that you can see
the performance. Something to think about for next time.

But as muddy as the waters were around Blade Runner, this was a friendly argument to make. After all, there were people who liked the voice-over (myself included) in that it helped build and explain the world in which this dystopian society operated in. Just like film noir voice-over should. This is doubly useful because of all the extra time director Ridley Scott spent filming vistas of blasted hellscapes and flying cars and having people sigh and drink and not say anything. And I never warmed to the Director’s Cuts, any of them, because I kept hearing the V.O. in my head during the scenes when it was supposed to be there and wasn’t.

But it was our movie, and we loved it. It was science fiction at a time when there was a limited amount of it to consume and the quality varied widely. Over the years, it became a right of passage for other SF fans. “You haven’t seen Blade Runner? Oh, you gotta! We’re watching it this weekend.” And it’s a movie that gradually became more popular, and more respected, despite the director’s best efforts to confuse everyone, but it was always firmly in the SF genre. It didn’t break out, never really crossed over. Jocks don’t watch Blade Runner. It’s not that kind of movie, and never was. Even in the new Age of the Geek, it’s a deep cut. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I never ever, not once, thought to myself, “I wonder what happens next?”

 

In the original movie, buildings were billboards.
So, like, we're two years ahead of the curve on this one.

Now we get to Blade Runner 2049.

In the “Even a Blind Squirrel Occasionally Finds a Nut” Category, we find this short feature by Looper on Why Blade Runner 2049 Really Failed at the Box Office. I offer it here with no commentary, because I largely agree with it, and also, what I really want to do is pile on here, because I watched this movie twice and I have to tell you, I don’t know what you all were watching, but I don’t think the Emperor is wearing new clothes, here.

 

This orange color palate is supposed to mean something,
but I have no idea what. Ford is blue in the poster. 

Dennis Villeneuve made a splash with Arrival, a science fiction film, adapted from a real science fiction story, and it was well-received all around. He apparently pulled a lot of his visual style from watching early Ridley Scott movies. I wonder which ones?

It’s too bad he never figured out that Scott’s “style” is another way of saying “storytelling,” because this film substitutes mood for murk, doesn’t know when to start telling the story it’s trying to tell, doesn’t know how to signal anything to an audience, visually meanders for two hours and forty three minutes. That’s if you don’t count the three short films Villeneuve commissioned to explain key events leading up to Blade Runner 2049. Those run an additional twenty-seven minutes. That’s three hours and ten minutes’ worth of “What the hell am I watching?”

A great many of the shots in this movie are set up along the same angles and planes as many shots in the original film. Noticeably so. This wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, but when Villeneuve isn’t swiping visual cues from the original movie, he’s bathing the background in heavy fog or smoke or “atmosphere” so that it’s really difficult to see what’s going on. In a 3D movie, darkened by technology to begin with, this renders big chunks of the movie oily and muddy by degrees.

When there is a light source, it’s in motion, creating a strange distraction. It’s the future. Why are light bulbs still swinging? Is conduit that scarce? Many of the scenes are inadequately lit—and we know this because when other scenes start, they are expertly lit, or over-lit. In a movie with three generations of hunky actors in it, you’d think you would want to shine a light on those darling faces so the audience could see them. There’s a scene with Ford and Leto where the moving light is so distracting, I was trying to figure it out instead of listening to the dialogue.

Oh, and that’s the thing: you have to concentrate on this movie, and instantly judge what you’re listening to so you can decide if this is plot, big secret reveal, or simply chit-chat before something else happens. For a movie that both slavishly values its silence, and yet also wrote in a literal Girl-Friday-in-the-Machine for Gosling to interact with so that we aren’t watching a silent picture for three hours, there are still scenes that Go Nowhere and Do Nothing. Gosling and Dave Bautista, easily the best actor in the movie, have several minutes of empty-calorie banter before Bautista is retired. The only purpose it serves is to introduce the idea that Gosling’s character is a Replicant, and in case you forget it, there’s a scene where he’s walking down a hallway shortly after that someone—human, I guess, barks at him as he’s walking by, “Lousy Skin-Job,” and Gosling’s character flinches and pulls away. See? Replicants are still a problem, here, too. But, why? I’ll get into the story, later.

And the soundtrack? It’s industrial noise. Say what you want about Vangelis, and I would not presume to debate you, but the soundtrack in this overblown set of vacation slides is giant, strident Harrumphing noises and sub-woofer honks. I shit you not. They are loud, too, instigating almost a jump-scare, because, see, for the past thirty minutes you’ve been leaning forward in your chair, trying to hear something, anything resembling meaningful dialogue. Next thing you know, Gosling is back in the car, flying over L.A. and the movie is braying at you like the genetically-recreated dinosaur that it is.

 

This is the most exiting moment in the film.
A real edge-of-your-seat nail biter, this one is.

It’s a technical mess. Villeneuve inexplicably found a sans serif font that is very thin and hard to read, underlit the text, and then slapped it up the upper and lower corners of the frame. It almost works when the screen is black, but those cards that are ideally used to tell you where you in the new scene (Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.) are get lost in the corners of the frame with no weight or light on them. Oh, and they are sporadically used, as well. Some places never get a card. Good luck figuring out the place with the context of Gosling frog-walking through a scene with no expression on his face! I’d call it a rookie mistake but I don’t think it is. I think it was just a bad choice.

The lighting is bad, the sound is bad (actors are either quietly talking, or the soundtrack is blasting sub-woofer honks at you), the pacing is bad, and it’s an editorial mess. So much dead space that is given to showing more vistas of blasted hellscapes. No sense of place, no sense of time. I honestly don’t know what Villeneuve was thinking.

Let’s talk about the actors for just a second. I love Harrison Ford. I grew up with him. Spiritually, he’s wish-fulfillment figure to me—a psychic Cool Uncle I wish I had. Raiders of the Lost Ark is my personal Rosetta Stone. And so I say this with zero irony and full sincerity: Please sit down. I am really afraid he’s going to break a hip or something. And for God’s sake, quit dressing up in your old roles. The only reboot you need to be in right now is the Grumpy Old Men revival. Of course, there’s a practical reason why Ford is in the movie, and I’ll hit that later. I guess if you’re casting a movie about life-like robots, the wooden Ryan Gosling is probably a great call.

I think Ryan Gosling is one of the blandest, most colorless, gotta-face-made-for-punching actors in Hollywood right now. I’m glad Ford really hit him. I don’t get how two lazy eyes and a half smirk equals sex appeal in the 21^st century, I really don’t. And don't say "abs." There's better abs on better actors. This triangle-headed incubus is what's wrong with the country today.

And then we come to Jared Leto. Yeah, I’m just going to leave that right there. This kid, boy, I tell you what...

But the worst thing about this movie is that it hinges on making a decision about the first Blade Runner movie. Its premise is based entirely on the idea that Deckard is a Replicant. Oh, yeah, sorry. Spoilers.

This premise has to be bought if you are going to buy the premise for the new movie. And if you are like me, and think the “Deckard is a Replicant” idea is bullshit, well, guess what? This movie is a fight from start to finish.

It’s a fight because the whole “secret plot” hinges on finding the baby—the all Replicant child of Deckard and Rachel. The baby that shouldn’t have happened. Because they are, you know, not real. Gosling’s character has to track this kid down before he “upsets the balance of the world.” I guess if the Replicants can Self-Replicate, then they are people and therefore not to be used as slave labor for...doing what, exactly? The off-world colonies are thriving, we are told. They aren’t terra-forming. Or are they? It’s a bunch of hand-waving, and God Help You if you didn’t watch the 27 minutes of bonus footage that came out ahead of time.

 

Lots of great visuals in this movie. When you can see them.
But not enough to move the story forward. 

Three vignettes. The first one was Dave Bautista, dated one year before the movie starts. It connects directly into the start of the movie. So directly, in fact, that it should have been the start of the movie.

The second vignette, starring Jared Leto doing the worst “William Shatner does Stevie Wonder” impression I’ve ever heard in my life, dated twelve years before the movie starts. We learned that the Tyrell Corporation was bought up by another mega-corp, run by Leto, who is genius enough to make Replicants who are totally safe, this time, because see, he orders his man to kill himself and he does it. Genius! Based on the movie that just came out, it’s safe to assume the ban on making Replicants has lifted.

The last one, an anime, is the longest, but it’s also got the most useful information in it. It happens three years AFTER the first movie. All of the Nexus 6 Replicants (Roy Batty’s batch) have expired because of their 5 year life span. Except presumably, apparently, (and now according to Villeneuve definitely) Rachel, who Tyrell said was special, and if you think that way, then presumably, apparently, (and now according to Villeneuve definitely) Deckard, as well. So, the new Replicants are Nexus 8’s, and they have all of the advantages of Nexus 6 Replicants, but they have a normal life span.

When a pack of former Replicant Soldiers find out that they are fighting a war against other Replicants (“toy soldiers in a sandbox,”) they decide to free the enslaved Replicants. Oh, yeah, and there’s an uprising. Replicants are being lynched. So, get the metaphor? Okay, just checking. Deep waters, here. A small team of infiltrators manage to blow up a satellite uplink and an installation that contains all of the Replicant records. It’s called The Blackout. It means, obliquely, that the Replicants were free to go into hiding to escape persecution. Which, apparently, they did.

 

This fight? In the Vegas Lounge? It's technical chaos.

Glossing right over the idea that, in fact, Blade Runner 2022 makes for a much better, more compelling, and more interesting story than the one we got, these nuggets of info are crucial to understanding the 2 hour and 43 minute movie you’re watching—because, apparently, they couldn’t figure out a way to shoehorn that information in—in 2 hours and 43 minutes.

But instead of putting useful information into the movie, we get told things and then are given all of this empty space to try and make sense of it. And, when Harrison Ford shows up at the end of Act 2, and you realize that all of the assumptions you had about the first movie were, according to this movie, wrong, well, that’s on you to wrestle with. We’re not going to fill anything in for you.

So, Deckard is, apparently, a magical Replicant, not a Nexus 6, but “special,” like Rachel. A prototype Nexus 8, maybe? Two of them? And why would NO ONE in the first movie say anything to anyone about this? Why would Tyrell create two prototype Self-Replicating Replicants, which is basically just cloning at that point, and not tell anyone about it?

When Gosling’s character (K, or Joe, or, you know what? Who cares!?) starts pulling at this glued-over Gordian Knot of a plot, it has to compete with other lapses in logic. RepliGos has to be regularly re-calibrated to “baseline,” which is, I guess, the tweak Jared Leto did that keeps the Replicants from freaking out. Except that everyone still hates and distrusts them. Except for the ones who don’t. Whatever. When he starts looking into this mystery of the magical RepliKid, he has another Replicant bird-dogging his every move. She’s loyal to Leto, who needs the kid for...what? The secret of Replicant Life? Leto apparently can’t make more Replicants and thinks a self-Replicating Replicant, or just a clone, is the key to making more Replicants. His Replicant helps RepliGos from a distance, at one point even taking out a group of people attacking him with missiles. But she doesn’t try to attack RepliGos until he finally goes rogue. And even then, his human handler gives him 48 hours to “get right,” but it’s clear she’s just letting him go. Now the Replicant Hunter has become the Replicant Hunted. And he’s being tracked by a tiny bug a prostitute slips into his coat. Jeez, Louise, what a god-awful mess.

This film takes a very long time to tell a very basic, hackneyed, clichéd story that ultimately goes nowhere and does nothing. It’s got no heart, no balls, and no guts. It’s fitting, I suppose, that everyone in the movie is so wooden as to appear to be puppets. The Biblical allegory is ham-fisted, and the elaborate machinations necessary to get Deckard into the movie, and have him figure into the Messiah plot, and spend so much time on these earnest discussions that solve no problems and raise no stakes. This movie flies in the face of everything that made the original Blade Runner great. It was a simple story, made complicated by the questions it asked. It did not ask a bunch of pedantic questions and then try to build a story out of them.

I watched this movie twice, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with all of the questions that came up. Having Deckard end up a Replicant in the movie knocked me out of the film completely, and took some time to get back in. By then, I was pissed. This is a premise that shouldn’t have been utilized for a platform.

I don’t doubt that Villeneuve is a huge Blade Runner fan. I think this movie attests that he was unable to separate himself from the material and as a result, he made bad creative choices. No one else could separate their fan-ness enough to help him, apparently. I wish like hell that Ford was able to continue his personal quest to kill all of his beloved characters before he dies. Deckard should have eaten a bullet in the third act. Instead, he gets the last shot in the movie. Phillip K. Dick is spinning in his grave.

Oh, and the cinematographer? Roger Deakins? I agree, he deserves an Academy Award. Just not for this. But this will be the movie he wins it for. And that just sucks.

You may well think I’m wrong. That’s fine. Feel free to try and convince me otherwise.