News Transformers

G.I. Joe and Transformers Living Together (Maybe) in New Crossover Movie

A vital, nay, NECESSARY film, we’re sure.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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If you saw the end-credit scene from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, you knew that a Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover movie was likely in the works. At CinemaCon today, Paramount Pictures made it official (via Deadline): We’re getting a blockbuster at some point in the future that will include aliens who can turn into cars and/or mecha beasts AND G.I. Joe soldiers doing… whatever G.I. Joe soldiers do.

While the film is now official, Paramount didn’t share any news about who would be directing this, though the idea apparently came from Rise of the Beasts director Steven Caple Jr and it will be executive produced by none other than Steven Spielberg. The story for the film is also reportedly based on the 1980s run of comics based on the two Hasbro brands.

The first time G.I. Joe and Transformers shared a page was in 1987’s aptly named G.I. Joe and the Transformers. The four-issue mini-series saw the Autobots and the G.I. Joes (a.k.a. the good guys) face off against the Decepticons and Cobra (a.k.a. the bad guys). There also appears to be some friendly fire where Bumblebee gets destroyed(!) and reanimated/rebuilt under a different name, and the changing of sides by one key group, making it three against one in a battle to save Earth from sure destruction.

How closely the movie ties to this plot remains to be seen. But the comic run sounds like something that could make for a blockbuster film. They just better not fuck with Bumblebee too much (see the wonderful Transformer pictured above), as they are the best character in the franchise.

No news yet on when the movie will go into production or make its way to the big screen. [end-mark]

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News The Running Man

Glen Powell to Star in Edgar Wright’s Adaptation of Richard Bachman’s The Running Man

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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It’s been over three years since we found out that Edgar Wright was directing another adaptation of Richard Bachman/Stephen King’s The Running Man. Today at the Paramount Pictures panel at CinemaCon (via The Hollywood Reporter), however, we found out not only that the movie is still happening, but that Glen Powell has signed on to star in the lead role, the part that Arnold Schwarzenegger took on in the 1987 adaptation.

The Running Man, which King wrote in 1985 under his Bachman pen name, takes place in a future dystopia (which, by the way, was the year 2025), where the U.S. government runs a gladiatorial game show where a group of killers try to hunt down and kill a contestant. The longer one lives, the more money one makes. One man, the titular running man, enters the game to try to raise money for his sick daughter and manages to rip the game apart from the inside.

Powell will play that man. The actor is currently set to star in the upcoming tornado sequel Twisters (pictured above) and also had roles in Top Gun: Maverick, Hidden Figures and a recurring part in Scream Queens.

No news yet on when this version of The Running Man will make its way to theaters. [end-mark]

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News Star Trek

Star Trek Origin Film Is Finally Happening! Gets 2025 Release Window

So many possibilities!

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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Star Trek is finally going to boldly head back to the big screen! During the Paramount Pictures panel today at CinemaCon (via /Film), news broke that a new Trek movie, which has been framed as an origin story, will be helmed by Toby Haynes. Haynes’ previous credits include directing episodes of Andor as well as the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister,” a brutal riff on the Star Trek franchise that explores the toxic side of the fandom. The writer for the film is Seth Grahame-Smith, whose previous credits include the underrated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and The LEGO Batman Movie.

Even more exciting is the news that this origin film is officially happening in the near future (or a least is a much surer thing than the fourth movie starring Chris Pine as Kirk seems to be). Production on the film is set to start later this year and will premiere in theaters sometime in 2025.  

This prequel can’t help but raise questions about how it will affect the canonical Star Trek timeline(s). Will this story tie into the Star Trek: Enterprise series? As such, will Scott Bakula’s Jonathan Archer (pictured above) make an appearance, perhaps as one of the first presidents of the Federation? Or will this film completely rewrite the timeline/create a new one just like J.J. Abrams did with his films starring Pine as Kirk?

Time will tell! And it looks like we’ll get our answers sometime next year. [end-mark]

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News Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

We’re Getting an R-Rated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Because What Is Reality Anymore?

It’s time to order a pizza…of vengeance.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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During their CinemaCon panel today, Paramount Pictures burdened us with the news that an R-rated live-action film based on the comic run Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is in the works. The movie will be solidly in the adults-only camp, which means it will be chock full of violence, gore, and death! I feel bad for the parents, however, who miss the memo that these turtles ain’t for kiddos and take their eight-year-old to see it.

Granted, the original TMNT comics were darker, grittier affairs than the animated and live-action adaptions we’ve gotten on screen. But the average moviegoer doesn’t know that. The Last Ronin is also a more recent comic series—it ran from 2020 to 2022 and was penned by TMNT creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. According to Variety, Eastman and Tom Waltz (writer of two TMNT video games: 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and 2016’s TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan) penned the script adaptation.

Here’s the synopsis, per Variety:

Uh oh, everyone’s dead! And to my uninitiated eye this premise reads like fanfic of the more family-friendly fare most people know, which I admit makes me more intrigued.

No news yet on who will play the surviving Turtle or when the film will go into production, much less make its way to a theater near you. [end-mark]

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News project hail mary

Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling to Star in Film Adaptation

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is getting adapted into a movie, with Ryan Gosling (Barbie, pictured above) on board to star and produce, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (the Spider-Verse films) directing, and Drew Goddard (The Martian, Netflix’s Daredevil series) penning the script. In addition to Gosling, directors Lord and Miller as well as Amy Pascal, Aditya Sood, Rachel O’Connor, and Weir are also on board to produce, with Pascal pulling the whole project together.

The movie comes from Amazon MGM Studios, which announced during CinemaCon today (per Deadline) that the film would premiere in theaters (rather than Prime Video) sometime in 2026. Gosling is undoubtedly playing the story’s protagonist, Ryland Grace.

Here’s the blurb for Weir’s book, to give you a sense of the story:

No news yet on who else might be in the film in a key role (if you know, you know), and no news on when exactly in 2026 we’ll see Project Hail Mary land at a theater near you. [end-mark]

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News The Blair Witch Project

Found Footage Is Back, Baby! A New Blair Witch Movie Is in the Works

But how will people appreciate your snot-coated sobbing if you apply face filters?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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This won’t be your mama’s Blair Witch! That’s what Lionsgate and Blumhouse execs Adam Fogelson and Jason Blum promised at CinemaCon today, where the studios announced a multi-film partnership that includes remaking (or making a sequel of?) the 1999 found footage phenom, The Blair Witch Project.

“I have been incredibly fortunate to work with Jason many times over the years. We forged a strong relationship on The Purge when I was at Universal, and we launched STX with his film The Gift. There is no one better at this genre than the team at Blumhouse,” said Fogelson (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We are thrilled to kick this partnership off with a new vision for Blair Witch that will reintroduce this horror classic for a new generation.” 

Blum also acknowledged that returning to Blair Witch was “a truly special opportunity” and he was “excited to see where it leads.”

I am also interested to see where this leads. Would the kids lost in the woods capture everything on their cell phones (and possibly uploaded to TikTok) instead of a camcorder? Other than that, will anything about it be markedly different than the original, which was captured via “found footage” from a cracked video camera that revealed some teens get stalked and murdered by a malevolent supernatural force? Time will tell! [end-mark]

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News Monopoly

From Barbie to B&O Railroad: Margot Robbie to Produce Monopoly Movie

Will there be people playing top hats? Will someone go directly to jail? Will everyone build a hotel on Broadway?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Margot Robbie, who recently starred in and produced the blockbuster Barbie (pictured above), is setting her sights on another toy-related property. During CinemaCon today, Lionsgate, which owns the rights to the Monopoly IP, announced that Robbie’s company LuckyChap will be taking on a live-action film based on the board game. Hasbro Entertainment is also producing.

“I could not imagine a better production team for this beloved and iconic brand than LuckyChap,” Lionsgate chair, Adam Fogelson, said (per Variety). “They are exceptional producers who choose their projects with great thought and care, and join Monopoly with a clear point of view. We are tremendously excited to be working with the entire LuckyChap team on what we all believe can be their next blockbuster.”

Details on the plot remain murky beyond Fogelson’s comment above about Robbie’s studio having a point of view on what to do with the capitalistic game. What that means exactly remains to be seen. Will Robbie play a major role, like the shoe game piece? Or perhaps the iron? Will someone go to jail, directly to jail? Will anyone get $200? Will Baltic Ave. finally get its due?

We’ll have to wait and see, though LuckyChap is chuffed to take it on. “Monopoly is a top property—pun fully intended,” said a LuckyChap representative. “Like all of the best IP, this game has resonated worldwide for generations, and we are so excited to bring this game to life alongside the wonderful teams involved at Lionsgate and Hasbro.”

No news yet on when it will go into production or build a hotel on a theater near you. [end-mark]

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News Joker: Folie à Deux

Love Is in the Air, Maybe, in the First Trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux

Nobody sings, though

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Welcome to Arkham Asylum, folks. Here you will find Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) living a drab, incarcerated life—until he sees a girl who appears to be singing in the prison choir. When they meet, everything changes. Freedom! Performances! Dancing on the rooftops! So much love is in the air!

But how much of this is real? The first trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux is full of flashes of color (those umbrellas!) and razzle-dazzle, but there is a distinct suggestion that little of their fancy lives is actually happening—at least not exactly the way we’re seeing it. Probably Arthur and Harley (Lady Gaga) do break out of prison, but all the shiny-outfit glowing-lights parts seem… well, these two aren’t generally known for being the best-adjusted of folks, you know?

Joker: Folie à Deux is, of course, Todd Phillips’s sequel to 2019’s Joker, which was a massive hit: a billion bucks at the box office and 11 Oscar nominations. It was supposed to be a one-off. Surprise! The sequel has been described as a jukebox musical, though Variety points out that director Phillips has said that’s not entirely accurate: “I like to say it’s a movie where music is an essential element,” Phillips said at CinemaCon, where footage debuted. “It doesn’t veer too far from the first film. Arthur has music in him. He has a grace to him.”

The Joker and Harley dance into theaters on October 4th. [end-mark]

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News Control

Julianne Moore and James McAvoy to Star in Mind-Affecting Thriller, Control

The “clock-ticking thriller” is all about having a voice in your head telling you what to do…

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 9, 2024

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The film adaptation of the podcast Shipworm from Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie is fleshing out its cast. The thriller, which currently has the title Control, has had James McAvoy (pictured above in X-Men: Days of Future Past; other credits include Split, Glass, and His Dark Materials) on board to star for about a year, and today Deadline broke the news that Julianne Moore (May December, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2) will be joining him on screen.

Control is a “clock-ticking thriller” where a troubled doctor (McAvoy) wakes up one morning with a mysterious voice inside his head. The voice, perhaps from an untraceable device of some sort, mandates that McAvoy’s character do certain things or something very, very bad will happen (or maybe multiple bad things will happen… it’s unclear). We don’t know much about Moore’s character, though Deadline reports that she “plays a pivotal character with which the doctor must contend.”

The film enters production in Berlin this month and is spearheaded by StudioCanal and The Picture Company. Robert Schwentke, whose previous credits include The Time Traveler’s Wife, R.I.P.D., and the adaptations of Insurgent and Divergent, will direct. Read into that what you will.

No news yet on when the film will make its way to a screen near you. Perhaps we’ll all wake up one day with a voice in our head telling us the details. [end-mark]

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News Under Paris

It’s the French’s Turn to Face a Large Shark in Under Paris

Ne va pas dans l’eau

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 9, 2024

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Perhaps we have been hoarding the large shark movies. Is it fair to other countries, really? The French have decided it is their time for a large shark film, and have created Under Paris, in which the arrival of a “giant” (she’s no MEG) shark in the Seine coincides with a very important triathlon.

Yes, you read that right. The poorly punctuated and extremely brief summary offered on YouTube says only, “Sophia, a brilliant scientist comes to know that a large shark is swimming deep in the river.” But there’s a triathlon! Many people in the water! It will be a massacre! (A word the subtitles helpfully translate to “carnage,” in case its meaning was unclear.)

“Comes to know” is sort of hilarious here, given that the trailer makes it clear Sophia (Bérénice Bejo) is tracking the movements of said shark. But this is definitely a movie for which it’s better to not ask many questions.

Under Paris is directed and co-written by Xavier Gens, who has directed episodes of Gangs of London and Lupin. It stars Nassim Lyes (Julia) alongside the aforementioned Bérénice Bejo, who was an Oscar nominee for The Artist. (There are actually a surprising number of Oscar-nominated and winning actors in shark movies, especially if you count Shark Tale, which maybe you shouldn’t.)

Under Paris swims onto Netflix on June 5th. [end-mark]

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Column Close Reads

Considering the Perfect Knits of Coraline

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make an iconic costume?

By Michelle Jaworski

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: LAIKA Studios

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Credit: LAIKA Studios

Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Michelle Jaworski breaks out the knitting needles (and possibly some extra buttons) to talk about Coraline’s amazing tiny sweaters.

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make that famous and immediately eye-popping sweater or knitted garment that appeared on the screen (and just became your new obsession)?

Sometimes, a film or TV show’s costume designer might purchase it before purposely ruining it to illustrate a character’s utter disregard for taking care of their things. Sometimes, a knitter will make it by hand, putting care into items that populate a lived-in world or turn into the most iconic part of a character’s costume. Sometimes, the inclusion feels so effortless and invisible that nobody else seems to appreciate it how you do.

And then there’s sometimes an instance where a film is so painstakingly crafted with such detail, care, and precision before you even consider the knitwear that it blows your mind when you finally get around to it. A film like LAIKA Studios’ 2009 stop-motion animated classic Coraline—from stop-motion legend Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wendell & Wild) and based on the 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman—and its perfectly tiny, hand-knitted sweater might do that to you.

Introduced about 45 minutes into the film, Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), the 11-year-old heroine of Coraline, sneaks through the hidden door in her new home to another world, one which offers affectionate parents, presents, delectable food, and instant entertainment. Her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) and Other Father (John Hodgman), who look and sound just like her real parents save for the black buttons sewn into their eyesockets, aren’t home. But her Other Mother left Coraline a gift: A new outfit made just for her, and an invitation to visit their neighbors after lunch.

What’s in the box? A bright and sparkling blue sweater imbued with silver stars that catch your eye in the light, black corduroy pants, and boots much closer in hue to Coraline’s iconic blue bob. After donning this outfit, Coraline witnesses the full spectacle of this other world with a showstopping performance, as well as the Other Mother’s cruelty. She learns the truth of what the Other Mother plans to do with her with the only light coming from the glow of the sweater’s stars and the three young ghosts who fell victim to the Other Mother before her. And even as Coraline and Other Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) are captivated by the show Coraline’s neighbors put on, you can’t keep your eyes off that sweater.

As a knitted piece of clothing, Coraline’s sweater is deceptively simple. It’s a pullover that limits itself to a single combination of thread (compared to the multi-colored striped gloves Coraline tries on in a store in our world) and doesn’t contain flourishes like cables; the stars were attached after the fact. Coraline’s costumes often stand out with whichever world she’s inhabiting—she’s usually the most colorful person in the room in the real world’s gloomy atmosphere and appears to dim the more time she spends in the fantastical Other World—and the chameleonic nature of the sparkly thread used to knit it further amplifies that. The stars also glow in the dark, making it look even cooler.

Coraline’s sweater was captivating enough in its own right that as part of the film’s marketing, Jenn Jarvis was tasked with creating a human-sized pattern—with both children and adult sizes included—geared toward fans who wanted to make a sweater of their own; Jarvis’ pattern is no longer officially online, but you can find it if you know where to look. 

It’s Althea Crome, a fiber artist who’s been making conceptual knitted garments (meaning without a set pattern) on a miniature scale for decades, who is responsible for creating that original starry sweater and Coraline’s striped gloves; she’s listed as “Knitwear Creator” in the film’s credits. According to a 2009 interview with The Oregonian, Crome said that LAIKA’s costuming department contacted her about making knitted pieces for the film, which involved weeks of searching to find the right combination of threads—a mix of holographic and polyester—to match what LAIKA had in mind. Once Crome got the go-ahead to knit the sweater, she was sent a version of Coraline’s body to make it fit on the puppet; she eventually made 14 sweaters and six pairs of gloves for LAIKA.

But that doesn’t begin to cover the scale of it. It’s one thing to hear or read about it. It’s another to view Crome’s documentation of her work on Coraline, which includes photos of the threads she used or photos of what it looks like for her to knit something on that scale. It’s another to watch Crome fully in her element, which we can do courtesy of a LAIKA behind-the-scenes video where she discusses her miniature knitting.

“I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny needles,” Chrome says in the video. “Some of the needles are almost the dimension of a human hair.”

Um… yes?

I’m in awe of what Crome has created not just because, as she put it, she shrunk a “craft or skill into something so tiny it asks the viewer to imagine how it was done.” I’ve been knitting for about seven years, so even before you shrink a hand-knitted garment, the wheels turn to calculate what goes into making something like a sweater or pair of gloves. My eyes are straining from the sheer thought.

But Crome’s work only amplifies that. To put it in perspective, the smallest set of knitting needles I own is a US 0, which has a diameter of 2mm; I might use them to work on a pair of socks or gloves. It’s kind of easy to misplace them, or accidentally break one of those needles if it’s made of a material like wood. Crome knits with needles so thin that she compared their fineness to human hair.

Crome’s needles are much smaller, the thread much thinner, and the scale is on a minuscule level (the entire span of the sweater is about four inches). One of Coraline’s gloves, measured from cuff to fingertip, isn’t much bigger than one of our fingernails. I can see Crome knitting on needles small enough to be used for sewing or embroidery, and I see what the result of that is on the screen, but all this time later, my mind still can barely comprehend it.

It’s that level of fine detail that makes Coraline’s world of stop-motion come to life. Even if you’re not thinking about the sweaters as often as I might be, it’s the kind of element that feeds into making Coraline’s more nightmarish elements feel that much more real.[end-mark]

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News David Lynch

Netflix Turned Down Snootworld, a “Wackadoo” Animated Project from… David Lynch?!

Lynch created the script years ago with Caroline Thompson, screenwriter for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Addams Family

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 8, 2024

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David Lynch, the mastermind behind Twin Peaks and the Dune movie (pictured above) that came before Denis Villeneuve’s endeavors, started working on a script about Snoots with Caroline Thompson (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and 1991’s The Addams Family) over two decades ago.

“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told Deadline. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

I also now can’t stop thinking about Snoots and what the hell these magical creatures from Lynch’s imagination might be like.

According to Thompson, the script is “wackadoo.”

“It takes my breath away how wacky it is,” she told Deadline. “The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world.”

Lynch had some thoughts on why Netflix made the dumb decision to pass. “Snootworld is kind of an old-fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old-fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Someone please make this and make Netflix rue the day they passed on it! I want to watch this lil’ Snoot get teenier and enter the quantum realm, or whatever world Lynch has concocted with his brain cells. Let Lynch be Lynchian! Bring on the Snoots! [end-mark]

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News MaXXXine

Mia Goth Takes Hollywood in the Trailer for Ti West’s Maxxxine

Stardom—or something—awaits

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 8, 2024

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This girl can’t catch a break. First she survives X, writer-director Ti West’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage. Then Maxine (Mia Goth) heads to Hollywood, ready to make a shift from adult film to super-classy horror flicks. But there’s a hitch in her plan: Hollywood has its own bloody threat looming in the form of a serial killer called the Night Stalker.

Can’t she just follow in the footsteps of Jamie Lee Curtis, becoming a famous actress via horror films? Probably not. Maxxine is the third film in the Ti West/Mia Goth powerhouse partnership, following X and Pearl (the origin story of one of the characters from X). It’s set in 1985 (six years after X), which you don’t need me to tell you if you watch the trailer: All the style and musical cues are right there. (Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” is a nice touch.)

Kevin Bacon lurks around as a private dick hired to find Maxine; Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan are detectives who—reasonably, I think—get interested in Maxine when it turns out she knows three of the Night Stalker’s victims. Being that Maxine does get some work as an actress, she winds up on the studio lot with the Bates Motel set. Totally normal. Nothing weird about that.

Maxxxine also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Halsey, Lily Collins, and Giancarlo Esposito. It’s in theaters July 5th. [end-mark]

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News Star Wars

Andor Writer Beau Willimon Will Co-Write James Mangold’s Star Wars Movie

When you write “One Way Out,” Star Wars wants you back

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 8, 2024

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Beau Willimon is going back to that galaxy far, far away. Willimon (who also created the series House of Cards) shares writing credit with Andor creator Tony Gilroy on three episodes of that excellent series, including the unforgettable prison break episode “One Way Out.” Now he’s headed to a very, very different Star Wars era: The Hollywood Reporter has the news that he’s working with writer-director James Mangold on Mangold’s Star Wars film, which has the working title Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi.

The Mangold film was announced, like several other tantalizingly vague future Star Wars, at Star Wars Celebration last April. As THR explains, it will “will trace the origins of the Force and be set 25,000 years before any of the timelines and stories told by the movies and shows so far.”

Little else is known about the project, which has no release date. But one Star War is definitely coming to a theater near you on a specific date: Last week, Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian & Grogu got the premiere date of May 22, 2026. Two other upcoming Star Wars films are still mysterious and undated: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s film about Rey, which takes place some years after the sequel trilogy, and Dave Filoni’s film, which is intended to bring together all the post-Return of the Jedi plot threads from various Disney+ series.

Disney has two more dates on their calendar saved for Star Wars films: December 18, 2026, and December 17, 2027. These dates are so far in the future that they sound fake, but there are series to tide us over: The shorts collection Tales of the Empire arrives May 4th, and The Acolyte on June 4th. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV monkey man

Monkey Man Seems Like a Straight Revenge Film, But It’s So Much More

Dev Patel serves up a bloody action film that’s really about communities supporting and protecting one another

By Alex Brown

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Published on April 8, 2024

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You’re going to see a lot of people describe Monkey Man as a bloody revenge film. Yes, there is a lot of blood. Like, A LOT of blood. Dev Patel is practically swimming in it for much of the movie. And yes, revenge is an underlying theme. It’s what starts Patel’s character down his blood-soaked path. 

But this movie is so much more than that. It’s about taking down the powerful and giving voice to the powerless. It’s about finding family in unexpected places and communities coming together to support and protect. It’s about rebellion against repression and resisting fascism in all forms. Monkey Man isn’t just a fun little action revenge movie but a call to take up arms and take back what your oppressors have stolen from you by any means necessary.

Dev Patel is our nameless protagonist—he is called “Bobby” for part of the film but credited simply as “Kid.” Kid begins the movie wearing a gorilla mask and getting the shit kicked out of him in staged matches in an underground fight club. His alter ego is based on Hanuman, a monkey-esque deity most known for his role in the epic poem Ramayana. His boss, a white South African man known as Tiger (Sharlto Copley) claims he found our monkey man deep in the African jungle and brought him to India as a beast to fight other “wild animals,” such as men known as King Cobra and Baloo. The fights are painful and designed so that Monkey Man will lose every time. But Kid doesn’t care. He has bigger fish to fry.

With his paltry earnings, he manages to scam his way into a job at the Kings Club, an exclusive night club run by crime boss Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar). Queenie’s fortress offers the wealthy everything they desire, from drugs to sex to entertainment to culinary decadence. On the walls hang portraits of dead Raja from the height of British colonialism, treated as aspirational tokens. All around him are signs of an oncoming crisis. Celebrity yogi Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a former poor kid who claims to have bootstrapped his way to the top, is backing a rightwing politician spouting nationalist rhetoric. His right hand man is Rana (Sikandar Kher), the chief of police of Yatana (a fictional city meant to invoke Mumbai).

But Kid isn’t concerned with social issues, not at first anyway. All he wants is to get revenge. He’s clever but not particularly skilled at fighting. All heart and head, no brawn. After a spectacular fight scene, Kid ends up in the care of a commune of hijra, or third gender people, hiding out in an abandoned temple to Ardhanarishvara, the dual manifestation of the Hindu deities Shiva, the Destroyer, and Pavarti, his consort and a goddess of love, devotion, and harmony. “Male, female, both, neither,” says Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the leader of the hijra. They help him see that the best way to get revenge isn’t to take one bad guy out but to topple the whole regime. Cue training montage and third act boss fight.

Now, I’m not Indian and I don’t know enough about the current socio-political issues going on there or about Hinduism to offer any insight into whether or not Monkey Man succeeds in its metaphorical takedown of real world issues. I expect it probably doesn’t, at least not fully. From what I can tell, it doesn’t do enough to follow through on its messaging and the messaging itself feels a bit muddled even at a distance. I also wish the film had spent more time on why the hijra are such outcasts in Indian society and how their situation differs from Kid’s and other oppressed people. There was a missed opportunity to connect their story to that of the prostitutes like Neela (Adithi Kalkunte) who are suffering under the patriarchy in a way that Kid isn’t.

The tenor and themes, however, are spot on. The third act sequence with the hijra is one I will never forget. I knew in that moment that this is a movie I am going to watch again and again and again. We may not have the Bharatiya Janata Party here in the US, but we do have religious fanatics, bigots, and nationalists who use the same hateful rhetoric to sow dissent. Whole political movements have formed to position one group of people above another as the righteous and rightful “owners” of the land. The yogi, in response to a question about what happened to the villagers living in the forest where his factory was built, claims the land was “barren” (where have we heard that one before?), and then proceeds to refer to his followers in religious terms as if he is a god and they are his worshippers. The story Patel is telling is specific to his cultural context, but many of the underlying concepts are, unfortunately, universal. 

On a lighter note, this is also a movie about community. The people in power are often seen alone; if there are others around them, they’re flunkies, goons, yes men, or victims. The people without power are surrounded by others. The hijra, his childhood village, even the poorest people living in the city, all work together and support each other. There is immediate and unconditional trust. Revolutions cannot be won through individual action. Community is what really frightens those in power.

If none of that is enough to sway you, Dev Patel’s directorial choices—assisted and enhanced by cinematographer Sharone Meir—should. The movie is well shot, with some truly beautiful backdrops. Joe Galdo, Dávid Jancsó, and Tim Murrell edited some of the fight scenes so well they almost look like they were done in one long take. Divvya Gambhir and Nidhi Gambhir deserve an Oscar just for the hijra’s glittering warrior outfits. 

Let me end this by begging Hollywood to put Dev Patel in everything. Put him in action movies, romcoms, comedies, historical dramas, literally everything. We all know Patel can act, and with Monkey Man he proves he can also direct. If he’s acting in it or directing it, I’ll watch it. I want this man to have exactly the career he wants. [end-mark]

The post <i>Monkey Man</i> Seems Like a Straight Revenge Film, But It’s So Much More appeared first on Reactor.

News The Mummy

1999’s The Mummy Starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Is Heading Back to Theaters!

Strike a match on your best buddy’s beard and grab your tickets now

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 5, 2024

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Are you, like me, a huge fan of 1999’s The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz? If so, I’ve got fantastic fucking news for you: The film is headed back to theaters this month to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary.

That’s right folks, starting Friday, April 26 (well, the evening of Thursday, April 25 actually, because that’s how things work these days) you can get a big ol’ bucket of popcorn, settle into a cinema near you, and see Fraser and Weisz dominate the big screen and dazzle your bisexual proclivities.

It looks like it’s playing in theaters across America, including AMC, Cinemark, and Alamo locations. At the AMC near me in southern California, I can buy a ticket for a measly five dollars. Five dollars! That’s less than the cost of a coffee these days—quite the deal to give yourself just over two hours of unmitigated joy.

If you haven’t been blessed to see 1999’s The Mummy before, the film follows the adventurer Rick O’Connell (Fraser) as he pairs up with a librarian named Evie (Weisz) and her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) to uncover the treasures buried at Hamunaptra, an ancient Egyptian city of the dead. They inadvertently wake up a sexy mummy named Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) and fight to stay alive as he hunts down all who awakened him. It is, in short, the best movie ever, and Universal Pictures knows it.

“Over the past twenty-five years, The Mummy has become a cornerstone of adventure cinema and has set the bar high for blockbuster entertainment,” Jim Orr, president of domestic theatrical distribution for Universal Pictures, said in a statement. “As we celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, we couldn’t be more thrilled to bring it back to the big screen. It’s a fantastic opportunity for both devoted fans and newcomers to immerse themselves in the exhilarating adventure and timeless story that made The Mummy an unforgettable cinematic experience.”

Tickets are now on sale. Go buy one! [end-mark]

The post 1999’s <i>The Mummy</i> Starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz Is Heading Back to Theaters! appeared first on Reactor.

News Avengelyne

Margot Robbie, Olivia Wilde, and Simon Kinberg Are Teaming Up to Adapt Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne

But who will wear this outfit?!?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 5, 2024

Credit: Image Comics

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Credit: Image Comics

Just take a second to wrap your head around this odd stack of people: Margot Robbie (Barbie herself), Olivia Wilde (the director of Booksmart), and Simon Kinberg (co-creator of Star Wars Rebels and the writer of not one but two messy X-Men/Dark Phoenix films) are at work on an adaptation of the comic book Avengelyne, created by Rob Liefeld.

If you are familiar with Liefeld’s work, you either already know Avengelyne or you have a pretty good idea what she looks like. Liefeld, of course, is responsible for (among other things) that infamous image of Captain America where it looks like someone inflated his pecs.

The character is a fallen angel—one with impossible proportions and very small outfits, naturally—who, having been cast out of Heaven, fights demons here on Earth. This is at least the third time someone has tried to get an adaptation off the ground. (Get it? Angels have wings? I’ll see myself out.) Gina Carano was once attached to star, and in 2016 Paramount was planning a movie version directed by Akiva Goldsman.

This new crack at an Avengelyne movie will have Wilde as director, with Kinberg and Robbie (with her company LuckyChap) producing. Variety doesn’t say anything who might be writing the film, and it does not have a studio or streamer behind it—yet.

As for a star, that too is unknown. I just hope for her sake that her outfits get a… let’s just call it a modern update. [end-mark]

The post Margot Robbie, Olivia Wilde, and Simon Kinberg Are Teaming Up to Adapt Rob Liefeld’s <i>Avengelyne</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Dune Messiah

Denis Villeneuve Is Doing Dune Messiah

Please ready your best “dune it again” jokes

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 5, 2024

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There could’ve been an infallible prophecy about this. That’s how inevitable it was. Last year, Denis Villeneuve said he only wanted to do one more Dune movie, making Dune Messiah to close out a trilogy. A wise man, he told Empire, “After that, the books become more… esoteric.”

A third Dune movie wasn’t official until now, in the wake of Dune 2 doing exceedingly well at the box office. And yet the announcement that he and Legendary are developing Dune Messiah was still so much of a foregone conclusion that it is tucked into a Deadline piece about an entirely different movie.

But it’s nice to have a level of certainty!

Dune Messiah takes place some years into Paul Atreides’ rule. As the book synopsis says:

There are political machinations, clones, children, deaths, and more politics. And philosophical musings, too.

It takes a while to make a sandworm saga, so Dune Messiah won’t be on screens any time soon. [end-mark]

The post Denis Villeneuve Is Doing <i>Dune Messiah</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Mysterians: Flying Saucers, Mecha Kaiju, Ray Guns, and… International Cooperation?

Spectacle! Giant Mole Robots! Meetings! This 1957 Japanese film grapples with the anxieties of the post-WWII atomic age…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 10, 2024

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The Mysterians (Japanese title: 地球防衛軍, Earth Defense Force) (1957) Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, and Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay by Takeshi Kimura and Shigeru Kayama based a story by Jojiro Okami.

It’s not possible to truly separate any film from the political context in which it is made. That’s a fairly bland observation about cinema. But context really does stand out in some cases more than others, and movies from the 1950s about aliens visiting Earth are one very obvious example. Last week’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and this week’s The Mysterians are companions in many ways, exploring the same themes and ideas that dominated so much of 1950s science fiction, but they are doing it from different perspectives, in different ways, with very different results.

And with very different robots that shoot death rays, but we’ll get to that.

The Mysterians came out in the middle of an absolute deluge of 1950s movies from Toho Company, the film production company behind so many beloved Japanese movies. Toho has some interesting history behind it, so pardon me for a brief detour. Toho started as a kabuki theater company in the 1930s and began producing films shortly thereafter. After Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, one of the things the American-led Occupation government did was encourage the organization of labor unions, and one of the industries that seized this opportunity was Japan’s film industry. The workers at Toho organized into a union in late 1945, and between 1946 and 1948 they participated in high-profile labor strikes.

But the anti-communist hysteria that was running rampant in the U.S. was also in full force in occupied Japan, and the Occupation government began thinking they had encouraged things to get a bit too liberal. The third Toho strike began when the company president fired over a thousand workers with the stated goals of ridding the company of both communists and debt. The union responded by occupying the studio from April until August 1948. They had the public support of many in the Japanese film industry, including director Akira Kurosawa and rising star Toshiro Mifune, but the strike was finally broken by a joint force of Japanese police and American military, who showed up with armored vehicles and tanks. As a result, Toho ended the 1940s nearly bankrupt and barely producing any movies at all. The company entered the 1950s badly in need of a smash hit to keep itself afloat.

In 1954 it made two: Seven Samurai, which contemporary critics expected to succeed based on Akira Kurosawa’s rising domestic and international fame, and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, which contemporary critics expected to flop because it was about a giant monster stomping around.

Godzilla did not flop. Instead it launched one of the most successful media franchises in history, still going strong seventy years later, and sparked an entire genre of atomic age monster movies. It also brought fame and recognition to the partnership of Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya pioneered what came to be known as the tokusatsu genre and style of films, which involve the use of elaborate practical effects. The two men would go on to make many kaiju films together, including Rodan (1956), Mothra (1961), and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). But they weren’t only making giant monsters. Somewhere in there they found time for a few sci fi movies, including The Mysterians.

Just as Godzilla was inspired by the success of American monster films King Kong (1933, but re-released in 1952) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the idea behind The Mysterians came in part from wanting a successful science fiction movie in the vein of War of the Worlds (1953) or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Japanese studios were making Japanese movies for Japanese audiences, but they were also very much aware of the fame and moneymaking potential of getting their films in front of international, and particularly American, audiences.

Big-budget movies about space and aliens were all the rage at the time, so that’s what Honda, Tsuburaya, and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka (also the producer of Godzilla) set out to make. Tanaka got science fiction writer Jojiro Okami to come up with a treatment for an alien film; Godzilla screenwriter Shigeru Kayama revised the story—adding, among other things, the mecha-kaiju that comes along to fuck things up—which was at last finalized by Rodan screenwriter Takeshi Kimura. They also brought in familiar cast members from Godzilla, Rodan, and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). All of that, plus a massive budget and full-color filming, was designed to make The Mysterians a big hit.

The movie was successful, both in Japan and later when it was dubbed and released in the U.S. Even at the time, however, many critics recognized that it was mostly the visual spectacle of The Mysterians that made such an impact, rather than its story or themes or overall quality. And that’s as true now as it was then. The film has a pretty thin plot with pretty shaky writing, and the talented cast can only do so much with the bland characters.

But the spectacle! We can’t deny the spectacle of it all. The incredible miniatures, the vibrant colors, the sweeping scenes of disaster—it’s all so much fun to look at.

The Mysterians opens with two young couples enjoying a festival in a rural village. One of the young men, Ryoichi Shiraishi (Akihiko Hirata), has broken off his engagement to one of the young women, and when his friend Joji Atsumi (Kenji Sahara) asks him about it, he gives no reason except that he must stay in the village to complete his work. This makes little sense to Atsumi, as they are astrophysicists and the village is not exactly a hotbed of scientific research. It’s about to become one, however, because a unnatural forest fire disrupts the festival, and soon thereafter the village is swallowed whole when the land is split by a massive chasm. Atsumi is back in the city when he receives this news, but Shiraishi was still in the village and is presumed dead.

Atsumi is part of the team sent to investigate the disaster. The village and temple are gone, the river’s fish poisoned by radiation, and the ground is hot enough and radioactive enough to melt the tires of their trucks. But the real problems start when an enormous mole-like robot burrows out of the mountainside and comes after them. This is Moguera, a mecha-kaiju who would decades later return to the movies in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994).

Apologies to all giant mole robots, but it must be said: Moguera is very, very silly looking. He’s wreaking havoc, but I still want to boop his pointy little mole nose.

I love the first part of this movie, with the mysterious destruction of the village, the strangeness left in its wake, and Moguera’s implacable advance—shooting death rays out of his eyes all the while—on the city while people race to evacuate. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and there is a real sense of triumph when the humans manage to stop Moguera by blowing up a bridge.

This sequence was made using Tsuburaya’s signature method: building elaborately detailed miniature landscapes and filming an actor in a monster suit at a high frame-rate as he stomps around. This is very different from the way American movies were creating giant monsters at the time; King Kong and the films of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen mostly used stop motion animation combined with live footage and projected backgrounds to put giant monsters into scenes. Tsuburaya had initially wanted to use stop motion animation with Godzilla, but constraints of time and money meant he had to use an actor in a monster suit instead, and that’s what he kept using throughout his career. (The men inside the Moguera suit are the same actors who were inside the Godzilla suit: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka.)

It may not have been the method Tsuburaya wanted when he started making giant monsters, but “suitmation” is undeniably effective when it comes to capturing the scale of destruction needed to make these scenes work. The quality of the miniatures is so important too, and I absolutely love how well they trick me into seeing villages and landscapes. It’s not that we can’t spot the difference when we look closely; what matters is that the overall scale and spectacle of the scene remains exciting to watch even when we can.

After Moguera is defeated, Atsumi and his mentor Adachi (Takashi Shimura) determine that the robot came from outer space. Helpfully, before he was swallowed up with the destroyed village, Shiraishi sent them a research report regarding a planet called Mysteroid that once existed in the solar system. (Note: The English subtitles sometimes refer to Mysteroid as a “star,” but that seems to be a linguistic quirk lost in translation rather than an egregious scientific error. The word they use is星, pronounced hoshi, which can refer to a star, planet, or other celestial body in either a literal or a figurative sense.)

Almost as soon as Atsumi and Akachi make the connection, the Mysterians themselves make an appearance, as their massive, hidden dome emerges from the ground near Mount Fuji. They claim to come in peace and ask to negotiate with Adachi, Atsumi, and a few other scientists. The humans are very skeptical, on account of the destroyed village and the giant mole-robot that just blasted a city with its laser eyes, but they agree to talk. They head into the Mysterians’ dome, which is wonderfully designed with bright colors and weird tubes and spinny things, and meet with the aliens directly.

The skepticism turns out to be justified, because the Mysterians have an offer they really don’t think the Earthlings should refuse. The Mysterian leader (Yoshio Tsuchiya, unrecognizably clad in an orange cape and helmet) explains that they destroyed their own planet in a nuclear war several generations ago, and they have been living on Mars ever since. The long-term effects of that war mean they all have high levels of strontium-90 in their bodies. All they ask of Earth is a plot of land three kilometers square to live on and access to human women to breed with. It would be very unfortunate for the humans to refuse, says the leader, because that would force the self-proclaimed pacifist Mysterians to respond with great force.

Let’s be clear about something. Not every science fiction story is symbolic or allegorical. Not every alien race is an analogue to people or governments in the real world. I think it is a disservice to both storytellers and audiences to view every work of science fiction through the lens of being required to dissect and determine its real-world meaning.

However, I also think that when Japanese filmmakers in 1957 make a movie about a shocking and indiscriminate act of destruction that causes radiation poisoning and has the purveyors of that destruction show up and say they really only want peace and all they ask is a bit of land to establish themselves on so they can make sure everybody does as they say… It’s maybe not a stretch to contemplate multiple levels of meaning.

The latter half of the movie, unfortunately, is not nearly as exciting as the beginning. There are a lot of meetings. Shiraishi is revealed to be alive and working with the Mysterians in their base. Women get kidnapped. The Mysterians take more land. Tokyo is in danger. There is a lot of military action. Through all of this, the special effects are still great, even if the plotting and pacing leave much to be desired. The dome itself is weirdly effective as a threat considering that it is literally just a dome that lights up and spins. It shouldn’t feel dangerous at all—but somehow it does. I am also impressed by the scene where water spouts from a lake and floods a village; the water rushing over the miniatures is very effective. But: there are so many meetings.

In a lot of ways, the meetings are the point, because this is a movie that ultimately advocates for international cooperation in response to an existential threat. There is a nice moment of Cold War commentary where a character remarks that whether they like it or not, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exist on the same planet and ought to act like it. The Mysterians was made just after Japan joined the United Nations in 1956, so the theme of international cooperation and mutual defense was very much on people’s minds. The movie does not create any tension around the notion of cooperation; the other nations show up as soon as they are needed to form the Earth Defense Force of the original Japanese title.

When the Mysterians prove difficult to defeat and somebody brings up the possibility of using a hydrogen bomb, the Japanese scientists react with horror. So, in the end, Earth’s victory comes from technological advancement that turns the Mysterians’ own weapons against them. The Mysterians flee Earth but are not destroyed. The movie ends with the message that they are still out there in the solar system, with potential to return in the future.

Even with its flaws, I find this movie to be an interesting addition to sci fi of the post-WWII atomic era. The ultimate message is very much the same as in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still: the development of nuclear weapons has set humanity on a dangerous path, and if we continue unchecked we will destroy ourselves. But where The Day the Earth Stood Still has an alien visitor show up to sincerely warn us about our own future actions, the alien visitors in The Mysterians show up unrepentant about their own past actions and fully prepared to visit that same destruction onto Earth.

And, yes, in the most obvious interpretation, that is an unsurprising difference between a film made in the country that dropped the atomic bombs and a film made in the country the bombs were dropped on. But there is also optimism in The Mysterians, not just in the success of cooperative action, but also in the ability of science to solve problems, even those problems that science has created in the first place. There are moments of individual heroism and sacrifice—Atsumi and Shiraishi in the dome at the end—but for the most part the focus is on the actions of the group, not the individual, from the large-scale civilian evacuations to the military operations.

It is a war movie, never mind the fact that the war is started by a giant mole-shaped robot that shoots lasers from its eyes and perpetuated by aliens dressed in fabulous citrus-bright capes, and more specifically it is the type of war movie where everybody working together saves the day. The Mysterians is, in a way, providing one answer to the question posed by the uneasy ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Is it a particularly plausible or convincing answer? Well, not especially, but I still find it notable, because it is yet another example of science fiction as a genre looked around after the end of WWII and tried to make sense of how the world had changed and would continue to change.

What are your thoughts about The Mysterians and where it sits in the subgenre of atomic era sci fi? Do you want to see more of Eiji Tsuburaya’s practical effects? You’ll get your chance; we are definitely going to watch Godzilla. I’m thinking there is a giant monster month in the future, so feel free to drop suggestions below.

Next week: We’re stepping away from the aftermath of WWII and jumping headfirst into the 1980s. We head back to the United States for some hijinks in Harlem with The Brother From Another Planet. Watch it on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.

The post <i>The Mysterians</i>: Flying Saucers, Mecha Kaiju, Ray Guns, and… International Cooperation? appeared first on Reactor.

News Abigail

New Abigail Trailer Confirms Splitting Up When Hunted by a Child Vampire Is a Bad Idea

also, never taunt a caged vampire

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 4, 2024

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The would-be kidnappers who find themselves trapped in a house with a child-sized vampire don’t seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed. In the latest trailer for Abigail, the group thinks they’ve trapped their future murderer in a cage, but soon find out that they’re the ones trapped, alive only because Abigail likes to play with her food.

The trailer also highlights a second fatal mistake the group makes. They split up! Have they ever, ever watched a horror movie?! Never split up! This decision—and I’m guessing here but I’m pretty sure I’m right—will likely result on more than one of them becoming a snack for the vampirena. (And based on the swamp of bodies we see decaying in the basement in this trailer, it also seems that this house is a place where Abigail regularly dines.)

Abigail stars Melissa Barrera (Scream, In the Heights), Dan Stevens (Godzilla x Kong, Legion), Kathryn Newton (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Freaky), William Catlett (Black Lightning, True Story), Kevin Durand (Resident Evil: Retribution, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Angus Cloud (Euphoria, North Hollywood) as the kidnappers, and Alisha Weir (Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, Darklands) as Abigail. The first trailer for Abigail also gave us a glimpse of Giancarlo Esposito, who locks the group inside the house for imminent consumption.

The movie comes to us from Radio Silence, the group behind the latest Scream movies, and premieres in theaters on April 19, 2024.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

The post New <i>Abigail</i> Trailer Confirms Splitting Up When Hunted by a Child Vampire Is a Bad Idea appeared first on Reactor.

News Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler’s Supernatural Horror Thriller Starring Michael B. Jordan Expands Its Cast

Jordan might be playing twins? Their might be vampires? The important part is that we get Delroy Lindo

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 3, 2024

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The details around the new supernatural horror thriller that Black Panther writer-director Ryan Coogler has in the works at Warner Bros. have been kept very hush-hush.

News has been leaking out, however, with The Hollywood Reporter sharing that the movie takes place in the Jim Crow South and may or may not include vampires and/or “Southern supernatural traditions.”

We also have some casting news. Michael B. Jordan (pictured above in Black Panther; other credits include Creed and Fahrenheit 451) is set to star in what THR is reporting may be dual roles. We also found out today from THR that Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty, playing Mr. Nancy in the upcoming Anansi Boys series) is on board to play a character with “a musical element,” and that (via Deadline) Jack O’Connell (Unbroken, Ferrari) will play the villain.

This isn’t the only project that Coogler has in the works. Last March, we found out that the writer-director is also working on a reboot or revival of The X-Files. Where that project stands, and whether Coogler is doing more than producing it is unknown, though we do know that there has been talk of a Black Panther 3 and that his production company is behind the upcoming Marvel series, Ironheart.

As for this new (to us) Warner Bros. project, THR reported that it will go into production in New Orleans later this spring, and that the studio currently has it set to release on March 7, 2025. Hopefully we’ll get more details about the film, including its title and what the story is, before then! [end-mark]

The post Ryan Coogler’s Supernatural Horror Thriller Starring Michael B. Jordan Expands Its Cast appeared first on Reactor.

News The Yellow M

Iconic Comic The Yellow M to Get Live-Action Film Adaptation

The European cult classic comic is getting a big-screen treatment

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 3, 2024

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The Belgian production company Belga Films has tapped French director Cédric Nicolas-Troyan to helm an English-language, live-action adaption of the 1950s comic, The Yellow M.

The Yellow M is the sixth volume in Blake and Mortimer, one of Europe’s most popular comic book series in the 1950s. The story centers on a villain who leaves a giant yellow “M” at the scenes of his crimes, with Blake and Mortimer called in to investigate. The two uncover that the villain behind these crimes (and also kidnappings) can manipulate others’ minds via taking control of something called the Mega Wave, a part of the brain that makes people compliant and docile to the controller.  

“The strength of the comics lies in its themes, still resonating today,” Belga Studios producer Jean-Jacques Neira told Deadline in a statement. “Brain control through screens endangers our democracies more than ever. As we grapple with the importance of moral responsibility, M offers a timely reminder to embrace critical thinking and positive impact in our era dominated by screens.”

Nicolas-Troyan comes to the project after having directed films like The Huntsman: Winter’s War and Kate. “I grew up with these characters, they are a big deal. They have been around for a while and beloved by many. So, obviously, I’m committed to honoring the comics and bring this rich and colorful universe to life while giving it a contemporary touch with plenty of heart and action,” he said in a statement to Deadline.

He added, “I’m also very excited by the creative freedom allowed on such a European independent production. So, when Belga Films approached me to direct and produce such an iconic property it was impossible for me to pass on the opportunity.”

Jan Kounen (Flight of the Storks, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky) and Jay Ferguson penned the script for the adaptation, with revisions by Nicolas-Troyan. No news yet on when the film will go into production, much less make its way to a screen near you. [end-mark]

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News The Matrix

The Matrix Series Will Continue With a New Film from Writer-Director Drew Goddard

Whoa.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2024

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We’re going back to The Matrix—but there’s a new captain at the helm. Drew Goddard is set to write and direct a new movie in the Matrix franchise, with original co-writer and co-director Lana Wachowski as executive producer.

This is, to put it mildly, unexpected news, and Goddard is an unexpected choice. A writer on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel, Goddard made his film debut as the director and co-writer of the meta-horror Cabin in the Woods. He wrote the screenplay for Cloverfield, then moved into adaptation territory, co-writing World War Z and flying solo for The Martian (for which he was nominated for an Oscar). He also directed Bad Times at the El Royale, and created a little show called Daredevil.

That’s a lot of generally interesting stuff, but none of it gets anywhere near Matrix territory, especially after the fourth film, of which Emmet Asher-Perrin wrote, “Like the first Matrix film, Resurrections is perfectly encapsulated: a leaping off point, or a finished thought depending on the angle you’re viewing it from. What’s incredible is that, regardless of your vantage point, it delves so much deeper than the story that proceeded it.”

In a statement quoted by Deadline, Warner Bros.’ President of Production, Jesse Ehrman, said, “Drew came to Warner Bros. with a new idea that we all believe would be an incredible way to continue the Matrix world, by both honoring what Lana and Lilly began over 25-years ago and offering a unique perspective based on his own love of the series and characters.”

Which characters? Where in the timeline will we be? What is happening? [end-mark]

The post <i>The Matrix</i> Series Will Continue With a New Film from Writer-Director Drew Goddard appeared first on Reactor.

News Cuckoo

Hunter Schafer Is Appropriately Skeptical of Her Situation in the Trailer for Cuckoo

Dan Stevens is delightfully creepy in this new horror film

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2024

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If your dad made you move to a weird resort in Germany with your notably young new stepmother and a bunch of weird people hanging around, wouldn’t you find it a bit strange? So it is for Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) in the new horror film Cuckoo. As if the family dynamic wasn’t enough to deal with, her dad has an intense boss, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), who is prone to saying things that are just this side of absolutely terrifying. Like, for example, “I want you to lock the doors and wait for me.”

Yikes.

And that’s not even getting into the creepy lady Gretchen keeps seeing. Here’s the synopsis:

Cuckoo also stars Marton Csokas (Into the Badlands) as Gretchen’s father, and Jessica Henwick (Iron Fist) as her stepmother. Director Tilman Singer’s last film, Luz, was about a cab driver and a demonic entity.

Early reviews of Cuckoo have been mixed, but Robert Daniels, writing at RogerEbert.com, offered an observation that might be enough to tip the scales in the movie’s favor: “Schafer is exceptional as this corroded wound, a girl barely holding herself together as she balances telling moments of silence and loud instances of hostility. But it’s Stevens, who’s often strongest when he turns weird, who is unforgettable, one-upping Andre 3000 as cinema’s premiere flute player.”

That last phrase is something I certainly didn’t expect. Cuckoo is in theaters August 9th. [end-mark]

The post Hunter Schafer Is Appropriately Skeptical of Her Situation in the Trailer for <i>Cuckoo</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Boy Kills World

Red Band Trailer for Boy Kills World Emphasizes Film’s Violently Bonkers Vibe

“R-rated Looney Tunes on acid” is the review they chose to highlight

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 2, 2024

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As I said in our post for the first trailer of Boy Kills World, the movie starring Bill Skarsgård as a deaf mute killing machine with an inner voice narrated by Bob’s Burgers H. Jon Benjamin, looks like it will be either completely terrible or a cinematic masterpiece.

The second red band trailer for the film makes a strong case that it falls in the latter camp. Yes, we see Skarsgård’s “Boy” murder in various violent and sometimes funny ways, but we also get several critics’ comments weaved in between kill scenes, which suggests that this movie might be something special.

Those comments include: “Totally unhinged,” “A kill fest,” “Gleeful lunacy,” and “R-rated Looney Tunes on acid.” Granted these are cherry-picked quotes from the film’s marketing team, but even if the rest of these reviews are bashing the film (and they’re not), I can’t help but want to watch something described as Looney Tunes on acid, and R-rated, no less!

In addition to Skarsgård and Benjamin, Boy Kills World stars Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman, Isaiah Mustafa, Yayan Ruhian, with Andrew Koji, Sharlto Copley, and Famke Janssen. It’s produced by Sam Rami, directed by Moritz Mohr, and written by Tyler Burton Smith, and Arend Remmers.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Boy Kills World premieres in theaters on April 26, 2024.

Check out the latest trailer below. [end-mark]

The post Red Band Trailer for <i>Boy Kills World</i> Emphasizes Film’s Violently Bonkers Vibe appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America

Released during the rise of McCarthyism, the film poses questions about how humans deal with fear and uncertainty that still feel startlingly relevant today.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 3, 2024

Image: 20th Century Fox

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Image: 20th Century Fox

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Directed by Robert Wise. Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, and Billy Gray. Screenplay by Edmund H. North, based on the short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.

I had never seen this movie before I picked it for this film club. I know it’s a genre classic. I know it’s widely influential and has been referenced in all kinds of sci fi works. I had heard of it, of course, and vaguely knew the premise—alien comes to Earth, Cold War politics—but not much more than that. And I avoided researching it until after I had watched it. I wanted to see it before I delved into what people thought of it.

I’m glad it approached it that way, because: (a) I really enjoyed the movie for itself, because it’s great, and (b) subsequently delving into what people think about The Day the Earth Stood Still is so overwhelming it makes me feel like I’m back in graduate school. For 70+ years people have been writing editorials, reviews, articles, dissertations, and books about the film’s impact and meaning. There are multiple scholarly debates still occurring across both academic journals and fandom spaces: Is the movie anti-war and anti-atomic? Is the main character a Christ-like figure? What is it saying about the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction? Is the position of the visiting alien justifiable from the perspective of ethical philosophy?

All of this is interesting, but there is absolutely no way I can cover everything in this piece, nor do I really want to, not unless somebody is going to give me another PhD for it. So I’m going to focus on a few things that I find most interesting, and I encourage everybody else to share their own thoughts in the comments.

First, a bit about the context, because we are talking about a high-profile, major studio Hollywood movie released in 1951, and there is a hell of a lot of relevant context. A few years earlier, in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed ten Hollywood producers, directors, and screenwriters to testify about suspected communist activities. They refused to answer any questions, were charged with contempt of Congress, and were subsequently fined and imprisoned. The heads of major studios, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Association of Motion Picture Producers, responded by declaring that they would not employ any of those ten men, nor anybody else linked to communist politics or any other vaguely-defined “subversive and disloyal elements.”

The statement they released on the matter, the Waldorf Declaration, is an odd piece of legal wriggling. There was not agreement among the studio heads about what to do, or even if they should do anything. Even at the hysteria-driven height of the so-called Red Scare, it was still, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment to fire somebody for having politics you don’t like, but the pressure to do exactly that was coming from the Congress. The studio heads decided that the financial risk of being sued outweighed the inevitable public backlash if they did nothing. (There are a million articles, books, interviews, and thinkpieces on this matter, but check out this Hollywood Reporter piece for a quick summary and timeline.)

The Waldorf Statement more or less became industry policy for the next few years, and the initial blacklist of ten people ballooned to more than 300, especially after Senator Joseph McCarthy began driving the widespread persecution that would come to bear his name. The impact on Hollywood was significant and very, very high profile. Just a few examples: Charlie Chaplin was denied re-entry to the United States in 1952 and subsequently cut ties with Hollywood; actor Edward G. Robinson, who was an outspoken anti-fascist as well as a civil rights supporter, was called to testify before the HUAC and basically forced to jump through political hoops to avoid being blacklisted; Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which became beloved Hollywood movies, refused to cooperate with HUAC and was blacklisted in 1953. The list goes on and on.

Right in the middle of all this came The Day The Earth Stood Still, a major studio film that was conceived, written, and filmed as commentary on the social and political environment in which it was made. Producer Julian Blaustein set out to make a movie about the paranoia and fear that gripped the world in the post-World War II atomic era; he was specifically interested in promoting a strong United Nations and said as much during press for the film. He looked around for a science fiction story that could be used as a basis for such a film and found Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Screenwriter Edmund North took a great many liberties with the original story, as is the way of such things, and the result is the script that director Robert Wise would turn into The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise would go on to become one of Hollywood’s absolute legends, as he would later direct West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Haunting, The Andromeda Stain, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and many, many other films. In 1951 he wasn’t a legend yet, but he was well on his way there; he had been the editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before he began directing his own films.

The Day the Earth Stood Still opens with a montage of people around the world reacting to the appearance of an unidentified craft soaring through Earth’s atmosphere. The craft soon reveals itself to be a sleek flying saucer. Articles about the film frequently claim that set designers Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter designed the spaceship with the help of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (for example: this article shared by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation), but it’s just as frequently claimed that this is an urban legend, so I have no idea if it’s true. If there are any Frank Lloyd Wright biographers hanging around, please let us know.

Whoever designed it, the spacecraft is striking and elegant as it settles into a landing spot on Earth: right smack in the middle of the National Mall in Washington D.C.. The ship opens and a humanoid alien emerges to say, “We have come to visit in peace and with goodwill,” and asks to meet with the leaders of Earth. A nervous soldier responds by shooting him, which is one of the most American things that has ever been committed to film. A large robot (played by Lock Martin) from the ship vaporizes all of the soldiers’ weapons, but the injured alien stops him before he can do more damage.

The alien is taken to the hospital, where he introduces himself as Klaatu and asks to speak to representatives of all the world’s governments. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) looks and acts human, which baffles the doctors, but it is necessary for the story the film is telling. Through the 1930s and ’40s, there was significant overlap in American cinema between sci fi films and horror films. There were popular space-based adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but for the most part American sci fi movies didn’t really begin to distinguish themselves from juvenile serials or monster movies until the ’50s. Another big sci fi release of 1951 was The Thing From Another World. The Thing was more representative of what Hollywood was doing with extraterrestrials at the time: alien visitors to Earth were often monsters and invaders, existing to be fought and feared. There weren’t characters or people. They weren’t us.

Klaatu, a polite, well-spoken alien who can easily pass as human, was a novelty. Wise initially wanted Claude Rains in the role of Klaatu, but he would later say it was a good thing Rains had been unavailable, because Michael Rennie turned out to be such a great alternative. And he was right, because Michael Rennie is fantastic as Klaatu. He’s friendly and warm, but there is a steely solemnity just beneath the surface that reveals the seriousness of his mission. When Klaatu escapes from the hospital, he tries to learn more about Earth and its people by walking around Washington, D.C., staying at a boarding house, spending a day with a child—all very human and ordinary things.

The mundanity of Klaatu’s actions are also key to the story the film is telling. There are very few special effects in The Day the Earth Stood Still; the goal of the production from the start was to give the movie a very realistic, almost documentary-style look. When we see the inside of Klaatu’s ship, it’s very minimalist in design and nothing is explained; when the robot Gort vaporizes human weapons all the audience sees is a blinding flash of white light. The stunning musical score by Bernard Hermann underscores this approach, as it is a compelling mix of recognizably orchestral and notably alien, with two theremins among the array of unusual instruments chosen to create a range of sounds. This was before stereophonic sound was standard in cinema—movies weren’t “presented in stereo!” just yet—and Hermann employed a lot of very clever techniques in both composing and recording to achieve the otherworldly sounds. Hermann is a genuine legend in Hollywood music history; he was wrote the memorable scores of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, several Ray Harryhausen fantasy epics, and many, many other movies you have probably seen. Check out a live performance of the theme of The Day the Earth Stood Still at an international theremin festival in 2018. Seventy years later, and this score is still so eerie, haunting, and beautiful.

The movie has a very clear goal in making these choices: the biology of the alien visitor, the nature of the world he came from, the details of his advanced technology, none of that is what we should be focusing on. What we should be focusing on is ourselves.

Klaatu’s time amongst the people of Earth explores a range of reactions. Presidential representative Mr. Harley (Frank Conroy) is sympathetic to Klaatu’s request to address the world’s leaders but unwilling to explore ways of helping; Mrs. Barley (Frances Bavier) at the boardinghouse thinks there is no extraterrestrial, only a Soviet agent, a conviction she states with confidence while sitting across the breakfast table from the actual alien; Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) thinks about how Earth must appear to an alien visitor who was attacked moments after greeting humans for the first time; her boyfriend Tom (Hugh Marlowe) only cares about alien visitation if it impacts his own life; Helen’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) is curious and excited more than scared. The various military men instantly see a threat to be eliminated, the news reporter is only interested in interviews that will support fear-mongering headlines, but for the most part people keep going about their lives as the tension and paranoia rise. We get glimpses of people around the world that are clearly meant to imply reactions are the same everywhere, including in the Soviet Union.

While tooling around Washington with young Bobby, Klaatu comes to the conclusion that politicians won’t help him deliver the message he needs to deliver, so he turns to scientists. He does this by asking Bobby to identify the smartest man around, a question that really bears no thinking about in a modern context (I do not want to consider what the range of answers would be), but makes a bit more sense in the context of Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe) being an obvious analogue to Albert Einstein, who was hugely popular with the general public at the time. Barnhardt agrees to summon scientists, philosophers, and all manner of thinkers to the city so they can all hear what Klaatu has to say.

What’s most curious about the film’s range of character reactions to alien contact is, perhaps, how very familiar they are to anybody who has watched a movie in the past 70+ years. From E.T.: The Extraterrestrial to Independence Day to The Avengers, the widespread paranoia, the childlike naivete, the military aggression, the scientific curiosity, the selfish disinterest, the histrionic press coverage are all so common they are often compressed into a montage. But here the reactions of the people of Earth aren’t a prelude or epilogue to the story, or an element that must be dispatched with before the action can start. Those reactions are the entire story.

Nothing in The Day the Earth Stood Still is actually about aliens. We learn almost nothing about Klaatu’s home or any other civilizations out there. It’s all about humans, about how we see ourselves, about what we do when we meet somebody a little different, about how we deal with fear and uncertainty.

Because those aspects of the film are so familiar, even comfortable, in the genre of sci fi, I am struck by how strongly I reacted to the ending. At the very end, Klaatu finally has a chance to address thinkers from all over the world. He tells them that because Earth has developed rockets and nuclear weaponry, other civilizations on other planets now view us as a threat. He has come to deliver a warning: change our violent ways, or be destroyed. He explains that his own civilization has achieved peace by outsourcing the enforcement of this moral and ethical dictum to a force of robot police, including his companion Gort, who have the absolute and unretractable mission to destroy any planet that is not sufficiently peaceful.

Now, look, I am an American living in the year 2024. The situation Klaatu describes as peaceful and ideal is, to me, the one of the most horrifying scenarios imaginable. I hate every single thing about it. We can’t even trust cops with handguns to make good choices; I’m sure as fuck not eager to trust a bunch of cops who never have to justify themselves with the power to destroy an entire planet.

But, setting aside my own visceral full-body shudder, I am fascinated by two things about this film’s ending.

The first is that I’m not sure how audiences in 1951 were expected to react to Klaatu’s ultimatum, because reactions were not at all uniform. Within the film itself, we don’t really get a good sense of how the gathered scientists and thinkers react to Klaatu’s message, only that they are taking it seriously. (Any crowd of real scientists would immediately begin arguing, but maybe they wait until Klaatu and Gort have noped out.) The film ends before we get a look at how humanity reacts—which is, of course, the entire point. There are several troubling assumptions behind Klaatu’s ultimatum: that everybody will define terms like threat and violence and freedom in the same way; that a serious enough and clear enough threat will unite the world; that it is possible to create a universal ethical standard that can be enforced without exception; that outsourcing our ethical choices beyond a certain level of significance to external actors is better than making those choices ourselves.

I don’t know that the movie is advocating acceptance of any or all of those assumptions. It is promoting international cooperation as a much better choice than mutually-assured destruction, but there is still skepticism about enforcing peace by means of violence. But, as I have already mentioned, people have been arguing about this for more than 70 years, and will probably be arguing about it for 70 more.

I’ll let the philosophers carry on and move on to the second thing that fascinates me, which is less about what the film itself is saying and more about where it fits into the history of science fiction, because most of the sci fi genre seems to be with me in experiencing that full-body shudder of revulsion. The Day the Earth Stood Still was asking if humankind could or would abandon its violent ways when forced to by an objective, unstoppable external force—and we’ve gotten a lot of answers from other stories over the years. Consider Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), and Robocop (1987), to name just a few films in which humans try to outsource their warfare and policing to machines and it does not, alas, result in peace and harmony for all mankind.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is, like all films, a product of its time and place, but in this way it seems to be a movie that could only have come from that particular time and place. Because the film ends before we learn what humans will decide, there is very much a sense of this being a story that stands on a precipice, one that is looking around at the world in the aftermath of WWII, in an environment of intense fear and paranoia that was actively harming the lives and careers of all kinds of people, and asking, “Now what do we do?”

What do you think about The Day the Earth Stood Still? How do you interpret the promise/threat of Gort’s robot police force and the politics of sci fi during the atomic era? I haven’t watched the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves, and I’m curious how the story was changed for a different era. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on that or anything else about this film in comments!

Next week: We’re bringing some different alien visitors down to Earth in The Mysterians (1957), one of the many epic collaborations between director Ishirō Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya. Watch it on Criterion and FlixFling, and it’s worth checking YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other upload sites. Some of the uploaded versions I’ve found are the English-language dub and some are of very sketchy quality, but poke around a little to find one that works for you.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Day the Earth Stood Still</i>: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America appeared first on Reactor.

News freaky friday

Freaky Friday 2 Has a Director, Is Really Happening

Who’s the crypt keeper now?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 1, 2024

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It has been 21 years since Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan starred in the hugely popular Freaky Friday. The film was Disney’s third adaptation of Mary Rodgers’s 1972 children’s book—and they’re definitely not done with it yet. Curtis and Lohan are “in negotiations” to reunite for Freaky Friday 2, which now has a director and is expected to begin filming this summer.

The Hollywood Reporter says “in negotiations,” but Curtis’s Instagram seems pretty certain; she posted a positively adorable picture of herself and Lohan with the caption “DUH! FFDEUX!”

Director Nisha Ganatra seems like an excellent choice; she directed a very different (but generally quite charming) pair of women, Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, in the comedy Late Night, and has directed TV episodes ranging from Mr. Robot to Dear White People to Dollface.

It’s not entirely clear who’s writing the film: THR says both that there’s “an early draft from Elyse Hollander” and that there’s a “new script, by Jordan Weiss.” According to Entertainment Weekly, there may be a new teen in the mix—or two. Lohan’s character reportedly has a 14-year-old daughter, Harper, who doesn’t care for her mom’s new love interest. Said love interest also has a teenage daughter, Lily. The girls don’t get along, and when they swap bodies with Curtis and Lohan, things get doubly complicated.

No release date has been announced, but you can expect to get Freaky again in a year or two. [end-mark]

The post <i>Freaky Friday 2</i> Has a Director, Is Really Happening appeared first on Reactor.

News The Monkey

Stephen King’s The Monkey Adaptation Wraps Production, Announces Full Cast, Including Elijah Wood and Tatiana Maslany

If you find a mysterious toy in an attic, leave it there

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 28, 2024

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It’s been almost a year since we found out that Stephen King’s short story, “The Monkey,” was getting a feature adaptation starring The White Lotus’ Theo James.

Today, Deadline broke the news that the project, directed by Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) and produced by Malignant, Aquaman, and The Conjuring filmmaker James Wan, wrapped up production. The outlet also reported on who else will be in the film besides James, and it’s an impressive line-up that includes Tatiana Maslany (pictured above in Orphan Black), Elijah Wood (Yellowjackets), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), Colin O’Brien (Wonka), Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek).

Here’s the official synopsis of The Monkey, which hews closely to King’s original tale:

In the film, James plays the adult versions of the twins while Convery plays the younger versions. We don’t have news on who the other cast members are playing, though I’m eager to find out.

We also don’t know when the film will make its way to our eyeballs, but given production has ended, it’s looking like it might be later this year or early next. [end-mark]

The post Stephen King’s The Monkey Adaptation Wraps Production, Announces Full Cast, Including Elijah Wood and Tatiana Maslany appeared first on Reactor.

News War Machine

Reacher’s Alan Ritchson to Star in Action Sci-Fi Film War Machine

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 27, 2024

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Alan Ritchson, who you might have seen in the Prime Video series Reacher (pictured above) and who is co-starring with Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, has signed up for undergoing more elaborate fight scenes on the big screen.

According to Deadline, the actor will star in the upcoming action sci-fi film, War Machine. The title suggests what kind of movie this might be, and the logline—the only other piece of information we have about the plot—supports this conclusion.

Here’s the logline, complete with its grammatical snafus: “In the final 24 Hours of the world’s toughest selection process, a team of Army Rangers encounter a threat beyond their imagination.”

This is a sci-fi movie, so I bet a dollar that this “threat beyond their imagination” is aliens and/or a rogue Artificial Intelligence bent on killing us all. Ritchson is undoubtedly one of those Army Rangers who encounters something beyond the scope of his comprehension and, most likely, does everything he can to murder it first. This is all speculation, of course. Time will tell if I’m right.

War Machine comes to us from Patrick Hughes, the director behind The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a 2017 action comedy film starring Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson where Reynold’s character, a disgraced CIA operative, has to protect Jackson’s character, a hitman about to testify in a trial, from other hitmen trying to kill him. That film earned a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score and Hughes’ 2021 sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, chalked up a 26% critics rating, though the audience scored it better at 79%.

The comedic slant to these films makes me curious whether War Machine will also take that approach. I’m more interested in it if it does, as that tone would be more intriguing and less well-trodden than a grim tale about how some incomprehensible threat is set to destroy us all.

Hughes along with James Beaufort wrote the script for War Machine. The movie is produced by Lionsgate and will make its way to Netflix at some point in the future. [end-mark]

The post <i>Reacher</i>’s Alan Ritchson to Star in Action Sci-Fi Film <i>War Machine</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column Close Reads

The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

What are things we don’t want to look at, but should?

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on March 28, 2024

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Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, we take a trip to a rocky beach to talk about a haunting scene from Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of Under the Skin.

I’m not a brave person, but I am trying to get better at being brave on the page. What are things I don’t want to look at, but should? How can I get at truth in my fiction? How can I write criticism that people find useful?

When I was trying to think of artistic bravery, my mind washed up on the shores of Jonathan Glazer. Specifically, what I think of as “the beach scene” in Under the Skin.

Under the Skin is the rare example of me liking a movie better than the book—mostly because I think the movie is its own entity. The book (by Michel Faber) is quite good, a dark sociological look at humans and the environment (it actually reminds me, weirdly, of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow) that spends most of its time in the mind of an alien hunting human prey.

But Glazer’s adaptation of the book is a miracle. The way he takes the book’s themes and runs into a direction that uses the strengths of film, color design, sound design, showing us a story rather than telling us a damn thing. When I watched it I felt like I was seeing something new.

And the beach scene to me is the best example of what it does well.

The scene opens with something innocuous, even nice. A dog is swimming in an inlet off Scottish coast. The unnamed alien, whom we’ve already seen prey on several men, watches a man swim a little further down the beach. In a cut back to the other end of the beach, we see a woman standing right at the shore, waving to a man and a baby, her back to the dog. Then the camera’s back with the alien, hanging a few feet behind her as the swimming man comes in and walks up the shore.

She begins what we know is her usual routine: asking him questions that will, potentially, get him to explain something to her—the aliens have figured out that it’s an easy way to get a man to open up—interspersed with questions that seem innocent and pleasant but are actually her way of learning if anyone will miss him if he disappears. He’s wary, but does tell her he’s travelling, alone, from the Czech Republic. As she’s about to press further, he looks past the alien and abruptly sprints off down the beach. The alien looks after him, her face reverting to the blankness she holds when she isn’t flirting for work.

The woman we saw before is swimming out past the breakers to save the dog, who’s been caught in a tide. She’s fully clothed, even leaving her heavy jacket on. The man (presumably her partner) leaves the baby to chase after her, and the Czech man dives in after both of them. The camera stays at its remove. We watch the dog go under, then the woman, as the man desperately takes on wave after wave. The Czech man gets to him after he goes under once and hauls him back to shore, but he’s no sooner let go than the man plunges in again. He goes under as the Czech man sprawls on the beach, too exhausted even to crawl out of reach of the waves.

The couple’s child sits alone on the rocks and screams.

The alien walks down the beach, inexorable. She lets waves break over her legs and boots and shows no sign of cold. She stands over the Czech man. Then she sorts through the stones for a moment until she finds one that fits easily in her fist, and bashes the Czech man in the back of his skull. Just once, just enough to knock him out. She drags him back toward her waiting van.

She never looks at the baby.

Just this could have been enough. Instead Glazer shows us the alien driving the man back to her house, the man still slumped over and unconscious in the passenger seat. He shows us the silent man, who appears to be the alien’s handler also in human disguise, back at the beach in the dark, gathering up the Czech man’s belongings so as to leave no trace of him. Again, this could have been enough. Instead, the camera follows the man down the beach as he retrieves the Czech’s towel.

The baby is still there. Still screaming. The man takes no notice of it and leaves the way he came. But the camera doesn’t follow him, instead it gives us one of the only closeups of the sequence, sitting squat in front of the baby, watching it sob, try to stand, fall back down. The camera is impassive. We know that no one knows it’s here. No one will hear it over the waves.

A few scenes later, we watch the alien as she hears a different child crying, in a car next to hers in traffic. In another scene, later still, she listens to a news bulletin that says the man’s body has been found on the shore, but that his wife and their child are still missing.

Did someone else take the child? Was it taken by the sea when the tide came further in? Is it still crawling down the beach alone? We don’t know. We never know.

Why did this come to me when I was rifling through moments of artistic bravery like stones on a beach? In some ways it’s the best moment in a very good movie, but it’s also doing something I hate. I hate child endangerment in fiction, and I hate animal deaths. They’re both cheap plays for emotion, easy screws to turn if you want your reader or audience to feel something.

So why does this work so well?

Part of it’s the camera placement. The camera neutrally records everything from a slight distance. It’s not a totally zoomed out God’s Eye shot that would elbow us in the ribs with the idea that some Unseen Other is watching tragedy unfold. It’s not fully the alien’s POV, because her actions are also recorded. It’s not zooming in on people faces. We’re never in the water with the dog or the people as they drown.

The humans act in recognizable, though slightly heroic ways, the woman going to rescue her dog with no thought for her own safety until it’s far too late, the husband diving in after her even though he can see how bad the tide is now. The Czech man going after both of them, despite already being worn out from a swim in these cold choppy waters. There too—the Czech charges after the family. He’s focused entirely on what he can do, which is get the husband, the closest one, the one who hasn’t been caught between tides or swept into a rock. The husband blindly going back in without even a backwards glance at the man who saved him, or the baby.

The camera doesn’t take on the alien’s point of view as she walks up the beach to the Czech man. It stays back and lets us see that she’s simply pursuing prey. She’s not angry—this is just part of the hunt. And then my favorite moment of all: the rock selection. As the baby sits a few feet away, crying, the alien matter-of-factly chooses a rock to hit the Czech man. She’s completely focused on finding a good rock. She’s not in a hurry, she’s not worried about being caught, or the man escaping.

So many other ways it could go: the Czech man could yell to the alien for help. The wife could scream at the husband to go back to their child. The husband could look back at the kid instead of diving for his wife. He could take a swing at the Czech man rather than saving all of his panic and energy for the second attempt in the water. The husband could make the second attempt while the wife was still above water. The alien could use a rock to silence the child, annoyed by its screaming. She could hit the Czech inexpertly the first time, and have to hit him repeatedly to incapacitate him. She could reveal extreme strength (as happens in the novel) and be able to lift the man and carry him easily. The baby could try to walk to her, could hold its arms up to be lifted.

But none of that happens. Nothing is told, nothing is indicated, nothing is underlined or highlighted or italicized. No tip into melodrama or pathos or torture porn. There is only what we see: the tide flowing in and out. The man who abandons the child to go after the woman—twice. The other man who goes in after them, despite knowing what he’s getting into. Who saves the person closest to him, and then is too exhausted to see that his rescue has been undone. The baby screaming with no awareness of what’s happening, only that it’s alone suddenly. The alien watching all of them, waiting to see what happens, finishing her assignment with no fuss or extraneous violence.

A different movie might show us the alien going back for the baby, or calling the police about it. A different movie might show us an alien who listens thoughtfully to the broadcast. Instead there isn’t even the barest hint of emotion. Even when she hears the other baby crying in a later scene, her expression only hints at curiosity—not empathy or pity. The beach scene is only the first tiny step toward empathy with humanity as she watches a succession of people try to help each other and fail. There’s still another half hour to go before she frees one of her captives, and another ten minutes after that before she attempts human food. It isn’t that she hates us or fears us or that we disgust her—we are precisely as interesting as the ant she observes in the opening scene, the fly she watches later, the dog swimming out into the waves.

The water flows, the waves crash, the cliffs loom over the tragedy. Nature doesn’t care that these people and their dog are dying. It doesn’t care about the terrified baby. It doesn’t care that an alien has come to Earth and is standing by and watching it all. Nature is implacable, unreasonable, unswayable. The sun goes on shining, the water goes on flowing.

Glazer keeps his camera back and observes. He neither holds our hands (the camera is going to sit right there and watch the baby cry, and there’s nothing we can do about that except close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears), nor pats our heads (the radio bulletin doesn’t give us the happy news that the baby was saved, at least). By staying impassive and allowing cause and effect to play out, he creates a gap between us and the movie. We can fill that gap with emotions, empathy, sorrow, anger, a sense of futility—or we can balk and reject the film. It’s an act of artistic bravery to trust the audience to pay attention and come all the way to him, rather than meeting us halfway.[end-mark]

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