Category: Reviews

The 1996-2012 Cultural Zenith, and the 2012-2024 Cultural Nadir

For a number of years now, I have claimed that in Britain there was a cultural high-point that ended at the end of 2012, and that ever since we have been in a cultural wasteland. In this post, I would like to prove it.

One of the early indicators I got of this was the decline in good fantasy and science fiction shows on the BBC. I remember in the late 2000s we had both Merlin and Doctor Who on television at the same time. Both of these shows were great – I remember being so excited for new episodes, and upon seeing each new episode me and my friends would spend hours and hours talking about them. We also had the BBC’s Robin Hood series (which was flawed – just as Merlin and Doctor Who were – but still great).

Robin Hood ended in 2009, and Merlin ended in 2012 (with a finale that rather frustratingly lacked closure). And the thing is, I don’t think I know of any good fantasy television shows that have been on the BBC since Merlin ended. Doctor Who has continued, of course, but it has steadily gotten worse, and is now completely unwatchable. A lot of people liked Matt Smith’s Doctor, but I started to notice the cracks from his very first episode. (That’s a niche joke there. (And that’s another niche joke there – one for the etymologists.)) Matt Smith took over in 2010, and by the end of 2012 the show had really deteriorated – whenever I rewatch those 2000s episodes of Doctor Who, I often don’t make it through all the Matt Smith ones.

So by the end of 2012, Robin Hood was gone, Merlin was gone, and Doctor Who was crumbling. From 2013 to 2015, the BBC gave us Atlantis – a show specifically designed to fill the gap left by Merlin, and created by many of the same people. But despite having some AMAZING actors – including Robert Emms, Sarah Parish, and Mark Addy (one of my all-time favourite actors) – it just wasn’t very good. It just wasn’t written very well.

Quite frankly, the BBC seemed to give up on fantasy and science fiction. It was as though they thought it was too hard to make – or they looked down on it as a genre, as a number of middle class, not-quite-as-intelligent-as-they-think-they-are people do.

Of course, we had Game of Thrones to keep us occupied, but even that seemed to fall to the post-2012 corruption in the end. The last two seasons of that – it is generally agreed – are quite flawed, and some would say even season six had quite a few issues. That takes us back to season five, which aired in 2015 – only 3 years after 2012.

Another early indicator I got was the decline in good comedy shows on the BBC – and on other British networks, actually. This decline has been much sharper. In the 2000s (including 2010), we had Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Come Fly With Me, The Armstrong and Miller Show, Harry and Paul, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, Peep Show, Green Wing, The IT Crowd (apart from the special), Gavin and Stacey (again, ignoring the specials), The Office, Extras, and even Coupling. That is A LOT.

What’s more, back then, Live At The Apollo was actually good. (I haven’t watched any of Live At The Apollo in years – they just kept inviting people on who weren’t very funny.) Back then is also the golden era of Mock The Week. Mock The Week continued for many years afterwards, of course, but it always seemed to be struggling to survive.

The first two series of Miranda were also in the 2000s (again, including 2010). The third series and the specials for Miranda were nowhere near as good as the first two series – something strange happened there. The early series of Not Going Out were also in the 2000s. (That’s had some great later episodes, but the early ones, for the most part, are better.)

Would I Lie To You was started in the 2000s – and again, those early episodes were great. (I haven’t watched any of the recent stuff – it just felt like it was going on and on.) QI! That was great when Stephen Fry was hosting it – again, mostly in the 2000s. I’ve watched almost none of it since Sandi Toksvig took over – it’s just terribly boring. (And think, all of the famous moments from the show – the ones that get watched over and over again on YouTube – are from Fry’s era.)

And Have I Got News For You was better back then too. Brian Blessed’s first appearance – which I think is the all-time high-point of the show – was in 2008. Nowadays HIGNFY is just awful – I can’t watch it. It’s mostly not funny – there’s just the odd weak pun that at most elicits a thought of ‘That’s funny.’, but no actual laughter and not even a half-smile. It feels like they’re just going through the motions. Ian and Paul know that the BBC’s never going to cancel it, so they’re just going to sit there, occasionally making a witty remark, until they’re too old and frail to walk on set anymore.

And what else have we had since 2012 that’s been any good? I mean we’ve had all of the Philomena Cunk stuff (where it’s her own show) – that’s been good. We’ve had 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown – a lot of the early stuff from that was good, although it’s deteriorated. There was also, briefly, 10 O’Clock Live and Live At The Electric – but those were quite early on since 2012. Other than that, what has there been?

The main comedy show that the BBC seems to have been pushing since that time is, of all things … Mrs Brown’s Boys. Jesus Fucking Christ. That show is one of the worst shows to have ever been created. Fuck it, it’s one of the worst things to have ever been created. I could write out a lengthy argument as to why it’s so absolutely fucking awful, but the reality is if you don’t already know why it’s awful, there’s no helping you. It’s the exact thing that was parodied by Ricky Gervais’ Extras – which the BBC themselves had aired just a few years before – but apparently having that template of what not to do did not help them.

Mrs Brown’s Boys should never have made it to air in the first place, and yet it seems to have been the BBC’s flagship comedy show for several years now.

So when it comes to comedy, we really are living through an absolute dearth of it.

I think I have already demonstrated that 2012 marks a boundary point – lots of good things had already finished by that point, and there aren’t that many good things that have come about since. But actually, the very first sign I got that we were entering a cultural nadir happened just a few minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day going from 2012 to 2013.

2012 had been a great year for Britain. We had hosted the Olympic Games – at which we had won an extraordinary number of medals, and the opening and closing ceremonies were some of the best we’ve seen since the turn of the millennium (though they still had quite a few flaws). It was also the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Now, even though we got to see a Platinum Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth, the Diamond Jubilee was better – the Queen was able to do more for it, and the celebrations themselves were better. (I remember the barge.)

It felt like Britain was at its all-time peak. It felt like we could do anything. But I remember staying up ’til midnight on New Year’s Eve to watch the fireworks on television. (The fireworks have long since become tedious and obnoxious, but that’s a rant for another post.) Once the fireworks were over, the BBC played their new ident for 2013. ‘Love 2013’ it read. It was so underwhelming. I knew at that moment that we were about to start a decline.

So 2012 is the end-point of the zenith – when did it start? I put it in 1996. 1996 was the year that Pokémon came out. (Granted, Pokémon is not a British cultural creation, but we still had it here – and it was BIG. Everyone who is around my age remembers it from school – we all played the games, swapped the cards, and watched the movies. It had a profound cultural impact on my generation.) Also, the first Harry Potter book came out not long after – in 1997. And thus began the intense craze for Harry Potter. People who have grown up after that time could not possibly imagine what that was like. The obsession with and adoration for the Harry Potter books and films was like nothing we’ve seen ever since.

The first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, and the last Harry Potter film (with the films always lagging behind the books, of course) came out in 2011 – almost perfectly bookending my proposed era.

There has been nothing like Harry Potter in the years since – either in book form or movie form. Game of Thrones came close – and might well have gone down as one of the all-time great television series, had they not screwed up the ending. And of course, George R. R. Martin himself has not published any more of the book series (the last one being published in 2011 – making my point again). He is never going to finish that series. He’s had 13 years and he still hasn’t done the next one. He is never going to do it.

The 1996-2012 cultural zenith also includes the Lord Of The Rings movies, of course – which will be classics for many centuries. It even includes the Matrix films – which again were not a British cultural creation, but they still had a big impact here. (And of course, there are only three Matrix films.)

And my goodness it even includes the Star Wars Prequels. Some people don’t like the prequels, but their cultural impact cannot be denied. The number of iconic lines, characters, and pieces of music greatly outstrips the ‘sequel’ films that Disney made. I’ve long thought that you can tell how culturally impactful a movie is by how many memes it produces – and the prequels are used in memes every day.

And gosh, now that I think about it, this era mostly overlaps with Star Trek: Voyager. Again, a number of people don’t like Voyager, but I think it’s almost as good as The Next Generation, and certainly far, far superior to anything that’s been made in recent years.

And actually, that just shows how post-2012 has been characterised not just by an absence of good television shows and movies, but by a presence of bad ones. I’ve commented on this sort of thing many times, of course, but to list just some of the awful shows we’ve had post-2012 (and much of which is after about 2015/2016): Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks (and I’m sure the other Star Trek stuff has probably been shit as well, but I haven’t seen it), the Star Wars ‘sequels’, the Han Solo film, the Kenobi Show, The Acolyte (and again, I’m sure lots of the other Disney Star Wars stuff has been shit too, but I haven’t seen it), all of Doctor Who since Jodie Whittaker took over, all of the Fantastic Beasts films, most of the MCU films since Endgame (a common observation), Amazon’s Rings of Power, The Matrix 4. I could go on but really what’s the point.

Of course, much of this can be attributed to the deterioration of Hollywood that’s been going on from about 2015 / 2016 (although the process started much earlier). There’s a lot to be said about the interplay between American and British culture, but I won’t say it in this post.

But what has caused this current cultural nadir? Well, thinking specifically about Britain, I think it is in part because of a deterioration at the BBC. I have long thought that the BBC has lacked the ability and the determination to make good fantasy, science fiction, and comedy. A game show, a quiz show, a travel show, a cookery show, a dancing show, a soap opera, a rerun – these things are not difficult to conceive of. Good science fiction requires true insight, and a willingness to do what no-one else is doing. The BBC has long seemed far too conformist for that.

I think there are other, nebulous reasons for this cultural nadir too. Britain is not doing as well as it was in the 2000s. It is a grimmer place. This is partly economic – our economic situation is worse than it was 12 years ago. (I will not defer to statistics here, but I think we all sense it.) Britons are less able to take chances on creative projects. The causes of our economic misfortune are manyfold.

When will this current nadir end? I don’t know. It could go on for a LONG time yet. I couldn’t say if we’re past the worst of it. I think I’d know it if I saw the beginning of the end, but perhaps not. But I do think the solution has remained the same throughout: bringing about a new cultural zenith requires extraordinary determination and discernment from talented creatives.

All that is left is to name these eras, but I can’t think of any good ones – yet.

For the sake of clarity, I have listed below many of the aforementioned television shows and books that belong to this pre-2012 zenith and post-2012 nadir. (There is, of course, a certain ‘fuzziness’ to these endpoints.)

The 1996-2012 Cultural Zenith

  • The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007)
  • Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
  • The Harry Potter Books (1997-2007)
  • The Men in Black Movies (1997-2012)
  • Pokémon Red and Blue (EU: 1999)
  • The Star Wars Prequels (1999-2005)
  • The Matrix Movies (1999-2003 – there is no fourth movie)
  • Coupling (2000-2004)
  • The Office (2001-2003)
  • The Harry Potter Movies (2001-2011)
  • The Lord Of The Rings Movies (2001-2003)
  • Shrek (2001)
  • Look Around You (2002-2005)
  • That Mitchell and Webb Sound (2003-2013)
  • Little Britain (2003-2004 – the first two series)
  • Peep Show (2003-2015)
  • QI (with Stephen Fry – 2003-2016)
  • The Catherine Tate Show (2004-2007)
  • Green Wing (2004-2007)
  • The Incredibles (2004)
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)
  • Extras (2005-2007)
  • Doctor Who (before it became shit, 2005-2010 (-ish))
  • The Thick Of It (2005-2012)
  • Mock The Week (2005-2022 – its golden era was earlier on)
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008)
  • That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006-2010)
  • Hyperdrive (2006-2007)
  • The IT Crowd (2006-2013)
  • Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe (2006-2008)
  • Robin Hood (2006-2009)
  • Harry & Paul (2007-2012)
  • The Armstrong & Miller Show (2007-2010)
  • Gavin & Stacey (2007-2010, ignoring the specials)
  • Merlin (2008-2012)
  • Newswipe with Charlie Brooker (2009-2010)
  • Miranda (2009-2010 – first two series only)
  • Avatar (2009)
  • Come Fly With Me (2010)
  • Him & Her (2010-2013)
  • Twenty-Twelve (2011-2012)
  • 10 O’Clock Live (2011-2013)
  • Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (2012)
  • The London Olympic Games (2012)
  • Live At The Electric (2012-2014)

The Post-2012 Cultural Nadir

  • Mrs Brown’s Boys (2011-now)
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
  • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
  • Doctor Who (Whittaker and after – 2017-now)
  • The Mash Report (2017-2022)
  • Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024)
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
  • Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
  • Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
  • Aladdin (2019)
  • Captain Marvel (2019)
  • Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023)
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024)
  • Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett (2021-2022)
  • WandaVision (2021)
  • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021)
  • Loki (2021-2023)
  • Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)
  • Star Wars: The Kenobi Show (2022)
  • She-Hulk (2022)
  • Amazon’s The Rings Of Power (2022-2024)
  • Star Wars: Ahsoka (2023)
  • Star Wars: The Acolyte (2024)
  • and more …

Wicked Part 1 – Astonishingly mediocre – 6/10

You might think it odd that I went to see this movie – given that the Wicked musical is famously more popular with women than is typical for fantasy, and it’s not exactly hard fantasy either. But when it comes to movies, really I’m willing to give anything a shot if it’s sufficiently ambitious and if the basic idea is interesting.

It’s worth stating at the outset that this is a review of the movie as an isolate work. I have not seen the musical it’s based on or read the book that that in turn is based on. I detest changes from source material, and I’m sure if I knew of them and saw them I would mark the movie down for them, but here I am judging it as a movie on its own.

I have heard many great things about the musical over the years (though as I say, I have not seen it). On that basis, I was expecting this movie to be quite good. But then also, the lead-up to the release of this movie has been disastrous. The lead actress criticised a fan for making a version of the movie poster that looked more like the poster for the musical. And then we had the endless series of interviews where the two lead actresses just started crying. It was just pathetic and repulsive. On the basis of all of that, I was expecting this movie to be a complete disaster.

So I was expecting either something brilliant or something disastrous. What I wasn’t expecting was what it ultimately was: astonishingly mediocre.

I’ll start with the stuff that was actually quite good – because quite frankly that stuff is much easier to describe and so easy to get out of the way first. The costume design was excellent – quirky and novel, but just managed to avoid being cliché. The set design was also excellent – exactly what you’d expect but also filled with many new things along the same lines. That train looked amazing. (Although I think it’s more properly referred to just as a locomotive, as it didn’t pull a ‘train’ of carriages behind it.)

The casting was also excellent. Jeff Goldblum was made to play the Wizard of Oz. As he tends to do in every film nowadays he just played himself, but in this case it was absolutely ideal. Michelle Yeoh was brilliant – I’m a huge fan of Michelle Yeoh whatever she’s in. She’s a phenomenal actress – she can take even very boring, cliché lines and make them sound great (which she had to do several times in this film).

Cynthia Erivo was actually very competent. Despite her insufferable personality in real life, she was actually very skilled – never underplaying or overplaying the part (which it would have been easy to do with that part).

The real star of the show, however, was Ariana Grande. Now, I don’t think of Ariana Grande as an actress – I think of her as a singer. I understand that she did actually start out as an actress, but I nevertheless think of her as a singer, and my general assumption is that singers can’t act. (And in fairness to me, that assumption is grounded – a lot of them really can’t act.) But she absolutely stole the show in this film. On a technical level her acting was flawless – every expression was exactly right. She was able to do the Connie D’Amico trope perfectly. And she also had lots of funny moments.

Some might dislike the idea of the second-main character stealing the show, but it’s generally more possible for secondary characters to be able to do this than the primary character, because secondary characters can often have more extreme character traits and be funnier, whereas the main character has to be sufficiently neutral for the audience to be able to project themselves onto them.

Some of the core ideas of the film were very interesting too. (Some, but not all, as I shall get onto.) The basic idea of expanding the world of the Wizard of Oz I really like – I always like that sort of thing. I’m a huge fan of the ‘lost knowledge’ trope (that George R. R. Martin always did really well), and the Grimmerie is part of that. Stories about dictatorships are often fun too.

So there were a number of things to like about this film. In fact, this film was particularly unusual – usually what lets a film down is its peripherals – usually the core story is a good idea, but the film is let down by its casting, its acting, its dialogue, its visual effects, and so on (think about the Last Airbender film – fantastic source material to work from – a great core idea – but let down by all its peripherals – the casting, the acting, the dialogue, and so on). This film was the other way round. All of its peripherals were good – it was let down by its core.

The main story is just, in parts, very stupid. A girl is born with green skin. Her parents – especially her father (although it is implied that he is not actually her father) – despise her for it, even though this is a land where magic is known to exist, even though a demonstration of her raw magical ability occurs moments after birth (if I remember correctly), even though they made an entirely green city – suggesting, as it does, that there may be a connection between greenness and magical ability, and so greenness would be revered, not detested – and even though this is a land filled with people who are already different shades of brown and beige, and even though this is a land filled with talking animals.

When she’s a bit older, some local children mock her for being green, and then when she first goes to the university, the people around her are absolutely mortified at the sight of her (although they get over it extremely quickly – just watch them in the background of the shots). It’s all ‘woe betide me, no-one likes me because I’m green’, but it makes no sense – the world we are looking at is filled with far more odd and unusual things than a person with green skin. It does not make sense for these people to find it as odd as they do.

‘But that’s the whole point! It’s not supposed to be rational! Discrimination isn’t rational!’, I hear an annoying person scream at their computer screen. Yes, discrimination between individuals on the basis of something that has no effect on the situation under consideration is generally irrational – the point is that in order for a difference to seem significant enough for people to hate you for it, it must be quite a lot different to anything else those people have experienced. Being green in a land filled with people who already vastly exceed Hollywood’s diversity quotas, along with talking animals and magic, should not be all that notable. In other words, how do you notice one odd thing in a room filled with odd things? When everything’s odd, nothing is.

It gets even stupider because as the film goes on they morph this idea of ‘discriminating against a person with green skin’ into ‘people with green skin are ugly’. This isn’t the first film to throw out this idea – I can’t remember what the other one was, but I’ve definitely seen it before, and it was stupid there too. It’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of beauty and ugliness. Skin colour doesn’t actually affect beauty at all – and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. Blue skin, magenta skin, orange skin, gold skin, multicoloured skin – literally any colour can look good. What actually matters is bone structure – just the basic shape of your face, the size and position of your eyes, and so on – this is what actually affects beauty. (Skin tone and complexion also affects it, but that’s different from colour – the actual hue makes no difference.) We all know this. Of course we all know this. But here this film is pretending that if someone were green, everyone would think they were ugly. No they wouldn’t.

(As an interesting aside, there are actually real humans with blue skin. Some people take colloidal silver (which is not a good idea), and over time it turns their skin blue – look it up. These people are a curiosity – medical and experiential – but they are not hated.)

Elphaba goes to Shiz University to support her sister as she enrols. While there, however, she accidentally gives a display of her magical power, causing a lot of disruption. On seeing that she has true power, Madame Morrible decides to admit her to the university. Elphaba just accepts this – but this is weird – didn’t she have other plans? Didn’t she have somewhere else to go after this enrolment ceremony? She’s just offered a place on a multi-year residential course and she can start then and there? Doesn’t she have to tell anyone? It’s just weird. I suspect it’s a hang-over from the musical – in a musical it would be fine because musicals always have a degree of unrealness to them, but you can’t get away with that in a film.

The film then progresses into its high school section. This section might as well just be every high school drama ever put to film or television. It’s almost unbearably cliché. The popular girl doesn’t like the girl who’s different. The girl who’s different is nerdy, and she’s ugly because she’s nerdy, and she’s nerdy because she’s ugly – because Hollywood really thinks that nerdiness makes you ugly and vice versa. Eventually the popular girl feels guilty about the way she treats the unpopular girl and decides to treat her better (because god forbid a change of behaviour be based on rationality and not emotion). But of course, now that the popular girl likes the unpopular girl, the unpopular girl cannot be allowed to remain ugly – she must be given a makeover – because you can only truly transcend into the domain of popularity if you completely conform to it and change your appearance. It’s all about appreciating people’s differences – and the way they do that is by completely squashing those differences – you must be like all of the other popular girls. And THEN, on top of that, the makeover consists of taking off the unpopular girl’s glasses and letter her hair down, because in reality this ‘ugly’ girl was played by a very good looking actress and wasn’t ugly at all – glasses and tying your hair up do not, in fact, make you ugly. So the ‘ugly’ girl was not really ugly, she already conformed to the standards of the popular girls, but the need for this conformity had to be emphasised to the audience by having her have a ‘makeover’ anyway.

I mean, it’s just so stupid isn’t it? Almost every idea is undermined by the next idea that’s presented. It’s unbearably cliché – every single part of it was parodied by Family Guy over a decade ago. There’s no meaning to it – it’s just flawed cliché after flawed cliché. I think it would be fine if the film accepted itself for what it is, but it (and its core audience) seem to think that it’s making some deeply profound statement.

We then learn that the animals in this world are discriminated against – and over the course of the film this intensifies. This doesn’t really work because when animals can talk what really sets them apart from humans? In the real world, a goat and a cat seem roughly equally different to a human, because neither can talk, but if they could both talk, surely they’d seem as different to each other as either would to a human, because speech is no longer a defining factor between the three. In other words, how does this category of ‘animal’ exist in this world? It doesn’t matter so much for the kind of easy fantasy of the Wizard of Oz, but since the film makes a big fuss about it it’s worth mentioning.

Jonathan Bailey shows up. Now let’s none of us kid ourselves – we all know why Jonathan Bailey got this part. He got it because he was in Bridgerton. Now, I tried watching Bridgerton. It was shit. Truly and utterly shit. It’s what happens when an American author tries to write about the British aristocracy. Americans do not understand aristocracy or royalty. But it is popular with women who want to fantasise about the Regency Era but who don’t care about facts or historical accuracy. Jonathan Bailey is the object of desire in the show.

And he’s the object of desire in this film too. He’s there because he’s good looking. It’s interesting how a gay actor has been selected as the object of desire for heterosexual women. I could go on a rant about the trend of gay males being treated as pets for women in media (particularly in fiction), but that’s for another post. Bailey’s character is, quite frankly, largely irrelevant in this film. (This is just part one though – perhaps that changes in part two.)

Eventually Elphaba and Glinda go to the Emerald City. I really liked the story of these kind of ancient magical beings who once inhabited the land of Oz and created the Grimmerie. I also really like all of the hints of what it is actually like to live in Oz – which is in far greater turmoil than many would have our main characters believe. All of that was great, but it did really need more worldbuilding.

And then we get a semi-conclusion. I didn’t know before going to see the film that it was only going to be part one, but that’s fine.

All of these story issues really make the film fall flat. Some of them could easily have been resolved – particularly the worldbuilding stuff – that’s easy to fix. But some of them couldn’t have been. The core story between Elphaba and Glinda revolves around the ‘popular girl’ trope, and there’s nothing you can really do with that that doesn’t change the entire story.

On top of that – and most egregiously for a musical – the music was actually pretty shit. There was A LOT of autotune used for some of the singers – I could hear its distinctive tone all the time. But even worse, the music was, quite frankly, forgettable. You can tell how good the music of a film is by how many tunes you could hum when walking out of the cinema. I could only do two: Defying Gravity and Popular – but that’s because I already knew those two beforehand. The rest I can’t remember. Pathetic, for a musical.

And also rather sickening was the dancing. God the dancing was shit throughout. It was that typical ‘Yeaaahhh I’m dancing so hard because I’m so passionate and emotional and kewwwlll!’ style of dance that only Hollywood actors who are desperate for their big break can do. It’s a style of dance that only someone who thought the word ‘rockstar’ was aspirational would come up with. Utterly dreadful.

And you know the film that this one most reminded me of was High School Musical. It’s easy to see why this story is more popular with women: it’s a story about someone being accepted by a social group despite her differences, and winning an attractive male over the (ostensibly) more attractive female.

So overall: not great. Not outright shit either – there were some interesting and fun parts to it – but it was flat, and gave itself much more credit than it deserved.

I probably will watch it again at some point. I put it in the same category as a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – that wasn’t a good film – it had a huge number of core errors – but it had a few interesting ideas – particularly visual ideas – and I like to return to it every now and then.

So it’s a 6/10.

Deadpool 3 – Enjoyable, but flawed – 8/10

I would have liked to have reviewed this earlier, but this movie required a second viewing.

It was difficult to decide what to title this review. This movie is, in some ways, quite complex. It achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it was made, but also has some crucial flaws that I think make it not quite as good as the first two movies in the series.

Where to begin. Well this movie masterfully handles the inclusion of the Deadpool franchise – and the X-Men franchise – into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is an aspect which it could have gotten very, very wrong – and I think with anyone other than Ryan Reynolds writing it, it would have gone very, very wrong.

This movie had many problems it had to solve. First, of course, was that the last time we saw Wolverine was in 2017’s Logan (seven years ago!). The general commentary around that movie was that it was going to be Hugh Jackman’s last performance of the character – I don’t know if that was an idea that came from Hugh Jackman himself, or whether the tone of the movie itself simply suggested it to everyone – but either way, that was the general understanding. And along with that also came the idea that this was the true end for the character. Logan was well and truly dead – his healing factor had finally given out. It was an extraordinary ability but it was not infinite. He was not coming back. (I found it a bit strange that everyone was willing to go along with this idea. It wasn’t as though the X-Men movies had handled timelines and do-overs perfectly up until that point. Timelines had been altered, people had come back, people had made unusual cameos – the studios had always just done whatever they wanted – that’s how it had been for years.)

This was what Deadpool 3 was facing as soon as they decided to include Wolverine. A lesser movie would have just avoided giving any explanation – it would have just included Wolverine and ignored any questions about timelines and settings and canon. This movie tackled it head-on – and that was the right way to do it.

The opening scene handles the questions that we the audience have. Surely Wolverine’s healing factor is infinite? Surely its slow-down was just a result of whatever that evil guy in Logan was doing with the water or something? Surely he’s actually alive? Surely Deadpool’s just got to dig him up?

Well he does, and no, he really is dead. A clever writing move – in writing it’s always extremely risky to bring a character back from the dead, as you undermine the ultimate stakes of any story. And how did Deadpool 3, therefore, get around this? By using the MCU’s new(-ish) multiverse to acquire an alternate Wolverine.

After Deadpool digs up Logan’s adamantium-coated skeleton, some people from the Time Variance Authority show up, and there’s a big fight. The Deadpool movies always start with a fight – which always includes lots of unusual and striking methods of attack, with plenty of gore, highlighted with slow motion.

Now, I was very sceptical when the TVA showed up. I do not think the TVA have been done very well at all. I did not watch the Loki television series. (Have there been two series’ of it so far? I don’t know.) Well – I watched the first episode and a quarter, or something – I can’t quite remember – but it was just dreadful and I couldn’t watch another second. I did not like the TVA in that and I haven’t liked them in anything I’ve seem them in.

I have said it many times before: time travel is difficult to get right as a writer – you have to be very careful about including it in a story. And even harder to get right is any kind of extra-temporal entity. Doctor Who has had problems with this in the past. The TVA seem to exist ‘outside’ of time, but the very fact that they can breathe and walk and talk at all shows that they themselves occupy a space-time. It might be a different space-time to our own, but they clearly occupy one. But then also the fact that they can and do interact with our own space-time shows that they are causally connected to it – they can take part in the events that they are supposedly ‘outside’ of temporal connection with. So to what extent are they really ‘outside’ of it at all. It just becomes meaningless – the TVA isn’t outside of time or outside of our reality at all – they are, unavoidably, inevitably, part of our timeline.

This is the kind of problem you run into when doing any kind of time-travel stuff in stories. Most writers are not mentally equipped to deal with the paradoxes of time travel – and it tends to show VERY quickly. The TVA come across as nothing special. They appear to be able to teleport, but they don’t seem to be able to do anything clever at all time-wise, despite ostensibly having the knowledge, means, and dimensional vantage point to do so.

In order to make something like the TVA work, they cannot merely be ‘quirky’, with some outdated, Arts décoratifs, brown-glass design choices. They must be unknowable. Any beings that are truly beyond time would have such a radically different experience of reality that we would struggle to understand them. Think of how in Interstellar the super-dimensional beings that make the tesseract towards the end never speak or communicate directly. We do not see them; we do not understand them – we only know of their existence through their actions. It doesn’t have to be taken to this extreme every time, but this is how you make something unknowable. They could have done this in the MCU, but they didn’t, and the result is that the TVA is plain and uninteresting. The TVA comes across as less powerful and less mysterious than SHIELD did.

So the moment I saw that the TVA was going to be included in this movie, I was sceptical. But actually, not only did this movie avoid some of the mistakes made with the TVA previously, it managed to repair the concept somewhat. And it did this by not over-using them. A few scenes later we meet Paradox – the movie’s second villain, or deuterantagonist. The fact that Paradox is not following the commands of the broader TVA, and working somewhat independently, allows for an explanation for the TVA’s apparent non-omnipotence. The TVA should be extremely powerful, but Paradox does not have many of the usual options available to him because he is trying not to draw attention to what he’s doing. Deadpool steals a device for travelling around the multiverse, and Paradox tries using a ‘time ripper’, but that’s it really. It sets the movie up for a standard ‘destroying the universe’ storyline with a little bit of multiversial travel to get another Logan. Beyond that the TVA’s just a bunch of kitch workers in a dreary super-dimensional office and their incapable henchmen. We don’t need to indulge the underwhelming ideas of Loki.

This is why I say that this movie achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it is made. With just a few deft keystrokes, this movie has solved the problem of everyone expecting Logan to be truly dead, the problem of how the Deadpool stories can actually be included in the multiverse, and the problem of how to include the TVA (which they have to be to some extent), while also actually improving the TVA over their appearance in Loki. This movie manages to put one thread through several needles on its first try.

I’ve been going through this movie somewhat chronologically because it’s difficult to do anything else. The opening scenes – though clever, and solving many problems – do make one or two mistakes.

Something I found quite confusing on first watch-through, and which I still don’t understand now that I’ve seen it a second time, is how exactly the events of the first two Deadpool movies fit into the timelines and the multiverse. The second scene of the movie is the one between Deadpool and Happy Hogan. It’s a very funny scene – I’ll get to that in a moment – but we are told very explicitly that this is Earth 616 – i.e., ‘the Sacred Timeline’. This is the universe in which all of the events of the MCU before the multiverse split happened – it’s the one we know from the movies. But in the next scene we are told (very explicitly again) that we are looking at Earth 10005, and that it is six years later. So we’re in a different parallel universe, and it is this universe that the TVA pulls Deadpool from (and this universe that the TVA wants to destroy (I think – I’m pretty sure)).

So hang on, which universe did the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 occur in? The scene with Deadpool and Happy Hogan occurs in Earth 616 – does it also occur in Earth 10005? The text says ‘six years later’, implying it did (or that this is a pan-dimensional six years), and they reference it later – it’s given as the reason why Deadpool lost his motivation and split from Vanessa. If it happened in both, why show us it in a different universe? If the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 happened in both universes, then why even suggest that our Deadpool is not from the prime universe?

It’s not clear to me at all. Perhaps there’s an explanation out there on the internet, or perhaps it’s all clear if you watched Loki. I don’t know. This is something that should have been straightforward – either the Deadpool we know is from the prime universe or he isn’t.

This ties into another flaw in this movie – which I actually didn’t realise until after I’d finished watching the movie, even though it is quite obvious from the very first scene. It’s implied (obviously) that the Deadpool of this movie is the same as the Deadpool of movies 1 and 2. This movie also incorporates the events of Logan – Logan happens in the Deadpool universe. In Logan, Logan himself is old, as is Charles Xavier, but in Deadpool 2, when we’re in the X-Men mansion, we momentarily see the young X-Men cast. Charles is bald, so it’s after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse, but this means that between the events of Deadpool 2 and Deadpool 3, some 40+ years must have passed, which would not make sense given that none of Deadpool’s friends have aged.

So although Deadpool 3 managed to include itself into the MCU quite well – solving many problems along the way, it was not perfect. This is, in large part, a result of the mess made by other movies. It was always going to be hard to include the X-Men movies into the MCU, because the X-Men movies have a lot of inconsistencies like this. They simply were not as careful with the young-cast X-Men movies as they were with the MCU pre-Endgame.

Something this movie did incredibly well was weaving together all of the previously non-MCU movies into the MCU by the inclusion of characters from those movies. I mean, this was done really, really well – to the extent that this movie was an homage to 25 years of moviemaking. There are too many to list, but obviously having Chris Evans as the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four movie was a stroke of genius. It was a way to have Captain America in the movie without having Captain America in the movie. It was a brilliant twist when he said ‘Flame On!’. It was a nod through the fourth wall to the curious fact that, while Captain America and Fantastic Four were originally not part of the same cinematic universe, they were part of the same source material universe, and having the same actor in two different parts was ironic. It was also great seeing Chris Evans playing quite a different character from the rather earnest Captain America (which Chris Evans seemed to enjoy).

I was also thrilled to see the return of Azazel – though he wasn’t played by the original actor. I was also thrilled to see the return of Sabretooth and Pyro – both played by the original actors – I love that.

An absolute favourite was the return of Jennifer Garner as Elektra. For that alone I have given this movie an 8/10 instead of 7/10. 2005’s Elektra is an iconic movie for me, and I’m a huge fan of Garner’s version of Elektra – I was beyond thrilled that we got one more performance of the character here. (Personally, I’d quite like to see a whole new Elektra trilogy with Garner.)

Reynolds certainly knows what the fans like and want. It was amazing to see Henry Cavill for a short cameo as an alternate Wolverine. Few studio bosses would have had the awareness to do that. Nicepool was also a fantastic addition – Reynolds has the gift of knowing with extreme precision how a line or expression will come across, and that is why he’s able to create and play a character like Nicepool without it breaking the entire immersion.

Reynolds also knew what the fans wanted in terms of fights. We got two Deadpool vs. Wolverine fights – both of which were very creative – and we got a Deadpool and Wolverine team-up against the gang of different Deadpools (which had a perfect conclusion with no-one dying (except Nicepool) and the gang of Deadpools getting distracted by Peter).

Emma Corrin gave an outstanding performance as Cassandra Nova. That is not an easy character to play. Go too serious and the character becomes incomprehensible. Go not serious enough and the character doesn’t seem threatening. With a character like that, it’s not what powers she has that makes her threatening, nor is it how she uses them – it’s her own reaction to what she does with them that makes her come across as threatening.

The character of Paradox was a bit off. He was a very self-aware villain, somewhat over-the-top, and a bit camp. It made his motivation seem unserious. It was probably not helped by the fact that the protantagonist was introduced quite late in the movie.

I think one of the bigger flaws in this movie was it did not seem to fit with what we’ve seen of Wade and Vanessa in the previous two movies. In the first movie we were shown that Wade and Vanessa are very much made for each other. Vanessa dies near the start of the second movie, and the whole movie is about Wade’s sorrow – and then she comes back at the end. I just don’t believe that, after all of that, they would simply drift apart, as is shown at the start of this movie. Vanessa is almost entirely absent from this movie, which just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Something I also didn’t like in this movie was the ‘grotesque’. I have a very specific idea in my mind of what I think of as ‘grotesque’, and it’s often hard to convey, but I absolutely hate it. I would consider that ugly dog to be grotesque. Of course, the point of the dog was as a joke – that Deadpool would have an obsession with something so ugly. But it was still grotesque. I would also consider that flying skull version of Deadpool to be grotesque. I hated that too. It’s just repulsive – in a way that regular blood and gore isn’t. Were it not for these distorted forms, I might have given this movie a 9/10.

Above all, though, this movie is funny. This is possibly the funniest of the three Deadpool movies – the jokes are just packed in. Particularly funny is that second scene between Deadpool and Happy Hogan – an interview for Deadpool to join the Avengers with Jon Favreau – who plays Hogan – being one of the architects of the MCU. I suspect that scene was conceived of long before the rest of the story.

I think a third Deadpool movie would have been better if the franchise had not been included in the MCU – it could have focused much more on its existing characters like Vanessa, Negasonic, Yukio, Domino, Peter, and Dopinder. However, given that it was to be included, it did VERY well with the situation it had. It managed to neatly connect the X-Men franchise to the MCU, bring in Wolverine with a strong motivation (Wolverine as a character always seems to be best when he is filled with regret), solve some of the problems with the TVA, and be very funny. 8/10.

New Term: Avant-Cliché

I actually came up with this term a few years ago. I thought I might have used it somewhere, but apparently not (unless it was in a video).

This was a term I came up with when reviewing movies and television shows – I think specifically it was when I was reviewing Star Trek Discovery that I thought of it. I remembered it again when watching reviews of Agatha All Along recently. (I haven’t actually watched any of Agatha All Along – the MCU turned to shit a while ago. I just watch the reviews.)

The word cliché refers to an expression that has been used so often – an expression that’s so tired and worn-out – that it has lost all meaning, and often is used only by people who cannot think of anything original or interesting to say.

The term avant-cliché refers to something that, though it has never been done or said before, is immediately a cliché the moment it is used – because it is something so predictably pathetic – such an obvious pattern in an absence of thought or insight – such a blatant appeal to overly-ruminant, self-indulgent, vapid, narcissistic emotion – that even though it is the first time it has been done or said, it feels as though you’ve seen or heard it a thousand times before.

I forget the thing that I originally saw that made me think of the term, but in the clips I’ve seen from Agatha All Along in the reviews, that stupid song they sang made me think of it. As a piece of music, it was so luridly bland – utterly lacking in interesting melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre – that it was as though I’d heard it thousands of times before, even though I’d never heard it before.

It’s over. It’s dead. 0/10 – Doctor Who – The Church on Ruby Road – Review

Before the 2023 specials, I was cautiously optimistic that Doctor Who could come back from death. There had been a number of concerning pieces of information that had come out in the lead up to these specials and the next series, but I remained hopeful.

The specials were a mixture of underwhelming, mediocre, and infuriating – not so much a problem if only one episode is like that, but all three were. Together, they were the worst writing I have ever seen from Davies – by far.

We’ve now been given a Christmas special – which I’m treating as the first episode of the next series, even though I think officially it’s not. I was optimistic about Gatwa as the Doctor – particularly in contrast to Jodie Whittaker, who was shit. But this optimism was misplaced.

This was one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen. (In fairness, I didn’t actually watch a lot of the Whittaker run – including that episode with all the ‘timeless child’ bollocks – my sense of how bad those episodes are comes from watching other reviews – it’s a much less visceral sense.) I award this episode 0 out of 10. I don’t think I’ve ever given anything 0 out of 10 before.

This episode completely and utterly shattered the immersion. You know those shatterproof rulers you used to have in school? Remember how ear-splitting the snap was when you did try to shatter it? That’s what this episode did to Doctor Who. This episode was so unlike Doctor Who, that when I was watching it, it was like I was watching another show. It was like I was watching one of Davies’ gay shows: Queer As Folk, Cucumber, It’s A Sin. Everything about it – the pacing, the aesthetics, the tone, the setting – was just like from one of those shows. This wasn’t a new series of Doctor Who – this was a new series of Queer As Folk.

The moment in the episode that exemplified this the most was the Doctor dancing in a nightclub, wearing a low-cut tank top and a skirt. (People will say that it’s a kilt, but to me its form appeared closer to a skirt – and given the gender-bending obsession of Russell these last few episodes, it seems plausible.) This moment is what drops the score to 0/10. There was actually one good thing in this episode (just one), but this nightclub scene was so bad that any and all remaining points are deducted.

I’ve already seen the qwerties of Twitter desperately trying to defend this shit. All the arguments boil down to the same thing: the qwerties like going to nightclubs themselves so they want the Doctor to as well – because god forbid the qwerties watch any character who isn’t identical to them.

The Doctor spinning around, arms in the air, grinning like a woman from HR getting kompromat on an employee at an office party, wearing a tank top that would be considered racy even in the queue for a glory hole, all while the most bland, directionless, meaningless, tuneless, non-music echoes in the background, and support dancers surround him, screwing their faces as hard as they can in a desperate attempt to suggest profundity, is a moment that shows us a character that is in no way connected to the actual Doctor at all. This is not the Doctor. This is so utterly incompatible with anything we have previously seen of the Doctor’s character, that all we can conclude is that this is not the Doctor. The immersion has been snapped. We are no longer watching Doctor Who – we are just watching Ncuti Gatwa dancing in a nightclub. That’s it.

Gatwa should be utterly humiliated by this. The absolute worst thing for you, as an actor, should be the audience not seeing the character – only seeing you. If that happens, it shows that you have utterly failed as an actor. We are not supposed to see you; we are supposed to see the character. This episode, in my opinion, seriously damages Gatwa’s career. I would hope that his agent is shouting down the phone to Russell at this very moment for allowing this to go out on television.

Nothing – nothing at all – about Gatwa as he appears here is reminiscent about William Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor. It’s laughable to even mention them in the same sentence. As I say – this isn’t Doctor Who – it’s an extra episode of Queer As Folk. Even worse, this moment has fuck all to do with the rest of the episode – it’s just there to make a statement.

The rest of the episode is little better: an inexplicable voice-over at the start (Russell seems rather keen on those at the moment), a lot of wasted time and dialogue (this episode could have been 15 minutes shorter), a grotesque set design for the apartment (it looked like the 70s had thrown up all over it), some pointless and unrealistic dialogue from the supporting actors (and some ghastly acting too – particularly from the actors who played the next-door neighbours).

Gatwa’s non-character claims to discover a new kind of science in this episode: the science of luck. Once again Russell is showing his recent lapse into unoriginality here – he did a similar thing in that episode about Shakespeare in series three. Gatwa’s non-character also claims to be ‘learning the vocabulary of rope’ as he tries to understand some knots. He’ll be gutted to discover that topology has already been studied and well understood for decades.

There is one good thing in this episode, and that’s the CGI for the goblins – they’ve done that very well. The goblin king is also fun and well-designed. (Although again, Russell shows his unoriginality – this goblin king is very similar to the one in The Hobbit.)

Unfortunately the goblins are ruined by their giving us a musical number. An overly-heavy beat and a trumpet that sounds like an Argos keyboard isn’t something anyone with a mental age greater than three wants, Russell. You might think that couldn’t get worse, but it does – with the addition of an autotuned Gatwa and side-kick (I forget her name – she’s quite a forgettable character).

There’s a hilarious moment when a woman in the nightclub shouts ‘Give us some willie!’ at a man pretending to be a woman on the stage. I think it’s supposed to be ‘Give it some wellie!’ – the perils of enunciation.

I’m surprised that the qwerties weren’t outraged by the goblins in this episode. After all, the qwerties insist, time and time again, that Rowling’s use of goblins in Harry Potter was antisemitic. In this episode, goblins are not only present, but they literally steal and eat children. They are also the cause of all the misfortune in everyone’s life. Why on earth the qwerties aren’t screaming antisemitism at this episode, I don’t know. (But consistency of position was never their strength.) I also notice that no-one asked each other what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were in this episode. According to Russell, this is bigotry, so I guess we are supposed to consider all of these characters bigots.

And all the remaining time in the episode is just filled with virtue signalling and The Message.

That was an absolutely atrocious episode. With that episode and the three that preceded it – all of which had a multitude of serious, serious flaws – I am forced to conclude that Doctor Who is well and truly dead. Completely and utterly dead. There is no point watching the rest of Gatwa’s series. I won’t be watching it or reviewing it.

Doctor Who should be cancelled. What the franchise needs is to be left alone – for at least a decade. Leave it alone; do nothing with it. Whoever picks it up again after that will be someone entirely different – hopefully someone who hasn’t been infected with this idiocy virus. It’s rare that I will outright call for a show to end, but now I am: cancel it. This also represents the downfall of Russell T. Davies. He has written many excellent shows over the years: Queer As Folk was well-written for what it was (I just don’t want Doctor Who to become it); Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, and It’s A Sin were all fun; and of course, the first four series’ of New Who. But these episodes have been an absolute disaster. Russell appears to have lost his talent.

Preachy, tiresome, but with a few fun moments, 7/10 – Doctor Who – The Giggle – Review

Where to start with this review? This episode was all over the place. It had some moments of brilliance, some moments of tiresome idiocy, some very promising moments, and some moments of what I can only describe as übercreep.

But first, Russell T. Davies would like us all to know that he’s very, very clever. Really, he is. He is very, very, very, very clever. He’s far cleverer than all of you, and he’d like you to know that.

It was clear right from the start that this was one of those episodes that’s going to have that gross, grotesque, ‘creep’ factor – in the form of those horrid dolls. This is certainly not the first episode to have that factor – S5E2 The Beast Below had it – with those horrid, disgusting ‘smilers’. It’s a thing that’s appeared in many other shows too. I think of this quality as being very easy to identify, but I don’t think it really has a proper name. I find it grotesque and repulsive, but these words alone don’t really emphasise just how perverse it always seems, so I think I shall call it übercreep. I find that kind of imagery – those misshapen dolls, with their malformed noses and rather noncy grins – to be uniquely repulsive. That’s the point, of course – to be creepy and repulsive – I guess some people find it entertaining – I don’t.

I think there’s this idea that übercreep makes for good television because it’s ‘scary’. But it’s not scary – it’s just repulsive. As such, it doesn’t really maintain any suspense. Things in a story are only really scary when the characters can’t do anything about them, but the only correct respond to these rather noncy dolls is to kick their fucking faces in and toss them in a skip, and preceding that to talk about how noncy they are. When tension is only maintained by a creep factor, you can cut through it with only words.

Some people like übercreep; I don’t – and it’s subjective, so I won’t mark the episode down for that.

Also, in case you missed it, Russell T. Davies is very, very clever. Did you know that? Very, very clever. And he’s going to remind you of that every two minutes in this episode.

We get some dialogue telling us that everyone in the world has suddenly started thinking they’re right all the time. The dialogue is absurdly expository (Jesus fucking Christ Russell, put some fucking effort in) and it’s also wrong. We see in that scene, as well as all later scenes, that people don’t actually just think they’re always right, they’ve just been driven into a state of mania where they’re very entitled, conspiratorial, and angry.

You see, what Russell’s doing here is very clever. Did you catch it? No of course not, because Russell is being very, very subtle here. He’s making an allegory for social media. Everyone always thinks they’re right on social media don’t they? And they’re always arguing with each other aren’t they? What an astute observation Russell’s made in 2023. (That was sarcasm, for the people at the back.)

Yep, this whole episode is going to be one giant allegory to social media. 

Now, I don’t dislike allegory. I’ve written quite a lot of allegorical stories myself, and hope to keep writing more. But as I’ve said before, it’s not good when allegorical stories come across as preachy or patronising. (I hope mine never do – I fear that it’s something one cannot detect in one’s own stories.) It’s also not good when the allegory is insanely basic. What Russell seems to have gone for here is ‘social media bad’. Wow – what insight Russell. No-one has ever made that observation before. Do expand on that. Oh, you’re not going to?

As I said, Russell is very, very clever.

We’re taken to Avengers Tower. Oh no wait it’s UNIT Tower. They look very similar. Russell’s really going for the original ideas this series. It’s nice that UNIT has been made sensible again – I could never keep track of what was going on with them in the Moffat and Chibnall years. (Also nice that we get a bit of that UNIT leitmotif back – they could stand to do a bit more of that.)

Jemma Redgrave is back as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. I can hardly remember anything of the Capaldi run, so I couldn’t tell you anything about this character’s backstory, but I vaguely recognise her. Jemma Redgrave performs the part very well.

Bonnie Langford is back as Melanie Bush. I’m not well-versed in Classic Who, but I could tell the second she appeared on screen that she was a classic character. Langford also by far gave the best performance of the episode, despite having quite a small part.

Wheelchair Lady is back. She’s fun. Did they ever tell us her name? I don’t know. They make a point, though, of, when Lethbridge-Stewart has her anti-spike Zeedex turned off, her angrily saying ‘I’ve seen you walking’ to Wheelchair Lady, and then apologising to her when her Zeedex is turned back on. An obvious allusion to the phenomenon of people online not always believing when someone is disabled. Isn’t Russell clever for putting that in there? Isn’t he clever? It definitely doesn’t pull you out of the story for a few moments.

Actually that reminds me, I don’t think I heard a single person in this episode ask anyone what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were. Bigots, the lot of them. That’s what Russell thinks, anyway.

We get some more wonderfully subtle, subtle, very subtle, totally-not-obvious allegory from Russell: ‘The world is now 100% online.’, ‘Everyone is connected.’, ‘For the first time in history, everyone has access to this – a screen.’, ‘Hating each other – you never needed any help with that.’. Tip of the fedora back to you Russell – this is top stuff. It’s said that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed, well the dildo of unsubtlety is twelve inches too big and slathered with mayonnaise, and Russell is going to slap you in the face with it.

Tennant and Tate have seemed ‘off’ for the last two episodes. In this episode, they are right back to form. The Doctor and Donna in this episode seem like an exact continuation from series 4, which is good.

The Toymaker makes a return in this episode. I’m quite glad that they’re selectively bringing back things from Classic Who. He’s played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately Neil Patrick Harris always just seems like Neil Patrick Harris. He’s like Johnny Depp and Ryan Reynolds – he’s always really playing the same character. I felt like I was watching A Series Of Unfortunate Events – this rendition is basically just Count Olaf.

Also, Russell seems to be almost exclusively choosing gay, transgender, or “queer” actors for parts. Neil Patrick Harris, Nathaniel Curtis, Miriam Margolyes, Yasmin Finney, Ncuti Gatwa. Statistically unlikely to not be a deliberate choice. Is it even legal to hire people on those grounds?

There are some basic errors of continuity. The Doctor says ‘when he was young’ when referring to his last encounter with the Toymaker, but with all the Timeless Child nonsense, the Doctor was already old by the time he was the ‘First Doctor’. The Doctor also calls himself a Time Lord, but he’s not – he’s an unknown species. (Well, that’s my understanding based on what I’ve heard of the Timeless Child nonsense – I never watched the episode itself – only the reviews.)

We get some more übercreep. I don’t care for it. Donna has the right idea – she kicks it in the face. Count Olaf gives us a recap of several series’, including ‘The Flux’ – whatever that is. I don’t care Russell – I just don’t care.

Did I mention that Russell is very clever? He’s certainly not going to let us forget. ‘[The Doctor] The human race, back in the future, why does everyone think they’re right? [The Toymaker] So that they win. I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel.’

Oh clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp clehp Russell. Oh how astute! Those people on the internet they sure do love to ‘cancel’ don’t they Russell? When will they learn? Surely after witnessing this delightlessly deft writing, Russell. Now get this mayo dildo out of my face.

We get a scene of Count Olaf dancing to the Spice Girls. It’s actually quite a visually spectacular scene – well made on a technical level. But it did just look like Neil Patrick Harris having fun dancing in a costume – I wasn’t sold on it.

‘[The Doctor] I don’t understand why your so small!!!’ – that’s ‘cause he’s far away dear – move closer and he’ll appear bigger.

We’re then introduced to a new thing: ‘bi-generation’. I actually find this idea quite interesting. The Doctor has essentially reproduced here. We don’t know what species the Doctor is, so we don’t know how it reproduces – apparently it’s by mitosis. (With all Russell’s polemicising about the universe being ‘non-binary’, it’s ironic that he’s chosen a method of reproduction that is distinctly binary.) Apparently it’s caused by the galvanic beam, so the Doctor could now reproduce indefinitely (though obviously that won’t happen, for the sake of the writers’ feeble hands).

Can’t say I’m thrilled to discover what kind of underwear the Doctor wears, though. I’d’ve thought a time-travelling, billion-year-old super-genius would’ve worked out that white cotton button-up boxer-briefs are a hard no. Might I suggest a polyamide-elastane blend for sir? (Also, the clothes being shared between the bi-generated Doctors and the Gatwa-Doctor wearing underwear means that the Tennant-Doctor is going commando. That’s not something I wanted to know.)

We’re given a bizarre moment of Gatwa embracing Tenant saying ‘I got you.’. God it’s weird. Here’s a rule of television writing for you: never have a younger character act like a parent to an older character. It’s weird and creepy.

The Master is apparently locked inside the Toymaker’s gold tooth, which for some reason falls out before he goes all origami. A hand picks up the tooth, in an almost exact replica of the scene from several series’ ago where a hand picks up the Master’s ring, which somehow contains his essence. (I think that’s how it goes – I can’t be bothered to look it up.) Who’s hand is that? Who was even standing there on that part of the platform? I don’t think anyone was.

The duplicate TARDIS is apparently wheelchair-accessible. Apart from the entire inside, of course – quite a few steep inclines. Isn’t virtue-signalling great?

Gatwa doesn’t really have enough of his own time in this episode to judge his performance – I guess we’ll wait until the next episode to see how that turns out. 

And that’s it. That was the episode. Gosh, it’s worse on the second viewing. 

There were some great moments in that episode – the structure made it fun, and there were some entertaining (if not good) performances – but there was also a lot of dizzying, preachy, tiresome, eye-roll-worthy nonsense. This could have been a great episode – I think it could have been a 9/10, if Russell had just had some self-restraint. I’d have to put it at a 7/10.

I was hoping that with these three episodes Davies would establish that Doctor Who had turned around – that it would no longer cling to the tropes of bad fan fiction. These three episodes have failed to do that. This really should be a lesson for all writers in the importance of not doing things that pull your readers or viewers out of the story. When I think back over the episodes, the things I remember most vividly are the nonsense: the gender-woo of the first episode, Indian Newton of the second episode, and the multitude of weird things from this one. It all pulls you out of the story, and when something pulls you out of the story, it’s like putting a spotlight on that thing. 

I don’t want to watch any of these episodes again. Not a good sign at all – especially since as I’m writing this I’d quite like to go back and rewatch series’ 1-4 of New Who. I’ll give Gatwa’s first full series a watch, but I am much less optimistic about it than I was.

Somehow both boring and chaotic at the same time, 3/10 – Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder – Review

Well that was all over the place.

Let’s start with the first scene – a truly bizarre scene that becomes even more bizarre when you realise it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.

It’s 1666, and we see a man exiting an old house. He chats to a woman briefly, in a cheery English fashion, and then goes and sits under an apple tree, scrawling something in a notebook. One of the apples falls on his head, and he has an idea.

It’s Sir Isaac Newton. But for reasons entirely baffling, Sir Isaac Newton is played by half-Indian actor Nathaniel Curtis.

*Sigh*

Now, these episodes of Doctor Who cannot escape the context in which they are being released. As I said in my last review, Doctor Who has had three disastrous series’ led by Chris Chibnall. It needs to show, now, that it is going to change course. It needs to show, now, that it is not going to make the same mistakes. If it doesn’t, it will be well and truly dead. 

One of the major errors of the show during the Chibnall Era (which I think henceforth I will refer to simply as ‘The Mistake’), was its relentless pandering to Twitter misosophy. Every bad idea that received applause from the seals of Twitter was rammed into the show. It is a virus that infected Star Wars, Star Trek, Amazon’s “Wrongs of Prime”, as well as Doctor Who. Doctor Who needed to show that the fever had passed – that it was not going to pander to these anti-sci-fi, anti-logic idiots anymore.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the idea of changing the ethnicity of established characters or (worse) historical figures – always from “white” (a word that is only valid in a North American context), or native British or native European, to black (another word that is only really valid in a North American context), south Asian, or arabic. (For some reason, none of the other ethnic groups in the world get a share.)

I say again here that these episodes cannot escape the wider context. The ethnicity of the actor not matching the ethnicity of the character is not always a bad thing. The show Merlin – on the BBC about 15 years ago now – a fantastic show – had Lady Guinevere played by Angel Coulby. No-one cared. But that was for two reasons. Firstly, the show established very early on that it was a ‘modernised’ telling of Arthurian Legend. There were loads of changes to modernise it – including making all of the characters young. And it remained consistent with this modernisation throughout. But secondly, that show was not being made in a time when rabid ideologues online were trying to make every historical figure black and ‘decolonise’ every book and fact in sight. Viewers trusted that there was no vicious ideology behind the change – it was just creative licence.

Nowadays, though, all of the great science fiction and fantasy film and television series’ have fallen into the hands of a horde of Hollywood lobotomites intent on destroying them (and succeeding). When characters and historical figures have their ethnicities changed nowadays, it is ALWAYS because of that ideology. So you must avoid it if you want to demonstrate that you are no longer deferent to that ideology.

This episode has not avoided it. In fact it’s put it front and centre, right at the start of the episode. This therefore shows complete adherence to this stupid, stupid, stupid ideology. It shows an orgasmic obsession with promoting The Message. This does not bode well for Doctor Who.

Any whole-brained person already knows why this case of ethnicity-swapping is bad, but for the slow people at the back, I’ll explain in more detail. Russell here is showing that he is completely on-board with this distinctly American ideology. It is an ideology that asserts that all Americans of European descent, as well as all native Britons and Europeans (who it erroneously labels ‘white’) are intrinsically bad, and that all culture and history must be edited to reduce their presence or remove them entirely. It’s an epitomisingly racist ideology. These ideologues go giddy when they see ‘white’ characters and historical figures changed to be ‘non-white’, but they would be apoplectic if it happened the other way round. (If we saw Martin Luther King played by Benedict Cumberbatch, or Nelson Mandela played by Eddie Redmayne, or Srinivasa Ramanujan (the great Indian mathematician) played by Daniel Day-Lewis, these ideologues would make it their life’s mission to exact revenge on everyone involved.)

Russell is showing that he doesn’t care about immersion. (Seeing a figure like Sir Isaac Newton played by someone who doesn’t look like Sir Isaac Newton pulls you out of the story (unless there’s an in-universe reason for it).) Any show about time travel has a great opportunity to explore history – Russell here is showing that he doesn’t care about any of that. History exists simply to support The Message. That is all that matters – The Message.

So instead of this being a fun opening to the episode, it just becomes two minutes of Russell desperately trying to appease American sociology professors.

The TARDIS crashes into the very tree that not-Newton was sitting under – how that weedy little tree was holding up the TARDIS I don’t know. The Doctor and Donna emerge, work out who the man isn’t, and make a joke about gravity. This, apparently, is the first time this random man has heard the word ‘gravity’. (Entirely ludicrous – the word ‘gravity’ was known about for centuries before this – but fine, it’s Doctor Who, whatever.) This random man is unable to recall the word just said to him, however, and accidentally remembers it as ‘mavity’. 

And that’s it – the scene ends. That was the first two minutes, and there was already that much wrong with it.

What’s worse, nothing in the rest of the episode had anything to do with it – well, with the exception of ‘mavity’. Later in the episode the Doctor and Donna sometimes say ‘mavity’ instead of ‘gravity’, suggesting that their short excursion to the past has altered history, and now everyone says ‘mavity’ (except the Doctor, sometimes). This is probably all setup for something later – which if it is, great. It does still make for a rather disjointed episode.

Now let’s get on to the actual story of this episode.

A lot of this episode was very slow. The first half of it after that opening scene was very slow. The characters talked much more than normal – with lines that added nothing. There were a lot of lingering CGI shots. Very few events happened, and the story did not set up a mystery or suspense well. In fact, the first part of the episode was so slow that by about half or two-thirds of the way through I started looking to see how long was left – that’s never a good sign.

This kind of problem is quite common in a lot of the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney Plus. Lingering shots – shots that are just too long or superfluous – and characters not getting anywhere – just kind of wandering around talking about irrelevant things. It’s very odd – and completely opposite to Davies’ normal style. Davies is normally excellent at using montages and music to increase the pacing, but here he has abandoned that. 

The pace of the episode does increase later. This episode did not need to be as long as it was – a lot could have been cut out – ten to twenty minutes of it, I think. It seemed like the script had been rushed – like it should have gone through several more rounds of edits to trim the fat.

At one point they refer to a thing called ‘the flux’ – I don’t know what that is and I don’t care to look it up – is that something they did during The Mistake? Don’t reference things from The Mistake, Russell, the returning fans neither know nor care about them. Treat The Mistake as though it didn’t happen. 

The basic idea of the story was okay: go somewhere where there supposedly aren’t any life forms, but actually there are. It’s been done many times. The whole which one of you is the real one has been done many times too – it was even parodied in Family Guy years ago. They’re not bad ideas – they’ve just been done a lot. 

The story did have a key flaw though. The Doctor suggests that the TARDIS brought them there deliberately to solve a problem (as it often does throughout the show – it takes them where they need to be). But had the TARDIS not appeared there at all, the problem would have solved itself. The ship would have blown up even if the Doctor and Donna hadn’t been there, killing the two aliens. The TARDIS didn’t need to appear there – and would have known this, given what we know about how the sentient TARDIS perceives time. This really is a script error – they just shouldn’t have had the Doctor suggest the TARDIS brought them there deliberately.

And then the episode ended with a glorious appearance from Bernard Cribbins. His character on the show remains incredibly popular – entirely because of Cribbins’ performance. It was a bizarre and sudden reversal of the tedium and nonsense of the rest of the episode. This episode would have been better if it had just been an hour of Cribbins and the Doctor chatting.

Unfortunately this moment was interrupted by explosions and stuff. We were also given the nightmare fuel of a plane falling from the sky and crashing nearby.

This episode was a mess. Before I started writing this review, I had a higher opinion of it. But this episode had ideological nonsense, slow pacing, lingering shots, boring dialogue, an overused core story idea, uninteresting set design and CGI, no memorable music, still a lacking vitality from the Doctor and Donna. The only properly good thing was Bernard Cribbins, and he wasn’t in it long enough. 

3/10

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent. 

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare. 

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.

Ricocheting between iconic and farcical – Red, White, & Royal Blue Review

I had no idea about this film when it was actually released – didn’t know it existed. I’ve only found out about it from the images and GIFs shared prolifically on social media in the months since its release. This suggests a somewhat underfunded marketing operation – given that I am probably the film’s target audience (gay, a royalist, and a big comedy fan).

I’ve been meaning to watch this film for the last few weeks, and now that I have (or am – I’ve actually started writing this with about ten minutes of the film left to go), I find the experience is utterly bizarre. This film violently ricochets between moments that could be iconic, and moments of such bad dialogue, such cultural ignorance, such TV-obsessed Californian idiocy that I almost stopped watching then and there.

The flaws in this film appear right from the outset in the form of utterly dreadful dialogue. And it’s all of the usual stuff we tend to see in bad dialogue: sentences that no real human would ever say, characters expositing their own psycho-analysis as the first line of a conversation, the writers using the actors as conduits for their Twitter-informed political beliefs, and gross TikTok slang spoken unironically as though it won’t horribly date the film in just six months. The most egregious example of that last one is Rachel Hilson’s character (whose name I couldn’t even guess) saying at 1 minute 37 seconds into the film ‘you’ve been yucking my yum all day’ – a phrase so unpleasant I think it could actually give someone IBS.

The bad dialogue appears right throughout the film, but about half the time it is compensated for by the skill of the actors. I have long said that a great actor can take even the worst-written dialogue and make it sound amazing (although perhaps sometimes only with a few spontaneous edits to it). In this regard, Nicholas Galitzine (who plays Prince Henry) and Rachel Hilson shine. (Hilson has had many years of experience fighting with unwieldy dialogue on Love, Victor – a show that is the unproclaimed king of unnatural dialogue.)

In fact, this is a film carried by its core cast, not by its writing. In this regard it is similar to Heartstopper, Love, Victor, and Love, Simon. (Why do so many recent gay romance films and television shows have this problem?) This film is mainly carried by the charisma of its two leads: Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez – with the former giving a really stand-out performance. Of course, this is the main requirement for a romance film or show – the two leads must have chemistry. Everything else can be a disaster, but as long as the two leads are convincing, the story will still be enjoyable. (I’ve said this of Heartstopper too – a disastrous, wholly unconvincing plot, but wholly convincing leads.)

The charisma of the leads is enough to keep me watching (indeed, glued to the screen for their scenes together), but it isn’t enough to stop me recoiling in horror every two minutes at everything else. The film has a multitude of basic errors in how British royalty works that betray a distinctly American misunderstanding of the concept. Without wishing to insult my American friends, it’s not that Americans can’t understand royalty, it’s that there seems to be something about American culture that puts them at a unique disadvantage when it comes to understanding it – both the traditions of it and the reasoning behind it. Americans seem to have a much greater hill to climb in order to understand it, and they often stop half-way up. This film gives the strong impression that the writers have learned most of what they know about British royalty from other films and television dramas, rather than from watching actual royal events or even just reading about it – actually being interested in it. It is a parody of royalty – more alike to the show The Windsors than it is to the real thing. The royal family and their assistants are portrayed as stuck-up fuddy-duddies whose social attitudes and beliefs are still Victorian. They are the epitome of the ultra-conservative arch-nemesis that I think nowadays might only exist in the minds of internet commentators. The film is also laced with condescension – an attitude of ‘Oh you silly Brits with your royalty! The American way is much better! You should be like us!’. It’s an insular attitude that reveals someone as having not thought about the subject for very long.

As I say, though, this film veers wildly between moments dominated by these errors and moments that could have made this film great. The casting of Stephen Fry as the fictional King James III was inspired – he should play kings more often. Unfortunately, his performance was ruined almost immediately by overly-verbose dialogue that was contradictory from one line to the next. His character exists not as a person with a personality, but simply as a megaphone for the misapprehensions of the writers. The character’s best moments are when he’s not speaking.

It’s a shame – this film could have been great – iconic. Its basic structure is sound – all of the things that take it down are things that could have been fixed on the day of filming with just a few seconds of thought.

I don’t often do star ratings, but I would give this film a 5 out of 10.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – Review

This movie had many interesting elements, and overall was fun, but it didn’t quite live up to its potential. I’d put it at about the same level as Thor 2.

I think the most frustratingly lacking aspect of the film was its main villain: Kang the Conqueror. The actor who plays the character – Jonathan Majors – has excellent presence – very necessary for a villain – and plays what he’s given very well. But the character’s motivation is confusing. This is ultimately a result of Marvel not really setting up their multiverse, and the concept of branching timelines, very well – in itself a result of the disastrous Loki series, which I could hardly watch more than an episode of. Marvel has not established a clear fictional physics of all of this, meaning that any justification that leans on it is very flimsy. Kang’s self-declared reasoning for his actions is hazy and flat. 

Additionally, with such high-powered, grandiose villains, they are rarely compelling if they are not poetic. The lines given to Majors to speak were bland. If the character’s lines had been more poetic, it would have created a much greater sense of transcendence – necessary to make a being’s power convincing. Also, Marvel forgot the Golden Rule of Villains: villains are much more threatening if they don’t shout, but retain a quiet, self-assured countenance. That’s why Thanos worked so well.

Marvel also forgot the Golden Rule of Heroes: heroes must start out flawed, and through their fight, overcome those flaws. Primarily these should be flaws of personality. In this film, Scott Lang’s daughter is elevated to a kind of semi-protagonist, and it’s almost not clear if she’s supposed to be the main character, or if Ant-Man himself is still supposed to be. Regardless, the only flaw that Cassie Lang seems to have at the start of the film is that she can’t quite use her own shrinking suit to punch properly. This flaw she overcomes by the end of the film, but this is hardly what one would call a compelling character arc.

This movie had impressive and interesting visuals. This was essential when the whole concept is ‘at the quantum-mechanical level, everything gets really weird and fractal-y’. Though this also shows again that spectacular visuals alone do not make a great movie – they can only enhance an otherwise great story.

Many Marvel movies of late have gone too far with the comedy. This movie was much closer to where it should be (though still overshot a bit). The funniest parts were anything involving the slimy blob that was Veb, and the telepath Quaz. There was also some humour in the deuterantagonist (the secondary villain) that was the mis-shrunken Darren Cross (from the first movie in the series). That was a gross, but sufficiently weird, addition to the movie. 

In addition to not getting its multiverse and timeline physics straight, this movie seems even to have forgotten the physics established in the movies it succeeds. Ant-Man now seems to be indestructible when he is super-sized – plasma blasts seem not to damage him or the suit in any way. The helmets also now seem to be entirely optional. The most egregious error, however, is that it has previously been established that you can enter and exit the ‘quantum realm’ just by turning the regulator off on the suits. Three of the characters in this film have suits, and there are multiple occasions where it would make sense for them to escape using this method. They never do.

So overall: fun, but flawed.