Tag: character

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.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith – Review

So, Episode III. I get the sense that this is the prequel film that people like the most. It does have a great many excellent moments – particularly after the half-way point, where Anakin becomes Darth Vader. I like almost everything in the second half of this film.

As with the review for the previous film, in this review I’m going to have to go through the events of the film in mostly-chronological order. (I would prefer to split the review by the different aspects of filmmaking, but that’s not really possible with this film.) A lot happens in this film, and a lot of the scenes we see build very rapidly on previous scenes.

The opening sequence is excellent. Such a complex, low-altitude space battle is not something we’ve seen before in this series. And George Lucas putting it over Coruscant leads to many interesting questions – if anything of sufficient size falls to the ground, it will cause A LOT of destruction – there’s nothing but city down there – anything that falls WILL kill a lot of people. Since Palpatine is ultimately orchestrating this entire war, and could stop it at any moment, it shows how little regard he has for the people of the soon-to-be empire.

The buzz droids are also not something we’ve seen before. They are an interesting new weapon, and an example of good world-building. In a universe with droids as clever and common as R2-D2, buzz droids would definitely exist.

We even get some good character moments in the opening sequence. Anakin’s determination to save Obi-wan from the buzz droids makes the ending to this film all the more tragic. But then despite Anakin saving Obi-wan, Obi-wan still berates Anakin – as he did throughout the last film – that Grievous’ ship’s shields are still up.

Ian McDiarmid and Christopher Lee are brilliant as always. If this film were released today, I’m sure the way McDiarmid plays Palpatine would be described as over-the-top, cartoonish – or even slightly flamboyant. There is a trend at the moment for gritty villains. But McDiarmid playing the character in this way is what makes it enjoyable – the character isn’t supposed to be some pretentious mIrRoR tO tHe AuDiEnCe – he’s supposed to be the embodiment of pure evil – someone who is devious and cunning – and McDiarmid plays that perfectly.

Like with the last two films, there are some odd lines of dialogue in this film. Some very noticeable examples are in the conversation between Anakin and Obi-wan after they have gotten the chancellor back, and just before Obi-wan goes back to the temple. This entire conversation is a bit off – the whole thing sounds like two actors acting rather than two people who are actually friends talking to each other. Once again, I think this is a writing problem – the lines just haven’t been written in a very natural way.

We then get many scenes that are great setup for Anakin’s fall. Anakin starts getting visions of Padmé’s death and he goes to Yoda for advice. (As a side note, I really like that Anakin can go to Grandmaster Yoda – this again shows how Yoda is not just the leader of a martial order, but a spiritual one too – he has to be involved as much in the moral training of the Jedi as the day-to-day running of a martial school.) The advice that Yoda gives Anakin is ‘Train yourself to let go.’.

This is the worst possible advice to give Anakin at this moment – he is never going to follow that advice. This shows how even if the Jedi’s teachings are correct, they did not adjust how they taught them for Anakin – who of course, was older than most people are when they join the Jedi Order – they knew he had already formed attachments – they needed to adjust his training based on that. And here, Yoda doesn’t know the exact details of Anakin’s situation, of course, but as soon as a Jedi as powerful as Anakin – and the Chosen One – came to him talking about fearing someone’s death, Yoda should have inquired more. This should have been a red flag for Yoda.

Anakin keeps getting bad instruction and bad advice from the Jedi Order – Obi-wan constantly berates him, and now when he goes to Yoda he doesn’t get the right advice. They are not good mentors for Anakin.

At the same time, Anakin sees Palpatine as an excellent mentor – his true mentor. There are several scenes in the previous film and this one that show that Palpatine has befriended Anakin over the time he’s been on Coruscant. (In truth, these scenes have told us this rather than shown it – through off-hand lines of dialogue. Seeing Palpatine befriend Anakin should probably have been a more major component of these films, given how important it is – it could certainly have replaced some of the overly-long action sequences – but I’m not sure it could ever have been given enough time given that this is just three films – this is perhaps another reason why the story of the prequels might be better told through a long-form television series than a film series, but at the time the prequels were made, such series’ were less common.)

Palpatine often compliments Anakin. In the previous film, Palpatine tells Anakin ‘You are the most gifted Jedi I have ever met.’. Later in this film, he says that Anakin is the obvious choice to be the one to hunt down General Grievous, and at around this point in the film he tells Anakin that he is appointing him to be his personal representative on the Jedi Council. Anakin immediately assumes that this means he will be a Jedi Master, and from his reaction it is apparent that he has always wanted this (and probably believes that he already should be one). For the entire time that Anakin has been training to be a Jedi, he has been told that he is the Chosen One – he is expected to be a great Jedi, and he has always wanted to meet that expectation. After years of feeling like Obi-wan has been holding him back, it is now Palpatine who allows him to progress. Anakin keeps receiving good sentiments from Palpatine, and now Palpatine is giving him the opportunity to do something he’s always wanted to do – Anakin sees Palpatine as a good mentor. This is all excellent setup for Anakin’s fall.

The Jedi give Anakin a seat on the Council, but they do not grant him the rank of master. Anakin is angered by this. He sees it as unfair, and as the Council deliberately holding him back. This adds to Anakin seeing the Jedi Council as being in opposition to him (something which started when Anakin first met the Jedi Council in Episode I – they did not want him to be trained as a Jedi – his first impression of the Jedi Council was as something that would get in the way of what he wants to be and do).

Then the Council asks Anakin to report on what the chancellor is up to. Anakin strongly dislikes this – it goes against the Jedi Code – it goes against what he has been taught that it means to be a good Jedi. Anakin first being denied the rank of master and then being asked to spy on Palpatine are more excellent setup for Anakin’s fall. First he is prevented from being the great Jedi he wants and is expected to be, and then he is asked to do something that a great Jedi would never do. It puts Anakin in direct conflict with the Council, and he realises that they are not the moral paragons that he has been taught that they are (which leads into the later line of ‘From my point of view the Jedi are evil.’). The Jedi Council asking him off-record to do this makes it worse – they are being secretive and deceptive – qualities that are associated with the Sith. The line from Obi-wan at the end of the scene ‘The Council is asking you.’ is the perfect line to end on – this makes it clear to Anakin that it is the Jedi Council – and thus the institution of the Jedi – that is the problem.

This scene also shows Anakin’s naïveté when it comes to politics. Palpatine putting Anakin on the Jedi Council was him trying to get Anakin to spy on the Council for him, but Anakin didn’t see it that way, because it wasn’t put that way (and because Anakin was blinded by ambition). Anakin should have disliked the idea of reporting on what the Council was doing to Palpatine as much as the idea of reporting on what Palpatine was doing to the Council, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t see what Palpatine was up to.

All of this is a master stroke of writing. We see how the Jedi are not good mentors to Anakin, while Anakin increasingly sees Palpatine as his true mentor. We see Anakin increasingly see the Council as being opposed to him, preventing him from becoming the great Jedi that he was told he would be and that he wants to be. We see the Jedi Council ask Anakin to do something against the Jedi Code – the moral code that they teach as the way to act – and spy on the very person who Anakin sees as his true mentor. This is all brilliant setup for Anakin’s fall.

After this we get the famous scene in the opera. This scene is so memorable that most Star Wars fans can quote it word for word. The best thing about this scene, of course, is Ian McDiarmid’s performance – again, maybe it’s a little bit over-the-top, but I think that’s good – that’s part of what makes it memorable. When I rewatched this film, one line that struck me as great was ‘If they haven’t included you in their plot, they soon will.’ – what a deliciously manipulative line for Palpatine to say to Anakin.

Shortly after that we get the final scene between Obi-wan and Anakin before Anakin turns to the Dark Side. Now, there’s nothing about the scene that suggests that this will be the last time they speak before Anakin turns to the dark side – there’s nothing foreboding about it – you only realise that it is the last scene when you rewatch the film, but that makes it all the more tragic. This final scene shows a very ordinary conversation. This means that from Obi-wan’s point of view, everything seemed fine, and it’s only when he returns from Utapau that he starts to see what’s happened.

What’s also interesting about this scene is that we finally see Obi-wan praise Anakin – ‘You have become a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be.’ – after berating him almost constantly for years. Had Obi-wan not berated Anakin so much, Anakin might not have started seeing Palpatine as his true mentor, but this praise is too late.

The world design of Utapau is excellent – we’ve not seen a world like this before in Star Wars. The prequels are excellent in how many new worlds and species are introduced. Grievous has an interesting character design – once a completely biological lifeform, he is now mostly machine – good foreshadowing of what Anakin will become. The fight scene between Obi-wan and Grievous is perhaps overly long (or perhaps other parts of the film are not long enough), but at least it incorporates elements that we’ve not seen before.

The scene where Anakin realises that Palpatine is a Sith Lord is good, but it needed to be a bigger moment. This is a pivotal moment in the story of the prequels – this moment and the moment where Anakin becomes Palpatine’s apprentice are possibly the two biggest moments – but it doesn’t entirely seem like the big revelation that it should be for Anakin. For that I think there needed to be more focus on Anakin’s reactions to every line Palpatine said, and more tension in the scene overall. The success of this scene depends not on the audience realising that Palpatine is a Sith Lord – we already know that – but on us seeing Anakin realise that, and understanding how he reacts to it – which we don’t get enough. Anakin has been told he is the Chosen One who will destroy the Sith for years – we should have seen a reaction from him of deep suspicion and indecision.

And then we get to the most important scene of the prequels – the scene where the Jedi try to arrest Palpatine, and where Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Palpatine’s new apprentice.

As has been commented many times before, the fighting between Palpatine and the Jedi could have been a lot better. It veers between fairly slow, simple fight choreography between the actual actors, and a CGI Ian McDiarmid jumping around unnecessarily. This should have been an epic, memorable fight, and it’s not (well, it’s memorable for the wrong reasons). I get the sense from behind-the-scenes videos that they just didn’t spend enough time on this aspect of the scene.

Mace Windu overpowers Palpatine, of course, and then Anakin comes in. Anakin has not seen the fight, nor heard anything that Palpatine said to the Jedi, and now he must choose who to believe about what has happened. The setup to this moment is fantastic – who does Anakin believe? Does he believe Master Windu, who has never trusted him – who was the person who said that he wouldn’t be trained as a Jedi, and then that he would not be given the rank of master – who is part of the Jedi Council, which Anakin has long found frustrating, and which asked him to do something against the Jedi Code, and who is now about to do something against the Jedi Code? Or does he believe the person he has long seen as his true mentor, and who claims can teach him how to save Padmé? It’s glaringly obvious which one he would choose in the end.

I like almost everything in the film from the point where Anakin turns to the Dark Side onwards. The music as Order 66 is executed is fantastic – sorrowful, mournful. We even get some great world-building as that happens – we see several completely new planets, with very different terrains and life-forms, just for a few seconds each as part of the montage. It’s more world-building than we get in all of the Disney films. The sight of the Jedi Temple on fire at night is also delightfully tragic.

The fight between Anakin and Obi-wan on Mustafar is one of the highlights of the trilogy, I think. Mustafar is another environment that we haven’t seen so far in the series, and an excellent choice of backdrop for a fight between father and son, or between brothers, that will decide the fate of the galaxy. The music – Battle of the Heroes – is outstanding – both epic and tragic. I know very little about sword-fighting, so I couldn’t say exactly how good or bad the fight choreography is, but throughout the entire sequence, it looks like both characters are giving it all they’ve got.

I think possibly the best line of the prequel trilogy is Obi-wan saying ‘I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.’ – because it is absolutely true, and it’s only now that it’s too late that Obi-wan has realised it.

It is a beautiful tragedy when Obi-wan has to watch Anakin be burned by the lava. He has to watch the destruction of his pupil and brother, who by this point hates him not just because he is on the opposing side of a war, but because he has been the source of his frustration for years, and is now just letting him burn. I think Christensen performs brilliantly in this scene (and so does McGregor, when I think about it).

There are some bad lines in this part of the film. Some of Padmé’s lines when she’s talking to Anakin after she arrives on Mustafar are a bit odd. I think that, as ever, this is down to how the dialogue is written – it’s far too terse – and a lack of reaction shots and close-ups. Also, after the Mustafar sequence, when Padmé is dying, and the robot says ‘She’s dying, and we don’t know why … She’s lost the will to live.’ – this is a bit daft.

At the same time as the sequence on Mustafar, we see the fight between Yoda and Palpatine. Once again, Lucas finds a way of doing something different with the fight – this one taking place in the main senate hall. The destruction of the senate hall as the head of the Sith and the head of the Jedi fight is a simple symbolism, but a satisfying one.

After all of that, there are various short scenes that wind down the film, and the trilogy. Qui-gon being the first Jedi to become a force ghost is a nice touch – you get the sense that if there’s anyone who would be the first, it would be him. Padmé’s funeral, while short, and sort of cliché, is beautifully tragic – and a great scene to have at the end of this trilogy – the tragedy of Padmé Amidala and the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker are essentially one and the same.

This film has an extraordinary number of excellent aspects. It has some bad lines of dialogue, and there are many missing reaction shots. Some of the scenes are too long, others too short, others not impactful enough. The film has many flaws, but I don’t think they at all outweigh the extraordinary number of good things about the film. This is an excellent, but imperfect, film.

This is the same as what I said about the previous two films. There are many, many great things about this trilogy, and the idea that it was a complete disaster, as some people seem to think, is completely flawed. To see this trilogy as a disaster, you would have to ignore about 90% of it, and over-focus on about four or five lines of dialogue throughout the three films. You would have to ignore all of the great world-building, the great actors, the great performances, the great sword fights, the great costume design, the great music, a story structure which is unlike most of what we get from modern Hollywood (one of the things people who like The Last Jedi claim is great about the film was that it didn’t follow the same tired structure that a lot of space fantasy films do – well the prequels also don’t follow that same structure), and you would have to over-focus on ‘I don’t like sand.’ – a line so forgettable and ignorable that I’m amazed anyone at all complains about it.

If nothing else, writing these reviews has shown me just how many things I like about these films, and I will now be able to come back to this review if I want to think over these things again.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 4 – I guess this is the level we’re working at

Hmmm. I liked this episode, but I have five pages of notes on it – that’s a lot more than usual. They’re all quite disconnected, and I think the only way of going through them is to go through them as they appeared in the episode.

Firstly, I liked the planet Vashti. This was actually the main reason why I liked the episode. I thought the look of the planet was very well designed – it was very distinctive. The whole opening sequence was set on the planet, and I think it was very immersive.

It was also nice to hear some Romulan. As much as I can’t stand Star Trek Discovery, one of the few things I did like about it was the inclusion of a lot of Klingon. Having characters speak in alien languages in a show adds to the realism. It creates more of a sense that these alien races are real and have real cultures.

The next point in my notes is that the dialogue in the show is still very, very unnatural. This is something that came up A LOT in the episode – I’ll return to it later with specific examples. So often the things that the characters say are not the things that any real person would say at that point in a real conversation. It’s jarring.

Another quick aside, Ian Nunney, who plays the young Elnor in this episode, is outstanding – he’s better than many of the older actors.

Now we get to some bigger points. The character of Dr. Jurati, who in previous episodes I quite liked, in this episode spontaneously becomes completely obnoxious. She has a conversation with Chris Rios, the captain of the ship they’re all on. She opens with ‘Space turns out to be super-boring.’ while something very interesting happens behind her. I don’t know about anyone else, but to me the idea of getting to look out of a ship as it’s travelling faster than the speed of fucking light sounds pretty fucking amazing.

After Chris Rios says something that’s full-on fucking edgelord, she says sarcastically ‘Well that’s not a conversation killer at all.’. But while what Chris Rios said was a bit weird and trying too hard, it wasn’t a fucking conversation killer – it had the potential to be quite interesting. What was a conversation killer, Dr. Jurati, was you listing off stats about the galaxy. See what I mean about this show having really weird dialogue? The show is trying to be banter-y, but the writers have no fucking idea how to write that.

It occurred to me while watching this episode that Dr. Jurati is basically just Tilly from Star Trek Discovery. They’re both nerdy; they’re both awkward; they’re both hyper-positive. They both just go up to people and start talking to them. They even have many of the same facial expressions. While I didn’t dislike Tilly in STD, is new Star Trek capable of writing any other kinds of character? This is just what non-nerds think nerds are like.

On the subject of obnoxious characters, Raffi is endlessly annoying. She can never let anyone else be right – she always has to correct them, often with patronising incredulity – particularly if anyone dares to infer what she might mean by something she’s said. It’s infuriating to watch, and I think it’s both a writing problem and an acting problem.

It’s become evident that this show is trying to assemble its ‘gang’. This is a concept that’s very familiar from shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender – your main characters form a group that goes around from place to place and adventure to adventure – each person in the group has distinctive personality traits and abilities (so that they all depend on each other), but they work well together as a group, even if some of them don’t get along sometimes.

The problem is that having a ‘gang’ like this depends on having likeable characters, and only Jean-luc is likeable out of this lot.

Anyway, we had some more stupid dialogue. Dr. Jurati says ‘Anyone else think the Way of Absolute Candor sounds potentially annoying.’ Oh ha ha very funny but no. That actually sounds pretty fucking convenient. What is annoying, however, is you.

Raffi says ‘Your basic impenetrable shield of orbital killer drones.’ – Who the fuck wrote this? A fucking five-year-old?

Elnor is just an elf from Middle Earth. Even the name ‘Elnor’ is pretty fucking elvish. Picard even asks him ‘Will you bind your sword to my quest?’ at one point – this is just Lord of the Fucking Rings!

While on the subject of Elnor, it’s annoying that when he and Picard meet for the first time after about fourteen years, we don’t get to see their initial reactions – it cuts away. This is something that seems to happen a lot in film and television nowadays, and it’s very annoying.

Not-quite-finally, another thing that I really didn’t like about this episode was the portrayal of many of the Romulans on Vashti. The Romulans weren’t very Romulan. In The Next Generation, the Romulans are of course militaristic, but they are also pensive, cunning, cautious, and sly. That makes them unique among the enemies of the Federation, and very ominous.

All of that is gone here. In this episode, they’re just space thugs. Why does every alien race in new Star Trek seem to become space thugs? It’s the same thing that happened with the Klingons in STD. It’s as though the writers of new Star Trek can’t conceive of any other form of evil than thuggishness.

On this same point, the actor who played the former Romulan senator clearly has never seen classic Star Trek. He has none of the presence that previous actors who’ve played Romulans of that kind of status had.

And then finally … Jeri Ryan’s still got it. The five seconds of her that we got at the end of the episode were better than the rest of the fucking episode. What is it about these actors from older shows that means that they’re just far better on screen? I’m not completely sure, but I think it’s probably that they can do performances with subtlety. The two or three facial expressions that we got from Jeri Ryan at the end of the episode were more engaging than any line said by any other character in the whole forty minutes.

So when I say I enjoyed this episode, I mean that it was engaging to watch, but it was also punctuated by lots of very annoying moments. In that regard it was similar to all of the episodes we’ve had so far – it looks like this whole series is going to be filled with these annoying moments.

Star Wars Is Dead – Part 1: Fan fiction pretending to be a reboot pretending to be a finale

Okay, it’s taken me longer to get round to the first part of this series than I expected, but let’s go.

This film is a massive fuck you to The Last Jedi.

This film was filled with retcons. I was actually almost impressed with the number of retcons in this film. I was also amazed at the kind of retcons we got. Some of the retcons were of the kind we’re used to seeing, where something that was possible in a previous film is now just not possible, and next to no explanation is given. Some of the retcons were of a different kind – which I’ve been calling ‘narrative retcons’ (which may not be the best name), where the act of undoing or replacing something is woven into the narrative – this kind of retcon seemed to be used to change the direction and style set-up by The Last Jedi. I didn’t even realise such ‘narrative retcons’ were possible before watching this film.

Now, before I start going through all of the retcons in this film, I want to assert that all retcons are bad. Having retcons in your film or television series or book is always bad – having them always makes your creative work lower quality than if it did not have them. Because fundamentally, a retcon is a discontinuity. (‘Retcon’ is an abbreviation of ‘retroactive continuity’, and was originally used to describe when the creator of a creative work – whether they’re an author or a film director or a film producer – either added something into a sequel work, or said something outside of any of the creative works in the series, that changes the meaning, or the sequence of events, the history, or the underlying physics or metaphysics, seen by the audience in the creative work, so as not to contradict something that is seen in the sequel work. Retcons are an attempt at providing continuity across the series of works. Because of this we might naïvely see them as continuities, rather than discontinuities. But the very fact that we the audience have to change our understanding of a part of the original creative work, so that on second viewing of the series as a whole it appears to have a continuity, means that there IS a discontinuity in our understanding of the story. In short, a retcon asks the audience to pretend they didn’t notice a thing from the previous parts of the story. A retcon is an attempt at giving the story continuity at the expense of the continuity of the audience’s understanding. So it is a discontinuity. In addition to this, the overwhelming majority of retcons are imperfect, and in their attempt to remove an inconsistency in the story, they just end up creating one or more other inconsistencies – as was the case with this film.) Discontinuities pull the audience out of the story – whether it’s a book or a television series or a film, a discontinuity reminds the audience that the world of the creative work is not real. Discontinuities lessen the immersivity of a story – they are the antagonists of immersivity. (This is why world-building is such a big part of writing science fiction and fantasy – you’ve got to make the audience believe that the world they are reading about could be real. If there are inconsistencies in your world design, it makes your world less believable.) Every time I see a discontinuity in a film, I am reminded that I am sitting in a cinema. This is not what I want. In a science fiction or fantasy film (or quite frankly any film), I want to forget that the real world exists – for between one and a half and three hours I want to imagine that the world of the film is all that exists, and I imagine that this is what a lot of the fans of these films want. Thus, all retcons are bad.

This is why I said, in the video I made about Episode IX before it came out, that I thought there was no possibility of this film being a good film. It either had to go with what it had been given from The Last Jedi, which was shit (that’s for another rant), or it had to retcon lots of things from the previous films, which would also have been shit because retcons are always bad. Whatever this film did, it would end up being shit.

But okay, onto the actual retcons. The main thing to point out here is that this film retconned all of the big things introduced in The Last Jedi. I would have thought that anyone who liked The Last Jedi would have hated this film because of that.

Firstly, the obvious one: in The Last Jedi it’s revealed that Rey’s parents are not anyone of significance within the galaxy. It’s also implied that they weren’t Force-users. This was massively, massively retconned in The Rise Of Skywalker (fuck I hate that title). Not only were Rey’s parents not ‘nobody’, they were very much ‘somebody’ – in fact they were some of the somebodiest ‘somebodies’ in the entire galaxy, because Rey is a grandchild of Emperor Palpatine.

Now, I personally don’t dislike this idea (other than the fact that it is a retcon – I would have liked this had they done the proper setup for it, but they didn’t, and now it’s a mess), but for those people who did like The Last Jedi, this must be pretty annoying. Defenders of The Last Jedi often exclaimed that it was a good thing that Rey was not related to any of the big Force-using families – why did everyone have to be related to everyone in this galaxy? Why did Force powers have to be inherited? Are the defenders of The Last Jedi annoyed by this change?

I don’t dislike the idea of this – I think had they intended this to be the case from the beginning, I think it could have been done very well. But the execution is hot trash. In TROS, after Rey finds out that she’s the grandchild of Palpatine, Kylo Ren uses the ‘true from a certain point of view’ angle (it’s pretty lazy writing to just do that one again) to show how what he said in TLJ wasn’t technically wrong. This means that Kylo Ren knew who Rey’s parents were back in TLJ – so he lied … … but … why? What reason did he have for lying at that point? As far as I can tell, there is none. (Also, if indeed Kylo Ren did find this out in TLJ, his reaction to it was remarkably unsurprised. This shows again how retcons are bad – expressions given by actors in previous scenes now no longer make sense.)

The problems go further than this. This film tries to retroactively explain Rey’s astonishing Force powers by linking her to Palpatine. Of course, one of the main criticisms of Rey from the last two films is that she’s a Mary Sue – she can just use the Force very well despite having no training. Connecting Rey to Palpatine, and indicating that that’s where her extraordinary powers come from is an attempt to un-Mary-Sue-ify Rey. But Episode VII is called ‘The Force Awakens’, and the message from that film is very much that the Force has ‘awoken’ in Rey (something which they continue leaning into in TLJ). But if Rey’s powers are inherited from Palpatine, how did they awaken? She had them all along. This change undermines the premise of this trilogy.

Okay, secondly: Snoke. This is one of the retcons that I class as a narrative retcon. Snoke remains dead in this film – they didn’t undo that. But they did undo the big thing that was done in TLJ. In TLJ, the Big Bad, the final boss, was killed using a very unsubtle play on words. This was hailed as revolutionary by film aficionados. We all expected that Snoke was going to be killed off at the end of the third film – that’s how it always goes – that’s one of the tropes of these kinds of films. Shock, he dies in the second film.

This film didn’t bring Snoke back, but it did undo the effect of killing him off. Killing Snoke meant that there was no Big Bad for Episode IX. Except … in the end … there was – this film just decided to bring back Palpatine instead. One Big Bad had been killed off, so they just brought in another one instead. The effect of killing off the Big Bad was nullified.

So this is a ‘narrative retcon’. They didn’t just straight-up bring Snoke back, but they changed the narrative to put the overarching story back into the place that it would have been had Snoke’s death not happened.

But this retcon goes deeper than this, almost in a way that suggests J. J. Abrams was insulted by the killing-off of Snoke, because this film completely removes Snoke as a character from these films. Early on in TROS, when Kylo Ren goes to visit Sheev in hospital, we see a large tank in the dark room where they keep Palpy. In this tank, we see several Snoke bodies. This means that Sheev literally created Snoke. And when Sheev says ‘I am every voice you’ve ever heard.’ (something like that – it’s been a few weeks), he must either mean that Snoke was a real person but who was Palpatine’s puppet, or Snoke was just under the direct control of Palpatine, using some other new Force power. Either way, Snoke only existed for the purpose of swaying Kylo Ren, probably only existed for a few years, and had no free agency. He effectively didn’t exist. That’s quite a monumental retcon.

Thirdly, the Holdo Manoeuvre. This was a full-on retcon. It was also a fuck you to fans, because they actually had a character ask a question that they knew fans would ask if they didn’t do this retcon: ‘Why not just use the Holdo Manoeuvre against Sheev’s fleet?’.

The response to this, from Finn, was ‘That’s one in a million.’ (something like that). This is the laziest fucking writing I’ve ever seen. He might as well have just said ‘Nah’. The Last Jedi introduced something into the Star Wars universe that was world-breaking. The existence of this as a thing that can happen means that a large number of events should have turned out differently, if this is to be a consistent universe. And the explanation we’re given as to why this thing doesn’t happen all the time is essentially just ‘it doesn’t’, which isn’t a fucking reason at all.

I have never seen such lazy fucking writing – why do you bother making films at all if you can’t be bothered to think about these things?

Those were the three big things from The Last Jedi that were retconned, but there were lots of other retcons too.

The biggest retcon of the entire film, of course, is Palpatine. At the start of this film, Palpatine is not dead. He did not die at the end of Episode VI (or he died and came back to life – since we don’t know the details the distinction is somewhat arbitrary).

Now, even before this film came out, I said, as did many others, that bringing Palpatine back was not a good idea. Palpatine being alive means that he didn’t truly die in Episode VI, which undermines the plot of Episode VI. At the end of Return Of The Jedi, all of the main characters celebrate the destruction of the second Death Star and the death of Palpatine (and consequently the fall of the empire). But this is now a hollow victory, because they didn’t truly kill Palpatine at all. This film completely changes the context and tone of the ending to ROTJ – the characters may be celebrating, but now we the audience know that they should instead be looking for Palpatine, either to kill him properly or to prevent him from coming back. The characters celebrate, but we the audience do not.

No explanation is given for how Palpatine survived – in true J. J. Abrams fashion. All we get is a repeat of Palpatine’s earlier line: ‘The Dark Side is a path to many abilities that some would consider unnatural.’ While this is not an explanation, it does reveal another (partial) retcon. This means that Sidious used the Force to stay alive – he did not just happen to survive by natural means. In the Prequels, Sidious says that only Darth Plagueis knew of how to cheat death using the Dark Side of the Force. So apparently, Sidious figured it out on his own at some point between the Prequels and the Originals. That’s not impossible according to the Star Wars universe’s own rules, so it’s not a full-on retcon, but we the audience know that this is a recent change, rather than a fact of the universe that was intended all along, so it still sticks out.

The main side-effect of Sidious being alive is that it undermines the finality of death in these stories. This is a problem that can exist in any story that brings characters back from the dead – either by making that physically possible in the world of the story, or by pretending that they were never dead in the first place. This is advice that writers are often given. Tension and suspense are created in your story because the reader or viewer does not want the characters to fail or to lose or to die – the audience has investment in the characters. Bringing characters back to life in your story ultimately removes death as a possibility – after all, if one character can come back once, surely any character can come back any number of times. It removes the stakes, and thus undermines the tension. We no longer fear that our protagonist may die in their fight, because if they do they can just come back to life.

And this is a problem we see in this film too. Sidious dies again in this film, but is there anything to stop him coming back again? Will he just come back whenever the franchise is in trouble? Death can no longer be a permanent victory against evil – the protagonists cannot win.

More on character-based retcons: this film gave us General Pryde. This I think is by far the most interesting, and funniest, of the retcons in the film. One of the complaints about The Last Jedi was that it undermined General Hux as a threatening villain. Hux was used as a comedy character. This made it very difficult to use Hux as a true villain in TROS, because we wouldn’t have taken him seriously. I think J. J. Abrams knew this, and that’s why we got General Pryde, played by Richard E. Grant. General Pryde is just another menacing First Order commander – on paper he is no different to Hux – but because we haven’t seen him be the butt of jokes in TLJ, he can actually be menacing – we the audience take him seriously. Pryde is a replacement for Hux.

This is another ‘narrative retcon’. The existence of Pryde doesn’t contradict anything we’ve seen before, nor does it change the meaning of anything we’ve seen before, but it does reverse the effect of TLJ by giving us a new secondary villain. It seems two villains from the previous film were replaced: Snoke was replaced with Palpatine, and Hux was replaced with Pryde. We now have our new primary and secondary villains.

The existence of Pryde isn’t interesting just because it is this different kind of retcon, but also because in this film, General Pryde shoots and kills General Hux. This was amazing when I saw it in the cinema (not in a good way) – they actually had General Hux’s replacement shoot General Hux! The replacement killed off the original! As retcons go, that is bold.

They killed off Pryde at the end of the film. (I don’t know why – he could have been a good villain for future films – maybe he’ll come back from the dead too.) But I wonder if there’s a hidden meaning here. The Last Jedi made Hux an unusable character; in the end it was Pryde / pride that killed him, and then Pryde / pride dies. Is General Pryde a jab at Rian Johnson? Johnson has aggressively defended The Last Jedi on Twitter ever since it came out – he has, it seems, always been proud of the film. Is Abrams saying that it was Johnson’s pride that killed Hux, and in the end pride dies because TLJ was hated by a lot of fans? I’ve heard stranger fan theories, and it would explain why this new general is called Pryde of all things.

While I’m on The First Order, there was another retcon there, and in some ways this is the worst one. In this film it is revealed that Palpatine has got a huge fleet of ships on Exegol. This fleet is bigger and more powerful than any other ever seen at any other point in the Star Wars films. Every ship in it is both a Star Destroyer and a Death Star (I’ll come back to that issue later). This fleet is more powerful than The First Order fleet was even before the destruction of Starkiller Base (gosh that seems like a long time ago now), since every five ships of this fleet is essentially another Starkiller Base. This fleet is part of what’s called The Final Order.

But what’s confusing is that Snoke, who apparently created the First Order, was a literal creation of Palpatine. Everything Snoke is and was was given to him by Palpatine. So was the First Order just part of the Final Order all along? As far as I can remember they have the same uniform. And when Palpatine reveals his fleet, thereafter there appears to be no difference between the First Order and the Final Order. General Pryde somehow gets from a First Order ship onto a Final Order ship – we never see how, and no-one in-universe seems to question it, so apparently none of them see any difference between the two. The Knights of Ren (when they make an appearance) also apparently switch from the First Order to the Final without any confusion. As far as I can tell, the First Order and the Final Order are one single organisation.

And this makes me wonder: do the people in the First Order know that they’re part of the Final Order? Some of them must do, surely, but apparently not Kylo Ren, otherwise he’d’ve know that Sidious was alive since Episode VII. This is a massive great inconsistency right in the middle of the film.

Also, how on earth does the Final Order survive out there on Exegol? They appear to have thousands of enormous ships. I know some people have done calculations for how many people must be on those ships – I can’t remember what they’ve said, but it could easily be tens of thousands on each one. There are potentially tens of millions of people living out there on Exegol, waiting for Sidious to do whatever he’s going to do. How do they live? Exegol doesn’t look like a planet that produces much food. And are all of these people people that they’ve taken from other parts of the galaxy and brought to Exegol to be trained as Stormtroopers? Is this film telling me that Sidious and his gang were able to bring tens of millions of people to Exegol over the years, and no-one either followed them or tried to escape once there? No-one sent out a covert signal to the rest of the galaxy?

Also among the retcons were the Knights of Bloody Ren. They’re back … although actually, are they? Have we ever even seen them? I think we saw them in a flashback in TFA or TLJ – they didn’t really do anything – they just stood there, as far as I can remember. I think that’s all we’ve ever seen of them. And I think we only see them in two scenes in this film – once on Kylo Ren’s First Order ship, and then once on Exegol, fighting Kylo Ren. This is sort of a retcon, in that they’ve been retconned into existence after being conspicuously out of existence. I’d reckon they were included in this film just because fans would have questioned it if they weren’t, but their inclusion is just baffling. We still know nothing about them. We don’t know who they are or what they want. And we can’t figure out what they want here, because their decisions don’t seem to make any sense. In the previous two films we were given the sense that they were very loyal to Kylo Ren, even though we never saw them. In this film, apparently, even though I don’t know how they know that Kylo has changed sides, they somehow do, and instead decide to serve the Emperor – so apparently not that loyal to Kylo in the end. So in the end, the Knights of Ren were completely fucking pointless. We still don’t even know what ‘Ren’ means.

And then finally (yes, we’re finally there), there were some retcons to Luke and Leia. Leia was now a Jedi all along, apparently, which explains how she was able to train Rey, but is not sufficient for how she was able to survive in space without any kind of spacesuit. Luke was also made more Jedi-master-like in this film, perhaps in a direct response to fans.

Furthermore, as part of this film’s ‘fuck you’ to TLJ, when Rey throws her lightsaber into a fire, Luke catches it, and they have him say the line ‘The weapon of a Jedi deserves more respect.’ – that’s a direct response to fans hating it when Luke threw his lightsaber over his shoulder in TLJ.

I’m sure there are more retcons than that, but those are all the ones I wrote down. You see why now I’m having to write out my thoughts on this film over several blog posts and videos – this blog post is almost 4000 words long, and this is just the retcons in the film.

These retcons alone mean that this film is incoherent, and the Star Wars universe is broken. This is not a universe where things make sense. You cannot anticipate what characters might do, because it is not based on the things that have so far been possible in the universe, any reasonable approximation of realistic logistics, or previously established character traits and motivations. It all just happens. Any future films and television shows cannot receive any of the benefits of being part of a shared universe, because they aren’t – a shared universe depends on consistency.

If there had been no other problems with the film, the existence of all of these retcons alone would have made it a disastrous film. As it was, there were loads of other problems.